Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony 0230019188

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Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony Edited by

John Chalcraft and Yaseen Noorani

Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony

Also by John Chalcraft THE STRIKING CABBIES OF CAIRO AND OTHER STORIES: CRAFTS AND GUILDS IN EGYPT, 1863–1914

Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony Edited by

John Chalcraft and

Yaseen Noorani

Editorial matter, selection and introduction © John Chalcraft and Yaseen Noorani 2007. All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2007. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–01918–8 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–01918–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Counterhegemony in the colony and postcolony/edited by John Chalcraft and Yaseen Noorani. p. cm. Papers presented at the workshop held on 9-10 July 2004 at the University of Edinburgh. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–01918–8 (alk. paper) 1. World politics. 2. Revolutions. 3. Power (Social sciences) I. Chalcraft, John T., 1970– II. Noorani, Yaseen, 1966– D32.C68 2007 325'.3––dc22 10 16

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents ix

List of Figures

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Acknowledgements

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Notes on Contributors Introduction John Chalcraft and Yaseen Noorani

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Part I The State and Politics: Nationalism and Revolution Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Hegemony, Counterhegemony and the Mexican Revolution Alan Knight The Fetishism of Identity: Empire, Nation and the Politics of Subjectivity in Algeria James McDougall

Part II Intellectual Formations: Authority and Opposition Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Redefining Resistance: Counterhegemony, the Repressive Hypothesis and the Case of Arabic Modernism Yaseen Noorani Hegemony and Liberation: Mao Zedong and Zou Taofen in Early Twentieth-century China Rana Mitter The Road through Africa: Imperial Nationalism and Diasporic Racial Consciousness in Post-slavery Barbados Melanie Newton

Part III Counterculture: Normative Tension and Ambiguity Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Reading, Hegemony and Counterhegemony in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic Benjamin C. Fortna Celebratory Ramadan and Hyperpiety in a Mexican Standoff: Counterhegemony in the Crossfire Walter Armbrust

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Part IV Popular Struggle: Manoeuvre and Contestation Counterhegemonic Effects: Weighing, Measuring, Petitions and Bureaucracy in Nineteenth-century Egypt John Chalcraft Chapter 9 Hegemony from Below: Print Workers, the State and the Communist Party in Peru, 1920–40 Paulo Drinot Chapter 10 The Politics of Institutional Subversion: Organized Labour and Resistance in Zambia Adrienne LeBas Chapter 11 How Do Activists Act? Conceiving Counterhegemony in Durban Sharad Chari

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Chapter 8

Index

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List of Figures Figure 6.1 Chaos in the Classroom: parodic representation of a ‘hoca’ in a ‘new-style’ school Figure 6.2 A ‘new-style’ teacher is subjected to similar treatment

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Acknowledgements The idea for this volume arose in 2002 during conversations between the editors when we were colleagues in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. We shared the enthusiasm of many for the sophisticated analyses of power which Gramscian notions of hegemony had unleashed. In spite of many hours of hair-splitting argument, however, we were unable to get genuine clarity on the important, corresponding concept of counterhegemony. Further enquiries convinced us that we were not alone in finding existing understandings of the notion problematic and vague. The idea, therefore, for a scholarly collaboration involving a workshop and an edited volume aiming to grapple seriously with this complex issue was born. The workshop was held on 9 and 10 July 2004 at the University of Edinburgh, and the chapters published here are its fruit, along with further contributions from those joining us subsequently. Our aim has been to add theoretical content to the concept of counterhegemony on the basis of in-depth historical research of little-known, but important, episodes of resistance in the global South. We would like to thank all the contributors for their hard work throughout the process, and for putting up with our pedantry. We are also grateful for the valuable criticism of our anonymous reviewers at Palgrave Macmillan. Special thanks go to both Laleh Khalili and Rachana Kamtekar for critique, support and encouragement throughout the process. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of Edinburgh, and funding from the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, the Edinburgh Development Trust and especially the Edinburgh Institute for the Advanced Study of Islam and the Middle East, which supported and underwrote our project from the beginning. Finally, in editing this volume, we pay homage to all those whose resistance has not been accommodated by history.

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Notes on Contributors Walter Armbrust is Albert Hourani Fellow at St Antony’s College and University Lecturer at Oxford. He is also a Fellow of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College. He previously held assistant professorships at the University of Michigan and Georgetown University. His Ph.D. is in Anthropology from the University of Michigan. One of his most important publications is Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. John Chalcraft is Lecturer in the History and Politics of Empire/Imperialism in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He previously held a lectureship at the University of Edinburgh and a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. His Ph.D. is in History from New York University. One of his most important publications is The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863–1914, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004. Sharad Chari is a Lecturer in Human Geography in the Department of Geography and Environment at the LSE, and Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows while an Assistant Professor in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan. His Ph.D. is from the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley. One of his most important publications is Fraternal Capital: Peasant-workers, Self-made men, and Globalization in Provincial India, Stanford: Stanford University Press, and Delhi: Permanent Black Press, 2004. Paulo Drinot is Lecturer in History at the University of Manchester. He previously held lectureships at the Universities of Oxford and Leeds. His D.Phil. is in Modern History from the University of Oxford. He is co-editor of Más allá de la dominación y la resistencia: estudios de historia peruana, siglos XVI–XX (Beyond Domination and Resistance: Studies in Peruvian History, Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries)(Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005). Benjamin C. Fortna is Lecturer in the Modern History of the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He previously held a lectureship at Washington University in St Louis. His Ph.D. is from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago. One of his most important publications is Imperial xi

xii Notes on Contributors

Classroom: Islam, Education and the State in the Late Ottoman Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Alan Knight is Professor of the History of Latin America at Oxford University. He is director of the Latin American Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He previously held a Chair at the University of Texas at Austin, and a lectureship at the University of Essex. His Ph.D. is from Oxford University. One of his most important publications is The Mexican Revolution, 2 Vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Adrienne LeBas is Assistant Professor of Political Science and African Studies at Michigan State University and Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. One of her most important publications is ‘Polarization as Craft: Explaining Party Formation and State Violence in Zimbabwe’, in Comparative Politics 38 (July 2006). James McDougall is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. He previously held a research fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford. His D.Phil. is in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford. One of his most important publications is History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Rana Mitter is University Lecturer in the History and Politics of Modern China at the Institute for Chinese Studies, University of Oxford. He previously held lectureships at Universities of Warwick and Oxford. His Ph.D. is from University of Cambridge. One of his most important publications is A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Melanie Newton is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto. Her Ph.D. is from the Faculty of Modern History, University of Oxford. One of her most important publications is The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation, 1790–1860, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, forthcoming. Yaseen Noorani is Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of Arizona. He previously held a lectureship at the University of Edinburgh and was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan. His Ph.D. is from the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Chicago. One of his most important publications is ‘Heterotopia and the Wine Poem in Early Islamic Culture’, in International Journal of Middle East Studies (August 2004).

Introduction John Chalcraft and Yaseen Noorani

We have . . . to add to the concept of hegemony the concepts of counter-hegemony and alternative hegemony, which are real and persistent elements of practice. Raymond Williams The collapse of the Soviet Union, the failure of Third World nationalism, the ascendancy of contemporary neoliberalism and the growth of right-ofcentre opposition movements have served in recent times to underline multiple criticisms of naïve or romanticized notions of resistance. Emancipatory nationalism can be seen as a derivative, essentialist discourse; socialism as Eurocentric, authoritarian and economistic; liberalism as imperial, disciplinary or both.1 In the ruins of a once-defiant resistance studies, scholars have built up an ever more elaborate conceptual framework for understanding the subtle workings of an apparently all-conquering capitalist modernity. Eclipsing former notions of authentic resistance, we have the concept of hegemony, which transforms what once appeared as resistance and agency into the activation of incorporated subjects, who, through their own activity of self-formation, including ostensible ‘resistance’, work largely unwittingly to sustain the ruling order.2 In the light of this considerable body of scholarship, outright assault on the established order appears as the preservation of hegemonic structures with new content. The contestation and manipulation of dominant terms by subalterns can be seen as consolidating the legitimacy of these terms. Inversion, parody and counterculture can be seen as ritualized satisfactions permitted only in authorized spaces. And surreptitious subversion – James C. Scott’s ‘weapons of the weak’ – can be seen as the manifestation of an inevitable gap between public rhetoric and reality, a disjuncture which allows subaltern groups some meagre room to manoeuvre without endangering the status quo.3 ‘It can be persuasively argued,’ writes Raymond Williams, ‘that all or nearly all initiatives and contributions, even when they take on manifestly alternative or oppositional forms, are in practice tied to the 1

2 John Chalcraft and Yaseen Noorani

hegemonic: that the dominant culture, so to say, at once produces and limits its own forms of counter-culture.’4 Increasing sophistication on the question of hegemony, however, has not been matched by a more developed conceptual or substantive understanding of resistance or counterhegemony, as Williams recognized. If anything, notions of resistance have become ever more elusive. In view of this longstanding problem, our aim in this volume is to provide the concept of counterhegemony with theoretical content, while bringing to light important but little-known or misunderstood episodes of resistance in the colonial and postcolonial world. We focus broadly on the global South – with contributions from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America – in order to break down familiar but often arbitrary boundaries drawn by Area Studies, and to move away from Eurocentric conceptions of paradigmatically ‘modern’ forms of hegemony and resistance. For these conceptions are often tied to some notion of advanced capitalism, by which they substitute one principle for the whole uneven formation, and end up arrogating the burden of world-historical oppression and salvation to the West. Whereas the study of empire from elite perspectives has long enjoyed a community of scholars and a distinctive literature, those studying colonization and empire critically, and ‘from below’, have often been fragmented into different disciplines and different ‘peripheries’ of the world system. But hegemonic and counterhegemonic processes sharing family resemblances have been at work, whether in China or Turkey, Algeria or Mexico, Zambia or Peru, and this volume aims to draw out some of these substantive themes through an unusual, global collaboration. Contributors to the volume take up specific instances of resistance associated with colonialism, tradition, nationalism, revolution, popular struggle and counterculture in the colony and postcolony, presenting fine-grained accounts that revolve around the enigmas posed by counterhegemony and suggesting ways of working through them. The volume, therefore, advances the scholarly debate not only by squarely addressing the problematic nature of resistance given our current theories of hegemony, but by offering distinctive ways of rethinking resistance and counterhegemony as analytical categories. We believe that the essays in this volume take us beyond loose and unexamined notions of resistance, providing a point of departure for recasting current conceptions of hegemony so as to account for the counterhegemonic processes that are all too often either nullified or romanticized. Our primary contribution, then, is to look at specific hegemonic formations across the global South in the light of the resistances that they engender, often require, and which in some cases lead to their undoing, not in some abstract terms of the human yearning for freedom, but in terms bound up in the hegemonic relations in which forms of resistance originate, but sometimes outrun.

Introduction

3

Gramsci, hegemony and counterhegemony Hegemony is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘[l]eadership, predominance, preponderance; esp. the leadership or predominant authority of one state of a confederacy or union over the others: originally used in reference to the states of ancient Greece, whence transferred to the German states, and in other modern applications.’ The term has long referred to the leadership of one state or political unit over a series of subordinate political units. The innovation of Marxist-Leninism was to use the term with reference to a social class instead of a polity. Hence in the writings of Lenin, Bukharin and Stalin, hegemony became the leadership of one class, above all the proletariat, over others in a system of political alliances.5 In this formulation, hegemony was something desirable, to be sought by the rising working class. With the Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci, the concept was significantly reformulated and enriched. Gramsci retained the idea that hegemony involved the leadership of a fundamental social class defined by its relation to the means of production. But for Gramsci, hegemony had been first achieved by the bourgeoisie, during the period in which this class led social emancipation, but was now illegitimately and cunningly withheld from the proletariat, thus explaining from a Marxist perspective delays in the anticipated socialist revolution. More importantly, hegemony for Gramsci meant not just a set of strategic and political alliances with other social groups, but a distinctive form of political, moral and intellectual leadership. Hegemony was the product of an ideological struggle – a war of position fought in the redoubts and trenches of civil society – in which a unity was forged out of diverse interests, and the narrow ‘corporate’ interests of the fundamental social class were widened and identified with universal interests, partly through compromise, but also through persuasion and education.6 A widening of narrow corporate interests was a necessity because first, capitalism was not destroying social groups, especially the peasantry, who remained non-proletarian and non-bourgeois: such groups had to be incorporated in one way or another. And second, consent was increasingly necessary for effective leadership because of mass politics on the one hand and a broadened scope for state action on the other. The result of hegemonic struggle was a political, moral and intellectual unity, a historic bloc exhibiting a collective will, which became the new ‘protagonist of political action’.7 Power in this formulation is not a matter of simple domination, but of direction, direzione – the construction from the elements of the national-popular and ‘spontaneous philosophy’ of what Gramsci called a ‘collective personality, a collective soul, a collective will’.8 This collective will was capable of acting historically. Hegemony, for Gramsci, therefore, is not a matter of brainwashing, the simple imposition of ruling ideas, false consciousness and straightforward ideological mystification. Instead, it is ‘the capacity of a

4 John Chalcraft and Yaseen Noorani

fundamental class to articulate to its discourse the ideological elements characteristic of a given social formation’.9 What of counterhegemony? For Gramsci, the socialist struggle involved replacing the hegemony of the bourgeoisie with that of the proletariat. This struggle involved not only the work of creating a new proletarian hegemony, but of countering the hegemony of the bourgeoisie, not through a direct assault on state power through a Leninist vanguard party and a war of manoeuvre, but through ideological struggle and a war of position. This war was to consist in a process of disarticulation-rearticulation, as Mouffe puts it, of ideological elements,10 partly carried out by organic intellectuals tied to the proletariat, contesting the organic intellectuals of the bourgeoisie. The guerra di posizione (‘war of attrition’) did not involve a complete and sweeping replacement of world views, but a more drawn-out ‘process of transformation’, reform, ‘attrition’ and ‘rearticulation of existing ideological elements’.11 The proletariat was to build an alternative cultural formation autonomously anchored in ‘cooperatives, workers’ councils, communists party sections’ and so on.12 This ‘organization of consent’13 would form a historical bloc linking other groups under proletarian leadership, which must be exercised prior to taking state power. As Gramsci wrote in the Prison Notebooks: What matters is the criticism to which such an ideological complex [bourgeois hegemony] is subjected by the first representatives of the new historical phase [proletarian hegemony]. This criticism makes possible a process of differentiation and change in the relative weight that the elements of the old ideologies used to possess. What was previously secondary and subordinate, or even incidental, is now taken to be primary – becomes the nucleus of a new ideological and theoretical complex.14 Hence, Gramsci’s version of counterhegemony was a gradual process of criticism, a ‘strategy of power pursued through a cultural work’,15 in Nadia Urbinati’s striking phrase, involving reform, disarticulation and rearticulation of ideological elements in such a way as to create a new collective will – a political, moral and intellectual unity – bound to the leadership of the proletariat.

After Gramsci Gramsci’s writings have proved to be a rich source of inspiration for scholars, above all since the 1970s, when interest in Gramsci revived. With the growth of Eurocommunism, Marxists committed to historical materialism and socialist politics but ready to entertain the importance of politics and ideology used Gramsci’s non-reductive formulations. 16 Post-structuralists and discourse theorists saw in Gramscian hegemony a way to develop radical

Introduction

5

understandings of the politics of social representation, while making a thorough break with Marxian economism, teleology and reductivism. 1 7 Foucauldians assimilated Gramscian hegemony to notions of diffuse, capillary power.18 Those studying the non-West saw in Gramsci’s notion of subaltern social groups a way to conceptualize social structure outside of Marxian economism and Eurocentrism.19 International Relations theorists have drawn on theories of hegemony and counterhegemony to move beyond a relentless focus on the traditional power politics of the state, and engage with historical materialism, political economy, class and ideology.20 Even Weberians interested in legitimacy borrowed from Gramsci’s work on consent. All those working with repressive or extractive models of power, moreover, could understand hegemony as an explanation for consent, order, social control or the paradoxes of false consciousness. Nonetheless, while the concept of hegemony proliferated, enabling more sophisticated analyses of leadership and power (although becoming more polysemic and occasionally unwieldy in the process), the notion of counterhegemony remained elusive, vague or underspecified, leaving resistance, as it were, as a theoretical lamb to the slaughter. Gramsci’s own notion of counterhegemony has run into heavy criticism with the breakdown of historical materialism and socialist conviction. Gramsci’s structure depended on what discourse theorists plausibly see as a kind of essentialism: ‘with regard to the privileged position of the working class, and with regard to “the last redoubt of essentialism: the economy”’.21 Few remain committed to the notion of fundamental social classes, or to the normative, teleological givenness of the content and direction of socialist politics.22 Hence, as Plotke puts it, ‘there is no longer any particular agent naturally entitled to be hegemonic [or counterhegemonic]. . . . The term itself is now yet another question rather than an answer.’23 Indeed, in Gramsci, the subjected classes must be seen as passively cooperating in their own subjection due to the effects of ideological and cultural institutions upon them. These classes can only be awakened to self-fulfilling agency by a class that is beyond the reach of hegemonic power due to its unique social position, that is, the working class. Without the aid of a universal class that is inherently the subject of a new hegemony and not an object of the old one, the dominated classes would remain in the thrall of hegemonic institutions indefinitely. But Gramsci’s redemptive social class – the proletariat – has been stripped of this status with the collapse of the Marxian metanarrative of historical materialism, dissolving concrete notions of counterhegemony in the process. Nor are the stagism and developmentalism of Gramsci’s conceptions of a phase of bourgeois hegemony followed by a new historical phase of proletarian hegemony given much credence any longer.24 Marxian economism has hardly been able to withstand the battering delivered by Laclau and Mouffe’s critique, not to mention the interventions of those who have shown that power, meaning, gender, race,

6 John Chalcraft and Yaseen Noorani

geography and so on, all enter into the dynamics of ‘the economy’ and thus deconstruct base/superstructure models of causation and priority.25 Hence the principal meaning, form and normative certainty of Gramsci’s counterhegemonic programme, which depends ultimately on a Marxian metanarrative, have effectively collapsed. The principal attempt to specify a post-materialist and yet Gramscian solution to the problems of hegemony has been made by post-structuralists Laclau and Mouffe. Their reformulation of hegemony as the terrain of the political posits an absolute divide between pre-modern ‘sutured’ societies, characterized by a fixed, inescapable, legitimate social hierarchy, and modern ‘unsutured’ societies, in which social identity is discursively fluid and subject to continuous hegemonic articulation and rearticulation within political formations whose legitimacy is always contingent and provisional. This absolute divide was made possible by the irruption of democratic discourse in 18th-century Europe, which introduced the power to destabilize the formerly closed and unassailable discourses of social hierarchy. For Laclau and Mouffe, forms of resistance existed in pre-1789 societies, but could only become antagonisms, politicized collective struggles, when invested with the ideal of equality.26 An antagonism is an instance of resistance against a relation of subordination as such. Hegemony is the articulation of a set of antagonisms in a bid for social power. This view repudiates any fixed human nature on the basis of which one could identify objective cases of oppression. Nevertheless, Laclau and Mouffe seem to regard the democratic revolution that inaugurated modern society as moving towards the increasing elimination of social inequalities as it pervades the different domains of society, a movement to be embraced by the ‘left’. The categories central to modern society, liberty and equality, cannot in their view be given any fixed content, yet nonetheless must remain ethically normative and politically regulative. And though there is no principle by which to know what is ‘left’ and what is ‘right’, their struggle for hegemony continues to constitute the political, and there somehow remains a normative compulsion to side with the left. With this model, Laclau and Mouffe attempt to eliminate many of the difficulties besetting hegemony and resistance by turning hegemony itself into political resistance and social order at the same time. Their model, however, is highly problematic when applied to the non-West, a failure that points to its internal flaws. The model acknowledges resistance in pre-democratic societies, but does not explain where such resistance comes from given that there can be no inherently oppressive relations. Further, there is no explanation for the emergence of democratic discourse, which is regarded as inherently external to the legitimizing discourses of hierarchical, pre-modern societies. The origin of politics therefore, of the possibility of social antagonism and hegemonic articulation, was miraculously conceived in Europe at a specific point in time but is otherwise alien to social relations and struggles. Colonial and

Introduction

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postcolonial non-Western societies that are not democracies and in which liberal political ideals are not the only ones apparently flounder in some unfathomable no-man’s-land lying between the ‘sutured’ and ‘unsutured’. And the notion of ‘strategic essentialism’, which flows from Laclau and Mouffe’s thinking, whereby a worker, or a woman, or a black or an immigrant posits his or her own unity artificially in order to seize political rights, is surely hobbled by the fact that this is based on a deliberate construction – in political struggle what could be impugned as a deception. Can such a notion really be serviceable in life-and-death struggles? And what is to prevent the rich, the male and the white from employing just such a strategic essentialism? Michel Foucault asserts that wherever there is power, there is also resistance.27 But he never adequately explains the nature of this resistance, how it is generated or its relationship to power. Disciplinary and capillary power can break down or malfunction, it would seem, but whether this adds up to practice of counterhegemony is unclear. It is surely implicit in Foucault that certain social sectors benefit materially from the smooth running of a disciplined social order, but the notion of resistance is problematic because where power is so diffuse, deriving neither from the interests of a social agent nor from a unifying principle, no one can really know who or what is in control or how or what to resist. Similarly, in Pierre Bourdieu’s work, it is clear that certain sectors benefit through material and symbolic appropriation, but due to the nearly absolute alignment of structured, structuring dispositions – the habitus – with social fields containing a pre-constituted range of occupiable positions, in combination with the sociological axiom that all actions of all agents are aimed at maximizing some form of social capital, resistance is in every case a misrecognition, or the preserve of a tiny, somehow enlightened vanguard of reflexive sociologists.28 Hegemonic structure produces our consciousness, so it is virtually unthinkable that our consciousness could exist outside of such structure. Social theorists influenced by Foucault, Bourdieu and other poststructuralist thinkers encounter similar problems. Timothy Mitchell, for example, in a powerful critique of James C. Scott’s ‘weapons of the weak’, speaks of hegemonic effects as forms of political domination which work ‘through the shaping of what can be thought and said, by this defining of what presents itself as “reasonable” and “realistic”’.29 Hegemony in Gramsci, Mitchell notes, is not merely about ‘domination at the level of ideas’ but concerns ‘non-violent forms of control exercised through the whole range of dominant cultural institutions and social practices, from schooling, museums, and political parties to religious practice, architectural forms, and the mass media’.30 Mitchell argues that in this context there is no such thing as context-free rationality, as rational calculations ‘will always depend on estimations and suppositions that are the effect of a set of hegemonic relations’.31 Power works in part therefore through ‘creating truths and subjects and sites of apparent autonomy’.32 The problem with this, however, is who

8 John Chalcraft and Yaseen Noorani

or what is power, this ghastly figure credited with such omnipresence and facility, that stands behind the production of interests, structures, agents and forms of representation. Without a clear specification of the sources and dynamics of this power, the question of resistance or counterhegemony remains vexed and unanswered, as we do not know who or what to resist, or even why we should be resisting. That Mitchell’s own conception of power makes resistance elusive does not mean that Scott’s ‘everyday forms of resistance’ can provide us with some sort of counterhegemonic panacea; far from it. First, the status of footdragging, dissimulation, pilfering, slander and the like are unclear even in Scott’s work – whereas at times they seem to be credited with the power to restructure social relations, they are at others merely individualistic reflexes incapable of generating progressive change. Moreover, ‘weapons of the weak’ may create the illusion of agency while reinforcing radically asymmetric relations.33 Further, such weapons are even more amply available to the powerful than they are to the weak. Second, Scott’s understanding of hegemony ignores Gramsci’s contribution to the development of the concept and takes us back to a hoary and materialist Marxian notion of hegemony as the imposed mystifying ideology of the ruling class. Beyond this, Scott has no need of counterhegemony, even in what would be an older sense of demystification and consciousness-raising, as he argues that subordinate groups are not mystified in any strong sense as to their own interests. Their apparent consent is merely an artefact of the public transcript where subordinates feign agreement with dominant norms. Hidden transcripts, available in off-stage utterances outside of the glare of power, can supposedly give us a glimpse of how far subordinate groups penetrate and demystify the notions of the powerful. Even if one agreed with these problematic formulations, which assume a radical distinction between the ‘hidden’ and the ‘public’ and ignore the forms of power at work in intimate or off-stage settings, they do not even get as far as addressing the subtler Gramscian notion of hegemony, and by extension counterhegemony, which is neither about simple false consciousness on the one hand nor autonomously granted legitimacy on the other, but involves subtler combinations of coercion, inequality and consent in the production of common sense and the forging of dominant values, meanings and aesthetics in the context of their effectivity in power relations. As Jackson Lears puts it, ‘hegemonic culture depends not on the brainwashing of “the masses” but on the tendency of public discourse to make some forms of experience readily available to consciousness while ignoring or suppressing others.’34 E. San Juan has attempted to go ‘beyond postcolonial theory’ in building up a notion of a counterhegemonic collective subject-in-process of a nongeographical ‘Third World’ and its national-popular based on an idea of development constructed from creative and non-instrumental reason that makes human beings, not gross national product or technology, the goal of

Introduction

9

social production.35 But San Juan returns to the pre-Gramscian materialist notion of ideology as mystification, and resistance becomes a matter of exposing the evils of capitalism-imperialism and the subsequent creation of a rather unproblematic unitary collective subject. This formulation pays scant attention to the thorny problems of subjectivation (that is, processes where the active energies and identities of political subjects are engaged), consent, compromise and incorporation that are at work in the making of hegemony and have dogged authenticist and consciousness-raising notions of resistance. As Mitchell rightly puts it, ‘hegemonic ideologies always offer significant claims to those they are directed against.’36 Counterhegemony can hardly, therefore, be a matter of simply exposing evil. Humanity as a goal is vague enough, moreover, and it might be admitted that the quasireligious modernist faith that some new form of social production will bring a golden age is currently at a low ebb. It should be clear from the foregoing that the notion of counterhegemony remains elusive. If hegemony, as Raymond Williams claims, is properly defined as the limits of the possible and the sensible, ‘the whole lived social process as practically organized by specific and dominant meanings and values’,37 then there has been little progress on what he saw as the ‘major theoretical problem’, namely: to distinguish between alternative and oppositional initiatives and contributions which are made within or against a specific hegemony (which then sets certain limits to them or which can succeed in neutralizing, changing or actually incorporating them) and other kinds of initiative and contribution which are irreducible to the terms of the original or the adaptive hegemony, and are in that sense independent.38 It is of course ironic that so often Gramsci’s work has been used to underline the ‘futility of efforts to change past and present capitalist societies’ and hegemony is often seen as something imposed on inert masses from above, whereas Gramsci was ‘above all else . . . a revolutionary strategist . . . [and] championed a political and ideological struggle for hegemony’ in the name of socialism.39 The task of building up concepts of counterhegemony is clearly far from easy. It requires judgements about who or what is in power and who or what is subordinated or disempowered; about whether power is zero-sum and predatory, collective and enabling, or diffuse and capillary in nature; about whether meaning is mystificatory (deluding subjects as to their best interests), autonomous (a matter of rational, genuine, autonomous choice by fully informed and aware subjects) or discursively produced (an effect of signifying practices of power); about the processes by which power relations are reproduced or destabilized and the role of coercion, politics, economics and culture. Specifying counterhegemony, furthermore, is often linked to

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fundamental judgements about human nature and grand metanarratives of historical change.

History, theory and the global South The present volume aims to tackle some of these problems by extending and enriching existing notions of counterhegemony on the basis of studies of episodes of power and resistance. Our cases are mostly historical, reaching back to the nineteenth century, as we consider that the need for an analysis of concrete, existing relationships, historical context and irreducible contingency loom large in the assessment of counterhegemony. Since theorists are often dogged by ahistoricity and historians and social scientists by empiricism, the attempt in this volume is to experiment with the interface between theory and history, mindful of the perils and complexities attendant thereon. The more historically minded among us feel that counterhegemony provides an important but underused concept through which to make sense of the past and present. The more theoretically minded among us think that empirical material can be useful for developing the concept of counterhegemony. All of us take seriously the tension between history and theory and have come to divergent resolutions. Conceptual development is here based on case studies from the global South in order to try to avoid the Eurocentric tendency to define counterhegemony by some principle at work in ‘advanced capitalism’, and then applying this definition to the rest of the world, which is consequently found to be lacking or deviant and thus unable to participate in proper resistance.40 The Marxian tradition, for example, has often seen underdeveloped proletariats the colonial world over as incapable of proper forms of socialist resistance. Post-structuralists such as Laclau and Mouffe posit that non-Europe cannot engage in politics proper, the liberatory struggle for hegemony, until the democratic discourse of 1789 takes root there. Or, to pick one more example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, reworking the Marxian tradition in postmodern, anarchic and optimistic ways, set much store by the fact that advanced capitalism generates forms of ‘immaterial labour’ – a kind of tertiarysector labour involving self-direction and decision-making – a labour form which for Hardt and Negri creates the possibility of spontaneous and creative revolutionary action. Where such labour is lacking – as, for example, in Africa, parts of Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America – revolutionary potentialities presumably must languish in the ‘waiting room of history’.41 These theories collude in a ‘selective tradition’ – ‘a deliberately selective and connecting process which offers a historical and cultural ratification of a contemporary order’42 – which constructs a universalized Western history as the figure of salvation and font of true resistance. In a world marked by imperialism and radical asymmetries in the exertion of transnational power, such a selective tradition only seems to ratify and glorify the agency of the West in a way

Introduction

11

which reproduces Western hegemony rather than some new form of counterhegemony. The focus on the colony and postcolony is not supposed to be simply an empirical move, as if we expected the orphan factual to do all our work for us, but is a partly heuristic displacement device for vivifying the problems of Eurocentrism. Putting cases from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America together in comparison and conversation is no guarantee of conceptual progress, but a deliberate self-positioning against the disciplinary boundaries erected in nineteenth-century colonial Europe among oriental studies (situated mostly in Asia), anthropology (situated mostly in Africa and Oceania), history (situated mostly in Europe) and those developed during the Cold War under the rubric of Area Studies. These powerful distinctions – part of a ‘selective tradition’ enshrining the West – do little justice to identifiably similar forms of power and resistance operating across the tricontinental area within processes and discourses of colonialism, nationalism, revolution, capitalism, civilization, race, commodification, literary production, education, identity formation and so on. This is not to suggest that the global South is the only site of subalternity, or that the global South represents a unitary subject, either in-itself or for-itself, but to call attention to regular and identifiable coercive inequalities, economic, political and cultural, at the global level, past and present.

Counterhegemony as rearticulation Gramsci’s counterhegemony, as discussed above, involves not an outright, violent assault on the established order, but a gradual process of disarticulation and rearticulation, a ‘war of attrition’ (guerra di posizione) in the ‘redoubts’ and ‘trenches’ of civil society. This notion of rearticulation is central to how most of the varied contributions in this volume understand counterhegemony. We show how the latent contradictions, selectivity, fractures, instability, insufficiency and contingent strength of existing forms of hegemony, subsisting within and between the structures of political, economic and cultural power, could be and have actually been exposed, deepened, manipulated, transformed and converted through material and cultural processes of counterhegemonic rearticulation. Each of the contributions in the volume addresses some aspect of this in order to single out and clarify some of the diverse mechanisms involved. Our debt to the work of Laclau and Mouffe derives from their development of the notion of hegemonic (re)articulation, but our conception of rearticulation is neither based on the Eurocentrism of a post-1789 logic of equivalence, nor does it take place exclusively at the level of culture, or even discourse, if discourse is understood as signifying practice of power productive of subjectivity. Instead, because individuals and groups are located within sometimescontradictory networks of cultural, economic, military and political power,

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to adopt the useful divisions proposed by Michael Mann, forms of breakdown, conversion, redirection and linkage take place not merely within cultural structures, but within and between economic and political structures.43 Not simply a cultural reductivism, our concept of counterhegemonic rearticulation is therefore more materially grounded than that of some versions of post-structuralism, taking seriously the relative autonomy of different social logics and historical contingency, but in no way involving a return to economism or modernist metanarrative. Many of the contributors would agree with Randolph Persaud, who writes that counterhegemony is not a single, unified set of practices, ‘nor need it be a strategy aimed at transformations which occur all at once. Counter-hegemony is more likely to be effective by proceeding from one trench to another’.44 The illustrative exposition of counterhegemonic rearticulation in the volume is through-written in that conceptual elements overlap, but emphases on the various mechanisms of rearticulation, historical contexts and fields of contest vary. The volume is divided into four parts corresponding to four different fields of contest – state politics, intellectual formations, civil society and subaltern struggle. These fields of contest present common problems, involve similar political actors, and entail somewhat comparable counterhegemonic forms and tasks. Part I, entitled ‘The State and Politics: Nationalism and Revolution’, is concerned with power relations at the national level, involving nationalist movements, the state and political parties. Alan Knight’s opening chapter surveys revolution, nationalism and political struggle in twentieth-century Mexico in terms of the concepts of hegemony and counterhegemony. Knight shows how forms of hegemony have contingent strength, and that successive hegemonic forms in post-revolutionary Mexico have had thick, thin and partial forms. In this conception, counterhegemony is a logically inextricable element in the open-ended construction of different forms of political, economic and cultural hegemony. The strength of these forms is always shifting, partly because of the ways in which different political, economic and cultural logics contradict one another, and also because historical logics bring new and unforeseeable elements onto the scene which both shape and can be seized on by diverse claimants. James McDougall’s chapter attempts a similarly synoptic view of anticolonial nationalism, state-building and exclusionary identity politics in twentieth-century Algeria, a country which held an iconic status in the discourse of the ‘Third Worldism’ of the 1950s and 1960s. McDougall probes the fundamental question of liberation, the Mecca of so many movements of resistance and opposition, demonstrating the dependence of discourses and representations of liberation on the categories of the oppressive order to which they are opposed. McDougall argues that the forms of colonial and commodity logic embedded in supposedly authentic and autonomous Algerian nationalism were the key flaws which should be held responsible

Introduction

13

for the subsequent failure of the post-independence project. In other words, McDougall’s more pessimistic chapter suggests that while a successful counterhegemonic movement (Algerian nationalism) was able to constitute itself through battening onto existing structures and discourses, these derivative linkages in turn caused its downfall, as they ultimately reinforced the original hegemonic categories associated with commodified forms of political identity. Genuine counterhegemony, argues McDougall, can only be found in an as yet unrealized pluralization of the political field. Part II, entitled ‘Intellectual Formations: Authority and Opposition’, is about moments of contestation and rearticulation in which intellectuals seek to enhance their authority and effect social change by drawing on existing social resistances to rework the prevailing hegemonic discourses. Such intellectuals redefine existing social resistances into new discourses of order that challenge the dominant order and thereby enhance their own authority. Yaseen Noorani’s chapter on Arab literary modernism expands on the theme of liberation broached by McDougall’s paper. Noorani argues that hegemony is conventionally understood in terms of the ‘repressive hypothesis’ – the idea that domination is based on the repression of an innate human desire for freedom. This is evident not only in Arabic literary modernism itself, with its quest for social liberation from oppressive tradition through visually autonomous perception, but in influential critiques of literary modernism that see it in the service of capitalist hegemony. Noorani attempts to show the untenability of the repressive hypothesis in evaluating countercultural ‘practices of freedom’ like modernism. Such practices are better understood as counterhegemonic rearticulations of resistances already present in the social order. Noorani proposes, in other words, that resistance be understood as constitutive of hegemonic order rather than as external and inimical to it. Rana Mitter’s chapter on the reinterpretation of Confucianism in early twentieth-century China deals with another kind of intellectual counterhegemonic rearticulation. Mitter shows how the once-popular but now largely forgotten intellectual Zou Taofen did not claim utterly to reject the broadly hegemonic Confucian tradition in the name of an alternate hegemony of Western modernity, but persuaded a wide audience through gestures which worked subtle transformations on both discourses. Mitter sees counterhegemony therefore not as a matter of a radical break, nor as the activation of an authentic tradition, but as the rearticulation of existing norms, this being the only way to avoid the hegemonic traps set for those who would attempt to overthrow the established ideological order in toto. Melanie Newton’s chapter takes the reader further back in time to focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Barbadan intellectuals and elites and the rearticulation of British colonial discourse in the Caribbean. Newton shows how Barbadan elites identified themselves with the British civilizing mission to Africa, while claiming that they themselves were capable of carrying out

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Britain’s imperial mission, thus implicitly challenging aspects of the racial hierarchy embedded in such imperial discourse. The latent contradiction between race and civilization, which remained just that among the white ‘civilizers’ of the metropole, became visible when black colonial subjects took on the mantle of civilizers, battening on to one aspect of dominant hegemony, while surreptitiously substituting this principle for that of the racial hierarchy. Over time, this potentially counterhegemonic manoeuvre played some role in more explicit challenges to racial hierarchy, pan-Africanism and the anticolonial nationalism of later years. Part III, entitled ‘Counterculture: Normative Tension and Ambiguity’, is concerned with contests in the cultural institutions Gramsci identified with civil society: here the chapters tackle education and religion, respectively. These cultural institutions are seen as necessary for hegemonic order but their meaning, it is suggested, cannot be controlled. This does not automatically mean, however, that such institutions will necessarily be politicized in counterhegemonic ways. Benjamin Fortna’s chapter discusses education in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic. In Fortna’s exposition, state power and market forces are by no means working together in a seamless hegemony in the field of education. Instead, their contradictory operations involve a hegemonic fracture, in that the subversive encroachment of market forces on state authority creates a space for potentially counterhegemonic parody and satire in independent magazines for children. Walter Armbrust’s chapter, more pessimistically, examines in ethnographic mode the religious ritual of Ramadan in late twentieth-century Egypt, finding it to be in important senses ‘counterhegemony proof’. Armbrust argues that everyday appropriations of Ramadan have long been inextricably linked to the competing hegemonic projects of the state on the one hand and the Islamists on the other. But these hegemonic projects are not linked to fundamental classes based on relations to the means of capitalist production, as in Gramsci, but instead on different appropriations of the modern. Counterhegemony is therefore unthinkable aside from a project challenging the fundamental bases of Egyptian modernity. Here the only limited room granted for counterhegemony comes in concepts such as ‘holiday fatigue’. Finally, Part IV, entitled ‘Popular Struggle: Manoeuvre and Contestation’, examines struggles waged by various subaltern groups, including workers and shanty-town dwellers, attempting to better their social situation by manoeuvring within hegemonic frameworks. They do so, it is argued, by reworking elements necessary to the hegemonic order but whose meaning or practical application cannot be entirely controlled. To achieve this reworking, popular struggle must articulate ‘illegitimate’ resistances into legitimized grievances and demands in a strategic manner. John Chalcraft’s chapter studies protests surrounding weighing and measuring in nineteenth-century Egypt. What would normally be conceived of as resistance or even counterhegemony is rewritten as a mode of hegemonic expansion, involving a ‘fallen’ version of subaltern agency. Chalcraft argues that popular protests

Introduction

15

couched in dominant languages at linguistic and practical sites of hegemonic articulation worked to suture and identify diverse social interests in a process of hegemonic deepening which is by no means a matter of narrow co-optation and exclusivist incorporation by elites. In this reading, where the normative valence of (counter)hegemony is deliberately ambiguous, counterhegemony becomes the process whereby these sites of hegemonic articulation are broken up and coercion becomes visible. Paulo Drinot’s chapter on print workers in Peru in the interwar period makes a comparable argument. Where Chalcraft writes of ‘hegemonic expansion’, Drinot advances the idea of ‘hegemony from below’, where workers seek versions of consensual or hegemonic relations with the authorities which allow them some room for manoeuvre. For Drinot, groups accept their own hegemonization in return for concessions of various kinds. Among Peruvian print workers, this strategy, counter-intuitively enough, took the form of involving themselves in the counterhegemonic projects of communism after the breakdown of more hegemonic relations with the state in the early 1920s. Workers were all along aiming to reconstitute some sort of hegemonic bargain with the state in return for their abandoning a form of counterhegemony. Adrienne LeBas takes up the question of counterhegemony with regard to workers in post-independence Zambia. Her chapter illustrates the notion that hegemonic structures contain certain resources, originally used to maintain hegemony, which can be turned to counterhegemonic purposes by subaltern groups pursuing their own interests. In a story of ‘institutional subversion’, she demonstrates how Zambian workers were able to use the pre-existing communications networks and various political resources of initially governmentcontrolled unions to gradually build and pursue counterhegemony from the late 1960s to the present. Institutions that were designed for top-down government control became the basis for cohesive opposition. The final chapter by Sharad Chari stays in sub-Saharan Africa but focuses on forms of popular mobilization in former ‘Indian’ and ‘Coloured’ townships of Durban, South Africa. Pursuing the question ‘How do activists act?’ Chari explores the counterhegemonic possibilities of spaces for the production of social value which are outside of or in contradiction with the spaces and logics of capital accumulation, wage-labour and the degradation involved in the drug and sex trades. Homes, streets and interstitial contacts ‘at the church door’ and elsewhere are sites for the creative production and definition of social value, sites which have the potential to become the seedbed for militancy or for rearticulation as a counterhegemonic bloc.

Conclusion Although some contributors are more pessimistic than others, the volume overall aims to provide illustrations and arguments supporting a conception of counterhegemony as a drawn-out process of cultural, political, economic and social rearticulation. In terms of the four forms of resistance noted at

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the outset – outright assault, manipulation, counterculture and surreptitious subversion – the volume generally argues for the utility of an expanded notion of ‘manipulation’, rewritten as rearticulation. Our notion of rearticulation goes beyond the mere contestation and modification of hegemonic terms, to encompass a potentially radical reconfiguration of hegemonic structures – thus including in its purview elements of the other three versions of resistance. This form of rearticulation, in other words, does not merely reinforce existing dominant categories. We argue that hegemony is, in principle, a process, an open-ended form of construction, not a once-andfor-all achievement. Hegemonic forms are contingently strong. They are partial, relatively thick or thin and include latent contradictions and fractures, as well as meanings and resources that are not fully controllable. As Mark Rupert puts it, hegemony is ‘the unstable product of a continuous process of struggle, a “war of position” . . . hardly a foreclosure of the horizons of meaningful political contestation’.45 These instabilities and contradictions, as well as forms of historical contingency, can be exploited by intellectuals and subaltern groups and other political subjects. Hegemonies do not rely on a singular and pure repression – the fallacy of the ‘repressive hypothesis’ – but are often actively constructed by diverse claimants – through processes of hegemonic expansion or the search for ‘hegemony from below’. This means that there can be no decisive or ultimate liberation from a hegemonic order. The notion that there is a sharp and universally recognizable difference between just, legitimate rule and unjust, illegitimate rule, based on how compatible this rule is thought to be with human nature, cannot guide our analysis. For the most part, the chapters in this volume seek to understand the genesis and nature of resistance movements and their relation to the hegemonic order in which they arose, while bracketing the question of whether these movements ‘liberated’ anyone or bettered their lives. And certainly, we have not attempted to address the more fundamental question of whether counterhegemony has ever brought about, or can ever bring about, a better society. Nevertheless, giving up the idea that hegemonic rule is based on some form of objective oppression does not mean that we must surrender the hope that social relations can be made more just. It means, rather, that our notion of justice must be anchored in the norms, processes and aspirations of specific social formations. In developing concepts of hegemonic analysis at diverse locations in the colony and postcolony in Asia, Africa, Latin American and the Caribbean, we aim above all to break down the Eurocentric conception that counterhegemony involves processes that begin or are somehow more advanced in the powerful countries of the global North. Counterhegemony does not require the industrial proletariat, a well-developed bourgeoisie, the immaterial labour of the multitude or the logic of democratic equivalence instated by 1789: radical politics and counterhegemonic processes are far more rich, continuous and plural than this.

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Notes 1. Respectively, Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Joseph A. Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, first published 1975, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 2. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971); Perry Anderson, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, in New Left Review, 100 (1976–7), pp. 5–78; Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, first published 1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Chantal Mouffe, ‘Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci’, in Gramsci and Marxist Theory, Chantal Mouffe ed. (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 168–203; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, first published 1985, second edition (London: Verso, 2001); Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000); Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader, edited by David Forgacs (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 3. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985). 4. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 114. 5. As Laclau and Mouffe put it, ‘political leadership within a class alliance’, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 55. 6. Mouffe, ‘Hegemony and Ideology’, pp. 168–203, esp. 178–81. 7. Mouffe, ‘Hegemony and Ideology’, p. 184. 8. Cited in Walter L. Adamson, ‘Beyond “Reform or Revolution”: Notes on Political Education in Gramsci, Habermas and Arendt’, in Theory and Society, Vol. 6, No. 3 (November 1978), pp. 429–60, esp. 431. Power here is communicative, involving a dialogue towards concerted decision. As Adamson writes on p. 431, ‘Proletarian revolution is the establishment of this sort of power, not a dictatorship of the proletariat, but an ascending “historical bloc” becoming a state’ 9. Ibid., p. 198. A subaltern social group referred most meaningfully to either the proletariat before achieving hegemony, or a group such as the peasantry which is not a fundamental social class and thus not a fit subject to exercise hegemony over other groups. Indeed, there are no other groups – it is essentially for hegemony over the peasantry that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat were competing in Gramsci’s view.

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10. 11. 12. 13.

Mouffe, ‘Hegemony and Ideology’, p. 193. Ibid., p. 192. Adamson, ‘Beyond “Reform or Revolution”’, p. 430. As Michèle Barrett puts it in ‘Ideology, Politics, Hegemony: From Gramsci to Laclau and Mouffe’, in Mapping Ideology, edited by Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 235–64, esp. 238. Quoted in Mouffe, ‘Hegemony and Ideology’, p. 191. Nadia Urbinati, ‘From the Periphery of Modernity: Antonio Gramsci’s Theory of Subordination and Hegemony’, in Political Theory, Vol. 26, No. 3 ( June 1998), pp. 370–391, esp. 370. Urbinati here refers to hegemony, but the form of counterhegemony as a strategy to forge a new hegemony involves the same principle. For a useful overview, see Anne Showstack Sassoon, Gramsci’s Politics, first published 1980, 2nd edn (London: Hutchinson, 1987). Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. See, for example, Massad, Colonial Effects, p. 3. For a useful overview of the changing shape of Subaltern Studies from the 1970s to the late 1990s, see Vinayak Chaturvedi ed., Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 2000). Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Enrico Angelli and Craig Murphy, America’s Quest for Supremacy and the Third World: A Gramscian Analysis (London: Puiter Publishers, 1988); Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Stephen Gill ed., Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); James H. Mittelman ed., Globalization: Critical Reflections (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1996); Mark Rupert, Ideologies of Globalization: Contending Visions of a New World Order (London: Routledge, 2000); Randolph B. Persaud, Counter-Hegemony and Foreign Policy: The Dialectics of Marginalized and Global Forces in Jamaica, Foreword by Robert Cox (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001); William I. Robinson, Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization (London: Verso, 2003). Barrett, ‘Ideology, Politics, Hegemony’, p. 247. Especially in the wake of the sustained hammering given Marxist economism and essentialism in Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Plotke, Social Movements, 1995, p. 135. See also David Plotke, ‘What’s So New About New Social Movements?’, Socialist Review 20, 1 (1990), pp. 81–102. See Dipesh Chakarbarty’s extensive criticism of what he calls ‘historicism’, in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 6–16. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. For an excellent discussion, see William Sewell, ‘Towards a Post-materialist Rhetoric for Labor History’, in Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis, edited by Lenard R. Bernstein (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, esp. pp. 176–93. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Random House, 1980). Bourdieu, Theory of Practice. Timothy Mitchell, ‘Everyday Metaphors of Power’, in Theory and Society, Vol. 19, No. 5 (October 1990), pp. 545–77, esp. 552. Mitchell, ‘Everyday Metaphors’, p. 553.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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14. 15.

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31. Ibid., p. 555. 32. Ibid., p. 564. 33. Cheating at the weighing out of grain at harvest time, for example, may give the peasant ‘the illusion of having more power and manoeuvrability than is actually the case – that is, these ineffective but psychologically satisfying forms of resistance could in fact contribute to false consciousness, blinding people to the painful reality of the extent of their powerlessness and exploitation’. Christine White quoted in Mitchell, ‘Everyday Metaphors’, p. 555. 34. T. J. Jackson Lears, ‘The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities’, in The American Historical Review, Vol. 90, No. 3 ( June 1985), pp. 567–93, esp. 577. 35. E. San Juan, Beyond Postcolonial Theory (London: Macmillan, 1999). See also E. San Juan, Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression: Essays in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995). 36. Mitchell, ‘Everyday Metaphors’, p. 552. 37. Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 109. 38. Ibid., p. 114. 39. George Lipsitz, ‘The Struggle for Hegemony’, in The Journal of American History, Vol. 75, No. 1 ( June 1988), pp. 146–50, esp. 146–7. Having said this, of course, the peasantry in Gramsci were indeed in a position of having the hegemony of a fundamental class imposed upon them from above. 40. Studies of counterhegemony in the global South are few and far between. A notable exception is Persaud, Counter-Hegemony and Foreign Policy. See especially Chapter 6. 41. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); for a useful critique see Gopal Balakrishnan ed., Debating Empire (London: Verso, 2003). The phrase ‘waiting room of history’, comes from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s critique of historicism in Provincializing Europe, p. 8. 42. Ibid., p. 116. 43. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 1–34. 44. Persaud, Counter-Hegemony and Foreign Policy, p. 49. 45. Rupert, Ideologies of Globalization, p. 11.

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Part I The State and Politics: Nationalism and Revolution

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1 Hegemony, Counterhegemony and the Mexican Revolution Alan Knight

I take the concept of hegemony, as developed by Gramsci, to be a useful – if somewhat blurred1 – notion, which seeks to explain a palpable fact: that, despite the glaring inequities evident in many societies, the rulers and elites of these societies do not necessarily have to resort to regular and extensive repression in order to maintain themselves. Coercion alone is not the secret of their success. Though we owe the development and deployment of the concept to Gramsci, it is one which – in different guises – crops up in diverse theoretical contexts. Long before Gramsci (or Marx), David Hume observed that ‘nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers’.2 And, while Gramsci introduced ‘hegemony’ to the Marxist conceptual family (where it sits alongside its rather more disreputable cousin ‘false consciousness’), there are more distant ‘bourgeois’ relatives, such as ‘consensus’, the ‘common culture’ and (Weberian) legitimacy.3 The multiplication of these kindred concepts seems to suggest that there is something to the notion; and, indeed, any reading of history will throw up socio-political orders which depend heavily on coercion, as compared to those which, despite no less glaring inequalities, manage to survive and reproduce themselves without resorting – at least not nearly as much – to the knout and the noose. In seeking to explain this pervasive phenomenon, Gramsci’s notion is helpful and should not, I think, be discarded.4 But it should be clarified and ‘operationalized’, that is, deployed in particular historical contexts. This chapter looks at ‘revolutionary’ Mexico – that is, the Mexico which emerged from the revolution of 1910 and, rhetorically at least, was ruled by the victorious ‘revolutionary’ regime down to 2000.5 The chapter is historical, not theoretical: I do not propose to clarify or critique Gramsci’s arguments, but to use them – and others – in eclectic and utilitarian fashion.6 ‘Hegemony’ (and counterhegemony) are my ‘organizing concepts’, which I take roughly for granted, and use to the extent that they are useful.7 That said, I will briefly 23

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outline the analysis which follows. Hegemony denotes a form of authority which does not depend wholly or principally on coercion and the threat of coercion; counterhegemony implies a challenge to hegemony which is in some way systemic, which goes beyond limited and particular resistance and challenges the bases of authority. Revolutions, for obvious reasons, offer good examples of such confrontations; no less interesting (though less studied) are the subsequent processes whereby triumphant revolutions strive for hegemonic consolidation. In developing the analysis in the Mexican context I stress that it is important to clarify whose hegemony is at stake: in particular, I contrast forms of political hegemony (attaching to regime, state or nation) and forms of socio-economic hegemony, which relate to the socio-economic order, or (occasionally) to the entire ‘mode of production’. We should also recognize the hegemonic or counterhegemonic pretensions of non-state actors, such as the Catholic Church. I deploy these arguments using a conventional threefold periodization: the armed revolution (1910–20); revolutionary reform and state-building (1920–40); and revolutionary retreat and routinization (1940–80). This sequence prompts several conclusions. An initial revolutionary mobilization, in the guise of popular liberalism, mounted an effective counterhegemonic challenge to a sclerotic old regime, but proved incapable of establishing a new hegemonic regime; the latter emerged later, in more piecemeal fashion and depended on institutional innovations (parties, schools, ejidos, sindicatos) as much as any ideological resources. Hegemony had to be worked at; and success was never more than partial. Over time, the new regime gelled, but in the process it lost much of early élan and came to depend on elaborate systems of patronage and clientelism. Political polarization, which had been marked during 1910–40, declined during the years of the Cold War; erstwhile antagonists (including the Catholic Church) settled for pragmatic accommodations. By the 1950s a ‘thin’ hegemony (at best), based on spoils, patronage and economic growth, supplanted the hegemonic confrontations of the revolutionary years. Yet even thin hegemony proved vulnerable to the recession, inflation, and state-shrinking of the 1980s and ’90s. Today, the hegemony of the revolution, thick or thin, is largely a thing of the past; but the hegemony of the capitalist socio-economic order is stronger than ever. Revolutions offer promising terrain for the study of hegemony, since, almost by definition, they provide illustrative moments when hegemony has demonstrably failed. Indeed, it is only at a time of mass protest and upheaval that we can confidently say that hegemony has failed.8 Of course, hegemony may fail in the absence of revolution, its failure being manifest in naked repression or, perhaps, socio-political ‘implosion’ (a kind of revolution manqué: a breakdown of hegemony which lacks any counterhegemonic alternative and which results in social fragmentation, violence and anomie).9 Despite prolix debate, there is a rough consensus that revolutions – that is, ‘great’ or ‘social’ revolutions – embody two aspects or phases: first, a fundamental struggle for power between rival forces, wedded to rival visions, and

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involving what Tilly refers to as a situation of ‘multiple sovereignty’;10 this leading, secondly, to a process of revolutionary triumph and state-building which marks a major break with the old regime. Several qualifications must be made: a power struggle may not result in a revolutionary triumph (witness China’s Taiping rebellion); the struggle must involve contrasting visions (the Wars of the Roses would not count); and there must be substantial voluntary popular mobilization on at least one side (thus, a struggle between mercenary armies would not qualify). The dual sequence can be reformulated in ‘hegemonic’ terms: during the struggle for power, rival hegemonies are in play (sometimes two, sometimes more); a successful revolution – one that destroys the old regime and creates a durable alternative11 – must in some measure establish its own hegemony, unless it is to rule solely by virtue of coercion. Revolutionary regimes may incur significant opposition and resort to significant repression (hence, the Jacobin Terror; the Kronstadt repression of 1921; Mexico’s Cristero War, 1926–9); but I can think of few that relied wholly or overwhelmingly on repression.12 Most counted on a real measure of genuine – even ardent – popular support. They were at least partially ‘hegemonic’. But there is also a third phase to the story, one that is not diagnostic of ‘revolution’, but which seems a likely result – or, we might say, requiem. The mature revolutionary regime, if it survives domestic and external challenges, is likely to go the way of bureaucratization, consolidation and conservatism. It may retain its self-proclaimed revolutionary – ‘socialist’, communist, or nationalist – credentials, but as its leaders age, as vested interests are created, and as new forms of inequality are introduced or old forms are enhanced, so the ‘revolutionary’ claim begins to ring hollow. At this point, hegemony may fail and the regime may falter. Or the regime may build an alternative (weak/thin) hegemony, based on self-interested patronage and clientelism rather than revolutionary ideals. This, the perceptive reader may have guessed, is roughly the Mexican story, which parallels others.13 However, before turning to that story and putting some historical flesh on these skeletal conceptual bones, I think it useful to make three loosely theoretical clarifications. First, when we talk of hegemony, we should clarify whose hegemony is at stake. Second, this clarification rapidly leads to a rather obvious conclusion: that hegemony is never complete and is, to varying degrees, contested. Third, and no less obvious, struggles for hegemony are shifting processes; hegemony is not a given. And even when it seems to be a given – when it seems secure and preponderant – it has to be worked at; it depends on mechanisms of, let us say, acculturation; and we should ask what those mechanisms are. Such an inquiry is likely to lead in an institutional direction: towards schools, churches, parties, unions, newspapers and the mass media.14 The first point is perhaps the most complex and demands greatest attention. When we talk of hegemony – and counterhegemony – we would do well

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to ask: the hegemony of who or what? In general, hegemony refers to the political regime and, by extension, the socio-economic order which that regime underpins or oversees.15 Such a perspective, which I will largely adopt, derives from the concept’s Marxist provenance. We should be careful not to devalue the term by applying it too promiscuously, by – for example – attaching it to specific governments and administrations. (The same caveat would be in order if we were considering the cognate term ‘legitimacy’.) Administrations can be unpopular, but an unpopular administration does not shatter the hegemony (or legitimacy) of a political regime and a socioeconomic order.16 Indeed, systemic hegemony may depend on the possibility of removing unpopular administrations – sacrificing a part in order to preserve the whole (I give an example below, relating to Mexico in 1911). The relative stability of consolidated democracies derives in large measure from this safety valve.17 By occasionally ‘kicking out the bums’, voters can nurture the fond belief that they exercise genuine democratic control and can even achieve systemic change, if they so desire.18 But non-democratic regimes often have their safety valves too: authoritarian regimes may be responsive to public opinion;19 monarchical regimes may typically sacrifice the ‘bad advisers’ of the kind in order to maintain the greater hegemony of monarchical rule.20 A string of bad administrations, of course, may undermine systemic hegemony: people begin to blame the system rather than the individual incumbents (in part, this is what happened in Mexico during the twilight of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional [PRI]) after 1982). If administrations represent relatively transient episodes, regimes, states and socio-economic orders are grander and more enduring edifices, whose claims to hegemony are crucial. By regime I mean the form the state adopts, irrespective of transient incumbents: monarchical, oligarchic, authoritarian, totalitarian, democratic, polyarchic. (We can adopt whatever typology we like, starting with Aristotle). The democratic to authoritarian and back to democratic switchback which Latin America had ridden throughout the twentieth century involves such changes (some accomplished by means of ‘social’ revolution, most by more prosaic processes of coup, rebellion and piecemeal democratization). Current debates about the degree of democratic ‘consolidation’ in Latin America are, it seems to me, addressing the question, whether democratic regimes are now ‘hegemonic’ – whether, in other words, they are backed by durable mainstream opinion, which makes them ‘the only game in town’.21 At a yet more profound level, we may consider the hegemony of the state and the socio-economic order (by which I mean the basic distribution of economic power and resources). I will consider the latter first. A rather reductionist approach would equate this with the ‘mode of production’ (a phrase which, 30 or so years after its theoretical heyday, now has a slightly antiquarian sound). There is nothing wrong with categorizing societies according to their ‘mode of production’; indeed, to say – for example – that a society is

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capitalist is to package a good deal of useful information in a one-word label. (And it is a lot more informative than saying that a society is ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’ or ‘Western’.) The problem with modes of production is not that they are unimportant or meaningless (far from it), but rather that they tend to change slowly, over time; they are like the tectonic plates of the social world which, while they may sporadically generate big upheavals, do not shift and transform themselves in the short term, but follow the slow rhythms of geological time. Meanwhile, a great deal goes on atop the tectonic plates (that is, the modes of production) which they do not directly influence and cannot therefore explain.22 Even ‘great’ revolutions do not usually achieve brisk transformations of the mode of production. Twentiethcentury ‘socialist’ revolutions may rapidly subvert capitalism (Cuba would be a good example); but other revolutions – roughly, ‘bourgeois’ revolutions, like the French and perhaps the Mexican and Bolivian – achieve no such rapid or drastic socio-economic change; they do not install ‘bourgeois capitalism’ on the smoking ruins of ‘feudalism’. However, even if they do not revolutionize the mode of production, they do substantially change the socio-economic order;23 they go beyond ‘mere’ political change, and their character as ‘great’ or – better – ‘social’ revolutions depends on this socioeconomic accomplishment. Classic examples in the Mexican case would be the campesinos’ successful campaign for land reform, which provoked bitter landlord opposition, and – a secondary, somewhat more muted conflict – the working class campaign for union rights, for better pay and conditions, and, in some cases, for outright workers’ control of enterprises. These campaigns involved not only political battles, which hinged on state policy and access to power, but also local agrarian confrontations (land seizures, lobbying, litigation, skirmishes and assassinations) and analogous shop-floor struggles. Though these relationships are complex in practice, we can make a fairly clear analytical distinction between the hegemony of the regime (the form the state adopts) and the hegemony of the socio-economic order, which we can define maximally (but rather unhelpfully) as a given ‘mode of production’ or, more modestly but more usefully, as a given distribution of economic power and resources, in both field and factory. ‘Political’ revolutions involve the first, ‘social’ revolutions the second.24 Social revolutions are likely to embody political revolutions, but the reverse does not follow. The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 was a political revolution which broadly consolidated the socio-economic status quo. The Mexican Revolution, I argue, followed the pattern of social revolutions which – like the French – changed both political and socio-economic structures, but without achieving a rapid and thorough transformation of the mode of production (such as occurred in Cuba after 1959). We may therefore depict administrations and regimes as concentric circles; and, alongside, overlapping but distinct, stand two similar concentric circles: socio-economic orders and modes of production.25

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[Nation-]State (Mexico)

Regime (revolutionary/ populist) Administration (Calles, Cárdenas)

Mode of Production (capitalist)

Socio-Economic Order (reformist/agrarian)

So far, so neat. But there is an outer (political) circle which also warrants a mention – and here things get more complicated. Administrations and regimes are both manifestations of the state; they can come and go without the state disappearing. The Latin American switchback – from democratic to authoritarian and back to democratic – did not involve the dissolution of the state.26 Almost by definition, the state claims some sort of hegemony; the classic Weberian formulation of the state’s monopoly of legitimate force says as much;27 and most hegemonic battles, including most revolutions, involve battles for control of the state. Hence the familiar ‘Tocquevillean’ sequence, whereby the successful revolution seizes and strengthens the state it has just recently overthrown.28 This view fits the Mexican story quite well. But, even in Mexico, there were revolutionary groups who were leery of state power, who, rather than seeking to seize the state and cast it in their own image, as would-be hegemons are meant to do, were chiefly concerned to weaken and even dissolve the state. Such anarchist/anarchisant forces were, of course, even stronger in other revolutionary contexts: in Nestor Makhno’s Ukraine, for example, or in the Spanish Revolution of the 1930s. These revolutionary actors sought to dismantle – or, at least, substantially weaken – state hegemony without apparently desiring to forge their own hegemonic statist alternative. However, such actors are relatively unusual and their appearance on the stage has tended to be brief.29 The Tocquevillean sequence reflects a kind of Weberian logic: states are hard to get rid of; they are seen as the essential political carapace of nations; and forces both domestic and international tend to reinforce processes of statebuilding – even if these processes are messy and only partially successful.30 As the last sentence suggests, there is a closely related institution whose fate is wrapped up with that of the state and whose ‘hegemony’ may also be moot: the nation. It is sometimes taken for granted that revolutions occur within nation-states and serve to perpetuate them. Indeed, the Tocquevillean sequence could be extended from ‘state’ to ‘nation-state’: revolutions, like the French (and the English, Russian and Chinese?), destroy old regimes but proceed to construct not only stronger states but also stronger nations than had existed before. Or, in the case of nationalist movements (whose revolutionary status, of course, may be debated), success

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involves the creation of entirely new nations: the United States in 1776, Algeria in 1962. Although the Mexican Revolution has been (rightly) seen as nationalist revolution and (wrongly) termed a ‘war of national liberation’,31 it seems clear that almost all the Mexican revolutionaries – and the vast majority of their enemies too – were sincere patriots or, if you prefer, nationalists, who eagerly subscribed to the notion of the Mexican nation.32 They differed profoundly over both the regime and the socio-economic order which Mexico should adopt (hence the revolution happened), but they endorsed the idea of a Mexican ‘imagined national community’. True, their ‘imagined national communities’ were not identical (were Cuauhtémoc and Hidalgo, or Cortés and Iturbide, the true fathers of the Mexican nation?); but they all agreed that a national community possessed of defined borders, territory and shared history existed. To that extent nationalism was hegemonic and the survival of the nation was not a basic issue during the Revolution.33 We could contrast this hegemonic nationalism with revolutionary struggles elsewhere in which the survival – or creation – of the nation-state was at stake. A century before the 1910 Revolution, Mexican patriots fought a long war against Spanish colonialism and finally triumphed, turning the colony of New Spain into the Mexican Republic. Cuban nationalists fought a similar war twice, in 1868–78 and 1895–8. These were genuine wars of national liberation, in which the fates of potential nations were determined. By and large, however, such nationalist forces did not set out to subvert the entire socio-economic order, still less the ‘mode of production’. More recently, in contrast, Latin America has witnessed radical and revolutionary movements which repudiate the very legitimacy of the nation-state, which they see as racist, exploitative and neocolonial: the starkest example would be Peru’s Sendero Luminoso. Given the sheer strength of the nation-state dyad, it is difficult to disaggregate the two elements: after all, potential nations who lack states (for example, the Kurds, or the Aymara of Peru and Bolivia) are destined to remain ‘submerged’ nationalities; conversely, most twentieth-century revolutionary movements – and virtually all the Mexican revolutionaries of 1910–40 – assumed that Mexico was a nation and, as such, required a congruent state. (In this respect, as Florencia Mallon points out, they differ from Sendero, which fought against an illicit nation-state in the name of an ‘Andean utopia’.)34 While some Mexican revolutionaries – like Zapata – favoured a relatively weak, decentralized state,35 they did not repudiate the idea of the nation and, to that extent, they took it for granted that the patria needed some protective political carapace.36 So far, I have argued that we should disaggregate hegemonic claims and loyalties according to two analytically distinct – but in practice linked – categories, depicted in the two concentric circles: roughly, the political category/circle (embracing ephemeral administrations, more durable regimes, and yet more durable nation-states); and the socio-economic category/circle, which may be maximally defined as a ‘mode of production’ and, more modestly and usefully, as a ‘socio-economic order’. But hegemony may attach to

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other grand institutions or relationships.37 Like the State, the Church can experience crises of hegemony: somewhat suddenly (as in the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century northern Europe); or gradually (the slow erosion of religious attitudes and church attendance in twentieth-century Western Europe). In Catholic countries like Mexico, Church and State have, since the Enlightenment, engaged in a protracted war of positions, sometimes testing their respective hegemonies against each other (for example, Mexico in 1917–40), sometimes coming together in a tight embrace in opposition to third – would-be hegemonic – rivals, such as Communism.38 It is, I think, quite right to dignify this struggle as ‘hegemonic’, since the collective actors – Church and State – are powerful, endowed with ample resources and – sometimes – possessed of starkly contrasting visions. In the Mexican case, as in others, the revolutionary state saw itself as actively engaged in subverting the perverse hegemony of the Church (‘hegemony’ was not the usual term, but closely analogous terms were common currency). In return, the Church sought to subvert the anticlerical state and – in the eyes of Catholic militants at least – set out to build the kingdom of Christ on earth. This was a quintessential battle for hearts and minds or, in other words, a struggle for hegemony. The Church–State confrontation is perhaps the clearest example of such a hegemonic struggle. It overlapped other, less clear-cut, confrontations: between agraristas and landlords, workers and bosses, conservatives and radicals. Taken together, these several struggles were a logical consequence of the revolution, which had toppled the political old regime, undermined the prerevolutionary socio-economic order, and sharply polarized Mexican society. For about a generation (1910–40) politics involved high stakes and profoundly uncertain outcomes: a classic revolutionary/post-revolutionary outcome. It follows from this scenario that hegemony was contested, with several collective actors being involved. By referring to hegemonic ‘contestation’ I mean much more than run-of-the-mill politics, in which the rules of the game are roughly known and observed by most major players and their room for manoeuvre is consequently constricted (that, as I note in conclusion, would more accurately describe post-1940s Mexico).39 While, during 1910–40, there was, as I have said, general acceptance of the Mexican nation-state (that collective identity was, we could say, hegemonically established; Mexico was a patria forjada),40 both the political form of the state and the make-up of the socio-economic order were matters of serious dispute. And these disputes were ‘hegemonic’ in the sense that, in prosecuting them, rival actors – caudillos, caciques, prelates, parish priests, union bosses, teachers, peasant leaders – competed intensely for mass support, putting forward substantially different visions of how Mexico should function. It follows that there was no established hegemony, but rather a hegemonic struggle. Needless to say, this was a shifting struggle, displaying marked variations over time and place. The revolutionary state seemed to triumph here (in the

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state of Morelos, for example, or on the left bank of the Yaqui River); while the Church carried the day elsewhere (for example, los Altos de Jalisco). The Laguna region became – like the railway union or the Poza Rica section of the oil-workers union – a bastion of radicalism and even Communism, while Chiapas, in contrast, boasted a powerful reactionary landed class, Oaxaca a clutch of conservative local caciques, and Monterrey the cream of Mexico’s industrial bourgeoisie. These major variations were spatial or sectoral; but there were also important shifts over time. So, in the second, more historical part of this chapter, I shall offer a highly schematic resumé of the course of the Revolution and the regime it engendered, relating the story to the notions of hegemony already introduced. We can readily discern three distinct periods: (1) armed revolution (1910– c. 20); (2) revolutionary reform and state-building (c. 1920–c. 40); and (3) revolutionary retreat, ‘routinization’ and bureaucratization (c. 1940–c. 80).41 The Revolution began in 1910 and, like several other revolutions, it took most observers by surprise.42 There was no premonitory phase of febrile tensions and worried diagnoses. True, the lead-up to the 1910 presidential election generated an unusual degree of popular interest and involvement, beginning in 1908–9. But this did not presage social revolution: other Latin American countries turned such tricky corners (for example, Argentina in 1912–16); and many would have agreed with the German diplomat who in 1910 considered ‘general revolution’ to be ‘out of the question’ – ‘as does public opinion and the press’, he added.43 However, when Mexico’s brief political opening was abruptly closed by the government in 1910, it provoked protest and, by 1910–11, armed rebellion. At this point, the scale and depth of popular discontent, hitherto concealed, became starkly apparent. Throughout northern and central Mexico, rebel movements suddenly prospered, enjoying broad public support.44 Alarmed by the intensity of rebellion, riot, land seizures and ‘banditry’, the government came to the negotiating table and, in the hope of preserving as much of the political and socio-economic status quo as possible, sacrificed the ageing president, Porfirio Díaz (a typical – but in this case futile – authoritarian ploy for survival). Two features of this initial revolutionary episode are, for our purposes, noteworthy. First, there is abundant evidence of the old regime’s lack of hegemony (or, if we wish to be bolder, loss of hegemony). Public opinion was broadly revolutionary. The desire for change was widespread. When old regime interests tried to fight back, they found themselves outnumbered and (metaphorically) outgunned: in 1909–10 official efforts to counter the nascent opposition by mounting mass rallies proved abject failures (the old regime lacked both the means and, more important, the masses); and when, a year later, paladins of the past like Chihuahua’s boss Luis Terrazas confronted popular insurgency, they did not dare arm their own peons and retainers for fear the guns would be turned on them.45 Thus, while we have

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no survey data, no focus groups, with which to gauge the popular mood, it seems clear that the old regime lacked hegemony. It did not engage with Mexican society, eliciting loyalty; rather, it rode on top, digging its spurs into a refractory burro, until, finally, the burro bucked and unseated its unloved master. We can, more cautiously, go further and suggest that, over time, the old regime had actually lost hegemony. This is, of course, a tricky argument. It is easier to show – in dramatic circumstances like 1910–11 (or 1917) – that hegemony is lacking. It is another thing to argue for its existence: maybe, as James Scott says, we too readily assume hegemony when what we are seeing is simply the grudging quiescence created by compulsion and disguised by popular dissimulation and elite self-deception.46 However, I think there is sufficient evidence to suggest that the early Díaz regime (1876–c. 90) enjoyed a greater measure of popular support, legitimacy, or hegemony: it was the heir to the patriotic liberal generation of Juárez; it had brought peace and stability after years of upheaval; it had successfully promoted economic growth. From the 1890s, however, the pendulum swung: stability began to look like ossification; growth proved highly regressive; and vigorous caudillos in the prime of life (Diaz was 46 when he took power in 1876) became the elderly, over-weight, out-of-touch politicos who now deferred to a new generation of cosmopolitan technocrats (the ‘cientificos’).47 Luis Terrazas, who had led popular militias against the common Apache enemy back in the 1880s, now became the aged, hugely affluent and deeply unpopular boss of the ruling clique in Chihuahua. The mature Porfirian regime of the 1900s thus increasingly justified its rule – to the extent that it felt the need to justify it at all – in terms of technocratic competence and economic growth. The second notable feature of 1910 is that the opposition successfully deployed a counter-ideology or counterhegemonic claim: roughly, that of patriotic liberalism. The revolutionaries laid claim to the old mantle of Juárez, which the Porfiristas had carelessly shrugged off; where the Porfiristas were elitist, authoritarian, self-regarding and xenophile, the opposition was popular, democratic, disinterested and patriotic. This was not a notably radical counter-ideology; its historical provenance was, we might say, Victorian, mid-nineteenth century in origin.48 It was also pretty vague. But as a mobilizing ideology it was highly effective: first, because – irrespective of its philosophical virtues or consistencies – it exercised a strong historical appeal;49 and, second, because its appeal was broad and unifying – it could bring together the progressive middle classes of the burgeoning cities, the bulk of the infant labour movement, and peasant communities who faced a dual attack on both their material resources (land and water) and their cherished political autonomy. The specific demands of these groups – of the peasants in particular – were sometimes socio-economically radical, but they could be assimilated to the broad cause of popular liberalism, at least for the time being. The Revolution thus depended on specific

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political and economic grievances – which varied from place to place and sector to sector – but it began under a common popular liberal banner. A final observation on 1910–11: the revolutionary banner had, in a sense, been snatched from the emaciated fingers of the Porfiristas. Popular liberalism had buoyed the early Porfirian regime in the 1870s and ’80s; by the 1900s, the regime found its old images and slogans being turned against it. This pattern, we will note, was repeated some 70 years later, as the (PRI) regime’s rather dog-eared ‘public transcript’50 – a transcript of reform, agrarianism and nationalism – was taken up and proclaimed by the opposition, not least by the Zapatistas of Chiapas. The revolution which began in 1910 continued for nearly a decade. Twice, broad revolutionary coalitions confronted and defeated the forces of the old regime (in 1910–11 and 1913–14). A third bout of civil war (1914–15: the ‘war of the winners’) pitted rival revolutionary factions against each other. By 1917, although violence remained endemic, the basic issue – who would rule Mexico? – was settled and a new reformist constitution had been promulgated. The story of this decade is immensely complicated, not least because of the sheer variety of Mexican revolutionary politics (‘many Mexicos’ meant ‘many revolutions’).51 But, for our immediate purposes, two points deserve emphasis. First, while the gravitational power of popular liberalism helped bring together the broad opposition coalitions of 1910–11 and 1913–14, it was quite incapable of maintaining these disparate coalitions in defiance of strong centripetal forces: those of class, ethnicity, region, generation and personal faction. With its broad, diffuse, emotive appeal, popular liberalism was effective as a ‘counterhegemonic’ ideology, espoused by the successful – but highly diverse – opposition to both Díaz (1910–11) and Huerta (1913–14); but it was much less use as a programme of government, especially of activist revolutionary government. It was an ideology of state contestation, not of state construction. In particular, as I have already suggested, a good many insurgents saw popular liberalism as a means to weaken the central government, to enhance local and provincial autonomy, and to gratify the strong attachment to the patria chica (literally, the ‘little fatherland’) felt by many Mexicans, well-to-do and plebeian alike. Zapata was leery of the central government, which he mistrusted and certainly did not want to appropriate.52 The great popular caudillo of the north, Pancho Villa, though more ambivalent, also displayed a relative indifference to Mexico City and the south; his ambitions were focused on his northern homeland, especially Chihuahua, Durango and the Laguna; and, in contrast to his chief rivals, Carranza and the Sonorans, he did not seem to entertain a hegemonic blueprint for the political takeover and transformation of Mexico. Those rivals, though militarily weaker, possessed such a blueprint: it involved seizing the south (especially Yucatán), allying with organized labour, combating, as they saw it, a hostile and reactionary Church, and adopting a stiff-necked nationalist attitude

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towards the United States and major foreign interests, notably the booming oil companies. While practical circumstances partly dictated these contrasting policies,53 it also seems clear that the Carranza/Sonora faction behaved the way they did because, unlike Villa and (a fortiori) Zapata, they nurtured a vision of a centralized nation-state, with them at the head of it, and rival powers – the church, the provinces, the oil companies – brought to heel.54 Popular liberalism could not form the basis of this ambitious hegemonic project. Even more important – since any hegemonic project demands methods and resources as well as inspirational ideas – the victorious revolutionaries had to set about fostering institutions which would grapple them to Mexican society, a society that was still sharply divided, often suspicious of ‘the centre’, but conveniently war-weary, thus disposed to tolerate the formation of a Tocquevillean new regime. The revolutionaries, in other words, were determined to avoid the fate that had overtaken Díaz: heading a state which lacked social penetration and which, even without knowing it, forfeited its claims to legitimacy/hegemony. They did not want to be bucked off the burro they had so recently mounted. To this end, the revolutionary regime (c. 1920–c. 40) proved creative and quite successful in its forging of new ‘hegemonizing’ institutions: the ejido (the agrarian reform community), which gave the peasants land, on a grand scale, but in return for their clientelist dependence on the state; the labour movement, which also received benefits (union recognition, arbitration, collective contracts, and a range of informal perks), so long as it, too, struck a bargain with the state; the federal school, which brought education – for a time, ‘socialist’ education – to the masses, while inculcating principles of revolutionary nationalism; and the revolutionary party (the PNR, 1929–38; the PRM, 1938–46; and finally, since 1946, the PRI), which pulled together the disparate regional and sectoral components of the winning coalition, placing them under the loose control of a clientelist machine which came to monopolize all major political offices. I am again schematizing a very complex process, which is the subject of intense debate. If we stand back and generalize about the period in question (c. 1920–40), a couple of points emerge. First, the relative success of the revolutionary hegemonic project derived from its incorporation of popular demands and interests. Historians of Mexico have argued at length whether the revolutionary state was a ‘top-down’ imposition on a resentful people, or a genuinely popular regime, dedicated to national well-being and reflecting mass involvement (which was the heroic self-image of the official party). The predictable answer is that it was both, and, again, that the balance varied from time to time and from place to place. Top-down imposition was more evident in, say Jalisco, where anticlerical policies provoked a major Catholic rebellion in 1926; popular engagement and reform can be seen in Morelos in the 1920s or the Laguna in the 1930s, both of which experienced genuine land reform and the partial empowerment of popular leaders.

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Second, it follows that revolutionary hegemony was patchy: we find some regions (and sectors) marked by popular mobilization and social reform; and others where resentment and resistance are more apparent. Indeed, these contrasting outcomes were two sides of the same coin. A radical land reform – as demanded by the campesinos of Morelos or the Laguna – was bound to offend both rich landlords and some well-to-do rancheros (the ‘peasant bourgeoisie’, as they have been called).55 Allying with organized labour – the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (Mexican Regional Workers’ Confederation [CROM]) in the 1920s, the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (Confederation of Mexican Workers [CTM]) in the 1930s – would similarly offend the burgeoning industrial bourgeoisie, especially the powerful ‘Monterrey group’. Promoting secular, ‘socialist’ and (briefly) sex education would inevitably antagonize Catholics, who had their own highly effective counterhegemonic institutions to rely on: the Church hierarchy, the parish system, private schools, the Catholic intelligentsia and a slew of mass Catholic organizations, embracing youth, parents, women, businessmen and some provincial elites. In a context of continued class and ideological polarization – the inevitable backwash of the armed revolution of the 1910s – the choices made by state actors, as they set about their work of reform and reconstruction, were bound to be somewhat divisive. Revolutionary leaders could not please all of the people all of the time. And some leaders – Múgica, Cárdenas, Tejeda, Carrillo Puerto – were genuine radicals, propelled to power by the preceding social upheaval and committed to root-and-branch reform. Of course, many revolutionary leaders also trimmed and compromised; and some threw in their lot with conservative vested interests (notably in the south). We could therefore hazard a kind of hegemonic map of the revolutionary period (1920–40), taking in both regions and sectors; and we could reduce it, highly schematically, to three blocs: (1) those Mexicans who, for reasons of idealism or selfinterest or both,56 positively endorsed the revolutionary state and its works (those, in other words, who actively subscribed and contributed to the hegemonic project); (2) those who were bitterly opposed and who, in some salient cases, had the organizational capacity to mount vigorous opposition (the Catholic Church would be the best example; but the Monterrey group, and big business in general, also counted; these, we might say, could deploy the ‘weapons of the strong’);57 and, in between, (3) a large middle ground occupied by Mexicans who were broadly neutral, who, rather in the manner generically described by James Scott, were suspicious of the state (and often of the church too),58 who regarded politics as a dirty game best avoided, but who were obliged, nonetheless, to reckon with the growing power of the revolutionary state, and who pragmatically, even cynically, adjusted to changing circumstances, looking out for their own and their family’s interests, deploying the well-known ‘weapons of the weak’ (foot-dragging, dissimulation, gossip, black humour).59 The numerous inhabitants of the middle ground did

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not propose a coherent counterhegemony; but they could quite successfully challenge the rival hegemonic projects which were directed at them from both wings, statist and clerical. Thus, we find both the revolutionary state and its arch-rival the Catholic church uttering almost identical complaints: that the Mexican people – workers and peasants in particular – were dirty, feckless, uneducated, superstitious, violent, macho, ill-disciplined, hard to control, and overly fond of drinking, gambling, blood sports, brujería (witchcraft) and casual sex. With apologies, I offer another diagram, which seeks to capture this threefold division of Mexican society: ‘Hegemonic map’ c. 1920–40

c. rival projects (for example, Catholic, big business); organized opposition; ‘weapons of the strong’

Even as the revolutionary period drew to a close – as the generation who had fought in the revolution died out and their policies ran into the sand – so these divisions remained clear. The 1940 presidential election was famously dirty and violent, involving both outright (‘counterhegemonic’) opposition and a good deal of popular abstention and cynicism (the protest of the middle ground). The decade which followed saw a major transition: cities grew and the countryside languished; a new political generation took power; radical policies lost their lustre; and the World War and Cold War combined to propel Mexico to the right, and into a closer relationship with the United States. By means of both coercion (for example, the forcible purging of the industrial unions) and clientelism (the distribution of favours to both elite and mass beneficiaries), the PRI came to dominate the political system, absorbing into its massive entrails a host of groups and interests who had hitherto remained outside. Meanwhile, some groups were ejected (good taste prevents me from pursuing the metaphor too far): the radical left, some union leaders, militant peasant activists. In other words, the PRI shifted to the right, casting some of the left into limbo, while absorbing erstwhile outsiders, including some business groups and provincial elites.60 The Party could never swallow up the Church, of course, but a cautious modus vivendi was now established between these old antagonists who, while they did not fall into a warm embrace, could at least agree that Communism was a greater common evil. This transition laid the groundwork for the prolonged ‘peace of the PRI’, which endured about a generation (roughly, 1950–80). During these years

Hegemony, Counterhegemony and the Mexican Revolution 37

Mexico experienced stable civilian government and sustained economic growth: a record unusual within contemporary Latin America and evidence, it is usually assumed, of the sustained hegemony or legitimacy of the revolution. It could be argued, however, that Mexican stability, growth and legitimacy/hegemony derived less from the continued implementation of the revolutionary project than its progressive abandonment – some would say, a little histrionically, its ‘betrayal’. During these years the party monopolized political office, engineered the endless election of its candidates, kept organized labour and the peasantry under a loose clientelistic control, and established favourable conditions for business (with low taxes, high tariffs, subsidies and state contracts). Living standards tended to rise (and, until the 1970s, inflation remained low); but inequality increased. This, as leftist critics pointed out, was hardly a revolutionary or even an actively redistributionist political economy.61 It is therefore hard to believe that the stability of the regime and the social order derived from eager popular endorsement of the revolutionary project. Polls – which begin to be of some use by the 1960s – suggest that many Mexicans still valued the goals and aspirations of the Revolution, but few believed that the regime was actively fulfilling them; on the contrary, faith in politicians – and in other state agents, including bureaucrats, official union leaders and the execrated police – was notoriously low.62 Mexicans thus displayed something of a schizoid – but understandably schizoid – political culture: they endorsed revolutionary principles but rejected ‘revolutionary’ políticos. Indeed, it was the extra- and anti-PRI left which, increasingly, took up the old slogans, icons and principles of the Revolution, turning them against a regime which, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary and therefore of growing scepticism, claimed still to be governing in the name of the Revolution and for the good of all. This increasingly odd situation was finally resolved, after a fashion, in the neoliberal 1980s and ’90s, when, like the Peronists of Argentina, the PRI formally ditched many of its old revolutionary and nationalist credentials, ending the agrarian reform, privatizing state assets and embracing markets, free trade and NAFTA. Now, the anti-PRI left could wave the old banner of the revolution even more vigorously: rebels in Chiapas assumed the iconic name of Zapata; and a new leftist-nationalist party, the PRD, was formed under the leadership of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of the great reforming president of the 1930s, Lázaro Cárdenas. If, during its heyday (1950–80), the PRI did not build its hegemony on a faithful fulfilment of the revolutionary project, on what was its hegemony based? For there can be little doubt that, despite recurrent coercion, the PRIísta state did enjoy a measure of hegemony and did not – like the military regimes of South America or the ethnocidal government of Guatemala – rely on extensive, root-and-branch repression. In my view (and there is little by way of conclusive proof), the PRI enjoyed a kind of ‘weak’ or ‘thin’ hegemony, based on effective clientelism and corruption, backed up by

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occasional coercion, on the whole creating an image of permanency which made systematic opposition difficult.63 In other words, the PRI ruled successfully in large measure because viable and attractive alternatives were not on offer; and because sufficient modest benefits were distributed to the mass of Mexicans (these included a measure of civil peace and limited prospects for individual and family advancement); while much juicier benefits were distributed, conditionally and often corruptly, to power-holders within the system. To a degree, therefore, that system became ‘naturalized’. There was no alternative; the dull compulsion of everyday life made most Mexicans settle – quite rationally – for the ‘limited good’ offered by the PRI rather than the hypothetical alternatives proposed by a minority of radical leftists, militant Catholics and quixotic liberals.64 The system held together so long as there were benefits to distribute (in this respect, much of Mexico’s political trajectory is eminently explicable in cold, calculating, material terms: we need not resort to fanciful ideological or discursive explanations. Hegemony, we might say, was a knife-and-fork question).65 The system began to fail when the benefits were cut off by debt crisis, inflation and recession in the 1980s. Ordinary Mexicans now found their livelihoods threatened: over a period of some 20 years real living standards barely improved. Elite Mexicans also found that the PRI was no longer lady bountiful. The private bankers were expropriated in 1982; and the PRI itself split in 1987, when the left within the party realized that they had been supplanted by state-shrinking neoliberal technocrats. What had been key mechanisms of the system – extensive clientelism, collaboration with the private sector, powerful presidentialism and stern party discipline – all began to break down. The breakdown confirmed the secret of previous success which, again, may be depicted diagrammatically: ‘Hegemonic map’ c. 1950–80

c. radical left, dissident unions; militant Catholics; dogged liberals

If, in conclusion, we compare the ‘hegemonic maps’ of the two periods under consideration (1910–40 and 1950–80), we note some important changes. In the second map the ‘hegemonized’ bloc (a) has been drained of

Hegemony, Counterhegemony and the Mexican Revolution 39

much of its old popular content; it now consists chiefly of residual official rhetoric and party apparatchiks (comparisons with Eastern Europe would not be wholly fanciful). The ‘dominant ideology’ now seems to perform the role that Abercrombie, Hill and Turner regard as its principal function: to integrate, justify and gladden the hearts of ruling elites.66 In contrast, the counterhegemonic bloc (c) has recruited an increasing number of disillusioned leftists - Communists, dissident unionists, peasant radicals and even some PRIísta defectors – who now invoke the Revolution in opposition to the so-called revolutionary regime.67 They cohabit uneasily with liberals and Catholics who had never been reconciled to the PRI machine. In the middle ground (b), where, at best, a ‘thin hegemony’ prevails, we find a vast population who have little love for the PRI (though they may retain some lingering attachment to unfulfilled revolutionary aspirations), who see active, consistent (‘counterhegemonic’) opposition to the PRI as both futile and risky, and who are snared in sticky webs of clientelism and corruption. Perhaps most striking of all is the huge growth of this middle ground which, we might say, provided the solid foundation of the Pax PRIísta during its heyday. Between c. 1950 and c. 1980 Mexico was much less polarized than it had been in 1910–40. Violence declined; after 1952, presidential elections were anodyne; and the economy grew steadily. (It was against this bland backdrop that the 1968 student massacre came as such a shock.) Charitable observers praised Mexico for its remarkable consensual stability.68 What had happened, as my ‘hegemonic maps’ seek to show, is that the profound battles of the revolutionary period, pitting rival hegemonic projects against each other, had yielded to a more prosaic form of controlled machine politics, which served the interests of the well-to-do (both inside and outside the PRI), while deflating popular expectations and curtailing popular empowerment. A kind of consensus prevailed, but it was an ideologically narrow consensus of elites and businessmen which worked by excluding extremes of both left and right and by subduing – coercively or clientelistically – the rambunctious politics of the revolutionary years.69 If the middle ground of ‘thin hegemony’ afforded the foundation for PRIísta rule, it is not surprising that, with the seismic shifts of the 1980s and ’90s (the debt crisis; chronic inflation; three serious recessions; the 1987–8 schism in the party itself), the ground began to shift and (thin) hegemony finally crumbled. It was not the PRI’s abandonment of the old hegemonic project of the Revolution which brought about its downfall in 2000, for that abandonment had occurred long before.70 Rather, it was its inability to keep middle-ground machine politics – the provision of jobs, land and perks – ticking over. The PRI, nonetheless, lives on, an opposition party with a significant base, but depleted clientelistic resources. The presidency, which since 2000 has been in the hands of the pro-business, pro-Catholic PAN (Partido Acción Nacional) is a shadow of its former PRIísta self, lacking both political cohesion and a solid popular constituency. (Having campaigned long and hard

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against PRI populism and clientelism, the PAN are poorly placed to construct their own versions.) As elsewhere in Latin America, the neoliberal (‘Washington’) consensus of the 1990s has lost some of its lustre and the PRD (Partido de la Revolución Democrática), the chief legatee of the revolutionary nationalist project, may yet win the presidency in 2006. At the time of writing ( July 2005), Mexico lacks a hegemonic party, bloc or project (whether that makes it unusual is another matter). Political competition – much greater now than before 1980 – is largely confined within narrow bounds: enhanced pluralism has not brought enhanced polarization.71 In these respects, Mexico more closely resembles ‘western democracies’ now than in the past. It is not clear, however, whether Mexican democracy is ‘consolidated’ – that is, ‘hegemonic’, invulnerable to contingent crises and upheavals. Some observers, too, would question the hegemony/legitimacy of the Mexican nation-state, which faces the – probably exaggerated – threat of Americanization to the north and the – possibly exaggerated – challenge of Indian/Zapatista protest to the south. What is undoubtedly ‘hegemonic’ – eagerly endorsed by some, grudgingly accepted by many – is the capitalist mode of production; or, more specifically, the highly regressive socio-economic order which Mexican capitalism has perpetuated for over 50 years, under successive governments, projects and regimes.

Notes 1. Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980), pp. 11–15. 2. David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 29. 3. Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis, pp. 31–6, which notes, I think correctly, that some ‘bourgeois’ theorists – such as Weber and Mannheim – are closer to Marxist tradition (in this respect) than often supposed. 4. As I have argued elsewhere, James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), is a persuasive work and a valuable corrective to glib assumptions about subaltern false consciousness, which Mexicanists should take seriously: Alan Knight, ‘Weapons and Arches in the Revolutionary Landscape’, in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 24–54. However, I think Scott goes rather too far in jettisoning more subtle variations on this theme, such as Gramsci’s (see Domination and the Arts of Resistance, pp. 90–1). I discuss this further in n. 63 below. On the historical pervasiveness of inequality, note the – impressionistic but cogent – comments of Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism (Vol. 2) The Wheels of Commerce (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), pp. 466–7. 5. I offer a periodization of Mexico’s short twentieth century later. There is a problem of nomenclature here, which relates to substantial matters of historical interpretation, and which might be summed up by asking: ‘when did the Revolution stop?’ Thus, when should we, as historians, stop using the ‘revolutionary’ label? We may all agree the Revolution began in 1910, but some would see closure occurring as

Hegemony, Counterhegemony and the Mexican Revolution 41

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

early as 1917 or 1920 (so, what came after was ‘post-revolutionary’); some would favour c. 1940; while the ruling party still claimed ‘revolutionary’ credentials a generation later (although, as its oxymoronic name proclaimed, it was both ‘revolutionary’ and ‘institutional’ at the same time, hence the PRI, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional). Since I incline to the 1940 ‘closure’ view, I am happy to refer to the regime of the 1920s and ’30s as ‘revolutionary’, but I would find it hard to sustain this usage beyond c. 1940; so, for the later decades, ‘revolutionary’ requires inverted commas. On the benefits of ‘deliberate eclectic[ism]’ (what might be called picking theoretical horses for empirical courses), see Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Constructing Social Theories (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), pp. 4ff. So, what follows is a historical analysis of Mexico (and a few other places) which deploys Gramscian (and a few other) concepts, without claiming to provide either a textual exegesis of these concepts (there is only one direct citation of Gramsci) or a theoretical unpicking of Gramscian thought. As Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, points out, the absence of upheaval does not necessarily denote hegemony; subaltern compliance may be grudging, fearful and/or pragmatic – informed by hard experience rather than shared consensual values. Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis, offers similar arguments. On ‘implosion’, see Matei Dogan and John Higley, ‘Elites, Crises and Regimes in Comparative Analysis’, in Elites, Crises and the Origins of Regimes, edited by Matei Dogan and John Higley (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), pp. 10–11. Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 10. The ‘durable alternative’ may take several forms: as I later note, some rather reductionist analyses wish to reserve the label ‘social revolution’ (or suchlike) for rapid transformations of the entire social and political system, even the ‘mode of production’. But this is very high hurdle to clear, and few putative revolutions would make it. For that reason, I lower the bar to ‘socio-economic order’; and I would readily include anticolonial and nationalist revolutions which also spawn ‘durable alternatives’ to the status quo ante. Ultimately, the point of such labels is to advance knowledge and understanding; they are ‘heuristic devices’ which should be judged according to their utility, not their ‘veracity’. Hence there is plenty of scope for reasonable dissent. Stalinism was ferociously repressive, but it also had a solid base of support and did not rule by terror alone: Sheila FitzPatrick, Everyday Stalinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 224. Perhaps the clearest case of revolution-by-terror (and little else?) would be the Khmer Rouge; although recent revisionist work on Mao seems to point (excessively?) in the same direction: Jung Chang and John Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (London: Cape, 2005). The ‘others’ being chiefly ‘bourgeois’ (or, more cautiously, ‘non-Communist’) revolutions like the French (1789) and the Bolivian (1952). I have developed these comparisons elsewhere: Alan Knight, ‘Revisionism and Revolution: Mexico Compared to England and France’, in Past and Present, 134 (February 1992), pp. 159–99; and ‘The Domestic Dynamics of the Mexican and Bolivian Revolutions’, in Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Comparative Perspective, edited by Merilee Grindle and Pilar Domingo (London: ILAS, 2003), pp. 54–90. Here we encounter, among other things, that quaint old villain of yesteryear, Althusser’s ‘Ideological State Apparatus’: Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis, pp. 23–4.

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15. The choice of verb obviously implies a distinct relationship between regime and socio-economic order or, as some would say, between base and superstructure; in the interests of rigorous eclecticism, I am avoiding commitment to any specific formulation; furthermore, I do not think the argument requires one. 16. Of course, a particularly unpopular, incompetent or abusive administration may provide the proximate cause of a major political upheaval: here we enter a familiar terrain of ‘triggers’, ‘catalysts’ or ‘last-straws-that-break-camels’-backs’ (see, for example, E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Revolution’, in Revolution in History, edited by Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 15–16. But such distinctions involve a hierarchy of causation and proximate causes require powerful ulterior causes if they are to ‘work’. After all, bad administrations are common, major political upheavals quite rare. 17. There is an obvious element of tautology here: ‘consolidated’ democracies are, by definition, those which have survived for some time and weathered crises, thus displaying their ‘consolidation’. Those which collapse reveal, ex post, that they were not really ‘consolidated’, even if – like Uruguay before 1966 – they looked as if they were. Nevertheless, there is an element of durability attached to some democracies which, I suggest, is closely linked to their capacity both to circulate and (sometimes) to censure elites. Conversely, regimes which have fallen victim to major rebellions and revolutions have typically been highly centralized, corrupt and personalistic (in a word, ‘Sultanistic’): Batista in Cuba, Somoza in Nicaragua, the Shah of Iran, for example. 18. I do not dispute the many ‘desirable consequences’ of representative democracy (see Robert A. Dahl, On Democacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 45ff., which includes a useful ten-point list). However, bringing about substantial systemic change is not usually one of them. Democracy often works by preventing worse outcomes (such as wars, famines, civil rights abuses, corruption with impunity). It is a commonplace that no socialist transformation has occurred as a result of the ballot box. When Allende threatened to contradict this commonplace, he was ousted and killed. 19. Albert Speer, who coordinated the German war economy, considered it ‘one of the oddities of the war’ that Hitler ‘demanded far less from his people than Churchill or Roosevelt did’, the explanation being ‘the [Nazi] regime’s anxiety not to risk any shift in popular mood’: Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), p. 214. It should be said that Speer’s views are open to question; and his inclusion of Roosevelt and the US in this comparison is particularly questionable. 20. On the phenomenon of ‘naive monarchism’, see Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, pp. 96–103 (though Scott is, of course, sceptical about it). Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810–21 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) offers a (colonial) Mexican version. The phenomenon is not, however, limited to old regime monarchies: for example, a similar ‘dissociative process’ appears to have insulated Hitler from criticism: Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich. A New History (London: Pan Books, 2001), p. 266; Richard Grunberger, A Social History of the Third Reich (Harmondsworh: Penguin, 1974), pp. 41–2. 21. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 10. 22. There are parallels here with Braudel’s famous tripartite scheme of historical change: modes of production, we might say (though Braudel did not), are products of the longue durée; revolutions and regime changes are, more precisely, part

Hegemony, Counterhegemony and the Mexican Revolution 43

23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

of ‘social history, the history of groups’; while lesser political flux – coups, revolts, changes in government – forms part of l’histoire événementielle, ‘a history of brief, rapid, nervous fluctuations’: Fernand Braudel, Ecrits sur l’Histoire (Paris: Flamarrion, 1969), pp. 11–12 (extracted from La Méditerranée et le monde mediterranéen à l’époque de Philippe II). How substantial is substantial? I make a stab at this recurrent conundrum in fn’s 11 and 24. Again, the problem of scale arises: how much political change is required to turn a political revolt or coup into a revolution and how much social change is demanded of a ‘social’ revolution? It is not difficult to come up with reasonable – sounding formulations: see, for example, Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 264 (‘rapid, fundamental and violent domestic change’), and Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 4–5 (‘rapid basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures’). But these definitions merely pad out the problem (how fundamental is fundamental, how rapid is rapid, how basic is basic?). Ultimately, since attempts at rigorous quantification are likely to fail, we have to rely on good judgement and informed intuition. I recognize that my ‘circles’ are in fact oblongs. The presence of ‘[nation]state’ in the left-hand oblong is explained later. Chile would probably be the best example of the state – police, courts, civil service – surviving and functioning through successive regime changes. Elsewhere in Latin America, however, state failure – verging on ‘implosion’ (see n. 9) – has been apparent in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and, most recently, Bolivia. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: The Free Press, 1964), p. 156. Jack Lively, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 154, 208; Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, pp. 161, 285. The Ukrainian Makhnovschina lasted about four years, much the same as the Anarchist thrust during the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. Zapatismo flourished for a decade before, in the wake of Zapata’s death in 1919, a new leadership came to terms with the central government. Many lesser Mexican rebel movements – which I have termed serrano (literally, ‘highlanders’) – were fundamentally anti-state, but they failed to endure or achieve lasting results: Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. 1, pp. 115–27. The question why states are hard to get rid of is rarely asked (is it a silly question?). If we rephrase the question as: ‘what functions do states perform?’ we will, of course, elicit a plethora of answers – Aristotelian, Thomist, Hobbesian, Lockean, Marxist and so on. Some – externalist – explanations would involve the international state system (which may be said to subsume colonialism), which obliges populations to acquire states, like it or not. Internalist explanations would, depending on their provenance, stress peacekeeping, the adjudication of disputes, the protection of property, the defence of class privilege, elite rent-seeking, the provision of economic externalities, making possible ‘the good life’, and complying with reason, providence or the will of God. John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 373. There were a few exceptions, perhaps the most striking being the Yaqui Indians of Sonora, who played a major role in the Revolution, but who – in part – repudiated the yori (white/mestizo) nation state and fought for some kind of ethnic autonomy.

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33. The survival of the nation was seen, by some, to be at risk from US intervention; but Mexico’s internal struggles – which were the basic fuel of the Revolution – did not revolve around the question of the nation. Thus, whoever triumphed (Díaz, Madero, Zapata, Huerta, Villa or Carranza), the preservation of the patria remained squarely on the political agenda – as a shared assumption, rather than a source of contention. Leaders often alleged that their rivals were vendepatrias – traitors bent on selling out the country – but this was partisan invective, not proven fact. 34. Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 311, 327. 35. On the political beliefs and practice of Zapatismo, see John Womack Jr, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), pp. 20, 62, 87, 107–8, 172–3, 195, 204–5, 224ff. 36. Alan Knight, ‘Peasants into Patriots: Thoughts on the Making of the Mexican Nation’, in Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Winter 1994), pp. 135–62, makes a distinction between Mexican patriotism – a basic shared allegiance to the ‘imagined political community’ of the patria – and nationalism, which denotes a more aggressive, ambitious and integrative commitment to nation-building (by means of schools, mass organizations, and the media). It follows that the former is more ‘bottom-up’ and even ‘organic’, the latter more ‘topdown’ and instrumental. The terminology may be disputed, but the distinction, I think, remains useful. Accordingly, Zapata and his ilk were patriots rather than nationalists. Mallon, Peasant and Nation, gives nineteenth-century examples of this divide (though uses different terminology). 37. Again, there must be some criterion of significance, otherwise ‘hegemony’ (like, for example, ‘charisma’) rapidly suffers conceptual debasement. We can certainly speak of the (putative) ‘hegemony’ of the state, the nation, the Catholic Church, Communism, democracy, capitalism and, perhaps, of ‘neoliberalism’ or even consumerism. But to refer – let us say – to the ‘hegemony’ of boy bands, reality TV, Coca-Cola or Manchester United would be unhelpful: first, because these items do not cross the necessary threshold of significance (in terms of scope, longevity and impact); and, second, because they do not, in Gramscian fashion, legitimize or challenge structures of power. There are intermediate cases (for example, Blairism) which, I think, fail on the first criterion but not the second. 38. Franco’s Spain would be a good case of the second scenario. I later note how Mexico has slowly moved from the first towards the second. 39. There is an interesting parallel with early modern England, which also experienced a period of polarization and contestation with the civil war and its aftermath (c. 1640–88), followed by political stabilization, a constriction of ideological options, and the rule of an effective oligarchic ‘machine’ (post-1715). 40. The phrase – a ‘forged fatherland’, i.e., a ‘nation constructed’ – derives from the classic work of Manuel Gamio, Forjando Patria – pro-nacionalismo (Mexico: Porrúa, 1916). 41. There is a final fourth period, post-1980, which, as I briefly mention in conclusion, witnessed the breakdown of the ‘revolutionary’ regime and the onset of political pluralism and alternancia; however, I don’t propose to analyze this new dispensation, which is too recent to permit historical investigation. 42. ‘There have never been greater events . . . better prepared yet less foreseen’: M. W. Patterson, trans., De Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Regime (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), p. 3. 43. Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 3, quoting Karl Bünz.

Hegemony, Counterhegemony and the Mexican Revolution 45 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55. 56.

Knight, Mexican Revolution, I, chap. 4. Knight, Mexican Revolution, I, pp. 51, 53, 182. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. The científicos, a small, rich, educated clique, closely associated with foreign business, claimed a ‘scientific’ grasp of society, derived from Comtean positivism; they supplied the intellectual legitimation and financial know-how of the later Porfirian regime. Parallels have been drawn between them and the neoliberal technocrats of the 1990s. There were more radical currents swirling around upstream of the Revolution, notably those which carried forward the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), led by the Flores Magón brothers (hence its alternative label, Magonismo). As its name suggests, the PLM began with an impeccably liberal ideology and programme; but it was soon radicalized by persecution and exile and became a loosely anarchosyndicalist movement, committed to armed insurrection. Its insurrections failed, however, and its appeal remained narrow. Even among the newly organized working class, Magonista influence was quite limited and eclipsed by popular liberalism: see Rodney Anderson, Outcasts in Their Own Land. Mexican Industrial Workers 1906–1911 (Dekalb: University of Illinois Press, 1976). On the nineteenth-century origins and appeal of patriotic liberalism, see Mallon, Peasant and Nation; and Guy P. C. Thomson with David G. LaFrance, Patriotism, Politics and Popular Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Wilmington: Del., SR Books, 1999). Scott’s phrase for the official discourse and public stance of regimes, which he contrasts with the ‘hidden transcripts’ – the ‘offstage’ counter-discourses – of subalterns (see Domination and the Arts of Resistance, pp. 2–5). The phrase, which derives from Lesley Byrd Simpson, Many Mexicos, first published 1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), has come to denote the mass of local and regional research, from which we derive the image of a much more complex, heterogeneous and fragmented Revolution than was previously assumed. Womack, Zapata, p. 219, describes Zapata’s and the Zapatistas’ diffident and short-lived occupation of Mexico City – during which time, Zapata ‘holed up in a grimy, gloomy little hotel a block away from the railroad station where trains left for Cuautla’, the chief town of his home state. To some extent, the Carrancistas’ power-hungry descent on southern Mexico – as well as their alliance with organized labour – was a reflection of their weakness; Villa, who had a solid base in north-central Mexico and a bigger, apparently better, army, was expected to drive them into the sea; so they had to find resources and recruits wherever they could. It is worth mentioning that the military victory of Carranza – more specifically, Obregón – over Villa in 1915 was not, in my view, the product of these contrasting ‘visions’; Villa was defeated because he lost the crucial battles and he lost the crucial battles because he adopted the wrong tactics. The explanation is military, not political. However, the contrasting visions – roughly, Carrancista centralization versus Villista decentralization – were important in determining what came next; the ‘war of the winners’ therefore mattered and had major implications for Mexico’s political future. Frans J. Schryer, The Rancheros of Pisaflores: The History of a Peasant Bourgeoisie in Twentieth-century Mexico (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1980). It is important to distinguish two contrasting kinds of ‘self-interest’: one was collective, exemplified in, for example, community struggles for land (especially

46

57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

62. 63.

Alan Knight ejidos – communal land grants); another was individualist (or, perhaps, familial) and involved more particularist quests for ejidal plots, jobs or other perks and positions. In both cases, the Revolution could bring material rewards; but collective struggle was more disinterested and classically ‘revolutionary’ (it involved group solidarity and individual self-sacrifice), while individual and family advancement was more instrumental and self-interested. The former is more significant in the present (1910–40) context; the latter, as I go on to argue, increasingly became the norm in later (post-1950) years. A reversal of Scott’s well-known title/concept (see n. 59), which is propounded in Alan Knight, ‘Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy?’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 26 (1994), p. 100. By ‘church’ I mean the organized Catholic Church, not the Catholic religion. In fact, a good deal of Mexico’s intense religious life – especially Indian/peasant religious life – was conducted by lay people within communities over which priests exercised rather distant and tenuous authority. Furthermore, clerical attempts to impose authority often met with rebuffs, resistance and evasion. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). This threefold typology – crudely, the enthusiasts, the neutrals and the opponents – could, of course, be made more complex. A somewhat similar – but fourfold – typology of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia is provided by Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 305, which discerns ‘those who believed; those who enjoyed or profited from or were happy to identify with the new order through opportunistic association; those who displayed an apathetic outward compliance, but inwardly sustained an unspoken conscientious objection; and finally those whose intolerance for [sic] the regime . . . manifested itself in forms of dissent, opposition or resistance’. Overy’s second category (‘those who enjoyed’) is, in my version, split between the pro-regime enthusiasts and the middle-ground neutrals; for me, the former are not simply ‘those who believed’, but also those who – out of self-interest and ‘opportunistic association’ – forged close, supportive ties to the regime, irrespective of normative convictions. Of course, the three regimes were different, and ‘belief’ was probably a stronger force in Overy’s two cases than in mine. This major socio-political shift, spanning the 1940s and ’50s, has been only sporadically investigated. The older studies of Mexican politics, written during the regime’s heyday, focused on elites, formal institutions and ‘the centre’, hence they did not penetrate deep enough to grasp it. Occasional local and regional studies have illustrated the regime’s absorption of – and absorption by – provincial elites, businessmen and caciques (bosses). The trend is captured in several of the analyses in Alan Knight and Wil Pansters, eds, Caciquismo: Machine Politics in Twentiethcentury Mexico (London: ISA, 2006). Pablo González Casanova, Democracy in Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Roger D. Hansen, The Politics of Mexican Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes in Five Nations (Boston: Little Brown, 1965). ‘Between consent and force’, Gramsci noted, ‘stands corruption/fraud (which is characteristic of certain situations when it is hard to exercise the hegemonic function, and when the use of force is too risky)’: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell

Hegemony, Counterhegemony and the Mexican Revolution 47 Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. 80. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, pp. 72, 74, proposes a ‘thin version of false consciousness’, stressing naturalization (‘the dominant ideology achieves compliance by convincing subordinate groups that the social order in which they live is natural and inevitable’). While such a view, Scott says, is ‘eminently plausible’ and, indeed, has become ‘almost an orthodoxy’ among social scientists (p. 75), he believes it is ‘fundamentally wrong’. The question is complicated and demands careful – hence rather lengthy – consideration. Scott is right to point out that subalterns have frequently rebelled and protested while remaining within the ideological or normative confines of ‘the prevailing social order’ (thus, turning the ‘official transcript’ against their leaders). However, frequent protest is not the problem that ‘hegemonic’ theory, in its different forms, primarily seeks to address; rather, it focuses on frequent passivity. Regarding ‘passive’ situations, Scott concedes that ‘the thin theory of naturalization is far more persuasive [sc. than the ‘fat’ theory of hegemony] because it claims nothing beyond the acceptance of inevitability’; but he then discards the theory because, he says, it wrongly assumes that ‘the absence of actual knowledge of alternative arrangements produces automatically [sic] the naturalization of the present, however hated that present may be’ (p. 80). This is an oddly idealist formulation which places great emphasis on ideational resources and options. (It also skews the argument [1] by needlessly introducing ‘automatically’ and [2] by adding ‘however hated the present might be’, which arguably begs the question). As I see it, bowing to the inevitable and making the best of a bad job does not mean that – in principle – better alternatives are unknown or inconceivable. For most of the last century, millions of Mexicans were fully aware that Americans were much better off than they were; but this did not impel them to rise up against the PRI (in fact, migration and remittances were probably effective safety valves which mitigated social tension and protest). The ‘naturalization’ of PRI rule depended, squarely but not solely, on a sober calculation that securing a radically different and better Mexico (be it American or socialist or Catholic-corporatist) was not feasible and would likely prove counterproductive. Sober calculations were more important than ideational resources. And such calculations were conditioned not simply by the fact or fear of coercion, but also by considerations of jobs, education, land, public works and other state benefits. 64. The ‘limited good’ was a concept developed by anthropologists working in Mexico, who argued that the poor saw life as a zero-sum game, which in turn encouraged subaltern suspicion and anomie rather than solidarity and cooperation: see George Foster, ‘Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good’, American Anthropologist, Vol. 47 (1965), pp. 293–315. While this was no doubt a considerable reification, it did capture some elements of Mexican ‘subaltern’ life which are relevant to the present discussion; furthermore, if we take the ‘limited good’ as a socio-political outcome, rather than some psychological given, we can see how the regime of the PRI often worked to promote division, rivalry and competition, thus making subaltern solidarity and contestation much more difficult. 65. There are possible parallels here with Eastern Europe where ‘from the late 1950s, ideology was no longer the cement – to use Gramsci’s expression – that held these societies together . . . what had developed was “goulash communism” . . . an implicit social pact in which elites offered the prospect of material welfare in exchange for silence . . . (and) the outcome was a society that was highly materialistic, atomized and cynical’: Przeworski, Democracy and the Market, p. 2.

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66. Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis, p. 3. 67. Compare Poland where, by the 1970s, ‘Communist ideology became a threat to the social order in which it was embodied’: Przeworski, Democracy and the Market, p. 3. 68. Robert E. Scott, Mexican Government in Transition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964). 69. Sylvia Maxfield, Governing Capital: International Finance and Mexican Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) is a cogent analysis of the elite alignments which underpinned financial, fiscal and political stability during the heyday of the PRI, c. 1950–80. 70. Compare Vincent T. Gawronski, ‘The Revolution is Dead. Viva la revolución!: The place of the Mexican Revolution in the Era of Globalization’, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer 2002), pp. 366–7, which argues that, for decades, ‘support for the [PRI] system’ rested on ‘ideological foundations and culture’; but that, ‘as globalization bears down heavily on Mexico, the traditional ideological and cultural sources of legitimacy are withering’. 71. The causal relationship bears inspection: it may be that, in Mexico, as elsewhere in Latin America, political pluralism (roughly, democracy – though some would say ‘low-intensity democracy’) has precisely depended on an absence of polarization; democratic politics works so long as there is a narrow consensus and certain policies are off-limits. If the range of debate expands and polarization ensues (compare, for example, in Venezuela), democracy starts to look a lot more fragile. It is true that events is Mexico since the time of writing (summer 2005) have provoked political polarization; although the leftist PRD did not win the presidential election of July 2006, it came very close, amid allegations of fraud, government chicanery and media bias. Despite extensive protests, however, the result stands and representative democracy survives (with all its faults and limitations, to be sure). In light of my final argument, it should be stressed that the enhanced polarization of 2006 had less to do with radically opposed economic projects (the PRD was and is not Chavista) than with flawed and contentious political processes.

2

The Fetishism of Identity: Empire, Nation and the Politics of Subjectivity in Algeria James McDougall

[D]iscourse does not simply express struggles or systems of domination – it is for it, and by it, that one struggles. It is itself the power which has to be seized.1 In the mid-1970s, Ernest Gellner wondered why greater numbers of socialist pilgrims, seeking the ideal revolutionary state, did not make for Algeria, despite the country’s anticolonial heroism, developmental ambition and resonant vision for the unfettered sovereignty and dignity of what could then still optimistically be termed the Third World. After all, the eminent anticommunist observed, ‘the promised land must be somewhere’. He found the answer in the apparently paradoxical centrality of Islam to the Algerian project of liberation.2 In more recent years, a far more real and acutely bitter paradox saw Algerians themselves fleeing their country, desperate to escape the violence and poverty into which everyday life there had descended – and, for many, the atrocious forms since taken both by the political articulation of ‘Islam’, and by its manipulation and repression. The queue of visa applicants winding down the hill from the consular entrance at the French embassy in Algiers is depressingly long and slow moving. An Algerian journalist, living in France, remarked on the anniversary of independence in 2002: ‘Forty years ago, Algerians did not want to have anything to do with France, and now, those who manage to get a visa to live there consider themselves more than lucky.’3 For Algerians, as for many in formerly revolutionary Africa and Asia, the ‘promised land’, in a savage twist of history, has tended to become the ex-colonial metropole.4 To some, of course, especially in France, this state of affairs provokes a sadistic Schadenfreude, while even nominally sympathetic commentators not infrequently relish a posteriori teleological wisdoms which purport to explain the inevitable ‘failure’ of the revolution’s promise and the persistent ‘failure’ of Algeria to transcend its inherited social and cultural divisions and achieve an integrated, holistic ‘identity’, ‘to come into its own’, as if the country’s problems were to be understood as some sort of adolescent crisis of ego. It is a curious feature of 49

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non-Marxist accounts of recent histories of radical politics in Asia and Africa that they so often cleave to one of the most useless features of an obsolete Marxist orthodoxy – treating ‘the Revolution’ as an ideal-typical point in a predetermined theory of developmental stages, and writing it off when it unsurprisingly ‘fails’ to deliver what could never in actuality be expected of it.5 The problem, of course, is precisely that the promised land is nowhere. The story of revolutionary and post-colonial Algeria is one of an endless process of struggle, not of progress towards the resolution of all struggles. If a progressive politics (or historiography) is still possible, it is in recognition of the fact that something other than class, national, racial or gender oppression remains to be overcome and that these subjectivities themselves are problematic even as categories through which resistance is empowered and ‘liberation’ fought for. The diagnosis of (post-) revolutionary struggles in Algeria, and their persistent foreclosure, requires something other than a litany of the failure of idealized schemes of national self-assertion, democratic transition or the utopian Islamic state. Such schemes have themselves tended to reproduce confining categories of subjection and modes of domination. In light of this, what is needed is an empirical investigation of the mechanisms of the production and appropriation of symbolic power within Algerian society, and the ways that these have prevented a more liveable, coexistent pluralism consonant with the inescapable plurality of Algerian histories, cultures and selfhoods, and open to a freer negotiation of possible futures. Such an opening of the political field might be ‘counterhegemonic’ in an ultimate sense of forcing an indefinite suspension of the monopolization of authority in the name of any singular social ‘truth’. What Algeria’s history has actually produced, though, has been counterhegemonic attempts on power in the more restricted sense of a series of exclusivist moves to hegemonize the symbolic goods of social truth from within, and against, a dominant system. At the end of the colonial period, the emergence of nationalism in colonial society’s cultural and political fields established an ultimately successful counter-order (or counterhegemony in this restricted sense). Since independence, the nationalist symbolic order has in turn become subject to challenges framed in its own terms, but these have been unable to establish successful alternative orders (whether in democratic pluralism or a substitute authoritarianism), let alone achieve the further counterhegemonic move of pluralizing the political field beyond the grasp of any one claimant. Central to this dynamic has been a certain logic of the production and appropriation of social power which might usefully, if only metaphorically, be grasped as a kind of ‘commodification’, and fetishism, of identity. It is this logic that this chapter seeks to discern. Algeria’s revolution did not ‘fail’. It succeeded, against overwhelming odds, in achieving its aim – the establishment of its independent state – and while it thereafter remained unfinished, the potentialities opened up by its

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rupturing of political order and social hierarchy being catastrophically unrealized, this cannot be equated with ‘failure’ except through a misrecognition of the nature of the revolution itself. Algeria’s revolution was the necessary establishment of a counter-order (that is, a parallel, and then a successor, disciplinary apparatus) to the specific form of colonialism out of which it grew. That the war of 1954–62 and the massive social mobilization and upheaval it occasioned did not simply result in the erasure of antagonism and the institution of freedom in equality is entirely unsurprising. More significant is what it did produce – an overturning of the colonial order and the institution of a new one, among whose immediate results was the decisive amputation of a whole realm of possibilities from the rapidly restructured social and political order that emerged from the unstable revolutionary moment. This foreclosure did not come about because ‘true’ modernization and liberation could not be achieved through a project conditioned, in part, by the persistence of Islam as the basic cultural code underpinning solidarity and legitimacy, as if the recourse to religion were the fatal flaw in the process, an unmodern vestige which nationalism failed to dislodge (or a deviation of the emancipatory struggle into a persistently archaising ‘false consciousness’). The limits of revolutionary freedom, and the actual process of its limitation, arise not from the elements of the project themselves – the relative proportions of its contents which would be somehow in themselves ‘progressive’ or ‘regressive’ – but from the relation in which they are constituted. The actuality of the revolution itself was what foreclosed its own unrealized potentialities, not through the working-out of a structural logic of ‘traditionversus-modernity’, but through the particular contingencies of a ‘hegemonic rearticulation’.6 To understand the revolution in Algeria, its emergence and its aftermath, the ways in which both empire and nation have been constituted, and the impasse of identity politics into which subsequent social struggles have fallen, we have to abondon every scheme of a determining structure of the social and its historical transformation – whether as the self-manifestation of a ‘people-class’, the ‘origins and development of a nation’7 or ‘the revolution that failed’. Instead, we might examine a series of political moments in which relations of power constituting the social field coalesce around contingent ‘nodal’ or ‘condensation points’ (or ‘quilting points’, to use Zizek’s translation of Lacan’s point de capiton), and at which particular forms of political subjectivity are produced, materialised, and appropriated. It is through the dynamics of this hegemonic conflict that particular conceptions of ‘ourselves’ emerged, not in absolute opposition to, but out of, the confining categories of objectified otherness, whose repressive and divisive force was thereby simultaneously subverted and preserved in the emergent, emancipatory and already authoritarian order of nationalism. It is in this process, too, that the ground was laid for an ultimately selfdestroying pattern of contest through the idioms of later identitarian ˆ ˆ

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demands – none of whose eventualities, of course, were determined in the struggles of anticolonialism, but whose conditions of possibility were being established even as the first spokesmen for ‘the nation’ were demanding that they be heard.

Ourselves out of others The analysis proposed here, then, operates on the level of discourse and symbolic order, but this ought not to be taken as a focus on the ‘ideal’ as against the ‘material’. It should be clear that it is the materiality, the effective force in praxis, of discursive formations that makes the notion of discourse itself interesting and useful. The return to political economy and ‘hard surfaces’ now demanded by critics of the less heuristic aspects of poststructuralism ought to have the decidedly salutary effect of regrounding analysis of the operations of discourse in the ‘real social life’ of production, appropriation, domination and struggle, but this should not mean a return to mechanically ‘sociologistic’ conceptions of the social. To articulate a historical analysis at the level of the symbolic is not to ignore ‘the real’, but to seek to apprehend the more elusive aspects of its constitution, the semiotic processes of the establishment and maintenance of systems of power, and the construction of legal codes, behavioural norms, ‘common-sense’ orthodoxies and internalized patterns of self-censorship through the symbolic structures which regulate apprehension of the world and the possibilities of action in it. Perhaps the most durably significant mechanism of imperial order in this regard was the legal foundation of the social and political division of privilege on which the entire colonial edifice was founded, and which lay in the basic terms of categorization of the population. It was in the citizenship and ‘personal status’ laws (code du statut personnel) which governed the legal position of different population groups that colonial rule was, at its most basic level, established. By a decree of 14 July 1865, the indigenous Jewish and Muslim population of Algeria was declared to be French in nationality, but not in citizenship.8 Instead of the rights and duties of citizenship (fundamentally expressed in the jurisdiction of French civil and criminal law), Jews and Muslims of Algeria continued to be governed, in civil matters, by their own religious codes, according to the engagements given by the generals of the conquest to respect religion, property and trade (and later, in addition, tradition, customs and law). Jews and Muslims as such, and not merely as ‘natives’, thereby found themselves members of a post-Ottoman, colonial millet of a decidedly modern type. In its historically specific form of conceptualizing the world and ordering society, French colonialism reconstituted these communities in carefully objectified categories, ‘French’ by ‘nationality’ – since ‘Algeria’ was simply another part of France – but, since governed by a special civil code, un-French in civic status.

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The exceptions made to this ‘un-Frenchness’, as well as the specific ‘privileges’ (in the strict sense of the word) applied through it, illustrate the way the statut had come to operate by the time of the First World War. First of all, the Jewish community, the competencies of whose rabbinical courts had already been reduced to virtually nothing, was granted citizenship en masse by a decree (known as the décret Crémieux) of 24 October 1870. Algeria’s Jews thereafter came to identify themselves as French, just as the colony’s Spanish, Maltese or Italian immigrants did, such that they would eventually (despite the rabid anti-Semitism widespread among the colonial population, as in the metropole, in the late nineteenth century, and the temporary stripping of their citizenship under Vichy) form a significant part of the peuple pied noir which found itself ‘repatriated’ into exile at the end of the war of independence. It was thus Islam, and the nominal sovereignty of Islamic law in civil matters, which thereafter remained the principle dividing ‘subject’ from ‘citizen’ in colonial Algeria. On the one hand, by 1914, Algeria’s ‘Muslim Frenchmen’ (Français musulmans) were eligible for conscription – for the duty of male citizens to die in defence of the republic. On the other, they were also subject to a massive system of special repressive legislation (the indigénat, instituted as a temporary ad hoc measure in 1881 and surviving until 1944) which took the place of French (and, of course, Islamic) criminal law in the regulation of the life of the Algerian Muslim community. On the clearly defined and easily policed category of indigène musulman (as the Français musulman became by quotidian slippage) was thus founded every procedure of discrimination, from inequality of salary to exclusion from the franchise and susceptibility to the draconian special legislation (lois d’exception constituting as crimes a vast array of activities not ordinarily criminalized under the standard penal code) from which Algerians suffered and which constituted their experience as colonized subjects, excluded, by a subtly half-measured inclusion, from la cité française.9 The issue of reforming the status of Algerians in the post-1918 period was articulated around the question of the right to full citizenship, and whether this citizenship could be accorded dans le statut, that is to a person of Muslim ‘personal status’. Under the terms of the 1865 act, most Muslim Algerians could not accede to full citizenship – that is full electoral enfranchisement, civic rights and escape from the indigénat – except by abandoning their ‘Muslim personal status’, that is, their subjection to Islamic law in civil matters. In a society where the colonial presence made this one remaining shred of autonomy the last redoubt of an Islamic communal self-identification, this was, of course, something the vast majority would never do.10 Thus, after the failed attempts at the physical cantonnement – restriction to reservations – of the indigenous population in the nineteenth century, the repressive device of the statut personnel served as an effective means of judicial cantonnement through the first half of the twentieth century.

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The statut personnel was thus the site in which the colonial oppression of Algerian Muslims was organized and exercised. At the same time, it was the key symbolic space of community cohesion – a strictly sacred space whose limits marked the boundary between apostasy and belonging. Although it was perhaps never intended by the lawyers who drafted it as so diabolical a device (here, as elsewhere, one has the strong impression that colonial legislators had little idea what they were actually doing), the colonized’s status of oppression in Algeria was legislated into existence in the very space from which the colonized not only could not, but would not, escape. This doubling of the category at the heart of colonial politics is the key to the dynamics of the interwar period. The statut was the key pretext for the exclusion of the majority population from that social and political ‘emancipation’ which France claimed to bring, but resolutely refused to deliver, and which Algerian spokesmen up to the mid-1940s continued to demand.11 The notion of ‘assimilation’ has served in the historiography of Algeria as a slogan, a fiction and a myth (in the sense of a structuring narrative), from both colonialist and nationalist points of view and, more particularly, for those spokesmen for colonized Algeria who fit neatly into neither scheme. From 1912 to 1936, sons of the Algerian notability, parsimoniously admitted to French schooling and the liberal professions, sought to engage the colonial system on its own terrain and in its own terms, staking everything on the supposition that, given sufficient pressure and with a little clarity of vision, the myth of France’s generous civilizing mission could be materialized in the political emancipation and socio-economic empowerment of their ‘miserable and backward’ compatriots. Having perfectly internalized the imperial vision – or rather, the unselfconsciously sincere humanism of a system which failed to perceive its own thoroughgoing and brutal cynicism12 – the so-called évolués of the Young Algerian movement argued tirelessly in newsprint, on election platforms and in the National Assembly itself that the only imaginable resolution of the unbearable contradictions of colonialism must be found in enfranchisement and partnership.13 The ‘assimilation’ they desired, however, had never, even in its moment as ‘policy’,14 served the declared purpose which they wished to see it actually fulfil. It was to be, at most, a pressure valve to siphon off the potentially dissatisfied ‘native élite’ while keeping the terrifying mass of the ‘semicivilized’/‘semibarbaric’ in a safely suppressed and permanent state of exclusion. Those who refused to be co-opted and who insisted, instead, in the name of the Republican trinity (liberté, égalité, fraternité) that Algeria’s indigenous workers and peasants, too, must now be made into Frenchmen alongside the others, found themselves inexplicably labelled as ‘nationalists’ and were ultimately harried by the system they sought to reform into the ranks of those whose project – the recourse to arms and the systematic violence of a necessarily long and terrible armed struggle – had been precisely what they had long sought to avoid.

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The ‘ulama, the army and the nationalist symbolic order The failure of the ‘assimilationist’15 project occurred concurrently with a shift which was simultaneously political and linguistic in the terms of the debate. While the argument raged around the unbreakable kernel of the statut personnel musulman, a metamorphosis occurred in the category itself, turning it from an inflexible instrument of politico-legal repression into an irreducible principle of religio-cultural resistance, in its Arabic rendering al-shakhsiyya ’l-islamiyya, ‘Islamic personality.’ It is important to note, here, that I am not – of course – supposing that it was this colonially imposed categorizing that made Algerians recognize themselves in Islam, any more than it was the exploitation of the religious criterion by the imperial order that ‘made’ Algerians Muslims. The significance of the category established in the statut personnel – the collective condensation symbol for all Algerians’ colonized subject status – resided in its institutionalization as a category, as a ‘nodal point’, a single master-signifier which, in the magical-rational way of modern classificatory operations, reduced the actual, historical heterogeneity of everything that might be called ‘Islam’ in Algeria to a single, rigid and defining term, ‘the Islamic personality.’ A newly formed political category – ‘Algerian identity’ – was thus condensed in this one symbolic space; we might almost say, in this single symbolic commodity, or even, commodity-fetish, the dry product of jurisprudential labour ‘changed into something transcendent’,16 a contingent social relation between people expressed as a necessary relation between ‘things’: the reified gods of ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’, ‘civilization’ and (precisely) ‘Barbary’. As well as instituting a repressive category consigning millions of people to subject status in an untrammelled police state, however, this move also implied a new cultural-political subjectivation. It unwittingly enabled a fundamentally novel form of cultural authority within colonized Algerian society, one that did not simply found itself on the accumulation of cultural capital (scriptural and/or charismatic) within a highly diversified and decentralized religious field (regional seats of learning, individual ‘poles’ of sanctity, locally embedded sites and lineages of veneration, multiple turuq17 and mobile tolba18 whose connections and itineraries ranged across the Islamic world) but which established a new kind of centre within the field. This centre was a space which could be occupied and from which the whole religiocultural field could be reordered; a commodity which could be appropriated and relative to which the other symbolic products of the field itself – the pedagogy of kuttab and zawiya, the practices of talib and mrabit19 – could be judged and classified as ‘orthodox’ or ‘heretical’. Not, again, that such conflicts over the ‘truth’ of religion were themselves new; disputation over the legitimacy of doxa and praxis was the stuff of Islamic as of every other religious history from its inception, from the arcane sciences of isnad criticism,

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through the illuminary warfare of the Maghrib’s Almoravids and Almohads to the rigorist zealotry of peninsular Wahhabism. What is new in colonialism and the islah (modernist ‘reform’) of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the way in which, in this new symbolic order, it became possible to think, enunciate and practice ‘orthodoxy’ such that its position as ‘the true Islam’ was not simply one of the historically temporary ascendancy of one element among other, relatively equal, elements in a constantly fluid relationship, but represented a fundamental hierarchical restructuring of the field such that a particular formulation of ‘Islam’ could be codified and (precisely as a commodity-fetish) abstracted from the real historical contingency of its manufacture, and thus establish itself not simply as a momentary and fleeting ‘glimpse’ of absolute orthodoxy, that of a historically specific movement embodied in an eschatological mahdi or mawl al-sa‘a (a redeemerfigure, frequently occurring in the millenarian anticolonial revolts of the nineteenth century) but as orthodoxy itself, firmly grounded in temporal continuity and the institutions of this world, as ‘the Islamic personality’. Moreover, it could be durably institutionalized as such, its competitors disqualified and consigned to an equally durable status of ‘archaism’, ‘magic’ or ‘superstition’ from which they would have the greatest difficulty in recovering. (Again, this is not to say that further shifts in the field are impossible, but to highlight the newly powerful form of hierarchy which comes to govern it.) The Islamic modernist movement in Algeria, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and institutionally established from the mid-1920s with the appearance of al-Muntaqid, ‘Abd al-Hamid ben Badis’ first press mouthpiece, and then in the Association of Algerian Muslim ‘ulama (AUMA) from 1931 onwards, effectively appropriated to itself this new commodity of ‘Islamic personality’ and thus placed itself in a position of considerable social power relative to the other social and political forces of Algerian society.20 While initially pursuing the Young Algerians’ goal of ‘loyal partnership’ with the metropolitan power, by the mid-1940s the ‘ulama had come to see the problem of religious reform and renewal with which they were most concerned as irresolvable except in the broader context of the political question of independence. Caught short in their own, gradualist project by the National Liberation Front’s (FLN’s) unforeseen declaration of war, the Islamic reformists, like the francophone electoralist inheritors of the ‘assimilationist’ position, were eventually obliged to take their place in the ranks of the unifying revolution, whose leaders and foot soldiers had already largely absorbed their vision of a single, authoritative national culture of Islam and Arabism, even if their (as yet undecided) political projects were principally concerned with quite other matters.21 The production of an authoritative doctrine of national identity in the space of subjection established by imperial order was thus a significant aspect of the gradual autonomization of Algerian national, political and

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cultural fields from those of French Algeria. In an elementary sense, of course, this is entirely unsurprising: ‘all or nearly all initiatives … even when they take on manifestly alternative or oppositional forms, are in practice tied to the hegemonic … the dominant culture, so to say, at once produces and limits its own forms of counter-culture.’22 The discourse of the colonizer, in imposing itself so brutally as the only possible language of the space and the people appropriated into the ‘possessions’ of colonialism, had to become, not only an aspect (and again, even less the mere expression) of the system, but itself the very power by which, and for which, the colonized would struggle; the power to reconstitute the social which had to be seized. This is not to say that the colonized had ‘nothing left to imagine’,23 but that their new-formed imaginaries were necessarily bound up in conditions not of their own choosing. Furthermore, as the production of a particular kind of meaning with which the (new) social world was to be endowed, such self-definition was an act not simply of the emancipatory self-expression of the colonized community, but already an exercise of power over the terms of that self-expression – an attempt, indeed, to determine and dominate the terms in which that ‘self’, the collective subject of national liberation, might conceive of, and express, its self. This emergence of a counterhegemonic nationalist order from within the structures of the empire, through a long process of contest in which the mechanisms of imperial order themselves became ‘the seat and the stake’24 of hegemonic conflict, had, however, still to be realized in full through the prosecution of a war. Not that this ‘identity demand’ was itself the object of the armed struggle, except in the limited sense that the practical political agenda of establishing a sovereign national state had to be understood as the goal of ‘the people’ whose expression the state would (supposedly) be, and it was the ‘ulama who had effectively asserted how ‘the people’ were to be defined. Recognition of this was expressed in the FLN’s founding statement of war aims, in the assertion that the goals of the struggle included ‘the realization of Maghribi unity in its natural Arab and Muslim context’. In the expression of the revolution in its heartland, the countryside, the mobilizing discipline of a rigorous Islam and the communal solidarity that went with it (though built on solid foundations of local social mores developed more out of generations of penury and strict village ethics than from reformist Islamic thought per se) were important idiomatic aspects of the way in which Algerians understood and experienced the struggle. The intentions of the revolutionaries from the outset, however, had little to do with any metaphysical or psychological ‘recovery of selfhood’ and everything to do with the entirely pragmatic political project of state-building, and the war engaged to achieve this end brought with it its own unpredictable and ungovernable vicissitudes. Through the seven long, bitter and fratricidal years of the war, the counter-state established by the FLN and the military hierarchy which came

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to dominate it wove their own, deeply fissured, secretive, conspiratorial and factional history, and the establishment of that state as sovereign in 1962 divided the spoils accordingly. It was the investment of the ‘ulama in, their claimed authority over, the crucial discursive resources of history and culture that gave them their symbolic strength relative to their rivals who lacked the cultural capital to claim this space as their own domain. Their ideological structure objectifying ‘the people’ was central to the functioning of the post-colonial order, dominated and directed by a purely military power-élite whose rule rested on their carrying the gun (against the French in the maquis and against their brother-rivals both there and elsewhere) and on dense networks of personal loyalties, but whose position and decisions had to be legitimized by a set of values and a historical narrative attributed to, and serving to interpret, the revolution, its state and their people. Having served an essentially instrumental and mobilizing, rather than foundational and programmatic, role in the prosecution of the war of liberation, the ideology of the ‘ulama was assigned a subordinate, but nonetheless significant, role in the division of labour and privilege after 1962. The reformist ‘ulama of the colonial period had seen their mission as cultural and pedagogical, and it was in these activities that they most conscientiously invested their efforts. At independence, of course, their mission (like that of the infrastructure of the zawiya which had preceded and, for a time, competed with them), to provide instruction in the two essential disciplines of the Arabic language and the Islamic religion, was taken over by the institutions of the state’s ministries of National Education and Religious Affairs. There were struggles over this: at first a limited autonomy was granted to the surviving elements of the pre-independence educational system (the ‘free schools’) which the AUMA had painstakingly constructed from the early 1930s through the mid-1950s, and some establishments were run under the ‘Original Education’ wing of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was initially constituted with such ta‘lim asli as part of its nomenclature and prerogatives. These remnants, however, were absorbed into the Ministry of National Education by decree in 1977.25 There nevertheless remained a considerable degree of influence, diffused through these same institutions or embodied in particular figures (most notably Ahmad Taleb Ibrahimi, son of the AUMA’s second and last President and an influential Minister of both Education and Culture) whose effect was such that ‘after independence, the vision of the ‘ulama served to “nationalise” Algerians’.26 But rather than pursuing the construction of an open, plural, culturalpolitical space founded on the country’s diverse historical inheritances and allowing the expression of its multiple contemporary creativities, a single, authoritative vision of ‘the national personality’, as the complement in the cultural sphere to the authoritarian monolithism of the military-security state, restricted ‘legitimate’ culture to the purview of that confining category over which the ‘ulama had struggled so hard to assert their control.27

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By accepting their place in the state and becoming its salaried functionaries, in return for the franchise on the language, cultural, family and educational policies which most concerned them, the ‘ulama achieved a limited success for their project, now transmitted through the apparatus of the state, whose constitution and, later, nationality and family laws, enshrined their vision of what ‘Algerian’ meant.28 They also, however, thereby gave up any possibility of creating in independent Algeria an autonomous, depoliticized religio-cultural field, one in which the country’s various potential modes and mechanisms of ‘self’-expression could flourish, and within which their own role as ‘ulama – as those whose responsibility, among all the other forces of the social body and independently of its ruling powers, of al-amr bi’l-ma‘ruf wa ’l-nahy ‘an al-munkar (to ‘enjoin good and forbid ill’) – could finally be recovered. Instead of freeing up the cultural domain for the recomposition of expression of civil society, then, they reproduced the colonial regime of power within which a strictly demarcated and politically invested cultural doctrine served as a controlling instrument of state. And like the colonial order before it, the nationalist system was unable to prevent its categorical modes of subjection from being turned into the means of further struggle. In each of its central components – language and religion – and again, precisely because of the authoritarian assertion of a single, dominant definition permitting of no legitimate contest outside its own limits, the postcolonial symbolic order of national selfhood proved vulnerable to unforeseen reappropriation and contest, in the former case by reaction against the perceived excess and exclusivity of the system, in the latter by a magnification and exorbitation of the system’s own professed values against its apparent compromise of them.

Politics of culture and virtue The most significant challenges to the postcolonial order in the 1980s and 1990s came from Berberism and Islamism, the estranged twin responses to the authoritarian monism of the cultural and political order of nationalism. Each has posed, and has been (mis)understood by outside observers, as an inevitable ‘resurgence of the repressed’, asserting underlying truths of Algerian selfhood. But again, rather than manifesting the irrepressible upsurge of ‘primordial identities’, the formulation of new phases of the postcolonial hegemonic conflict that would ultimately, in 1992, break down into outright warfare has to be viewed as the resubjectivation of actors within a political field structured by the symbolic order of nationalism. The inheritance of a founding myth of redemptive violence, the social veneration of the revolutionary martyrs, and the symbolic artefacts of ‘Algerian identity’ are at once more subtle and more tangible factors in the country’s recent history than are notions of some Arab-Islamic or Berber ‘bedrock’ of Algerian selfhood. Each movement ought, then, to be examined in this light.

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The question of the relationship of Kabylia (the mountainous, Berberophone region that has been the centre of Amazigh self-assertion) to the central state, and the language question more broadly, which is bound up in, but not coterminous with, the Kabyle issue, have often been sublimated in accounts by outside observers, and actors from the region, and especially through the activism of the Kabyle diaspora, into an overarching ‘Berber question’, conceived of as an ethnic minority issue analogous to that of Armenians or Kurds in the Middle East. This, in historical terms, is a formulation of somewhat dubious value – although it does now seem that the issue has become ethnicized by the persistence of the conflict, particularly since 1980.29 Rather, the Kabyle issue has been constituted of a syndrome of factors of revolt which have crystallized around, and found both the opportunity and the idiom for their expression in the question of linguistic and cultural ‘recognition’. This demand for cultural or ‘identity’ recognition has served above all as a sublimation, and particularist local expression, of a more basic and widespread demand for political recognition, as citizens30 whose due dignity has been consistently denied them by a state which, in all its aspects, is seen to express only hogra/thamheqranith (disdain, contempt) for the people by whom and for whom it claims to exist.31 The first instantiation of a ‘Berber question’ in Algerian nationalism was of precisely this kind – the ‘Berberist crisis’ of 1949, which caused a major internal conflict and purge in the revolutionary populist party, the PPAMTLD,32 was initiated by a dispute over antidemocratic practices in the party leadership; the argument was translated through the issue of the party’s territorial organization into that of cultural pluralism and the alleged ‘ethnic divisiveness’ of the leadership’s opponents (who happened to be Kabyles).33 The 1949 crisis, one of many taboo subjects in Algerian history until relatively recently, ultimately contributed to the long history of Kabylia as a restive fronde in independent Algeria. This history, persistently misrepresented as an ‘ethnic’ struggle, or, in terms more directly derived from a colonial mythology still current in some French circles, especially common in the French media, and not infrequently reiterated by Kabyle activists themselves, as an age-old contest of ‘democratic, secularrepublican’ Kabyles against ‘despotic, fundamentalist-theocratic’ Arabs, is a notable example of the capacity of political struggles actively to engage in the production of symbols which, translating their causes and demands into culturally specific terms, both misrepresent the underlying dynamics of the struggle itself and contribute to new (and more aggravated) forms of conflict which begin to operate in the terms of the original misrepresentation. Subsequent episodes of the story have all followed a similar logic, from the insurrection of Hocine Aït Ahmed, Mohand Ou El Haj and the FFS in 1963–434 (which began as a revolt against the establishment of authoritarianism and over access to power-sharing but, through its particular opposition to the strident Arabism of President Ben Bella, became identified as a

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specifically Kabyle and ‘Berberist’ dissidence) through the ‘Berber Spring’ of 1980 (a student strike and protest against the state’s crass heavy-handedness, which spread throughout the country and marked the first real challenge to the system, but whose main outcome was a specifically culturalist Berber movement and which is now memorialized as a Berber uprising and annually celebrated as thafsut imazighen),35 to the ‘printemps noir’ of 200136 and the long-running, sporadically violent, crisis that followed (and which remained basically unresolved, if, on the whole, exhausted, into the mid2000s). Deprived of the political space, language or institutional means to advance an integrated critique of the state system and a thoroughgoing project for its reformulation, contest has centred on the sphere of culture.37 The apparent centrality of cultural aspects of the struggle – the symbolic acts and slogans most visibly adopted, such as the effacing of the Arabic portion of road-signs with black spray-paint, the Amazigh flag and banners in tifinagh (the ancient Berber alphabet) and/or French carried in demonstrations – and the cultural means and moments of expression, in particular through music,38 have served to limit, more effectively than the state alone ever could, the appeal of the movement beyond Kabylia and the Kabyle diaspora when, in fact, it was founded on, and has also articulated, more general demands concerning the relation of state to society with which all Algerians would most likely agree (the end of hogra and the democratization of the system). So much has this become true that, while Kabyle activists insist, vociferously and above all else, that their demands are made as Algerians and are those of all Algerians, it is perfectly commonplace to find other Algerians who are convinced that ‘the Kabyles do not consider themselves as Algerians’39 and who identify the Kabyle ‘mouvement citoyen’ as ethnic divisiveness and potential secessionism. It seems likely that the recently-created fringe minority movement in Kabylia and (perhaps especially) in the diaspora which, having most thoroughly internalized and reproduced the ethnicization of the Kabyle struggle, now demands regional autonomy, is taken much more seriously by non-Kabyle Algerians than it is by Kabyles themselves.40 The expression of Kabylia’s protests as a politics of identity has arguably been the greatest factor both limiting their impact on Algeria as a whole and contributing to the internal dissipation of their energies. The inability of the protest movement in 2001, which for a while looked as if it might spread significantly beyond Kabylia itself, effectively to mobilize opinion and activism elsewhere in the country, and the swiftness with which the state, the media and other regions in fact marked the troubles down as expressions of Kabyle particularism, demonstrates both the self-defeating limitations of the movement’s self-expression in primarily cultural terms, and the tenacity with which the postcolonial system has confined conflicts to this sphere, and has kept them from overwhelming the political domain itself.

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The second contest faced by the nationalist order, however, came much closer to doing so, although it is now becoming possible to see just how limited was Islamism’s real political challenge, to what extent it has failed in its stated aspiration to overcome the ‘corrupt’ postcolonial system and has in fact served its perpetuation. It did, of course, seem at the end of the 1980s and through the middle of the 1990s that Algerian Islamism really threatened (or promised, as one will) entirely to submerge the cultural field and to sweep victoriously into political power. The Islamist reading of events since 1962 was in a sense the obverse complement of that of Berberism – that the FLN’s state had indeed failed to deliver the ‘true’ goals of the revolution, but that these, rather than the cultural plurality and democracy advocated through the idioms of diversity expressed in Kabylia’s movements, had in fact been the establishment of an ‘authentic’ Islamic social order. This, the true expression of Algeria’s historic and cultural personality, had been abandoned by the ‘ulama (unworthy successors of Ben Badis, who was reimagined in official history as the spiritual father of the revolution) who had allowed themselves to be bought off by the state, traduced by the ‘atheistic socialism’ of President Boumedienne’s development project and undermined by the alienating presence of ‘deformed’, denaturalized francophone intellectuals who ‘corrupted Algeria’s youth’ and threatened the return of colonialist power in the most intimate realm of the nation – its cultural, religious and family life. This misperception of the revolution and the staking of a claim to its inheritance in place of the ‘thieves’ in the power structure was, like the Berberist alternative, an oppositional strategy firmly embedded in, and derived from, the dominant ideological structures of the nationalist order (in the narrative of national history, the symbolism of the paternity of the revolution, the ownership of its mission and the authority to interpret its meaning; above all, in the claim to authority over the cultural definition of ‘Algeria’ and ‘Algerians’ and the political expression of this definition in a new social order). An exorbitation of the revolutionary FLN’s own discourse, the Islamist vision was carried in embryo within the nationalist order. Islamism was enabled as a form of competition for a better place in the division of privilege (for disadvantaged arabophone graduates, conservative petits bourgeois, unemployed and frustrated young men – and women – ideological illuminaries, Egyptian ikhwangi or Afghan anti-Soviet jihadi sympathizers) by the very failure of the ‘ulama-in-the-state to re-establish a religious field as part of a necessarily plural civil sphere beyond the state’s control, and by their prior establishment of the doctrine of ‘the (Algerian⫽) Islamic personality’ as a fixed essence, a commodity which could, once they were seen to have proven unworthy guardians of it, be declared once more open to (re)appropriation. The actual political indigence of the Islamist project, their utopian populism articulated around the eschatological slogan of an ‘Islamic state’ whose actual form, other than general social conservatism and public ‘re-moralisation’, was

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never clearly expressed or, in all likelihood, clearly agreed upon among its proponents,41 did not prevent their making an affectively strong statement, rearticulating the (equally vacuous) nationalist ideological principle of the need for the people to ‘become themselves again’ (redevenir eux-mêmes, a key slogan of the ‘cultural revolution’ under Boumedienne). This transposition of the conflict from debate over practical policy to the invocation of a salvific panacea which of itself would supposedly make social divisions, antagonism, injustice and iniquity disappear is an extreme instance of the concentration of contest in the idiom of identity as itself the site of the problem and of politics. That this left the Islamist movement open to the manipulative orchestration of elements of the system itself now seems beyond doubt,42 but the extreme crisis which their initial popular success and its instrumentalization caused in the system – leading to the overt intervention of the military, the suspension of the electoral process and the resignation of President Benjedid – brought about the implosion of the system itself and the recourse to the naked, unmediated and extreme use of violence, with the outbreak of an armed insurrection and the resort by the state to emergency measures of repression to preserve itself. In an atrocious passage à l’acte, the fantasies of revolutionary inheritance and cultural-political representativity, previously deployed and disputed in symbolic slogans and ritual, were pursued in armed conflict over the bodies of citizens, with each antagonist performing an allotted role – defenders of the republic and its institutions against ‘a programmatic regression’, virtuous executors of the true destiny of the community in the face of tyrannical unbelief. The paradox, once again, is that the Islamists’ bid to hegemonize the symbolic goods of community in a neo-fundamentalist reappropriation of ‘the Islamic personality’ constituted, not a liberation from confining alienation in the final achievement of selfhood, a recovery and fulfilment of history, but on the contrary another repressive move attempting to take possession of the symbolic commodity of Algerian ‘personality’ and simultaneously refiguring it, in a largely imported43 ideological reaction whose aspiration to dominant political authority most Algerians would ultimately refuse.

The resilience of the state and reconstitution of the symbolic order The limits of the Islamists’ challenge to the hegemony of the state’s order – and the fact that their project was indeed contained within this hegemonic relation and was not a radical attempt to overthrow the system itself – would eventually be most clearly demonstrated by the effectiveness of the reconstitution of the nationalist status quo ante by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Bouteflika, brought to the Presidency by the army in the spring of 1999 and reinstalled (largely by his own devices) in the election of 8 April 2004. Bouteflika’s greatest success in domestic policy has been the successful reabsorption of

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the Islamist movement into a logic of ‘fraternal’ allegiance within the system. The gamble of Chadli Benjedid – that the Islamists could be mobilized to provide populist support for a strong presidency which would, while making the appropriate concessions to them, push through its program of drastic economic and social reforms, against its opponents in the ‘old guard’ of the FLN and the army – cost Chadli his job, and its failure plunged Algeria into a decade of terror. With the exhaustion of the armed rebellion and the need to come to some accommodation, Bouteflika appears (at the time of writing) to have succeeded where Chadli failed, establishing an administration devoted to neoliberalism and geopolitical realignment along with the re-establishment of a unanimist factional coalition supporting a strong presidency largely emancipated from its rivals in the power structure. Although the symbolic structures of the state seemed in the mid-1990s to have been definitively shattered in the dispersal of their elements between competing and armed claimants to succession, the state itself has proved intensely resilient, and has recomposed its signs of legitimate authority, its systems of integration and exclusion and its prerogatives of order, around its undiminished infrastructure of coercive force. At the same time as Bouteflika’s presidency reintegrated the Islamists under the banner of ‘national concord’ and ‘reconciliation’ – rehabilitating the ‘brothers who have strayed from the straight path’ in a surrender with honour, amnesty and amnesia – there has been an equally decisive and effective exclusion of the Kabyle movement, whose accommodation (in terms limited, of course, to the cultural sphere, through integration of thamazighth into school curricula and the incorporation of ‘Amazigh identity’ as a factor of nationhood) goes hand in hand with the continued barring of their demands for accountability, pluralism and effective participation. By resorting systematically to a strategy of boycotting the political system (in the respectively legislative, municipal and presidential elections of 2002, 2003 and 2004), Kabylia has, by a supreme irony, sealed the effectiveness of its own exclusion and isolation.44

Conclusion What does the fate of these movements tell us about the operation of hegemony, and the possibilities and limits of counterhegemony, in Algeria? No domination, as we know, is ever total, and the structures of power and resistance do not operate in binary antagonism; there are always elements of the symbolic order itself which prove susceptible to attempts at their inflection, recomposition, reappropriation. In a system built on the claim of popular revolutionary emancipation, spaces are not lacking for those who seek to contest the authoritarian structures which emerged from the factional struggles of nationalist politics and the fratricidal progress of the war of independence. The postcolonial emergence of counterhegemonic movements seeking to recover the autonomy of a self-creating, self-directing political

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community, however, is fraught with difficulties, some of which are of their own making. Neither the ‘Berberist’-democratic nor the Islamist-authoritarian movements have been able to create a counter-order to that of the nationalist state (as the FLN’s nationalist state-project did in supplanting the political field of colonialism), nor have they been able to gain sufficient control over the discursive formations of state power so as to undermine it from within its own categories of legitimation and subjection (as the ‘ulama did in the colonial cultural field). The persistence, from colonialism and nationalism through recent challenges to the postcolonial dispensation, of a politics privileging the articulation of domination and its contest in cultural terms has been a major factor in the unfolding, and continual foreclosure, of these hegemonic conflicts. The colonial order and its own internal contradictions, having first set up a particularly intractable framework of white minority rule, produced in turn a nationalism which became a successful – indeed, paradigmatic – vehicle of emancipation but which never resolved the conflicting visions of history, community and the future which lay within it. Indeed, it was never the intention of the revolutionary elite to do so, and in the establishment of the state as the preservation of their hard-won dominance and the vehicle of their forced-march developmental agenda after independence, the dangerous luxury of contradictory debate, plural political competition and, alongside them, plural cultural and religious fields open to a multiplicity of visions of ‘Algeria’ articulated by different ‘Algerians’, was ruled out in advance. This was not the revolution’s failure – it was thought to be a condition of its success. The preserved privilege of a centralized, unitary doctrine of national selfhood did not, however, prevent it from becoming the object of contests. Indeed, it perhaps bound it to become so. The subject-politics of a fetishised identity, the framing and mobilization of social conflict in the idioms, and on the basis, of ‘selfhood’ and ‘otherness’, is a durable legacy of imperial forms of order and the culturally articulated visions of nationalism that emerged from them. As Mahmood Mamdani has shown in the (yet more terrible) case of Rwanda, ‘the failure to transcend these identities is at the heart of the crisis of citizenship in postcolonial Africa’.45 Mamdani’s focus on the establishment and institutionalization of particular political identities through colonial rule, and the postcolonial perpetuation of (and organization of violence through) these same categories, obviously has a different significance in the case he examines to that under discussion here. But in Algeria, too, as we have seen, the colonial and postcolonial exercise of power and attempts at its subversion have all been trapped in a similar logic. In this sense, Algeria’s travails are another instance of the widely shared patterns of postcolonial crisis afflicting the continent and the ‘decolonized’ world more generally. In Algeria, as elsewhere, no movement of resistance to the persistent disenfranchisement and alienation of ordinary people as citizens relative to the political system

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governing them has yet emerged which has not itself replicated (or, as in the case of Berberism, allowed itself to be diverted so as to replicate), in its own struggle by and for the systems of symbolic power, the same tendency to reproduce relations of objectification and domination through every promised subject of emancipation. Such a conclusion may be bleak, but this has been only an account of a history that remains unfinished. If resistance ‘does not operate outside power’ but is necessarily ‘imbricated within it’,46 the dynamics of the production of counterhegemonic possibilities, and the constraints they impose, have to be understood. Every category of repression (as ‘woman’, ‘black’, ‘Algerian’ or ‘Muslim’) contains the possibility of its reappropriation because each mechanism of subjection produces a space of subjectivation. But the exploitation of such apertures might yet become, not determined by a fixed (and even less a ‘strategic’) essentialism of ‘identity’ but open to the possibilities of political imagination. Hegemony may be inescapable, but can never be complete, and there remains to be created a mode of resistance which would be capable of seizing the power to reopen the potential to transform the social world, without falling instantly back into its repressive enclosure. Therein lies the challenge of a newly ‘radical democracy’, and of the reinvention of a politics beyond identity.

Notes 1. Michel Foucault, L’Ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 12 (emphasis added) 2. Ernest Gellner, ‘The Unknown Apollo of Biskra: The Social Base of Algerian Puritanism’, originally published in Government and Opposition, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Summer 1974), pp. 277–310, repr. in Muslim Society (Cambridge, 1981), p. 277. On the disjunction between Algeria and what Third Worldist radicals in the West (and particularly in France) sometimes thought it stood for, see Hugh Roberts’ critique of Robert Malley, The Call from Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution and the Turn to Islam (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), in The Battlefield Algeria, 1988–2002: Studies in a Broken Polity (London: Verso, 2003), chap. 13. 3. Ferid Khelifati, for www.news.bbc.co.uk, 5 July 2002. 4. A poignant observation of this dynamic is given in Merzak Allouache’s film Bab el Oued City (1994). 5. The earliest critique from a leftist perspective is Arslan Humbaraci, Algeria, a Revolution That Failed: A Political History Since 1954 (New York: Pall Mall Press, 1966). The idea has longevity, however: George Joffé, Algeria: The Failed Revolution (London: RoutledgeCurzon, forthcoming). 6. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, first published 1985, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2001). 7. John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation, first published 1992, 2nd edn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). 8. The best exposition of the legal intricacies is in Michael Brett, ‘Legislating for Inequality in Algeria: The Senatus-Consulte of 14th July 1865’, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 51 (1988), pp. 440–61.

The Fetishism of Identity 67 9. As Étienne Balibar points out: ‘We must … observe that the exteriority of the “native” populations in colonisation, or rather the representation of that state as racial exteriority … is by no means a given state of affairs. It was in fact produced and reproduced within the very space constituted by conquest and colonisation … and therefore on the basis of a certain interiority.’ ‘Racism and Nationalism’, in Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 42–3. Similarly, Robert Young writes of ‘the appropriation of the other as a form of knowledge within a totalising system’ in the realization of an ‘economy of inclusion’. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 4. 10. A gradually increasing number of exceptions was granted, making citizenship ‘dans le statut’ available to certain categories of the population (war veterans, administrative office-holders and so on), but the general principle remained that the ‘statut’ must be voluntarily resigned by an individual seeking full naturalization. Such renunciation was, of course, opposed by the sanction of the community in general and by the ‘ulama in particular. Charles-Robert Ageron numbers naturalizations at around 40 per year on average during the 1920s and 157 per year in the 1930s. Histoire de l’ Algérie contemporaine, 2 Vols (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979), Vol. 2, p. 316. 11. The Jonnart law of 1919 enlarged the Muslim constituency eligible for citizenship, but in fact set up a formidable series of barriers in the criteria that had to be met. The Popular Front’s 1936 Blum-Viollette bill, which looms so large in French liberal historiography, was nothing more than a marginally more generous variation on the same theme. The 1947 statute of Algeria transformed matters, giving citizenship of the French Union to all Algerians, but minority rule was preserved by the cantonnement of the ‘Muslim vote’ in a second college, where 1,300,000 electors, voting on behalf of a population of 8 million, voted for the same number (60) of Algerian representatives as the 532,000 voters of the first (almost entirely European) college. 12. For a detailed case, see Fanny Colonna’s historical sociology of education in Algeria, Instituteurs algériens, 1883–1939 (Paris: Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1975). 13. This movement – a necessarily simplifying abstraction of a dense and varied series of histories – begins with the generation of Dr Benthami ould Hamida, Omar Bouderba and Chérif Benhabylès, who began to write and speak out from 1908 to 1914; they were followed by the brief but notable career of the amir Khaled ibn Hashemi (grandson of the amir ‘Abd al-Qadir ibn Muhy al-Din who had led the state-building movement of ‘primary’ resistance in the 1830s–40s) in 1914–23, and finally Dr Mohamed-Salah Bendjelloul, Ferhat Abbas and others in the 1920s–40s. 14. During the first 20 years of the Third Republic, see Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie, Vol. 2, chap. 1. 15. It should be noted that the label is unsatisfactory in that the later representatives of the movement (after the ‘first generation’ of 1908–19) sought the extension of full citizenship to all Algeria’s inhabitants without regard to race or religion and hence with the preservation of Muslim ‘personal status’. The ‘dilution’ or abandonment of Islam, either as an element of social life or as cultural inheritance, sometimes assumed to be inherent in the notion of (cultural) assimilation (and present to a greater of lesser extent in some of the more pronounced Francophile and secularist tendencies of other groups) was never envisaged by them. 16. Karl Marx, Capital (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), Vol. 1, p. 76. I intend this usage figuratively, as a metaphor for the way that the social production of

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

James McDougall identities is realized in the abstraction of the categories of subjectivation from the ‘ownership’ of their subjects. Or, to put it the other way around, in the alienation of the producers of a certain subjecthood from the means of their subjectivation in the very moment of its creation. Identity emerges, not as an open field of social relations into which anyone can pour meaning, but as a ‘thing’ appropriated and set up, totem-like, to which those in whom it is supposedly incarnated must bow down. This ‘fetishism’ (which I use, as I take Marx to, with some irony) does not imply a simple illusion or mystification; the point is to try to grasp the effective force in praxis of the mechanism that leads instantly from an apparent opening of agency to the closure of subjection. Religious orders or ‘brotherhoods’, generally incorporating mystical, Sufi elements. Itinerant religious specialists and teachers. See Fanny Colonna, Les versets de l’invincibilité: Permanence et changements religieux dans l’Algérie contemporaine (Paris: Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1995). Kuttab – Qur’anic elementary school; zawiya – teaching and welfare institution of a Sufi order, generally organized around the tomb of a saintly founder and run by descendents transmitting charismatic baraka, ‘blessing’; mrabit – (in French ‘marabout’) such a saintly ancestor, or descendant, one ‘bound’ away from the mundane world and dedicated to God. The classic general study of the early development of Algerian islah is Ali Merad, Le Réformisme musulman en Algérie de 1925 à 1940: Essai d’histoire sociale et religieuse (Paris & the Hague: Mouton, 1967); to this invaluable but inevitably dated work must now be added important studies by Colonna, Les versets de l’invincibilité, and her student Kamel Chachoua, L’Islam Kabyle: Religion, État et Société en Algérie (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001). A detailed critical account is offered in my History and the Culture of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For an account of the position of the ‘ulama relative to the revolution, see my ‘S’écrire un destin: l’Association des ‘ulama dans la révolution algérienne’, Bulletin de l’Institut d’Histoire du Temps present, 83 (June 2004), pp. 38–52. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p.114. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 5. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideologies and Ideological State Apparatuses’, first published 1970, repr. in Mapping Ideology, edited by Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 1994), p. 138. Colonna, Les versets de l’invincibilité, p. 352. Mohamed Harbi, L’Algérie et son destin: croyants ou citoyens (Paris: Arcantère, 1992), p. 29. The FLN veteran, intellectual and politician Mostefa Lacheraf was perfectly clear on the dangers of this development as early as 1963 in ‘L’avenir de la culture algérienne’, Les Temps Modernes, 209 (October 1963), pp. 720–45. Art. 4 of the 1963 constitution (art. 2 of the 1976 constitution and subsequent revisions) declared Islam to be the religion of state. Legislation on nationality and inheritance rights in Algeria later also made adherence to Islam the crucial criterion for inclusion in the national community. After much hesitation, a markedly conservative family code was enacted in 1984. For the Berber question as a minority rights issue, see Tassadit Yacine ed., Les Kabyles: Éléments pour la compréhension de l’identité berbère en Algérie (Paris: Groupement pour les droits de minorités, 1992). For Berbers as a proto-national ethnie, Bruce Maddy-Weitzmann, ‘Nationalism in the Making? The Berber Question

ˆ ˆ

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30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

in Algeria’, in Minorities and the State in the Arab World, edited by Ofra Bengio and Gabriel Ben-Dor, (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), pp. 31–52. Hugh Roberts, ‘Towards an Understanding of the Kabyle Question in Contemporary Algeria’, The Maghreb Review, Vol. 5, No. 5–6 (September–December 1980), pp.115–24, gives a class analysis of the early movement. On the subsequent ethnicization of the question in the diaspora, and the problematic dynamics of the local and transnational aspects of the struggle, see Paul A. Silverstein, ‘Martyrs and Patriots: Ethnic, National and Transnational Dimensions of Kabyle Politics’, in Nation, Society and Culture in North Africa, edited by James McDougall (London: Frank Cass, 2003), pp. 87–111. It is the term ‘citizen’ which is most obsessively used, both deliberately and automatically, as a kind of reflex, in the self-description of Algerians and their social movements, even when such movements themselves neither manifest in their organization nor openly express in their slogans and demands an actual vision of equal, democratic participatory citizenship. The movement of the ‘aarush (assemblies of village delegates) which emerged in Kabylia in the wake of the violence of April–May 2001, a grassroots organization bypassing political parties and describing itself as a ‘mouvement citoyen’ but which excluded women from its deliberations, is the most striking contemporary example. The FLN’s slogan, bi ’l-sha‘b wa li ’l-sha‘b, is emblazoned on all public administrative buildings in Algeria. The Parti du peuple algérien, founded in 1937 and clandestine after 1939, and its electoralist legal cover, the Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratiques, the popular independentist movement which would eventually give birth to the FLN through a major schism in 1953–4. On the ‘Berberist crisis’, see Mohamed Harbi, Aux origines du FLN: le populisme révolutionnaire en Algérie (Paris: Bourgois, 1975), and Omar Carlier, ‘La production sociale de l’image de soi. Note sur la “crise berbériste” de 1949’, Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord, 23 (1984), pp. 347–71. Aït Ahmed, one of the founding leaders of the FLN, and Mohand Ou El Haj, guerrilla chief of wilaya IV (the FLN designation for Kabylia), formed the Front de Forces Socialistes, returned to the maquis in September 1963 and began a revolt against the regime of Aït Ahmed’s erstwhile companion (at arms and in jail) Ahmed Ben Bella, who had triumphed in the factional fighting of August–September 1962 with the aid of the army ‘of the frontiers’ formed by Houari Boumedienne in Tunisia and Morocco (and against opposition from the remaining interior guerrilla groups) to become Algeria’s first President. Aït Ahmed was arrested in October 1964 and condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted and he later escaped into exile. The FFS became a legal political party in 1989. The ‘Berber Spring’ began with a student sit-in at the university campus in Tizi Ouzou (Kabylia’s principal town) in protests at the administration’s cancellation of a lecture on Berber poetry by the charismatic linguist, writer and anthropologist Mouloud Mammeri. When the campus was forcibly evacuated by riot police, three days of rioting followed, and the ‘Berber Cultural Movement’ was born. Thafsut imazighen, ‘the Amazigh Spring’, refers to the ethnonym now current in the Berber movement to identify Berbers as a group (amazigh, pl. imazighen, ‘free man’ or ‘noble’). The ‘Black Spring’ began on 18 April 2001, with the shooting by gendarmes and death in custody of a high school student, Massinissa Guermah, in the commune of Beni Douala in Kabylia, followed by a series of violent confrontations between

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38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

James McDougall Kabyle youths and gendarmes resulting in 123 dead and several hundred injured. The rioting lasted several weeks before, between two meetings held on 3 and 10 May, a leadership of village delegates emerged (‘Coordination des aarchs, daïras et communes’, popularly known as the ‘aarush) to coordinate protests in the aftermath of the violence. This is not to say that no such project has been forthcoming – the FFS, Algeria’s oldest surviving opposition party, presents a comprehensive programme for a new constitutional assembly and the refoundation of the state in a Second Republic. But the persistently closed political system both passively (through its simple inadmission of real contest) and actively diverts oppositional energies into other fields, where it not only gives them space to express themselves but encourages them to do so (as in the gendarmerie’s violence of spring 2001 in Kabylia, and in the manipulation of Islamism as a populist channelling of opposition), thus preserving the political realm in the hands of its power brokers. The inability of forces such as the FFS, despite its claims to be a ‘national’ political party and its global agenda, to establish a significant constituency beyond Kabylia and Kabyle communities elsewhere is the best indicator of the success of the system in this regard. Most notably the emblematic figure of Kabyle singer Lounès Matoub, who wore military uniform on stage and called for armed resistance to Islamism. He was assassinated near Tizi Ouzou on 25 June 1998, and while responsibility for his murder was claimed by the Islamist GSPC, his rioting supporters in Kabylia were immediately convinced that the state had been somehow responsible. The case continues to elicit considerable controversy, and Matoub remains an iconic figure – in March 2004, in one locality in the Soummam valley, the south-eastern girdle of the Kabyle region, I saw a poster hoarding for the presidential campaign (divided into six spaces, one for each of the candidates) plastered with his image in every space. N.B. also: tifinagh – the neo-Lybic alphabet revived by the Berber cultural movement and often now used to write thamazighth (the Berber language in its Kabyle dialect), and the Amazigh (that is, Berber) flag – a horizontal tricolour of blue, green and yellow (representing the geography of tamazgha, the Berberist designation for North Africa: from north to south, the Mediterranean, the mountains and the desert) with the tifinagh letter aza (z), now the ubiquitous sign of Amazigh identity, in red across the centre. Conversations in Algiers and Constantine, March–April 2004. The Mouvement pour l’Autonomie de la Kabylie (MAK) was announced in a press conference in Tizi Ouzou on 16 April 2003 by its spokesman and founder, the singer Ferhat Mehenni. (See the movement’s website at www.makabylie.info). See the preoccupations (immediate domestic crisis resolution; global Muslim solidarity; nothing of substance in between) of the FIS’ 15-point platform, published in al-Munqidh 16, repr. in L’Algérie par ses islamistes, edited by Mustafa al-Ahnaf, Bernard Botiveau and Franck Frégosi (Paris: Karthala, 1991), pp. 49–51, and other texts in the same volume. See Hugh Roberts, ‘Doctrinaire Economics and Political Opportunism in the Strategy of Algerian Islamism’, in Islamism and Secularism in North Africa, edited by John Ruedy (London: Macmillan, 1994). The newer neighbourhood mosques in Algeria, and some of the more iconic religious buildings of the past 30 years, above all the monumental ‘Amir ‘Abd alQadir mosque in Constantine, are notable for their deliberate Middle Eastern architectural echoes and their resolute lack of any distinctively ‘traditional’ Maghribi features (particularly notable is the predominance of multiple, slim,

The Fetishism of Identity 71 cylindrical minarets over single, solid, square ones). Asked about this, an Algerian colleague remarked, ‘It’s Wahhabism, it’s a fashion – c’est pas de chez nous, ça.’ The fashion of Islamism is, of course, also evident in dress, for both men and women. This is immediately noticeable in Algeria, where older, local forms of veiling (the ha’ik and triangular lace voilette), practised mainly by older women, are distinctively different to newer, mashriqi forms (headscarf, chador or burqa), and the ‘Afghan’ qamis is a visibly new type of male attire. 44. This is made all the more effective by the structural opposition of Kabylia’s politics between the two major parties in the region, the FFS and RCD (Rassemblement pour la Culture et la Démocratie, an offshoot of the Berber Cultural Movement of the early 1980s). In the legislative elections of 2002, both parties boycotted the vote; in the municipal election the following year, however, the FFS participated against an RCD boycott, while in the presidential election of 2004 the RCD leader, Said Sadi, stood against calls for a boycott by the FFS and the movement of the ‘aarush. In each case voting was prevented, in some cases by intimidation and violence, and those standing for election were condemned as ‘traitors’ by those opposed to participation. 45. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p.14. See also Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History and Violence in Nineteenth Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) and Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 46. Young, White Mythologies, p. 87.

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Part II Intellectual Formations: Authority and Opposition

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3

Redefining Resistance: Counterhegemony, the Repressive Hypothesis and the Case of Arabic Modernism Yaseen Noorani I don’t give a shit about dying, when you’re into revolution you have to die, and you can’t be a revolution unless you’re willing to die. Artie Sternlicht, hippie rebel in E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel Literary modernism, despite the apocalyptic proclamations issued by many of its seminal practitioners, has now the status of a defunct artistic movement, an outmoded phase of Western culture, universally regarded as a failure in its broader cultural aims, and often subject to scorn and ridicule in respect of the revolutionary claims associated with it. Nevertheless, literary modernism and the debates surrounding it have played a key role in the evolution of ideas about counterhegemony in the twentieth century. The claim that hegemonic structures operate at the level of the psyche lay at the basis of the assault upon the bourgeois social order of early twentiethcentury Europe mounted by avant-garde groups and other modernist practitioners, whose politics ranged from the extreme left to the extreme right.1 In the Arabic context, where modernist techniques took root after World War II, modernism was and continues to be associated with the overturning of the traditional order and its values. Through the course of the twentieth century, modernist ideology has interacted with social theories, from the Weberian to the structuralist, in pressing the view that subjectivity is shaped by structures of domination. All of these outlooks share the underlying assumption that hegemony – political order relying on the apparently noncoerced reproduction by social subordinates of their subordinate status2 – is founded upon the repression and deformation of that which is authentically human and/or natural, that which impels human beings towards freedom.3 Insofar as modernist artistic practices purported to access and gave expression to this primal zone, wherein lie our irreducible desires for personal and social happiness, they have been available to politically minded attempts to theorize counterhegemony. 75

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Consideration of the continued resonance of central modernist assumptions, alongside the theoretical repudiations of modernism and its evident historical failure, enables us to raise fundamental questions about the nature of resistance and hegemony. One of the most persistent and coherent lines of attack upon modernism was initiated by its contemporary Georg Lukacs and has been taken up more recently by Frederic Jameson. The critique of modernism here is founded on the same repressive hypothesis4 that modernist ideology itself exhibits – (capitalist) modernity engenders social and psychic fragmentation, alienating us from our inner desire for freedom which can now take only masked and distorted forms, thus robbing us of agency. Modernist art, however, in constructing an aesthetic of the fragmentary, does not transcend and redeem fragmentation, but merely extends it, supplying the internal logic of the culture of consumerism. In contrast to this Lukacsian critique, an opposing line of thought, evident in such theorists as Foucault and Bourdieu, calls the whole problematic of repression into question by viewing hegemonic relations as productive of human subjectivity. In this view, whatever desire and agency human beings possess is engendered by mechanisms within the social order itself. Hegemonic relations should be investigated in terms of the forms of subjectivity to which they give rise and by which they are reproduced, without recourse to notions of an originary human desire anterior to the hegemonic order. In this approach, however, the status and nature of resistance become less clear. Can there be real resistance to the hegemonic order, and if so, where does it originate? How and when can the social relations and mechanisms of a given order create in subjects the capacity for resistance to this very order? In this chapter, I propose that it is necessary, on the discursive level, to regard resistance as constitutive of hegemonic relations. In other words, resistance does not originate in a sacred, inviolate site outside of hegemony, but is posited from the outset in the discourses that justify particular relations of order. Such relations are represented as legitimate precisely because they overcome and transform tendencies towards disorder inherent in the subjects within their purview. Resistance, therefore – as a ‘natural’ disposition towards recalcitrance – is not only acknowledged by hegemonic discourses, but required by them to project the ordering effects of hegemonic relations. This means, however, that hegemonic legitimacy is only ever a quasilegitimacy, for the resistance that constitutes it has its own form of authority which is never fully under control. Such resistance becomes political, which is to say, counterhegemonic, when a particular set of resistances inhering in a particular set of relations is recast as legitimate resistance to oppression. The cultivation of resistance required by hegemonic discourses creates the danger, not so much that this resistance will be enacted in a frenzy of disorder, but that hegemonic legitimacy will be undermined when what was formerly tolerated and even revered as discipline comes to be repudiated as tyranny. Resistance is always represented as on the brink of insurrection – thus does

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hegemony carry its insurrection within itself. But this latent insurrection only unfolds as a struggle against the hegemonic order when changing social conditions enable the rise of an opposing principle of freedom that alters the moral valence of a set of resistances by rearticulating them along its axis.5 I will develop this view of resistance and counterhegemony through an analysis of Arabic literary modernism as it emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on its explicit attack upon traditional social values and its linkage with the revolutionary nationalist ferment of that period. Looking at a supposedly European cultural phenomenon as it developed outside of Europe allows us to disembed it from Eurocentric world-historical narratives, and thereby to isolate features of such phenomena that may be more easily discernible in non-European contexts. In the case of Arabic modernism, the break in aesthetic canons that is effected and its articulation with a range of oppositional positions reveals mechanisms through which resistance turns into counterhegemony. I am specifically interested in the manner in which modernist authors identified the activity of perception as the fundamental site of hegemonic repression, and on this basis, cast their literary enterprise as a practice of freedom enabling the release of primal, socially transformative human energies. They did so by showing authentic perception, as embodied in their art, to be the ultimate site of moral investment. In other words, the self-sacrifice required to perceive truly, liberates humanity from the imposed, habituated modes of perception that sustain domination and stasis. My analysis of modernist techniques, centring on the influential poet Adunis (‘Ali Ahmad Sa’id, 1930–), finds the modernist point of resistance to lie in its attack upon the opposition between reality and representation upheld in the aesthetics of beauty. Modernist techniques aim not at representing reality in an ideal form, but at regenerating reality in the act of perception. I argue that in transferring moral investment from a practice deemed to uphold social domination (aesthetic contemplation), to one envisioned as resisting domination (creative perception), Arabic modernism casts its art as a practice of freedom that redefines a range of social relations as manifestations of tyranny.

Modernity, visuality and Arabic modernism In assessing the meaning and significance of literary modernism in the Arabic context, it is necessary to recall the suggestion made by the Egyptian critic Ghali Shukri in his book on modern Arabic poetry published in 1968. Discussing the influence of T. S. Eliot, he says, ‘Perhaps imported Western techniques are transformed during their interaction with Arabic content into something new that would have never occurred to the original inventors, or to the new audience, and is hidden in the complex process that we call the interaction between the artist and his world.’6 Critics have been confident in identifying a post-World War II Arabic poetic modernism taking

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their cue from the proliferation of literary techniques customarily associated with modernism in the West, most of which have to do with breaking up traditional unities and continuities for the sake of more arresting and difficult aesthetic patterns. These techniques gained currency on the heels of and in conjunction with the emergence of so-called free verse in the early 1950s, which replaced the traditional Arabic poetic verse (bayt) with a line of variable length, thereby opening the structure of poems to greater individual experimentation. This sudden plethora of poetic innovation occurred during a period of political explosiveness in a number of Arab countries, from Egypt to Iraq. There is no doubt a link between these phenomena in that both the literary and political fields were altered by the intervention of social groups that had previously been marginal to these fields. Many of the pioneers of the free-verse movement were politically active, belonging to or associated with revolutionary socialist and nationalist parties. In these respects, there are some contextual parallels with the initial emergence of modernist literary techniques in the volatile landscape of early twentiethcentury Europe.7 Yet the underlying social differences, and the impact of the colonial situation, are decisive in ensuring that the meaning and ideological function of modernism differ in both cases. This is most apparent in the opposing conceptions of modernity to which modernism is linked in the two contexts. There is a key difference between Arabic modernist ideology, as it emerged in the early post-war period, and Western modernist ideology, a difference which helps to shape the counterhegemonic potential envisaged in the Arabic context. It is well known that many of the literary works identified with European high modernism are hostile towards modernity, and even avant-garde groups often rejected much that is normally associated with modern life.8 Arabic modernism, however, at least in the early period, fully embraces modernity as the means of liberating and restituting Arab life, and fully identifies modern poetry and its techniques with modernity. For Arabic modernism, modernity is not simply a set of social processes that alter our way of life. It is rather, a historically culminatory liberation from the shackles that have bound creativity and individuality from earliest times. Modernity is seen as the release of the energy that underlies human achievement and historical movement, the energy that has been repressed in historically decadent Arab society.9 The modern age is characterized by ‘transgression and transcendence’ of all existing limits, due to its ‘undulating essence that cannot be realized completely and finally’.10 There is little conception here, therefore, of a past traditional society in which individuals enjoyed an organic relationship with their world, resulting in psychic and aesthetic harmony. The salient opposition is not the one that lies between a lost wholeness of traditional life and a disunified modern existence. Rather, tradition is seen as a rigid and lifeless structure imposed upon human vitality and, in the past, only occasionally breached by it. Modernity is thus

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wholly identified with the freedom that lies within the human spirit, and becomes thereby a purely moral, utopian category, an ideal state of the psyche and of society. For this reason, the fragmentation of social and psychic life that is normally associated with modernity in Western accounts, even the most heroic and celebratory of them, is assigned in the Arab context to presently existing social conditions, which are identified with the lack of modernity, the persistence of tradition in the age of liberation. Indeed, Ghali Shukri argued that European culture and the European psyche are unified, despite the appearance of fissures created by critiques of modernity, due to the gradual emergence of modernity in Europe as an internal transformation. The Arab modernist, on the other hand, suffers from dismemberment, caught between the historical backwardness of Arab society and the ideals promised by the modern age. Tradition-bound Arab society itself is ruptured by an inveterate disjuncture between a sacralized cultural heritage (turath) and the reality of actual life with which it is in discord. ‘No matter how much the cultural heritage contradicts our daily life it is always right and we are always wrong. For that reason the split between the prophets of modernism in our poetry and the poetic heritage is nothing but the reflection of the historical split between belief and practice.’11 This split, ‘the frightful abyss between self and world’, results in ‘profound spiritual mutilation’. The poetry and discourse surrounding it of the 1950s and 1960s were rife with such depictions of psychic disjuncture, in which the traditional social and cultural order imposes categories of consciousness that disable the proper course of historical development. As Marx puts it, ‘The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’12 Society is thrust into modernity by external forces, but incapable of taking on the challenge due to an ossified regime of perception, suffers a widening internal rupture resulting in perverted forms of modern life. To restitute Arab life, to reconcile the internal divisions that prevent forward movement, a new mode of perception is necessary that would enable Arabs to see and thereby release the repressed dynamic force in their world and in themselves. In other words, Arabs must learn to perceive the world in a modern, dynamic manner in order to become agents of the perpetual transformation that modernity inaugurates. To identify this conception of modernity with literary modernism, poets and critics had to show modernist poetic techniques to embody the creative, and indeed destructive, force supposed to lie at the heart of modernity. In other words, they had to show that the process of perception, particularly visual perception, that lay at the centre of modernist techniques, is the site of modern freedom, truth and authenticity. In attributing redemptive moral significance to perception, or aesthesis, and thus downgrading the previous moral sites, virtue and beauty, Arabic modernism does not deviate from the characteristic practice of Western modernisms. And in fact it is precisely in

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this elevation of perception that the counterhegemonic programme of modernism lies. The European modernist assumption is that modern inauthenticity is rooted in the separation and disharmony of human psychic powers, which make it impossible for contemporary individuals to integrate their experience, their sense data, into any sort of meaningful whole, leading to the passive experience of ordinary life as a continuous bombardment of the senses with heterogeneous, opaque stimuli. But modernist literary techniques, as new forms of perception capable of integrating complex experiences into aesthetic wholes, redeem modern life by creating a life of greater intensity than has hitherto been known out of the chaotic, fragmented flux of modern life in which we would otherwise aimlessly float about. In the higher reintegration of the psyche that modernism promises, meaning will come about not out of truths and values that inhere in a fixed universe, but from the creative process of perception itself, which is where our experience of the world originates. Nineteenth-century scientific thought, philosophy and artistic experimentation converged on the conclusion that what we see is not the direct imprint of a fixed external reality upon our retinas, but the product of a creative visual process that organizes meaningless flux into intelligible forms.13 And now that our sensual-interpretive powers have become outstripped by the furious pace of modern experience, resulting in passivity and enslavement, it is up to modernism to reconcile us to our reality once again, to show us how to transform it into something that we can live with.

Reification and the critique of modernism The view that modernist literary techniques arise from transformations in modern conditions of perception is common to both modernism itself and critical analyses of it, to accounts that attribute a revolutionary or critical orientation to these techniques as well as accounts that regard modernism as the cultural arm of capitalist hegemony. These accounts are rooted in the idea that processes of modernization, particularly an ever-deepening division of labour, create division and disharmony in the selves of individuals who must devote themselves to developing specific native capacities at the expense of all others. The modern form of life requires the reduction of individuals to limited aspects of their being, precluding any possibility of the harmonious development of the entire range of individual faculties within a holistic framework and ideal. Modern individuals are therefore internally divided, unable to integrate their thought and feeling, that is, their experience, into a manageable whole. This break-up of internal unity mirrors the break-up of traditional, social and cultural structures that imposed an external unity and meaning on the experience of individuals. Reality – no longer governed by organic traditional structures but fragmented into functional units organized according to laws of efficiency – is no longer intelligible to

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the individual sensorium. This way of understanding the development of modernity, and in particular, the difference between modern and traditional forms of life, has been powerful and prevalent in twentieth-century thinking. And in most accounts, both the nature of modernist literary techniques and the question of their counterhegemonic potential ride on assumptions about modern social and psychic fragmentation. We may consider a sophisticated and powerful theorization of this view, that of Fredric Jameson, which proposes that whereas modernist techniques purport to reintegrate the psyche and the world on an aesthetic basis, they in fact extend into the psyche the processes that shatter and reconfigure social life (reification). They indeed once again enable interior to match with the exterior world of perception, but not by empowering interiority to unify with this world on the basis of internal desire, but rather by ‘colonising’ the psyche so that it obeys the same laws as capitalist reality. At the same time, modernist techniques repress the gap between desire and reality, creating ‘the political unconscious’. Therefore modernism was never inherently counterhegemonic, and indeed was from the outset a product and handmaiden of capitalist rationalization, and ultimately the high priest of consumer culture. Jameson argues that modern processes of breaking up and mechanistically reconfiguring the social relations and practices of traditional society led to the fragmentation of both social and psychic reality. Emphasis on rational calculative abilities makes sensory capacities superfluous, and thus detached from ordinary experience and semi-autonomous. Modernism arises from this phenomenon as what Jameson calls an ‘aestheticizing strategy,’ taking up the cast-off realm of sensory experience as an end in itself. Modernism ‘seeks to recode or rewrite the world and its own data in terms of perception as a semi-autonomous activity’.14 In other words, the aestheticizing strategy takes the social reality of Capitalism as mere material for an exercise in creative perception, thereby distorting and repressing our experience of this reality. In so doing, modernist works rescue us from our traumatic apprehension of the horror of capitalist reality by turning the fragmented bits of this experience that we were unable to synthesize into a utopian fantasy of psychic integration on the aesthetic level. Thus the historical is disguised and made palatable as the psychic in a formula that can now defuse the rising threat of mass politics through its embodiment in the commodity, whose consumption will now become the chief capitalist dynamic. As for the counterhegemonic pretensions of modernism, Jameson ridicules these as the naive view that ‘a change in style will help us to see the world in a new way and thus achieve a kind of cultural or countercultural revolution of its own’.15 Modernism, then, is ‘a final and extremely specialized phase of that immense process of superstructural transformation whereby the inhabitants of older social formations are culturally and psychologically retrained for life in the market system’.16 Yet at the same time, modernism preserves the

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utopian impulse by containing it in a form that appears to gratify it. ‘It is precisely this new semi-autonomy [of perception] and the presence of these waste products [abstract objects such as color and pure sound] of capitalist rationalization that opens up a life space in which the opposite and the negation of such rationalization can be, at least imaginatively, experienced.’17 Therefore, modernism’s ‘intent … is to “manage” historical and social, deeply political impulses, that is to say, to defuse them, to prepare substitute gratifications for them, and the like’.18 The result of this line of thinking is that not only is the modernist artwork a commodity, but so becomes the mind itself. The reified mind recapitulates the commodity as a pleasurable, sutured aesthetic surface containing and hiding a utopian impulse traumatized by reality. This is of course to be expected, since the commodity form is the ultimate embodiment of the logic of reification, in which relations among people appear as relations among things. Jameson’s account shares two basic assumptions with modernist ideology itself: that the utopian desire for freedom is repressed in bourgeois society, and that this repression is effected through fragmentation of social and psychic life. His primary charge is essentially a reformulation of Marcuse’s thesis on the affirmative character of culture – that bourgeois life relegates happiness, human fulfilment, to the ideal, spiritual realm of culture; this realm is constituted as incompatible with practical life, where strife and inequality must reign; the exclusion of aspirations for happiness from practical life ensures the perpetuation of the status quo.19 Jameson’s version shrewdly develops this thesis in terms of the functions that modernism fulfils for the capitalist order – extension of reification into the psyche; substitution of ‘culture’ with consumerist culture as the domain of happiness; recoding and obscuring the ‘real’, that is capitalist social reality and its psychic trauma, in a pleasurable, reconciled form. Jameson is concerned with explaining the historical meaning of modernism within the overarching narrative of reification, given its failure in revolutionary terms. The speculative foundation of his account, however, undermines its explanatory value. Accounts like Jameson’s take utopian desire as the standard against which to measure historical phenomena. The standard of analysis, however, has no specified content. Utopian desire functions analytically as a purely negative concept, because it is not known what kind of artistic practice fully enacts it. All that is known here is that modernism must not have done so because of its revolutionary failure and co-optation, in one way or another, by the capitalist order. Working from this point, a functionalist account is developed showing how modernism actually assisted in repressing utopian desire. Culture is understood as the outlet in which utopian desire is expressed in a coded form and neutralized. Without positing an empty utopian desire, therefore, the account has no basis. Yet this utopian desire is simply the striving of human nature to realize itself socially, and this striving must exist and must find some form of expression since human nature cannot be satisfied

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with a social form inadequate to itself (capitalism). How is this known? Through the discovery of this desire in culture. Therefore, the argument that culture or modernist art is the self-neutralizing expression of utopian desire because this must take place for the capitalist order to persist looks very much like a functionalist tautology.

Visual autonomy and self-sacrifice Readings of modernism that see its techniques as inherently designed to serve the ruling order give no analysis of the counterhegemonic orientation taken up by modernist writers, and thereby fail to provide insight into cultural forms of resistance more generally. Jameson’s account treats the modernist representation of fragmented experience as if it were the unmediated presence of reification, that is reality itself, in the modernist work. This keeps him from investigating how such representations function in modernist works, and particularly, how they can be morally invested for counterhegemonic purposes. Let us consider visual autonomy, a primary ‘reified’ feature of modernist works of art.20 By visual autonomy I mean that visual signifiers within the text appear neither as referring to external objects that they describe nor as intended by the consciousness of a viewer. They are presented as standing alone, not determined by any separate subject or object. They tell us neither about an external world they are describing nor about a personality to whom they are of interest. They appear to us of their own accord, as self-standing existents. Visual autonomy is a condition often attributed to modernity and modern experience, a prime instance of the fragmentation of traditional frameworks of meaning, making it possible for us to be bombarded by an endless plethora of unassimilable images, as well as to engage in unceasing consumption of them. The development of forms of visual autonomy in modernist works, however, must be seen as a representation of modern experience, a way of grasping and interpreting it, rather than as a direct infusion of modern reality and its processes into works of art. Visual autonomy enables artworks to herald an aesthetic basis for coming to terms with modern reality, centred on the integrative and redemptive capacities of creative perception. Arabic modernism elevates perception to primary aesthetic status by investing it with moral significance. Consider the following verses from the Lebanese poet Yusuf al-Khal, published in the early ’60s: ‘The poet is the symbol of truth in/A world that has gone astray from the truth/He crucifies himself to redeem souls/That have ground their brows in sensory lust.’21 Though al-Khal happened to be Christian, he was not alone in depicting the poet in this manner, and provides us here with a precis of modernist ideology. The world no longer sees the truth but the poet can. This truth is not discursive or propositional, something that can be explained in ordinary language, but is contained within the process of perception. As Adunis puts it,

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modern poetry is ‘a transformation in the order of things (nizam al-ashya’ ) and in the order of viewing them (nizam al-nazar ilayha).’22 Ordinary people cannot see the world because they are immersed in their senses, that is, their ossified, habitual way of looking. They passively accept what their eyes tell them without realizing that their eyes have merely produced a feeble imitation of someone else’s reality for them. The poet, however, is able to see an authentic reality because his perception occurs at a deeper level than the habitual. This is the level on which the underlying creative, interpretive process of perception takes place that enables us to change our reality, to innovate, to generate history. Reality is not a given, but emerges from this process. Therefore, if you see creatively, you see the truth. But doing so requires self-sacrifice – willingness to die. To see creatively, one must transcend one’s everyday consciousness, everyday modes of perception, one’s habits and traditions, and in sum, one’s ordinary ego and identity. To see creatively, one must give up the practical, utilitarian modes of perception oriented towards self-preservation and free perception to be an end in itself. This means sacrificing one’s ordinary consciousness and selfhood for the sake of perception. We read in one of Adunis’s poems, ‘I surrendered my days to an abyss/Rising and falling beneath my vessel/And I dug my grave in my eyes.’ The poet has dug his grave in his eyes and surrendered his everyday life to an abyss by adopting a mode of vision that entails his death and rebirth beyond himself, in the form of a new world that is creative, authentic and ever-changing. Arabic modernist poets and critics developed an aesthetic based on the liberation of creative perception in visual autonomy because of the capacity of such an aesthetic to challenge the existing order. We can see this by considering the implications of their removal of the site of moral investment from beauty to perception. Let us take the views on beauty of one of the foremost writers of the previous generation (and enemy of free verse), ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad (1889–1964) as an example. According to al‘Aqqad, the highest goal of both human beings and nature is freedom. The highest, most perfect form of life is the one that has achieved the most freedom, and is thus the most beautiful form, because ‘beauty is “freedom’s overcoming of necessity’”.23 In other words, the life forms that most exhibit freedom overcoming necessity are the most beautiful forms. Freedom is seen in vital function and movement. Therefore, the body that lacks beauty is one in which ‘something prevents the vital functions within it from freedom of movement’. The principle of beauty in art is the same as that of life. Like life forms, art shows freedom overcoming the constraints of rules and medium. The difference is that whereas beauty in life is dispersed and not easily perceived by all, art provides a ‘synoptic image of life’ by extracting the forms of beauty from it and displaying them to us in a concentrated form. The other pole of al-‘Aqqad’s theory of beauty is the genius, the one who is capable of perceiving beauty. The genius is able to see the permanent

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forms of beauty that lie beyond impermanent sensible appearances. Due to the abundance of feeling of life in his interior self, the genius is more sensitive to the underlying forms of beauty in nature; he reacts to them with greater emotion.24 Thus the interior ‘feeling of life’, joy and emotion stimulated by beauty, is the internal freedom that correlates to the external forms in which freedom is manifest. While perception is critical in al-‘Aqqad’s theory, it is constituted by the two poles of perception, the genius and beautiful forms, the subject and the object, which, as in most such theories, are hierarchically related and gendered. It is possible to see linkages between al-‘Aqqad’s aesthetics and the liberal, romantic nationalism that was dominant in the Egyptian public sphere in the period between the world wars. Al-‘Aqqad extends his conception of the relationship between beauty and freedom to world politics, asserting that the ‘high’ nations are superior to the ‘low’ nations precisely in their ‘appreciation for the beauty of nature and pleasure in the arts’.25 Thus, ‘vanquished nations seek independence when they seek beauty and do not steal time from the mission of freedom when they invest it in the mission of literature and art.’26 The politics of beauty, however, is ultimately elitist and meliorist in nature. The contemplation of nature and other beautiful forms more effectively serves to sustain the cultural prestige of the leisured classes than to foment agitation for independence. Moreover, and more important, the doctrine that beauty inheres in objective, permanent forms implies that traditional standards of beauty could not have been that far off the mark, and that such standards can be found in great works of art of the past. Beauty itself does not change; evolution occurs in the forms of life, including social forms, that progressively move towards it. Order is just as much involved in beauty as freedom – this is the meaning of beauty as ‘ordered freedom or freedom that emerges among the constraints of necessity’.27 Therefore the fixed forms of order that we see in art and nature are paradigmatic of the order to which society must aspire. In fact, the tautological nature of the freedom that most fully frees itself among constraints allows the paean to freedom to culminate in an emphasis on the necessity of order. The politics of beauty, therefore, in al-‘Aqqad’s formulation, has few revolutionary implications. Perhaps this is not unconnected with al-‘Aqqad’s own conservative party politics as a long-serving member of the pre-1952 Egyptian parliament. The aesthetics of beauty rest on the polarity between the disinterested contemplating subject and the ‘useless’ object whose end in itself lies in its appearance. The moral freedom of beauty lies in this nature of both poles. With regard to visuality, the polarity ensures that works of art will be split between these two poles, focusing either on transmitting the objective form to the work’s audience, through techniques of description, or transmitting the artist’s contemplation of beauty, his subjective and intentional appropriation of the form into his pre-constituted consciousness, through techniques

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of self-expression. This results in what Adunis attacks as ‘scenic vision’ (al-ru’ya al-ufuqiyya) in his manifesto on modern poetry: ‘In most of our contemporary and past poetry, life appears as a view, or a beautiful landscape. Therefore the relation between the human being and the world appears as a formal relation. He views things as forms, not meanings or functions. Thus the poetry is bereft of obscure magic – the essence of poetry.’28 The ‘scenic’ mode of vision is limited to the transmission of sensible forms, and is therefore superficial. Modern poetry, however, takes a different approach. ‘With modern poetry we go beyond the surface, to penetrate things beyond their appearances, such that we are able to see the world in its vitality, its virginity, its capacity for renewal, and unite with it.’29 This transformation in the order of viewing things abjures subjective lyricism at the same time that it abjures the world of objective forms. ‘The poet is not someone who has something he wants to express, but someone who creates his things in a new way.’30 Individual emotion is not permitted in this sort of poetry. Nor is reference to transient events, facts of empirical existence, external issues or ideas permitted. The model of vision here is creative and cognitive at the same time. It is ‘a form of knowledge with its own rules, separate from those of science’. Modern poetry ‘perceives things spontaneously, not according to logical connections, but according to their essence and core which are realized through visualization (tasawwur)’.31 Adunis’s modern poetry seeks to get below subject and object and uncover the process of perception at its most fundamental levels. The work of art that achieves this is no longer the description of an external form that has been perceived, nor an expression of the consciousness that perceives, but is in itself an instance of the originary process of perception, in which the self/world appears for the first time. Such a work is ‘a movement and meaning in which the self and things unite, the world and thought. It is . . . the poem-life’.32 Herein lies the inherently oppositional, or at the least negational, thrust of the aesthetics of perception. The hegemonic structures of tradition that reproduce stable subjects and objects must be annihilated in order to liberate both from factitious external determination. ‘As modern poetry oversteps our closed, ordered world, it scorns the bases on which our life stands, and has faith in an as yet unknown world.’33 The shattering of world and consciousness effected in visual autonomy, the ‘abyss’ that is the condition of modernity, becomes the primordial ground of perpetual renewal. In an uncertain world, in which the security of logical order no longer obtains, one ‘considers himself an adventurer before dangerous contingencies that require daring more so than they require prudence’.34 Just as the aesthetics of beauty may be associated with liberal romantic nationalism, the aesthetics of perception must be understood in the context of revolutionary nationalism. Both envisage an overturning of political structures and hierarchies that would result in the entrance of Arab society into modernity. The key linkage between the two is found in the morality of self-sacrifice, willingness

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to die, required for both perceptual and political revolution. The moral investment of perception, the sacrifice or overcoming of one’s empirical self in order to uncover authentic vision, shown as inhering in modernist artistic techniques, allows these techniques to embody counterhegemony and signify politically without containing direct political content. The transfer of moral investment to perception aims to eliminate the distinction between reality and the representation of reality that is present in the aesthetics of beauty. Instead of envisioning ideal forms that are immanent in existing reality but are not themselves actual, modernist works seek to constitute reality anew through new acts of envisionment. The work itself, freed from relationships of referentiality, is to be its own reality. The world of the work appears to us just as the elements of the world around us appear to us. This means that the aesthetic principles and relationships operative within the work are not superadded to reality as enhancement or intensification, but are capable of constituting reality. Creative perception, aesthesis, acquires the same kind of ontological status as the actually operative principles of life – practical rationality, self-preservation. Aesthesis has indeed a superior ontological status because it is the more authentic mode of perception, the foundation that has been obscured by social domination and its overlay of second nature. Therefore, the opposition between representation and reality, the unstable yet necessary aesthetic and cultural fulcrum in romantic ideology, becomes in modernism the point of resistance at which an entire counterhegemonic orientation is anchored. We may consider in this regard Adunis’s own form of modernist practice in what has been perhaps his most influential volume of poetry, Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi (‘The Songs of Mihyar of Damascus’), published in 1961. In this collection, Adunis brought the modernist treatment of visuality in Arabic poetry to a new level. Whereas previous experimentation with visuality had centred on the juxtaposition of visual objects, preserving and relying upon the visual appearance of these objects, ‘The Songs of Mihyar’ takes the process of removing visual objects from conventional frameworks of meaning a step further by destabilizing visuality itself. The specular forms of objects are evoked only to be rescinded when these objects become impossible to visualize. We find ourselves in a strange, ontologically ambiguous world in which principles of identity no longer obtain. Ordinary relations and categories are absent. There is no evident relationship between the world of the poems and the empirical world of everyday life. Take for instance the following poem, entitled ‘Ru’ya’ (‘A vision’): I glimpse among the lowly books In the yellow dome A punctured city flying I glimpse walls of silk And a slain star

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Swimming in a green bottle. I see a statue of tears Of the porcelain of mutilated bodies and kneeling In the presence of the Prince.35 It is clear from the outset that we are not dealing with any form of mimesis, any attempt to imitate what something looks like. We can visualize the yellow dome, the green bottle, and perhaps the walls of silk, but mostly the ‘imagery’ is such that it cannot be visualized. Indeed, the effect of the poem is to frustrate visualization, because whenever we feel that the poem is inducing us to form an image, the possibility of doing so is immediately withdrawn. As soon as we thought we might see something of interest in the yellow dome among the lowly books, it turns out to be a punctured flying city, which joltingly alerts us to the absence of descriptive intent in the poem. Nevertheless, the adjectives ‘punctured’ and ‘flying’ leave a kind of visual impression whose effect remains, even though we cannot see how they apply to a city. Even when we try to search for some kind of metaphorical or allegorical meaning for these adjectives, it is rather the visual impression that lingers most strongly once we have failed to do so or reached a conclusion that must remain doubtful. Although the ‘punctured city flying’ appears to be a metaphor, it is an unstable one, because we do not have any fixed term to ground it in. We cannot judge how to apply these adjectives metaphorically to the city because we do not know which or what sort of city is being spoken of. The city itself may be metaphorical, because cities are not often seen in domes among books. In fact, we may now begin to surmise that all of the terms are metaphorical, that the poem is some sort of allegory, a code whose key has been withheld. We are left then with a sense of visual impression, though nothing that we can see concretely. This is perhaps even more the case when it comes to the slain star swimming in the green bottle. This particularly arresting ‘image’ seems to hover on the edges of both visualization and meaning without acceding to either. ‘Star’ is a semantically laden word, particularly in a poetic context. Yet it is not possible here to decide on a specific sense for it, a specific symbolic meaning or associative dimension, which is especially begged by the designation of the star as ‘slain’. Nevertheless, the star’s semantic ladenness remains in effect, creating a mysterious sense that there is a great deal of meaning here just beyond our reach. And this semantic mystery is of course enhanced by the teasingly impossible visuality of the complex. The star and the green bottle are items for which we can form distinct images; the idea of something swimming in a bottle urges visualization; we are thereby induced to form an image while realizing that the image we have formed is a failure. In this way, the complex brings about the sense of abstracting meaning and visual sensation from the conventional and empirical ground in which they ordinarily inhere. We have the sense of a purified realm in which these elements have been liberated to function of their own accord.

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The effect of this is that we seem to enter a world that is removed from empirical reality but somehow adjacent to it. The internal consistency of this world depends on the sense that it is closely related to empirical reality, to ordinary meaning and sensation, but just beyond them. Certain aspects of the poem, particularly ‘the yellow dome’, ‘the Prince’ (al-amir), and ‘kneeling’ (ruku’, a prescribed position in prayer), evoke a medieval Islamic past. The overall impression of the poem is one of fairy-tale exoticism intermingled with sybaritic decadence and brutality. If we read the ‘vision’ as connected with or emanating from the medieval past, it has to be taken as a reality that underlies this past appearing in its distinctive manner. There is no particular object or event that is being described. Nor does the poem tell us anything about the consciousness of the person who sees it, because there is no evidence of subjective intentionality in what is seen. The poem can only be a reality in and of itself that can only take the form that it has in the poem. But at the same time, even if we say that the poem is merely an aesthetic construct designed for the sake of pleasure or stimulation, it nevertheless engages dimensions of meaning and sensation that invoke a mode of perception removed from or hidden within ordinary experience. If we accept that this mode of perception is constitutive of ordinary perception, then its realities will outweigh those of ordinary experience. Just as the poetic techniques in ‘The Songs of Mihyar’ remove visual sensation from its grounding in concrete visuality, so do they remove the ‘I’ that speaks from an empirical ego in which it should be anchored. The poet first speaks of and then becomes the heroic and tragic Mihyar. But Mihyar is a kind of revolutionary cipher. He has no identity beyond his abstract status as a messianic figure. Beyond this there is no indication that he has a personality or consciousness, that he is in any sense a real person. Nor that his actions occur in any specific time or place. More abstract even than an archetype, he is closer to a universal and timeless state of being. The first section of the volume speaks of Mihyar in the third-person. In the following poem, entitled ‘The Face of Mihyar’, he appears in a relatively straightforward manner: The face of Mihyar is fire That incinerates the land of familiar stars, There he is crossing the Caliph’s borders Raising the flag of setting Destroying every house; There he is refusing the Imamate Leaving his despair a sign Over the face of the seasons. Like any other messiah, Mihyar comes to destroy the familiar, to transgress borders, to overthrow established authorities. In contrast to familiar messiahs,

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however, he sets up no new, just order that will take the place of the present unjust one. He leaves those he saves homeless. This is associated with his despair, his acceptance of mortality. We can connect this with the conception of modernity outlined by Adunis in his manifesto, in which principles of order no longer obtain, giving way to danger, daring, and as we see here, despair. Mortality, despair and perplexity will now form the ground of life and knowledge, rather than the familiar and permanent authorities of the past. ‘Because he is perplexed/He taught us how to read the dust … Because he is perplexed/Imagination gave to us/His pens, it gave to us his book.’ Mihyar, therefore, is a revolutionary figure par excellence. He frees people from the tyranny of false orders, and turns their incapacity and failure to find a proper home into the basis of a heightened existence. This revolutionary figure has no identity beyond that status, even after he becomes the poet who speaks to us. He is more like a natural or historical phenomenon than a human individual. We can associate the lack of subjectivity, the absence of a consciousness containing empirical content, with the realm of perception lying beyond ordinary existence discussed above. Consider the following poem entitled ‘The Lightening Bolt’: O green lightening bolt O my wife in the sun and madness, The stone has collapsed upon the eye-lids So alter the map of things. From a land with no sky I have come to you Full of God and the abyss Winged with the wind and eagles I penetrate the sand on the seeds I bow to the approaching cloud So alter the map of things O my image in the sun and madness O green lightening bolt. This poem, like many others in the collection, enacts the process of perception itself. What it gives us is not a record of someone perceiving something, as we get in the poetry of expression, but the state of being in which perception takes place. This is the state of self-sacrifice, which we see precisely in the absence of subjectivity, which goes together with the surrender of empirical reality. In more conventional forms of poetic discourse, the self of the speaker is revealed to us in what is described. The distinctive way in which the speaker appropriates phenomena with which we are familiar, the way in which they are interpreted and invested with meaning, the emotional states that accompany them, and above all, the kind and quality of mental coherence, all work to construct a selfhood to which readers are

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induced to compare their own. The revelation of selfhood, therefore, depends on the relative familiarity of the world through which it is expressed. It depends on a common frame of reference. In the case of Adunis’s poems, however, such a common frame of reference is not available. The words in his poems, for the most part, seem to function nonreferentially. We don’t have a clear sense of what he is talking about, or in what register it should be interpreted. Furthermore, the statements made in the poem lack the coherence and motivation that we expect of a thinking mind. They seem to be governed by a logic foreign to that of subjective intentionality. For this reason, we are unable to see a recognizable form of subjectivity in the way that the poet sees the world and what it means to him. We have to look for the subject not in the nature of the coherence of his consciousness, but in the overall effect of the poem, the arrangement of its elements, their relations among each other. In the absence of an identifiable mental process, the speaker must be located in the nature of the ‘world’ that the poem gives us. The poem in this way creates the effect that the speaker is the poem, rather than a mind that speaks the poem. The poem contains, however, a critical dimension of what appears to be subjective intentionality, and this is of course the address to the lightening bolt, the request made of it to ‘alter the map of things’. In other words, the poem takes the form of a type of discourse whose attribution to conscious, thinking subjects admits no doubt. But the poem prevents us from taking this address at face value, or even at rhetorical value, by means of the ambiguity of its reference, and as a result, the lack of rootedness of its motivation in any specific state of affairs. For this reason, the poem’s impression is that of an abstract desire for transformation that finds its force in the autonomous images in which it inheres. This desire seems to lie at the heart of the zone in which creativity takes place, where things are destroyed and reconstituted, where humanity and nature are reconciled. Desire and transformation are thus indistinguishable, and in their union we find the authentic self. The counterhegemonic force of Adunis’s poetry lies in its moral investment of perception, which purports to embody the creative force that will overturn the existing order, designed to repress it, and will never stop at any order. On the thematic level, the moral nature of this process appears in motifs of purgation, sacrifice and redemption, and on the centrality of words like ‘perdition’, ‘death’, ‘perplexity’, ‘wound’ and so forth. Even though these motifs and words are separated from any empirical ground as their ordinary meanings are subverted, they retain an abstract thematic content that informs the poetry. They establish the heroic and tragic sense of authentic perception. On the level of techniques, the effect of suspending the polarity between subject and object created by eliminating or deforming the representational elements that enforce this polarity points to a mode of perception and of being that is more primordial and liberated than ordinary experience. The use of such techniques requires the suppression of one’s

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personality, one’s ordinary mental and emotional processes, which are bound up in conventional representation. This is a moral act that requires suffering and results in cognitive insight, and moreover justifies the challenges modernist works pose to their audiences.

Modernism and counterhegemony Now that the euphoric innovative frenzy of early modernism is long dissipated, and the hothouse of revolutionary nationalism that nurtured it lies in ruins, it is easy to dismiss the grand linkage posited in modernist art between the aesthetic liberation of form and the destruction of perceptual constraints supposedly characteristic of modern life. Moreover, it is much clearer now the extent to which modernist techniques rely more on the manipulation and transgression of aesthetic conventions than on the creation of viable new modes of perception. The techniques created by Adunis, for example, rely on the distortion and negation of conventions of linguistic representation, both those of the poetic tradition and those of prose. He exploits semantic features and visual effects that are ordinarily suppressed or ignored by users of the language. He creates patterns from these that have internal consistency and resonance, and impart a semantic impression. But the world of his poems depends for all of this on its proximity to the linguistic world in which we normally live. It is produced through a selective negation. Its effects require ordinary meaning and linguistic usage to be intact. The ground of creativity is not a place that is reached when conventional categories are suspended, but the ground of these categories themselves, the hidden potentials that they release when partially negated. This does not mean, however, that modernism can be made sense of as merely a misguided or self-deluded form of resistance whose innate function was always the consolidation of hegemony. Such an interpretation fails to account for the moral investment claimed for modernist art as a practice of freedom. The foregoing analysis of techniques employed by Adunis shows that the apparent detachment of visuality from external determinants gains its significance only in respect to what must be regarded as the ultimate referent of the poems: contemporary history, the existing status quo. This is not a referential relation in the ordinary sense, but is indeed the ultimate referent that accounts for the lack of ordinary reference. The liberation of visuality from ordinary referents announces the modern liberation of perception, and thus social life, from hegemonic manacles. Or in other words, visual autonomy as an artistic practice embraces and redeems the visual autonomy of modern existence. The putative equivalence of the two is both the basis of the name ‘modernism’ and the basis of the redemptive project of revolutionary modernist art. Peter Bürger has argued along similar lines that the aim of the pre-World War II avant-garde groups in Europe was the destruction of art as a self-contained social institution, that is, the fusing of

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artistic practices and principles with social life in general so as to transform social life and overthrow its bourgeois, utilitarian order.36 My argument here focuses more specifically on the modernist attack, on the basis of visual autonomy, upon the opposition between reality and representation. In either case, aesthetic formalism is taken up in modernist works as a means of interpreting and confronting the historical juncture rather than as a means of repressing it by aesthetically transcoding it. Despite this challenge to the bourgeois order, there is no doubt that many modernist techniques, or at least diluted versions of them, have become mainstays of advertising and commodity development. As Raymond Williams puts it, ‘The painfully acquired techniques of significant disconnection are relocated, with the help of the special insensitivity of the trained and assured technicists, as the merely technical modes of advertising and the commercial cinema.’37 Morally invested (‘painfully acquired’) techniques have been deformed into mere ‘technical modes’. Peter Bürger calls this kind of absorption of artistic practice into social life the ‘false elimination of the distance between art and life’ or the ‘false sublation of art as an institution’.38 It is false, not simply because it controverts the intentions that Bürger attributes to the avant-gardists, but because the modernist techniques are seen, in their truth, as fundamentally inimical to the bourgeois order. It is a case, then, of the hegemonic repression and falsification of a genuine impulse for liberation. It is not clear however what predisposed the embodiment of a genuine impulse for liberation to co-optation by the oppressor. The obverse of this analysis, Jameson’s argument that capitalist service is the truth of modernism rather than a false appropriation of it, nevertheless acknowledges that modernist works harbour and preserve the human protest against reification even as they fulfil their function of repressing it. In other words, both views are founded on the repressive hypothesis of hegemony, differing in whether modernism was the agent or victim of repression. Yet in both views, modernism ends up partaking of both sides of this polarity – it must be, at some level, both the repressor and the repressed. In view of this kind of undecidable conflict of interpretation, made inevitable by the repressive hypothesis and its attendant commitments to doctrines of human nature and the historical trajectory of human liberation, it makes more analytic and indeed explanatory sense to recognize that resistance is constitutive of hegemony rather than an element fundamentally alien to the hegemonic order and disruptive of it. This is particularly apparent in the case of artistic practices, which frequently contain countercultural, parodic and transgressive dimensions apparently tolerated by the ruling order. The pressure-cooker theory of society and the psyche – that oppressed individuals build up ‘steam’ for which these forms of expression provide an escape valve, thus dissipating dissent and dissatisfaction – cannot explain why such expression should not, on the contrary, heighten dissatisfaction

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and sharpen awareness of it. Conceiving of resistance as constitutive of hegemony enables analysis of the specific forms of resistance engendered by and relied upon by a particular order, and enables an understanding of how these resistances can, through their redefinition and rearticulation, alter the order in which they inhere. The modernist transformation of the romantic opposition between ideal beauty and corrupt reality into the abolition of any boundary between reality and representation turned an incorporated site of resistance into an assault upon the existing social way of life. The identification of perception as the fundamental site of hegemonic repression enabled a unification of art and reality on the ground of the visual autonomy regarded as definitive of modern life. The counterhegemonic orientation of Arabic modernism, like the celebratory versions of modernity put forward by authors like Marshall Berman or Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, is based on the conception of modern existence as inherently indeterminate and liberating, a new era of human self-definition. Radical modernism attempted to embody the liberatory indeterminacy attributed to modern life by identifying this with the transgression and overturning of conventional forms effected by its artistic techniques. For this reason, modernism is particularly instructive as a form of counterhegemony. It elevates the counternormative dimensions of artistic representation into a pure ideology of liberation as indeterminacy. The blind, arbitrary order of past hegemony will give way to the release of all resistances, the elimination of repression from human existence. Arabic modernism, as a practice of freedom, provided a powerful means for articulating a number of resistances within contemporary Arab society, or to put it another way, for undermining key institutions of the social order, particularly the sites of cultural and religious legitimacy. In other words, it provided a means for recasting resistance to religious authority and the cultural heritage, in a coherent form. It was able to identify these institutions with the social order as a whole as the apparatus of repression. The moral and negational nature of creative perception made the subversion of these institutions a heroic act. It enabled the recovery and reinterpretation of past figures who breached norms, assimilating their activity to the struggle of the present. The articulation of resistances is in a sense the inverse of hegemonic articulation, because it is aimed against the existing order. It links together specific sites of existing society and identifies them as constituting an oppressive order. The energy released through destruction of restrictive norms becomes the new norm that justifies destruction. But a negative norm of this nature could not have borne much political weight without itself being articulated to revolutionary nationalism. When the moment of revolutionary nationalism had passed, the political dimension of modernism became symbolic, because it does not contain in itself any principle of community. The modernist fusion of representation and reality on the basis of visual autonomy is therefore no more inherently liberatory than previous artistic

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transgressive forms. Indeed, it takes its place in a long succession of modes of establishing the ontological primacy of artistic forms. And like those previous forms, its capacity to threaten the order in which it inheres is directly proportional to its capacity to serve as a foundation of that order. Modernism’s moral investment is what enabled it to articulate resistances in a revolutionary period, to produce its utopian vision. But when stripped of that moral investment, when detached from its underlying reference to an oppressive status quo, the representational techniques of visual autonomy can serve as the basis for the emergence of consumer culture, ‘the society of the spectacle’, in which the aesthetic configuration of commodities, an endless interplay of autonomous images, is the only reality. This may be called co-optation, but it is neither stable nor predetermined, and is the product of as genuine a resistance as there can ever be. But is it really wise to abandon the possibility of human liberation merely to save the reputation of literary modernism? Or in other words, what are we left with after surrendering the repressive hypothesis, other than a spineless political relativism that allows us to exonerate co-opted cultural practices? Opposition to a social order has always been based on the claim that the order violates human nature. This leads to the moral investment of resistance against the order – those who understand that they cannot achieve their humanity under it are willing to die in order to overthrow it. Enslavement is a death that is worse than death. Resistance is a death, or a risk of death, that preserves the possibility of life. Having agency means that one is always willing to die to preserve that agency. Hence, tyranny must be combated at any cost. Is it possible to abandon these views of agency and liberation and retain any positive political meaning for the notion of counterhegemony? If no order is objectively oppressive, why should anyone risk his or her life to oppose any order? Or at the least, what sense does it make to talk about liberation? Laclau and Mouffe attempt to answer this question in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. They abandon the repressive hypothesis, yet seek to retain liberation. The line of argument I have taken in this chapter, suggesting that resistance is better viewed as constitutive of hegemony than as external to it, owes a great deal to the model of hegemonic politics put forward by Laclau and Mouffe. I have drawn on their work for my definition of counterhegemony as the articulation of resistances, the attempt to recast them as a unified opposition to a social order represented as repressive in a specific way. I have differed from Laclau and Mouffe, however, in seeking to redefine political resistance and hegemonic articulation beyond democratic discourse in liberal societies. They depict democratic discourse as a purely negative moment in liberal politics, a discourse of radical critique which is external to discourses of social subordination and is thereby the sine qua non of politics, that is, of resistance and hegemonic articulation. As a result, they institute an absolute divide between pre-modern societies, governed by fixed, hierarchical social

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categories, and modern liberal societies, in which social identities are discursively fluid and subject to perpetual redefinition and political realignment. The effect is similar to that of the repressive hypothesis, because here, the transformation of human possibilities from the pre-modern to the modern is so radical that it is tantamount to a liberation of a formerly repressed human nature. Yet, since this model repudiates any notion of an innate human desire for liberation, both the unpolitical resistance of pre-modern societies and the irruption of democratic discourse in the eighteenth century are left with no specified origin. If there is no objective oppression, and no democratic discourse with which to imagine a relation as oppressive until 1789, why did resistance exist in the first place? By viewing resistance as constitutive of hegemony, and as intrinsically susceptible to politicization and articulation within a struggle against oppression, we can do away with the notion that democratic discourse is definitive of politics and thus eliminate the divide between pre-modern and modern social order, a divide that renders non-liberal modern societies unintelligible. This means that we must recognize that democratic discourse is only one of many possible universalizing critiques of hegemonic order. I have shown how an artistic practice, through its negative conception of human nature, was able to function in this manner. Laclau and Mouffe give democratic discourse a singular status in human history by viewing it as a purely negative, critical discourse available for the subversion of any hegemonic formation. But the ideals of liberty and equality have never appeared, and are unthinkable, outside of positive formulations of human nature and social order that give them their normative purchase. In the same way, non-liberal hegemonic discourses, when in oppositional mode, have had their own negative and critical articulatory dimensions, or have worked in tandem with negatively oriented complementary discourses. The elements of political articulation and universalizing critique may have ‘non-standard’ forms in non-liberal societies, but to eliminate their possibility by making liberalism definitive of politics cripples social analysis and historical understanding. I have emphasized in my account of counterhegemony the moral investment required to turn a particular resistance into a practice of freedom capable of articulating other social resistances to itself. Only those who are willing to die can oppose and vanquish the particular form of repression on which the unjust social order is based. Laclau and Mouffe attempt to preserve a notion of liberation while disavowing the repressive hypothesis by retaining liberty and equality as normative political ideals which are mutually delimiting but empty of fixed content. The basis for their normativity is that they are simply foundational or axiomatic in the politics of liberal societies. The effect of this view is that these values create a moral, human divide between liberal and non-liberal societies, while leaving this divide ambiguous and vulnerable to political manipulation. Within liberal politics, Laclau and Mouffe argue that the lack of content of liberty and equality

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ensures that humanity and society have no definitive centre. No struggle of any kind can claim a higher importance for humanity or human freedom than any other. But this means that, within liberal politics, there is no struggle that can demand self-sacrifice. No value or good is definitively essential for humanity more than anything other, so why should anyone feel obligated to suffer harm for it? What moral pull a particular articulation of liberty or equality can have in this model, and where this pull comes from, is difficult to envisage. In fact, it is difficult to conceive how a demand for political action can be made and justified without invoking a violation of some fundamental value or right. In other words, without the repressive hypothesis. I believe that we must follow Laclau and Mouffe, and other critics of the unitary subject, in attempting to repudiate notions of agency, of authentic humanity, which consist in the willingness to die in order to practice and preserve some definitive human freedom. The fundamental challenge, however, is how to retain a normative basis for political judgement and action, for counterhegemony, without creating divisions in the humanness of humanity.

Notes 1. The distinction between ‘avant-garde’ and ‘modernism’ is a vexed issue around which there has been much debate. Peter Bürger regards modernism as a continuation of nineteenth-century aestheticism which maintained an unbridgeable divide between art and life, while the avant-garde launched the radical attempt to abolish the divide by tearing down art as an autonomous institution of bourgeois society and establishing a new praxis in which art and life would be fused. See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984). Raymond Williams, on the other hand, sees greater continuity between the two, arguing that ‘the defense of a particular kind of art became first the self-management of a new kind of art [modernism] and then, crucially, an attack in the name of this art on a whole social and cultural order [avant-garde]’. The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989), p. 51. The common idea in both these views is the oppositional political orientation of the avant-garde. In the Arabic context, modernist techniques were from the outset associated with political opposition, so the distinction is less relevant. 2. It is important to note that Gramsci understood hegemony in a liberating sense as the moral leadership of the historically universal class. It is only the undue persistence of bourgeois hegemony, after the expiry-date of its universality, to which he was opposed. Yet it is his analysis of this persisting illegitimate hegemony of the bourgeoisie that has been influential in the usage of the term. Laclau and Mouffe, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 2001), attempt to preserve the liberating Gramscian sense of hegemony on a new basis. 3. Such notions need not be essentialist notions of human nature. 4. The term ‘repressive hypothesis’ derives from Foucault, who designates by it the view that sexuality was repressed in pre-Freudian European culture. He argues to the contrary that sexuality has proliferated on all levels since the early modern

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5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

Yaseen Noorani period. See The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980). The term is in keeping with the general tenor of his argument that power is productive rather than repressive. The view of resistance I am presenting here is related to Lila Abu-Lughod’s suggestion, following Foucault, that we ‘use resistance as a diagnostic of power.’ She posits that resistance is produced by power, but does not further specify their relationship. See her article, ‘The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women’, American Ethnologist, Vol.17, No. 1 (February 1990) pp. 41–55, esp. 42. Ghali Shukri, Shi’runa al-Hadith: ila ayn? (Our Modern Poetry: Whither?) (Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘arif, 1968), p. 216. Cf. Perry Anderson’s account of modernism’s social context: ‘In a sketch of the origins of modernism in the European Belle Epoque, I once suggested that it was best understood as the outcome of a field of force triangulated by three coordinates: an economy and society still only semi-industrial, in which the ruling order remained to a significant extent agrarian or aristocratic; a technology of dramatic inventions, whose impact was still fresh or incipient; and an open political horizon, in which revolutionary upheavals of one kind or another against the prevailing order were widely expected or feared. In the space so bounded, a wide variety of artistic innovations could explode – symbolism, imagism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism: some quarrying classical memory or patrician styles, others drawn to a poetics of the new machinery, yet others fired by visions of social upheaval; but none at peace with the market as the organizing principle of a modern culture – in that sense, virtually without exception antibourgeois.’ Perry Anderson, The Origin of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1988), p. 81. It is not clear, however, how these conditions give rise to the specific techniques associated with modernism. Italian Futurism, with its Dionysian embrace of the machine-age, is a notable exception. Nevertheless, Futurists hoped that the violent, inhuman forces they associated with modernity would annihilate existing reality. See Salma Jayyusi’s discussion of these views in her article on modern Arabic poetry in Modern Arabic Literature, edited by M. M. Badawi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1992), pp. 132–79. Adunis has expressed such views on modernity in many of his writings. One good summation can be found in his Introduction to Arab Poetics, trans. Catherine Cobham (London: Saqi Press, 1990), chap. 4. Adunis, ‘Muhawala li-tahdid al-shi’r al-hadith’ (Attempt to Define Modern Poetry), in al-Shi’r, Vol.3, No.11 (Summer 1959), pp. 79–90, esp. 79, 83. Shukri, Shi’runa al-Hadith, pp. 19–20. Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 300. The development of nineteenth-century thought on perception, particularly visual perception, and the implication of this development in capitalist regimes of subjectivity, has been carefully traced in the fascinating work of Jonathan Crary. See his Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), and Suspensions of Perception (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell, 1981), p. 230. Frederic James, ‘The Ideology of the Text’, in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986 (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 17–71, esp. 68. Jameson, Political Unconscious, p. 236. Ibid., p. 236.

Redefining Resistance 99 18. Ibid., p. 266. 19. See Herbert Marcuse, ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 95. 20. I have previously discussed visual autonomy in ‘Visual Modernism in the Poetry of “Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati”’, Journal of Arabic Literature, Vol. 32, No. 3 (2001), pp. 239–55. The concept derives from Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer. 21. Quoted in Shukri, Shi’runa al-Hadith, p.180. 22. Adunis, ‘Muhawala’, p. 79. 23. ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad, ‘Ma’na al-Jamal fi al-Hayat wa al-Fann’, in Muraja’at fi al-Adab wa al-Funun (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-‘Arabi: 1966), pp. 46–53, esp. 48. 24. See al-‘Aqqad, Muraja’at, pp. 58, 69. 25. Ibid., p. 70. 26. Ibid., p. 62. 27. al-‘Aqqad, ‘Ma’na al-Jamal’, p. 52. 28. Adunis, ‘Muhawala’, p. 81. 29. Ibid., p. 82. 30. Ibid., p. 85. 31. Ibid., p. 80. 32. Ibid., p. 90. 33. Ibid., p. 87. 34. Ibid., p. 87. 35. Adunis, Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi (The Songs of Mihyar of Damascus), first published 1961 (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1988), p. 119. 36. This is the central argument of Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde. 37. Williams, Politics of Modernism, p. 35. 38. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, pp. 50, 54.

4 Hegemony and Liberation: Mao Zedong and Zou Taofen in Early Twentieth-century China Rana Mitter

The story of twentieth-century China has been written, particularly in retrospect, as the collapse of various hegemonic systems, in particular the ‘traditional’ Confucian society and the imperialism of the western (and Japanese) powers, in the face of an ultimately victorious Chinese Communist Party. The grand narrative of Chinese modernization through radicalization of the peasantry and the establishment of a Chinese state that, in Mao’s words, ‘stood up’ has been a staple of liberation discourse in the global South for decades, even at a time when the Maoist economy has long since disappeared under a corporatist marketization in both urban and rural China. However, as the Mao era fades into history, there is a growing sense of unease that the quarter century or more of his rule, far from being a logical conclusion of an anti-traditional, anti-feudal project, was in fact a detour from a much more pluralist model of modernization that took root in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, the seemingly successful counterhegemonic strategies of the Maoist project, far from destroying the old society, in fact retained many of its most oppressive features while failing to understand the ways in which it might be successfully undermined. This chapter will look at two thinkers who found ways to cope with the breakdown of the pre-modern society that had shaped China for two millennia, but which found itself increasingly under attack from the late nineteenth century onwards. It looks at the writing of two figures: first, Mao Zedong is well known, though the writings here come from the lesser known preMarxist period of his life; the second, Zou Taofen, was far better known than Mao in the early twentieth century, though less so now. Their writings in the period from the 1910s to the 1920s provide an important microcosm of competing challenges to hegemonies. These conflicts have not disappeared in the later part of the century, and are re-emerging in various forms today. How, in this essay, will the terms ‘hegemony’ and ‘counterhegemony’ be understood? At its most basic, the conflict in those terms is an issue not just of shared values or assumptions, but of power. Hegemonies operate to reproduce and support existing relations of domination. To that extent, the 100

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anti-Confucian reformers were unfair but not wrong. For millennia, Chinese society had, broadly speaking, operated on the basis of norms that emphasized certain qualities – social stability, maintenance of hierarchies – that inevitably concentrated power in particular hands (rulers, husbands, men). As we shall see, many modernizers (such as Mao) caricatured the nature of the society as being purely about subjugation and violation, denying that ethical or moral values could possibly flow from such a system. However, they were correct that such a system did exist and continued to maintain a powerful grip on the way in which power was understood and constructed, even when language and norms appeared to have become entirely modern. In that context, counterhegemony, at least in the troubled era when the last dynasty fell and the uncertain Republic came into being, must refer to strategies that aimed to destroy the system of power relations that a ‘traditional’ Chinese culture had maintained, and replace it with one inflected by what was perceived as ‘modernity.’ Surface dazzle and triumphalistic language from the modernizers, particularly the most anti-traditional May Fourth reformers, should not distract us from the reality that a pre-modern set of categories and values continued to reproduce structures of dominance that were very much at odds with the modernizing elites. Modernizers in early twentieth-century China were in office, but it is harder to state unequivocally that they were in control.

The hegemonic trap of May Fourth radicalism The cultural moment known as the ‘May Fourth era’, roughly from the mid1910s to the early 1930s, was a particularly salient one for the examination of the question of hegemony and counterhegemony. One of the key reasons for this was the presence of an unusually radical ‘counter-traditional’ reform movement within China. Even compared with other prominent anticolonial movements, the desire to throw off the Chinese past completely was a notable feature of the ‘New Culture’ advocates of the post-1911 period.1 ‘Iconoclasm’ would become a keyword automatically associated with ‘May Fourth’ culture. The era itself was named after the student demonstrations of 4 May 1919, when angry protesters gathered in front of the Tian’anmen gate in Beijing, outraged by the cession of former German colonies to Japan at the Paris Peace Conference. However, this patriotic demonstration was symbolic of a decade and more of social change, notable for new thinking about politics, the family, youth culture and China’s place in international society. The most radical anti-traditionalism was fuelled by a reaction against a perceived hegemonic culture encapsulated in the term ‘Confucianism.’ ‘Confucianism’ was used as a catch-all device to define a variety of different ideas which angered radical thinkers, notably Chen Duxiu, one of the founder members of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. For them, the Confucian obsession with reverence for age, precedent and order in society was the major problem with the old culture that was holding China back; the

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most radical manifestations of modernity, exemplified by a fixation with youth, dynamism and a Dionysiac creative destruction, were a necessary corrective to China’s crisis. One of the most emblematic texts is Chen Duxiu’s 1915 ‘Call to Youth’ in which he declared: ‘Youth is like early spring, like the rising sun. . . . It is the most valuable period of life.’2 This was a distinct departure from the Confucian assumptions of the past. The Social Darwinist tone of this work is no accident. The influence of ideas of evolution and Social Darwinist zero-sum assumptions about racial struggle had heavily shaped all Chinese modernizing discourse from the late nineteenth century onwards.3 In its opposition to Confucianism, the counterhegemonic discourse of the radicals took several paths, some of them parodic and literalistically oppositional. Let us take the most famous example of the parodic assault first. In 1918, Lu Xun published his Gogolesque ‘Diary of a Madman’, appropriately enough in Chen Duxiu’s New Youth magazine. The story purports to be the ravings of a man temporarily insane. While in madness, he claims to have discovered that all the people around him are in fact cannibals. In case the meaning of the metaphor is not made clear enough to the reader, the narrator claims at one point to have looked up the reasons for cannibalism in a history book, only to find that every page is covered in scribblings reading ‘Confucian virtue and morality’, and that reading between the lines, the words ‘eat people’ appear over and over again.4 Mao Zedong’s earliest writings show a more literalistic approach to breaking down Confucian norms which he felt were socialized into the Chinese people. The attachment of Confucianism to scholarship meant that physical exercise and military prowess had not traditionally been considered worthy attributes of a ‘gentleman’ or ‘person of integrity’. Mao’s earliest writings, which predate his turn to Marxism, follow up the Social Darwinist assumptions that shaped so much of late Qing and early Republican thinking. His essay ‘On Physical Exercise’ (1917) is one of the clearest examples of how the connection between the individual body and the body politic was made in Mao’s mind, as it was for other radicals of the era. He declared: The superior man’s [that is, the gentleman’s] deportment is cultivated and agreeable, but one cannot say this about exercise. Exercise should be savage and rude. To charge on horseback, amid the clash of arms, and to be ever victorious; to shake the mountains by one’s cries, and the colors of the sky by one’s roars of anger . . . all this is savage and rude and has nothing to do with delicacy.5 Mao ended the essay by giving a practical schema for implementation of this bodily (and thereby political) transformation: I have . . . put together a system of my own, from which I have derived considerable benefit. . . . Make fists, alternately extend the arms to the

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front and retract them. Left and right, successively, three times. . . . Unclench the fists. Alternately raise the whole body to a standing position, and return to a squatting position. While squatting, the heels should more or less touch the buttocks. Three times.6 This early essay shows in microcosm a larger problem with the seemingly successful creation of a counterhegemonic discourse. The replacement of an essentially ethical and ordered Confucian norm which disdained exercise with an amoral Social Darwinism that equated physical prowess with dynamic progress seems, on the surface, to be a clear change in norms. But one of the reasons that Social Darwinism seemed to fit so well in the late nineteenth-century Chinese search for change was that it reflected a much more long-standing Confucian technique of xiushen, or ‘bodily cultivation’, that also made a link between individual self-reflection and improvement and the health of the body politic. Xiushen involved familistic rather than biological metaphors, and it did not valorize physical effort, but the point of similarity between the two was clearly there. This factor was reflected more widely, as we see below, in other seemingly counter-Confucian strategies which found themselves nonetheless operating through assumptions that in fact reflected their inventors’ continuing imbrication within a system of Confucian norms. It is important to add at this point that I am not making the argument that Chinese society remained essentially ‘Confucian’ throughout the twentieth century – what one might call in shorthand the ‘new emperors’ fallacy. (At the very least, such an argument would fall into the trap of suggesting that there was one monolithic system called ‘Confucianism’ which had remained essentially unchanged over 2000 years – as untrue for Confucianism as for Christianity or Islam.) Rather, the ostensible and real shift to modern practice was carried out in ways that reflected the assumptions of Confucian behaviour, consciously or unconsciously – as we shall see. The Confucian society that had existed prior to the late nineteenth century had contained its own counterhegemonies, with plenty of grassroots adaptation and contestation of attempts by the state to define what acceptable cultural and political practice was.7 For the radical modernizers of the May Fourth era, however, the construction of a monolithic ‘man-eating’ monster named Confucianism was an essential part of the discourse of counterhegemony. Unfortunately, the unwillingness of these radicals to allow almost any part of the pre-modern Chinese past to enter the matrix of their new cultural construct meant that it derived instead from a thought system that was both alien and imperialist. The radical May Fourth generation was simultaneously caught in three hegemonic traps. The first was that the version of ‘Confucianism’ which the radicals put forward was necessarily a caricature – in Lu Xun’s case, literally so, as cannibalism. This caused serious problems in the agenda of undermining Confucian

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hegemony. For a representation of Confucianism simply as a ‘man-eating’ system meant that the whole ethical system on which Confucianism was built philosophically was dismissed out of hand, and the social contract that the traditional set of pre-modern relationships within Chinese society had nurtured was considered, effectively, a form of ‘false consciousness’. Although this latter term was not used much at the time, much commoner was the vocabulary of ‘awakening’ and ‘enlightening’ China. One Nationalist (Kuomintang) activist called himself Zeng Jue (Already Awakened), representative of his burning desire to act against ‘superstition’ (that is popular religion).8 However, the wider population did not share the radical elite’s enthusiasm for anti-Confucianism, and since its manifestations involved violent rhetoric and action (smashing of temples to set up new schools, for instance), the emergence of a radical agenda of anti-traditionalism merely set up one elite discourse in opposition to a previous one. The second point has already been made very effectively by Lin Yu-sheng, so I shall not labour it here.9 That is the way in which the radicals’ rejection of the Confucian past was, in significant part, shaped by the very orthodox/ heterodox categories which had marked Confucian discourse over centuries, where shades of grey were hard to justify. The third trap also stems from the complete rejection of a supposed Confucian hegemony: namely, the necessity to choose an alternative repertoire of assumptions that derived almost entirely from the imperialist project which emergent Chinese nationalism rejected. The hybrid anticolonial nationalism of a Gandhi or a Tagore was not for them; so much so that Tagore was verbally attacked and vilified on his visit to China in 1924. The nature of these traps have been obscured because of the CCP’s ultimate success – but in fact, until catalysts such as the catastrophic war with Japan in the 1930s, the anti-traditional strain of both the KMT and the CCP was frequently a hindrance rather than a help in popularizing the party’s missions.

Adaptation rather than rejection? May Fourth moderation and Zou Taofen From the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, one of the most influential figures in Chinese journalism, particularly among urban youth, was Zou Taofen. Zou was editor of Life (Shenghuo) magazine between 1926 and 1933, when it was banned by the Nationalist government. Life was a heady mixture of inspirational stories of entrepreneurs and political leaders from around the globe (Eastman, Gandhi, Atatürk, Marie Curie), accounts of young men (occasionally women) who had come to the city and made good through hard work and an agony column (‘Readers’ Mailbox’) where readers could ask Zou about how to deal with aspects of their working and love lives. The mixture saw circulation rocket to over 200,000 by the time of the journal’s closure.

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Zou Taofen provides a more nuanced case study than the strident certainties of Social Darwinism and Marxism which shape the thought of Mao. On the one hand, he is more self-aware of the contradictions within the transition from pre-modern to modern thought that he is attempting to make. On the other hand, it is also clear that he was also tied into a discourse that was also limited by the difficulties of adapting modernity wholesale to the Chinese experience. What differentiates Zou perhaps most strongly from his radical May Fourth counterparts is his willingness to rethink, rather than abandon, Confucian norms in the context of modernity. As a thinker of the May Fourth era, it was natural that Zou, like Mao, would turn to questions of how to combat imperialism, one of the major factors in China’s crisis as perceived at the time. In 1927, he wrote a piece which was quite explicit about trying to find indigenous values which would be compatible with modernity while not stepping into wholesale westernization: The most important part of China’s innate morality is zhongxiao, xinyi, ren’ai and heping [loyalty and filiality, trust and righteousness, benevolent love, peace and stability]. Some people have misunderstood and considered that whereas in the monarchical era, there was loyalty, now in the republican era there is no loyalty. But why isn’t loyalty to the country [guo] counted as loyalty? In fact, with regard to these several good moralities, we should not only preserve them, but also develop and expand them, and solidify our national base. Aside from our innate morality, there is also our innate wisdom [zhishi]. We ought to recover this, and honestly and sincerely cultivate [xiushen] principles of ordering the family and regulating the country. This is the most precious item of the innate wisdom of China. . . . If foreigners see that China cannot govern the country, then they will come and exercise joint control [gongguan] over it.10 What is important to note here are the starting assumptions of Zou and Mao. Thinkers in the May Fourth era had differing approaches to the solution to China’s crisis because they had different ideas about what the problem itself was. The vagueness of some of the keynote phrases of the era emphasize this problem. ‘Warlordism and imperialism’ were the problems from which they needed to ‘save China’, and the tools with which this was to be done were ‘science and democracy’. Each of these contains a list of hidden assumptions: ‘-isms’, ideological terms (in Chinese, Chen Duxiu spoke of ‘Mr Science and Mr Democracy’) assuming a positivistic definition of problematic issues and a soteriological tendency derived in large part from an adapted Social Darwinism in which the power of will could change one’s evolutionary path. Zou Taofen was by no means free of these assumptions. The salvation of China was his task too, and he was keen to free China from control by

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foreigners. Yet he did not start (just as his hero Sun Yatsen had not started) with the idea that Confucianism was the problem per se. Rather, he saw that the old imperial system which had been underpinned by Confucianism was gone, and asked whether Confucianism could still be relevant. Other thinkers in the late nineteenth century had also asked such questions before the fall of the Qing dynasty, notably Zeng Guofan and Kang Youwei. The model of Meiji Japan was very much present in the minds of thinkers of this time. Zou, it should also be noted, shared Mao’s revolutionary aims in significant measure. The May Fourth and New Culture movements had emerged in large part because of the perceived failure of the 1911 Revolution, after which the attempts to institute parliamentarianism and citizenship rights fell victim to the dictatorship of Yuan Shikai, the militarist president who took over in 1912. To understand the differing counterhegemonic projects put forward by Mao and Zou Taofen, one point of similarity must be noted: both were revolutionary writers. This is especially important to understand, because the values associated with Zou (an interest in individual commercial entrepreneurialism, the adaptation of Confucianism) have been represented as bourgeois, liberal, and in effect, counter-revolutionary in retrospect. Of course, there is no necessary lack of overlap in the European tradition between the terms ‘bourgeois-liberal’ and ‘revolution’, but assumptions about China and its rural population have meant that the two fit together somewhat awkwardly in most discussions both within and outside China. So let us be clear first about why Zou and Mao can be called revolutionary, not just in the general sense of innovative, but in a political sense. First, both Mao and Zou had been disillusioned by the 1911 revolution, which they felt overthrew the imperial system without carrying out any greater changes within society. The swift descent of the new Republic into militarist rule was a further source of dismay for both men, as was the attempt by the dictatorial president Yuan Shikai to declare himself emperor shortly after dissolving parliament. Mao, famously, spent the May Fourth years in and around Beijing and joined the ‘study societies’ that would coalesce into the Chinese Communist Party. For this group, the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution was crucial: the 1917 revolution was by no means the point of origin for Chinese socialism, but it was certainly a catalyst.11 However, Bolshevism was by no means a mainstream position in the early 1920s. For those who were disillusioned with the failure of the 1911 revolution, there was one rather more obvious vehicle of destiny: the Nationalist (Kuomintang) party of Sun Yatsen. The party was outlawed in 1913 by Yuan Shikai, and Sun spent the next few years in exile before returning to a precarious existence under the variable protection of various militarist leaders in southern China. He would never, as it turned out, be in serious contention for power before his death in 1925. However, for an emergent public becoming disillusioned with the politics of militarism, the Nationalists became the repository of hope for the

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continuation of the revolution: ‘the revolution,’ declared the stamp on Nationalist documents, ‘is not yet complete.’ The only modern Chinese political figure whom Zou considered worthy of discussion before the 1930s was Sun Yatsen. Over and over again, his political writing analyses the detail of key Sun speeches such as the ones on the ‘Three People’s Principles’ of nationalism, democracy and livelihood for the people, which he felt lay at the base of a stable Republic. It is in this modernizationist mode that one must understand Zou’s advocacy of Sun’s cause through the pages of Life magazine. Before 1927–8, when Sun’s successor Chiang Kaishek established a recognized, national government with its capital at Nanjing, the advocacy of Sun’s thought was the espousal of a revolutionary dogma that opposed the twin dangers of ‘warlordism’ and ‘imperialism’ which had animated the May Fourth protestors. One should note one other complication at this point. The binarized nature of Chinese politics through much of the early twentieth century meant that the struggle between the Nationalists and Communists, a story told essentially as the clash of rival ideologies which dominated the historical terrain, has become the accepted metanarrative of Chinese history in the twentieth century. Of course, there is a counter-argument that the metanarrative has been hijacked by two actors who agree more than they disagree: two differing versions of Enlightenment modernity, one of which cloaked itself in a thin veneer of supposedly Confucian values late in its life (the Nationalist ‘New Life’ movement of the 1930s), but both of which were essentially secular, centralizing, and embraced some idea of ‘modernity’ as a teleological goal for China’s development. Space does not permit discussion here of the many alternatives which China was offered at this time. But to list a few: provincial federalism with a minimal central government; the development of a local, ruralized culture based on popular religion; collaboration with imperialist regimes, in particular Japan.12 Why is this important? Because Zou was not just ‘CCP lite’, or just a moderate or a liberal – his was an alternative revolutionary tradition. He only fails the test for a ‘true’ revolutionary if one argues that Bolshevist revolution was the only genuine Chinese revolutionary path. Ironically, Zou himself came to believe this later on, when he turned to Marxism in the 1930s, but that does not mean that we have to apply his own retrospective view to the development of his thought in the 1920s.

Subversion or attack? Dealing with patriarchy Let us contrast two pieces written on one of the big hegemonic issues that defined how power was exercised, patriarchy, and see how both Mao and Zou deal with it. Both ostensibly seek to undermine a particular hegemonic discourse, in this case broadly Confucian. Where do they succeed, and where do they enter the hegemonic trap?

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In 1919, Mao assumed the editorship of the Xin Hunan (New Hunan) magazine. In the November of that year, he wrote no fewer than ten articles dealing with the suicide of Zhao Wuzhen, a young woman who killed herself in protest against an arranged marriage. Mao’s initial commentary, published on 16 November 1919, is well known. Mao argued that three ‘iron nets’, Miss Zhao’s family, her future in-laws and ‘Chinese society’ as a whole, had trapped her with no hope of escape.13 His follow-up articles are less well known, but they illustrate the way in which Mao’s violently (the word is chosen with care) anti-Confucian discourse resorts, once again, to caricature, thereby closing off doors that might provide meaningful liberation. Take his follow-up piece, ‘The Question of Miss Zhao’s Personality’. Mao said he had been asked whether Miss Zhao had had a personality or not. Until the moment of her death, Mao said, she had not had one: What did I mean by saying that Miss Zhao did not have a personality? . . . Having a personality requires respect from those one deals with. Its prerequisite is freedom of the will. Was Miss Zhao’s will free? No, it was not free. Why wasn’t it free? Because Miss Zhao had parents. In the West, the free will of children is not affected by the parents. . . . Not so in China. The commands of the parent and the will of the child are not at all on an equal footing. The parents of Miss Zhao very clearly forced her to love someone she did not want to love . . . If you do not want to love me, but I force my love on you, that is a form of rape. This is called ‘direct rape.’ Their daughter did not want to love that person, but they forced their daughter to love that person. This, too, is a kind of rape, which is called ‘indirect rape.’ Chinese parents all indirectly rape their sons and daughters.14 This is a busy little passage, and for the comprehension of competing counterhegemonies, it is a very rich one. One level that we cannot explore, but is very noticeable, is that Mao’s father is evident everywhere in this piece. Mao hated his father, and a significant part of his motivation for leaving the small village of Shaoshan was to escape his family life. Yet the piece’s greater significance is that it already shows us, in a very early pre-Marxist phase of his writings, how many of the themes that would underpin Mao’s desire to break down the ‘iron nets’ (hegemonies) which shaped China, as he saw it, were from the earliest days tied up in other assumptions and caricatures that would undermine his own project. For example, the argument about whether or not Miss Zhao had a ‘personality’ was really part of a wider discussion in the era about the modern self. Mao was contrasting the collective values of Confucianism with the autonomous ideas of the self that modernity had introduced. There is a considerable debate about how ‘modern’ the individuated self is in Chinese culture, and whether it exists even now.15 Most observers, however, would acknowledge that there is a certain level of difference between the Confucian

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and the modern self; the former tended not to be extinguished, but rather to be downplayed. This is very different from what Mao and the most radical of the May Fourth generation argued. For them, patriarchal Confucianism was the man-eating monster of Lu Xun’s parody. In this case, Confucian patriarchy was nothing less than rape. Compromise with such a monstrous system was clearly impermissible. However, Mao’s rejection of one hegemony, Confucianism, in effect put him in thrall to an undifferentiated discourse derived from a western model that he accepted very uncritically. It also, more importantly, alienated him from the society which he chose to confront. For Mao, the rejection of Chinese society was the rejection of a man-eating, rapist monster. Yet for the wider population that he attacked, that supposed monster was also cherished ceremonies, familiar temples, a settled way of life. May Fourth radicalism chose to cut itself off from the society it purported to engage with and liberate, and this tendency continued into Mao’s Marxist phase. The desire to break up traditional social bonds and substitute new, non-familistic ones led to the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, where the break-up of extended families into new structures was recommended by the collective, along with denunciations of parents for crimes against the state. It was even more visible in the brief reign of Mao’s aptest pupil, Pol Pot, in Cambodia in 1975–8, when a murderous regime effectively abolished all family bonds. Zou Taofen, in contrast, was far more sympathetic to an extension of the Confucian ‘family’ metaphor into the Republican era. However, this should not be confused with thinking that Zou simply tolerated the continuation of a pre-modern patriarchy in society. His Readers’ Mailbox column encouraged readers to write in with problems they had adjusting to the new modernity, and gave them thoughtful answers. Take the case of You Mei, a 19-year-old woman who wrote in to Zou in 1931. She found herself being increasingly harassed by a senior male colleague in her office, who starting sending her ardent letters. As she was already betrothed, she tried discreetly to discourage him, but to little effect. As she wrote to Zou, ‘How I wish I could escape this pit of torment! . . . If I can maintain my current attitude and [show] not the tiniest bit of feeling toward him, will there be any problem for my reputation and status? I don’t have much experience, so can I ask you . . . to find a good way to deal with this situation?’16 Zou answered You Mei thus: A girl who’s betrothed should not have to avoid friends of the opposite sex. The important thing is to be careful as to whether the friend you are making is a righteous person, whether or not he is a person of upright character. . . . Getting close to male colleagues is not in itself a bad thing, if it is done with cooperation and respect. But if they do not know how to behave with dignity, then this is a very dangerous place to be, and for the sake of your whole life’s happiness, it’s best that you make definite plans to leave.17

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At first, this seems to be an answer fairly straightforward in its derivation. It looks very Confucian. Zou appears to be warning You Mei about the loss of her status as lienü, the archetypal ‘virtuous woman’ for whom any hint of sexual impropriety carried the stain of death. Mao’s complaint, when considering the case of Miss Zhao, was that the ‘iron net’ of Chinese society had prevented her even having an individuated sense of the self, and it appears that Zou is here reinserting You Mei into that iron net. Another letter to Zou from the same year also makes the point. Miss Zhu, a recent high school graduate, wrote in with her own experience in a Shanghai park: My sister and I . . . went for a walk together in the park along the Bund . . . We sat down and talked about our happy life at school, and how sad it was to have graduated, but we hadn’t been there more than twenty minutes when we wanted to get up and go. But there wasn’t the tiniest path to let us go. We had been surrounded on all four sides by nasty men . . . We kept sitting there, but soon we could hear them, one saying ‘What a lovely scent!’ . . . When we’d heard a lot of inappropriate banter, and couldn’t bear any more, we replied to them in a warning tone: ‘It’s not too late to keep your dignity!’ ‘If any foreigners see you, won’t you look like fools to them? Won’t you be causing bad luck to the country?’18 Zou fumed in response: In China, this group of shameless types . . . dares to call themselves by the name ‘new people,’ as with what Miss Zhu has cited as this brazen justification that ‘Men and women are equal’ and so on, which is an example of this . . . To take oppressive behaviour toward women and call it equality, where is the ‘fairness’ in this?19 However, his solution is hardly one that Mao would have found attractive: Zou proposed that women should make sure they had a male escort (with the word ‘escort’ spelled out in English in the Chinese text). Surely, then, Zou was complicit with a Confucian mindset even while he claimed to chip away at its edges? Zou himself acknowledged that the May Fourth radicals would see him as part of the problem rather than the solution: ‘perhaps you will curse my thought as being behind the times.’ Yet On the man’s side, he can take advantage of the opportunity of open social relations between men and women so as to advance their selfish desires, and the happiness through her whole life of the woman who is sacrificed does not come into the consideration of this sort of selfish man out for his own advantage.

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In other words, Zou argued, he was explicitly subverting the Confucian patriarchy, not reinforcing it: I positively advocate men and women interacting socially . . . [but] if we want men and women openly to relate socially, then men must seriously respect these two conditions toward women; first, they must pay attention to the happiness that she expects for her whole life. Second, they must respect her free will.20 This is chipping away at patriarchy rather than using the sledgehammer that Mao wielded in his analysis of the case of Miss Zhao. Yet in a real sense, it shows an understanding of the true nature of the hegemonic culture as well as of how to subvert it – not exactly surreptitiously, but with a cooler understanding, perhaps, of how it might be done. Zou knew that his message that much of the supposed talk of ‘equality’ was actually a ‘false mask’ for predatory men would not be popular with many of the May Fourth generation. Yet for those who cared to look behind what appeared at first glance to be Confucianism writ anew, it was clear that Zou’s agenda actually rethought many of the norms of the old society. For instance, Zou encouraged women to enter the workplace (at least in the 1920s, though the worsening of unemployment in the 1930s led to a certain dismissiveness on his part of women’s rights to employment as compared to men), and praised female role models such as Marie Curie (‘Many countries have women poets, women writers, women educators and all types of leaders, but which country has a woman scientist like Mme Curie?’21) One should also note that this ‘subversion’ of a Confucian ‘norm’ was by no means unprecedented in pre-modern China: women’s education had been regarded as a necessary marker of social status in many local elite families. However, one of the central points of the modernizing agenda, the drive towards ‘equality’, which implied strong opposition to Confucian hierarchy, was absolutely at the centre of Zou’s ambitions. In an essay asking ‘What is equality?’, Zou answered his own question: ‘Not every person’s natural intelligence or strength is equal. But if each person develops his mind toward service and morality . . . so as to contribute to the mass of humanity, then he can be regarded as equal. That is real equality.’22 This argument acts both against the Confucian hierarchy which clearly did not argue that there was a possibility for everyone to be regarded as equal, and against the powerful Social Darwinist thread which argued against ‘morality’ as a meaningful concept in social relations. The essence of the implicit argument between Zou and Mao was not about goals, at least in the sense that both felt that the pre-modern social order was unsustainable. Rather, it was about the best way to undermine hegemony. Zou’s route ran the danger of appearing to be a compromise, and in many senses it was, as the ‘escort’ solution showed. Compromise is not always the

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path to liberation, which is one of the reasons that the most radical antiConfucians denounced ‘moderation’ as one of the most pernicious of all the Confucian values. Yet Zou’s approach also showed a subtle understanding of the ways in which society would slowly be changed. It granted agency by acknowledging complexity. In effect, Zou the Deweyan liberal was more of a Marxist (in his understanding that ‘people do not make history exactly as they please’) than the romanticist, Social Darwinist early Mao. In contrast, Mao’s piece, while more uncompromisingly oppositional, also comes over as shrill and unsubtle. In its concentration on the self, it reduces the society which it opposes to a caricature and as such, reduces its own subversive power. The argument that all Chinese parents are ‘indirect rapists’, just as with Lu Xun’s Madman’s declaration that Confucianism is equated to cannibalism, was far less likely to appeal to an actual Chinese audience than Zou’s more measured advice, the popularity of which is measurable through its huge circulation figures. Although Lu Xun shared Mao’s radical hatred of the Confucian past, he had more in common with Zou when he considered the way in which patriarchy might successfully be contested. In his essay of 1923, ‘What happens when Nora leaves home?’, Lu Xun reflected on the likely fate of a Chinese Nora, the heroine of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, who leaves her husband and children to find herself as an individual at the end of the play. Lu Xun declared that despite her aims being worthy, a Chinese Nora would find herself quickly trapped in a wider society that had not internalized the changes that would enable her individuated self to flourish.

Conclusion There is a danger, having said all this, of fetishizing Zou’s approach and simply dismissing Mao’s out of hand. The historical record shows that it was Mao who ultimately rose to paramount power in China, and furthermore, that Zou himself abandoned his earlier neo-Confucian, Deweyan liberal stance to embrace Marxism and, on his deathbed, membership of the CCP. In particular, the limitations of Zou’s approach must be noted. For instance, his approach was largely urban based, although he was highly popular within that context. Furthermore, a very significant number of the role models he examined and put forward from the modern era were figures of the imperialist west, although his interest in the likes of Gandhi and Atatürk balanced his devotion to Eastman and Edison. Yet the same criticism could be levelled at Mao, whose embrace of Social Darwinism and later Marxism was also derived from a western base. The insight that Zou had, and which Mao seemed not to develop, was that neither the repertoire of Chinese indigenous thought nor imported western thought was the cause of a hegemonic trap in and of itself. Both could be part of what it meant to be modern and Chinese. What was important was the need to recognize that

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Chinese modernity could only be meaningful if it were hybrid and dealt with the reality that China found itself between worlds: Confucian and imperialist, urban and rural, free and unfree. That having been said, it is still necessary to understand both Mao and Zou as genuinely counterhegemonic figures. The temptation, nearly a century later, is to view their path to success as inevitable, and to assume that in the China of the 1910s, that the modernizationist paradigm was already truly hegemonic: that that paradigm even provided a set of values and categories which served to reproduce and support existing categories of domination. This would be a great mistake. Both Mao and Zou recognized that the simplistic declaration that the old values were dead and gone, however convincing they might seem to May Fourth radicals in the cities, bore little resemblance to the much more long-standing persistence of a culture based on ritual norms, hierarchies and ideas about the relationship of the individual to society and the state that did not derive from modernity. The continuing twentieth-century crisis of the modernizationist project, whether under the Nationalists or the Communists, is largely due to the modernizers’ failure to engage with a system of power relations that is perhaps more vulnerable to constant attrition than all-out assault.

Notes 1. One of the most important texts on the era remains Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). Important later works include Lin Yu-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979) and Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). A recent overview of the Movement and its legacy is Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 2. Chen Tu-hsiu (Chen Duxiu), ‘Call to Youth’, in John Fairbank and Ssu-yu Teng, China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 240. 3. See, for instance, James Pusey, China and Charles Darwin (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 1983). 4. Lu Xun, ‘Diary of a Madman’, in Call to Arms (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1981), p. 4. 5. Stuart Schram, ed., Mao’s Road to Power (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), Vol. 1, p. 125. 6. Schram, Mao’s Road, 1, pp. 125–6. 7. Prasenjit Duara, ‘Superscribing Symbols: The Myth of Guandi, God of War’, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 47, No. 4 (November 1988), pp. 778–95. 8. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 100–1. See also John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 9. Lin, Crisis, pp. 152–60.

114 Rana Mitter 10. Zou Taofen, ‘Zenyang huifu minzu diwei’ (How to recover our national position), Shenghuo, Vol. 2, No. 33 (19 June 1937). 11. On this topic, see Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Hans van de Ven, From Friend to Comrade: The Origins of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921–1927 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); and S. A. Smith, A Road is Made (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000). 12. On alternative political parties, see for instance Roger Jeans ed., Roads Not Taken:The Struggle of Opposition Parties in Twentieth-century China (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992). 13. Schram, Mao’s Road, 1, p. 421. 14. Ibid., p. 423. 15. Pei-yi Wu, The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 16. Guan Dongsheng, ed., Taofen ‘duzhe xinxiang’ (Taofen’s ‘Readers’ mailbox) (Beijing: n.p., 1998), p. 137. 17. Ibid., pp. 138–9. 18. Ibid., p. 134. 19. Ibid., pp. 135–6. 20. Ibid., p. 140. 21. ‘Nü kexuejia shou de ji ju hua’ (Some words about a woman scientist), Taofen sanwen (Essays by Zou Taofen), edited by Xu Xing and Jing Zhen (Beijing: Zhongguo guangbo dianshi chubanshe, 1997), p. 682. 22. ‘Shenme shi pingdeng?’ (What is equality?), Taofen sanwen, p. 69.

5 The Road through Africa: Imperial Nationalism and Diasporic Racial Consciousness in Post-slavery Barbados Melanie Newton [E]ver since the abolition of the slave trade, the alliance between Prospero and Alonso had been breaking down; and ever since the Haitian revolution, Caliban was beginning to discount the omnipotence of Prospero’s magic and was at last learning how to circumvent the influence of his servant, Ariel.1 The road to West Indian national identity lay through Africa.2 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as the crisis over slave emancipation deepened, fissures appeared in the hegemonic order of Europe’s Atlantic slave-holding empires. Creole planters increasingly found themselves alienated from the imperial political establishment and popular metropolitan sentiment. Those most marginalized by the system of racial plantation slavery – slaves and free people of colour – immediately took advantage of these cracks and pressed for radical redefinitions of their place in the empire, with the most revolutionary demand being that of immediate slave emancipation. While the most dramatic and powerful example of this was the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution just two years into the revolution in France, such dynamics were a widespread feature of the colony-metropole relationships of the Caribbean after 1789. The ‘Age of Revolution’ was both fostered and sustained by fundamental transformations in the public order of the Atlantic world, part of a challenge to structures of aristocratic governance and new forms of intervention by the most dispossessed people of Europe’s slavery-based colonial system on the stage of imperial public life.3 In 1977 Barbadian scholar-artist Kamau Brathwaite wrote a Shakespearean interpretation of this transatlantic drama, focusing on the massive slave revolt in Jamaica in 1831, the anti-slavery uprising which would finally force the British imperial parliament to seriously consider immediate slave emancipation. In Brathwaite’s reading, Prospero and Alonso represented the metropolitan and creole political establishment respectively; Caliban stood for 115

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the mass of Jamaica’s enslaved people, while Ariel symbolized the free AfroJamaican elite and the most privileged among the enslaved labour force. Brathwaite described Ariel as a ‘go-between . . . open to “white” creolization and technology’ and argued that the least acknowledged but perhaps most porous, tense and productive site of cultural and political interaction was between Ariel and Caliban. While Caliban struggled to find a way to represent himself, Ariel claimed the right to speak as the voice of Afro-Caribbean identity, either completely silencing Caliban, excluding his concerns from the agenda and seeking to keep him subjugated, or appropriating Caliban’s interests to his own ends in exchange, ultimately, for only minimal improvements in Caliban’s situation.4 This chapter takes up Brathwaite’s metaphoric use of – The Tempest – as the basis for an examination of Afro-Barbadian conceptualizations of their place in the empire in the age of emancipation. Between 1834 and 1838, the time period which encompassed the ‘apprenticeship’ period of transition from slavery to ‘full’ legal freedom in the Anglophone Caribbean, a new political discourse emerged among the urban merchant and tradesman stratum of free people of colour in Barbados, the most privileged group among the island’s population of African descent. For the first time, this group began to articulate publicly a politics of collectivity which was based on a sense of themselves as members of a transatlantic African diaspora as well as equal subjects to whites within the British Empire. They adopted the emancipation of slaves as an event which also set them loose from bondage and, in Ariel-like fashion, sought a new political role for themselves as the legitimate representative voice of all people of African descent in the island. This chapter situates these expressions of Afro-Barbadian political consciousness within the framework of the transatlantic ‘public’ forged by the circulations of people and ideas around the Atlantic world in the era of the slave trade. Ever since C.L.R. James’s 1938 work The Black Jacobins powerfully illustrated the interconnections between the Haitian and French Revolutions, scholars have elaborated on James’s recognition of the central place of African and African-Caribbean popular political ideologies and consciousness in the making of the revolutionary Atlantic world. John Thornton has thoroughly examined the Congolese political dimensions of Haitian rebel consciousness while Hilary Beckles has argued that ‘[Slaves’] tradition of anti-slavery activity impacted upon the social culture and polity of the Caribbean world in more fundamental ways than anti-slavery lobbyists ever did in metropolitan societies. . . . These metropolitan actions were part of the final episode in an epic struggle – initiated and propelled by its greatest sufferers – the slave population.’5 This chapter builds upon such findings, arguing that Afro-Barbadians’ expressions of imperial consciousness emerged at the intersection of several revolutionary and reformist struggles and practices whose roots lay on all sides of the Atlantic world: a long tradition of enslaved resistance and struggle, the anti-slavery and democratic ideals of the Haitian Revolution, and British abolitionism.

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The self-positioning of well-to-do Afro-Barbadians in particular expressed a politics of counterhegemony, as they sought to bring the voices of the British Caribbean’s non-white bourgeoisie – whose potential contribution to the debate over emancipation was usually dismissed by white imperial officials and white Creoles – to the centre of the discussion. They used the occasion of the French revolutionary upheavals to press their own civil rights claims and, over time, developed a civil rights campaign which embraced an anti-slavery agenda, adopting a language of imperial citizenship, rights, anti-racism and anti-slavery which was deeply rooted in the revolutionary currents circulating around the Atlantic in the age of revolution and emancipation. And yet the politics described in this chapter cannot be unproblematically categorized as resistance. Afro-Barbadian civil rights campaigners repudiated the Haitian revolution’s policies of anti-imperialism and violent resistance, and initially sought to distance themselves from French Caribbean radicalism even as they drew upon Haitian leaders’ pan-Africanist discourse. Furthermore, this political project largely excluded the majority of AfroBarbadians, assuming that only a privileged elite had the right and ability to speak for a black ‘community’ to which it had only reluctantly acknowledged that it belonged. Claiming a pivotal role in the remaking of Britain’s relationship with the African continent in the aftermath of slavery was central to Afro-Barbadians’ reconfiguration of the meaning of Britishness. Privileged Barbadian men of colour articulated a simultaneously pan-African yet civilizationalist discourse which Paul Gilroy has described as a ‘counterculture of modernity’.6 Many saw themselves as the defenders of Africa in the British Empire and as the potential vanguard of Western ‘civilization’ on the African continent. Afro-Barbadians’ political situation as British subjects gave their articulations of black Atlantic subjectivity a particular significance. They drew upon their position in the British Caribbean, as the descendants of slaves and as committed supporters of the British Empire’s new reformist agenda, to redefine the meaning of ‘Britishness’ and to lay claim to a radically reconceptualized notion of imperial citizenship. Thus, the most fundamental re-imagining of early nineteenth-century British identity and citizenship emerged, not in the metropole, but in its colonies among the empire’s most racially subordinated people. The politics which are described in this chapter expressed a profoundly imperial British nationalism which defined itself against aristocratic, proslavery, racially exclusive and narrowly metropolitan conceptions of the British nation. As Mimi Sheller has noted in her discussion of Afro-Jamaican attitudes towards the British government in the mid-nineteenth century: ‘Their claims were clearly grounded on an assertion of membership in the British Empire, and morally grounded in English law and constitutionality.’ 7 And yet what Afro-Barbadian imperial nationalists demanded had no clear precedent in traditional imperial definitions of nationality and citizenship. Based on their status as the progeny of both enslavement and British

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‘civilization’ in the West Indies, these men sought to reimagine themselves as active citizens of the British Empire, in the process asserted a definition of Britishness which was far more inclusive than anything imagined by metropolitan abolitionists at the time. Their example challenges the still-powerful and widespread historical assumption that modern conceptions of liberal democracy which became central to modern European political identity were primarily a ‘European’ invention. As Laurent Dubois has stated: Central aspects of the universalism presented by imperial powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (as well as the world order of the twenty-first) as products of Europe’s intellectual heritage in fact originated in the Caribbean. The democratic possibilities imperial powers would claim they were bringing to the colonies had in fact been forged, not within the boundaries of Europe, but through the struggles over rights that spread throughout the Atlantic empires. The challenges posed by colonial insurgents in the Americas – the most revolutionary of them the enslaved rebels of the French Caribbean – created a democratic culture that was later presented as a gift from Europe and a justification for expanding imperialism.8 At the same time, despite the subversive aspects of Afro-Barbadians’ mobilization of new discourses of national belonging, their racial consciousness was elitist, masculinist and reaffirmed many aspects of the rigid socio-economic and cultural hierarchy which had survived the demise of slavery. While it is possible that some public documents, such as letters to newspapers written under pseudonyms, were authored by women and recently emancipated people, the documentary evidence overwhelmingly suggests that their voices were systematically excluded from or suppressed within the development of this racial diasporic discourse. Elite racial reformers in Barbados saw it as their special role as citizens of the British Empire to spread the light of capitalism and European culture to the unenlightened Afro-Barbadian working class as well as to ‘culturally backward’ populations in Africa. Furthermore, their politics illustrated the ease with which the language of liberal freedom accommodated itself to British imperialist claims to moral and cultural superiority over nonwhites elsewhere in the world.9 The political right of the British government to maintain colonial power in the Caribbean and to establish it in Africa was assumed to be legitimate, and, in fact, necessary in order to further the cause of equal rights and liberty for Africans on the continent and in the Caribbean diaspora from European oppression.

‘Race’, class and political collectivity during slavery By the mid-seventeenth century, Barbados was characterized by almost total white elite domination of political power and overwhelming white control of economic and land resources. The Barbadian plantocracy was composed

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of a tiny elite within the white community, which owned more than 80 per cent of the island’s arable land.10 There were few opportunities for free people of colour to become wealthy and the free population of colour was relatively impoverished, both in relation to Barbadian whites and in comparison with its counterparts in, for example, Jamaica and Saint Domingue. As elsewhere in the Americas free people of colour in Barbados were concentrated in urban areas, where they had more opportunities of earning a living than they did in the plantation-dominated countryside.11 By the eighteenth century, Barbados was renowned in the Anglophone Caribbean for the rigidity of its racial barriers – however ‘European’ one might be in phenotypic appearance, even the most remote known African ancestry meant exclusion from the legal and socio-economic privileges associated with whiteness. The legislature, dominated from the 1630s by men of the white planter elite, made particularly strenuous efforts in the eighteenth century to deprive all free men and women of colour of crucial civil rights, passing laws which stripped men of African descent of the right to vote, hold public office or serve on juries, and denying both men and women the right to testify in court.12 In the context of such repression some well-to-do free people of colour in Barbados sought to distance themselves from slaves and lower class free non-whites by emphasizing their property ownership, free status and their support for slavery as an institution in order to secure a better social position for themselves. This reactionary tendency among the Afro-Barbadian elite became pronounced during the 1790s, at a time when free people of colour elsewhere in the Caribbean, notably in the French Caribbean and in Grenada, united with slaves against slavery and racial inequality.13 These events coincided with, and were perhaps related to, a rapid increase in the size of free populations of colour across the slave-holding societies of the Caribbean. In Barbados, the late eighteenth century also witnessed the emergence of a small free elite of colour, composed mainly of merchants, hoteliers and artisans and concentrated in the island’s principal port towns. Although a few free Afro-Barbadians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were extremely wealthy, owning large merchant firms or even plantations, the majority of them were modest but successful shopkeepers and artisans, owning small to medium-sized businesses in Bridgetown. They could be best described as a bourgeois-elite, occupying a socio-economic position well below that of the white landed aristocracy, yet representing the wealthiest and most privileged sector of the island’s majority population of African descent. This group of comparatively well-to-do merchants launched the first collective and organized challenges by free people of colour in Barbados against the racial segregation laws. Their petitions requested such privileges as the right to testify in court and were crafted to illustrate their support for the principles of slavery, racial inequality and white aristocratic government. They therefore distanced their civil

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rights campaign from abolitionism and the democratic demands of the rebels of the francophone Afro-Caribbean.14 This trend of pro-slavery, elite petitioning contrasted significantly with the lived reality of the majority of free Afro-Barbadians during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Throughout the final decades of slavery, although the free population of colour increased significantly from a recorded figure of around 2500 in the 1810s to 6500 by 1834, the number of slave owners of colour remained constant at around 600 people. Consequently the percentage of slave owners among the free population of colour in Barbados declined from around 20 per cent in the first slave registry of 1817 to a mere nine per cent just before emancipation. This meant that, over time, a steadily decreasing minority of free people of colour had a direct stake as slave owners in the maintenance of slavery or interacted with enslaved people as their owners.15 For the overwhelming majority of free Afro-Barbadians and enslaved people the experience of manual labour created a working class culture, especially in urban centres, which crossed and subverted legal backgrounds. Many people of colour, both slave and free, who lived and worked in urban areas maintained close connections to enslaved relations in the countryside. Even the most well-to-do free people of colour often had enslaved kin and devoted significant financial resources to freeing these relatives. The small size of the free population of colour, as well as its close family and social ties and shared cultural background with slaves, created conditions for uniting across legal barriers to oppose a common source of oppression. This sense of community was both the product of and a form of resistance to structures of racial and legal disempowerment. Challenges to slavery and racism elsewhere in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century created a context in which this sense of AfroBarbadian collective identity became increasingly politicized. As residents of a key port of call in the eastern Caribbean, Barbadians were constantly in touch with political developments in other parts of the Atlantic world. During the 1810s, 1820s and 1830s, abolitionists stepped up the pressure on the British government and West Indian slave owners. Influential antislavery campaigners in the British parliament incorporated the civil rights demands of British Caribbean free people of colour into the abolitionist agenda. Free people of colour and slaves in the British Caribbean used the window of opportunity created by abolitionism to further their political struggles.16 Several developments in Afro-Barbadian politics during this period laid the groundwork for their political activity into the post-slavery era. First, as was evident during a major slave rebellion in 1816, slaves and free people of colour of all class backgrounds saw the British government as their champion against the local legislature and believed that British imperial efforts to abolish slavery and enfranchise people of colour were being blocked by local white authorities.17 During the 1820s, even the most conservative free black

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and coloured civil rights petitioners would often send their petitions to the island’s governor, the representative of the Crown, rather than to the local legislature, in a clear effort to appeal to a higher and seemingly more sympathetic authority than the local plantocracy.18 In the 1820s, even though the Afro-Barbadian elite pursued rather narrow bourgeois increases in civil rights for its own benefit, this group also began to seek a more broadly based community mandate for its civil rights demands and organized increasingly important political mass meetings of free people of colour of all class backgrounds to determine how to counter racist legislation.19 As British government pressure forced successive neighbouring colonies to pass laws admitting propertied free blacks and coloureds to full political rights, an affluent minority of free Afro-Barbadian men also demanded political enfranchisement at the end of the 1820s.20 In response to demands from both free people of colour and the imperial government the Barbadian legislature was forced in 1831 to relent and enfranchise a tiny number of free men of colour.21 As the British government moved closer to abolishing slavery during the 1820s, popular opposition from the Afro-Barbadian majority forced the free elite of colour to drop any antiabolitionist and anti-British statements from its civil rights petitions.22

Slavery and the discourse of racial integration during the apprenticeship period Slave emancipation in 1834 fuelled Afro-Barbadian hopes that racial equality was now possible as it could never have been during slavery. However, the assembly dug in its heels and sought to strengthen segregation in public institutions during the apprenticeship period.23 The contrast between the climate of imperial reform and the continuing intransigence of the local legislature emboldened more radical and previously marginalized voices of opposition among Barbadian free people of colour during the apprenticeship period. Some privileged free Afro-Barbadian men became convinced that cross-class political mobilization along racial lines, including the mobilization of former slaves, was the only way to effect change in their interests. Some of the more radical elite individuals who sought to represent the voices of the dispossessed Afro-Barbadian majority had been educated in England during the 1820s, in an atmosphere charged with the influences of abolitionism and other movements for social, political and imperial reform. On their return such individuals began to use the printed media, which had proven so effective for the abolitionist and parliamentary reform movements in Great Britain, in the service of Barbadians’ struggles for racial desegregation. The island’s first two abolitionist newspapers, the Liberal and the New Times, were founded during apprenticeship, edited by men of colour free before emancipation who had spent some of their formative years abroad. American abolitionists wrote of their meeting with Samuel

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Jackman Prescod, Thomas Harris Jr and their families during a visit to Barbados to observe the apprenticeship system in operation in 1836, while Prescod was still editor of the New Times and just before Prescod and Harris founded the Liberal. They noted that, on returning from England, Prescod ‘had seen himself and his accomplished wife excluded from the society of whites, though keenly conscious of their capacity to move and shine in the most elevated social circles’. Harris, who had also gone to France sometime during the 1820s, claimed that, while in Europe, he had become involved with abolitionism, and had, since his return to Barbados, ‘often found himself in court for his views’. Nathaniel Roach, another abolitionist journalist of colour who rose to prominence during the apprenticeship period as Prescod’s successor at the New Times, lived in England for 12 years before returning to Barbados in 1828, where he first opened a school in Bridgetown.24 Prescod and Harris in particular became leaders of the civil rights struggle, pushing other, more conservative people of colour free before general emancipation to embrace the abolition of slavery as part of their civil rights campaign. On 2 August 1838, the day after the apprenticeship period came to an end, the Liberal’s editors organized and presided over a meeting of around 15 Bridgetown merchants of colour, called to celebrate full emancipation. Harris’s speech on this occasion is worth quoting at some length: I rise with a heart uplifted with gratitude to a merciful Creator, for the inestimable blessing this day vouchsafed me, of meeting to celebrate our Emancipation. I say our Emancipation, gentlemen, because I do assert, and that too, without the fear of contradiction, that this day in which . . . the legislature of this Island has granted freedom to the slave – also made us free indeed. . . . Gentlemen, by one Queen, the stain, that disgraceful stain of slavery and its horrors . . . has been removed from the escutcheon of Britain. Long may she reign to witness the good effects of the blessing she has conferred upon a grateful though calumniated people. Gentlemen . . . we must admit, to use the language embodied in an admirable resolution of the coloured people of America, ‘That [the late emancipated class] are our brethren by the lieu [sic: liens] of consanguinity, of suffering, and of wrong . . .’ And I trust the first of August will ever be celebrated by us with praise and thanksgiving, and with the same brotherly love which now actuates the company present. Harris continued by reminding the audience: ‘Our newly emancipated brethren look to us, gentlemen, for countenance and protection from the wrongs they may yet be subjected to; and I trust . . . that there is no gentleman of our body who will

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so far forget that . . . [O]ur interests and theirs are now one and the same – to be affected with common benefit or common injury!’25 While the New Times and the Liberal were the most progressive voices in apprenticeship-era politics among free people of colour, they were examples of a rapid and widespread change in the attitude of elite free people of colour towards emancipation. By the middle of the apprenticeship period, elite men of colour who had only recently been slave owners, had publicly expressed pro-slavery opinions or had sought not to antagonize whites by giving any public support to abolitionism, now supported emancipation, claiming it as further justification for their demands for increased political and civil rights.26 As the most prominent free people of colour in the country, they could now claim to represent an even larger constituency than they had before emancipation. Thus, at a November 1838 dinner organized by Prescod in honour of British abolitionist John Scoble, who was visiting the island, ‘the more respectable of the colored and black community were there, with few exceptions’, along with ‘one or two liberal whites’. Scoble told the ‘pre-emancipation free people’ who attended that ‘They were the natural protectors of an immense class of their brethren. From their station, their characters, their influence, their knowledge, the lately emancipated slave looked up to them to secure him against the oppression of wrong doers.’ In response there were cries from the audience of, ‘[W]e will do it’ and Scoble ‘assured them of the cooperation of the British in this holy work’. He concluded that, now that everyone in the colony was free, there was a need for ‘just and equal laws’, to which someone replied, ‘[W]e won’t get it [sic], till we have an extension of the elective franchise!’27 People of colour, both ex-slaves and pre-emancipation free people, venerated British law and the imperial government as the institutions which would guarantee colour-blind justice in the island. However, after full emancipation removed the legitimacy of citing race as the basis for excluding people of African descent from politics, the local legislature found a new tool with which to maintain white supremacy – class. Even if free black and coloured merchants were wealthy compared with the majority of people of colour, only a handful were as wealthy as the white plantocracy. In 1838, the governor appointed the wealthy merchant Thomas Cummins to the magistracy and nominated him for the Legislative Council. Although, as he said, Cummins was ‘an opulent gentleman of color . . . whose manners and education, qualify him for the same rank’, his nomination met with ‘[C]onsiderable repugnance, on the part of several Members of Council to his nomination, when I made him a Magistrate; on account, not of his complexion, but of his keeping a retail shop – and I have since, in vain, urged him to purchase a landed estate, in order to endeavour to be returned to the Assembly’.28

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Imagining freedom: Africa, the ‘civilising mission’ and political discourse of racial equality, 1834–42 In this context elite men of colour in Barbados turned their imaginations eastwards towards Africa and the idea of black racial utopia. At the same time that people of colour in Barbados pursued the desegregation of public institutions in the island, many also drew inspiration from Haiti and ‘repatriation’ projects to Africa which aimed to establish black polities for people of African descent from the Americas.29 Toasts to ‘the infant Haiti’ were a regular feature at the post-emancipation anti-slavery dinners, whose attendants seem to have been predominantly, perhaps entirely, people of colour.30 The British Sierra Leone colonization scheme which began in the 1780s and the American Liberia project of the 1820s may have drawn fire from abolitionists as thinly veiled attempts to ‘whiten’ Britain and the United States, however people of colour in Barbados seem to have found the projects attractive and lent them their moral support.31 For wealthy and educated men of colour whose political ambitions were blocked in the Caribbean colonization schemes also held out the possibility of establishing a political career in Africa. As the British government did not go out of its way to find appointments in the West Indies for any Caribbeanborn subjects, Sierra Leone seemed to offer the best hope for Caribbean men of colour to acquire positions of influence in imperial administration. However, the British government lacked a coherent West African policy, and nothing came of the Colonial Office’s sporadic and half-hearted requests for governors in the West Indies to furnish lists of suitable men of colour as candidates for West African government.32 The case of Charles Phipps, a pre1834 Barbadian free man of colour, is a good example of the hopes which some people of colour had of building careers as imperial officials in Africa, and of the difficulties they faced realizing these dreams. Phipps, a teacher by profession, was quite a prominent Afro-Barbadian man, who had for a long time been a teacher and philanthropist as secretary of the Colonial Charity School – established by elite free people of colour in the 1820s and one of the largest schools in Bridgetown – and secretary of the Barbados Auxiliary Bible Society of the Free People of Colour.33 In 1842 Governor Sir Charles Grey described him as ‘a coloured Gentleman of respectable appearance and demeanour’ who had studied in Dublin. Between 1837 and 1842, Phipps sent at least seven unsuccessful petitions to the governor and the Colonial Office asking for an imperial appointment as a magistrate or provost marshal in either another Caribbean island or Sierra Leone. Governor Sir Charles Grey wrote to the Secretary of State saying that Phipps’s ‘station in Society, though quite respectable, does not adapt him to be added to the existing body of Magistrates in this Island’, and, despite his qualifications, it would be difficult to find a ‘suitable’ appointment for him in Barbados. Grey, the island’s Attorney-General and Phipps himself thought ‘something on the

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coast of Africa’ or in another Caribbean colony regulating the immigration of labourers from Africa would be most suitable.34 Had Phipps been white his background would probably have inclined the governor and the Colonial Office more favourably to his request for a post, although they might still have thought him insufficiently wealthy to be a magistrate. This desire for a role in the imperial civil service was probably an influential factor when, in 1841, elite men of colour, along with a few white planters, merchants and clergymen, established the Barbados Auxiliary to the British Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and the Civilization of Africa. The organization’s parent society was founded in 1839 by Thomas Fowell Buxton, the leader of the parliamentary anti-slavery lobby. The Barbados Anti-Slavery Society held its first meeting at the home of Joseph Thorne, a shopkeeper who served as an Anglican catechist and a leader of more conservative opinion among elite Afro-Barbadians. Charles Phipps was among the founders, along with Thomas Cummins and two other prominent Afro-Barbadian merchants and philanthropists, the Methodist reverend Joseph Hamilton, and Edward Archer, a teacher and shopkeeper. The society was formed to lobby the Colonial Office to recruit West Indian subjects of African descent in order to ‘civilize’ Africa, so that Europeans would not have to set foot on Africa’s ‘pestilential’ shores.35 Yet there was more driving the shift in the attitude of free people of colour towards emancipation and their new-found interest in the ‘civilization’ of Africa than just individual political opportunism. As their political hopes in the Caribbean were repeatedly thwarted, many came to feel that the upliftment of people of African descent in the Americas could never be realized until the slave trade was completely suppressed and the African continent was accepted by European states as an equal on the world stage. Equal rights activists like Samuel Prescod argued that Europe’s exploitative slave-trading relationship with Africa was largely responsible for Africans’ perceived economic and cultural underdevelopment. Yet he also assumed that European Christianity, science and culture were superior to anything which currently existed in Africa and that people of colour in the British colonies were culturally superior to their contemporaries in Africa. Thus, the regeneration of Africa would have to come from the outside forces of ‘legitimate’ trade with Europe and the spread of the ‘advantages of civilization’ from Europe to Africa. At the 1838 dinner in Scoble’s honour, Prescod announced a toast to ‘the speedy civilization of Africa’, his ‘motherland’ as well as that of other people of colour, and argued that [Before] the white man would give up his notions of exclusive humanity. . . . The light of the gospel must spread into [Africa’s] deepest recesses, and the foot of the slave merchant must desert her shores. The European must seek these shores to carry improvements to her children, and not to render her barbarism more barbarous – her mental darkness more impervious,

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by the damning influences of a traffic in human souls . . . For until they [people of colour] could point to Africa, with the same feelings of pride, with the same degree of exultation, with which the white man, now pointed to Europe, and say, behold our Mother country – until they could do this, they must be satisfied to be still a degraded people, although revelling in wealth and comforts. He then made his toast, which was, ‘drunk with enthusiastic applause’ by the audience.36 Prescod’s speech illustrates the ambivalent political implications inherent within the racial consciousness which was expressed in the early postemancipation period. While Prescod accused Europeans of having retarded African development, he accepted the notion that Europe represented modern ‘civilization’, and that Africans had to become students in the school of Western European ‘progress’. Prescod, unlike, for example, the men of his class who formed the Barbados Anti-Slavery Society, does not appear to have imagined that Europe should establish colonial control over the African continent – his desire to hold Africa up as the motherland of people of colour on par to Europe’s role for Europeans suggests the opposite. However Prescod’s hope to see Western religion spread throughout Africa and to see European states use their might to ‘drive slave merchants’ from the continent’s shores indicates his support for a rather invasive British role in Africa in the name of ‘civilization’. After emancipation, British Caribbean free people of colour argued that it was the special role of people of African descent to be in the vanguard Europe’s modernization project on the ‘benighted’ African continent. At the same time, many sought to challenge European cultural arrogance, observing that the slave trade obscured the existence of great and ancient civilizations in Africa. In an 1841 letter, an anonymous contributor to the Liberal, who wrote as ‘Africanus’, expressed his (perhaps her) view of the special mission of the British Empire’s black and coloured subjects in the Caribbean: There is a rumour afloat of a scheme of the British people, for the civilization of Africa. As this century is marked by a spirit of enterprize [sic], and the energies of the British people, pent up for years, now seek an outlet in philanthropic acts to benighted Africa. . . . How exalted ought to be the emotions of gratitude, in the breast of every descendant of Africa, to the British nation, that so disinterestedly, so humanely, extends the hand of succour to the sons of that despised land, with a view of raising them to a station among the civilised nations of the earth! It is necessary for the practical success of the scheme, that the children of Africa in the Colonies should lend their zealous co operation in this gigantic undertaking. . . . [I]t is not unreasonable to infer, from instances

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afforded by history, that the vast unexplored continent of Africa may contained nations who have arrived at a high degree of civilisation. . . . [T]here is nothing in the least unreasonable in the idea, in the far regions of that vast continent, another China might be concealed from the vision of the great European nations, who at present consider themselves the Monopolisers of learning and science.37 This statement may have been a celebration of the presumed cultural ‘superiority’ of nineteenth-century Europe but it was also a political challenge to the racial hierarchies of European imperialism and colonial West Indian society. Thus the letter sought to contextualize European ‘civilization’ as relatively young in the history of the world, while presenting Africa as a place which, although once great, could only now revive and rediscover its ancient greatness through the ‘necessary’ intervention of ‘the children of Africa in the Colonies’, the beneficiaries of the younger, more vigorous European legacy. In other correspondence ‘Africanus’ asserted that it did not matter where people of African descent found themselves in the world – the shared fact of African ancestry created a basis for solidarity which overrode all differences of culture, language and local history. A history of forced migration which had led to the scattering of people of African ancestry around the Atlantic world was invoked as a source of political adaptability, cultural strength and transcontinental solidarity, which were reinforced by a sense of the righteousness of the quest by Africans in the Americas for a homeland. Whatever Africanus’ assumptions about the superiority of modern-day Europe and Europeans over Africa and Africans, his/her idealized vision of this unified yet diverse African diasporic nation-without-a-state is a far cry from British authorities’ paternalistic dismissal of blacks’ ability to exercise political autonomy.38 Africanus’ argument hinted at the politically subversive possibility that people of African descent did not necessarily need to wait for British or other European imperial sanction in order to move elsewhere and establish their new society. At the same time, however, ‘Africanus’ assumed that people of African descent would naturally be welcomed as long-lost relatives wherever they went, including Africa, and that such colonization could never lead to relations of domination. This idealized vision was greatly at odds with the reality of colonization schemes on the African continent.39 In late 1847, Charles Phipps, who was still unsuccessfully petitioning the Colonial Office for a government post in West Africa, sent a new proposal to the Secretary of State. He suggested that tradesmen and mechanics from Barbados be sent to Sierra Leone (accompanied by himself, it would seem) in order to teach the ‘natives’ trades.40 Later that year the Barbados Colonization Society was founded, and, under the auspices of the society, 103 Afro-Barbadians volunteered to emigrate to Africa to help the British government with ‘the suppression of the slave trade and the introduction of

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civilization into Africa’. They were certain that ‘the knowledge and habits which they have acquired in a civilized community, must peculiarly fit them for carrying out the benevolent intentions of Government.’41 The proposal was published in the newspapers and met with an overwhelming response. In October, 234 Afro-Barbadian men, among them 120 married men who offered to emigrate with their families, signed a follow-up petition, making a total of 671 people who were prepared to emigrate immediately to West Africa. A detailed list of their occupations was provided, which shows a variety of backgrounds, ranging from schoolteacher to ‘general agriculturalist’, which perhaps referred to either an independent peasant farmer or an estate worker. Most of those listed claimed to be artisans.42 Lacking the money themselves for such an undertaking, this group appealed to the imperial government for assistance to help them emigrate but the Secretary of State for the Colonies declined. Despite this setback, AfroBarbadians kept petitioning for government assistance to get out of the island.43 That same year, 965 artisans, led by a politically vocal artisan of colour named Henry Dayrell, sent a new petition to the island’s House of Assembly, also asking to be allowed to emigrate.44 Afro-Barbadians continued to support church-sponsored colonization projects and were centrally involved in organizing an Anglican mission from Barbados to the Rio Pongas area of West Africa in what is now Gambia, which was established in 1855.45 Additionally, in 1865 the American Colonization Society, with whom Barbadian colonization activists had close contacts, granted $10,000 to assist ‘in furtherance of Barbadian Liberian Emigration’. The money enabled 346 Barbadians of colour to emigrate to Liberia later that year.46

The ‘stain’ of Africa: the internalization of racism As their support for a greater British civilizing mission in Africa shows, elite free people of colour combined their condemnation of slavery and pride in their African heritage with strong disdain for cultural practices associated with Africa. After 1834, Afro-Barbadians free before general emancipation were key figures in the dissemination of notions of Christian morality as teachers, journalists and missionaries. In 1839 Anglo-Irish stipendiary magistrate John Bowen Colthurst credited the missionary and future founder of the Barbados Anti-Slavery Society Joseph Thorne with having ‘put a final stop to the practice of oboe [obeah]’ in Colthurst’s district of rural St Michael. According to Colthurst, Thorne would lecture to apprentices about ‘[T]heir duties when they became positively free and entirely dependent on their own good conduct for support; the gratitude they owed to the Almighty who moved the hearts of the British people to release them from the chains and bonds of slavery’.47 Although Thorne professed immense pride in being a person of colour Colthurst’s description of one particular

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incident gives a possible hint of the deep internal identity conflicts which motivated Thorne in his attitudes towards Africa and cultural practices which he perceived to be African: Coloured as he is, he has a double advantage, and from what has come to my knowledge, has done more real good in the colony than any other person in it . . . when persuasion failed, he used the stick freely. His last performance was of this description, on which occasion he dispersed a crowd of negroes collected together to perform the barbarous ceremony of strewing the grave of a friend with provisions to help the dear defunct on his journey to his native land. On this occasion, Thorn (who is, by the by, a very able man) laid about him manfully, and scattered the assemblage in every direction, and served the provisions in the same way he did the commissaries.48 Thorne’s disrespectful response to these African-inspired New World burial practices was perhaps the typical reaction of a zealous christian missionary. At the same time, the fact of his own African descent should not simply be dismissed as irrelevant to his behaviour, and one might suggest that his assault on the burial ceremony was rooted in a deeper sense of discomfort regarding his own origins in a community which indulged in such forms of cultural expression. With the founding of the Barbados Anti-Slavery Society, Thorne merely extended his mission to stamp out African cultural practices across the Atlantic to the continent which he perhaps saw as the source of the problem. After emancipation distinctions of complexion and ‘shade’ also hampered efforts to consolidate a political struggle of all people of African descent in the island. On one hand, the relevance of lightness and darkness of skin among Afro-Barbadians should not be overstated. Being of light complexion was by itself rarely enough to elevate a person of African descent, whether slave or free, to another social rank and the majority of people with visible European ancestry were as impoverished as those of darker complexion. There is no concrete evidence to support claims that distinction between people of lighter and darker complexion was the key factor defining AfroBarbadian politics, or to support Beckles’ assertion that light-skinned people of colour gained increases in civil rights during the late slavery period at the expense of those of darker complexion.49 If complexion was ever a consideration in the legislature’s reactions to the political demands of free people of colour this was never explicitly stated. However, there is evidence to suggest that individuals with European relations or ancestry and lighter complexioned people were disproportionately represented in the property-owning elite during slavery and that colour influenced decisions by estate authorities in Barbados about whether or not slaves should be sent to labour in the fields.50 In Barbados, as in early post-slavery Cuba, Afro-Barbadians’ sense of

130 Melanie Newton

‘collective identity . . . did not exclude personal distinctions based on color and ethnicity’.51 Despite attempts to promote racial pride among people of colour, many Afro-Barbadians had internalized negative attitudes about dark skin colour as a signifier of a connection with Africa and ‘backwardness’ which was too close for comfort. This was made painfully clear in August 1842, when several hundred people of colour attacked the home of wealthy black merchant London Bourne after he charged one of his shop assistants, a light-complexioned man of colour named John Piper, with theft. Bourne, who had been enslaved until 1818, was a keen participant in schemes involving West Indians of colour for imperial colonization and ‘civilization’ in West Africa, and, in the 1850s, he became one of the principal organizers of the establishment of the Anglican mission to the Rio Pongas region in Gambia.52 In 1859 he was described as ‘a man of unmixed African blood’, which suggests that he was of very dark complexion.53 Some of Bourne’s neighbours, themselves people of colour, apparently either participated in the attack or refused to help the police disperse it. In an editorial on the incident the Liberal expressed outrage at the fact ‘that black men and women, above all others’ would ‘openly riot’ for the principle ‘that fair complexion and respectability, real or presumed, are to be a passport to impunity from crime, when the party injured happens to be a black man!’54 The crowd threw stones at the house and threatened to kill Bourne’s son, who had testified against Piper, referring to Bourne as a ‘Barbadian Congo’ and his son as ‘the Congo son’.55 The term ‘Congo’ was allegedly used in the British West Indies as a derogatory expression for a ‘person who is black, whose standard of living is of the lowest, speech uneducated and language rough, and who is also considered basically stupid and ignorant’. Creole slaves in the Anglophone Caribbean, who comprised over 90 per cent of the Barbadian slave population by the end of the eighteenth century, ‘strongly despised’ Africans brought from the Congo and associated them with a ‘stigma of stupidity’.56 Such negative Creole stereotypes of Africans were not confined to people from the Congo, as Creole slaves often derisively referred to Africans as ‘saltwater Negroes’.57

Conclusion The Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, and British slave emancipation between 1834–8 were key moments which sparked public redefinitions of racial collectivity among Barbados’ free and enslaved populations of African descent. Nevertheless class, legal status and political circumstances specific to Barbados shaped how people of colour responded to these international developments. Elite free people of colour who were seeking an expansion of their legal rights in Barbados gradually distanced themselves from the proslavery cause and sought to build a common political identity with free

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people of lower class origins and slaves during the period of transition from slavery to emancipation. Anti-slavery racial consciousness in nineteenth-century Barbados was intimately connected with a strong belief in the legitimacy and inherent justice of British imperial governance and legal practice. Emancipation both confirmed this faith in British imperialism and created a space for people of African descent to assert their political claims as part of a transnational community of people of African descent. They claimed a special role for themselves, as active British citizens, to help suppress the slave trade and bring ‘civilization’ to Africa. In making such claims they challenged European assertions of superiority over Africa and people of African descent, arguing that Europeans were responsible for the ‘backwardness’ of Africa. Yet at the same time many Barbadian people of colour, particularly those of relatively privileged economic background who were free before emancipation, accepted the notion that European culture and ‘civilization’ were superior to African political and culture practices and saw it as their role to bring the ‘civilizing’ influence of Europe to Africa. They held up their position as ‘the children of Africa in the Colonies’ as a way of demanding racial desegregation in Barbados, while also pursuing dreams that the same connections of empire and trade which had created the African diaspora would facilitate the efforts of members of that diaspora to ‘return’ to Africa. This chapter raises several questions about the role of race, imperialism and nationhood as forms of ‘imagined community’ in the post-emancipation British Caribbean.58 First, some of the scholarly literature continues to be animated by an assumption that the ‘failure’ of most free people of colour in slave societies to unite in racially based rebellion with slaves is evidence that they had an ‘incomplete’ and damaged sense of who they were and that their ‘natural’ sense of their pride in their African descent was stunted by their marginal socio-legal position. ‘Blackness’ and ‘race’ are too often still treated as natural categories of political identity, which remained essentially unchanged once slavery called them into existence. This chapter has described several constructions, reconstructions and conflicts over the meaning of racial identity among people of colour in Barbados who were continuously reassessing their position as the subjects of a racialized empire. Afro-Barbadians imagined Africa as a place onto which they could project their dreams of a different political future in which they could shape their own lives. They invoked Africa as much to claim their full rights as equal citizens of the British Empire as they did to assert their sense of solidarity with people of African descent elsewhere in the Atlantic world. The Caribbean, British and racial diaspora identities which were expressed in the nineteenth century were certainly deliberate attempts to form a sense of political collectivity which could effectively challenge the authority of local white elites and racist injustice. However they were also appropriations of Britishness and demands, not only that the British Empire accord the same rights to its

132 Melanie Newton

non-white subjects as it did to those of European descent, but that the empire recognize that the historical reality of slavery and racism created new ways of understanding what citizenship and Britishness should mean in a post-slavery empire. Afro-Barbadians argued that the empire’s tortured entanglements with blackness and Africa gave them a different but no less valid claim to the rights of active citizenship. There is a need for a deeper examination of the intellectual milieu in which British Caribbean people of African descent lived in the early years after emancipation. What was their role in promoting and participating in the missionary schemes to Africa in the decades between slave emancipation and ‘The Scramble for Africa’? Although a number of Barbadian people of colour eventually did go to West Africa as agents of both African diasporic solidarity and missionary imperialism, little is known about the effects of their role in Africa.59 By raising such questions I do not mean to imply that, because Afro-Caribbean free people promoted a European ‘civilising mission’ in Africa, West Indians were therefore somehow responsible for the later turn of events. However, understanding profoundly pro-British and culturally conflicted form of African diasporic consciousness described in this research may lead us to a better and more nuanced understanding of the genealogy of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century PanAfricanism, as well as the role of West Indians in African politics into the twentieth century.60 Finally, on one hand, this chapter is strongly critical of efforts to easily fit nineteenth-century Afro-Barbadian articulations of racial consciousness into positivist historical narratives about the development of a ‘Barbadian nationalist enterprise’.61 And yet the road to Caribbean national identity lies through Africa, especially in a country such as Barbados, where over 80 per cent of the population has remained of African descent for centuries. The central place of Africa in Afro-Caribbean people’s early nineteenth-century sense of loyalty to the British Empire rested on a sense of the empire’s indebtedness, both to them and to the African continent. Just as many white abolitionists of the 1830s and 1840s judged emancipation as a ‘success’ or ‘failure’ based on the willingness of Afro-Caribbean people to accept their place at the bottom of the socio-economic hierarchy,62 people of African descent considered that the metropole had to pass the ‘test’ of freedom by living up to its promises of African empowerment on the continent and in the Caribbean. Insofar as Britain lived up to the mandate of atonement bequeathed to it by its history as one of the world’s most prolific enslaving states loyalty was more or less assured. Implicitly, then, there was a certain element of contingency in Afro-Caribbean imperial loyalties, a contingency clause, as it were, which left the door open to disillusionment with imperialism and the emergence of a more explicitly anti-hegemonic nationalism. Given this contingency, it is no surprise that support for the empire began to unravel in the

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early twentieth century and that Britain’s repudiation of its perceived duty to defend the freedom of Africans on the continent and in the diaspora played a central role. In the 1930s, when Britain’s support for the Italian invasion of Ethiopia coincided with the 100th anniversary of slave emancipation and the hardships of the Great Depression, the Empire was rocked by violent popular uprisings which spread throughout the British Caribbean, rebellions which ushered in the era of decolonization.63 The generation of black and mixed-race middle-class professional leaders who would rise to prominence in Barbados and across the soon-to-be former British Caribbean out of the ashes of these rebellions, could be seen to embody the same Ariel persona as the urban bourgeois-elite of colour of a century before. For Caliban, Prospero’s magic had ceased to be omnipotent and, for Ariel, the chance to dethrone Alonso (at least in the realm of formal politics), and assume the reigns of power had finally come, by claiming, once again, the right to ‘speak for’ Caliban.

Notes 1. Kamau Brathwaite, ‘Caliban, Ariel and Unprospero in the Conflict of Creolization: A Study of the Slave Revolt in Jamaica in 1831–32’, first published 1977 and republished in Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World, edited by Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2000), pp. 879–95, esp. 883. 2. C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, first published 1938 (London: Allison and Busby, 1994), p. 402. Italics in the original. 3. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776–1848 (London and New York: Verso, 1988). 4. Brathwaite, ‘Caliban’, pp. 881 ff. Brathwaite was influenced by the earlier postcolonial interpretations of The Tempest by O. Mannoni, La Psychologie de la Colonisation (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1950) and Aimé Césaire, Une Tempête, Adaptation de la Tempête de Shakespeare pour une Théâtre Nègre (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1956). 5. Hilary Beckles, ‘Caribbean Anti-Slavery: The Self-Liberation Ethos of Enslaved Blacks’, in Caribbean Slavery, pp. 869–78, esp. 877. 6. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 1–40. I employ Gilroy’s useful notion of ‘counterculture of modernity’ with several important caveats. First, I agree with Sidney Mintz’s critique that Gilroy ‘ignores the historically-shaped differences within [the Black diaspora] which make the thought of Black Brazilians, Jamaicans, Haitians, Cubans and North Americans (for instance) different enough from each other to raise the question whether there is any single body to that uniqueness’ in Sidney Mintz, ‘Enduring Substances, Trying Theories: The Caribbean Region as Oikomenê’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1996), pp. 290–311, esp. 299. Furthermore, Gilroy’s intimate knowledge about twentieth-century expressive popular culture in the Caribbean and the United States is not matched by an equal knowledge of trends in the Caribbean’s political and intellectual thought. Finally, Gilroy’s denunciation of nationalism is based on ‘a generalized (and somewhat caricatured) ethnic nationalism as the only kind of contemporary nationalism’. In so doing he ‘enables academics to feel

134 Melanie Newton justified in not taking seriously the challenges posed by black and Third World nationalisms to established forms of knowledge and to their institutional privilege’: see Laura Chrisman, ‘Journeying to Death: Gilroy’s Black Atlantic’, Race & Class, Vol. 39, No. 2 (October–December 1997), pp. 51–64, esp. 52. A far more trenchant critique of bourgeois nationalism is to be found in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, first published 1961 (London: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 119–65. 7. Mimi Sheller, Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (London and Oxford: Macmillan Education Ltd., 2000), p. 219. 8. Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 4–5. 9. See Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-century British Liberal Thought (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999). 10. Jerome Handler, The Unappropriated People: Freedmen in the Slave Society of Barbados (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 121; Vincent Harlow, A History of Barbados, 1625–1685 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), p. 307; Karl Watson, The Civilised Island: Barbados a Social History, 1750–1816 (Ann Arbor: University of Florida, 1977), pp. 201–2. 11. Jerome Handler, ‘Barbados’ in Neither Slave Nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World, edited by David Cohen and Jack Green (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1972), pp. 214–57, esp. 216–17; Barry Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834, first published 1984 (Kingston: The Press, University of the West Indies, 1995), p. 96; H.N. Coleridge, Six Months in the West Indies, in 1825 (London: n.p., 1826), p. 48; Bayley, Four Years’ Residence in the West Indies, during the years 1826, 7, 8 and 9 (London: William Kidd, 1833), p. 58. 12. Handler, Unappropriated People, pp. 191–2. 13. See Edward L. Cox, Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St. Kitts and Grenada, 1763–1833 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), pp. 76–91; Dubois, A Colony of Citizens; Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); Anne PérotinDumon, ‘Free Coloreds and Slaves in Revolutionary Guadeloupe: Politics and Political Consciousness’ (pp. 259–79) and David Geggus, ‘The Slaves and Free Coloreds of Martinique during the Age of the French and Haitian Revolutions: Three Moments of Resistance’ (pp. 280–301) in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, edited by Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman (Florida: University Press of Florida, 1996). 14. See, for example, Lucas Mss, Minutes of the Barbados Council, 15 October 1799, ‘The Humble Memorial and Remonstrance of the Free Coloured People . . .’, 14 October 1799, and ‘The Humble Petition of the Free Coloured People, Inhabitants of the Island’, in Lucas Mss, Minutes of the Barbados Council, 1 November 1803, cited in Handler, Unappropriated People, pp. 76 and 147. 15. Barbados Slave Registration Returns, National Archives, London, T71/523, 528, 533, 546, 552. 16. Mavis Campbell, The Dynamics of Change in Slave Society: A Socio-political History of the Free Coloreds of Jamaica, 1800–1865 (London: Associated University Presses, 1976), pp. 108–9 and 118–19. 17. Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Handler, Unappropriated People, p. 192.

The Road through Africa 135 18. See Handler, Unappropriated People, pp. 90–7; National Archives (hereafter omitted), Colonial Office records (hereafter CO) CO 31/49, 4 February 1824; CO 28/93 Governor Henry Warde to Secretary of State for the Colonies Bathurst, 4 February 1824). 19. See for example CO 28/93 No. 20 Warde to Bathurst, 31 March 1824 enclosing ‘Examination of Witnesses . . . relative to the Publication . . . purporting to be the production of 373 of the free black and coloured inhabitants . . . expressive of their disapprobation of the loyal and respectful Address which was presented to the Legislative Bodies on the 21st October last by a Committee or free coloured and black persons’, 3 and 4 February 1824. 20. CO 31/51 14 July 1829. 21. CO 30/21 No. 538 ‘An Act to remove certain restraints and disabilities imposed by Law on His Majesty’s Free Coloured and Free Black Subjects of this Island’, passed 9 May 1831. However, the act, popularly known as the ‘Brown Privilege Bill’, set a franchise qualification of property valued at £30 for men of colour and enfranchised a mere 75 people while No. 541, ‘An Act the better to equalize the value of freehold property within this Island’, passed three days later maintained the £10 qualification for white men. Furthermore the Brown Privilege Bill was passed with a suspending clause which delayed its operation under November 1832 (see discussion in Handler, Unappropriated People, p. 103). 22. Melanie Newton, ‘Race for Power: People of Colour and the Politics of Liberation in Barbados, 1816–c. 1850’, in Control and Resistance in the Postemancipation Caribbean, edited by David Trotman and Gad Heuman (London and Oxford: Macmillan Education Ltd., 2005). 23. See discussion of the Barbados assembly’s attempt to keep people of colour out of the new police force in PP 1835, Vol. 50, Lord Glenelg to Governor Lionel Smith, 20 June 1835, pp. 228–31; CO 31/52 6, August 1835. 24. James A. Thome and J. H. Kimball. Emancipation in the West Indies: A Six Months’ Tour of Antigua, Barbados and Jamaica in the Year 1837 (New York: American AntiSlavery Society, 1838), pp. 72–5; Handler, Unappropriated People, pp. 181 and 192. 25. Liberal, 4 August 1838 (italics in the original) 26. See, for example, Thome and Kimball’s conversations with prominent merchants of colour Thomas Cummins and Joseph Thorne, in Thome and Kimball, Emancipation in the West Indies, p. 74. 27. Liberal, 1 December 1838. 28. CO 28/123 Private, Governor Evan MacGregor to Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord Glenelg, 8 September 1838. 29. See, for example, articles entitled ‘Communication with Hayti’, and ‘Biographical Sketch of the Late Sir John Jeremie, Governor of Sierra Leone’, in the Liberal, 26 November 1842. 30. See reports of the anti-slavery annual dinners in ibid., 3 August 1839, 5 August 1840 and 3 August 1842. 31. Support for African colonization only grew among African-American abolitionists after Liberia began independent in 1847, and after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law (see Richard Blackett, Building an Anti-Slavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983], p. 68; Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and ‘Race’ in New England, 1780–1860 [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 261–7]; Barbadian, 24 February 1834).

136 Melanie Newton 32. CO 28/100 Governor Henry Warde to Undersecretary William Horton, 20 January and 27 April 1827, enclosing Governor’s Private Secretary to the Council, January 30 1827; CO 28/139 No. 21 MacGregor to Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord Russell, 26 February 1841. 33. Barbadian, 22 August 1826; Handler et al., Freedmen of Barbados, p. 42. 34. CO 28/127 No. 39 3 April 1839, MacGregor to Glenelg, enclosing petitions from Charles Phipps, referenced as No. 274, 5 December 1837, No. 205 5 July 1838 and No. 247 1 September 1838. Also enclosing No. 28 Glenelg to Macgregor (n.d), about Phipps. Later correspondence regarding Phipps and enclosing his petitions: CO 28/134 No. 92 MacGregor to Russell, 22 October 1840; CO 28/140 No. 20 Lieutenant-Governor Henry Darling to Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord Stanley, 22 October 1841; CO28/144 No. 43 Grey to Stanley, 26 August 1842. After 1834, the imperial government experimented with a scheme of using Africans liberated from foreign slave ships as indentured labourers in ex-slave colonies which needed estate labour (see Monica Shuler, ‘Alas, Alas, Kongo’: A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). 35. Barbadian, 3 July 1841; Liberal, 10 July 1841 and 19, 26 January 1842. 36. Liberal, 1 December 1838. Prescod’s faith in the power of ‘legitimate trade’ to spread ‘civilization’ and create equal relations between Africa and Britain echoed and was probably inspired by the thinking of Olaudah Equiano, who argued in favour of the Sierra Leone project in 1789 on the grounds that: ‘A System of Commerce once being established in Africa, the Demand for Manufactories will most rapidly augment, as the native Inhabitants will insensibly adopt out Fashions, Manners, Customs, etc. etc. . . . In proportion to the Civilization, so will be the Consumption of British Manufactures. . . . ‘, Cited in Mavis Campbell, Back to Africa: George Ross & the Maroons from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone (Trenton, NJ: Africa New World Press, 1993), pp. viii–x. 37. Liberal, 17 February 1841. 38. Ibid., 10 February 1841. 39. Nemata Blyden, West Indians in West Africa: The African Diaspora in Reverse (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000). 40. CO 28/169 Misc. 338 Barbados, 4 January 1848, containing petition of Charles Phipps to Earl Grey. 41. CO 28/168 No. 33 Reid to Earl Grey, 7 May 1848. 42. See CO 28/169 Misc., unnumbered, Charles Phipps and Edward Archer to Grey, 9 October 1848. 43. CO 28/169 No. 10 Earl Grey to Governor William Colebrooke, 22 November 1848. 44. CO 31/56 11 April 1848; Barbadian, 28 February 1848. This was an entirely separate group from the Colonization Society. Dayrell, who had until recently been a member of the Barbados Colonization Society and had initially supported the colonization scheme, left after a rumour spread that the Society ‘intended establishing a republican government so soon as they got to Africa’ (Barbadian, correspondence between Dayrell and Charles Phipps and Edward Archer of the Barbadian Colonization Society, 1, 5, 8, 21 and 26 July 1848). 45. See Bishop’s Court records, microfilms BS 33–8, particularly BS 38 (Barbados Public Library); CO 28/173, No. 73 Colebrooke to Grey, 29 November 1850, enclosing Bishop of Barbados to Colebrooke, 28 November 1850, enclosure no. 4, ‘Proposed Mission from the Church of the West Indies to Western Africa’. Barbados: Barbadian

The Road through Africa 137

46. 47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

Office, 1850. Thomas J. Cummins, John Montefiore and London Bourne, three of the wealthiest men of colour in the island, were members of the committee for this project. See also recently Karch, ‘A Man for All Seasons’, pp. 21–31. ‘Extracts from the Times, February 1865, quoted in Karch, ‘A Man for All Seasons’, pp. 27–28. Woodville Marshall ed., The Colthurst Journal: Journal of a Special Magistrate in the Islands of Barbados and St. Vincent, July 1835–September 1838 (New York: KTO Press, 1977), pp. 79–80; CO 28/117 No. 613, President Beckles to Glenelg, 21 September 1836, enclosing monthly reports, District A, Rural Division. Stipendiary or special magistrates were appointed under the 1833 emancipation act to adjudicate in all disputes between apprentices and their former owners (now employers). Marshall, Colthurst Journal, p. 84. As Marshall points out, this was not an obeah ceremony. It was a common belief among the enslaved that the dead went on a journey. Marshall quotes Orlando Patterson’s observation that this was likely the ‘retention and slight re-interpretation of the common African belief that on death one rejoins one’s ancestors’. Hilary Beckles, ‘On the Backs of Blacks: The Barbados Free-Coloureds’ Pursuit of Civil Rights and the 1816 Slave Rebellion’, Immigrants and Minorities, Vol. 3, No. 2 (July 1984), pp. 167–88. Handler, Unappropriated People, pp. 142–3. Handler’s estimates do not take into account the fact that the term ‘coloured’ did not necessarily denote phenotype, and was often used as a generic term for any free person of colour; on skin shade and estate labour policies see Newton Estate Papers, 1815, item 745, cited in Barry Higman, Slave Populations, p. 197. Quote from Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 40. See fn. 45 above. Karch, ‘London Bourne’, p. 19. Liberal, 20 August 1842. Ibid., 3 September 1842, see also reports in the Barbadian, 20 and 27 August 1842. Richard Allsopp, Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 167. Watson, Civilised Island, p. 135. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Blyden, West Indians in West Africa, passim. For an example of such a genealogical excavation see discussion of Marcus Garvey’s father’s attendance at the Underhill Meetings in the months before the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in John Henrick Clarke and Amy Jacques Garvey, Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 30, cited in Sheller, Democracy After Slavery, pp. 238–40. See excellent discussion of nineteenth and twentieth century popular anti-racist radicalism and attitudes towards imperialism, Britishness and Africa among British Caribbean people in Richard D.E. Burton, Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 108–47; Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America (London and New York: Verso, 1998), pp. 52–69; O. Nigel Bolland, The Politics of Labour in the British Caribbean: The Social Origins of Authoritarianism and Democracy in the Labour Movement (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2001).

138 Melanie Newton 61. See Glenford Howe and Don Marshall eds, The Empowering Impulse: The Nationalist Tradition of Barbados (Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago: Canoe Press, 2001), p. vii. 62. Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1992). 63. Bolland, The Politics of Labour, pp. 212–378.

Part III Counterculture: Normative Tension and Ambiguity

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6 Reading, Hegemony and Counterhegemony in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic Benjamin C. Fortna This problem [of collectively attaining a single cultural ‘climate’] can and must be related to the modern way of considering educational doctrine and practice, according to which the relationship between teacher and pupil is active and reciprocal so that every teacher is always a pupil and every pupil a teacher. Every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily an educational relationship and occurs not only within a nation, between the various forces of which the nation is composed, but in the international and world-wide field, between complexes of national and continental civilisations.1 This chapter is an attempt to come to terms with one aspect of the relationship between learning to read and reading and the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic, namely, the extent to which market forces undermined the dominant educational discourse. It grows out of my previous work on state and education in the late Ottoman period and education and autobiography that spanned the Ottoman and Republican eras.2 The question of reading affords the opportunity to get beyond the orbit of the state that dominates Ottoman and Turkish historiography. For it is the state that both monopolizes the history (dictating its periodization, setting its agenda) and provides (through its archives, its decrees and the writings of its ranking personnel) much of the source material upon which this history is based. Indeed, the central question for the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century was the unrepentantly state-centred, ‘How can this state be saved?’ In the frenetic, increasingly violent Young Turk, or Second Constitutional, era the focus of politics was on capturing the state and its ever-increasing powers and reach. The early Republic of Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk, represented the ultimate expression of the centralizing, self-aggrandizing single-party governmental apparatus whose agenda included ‘statism’ among its ‘Six Arrows’.3 141

142 Benjamin C. Fortna

Despite considerable recent attention to education in the late Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, the main assumption still operative is that the Republic emancipated its population from the retarding effects of the ancien régime, by building schools, eliminating the supposedly outmoded Arabo-Persian script and generally teaching the nation to read, with Mustafa Kemal playing the role of national instructor-in-chief. Through a larger project which examines the ways in which young people learned to read, the different contexts of reading, the variety of texts produced to this end and the different lessons and attitudes they contained, I hope to escape both this teleological approach to the Ottoman-Republican transition – a problem of historiography – and the confines of the state’s attempt to control the educational terrain – a problem of sources.

Education, State Control and the Market ‘Control’ is the operative word in the history of education across the nineteenth and twentieth century in the Ottoman/Turkish lands. It is the story, broadly conceived, of the attempt by the central government of first the empire and then the republic to seize control of the process, context, locale, personnel and content of education. Given that education was traditionally provided almost entirely by the various religious establishments (with the government involved only to the limited extent of training princes, military officers and the scribal service), this meant a major assertion of state control over education. Naturally, this changed the purpose, condition and ambience of education entirely, a transformation not always fully apprehended in the largely utilitarian comparisons between the two approaches. For many Muslims this shift entailed a change from a situation where he (and increasingly she) would have been taught to read the Qur’an by a member of the ulema (the Islamic men of learning), usually referred to as a hoca in the Turkish-speaking context, in a mekteb, or Qur’an school (often attached to a mosque), to one where he or she would be taught from state-supplied textbooks on a range of largely, but not entirely, secular topics by a lay teacher in a purpose-built state school building. The change from the configuration of hoca/mekteb/Qur’an to that of lay teacher/state school/ textbook dramatically altered the educational experience. But the processes I am interested in here, namely, learning to read and reading, were not confined to state schools or the texts they provided. Many learned to read outside of school and those who did learn in schools quickly found that what they had learned there amounted to what today’s educational bureaucrats like to refer to as ‘transferable skills’. They were now part of the statistically still relatively small but rapidly growing ranks of the literate.4 The growth in readership did not go unnoticed by the equally expanding ranks of authors and publishers who rushed in to provide them with reading material. Much of the boom in the publishing industry in the region

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could be attributed to the remarkable expansion of state education. The new schools required new textbooks, both for all the new students and for all the new teachers who had to be trained as well. It was natural that the authors and publishers of official school texts would also be keen to provide materials for the students outside of school time and outside the strictures of the official vetting process organized by the Ministry of Education. Although we know remarkably little about the economics of publishing in the late Ottoman- and early Republican periods, it is clear that the burgeoning ranks of readers were faced with an increasingly varied and inexpensive array of offerings, as publishers sensed the opportunities created by this new market. A sophisticated readership set the terms of this new market, and publishers reacted accordingly by raising or, more often, lowering their prices to accommodate what the market would bear.5 But mostly the publishers responded by attempting to carve out a particular niche for their publications. The resulting differentiation is reflected in the remarkable diversity of publications.6 Across this spectrum, commercialism was on the rise. As the number of publications expanded, their editors sought ways to distinguish their products from a crowded field of competitors. The first issue of the children’s periodical Bizim Mecmua (Our Magazine), appearing in 1922, claimed that it offered ‘things not found in other journals’. The trend towards differentiation increased as the competing presses sought to establish their own niche in the market. Like sellers everywhere they were both responding to what they perceived as the real needs of individual customers and attempting to convince them that such needs existed in the first place. (In this respect it is interesting to note the instances of ‘product placement’ employed by the journal Yeni Yol in the illustrations reproduced below.) The trend towards differentiation further reinforced the varied nature of reading material, especially, as we shall see, as companies tried to cater to a wider range of tastes. It also introduced a rising level of tension between the agenda of the state, which had previously enjoyed a fairly firm control over the printed word, and those materials intended especially for students. As the size of the press sector grew, the imperative for publishers to distinguish their products from all the rest could produce newly discordant voices in the increasingly diverse body of literature available for children, a corpus over which the state would struggle to control. Here again it is important to observe the distinction between the realm of the state and that of the private sector. Each generated reading material for school-aged children but under rather different parameters. In a sense the state made its own market for children’s literature, specifically by commissioning textbooks for its schools and generally by increasing the ranks of the literate. The private sector quickly responded to the growing market among young readers by producing reading material, mainly books and magazines, that its publishers, editors and writers imagined would appeal to this audience. It is

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clear that the state material was carefully vetted and controlled, both in the late Ottoman and Turkish Republican periods. School texts announced that they were in conformity with the appropriate regulations of the Education Ministry on their title pages. Archival evidence indicates that the state bureaucracy was quick to detect and pursue instances of material it deemed inappropriate or damaging, occasionally recalling texts that contained such material. As a result, textbook authors and their publishers were keen to stay on the correct side of the issue. For example, when the Turkish Republic promulgated the hat law in 1925 both the author and publisher of a popular series of textbooks in use in the state school system wrote to Ankara to assert that they were in the process of changing the illustrations accompanying its text to reflect conformity with the new law. Suddenly, characters who had been wearing the fez underwent a sartorial transformation so that they now appeared in peaked and brimmed Western-style headgear.7 The situation of the private-sector publishers is much more difficult to determine. If anything, they seem to have practiced a sort of self-censorship where children’s publications are concerned, and almost all of the periodicals produced seem to support, at least outwardly, the regime in power. Thus either directly or indirectly the children’s literature broadly reinforced the sense of uniformity that the government’s policy intended. I would now like to return to the relationship between the new publishing dispensation and the question of educational change and expansion as reflected in the change from the world of hoca/mekteb/Qur’an to that of lay teacher/state school/textbook. It is clear that what both the late Ottoman and early Republican states intended was that the educational system they were rapidly – and expensively – expanding would produce young subjects/citizens who behaved, appeared and thought in a particular way. Both regimes wanted (and here we may note one of many Ottoman-Republican continuities spanning what is mainly held to be a stark historiographical divide) students who were patriotic, westernized in certain tastes, yet Ottoman or Turkish in others, respectful of their elders, attuned to cleanliness, morally upright, capable and, of course, literate. They were attempting to create what Gramsci referred to as a ‘single cultural “climate.”’ A crucial feature of this endeavour was its attempt to project the authority of the state through the new educational system in general and through the medium of the textbook in particular. In both periods, late Ottoman and early Republican, the state used a number of tools and effects to instil the sense that it was authoritative – and here the semantic link between authorial voice and authoritative voice is readily apparent. The means it employed included projecting an unrelentingly didactic and omniscient posture towards its student readers; imposing the rigid order of the new curriculum with its grading system, schedule (time-consciousness), grades, prizes and so on; adopting an, at times, extremely condescending approach to children who are frequently referred to as having ‘mini, mini brains’; setting out a

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series of binary oppositions and juxtapositions (for example, good versus bad; well-mannered versus naughty) which did double duty as both didactic tool and as a means for conveying authority; modelling ideal behaviour, both for children and teachers, emphasizing proper deportment and morality and therefore part of a worldwide trend in this period; and through a sort of ventriloquism which placed sometimes quite ridiculously far-fetched paeans to their school and teachers in the mouths or pens of fictitious children, one of whom, for example, is made to compare her school positively with her favourite dessert. Whatever their actual effects, and we cannot exclude the possibility that the aggressiveness of the state’s attempt to project strength may actually have been seen as a sign of weakness, it is clear that the intention written across the pages of the materials produced for state school students was one of unified and almost monotonous authority. However ambitious these expectations were, the reality was always more complicated, messier. Beyond the state’s yearning for producing cadres of interchangeable students ready to take up their share of service to the fatherland, there lurked an array of tensions and contradictions that frequently frustrated the master plans. In the realm of education and reading there were tensions between the secular and the religious, between public and private and between the serious and playful, as I have indicated elsewhere.8 In many respects state educationalists were attuned to these tensions and this awareness made them redouble their efforts to impose their imprint on the processes and texts involved in education and learning to read. As we will see shortly, state-supplied teaching materials and state memoranda indicate a profound distrust of the lessons that students received at home and attempted to ensure that parental influences be diminished if not eradicated entirely.

Children’s literature and the challenge to state control Children’s publications reflect the tensions between state and society in the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican periods. In a broad sense they point towards the contradictions inherent in the state’s attempts to expand literacy and access to information about the wider world that it deemed necessary to raise the up-to-date, educated citizenry its modernization programme demanded. The main problem for the state, of course, was how to maintain control over information and the flow of ideas and texts while initiating the range of changes that were leading towards an increasingly unrestricted notion of ‘civil society’. Over time one can detect the subtle but steady emergence of a questioning spirit in children’s literature. The early examples are hardly worrisome from the state’s perspective, but as we shall see, the trend was moving in a potentially more troublesome direction. But let us look at an early, less threatening example. It is taken from a late Ottoman children’s primer called For the

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Benefit of Children: Moral Improvement and Useful Information and was pub· lished in AH 1304 (1886/7 CE). The book’s author, Ali Irfan, although not a household name, seems to have made a career for himself by writing a long list of children’s books, and can thus be seen as a symptom of the expansion of state education and literacy in this period. A compendium of advice, bromides and children’s tales, the book fits in well with the state’s plans to dictate the moral development of its young subjects. Let us turn now to a story called simply ‘The Book’.9 This story has to do with a dutiful boy, aptly named Zeki, meaning intelligent or clever, and his mother who defying statistical probability is conspicuously literate. One day when they are at home together, Zeki becomes bored and, coming to sit beside his mother, asks her to tell him a story. The mother obliges, relating her account of Fatih Sultan Mehmed, the conqueror of Istanbul, whom she describes as ‘brave, intelligent, and merciful’. Then the child asks, ‘Mother, do you know Fatih Sultan Mehmed?’ The mother replies with surprise that he has been dead for many, many years. The child then asks, with a logical directness befitting his age, ‘If he is dead, [then] how do you know that he was an intelligent and merciful sultan?’ Forgoing the universal temptation of parental omniscience, the mother explains that she read it in a book, and cites a number of such useful and informative publications. The story continues. One subsequent day the mother leaves the child alone at home while she goes out shopping. Zeki again becomes bored and wonders at the realization that his mother’s books seem to contain a trove of beautiful stories. He takes one down and opens it but is unable to see anything apart from some very small black scribbles. He puts the book back, only to try another with the same unhappy result. When his mother returns, he relates his frustrating experience with the printed word to her and asks, ‘Dear Mother what must I do to understand the beautiful stories that are in your books?’ ‘My son,’ she replies, ‘these stories can only be understood by reading them. One cannot do it any other way.’ The following day he begins school with the desire to learn, and within two or three years, the reader is told, he makes such progress that he is able to read not only his mother’s books, but also much more difficult ones as well. This story indicates, among other things, that the authorities looked favourably upon an inquisitive child, provided that his questions were unproblematic. The fictional Zeki represents the ideal case in that he is naturally inquisitive and his perhaps wishfully imagined thirst for learning can be channelled, thanks to the confederacy of his mother, into the state school system. Not all educators were lucky enough to face such compliance and, as we shall see below, not all children’s literature would assume such an uncritical stance. Unsurprisingly many children’s publications found it natural to link their offerings with the world of the school, and therefore seemed initially to coincide with the state’s agenda. Hoping perhaps to capitalize on the pre-existing

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relationship between young readers and their schools or simply perhaps unwilling to challenge this relationship, many publications reinforced the link, via praising the school or by linking their content with the school calendar (competitions and busy-work set to coincide with the summer calendar. For example, the first issue of Çocuklara Klraat (A reader for children), founded in 1883, states that the suggestion for its creation came from ‘one of your teachers’, promised to keep children busy during their holidays with ‘puzzles and questions written for the lessons in your curriculum’.10

New horizons Eventually the new reading materials opened up new vistas and included new subjects that fell outside state control. This was perhaps inevitable, given the sheer size and scope of the state’s educational agenda, but it certainly sat uneasily with the intention, observed in both late Ottoman and Republican eras, for the state to dominate relationships with young readers, displacing parents and all views formed outside the school. We can see this, for example, in the texts used to teach morals (ahlâk) during the late Ottoman era in which a profound distrust of home environment can be detected,11 and in the young Republic’s Primary School Instruction of 1929, which stated, ‘The teacher’s first task is to establish affection between the pupil and his subject and by annulling children’s old knowledge to create new information in its place.’12 The new literature available to children in the late Ottoman and early Republican periods exposed them to a whole new set of referents. Particularly apparent was the emphasis on new horizons in terms of both geography and genre. The new information, subtly but cumulatively, introduced the young readers to worlds far removed from the ambit of the state, and thus inadvertently served to reduce its relative importance over time. The artwork contained in the children’s publications alone depicted a wide array of references, both indigenous and foreign. As a result young readers were confronted with both local images, such as the characters from the popular Karagöz shadow puppet repertoire or children wearing the fez, and those coming from afar, featuring such illustrations as aeroplanes, junks sailing along a Chinese river or a native American chieftain in his war bonnet. The print content of this literature conveyed a similarly eclectic range. For example, a single issue of Çocuklara Mahsus Gazete (The Children’s Own Gazette), the longest lived children’s periodical from the late Ottoman period (1896–1908), reveals the following combination of materials: there is a story of ‘Malik ibn Dinar’ and his encounter with a small child; a reference to Prophet Muhammad’s advice on social interaction; an illustration of children in contemporary Germany fording a river in a horse-drawn cart; news from Brussels and Japan; an illustration of an orphanage in San Francisco; instructions for eating at table in alafranga mode; and all of this alongside

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more conventional fare, emphasizing correct moral behaviour, the importance of working hard, the family and so on.13 A glance at children’s publication from a slightly later period reveals a similarly wide range of influences. The first year of Çocuk Dünyasl, which was published from 1913–26, includes references to the Old Testament; the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid; the 1001 Nights; the legend of the Japanese warrior Oeyama; Goethe; Tolstoy; William Tell; the Wright brothers and the first aeroplane; the Ottoman writers Ahmed Midhat Efendi, Ziya Gökalp and Mehmed Emin; ‘national’ stories (millî masal) as well as correspondence from readers in Baku, Kazan and Bulgaria.14 Young readers were thus exposed to an eclectic mix of images and genres, with a broad range of geographical and chronological provenance. But this eclecticism was increasingly at odds with the contrastingly predictable fare they were receiving at school. In other words, there was a gap between the material supplied by the state and that procured through the free market. Over time that gap appears to have been growing. On the whole, young readers were provided what might be expected in terms of materials intended to inculcate values linked with loyalty (first to the empire and its sultan and then to the republic and its president), duty, respect for elders, cleanliness and, generally speaking, the modern. The children’s literature provided models according to which they were meant to pattern their lives along more or less predictable lines, in tandem with the official, school-centred view of childhood and the messages that children ought to be receiving. Perhaps young readers experienced some sort of whiplash effect due to the rather sudden transition from Ottoman to republican ideology. For example, one story appearing in an early republican reader included a story called ‘Long live the Republic’ which features an argument between two boys, one (Osman) representing the ancien régime and the other (Turhan) the new republic.15 Naturally enough it is Turhan who emerges as the guardian of Republican values against this reactionary Ottoman usurper. Each protagonist is surrounded with a crowd of anonymous partisans, who seem to represent factions in broader society. Here is a taste of the dialogue from the opening lines: Osman: (rifle on his shoulder, with a contingent of children behind him, sternly): Look sharp! Come here all of you and let me see you. (The children stop their playing and look on in astonishment.) Turhan: (bravely): Are we supposed to come on your order? Osman: Yes, on my order. Leave your games and come here! (He aims his rifle at them, and so do his confederates.) Turhan: What do you want from us? Osman: You will give me all of your toys and all of your playthings. Turhan: Vay beyim vay! Who do you think you are? You are acting like the evil padishah who robbed the nation. That day has gone, my dear. (O zaman geçti, yavrum.)

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Eventually, of course, Turhan and his faction of Republicans win out. Turhan’s last line is ‘Let’s all shout together, “Down with the Sultan; Long live the Republic!”’ In other words, the students were being called upon to move from being devoted to the sultan to vilifying him in a very short time. The mixed message may have further increased the students’ receptivity to the parody and cynicism that would eventually emerge.

Parody When it came to the environment of the school, children’s publications generated a jarringly mixed message. With time children’s publications began to offer material that parodied or otherwise made light of state education – its teachers, lessons and surroundings. Given the overbearing seriousness and didacticism of the state educational enterprise as a whole, the publisher’s task of finding a humorous target was hardly difficult. Let us now consider this turn to parody, at once both a radical, unexpected departure from the reverent norm and a natural turn of events suggested by the combined logic of the expansion of state education in the first place and literacy, as we have seen, and the forces of market capitalism. At times the recourse to humour was seemingly generic. There are numerous instances of children’s articles that seem to have been included purely for their risible nature, for example, a story about a horse that could write or a lamb that came to school. Sometimes the search for laughs could assume a darker tone, producing what today would immediately be labelled politically incorrect. The magazine Yeni Yol, particularly notable in this regard, ran cartoons ridiculing one character for being overweight or making jokes about an African woman depicted in full racist caricature with her two children, named Daylight (Gündüz) and Cotton (Pamuk). Sometimes this ‘fun’ could be taken at the expense of the official line, actually encouraging disobedience. Children’s journals eventually targeted schools and teachers as objects of derision, poking fun at them in an apparent attempt to form a closer bond with the students. Thus schools and teachers were portrayed as silly or irrelevant. Hence, like their contemporaries in Western Europe in this period, publishers were attempting to cater to the tastes of younger readers.16 The result was a shocking departure from the serious, duty-laden tone and material of the earlier texts. The new trend was towards the comic and the satirical. Naturally, the old hocas and their mektebs, or Qur’an schools, were a prime candidate for this abuse, but interestingly the new style schools were targeted as well. Consider the cover illustration of an edition of Yeni Yol dating from 1925.17 See figure 6.1. It features a member of the ulema teaching in a ‘new style’ school, with the children seated in rows of desks. The scene resembles one of those children’s games where the object is to spot all of the things that are wrong in the picture. The hoca looks on aghast over his charges; some of the boys are snickering and

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Figure 6.1 Chaos in the classroom: parodic representation of a ‘hoca’ in a ‘new-style’ school

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whispering to each other; some are busy folding paper into origami-like shapes; one is standing to give an apparently unconvincing answer while a fist punches him in the back while others pore over a copy of Yeni Yol. The message is clear: the teacher has clearly lost control of the class, and none of the props of classroom teaching – the map on the wall or the blackboard with its Arabic declensions – can hold the boys’ attention the way the magazine can. Other examples show that this sort of satire was not only reserved for members of the ulema. A humorous piece in Bizim Mecmua, founded just prior to the establishment of the Republic, has some fun at the expense of a new-style teacher when the math problem he gives the class is converted into a joke by a cheeky retort: ‘The teacher: “What do five kurush bread, five kurush tea, five kurush cheese make?” Student: “Breakfast, Mr Teacher.”’18 A final example, accompanied by an illustration, provides more evidence that the fez- and frock coat-wearing teacher is equally subject to ridicule. In this scene, another math lesson, the teacher is again made to look ridiculous: In the Math Lesson: My son, what is ten take away ten? !! Why are you silent. For example, a man buys ten apples. He throws two away because they are rotten; he drops five; three are stolen by vagabonds; so now how many are left? A pear [slang for idiot].19 The crudely drawn illustration (figure 6.2) makes it clear which side the magazine is on; one of the boys has a copy of Yeni Yol sticking out of his jacket pocket.

Conclusion These instances of parody and humour point up the tension between the patriotic, hegemonic discourse surrounding education and the state, on the one hand, and the extension of control beyond the realm of the state that was driven, in part, by the profit motive, on the other. In other words, we encounter among the children’s periodicals of the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican period evidence of the convergence of two trends. First, and somewhat ironically, the rapid expansion of state education and its subsequent reliance on publishers outside its control eventually weakened its control over publications intended for young children. Secondly, the tendency of the market to encourage differentiation opened up subversive possibilities that, perhaps inevitably, could be turned against the state itself.

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Figure 6.2 A ‘new-style’ teacher is subjected to similar treatment

The question of whether the humour attempted in these publications represented a truly counterhegemonic tendency or was merely intended as a diverting endeavour free of political import is nearly impossible to determine in the absence of much more information concerning the individuals involved on the production end and the decisions that lay behind choices to buy certain periodicals on the consumption side. At this point in my research I can only state with some degree of certainty that at the very least

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the conditions of change in this period opened up the possibility for subversion, and that the potential was being created for an increasingly fraught relationship between the state and the reading public. To return to the words of Gramsci cited at the beginning of this chapter, perhaps we could say that the children’s press of the late Ottoman and early Turkish period was acting to redress the imbalance between teacher and the pupil, as representing the state and society respectively, by attempting to alter the hegemonic relationship inherent in the provision of state education. The state’s conception of education hardly amounted to Gramsci’s vision of ‘an active and reciprocal’ relationship between teacher and pupil or between state and society. The emergence of a publishing sector outside of direct state control did not redress this imbalance, of course, but perhaps it provided a means of beginning to do so.

Notes

c

c

1. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. 349–50. 2. Benjamin C. Fortna, ‘Islamic Morality in Late Ottoman “Secular” Schools’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 32 (2000), pp. 369–93; Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Benjamin C. Fortna, ‘Education and Autobiography at the End of the Ottoman Empire’, Die Welt des Islams, Vol. 41, No.1 (2001), pp. 1–31. I gratefully acknowledge support from the Spencer Foundation and from SOAS without which I would have been unable to carry out this research. 3. Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I B Tauris, 1998), pp. 189–90. 4. For an overview of attempts to define and quantify late Ottoman and early Republican literacy, see François Georgeon, ‘Lire et écrire à la fin de l’Empire ottoman: quelques remarques introductives’, in Oral et écrit dans le monde turcottoman, edited by Nicolas Vatin, Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Mediterranée 75–6 (1995), pp. 170–3. For the Arabic-speaking world, see Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 135–65. 5. Palmira Brummett, Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1909–1911 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 40–50. 6. Late Ottoman periodicals for children have been identified and analysed in, Cüneyd Okay, Osmanll Çocuk Hayatlnda Yenile¸smeler, 1850–1900 (Istanbul: Kirkambar Yaylnlarl, 1998) and Cüneyd Okay, Eski Harfli Çocuk Dergileri (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 1999). 7. Cüneyd Okay, ‘Inkilâplarin Hayata Geçerilimesinde Egitimin Yeri ve ¸sapka Kanunun Örnegi’ Bilgi ve Bellek, Vol. 2, No. 4 (forthcoming). I am grateful to Professor Okay for generously sharing his research and relevant source material. 8. See Benjamin C. Fortna, ‘Learning to Read in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2001) 33–41.

154 Benjamin C. Fortna . . 9. Ali Irfan, Çocuklara Istifade[;] Tezhib-i Ahlâk ve Malumat-i Nafia (Istanbul: S¸ irket-i Murettibiye Matbaasl, 1304), pp. 21–5. 10. Çocuklara Klraat, 1 (1883), pp. 1–2. 11. Fortna, . Imperial Classroom, p. 234. 12. T.C., Ilkmektepler Talimatnamesi (Ankara, 1929), p. 18. 13. Çocuklara Mahsus Gazete, 3 (29 Zilhicce 1313). 14. Çocuk Dünyasi, 1 (1913). 15. Cumhuriyet Çocuklarina Türkçe Klraat, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Istanbul: Hilmi, 1929) pp. 88–91. 16. Martyn Lyons, ‘New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers’, in A History of Reading in the West, edited by Roger Chartier and Guglielmo Cavallo, (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), p. 332. 17. Yeni Yol, 57 (1 January 1925). 18. Bizim Mecmua, 2 (12 April 1922), p. 4. The term of address for the teacher, Muallim Bey, marks him as a secularly trained teacher, and not a member of the ulema. 19. Yeni Yol, 66 (5 March 1925).

7 Celebratory Ramadan and Hyperpiety in a Mexican Standoff: Counterhegemony in the Crossfire Walter Armbrust 1

Allah’s Apostle said, ‘When Ramadan begins, the gates of Paradise are opened.’2 Although Egyptian Muslims have fasted during the month of Ramadan for centuries, their mass media nonetheless feature a surprising amount of material describing how the fast should be done, and analysing what it means. The content of this annual Ramadan discourse is disseminated in books, pamphlets and various audio-visual formats, as if every year the authors and talking heads were addressing a new cohort of complete novices to the ritual of fasting.3 Despite appearances, readers and viewers perceive themselves not at all as novices, but rather as perfectly competent to make their own interpretations of what Ramadan means and how one should perform the fast. A public empowered with the right of interpretation still encounters a panoply of experts in books and on television who devote considerable energy to explaining how a correctly performed Ramadan fast curbs the passions and desires occupying the hearts and minds of believers during the rest of the year. However, it is curious that they pay little attention to the passions and desires that are constructed through Ramadan rather than outside it. For Ramadan may be shahr al-siyam wa al-qiyam – the month of fasting and praying – as the religious authorities say. But as they and everyone else know, it is also the month of excessive consumption – of food (particularly luxury items) and television content that has nothing to do with religion, and which paradoxically sharpens the very passions and desire that the daily fast is supposed to suppress. If, when Ramadan begins, the gates of paradise are truly open, as the hadith says, then it must be acknowledged that Egyptian Ramadan practices might attract the unwelcome attention of gatecrashers. The open gate of Egyptian Ramadan seems to beckon to state authorities concerned with covering themselves in a cloak of morality, marketing executives eager to make a profit, mass media moguls salivating at supercharged advertising revenues and even just plain hedonists looking for a good party. 155

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The contradictions between Ramadan as a ritual and Ramadan as a holiday, obvious to all on some level, are not necessarily perceived by social actors in Egypt as a phenomenon connected with power or politics. Naturalized invisible links between incompatible interests are the stuff of hegemony. But while Egyptian Ramadan may be usefully understood as a highly complex hegemonic construct, the question of what, in this case, constitutes counterhegemony is even more vexed. A counterhegemony must advance an alternative, but one can hardly be ‘against Ramadan’ and be a Muslim. Public renunciation of Muslim identity is a drastic step, which few people in Egypt can take. Apostasy is therefore in effect a kind of firewall protecting hegemonic Ramadan from the frontal assault of straightforward rejection or replacement. By contrast, to instead take refuge from the ritualistic side of Ramadan by embracing the celebratory holiday version of Ramadan is to engage in a manifestly futile war of position. Such a tactic would not constitute resistance to Ramadan (a notion that would, in any case, sound extremely odd to any Muslim), but rather the adoption of a position within the hegemonic construct – and a weak position at that, as it flirts with the ‘nuclear option’ of apostasy. Moreover I will argue that simply refusing the excessive consumption that comes every year with Ramadan also does not necessarily constitute opposition to the hegemony of Ramadan. It may be going too far to say that Ramadan is counterhegemonyproof, but there is no denying that Ramadan in Egypt is so intertwined with certain inescapable imperatives of the age that countering it is particularly problematic.

Fasting and feasting: ritual versus holiday I argue that what is called Ramadan is actually two Ramadans – that of fasting and praying, and that of excessive consumption. The notion of ‘two Ramadans’ is certainly not a local construct. If asked, most Egyptians would undoubtedly say that of course excessive consumption and the promotion of materialism are incompatible with ‘Ramadan’; the act of worship described in religious discourse is the only formal label that can be applied to the month of fasting prescribed for Muslims. However, explicitly asking ‘what is Ramadan’ would be no different than if one were to ask, ‘what is Arabic’? Most Egyptians will answer al-lugha al-fusha – the ‘more eloquent language’, usually glossed as ‘classical Arabic’, and linked conceptually, if not empirically, to the Quran. Fusha Arabic is ideologically linked to the modern written Arabic taught in schools, even if that Arabic is demonstrably not very much like that of the Qur’an, and even if the Arabic that people speak is very different indeed from whatever it is that makes Arabic ‘Arabic’ in formal situations. But such nuances are invisible if one approaches Arabic through the categories that most native speakers use to describe it. More importantly, the links between language and society that

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make Arabic a productive index of political and economic authority become invisible. So it is with Ramadan: there is an ideologically correct notion of ‘what it is’, or more precisely, how it is to be practiced, which is rarely thought of as ideological; and there are Ramadan practices in which various ideological negotiations between social groups have in fact been made. Ramadan as practiced in Egyptian society must be understood as an instance of hegemony – a situation in which ‘subordinate groups are, if not controlled; then at least contained within an ideological space which does not seem at all “ideological”: which appears instead to be permanent and “natural”, to lie outside history, to be beyond particular interests’.4 Ernesto Laclau defines hegemony along the same lines, as ‘the type of political relation by which a particularity assumes the representation of an (impossible) universality entirely incommensurable with it’.5 He asserts that, ‘All groups are particularities within the social, structured around specific interests. But they only become hegemonic when they take up the representation of the universality of the community conceived as a whole.’6 There are some obvious complications arising from an analysis of Ramadan through the concept of hegemony. One is that groups in question are complex and not easily reducible to social classes. An ‘impossible universality’ represented by Ramadan nominally pits a ‘Westernized’ elite that has historically championed secularism against subaltern groups which embrace religion. But such an opposition rapidly dissolves in the face of historical contingency. ‘Western’ and ‘secular’ are rarely used as terms of selfattribution by Egyptians, and therefore ‘Westernized elites’ are less a social group than a negative image against which almost anyone could define himself or herself.7 A ‘Westernized elite’ is anyone who exhibits the diacritica of a European – a huge group with many different interests; anyone in a European suit rather than a galabiya, and yet no one. At the same time, it would be an understatement to say that historically, there has been fierce competition for access to the material benefits associated with ‘outside Egypt’, whether ‘outside’ meant Europe, the United States, the Arab Gulf or other places; and with the competition for access to ‘outside’ came an equally fierce competition for controlling the meaning of ‘outside’ in local culture, particularly in an era when elements of the outside world were so blatantly present within Egypt, and so massively intertwined with its culture. There are, of course, winners and losers in these competitions, but there are also many different levels to the game. The ‘subalterns’ who embrace Islam, nominally arrayed against a ‘Westernized elite’, are no easier to define as a social group. It has never really been politically viable to deny religious identity in Egypt, though there has long been debate over defining the role of Islam in government or national identity. The authority of religious institutions declined over the past century, even as the influence of extra-establishment religious movements increased. The most important Islamist ideologues (Hassan al-Banna and

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Sayyid Qutb, for example) came from the middle strata of society and had access to modern educational institutions – the same institutions which were the crucible of those who could conventionally be termed ‘secular’ or ‘Westernized’. Certainly there is no ‘religious class’ identifiable over all of the past century. Just as a ‘Westernized’ class is better thought of in terms of competition over control of Egypt’s relation to the outside world, so too it might be better to think of a ‘religious class’ not as an identifiable group, but as a process of competing for moral legitimacy. In both cases, though the field of competition is complex, the players are concrete in terms of their strategies to mobilize resources and influence politics. In that sense one might be able to discuss hegemonic Ramadan in terms of relations between social groups within at least provisionally defined contexts. But one must acknowledge the rapid change in these contexts. An Islamic entrepreneur selling an Oprah Winfrey-like da’wa (‘Islamic outreach’) television programme in 2005; an Islamist engineering student recently migrated from the countryside and living in al-ahya` al-’ashwa`iya (‘haphazard neighborhoods’) that sprouted on the Margins of Cairo in the 1980s; an Azharite scholar adjusting to the reality of nationalization of his institution in the 1960s; and a Sufi schoolteacher founding an Islamic social movement in the 1930s: all can be understood as participants in religious groups that pose themselves against Westernized secular society. But there is nothing to be gained from seeing them as a stable subaltern group posed against a continuous Western/secular group. ‘Islamists’ are a poor candidate for Gramscian ‘organic intellectuals’ capable of incubating counterhegemonic strategies because they have always overlapped and interpenetrated the ‘Westernized’ parts of society that would be opposed to ‘subaltern’ Muslim society if one were to insist on applying the concept of hegemony strictly to identifiable groups and interests. Used more creatively the concept of hegemony still helps to sort out such a messy relation of groups; the hegemonic construct is there, even if the groups vying for dominance within it are fluid. A key component of the concept of hegemony is mobility – the notion that ‘the life of the state is conceived of as a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria . . . between the interests of the fundamental group and those of the subordinate groups’.8 Or as Hebdige puts it, ‘hegemony is . . . a “moving equilibrium” containing relations of forces favourable or unfavourable to this or that tendency’.9 The conceptual flexibility of hegemony makes it analytically productive, as it provides the means to get beyond attributions of static oppositions between groups or terms. In a nutshell, the contingent nature of hegemony makes it articulate well with complex changing social realities. The reality in question centres on competition over meanings: the meaning of Egypt’s relation to the world outside it, and the meaning of morality. These are sutured together by means of a ritual fused to a holiday, namely Ramadan. My chapter will

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approach Ramadan first through an analysis of its ritual side, as elaborated each year in addresses through mass media to an imagined Muslim interpretive community. Subsequently I will examine Ramadan-as-holiday in the context of a family’s experience of Ramadan entertainment. My conclusion will return to the problematic nature of countering hegemonic Ramadan.

Fiqh al-siyam In the introduction to his book on the ‘jurisprudence of fasting’ (fiqh al-siyam) the well-known Egyptian scholar and television personality Yusuf al-Qaradawi notes that in Islam human beings are believed to have a dual nature. They are made of material (literally mud – tin), and of spirit (ruh). The material nature of man is necessary because ‘he needs what is taken from the earth in order to eat, drink, wear clothes and live’.10 But the material side of human nature can also reduce mankind to the level of animals, and therefore it must be controlled. Qaradawi’s book argues that Islam gives human beings the means to control their material side (al-janib al-tini), and fasting is one of the foremost ways to accomplish this objective: Fasting is considered one of the greatest arenas for man’s spiritual struggle in Islam. Man, by his own free will, controls eating, drinking and desires such as the craving for sex, all for the sake of God the Sublime. The Muslim refrains from partaking in his desires; he does not extend his hand toward things that are easily available; he is hungry beside the best food; is thirsty with cold water before him; abstains from his wife when she is right next to him; does not smoke when the cigarettes are in his pocket. The fast is a true test of the scope of a human being’s belief and of the human will.11 Like all Muslim scholars, Qaradawi discusses Ramadan as an act of worship (‘ibada; pl. ‘ibadat). ‘Ibadat in general are considered means for purifying the soul. Abu al-Wafa` al-Taftazani, a prominent Egyptian scholar writing a generation before the publication of Qaradawi’s Jurisprudence of Fasting described the general purpose of ‘ibadat as follows: God enjoins acts of worship (‘ibadat) upon the human being so that he can free his soul of its desires and cravings, which are the greatest barrier to knowing the Lord, and witnessing His sublime greatness. It should be noted that in a true religious experience – as opposed to a superficial one – acts of worship connect man to his creator with a strong spiritual bond, and at the same time cut him off from his sins and wickedness.12 Ramadan is an ‘ibada of a special type: ‘one of the rites of worship which are the pillars of Islam: prayer, fasting, giving alms, and pilgrimage’.13 Among the

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‘five pillars’14 fasting is given a special place. Contemporary texts on Ramadan often cite a hadith that states the following: ‘Allah said, “All the deeds of Adam’s sons (people) are for them, except fasting which is for Me, and I will give the reward for it.” ’15 Another hadith states that ‘I [God] will reward (the fasting person) for it and the reward of good deeds is multiplied ten times’.16 Most of the contemporary religious writing on Ramadan focuses on the disciplinary potential of fasting, as suggested by the Qaradawi passage quoted above. Here is another formulation of such sentiments: The month of Ramadan is a month of spiritual exercise and training; spiritual exercise for the apprehensive soul burdened with the weight of sins over many years; training against the Satan of the soul which is perhaps inside each one of us. More than that, it is a divine and heavenly trial which the Creator gives us to allow cleansing the fabric of our spirits of whatever spiritual detritus or signs of evil have adhered to it. It is a fine and gentle ‘divine education’ which will correct twisted roads in the Straight Path – the Path of God.17 But while instructional literature puts great emphasis on such concepts as discipline and purification, it also assures readers that Ramadan is not meant to be an impossible endurance test. Qaradawi writes that ‘not all fasting is praiseworthy or necessary in Islam, for . . . what has not been made legal or commanded likewise cannot be a part of worship, because it is heretical innovation (bid’a)’.18 Of the five types of ahkam (rulings on points of law)19 a number of types of fasting fall into the ‘forbidden’ and ‘undesirable’ categories. For example, fasting on the days of the two main Muslim holidays (‘Id al-Fitr and ‘Id al-Adha – the Feast of Breaking the Fast, and the Feast of the Immolation), or on the days of tashriq (the three days following the ‘Id al-Adha). Continuous fasting, by contrast, is in the ‘undesirable’ category,20 as is fasting during the month of Rajab, if it is done in a manner similar to the Ramadan fast.21 The general effect of all such fine-tuned recommendations of when and how one fasts is to dispel any illusions one may have that a Muslim can simply accrue greater moral worth simply through extra fasting. The physical act of fasting – its form – cannot be equated to the content. In an article entitled ‘Why Do We Fast?’, Shaykh Zaki al-Din Sha’ban begins by insisting on keeping the form of fasting separate from its purpose: ‘In every act of worship God commands to his servants there is an objective, a benefit, and an aim. Any act of worship that does not accomplish its intended objective has the form and image of worship, but not its reality or spirit.’22 A Friday sermon on the subject of Ramadan by Hasan al-Banna delivered in the 1940s made the point more forcefully: The basic principle in a proper act of worship is virtuous intent. Every act is done with an intent, and every man intends something [by his acts]. If

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the first motive of an act of worship is not heartfelt – involving sentiment with bodies and hearts; purifying soul and spirit – then it has no weight and will bring no reward from God. For there is nothing in the servant’s prayers except what he puts into them intentionally. How often the fasting man gets nothing from his efforts other than hunger and thirst!23 The gist of contemporary literature on Ramadan is that quality takes precedence over quantity, or even over straightforwardly correct practice that is devoid of understanding. The notion of an Islam attuned to orthopraxy (a concern with ‘correct practice’ rather than with ‘correct belief’)24 seems particularly nonsensical in light of what, in these writings, is a relentless insistence on the inseparability of faith and ritual practice.25 But the sort of ‘over-fasting’ identified by Qaradawi as forbidden (for example, fasting on the ‘Id al-Fitr and the ‘Id al-Adha) or undesirable (for example, fasting continuously, fasting through the month of Rajab) are accompanied by injunctions against what one might call ‘under-fasting’. Of course simply not observing the fast is completely forbidden. Also forbidden is, for all intents and purposes, pretending to fast. Qaradawi’s Ramadan book has no neat category for this type of forbidden practice – nothing on the relatively crisp model of ‘ifrad siyam yaum 27 Rajab’ (setting aside the 27th of Rajab for fasting) – a type of ‘al-siyam al-mubtada’ fi al-din’ (fasting that is heretical in religion). Rather the category is listed in the book as a description: ‘An employee who obstructs the public good on grounds of fasting’.26 He elaborates further: [Another example is] anyone who fasting prevents from giving others their due. An example of this is the teacher who cannot do his duty explaining lessons to his students because he is fasting. Or the employee who is unable to discharge his assigned duties toward people, delaying them day after day on the pretext that he is fasting and is too tired. And so on and so forth – all those who use fasting as a pretext on Monday or Thursday, or on the fast of Dawud etc. when he does not do his work well, and does not fulfil his duties.27 Qaradawi’s relatively awkward illustration of the nominal fast that covers a complete failure in proper intent was more colourfully described some 60 years ago by al-Banna, who dismisses the fallen Muslims who do not even pretend to fast, and then turns his attention to another group who fasts like everyone else, but who are as far as can be from understanding the point of fasting, or the virtues of Ramadan. Either they sleep during the day, or they sin with an ugly word, harsh withdrawal from society, a criminal gaze, or uncouth thoughts. At night they gather in places of pleasure and amusement, and indeed, of sin and

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obscenity. Gluttonously they eat every manner of food, filling their bellies. For them Ramadan is the month of good eating, fine drink, long nights in bars, and partaking in all sorts of entertainment.28 In fact very little of the formal literature spelling out correct Ramadan practices year after year – citing the same hadiths, giving the same advice about spiritual cleansing, describing Ramadan as the ‘month of victories’, and disseminating a ‘jurisprudence of fasting’ rooted in ancient texts but now recast in more accessible forms for a less scholarly interpretive community – very little of this literature says very much about Ramadan practices which are, by its own standards, quite deviant. This is remarkable given how different the practices coalescing around Ramadan can be from the Ramadan of jurisprudential manuals.

Celebrating Ramadan As anyone who has been in Egypt during Ramadan knows, it is quite easy to observe deviations from the scripturally oriented explanation of the Ramadan fasting ritual outlined above. On the contrary, Egyptian Ramadan appears to be celebratory, even hedonistic. Many people simply invert night and day, thereby incurring little hardship from the fast. I encountered this practice in 2003 when I was asked by a friend to write a short article detailing my own observations of Ramadan (of AH 1424), to be published in the weekly magazine Sabah al-Khayr.29 I wrote the article in English, he translated it into Arabic and I reviewed the translation with him. The article was published on the 23rd of Ramadan, so we were working on it the week before, in roughly the middle of the month. We reviewed the translation in his office in the Ruz al-Yusuf building.30 He asked me to come by at about 11 p.m. I arrived at the appointed time and found the place buzzing with activity – busier than I had ever seen it during the daytime. Clearly the employees had simply elected to do their jobs in the evening after they had broken the fast rather than during the daytime fasting hours.31 The next day I turned on the television, and, flipping through the channels, I encountered an interview broadcast on Nile TV in which a man and his wife, both journalists, were asked whether it was permissible during Ramadan to simply sleep during day and work at night while after the fast. Nile TV is a station for foreigners – all the broadcasts are in foreign languages, English in this case. In their response to the interviewer’s question the couple – young, smartly dressed, and ‘Westernized’ in their dress and in the mise-en-scene (a chic living room in the style of American talk shows) – both implicitly invoked the ‘jurisprudence of fasting’, solemnly explaining that of course nobody would reverse night and day, thereby effectively avoiding the fast even while technically complying with it. They did not actually say that it was ‘forbidden’, but rather that ‘it did not happen’.32 And

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yet one of the two actually worked for Ruz al-Yusuf, where a few hours before the broadcast I had viewed virtually the entire organization hard at work in the middle of the night. Since the intended audience for Nile TV broadcasts is foreigners, the question was, essentially posed as if by an outsider; the answer neatly sutured up all the very noticeable contradictions in Ramadan practice into Laclau’s ‘(impossible) universality’.33 But the invocation of ‘universal Ramadan’ occurs in this case because the implicit outside perspective on the phenomenon of fasting requires such a distillation. By contrast, in local Ramadan practices – as opposed to the universal Ramadan invoked by an implicit outsider gaze – the celebratory side of Ramadan can actually loom larger than Ramadan-as-act-of-worship. The most obvious reason for this is that celebratory Ramadan practices in Egypt have long been co-opted by state modernizers and commercial interests, largely as a means of furthering what looks like an agenda of Westernization and secular materialism. But the point of an outwardly Westernized, secular or materialistic Ramadan is not to impose Westernization on Egyptian society. It is rather to buttress the position of those who control access to the outside by forming a hegemonic link to the moral values inherent in the ‘universal Islam’. Consequently while in public culture the materialistic side of Ramadan can often seem to actually crowd out Ramadan as an act of worship, it never poses itself against juridical Ramadan. Most of the time the two Ramadans exist as if in parallel universes. They can be laid side-by-side, or bundled together in a single package, even though the local terms of reference provide no means to relate them to each other. For example, in the pre-Six-Day War 1966–7 Minbar al-Islam Ramadan special issue a number of articles addressed the issue of local Ramadan customs, including, most prominently, the custom of ‘celebrating’ Ramadan by hanging or carrying lanterns in the streets. The articles actually used words denoting celebration: ihtafala (to celebrate) and hafiya (to welcome in festivity). These words are not used in the religion-oriented articles in the same issue (or indeed, rarely if ever in any of the religious literature on fasting). As one of the articles says, ‘this essay depicts the reception (istaqbal) of the month of Ramadan and its celebration (al-hafaawa bihi) by Muslims throughout history. . . . The Fatimid state endeavoured to enliven the month of Ramadan, and to celebrate its nights (ihtafat bi-layalihhi) in a way that was unprecedented in Egypt.’34 Another article did not use the exact terms for celebration, but constructed an image of sumptuousness, albeit with a tinge of Nasserist spirit: Fatimid history in Egypt mentions unforgettable traditions, particularly in the month of Ramadan. This month was one of the peoples’ holidays (‘id min a’yad al-sha’b), the nights of which were illuminated with joy, and the gatherings of which were marked by sociability. One thing the Fatimids did was to create a ministry (wizara) charged with providing

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services to the people. It had a large place reserved for it called Dar alFutra. This place provided the people with candy, fried breads (fata`ir) and dried fruits (yamish) during Ramadan.35 The 1967–8 Minbar al-Islam Ramadan special issue, published after the Six Day War, contained not a single article devoted to local Ramadan customs. But it did contain ‘Fasting as Training for Steadfastness against the Challenges of Aggression’, ‘Fasting and Jihad’, and numerous articles about Ramadan as the ‘month of victories’.36 Nonetheless the emphasis on Ramadan as a propitious time to fight by no means crowded out other themes. There was no grand sea change pushing Ramadan literature decisively into a new configuration. Indeed, Ramadan as the ‘month of victories’ was a staple of Ramadan writing – the pre-Six-Day War 1966–7 Minbar alIslam Ramadan issue also had a number of articles along the same lines. By the time of the 1973 October War (launched on the 10th of Ramadan), when Egypt did launch a surprisingly successful attack against Israel, the Minbar al-Islam Ramadan special ran articles on both themes. Moreover, as we shall see, Ramadan discourse is far more varied in its forms and media than the analysis of printed sources suggests thus far.

Ramadan in practice: 1985 At this juncture I turn to an ethnographic analysis of Ramadan in order to portray contests over its meaning and practice as a continually changing discourse that can be adapted to a variety of ideological agendas. My observations are informed by long contact with a family I have known since 1985. When I first met them the family consisted of a divorced woman with two daughters aged, at that time, roughly sixteen and six. They would best be described as middle-class by aspiration, but lower-to-lower-middle class by income. All were literate, or in the process of becoming so. They were pious, and the adults prayed regularly, but at that time none wore the hijab – the neo-Islamic headscarf. The mother worked in a public-sector pharmaceutical factory and received irregular alimony from her ex-husband, plus inadequate assistance from a disappointing brother and cousins. They lived in a single room of a crowded hundred-year-old building that had begun its life as a hospital. It was not far from downtown Cairo, actually a rather desirable location despite its dilapidated condition.37 The most memorable event during the first year I knew them was undoubtedly the experience of Ramadan, which took place usually at their one-room flat, at which I often attended iftar. We also took occasional forays to modest public entertainment venues. It was memorable for them too, judging by the frequent laments in later years for the magical nights of my first Ramadan in Egypt. Ramadan in the mid-1980s featured powerfully attractive television programmes, particularly, that year, a show called

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‘Ramadan Riddles’ (Fawazir Ramadan).38 It consisted of riddles constructed around a theme, and not just told, but enacted in lavish highly publicized song-and-dance routines hosted by an actress.39 The theme was always nonreligious. In 1986 it was folk sayings; in 1994, another year in which I followed ‘Fawazir Ramadan’, it was pieces of paper (for example, a college degree, a marriage license, a boat ticket and so on). If one guessed the answers to the riddles and sent them in to the Radio and Television Union one stood a chance of winning valuable prizes. The prizes were sponsored by the private sector (Islamic banks in 1986, shortly before they were accused of fraud by the government and closed), and the state-run television acted as master-of-ceremonies. At that time it was possible for the state to synchronize sacred time with commercial interest through television. This was because there were only three channels available, all state-run, and all of the best programmes were broadcast on a single channel reaching every household that owned a television, which is to say, almost the entire country. From the maghrib (dusk) prayer after which the fast can be broken to some time after the ‘isha` (evening) prayer, a very large proportion of the population was glued first to the dinner table and then to the television. The family I dined with was always glued to both at the same time. The ‘Fawazir’ were a contradictory phenomenon. In 1986, when I experienced Ramadan for the first time, the prizes for the ‘Fawazir’ were sponsored by Islamic banks which were declared fraudulent and shut down by the government shortly thereafter. The self-proclaimed piety of the Islamic banks was an intriguing counterpoint to the hostess of the ‘Fawazir’, an actress named Sherihan. She was younger than most top-ranked stars of the period,40 and for much of her career was dogged by more than the usual degree of innuendo and rumour applied to everyone in the entertainment professions. Parts of Sherihan’s ‘Fawazir’ introduction – a lavish dance routine played every night before the riddle – were censored half way through the month, on the grounds that they were simply too sexy for Ramadan. The cuts, however, were quite symbolic, and what remained always struck me as more cabaret than family entertainment. In addition to the brouhaha over the censored dance scenes I also heard disgruntled mutterings about the ‘bourgeois riddles’, no doubt prompted partly by Sherihan’s over-the-top performances, but also by the huge prizes and the overt commercialism that came with the programme. Of course intellectuals and sophisticates disavowed the ‘Fawazir’, as they disavow much television, though this is not always a sure indicator that they do not still watch. My informants did not consider themselves intellectuals, and were happy to be seen watching the ‘Fawazir’ every night with great interest. Many people comment anecdotally about the more social nature of television spectatorship in Egypt, mentioning that it is always on ‘in the background’. This is true, but it does not mean that people never actually ‘watch’ television. In 1986 the ‘Fawazir Ramadan’ was a programme

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that people certainly did watch, paid attention to and commented on. Comments on television are rarely the sort of direct discourse that political scientists or quantitative researchers can use, or even, for that matter, the sort of sound bites that anthropologists can use to convey a sense of immediacy. In this case comments focused on such things as the dresses worn by Sherihan – sometimes on the provocativeness of her clothes, but just as often with admiration. Sponsorship of the prizes by Islamic banks was certainly noted, but the size of the prizes – quite substantial – was of greater importance in the talk of my informants. They tried quite seriously to guess the answers to the riddles, though it hardly mattered whether or not they guessed correctly, since by the end of the month the answers were being sold in the streets. And though I experienced that Ramadan almost entirely through the iftars and subsequent television consumption of a single family, it was clear that their habits were shared by many. If I departed from their one-room flat before the end of the ‘Fawazir’ the streets were empty, leaving no doubt that consumption of the ‘Fawazir’ was a mass phenomenon. The programme was explicitly designed as entertainment; it had no ideological content that most of its viewers could articulate. At the same time, it fused a religious ritual with a materialist and free market-oriented ethic. Furthermore, it displayed an impressive capacity to get almost the entire nation watching a government-produced television programme. Television allowed the state to become master of the daily ceremony of transition from ritual time to profane time. And this form of Ramadan became the object of nostalgia. ‘Where are the nights of Ramadan’ was a frequent lament I heard from my informants in later years.

Ramadan in 2003 On the first day of Ramadan in 2003 I attended iftar in the home of the same family, or actually in the home of the oldest daughter, who by then was married. Of course many things changed in the 17 years between my first Egyptian Ramadan in 1986 (AH 1406) and that of 2003 (AH 1424). The family had moved to a different part of Cairo. The converted hospital close to the old centre of Cairo in which they occupied a room was condemned after the earthquake of 1992. Their new flat, far from the centre of Cairo, was in one of the many areas described as ‘ashwa`iya (haphazard). Such neighbourhoods do not usually look like slums, though wealthy people sometimes describe them as such. They are semi-planned neighbourhoods in which the buildings appear similar to the rest of the city. But such neighbourhoods were built in contravention of both planning permission and building codes. After their existence became a fait accompli the state moved in, extended utilities and provided a modicum of services. Islamists also move into ‘ashwa`iyya neighbourhoods and compete with the state in providing services, particularly in the educational and medical sectors.41

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My long-time friends had been visibly affected by the trend towards greater piety over the past 17 years. All the women now wore the hijab. The two daughters had both graduated from college, and though neither of them pursues employment in a field related to their majors (law and business), their college degrees were undoubtedly valuable social capital. The older daughter, a graduate of the Cairo University law faculty, parlayed her education into a rather better marriage than a daughter of a divorced woman might have expected. Her husband is a judge. They have four children, and live only a ten-minute walk from her mother. The younger daughter worked as a clerk in an auto parts store. In general terms a shift away from the state’s vision of modern society – a society in which public signs of piety are rarely in evidence – towards a more Islamically oriented vision of society is clear. In some cases it is publicly marked. The hijab is virtually universal in the new neighbourhood. Mosques are more prevalent than in their old neighbourhood, and this was particularly evident during Ramadan, when Qur’an recitations and tarawih – special prayers said during the nights of Ramadan – were often performed over loudspeaker systems. The mother of the family told me that tarawih are normally performed in multiples of 15, but that in the really zealous mosques like the one she attends they do 21.42 On the ‘Id al-Fitr, the day of breaking the fast after Ramadan ends, I went to their house for lunch, and was told that they would only break the fast that day. This was because breaking the fast on the ‘Id is fard – obligatory – and after they fulfilled their religious duty they would return to fasting for another six days because it is, in their belief, sunna, sanctioned by the tradition of the Prophet Muhammad, to add additional days to the prescribed Ramadan fast. In 2003 their engagement with television was much more ambivalent than it had been in the mid-1980s. A kind of holiday fatigue had set in. I had heard similar sentiments expressed in conversation with others, and encountered the phenomenon even in the media.43 Ramadan, it was said, had been ‘Christmasized’, turned into nothing but an opportunity to market mobile phones, indulge in gluttony and gaze passively at ever more vulgar television programmes after stuffing oneself full of twice as much food as would be consumed on a normal non-Ramadan day. One might be tempted to interpret holiday fatigue as a symptom of counterhegemonic resistance – of the Islamist-dominated ‘haphazard quarters’ reclaiming Ramadan from the state-backed business elite, in the same mould as the American Christian fundamentalist campaign to ‘put the Christ back in Christmas’.44 However, one must remember that ‘holiday fatigue’ is a product not of withdrawal, but of exposure. Anyone expressing fatigue is watching. Anyone who is not watching cannot competently switch between the code of Ramadan-as-ritual and that of Ramadan-as-holiday, which is to say that they compete for a morally legitimized claim to modern identity with one hand tied behind their backs.

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Nor did I observe anything else in the Islamist-dominated neighbourhood that my friends now lived in that could be described as resistance. Certainly nobody I met in that neighbourhood espoused overthrowing the government or committing acts of violence in a political cause. Indeed, the oldest daughter’s husband, the judge, opined that politics were dead. Of course one might take such a statement with a grain of salt, on the grounds that he was talking to me, a foreigner. But in my experience this had never been an impediment to people inclined to offer political opinions before. It had never been an impediment to him offering political opinions. I took it as a sign that Islamist political tactics in their contest with the state for hegemony has shifted to a cultural idiom in recent years. Furthermore, a cultural idiom that translates easily to other terms, such as those of the economy. Perhaps the most telling sign of a shift in the idiom of Islamist discourse for me came in the form of shopping advice. Over 17 years I had of course acquired things during research and work stints in Egypt that lasted as long as two years. Many of these objects ended up in the hands of this particular family, so they were always very interested in what I might buy while in Egypt. When I told them that the flat I was renting did not have an automatic washing machine, they insisted that I buy one – even just a ‘baladi’ (‘country’ or, in this context, ‘low-class’) washer, the kind that tumbles clothes in a large metal tub, but does not rinse, spin or dry. As people without a great deal of money, they had strong opinions about where to buy things reliably, without getting cheated. One of their most common recommendations for purchasing reliable trustworthy consumer goods was ‘Umar Effendi, a department store nationalized during the Nasser era, which had been formerly owned by wealthy Jewish families who emigrated after 1948. In the 1980s, for lower-income people, ‘Umar Effendi was a trusted institution. I was repeatedly told to go to ‘Umar Effendi for my appliances, as the government could be trusted to supply decent consumer goods at an affordable price.45 But in 2003 when the prospect of my buying a fairly expensive consumer product arose (and my inevitable departure three months later might well leave the item in their hands) I was not advised to go to ‘Umar Effendi. Now I was told that the best and most reliable place to shop was alTauhid wa al-Nur, a new department store. It was both a private-sector business, and an ideological project. Al-Tauhid wa al-Nur began as a vendor of clothes for modest women – hijabs in other words. The hijab as a neo-Islamic form of veil dates roughly from the end of the Nasser period, when Sadat promoted Islamic political groups, particularly on college campuses, as a counterweight to the Left. There is a three-decade historical arc from the early 1970s to the early 2000s in which the growth of Islamist hegemony went in inverse proportion to the decline of state public-sector economic hegemony. The expanding private sector became a potential ideological battleground. Al-Tauhid wa al-Nur (‘unity and light, ,that is, belief in the oneness of God and His light) is a notable Islamist success in the contest for the

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market, at least in terms of the company’s public profile. In some quarters I heard doubts expressed about the actual solvency of the company, but this is of less importance here than the public perception.46 There are al-Tauhid wa al-Nur branches all over Cairo, in poor neighbourhoods and wealthy. There is, for example, a branch in downtown Cairo; a ‘superstore’ in the upscale district of Muhandisin; and one on Faysal Street not far from where my informants lived. The company had branched out from its original modest clothing specialty to market a full range of clothing and consumer goods. The branch I went to was a downscale branch, but was obviously doing good business. The shift in trust from the public sector ‘Umar Effendi to the private Islamist al-Tauhid wa Nur was striking. When the mother of the family told me where to shop, she explicitly emphasized the comparison before I had the slightest inkling of what ‘Al-Tauhid wa al-Nur’ was. The woman argued proof of the company’s trustworthiness in terms of who they hired: ‘You know you can trust al-Tauhid wa al-Nur,’ I was told by my erstwhile ‘Umar Effendi promoter, ‘They don’t hire women. All the employees are men. They’re better than ‘Umar Effendi. Don’t go there.’47 It was true, at least in the Faysal Street branch. All of the employees were men, and many wore Islamist-style beards. The cultural environment of this neighbourhood is very much influenced by Islamists. They are not necessarily politically mobilized Islamists in a conventional sense. I have heard people talk about promoting a spirit of resistance to a state hegemony organized around a crony-capitalist type of privatization nominally garbed in the dress of ‘structural adjustment’, designed to convert Egypt into a fully market-driven society. But al-Tauhid wa al-Nur was in fact impossible without the market liberalizations enabled by structural adjustment. And just as al-Tauhid wa al-Nur flourishes through the same liberalized economic system that Islamists once criticized (as some still do), the state continues to compete on their turf. Certainly the state attempts to monopolize Islamic discourse.48 Consequently, in the 2000s one might expect rejection of the celebratory, almost hedonistic, television-centred Ramadan of the mid-1980s. Indeed, since the 1980s the state’s emphasis on Ramadan television has only increased and taken an even more aggressively non-religious tone. In the 2000s there are far more television programmes broadcast during Ramadan than in the 1980s of all types, including narrative television (musalsals – dramatic serials), game shows, talk shows and programmes featuring music and dance. Ramadan television advertising rates continue to rise. A huge proportion of the state’s television production budget is devoted to Ramadan programming.49 On the other hand, in the mid-1980s all broadcasts were terrestrial, and only three channels were available to most viewers. The main Ramadan programmes were concentrated on Channel 1, and the audience was very nearly captive. By 2003 programming had been splintered due to

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the advent of satellite television broadcasting. Suddenly terrestrial broadcasts had to compete with state-owned satellite programmes, private programmes, and non-Egyptian programmes. There are also specialized programmes, the majority of which play music videos. But the full range of special programming covers religion, news, sports, shopping, films, documentaries and many other interests. On a typical night in the 2003 Ramadan, when I joined iftar at the home of the oldest daughter in the family, we watched the most heavily hyped Ramadan programmes. Everyone proclaimed utter disdain for that year’s programmes. Even I had to admit that the level of vulgarity in that year’s programming was stunning in comparison to programmes I had watched before. The 2003 programming included a ‘dating game’ clone-titled ‘Ana ‘Awiz Atgawwiz’ (I Want to Get Married) in which an engaged couple tried to predict each other’s responses to personal questions.50 Several programmes featured humiliation. One was a ‘Candid Camera’ type programme called ‘Zaghlul wa Lisan al-’Asfur’ (Lisan al-’Asfur – literally ‘sparrow tongues’ [and a type of pasta used in soup] – was the nickname of one of the comedians in the programme). It featured crude set-ups, such as a crossdressed comedian trying to pick up men in a restaurant. Almost nobody had anything good to say about these programmes. But they watched them anyway. On one iftar at the judge’s home I watched him, stretched out on the floor after a large meal, his family seated all around him, all watching ‘Zaghlul and the Sparrow Tongues’ and ‘Husayn in the Studio’. Clearly they hated it. The judge’s mouth was hanging open in disbelief. The face of the oldest woman – my hostess at those long-ago Ramadans that were now the object of nostalgia – was contorted in a squint, as if she was trying hard to comprehend the programmes. Direct questions about the programmes addressed to this family or to anyone else I knew elicited almost universal condemnation. And yet almost everyone I knew was still watching them.

Counterhegemony-proof Ramadan Earlier I discussed fiqh al-siyam (the jurisprudence of fasting), showing that the observance of Ramadan – or more precisely, its celebration – can also be associated with a high degree of commercialism. Virtually nobody disputes the commercialization of Ramadan, though of course interpretations of its significance differ. Moreover, in some circumstances Ramadan can be presented as a kind of ‘universal impossibility’ which exhibits only the juridical face of the phenomenon – as if Ramadan were nothing but an act of worship. In this case the social groups that feature the most ‘Western’ diacritica – clothes, consumption of imported goods, access to foreign languages and travel abroad, residence in certain neighbourhoods and types of housing – become the owners of ‘true Ramadan’, despite their lack of association with

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the symbols of religious identity. In other circumstances celebratory Ramadan can stand autonomously, not as a denial of ‘true Ramadan’ in the ritual sense, but parallel to it. The scale of social interaction plays a crucial role in determining whether one stays entirely within the terms of ‘true’ or universal Ramadan, as, for example, when one is put in the position of explaining ‘it’ to an outsider. In local practice, absent the direct or implicit need to represent Egypt to the outside world, ‘true’ and celebratory registers of Ramadan are communicative codes, and social actors can use them performatively. The most effective performers in this social drama are those who are fluent in both the ritual and celebratory codes, and can invoke either of them without calling attention to their essential incompatibility. The fusing of a ‘modern’ form of Ramadan with a timeless and ‘true’ form makes defining counterhegemony extremely difficult. A hegemonic project requires a task and an agent, and results in a negotiation of power between social classes. Here the task can be understood in two ways. Either it is to make a timeless act of worship modern, or it is to link modernity to moral authority. The project does not involve clearly defined groups, but it does involve aspirations to modernity. Only the modern have real economic and political power in Egyptian society. There is, in a limited sense, a permanent counterhegemony built into this construct: everyone aspires to be modern, which is to say that social actors do not see themselves in static groups, but rather as in competition for the same prize. In other words, one hopes to compete for the prize ‘from below’, which is what one might expect from a counterhegemonic movement dedicated to replacing the dominance of one social class with their own dominance. To be modern is to be given the keys to a gate – not the gate to paradise (which, as the hadith says, is opened by the onset of Ramadan) – but to the outside world. Modernity in Egypt is communicated through diacritica – public acts that communicate where a person stands in society; manners, clothes, ways of speaking; also habits of consumption, place of residence and the ability to move beyond Egypt and into the world outside. But this is less a list of publicly accessible resources than an index of progressively greater exclusion. One can buy the clothes at some level, and learn the manners and ways of speaking. But not everyone can have the Mercedes, the villa, a position in a global business that pays world-class salaries, or the ability to act as a broker of goods and services moving in and out of the country. The importance of controlling access to ‘outside’ the nation may be a feature of many postcolonial societies. It may seem a slightly odd emphasis given current academic interests in how culture, media and people transcend national boundaries, even to the point of creating ‘cosmopolitan’ sensibilities among people who have never left home.51 But in Egypt more is at stake than just the difference between being able to travel and being able to imagine travelling. It is rather that power substantially equates to having access to wealthier economies, and access is strictly controlled.

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My long-time informants whom we last saw transfixed by Ramadan television programmes that disgusted them live in an Islamist-dominated neighbourhood. In many ways their lives have become marked over the past 20 years not by greater attention to the diacritica of modernity, but to those of religious conservatism. They sometimes attend tarawih prayers during Ramadan, give zakat, receive religious instruction and social services from local Islamic da’wa (‘outreach’) organizations. They read little, but partake of religious instruction through broadcast media. When Shaykh Sha’rawi (the recently deceased grey eminence of Egyptian television preaching) was alive they adored him; they are now captivated by Amr Khaled (a young da’ia – ‘preacher’ or ‘missionary’) who models his programmes on Christian televangelical shows. At the same time they certainly see themselves as aspirants for a materially successful (hence linked to having access to the outside world) modern life. They could not completely turn their backs on the religiously dubious celebratory style of Ramadan. Like many of their friends and relatives, they eat more and better quality food during Ramadan, and they dutifully watch programmes and advertisements that conflict with their religious practices. Increasingly their attitudes towards the Ramadan practices that conflict with juridical Ramadan are expressed as holiday fatigue, but this is more a sign that they continue to participate in celebratory Ramadan than an indication of resistance. An effective counterhegemony could not really take shape through the current construct of Ramadan. The construct nominally divides Ramadan into a ‘modern secular’ side, and a ‘juridically correct’ side. If these nominal divisions corresponded to hierarchically arranged social classes then presumably organic intellectuals of the subaltern class could form an alternative to the existing hegemony. But there is no such correspondence of class and Ramadan practice. Nobody can really step outside the imperatives of modernity and moral authority. Ultimately Ramadan is an intense distillation of a more encompassing hegemonic construct, which can be challenged only through resistance to the entire edifice of Egyptian modernity.

Notes 1. I would like to thank the members of the Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony conference at Edinburgh for considerably improving my understanding of hegemony. And I thank Nadia Muhammad Fathi Hilal, Jehan Husayn Muhammad and Amani Husayn Muhammad for many memorable Ramadan nights. 2. Narrated by Abu Huraira, Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 3, Book 31, Number 122 (translated by M. Muhsin Khan: http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/fundamentals/hadithsunnah/bukhari/031.sbt.html#003.031.122 accessed 27 May 2006). 3. While the themes of Ramadan literature are perennial, one can nonetheless discern shifts in emphasis and packaging linked to political and social trends. Armando Salvatore examines such shifts through analysing religious content on the pages of Egyptian daily al-Ahram published during the two Ramadans before and after the

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4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

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June 1967 war. He suggests that a rise in religious content published in the 1968 (AH 1387) Ramadan indicates not an eruption of a ‘religious substratum’, but rather a much more complex and historically contingent jockeying for religious authority between various political actors, Armando Salvatore, ‘Staging Virtue: The Disembodiment of Self-Correctness and the Making of Islam as Public Norm’, in Islam – Motor or Challenge of Modernity, edited by Helmut Buchholt and Georg Stauth (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 1998), pp. 87–120. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Stylefirst published 1979 (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 16. Ernesto Laclau, ‘Power and Social Communication’, in Ethical Perspectives, Vol. 7, No. 2–3 (2000), pp. 139–45, esp. 140. Ibid., p. 140. For a more extensive analysis of how terms of identity are deployed performatively to construct the self through contrasts in ideal types, see Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). In a nutshell, everyone can be an ibn al-balad – a ‘son of the country’ marked socially by certain ‘traditional’ diacritica of dress, location, habits of speech and so on. The diacritica are associated with notions of cultural authenticity. But aside from its sociological referents, the term functions to define who is ‘one of us’ because the boundaries of ‘us’ are quite flexible. To the man in a galabiya ‘one of us’ excludes the ‘obviously Westernized’ tweed-suit wearing Egyptian who drives a Mercedes; the man in the suit rejects the ‘Westernized’ label because his self-image is not of a culturally compromised pretend-foreigner, but of a modern Egyptian national (the national ibn al-balad) as distinct from the European or American. A tremendous amount of popular culture produced over the past century turns on inclusion or exclusion from this ‘national us’. ‘Westernized Egyptians’ abound in this massive corpus of popular culture, but always as ‘what we are not’. Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader, edited by David Forgacs (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 205–6. Hebdige, Subculture, p. 16. The same point is echoed by inter alia Tony Bennett, ‘Popular Culture and the “Turn to Gramsci”’, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by John Storey (London: Prentice Hall, 1998), pp. 217–24, esp. 221; and by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), p. 3. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Shahr Ramadan wa Fiqh al-Siyam wa-l-Qiyam (The Month of Ramadan: The Jurisprudence of Fasting and Prayer) (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 2001), p. 8. al-Qaradawi, Shahr Ramadan, p. 10. Abu al-Wafa al-Ghunaymi al-Taftazani, ‘Ibadat al-Saum wa Ahdafuha’ (The Act of Fasting and Its Aims), Minbar al-Islam, Vol. 31, No. 9 (Ramadan AH 1393/AD 1973), pp. 57–60, esp. 58. Qaradawi, Shahr Ramadan, pp. 9–10. The notion of the ‘five pillars’ as the essential core of Islam dates to a sound hadith (Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 1, Book 2, No. 7), hence there is no doubt that Ramadan, as one of the pillars, has always been central to Islamic practice. Qaradawi mentions four of the five. The fifth – the shahada (profession of faith) – is also an ‘ibada. The other four follow from the basic statement of faith. Cited in Hasan Gad, ‘Al-Siyam wa Athruhu fi Takwin al-Mujtama’ al-Mithali’ (Fasting and Its Effect on the Formation of the Ideal Society), Minbar al-Islam, Vol. 24, No. 9 (Ramadan AH 1386/December 1966 to January 1967), pp. 21–4, esp. 22;

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16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

and in Taftazani, ‘Ibadat al-Saum’, p. 58. The hadith is narrated by Abu Huraira, and is in Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 3, book 31, No. 128. (http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/ fundamentals/hadithsunnah/bukhari/ accessed 17 May 2006). Taftazani, ‘Ibadat al-Saum’, p. 58 ‘Abd al-Hakim al-Naggar, ‘Dur al-Qiyam al-Ruhiya fi Tarbiyat al-Jil al-Jadid’ (The Role of Spiritual Performance in Educating the New Generation), Minbar al-Islam, Vol. 25, No. 9 (Ramadan AH 1388/AD 1968), pp. 48–50, esp. 48. Qaradawi gives a very similar depiction of the cleansing nature of the Ramadan fast, describing it as a ‘spiritual bath’: Qaradawi, Shahr Ramadan, p. 12. Ibid., p. 199. Obligatory (wajib), recommended (mandub), permissible (mubah), prohibited (haram) and repugnant (makruh). From Wael Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories: An Introduction to Sunni usul al-fiqh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 40. Qaradawi, Shahr Ramadan, p. 208. Ibid., p. 213. Rajab was a fasting month for the Arabs during the Jahiliya, hence fasting during the entirety of the month was construed as a challenge to Islamic practice during early Islamic history. Zaki al-Din Sha’ban, ‘Limadha Nusumu?’ (Why Do We Fast?), Minbar al-Islam, Vol. 24, No. 9 (Ramadan AH 1386/ December 1966 to January 1967), pp. 25–7, esp. 25. Hasan al-Banna, ‘Hilal Ramadan’ (The Month of Ramadan), in Hasan al-Banna, Ahadith al-Jum’a (Beirut: Manshurat al-’Asr al-Hadith, 1972), pp. 75–80, esp. 76. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Islam in Modern History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 19. Starrett notes that this dichotomy ‘has been used in part by Western scholars to distance outer-directed Islam from inner-directed Christianity, the implication being again that “their” ritual is empty while “ours” has intellectual content’, Gregory Starrett, ‘The Hexis of Interpretation: Islam and the Body in the Egyptian Popular School’, in American Ethnologist, Vol. 22, No. 4 (1995), pp. 953–69, esp. 964. Qaradawi, Shahr Ramadan, p. 207. Ibid., p. 207. Dawud refers to the Muslim prophet David known for his custom of fasting on alternate days. Hasan al-Banna, Nafahat Ramadan: Din wa-siyasah; al-Banna yutalibu bi-hukum alIslam (Beirut: Maktabat Hittin, 197?), pp. 18–19. Walter Armbrust, ‘Ashiqtu Ramadan al-Masri’, in Sabah al-Khayr 2498 (18 November 2003), pp. 24–5. Sabah al-Khayr dates from the mid-1950s, and is an offshoot of the Ruz al-Yusuf publishing house, which was founded in the mid-1920s. It must be noted that part of the reason for this is logistical. Traffic jams caused by forcing everyone into the streets at the same hour to attend iftar are immense, so many people must leave work early in order to spread the rush hour. Consequently shifting working hours to the non-fasting night hours probably improves efficiency apart from any questions of ‘correct fasting’. Efforts to hide ‘embarrassing’ aspects of culture (such as the fact that vast numbers of workers actually do ease their fasts by working at night and sleeping during the day) can often be a powerful means of demarcating boundaries between in-group and outsider status. For analyses of similar phenomena of ‘cultural intimacy’ constructed through mass media see Andrew Shryock ed., Off Stage/On Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

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33. Laclau, Social Communication, p. 140. 34. Ibrahim al-Buhi, ‘Ramadan Alladhi Nusumuhu’ (The Ramadan in Which We Fast), Minbar al-Islam, Vol. 24, No. 9 (Ramadan AH 1386/December 1966–January 1967), pp. 32–6, esp. 32, 33. 35. Mustafa Abd al-Rahman, ‘Fanus Ramadan’ (The Ramadan Lantern), Minbar alIslam, Vol. 24, No. 9 (Ramadan AH 1386/December 1966 – January 1967), pp. 37–9, esp. 37. Dar al-Futra (futra: nuts and candy served during Ramadan), actually described in the article as a ‘ministry’, sounds rather like the Wizarat alTamwin (Ministry of Food Supply), a Nasser-era institution charged with distributing food commodities. The system was plagued by corruption and gave rise to much black marketeering, but until at least the late 1980s it was still the main (and inadequate) provider of a number of key commodities such as sugar and rice. 36. ‘The Leader and the Exemplar in the Conquest of Badr’, ‘Reasons for Victory in the Battle of Badr’, ‘The First Victory in Ramadan’ and others. The shift in emphasis is consistent with the analysis of religious content in Al-Ahram from the same two Ramadans given in Salvatore, ‘Staging Virtue’. 37. I had met them through an American student who had been studying Arabic in Cairo the year before. The all-female family had mitigated whatever tension might have arisen through social contact with two males (myself and my colleague from the previous year) largely by brazening it out with the neighbours until they came to know and more or less accept our occasional presence; his one year, mine the next and both of ours occasionally for years afterwards. 38. For more on ‘Fawazir Ramadan’ see Walter Armbrust, ‘Synchronizing Watches: The State, the Consumer, and Sacred Time in Ramadan Television’, in Religion, Media and the Public Sphere, edited by Birgit Meyer and Annalies Moors (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 207–26. 39. In earlier years ‘Ramadan Riddles’ had been sometimes hosted by male actors, always comedians. 40. Until the late 1990s a number of Egyptian actresses remained not just commercially viable well into their 40s, but in some cases (Nabila ‘Ubayd, Nadia al-Gindi) actually dominant. Sherihan was unusual in the context of the 1980s and early 1990s in that she became a significant box-office draw while young. 41. Consequently Al-Ahya` al-’Ashwa`iya were also important during the 1980s and 1990s as a key site of Islamist political recruiting. While the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups were able to provide social services in areas where the government had not caught up with semi-planned urban growth, Islamist groups at the same time developed less violent and confrontational tactics, which shielded them from direct government repression so long as they refrained from overt political engagement. A necessity to keep a low profile may have actually worked to these groups’ advantage in exploiting kin and friendship networks for purposes of recruitment. For more on the relation of ‘haphazard’ neighbourhoods and Islamist politics see Carrie Rosefsky, Mobilizing Islam: Religion, Activism, and Political Change in Egypt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 42. Wennisnck says that tarawih consist of ten taslimas, each containing two rak’as: A. J. Wennisinck, ‘Tarawih’, Encyclopedia of Islam (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004), p. 222. 43. See http://www.cairolive.com/newcairolive/dardasha/yameesh.html (accessed on 29 May 2006). 44. A historically nonsensical idea, given that the roots of European and early colonial Christmas were more in carnival than in the sort of solemn family-oriented ritual

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45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

envisioned by fundamentalists; Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). This was perhaps unsurprising coming from a woman who had worked for a public-sector factory, and for whom one of the advantages of an admittedly low public-sector salary was that through work she gained access to goods and services distributed by the state. The profitability of ‘Islamic’ business ventures can be a political issue. The collapse of the Islamic banking companies of the 1980s was attributed by the government to massive fraud, but the closure of the companies was interpreted by many of the public as ideologically motivated, that is, the government supposedly closed them down because they were too successful. The same contrast was invoked for different effect in the 2001 film Ashab wala Biznis (Friends or Business), written by Medhat El-Adl and directed by Ali Idris. In one scene of the film two show-business sophisticates are insulting each other. One says, ‘where did you get those clothes, ‘Umar Effendi?’ The other replies, ‘And what about yours? From al-Tauhid wa al-Nur?’ In other words, both are emblems of unfashionableness. See, for example, Patrick Gaffney, The Prophet’s Pulpit: Islamic Preaching in Contemporary Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Gregory Starrett, Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). An official in the advertising section of the Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU) claimed that 80 per cent of the state’s production budget is focused on Ramadan. During the rest of the year production is subcontracted to private producers, though content is still subject to censorship. The continuing rise in advertising rates during Ramadan was confirmed by the same official. This was a very odd formula for a society in which there is no social sanction for ‘dating’ before marriage. For most of the audience a proper couple really should not know each other particularly well, though their families perhaps should. The programme was not popular, though I found that diverse audiences were watching it anyway. Indeed, ‘watching anyway’ was probably the hallmark of these programmes. Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘The Interpretation of Culture(s) after Television’, in The Fate of Culture, edited by Sherry Ortner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 110–35, esp. 122–8.

Part IV Popular Struggle: Manoeuvre and Contestation

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Counterhegemonic Effects: Weighing, Measuring, Petitions and Bureaucracy in Nineteenth-century Egypt John Chalcraft This chapter focuses on protests surrounding weighing and measuring in nineteenth-century Egypt. Such protests continued throughout the century and came mainly in the form of petitions to the authorities from merchants, retailers and buyers, as well as weighers and measurers themselves. My initial objective was to ask whether these protests represented a genuine form of resistance to forms of exploitation, or were they simply part and parcel of the hegemonic reproduction of Egypt’s ruling order. But it was impossible to overcome the difficulties attendant on defining genuine resistance. Authentic counterhegemony remains seemingly in the eye of the beholder, and depends on an observer’s prior commitment to a set of values or a historical metanarrative which can allow the specification of truly liberatory practice. The goal of this chapter therefore became how to continue to use the valuable concepts of hegemony and counterhegemony, which have allowed historians and others to understand the operations of power in far more sophisticated ways than models which speak simply of either oppression or legitimate authority, in default of some quasi-divine insight into human nature and social meaning. On this basis, the petitions and protests I studied became an illustration of a form of successful hegemonic articulation or hegemonic deepening, involving the identification – in a particular sense – of diverse social interests at specific linguistic and practical sites. ‘Resistance’ becomes hegemonic expansion. In this particular history, the form of hegemonic expansion unwittingly facilitated the growth of bureaucratic order, which in turn, because of the hegemonic contraction which followed, had counterhegemonic effects.

Hegemony and counterhegemony To increase their effectivity, forms of economic, political and military social power can harness the agency and energies of those persons necessarily mobilized as their objects.1 Rulers do not hold great power for very long through being linked to those under their rule solely by forms of violence 179

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and coercion. Workers, consumers, soldiers, taxpayers and so on concentrate social power by actively embracing their status and role. Arguably, hegemony deepens the more that the individuals who are the objects of social power identify themselves as subjects, as those who believe themselves to choose their social practice autonomously, and as an end-in-itself, even while playing an instrumental role in the organization of social power. The conscript is identified as a hero, the proletarian a responsible breadwinner, the consumer as empowered and fulfilled. Hegemony, one might say, is where means and ends coincide. Hegemonic rule is effective because it relies not just on obstruction and repression, but also on channelling, institutionalizing, refining, harnessing and incorporating the subjectivity and agency of apparently active subjects. The subjects of a hegemonic order thereby collaborate in their own subordinate position in a set of power relations in which some elements in the social, whether groups or individuals, have a greater capacity to effect change or impose their will. Such collaboration allows power, command and resource allocation to be transmitted through the social (between the stronger and the weaker) with a minimum of dissipation and breakdown, transforming a scattered, divided and incommensurable heterogeneity – the social and the individual – into a powerful and apparently unified instrument – a Self, an alchemy with sometimes devastating consequences for those defined as Other. Hegemony, conceived here as a kind of social mechanism in the reproduction of rule, continues to transmit power, but makes coercion and violence invisible to hegemonic subjects. Hegemonic articulation is one way in which social elements (whether groups or individuals) are linked together across power asymmetries, and can describe the process whereby means and ends can coincide. It involves an identification of interests, in both senses of identification: first that interests are identified, that is, their outlines are made visible, and they are also identified, that is, they come to have an identity with one another. The effect of hegemonic articulation is thus a ‘suture’ – a plethora of diverse identities, histories and projects are stitched together and an unstable unity is constituted.2 Hegemonic articulation is embodied in linguistic and social practices, which can be distinguished as ‘sites’ of hegemonic articulation. Like building sites, perhaps, their output is more than the sum of their inputs. Such sites are built up, but not according to the plans of any one individual subject. Political parties, elections, petitions, the media, schools, churches, as well as languages of justice, rights, honour and equality are all sites of hegemonic articulation. Such sites are institutions – whether linguistic or social – which provide an arena where interests can be doubly identified – both defined and sutured. Hegemony is never complete or entirely singular, but is always unfinished, uneven and subject to reconfiguration, expansion and contraction. Hegemonic expansion takes place when sites of hegemonic articulation are

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multiplied and deepened: more numerous elections, petitions, schools, newspapers and so on; more widespread appeals to justice and so forth; and the presence of further areas where such institutions and languages of autonomy, justice and/or equality are applied. Hegemonic contraction takes place where sites of hegemonic articulation are reduced and thinned: there are fewer such sites, they apply in fewer areas and their languages and institutions become ineffective in identifying interests across power differentials, persons come to see themselves as merely instruments in the hands of exploiters, and the visibility of (and sometimes even the presence of) coercion and violence is increased. Far from enhancing the power and effectivity of the system of rule, such exposure and coercion dissipates and leaks social power, breaks up its transmission and diminishes its overall effectivity. If hegemony refers primarily to a form of rule, a way in which power can be organized, and not a given set of values or ideas, then counterhegemony is action that counters hegemonic forms of rule, in other words, action that generates hegemonic contraction. Any practice which diminishes the number of sites of hegemonic articulation, reduces their range of application and makes them disarticulate and break up, thereby exposing (and even necessitating) the growth of violence and coercion in the social is counterhegemonic. Counterhegemony thus embraces a wide variety of activity, carried on by a wide variety of persons. Paradoxically, even, a ruler may engage in counterhegemonic action, by bypassing sites of hegemonic articulation, breaking them up or ignoring their logic. Counterhegemony involves the thinning of institutions and their failure on their own terms. It should thus be distinguished from the concrete production of alternative hegemony, which involves the substantive building up of new sites of hegemonic articulation, on an alternative basis, and their successful operation, on the basis of new terms. Such new sites may lead to the breakdown or overthrow of the old, and thus have counterhegemonic effects, but such forces are not always necessary for a process of counterhegemony to go ahead. There is no mechanically given ‘level’ of hegemony that all societies require for their functioning. As functionalism fails to grasp, the social does not always function: it can break down. Counterhegemony can proceed without any automatic and corresponding construction of a firmly established alternative hegemony. Hegemonic rule is often seen negatively by those who mistakenly identify this strategy of power with the values approved within a given hegemonic system – neoliberalism, consumerism, racism, patriarchy and so on. In fact, hegemony does not refer to any given set of values, but a particular structure of power, involving the coincidence of means and ends. Both socialism and capitalism involve different forms of hegemony, as Gramsci, who struggled for a socialist hegemony, knew all too well. Beyond this, however, hegemony has a kind of built in nefarious character because in it individuals or groups consent to some form of asymmetric power relation – troubling to

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many in an age when equality, to paraphrase Marx, has acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. But it should be recalled that equality is not only uneven and selective, but it is also a positive principle for the structuring of the social, a kind of hegemonic claim in itself: it therefore cannot be allowed to define the character or meaning of hegemony, which refers instead to a mechanism in the reproduction of a system of power relations. Where critique – based on normative historical metanarratives – has predefined hegemony, analytical clarity has been lost. Instead, critique can productively follow, rather than prejudge the specification of forms of (counter) hegemony. Hegemony is a form of power, a structure which new leaders, whatever their political stripe, will inevitably use in order to effectively transmit power. The only way to escape hegemony itself is to completely remove the transmission of power from the social. My aim in this chapter is to try to explore the foregoing concepts of hegemony and counterhegemony by applying them to as-yet largely ignored petitions and protests about weighing and measuring in nineteenth-century Egypt. Compared to other crafts, retail and service trades in nineteenthcentury Egypt, measurers and weighers are relatively prominent in Egypt’s state archives, judging by the number of relevant petitions, government correspondence, enquiries and regulations. This resulted partly from the fact that weighers and measurers had considerable economic importance, occupying a key location at the many seams of the growing market. In principle they had long ‘facilitate[d] commercial transactions by bringing to them guarantees of impartiality and good faith’.3 Measurers were principally involved in measuring cloth in depots and markets and grains (maize, wheat, barley, rice, cotton seeds, full beans, lentils and sesame) in major ports and minor landing stations up and down the country.4 The 1897 census recorded almost ten thousand measurers in Egypt, with over one thousand in Cairo, the majority at the grain ports in Bulaq and Old Cairo.5 Weighers were an important presence in a variety of trades, weighing coal, coffee, precious metals, soap, spices, meat and vegetables in ports, weigh-stations, warehouses and town and country markets the length of Egypt. The 1897 census recorded almost two thousand weighers in Egypt, 275 of whom worked in numerous locations in Cairo.6 The objective here is to show how – in disputes over exploitation, taxation and accurate measures in these professions – protestors and government engaged several sites of hegemonic articulation: petitions and elections on the one hand, and notions of justice (haqq) and order (al-dabt wa-l-rabt) on the other. By examining some of the petitions in detail, and the responses to them by the government, I hope to shed some light on the question of how hegemony and counterhegemony operated, and how interests were defined and sutured. I also want to argue that the very success of hegemonic articulation set in motion a structural change – the growth of bureaucratic order – which undermined existing sites of hegemonic articulation, especially with

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respect to petitioning, elections, custom, local tyranny and the just ruler. Paradoxically, therefore, hegemonic expansion eventually came to have counterhegemonic effects.

Before the bureaucracy In 1694, a combination of political strife and a low Nile flood meant the beginning of a rise in grain prices in Cairo and the growing threat of a crisis of subsistence. An Ottoman official, a certain Kücük Muhammad, decided to take steps to prevent the anticipated cheating, hoarding and speculation by grain merchants, measurers and others in the port of Bulaq, where much of Cairo’s grain was landed, stored and sold on wholesale to the city’s merchants and retailers. Kücük Muhammad went to Bulaq personally, gathered together various officials, the captains of the boats and the measurers, and warned them that if grain prices rose too high they would suffer spectacular corporal punishment for their crimes: he would hang them. He proceeded to take energetic measures to organize the distribution of grain directly, aiming to prevent merchants from cornering the market. Agents of tax farmers, the grain merchants, as well as Janissaries who had interests in the grain trade, attempted to conciliate Kücük Muhammad, or bribe him to back off. When these methods failed, vested interests appear to have subverted the official’s instructions by engaging in familiar practices of hoarding and profiteering, because grain prices soon began rising. Kücük Muhammad, not to be deterred, carried out a number of executions. Before long, Kücük Muhammad was himself assassinated, an action probably linked to the grain speculators.7 Many noteworthy features of state regulation of weighing and measuring under the old order in Ottoman Egypt are present in one way or another in the story of Kücük Muhammad. First, one observes the characteristic suddenness, discontinuity and relative blindness of regulative practice. As Raymond noted, in principle weigh-scales were submitted to the market inspector (muhtasib) and the agha of the Janissaries for inspection, and there is some record of such inspections. Yet Raymond makes no mention of the measurers here, and even regarding the weighers, ‘this surveillance appears only to have been exercised on particular occasions and above all during periods of crisis’.8 Crises only precipitated short-lived and discontinuous regulative efforts. As a cause and an effect of this situation, state officials were blind in significant respects as to statistical details on weighing and measuring in Egypt. Second, regulation was overt, face-to-face, and deployed direct coercion. Kücük Muhammad’s intervention, lacking institutionalized mechanisms, and confronting vested interests, had to be noisy, as-it-were. It stood out, made itself known, and attracted debate, discussion, support and, more significantly in this case, opposition. It relied on direct, personal and unmediated relations of domination, and in this respect made logical use of the threat of spectacular coercion. The extensive presence of personalism in

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the field of regulation inevitably meant that right regulation appeared not just as competent institutional performance, but also as an ethical matter which depended on the virtuous conduct of individuals. Price rises therefore made criminals out of measurers. Germain for eighteenth-century European commentators, therefore, was the good faith, or lack thereof, of weighers in Egypt.9 Third, such regulation lacked effectivity – measured in terms of instrumental capacity to achieve its own objectives. Kücük Muhammad’s overt, sudden, relatively blind, face-to-face, directly coercive and external attempt to regulate merchants and measurers in Bulaq was quite unable to achieve its goals. It was because of this official’s very weakness, in a sense, that his power was forced to show its face. By that time the battle had been lost, and the complex of interests surrounding the grain trade in Bulaq overcame his initiatives and cut him down. Small wonder that the chronicler al-Jabarti was still lamenting, albeit in justification of his father’s attempts to intervene, the profound anarchy that reigned in weights and measures in the late 1750s, and the worrying ignorance of the artisans who made them and the weighers that used them.10 Real power rested not with the would-be regulators, but with local networks that were embedded in the day-to-day and proximate functioning of the trades in question – principally tax farmers, merchants, Janissary corps, guilds and the qadis/judges. Such networks were by no means easily legible to or manipulable by state officials. Cairo’s weighing tax farm, for example, was divided into numerous sub-farms in different parts of the city.11 Such sub-farms were in turn subject to various semi-autonomous powers, in particular, that of the qadi, who seems to have exercised control of weighing tax farms for much of the eighteenth century. In 1724, for example, when a certain Ibrahim, ketkhuda (steward) of the ‘Azab (a eunuch regiment), tried to obtain via a gift to the qadi a tax farm in weighing, the qadi refused; Al-Jabarti mentions qadi control as late as 1816.12 The qadi also seems to have had some jurisdiction in the actual appointment of weighers to their posts in the eighteenth century and before.13 The only missing element in the story of Kücük Muhammad is the presence of protest by the wealthy and/or the poor over the unjust use of weights and measures. We do not know much about this official’s motivation, and whether or not he was responding to complaints raised by groups whom he aimed to please. Moreover, very little is known about protests over weights and measures in eighteenth-century Egypt. However, we do know that complaints by the people and popular protest in eighteenth-century Cairo were ‘rather frequent’, as Baer puts it.14 Such protests, especially in the early part of the century, Raymond argues, were often about high food prices, a matter bound up with weighing and measuring, as we have seen.15 It does not seem too much to suggest at the very least that protests over weighing and measuring took place, even if little is known about how such protests articulated with relatively unsuccessful ruling attempts to regulate these trades.

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Restructuring the ruling order During the first few decades of the nineteenth century the structure of statesociety relations in Egypt changed in crucial ways. Mehmet ‘Ali was formally invested by the Ottoman sultan as provincial governor in 1805. He was an Ottoman-Albanian military commander who came to the fore during power struggles following the French departure in 1801. Both merchants and ulama seeking order after decades of civil strife, and popular groups protesting high prices, shortages and oppression endorsed the rule of the new strongman. Mehmet Ali aimed to establish his own dynasty and took advantage of his newly acquired power to transform the existing system of rule in a far more ambitious way than his would-be dynastic predecessors in Egypt (Ali Bey al-Kabir, 1760–73) and Palestine (Ahmad al-Jezzar, 1775–1802). He crushed the mamluk military households, sidelined the old standing army (the Janissaries) and built a new European-style professional army based on conscription. To fund this new army he abolished the rural tax farms in 1814, implemented cadastral surveys and instituted direct, bureaucratic taxation in the countryside. The beginnings of ministries based on functional differentiation were firmly in place by the 1830s; provincial administration on a bureaucratic basis appeared, and the police were reorganized and started to take on new functions. Such changes created a new political framework. The Janissaries were neutralized and then abolished; the qadi courts were brought under closer state control, and the rural tax farmers disappeared. The door stood open to new kinds of intervention from above and new forms of protest from below.

Intermediaries and indirect rule Indirect rule based on intermediaries discharging state-like functions (deploying sanctioned coercion, making binding rules and levying taxes), however, did not simply disappear. In the regulation of weighing and measuring, for example, which became particularly important as market relations extended,16 the government sought where possible to use intermediaries – tax farmers, notables, guild heads and foremen – while aiming to curtail their customary autonomy and subject them to new bureaucratic regulations. The latter because such intermediaries often had vested interests – income, privileges and monopolies – in preventing accurate weighing and measuring and government interference in their own spheres of control. Establishing a complete bureaucracy, on the other hand, which would have involved extending the ministries, the police force, the health board and local councils and committees of various kinds, and abolishing tax farmers and guilds, was not a measure that was thought necessary, practical and/or cost-effective. For one thing it would have involved considerable outlay in salaries alone. Instead it was supposed that existing local intermediaries, the government’s eyes and ears in

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the localities, now stripped of their links to Janissaries and others, were useful in search of dynasty building, justice, order and revenue. Accordingly, the government turned to such intermediaries on numerous occasions. For example, it was discovered in February 1845 that retailers in Alexandria were guilty of ‘treachery to purchasers’ in using short measures. The government proposed that the correct hindasa length be ascertained from the turners, and the shaykh of the retailers guild was to obtain 200 hindasa from the shipyard and distribute them to members of the guild. The shaykh was made responsible for having to pay for the total cost of these measures to the government. These correct measures were to be used on pain of punishment. It was even recommended in the light of this case that it might be more appropriate to use metal measures at some point in the future, as it was easier to use trickery with wooden measures.17 Thus in search of accurate measures among the retailers of Alexandria, the government sought to use the existing guild shaykh while trying to subject him to government regulations – all this was to be done on the cheap, for the cost of the new measures was to be borne collectively by the guild. Or, in September 1852, the regulations of 1835 specifying and publicizing official units and how much they weighed were repeated, because merchants [still] take goods and cereals and products which they buy from the people in Cairo and Alexandria and the provincial towns by adulterated weights and measures and this means treachery for the people who are not aware of the difference of the measures and weights in this respect. Furthermore, the people are not able to implement sales of their own accord so inevitably [such sales] are carried out with the knowledge of their shaykhs [presumably leading to kickbacks]. It is necessary to protect the people from [such] forms of treachery and damage. To achieve such protection it was decreed that the guild shaykh would be held responsible if any measurers under his authority were found using adulterated weights and measures. He would be ‘removed from the shaykhate’, and prohibited from any reappointment. The offending weigher or measurer was also to be removed from service if he was aware of his own malpractice, and even if he was not then he would be guilty of a misdemeanour. And the heads of the sub-districts (khutt/akhtat) and of the districts (qism/aqsam) if they were aware of these violations and they did not prevent them then they will be punished by losing one rank from their position in order to ensure their attention – even if they were unaware of what was going on – because they should have been aware. Mudirs, governors, inspectors and police chiefs were also cautioned to pay attention to such questions.18 In this way we see how the government

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attempted to use and at once control the shaykhs of weighing and measuring, holding them responsible for local regulation, while subjecting them to bureaucratic codes, and even reaching over their heads to the individual weighers or measurers concerned in case of violation. We also see here how local shaykhs and higher layers of bureaucracy were deployed all of a piece – in service of the same goals.

Hegemonic articulation Egypt’s rulers did not simply rely on intermediaries and new bureaucratic agencies to transmit power through the social. The mass of the population was also engaged in this process through various sites of hegemonic articulation, especially petitions and elections on the one hand, and notions of justice and order on the other. The petition had long been an accepted element of Ottoman statecraft. Petitions from the populace were seen as an important part of the overall ‘circle of justice’: theoretically, through petitions the population could obtain justice, which would lead to their prosperity, which would increase state revenues, which would support the ruler who in turn would support justice. Mehmet Ali’s dynasty building in Egypt centralized state power and built up a bureaucracy, but continued to admit petitions on similar grounds as his predecessors. Regulations issued in 1830 state that any peasant or village shaykh can present a petition to ‘al-a‘tab al-saniyya’, that is, the Sublime Thresholds, about any case ‘since the Thresholds are the refuge of the poor and the sanctuary of the weak’.19 Mehmet Ali and his successors were particularly interested in receiving petitions about intermediaries who fleeced the treasury or damaged production or cultivation by oppressing the population. State building may also have increased the bureaucracy’s ability to handle and process petitions. By 1859, the department which was to become the Interior Ministry in the 1860s was already receiving petitions and complaints from Egyptian subjects and dealing with some of them itself. The petition, together with the discourse of the just ruler and the loyal subject on which it was premised, provided a site of hegemonic articulation, a discursive space where divergent interests could be defined and sutured. Intermediaries, furthermore, were only thought to be effective if they were upright and had the consent of those under their authority. Probity would ensure the flow of taxes upwards, and the consent of subordinates was taken to be a sign of their just treatment. It was standard official practice, therefore, to ascertain the good manners, record and character of guild shaykhs and tax farmers on the one hand, and to discover, on the other, whether or not an intermediary had the consent (ridan, taradin) of those under their authority. To pick one example from scores of similar references: the chief of Cairo police sought confirmation by the Interior Ministry of the appointment of a guild deputy, one Ridwan Hasan, for the weighers of Bulaq.

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Among other things, he noted that ‘the people of the guild were informed of this [the intention to appoint Ridwan Hasan] and he [the shaykh] asked for their word about who they would be satisfied with (‘anman yastarduhu), and they answered with their consent (ridahim) to Ridwan [Hasan].’20 In pursuit of this logic, indeed, formal elections for guild officials were established in 1869, and were carried out via the police on numerous occasions. This official perception provided a key point of articulation which allowed divergent interests to be sutured. Probity and consent were viewed as necessary to the ruling order, and were discourses which could also be seized and used by subaltern or other claimants. Activated within petitions and elections were hegemonic notions of justice and order. Justice or right (haqq) involved a conception in which each defined group or individual in the social order had different and unequal just claims, and/or enforceable rights (huquq). As guild members, as peasants, as women and men, as rulers and ruled, each could lay claim to a bundle of rights or claims, and could be expected to discharge a number of duties. Such rights were not usually subjected to a test of equality, and were not supposed to be. Good order, most commonly rendered as order and regulation (al-dabt wa-l-rabt), referred to practice in accordance with the law, and above all with state decrees and regulations, which in turn overlapped greatly with customary practice, all such precepts theoretically operating in the service of justice – or of giving ‘each possessing a right his right’ (kulla dhi haqqin haqqahu). Justice and order provided a language within which the humblest subject had a right, and even a duty, to speak. They were linguistic sites where interests could be defined and sutured. The population were not slow to make use of social and linguistic practices which enabled them to engage in making claims and seeking justice against local exploiters in matters of accuracy of weights and measures, guild affairs and taxation.

Weights and measures Throughout the century, from Alexandria to Asyut, petitioners protested the use of adulterated weights and measures. Merchants, retailers and buyers complained about weighers and/or measurers who overcharged them or under- or over-estimated quantities. Measurers, weighers and retailers complained about their fellows who cheated in ways which robbed their upright colleagues of trade and/or tax revenue. The police, the provincial offices, the local authorities, the Ministries and the Khedive were all involved in responding to complaints and in pursuing their own projects to ensure the accuracy of weights and measures. Ongoing government attempts were made to discontinue older weights and measures, fix and publicize new and/or standard quantities and correspondences, and ensure the use of only government-sanctioned weights and measures. That weights and measures

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should be accurate was a part of official notions of order and regulation (al-dabt wa-l-rabt), the language of which served as a site of hegemonic articulation between petitioners and state officials. The case of a barely legible and grammatically wayward petition by 20 cloth-retailers from the towns of Zaqaziq and Bilbais in Lower Egypt offers a glimpse of the workings of such articulation. Sometime in the late 1860s or early 1870s, the date itself is not clear, these retailers wrote the following to the governor (mudir) of Sharqiyya province: Those presenting this to your honour are retailers living in Zaqaziq town and Bilbays town in Sharqiyya province. We are petitioning to your honour that we are retailers who pay trade taxes, and a government professional tax (wirku) is assessed on us. Our trade is retailing cloth and linen and other things. We use the dhira‘ misri [to measure the cloth] and have sold by this dhira‘ in the past. And now it has happened that some retailers have invented [the practice of] selling by the dhira‘ armi, [which is] different to the misri measure and this is the case for a reason known only to them. In as much as something like that is contradictory to the previous regulations (rawabit), it has led to our [tax] arrears and the accumulation of [unpaid] trade tax which we pay, and arrears in the payments of government taxes. So we had to petition to request from the provincial offices that they notify the place [the relevant authorities?] to require that a known regulation (rabita) be put into action, delivering for that metal dhira‘-s with government stamps to them [retailers] according to their cost – the price of the dhira‘ is 20 piastres – and bringing a demand to show the reality of how many retailers are in the wirku [professional tax] register. [This should be done] until it is considered that the work of the regulation (rabita) [is properly completed] and the above-mentioned dhira‘-s are brought and distributed in all branches of the province, preventing measuring by the dhira‘ armi and [ensuring] selling [only] by the dhira‘ measure brought by the government for the sake of order and regulation (dabt wa rabt) in measuring and the probity of all the retailers, and the merchants obtaining the sale of their goods and the payment of what is demanded from them to the government and elsewhere.21 The retailers, who all had different last names, and included three Hajjs but no shaykhs, are protesting about the use by fellow retailers of a non-standard measure. I have not seen reference to the dhira‘ armi elsewhere. Such use may have stemmed from the weakness of guild organization, and/or the pressures of the growing market economy. It was either robbing the protestors of custom (and thus making them less capable of paying taxes), or was unfairly increasing the protestors’ tax burden by enabling their antagonists to escape or lighten their own taxation. The protestors are clearly encouraged by their perception, which was almost certainly accurate, that their antagonists were

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acting against government regulations by using the dhira‘ armi. A countrywide attempt by the government to implement a sound regulation (rabita) in measuring had begun in May 1867. Such government intervention provided the political opportunity for a protest such as this, which adopted the selfsame language as that used by state officials, as well as appealing strategically to the government’s desire to abolish tax fraud. In the name of order, probity, trade and taxes the protestors are seeking the imposition of a standard measure by the government, the dhira‘ misri, made of metal and duly stamped, in order to prevent adulteration, and for this measure to be distributed by government agency in all areas of the province. The petition’s consequences are unfortunately unknown. One only knows that it was forwarded to the Zaqaziq police chief for action to be taken. The protestors made use of the petition and the conceptions of a just ruler and the loyal subject that lay behind it: it was only their antagonists, apparently, who fell outside the hallowed sphere of righteous conduct. They elaborated, further, on the concept of justice (haqq): it was not only that the government had a right (haqq) to extract a known amount of taxes from the retailers, but that such taxation be fair, that is, not overtax those using the dhira‘ misri and undertax those using the dhira‘ armi. Further, the merchants and retailers had some sort of just claim (haqq) to be able to pursue their livelihoods without the fraud and disruption associated with the dhira‘ armi. Most strikingly, perhaps, in the search for justice, petitioners embraced the language of al-dabt wa-l-rabt and bureaucratic order, seeking their more extensive operation in their trade. There are no less than five mentions of rabt, rawabit or rabita in the petition. Thus petitioning, justice, but especially the language of order and regulation served as sites of hegemonic articulation, where interests among social elements engaged in asymmetric power relations were both constructed and made to seem identical. These hegemonic linguistic and social practices, within which struggle took place, were not simply imposed on a passive population by the powers that be. Nor, on the other hand, were they the result of free, authentic and spontaneous popular wishes. Sites of hegemonic articulation incorporated and channelled potentially incommensurable and conflicting objectives. Aldabt wa-l-rabt was not just an ideological mask adopted by the government or the population to cover state or class interests. On the contrary, it was a discourse which helped constitute those interests. Therefore officials used the language to organize their experience and to make sense of their actions to each other, and in numerous cases one can discern concrete results from claims made to order and regulation. Officials explicitly sought to implement the desires of the people when they were linked to claims to order, even when in confidential communication with each other, where the call for a masking, legitimating discourse was diminished. For example, while trying to secure the use of standard and sound measures, the Deputy Inspector of

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Egypt in a letter to the Interior Minister underlined the importance of the desires of the inhabitants. His honour the deputy inspector for Upper Egypt sent here a statement (no. 16) building on the statement which was sent to him from Asyut provincial offices by which [it was reported that] the people of the town of Manfalut [and] the cloth retailers want to use stamped, metal dhira‘ masri; they [will] pay a sum of ten government piastres for every dhira‘. Inasmuch as everything bought and sold [will be] measured by this dhira‘ then all complaints [will] be removed because of this [the sole use of this standardized measure], and because the measures in use among the people in buying and selling are of types which have been fixed by his honour by enquiries about which type of dhira‘-s [people] desire to use. A statement (no. 22) from his honour was sent showing that the desired dhira‘ is the dhira‘ baladi [that is, dhira‘ misri].22 Here it is indicated that government officials – from the Deputy Inspector of Egypt to officials in Asyut – take the desires of the population for order and consistency in the use of weights, expressed in petitions, complaints and through consultations with intermediaries, very seriously in their efforts to put on track a sound measuring administration in Asyut province. Note that the Deputy Inspector is anxious to avoid complaints, which indicated a lack of order and regulation, and took up government time. Moreover, as this letter indicates, state officials actually made binding the desire of the inhabitants and the cloth retailers, by confirming that the dhira‘ baladi would now be the sole measure of cloth in use in Manfalut. The production of standardized units was not merely a top-down affair. In the same letter, the Deputy Inspector reported Following enquiries to the Inspector for Lower Egypt about current practice in this matter in the provinces of Lower Egypt, a statement was sent from him based on answers from the provinces. [The statement indicated] that the inhabitants of Mansura town in Daqhaliyya [province] by agreement with his honour the mudir approved the use of measuring of all products by the stamped hindasa [obtained] by paying [a fee] to the government as is current practice in Alexandria – the fee is levied by whoever verifies [the measures]. Broadcloth, silk and similar products are measured by the metre.23 In other words, in Mansura in Lower Egypt the hindasa (not the dhira‘ baladi) appears to have been the preference of the inhabitants and was officially confirmed as the main unit of cloth measuring ‘by agreement’ with the provincial governor.

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More strikingly, in Tanta, three different kinds of measures were officially approved: ‘The inhabitants of Tanta town in Gharbiyya [province], by agreement with his honour the mudir, did not decide [to do] what was agreed by the ‘umad of Mansura. They agreed to use three measures: the dhira‘ baladi, and the hindasa and the dhira‘ islambuli.’24 The Deputy Inspector goes on to list the different kinds of cloth that were to be measured by these different measures. It seems therefore that there was a variety of measures officially in use, and the regulative regime was uneven across the country, depending on local bargains – an indication of how state and society interacted to produce outcomes, and how the language of al-dabt wa-l-rabt was a site of articulation rather than a one-way street of imposition. Of course, the inhabitants of Asyut sought a single measure in order to attain justice in buying and selling. Whether or not they achieved this in practice is doubtful. What is clear is that by their complaints they had helped confirm and even to further embed a principle of bureaucratic order. As the Deputy Inspector stated: The most propitious way of ensuring no contraventions in measuring is to take pledges from the merchants and the retailers [to the effect] that they will measure by this dhira‘ and no other. The nazzar al-aqsam or their deputies and police chiefs will supervise this by inspection. Any merchant in contravention will be punished and an investigation will be carried out and a statement [issued] confirming measures taken. Hence bureaucratic institutions, their codes and accompanying forms of investigation, inspection and registration were deepened in the regulation of accuracy in the measuring trade. As a site of hegemonic articulation, then, the language of al-dabt wa-l-rabt, and the forms of bureaucratic intervention it implied, had a certain effectivity. The discourse was not simply a display or a performance to persuade people: it actively articulated, as a practical matter, incommensurable elements within the social. That complaints about accuracy continued throughout the century did not negate the hegemonic effectivity of al-dabt wa-l-rabt – but rather merely confirmed it as the language within which such struggles were articulated. It is hard to escape the thesis that these expanded forms of hegemonic articulation worked to further establish the principle of bureaucratic order in the everyday life of the weighing and measuring trades. Consider the following case of fraud among the Bulaq measurers in 1852, a case sufficiently important to be listed in a summary of major regulations in weighing and measuring from 1830 to 1875: A judgement from the High Court (majlis al-ahkam) on 8 Safar 1269 [21 November 1852] verified by the Ketkhuda’s office on 9 Safar 1269, [contained] a letter to the police comprising the complaints of two persons

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about the just practice (haqq) of Muhammad Abu Shanab, a foreman in Bulaq port. These two [persons] are Hasan ‘Abd and Hasan ‘Usfur. It was judged by the court that the defendant be totally prevented from taking and giving and measuring in cereals and similar [goods]. And the aforementioned Muhammad Abu Shanab is to be prevented and completely removed from the post of foreman. The police are to try to find out about the measurers in grain-selling shops and about whoever is found using measures more than those fixed and take the necessary action with him by means of the police. The surveillance is [carried out] by means of those responsible for regulating prices and weights in the streets.25 It appears that Abu Shanab, a foreman of the measurers in Bulaq port, had been found guilty by the High Court of using, or of tolerating the use by those under his supervision of adulterated measures. Only the measures fixed by the government, as usual, were to be allowed. The profession of the plaintiffs – Hasan ‘Abd and Hasan ‘Usfur – is not disclosed, but they may well have been grain merchants who either sold or bought through the defendant, and had thus lost out by his fraudulent practice. Perhaps the extension of the market was provoking conflicts between those linked to the measuring trade. Whatever the cause, such a matter was serious enough to get to the High Court probably because it took place in Cairo’s main grain port and involved a foreman, responsible for a dozen or more measurers. Abu Shanab not only lost his post as foreman, but was ejected from the trade altogether by court order. State regulations were to be implemented not by any guild officials, who are not mentioned, and may have been part of the problem, but by the more centrally controlled police. The ruling, further, ordered the police to proactively implement surveillance on measurers in the grain shops. Whether or not Abu Shanab made some unofficial, later return to the trade, and/or if malpractice continued, whether through the corruption of the police or not, the basic terms of hegemonic articulation were deepened, and bureaucratic practice made inroads into the life of the trade.

Guild officials Throughout the century, numerous petitions from guild members, merchants, buyers and others protested the exploitative action of guild leaders and foremen, who were accused of various kinds of tyranny and corruption, associated in one way or another with cheating on taxation, overcharging for services rendered or fleecing guild members regarding their share of weighing or measuring fees. In response to such complaints, and pursuing its own search for order and taxation, the government sought to intervene in the name of justice and order. In December 1876, some 134 measurers from Bulaq port sent a long petition (more than one thousand words) to the Interior Minister. They were

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complaining about being robbed of their measuring fees by a contracting scam organized by a disgraced former head of the guild and five deputies. It appears that the former guild head, one Hasan ‘Abd Allah, and a number of deputies had been sentenced by a court to dismissal from the headship. The deputies had gone to prison, whereas Hasan ‘Abd Allah had launched a legal appeal, during which time he does not seem to have been confined. Instead, he apparently brought several allies and managed to get them instated by the police as temporary replacement deputies in the guild of measurers. Meanwhile legitimate elections were held, and the guild voted for three new deputies and a new shaykh. But this election does not seem to have been recognized by the authorities. The temporary, illegitimate deputies started monopolizing measuring contracts and renting out measurers in an exploitative way. Previously the measurers simply took the fee directly from the seller of grain, whereas now the deputies took the fee and distributed it later, taking their own unfair cut in the process. As elsewhere, the petition linked claimants to power holders, and the Bulaq measurers were careful to reiterate the notions of just ruler and loyal subject that accompanied petitioning. Beyond the usual references to your Excellency (dawlatalu afandim) and to your servants (‘abidkum), the petitioners also mention in a more unconventional manner that the corruption of Hasan ‘Abd Allah is not hidden ‘from our wise leaders’ (la yakhfi dhalika ‘ala asyaduna dhuya al-ma’qul), invoking the putative omniscience as well as the benevolence of the powers-that-be. Further, the petitioners articulate and identify their interests with the language of justice (haqq). As the petitioners roundly assert, ‘It is not made up that if we have rights (huquq) [fees which have been withheld] on the account of the deputies then we are not slow to complain to the bureaux of the government, which for its part gives each possessing a right his right (i‘ta kulla dhi haqq haqqahu) and removes injustices’. A strong statement as to popular expectations of the ideal functioning of the state. As the petitioners elaborate, ‘it is not permitted to dispossess the guild of about three hundred persons of work and of all the orders of the government’. In fact, Hasan ‘Abd Allah, it is asserted, ‘takes us as slaves, even though slavery and monopoly are forbidden, and yet his intention is to take us by a type of slavery just as when he was guild head’. Measurers were asserting a right to make a living without dispossession or slavery. Finally, the petitioners impugn the probity of Hasan Abd Allah, underlining the fact that he does not enjoy the consent of the guild. There are repeated references to his trickery, treachery and falsification, and it is several times asserted that the guild desire not Hasan ‘Abd Allah but a different shaykh and three deputies, who, it is claimed, have in fact already been legitimately elected and are of upright character.26 Through petitioning and elaborating on the question of justice and the good practice of local leadership petitioners engaged an agreed-on language which linked them to the state and without any hint of transgression,

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conveying in the process some sense of the moral economy that stood behind the grievances of the ‘enslaved’ measurers, who were not receiving proper fees for measuring at the hands of corrupt deputies. In practice, whether or not the signatories were telling the whole truth, their petition appears to have been effective, at least as far as the archival record goes. The Interior Minister was quick to demand the truth of the matter from the Cairo governor, who replied a month later to say that the police would now – following a decision against Hasan Abd Allah from the Appeals Court – ensure the dismissal of Hasan Abd Allah from his position.27 As elsewhere, hegemonic articulation appears to have had an only partially intended structural effect, which was to bring the codes and practices of bureaucracy, here in the shape of the police and the law courts, more closely to bear on guilds and trades. The encroachment of the bureaucracy can be seen vividly in the case of complaints about foremen in Giza and the subsequent launching of a major regulatory project. In 1867, after a decision by the Privy Council, a countrywide project was launched to subject measures to a sound regulation. At least according to the all-Egypt Inspector, in the instructions to Upper and Lower Egypt which set up the project, the initiative was launched as a result of the discovery of corruption among the measurers of Giza, which was found out in turn because of the complaints of a number of lowly measurers themselves about their exploitative foremen. As he wrote, ‘the mudir of Giza had discovered what was going on because of complaints from the measurers about their foremen.’28 At the very least, the state was in positive need of some sort of complaint from the population to convey the existence of a problem and for some of the information necessary to begin to tackle that problem. We learn from the mudir of Giza himself, in a later letter to the Upper Egypt Inspectorate, that the problem was that the Giza measurers were not under ‘sound regulations’ (rawabit mustaqima), the problem being that [the measurers] were not under the supervision of anyone, and therefore complaints and grievances were lodged by the measures in Giza about the presence of a shaykh and a group of foremen, who take a share of the measuring fees. So the current fee that they take is not fixed but independently determined, and so the situation is not free of treachery against the cereals owners or the merchants in collecting the fee, and the measures are not accurate because they are not from the government. It would appear that shaykhs and foremen were ripping off both measurers as well as the merchants who had to pay inflated fees to have their grains measured. The mudir continued, And for the sake of removing these troubles and [for the sake of] lack of treachery to anyone . . . we approved that measures used by the measurers be made by the government, [that they be] metal-covered and stamped

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and that they are from the government. And that the measurers in the town have just one foreman according to the consent of the guild and are thereby under the supervision of the government for no thieving of their fee by a group of foremen or treachery to the buyers and sellers. And the rate is assessed at 1 piastre per ardab collected from the seller, half to the measurers and the foreman and half to the government in return for government action on behalf of order and regulation (al-dabt wa-l-rabt) and distributing the measures on its account.29 The regulatory project which followed involved the entire country and generated hundreds of documents. Complaints by measurers about the treachery of their foremen identified an interest by melding their concerns with those of the state, a successful hegemonic articulation which resulted in the eyes and ears of the central state drawing ever closer to the everyday life of the trade.

Tax farmers Exploitation associated with tax farming in weighing and measuring was also the subject of complaints by merchants, guild members and the general population. While the government continued to use tax farmers to tax weighers and measurers it was also ready to entertain complaints against them, particularly where forms of corruption which diminished revenue were at stake.30 A suggestive example involved the complaints in April 1878 by no less than 73 merchants and inhabitants of Tanta in Lower Egypt about the tax farmers in the weighing trade there. They petitioned the Khedive as follows: This [petition] is offered by your below-mentioned servants who are grain merchants and inhabitants of Tanta in Gharbiyya. We petition to the Royal Thresholds that when the weighing agency was under the supervision of the government, no weighing [tax] was taken on sweetcorn [not on the cob] and these [goods] were not weighed [at all]. And when tax farms were taken this was the practice followed at the beginning under their supervision. But during this time complaints [started to] come about them because of the weighing of this product by a kind of innovation compared to what had happened during the period of the government [supervision], but not in their [the tax farmers’] period from the early stages: this product includes seeds such as fava beans and wheat and other [grains] of these sorts and these are measured [a practice] based on what is noted on the official schedule . . . and inasmuch as it was not like this previously, as was mentioned, then this contravenes existing [official practice] in the provinces of the regions of the land of Egypt. It is known that the acceptance of tax farms is [should be] according to the existing government and town regulations (dustur), [and we have] fallen into distress (sar fi halat al-dank) because of the cutting in the arrival

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of the goods mentioned. Perhaps it is possible that the sweetcorn could be noted on the official schedule as it used to be . . . [when it was] sold in the same way as types of fruit and green vegetables. So for protection against injury and for the sake of good practice, and to prevent the cutting of trade, it has been necessary to petition requesting the issue of a decree to whoever necessary . . . to remove the meddling of the tax farmers and [return] practice [to how it was] in the past.31 The petitioners were protesting the fact that once the weighing administration in Tanta had been farmed out to tax farmers, they had started to tax and weigh sweetcorn and other cereals which had previously been measured and not taxed. The protestors sought a return to the status quo ante. As in the other cases the protestors lodged their claims through the petition and the associated discourse of the just ruler and loyal subject, indicated very briefly by the reference to the ‘Royal Threshholds’ on the one side and ‘your servants’ on the other. More generally, as elsewhere, the petition completely avoided any attribution of injustice to the ruler. The petitioners avowedly only sought ‘protection against injury’, ‘good practice’ and the flourishing of trade. They were able to express some measure of their moral economy by articulating as an injustice the fact that the diminution in trade which resulted from the new taxes meant that they had ‘fallen into distress’. They also underlined that the tax farmers were straying from government regulations, as well as breaching precedent. It is interesting that both appeals were made, because precedent had a complex relation to regulation during these years – as many regulations overrode and transformed custom, while others merely confirmed customary practice. Neither unwritten custom nor written code took simple precedent. Strikingly enough, the petitioners claimed that ‘it is known that the acceptance of tax farms is according to the existing government and town regulations (dustur)’. Here was a clear request for government intervention to regulate and control these wayward tax-farming intermediaries, on the basis of the written technology of a tax schedule, a government intervention which was only supposed to confirm previous practice. The petition was transferred to the Interior Minister, who forwarded it to the mudir of Gharbiyya, seeking the truth of the matter. The reply of mudir of Gharbiyya province to Interior in July 1878 is as follows: Your honour’s statement of the end of Rajab 1295 no. 105 was issued with a deposition included by Zaydan Ahmad and his companions, grain merchants and people of Tanta town [who were] complaining about the tax farmers of the weighing agency in this region, who are contravening past [practice] by weighing the sweetcorn. [Interior’s] statement demanded to know the truth of the matter and the information of the mudiriyya on that. The situation is that it is known to the mudiriyya that the types of corn mentioned are included in the tax tariff issued from the [Finance Ministry]

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about the goods which are weighed . . . and the mudiriyya has a copy of this from the Lower Egypt Inspectorate from . . . 1291 [1874] no. 1260. There are two types, one of them is sweetcorn for 20 Para and the other is sweetcorn on-the-cob [with its leaves on] (kiyzana) for 15 Paras. But regarding the arrival of complaints from the merchants and the people about the right of the tax farmer of this agency to levy taxes on sweetcorn products without any precedent, it is known, as the shaykh of the weighing station in Tanta made clear, that the two types – sweetcorn and sweetcorn on-thecob – were not previously weighed and no weighing tax was taken on them during the period of the supervision of the government: they were sold by the ardab and measured and not weighed. And therefore [a note] has been written to Finance to find out if it is intended to take a tax on this product . . . until now the correspondence about that is with Finance.32 Note first the seriousness with which the government takes the case. There is no question of simply dismissing the petition and its appeals, which turned on the effective language of hegemonic articulation. The petition is forwarded to the mudir of Gharbiyya Province, and the information and the truth of the matter was sought. It is also striking that even though it was found that the Ministry of Finance had included the sweetcorn in a weighing tax schedule, this was not an end to the matter. The governor of Gharbiyya Province still wanted to find out if this had been a mistake or not, testifying to the importance attached to the complaint, as well as to the power of precedent to authorize correct practice. It is also important to note that at one point measuring in Tanta was under closer government supervision, but had in recent times been ceded to a tax farmer. There was therefore no natural, linear progression from indirect to direct government. Here, in fact, change had gone in the other direction. However, this particular complaint, raised by some 73 inhabitants of this medium-sized provincial town, sought to subject the tax farmers to closer government regulation in order to curtail the autonomy of these intermediaries. Although we do not know what eventually becomes of the case, bureaucratic principles and modes of investigation are again brought to bear on the social as a result of successful hegemonic articulation. Perhaps it was no coincidence that tax farming was slowly being abolished across urban Egypt.

Counterhegemonic effects In the particular history studied here, the very success of petitions, elections, justice and order as sites of hegemonic articulation appears to have driven forward an only partially intended structural change: the further establishment of bureaucratic principles, codes and institutions in the everyday affairs of the trades. Throughout the century, the trend is unmistakeable: the police, the local authorities and the ministries expanded their activities. The guilds were

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largely abolished by 1890. Urban tax farmers had more or less ceased to exist by 1903. And by 1911 a full Administrative Code was published. That this Code was driven forward by articulation between complaints and state intervention is demonstrated by the selectivity of regulation relevant to crafts and service trades. The artisanal trades, from which far fewer complaints emanated, are barely mentioned in the Administrative Code, whereas all those trades coming into continuous contact with a wider public, or having strategic importance, that is, those which provoked numerous petitions and complaints, are in the forefront: weighers and measurers, for example, but also, cab-drivers, donkey-drivers, porters, peddlars, servants, shoeblacks and so on.33 But in this new bureaucratic structure, whither the petition, the election, customary order and the concept of justice which had been the very means by which bureaucracy had been able to batten on to the social? All these sites of hegemonic articulation were broken up, disabled, rendered ineffective, bypassed, disaggregated and/or threatened in some way by the growth of the bureaucracy. Petitions became less effective, when bureaucratic regulation, rather than an individual tyrant, started to lie at the heart of regulatory issues. And the attempt to secure justice dispensed by a just ruler started to become irrelevant as the impersonalism of the bureaucracy started to dominate. Tax farmers were gradually abolished: it was the distant treasury to which petitioners would have to turn if they sought to make claims about taxation. And elections for state-like intermediaries disappeared with the latter’s attrition – the guilds were tacitly abolished in 1890. Claims to precedent and customary practice started to further lose their weight and be redefined negatively as forms of backwardness and tradition, while written regulation and centralized codes became the ruling norm. Slowly a new framework was battened on to the social. A new politics would now be required for claim-making, a politics of mass demonstrations, newspapers, political parties and ideology – a politics, in fact, that was to be repressed by colonialism and local oligarchy using the very bureaucracy that hegemonic articulation had helped build.34 All these processes broke down and disaggregated sites of hegemonic articulation. Their very success, in other words, which assisted the growth of the bureaucracy, ultimately had counterhegemonic effects. Petitioners hoped that new and tighter regulations would liberate them from local tyrannies. In fact, the construction of the bureaucracy brought a new and grander tyranny into their lives, an uncontroversial, impersonal instrument of continuous power and surveillance of unprecedented capacity.

Conclusion [T]he care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment’. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. Max Weber

200 John Chalcraft

This chapter has examined the protests which surrounded the regulation of weighing and measuring in nineteenth-century Egypt. The goal has been to show how, in disputes over accurate measures, guild officials and tax farmers, protestors and government engaged several sites of hegemonic articulation: petitions and elections on the one hand, and notions of justice (haqq) and order (al-dabt wa-l-rabt) on the other. On the basis of some original sources I have aimed to shed some light on how these agreed-on linguistic and social practices served to identify interests – in the sense of both specification and forging a unity – across power differentials. In this sense, these institutions served as sites of hegemonic articulation, sites which were not countered, but expanded by protests, petitions on the one side, and responses by the government on the other. Such sites were not simply forms of ideology, which masked anterior interests; they were not simply disguises worn by the government to deceive the population in service of narrowly conceived interests of ruling individuals or groups. Instead, such social mechanisms helped constitute interests as much as clothe them and were integral to the construction of effective order, in which consent expanded at the expense of coercion and violence. The claims of the powerful and subordinate alike were not simply constituted on the basis of cliquish, individualistic and/or contingent interests. They were produced within and regulated by certain kinds of institutions and languages, which were not simply imposed from above, but defined by their capacity to serve as a site of suture. In short, this chapter has aimed to illustrate processes of hegemonic expansion which should not be seen as a narrow form of co-optation or domination by the corporate interests of a predatory elite. Such reasoning leads one to suggest that counterhegemony can proceed from rulers just as much as from the ruled, inasmuch as rulers have the material and coercive power which enables them to continuously break down, or bypass, sites of hegemonic articulation. These claims also dispute Laclau and Mouffe’s argument that hegemonic articulation is indissolubly linked to a post-1789 form of political struggle based on the principle of democratic equivalence. Concepts of justice and order which imply hierarchy should also be admitted within the fold of hegemonic articulation. Finally, I have argued that the very success of hegemonic articulation helped to set in motion a structural change – the growth of bureaucratic order – which undermined existing sites of hegemonic articulation. Bureaucratic codes and institutions bypassed, broke down or rendered ineffective older forms of articulation such as petitions, elections and customary law. In a sense, therefore, weighers, measurers, retailers and others moved out of the frying pan and into the fire. As in other visions of modernist liberation, protagonists placed the burden of coercion and unfreedom onto the past, focusing only on the tyrannies that were being escaped, and failed to perceive the construction of a new ‘iron cage’. Instead, therefore, of seeing protests as counterhegemonic in aim but fatally flawed and thus co-opted to

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a new hegemony, I have seen them as a feature of hegemonic expansion, which then indirectly and unwittingly came to have counterhegemonic effects. Bureaucracy and counterhegemony was not the inevitable result of hegemonic articulation, but depended on historical contingencies of various kinds. Nonetheless, it would seem that processes of hegemonic articulation can contain diachronic dynamics involving changes in the organization of social power, supplying a motor of processual change ensuring that hegemony and counterhegemony are open-ended, unfinished and unstable constructions.

Notes 1. This formulation uses ‘social power’ in the sense meant by Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power: A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 2. This reading of ‘suture’ is greatly indebted to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985), passim. 3. André Raymond, Artisans et commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siècle, 2 Vols, (Damas: Institut Français d’Etudes Arabes, 1973), p. 275. 4. According to Lane, the dry measure of volume, ardab, was equivalent to about 182 litres and divided into 6 waiba and/or 24 rub‘a. in ardab. 5. The Egypt Census of 1897 lists 9661 measurers of cereals, including 1077 measurers and sifters in Cairo. The Cairo Census of 1868 recorded 740 measurers and what were probably deckhands (kayyalin wa lawwahin). Dar al-Watha’iq alQawmiyya (The Egyptian National Archives, hereafter DWQ) Muhafizat Misr, Ta‘dad Nufus 1285. ‘Ali Mubarak listed 497 measurers in Alexandria in 1877 – table reproduced in ‘Abd Al-Salam ‘Abd Al-Halim ‘Amr, Tawa’if Al-Hiraf fi Misr, 1805–1914, (Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, 1993), p. 211. The dhira‘ is a length measure highly variable depending on products concerned. Lane specifies the measures as follows: dhira’ baladiyya (57.57 cm), a measure of Egyptian cloth; dhira‘ al-hindasa (63.5 cm), a measure of Indian cloth; and dhira‘ istanbuliyya (67.3 cm), a measure of European cloth. Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, first published 1836 (The Hague and London: East-West Publications, 1978), p. 568. 6. The Egypt Census of 1897 lists 1996 weighers (practically all classed as Egyptian) in Egypt including 275 in Cairo, spread all over city, although with 75 in Bulaq; Ali Mubarak lists 327 weighers in Alexandria in 1877, ‘Amr, Tawa’if Al-Hiraf, p. 211. The Cairo Census of 1868 lists 511 members of the guild of weighers (ta’ifat al-qabbaniyya), all but 9 from the capital, with 6 from provinces and 3 Turks; 12 verifiers and/or makers of weights/measurers (ma‘ayrji); and 7 weighers of silver and gold. DWQ Muhafizat Misr (Cairo Governorate), Ta‘dad Nufus (Census), 1285. The principal unit of weight in 1800 was the qantar (44.35 kg), divided into 36 uqqa and/or 100 ratl (0.443 kg); each ratl is divided into 12 wuqiyya and/or 144 dirham of 3.08 grams each. 7. Raymond, Artisans, p. 743–4 8. Ibid., p. 276. 9. Chabrol from 1704, cited in ibid., p. 276. 10. Ibid., p. 276.

202 John Chalcraft 11. Ibid., p. 636–7. 12. Ibid., p. 610. 13. Pascale Ghazaleh, Masters of the Trade: Crafts and Craftspeople in Cairo, 1750–1850, Cairo Papers in Social Science, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999), p. 94. 14. Gabriel Baer, ‘Popular Revolt in Ottoman Cairo’, in Der Islam, 54 (1977), pp. 213–42, esp. 213. 15. André Raymond, ‘Quartiers et mouvements populaires au Caire au XVIIIième Siècle’ in Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt, edited by P.M. Holt (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 104–16, esp. 112–13. 16. Pascale Ghazaleh mentions the ‘strategic importance’ of the weighers to the state. Masters of the Trades, pp. 30–2. 17. DWQ, Summary of Regulations, 25 Muharram 1261/3 February 1845. 18. DWQ, Summary of Regulations, 2 Dhu al-Hijja 1268/17 September 1852. 19. Text of the Qanun al-Muntakhabat (issued in Sha‘ban 1245/Jan/Feb 1830) in Filib Jallad, Qamus al-Idara wa-l-Qada’ Vol. 3 (Alexandria: n.p., 1891), p. 1327. ‘Throughout his [Mehmet Ali’s] many trips round the countryside,’ Marsot writes, ‘any fallah with as petition was allowed to present it.’ Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 109–10. Marsot speaks of many petitions and complaints, the usual targets being local ‘umad and shaykh-s al-balad (p. 113). 20. DWQ Nizarat al-Dakhiliyya (Interior Ministry, hereafter ND) Mukatibat ‘Arabi (Arabic Correspondence, hereafter MA) Mahfaza (file, hereafter M) 35, Ma’mur of Cairo Police/Deputy of Interior Ministry, 12 Rajab 1297/1880. 21. DWQ Majlis al-Khususi (Privy Council, hereafter MK) Wazirat (ministers, hereafter W) M1, Twenty Zaqaziq and Bilbais retailers/Mudir of Sharqiyya Province, n.d., no. 68. 22. DWQ MK W M1 No. 124, Deputy Inspector of Egypt/Interior Minister, 22 Rajab 1287/18 October 1870. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. DWQ, Summary of Regulations. 26. DWQ ND MA M20, 134 Bulaq measurers/Interior Minister, Dhu al-Qa‘ada 1293/December 1876. 27. DWQ ND MA M20, Cairo Governor/Interior Minister, 19 Dhu al-Qa‘ada 1293/6 December 1876; and Interior Minister/Cairo Governor, 1293. 28. DWQ MK W M1, Mufattish ‘Umum al-Aqalim (Inspector General of the Provinces)/Wakil Taftish Bahri (Deputy Inspector for Lower Egypt), Muharram 1284/May 1867, No. 4. 29. DWQ MK W M1, Mudir Giza (Governor of Giza)/Taftish Aqalim Qibli (Inspector of Upper Egypt), 23 Safar 1284/26 June 1867, No. 18. 30. DWQ MK W M1, Inspector for Upper Egypt/Keeper of the Khedivial Seal (muhradar), 26 Rabi‘a II 1293/1876. This correspondence gives some details of the activities of Mahmud Mawsi who held a tax farm in cereals measuring in Fayum province. The yield of the tax farm was reportedly 150 Egyptian pounds per annum. Mahmud Mawsi was seeking to take 20 fidda on every ardab measured. Another tax farm on the Fayum town market yielded 105 Egyptian pounds per annum and was held by ‘Ali Hasan, a grain merchant. (An Egyptian pound was then equivalent to £1. 0s 6d.) 31. DWQ ND MA M25, Zaydan Ahmad and 72 merchants and inhabitants of Tanta / Khedive, April 1878.

Counterhegemonic Effects 203 32. DWQ ND MA M25, Mudir Gharbiyya/Interior Minister, 5 Rajab 1295/5 July 1878. 33. For a survey of these regulations, see ‘Amir, al-Tawa’if al-Hiraf, pp. 218–79. 34. One might suggest, more ambitiously, that these processes of disarticulation stood behind the emerging crisis of the colonial order and paved the way for anticolonial nationalism.

9

Hegemony from Below: Print Workers, the State and the Communist Party in Peru, 1920–401 Paulo Drinot

In this chapter, I examine how in the 1920s and 1930s the Lima print workers’ union (Federación Gráfica del Perú) interacted, on the one hand, with the state and, on the other, with the Peruvian Communist Party in order to suggest ways in which the history of workers in ‘postcolonial’ contexts can help us to conceptualize and understand hegemony and counterhegemony.2 First, this study suggests that we need to pay attention to how hegemony is constructed from below. For the purposes of this chapter, hegemony is understood as a form of domination in which coercion is outweighed by consent, or coercion is armoured by consent. However, I suggest, consent always involves a dynamic relationship.3 Since hegemony is always in the making (it is a process rather than a condition), consent is always negotiated. Or, in other words, consent is not only extracted by the dominant but is also granted, and therefore appropriated and in some cases reformulated, by the subordinate. As such, although hegemony tends to be associated with ideological or ‘cultural’ projects formulated by elites, this study suggests that when hegemony is weak or ‘thin’ (when consent only barely outweighs coercion), the subordinate may (re)produce hegemonic projects of their own, whereby they offer consent to the dominant (they agree to be hegemonized) in exchange for a form of domination based on certain conditions (the right to hold land communally, say, or the right to a closed shop).4 Such projects correspond, therefore, to what we may call ‘hegemony from below’. As I show in this chapter, in the early 1930s, the Lima print workers appropriated and reformulated the discourse that underpinned a form of hegemonic statelabour relations that the state had promoted in the early 1920s but subsequently largely abandoned. In doing so, they formulated their own project of hegemonic state-labour relations, which drew its legitimacy from, but at the same time claimed to improve upon, the state’s hegemonic project.5 Second, this study suggests that we also need to pay attention to the ways in which the interplay of hegemony and counterhegemony creates opportunities for the subordinate to negotiate the basis of their hegemonization, or, to put it another way, to look at how the subordinate strategically engage 204

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in counterhegemony. E. H. Carr’s observation that ‘every society is an arena of social conflicts, and those individuals who range themselves against existing authority are no less products and reflexions of the society than those who uphold it’ is a useful starting point for a discussion of counterhegemony.6 Counterhegemony is often conceived as an alternative hegemony, that is, as a new form of domination that is intended to replace an older form of domination, and, as such, as a direct challenge to the established order. But counterhegemony is also a mirror of hegemony (and, as such, arguably, is never fully outside hegemony).7 Counterhegemony, therefore, reflects the limits of hegemony and arises where hegemony is weak, ‘thin’ or failing. Since counterhegemony seeks to establish itself as an alternative form of domination in which coercion equally is outweighed by consent, it too seeks to extract consent from the subordinate. In a sense, then, successful counterhegemony involves the transferral of the subordinate’s consent from one hegemonic project to another. Far from being inherently emancipatory, then, from the point of view of the subordinate, counterhegemony is merely a new hegemony in the making (in which the character of consent will need to be negotiated anew). Rather, if counterhegemony is emancipatory from the point of view of the subordinate, it is because the challenge of counterhegemony creates conditions in which the subordinate may renegotiate their hegemonization. This study suggests that rather than merely transferring their consent from one hegemonic project to another, the subordinate engage in counterhegemony (that is to say, they express support for and contribute resources to counterhegemonic projects) in order to strengthen their position within the hegemonic order. As I show below, in the 1930s the Lima print workers engaged in the counterhegemonic project formulated by the Peruvian Communist Party not because they believed in, or sought to bring about, Communist revolution, but because they hoped that a reorganization of the union led by Communist organizers would strengthen the union’s bargaining position vis-à-vis employers. Although the strategy backfired (it invited repression and divided the union), the print workers came to see the Communist counterhegemonic project (and, in particular, the fact that the state perceived it as a real threat to its own hegemony) as a useful bargaining tool with which to negotiate their place in the hegemonic order that they themselves sought to help establish. Although counterhegemony is not necessarily emancipatory, then, it can nevertheless be used strategically by the subordinate to influence the character of the hegemonic relationship, that is, to negotiate the conditions in which consent is extracted and granted. In this sense, although counterhegemony is in essence an alternative hegemony in the making, in particular circumstances it can become an element in a broader hegemonic project from below. In contrast to much of the literature on the history of the Peruvian working class in this period (which relies almost exclusively on published sources),

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my approach is in large part archive based; in my estimation a better method for recovering the complexity of working-class experience in twentiethcentury Peru. In particular, I employ two types of sources: the minute books of the print workers’ union and the documents of the Labour Section, a state agency set up in the 1920s to institutionalize collective bargaining, which together provide a privileged perspective on the experience of Lima’s print workers and their union in the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, these sources give us insight, on the one hand, on the negotiations that went on within the union between different groups of workers (difficult to surmise from published sources such as union newspapers, which would tend to provide only the union line adopted following negotiations), and, on the other, on the negotiations between the union, employers and the representatives of the state at the Labour Section (equally difficult to surmise from published sources such as ministerial reports, which would tend to provide only information on the outcomes of the negotiations). In other words, in contrast to other approaches, the approach and the sources used here give us an opportunity to study the Lima print workers’ experience of hegemony and counterhegemony from below.

The promise and betrayal of hegemony: the Federación Gráfica del Perú and the Patria Nueva The Federación Gráfica del Perú (FGP) was founded on 14 January 1919 during a period of acute labour agitation (brought about, in part, by a steep rise in the price of foodstuffs) which saw the country’s first general strike and contributed to the downfall of one government (Pardo) and the rise of another (Leguía).8 The 26 founding members agreed ‘to unify all the workers in the profession and to prepare them for the defence of their interests’.9 Earlier attempts at organization in the industry date back to the late nineteenth century (if not earlier). The Sociedad Tipográfica del Perú (founded in 1877), the Sociedad Gutenberg (1882), the Unión Gráfica del Perú (1883) and the Sociedad Tipográfica Confederada (1896) are some precursor organizations. A Sociedad Tipográfica is said to have existed as early as 1795.10 Relatively little is known about these early attempts at organization. Members of the Sociedad Tipográfica de Auxilios Mutuos were behind the publication of El Obrero, published once a week between 1875 and 1877. These organizations largely limited their sphere of action to mutual-aid activities, although debates in the pages of El Obrero suggest that the workers in the industry, or gráficos, were beginning to develop a political identity which was broadly liberal in outlook.11 In the 1890s a degree of militancy appears to have crept in and some early mobilizations resulted in improved working conditions.12 But organization was incipient and fickle. In 1892, one newspaper, La Linterna, pointed to the lack of unity among workers suggesting that they needed to agree on a pay scale if they were ever to stand

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up to employers.13 In 1896 a month-long strike, already weakened by scabbing, collapsed when a worker stole the strike fund.14 In the decade that followed its creation the FGP faced many of the same problems that its precursor organizations had faced. The FGP combined the roles of a mutual-aid organization and of a trade union fighting for better working conditions in the print shops. It does not appear to have succeeded particularly well in either of the roles. For one thing, the union represented only a small proportion of Lima’s print workers. In 1920, the FGP boasted some 350 members.15 However, the number of print workers was much greater: according to the 1920 census there were 905 workers employed in the ‘Printing and Bookbinding’ trades in Lima.16 As the FGP itself recognized, a considerable proportion of print workers working in Lima’s 60 odd print shops were not members of the union.17 In part this owed to the fact that, following a strike in 1926, some of the larger print works, known as rotativos, owned by the country’s major newspapers, such as El Comercio, La Prensa, La Crónica and El Tiempo, decided to employ only non-union workers.18 But available evidence suggests that even in the medium or small print works, or talleres, the FGP had a limited control over the workforce. By 1931, according to one estimate, the number of print workers had risen to 2208.19 It is not known how many of these were members of the FGP, but it is unlikely to have been more than a fourth of the total. For a union that had been founded in order ‘to unify all the workers in the profession’, such low levels of unionization severely weakened its capacity to shape labour conditions in the print shops. The FGP’s limited representation can be explained in several ways. As we have seen, some print workers were prevented from joining the FGP by their employers. Some, the more moderate, may have been put off by the union’s anarquisant rhetoric as included in its ‘Declaration of Principles’, with its claim that ‘relations between capital and labour create an antagonism as a consequence of the different values attached to one and the other’. Others, the more radical, may have been put off by its relatively moderate goals, which included ‘establishing a library and reading room’ and building ties of friendship with print unions in Europe and South America. Others still may have felt, not unjustifiably, that the union was run by a small clique that looked after its own interests rather than those of the more general community of print workers.20 Women were clearly not encouraged to join, and on several occasions, the FGP tried to stop print shops from employing ‘women and children’. Some may have thought that the 50 centavos (about a fourth of an average daily wage) that the FGP charged its members on a monthly basis was more than they could afford, or that the mutual-aid benefits that they could expect from the union were not worth the investment. But most are likely to have stayed away because they could see that the union could do little to wrest better wages and working conditions from employers. In October 1919 the FGP presented its first pliego de reclamos (list of grievances) to the owners of 46 print shops (both rotativos and talleres). Included

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in its demands were wage increases that ranged between 50 and 80 per cent, double pay on Sundays, the elimination of fines and 50 per cent sickness pay.21 As the dispute unfolded, the recently established government of President Augusto B. Leguía set up an arbitration tribunal. Dr Pérez Aranibar, the government-designated arbitro, headed the tribunal. The dispute resulted in a clear victory for the FGP. The collective contract signed between workers and employers granted workers on a per diem wage a 70 per cent pay rise, while workers on piecework got specific increases. Other benefits gained included double pay on holidays and 50 per cent extra pay for night work until 11 p.m., and double pay thereafter. The FGP concluded No doubt about it; none of our comrades has been jailed; no traitor has been beaten up, no notes have been skipped, no one has sung out of tune. Social harmony has been our goal and victory our driving force. It is a modest material victory but a glorious moral victory. We have succeeded in organising the most disorganized workforce that has ever existed. And if we did not obtain all that we strove for, we must take advantage of the edifying lessons that our struggle has left us.22 Dr Pérez Aranibar was thanked for his intervention and the union backed a motion sent to the National Assembly to create a Ministry of Labour. A few months later, in January 1920, the Labour Section (Sección del Trabajo) of the Development Ministry granted official recognition to FGP. As the above suggests, the FGP was one of a number of unions to welcome, and to benefit from, the creation of an institutional and legal framework of collective bargaining for the resolution of industrial disputes overseen by the Labour Section; or, what we may call, hegemonic state-labour relations.23 Like similar institutions, such as the Indian Affairs Section (Sección de Asuntos Indígenas), the Labour Section was created in order to channel growing pressure from below (from organized workers demanding the eight-hour day or improvements in working conditions, or from indigenous communities demanding legal recognition of their lands or protection from encroaching latifundia). The government of Augusto B. Leguía (1919–30) backed the creation of such institutions in part because it had been swept to power on a wave of popular support.24 However, their creation also reflected the belief (or desire) prevalent in some sectors of the elite that Peru was entering a new ‘modern’ age and as such required ‘modern’ institutions to deal with ‘modern’ problems. In this sense, the Labour Section and the Indian Affairs Section can be seen as elements in a hegemonic project based on the development of ‘modern’ institutions, increased state capacity and autonomy and an industrialising project, which came to be known as the ‘Patria Nueva’ (New Fatherland). At least initially, unions were eager to buy into this project. Most unions actively sought official recognition.25 Moreover, many turned to the Labour Section to force employers to agree to collective contracts

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regulating working conditions and wages.26 The fact that young and progressive men, most of whom had close links to the labour movement, manned the Labour Section in this early period largely explains why many unions were relatively successful.27 The progressive thrust of the early years of the Patria Nueva was not to last. As his grip on the country strengthened, Leguía backtracked on his early progressive measures. To borrow from James C. Scott, a short-lived ‘thick’ version of hegemony, based on active consent, was replaced by a ‘thin’ version, based on resignation.28 The budget of the Development Ministry, which housed the Labour Section, was slashed from 109,000 to 36,000 Peruvian pounds in 1921 and 1922.29 By 1923, following the mass protests that arose from the attempt to consecrate the country to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Leguía began systematically to repress labour and to undo rapidly the hegemonic state-labour relations put in place following his rise to power. Labour leaders and progressive intellectuals, such as, most famously, José Carlos Mariátegui and Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, were jailed or exiled, union locales were closed and worker libraries were confiscated. By 1927 union activity was severely curtailed. The Development Ministry handled only 20 industrial disputes that year. Of these only seven were found to be legitimate.30 At the same time, Leguía promoted a bland form of unionism through patronage of mutual-aid societies, which, in exchange, campaigned in favour of the president’s re-election efforts. This shift in Leguía’s labour policy corresponded to the abandonment of the ‘thick’ hegemonic project of the Patria Nueva as the president turned his back on his original support base of urban popular sectors and progressive middle-class sectors. Instead, Leguía began to court both sectors of the old ‘oligarchy’ and foreign, particularly US, capital which largely controlled agricultural and, particularly, mineral and oil export sectors and to erect a highly corrupt and agent state dependent on (international) debt financing. This ‘betrayal’ of the Patria Nueva project, and its associated ‘thick’ hegemonic state-labour relations, had dire consequences for the print workers. The FGP’s triumphant tone and enthusiasm for government intervention in the industrial disputes of 1919 was short lived. It soon became clear that although the print shop owners had signed a new collective contract they had little intention of respecting it and that the state, and its institutions, had no interest or power to force them to do so.31 Between March 1920 and October 1921, the FGP sent a series of letters of complaint to the Labour Section pointing out that employers were flouting regularly the collective contract. Some letters referred to the shortcomings of the contract’s clauses. Humberto Ibáñez, president of the FGP, noted in March 1920 that the wording of clause 13 relative to sick pay was lacking in precision, which allowed the print shop owners to evade it: ‘each time a worker falls ill he gets fired inhumanely as has happened with a union member who works at the Fabbri

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print shop’.32 Other complaints referred to lack of payment on holidays, poor hygiene in some print shops, ‘the scant security and the danger posed by machinery installed in locales that are unsuitable’, as well as workdays exceeding eight hours, and ‘unjust dismissal’.33 These letters suggest that, at least initially, the FGP were willing to become involved in the new institutionalized system of industrial relations that the Leguía government was promoting. The ‘thinning’ of hegemonic state-labour relations was reflected in growing dissatisfaction with the Labour Section’s capacity to enforce the contract in the FGP. In August 1922, the FGP protested at ‘the uselessness and incompetence of the Labour Office’.34 By mid-1923, the Obrero Gráfico, the union newspaper, claimed that the Labour Section and the Superior Council of Labour Social Foresight ‘in theory and in practice, only fulfil decorative functions, because, to this date, we have not seen or heard of a single just resolution’. According to the newspaper, the institutions served only the interests of capitalists: ‘they are bureaucratic entities created to protect the rich’.35 The growing dissatisfaction with the Labour Section led the FGP to seek the intervention of Lima’s Prefect when it issued a new ‘list of grievances’ demanding a general wage rise in the industry in 1924. Teobaldo Sarmiento, the FGP’s general secretary explained to the Prefect: ‘We have not sought the intervention of the Labour Section because we have little confidence that this entity can achieve a fair resolution in our disputes. We speak from bitter experience. For this reason we ask you for an impartial and serene ruling.’36 During another dispute, in May 1925, the FGP rejected the mediation of the Labour Section, preferring instead to settle the dispute directly with the owner of Imprenta Scheuch: ‘the conciliations promoted by that institution do not inspire confidence, as previous experience has shown its clear partiality and that is why we do not seek its intervention’.37 The FGP’s dissatisfaction with the Labour Section was matched by the employers’ dissatisfaction. During a dispute over wage cuts at the Berrio print shop in October 1921, the shop owner, Pedro Berrio, wrote a letter to the Labour Section to complain about its intervention in the dispute, noting that although he recognized the right of the Labour Section to act in the case of a dismissal, ‘the [present] intervention represents a real danger, as it incites pernicious desires among the workers, such as their attempt to force us to pay higher wages that we could never accept’.38 As this suggests, for employers it was the ‘thick’ version, rather than the ‘thin’ version, of hegemonic state-labour relations that represented a threat to their interests. Like the workers, employers too turned to other institutions to seek support. During a dispute at the Torres Aguirre print shop in 1924, following the FGP’s refusal to attend the arbitration tribunal and to accept the tribunal’s ruling, the shop owners turned to the Interior Ministry, rather than the Development Ministry, and demanded that the Minister apply ‘the appropriate sanction to this act of rebellion’.39 The need for both employers and,

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in particular, workers, to turn to government, prefectural, or municipal authorities with executive clout and the power to implement, through force if necessary, the resolutions of the Labour Section and of the industrial relation tribunals, effectively undermined both the Labour Section and the Development Ministry’s capacity to elaborate and legitimize an effective industrial relations policy. It reflects, more generally, the rolling back of the institutionalization and ‘modernization’ associated with the project of the Patria Nueva, its ‘thinning out’ perhaps, and its replacement by a more traditional form of political patronage. Severely weakened by the impact of the world economic crisis and with few friends (Leguía even alienated the armed forces over the controversial Tacna-Arica dispute resolution with Chile), the regime collapsed in 1930 following a coup by Lieutenant Colonel Luis M. Sánchez Cerro. The brief political opening that ensued saw the emergence of two new political forces (admittedly both with roots in the 1920s) with distinct counterhegemonic projects that would radically transform Peru’s political arena: the Peruvian Communist Party and APRA. It also saw an unprecedented level of mobilization by workers in the export sectors and in urban centres culminating in the May 1931 general strike. Following the strike, and particularly following Sánchez Cerro’s election to the presidency in October 1931, the political opening gave way to a period of intense if selective repression. In this increasingly volatile context, organized workers, including the members of the FGP, tried hard to resist attempts by employers to transfer the impact of the slump to their workforce by firing workers, cutting work days, reducing wages and, more generally, by flouting the collective contracts that had been signed at the beginning of the 1920s. As I show below, the FGP proved too weak to impose the sort of union discipline that could have resisted the employers’ attacks. Facing total defeat, the union pursued political patronage to its logical conclusion by writing a petition to the President. But, a reading of the petition and of the debates that surrounded its drafting suggests that in turning to the President the FGP sought more than the protection of a patron. The petition was a call for the re-establishment of hegemonic state-labour relations.

Hegemony from below: the FGP and the slump The printing industry was not spared the effects of the late 1920s and early 1930s slump. Orders for printing jobs, particularly from the state, were cut. Several newspapers were closed, including El Tiempo, El Perú and, following the collapse of the Leguía government, La Prensa, the regime’s mouthpiece. In Lima and Callao, unemployment affected around 30 per cent of print workers, not a negligible amount, but less than in other industries.40 However, to fire a worker could be expensive. Although there existed no specific law regulating compensation for dismissal, after 1924 the Labour

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Section established that workers who were fired would receive one week’s wages per year worked as compensation.41 In the case of high-earning print workers, the amount paid could be substantial. Some employers put money aside specifically to pay for compensation.42 Employers could, however, circumvent paying compensation if they could show that workers had broken the law. This is what happened at the El Escritorio print shop in June 1930. A dispute erupted after workers declared themselves on strike when Santiago Silva, the print shop administrator, refused to pay half a day’s wages holiday pay as stipulated in the collective contract signed with the print shop on 17 September 1924.43 Silva used the strike as an opportunity to get rid of excess workers, particularly the more ‘uppity’ ones. The dispute lasted almost three months and resulted in a clear and humiliating defeat for the FGP when despite countless negotiations with the print shop owners at the Labour Section, the print shop workers agreed to go back to work on a piece rate basis, thus undermining (and in practice voiding) the collective contract. As at El Escritorio, the owners of other print shops used the new economic context to alter the onerous, as they saw it, working and remuneration arrangements that workers had gained in the early 1920s. It was against these changes that workers reacted. A few disputes were resolved relatively swiftly. The owner of the Ruiz print shop requested that during the months of July and August 1930 no work be carried out on holidays. In exchange he promised to pay 25 per cent of the normal wage on those days and not to reduce wages or dismiss any workers. After some discussion a deal was struck, the owner raised his offer to 30 per cent of the wage and one full day during 28 July week (national day).44 However, most disputes were more acrimonious.45 Many were outright defeats for the FGP. At La Opinión Nacional, the FGP’s authority was completely undermined when the owner succeeded in getting his workers to sign individual contracts.46 Disputes at other print shops, such as Colville, Orellana, Fabbri, Scheuch, La Americana, Varese and La Prensa, followed similar patterns. The owners did not respect the contracts, wages were cut, or more often, workdays were reduced and payment of wages was delayed. Typically, owners tried to establish new contracts, usually on an individual basis and in some cases, as in El Escritorio, to change the pay structure from daily wages to piece work. They normally succeeded. The FGP’s response followed a recognizable pattern. Whatever the cause of the dispute, the goal was to protect the collective contract and have it ratified and enforced by the Labour Section or the Development Ministry.47 Particularly when they escalated into strikes, disputes were expensive and exercised a heavy toll on the FGP’s finances. The third trimestre of 1930 resulted in a deficit of 732.78 soles.48 By comparison, the deficit for the first trimestre of 1930, before the El Escritorio strike, had been a mere 18.73 soles.49 Strikers had to be paid: according to one entry in the minute books, the strikers received 171.90 soles over three days.50 However, funds to support a strike

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were hard to come by. During the La Prensa strike a mere 105.10 soles were collected. The 42 workers involved in the strike received 2.50 soles each.51 Clearly, support for strikes meant digging into the union’s coffers. However, these were usually empty both because few members paid their dues and because the union’s mutual-aid functions were extremely onerous. Pleas for financial support from other unions were met with a blanket, if polite, refusal.52 The FGP’s inability to sustain strikes financially for any prolonged period of time perhaps explains some workers’ readiness to strike deals with their employers, however detrimental these might have been in the long run. Moreover, as the FGP readily admitted, the deals were more detrimental to the FGP than to the workers themselves. For some workers, the situation had become so desperate that they decided to try their luck in Chile, presumably in the nitrate mines.53 The resolution of the disputes points to the increasing weakness of the FGP in the early 1930s. Faced with a lame duck Labour Section, the FGP was in effect powerless to stop employers from flouting the collective contract. This may explain why print shop workers engaged in a number of disputes independent of the FGP. However, the nature of these disputes and their outcomes were similar to those in which the FGP was involved. A dispute at the Southwell print shop was remarkably similar to the El Escritorio dispute. In April 1930, ten workers complained that they had not received their wages, amounting to a total of 730.30 soles.54 After several discussions and exchanges of letters, the Labour Section decided in favour of the workers. However, by December, the workers had yet to receive their wages; they concluded that the Labour Section and Development Ministry were hopelessly ineffective and requested a copy of the Labour Section’s ruling to take the matter up in the common law courts (tribunales comunes).55 At the Castrillón print shop, several workers were owed a total of 1102.89 soles. The print shop was practically bankrupt. However, the owner promised to pay up. Yet, as one Development Ministry employee noted, ‘there is no chance that Castrillón will pay what he has offered’.56 At the Orellana workshop, a dispute over pay that began in September 1930 had yet to be settled as late as August 1931.57 Unable to rely on the Labour Section for protection of its collective contract, the FGP attempted to redress the balance of power as it had done in the past by turning to political authorities with greater clout. In September 1930, during the El Escritorio dispute, the FGP drafted a memorial (petition) to President Sánchez Cerro, in power for less than a month.58 The grievances and demands contained in an early draft of the memorial are instructive. Most demands concerned specific issues such as work time and wages. The print workers protested at the print shop owners’ failure to respect the 48 hour work-week and at the ‘improvised holidays’ that they imposed, thus suppressing workdays. As orders were cut, so employers sought to cut costs, and labour costs must have been high on their list. The memorial also pointed

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out that legislation regulating the work of women and children had to be respected. Since wages for women and children were typically lower, it seems likely that employers were turning to this cheaper labour to carry out the few orders they received. Workers also complained about the unfair competition of state-owned printers and trades schools and demanded that it be controlled, as they brought prices down and created a ‘lack of work in many print shops’. In addition, the memorial contained more general concerns, including a point about ‘work that is sent abroad by a number of print shops when it can be done in the country’ and a demand that the government ‘reduce tariffs on imports of print shop goods in order to protect the national print industry’. A careful reading of the union’s minute books suggests that the print workers thought long and hard about the content of the memorial, adding and subtracting demands. Following a long discussion on 18 September 1930, the FGP assembly voted to add a demand that the government establish fines for those workshops caught exporting work. It also agreed to eliminate the tariff issue on the grounds that ‘it reflects the interests of owners more than those of workers’. While the FGP had a clear vision of the economic situation of the printing industry, and was fully aware of the effect protectionism had on the material condition of workers, it nevertheless rejected making common cause with the print shop owners. More important, the assembly also voted to omit from the memorial that was sent to the President a request that the government introduce a labour code. The FGP decided to leave this matter to the Confederación General de Trabajadores del Perú (CGTP), the labour central, ‘so that it can request it in agreement with the other unions’. Although Sánchez Cerro was sent a watered-down version of the original draft, it is important to recognize that the memorial was not a simple petition by submissive clients for support from a powerful patron. Instead a careful reading of the process that led to the drafting of the memorial suggests that the FGP members conceived of their situation, and that of the broader organized working class, in complex terms. The FGP had a broad, even sophisticated, understanding of the factors that shaped the lives of Lima’s print workers. It was aware of both the economics of protectionism and the complexities of social legislation. And it had a number of concrete proposals, both practical and ‘moral’ and revealing a particular idea of statelabour relations, which echoed the ‘thick’ hegemonic state-labour relations that Leguía had initiated and then abandoned. In a sense, the memorial was a pitch for hegemony from below. As subsequent entries in the minute books show, the memorial had little if no effect, despite several visits to the Presidential palace by FGP delegations. With the failure of the memorial, the FGP effectively ran out of official channels of protest and hope of redress. The experience of the 1920s, confirmed by the experience of the early 1930s, had shown the FGP that the Labour Section was a lame duck organization with no power to either enforce the

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industry’s collective contract or to stop employers from arbitrarily undermining it by signing individual contracts with their workers. Moreover, it became increasingly clear that the union exercised no real control over individual print shops, regardless of whether these were affiliated to the FGP or not. Under pressure from the print shop owners, the workers typically gave way to their demands, and in the process, further weakened the FGP. If the political opening that accompanied the Sánchez Cerro revolution against the Leguía regime had raised the possibility of an improvement in the union’s fortunes, the repeated humiliations at the hands of employers and the failure to establish a greater degree of control over Lima’s print workers appear to have convinced the FGP that it could expect little from the state’s institutions or, indeed, from the President. If the increasingly weak position of the union was to be addressed, it would have to be addressed from within. The course taken was to reorganize the FGP.

Counter hegemony engaged: the Sindicato de Trabajadores Gráficos de Lima The justifications for the reorganization of the FGP are contained in a series of documents that span a relatively long period of time. As early as October 1930, two members of the FGP executive, Pablo Villanueva and Bastarrachea (first name unknown), argued that it was necessary to reorganize the FGP ‘and turn it into a real syndicalist entity in order to stop the misuse of union funds for mutualism, which undermines the strength of the union when conflicts arise’. Bastarrachea added ‘it is our lack of true organization that has caused the Federation to be in the state it is today’.59 In December 1930, the FGP issued a pamphlet entitled ‘Manifesto to the Print Workers’.60 It began by noting the workers’ shortcomings in dealing with the severe economic crisis. According to the authors of the pamphlet, the workers’ actions were limited, reactive and lacked cohesion. They denounced the ‘collaborationism’ of many workers and identified the problem faced by their union as follows: ‘we have failed to bring to the fore our class consciousness, our organizing spirit and our belief in the social mission of the proletariat.’ The answer to these problems, the authors argued, was sindicalismo: ‘the only medium capable of uniting the working class and of giving its struggles a decisive effectiveness’. In praising syndicalism, the pamphlet identified mutualism as the cause of collaborationism and of much if not all that was wrong in the labour movement: ‘Many comrades join the Federation only in order to gain access to the mutual subsidies’, it suggested. Mutualism, the pamphlet continued, established a system of privilege: only those who paid their dues benefited, while the unorganized and unemployed were left by the wayside. This situation promoted parsimony and complacency, which were both alien and detrimental to the worker. Mutualism was thus presented as a corrupting and divisive influence: it introduced a disuniting and immoral element into

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labour organization. By contrast, with syndicalism, the union dues would be used productively. They would be channelled towards propaganda, achieving unification at the national level and raising class consciousness, as well as promoting solidarity, sport and a strike fund. It is worth noting the reasons given for developing sport: [The dues] will be used to create and maintain a section that promotes workers’ physical development and that, under the control and direction of our representative institutions, will keep at bay the economic and moral influence of the bourgeoisie that at the moment predominates in sport institutions to which many of our comrades belong in light of the absence of proletarian sport institutions. Sport, then, would become a part of the class struggle; it would serve both a physical and an ideological function. The changes would be twofold. First, mutualism would be scrapped. The FGP would no longer provide health and death benefits. These were extremely costly and, from the FGP’s point of view at least, hindered the union’s capacity to fulfil its role as a representative of the print workers in disputes with employers. Second, the organization and structure of the FGP would be modified. Each print shop would form a shop committee, thus extending the syndical structure to each shop. In effect, each print shop would become a mini-union. These committees would then elect delegates who would represent them at the regional level within the Sindicato de Trabajadores Gráficos de Lima (STGL). Similar sindicatos would be set up in other cities. Delegates from the sindicatos would then form the new FGP.61 The reorganization contained elements of both decentralization and centralization. In principle, the committees would be more autonomous. However, as the President of the FGP made clear, the union was being reorganized ‘so that the Federation can have greater control over its affiliates’.62 The new Sindicato would be financed by weekly contributions of ten centavos, a considerably smaller amount than was paid in dues to the FGP. As the statutes stressed, the contributions would be used for the Sindicato’s principal function as an exclusively syndical entity.63 The proposals to reorganize the FGP were accompanied by a radical discursive shift, as the quotes above suggest. This shift was especially clear in the statutes of the STGL. The new statutes shared many common elements with most union statutes of the 1920s. They began by stressing the division of society into two antagonistic classes: the exploitative bourgeoisie and the exploited proletariat. But they also contained discursive elements that were strikingly new. According to the statutes’ Orientación section: The capitalist system has at present reached its period of imperialism – the highest stage of capitalism. The world is today divided into colonial and semicolonial countries. We, the proletarians of a semicolonial country,

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have the duty to fight energetically against imperialism, in all its facets, in the terrain of class, linking that struggle to our own struggle and to the worldwide anti-imperialist struggle. Similarly, in both this and other sections, explicit reference was made to ‘el fascismo’. While the statutes identified the ‘union of all of Lima’s print workers, irrespective of race, nationality, sex, age or ideology’, as the principal objective of the FGP (and again a common component of union statutes of this period), they went on to stress that ‘fascist agents’, along with traitors, scabs and defaulters, will be excluded from the Sindicato. Article 17, section d. was particularly revealing. It read: ‘[The STGL will oppose] all state intervention, of its dependencies or authorities, in the disputes that arise between ourselves and employers and against all forms of state arbitration’. Both the ‘new’ language, which strongly echoed the rhetoric of Third International Communism, and the explicit rejection of state intervention suggest a growing influence within the FGP of the Central General de Trabajadores del Perú (CGTP), the labour central controlled by the Peruvian Communist Party. As one STGL member noted in late 1931 ‘our statutes are identical to those of the CGTP’.64 The relation between the FGP and the CGTP can be traced back to early 1930 when the latter requested the use of the FGP’s locale for their own sessions.65 However, the FGP’s links with the Peruvian Communist Party (or its earlier incarnation, the Peruvian Socialist Party) predate the creation of the CGTP. From 1926 onwards there are frequent references in the minute books to José Carlos Mariátegui, the Fiesta de la Planta, and the Universidades Populares González Prada.66 The closeness of the FGP to Mariátegui is evident from the minute books. The FGP was a stakeholder in Mariátegui’s Claridad print works.67 Mariátegui appears to have acted as an adviser to the FGP on certain disputes.68 On a number of occasions, the FGP sent commissions to visit Mariátegui during his prolonged illnesses.69 Members of Mariátegui’s political and intellectual entourage also appear in the FGP’s minute books. Ricardo Martínez de la Torre gave talks on labour issues at the FGP, and presented a few books and a portrait of ‘Lenine’ (sic).70 In particular, two print workers, Manuel Zerpa and César Hinojosa, became close associates of Mariátegui. Both were involved in the Second Workers’ Congress held in 1927; Zerpa was elected secretario de actas and later that year became one of a number of workers and intellectuals forced into exile (to Panama, in his case) by the Leguía regime following the ‘Complot Comunista’ episode. In 1929, Hinojosa became a founder-member of Mariátegui’s Socialist Party.71 Indeed, the reorganization of the FGP and the emergence of a more radical communist-inspired rhetoric owed much to the growing, if brief, influence of Zerpa, who returned to Peru in October 1930, and Hinojosa in the union.72 However, although Communist print workers like Zerpa and Hinojosa were behind the changes in the union neither the Peruvian Communist

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Party nor the CGTP controlled the FGP and FGP support for the CGTP was never unconditional. The FGP sent delegates to the CGTP who informed on proceedings at the CGTP and ‘lobbied’ for the FGP at the central. On some occasions, the CGTP intervened directly in FGP affairs.73 But on others the FGP refused to toe the line. When the CGTP ordered that every affiliate union buy 50 to 100 copies of the CGTP newspaper, El Trabajador, the President of the FGP replied ‘we can do no more than suggest to workers that they buy the paper’.74 Discussions concerning the CGTP at FGP meetings were often marked by disagreements. Letters from the CGTP were not usually given priority, and were often left to be discussed at subsequent meetings. More important, when the CGTP attempted to organize a general strike in November 1930, the FGP refused to join on the grounds that many gráficos, particularly those working in the newspapers, were not members of the FGP and that the strike would be a failure.75 Following the May 1931 general strike, the union received a letter from the CGTP, which was discussed at length. The FGP assembly agreed ‘to critique their actions which have strayed from a purely syndical line’, thus echoing the criticisms made by a number of labour organizations at the Communist Party’s manipulation of the CGTP.76 As this suggests, the growing influence of Communist workers in the union was not a consequence of a growing control of the Communist Party over the union. On the contrary, in light of their frustrated attempts to stand up to the employers and to establish a degree of union discipline among the workforce, the members of the FGP seem to have been prepared to countenance the proposals put forward by Zerpa and his comrades. Some of the rhetoric, regarding the semicolonial character of Peru or the threat of fascism may have seemed fanciful. But the Communists’ call to reject state arbitration must have found plenty of supporters, given past experience with the Labour Section. Similarly, given the weakness of the union’s influence in the print shops, devolving some degree of power to them must have seemed like a reasonable way of increasing their involvement. In fact the reorganization proved a disaster. The Sindicato de Trabajadores Gráficos de Lima (STGL) finally came into existence in May 1931. Pablo Villanueva, one of the FGP’s delegates to the CGTP, was elected general secretary. In a speech to the assembly, Villanueva pointed to the difficult conditions faced by print workers, including ‘four and three days of work a week, non-payment of salaries, unjustified sackings of workers’, which made it imperative to reunify the workforce.77 But the creation of the STGL coincided with the arrest of much of the union’s leadership including Zerpa and Hinojosa.78 It coincided more broadly with a new period of political closure, as the Sánchez Cerro government adopted an increasingly authoritarian approach to dealing with the labour movement and the parties of the left. The CGTP was banned in late 1931 and both the PCP and APRA were forced underground. In this context, the reorganization proved a disaster.

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The STGL argued that part of its undoing was a result of ‘the political situation which makes it impossible for us to hold meetings’.79 But the problems faced by the union were also a direct consequence of the new syndical structure. In particular, the devolution of power to shop committees weakened further the capacity of the union to influence its members in the individual print shops. By early 1932 at least five shop committees (El Lucero, La Opinión Nacional, Sanmarti, Ruiz and El Tiempo) had practically severed their links to the STGL. The payment of dues had fallen to such levels that only very basic expenditure could be covered. Faced with such a divided workforce employers were increasingly able to do as they pleased.80 In assessing the reasons for the problems the union faced, the STGL leadership pointed to the general lack of consciousness in the print shops. Workers, it argued, had grown accustomed to the weak organizations of the past, which could do little else but ‘snatch concessions’ from employers and failed to see the benefits of a strong organization: ‘There are many shop committees whose union work is characterized by total and manifest inaction and by its narrow and egoistic conception of the role of these committees, limiting their actions to that which concerns that particular print shop, without thinking seriously about the issues that are of interest to the whole workforce.’81 In an attempt to raise funds and consciousness, in late 1931 the STGL organized a football tournament (teams paid a fee to participate) as well as talks ‘to educate a number of our comrades in syndical matters’.82 But such measures had little success. In August 1933 one member concluded: ‘if in previous years we have had some success it is because of the employers’ ignorance and not because of the consciousness of workers and as a consequence we are losing today all that we had gained in the past.’83 Indeed, by this time the union members had come to the conclusion that the reorganization had failed to strengthen the union while heightening political divisions among its membership and voted in favour of a return to the FGP model; which in effect meant a return to mutualism and a more centralized structure.84 As the minute books reveal however, this return to the FGP also failed to improve the situation of the union and although the union continued to hold sessions in the later 1930s (particularly in order to discuss a series of new labour laws that the Benavides government [1933–9] introduced) these became increasingly irregular. In 1939, after ‘a long period of time during which the Federation’s activities were restricted as a result of circumstances of which we are all aware’ the FGP underwent yet another reorganization.85 On 7 July the new FGP was awarded official recognition as a ‘mutual-aid institution’.86 According to an editorial in the Obrero Gráfico, the union’s newspaper, its aims and values were those of a moderate institution: We do not pretend to engage in a senseless struggle in the terrain of social demands; no, respectful of order and of the protection of the law, we aim to re-conquer the rights that have been denied us, request the enforcement

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of those laws, and, respecting also the rights of others, while defending with justice and serenity our own rights, advance down that rugged road without wavering, with the sure footing that print workers know and can demonstrate and with the certainty that we will know how to defend our present and our future.87 With this editorial the union leadership hoped no doubt to signal to the authorities that it rejected radical projects, and, in particular, that its own flirtation with radical projects was in the past. As in previous opportunities, the FGP was taking advantage of a new political opening, this time as a result of the election of Manuel Prado (1939–45), to seek support from state authorities in its negotiations with employers. As such, it made sure to stress the distance between the disorder and senselessness of its past and the order and respectability of its present and future. But while the editorial emphasized the moderate character of the reorganized union, it also stressed the type of legal and institutional framework of industrial relations required in order to achieve a successful industrialrelations policy in the new, freer political climate that the new government was promoting. The themes that the editorial flagged, the protection of the law, labour rights and justice, and the implication that these had in the past been denied, all indirectly pointed to the causes of (and responsibilities for) the ‘senseless struggles’ of the past. Like the memorial to Sánchez Cerro, this editorial reveals the FGP’s sophisticated reformulation of hegemonic statelabour relations from below. The reorganization of the FGP had been led by Communists and it is likely that some of their message found an audience. But the Communists were allowed that degree of leadership in the union because all other options seemed to lead to dead ends. As such, though the FGP chose to (or had little choice but to) characterize its own engagement in the counterhegemonic project of the Peruvian Communist Party as a ‘senseless struggle’, the editorial also was used to imply that that engagement was a direct consequence of the absence of effective hegemonic state-labour relations. In this way, Lima’s print workers appropriated and redefined both the promise of ‘thick’ hegemonic state-labour relations that had been central to Leguía’s Patria Nueva and the threat of the counterhegemonic communist project in order to formulate, at once, a critique of the state’s failings and a proposal for a new social order.

Conclusion The analysis I have presented here is, of course, specific to Lima’s print workers. But the experience of other groups of workers was similar. Other unions, such as the bakery workers union, the dozen or so textile workers unions or the two railway workers unions of the Central Railway, also welcomed and benefited from the system of ‘thick’ hegemonic state-labour relations of the

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Patria Nueva and they too fought hard to keep those benefits in the 1920s and 1930s. Like the printers, these other groups too engaged in the counterhegemonic projects put forward by the Peruvian Communist Party and APRA for similar reasons and with similar goals. This strategy proved largely successful in the case of the textile workers and the railwaymen (the latter, for example, were reclassified as white-collar workers thus gaining access to improved benefits and a higher social status) and unsuccessful in the case of the bakery workers and, as we saw, the printers. Ultimately, success or failure depended on a number of different factors over which workers had limited control, including their strategic importance to the economy, their centrality to elite conceptions of modernity and their centrality to counterhegemonic projects. Overall, however, the strategy brought some tangible benefits for all workers: a number of measures introduced in the 1930s, such as work creation schemes, cheap and ‘decent’ restaurants for workers, worker housing, or the creation of a social security system for blue-collar workers in 1936 were all clearly intended to undermine support for the counterhegemonic projects.88 To restate the point made in the introduction: the experience of Lima’s print workers, and, more generally, of Peruvian workers in the 1920s and 1930s, provides a useful perspective from which to examine the dynamic interplay between hegemony and counterhegemony. As suggested above, counterhegemony reflects the limits of hegemony and arises where hegemony is weak, ‘thin’ or failing. As I have argued, counterhegemony in 1920s and 1930s Peru, in the guise of the emerging revolutionary projects of the Peruvian Communist Party or of APRA, reflected the weakening or ‘thinning out’ of the hegemonic project of the Patria Nueva, a project that workers such as the members of the FGP had come to see, and reformulate, as their own. As the Leguía regime turned its back on ‘thick’ hegemonic state-labour relations, so workers started to turn to the counterhegemonic projects. This was a risky strategy, since engaging in counterhegemonic projects tended to bring about repression. But, workers had few other options. Yet, and this point is of fundamental importance, for the most part workers engaged in counterhegemony not to overthrow the established order, but rather to try to reshape state-labour relations; to convince a reluctant state of the need to establish a more fully hegemonic, or ‘thicker’ form of state-labour relations. Counterhegemony, in this sense, emerges as a strategy central to the formulation of hegemony from below.

Notes 1. I am grateful to Jelke Boesten and the editors for their comments on an earlier version of the chapter. I also wish to acknowledge the financial assistance provided by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust, which made possible the research upon which this chapter is based. Abbreviations as used in the endnotes: Archivo General de la Nación (Lima)/ Ministerio de Fomento/Reclamos

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

Colectivos (AGN/MF/RC); Archivo General de la Nación (Lima)/Prefectura de Lima (AGN/PL); Archive of the Federación Gráfica del Perú (FGP/L[ibros de actas]/A[samblea]; FGP/LA/J[unta administrativa]). I use the term ‘postcolonial’ with some reservations, since I am not convinced of its useful applicability in the Peruvian, or indeed, Latin American context. On this point, see J. Jorge Klor de Alva, ‘The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience: A Reconsideration of “Colonialism”, “Postcolonialism”, and “Mestizaje”’, in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, edited by Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 241–78. I do not claim that this is an original insight. As William Roseberry has noted, Gramsci himself ‘does not assume that subaltern groups are captured or immobilized by some sort of ideological consensus […] Rather active or passive affiliation and the preservation of mentalities are placed within a dynamic range of actions, positions and possibilities, a range that includes the formation of new organizations and institutions, the pressing of claims, the assertion of autonomy’. See William Roseberry, ‘Hegemony and Language of Contention’, in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 360. I find James C. Scott’s distinction between a ‘thick’ version of hegemony, based on the active consent of the subordinate, and a ‘thin’ version based on resigned compliance, a useful way to think about different degrees or phases of hegemony. See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 72. Scott has pointed to the radical nature of such ‘critiques within the hegemony’, which ‘[take] the values of ruling elites seriously, while claiming that they (the elites) do not. To launch an attack in these terms is to, in effect, call upon the elite to take its own rhetoric seriously’. See Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, p. 106. E. H. Carr, What is History (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 52. Or as Florencia Mallon puts it, ‘if the concepts of hegemony and counterhegemony are always interlaced, each hegemonic impulse involves a counterhegemonic impulse. Hegemony cannot exist or be reproduced without the constant, though partial, incorporation of counterhegemony.’ Florencia Mallon, ‘Reflections on the Ruins: Everyday Forms of State Formation in Nineteenth Century Mexico’, in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 71. On the labour history of the period under review, see among others, Denis Sulmont, El movimiento obrero en el Perú, 1900–1956 (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1975); José Deustua and Alberto Flores Galindo, Los comunistas y el movimiento obrero, in Alberto Flores Galindo, Obras Completas I, first published 1977 (Lima: SUR, 1993); Piedad Pareja, Anarquismo y sindicalismo en el Perú (Lima: Ediciones Rikchay Perú, 1978); Steve Stein, Populism in Peru: The Emergence of the Masses and the Politics of Social Control (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980); Peter Blanchard, The Origins of the Peruvian Labor Movement, 1883–1919 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1982); Steve Stein ed., Lima obrera, 1900–1930 (Lima: Ediciones El Virrey, 1986–7); Luis Tejada, La cuestión del pan: el anarcosindicalismo en el Perú (Lima: Instituto Nacional de Cultura/Banco Industrial del Perú, 1988); Cynthia Sanborn, ‘Los obreros textiles de Lima: Redes sociales y organización laboral 1900–1930’, in Mundos interiores: Lima 1850–1950, edited by Aldo Panfichi and Felipe Portocarrero (Lima: Universidad del Pacífico,

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9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

223

1995), pp. 187–215; David S. Parker, ‘Peruvian Politics and the Eight-Hour Day: Rethinking the General Strike’,Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire, Vol. 30 (1995), pp. 417–38; and Augusto Ruiz Zevallos, La multitud, las subsistencias y el trabajo. Lima, 1890–1920 (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2001). FGP, Historia de la Federación Gráfica del Perú (Lima: n.p., 1985), p. 39. FGP, Historia, p. 29. On this point, see Ulrich Muecke, Political Culture in Nineteenth-century Peru: The Rise of the Partido Civil (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2004), pp. 153–62; Iñigo García-Bryce, Crafting the Republic: Lima’s Artisans and Nation-building in Peru, 1821–1879 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), p. 156. FGP, Historia, p. 30; Blanchard, Origins, p. 20. La Linterna, 18 June 1892. Roberto Mac-Lean y Estenós, Sociología del Perú (Mexico: UNAM, 1959), p. 111. It is not clear what became of these organizations in the 1900s and 1910s. However, it is likely that the print workers became members of the umbrella artisan organizations, the Confederación de Artesanos Union Universal and the Asamblea de Sociedades Unidas. AGN/MF/RC/1:1, Humberto Ibañez to Director of the Labour Section, 5 January 1920. The Sociedad Tipográfica had faced the same problem. In the 1870s only an eighth of Lima’s 400–500 printers were members. Muecke, Political Culture, p. 157. FGP/LA/A, 12 November 1930. According to one document, in 1924 Lima boasted 62 print shops, most of which were concentrated in the central districts of the city. See AGN/PL/3.9.5.1.15.1.13.14, Corte Superior to Prefect, 2 May 1924. Mac-Lean y Estenós, Sociología, p. 152. Wima Derpich, José Luis Huiza and Cecilia Israel, Lima años 30, salarios y costo de vida de la clase trabajadora (Lima, 1985), p. 14. The FGP adopted the organizational structure of most worker societies of this period. Its executive, the Junta administrativa, was composed of a series of officers, including a president, a secretary general and a treasurer. The officers were elected in yearly ballots, usually in December or January. However, as a detailed reading of the union minute books reveals, these executive positions were occupied by a limited and recurring group of people: a core group of some 20 print workers dominated the executive positions for much of the period of the 1920s and 1930s. Interestingly, one reason given for the dispute was that the successful strikes in other industries had driven prices up to such an extent that it had now become necessary for the gráficos, ‘one of the best remunerated professions in the whole world’, to demand increased wages. Other reasons given include unacceptable ‘abuses’, and a general sense of injustice. FGP, Historia, p. 47. FGP, Historia, p. 62. In addition to various laws and institutions created to institutionalize state-labour relations, the 1920 constitution introduced compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes. H. Núñez, Legislación social peruana (Arequipa, 1934), pp. 147–9. On institutional developments in this period, see C. F. Herbold, ‘Developments in the Peruvian Administrative System, 1919–1939: Modern and Traditional Qualities of Government under Authoritarian Regimes’ (Yale University, PhD thesis, 1973), p. 155. In addition to the Labour Section, Leguía set up the Superior Council of Labour and Social Oversight (Consejo Superior de Trabajo y Previsión Social) in 1922.

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25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

This Council was composed of seven worker delegates, seven representatives of capital and seven state officials. However, the Council never fulfilled its initial promise. It was reorganized several times (1929, 1931 and 1934). Nuñez Borja, Legislación, pp. 182–3. In 1922, 31 out of a total of 86 unions had been recognized. By 1929 the figure had risen to 272 recognized unions. A. J. Hill, Report on the Finance, Industry and Trade of Peru (London, 1923), p. 16; Peru-Ministerio de Fomento, La labor constructiva del Perú en el gobierno de Don Augusto Leguía (Lima, 1930), no page number. According to one source, the Labour Section dealt with 89 disputes in 1920, 106 in 1921 and 77 in the first half of 1922. Hill, Report, p. 16. At least initially, Leguía’s rise to power resulted in a significant purge of the older bureaucracy. Many of the incoming officials were progressives, including the Interior Ministry, Germán Leguía y Martínez, a cousin of the president. Lauro Curletti, Development Ministry from 1921 to 1923, was a firm believer in the scientific value of labour legislation. At the Labour Section, one Chief of Section, Erasmo Roca, a lawyer and erstwhile member of the anarchist group La Protesta, was largely responsible for the office’s early organization. In addition to Roca, the Labour Section was staffed by provincial intellectuals such as Hildebrando Castro Pozo, who went on to head the Indian Affairs Section, and Agustín Haya de la Torre, the brother of Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, APRA’s founder and leader. On Roca, see M. Temoche Benites, Manual del sindicalista (Lima, 1989), p. 58. On Castro Pozo, see C. Franco, ‘Hildebrando Castro Pozo: El socialismo cooperativo’, in A. Adrianzén, Pensamiento político peruano, 1930–1968 (Lima, 1990), pp. 155–230. Apel, De la hacienda a la comunidad, chapter 1; G. Leibner, El mito del socialismo indígena en Mariátegui (Lima, 1999), pp. 120–8. See Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, p. 72. In 1923, Leguía dismissed his cousin Germán Leguía y Martínez from his position as the head of the Interior Ministry, as well as most of his supporters. Curletti, Roca and Castro Pozo, the architects of the government’s early labour policy, all left the Development Ministry at this time, either voluntarily or, in the case of Castro Pozo, as a result of enforced exile. Peru, Statistical Abstract of Peru, 1923 (Lima, 1924), p.137. Peru, Mensaje presentado al congreso ordinario por el Presidente de la República Augusto B. Leguía (Lima, 1928), pp. 114–15. An employers’ union, Union Imprentas, was set up in 1919, only a few months after the creation of the FGP. The goals of Union Imprentas included paternalistic measures or, as the employers claimed, ‘the betterment of the working class [clase obrera] employed in the print shops’. See AGN/PL/3.9.5.1.15.1.13.11, Alfredo D. Torres, Union Imprentas, to Prefect, 10 October 1919. But, its main goal was to put up a united front to counter the growing assertiveness of the print workers. In this they were relatively successful. Although employers claimed to be interested in ‘the betterment of the working class’, they did little to improve working conditions in their shops. When, in 1924, the FGP wrote to Carlos Fabbri to demand basic repairs in the workshop to improve hygienic standards, the shop owner replied that ‘workers’ poor health results, in general, from their fragile constitution and the lack of order in the lives they lead, and not from the establishments where they work’. AGN/PL/3.9.5.1.15.1.1.15, Carlos Fabbri to FGP, 4 January 1924. AGN/MF/RC/1:1: Humberto Ibañez to Director of the Labour Section, 13 March 1920. Ibid., 10 June and 21 May 1920 and 12 and 16 March 1922.

Hegemony from Below 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

225

FGP, Historia, p. 123. El Obrero Gráfico, 1 May 1923. AGN/PL/3.9.5.1.15.1.13.14, Sarmiento to Prefecto, 7 September 1924. AGN/PL/3.9.5.1.15.1.13.16, Included in Enrique Zegarra to Prefect, 16 May 1925. AGN/MF/RC/2:34: Pedro Berrio to Chief of the Labour Section, 27 October 1921. See AGN/MI//250/Lima: Enrique Zegarra to Alfredo D. Torres, 16 May 1924; AGN/MI/250/Lima: Alfredo D. Torres to Ministro de Gobierno, 19 May 1924. Pareja, Anarquismo, p. 34. Nuñez, Legislación, p. 101. Paradoxically, a law regulating compensation was introduced on 2 February 1924. Employers were bound to present a fifteen-day notice or, failing that, pay a compensation equivalent those two weeks wages. However the law was derogated ten days later at the behest of several labour organizations including the Asamblea de Sociedades Unidas, the Federación Obrera Local de Lima and the FGP who argued that employers were taking advantage of the new law systematically to get rid of certain workers and disregard the collective contracts. Nuñez, Legislación, p. 206. Nevertheless, the practice of compensation (as opposed to a law) does seem to have taken root. ‘Manrique says that whenever an issue is raised with the administrator of [Casa Scheuch], he threatens that he has 15,000 soles which he can use to fire workers’. FGP/LA/A, 13 May 1935. The contract stipulated that the owner was obliged to provide work on holidays and that although workers only had to work half a day they would receive full pay. AGN/MF/RC/4:70, Manuel Farfán and Julio Alzamora to Chief of the Labour Section, 5 July 1930. FGP/LA/A, 2 July, 3 July, 10 July and 17 July 1930. While the disputes created considerable animosity between the opposing sides, there is little evidence to suggest that violence was a common occurrence. There is only one recorded violent incident in the minute books in this period. Guillén, of El Escritorio, claimed to have been beaten up by three scabs. The FGP’s response was to make an official complaint to the police and to circulate a list of scabs in the print shops. FGP/LA/A, 18 September 1930. FGP/LA/A, 18 May 1930. FGP/LA/A, passim. FGP/LA/A, 6 October 1930. In 1930, one sol was equivalent to 0.50 US dollars. FGP/LA/A, 29 June 1930. FGP/LA/A, 6 July 1930. FGP/LA/A, 13 October 1930. FGP/LA/A, 29 September 1930. FGP/LA/J, 26 June 1930; FGP/LA/A, 20 January 1931. AGN/MF/RC/4:69, Several workers of Imprenta CF Southwell to Chief of the Labour Section, 22 April 1930. AGN/MF/RC/4:69, Several workers of Imprenta CF Southwell to Director de Fomento, 9 December 1930. AGN/MF/RC/4:82, Jorge Salazar to Minister of Development, 6 November 1930. AGN/MF/RC/6:112, Francisco Sevillano and Alfredo Cordova to Jefe General del Trabajo, 20 September 1930; Several workers to Director of Development, 12 August 1931. Unfortunately, it has proved impossible to find a copy of the memorial. However, its seven ‘points’ are summarily discussed in the union minute books. See FGP/LA/A, 18 September 1930.

226 Paulo Drinot 59. FGP/LA/A, 30 October 1930. 60. BNP/Volantes, Comisión Gráfica de Organización y Propaganda Sindical: Manifiesto a los Obreros Gráficos, December 1930. 61. FGP/LA/A, 15 January 1931. 62. FGP/LA/A, 15 January 1931. 63. See STGL, Estatuto y Reglamento del Sindicato de Trabajadores Gráficos (Lima, 1931). 64. FGP/LA/J, 28 December 1931. 65. FGP/LA/J, 20 March 1930. 66. On the Fiesta de la Planta and the Popular Universities, see R. Tapia, ‘La Fiesta de la Planta de Vitarte’, in Pretextos, 3–4 (1992), pp. 187–20; R. Portocarrero, ‘José Carlos Mariátegui y las Universidades Populares González Prada’, in La Aventura de Mariátegui, edited by G. Portocarrero, E. Cáceres and R. Tapia (Lima, 1995). 67. FGP/LA/A, 20 May 1927. 68. On one occasion, the FGP sent copies of Amauta, Mariátegui’s journal, and La Sierra, to ‘comrades’ in Argentina, and pointed out that the magazines were ‘the only idealist magazines published in the capital’. FGP/LA/J, 14 June 1928. 69. FGP/LA/J, 24 May 1930; 10 April 1930. 70. FGP/LA/A, 20 January 1929. 71. Portocarrero, Sindicalismo, p. 164. 72. It would seem that after Panama, Zerpa spent some time in Ecuador, Chile and Bolivia. It is likely that he returned to Peru from Chile as he appears to have visited Mollendo, Arequipa and Cuzco prior to returning to Lima. Shortly afterwards, Zerpa set about organizing and strengthening the FGP. He met with the owners of El Lucero and La Americana print shops to attempt to settle pending disputes. He encouraged further interest in the provincial print workers’ organizations, and was named delegate of the Cuzco print workers’ union, and of the as yet unorganized print workers of Puno. FGP/LA/A, 27 October 1930. Along with Pablo Villanueva and César Hinojosa, Zerpa demanded that a contribution be made to the Socorro Rojo, the CGTP organization that dealt with jailed workers. FGP/LA/A, 23 and 27 October1930. 73. During the El Escritorio strike, for example, or when Julio Portocarrero, the Communist textile leader, presented a CGTP ‘circular’ at an FGP assembly on ‘various problems of great urgency to workers’. FGP/LA/A, 16 October 1930. 74. Indeed, the FGP regularly refused to pay their dues to the CGTP, on the grounds that ‘the Federation cannot afford extraordinary expenses’. FGP/LA/J, 3 April 1930; FGP/LA/A, 18 October 1930. 75. The industry, it was argued, was undergoing a reorganization and the FGP could not therefore guarantee that it would heed the strike call. One gráfico demanded that the FGP recall its delegates from the CGTP. The delegates were not recalled, on the grounds that ‘this is not the time to distance ourselves from other workers’. FGP/LA/A, 12 November 1930. 76. FGP/LA/J, 23 June 1931. 77. Vanguardia, 15 May 1931. 78. Although he appears to have been released shortly thereafter, Zerpa effectively disappears from the minute books in the following years. FGP/LA/A, 1 May 1931. 79. FGP/LA/J, 21 April 1932. 80. As reported in one union pamphlet: ‘Every day we see an increase in the number of print shops that cut work days. Wages are paid when the employers feel like it. Contract work is introduced and encouraged. The phenomenon of unemployment is used to reduce wages and to fire workers. The employers even go so far as

Hegemony from Below

81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88.

227

to try to find ways to sow division in their workforce.’ BNP/Volantes, Boletín, Sindicato de Trabajadores Gráficos de Lima, 2 March 1932. BNP/Volantes, Boletín, Sindicato de Trabajadores Gráficos de Lima, 2 March 1932. FGP/LA/J, 15 December 1931. FGP/LA/A, 24 August 1933. When a new executive was elected in November 1933, one member stressed: ‘Now that we are electing our representatives we must present a united front and invite all gráficos, be they communists, Apristas, conservatives or independents to our institution. [We] have only one mission: the defense of our interests without sectarianism or divisions.’ FGP/LA/A, 2 November 1933. El Obrero Gráfico, 4 September 1940. AGN/PL/3.9.5.1.15.1.1.22, Jorge Fernández Stoll, Director de Previsión Social to Prefecto, 10 July 1939. El Obrero Gráfico, 4 September 1940. See Paulo Drinot, ‘Fighting for a Closed Shop: The 1931 Lima Bakery Workers’ Strike’, in Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2 (May 2003), pp. 249–78 and Paulo Drinot, ‘Food, Race and Working-class Identity: Restaurantes Populares and Populism in 1930s Peru’, in The Americas, Vol. 62, No. 2 (2005), pp. 245–70.

10

The Politics of Institutional Subversion: Organized Labour and Resistance in Zambia Adrienne LeBas

From independence to the beginning of the 1990s, sub-Saharan Africa was considered a poor laboratory for those interested in the organization of popular movements and what we might term counterhegemonic resistance. The majority of African countries experimented with a brief spell of open politics at independence, but authoritarianism in various forms was endemic and entrenched in all regions of the subcontinent by the late 1960s.1 Africanist political science turned its attention to the authoritarian African state, focusing especially on its puzzling ability to dominate society despite its weak state capacity.2 In this work, state power was built on the shallow base of neo-patrimonialism and coercion; other forms of state– society linkage were often dismissed as absent, weak or irrelevant.3 Society was passive or estranged from the political realm: Azarya wrote of ‘disengagement’, Kasfir of ‘departicipation’, Hyden of the ‘uncaptured peasantry’ and Bayart of a fractured civil society that can only ‘chip at the state from below’.4 Those interested in societal response to state rule were left with work that emphasized the ‘informalization’ of politics and the various ‘exits’ pursued by individuals.5 This neglect of society has distorted our view of African state–society relations during authoritarianism.6 For decades, politics tended to be interpreted through the single optic of state predation and societal retreat. Political organization and mobilization by non-state actors were ignored. As Mamdani et al. point out, the state centrism of much Africanist political science obscured episodes of popular resistance and societal claims-making during authoritarian rule.7 Furthermore, it has left us poorly equipped to understand the contention-led breakdown of authoritarian regimes in sub-Saharan Africa that occurred in the late 1980s and 1990s. Because past scholarship focused on explaining continuity and the durability of authoritarian rule, change appears as if from nowhere: hegemonic systems suddenly become ‘bankrupt’, societal resistance is ‘reborn’, civil society appears as a new political actor. Bratton and Van de Walle rightly identity popular protest as a key ingredient in African 228

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transitions to democracy,8 but relatively few scholars have tried to explain differences in protest’s form or success. This chapter argues that there is a different way of looking at authoritarian rule, one that allows us to understand patterns of societal resistance both before and during regime transition. This endeavour requires, however, that we take seriously both formal institutions and state policies, something that Africanist political science has been reluctant to do in the past. In stark contrast to the bulk of the literature on authoritarian Africa, which has emphasized societal exit, this chapter argues that some states pursued policies aimed at societal incorporation and the channelling (rather than elimination) of popular participation. In other words, rather than the uniformity sketched above, the politics of the African authoritarian state varied from country to country. In some places, state rule did amount to little more than organized banditry.9 But in others, states were concerned about legitimacy and negotiated the terms of their interaction with societies or, at the very least, with particular corporate groups. In countries as diverse as Zambia, Egypt, Ghana, Zimbabwe and Tunisia, corporate groups, most notably organized labour, were given a formal status in government policymaking and implementation. Alliances between the state and these actors were by no means contracts between equals, and the state ultimately dictated the degree of groups’ autonomy and influence. The form of governance in semi-corporatist Africa, therefore, resembled less the inclusionary decision-making of corporatist Western Europe than a particular form of hegemony: corporate groups were given resources and state in order to serve the interests of the state, boost its legitimacy, and increase its control over society. As this chapter will make clear, alliances are renegotiated, and institutions can be challenged and changed from within. In other words, incorporated groups are not merely ‘captive’, nor are they isolated from broader mass constituencies. Semi-corporatism may expand state control over social groups, but it may also arm state allies, giving them political and material resources that can later be used to mobilize opposition to the state. The likelihood of this kind of institutional subversion is heavily conditioned, of course, by state policies, by the linkages built between political elites and mass constituencies, and by the resources available to challengers. Put most simply, an analysis of previously ignored differences in authoritarian state rule in Africa can shed light on how different societal actors organize resistance, on the kinds of claims that they make and on the capacity of states to resist those claims. Particular hegemonic projects may lay the groundwork for counterhegemonic movements by providing resources or fostering identities that facilitate collective action by non-state actors. In this chapter, I will examine one instance of this process: the transformation of state-allied trade unions in post-colonial Zambia into a base for protest and, eventually, an opposition political party.

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Hegemony and resistance in semi-corporatist systems The chapter does not merely trace the transformation of a collective actor. It also sheds light on the ways in which the supports of authoritarian rule, including its legitimating discourse, may be adapted or subverted by the creative action of individuals and groups. Many accounts of state hegemony tend to downplay the efficacy of challenges from below, or have suggested that the system is first eroded by sudden economic shocks or popular ‘disruptions’ that are spontaneous and unorganized. In this chapter, I argue that organized resistance can emerge from institutions that were created to support the state’s hegemonic project. I use the concept of hegemony in a classical Gramscian fashion. A regime can be said to be hegemonic when it has institutionalized a particular set of political identities and practices in a society (to the exclusion of others). As Gramsci observes, hegemony may be built partly through coercion, but societal compliance is primarily voluntary or becomes so over time.10 Thus, hegemony endures largely because societal actors comply with its ordering principles and ‘believe’ in the legitimating discourse underlying practices of state rule. Laitin usefully points out the self-reinforcing character of hegemony: it is the ‘institutionalization of a pattern of group activity in a society and the concurrent idealization of that schema into a dominant symbolic framework that reigns as common sense’.11 Challenges to a hegemonic system do occur, of course, but they rarely take on the form Gramsci refers to as ‘war of manoeuvre’ or direct challenge. Instead, assaults on the ruling order are most effective where they occur on the margins, gradually undermining the bases of the state’s cultural power or cohesiveness. If hegemonic systems rely on the voluntary consent of the governed, counterhegemony consists of political actions that qualify society’s acceptance of the rules and norms that underlie state hegemony. In other words, counterhegemonic movements need not seek to entirely dismantle existing political structures and culture, though they may in exceptional circumstances do so. They need only suggest that societal compliance with values and rules is contingent, that ‘common sense’ may encompass a wider spectrum of beliefs and claims than those sanctioned by the state. Working with this limited, non-revolutionary definition of counterhegemony, we can imagine counterhegemonic movements arising in three distinct ways. First, hegemony in a particular society may not be fully established, or significant societal pockets exist that do not accept the ‘dominant symbolic framework that reigns as common sense’. Counterhegemonic movements in these societies focus on dismantling a hegemony that is superficial or weak, and they draw on identities, structures and appeals that have continued to exist within a society outside the hegemonic regime. In a second scenario, the norms and principles that legitimate a hegemonic system might

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be appropriated by skilful actors outside the hegemonic elite, even where hegemony is fully consolidated. These actors do not necessarily challenge core hegemonic beliefs; instead, they argue that practice conflicts with principle and typically argue for what might be termed a ‘purification’ of the existing order. Finally, it is possible that a seemingly consolidated hegemonic system contains within itself contradictions or omissions that facilitate the emergence of a counterhegemonic movement. For instance, in this chapter, we see that the institutional apparatus of hegemony can conflict with the rhetoric deployed on its behalf. In the latter half of the twentieth century, developmental states in the developing world built political cultures based on solidarity and loyalty to the ‘nation’ rather than on the representation of demands. In order to implement economic policy and enforce social order, however, many of these states relied on alliances with corporate actors, such as trade unions, that existed (in practice and in rhetoric) to advocate the interests of particular groups.12 Organized labour is a particularly interesting focus for those interested in hegemony and counterhegemony in post-colonial environments, as it has often found itself at the centre of debates about state–society relations in the developing world. For much of the post-independence period, organized labour was either entirely ignored by Africanist scholars or viewed as a reactionary political force. Those focusing on organized labour explicitly wrote of it as a highly paid ‘labour aristocracy’, largely disconnected from the rest of society and strongly supportive of the status quo.13 There are echoes of the labour aristocracy thesis in Bates’s work on agricultural pricing and the ‘urban bias’ behind artificially low food prices in sub-Saharan Africa.14 The thesis seems to reappear once more in Bellin’s recent work on ‘stalled’ democracy in Tunisia, in which she argues that organized labour and the business community did not advocate democracy due to their dependence on the Tunisian state.15 Of course, other scholars have cast doubt on the essentially captive nature of organized labour in sub-Saharan Africa, arguing that formal sector workers possessed strong links to the urban and rural poor and were also willing to strike and participate in other protest action.16 But the best evidence against the labour aristocracy thesis is the role played by African trade unions in the 1980s and 1990s, when they often participated in protests against economic structural adjustment alongside the urban poor. In some countries, notably Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe, organized labour was an important part of the pro-democracy movements that grew out of economic protest. By excavating the complicated politics of organized labour during authoritarian rule, we might begin to understand how and why organized labour played different roles and had different levels of success in organizing protest during regime transitions. As a first step, this chapter traces the transformation of Zambian trade unions from a state ally into the driving force behind counterhegemonic protest and regime change.

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Labour control in post-colonial Zambia During the colonial period, organized labour in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) possessed a bargaining power that differentiated it from labour movements elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. The concentration of mining activities in a small strip of land in northern Zambia, the Copperbelt region, created a large, urbanized working class in Zambia by the early 1930s. In comparison to their counterparts in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) or South Africa, workers on the Copperbelt were successful in using collective action and the organization of unions to advance their interests. Thousands of Zambian miners, sawmill workers and railwaymen participated in strikes throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Large-scale, coordinated strikes in 1935, 1940 and 1956 effectively shut down copper production for days or even weeks.17 The creation of a mineworkers union in 1948 strengthened miners’ bargaining power, despite the mines management’s attempts to undermine the organization. Between 1950 and 1954, the total wage bill for African mineworkers more than doubled, even though the labour force expanded by less than seven per cent.18 The union won the loyalty of its members by delivering concrete benefits, but it also made use of social networks and shaming to ensure workers’ compliance with union demands.19 Participation in strikes called by the union regularly topped 90 per cent, and management-sponsored splinter unions never attracted a substantial membership. Though the Zambia Mineworkers’ Union (ZMU) would continue to dominate the labour movement for some time, trade unionism was by no means limited to the Copperbelt. In the period immediately preceding independence, several smaller unions were formed or expanded their memberships substantially. In 1960, only the Mineworkers Union had a membership of over 5000; by 1964, five unions, including two truly national public sector unions, had 5000 members or more.20 The unionized labour force expanded from approximately 50,000 in 1961 to 102,000 in 1964, meaning that nearly half of Zambian wage earners were union members. During the colonial period, the ZMU had jealously guarded its autonomy, refused to organize strikes for political purposes and had even pulled out of an incipient trade union confederation due to fears that it was too tightly linked to UNIP. After independence, leaders of the ZMU and other unions continued this policy, announcing that they would remain independent of political parties and would defend the interests of their members alone. The strength and autonomy of the labour movement put substantial constraints on the post-independence government. Unlike other African states, which were often free to repress or ignore existing trade unions, the Zambian state was forced to either accommodate or co-opt a labour movement that was already well established. The negotiation between government and labour that took place in the immediate post-independence period was shaped by two essential factors: Zambian organized labour’s proven capacity to disrupt the economy through strikes, and the economic constraints facing the new

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government. As in other post-colonial states, state economic planning in Zambia was premised on wage restraint, since the new government’s primary interest was job creation and speedy expansion of the industrial sector. In addition, the new government’s dependence on copper revenues made it anxious to avoid the significant disruptions of production that strikes would cause. In the period 1965–9, for instance, copper production accounted for 42.3 per cent of Zambia’s GDP and 93 per cent of its exports; mineral taxes provided 60.8 per cent of the state’s earned revenue.21 After the state nationalized the copper mines in 1969, the government’s desire to restrain wage growth increased further, as government profits would have been directly impacted by growth in wages without corresponding worker productivity increases. To the new ruling party, therefore, union leaders’ statements that they would respond only to the demands of their memberships seemed to auger an era of unrestricted union demands, spiralling wages and ongoing labour unrest. These fears seemed to have been borne out by the high level of strike activity following independence, which peaked in 1969 with a total of 1161 registered strikes in that year alone.22 The new ruling party, the United National Independence Party (UNIP), was thus caught between its need for labour control and its inability to achieve that goal without the cooperation and support of organized labour. Rather than using state or party structures over which it had direct control, UNIP built a hegemonic system of labour control that relied on the autonomous institutions of organized labour and an ideology of government– union ‘partnership in development’. This was partly a result of the weakness of the state and, especially, the weak organizational reach of UNIP itself. Though trade unionism only seemed to be expanding in influence and reach at the time of independence, UNIP was already beginning a period of party decline. For this reason, corporate groups with good links to mass constituencies, such as the trade unions and, later, the cooperative movement, were valuable allies for a party that wished to expand state reach and implement an ambitiously developmental economic policy. Initially, UNIP attempted to tie the labour movement to the ruling party through leadership co-optation, manipulation of internal union elections and the sponsoring of party-linked splinter unions. By 1967, UNIP seems to have largely abandoned this strategy. In future, instead of undermining or manipulating existing union structures, the ruling party would attempt to control labour unrest by strengthening the labour movement. The system of semi-corporatism established in Zambia relied on two key ingredients: the creation of a centralized, top-down trade union structure, and the voluntary renunciation of interest representation by union leaders. In terms of the first of these, early labour legislation clamped down on strikes and encouraged union amalgamation. Initially, the government invoked existing legislation that illegalized strikes in ‘essential’ industries. In 1967, transport was declared an essential industry after a strike of road workers; in 1968, striking railway workers were declared essential workers

234 Adrienne LeBas

and barred from striking; in 1970, striking teachers were dealt with in the same way.23 The government also tried to put in place a more pliant union leadership through the co-optation of individual leaders and the manipulation of internal union elections.24 Strikes continued, however, and the government needed a less ad hoc way of dealing with labour unrest. In 1964, the government was directly involved in the creation of a union centre, the Zambian Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). The ZCTU did not become the powerful partner government wanted immediately: affiliation to the Congress was voluntary, and the organization had few powers to discipline or control its affiliates.25 Ostensibly, unions were to seek ZCTU approval prior to holding a strike, but this requirement was seldom observed. The 1971 Industrial Relations Act (IRA) did away with this voluntarism, laying the groundwork for a much more centralized trade union structure. Rather than the toothless requirement of ZCTU approval before a strike was called, the IRA largely outlawed all strikes. The legislation failed to list which sectors fell under ‘necessary services’, for which all strikes were illegal. Even outside these sectors, the means of obtaining strike permission from the ZCTU was so cumbersome as to make strikes de facto illegal. More importantly, the IRA substantially expanded the powers of the trade union confederation. The IRA required unions to affiliate with the Congress and tied union registration and participation in collective bargaining to the ZCTU structure. These actions were taken to insinuate the Congress more directly into negotiation processes between unions, employers and the state; as one scholar suggests, the reforms served to ‘modernise the trade union structure by bypassing the existing unions’.26 Finally, the IRA instituted the principle of ‘one union, one industry’ in trade union registration. This led to an amalgamation of several smaller unions into larger, more centralized sector affiliates, many of which had much stronger national structures than their predecessors. It also allowed the government to institute a ‘check-off’ system of dues collection, in which all workers in a sector would have their dues for their sectoral union automatically deducted from their wages. These measures, obviously, strengthened the structures of Zambian unions, especially the ZCTU. Changes in the institutional framework of the labour movement were paralleled by even more dramatic changes in the ideological orientation of the labour leadership. Put simply, Zambian unions discarded the strict economism that had governed union behaviour in the colonial period and embraced alliance with the state and, by extension, with the ruling party. At a government-sponsored labour conference in Livingstone in 1967, Zambian trade union leaders made the change explicit in the conference’s closing declaration: We, the workers, pledge that we will put the interests of Zambia before our own interests, either as individuals or as members of trade unions; [and] we will work hard to play our part in the National Development Plan.27

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Even prior to the declaration of single party rule, the labour movement formally accepted that state interests trumped the interests of the union rank-and-file. The commitments of union and ZCTU leadership went well beyond support for the government’s economic policies alone, amounting instead to a political alliance between the labour movement and the ruling party. A month after the Livingstone conference, the Supreme Council of the renamed Mineworkers Union of Zambia (MUZ) resolved that ‘the Union shall co-operate with the Government, the Ruling Party (UNIP) and Zambia Congress of Trade Unions.’ Newly elected MUZ leaders also pledged that they would discipline those workers who were ‘not prepared to listen to the leaders’ and went out on strike.28 Together, the implications of these changes in labour relations went well beyond the attitudes or political loyalties of union leaders. From this point forward, Zambian unions were to serve a purpose other than aggregating workers’ interests or improving workers’ bargaining strength. In public discussions of the proper role of trade unions, both labour leaders and state officials downplayed notions of mobilization, participation or voice; instead, trade unions served to discipline or enforce worker compliance with demands that came from elsewhere. Institutional and legal changes, described above, merely reinforced this new orientation, which Bates describes in a passage worth quoting at length: Instead of emphasizing the union’s role as a defender of the workers’ interests, however, in the field of development policy, the government emphasizes the union’s role as a defender of the interests of the nation. Rather than transmitting and fighting for the demands of its members, the union is to regulate their behavior in conformity with public policy. In short, the union is to deviate from its traditional role as an input structure, and to serve as an agency for implementing public policy.29 Burawoy portrays government pressures on the mineworkers union in somewhat different terms: the government attempted to shift the union ‘from a “consumption orientation” to a “production orientation” – making it an agency that will promote production and productivity rather than looking to the wages and welfare of its members’.30 In time, the government’s plan for ‘industrial participatory democracy’ led to the appointment of trade union leaders to positions on the managing bodies of the mines and other state-owned industries, further confusing the line between the union’s role as representative and its role as labour manager. The ideology underlying this new relationship between unions and UNIP stressed that the two organizations had different functions but were united to further common aims. Like many other African single-party developmental states, Zambian hegemony was built on unanimity. The ZCTU was granted authority and power over a particular corporate group, unionized

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workers, but that authority was premised on the understanding that ZCTU leaders must accept the supremacy of the party in determining the demands of the nation and the proper way of responding to those demands. To put the philosophy of Zambian state hegemony most clearly, solidarity was a vital prerequisite for economic development; therefore, both pluralism and individual interests must be set aside until this national goal was attained. Trade unions must pursue the interests of the nation, which involved the disciplining of workers rather than the expression of their interests. The ruling party did not expect compliance with this ideology to be wholly voluntary on the part of trade union leaders. Branch ‘militants’ sometimes found themselves promoted to positions that rendered them ineligible to stand in elections, and a handful of trade unionists were arrested or stripped of their positions on suspicions of support for illegal opposition parties.31 For the most part, however, UNIP expected trade union leaders to act within the bounds of the system without direct force. Importantly, the ruling party never tried to seize direct control over the elections or internal governance of the ZCTU or its affiliates.32 Instead of viewing Zambia as an example of controlled or coercive corporatism, therefore, it is more accurate to see it as a system that granted considerable autonomy to trade unions, so long as their public demands remained within the bounds of acceptable political discourse. Where the regime miscalculated, however, was in its belief that trade union leaders would be willing to possess a formal role as representatives without demanding the rights to representation. Over time, as we will see, the constrained autonomy granted to trade unions served as a justification for further demands and even, eventually, direct criticism of government. In this respect, Zambia was not an exceptional semi-corporatist regime. For instance, in his study of labour corporatism in Egypt, Robert Bianchi suggests that political incorporation led to increased expectations on the part of trade unionists, even in a context far less amenable to organized labour than Zambia’s.33 Unions were often threatened and subjected to political interference during the early years of Nasser’s alliance of ‘popular working forces’, and labour’s involvement in the management councils of parastatals and other decision-making fora was little more than token. Despite this, even among those who were unsympathetic to Nasser, ‘the very creation of new representative institutions is construed as a “promissary note” that might be redeemed in future to permit greater consultation and cooperation with corporatist groups in shaping policies that directly affect their interests’.34 For the most part, as will be shown in the pages that follow, the relationship between the Zambian state and trade unions followed a similar pattern. Many Zambian trade unionists, in public statements and in interviews with this author, emphasized that the partnership with the ruling party was based on an unequal bargain and was often characterized by abuse. But they also emphasized, like Bianchi’s unionists, that the treatment of the labour movement as a

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formal ally accorded it rights. To put this more concretely, the hegemonic system established by UNIP was premised on the notion of partnership with organized labour. This stabilized and created legitimacy for the government’s system of labour control; however, by suggesting to unionists that rights to participation and autonomy underlay their alliance with the ruling party, it laid the groundwork for future counterhegemony. During the UNIP regime, trade union leaders willingly worked through the structures and within the role they had been granted. Several prominent unionists served as UNIP Members of Parliament, union leaders were accorded positions on the party’s Central Committee, and officials demanded on behalf of the labour movement involvement in all realms of state policy. ZCTU and Mineworkers Union of Zambia (MUZ) officials were elected as Members of Parliament, and the unions sought to expand their participation in government structures in other ways as well. In 1975, ZCTU Secretary-General Newstead Zimba announced that labour leaders would attend all provincial and district political and developmental meetings.35 Previously, the labour movement had only attended the annual UNIP national council and national conferences; however, Zimba said that the ZCTU now wanted ‘to be consulted in ministerial reshuffles, bills, regulations and administrative actions which are likely to affect interests of the workers and their organization’. ZCTU President Frederick Chiluba also made statements that suggested that labour saw its role as assisting UNIP in governance: ‘we need and we must be involved in the mechanisms of implementing policy, not just its declaration.’36 The unions did not limit their demands for participation in government to labour or economic matters that touched directly on the interests of their members. In 1975, Chiluba told government the ZCTU should have been involved in UNIP’s voter registration drive: ‘If we had been informed in advance of the voters’ registration exercise, half of the job would have been accomplished. [Voters registration] is one of the exercises requiring collective effort on the part of the Party and Government on the one hand and the labour movement on the other.’37 Labour leaders thus accepted the broad outlines of the corporatist system established by UNIP, and they sought to expand labour influence within the bounds of that system. Union leaders’ willingness to work within party structures, even when they sat within an organization that was formally autonomous from the party, suggests the kind of voluntary compliance that I previously suggested props up hegemonic systems. Furthermore, the labour movement did not – for over two decades – challenge the principle underlying UNIP rule: the relegation of group interests to the interests of the ‘nation’, which were defined, of course, by the ruling party. So what changed? How did organized labour turn from hegemonic ally to counterhegemonic opponent? In the section below, I suggest that popular contention, especially mobilization by labour rank-and-file, pushed the labour

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leadership away from its alliance with the state and towards a more autonomous, more critical stance vis-à-vis the ruling party. By pursuing this new strategy in the 1980s, organized labour signalled that their partnership with government was contingent. Partnership might occur where national and workers’ interests coincided, but the relegation of workers’ interests to those of the nation was no longer an acceptable constant in Zambian politics.

Unruly corporatism and mobilization from below The labour leadership’s alliance with UNIP – and its support for strike suppression – was not without costs. Strains between the union leadership and membership rank-and-file emerged fairly soon after independence, and they intensified as the union leadership was more firmly consolidated into the UNIP regime. By the time of Bates’s and Burawoy’s fieldwork in the late 1960s and early 1970s, workers were already frustrated with the less confrontational, more political, unionism that was emerging in Zambia. Bates found that once militant unions with strong membership loyalty in the nationalist period were already encountering plummeting perceptions of union legitimacy and leadership representativeness among their membership by the early 1970s.38 A 1969 survey of Copperbelt miners found high levels of dissatisfaction and apathy towards the mineworkers union: 50 per cent were dissatisfied with the mineworkers union, 40 per cent had no interest in union activities, and 83 per cent of those surveyed did not know the name of their union branch chairman.39 Miners complained that union leaders were compromised by close ties with the ruling party and mines management, and others opposed the union leadership’s growing resistance to strike actions. Reflecting a level of leadership distrust that would only intensify during the 1970s, one miner told Burawoy that ‘all the unionists, especially [the MUZ president], are Government supporters, and I suspect that the mine management gives them money to cover up its evils in dealing with our genuine complaints’.40 Another added, ‘when we want to go on strike we just go and without consulting the Union because their policy on strike action is difficult to understand [sic].’ The core of leadership–grassroots conflicts was the ZCTU and affiliates’ restraint regarding wage demands and collective action. The union grassroots demanded a more confrontational approach to collective bargaining and a greater willingness to strike in defence of workers’ interests. The incompatibility between bottom-up and top-down pressures created an increasing disconnection between national union leadership and what was occurring at the grassroots or local level. Already in the 1970s, there was greater churning of union officeholders at the local level and declining levels of labour discipline within the labour movement. By the mid-1970s, several candidates usually competed for union offices at the branch level,

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and candidates were more willing to confront their national leadership on issues of union governance and irregular election practices. In 1974, for instance, 25 candidates contested the six available posts in the MUZ branch elections in Chililabombwe, one of the large towns on the Copperbelt; 30 contested the subsequent branch elections in nearby Nkana.41 These elections were especially competitive and centred on criticism of the national union leadership to a surprising extent. Workers often voted out of office leaders perceived to be ‘political’ or pro-government.42 Though the local union leadership criticized the national leadership, it too was vulnerable to pressures from below. Lower level union positions had high turnover in leadership, and the rank-and-file union membership often ignored appeals during job actions from both national and branch leaders. The unpredictable and often ambivalent attitude of union membership towards its leadership is perhaps best illustrated with an account of a 1980 wildcat strike undertaken by agricultural workers at Nakambala, one of the country’s largest sugar estates.43 The Nakambala employees went on strike on 10 March, and, since the strike was illegal, police arrived the following day to consult with management. Over the next few days, workers shouted down both branch and national union leaders who called for them to return to work. There was a strong undercurrent of violence during the strike: at one point, workers refused to allow union representatives to address them and began to throw stones at them; at another, workers attacked management and then burned 65 hectares of sugar cane. The strike at Nakambala Sugar Estates achieved national prominence because the police used excessive force in controlling the strike, opening fire on a crowd of protesting workers and seriously injuring four. However, the internal dynamics of the strike and, especially, the resistance of the workers to appeals from their union leadership were fairly typical of strikes during this period. More and more strikes like Nakambala strike occurred in the late 1970s and 1980s, and union leadership could no longer control wage demands or prevent strikes. Strikes during this period were a response to Zambia’s unwieldy collective bargaining apparatus, but they were also – probably to a much greater extent – a consequence of inflation, which was drastic eroding workers’ standard of living. From 1976–86, for instance, the real wages of all workers fell by 66.8 per cent.44 Upon disaggregating this data, different patterns emerge in terms of the rate of wage erosion across sectors. Initially, miners and industrial workers were cushioned from the effects of economic decline, and their real wages actually rose in the period 1975–80 by 13 and 66 per cent, respectively. In contrast, community and social services workers, including teachers and community health workers, experienced a real wage erosion of 16 per cent, and workers in communications and transport faced a drop of 29 per cent. This pattern is reproduced in the chronology of the ‘wildcat’, or unauthorized, strikes during this period: strikes began with teachers and other public sector workers, spreading to other

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sectors somewhat later. Wildcat strikes were, therefore, driven by material interests or, more specifically, by the declining living standards of workers. They also served, however, an important political role: by placing the government–labour alliance under strain, grassroots protest pushed union leaders towards more critical positions and made it more difficult for those leaders to credibly claim loyalty to the system. In January 1981, there were large-scale protests, a wave of uncoordinated strikes, and rioting after UNIP suspended several union leaders from the ruling party’s central committee after they disagreed with government proposals for local government reform.45 In order to control the riots and convince striking workers to return to work, the government was forced to reinstate the union leaders and accede to their demands on the local administration act. The 1981 strike was an important turning point, since it demonstrated to government that organized labour had its own base of support and its own means of self-defence. The attitude towards union leadership expressed during the strike was a stark contrast to the tensions that had characterized leadership-grassroots relations throughout the 1970s. On the Copperbelt, miners and other protesters chanted ‘MUZ is power,’ and flyers distributed during the strike read, ‘All workers out; . . . expulsion of union leader from Party means expulsion of all workers belonging to trade unions; workers are one.’46 As several unionists suggested to me, the labour movement – and especially the ZCTU – attracted greater support and greater power over its grassroots only when it moved away from government alliance towards a more critical stand.47 This process of government-labour distancing began with the events of 1981 and intensified over the course of the 1980s, as UNIP began to implement structural adjustment policies that hurt both workers and the urban poor. In response to International Monetary Fund demands, the Zambian government began to implement economic austerity measures in the early 1980s.48 In 1985, the introduction of a foreign exchange auction system led to a run on the local currency and spiralling inflation. These reforms had immediate effects on the well-being of Zambians, especially those in urban areas. Liatto reports that the consumer price index for low income Zambians increased dramatically in the months following the introduction of the auction system, from 513.3 in 1985 to 794.9 in July 1986 (1975=100).49 In December 1986, the government placed an even greater burden on urban dwellers by removing price supports for mealie-meal, the country’s staple food. The price of mealie-meal doubled overnight; within days, rioting and looting of government stores had spread from the Copperbelt to urban areas nationwide.50 In the ensuing government crackdown, between 13 and 20 protesters were killed. The 1986 riots again strengthened the power and independence of the ZCTU, as had the protests in 1981. The riots eroded much of UNIP’s remaining popular legitimacy, since the removal of price supports seemed to many

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to be a violation of the state paternalism upon which UNIP rule had been based. The ZCTU, which had operated since 1981 as a kind of ‘unofficial opposition’, was the logical beneficiary of Zambians’ disillusionment with government. Economic hardship in the mid-1980s further increased popular support for the ZCTU: The workers saw what was happening in the country. They would queue for everything . . . This is where the Congress received not only support from workers but also from ordinary people, including members of [the UNIP] Central Committee who were coming to us privately and saying ‘we have problems with the system, but it is not easy to resign from the system – but we support you.’51 In the wake of the riots, UNIP reversed the price increases. For the next three years, the government pursued a contradictory approach to structural adjustment, implementing reforms only to abandon them in the wake of popular protest. In the first six months of 1987, wildcat strikes exploded across sectors. In March, teachers went on strike, followed by nurses and clinical staff, doctors and postal workers. Austerity measures introduced as part of ESAP motivated collective action from groups other than workers, especially in urban areas. In October of 1989, hundreds of miners’ wives marched twice to the Zambian Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM) headquarters, smashing ZCCM signs along the way, to protest the introduction of fees at the mines’ hospitals.52 Like participants in many of the wildcat strikes, the wives were successful, and the introduction of fees was revoked. Importantly, the discontent of the late 1980s was directed from below, as it had been since independence. 53 Protesters often refused to cooperate with – and sometimes even abused – union leaders who called for restraint. In the case of the miners’ wives, for instance, the group physically attacked a MUZ official when he appeared with a governor to ask them to disperse. In many ways, this cycle of bottom-up protest and erosion of established state-society relations in Zambia resembled what was occurring across sub-Saharan Africa. Systems of state domination, including those resembling Zambia’s state hegemony, had been weakened by economic decline all over the continent by the end of the 1980s. What was different about Zambia, however, was that popular dissent was organized into a coherent counterhegemonic movement, which advocated pluralism and government responsiveness to expressed demands. In order to understand why counterhegemony occurred in Zambia, versus the fairly ineffectual opposition that occurred elsewhere, we need to look to the organizational resources granted to the labour movement by its participation in state hegemony. This is the purpose of the next section, but let me first make a final note on the labour movement’s reluctance to directly challenge the hegemonic system it had helped to create. The politicization of the ZCTU – which was a necessary ingredient for

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the organization of this counterhegemonic movement – occurred later than is commonly supposed. Labour leaders continued to voice loyalty to UNIP, they continued to hold political positions within the government and the ruling party, and they neither organized nor supported strike actions or other forms of worker protest.54 In 1986, after government criticized labour for not contributing to policy formulation, Zimba stated that the trade unions should remain autonomous from politics and assured UNIP that labour ‘loved’ the government.55 Spontaneous mobilization from below played a large role in fraying the state–labour alliance that had supported state hegemony in Zambia: it made it harder for labour leaders to credibly claim loyalty to the ruling party; it made labour leaders fear for their security in office, which caused them to take the representation of workers’ interests more seriously; it demonstrated the intensity and scope of popular disillusionment with state hegemony. Without the organizational contribution of the ZCTU, however, protest might have remained episodic or easily deflected.

The emergence of oppositional unionism Despite unionists’ assurances of political loyalty, UNIP reacted to the increasing numbers of strikes by attempting to dismantle the strong and centralized labour movement it had helped to create. Despite the unions’ complaints that wildcat strikes were not sanctioned by union leaders, the government passed a statutory instrument in 1985 that revoked the check-off system of dues collection for all unions whose members went out on strike.56 Attacks on organized labour in the state-owned media escalated as well, and Kaunda accused donors and foreign organizations of ‘secretly funding the ZCTU’ in order to destabilize the government.57 In 1987, the government announced that only government officials would address May Day celebrations, since labour leaders had been using the occasion to ‘abuse’ the government.58 By the elections in 1988, UNIP was opening accusing the ZCTU of campaigning against Kaunda in the presidential elections of that year.59 The labour movement lost its government sponsorship, but it retained the structures that the government had helped to create 20 years earlier. As the government began to fire striking civil servants and use more repressive means of strike control, the labour movement started to discuss open political opposition for the first time. At the end of 1989, the ZCTU General Council decided on the need for multiparty political competition, arguing that one-party rule had led to corruption, economic mismanagement and creeping repression of workers’ rights.60 In the resolution adopted by the General Council in December of that year, ZCTU leaders stated that the organization would do whatever it could to facilitate the movement to a multiparty system, and it explicitly called upon other parties to join it in this campaign.61 Six months later, trade unionists, businessmen and human rights activists met at Garden House Hotel in Lusaka in order to formulate a

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strategy for the campaign that would eventually produce the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD). It was at Garden House that the labour movement broke its final ties to UNIP. In a statement to the meeting, ZCTU Secretary-General Frederick Chiluba acknowledged that organized labour had worked since independence as an ally of the ruling party. He also argued, however, that organized labour retained its political autonomy throughout the years of cooperation: ‘this support [for the ruling party] stood, and stands to this day, qualified; support [was] for the programme of action or ideology of a political party as long as that party remained progressive and recognised social justice as an indispensable tool of development.’62 The MMD, which was launched at Garden House, was to function initially as an advocacy group that would campaign for a ‘yes’ vote in an upcoming referendum on the introduction of multiparty competition. Within months, rallies for constitutional reform were drawing audiences of tens of thousands, Zambia’s major churches and other civic groups threw their support behind the MMD, and trade unionists became the most visible public faces of the movement. After President Kaunda acceded to the demands of his party and amended the constitution without a referendum, the MMD transformed itself fairly seamlessly into a political party. Elections were held nine months later, and the MMD won 80 per cent of the popular vote and 125 of 150 National Assembly seats.63 In order to explain the speed with which the party was able to assemble this landslide electoral victory, informants from all backgrounds emphasized the importance of the pre-existing institutional structures of the labour movement. At the workplace level, the individual branches of ZCTU affiliates helped coordinate opposition to single-party rule. Union activists also made use of works committees, which were shop floor structures originally established by the government to bypass trade union structures and gain direct access to workers.64 Most importantly, the MMD – both during its formative period and after its registration as a party – relied on the district committees (DCs) of ZCTU, which had been established starting in 1977 in order to improve communication between the ZCTU and union members at the grassroots level.65 The DCs provided the MMD with a national structure that made possible coordination of action, durability of mobilization over time and communication between national elites and local activists. As suggested above, the relationship between affiliate leaders and grassroots unionists (including branch officials) had, for some time, been neither strong nor harmonious. The DCs thus served as a vital intermediary link between local union structures and the national leadership of the ZCTU, which became the leadership of the MMD. After the MMD became a political party, the DCs were transformed into party branches and allowed the party to organize a truly national election campaign. It is important to emphasize that the organizational resources available to the ZCTU, including the DCs, were skeletal. This, once again, demonstrates

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that counterhegemony can be organized using even weak footholds in the state realm; indeed, the ZCTU’s ability to use the DCs suggests that even marginal investment in organizational reach can have significant effects on mobilization. In 1980, 31 district committees (DCs) were in operation, though by the ZCTU’s own admission, these operated ‘largely on paper’, and members were often unclear about the role of the DCs and how they were to function.66 Even as the government–labour relationship disintegrated over the course of the 1980s, the national leadership of the ZCTU did not attempt to strengthen its DCs or expand its control over its membership. The organization department did little to expand, support or even maintain the DCs in the late 1980s due to a lack of funds and the death of the department’s director.67 Between March and November 1989, the new director of organization undertook three organizational tours of Copperbelt, Luapula, Lusaka and Western provinces in order to evaluate the state of their DCs.68 At this point, it does not seem that the DCs were a priority for the ZCTU leadership, and the ZCTU did not rely upon DCs for communication with or education of its membership. Occasionally, they were asked to assist in membership drives or were given funds to hold Labour Day celebrations, but several of the DCs went long periods without direct contact with the ZCTU. From their formation to the present, DCs would periodically fall inactive and then be revived when needed by ZCTU leadership.69 After the formation of the MMD, the DCs became a priority for trade union leadership, and they were seen as the best means of quickly extending the MMD’s national reach. In August of 1990, soon after the formation of the MMD, the ZCTU General Council decided that ‘multiparty campaign committees’ should be formed at the district level, and it recommended that funds be dispersed from the ZCTU to these committees.70 The new MMD DCs were, for the most part, a reconstitution of the existing ZCTU DCs to serve a new purpose. The ZCTU leadership was aware of the importance of establishing a local structure for the MMD, and the national labour leadership began to devote significant attention to the DCs for the first time. In 1991, the ZCTU again organized a tour of the district committees. In contrast to the 1989 tour, however, the 1991 tour included all districts in five provinces, four of which had not been visited in 1989.71 The change in DCs’ priority within the ZCTU was also reflected in the list of those participating in the district tour, which included the ZCTU Chairman and Deputy Chair, two Assistant Secretary-Generals, ZCTU trustees and affiliate heads. The reliance on the DCs explains how the MMD was able to convey information, despite state control of the media, and organize large rallies nationwide within two months of its formation. T.Z. Tembo’s personal account of the MMD district committee in Livingstone indicates that ZCTU DC was in touch with union leadership the day after Garden House. The formation of a ‘referendum committee’ was first discussed at the home of the Provincial Secretary of the Zambian United Local Authority Workers Union

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(ZULAWU), a resident of Livingstone. Five of the seven initial planners of the MMD committee were trade unionists, and the initial meetings of the MMD branch were held in ZULAWU headquarters.72 Austin Liato, who was president of the electricity workers’ union at the time, said that overlapping leadership of the ZCTU DCs and MMD branches was common nationwide: So what was happening was the DCs, the leaders there became the pioneers of the MMD. So that, for example, if you had a MMD person come or travel there, they would say this is [union] politics, we [ZCTU] are doing this now, can you help? And you would find that the chairman of the DC – because that is who they would talk to – is suddenly the chairman of the newly formed MMD branch.73 Trade unionists formed the heart of most MMD local branches or committees, but the DCs also performed another crucial task that national union leadership could not have achieved on its own. DC officials identified local businessmen and local government officials that could be incorporated into the new MMD structures. These small-scale local businessmen, who were shopkeepers or commercial farmers, provided funds and transport for the first MMD rallies. Mbikusita-Lewanika suggests that their support was far more crucial to the success of the MMD than the support of elite members of the ‘business community’, including former UNIP politicians.74 The ZCTU leadership assisted the organization of the MMD and mobilization of mass constituencies in other ways as well. One ZCTU official said that, in the early days of the MMD, the ZCTU provided funds and facilities for the printing of MMD flyers and other materials.75 Rakner, who was conducting fieldwork immediately prior to the 1991 elections, notes that ZCTU vehicles were repainted with MMD letters and colours and used in the election campaign.76 Direct assistance of this kind was risky, however, and union leaders always feared that their involvement in the multiparty campaign might result in a backlash against organized labour. Unionists emphasized that the formal boundaries between trade union work and MMD work had to be respected, especially after UNIP passed legislation limiting how trade union funds could be used.77 The ZCTU did find ways, however, of continuing to communicate with and mobilize mass constituencies on behalf of the MMD. Alfred Mudenda, who was then General Secretary of ZULAWU, said that MMD business was regularly mixed into normal union activities: So you are strengthening the district officials, but you would not say ‘how do we strengthen the district committees and help the MMD.’ You couldn’t say that. [But it was understood? Strengthening the DCs meant strengthening the local MMD?] Oh yes, yes, at the time. But you would not say you want to strengthen the MMD. You would say you want to

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change the political understanding. You would say I think this movement is progressive, and you should consider supporting it. And Zimba and Chiluba would come, but you could not invite these solely political figures [other non-union MMD leaders].78 When directly asked if DCs were given money in order to organize MMD rallies, Mudenda again emphasized the importance of maintaining the appearance of autonomy between the ZCTU and the MMD. He said that DCs were given funds in order to visit local chiefs, councillors and ordinary people – ostensibly on union business – and they also might be provided with MMD manifestos ‘to study’ in order to determine if it was a progressive party that workers might want to individually support. Assessing the effects of organized labour’s contribution to the MMD is beyond the scope of this chapter. Those familiar with Zambian politics will object that the MMD, after winning power, did not fulfil its promise as a counterhegemonic movement; others will add that organized labour, far from benefiting from its contribution to the MMD, found its lot substantially worsened under MMD rule. This is correct. It is important, therefore, to stress the variable and highly contingent consequences of counterhegemonic movements. The demands and claims used to mobilize and challenge the norms and practices of hegemony need not necessarily form the basis for post-hegemonic systems of government. In post-hegemonic moments, power-holders may be drawn to disavow collectivist principles and prize adaptability and pragmatism. In the case of Zambia, the MMD did much to dismantle a hegemonic system based on unitary interest, but it did little to ensure that a new system of government would be accountable to the multiplicity of interests that emerged in hegemony’s wake. As in some other democratizing countries in Africa, the organization of popular dissent into a counterhegemonic movement proved more feasible in Zambia than the organization of a democracy that allowed for the effective representation of demands.

Conclusions This chapter argues that, in pursuit of greater state control, incorporative state policies created conditions that were ripe for successful counterhegemonic movements. Though the UNIP state in Zambia created allied institutions in order to expand its control over mass constituencies and corporate groups, it also granted these institutions some degree of formal autonomy. The labour movement in Zambia therefore possessed – independent of the government or the ruling party – communication networks and other political resources that connected citizens across ethnic or regional boundaries. When circumstances changed and state–labour alliances frayed, institutions that were meant to be instruments of state control quickly became mobilizing structures for a strong, cohesive opposition movement. The story of organized labour in

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Zambia is thus a story of institutional subversion, as the centralized trade union structure intended to be a top-down means of control was transformed into a movement that mobilized and gave voice to the demands of the grassroots. To reflect on Zambia’s experience more broadly, post-colonial states – as well as some of their colonial predecessors – created participatory institutions, hoping that these institutions would assist the state in channelling, disciplining and shaping popular demands. The institutions designed by the state for control, however, can also serve as the staging grounds for counterhegemonic projects.

Notes 1. See Nelson Kasfir, The Shrinking Political Arena: Participation and Ethnicity in African Politics with a Case Study of Uganda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) and Ruth Berins Collier, Regimes in Tropical Africa: Changing Forms of Supremacy, 1945–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 2. For example, Thomas Callaghy, The State–society Struggle: Zaire in Comparative Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) and Crawford Young, ‘The End of the Post-colonial State in Africa? Reflections on Changing African Political Dynamics’, African Affairs, 103 (2004), pp. 23–49, esp. 27. 3. For example, Jean-Francois Bayart, ‘Civil Society in Africa’, in Political Domination in Africa: Reflections on the Limits of Power, edited by P. Chabal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and Richard Joseph, ‘Class, State and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Studies, 21 (1983), pp. 21–38. 4. Victor Azarya, ‘Reordering State-society Relations: Incorporation and Disengagement’, in The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa, edited by D. Rothchild and N. Chazan Rothchild (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988); Nelson Kasfir, ‘Departicipation and Political Development in Black African Politics’, Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1974), pp. 3–25; Lucan A. Way, ‘Authoritarian State Building and the Sources of Regime Competitiveness in the Fourth Wave: The Cases of Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine’, World Politics, Vol. 57, No. 2 (2005), pp. 231–61; Jean-Francois Bayart, ‘Civil Society in Africa’, p. 119. 5. Anthropologists, rural sociologists and even historians continued to produce excellent accounts of societal responses to economic and social change. This work, equally skilled at uncovering individual and community strategies vis-à-vis the state, was often implicitly political. See, for instance, Sarah Berry, Fathers Work for Their Sons: Accumulation, Mobility and Class Formation in an Extended Yoruba Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 6. By the early 1990s, partly due to the international donor community’s disillusionment with state-led development, scholars began to criticize this focus on the state and attendant neglect of non-state actors. In one early contribution to the debate, Doornbos underlined the ‘prolonged withering-away of African civil society from academic and policy attention’ and suggested that, since independence, ‘socio-economic relationships and institutions at the “grassroots,” in both rural areas and in urban centers, have received attention mainly in their reaction to interventions from “above”’. See Martin Doornbos, ‘The African State in Academic Debate: Retrospect and Prospect’, Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2 (1990), pp. 179–98, esp. 190.

248 Adrienne LeBas 7. Mahmood Mamdani and Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba eds, African Studies in Social Movements and Democracy (Dakar: Codesria, 1995). 8. Michael Bratton and Nicholas van de Walle, Democratic Experiences in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 9. For example, William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1998). 10. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971). 11. David Laitin, ‘Hegemony and Religious Conflict: British Imperial Control and Political Cleavages in Yorubaland’, in Bringing the State Back In, edited by P. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985), p. 287 (emphasis added) 12. The analytical distinctions between these three paths are somewhat artificial. We can imagine, for instance, a counterhegemonic movement taking advantage of contradictions within hegemonic rule at the same time that it draws on identities or networks that were never a part of the hegemonic system. 13. See, for example, Giovanni Arrighi and John Saul, ‘Socialism and Economic Development in Tropical Africa’, Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1968), pp. 141–69, and Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, first published 1961 (New York: Grove Press, 1993). 14. Robert Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 15. Eva Bellin, Stalled Democracy: Capital, Labour and the Paradox of State-sponsored Development (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 16. Joan Nelson, Access to Power: Politics and the Urban Poor in Developing Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Jeff Crisp, The Story of an African Working Class: Ghanaian Miners’ Struggles, 1870–1980 (London: Zed Books, 1984); Richard Jeffries, ‘Populist Tendencies in the Ghanaian Trade Union Movement’, in The Development of an African Working Class: Studies in Class Formation and Action, edited by R. Sandbrook and R. Cohen (London: Longman Group, 1975); John Wiseman, ‘Urban Riots in West Africa, 1977 to 1985’, Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1986), pp. 509–18. 17. Henry Meebelo, African Proletarians and Colonial Capitalism: The Origins, Growth and Struggles of the Zambian Labour Movement to 1964 (Lusaka: Kenneth Kaunda Foundation, 1986), chaps. 3–5; Michael Burawoy, ‘The Hidden Abode of Underdevelopment: Labour Process and the State in Zambia’, Politics and Society, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1982), pp. 123–66. 18. The total ‘emoluments’ paid to Africans increased from £2,116,251 in 1950 to £4,589,840, while the number of African employees increased from 34,814 to 37,193. Northern Rhodesian Chamber of Mines figures, reported in B. Vander Plaetse, G. Hlatiwayo, L. Van Eygen, B. Meessen and B. Criel, ‘Costs and Revenue of Health Care in a Rural Zimbabwean District’, Health Policy and Planning, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2005), pp. 243–51, 96n7. 19. M. R. Mwendapole, A History of the Trade Union Movement in Zambia up to 1968 (Lusaka: University of Zambia, Institute for African Studies, 1977). 20. Labour Department figures, cited in Cherry Gertzel, ‘Industrial Relations in Zambia to 1975’, in Industrial Relations in Africa, edited by U. G. Damachi and H. D. Seibel (New York: Macmillan Press, 1979), pp. 319–20. 21. Oliver Saasa and Jerker Carlsson, The Aid Relationship in Zambia: A Conflict Scenario (Stockholm: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1996), p. 35.

The Politics of Institutional Subversion 249 22. Darlington Amos Banda, The Trade Union Situation in Zambia: An Overview of the Law, Practice and the Way Forward (Lusaka: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1997), p. 18. 23. See Gertzel, ‘Industrial Relations’, p. 338. 24. Peter Harries-Jones, Freedom and Labour: Mobilization and Political Control on the Zambian Copperbelt (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), pp. 166–70; Robert Bates, Unions, Parties and Political Development: A Study of Mineworkers in Zambia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), especially Chapter 5. 25. Lise Rakner, Trade Unions in Processes of Democratisation: A Study of Party Labour Relations in Zambia (Bergen, Norway: Chr. Michelson Institute, 1994), pp. 77–82. 26. Anirudha Gupta, ‘Trade Unionism and Politics on the Copperbelt’, in Politics in Zambia, edited by William Tordoff and R.V. Molteno (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974), p. 308. 27. Quoted in Neo Simutanyi, ‘Political Economy of Workers’ Participation: The Role of Trade Unions in Promoting Industrial Democracy in Zambia’, M.A. Thesis in Development Studies, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, 1987, p. 33. 28. Quoted in Miles Larmer, ‘Unrealistic Expectations? Zambia’s Mineworkers from Independence to the One-party State, 1964–1972’, Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 18, No. 4 (2005), pp. 318–52, esp. 332. 29. Bates, Unions, p. 47. 30. Michael Burawoy, The Colour of Class on the Copper Mines: From African Advancement to Zambianization (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), p. 78. 31. Interview with Sylvester Tembo, Lusaka, 9 July 2004; see also, Times of Zambia, 18–20 July and 26 July 1974. 32. At one point in the early 1980s, there seems to have been some discussion within UNIP of folding the ZCTU into party structures. It seems that this proposal never gained much force, but it did convince the ZCTU leadership to inaugurate, as a form of self-defence, the District Committees discussed below. 33. Robert Bianchi, Unruly Corporatism: Associational Life in Twentieth-century Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 34. Ibid., p. 81. 35. Times of Zambia, 23 November 1975. 36. Television interview with Frank Mutubila, Zambian National Broadcasting Corporation, broadcast 4 February 1976. Quoted in Bernice Liatto, ‘Organised Labour and the State in Zambia’, Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Politics, University of Leeds, 1989, p. 213. 37. Chiluba added that the ZCTU and its affiliates should be represented on all policymaking bodies. Times of Zambia, 20 March 1975. 38. Bates, Unions, pp. 57–65; 106–11. 39. Burawoy, Colour, pp. 78–9. 40. Ibid., p. 80. 41. Times of Zambia, 25 April 1974 and 16 May 1974. 42. Interview with Charles Muchimba, 3 July 2004. This tendency to vote out ‘political’ leadership increased as government–labour relations soured in the 1980s; most notably, the National Chair of MUZ lost his position very soon after accepting a government appointment in 1989. 43. This account is derived from statements by the Ministers of Labour and Social Services and of Home Affairs, Zambia Parliamentary Debates, 18 April 1980. 44. All data in this section are from ZCTU 1988. 45. The suspension of labour leaders was a result of the unions’ announcement that they opposed a new local administration structure passed by UNIP and would not

250 Adrienne LeBas

46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

allow union officials to run for local government offices. Ironically, labour’s opposition was motivated by the strictly parochial interests of mineworkers: the new act would have brought mining townships under municipal control and eliminated some of the privileges that mineworkers received as residents of non-municipal townships. The majority of participants in the 1981 protests and riots would have been unaffected by this change. Times of Zambia, 28 January 1981. Interviews with Japhet Moonde, 24 June 2004; Austin Liato, 22 June 2004; Charles Muchimba, 3 July 2004. For more on these reforms and their consequences, see Bratton and van de Walle, Democratic Experiences in Africa, and Robert Bates and Paul Collier, ‘The Politics and Economics of Policy Reform in Zambia’, in Political and Economic Interactions in Economic Policy Reform : Evidence from Eight Countries, edited by R. Bates and A. Kreuger (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell 1993). Liatto, ‘Organised Labour and the State’, p. 52. Times of Zambia, 9–12 December 1986; National Mirror, 28 December 1986. Interview with Alfred Mudenda, 2 July 2004. See Times of Zambia, 10–12 October 1989 and 17–18 October 1989. Interviews with Leah Asaji, Joel Kamoko, Helen Mwiyakui and Johnson Zulu, 8 July 2004. See, for instance, Neo Simutanyi, ‘Organised Labour, Economic Crisis, and Structural Adjustment in Africa: The Case of Zambia’, in Democracy in Zambia: Challenges for the Third Republic, edited by B. Chikulo and O. Sichone (Harare: SAPES Trust, 1996). Times of Zambia, 12 October 1986. This was, in and of itself, a departure from earlier ZCTU policy. In the 1970s, as discussed earlier in this chapter, Zimba, Chiluba and other trade union leaders had repeatedly requested more involvement in policymaking, and they had consistently sought trade union representation on government bodies. Liatto, ‘Organised Labour’, pp. 175–8. See, for instance, Times of Zambia, 30 December 1986; Times of Zambia, 16 April 1987; Times of Zambia, 29 April 1987. Times of Zambia, 1 May 1987. Sunday Times of Zambia, 7 February 1988. Interviews with Chitalu Sampa, 2 July 2004; Alfred Mudenda, 2 July 2004. Rakner, Trade Unions, p. 58. Chiluba, ‘Workers’ Challenge’, statement to the June 1990 Garden House Conference, reprinted in Akashambatwa Mbikusita-Lewanika and Derrick Chitala, eds, The Hour Has Come! Proceedings of the National Conference on Multiparty Options (Lusaka: Zambia Research Foundation, 1990), pp. 95–106. For a more detailed analysis of the 1991 elections, see Carolyn Baylies and Morris Szeftel, ‘Democratisation and the 1991 Elections in Zambia’, in Voting for Democracy: Watershed Elections in Contemporary Anglophone Africa, edited by J. Daniel, R. Southall and M. Szeftel (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999). Interview with Joyce Nonde, 6 July 2004. Report of the Secretary-General to the 7th Quadrennial Congress of the ZCTU, Livingstone, 15–18 October 1986. QC/D No. 1, ZCTU Archives, Kitwe, Zambia. Ibid. ZCTU, ‘Secretarial Report for 1989, National Centre’, mimeo, ZCTU Kitwe. Ibid. Affiliates were invited along on the tours of Luapula and Western provinces, which have traditionally been areas of low trade union presence. Those that did

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69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

come, noticeably the Guards Union of Zambia and ZNUT, gained new members. Few affiliates, however, expressed interest in the DC tour. See District Committee Correspondence, DC/2-63. ZCTU Archives, Kitwe Zambia. Rakner, Trade Unions, pp. 59–60. Interview with Austin Liato, 22 June 2004. ZCTU, ‘Report of the SG to the 9th Quadrennial Congress, 25–7 October 1994, Livingstone’, mimeo, ZCTU Kitwe. The provinces visited were Southern, Eastern, Western, Northern and Central provinces. T. Z. Tembo, The Road to Multiparty Democracy in Zambia and Its Consequences (Livingstone, Zambia: Sanisani Chemis, 1996), pp. 1–2. Interview with Austin Liato, 22 June 2004. Interview with Akashambatwa Mbikusita-Lewanika, 23 July 2003. Interview with Maria Kamuchele Kabwe, 2 July 2004. Rakner, Trade Unions, p. 60n9. Interviews with Alfred Mudenda, 2 July 2004; Sylvester Tembo, 9 July 2004; and Charles Muchimba, 3 July 2004. Interview with Alfred Mudenda, 2 July 2004.

11

How Do Activists Act? Conceiving Counterhegemony in Durban Sharad Chari1

The first decade of democracy in South Africa’s port city of Durban has seen a range of new forms of protest, expressing the many ways in which struggles for social justice continue after apartheid. One such set of struggles concentrates in neighbourhoods next to petrochemical refineries, a pulp and paper mill and the airport. Formerly the ‘Indian’ township of Merebank, and the ‘coloured’ township of Wentworth, these places were consolidated in an incongruous industrial-residential landscape by apartheid spatial planning to offer proximity to work and access to the city to intermediate ‘race groups’.2 On two sides of Duranta Road, and with roughly similar populations (about 27,000 for Wentworth and 21,000 for Merebank in 2001), these neighbourhoods have been shaped in similar ways in some respects and in profoundly different ways in others.3 What is more, though both have lived with similar indignities, such as breathing benzene all their lives, and although Merebank’s residents have only slightly higher household incomes, and slightly lower unemployment levels,4 Wentworth today is a hotbed of political activism while Merebank is relatively quiescent. To characterize these neighbourhoods brusquely, Wentworth has over time become a ghetto in the analytical sense proposed by Louis Wacquant as shaped by stigma, constraint, spatial confinement and institutional containment.5 Although its residents have come from all over South Africa, this diverse product of the attempt to legislate against ‘miscegenation’ seems mired in the poverties of place. Across the road, Merebank’s quiescence emerges from a very different history of space, through which a former village on the outskirts of Durban has been pulled apart and has become part of the cultural, political and economic fortunes offered by the new South Africa. This chapter is part of a broader research project on changing forms of racialized livelihood and political imagination in two quite different histories of space, within South Africa’s changing circuits of class and social citizenship.6 Here, I focus on the ways in which Wentworth has become an intense site of activism, particularly with respect to innovative industrial labour and environmental justice organizing. While some critics with a 252

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wide-angle lens on politics have asked whether these ‘red’ and ‘green’ struggles can link and join broader currents of post-apartheid organizing against neoliberal globalization, close inspection of the labour and grammar of struggle reveals a multiplicity of political imaginations, rationales and tactics through which activists act. As the organizers to this volume argue, counterhegemonic rearticulation is difficult work, fraught with specific contradictions and challenges. My key question – how do activists act? – is also a call for ethnographic engagement with the concrete and multiple conditions of subaltern inequality, agency and aspiration. In asking ‘how do activists act?’ I also invoke Michael Burawoy’s reframing of the labour question as a question of getting workers to work under specific material-semiotic conditions. By asking why workers work, Burawoy’s point is that worker’s consent to the labour contract implies nothing about capital’s ability to extract work-effort or labour power of a particular type and intensity in the process of labour. The politics of production refers to the ongoing process through which hegemony is sought in the labour process, in order to both secure and obscure the production of value, to get workers to participate in the terms of their exploitation. For scholars of work, this problematic necessitated ethnographies that explored consent formation within the labour process, and, in critiques of Burawoy’s workplace-centrism, through consent across raced and gendered processes of struggle cutting through work regimes.7 Several years later, Burawoy’s contrapuntal reading of Karl Polanyi and Antonio Gramsci is driven by the problem of subaltern counterhegemony, rather than capitalist hegemony.8 Here, Burawoy argues that Gramsci’s ‘civil society’ seeks to explain the making of a specific form of society within which consent to the ruling alliance is secured, however tenuously. As a theorist of capital’s constant breakdown and tendency to crisis, Polanyi’s ‘active society’ proves efficacious in quite a different way from Gramscian ‘civil society’, to explain how collectivities mobilize in defence of livelihoods, local environments, healthy bodies and other fictitious commodities, in Polanyi’s terms, whose reproduction cannot be secured through the capitalist labour process. In many sites in which the social reproduction of capital consistently fails, the striving of ‘labour’ and ‘nature’ to persist points to other conceptions of value, and to more humane and just, possible futures. In responding to Burawoy’s reframing of the question of counterhegemony, I return to his earlier attention to the production of sentient subjects at work, whose intellectual work is necessary for workplace hegemony. The problem of counterhegemony begs a similar questioning of how and under what conditions activists are made and given to act. The crucial question is: what are the social and spatial conditions for articulating many forms of human creativity as a counterhegemic force? To clarify, struggle has to be forged both socially and spatially, as suggested in Burawoy’s concluding call to the ‘travelling interpreter who is always excavating new terrains’ while

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following the many degradations and struggles in the wake of the commodification of land, labour and money.9 Since these landscapes of waste, decay, devaluation and denigration are often racialized, gendered or dishonoured in specific ways, Burawoy’s ‘ethnographic archaeologist’ has to be neither the legislator of orthodox Marxism nor the Gramscian organic intellectual tied to place-specific cultural history. Such intellectual work must be attentive both to multiplicities of subaltern life, as well as to broader spatial dynamics of accumulation, disaccumulation, dispossession and changing technologies through which the life and death of populations is sanctioned as societal defence.10 Wentworth’s specific struggles speak to this broader problematic by showing how people forced by circumstance to live next to polluting industry in the aftermath of a named form of racial capitalism – ‘South African apartheid’ – seek to call their containment into question. In other words, ‘counterhegemony’ must be forged through active processes of cultural production that revalorize social labour against multiple degradations of poverty and inequality, in this case as neighbours of polluting industry. The work of imagining counterhegemony requires sustaining relationships and innovating tactics in the face of hardship, and the spaces of this creativity are necessarily diverse and often in the interstices of neighbourhood life: on the street, between church meetings, across people’s homes, in the preparation for political rallies or while cleaning up after them.11 These circuits of potential revaluation of social labour mark themselves off from reliance on sex- and drug-related work that erodes individual and collective capacities, but once again it is the terms of potential counterhegemony and the degree to which they are domesticated by dominant routines that are crucial to apprehend, if we are to understand whether they are the seedbed of militancy or co-optation. Current debates over the ANC’s apparent retreat from orthodox neoliberalism, through commitment to expansion in public works and infrastructural investment, but not the guaranteed social wage argued for by several critics, turn on precisely how the dominant political alliance responds to a multitude of social forces. Since 2004, the ANC’s language of ‘two economies’ – a ‘First Economy’ presumed to be the engine of growth, and a ‘Second Economy’ defined by subsistence – seeks limited and targeted social security as a means of identifying and harnessing various ‘indigents’. Whether this policy shift will serve to discipline nascent counterhegemonic currents, or whether subaltern politics can turn the language of ‘two economies’ on its head to argue for the expansion of universal rights to social citizenship in one deeply divided post-apartheid society remains to be seen.12 In tracing the many disconnected labours that might rearticulate as a counterhegemonic bloc in one region of this broader political economic landscape, I first turn in to a sketch of the broader spatial dynamics that have forged the potential for activism. Following this, I turn to the ways in which itinerant labour activism has emerged from a particular labour regime,

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and the way in which environmental justice activism has emerged in parallel as a new terrain of post-apartheid struggle. I conclude with some of the gendered challenges in articulating these forces, and the political imaginations of most of Wentworth’s residents, within broader post-apartheid aspirations and mobilizations for justice and redress. Counterhegemony is far from guaranteed, but multiple forms of political striving are produced just as surely as struggles against the degradations of postcolonial capitalism continue. I conclude with some challenges within struggles for counterhegemony as Durban’s residents strive in myriad ways to become fully enfranchised citizens.

Making counterhegemony possible To appreciate the specificity of Wentworth as a crucible of activism, it is important to note that its residents have come from all over South Africa and beyond. Wentworth was created as a township for the ‘coloured racial group’ in the early 1960s, from a combination of peri-urban farmland, a mixture of housing stock for Navy subalterns and railway workers, a former concentration camp for Boer prisoners (English Natal being the pioneer of the concentration camp as a technology of terror), and a swampy informal settlement next to the refinery site with the ironic name ‘Happy Valley’. Austerville, the heart of today’s Wentworth, was a dumping ground for Coloureds evicted from tenancies across the city of Durban, particularly through the advancing expropriation of Indian landowners in the application of the Group Areas Act. This unexpectedly large population of Coloured tenants from places like Mayville, Cato Manor and the city centre was relocated along with Coloureds from the rural Eastern Cape – many dispossessed long before the 1913 cut off date for land claims – in former military housing in Wentworth. As in neighbouring Merebank, the Group Areas Act offered improved housing to intermediate ‘race’ groups like Indians and Coloureds, with the hope of drawing these populations into a structural relation of complicity with apartheid and its geographies. Indeed, several families of teachers secured access to semidetached housing that many describe as comfortable, despite conflict over communal bathrooms and toilets. Indeed, complicity with apartheid planning would prove primarily to be a presumption, as residents drawn from far and wide into cramped flats next to refineries found their lives shaped by new forms of violence and constraint.13 Wentworth’s residents have acted in relation to violence and constraint in at least four distinct realms of sociality: gangs, churches, soccer and racialized labour regimes, none of which are easily bracketed as domains of apartheid hegemony.14 Over time, the fragmented dynamics of church and labour, and the uncertain scramble for money and respect through these media, have brought people back to living in unemployment in the smelly shadows of Wentworth’s petrochemical refineries.

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The racialization of space and labour are well-worn narrative frames in South African historiography. The first decade of democratic South Africa has been a quintessentially post-revolutionary moment, in which the failed possibilities of national-proletarian transformation of racial capitalism were set aside in a negotiated settlement with defenders of apartheid capitalism.15 One of the productive aspects of this moment is that the multiple mechanisms and manifestations of racism have been subjects of fierce, scholarly and popular debate; one of the unproductive aspects of this moment is that notions of ‘race’ have hardened in various arenas of public institutional debate.16 Germane to this chapter is the questioning of new terms and forms of statesanctioned racism, whether in the arena of crime and policing,17 housing and rights to the city or the disastrous effects of the state’s ‘denialism’ with respect to HIV/AIDS.18 ‘Race’ has once more become a ‘dense transfer point’ for a variety of broader struggles and anxieties in the social body.19 In Wentworth, racial stigma attaches itself to residents and their neighbourhood centrally through the idiom of gangsterism. Wentworth continues to be seen as a place of gangs and violence, a fiction reproduced by several of its residents. Representations of gangs permeate conceptions of Wentworth from without and within the township, and powerfully shaped the way in which this corner of South Africa could participate in antiapartheid activism. Former gangsters are among today’s labour brokers, labour organizers, entrepreneurs, social investment coordinators, saved pastors and tireless social activists. If the conception of Wentworth as apolitical, stigmatized and closed in on its own pathologies is a dominant one, recurring through time in narratives that criss-cross its borders, this is not the only one. Wentworth has been made as much by its connections to other places by the movements of people, in their relocation to the township, in their subsequent trajectories as industrial migrants, as in its connections to wider political currents and counterhegemonic solidarities. As an aside on the dialectics of ‘race’ and ‘culture’, it is important to note that Wentworth Coloureds continue to battle with origins stories, claims to Griqua or Zulu indigeneity, related claims to land and/or chieftaincy and disconnections from family who passed into white or Indian areas. When pushed to confront ‘Coloured culture’, Wentworth Coloureds emphasize race mixture, and sometimes also the fiction of race, but more often the stigma of not being racially pure.20 The continuing power of a colonial ideology that accords primacy to race purity feeds a sentiment that its lack has meant disentitlement in the past and present. Farred argues that Coloureds experience both race and citizenship with uncertainty and ambivalence, even though South Africa is the only nation to which they can belong. This, he attributes to the hegemony of black/white in constituting the nation, which, I suggest Indians in neighbouring Merebank can evade through the alterity of ‘Indian culture’.21 This said, the dominant view in Wentworth handles white/black binarism as primarily European/Zulu, in

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which the patriarch is preferably an Englishman whose photograph hangs proudly in the living room, and in which some now claim a resurgent interest in their black matriarchs.22 A few individuals have been able to amass documentation to link invocations of indigeneity to claims on ancestral property as descendants of prominent English or Griqua landowners. Since these land claims predate the 1913 Land Act, the cut off date for restitution through the Land Claims Court, the articulation of ethnicity and land has not proven to be a successful form of counterhegemonic assertion, and indeed most people do not have recourse to the evidentiary means to make effective land claims. Certain forms of politics have been able to present themselves as counterhegemonic, while others, such as claims to land, have not. This section has only sketched some of the broader social and spatial contours through which activism has become possible in specific ways. What I turn to in the following section is the way in which political work has emerged from the dominant, gendered labour regime which has harnessed and disposed a significant share of Wentworth’s labour.

Work, unions and cooperative labour The most fortunate Wentworth men, arguably, have been the pre-eminent semi-skilled industrial migrants of South Africa. They are the pipe fitters, boilermakers, fitters and turners who have been at the centre of industrial construction work across South Africa’s refineries. It is therefore with painful irony that they return today to live in unemployment at the footsteps of the Engen and SAPREF refineries. With about a third of Wentworth’s population unemployed,23 and given few means of self-provisioning through subsistence fishing or gardening, all forms of variously remunerated work are underwritten by income earned somewhere. A substantial share of work in Wentworth is illegal and related to theft, sex work, traffic in women and children and drug trade. Needless to say, this criminalized and stigmatized work eats away at people, community and the local environment, and further devalues life in Wentworth. Families of various sorts rely on pensions, child support and disability grants, some legal waged work and some illegal waged work, all cross-subsidized by the unwaged care work primarily of women, who take care of the young, infirm and injured, and who share some resources through community welfare organizations. Work in Wentworth today is structured around the decline of formal, predominantly male, migrant-itinerant industrial labour, and the ongoing necessity of predominantly female, largely uncommodified community care work. Over the relatively short history of Wentworth as a ‘coloured’ township, it has become a key recruitment site for itinerant industrial work at the refineries. Lenny Samuels speaks passionately about the way in which he was forced into the stereotyped coloured job of industrial construction.24 Lenny either worked on limited duration contracts at the Engen refinery in

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the middle of Wentworth,25 or he travelled the length and breadth of South Africa to work in industrial construction in the cities of Richards Bay, Sasolberg and Saldhana. He narrates a complex story about the interconnections between labour brokering, nascent labour organizing and a local world of gangs. Critics of labour unionism in this sector often argued that strikes were vehicles for competing brokers to force their way into various contracts. What seems less contested is that for the majority of limitedduration industrial construction workers in the refineries, work would prove difficult to secure and hold onto by the 1990s. It was at this point that Lenny and a few others started in the Chemical Engineering and Industrial Workers Union (CEIWU), a militant independent labour union that has persistently fought for the rights of limited duration contract workers at the Engen Oil Refinery and beyond since the late 1990s. For Lenny and other labour organizers, this has effectively meant being blacklisted by industry. Each year since 1998 CEIWU has struck during the annual shutdown at Engen primarily for parity between the entitlements of limited duration and permanent workers. The refineries shifted to outsourcing and contracting of operations since the enactment of the 1995 Labour Relations Act. After a major wildcat strike in 2001, ENGEN has shifted to a model of partial and so-called unscheduled shutdowns, planned at short notice in order to reduce this type of strike activity, and they have shifted to getting work fabricated elsewhere, as far as Gauteng. CEIWU also claims that the refineries have been illegally blacklisting workers since the rise in strike activity after 2000. Lenny, who is sure he is on a blacklist, says, ‘I’ve lost my car, I’ve lost my wife, I’ve lost my house. I find myself in the situation where my lights are being cut and I’m being evicted because I stand for justice for workers.’26 In 2004, the labour union CEIWU won an important victory by turning a case of unfair dismissal of 176 workers into a challenge of limited duration contracts. CEIWU used a combination of ongoing militancy across the road from the refinery gate, and patient legal activism, and as a consequence the 2004 judgement ruled that the workers’ contracts could not be considered limited duration, as they made clear reference to benefits, leave, overtime and other conditions of service. As a consequence, the striking workers’ jobs could not be terminated either for insubordination or for operational requirements without following due procedure. This judgement runs against the ruling in the landmark ‘Fry Metals (Pvt Ltd) VS NUMSA’ case from 2002, which upheld the right to dismiss workers on the basis of operational requirements while workers were on strike. Engen could have strengthened this verdict if it had won the case against the 176 workers, on the grounds that the strike was jeopardizing the contracts necessary for the obligations of work. CEIWU’s victory has quite fundamentally altered the terms of labour struggle for industrial artisans in the petrochemical sector, and the court decision is a resource for the struggles of contract workers across South Africa.

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CEIWU has since expanded to represent scaffolders, cleaners and the core maintenance workers who have been its mainstay. The maintenance workers who spearheaded the militancy in CEIWU, have deepened unionization across the refineries of South Durban. As for the community of Wentworth surrounding the refinery and its strikers, Karl G., a union organizer at CEIWU admits ‘the community has a love-hate relationship with strikers at the refinery. They say “Eey, you’re going out on strike. Again! Other people haven’t got work. We’ll go down and work down there!”’27 CEIWU has had problems with scab labour from the community, but they say they have been able to convince them that if they went in, they would face the same problems in the future. Recently, CEIWU has been approached by call centre workers from Pinetown, also on limited duration contracts. Packing workers from a logistics centre in the retail sector have also approached CEIWU. ‘Marginal’ workers outside the provisions of the Labour Relations Act, by virtue of their short-term contracts, have found CEIWU to be an effective voice. The union’s policy is to try to represent contract workers if a bigger union is unavailable. CEIWU’s labour organizing progresses on three fronts. First, CEIWU continues to try to consolidate its base in the engineering sector in the South Basin, across refineries and subcontracting companies. Second, CEIWU now represents workers who can potentially redefine the accountability of capital under the Labour Relations Act, to fight contract work itself. This has expanded their focus from the chemical engineering industries to workers on very short-term contracts in retail and services as well. Often, this expansion of focus has come through the activism of former refinery workers who were blacklisted for militant labour unionism, and who have since shifted to work in call centres and other forms of short-term contract work. Finally, CEIWU has begun to see that it has built capacity in organizing contract workers who are constantly in flux. Bigger unions presume that organizers can be sent to a site to unionize workers, while CEIWU talks to people across work and home, individually and in groups and in informal locations. CEIWU has recently federated with a large and bureaucratized labour union federation to impart some of its activist expertise. A small group of unemployed industrial artisans who have participated in the militant unionism of CEIWU, including Lenny Samuels, also launched an experiment in forming industrial cooperatives in 2002. Lenny explained to me that male artisans from Wentworth continue to engage in longdistance migrant work; they go to abattoirs in Ireland and Scotland; they go to construction work in New Zealand and Australia. Against this drain of artisanal labour, Lenny says he decided to stay and fight for an alternative future centred on cooperatives: I look at a cooperative as something that will oppose multinational capitalism. This will unite our community and also address our socioeconomic needs . . . Giving a sense of dignity as you owning something

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that belongs to you, not to some white guy that’s hidden, that you don’t even know . . . The government has encouraged this by a program which they call GEAR: outsourcing. I’ve had my toilet fixed now; it was supposed to be done by the department of housing, but they sent a private contractor to my house now. We’d rather all become contractors or coops. We want to contract to the government to address our own needs. Why don’t we say we are cooperatives and do this work ourselves instead of allowing this outsourcing to be done . . . If I belong to a coop that does metalworking, and my wife belongs to a coop that does sewing for instance, we could support one another, and then we could have another coop which would be a buying coop, then maybe a gardening coop. We’re looking at reversing things. We’ll barter.28 This popular political economy can be written off as utopian populism, but such scholarly cynicism does not do justice to the way in which people living under neoliberal restructuring experience the present and conceive of alternatives. Lenny knew as we spoke that this vision was already compromised by tensions within the community over what cooperatives, community and development mean. The Metalworkers’ Cooperative was formed by a small number of unemployed artisanal labour unionists from CEIWU, including Lenny, and the late Skido Joseph.29 CEIWU’s involvement was in the inception, as part of the ‘Wentworth Poverty Alleviation Program’ (WEPAP) which was to pitch a community-based cooperative initiative to the Poverty Alleviation section of local government’s Economic Development section. WEPAP was based on the formation of two initial coops which would then spawn other coops engaged in other kinds of work. The men of CEIWU started a metalworkers coop, and a group of women unemployed by the massive retrenchments in the clothing industry were to start a sewing coop. Conflict soon emerged, because the sewing coop was led by a mother and daughter from outside Wentworth who apparently saw this as an opportunity to harness a dependent contract group to their connections in the clothing industry. Lenny put it categorically: ‘They are taking the cooperative and offering big businesses cheap labor; that’s exploitation.’ What emerged in the ensuing local debates about cooperatives was that some of Wentworth’s working class population are aware of the way in which their livelihoods are bound up with the government’s economic policy. What is less clear in the ideology but blatant in practice is that community debates over cooperatives became polarized through the work of gender. Indeed, some of the unemployed women in the sewing cooperative did not conceptualize cooperatives in anything like the materialist idiom used by Lenny Samuels. For instance, in the heated meetings between members of the metalworkers coop and the sewing coop, Greta Jones rose up to control the negotiations and

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said, ‘I don’t know much about cooperatives, but I know that I’m hungry and my clothes are falling off my body.’ Pin-drop silence followed and she seemed to use a command of Biblical oratory to steer disparate factions towards consensus. When I asked her about it later, she smiled and said, ‘You saw what happened, didn’t you! He was there, the Holy Spirit speaks through me to show us the light.’30 Greta and her friend Diane call themselves ‘intercessors’: they describe their primary work as intervening in oppressive marriages to show women the way to take control of their lives. They speak of the deep fissures that migrant work has driven into their possibilities of having stable families, and they are proud to be single mothers.31 Stable marriage is not in actuality the norm, even if open divorce or separation is not either. In a context of what several people from Wentworth see as an endemic familial conflict, my conjecture is that these and other women find in Pentacostalism a way of maintaining their political engagement in the name of ‘community’ without compromising their moral stature, knowing full well that their ideal of family has been deeply compromised. While often seeming to reproduce dominant conceptions of the deserving and undeserving poor, charismatic Christianity provides a means to revalue the lives of individuals whose lives have been damaged in several ways. Over the past year, the sewing cooperative has seen a revival, though the ‘outsider’ leaders have left, and the entire workforce has turned around. Janice C. left out of disgust with the politics surrounding the cooperative, and a sense that more middle-class women were beginning to use the workers for their own ends, to bolster their role as champions of women in the community.32 Three sisters were running the cooperative in early 2004, two of them unemployed machinists who returned to work once this opportunity presented itself. When I met them, they had just been squeezed on a payment by a more middle-class woman activist in Wentworth, for whom the cooperative was doing subcontract labour. They admitted to me that it is still difficult not to act in fact as a subcontract unit under such circumstances. The sewing cooperative also rebuilt ties with the metalworkers cooperative, in a wider attempt to socialize production in community hands. As Massimo deAngelis reminds us, invocations of ‘community’ require contending with the messiness and politics of actual commons, a point borne out by the transitory and largely unnoticed history of cooperatives in Wentworth.33 The metalworker’s cooperative had a short, significant turnaround in early 2004, principally through the entry of Lorraine L., also a significant figure in the major Engen strike in 1980, when she was a key activist in CEIWU. When I last interviewed her in 2002, she had left the chemical engineering sector to work at a call centre, and it was her initial work organizing workers at the call centre which brought CEIWU into organizing very limited duration service workers there and elsewhere. When she lost her job, Lorraine returned to being an industrial artisan. Importantly, Lorraine flouts the conception that this work is Coloured men’s work, rather than the trade

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she is most attached to. When I spent time with the members of the coop in early 2004, they had just decided to draft a business plan and to pose as a small business; it seemed they were not getting contracts; as cooperatives cannot be held liable in the same ways that businesses can. It is ironic that while they were once critics of the sewing coop’s role as a subcontract unit, the metalworkers coop might become a small business. This is not to say that its members are not idealistic or committed to cooperatives, but that larger forces call the shots.34 In early 2005, the metalworkers cooperative began negotiations to join a consortium formed by enterprising men, primarily Coloured, partially from Wentworth, to try to secure ‘Black Empowerment’ contracts for smaller contractors. The consortium aims to secure contracts and provide basic business skills which are beyond the overheads of small contractors, and its aim is also ‘poverty alleviation’ in Wentworth. The consortium’s two arms specialize in construction and metalwork, and the metalworkers’ cooperative was an important sign of the consortium’s commitment to ‘poverty alleviation’. The opportunities in this alliance were already framed and perhaps compromised by the uncertain meaning and practice of ‘black empowerment’, as well as the sole focus on construction and mechanical engineering, both stereotypes of Coloured male work. By the end of 2005, the metalworkers’ cooperative had closed shop. These micro-experiments in cooperative building reflect community aspiration and creativity, compromised by forces not of their making.

Nature’s ghetto Apart from struggles over possible forms of legal work, and apart from the illegal work that I have mentioned in passing, many people are involved in civic and social organizations. In addition to the work of labour organizers and of the pioneers of cooperative building, several people are involved in work aimed at the transformation of the terms of work, life, environment, family and community. As new struggles have emerged from the changing terms of life under the new dispensation, environmentalism would seem to have been the most efficacious as it holds the promise of drawing together a variety of constituencies across race and class in shared mobilization over their commons, dispossessed to be the waste dump of petrochemical giants. The origins of environmental organization in South Durban is often attributed to the interest with which Nelson Mandela listened to the concerns of protestors outside the Engen refinery in 1995, when he stopped to talk to them. After some fits and starts, the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) was formally begun in early 1997 as an alliance of organizations committed to linking environmental justice struggles across the racial boundaries in Wentworth, Merebank, Bluff, Isipingo, Clairwood and Umlazi, in order to respond systematically to pollution in

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the South Durban industrial basin. SDCEA is located in Wentworth, but it has tried to maintain a sense that it represents all these communities.35 The affiliate of SDCEA representing the local community is the Wentworth Development Forum, formed in 1994. SDCEA also shifted focus outwards from the local, to later help found South Africa’s key environmental justice organization, ‘groundWork’, in 1999.36 groundWork’s mandate has been to address three major concerns: oil and air pollution with regard to chemical industries, health care waste and incineration and hazardous waste. A persisting strength of the SDCEA/WDF/groundWork alliance, seen from Wentworth’s activist mileiu, is that it can wear many hats – militant and professionalized, grassroots and networked, confrontational and negotiable – and it can work across multiple scales: local, city, provincial, national and international. Local and national levels of government have been their key points of pressure against the corporate-state alliance, particularly with the weakening of provincial government since the turn to political decentralization.37 Another key strength for the environmental movement is that the scientific knowledge on pollution in South Durban is now clearer than ever. Public health scholars from the University of Michigan and the University of KwaZulu-Natal have shown that Engen, Sapref and Mondi contribute to 80 per cent of the pollution that people in South Durban have to live with. Newspaper reports estimated leukaemia rates in South Durban at 24 times the national average.38 What is striking in the wake of clear evidence that the residents of South Durban live in a toxic soup is that the lines of ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ are by no means clearly drawn. Many residents appeal to a pragmatism, arguing that the only way to make the giants in their backyards pay for pollution is to extract from their ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) programmes. SDCEA and groundWork are categorically against CSR as mere ‘greenwashing’. groundWork’s campaign on corporate accountability emerged out of this and attempts to bring them all together. Rather than corporate social responsibility or CSR, groundWork’s position is that the underlying problem is to make capital accountable across multiple spaces and scales. Corporate accountability has come to mean something quite different from CSR, in that it pins its claims on broad-based civic organizing to bring corporates to book for pollution and other social abuses, rather than presuming that corporate ‘best practice’ will emerge through managerial change.39 To this end, groundWork facilitates links with communities across South Africa, but it continues to use SDCEA as an index of community-based environmental justice struggle. In other words, groundWork tries to use the history of environmental activism centred on Wentworth, to try to create similar capacity elsewhere in South Africa where similar ‘fenceline’ issues can be politicized. While SDCEA does not command a steady mass base in South Durban, or even in Wentworth, the activism of the alliance has been multi-faceted. There are three important points to be noted about SDCEA/WDF’s strategy. First,

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while these organizations are small and their presence in daily organizing is weak, they can pull in a crowd for spectacular events by drawing on a variety of other community organizations, even if they dissent with SDCEA/WDF’s tactics or point of view. Second, SDCEA/groundWork has tried to pursue a technocratic approach by claiming to empower residents in community monitoring of pollution levels, and community collection of research data to demonstrate ongoing ill health in the shadow of oil refineries. While this technocratic approach has not made an army of resident scientists monitoring pollution levels, it has won SDCEA important allies in international environmental justice research. Third, SDCEA has also taken recourse to legal activism, by pursuing Engen, SAPREF and Mondi in the courts. This constitutional route, alongside periodic mass action, has been quite fruitful, particularly in the recent victory against Mondi’s plan to build an incinerator/combustor. One of the important aspects of this struggle is that it brought to the foreground the importance of definitions, in which ‘antiincineration’ has been a key moral claim made by community residents. Furthermore, legal activism around Mondi’s planned expansion exposed the informal ties between capital and the state, which had substituted for open and accountable procedures for obtaining exemptions from environmental impact assessment. Ultimately, anti-incineration was an emotive organizing tool that could link local and international forces in what could be presented as a global anti-incineration movement. Given that SDCEA does not have a mass base but that it can bring together a strong crowd around issues like incineration and relocation, it has found it necessary to deepen the links between campaigning and episodic militancy. One of the challenges the alliance faces is to forge a tighter link between labour and fenceline communities, to bring together questions of environmental pollution and jobless growth in the expansion of the South Durban industrial basin. Despite the fissures within the SDCEA/WDF/groundWork alliance, all of them supported the militant labour union CEIWU during the important 2003 strike. As Peek maintains, ‘The environmental movement is just beginning to challenge the economic system.’40 However, not everyone in the locality falls in line with environmentalism as the key issue facing Wentworth’s residents. Jane G., an activist fighting for decent housing in the ‘ghetto within the ghetto’ in Woodville Road says, ‘I’m not worried about the environment; all I want is my piece of oxygen!’ Her stance derives less from ideological competition and more from profound gender tensions within various domains of activist labour in Wentworth. Jane represents a contingent grouping of women who found it necessary to organize themselves rather than accept being represented by the Wentworth Development Forum (WDF), over occupation of flats left vacant by the Provincial Housing Department. In brief, a group of women from Woodville Road formed a small organization in 2003 to take on the leadership of the WDF. The WDF was in the

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process of negotiating with the Housing Department to employ local contractors for construction work. The women of Woodville Road decided they could wait no longer. One night, they held hands and prayed, and they say that the Holy Spirit descended upon them and enabled them to act. By the next morning they had taken over the new housing stock and could not be dislodged. The WDF then called a meeting with key external activists, and the women of Woodville Road were chastised for defying the leadership. Jane Glover’s response, couched in a careful apology to the WDF leadership and the community, focuses on the difficulties of being sexually intimate, of performing ‘family obligations’, in overcrowded flats. Embedded in her appeal to family values is a strong critique of the political inactivity of men in securing basic means of survival, and the continuing gender politics within ‘community work’. Jenny and her comrades say they experience being moved by the Holy Spirit to act in their interests and against the commands of their male leadership. What appear to be conservative notions of religion, family, gender and sexuality may in fact provide a moral framework for more radical action. Jane Glover reminds us that involvement in community work takes many forms. In one instance, a women uses her home as a meeting ground for community activists of all sorts, and she manages in various ways to access wider resources like surplus food from grocery stores, or corporate social responsibility funds from the industrial giants, and she distributes these resources through her networks. Several unemployed poor women participate in this women’s organization in order to keep active and to retain a sense of pride. One unemployed woman has sent her children to live with foster parents in a farm near Kokstad in the Eastern Cape because she cannot afford to raise them. She goes to the women’s organization every day to work for ideals she believes in, while receiving some tea and food in the process. Another young unwed mother runs youth programmes and a young girls’ after-school group. This women’s organization is able to harness wider resources to make a variety of projects work, but these resources also filter into and support forms of mutualism in the context of deepening unemployment. This is not to say that mutualism is not internally exclusionary, but it does provide an alternative to a violent search for economic security through the drug trade, sex and theft. These forms of ‘community work’ are profoundly gendered, and the sites of struggle are homes, streets, the community garden, backyard churches and impromptu meetings. Occasionally, this mutualism is expressed in a charismatic Christian idiom, and this has important implications for its articulation as part of a specifically political imagination. The incredible number of Pentacostal sects in Wentworth, which people put at between 50 and 70, might be something like pyramid schemes found in various contexts of political and economic instability, and certainly tithing does allow some amount of accumulation by pastors.41 MJ is both a young entrepreneur and an aspiring pastor, and he says there are many who get into this vocation for the wrong reason to misuse the

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mechanism of tithing as prescribed in scripture.42 What MJ hints at are the ways in which pastoring draws on other spheres of masculine affiliation, principally gangs and artisanal labour networks. His father interjects bluntly that they are all based on control of turf. While this explanation says little about why and how unemployed women tithe, and what their engagement in political work might have to do with Pentacostalism, not often associated with oppositional ideology. While the Holy Spirit might provide a political ontology for some unemployed women in Wentworth to act, one would expect its Pentacostal message to reproduce conservative conceptions of family and feminine propriety. In this sense, organizing with God carries strong risks. Pentacostalism brings gender, family and sexual propriety out of the domain of doxa, into the realm of contestable ideology. When women channelling the Holy Spirit are seen as transgressing gender norms, they reveal ‘the very social life of gender . . . to be malleable and transformable’.43 This can be an important moment in the struggle against stigma. Indeed, these possibilities come with strong forces of conservative reaction. The risks of organizing with God are particularly strong in the sphere of activism for the rights of people with HIV/AIDS. A few itinerant, unpaid caregivers, like Greg A., an unemployed man who lives on a disability grant from the state, fights a slow and surprisingly marginal struggle for the rights of those who suffer with the virus, many of whom are hidden under the mantle of Wentworth’s powerful currents of conservatism. Greg questions the stigma ascribed to people living with AIDS, and in the process he faces constant opposition to discuss questions concerning sex and sexuality. Greg has personal networks into illegal work of various sorts, as he does into the morally upright work of saved social workers. He walks a tightrope while quietly pushing against the Churches to spread condoms along with the Word. Others address questions of HIV/AIDS and sexuality through the rubric of protecting families and family values. A campaign by WDF responds to Thabo Mbeki’s 2004 pre-election trip, in which he was apparently told about the ‘degeneration of the family’ and the rising exchange of sex for survival in Wentworth; these points were met by indignation from some in WDF who saw it as an affront to a community that has been stigmatized enough. Mbeki’s eccentric response was to call for a multi-faceted approach to Wentworth’s problems, beginning with increased policing. Greg continues to work in a more modest way with the variety of forces that divides the social labour of Wentworth.

Conclusion: how do activists act? Wentworth’s many struggles continue into the present and do not converge in any clear way. The environment and labour struggles are the most formally

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organized, but a large number of people continue to participate in the everyday labours of organizing across a range of concerns that come from living in a ghetto surrounding a refinery. The rapid rise of Pentacostalism in Wentworth is significant for what people do with it, and what is rare for Pentacostalism, given its conservative gender ideology, is for it to become a tool for women-dominated, if not led, militancy. Pentacostal practice does not provide a critique of the stigma that contains Wentworth as a ghetto in the new South Africa, but it does allow people to claim their place as moral beings and it brings gender into contestable ideology. However it is dignified or sanctified, community work and activism allow some unemployed women the option to work as agents of change outside the church and labour market, as heirs to the fruit of this world: to its housing, its basic services, its jobs, its medicine and its clean air. I have tried to show through one situation how political work brings into view degraded bodies and environs, and incomplete aspirations for social justice. Activist work prompts people to ask whose bodies and whose front yards can be repositories of waste and decay. When people stop accepting their bodily infirmities and polluted environs as a part of nature, and when they imagine ways of taking hold of these realms of experience, the detritus comes into the realm of conscious struggle. The flowering of activism in a time of unemployment in Wentworth over the past ten years is important for this reason, but this ‘first cut’ answer does not tell us how activists have been called to act. What is striking about the sites of environmental and labour activism in Wentworth is that they are precisely not at workplaces, but in homes and street conversations, in small neighbourhood shops or in the community garden, in the community centre or public library or, finally, in church groupings. These are active sites outside dominant circuits of value, but also outside dominant circuits of devaluation through the drug and sex trades. These are not sites in which people can profit from their own and others’ degradation, but they are sites of reclamation in various more subtle and ongoing ways. From these locations, people squarely blame pollution and irregular employment as well as claims for compensation and ‘social responsibility’ on the industrial Goliaths who are their neighbours. More precisely, people refuse consistently to bear the wastes of the profitable alliance of big capital and the state. These aspects are clouded by another important set of facts, however. Wentworth is not one of the shack settlements of the poorest black South Africans, nor is it a black township in the far periphery, hours from any waged labour of consequence. As long as these other black communities and their forms of abjection remain outside the purview of critique from relatively privileged working-class communities like Wentworth, the detritus of racial capitalism continues to be an uneven and motley collection of

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dominated places and bodies, presumed necessary as sites of decay and degradation. This is an incomplete story. As I write, a new Jacobin radicalism has erupted from the shack settlements of Durban that sit uneasily between elite neighbourhoods, often in the ‘buffer zones’ that kept middle class Indians and Coloureds separate from whites.44 Wentworth activists have participated in important acts of solidarity with these activists, opening the possibility of anti-racism through what Memmi calls ‘the difficult task of participating in the other’. These are the practical grounds for critique of the unfinished popular nationalism emblematic of the postcolonial condition and its excesses, eloquently expressed by the activist-intellectual Richard Pithouse in conversation with C. L. R. James: ‘Two hundred years after the Haitian revolution, we too must confront “The waste, the waste of all this bravery, devotion and noble feeling on the corrupt and rapacious bourgeoisie.”’45 Wentworth’s peculiar challenge in contesting the remaindered energies of national liberation struggle is to speak from geography in which corporate power is the neighbour of the destitute, and to speak outward to the broader landscape of black destitution. The crucial and unfinished critique of post-apartheid racism as it permeates a variety of aspects of life – crime, disease, labour – requires activist intellectuals – like Ashwin Desai and Richard Pithouse – to write for and from popular struggles, with an attention to the multiplicity of black cultural politics and the difficulties in building solidarities across them.46 In microcosm, Wentworth’s experiments with counterhegemony concretize the challenges of South Africa’s current conjuncture, in which the ANC is beating at least a rhetorical retreat from its post-1996 adherence to orthodox neoliberalism. While several commentators see the populist overtures of the dominant alliance as a response to civic action, what we are just beginning to understand are the ways in which poor people find the space to build and sustain counterhegemonic agency. What I have tried to suggest is that counterhegemony must be understood as a form of labour, part of a broader landscape of waged and unwaged work, but as labour that is specifically directed at revaluation of human life in the wake of multiple forms of suffering, degradation, dishonouring and devaluation. That counterhegemony is organized in many spaces outside the proverbial factory floor should come as no surprise, nor should the fact that it is often articulated in gendered, racialized or ‘religious’ idioms. Commentators with a wide-angle lens on contemporary struggles in South Africa have asked how ‘red’ and ‘green’ conflicts might converge, or how local and ‘antiglobalisation’ forces might take on the global spread of neoliberalism. What I have tried to show through a micro-ethnography of struggles in one neighbourhood is that the germ of counterhegemony lies in multiple, ongoing, contradictory and immensely creative struggles over value itself.

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Notes 1. I am grateful for research support from the University of Michigan, the London School of Economics and the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. This chapter has had the benefit of comments from Richard Ballard, John Chalcraft, Ashwin Desai, Grant Farred, Gillian Hart, Jeremy Jones, Yaseen Noorani, Raj Patel, Richard Pithouse and Stephen Sparks. The chapter has been substantially revised from material in Sharad Chari, ‘Political Work: The Holy Spirit and the Labours of Activism in the Shadows of Durban’s Refineries’, Research Reports, No. 30 (Durban: Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2005), a shorter version of which appears in The Development Decade? Economic and Social Change in South Africa, 1994–2004, edited by Vishnu Padayachee ed. (Pretoria: Human Science Research Council Press, 2006). The chapter extends the argument about unpaid ‘political work’ to the problematic of this volume, paying special heed to how counterhegemony is organized and contended with across issues and sites, in attempts to revalorize social labour against multiple degradations of poverty and inequality. 2. Henceforth I do not systematically use quotes to indicate that ‘race’ is a fiction, particularly since ‘Coloured’ is presumed to be more of a fiction than ‘Indian’, given there is no Coloured land to point to as home, escape or threat of repatriation, and the incredible difference between cultural productions that can objectify Indian as opposed to Coloured artefacts from food to fashion and film. Instead, I capitalize Indian and Coloured as proper nouns. By ‘cultural production’, I follow Willis to refer to the broadest sphere of ongoing human creativity, much of which maintains hegemonic ideologies in the realm of cultural reproduction, which in turn makes possible the social reproduction of capitalism. Cultural production encompasses much more than is necessary for capitalist hegemony; it always contains multiple nascent and overt critiques of power. Paul Willis, ‘Cultural Production is Different from Cultural Reproduction is Different from Social Reproduction is Different from Reproduction’, Interchange, Vol. 12, No. 2–3 (1981), pp. 48–67. 3. Data from Statistics South Africa shows that Indians and Coloureds continue to numerically dominate these townships, but that as a share of eThekwini city or KZN province, Wentworth Coloureds are a much more significant share of the Coloured population than are Merebank Indians of the city or provincial Indian population. Indeed, Wentworth has a distinctive character as a Coloured community while Merebank is but one small corner of Indian Durban. 4. Individual monthly incomes for both communities are in the range of R1600–3200, though Austerville (as Statistics South Africa labels the area that comprises most of Coloured Wentworth) has a substantially larger population of individuals with no income, and household monthly incomes are slightly higher in Merebank. A comparison of household annual incomes with former ‘African’ townships and ‘white’ areas shows that Wentworth and Merebank sit similarly between the two, with Merebank appearing only slightly more advantaged. What stands out in general in the statistical data is the much higher number of households with no income in African areas in contrast to all other former ‘racial group areas’. 5. Wacquant derives this relational conception of the ghetto as a critique of functionalist conceptions of ethnic clustering and social domination in the urban ecology of the Chicago school of sociology. Through Wacquant’s genealogy, the ghetto emerges as a ‘social-organizational device’ directed, in his terms, at producing and forcibly confining a dispossessed and dishonoured group; he suggests the ghetto

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6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

ought to be seen in analogy with other forms of collective violence like the reservation, the refugee camp and the prison. Each form links economic exploitation and social ostracization differently, each presumes a different mix of the four general elements. A Coloured ghetto that breathes petrochemical fumes across town from the gentility of leafy English Berea, but not as far out of the city as African townships, carries its own particular social geographic contradictions. Wacquant gets us some distance in understanding ghetto culture, in that its residents create strong internal affinities to make the experience of stigma bittersweet. Unlike the ethnic neighbourhood, the ghetto is less a springboard to assimilation in society than what Wacquant calls a walled-in ‘dissimilation’. Loic Wacquant, ‘Ghetto’, in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Neil Smelsner and Paul Baltes eds, (London: Pergamon Press, 2004). Wentworth and Merebank diverge along these lines: Merebank has recourse to broader circuits of Indian diasporic cultural production while Wentworth produces a local ghetto culture through a range of citations, not least to a canon of archetypes from African American cultural production. Histories of space presume what Henri Lefebvre calls a properly social theory of space that refuses the dichotomy of physical/container-space and mental/cognitive space, to apprehend how spaces are fought for, made, devalued, destroyed, restored, irrevocably lost or nostalgically remembered in The Production of Space, first published 1974 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). Burawoy’s provocation is that workers consent to capitalism, on terms intelligible through workplace ethnography; the parallel problematic would be whether the terms of activism script similar forms of routinized control which dampen the possibility of counterhegemony. Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Ching-Kwan Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998); Judith Carney and Michael Watts, ‘Manufacturing Dissent: Work, Gender and the Politics of Meaning in a Peasant Society’, Africa, 60 (1990), pp. 207–41; Leslie Salzinger, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Sharad Chari, Fraternal Capital: Peasant-workers, Self-made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Michael Burawoy, ‘For a Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi’, Politics and Society, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2003), pp. 193–261. Burawoy, ‘Sociological Marxism’, p. 251. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (London: Picador, 2003). Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe in wonderful detail the ways in which ‘the outcasts of the nations of the Earth’ mingled in taverns and wharves in an insurrectionary subaltern public sphere in the New York of the late eighteenth century. The Many-headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). While I find much use in their attention to multiple spaces of protest, their focus on recuperating the agency of the motley crew of outcasts leads them not to ask how subaltern agency is often contradictory, particularly when it invokes moral discourses that separate the deserving and undeserving poor, language that more often provides the means of co-optation rather than resistance.

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12. Gillian Hart, ‘Beyond Neoliberalism? Post-apartheid Developments in Historical & Comparative Perspective’, in The Development Decade? Economic and Social Change in South Africa 1994–2004, edited by Vishnu Padayachee (Pretoria: HSRC Press, 2006); Ben Cousins, ‘Agrarian Reform and the Two Economies: Transforming South Africa’s Countryside’, SARPN Seminar Report (http://www.eldis.org/ static/DOC17505.htm accessed 19 February 2006: 24 October 2005); Charles Meth, ‘Ideology and Social Policy: “Handouts” and the Spectre of “Dependency”’, Transformation, 56 (2005), pp. 1–30. 13. Following Farred’s (p. 113) prescient critique of Mark Sanders Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Raleigh NC: Duke University Press, 2002), the task is to map specific dialectics of resistance and complicity, in relation to changing forms of state-sanctioned racism. Farred also cautions against the confessional logic of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, through which black struggle and enfranchisement are exalted while elite property and privilege remain secure. Precisely because these moments are differently valorized by various forms of Indian and coloured cultural production, what remains to be shown is when these forms are reproductive of black anti-black racism, and when, in rare moments, they are fiercely critical of multiple forms of black subjection. ‘The black intellectual’s work is never done’, as Farred puts it, because neither complicity nor resistance are guaranteed. Grant Farred, The Black Intellectual’s Work is Never Done: A Critique of the Discourse of Reconciliation in South Africa’, Book Review of Mark Sanders (2002) Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid, Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press. 14. Sport is a fourth institutional realm, particularly in the area of soccer. 15. One classic work on this kind of moment is Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 16. The key texts are Ashwin Desai, We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Postapartheid South Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002); Richard Pithouse, ‘Struggle is a School: The Rise of a Shack Dwellers’ Movement in Durban, South Africa’, Monthly Review, Vol. 57, No. 10 (February 2006), online on http:// www.monthlyreview.org/0206pithouse.htm; Richard Pithouse, ‘Solidarity, Cooptation and Assimilation: The Necessity, Promises and Pitfalls of Global Linkages’, in Nigel Gibson ed. Challenging Hegemony (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2006); Grant Farred, ‘Where Does the Rainbow Nation End? Colouredness and Citizenship in Post-apartheid South Africa’, New Centennial Review, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2001), pp. 175–99; Grant Farred, ‘The Not-yet Counterpartisan: A New Politics of Oppositionality’, South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 103, No. 4 (Fall 2004), pp. 589–605; Grant Farred, ‘The Black Intellectual’, Disabling Globalisation: Places of Power in Post-apartheid South Africa, edited by Gillian Hart (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); and several papers from the Centre for Civil Society’s Research Reports and other online writings accessible from http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/. 17. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, ‘Criminal Obsessions After Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing and the Metaphysics of Disorder’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Summer 2005), pp. 800–24. 18. As Mbali’s fascinating research shows, the Treatment Action Campaign draws together multiple histories of activism – including queer activists within liberation movements, activist doctors, HIV⫹ people and people living with AIDS, and trade unionists – to fight Mbeki’s denialism and its collusion with capital and, implicitly, contemporary racism. TAC’s activism has done several things: it has exposed the

272 Sharad Chari

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

power of multi-faceted activism that combines militancy and negotiation with the state. Mandisa Mbali, ‘TAC in the History of Rights-based, Patient-driven HIV/AIDS Activism in South Africa’, Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2004 (http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?3,28,10,1298 accessed 9 November 2004). The spread of HIV/AIDS has also more generally brought questions of sex and sexuality into public discourse in new ways, as Deborah Posel has argued, Howard Wolpe Lecture, Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZuluNatal, July 2004. To invoke Ann Stoler’s use of Foucault in Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Erasmus states categorically in the introduction to a book on ‘coloured identity’ in the Western Cape that ‘coloured’ cannot mean mixture because that would presume race purity. Zimitri Erasmus, Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town (Cape Town: SA History Online and Kwela Books, 2001). There is no reason to presume the metaphysical primacy of the latter; indeed colonial obsession with race purity always relied on concern for the control of sexuality in the wake of pervasive transgressive sex across racial frontiers, as, among others, Ann Stoler’s historical work has shown. What is important is that this colonial logic that privileges the primacy of race purity has such a continuing power in the lives of Wentworth Coloureds. Farred makes his point forcefully: ‘they have no a priori or pre-lapsarian moment; [nor can they] retreat into a mythic precolonial “innocence”. Coloured difference is . . . insufficiently different for them to conceive of themselves as anything but South African’, Farred, Rainbow Nation, p.186. Wentworth Coloureds do try to make claims to Khoi-San indigeneity, but the contrast with the swirl of ‘Indian’ cultural artefacts that can work to detach South African Indians from responsibility to racism and citizenship is striking. See, for instance, Agnes Lottering’s autobiography, Winnifred and Agnes: The True Story of Two Women (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2002). Census data on the ward that contains most of Wentworth shows a third of the population aged 15–65 years is unemployed: a sizeable group is unable to work due to illness or disability; an equally sizeable group either chooses not to work or could not find work; a significant group is comprised of currently unemployed seasonal workers; and a large share of those employed are men in building, metal or machine trades. LS, 26 November 2002. All interviews have been conducted by the author through multiple revisits to Wentworth and Merebank between 2002 and 2006; the locations of interviews are varied but usually in these neighbourhoods, names are usually concealed and interviews recorded with due consent. Engen was initially Standard Vacuum Oil Company of New Jersey at its inception in 1954; the company subsequently changed its name to Mobil, which suddenly pulled out of South Africa in 1989 and was bought over by a South African mining giant, Gencor; it has since become Engen which was listed on the Johannesburg stock exchange and bought out in two major shares by the Malaysian state oil corporation, Petronas. Management from Exxon-Mobil have continued to have a presence in the refinery throughout its history. LS, 26 November 2002. KG, 21 April 2004. LS, 26 November 2002.

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29. Skido Joseph passed away tragically in late 2003. 30. GJ, 21 November 2002, 31. It is important to note that 2001 Census data for the ward that contains most of Wentworth shows there are almost the same number of female as male household heads; that male household heads are significantly more likely to be employed (female-35 per cent, male-53 per cent), and only slightly more likely to be unemployed (female-10 per cent, male-14 per cent); that 25 per cent of the population is married, 60 per cent have never married, 4 per cent live together ‘like married partners’, and 5 per cent are separated or divorced. Republic of South Africa Census 2001 (Pretoria: Statistics South Africa, 2001). 32. JC, 14 September 2004. 33. Massimo De Angelis, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital (London: Pluto Press, forthcoming.) 34. LL, 13 September 2004. 35. Bobby Peek, one of its founders, comments on the difficulties in getting the Umlazi Reconstruction and Development Forum onto the environmental justice platform, although he had witnessed commitment to the issues in Umlazi through the difficult period of the ANC/IFP tensions in 1995. Personal communication, 31 October 2004. 36. Bobby Peek, Personal communication, 31 October 2004. 37. As an indication of this weakness, while the power to decline Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) lies at the provincial level, only one of the 64 EIAs concerning South Durban between January 2002 and March 2003 was declined. 38. Tony Carnie, ‘Durban Cancer Cluster “Not a Fluke” – Expert’, The Mercury (10 September 2000), online at http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id⫽1&click_id⫽ 13&art_id⫽ct20000910215512895S320884. 39. GroundWork’s position is online at http://www.groundwork.org.za/Projects/ wssd.htm; this is not to say that CSR ought not also to be seen as an arena of conflict, albeit one that is severely circumscribed by corporate power, as is wonderfully documented in the work of Marina Welker, ‘Global Capitalism and the “Caring Corporation”: Copper Mining and Corporate Social Responsibility in Sumbawa, Indonesia’, Ph.D. dissertation in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan, May 2006 draft. 40. Bobby Peek, 22 April 2004. 41. Thanks to Richard Ballard for this point, Durban 2005. 42. Marcel Jones, 13 September 2004. 43. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 216. 44. The key activist intellectuals engaged with the shack dwellers’ struggles in Durban include Richard Pithouse, ‘Struggle is a School’; Raj Patel, ‘Solidarity with Africa and Other Lessons from the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo’, unpublished manuscript; and S’bu Zikode, ‘The Third Force’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 41 (2006), pp. 185–9. 45. Pithouse (2004: 4) commenting on a quotation from C.L.R. James. 46. Some notable pieces, in addition to the works of Desai, Farred, Hart, Patel and Pitthouse mentioned already, are Fiona Lumsden, Alex Loftus, ‘Inanda’s Struggle for Water through Pipes and Tunnels: Exploring State-Civil Society Relations in a Post-apartheid Informal Settlement’, Research Report 6 (Durban: Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2003); Ran Greenstein, ‘State, Civil Society

274 Sharad Chari and the Reconfiguration of Power in Post-apartheid South Africa’, Research Report 8 (Durban: Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2003); Franco Barchesi, ‘Classes, Multitudes and the Politics of Community Movements in Post-apartheid South Africa’, Research Report 20 (Durban: Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2004).

Index Abd Allah, Hasan, 194–5 abolitionism, 116, 120–1, 123 Abu Shanah, Muhammad, 193 accountability, 64, 263 acculturation, 25 active society, 253 activism in Wentworth, Durban anti-apartheid activism, 256 apartheid capitalism, 256 background to, 252–3 “Black Empowerment” contracts, 262 characterized, 266–8 Chemical Engineering and Industrial Workers Union (CEIWU), 258–61, 264 citizenship, 252 cooperative labour, 257–62 counterhegemony, 254–57, 268 cultural productions, social/spatial articulation of, 253 environmentalism, 262–7 environmental justice, 255 groundWork, 263 housing, 264–5 labour power, 253, 258 legal, 264 Metalworkers’ Cooperative, 260–1 organized labor, 258–9 political, 252 political economy, 260 post-apartheid struggle, 255 racial capitalism, 267 racial stigma, 256 refinery workers, 258–9 sewing cooperatives, 260–1 social labour, 254 South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA), 262–4 spatial dynamics, 254–5 stigmatism, 256, 266 strikes, 258 subaltern groups, 255 violence, 255–6

Wentworth Development Forum (WDF), 264–6 Wentworth Poverty Alleviation Program (WEPAP), 260 workplace-centrism, 253, 267 adaptive hegemony, 9 administration, 28 Adunis, literary modernism, 77, 83–4, 86, 91 aesthesis, 79–80, 87 aesthetic contemplation, 77 Africa alliances, 229, 246–7 anti-slavery activity, 116 apprenticeship, racial integration during, 121–3 authoritarian states, 229 citizenship, 132 counterhegemonic projects, 230–1, 247 forced migration, 127 internalism of racism, 128–30 organized labour and resistance, 228–47 perceptions of, 131 political science of, 228–9 postcolonial, 65 protest, 229 racial consciousness, 116, 118–21 racial equality, 124–8 radical politics, 50 regime transition, 229 revolution in, 10 semi-corporatist systems, 230–1 state-society relations, 228 slave emancipation, 115–7, 132–3 see also specific African countries African-Caribbean political ideologies, 116 Afro-Barbadians collective identity, 130 racial integration, 121–3 racism and, 129 slavery emancipation, 116–21 Afro-Jamaicans, 117 275

276 Index Age of Revolution, 115, 117 agency, 8 Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi, 87 agrarianism, 33–4, 37 AIDS, 256, 266 al-‘Aqqad, Abbas Mahmud, 84–85 al-Banna, Hasan, 157, 160–1 Al-dabt wa-l-rabt, 190–2, 196 al-Khal, Yousef, 83 al-Qaradawi, Yusuf, 159–61 Al-Tauhid wa al-Nur, 168–9 al-Wafa al-Taftazani, Abu, 159 Algeria, Muslim population assimilationists, 56 AUMA, 58 Berber question, 60–2, 65–6 citizenship, 52–3 colonist power, 62 community cohesion, 54 cultural revolution, 63 cultural struggles, 61 culture, politics of, 59–60, 65 discourse, 52 French colonialism, 52–3, 55, 57 FLN, 57, 62, 64–5 Jewish population, 52–3 Kabyle issue/Kabyle diaspora, 60–2, 64 liberation project, 49–50 modernist movement, 56 nationalist movement, 29 national identity/personality, 56–60 nationalists, 54–9, 62 perceptions of, 52–3, 55 political emancipation, 54 political indigence, 62 primordial identities, 59 religio-cultural resistance, 55, 65 repatriation in, 53 repression, political-legal, 55, 59 resilience of the state, 64–5 state-building, 57–8 statut personnel, 53–4 symbolic order, 56, 59, 63–4 traditional-versus-modernity, 51 ulama, 57–9, 65 unfinished independence, 50–1 virtue, politics of, 59–60 war of liberation, 58–9 Algerian identity, 55, 65 Ali, Mehmet, 185, 187

alliances change in, 229, 246–7 political, 3 state-labour, 242 strategic, 3 Almohads, 56 Almoravids, 56 Amazigh identity, 64 American Colonization Society, 128 americanization, 40 anarchist/anarchisant forces, 28 ambiguity celebratory Ramadan, 155–72 Late Ottoman Empire/Early Turkish Republic, 141–51 Ancient Greece, 3 anglophone Caribbean, 116, 119, 130 anomie, 24 antagonisms, 6 anti-Confucian perspectives, 108 reformers, 101 anti-incineration movement, 264 anti-slavery lobby, 120, 125 apartheid hegemony, 252, 255–6 apostasy, 156 apparatchiks, 39 apprenticeship system, 121–3 APRA, 211, 218, 221 arabic languages, types of, 156 arabic modernism autonomy, visual, 83–92 characterized, 77–80 counterhegemony, 77, 92–7 critique of, 80–3 reification, 80–3 self-sacrifice, 83 arabism, 56, 60 arab society, traditional, 79 Aranibar, Dr. Pérez, 208 arbitration, 210 Archer, Edward, 125 architectural forms, 7 area studies, 2 Argentina, 31 aristocracy, 119 Aristotle, 26 armed revolution, 31 armenians, 60

Index articulation, hegemonic, 6, 15, 180–2, 187–8, 190, 192–3, 199–201 Asia radical politics, 50 revolution in, 10 assault, 16 attrition, 4 AUMA, 58 authenticists, 9 authentic resistance, 1 authentic vision, 87 authoritarianism, 50, 228 authoritarian movement, 65 authoritarian regimes, 26 authority, monopolization of, 50 autonomy political, 127, 243 significance of, 7, 9, 12, 32–3, 53, 64, 181, 232 visual, 83–92 Azarya, 228 banditry, 31 banking industry, 38 bankrupt hegemonic systems, 228 Barbadian nationalist enterprise, 132 Barbados Anti-Slavery Society, 125–6 Auxiliary to the British Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and Civilization of Africa, 125 Colonization Society, 127–8 racial consciousness, 116, 118–9, 130 Bayart, 228 beauty, politics of, 85, 94 Beckles, Hilary, 116 belief system, 230 Bella, Ben, President, 60 Benjedid, Chadli, 64 berberism, 59–62, 65–6 Berman, Marshall, 94 Berrio, Pedro, 210 Bianchi, Robert, 236 Bizim Mecmua, 143, 151 Black Jacobins, The (James), 116 Bolivia, revolutionary movements, 27, 29 Bolshevist revolution, 107

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Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 76 bourgeois capitalism, 27 hegemony, 5 order, 93 bourgeoisie, 3–4, 16, 216 Bourne, London, 130 Bouteflikak, Abd al-‘Aziz, 63–4 brainwashing, 3, 8 Brathwaite, Kamau, 115–6 Bratton, 228 Britain, abolitionism, 116 British Caribbean, 126 British Empire, 117, 131–2 British law, 123 Britishness, 117–8, 131–2 Burawoy, Michael, 253 bureaucracy counterhegemony and, 201 nature of, 199 regulations, 185 bureaucratic order, 182, 190, 192 bureaucratization, 25, 31 Bürger, Peter, 92–93 Buxton, Thomas Fowell, 125 Campesinos, Mexican Revolution, 27, 35 capillary power, 7, 9 capitalism advanced, 2 impact of, 3, 11, 81, 181 Mexican, 40 post-advanced, 10 capitalism-imperialism, 9 capitalist modernity, 1 capitalist order, 82 capitalist societies, 9 capitalist systems, 216 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 37 Caribbean colonization schemes, 124 revolution in, 10 see also specific Caribbean islands Carr, E. H., 205 Catholic Church Catholic rebellion, 34 hegemony in, 24, 29–31 causation, 6 Central General de Trabajadores del Perú (CGTP), 217–218

278 Index Cerro, Colonel Luis M. Sánchez, 211, 215, 218 children’s literature, Ottoman Empire/Turkish Republic humour, 151–2 impact of, 145–9 parody, 149–51 types of, 143–4 Chile, 211, 213 Chiluba, Frederick, 237, 243 China characterized, 100–1, 112–3 Confucianism, 107–10, 112–3 Cultural Revolution, 109 Deweyan liberals, 112 equality, 111 Great Leap Forward, 109 Mao Zedong, 100, 107–12 May Fourth moderation, 104–7 May Fourth radicalism, 101–4, 113 nation-state revolution, 28 patriarchy, 107–12 Taiping rebellion, 25 traditional culture, 101, 113 women’s education, 111 Zou Taofen, 100, 104–7, 109–12 Christian fundamentalists, 167 Christianity, European, 125 church hierarchy, 35 church-state confrontation, 30–31 citizenship, 52–3, 117, 132, 252 civilization, 11 civil rights campaigns, 117, 119–22 civil society, 145, 253 classic Arabic, 156 class structure, 5. See also specific classes clientelism, 36–39 Çocuk Dünyas, 148 Çocuklara Kiraat, 147 Çocuklara Mahsus Gazete (Children’s Own Gazette), 147 coercion, 9, 23–25, 36, 38–9, 180–1, 200, 204–5, 228 Cold War, 24, 36 collective bargaining, 208. See also Zambia, post-colonial collective identity, 120, 130 collective personality, 3 collective power, 9 collective soul, 3

collective struggles, politicized, 6 collective will, 3–4 collectivity, political, 118–121 colonial logic, 12 colonialism characterized, 11, 57 imperial, 130 Colthurst, John Bowen, 128 commodification, 11, 50, 55–6 commodity-fetish, 55–56 commodity logic, 12 common culture, 23 communism, perceptions of, 4, 30, 36, 107, 113 community work, 265 compromise, 9 condensation points, 51 Confucianism, 107–10, 112–3 Confucian values, 107 Congo, 130 consciousness class, 216 political, 116 racial, 116, 118–21, 126 -raising, 8–9, 219 significance of, 3, 5, 7–8, 79, 84–6, 89, 91 consensus, 23, 39 consent, organization of, 4–5, 8–9, 181, 187–8, 200, 204–5, 209, 253 conservatism characterized, 25 religious, 172 social, 62 consolidation, democratic, 25–6 consumerism, 181 contestation, hegemonic, 30 contradictions, 11 cooperatives, 4 corporate social responsibility (CSR), 263–4 corporatism, 238–42 corruption, 37, 193, 195 counterculture celebratory Ramadan, 155–72 characterized, 1, 16 Late Ottoman Empire/Early Turkish Republic, 141–53 counterhegemonic ideologies, popular liberalism, 33

Index counterhegemonic movements, 64, 66 counterhegemony activism in Durban, 254–7, 268 Algerian liberation project, 50 Arabic modernism, 77, 92–7 celebratory Ramadan, 156, 170–2 Late Ottoman Empire/Early Turkish Republic, 141–53 Mexican Revolution, 36, 38–9 modernism and, 81, 92–7 perceptions of, 2, 4–5, 8, 205 rearticulation, 11–15 twentieth century, 65 weights and measures in 20th century Egypt, 79–83, 198–201 counter-order defined, 50 establishment of, 51 creative perception, 77, 87, 94 creativity, 92 Creole slaves, 130 Creolization, 116 criticism process, 4 CROM, 35 CTM, 35 Cuba, 27, 29, 129 cultural capital, 55, 58 cultural code, 51 cultural formation, 4 cultural hegemony, 12 cultural plurality, 62 cultural power, 11 cultural recognition, 60 cultural revolution, 63, 109 cultural structures, 12 culture affirmative character of, 82 significance of, 9 Cummins, Thomas, 123, 125 cynicism, 149, 260 dark-skinned people of colour, 129 Dayrell, Henry, 128 decentralized states, 29, 55 decision- making process, influential factors, 10 decolonization, 65, 133 Décret Crémieux, 53 deformation, 75 democracy, liberal, 118

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democratic regime, 26 democratic revolution, 6 democratization, 26 departicipation, 228 desegregation, 124, 131 developmentalism, 5 diachronic dynamics, 201 Diaz regime, 32–3 diffuse power, 9 disarticulation-rearticulation, 4 disciplinary power, 7 discourse democratic, 6, 11, 95–6 operations of, 52 theories, 4–5 disempowerment, 9, 120 disengagement, 228 dispositions, 7 dissatisfaction, 93–94 dissimulation, 8, 32 dominant ideology, 39 domination impact of, 65–6, 204–5 modes of, 50 political, 7 social, 87 Dubois, Laurent, 118 economic crisis, global, 211 economic growth, 24 economic hegemony, 12 economic power, 11, 26 economics, significance of, 9 Economism, Marxian, 4 education significance of, 3, 7, 11 socialist, 34 state-controlled, 142–145, 149, 151, 153 Effendi, Umar, 168–169 efficiency, 80 Egypt literary modernism, 78 Margins of Cairo, 158 political powers in, 171 religious identity in, 157. See also Ramadan, Egyptian state-society relations, 229 structural adjustment, 169 travelling outside, 171

280 Index Egypt (continued) weights and measuring, see Weights and measurements, 19th century Egypt El Escritorio disputes, 212–3 El Obrero, 206 El Trabajador, 218 emancipation political, 54 slave, 115–7, 132–3 social, 3 support for, 123 emancipatory authoritarian order, 51 emancipatory nationalism, 1 emancipatory struggles, 51 empowerment, 39, 50 enabling power, 9 England, nation-state revolution, 28. See also Britain Enlightenment characterized, 30 modernity, 107 envisionment, 87 equality, 6, 96–7, 180–2 equilibrium, 158 equivalence, 11, 200 essentialism, 5–7, 66 Ethiopia, 133 ethnocidal governments, 37 ethnographies, 253 eurocentric narratives, 77 perspectives, 1–2 eurocentricism, 5, 10–1 eurocommunism, 4–5 Europe, art destruction, 92–3. See also specific European countries extractive power, 5 false consciousness, 5, 8, 23, 51 family law, 59 fatimid history, 165–166 fetishism, 50, 55–6, 65 feudalism, 27 Fiqh al-siyam, 159–62, 170 FLN, 57, 62, 64–5 footdragging, 8 For the Benefit of Children: Moral Improvement and Useful Information, 146 foucauldians, 5

Foucault, Michel, 7, 76 fractured civil society, 228 France bourgeois revolution, 27 colonialism, 52–3 freedom, 84–85 free market, 148, 166 French Caribbean radicalism, 117, 119 Fry Metals (Pvt Ltd) vs. NUMSA, 258 functionalist perspectives, 82 Fusha Arabic, 156 Gambia, 130 Gellner, Ernest, 49 Ghana, state-society relations, 229 Gilroy, Paul, 117 global South, conceptual development, 10–1 Glorious Revolution of 1688, 27 Glover, Jane, 265 Gramsci, Antonio, 3–7, 9, 153, 181, 230, 253 Great Leap Forward, 109 Grenada, 119 Grey, Sir Charles, 124–5 groundWork, 263 Group Areas Act, 255 Guatemala, ethnocide, 37 Guerra di posizione, 4, 11 Habitus, 7 Haitian Revolution, 115–7, 130 Hamilton, Joseph, 125 happiness, 75, 82 Hardt, Michael, 10 Harris, Thomas, Jr., 122 Hasan, Ridwan, 187–8 Haya de la Torre, Raûl, 209 hegemonic articulation, 199–200 hegemonic conflict, post-colonialism, 59 hegemonic contraction, 181 hegemonic expansion, 15–6, 180–1 hegemonic maps, 38–39 hegemonization, 205 hegemony, 180 administration of, 26 authentic resistance and, 1 characterized, 100–1, 180 conceptual perceptions, 3 defined, 3, 26, 157

Index failure of, 24 and liberation, 107–12 Late Ottoman Empire/Early Turkish Republic, 142–53 loss of, 31–2 Marxist, 26 Mexican Revolution, 36, 38 perceptions of, 24 print workers in Peru, 208–10, 220–1 public-sector economic, 168 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 95 Hinojosa, César, 217–8 HIV, 256, 266 holiday fatigue, 167, 172 honour, 180 Huerta regime, 33 human desire, 76 humanism, 54 humanity, as goal, 9 human nature, 10, 159 Hume, David, 23 Hyden, 228 idealism, 35 identitarian demands, 51–2 identity Afro-Caribbean, 116 Algerian, 50, 55, 65 Amazigh, 64 collective, 120, 130 demand, 51–2, 57 fetishness of, 49–66 Muslim, 156 national, 56–7, 132, 157 political, 65–6, 118, 131, 206 recognition, 60 religious, 157, 171 significance of, 55 subalternity, 11 ideological masks, 190 ideological mystification, 3, 8–9 ideology, 5 immaterial labour, 10 imperialism, 107, 127, 131 impossibility, universal, 170 incorporation, 9 indirect rule, 185–7 Industrial Relations Act (IRA), 234 inequalities, types of, 6, 11, 23 inflation, 24, 39 injustice, 197

281

insurrection, 76–7 integration, psychic, 81 intellectual formations Arabic modernism, 75–97 imperial nationalism in Barbados, 115–33 liberation in 20th century China, 100–13 intellectuals, perceptions of counterhegemony, 4 intentionality, 91 international relations theories, 5 inversion, 1 investment speculators, 183 Iraq, literary modernism, 78 Islam al-Banna, Hassan, 157, 160–1 characterized, 49–51 fasting, 159–62 hadith, 160, 162 maghrib prayer, 165 orthodoxy, 56 political groups, 168–9 rites of worship, 159–60, 163 rituals, 156–9, 166 role in national identity, 157 Sayyid Qutb, 158 subaltern groups, 157–8 true, 56 universal, 163 Isnad criticism, 55 Jacobin radicalism, 268 Jacobin Terror, 25 James, C. L. R., 116, 268 Jameson, Fredric, 81–3 Janissaries, 183, 185 Japan, 107 Jihadi, 62 Jurisprudence of Fasting (Qaradawi), 159 justice (haqq), 180–2, 187–8, 190, 192, 194, 199 Kabyle struggle, 60–1, 64 Kai-shek, Chiang, 107 Kasfir, 228 Kaunda, President, 243 Khaled, Amr, 172 Kronstadt repression (1921), 25 Kurds, 29, 60 Kuttab, 55

282 Index labour movement, in Mexico, 32, 36 Labours Relation Act (1995), 258–9 Laclau, Ernesto, 5–7, 10–1, 94–7, 157, 163, 200 La Linterna, 206–7 Lands Act (1913), 257 land seizure, 31 language(s) Arabic, 156 literary modernism, 88–9 significance of, 59 society and, 156–7 La Prensa, 211–213 Late Ottoman Empire, characterized, 141–142 Latin America characterized, 28, 37 neoliberalism, 40 revolutionary movements, 29 revolution in, 10 social revolution in, 26 see specific Latin American countries leadership analyses of, 5 effective, 3 proletarian, 4 relationshp with, 238–40, 243 Lears, Jackson, 8 legitimacy, hegemonic, 51, 76 Leguía, Augusto B., 208–9, 211, 213, 220 Leninists, 4 Liberal, 122–3, 126, 130 liberalism, perceptions of, 1, 24, 96. See also specific types of liberalism liberal politics, 7 liberty, 96–7 life-and-death struggles, 7 “Lightening Bolt, The,” 90 light-skinned people of colour, 129 linguistics, 92 literary modernism, 75, 79, 145–51 literary production, 11 literature children’s, 145–52 poetry, 77–97 religious, 163 logic, 50–1, 181 loyalties, 32, 58, 132, 238 Lukacs, Georg, 76

Makhno, Nestor, 28 Mallon, Florencia, 29 Mamdani, Mahmood, 65 “Manifesto to the Print Workers,” 215–6 manipulation, 16 Mann, Michael, 12 Marcuses’ thesis, 82 Margins of Cairo, 158 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 209, 217 Martínez de la Torre, Ricardo, 217 Marx, Karl, 182 Marxian economism, 5 Marxian metanarrative, 5–6 Marxism characterized, 4, 10, 107 historical materialism, 5 perception of hegemony, 3 Marxist-Leninism, 3 Marxist orthodoxy, 50 mass politics, 3 materialism, 4–5, 163, 166 materiality, 52, 159 May Fourth radicalism, 101–104, 113 moderation, 104–107 reformers, 101 meaning, 9 measurement systems, 182–186, 188–196, 199 media, impact of, 7, 31, 155, 162, 167, 242 Meki, Thabo, 266 Metalworkers’ Cooperative, 260 metanarratives, historical, 182 Mexican Revolution armed revolution, 24 aspirations of, 37 Catholic Church, role in, 34–6 civil war, 33–4 counterhegemonic society, 36, 38–9 duration of, 33 hegemonized society, 36, 38 lack of hegemony, 32 middle ground society, 36, 38–9 nationalist movement, 27–9 patriotic liberalism, 32 polarizations, 35 popular liberalism, 32–4 PRI, 34, 36–40 revolutionary reform, 24

Index revolutionary retreat and routinization, 24 social reform, 35 state-building/construction, 24, 33 three periods of, 31–33 top-down imposition, 34–5 types of revolution, 24–5 war of the winners, 33 Mexico agrarian reform, 37 bourgeois revolution, 27 Church-state confrontation, 30–31 Cristero War, 25 debt crisis, 39 empowerment in, 39 land reform, 27, 34 nation-state, 40 PAN, 39 pluralism, 40 PRI regime, 34, 36–40 revolution in, see Mexican Revolution schizoid political culture, 37 stability in, 37 violence in, 39 micro-ethnography, 268 Minbar al-Islam, 163–4 miscegenation, 252 Mitchell, Timothy, 7–9 mobility, 158 mode of production, 24, 26–9 modernism, 80–3 modernist ideology, 75–8 movement, 56 modernizationist paradigm, 113 modern society, 6, 27 monarchical regime, 26 monism, 59 monolithism, authoritarian, 58 moral behavior, 144, 147–8 moral economy, 195, 197 moral investment, 95 morality, 145, 155 Mouffe, Chantal, 5–7, 10–1, 94–7, 200 moving equilibrium, 158 Mudenda, Alfred, 245 Mudir, 195, 197–8 Muhammad, Kücük, 183–4

283

multiparty political rule, 242, 244–5 multiple sovereignty, 25 museums, 7 Muslim identity, public renunciation of, 156 Muslim population in Egypt, 155 Ottoman empire, 142 see also Islam mutualism, 215–6, 265 mystificatory meaning, 9 NAFTA, 37 Nakambala strike, 239–40 Nasserists, 165, 168, 236 national community, 29 National Education and Religious Affairs, 58 national identity, 56–7, 132, 157 nationalism anti-hegemonic, 132 characterized, 11, 33 emancipatory/authoritarian order of, 51 hegemonic, 29 imperial British, 117 revolutionary, 86, 94 romantic, 85 types of, 1 “Three People’s Principles’,” 107 nationalist characterized, 29, 107, 113 movements, 28, 57 national personality, 58 nation-state regime, 28, 40 negotiation, 50 Negri, Antonio, 10 neoliberalism characterized, 37, 181 orthodox, 254, 268 neoliberal technocrats, 38 neo-patrimonialism, 228 New Life movement, 107 New Times, 122–3 Nigeria, organized labour, 231 nodal points, 51 non-democratic regimes, 26 non-reductive formulations, 4 non-Western societies, 6–7 Northern Rhodesia, see Zambia

284 Index objectification, 66 oil industry, 34 oligarchic regime, 26, 209 omnipresence, 8 opinion, types of, 26, 31 oppression, 2, 50, 54, 76, 94, 120, 187 optimism, 10 organized labour, 34. See also print workers union in Peru; Zambia, post-colonial orthodoxy, 50, 56, 254, 268 orthopraxy, 161 Other, 180 Otherness, 51, 65 Ottoman Empire, transition to Turkish Republic children’s literature, 145–9 civil society, 145 education system, 142–5, 147, 149, 151 parody, 149–51 state control, 142–7 subversion, 153 PAN (Partido Acción Nacional), 39 Pan-Africanism, 132 parody, 149–51 passivity, 84 Patria Nueva, 208–1, 220 patriarchy, 107–12, 181 patriotic liberalism, 32 patriotism, 29, 144, 148, 151 patronage, 24 Pax PRIista, 39 peasants/peasantry, 32–5, 39, 54, 187 Pentacostalism, 266–7 people-class, 51 people of colour, free, 121–3, 126 perception, aesthetics of, 86 perpetuation, 82 Persaud, Randolph, 12 personalism, 183 personal status laws (code du statut personnel), 52 persuasion, 3 Peru APRA, 211, 218, 221 Aymara of, 29 Communist Party (PCP), 205, 211, 217–8, 220–1

Complot Communista, 217 Confederación General de Trabajadores del Perú (CGTP), 214, 217–8 Development Ministry, 209–11, 213 Indian Affairs Section, 208 industrial relations policy, 211 Labour Section, 206, 208–13 Pardo government, downfall of, 206 print workers union, see Print workers union in Peru Sendero Luminoso, 29 Sociedad Gutenberg, 206 Sociedad Tipográfica Confederada, 206 Sociedad Tipográfica de Auxilios Mutuos, 206 Sociedad Tipográfica del Perú, 206 state-labour relations, 208–10, 220–1 Uniôn Gráfica del Perû, 206 pessimism, 13 petitions/petitioning, 188–90, 194, 199 Phipps, Charles, 124–125, 127 pilfering, 8 Piper, John, 130 Pithouse, Richard, 268 plantocracy, 118–9, 121 Plotke, 5 pluralism, 40, 50, 60, 100 poetry Arabic modernism, 77–97 essence of, 86 modern, 86 Point du caption (Lacan), 51 Polanyi, Karl, 253 polarization, 24, 35 political alliances, 3 political autonomy, 243 political domination, 7 political economy, 5, 52 political emancipation, 54 political hegemony, 12, 24 political identity, 65–6, 118, 131, 206 political order, 51 political organizations, 228 political parties, 7 political polarization, 24 political power, 5, 11 political rallies, 254 political restructuring, 185

Index political revolutions, 27 political rights, 7 politics significance of, 9 sine qua non, 95 socialist, 5 polyarchic regime, 26 popular liberalism, 32–34 popular struggle activism in Durgan, 252–68 organized labor in Zambia, 228–47 print workers in Peru, 204–21 weight and measures in 20th century Egypt, 179–201 Populism, 40 Porfirian regime, 32–33 post-apartheid, 255 postcolonial societies, 171 postcolonial theory, 8 post-structuralism, 4, 6, 10, 12, 52 Pot, Pol, 109 power asymmetric, 181 models of, 5 perceptions of, 3, 7–9 politics, traditional, 5, 11 predatory, 9 relations, 9, 182 repressive, 5 resistance and, 7 social, 6, 50, 180–1, 187 PPA-MTLD, 60 Prado, Manuel, 220 prayer, 165 PRD, 37 predatory power, 9 pre-democratic societies, 6 pre-modern societies, 6 Prescod, Samuel Jackman, 121–2, 125–6 presidentialism, 38 PRI, 34, 36–40 print workers union in Peru (Federación Gráfica del Perû/FGP) benefits of, 221 Central General de Trabajadores del Perú (CGTP), 217 characterized, 204–6 collective contracts, 215 counterhegemonic effects, 205, 215–20

285

Declaration of Principles, 207 disputes in print shops, 212 grievances, 207–8, 213–4 hegemonic state-labour relations, 208–10, 220–1 La Opinión Nacional, 21 “Manifesto to the Print Workers,” 215–6 media and, 207 memorial (petitions), 213–4 as mutual-aid institution, 219–20 negotiations/renegotiations, 206 Patria Nueva project, 208–11, 220 printing industry slump, 211–5 reorganization of, 220 shop committees, 216, 219 Sindicato de Trabajadores Gráficos de Lima (STGL), 215–6, 218–9 snatch concessions, 219 strikes, 211–3, 218 priority, 6 Prison Notebooks (Gramsci), 4 privatization, 169 probity, 188 proletarian hegemony, 3–4 Proletariats, 5, 10, 16, 216 “Promised land,” 49–50 pro-slavery, 130 prosperity, 187 Protestant Reformation, 30 public opinion, 31 “Question of Miss Zhao’s Personality, The” (Zedong), 108 quilting points, 51 Qur’an, 142, 144, 156, 167 race, 11 racial capitalism, 256, 267 racial equality, 124–8 racial segregation laws, 119 racism, 128–30, 181 radical democracy, 66 radical modernism, 94 radical politics, 16 rallies, 31, 254 Ramadan case illustration, 164–6 celebration of, 162–4, 172 counterhegemony-proof, 156, 170–2

286 Index Ramadan (continued) defined, 155 Egyptian, 155–6 fasting (fiqh al-siyam), 159–62, 170 Fawazir, 165–6 hadith, 160, 162 hegemonic, 158, 168, 172 perceptions of, 155 in practice, 166–70 Riddles, 165 ritual vs. holiday, 156–9, 166, 171 television programmes, 169–70, 172 true, 170–1 universal, 163 war of position, 156 rationality, 7, 9, 87 rationalization, 82 rearticulation, 6, 11–6 recession, 24, 39 reductivism, 4, 12 reflexive sociologists, 7 reification, 80–3 relativism, political, 95 religio-cultural resistance, 55, 65 religion, significance of, 51, 59. See also specific religions religious practices, 7 re-moralization, 62 repression, 23, 25, 55, 75, 82, 94, 96 repressive hypothesis, 16, 96 repressive power, 5 Republic of Mustafa Kemal, 141 resistance authentic, 1 nature of, 7 organized labour, 228–47 power and, 7 religio-cultural, 55, 65 revolutionary reform, 31 revolutionary retreat, 31 revolutions bourgeois, 27 impact of, 11, 24 successful, 125 see also Mexican Revolution rhetoric, 39 rights (huquq), 180, 187, 194. See also Civil rights campaigns routinization, 31

rules hegemonic forms of, 181 legitimate vs. illegitimate, 16 societal acceptance of, 230 Rupert, Mark, 16 Russia, nation-state revolution, 28 Ru’ya’, 87–9 Sabah al-Khayr, 162 salvation, 2, 10 San Juan, E, 8–9 scepticism, 37 Schadenfreude, 49 Scoble, John, 123, 125 Scott, James C., 1, 7–8, 32, 35, 209 secessionism, 61 Second Economy, 254 secularism, 157–8, 163 self, 180 self-aggrandizement, 141 self-deception, 32 self-definition, 57 self-delusion, 92 self-expression, 57, 86 self-formation, 1 selfhood, 59, 65, 90–1 self-interest, 35 self-preservation, 84, 87 self-sacrifice, 77, 83–4, 87–8, 90 semantics, 88, 92, 144 semi-corporatism characterized, 229, 233 hegemony and resistance in, 230–231 Sha’rawi, Shaykh, 172 Sheller, Mimi, 117 Shukri, Ghali, 79 Sierra Leone, colonization, 124 Sindicato de Trabajadores Gráficos de Lima (STGL), 215–20 Six Days War, 164 slander, 8 social agent, 7 social antagonism, 6 social capital, 7 social classes, significance of, 5, 157 social conflict, 205 social control, 5 Social Darwinists, 111 social emancipation, 3 social fragmentation, 24

Index social hierarchy, 6, 51 social identities, 6, 96 social inequality, 6 socialism, perceptions of, 1, 5, 9, 181 socialist hegemony, 181 socialist politics, 4 socialist revolution, 3, 27 social mobilization, 51 social order, 7, 51 social power, 6, 50, 180–1, 187 social production, 9 social relations, 8, 77, 81 social representation, 5 social responsibility, 265 social revolutions, 27 social subordinates, 75 social truth, 50 socio-economics empowerment, 54 hegemony, 24 hierarchy, 132 order, 24, 26–30, 40 sociological perspectives, 7 socio-political implosion, 24 orders, 23 solidarity, 51 “Songs of Mihyar, The,” 87, 89–90 South Africa activism in, see Activism in Wentworth, Durban historiography, 256 neoliberalism, 268 South America military regimes, 37 see also specific South American countries sovereignty, 49, 53 Soviet Union, collapse of, 1 Spanish colonialism, 29 Spanish Revolution, 28 stagism, 5 state-building, 31, 57–8 state hegemony, dismantling of, 28 statism, 141 status quo, 1, 27, 31, 63, 82 stereotypes, 257 strategic alliances, 3 strategic essentialism, 7 structural adjustment, 169

287

structural changes, 182, 200 structuralists, 75 structural logic, 51 subaltern counterhegemony, 253, 255 subaltern groups, 1, 5, 157, 188, 255 subalternity, identity site of, 11 Sub-Saharan Africa, state-society relations, 228, 232, 241 subjection, 50 subjectivation, 9, 66 subjectivity, 11, 51, 76, 90–1, 117, 180 subordination, 8–9 subversion, 1, 16, 153. See also Activism in Wentworth, Durban suppression, 91–2 sutured societies, 6–7, 158, 180, 182 symbolic order, 52, 56, 59, 63–4 symbolic structures, 52 systemic hegemony, 26 Taofen, Zou, 100, 104–7, 109–12 taxation, 182–5, 188–90, 196–9 teacher-pupil relationship, 147, 153 teleology, Marxian, 4 television Ramadan broadcasts, 169–70, 172 state-run, 165–6, 170 Tembo, T.Z., 244 Terrazas, Luis, 32 thin hegemony, 24–25 Third World, 1, 8, 49 Third Worldism, 12 Thorne, Joseph, 125, 128–9 Thornton, John, 116 Tocquevillean sequence, 28, 34 totalitarian regime, 26 trade unions, see print workers union in Peru; Zambia, post-colonial traditional society, 27 transformation process, 4 transnational power, 10 Tunisia, state-society relations, 229 Turkish Republic children’s literature, 145–9 education system, 142–5, 149, 151 parody, 149–51 publishing industry, 142–3 state control, 142–7 tyranny, 76, 199

288 Index Ukraine, 28 Ulama, 57–9, 65 uncaptured peasantry, 228 unionism, oppositional, 242–6 United States, nationalist movement, 28 unity internal, 80 political, moral, and intellectual, 3–4, 7 significance of, 168 universality, 163 unsutured societies, 6–7 Urbinati, Nadia, 4 utilitarian order, 93 utopia, 50, 62, 124 utopian desire, 82 values, societal compliance with, 230 Van de Walle, 228–229 veneration, 55 violence, 24, 179, 181, 200, 255–6 visual autonomy, 83 visualization, 88 visual perception, 79–80 voting system, 26 Wacquant, Louis, 252 wahhabism, 56 warlordism, 107 war of attrition, 4, 11 war of liberation, 58–9 war of national liberation, 29 war of position, 156 war of the winners, 33 Wars of the Roses, 25 weapons of the strong, 35 weapons of the weak, 1, 7–8, 35 Weberian formulation/logic, 5, 28, 75 weights and measurement, 19th century Egypt counterhegemonic effects, 179–83, 198–201 guild officials, 186, 193–6, 199 hegemonic articulation, 180–2, 187–8, 190, 192–3, 199–201 hegemonic rule, 179–83 historical perspectives, 183–4 indirect rule, 185–7 intermediaries, 185–7, 197, 199 restructuring, 185, 200

retailer protests, 179, 182–6, 188–196, 198–200 Royal Thresholds, 197 tax farms/farmers, 182–5, 196–9 well-being, national, 34 West Africa, 130 westernization, 162–3 westernized elites, 157 western modernist ideology, 78–9 western religion, 126 western society, 27 West Indies, 118, 120, 124–5 Williams, Raymond, 1–2, 9 workers’ councils, 4 working class, 5, 27 workplace-centrism, 253 world views, 4 World War I, 36, 53 Wuzhen, Zhao, 108 Yatsen, Sun, 107 Yeni Yol, 143, 149–151 Zaki a-Din Sha’ban, Shaykh, 160 Zambia, post-colonial collective bargaining, 239 corporatism, 238–42, 246 counterhegemonic movement, 242, 244, 247 district committees (DCs), 243–4 economic development, 236 economic policy, 233 government-labour relations, 240, 244 hegemonic system, 241–2 industrial participatory democracy, 235, 247 Industrial Relations Act (IRA), 234 labour control, 232–8, 247 labour movement, 234–8, 243 leadership-grassroots relations, 238, 240, 243 Mineworkers Union of Zambia (MUZ), 235, 239–41 mobilization, 239–42, 246 Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), 243–5 oppositional unionism, 242–6 riots, 240–1 semi-corporatism, 233 state-labour alliance, 242

Index state-society relations, 228, 232, 241, 246 strikes, 232–4, 239–42 union leadership, 238–9 union membership, loyalties of, 238, 240 United National Independence Party (UNIP), 233, 235–8, 240–2, 245 Zambia Mineworkers’ Union (ZMU), 232 Zambian Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), 234–8, 240–5

289

Zambian Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM), 241 Zambian United Local Authority Workers Union (ZULAWU), 244–5 Zapata, 29, 33–4, 37 Zapatistas, 33, 40 Zawiya, 55 Zedong, Mao, 100, 107–12 zero-sum power, 9 Zerpa, Manual, 217–8 Zimbabwe organized labour, 231 state-society relations, 229