Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies [3, 1 ed.] 041519363X, 0415193605

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POSTCOLONIALISM

POSTCOLONIALISM Critical concepts in literary and cultural studies

Edited by Diana Brydon Volume III

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK

To maintain the integrity of the original articles, references which refer the reader to text not included within these volumes have been retained. However, figures and any reference to them within the text, have been omitted. First published 2000 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint oj the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Selection and editorial material © 2000 Diana Brydon; individual owners retain copyright in their own material Typeset in Times by Wearset, Boldon, Tyne and Wear All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Postcolonialism: critical concepts in literary and cultural studies / edited by Diana Brydon. p. cm. Collection of previously published articles, essays, etc. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-19360-5 (set) — ISBN 0-415-19361-3 (v. 1) — ISBN 0-415-19362-1 (v. 2) — ISBN 0-415-19363-X (v. 3) — ISBN 0-415-19364-8 (v. 4) — ISBN 0-415-19367-8 (v. 5) 1. Postcolonialism. I. Brydon, Diana. JV51.P67 2000 325'.3—dc21

99-0599119

The publishers have made every effort to contact authors/copyright holders of works reprinted in Postcolonialism. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies whom we have been unable to trace. ISBN 13: 978-0-415-19360-3 (set) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-19363-4 (hbk) (volume 3)

CONTENTS

VOLUME III PART 6 Orientalisms

813

6.1

815

Orientalism in Crisis ANOUAR ABDEL-MALEK

6.2

Orientalism Reconsidered

846

E D W A R D W. SAID

6.3

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography

862

GYAN PRAKASH

6.4

After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World

889

ROSALIND O ' H A N L O N A N D D A V I D WASHBROOK

6.5

Can the "Subaltern" Ride? A Reply to O'Hanlon and Washbrook

916

GYAN PRAKASH

6.6

Introduction to Occidentalism

934

X I A O M E I CHEN

6.7

Vacation Cruises; or, The Homoerotics of Orientalism J O S E P H A. BOONE

V

961

CONTENTS

PART 7 Thinking/Working Through Race 7.1

A Strong Race Opinion on the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction

989 991

E. P A U L I N E J O H N S O N

7.2

Negritude and African Socialism

998

LÉOPOLD SÉDAR SENGHOR

7.3

The Fact of Blackness

1011

FRANTZ FANON

7.4

Black Power - Its Relevance to the West Indies

1033

WALTER R O D N E Y

7.5

An Image of Africa

1042

C H I N U A ACHEBE

7.6

The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature

1055

ABDUL R. J A N M O H A M E D

7.7

Haunted Lines: Postcolonial Theory and the Genealogy of Racial Formations in Fiji

1085

SUDESH MISHRA

7.8

Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification

1103

D I A N A FUSS

7.9

Yellow Skin, White Masks: Race, Class, and Identification in Japanese Colonial Discourse 1132 LEO CHING

PART 8 Feminisms and Gender Analysis

1157

8.1

1159

Algeria Unveiled FRANTZ FANON

8.2

Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY

vi

1183

CONTENTS

8.3

Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference

1210

TRINH T. MINH-HA

8.4

Feminist Fictions: A Critique of the Category 'Non-Western Woman' in Feminist Writings on India

1216

J U L I E STEPHENS

8.5

Response to Julie Stephens

1245

SUSIE THARU

8.6

Unveiling Algeria

1251

WINIFRED WOODHULL

8.7

Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers 1271 GLORIA ANZALDÚA

8.8

The Discourse of the Veil

1280

LEILA A H M E D

8.9

Postmodern Blackness

1306

BELL HOOKS

8.10

Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition 1314 SARA SULERI

8.11

Why Keep Asking Me About My Identity? N A W A L EL S A A D A W I

vii

1328

Part 6 ORIENTALISMS

6.1

ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS Anouar Abdel-Malek From Diogenes 44 (Winter 1963): 103-40 (trans. J.W.C.)

"It is indispensable to view Europe from the outside, to view the history of Europe, the failures of Europe as well as its successes, through the eyes of that vast part of humanity which is formed by the peoples of Asia and Africa." Joseph Needham

In order to dispel "the iron curtain of false enigmas," of which Claude Roy speaks, it is urgent to undertake a revision, a critical reevaluation of the general conception, the methods and implements for the understanding of the Orient that have been used by the West, notably from the beginning of the last century, on all levels and in all fields. This is an imperative of every exact science, which aims at understanding. And yet the resurgence of the nations and the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, in the last two generations, was required in order to provoke a prise de conscience, tardy and frequently reticent, of an exigency of principle become an unavoidable practical necessity, precisely due to the decisive influence of the political factor, i.e., the victories achieved by the various movements of national liberation on a world scale. For the time being, the crisis strikes at the heart of orientalism: since 1945, it has been not only the "terrain" that has escaped it, but also the "men," until yesterday the "object" of study, and, henceforth, sovereign "subjects." The domain of human and social sciences are also proving to have need of an alteration, an extension, a transformation which would not be just narrowed to the field; but for the time being at least no characterized crisis may be perceived. This is because several factors, and principally the growing role of the Marxist methodology, universalist and historicizing, but also methods which tie in with it at such or such a point, that is, 815

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methods of modern science and rationalism, allow more effective syncretism and flexibility, though still profoundly insufficient. Let us examine the subject closer. Our study deals naturally with the Arab world, and more particularly with Egypt; it will also touch upon the sector of China and Southeast Asia, in a related fashion. Numerous works1 are at the disposal of scholars, disparate material, full of suggestions, rarely precise, on the history of traditional orientalism— from its foundation, decided on by the Council of Vienna in 1245, and from the first chairs of Oriental languages at the Universitas magistrorum et scolarium Parisiensium, until World War II.* One will note with interest, however, that the real impetus of Oriental studies in the two key sectors, that of the Arab world and the Far East, dates essentially from the period of colonial establishment, but, above all, from the domination of the "forgotten continents" by the European imperialisms (middle and second half of the twentieth century): the first wave was marked by the creation of orientalist societies (Batavia 1781); Societe Asiatique, Paris 1822; Royal Asiatic Society, London 1834; American Oriental Society, 1842; etc.); the second phase witnessed the appearance of orientalist congresses, the first of which took place in Paris in 1873; sixteen congresses were then held up to World War I (the last congress was the one in Vienna in 1912); since then only four have taken place . . . Precisely what kind of studies were these? The orientalist—"a scholar versed in the knowledge of the Orient, its languages, its literatures, etc."2—what kind of man, what kind of scholar is he? What are his motivations? What occupies him? What objectives does he set himself to attain? Michelangelo Guidi (1886-1946) placed himself in the perspective of a philosophy of history as opposed to that of the hellenocentric peoples, upheld, notably, by Werner Jaeger:3 "By orientalists, I understand those who study the Near East; for the thought of India and China is certainly of the greatest interest in understanding the spiritual paths (. . .), but they have no vital contact with us;" "We orientalists, in fact, look towards the cultures in which the Oriental element appears in its most complete expression, that is, towards the pure national cultures, towards Islam, for instance, not only with the aim of recreating a foreign world, very high nevertheless, very worthy of scientific consideration, but also as the only means that would enable us to understand fully the nature of the elements of the admirable and very fecund fusion that occurred in the zone of hellenism;"4 "The orientalist, if he wants to be complete, must start with the classic world. But it would be anti-historical to disregard completely a period which is situated between us and pure antiquity. A homo classicus and a homo orientalis become, at a certain moment, a recollection or an abstraction. Only a homo novus of hellenism is a 'living' product of 'living' movements and not of movements artificially created by the scholars; all 816

O R I E N T A L I S M IN CRISIS

have been created by an original historical force." Therefore "we do not study these worlds to arrange a new series of phenomena in the show window of the human museum, to describe exotic and marvelous forms, in order to understand the Pap(3apwv (rcxpia; we study these worlds rather to relive in their fullness the phases of intimate union of two different traditions, endeavoring to distinguish the modes and functions of one of them, with eyes made more keen by the contemplation of the manifestations of Oriental culture in its total expression, with the possibility of a more precise estimation, with a livelier sensibility,"5 etc. Is it exaggerated to speak here of romantic "europeocentrism,"6 which animates scientific investigation, while one finds in a Raymond Schwab identical themes,7 and while the seven portraits of English orientalists—S. Ockley, W. Jones, E. H. Palmer, E. G. Browne, R. A. Nicholson, A. J. Arberry—drawn by this latter very recently,8 are moving essentially in the same sense? But we must see that we are—historically—at the epoch of European hegemony; the retrospective criticism must take this into account. The most notable works of the principal Western orientalist schools spring from this current of thought, from this vision of orientalism (France, Great Britain, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia and the United States). Their contribution has been multiple and fruitful. The Lebanese bibliographer Youssef Assaad Dagher distinguishes eight positive elements in the field of Arabic and Islamic studies: the study of ancient civilization; the collection of Arabic manuscripts in European libraries; the establishment of catalogues of manuscripts; the publication of numerous important works; the lesson of method thus given to Oriental scholars; the organization of orientalist congresses; the editing of studies, frequently deficient and erroneous from a linguistic point of view, but precise in the method; and finally, "this movement has contributed to arousing the national consciousness in the different countries of the Orient and to activating the movement of scientific renaissance and the awakening of the ideal."9 We will see further on what is in it. This vision of traditional orientalism, however, was not the dominant vision; or, rather, it represented, in part, the essential segment of the work, accomplished in the universities and by scholarly societies, without however ignoring the whole range of the work that has been carried out and published within this framework and elsewhere. On the other hand, this study itself was profoundly permeated by postulates, methodological habits and historico-philosophical concepts that were to compromise, often, the results and the scientific value of arduous work, and to lead, objectively, a great number of genuine orientalist scholars to the politicophilosophical positions of the other group of researchers. This latter group was formed by an amalgam of university dons, businessmen, military men, colonial officials, missionaries, publicists and adventurers, whose only objective was to gather intelligence information 817

ORIENTALISMS

in the area to be occupied, to penetrate the consciousness of the people in order to better assure its enslavement to the European powers. "The optic of the Arab bureau," as Jacques Berque rightly observed, has led to the result that, "sustained, nourished at the same time and limited by action, the study of the North African societies has been oriented from the start."10 One may guess in which sense . . . The phenomenon is general, since it is built into the structure of the social science of the European countries in the period of imperialist penetration and implantation: Italian orientalism under Mussolini, the psycho-political penetration as practiced by T. E. Lawrence and his school, and previous to them the reports of missionaries, business circles and orientalists (a notable instance being the third provincial congress of orientalists at Lyons, in 1878), etc.—the examples abound, multiply, for we are still in the epoch of humiliation, of occupation, before the great liberating revolutions.11 Can one speak, however, despite these very real differences, of a certain similarity in the general conception, the methods and the instruments introduced by these two schools of traditional orientalism? We will answer in the affirmative: the community of interest, and not only of interests, is fundamental, in the face of the other, the world which later was to be called "third" with regard to the present as history. 1) General conception, that is, the vision of the Orient and of Orientals by traditional orientalism: a) On the level of the position of the problem, and the problematic, the two groups consider the Orient and Orientals as an "object" of study, stamped with an otherness—as all that is different, whether it be "subject" or "object"—but of a constitutive otherness, of an essentialist character, as we shall see in a moment. This "object" of study will be, as is customary, passive, non-participating, endowed with a "historical" subjectivity, above all, non-active, non-autonomous, non-sovereign with regard to itself: the only Orient or Oriental or "subject" which could be admitted, at the extreme limit, is the alienated being, philosophically, that is, other than itself in relationship to itself, posed, understood, defined—and acted—by others. b) On the level of the thematic, both groups adopt an essentialist conception of the countries, nations and peoples of the Orient under study, a conception which expresses itself through a characterized ethnist typology; the second group will soon proceed with it towards racism. According to the traditional orientalists, an essence should exist— sometimes even clearly described in metaphysical terms—which constitutes the inalienable and common basis of all the beings considered; this essence is both "historical," since it goes back to the dawn of history, and fundamentally a-historical, since it transfixes the being, "the object" of study, within its inalienable and non-evolutive specificity, instead of defining it as all other beings, states, nations, peoples and cultures—as a 818

ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS

product, a resultant of the vection of the forces operating in the field of historical evolution. Thus one ends with a typology—based on a real specificity, but detached from history, and, consequently, conceived as being intangible, essential—which makes of the studied "object" another being, with regard to whom the studying subject is transcendent: we will have a homo Sinicus, a homo Arabicus (and, why not, a homo Aegypticus, etc.), a homo Africanus,12 the man—the "normal man" it is understood—being the European man of the historical period, that is, since Greek antiquity. One sees how much, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the hegemonism of possessing minorities, unveiled by Marx and Engels, and the anthropocentrism dismantled by Freud are accompanied by europeocentrism in the area of human and social sciences, and more particularly in those in direct relationship with non-European peoples. Among the masters of traditional orientalism, none have expressed this theme better, in speaking of the Arabs, dear to his mystic heart, than the great scholar Louis Massignon (1883-1962). In one of his last texts, a short time before his death, he wrote: "I think that for the problem of the future of the Arabs, it must be found in semitism. I think, that at the base of the Arab difficulties there is this dramatic conflict, this fratricidal hatred between Israel and Ismae'l. I think that it must be surmounted. Can we succeed in surmounting it? I believe it must be placed less in the drama of the mechanical incidence of actual technocracy in which Israel, in the final analysis, pulls the strings of the entire world, for due to its superiority of thought and technique in the construction of the problems—because Israel has never ceased posing these problems to itself, it is its strength of hope, an intellectual speculation in a pure state—the Arabs find themselves in collision with it in the claim of exclusivity among the Semites, the privileged Semites of the right. They, on the contrary, are the outlaws, the excluded; for many reasons, they proved themselves inferior to the task Israel had known how to overcome, but it seems to me that between brothers there should be a reconciliation, for Israel as the Arabs can bring internal testimony to bear; it is the testimony of their language, which is a sacred language, and which is also an instrument of abstract scientific research. The Jewish elite thought and wrote in Arabic during the entire Middle Ages. That is the essential problem."13 The generosity of the sentiment could not hide the nature, profoundly erroneous and capable of pernicious extensions, of this thematic. It would be, almost, comparable to seeing the history of contemporary Europe through the deforming prism of Aryanism. 2. Methods of study and research. These are inevitably determined by the general conception: a) The past of Oriental nations and cultures quite naturally constitutes the preferred field of study:14 in "admitting implicitly that the most 819

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brilliant periods of the Orient belong to the past," one admits, by the same token, "that their decadence is ineluctable." And Jean Chesneaux rightly notes that "the road followed since the second half of the nineteenth century, by the Greco-Latin studies and their rebirth as studies of "dead" civilizations, completely cut off from their contemporary heirs, furnished an eminent model to the orientalists."15 b) This past itself was studied in its cultural aspects—notably the language and religion—detached from social evolution. If the general offensive of anti- and post-Hegelian irrationalism in Europe explains the accent placed on the study of the religious phenomenon, as well as its parapsychical, esoteric aura, this is tantamount to the rebirth of the studies of Antiquity, at the end of the last century, in the light of the historical method, and more precisely of historical philology, which explains the primacy accorded simultaneously to linguistic and philological studies by traditional orientalists. But the study of Oriental languages—such as Arabic, very much a living language—as dead languages was bound to cause a great number of mistakes, contradictions, errors, just as if one intended to furnish a commentary on the French language (of R. Martin du Gard, of Sartre, or of Aragon) on the basis only of the knowledge of the "Chansons de geste," of the English of Shaw or Russell on the basis of Saxon, or of the Italian of Croce, Gramsci or Moravia on the basis of Church Latin.16 c) History, studied as "structure" was projected, at its best, on the recent past. That which re-emerged, appeared as a prolongation of the past, grandiose but extinct. From historicizing, history became exotic. d) The scientific work of the scholars of different Oriental countries was passed over in silence, and for the most part completely ignored, except for a few rare works which are conceived in the sense of orientalism of the cities. The rest was declared to be without value, denigrated, and the retardation, imputable to historical conditions, notably to colonialism, became a specific constitutive characteristic of Oriental mentalities. 3. The instruments of study and research: a] These are constituted essentially by the accumulation and concentration of the treasures belonging to the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America in the great European cities: the history of the Cernuschi and Guimet museums in Paris, of the great collections of the British Museum, for example, follows the same trajectory, which is that of the immigration of the scholarly treasures of Europe in the direction of the United States, since 1919. In the field of Arabic studies, especially, the situation is particularly serious: several tens of thousands of manuscripts (the number 140,000 has been mentioned) are outside the Arab world, that is, practically out of reach of Arab researchers themselves; hence, they must work most of the time on the basis of indirect sources dealing with the matters at the core itself of their own national and cultural history. The League of Arab States, as well as several countries, principally Egypt, has established 820

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various organisms, publications and projects, whose aim is to restitute to the Arab world its irreplaceable sources.17 b) In the field of modern and contemporary history, the greatest and even the essential part of the materials concerning the colonial and dependent countries (notably India, Egypt and the Arab Near East, the Maghreb, dark Africa, etc.), which are collected in the state archives of the great ex-colonial powers, are for the most part inaccessible, subject to various kinds of interdictions (the least serious being the famous rule of "fifty years"). The approximative knowledge of the past is thus prolongated into a quest of one's self, full of perilous gaps. c) The secondary sources used by traditional Western orientalists— reports by colonial administrators,18 by Catholic or Protestant religious missions,19 balance sheets and reports of boards of directors of companies, travel descriptions, etc.—are profoundly tainted by all the variants of ethnism and racism; the most moderate are exotic and paternalistic. One may see that, though furnishing numerous data, these secondary sources hide many other facts and could not, in any case, validly sustain scientific research work. These are the main characteristics of traditional orientalism, that which represented the whole of orientalism up to the end of World War II, and which continues to occupy a disproportionate place to the present day. But the rebirth of the nations and peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, since the end of the nineteenth century, and the very rapid acceleration of this process due to the victory of the national liberation movements in the ex-colonial world but also to the appearance of the group of socialist states and the subsequent differentiation between the "two Europes,"20 has shaken the edifice of traditional orientalism to its foundations. Suddenly, specialists and the public at large became aware of the time-lag, not only between orientalist science and the material under study, but also—and this was to be determining—between the conceptions, the methods and the instruments of work in the human and social sciences and those of orientalism. Rejected by history and the national rebirth of the Orient, traditional orientalism found itself out of step with regard to the progress of scientific research. Therefore, the whole problem had to be thought anew.

Two faces of neo-orientalism "Two Europes" are rethinking this complex: the Europe (and European America) of the colonial powers; the Europe of the socialist states and movements, soon joined by the revolutions on the three "forgotten continents." The divorce is profound, notably in the matter of general conception. 821

ORIENTALISMS A. The neo-orientalism of western europe

Two essential documents—the inaugural lecture of Jacques Berque at the College de France (December 1956), and the Hayter Report (1961)—and also several methodological works permit an analysis of this renewal of traditional orientalism in the Western colonial powers. 1. General conception: J. Berque observes that "the personality of the world (of Islam) appears rather uncommunicable. To whomever frequents it, it awakens rightly images of a "cave" or of a "labyrinth" (. . .) it defends itself against the outside, the aberrant. Evasive, menacing or a charmer, it disappears by turns in mystery, injury or seduction. It bars its true access, and hides its truth. Many stop at the first obstacle, and remain taken in by the caress of the picturesque, snared by the equivocal, the combativity of the gesture. Research must go much further (. . .) We must make ourselves more and more attentive and sensitive to the Arab other side of things." The work that he undertook, and whose first balance sheet he uncovers in this lesson, leads him to think that "the modern history for the Arab countries begins after World War I, or even World War II." According to him, "the tragic age of revision" results from this; however, he says, "under the gesticulation, let us recognize the testimony, this word so dear to Louis Massignon." Trouble set in everywhere: "The tension deforms them. Their structures become transient, their determinations ambiguous. The concrete with them is continuously surpassed by affectivity, and the act by the symbol. Every phenomenon is disposed for them on several levels, every attitude must be understood from more than one angle. Hence the extreme difficulties of expression for them, and of interpretation for us." Naturally, "these structures are incomprehensible, if isolated from their historic context and entirely from social psychology." But the verdict is nonetheless decisive:21 "The vast bustle of ideas that have established themselves (. . .) have associated confusedly structure with existence, true or false causalities with the needs of the heart and with the expansion of the gesture;" all attempts "seem to me to correspond, in the first place, to a search for solidity. A search frequently unskillful, summary, disfiguring, and sometimes insincere: a friend at least should have the right to say so. It has been inexpert, hasty in the majority of cases. In addition, the analysis of present-day political forms in the Orient does not lead us very far." Referring several times to Renan,22 he continues: "this history is not autonomous (. . .). Until the present this humanity has refused what has been called 'the parti-pris of things.' For, so far as things are concerned, history contests either its savour or precision (. . .). Harrassed by what an Egyptian essayist has called 'the heavy history,' they are tempted to search for their affirmations outside of continuity, of logic, and perhaps even of history (. . .). Now, can one fight against facts with tokens, even were they as august as that of freedom?" 822

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Having thus established this affirmation of non-autonomy—that is, the impotence of the Arab and Islamic peoples to define themselves and to forge the instruments of knowledge, which alone would be capable of initiating in depth action and progress—J. Berque has naturally advanced to fill this vacancy, particularly in Les Arabes d'hier a demain, published in 1960: "The Arab soul today maintains or restores a reference to itself, an autonomy of sensation and of expression that no exterior system, as enriching as it might have been, should ever have denied it. Should this be a sufficient reason for the foreign researcher, because he is from the start suspected and held to innumerable precautions for fear of hurting live susceptibilities, to abstain from contributing his own theory? Entirely the contrary, the opportunity of his contribution will increase the spontaneity recovered by the Arabs. If then I dare submit to them a system of their contemporary history, it is in the hope of submitting it to their judgement. The more criticism from the inside that it excites, the better it will help to progress those it claims to serve. No doubt handicapped, in what it emanates, despite everything, of a foreigner, it will on the other hand have the advantage of distance. Its chances and misfortunes are, in the final analysis, only those of a new orientalism, at the same time disinterested and committed."23 The reactions evoked by this view of the work undertaken prompted, two years later, this rectification: "An Egyptian essayist has pointed out, in connection with my last book, that I address the Oriental as well as the Western reader. He saw a novelty in this! Is it too ambitious? The study conceived in this fashion requires that its object become a partner in the dialogue, critical and participating."24 The instrument of this research is French culture, "for French culture, I dare say it even today, remains the hellenism of the Arab peoples."25 The two works of this author—on the Arabs, then on the Maghreb—set up the framework of this new typology. Being preoccupied here with methodology, we cannot examine its postulates, its theses, or its conclusions. However, it should be noted that the new typology, while remaining essentialist in its central core, is made more flexible by taking into consideration the economic factor.26 The approach to the problem is different in the Anglo-Saxon world. In 1946, the "Middle East Institute" was founded in Washington, soon to be followed, in 1949, by the "Council for Middle Eastern Affairs" in New York. In 1947, the Scarborough Commission, on the advice of A. J. Arberry, undertook a renewal of orientalism in Great Britain: the end of the war required the rearranging of "the responsibilities that remain to us in the colonies, in our relations with the Dominions, the close neighbors of the peoples of Asia and Africa, and our new relations with India, Burma and Ceylon." The report formulates an undisguised criticism of "europeocentrism" and notes that the retardation of orientalist studies in Great Britain, compared to France, Germany, Italy, Holland, the Soviet Union 823

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and the United States (in that order) "is in disagreement with our situation of a great power, and is not adequate to our imperial responsibilities." It will be a question of organizing modern studies, finally, in order to aid notably the scientists, physicians, engineers and economists, who intend to make a career in the Middle East, and to integrate themselves well there.27 The Hayter Commission, four years later, reacted in vigorous political terms to a situation which remained faltering. The center of gravity of the world having been displaced from Europe, the time is not for linguists but rather for a "surplus of historians, jurists, economists and other specialists in the social sciences." The main objectives envisaged are the following: "to furnish the nation with a more important and better equilibrated reserve of researchers and of published materials on the subject of these countries;" "to stimulate indirectly the interest in Oriental languages;" and finally, "to increase the proportion of modern studies, as well as the study of modern languages, by comparison with classical studies."28 The Commission analysed the work undertaken by the United States, formerly one of the lagging behind countries at the time of the Scarborough report; it declared itself very much impressed by the "extent of the effort undertaken, the type of organization on which this effort was based, and the accent placed on modern studies." It called the attention of the British government to the following points: "The power of the support accorded by the United States government to Oriental and Slav studies, due to their national importance; the efforts deployed by means of study centers by area, to break down at last the barriers between the various disciplines, and to promote balanced studies of these areas; the enlivening emphasis placed on modern studies; the role of the scholarships granted to graduates in order to channel their activity towards new fields of work; the value of intensive language courses and mechanical aids destined to overcome the difficulties of languages that are not taught in the schools and to reduce the period of apprenticeship." Did this mean that the United States should be copied? "The traditions of classical erudition, hellenistic and Oriental, are weaker than in Europe (...). The British field of research in this area, and more particularly in the Oriental languages, is situated between the classicial and severe linguistic traditions of Western Europe and the more modernist developments, with the emphasis on social sciences, in America."29 The difference of the conception from that of J. Berque may be seen: the dialogue and the interests of state must be assured through the enlargement and the publication of works, as well as the improvement of the qualification of the researchers, not through a "penetration" of the object studied—not capable of being autonomous—by European orientalism. That this fundamental postulate, which is at the heart of all European orientalism, whether it be traditional or renewed, remains subjacent 824

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among all the non-socialist scholars of the West, could not be contested. Thus, Sir Hamilton A. R. Gibb, making a review of the history of Islam, from its origins to our times, relies on nineteen European authors; one sole Oriental—A.-E. Afifi—figures in their company.30 The recent conference on Moslem sociology, at Brussels (September 11-14, 1961), heard twenty speakers, not including a single scholar from the Orient; a circumstance to which J. Berque rightly took exception.31 Yet it was the question of the evolution of the Arab and Moslem societies that was essentially dealt with .. . The Egyptian historian Hussein Mo'nes easily demonstrated that a great number of the speeches were profoundly out of date in regard to current history.32 The recent writings of G. E. von Grunebaum proceed from the same vision; nevertheless, the serious philosophical culture of their author frequently enables him to furnish structured analyses, in which the effort to overcome the old habits are evident.33 The recent thesis by Vincent Monteil on L'Arabe moderne is full of errors—as opposed to the work of Hans Wehr—and is the culminating point of a will to theorize without understanding the inside of the studied area.34 2. Methods of study and research: a) The past continues to occupy the first place in Oriental studies. But it is now no longer alone. The requirements of politics, the displacement of the center of gravity outside of the European glacis, the emotion caused by the thrust of the peoples of the Orient, yesterday still in varying degrees submissive and malleable, the needs of the modernization of working habits, if only to keep pace with the other social sciences—so many factors have contributed decisively to direct the new orientalist studies towards the modern, or even the contemporary, age. b) This present, finally having been admitted as an object of study (often at the price of serious difficulties), nevertheless does not escape the requirements for the constitution of typologies appropriate to the different peoples of the Orient. The mediation—between the socio-political requirements for the constitution of these typologies and modernism—will be carried out by means of the structuralist philosophy. The philosophy, as is known, is the study of sectors of reality as such, as "structures," and hardly, any more, as a product, a resultant or vection, of an historical evolution. Thus conceived, structuralism in human sciences appears as the most acceptable expression—the most "objectivized"—of phenomenology, the dominant form of the irrationalist philosophy of our times. But, in the field of orientalism, the structuralist method moves in known terrain, so to speak, as it is from linguistics that structuralism got its impetus, with F. de Saussure's Cours de linguistique generate in 1906-1911 (the course was edited in 1916). The traditional orientalists, in great majority language or religion specialists, used to structuralism, thus easily recognize their modernist, neo-orientalist colleagues, for whom the 825

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structuralist method provides the surest means—but also the most "modernist"—on which to found their elaboration of typologies in 'novelties'. c) The scientific work carried out in the Orient will continue to be denigrated, either because of ignorance (since it becomes more and more difficult, even impossible, to theorize on the subject of a whole sector—Arab, Chinese, Asian, Latin-American, Islamic—on the basis of a necessarily restricted documentation, while the autochtonous production grows continually), or in order to continue to maintain the (theoretical) primacy of knowledge.35 d) The method of participation and penetration, elaborated and applied by J. Berque, appears more interesting: "In a matter so alive, so burning and also so long-suffering, the habitual means of science have immense value, but one that could not suffice. One must live in contact with these people, attempt to become friendly with them, almost to the point of connivance. Is this possible without involving passion?" It is certainly the question, considering this willingness and these procedures, of a "quest more than ever participating," cherished by the author. The latter writes, a few pages farther on, forestalling the others: "Impressionism will not be my strong point. Our role is one of understanding. Only the analysis, to be efficacious, to penetrate sufficiently in depth, should not dissociate the facts either from their emotional context or from the sense in which they are colored by lived experience."36 Is this otherwise elsewhere? For W. Cantwell Smith, whose Canadian environment is non"imperial," the value of this participation is to be judged by the autochtones: "The work will equally fail, if intelligent and honest Moslems are incapable of recognizing the precision of its observations, the extent and the desire for clarification of its interpretations as well as of its analyses."37 3. Instruments of study and research. a) The Western powers, notably the United States, intend to add new centers of accumulation of treasures and cultural materials to the depots already existing; the means, employed here, are out of all proportion to those at the disposal of the Orient, its scholarly institutions and researchers.38 b) Collaboration with the scholars and researchers of Oriental countries is recognized as an objective necessity. One will note, however, that in the United States, they dispose of university posts and means of dissemination relatively vast in scope,39 whereas in Western Europe, this collaboration is arranged on a subordinate level.40 However, the realism of H. A. R. Gibb leads him, at the conclusion of a balance sheet of failure of the historical studies on the modern Orient, to propose a division of labor: "The first task of the Western universitarian is to research, coordinate and evaluate critically the Western sources. The 826

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special domain of the autochtonous universitarian is to research and to organize the archives and the local documentary materials." One will note that there is hardly a question, in this latter case, of "critically evaluating" the elements collected . . . Simultaneously, "it must be established, with no possible equivocation, that the Western universitarian cannot realize any work on an academic level in his own field without having an adequate knowledge of Arabic, Persian or Turkish, according to the case, as well as of the historical and cultural background." This means, surely, that "the adult student of Middle-Eastern history, must be, to some extent, a kind of orientalist;" but it is "only when a historian possesses technical qualifications in a broader field that he can be a good historian in the MiddleEastern field."41 Hence, the primacy of specialized scientific formation, alongside of an adequate ethno-cultural and linguistic formation, is well recognized. So far we have dealt with Western scholarly neo-orientalism, as it is required. Parallel to it, the persistence of "Europeocentrism" by the means of modernist manifestations, which it took on after World War II, and the accentuation of the direct struggle between the colonized countries (of the Orient) and the imperialist powers (of the West), favored the formation of a new sub-group, that of the publicists and journalists specialized particularly in Asian and African affairs with, here and there, some universitarian extensions. The ignorance of the languages of the Oriental peoples was very frequently aggravated by a deficient scientific formation; the procedures of rhetoric and stylistics, the brilliance of great journalism served both as guarantee and a platform for specious publications, which requested to be taken as sources of direct and "specialized" information, at the same time by intellectuals of the Orient and by the general public in the West.42 B. Neo-orientalism in the socialist sector The socialist sector of Europe (states and movements) will be considered here primarily. In fact, despite a common sphere, the work accomplished in China appears closer to the conceptions of the independent nonsocialist national states and the socialist movements of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Immediately following World War II, researchers in the socialist sector became preoccupied with basic studies of the countries of the Orient. Maxime Rodinson, after a long stay in the Near East, undertook, from 1950 on, a basic analysis of the conceptions, methods, and area of application of traditional orientalism, in view of the advance of the movements of national liberation in the Arab and Islamic countries;43 at the same time Jean Chesneaux began his work on Le mouvement ouvrier chinois de 1919 a 1927;44 the eminent Cambridge biologist Joseph Needham, after twenty 827

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years of preparation, started publication, in 1954, of the first volume of his Science and Civilization in China, a monumental, encyclopedic work, which endeavors to restore to the civilization and culture of our times its second dimension—the Chinese dimension—which had fallen into disuse from the eighteenth century (European) on, a model of erudition, of scientific precision, of theoretical depth, which has rightly been defined as "the greatest action of historical synthesis and of intercultural communication, to which a human being has ever applied himself." (L. Picken)45 In the socialist countries, the question was to take up again an already ancient tradition, then to direct it towards the new preoccupations of Marxist methodology and the political resurgence of the Orient.46 The conference on the solidarity of the Afro-Asian peoples in Bandoeng (April 1955) gave a decisive impetus to cultural renewal—notably in the matter of history, of the social sciences and of literature—in the two continents. It was soon to be followed by the 20th Congress of the CPSU (1956), which determined the "new course" of Soviet orientalism. The first congress of Soviet orientalists, held at Tashkent (1957), dealt explicitly with three general themes: 1. The collapse of the imperialist system; 2. The tasks of Soviet orientalism after the 20th Congress; 3. The worldwide importance of the Bandoeng Conference. The 21st Congress of the C.P. of the Soviet Union further accentuated this orientation, which was to reach its culminating point in the 25th international congress of orientalists, held in Moscow, in August 1960. This short historical introduction will serve to situate the analysis of neo-orientalism in the socialist sector. 1. General conception: a) On the level of the problematic, the end of European hegemony in political matters—recognized simultaneously by the Bandoeng Conference, Unesco, the Hayter Report, the ideological theses of the Chinese leaders, among others—must be accompanied by a fundamental critique of "europeocentrism," that is, its final rejection, in terms of principle. "Western civilization continues to suffer from an unjustified cultural pride, which falsifies its contacts with other peoples of the world; this may rightly be defined as 'spiritual meanness on a high level' and also as TCX jtveduaTixot TTJ£ 7iovnpia£ ev TOI£ eno-&pavioi£—'the spirit of evil in divine things' "; and J. Needham, after having denounced "the psychology of domination always at work:" "The realization is very slow to come that the peoples of Asia themselves could also participate in all the benefits of modern science, that they could study the world of nature in a new way, that they could comment on, read, study and digest the Journal of Biophysics (for example), and regain respect for themselves in acceding to a higher level of life, as fine as that of any other part of the world, while keeping the best of their cultural and religious traditions."47 828

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"The fundamental error of europeocentrism is the tacit postulate, according to which, due to the fact that modern science and technique, which originated in Renaissance Europe, are universal, everything that is European is equally universal." He shows that this is erroneous, both in the field of science and of history, and stresses the role of religion as a means of penetration by, and integration to, Europe.48 The tone was quite different in the important speech given by Anastas I. Mikoyan at the opening session of the 25th orientalist congress: "It goes without saying that the revolutionary changes in the life of Asia and Africa alter in a radical way the character and content of orientalism. It can even be said that the new theoretical particularity of principle of orientalism is that, now, the peoples of the Orient create themselves their own science, elaborate their own history, their culture, their economy; in this way, the peoples of the Orient have been promoted from being objects (matter) of history to the rank of creators. This is what differentiates this congress from the others." b) At the very same time, this affirmation of principle—which is in accordance with the fundamental core of the thought of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and their intelligentsia—is enhanced by a political vision, that of the world anti-imperialist front. "The duty of the orientalists in their work"—A. I. Mikoyan continued—"is to reflect objectively on the most important processes of the countries of Asia and Africa, to contribute, in a creative manner, to the elaboration of the fundamental problems of the struggle of the peoples of the Orient for their national and social liberation and to recover from their economic backwardness. One may rightly say that only then can orientalism count on a broad consideration and on success, from the time that it serves the interests of the peoples of the Orient."49 B. G. Gafurov, director of the Moscow institute or orientalism, expressed the following thought, in his speech closing the congress: "We Soviet orientalists consider it our scientific duty, our conscience also obliges us, to help the peoples of the Orient, continuously, in their struggle for a better future; we are convinced that our discoveries and scientific results, our basic scientific Marxist-Leninist method, whose reality has confirmed its truth, as well as the experience of our country in the building of socialism, an experience based on a progressive scientific theory, we are convinced that all this will help the peoples of Asia and Africa find the best and most efficient way to achieve progress."50 One will note that orientalism thus acquires value, scientifically, in direct relation with of its objectivity and of the support it will eventually give the work of national liberation and edification. It is above all on this last level that it must "provide aid," that is, participate with the "subject," "the creators." c) However—on the level of the thematic—some socialist European neo-orientalists continue to think, along with J. Chesneaux, that "to 829

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reduce purely and simply the scientific study of the countries of Asia and Africa into the generality of historical or linguistic science would be tantamount, at the present stage of world evolution, to a relapse into europeocentrism. Not only does the linguistic barrier justify an organization for special work, but also still today too many common traits among all the countries of Asia and Africa continue to differentiate them from Europe, so that it is necessary to take them largely into account. Orientalism is an antiquated and outmoded concept, but Asian and African studies continue to pose problems proper to themselves: underdevelopment, the history of imperialist expansion and of national movements, their own mediaeval traditions, etc."51 The author rightly points out the enrichment of "the general Marxist theory of the history of the world" by the following elements, gathered in the study of specific national particularities of Asia and Africa: the importance of the "Oriental mode of production," within the general framework of the periodization of human history according to the five basic modes of production;52 the balance sheet of colonial imperialism, "taking into account its internal contradictions," of which "the principal aspect is the brutal domination and all the phenomena of regression and stagnation that accompany it," but without "ignoring its secondary though very real aspect, that is, the new elements of society," mentioned by Marx when he spoke of "the twofold character of British imperialism in India."53 The appearance of the movements of national liberation in the colonies as an element objectively more advanced than the working-class movement in the European countries; the importance of the factor known as "national psyche,"54 the appearance of a third type of nation (in addition to the two types distinguished by J. V. Stalin) within the Afro-Asian group, according to the degree of their cohesion in history; "the universalization of Marxist thought;"55 the different role of the working class, which tends to become the central element of the popular forces, of the people, and not of a unique dominating class.56 The official Soviet formulation—after the 21st Congress of the C.P. (1958)—is more traditional: "The multitude of new problems and phenomena in relationship with the accession of the great countries of the Orient to the road of sovereign development, in particular the struggle of the working class to raise its standard of living in the process of industrialization of the countries weakly developed from the economic point of view, and in the social life of the entire state;" "the study of problems, relative to class differentiation within the peasantry and those of accelerated capitalist development in agriculture and its consequences;" "the problems of the struggle of the working class for hegemony within the peasant movement, in the framework of this new phase of development, are particularly interesting and important;" "penetrating research into the creation and development of the national literatures of the countries of 830

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Africa and Asia will give the destructive blow to the theories of europeocentrism; to this effect, the study of the problems bearing on the interactions among the literatures of the Orient and the West is of first importance."57 2. Methods of study and of research: a) In the first place, the question will be to define "a new attitude towards the problem of the relationships between orientalism and every one of the human sciences, each of them conceived in its planetary universality (. . .). Whether it be history, economics, sociology, literature, linguistics, the perspective must be to 'disorientalize' the studies relative to Asia (. . .), to lead these studies back to what could be called 'the common law' of each discipline." And J. Chesneaux continues thus: "The obstacles of language and of the social and attitudinal heritage should not be shunned; but, once these two difficulties are surmounted, one must tackle, according to a similar method and with a similar problematic, the study of the Italian bourgeoisie and that of the Indonesian bourgeoisie, the analysis of the Aufkldrung movement and that of the movement of the literary renaissance in China in 1920, the examination of the British economy under the continental blockade and that of the Indian economy since independence. This orientation will not only benefit Asian studies; it will provide at the same time a truly universal foundation to each of our human sciences, whose conceptual equipment and the basic data up to now were derived, with a few exceptions, from the sole study of Western Europe." Nevertheless, the idea of a certain general specificity of the Afro-Asian whole remains: "This perspective of universalization, of normalization of Asian studies, does not exclude, however, the fact that there still remain factual relationships and stronger ties among the various countries of Asia.58 The name of Bandoeng is enough. The similarities which the contemporary evolution in the countries of Asia (and of Africa also) continue to show should be taken into account with the greatest care, as they still today differentiate them from the West. But this is another question, from the point of view of the method, than to preserve the traditional conception of orientalism. This is perfectly compatible with a methodological unity of the study of the societies of the Orient and the West."59 Western ignorance of the Orient has many times been put on trial, particularly by J. Needham and R. Etiemble.60 The study of philosophy in the universities of Europe and America, up to the level of the agregation and the doctorate, is essentially that of European philosophy, when Chinese philosophy, to talk only of it, covers 3000 years of continuous development,61 when Greek philosophy was deeply penetrated by the religious thought and the myths of Egypt and the Orient, when Arab philosophy, during the Middle Ages, was quite a different thing than a mere "transmission of the Greek heritage,"62 when the idealism of Indian

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thought has nourished an ample, diverse and brilliant civilization. The same could be said of the history of the sciences, notably of mathematics, biology, medicine and astronomy. One begins only to discover what had been the traditional literatures of Asia and Africa, particularly thanks to the action of the different national commissions of Unesco; the modern field remains almost entirely ignored. b) The emphasis is placed on the study of the present as a privileged field, the process of evolution of Oriental societies in the modern and contemporary period.63 "The study in depth of the actual problems of the contemporary period must become central and fundamental;" whereupon the Soviet author quickly adds that "it will contribute to put forth creative solutions of the problems of Soviet foreign policy in the future vis-a-vis the countries of the Orient, which should constitute a question of honor for the orientalists.64 The 25th congress of Orientalists in Moscow marked the rapid growth of the proportion of modern studies, even among traditional orientalists, as well as the multiplication of the national sections, an irrefutable index of the emergence of the nations and states which can no longer be grouped together under "typological labels."65 Yet this decisive and ineluctable modification of the respective weight of the "classical" and "modern" sectors, in the field of Oriental studies, should not be achieved at the expense of the past. "I have certainly not the intention"—writes J. Needham—"of minimizing, in any way, the extraordinary amelioration brought about by the present Chinese government, under the direction of the Communist Party, in the condition of 'the hundred ancient names.' At the same time, this work can be understood by Westerners with difficulty, if the latter do not take into account certain ancestral characteristics of Chinese culture, which they ignore most often in a lamentable fashion. In fact, contemporary writers themselves, preoccupied with demonstrating the profound renewal in the rebirth of their country, sometimes tend to denigrate their own past, either by emphasizing its somber aspects, such as the subjugation of women, the rapacity of landowners, or by underestimating the philosophy or the art of the preceding periods. This is tantamount to sawing off the branch on which one sits. It is necessary that the rest of the world learn, in all humility, not only about contemporary China, but also about ageless China, for in Chinese wisdom and experience there are remedies for many diseases of the mind, as well as the indispensable elements of the future philosophy of humanity."66 c) The Marxist conception of history and its methodology quite naturally permeate most of these works. However, one will note that the scholars of the socialist sector also include eminent non-Marxists—such as J. Needham—who take place within the larger spectrum of philosophical rationalism. However, sometimes the needs of practical action, in particular for 832

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regroupings, invite the neo-orientalists of the socialist sector—notably in Western European countries—to accommodate themselves with irrational methods—essentially those of a certain phenomenology, which expresses itself by the subterfuge of typology, directly related to the fashionable structuralism—thus compromising scientific precision as well as the fraternity of basic work, which ought to be seeked with intelligentsia of the countries of the Orient in its struggle for liberation and progress.67 3. Instruments of study and research: a) The socialist states, mainly the Soviet Union, did not have access to the same sources of materials—direct and mediate—which were a monopoly of the colonial powers. In return, the ever closer relations between the USSR and the Afro-Asian states and popular movements, since the Bandoeng Conference particularly, have led it to undertake a truly colossal effort in the field of modern orientalism: the "Institute of the peoples of Asia," attached to the Academy of Sciences is the biggest in the world; all the universities organize studies on Asia, Africa and Latin America; new and important scientific reviews have been established;68 all the academies of science of the Republics include sections or organs relating to these studies; the personnel who work in them (professors, research workers, technical assistants, translators, librarians, etc.) number from 18,000 to 20,000 persons; one publishing house alone, specializing in Oriental books, publishes a new title every two or three days; modern studies are on a par with classical orientalism, much in honor in the Russia of yesterday; finally, in 1959, an "Africa Institute" was created under the direction of the academician I. Potehkin.69 In a few years, the scientific data on the modern and contemporary Orient have changed abruptly: it is now impossible to undertake deep studies related to these sectors without the knowledge of the Russian language, in addition to the traditional European languages and one or more Oriental languages. b) The scientific work of the research workers and scholars of the various Oriental countries is not only recognized, appreciated and solicited—which should be a matter of course—but placed, as it ought to be, in a privileged rank. J. Chesneaux refers, among other things, to "the problem of the aptitude of foreigners to study contemporary social facts with the same chances of success as the nationals;" in fact, "the latter are evidently privileged vis-a-vis of these facts, because of their knowledge of the language and also because of their innate familiarity with the entire attitudinal environment, the whole heritage of these peoples of Asia;" "in pushing this reasoning to the extreme, one could ask oneself whether it would not be reasonable to consider that the study of contemporary problems is essentially in the province of the nationals, while the further a theme recedes into the past, the more accessible it is to non-Asian scholars." His conclusion in part is similar to that reached by H. A. R. Gibb, 833

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quoted above: "If one may speak here of a national privilege, one cannot speak of a national exclusive, insofar as the study of the contemporary world is concerned. Foreigners, who come from far away with another cultural and social heritage, can frequently penetrate rapidly into, and give an original interpretation of, the life of other peoples. For example, AngloSaxon studies for the past five years figure among the best works on political life."70 The cultural policy of China, at present, is not as open to foreign researchers: "The first thing to be noted is that academic research (for foreign researchers) is extremely rare," for it appears as "not distinguishable from espionage;" the central thesis is that "foreigners are incapable of understanding us: the field of sinology belongs to the Chinese;" however, "if this study can be conducted by the means of materials, official documents and with the help of a watchful orientation, it is perhaps possible to approach even a delicate subject. But, if a study includes direct observation in the area, without orientation, the free and extensive access to people and independent work," obstacles emerge, "except for the most secure of the foreigners;" "it would appear ab initio that archaeology is not a delicate field politically; but, on the other hand, it falls within an area exclusively reserved, in all evidence, to the Chinese, that is, the study of their own national treasures and the interpretation of their own history with authority. Here, the specialist on Japan will recall how delicate the character of archaeology was in pre-war Japan." Yet, the American author of this study71 points to the intelligent and massive aid given to J. Needham, and that, more reticent, accorded to J. Chesneaux, while R. Dumont, Geddes and C. P. Fitzgerald (New Zealand), and S. Chandrasekhar (India) benefited by a very open reception. Here, the attitude of the Communist leaders of the P.R. of China is closer to that of the new independent national states of Asia and Africa than to that of the socialist countries and movements of Europe. c) The type even of the scientific researcher must change radically. The study of mediaeval classical Arabic and that of Islamic mysticism entitle one to speak of them, but not to understand the differentiation into several sectors of the bourgeoisie of any particular Arab country, the problems of Arab realist literature after 1945, nor the ideology of the different components of the national and democratic movement. The "normalization" of modern Oriental studies requires on the first level a solidity and profundity of specialized formation in a particular sector of the human and social sciences (economics, law, history, sociology, political science, philosophy, esthetics, etc.). This will have to be accompanied by a rapid but nevertheless reasonably sufficient study of the language of the country or the sector under study, such as it presents itself in the modern and contemporary period, both in its written and spoken variants. The aim of this linguistic study is to permit direct access to basic 834

ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS materials, on the one hand, and to improve the psychological and sociological understanding of everyday life in the country studied, on the other. In the Soviet Union, eight years are now devoted to this "double formation," while in the United States, only an "accelerated" linguistic formation following the termination of specialized studies is required.72 On this point, the official preoccupations of the Anglo-Saxon countries come together at the same time with those of the European socialist sector and, essentially, with the vision of the Oriental countries themselves. It is this last question that we now propose to explore.

Bibliography and notes * See bibliography and notes at the end of this article. 1 On the general history of traditional orientalism, more particularly in the Arab and Islamic field, is an abundant bibliography, notably: V. V. Barthold. La decouverte de I'Asie, historic de I'orientalisme en Europe et en Russie, Fr. tr., Paris, 1947; nothing in the Encyclopedic de I'lslam, nor in the Encyclopedia Britannica; "Orientalistika," Soviet Encyclopedia, Moscow, 1951, Vol. IX, 193-202; Giovanni Vacca, "Orientalismo," Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti, Rome, 1935, vol. XXV, 537; G. Levi della Vida, "Per gli studi arabi in Italia," Nuova Antologia, Dec. 1912, 1-10; A. Bausani, "Islamic Studies in Italy in the XlXth and XXth Centuries," East and West, VIII, 1957, 145-155 and Journal of Pakistani Historical Society, V, 1957, 185-199; Z. M. Holt, "The Origin of Arabic Studies in England," al-Kulliyya, Khartum, 1952, No. 1, 20-7; A. J. Arberry, Oriental Essays, London, 1960; M. Morten, "Die Probleme der Orientalistik," Beitrage zur Kenntnis des Orient, XIII, 1916, 143-61; G. Germanus, "Hungarian Orientalism—Past and Present," IndoAsian Culture, VI, 1957, 291-8; L. Bouvat, "Les Hongrois et les etudes musulmanes," Revue du monde musulman, I, 1907, No. 3, 305-24; Naguib Al-'Aqiqi, Al-moustachriqoun, Cairo, 1947; Youssef A. Dagher, Daltl al-A'areb ild 'ilm'alkoutoub wa fann al-makdteb, Beyrouth, 1947, bibl. trav. etrangers, 150-60, Arabes, 161-7; Y. A. Dagher, Fahdress al-maktaba al-'Arabiyya fi'l-khafiqayn, Beyrouth, 1947,105-12; Y. A. Dagher, Massdder al-dirassa al-adabiyya, vol. II, 1800-1955, Beyrouth, 1955, 771-84; J. Fueck, Die arabischen Studien in Europa, Leipzig, 1955; etc. 2 "Orientaliste," Grand Larousse encyclopedique, Paris, 1963, VII, 1003^1. 3 This is the famous book of the master from Berlin: Paideia, Die Formung des griechischen Menschen (I, Berlin-Leipzig, 1934), thus synopsized by M. Guidi, "No broadening of the historical horizon can change anything of the fact that our history starts with the Greeks (. . .). Evidently, this history cannot have the whole planet for its theatre, but only the "hellenocentric" peoples (...), since it is they who have taken from the Greeks the conscious principle of the true Kultur (...). It is not at all difficult to draw the practical consequences from this theoretical formula: the absolute and central value of antiquity, as the eternal and unique source of the constitutive principle of our culture, and, consequently, as the force of formation and education. Total humanism." (M. Guidi, "Trois conferences sur quelques problemes generaux de I'orientalisme," Annuaire de I'lnstitut de philologie et d histoire orentales—volume offert a Jean Capart, Brussels, 1935,171-2.) 4 Our italics. They point out well the reference to one's own self, i.e., to Europe. 835

ORIENTALISMS 5 M. Guidi, op. cit., 171-80. He defined thus orientalism in 1954: "The scholar from the Orient, or orientalist worthy of this name, does not limit himself to the knowledge of certain ignored languages, or who can describe the foreign customs of some peoples, but he is the one who unites rather the study of certain sides of the Orient to the knowledge of the great spiritual and moral forces which have influenced the formation of human culture, the one who has been nourished on the lesson of ancient civilizations and who has been able to evaluate the role of the different factors which have participated in the constitution of the civilization of the Middle Ages, for example, or in the course of the modern Renaissance." ("'Urn al-Charq wa tarikh al-'oumran," Al-Zahra\ rabie awwal 1347 H., August-September 1928, quoted by Y. A. Dagher, Massader ..., 771.) 6 On the definition of "europeocentrism," cf., among others, J. Needham, "Le dialogue entre 1'Europe et 1'Asie," Comprendre, No. 12,1954,1-8; equally, the preface of our Egypte, societe militaire, Paris, 1962, 9-13. 7 R. Schwab, "L'orientalisme dans la culture et les litteratures de 1'Occident moderne," Oriente Moderno, XXXII, 1952, Nos. 1-2,136. 8 A. J. Arberry, op. cit. 9 Y. A. Dagher, Massader..., 779-80. 10 J. Berque, "Cent vingt-cinq ans de sociologie maghrebine," Annales, XI, 1956, No. 3, 299-321. 11 "The advanced studies, and in particular Oriental, philological and historical studies, are they not, on the contrary, the most valuable auxiliary of the colonial expansionist policies of Italy?" (A. Cabaton, "L'orientalisme musulman et 1'Italie moderne," Rev. Md. Mus. VII, 1914, No. 27, p. 24); the moving postscript of Lawrence in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (London, 1926), showing how he was caught himself at his own game, is known: "Damascus had not seemed a sheath for my sword, when I landed in Arabia; but its capture disclosed the exhaustion of my main springs of action. The strongest motive throughout had been a personal one, not mentioned here, but present to me, I think, every hour of these two years. Active pains and joys might fling up, like towers, among my days: but, refluent as air, this hidden urge re-formed, to be the persistent element of life, till near the end. It was dead before we reached Damascus:" "The French nation works, accumulates. From its adventurous consuls to its Utopian designers of railroad lines, to its moved travelers, a Lamartine, a Barres, it edifies in the Orient a work, of which the Champollions, Sacys and Renans erect the scientific counterpart. In this period the Arabs neglect their own past, and stammer their noble language. Contemporary orientalism was born from this vacancy. The exploration, the resurrection of such moral treasures was the chance of the erudite Christian, who as well as the Christian of the Bank concurrently revived the wasted space and filled the warehouses (...). For instance, look at the Arab tribe, at Deduinism in general, Orientalism approaches them through three great political thrusts: the phase of our 'Arab Bureau,' in Algeria, until about 1870; the phase of the 'revolt in the desert,' the triumph of British agents in the Near East; the contemporary petroleum expansion." (J. Berque, "Perspectives de l'Orientalisme contemporain," Ibla, XX, 1957, 220-1); in 1822, the founders of the "Societe Asiatique" pledge themselves to "permit to the historians the explanation of the Antiquities of the peoples of the Orient," and to collect a "valuable documentation on the diplomatic operations in the Levant and the commercial operations in all of Asia;" among the questions posed to the orientalists, at Lyon, let us point out the following: "Is it in the interest of the Europeans to demand that treaties

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give them the right of residence in the interior of China, in order to buy themselves cocoons and silk directly from the producers; in order to establish spinning factories, and to engage in business in general? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the coming of Chinese coolies into foreign countries?" (Texts quoted by J. Chesneaux: "La recherche marxiste et le reveil contemporain de 1'Asie et de 1'Afrique," La Pensee, No. 95, Jan.-Feb. 1961, 4-5.) On ethnist typology, cf. M. Rodinson, "L'Egypte nasserienne au miroir marxiste," Les Temps Modernes, No. 203, April 1963,1859-65. J. Berque and L. Massignon, "Dialogue sur Les Arabes," Esprit, XXVIII, 1960, No. 288, 1506. On the relationship between orientalism and colonialism, these words from L. Massignon, "I myself, strongly colonial at the time, wrote to him about my hopes for a coming conquest of Morocco by arms, and he answered me approvingly (letter No. 1 from In-Salah, Oct. 2, 1906). Let us admit that Morocco then was in a terrible state. But fifty years of occupation, without Lyautey and his high Franco-Moslem ideal, would have left nothing that was essential." ("Foucauld in the desert before the God of Abraham, Agar and Ismae'l," Les mardis de Dar el-Salam, 1959, p. 59.) Precise criticisms in University Grants Committee: Report of the Subcommittee on Oiental. Slavonic, East European and African Studies (London, H.M.S.O., 1961), under the presidency of Sir William Hayter; "Modern Far Eastern studies are a closed book in almost every other history or social science faculty." (p. 38) "The more inward looking characteristics of the language departments and their lack of interest in modern studies and languages have contributed to a number of unfortunate results." (p. 46), etc. A very recent selection, Etudes d'orientalisme dediees a la memoire de Levi-Provencal (2 vol., Paris, 1962), groups sixty-one articles, only eight of which deal with the modern period, and three are of a bio-bibliographical nature related to it. J. Chesneaux, La recherche .. ., 5. Omar Al-Dassouqui, Fi-'l-adab al-hadith, 3rd edit., Cairo, 1954, 325-6; Y. A. Dagher, Massader . . ., 779; N. al-Aqiqi, op. cit., 207-9; Mohamed Hussein Heykal, 'Haydt Mo'hammad, preface to the 2nd edit. (6th edit., Cairo, 1956), 60-1; Anouar al-Guindi, Al-adab al-'Arabi al-'hadith ft ma'rakat almouqawama wa'l-tagammo' min'al-mou'hit ila'l-khalig, Cairo, 1959, 621-4; then: Al-fikr al-'Arabi al-mou'dsser ft maarakat al-taghrib wa'l taha'iyya althaqafiyya, Cairo, s.d.c., 1962, 271-85, etc. Particularly the "Institute of Arab Manuscripts," directed by Prof. Salah Eddine al-Mounajjed, attached to the Arab League; the review Magallat almakhtoutat al-'Arabiyya, which has been published in Cairo since 1955; the creation of the new "Institute of Islamic Research," at the University Al-Azhar, under the direction of Prof. Abdallah al-'Arabi (Al-Ahram, Nov. 23,1961); the effort of restoration undertaken by the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance of Egypt, mainly under the impetus of Fat'hi Radouan, Hussein Fawzi and Tharwat 'Okacha, must be mentioned; similar efforts in Syria and Iraq, in particular. In Egypt, the existentialist philosopher 'Abd al-Ra'hman Badawi has undertaken, since 1940, a gigantic work of publication and has given the impetus to many works on Moslem thought, while the great philologist, Mourad Kamel, authoritatively cleared the ground in the Coptic, Ethiopian and Semitic field. J. Berque mentions it at length, critically, both in Le Maghreb entre les deux guerres (Paris 1962), and in his lectures at the College de France. Equally, J. P. Naish, "The Connection of Oriental Studies with Commerce, Art and Literature during the XVIIIth and XlXth Centuries," Journ. Manch. Eg. and Or. 837

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22

23 24 25 26 27

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Soc., XV, 1930, 33-9; J. Chesneaux, "French Historiography and the Evolution of Colonial Vietnam," in D. G. E. Hall, Historical Writing on the Peoples of Asia—Historians of South-East Asia, Oxford-London, 1961, 235-44. Cf. M. Khalidi and O. Farroukh, Al-tabchir wa'l-isti'mar fi'l-bildd al-'Arabiyya, Sayda-Beyrouth, 1953. On this idea, cf. R. Makarius, La jeunesse intellectuelle d'Egypte au lendemain de la Deuxieme Guerre Mondiale (Paris-The Hague, 1960), and our article "La vision du probleme colonial par le monde afro-asiatique," publ. in Cahiers inter, de sociologie, vol. 35,1963,145-56. Jacques Berque, who stands as the friend of Arab renewal and the link between our cultures, did not fail to honor several of our intellectuals. I thank him myself for the mention he made, many times, of our works—particularly those of Mahmoud al-'Alem and myself, as well as of the narrators and novel writers of the Egyptian realist school—both in his lectures at the College de France, in "L'inquietude arabe des temps modernes" (Rev. des Et. Islamiques XXVI, 1958, No. 1, 87-107, Les Arabes ..., p. 102). Yet it was Renan in France who theorized on the differentiation between semitism and aryanism, the peoples of the first group being inferior, in every respect, to those of the second group (cf. Histoire generate et systeme compare des langues semitiques, 1st part, Paris, 1855): D. Kimson is influenced by it in his Pathologic de I'Islam et les moyens de le detruire (Paris, 1897). This theory has since been continuously combated by all the thinkers and scholars of the Arab world. P. 10-11; a critical analysis of this book is not our purpose here. Le Maghreb entre deux guerres, Paris, 1962, 8. Perspectives ..., p. 237. Expose of the theoretical results in "Expression et signification dans la vie arabe," L'Homme, 1,1961, No. 1. 50-67. Report of the Interdepartmental Commission of Enquiry on Oriental, Slavonic, East European and African Studies, London, H.M.S.O., 1947; commentary by A. J. Arberry, op. cit, pp. 240-9, analysis and balance sheet in Hayter Report, 6-4Q. Hayter Report, 45-52. Hayter Report, 53-63. General P. Rondot, who studies "Les Etats-Units devant 1'Orient d'aujourd'hui" (in Orient, 1957, No. 2, 19-52; No. 3, 31-80), points to the role of the foundations, of the Language and Near-Eastern Area School, attached to the American Embassy in Beyrouth, and the two American universities of Beyrouth and Cairo (the latter, we should note, being the only establishment of higher learning authorized in the U.A.R.); the statement of the reasons given by the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), for enlarging its study program on the modern Orient, is expressed thus: "1) To make the greatest possible number of Americans acquainted with the Near East; 2) To encourage the idea that the United States have a vital interest in the present and future developments in this area; 3) to constitute an elite group of intelligent Americans, experts in the questions of the Near East." The judgement of the author on the work accomplished is, however, most reserved. Cf. R. Bayly Windsor, "Arabic and Islamic Studies in the U.S." (in Middle East Forum, No. 31, June 1956,19-22). "An Interpretation of Islamic History," Cahiers d'histoire mondiale, I, 1953, 39-62. "Pour 1'etude des societes orientales contemporaines," in Colloque sur la sociologie musulmane—Actes, 11-14 Septembre 1961 (Brussels, 1962): "The 838

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fact that we have congregated here to speak of Oriental societies in the absence of our Oriental colleagues is an anomaly (. . .)> which must be meditated upon. Since our interpretations lead us, I think, beyond the political state of affairs, bringing us to a questioning of the methods of our discipline, and, perhaps of its object." (p. 85): "The regrettable absence of our Oriental colleagues among us does not correspond, as might be thought, to a political situation, but to a profound uneasiness, corresponding to the nature itself of the society we are studying, in its relations with ours;" yet "we are not wrong in being such as I describe us." (p. 457). "Ara'wa chata'hat 'anna wa 'an tarikhina," Al-Ahram, Dec. 21,1962. It must be pointed out, notably: "Le probleme des echanges culturels," in Etudes Levi-Provenqal. . ., I. 141-51, which gives a resume of the theses of the volumes edited by the author, particularly Unity and Variety in Moslem Civilization (Chicago, 1955), and, with W. Hartner, Klassizismus und Kulturverfall (Frankfurt, 1960); "An Analysis of Islamic Civilization and Cultural Anthropology," in Actes Coll. Bruxelles, 21-71. In one page alone—where the author laments: "Alas! the semantic anarchy is only too real. And the escape, far from the facts, into verbalism, all too frequent . . ." The following errors may be pointed out: al-'hiyad al-igdbi (positive neutralism), which since 1959 has been substituted by 'adam al-irihiyaz (noncommitment), has not been made to disappear because the first expression was "judged obsolete" and the second "considered to be more satisfactory," but rather because of the new orientation of Egyptian policies, after the Bandoeng period, at the moment of the repression of 1959 (cf. our Egypte . . ., 219^2); "cadres," translated by itarat in North Africa, is not called milak in the Orient, but simply, kadr, "structure," as every philosophy student, every intellectual from the Arab countries knows, is called tarkib in philosophical terminology, but never haykal, gihaz or nizam', one learns, with the greatest stupefaction, that it was the speech by M. Abdallah Ibrahim, on April 6,1959, which opened "the road to a modern Arab language in which words correspond to reality" (and before?); and to quote niqabat (trade unions), in use since 1908, in Cairo, al-gihaz al-assasi (infrastructure), in Egypt, al-tarkib al-assasi, while al-tarkib al-'ilwi designates "superstructure," these two last terms have been in use since 1940-1945, among Marxist intellectuals of the Orient, engaged in the struggle for liberation and national edification (L'arabe moderne, Paris 1960, 360). Cf. n. c. by M. Rodinson in Cahiers de I'Orient contemporain, No. 50,1952. "Those countries that intend to accede to history and make history—says Berque—probably have not even now chairs of modern history in their faculties." (Dialogue . . ., p. 1508). This text, which dates from 1960, seems to ignore the work in modern and contemporary history carried on at the University of Cairo for the past two generations, as well as in Damascus, Bagdad and Alexandria. In just one issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Historical Studies (Cairo, I, 1951, publ. in 1952), 77 pages in 194 are devoted to contemporary history (article by M. M. Safwat and by G. E. al-Chayyal). Chairs of modern and contemporary history exist in the faculties of letters and political science, in particular. These, of course, are examples, without pretending to exhaust the subject. Cf. criticism of contemporary Arab historiography by A. G. Chejne, "The Use of History by Modern Arab Writers," in Middle EastJourn., XIV (1960, 4, 382-96). Let us point to the fact that a great effort at understanding was made in European countries not directly engaged in traditional colonialism: in Germany, cf. L. Rathmann, "Zur Widerspiegelung des antiimperialistischen

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Befreiungsbewegung der arabischen Volker in der biirgerlichen deutschen Historiographie," Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft, Berlin, X, 1962, No. 3, 548-74); in Spain, F. Cantera Burgos, "Los estudios orientales en la Espana actual," Oriente Moderno, XXXV, 1955, No. 1, 236-47, etc. Perspectives de I'Orientalisme . . ., 218-32. Same theme, at the Conference of Brussels: "Orientalist sociology should aim at integrating itself in the oriental societies, not by knowledge formerly tied to colonial expansion, but through a contribution to the analysis, that is, to the construction from within." (Actes . . ., 458-9); H. Kruse-Elbeshausen, "Islamic Studies in Post-War Germany," Islamic Culture, XXVI, 1952, No. 2, 51-6; on Spain, F. Cantera Burgos, "Los estudios orientales en la Espana actual," in Oriente Moderno, XXXV, 1955, No. 1. 236^7; on Belgium, G. Ryckmans, "L'orientalisme en Belgique," Revue gen. Beige, 1947, No. 23, 724-38; on Italy, E. Rossi, "Near Eastern Studies in Italy," Middle Eastern Affairs, VIII, 1957, No. 2, 57-60; on Finland, P. Aalto, "Les etudes orientales en Finlande," Archiv Orientalny, 1951, No. 19, 79-84; A. Abel, "Approches critiques d'une etude sociologique du monde musulman contemporain," Etudes (Brussels), 1,1962, Nos. 1-2, 3-16; etc. Islam and Modern History, Princeton, 1960; in the same spirit: "A great number of Christians, in addition to the author, would be profoundly happy if a Moslem writer should undertake a similar study on contemporary Christianism." This book overflows with interesting analyses and gives an overall view of Islamic reality in Africa as well as in Asia. The budget of one sole university institute in the United States—the "Near Eastern Center" of the University of California in Los Angeles—is six times the annual budget of a particular small European country. Several Arab professors hold teaching positions in various American universities, while others direct research departments. The analysis of the "articles and studies" of the "table of contents for years 1957-1962" of the new modernist review Orient gives clear indications about this subject: four autochtonous authors out of nearly seventy-five; it is true that a good part is constituted by the presentation of texts on the literature, thought, religion and politics of our countries. But these are materials of study for an analyst who remains transcendent. "Problems of Middle Eastern History" (Washington, 1956), in Studies on the Civilization of Islam (London, 1962, 342-3); the author does not want to take into consideration the historical and sociological research work carried out in the Middle East (p. 339^4-0), except Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt, by J. Heyworth-Dunne (London, 1938). The important work of W. Montgomery Watt, Islam and the Integration of Society (London, 1961), based on the theories of K. Mannheim, is silent on recent Arab works; M. Rodinson points out the most serious in his "Bilan des etudes mohammadiennes" (in Rev. Historique, fasc. 465, Jan-Mar., 1963), 169-220. On the academic level, two works by J. Austruy, who theorizes on the homo Islamicus, on the basis of a total ignorance of the Arab language and culture: Structure economique et civilisation—I'Egypte et le destin economique de I'Islam (th. Dr., 1960), then L'Islam face au developpement economique (Paris, 1961). On the side of journalism, J. and S. Lacouture decree in the matter of culture and religion: "May the author be forgiven for having approached this subject, not reading Arabic?"; then, referring to certain omissions: "We are dealing here only with 'national' culture" . . . (L'Egypte en mouvement, 2d. ed., Paris, 1962, 306-343); yet, the work abounds in good pieces. At the same time, S. Lacouture publishes an Egypte (coll. "Petite Planete," Paris, 1962), in which 840

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literature, thought, esthetics, etc., are judged peremptorily, which singles out foreign writers living in Egypt who are totally unknown to the public. Of course, these examples could be multiplied . . . "Consider only the question of literatures. A non-European, who might visit the great reading room of the British Museum or the Bibliotheque Nationale, and ask himself what this enormous mass of books is good for, would be considered a dreadful barbarian. But there are in the world other literatures of more or less equal span, such as, for instance, Chinese literature, of which the average European, even the educated, does not understand a single word. Is he not in his turn a barbarian?" (J. Needham, Le dialogue . . ., p. 3, n. 1). C. Bremond, in a quick study on "Les Communications de masse dans les pays en voie de developpement" (in Communications, II, 1962, 56-67), judges the overall problem on the basis of reports of European experts, without any reference to an autochtonous work, of any country whatsoever. A first selection of his studies and essays will be published soon: Islam, ideologic, marxisme. "When at this date (1950) I decided to orient my research towards the history of the Chinese proletariat and the Chinese working-class movement in the wake of the October Revolution and World War I, it was essentially a sort of Pascalian bet for me, expressing the conviction that it was possible and necessary at the same time to constitute in a truly scientific discipline the study of the contemporary history of China ("Recherches sur 1'histoire du mouvement ouvrier chinois," in Mouvement Social, No. 41, Oct. 1962,1-12). The choice of the central theme of research "the workers' movement" and not "the national movement" issued from the problematic of European Marxism. The author disposes both of a library unique in the world of works and documents relating to science and technology, as well as of groups of collaborators who surround him at the "Caius and Gonville College," of which he is the principal: Wang-Ching-Ning, Lu-Gwei-Djen, Ho Ping-Yii, Kenneth Robinson, Rs'ao T'ien-Ch'in. The following volumes have already been published: vol. I: Introductory Orientations (Cambridge-London, 1954): II: History of Scientific Thought (1956); III: Mathematics and Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth (1959); IV (A): Physics and Physical Technology-Physics (1963). W. Z. Laqueur notes that the new central periodical of Soviet orientalism Sovetskoe Vostokvedenie, appeared in April 1955, the month of Bandoeng; he points out the decisive role of A. I. Mikoyan, B. G. Gafurov (at the same time member of the Academy of Sciences and the Central Committee of the C.P.), N. A. Mukhtidinov and A. F. Sultanov, all of them leaders of non-European origin, and he designates some publications that he thinks important, namely: Contemporary Persia, Contemporary Syria, the book by E. A. Lebedev on Jordan (1956), that of A. N. Kotlov on the Iraqi Revolution (1958), of I. P. Belaev, American Imperialism in Saudi Arabia (1957), and of M. F. Gataulin, Agrarian Relations in Syria (1957), etc. (The Soviet Union and the Middle East, London, 1959, 168-86). The most important publications on neo-orientalism in the socialist countries are: M. Perlmann, "The Study of the Islamic Middle East in the Soviet Union 1940-1956" (in Report on Current Research, 1957,17-26); B. G. Gafurov, "Immediate Tasks of Soviet Oriental Studies" (in Vestnik Akademii Nauk, 9, 1957); A. N. Mukhtidinov, K novym uspekham sovietskogo vostokvedenia (Moscow, 1957); M. Guboglu, "40 ans d'ctudes orientales en U.R.S.S. 1917-1957" (in Studio, et Acta Orientalia, I, 1958, 281-316), in which he speaks of the "crushing in the Trot/kyite manner of the 'mode of Asian production,' in 1934" (p. 295); "La prima conferenza Pansovietica degli

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ORIENTALISMS Orientalisti, Tashkent, 4-11 June 1957" (in Or. Mod. 38, Feb. 1958, 202); W. Z. Laqueur, "The Shifting Line in Soviet Orientalogy (in Problems of Communism, 5, 1956, 20-6); R. Loewenthal, "Russian materials on Islam and Islamic Institutions, a Selective Bibliography" (in Der Islam, XXXIII, 1958, Nos. 1-2, 280-309); then: "Russian Materials on Arabs and Arab Countries, a Select. Bibl." (in idem, XXXIV, 1959, 174-87); "Dix ans d'etudes orientales en Pologne" (in Rocz. Or]., 20, 1956, 7-14); D. Sinor, "Dix annees d'orientalisme hongrois" (in Journal Asiatique, 239, 1951, 211-37); Les actes des journees scientifiques d'orientalisme, Praha-Dobris, 20-25 June 1949; J. Reychman, "Les etudes orientales (islamiques) en Pologne" (in Stud, et Acta Orient., II, 1959, 161-87); J. Kabrda, "Les etudes orientales en Yougoslavie" (in Arch. Or. 25, 1957, 146-55); J. Blaskovic, "Les buts, 1'organisation et 1'activite de 1'ecole orientalistique Tchecoslovaque" (in Stud, et Acta Or., 2, 1959, 61-9); K. Petracek, "Les etudes arabes et islamiques et la semitologie en Tchecoslovaquie" (in Arch. Or., 19, 1951, 98-107); J. Rypka, "L'Orientalisme en Tchecoslovaquie" (in Arch. Or. 19, 1951, 15-26); M. Guboglu, "Contributions roumaines aux etudes orientales" (in Arch. Or., 24, 1956, 459-75); D. Zbaritel, Die Orientalistik in der Tschechoslovakei, Prague, 1959; etc. 47 "Christianity and the Asian Cultures" (in Theology, LXV, 1962,1-8). 48 "There were long centuries of preparation during which Europe was assimilating Arab teaching, Indian thought and Chinese technology;" "Europe is not interested in the inventions which have made these voyages (of the explorers) possible. The compass and the stern-post rudder, originally from China; the multiple masts, from India and Indonesia; the latin artimon sails due to the sailors of Islam;" "frequently one hears talk to the effect that the Europeans alone had discovered the whole rest of the world. A limited conception, and not at all true before the Renaissance. Bactrian Greeks did not discover the Chinese; on the contrary, it was the Chinese who discovered the Greeks (in the person of Tchang Tchien about 125 B.C.). Two centuries later, Kan Ying penetrated as far as the Persian Gulf, that is, a lot farther West than any Roman had traveled East. At the end of the Ming dynasty, the Chinese flag could be seen flown everywhere, in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, from Zanzibar to Borneo, and Borneo to Kamtchatka;" "The idea one hears expressed quite frequently, namely, that it is due to European civilization that the true historic sense was developed, is altogether inadmissible. The honor rather reverts to Chinese civilization, whose 24 historic dynasties, beginning in 90 B.C., form a body of work by historians without equal anywhere. (. . .) Even if one persists in considering 'historical sense' as 'philosophy of history,' the European contributions were also not the first, since Ibn Kaldoun lived three centuries before Vico;" "One cannot accept the thesis, according to which it was from Europe that the idea of making one single society of the human race radiated. The Confucean proposition, 'between the four seas all men are brothers,' dates back to the fourth century B.C. In India, Kabir was only one of the voices in the choir of poets and prophets of human solidarity;" "Certain European scholars consider that modern science and technology, in their victorious radiation across the whole world, have been accompanied by a secularized form, which has branched out, mutilated, from European civilization. They assert, not without sadness, that the European system of religious values has been rejected by all the national independence movements of Asia and Africa. Since, for these thinkers, Christianity is inseparable from the spirit of modern science; it provided, so to speak, the intellectual climate for its evolution. In accepting such theories, one was not far from admitting the predication for a new

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crusade, in order to impose European religious ideas on other cultures. Its flags could well bear the sign of the cross, but they would be born by capitalism and imperialism. But what precisely are the philosophical elements inseparable from science and technology, this is what no one has as yet been able to determine." (Le dialogues . . .) Since then the deeply human encyclica, Pacem in terns, of John XXIII has marked the will of Catholicism to put an end to this vision of things. "A. I. Mikoyan's Speech at the 25th International Congress of Orientalists" (in Problemi Vostokvedenia, 1950, No. 5, 3-6). The (disinterested) aim of orientalism is that of "the military engineer studying the offensive or defensive works of the enemy: its destruction," said Goguyer in his translation of Ibn Malik's Alfiyya (quoted by L. Massignon, Mardis de Dar el-Saldm, IX, 1958, 59); etc. K. Mueller, "Der Ostblok und die Entwicklungslander," Das Parlament, July 12,1961, 397-411. Expose in Colloque sur les recherches des instituts francais de sciences humaines en Asie, org. by the Foundation Singer-Polignac, 23-31 Oct. 1959 (Paris, 1960), 39-41. The theses established in Oriental Despotism have been severely criticized, particularly by E. E. Leach, "Hydraulic Society in Ceylon" (in Past and Present, 1959, No. 15, 2-29); J. Needham, "The Past in China's Present" (in Centennial Review, IV, 1960, No. 2, 164-5); J. Chesneaux, La recherche . , ., 12, No. 5. A recent lecture by the Hungarian scholar F. Tokei, Sur le "mode de production asiatique" at C.E.R.M. (Paris, June 1962, 35 pages), on the basis of a recent text by Marx, Formen, die der kapitalistischen Produktion vorgehen: Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, Rohentwurf (Berlin, 1953), inaugurates a new moment of Marxist research on this problem. Marx-Engels, The First Indian War of Independence, Moscow, 1960, 36-37. It is an entirely different problem than "mutual fault" based on the theory called the "reciprocity of perspectives" . . . Remarkable theoretical report by F. Althusser, "Contradiction et surde-termination," then "Sur la dialectique materialiste," La Pensee, No. 106,1962, 3-20, and No. 116,1963, 5-46. Several studies, to be published in 1963-64, formulate the first lines of our concept of civilization, national-cultural, of social evolution in the Arab world; the first, "Problematica del socialismo nel mondo arabo," in Nuovi Argomenti (61-66,1963-64,141-83). According to our opinion, the theoretical basis of the Sino-Soviet divergencies consists in the refusal as a matter of principle by the Chinese leaders of any kind of perpetuation of "europeocentrism" in Marxist theory and in revolutionary strategy. Already, in 1955, Georg Lukacs wrote: "In the course of their march towards modern civilization, in their effort to liquidate the residues of their own Middle Ages, countries such as India follow a road which gives a place at least partially to socialism. It is entirely conceivable that the original characteristics of these social transformations will express themselves through new literary forms, which could not be reduced to abstract schemata." (Die Gegenuwartsbedeutung des kritischen Realismus, 1955, Hamburg, sub, Wider den missverstandenen Realismus, Fr. trans, by de Gandillac, Paris, 1960,137). J. Chesneaux, La recherche ..., 11-16. "The 21st Congress of the C.P.S.U. and the Tasks of Orientalogy" (in Probl. Vostokv., I, 1959, 18-25); also M. Mancall, "The 21st Party Congress and Soviet Orientalogy" (in /. Asian Studies, XIX, 1960, No. 2,18-25). Enrica Collotti-Pischel, in Cina, India ed Egitto e la "fase di transizione" rightly points out the geographic and historical affinities of the Arab and 843

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59 60 61 62

63 64

65

Moslem researchers with their European colleagues, while the gap deepens as soon as China is approached (Problemi del Socialismo, VI, 1963, No. 2, 193-213). Her book, La rivoluzione ininterrotta (Turin, 1962) constitutes the most sympathetic effort undertaken by European Marxism to understand the Chinese vision of history. Collogue sur la recherche, cf. note 51. The latter, in his remarkable lectures at the Sorbonne, namely: L'Orient philosophique: generalites, definitions; Missionaires et philosophes; Sinophiles et Sinophobes (stencilled issues, Paris, 1960-62). Fung Yeou Lan, History of Chinese Philosophy, Peking, 1937, Princeton, 2 vol. (1952-3) and J. Needham, Science and Civilization . . ., vol. II. Under the impetus of the rector Cheikh Moustapha 'Abd al-Raziq (1882-1947), the method of history of Moslem philosophy was renovated, particularly in his Tamhid li tarikh al-falsafa al-Isldmiyya, Cairo, 1944. Cf. works by 'Abd al-Rahman Badawi, 'Abbas al'Aqqad, 'Osman Amin, Mohammad Youssef Moussa, Ibrahim Madkour, Isma'il Mazhar, Mohammad 'Abd alHadi Abou Rida, 'Omar Farroukh, etc. Cf. Al-fikr al-falsafi ft mi'at 'am (Amer. Univ., Beyrouth, 1962), pp. 9-70,102-241, 298-392; our review of "How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs," by De Lacy O'Leary London, 1951), in AlMagalla, 1,1957, No. 4,125-7, etc. Paul Sweezy, The Present as History, New York, 1953. Cf. Acts of the conference Probleme des Neokolonialismus und die Politik der beiden deutschen Staaten gegenuber dem nationalen Befreiungskampf der Volker, April 5-8 1961, Leipzig), 2 vol. The text quoted is from the article by Mancall. J. Chesneaux established (in La recherche . . ., 10-11) the following approximate table from the 20th Congress of Orientalists (Paris, 1948), to the 25th, held in Moscow, in 1960:

NUMBER OF COMMUNICATIONS

TOTAL

Paris Istambul Cambridge Munich Moscow

299 185

"MODERN" SUBJECTS

23 17 55 80

404 438

767

287

AFRICAN OR ASIAN AUTHORS 37 51

62 86

197

66 The Past... (in Centennial Review, IV, 1960, No. 3, 308). 67 La Revue dhistoire economique et sociale de ['Orient, dir. by Cl. Cahen (in Leyden since 1957), deals primarily with the classical periods. In the summary of the main Marxist or near-Marxist historical journals of Western Europe— Past and Present (Oxford), Recherches Internationales (Paris), Studi Storici (Rome)—the contemporary Orient continues to occupy a largely secondary place. The English Marxists (namely Lawrence and Wishart Publishers) devote much more attention to it, notably R. Palme Dutt, The Crisis of Britain and the British Empire (London, 1957), Problems of Contemporary History (1963), the works of J. Woddis on Africa, etc. 68 Quoted several times in the preceding notes. 69 On this institute, cf. Probl. Vostokv., 1960, No. 6, 221 sqq. 70 Colloque sur les recherches .. .

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ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS 71 H. Passin, China's Cultural Diplomacy. London, 1962,107-15. 72 In the United States, it is interesting to note that the "main emphasis has been put on six 'critical' languages, which are Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese and Russian; however, eighteen other Slav and Asian languages have been selected to receive attention," says the Hayter Report (p. 55), which formulates its own conclusions for Great Britain, p. 92-99.

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6.2

ORIENTALISM RECONSIDERED Edward W. Said From Cultural Critique 1 (Sept 1985): 89-107

There are two sets of problems that I'd like to take up, each of them deriving from the general issues addressed in Orientalism, of which the most important are: the representation of other cultures, societies, histories; the relationship between power and knowledge; the role of the intellectual; the methodological questions that have to do with the relationships between different kinds of texts, between text and context, between text and history. I should make a couple of things clear at the outset, however. First of all, I shall be using the word "Orientalism" less to refer to my book than to the problems to which my book is related; moreover, I shall be dealing, as will be evident, with the intellectual and political territory covered both by Orientalism (the book) as well as the work I have done since. This imposes no obligation on my audience to have read me since Orientalism', I mention it only as an index of the fact that since writing Orientalism I have thought of myself as continuing to look at the problems that first interested me in that book but which are still far from resolved. Second, I would not want it to be thought that the license afforded me by the present occasion is an attempt to answer my critics. Fortunately, Orientalism elicited a great deal of comment, much of it positive and instructive, yet a fair amount of it hostile and in some cases (understandably) abusive. But the fact is that I have not digested and understood everything that was either written or said. Instead, I have grasped some of the problems and answers proposed by some of my critics, and because they strike me as useful in focussing an argument, these are the ones I shall be taking into account in the comments that follow. Others - like my exclusion of German Orientalism, which no one has given any reason for me to have included - have frankly struck me as superficial or trivial, and there seems 846

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no point in even responding to them. Similarly, the claims made by Dennis Porter, among others, that I am ahistorical and inconsistent, would have more interest if the virtues of consistency (whatever may be intended by the term) were subjected to rigorous analysis; as for my ahistoricity that too is a charge more weighty in assertion than it is in proof. Now let me quickly sketch the two sets of problems I'd like to deal with here. As a department of thought and expertise, Orientalism of course refers to several overlapping domains: firstly, the changing historical and cultural relationship between Europe and Asia, a relationship with a 4000 year old history; secondly, the scientific discipline in the West according to which beginning in the early 19th century one specialized in the study of various Oriental cultures and traditions; and, thirdly, the ideological suppositions, images, and fantasies about a currently important and politically urgent region of the world called the Orient. The relatively common denominator between these three aspects of Orientalism is the line separating Occident from Orient, and this, I have argued, is less a fact of nature than it is a fact of human production, which I have called imaginative geography. This is, however, neither to say that the division between Orient and Occident is unchanging nor is it to say that it is simply fictional. It is to say - emphatically - that as with all aspects of what Vico calls the world of nations, the Orient and the Occident are facts produced by human beings, and as such must be studied as integral components of the social, and not the divine or natural, world. And because the social world includes the person or subject doing the studying as well as the object or realm being studied, it is imperative to include them both in any consideration of Orientalism, for, obviously enough, there could be no Orientalism without, on the one hand, the Orientalists, and on the other, the Orientals. Far from being a crudely political apprehension of what has been called the problem of Orientalism, this is in reality a fact basic to any theory of interpretation, or hermeneutics. Yet, and this is the first set of problems I want to consider, there is still a remarkable unwillingness to discuss the problems of Orientalism in the political or ethical or even epistemological contexts proper to it. This is as true of professional literary critics who have written about my book, as it is of course of the Orientalists themselves. Since it seems to me patently impossible to dismiss the truth of Orientalism's political origin and its continuing political actuality, we are obliged on intellectual as well as political grounds to investigate the resistance to the politics of Orientalism, a resistance that is richly symptomatic of precisely what is denied. If the first set of problems is concerned with the problems of Orientalism reconsidered from the standpoint of local issues like who writes or studies the Orient, in what institutional or discursive setting, for what audience, and with what ends in mind, the second set of problems takes us 847

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to a wider circle of issues. These are the issues raised initially by methodology and then considerably sharpened by questions as to how the production of knowledge best serves communal, as opposed to factional, ends, how knowledge that is non-dominative and non-coercive can be produced in a setting that is deeply inscribed with the politics, the considerations, the positions, and the strategies of power. In these methodological and moral re-considerations of Orientalism, I shall quite consciously be alluding to similar issues raised by the experiences of feminism or women's studies, black or ethnic studies, socialist and anti-imperialist studies, all of which take for their point of departure the right of formerly un- or misrepresented human groups to speak for and represent themselves in domains denned, politically and intellectually, as normally excluding them, usurping their signifying and representing functions, overriding their historical reality. In short, Orientalism reconsidered in this wider and libertarian optic entails nothing less than the creation of new objects for a new kind of knowledge. But let me now return to the local problems I referred to first. The hindsight of authors not only stimulates in them a sense of regret at what they could or ought to have done but did not; it also gives them a wider perspective in which to comprehend what they did. In my own case, I have been helped to achieve this broader understanding by nearly everyone who wrote about my book, and who saw it - for better or worse - as being part of current debates, conflicts, and contested interpretations in the Arab-Islamic world, as that world interacts with the United States and Europe. Certainly there can be no doubt that - in my own rather limited case - the consciousness of being an Oriental goes back to my youth in colonial Palestine and Egypt, although the impulse to resist its accompanying impingements was nurtured in the heady atmosphere of the postWorld War II period of independence when Arab nationalism, Nasserism, the 1967 War, the rise of the Palestine national movement, the 1973 War, the Lebanese Civil War, the Iranian Revolution and its horrific aftermath produced that extraordinary series of highs and lows which has neither ended nor allowed us a full understanding of its remarkable revolutionary impact. The interesting point here is how difficult it is to try to understand a region of the world whose principal features seem to be, first, that it is in perpetual flux, and second, that no one trying to grasp it can by an act of pure will or of sovereign understanding stand at some Archimedean point outside the flux. That is, the very reason for understanding the Orient generally and the Arab world in particular was first, that it prevailed upon one, beseeched one's attention urgently, whether for economic, political, cultural, or religious reasons, and second, that it defied neutral, disinterested, or stable definition. Similar problems are commonplace in the interpretation of literary 848

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texts. Each age, for instance, re-interprets Shakespeare, not because Shakespeare changes, but because despite the existence of numerous and reliable editions of Shakespeare, there is no such fixed and non-trivial object as Shakespeare independent of his editors, the actors who played his roles, the translators who put him in other languages, the hundreds of millions of readers who have read him or watched performances of his plays since the late sixteenth century. On the other hand, it is too much to say that Shakespeare has no independent existence at all, and that he is completely reconstituted every time someone reads, acts, or writes about him. In fact Shakespeare leads an institutional or cultural life that among other things has guaranteed his eminence as a great poet, his authorship of thirty-odd plays, his extraordinary canonical powers in the West. The point I am making here is a rudimentary one: that even so relatively inert an object as a literary text is commonly supposed to gain some of its identity from its historical moment interacting with the attentions, judgements, scholarship, and performances of its readers. But, I discovered, this privilege was rarely allowed the Orient, the Arabs, or Islam, which separately or together were supposed by mainstream academic thought to be confined to the fixed status of an object frozen once and for all in time by the gaze of Western percipients. Far from being a defense either of the Arabs or Islam - as my book was taken by many to be - my argument was that neither existed except as "communities of interpretation" which give them existence, and that, like the Orient itself, each designation represented interests, claims, projects, ambitions, and rhetorics that were not only in violent disagreement, but were in a situation of open warfare. So saturated with meanings, so overdetermined by history, religion, and politics are labels like "Arab" or "muslim" as subdivisions of "The Orient" that no one today can use them without some attention to the formidable polemical mediations that screen the objects, if they exist at all, that the labels designate. I do not think it is too much to say that the more these observations have been made by one party, the more routinely they are denied by the other; this is true whether it is Arabs or Muslims discussing the meaning of Arabism or Islam, or whether an Arab or Muslim disputes these designations with a Western scholar. Anyone who tries to suggest that nothing, not even a simple descriptive label, is beyond or outside the realm of interpretation is almost certain to find an opponent saying that science and learning are designed to transcend the vagaries of interpretation, and that objective truth is in fact attainable. This claim was more than a little political when used against Orientals who disputed the authority and objectivity of an Orientalism intimately allied with the great mass of European settlements in the Orient. At bottom, what I said in Orientalism had been said before me by A. L. Tibawi, by Abdullah Laroui, by Anwar Abdel Malek, by Talal Asad, by S. H. Alatas, by Fanon and Cesaire, by Pannikar, and 849

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Romila Thapar, all of whom had suffered the ravages of imperialism and colonialism, and who, in challenging the authority, provenance, and institutions of the science that represented them to Europe, were also understanding themselves as something more than what this science said they were. Nor was this all. The challenge to Orientalism and the colonial era of which it is so organically a part was a challenge to the muteness imposed upon the Orient as object. Insofar as it was a science of incorporation and inclusion by virtue of which the Orient was constituted and then introduced into Europe, Orientalism was a scientific movement whose analogue in the world of empirical politics was the Orient's colonial accumulation and acquisition by Europe. The Orient was therefore not Europe's interlocutor, but its silent Other. From roughly the end of the eighteenth century, when in its age, distance, and richness the Orient was re-discovered by Europe, its history had been a paradigm of antiquity and originality, functions that drew Europe's interests in acts of recognition or acknowledgement but from which Europe moved as its own industrial, economic, and cultural development seemed to leave the Orient far behind. Oriental history - for Hegel, for Marx, later for Burkhardt, Nietzsche, Spengler, and other major philosophers of history - was useful in portraying a region of great age, and what had to be left behind. Literary historians have further noted in all sorts of aesthetic writing and plastic portrayals that a trajectory of "Westering," found for example in Keats and Holderlin, customarily saw the Orient as ceding its historical preeminence and importance to the world spirit moving westwards away from Asia and towards Europe. As primitivity, as the age-old antetype of Europe, as a fecund night out of which European rationality developed, the Orient's actuality receded inexorably into a kind of paradigmatic fossilization. The origins of European anthropology and ethnography were constituted out of this radical difference, and, to my knowledge, as a discipline anthropology has not yet dealt with this inherent political limitation upon its supposedly disinterested universality. This, by the way, is one reason Johannes Fabian's book, Time and The Other: How Anthropology Constitutes Its Object is both so unique and so important; compared, say, with the standard disciplinary rationalizations and self-congratulatory cliches about hermeneutic circles offered by Clifford Geertz, Fabian's serious effort to re-direct anthropologists' attention back to the discrepancies in time, power, and development between the ethnographer and his/her constituted object is all the more remarkable. In any event, what for the most part got left out of Orientalism was precisely the very history that resisted its ideological as well as political encroachments, and this repressed or resistant history has returned in the various critiques and attacks upon Orientalism, which has 850

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uniformly and polemically been represented by these critiques as a science of imperialism. The divergences between the numerous critiques made of Orientalism as ideology and praxis, at least so far as their aims are concerned, are very wide nonetheless. Some attack Orientalism as a prelude to assertions about the virtues of one or another native culture: these are the nativists. Others criticize Orientalism as a defense against attacks on one or another political creed: these are the nationalists. Still others criticize Orientalism for falsifying the nature of Islam: these are, grosso modo, the fundamentalists. I will not adjudicate between these claims, except to say that I have explicitly avoided taking stands on such matters as the real, true, or authentic Islamic or Arab world, except as issues relating to conflicts involving partisanship, solidarity, or sympathy, although I have always tried never to forsake a critical sense or reflective detachment. But in common with all the recent critics of Orientalism I think that two things are especially important - one, a rigorous methodological vigilance that construes Orientalism less as a positive than as a critical discipline and therefore makes it subject to intense scrutiny, and two, a determintation not to allow the segregation and confinement of the Orient to go on without challenge. My own understanding of this second point has led me to the extreme position of entirely refusing designations like "Orient" and "Occident," but this is something I shall return to a little later. Depending on how they construed their roles as Orientalists, critics of the critics of Orientalism have either reinforced the affirmations of positive power lodged within Orientalism's discourse, or much less frequently alas, they have engaged Orientalism's critics in a genuine intellectual exchange. The reasons for this split are self-evident: some have to do with power and age, as well as institutional or guild defensiveness; others have to do with religious or ideological convictions. All, irrespective of whether the fact is acknowledged or not, are political - something that not everyone has found easy to acknowledge. If I may take use of my own example, when some of my critics in particular agreed with the main premises of my argument they tended to fall back on encomia to the achievements of what one of their most distinguished individuals, Maxime Rodinson, called "la science orientaliste." This view lent itself to attacks on an alleged Lysenkism lurking inside the polemics of Muslims or Arabs who lodged a protest with "Western" Orientalism, despite the fact that all the recent critics of Orientalism have been quite explicit about using such "Western" critiques as Marxism or structuralism in an effort to override invidious distinctions between East and West, between Arab and Western truth, and the like. Sensitized to the outrageous attacks upon an august and formerly invulnerable science, many accredited members of the certified professional cadre, whose division of study is the Arabs and Islam, have disclaimed any 851

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politics at all, while pressing a vigorous, but for the most part intellectually empty and ideologically intended, counter-attack. Although I said I would not respond to critics here, I need to mention a few of the more typical imputations made against me so that you can see Orientalism extending its 19th-century arguments to cover a whole incommensurate set of late 20thcentury eventualities, all of them deriving from what to the 19th-century mind is the preposterous situation of an Oriental responding to Orientalism's asseverations. For sheer heedless anti-intellectualism, unrestrained or unencumbered by the slightest trace of critical self-consciousness, no one, in my experience, has achieved the sublime confidence of Bernard Lewis, whose almost purely political exploits require more time to mention than they are worth. In a series of articles and one particularly weak book - The Muslim Discovery of Europe - Lewis has been busy responding to my argument, insisting that the Western quest for knowledge about other societies is unique, that it is motivated by pure curiosity, and that in contrast Muslims neither were able nor interested in getting knowledge about Europe, as if knowledge about Europe were the only acceptable criterion for true knowledge. Lewis's arguments are presented as emanating exclusively from the scholar's apolitical impartiality, whereas at the same time he has become an authority drawn on for anti-Islamic, anti-Arab, Zionist, and Cold War crusades, all of them underwritten by a zealotry covered with a veneer of urbanity that has very little in common with the "science" and learning Lewis purports to be upholding. Not quite as hypocritical, but no less uncritical, are younger ideologies and Orientalists like Daniel Pipes whose expertise as demonstrated in his book In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power is wholly at the service not of knowledge but of an aggressive and interventionary State - the U.S. - whose interests Pipes helps to define. Even if we leave aside the intellectually scandalous generalizing that allows Pipes to speak of Islam's anomie, its sense of inferiority, its defensiveness, as if Islam were one simple thing, and as if the quality of his either absent or impressionistic evidence were of the most secondary importance. Pipes's book testifies, I think, to Orientalism's unique resilience, its insulation from intellectual developments everywhere else in the culture, and its antediluvian imperiousness as it makes its assertions and affirmations with little regard for logic or argument. I doubt that any expert anywhere in the world would speak today of Judaism or Christianity with quite that combination of force and freedom that Pipes allows himself about Islam, although one would have thought that a book about Islamic revival would allude to parallel and related developments in styles of religious resurgence in, for example, Lebanon, Israel, and the U.S. Nor is it likely that anyone anywhere, writing about material for which, in his own words, "rumor, hearsay, and other wisps of evidence" are the only proof, will in the very same paragraph alchemically transmute rumor and hearsay into "facts" on 852

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whose "multitude" he relies in order "to reduce the importance of each." This is magic quite unworthy even of high Orientalism, and although Pipes pays his obeisance to imperialist Orientalism he masters neither its genuine learning nor its pretense at disinterestedness. For Pipes, Islam is a volatile and dangerous business, a political movement intervening in and disrupting the West, stirring up insurrection and fanaticism everywhere else. The core of Pipes's book is not simply its highly expedient sense of its own political relevance to Reagan's America where terrorism and communism fade imperceptibly into the media's images of Muslim gunners, fanatics, and rebels, but its thesis that Muslims themselves are the worst source for their own history. The pages of In the Path of God are dotted with references to Islam's incapacity for self-representation, selfunderstanding, self-consciousness, and with praise for witnesses like V. S. Naipaul who are so much more useful and clever in understanding Islam. Here, of course, is perhaps the most familiar of Orientalism's themes since the Orientals cannot represent themselves, they must therefore be represented by others who know more about Islam than Islam knows about itself. Now it is often the case that you can be known by others in different ways than you know yourself, and that valuable insights might be generated accordingly. But that is quite a different thing than pronouncing it as immutable law that outsiders ipso facto have a better sense of you as an insider than you do of yourself. Note that there is no question of an exchange between Islam's views and an outsider's: no dialogue, no discussion, no mutual recognition. There is a flat assertion of quality, which the Western policy-maker, or his faithful servant, possesses by virtue of his being Western, white, non-Muslim. Now this, I submit, is neither science, nor knowledge, nor understanding: it is a statement of power and a claim for relatively absolute authority. It is constituted out of racism, and it is made comparatively acceptable to an audience prepared in advance to listen to its muscular truths. Pipes speaks to and for a large clientele for whom Islam is not a culture, but a nuisance; most of Pipes's readers will, in their minds, associate what he says about Islam with the other nuisances of the 60's and 70's - blacks, women, post-colonial Third World nations that have tipped the balance against the U.S. in such places as UNESCO and the U.N., and for their pains have drawn forth the rebuke of Senator Moynihan and Mrs. Kirkpatrick. In addition, Pipes - and the rows of like-minded Orientalists and experts he represents as their common denominator - stands for programmatic ignorance. Far from trying to understand Islam in the context of imperialism and the revenge of an abused, but internally very diverse, segment of humanity, far from availing himself of the impressive recent work on Islam in different histories and societies, far from paying some attention to the immense advances in critical theory, in social science and 853

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humanistic research, in the philosophy of interpretation, far from making some slight effort to acquaint himself with the vast imaginative literature produced in the Islamic world, Pipes obdurately and explicitly aligns himself with colonial Orientalists like Snouck Hurgronje and shamelessly procolonial renegrades like V. S. Naipaul, so that from the eyrie of the State Department and the National Security Council he might survey and judge Islam at will. I have spent this much time talking about Pipes only because he usefully serves to make some points about Orientalism's large political setting, which is routinely denied and suppressed in the sort of claim proposed by its main spokesman, Bernard Lewis, who has the effrontery to disassociate Orientalism from its 200 year old partnership with European imperialism and associate it instead with modern classical philology and the study of ancient Greek and Roman culture. Perhaps it is also worth mentioning about this larger setting that it comprises two other elements, about which I'd like to speak very briefly, namely the recent (but at present uncertain) prominence of the Palestinian movement, and secondly, the demonstrated resistance of Arabs in the United States and elsewhere against their portrayal in the public realm. As for the Palestinian issue - the question of Palestine and its fateful encounter with Zionism, on the one hand, and the guild of Orientalism, its professional caste-consciousness as a corporation of experts protecting their terrain and their credentials from outside scrutiny, on the other hand, account for much of the animus against my critique of Orientalism. The ironies here are rich, and I shall restrict myself to enumerating a small handful. Consider the case of one Orientalist who publicly attacked my book (he told me in a private letter) not because he disagreed with it - on the contrary, he felt that what I said was just - but because he had to defend the honor of his profession!! Or, take the connection - explicitly made by two of the authors I cite in Orientalism, Renan and Proust between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Here, one would have expected many scholars and critics to have seen the conjuncture, that hostility to Islam in the modern Christian West has historically gone hand in hand with, has stemmed from the same source, has been nourished at the same stream as anti-Semitism, and that a critique of the orthodoxies, dogmas, and disciplinary procedures of Orientalism contribute to an enlargement of our understanding of the cultural mechanisms of anti-Semitism. No such connection has ever been made by critics, who have seen in the critique of Orientalism an opportunity for them to defend Zionism, support Israel, and launch attacks on Palestinian nationalism. The reasons for this confirm the history of Orientalism, for, as the Israeli commentator Dani Rubenstein has remarked, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the destruction of Palestinian society, and the sustained Zionist assault upon Palestinian nationalism has quite literally been led and 854

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staffed by Orientalists. Whereas in the past it was European Christian Orientalists who supplied European culture with arguments for colonizing and suppressing Islam, as well as for despising Jews, it is now the Jewish national movement that produces a cadre of colonial officials whose ideological theses about the Islamic or Arab mind are implemented in the administration of the Palestinian Arabs, an oppressed minority within the white-European-democracy that is Israel. Rubenstein notes with some sorrow that the Hebrew University's Islamic studies department has produced every one of the colonial officials and Arab experts who run the Occupied Territories. One further irony should be mentioned in this regard: just as some Zionists have construed it as their duty to defend Orientalism against its critics, there has been a comic effort by some Arab nationalists to see the Orientalist controversy as an imperialist plot to enhance American control over the Arab world. According to this seriously argued but extraordinarily implausible scenario, we are informed that critics of Orientalism turn out not to be anti-imperialist at all, but covert agents of imperialism. The next step from this is to suggest that the best way to attack imperialism is either to become an Orientalist or not to say anything critical about it. At this stage, however, I concede that we have left the world of reality for a world of such illogic and derangement that I cannot pretend to understand its structure or sense. Underlying much of the discussion of Orientalism is a disquieting realization that the relationship between cultures is both uneven and irremediably secular. This brings us to the point I alluded to a moment ago, about recent Arab and Islamic efforts, well-intentioned for the most part, but sometimes motivated by unpopular regimes, who, in attracting attention to the shoddiness of the Western media in representing the Arabs or Islam, divert scrutiny from the abuses of their rule and therefore make efforts to improve the so-called image of Islam and the Arabs. Parallel developments have been occurring, as no one needs to be told, in UNESCO where the controversy surrounding the world information order - and proposals for its reform by various Third World and Socialist governments - has taken on the dimensions of a major international issue. Most of these disputes testify, first of all, to the fact that the production of knowledge, or information, of media images, is unevenly distributed: its locus and the centers of its greatest force are located in what, on both sides of the divide, has been polemically called the metropolitan West. Second, this unhappy realization, on the part of weaker parties and cultures, has reinforced their grasp of the fact that, although there are many divisions within it, there is only one secular and historical world, and that neither nativism, nor divine intervention, nor regionalism, nor ideological smokescreens can hide societies, cultures, and peoples from each other, especially not from those with the force and will to penetrate others for political as well as economic 855

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ends. But, third, many of these disadvantaged post-colonial states and their loyalist intellectuals have, in my opinion, drawn the wrong set of conclusions, which in practise is that one must either attempt to impose control upon the production of knowledge at the source, or, in the worldwide media economy, to attempt to improve, enhance, and ameliorate the images currently in circulation without doing anything to change the political situation from which they emanate and on which to a certain extent they are based. The failings of these approaches strike me as obvious, and here I don't want to go into such matters as the squandering of immense amounts of petro-dollars for various short-lived public relations scams, or the increasing repression, human-rights abuses, outright gangsterism that has taken place in many formerly colonial countries, all of them occurring in the name of national security and fighting neo-imperialism. What I do want to talk about is the much larger question of what, in the context recently provided by such relatively small efforts as the critique of Orientalism, is to be done, and on the level of politics and criticism how we can speak of intellectual work that isn't merely reactive or negative. I come finally now to the second and, in my opinion, the more challenging and interesting set of problems that derive from the reconsideration of Orientalism. One of the legacies of Orientalism, and indeed one of its epistemological foundations, is historicism, that is, the view propounded by Vico, Hegel, Marx, Ranke, Dilthey, and others, that if humankind has a history it is produced by men and women, and can be understood historically as, at each given period, epoch, or moment, possessing a complex, but coherent unity. So far as Orientalism in particular and the European knowledge of other societies in general have been concerned, historicism meant that the one human history uniting humanity either culminated in or was observed from the vantage point of Europe, or the West. What was neither observed by Europe nor documented by it was therefore "lost" until, at some later date, it too could be incorporated by the new sciences of anthropology, political economics, and linguistics. It is out of this later recuperation, of what Eric Wolf has called people without history, that a still later disciplinary step was taken, the founding of the science of world history, whose major practitioners include Braudel, Wallerstein, Perry Anderson, and Wolf himself. But along with the greater capacity for dealing with - in Ernst Bloch's phrase - the non-synchronous experiences of Europe's Other has gone a fairly uniform avoidance of the relationship between European imperialism and these variously constituted, variously formed and articulated knowledges. What, in other words, has never taken place is an epistemological critique at the most fundamental level of the connection between the development of a historicism which has expanded and developed enough to include antithetical attitudes such as ideologies of Western 856

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imperialism and critiques of imperialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the actual practise of imperialism by which the accumulation of territories and population, the control of economies, and the incorporation and homogenization of histories are maintained. If we keep this in mind we will remark, for example, that in the methodological assumptions and practise of world history - which is ideologically anti-imperialist - little or no attention is given to those cultural practises like Orientalism or ethnography affiliated with imperialism, which in genealogical fact fathered world history itself; hence the emphasis in world history as a discipline has been on economic and political practises, defined by the processes of world historical writing, as in a sense separate and different from, as well as unaffected by, the knowledge of them which world history produces. The curious result is that the theories of accumulation on a world scale, or the captialist world state, or lineages of absolutism depend (a) on the same displaced percipient and historicist observer who had been an Orientalist or colonial traveler three generations ago; (b) they depend also on a homogenizing and incorporating world historical scheme that assimilated non-synchronous developments, histories, cultures, and peoples to it; and (c) they block and keep down latent epistemological critiques of the institutional, cultural, and disciplinary instruments linking the incorporative practise of world history with partial knowledges like Orientalism, on the one hand, and with continued "Western" hegemony of the non-European, peripheral world, on the other. In fine, the problem is once again historicism and the universalizing and self-validating that has been endemic to it. Bryan Turner's exceptionally important little book Marx and The End of Orientalism went a very great part of the distance towards fragmenting, dissociating, dislocating, and decentering the experiential terrain covered at present by universalizing historicism; what he suggests in discussing the epistemological dilemma is the need to go beyond the polarities and binary oppositions of Marxisthistoricist thought (voluntarisms vs. determinism, Asiatic vs. Western society, change vs. stasis) in order to create a new type of analysis of plural, as opposed to single, objects. Similarly, in a whole series of studies produced in a number of both interrelated and frequently unrelated fields, there has been a general advance in the process of, as it were, breaking up, dissolving, and methodologically as well as critically re-conceiving the unitary field ruled hitherto by Orientalism, historicism, and what could be called essentialist universalism. I shall be giving examples of this dissolving and decentering process in a moment. What needs to be said about it immediately is that it is neither purely methodological nor purely reactive in intent. You do not respond, for example, to the tyrannical conjuncture of colonial power with scholarly Orientalism simply by proposing an alliance between nativist sentiment buttressed by some variety of native ideology to combat them. This, it 857

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seems to me, has been the trap into which many Third World and antiimperialist activists fell in supporting the Iranian and Palestinian struggles, and who found themselves either with nothing to say about the abominations of Khomeini's regime or resorting, in the Palestine case, to the timeworn cliches of revolutionism and, if I might coin a deliberately barbaric phrase, rejectionary armed-strugglism after the Lebanese debacle. Nor can it be a matter simply of re-cycling the old Marxist or world-historical rhetoric, which only accomplishes the dubiously valuable task of reestablishing intellectual and theoretical ascendancy of the old, by now impertinent and genealogically flawed, conceptual models. No: we must, I believe, think both in political and above all theoretical terms, locating the main problems in what Frankfurt theory identified as domination and division of labor, and along with those, the problem of the absence of a theoretical and Utopian as well as libertarian dimension in analysis. We cannot proceed, therefore, unless we dissipate and re-dispose the material of historicism into radically different objects and pursuits of knowledge, and we cannot do that until we are aware clearly that no new projects of knowledge can be constituted unless they fight to remain free of the dominance and professionalized particularism that come with historicist systems and reductive, pragmatic, or functionalist theories. These goals are less grand and difficult than my description sounds. For the reconsideration of Orientalism has been intimately connected with many other activities of the sort I referred to earlier, and which it now becomes imperative to articulate in more detail. Thus, for example, we can now see that Orientalism is a praxis of the same sort, albeit in different territories, as male gender dominance, or patriarchy, in metropolitan societies: the Orient was routinely described as feminine, its riches as fertile, its main symbols the sensual woman, the harem, and and the despotic but curiously attractive - ruler. Moreover, Orientals like Victorian housewives were confined to silence and to unlimited enriching production. Now much of this material is manifestly connected to the configurations of sensual, racial, and political asymmetry underlying mainstream modern Western culture, as adumbrated and illuminated respectively by feminists, by black studies critics, and by anti-imperialist activists. To read, for example, Sandra Gilbert's recent and extraordinarily brilliant study of Rider Haggard's She is to perceive the narrow correspondence between suppressed Victorian sexuality at home, its fantasies abroad, and the tightening hold of imperialist ideology on the late 19th-century male imagination. Similarly, a work like Abdul JanMohamed's Manichean Aesthetics investigates the parallel, but unremittingly separate artistic worlds of white and black fictions of the same place, Africa, suggesting that even in imaginative literature a rigid ideological system operates beneath a freer surface. Or in a study like Peter Gran's The Islamic Roots of Capitalism, which is written out of a polemically although meticulously researched and 858

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scrupulously concrete anti-imperialist and anti-Orientalist historical stance, one can begin to sense what a vast invisible terrain of human effort and ingenuity lurks beneath the frozen Orientalist surface formerly carpeted by the discourse of Islamic or Oriental economic history. There are many more examples that one could give of analyses and theoretical projects undertaken out of similar impulses as those fuelling the anti-Orientalist critique. All of them are interventionary in nature, that is, they self-consciously situate themselves at vulnerable conjunctural nodes of ongoing disciplinary discourses where each of them posits nothing less than new objects of knowledge, new praxes of humanist (in the broad sense of the word) activity, new theoretical models that upset or at the very least radically alter the prevailing paradigmatic norms. One might list here such disparate efforts as Linda Nochlin's explorations of 19th-century Orientalist ideology as working within major art-historical contexts; Hanna Batatu's immense re-structuring of the terrain of the modern Arab state's political behavior; Raymond Williams's sustained examinations of structures of feeling, communities of knowledge, emergent or alternative cultures, patterns of geographical thought (as in his remarkable The Country and The City); Talal Asad's account of anthropological self-capture in the work of major theorists, and along with that his own studies in the field; Eric Hobsbawm's new formulation of "the invention of tradition" or invented practises studied by historians as a crucial index both of the historian's craft and, more important, of the invention of new emergent nations; the work produced in re-examination of Japanese, Indian, and Chinese culture by scholars like Masao Miyoshi, Eqbal Ahmad, Tarik Ali, Romila Thapar, the group around Ranajit Guha (Subaltern Studies), Gayatri Spivak, and younger scholars like Homi Bhabha and Partha Mitter; the freshly imaginative reconsideration by Arab literary critics - the Fusoul and Mawakif groups, Elias Khouri, Kamal Abu Deeb, Mohammad Bannis, and others - seeking to redefine and invigorate the reified classical structures of Arabic literary performance, and as a parallel to that, the imaginative works of Juan Goytisolo and Salman Rushdie whose fictions and criticism are self-consciously written against the cultural stereotypes and representations commanding the field. It is worth mentioning here too the pioneering efforts of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, and the fact that twice recently, in their presidential addresses an American Sinologist (Benjamin Schwartz) and Indologist (Ainslee Embree) have reflected seriously upon what the critique of Orientalism means for their fields, a public reflection as yet denied Middle Eastern scholars. Perennially, there is the work carried out by Noam Chomsky in political and historical fields, an example of independent radicalism and uncompromising severity unequalled by anyone else today. Or in literary theory, there are the powerful theoretical articulations of a social, in the widest and deepest sense, model for narrative put forward by 859

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Fredric Jameson; Richard Ohmann's empirically arrived-at definitions of canon privilege and institution in his recent work; revisionary Emersonian perspectives formulated in the critique of contemporary technological and imaginative, as well as cultural ideologies by Richard Poirier; the decentering, redistributive ratios of intensity and drive studied by Leo Bersani. One could go on mentioning many more, but I certainly do not wish to suggest that by excluding particular examples I have thought them less eminent or less worth attention. What I want to do in conclusion is to try to draw them together into a common endeavor which, it has seemed to me, can inform the larger enterprise of which the critique of Orientalism is a part. First, we note a plurality of audiences and constituencies; none of the works and workers I have cited claims to be working on behalf of One audience which is the only one that counts, or for one supervening, overcoming Truth, a truth allied to Western (or for that matter Eastern) reason, objectivity, science. On the contrary, we note here a plurality of terrains, multiple experiences, and different constituencies, each with its admitted (as opposed to denied) interest, political desiderata, disciplinary goals. All these efforts work out of what might be called a decentered consciousness, not less reflective and critical for being decentered, for the most part non- and in some cases anti-totalizing and anti-systematic. The result is that instead of seeking common unity by appeals to a center of sovereign authority, methodological consistency, canonicity, and science, they offer the possibility of common grounds of assembly between them. They are therefore planes of activity and praxis, rather than one topography commanded by a geographical and historical vision locatable in a known center of metropolitan power. Second, these activities and praxes are consciously secular, marginal, and oppositional with reference to the mainstream, generally authoritarian systems from which they emanate, and against which they now agitate. Thirdly, they are political and practical in as much as they intend - without necessarily succeeding in implementing - the end of dominating, coercive systems of knowledge. I do not think it too much to say that the political meaning of analysis, as carried out in all these fields, is uniformly and programmatically libertarian by virtue of the fact that, unlike Orientalism, it is not based on the finality and closure of antiquarian or curatorial knowledge, but on investigative open models of analysis, even though it might seem that analyses of this sort frequently difficult and abstruse - are in the final count paradoxically quietistic. I think we must remember the lesson provided by Adorno's negative dialectics, and regard analysis as in the fullest sense being against the grain, deconstructive, Utopian. But there remains the one problem haunting all intense, self-convicted, and local intellectual work, the problem of the division of labor, which is a necessary consequence of that reification and commodification first and most powerfully analysed in this century by Georg Lukacs. This is the 860

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problem sensitively and intelligently put by Myra Jehlen for women's studies: whether in identifying and working through anti-dominant critiques, subaltern groups - women, blacks, and so on - can resolve the dilemma of autonomous fields of experience and knowledge that are created as a consequence. A double kind of possessive exclusivism could set in: the sense of being an excluding insider by virtue of experience (only women can write for and about women, and only literature that treats women or Orientals well is good literature), and second, being an excluding insider by virtue of method (only Marxists, anti-Orientalists, feminists can write about economics, Orientalism, women's literature). This is where we are now, at the threshold of fragmentation and specialization, which impose their own parochial dominations and fussy defensiveness, or on the verge of some grand synthesis which I for one believe could very easily wipe out both the gains and the oppositional consciousness provided hitherto by these counter-knowledges. Several possibilities propose themselves, and I shall conclude simply by listing them. A need for greater crossing of boundaries, for greater interventionism in crossdisciplinary activity, a concentrated awareness of the situation - political, methodological, social, historical - in which intellectual and cultural work is carried out. A clarified political and methodological commitment to the dismantling of systems of domination which since they are collectively maintained must, to adopt and transform some of Gramsci's phrases, be collectively fought, by mutual siege, war of maneuver and war of position. Lastly, a much sharpened sense of the intellectual's role both in the denning of a context and in changing it, for without that, I believe, the critique of Orientalism is simply an ephemeral pastime.

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WRITING POSTORIENTALIST HISTORIES OF THE THIRD WORLD Perspectives from Indian Historiography* Cyan Prakash From Comparative Studies in Society and History 32.2 (April 1990): 383^08

To ask how the "third world writes its own history" appears, at first glance, to be exceedingly naive. At best, it reaffirms the East-West and Orient-Occident oppositions that have shaped historical writings and seems to be a simple-minded gesture of solidarity. Furthermore, in apparently privileging the writings of historians with third-world origins, this formulation renders such scholars into "native informants" whose discourse is opened up for further disquisitions on how "they" think of "their" history. In short, the notion of the third world writing its own history seems to reek of essentialism. Seen in another way, this formulation can be construed as positing that the third world has a fixed space of its own from which it can speak in a sovereign voice. For many, this notion of a separate terrain is rendered problematic by the increasing rapidity and the voracious appetite with which the postmodern culture imperializes and devours spaces. In view of the above objections, it appears hazardous to even pose, let alone answer, the question as to how the third world writes its own postOrientalist history; and, given the fire drawn by well-intentioned attempts to locate this third-world voice,1 such an enterprise seems positively foolhardy. I persist precisely because the call for mapping post-Orientalist historiographies also acknowledges that the knowledge about the third world is historical. The attention to the historicity of knowledge demanded by the invitation to chart post-Orientalist historiography, therefore, runs counter to those procedures that ground the third world in essences and 862

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see history as determined by those essential elements. It requires the rejection of those modes of thinking which configure the third world in such irreducible essences as religiosity, under-development, poverty, nationhood, non-Westerness; and it asks that we repudiate attempts to see thirdworld histories in terms of these quintessential principles. Thus, the previously mentioned objections, instead of invoking essentialism, unsettle the calm presence that the essentialist categories—east and west, first world and third world—inhabit in our thought. This disruption makes it possible to treat the third world as a variety of shifting positions which have been discursively articulated in history. Viewed in this manner, the Orientalist, nationalist, Marxist, and other historiographies become visible as discursive attempts to constitute their objects of knowledge, that is, the third world. As a result, rather than appearing as a fixed and essential object, the third world emerges as a series of historical positions, including those that enunciate essentialisms. This essay is an attempt to map the different positions occupied by India in the post-Orientalist historiographies. To do so, however, requires that we begin by defining and situating Orientalism. For this purpose, nothing is more suitable than Edward Said's general definition of Orientalism as a body of knowledge produced by texts and institutional practices.2 According to him, Orientalism was responsible for generating authoritative and essentializing statements about the Orient and was characterized by a mutually supporting relationship between power and knowledge. As I reflect on Said's analysis, there are three key elements that in my view gave Orientalism its coherence: first, its authoritative status; second, its fabrication of the Orient in terms of founding essences invulnerable to historical change and prior to their representation in knowledge; and third, its incestuous relationship with the Western exercise of power over what we call the third world. This essay analyzes Orientalism in India with respect to these three elements in order to sketch in what ways and in which contexts Orientalism has survived and changed, and describes histories that can be called post-Orientalist. Orientalism's India Orientalism was a European enterprise from the very beginning. The scholars were European; the audience was European; and the Indians figured as inert objects of knowledge. The Orientalist spoke for the Indian and represented the object in texts. Because the Indian was separated from the Orientalist knower, the Indian as object—as well as its representation—was construed to be outside and opposite of self; thus, both the self and the other, the rational and materialist British and the emotional and spiritual Indian, appeared as autonomous, ontological, and essential entities. Of course, the two essential entities, the spiritual India 863

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and the materialistic West, made sense only in the context of each other and the traces of each in the other, which suggested that heterogeneity and difference lay beneath the binary opposition, although the process of rendering India into an object external both to its representation and to the knower concealed this difference. It also made the colonial relationship— the enabling condition of British Orientalism—appear as if it was irrelevant to the production of knowledge. As a result, although colonial dominance produced the East-West construct, it looked as if this binary opposition not only predated the colonial relationship but also accounted for it. In other words, Orientalist textual and institutional practices created the spiritual and sensuous Indian as an opposite of the materialistic and rational British, and offered them as justifications for the British conquest. To be sure, the above representations underwent considerable change over time, but Orientalism's basic procedures of knowledge remained remarkably stable. They were developed soon after the East India Company conquered Bengal in 1757. Since the company required that its officers have a knowledge about the conquered people, administrators learned Persian and Sanskrit and soon began to publish texts. Alexander Dow, an army officer, translated one of the standard Persian histories into English, The History of Hindustan in 1768-71; and N. B. Halhead compiled and translated the Sanskrit Dharmashastras as A Code of Gentoo Laws, or Ordinations of the Pundits in 1776.3 With the involvement of more officials—notably, William Jones, H. T. Colebrooke, John Shore, and Francis Gladwin—this process of learning Sanskrit and Persian, as well as that of publishing texts and commentaries, gathered speed and led to the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784. From then on, a number of research journals emerged, such as the Asiatik Researches (1788), the Quarterly Journal (1821), and the Journal of the Asiatic Society (1832). Orientalist knowledge spread to European universities; and scholars with no direct contact with India, Max Milller in London and the Romantics on the continent, saw Europe's origins or childhood in India.4 In this developing discourse, the discovery of affinities between Sanskrit and European languages provided the premise for formulating the belief in an "Aryan race" from which the Europeans and Brahmans were seen to originate.5 This search and discovery of European origins in the India of Sanskrit, the Brahmans, and texts essentialized and distanced India in two ways. First, because it embodied Europe's childhood, India was temporally separated from Europe's present and made incapable of achieving "progress." As an eternal child detached altogether from time, India was construed as an external object available to the Orientalist's gaze. Second, composed of language and texts, India appeared to be unchanging and passive. These distancing procedures overlooked the European dominance of the world that provided the conditions for the production of this knowledge and that had constituted this discursive dominance. The India of the 864

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Orientalist's knowledge emerged as Europe's other, an essential and distanced entity knowable by the detached and distanced observer of the European Orientalist. While essentialism, distancing, and the centrality of the opposition of Europe and India deployed in the formative phase of Orientalism outlived the early Orientalists, the specific configurations of knowledge did not. As the genuine respect and love for the Orient of William Jones gave way to the cold utilitarian scrutiny of James Mill, and then to missionary contempt, the picture changed.6 Sanskrit, texts, and Brahmans were no longer attractive in the harsh light thrown by the liberal reformers and critics. Instead, they became accountable for India's lack of civilization, moral obligations, good government, and historical change. Such revisions and refigurations of representations were occasioned by debates over such major policy questions as land revenue settlements, educational and administrative policies, and the renewal of the charter for the East India Company.7 These were occasions when the ideas current in Europe were most conspicuously applied to India. In the course of time, the application of Eurocentric ideas added to the stock of images available for representing India, but the on-the-spot official reports, Parliamentary inquiries and papers, and detailed surveys during the first half of the nineteenth century exponentially crowded the representational field. These became regularized and professionalized in the late nineteenth century, as linguistic, ethnological, archaeological, and Census surveys and the District Gazetteers emerged. With these, the older India of Sanskrit, texts, and Brahmans was pushed off center by details on peasants, revenue, rent, caste, customs, tribes, popular religious practices, linguistic diversity, agroeconomic regimes, male and female populations, and other such topics. In this enlarged but congested picture, the India of William Jones was less relevant. The enormous growth, change, and the increasing complexity of Orientalist knowledge was of crucial importance; for, committed as British rule was to a government based on accurate knowledge of facts, changes in knowledge had direct implications for the technologies of rule. For example, when the ethnographic surveys and census operations commenced in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, they broke society into groups, households, and individuals, making them available for piecing together through statistics. Because the society aggregated from the new units was constituted by an apparently objective and culturally neutral classificatory system of individuals, households, occupations, it became available to more extensive administrative penetration. This brought the older debates on the nature of Indian village communities, culminating in Baden-Powell's 1892 publication of The Land Systems of British India, to an end. The government no longer considered the indirect systems of rule—consisting of contractual agreements with village leaders 865

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as necessary—and it reached down to the individuals configured by their caste and tribal status.8 The discursive space for such changes in knowledge was provided by the Orientalist construction of India as an external object knowable through representations.9 Because the government viewed knowledge contained in official documents as a representation of reality, or in one official's words in 1860, as a "photograph of the actual state of the community,"10 it was always possible to argue that the photograph did not represent the external reality adequately, thus requiring more adequate representations. This representational model of knowledge, coupled with the exigencies of colonial government, enabled the scholarly field of Orientalism, or Indology, to repeatedly refigure itself. The consequent refiguration, however, did not unsettle the authority of the Orientalist, the essentialization of India, and its representation as an object in binary opposition to Europe. The lines were drawn clearly, with separate authentic and autonomous essences—India and Europe (or England)—clearly reflected in that knowledge. The old Orientalist, buried in texts and devoted to learning Sanskrit and Persian, was replaced by the official, the scholar, and the modernizer. The new Orientalist administered the fruits of modern knowledge and government while being careful not to upset the Indian's presumed outmoded and traditionalist beliefs. Such actions and projections reaffirmed India's representation as a religiously driven social organism and found that the Indian's disinterest in modern politics and historical change was reflected in Sanskritic Hinduism and popular "animism." This representation allowed the British to see themselves as engaged in managing and changing such areas as politics and the economy in which the Indian social organism and thought was incapable of operating.11 Nationalist historiography The first significant challenge to this Orientalized India came from nationalism and nationalist historiography, albeit accompanied by a certain contradiction. While agreeing to the notion of an India essentialized in relation to Europe, the nationalists transformed the object of knowledge— India—from passive to active, from inert to sovereign, capable of relating to History and Reason.12 Nationalist historiographers accepted the patterns set for them by British scholarship. They accepted the periodization of Indian history into the Hindu, Muslim, and British periods, later addressed as the ancient, medieval, and modern eras; relegated caste to sections on "Society," that is, to the history of society with politics left out; and reiterated the long and unchanging existence of a Sanskritic Indie civilization. In the 1920s and the 1930s, when nationalism became a mass phenome866

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non, a professional Indian historiography emerged to contest British interpretations. It is significant that these historians chose ancient India as the ground for this contest. If some of the early Orientalists had seen Europe's origin in the India of the texts, the nationalists saw the origin of the modern nation in that same ancient India; and for such historians, the old Orientalist scholarship's sympathetic remarks on the India of the texts, such as Max Miiller's studies, became objective and authoritative statements that affirmed India's great past.13 Nationalist historians, such as H. C. Raychaudhuri, K. P. Jayaswal, Beni Prasad, R. C. Majumdar, and R. K. Mookerjee, studied ancient emperors and saw the rise of a nationstate in the creation of these ancient empires. Furthermore, as Romila Thapar points out, it was important for this historiography to claim that everything good in India—spirituality, Aryan origins, political ideas, art— had completely indigenous origins. In fact, Southeast Asian cultures were seen as outgrowths of the glorious Indian civilization, and the period of the Gupta empire (320-540 A.D.) came to symbolize the "Golden Age," when Hinduism prospered, national unity soared, and economic wealth, social harmony, and cultural achievements reached a state of plenitude. Later, the Muslims came (in the eleventh to twelfth centuries), and it was all downhill after that. This abbreviated account of nationalist historiography does not do full justice to its achievements and complexity. These historians forced debates on sources and brought out much that was unknown, and thus regional histories came into focus. The assumption that all that was valuable in world civilizations originated in Greece was challenged. The Orientalist authority to speak for India was also contested, and Hindu chauvinist interpretations did not go unquestioned. Jawaharlal Nehru's The Discovery of India, for example, was marked by an awareness of cultural and historical diversity, and argued that it was "undesirable to use Hindu or Hinduism for Indian culture."14 Although for him, too, spirituality also defined India's past essence and that the Gupta age represented the blossoming of nationalism, the Hindu revivalist historiography was too parochial for his secular and cosmopolitan outlook. The India that he discovered and presented was a secular entity, not a Hindu nation, that had cradled a variety of religions and sects through centuries, and had acquired a degree of unity while surviving conquests and conflicts. His Discovery of India was a documentation of this unity through history; and, for him, the nationalist movement was designed to free this unity so that India could join the world-historical march towards modernity. Clearly, the differences between Nehru and the nationalist interpretations of Hindu chauvinistic historians were important. There can be no doubt that the concept of India as essentially Sanskritic and Hindu—glorious in ancient times, then subjected to Muslim tyranny and degeneration in the Middle Ages, which made it an easy target for British conquest— 867

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had and continues to have deadly implications in a multiethnic country like India. While recognizing the importance of these differences, I also want to highlight that which was common to nationalism as a whole: the assumption that India was an undivided subject, that is, that it possessed a unitary self and a singular will that arose from its essence and was capable of autonomy and sovereignty. From this point of view, the task of History was to unleash this subjectivity from colonial control; and historiography was obliged to represent this unleashing. The nationalists acted on this assumption by questioning the authority of Orientalists. They accused the older Indological knowledge of biases and judged it as being inadequate for representing reality. In its place, nationalist historiography offered more adequate portraits. A good example of this was the interpretation of the 1857 revolt in north India. For British historians, mutiny was the correct term because the revolt was nothing but an uprising of disaffected soldiers; calling it anything other than a mutiny meant conceding that it had some legitimacy. In 1909, a Hindu nationalist, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, wrote a book entitled The Indian War of Independence, 1857 and argued that it was a national revolt.15 Nationalist historiography's commitment to the idea of India as an essential and undivided entity, and to knowledge as more or less adequate representation of the real, underlay such revisions. In spite of such complicities in Orientalist procedures, nationalism broke the exclusivity of Indology as a European discipline. In the discourse of the nationalists, the objects of description did not owe their meanings only to their opposition to European essences; rather, it was the ontological being of India as a nation—no doubt barely visible and, for the most part in its history, enslaved—that was the most evident element in providing meaning to historical events and actors. So, when politicians spoke of a nation in the making, they were referring to the task of making the masses conscious of a nation already in existence as an objective reality. The nationalist historiography's narrativization of India nationalism, brought to a successful conclusion in the achievement of independence in 1947, represents one trajectory in the writing of post-Orientalist history, despite its complicity in many of the categories of thought and procedures of Orientalism; however, burdened with the task of articulating an anticolonial national view, it could not but be different from Orientalism. Thus, the nationalists produced impressive scholarship on the "drain" of wealth from India to Britain, on the deindustrialization of the country by British manufacturing interests, the neglect of Indian industrialization, and other such questions.16 For this economic and nationalist historiography, as for cultural and political historians, the subject was always India, and the interests of the nation were always at stake. Powerful pronouncements of these kinds established India as an active subject. Therefore, we need to recognize it as one of the ways in which the "third world writes its own 868

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history." The nationalist writing of history—both before and after independence—did not, however, break free from two elements of the Orientalist canon. First, the nationalists, like the Orientalists, also assumed that India was an undivided entity but attributed it a sovereign and unitary will that was expressed in history. India now emerged as an active and undivided subject that had found its expression in the nation-state and transcended class and ethnic divisions, rather than being the inert object of Orientalist representations. Second, India was given an ontological presence prior to and independent of its representations which followed the procedures of Orientalism. Nationalism's confinement within the Orientalist problematic should not be surprising. As Partha Chatterjee argues, the nationalists opposed colonialism in the name of Reason through their claim that India's ancient history had followed, if not pioneered, a universal spirit leading to the nation-state, republicanism, economic development, and nationalism that reaffirmed the cunning of Reason; and their assertion that a "backward" country like India could modernize itself, if liberated from colonial slavery. The latter reaffirmed, however, the projects of modernity, making India ideologically incapable of transcending the Orientalist problematic.17 Nationalism hijacked even Gandhi's antimodern ideology in its drive to create a nation-state devoted to modernization and turned him into a figure revered for his ability to appeal to the "irrational" peasants and for the mystical bond that he was seen to have with the masses. That historiography became a part of this project should cause no wonder. History, as a discipline, was, after all, an instrument of the post-Enlightenment regime of Reason; and the Indian nationalist historians, being Western-educated elites, were its eager proponents.

The refigurations of essentialized India Nationalist historiography so discredited some of the specific representations of Orientalism that the image of a sensuous, inscrutable, and wholly spiritual India no longer enjoys academic prestige. More important, it made histories centered on India as the norm. The postwar decolonization, anticolonial sentiments, and upsurges against neocolonialism also created a congenial political and intellectual climate for an orientation based on India. This orientation was institutionalized in the United States by the establishment in the 1950s of study programs on the South Asia area. Scholarship founded on this basis did much to bring new evidence on history and culture to light by historians who moved rapidly from the study of imperial policies to "realities on the ground," and social and cultural anthropologists who broke new grounds in the analysis of caste and village society. Implicit in these moves, however, was the search for an authentic India. With colonial rule finished and cultural relativity ascendant, the research centered on India assumed that an authentic history and 869

ORIENTALISMS culture unaffected by the knower's involvement in the object of knowledge could be recovered. This research naively assumed that its valorization of India freed the scholar from colonial discourses, released to write, as it were, on a clean slate. Acting on this assumption, the knower could once again be construed as separate from knowledge, thereby overlooking that this position itself had a long history; but because this scholarship did not take cognizance of this history, it obviously could not reflect upon the consequences of its belief that the scholar was external to the object of inquiry. As a result, the operation of a whole battery of interests (academic disciplines, ideologies, institutional investments) was concealed, and old ideas reappeared in new guises. This was true, for instance, of the concept of a caste-driven and other-worldly India, which was reformulated as "traditional India" by modernization theory in the 1960s. In the postcolonial context, the reappearance of such essentializations had two implications. First, insofar as a focus on India and cultural relativity enabled the represented object to appear as a vibrant and independent entity, the nationalist project was endorsed. Second, the attribution of this identity-in-itself made an Orientalist refiguration also possible. Anthropological studies of the 1950s and the 1960s illustrate these two tendencies and are worth considering because they came to command a prominent place in South Asia area-study programs quite early, preceding the recent liaison between history and anthropology by at least a decade. Unlike the traditional Orientalists, anthropologists studied people instead of texts and observed culture in action rather than studying its textual remnants. Moreover, as a discipline that specialized in scrutinizing the other, it was particularly suited to pursue studies centered on India. Studies of caste by anthropologists and, to a lesser extent, historians influenced by them became the most prominent aspect of this scholarship.18 Louis Dumont argued that caste, after all, was a vital part in envisioning the essence of India, and this was also the assumption in the vigorous debates and theorizing about its place.19 After the publication of Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus in English, very few could resist the argument that caste was the centerpiece of Indian society. Even Marxists, who had always had some trouble dealing with caste in their analysis of Indian society and history, were forced to take note and could no longer dismiss it as superstructural or as "false consciousness." For others, Dumont's allencompassing theory provided a very elegant framework for explaining the forces of continuity, if not "unchangeability," in Indian history. All this is not to imply that studies on caste did not yield important insights. On the contrary, they did explode the older myths about the unchangeability of the caste system, show its links to economy and polity, and trace patterns of social mobility.20 Imbued as these works were with a great deal of empathy for India, their depictions of vibrant realities fell in line with the nationalist celebration of India's autonomous and unitary subjectivity. 870

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The attribution of cultural and social essences was, however, also open to Orientalist recuperation. The obsessive focus on caste, for instance, served to affix it as the one essence of India. In doing so, it shared the Orientalist project of constituting India as the other—an other whose difference from self recuperated the latter as selfsame, autonomous, and sovereign. This was a far cry from the avant-garde ethnographic surrealism of Paris in the 1920s, when the other had corroded the reality of self.21 The Paris of Louis Dumont in the 1960s, on the other hand, represented homo hierarchicus (India) in affirming the reality of homo aequalis (West). What was taken to be Dumont's distinct and crucial insight—namely that caste was a religious hierarchy that encompassed the economic and the political—turns out to be not all that different from the colonial view that India's essence lay in social organisms separated from the sphere of power.22 In this respect, Dumont's work, the most celebrated and authoritative postwar anthropological scholarship on India, illustrates the vulnerability of essentialism to Orientalist refiguration. These post-decolonization refigurations and recuperations in the scholarly field, particularly in anthropology, ought to be seen as materializations of a context marked by what may be called developmentalism. As new nations emerged from the shadow of colonial rule, the older project of colonial modernity was renovated and then deployed as economic development. As such a new nation-state, India looked upon science and technology as universal forces and deployed them in transforming its society. The boom in postwar anthropological fieldwork and studies began and then pushed forward this reformulation of modernizing projects by providing a social-scientific knowledge of "traditional" social structures and beliefs targeted for modernization. The subdiscipline of economic development within the field of economics also emerged during these decades to formulate and further the modernization project by furnishing knowledge on the ways that existing economic institutions worked and by outlining strategies that could transform them. The area studies programs united these social-scientific fields with Indological pursuits in creating knowledge which was no longer bounded by the old East-West definitions. Drawing regional rather than the old Orient-Occident boundaries, these area studies provided a distinct, yet subtler understanding of cultural relativity, although they could not provide post-colonial scholarship with the means to escape nationalist and Orientalist essentialisms. Indeed, it was precisely the lens of cultural relativity that, as Johannes Fabian points out, made the world appear as culture gardens separated by boundarymaintaining values—as posited essences.23 Furthermore, the erection of these boundaries visualized the separateness of the subject from the object and defended anthropology's claim to represent an external other. In this regard, professional training and expertise allowed the researcher to claim that participant-observation protected the observer's externality that had 871

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been compromised in fieldwork. Conditioned by these methods of denying involvement in the construction of its object of knowledge, neither anthropology nor area studies could escape the nationalist and Orientalist recuperations of their essentialisms. These entities became represented as "traditional" beliefs and structures, which were posed in opposition to modernization and were useful both in formulating culturally sensitive development projects and in evolving the "appropriate" technology. To be sure, the methodological conventions devised and the questions posed by anthropology, development studies, and area studies cannot be reduced to some crude political determination: We can trace the particular configurations of these fields to the discussions and debates within them; rather, my point is that these scholarly conventions and questions helped in configuring the postwar context of developmentalism—insofar as they highlighted the essences (for example, Dumont's essentialization of ritual hierarchy) that could be evaluated for their adaptability to modernization. Post-nationalist foundational histories It is a tribute to the resilience of the modernizing project inaugurated by Orientalism that the legitimacy of its proponents was challenged before its hegemony was threatened. Thus, nationalism accused colonialism of deliberately failing to live up to its own promise; and Marxists, in turn, viewed both colonialism and nationalism as structurally incapable of fulfilling the tasks of modernization in the colonies. In Marxist analysis, the notion of India as an undivided subject, separated and observable in relation to an equally undivided Europe, was suspect because it denied the class relations underlying these entities. These class relations led to an unequal and uneven development that neither colonial rulers nor their nationalist successors could overcome; so, the Marxists regarded the nationalist representation of India as an undivided and autonomous subject as ideological. A somewhat similar critique has been developed by social historians oriented toward world history. In their accounts, India is released from the restricting lens of national history and is placed in the larger focus of world history. Although the emergence of a professional Marxist historiography of India preceded the rise of world-history analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s by roughly two decades, the two can be treated together because both interpret India in terms of a world-historical transition, despite the many differences between them. With their shared emphasis on political economy, they hold questions of production systems and political control to be of paramount importance in specifying the "third worldness" of India. In the Marxist case, the issues relating to political economy were, above all, expressed by social classes. The consequent advocacy of class histories—often contesting Marx's writings on India—cracked the image of 872

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an undivided India. While other scholars approached India from the institutional context of an academic discipline, Marxists adopted the perspective of engaged critics, which enabled them to adopt a combative stance vis-a-vis the disciplines of Indology and South Asia area studies. Convinced that nonclass histories suppress the history of the oppressed and stress consensus over conflict, Marxists wrote contestatory histories of domination, rebellions, and movements,24 in which they accused others of biases and claimed that their own biases were true to the "real" world of class and mode of production. In place of the notion of a homogeneous Indie civilization, the Marxists highlighted heterogeneity, change, and resistance.25 The postcolonial Marxist historiography, in particular, replaced the undivided India of the nationalists with one divided by classes and class conflict; but because its inquiries were framed by a narrative about the transition of the mode of production, this scholarship viewed the activities of classes within the context of India's passage to capitalism (or, more accurately, to an aborted capitalist modernization). Take, for example, the Marxist readings of the so-called "Bengal renaissance" during the first half of the nineteenth century, when brilliant Bengali reformers had defied conventions and produced new visions of Hinduism. Long heralded as the beginning of a new India (with one of the earliest reformers, Ram Mohun Roy, called "the father of modern India"), Marxist reinterpretations stressed the failure of this project.26 Arguing against the widespread belief that this "renaissance" was entirely a Western influence, the existence of an indigenously born rationalism was discovered and shown to turn conservative through contact with the West. As for the modernity inspired by the West and promoted by the "Bengal renaissance," these scholars contended that, in the absence of an organic class to serve as its basis, the reformers could not but fail in their project. In short, the "renaissance" represents the case of aborted or colonial modernity. Without belittling the value of these reinterpretations, I think it is fair to say that the construction of India in terms of this and other failures represents a foundational view. While it highlights the paradoxes of "renaissance" in a colonial context, the interpretation of these events as aborted or failed modernity defers the conclusion of the modernization narrative but does not eliminate the teleological vision. We are thus led to see the "third worldness" of India in its incomplete narrative and unfulfilled promise, which invites completion and fulfillment. A somewhat related interpretation has emerged also in recent social history writings that place modern Indian history in a world-historical framework. Like Marxist historiography, these social histories have dislodged the undivided and essential India of the Orientalists and nationalists. From the works in this genre, the Indian nation appears as a recent and tenuous creation whose artificiality, shown by the earlier "Cambridge school" historians in the intrigues and stratagems of the nationalists,27 is 873

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quite evident in eighteenth-century history. Descriptions of that century by these social historians decompose India into coasts which look outwards and face the Indian Ocean, and hinterlands composed of regional systems of social and political interests, trade, and agriculture. Coasts and hinterlands connect and disconnect, fragment and rejoin; but the multiplicity of interests and perspectives disallow the articulation of a unitary India. C. A. Bayly's study is perhaps the most complete and original work in this genre.28 His work revises, with a wealth of detail and insights, the older notion of eighteenth-century India as a period of chaos and decline into which the British just stepped in to pick up the pieces. Instead of explaining the conquest as the victory of a technologically superior and stronger Britain over a backward and weaker India, he offers a persuasive account of how tendencies within the north Indian society interacted with the East India Company's activities in creating an empire. Stressing parity rather than disparity in technological level and economic organization, he analyzes the British conquest as a conjunctural combination of social, economic, and political conditions and interests. In this story, the rise of the Indian nation appears not as an eruption of a previously existing entity but rather as a historical creation attributable to the transformation of the late eighteenth-century empire into a classic colonial relationship by the midnineteenth century. There is no denying the richness of Bayly's narrative and the importance of its revisionist insights. Other studies have added support to this story, and a more explicitly Marxist elaboration of this interpretation has been offered;29 and although it differs from the Marxist accounts on many substantive issues, it provides a more fully developed and substantiated version of the transition story than that formulated in the older Marxist accounts. Whereas the Marxists write from the position of engaged critics and thus stress domination and struggle, historical sociology underplays conflict and traces the development of structures. We have the echoes here of the now familiar contrast between agency and structure. More significant than this contrast, however, is their common immersion in foundational historiography. For both of them, writing history implies recapturing the operation of classes and structures, with the usual caveats about the historian's biases and ideology. I do not mean by this that this historiography makes simple-minded claims to objectivity, and I do not intend to get bogged down in a sterile debate over subjective versus objective accounts; rather, when I call this form of historical writing foundational, I refer to its assumption that history is ultimately founded in and representable through some identity—individual, class, or structure— which resists further decomposition into heterogeneity. From this point of view, we can do no better than document these founding subjects of history, unless we prefer the impossibility of coherent writing amidst the chaos of heterogeneity. Any change in historical writing becomes primar874

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ily a matter of interpretive shifts—new concepts replace old and unworkable ones. This vision excludes a critical return to the scene of writing history and carries an objectivist bias with it, however provisional. Take, for example, the narrativization of Indian history in terms of the development of capitalism. How is it possible to write such a narrative, but also contest, at the same time, the homogenization of the contemporary world by capitalism? How can the historians of India resist the totalizing claims of the contemporary nation-state if their writings represent India in terms of the nation-state's career? The second question is now easier to handle for most people because nationhood can more easily be shown as "imagined" and fictive.30 The decomposition of the autonomous nation into heterogeneous class, gender, regional, linguistic, and cultural divisions is easy to show. The refusal of foundational categories that construct the theme of global modernity, however, has proved difficult, but the tenuous presence and the very historicity of class structures that anchor the transitional narrative cannot be fully acknowledged without the rejection of the stability occupied by the theme of transition in the discourse of historians. Without such an acknowledgement, the Marxist and social historians can only envision that India's "third worldness" consists of its incomplete or underdeveloped development. India, which is seen in this history as trapped in the trajectories of global modernity, is doomed to occupy a tragic position in these narratives. Such a vision cannot but reproduce the very hegemonic structures that it finds ideologically unjust in most cases, and occludes the histories that lie outside of the themes which are privileged in history. Towards post-foundational histories The preceding account of how the "third world writes its own history" makes it clear that historiography has participated in constituting shifting positions. The nationalists, who were opposed to the Orientalist representation of India as a separate and passive other, gave it autonomy and a national essence. Cultural anthropology and area studies programs in the postwar period, particularly in Europe and the United States, orientalized this essence in terms of the cultural concept and left an undivided India intact. Marxists and social historians broke up this entity in terms of founding class and structural subjects, but narrativized India in contemporary hegemonic terms. If nothing else, these multiple positions suggest how the third-world subject escapes being fixed. Lest this recognition of nonfixity be appropriated as another form of fixing, I hasten to add that the gesture that frames the endorsement of heterogeneity refuse the language of fixing. By way of elaborating and concluding my account of the post-Orientalist Indian historiography, I will refer to Edward Said's 875

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Orientalism as an argument for an antifoundational history and discuss examples of attempts in this direction. Several scholars have noted that Edward Said's work rejects an essentialist reversal of Orientalist constructions.31 He does not envision the task of post-Orientalist scholarship as consisting of substituting the "real" Orient for the "myth" of the Orientalists; rather, his work articulates a post-Orientalist interpretive position that would trace third-world identities as relational rather than essential. This rules out a mere inversion of the Hegelian dialectic so that, instead of the Orientalist's assertion of the Occident's primacy, the self-other opposition could be used to assert the autonomous presence of the Orient. In its place, a post-Orientalist historiography visualizes modern India, for example, in relationships and processes that have constructed contingent and unstable identities. This situates India in relationships and practices that organized its territory and brought it under an international division of labor, assembled and ordered cultural differences into a national bloc, and highlighted it as the religious and spiritual East opposed to the secular and materialist West. I am not suggesting that Indian historiography is yet to study these relational processes. On the contrary, as my account has noted, the Marxist and social historians, for example, have shown in considerable detail that the global history of capitalism has articulated the identity of modern India; but such historical writings do not explore and expose the alterity which underlies this identity—other than calling it precapitalist, protoindustrial (or feudal and semifeudal, as opposed to capitalist), unfree labor (as opposed to free labor), and traditional (not modern).32 This strategy cannot historicize the emergence of a modern, colonial-capitalist Indian nation because it does not displace the categories framed in and by that history. The historicization of this process requires (as Said, for example, accomplishes in his study of the Orientalist essences) unsettling these identities, disrupting their self-same presence. The most prominent example of such an attempt in Indian historiography is to be found in the volumes of the Subaltern Studies: a series of fiercely combative historical accounts written by a group of Indian and British Marxist historians scattered between India, Britain, and Australia—almost all of them having had first-world academic training or experience.33 Arguing that much of the existing historiography reproduced the colonial, nationalist, and Marxist teleologies, the Subaltern Studies group aims at recovering the history of subaltern groups. In doing so, it disrupts, for example, the nationalist narrative that considers all colonial revolts as events in the becoming of the Indian nation and contests the older Marxist accounts which see these episodes as preludes to the emergence of full-fledged class consciousness. In carrying out this project, several essays in the series employ the familiar "history-from-below" approach. Furthermore, the Ideological effects of the Hegelian dialectic 876

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that they employ, as well as the notion of recovering and restoring the subaltern that they use, do not mesh very well with their structuralist decoding of the sign systems.34 These limitations, however, should not be allowed to obscure what is truly novel and theoretically refreshing in their work—the deployment of the concept of subalternity. This concept is particularly defined and used the most fruitfully in the work of Ranajit Guha, the editor of the series,35 who views subalternity as an essential object in place of class—an effect of power relations and expressed through a variety of means—linguistic, economic, social, and cultural. This perspective, therefore, breaks the undivided entity of India into a multiplicity of changing positions which are then treated as the effects of power relations. The displacement of foundational subjects and essences allowed by this also enables Guha to treat histories written from those perspectives as documents of counterinsurgency—those seeking to impose colonial, nationalist, transitional (modernizational) agendas. Writing subaltern history, from this point of view, becomes an activity that is contestatory because of its insurgent readings. From the constitution of subalternity as effects, as identities dependent on difference, it should be clear that the Subaltern Studies project shares some of the structuralist and post-structuralist critiques of the autonomous and sovereign subject. In fact, the influence of French and Soviet structuralist semiotics is quite explicit in some of the writings. Indeed, a recent collection consisting of selections from several volumes aims at making an explicit connection with Michel Foucault's writings.36 Not withstanding these connections, the Subaltern project is somewhat different because while it rescues the subaltern from the will of the colonial or nationalist elite, it also claims autonomy for the subaltern consciousness. However this tension is ultimately resolved in their forthcoming studies, the significance of their project lies in the writing of histories freed from the will of the colonial and national elites. It is this project of resisting colonial and nationalist discursive hegemonies, through histories of the subaltern whose identity resides in difference, which makes the work of these scholars a significant intervention in third-world historiography. If the recent rise of poststructuralist theories, particularly in the United States, is partially responsible for the recognition of Subaltern Studies scholarship, its influence is also evident in the new post-Orientalist historiography. With a somewhat different focus than Subaltern Studies and with explicit reference to poststructuralism, this scholarship is marked by its attempts to make cultural forms and even historical events contingent, above all, on power relations. In considering nationalist identity for example, it points to the differences suppressed and the power exercised even as colonial domination was challenged. In studying criminality, it points to power relations at work in classifying and acting upon "criminal tribes" even as threats to life and property were countered; and in 877

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examining the nineteenth-century reformist attempts to suppress and outlaw the institution of widow sacrifice (suttee), it reveals how gendered ideas were formulated and used by the colonial rulers and Indian reformers even as they questioned the burning of widows.37 Rather than seeing these events as important because they were so well regarded in the past, it interrogates the past's self-evaluation. It attempts to disclose that which is concealed when issues are posed as India versus Britain; crime versus law and order; and traditional, reactionary, and oppressive treatment of women versus their modern and progressive emancipation. The purpose of such disclosures is to write those histories that history and historiography have excluded. The emerging historiography, as the above account makes evident, can be located at the point where poststructuralist, Marxist, and feminist theories converge and intersect. In understanding this scholarship, however, it is not enough to trace its links with these theories. Equally relevant is some of the earlier historiography. Take, as examples, Romila Thapar's searching scrutiny of Orientalist and nationalist constructs in her work on ancient India and Bernard Cohn's historicization of cultural forms essentialized during colonial rule.38 Such earlier work of clearing and criticizing essentialist procedures anticipated the contemporary trend of making cultural forms contingent and of highlighting the complicity of colonial and nationalist knowledge in constituting the objects of inquiry. The work by Nicholas Dirks illustrates this point.39 Like earlier scholars, he also traces the genealogy of a widely accepted idea—namely, that the caste system was primarily a religious phenomenon that encompassed the political; but his argument is framed by contemporary theories in showing that British rule depoliticized the caste system, which then gave rise to the idea that it was primarily a religious entity. Thus, he historicizes the conventional notion of caste by showing its shifting position in a south Indian kingdom. This unstable and changing position of caste and kingdom is accentuated in turn by the repeated interruptions of the narrative and its movement in and out of different historical periods and disciplines. The overall result forces the reader to reflect upon the procedures and rhetoric of the academic disciplines in which the book is located. This historiography's critical focus on epistemological procedures and institutional interests makes it somewhat different from the Subaltern Studies, which targets the colonial or nationalist will. While the former analyzes power relations in the context of academic disciplines and institutions, the latter sees itself disrupting and derailing the will of the powerful. Although both ultimately aim critical reflections upon discursive formations, the emphasis is clearly different. In view of the role that Western academic institutions play in studying and marginalizing the other, it is not surprising that the post-Orientalist historiography targets academic disciplines. It is precisely for this reason also that Indology and area studies in 878

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Europe and North America have been less than enthusiastic, if not hostile, to Said's interpretation as disciplines devoted to representing the other. Because the demystification of India as an undivided and separate object calls for the decomposition of the undivided and autonomous West, disciplines instituted to represent the binary opposition are understandably reluctant. Interestingly, it is in those fields not associated with Indology— such as literature—and in institutions without strong programs in South Asian area studies that Said's book has stimulated much new work; but even traditional centers of Indology are beginning to take account of challenges posed by critiques of Orientalism.40 The story of Indian historiography that I have been telling has certain evident themes. First, the "third worldness" of India has been conceived in a variety of different ways by historiography. These shifting conceptions testify to the changing history of India and locate historiography in that history, contributing to as well as being a part of it. This rules out the comfort of assuming that India, or the third world, will finally speak in a voice that will render all previous ones inauthentic. Second, the identification with the subordinated's subject position, rather than national origin, has been the crucial element in formulating critical third-world perspectives. Of course, as subordinated subjects, Indian historians have obviously developed and embraced the victim's subject-position more readily; but because the experience and expression of subordination are discursively formulated, we are led back to the processes and forces that organize the subordinate's subject position. Third, the formation of third-world positions suggests engagement rather than insularity. It is difficult to overlook the fact that all of the third-world voices identified in this essay, speak within and to discourses familiar to the "West" instead of originating from some autonomous essence, which does not warrant the conclusion that the third-world historiography has always been enslaved, but that the careful maintenance and policing of East-West boundaries has never succeeded in stopping the flows across and against boundaries and that the self-other opposition has never quite been able to order all differences into binary opposites. The third world, far from being confined to its assigned space, has penetrated the inner sanctum of the first world in the process of being "third-worlded"—arousing, inciting, and affiliating with the subordinated others in the first world. It has reached across boundaries and barriers to connect with the minority voices in the first world: socialists, radicals, feminists, minorities. Although such crossings and interruptions of boundaries have become more insistent now, the turmoil in the field and attempts to write post-Orientalist histories are not new. Historians of India have previously questioned and unsettled dominant paradigms. Fine examples of non-Orientalist histories already exist; to think otherwise would mean attributing a totalizing power to Orientalism. The existence of 879

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earlier precedents, however, does not mean that the present historiography is completing the tasks left unfinished and that we are now witnessing the end of Orientalism; such a perspective entails the notion of a continuous history and assumes an essential similarity between different historiographies. Neither entirely new nor completely the same, the present ferment gets its specificity from the ways in which a new post-Orientalist scholarship is being currently conceived lies in the difference from previous contexts; and the particular insights generated by the emerging historical writing can be attributed to the larger field of social experience articulated in discourses. The present critical appraisal of concepts, disciplines, and institutions associated with the study of South Asia forms a part of contemporary challenges to beliefs in solidly grounded existence and identities, if not their loss. Jacques Derrida's disclosure of the "metaphysics of presence" and Michel Foucault's genealogical accounts of the disciplinary constitution of criminal and sexual subjects have certain general affinities with Edward Said's analysis of Orientalism's suppression of difference in favor of stable and hierarchical East-West identities. These resemblances, which do not diminish significant differences among them, arise from their common espousal of poststructuralist methods. It is argued that these methods form theories about the practices of the earlier literary and aesthetic modernism (such as the latter's break from the belief that language was a transparent medium) and that the kinship with modernism accounts for its obsessive concern with language and writing, which displaces political questions to the aesthetic arena.41 While the trace of modernism's transgressive impulses may well be discerned in poststructuralism's decentering methods, the current prominence of these theories is better understood as a moment in the postmodern valorization of blurred genres and offcentered identities. Fashioned by denials of grand totalizing theories, postmodernism defies and refuses definition. Only a laundry list of conditions can be offered—TV images, fashion magazines, Salman Rushdie, Talking Heads, challenges to universalist and essentialist theories, architectural irreverence and playfulness, translational capitalism. The list is endless, without a beginning or end; and any gesture towards classification and distillation would be contrary to postmodernism, which exists only as a combination of conjunctural conditions.42 This conjuncture includes the poststructuralist disavowal of the essentialist categories and modes of thought in the "Western tradition"—a position that overlaps with the third-world scholarship's combative stance with respect to the legacies of the application of this tradition to non-European cultures. This repudiation of the post-Enlightenment ideology of Reason and Progress is also what distinguishes the present historiography from the anti-Orientalism of nationalism. Earlier, when nationalism challenged Orientalism, it staked the subjected nation's claim to the order of Reason 880

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and Progress by showing, for instance, that India had a history comparable to that of the West; that it too had produced a proto-republican political order; and that it had achieved economic, cultural, and scientific progress. The older Marxist historians, as well as the more recent social historians, broke up the nationalist's undivided India into an entry permeated with class conflict, but their global mode-of-production narratives did not fully confront the universalism of the post-Enlightenment order of Reason. What we are witnessing now in the post-Orientalist historiography is a challenge to the hegemony of those modernization schemes and ideologies that post-Enlightenment Europe projected as the raison d'etre of history, an assault on what Ashis Nandy calls the "second colonization." This is because, as Nandy argues:43 Modern colonialism won its great victories not so much through its military and technological prowess as through its ability to create secular hierarchies incompatible with traditional order. These hierarchies opened up new vistas for many, particularly for those exploited and cornered within the traditional order. To them the new order looked like—and here lay its psychological pull—the first step towards a more just and equal world. That was why some of the finest critical minds in Europe—and in the East—were to feel that colonialism, by introducing modern structures into the barbaric world, would open up the non-West to the modern critical-analytical spirit. Like the "hideous heathen god who refused to drink nectar except from the skulls of murdered men," Karl Marx felt, history would produce out of oppression, violence and cultural dislocation not merely new technological and social forces but also a new social consciousness in Asia and Africa. Today, ideologies of science, progress, and hypermasculinity that the Age of Reason brought to a third world riding on the back of colonialism, have lost their seductive appeal; but in reflecting on this history in which Descartes defined rationality and Marx defined social criticism, we must, Nandy argues, listen to the voices contained therein and write "mythographies" that we did not before. This is not only a plea for a recognition of the plurality of critical traditions but a claim for the liberating nature of the victim's discourse, particularly for that of the colonized. Although both the colonizer and the colonized have been the victims of colonialism, the colonized have a special story to tell because they not only had to confront the "West" on its own terms of robust hypermasculinity but also to construct and connect with the other subordinated selves of the "West." This call for a writing of mythographies, therefore, provides an appreciation not only for the colonized's construction of their subjected self but 881

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also the colonized's appeal to and affiliation with the subordinated selves of the colonizer. Such mythographic accounts revealing the previously hidden histories of the subordinated selves of first and third worlds will also expose the mythic quality of colonial and postcolonial fables of modernity. This invocation of the mythic in disclosing the fable-like character of "real" history calls to mind Salman Rushdie's fabulous history of postcolonial India and Pakistan in Midnight's Children.44 In the novel, Saleem Sinai, a child fathered by history, melts the apparent solidity of history singlehandedly and—through his long nose, face, casual talk, and telepathy— causing border wars, violent demonstrations, and ethnic riots. The very extravagance of myths, dreams, and fantasies elicits belief in its truthfulness and defamiliarizes the real. While Rushdie spins his tale around pepper pots and spittoons, Nandy's mythography of history has unheroic heroes— the saintly Gandhi and the comical Brown Sahibs—and through these unlikely figures the tragic tale of colonialism is told, its alliance with psychopathic technologies exposed, its fantastic quality revealed. Such a strategy of privileging the "mythic" over the "real" has turned the historiographical field topsy-turvy. The entities upon which South Asian studies were based—India and the West—can no longer be unquestionably accepted as entirely separate and fixed. After all, if Gandhi's saintliness and nonviolence—those quintessential "Indian" qualities—had counterparts in the "West" (albeit marginalized); if the Brown Sahibs' imitation of the British was an "Indian" strategy of survival and even resistance; and if, in spite of its clearheaded realpolitik, modern anticolonial Indian nationalism fell prey to a "second colonization"; then what is left of the neatly separated "India" and the "West"? Such destabilization of identities and crossing of carefully policed boundaries promise a new third-world historiography that will resist both nativist romanticization and Orientalist distancing. This post-foundational move, implicit in the emerging writings, affiliates the new third-world historiography with poststructuralism, and together they both echo the postmodernist decentering of unitary subjects and hegemonic histories. This common articulation of the postmodern condition, however, cannot be taken to mean that the fragmentation and proliferation of identities, histories, cultures, and the failure of representations and the existence of ironic detachments do not have regional configurations and contextual resonances (American? French? Parisian? German? Continental philosophy? Marxism?). This being so, the post-Orientalist scholarship, while sharing certain common features with poststructuralism and postmodernism, cannot but be different from them. This is particularly important because the third world was defined as marginal from the very beginning. The new post-Orientalist scholarship's attempt to release the third world from its marginal position forms a part of the movement that advocates the "politics of difference"—racial, class, gender, ethnic, 882

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national, and so forth.45 Two points are worth noting about this phenomenon. First, it posits that we can proliferate histories, cultures, and identities arrested by previous essentializations. Second, to the extent that those made visible by proliferation are also provisional, it refuses the erection of new foundations in history, culture, and knowledge. Seen in this light, this politics of difference evinces impulses similar to those manifested in what is generally referred to as cultural criticism today, although cultural critics have different concerns in that they take the "Western tradition" as their starting point. Their principal aim is to unlock the "closures" in "high" literary and philosophical texts and release meanings trapped by beliefs in essences.46 Often, their interests are not directly focused on political questions and demonstrate an aestheticist bias, although this is not true of feminist theories and the advocates of the politics of difference. The post-Orientalist historiography, on the other hand, is much more directly concerned with the question of domination because its very subject—the third world—is defined by its dominated status.47 The attempt to unlock history from the "closures" is thus not so much a question for these scholars of taking pleasure in the revealed Bakhtinian carvinalesque but an issue of engaging the relations of domination. Thus, the representation of India as an other denned by certain essences—tradition, spirituality, femininity, other worldliness, caste, nationality—becomes a site of contest. In these contests, the maintenance and the subversion of the relations of domination discursively reproduced by the lack of a clear break from the legacies of Orientalism, nationalism, and the ideologies of modernization are at issue. The power attributed to the knowledge about the past makes historical writing into a political practice and turns the recent post-Orientalist historical accounts into contestatory acts. Such a clearly political vision is what distinguishes this historiography in a context in which the third world is widely recognized as a signifier of cultural difference but is rapidly appropriated and commodified as cultural surplus (the Banana Republic stores being the most offensive contemporary example in this respect)48 or serves as an other in a hermeneutic exercise devoted to the exploration of blurred genres and decentered realities validated by postmodernism.49 Enabled by, but also in resistance to, these contemporary postmodernist tendencies, the self-consciously political visualization of writing history as a site of contest acquires a distinct significance; but if the postmodern conjuncture accounts for the attention currently paid to how the "third world writes its own history," it also threatens to envelop it in the larger project of dislodging the "Western tradition." If that happens in the present flurry of conferences and seminars on the third world, we will lose sight of the crucial fact that the "Western tradition" was a very peculiar configuration in the colonial world; and the old axiom—that the third world is a good thing to think with about the "West"—will once again be proven correct. Such a turn of events will 883

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bring the post-Orientalist historiography's promise to contest hegemonic structures and reveal new histories to an ironic end.

Notes * This essay was originally presented as a paper in a panel entitled "After Orientalism: the Third World Writes its Own History" at the American Historical Association's annual meeting in Cincinnati. December 1988. I am thankful to Carol Gluck, whose imagination and organizational efforts made this panel possible and whose invitation prompted me to think about these broader questions. Remarks by others on the panel—Ervand Abrahanian and Edward Said in particular—and the questions and comments from the audience, clarified the issues involved. Comments from Nicholas Dirks, Joan Scott, and Carol Quillen were extremely useful in rewriting the original paper, and the criticisms and suggestions of the revised paper offered at the workshop on "Colonialism and Culture" by this journal (Comparative Studies in Society and History), at Ann Arbor, Michigan, May 1989, particularly by Roger Rouse and Vicente Rafael, were of great help in writing the present version. 1 A recent example is the exchange between Fredric Jameson and Aijaz Ahmad, in which Jameson's well-intentioned but "first-world" gesture drew deserved criticism. See Jameson's "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital," Social Text, 15 (Fall 1986), 65-88; and Ahmad's "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory'," Social Text, 17 (Fall 1987), 3-25: and Jameson's reply on pp. 26-27. 2 Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). 3 On these Orientalist writers, see Bernard S. Cohn, "Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture," Structure and Change in Indian Society, Milton Singer and Bernard S. Cohn, eds. (Chicago: Aldine, 1968), 7. On Halhead, see Rosane Rocher, Orientalism, Poetry, and the Millenium: The Checkered Life of Nathaniel Brassey Halhead (Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1983). For a discussion of Persian historiography and for more on the early British treatments of how eighteenth-century British writings dealt with prehistory, see Historians of Medieval India, Mohibbul Hasan, ed. (Meenakshi: Meerut, 1968). 4 Wilhelm Halfbass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 69-83. Also, Ronald Inden, "Orientalist Constructions of India," Modern Asian Studies, 20:3 (1986), 401-46. 5 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 227-9, 330-6. 6 James Mill, The History of British India (1817; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). On missionaries, see Ainslee Thomas Embree, Charles Grant and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962). 7 On how European ideas were applied to India, see Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Paris: Mouton, 1963); Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). 8 Richard Saumarez Smith's "Rule-by-Records and Rule-by-Reports: Complementary Aspects of the British Imperial Rule of Law," Contributions to Indian Sociology (new series), 19:1 (1985), 153-76. is an excellent study of this process in Punjab. 9 See Ronald Inden, "Orientalist Constructions" on the use of representation in

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10 11 12 13

14 15

16

17 18

19

Orientalism. Timothy Mitchell's Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) contains a fascinating interpretation of representation in British and European knowledge about Egypt. Cited in Smith, "Rule-by-records," 153. Nicholas B. Dirks's The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) is a powerful argument against this thesis. See also, Ronald Inden, "Orientalist Constructions." Compare Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World—A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986), 38. Much of this account is based on Romila Thapar's excellent "Interpretations of Ancient Indian History," History and Theory, 7:3 (1968), 318-35, which contains a critical discussion of these nationalist historians. For more on this phase of historiography and on individual historians, see Historians and Historiography in Modern India, S. P. Sen, ed. (Calcutta: Institute of Historical Studies, 1973). Jawaharlal Nehru's The Discovery of India (New York: John Day Company, 1946), 65. Interestingly, Marx and Engels' writings in the New York Daily Tribune on the 1857 revolts were put together and published in the Soviet Union as The First Indian War of Independence 1857-59 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959). R. C. Dutt's The Economic History of India, 2 vols. (1901, rpt. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950) is the classic of this genre. For a detailed treatment of this line of nationalist historiography, see Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India (Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1966). For a debate on the "deindustrialization" question, see M. D. Morris et al, Indian Economy in the Nineteenth Century: A Symposium (Delhi: Indian Economic and Social History Association, 1969). Chatterjee. Nationalist Thought, 30,168-9. The list is huge, but for some representative examples, see Frederick J. Bailey, Caste and the Economic Frontier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1957), and M. N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). David G. Mandelbaum, Society in India, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970) summarizes and cites much of the scholarship on caste. Fine historical studies of caste include the following: Ronald B. Inden, Marriage and Rank in Bengali Culture: A History of Caste and Clan in the Middle Period Bengal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975; Frank F. Conlon, A Caste in a Changing World: The Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmans, 1700-1935 (Delhi: Thomson Press, 1977); and Karen I. Leonard, Social History of an Indian Caste: The Kayasths of Hyderabad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); McKim Marriott, "Hindu Transactions: Diversity Without Dualism," in Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior, Bruce Kapferer, ed. (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976); and Michael Moffat, An Untouchable Community in South India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Although Dumont's work no longer enjoys the influence that it did in the 1970s, his formulation that ritual hierarchy defines India continues to draw adherents. For example, Donald E. Brown's Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988) employs the Dumontian essentialization of caste and hierarchy to explain the absence of "real" historiography in India. 885

ORIENTALISMS 20 See, for example, Social Mobility in the Caste System of India, James Silverberg, ed. (Paris: Mouton, 1968). 21 James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Surrealism," The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 117-51. 22 Compare Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown, 3-5. For other critiques, see Arjun Appadurai, "Is Homo Hierarchicus?," American Ethnologist, 13:4 (1986), 745-61; and "Putting Hierarchy in its Place," Cultural Anthropology, 3:1 (1988), 36-49. 23 Johannes Fabian, Time and The Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 47. 24 The notable examples include: P. C. Joshi, ed., 1857 Rebellion (Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1957), which tried to reclaim the 1857 revolt as a moment in popular revolutionary movement; A. R. Desai, ed., Peasant Struggles in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979) interprets revolts and movements spread over two centuries as part of wider struggle of the dominated, and Irfan Habib's masterly The Agrarian System of Mughal India (London: Asia Publishing House, 1963), which argues that the peasant revolts led by the local notables plunged the Mughal empire into a paralyzing crisis in the eighteenth century. 25 D. D. Kosambi's works on ancient India mark the beginning—and remain stellar examples—of a professional Marxist historiography of this genre. See his Culture and Civilization of Ancient India in Historical Outline (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965). 26 See Sumit Sarkar, "Rammohun Roy and the Break with the Past," in Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India, V. C. Joshi, ed. (Delhi: Vikas, 1975), 46-68; Barun De, "The Colonial Context of the Bengal Renaissance," in Indian Society and the Beginnings of Modernization c. 1830-1850, C. H. Philips and Mary Doreen Wainwright, eds. (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1976), 119-25; and Asok Sen, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and his Elusive Milestones (Calcutta: Rddhi-India, 1977). 27 See John Gallagher, Gordon Johnson, and Anil Seal, eds., Locality, Province and Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); and David Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 28 Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the British Expansion, 1770-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 29 For example, David Ludden, Peasant History in South India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); and Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab 1707-1748 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986). For a Marxist version of this narrative, see David Washbrook, "Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History," Modern Asian Studies, 22:1 (1988), 57-96. 30 Compare Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). The brilliance of its insights is somewhat marred by a lapse into sociological determinism and by its overemphasis on "print capitalism." 31 Compare James Clifford, "On Orientalism" in The Predicament of Culture, 255-76. 32 My forthcoming Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) shows how the free-unfree opposition appropriated and reorganized different forms of labor. 33 Subaltern Studies, vols. I-V, Ranajit Guha, cd. (Delhi: Oxford University Press,

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34

35 36

37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47

1982-85). The reference to national origins and to the "first world" site of academic training and experience is not meant to be invidious: rather, my intention is to show that national origin is not a necessary requirement for the formulation of a post-Orientalist position. Rosalind O'Hanlon's "Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia," Modern Asian Studies, 22:1 (1988), 189-224, argues persuasively that an essentialist and teleological thinking also exists in their work. For an "against the grain" reading that attempts to capture what is novel and contestatory in the Subaltern Studies, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," in Subaltern Studies, vol. IV, 330-64. See, in particular, his Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). Selected Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., with the Foreword by Edward W. Said (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). The last section in this volume, for instance, is called "Developing Foucault." See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World', Veena Das, "Gender Studies, Cross-Cultural Comparison and the Colonial Organization of Knowledge," Berkshire Review, no. 21 (1986), 58-76; Lata Mani, "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India," Cultural Critique, 7 (Fall 1987), 119-56; and Sanjay Nigam, "The Social History of a Colonial Stereotype: The Criminal Tribes and Castes of Uttar Pradesh, 1871-1930" (Ph.D. disser., Department of History, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 1987). See Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist Among Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987): and Romila Thapar, Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1978). Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown. The South Asia Regional Studies Department, University of Pennsylvania, held a year-long seminar in 1988-89 entitled "Orientalism and Beyond: Perspectives from South Asia." Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 206-16. Andrew Ross, "Introduction," in Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, Andrew Ross, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), x. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), ix. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (New York: Avon Books, 1980). For a recent statement of this position from a feminist perspective, see Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). This politics of difference is called "minority discourse" by Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd in their "Introduction: Minority Discourse—What is to Be Done?," Cultural Critique, 1 (Fall 1987), 5-17. These concerns are stated, for example, in Dominick LaCapra's Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), and History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Compare Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Gary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, eds. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313, in which she argues that even politically oriented Western poststructuralists, like

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Foucault, are marked by a certain blindness to the reality of imperialist domination. 48 See Paul Smith's "Visiting the Banana Republic," in Universal Abandon?, 128-48. 49 Stephen A. Tyler's "Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document," in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, James Clifford and George Marcus, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 122-40, exemplifies this tendency. Note, for instance, that he conceives postmodern ethnography's task as invoking "the fantasy reality of a reality fantasy" and "the occult in the language of naive realism and of the everyday in occult language." This invocation, according to him, "provokes a rupture with the commonsense world and evokes an aesthetic integration whose therapeutic effect is worked out in the restoration of the commonsense world" (p. 134). In this view, the offcentering of the ethnographer, as in the cover photograph of Writing Culture, becomes the purpose of postmodern ethnography.

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6.4

AFTER ORIENTALISM Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook From Comparative Studies in Society and History 34.1 (January 1992): 141-67

Over the last decade, studies of "third world" histories and cultures have come to draw to a very considerable extent upon the theoretical perspectives provided by poststructuralism and postmodernism. With the publication in 1978 of Edward Said's work, Orientalism, these perspectives—now fused and extended into a distinctive amalgam of cultural critique, Foucauldian approaches to power, engaged "politics of difference," and postmodernist emphases on the decentered and the heterogeneous—began to be appropriated in a major way for the study of non-European histories and cultures. Certainly in our own field of Indian colonial history, Said's characteristic blending of these themes has now become virtually a paradigm for a new generation of historians and anthropologists. These directions have been most recently and sharply endorsed in Gyan Prakash's discussion, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography."1 We share Prakash's concern with the emancipation of previously submerged colonial histories and identities. However, we are deeply concerned at the way in which his "postfoundational" history would set about these tasks. Prakash sees this history, and the postmodernist and poststructuralist perspectives that underlie it, as our best future hope for a genuinely critical understanding of the Indian past. We question this, given the manner in which these perspectives have come to be interpreted and absorbed into the mainstream of historical and anthropological scholarship, particularly in the United States. We argue that postfoundational history offers us ways of "knowing" the Indian past that are quite 889

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inadequate to its supposed political concerns. In emancipating ourselves from what Prakash calls foundationlism, we need also to ask rather more carefully what exactly we are emancipating ourselves into. We argue that these approaches prescribe remedies which actually create new and in many cases much more serious difficulties of their own, in part because they have, of course, as much to do with arguments about the politics of representation in Western intellectual and academic circles, as they do with imposing that manner of representation on the third World's history. We discuss what we see to be the difficulties of these approaches in the context of Indian and other non-Western historical writing and suggest that they have arisen in part from the widely shared but mistaken assumption that Edward Said's work provides a clear paradigm for a history that transcends older problems of representation.

Post-foundational history: dilemmas and problems Taking Edward Said's definition of Orientalism as his starting point, Prakash moves through a range of approaches for the study of Indian society, showing how each has inherited and reproduced some of Orientalism's key assumptions and techniques of representation. Indian nationalist historiography, for example, has been unable to transcend Orientalism's preoccupation with essences and its teleologies of modernity. Its historians understood knowledge as a "more or less adequate representation of the real," and India itself as having an existence independent of its representations.2 India itself appeared for them as an undivided subject struggling to transcend colonial backwardness and to realise itself as a modern national state. Likewise, the area studies programmes that dominated South Asian history and anthropology from the 1950s searched for an authentic Indian history and culture, fixing on caste as Indian society's essence and scrutinizing its structures in terms of their potential as vehicles for political and economic modernization. Prakash then turns to "post-nationalist foundational histories." By this he means Marxist and what he calls "social historians oriented toward world history," such as C. A. Bayly, who have been concerned with Indian political economy, particularly in its relationship to world-historical transitions. Although Prakash carefully points out their gains, he finds them ultimately unsatisfactory because their histories are "foundational." They use categories which are at some level fixed and essential, as if history were "ultimately founded in and representable through some identity— individual, class, structure—which resist further decomposition into heterogeneity." Such categories cannot but have an "objectivist bias" built into them.3 Their emphasis on the theme of capitalist transition leads, moreover, to a Ideological account that sees India principally as an instance of aborted capitalist modernity and cannot 890

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explore and expose the alterity which underlies this identity— other than calling it precapitalist, protoindustrial (or feudal and semi-feudal as opposed to capitalist), unfree labor (as opposed to free labor), and traditional (not modern). This strategy cannot historicize the emergence of a modern, colonial-capitalist Indian nation because it does not displace the categories framed in and by that history.4 These approaches can only in the end legitimate the structures of capitalist modernity they describe; for, Prakash asks, how is it possible to understand Indian history in terms of the development of capitalism, "but also contest, at the same time, the homogenization of the contemporary world by capitalism?"5 In the last part of his discussion, Prakash considers what he calls "postOrientalist" histories, which try to move towards postfoundational approaches. These utilise the insights of Edward Said and Michael Foucault and draw further on themes from postmodernism, feminism, minority discourses and other advocates of the "politics of difference." These approaches share Prakash's concern to show how knowledge about the third world is historically produced. They seek "to make cultural forms and even historical events contingent, above all, on power relations."6 Avoiding the temptation to return to essential identities, they work instead to displace foundational subjects and essences, to break up notions of a unitary India into a multiplicity of contingent and unstable identities which are the effects of changing power relationships. They refuse the privileged themes of global capitalist modernization and focus instead offcentre on what those themes exclude: histories of the subordinate whose identity, like all identity, resides in difference. Post-modernist perspectives are important in shaping these approaches, with their "blurred genres and off-centred identities" and their hostility to systematizing theories: Fashioned by denials of grand totalizing theories, postmodernism defies and refuses definition. Only a laundry list of conditions can be offered—TV images, fashion magazines, Salman Rushdie, Talking Heads, challenges to universalist and essentialist theories, architectural irreverence and playfulness, translational capitalism.7 Nor do the new histories limit their vision to India or other third world societies. They forge links with subordinate others in Western contexts, with radicals, feminists, ethnic and other minorities, in a common challenge to teleologies of modernization and their constituent themes of Reason and Progress Above all, they do not draw back from political engagement. They identify with the subject-position of the subordinate, concern themselves with relationships of domination, and self-consciously 891

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make their own historical accounts into contestatory acts. In these respects they differ from the often depoliticized perspectives of postmodernism, while at the same time sharing its emphasis on the provisionality of all identities, its resistance to all systematizing or totalizing theory and its refusal to set up "new foundations in history, culture and knowledge."8 Prakash points to examples of these new approaches. Although he notes their limitations, he commends Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies project for deploying poststructuralist arguments and the concept of "subalternity." This has enabled them to get away from the older frameworks of colonialism and nationalism within which Indian history was studied and to break up their associated foundational categories, revealing India instead as "a multiplicity of changing positions which are then treated as effects of power relations."9 The work of Bernard Cohn and Nicholas Dirks reveals in different ways how colonial rule created and froze social institutions which the British took to be immutable features of India as a primarily religious society. In common with postmodernists, Ashis Nandy's work on the culture and psychology of colonialism has repudiated the "post-Enlightenment ideology of Reason and Progress," in which "Descartes defined rationality and Marx defined social criticism."10 To escape these tyrannies, we must turn to "mythographies," the hidden stories of colonialism's victims, which will "expose the mythic character of colonial and postcolonial fables of modernity." Salman Rushdie likewise shares postmodernism's hostility to "grand totalizing theories," disclosing in Midnight's Children the "fable-like character of real history."11 But we see many problems here. The critique of foundational categories derives in large part from the work of Jacques Derrida, although Derrida's work contains very little to indicate how we should go about the basic, inescapably active, and interventionist task of historical interpretation. Derrida's particular approach to the problem of the conventional and nonobjective nature of our categories and schemes of interpretation may actually represent something of an intellectual cul-de-sac, at least for those who would offer forms of historical understanding. As John Searle has argued, Derrida correctly sees that there aren't any such foundations, but he then makes the mistake that marks him as a classical metaphysician. The real mistake of the classical metaphysician was not the belief that there were metaphysical foundations, but rather the belief that somehow or other such foundations were necessary, the belief that unless there are foundations something is lost or threatened or undermined. 12 In the absence of such foundations, Derrida can do little more than reveal, over and over again, the subjective and arbitrary nature of our categories 892

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and the uncertainty of the knowledge derived from them. He misses, in effect, the crucial point that we cannot actually do without some categories and some means of evaluating orders of certainty, in order to comprehend, to explain, to elucidate and to do. That these categories are conventions, Searle further argues, is no bar to our continuing to use them provided we recognize them for what they are, inventions of our own necessity. However, this recognition involves a change in the way that we conceive and test them—not against metaphysically conceived standards of objectivity but against their adequacy in serving the purposes for which we want and need to use them. Such considerations of course include ourselves and the reasons why we require particular kinds of knowledge. Preoccupied as he is with the non-problem of objectivity at the expense of questions of purposive adequacy, Derrida has rather little to offer us on these key questions of method. If Prakash's aim were simply to render our existing knowledge of Indian and other third world societies uncertain and unstable, there would indeed be a point in his invoking Derrida's attack on foundational forms of knowledge. Because he actually intends a highly purposive agenda of historical reconstruction and political engagement, however, this invocation seems to us starkly inappropriate. Prakash's critique of Indian historiography and his prognoses for its future reflect these contradictions. Most who fall into his category of Marxist and social historians of India have long recognised the irreducibly subjective element in their interpretations, seeing that the historian is inescapably a part of what they study as a constant process of movement and transformation.13 Most would be thoroughly mystified by the charge that they operate with reined and ahistorical categories of class, individual, and structure. Such categories are usually contextualized in terms of their making and unmaking, their emergence and decline. Bayly, for example, presents eighteenth-century India in terms of the making and unmaking of a particular and contingent set of relations, which threw up a distinctive and ultimately transient structure of class, on the basis of which colonial rule was initially established. He plainly sees class, along with other forms of structure and identity, as historically contingent, unstable, and given to change—certainly not as immutable in some way. It is also not obvious that these historians understand capitalist transition merely in terms of Western development and Asian underdevelopment. Within the Marxist discourse, debates around the themes of comparative feudalism, the articulation of modes of production, and the work of Robert Brenner have all explored the specific dynamics of non-British and wider non-Western relations of production and social formation.14 Equally, a major thrust of research on the Indian past has for a considerable time now been precisely to break down East-West dichotomies by exploring the indigenous forms of capitalism and their associated military and mercantile institutions that were developing in India from the late seventeenth century. This research 893

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describes how these indigenous dynamics powerfully and importantly shaped the East India Company's initial engagement with the economies and societies of the subcontinent and its own subsequent development as a colonial state.15 Bayly himself sets this against a sharply redrawn picture of early nineteenth-century British society designed to reveal the precise ways in which its forms of modernity were not only partial and limited but created out of and sustained by wider imperial relationships.16 Prakash also contends that any historian who writes about India's history in terms of capitalism's development must in the end be complicit in the very hegemony so described. Rather, we must aim for a "refusal of foundational categories that construct the theme of global modernity."17 The implications of this seem somewhat unclear. If the complicity arises from a tendency to present the world of capitalism as homogeneous, it must be pointed out that most Marxist social history critiques capitalist modernity precisely in order to challenge the self-images and pretensions to the universality of Western social theories of modernization. Lumping the two together because both appear to address the same problem of the forms and forces of capitalist modernity is deeply misconceived. Prakash and the other postmodernist theorists on whose work he draws apparently have the view that merely engaging the question determines our understanding of it so that we ought actually to assume that it does not really exist in any systematic form. What his position leaves quite obscure is what status exactly this category of "capitalist modernity" occupies for him. If our strategy should be to "refuse" it in favour of marginal histories, of multiple and heterogeneous identities, this suggests that capitalist modernity is nothing more than a potentially disposable fiction, held in place simply by our acceptance of its cognitive categories and values. Indeed, Prakash is particularly disparaging of Marxist and social historians' concern with capitalism as a "system" of political economy and coercive instrumentalities. Yet in other moments Prakash tells us that history's proper task is to challenge precisely this "homogenization of the world by contemporary capitalism."18 If this is so, and there is indeed a graspable logic to the way in which modern capitalism has spread itself globally, how are we to go about the central task of comprehending this logic in the terms that Prakash suggests? These problems seem further compounded if we turn to the work of historians whom Prakash recommends as exemplars of postfoundationalist approaches. What is puzzling is that many of these historians themselves put forward timeless or undifferentiated conceptions of the Indian past, often in a particularly glaring way. Bernard Cohn has undoubtedly done much to disassemble monolithic notions of a traditional India advanced in colonial social theory. Yet in his account of how these notions were fabricated, he describes a clash between European and Indian forms of knowledge which are both undifferentiated, the former located in time 894

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somewhere between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries and the latter not at all.19 Ashis Nandy identifies the psychological damage and "loss" associated with the colonial experience. Yet his strategy for the recovery of an "Indian self" seems merely to invert a range of what were originally Orientalist conceptions about India and to generalize the cultural experience of Bengali literati to that of the whole nation.20 Ranajit Guha may well criticize "bourgeois" Indian nationalism for its failure to identify with the very different needs of subaltern classes, but he does take the central question of modern Indian history to be the "historic failure of the nation to come to its own," a question that plainly derives from the nationalist paradigm that Prakash condemns so strongly.21 Many theories about Indian personality and social structure which Guha uses to test the consequences of colonial domination bear a strong resemblance to those of Louis Dumont, whose ideas Prakash elsewhere deems to be "refigured essentialisms." Indeed, Guha has of late taken to referring to the (undifferentiated) Indian nation as "us."22 Prakash dismisses "totalizing" understandings of the Indian past in favour of the alternative and the marginal and commends Nicholas Dirks' attack on Dumont's ahistorical theories of caste for making this possible. Yet Dirks himself presents us with a countertheory of caste that is scarcely less generalizing than Dumont's own. He erects it, moreover, very largely on the basis of the worldview and selfimages of locally dominant groups.23 Prakash himself does what he tells us not to. He warns us against writing history around the major themes of global transition but then writes about Indian historiographical development in precisely these terms, seeing the determinants of its progression passing from imperialism to nationalism to a liberal hegemony centered on the United States. This all makes it very difficult to grasp the character of postfoundationalist understandings of the past or to see what they are meant to achieve. These confusions seem to us to arise out of a wish to generate an historical praxis from Derridean and postmodernist perspectives that are inherently inimical to it. These perspectives undermine possibilities for such a praxis in two ways. First, because they regard any intervention by the historian or interpreter in the past as inherently illegitimate, a kind of complicity, they fail to acknowledge the particular and specific means by which that scholar acquires knowledge of the past. Prakash objects to our giving some analytical categories privilege on the grounds that this "occludes the histories that lie outside of the themes which are privileged in history." But this suggests that the themes of history are or should be given in the material of history itself, exposed or not exposed by the historian, whose cognitive relation to them is passive. What this objection reflects is actually a rather old-fashioned, even positivistic assumption about the sources of historical knowledge, but one also which may not surprise us. For as Searle has argued, Derrida's own obsession with the non-problem of objectivity 895

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and his failure to recognize our subjective need for knowledge as primary and legitimate, leaves his concerns also laden with residues of positivism.24 The objection entirely misses the fact that the past, including its historical subjects, comes to the historian through fragmentary and fractured empirical sources, which possess no inherent themes and express no unequivocal voices. In and of themselves, these sources and voices are just noise: "Other" histories uncovered do not speak for themselves any more than the "facts" of history do. To state the obvious, the historian must undertake the prior, and in part subjective, tasks that only the historian can do: to turn the noise into coherent voices through which the past may speak to the present and to construct the questions to which the past may give the present intelligible answers. Prakash seems to refuse to acknowledge the inevitability (and the responsibility) of this task. Indeed, he offers us a methodology that would seem to rule out even the refusals of which he speaks. He enjoins us to refuse particular themes and categories, most notably those pertaining to the global transition to modern capitalism, lest simply by engaging with them we become implicated in and so reproduce the hegemonies which they represent. But how can we refuse certain themes if we do not know what they are and how can we know what they are if we are not permitted to engage and study them? Second, and in common with others who have drawn on postmodernist perspectives, Prakash seems to think that it is not possible to recognise differences or resistance under the rubric of general or totalizing systems and theories of transition. There are fundamental misconceptions here. As Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson have argued in their different ways, it is unclear why a system or process should by definition be incapable of generating difference or raising resistances. Capitalism as most contemporary Marxist historians see it indeed constitutes a system or process but one inherently conflictual and changeful, incapable of realizing or of stabilizing itself. It produces and operates through a wide variety of social relations of production and exploitation, which are themselves in constant transformation. Although its forces may shape forms of resistance, they do not predetermine its outcomes, for no hegemonic system can pervade and exhaust all social experience, least of all one which fails to meet so many human and social needs.25 Indeed, it is only in the light of some conception of a dominant cultural logic or hegemonic system that resistance, emancipation, or difference can be meaningfully identified or measured at all.26 It is also difficult to take Prakash seriously when he recommends postmodernist perspectives on the grounds that they avoid totalizing forms of theory or explanation. As Jameson has also pointed out, postmodernist approaches are themselves built around a form of totalizing abstraction that distinguishes postmodern culture by its logic of difference and its sustained production of random and unrelated subsystems of all kinds.27 In these ways, then, postfoundationalist history and the wider per896

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spectives from which it derives seem to us to offer an uncertain and deeply inconsistent premise from which to conceive our relationship to the past.

Representation, self-representation, and politics If these practical examples of a postfoundationalist approach seem beset with problems, what of the theoretical arguments, the combination of cultural critiques, styled after Said, Foucaultian perspectives on power, engaged politics of difference, and aspects of postmodernist theory that Prakash sees as animating these new directions in history? The core of his argument is that these perspectives can be combined and employed both to emancipate other histories and to develop new approaches to the larger question of representation and its politics. But there are critical questions here too, in particular as these arguments relate to the wider issue of selfrepresentation by minority and marginal groups themselves and in contexts involving the developed as well as undeveloped nations. As we shall argue, we need to look rather more carefully here at what we are emancipating ourselves into. Prakash clearly wishes to retain some notion of an emancipatory politics for the dispossessed, as against, for example, an extreme Foucauldian view of the inescapability of relations of power and domination. If we do wish to hold to some view of political struggle as potentially emancipatory, yet simultaneously refuse to define what the larger structures and trajectories of such struggle might be, on the grounds that this would constitute a totalizing form of analysis, we push the burden of representing such a politics and its trajectories onto those who are in struggle themselves. This is not just by default. The principle of self-representation is, as we shall see, enshrined and positively recommended in much explicit postmodernist theory as the very means to recovering suppressed histories and identities. The obvious problem here, though, is that self-representation, the idea that there can be unitary and centred subjects who are able to speak for themselves and present their experience in their own authentic voices, is precisely what postmodernist theory attacks in the Western humanist tradition. A number of critics have tried to blur this problem by talking in terms of a kind of rainbow alliance shared among a range of oppositional voices. This may, indeed, be Prakash's attempted solution to this dilemma. He describes how "the new post-Orientalist scholarship's attempt to release the third world from its marginal position forms a part of the movement that advocates the 'politics of difference'—racial, class, gender, ethnic, national and so forth."28 This appears at first to resolve the difficulties in privileging self-representation, for what is offered instead is a common platform shared between a variety of dissenting groups, who can speak to and for others and for themselves. In some respects, resistance from the 897

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point of view of class, gender, ethnicity or third world nationhood indeed share common ground; but assuming that these share the same agenda in some more general and positive way simplifies what are actually very complex and sometimes fiercely antagonistic positions.29 It is also very difficult, from any set of Foucauldian perspectives at least, to generate a common platform or a fusion of struggle for these localised oppositional groups. Doing so means subordinating them to a transcendent or totalizing form of political logic: If it is hard to generate a common agenda for these oppositional groups, we are led back to some form of privileged selfrepresentation. Very clearly, it is tremendously important to attend to the experiences and self-accounts of marginal groups; but this is very different from the nativist view, implicit here, that they have some kind of inherently superior validity. Prakash disassociates himself strongly from such a view, but it is hard to see how he can avoid it, given the contradictions described above. This leads on to a further set of problems. We are invited to see these new critiques of Orientalist and other forms of privileged knowledge as contestatory acts, to commend their concern with relationships of domination and their efforts to unlock and release histories, cultures and identities frozen by the essentialisations of the past. This implies not only that subjects can and do represent themselves on the basis of their experience; it suggests also that their resistances eventuate in forms of knowledge which are emancipatory, transcending relationships of domination, in some senses at least. The problem is that these assumptions are not consonant with the kind of Foucauldian perspective on power and identity that Prakash commends elsewhere. As a range of critics have pointed out, including Said himself, it is difficult to see how any concerted political engagement, let alone one with the processes of capitalist modernization, is possible on the basis of Foucault's deliberately amorphous and dispersed vision of power.30 Such an engagement looks even less promising when we are told that postfoundationalism's major virtue is its intellectual refusal to accept the very analytical theme of capitalist modernity, lest we take on its ideologies by admitting to any of its realities. The principal casualty of this inadequacy must be politics, for what kind of resistance can be raised to capitalism's systemic coercions if that resistance apparently denies their existence? Indeed, it is even less clear that one can generate what is ultimately a politics of emancipation from a set of Foucauldian assumptions about power and social relations. Prakash and many who share his approaches vigorously and virtuously assert the presence of struggle in all social relations whilst saying very little about the systematic political means by which emancipation is to be pursued or what indeed it might look like if it were ever achieved. According to this view, emancipation becomes a struggle purely internal to the consciousness of those who resist and only repre898

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sentable by them. The precise effect of this reading of emancipation back into Foucault is to return these areas of his argument to their sources in Nietzsche. Emancipation becomes a Nietzschean act of pure autonomous will. This might seem an ironic position for a theory concerning itself with the struggles of underclasses,31 but as Prakash himself notes, this has been precisely the approach of the Subaltern Studies group, which he then commends to us for its creative appropriation of poststructuralist perspectives! There are further difficulties concerning questions of subjectivity and hence of history and agency. Prakash draws on Foucault to argue that subalternity, indeed the multiplicity of changing positions within Indian society, are to be regarded as "effects of power relations." The subjectposition of the subaltern likewise is an effect, contingent and unstable, which "resides in difference." Questions of subjectivity are discussed in terms of the discourses which construct it. Thus, the identification with the subordinated's subject-position, rather than national origin, has been the crucial element in formulating critical third-world perspectives. Of course, as subordinated subjects, Indian historians have obviously developed and embraced the victim's subject-position more readily. But because the experience and expression of subordination are discursively formulated, we are led back to the processes and forces that organise the subordinate's subject-position.32 The difficulty here is that it is hard to see how this approach can have room for any theory about experience as the medium through which resistances emerge and are crystallised or about the conditions under which the subordinate can become active agents of their own emancipation on the basis of this experience. Some conception of experience and agency are absolutely required by the dispossessed's call for a politics of contest, for it is not clear how a dispersed effect of power relations can at the same time be an agent whose experience and reflection form the basis of a striving for change. To argue that we need these categories in some form does not at all imply a return to the undifferentiated and static conceptions of nineteenth-century liberal humanism. Our present challenge lies precisely in understanding how the underclasses we wish to study are at once constructed in conflictual ways as subjects yet also find the means through struggle to realize themselves in coherent and subjectively centred ways as agents.33 The question of historical understanding is still more crucial. As Fredric Jameson and Andreas Huyssen have argued, and we have tried in a different way to suggest above, postmodernist approaches desperately lack a sense of history, a capacity for that labour of remembrance and understanding through which agents become able to experience history in an 899

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active way, to orient themselves individually and collectively in the present, and so to act. Indeed, this capacity must lie at the very centre of what Prakash and many others call for—in the recovery of frozen and silenced histories as part of a conscious political strategy designed to engage contemporary relations of domination, as these have affected third-world societies. The problem, though, is that it is extremely difficult to see how we can actually have a postmodern perspective which possesses any kind of strong historical sense. On present definitions, the two would seem to be a rather strong contradiction in terms. What distinguishes the former is precisely its sense of depthlessness, of the past's disassembly into a vast collection of images and fragments available in the present only for the purposes of nostalgia or pastiche.34 Whilst acknowledging the extent to which he and others have drawn on these perspectives, Prakash certainly emphasises the very significant differences in their approaches to issues of politics and power. The concerns of postmodernism have in the end been different in two ways. First, they have tended to take pleasure in a Bakhtinian proliferation of voices for its own sake and in a way more aesthetic than political. Second, their own efforts to fragment Western procedures of representation run the risk of using third-world voices and cultures merely as others. Yet Prakash does not really tell us how his more politically engaged stance is substantially different from the politics of postmodernism. In fact, it is striking how much the two have in common. Both are caught between the critique of objectivist forms of representation on the one hand and what becomes a slide towards self-representation on the other. Likewise, postfoundational history tries to dissolve the concepts of experience and identity and to question the use of any historical category "which resists further decomposition into heterogeneity." Like postmodern theory itself, this tends to inhibit rather than to promote an active politics. Ironically, in fact, not all feminist and black criticism, which Prakash would draw into alliance, is actually so hostile to founding categories or concepts of experience, identity, or political agency. Within feminist criticism there is, of course, an immensely wide range of positions and approaches; but as Denise Riley has argued, if feminism abandons the category of women and the proposition that they have a different history, it dissolves its own subject. Although feminists contend strongly amongst themselves as to whether the concept of woman constitutes a universal category, they must for some purposes and at some levels continue to act as if such a category indeed exists, precisely for the reason that the world continues to behave and treat women as though one does.35 Not all feminists have foreclosed on questions of agency, experience, and identity. Both feminism and postmodernism strive to reveal the implication of many forms of knowledge in power, but many feminists argue that they cannot limit themselves to dissection or to the fundamental cultural relativism 900

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that underlies postmodernism's refusal to do more than proliferate deconstructive questions. Showing how certain kinds of knowledge are privileged does not in itself change very much. Postmodernism itself cannot provide a theory for or make the move to agency, precisely because it regards all knowledge as tainted and complicit. Because its ultimate concern is with real social change feminism can and must make this move, which also keeps open the possibility that there may be some forms of knowledge which are emancipatory rather than tainted and complicit and which are measured against their usefulness for feminist purposes rather than against the inverted positivist standards of postmodernist epistemology. Likewise, questions of experience and identity remain open ones for many feminists. In the Western tradition, as Linda Hutcheon suggests, women have not been identified historically with origins, authority, or ego. On the contrary, they envisage themselves as lacking these attributes already. Their task must be to reconstruct as well as question concepts of self and experience, for as emphasised above, political action becomes impossible if women as subjects see themselves and their experience only in terms of dispersal.36 If feminists have made these differences very clear, so too have at least some critics writing from other minority backgrounds, certainly some of those to which Prakash refers. In an article on these minority discourses in their relation to the Western intellectual tradition and its academic institutions, Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd do not hesitate to use privileged categories or totalizing forms of analysis. For them, the problems of minority intellectuals spring "as inevitably from the modes of late capitalist society as do the systematic exploitation of the less privileged minority groups and the feminization of poverty."37 They are very clear, moreover, that for all the importance of changes at the level of discourse, emancipation depends ultimately on "radical transformations of the material structures of exploitation."38 The question of identity also remains an open one, significant only in the end for issues of practice and struggle. Fragmented identity is for minorities a given of their social existence. But as such a given it is not yet by any means an index of liberation, not even of that formal and abstract liberation which is all that poststructuralism, in itself and disarticulated from any actual process of struggle, could offer. On the contrary, the non-identity of minorities remains the sign of material damage, to which the only coherent response is struggle, not ironic distanciation.39 Edward Said: problems of a paradigm That Prakash's position should be so shot through with inconsistencies is in some senses understandable. He takes his definitions and many of his 901

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premises from Said, whose text also has many of these same contradictions. It is worth returning to these aspects of Said's work, because Prakash is only one of a great number of historians who seem to us to have based themselves on Said's positions without attending adequately to the problems in them. It is well known that Said draws heavily on a range of Foucauldian perspectives, both for the analysis of Orientalism as a form of discourse and for his own repudiation of Europe's "universalising historicism." He brings these themes together to press home one of his central arguments: Orientalist constructions are not merely inaccurate, biased, or in need of replacing with more adequate ones. Rather, Orientalism as a style of authoritative representation is itself the tainted product of an epistemology and an intellectual tradition in which "the one human history uniting humanity either culminated in or was observed from the vantage point of Europe."40 Said's continuing commitment at other levels both to conventional humanist techniques of representation and to an implicitly universalist discourse of freedom is often less well appreciated. Despite his criticism of Orientalism as a style of representation, he makes it clear that his concern is not to reject the possibility of any kind of objective representation. Knowledge for Said clearly is not just the endlessly self-referential product of all-pervasive power relations. On the contrary, his interest lies in developing forms of representation and knowledge which are emancipatory in their effects and which can serve as a basis for active political commitment and intervention. As he says, unless intellectuals are interested in changing political relations, in dismantling systems of domination as well as defining them, the critique of Orientalism is merely "an ephemeral pastime."41 He sees any worthwhile cultural criticism as "constitutionally opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom."42 This pursuit of criticism's active emancipatory potential is "a fundamental human and intellectual obligation."43 He differs sharply here from Derrida and Foucault, whom he sees as having abandoned the critic's proper task of an engagement which is ultimately political in its nature with the dominant structures of contemporary culture. Derrida elected to illustrate what is undecidable within texts, rather than to investigate their worldly power; and Foucault forgot that ultimately "the fascinated description of exercised power is never a substitute for trying to change power relations within society."44 Said also reserves a place and a significance for individual agents and individual experience in the shaping of Orientalist discourse: "Yet unlike Michel Foucault, to whose work I am greatly indebted, I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Oriental902

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ism."45 This position is wildly at odds with Foucault's own unremitting attempts to fragment these categories on the grounds of their humanist and essentialist character. In contrast, Said refers to his own and similar projects as humanist in a broad sense and in an interview in 1986 referred very explicitly both to the contradictions in his own position and to his radical disagreement with Foucauldian perspectives on representation and power: "Orientalism is theoretically inconsistent, and I designed it that way: I didn't want Foucault's method, or anybody's method, to override what I was trying to put forward. The notion of a non-coercive knowledge, which I come to at the end of the book, was deliberately anti-Foucault."46 How, then, is the critic to go about the universal moral and political tasks, which Said commends, without appearing to invoke the tainted authority of European or any other single and dominating intellectual tradition? He notes that a whole range of intellectual projects, just like his own, have already begun to break up old objects of knowledge ruled by Orientalism and to form new fields of investigation. These projects are local and self-convicted but form a common endeavour. Their methods deliberately avoid totalizing and systematizing; rather, they strive consciously to be secular, marginal, oppositional. They work out of a decentered consciousness, intending the end of dominating, coercive systems of knowledge; but they do not seek common unity by appeals to any kind of sovereign authority, methodological consistency, canonicity, science.47 The point about consistency is certainly true, for what comes out of all this is a very strained and contradictory position. Said recommends that we abandon totalization and systematization in favour of the off-centre and the marginal. But what view could have been more centrally focussed and systematising than that which he presented in Orientalism! What gave the latter its power was precisely its ability to reinterpret, within a single analytical framework, core elements in the European intellectual and political tradition for a very long period and, indeed, to reinterpret them in ways that obscured internal relations of contestation and resistance in Western cultures. If Said had followed his own injunctions, now echoed in Prakash, Orientalism would never have been written, with much loss to the whole scholarly community. Again, Said advocates humanist values and a set of universal moral imperatives regarding politics and human freedom, the fundamental obligations of intellectuals, the proper role of cultural criticism. But how are these strong and central normative themes reconciled with the secular and marginal position, the extreme relativist "plurality of terrains, multiple experiences and different constituencies" which Said commends elsewhere?48 Ambiguity also marks Said's position on representation. He repudiates the view that only women can write about women, blacks about blacks, that only criticism which treats them well is good criticism. But as he himself says, the kind of local and self-committed intellectual projects he commends are always in danger of slipping into a 903

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kind of "possessive exclusivism," which holds that the only valid kind of representation is the self-representation of insiders.49 Of course, it is true that such contradictions can be very fruitful, particularly in hands as deft as Said's. But their fruitfulness lies surely in prompting us to recognize and go beyond them. Moreover, there do seem to be levels in Said's wider position at which creative tensions begin to look like submerged self-contradictions. This was perhaps most interestingly so, for our purposes, in what he said early in 1989 during the battles over Salman Rushdie's work. Rushdie's "fundamental rights" should be protected, Said argued, because the contemporary world, for all its particularities, must be regarded as one world and human history as one history. (But not, to paraphrase his earlier remarks, a human history seen from Europe's vantage point.) This meant that there was no pure unsullied essence to which Muslims or anyone else could return; this single world was irredeemably heterogeneous, and Rushdie's work was a part of that. At the same time, one feature of his work that made it legitimate was that "Rushdie, from the community of Islam, has written for the West about Islam. The Satanic Verses is thus a self-representation."50 This brings Said very close to what he rejected earlier about self-representation: its tendency merely to invert the essential categories of Orientalism. It is simply very difficult to combine arguments concerning fundamental rights and possibilities for emancipation with a postmodernist refusal of any kind of unitary or systematizing perspective as to what these rights might be or what emancipation is from or into. Consequently, rights, dominance, and emancipation are defined only from the extreme relativist perspective of the multifarious struggles of oppositional groups. And when one version of emancipation conflicts with another, the natural defence for both becomes the principle of self-representation as such.

Historicizing postmodernism? Perspectives on a liberal culture Why, then, have these perspectives achieved such widespread popularity in Western, particularly American, academic circles? There is now, of course, a large and influential body of postmodernist writing in history and anthropology, mostly published in the United States.51 This writing does not just embrace postmodernist and poststructuralist strategies partially and contradictorily as Said and Prakash do but advocates them wholeheartedly as the very means to fashion new possibilities for writing and representation in a postcolonial world. There have been a range of prominent contributors here, but perhaps the most influential has been James Clifford, both in the collection edited with George Marcus in 1986, Writing Culture, and his own more recent volume of essays, The Predicament of Culture?2 We would like to turn now to look at Clifford's more thorough904

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going recommendation of postmodernist perspectives, to discuss what we see to be its extremely conservative political implications, implications which Prakash cannot logically disassociate himself from. Clifford himself notes that Said remains "ambivalently enmeshed in the totalizing habits of Western humanism."33 For him, the relativist and poststructuralist features of Said's work make it important; its humanist and universalist elements are merely an unfortunate hangover from an outmoded intellectual tradition: the privilege of standing above cultural particularism, of appealing to the universalist power that speaks for humanity, for universal experiences of love, work, death, etc., is a privilege invented by totalizing Western liberalism.54 Clifford's critique of Said flows out of a set of clear postmodernist and poststructuralist commitments. New possibilities for postcolonial ethnography are best opened up through a rejection of all universal forms of understanding culture or the past. Ethnography should focus instead on the ways in which cultures, as forms of "collectively constituted difference," are in a constant process of local invention, carried out in relation to recent colonial histories and new national identities.55 In this mobile postcolonial world, in which exotic others return the ethnographer's gaze, new ways must also be found of talking about relations between cultures which emphasise that these are relationships of power. This does not mean, however, that we can devise new theories about global homogenization or the transformation of postcolonial societies in the image of Europe. Certainly, Clifford concedes, there are increasingly pervasive processes of economic and cultural centralisation at work. But these do not tell the whole or the only story. What emerges constantly at the level of local societies are new and inventive orders of cultural difference and of subversion, mockery, syncretism and revival, which challenge all efforts to construct any single master narrative of global historical change: "Indeed, modern ethnographic histories are perhaps condemned to oscillate between two metanarratives: one of homogenization, the other of emergence; one of loss, the other of invention."56 Here, then, postmodernist hostility to any kind of universal history, and what is in effect a position of extreme cultural relativism, feed into and reinforce one another. From this perspective, one can see why Clifford is anxious to hold on to some concept of culture itself, for its "differential and relativist" functions are precisely what is important.57 What we therefore need, he argues, are new ways of constructing and authorising knowledge about others. Instead of the ethnographer as the privileged purveyor of such knowledge, we must learn to envisage a world of generalized ethnography and texts which are frankly the product of many voices. This means going 905

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beyond methods which make the writer into an omniscient authority and spokesman, which screen off the whole business of research and writing, and which deal with abstract collectivities and typifying processes, such as "the Nuer think. . . ." It means having ethnographies which are open about their status as "a constructive negotiation involving at least two, and usually more, conscious, politically significant subjects."58 These new dialogical approaches not only strive to create texts which are an open-ended interplay of many voices, along the lines that Mikhail Bakhtin envisaged. They also seek to return control over knowledge to its indigenous sources, to represent adequately the authority of informants, and to open real textual spaces for a multitude of indigenous voices whose perspectives and agendas are not imposed on them from outside: "If accorded an autonomous textual space, transcribed at sufficient length, indigenous statements make sense in terms different from those of the arranging ethnographer. Ethnography is invaded by heteroglossia."59 Although these aims are in some senses still Utopian, Clifford points to a range of recent studies that have tried to accord to particularly knowledgeable or sophisticated informants the status not merely "of independent enunciators, but of writers."60 Anthropologists writing from this perspective "have described the indigenous 'ethnographers' with whom they shared, to some degree, a distanced, analytic, even ironic view of custom. These individuals became valued informants because they understood, often with real subtlety, what an ethnographic attitude toward culture entailed."61 In this way, anthropology has been able not only to move towards a world of plural authorship but to recognize ethnography's participation in the actual invention of culture, as in the collectively produced study, Piman Shamanism and Staying Sickness. The ethnographer, Donald Bahr, appears on the title page with three other authors, who are Papago Indians. The book is intended "to transfer to a shaman as many as possible of the functions normally associated with authorship."62 The shaman, Gregorio, is thus the main source for the "theory of disease" described in the book. The audiences to which the book is addressed are also multiple. Gregorio's commentaries are in Piman, with translations made by the interpreter, David Lopez; and the linguist, Albert Alvarez; and accompanied by Bahr's own interpretations. Thus the book not only keeps distinct the contributions of each but provides material for qualified Papagos as well as for Western audiences. Indeed, Alvarez himself designed the translations so that the book could be used in language teaching, thus contributing to the development of Piman as a written language: "Thus the book contributes to the Papagos' literary invention of their culture."63 What, then, are the broader implications of this approach? Certainly, issues of power are taken to be central to the relation between ethnographer and writer-informant; and a very large effort is made to change the 906

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terms on which they conduct their exchanges. However, we need to look more closely at these terms of exchange and to ask how far they manage to avoid the problems identified earlier. We would like to argue not only that these problems are not avoided, but that there is actually another and much more disturbing political logic in these arguments as presented by Clifford. Here certainly, the principle of self-representation is pushed to its logical conclusion, which is the self-representation of individuals. This is precisely what is implied in the new dialogical approach to ethnography that Clifford and others advocate as the means to supercede older styles of representation, with their questionable assumptions about authorship, their typifying procedures, and their references to abstract collectivities. If we are not to employ the latter, indeed, it certainly is very difficult to see what other categories and accounts ethnographers could work with except for direct indigenous statements, quotations and translations, such as those of Gregorio the shaman, who have a sophisticated knowledge of the culture and an understanding of what a properly ethnographic attitude entails. But because it privileges only the voices of authoritative indigenous individuals, this approach presents a clear problem. It is hard to see how such an approach can recognise or give adequate place to conflict within social contexts thus examined or to those groups or communities who may dissent very strongly from these authoritative accounts. It is not clear how such relationships of power are discussed at all if the analytical means of abstraction and typification are eschewed in favour of a dialogue between individuals. Indeed, the strategies proposed here look disturbingly similar to those of East Indian Company officials, who also thought of culture as "collectively constituted difference" in early colonial India. When they wished to elucidate the major principles of what they assumed to be a composite Hindu culture, they turned to the Brahman pandits who were deemed to be experts and authorities in the matter. The result of this privileging of particular informants was the longer-term emergence of an all-India Hindu tradition very much in the image of Brahmanic religious values. These values, now embodied in written legal codes and disseminated in a wide range of social contexts, gradually eroded what had previously been a much more heterogeneous collection of local social and religious practices.64 Given the great play that Clifford and others make with their vigorous repudiation of all legacies of colonialism, one would have thought that an especial target of their attack would have been precisely this sort of colonial effort to establish dominance through the textualisation of cultures in collaboration with carefully chosen indigenous authorities. But this is just the kind of intervention that he seems to recommend in the example of the jointly produced book on Papago culture, in which the shaman Gregorio's translated accounts were designed in part to contribute to "the Papagos' literary invention of their culture." 907

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Postmodernism supposedly distinguishes this kind of collaboration from colonial strategies, of course, with the argument that ethnographic consciousness is now no longer the monopoly of Western specialists but is shared with a whole range of indigenous audiences who will scrutinize ethnographic texts and decode them in their own ways. Indigenous as well as Western voices are now free to negotiate and contest such representations on what has become a world-wide cultural stage. Local cultures constantly reinvent themselves within and against these new circumstances of global relationality. Their stories are different. They continually undercut and forbid the construction of any single or totalising narrative. To question these basic suppositions is not to deny that indigenous audiences are sharply alive to the political consequences of novel cultural interpretations and interventions. The dissemination of Brahmanical religious values was consciously and bitterly contested in nineteenth-century India and continues to be fought by rather different groups at present. But it is quite a different thing to posit, as Clifford appears to here, a shared ethnographic consciousness, a common participation in the textualization of cultures and in what he calls the "distanced, analytic, even ironic view of custom" that ethnographic consciousness entails.65 Most obvious, it seems unlikely that those amongst indigenous audiences who are neither powerholders nor specialist purveyors of knowledge will be able to afford a detached or abstracted view of custom, particularly when its terms are being reinterpreted from outside as well as from above. Even within the terms of a dialogical approach, which focusses much more narrowly on exchanges between ethnographers and their selected writer-collaborators, it is hard to see how we can speak of a dialogue or negotiation which both share on near-equal terms. The issue is not simply the problem of a text's internal composition, which is the chief concern of dialogical approaches. It is also, as Bob Scholte has argued, that ethnographic texts are subject to external as well as to internal relations of production, which include a professional academic apparatus of seminars, lectures and conferences, funding bodies, research councils and committees of appointment.66 It would be very difficult to deny that this intellectual and institutional apparatus helps set to a considerable extent the agendas and framing questions which ethnographers take with them into the field and that it also exerts a large control in shaping professional standards, styles of writing, and access to publication; in awarding recognition and conferring academic authority; and in approving and financing further research. Local writer-collaborators may indeed have long-lasting and intimate connections with individual ethnographers. It is much less clear what access and influence they, let alone wider and less privileged indigenous audiences, are able to command in these complex external contexts of a text's production. This is an extraordinary blindness. As we have seen, postmodernist 908

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writing in this field repeatedly insists that its paramount concern is with relationships of power and the immersion of all knowledge within them. But this apparently applies to all knowledge and to all forms of historical and social belonging except the postmodern critic's own. In many ways, such a position is entirely consistent with postmodernism's broader premises, which deny possibilities for an active historical selfunderstanding and experience in favour of mythified and fabulized stories which melt our sense of the past's solidity. They refuse to equip themselves for any kind of wider historical or sociological vision, for to do so would need the range of analytical tools that both Clifford and Prakash ask us to echew: privileged categories which "occlude" other histories, abstract collectivities and typifying processes, totalizing and systematizing forms of understanding. What follows from this, in terms of postmodernism's refusal to examine its own historical provenance, may be consistent; but it is none the less disconcerting. It bears a strange resemblance to colonial strategies of knowledge, which notoriously regarded all indigenous identities and relations as proper objects for investigation (in consultation, of course, with proper indigenous authorities) whilst veiling its own history from scrutiny. If, as Clifford sees it, indigenous writers now virtually define and represent themselves through ethnographic texts, so too do local cultures themselves in these new global relationships. In view of postmodernism's hostility to totalities, of course, it is somewhat difficult to hold onto any concept of a culture as such. The way around this, which Clifford takes, is to suggest that cultures may not actually be totalities at all but "mobile ensembles" that constantly reinvent themselves, tell their own stories, and create their own variants on global political relationships. We end up with still a totality but one conceived, like postcolonial subjects themselves, in extremely volatile and voluntaristic ways. Postcolonial societies are free, it would seem almost, to reinvent global political and economic relationships at will. There are forces through which the world is becoming increasingly homogeneous, but we cannot accept a unitary or systematic analysis of these changes. Our stories of homogenization are in the end no different from their stories of local and different self-invention. What, then, are we to make of the apparent popularity of this combination of extreme cultural relativism with a liberal, almost individualist understanding of these postcolonial societies' ability to define and create themselves? For Prakash, as indeed for others who share his approaches, postmodernist perspectives help make possible a radical-sounding assault, issued along with a declamatory public commitment to the emancipation of marginalised cultures, on all existing frameworks of interpretation. For Clifford, just as for Prakash, modern capitalism's global spread can produce only homogenization, just as any history focussing on the theme of capitalist transition can recognize only homogeneity to the detriment of 909

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other and different histories. We see here the postmodernist misconception described above, that systems can only generate sameness. This makes it possible, within a culture deeply antagonistic to any kind of materialist historical explanation, to dismiss suggestions that the local differences we see emerging in postcolonial societies might have something at least to do with logics of differentiation intrinsic to modern capitalism, since it is against and in spite of such logics that these local cultures invent themselves. But the result brings us strangely close to the classic liberal view that culture represents some realm of freedom and choice. Although we can study larger forces of global economic centralization and the coercions they exert, cultural relativism means that this metanarrative can do no more than stand alongside its opposite, that of local cultures' selfcreation. Further, these very public commitments to cultural emancipation seem to displace most of the intellectual risk onto writer-collaborators who authorise their own representations, indigenous audiences who decode texts in their own ways, and a range of national, ethnic and other marginalized people who are made responsible for their own selfrepresentation, their own visions of emancipation and political struggles towards it. Clifford Geertz has identified some of the logics underlying this position. All these approaches (he calls them pretensions) try to "get round the un-get-roundable fact that all ethnographical descriptions are homemade, that they are the describer's descriptions, not those of the described."67 Although the business of representation has become infinitely more complex in recent years, although ethnographers and historians are more sharply aware than ever before of its acute moral and political difficulties, these cannot be shifted onto those whose control over the production of ethnographic texts is more apparent than real; nor can it be resolved through technique: The burden of authorship cannot be evaded, however heavy it may have grown; there is no possibility of displacing it onto "method", "language" or (an especially popular maneuver at the moment) "the people themselves" redescribed ("appropriated" is probably the better term) as co-authors.68 We would go rather further than this. These postmodernist approaches, particularly Clifford's, actually offer us an epistemology that denies that its own history can be seriously investigated and an analytical preoccupation with a very narrowly defined set of individual relationships. Effectively depoliticised by being insulated from their material and institutional contexts, these relationships are presented as an arena in which indigenous collaborators and audiences are free, as it were, to invent and be themselves. Such efforts to sever off spheres of activity for free individuals or 910

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cultures are a very old device of liberal ideology. The British colonial record is full of them. If all this looks more like a device for legitimation than any basis for an emancipatory form of knowledge, what is being legitimized? Said, Huyssen, and others have made the point that French postmodernism and poststructuralism underwent a peculiar metamorphosis when they were domesticated within American liberal culture from the early 1960s. Their rapid growth in popularity reflected the degree to which they were eviscerated of their earlier and radical political content by literary and cultural critics, who converted them into forms of "writerly connoisseurism and textual gentrification."69 We see these intellectual positions sustaining key aspects of contemporary political culture in the United States. The first concerns the way in which the advance of arguments about the selfrepresentation of third world peoples fits neatly into its self-consciously multiminority academic culture. What marks debate here is, of course, a deep concern with multiple and conflictual identities. Yet what is striking about these debates, particularly those employing postmodernist perspectives, is how one particular identity, that of class or material relations, is so often downplayed or screened off. Not only do participants in these debates frequently ignore questions of class, but they see themselves also as having to challenge the larger intellectual tradition of historical materialism that establishes those questions as central, on the grounds that its universalist and objectivist pretensions are really no different to those of liberal modernization theory. One consequence of this is that self-defined minority or subaltern critics are saved from doing what they constantly demand of others, which is to historicise the conditions of their own emergence as authoritative voices—conditions which could hardly be described without reference of some kind to material or class relations. At other levels, the exclusion of class and of the materialist critique of capitalism from the agenda of scholarship has implications that seem to us absolutely critical. What it means is that the true underclasses of the world are only permitted to present themselves as victims of the particularistic kinds of gender, racial, and national oppression which they share with preponderantly middle-class American scholars and critics, who would speak with or in their voices. What such underclasses are denied is the ability to present themselves as classes: as victims of the universalistic, systemic and material deprivations of capitalism which clearly separate them off from their subaltern expositors. In sum, the deeply unfortunate result of these radical postmodernist approaches in the minorities debate is thus to reinforce and to give new credence to the well-known hostility of American political culture to any kind of materialist or class analysis. These approaches also seem to us to have had important and wider implications in American political and academic culture. Another anthropologist who employs them, Paul Rabinow, tells us engagingly that he is 911

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"temperamentally more comfortable in an oppositional stance."70 The same seems to be true of a wide range of current academic writing. There runs through it a desire to be seen on the side of the dispossessed against power, working with their strange voices and different stories, subverting dominant cultures and intellectual traditions "from within the academy." But in the case of postmodernist approaches, these commitments can be made with a lightened burden of authorship and a comforting sense that in this volatile new world of cultural self-invention, the critic's own history is at best a fable. What all this begins to look very like, in fact, is a new form of that key and enduring feature of Western capitalist and imperialist culture: the bad conscience of liberalism, still struggling with the continuing paradox between an ideology of liberty at home and the reality of profoundly exploitative political relations abroad, and now striving to salve and reequip itself in a postcolonial world with new arguments and better camouflaged forms of moral authority. But the solutions it offers— methodological individualism, the depoliticising insulation of social from material domains, a view of social relations that is in practice extremely voluntaristic, the refusal of any kind of programmatic politics—do not seem to us radical, subversive, or emancipatory. They are on the contrary conservative and implicitly authoritarian, as they were indeed when recommended more overtly in the heyday of Britain's own imperial power. Prakash himself does not push these perspectives to their most authoritarian conclusions and tries rightly to be critical of their depoliticising effects. But since he shares many of their core assumptions, his efforts result in ambiguity and contradiction. His is basically an attempt, like that of Said and of many others who try to use his position as a point of departure, to ride two horses at once. But one of these may not be a horse that brooks inconstant riders, and Said himself does at least seem to know which of them in the end he would rather be on.

Notes * We would like to thank Ajay Skaria, Crispin Bates, Saurabh Dube, David Ludden, Fred Reid, and Burt Stein for their reading and comments on this paper. 1 Gyan Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32:2 (April 1990), 383-408. 2 Ibid., 390. 3 Ibid., 397. 4 Ibid. ,399. 5 Ibid., 398. 6 Ibid., 401. 1 Ibid., 404. 8 Ibid., 406. 9 Ibid., 400. 912

AFTER O R I E N T A L I S M 10 Ibid., 404-5. 11 Ibid., 405. 12 John Searle, "The Word Turned Upside Down," New York Review of Books (27 October 1983), 78. A good introduction to this debate is in Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 194-9. Ajay Skaria kindly provided this reference. 13 Prakash's notion of what constitutes Marxist history is problematic, for neither of the two examples which he provides fall easily into the category. The first, concerning Bengali histories of the Bengali renaissance would seem most influenced by Bengali nationalist ideology, as it is not clear why Bengal's failure to generate a secular rationalist culture and a bourgeois social order prior to the development of industrial capitalism is a problem for Marxism. The second, concerning usage of Andre Gunder Frank's concept of underdevelopment, also ill fits the category, for the concept derives from neo-Smithian rather than Marxist economic theory: see R. Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism," New Left Review, 104:4 (1977), 25-92. 14 See, for example, T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); T. J. Byres and Harbans Mukhia, eds., "Feudalism and Non-European Societies," Journal of Peasant Studies (Special Issue), 12:2, 3 (January, April 1985). 15 For these arguments in Bayly, see The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad 1880-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For a general guide to recent research in this field, see D. A. Washbrook, "Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History c. 1720-1860," Modern Asian Studies, 22:1 (1988), 57-96. 16 These arguments are developed in C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and The World 1780-1830 (London: Longman, 1989). 17 Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories," 398. 18 Idem. 19 See, for example, Cohn's "The Command of Language and the Language of Command," in R. Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies IV (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 279-80. 20 See especially Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). 21 Ranajit Guha, Subaltern Studies 1 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 7. 22 Guha's latest contribution to Subaltern Studies, "Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography," distinguishes between a British and a precolonial Indian form of political authority, the latter organized around principles of Brahmanic and kingly authority. He concludes by describing his argument as "a critique of our own approach to the Indian past and our own performance in writing about it," designed to "assist in the self-criticism of our own historiography—the historiography of a colonized people" (Guha's emphasis; Subaltern Studies IV [Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989], 306-7). 23 In this case, the royal and dominant Kallar caste in Pudukottai. See Nicholas B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 24 Searle, "The World Turned Upside Down," 78-9. 25 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 913

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26 27 28 29

30 31

32 33

34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

1977), 125: Fredric Jameson, "Marxism and Postmodernism," New Left Review, no. 176 (1989), 34-9. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review, no. 146 (1984), 57. Jameson, "Marxism and Postmodernism," 34. Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories," 406. On the issue ofsati in India, for example, compare Ashis Nandy, At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), 1-31, with Sharada Jain, Nirja Misra, and Kavita Shrivastava, "Deorala Episode: Women's Protest in Rajasthan," Economic and Political Weekly, nos. 7, 11 (1987), 1891^1. See also the very interesting discussion of Nandy's position on the Roop Kanwar case in Lata Mani, "Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception," Inscriptions, no. 5 (1989), 15-16. Edward Said, The World, The Text and The Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 245. The wider and deeply conservative implications of post-Nietzschean projects for emancipation outside any framework of instrumental reason are discussed in Jurgen Habermas's classic article, "Modernity versus Postmodernity," New German Critique, 22 (Winter 1981). Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories," 402-3. This question of how we might conceptualise the presence of the subaltern is discussed further and with different emphases in R. O'Hanlon, "Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia," Modern Asian Studies, 22:1 (1988), 218. For these arguments in Jameson and Huyssen, see Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," especially pp. 64-71; and Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (London: Macmillan, 1988). Denise Riley, Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History (London: Macmillan, 1988), 112-4. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 39 and 167-8. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, "Introduction: Minority Discourse— What is to Be Done?," Cultural Critique, Fall (1987), 12. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16. Edward Said, "Orientalism Reconsidered," in Francis Barker et al., eds., Literature, Politics and Theory (London: Methuen, 1986), 223. Ibid., 229. Said, The World, 29. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 222. Said, Orientalism (London: Peregrine Books, 1985), 23. See the interview with Said in Imre Salusinszky, Criticism in Society (London: Methuen, 1987), 137. Said, "Orientalism Reconsidered," 228. Idem. Ibid., 229. This short article appeared in the Observer newspaper (26 February 1989, 14). Useful introductions to this literature are Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism; and D. Kellner, ed.. 914

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52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70

Postmodernism, Jameson, Critique (Washington, D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1989). James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 271. Ibid., 263. Ibid., 274. For a good summary of the arguments about culture as collectively constituted, see Roger M. Keesing, "Anthropology as Interpretative Quest," Current Anthropology, 28:2 (April 1987). Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 17. Ibid., 21'4. Ibid., 41 Ibid., 51. Idem. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 52. Historians have documented this process across a range of fields. See, for example, L. Mani, "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India," Cultural Critique, Fall (1987); D. Washbrook, "Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India," Modern Asian Studies, 15:3 1981; R. O'Hanlon, "Cultures of Rule, Communities of Resistance: Gender, Discourse and Tradition in Recent South Asian Historiographies," Social Analysis, no. 25 (September 1989); C. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, 136-68; N. Dirks, "The Invention of Caste: Civil Society in Colonial India," Social Analysis, no. 5 (September 1989); Lucy Carroll, "Law, Custom and Statutary Social Reform: The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856," Indian Economic and Social History Review, 20:4 (1983). Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 49. Bob Scholte, "The Literary Turn in Contemporary Anthropology," Critique of Anthropology, 7:1, 38. Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 144. Ibid., 140. Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 212; Said, The World, 3-5. Paul Rabinow, "Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and PostModernity in Anthropology," in Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture, 258.

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CAN THE "SUBALTERN" RIDE? A reply to O'Hanlon and Washbrook Cyan Prakash From Comparative Studies in Society and History 34.1 (January 1992): 168-84

The problem with Prakash, O'Hanlon and Washbrook conclude, is that he tries to ride two horses at once—one Marxist, the other poststructuralistdeconstructionist.1 "But one of these may not be a horse that brooks inconstant riders. . . ." So, they say we must choose only one to ride on, not both because the two, in their view, have opposing trajectories. One advances historical understanding and progressive change, the other denies history and perpetuates a retrogressive status quo. Posed in this manner, the choices involve more than a dispute over which paradigm provides a better understanding of the histories of the third world and India. At stake is the writing of history as political practice, and the only safe bet, from their point of view, is Marxism (of their kind), not the endless deferral and nihilism of deconstruction and postmodernism. Having set up this opposition, O'Hanlon and Washbrook's either/or logic has no place for the productive tension that the combination of Marxist and deconstructive approaches generates. They are uncomfortable with those recent writings that employ Marxist categories to analyze patterns of inequalities and exploitation while also using deconstructive approaches to contend that Marxism is part of the history that institutionalized capitalist dominance— approaches which argue that although Marxism can rightfully claim that it historicizes the emergence of capitalism as a world force, it cannot disavow its history as a nineteenth-century European discourse that universalized the mode-of-production narrative. Obviously, this is a strategy predicated on the understanding that historical processes and their critical analysis operate ambivalently; but because such a strategy cannot provide mastery, O'Hanlon and Washbrook resist the ambivalence involved in recognizing 916

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complicity in a history that the critic also seeks to unravel. Therefore, called upon to deconstruct structures and identities rendered foundational by history and faced with the admittedly difficult but enabling strategy of writing histories in terms other than in those they come to us, my critics present us with a stark dichotomy. We are offered the choice of either recognizing that history is structured by certain master narratives, the direction of responsible and critical thinking, or entertaining the illusion that there exist forces and processes other than those authorized by master categories—the road to irresponsible, endless deferral. By thus posing historical writing and deconstructive criticism as opposites, O'Hanlon and Washbrook overlook the possibility of exceeding the limits that history imposes on criticism—a possibility opened up when we recognize that criticism derives both its potential and its limits from its historicity. Turning away from the ambivalent criticism that such a perspective provides, O'Hanlon and Washbrook's desire for a pure, contradiction-free strategy reaches for horses to ride to mastery. The use of the image of the rider is worth pursuing because it illustrates what is at issue in the desire for mastery over ambivalence. In nineteenthcentury India, the British used, among other things, the inability of the Western-educated Indian (the Bengali babii) to ride horses to keep them out of the covenanted civil service. By pointing to a lack in the Indian, the polarity between the native and the Englishman was preserved, thus containing the threat that the equivocal figure of the English-speaking Indian posed to the binary structure of colonizer and the colonized. The British rulers' deceit in using the Indian's lack of horse-riding skills can be construed in the same way as Homi Bhabha reads the utilization of pseudoscientific theories and the citation of spurious authorities in colonial discourses—that is, as an attempt to normalize the ambivalence produced in the contradictory enunciation of the colonial discourse. This ambivalence, he argues, arose in the colonial discourse from the "tension between the synchronic panoptical vision of domination—the demand for identity, stasis—and the counter-pressure of the diachrony of history—change, difference."2 Under these opposing pressures, the colonial discourse was caught up in conflict, split between "what is always 'in place,' already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated . . . as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual license of the African that needs no proof, can never really, in discourse, be proved."3 If, on the one hand, the colonial discourse asserted that the colonizers and the colonized were fixed, unchanging identities, the repetition of this assertion, on the other hand, meant that discourse was forced to constantly re-constitute, re-figure this fixity: consequently, the discourse was split between proclaiming the unchangeability of colonial subjects and acknowledging their changing character by having to re-form, re-constitute subjects. If it produced a dichotomy between the colonizer and the colonized that operated 917

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to secure domination in the Hegelian form of master-slave and self-other dialectic, then the discourse's operation also gave rise to figures and processes which could not be easily accommodated in the given structure of power relations.4 Either way, such conflict caused the colonial discourse to serve domination equivocally. Bhabha traces an example of such an ambivalent functioning of discourse in the construction of the colonial stereotype of mimicmen imposed on English-speaking Indians. He argues that if the British portrayal of the resemblance of Anglicized Indians with Englishmen as mimicry was a "strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which 'appropriates' the Other," the stereotype of mimicry was also the mark of a recalcitrant difference, "a difference that is almost the same, but not quite."5 If the colonial discourse produced a reformed Other—the Anglicized Indian—the product only resembled, but did not replicate, the Self. Because the resemblance alluded not only to sameness but also to a recalcitrant difference—'not white/not quite"—a conflictory economy, based on the simultaneous domestication and recognition of difference, was set into motion. In this economy, because sameness—"English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect"—was embodied in the strange—"Indian in blood and color"—the self-sameness changed to grotesque difference: Mimicry returned as menacing mockery. An assertion of mastery countered the threat that the ambivalence of this mimicry posed to the binary opposition of the colonizer and the colonized by pointing either to a crucial lack (poor horse-riding skills) or a ludicrous excess (the "Johnsonian English" of the Anglicized Indian). O'Hanlon and Washbrook also counter the threat of equivocality ("riding two horses at once") that they see in my arguments for postfoundational histories with a discourse that longs for mastery and has the ability to survey the field from a panoptic position and speak in a singular voice. Deeply problematic for them are my arguments for historical writings that resist the urge to ground history in foundational themes and describe histories that both inhabited and exceeded different systems of power, culture, identity formation, and subject position. From their point of view, anything less than a totalizing vision appears as inadequate, confused, not in control. Thus not only are my views characterized as "deeply misconceived" (p. 147), I also become one of the many who do not really know what is going on (Prakash is "only one of a great number of historians who seem . . . to have based themselves on Said's positions without attending adequately to the problems in them" [p. 155]). Joining the horde of poststructuralists and postmodernists (the two are the same in their opinion), my position becomes "shot through with inconsistencies" (p. 155); and because I follow Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and postmodernists without knowing that they are "inherently inimical" to historical praxis, I land inevitably in the camp of American political culture. What is worse, I cannot avoid views which, along with those of James Clif918

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ford, place me in a relation of "strange resemblance to colonial strategies of knowledge" (p. 163). Other writers also receive a rough treatment, as they are grossly misread and summarily dismissed.6 The condescending and dismissive tone is not accidental; it flows out of their desire for mastery over ambivalence. The nature of their enterprise is to assert the supremacy of an either/or logic through hasty, simplistic, and even ill-informed readings of my essay and of many others whose writings are faulted for one reason or another. I will confine my response to the five areas in which their desire for an unequivocal strategy leads them to serious misreadings: Derrida and the critique of foundations; deconstructive criticism and the possibility of historical writing; the theme of capitalist modernity and its relation to colonialism; Edward Said's Orientalism and its relation to liberal humanism; and postmodernism and the politics of differentiated subject positions.

Derrida and the critique of foundations It is perhaps not surprising that Derrida, a philosopher who has strived the most in recent times to show the possibility and impossibility of master categories, is the biggest casualty of hasty and ill-advised reading. We are told that Derrida's critique of foundational thought "can do little more than reveal, over and over again, the subjective and arbitrary nature of our categories and the uncertainty of knowledge derived from them" (p. 145); that "preoccupied with the non-problem of objectivity," he can only lead us into an "intellectual cul-de-sac" (p. 144). Strong words. But not one of Derrida's writings and interviews is cited as a basis for this reading. Instead, we are offered John Searle's review essay in the New York Review of Books as the authoritative word on Derrida. We are told, on Searle's authority, that, laden as he is with the "residues of positivism," Derrida is hardly in a position to offer us a new method, let alone one with "purposive adequacy" (p. 145). As this extraordinary misreading informs their views on my critique of foundational history, let us examine the prejudice that Derrida is a philosopher of skepticism and nihilistic demolition. Deconstruction is emphatically not about showing the arbitrariness of our categories; rather, its purpose has been to show that structures of signification effect their closures through a strategy of opposition and hierarchization that edit, suppress, and marginalize everything that upsets founding values. And yet the very staging of this strategy reveals what is repressed. Derrida explores the marks of such closures and disclosures in the odd turns of phrase, silences, unguarded details, and contradictions in texts overlooked by traditional notions of meaning, identity, authorial intentions. In Of Grammatology, Derrida shows that Rousseau's conception of speech as the origin of language and writing as its degradation involves placing the latter as a supplement in order to establish the 919

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originality of speech. He then goes on to show that the logic of supplementarity renders problematic the idea of origin: "Supplementarity wrenches language from its condition of origin."7 Derrida concludes from this that the place of writing in Western metaphysics has been "a debased, lateralized, repressed, displaced theme, yet exercising a permanent and obsessive pressure from the place it remains held in check."8 Referring to this powerful myth of presence, its effects, and how its repression of the Other is incomplete, Derrida writes: Metaphysics—the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-European mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form that he must still wish to call Reason. . . . White mythology—metaphysics has erased within itself the fabulous scene that has produced it, the scene that nevertheless remains active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest.9 It would be a gross misreading to conclude from the above passage that its deconstruction of the founding myth of presence is directed just to show the nonobjective character of our knowledge. On the contrary, the purpose of disclosing that origins operate by erasing the signs of their own production is to undo foundations, to open up the structure of differance for rearticulation. The purposive adequacy of this strategy, then, consists in revealing that the politics displacing other claims to the margins can be undone by rearticulating the structure of differences that existing foundations seek to suppress and that strategies for challenging the authority and power derived from various foundational myths (History as the March of Man, Reason, Civilization, Progress, Modes-of-Production) lie inside, not outside, the ambivalence that these myths seek to suppress. From this point of view, critical work seeks its basis not without but within the fissures of dominant structures. Or, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak puts it, the deconstructive philosophical position consists in saying an "impossible 'no' to a structure, which one critiques, yet inhabits intimately."10 Inconstant rider? Deconstructive criticism and historical writing Because they disavow equivocality, O'Hanlon and Washbrook fail to see that deconstruction opens up productive ways of reading and reinscribing the structure of ambivalence closed by foundations in serving certain types of authority and power. Instead, they choose to read its critique of foundational thought as amounting to no more than a demonstration that our knowledge is subjective. Therefore, when my essay proposes that the the920

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matization of modern Indian history in terms of capitalist modernity fails to place that history in a critical light, they jump to the conclusion that I am saying nothing, except to repeat "over and over again," that our knowledge is subjective. They follow this extraordinary conclusion with the assertion that the critique of foundations leads to the paralysis of the interpreter because deconstruction's alleged "residual positivism" results in a failure to see that "the past, including its historical subjects, comes to the historian through fragmentary and fractured empirical sources, which possess no inherent themes and express no unequivocal voices" (p. 149). Because the past comes as "noise," they continue, it is the responsibility of the historian to give it voice—a responsibility that they think I duck because deconstruction and postmodernism regard "any intervention by the historian/interpreter in the past as inherently illegitimate, a kind of complicity" (p. 148). Let us attend to the noise first. Is it the case that the past comes to us through empirical sources with no inherent themes, as noise? Evoked here is a primeval scene, an original encounter before history when the historian faces fragmentary and fractured empirical sources and seeks to give it voice. This staging of interpretation as the first encounter between the allpowerful interpreter and the lifeless evidence is blind to the history of its own enactment: Hidden from its view are the stories told in the very presence of particular sources and in the processes by which the historian gets placed as a sovereign interpreter who turns noise into voice. Gone are the traces of the history of archives, the monumentalization of history in documents, and erased are the marks of the historian's conditioning in this dramatization of interpretation as the first discovery. To illustrate the point that empirical sources do not enunciate noise but a structure of audible historical voices, let us take an example. Among the sources on modern India are archival documents dealing with the abolition of sati, or Hindu widow sacrifice in the early nineteenth century. These do not come as noise to us; we encounter them as voices speaking of other encounters between the British civilizing mission and Hindu heathenism, between modernity and tradition; and of previous readings about the beginning of the emancipation of Hindu women and about the birth of modern India. If we ignore the fact that these sources come with stories to tell, we run the risk of believing them uncritically and disregarding their history as archives of imperialism and patriarchy; for, as Lata Mani has shown,11 the very existence of these documents has a history involving the fixing of women as the site for the colonial and the indigenous male elite's constructions of authoritative Hindu traditions. The accumulated sources on sati—whether or not the burning of widows was sanctioned by Hindu codes, did women go willingly or not to the funeral pyre, on what grounds could the immolation of women be abolished—come to us marked by early nineteenth-century colonial and indigenous patriarchal discourses. 921

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And just as the early nineteenth-century encounter between colonial and indigenous elites, on the one hand and textual sources, on the other, was resonant not with noise but with colonial patriarchal voices, the historian's confrontation today with sources on sati cannot but escape the echo of that previous rendezvous. In repeating that encounter, how does the historian today not replicate the early nineteenth-century staging of sati as a contest between tradition and modernity (or different visions of tradition), between the slavery of women and efforts towards their emancipation, between barbaric Hindu practices and the British civilizing mission? Lata Mani accomplishes this task brilliantly by showing that the opposing arguments were founded on the fabrication of the lawgiving scriptural tradition as the origin of Hindu customs: Both those who supported and those who opposed sati sought the authority of textual origins for their beliefs. During the debate, however, the whole history of the fabrication of origins was effaced, as was the collusion between indigenous patriarchy and colonial power in constructing the origins for and against sati. Consequently, as Spivak states starkly, the debate left no room for the woman's enunciatory position. Caught in the contest over whether traditions did or did not sanction sati and over whether the woman self-immolated willingly or not, the colonized subaltern woman disappeared: She was either literally extinguished for her dead husband in the indigenous patriarchal discourse or was offered the disfiguring liberation of the Western notion of sovereign, individual will.12 In other words, it is not as if the sources come with a noise in which the historian can decipher the woman's voice. Nor is the problem one of sources (the absence of woman's testimony), but that the very staging of the debate left no place for the widow's enunciatory position: She is left no position from which she can speak. Without doubt Spivak makes this silencing of the woman speak of the limits of historical knowledge, but the critic can do so because the colonial archive comes not with noise but with a pregnant silence.13 Contrary to O'Hanlon and Washbrook's charge that deconstruction refuses to take responsibility for interpretation, Spivak very correctly marks the silencing of the subaltern woman as the point at which the interpreter must acknowledge the limits of historical understanding; for it is impossible to retrieve the woman's voice when she was not given a subject-position from which to speak. But this refusal to retrieve the woman's voice because it would involve the conceit that the interpreter speaks for her does not disable understanding; rather, Spivak manages to reinscribe the colonial and indigenous patriarchal archive when she shows that the tradition versus modernization story was told by obliterating the colonized women's subject-position. Here, the interpreter's recognition of the limit of historical knowledge does not disable criticism but enables the critic to mark the space of the silenced subaltern as aporetic that, by resisting a paternalist recovery of the subaltern's voice, 922

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frustrates our repetition of the imperialist attempt to speak for the colonized subaltern woman. Basically, an attempt to ride two horses at once.

The relationship between capitalism and history Let us now move to O'Hanlon and Washbrook's objection to my argument that representing Indian history in terms of the theme of capitalist modernity cannot constitute critical writing because it does not displace the categories framed in and by that history. At issue here is the relationship between capitalism and difference. In my essay, I had stated that we cannot thematize Indian history in terms of the development of capitalism and yet also contest capitalism's homogenization of the contemporary world. Critical history cannot simply document the process by which capitalism becomes dominant, for that amounts to repeating the history we seek to displace; instead, criticism must reveal the difference that capitalism either represents as the particular form of its universal existence or sketches only in relation to itself. These two authors contend that my position not only commits me to viewing capitalism as a "disposable fiction" (p. 147) but is also based on a simplistic understanding of the relationship between capitalism and heterogeneity (p. 147). Their alternative proposes that we recognize the structure of domination as a totality (capitalism) and that this conception alone provides the basis for understanding the sources of historical oppression and formulating critical emancipatory positions. Does a refusal to thematize modern Indian history in terms of the development of capitalism amount to saying that capitalism is a disposable fiction and that class relations are illusory? Not at all. My point is that making capitalism the foundational theme amounts to homogenizing the histories that remain heterogeneous with it. As this formulation attracts the most vehement objection, let me elaborate it a bit further than I did in my essay. It is one thing to say that the establishment of capitalist relations has been one of the major features in India's recent history but quite another to regard it as the foundation of colonialism. It is one thing to say that class relations affected a range of power relations in India—involving the caste system, patriarchy, ethnic oppression, Hindu—Muslim conflicts—and quite another to oppose the latter as forms assumed by the former. The issue here is not that of one factor versus several; rather, it is that, as class is inevitably articulated with other determinations, power exists in a form of relationality in which the dominance of one is never complete. For example, although the colonial rule in India constructed the labor force according to the economy of the frec-unfree opposition, this domestication of otherness (of Hindu and Islamic forms of slavery) as unfreedom also left, to use Derrida's evocative formulation, "an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest."14 It is precisely by sketching the 923

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"invisible design covered over in the palimpsest" that capitalism's attempts to either subsume different structures within itself or polarize them as its opposite can be shown as incompletely successful. This task cannot be accomplished by regarding history as a noise that we turn into a coherent voice, for that amounts to pretending that the investigator occupies a space outside history and that sources do not come to us already with some stories to tell. If, as I am suggesting, the investigator stands squarely in the middle of history, inhabiting a structure that seeks to place colonialism within a mode-of-production narrative, then the investigator's critical role is to examine the fault-lines of this discourse. Only then could the investigator deal responsibly with the historicity of his or her own position as an historical subject. Specifically, this means making visible the ambivalence and alterity present in the constitution of capitalism as a foundational theme. It means listening attentively when the culture and history that the critic inhabits make capitalism name and speak for histories that remained discrepant with it. To the extent that these discrepancies are made to speak in the language of capitalism—as precapitalist peasants, unfree laborers, irrational peasants—its foundational status is not a disposable fiction. But, it is equally true that, in domesticating all the wholly other subject positions as self-consolidating otherness (/?re-capitalist, wn-free laborers, zr-rational peasants), capitalism is also caught in a structure of ambivalence it cannot master. This is why study after study shows that capitalism in the third world, not just in India, was crucially distorted, impure, mixed with pre-capitalist survivals. To think of the incompleteness and failures of capitalist modernity in the third world in critical terms, therefore, requires that we reinscribe the binary form in which capitalism's partial success is portrayed, that we render visible processes and forms that its oppositional logic can appropriate only violently and incompletely. Of course, historians cannot recover what was suppressed, but they can critically confront the effects of that silencing, capitalism's foundational status, by writing histories of irretrievable subject positions, by sketching the traces of figures that come to us only as disfigurations. Again, not to restore the original figures but to find the limit of foundations in shadows that the disfigurations themselves outline. This strategy strikes O'Hanlon and Washbrook, who want to get on with the business of showing how the British conquest of India forms a part of the larger theme of the development of world capitalism, as nihilistic.15 But if "colonialism was the logical outcome of South Asia's own history of capitalist development," as Washbrook writes elsewhere,16 one is entitled to ask: How did this logic make the English East India Company the ruler? If the configuration of class forces produced indigenous agents for India's colonization, why was it that these remained just that—collaborators? How did the universalistic logic of capital discriminate between turning power over to the English company and making the 924

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natives into the ruled? Washbrook can only offer specific histories of South Asia and Europe, making an unacknowledged gesture towards such particularistic sources as region, culture, race, nation . . . in other words, difference. So, it turns out that, in the very process of appropriating difference, the sovereign logic of capital gets compromised, its universality undone. Even the most insistent claim for the foundational status of capitalism cannot do without the supplementarity of the particularistic! Instead of pursuing the logic of supplementarity to split the originating presence of capitalism and rather than exploring the cohabitation of capital with race and culture, O'Hanlon and Washbrook wish to retain the pure presence of capital. How and why this logic of capital distinguishes between brown and white people in the latter's favor gets tucked away from our sight, and colonialism—the violent institution of a set of racial, political, epistemic, and economic systems—becomes an unfortunate episode in the narrative of mode-of-production. The Cambridge School's long dormant historiography of India,17 which sought in the 1970s to delegitimize nationalism's challenge to colonialism by portraying the former as nothing but an ideological cover for the elite's manipulations for power and profit, comes roaring back once again to salvage colonialism, this time by subordinating colonialism to the logic of unfolding capitalism. This is how history turns into a process of the self-realization of a Hegelian totality: The universalizing narrative of mode-of-production becomes the guise in which White mythology, as Derrida calls it, returns as History.18 The burden of Eurocentrism on the narrative of mode-of-production as History cannot be lightened by arguing, as O'Hanlon and Washbrook do, that one seeks to "break down East-West dichotomies, by exploring the indigenous forms of capitalism .. ." (p. 146). Indigenous forms of a universal phenomenon? At issue here is an unexamined Eurocentric Marxism that they ask us to accept uncritically. I am not suggesting that acknowledging Marx's Eurocentrism requires abandoning Marxism altogether. But students of Indian history, who know only too well the Eurocentricity of Marx's memorable formulation that the British conquest introduced a history-less India to History, cannot now regard, as do O'Hanlon and Washbrook, the mode-of-production story as a normative universal. In fact, like many other nineteenth-century European ideas, the staging of the Eurocentric mode-of-production narrative as History should be seen as an analogue of the nineteenth-century territorial imperialism. From this point of view, Marx's ideas on changeless India—theorized, for example, in his concept of the "Asiatic mode of production"—appear not so much as mistaken views but as evidence of the alterity that was suppressed in universalizing the story of Europe's transition from feudalism to capitalism. Such a historicization of the Eurocentrism in nineteenth-century Marxism enables us to understand the collusion of capitalism and colonialism and to undo the effect of that collusion's imperative to interpret 925

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third-world histories in terms of capital's logic. To suggest that we reinscribe the effects of capitalism's foundational status by writing about histories that remained heterogeneous with the logic of capital, therefore, is not to abandon Marxism but to extricate class analysis from its nineteenthcentury heritage, acknowledging that Marxism's critique of capitalism was both enabled and disabled by its historicity as a European discourse. O'Hanlon and Washbrook, on the other hand, operate with a Eurocentric Marxism and invite us to see colonialism as reducible to the development of capitalism in Britain and in India. The conflation of the metropolitan proletariat with the colonized subaltern that this approach involves amounts to a homogenization of irreducible difference. My critics claim that capitalism, rather than homogenizing difference necessarily, is perfectly capable of utilizing and generating heterogeneity. But the notion that capitalism is a founding source responsible for originating and encompassing difference amounts to appropriating heterogeneity as a self-consolidating difference, that is, refracting "what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other. . . ,"19 This assimilation of difference into identity is characteristic not of all systems, as my critics allege I imply, but of totalizing systems. When capitalism is made to stand for History—so that the heterogeneity of histories of the colonized subaltern with those of the metropolitan proletariat is effaced—absolute otherness is appropriated into self-consolidating difference. We are thus invited to once again think of colonialism as part of the career of capitalism, demanding a single, undifferentiated strategy of resistance. Just one horse.

The place for ambivalence in Said's Orientalism The consequence of O'Hanlon and Washbrook's commitment to totalizing analysis is a failure to appreciate that historical attempts at mastery were so riven by conflictory economies as to create possibilities for resistance in terms other than those determined by power. This failure is particularly evident in their reading of Edward Said's Orientalism.20 Although Said's work has been justifiably regarded as a breakthrough, providing a basis for a number of deconstructive accounts, several critics have also pointed out that his analysis suffers from an unnecessary and untenable closure that dismisses conflicts and resistance inherent to the functioning of Orientalism as a system of power and knowledge. O'Hanlon and Washbrook, on the other hand, commend Said's neglect of "internal relations of contestation and resistance in western cultures" because it enabled him to present "within a single analytical framework, core elements in the European intellectual and political tradition for a very long period" (p. 157). They also applaud when Said parts company with Foucault and, using the liberal humanist notions of intentionality and individual subjects, reduces Orien926

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talism to the Western will to power and places the burden of resistance on the humanist intellectual. This endorsement of Said's liberal humanism is "wildly at odds" with O'Hanlon and Washbrook's strident denunciation of the liberal tendencies of the postmodern culture, but it helps to explain why they think that Said knows which horse he would ultimately rather be on. Said did suggest that Orientalism functioned as a discourse unified by the Western will to dominate. But, as Bhabha shows convincingly, it is also equally true that Said himself provides plenty of evidence for Orientalism's, ambivalence when he describes it as a discourse not only of Western scholarship but also of Western fantasy, as a discipline for domination but also as a desire for the Other, as a manifest but also as a latent discourse.21 Although he describes Orientalism as a "static system of 'synchronic essentialism,' " Said also shows how this discourse of stable signifiers was threatened by its own "diachronic forms of history and narrative, signs of instability." But reluctant "to engage with the alterity and ambivalence in the articulation of these two economies which threaten to split the very object of Orientalist discourse as a knowledge and the subject positioned therein," Said seeks to unify "these two economies in Western intention."22 With the structure of ambivalence closed, the exercise of power and the mounting of resistance can be located, not in the history of Orientalism as textured and contradictory enunciations, but in the ahistorical, unified will of individual subjects. Here Said, who parts company with Foucault, invokes authorial intention and individual subjects, explaining Orientalism as the Western will to power and finding resistance in intellectuals who, as individuals endowed with critical consciousness and humanist values, stand outside totalizing systems of domination.23 O'Hanlon and Washbrook note approvingly Said's move towards intentions and individual subjects, as also his criticism of Foucault and Derrida, and conclude that both Orientalism's critical edge and Said's political commitment are advanced by his embrace of Western humanism (p. 156). In fact, such notions of intentionality and sovereign subjects end up supporting the Orientalist's claim, challenged throughout by Said's work, to be a detached observer; and, with historically enunciated ambivalence and alterity effaced by the ahistorical "single analytical framework" of intentions, we are invited to think that the critic is not "worlded" in power relations but stands "outside," as a sovereign subject. Those inside the structure of Orientalist power are allowed little space for resistance, when, in fact, there are plenty of examples to show that the conflictory economy of Orientalism itself provided the basis for challenging colonial power.24 Said at least seems to know which horse in the end he would rather be on.

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Postmodernism and the politics of difference Acknowledging the potential for resistance within the structure of power, however, requires the recognition that the functioning of the structure makes equivocality, contingency, and difference possible. O'Hanlon and Washbrook are indeed willing to consider difference, but only to the extent that it can accommodate a totality. Thus, they regard the contemporary fragmentation of identities and insistent heterogeneity as symptomatic of postmodernism. Like Fredric Jameson, they take this as the cultural logic of late capitalism;25 but their understanding of the postmodern condition has an unacknowledged though important difference. For Jameson, the postmodern decentering is a new stage of cultural dominance, not a refiguration of the older liberal culture. Indeed, he develops the idea of the postmodern as a totality to such an extreme that it abolishes its binary opposite, the outside, from which the humanist critic of O'Hanlon and Washbrook speaks.26 From this, Jameson draws the following conclusion: In place of the temptation either to denounce the complacency of postmodernism as some final symptom of decadence, or to salute the new forms as harbingers of a new technological and technocratic Utopia, it seems more appropriate to assess the new cultural production within the working hypothesis of a general modification of culture itself within the social restructuration of late capitalism as a system.27 Because Jameson's notion of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism includes global heterogeneity as its defining condition, the idea of disjunctions within the structure, disallowed by the idea of totality, returns curiously enough but in the domesticated form of "cognitive mappings." The responsibility is placed now on the (first world?) intellectual critic to provide a cognitive map through which we can find our way out of the postmodern disorientation. O'Hanlon and Washbrook, on the other hand, see postmodernism in terms of a text and context dichotomy; culture reflects the ideological imperatives of late capitalism. The insistence on difference, then, can be nothing other than the cultural form that the ideology of liberal individuality assumes in the late capitalist United States, and it must be opposed by a universalist class-based "materialist conception of history." But from whence do they speak? Having identified postmodernism and deconstruction as the expressive cultural ideological form of the totality of late capitalism in the United States, Britain becomes the unacknowledged privileged space from which universalism fixes its stern gaze across the Atlantic (the empire strikes back?). To the eye of class universalism, 928

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heterogeneity appears problematic; it must be familiarized as the mere form in which class identity rests—just as, in commodity form, exchange value finds the concreteness of use value as the mere form of its universal existence. If not, difference creates a structure of equivocality that threatens to split apart the foundational status of class, placing it alongside different and incommensurable forms of difference. To prevent this eventuality, they argue that the decentering of foundations inevitably privileges the politics of self-representation which, given the "well-known hostility of American political culture to any kind of materialist or class analysis" (p. 166), leads inevitably to liberal individuality—a position they now attack as politically conservative, contradicting their earlier endorsement of liberal humanism in Said as politically enabling. Their deep discomfort with difference surfaces when they state that postmodernists and deconstructionists screen off "universalistic, systemic and material deprivations of capitalism, which clearly separate them [the underclasses] from their 'subaltern' expositors," so that the underclasses are permitted only to appear as "victims of the particularistic kinds of gender, racial and national oppression which they share with predominantly middle-class American scholars and critics" (p. 166). Once again, they show an unwillingness to give up polarizing different systems of power into universalistic (class) versus particularistic (gender, race, nation). If we follow their prescription, class oppression in Britain will stand for colonial exploitation of India, gendered power in Britain will be commensurable with patriarchal oppression in India. It is just such a search for subject positions, valid for all times and places, that leads them to argue that we cannot give up the universal category of woman. Here, it is interesting to read what O'Hanlon has written elsewhere: What is interesting, indeed, is that just the same issue, of the attempt to reintroduce homogeneity and consensus within a redrawn idea of an essential collectivity, has arisen in the feminist debate. Toril Moi describes how minority feminist groups have forced white heterosexual feminists to "re-examine their own sometimes totalitarian conception of 'woman' as a homogeneous category." To maintain radical thrust of feminist criticism, she argues, these groups "ought to prevent white middle-class First World feminists from defining their own preoccupations as universal female (or feminist) problems."28 Contrary to the above passage, we are now asked to project the universal category of woman on to multiple and heterogeneous subject positions, even if it is discontinuous with the colonial history wherein there was no subject position for the subaltern woman. From their point of view, universal categories are apparently valuable in conceiving agency and active 929

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politics, whereas Foucauldian and postmodernist perspectives allegedly inhibit possibilities of resistance because they suggest dispersed rather than centered power and subjectivity.29 There are two key assumptions here: First, that the historical enunciation of such "universal" categories as woman, black, Asian, and native carried out the intentions of the dominant successfully and unproblematically; and second, that just as power operates on the basis of a centered and homogeneous identity, so does resistance: Agency can be conceived only when the agent experiences oppression as a woman or a native and mounts resistance based on the given and experienced identity. Both these assumptions are deeply problematic. It is one thing to recognize that certain systems of dominance operate by conferring and constituting identities such as the woman and man, colonizer and the colonized, and quite another to assume that such homogeneous identifications do not split and open themselves up to heterogeneous formations in historical articulation: A case in point is the breakdown of the colonizer-colonized dichotomy when faced with the ambivalent figure of the English-speaking Indian in British India. Similarly, it is one thing to acknowledge that political practice requires the notion of agency and quite another to assert that the space for agency must be defined in terms of centered, not dispersed, power relations. If agency and "experience" are attributed to the centering and "founding" force of power relations, then how can resistance be even conceived except in terms given them by the dominant? How can we envisage agency unless we see that the ambivalent, conflictory, and dispersed operation of power relations enunciated subject-positions and discourses heterogeneous with and covered over by universal categories? O'Hanlon and Washbrook, however, think that we have no recourse other than to operate with homogeneous identities given us by dominant relations: Because the world operates and behaves as though "woman" was a universal category, we, too, must conceive resistance on this basis (p. 154). But a contestatory appropriation of the position woman can occur because the operation of power relations marks the term woman with heterogeneity (white/black/working class/native) and breaks down the patriarchal man-woman opposition; agency rests on the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of the category woman. O'Hanlon and Washbrook are averse to agency produced in such ambivalence; they prefer the homogeneous subject produced by "foundational" and centered power relations, an agent who turns the "experience" of oppression into the basis for resistance. This conception is dangerously close to the liberal vision of selfrepresenting subject-agent they disparage. But no matter. It has the secure and comforting either/or logic; either man or woman, either class or race and gender. Once again, one horse. In asking us to attribute multiple and particularistic forms of oppression to the unitary and universalistic forces of capitalism, O'Hanlon and Washbrook, once again, express their desire 930

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to master those histories which remain heterogeneous with it. Nowhere is this more disabling than in understanding and dealing with the effects of colonialism. If the West sentenced the otherness of the conquered to History, to recognize that project now as the work of a universal logic which used and produced difference without compromising its sovereignty is to repeat that act of incarceration. This leaves no room for the otherness and resistance that was not determined by the Western conquest; it denies that anticolonial nationalism and subaltern struggles, while being constituted by dominant structures, could slip beyond and come back to haunt the conditions of their own constitution. If the conflicts, contradictions, and ambivalence in colonial history cannot be said to have upset their founding source in some universality, then the difference of postcoloniality, its critical edge, cannot even be postulated. This means that historians and critics, who have been constituted in the economic, political, epistemic transformations of colonial history and presently work in institutions and in disciplines dominated by Western thought, cannot hope to criticize structures that they inhabit. This is a deeply depressing and disabling prospect for critical historiography because it closes the possibility of reinscribing the assumptions and methodologies of historical writing. But, as we have seen, all totalizations reveal their impossibility in their use of supplements. This means that history becomes possible in the structure of marginalized others; Western discourses may have constituted and transformed colonial and postcolonial subjects, but they cannot determine the agency that these subjects find in the contradictions and equivocality set in motion in discursive fields. The assertion of this heterogeneity, the insistence that the histories of the metropolitan proletariat and the colonized worker are discrepant, even if both are exploited by capitalism, therefore, is to insist on difference as the condition of history's possibility, and to rearticulate it differently than White mythology. It neither implies the dismissal of foundations as disposable fictions, nor does it recommend nihilistic destruction. Rather, the purpose of underscoring difference is to argue that if historical effects were reduced to their founding origins—if the contradictions and ambivalence in colonial social, economic, cultural, and epistemic productions were reduced to their origins in capitalism—history would only amount to a return to origins, the recovery of the original presence, the White mythology—not something O'Hanlon and Washbrook would want, even if their arguments lead them in that direction. As for me, I say, let us hang on to two horses, inconstantly.

Notes * I am grateful to the following who commented on previous drafts of this essay: Homi Bhabha, Natalie Z. Davis, Nick Dirks, Tony Grafton, Bill Jordan, Peter Mandler, Mark Mazower, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Bob Tignor, Jyotsna Uppal, and Dror Wahrman.

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1 "After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34:1 (January 1992). Page numbers for all subsequent references appear within parentheses in the text. 2 "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," October, 34 (Fall 1985), 126. 3 Homi Bhabha, "The Other Question ..." Screen, 24:6 (1983), 18. 4 Homi Bhabha, "The Other Question," 23-25. 5 "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," 126. 6 An example of hasty reading of this sort occurs when they accuse Ranajit Guha of "referring to the (undifferentiated) Indian nation as 'us' " (p. 148). In fact, phrases such as "our own" in the text refers to Indian historiography. See his "Dominance Without Hegemony and its Historiography," Subaltern Studies VI, Ranajit Guha, ed. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). For examples: "On our own part, we present our views on the structure of domination in colonial India and historiography's relation to it as a critique of our own approach to the Indian past and our own performance in writing about it not to an undifferentiated Indian nation" (p. 306); or "This [Guha's essay], we hope, may assist in the self-criticism of our own historiography—the historiography of a colonized people" (p. 307). An "undifferentiated nation"? Their reading that Ashis Nandy generalises the experience of "Bengali literati to that of the whole nation" (p. 147) is similarly hasty for Nandy is quite clear that he is speaking about intellectuals; he never claims that India as a whole experienced colonialism in the same way. 7 Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 243. See also pages 216-45, 270-80. 8 Ibid., 270. 9 Margins of Philosophy, Alan Bass, trans. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 213. 10 "The Making of Americans, the Teaching of English, and the Future of Cultural Studies," New Literary History, 21:4 (1990), 28. 11 "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India," Cultural Critique, 1 (Fall 1987), 119-56. 12 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," in Marxism and Interpretation of Culture, Gary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313. See, in particular, pages 299-307. 13 For a similar argument about the colonized woman caught between indigenous patriarchy and the politics of archival production, see also Spivak's "The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives," History and Theory, 24:3 (1985), 247-72. 14 For a study of the process of this covering over in the context of unfree laborers, see my Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Nicholas Dirks's The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), similarly, traces the marks of a relationship between caste and power in the process that hollowed out the political space in a south Indian kingdom and filled it with colonial power. 15 This view is elaborated by Washbrook in his "Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History c. 1720-1860," Modern Asian Studies, 22:1 (1988), 57-96. 16 Ibid., 76. 17 For examples of this historiography, see Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), and D. A. Wash-

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18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26

27 28

29

brook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics: The Madras Presidency 1870-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). For a recent critique, see Guha, "Dominance Without Hegemony." On the Eurocentrism of History, see Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), particularly pp. 2-12. Spivak, "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism," Critical Inquiry, 12:1 (1985), 253. Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978). "The Other Question," 23-26. Ibid., 24. See Robert Young, White Mythologies, 129-36. For an argument demonstrating how nationalist thought in India shared the thematic of Orientalism, see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World—A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986). "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review, 146 (1984), 53-92. Following Jameson, O'Hanlon and Washbrook conflate postmodern culture and poststructuralist theory, unlike Andreas Huyssen to whom they also mistakenly attribute this conflation. See Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 206-16. "The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt" (The Ideologies of Theory, Essays 1971-1986, vol. 2 [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988], 111). Ibid. "Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia," Modern Asian Studies, 22:1 (1988), 212. This essay makes a very different reading from the present O'Hanlon and Washbrook essay on virtually every issue. This view runs right through their critique. See pp. 150-1, particularly, where they state that a Foucauldian perspective disallows the notion of agency.

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INTRODUCTION TO OCCIDENTALISM Xiaomei Chen From Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China, Oxford University Press, 1995,3-26

In the years since its introduction, Edward Said's celebrated study, Orientalism, has acquired a near paradigmatic status in the Western academic world as a model of the relationships between Western and non-Western cultures. Said seeks to show how Western imperialist images of its colonial others—images that, of course, are inevitably and sharply at odds with the self-understanding of the indigenous non-Western cultures they purport to represent—not only govern the West's hegemonic policies, but were imported into the West's political and cultural colonies, where they affected native points of view and thus themselves served as instruments of domination. Said's focus is on the Near East, but his critics and supporters alike have extended his model far beyond the confines of that part of the world. Despite the popularity of Said's model, however, comparatists and Sinologists have not made extensive use of it in their attempts to define China's self-image or the nature of Sino-Western social, cultural, and political relationships.1 On first consideration, this neglect of Said's work seems justified. Throughout this century, and especially recently, the People's Republic of China (PRC) and its political forbears have emphasized their unique and "Chinese" ways of doing things. Yet, such talk can be deceptive. Indeed it seems clear that when Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping advocated a "particularly Chinese road to socialism and communism," their "Chineseness" was not merely the product of how the Chinese understood their unique political and cultural circumstances. Rather, just as Said's model suggests, the "pure Chinese" self-understanding advocated by such belated figures had already been historically "contaminated" and even constructed by cultural and cross-cultural appropriations that belong to the whole of Chinese-Western relationships, relationships that to a marked 934

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degree have been determined—and overdetermined—by the way that the West has understood itself and China. Most recently, for instance, in announcing its cultural uniqueness, the advocates of a culturally pure China have declared their nation as "the last banner of socialism." Such claims seek to have hortatory as much as descriptive content, since they take as their priority the national campaign against "the foreign imperialists' dream of a peaceful transformation to capitalism in China," especially in view of the recent disintegration of the Soviet Union and other Eastern block socialist countries, which had "tragically regressed to the road of capitalism." Indeed, as this remark suggests, nowhere is the phenomenon of pervasive Orientalism, or the Western construction of the Orient, more visible in modern China than in the history of the Chinese revolution. One might well argue that to a large extent all elite discourses of anti-traditionalism in modern China, from the May Fourth movement to the 1989 Tiananmen student demonstrations, have been extensively Orientalized. This at least partially self-imposed Orientalism is quintessentially reflected, for example, in Chinese appropriations of the idea of history as progress and teleology, notions derived from the Western Enlightenment and from various schools of Western Utopian thinking that, of course, found their most potent expression in the ideas of Karl Marx. Indeed, as Arif Dirlik has succinctly pointed out, Chinese Marxism has been greatly influenced by a Marxist globalized historical consciousness, which takes unilinear European history as the model to represent China's past in order to attain China's admission into universal history.2 Yet for all of this it would not be accurate to say that Chinese political and intellectual culture is nothing more than an outpost of mindlessly replicated Western thought. However Western these "Chinese" ideas may be in their origins, it is undeniable that their mere utterance in a nonWestern context inevitably creates a modification of their form and content. In such modifications of Western Marxist thought we see examples of the way that in China—and perhaps elsewhere—Orientalism has been accompanied by instances of what might be termed Occidentalism, a discursive practice that, by constructing its Western Other, has allowed the Orient to participate actively and with indigenous creativity in the process of self-appropriation, even after being appropriated and constructed by Western Others. As a result of constantly revising and manipulating imperialistically imposed Western theories and practices, the Chinese Orient has produced a new discourse, marked by a particular combination of the Western construction of China with the Chinese construction of the West, with both of these components interacting and interpenetrating each other. This seemingly unified discursive practice of Occidentalism exists in a paradoxical relationship to the discursive practices of Orientalism, and in fact, shares with it many ideological techniques and strategies. Despite these similarities, however, Chinese Occidentalism 935

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has mainly served an ideological function quite different from that of Orientalism. Orientalism, in Said's account, is a strategy of Western world domination, whereas, as the rest of this study seeks to show, Chinese Occidentalism is primarily a discourse that has been evoked by various and competing groups within Chinese society for a variety of different ends, largely, though not exclusively, within domestic Chinese politics. As such, it has been both a discourse of oppression and a discourse of liberation. Chinese Occidentalism, especially as it is reflected in the political and literary expressions of the post-Mao period—which is the focus of this study—might be regarded as two related yet separate discursive practices, or perhaps, two different appropriations of the same discourse for strikingly different political ends. In the first, which I term official Occidentalism, the Chinese government uses the essentialization of the West as a means for supporting a nationalism that effects the internal suppression of its own people. In this process, the Western Other is construed by a Chinese imagination, not for the purpose of dominating the West, but in order to discipline, and ultimately to dominate, the Chinese self at home. This variety of official Occidentalism perhaps found its best expression in Mao Zedong's theory of three worlds, in which Mao asserted that the First World superpowers—the Soviet Union and the United States—invariably exploit and oppress the Third World countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This theory was to a great extent a product of the radical ideology of the Cultural Revolution, which, despite its expressed concern for the non-Chinese oppressed of the world, had as its chief interest the domestic legitimization of Mao as the "great leader" of the Third World. It thus was a strategy to consolidate Mao's shaky and increasingly problematic position within the Chinese Communisty Party. At the dawn of the Cultural Revolution in 1965, Lin Biao, Mao's chosen successor at the time, advocated the application of Mao Zedong's theory of "establishing revolutionary base areas in the rural districts and encircling the cities from the countryside"—a theory that was said to have brought about the victory of the Chinese revolution—to the international arena of the Third World countries in their struggle against "aggression and enslavement on a serious scale by the imperialists headed by the United States and their lackeys."3 We can see these concerns in Lin Biao's long essay "Long Live the Victory of People's War," published in People's Daily on September 3, 1965, in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of victory in the Chinese people's war of resistance against Japan: Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called "the cities of the world," then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute "the rural areas of the world." Since World War II, the proletarian revolutionary movement has for various 936

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reasons been temporarily held back in the North American and West European capitalist countries, while the people's revolutionary movement in Asia, Africa and Latin America has been growing vigorously. In a sense, the contemporary world revolution also presents a picture of the encirclement of cities by the rural areas. In the final analysis, the whole cause of world revolution hinges on the revolutionary struggles of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples who make up the overwhelming majority of the world's population. The socialist countries should regard it as their internationalist duty to support the people's revolutionary struggles in Asia, Africa and Latin America.4 As has subsequently become clear, Lin Biao's discourse, although seemingly directed to Third World countries against Western imperialist policies, was part and parcel of his radical anti-Western and antibourgeois ideology advanced in an attempt to advocate the Cultural Revolution for decidedly internal and domestic political ends. The most direct impact of his work was to initiate and promote a Maoist cult, which reached its peak at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, under the pretext of spreading "Mao Zedong Thought" as the supreme principle and living gospel of Marxism and Leninism. We seem to have here an Occidentalism wholly Chinese in its content and purpose. Yet matters are more complicated than they might at first appear. Even the brief quotations given above suggest the complex relationship between Chinese Occidentalism and Western Orientalism. Lin Biao cleverly elaborated Mao's supposedly Chinese theory of the dichotomy between the town and the country—a dichotomy that had served a strategic function in the triumph of the Chinese revolution—into a larger context of world revolution, in which the Third World "countryside" was expected to surround and finally overcome the "cities" of the imperialist Western superpowers. Beneath these claims lies a pervasive modern Chinese antiurbanism that, as Maurice Meisner has pointed out, reveals a key element of Maoist thought, which was characterized by "a deep emotional attachment to the rural ideal of 'the unity of living and working' " and a profound distrust of the cities as sites of foreign dominators and their servants, urban intellectuals.5 Mao presented these notions as products of a specifically Chinese experience, as indigenous insights far removed from Western thought. Yet obviously this supposedly uniquely Chinese Maoist antiurbanism shares "certain similarities with a strain in the Western intellectual tradition, partly derived from Rousseau, which viewed the city as the embodiment of all social evils and moral corruptions, as a monolith threatening to crush the natural purity of the countryside." 6 In this regard Maoist Occidentalism seems dependent on the very Western predecessors with which it disavows any connection. Like its Orientalist counterpart, it 937

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seeks to construe its Other by asserting a distorted and ultimately anxious image of its own uniqueness. In addition, the apparent aim of this discourse seems, again like its Western counterpart, to be directed toward an imperialist strategy: it is China that will lead the rural Third World to its liberation, because it is China, at least in the period since the end of the World War II, that seems uniquely suited for this task.7 Yet it must be strongly emphasized that the ultimate aim of this Occidentalist practice was not primarily Chinese hegemony in the Third World, but the consolidation of a particular group within domestic politics. It is possible to overemphasize this point, of course. Concerns with domestic politics are seldom absent from the exercise of Western Orientalism. But if we historically compare Western Orientalism with Maoist Occidentalism, it seems clear that the primary aim of the Chinese discourse has been domestic oppression of political opponents rather than world domination, while the inverse has been true in the West. Such a difference, obviously, does not arise out of the moral superiority or even the ultimate political aims of the Chinese practitioners of Occidentalism; after all, China has a history of imperialist longings and practices far older than its counterparts in the West. Rather, this difference reflects the historical moment in which Western imperialism, aided in large measure by its Orientalist discourse, was at or near its apogee and in various ways presented a threat even to the prevailing Chinese political order. In this sense, Chinese Occidentalism is the product of Western Orientalism, even if its aims are largely and specifically Chinese. This official Occidentalism—Chinese in purpose yet in paradoxical ways dependent upon Western ideas—is pervasive in contemporary Chinese culture and life. But Chinese Occidentalism is by no means confined to this official use. Alongside of it we can readily find examples of what we might term anti-official Occidentalism, since its purveyors are not the established government or Party apparatus but the opponents of those institutions, especially among various groups of the intelligentsia with diverse and, more often than not, contradictory interests. As a result of the cultural and sociological specificities of contemporary Chinese society, such Occidentalism can be understood as a powerful anti-official discourse using the Western Other as a metaphor for a political liberation against ideological oppression within a totalitarian society. It is here that I distance my approach from that of Said and other postcolonialists inspired by Said's paradigm. I argue that what might rightly be considered as a global, "central" discourse of Occidentalism in their account can also sometimes be used as a locally marginal or peripheral discourse against the centrality of the internal dominant power in a particular culture. Under these special circumstances, therefore, arguing absolutely against cultural imperialism in the international arena can be politically dangerous since it inevitably, if unintentionally, supports the status quo of a ruling ideology, such as the 938

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one in contemporary China, that sees in the Western Other a potentially powerful alliance with an anti-official force at home. Post-Mao Chinese society presents us with a compelling example of Occidentalism, by which I mean a Chinese representation of the Occident as "its deepest and most recurring images of the Other."8 Such Occidentalism may be considered as a counter-discourse, a counter-memory, and a counter-"Other" to Said's Orientalism. These terms, of course, readily evoke Michel Foucault's notion of "discourse," employed also by Said in his definition of Orientalism, as "a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient."9 Yet a critical difference between Said and Foucault's conceptions, as noted by Uta Liebmann Schaub, resides in the fact that "whereas Foucault allows for the emergence of counter-discourses beneath the official discourse of power, Said ignores Western discourses about the Orient that oppose Western expansionism and subvert, rather than support, Western domination."10 The same claim, as we shall see, can be advanced from yet another perspective: Said's claims do not provide for even the possibility of an anti-official discourse within "Oriental" societies that employs an Occidentalism to combat the official cultural hegemony dominating a given non-Western culture. In such cases, the Western Other at least theoretically can and often does become a metaphor for political liberation against indigenous forms of ideological oppression. As the following chapters make abundantly clear, this has often been the case in modern China, though the appearance of this phenomenon is by no means limited to Chinese culture. But in China, the evocation of the West, as a counterpart of the indigenous culture, has more than once set in motion a kind of "dialogic imagination" that in turn has become a dynamic and dialectical force in the making of modern Chinese history, both literary and political. One difficulty in the ongoing debates concerning Third World and anti-colonial discourses is that some critics seem to have interpreted Said's book as asserting that any kind of indigenous cultural appropriation of the Other has necessarily negative effects, being either an act of imperialistic colonialization when performed by the "superior" culture, or one of self-colonialization when carried on by the "inferior" culture in the context of global domination. Such a charge, for example, has recently been brought against Peter Brook's production of the Indian Epic The Mahabharata.11 While not in total disagreement with Brook's intertextual reading, which relates The Mahabharata to various Shakespearean themes, Gautam Dasgupta believes that "one should not, under cover of universality of theme or character, undercut the intrinsic core of how The Mahabharata's characters function within the world of which they are a part."12 Here we see a privileging of the "intrinsic core" of an original text and the culture of which it is a part, understood from "the native's point of view," over the alien specificities of a 939

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receiving culture that necessitate cross-cultural communications in the first place. My argument with Said in terms of recent Chinese experience connects with some recent critiques of Said's Orientalism from what might well be termed post-Orientalist perspectives. In his review of Said's recent book Culture and Imperialism, Ernest Gellner asserts that Said's Orientalist discourse against imperialism and colonialism fundamentally neglects the fact "that the industrial/agrarian and Western/Other distinctions cut across each other, and obscure each other's outline. . . ,"13 In Gellner's opinion the current spate of economic success stories from the Pacific Rim may now call for a critical reversal of the concept of power structure as defined by Said's Orientalism, since one might be able to argue that industrialism—one of the crucial yardsticks with which Said developed his binary categories of the Orientalist and Orientalized entities—might be better "run in a Confucian-collective spirit" in the non-Western societies.14 From a different angle, moreover, Gellner argues that Said, while selectively criticizing some Europeans as Orientalists, privileges anti-colonialist critics such as Franz Fanon in a thoroughly unhistorical manner. Though Fanon was enormously influential in "the international literary-intellectual scene" in the West, Gellner claims, Fanon nevertheless "meant nothing to the Algerians themselves (whereas Ben Badis, unknown internationally, meant a very great deal)"15 to his own people. Gellner continues to hold this view even after having been so challenged by Eqbal Ahmad and David Davies, both of whom claimed that Franz Fanon was indeed influential in wartime Algeria.16'17 To this charge Gellner insisted that "vicarious populist romanticism means nothing to the average Algerian, who does not know Fanon's name," whereas Ben Badis's "influence was pervasive and persistent, and there could be no need to 'appropriate' him. He was there all the time. He more than anyone else had made modern Algeria."18 In another review of Said's Culture and Imperialism, Fred Inglis also sees its theme as "nothing less than the monster claim that imperialism is the biggest fact of the 20th-century world, that it pervades and defines the structure of feeling . . . of the epoch, and that all culture and all art, high or low, must (sic) be read as a revelation of old imperialism and its colossal field of force."19 Said's claim to this universal truth, however, finds its supports only in regional parts of the world in "strictly British, French and American provenance."20 Although I cannot endorse their entire political agendas, Gellner's and Inglis's critiques of Said's most recent reflections on Orientalism nevertheless have a certain cogency, because they point to the (ir)relevance of Western theory to the day-to-day life experience of those persons who are victims of ideological illusions in their indigenous cultures both in the Orient and the Occident. These reviews raise an important issue: many Western cultural critics created a system of values from which they criti940

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cized the Orientalism of their own culture, a critical act which I applaud since it was motivated by a desire to address problems in one's own social and political environment. But the events of the last half-decade have made it impossible for us to overlook what these thinkers betrayed in endorsing in an essentialist way the opponents of Orientalism. Indeed, Said's Orient is a half-Western Orient, and it is inevitable that "real" Orientals from China and Korea are likely to see how one-sided Said's arguments really are. Seen from this perspective they are valid, but they are not the whole story as Said continues to claim even in his recent response to Gellner's review, whom he accuses of having, once again, expressed "the ways of Orientalism."21 The discourses of Orientalism and of Occidentalism are, of course, intricately related to the problems of Eurocentrism and ethnocentrism. Among the reams of material produced on these subjects, one of the most telling is Kwame Anthony Appiah's insightful essay "Europe Upside Down: Fallacies of the New Afrocentrism." Appiah analyzes two approaches towards African studies taken by scholars in the West: the first group is characterized by its attempt to promote a negative belief that everything produced on the part of Western and European scholars about Africa is highly Eurocentric; it either implies that Europe is the "ideal type," or describes its African Other as "sympathetic," thus presupposing that Africans themselves "have produced little of much cultural worth" with "sophistication" and "value."22 The second group, according to Appiah, proposes an Afrocentric view as an positive alternative to negative Eurocentrism; it attempts to claim "African cultural creativity" as the origin of Western civilization, as typically shown, for example, in the works of Cheikh Anta Diop, who sees "the splendours of Egypt" "as a reason for contemporary African pride. . . ,"23 Appiah demonstrates how Afrocentrists such as these fall into the same trap as those they are attacking: similar to the Eurocentrists who are heavily influenced by nineteenthcentury European thoughts, Afrocentrists are likewise preoccupied "with the ancient world."24 More importantly, by claiming Egypt as the source of Greece and thus of the West, Afrocentrists admit, willy-nilly, that "the West too is a moral asset of contemporary blacks, and its legacy of ethnocentrism presumably one of our moral liabilities."25 Afrocentrism is therefore seen by Appiah as "simply Eurocentrism turned upside-down." It functions merely as a reaction to Eurocentrism, Appiah implies, not as a possible refutation of or a real alternative to it. Appiah's concern is with contemporary Afrocentrism, its uses and misuses, while this book is concerned with a quite different part of the globe. Yet Appiah's essay is relevant and cogent to the discussion of Occidentalism that follows, since both warn against a dangerous tendency in contemporary American academic discourse. Many Africanists, especially American ones, have invented an Africa that has little to do with the African peoples and their experiences 941

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and forms of life. This academically sponsored Afrocentric discourse functions primarily, and seems so intended, as a tactic to advance interests and careers in the West. Even while claiming those interests as "African," their advocates, as Appiah shows, are often totally removed from African experience, no matter how great their sojourn in Africa has been. Indeed, while making antiracial claims and judgments, they often perpetuate a fundamental racism. In the studies that follow, I have attempted to avoid this pitfall by strongly rejecting binarist and universalist arguments based on the concept of an Orient constructed either by East or West as its "true Other." Only in this way, as far as I can see, can scholarship remain responsible both to the theoretical insights from which it often and legitimately proceeds and to the concrete situations of the peoples it seeks to describe in their cultural and historical integrity. In this regard, perhaps a parallel can be drawn between what Diana Fuss defines as the binarism between essential and constructive feminism and what I discuss as the antithesis of East and West. In her Essentially Speaking, Fuss criticizes "appeals to a pure or original femininity, a female essence, outside the boundaries of the social and thereby untainted (though perhaps repressed) by a patriarchal order."26 The studies that follow make a similar critical move, arguing that it is also an essentialist claim to assume that the West is by nature or definition monolithically imperialistic, and therefore has subjugated all non-Western cultures throughout all historical periods. Of course, it would be just as mistaken to assume that "Oriental" cultures have never been imperialistic, or that they have only learned their "imperialism" from the West. Despite the recent claims to the contrary, and the endless disputes among comparatists, theoreticians, and cultural critics over cultural imperialism, it seems clear that neither East nor West is an essential and empirical category. Indeed, this study intends to demonstrate, among other things, that in many instances being politically "correct" in the West might be at the same time politically "incorrect" in the East where a totalitarian regime posts the West—or any form of "Other"—as antithetical to its dominant power. My ultimate aim, then, is to discuss particular cultural phenomena in the light of their own historical exigencies, and to explicitly avoid the totalizing strategies and universal claims that have all too often been part of even those interpretive strategies that claimed to reject them. No theory can be globally inclusive, and hence conclusive of local diversities and cultural specificities. The critical discourse of Orientalism should not become a new orthodoxy that could be easily applied to all countries and all historical periods. In fact, the very discussion of the problematic and paradoxical EastWest relation involves a denial of such opposition. There are many examples of failures in a clear definition of, and distinctions between, East and West. Joseph R. Levenson, for example, was aware of this problem as 942

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early as 1967 in his classic study of Liang Qichao, a Chinese westernizer at the beginning of the century who saw the West as representing matter while China was said to stand for spiritual qualities. Levenson pointed out that Liang's "matter-spirit distinction between the Western and Chinese cultures, regardless of its justice or injustice at the moment he made it, becomes always less applicable to the actual scene."27 And this is truer today than ever as China industrializes and modernizes in response to the West. Another example of a rejection of sweeping distinctions of the Orient and Occident in the field of Chinese studies can be found in Benjamin I. Schwartz's celebrated study of Yan Fu, a Chinese interpreter of Western thoughts. Schwartz cautioned against stiff categories such as West/non-West or preindustrial/traditional societies, believing that "in dealing with the encounter between the West and any given non-Western society and culture, there can be no escape from the necessity of immersing ourselves as deeply as possible in the specificities of both worlds simultaneously. We are not dealing with a known and an unknown variable but with two vast, ever changing, highly problematic areas of human experience."28 In a more recent study advanced from a somewhat different perspective, Masao Miyoshi narrates his account of the image of cultural dynamics of modern Japan, which constantly blurred the boundaries of the Self and the Other, the colonialist empire and the colonized subordinate. As "the earliest non-Western case of modern imperialist aggression," according to Miyoshi, Japan's incursion simultaneously "contained a nativist program of fighting back against the Western conquest."29 Although contaminated with a domestic imperialist agenda that imitated the Western model of domination from the onset, Japan's defeat of the powerful Russian imperialist czarist army in 1905 paradoxically "became a model for other independent-movement leaders" such as "Sun Yat-sen of China, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt... ."30 Thus, Miyoshi implies, it is difficult, if not impossible, to totally and completely separate imperialism—as reflected in Japan's military actions during World War II —and anti-imperialism—as demonstrated when Japan was subjected to Russian imperialism at the turn of this century, or to the Chinese imperial empire long before modern times. Miyoshi thus argues that any attempt to represent different realities between the First World and the Third World is "treacherous," since the very term "Third World" may imply "a racist reaffirmation of the First World with its essentialized characteristics; it can likewise celebrate placement of the First World at a more advanced stage on a supposed scale of progress and modernization. Conversely, it can signify a reactive nativist valorization of Third World communality of spirituality; it can also congratulate Third World traditionalism, proposing permanence as an absolute."31 Arguing against an essentialist claim of a binarism in critical discourse that sees the First World and the Third 943

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World as "homogeneous" entities, Miyoshi ultimately believes that one should not just talk about "white and black, rich and poor, men and women; but rich men and poor women, or rich black women and poor white men, or even poor yellow women living in the First World and rich white men inhabiting the Third World."32 It is only with such critical—and crucial—positioning that Miyoshi was finally able to point to the "internal colonization" within the discourse of colonialism with which the "poor and powerless of the First World are mobilized to serve as the actual agents of colonialism—often at the expense of their compatriots in poverty," while at the same time the same practice of colonization produced native elites who speak the voice of the colonizers to suppress their compatriots.33 Current cultural studies such as Miyoshi's have greatly enhanced our awareness and understandings of (post)colonial and (semi)colonial societies; what needs to be further explored is the internal discourse operating against imperial power within the indigenous culture, using anticolonialist discourse to dismiss the political and ideological demands of the people both in Western and non-Western societies.34 From yet another cultural and historical perspective, Chungmoo Choi discusses the problematics of the (post)colonialist South Korea, where the end of Japanese colonialist rule in 1945 only began for the South Korean people a new era of "colonization of consciousness" in which liberation was acknowledged in the official history of South Korea as "a gift of the allied forces, especially of the U.S.A. . . ."35 It was this national narrative and the subsequent American imperialists' contest with the former Soviet Union that made Korean people accept "Cold War ideology as the ruling ideology of both Koreas."36 Choi is correct in pointing out that modernization and decolonization in contemporary South Korean society meant a privileging of Western culture, English language, world history, and finally "an admission of one's own cultural inferiority."37 It created a "subaltern climate" in which "the 'postcolonial' Korean elite distinguish themselves as members of the privileged class by meticulously acquiring Western, that is, American, culture."38 While Choi's forceful argument certainly falls in with and furthers the discussion about the complexity and the problematics of postcolonialist discourse that is taking place in American academia, one wonders, however, if a different or at least additional factor is not relevant to the cultural scene that she describes: the cultural and political arena of North Korea, where anti-American imperialist discourse applied by the official ideology is employed for a hidden agenda of the "socialist" regime of Kim II Sung. As an ally of the former Soviet Union and an old friend of China's octogenarian leaders, with whom he had fought a common enemy in an anti-Japanese-imperialist war, Kim II Sung more often than not joined his socialist brothers in their anti-American and antiimperialist rhetoric, while playing with a delicate balance between the two socialist-imperialist superpowers—China and the former Soviet Union—in 944

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their ideological and territorial disputes. Here, an official Occidentalism was employed in Maoist China for the sake of subjugating its socialist brother, which paradoxically shared its master-country's attempt to promote a global discourse against Western imperialism at the expense of the interests of the local communities both in China and North Korea. By so doing, a neocolonialism in socialist China effectively recovered the long-lost Chinese imperial claim on Korean subjects by employing an antiWestern-imperialist strategy. The "imperial" China, in turn, also had its share in making use of an anti-imperialist Korean War in the early 1950s to carry out "mass campaigns to extend the ethos of the [Korean] war into a passionate hunt for domestic spies and alleged or real enemy agents," especially those who had contact "with the Guomingdang or had worked in foreign firms, universities, or church organizations" before 1949.39 Seen in this light, one might point to a historical parallel between a Chinese Occidentialism and a North Korean Occidentalism; in both the image of the modern West is used as cultural and symbolic capital for different ideological agendas. Failure to recognize this indigenous use of Western discourses and the great variety of conditions that might provide the focus for its utterance can lead to fundamental problems in crosscultural studies, as I hope this study will demonstrate. It is one thing for cultural critics writing in the West in the area of Korean studies to condemn Occidentalist discourse. Such writings are only to be expected in the current academic tradition that unswervingly sets itself against colonialism and neocolonialism. But it does not at all follow that those in Korea for whom they presume to speak would necessarily agree with their claims. And certainly it is the case, as Choi has shown, that the discourse of classical Marxism has been employed in South Korea by dissenting intellectuals as a form of protest against a regime that has been repeatedly linked with "American imperialism."40 But if our focus is on the use of discourse, rather than on the "truth" or "falsity" of a particular ideological position, it should be clear that underground Occidentalist sentiment in North Korea also has a potentially liberating function vis-a-vis the unrelenting orthodoxy of local Marxist indoctrination. This is also clearly the case in the current relationship between Chinese studies in the West and lived experience in contemporary China. The leftist claims that are so frequently voiced in the West, no matter how positive a role they have or might play in the West in bringing about social changes, do not necessarily appeal to the contemporary Chinese generation oppressed by the leftist ideology. The widespread rejection of this discourse in China is as pervasive today as was its widespread acceptance when it inspired previous generations to participate in the Communist revolutionary movement. The situation could hardly be otherwise, and Orientalists in the West who fail to see this are doomed to an unending and historically irrelevant repetition of "truths" that are now widely 945

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regarded in the East as shopworn and outmoded. Shift the historical perspective just a bit, and the same holds true for many regions at the end of the twentieth century, where Occidentalist discourse can and is employed as a strategy of liberation. From this perspective, we can further problematize and enrich the debate on what Choi terms "colonial double discourse," a discourse that "has created for colonized people an illusion of living in the same social and cultural sphere as that of the metropolis, while it ruthlessly exercises a discriminatory politics of hierarchy."41 Just as such oppression is the product of both capitalist and socialist strategies of domination, so both Orientalist and Occidentalist discourses can serve, under differing local conditions, as discourses of liberation. It is this strategic use of discourse that the present study seeks to employ. Situated within the critical debate of postcolonial and cultural studies and locally focused on Chinese Occidentalism, it undertakes to explore the "semi-colonized" Self that uses the discourse of the colonialist Other for its own political agenda within its own cultural milieu. Understood from local context, Occidentalist discourse in contemporary China is neither merely the product of an ideologically colonizing importation from the West, nor an expression of a masochistic wish on the part of the Chinese people that the more unfortunate aspects of a capitalist system be established in their country. Just as a radical feminist does not necessarily speak for her subaltern Other, who had no voice in the debate about political "correctness" among the elitist theoreticians, the often strident claims of liberal theoreticians usually operating in the West cannot automatically be taken as identical with the hopes and wishes of the nonWestern Other for whom she, usually without prior consultation, purports to speak. Though such theoretical pronouncements often do address in some manner the subaltern subject, like all other utterances, they are certainly not free of the personal interests of their speakers. One must candidly admit, though such admissions are seldom found in First World academic discourse, that there is always the danger of theoretically recolonizing the Third World with Western-invented and theoretically motivated languages of "anti-colonialism." As I hope the remainder of this book will make clear, such an assertion is not made in order to deny the usefulness of Western theory, or even its potential for strategies of liberation. By reinterpreting non-Western realities mainly through the looking-glass of Western theory, one might invent a new center with which a non-Western phenomenon can only be meaningfully explained by Western terminology and from a Western point of view. The natives' voices in non-Western countries should not have been "rediscovered" to promote the agendas of political "correctness" in the West. Western theoreticians—especially those "Third-World-born" critics residing in the West—who speak for the need of liberating the "Third World" from the West's economic and political power—need to be much more cautious in their claims, lest they 946

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unwittingly and unintentionally themselves become neocolonizers who exploit the cultural capital of the colonized in a process in which those voices are appropriated for reinvestment in those "banks of the West" that currently offer the highest rate of return to speculators in trendy academic markets. For one who lives in the West and speaks from the center about marginal cultures, it is extremely difficult and problematic to represent the Other. As one such critic myself, I have felt the need to constantly ask myself, "Who are we?" "Whose voice is it when we speak?" "Are we also the beneficiaries of the very system we are decrying?" One needs to persistently ask the question "does my study mean anything to people back at home?" Clearly these are ponderous questions with no easy answers, or perhaps no answers at all. But responsible criticism needs to ask them, and one cannot but lament that one does not find them more foregrounded in the exciting and stimulating studies that have been produced in the West in recent years. In any case, my study of Chinese Occidentalism attempts to address, or at least to be informed by such questions as it explores such phenomena as the television series He shang. These programs, like some of the other subjects discussed in the pages that follow, are unquestionably politically "incorrect" by the theoretical standards of American and European academia because of their glorification of a "progressive" West. Yet they have nevertheless exerted an enormous and even liberating influence on Chinese society, an influence that directly or indirectly resulted in the political event of the June 4 Tiananmen demonstrations. Of course, not everyone is likely to agree with the argument advanced here. But I hope that by these remarks I have shown that I am fully aware of the problematics of my own voice in this study, which in varying measure distances itself from the official voice of contemporary China, from diverse groups of Chinese intellectuals whose voices I describe as anti-official, from the Western theoreticians who dwell in the center while speaking for the marginal, and last but not least, from isolationists who think that Western theory has no value for non-Western cultures whose traditions are varyingly deemed either as superior or inferior to their Western counterparts. As a Chinese intellectual educated in the West, I cannot realistically shake off the unavoidable influence of Western culture—be it neocolonial, postcolonial, or neotraditional—since the very English language I use in writing about the voices of the "Other" predetermines the temporality of my own historical vantage point. By the same token, being a native Chinese does not necessarily give me an uncontested "native" voice since I cannot claim to speak absolutely for the interests of the majority of the Chinese people of both genders, all classes, all races, and different social spectrums. So long as we continue to use Chinese sources to write in the West, we should always be critically aware of what Rey Chow has insightfully termed the unequal "relationship between us as 947

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intellectuals overseas and them at home," which "will increasingly take on the coloration of a kind of master discourse/native informant relationship."42 Such a situation has its assets and liabilities, and it certainly characterizes the arguments which follow. In other words, although I base my research on published and unpublished materials from Chinese culture, I admit my subjectivity in selecting my data and structuring my narratives. In this regard, I agree with Silvia Tandeciarz's argument against Spivak's search for an "empirical truth" and "scientific," "verifiable," and "anthropological fact-finding" approach in examining the Third World woman. Tandeciarz believes that one should ask the better question of "whether it is to anyone's advantage to read any text as anything other than a fiction, constructed by a particular vision, which in turn is constructed by a particular experience, and whose claim to 'objectivity' thus necessarily is rendered moot" by the assumption of fictionality.43 Tandeciarz insists that after one acknowledges the impossibility of knowing the "other," he or she could examine "how the imagining of that space construed as 'other' might serve certain ends, suggest certain alternatives that otherwise might have remained unvoiced."44 The issue of what alternatives, ends, and impact the writing of the Chinese Other might bring about are perhaps best illustrated in a recent letter from China written by Li Xiaojiang, a Chinese scholar who lived through the June 4 massacre, traveled to the West, and finally returned to China. Writing in an open letter to Su Shaozhi, a Chinese scholar in exile, Li argues that overseas Chinese scholars, trained in the latest Western intellectual fashions, are extremely competent in developing profound and meticulous theoretical arguments, which unfortunately, she insists, do not often address "the real conditions prevailing in China" in the post-1989 period.45 Upon her return from the West, Li traveled extensively to many remote regions in China, conducting investigations across the country, the conclusions of which were usually related to the current changes and transformations in China. Li pointed to the phenomenon of a perplexing discrepancy between "China will perish"—a judgment derived from gazing at China from a distance with grand theoretical analysis on the part of overseas China scholars—and "China's continued survival"—a contradiction which "leav[es] a large opening for reflection."46 Li thus warned her colleagues in diaspora: "We must look at what China really is, beyond 'concepts,' and beyond 'systems.' "47 From a slightly different angle, Zhang Longxi also emphasizes the importance and desirability of understanding China from the perspectives of those who actually live and survive in contemporary Chinese society. Zhang argues against a trend in Western discourses involving Chinese studies which seem to have resulted from the current American leftist intellectual context rather than from "a perspective grounded in Chinese reality."48 Sophisticated Western theory, albeit important, can be useful 948

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when understood in terms of the role it plays within the cultural and political environment of China. Conversely, those critics inside China without a real understanding of Western theory can and have developed their own form of articulation situated at the very center of political events: "Liu Zaifu and many other Chinese literary scholars, to put it simply, are not ivory-tower dwellers who talk about the autonomy of literature and the freedom of artistic expression only from a safe distance, somewhere outside history. They are men and women of enormous courage and moral integrity fighting for social justice and intellectual freedom in political actions."49 The validity of this claim is self evident, yet to acknowledge it is not to necessarily agree with the essentialist rejection of self-contained Western theory and its concomitant construction of a "true" Other. Zhang's essay, which is itself well-versed in Western theory, challenges the voice behind theory, not theory itself. It is one thing to critique theory from the perspective of indigenous Chinese society; it is quite another to advance theory merely as a means of self-empowerment conditioned by a particular moment in Western culture. Such a distinction is just what my study advocates: to reject binarist and universalist arguments grounded in an Orient constructed either by the East or by the West. Such a project thus demands both engaging with and moving away from theory, rejecting a globalizing tendency—which falls prey to Orientalism—and a localizing approach—which would once again isolate China from the rest of the world through the discourse of the official Occidentalism that this study seeks in part to explore. In their discussions of the problematics of Western theory and Chinese experience, both Li and Zhang point to the important question of the role of intellectuals in social transformations in indigenous cultures, an issue that is doubly complicated in China and other societies where intellectuals traveled to the West and are now living and writing in the West. Such studies in the past decades have produced many valuable perspectives exploring the indispensable and yet problematic roles Chinese intellectuals have played in inaugurating new ideas and social changes in traditional Confucian society in modern China before, during, and after the May Fourth movement. Yet it would be easy—and questionable—to overvalue the role of intellectuals. Recent works in subaltern studies, primarily initiated by Indian scholars, have explored problems within the role of intellectuals in colonized and semi-colonized countries. By raising the question of "Can the subaltern speak?" the Subaltern Studies Group intended to "write subalterns ('the people') back into a history dominated by two elite historiographies: one which gave pride of place to colonial authorities, the other to Indian nationalist elites."50 In response to such theory, Gail Hershatter recently pointed out that such an end aim of subaltern studies became problematic for Chinese historiography after 1949, when officially dispatched historians collected 949

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"speak bitterness" stories of worker and peasant against the feudal and imperialist past in a vocabulary supplied by the state.51 Yet this "legacy of official subaltern-speak" should not foreclose our interrogation of the subversive voices.52 On the contrary, by exploring the "multiple, relational degrees of subalternity," Hershatter gives a positive answer to Spivak's question of "Can the subaltern speak?": some of the subaltern speak "can be understood as resistance to the dominate discourses and institutions that constrain subalterns. . . ,"53 The strength of Hershatter's essay lies in her emphasis on "local configurations" and "multiple political subjectivities" in subaltern and cultural studies, even if there remains much more to be said in order to fully and convincingly answer Spivak's question.54 Yet in cultural matters things are never simple or straightforward. Hershatter's conclusion, striking as it is, calls out for the problematizing that the details and localness of history can always produce. We can see this by considering an episode in the history of subaltern representation in contemporary China. During the height of the Cultural Revolution, when the Red Guards were increasingly spinning out of control in chaotic cities torn by civil war, Mao Zedong promoted the movement of "going up to the mountain areas and going down to the villages," during which millions of educated youth were coerced into settling down in remote rural areas. The initial goal of such a movement was to provide an opportunity for the educated youth to "receive education from the poor and lower-middle peasants" so that they could eventually be accepted by the subalterns, acting like them, and speaking in their voice. The following quotation from Mao Zedong, for example, was frequently used to promote a Maoist theory of subaltern representation during the Cultural Revolution, when educated youth were encouraged to reform themselves according to the role models of the subalterns in the countryside: How should we judge whether a youth is a revolutionary? How can we tell? There can only be one criterion, namely, whether or not he is willing to integrate himself with the broad masses of workers and peasants and does so in practice. If he is willing to do so and actually does so, he is a revolutionary; otherwise he is a non-revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary. If today he integrates himself with the masses of workers and peasants, then today he is a revolutionary; if tomorrow he ceases to do so or turns round to oppress the common people, then he becomes a non-revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary.55 This Maoist theory of subaltern representation is drastically different both from the regional and local Indian subalterns in Ranajit Guha's definition and from the gendered subalterns in Spivak's definition. Most importantly, Rey Chow's explanation that "the relation between the elite 950

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and the subaltern in China needs to be formulated primarily in terms of the way education and gender work together" is not at all sufficient to account for the brutality and unpredictability of a dominant political power that classifies people into opposing social classes at random according to its various and ever-changing ideological agendas.56 In the numerous political movements in the brief history of the PRC, the concept of "revolutionary subaltern" is conveniently used by the ruling ideology as a counter Other to classify a dissident as "counter-revolutionary" with the simple pretext that he "ceases to" integrate himself "with the masses of workers and peasants" or that he "turns around to oppress the common people." More often than not, even members of the subaltern group itself can be outlawed overnight as "counter-revolutionary" if they happen to step beyond the Party line. Differences in gender, class, and educational level alone cannot, therefore, fully explain the complexity of the subaltern representation in the PRC. This Maoist Utopian idealism, of course, never materialized into concrete reality. For more than 10 years during the Cultural Revolution, many of the educated youth were either persecuted, or in some instances, even raped, by local tyrannical Party officials who claimed to represent the best interests of the subalterns, since—as opposed to the educated youth—they belonged to the class of the subalterns themselves.57 As for the real subalterns, their illiteracy, lack of power, or even lack of a desire for power, kept them silent and invisible. The educated youth thus became a new generation of a special class of the oppressed "subalterns" whose literacy became the very reason for their being deprived of any traces of the power of discourse that they had previously possessed. Instead of realizing the initial intention of becoming one of the subalterns, they were reduced to a class less verbal and visible than the illiterate subalterns themselves. This situation predictably led to these intellectual subalterns entering into open confrontation with the ruling ideology between 1978 and 1979, a time when many of the 10 million educated youths still remained in the countryside. These youths joined their efforts in hunger strikes, railway blockages, and mass demonstrations for the purpose of demanding their right to go back to their home cities.58 For the first time, the educated youths spoke up for themselves as "subalterns," but their demands had nothing to do with the interests of local subalterns whom they were supposed to embrace as role models. Their voice of protest was further recorded in post-Mao history through their writings of "wounded literature (shanghen wenxue)" in which they expressed their grievances at being reduced to the position of the subalterns.59 One finds in these writings ambiguous feelings towards the local subalterns, some of whom suppressed them as political opponents whereas others sided with them against the official ideology on different occasions.60 This episode demonstrates the impossibility and complexity of a 951

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one-sided discourse about subalterns in contemporary China, where class categories crosscut each other and are continuously redefined by the representatives of the ruling ideology in accordance with their own interests and ever-shifting agendas. The same can be said of other political movements such as the "anti-rightist" and the Cultural Revolution, during which numerous Chinese intellectuals were sent to the country in exile to be "ideologically reformed" by the local subalterns. In the context of the cultural and political history of contemporary China, the issue of "Can the subalterns speak" is much more complicated than those situations that have been reported, accurately or not, by Indian scholars. In fact, to many Chinese readers and critics, the question of "Can the subalterns speak" is painfully reminiscent of the familiar question of "For whom do we speak?" which was the central issue raised by Mao Zedong in his Yan'an Talk of 1943. To a large extent, this document helped shape the predominant Maoist-Marxist theory of literature and art since 1949, a theory that has persistently marked out the goal of serving the interests of workers, peasants, and soldiers. In the political and cultural history of the PRC, this supposedly subaltern theory of literature and art has conveniently justified the Party's demand for "the correct attitude of the writer, the need for a popular language comprehensible to the masses, the prerequisite of 'extolling' and not 'exposing' revolutionary reality, and similar phrases which at various times have been much more than empty utterances."61 In the "glorious" defense of subalterns—most of whom, thanks to the failure of official education programs, remain illiterate even in present-day China—the ruling ideology found a "natural" ally in the political suppression of the intellectuals whose already limited articulations of anti-official voice were rendered even more mute and powerless. Seen from this context it is ironic to note that at the very moment when the pretext for subaltern speech as an instrument of power is dying in China as part and parcel of an obsolete, radical Marxist ideology, it is being popularized in the West as an effective weapon against the mainstream claims of Western academics. While not denying its positive role in opening up theoretical issues, I nevertheless caution against the use of this once local-andregional discourse for the sake of globalizing cultural and theoretical issues. Like other strategies of "truth" that seek to assert power both at home and abroad, this discourse may well turn out to be yet another form of the Western theoretical hegemony that it claims to displace. It is not easy for the Chinese people to erase the memory of the promulgation of an official discourse on subalterns, a discourse of power fully employed to suppress the advancement of other discourses by Chinese intellectuals. Indeed, the memories of this discourse and its tragic effects are one of the places from which I here advance my study of a Chinese Occidentalism that focuses on the role of the intellectuals in producing a counterdiscourse about an imagined and imaginary West, a discourse, as we shall 952

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see, that was directed against the ruling ideology and its self-claimed subaltern interest. In evoking the term "Chinese intellectuals," I hardly need to point out the obvious fact that it is a loaded term that necessarily involves diverse social groups and conflicting ideologies in different historical periods. I do not wish to claim that the post-Mao age can merely be understood in terms of a seemingly unbridgeable gap between the official and the antiofficial discourses designed by "progressive" intellectuals. Neither do I intend to give the impression that the anti-official message alone constitutes the historical necessity of those literary and dramatic institutions under discussion. Fully aware of the danger of a binary thinking that confines intellectual inquiry, I use the terms of "official/anti-official discourses" strategically in order to identify temporary, complex, fluid, and constantly shifting historical moments in which diverse groups of Chinese intellectuals collaborated with other social forces in their confrontations with the ruling ideology. To demonstrate the complexity of those historical moments, I discuss, in chapter 2, an example of a third kind of Chinese Occidentalism in which the anti-official Occidentalism overlapped with the official Occidentalism of the early post-Mao regime, which manipulated the former into legitimizing the latter's political agenda. In these instances, it is precisely the "complicity" with the ruling ideology that marked the multiple historical moments of Chinese Occidentalism. This "complicity" marks a crucial feature of the Chinese Occidentalism and the questionable role of what Carol Lee Hamrin and Timothy Cheek termed "Chinese establishment intellectuals," who allied themselves with the authoritarian ruling elite, living and writing within the tension and conflicts between them.62 Yet to emphasize the politically liberating force of Occidentalism in the formation of literary and cultural history in contemporary China is not to ignore the fact that Occidentalism is multifaceted and highly problematic and can at times become ideologically limiting and confining. I therefore stress in chapter 6 the problematic nature of Occidentalism by recounting a profound irony in an earlier episode in modern Chinese dramatic history. I argue that, on the one hand, several male May Fourth playwrights considered writing about women's issues of liberation and equality important political and ideological strategies in their formation of a countertradition and a countercanon against the Confucian ruling ideology. In such a peculiar "male-dominated-feminist" discourse, they found in the image of the West a powerful weapon against the dominant ruling ideology of Confucianism. When the West is used in this way as a strong antiofficial statement against Confucian traditional culture, this Occidentalist discourse can be regarded as politically liberating. On the other hand, however, in view of the particular historical conditions of the May Fourth period, which is characterized by its embrace of an anti-imperialistic 953

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agenda as its top priority, the appeal to the West paradoxically turned out to be a yet another way in which Western fathers subjugated and colonized "Third World" women, as I hope to show. The last chapter deliberately steps out of the historical period of post-Mao China, from which the bulk of this study draws its raw material, in order to demonstrate the continuity and complexity of Occidentalism in modern Chinese society. The postscript, by contrast, brings this study of Chinese Occidentalism up to the present historically by analyzing the controversial receptions of A Chinese Woman in Manhattan, a bestseller in 1992 in China, which was then bewildered by a recent "autobiographical" account of a Chinese woman's success in living the "American dream." It hardly seems necessary to emphasize that this study in no way constitutes an attempt to sketch a comprehensive history of Occidentalism in modern China. Such an attempt is surely beyond the scope of any single monograph. Indeed, this work does not even claim to be a typical survey of the entire post-Mao period, whose political course is to a large extent characterized by an ambivalent and paradoxical relationship to the West. It is merely a portrait gallery of the "heroes" and "villains" in a few exciting—and, in some cases, much-neglected—moments in history when Chinese realities clashed with the Western Other, confusing the traditional differences between them, and claiming the Other as access to its own cultural and symbolic capital in an indigenous battle to subvert domestic power and knowledge both in economic and political terms. By avoiding a chronological history, these fragmented "case studies" categorically question the familiar story outlined by the continuous narratives of official and national history. By drawing materials more heavily from dramatic studies than from other literary genres, I intend to redeem modern Chinese spoken drama from its marginal position both in China and in the West. While selectively celebrating the internal antihegemonic use of the image of the West in certain specific moments in contemporary Chinese history, I am equally aware of the fact that the symbolic uses of the West in Chinese texts and contexts treated here by no means offer a complete story of Chinese Occidentalism, which has rightly been characterized on both sides as problematic and contradictory ever since China's initial contact with the West.63 The discussions of the instances of Chinese Occidentalism considered here are offered as at best partially representative and are merely meant to open up a new discourse, which mediates between theory and historical analysis of the concrete experience of the indigenous cultures. With this observation, I begin my tale, to be completed inevitably by the interrogations and interventions of others.

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Notes 1 For an informative survey of Chinese views of America in the form of travel accounts, official diaries of visiting diplomats, and short essays by leading intellectuals, see Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present, trans, and eds, R. David Arkush and Leo O[u-fan]. Lee (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989). For an early review symposium on Edward Said's Orientalism by Asian studies scholars published in The Journal of Asian Studies 39:3 (1980), see Robert A. Kapp, "Edward Said's Orientalism: Introduction," 481-84; Michael Dalby, "Nocturnal Labors in the Light of Day," 485-93; David Kopf, "Hermeneutics versus History," 495-506; and Richard H. Minear, "Orientalism and the Study of Japan," 507-18. Simon Leys, in his The Burning Forest (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1986), rejects Said's Orientalism as a contention that "certainly does not apply to sinologists" since "the intellectual and physical boundaries of the Chinese world are sharply defined; they encompass a reality that is so autonomous and singular that no sinologist in his right mind would ever dream of extending any sinological statement to the non-Chinese world" (96). For a recent study on Orientalism and nationalism in the context of contemporary Chinese literary and cultural studies, see Xiaobing Tang, "Orientalism and the Question of Universality: The Language of Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory," Positions 1:2(1993):389-413. 2 Arif Dirlik, "Marxism and Chinese History: The Globalization of Marxist Historical Discourse and the Problem of Hegemony in Marxism," Journal of Third World Studies 4:1 (1987):158. In his definitive study The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), Dirlik also traces the problematic relationship between socialism worldwide and the Chinese transplantation of Marxism and socialism from 1917-1921. Dirlik comments on China's reaction to the outside world: "Global problems were China's national problems, and China's national problems were global problems, all of them rooted in the capitalist world system. Awareness of worldwide social conflict resulted in a new reading of China's problems, in other words, while the evidence of social conflict within China endowed worldwide developments, including the Russian Revolution, with an immediacy of meaning. Social revolutionary ideology, which as ideology had a history of nearly two decades in Chinese radical thinking, had found its substance. In this context, socialism, with its promise to end the conflicts created by capitalism, found a ready audience" (9). 3 For an English translation of Lin's essay, later published as a booklet, see Lin Piao (Lin Biao), Long Live the Victory of People's War! In Commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of Victory in the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japan [Renmin zhanzheng shengli wansui] (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965). Citations are quoted from this translation. 4 Lin Piao, 48^-9. For a discussion of the related issues of race in Chinese history, see Frank Dikotter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992). Dikotter rightfully points out: Although there is nothing in Mao's writings which deals directly with the idea of race, it is clear that his sense of nationalism was based on a strong racial consciousness and a sense of biological continuity. Like

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5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

For examples of China's relationship to Third World countries, see Alan Hutchison, China's African Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1975), and Philip Snow, The Star Raft (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988). Maurice Meisner, Marxism, Maoism, and Utopianism: Eight Essays (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 98. Meisner, 100. Jonathan D. Spence has pointed out the hegemonic nature of such a discourse. He believes that Lin Biao's 1965 statement "became a basic formula for Chinese foreign policy during the Cultural Revolution, and was interpreted by many Western observers to mean that China sought to play a dominant role in creating global upheavals that might lead to a weakening of the capitalist nations." See his The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1990), 627. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 1. Said, Orientalism, 3. Uta Leibmann Schaub, "Foucault's Oriental Subtext," Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, (hereafter cited as PMLA) 104:3 (1989):308. Gautam Dasgupta, "The Mahabharata: Peter Brook's 'Orientalism,' " Performing Arts Journal 30:3 (1987):10. Dasgupta, 14. Ernest Gellner, "The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism," review of Culture and Imperialism, by Edward Said, Times Literary Supplement 19 Feb. 1993:4. Gellner, "The Mightier Pen?" 3. Gellner's point is not without problems: it views "Confucian-collective spirit" as a better option to non-Western societies without taking into account the controversies over Confucianism in modern Chinese scholarship. Gellner, "The Mightier Pen?" 4. Eqbal Ahmad, review of Culture and Imperialism, by Edward Said, Times Literary Supplement 2 Apr. 1993:17. David Davies, letter, Times Literary Supplement 19 Mar. 1993:15. Gellner, reply to letter of Edward Said, Times Literary Supplement 9 Apr. 1993:15. Fred Inglis, "A Peregrine Spirit with an Eye for Eagles," review of Culture and Imperialism, by Edward Said, The Times Higher Education Supplement 5 Mar. 1993:27. Inglis, 27. Edward Said, letter, Times Literary Supplement 19 Mar. 1993:15. Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Europe Upside Down: Fallacies of the New Afrocentrism," Times Literary Supplement 12 Feb. 1993:24. Appiah, 24. Appiah, 24. Appiah, 24. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), 2.

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27 Joseph R. Levenson, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and the Mind of Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953), 8. 28 Benjamin I. Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), 2; citation and comments by Paul A. Cohen and Merle Goldman in their "Introduction" to Ideas Across Cultures: Essays on Chinese Thought in Honor of Benjamin I. Schwartz, eds., Paul A. Cohen and Merle Goldman (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard Univ., 1990), 4. 29 Masao Miyoshi, Off Center: Power and Culture Relations Between Japan and the United States (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), 40. 30 Miyoshi, 41. 31 Miyoshi, 41. 32 Miyoshi, 42. 33 Miyoshi, 42. 34 Miriam Silverberg has also discussed the impossibility of separating gender and ethnic relations "into neat binaries of male/female" and binaries of colonial Japan/colonialized Korea and China during World War II period in her "Remembering Pearl Harbor, Forgetting Charlie Chaplin, and the Case of the Disappearing Western Woman: A Picture Story," Positions 1:1 (1993):32. Silverberg narrates the story of Ri Ko-ran, daughter of a Japanese colonial official working in Manchuria, who was idolized as a Chinese movie star by Japanese audiences, although she was in fact a Japanese growing up in Manchuria and Beijing. In this episode in which "the colonizer is passing as colonized" (35), thus acquiring power and knowledge of both the Other and the Self, one sees the danger of idealizing Oriental cultures as monolithically the "oppressed" and the "subaltern" on the part of the Western cultural critics as well as of the indigenous cultures in question. Silverberg's insight that "national-ethnic fluidity" prevails "because historical exigencies countered political ideologies of racial identity/purity" (63) once again warns us against any essentialization of a culture as either the "Other" or the "Self," the colonizer and the colonized. Others have also studied the impact of Japanese colonialism and imperialism on the making of literary and cultural histories both in colonial Japan and in the East Asian countries colonized by Japan. See, for example, James A. Fujii, "Writing Out Asia: Modernity, Canon, and Natsume Soseki's Kokoro" Positions 1:1 (1993):194-223. Commenting on the "ongoing reproduction of amnesia that underwrites" the reception of the canonical work by Soseki, which forgets the colonial history of modern Japan (194), Fujii demonstrates how Kokoro "continues to be read in ways that ignore the specific conditions of Japanese modernity and nationness that give rise to this text. What must be endeavored is to bring into focus the oft-neglected relationship between Japan and its Asian neighbors as a way of thinking about Japanese modernity and 'modern Japanese literature' (which is always marked by the West)" (197). Working in different cultural contexts, Ann L. Stoler challenges binary categories of "colonizer" and "colonized" by showing them as having been "secured through notions of racial difference constructed in gender terms," as demonstrated in the experience of European women during the colonial rule of French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies (651). See Ann L. Stoler, "Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-century Colonial Cultures," American Ethnologist 16:4 (1989):634-59. From a different angle, John L. Comaroff problematizes the notion of colonialism as "a coherent, monolithic process" by narrating how, in 19th-century South Africa, three equally important colonizing groups such as "settlers, 957

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55

56

administrators and evangelists contested the terms of European domination" (661). Comaroff confirms the points of view expressed in some recent anthropological scholarships against an essentialist view on colonialism: "that colonialism simply does not have a single, transhistorical 'essence,' neither political nor material, social nor cultural. Rather, its form and substance are decided in the context of its making" (681). See John L. Comaroff, "Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience: Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa," American Ethnologist 16:4 (1989):661-85. Chungmoo Choi, "The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea," Positions 1:1 (1993):80. Choi, 80. Choi, 82. Choi, 82. Spence, 531-32. Choi, 88-96. Choi, 82. Rey Chow, "Against the Lures of Diaspora: Minority Discourse, Chinese Women, and Intellectual Hegemony," in Tonglin Lu, ed., Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1993), 33. Silvia Tandeciarz, "Reading Gayatri Spivak's 'French Feminism in an International Frame': A Problem for Theory," Genders 10 (Spring 1991):79. Tandeciarz, 79. Li Xiaojiang, "Open Letter to Su Shaozhi," trans. Feng-ying Ming and Eric Karchmer, Positions 1:1 (1993); 270. Li Xiaojiang, 276. Li Xiaojiang, 278. Zhang Longxi, "Western Theory and Chinese Reality," Critical Inquiry 19 (1992):127. Zhang Longxi, 112. Gail Hershatter, "The Subaltern Talks Back: Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese History," Positions 1:1 (1993):105. For studies on and by the Subaltern Studies Group, see Subaltern Studies (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press), 7 Vols; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Gary Nelson and Lawrence Crossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-311; Spivak, "A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman's Text from the Third World," in her In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), 241-68; and Rosalind O'Hanlon, "Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia," Modern Asian Studies 22:1 (1988):189-224. O'Hanlon's essay was cited by Hershatter. Hershatter, 108. Hershatter, 108. Hershatter, 111, 119. These two terms are Tani E. Barlow's in her "Editor's Introduction" to the issue of Positions in which Hershatter's essay appears, vi. Mao Zedong, "Qingnian yundong de fangxiang" [The orientation of the youth movement], Mao Zedong xuanji [Selected works of Mao Zedong] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1964), 530. English translations are from Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975), 46. For Rey Chow's comment on Ranajit Guha and Spivak, see Rey Chow, "Against the Lures of Diaspora," in Lu, Gender and Sexuality, 44. 958

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57 Examples of such abuse can be found in Deng Xian's astonishing narrative history of those educated youth who lived in Yunan Province for 10 years. See his Zhongguo zhiqing meng [The dream of Chinese educated youth] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1973), 124-27. For an early account of this movement in English, see Thomas Bernstein, Up to the Mountain and Down to the Villages: the Transfer of Youth from Urban to Rural China (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977). 58 Deng Xian, 170-377. 59 "Wounded literature" was first attributed to Lu Xinhua's short story "The Wounded" [Shanghen] published in Wenhui bao in 11 Aug. 1978. For English translation of representative works, see The Wounded: New Stories of the Cultural Revolution, 77-78, trans. Geremie Barme and Bennett Lee (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1979). For examples of post-Mao literature in English translation depicting the lives of educated youth in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, especially with regard to their use of knowledge and their interaction with local subalterns, see Ah Cheng, "King of Children" and "King of Chess" in his Three Kings: Three Stories from Today's China, trans, and intro. Bonnie S. McDougall (London: Collins-Harvill, 1990), 155-215, 27-94. See also Laifong Leung, Morning Sun: Interviews with Chinese Writers of the Lost Generation (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994). Using an ironic title borrowed from Mao Zedong's once famous quotation that "young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning," Leung recorded interviews with twenty-six contemporary Chinese writers who were themselves members of the "educated youth," spending their most precious years laboring away in the countryside, disillusioned and deceived by an idealist Maoist ideology. 60 The problematic and intricate relationship between modern Chinese writers and the subalterns they claim to represent in their literary and political imaginations dates back long before the founding of the People's Republic of China. For an anthology in English on the images of the peasants represented in modern Chinese literature from the 1930s to the 1980s, see Helen F. Siu, comp. trans, and intro., Furrows: Peasants, Intellectuals, and the State (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990). Siu rightly notes that "urban Chinese intellectuals have concentrated on portraying a social world they seldom grasp. Whether objects of abuse in traditional society or objects of transformation in the decades of socialism, the peasants have been, in the eyes of these writers, as much a political and moral metaphor as living, suffering, and functioning human beings. However unreal these literary images of peasants may be, they reveal the evolution of the writers' fitful, ambivalent, but compelling relationships with the peasantry on the one hand and with state-building efforts on the other hand" (Siu, vii). Once again, the "subaltern-speak" was presented completely by elitist intellectuals with the very absence of the subalterns' own voice. The representations of the subalterns are merely used to illustrate "the odyssey of modern Chinese intellectuals" (Siu, vii), not the odyssey of the subalterns themselves. For scource materials available in English on rural and urban women in 1980s China as subalterns, see Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980's (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988). 61 Leo Ou-fan Lee, "The Politics of Technique: Perspectives of Literary Dissidcnce in Contemporary Chinese Fiction," in Jeffrey C. Kinklcy, ed., After Mao: Chinese Literature and Society 1978-1981 (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard Univ., 1985), 162. For an English translation of Mao's "Talks,"

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ORIENTALISMS see Mao Zedong, "Talks at the Yan'an Conference on Literature and Art": A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary, trans. Bonnie S. McDougall (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, Univ. of Michigan, 1980). 62 For a comprehensive study of the Chinese establishment intellectuals, see Carol Lee Hamrin and Timothy Cheek, eds., China's Establishment Intellectuals (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1986), especially the "Foreword" by John Israel and "Introduction: Collaboration and Conflict in the Search for a New Order" by Timothy Cheek and Carol Lee Hamrin, ix-20. For important works on Chinese Intellectuals in early modern China, see Chang Hao, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning (1890-1911) (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987); Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986); and Jerome B. Grieder, Intellectuals and the State in Modern China: A Narrative History (New York: Free Press, 1981). For the roles of intellectuals in the PRC, see Merle Goldman with Timothy Cheek and Carol Lee Hamrin, eds., China's Intellectuals and the State: In Search of a New Relationship (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard Univ., 1987). See also Li Zehou and Vera Schwarcz, "Six Generations of Modern Chinese Intellectuals," Chinese Studies in History 8:2 (1983-84):42-56. In this essay, modern Chinese intellectuals are divided into distinct, and yet problematically overlapping groups of the 1911 generation, the May Fourth generation, the 1920s generation, the Anti-Japanese War generation, the 1940s and 1950s generation, and the Red Guards generation. For recent important works on Chinese intellectuals and power, see Tani E. Barlow, "Zhishifenzi [Chinese intellectuals] and Power," Dialectical Anthropology 16 (1991):209-32. Barlow argues that the Chinese intellectual "has positioned itself between internal and external others" (209) and that they appropriate signs such as Woman, Sexuality, and the master narrative of privileged modernist discourse "out of the 'stronger' European language into the 'weaker' language and local context" of China (212). I agree, in particular with her argument regarding the younger generation of intellectuals in the post-Mao era, whose rhetoric on the Western signs of "democracy," "liberty," and "modern" "refers to a 'West' that never was and is a weapon against the autocratic China they know too well" (224). See also Rey Chow, "Pedagogy, Trust, Chinese Intellectuals in the 1990s— Fragments of a Post-Catastrophic Discourse," Dialectical Anthropology 16 (1991):191-207, for an examination of Chinese intellectuals' agency in Chinese politics. 63 Although there are no substantial studies exclusively on Chinese Occidentalism, China's interaction with the West has been a persistent concern in Chinese studies. For a selected few related to literary and cultural studies, see, for example, Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973); Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia Univ. Press 1984); Bonnie S. McDougall, The Introduction of Western Literary Theories into Modern China, 1919-1925 (Tokyo: Center for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1971). For recent critiques on the problematics of Chinese studies and their related issues from new and different perspectives, see Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East (Minnesota: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1991); Tani E. Barlow, "Career in Post-war China Studies," and Lydia H. Liu, "Translingual Practice: The Discourse of Individualism between China and the West," both in Positions 1:1 (1993):224-67 and 160-93 respectively.

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6.7 VACATION CRUISES; OR, THE HOMOEROTICS OF ORIENTALISM Joseph A. Boone* From PMLA 110.1 (Jan. 1995): 89-107

Why the Orient seems still to suggest not only fecundity but sexual promise (and threat) . . . is not the province of my analysis here, alas, despite its frequently noted appearance. Edward Said (188) So we had sex, or at least I lay and allowed him to fuck me, and thought as his prick shot in and he kissed my neck, back, and shoulders, that it was a most unappetising position for a world-famous artist to be in. Joe Orton in Tangier (174)

Perhaps nowhere else are the sexual politics of colonial narrative so explicitly thematized as in those voyages to the Near East recorded or imagined by Western men. "Since the time of the Prophet," one of these records proclaims, "fabulous Araby has reeked of aphrodisiac excitement" (Edwardes and Masters 175). With various shades of prurience and sophistication, similar sentiments echo throughout the writings of novelists, poets, journalists, travel writers, sociologists, and ethnographers whose pursuit of eros has brought them, in Rana Kabbani's phrase, "to the Orient on the flying-carpet of Orientalism" (Passionate Nomad x). For such men, the geopolitical realities of the Arabic Orient become a psychic screen on which to project fantasies of illicit sexuality and unbridled excess —including, as Malek Alloula has observed, visions of "generalized perversion" (95) and, as Edward Said puts it, "sexual experience unobtainable in Europe," that is, "a different type of sexuality" (190). This appropriation of the so-called East in order to project onto it an otherness 961

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that mirrors Western psychosexual needs only confirms the phenomenon that Said calls "Orientalism" in his book of that name.1 But exactly what others are being appropriated here? Despite Alloula's italicizing of the word perversion, despite Said's carefully ambiguous rendering of the phrase "a different type of sexuality," both Alloula's and Said's analyses of colonialist erotics remain ensconced in conspicuously heterosexual interpretative frameworks.2 In contrast, the epigraph from Joe Orton's diary makes explicit an aspect of the vacation agendas of many male tourists that remains unspoken in most commentaries on colonial narrative: namely, that the "sexual promise (and threat)" that Said attributes to the Orient is for countless Western travelers inextricably tied to their exposure abroad to what has come to be known within Western sexual discourse as male homosexual practice (188).3 Whether these homoerotically charged encounters figure as a voyeuristic spectacle—that is, as one more "exotic" item that the tourist views from a distance—or as a covert goal of the traveler's journey, the fact remains that the possibility of sexual contact with and between men underwrites and at times even explains the historical appeal of orientalism as an occidental mode of male perception, appropriation, and control. The number of gay and bisexual male writers and artists who have traveled through North Africa in pursuit of sexual gratification is legion as well as legend: Andre Gide lost his virginity on the dunes of Algeria in 1893 (where Oscar Wilde served as his procurer two years later), and E. M. Forster on the beaches of Alexandria in 1916. Morocco has also served as a mecca for the gay and bisexual literati vacationing in North Africa—many clustered around Tangier's famous resident Paul Bowles— to say nothing of the nonliterati, those celebrities of ambiguous sexual persuasion ranging from Mick Jagger to Malcolm Forbes.4 Many heterosexually identified men have traveled to the Arabic Orient in pursuit of erotic fulfillment as well, but even these adventurers have had to confront the specter of male-male sex that lurks in their fantasies of a decadent and lawless East; such encounters put into crisis assumptions about male sexual desire, masculinity, and heterosexuality that are specific to Western culture. In the following pages I hope to address the way in which the public and personal texts produced by both straight and nonstraight travelers are implicated in a colonizing enterprise that often "others" the homosexually inscribed Arab male, a condition that obtains, albeit with differing valences and contexts, whether that "other" is perceived with dread or with desire. Simultaneously, in nearly all these texts, the imagined or actual encounter with exotic otherness engenders profound anxieties about one's authority to narrate: the threat of being "unmanned" by the attractive yet dangerous lure of a polymorphous Eastern sexuality that exceeds representation is mirrored in many Western writers' fears, in the face of such excess, of never writing again. 962

V A C A T I O N C R U I S E S ; OR, THE HOMOEROTICS OF O R I E N T A L I S M To delineate more precisely these discursive manifestations of displaced and discovered homoeroticism, this essay investigates three categories of occidental tourists whose writings eroticize the Near East. First, it looks at heterosexually identified writers whose transformation of Egypt's perceived sexual bounty into a symbol of polymorphous perversity engenders their obsessive fascination with, and often anguished negotiation of, the homoerotic. Second, it examines the homoerotic undertow in representations of life on the desert, where the act of masquerading as the foreign other, sadomasochism, and gender ambiguities uneasily collide. Third, it turns to gay male enclaves established in the African Mahgreb since the beginning of the twentieth century, in order to consider the implications of the colonially sanctioned tradition of male prostitution for various narratives of gay self-affirmation. Driving and binding all these homoeroticizing strands of orientalist narrative are a series of interrelated sociopolitical, psychosexual, and aesthetic issues: the practice and economics of empire, perceptions of race, the collusion of phallocratic and colonial interests, constructions of sexual "deviance," questions of narrative authority, crises of representation. Because of the number of texts—biographical, autobiographical, fictional—canvassed in the following pages, highlighting one topos over another is at times necessary, partly but not solely because of space limitations. Working by pastiche, letting the heterogeneous strands of my analysis contribute to the illumination of a subject that is necessarily multifaceted and hybrid, rather than forcing each strand to illustrate every aspect of an emerging overview, seems an effective strategy with which to forestall the classic colonizing—and indeed scholarly—move of defining each part in the name of an already assumed whole. In tracing the trajectories outlined above, my own narrative aims to traverse and unsettle, even as it provisionally inscribes, a number of imposed boundaries—not least those separating "West" from "East" and "heterosexual" from "homosexual." What follows is written as part of the growing academic discipline of gay and lesbian studies, whose boundaries I hope to push by showing how contingent and Western its conception of "homosexuality"—as an identity category, a sexual practice, and a site of theoretical speculation—often proves to be when brought into contact with the sexual epistemologies of non-Western cultures, particularly when encounters of "East" and "West" are crossed by issues of colonialism, race, nation, and class. Taking a cue from Homi K. Bhabha's insightful formulation of the continually "unfixing" propensities of the colonial stereotype, I present a series of collisions between traditionally assumed Western sexual categories (the homosexual, the pederast) and equally stereotypical colonialist tropes (the beautiful brown boy, the hypervirile Arab, the wealthy Nazarene)—collisions that generate ambiguity and contradiction rather than reassert an unproblematic intellectual domination over a mythic East as an object of desire. For many white gay male

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subjects, that object of desire remains simultaneously same and other, a source of troubling and unresolved identification and differentiation. It is precisely in the space opened by this gap that a critique of orientalist homoerotics may usefully locate itself and begin the work of dismantling those paradigmatic fictions of otherness that have made the binarisms of West and East, of heterosexuality and homosexuality, at once powerful and oppressive.5

(Re) orienting sexuality The three thematic categories I have outlined map out an imagined terrain of male desire that has specific geographic coordinates. Stretching from the North African countries of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia to Egypt and thence to the Syrian-Arabic peninsula, this vast territory, whose ethnic and cultural diversities have over the centuries been tenuously linked by a common language and shared Islamic faith,6 also corresponds to what Richard Burton, in the terminal essay of his 1885-86 translation of the Thousand Nights and a Night, dubbed the "Sotadic Zone." Within this zone, as Burton argues for forty-some pages of exacting if dubious detail, sodomy, or "what our neighbors call Le vice contre nature" "is popular and endemic, held at worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the North and South of the[se] limits . . . as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation and look upon it with the liveliest disgust" (10: 177, 179). What Burton labels a "popular and endemic" Sotadic practice might more properly be called a "popular and endemic" stereotype of Eastern perversity, one firmly wedged in the dominant Western imaginary.7 By documenting this tradition of "Eastern" sodomitic "vice," Burton offers a theory important less for its accuracy than for its frankness in articulating a widespread perception that had hitherto been filtered through codes of vague allusion. Readers of John Hindley's English translation of Persian Lyrics (1800), for instance, are informed that "the disgusting objectfs]" of these love poems have been feminized "for reasons too obvious to need any formal apology" (33). In his classic study of modern Egyptian life (1833-35), Edward W. Lane also draws on the trope of disgust to avoid making explicit the sodomitic antics performed on the streets of Cairo by a trickster and his boy assistant: "several indecent tricks which he perform[ed] with the boy I must refrain from describing; some of them are abominably disgusting" (391). And yet despite this aura of unmentionability, one can find textual evidence of a fascination with the Near East's rumored homoeroticism scattered through commentaries that reach back to the time of the Crusades.8 By 1780 Jeremy Bentham could dispassionately write, "Even now, wherever the Mahometan religion pre964

V A C A T I O N CRUISES; OR, THE H O M O E R O T I C S OF O R I E N T A L I S M vails, such practices seem to be attended with but little dispute" (1: 175; see also Crompton 111). In this light, Said's failure to account for homoerotic elements in orientalist pursuits is a telling omission. Said's theorization of orientalism has proved invaluable in drawing scholarly attention to the discursive paths whereby the Arabic Orient has come to represent "one [of the West's] deepest and most recurring images of the Other" (1). The threatening excess of this otherness, Said argues, has most often been gendered as feminine and hence sexually available so that it can be penetrated, cataloged, and thus contained by the "superior" rationality of the Western mind (40, 44, 137-38). Such metaphors for the West's appropriation of the East are at least implicitly heterosexual. But as a close analysis of several specific Western experiences and representations of the Near East reveals, that which appears alluringly feminine is not always, or necessarily, female. A telling example of this reversal of expectation, as I have argued elsewhere, can be located in Said's analysis of the notebooks and journals that Gustave Flaubert kept during his voyage to Egypt in 1849-50 (see "Mappings" 80-81). Said focuses on Flaubert's heady account of his affair with the professional dancer Kuchuk Hanem. For Said, Flaubert's transformation of Kuchuk's material flesh into an occasion for poetic reverie forms a paradigmatic example of the mechanisms of orientalism: the masculinized, penetrating West possesses for its own purposes the East's fecundity, gendered as female in Kuchuk's "peculiarly Oriental" sensuality (187). Yet Said overlooks the crucial fact that the first exotic dancer to catch Flaubert's eye is not the female Kuchuk but a famous male dancer and catamite. "But we have seen male dancers. Oh! Oh! Oh!" exclaims Flaubert in a letter to his best friend as, with barely contained excitement, he details Hasan elBelbeissi's lascivious pantomime, (semi)female garb, and kohl-painted eyes. This description in turn leads to a discussion of the practice of sodomy among Flaubert's Egyptian acquaintances ("Here it is quite accepted. One admits one's sodomy") and thence to a declaration of his own attempt to "indulge in this form of ejaculation" at the local bath (83). Some of the most blatantly heterosexual examples of orientalism— ranging from nineteenth-century travelogues to pseudoscientific surveys of "Eastern" sexual customs—reveal a similar proximity to the homoerotic.9 Likewise Burton, a serious orientalist, opens the boundaries of his textual body to a certain destabilizing pressure when he addresses the subject of desire between men in the Arabic Orient. For example, in his introduction to the Nights Burton begins with an anatomical metaphor that bestows on his translation a specifically male body. Prior bowdlerized editions, he complains, have "castrat[ed]" the tales, producing only "ennui and disappointment" in the reader, whereas his aim is to "produce a full, complete, unvarnished, copy of the great original" (1: xvii, ix). The means by which Burton seeks to restore the text to its "uncastrated" manhood is curious,

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however (xii); he proceeds to adorn it with footnotes, annotations, and appendixes whose copiousness rivals the primary text, creating a proliferation of multiple (one might argue feminine) sites of textual pleasure (see Naddaff) that threaten to explode the complete and contained male body he has assigned to his translation. Primary among these supplements, moreover, is the terminal essay, whose lengthy fourth section is dedicated to le vice centre nature. Burton announces his intention to display this subject—again using a phallic metaphor—"in decent nudity, not in suggestive fig-leaf" in order to establish once and for all the prevalence of sodomy in the Arab Muslim world (10: 178). The "unvarnished," uncastrated male body assigned to the text in the introduction, here exposed "in decent nudity" and without "fig-leaf," becomes a sodomitic subject in both senses of the phrase. Moreover, like the language used to frame this discussion of Near Eastern sodomy, the contents of the terminal essay work against Burton's anthropological and orientalist predilection to contain and classify his subject. As his inquiry into sexual relations between men broadens, so too the initially circumscribed Mediterranean "belt" (10: 201) wherein the vice is said to flourish expands eastward—till, by the conclusion of the essay, it encompasses the Far East and the continents of the precolonized Americas. As East spins back into West, Burton is forced to confirm le vice's growing presence even in "our modern capitals, London, Berlin, and Paris" (10: 213), although he has earlier set the West off-limits, claiming that the northern European races are "as a rule .. . physically incapable of performing the operation" (10: 179). Burton's definition of sodomy collapses in contradiction and repeats in its global uncontainability the operation that his notes perform on a textual level, exposing the sanctity of the male body's claim to uncastrated completeness as another masculinist myth. Or to put it another way, as long as Burton can maintain an anthropological pose, he does not mind parading the non-European homosexual subject of the Nights in "decent nudity"; but when he must envision himself as a reader, one whose authority over content yields to vicarious participation in the fictions being relayed, he finds himself restoring the "fig-leaf" beneath which he has previously declared himself willing to glimpse. For many Western men the act of exploring, writing about, and theorizing an eroticized Near East is coterminous with unlocking a Pandora's box of phantasmic homoerotic desire, desire whose propensity to spread without check threatens to contaminate, if not to re-orient, the heterosexual "essence" of occidental male subjectivity. Fantasizing the "delight... and infamy of the Egyptians" Of all the regions of the Near East, Western writers most readily associate ancient and modern Egypt with the spreading "contagion" of homosexual966

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ity. Curiously, Egypt's reputation as "that classical region of all abominations," in Richard Burton's phrase (10: 194), has proved to be an irresistible draw to the literary ambitions of a score of occidental writers from Gerard de Nerval and Flaubert to Lawrence Durrell and Norman Mailer —writers intent on producing texts as gargantuan as their (hetero) sexual appetites. In these writers' prose the dazzling spectacle of Cairene and Alexandrian street life is transformed into an emblem of the psyche's overflowing polymorphous desires. As such, this spectacle becomes a convenient screen on which to project fantasies of illicit, unbridled eroticism. In Colonizing Egypt, Timothy Mitchell has forcefully shown how such psychological projections onto the foreign other derive from a general Western representational tendency to treat all things Egyptian—including Egyptian visitors to Europe—as objects on display, as exhibition pieces whose "carefully chaotic" arrangement is orchestrated solely to satisfy the "isolated gaze" of a European viewer (1, 9). Experiencing Egypt's curiosities as panoramas and tableaux depends, of course, on the illusion of some ineffable but inviolate boundary dividing spectator and spectacle, subject and object, self and other. Despite the strategic mystification of foreign otherness at work in this process, however, Egypt's historical positioning as a conduit between East and West, Europe and Africa, the familiar and the foreign has meant that, contrary to expectation, it has never functioned merely or solely as the Occident's other. Rather, as Antonia Lant suggests, Egypt has come to represent in the Western imagination an intermediate zone, "a foothold, a staging point," that signifies liminality and indeterminacy itself (98). As a realm of nonfixity, moreover, it has become a ready-made symbol for that interior world of the polymorphously perverse that its Western visitors find uncannily familiar and, as an effect of repression, unimaginably estranging. Colonized as other but never susceptible to total differentiation from or appropriation by the West, Egypt in all its exotic appeal thus presents the occidental tourist with an unsuspected challenge. Hence the note of hysteria infiltrating the late-eighteenth-century Travels of C. S. Sonnini, a former engineer in the French navy, who pauses in his narrative to lament [t]he passion contrary to nature .. . [that] constitute[s] the delight, or to use a juster term, the infamy of the Egyptians. It is not for women that their amorous ditties are composed. . . . [F]ar different objects inflame them.. .. This horrid depravation, which, to the disgrace of polished nations, is not altogether unknown to them, is generally diffused all over Egypt: the rich and poor are equally infected with it. (1: 251-52) Part of the horror is that this "inconceivable appetite" (1: 251) "is not altogether unknown" to civilized Europe: if the Egyptian vice knows no 967

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class ("rich and poor are equally infected with it"), can it be expected to respect the boundaries of colonizer and colonized? Thirty years later, a similar image of unchecked infection appears in Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians when the Victorian author addresses, with characteristic understatement, this aspect of Egyptian "immorality." "A vice for which the Memlooks . . . were infamous," Lane writes of the Ottoman rulers, "was so spread by them in [Egypt] as to become not less rare here than in almost any other country of the East." Here Egypt is the victim of contagion, the Turks are the culprits, and one assumes (since Lane asserts that "of late years it is said [the vice has] much decreased") that the civilizing machinery of British Empire is the solution (304; emphasis added). Once again, aspersions of "unnatural" sexuality become markers of larger competing global and colonial interests. This mythicizing of the magnitude of Near Eastern "vice" is not unrelated to a Western obsession with the genital size of Egyptian men that niters into even the driest orientalist discourse. For while the figure of the effeminate Asiatic—embodied, for instance, in the transvestic dancer— represents one "face" of orientalist homoerotic fantasy, the reverse image, that of the hypervirile, mythically endowed sheikh holds equal currency in orientalist homoerotic discourse. Thus Burton, in his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1893) argues that members of "the Nilotic race, although commonly called 'Arabs,' " are more closely related to African blacks because of the size of their sexual organs (2: 83); that this information is buried in a footnote—one written in Latin, no less, to ward off the nonspecialist—would seem to indicate that what is at stake here is a certain European male anxiety or sense of inferiority that needs to be kept under wraps. That white, male, implicitly heterosexual subjectivity is the real issue underlying this prurient obsession with indigenous body parts is made even more blatant in the linking of racial stereotyping with sexual perversion in Jacob Sutor's L'amour aux colonies (1893), published under the pseudonym Dr. Jacobus X. An army surgeon posted to various French outposts, Sutor claims that his clinical experience proves beyond a doubt that the Arab, "an active pederast, is provided with a genital organ which, for size and length, rivals that of the Negro" (298), and adds that "[w]ith such a weapon does the Arab seek for anal copulation. He is not particular in his choice, and age or sex makes no difference" (300). If foreignness, genital endowment, and sodomy are of a piece for Sutor, so too do exoticism and excess come together to form the more clearly homoerotic frisson of Allen Edwardes's surveys of Eastern eroticism. "As hitherto noted, the penile proportions of the Egyptians were as notorious as their promiscuity," he states as fact, then proceeds, with more than a touch of prurience, to describe bas-reliefs that purportedly depict "Nilotic peasants and labourers with their loin-clothes" hoisted "to reveal fleshy genitalia" (Erotica Judaica 93); elsewhere he 968

V A C A T I O N CRUISES; OR, THE H O M O E R O T I C S OF O R I E N T A L I S M records the "impressive sight" presented by orgies of "round-robin sodomy" in the Egyptian hammam (Jewel 207), where "well-proportioned" nude bath-boys service willing customers of all classes (246). The guise of orientalist scholarship allows Edwardes to express a surfeit of subconscious homoerotic fantasy. In a like manner, the autobiographical and literary productions of Flaubert and Durrell—which I discuss in greater depth elsewhere ("Mappings")—transform Egypt into a landscape of unbridled libidinal desires, a landscape in which same-sex activity is conspicuously highlighted. Figuratively exploring such "foreign" terrain may give these writers an excuse to inhabit textually the other whom their phallocentrically constituted heterosexuality must otherwise disavow, but these imaginative ventures into alien territory only highlight the problematic, indeed unstable, construction of Western discourses of masculinity under the sign of the phallus. And for both Flaubert and Durrell the fantasized projection of sexual otherness onto Egypt eventually occasions a crisis of writing, of narrative authority, when the writing subject is confronted by (imagined) sensual excess. Bombarded on his arrival in Egypt by "such a bewildering chaos of colours [and sound] that [his] poor imagination is dazzled as though by continuous fireworks," Flaubert quickly embraces the exotic otherness of Egypt as a source of artistic inspiration and sexual gratification (79). Part of these "fireworks" is the erotic dance of the "marvellous Hasan elBelbeissi," whose talent at putting "additional spice into a thing that is already quite clear in itself" injects into Flaubert's correspondence and diaries a stream of homoerotic banter and speculation that becomes a source of titillation and eventually a spur to experimentation without radically disturbing Flaubert's heterosexual self-definition ("Here . . . it is spoken of at table. Sometimes you do a bit of denying, and then everyone teases you and you end up confessing" [84]). Simultaneously, however, the possibilities unlocked by this flirtation with Egyptian sodomy become the source of a subliminal anxiety linked to Flaubert's literary ambitions. Having traveled to Egypt in search of creative inspiration, Flaubert expresses his writerly potential in metaphors of (hetero)sexual reproduction ("but—the real thing! To ejaculate, beget the child!" [199]) and conversely expresses his despair at not having realized his literary goals in images of nonreproductive sexual play (198-99); he subtly figures the exotic otherness of sexual perversion as the threat of erasure, the negation of artistic vitality or sap, when "the lines don't come" (87; see Boone, "Mappings" 102). For all Flaubert's openness to his Near Eastern experiences, then, his encounter with foreign homosexuality triggers an uneasiness about what it means to be a writer and a man; in consciously striving to become one of the West's great writers, Flaubert subconsciously regards his narrative authority as equivalent to, and dependent on, a sexual authority associated with Western codes of heterosexual potency.

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A similarly disabling equation of sexual aberration and writerly debilitation haunts Durrell while he is stationed in Egypt during World War II. "Love, hashish, and boys [are] the obvious solution to anyone stuck here for more than a few years," he writes Henry Miller from Alexandria in 1944, a few months later adding, "One could not continue to live here without practising a sort of death—hashish or boys or food" (Wickes 190, 195). A parallel "sort of death" faces Darley, the narrator-protagonist of the Alexandria Quartet. Confronted with Alexandria's dazzling yet benumbing spectacle of sensual excess—"the sexual provender that lies at hand is staggering in its variety and profusion," Darley notes on arrival with envy and some fear—this would-be writer experiences a breakdown that is both sexual and textual, finding himself unable to write and "even to make love" (1: 4, 11). Barley's feelings of impotence and inadequacy, compounded by Justine's betrayal, increasingly lead him to doubt his "manhood." In turn these doubts trigger a flood of repressed memories and events that implicate him in an expanding web of homosexual desire and panic. The welling up of these taboo desires is made possible largely by the psychodramatic resonances that Egypt assumes in Barley's psyche and in Burrell's fiction, its "foreign" landscape transformed into an emblem of the fragmented, anarchic terrain of the component instincts through which the questing writer must pass on his way to artistic manhood. Ironically, only when Barley has purged himself of all expressions of polymorphous play and perversity can he break through the writer's block that plagues him for four volumes and emerge on the last page of the Quartet as a productive writer and successful heterosexual lover. These displacements shed additional light on Burrell's letter equating the enjoyment of "hashish or boys or food" with "death" of the self. For Burrell proceeds to describe the "wonderful novel on Alexandria" he has just conceived, "a sort of spiritual butcher's shop with girls on the slab" (2: 196). Underlying this inspiration of the written text of the Quartet as a heterosexist fantasy of girls as meat to be devoured glimmers the fear of sodomy as an ultimate indulgence in passive pleasures (like drugs, like food) that spell a "sort of death" to active, or "masculine," artistic (pro)creativity. The homoerotic fantasies unleashed by Burrell's projection onto Egypt of the "dark tides of Eros" hidden within every psyche generate a crisis of masculine subjectivity that compels Burrell to Promethean efforts to contain the very desires on which his exploration of foreign otherness depends (2: 185). To a lesser degree, the same paradox overwhelms Flaubert's exploration of Egyptian sensuality. In the process, "the homoerotics of orientalism" constantly threatens to become another name for occidental homophobia.

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Dressing down the desert androgyne While writers like Flaubert and Durrell locate their visions of a sexualized, mythic Near East in the spectacle and stimulation of Egypt's infinite variety, the homoerotic impulse infiltrating occidental visions of the Near East also manifests itself in adventurers who search out the nomadic life of the desert and embrace ascetic solitude rather than profusion. Seeking to blend into their surroundings by taking on the apparel of the Bedouin, such figures attempt not merely to possess but, more important, to become the desired other. Putting on "Arab drag" provides the desert androgyne with a disguise that allows for the play of sexual and gender ambiguity. Coupled with a persistent misogyny, this ambiguity issues forth in a complicated modality of homoerotic desire that is expressed sometimes in puritanical asceticism and sublimation, sometimes in sadistic outbreaks of violence, and sometimes in swooning surrender to the desert's harsh beauty. These desert androgynes transform their short lives into the subject of scandal and eventually the stuff of myth—a status that may overshadow but cannot eclipse the specific scenarios of empire and colonialism that make possible their legendary romances with the desert. This blend of sexual repression, homosexual yearning, and sadomasochistic surrender finds quintessential expression in T. E. Lawrence, the twentieth century's most famous icon of the thrill and contradictions of assuming Arab drag. For Lawrence dressing in desert gear was foremost a means of "[quitting him] of [his] English self," of attempting to become the other rather than the colonizer. At the same time he admitted that he "could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only" (Seven Pillars 30). This contradictory doubleness—which Marjorie Garber links to psychic transvestism (304-09) and Kaja Silverman to the "double mimesis" of psychic colonialism (17-19)—characterized all aspects of Lawrence's life, including the powerful if elusive homoerotic strain that he writes into The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the official story of his engagement in the Arab revolt of 1914-18. The homoerotics of this epic tug in two directions: toward an impossibly idealized Bedouin homosexuality and toward its nightmarish opposite, utter degradation—conditions that both pivot on (dis)simulations of dress and disguise. The first strain is proclaimed in chapter 1, as Lawrence frankly addresses the "strange longings" that blossom in the "virile heat" of the desert as his youthful Bedouin followers "slake one another's few needs in their own clean bodies." The passion of "friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace," Lawrence continues, is but "a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was wielding our souls in one flaming effort" (28; emphases added). An erotic ideal thus finds its reflection in a political ideal that, under the sign of male-male love, tenuously combines British colonial interests and the movement toward Arab

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sovereignty. This idealizing strain is continued in the story of the Bedouin lovers Baud and Saad—"an instance," Lawrence writes approvingly, "of the eastern boy and boy affection which the segregation of women [makes] inevitable" (244). Finally, this idealization of love between men is set forth as the raison d'etre of Lawrence's participation in the Arab conflict in the volume's dedicatory poem, "To S. A.," which begins "I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands . . . To earn you Freedom." Again, the sexual ideal coexists with and expresses the political goal. Most biographers agree that the dedication refers to Sheikh Ahmed, otherwise known as Dahoum, the fourteen-year-old water boy with whom Lawrence became infatuated during his first extended stay in the Middle East. Onto this constant companion Lawrence projected an idealized vision of the Arabic race as pure, simple, and untainted by Western culture. The determination with which Lawrence set out to construct Dahoum as an ideal foreign other mirrors the determination with which Lawrence willed his own self-image into being, confident that through sheer self-mastery he could "mak[e] himself," in his biographer's words, "a perfected and refined instrument" (Mack 97, 86). One by-product of this discipline was Lawrence's puritanical sublimation of his homosexual inclinations. Yet in renouncing the flesh, Lawrence also set himself up for a vicious return of the repressed, which in Seven Pillars takes the form of the nightmarish inverse of the text's representation of idealized male bonds: the brutal rape he claims he endured when taken prisoner by the Turks at Der'a and the psychologically devastating loss of self-mastery that experience signified for him. These two faces of homosexuality assume unmistakably ideological valences in Lawrence's imaginary: the Arab freedom fighters whose cause he has undertaken engage in "clean" sex, while the Turks—Britain's foes—are "beastly" rapists (28, 452). But for all the detail with which Lawrence represents his humiliation and degradation—exhibitionistically offering his bloodied body to his readers as a fetishized spectacle—what actually happened at Der'a remains lost in what biographers agree to be Lawrence's inability to distinguish between fact and fantasy. After telling how he spurned the Turkish bey's "fawn[ing]" (452) sexual advances, Lawrence reports being taken into the hall by the bey's soldiers and repeatedly beaten, lashed, and sodomized. Yet it is indicative of the narrative's confusion that Lawrence's descriptions of torture and sexual abuse are indistinguishable: in the nightmarish fear of sexual contact that forms the inverse of Lawrence's idealization of homoerotic relations, submitting sexually and being tortured are the same fantasy.10 What emerges is Lawrence's guilt for having surrendered his vaunted self-mastery to the mastery of another; the threat of anal penetration signifies a loss of will that in turn signifies a loss of self. The incredible narrative projections of fear and desire that arise from 972

V A C A T I O N C R U I S E S ; OR, THE H O M O E R O T I C S OF O R I E N T A L I S M Lawrence's contemplation of one man's penetration by another are usefully explained by Leo Bersani in his influential essay "Is the Rectum a Grave?" Bersani argues that phallocentric culture promotes a powerfully subliminal equation between passive anal sex, which represents the breakdown of bodily boundaries, and a shattering of the male ego that is tantamount to death. Underlying the cultural prohibition against being penetrated by another man is the irrational fear of dissolution of the psychic boundaries of the self—a notion that, as Bersani shows, reflects a specifically modern and Western conception of the ego as a self-contained and integral fortress. "That night the citadel of my integrity [was] irrevocably lost," Lawrence concludes the published account of the Der'a rape (Seven Pillars 456); in a private explanation to Charlotte Shaw, he confesses, "[T]o earn five minutes respite from . . . pain . . . I gave away the only possession we are born into the world with—our bodily integrity" (Letters 47-48). This specifically male fear of the loss of corporeal integrity and ego boundaries cannot be separated from a concurrent desire to experience sexual surrender, as Bersani also makes clear: the desire expressed in Lawrence's evocation of "the delicious warmth, probably sexual, . . . swelling through [him]" as he is brutally kicked and then whipped in the groin (Seven Pillars 454). This experience forces on Lawrence the humiliating knowledge that he can allow himself to experience sexual pleasure only if pain and coercion are part of the scenario—his resistance has to be whipped out of him by an external force. And Lawrence becomes conscious of this hitherto repressed knowledge precisely through his psychodramatic projections onto the Near East of his attraction to and terror of sexual surrender as feminizing (see also Silverman on how this experience transforms Lawrence from a "reflexive" to a "feminine" masochist [35]).11 Lawrence's masochism marks his subsequent relation to writing. He obsessively rewrites the Der'a incident from 1919 to 1925, elaborating and revising its details, just as he obsessively revises the unruly manuscript of Seven Pillars, which has become a text that is out of control, that cannot be mastered. This crisis of narrative authority reenacts the loss of bodily integrity and sexual control that Lawrence has grafted onto the experience of his rape. As a result, Lawrence increasingly expresses disgust toward the act of writing in terms that conflate authorial and biological functions: "1 can't write . . . since creation . . . is only a nasty vice. You have to be very eager-spirited to overcome the disgust of reproduction" (Mack 423). Ironically, this metaphoric association of textual production and sexual reproduction demonstrates Lawrence's subliminal allegiance to the phallocentric model that inhibits him sexually: a model whose link between regained masculine potency and successful literary production recurs in Flaubert and Durrell. Hence, as the fantasized site of male prowess, of

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spermatic reproduction, the textual body that arouses Lawrence's "disgust" mirrors the disgust he expresses in Seven Pillars toward his "soiled"—because mastered—sexual body. And he now equates the "rankling fraudulence" of this body with his "daily posturing in alien dress"—desert drag no longer serves as an adequate vehicle for mediating his homoerotic urges. The desublimation of his homosexuality through masochistic degradation not only curtails the idealized fantasy of "clean" Bedouin sex but also forces Lawrence to see his role in "the national uprising of another race" as a "fraud" perpetuated by English interests (Seven Pillars 514). The man who has traveled to the Arabic desert filled with confidence, privately transforming himself into the foreign other he wants to be (and to have) while publicly transforming himself into the heroic liberator of the land of his desires, returns home to England in selfdefeat. Having failed to become the colonial object of his desire, Lawrence settles, ironically, for a pale imitation: psychic existence as a mastered subject, in thrall to an "imperial" notion of masculine will that transforms his homosexual yearnings into a feminine surrender for which he can only punish himself in rites of degradation and self-abnegation.12

The tourist trade in boys Not all imaginative travelers to the Near East remain so resigned as Lawrence or so resistant as Durrell to the homoerotic pulsations fueling many occidental visions of Arabic sexuality. For over a century, numerous gay men have journeyed to North Africa to discover what they already suspected was there: a colonized Third World in which the availability of casual sex is based on an economics of boys. Seized by the French in 1834, Algeria became a popular cruising site for Gide, Wilde, Alfred Douglas, Ronald Firbank, and many other homosexual men of means by the century's end.13 During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Algeria's reputation for gay tourism was superseded by that of the FrenchSpanish colony of Morocco. Tangier's establishment as an international zone by Western interests from 1923 to 1956 played a role in this shift by encouraging suspect activities ranging from international monetary speculation and a black market in drugs to under-age prostitution.14 This atmosphere inevitably nurtured a reputation for sexual permissiveness; behaviors unthinkable in much of Europe and America became local badges of honor. Writing in the 1950s, William Burroughs sums up the appeal of Tangier as a haven for those gay, bisexual, and otherwise sexually marginalized Anglo-American artists and intellectuals whose desires were a source of persecution back home: "The special attraction of Tangier can be put in one word: exemption. Exemption from interference, legal or otherwise. Your private life is your own, to act exactly as you please. . . . It is a sanctuary of non-interference" (59). 974

V A C A T I O N CRUISES; OR, THE HOMOEROTICS OF O R I E N T A L I S M Given the reality of homosexual persecution that drove a number of Europeans and Americans to make Tangier their home,151 do not mean to undervalue the degree to which these gay enclaves created self-affirming communities impossible elsewhere or to overlook the degree to which these expatriate communities, however privileged in their trappings, sometimes allowed for the emergence of desires and practices resistant to the dominant Western erotology of romantic coupling. But the "sanctuary of non-interference" that Burroughs applauds was no gay Utopia. The intersection of this "sanctuary" for gay men with certain historical and economic factors of Western colonialism allowed a level of exploitation potentially as objectionable as the experience of marginalization and harassment that sent these Western voyagers abroad in the first place. Sex for sale provides an obvious but far from simple example. As Alfred Chester notes, "[i]t is traditional in Morocco to pay for sex," and although the Westerner may find the price nominal, "to the Moslem it can be enough to live on—and when it is, there is no escaping the fact that, however gilded it is by tradition, prostitution is taking place." Chester then wickedly adds, in reference to the vaunted primacy of ends over means in Moroccan men's sex practices, "What makes it adorable to people at either end of the banknote is that, though the Moslem is an employee, he really and truly loves his work" (225). There may be more than a grain of truth in Chester's final turn of phrase: local economies of Moroccan sex can latch onto, participate in, and even exploit "exploitative" Western practices in complex and unpredictable ways. "Love" of work, however, does not erase the dynamics of power that many employers would rather believe their employees consider mere technicalities of the trade. The novelist Robin Maugham, a longtime Tangier resident, anecdotally sums up the political subtext of such tensions in relating an incident that occurred after the granting of Moroccan independence in 1956. Hassled during a walk with visitors by the persistent propositions of a young boy, one of Maugham's companions snaps, "Oh do go home"; to this rebuke the boy replies in English, "You go home, you go home . . . and don't come back to my country" ("Peter Burton" 145; emphases added). In a colonial context, what and where is "home," and whose home is it? Within this tradition of gay occidental tourism, Gide's 1902 novel of sexual discovery, L'immoraliste (The Immoralisf) is paradigmatic, relentlessly disclosing beneath its veneer of reticence a narrative of homosexual —and specifically pederastic—awakening.16 The text opens with Michel's confessing to a group of friends summoned from France the story of his marriage and near-fatal honeymoon trip to an Arabic world that, as a scholar of orientalism, he has hitherto possessed only through books. After almost dying in Tunis from a tubercular attack, Michel is nursed back to health in Algeria, where he undergoes a voluptuous awakening to

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the exotic foreign landscape, which envelops him in its "richer, hotter blood" and penetrates to "the most . . . secret fibers of [his] being" (52). The Nietzschean dialectic of freedom versus culture, body versus mind, that evolves as Michel embraces a life of sensual abandon barely covers the homoerotic subtext that the text continually teases the reader to decode. The first clue to this coded subtext is Gide's representation of Michel's gaze, which uncovers in brief flashes the naked limbs of Arab boys and youths beneath loose clothing. A second, related clue to Gide's gay subtext is the procession of pubescent boys who pass through Michel's quarters or whom Michel encounters on walks during his convalescence. A third clue lies in Michel's growing obsession with masks, deceit, and concealment—an obsession, in effect, with the homosexual art of passing and getting away with it. A fourth clue involves Gide's manipulation of Michel's language so that the words always seem on the verge of saying something other than what they ultimately reveal.17 That the reader is being actively solicited to decode the "open secret" of these passages is spelled out in an aside in which Michel compares himself to a text—specifically, to a palimpsest beneath whose "more recent" layers the scholar digs to find the "more precious ancient text," that of the repressed self (51). But the possibility of leading (and writing) a double life, coupled with Michel's growing recognition of his own latent desires, breeds profound ambivalence, for in a complex process of internalization that amounts to a fetishizing of the closet, Michel's psyche translates secret desires into necessarily criminal ones. The ultimate measure of Michel's "criminality" is his neglect of Marceline, whose health has declined as his has improved and whose death Michel guarantees by forcing her to return with him to North Africa, the scene of his homoerotic awakening—symbolically her death ensures that Michel can live as a free man. But to be free translates for Michel into utter immersion in sensual self-gratification at the expense of other selves. "I'm afraid that what I have suppressed will take its revenge," he tells his auditors, and then, in a revelation withheld till the novel's final lines, the reader learns of Michel's pederastic relationship with the Kabyl child Ali, whose caresses, "in exchange for a few sous," are "what keeps [Michel there] more than anything else" (170-71), sunk into torpid surrender to inner passions projected outward onto the African landscape. "This climate, I believe, is what's responsible for the change," he says. "Nothing discourages thought so much as this perpetual blue sky. Here any exertion is impossible, so closely does pleasure follow desire" (170). The disturbing conflation that this conclusion effects between homoerotic surrender and the lure of North African otherness points to the unconscious colonialism involved in Gide's projection of a narrative of gay awakening onto the Near East. Michel's awakening depends on the orien976

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talist move of equating the Near East almost exclusively with the body and with surfeit: for Michel, North Africa can be apprehended only sensually, and that mode of apprehension leaves no room for art or intellect. "Art is leaving me, I feel it," says Michel, "[but] to make room for ... what?" (163). Michel's awakening also depends on his refusal to see the actual foreign others who embody his desire as anything other than objects: boys, once Michel realizes he desires them, form an endless chain of anonymous, available bodies, the means to his awakening, never subjects of their own stories or desires. The economic underpinnings of this exchange in boys as objects of Western consumption, only hinted at in Gide, are made explicit in Orton's diary account of his and Ken Halliwell's sexual escapades in Tangier in 1967. Orton's diary in fact owes its inspiration to his agent's suggestion that Orton start a "journal a la Gide" of his travels (Lahr 12). The Morocco entries emulate Gide with a vengeance, recording the constant stream of youths trooping in and out of Orton's Tangier flat. The flat, however, is not all that is paid for: Orton takes as a given, indeed as a source of stimulation, that you get what you pay for and pay for what you get in terms of Tangier trade, and he records with cynical humor the bargaining that undergirds sexual pleasure in Morocco. Who could want more, he sardonically muses, than "the [daily] company of beautiful fifteen-year-old boys who find (for a small fee) fucking with me a delightful sensation"? (186). A corollary of the occidental tourist's fantasy that all boys are available for the right price is the assumption that they represent interchangeable versions of the same commodity: (nearly) under-age sex. The number of identically named Mohammeds that Orton meets thus becomes a running joke in his diary ("His name, inevitably, was Mohammed" [193]), and to keep his schedule of assignations from becoming hopelessly muddled, Orton assigns the boys farcical surnames: Mohammed (I), Mohammed Yellow-jersey, Mohammed Goldtooth. What may be humorous in the abstract is of course dehumanizing in reality, for such typecasting only reinforces the boys' anonymity and dispensability.18 Tellingly, Orton not only turns against the one Mohammed who attempts to assert his individuality—proudly declaring to Joe and company that he is off to Gibraltar to make a life for himself, with a legitimate job—but also belittles this ambition as bourgeois careerism and then claims, to top it off, that Mohammed is a bad lay. Not coincidentally, it is also this Mohammed who has asserted his subjectivity by complaining to Orton, "You give me money, yes—but me want I'amour. Me like you. Me want I'amour" (174). L'amour, of course, is the one item missing from the vacation cruise package Orton has signed up for. As a gay adventurer in Tangier, then, Orton manifests the contradictions of the colonialist abroad; he hates and mocks the general run of 977

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tourists for ruining "our town" (187), while at the same time he depends on the hierarchical dynamic of (moneyed) white man/(purchased) brown boy to make his own vacation a success. This doubleness repeats itself in the contradiction between Orion's courageous rebellion against sexual orthodoxy (exemplified in his enjoyment of sex for its own sake) and his basic phallocentrism (categorizing each boy he has had as a "very valuable addition to [his] collection" [186]). Finally, this appropriation of the East manifests itself on the level where sexual and textual pleasures combine for Orton. For his diary entries, as a record of conquests meant to keep the excitement going, become yet another means of possessing the foreign other, but as textual image rather than as physical body. As Orton writes of one particularly steamy encounter: "At [that] moment with my cock in his arse the image was, and as I write still is, overpoweringly erotic" (207; emphases added). If Orton does not manifest the anxieties of textual and sexual authority or the loss of the desire to write present in many writers' homoerotic negotiations with the Near East, it is because Orton's confidence in his gay identity allows him to reassert the coupling of writerly authority and male potency that has always characterized phallocentric discourse, but now in the name of homosexual rather than heterosexual pleasure. The continuities represented by Gide's and Orton's responses to the North African trade in boys are played out in numerous Western narratives written by gay or bisexual men.19 In contrast, the Moroccan storyteller Mohammed Mrabet's Love with a Few Hairs dramatically recasts the plot of L'immoraliste from the perspective of the kept Arab boy: here the sexual object—also named Mohammed—becomes the subject of his own story, a story that renders the Westerner, or Nazarene, the anonymous other.20 The first sentence of Mrabet's tale—"Mohammed lived with Mr. David, an Englishman who owned a small hotel near the beach"—introduces the kept-boy theme matter-of-factly, indeed as a fact of life. The reader next learns that "only [one] thing about Mohammed's life . . . [had] made his father sad . . . during the four years he had been living with Mr. David." Any expectation that the father's unhappiness may involve the propriety of Mohammed's having maintained a sexual relationship since the age of thirteen with a man the father's age is quickly deflated: the vice that disturbs the father is not sex but alcohol abuse: "One day soon you'll be getting married. Do you want your wife and children to see you drunk?" (1). Here the structural opposition is between drinking and marriage, not between marriage and a pederastic relationship, for in the narrative that unfolds—the story of Mohammed's ill-fated infatuation with a girl named Mina—the relationship with Mr. David hovers uninterrupted in the background, in a stratum of Tangier life proximate to, but held at a distance from, the story of "love with a few hairs"—a reference to the magic potion Mohammed procures to make Mina love him. 978

V A C A T I O N CRUISES; OR. THE HOMOEROTICS OF O R I E N T A L I S M The text's opening also spells out the economics of the occidental trade in boys, but from a Moroccan perspective. The family, it is clear, looks on Mr. David as a benefactor who periodically brings Mohammed's father "gifts" that the father can sell on the black market (2). This understood exchange, whereby Mohammed is passed from father to paternal lover, is only one of the many monetary exchanges that Mrabet depicts as affecting all facets of Moroccan life. Within this framework, the Western tourist's guiding principle of promiscuous sexual consumerism—you get what you pay for—gives way to the more pervasive local economies of barter. Sex, as a result, becomes Mohammed's most effective bargaining chip, both in manipulating Mr. David for the money to finance marriage to Mina and in maneuvering to stay in Mr. David's good graces despite the marriage. Here Mrabet's artistry is at its most subtle, as carefully placed variations on the sentence "That night Mohammed slept with Mr. David" signal the economic and emotional pressures of Mohammed's adjacent heterosexual love life: when he needs money or feels unhappy, Mohammed knows where to go and what to do. In this recasting of the Gidean fantasy from the perspective of the indigenous subject, it is the Western benefactor and not the Moroccan boy who is kept virtually anonymous: the reader never even learns whether David is Mr. David's given name or his surname. Whatever the degree of his seemingly real affection for Mr. David, Mohammed ultimately sees his patron as indistinguishable from the other Nazarenes hanging out in Tangier, and this perspective dramatically reverses the dynamics of otherness that rule in Gide and in Orton. Yet Mrabet's demystification of the colonialist fantasy of the trade in boys coexists with acceptance of the misogyny and sexism that mark many of the Western narratives discussed here. This contiguity between Eastern and Western sexism is most pronounced in the collusion of Moroccan male culture and of Mr. David's occidental cohorts in supporting Mohammed's scheme to get his marriage annulled by treating Mina so badly that she will beg to be let go. The narrative's entire trajectory works toward a demonstration of the correctness of Mr. David's admonition "Don't trust any woman" (177), which in turn reinforces Mina's expendability in the plot's economy of desire. While Mr. David takes Mohammed's bisexuality as a given, he also encourages Mohammed to maintain a string of girlfriends, rather than a single relationship. It is Mohammed's acceptance of this advice that forms Mrabet's conclusion: a reformed Mohammed moves back in with Mr. David, "ha[s] other girls but [does] not let himself love any of them," and lives happily ever after (196). The text's erasure of Mina is finalized when, years later, Mohammed encounters her when he is on the way to visit his father (from whom Mohammed has been estranged because of his marriage to Mina). After escaping Mina, Mohammed hurries, in the text's last line, "quickly [on] to his father's house" (198). The closing words thus reestablish the

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alignment between Mohammed's father and Mr. David, between Eastern and Western patriarchy, that opens the narrative, proving that fathers know best: "You should be like the Englishman," Mohammed's father scolds him in the novel's opening scene. "He doesn't go out into the street drunk" (2). And one of the last things the reader learns about Mohammed is that he now rarely drinks—he has become not only a "good" Muslim like his religiously observant father but also a mirror of his Western paternal lover. *

*

*

These pages trace a number of crossings over hypothetical borders or divisions: East/West, female/male, homosexual/heterosexual, colonized/colonizer, among others. As the lines between these terms blur, neither the dichotomies that these pairings purport to describe nor the hierarchical arrangements they are meant to enforce prove to be so apparent. In particular, by gridding the geographical and sexual oppositions— West/East, heterosexual/homosexual—onto and across each other's axes, I have attempted to call attention to the sexual and textual politics that complicate many Western male travelers' encounters with a homoeroticized Near East. In accounts of orientalism that assume the heterosexuality of the erotic adventurer, for example, the confrontation with the specter of homosexuality that lurks in Western fantasies of Eastern decadence destabilizes the assumed authority of the tourist as a distant, uncontaminated spectator. In narratives where the occidental traveler by virtue of his homosexuality is already the other, the presumed equivalence of Eastern homosexuality and occidental personal liberation may disguise the specter of colonial privilege and exploitation encoded in the hierarchy white man/brown boy. And reading Mrabet against Gide's and Orton's narratives shows not only how the other other's story can unsettle the assumed hierarchy colonizer/colonized but also how, despite this political critique, a complicitous equivalence between East and West can reestablish itself under the aegis of patriarchy precisely when the tension marking the hierarchy male/female becomes palpable. This return to the gender binary on which sexual hierarchy within patriarchy is based serves as a reminder that the story of many Western men's encounters with the Near East, whatever these tourists' putative sexual orientations, has also been the story of a crisis in male subjectivity—the crisis that by definition is occidental masculinity itself. Every rereading of this story may help Western readers re-orient their perceptions of the complex undercurrents of those fantasized geographies of male desire that depend on, even as they resist, the homoerotics of an orientalizing discourse whose phallocentric collusions and resistant excitations this essay has just begun to uncover.21

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Notes * JOSEPH A. BOONE is associate professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he teaches courses in the novel and in gay and gender studies. He is the author of Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (U of Chicago P, 1987), as well as of an earlier essay in PMLA (1986), on Henry James, and he coedited Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism (Routledge, 1990). He is at work on two book projects, one on issues of sexuality and narrative in modernist fiction and the other on the homoerotics of orientalism (from which this essay is excerpted). 1 By Orient Said means the Near and Middle East; for insightful critiques of the ways in which Said's terminology unintentionally produces a unified Orient all the more easily dominated by a discursively all-powerful West, see Mani and Frankenberg; Bhabha; and Sharpe. Likewise, while I attempt to make my use of the terms West and East as specific as possible, it is impossible not to generalize at times; I hope that the context of my statements makes clear when I am using these rhetorical markers as shorthand for much more complex geographic and psychological realities. 2 While Alloula's phrase occurs in a chapter titled "Oriental Sapphism," his interest lies in the heterosexual viewer for whom images of lesbian love in the harem are created. Said's sidestepping of the homoerotic dimensions of this "promise (and threat)" is not unique; see the way in which Kabbani raises the specter of homoeroticism only to subsume it into the sexuality of the oriental woman (Europe's Myths 80-81). Homosexual practice in the British Empire is addressed by Ronald Hyam, who notes that "the empire was often an ideal arena for the practice of sexual variation" (5-6); however, his exclusive focus on official British guardians of empire, coupled with his dismissal of feminist criticism, limits his usefulness in analyzing the sexual politics of colonialism. The most thoughtful examination to date of the homoerotic subtexts in Western visions of the Arabic Orient is Marjorie Garber's often dazzling chapter "The Chic of Araby." 3 Here terminology becomes, if not a problem, a reminder that defining "the homosexual" as such is very much a Western enterprise; while male-male sexual practice is plentiful in Muslim culture, there is no Arabic word equivalent to homosexuality. The closest approximation is the classical Arabic liwat, which designates an act of sodomy performed on or by means of (not with) a boy (Schmitt 5, 9-11). 4 These literary-artistic vacationers and sojourners have included, among others, Orton, Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Ronald Firbank, Robin Maugham, Angus Stewart, Rupert Croft-Cooke, Michael Davidson, Harold Norse, Truman Capote, Alfred Chester, Ned Rorem, and Roland Barthes. 5 In conceiving this project, I am mindful of Jenny Sharpe's warning that "[i]t might well be argued that studies [written within an authorizing Western discourse on] the domination of dominant discourses merely add to their totalizing effects" (138); my presentation attempts to avoid this trap as much as is possible by focusing on an aspect of colonialist discourse—sexuality between men—that remains relatively unauthorized and censored in those "totalizing" Western discourses to which Sharpe refers. If this investigation owes much to the critiques of European colonialism that have followed in the wake of Said, its gendered analysis is indebted not only to queer theory but also to those many feminist analyses that have engaged issues of colonialism; see Sharpe; Abu-Lughod; El Saadawi; Mernissi; Shaarawi; Lowe; and Woodhull, as well as 981

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6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Spivak's and Mohanty's analyses of the intersections of Western feminist and Third World criticism. I do not focus on same-sex activity between women in this essay, but lesbianism within the harem has also been the subject of much orientalizing commentary since Montesquieu's Persian Letters', see the critiques offered by Behdad; Alloula; Croutier. For an account of how some European women have appropriated iconography of the harem as a way of encoding lesbian desire, see Apter's "Female Trouble." The Arab world that I subsume under the rubric of the Arabic Orient follows, loosely, the definitions unfolded by Bernard Lewis, who traces the historical emergence of an "Arab" identity that resides as much in a common language, a shared religious faith, and a loose confederation of multiple, often highly variable, cultures and nation-states as it does in a single ethnicity or nationality. This assertion is not intended to deny the practice or specificity of sexual relations between males in many strata of Muslim Arabic society. A number of historical factors have infuenced the prevalence and (to Western perception) relative tolerance of same-sex love within the nonetheless predominantly heterosexual cultures of the Arabic Orient: the Prophet's relative indifference to male homosexuality (Daniel 40), reflected in stipulations in the Koran that make legal prosecution highly unlikely; the general celebration of all male sexual pleasure in Islamic cultures; the tendency to measure sexuality in terms of activity or passivity rather than in terms of gender; the medieval Persian tradition of pederasty; the latitude offered by sociocommunal codes of propriety and discretion (see Bouhdiba 103-04, 140-42, 200-10; Daniel 40-42; Schmitt, esp. 7; Schmitt and Sofers). For reports of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century testimony, see Boswell 281-82 and Daniel 62 on Jacques de Vitry's propagandistic Oriental History, William of Ada, and Friar Guilliaume Adam. For seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury texts reporting the frequency of male-male sexuality in the Near East, see the orientalizing travelogues of Rycaut on Turkey, of Covel on the Levant, and of Sonnini and of Denon on Egypt just before and during the Napoleonic invasion. For further examples of this phenomenon, see my analysis of Hector France's turn-of-the-century travelogue Musk, Hashish, and Blood in "Framing the Phallus" and my reading of the adult film Sahara Heat in "Rubbing Aladdin's Lamp." Lawrence's collapse of the distinctions between sexual contact and rape should be taken not as a general comment on the physical or psychic abuse experienced by rape victims but as an example of the fantasies engendered by a specifically male cultural fear of anal penetration. After Lawrence returned home to England, the masochistic desire awakened by this shattering of will no longer had to masquerade in Arab drag. For the final ten years of his life, which he spent in England, he engaged in an elaborate ritual of birchings to repeat his original surrender while punishing himself for the pleasure that this punishment stimulated. According to an anonymous eyewitness, Lawrence stipulated that "the beatings be severe enough to produce a seminal emission" [Mack 433; see also D. Stewart 244, 275; Maugham, Escape 104]). Space limitations prevent me from tracing the homoeroticizing possibilities of donning Arabic dress through their many subsequent permutations. But one might consider Rudolph Valentino's filmic performances as "the Sheik." One might also ponder the homoerotic current that persists even when, as with Isabelle Eberhardt, the white "man" in Arab drag turns out to be a woman or 982

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13

14

15 16

17 18

19

the frisson that Bowles exploits when Kit Moresby's captor disguises her as an Arab boy in The Sheltering Sky (see also Garber 309-11, 325-26, 335). The pathos of these instances is that the Western subject—real or fictionalized—can imagine male homosexuality only as a total surrender to surfeit, passivity, or violation (desired rather than, as with Lawrence, both desired and feared), because the command to yield takes the decision, the agency, out of one's hands. By attempting to become part of a culture whose fatalistic creed is summed up in the saying mektoub 'it is written,' the occidental tourist recasts "deviance" as part of an immutable decree beyond individual or authorial control. It is no coincidence that the decade that saw the creation of the pathological category of the homosexual intensified the search for non-European outlets, such as Algeria, for sexual energies increasingly persecuted within Western culture. My phrase "underage prostitution" begs further definition, as does subsequent use of the term boys. Many writers who describe voyages to the Near East use the term boy to refer to any male youth from adolescence to late teens and even early twenties. Indeed, the myth of "younger is better" is so potent a part of gay tourist lore that many Westerners pretend to be engaging in underage sex even when they are not. But for men whose desires are definitionally pederastic, pubescent and prepubescent boys, especially those who come down from the Riffian mountains to eke out a living in the city, are by all accounts readily available. Within a Near Eastern perspective, the term underage sex carries little or no meaning and little of the sense of taboo or moral condemnation that it bears within Western constructions of sexuality as an adult activity; a child, particularly one of the peasantry or working class, is never a sexual innocent, indeed is a practicing adult from the time he takes to the streets on his own. See A. Stewart's and Davidson's pederastic narratives, as well as Rossman's survey (100-02, 116-21) of the North African "pederast underground." For example, scandals and prison sentences forced both the respected journalist Michael Davidson (169-81) and the novelist Rupert Croft-Cooke to leave England for Morocco. For a report of Gide's similar sexual initiation in Algeria, see his autobiography If It Die ... (267-69, 303), and for a perceptive analysis of the book's colonialist underpinnings, see Michael Lucey ("Gide Writing" 30; "Consequence" 182, 185). Apter identifies the rhetorical strategy whereby the gap in Michel's sentences prefigures an "unstated subtext of homoeroticism" as anacoluthon (Gide 113-15). Since part of the Moroccan vacation fantasy has to do not simply with availability but with youth, Orton's other means of differentiating among his prospects is to assign an age to each (a "very attractive fifteen-year-old boy," "a quite nice looking boy of seventeen," "a very pretty boy of about eleven" [174,184, 209]). And yet so strong is the myth that younger is better that Orton scales down his original estimates: thus Mohammed, "a very beautiful sixteen-yearold boy" at the beginning of the 9 May entry, is "about fifteen" by 25 May and "fourteen" by 11 June (160. 185. 260).' Examples include Maugham's The Wrong People (1964), Norse's "Six for Mohammed Riffi" (1962-63), Chester's "Glory Hole: Nickel Views of the Infidel in Tangiers" (1963-65), Croft-Cooke's Exiles (1970), Angus Stewart's 983

ORIENTALISMS Tangier: A Writer's Notebook (1977), Scott Symon's Helmet of Flesh (1986), and Aldo Busi's Sodomies in Eleven Point (1992). 20 Transcribed and translated from the Maghrebi by Bowles, Mrabet's text also illustrates an ironic "payoff" of the colonial trade in boys: for Bowles has not only worked indefatigably for over three decades to secure publication and recognition for rising young Moroccan writers but also made handsome proteges like Mrabet into favored male companions. The implicit power dynamic of Western patron/Moroccan youth underpinning these touted "literary collaborations" thus participates in and complicates the erotic transactions that form this essay's subject. Another narrative told from the point of view of the kept Moroccan boy is Larbi Layachi's A Life Full of Holes. 21 This essay has benefited greatly from the responsive audiences it has met at the University of California, Berkeley; the Humanities Center at the University of California, Davis; Georgetown University's 1990 Conference on Literary Theory; the 1991 Unauthorized Sexual Behaviors conference at the University of California, Riverside; and the University of Southern California's Life of the Mind series. Thanks are also due to Earl Jackson, Ed Cohen, Lee Edelman, David Roman, Hilary Schor, Jim Kincaid, Jonathan Strong, and Scott Elledge for their insightful comments, as well as to Parama Roy, Sandra Naddaff, Emily Apter, Karen Lawrence, Michael Lucey, Nancy Paxton, and Greg Mullins for sharing ideas, work, and citations from related projects.

Works cited Abu-Lughod, Lila. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986. Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem. Trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich, 1981. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Apter, Emily. Andre Gide and the Codes of Homotextuality. Stanford French and Italian Studies 48. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987. . "Female Trouble in the Colonial Harem." Differences 4.1 (1992): 205-24. Behdad, Ali. "The Eroticized Orient: Images of the Harem in Montesquieu and His Precursors." Stanford French Review 13 (1989): 109-26. Bentham, Jeremy. Works of Jeremy Bentham. Ed. John Bowring. 1838^-3.11 vols. New York: Russell, 1962. Bersani, Leo. "Is the Rectum a Grave?" AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. Ed. Douglas Crimp. Cambridge: MITP, 1987.197-222. Bhabha, Homi K. "The Other Question . . . Homi K. Bhabha Reconsiders the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse." Screen 24 (1983): 18-36. Boone, Joseph A. "Framing the Phallus in the Arabian Nights: Pansexuality, Pederasty, Pasolini." Translations/Transformations: Gender and Culture in Film and Literature. Proceedings of the Literary Studies East and West Conference. Ed. Cornelia Moore and Valerie Wayne. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1993, 23-33. . "Mappings of Male Desire in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet." Displacing Homophobia. Spec, issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 73-106. "Rubbing Aladdin's Lamp." Negotiating Lesbian and Gay Subjects. Ed. Monica Dorenkamp and Richard Henke. New York: Routledge, 1995. Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.

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V A C A T I O N C R U I S E S ; OR, THE H O M O E R O T I C S OF O R I E N T A L I S M Bouhdiba, Abdelwahab. Sexuality in Islam. London: Routledge, 1985. Burroughs, William S. Interzone. New York: Viking. 1989. Burton, Richard, trans, and ed. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. Burton Club ed. 10 vols. London: n.p., 1885-86. . Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah. 1893, 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1964. Chester, Alfred. "Glory Hole: Nickel Views of the Infidel in Tangiers." Head of a Sad Angel: Stories, 1953-1966. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1990. 217-31. Covel, John. "Dr. John Covel's Diary (1670-79)." Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant. Ed. J. Theodore Bent. London, Clark: 1893,101-287. Croft-Cooke, Rupert. The Verdict of You All. London: Allen, 1974. Crompton, Louis. Byron and Greek Love; Homophobia in Nineteenth-Century England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985. Croutier, Alev Lytle. Harem: The World behind the Veil. New York: Abbeville, 1989. Daniel, Marc. "Arab Civilization and Male Love." 1975-76. Gay Roots: Twenty Years of Gay Sunshine: An Anthology of Gay History, Sex,, Politics, and Culture. Ed. Winston Leyland. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1991, 33-75. Davidson, Michael. The World, the Flesh, and Myself. 1962. London: GMP, 1985. Denon, Vivant. Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt. 2 vols. New York: n.p., 1803. Durrell, Lawrence. Alexandria Quartet. 4 vols. New York: Pocket, 1957-60. Edwardes, Allen, Erotica Judaica: A Sexual History of the Jews. New York: Julian, 1967. . The Jewel in the Lotus: A Historical Survey of the Sexual Culture of the East. New York: Julian, 1959. Edwardes, Allen, and R. E. L. Masters. The Cradle of Erotica. New York: Julian, 1963. Flaubert, Gustave. Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour. Trans, and ed. Francis Steegmuller. Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1979. France, Hector. Musk, Hashish, and Blood. London: n.p., 1900. Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992. Gide, Andre. If It Die . . .: An Autobiography. Trans. Dorothy Bussy. New York: Random, 1935. Trans, of Si le grain ne meurt. . The Immoralist. 1902 Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage, 1970. Trans, of L 'immoraliste. Hindley, John. Persian Lyrics; or, Scattered Poems from the Diwan-i-Hafiz. London: Harding, 1800. Hyam, Ronald. Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990. Kabbani, Rana. Europe's Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule. London: Macmillan, 1986. . ed. The Passionate Nomad: The Diary of Isabelle Eberhardt. Boston: Beacon, 1987. Lahr, John. Introduction. The Orton Diaries. New York: Perennial-Harper, 1986, 11-31. 985

ORIENTALISMS Lane, Edward William. An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. 1833-35. London: Gardner, 1898. Lant, Antonia. "The Curse of the Pharaoh; or, How Cinema Contracted Egyptomania." October 59 (1992): 86-112. Lawrence, T. E. Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph. 1926. London: Penguin, 1963. . T. E. Lawrence: The Selected Letters. Ed. Malcolm Brown. New York: Norton, 1988. Layachi, Larbi. A Life Full of Holes. Trans. Paul Bowles. New York: Grove, 1982. Lewis, Bernard. The Arabs in History. Rev. ed. New York: Torchbooks-Harper, 1960. Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. Lucey, Michael. "The Consequence of Being Explicit: Watching Sex in Gide's Si le grain ne meurt." Yale Journal of Criticism 4.1 (1990): 174-92. . "Gide Writing Home from Africa; or, From Biskra with Love." Qui Parle 4.2 (1991): 23-42. Mack, John E. A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence. Boston: Little, 1976. Mailer, Norman. Ancient Evenings. Boston: Little, 1983. Mani, Lata, and Ruth Frankenberg. "The Challenge of Orientalism." Economy and Society May 1985:174-92. Maugham, Robin. Escape from the Shadows. New York: McGraw, 1973. . "Peter Burton Interviews Robin Maugham." The Boy from Beirut and Other Stories. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1982,109-60. Mernissi, Fatima. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Mitchell, Timothy. Colonizing Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses." Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Ed. Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991, 51-80. Mrabet, Mohammed. Love with a Few Hairs. Trans. Paul Bowles. 1967. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986. Naddaff, Sandra. Arabesque: Narrative Structure and the Aesthetics of Repetition in The Thousand and One Nights. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1991. Orton, Joe. The Orton Diaries. Ed. John Lahr. New York: Perennial-Harper, 1986. Rossman, Parker. Sexual Experience between Men and Boys: Exploring the Pederast Underground. New York: Association, 1976. Rycaut, Paul. The Present State of the Ottoman Empire. London: Starkey, 1668. El Saadawi, Nawal. The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World. London: Zed, 1980. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Schmitt, Arno. "Different Approaches to Male-Male Sexuality/Eroticism from Morocco to Usbckistan." Schmitl and Sofers 1-24. Schmitt, Arno, and Jehoeda Sofers, eds. Sexuality and Eroticism among Males in Moslem Societies. New York: Harrington Park, 1992.

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V A C A T I O N C R U I S E S ; OR, THE H O M O E R O T I C S OF O R I E N T A L I S M Shaarawi, Huda. Harem Years: Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist. London: Virago, 1986. Sharpe, Jenny. "Figures of Colonial Resistance." Modern Fiction Studies 35 (1989): 137-55. Silverman, Kaja. "White Skin, Brown Masks: The Double Mimesis; or, With Lawrence in Arabia." Differences 1.3 (1989): 3-54. Sonnini, C. S. Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt. Trans. Henry Hunter. 3 vols. London: Stockdale, 1807. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988. Stewart, Angus. Tangier: A Writer's Notebook. London: Hutchinson, 1977. Stewart, Desmond. T. E. Lawrence. New York: Harper, 1977. Sutor, Jacob [Dr. Jacobus X]. Untrodden Fields of Anthropology: Observations on the Esoteric Manner and Customs of Semi-civilized Peoples. 2 vols. Paris: Librairie de Medecine, Folklore et Anthropologie, 1898. Trans, of L 'amour aux colonies. Wickes, George. Lawrence Durrell-Henry Miller: A Private Correspondence. New York: Dutton, 1963. Woodhull, Winifred. "Unveiling Algeria." Genders 10 (1991): 112-31.

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Part? THINKING/WORKING THROUGH RACE

7.1

A STRONG RACE OPINION ON THE INDIAN GIRL IN MODERN FICTION E. Pauline Johnson From The Toronto Sun Globe 22 May 1892

E. Pauline Johnson of the Iroquois Makes Some Remarks The One Distressful Type - Winona - Her Suicidal Tendency - Mair's "Tecumseh" - "The Algonquin Maiden" - A Chance for Writers.

Every race in the world enjoys its own peculiar characteristics, but it scarcely follows that every individual of a nation must possess these prescribed singularities, or otherwise forfeit in the eyes of the world their nationality. Individual personality is one of the most charming things to be met with, either in a flesh and blood existence, or upon the pages of fiction, and it matters little to what race an author's heroine belongs, if he makes her character distinct, unique and natural. The American book heroine of today is as vari-colored as to personality and action. The author does not consider it necessary to the development of her character, and the plot of the story to insist upon her having American-colored eyes, an American carriage, an American voice, American motives, and an American mode of dying; he allows her to evolve an individuality ungoverned by nationalisms - but the outcome of impulse and nature and a general womanishness. Not so the Indian girl in modern fiction, the author permits her character no such spontaneity, she must not be one of womankind at large, neither must she have an originality, a singularity that is not definitely "Indian". I quote "Indian" as there seems to be an impression amongst authors that such a thing as tribal distinction does not exist among the North American aborigines. 991

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Tribal distinctions The term "Indian" signifies about as much as the term "European," but I cannot recall ever having read a story where the heroine was described as "European." The Indian girl we meet in cold type, however, is rarely distressed by having to belong to any tribe, or to reflect any tribal characteristics. She is merely a wholesome sort of mixture of any band existing between the Mic Macs of Gaspe and the Kwaw-Kewiths of British Columbia, yet strange to say, that notwithstanding the numerous tribes, with their aggregate numbers reaching more than 122,000 souls in Canada alone, our Canadian authors can cull from this huge revenue of character, but one Indian girl, and stranger still that this lonely little heroine never had a prototype in breathing flesh-and-blood existence! It is a deplorable fact, but there is only one of her. The story-writer who can create a new kind of Indian girl, or better still portray a "real live" Indian girl who will do something in Canadian literature that has never been done, but once. The general author gives the reader the impression that he has concocted the plot, created his characters, arranged his action, and at the last moment has been seized with the idea that the regulation Indian maiden will make a very harmonious background whereon to paint his pen picture, that, he, never having met this interesting individual, stretches forth his hand to library shelves, grasps the first Canadian novelist he sees, reads up his subject, and duplicates it in his own work. After a half dozen writers have done this, the reader might as well leave the tale unread as far as the interest touches upon the Indian character, for an unvarying experience tells him that this convenient personage will repeat herself with monotonous accuracy. He knows what she did and how she died in other romances by other romancers, and she will do and die likewise in his (she always does die, and one feels relieved that it is so, for she is too unhealthy and too unnatural to live).

The inevitable "Winona" The rendition of herself and her doings gains no variety in the pens of manifold authors, and the last thing that they will ever think of will be to study "The Indian Girl" from life, for the being we read of is the offspring of the writer's imagination and never existed outside the book covers that her name decorates. Yes, there is only one of her, and her name is "Winona." We meet her as a Shawnee, as a Sioux, as a Huron, and then, her tribe unnamed, in the vicinity of Brockville. She is never dignified by being permitted to own a surname, although, extraordinary to note, her father is always a chief, and had he never existed, would doubtless have been as conservative as his contemporaries 992

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about the usual significance that his people attach to family name and lineage. In addition to this most glaring error this surnameless creation is possessed with a suicidal mania. Her unhappy, self-sacrificing life becomes much a burden to both herself and the author that this is the only means by which they can extricate themselves from a lamentable tangle, though, as a matter of fact suicide is an evil positively unknown among Indians. To-day there may be rare instances where a man crazed by liquor might destroy his own life, but in the periods from whence "Winona's" character is sketched self-destruction was unheard of. This seems to be a fallacy which the best American writers have fallen a prey to. Even Helen Hunt Jackson, in her powerful and beautiful romance of "Ramona," has weakened her work deplorably by having no less than three Indians suicide while maddened by their national wrongs and personal grief.

To be crossed in love her lot The hardest fortune that the Indian girl of fiction meets with is the inevitable doom that shadows her love affairs. She is always desperately in love with the young white hero, who in turn is grateful to her for services rendered the garrison in general and himself in particular during red days of war. In short, she is so much wrapped up in him that she is treacherous to her own people, tells falsehoods to her father and the other chiefs of her tribe, and otherwise makes herself detestable and dishonorable. Of course, this white hero never marries her! Will some critic who understands human nature, and particularly the nature of authors, please tell the reading public why marriage with the Indian girl is so despised in books and so general in real life? Will this good far-seeing critic also tell us why the book made Indian makes all the love advances the white gentleman, though the real wild Indian girl (by the way, we are never given any stories of educated girls, though there are many such throughout Canada) is the most retiring, reticent, non-committal being in existence! Captain Richardson, in the inimitable novel, "Wacousta," scarcely goes as far in this particular as his followers. To be sure he has his Indian heroine madly in love with young de Haldimar, a passion which it goes without saying he does not reciprocate, but which he plays upon to the extent of making her a traitor to Pontiac inasmuch as she betrays the secret of one of the cleverest intrigues of war known in the history of America, namely, the scheme to capture Fort Detroit through the means of an exhibition game of lacrosse. In addition to this de Haldimar makes a cat's paw of the girl, using her as a means of communication between his fiancee and himself, and so the excellent author permits his Indian girl to get herself despised by her own nation and disliked by the reader. 993

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Unnecessary to state, that as usual the gallant white marries his fair lady, who the poor little red girl assisted him to recover. G. Mercer Adam's Algonquin Maiden Then comes another era in Canadian-Indian fiction, wherein G. Mercer Adam and A. Ethelwyn Wetherald have given us the semi-historic novel "An Algonquin Maiden." The former's masterly touch can be recognized on every page he has written; but the outcome of the combined pens is, the same old story. We find "Wanda" violently in love with Edward MacLeod, she makes all the overtures, conducts herself disgracefully, assists him to a reunion with his fair-skinned love, Helene; then betakes herself to a boat, rows out into the lake in a thunderstorm, chants her own death-song, and is drowned. But, notwithstanding all this, the authors have given us something exceedingly unique and novel as regards their red heroine. They have sketched us a wild Indian girl who kisses. They, however, forgot to tell us where she learned this pleasant fashion of emotional expression; though two such prominent authors who have given so much time to the study of Indian customs and character, must certainly have noticed the entire ignorance of kissing that is universal among the Aborigines. A wild Indian never kisses; mothers never kiss their children even, nor lovers their sweethearts, husbands their wives. It is something absolutely unknown, unpracticed. But "Wanda" was one of the few book Indian girls who had an individuality and was not hampered with being obliged to continually be national first and natural afterwards. No, she was not national; she did things and said things about as un-Indianlike as Bret Harte's "M'liss:" in fact, her action generally resembles "M'liss" more than anything else: for "Wanda's" character has the peculiarity of being created more by the dramatis personae in the play than by the authors themselves. For example: Helene speaks of her as a "low, untutored savage," and Rose is guilty of remarking that she is "a coarse, ignorant woman, whom you cannot admire, whom it would be impossible for you to respect;" and these comments are both sadly truthful, one cannot love or admire, whom it would be impossible for you to respect; one cannot love or admire a heroine that grubs in the mud like a turtle, climbs trees like a raccoon, and tears and soils her gown like a madwoman. The "beautiful little brute" Then the young hero describes her upon two occasions as a "beautiful little brute." Poor little Wanda, not only is she non-descript and ill-starred, but, as usual the authors take away her love, her life, and last and most terrible of all, her reputation; for they permit a crowd of men-friends of the 994

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hero to call her a "squaw," and neither hero nor authors, deny that she is a "squaw." It is almost too sad when so much prejudice exists against the Indians, that any one should write an Indian heroine with such glaring accusations against her virtue, and no contradictory statements either from writer, hero, or circumstance. "Wanda" had without doubt the saddest, unsunniest, unequal life ever given to Canadian readers. Jessie M. Freeland has written a pretty tale published in The Week; it is called "Winona's Tryst," but Oh! Grim fatality, here again our Indian girl duplicates her former self. "Winona" is the unhappy victim of violent love for Hugh Gordon, which he does not appreciate or return. She assists him, serves him, saves him in the usual "dumb animal" style of book Indians. She manages by self abnegation, danger, and many heart-aches to restore him to the arms of Rose McTavish, who of course he has loved and longed for all through the story. Then "Winona" secures the time honored canoe, paddles out into the lake and drowns herself. But Miss Freeland closes this pathetic little story with one of the simplest, truest, strongest paragraphs that a Canadian pen has ever written, it is the salvation of the otherwise threadbare development of plot. Hugh Gordon speaks, "I solemnly pledge myself in memory of Winona to do something to help her unfortunate nation. The Rightful owners of the soil, dispossessed and driven back inch by inch over their native prairies by their French and English conquerors"; and he kept his word. Mair's drama "Tecumseh" Charles Mair has enriched Canadian-Indian literature perhaps more than any of our authors, in his magnificent drama, "Tecumseh." The character of the grand old chief himself is most powerfully and accurately drawn. Mair has not fallen into that unattractive fashion of making his Indians "assent with a grunt" or look with "eyes of doe-like fidelity" or to appear "very grave, very dignified, and not very immaculately clean." Mair avoids the usual commonplaces used in describing Indians by those who have never met or mixed with them. His drama bears upon every page evidence of long study and life with the people whom he has written of so carefully, so truthfully. As for his heroine, what portrayal of Indian character has ever been more faithful than that of "lena." Oh! Happy inspiration vouchsafed to the author of "Tecumseh" he has invented a novelty in fiction - a white man who deserves, wins and reciprocates the Indian maiden's love - who says, as she dies on his bosom, while the bullet meant for him stills and tears her heart, "Silent for ever! Oh, my girl! my girl! Those rich eyes melt; those lips are sunwarm still 995

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They look like life, yet have no semblant voice. Millions of creatures throngs and multitudes Of heartless beings, flaunt upon the earth, There's room enough for them, but thou, dull fate Thou cold and partial tender of life's field, That pluck'st theflower,and leav'st the wood to thrive Thou had'st not room for her! Oh, I must seek A way out of the rack - I need not live, * * * * but she is dead And love is left upon the earth to starve, My object's gone, and I am but a shell, A husk, and empty case, or anything That may be kicked about the world." After perusing this refreshing white Indian drama the reader has but one regret, that Mair did not let "lena" live. She is the one book Indian girl that has Indian life, Indian character, Indian beauty, but the inevitable doom of death could not be stayed even by Mair's sensitive Indian-loving pen. No, the Indian girl must die, and with the exception of "lena" her heart's blood must stain every page of fiction whereon she appears. One learns to love Lefroy, where is your fellowman in fiction? "lena," where is your prototype? Alas, for all the other pale-faced lovers, they are indifferent, almost brutal creations, and as for the red skin girls that love them, they are all fawn eyed, unnatural, unmaidenly idiots and both are merely imaginary make-shifts to help our romances, that would be immeasurably improved by their absence.

A chance for Canadian writers Perhaps, sometimes an Indian romance may be written by someone who will be clever enough to portray national character without ever having come in contact with it. Such things have been done, for are we not told that Tome Moore had never set foot in Persia before he wrote Lalla Rookh? And those who best know what they affirm declare that remarkable poem as a faithful and accurate delineation of oriental scenery, life and character. But such things are rare, half of our authors who write up Indian stuff have never been on an Indian reserve in their lives, have never met a "real live" Redman, have never even read Parkman, Schoolcraft or Catin; what wonder that their conception of a people that they are ignorant of, save by hearsay, is dwarfed, erroneous and delusive. And here follows the thought - do authors who write Indian romances love the nation they endeavor successfully or unsuccessfully to describe? Do they, like Tecumseh, say, "And I, who love your nation, which is just, when deeds deserve it," or is the Indian introduced into literature but to 996

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lend a dash of vivid coloring to an otherwise tarn and somber picture of colonial life: it looks suspiciously like the latter reason, or why should the Indian always get beaten in the battles of romances, or the Indian girl get inevitably the cold shoulder in the wars of love! Surely the Redman has lost enough, has suffered enough without additional losses and sorrows being heaped upon him in romance. There are many combats he has won in history from the extinction of the Jesuit Fathers at Lake Simcoe to Cut Knife Creek. There are many girls who have placed dainty red feet figuratively upon the white man's neck from the days of Pocahontas to those of little "Bright Eyes," who captured all Washington a few seasons ago. Let us not only hear, but read something of the North American Indian "besting" some one at least once in a decade, and above all things let the Indian girl of fiction develop from the "doglike," "fawnlike," "deer-footed," "fire-eyed," "crouching," "submissive" book heroine into something of a quiet, sweet womanly woman she is, if wild, or the everyday, nature, laughing girl she is, if cultivated and educated, let her be natural, even if the author is not competent to give her tribal characteristics. E. Pauline Johnson

997

7.2

N E G R I T U D E AND AFRICAN SOCIALISM 1 Lecture delivered at St Anthony's College, Oxford Leopold Sedar Senghor From St. Anthony's papers (15), 1963, 9-22, also published in Llberte II. © Editions du Seuil 1971

You in Britain have been criticised in the past for not having a sense of universality, for your refusal to assimilate native populations. Today, you are praised for having emphasised points of difference rather than of similarity. You must agree that the Civilisation of the Universal will be brought about by the fusion of "differing civilisations" (Teilhard de Chardin 1959). And that to achieve this, the peoples who until now "had hardly any life beyond the surface of themselves" (Teilhard de Chardin 1959) must, in the words of Teilhard de Chardin, arouse the "world of energy" which "still slumbers within them". But all these peoples and races must first rediscover the profundity of life; they must not only know it but, as the French word "con-nautre" suggests, be reborn with it. The University of Oxford, through its chairs devoted to overseas studies, continues to teach the knowledge of these hidden springs of life. This brings me to the theory of Negritude. A few months ago, in Nairobi, a friendly journalist from that much-respected paper, The Times, put on a show of naivety and asked whether the concept of Negritude was not, in the final analysis, a new form of racialism. I must admit that it was, indeed, in its early days "an anti-racial racialism", as Jean-Paul Sartre calls it in his Orphee Noir. Now, try to put on a black skin for five minutes. I know you find this hard to do, but there is no other way to get the living feel of our situation. Go back in time some thirty years, to the years between the two world 998

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wars. We black students in the Latin Quarter were filled with pride, passion, and also the naive ignorance of youth. We had been taught, by our French masters at the Lycee, that we had no civilisation, having been left off the list of guests at the Banquet of the Universal. We were tabula rasa, or, better still, a lump of soft wax which the fingers of the white demiurge would mould into shape. The only hope of salvation you could hold out to us was to let ourselves be assimilated. This is what you taught, and we followed your precepts meekly because we despaired of ourselves. I say "you". I mean, of course, the Latin peoples. Yet, about the same time, ethnology began to be taught in France. But it was confined to specialised institutes, such as the Ecole Coloniale, where I long taught myself. In the University of Oxford this new science of Negro-African ethnology held a place of honour long before its triumphal entry into the Sorbonne. That is the first point I wished to make, and for which I wanted to praise you, the University of Oxford, who so promptly invited the black man to take his seat at your Banquet. "Yes, but in the kitchen," I can hear the disgruntled say. And they go on to quote the lines of the American Negro poet, Langston Hughes: I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the Kitchen When company comes. But I laugh And eat well And grow strong. "No, not in the kitchen," I would reply; at the bottom of the table, perhaps. What matters is that we were invited, and we did come. Is there any people, any nation, which does not consider itself superior, and the holder of a unique message? I repeat, what matters is that the black man was present among you, and that you treated him like a brother, who might be the youngest member of the family, but had something worthwhile to say. What matters is that, through its most famous university, Great Britain recognised the Negro-African personality, and considered it digna amari, worthy of fostering. A fact to which the United Kingdom had for a long time given expression through its policy of indirect government. "But what do you mean by Negritude?" you may ask, in company with the friendly journalist from the much-respected Times. To answer your question, may I again recall my student days in the Latin Quarter? Paradoxically, it was the French who first forced us to seek its essence, and who then showed us where it lay. The French forced us to seek the essence of Negritude when they enforced their policy of assimilation and thus deepened our despair. It 999

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almost drove the West Indian poet, Aime Cesaire, who had become a Negro-African in spirit, to insanity. Early on, we had become aware with ourselves that assimilation was a failure; we could assimilate mathematics or the French language, but we could never strip off our black skins nor root out our black souls. And so we set out on a fervent quest for the Holy Grail, which was our Collective Soul. And we came upon it. It was not revealed to us by the "official France" of the politicians who, out of selfinterest and political conviction, defended the policy of assimilation. Its whereabouts was pointed out to us by that handful of free-lance thinkers writers, artists, ethnologists, and pre-historians - who bring about cultural revolutions in France. It was, to be quite precise, our teachers of ethnology who introduced us to the considerable body of work already achieved in the understanding of Africa by the University of Oxford. What did we learn from all those writers, artists, and teachers? They taught us that the early years of colonisation and especially, even before colonisation, the slave-trade, had ravaged black Africa like a bush fire, wiping out images and values in one vast carnage. That negroid civilisation had flourished in the Upper Palaeolithic Age, and that the Neolithic Revolution could not be explained without them. That their roots retained their vigour, and would one day produce new grass and green branches. That mere discursive reason, the reason which only sees, was inadequate to "comprehend" the world, to gather it up and transform it. That it needed the help of intuitive reason, the reason which comes to grips, which delves beneath the surface of facts and things. I must admit that this revelation went to our heads, and set us well on the way to racialism. Soldiers in the cause of Negritude, the Senegalese light infantry, we unsheathed our native knives and stormed the values of Europe, which we summed up in the threefold expression: discursive reason, technical skill, and a trading economy. In other words, capitalism. I ought at this point, you may think, to define Negritude. Well, Negritude is the whole complex of civilised values - cultural, economic, social, and political - which characterise the black peoples, or, more precisely, the Negro-African world. All these values are essentially informed by intuitive reason. Because this sentient reason, the reason which comes to grips, expresses itself emotionally, through that self-surrender, that coalescence of subject and object; through myths, by which I mean the archetypal images of the Collective Soul; above all, through primordial rhythms, synchronised with those of the cosmos. In other words, the sense of communion, the gift of myth-making, the gift of rhythm, such are the essential elements of Negritude, which you will find indelibly stamped on all the works and activities of the black man. As I said when discussing our revelation, we were as harshly uncompromising as neophytes, and our attitude was reinforced by all the resentment stirred in us by the colonial regime. We refused to cooperate; we took

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pleasure in a root and branch opposition to Western civilisation. "But," notes Cheikh Anta Diop, "the word Negritude has a whole history of its own. The historical circumstances which attended its birth seem fully to justify it. Nevertheless, we must draw attention to the fact that its content has been enriched with the passing of time, and has been renewed as circumstances have altered." Like life, the concept of Negritude has become historical and dialectical. I should now like to trace the stages of this evolution for you as briefly as possible. In opposition to European racialism, of which the Nazis were the symbol, we set up an "anti-racial racialism". The very excesses of Nazism, and the catastrophes it engendered, were soon to bring us to our senses. Such hatred, such violence, ah! above all, such weeping and such shedding of blood produced a feeling of revulsion - it was so foreign to our continent's genius: our need to love. And then the anthropologists taught us that there is no such thing as a pure race: scientifically speaking, races do not exist. They went one better and forecast that, with a mere two hundred million people, we would in the end disappear as a "black race" through miscegenation. At the same time they did offer us some consolation. "The focal points of human development," wrote Teilhard de Chardin, in 1939, "always seem to coincide with the points of contact and anastomosis of several nerve paths," that is, in the ordinary man's language, with the meeting points of several races. If, then, we were justified in fostering the values of Negritude, and arousing the energy slumbering within us, it must be in order to pour them into the mainstream of cultural miscegenation (the biological process taking place spontaneously). They must flow towards the meeting point of all humanity; they must be our contribution to the Civilisation of the Universal. Biological miscegenation, then, takes place spontaneously, provoked by the very laws which govern life, and in the face of all policies of apartheid. It is a different matter in the realm of culture. Here, we remain wholly free to cooperate or not, to provoke or prevent the synthesis of cultures. This is an important point. For, as certain biologists point out, the psychological mutations brought about by education are incorporated in our genes, and are then transmitted by heredity. Hence the major role played by culture. We Negro-Africans and you Europeans thus have a common interest in fostering our specifically native values, whilst remaining open to the values of the Others. Do we not agree, then, that culture, far from rooting us in materially determining factors - geography, ethnology, and history - is in the end a means of transcending them? Seen within this prospect of the Civilisation of the Universal, the colonial policies of Great Britain and France have proved successful complements to each other, and black Africa has benefited. The policies of the former tended to reinforce the traditional native civilisation. As for France's policy, although we have often reviled it in the past, it too ended

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with a credit balance, through forcing us actively to assimilate European civilisation. This fertilised our sense of Negritude. Today, our Negritude no longer expresses itself as opposition to European values, but as a complement to them. Henceforth, its militants will be concerned, as I have often said, not to be assimilated, but to assimilate. They will use European values to arouse the slumbering values of Negritude, which they will bring as their contribution to the Civilisation of the Universal. Nevertheless, we still disagree with Europe: not with its values any longer, with the exception of capitalism, to which I will return, but with its theory of the Civilisation of the Universal, as formulated by the Society for European Culture. This theory has been very precisely defined by Humberto Campagnolo, and more aggressively, but, fortunately, less narrowly denned by Denis de Rougemont. We had this matter out at the Rome conference, in February 1960, at a joint meeting of the Society for European Culture and the Society for African Culture. In the eyes of the Europeans, the "exotic civilisations" are static in character, being content to live by means of archetypal images, which they repeat indefinitely. The most serious criticism is that they have no idea of the pre-eminent dignity of the human person. My reply is this. Just as much as black Africa taking this as an example - Europe and its North American offspring live by means of archetypal images. For what are free enterprise, the American way of life, democracy, communism, but myths, around which hundreds of millions of men and women organise their lives? Negritude itself is a myth (I am not using the word in any pejorative sense), but a living, dynamic one, which evolves with its circumstances into a form of Humanism. Actually, our criticism of the thesis advanced by the Society for European Culture is that it is monstrously anti-Humanist. For if European civilisation were to be imposed, unmodified, on all peoples and continents, it could only be by force. That is its first disadvantage. A more serious one is that it would not be humanistic, for it would cut itself off from the complementary values of the greater part of humanity. As I have said elsewhere, it would be a universal civilisation; it would not be the Civilisation of the Universal. Whereas our revised Negritude is humanistic, I repeat, it welcomes the complementary values of Europe and the white man, and indeed, of all other races and continents. But it welcomes them in order to fertilise and reinvigorate its own values, which it then offers for the construction of a civilisation which shall embrace all mankind. The neo-Humanism of the twentieth century stands at the point where the paths of all nations, races, and continents cross, where the four winds of the spirit blow. The African mode of socialism I said, a few moments ago, that, among the values of Europe, we had no 1002

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intention, we still have no intention, of retaining capitalism, not in its nineteenth-century form at least. Of course, private capitalism was, in its early days, one of the factors of progress, just as feudalism was in its time, and even colonisation. For the backwardness of black Africa, for example, has been caused less by colonisation than by the slave trade, which in three centuries carried off some two hundred million victims, black hosts. Capitalism, then, thanks to the accumulation of financial resources and its development of the means of production, was a factor of progress for Europe and also for Africa. Today it is an out-of-date social and economic system - like federalism, like colonisation. And, I would add, like the imperialism in which it found its expression. Why? Because if, with its specialisations, the collectivisation of work constitutes a critical step towards socialisation, the defence or, more exactly, the extension of private property does not lead in this direction. Just as serious is the alienation, in the material realm and the realm of the spirit, of which capitalism is guilty, because capitalism works only for the well-being of a minority. Because, whenever state intervention and working-class pressure have forced it to reform itself, it has conceded only the minimum standard of living, when no less than the maximum would do. Because it holds out no prospect of a fuller being beyond material wellbeing. That is why, under the capitalist system, the political, cultural, and spiritual liberties, which are so often quoted, are enjoyed only in theory: on the surface. They are not lived. Under this system the word is not bound up with the idea, the act is not linked with the word; there is, in short, a gap between practice and theory, between life and ethics. The result is the theoretical contradictions of free enterprise, with its doctrines of laissez-faire and laissez-aller, and the anarchy of its practical application. There can be no concrete freedoms - political, cultural or spiritual without economic freedom. Now, we can hardly define economic freedom as the freedom granted to a minority to exploit the majority. "Freedom," writes Teilhard de Chardin, "means the opportunity offered to each and every man (by suppressing the obstacles in his path and equipping him with the appropriate means) of transcending his human state by extending himself to the limits of his being." Private capitalism does not offer each man this opportunity of attaining the fuller being which lies beyond wellbeing. It is because private capitalism finds it repugnant - or, more precisely, finds it impossible - to transcend its material bounds, it is because of its transformation into colonialist imperialism, that we were converted, after much hesitation, to socialism. As a matter of fact the general reasons I have just exposed were reinforced by more specific reasons arising from our colonial situation. It is undeniable that the principal motive of European overseas expansion was financial profit. I am not saying it was the sole motive. Trade opened the way to soldiers, missionaries,

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administrators, teachers. But private capitalism's aim has always been to sell the products of European industry to native populations, at the highest price possible, and to buy from them, at the lowest possible price, their raw materials. This is still the situation today after the granting of independence, and it goes some way to nullify the effects of the New Deal for underdeveloped countries: the European and American policy of gifts. But our socialism is not that of Europe. It is neither atheistic communism nor, quite, the democratic socialism of the Second International of the Labour Party, for example. We have modestly called it the "African mode of socialism". Why? I should now like to explain our reasons as briefly as possible. Mr Potekhin, the Director of the African Institute in Moscow, in his book entitled Africa looks ahead, gives the following definition of "the fundamental traits of the socialist society": The State's power is vested in the workers. All means of production are collective property, there are no exploiting classes, nor does one man exploit his fellow; the economy is planned, and its essential aim is to afford the maximum satisfaction of man's material and spiritual needs. Obviously we cannot withhold our support from this ideal society, this earthly paradise. But it has still to come about, the exploitation of man by his fellow has yet to be stamped out in reality, the satisfaction of the spiritual needs which transcend our material needs has to be achieved. This has not yet happened in any European or American form of civilisation: neither in the West nor the East. For this reason we are forced to seek our own original mode, a Negro-African mode, of attaining these objectives, paying special attention to the two elements I have just stressed: economic democracy and spiritual freedom. With this prospect before us, we have decided to borrow from the socialist experiments - both theoretical and practical - only certain elements, certain scientific and technical values, which we have grafted like scions on to the wild stock of Negritude. For this latter, as a complex of civilised values, is traditionally socialist in character. In this sense, our Negro-African society is a classless society, which is not the same as saying that it has no hierarchy or division of labour. It is a community-based society, in which the hierarchy - and therefore power - is founded on spiritual and democratic values: on the law of primogeniture and election; in which decisions of all kinds are deliberated in a palaver, after the ancestral gods have been consulted, in which work is shared out among the sexes and among technico-professional groups based on religion. This is a community-based society, communal, not collectivist. We are concerned, here, not with a mere collection of individuals, but with people conspiring

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together, con-spiring in the basic Latin sense, united among themselves even to the very centre of their being, communing through their ancestors with God, who is the centre of all centres. Thus, in the working out of our "African mode of socialism", the problem is not how to put an end to the exploitation of man by his fellow, but to prevent its ever happening, by bringing political and economic democracy back to life; our problem is not how to satisfy spiritual, that is, cultural needs, but how to keep the fervour of the black soul alive. It is a question, once again, of modernising our values by borrowing from European socialism its science and technical skill, above all its spirit of progress. The theory of historical and dialectical materialism justifies us in thrusting our roots deep into Negritude, seen as the historical situation of a group of actual men at a point in time, informed by a set of precise determining factors: geographical, ethnological, economic, social, cultural, and political. I am aware that many Europeans of all political creeds dislike both the name and the theory of Negritude. I can only see in this the expression of a superiority complex: the cultural imperialism of Europe. Scientific research, cooperation, syndicalism, and planning represent so many contributions to serve as a working model. We must use them to fertilise the concept of Negritude and turn it into a twentieth century socialism, by means of which our countries can attain full economic and social development. They must help us to ensure the well-being of each individual. Syndicalism represents the negative aspect of socialism. Even today, after some sixty years of colonial rule, no economic bourgeoisie is to be found in the majority of the Negro-African states promoted to independence. As for feudalism, it collapsed in the former "French colonies", and was turned into a showpiece in the former "British colonies". The specific object of African socialism, after the Second World War, was to fight against foreign capitalism and its slave economy; to do away, not with the inequality resulting from the domination of one class by another, but with the inequality resulting from the European conquest, from the domination of one people by another, of one race by another. Marx nowhere deals with this form of inequality, this domination, and the struggle for freedom which they were to provoke. That was one of his omissions, which we had to repair by starting from our own situation, extrapolating, nevertheless, from his analyses and his theory, pressing them home to the very last of their logical implications and of their practical implications. For the celebrated solidarity of the world proletariat has remained purely theoretical, even among Marx's disciples. In hard fact, as we must have the clear sight — and the courage - to admit, the rise in the standard of living of the European worker has been effected, through a colonial slave economy, to the detriment of the masses of Asia and Africa. Hence the difficulties of decolonisation. I do not seek to deny, in this

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process of decolonisation, the disinterested action of certain noble minds, of intellectuals, of teachers, of philosophers, spurred on by a high ideal of brotherhood. These men and women have saved Europe's honour, and made possible the cooperation between Africa and Europe which exists today. But I would say that they were not in the majority, that decolonisation, as General de Gaulle admits in his plain-speaking magnanimity, now suits the needs of Europe and the conditions imposed by the Cold War. And so scientific research, planning, and cooperation have as their first objective to ensure the well-being of each member of a given society, on an area of the world's surface which is shrinking as the population grows; the problem is to ensure that the earth - its soil, sub-soil and the air above it - is so treated that its resources are exploited with maximum efficiency, by modernising our agricultural, industrial, and commercial methods. But a prior condition of this modernisation is scientific research; we must first make a survey of our riches, our potentialities, and our shortcomings: not only our material riches, potentialities, and shortcomings, but also technical and human ones. The Plan for Social and Economic Development is then drawn up on the basis of this survey. This is a working hypothesis; it is, above all, the harmonious organisation of financial and technical interrelationships, and even cultural and social ones, all of which have as their primary objective, I repeat, the satisfaction of material needs: housing, food, clothing, transport, etc. At this level, cooperation is the positive aspect of syndicalism. Here it is not only a matter of suppressing private capitalism, it is a question of replacing it, by organising work on a collective basis for the benefit of the workers. The workers in field and factory must take over the means of production and organise them more rationally, that is, more efficiently, thanks to help from the state, and the new hope roused in them by their re-won freedom, of which they how have a living experience. Scientific research, planning, and cooperation sum up exactly the programme which my country, Senegal, has just put into action, the moving force being Monsieur Mamadou Dia, the Prime Minister. Our first FourYear Plan has been under way since April 1961 with its research institutes, its state banks, its state enterprises, its office for the commercialisation of agriculture, and its cooperatives, which now comprise 80% of the peasants, who themselves form 70% of the total population. All this was preceded by a Social and Economic Survey, which took more than eighteen months to complete, and which is summed up in some two thousand pages. And yet we have not legally suppressed private capitalism, which is foreign to our country; we have not even nationalised anything; above all, we have not shed a single drop of blood to obtain our independence or to get our Four-Year Plan under way. Why? Because we began by analysing our situation as an under-developed and colonised country. The essential task in the years following the war was to win back our national independ-

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ence. Next we had to eliminate the flaws of colonial rule while preserving its positive contributions, such as the economic and technical infrastructure and the teaching of the French language; in spite of everything, the balance sheet of colonisation is positive rather than negative. Finally, these positive contributions had to be rooted in Negritude by a series of comparisons between existing systems. When private capitalism comes into peaceful competition with socialism, the latter must, I feel sure, emerge triumphant, provided that it transcends the goal of mere well-being, and does not secrete hatred. In the meantime, we need capital, even from private sources. Our aim is to fit it into the Development Plan, by controlling its use, as we do. At this point we part company with the socialist experiments of Eastern Europe, with communist experiments, whilst taking over their positive achievements, when it is necessary. I spoke earlier of the living experience of a re-won freedom. To the list of needs which the plan must satisfy, I might have added leisure. This is how research, planning, and cooperation transcend, in their essence, the objective of material well-being. Science, by which I mean the quest for truth, is already a spiritual need. As is that rapture of the heart, of the soul, which art expresses, art which itself is only the expression of love. These spiritual needs, which weigh so heavy in Negro-African hearts, were touched on by Marx, as by Mr Potekhin; but Marx did not stress them, nor did he fully define them. For, Marx's world-view, although that of a genius, remained too narrow; it was neither sufficiently retrospective, nor sufficiently prospective, as the Senegalese philosopher Gaston Berger (who was Director of Higher Education in France) would have said. We can hardly blame Marx for this, for, in the middle of the nineteenth century, theories, like relativity and the quantum theory, which have since revolutionised science, had not yet been advanced. History was scarce come to manhood; biology, geology, anthropology, and linguistics were still in their infancy. Prehistory had not yet been conceived. With the revolutions brought about in physics and chemistry, now that those sciences I mentioned have solidify established their methods, we can form a new world-vision which takes in the whole of matter and life: a Weltanschauung deeper and more complete than Marx's, and therefore more human. That is what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin tried to achieve. Henceforth, it is to this neo-Humanism that we must refer, not to refute the old scientific socialism, but to revise it, just as we revised our Negritude: by plugging the holes in it, and by opening up its blind alleys. In this new world-view, historical and dialectical materialism remains fertile, to the extent that we extract all its consequences. But matter, "Holy Matter" as Teilhard de Chardin has called it, is no longer the indefinable thing it used to be. On analysis, it appears, through a bold reversal in the dialectical process, to be subtended by a radial energy of a psychic nature. And this, paradoxically, is how Negro-Africans have always

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thought of matter. History, in this new vision of the world, is no longer restricted to man or to the West; it plunges, way back beyond prehistory, into geology. In this retrospective-prospective vision, in this total history, which is founded on evolution, man loses his position of domination, only to rediscover it on the farthest edge of the biological and cosmic drift, equipped with its irreducible idiosyncrasies. His essential idiosyncrasy is the tendency for all peoples, nations, and races to merge, whereas other animals are dispersed through the development of species. Now, seen from this new and total view, the class struggle, the cornerstone of Marxist theory, is set in its true place. It becomes simply one aspect among many of the conflicts which set social groups, nations, and continents one against the other. In Europe - and in America - classes are being transformed into technico-professional groups, and the conflict between them is gradually resolved in balanced syntheses, following the human tendency to merge. It has already been pointed out that the American and Soviet social systems are growing more like each other, even though they are enemies. For now the great conflicts of history take place between nations - we call them the Cold War and decolonisation. They are only the exterior signs of the painful labour from which will be born the world of the future, with all divisions healed. Why and how this reconciliation? For whom and by whom? Now we come to the problem of ultimate goals and methods, of ends and values. This is an aspect which Marx, in his excessively apocalyptic and determined vision, failed to stress sufficiently, forgetting that, as he progressed, man remained free to choose; he could accept or reject progress, depending on whether he found the goal attractive or not. Let me remind you of our first objective - material well-being, comfort - and the means I described of achieving it. At the same time I suggested its limitations. As a syndicalist of the East German Democratic Republic put it, "Now I could do with reading some good literature." And you know that religious vocations are more numerous in the America of plenty than in the America of poverty in the South. Beyond the objective of material well-being, man aspires to fuller being, which is his end; beyond the satisfaction of his material needs, to that of his spiritual needs, especially in black Africa and in the underdeveloped countries. Their peoples hunger not so much after American or Russian surpluses, as after independence, dignity, science, and culture: after Love-in-Union. Try to imagine a world without love: between man and wife, in the family, in the nation, on the whole planet. Without this Love-in-Union, which is made real in God through religion and art, the world would be ice-bound; we would be powerless to prevent the taedium vitae taking possession of our souls.

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For that rapture of the heart, that Love-in-Union which is Man's true end, to come into being, a minimum of material well-being is obviously necessary. On this scale, the means of socialism, which I listed above, may be considered as values, especially if we elevate them from the national to the international level. In any case, an economy which is restricted to the frontiers of a nation is not viable, as Francois Perroux has affirmed. Marx had already suggested that this was so. Thus, the means of socialism transcend mere physical comfort, even on the national level; they are already personal values, values of the fuller being. Research, planning, and cooperation almost always allot large sums of money to family welfare, education, culture, leisure, and sometimes, as with us, to religious communities, to the satisfaction of spiritual needs. But the major phenomenon of the century in which we live is the development of international relations. The United Nations Organisation has taken the place of the League of Nations. What is the role of the UNO, but to organise on a rational basis, and to perfect, the interrelationships which have already been woven between peoples and nations, covering the surface of the globe with an ever-tighter network of material, cultural, and moral communications? Today, ships and railways, aeroplanes and rockets, books and newspapers, radio and television, are all much more than the means to an international economy, they are values of the Civilisation of the Universal. With an ever-growing awareness of the part these means can play, the United Nations Organisation proposes to coordinate and develop them through its specialised agencies, so that they lead us to the meeting point of all humanity. Now, about the major role of UNESCO, which is to help build the Civilisation of the Universal by bringing the different civilisations together in discussion. It has started to show that the concept of race is a false myth; that each civilsation is a complex of material, technical, cultural, and spiritual values, the fruits of geography, history, and a mingling of ethnic characteristics; that the great civilisations of antiquity - Egypt, Sumeria, India, China, Greece - were born at the meeting points of the world's roads, and the world's races. Finally - last but not least - that the Civilisation of the Universal, which will be the culmination of socialisation, will not be European civilisation - in either its Eastern or Western form imposed by force, but a biological and psychic miscegenation, a symbiosis of the different civilisations. From now on, our duty as Negro-Africans is plain. We remain free to travel with the current, or to row against it. I say "our duty". I should say "our easily appreciable interests", which lie in the direction of the Civilisation of the Universal, of a socialism revised as socialisation, in which body and soul shall be fulfilled, and know the ineffable rapture of Love-inUnion. That Civilsation of the Universal, to which we shall contribute, when all is said and done, by pouring into it the burning lava of our

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Negritude, those values of our civilisation which I have denned above. If we were missing, civilisation would lack the rhythm section of its orchestra, the bass voices of its choir. Henceforth, revised socialism will have as its counterpart revised Negritude, which, let me repeat, is a form of Humanism. Such are the thoughts (far too long, I know) that the University inspires in me. Black Africa and the whole world are deeply in its debt. Oxford is one of the peaks of the Civilsation of the Universal.

Note 1 Lecture delivered at St. Anthony's College, Oxford, 26 October 1961.

References Senghor, L. S. 1963. "Negritude and African socialism", in K. Kirkwood (ed.), St Anthony's papers, no. 15, Oxford, 9-22. Senghor, L. S. 1965. On African socialism. Stanford: Pall Mall. Senghor, L. S. 1966. "Negritude." Optima, 16:1-8. Senghor, L. S. 1971. "Negritude and African socialism", in Liberte II, Paris: Editions du Seuil Teilhard de Chardin, P. 1959. The phenomenon of man. London: Collins.

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THE FACT OF BLACKNESS Frantz Fanon From Charles Lam Markmann (trans.) Black Skin White Masks, Grove Press Inc., 1967, 109-40. Originally published as Peau noire, Masques Blancs, Editions du Seuil, 1952.

"Dirty nigger!" Or Simply, "Look, a Negro!" I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects. Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with an agility that I had thought lost, and by taking me out of the world, restoring me to it. But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self. As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others. There is of course the moment of "being for others," of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society. It would seem that this fact has not been given sufficient attention by those who have discussed the question. In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology - once it isfinallyadmitted as leaving existence by the wayside does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man. Some critics will take it on themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man. Overnight the Negro has been given two frames of reference within which he has had to place

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himself. His metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they were based, were wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him. The black man among his own in the twentieth century does not know at what moment his inferiority comes into being through the other. Of course I have talked about the black problem with friends, or, more rarely, with American Negroes. Together we protested, we asserted the equality of all men in the world. In the Antilles there was also that little gulf that exists among the almost-white, the mulatto, and the nigger. But I was satisfied with an intellectual understanding of these differences. It was not really dramatic. And then.. .. And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man's eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and take the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. The matches, however, are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And all these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world - such seems to be the schema. It does not impose itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring of the self and of the world - definitive because it creates a real dialectic between my body and the world. For several years certain laboratories have been trying to produce a serum for "denegrification"; with all the earnestness in the world, laboratories have sterilized their test tubes, checked their scales, and embarked on researches that might make it possible for the miserable Negro to whiten himself and thus to throw off the burden of that corporeal malediction. Below the corporeal schema I had sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been provided for me not by "residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character,"1 but by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories. I thought that what I had in hand was to construct a physiological self, to balance space, to localize sensations, and here I was called on for more. "Look, a Negro!" It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile. "Look, a Negro!" It was true. It amused me. "Look, a Negro!" The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement. "Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened!" Frightened! Frightened! Now 1012

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they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible. I could no longer laugh, because I already knew that there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity, which I had learned about from Jaspers. Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema. In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person. In the train I was given not one but two, three places. I had already stopped being amused. It was not that I was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other . . . and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea.... I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tomtoms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slaveships, and above all else, above all: "Sho' good eatin'. " On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help to build it together. But I rejected all immunization of the emotions. I wanted to be a man, nothing but a man. Some identified me with ancestors of mine who had been enslaved or lynched: I decided to accept this. It was on the universal level of the intellect that I understood this inner kinship - I was the grandson of slaves in exactly the same way in which President Lebrun was the grandson of tax-paying, hard-working peasants. In the main, the panic soon vanished. In America, Negroes are segregated. In South America, Negroes are whipped in the streets, and Negro strikers are cut down by machine-guns. In West Africa, the Negro is an animal. And there beside me, my neighbor in the university, who was born in Algeria, told me: "As long as the Arab is treated like a man, no solution is possible." "Understand, my dear boy, color prejudice is something I find utterly foreign. . . . But of course, come in, sir, there is no color prejudice among us. ... Quite, the Negro is a man like ourselves. . . . It is not because he is black that he is less intelligent than we are. . . . I had a Senegalese buddy in the army who was really clever. .. ." Where am I to be classified? Or, if you prefer, tucked away? "A Martinican, a native of 'our' old colonies."

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Where shall I hide? "Look at the nigger! .. . Mama, a Negro! . . . Hell, he's getting mad.. . . Take no notice, sir, he does not know that you are as civilized as we...." My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger, it's cold, the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his mother's arms: Mama, the nigger's going to eat me up. All round me the white man, above the sky tears at its navel, the earth rasps under my feet, and there is a white song, a white song. All this whiteness that burns m e . . . . I sit down at the fire and I become aware of my uniform. I had not seen it. It is indeed ugly. I stop there, for who can tell me what beauty is? Where shall I find shelter from now on? I felt an easily identifiable flood mounting out of the countless facets of my being. I was about to be angry. The fire was long since out, and once more the nigger was trembling. "Look how handsome that Negro is! .. ." "Kiss the handsome Negro's ass, madame!" Shame flooded her face. At last I was set free from my rumination. At the same time I accomplished two things: I identified my enemies and I made a scene. A grand slam. Now one would be able to laugh. The field of battle having been marked out, I entered the lists. What? While I was forgetting, forgiving, and wanting only to love, my message was flung back in my face like a slap. The white world, the only honorable one, barred me from all participation. A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to behave like a black man - or at least like a nigger. I shouted a greeting to the world and the world slashed away my joy. I was told to stay within bounds, to go back where I belonged. They would see, then! I had warned them, anyway. Slavery? It was no longer even mentioned, that unpleasant memory. My supposed inferiority? A hoax that it was better to laugh at. I forgot it all, but only on condition that the world not protect itself against me any longer. I had incisors to test. I was sure they were strong. And besides.. . . What! When it was I who had every reason to hate, to despise, I was rejected? When I should have been begged, implored, I was denied the slightest recognition? I resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to assert myself as a BLACK MAN. Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known.

1014

THE FACT OF B L A C K N E S S

In Anti-Semite and Jew (p. 95), Sartre says: "They [the Jews] have allowed themselves to be poisoned by the stereotype that others have of them, and they live in fear that their acts will correspond to this stereotype. . . . We may say that their conduct is perpetually overdetermined from the inside." All the same, the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness. He is not wholly what he is. One hopes, one waits. His actions, his behavior are the final determinant. He is a white man, and, apart from some rather debatable characteristics, he can sometimes go unnoticed. He belongs to the race of those who since the beginning of time have never known cannibalism. What an idea, to eat one's father! Simple enough, one has only not to be a nigger. Granted, the Jews are harassed - what am I thinking of? They are hunted down, exterminated, cremated. But these are little family quarrels. The Jew is disliked from the moment he is tracked down. But in my case everything takes on a new guise. I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the "idea" that others have of me but of my own appearance. I move slowly in the world, accustomed now to seek no longer for upheaval. I progress by crawling. And already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed. Having adjusted their microtomes, they objectively cut away slices of my reality. I am laid bare. I feel, I see in those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new genus. Why, it's a Negro! I slip into corners, and my long antennae pick up the catch-phrases strewn over the surface of things - nigger underwear smells of nigger nigger teeth are white - nigger feet are big - the nigger's barrel chest - I slip into corners, I remain silent, I strive for anonymity, for invisibility. Look, I will accept the lot, as long as no one notices me! "Oh, I want you to meet my black friend. . . . Aime Cesaire, a black man and a university graduate. . . . Marian Anderson, the finest of Negro singers. . . . Dr. Cobb, who invented white blood, is a Negro. . . . Here, say hello to my friend from Martinique (be careful, he's extremely sensitive)...." Shame. Shame and self-contempt. Nausea. When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle. I turn away from these inspectors of the Ark before the Flood and I attach myself to my brothers, Negroes like myself. To my horror, they too reject me. They are almost white. And besides they are about to marry white women. They will have children faintly tinged with brown. Who knows, perhaps little by l i t t l e . . . . 1 had been dreaming. "I want you to understand, sir, I am one of the best friends the Negro has in Lyon."

1015

THINKING/WORKING THROUGH RACE

The evidence was there, unalterable. My blackness was there, dark and unarguable. And it tormented me, pursued me, disturbed me, angered me. Negroes are savages, brutes, illiterates. But in my own case I knew that these statements were false. There was a myth of the Negro that had to be destroyed at all costs. The time had long since passed when a Negro priest was an occasion for wonder. We had physicians, professors, statesmen. Yes, but something out of the ordinary still clung to such cases. "We have a Senegalese history teacher. He is quite bright. . . . Our doctor is colored. He is very gentle." It was always the Negro teacher, the Negro doctor; brittle as I was becoming, I shivered at the slightest pretext. I knew, for instance, that if the physician made a mistake it would be the end of him and of all those who came after him. What could one expect, after all, from a Negro physician? As long as everything went well, he was praised to the skies, but look out, no nonsense, under any conditions! The black physician can never be sure how close he is to disgrace. I tell you, I was walled in: No exception was made for my refined manners, or my knowledge of literature, or my understanding of the quantum theory. I requested, I demanded explanations. Gently, in the tone that one uses with a child, they introduced me to the existence of a certain view that was held by certain people, but, I was always told, "We must hope that it will very soon disappear." What was it? Color prejudice. It [colour prejudice] is nothing more than the unreasoning hatred of one race for another, the contempt of the stronger and richer peoples for those whom they consider inferior to themselves and the bitter resentment of those who are kept in subjection and are so frequently insulted. As colour is the most obvious outward manifestation of race it has been made the criterion by which men are judged, irrespective of their social or educational attainments. The light-skinned races have come to despise all those of a darker colour, and the dark-skinned peoples will no longer accept without protest the inferior position to which they have been relegated.2 I had read it rightly. It was hate; I was hated, despised, detested, not by the neighbor across the street or my cousin on my mother's side, but by an entire race. I was up against something unreasoned. The psychoanalysts say that nothing is more traumatizing for the young child than his encounters with what is rational. I would personally say that for a man whose only weapon is reason there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason. I felt knife blades open within me. I resolved to defend myself. As a good tactician, I intended to rationalize the world and to show the white man that he was mistaken.

1016

THE FACT OF B L A C K N E S S

In the Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre says, there is a sort of impassioned imperialism of reason: for he wishes not only to convince others that he is right; his goal is to persuade them that there is an absolute and unconditioned value to rationalism. He feels himself to be a missionary of the universal; against the universality of the Catholic religion, from which he is excluded, he asserts the "catholicity" of the rational, an instrument by which to attain to the truth and establish a spiritual bond among men.3 And, the author adds, though there may be Jews who have made intuition the basic category of their philosophy, their intuition has no resemblance to the Pascalian subtlety of spirit, and it is this latter - based on a thousand imperceptible perceptions - which to the Jew seems his worst enemy. As for Bergson, his philosophy offers the curious appearance of an anti-intellectualist doctrine constructed entirely by the most rational and most critical of intelligences. It is through argument that he establishes the existence of pure duration, of philosophic intuition; and that very intuition which discovers duration or life, is itself universal, since anyone may practice it, and it leads toward the universal, since its objects can be named and conceived.4 With enthusiasm I set to cataloguing and probing my surroundings. As times changed, one had seen the Catholic religion at first justify and then condemn slavery and prejudices. But by referring everything to the idea of the dignity of man, one had ripped prejudice to shreds After much reluctance, the scientists had conceded that the Negro was a human being; in vivo and in vitro the Negro had been proved analogous to the white man: the same morphology, the same histology. Reason was confident of victory on every level. I put all the parts back together. But I had to change my tune. That victory played cat and mouse; it made a fool of me. As the other put it, when I was present, it was not; when it was there, I was no longer. In the abstract there was agreement: The Negro is a human being. That is to say, amended the less firmly convinced, that like us he has his heart on the left side. But on certain points the white man remained intractable. Under no conditions did he wish any intimacy between the races, for it is a truism that "crossings between widely different races can lower the physical and mental level. . . . Until we have a more definite knowledge of the effect of race-crossings we shall certainly do best to avoid crossings between widely different races."5 1017

T H I N K I N G / W O R K I N G T H R O U G H RACE

For my own part, I would certainly know how to react. And in one sense, if I were asked for a definition of myself, I would say that I am one who waits; I investigate my surroundings, I interpret everything in terms of what I discover, I become sensitive. In the first chapter of the history that the others have compiled for me, the foundation of cannibalism has been made eminently plain in order that I may not lose sight of it. My chromosomes were supposed to have a few thicker or thinner genes representing cannibalism. In addition to the sexlinked, the scholars had now discovered the racial-linked.6 What a shameful science! But I understand this "psychological mechanism." For it is a matter of common knowledge that the mechanism is only psychological. Two centuries ago I was lost to humanity, I was a slave forever. And then came men who said that it all had gone on far too long. My tenaciousness did the rest; I was saved from the civilizing deluge. I have gone forward. Too late. Everything is anticipated, thought out, demonstrated, made the most of. My trembling hands take hold of nothing; the vein has been mined out. Too late! But once again I want to understand. Since the time when someone first mourned the fact that he had arrived too late and everything had been said, a nostalgia for the past has seemed to persist. Is this that lost original paradise of which Otto Rank speaks? How many such men, apparently rooted to the womb of the world, have devoted their lives to studying the Delphic oracles or exhausted themselves in attempts to plot the wanderings of Ulysses! The pan-spiritualists seek to prove the existence of a soul in animals by using this argument: A dog lies down on the grave of his master and starves to death there. We had to wait for Janet to demonstrate that the aforesaid dog, in contrast to man, simply lacked the capacity to liquidate the past. We speak of the glory of Greece, Artaud says; but, he adds, if modern man can no longer understand the Choephoroi of Aeschylus, it is Aeschylus who is to blame. It is tradition to which the anti-Semites turn in order to ground the validity of their "point of view." It is tradition, it is that long historical past, it is that blood relation between Pascal and Descartes, that is invoked when the Jew is told, "There is no possibility of your finding a place in society." Not long ago, one of those good Frenchmen said in a train where I was sitting: "Just let the real French virtues keep going and the race is safe. Now more than ever, national union must be made a reality. Let's have an end of internal strife! Let's face up to the foreigners (here he turned toward my corner) no matter who they are." It must be said in his defense that he stank of cheap wine; if he had been capable of it, he would have told me that my emancipated-slave blood could not possibly be stirred by the name of Villon or Taine. An outrage!

1018

THE F A C T OF B L A C K N E S S

The Jew and I: Since I was not satisfied to be racialized, by a lucky turn of fate I was humanized. I joined the Jew, my brother in misery. An outrage! At first thought it may seem strange that the anti-Semite's outlook should be related to that of the Negrophobe. It was my philosophy professor, a native of the Antilles, who recalled the fact to me one day: "Whenever you hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you." And I found that he was universally right - by which I meant that I was answerable in my body and in my heart for what was done to my brother. Later I realized that he meant, quite simply, an anti-Semite is inevitably anti-Negro. You come too late, much too late. There will always be a world - a white world - between you and us. ... The other's total inability to liquidate the past once and for all. In the face of this affective ankylosis of the white man, it is understandable that I could have made up my mind to utter my Negro cry. Little by little, putting out pseudopodia here and there, I secreted a race. And that race staggered under the burden of a basic element. What was it? Rhythm! Listen to our singer, Leopold Senghor: It is the thing that is most perceptible and least material. It is the archetype of the vital element. It is the first condition and the hallmark of Art, as breath is of life: breath, which accelerates or slows, which becomes even or agitated according to the tension in the individual, the degree and the nature of his emotion. This is rhythm in its primordial purity, this is rhythm in the masterpieces of Negro art, especially sculpture. It is composed of a theme sculptural form - which is set in opposition to a sister theme, as inhalation is to exhalation, and that is repeated. It is not the kind of symmetry that gives rise to monotony; rhythm is alive, it is free. . . . This is how rhythm affects what is least intellectual in us, tyrannically, to make us penetrate to the spirituality of the object; and that character of abandon which is ours is itself rhythmic.7 Had I read that right? I read it again with redoubled attention. From the opposite end of the white world a magical Negro culture was hailing me. Negro sculpture! I began to flush with pride. Was this our salvation? I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice. Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason. It was up to the white man to be more irrational than I. Out of the necessities of my struggle I had chosen the method of regression, but the fact remained that it was an unfamiliar weapon; here I am at home; I am made of the irrational; I wade in the irrational. Up to the neck in the irrational. And now how my voice vibrates!

1019

T H I N K I N G / W O R K I N G THROUGH RACE

Those who invented neither gunpowder nor the compass Those who never learned to conquer steam or electricity Those who never explored the seas or the skies But they know the farthest corners of the land of anguish Those who never knew any journey save that of abduction Those who learned to kneel in docility Those who were domesticated and Christianized Those who were injected with bastardy.. .. Yes, all those are my brothers - a "bitter brotherhood" imprisons all of us alike. Having stated the minor thesis, I went overboard after something else. . . . But those without whom the earth would not be the earth Tumescence all the more fruitful than the empty land still more the land Storehouse to guard and ripen all on earth that is most earth My blackness is no stone, its deafness hurled against the clamor of the day My blackness is no drop of lifeless water on the dead eye of the world My blackness is neither a tower nor a cathedral It thrusts into the red flesh of the sun It thrusts into the burning flesh of the sky It hollows through the dense dismay of its own pillar of patience.8 Eyah! the tom-tom chatters out the cosmic message. Only the Negro has the capacity to convey it, to decipher its meaning, its import. Astride the world, my strong heels spurring into the flanks of the world, I stare into the shoulders of the world as the celebrant stares at the midpoint between the eyes of the sacrificial victim. But they abandon themselves, possessed, to the essence of all things, knowing nothing of externals but possessed by the movement of all things uncaring to subdue but playing the play of the world truly the eldest sons of the world open to all the breaths of the world meeting-place of all the winds of the world

1020

THE FACT OF B L A C K N E S S

undrained bed of all the waters of the world spark of the sacred fire of the World flesh of the flesh of the world, throbbing with the very movement of the world!9 Blood! Blood! . . . Birth! Ecstasy of becoming! Three-quarters engulfed in the confusions of the day, I feel myself redden with blood. The arteries of all the world, convulsed, torn away, uprooted, have turned toward me and fed me. "Blood! Blood! All our blood stirred by the male heart of the sun."10 Sacrifice was a middle point between the creation and myself - now I went back no longer to sources but to The Source. Nevertheless, one had to distrust rhythm, earth-mother love, this mystic, carnal marriage of the group and the cosmos. In La vie sexuelle en Afrique noire, a work rich in perceptions, De Pedrals implies that always in Africa, no matter what field is studied, it will have a certain magico-social structure. He adds: All these are the elements that one finds again on a still greater scale in the domain of secret societies. To the extent, moreover, to which persons of either sex, subjected to circumcision during adolescence, are bound under penalty of death not to reveal to the uninitiated what they have experienced, and to the extent to which initiation into a secret society always excites to acts of sacred love, there is good ground to conclude by viewing both male and female circumcision and the rites that they embellish as constitutive of minor secret societies.11 I walk on white nails. Sheets of water threaten my soul on fire. Face to face with these rites, I am doubly alert. Black magic! Orgies, witches' sabbaths, heathen ceremonies, amulets. Coitus is an occasion to call on the gods of the clan. It is a sacred act, pure, absolute, bringing invisible forces into action. What is one to think of all these manifestations, all these initiations, all these acts? From every direction I am assaulted by the obscenity of dances and of words. Almost at my ear there is a song: First our hearts burned hot Now they are cold All we think of now is Love When we return to the village When we see the great phallus Ah how then we will make Love For our parts will be dry and clean.12

1021

T H I N K I N G / W O R K I N G THROUGH RACE

The soil, which only a moment ago was still a tamed steed, begins to revel. Are these virgins, these nymphomaniacs? Black Magic, primitive mentality, animism, animal eroticism, it all floods over me. All of it is typical of peoples that have not kept pace with the evolution of the human race. Or, if one prefers, this is humanity at its lowest. Having reached this point, I was long reluctant to commit myself. Aggression was in the stars. I had to choose. What do I mean? I had no choice.... Yes, we are - we Negroes - backward, simple, free in our behavior. That is because for us the body is not something opposed to what you call the mind. We are in the world. And long live the couple, Man and Earth! Besides, our men of letters helped me to convince you; your white civilization overlooks subtle riches and sensitivity. Listen: Emotive sensitivity. Emotion is completely Negro as reason is Greek.™ Water rippled by every breeze? Unsheltered soul blown by every wind, whose fruit often drops before it is ripe? Yes, in one way, the Negro today is richer in gifts than in works.1"1 But the tree thrusts its roots into the earth. The river runs deep, carrying precious seeds. And, the Afro-American poet, Langston Hughes, says: I have known rivers ancient dark rivers my soul has grown deep like the deep rivers. The very nature of the Negro's emotion, of his sensitivity, furthermore, explains his attitude toward the object perceived with such basic intensity. It is an abandon that becomes need, an active state of communion, indeed of identification, however negligible the action - I almost said the personality - of the object. A rhythmic attitude: The adjective should be kept in mind.15 So here we have the Negro rehabilitated, "standing before the bar," ruling the world with his intuition, the Negro recognized, set on his feet again, sought after, taken up, and he is a Negro - no, he is not a Negro but the Negro, exciting the fecund antennae of the world, placed in the foreground of the world, raining his poetic power on the world, "open to all the breaths of the world." I embrace the world! I am the world! The white man has never understood this magic substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself alone. He finds himself predestined master of this world. He enslaves it. An acquisitive relation is established between the world and him. But there exist other values that fit only my forms. Like a magician, I robbed the white man of "a certain world,"

1022

THE FACT OF B L A C K N E S S forever after lost to him and his. When that happened, the white man must have been rocked backward by a force that he could not identify, so little used as he is to such reactions. Somewhere beyond the objective world of farms and banana trees and rubber trees, I had subtly brought the real world into being. The essence of the world was my fortune. Between the world and me a relation of coexistence was established. I had discovered the primeval One. My "speaking hands" tore at the hysterical throat of the world. The white man had the anguished feeling that I was escaping from him and that I was taking something with me. He went through my pockets. He thrust probes into the least circumvolution of my brain. Everywhere he found only the obvious. So it was obvious that I had a secret. I was interrogated; turning away with an air of mystery, I murmured: Tokowaly, uncle, do you remember the nights gone by When my head weighed heavy on the back of your patience or Holding my hand your hand led me by shadows and signs The fields are flowers of glowworms, stars hang on the bushes, on the trees Silence is everywhere Only the scents of the jungle hum, swarms of reddish bees that overwhelm the crickets' shrill sounds, And covered tom-tom, breathing in the distance of the night. You, Tokowaly, you listen to what cannot be heard, and you explain to me what the ancestors are saying in the liquid calm of the constellations, The bull, the scorpion, the leopard, the elephant, and the fish we know, And the white pomp of the Spirits in the heavenly shell that has no end, But now comes the radiance of the goddess Moon and the veils of the shadows fall. Night of Africa, my black night, mystical and bright, black and shining.16 I made myself the poet of the world. The white man had found a poetry in which there was nothing poetic. The soul of the white man was corrupted, and, as I was told by a friend who was a teacher in the United States, "The presence of the Negroes beside the whites is in a way an insurance policy on humanness. When the whites feel that they have become too mechanized, they turn to the men of color and ask them for a little human sustenance." At last I had been recognized, I was no longer a zero.

1023

THINKING/WORKING

THROUGH RACE

I had soon to change my tune. Only momentarily at a loss, the white man explained to me that, genetically, I represented a stage of development: "Your properties have been exhausted by us. We have had earth mystics such as you will never approach. Study our history and you will see how far this fusion has gone." Then I had the feeling that I was repeating a cycle. My originality had been torn out of me. I wept a long time, and then I began to live again. But I was haunted by a galaxy of erosive stereotypes: the Negro's sui generis odor . . . the Negro's sui generis good nature . .. the Negro's sui generis gullibility. . . . I had tried to flee myself through my kind, but the whites had thrown themselves on me and hamstrung me. I tested the limits of my essence; beyond all doubt there was not much of it left. It was here that I made my most remarkable discovery. Properly speaking, this discovery was a rediscovery. I rummaged frenetically through all the antiquity of the black man. What I found there took away my breath. In his book L'abolition de I'esdavage Schoelcher presented us with compelling arguments. Since then, Frobenius, Westermann, Delafosse - all of them white - had joined the chorus: Segou, Djenne, cities of more than a hundred thousand people; accounts of learned blacks (doctors of theology who went to Mecca to interpret the Koran). All of that, exhumed from the past, spread with its insides out, made it possible for me to find a valid historic place. The white man was wrong, I was not a primitive, not even a half-man, I belonged to a race that had already been working in gold and silver two thousand years ago. And too there was something else, something else that the white man could not understand. Listen: What sort of men were these, then, who had been torn away from their families, their countries, their religions, with a savagery unparalleled in history? Gentle men, polite, considerate, unquestionably superior to those who tortured them - that collection of adventurers who slashed and violated and spat on Africa to make the stripping of her the easier. The men they took away knew how to build houses, govern empires, erect cities, cultivate fields, mine for metals, weave cotton, forge steel. Their religion had its own beauty, based on mystical connections with the founder of the city. Their customs were pleasing, built on unity, kindness, respect for age. No coercion, only mutual assistance, the joy of living, a free acceptance of discipline. Order - Earnestness - Poetry and Freedom. From the untroubled private citizen to the almost fabulous 1024

THE FACT OF B L A C K N E S S

leader there was an unbroken chain of understanding and trust. No science? Indeed yes; but also, to protect them from fear, they possessed great myths in which 'the most subtle observation and the most daring imagination were balanced and blended. No art? They had their magnificent sculpture, in which human feeling erupted so unrestrained yet always followed the obsessive laws of rhythm in its organization of the major elements of a material called upon to capture, in order to redistribute, the most secret forces of the universe... ,17 Monuments in the very heart of Africa? Schools? Hospitals? Not a single good burgher of the twentieth century, no Durand, no Smith, no Brown even suspects that such things existed in Africa before the Europeans came.... But Schoelcher reminds us of their presence, discovered by Caille, Mollien, the Gander brothers. And, though he nowhere reminds us that when the Portuguese landed on the banks of the Congo in 1498, they found a rich and flourishing state there and that the courtiers of Ambas were dressed in robes of silk and brocade, at least he knows that Africa had brought itself up to a juridical concept of the state, and he is aware, living in the very flood of imperialism, that European civilization, after all, is only one more civilization among many - and not the most merciful.18 I put the white man back into his place; growing bolder, I jostled him and told him point-blank, "Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone." I shouted my laughter to the stars. The white man, I could see, was resentful. His reaction time lagged interminably. . . . I had won. I was jubilant. "Lay aside your history, your investigations of the past, and try to feel yourself into our rhythm. In a society such as ours, industrialized to the highest degree, dominated by scientism, there is no longer room for your sensitivity. One must be tough if one is to be allowed to live. What matters now is no longer playing the game of the world but subjugating it with integers and atoms. Oh, certainly, I will be told, now and then when we are worn out by our lives in big buildings, we will turn to you as we do to our children - to the innocent, the ingenuous, the spontaneous. We will turn to you as to the childhood of the world. You are so real in your life - so funny, that is. Let us run away for a little while from our ritualized, polite civilization and let us relax, bend to those heads, those adorably expressive faces. In a way, you reconcile us with ourselves." Thus my unreason was countered with reason, my reason with "real reason." Every hand was a losing hand for me. I analyzed my heredity. I made a complete audit of my ailment. I wanted to be typically Negro - it was no longer possible. 1 wanted to be white - that was a joke. And, when

1025

THINKING/WORKING THROUGH RACE

I tried, on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to reclaim my negritude, it was snatched away from me. Proof was presented that my effort was only a term in the dialectic: But there is something more important: The Negro, as we have said, creates an anti-racist racism for himself. In no sense does he wish to rule the world: He seeks the abolition of all ethnic privileges, wherever they come from; he asserts his solidarity with the oppressed of all colors. At once the subjective, existential, ethnic idea of negritude "passes," as Hegel puts it, into the objective, positive, exact idea of proletariat. "For Cesaire," Senghor says, "the white man is the symbol of capital as the Negro is that of labor.. .. Beyond the black-skinned men of his race it is the battle of the world proletariat that is his song." That is easy to say, but less easy to think out. And undoubtedly it is no coincidence that the most ardent poets of negritude are at the same time militant Marxists. But that does not prevent the idea of race from mingling with that of class: The first is concrete and particular, the second is universal and abstract; the one stems from what Jaspers calls understanding and the other from intellection; the first is the result of a psychobiological syncretism and the second is a methodical construction based on experience. In fact, negritude appears as the minor term of a dialectical progression: The theoretical and practical assertion of the supremacy of the white man is its thesis; the position of negritude as an antithetical value is the moment of negativity. But this negative moment is insufficient by itself, and the Negroes who employ it know this very well; they know that it is intended to prepare the synthesis or realization of the human in a society without races. Thus negritude is the root of its own destruction, it is a transition and not a conclusion, a means and not an ultimate end.19 When I read that page, I felt that I had been robbed of my last chance. I said to my friends, "The generation of the younger black poets has just suffered a blow that can never be forgiven." Help had been sought from a friend of the colored peoples, and that friend had found no better response than to point out the relativity of what they were doing. For once, that born Hegelian had forgotten that consciousness has to lose itself in the night of the absolute, the only condition to attain to consciousness of self. In opposition to rationalism, he summoned up the negative side, but he forgot that this negativity draws its worth from an almost substantive absoluteness. A consciousness committed to experience is ignorant, has to be ignorant, of the essences and the determinations of its being.

1026

THE FACT OF B L A C K N E S S

Orphee Noir is a date in the intellectualization of the experience of being black. And Sartre's mistake was not only to seek the source of the source but in a certain sense to block that source: Will the source of Poetry be dried up? Or will the great black flood, in spite of everything, color the sea into which it pours itself? It does not matter: Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through Poetry; sometimes the poetic impulse coincides with the revolutionary impulse, and sometimes they take different courses. Today let us hail the turn of history that will make it possible for the black men to utter "the great Negro cry with a force that will shake the pillars of the world" (Cesaire).20 And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me. It is not out of my bad nigger's misery, my bad nigger's teeth, my bad nigger's hunger that I will shape a torch with which to burn down the world, but it is the torch that was already there, waiting for that turn of history. In terms of consciousness, the black consciousness is held out as an absolute density, as filled with itself, a stage preceding any invasion, any abolition of the ego by desire. Jean-Paul Sartre, in this work, has destroyed black zeal. In opposition to historical becoming, there had always been the unforeseeable. I needed to lose myself completely in negritude. One day, perhaps, in the depths of that unhappy romanticism.... In any case I needed not to know. This struggle, this new decline had to take on an aspect of completeness. Nothing is more unwelcome than the commonplace: "You'll change, my boy; I was like that too when I was young . . . you'll see, it will all pass." The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself. It shatters my unreflected position. Still in terms of consciousness, black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes. I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside me. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is. It is its own follower. But, I will be told, your statements show a misreading of the processes of history. Listen then: Africa I have kept your memory Africa you are inside me Like the splinter in the wound

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like a guardian fetish in the center of the village make me the stone in your sling make my mouth the lips of your wound make my knees the broken pillars of your abasement AND YET I want to be of your race alone workers peasants of all lands . . . . .. white worker in Detroit black peon in Alabama uncountable nation in capitalist slavery destiny ranges us shoulder to shoulder repudiating the ancient maledictions of blood taboos we roll away the ruins of our solitudes If the flood is a frontier we will strip the gully of its endless covering flow If the Sierra is a frontier we will smash the jaws of the volcanoes upholding the Cordilleras and the plain will be the parade ground of the dawn where we regroup our forces sundered by the deceits of our masters As the contradiction among the features creates the harmony of the face we proclaim the oneness of the suffering and the revolt of all the peoples on all the face of the earth and we mix the mortar of the age of brotherhood out of the dust of idols.21 Exactly, we will reply, Negro experience is not a whole, for there is not merely one Negro, there are Negroes. What a difference, for instance, in this other poem: The white man killed my father Because my father was proud The white man raped my mother Because my mother was beautiful The white man wore out my brother in the hot sun of the roads Because my brother was strong Then the white man came to me His hands red with blood Spat his contempt into my black face Out of his tyrant's voice: "Hey boy, a basin, a towel, water."22 1028

THE FACT OF B L A C K N E S S Or this other one: My brother with teeth that glisten at the compliments of hypocrites My brother with gold-rimmed spectacles Over eyes that turn blue at the sound of the Master's voice My poor brother in dinner jacket with its silk lapels Clucking and whispering and strutting through the drawing rooms of Condescension How pathetic you are The sun of your native country is nothing more now than a shadow On your composed civilized face And your grandmother's hut Brings blushes into cheeks made white by years of abasement and Mea culpa But when regurgitating the flood of lofty empty words Like the load that presses on your shoulders You walk again on the rough red earth of Africa These words of anguish will state the rhythm of your uneasy gait I feel so alone, so alone here!23 From time to time one would like to stop. To state reality is a wearing task. But, when one has taken it into one's head to try to express existence, one runs the risk of finding only the nonexistent. What is certain is that, at the very moment when I was trying to grasp my own being, Sartre, who remained The Other, gave me a name and thus shattered my last illusion. While I was saying to him: "My negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral, it thrusts into the red flesh of the sun, it thrusts into the burning flesh of the sky, it hollows through the dense dismay of its own pillar of patience ..." while I was shouting that, in the paroxysm of my being and my fury, he was reminding me that my blackness was only a minor term. In all truth, in all truth I tell you, my shoulders slipped out of the framework of the world, my feet could no longer feel the touch of the ground. Without a Negro past, without a Negro future, it was impossible for me to live my Negrohood. Not yet white, no longer wholly black, I was damned. Jean-Paul Sartre had forgotten that the Negro suffers in his body quite

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differently from the white man.24 Between the white man and me the connection was irrevocably one of transcendence.25 But the constancy of my love had been forgotten. I denned myself as an absolute intensity of beginning. So I took up my negritude, and with tears in my eyes I put its machinery together again. What had been broken to pieces was rebuilt, reconstructed by the intuitive lianas of my hands. My cry grew more violent: I am a Negro, I am a Negro, I am a Negro.... And there was my poor brother - living out his neurosis to the extreme and finding himself paralyzed: THE NEGRO: I can't, ma'am. LIZZIE: Why not? T H E N E G R O : I can't shoot white folks. LIZZIE: Really! That would bother them, wouldn't it? THE NEGRO: They're white folks, ma'am. LIZZIE: So what? Maybe they got a right to bleed you like a pig just because they're white? THE NEGRO: But they're white folks. A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence. Sin is Negro as virtue is white. All those white men in a group, guns in their hands, cannot be wrong. I am guilty. I do not know of what, but I know that I am no good. THE NEGRO: That's how it goes, ma'am. That's how it always goes with white folks. LIZZIE: You too? You feel guilty? THE NEGRO: Yes, ma'am.26 It is Bigger Thomas - he is afraid, he is terribly afraid. He is afraid, but of what is he afraid? Of himself. No one knows yet who he is, but he knows that fear will fill the world when the world finds out. And when the world knows, the world always expects something of the Negro. He is afraid lest the world know, he is afraid of the fear that the world would feel if the world knew. Like that old woman on her knees who begged me to tie her to her bed: "I just know, Doctor: Any minute that thing will take hold of me." "What thing?" "The wanting to kill myself. Tie me down, I'm afraid." In the end, Bigger Thomas acts. To put an end to his tension, he acts, he responds to the world's anticipation.27 So it is with the character in // He Hollers Let Him Go28 - who does precisely what he did not want to do. That big blonde who was always in

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his way, weak, sensual, offered, open, fearing (desiring) rape, became his mistress in the end. The Negro is a toy in the white man's hands; so, in order to shatter the hellish cycle, he explodes. I cannot go to a film without seeing myself. I wait for me. In the interval, just before the film starts, I wait for me. The people in the theater are watching me, examining me, waiting for me. A Negro groom is going to appear. My heart makes my head swim. The crippled veteran of the Pacific war says to my brother, "Resign yourself to your color the way I got used to my stump; we're both victims."29 Nevertheless with all my strength I refuse to accept that amputation. I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers, my chest has the power to expand without limit. I am a master and I am advised to adopt the humility of the cripple. Yesterday, awakening to the world, I saw the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly. I wanted to rise, but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep.

Notes 1 Jean Lhermitte, L'Image de notre corps (Paris, Nouvelle Revue critique, 1939), p. 17. 2 Sir Alan Burns, Colour Prejudice (London, Allen and Unwin, 1948), p. 16. 3 Anti-Semite and Jew (New York, Grove Press, 1960), pp. 112-113. 4 Ibid.,p. 115. 5 Jon Alfred Mjoen, "Harmonic and Disharmonic Race-crossings," The Second International Congress of Eugenics (1921), Eugenics in Race and State, vol. II, p. 60, quoted in Sir Alan Burns, op. cit., p. 120. 6 In English in the original. (Translator's note.) 7 "Ce que 1'homme noir apporte," in Claude Nordey, L'Homme de couleur (Paris, Plon, 1939), pp. 309-310. 8 Aime Cesaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Paris, Presence Africaine, 1956), pp. 77-78. 9 Ibid., p. 78. 10 Ibid., p. 79. 11 De Pedrals, La vie sexuelle en Afrique noire (Paris, Payot), p. 83. 12 A. M. Vergiat, Les rites secrets des primitifs de I'Oubangui (Paris, Payot, 1951), p. 113. 13 My italics - F.F. 14 My italics-F.F. 15 Leopold Senghor, "Ce que 1'homme noir apporte," in Nordey, op. cit., p. 205. 16 Leopold Senghor, Chants d'ombre (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1945). 17 Aime Cesaire, Introduction to Victor Schoelcher, Esclavage et colonisation (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), p. 7. 18 Ibid., p. 8. 19 Jean-Paul Sartre, Orphee Noir, preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), pp. xl ff. 1031

THINKING/WORKING THROUGH RACE 20 Ibid., p. xliv. 21 Jacques Roumain, "Bois-d'Ebene," Prelude, in Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache, p. 113. 22 David Diop, "Le temps du martyre," in ibid., p. 174. 23 David Diop, "Le Renegat." 24 Though Sartre's speculations on the existence of The Other may be correct (to the extent, we must remember, to which Being and Nothingness describes an alienated consciousness), their application to a black consciousness proves fallacious. That is because the white man is not only The Other but also the master, whether real or imaginary. 25 In the sense in which the word is used by Jean Wahl in Existence humaine et transcendance (Neuchatel, La Baconniere, 1944). 26 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Respectful Prostitute, in Three Plays (New York, Knopf, 1949), pp. 189,191. Originally, La Putain respectueuse (Paris, Gallimard, 1947). See also Home of the Brave, a film by Mark Robson. 27 Richard Wright, Native Son (New York, Harper, 1940). 28 By Chester Himes (Garden City, Doubleday, 1945). 29 Home of the Brave.

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7.4

BLACK POWER - ITS RELEVANCE TO THE WEST INDIES Walter Rodney From The Groundings With My Brothers, Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1969, 24-34

About a fortnight ago I had the opportunity of speaking on Black Power to an audience on this campus.1 At that time, the consciousness among students as far as the racial question is concerned had been heightened by several incidents on the world scene—notably, the hangings in Rhodesia and the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. Indeed, it has been heightened to such an extent that some individuals have started to organise a Black Power movement. My presence here attests to my full sympathy with their objectives. The topic on this occasion is no longer just 'Black Power' but 'Black Power and You'. Black Power can be seen as a movement and an ideology springing from the reality of oppression of black peoples by whites within the imperialist world as a whole. Now we need to be specific in defining the West Indian scene and our own particular roles in the society. You and I have to decide whether we want to think black or to remain as a dirty version of white. (I shall indicate the full significance of this later.) Recently there was a public statement in Scope where Black Power was referred to as 'Black supremacy'. This may have been a genuine error or a deliberate falsification. Black Power is a call to black peoples to throw off white domination and resume the handling of their own destinies. It means that blacks would enjoy power commensurate with their numbers in the world and in particular localities. Whenever an oppressed black man shouts for equality he is called a racist. This was said of Marcus Garvey in his day. Imagine that! We are so inferior that if we demand equality of opportunity and power that is outrageously racist! Black people who speak up for their rights must beware of this device of false accusations. It 1033

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is intended to place you on the defensive and if possible embarrass you into silence. How can we be both oppressed and embarrassed? Is it that our major concern is not to hurt the feelings of the oppressor? Black People must now take the offensive—if it is anyone who should suffer embarrassment it is the whites. Did black people roast six million Jews? Who exterminated millions of indigenous inhabitants in the Americas and Australia? Who enslaved countless millions of Africans? The white capitalist cannibal has always fed on the world's black peoples. White capitalist imperialist society is profoundly and unmistakably racist. The West Indies have always been a part of white capitalist society. We have been the most oppressed section because we were a slave society and the legacy of slavery still rests heavily upon the West Indian black man. I will briefly point to five highlights of our social development: (1) the development of racialism under slavery; (2) emancipation; (3) Indian indentured labour; (4) the year 1865 in Jamaica; (5) the year 1938 in the West Indies. Slavery. As C. L. R. James, Eric Williams and other W.I. scholars have pointed out, slavery in the West Indies started as an economic phenomenon rather than a racial one. But it rapidly became racist as all white labour was withdrawn from the fields, leaving black to be identified with slave labour and white to be linked with property and domination. Out of this situation where blacks had an inferior status in practice, there grew social and scientific theories relating to the supposed inherent inferiority of the black man, who was considered as having been created to bring water and hew wood for the white man. This theory then served to rationalise white exploitation of blacks all over Africa and Asia. The West Indies and the American South share the dubious distinction of being the breeding ground for world racialism. Naturally, our own society provided the highest expressions of racialism. Even the blacks became convinced of their own inferiority, though fortunately we are capable of the most intense expressions when we recognise that we have been duped by the white men. Black Power recognises both the reality of black oppression and self-negation as well as the potential for revolt. Emancipation. By the end of the 18th century, Britain had got most of what it wanted from black labour in the West Indies. Slavery and the slave trade had made Britain strong and now stood in the way of new developments, so it was time to abandon those systems. The Slave Trade and Slavery were thus ended; but Britain had to consider how to squeeze what little remained in the territories and how to maintain the local whites in power. They therefore decided to give the planters £20 million compensation and to guarantee their black labour supplies for the next six years through a system called apprenticeship. In that period, white society consolidated its position to ensure that slave relations should persist in our society. The Rastafari Brethren have always insisted that the black people

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were promised £20 million at emancipation. In reality, by any normal standards of justice, we black people should have got the £20 million compensation money. We were the ones who had been abused and wronged, hunted in Africa and brutalised on the plantations. In Europe, when serfdom was abolished, the serfs usually inherited the land as compensation and by right. In the West Indies, the exploiters were compensated because they could no longer exploit us in the same way as before. White property was of greater value than black humanity. It still is—white property is of greater value than black humanity in the British West Indies today, especially here in Jamaica. Indian Indentured Labour. Britain and the white West Indians had to maintain the plantation system in order to keep white supreme. When Africans started leaving the plantations to set up as independent peasants they threatened the plantation structure and therefore Indians were imported under the indenture arrangements. That was possible because white power controlled most of the world and could move non-white peoples around as they wished. It was from British-controlled India that the indentured labour was obtained. It was the impact of British commercial, military and political policies that was destroying the life and culture of 19th century India and forcing people to flee to other parts of the world to earn bread. Look where Indians fled—to the West Indies! The West Indies is a place black people want to leave not to come to. One must therefore appreciate the pressure of white power on India which gave rise to migration to the West Indies. Indians were brought here solely in the interest of white society—at the expense of Africans already in the West Indies and often against their own best interests, for Indians perceived indentured labour to be a form of slavery and it was eventually terminated through the pressure of Indian opinion in the homeland. The West Indies has made a unique contribution to the history of suffering in the world, and Indians have provided part of that contribution since indentures were first introduced. This is another aspect of the historical situation which is still with us. 1865. In that year Britain found a way of perpetuating White Power in the West Indies after ruthlessly crushing the revolt of our black brothers led by Paul Bogle. The British Government took away the Constitution of Jamaica and placed the island under the complete control of the Colonial Office, a manoeuvre that was racially motivated. The Jamaican legislature was then largely in the hands of the local whites with a mulatto minority, but if the gradual changes continued the mulattoes would have taken control—and the blacks were next in line. Consequently, the British Government put a stop to the process of the gradual takeover of political power by blacks. When we look at the British Empire in the 19th century, we see a clear difference between white colonies and black colonies. In the white colonies like Canada and Australia the British were giving white

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people their freedom and self-rule. In the black colonies of the West Indies, Africa and Asia the British were busy taking away the political freedom of the inhabitants. Actually, on the constitutional level, Britain had already displayed its racialism in the West Indies in the early 19th century when it refused to give mulattoes the power of Government in Trinidad, although they were the majority of free citizens. In 1865 in Jamaica it was not the first nor the last time on which Britain made it clear that its white 'kith and kin' would be supported to hold dominion over blacks. 1938. Slavery ended in various islands of the West Indies between 1834 and 1838. Exactly 100 years later (between 1934-38) the black people in the West Indies revolted against the hypocritical freedom of the society. The British were very surprised—they had long forgotten all about the blacks in the British West Indies and they sent a Royal Commission to find out what it was all about. The report of the conditions was so shocking that the British government did not release it until after the war, because they wanted black colonials to fight the white man's battles. By the time the war ended it war clear in the West Indies and throughout Asia and Africa that some concessions would have to be made to black peoples. In general, the problem as seen by white imperialists was to give enough power to certain groups in colonial society to keep the whole society from exploding and to maintain the essentials of the imperialist structure. In the British West Indies, they had to take into account the question of military strategy because we lie under the belly of the world's imperialist giant, the U.S.A. Besides, there was the new and vital mineral bauxite, which had to be protected. The British solution was to pull out wherever possible and leave the imperial government in the hands of the U.S.A., while the local government was given to a white, brown and black petty-bourgeoisie who were culturally the creations of white capitalist society and who therefore support the white imperialist system because they gain personally and because they have been brainwashed into aiding the oppression of black people. Black Power in the West Indies means three closely related things: (i) the break with imperialism which is historically white racist; (ii) the assumption of power by the black masses in the islands; (iii) the cultural reconstruction of the society in the image of the blacks. I shall anticipate certain questions on who are the blacks in the West Indies since they are in fact questions which have been posed to me elsewhere. I maintain that it is the white world which has defined who are blacks—if you are not white then you are black. However, it is obvious that the West Indian situation is complicated by factors such as the variety of racial types and racial mixtures and by the process of class formation. We have, therefore, to note not simply what the white world says but also how individuals perceive each other. Nevertheless, we can talk of the mass

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of the West Indian population as being black—either African or Indian. There seems to have been some doubts on the last point, and some fear that Black Power is aimed against the Indian. This would be a flagrant denial of both the historical experience of the West Indies and the reality of the contemporary scene. When the Indian was brought to the West Indies, he met the same racial contempt which whites applied to Africans. The Indian, too, was reduced to a single stereotype—the coolie or labourer. He too was a hewer of wood and a bringer of water. I spoke earlier of the revolt of the blacks in the West Indies in 1938. That revolt involved Africans in Jamaica, Africans and Indians in Trinidad and Guyana. The uprisings in Guyana were actually led by Indian sugar workers. Today, some Indians (like some Africans) have joined the white power structure in terms of economic activity and culture; but the underlying reality is that poverty resides among Africans and Indians in the West Indies and that power is denied them. Black Power in the West Indies, therefore, refers primarily to people who are recognisably African or Indian. The Chinese, on the other hand, are a former labouring group who have now become bastions of white West Indian social structure. The Chinese of the People's Republic of China have long broken with and are fighting against white imperialism, but our Chinese have nothing to do with that movement. They are to be identified with Chiang-Kai-Shek and not Chairman Mao Tse-tung. They are to be put in the same bracket as the lackeys of capitalism and imperialism who are to be found in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Whatever the circumstances in which the Chinese came to the West Indies, they soon became (as a group) members of the exploiting class. They will have either to relinquish or be deprived of that function before they can be re-integrated into a West Indian society where the black man walks in dignity. The same applies to the mulattoes, another group about whom I have been questioned. The West Indian brown man is characterised by ambiguity and ambivalence. He has in the past identified with the black masses when it suited his interests, and at the present time some browns are in the forefront of the movement towards black consciousness; but the vast majority have fallen to the bribes of white imperialism, often outdoing the whites in their hatred and oppression of blacks. Garvey wrote of the Jamaican mulattoes—'I was openly hated and persecuted by some of these coloured men of the island who did not want to be classified as Negroes but as white'. Naturally, conscious West Indian blacks like Garvey have in turn expressed their dislike for the browns, but there is nothing in the West Indian experience which suggests that browns are unacceptable when they choose to identify with blacks. The post-1938 developments in fact showed exactly the opposite. It seems to me, therefore, that it is not for the Black Power movement to determine the position of the browns,

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reds and so-called West Indian whites—the movement can only keep the door open and leave it to those groups to make their choice. Black Power is not racially intolerant. It is the hope of the black man that he should have power over his own destinies. This is not incompatible with a multi-racial society where each individual counts equally. Because the moment that power is equitably distributed among several ethnic groups then the very relevance of making the distinction between groups will be lost. What we must object to is the current image of a multi-racial society living in harmony—that is a myth designed to justify the exploitation suffered by the blackest of our population, at the hands of the lighterskinned groups. Let us look at the figures for the racial composition of the Jamaican population. Of every 100 Jamaicans, 76.8% are visibly African 0.8% European 1.1% Indian 0.6% Chinese 0.1% Syrian 14.6% Afro-European 5.4% other mixtures

91% have African blood

This is a black society where Africans preponderate. Apart from the mulatto mixture all other groups are numerically insignificant and yet the society seeks to give them equal weight and indeed more weight than the Africans. If we went to Britain we could easily find non-white groups in the above proportions2—Africans and West Indians, Indians and Pakistanis, Turks, Arabs and other Easterners—but Britain is not called a multi-racial society. When we go to Britain we don't expect to take over all of the British real estate business, all their cinemas and most of their commerce as the European, Chinese and Syrian have done here. All we ask for there is some work and shelter, and we can't even get that. Black Power must proclaim that Jamaica is a black society—we should fly Garvey's Black Star banner and we will treat all other groups in the society on that understanding—they can have the basic right of all individuals but no privileges to exploit Africans as has been the pattern during slavery and ever since. The present government knows that Jamaica is a black man's country. That is why Garvey has been made a national hero, for they are trying to deceive black people into thinking that the government is with them. The government of Jamaica recognises black power—it is afraid of the potential wrath of Jamaica's black and largely African population. It is that same fear which forced them to declare mourning when black men are murdered in Rhodesia, and when Martin Luther King was murdered in the U.S.A. But the black people don't need to be told that Garvey is a

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national hero—they know that. Nor do they need to be told to mourn when blacks are murdered by White Power, because they mourn everyday right here in Jamaica where white power keeps them ignorant, unemployed, ill-clothed and ill-fed. They will stop mourning when things change—and that means a revolution, for the first essential is to break the chains which bind us to white imperialists, and that is a very revolutionary step. Cuba is the only country in the West Indies and in this hemisphere which has broken with white power. That is why Stokely Carmichael can visit Cuba but he can't visit Trinidad or Jamaica. That is why Stokely can call Fidel 'one of the blackest men in the Americas' and that is why our leaders in contrast qualify as 'white'. Here I'm not just playing with words—I'm extending the definition of Black Power by indicating the nature of its opposite, 'White Power', and I'm providing a practical illustration of what Black Power means in one particular West Indian community where it had already occurred. White Power is the power of whites over blacks without any participation of the blacks. White Power rules the imperialist world as a whole. In Cuba the blacks and mulattoes numbered 1,585,073 out of a population of 5,829,029 in 1953—i.e. about one quarter of the population. Like Jamaica's black people today, they were the poorest and most depressed people on the island. Lighter-skinned Cubans held local power, while real power was in the hands of the U.S. imperialists. Black Cubans fought alongside white Cuban workers and peasants because they were all oppressed. Major Juan Almeida, one of the outstanding leaders of Cuba today, was one of the original guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra, and he is black. Black Cubans today enjoy political, economic and social rights and opportunities of exactly the same kind as white Cubans. They too bear arms in the Cuban Militia as an expression of their basic rights. In other words, White Power in Cuba is ended. The majority of the white population naturally predominates numerically in most spheres of activity but they do not hold dominion over blacks without regard to the latter's interests. The blacks have achieved power commensurate with their own numbers by their heroic self-efforts during the days of slavery, in fighting against the Spanish and in fighting against imperialism. Having achieved their rights they can in fact afford to forget the category 'black' and think simply as Cuban citizens, as Socialist equals and as men. In Jamaica, where blacks are far greater in numbers and have no whites alongside them as oppressed workers and peasants, it will be the black people who alone can bear the brunt of revolutionary fighting. Trotsky once wrote that Revolution is the carnival of the masses. When we have that carnival in the West Indies, are people like us here at the university going to join the bacchanal? Let us have a look at our present position. Most of us who have studied at the U.W.I, are discernibly black, and yet we are undeniably part of the

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white imperialist system. A few are actively pro-imperialist. They have no confidence in anything that is not white—they talk nonsense about black people being lazy—the same nonsense which was said about the Jamaican black man after emancipation, although he went to Panama and performed the giant task of building the Panama Canal—the same nonsense which is said about W.I. unemployed today, and yet they proceed to England to run the whole transport system. Most of us do not go to quite the same extremes in denigrating ourselves and our black brothers, but we say nothing against the system, and that means that we are acquiescing in the exploitation of our brethren. One of the ways that the situation has persisted especially in recent times is that it has given a few individuals like you and I a vision of personal progress measured in terms of front lawn and of the latest model of a huge American car. This has recruited us into their ranks and deprived the black masses of articulate leadership. That is why at the outset I stressed that our choice was to remain as part of the white system or to break with it. There is no other alternative. Black Power in the W.I. must aim at transforming the Black intelligentsia into the servants of the black masses. Black Power, within the university and without must aim at overcoming white cultural imperialism. Whites have dominated us both physically and mentally. This fact is brought out in virtually any serious sociological study of the region—the brainwashing process has been so stupendous that it has convinced so many black men of their inferiority. I will simply draw a few illustrations to remind you of this fact which blacks like us at Mona prefer to forget. The adult black in our West Indian society is fully conditioned to thinking white, because that is the training we are given from childhood. The little black girl plays with a white doll, identifying with it as she combs its flaxen hair. Asked to sketch the figure of a man or woman, the black schoolboy instinctively produces a white man or a white woman. This is not surprising, since until recently the illustrations in our text books were all figures of Europeans. The few changes which have taken place have barely scratched the surface of the problem. West Indians of every colour still aspire to European standards of dress and beauty. The language which is used by black people in describing ourselves shows how we despise our African appearance. 'Good hair' means European hair, 'good nose' means a straight nose, 'good complexion' means a light complexion. Everybody recognises how incongruous and ridiculous such terms are, but we continue to use them and to express our support of the assumption that white Europeans have the monopoly of beauty, and that black is the incarnation of ugliness. That is why Black Power advocates find it necessary to assert that BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL. The most profound revelation of the sickness of our society on the question of race is our respect for all the white symbols of the Christian religion. God the Father is white, God the Son is white, and presumably

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God the Holy Ghost is white also. The disciples and saints are white, all the Cherubim, Seraphim and angels are white—except Lucifer, of course, who was black, being the embodiment of evil. When one calls upon black people to reject these things, this is not an attack on the teachings of Christ or the ideals of Christianity. What we have to ask is 'Why should Christianity come to us all wrapped up in white?' The white race constitute about 20 per cent of the world's population, and yet non-white peoples are supposed to accept that all who inhabit the heavens are white. There are 650 million Chinese, so why shouldn't God and most of the angels be Chinese? The truth is that there is absolutely no reason why different racial groups should not provide themselves with their own religious symbols. A picture of Christ could be red, white or black, depending upon the people who are involved. When Africans adopt the European concept that purity and goodness must be painted white and all that is evil and dammed is to be painted black then we are flagrantly self-insulting. Through the manipulation of this media of education and communication, white people have produced black people who administer the system and perpetuate the white values—'white-hearted black men', as they are called by conscious elements. This is as true of the Indians as it is true of the Africans in our West Indian society. Indeed, the basic explanation of the tragedy of African/Indian confrontation in Guyana and Trinidad is the fact that both groups are held captive by the European way of seeing things. When an African abuses an Indian he repeats all that the white men said about Indian indentured 'coolies'; and in turn the Indian has borrowed from the whites the stereotype of the 'lazy nigger' to apply to the African beside him. It is as though no black man can see another black man except by looking through a white person. It is time we started seeing through our own eyes. The road to Black Power here in the West Indies and everywhere else must begin with a revaluation of ourselves as blacks and with a redefinition of the world from our own standpoint.

Notes 1 The U.W.I, campus. 2 As the non-blacks in Jamaica. Editor's note.

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AN IMAGE OF AFRICA* Chinua Achebe From The Massachusetts Review 18.4 (Winter 1977): 782-94

It was a fine autumn morning at the beginning of this academic year such as encouraged friendliness to passing strangers. Brisk youngsters were hurrying in all directions, many of them obviously freshmen in their first flush of enthusiasm. An older man, going the same way as I, turned and remarked to me how very young they came these days. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was a student too. I said no, I was a teacher. What did I teach? African literature. Now that was funny, he said, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know. By this time I was walking much faster. "Oh well," I heard him say finally, behind me, "I guess I have to take your course to find out." A few weeks later I received two very touching letters from high school children in Yonkers, New York, who—bless their teacher—had just read Things Fall Apart. One of them was particularly happy to learn about the customs and superstitions of an African tribe. I propose to draw from these rather trivial encounters rather heavy conclusions which at first sight might seem somewhat out of proportion to them: But only at first sight. The young fellow from Yonkers, perhaps partly on account of his age but I believe also for much deeper and more serious reasons, is obviously unaware that the life of his own tribesmen in Yonkers, New York, is full of odd customs and superstitions and, like everybody else in his culture, imagines that he needs a trip to Africa to encounter those things. The other person being fully my own age could not be excused on the grounds of his years. Ignorance might be a more likely reason; but here again I believe that something more willful than a mere lack of information was at work. For did not that erudite British historian and Regius Professor at Oxford, Hugh Trevor Roper, pronounce a few years ago that African history did not exist? If there is something in these utterances more than youthful experience,

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more than a lack of factual knowledge, what is it? Quite simply it is the desire—one might indeed say the need—in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil in Europe, a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest. This need is not new: which should relieve us of considerable responsibility and perhaps make us even willing to look at this phenomenon dispassionately. I have neither the desire nor, indeed, the competence to do so with the tools of the social and biological sciences. But, I can respond, as a novelist, to one famous book of European fiction, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which better than any other work I know displays that Western desire and need which I have just spoken about. Of course, there are whole libraries of books devoted to the same purpose, but most of them are so obvious and so crude that few people worry about them today. Conrad, on the other hand, is undoubtedly one of the great stylists of modern fiction and a good storyteller into the bargain. His contribution therefore falls automatically into a different class—permanent literature— read and taught and constantly evaluated by serious academics. Heart of Darkness is indeed so secure today that a leading Conrad scholar has numbered it "among the half-dozen greatest short novels in the English language."1 I will return to this critical option in due course because it may seriously modify my earlier suppositions about who may or may not be guilty in the things of which I will now speak. Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as "the other world," the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where a man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality. The book opens on the River Thames, tranquil, resting peacefully "at the decline of day after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks." But the actual story takes place on the River Congo, the very antithesis of the Thames. The River Congo is quite decidedly not a River Emeritus. It has rendered no service and enjoys no oldage pension. We are told that "going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginning of the world." Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good, the other bad? Yes, but that is not the real point. What actually worries Conrad is the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames, too, "has been one of the dark places of the earth." It conquered its darkness, of course, and is now at peace. But if it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would run the terrible risk of hearing grotesque, suggestive echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and of falling victim to an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first beginnings. I am not going to waste your time with examples of Conrad's famed evocation of the African atmosphere. In the final consideration it amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two 1043

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sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy. An example of the former is "It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention" and of the latter, "The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy." Of course, there is a judicious change of adjective from time to time so that instead of "inscrutable," for example, you might have "unspeakable," etc., etc. The eagle-eyed English critic, F. R. Leavis, drew attention nearly thirty years ago to Conrad's "adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery." That insistence must not be dismissed lightly, as many Conrad critics have tended to do, as a mere stylistic flaw. For it raises serious questions of artistic good faith. When a writer, while pretending to record scenes, incidents and their impact, is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity. Generally, normal readers are well armed to detect and resist such underhand activity. But Conrad chose his subject well— one which was guaranteed not to put him in conflict with the psychological predisposition of his readers or raise the need for him to contend with their resistance. He chose the role of purveyor of comforting myths. The most interesting and revealing passages in Heart of Darkness are, however, about people. I must quote a long passage from the middle of the story in which representatives of Europe in a steamer going down the Congo encounter the denizens of Africa: We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories. The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was 1044

AN IMAGE OF AFRICA the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend. Herein lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the Western mind: "What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours.. .. Ugly." Having shown us Africa in the mass, Conrad then zeros in on a specific example, giving us one of his rare descriptions of an African who is not just limbs or rolling eyes: And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind legs. A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted at the steam gauge and at the water gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity—and he had filed his teeth, too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. As everybody knows, Conrad is a romantic on the side. He might not exactly admire savages clapping their hands and stamping their feet but they have at least the merit of being in their place, unlike this dog in a parody of breeches. For Conrad, things (and persons) being in their place is of the utmost importance. Towards the end of the story, Conrad lavishes great attention quite unexpectedly on an African woman who has obviously been some kind of mistress to Mr. Kurtz and now presides (if I may be permitted a little imitation of Conrad) like a formidable mystery over the inexorable imminence of his departure: She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent . . . She stood looking at us without a stir and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose.

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This Amazon is drawn in considerable detail, albeit of a predictable nature, for two reasons. First, she is in her place and so can win Conrad's special brand of approval; and second, she fulfills a structural requirement of the story; she is a savage counterpart to the refined, European woman with whom the story will end: She came forward, all in black with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk. She was in mourning. . .. She took both my hands in hers and murmured, "I had heard you were coming" . . . She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering. The difference in the attitude of the novelist to these two women is conveyed in too many direct and subtle ways to need elaboration. But perhaps the most significant difference is the one implied in the author's bestowal of human expression to the one and the withholding of it from the other. It is clearly not part of Conrad's purpose to confer language on the "rudimentary souls" of Africa. They only "exchanged short grunting phrases" even among themselves but mostly they were too busy with their frenzy. There are two occasions in the book, however, when Conrad departs somewhat from his practice and confers speech, even English speech, on the savages. The first occurs when cannibalism gets the better of them: "Catch 'im," he snapped, with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp white teeth—"catch 'im. Give 'im to us." "To you, eh?" I asked; "what would you do with them?" "Eat 'im!" he said curtly . . . The other occasion is the famous announcement: Mistah Kurtz—he dead. At first sight, these instances might be mistaken for unexpected acts of generosity from Conrad. In reality, they constitute some of his best assaults. In the case of the cannibals, the incomprehensible grunts that had thus far served them for speech suddenly proved inadequate for Conrad's purpose of letting the European glimpse the unspeakable craving in their hearts. Weighing the necessity for consistency in the portrayal of the dumb brutes against the sensational advantages of securing their conviction by clear, unambiguous evidence issuing out of their own mouth, Conrad chose the latter. As for the announcement of Mr. Kurtz's death by the "insolent black head of the doorway," what better or more appropriate finis could be written to the horror story of that wayward child of civilization who willfully had given his soul to the powers of darkness and "taken

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a high seat amongst the devils of the land" than the proclamation of his physical death by the forces he had joined? It might be contended, of course, that the attitude to the African in Heart of Darkness is not Conrad's but that of his fictional narrator, Marlow, and that far from endorsing it Conrad might indeed be holding it up to irony and criticism. Certainly, Conrad appears to go to considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and the moral universe of his story. He has, for example, a narrator behind a narrator. The primary narrator is Marlow but his account is given to us through the filter of a second, shadowy person. But if Conrad's intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and the moral and psychological malaise of his narrator, his care seems to me totally wasted because he neglects to hint however subtly or tentatively at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters. It would not have been beyond Conrad's power to make that provision if he had thought it necessary. Marlow seems to me to enjoy Conrad's complete confidence—a feeling reinforced by the close similarities between their careers. Marlow comes through to us not only as a witness of truth, but one holding those advanced and humane views appropriate to the English liberal tradition which required all Englishmen of decency to be deeply shocked by atrocities in Bulgaria or the Congo of King Leopold of the Belgians or wherever. Thus Marlow is able to toss out such bleeding-heart sentiments as these: They were all dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. The kind of liberalism espoused here by Marlow/Conrad touched all the best minds of the age in England, Europe, and America. It took different forms in the minds of different people but almost always managed to sidestep the ultimate question of equality between white people and black people. That extraordinary missionary, Albert Schweitzer, who sacrificed brilliant careers in music and theology in Europe for a life of service to Africans in much the same area as Conrad writes about, epitomizes the ambivalence. In a comment which I have often quoted but must quote one last time Schweitzer says: "The African is indeed my brother but my junior brother." And so he proceeded to build a hospital appropriate to the needs of junior brothers with standards of hygiene reminiscent of medical practice in the days before the germ theory of disease came into

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being. Naturally, he became a sensation in Europe and America. Pilgrims flocked, and I believe still flock even after he has passed on, to witness the prodigious miracle in Lamberene, on the edge of the primeval forest. Conrad's liberalism would not take him quite as far as Schweitzer's, though. He would not use the word "brother" however qualified; the farthest he would go was "kinship." When Marlow's African helmsman falls down with a spear in his heart he gives his white master one final disquieting look. And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory—like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment. It is important to note that Conrad, careful as ever with his words, is not talking so much about distant kinship as about someone laying a claim on it. The black man lays a claim on the white man which is well-nigh intolerable. It is the laying of this claim which frightens and at the same time fascinates Conrad, ". .. the thought of their humanity—like yours . . . Ugly." The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely, that Conrad was a bloody racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticism of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely undetected. Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives. A Conrad student told me in Scotland last year that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz. Which is partly the point: Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Of course, there is a preposterous and perverse kind of arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the breakup of one petty European mind. But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot. I would not call that man an artist, for example, who composes an eloquent instigation to one people to fall upon another and destroy them. No matter how striking his imagery or how beautiful his cadences fall such a man is no more a great artist than another may be called a priest who reads the mass backwards or a physician who poisons his patients. All those men in Nazi Germany who lent their talent to the

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service of virulent racism whether in science, philosophy or the arts have generally and rightly been condemned for their perversions. The time is long overdue for taking a hard look at the work of creative artists who apply their talents, alas often considerable as in the case of Conrad, to set people against people. This, I take it, is what Yevtushenko is after when he tells us that a poet cannot be a slave trader at the same time, and gives the striking example of Arthur Rimbaud who was fortunately honest enough to give up any pretenses to poetry when he opted for slave trading. For poetry surely can only be on the side of man's deliverance and not his enslavement; for the brotherhood and unity of all mankind and against the doctrines of Hitler's master races or Conrad's "rudimentary souls." Last year was the 50th anniversary of Conrad's death. He was born in 1857, the very year in which the first Anglican missionaries were arriving among my own people in Nigeria. It was certainly not his fault that he lived his life at a time when the reputation of the black man was at a particularly low level. But even after due allowances have been made for all the influences of contemporary prejudice on his sensibility, there remains still in Conrad's attitude a residue of antipathy to black people which his peculiar psychology alone can explain. His own account of his first encounter with a black man is very revealing: A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards. Certainly, Conrad had a problem with niggers. His inordinate love of that word itself should be of interest to psychoanalysts. Sometimes his fixation on blackness is equally interesting as when he gives us this brief description: A black figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black arms.2 as though we might expect a black figure striding along on black legs to have white arms! But so unrelenting is Conrad's obsession. As a matter of interest Conrad gives us in A Personal Record what amounts to a companion piece to the buck nigger of Haiti. At the age of sixteen Conrad encountered his first Englishman in Europe. He calls him "my unforgettable Englishman" and describes him in the following manner: [his] calves exposed to the public gaze . . . dazzled the beholder by the splendor of their marble-like condition and their rich tone of

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young ivory . . . The light of a headlong, exalted satisfaction with the world of men . . . illumined his face . . . and triumphant eyes. In passing he cast a glance of kindly curiosity and a friendly gleam of big, sound, shiny teeth . . . his white calves twinkled sturdily.3 Irrational love and irrational hate jostling together in the heart of that tormented man. But whereas irrational love may at worst engender foolish acts of indiscretion, irrational hate can endanger the life of the community. Naturally, Conrad is a dream for psychoanalytic critics. Perhaps the most detailed study of him in this direction is by Bernard C. Meyer, M.D. In his lengthy book, Dr. Meyer follows every conceivable lead (and sometimes inconceivable ones) to explain Conrad. As an example, he gives us long disquisitions on the significance of hair and hair-cutting in Conrad. And yet not even one word is spared for his attitude to black people. Not even the discussion of Conrad's antisemitism was enough to spark off in Dr. Meyer's mind those other dark and explosive thoughts. Which only leads one to surmise that Western psychoanalysts must regard the kind of racism displayed by Conrad as absolutely normal despite the profoundly important work done by Frantz Fanon in the psychiatric hospitals of French Algeria. Whatever Conrad's problems were, you might say he is now safely dead. Quite true. Unfortunately, his heart of darkness plagues us still. Which is why an offensive and totally deplorable book can be described by a serious scholar as "among the half dozen greatest short novels in the English language," and why it is today perhaps the most commonly prescribed novel in the twentieth-century literature courses in our own English Department here. Indeed the time is long overdue for a hard look at things. There are two probable grounds on which what I have said so far may be contested. The first is that it is no concern of fiction to please people about whom it is written. I will go along with that. But I am not talking about pleasing people. I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today. I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question. It seems to me totally inconceivable that great art or even good art could possibly reside in such unwholesome surroundings. Secondly, I may be challenged on the grounds of actuality. Conrad, after all, sailed down the Congo in 1890 when my own father was still a babe in arms, and recorded what he saw. How could I stand up in 1975, fifty years after his death and purport to contradict him? My answer is that as a sensible man I will not accept just any traveller's tales solely on the grounds that I have not made the journey myself. I will not trust the evid-

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ence even of a man's very eyes when I suspect them to be as jaundiced as Conrad's. And we also happen to know that Conrad was, in the words of his biographer, Bernard C. Meyer, "notoriously inaccurate in the rendering of his own history."4 But more important by far is the abundant testimony about Conrad's savages which we could gather if we were so inclined from other sources and which might lead us to think that these people must have had other occupations besides merging into the evil forest or materializing out of it simply to plague Marlow and his dispirited band. For as it happened, soon after Conrad had written his book an event of far greater consequence was taking place in the art world of Europe. This is how Frank Willett, a British art historian, describes it: Gaugin had gone to Tahiti, the most extravagant individual act of turning to a non-European culture in the decades immediately before and after 1900, when European artists were avid for new artistic experiences, but it was only about 1904-5 that African art began to make its distinctive impact. One piece is still identifiable; it is a mask that had been given to Maurice Vlaminck in 1905. He records that Derain was "speechless" and "stunned" when he saw it, bought it from Vlaminck and in turn showed it to Picasso and Matisse, who were also greatly affected by it. Ambroise Vollard then borrowed it and had it cast in bronze . . . The revolution of twentieth century art was under way!5 The mask in question was made by other savages living just north of Conrad's River Congo. They have a name, the Fang people, and are without a doubt among the world's greatest masters of the sculptured form. As you might have guessed, the event to which Frank Willett refers marked the beginning of cubism and the infusion of new life into European art that had run completely out of strength. The point of all this is to suggest that Conrad's picture of the people of the Congo seems grossly inadequate even at the height of their subjection to the ravages of King Leopold's International Association for the Civilization of Central Africa. Travellers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves. But even those not blinkered, like Conrad, with xenophobia, can be astonishingly blind. Let me digress a little here. One of the greatest and most intrepid travellers of all time, Marco Polo, journeyed to the Far East from the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century and spent twenty years in the court of Kublai Khan in China. On his return to Venice he set down in his book entitled Description of the World his impressions of the peoples and places and customs he had seen. There are at least two extraordinary omissions in his account. He says nothing about the art of printing unknown as yet in

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Europe but in full flower in China. He either did not notice it at all or if he did, failed to see what use Europe could possibly have for it. Whatever reason, Europe had to wait another hundred years for Gutenberg. But even more spectacular was Marco Polo's omission of any reference to the Great Wall of China nearly 4000 miles long and already more than 1000 years old at the time of his visit. Again, he may not have seen it; but the Great Wall of China is the only structure built by man which is visible from the moon!6 Indeed, travellers can be blind. As I said earlier, Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it. For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry, the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparing it with Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity, it could say with faith and feeling: There go I but for the grace of God. Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray—a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate. Consequently, Africa is something to be avoided just as the picture has to be hidden away to safeguard the man's jeopardous integrity. Keep away from Africa, or else! Mr. Kurtz of Heart of Darkness should have heeded that warning and the prowling horror in his heart would have kept its place, chained to its lair. But he foolishly exposed himself to the wild irresistible allure of the jungle and lo! the darkness found him out. In my original conception of this talk I had thought to conclude it nicely on an appropriately positive note in which I would suggest from my privileged position in African and Western culture some advantages the West might derive from Africa once it rid its mind of old prejudices and began to look at Africa not through a haze of distortions and cheap mystification but quite simply as a continent of people—not angels, but not rudimentary souls either—just people, often highly gifted people and often strikingly successful in their enterprise with life and society. But as I thought more about the stereotype image, about its grip and pervasiveness, about the willful tenacity with which the West holds it to its heart; when I thought of your television and the cinema and newspapers, about books read in schools and out of school, of churches preaching to empty pews about the need to send help to the heathen in Africa, I realized that no easy optimism was possible. And there is something totally wrong in offering bribes to the West in return for its good opinion of Africa. Ultimately, the abandonment of unwholesome thoughts must be its own and only reward. Although I have used the word willful a few times in this talk to characterize the West's view of Africa it may well be that what is happening at this

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stage is more akin to reflex action than calculated malice. Which does not make the situation more, but less, hopeful. Let me give you one last and really minor example of what I mean. Last November the Christian Science Monitor carried an interesting article written by its Education Editor on the serious psychological and learning problems faced by little children who speak one language at home and then go to school where something else is spoken. It was a wideranging article taking in Spanish-speaking children in this country, the children of migrant Italian workers in Germany, the quadrilingual phenomenon in Malaysia and so on. And all this while the article speaks unequivocally about language. But then out of the blue sky comes this: In London there is an enormous immigration of children who speak Indian or Nigerian dialects, or some other native language.7 I believe that the introduction of dialects, which is technically erroneous in the context, is almost a reflex action caused by an instinctive desire of the writer to downgrade the discussion to the level of Africa and India. And this is quite comparable to Conrad's withholding of language from his rudimentary souls. Language is too grand for these chaps; let's give them dialects. In all this business a lot of violence is inevitably done to words and their meaning. Look at the phrase "native language" in the above excerpt. Surely the only native language possible in London is Cockney English. But our writer obviously means something else—something Indians and Africans speak. Perhaps a change will come. Perhaps this is the time when it can begin, when the high optimism engendered by the breathtaking achievements of Western science and industry is giving way to doubt and even confusion. There is just the possibility that Western man may begin to look seriously at the achievements of other people. I read in the papers the other day a suggestion that what America needs at this time is somehow to bring back the extended family. And I saw in my mind's eye future African Peace Corps Volunteers corning to help you set up the system. Seriously, although the work which needs to be done may appear too daunting, I believe that it is not one day too soon to begin. And where better than at a University?

Notes * This paper was given as a Chancellor's Lecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, February 18, 1975. 1 Albert J. Guerard, Introduction to Heart of Darkness (New York: New American Library, 1950), p. 9: 2 Jonah Raskin, The Mythology of Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 143.

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3 Bernard C. Meyer, M.D., Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 30. 4 Ibid.,p.3Q. 5 Frank Willett, African Art (New York: Praeger, 1971), pp. 35-36. 6 About the omission of the Great Wall of China I am indebted to The Journey of Marco Polo as recreated by artist Michael Foreman, published by Pegasus Magazine, 1974. 7 Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 25,1974, p. 11.

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7.6 THE ECONOMY OF MANICHEAN ALLEGORY The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature Abdul R. JanMohamed* From Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 59-87

Despite all its merits, the vast majority of critical attention devoted to colonialist literature restricts itself by severely bracketing the political context of culture and history. This typical facet of humanistic closure requires the critic systematically to avoid an analysis of the domination, manipulation, exploitation, and disfranchisement that are inevitably involved in the construction of any cultural artifact or relationship. I can best illustrate such closures in the field of colonialist discourse with two brief examples. In her book The Colonial Encounter, which contrasts the colonial representations of three European and three non-European writers, M. M. Mahood skirts the political issue quite explicitly by arguing that she chose those authors precisely because they are "innocent of emotional exploitation of the colonial scene" and are "distanced" from the politics of domination.1 We find a more interesting example of this closure in Homi Bhabha's criticism. While otherwise provocative and illuminating, his work rests on two assumptions—the unity of the "colonial subject" and the "ambivalence" of colonial discourse—that are inadequately problematized and, I feel, finally unwarranted and unacceptable. In rejecting Edward Said's "suggestion that colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely by the coloniser," Bhabha asserts, without providing any explanation, the unity of the "colonial subject (both coloniser and colonised)."2 I do not wish to rule out, a priori, the possibility that at some rarefied theoretical level the varied material and discursive antagonisms between conquerors and natives can be reduced to the workings of a single "subject"; but such a

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unity, let alone its value, must be demonstrated, not assumed. Though he cites Frantz Fanon, Bhabha completely ignores Fanon's definition of the conqueror/native relation as a "Manichean" struggle—a definition that is not a fanciful metaphoric caricature but an accurate representation of a profound conflict.3 Consider, for instance, E. A. Brett's research, only one example I might adduce that corroborates Fanon's definition. Brett found that the European attempt to develop a capital-centered mode of agricultural production in Kenya, where farming was essentially precapitalistic, created a conflict between two incompatible modes of production and that "any effective development of one necessarily precluded an equivalent development of the other in the same social universe."4 Native farming was centered around a subsistence economy and, more crucially, did not offer the means of production—namely, land and labor—for exchange on the market. Consequently, as Brett demonstrates, in order to commodify land and labor and make them available on the capitalist "market," the British systematically destroyed the native mode of production. In other words, the Europeans disrupted a material and discursive universe based on usevalue and replaced it with one dominated by exchange-value. In this kind of context, what does it mean, in practice, to imply as Bhabha does that the native, whose entire economy and culture are destroyed, is somehow in "possession" of "colonial power"? Bhabha's unexamined conflation allows him to circumvent entirely the dense history of the material conflict between Europeans and natives and to focus on colonial discourse as if it existed in a vacuum. This move in turn permits him to fetishize what he calls "colonial" discourse (that is, the discourse of the dominators and the dominated) and map its contradictions as the problematics of an "ambivalence," an "indeterminacy," that is somehow intrinsic to the authority of that discourse.5 By dismissing "intentionalist" readings of such discourse as "idealist" quests, Bhabha is able to privilege its "ambivalence" and, thereby, to imply that its "authority" is genuinely and innocently confused, unable to choose between two equally valid meanings and representations. To impute in this way, at this late date, and through the back door, an innocent or naive "intention" to colonialist discourse is itself a naive act at best. Wittingly or otherwise, Bhabha's strategy serves the same ideological function as older, humanistic analyses: like Mahood, he represses the political history of colonialism, which is inevitably sedimented in its discourse. We can better understand colonialist discourse, it seems to me, through an analysis that maps its ideological function in relation to actual imperialist practices. Such an examination reveals that any evident "ambivalence" is in fact a product of deliberate, if at times subconscious, imperialist duplicity, operating very efficiently through the economy of its central

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trope, the manichean allegory. This economy, in turn, is based on a transformation of racial difference into moral and even metaphysical difference. Though the phenomenological origins of this metonymic transformation may lie in the "neutral" perception of physical difference (skin color, physical features, and such), its allegorical extensions come to dominate every facet of imperialist mentality. Even the works of some of the most enlightened and critical colonial writers eventually succumb to a narrative organization based on racial/metaphysical oppositions, whose motives remain morally fixed but whose categories flex to accommodate any situation. I cannot trace the genealogy of the metonymic transformation and the resulting allegory in its entirety here; nevertheless, our examination must begin with a brief appraisal of the social, political, and economic ambience of colonial society, which is responsible for generating these duplicitous tropes.

1 The perception of racial difference is, in the first place, influenced by economic motives. For instance, as Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow have shown, Africans were perceived in a more or less neutral and benign manner before the slave trade developed; however, once the triangular trade became established, Africans were newly characterized as the epitome of evil and barbarity.6 The European desire to exploit the resources of the colonies (including the natives, whom Europeans regarded as beasts of burden) drastically disrupted the indigenous societies. Through specific policies of population transfers, gerrymandering of borders, and forced production, to mention only a few such measures, European colonialists promoted the destruction of native legal and cultural systems and, ultimately, the negation of non-European civilizations.7 These measures produce pathological societies, ones that exist in a state of perpetual crisis.8 To appreciate the function of colonialist fiction within this ambience, we must first distinguish between the "dominant" and the "hegemonic" phases of colonialism as well as between its material and discursive ideological practices. Throughout the dominant phase, which spans the period from the earliest European conquest to the moment at which a colony is granted "independence," European colonizers exercise direct and continuous bureaucratic control and military coercion of the natives: during this phase the "consent" of the natives is primarily passive and indirect. Although we shouldn't overlook the various forms of native "cooperation"—for example, in the traffic of slaves—the point remains that such cooperation testifies less to a successful interpellation of the native than to the colonizer's ability to exploit preexisting power relations of hierarchy, subordination, and subjugation within native societies. Within the

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dominant phase (to which I will confine the scope of this paper), the indigenous peoples are subjugated by colonialist material practices (population transfers, and so forth), the efficacy of which finally depends on the technological superiority of European military forces. Colonialist discursive practices, particularly its literature, are not very useful in controlling the conquered group at this early stage: the native is not subjugated, nor does his culture disintegrate, simply because a European characterizes both as savage. By contrast, in the hegemonic phase (or neocolonialism) the natives accept a version of the colonizers' entire system of values, attitudes, morality, institutions, and, more important, mode of production. This stage of imperialism does rely on the active and direct "consent" of the dominated, though, of course, the threat of military coercion is always in the background. The natives' internalization of Western cultures begins before the end of the dominant phase. The nature and the speed of this internalization depend on two factors. The many local circumstances and the emphasis placed on interpellation by various European colonial policies. But in all cases, the moment of "independence"—with the natives' obligatory, ritualized acceptance of Western forms of parliamentary government—marks the formal transition to hegemonic colonialism. Distinguishing between material and discursive practices also allows us to understand more clearly the contradictions between the covert and overt aspects of colonialism. While the covert purpose is to exploit the colony's natural resources thoroughly and ruthlessly through the various imperialist material practices, the overt aim, as articulated by colonialist discourse, is to "civilize" the savage, to introduce him to all the benefits of Western cultures. Yet the fact that this overt aim, embedded as an assumption in all colonialist literature, is accompanied in colonialist texts by a more vociferous insistence, indeed by a fixation, upon the savagery and the evilness of the native should alert us to the real function of these texts: to justify imperial occupation and exploitation. If such literature can demonstrate that the barbarism of the native is irrevocable, or at least very deeply ingrained, then the European's attempt to civilize him can continue indefinitely, the exploitation of his resources can proceed without hindrance, and the European can persist in enjoying a position of moral superiority. Thus a rigorous subconscious logic defines the relations between the covert and overt policies and between the material and discursive practices of colonialism. The ideological functions of colonialist fiction within the dominant phase of imperial control, then, must be understood not in terms of its putative or even real effects on the native but in terms of the exigencies of domestic—that is, European and colonialist—politics and culture; and the function of racial difference, of the fixation on and fetishization of native savagery and evil, must be mapped in terms of these exigencies and

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ideological imperatives. I do not wish to suggest, however, that racial denigration has no effect whatsoever on colonized intellectuals and literature. It does—but only during the late stages of the dominant phase and, more particularly, during the hegemonic phase. Before turning to the question of racial difference in the works I will discuss, we need to note the relation of the individual author to the field of colonialist discourse. The dominant pattern of relations that controls the text within the colonialist context is determined by economic and political imperatives and changes, such as the development of slavery, that are external to the discursive field itself. The dominant model of power- and interest-relations in all colonial societies is the manichean opposition between the putative superiority of the European and the supposed inferiority of the native. This axis in turn provides the central feature of the colonialist cognitive framework and colonialist literary representation: the manichean allegory—a field of diverse yet interchangeable oppositions between white and black, good and evil, superiority and inferiority, civilization and savagery, intelligence and emotion, rationality and sensuality, self and Other, subject and object. The power relations underlying this model set in motion such strong currents that even a writer who is reluctant to acknowledge it and who may indeed be highly critical of imperialist exploitation is drawn into its vortex.9 The writer is easily seduced by colonial privileges and profits and forced by various ideological factors (that I will examine below) to conform to the prevailing racial and cultural preconceptions. Thus the "author-function" in such texts, as elsewhere, "is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses."10 And since this "function" in the imperialist context confers on the author all the moral and psychological pleasures of manichean superiority, a "native" writer, such as V. S. Naipaul, can also be inducted, under the right circumstances, to fulfill the author-function of the colonialist writer.11 Another significant feature of the system governing colonialist fiction is the nature of its audience. Since the object of representation—the native—does not have access to these texts (because of linguistic barriers) and since the European audience has no direct contact with the native, imperialist fiction tends to be unconcerned with the truth-value of its representation. In fact, since such literature does not so much re-present as present the native for the first time, it is rarely concerned with overtly affirming the reader's experience of his own culture and therefore does not really solicit his approval: it exists outside the dialogic class discourse of European literature. The value of colonialist statements is consequently all the more dependent on their place in colonialist discourse and on "their capacity for circulation and exchange, their possibility of transformation, not only in the economy of discourse, but, more generally, in the administration of scarce resources."12

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Just as imperialists "administer" the resources of the conquered country, so colonialist discourse "commodifies" the native subject into a stereotyped object and uses him as a "resource" for colonialist fiction. The European writer commodifies the native by negating his individuality, his subjectivity, so that he is now perceived as a generic being that can be exchanged for any other native (they all look alike, act alike, and so on). Once reduced to his exchange-value in the colonialist signifying system, he is fed into the manichean allegory, which functions as the currency, the medium of exchange, for the entire colonialist discursive system. The exchange function of the allegory remains constant, while the generic attributes themselves can be substituted infinitely (and even contradictorily) for one another. As Said points out in his study of Orientalism, such strategies depend on a "flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand."13 Within such a representational economy, the writer's task is to "administer" the relatively scarce resources of the manichean opposition in order to reproduce the native in a potentially infinite variety of images, the apparent diversity of which is determined by the simple machinery of the manichean allegory. Hence we can observe a profound symbiotic relationship between the discursive and the material practices of imperialism: the discursive practices do to the symbolic, linguistic presence of the native what the material practices do to his physical presence; the writer commodifies him so that he can be exploited more efficiently by the administrator, who, of course, obliges by returning the favor in kind.14 In fact, at any given point within a fully developed dominant imperialism, it is impossible to determine which form of conimodification takes precedence, so entirely are the two forms intertwined.

2 Colonialist literature is an exploration and a representation of a world at the boundaries of "civilization," a world that has not (yet) been domesticated by European signification or codified in detail by its ideology. That world is therefore perceived as uncontrollable, chaotic, unattainable, and ultimately evil. Motivated by his desire to conquer and dominate, the imperialist configures the colonial realm as a confrontation based on differences in race, language, social customs, cultural values, and modes of production. Faced with an incomprehensible and multifaceted alterity, the European theoretically has the option of responding to the Other in terms of identity or difference. If he assumes that he and the Other are essentially identical, then he would tend to ignore the significant divergences and to judge the Other according to his own cultural values. If, on the other hand,

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he assumes that the Other is irremediably different, then he would have little incentive to adopt the viewpoint of that alterity: he would again tend to turn to the security of his own cultural perspective. Genuine and thorough comprehension of Otherness is possible only if the self can somehow negate or at least severely bracket the values, assumptions, and ideology of his culture. As Nadine Gordimer's and Isak Dinesen's writings show, however, this entails in practice the virtually impossible task of negating one's very being, precisely because one's culture is what formed that being. Moreover, the colonizer's invariable assumption about his moral superiority means that he will rarely question the validity of either his own or his society's formation and that he will not be inclined to expend any energy in understanding the worthless alterity of the colonized. By thus subverting the traditional dialectic of self and Other that contemporary theory considers so important in the formation of self and culture, the assumption of moral superiority subverts the very potential of colonialist literature. Instead of being an exploration of the racial Other, such literature merely affirms its own ethnocentric assumptions; instead of actually depicting the outer limits of "civilization," it simply codifies and preserves the structures of its own mentality. While the surface of each colonialist text purports to represent specific encounters with specific varieties of the racial Other, the subtext valorizes the superiority of European cultures, of the collective process that has mediated that representation. Such literature is essentially specular: instead of seeing the native as a bridge toward syncretic possibility, it uses him as a mirror that reflects the colonialist's self-image. Accordingly, I would argue that colonialist literature is divisible into two broad categories: the "imaginary" and the "symbolic."15 The emotive as well as the cognitive intentionalities of the "imaginary" text are structured by objedification and aggression. In such works the native functions as an image of the imperialist self in such a manner that it reveals the latter's self-alienation. Because of the subsequent projection involved in this context, the "imaginary" novel maps the European's intense internal rivalry. The "imaginary" representation of indigenous people tends to coalesce the signifier with the signified. In describing the attributes or actions of the native, issues such as intention, causality, extenuating circumstances, and so forth, are completely ignored; in the "imaginary" colonialist realm, to say "native" is automatically to say "evil" and to evoke immediately the economy of the manichean allegory. The writer of such texts tends to fetishize a nondialectical, fixed opposition between the self and the native. Threatened by a metaphysical alterity that he has created, he quickly retreats to the homogeneity of his own group. Consequently, his psyche and text tend to be much closer to and are often entirely occluded by the ideology of his group. Writers of "symbolic" texts, on the other hand, are more aware of the

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inevitable necessity of using the native as a mediator of European desires. Grounded more firmly and securely in the egalitarian imperatives of Western societies, these authors tend to be more open to a modifying dialectic of self and Other. They are willing to examine the specific individual and cultural differences between Europeans and natives and to reflect on the efficacy of European values, assumptions, and habits in contrast to those of the indigenous cultures. "Symbolic" texts, most of which thematize the problem of colonialist mentality and its encounter with the racial Other, can in turn be subdivided into two categories. The first type, represented by novels like E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and Rudyard Kipling's Kim, attempts to find syncretic solutions to the manichean opposition of the colonizer and the colonized. This kind of novel overlaps in some ways with the "imaginary" text: those portions of the novel organized at the emotive level are structured by "imaginary" identification, while those controlled by cognitive intentionality are structured by the rules of the "symbolic" order. Ironically, these novels—which are conceived in the "symbolic" realm of intersubjectivity, heterogeneity, and particularity but are seduced by the specularity of "imaginary" Otherness—better illustrate the economy and power of the manichean allegory than do the strictly "imaginary" texts. The second type of "symbolic" fiction, represented by the novels of Joseph Conrad and Nadine Gordimer, realizes that syncretism is impossible within the power relations of colonial society because such a context traps the writer in the libidinal economy of the "imaginary." Hence, becoming reflexive about its context, by confining itself to a rigorous examination of the "imaginary" mechanism of colonialist mentality, this type of fiction manages to free itself from the manichean allegory.

3 If every desire is at base a desire to impose oneself on another and to be recognized by the Other, then the colonial situation provides an ideal context for the fulfillment of that fundamental drive. The colonialist's military superiority ensures a complete projection of his self on the Other: exercising his assumed superiority, he destroys without any significant qualms the effectiveness of indigenous economic, social, political, legal, and moral systems and imposes his own versions of these structures on the Other. By thus subjugating the native, the European settler is able to compel the Other's recognition of him and, in the process, allow his own identity to become deeply dependent on his position as a master.16 This enforced recognition from the Other in fact amounts to the European's narcissistic self-recognition since the native, who is considered too degraded and inhuman to be credited with any specific subjectivity, is cast as no more than a recipient of the negative elements of the self that the

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European projects onto him.17 This transitivity and the preoccupation with the inverted self-image mark the "imaginary" relations that characterize the colonial encounter. Nevertheless, the gratification that this situation affords is impaired by the European's alienation from his own unconscious desire. In the "imaginary" text, the subject is eclipsed by his fixation on and fetishization of the Other: the self becomes a prisoner of the projected image. Even though the native is negated by the projection of the inverted image, his presence as an absence can never be canceled. Thus the colonialist's desire only entraps him in the dualism of the "imaginary" and foments a violent hatred of the native. This desire to exterminate the brutes, which is thematized consciously and critically in "symbolic" texts such as Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India, manifests itself subconsciously in "imaginary" texts, such as those of Joyce Gary, through the narrators' clear relish in describing the mutilation of natives. "Imaginary" texts, like fantasies which provide naive solutions to the subjects' basic problems, tend to center themselves on plots that end with the elimination of the offending natives. The power of the "imaginary" field binding the narcissistic colonialist text is nowhere better illustrated than in its fetishization of the Other. This process operates by substituting natural or generic categories for those that are socially or ideologically determined. All the evil characteristics and habits with which the colonialist endows the native are thereby not presented as the products of social and cultural difference but as characteristics inherent in the race—in the "blood"—of the native. In its extreme form, this kind of fetishization transmutes all specificity and difference into a magical essence. Thus Dinesen boldly asserts: The Natives were Africa in flesh and blood. . . . [The various cultures of Africa, the mountains, the trees, the animals] were different expressions of one idea, variations upon the same theme. It was not a congenial upheaping of heterogeneous atoms, but a heterogeneous upheaping of congenial atoms, as in the case of the oak-leaf and the acorn and the object made from oak.18 As this example illustrates, it is not the stereotypes, the denigrating "images" of the native (which abound in colonialist literature), that are fetishized. Careful scrutiny of colonialist texts reveals that such images are used at random and in a self-contradictory fashion. For example, the narrator of Gary's Aissa Saved can claim that "Kolu children of old-fashioned families like Makunde's were remarkable for their gravity and decorum; . . . they were strictly brought up and made to behave themselves as far as possible like grown-ups."19 He even shows one such child, Tanawe, behaving with great decorum and gravity. Yet the same narrator depicts Kolu

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adults who have converted to Christianity as naughty, irresponsible children. Given the colonialist mentality, the source of the contradiction is quite obvious. Since Tanawe is too young to challenge colonialism, she can be depicted in a benign manner, and the narrator can draw moral sustenance from the generosity of his portrayal. But the adult Kolus' desire to become Christians threatens to eliminate one of the fundamental differences between them and the Europeans; so the narrator has to impose a difference. The overdetermined image he picks (Africans = children) allows him to feel secure once again because it restores the moral balance in favor of the ("adult") Christian conqueror. Such contradictory use of images abounds in colonialist literature. My point, then, is that the imperialist is not fixated on specific images or stereotypes of the Other but rather on the affective benefits proffered by the manichean allegory, which generates the various stereotypes. As I have argued, the manichean allegory, with its highly efficient exchange mechanism, permits various kinds of rapid transformations, for example, metonymic displacement—which leads to the essentialist metonymy, as in the above quotation from Dinesen—and metaphoric condensation—which accounts for the structure and characterization in Gary's Mister Johnson. Exchange-value remains the central motivating force of both colonialist material practice and colonialist literary representation. The fetishizing strategy and the allegorical mechanism not only permit a rapid exchange of denigrating images which can be used to maintain a sense of moral difference; they also allow the writer to transform social and historical dissimilarities into universal, metaphysical differences. If, as Dinesen has done, African natives can be collapsed into African animals and mystified still further as some magical essence of the continent, then clearly there can be no meeting ground, no identity, between the social, historical creatures of Europe and the metaphysical alterity of the Calibans and Ariels of Africa. If the differences between the Europeans and the natives are so vast, then clearly, as I stated earlier, the process of civilizing the natives can continue indefinitely. The ideological function of this mechanism, in addition to prolonging colonialism, is to dehistoricize and desocialize the conquered world, to present it as a metaphysical "fact of life," before which those who have fashioned the colonial world are themselves reduced to the role of passive spectators in a mystery not of their making. There are many formal consequences of this denial of history and normal social interaction. While masquerading under the guise of realist fiction, the colonialist text is in fact antagonistic to some of the prevailing tendencies of realism. As M. M. Bakhtin has argued, the temporal model of the world changes radically with the rise of the realist novel: "For the first time in artistic-ideological consciousness, time and the world become historical: they unfold . . . as becoming, as an uninterrupted movement

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into a real future, as a unified, all-embracing and unconcluded process."20 But since the colonialist wants to maintain his privileges by preserving the status quo, his representation of the world contains neither a sense of historical becoming, nor a concrete vision of a future different from the present, nor a teleology other than the infinitely postponed process of "civilizing." In short, it does not contain any syncretic cultural possibility, which alone would open up the historical process once more. Gordimer has succinctly articulated the consequences of this foreclosure for the colonial writer: Cultural identity [is] "nothing more nor less than the mean between selfhood and otherness ..." The dilemma of a literature in a multiracial [that is, imperialist] society, where the law effectively prevents any real identification of the writer with his society as a whole, so that ultimately he can identify only with his colour, distorts this mean irreparably. And cultural identity is the ground on which the exploration of self in the imaginative writer makes a national literature.21 For these reasons the colonialist text also lacks the domestic novel's inconclusive contact with an open-ended present. By producing a necessary incongruity between man and his potential, domestic fiction can actively engage the question of the hero's unrealized potential and demand and his inadequate response to his fate and situation. In the colonialist fiction, on the other hand, either the debased native's lack of potential is a foregone conclusion or, if he is endowed with potentiality—as, for example, Aladai is in Gary's African Witch—then it is violently and irrevocably foreclosed before the novel ends. The potentiality and even the humanity of the native are considered momentary aberrations that will inevitably subside and return him to his innate, inhuman barbarity. Similarly, the European's own potential, purpose, and direction are never called into question by the social and cultural alterity of the native since he is, after all, extremely debased or entirely inhuman. The colonialist's need to perpetuate racial differences also prevents him, as we have seen, from placing the object of his representation, the racial Other, on the same temporally and socially valorized plane as that occupied by the author and the reader. This complicity between reader and author encourages an even further distancing of the represented world. We find the most telling version of this strategy in colonialist humor. In Gary's Mister Johnson, for instance, the ridiculousness of Johnson, a black, semiliterate clerk in the colonial service, depends on an implicit agreement between the narrator and the reader that Johnson's attempt to imitate English manners, values, and ideas is inherently absurd. Comic dismemberment in these kinds of novels does not demystify and

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familiarize the world but, rather, solidifies and reinforces the distance between the reader and the world. Even in a "symbolic" novel such as Kim, the absurdity of Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, M.A.—and, above all, of his desire to become a fellow of the Royal Society—depends on the same distancing strategy. In the manichean world of the colonizer and the colonized, of the master and the slave, distance tends to become absolute and qualitative, rather than relative and quantitative. The world is perceived in terms of ultimate, fixed differences, and the privileging of experience, knowledge, and practice, which Bakhtin considers necessary for the development of the novel, tends to be ignored entirely.22 The economic, social, and political hierarchical organization of the colonial society turns it into a quasifeudal world, which finds its appropriate literary forms in the adaptable categories and hierarchically valorized structures of allegory and racial romance. Conrad seems to have understood implicitly that such involvement in the colonial situation entailed a regression to the economy of the "imaginary" phase and its concomitant domination of the psyche. In many of his short stories and novels, he explores the edges of the European imperial world, and in Heart of Darkness he depicts the process whereby the colonialist is transformed by the structure he sets in place. Conrad's thorough comprehension of the imperial situation, the colonialist mind, and its literary implications manifests itself in his decision to write a "symbolic" novella that deliberately thematizes the libidinal economy of the "imaginary." His comprehension is equally evident in his choice of a form best suited to the colonialist context: a manichean allegory, with its metonymic machinery, based on an overdetermined metaphor of Africa as the heart of darkness and evil. The allegory operates through imagery of light and dark that functions simultaneously at the pseudo-religious, political, and psychological levels. Furthermore, it is buttressed by the parallel between the Roman conquest of Europe and the European conquest of Africa, which tends to dehistoricize Western colonialism. Yet through the imagery, the narrative frame, and the character development, Conrad ensures that in the final analysis his novella remains rooted in the "symbolic" realm. He does so, first, by inverting the metaphor of darkness: through the breaks in the narrative, he demonstrates that darkness is present in London; he characterizes Brussels, the whited sepulcher, as the door to darkness, guarded by the angels of death; and, by insisting that the Belgian Congo is not initially a dark but a blank spot on the map, he implies that darkness, both as a metaphor and as the practice emblematized by slavery, comes with colonial occupation. By characterizing Marlow as Buddha, by implicitly equating his voyage with Christ's journey into the wilderness, and by thus turning his "inconclusive" story into a modern parable, Conrad rescues his novella from the easy satisfaction of the allegorical

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fantasy typical of the narcissistic colonialist text and transforms it into a story that becomes meaningful through the exegetical participation of the audience. Finally, by granting Kurt/ a momentary awareness of his actions and by presenting us with Marlow's meditation about their implication, Conrad demystifies important aspects of the fetishistic and occluded mentality of the colonizer. In doing so, Conrad shows that the transformation from the overt to the covert colonialist aims, depicted by the degeneration of Kurtz, is mediated by the infinite power of the conqueror, by his arrogation of the position of a God among the natives. Once he succumbs to his own power, Kurtz is trapped by his own self-image, which he superimposes on the natives. He eventually projects his self-hatred, as well, in his desire to exterminate all the brutes, whom he now considers the source of the evil. Yet despite what writers like Chinua Achebe say about the denigration of Africans in Heart of Darkness, Africans are an incidental part, and not the main objects of representation, in the novella.23 At times Conrad's depiction of Africans is quite unbiased and perceptive—for example, when he equates the function of African drumming with that of church bells in a Christian country, he rejects the traditional colonialist use of drumming as the emblem of the natives' evil, bloodthirsty intentions. He is not entirely free, however, from the colonialist mentality that he reveals so well: his depiction of the intimated cannibalism is tasteless and probably groundless, and he represents and eventually forecloses the syncretic potentiality of his African helmsman through traditional colonialist humor. We can also see embedded within Conrad's novella a number of subgenres that are always based on the manichean allegory: the adventure story—such as those of G. A. Henty that are specifically designed for young boys or those of Edgar Wallace and H. Rider Haggard that are also geared to adults—about Europeans battling dark, evil forces; the story utilizing Africa as an alluring, destructive woman—from Haggard's She and Nanda the Lily to Marguerite Steen's Sun Is My Undoing—that recalls Kurtz's fixation on the dark, satanic woman; and the story presenting Africa as a dark labyrinth—which Conrad seems to have inaugurated and which finds its more recent manifestations in such novels as Graham Greene's Heart of the Matter—wherein a European journeys into Africa in order to discover his own identity as well as the meaning of life and death. All these are implicitly at work in Heart of Darkness. The only subgenre not included in the novella (but which Conrad understood thoroughly and dramatized in Lord Jim, in Jim's journey to the mythic world of Patusan) is the narrative depicting Africa as an uncorrupted Eden. But whether these versions of Africa are benign or denigrating, they are all manichean and essentially unchanging. As Hammond and Jablow conclude after surveying four centuries of British writing about Africa, "whether confident or doubtful, the writers describe Africa in the same conventions. The

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image of Africa remains the negative reflection, the shadow, of the British self-image."24 The most significant formal manifestation of the manichean allegory is the racial romance. Northrop Frye's definition of the romance also appropriately describes this subgenre: "The essential difference between novel and romance lies in the conception of characterization. The romancer does not attempt to create 'real people' so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes. It is in romance that we find Jung's libido, anima, and shadow reflected in the hero, heroine, and villain respectively." Where the novelist deals with personae and a stable society, the "romancer deals with individuality, with characters in vacuo idealized by revery."25 In the racial, colonialist version of this genre, the villains are always the dark, evil natives (and, occasionally, whites who sympathize or consort with the natives) who are used simultaneously as stereotypes and archetypes. Racial romances can vary from pristine fantasy versions to more mixed and problematic ones, from Haggard's She to Andre Brink's A Chain of Voices. In all cases, however, they pit civilized societies against the barbaric aberrations of an Other, and they always end with the elimination of the threat posed by the Other and the legitimation of the values of the good, civilized society. The ideological function of this form of "kidnapped romance" is to justify the social function of the dominant class and to idealize its acts of protection and responsibility.26 This genre is not only suited to but is an integral and necessary part of the dominant phase of colonialism. Its persistence and the obsessive preoccupation that Gary, for one, has had with it in spite of his desire to move away from it testify to the fact that this form is determined by colonialist social and economic structures.27 Finally, we must briefly consider the fact that where dominant colonialism and racism still exist today we will find examples of racial romance and allegory. The "Republic" of South Africa, which has codified one of the most developed forms of racism, has recently produced two worthy paradigms: Andre Brink's A Chain of Voices and J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians^ At the level of cognitive intentionality, Brink's work is a "radical" historical novel. It depicts a failed revolt of black, "Coloured," and Asian slaves against their Afrikaner master in the South African hinterland of the early 1800s. By endowing each character with a distinctive individual voice, Brink builds up a polyphonic chorus, spanning two generations, that is designed to explore from various viewpoints the causes and nature of the revolt. To give a voice to slaves and particularly to their desire for freedom is no doubt a courageous and provocative act in contemporary South Africa. Nonetheless, the novel remains rooted in racial stereotypes/archetypes. The latter are not crude, for both the white and the leading nonwhite characters have depth. However, the only distinction between the two racial groups, other than the obvious one

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between masters and slaves, is that the whites experience severe sexual repression, while the nonwhites are obsessed with sex; indeed, some of the nonwhites can perceive themselves only in terms of sexual pleasure and fecundity. The undiscriminating sexuality of Ma-Rose, the slave earth mother, is endowed with an ill-defined liberatory quality, and the efficient and immediate cause of the revolt is a series of sexual transgressions by the white masters. Thus we see, once again, that the very conception of the novel, its emotive intentionality, is determined by the "imaginary" mechanism of the manichean allegory: the whites are in perfect control of themselves, while the natives, who indiscriminately indulge their sexual appetities, clearly lack control and hence need to be managed. The "historical" nature of the novel is also undermined, with unintentional irony, by the framing device. The preface of the novel presents the court's formal accusation against the rebels, and the epilogue presents the conviction and sentencing. The main body of the narrative is thus intended to examine the "reality" bracketed between legal facts. Yet the legal facts also serve to bracket the narrative from the external historical world: they utterly seal the failure of the rebellion. This drastic legal closure cuts off all historical continuity and the hope for change. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, a deliberate allegory, epitomizes the dehistoricizing, desocializing tendency of colonialist fiction. Set in a remote border town of a socially and historically unspecified empire, the allegory focuses on a liberal judge's reluctant, passive participation in the fascist activity of his country. The novel does justice to the themes of a liberal's complicity with fascism, his subsequent sense of guilt, and, most important, the function of manichean polarity within the empire; it shows without any hesitation that the empire projects its own barbarism onto the Other beyond its borders. Although the novel is obviously generated by white South Africa's racial paranoia and the guilt of its liberals, Waiting for the Barbarians, unlike Conrad's Heart of Darkness, refuses to acknowledge its historical sources or to make any allusions to the specific barbarism of the apartheid regime. The novel thus implies that we are all somehow equally guilty and that fascism is endemic to all societies. In its studied refusal to accept historical responsibility, this novel, like all "imaginary" colonialist texts, attempts to mystify the imperial endeavor by representing the relation between self and Other in metaphysical terms. The fundamental strategy of all such fiction is its unchanging presentation of the natives' inferiority as an unalterable metaphysical fact. Thus, for instance, Joyce Cary, after spending years trying to "civilize" the natives of Nigeria, confidently asserts that they should not be given independence: "An overcrowded raft manned by children who had never seen the sea would have a better chance in a typhoon" than would the Africans in managing their own destinies.29

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4 This adamant refusal to admit the possibility of syncretism, of a rapprochement between self and Other, is the most important factor distinguishing the "imaginary" from the "symbolic" colonialist text. The "symbolic" text's openness toward the Other is based on a greater awareness of potential identity and a heightened sense of the concrete sociopolitico-cultural differences between self and Other. Although the "symbolic" writer's understanding of the Other proceeds through selfunderstanding, he is freer from the codes and motifs of the deeper, collective classification system of his culture. In the final analysis, his success in comprehending or appreciating alterity will depend on his ability to bracket the values and bases of his culture. He may do so very consciously and deliberately, as Forster does in A Passage to India, or he may allow the emotions and values instilled in him during his social formation in an alien culture to inform his appraisals of the Other, as Kipling does in Kim. These two novels offer the most interesting attempts to overcome the barriers of racial difference. "The racial problem can take subtle forms," says the narrator of A Passage to India, and in order to focus on the subtler versions, Forster firmly and mercilessly satirizes the cruder, "imaginary" forms of colonialist racism.30 Although his statements verge at times on the stereotypic/ archetypic colonialist generalizations (for instance: "Like most Orientals, Aziz overrated hospitality" [PI, p. 142]), Forster does not present us with stereotypes. The main characters may be flatter than in his previous novels, but in the context of colonialist literature they are well-rounded individuals who adequately represent themselves as well as some of the general characteristics of their cultures. Thus, for instance, the general differences between Muslim and Hindu beliefs and between Anglo-Indian and English values are concretely and accurately delineated. Forster clearly understood and represented the British colonialists' "imaginary" fixation on racial difference and all the psychic and social distortion it entails. Benita Parry succinctly characterizes them in her analysis: While profiting from the fear on which the Raj rests, the AngloIndians are victims of a fear which India arouses in them. They live amidst scenery they do not understand, sense that Indians hate them and feel India to be a poisonous country intending evil against them. Already coarsened by their status in India, the crisis generated by Adela Quested's accusation against Aziz hurls them into cruder demonstrations of their hostility, some demanding holocausts of natives, others longing to inflict humiliating punishment.31

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The retreat of Anglo-Indians into the simple, manichean emotions of the "imaginary," their negation of "free intellectual inquiry and accommodating civilized personal relations,"32 is also clearly castigated by Forster: "[Fielding] was still after facts, though the herd had decided on emotion. Nothing enrages Anglo-India more than the lantern of reason if it is exhibited for one moment after its extinction is decreed" (PI, p. 165). Forster's representation of the Indians' cruder attempts to overcome the effects of racial denigration—for example, the servility of the colonized, the easily wounded pride and vanity of Aziz, the histrionic outbursts of Mahmoud Ali in court, and other such manifestations of self-pity—are equally acerbic and penetrating. All of these, however, provide the backdrop against which Forster examines the more genuine and well-intentioned efforts of some of the Indians and the few British, those still not entirely contaminated by colonialist values, to overcome the barriers of racial difference. Yet the very devices—the landscape of India and, in particular, the Marabar Caves, which become the efficient cause of mystical experiences and the major crisis in the novel—through which Forster chooses to examine the possibilities of cultural and racial rapprochement (as well as the larger issue of the spiritual and metaphysical meaning of human endeavor that is the central preoccupation of the novel) eventually guarantee their failure. He characterizes India as a land of pathos, of an ontological homesickness, a land that knows "the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth": "[India] calls 'Come' through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal" (PI, p. 136). The pathos is embodied in the Marabar Hills and Caves and is characterized by their eternal ambiguity. In the scene prior to the incidents in the caves, Forster takes some pains to establish, through the discussion about some mounds and a snake, that the Indian mind is steeped in and thrives on ambiguity: "Everything seemed cut off at its root, and therefore infected with illusion" (PI, p. 140). The ambiguity of the caves—the absolute "Nothing" which inheres in them and the experience of which is the goal of Jain religion—comes to represent the essence of Indian metaphysics, and, as Frederick Crews points out, metaphysics rather than morality preoccupies Forster in A Passage to India?1" The careful correlations between the iconography of the caves and the metaphors of Jain metaphysics stress Forster's concern with the concepts of identity and difference that Indian philosophy privileges.34 The caves represent the fundamental, unconscious identity from which all natural and social differences emanate and to which they all return when they can escape their phenomenal manifestation. Mrs. Moore and Professor Godbole experience this kind of unity, and Greysford and Sorley anxiously speculate about it in their own Christian terminology.

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Given Mrs. Moore's spiritual concerns and her rejection of the value of social relations (see PI, p. 135), the caves echo her unconscious meditation with "bourn," itself an echo of the sacred Hindu syllable "om," the meditation on which leads eventually to an experience of transcendent unity, identity, and silence that erases all the categories of thought (and thereby of nature), all the differences posited by signification. For Adela Quested, balanced delicately between the spiritual concerns of Mrs. Moore and the purely social ones of Fielding (who finds the caves meaningless and unimpressive), the unconscious realm of the caves mirrors her own repressed sexuality, the horror of which is quickly projected, with the eager help of the Anglo-Indian community (well versed in such projection), onto the racial Other, Aziz, who was the object of her fantasy. Thus Forster, too, endows not the native but the land, emblematized by the caves, with a specular function. Adela's repression and projection are not rescinded until the courtroom scene, when she is once again aroused by the physical beauty of that icon of god-as-unconscious, the punkah wallah, and by the deification of Mrs. Moore's name, which, like other mantras, also leads to the unconscious identity underlying difference. Yet, having invested "India" (the land, the caves, and the non-Muslim Indian religions) with this particular metaphysics of identity and difference, Forster recoils from it in mild horror. His subconscious rejection of it is revealed by the chaos and danger that follow each encounter with the all-consuming transcendental identity: immediately after her experience in the caves, Mrs. Moore is panicked and hurt by the crowd of wild, uncontrolled Indians that surge into the cave; Adela feels sexually abused after her visit; her encounter, in the courtroom, with the iconic representation of the unconscious is followed by pandemonium that symbolically threatens the order of the British Empire; and Godbole's mystical experience of identity is surrounded by the utter chaos of the Gokul Ashtami festival. Even a momentary transcendence of difference, Forster seems to fear, will lead to uncontrollable chaos. A Passage to India also abounds in conscious rejection of the chaos that, from Forster's viewpoint, attends the discovery of transcendent identity. The echo returns to tell Mrs. Moore that "everything exists, nothing has value," and she is gradually terrified by the realization that everything— the concepts of eternity and infinity, the wisdom of "talkative Christianity," and even her affection for her children and Aziz—is "bourn," Nothing (PI, pp. 149, 150). In consequence, she wishes to leave India as soon as possible. Her experiences may well be the product of disillusioned old age, as Crews argues, but the fear of identity manifests itself in other forms as well.35 India itself (which is a protagonist rather than a background in this novel) mocks Mrs. Moore's discovery of identity by confronting her with its differences: as she sails, the palm trees of India say to her, " 'So you thought an echo was India; you took the Marabar caves as

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final?' they laughed. 'What have we in common with them, or they with Asirgarh? Good-bye!' " (PI, p. 210). Difference, then, mocks the primacy of identity, but the result is not order. Like Fielding, who prefers the "order" of Renaissance Italy to the "chaos" of India, the narrator too withdraws from the emotional demands inherent in the process of identifying with an alterity: How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones? The soul is tired in a moment, and in fear of losing the little she does understand, she retreats to the permanent lines which habit or chance have dictated, and suffers there. [PI, pp. 247-48; my emphasis]36 Just as the novel retreats from the demands of metaphysical identity to the safety of phenomenal difference, so conversely it avoids the prospects of interracial identity by evoking metaphysical difference—that is, it takes refuge behind the "permanent" ideological boundaries defined by "habit or chance," by culture or race that has been turned into a metaphysical fact. The only relationship with the potential for transcending this kind of racial barrier fails, but the reasons for the failure are rather curious. In spite of Fielding's rationality, lack of racial prejudice, and humaneness, he is unable to "give in to the East" and live in "a condition of affectionate dependence upon it" as Aziz wants him to. For Fielding, "dependence" means becoming subservient, like Mohammed Latif, and such conversion is naturally beyond him: "When they argued about it something racial intruded—not bitterly, but inevitably, like the colour of their skins: coffeecolour versus pinko-grey" (PI, p. 260). The misunderstanding or misinterpretation about subservience seems, at first sight, like an attempt to avoid the possibility of a genuine friendship. Indeed, Forster is quite ambivalent about identifying the causes that perpetuate racial difference. On initial consideration, the discussion between Aziz and Fielding at the end of the novel strongly implies that colonialism, which necessarily involves the subordination of one to the other, is the real barrier. But when Fielding finally asks why he and Aziz cannot be friends even though they both want it, the negative reply comes not from either man but from the many objects, both "ridiculous and august." The "India" that had said "Come" and that, as we have seen, is the embodiment of an unpalatable metaphysical calculus of identity and difference, now says "No" to the possibility of overcoming racial alterity. In the final analysis, racial difference is once again supported and justified by metaphysical difference. The metaphysical preoccupation of A Passage to India is a culmination of problems that Forster had been examining throughout his work, and his decision to cast his 1073

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concerns in terms of Indian philosophy is innocent and logical. But the narrative decision to turn India into a metaphysical protagonist inherently antithetical to Western liberal humanism probably stems from a sense of larger cultural differences, the machinery of which is similar to that of the manichean allegory. A Passage to India is in many ways a far more penetrating and satisfying novel than Kim. But, ironically enough, Kipling, the champion of colonialism and British superiority, has produced the novel that more intriguingly explores the issues of racial barriers and syncretic possibility. This is due to the fact that Forster's depiction of racial and cultural difference is ultimately based on a rational, intellectual concern, whereas Kipling's is determined by strong emotional ties that collide with his intellectual prejudice and colonialist sympathies. Kipling's own childhood in India is quite obviously the basis of Kim's affection for the Indian world; and, in the context of colonial fiction, a novel that proceeds from emotional identification with the Other offers the most thorough vision of the syncretic possibility. In Kim, Kipling has created a lovable, honest rogue who easily wins the reader's affection, which the narrator then harnesses to Kim's affection for India. We are thus introduced to a positive, detailed, and nonstereotypic portrait of the colonized that is unique in colonialist literature. The narrator seems to find as much pleasure in describing the varied and tumultuous life of India as Kim finds in experiencing it. What may initially seem like a rapt aesthetic appreciation of Indian cultures turns out, on closer examination, to be a positive acceptance and celebration of difference. Kim delights in changing his appearance and identity, in becoming Other, and he loves to live in a world of pure becoming. He is a world of infinite concrete potentiality. As an orphan (a fact that is inconsequential to him), he has no origins and therefore no familial, social, political, or Ideological constraints either. Endowed by the narrator with special talents, he can do anything and become anybody. Kim and his celebration of Indian cultures seem like perfect embodiments of Kipling's syncretic desires. In fact, the structures of Kim's character and his situation reveal the imperative that is essential for the fulfillment of that desire. Because Kim's self is entirely decentered and malleable, he finds pleasure in becoming an Other and in the variety and difference in his world. Occasionally and momentarily he is troubled by his lack of fixed identity, but in extreme situations he temporarily finds a center by chanting his name. This ability to forgo a permanent fixed self, which is essential if one is going to understand and appreciate a racial or cultural alterity, is turned into a positive principle in Kim. The novel also implicitly celebrates the analogous notion of maya, which means both "creation" and "illusion." Kim delights in creating illusions of himself, and eventually the question about his identity and his political role as a spy is linked up with the lama's philosophical theories about the illusion of the phenomenal world.

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Kipling's choice of the picaresque form is not only appropriate to this story but also bolsters the unique position of this novel in the gamut of colonialist fiction. Like the Grand Trunk Road, the novel continuously accommodates a wide variety of episodes and people, including the "low life" of India, without distancing them through moral disapproval or a preponderance of colonialist humor. In fact, it familiarizes the mundane world of the colonized through gentle, affectionate humor and in this way overcomes the barriers of racial difference better than any other colonialist novel. It rescues the native cultures from the prejudged allegorical closure of the "imaginary" text and brings them into the open-ended, transitory, contemporary world; in keeping with the personality and values of its protagonist, it presents the world as becoming, as a movement into the future, and raises the question of unrealized potential and demand. Yet underneath the celebration of Indian cultures lurks the problem of racial difference. Is Kim white, or is he a native? The underlying problem is that the birth of a genuinely syncretic subject necessarily implies the death of an exclusively British subject. Consequently, the novel equivocates: while Kim insists that he is an Indian, the narrator adamantly asserts Kim's British origins. Kim is an Irish orphan who has been brought up entirely within various Indian cultures: he looks, behaves, and thinks like an Indian, speaks and dreams only in Hindustani, and is more afraid of the English than are other native children. Subconsciously aware of the enormous weight of this social formation, the narrator tries to negate it at the very beginning of the novel: Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped, uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazaar; Kim was white—a poor white of the very poorest.37 Thus we see the old manichean dichotomies surfacing once again: in the colonialist universe nurture is ephemeral—one's culture is inherited, like the color of skin, through the genes. This struggle between Kim and the narrator continues throughout the novel. Every time someone suggests that he is white, Kim denies it vehemently and even insists that he will die if he is removed from his beloved Indians. The narrative, however, burdens him with a racial destiny that must, of course, be fulfilled: his father's regiment will discover and restore him to his race. Eventually, the novel works out a satisfactory compromise, which, for all its subtlety, is once again a product of the infinitely flexible categories of the manichean allegory. The compromise also resolves the problem of Kim's origins. Among other things, Kim is a story of the prolonged and unnatural recovery of the

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paternal function, and the struggle over Kim's inheritance is a manifestation of the conflict over cultural allegiance. Kim is an orphan, a fact that he volunteers repeatedly when he is pretending to be a beggar. As he matures and gradually is enlisted as a spy, he develops allegiances to various Indian and European adults. Eventually, some of them adopt him as their son, and he accepts them as fathers and mothers. The process of mutual adoption between Mahbub Ali and Kim is explicitly, if not legally, ceremonious; the relationship between the Teshoo Lama and Kim, between a religious master and his disciple, is that of a spiritual father and son; Hurree Babu acts and is accepted as Kim's elder brother; and the Sahiba becomes his mother. All these relations are deeply emotional and specific: each "parent" or "sibling" sees the chameleonic Kim as a unique being, and he in turn draws a different kind of sustenance from each of them. In contrast, his relationship to two Englishmen who control the British espionage activities in India and take charge of his formal education (though it is financed by the lama) is cold and rational. Kim is fully aware that Creighton's largess and protection are based on an ulterior motive (see K, p. 133). While the Indians keep reminding him that he is white, the Englishmen tell him not to alienate himself from the Indians. Thus the struggle over the inheritance is resolved through a bifurcation of the paternal function: on the one hand, Kim's personal and emotional allegiance to the Indians and, on the other, his impersonal and rational relation to the Englishmen. This solution plunges the novel back into colonialist ideology. According to the manichean allegory, Europeans are rational and intelligent, while Orientals are emotional and sensuous. Kim does not resort to racist stereotypes; the Indians are portrayed as being intelligent. Kim's allegiance to them, however, is entirely emotional, whereas his relationship to whites is entirely rational and impersonal—they simply train his mind. Hence, the results of the syncretic experiment are finally decided by manichean bifurcations. Furthermore, Kim's initiation into espionage, his becoming an intelligence agent, allows the white Kim to serve colonialist power and the Indian Kim to consort with various natives. Kim's first major accomplishment as a spy is to thwart Russian and French agents who are trying to subvert the British Empire in India. As a "protector" of India, Kim also helps to bolster the overt colonialist aims (to protect and civilize the Indians) while in fact prolonging the lease of the covert policies. Kirn becomes involved in espionage because he loves to play games of illusion and to experience the variety of life. He has no ulterior motives in this: he plays at the "Great Game" of life (and espionage) simply for the pleasure of playing, not for the sake of any profit. Yet in this specific use-value that motivates Kim, the British colonialists and their Indian agents are able to detect and exploit his exchange-value: it is precisely because Kim can "exchange" himself with any native that he is

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useful to the British. Thus like other colonialist writers, Kipling also builds a novel around the exchange-value of the native, or quasi native. Not once does the fascinating possibility that Kim's syncretism could have a significance other than its use for British colonialism cross the threshold of awareness in this novel. The hero's syncretic potential is foreclosed and his celebration of that syncretism is limited by the narrative decision not to probe beyond his adolescence. The foreclosure is part of a larger strategy of containment. As John McClure has observed, Kipling creates an idyllic world in Kim by purging all significant danger or evil from the novel and by excluding the two social forces that most infuriated him: the imperial administrative hierarchy and the emerging nationalist Indian bourgeoisie. Both these forces are present in the novel in only their most marginal and absurd forms. More crucially, however, "what Kipling excludes, ultimately, is history, the vital force changing Indian society. He does so by focusing on either side of the historical process, on the plentitude of the moment [Kim's experiences of the highways, bazaars, and so forth] and the finality of the eternal [the "Great Game," the lama's search, and so forth]."38 Despite all its concreteness, then, the syncretism of Kim is founded both on the fixed oppositions of the manichean allegory and on the ahistorical abstractness of wish fulfillment. Kipling understands and flirts with the concept of maya—the notion that illusion inheres in all the noemata of human and natural creation and in the noetics of human perception—at several different levels of the novel, but ultimately the problematics of maya, too, are displaced by the colonialist preoccupation with race. The lama feels that the whole phenomenal world is an illusion and that everyone is "deceived by the shadow of appearance" (K, p. 286), but Kipling is gently mocking him: he is entirely blind to the fact that his unique disciple is a spy and is using him to thwart the foreign agents. Mahbub Ali, Hurree Babu, Kim, and the other British agents are playing their own "Great Game" of maya, masking their real purposes and identities while trying to probe beneath the appearances of Indian political life. Whereas the narrator dismisses the lama's game of maya, that of the spies continues indefinitely because its perpetuation is necessary for the resolution of the third game—the game of Kim's identity. Only so long as Kim is a spy can he continue to be an Englishman while appearing to be an Indian. For the narrator, the only certainty behind the appearances of the novel is the racial identity of Kim. 5

European fiction that deals with the colonial context is not invariably caught in the pitfalls of the "imaginary" relations with the racial Other. One type manages to avoid the world of specularity. Another type, at 1077

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times, even breaks through the barriers of fetishized racial difference, and, though unable to achieve some "genuine" or "objective" understanding of the Other, it offers evidence of a dialectical, mutually modifying relation between self and Other. Both varieties, however, pay a certain price in order to avoid the narcissistic world of the colonialist. The first type of writer manages to resist the pull of the "imaginary" realm by rigorously eschewing the temptation to represent the Other. Whether deliberate or subconscious, this decision is based on an understanding that differences between self and Other cannot be adequately transcended within the colonial context. Consequently, the writer chooses instead to focus almost exclusively on the subjugating process and on the mentality of the conqueror. Conrad follows this course most of the time, but occasionally he slips either into the colonialist mode of perception or into the world of the Other.39 In Nostromo, as in Heart of Darkness, he stereotypes the Other, in this case the South American Indian, but uses him as a background in order to examine the imperial process itself. Thus Nostromo can be read as a study of the alienating power of exchangevalue, emblematized by the silver. Idealists and cynics, reactionaries and revolutionaries, pompous fools and lucid thinkers, altruistic and egotistic men and women are all eventually "corrupted" and alienated by their attempt to use the silver as a medium of exchange in order to gratify their "real" desires. The novel is relentlessly preoccupied with the fundamental motive of colonialism, that is, with the desire for profit, which is ultimately the desire to control the medium of exchange. Accordingly, Conrad's notions of capitalism/imperialism are, as Fredric Jameson implies, both the source and object of Nostromo: "the emergence of capitalism as ... an always-already-begun dynamic, as the supreme and privileged mystery of a synchronic system which, once in place, discredits the attempts of 'linear' history or the habits of the diachronic mind to conceive of its beginnings."40 However, in the context of colonialist discourse, it must be emphasized that Conrad is able to achieve this apparently impossible feat precisely by focusing on the colonialist manifestation of capitalism, that is, on the space in which capitalism reproduces itself and rehearses its own history. In this capacity, Nostromo functions as a mirror—it shows capitalism, in its process of subjugating the Other, its own specular image. Nadine Gordimer, a contemporary writer whose interrogation of colonialist intervention is even more relentless in some ways than Conrad's, began her career with a clear understanding of the "imaginary" trap. At a crucial point in her first novel, the heroine's developing awareness of the manichean oppositions enforced by apartheid is mediated by an inverted image of the self. Helen Shaw first sees Mary Seswayo, one of the few black women students at the university she attends, in a mirror, and, as their glances meet, Helen for the first time recognizes, in the other woman's face, her own idealistic anticipation of boundless intellectual

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stimulation and infinite justice that she expects the university to offer.41 Apartheid, however, will neither allow Helen to become intimate with her Other nor permit her to pursue a self-development untainted with its fascist precepts. The novel ends with her determination to avoid, at all costs, the ideological closures of a racist, exploitative society. Henceforth, all of Gordimer's novels focus on the bankruptcy of the liberal ideology, on the effects of South African fascism on the liberal consciousness of her white protagonists, and on their progressive radicalization. When she does enter the world of the Other, as in July's People, it is primarily to examine the dependence of whites on their African servants. Unable and unwilling to turn away from the colonial situation, Gordimer makes a virtue of necessity by systematically scrutinizing the social and psychological effects of the manichean bifurcation on her white protagonists, even though she is acutely aware that the price she pays for this deliberately restricted focus is her inability, as a writer, to participate in the formation of a genuinely national literature.42 Occasionally a writer overcomes the racial barriers and is significantly influenced by the dominated Other. Isak Dinesen is an interesting case in point. Her autobiographical works, Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass, clearly show that she was strongly influenced by the oral/mythic culture of the Africans (which has a phenomenology significantly different from that of chirographic cultures).43 It can be argued that her tales, the themes of which are only incidentally connected with Africa, are influenced by oral narratives. Dinesen's understanding and appreciation of the Gikuyu, Masai, and Somali cultures are the result of her willingness to examine and decenter herself and her culture in the presence of the Other. As she looks at herself through the eyes of natives, she begins to realize that her cultural values, and therefore the self constituted by those values, are entirely relative; instead of panicking, however, she is able to accept the experience and even attain a partial transcendence through it, which once again verifies the power of the manichean allegory. Her treatment of her African servants and laborers and her regard for their dignity and feelings improve dramatically as a result of her transformation. But much of her colonialist rhetoric remains intact: she thinks of Africans as primitive children. Though she sympathizes with their plight under colonialism and makes genuine and significant efforts to improve their situation, her representation of Africans is nonetheless determined by the pervasive currency of the manichean allegory. But, while the manichean allegory determines the deep structure of most colonialist texts, in Dinesen's work it produces only the surface structure. Similarly, Laurens Van der Post's decision to depict his own experience of African oral cultures takes the form of a novel about a young boy's adventures: even though Van der Post clearly does understand the phenomenology of mythic culture, his representation of it is limited by his

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belief that only a child would be interested in such cultures.44 Here the allegory determines the deep structure, the very conception, of the novel.

6 As we have seen, colonialist fiction is generated predominantly by the ideological machinery of the manichean allegory. Yet the relation between imperial ideology and fiction is not unidirectional: the ideology does not simply determine the fiction. Rather, through a process of symbiosis, the fiction forms the ideology by articulating and justifying the position and aims of the colonialist. But it does more than just define and elaborate the actual military and putative moral superiority of the Europeans. Troubled by the nagging contradiction between the theoretical justification of exploitation and the barbarity of its actual practice, it also attempts to mask the contradiction by obsessively portraying the supposed inferiority and barbarity of the racial Other, thereby insisting on the profound moral difference between self and Other. Within this symbiotic relation, the manichean allegory functions as a transformative mechanism between the affective pleasure derived from the moral superiority and material profit that motivate imperialism, on the one hand, and the formal devices (genres, stereotypes, and so on) of colonialist fiction, on the other hand. By allowing the European to denigrate the native in a variety of ways, by permitting an obsessive, fetishistic representation of the native's moral inferiority, the allegory also enables the European to increase, by contrast, the store of his own moral superiority; it allows him to accumulate "surplus morality," which is further invested in the denigration of the native, in a self-sustaining cycle. Thus the ideological function of all "imaginary" and some "symbolic" colonialist literature is to articulate and justify the moral authority of the colonizer and—by position the inferiority of the native as a metaphysical fact—to mask the pleasure the colonizer derives from that authority. The partial success that such literature achieves in justifying and perpetuating imperial ideology is evident in certain kinds of critical elaborations. Harry Barba, for instance, feels that the "regression" of Aladai, the African "hero" of Gary's African Witch, "represents a triumph for the primordial, retrogressive urge that dominates the Nigerian: for totem and taboo, for ju-ju, and for the more advanced but equally destructive stages of primitive ju-ju Christianity." We may receive this statement with incredulity, but he goes on to state his point even more explicitly: "Like Uli, Aladai shows a response to the call of blood which is stronger than the influence of his contact with civilization." 45 Such "criticism" is by no means rare: more sophisticated current versions of it can be found praising V. S. Naipaul's representation of the innate barbarity of Third World people.46 But while colonialist fiction-as-rhetorical-practice does succeed in per-

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suading some people that its claims are valid, the same fiction in its essence as determined-cultural-text preserves the structures and functions of imperialist ideology for those who wish to discern them. Finally, we must bear in mind that colonialist fiction and ideology do not exist in a vacuum. In order to appreciate them thoroughly, we must examine them in juxtaposition to domestic English fiction and the anglophone fiction of the Third World, which originates from British occupation and which, during the current, hegemonic phase of colonialism, is establishing a dialogic relation with colonialist fiction. The Third World's literary dialogue with Western cultures is marked by two broad characteristics: its attempt to negate the prior European negation of colonized cultures and its adoption and creative modification of Western languages and artistic forms in conjunction with indigenous languages and forms. This dialogue merits our serious attention for two reasons: first, in spite of the often studied attempts by ethnocentric canonizers in English and other (Western) language and literature departments to ignore Third World culture and art, they will not go away; and, second, as this analysis of colonialist literature (a literature, we must remember, that is supposed to mediate between different cultures) demonstrates, the domain of literary and cultural syncretism belongs not to colonialist and neocolonialist writers but increasingly to Third World artists.

Notes * Abdul R. JanMohamed, assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa. He is a founding member and associate editor of Cultural Critique and is currently working on a study of Richard Wright. 1 M. M. Mahood, The Colonial Encounter: A Reading of Six Novels (Totowa, N.J., 1977), pp. 170, 171; and see p. 3. As many other studies demonstrate, the emotional innocence and the distance of the six writers whom Mahood has chosen—Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, Chinua Achebe, R. K. Narayan, and V. S. Naipaul—are, at best, highly debatable. 2 Homi K. Bhabha, "The Other Question—The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse," Screen 24 (Nov.-Dec. 1983): 25,19. 3 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York, 1968), p. 41. 4 E. A. Brett, Colonialism and Underdevelopment in East Africa: The Politics of Economic Change, 1919-1939 (New York, 1973), p. 169. 5 "For it is the force of ambivalence that gives the colonial stereotype its currency: ensures its repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures; informs its strategies of individuation and marginalisation; produces the effect of probabilistic truth and predictability which, for the stereotype, must always be in excess of what can be empirically proved or logically construed" (Bhabha, "The Other Question," p. 18). Bhabha amplifies his views of ambivalence in "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse." October 28 (Spring 1984): 125-33. 1081

THINKING/WORKING THROUGH RACE 6 See Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing about Africa (New York, 1970), pp. 20-23. 7 These policies and practices have been documented abundantly. Specific studies provide thoroughly detailed information; see, e.g., Richard D. Wolff, The Economics of Colonialism: Britain and Kenya, 1870-1930 (New Haven, Conn., 1974). 8 See G. Balandier, "The Colonial Situation: A Theoretical Approach," in Social Change: The Colonial Situation, ed. Immanuel Wallerstein (New York, 1966), p. 37. 9 For a detailed study of one such case, see chapter 2, "Joyce Gary: The Generation of Racial Romance," in my Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst, Mass., 1983), pp. 15-48. 10 Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), p. 130. 11 I cannot develop this argument here for two reasons: first, Naipaul clearly belongs to the hegemonic phase of colonialism, the discourse of which must be examined in its own right and, second, the transformations and repressions that a "native" writer must undergo in order to become a colonialist writer are complicated and also demand separate consideration. 12 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972), p. 120. 13 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), p. 7. 14 This relation between material and discursive practices, between power and knowledge in Western representation of Others, has been mapped most thoroughly in Said's Orientalism. 15 These categories, the "imaginary" and the "symbolic," are derived from the work of Jacques Lacan. The "imaginary" is a preverbal order, essentially visual, that precedes the "symbolic," or verbal, order in the development of the psyche. The "imaginary," actualized during the "mirror stage" (between the ages of six and eighteen months) by the child's recognition of his own image in a mirror or in the presence of another human being, is characterized by identification and aggressivity. During this phase, the child identifies himself completely with his specular image; yet, because the identification includes a non-transversable distance between self and the Other (who is seen as self), the experience is deeply imbued with aggressivity toward the self/Other. This capture of the self by the specular image is only partially modified by the subject's accession, through the acquisition of language, to the "symbolic" order of society and intersubjectivity. In the "symbolic" order, language mediates (and, once again, alienates) the subject's desire, but the specular dynamics of the "imaginary" phase remain embedded in the "symbolic" order, albeit in a form modified by the complex sublimations of the "symbolic" order. See, particularly, Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, 1977), pp. 1-7. I am also indebted to commentaries on Lacanian theory; see Anika Rifflet-Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, trans. David Macey (London, 1977); Lacan, The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore, 1968); and Fredric Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject," Yale French Studies, no. 55-56 (1977): 338-95. It is perhaps necessary to repeat Wilden's stress on the fact that the relation-

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16 17

18 19 20

21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

ship between the "imaginary" and "symbolic" orders is simultaneously diachronic (developmental) and synchronic (structural) and that the stade du miroir must be read in three ways at once: "backwards—as a symptom of or a substitute for a much more primordial identification; forwards—as a phase in development; and tunelessly—as a relationship best formulated in algorithmic terms. The subject's 'fixation' on (or in) the Imaginary is a matter of degree" (Wilden, "Lacan and the Discourse of the Other," in The Language of the Self, p. 174). We might add that similarly the "imaginary" or "symbolic" quality of a given text is a matter of degree. See Nadine Gordimer, July's People (New York, 1981), for an unrelenting examination of this dependence. For a general discussion of this transitive mechanism in racial situations, see Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York, 1971); for a historical case study see O. Mannoni's discussion of rape in Madagascar in Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. Pamela Powesland, 2d ed. (New York, 1964). Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa (New York, 1937), p. 21. Joyce Gary, Aissa Saved (London, 1949), p. 33. M. M. Bakhtin, "Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Holquist, University of Texas Press Slavic Series, no. 1 (Austin, Tex., 1981), p. 30. Gordimer, "Literature and Politics in South Africa," Southern Review [An Australian Journal of Literary Studies] 7 (Nov. 1974): 226. See Bakhtin, "Epic and Novel," pp. 15-16. The interpretation and status of Conrad's fiction among Third World writers is quite ambivalent; see, e.g., Achebe, "An Image of Africa," Massachusetts Review 18 (Winter 1977): 782-94, and Peter Nazareth, "Out of Darkness: Conrad and Other Third World Writers," Conradiana 14, no. 3 (1982): 173-87. Hammond and Jablow, The Africa That Never Was, p. 197; in this book Hammond and Jablow present a good content analysis of these subgenres. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J., 1957), pp. 304, 305. See Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance, Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1974-1975 (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), p. 57. For a more elaborate definition of racial romance, see my chapter "Joyce Gary: The Generation of Racial Romance," Manichean Aesthetics, pp. 15-48. See Andre Brink, A Chain of Voices (Harmondsworth, 1983), and J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (Harmondsworth, 1982). Cary, The African Witch (London, 1949), p. 12. Forster, A Passage to India (New York, 1924), p. 158; all further references to this work, abbreviated PI, will be included in the text. Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination, 1880-1930 (London, 1972), pp. 279-80. Parry, Delusions and Discoveries, p. 273. For an elaboration of Forster's humanist concerns in A Passage to India, see Frederick C. Crews, E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism (Princeton, N.J., 1962), pp. 139-63. For an elaboration of this fascinating correlation, see Parry, Delusions and Discoveries, pp. 288-90. See Crews, E. M. Forster, p. 156.

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THINKING/WORKING THROUGH RACE 36 In Jain philosophy each distinct entity, including the tiniest grain of sand, has a soul and is capable of feeling; see Parry, Delusions and Discoveries, pp. 288-90. 37 Rudyard Kipling, Kim (New York, 1959), p. 5; my emphasis. All further references to this work, abbreviated K, will be included in the text. 38 John A. McClure, Kipling and Conroad: The Colonial Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), p. 80. 39 Conrad's attempts to free himself from the preformed categories of colonialist discourse and the consequent struggles in his fiction between his criticism of imperialism/capitalism and the received closures of colonialist ideology are admirably mapped in Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers (London, 1983). 40 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Inthaca, N.Y., 1981), p. 280. 41 See Gordimer, The Lying Days (New York, 1953), p. 144. 42 I have explored Gordimer's fiction in detail elsewhere; see my chapter "Nadine Gordimer: The Degeneration of the Great South African Lie," Manichean Aesthetics, pp. 79-149. 43 See Dinesen, Out of Africa, and Shadows on the Grass (New York, 1974). For a succinct definition of oral cultures, see Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982), and for a detailed study of Dinesen's transformation, see my chapter "Isak Dinesen: The Generation of Mythic Consciousness," Manichean Aesthetics, pp. 49-77. 44 See Laurens Van der Post, A Story Like the Wind (New York, 1972). 45 Harry Barba, "Gary's Image of Africa in Transition," University of Kansas City Review 29 (1963): 293. 46 I do not mean to imply that any writer who criticizes Third World cultures must be automatically condemned as a colonialist. For instance, Achebe's depiction of corruption in Nigeria, in his novel No Longer at Ease (New York, 1961), is as complete and penetrating (if not more so) as any of Naipaul's characterizations. The crucial difference, however, is that while Achebe's representation is sympathetic and, therefore, informative, Naipaul's reeks of contempt and reveals only the operation of colonialist mentality.

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HAUNTED LINES Postcolonial Theory and the Genealogy of Racial Formations in Fiji Sudesh Mishra

An abridged version was published in Meanjin 52.4 (Summer 1993): 623-34

Gesturing at postcolonial theory By definition, postcolonial theory negotiates four types of historical space—the pre-colonial, the colonial, the neo-colonial and the postcolonial; spaces it no longer understands in temporal terms of linear discontinuity, with one spatial moment succeeding another in time, but instead regards as discursive formations wherein each dominant moment, as it emerges in history through discourses of power, is forever shadowed by its radical or familial alterities. So that, to take a recent example, the hegemony of the incumbent neo-colonial regime in Fiji, a regime that gained its legitimacy through a decreed Constitution, is secured by its method of mutating, reproducing and marginalising—not excluding—the other three spaces and moments. If we were, then, to regard Fiji's postcoup Constitution as a neo-colonial text, we would find that it signals, wittingly or in spite of itself, those cognate or subaltern discourses that must eternally ghost it. In this way the Constitution as neo-colonial text differently reproduces the structures of a precursive colonialism by prescribing a form of representational apartheid; it also mutates partially-grasped ideas of pre-contact tribalism to fit pastoral discourses of modern indigenism: this as a way of framing a moral apology for the near-disfranchisement of settler-groups; and, lastly, in its self-traumatising desire to accommodate all ethnic groups, the Constitution gestures at postcolonial freedoms (of conscience, expression, etc.) only to emasculate them as effective clauses through the inscription of a mastering racist narrative.2 While it is undoubtedly a rare, not to say schizophrenic, textual instance of the hierarchic inter-discursivity that forms an historical moment, the Fijian Constitution serves as an illustration of postcolonial theory's desire 1085

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to excavate knowledges that have been historically repressed, distorted or erased by dominant knowledge-power formations—formations determined by the conjuncture of the various uninnocent discourses of ethnicity, politics, morality, theology, gender, class and economics. And it is this excavatory agenda that seems to motivate most, if not all, theorists of postcoloniality. Their use of recuperative strategies, even when they are necessarily interrogating colonialist formations, opens up spaces required for the construction of new epistemologies, new archives and new enunciative solutions. Of course these new formations are not new, if by that we mean the (re)inscription of knowledges untainted by the historical moment that they mean to resist, but exploratory renditions of knowledges that have been either mangled or pushed to the margins or dehistoricized by overarching colonialist narratives. To reach this speaking-position, however, entails an inventory of the self that will account for the "infinity of traces" that historical process has left behind without an inventory.3 It is easy to see how this type of subject-position, if the subject is an ex-colonized, naturally leads to the practice of what has become known as Colonial Discourse Analysis. Postcolonial theorists begin by interrogating colonial discourses, imploding their political partisanship by introducing, in strategic points of their critiques, subaltern texts that see the colonial moment differently, that use other knowledges—as distinct from the western—to articulate another view of the self, of history, of knowledge-power formations, resisting in the process the burden of colonialist epistemology and, in fact, mounting a counter-assault by enabling previously disabled languages, histories, modes of seeing the world. This procedure appears to have the long-term agenda of demoting colonial formations to the level of traces— since their total erasure is an impossibility in terms of the thesis being advanced here—by exponentially rendering greater space and power to subaltern discourses. We detect this procedure in the otherwise dissimilar theories of Edward Said, Homi Bhaba, Gayatri Spivak, Simon During, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Vijay Mishra, Abdul R. JanMohamed, Aijaz Ahmed—among others. JanMohamed in his magisterial essay on "The Economy of the Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Literature," for instance, argues that colonialist allegory, a product in any case of the split within the imperialist subject, leads to the domestication and codification of "unworlded" worlds by European significations and ideologies.4 The manichean allegory, then, forecloses what Spivak calls the natives' own world by worlding it anew, "by obliging them to domesticate the alien as Master."5 JanMohamed proceeds to assess canonised European texts such as Mr Johnson, A Passage to India, Kim and Heart of Darkness, showing how the first presents the colonialist allegory in the reader-author collusion, the second locates it in the irreconciable difference between metaphysical India and Western liberal human-

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ism, the third posits it in terms of the struggle between narrator and protagonist, while the last, though scathing in its treatment of colonialism, enters the manichean dimension by self-consciously occluding that world which is the object both of imperial knowledge and desire. For JanMohamed the interrogation of such texts reveals the interred, vestigial or absent spaces of other worlds that need to be "worlded" in their own terms, in their own images, in their own voices, and this project is implicitly achieved in the knowledges that buttress his own speaking-position as the writer of the essay. Edward Said effects a slightly different manoeuvre by tactically implanting vernacular texts in the midst of his appraisal of colonialist formations, thereby blasting open the latter as a means of centring peripheral knowledges, empowering them within a discursive frame that has throughout history inscribed their disempowerment. This strategy is expertly deployed in that section on "Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World" where Said sets Fourier's introduction to the Description de I'Egypte against Jabarti's Journal, both composed around the same time. Fourier, he says, . . . speaks as the rationalizing mouthpiece of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798. The resonances of the great names he summons, the placing, the grounding, the normalizing of foreign conquest within the cultural orbit of European existence—all this transmutes conquest from an event into a process that is much longer, slower, and more acceptable to the European sensibility enfolded within its own cultural superstructure, than such an event could have been for any Egyptian enduring the conquest.6 Jabarti, on the other hand, argues Said by quoting from his Journal, "has eyes for, and only appreciates, the facts of power. They bear upon his existence as a conquered Egyptian, an existence for him compressed into that of a subjugated particle, barely able to do much more than record the French army's comings and goings, its imperious decrees, its overwhelmingly harsh measures, its awesome and seemingly unchecked ability to do what it wanted according to imperatives none of the natives could affect."7 Said's intervention on behalf of Jabarti, an intervention that restores a seemingly unimportant text submerged by colonial historiography, serves the dual function of denying the scholastic innocence of a monumental text about the East produced in the West while, at the same time, morally and ideologically privileging the "subjugated particle's" account as the correcter version of the same event. Jarbati's solitary "postcolonial" sentence explodes the twenty-four volumes of the Description, wedging itself at that point in Said's essay when colonial historiography must itself die to be reborn in a form whose very contours are defined by subaltern texts.

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In a slightly different context, Salman Rushdie's problematising of memory, narrative and history is intended to raise similar questions about the nature of historiography. For him, the novel as an instance of historiography must bend with the postcolonial moment for that moment to generate knowledges resistant to and relieved from the grand recits of colonialism, if only to replace them with the grand recits of postcolonialism inspired by forms of knowledge other than, but not excluding, the occidental. In any event, postcolonial theory is concerned with investigating colonial or neocolonial discursive formations in order to show how these actively contribute to the expansionist goals of various imperial powers with ambitious economic agendas. By subjecting a variety of collusive texts to hard analysis, theorists frame a whole network of crisscrossing discourses (political, cultural economic, religious, literary, moral, ethnographic, etc.) to show how the act of invasion is seen by the invaders as an ideological imperative, and is justified as such, though it is in reality a matter of brute choice. Quite often the disclosure of the crude material basis of most colonial texts coincides with, and is in fact dependent on, the way contemporaneous or subsequent postcolonial texts contend for the same space in their different motivations. Any critical enterprise must, in fact, see theory as process and its application as a means of determining the powers, desires, preferences, etc., that lend shape to all discourses, supplying them with discursive wills directed towards unhypothetical ends. In this sense, postcolonial theory is immensely useful for it can, if sensibly deployed, begin with the primary terrain/text and, in what amounts to an ironic inversion, establish the cartographic basis for its reality by posing questions such as who, why, when, where, how, for whom, for what purpose, etc., draws the map which via knowledge-power formations takes on a worldly presence insofar lives, histories, societies are affected by it. Colonial discourse analysis: a case study from Fiji In a recent book called The Facade of Democracy: Fijian Struggles for Political Control 1830-1987, Asesela Ravuvu, Professor of Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific, offers the following observations about intercommunal perceptions in Fiji: Fijians generally perceive Indians as mean and stingy, crafty and demanding to the extent of being considered greedy, inconsiderate and grasping, uncooperative, egoistic and calculating. Indians, on the other hand, view Fijians as "jungalis" or bushwhackers, still behind the times and backward, naive and foolish, and generally poor. They are seen as lazy, proud and extravagant, pound-foolish and undependable.8 1088

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One naturally demurs at the presumption that allows the writer to speak for all Fijians and all Indo-Fijians, and in such intransigent terms. What is more interesting, however, is that this professedly historical discourse emerges at a point in Fiji's history when the neo-colonial moment has displaced an inchoate postcolonial one. Published in 1991, almost five years after the coup d'etat, and one year after the promulgation of a constitution that empowers one ethnic group to the exclusion of the rest on rickety essentialist grounds, Ravuvu's text discursively consolidates the neocolonial position, rationalizing it as the inevitable culmination of historical process and endowing it with the aura of the citable instance ratified by an academic institution. Not for one minute, however, should we think that it is Ravuvu, the writing subject, who bifurcates into the oracular collectivities of Fijian and Indian, or that his adversarial reading of intercommunal relations in Fiji, if it indeed holds any water, is drawn from an unmediated experience of the negative stereotypes exchanged mutually by the two communities. The Facade, in fact, is a variation on a manichean theme shared by several precursive colonial texts, the most influential of which is James A. Michener's Return To Paradise. Return to Paradise (1951) belongs to a pedigree of books on Fiji written by white travellers, planters, historians, traders, missionaries and administrators. In fact, it could well be considered the hegemonic colonial text insofar as it crystallizes most, though not all, colonial opinion on the islands from the moment of European contact while, at the same time, functioning as a template-text for future neo-colonial commentators. Michener writes: Imagine a group of islands blessed by heaven, rich in all things needed to build a good life, plus gold mines and a good climate. Picture a native population carefree, delightful and happy. Add a white government that works overtime to give honest service. Top it all off with a democracy that enables dozens of different levels of society—from Oxford graduates to bush-dwellers—to have a fine time. That makes for a pretty wonderful colony, doesn't it? There's only one thing wrong with the picture of Fiji. The Indians . . . It is almost impossible to like the Indians of Fiji. They are suspicious, vengeful, whining, unassimilated, provocative aliens in a land where they have lived for more than seventy years. They hate everyone: black natives, white Englishmen, brown Polynesians and friendly Americans. They will not marry with Fijians, whom they despise. They avoid English ways, which they abhor. They cannot be depended upon to support necessary government policies. Above all, they are surly and unpleasant. It is possible for a traveller to spend a week in Fiji without ever seeing an Indian smile.9

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Here the uncreated word becomes created through the workings of the imagining subject, the god-narrator himself. But it certainly is not a word that is being created for the first time; this word carries with it the theological resonance of the Old Testament of Milton's Paradise Lost, and is undoubtedly a disembodied signifier on the lookout for a signified to colonise, to make corporeal in its own image. Michener's divine imagining sets off a biblical narrative that is superimposed on a tropical island and speaks to fellow light-bringers, those who are conversant with the sourcetext through which the latter text must pass and who, in fact, read it as a variation of the original thesis. The narrator constructs the manichean world he describes, a world—potentially paradisal but actually contaminated—in which cooperative Adam10 (naive, noble) is at risk from uncooperative Satan (shrewd, ignoble); this being the case, it is the "white government" which must continue to make laws, dispense justice, lest the islands plunge into a primordial darkness. By repeating the act of creation and the narrative of the primal fall, the god-narrator intervenes on behalf of the colonial government, justifying its presence on the basis of divine altruism: the coloniser is morally obliged to colonise for he (never she), after all, obeys a divine imperative and, since a post-lapsarian milieu can never fully recover its innocence, the process of "civilizing" becomes frustratingly endless. Michener's world has become Ravuvu's: the latter sees himself in the former's looking-glass, ingesting his adversarial scheme so completely that it begins to represent the mutually hostile articulations of the two colonised parties, instead of being, as it is, a discursive strategy that makes the act of colonialism acceptable to the invader's own constituency. Ravuvu is a half-conscious collaborator in the neo-colonial process; in submitting his subjective and intellectual space to effacement and palimpsestic overwriting, he falls prey to the redoubtable power of orientalizing discourses. And just as Michener's world-view has a colonial genealogy, Ravuvu's neo-colonial allegory is sired by other, both earlier and more recent, discursive attitudes of writers on Fiji.11 So that, in the grandly titled The History of the Pacific Islands: Kingdoms of the Reefs, written by a white historian working in Canberra and published in the same year as The Facade, the narrator feels the need to mediate for both the Fijian and the Indo-Fijian. Speaking on behalf of the Fijian, he writes about their perception of Indo-Fijians as a "hungry and intransigent people;"12 the manichean allegory thus never lets up but gets re-warehoused and circulated in the discourses of outsiders—transfixed by Oceania as the supplementary site for a whole range of competing European desires (economic, voyeuristic, liberal humanist), anxieties (libidinal, geopolitical, cultural) and discourses (biblical, ethnographic, philological)—and insiders— equally transfixed by the propagandising force of an ongoing western hegemony (via technology) in all aspects of their lives. Indo-Fijians are

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therefore "hungry" (grasping, predatory, competitive) and "intransigent" in their demands for political equality, access to secure land tenures, etc., not so much in the eyes of the Fijian (with whom they were not directly competing at that historical juncture), but in the eyes of the colonial regime whose anxieties regarding the threat to white hegemony posed by "coolies" is clearly shared by the narrator. Of course in the manichean scheme, Indo-Fijian hunger is countered implicitly by Fijian contentedness, the former's intransigence is repelled by the latter's flexibility. Both, however, are "culturally exclusive"13 and so never attain the civilized heights of an inclusive western liberal humanism—the yardstick against which, it is implied, all societies must be judged. Ravuvu is the neo-colonial insider who discursively, not to say politically, espouses and disseminates colonial allegories in order to support a regime that has religiously internalized colonial modes of governance for its own programme of power retention and distribution.14 He plugs into the manichean world-views of colonial apologists such as Michener and his neo-colonial legatees incarnated in, among others, Deryck Scarr, Ron Crocombe and Len Usher. However, as I have suggested earlier, the attitudes of these later writers have their lineage in earlier commentators on Fiji, amongst them officials in the colonial administration, CSR (Colonial Sugar Refining Company) attorneys, members of the deputation sent by the British Raj, visiting religious dignitaries and tourists such as Rupert Brooke and Somerset Maugham. Brooke, for instance, though he is remarkably less inclined to make blanket racist statements and disdains colonial rednecks who do, still falls into an easy dichotomy when speaking of Fijians and Indo-Fijians: [Suva is] the 'capital' of Fiji: full of imported Indians, staid English officials, heavy with the White Man's Burden, and jolly grinning fuzzy-haired Fijians, who care nothing, and know nothing, of burdens, Empires, or responsibility, nor that they are a dying and defeated race. They merely like sunshine, and people, and fishing, and food and especially swimming in the sea. It's so queer, seeing the thin, much clothed, ancient, over-civilized, silver-bangled, subtle Indians, and these jolly, half-naked, savage children of the earth, working side by side in obedience to the Clifton and Trinity, or Winchester and New College, man, with his 'Doesn't do to be too friendly with these niggahs, you know. You must make 'em respect you!' That is Empire.15 Yet the incorporated irony fails to undercut Brooke's privileging of the necessary virtues of Empire. In his letter we find the prototype of Michener's "carefree, delightful and happy" Fijians, though not their antithesis in the Indo-Fijian. By describing Fijians as children frolicking in Eden, he

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undermines their capacity to represent, far less, govern themselves. Maturity, civilization is ahead of them. It is a line that colonialists have pursued time and again to defuse local agitations for independence. Brooke reserves a subtler effect for the Indo-Fijian. They are "subtle" (evasive, mysterious, clever, crafty) because they are "ancient" and "over-civilized"—the last two epithets suggesting a people whose civilization is behind them. They are, as it were, the ossified remains of an historical event rather than the living, acting components in a cultural process.16 If civilization has superseded them, if it has passed into the hands of another set of conquerors, then it is only historically inevitable that they be incorporated to serve the present civilizational moment, not so much for the conquerors' sake, it is argued, but for the sake of their own re-invigoration as members of a spent culture. And so the burden falls on white shoulders, for their history dictates that they lead the childlike into maturity and the senescent into a new youth. That, after all, is Empire. Brooke, however, cannot help but be infected by discourses about the colonies circulating at home and abroad. Such is the machinery behind the production of Europe's "scientific" (biological, archaeological, geographical, anthropological, philological, etc.) and humanistic (political, cultural, religious, economic, philosophical, etc.) knowledges about the Other that it would have taken, on his part, a quantum leap of mind to overcome the colonial moment to which he belonged. His touristic views are merely a polite distillation of the "liberal" attitudes of the empowered in colonial Fiji. In fact, several years after Brooke, it was still possible to talk of the Fijian as "one of Nature's [despoilt] gentleman,"17 of "an ignorant Asiatic race"18 and of "the discipline that is the sine qua non between master and man in all classes and races."19 But perhaps the most telling example of the redoubtable force of colonialist discursive formations can be found in parts of the report filed in 1922 by an Indian member of the Indian Government's Deputation to Fiji, sent over to report on the suitability of continuing emigration from the sub-continent to the islands: Fijians and Indians have always held aloof from one another. The Fijians, being landowners, looked down upon the Indians as labourers; and it is a coincidence that the word 'coolie' in the Fijian language means dog. The Indians, on their part, regarded the Fijians as 'junglies'. The use made of Fijians as special constables during the past two years has tended to increase their contempt for the Indians whom they were called upon to repress. At the same time, the Indians have been irritated against the Fijians.20 This could be a case of Raju meets Ravuvu.21 The point, however, is that

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Raju's manichean account simply reflects the official four-way discourse that was occurring among the British Raj, the Colonial Office in London, the CSR and the Colonial Administration in Fiji, each with its own political and economic agenda, each feeling the pressure from various lobbygroups. Raju's attitude was, in fact, meant to emphasise the misplacement of Indians in Fiji; he was, to some extent, the mouthpiece for the antiemigration campaign mounted in India by M. K. Gandhi and C. F. Andrews. His position was contrary to the Government of India's stated desire for an Indian colonization of Fiji; it was also in opposition to CSR's, and therefore the Government of Fiji's, need for a constant supply of cheap labour for its plantations. The point is that different officials were utilising similar attitudes for dissimilar goals: the colonialists in order to maintain a unilateral stranglehold on Fiji; the CSR to ensure a steady supply of cheap, experienced and manageable peasant labour; and the Indian nationalists as a way of terminating the indignity of emigration.22 Thus knowledges were exchanged, modified, and reproduced in official discursive circles and these usually spoke for, of and about peoples who had no, or very little, input in constructions about themselves. One text, however, stands out as an instance of postcolonial resistance in the midst of colonial hegemony. Totaram Sanadhya's Fijidwlp Men Mere Ikkis Varsh (1914) or My Twenty One Years in the Fiji Islands23 can be, in fact, regarded as the founding postcolonial (subversive, recuperative) text of Indo-Fijian writing, not merely in relation to the historical discourses of Brij Lai or Ahmed Ali, or the sociological studies undertaken by Vijay Naidu, but also in connection with the literary productions of Satendra Nandan, Raymond Pillai and Subramani. Sanadhya's account, as a girmitya (indentured labourer) with first-hand experience of the kuli pratha (coolie system), wedges itself as a vernacular moment24 inside the discursive space generated and occupied by colonial officials. Mere Ikkis Varsh is a classic narrative of resistance in that it is a polemical text written in the repressed, and therefore subversive, language of the colonised and, as such, aimed at galvanising—through the strategies of moral exhortation, nationalistic plea, descriptive hyperbole, cultural outrage and religious invocation—a constituency made up of empowered native intellectuals in India rather than disempowered girmityas in Fiji. Sanadhya and his scribe, Benarsidas Chaturvedi, were intent on seeing an end to the atyachars (atrocities) of indenture and, in consequence, as John D. Kelly points out, they did not set out to write verisimilar "history" but instead tried to inspire their constituents into political action against the system.25 Towards this end they deployed a narrative that ingeniously married first-hand experiences, eye-witness reports and anecdotal accounts with on-the-spot historical, economic and social analyses often ratified by citations from sympathetic white informants such as H. Dudley and J. W. Burton.26 It was not just a matter of correcting the

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pseudo-objective discourses radiating from official circles both within and without the colony, but of rhetorically destroying the very basis of such emanations, transforming them into official lies as opposed to the girmitya's vernacular truths. At one stage, Sanadhya writes: Because of our black colour, we have to endure many hardships on steamers. First of all, we are given very bad places to sit. We are not allowed to go towards the rooms of the Europeans. Even if we are prepared to pay the full fare, we still do not get a good place to sit. One time I went from Suva to Lautoka on the steamer named the "Adi Kepa" I was made to sit where pigs and other animals are kept.... The treatment I received is not given only to uneducated or less-educated Indians. It is also given to important well-educated Indians. In many ports, third-class whites disembark casually, and the clothes of second-class Indians, their socks, pajamas and so forth, are all taken and disinfected. In Fiji there is one big company called "C.S.R." which is in the sugar business. They buy all our sugar cane. A man whose sugar cane goes to them is given a receipt.... When the company officer takes these receipts from our hands, he first takes the receipt with iron tongs from far away, and then puts it through the smoke of a burning sulphur fire. When they [sic] are asked why they are doing this, they say, "You are black people...." One time I went with my friend to the office of an English lawyer. An Indian was there writing something. The barrister sahab told his wife, "Cover you mouth and nose with a hanky. Otherwise you will get sick from the air coming out of the mouth of this black man." . . . Readers! This is a barrister who makes thousands of pounds every year from our brothers.... We people, who consider ourselves subjects of the British Empire, are treated like this when we have left our homes in India. Then we open our eyes.27 In this passage, Sanadhya immediately contextualizes the girmityas' predicament in terms of the larger nationalist struggle in India; his emphasis on colour-prejudice, for instance, invites a collective sharing of empathy on the part of his constituents. Nevertheless, it is his allusion to the blatant discrimination he experiences as a traveller that plugs him into the very heart of nationalist agitation, for his account duplicates Gandhi's own experiences on a train in South Africa.28 Sanadhya's prose, despite (or perhaps because of) its disarming simplicity, is a marvellous instance of human outrage turned into postcolonial rhetoric. He begins with a general statement on colour-prejudice, then moves on to furnish an autobiographi-

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cal instance of it. His example, interestingly enough, is a literal realisation of the symbolic reference by colonialists to the labourers' "brute animalism."29 Once symbolic defilement enters the shocking dimension of the real, the narrator proceeds to show how racial stigma attaches itself to, and is physically experienced by, every black person—social, educational and caste status notwithstanding. Sanadhya's own status as a brahmin, with his caste's strictures against pollution and defilement, undoubtedly aggravates his trauma at being treated like a pollutant. This may seem trivial, but to his culture-specific readers the whole account would have been troubling in the extreme. Sanadhya, however, is not content to mull over the racial implications of white prejudice on girmityas; he sets out to disclose how, in spite of their obvious revulsion for the blacks, the whites must hypocritically conduct business with them. In this way, he points to the economic basis of racism and implies that an end to it entails the termination of this relationship: specifically, the indenture system; generally, the British Raj. Sanadhya's other key achievement is his postcolonial exploding—in "Bhut Lane Ki Katha" or "The Story of the Haunted Line"—of the manichean plot (the pun is intended) that informs most colonial accounts of the Fijian and Indo-Fijian encounter. After describing at length the dehumanising conditions of indenture, Sanadhya mentions how his attempt at atmahatya (suicide), induced by a lack of food, the severity of his tasks and a nostalgia for home, was thwarted by the fortuitous arrival of four hungry Fijians: They got up and looked into the pot. About half of a half pound of rice was left from Sunday there. I had completely forgotten about the rice. The four made share and ate, drank water, and got ready to go. ... Samu said to me, "My brother died in Suva. We are coming back from burying him. You fed us, from today you are my friend." With this much food we will reach our home. . . ." He went, and I was very pleased in my mind that God today kept me from great shame. Samu came back in two hours. With him were seven more men. They brought sacks and put them in my house. In one sack was sweet potato, in one bulbs, and in two were roots like yams. . . . I was served first on the banana leaves and they said to me "You eat first." Then Samu's eyes fell onto the rope which was tied to complete my life's journey. Samu climbed onto the platform, opened the rope and said to me, "I'm taking this rope, I will use it for tying the boat." Saying this he wrapped the rope around his waist and said to me, "I am giving these four bags of roots to you. You should eat them." They wrapped up the boiled yams and shook hands with me, and then all the Fijians went away.30

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Several things are happening here, not least the recognition of a mutual predicament: indigenous villager meets displaced peasant and both, in a moment that is more subconscious than conscious, unite against a system which must, like a shadow, remain outside the frame of their meeting precisely because what they exchange is a humanity that extends beyond the coloniser's purview. Two distinct cultural attitudes to hospitality mark out the convergence of the two parties. The group of Fijians enter Sanadhya's room expecting to be fed, thus exercising the customary rights accorded to travellers within their own culture. Fortunately, the very moment of their entrance makes Sanadhya a host bound by Indian custom to oblige his guests in every possible way. When he speaks of being saved from a "great shame," Sanadhya is alluding to the discovery of food which allows him to fulfil his role as host. In the meantime, the Fijians realise that Sanadhya is seriously impoverished and, in their communal system of kerekere (request), it is the "haves" who must give to the "have-nots." Underlying this cross-ethnic symbiosis is of course a mutual awareness, momentary though it may be, of a shared humanity. Sanadhya's assembling of variant or subaltern opinions in relation to the same discursive field traversed by official traces, registers and narratives may betoken, if seminally, the formation of a postcolonial historiography that performs surgery on colonial malformations, that retrieves voices that throw an alternate light on what we think we know about ourselves, about our attitudes to other groups we live with, thereby putting into question certain epistemologies that may shape our outlook, or mould our perception of either our own or another's ontological being. That discursive formations are often determined by the deployers of power (political, economic, militaristic) is made amply clear by Sanadhya's own realistic struggle to articulate and address a constituency that had the potential to, and in the end did, exercise its power to resist the hegemony of the British Raj. Subaltern voices: Satendra Nandan and Subramani It is this postcolonial historiography based on the privileging of the oral as oracular that inspires Satendra Nandan in "The Old Man and the Scholar." Three attitudes are inscribed in the poem: the first inclines towards irony and belongs to the authorial persona who recognises the contradictions involved in straddling two or three cultures; the second belongs to the scholar, the object of irony, who has internalised western discursive practices to the degree that he, in his quest for orthodox, dataoriented forms of history, misses the subaltern view offered by an oral telling; and the last belongs to the girmitya, the fast-disappearing source of an alternate historiography that entails—as it must—a radical transformation of the very vessel in which the substance of history is poured: 1096

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the scholar's questions are relevant and always to the point about the man's life, his journey his women, children, if any . . . but all the man breathes: 'bhaiya, rowat-gawat heelat-dolat adat-padat hum sub flflj'n/'31 to several subtle questions the same answer, although he pushed the mike nearer to his mouth. the old chap is quite senile— authentic history cannot be written with words from living mouths, finally the thesis is done through official documents plagiarism and remembered lies: it's given life in black & white for words are easier to understand than eyes that are almost blind.32 The italicised vernacular suggests that both the narrating persona and the scholar are at several removes from the discursive world of the girmitya; in fact, unlike him, their speaking-positions are to be found in metropolitan discourses of the West. Whereas the former sees this paradox for what is and makes an intellectual decision to inhabit the girmitya's space, to fix the experiential rhythms of his vernacular signifiers and the is-ness of the signified moment they strive to capture, the latter chooses to ignore the old man's remarks as it offers a poetic rehearsal of history and has, therefore, no place in his assumptions about historiography. The vernacular, in any event, explodes both the narrator's cultivated irony and the scholar's enslavement to western discursive formations. It violates the defining form of history through subaltern incursions, forcing it to communicate a different ontological moment by grounding it in a new type of epistemology. Authentic history can be written with words from living mouths, only its authority may lie in alternative—non-western and postcolonial—discursive practices. The insight-in-blindness trope of the closing lines makes the point that seeing and saying are the same for the old man, that his blindness negates the shaky truths captured by ordinary sight, so that language embodies the immediacy of feeling, the process itself, not the objectivity of seeing. Unlike the "words" of a conventional reporter, his language—on

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an atheoretical level at least—refuses to distinguish between word, memory and experience. Word is, memory is, experience is. It can be claimed that fiction is history as performance inasmuch as signs are forever exchanged in the present (narrative tenses nothwithstanding); fiction, in other words, offers a view of history as always happening, as an enactment, in contrast to mandarin notions of history as chronicle (i.e. the selection and ordering of events) where signs are supposed to—though in reality they never do—narrativise the past even while their exchange happens in the discursive present that binds all reader-text contracts. The novel, in this context, offers a revolutionary instance of historiographic writing, though the postcolonial subject must treat it with caution as an aberrant product of western epistemology, and seek out ways of radicalising the form, of subjecting it to an altogether different epistemological scheme while acknowledging that the English language brings with it a whole culture of predetermined signs. Many postcolonial writers have taken up this daunting challenge: Wilson Harris, Nissim Ezekiel, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghose and Ben Okri are examples. Subramani, in the context of Fiji, attempts to generate a radical historiography that finds its archival source in the experience of indenture. Many of his stories from The Fantasy-Eaters and Other Stories, and in particular "Gamalian's Woman," are attempts at formulating narrative forms using indenture myths with the aim of positing views of the world that elude post-enlightenment logic and the dogmatic eschatalogy that seems to characterise most Judaeo-Christian thought. The very beginning of the story seeks to problematise our narrative expectations: "Mrs Gamalian died in her dream one fine Saturday morning."33 Death implies closure, but we are not, as yet, sure whether Mrs Gamalian literally dies as she dreams or whether she dies in the narrative of her dream. In fact, as we later discover, she dies into her dream, a dream that "originated in the arkathis' lies" about a paradisal land. Closure—associated with "calendar-time,"34 the temporal realm of most fiction—is frustrated since Mrs Gamalian is inscribed in a dream-time that goes beyond the ken of history. Subramani's sentence encodes temporal discontinuity—the stuff of western historiography—only to replace it with the idea of metaphysical continuity— the stuff of girmitya aspirations. And his conceptualisation of this paradox takes on a quotidian particularity in "one fine Saturday morning." The issue is further complicated by having Mrs Gamalian return to the mundane realm with narratives of the marvellous, which she then proceeds to sell to credulous villagers for a price. In the economy of signexchange, the language of the marvellous suggests a transformative nexus with the language of the mundane. Mrs Gamalian recognises the exchange-value of a marvellous coding to auditors who are, as a result of their collective history, accustomed to a mundane coding. The lies of the arkathis, since they have no basis in lived reality, are converted into meta-

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physical truths occupying fable-time and then mobilised, for a profit, against mimetic discourses: Mrs Gamalian navigated her way through waves of dreams and reveries and lurched onto her gilded palanquin. Her lathi and spectacles floated in the air for a moment and then plummeted down into the yard, splashing the dew from blades of grass. The glasses were immediately covered with a film of m i s t . . . Her audience gazed at her face—a face that was bleached and lined like driftwood. Their hearts throbbed with many unarticulated fears and questions.35 Mrs Gamalian's entrepreneurial use of dreams suggests a desire, at least on her part, to enact them on a corresponding material plane. A degraded world of history is supplanted by an upgraded world of myth. Even the narrator cannot help but be led by the irrepressible force of the protagonist's virtual vision, mainly because it (since we are talking of a grammatical voice), like Mrs Gamalian, sees the virtue of virtual reality in its flexibile economy of sign. Afterlife, in this context, eludes the limitations of history, of temporality, in that it prevents closure and opens up an infinity of possible texts, each leading from one instance of the marvellous to another instance of the same. So that when Mrs Gamalian dies again in the last sentence, after her dreams fail to materialise, we remain somewhat sceptical of the gestured-at closure: "One morning the old woman died in her shack, leaving Bamboo a bawling, bewildered orphan."36 The story ends, but its ending points to the beginning which, in turn, transports us to the realm of dream and fable, of a world without closure. Once this cyclical procedure is inscribed by language, history breaks out of its straitjacket and is redefined by postcolonial forms. Mrs Gamalian's yarn-spinning, in its paranormal variety, is not about escaping history but about discursive empowerment that allows her to make history in her own image: colonial archives succumb to postcolonial readings. There are, to sum up, more recent instances of subaltern explosions in the plays of Larry Thomas, who skilfully taps into the verandah-English that forms the discursive world of the urban underclass in Fiji, and Raymond Pillai, who deploys Fiji-baat (Hindi as it is spoken in Fiji) in Roman rather than Devanagari script to suggest an Indo-Fijian community that is fast evolving a (postcultural?) worldview simultaneously at odds with and a synthesis of the three cultures available to it: the mothering, the indigenising and the colonising. But that of course is the subject of another, much lengthier, essay.

Sudesh Mishra, The University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji Islands

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Notes 1 Race is ironised here; it exists as a differentiating category because the discourses surrounding it exist (and have historically existed) to reify it, though it must be said that as a reined—albeit unstable—category, as a typology, it pretends to occupy a metaphysical field, hovering above social formations, masquerading as a signifier that posits an essential signified, whereas in truth it is very much a construct of power relations in the performative field of capital. When taken as a natural signifier, race is neither a product of nor a performer in the complex field of capital, the site of class struggle, neither is it viewed in terms of the related economic sphere of imperialism, but instead takes its nomenclative place in the simple field of biological determinism where the dialectic is framed around notions of phenotypes and genotypes. This concept of race gives rise to social, cultural, psychological and political discourses which treat it as self-evident, a term centred in the Gramscian domain of common sense, rather than a chimerical product, variously reproduced; of specific discursive practices sourced in one or another materialist enterprise. This essay was, in many ways, inspired by John O'Carroll. I dedicate it to him. 2 History is of course governed by a material dialectic, but it is also, as my spatial categorisation of it may suggest, made up of contending forms, thoughtpatterns and alternate paradigms determined by the specificity of the context and the cultural specificity of the participants locked in unequal combat, a combat that is simultaneously about subject-positions, power-deployment and discursive hegemony. In this regard, it is not strange that the dominance of the feudal moment before contact may, and I speak here of symmetrical forms and structures and not of any technologically-inspired economic dialectic, contain localised hierarchies that mirror the hierarchies imported and developed afterwards by colonisers. While the dialectic of history may seem defineable in materialist terms in the sense that it unfolds in sympathy with or reaction against what is already in place, it needs to be grasped that there are voices, thought-patterns and alternate paradigms that, though consigned to the realm of shadows by the dominant moment, haunt it like spectres in anticipation of a future corporeality. I would like to thank Steven Ratuva for helping me clarify some of the above points in my paper. Steven also raised the possibility of a postcolonial thinker turning into a neo-colonial policymaker, as perhaps may be the case with Ratu Mara. The problem here is, I feel, one of ideological inconsistency in the individual rather than any fault with my model. 3 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, Hoare. Q & G.N. Smith (eds. & transl.), London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971, p. 324 4 Abdul R. JanMohamed, "The Economy of the Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature," Critical Inquiry, 12, 1, Autumn 1985, p. 64 5 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives," History and Theory, 24, 3,1985, p. 253. 6 Edward Said, "Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World," Salmagundi, 70-71, Spring/Summer, 1986, p. 57 7 ibid., pp. 56-57 8 Asesela Ravuvu, The Facade of Democracy: Fijian Struggles for Political Control 1830-1987, Suva: Reader Publishing House, 1991, p. 57 9 James A. Michener, Return to Paradise, London: Seeker & Warburg, 1956, p. 123 1100

HAUNTED LINES 10 Eve(s) have no place in Michener's patriarchal narrative, a narrative that is so solipsistic in its referentiality that even a misarticulation of women is not possible within its parameters. Women are left out not because of the narrator's squeamishness in matters of representation, but because of his implicit belief in the impossibility of (even) "unworlded" worlds existing beyond the discursive horizons of patriarchy. 11 Ravuvu's scheme, however, is different in its reproduction of anterior models; he tends to reshuffle earlier signifiers, so that, with the apparent withdrawal of God into a realm of multinational (or corporate) invisibility, Adam inherits the structures in place, not in any stable or exact way, but in a mimetic way that admits local permutations. We must, at this point, also remark on Ravuvu's affiliation with the Fijian ruling classes who, as S. H. Alatas notes in the Malaysian context, "inherited the rule from the British without a struggle for independence such as that which took place in Indonesia, India and the Philippines. As such there was also no ideological struggle. There was no intellectual break with British ideological thinking at a deeper level." See S. H. Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of Malays, Filipinos, and Javanese from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century and Its Functions on the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism, London: Frank Cass, 1977, p. 152. 12 Deryck Scarr, The History of the Pacific Islands: Kingdoms of the Reefs, Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990, p. 251 13 ibid. 14 It is not enough to say that Ravuvu unwittingly "internalizes" a manichean model; he has made no secret of his empathy with the taukei ideology. In this respect, he enunciates, disseminates and polices a discourse that naturalizes a polity based on a colonial division of ethnicity. While on this subject, I should also mention that it has been argued, by some of my colleagues, that Ravuvu's account can be shown to be empirically accurate. If this is so, then it only serves to strengthen my thesis which tries to make a case for the circulatory power of a manichean discourse that has been transmitted through history, accruing in the process an archival network of quotations, references, footnotes, etc., that gives it a legitimacy that is reproduced in the national consciousness. In fact, it could be argued that this discourse has assumed the form of an ideology inasmuch as it "hails" the subject it creates, thus eliciting reactions that are prescribed and circumscribed by the ideology itself. 15 Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), The Letters of Rupert Brooke, London: Faber, 1968, pp. 538-539. 16 Unfortunately, even intelligent insider-critics are seduced by imperialist formations that regard certain cultures, when these belong "civilizationally" to an older lineage, as fossil-types, the better to treat them as exchange-value in the colonial-capitalist scheme. Vijay Mishra, for instance, talks of "how in the nostalgic transmission of culture the [Indian] diaspora itself became a fossilized fragment of the original nation." Vijay Mishra, "The Girmit Ideology Revisited: Fiji Indian Literature," Immanuel S. Nelson (ed.), The Literature of the Indian Diaspora, New York: Greenwood Press, 1992, p. 2. 17 A Colonial Office bureacrat minuting remarks made by the Right Reverend T. C. Twitchell, Bishop in Polynesia, cited by K. L. Gillion, The Fiji Indians: Challenge to European Dominance 1920-1946, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1977, p. 67 18 Remarks attributed to a CSR attorney during the 1920 sugarcane strike, cited by Gillion, ibid., pp. 57-58 19 ibid.

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20 Raju Report cited by Gillion, ibid., p. 60 21 The final report, it needs to be mentioned, was put together by G. L. Corbett, the only white member in a deputation of four. Raju (whose full name was B. Venkatapatiraju Garu) as president of the group would have undoubtedly decided on the final status of the report. See Gillion, ibid., pp. 79-80. 22 Raju's anti-emigration manicheanism may find an earlier variant in the romantic sub-text of Arthur Gordon's protectionist policy towards ethnic Fijians which postulates the view of a delicate, childlike people in need of paternalistic care. That he introduced the system of indentured immigration in pursuit of this policy implies the different standards he exercised in relation to peasant Indians. This is not so surprising when we consider the ethnographic impulse that led Gordon to classify some cultures as objects of desire and others as repositories of labour. There is an assumption here that distinguishes between those cultures which have been articulated, by themselves or by others, and can be read in terms of some Eurocentric code of civilisation, and those which have yet to be articulated in such terms. The first type of culture is readerly and mostly of use-value whereas the second type is writerly insofar as it awaits original production, and thus must be protected, by a western metasubject. 23 Totaram Sanadhya, My Twenty One Years in the Fiji Islands, Kelly J. D. & Utara Singh (eds. & transl.), Suva: Fiji Museum, 1991. 24 Speaking of the revolutionary project implied by a privileging of the vernacular moment, Ranajit Guha writes: "To speak of vernacular pasts as the object of historiography is already to problematize the latter, since a past designated as vernacular can hardly find its place in historical discourse except in an alternative mode—that is, the mode of an alternative to non-vernacular historiography. Situated thus, its alterity takes its stand at once within a relationship of power. For the Latin verna inheres in the phrase 'vernacular' like memory in a microchip. Verna means, among other things, 'a home-born slave'." See Ranajit Guha, "The Authority of Vernacular Pasts," Meanjin, 51, 2, Winter, 1992, p. 299. 25 Sanadhya, ibid., p. 9 26 See, for instance, Sanadhya, ibid., pp. 70-79 27 ibid., pp. 46^7 28 M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Desai, M (transl), Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1989, pp. 93-96. 29 A. R. Coates, Agent General of Immigration 1903-1914, cited by Ahmed Ali, Plantation to Politics: Studies on Fiji Indians, Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1980, p. 10 30 Sanadhya, ibid., p. 126 31 Nandan translates this as: "brother, crying-praying, rising-falling, eatingfarting, we all arrived." See Satendra Nanda, Voices in the River, Suva: Vision International, 1985, p. 114 32 ibid., p. 61 33 Subramani, The Fantasy Eaters and Other Stories, Washington: Three Continents Press, 1988, p. 55 34 Julio Ortega makes the distinction between calendar-time and fable-time in "Exchange System in 100 Years of Solitude," Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Powers of Fiction, Julio Ortega (ed.), Austin: University of Texas, 1988, p. 2 35 Subramani, ibid., p. 56 36 ibid., p. 61

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INTERIOR COLONIES Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification Diana Fuss* From Diacritics 24.2-3. (Summer/Fall 1994): 20-42

I begin this discussion of identification with two claims: first, that identification has a history—a colonial history; and second, that this colonial history poses serious challenges for contemporary recuperations of a politics of identification. I do not mean to imply that identification, a concept that receives its fullest elaboration in the discourse of psychoanalysis, cannot be successfully mobilized for a radical politics. I mean only to suggest that if we are to begin to understand both its political usages and its conceptual limitations, the notion of identification must be placed squarely within its other historical genealogies, including colonial imperialism. To assist me in this reading, I turn to one of the most important twentieth-century writers working at the intersection of antiimperial politics and psychoanalytic theory, the practicing psychiatrist and revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon. Psychoanalysis's interest in the problem of identification provides Fanon with a vocabulary and an intellectual framework in which to diagnose and to treat not only the psychological disorders produced in individuals by the violence of colonial domination but also the neurotic structure of colonialism itself. At the same time, Fanon's investigation of the dynamics of psychological alterity within the historical and political frame of colonialism suggests that identification is neither a historically universal concept nor a politically innocent one. A by-product of modernity, the psychoanalytic theory of identification takes shape within the larger cultural context of colonial expansion and imperial crisis.

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Imperial subjects Contemporary theories of racial alterity and difference owe much to the rethinking of self-other relations that Fanon elaborates in his anticolonialist treatise, Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Most prominently, Edward Said's enormously influential theory of orientalism, which posits the Muslim "Orient" as a phobic projection of a distinctly Western imaginary, echoes elements of Fanon's own theory of colonial psychopathology in which the black man is subjugated to the white man through a process of racial othering: "for not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man" [Fanon, Black 110]. Assigned the role of embodying racial difference within a colonialist metaphorics of representation, the black man becomes for the white man the repository of his repressed fantasies, "the mainstay of his preoccupations and his desires" [170]. Under colonialism, Fanon contends, "the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man" [161].' Yet significantly complicating this notion of "Black as Other" is a rather different reading of alterity in Fanon's work with potentially even greater import for an anticolonialist politics. In this second theory of white-black relations, Fanon implicitly disputes his own initial formulation of racial alterity and asks whether, in colonial regimes of representation, even otherness may be appropriated exclusively by white subjects. Fanon considers the possibility that colonialism may inflict its greatest psychical violence precisely by attempting to exclude blacks from the very self-other dynamic that makes subjectivity possible. This alternative theory of (non)alterity elaborated in Black Skin, White Masks does not so much call into question the first as uncover another, deeper, more insidious level of orientalism. Fanon proposes that in the system of power-knowledge that upholds colonialism, it is the white man who lays claim to the category of the Other, the white man who monopolizes otherness to secure an illusion of unfettered access to subjectivity. Deploying the conventional psychoanalytic grammar of "the other" and "the Other" to distinguish between imaginary and symbolic difference, or between primary and secondary identification,2 Fanon implies that the black man under colonial rule finds himself relegated to a position other than the Other. Colonialism works in part by policing the boundaries of cultural intelligibility, legislating and regulating which identities attain full cultural signification and which do not. For the black man, the implications of his exclusion from the cultural field of symbolization are immediate and devastating. If psychoanalysis is right to claim that "I is an Other" [Lacan 23], then otherness constitutes the very entry into subjectivity; subjectivity names the detour through the Other that provides access to a fictive sense of self. Space operates as one of the chief signifiers of racial difference here: under colonial rule, freedom of movement (psychical and social) becomes a white prerogative. 1104

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Forced to occupy, in a white racial phantasm, the static ontological space of the timeless "primitive," the black man is disenfranchised of his very subjectivity. Denied entry into the alterity that underwrites subjectivity, the black man, Fanon implies, is sealed instead into a "crushing objecthood." Black may be a protean imaginary other for white, but for itself it is a stationary "object"; objecthood, substituting for true alterity, blocks the migration through the Other necessary for subjectivity to take place. Through the violence of racial interpellation—" 'Dirty nigger!' Or simply, 'Look, a Negro!' "—Fanon finds himself becoming neither an "I" nor a "not-I" but simply "an object in the midst of other objects": "the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye" [Black 109]. Stricken and immobilized by a white child's phobically charged cry, "Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened!," Fanon's very body strains, fragments, and finally bursts apart: "I took myself off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?" [112]. "Fixed" by the violence of the racist interpellation in an imaginary relation of fractured specularity, the black man, Fanon concludes, is "forever in combat with his own image" [194], The black man (contra Lacan) begins and ends violently fragmented. For the white man, the considerable cultural capital amassed by the colonization of subjectivity amounts to nothing less than the abrogation of universality. While the "black man must be black in relation to the white man," the converse does not hold true; the white man can be white without any relation to the black man because the sign "white" exempts itself from a dialectical logic of negativity. Consider Fanon's formula for "whiteness": White Ego different from the Other

[215]

Claiming for itself the exalted position of transcendental signifier, "white" is never a "not-black." As a self-identical, self-reproducing term, white draws its ideological power from its proclaimed transparency, from its selfelevation over the very category of "race."3 "White" operates as its own Other, freed from any dependency upon the sign "Black" for its symbolic constitution. In contrast, "Black" functions, within a racist discourse, always diacritically, as the negative term in a Hegelian dialectic continuously incorporated and negated. Fanon articulates the process precisely: "The Negro is comparison" [211]. The broad outlines of Fanon's theory of otherness are borrowed from Jean-Paul Sartre, whose use of the Hegelian dialectic in Being and

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Nothingness provides Fanon with a useful paradigm for theorizing psychological alterity in specifically historical and political terms. Sartre's thesis that it is the Other who founds one's being, the Other who holds for the Self the "truth" of identity, becomes the theoretical basis for Fanon's repeated calls in Black Skin, White Masks for an ethics of mutual identification, "a world of reciprocal recognitions" [218].4 Recently, the category of the Other has achieved considerable prominence in critical discussions of identity, offering a ready and useful shorthand for signaling the production of cultural difference. Yet often in reading this work I am struck by the inadequacy of the term to do everything we ask of it. To invoke "the Other" as an ontological or existentialist category paradoxically risks eliding the very range and play of cultural differences that the designation is intended to represent. Reliance upon the Other as a categorical imperative often works to flatten rather than to accentuate difference.5 Moreover, the signifier "Other," in its applications if not always its theorizations, tends to disguise how there may be other Others—subjects who do not quite fit into the rigid boundary definitions of (dis)similitude, or who indeed may be left out of the Self/Other binary altogether. Fanon sees the Other for what it is: an ideological construct designed to uphold and to consolidate imperialist definitions of selfhood. Thus, in Fanon's estimation, Sartre's theory of alterity fails on two counts. First, it fails to register how, in colonial history, not all others are the same: "though Sartre's speculations on the existence of The Other may be correct," Fanon argues, "their application to a black consciousness proves fallacious. That is because the white man is not only The Other but also the master" [138]. Second, Sartre's deployment of a Self/Other dialectics fails to see how the Other who is master is firmly located in an economy of the Same. In a colonial dialectics, based on a radical asymmetry of power, symbolic alterity operates precisely as a privilege of the Self-Same.6 The problem originates with the Hegelian dialectic, which, as Robert Young has recently observed, is modeled upon Enlightenment history. As a form of knowledge based upon incorporation, Hegel's philosophical theory of self-other relations "simulates the project of nineteenth-century imperialism . . . mimics at a conceptual level the geographical and economic absorption of the non-European world by the West" [Young 3]. Both the existentialist and the psychoanalytic notions of otherness, which Fanon inherits from Sartre and Freud respectively, operate on the Hegelian principle of negation and incorporation. The colonial-imperial register of self-other relations is particularly striking in Freud's work, where the psychoanalytic formulation of identification can be seen to locate at the very level of the unconscious the imperialist act of assimilation that drives Europe's voracious colonialist appetite. Identification, in other words, is itself an imperial process, a form of violent appropriation in which the Other is deposed and assimilated into the lordly domain of

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Self. Through a psychical process of colonization, the imperial subject builds an Empire of the Same and installs at its center a tyrannical dictator, "His Majesty the Ego." What happens when imperial subjects become Imperial Subjects? When Otherness, and thus subjectivity, is claimed as a prerogative of the colonizer alone? For Fanon, the answer is clear: when subjectivity becomes the exclusive property of "the master," the colonizer can claim a sovereign right to personhood by purchasing interiority over and against the representation of the colonial other as pure exteriority. This is the elusive meaning of Fanon's enigmatic phrase "the Umwelt of Martinique" [37], one of many references in Black Skin, White Masks to Lacan's 1949 paper on the mirror stage, in which the function of the mirror is said "to establish a relation between the organism and its reality . . . between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt" [Lacan 4]. But if Martinique is the Umwelt to Europe's Innenwelt, if the colonized is no more than a narcissistic selfreflection of the colonizer, then the latter's exclusive claim to "humanness' is seriously compromised, put into jeopardy by the very narcissism that paradoxically constructs the nonhuman in the Imperial Subject's own image. Moreover, by imposing upon the colonial other the burden of identification (the command to become a mimic Anglo-European), the Imperial Subject inadvertently places himself in the perilous position of object—object of the Other's aggressive, hostile, and rivalrous acts of incorporation. It therefore becomes necessary for the colonizer to subject the colonial other to a double command: be like me, don't be like me; be mimetically identical, be totally other. The colonial other is situated somewhere between difference and similitude, at the vanishing point of subjectivity. Of course, the same dialectic of difference and similitude constitutes the Imperial Subject as well. Any racial identity is organized through a play of identification and disidentification: "The Negro is not. Any more than the white man" [Black 231]. But "white" defines itself through a powerful and illusory fantasy of escaping the exclusionary practices of psychical identity formation. The colonizer projects what we might call identification's "alienation effect" onto the colonized, who is enjoined to identify and to disidentify simultaneously with the same object, to assimilate but not to incorporate, to approximate but not to displace. Further, in attempting to claim alterity entirely as its own, the Imperial Subject imposes upon all others, as a condition of their subjugation, an injunction to mine alterity. The colonized are constrained to impersonate the image the colonizer offers them of themselves; they are commanded to imitate the colonizer's version of their essential difference. What, then, is the political utility of mimesis for the colonized, when mimesis operates as one of the very terms of their cultural and political dispossession under colonial imperialism? In recent feminist theory, mimesis is most frequently understood in

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opposition to the category of masquerade: "mimicry" (the deliberate and playful performance of a role) is offered as a counter and a corrective to "masquerade" (the unconscious assumption of a role).7 The critical difference between masquerade and mimicry—between a nonironic imitation of a role and a parodic hyperbolization of that role—depends on the degree and readability of its excess. In this reading, mimicry resists and subverts dominant systems of representation by intentionally ironizing them. Postcolonial discourse theory understands mimicry in strikingly contrary terms, not as a tactic of dissent but as a condition of domination. In the words of Homi Bhabha, "mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge." Bhabha's theory of colonial mimicry, developed through a series of important readings on Fanon's work, reminds us that it is precisely through the figures of "trompe I'oeil, irony, mimicry, and repetition" that the discourse of colonial imperialism exercises its authority ["Mimicry" 126].8 In this second reading, mimicry subtends rather than disturbs dominant systems of representation; it operates as an emphatic instrument of political regulation, social discipline, and psychological depersonalization. Yet despite their apparent incompatibility, these two notions of mimesis cross, interact, and converge in ways that make it increasingly difficult to discriminate between a mimicry of subversion and a mimicry of subjugation, or at least to know with any degree of certainty their possible political effects. Bhabha makes it clear that the ever-present possibility of slippage—from mimicry into mockery, from performativity into parody— immediately discredits colonialism's authorized versions of otherness and profoundly undermines the colonizer's elusive self-image to the point where "the great tradition of European humanism seems capable only of ironizing itself" ["Mimicry" 128]. As narcissistic authority evolves into paranoiac fear ["Sly Civility" 78], the rents and divisions within colonialist narratives of domination become more visible. Not even the colonial production of the divided other—black skin, white masks—leaves the colonizer's authority completely intact: "in occupying two places at once . . . the depersonalized, dislocated colonial subject can become an incalculable object, quite literally, difficult to place. The demand of authority cannot unify its messages nor simply identify its subjects" ["Remembering" xxii]. Bhabha's point, simply put, is that the production of mimic others can prove to be disruptive in ways colonial discourse does not intend and cannot possibly control. If the mimicry of subjugation can provide unexpected opportunities for resistance and disruption, the mimicry of subversion can find itself reinforcing conventional power relations rather than eroding them. This is the conclusion of several recent studies on a form of racial cross-identification that Fanon does not discuss in Black Skin, White Masks, namely the subject position of white skin, black masks, or whites in black face.9 In a

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reading of racial fetishism and the homoerotic imaginary, Kobena Mercer asks: "what is going on when whites assimilate and introject the degraded and devalorized signifiers of racial otherness into the cultural construction of their own identity? If imitation implies identification, in the psychoanalytic sense of the word, then what is it about whiteness that makes the white subject want to be black?" ["Skin" 21]. Kaja Silverman, in her analysis of Lawrence of Arabia, provides a possible answer with her theory of the double mimesis. While, on the one hand, T. E. Lawrence's adoption of Arab dress and custom promoted an unorthodox homoerotic identification with Arab nationals, on the other hand, the very same cultural impersonation masked a will-to-power, a desire to outdo the Arabs in their "Arabness," an ambition to become more truly other than the Other [17-20]. Gail Ching-Liang Low expresses a similar concern when she speculates on whether, for the colonial subject, "the primary attraction of the cross-cultural dress is the promise of 'transgressive' pleasure without the penalties of actual change" [93]. Keeping in mind the power relations involved, there may be little if anything subversive in crosscultural impersonations that work in the service of colonial imperialism. When we take into account multiple axes of difference that cross-cut, interfere with, and mutually constitute each other, the dream of a playful mimesis cannot be so easily or immediately recuperated for a progressive politics. Given the various and continually changing cultural coordinates that locate identity at the site of both fantasy and power, one would have to acknowledge, at the very least, that the same mimetic act can be disruptive and reversionary at once. Folded into one another, these two notions of mimicry together suggest that context is decisive in registering the full range of political meanings one might attribute to even a single identification. The deceptively simple details of who is imitating whom and under what conditions stand as the most insistent, intricate, and indispensable questions for a politics of mimesis. The project of evaluating the political effects of mimesis encounters further complications when we consider the ways in which "imitation repeatedly veers over into identification" [Silverman 19]. Psychoanalytic theories of identification all seem to agree that "every imitation . . . is also an incorporation" [Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, "Unconscious" 208]. In the next section I would like to examine at least one instance in Fanon's work where this premise does not appear to hold true, one scene of mimesis that draws its power from a certain refusal of identification. Tentatively unfastening impersonation from identification, I propose to demonstrate how mimesis might actually be deployed to counter a prescribed identification. When situated within the context of colonial politics, the psychoanalytic assumption that every conscious imitation conceals an unconscious identification needs to be carefully questioned, read for the signs of its own colonizing impulses.

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Impersonating identification The wearing of the veil throughout the period of the French occupation of Algeria provides Fanon with one of his most important examples of the role of mimesis in the psychopathology of colonial relations. In the opening essay of A Dying Colonialism, entitled "Algeria Unveiled," Fanon examines the mutable and contradictory cultural meanings attributed to Arab women's dress, what he suggestively denotes as "the historic dynamism of the veil" [Dying 63]. For the European occupiers, the veil functions as an exotic signifier, invested with all the properties of a sexual fetish. Faced with a veiled Algerian woman, Fanon writes, the European is consumed with a desire to see, a desire that, in colonialism's highly sexualized economy of looking, also operates as an urge for violent possession: Every new Algerian woman unveiled announced to the occupier an Algerian society whose systems of defense were in the process of dislocation, open and breached. Every veil that fell, every body that became liberated from the traditional embrace of the haik, every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer. [42] The colonialist desire to unveil the Algerian woman is given special urgency by the capability of the veil to block the look of the Other while permitting the woman herself to assume the privilege of the Imperial Subject—to see without being seen [44]. Fanon reads the French colonial political program of "unveiling" as an attempt to strip all Algerians of their national, cultural, and religious identity by reducing the Algerian woman to a sexual representation more readily assimilated to white European ideals of womanhood. In direct opposition to the signification of the veil for the French colonialists, the veil comes to function for the colonized as a visible sign of Algerian nationalist identity and a symbol of resistance to imperial penetration and colonial domination. Each attempt to Europeanize the Algerian woman is countered by a reinvestment of the veil with national import. Even more importantly for Fanon, the wearing of the veil operates as one of the most visible and dramatic indices to the historical emergence of women's political agency: "the Algerian women who had long since dropped the veil once again donned the haik, thus affirming that it was not true that woman liberated herself at the invitation of France and of General de Gaulle" [62]. Yet as Mervat Hatem reminds us, revolutionary calls for the reassumption of the veil may have quite other motivations during times of severe economic hardship brought on by the colonial wars: the veil, and the 1110

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exclusion of women from the public sphere that it signifies, upholds a traditional sexual division of labor and preserves for men increasingly scarce jobs in the workplace [31].10 Within a single discourse the veil can thus signify doubly, as a mode of defying colonialism and as a means of ensuring patriarchal privilege.11 Conversely, the veil can carry a similar meaning across seemingly antithetical discourses: in the discourse of colonial imperialism and in the discourse of national resistance, the veiled Algerian woman stands in metonymically for the nation. In both instances, the woman's body is the contested ideological battleground, overburdened and saturated with meaning. It is the woman who circulates as a fetish— both the site of a receding, endangered national identity and the guarantor of its continued visibility. In Fanon's "Algeria Unveiled," the wearer of the veil becomes a veil, the inscrutable face of a nation struggling to maintain its cultural inviolability. A fetishistic logic of displacement operates in Fanon's own text, as the veiled Algerian woman comes to bear the burden of representing national identity in the absence of nation. Fanon extends this logic of fetishization to include the unveiled Algerian woman as well. His argument rests on a paradox of unveiling: if some Algerian women during the war have begun to dress in European clothes, this act of cultural cross-dressing is testimony not to the success of the relentless European attempts at psychological conversion and deculturation but to their failure; these women, enlisted by the FLN, unveil themselves only in order to better disguise themselves. "Passing" as European, Algerian women can move freely through the European quarters of the city, carrying concealed guns, grenades, ammunition, money, papers, and even explosives. For Fanon, this kind of national passing in the service of revolutionary activity is never a question of imitation: It must be borne in mind that the committed Algerian woman learns both her role as "a woman alone in the street" and her revolutionary mission instinctively. The Algerian woman is not a secret agent. It is without apprenticeship, without briefing, without fuss, that she goes out into the street with three grenades in her handbag or the activity report of an area in her bodice. She does not have a sensation of playing a role she has read about ever so many times in novels, or seen in motion pictures. There is not that coefficient of play, of imitation, almost always present in this form of action when we are dealing with a Western woman. What we have here is not the bringing to light of a character known and frequented a thousand times in imagination or in stories. It is an authentic birth in a pure state, without preliminary instruction. There is no character to imitate. On the contrary, there is an intense dramatization, a continuity between the woman and the revolutionary. [Dying 50]

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Fanon's insistence upon the nonmimetic character of the Algerian woman's national cross-dressing poses a number of questions for a politics of mimesis. What does it mean to say that this woman "learns" her role "instinctively," without apprenticeship and without example? Can one imitate without an object or a model to impersonate? Can there be impersonation without imitation, or role-playing without a role to play? In one sense, yes. Theories of the masquerade remind us that there is no model behind the imitation, no genuine femininity beneath the performance, no original before the copy.12 But Fanon's insistence that the Algerian woman's European impersonation is "an authentic birth in a pure state" presumes not that femininity is itself a cultural production of the masquerade but that masquerade is a natural function of femininity. It assumes that if the Algerian woman in her performance as "European" expertly dissimulates, she does so naturally, without "that coefficient of play, of imitation" that characterizes Western women. Fanon's retrieval of an essentialist discourse of black femininity to explain the paradox of the unveiled Algerian woman's nonmimetic imitation appears motivated by a desire to refuse any possibility of cultural contamination between the imitator and her subject, the colonized and the colonizer, the Algerian and the European. But is it possible to separate so completely the imitation from what it imitates? Is it possible for the mimicking subject to inhabit fully a performative role while still remaining largely outside it? Where, in other words, in a politics of imitation can one locate the politics? Following the mimicry/masquerade distinction, we might be tempted to conclude that the revolutionary agent that Fanon describes, the Algerian woman "radically transformed into a European woman, poised and unconstrained, whom no one would suspect" [57], engages in a form of mimicry but not masquerade. Her "transformation" involves the deliberate taking up of a cultural role for political ends rather than the unconscious "bringing to light of a character known and frequented a thousand times in imagination or in stories." However, the success of this particular mimetic act depends not upon excess but equivalency, not upon mimicry's distance from masquerade but upon its approximation to it. "Algeria Unveiled" dramatizes a form of mimesis that takes masquerade as its object; the political strategy described is more like that of miming masquerade. To avoid inspection by the French soldiers, the unveiled Algerian woman, by impersonating the sartorial masquerade of white European femininity, submits herself to another kind of examination: "The soldiers, the French patrols, smile to her as she passes, compliments on her looks are heard here and there, but no one suspects that her suitcases contain the automatic pistol which will presently mow down four or five members of one of the patrols" [58]. To do its work, this form of tactical mimesis must be perceived by its colonialist target as feminine masquerade (where both "feminine" and "masquerade" signify "European"), and the mas1112

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querade, in turn, as evidence of another Algerian woman "saved," another victory of Europeanization, another piece of "the flesh of Algeria laid bare" [42]. It might be more accurate to say, then, that imitation is very much at issue in Fanon's example of the Algerian woman unveiled, but that not all forms of imitation are identifications. The importance of Fanon's reading of this particular scene can be registered elsewhere, in its attempt to install a wedge between identification and imitation, in its suggestion that not every imitative act harbors a secret or unconscious identification. Indeed, to read uncritically the Algerian woman's dramatization as an act of identification risks trivializing the role political necessity plays in this performance and minimizing the trauma of the historical event that occasions it. Fanon implies that some imitations may only disguise themselves as identifications. But, it could be objected, in so doing might the act of mimesis actually produce the very identification it seeks to disavow? Identification, after all, is an unconscious operation that repeatedly resists our attempts to govern and to control it. Did the opportunity to dress in European clothes permit some Algerian women to engage in cross-national, crossracial, cross-class, and cross-cultural identifications with white bourgeois European women? Perhaps. (Although there is no simple way of knowing anything about the fantasies, desires, and identifications of the women in the FLN from Fanon's admittedly opaque texts: elsewhere Fanon claims to "know nothing" about the woman of color [Black 179-80]). But the point to be registered is that while imitation may either institute or gratify an unconscious identification, it can and does frequently exceed the logic of that identification. Put another way, identification with the Other is neither a necessary precondition nor an inevitable outcome of imitation. For Fanon it is politically imperative to insist upon an instrumental difference between imitation and identification, because it is precisely politics that emerges in the dislocated space between them.13 It is because the French colonialists did not understand the difference between identification and imitation that their own deployment of a politics of mimesis failed as spectacularly as the Algerians' succeeded. In The Wretched of the Earth Fanon discusses the colonialist practice of interning leading Algerian male intellectuals and submitting them to prolonged sessions of brainwashing, a strategy designed "to attack from the inside those elements which constitute national consciousness" [Wretched 286]. The details Fanon provides of the "pathology of torture" show how this particular form of psychological abuse aspires to nothing less than the forcible realignment of identifications achieved through a program of strictly monitored imitations: during the psychological "conversion" process, the intellectual is ordered to "play the part" of collaborator; his waking hours are spent in continuous intellectual disputation, arguing the merits of French colonization and the evils of Algerian nationalism; he is

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never left alone, for solitude is considered a rebellious act; and he must do all his thinking aloud, since silence is strictly forbidden [286-87]. Ultimately, the native intellectual's life depends upon his ability to imitate the Other perfectly, without a trace of parody; it depends, in short, upon his ability to mime without the perception of mimicry. Once again, mimicry must pass as masquerade if the subject who performs the impersonation is to survive to tell the tale. This type of torture is perhaps only the most extreme form of what Bhabha has described as the primary mode of subjectification under colonial domination: "a grotesque mimicry or 'doubling' that threatens to split the soul" ["Other" 27]. Yet this violent attempt to produce an identification (what psychoanalysis calls an "identification with the aggressor") fails "to split the soul," and it fails because imitation alone is not sufficient to produce an identification. Those interned subjects released after "successful completion" of the conversion program, Fanon tells us, all returned to their communities and took up, once again, their respective roles in Algeria's struggle for national liberation. This is not to say, however, that the male revolutionaries Fanon describes in The Wretched of the Earth, forced to imitate the ideology, speech, and mannerisms of their European captors, were not left unscarred by the process. Indeed, as early as Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon is concerned with the profoundly debilitating psychological effects of colonial mimesis on all black men who must labor under the brutal colonial injunction to become (in Bhabha's eloquent turn of phrase) "almost the same but not white" ["Mimicry" 130]. For the black man, mimesis is a by-product of the colonial encounter, a pathology created by the material conditions of imperial domination, a psychological "complex" that at all points must be refused and resisted.14 If we compare Fanon's discussion of black men in Black Skin, White Masks to his later discussion of black women in "Algeria Unveiled," we detect a dubious gender incongruity structuring Fanon's theory of colonial mimicry: whereas colonial mimicry for black men is alienating and depersonalizing, for black women it is natural and instinctive. In Fanon's view, black women are essentially mimics and black men are essentially not. Fanon's analysis of colonial mimesis repeatedly runs aground on the question of sexual difference. What are the implications of Fanon's sex/gender essentialisms for his project to decolonize sexuality? Decolonizing sexuality Fanon's disquieting discussion of not only femininity but homosexuality— inextricably linked in Fanon as they are in Freud—have received little if any attention from his critical commentators. Passages in Fanon's corpus articulating ardent disidentifications from black and white women and from white gay men (for Fanon homosexuality is culturally white) are rou1114

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tinely passed over, dismissed as embarrassing, baffling, unimportant, unenlightened, or perhaps simply politically risky. In this section I turn specifically to Fanon's theory of "the sexual perversions" for several reasons. First, these difficult passages tell us something important about Fanon's own sexual identifications as they are shaped within and against a colonial discourse of sexuality that appropriates masculinity as the exclusive prerogative of white male colonizers while relegating black male sexuality to the culturally objected, pathologized space of femininity, degeneracy, and castration. Second, Fanon's remarks on homosexuality, while failing to challenge some of Freud's most conventional and dangerous typologies of sexuality, simultaneously question, at least implicitly, the ethnological component of psychoanalysis that has long equated "the homosexual" with "the primitive."15 Finally, Fanon's theory of racialized sexualities under colonialism helps point us in the direction of interrogating the ethnocentrism of the very category of "sexuality." Along the way, I hope to avoid the problem of oversimplification—either hastily dismissing Fanon's notions of sexuality as theoretically suspect, or uncritically recuperating them as historically overdetermined—by employing a double reading strategy. The most appropriate methodology for reading the politics of sexual identifications may be to theorize and to historicize at once, to follow what I take, in fact, to be Fanon's own reading strategy elaborated more fully in later works like The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon's theory of the sexual perversions appears within a broader discussion of the problem of Negrophobia in chapter 6 of Black Skin, White Masks. "The Negro and Psychopathology" takes as its central focus fantasies by white subjects in which black men perform the role of "phobogenic objectfs]" [151]. Following closely Angelo Hesnard's definition of phobia as "a neurosis characterized by the anxious fear of an object,"16 Fanon widens the field of the clinical disorder by explaining that the phobic object need not be present in actuality but need only exist as a possibility in the mind of the subject [54]. In a reading of the fantasy "A Negro is raping me" (the chapter's central example of Negrophobia) Fanon identifies the phobia as a disguised expression of sexual desire: "when a woman lives the fantasy of rape by a Negro, it is in some way the fulfillment of a private dream, of an inner wish. . . . [I]t is the woman who rapes herself." How can it be said that the Negrophobic woman rapes herself? Like Freud's hysteric,17 Fanon's phobic can apparently occupy in fantasy two or more positions at once. Through a cross-gendered and cross-racial identification, the white Negrophobic woman usurps the position she herself has assigned to the black man and plays the role not only of victim but of aggressor: "I wish the Negro would rip me open as I would have ripped a woman open" [179]. For Fanon, the white woman's fantasy "A Negro is raping me" is ultimately an expression of either a violent lesbian desire or a wish for self-mutilation, with narcissism ultimately 1115

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blurring the distinction between them. Even more questionable, the desire to be a rapist is posited as the basis of the desire to be raped, a masochistic identification that Fanon unproblematically takes as one of the defining psychopathologies of white femininity. It is, however, important to recall at this juncture that Fanon elaborates his reading of this particular fantasy during a period when fabricated charges of rape were used as powerful colonial instruments of fear and intimidation against black men. Fanon's deeply troubling comments on white women and rape are formulated within a historical context in which the phobically charged stereotype of the violent, lawless, and oversexed Negro put all black men at perpetual risk. What we might call Fanon's myth of white women's rape fantasies is offered as a counternarrative to "the myth of the black rapist" [see Davis]. Ultimately, what may be most worrisome about the treatment of interracial rape in Black Skin, White Masks is not what Fanon says about white women and black men but what he does not say about black women and white men. As Mary Ann Doane notes in her reading of Fanon's analysis of rape and miscegenation, Fanon asks few (if any) questions about the white man's psychosexuality in his violent confrontation with the black woman— fewer still about how one might describe black female subjectivity in the face of such violence. In the historical scenario conjoining rape and lynching, the emotional charge attached to miscegenation, its representational intensity, are channeled onto the figure of the white woman, effectively erasing the black woman's historical role. [222] According to Doane, rape itself undergoes a certain displacement—"from the white man's prerogative as master/colonizer to the white woman's fears/desires in relation to the black male" [222].18 What disappears in Fanon's act of displacement is any analysis of the production and institutionalization of a violent imperial masculinity necessary to keep the social structure of colonial domination firmly in place. What drops out is a recognition of how sexual violence is imbricated in an entire economic and political system in which the rape of black women by white settlers (or "colons") works to establish and to maintain what is, in effect, a slave economy.19 What is missing, finally, is any serious discussion of black women's subjectivity under colonial rule: "Those who grant our conclusions on the psychosexuality of the white woman may ask what we have to say about the woman of color. I know nothing about her" [Black 179-80].2Q If, in Fanon's theory of Negrophobia, the white woman who fears the black man really desires him, then so apparently does the phobic white man: "the Negrophobic woman is in fact nothing but a putative sexual

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partner—just as the Negrophobic man is a repressed homosexual" [156]. For Fanon, the root pathogenic cause of Negrophobia is sexual perversion—a perversion of sexual object choice for men and sexual behavior for women ("All the Negrophobic women I have known had abnormal sex lives. . . . [t]here was also an element of perversion, the persistence of infantile formations: God knows how they made love! It must be terrifying" [158].) In both instances, perversion is represented specifically as a white pathology. There are no homosexuals in Martinique, Fanon speculates, because the Oedipus complex remains, in every sense, foreign to the Antilles: "Like it or not, the Oedipus complex is far from coming into being among Negroes" [152]. Fanon insists that while Martinique may have its "godmothers," male transvestites in the Antilles nonetheless lead "normal sex lives" and "can take a punch like any he-man" [180]. For white men homosexuality is a pathological condition; for black men it is "a means to a livelihood," a by-product of colonialism in which black men from the colonies are forced into homosexual prostitution in the metropole in order to survive economically. The most serious problem with Fanon's theory of the sexual perversions is the pivotal relation assigned to homosexuality in the cultural construction of racism. All of the psychical components Fanon identifies as central to the "hate complexes" are identical to those he posits as constitutive of same-sex desire: "fault, guilt, refusal of guilt, paranoia—one is back in homosexual territory" [183]. It is not entirely clear which of these two "complexes" (racism or homosexuality) Fanon believes to be the pathological trigger for the other; more certain is the sleight of hand in which "homosexuality" is inserted into a violent cultural equation where "homophobia" properly belongs. As Lee Edelman has pointed out, homosexuality and homophobia are made to change places with one another in a falsely syllogistic logic: "homophobia allows a certain figural logic to the pseudoalgebraic 'proof that asserts: where it is 'given' that white racism equals castration and 'given' that homosexuality equals castration, then it is proper to conclude that white racism equals (or expresses through displacement) homosexuality and, by the same token, in a reversal of devastating import for lesbians and gay men of color, homosexuality equals white racism" [Edelman 55]. If racism is articulated with homosexuality instead of homophobia, where are antiracist lesbians and gay men, of all colors, to position themselves in relation to same-sex desire? Fanon's theory of sexuality offers little to anyone committed to both an antiimperialist and an antihomophobic politics. Yet, like Fanon's theory of white femininity, his complicated reading of homosexuality needs to be framed historically, placed within the prism of the particular colonial history that shapes and legislates it. Fanon's concern with the economics of sexual exchange between colonizer and colonized is not entirely without warrant; prostitution was indeed one of the

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few occupations open to black immigrants in colonial France. The point needs to be made that colonialism's insatiable desire for exotic black bodies, its institutionalization of a system of sexual exploitation that focused largely on black women, was extended to include many black men as well. Moreover, Fanon's effort to call into question the universality of the Oedipus complex may constitute what is most revolutionary about his theoretical work, a political intervention into classical psychoanalysis of enormous import for later theorists of race and sexuality. Responding to an allusion by Lacan to the "abundance" of the Oedipus complex, Fanon shows instead the limitations of Oedipus, or rather the ideological role Oedipus plays as a limit in the enculturating sweep of colonial expansionism. Prone to see Oedipus everywhere they look, Western ethnologists are impelled to find their own psychosexual pathologies duplicated in their objects of study [152]. Under colonialism, Oedipus is nothing if not selfreproducing. Taking their cue in part from Fanon, two French theorists of the metropole, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, unmask oedipality as a form of colonization turned inside out: "Oedipus is always colonization pursued by other means, it is the interior colony, and . . . even here at home, where we Europeans are concerned, it is our intimate colonial relation" [170].21 Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, published in the early 1970s during the watershed period of publications on Fanon's work,22 is as much a polemic against the psychology of colonization as it is a demystification of the imperial politics of oedipalization, and indeed the great insight of this wildly ambitious book is its demonstration of how the historical emergence of both colonization and oedipalization participate in a double ideological operation where each serves effectively to conceal the political function and purpose of the other. "Even in the case of worthy Oedipus," pronounces Anti-Oedipus, "it was already a matter of 'polities' " [98]. Fanon's insistence that there is no homosexuality in the Antilles may convey a more trenchant meaning than the one he in fact intended: if by "homosexuality" one understands the culturally specific social formations of same-sex desire as they are articulated in the West, then indeed homosexuality is foreign to the Antilles. Is it really possible to speak of "homosexuality," or for that matter "heterosexuality" or "bisexuality," as universal, global formations? Can one generalize from the particular forms sexuality takes under Western capitalism to sexuality as suchl What kinds of colonizations do such discursive translations perform on "other" traditions of sexual differences? It is especially important, confronted by these problems, to focus attention on the ethnocentrism of the epistemological categories themselves—European identity categories that seem to me wholly inadequate to describe the many different consolidations, permutations, and transformations of what the West has come to understand, itself in myriad and contradictory fashion, under the sign "sexuality."

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Fanon's disavowal and repudiation of "homosexuality" take on special meaning in light of the parallel that psychoanalysis draws between "perversion" and "primitivity." This is not to say that Fanon's work is free of the specter of homophobia. When Fanon confesses, "I have never been able, without revulsion, to hear a man say of another man: 'He is so sensual!' " [Black 201], the very form of the enunciation obeys the terms of Fanon's own earlier definition of phobia as "terror mixed with sexual revulsion" [155]. However, Fanon's disidentification can be read as another kind of refusal as well, a rejection of the "primitive = invert" equation that marks the confluence of evolutionary anthropology and sexology and their combined influence on early twentieth-century psychoanalysis. Inversion, Freud comments in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, "is remarkably widespread among many savage and primitive races . . .; and, even amongst the civilized peoples of Europe, climate and race exercise the most powerful influence on the prevalence of inversion and upon the attitude adopted towards it" [7: 139].23 In these curious lines linking inversion to race and climatology, Freud has in mind the influential theory of the "Sotadic Zone" developed in the final volume of Richard Burton's The Arabian Nights. Burton's Sotadic Zone, a global mapping of inversion according to certain latitudes and longitudes, covers all the shores of the Mediterranean, including North Africa, and extends as far as the South Sea Islands and the New World.24 While Burton describes his sexual topography as "geographical and climactic, not racial," he nonetheless finds the incidence of "Le Vice" to be highest amongst the Turks ("a race of born pederasts" [232]), the Chinese ("the chosen people of debauchery" [238]), and the North American Indians ("sodomites" and "cannibals" [240]). The sexologist Havelock Ellis, following Burton, also finds a "special proclivity to homosexuality . . . among certain races and in certain regions" [Ellis 22]. For Burton and Ellis, the category "race" encompasses more than simply skin color; for these writers "race" operates as a somewhat more elastic term folded into the category of nation ("the British race"), species ("the human race"), and even gender ("the male or female race"). Not insignificantly for the present reading of racialized sexualities, fin de siecle sexology routinely refers to "the third sex" as a separate race or species. In both Ellis's and Burton's discourse of Empire, Algeria is singled out as the most dangerous—because the most sexually infectious— of the Sotadic Zones. Like a kind of venereal disease threatening the moral health of an Empire, homosexuality is said to be "contracted in Algeria" by members of the French Foreign Legion, "spread" through entire military regiments, and finally transmitted to the civilian population [see Ellis 10; Burton 251]. Through what we might call an epidemiology of sexuality, colonial discourse represents places like North Africa as breeding grounds for immorality and vice, thereby inverting and disguising the

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real trauma of colonial imperialism: the introduction of highly infectious and devastatingly lethal European diseases into the colonies. Fanon's theory of the sexual perversions can thus be more fully understood as an impassioned response to popular colonialist theories of race and sexuality. Fanon's resolutely masculine self-identifications, articulated through the abjectification of femininity and homosexuality, take shape over and against colonialism's castrating representations of black male sexuality. Unfortunately, Fanon does not think beyond the presuppositions of colonial discourse to examine how colonial domination itself works partially through the social institutionalization of misogyny and homophobia. Fanon's otherwise powerful critique of the scene of colonial representation does not fundamentally question the many sexualized determinations of that scene. In each of Fanon's works, including "Algeria Unveiled," the colonial encounter is staged within exclusively masculine parameters; the colonial other remains an undifferentiated, homogenized male, and subjectivity is ultimately claimed for men alone. When the politics of sexual difference is in question, Fanon's theory of identification risks presenting itself as simply another "theory of the 'subject' [that] has always been appropriated by the 'masculine' " [Irigaray, "Any" 133]. Identification in translation It is important to remember, when discussing the complicated subject of Fanon's own personal identifications, that he was a practicing clinician whose theoretical and cultural work was informed and shaped by an entire institutional, professional, and political apparatus located in the space of violent colonial struggle. The complexity of Fanon's heterogeneous subject position—an Antillean-born, French-educated physician practicing psychiatry in North Africa—helps to frame one of the most startling contradictions of his clinical practice. As a psychiatrist Fanon treated all types of patients during the early years of the Algerian war: during the daytime he worked with French soldiers suffering psychological breakdowns as a result of their daily torture of suspected Algerian nationals; at night he treated the victims of these tortures, often restoring them to health only to see them returned once again to the brutality of a French police interrogation [McCulloch 1]. Not surprisingly, Fanon's attitudes toward psychiatry reflected the deep ambivalences of his own changing political affiliations and personal identifications. As a member of the FLN and eventually one of its most important international spokesmen, Fanon warned against colonialist appropriations of the psychoanalytic "cure" as a convenient method of cultural socialization, a means of adjusting members of the colonial population to their political condition of social alienation. At the same time, as a doctor from the metropole, Fanon continued throughout his life to promote psychoanalysis as one of the most powerful instruments 1120

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available to combat those mental pathologies that are "the direct product of oppression" [Wretched 251]. Introduced into Algeria in 1932, the psychiatric hospital ironically became for Fanon a site of active resistance to the violence of the colonialist enterprise that instituted such Western-style institutions in the first place. When Fanon was appointed, in the fall of 1953, director of the Hospital at Blida-Joinville, the largest psychiatric hospital in Algeria, there were eight psychiatrists and 2500 beds for a national population of 8.5 million Muslims and 1.5 million Europeans [Gendzier 73]. Disproportionate to their numbers, over half of Fanon's patients were white Europeans, the rest black Algerians; Fanon ministered to both. However, Fanon's sessions with his European and Algerian patients were marked by a radical disparity, for the French-speaking Fanon spoke neither Arabic nor Kabyle and could not communicate with his Muslim patients without the mediation of a translator.25 There are two immediate points to be made on the subject of the translator in Fanon's clinical practice. The first is what is added to the analytic process: a heightened awareness of language as an embattled site of historical struggle and social contestation. Fanon's complete reliance upon translators to converse with his Muslim patients is nothing if not a powerful reminder, to both doctor and patient, of the immediate political context in which the therapeutic dialogue struggles to take place. The daily translations of Arabic and Kabyle into French could not avoid reproducing, within the space of the clinical treatment, the very structure of the colonial relation. The second is what is lost in this translation: quite simply, the analysand's own speech, the speaking unconscious. What ultimately escapes Fanon are the slips and reversals, the substitutions and mispronunciations, in short, the free associations that provide the analyst with his most important interpretive material, the traces and eruptions of the patient's unconscious into language. Strictly speaking, the speech Fanon analyzes in the sessions with his Muslim patients is the translator's, not the patient's, a situation that impossibly confuses the analytic process and urgently poses the question of whether a therapeutic model constructed in one language or culture can be so easily or uncritically translated into another. Fanon's essay "The 'North African Syndrome,' " published in the February 1952 issue of L'esprit, gives us some indication of the formidable problems posed by the use of a translator in colonial medicine. The following scene dramatizes, with wry humor, a routine medical examination between a French doctor and a North African patient: [The patient] tells about his pain. Which becomes increasingly his own. He now talks about it volubly. He takes hold of it in space and puts it before the doctor's nose. He takes it, touches it with his ten fingers, develops it, exposes it. It grows as one watches it. 1121

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He gathers it over the whole surface of his body and after fifteen minutes of gestured explanations the interpreter . . . translates for us: he says he has a belly-ache [Toward 5] Fanon later faced very similar difficulties in his psychiatric practice at Blida, where the problem of language comprehension was further exacerbated by the tendency of analysis to base itself almost exclusively upon dialogue, upon close attention to the intonations and equivocations of language, language that indeed must be said to be completely and inescapably culturally inflected. Fanon's own clinical writings provide us with little clue to the presence of a third-party interpreter in the psychiatric sessions with his Algerian patients; all traces of this fundamental disturbance in the actual scene of analysis are entirely erased from the written case histories. Who were these translators without whom Fanon could not do his work? Fanon's translators at Blida were the hospital's male nurses, educated Algerian men who, under colonial rule, were denied the opportunity to pursue advanced medical degrees. It was this group of male nurses whom Fanon counted as his closest supporters in the battle to institute a series of controversial hospital reforms; it was the Algerian nurses and not the European staff who possessed the appropriate language skills necessary for running a multilingual hospital; and it was the nurses to whom Fanon dictated his case notes, the nurses who, in some instances, actually wrote the case histories that were later edited by Fanon [Gendzier 77; Geismar 83]. Unlike Freud, then, who had the luxury of a private practice that selectively treated exclusively middle-class patients, Fanon's professional sessions were conducted in a large psychiatric state hospital and were dependent upon the intensive labor of a whole team of invisible workers that administered to the needs of many hundreds of patients a day. This cadre of nurse-translators may be only the most visible sign of an institution that in both purpose and design continued to bear the stamp of a colonial import. Ultimately, the use of a translator in his clinical work may provide the most powerful testimony of all to Fanon's hypothesis that to be exiled from language is to be dispossessed of one's very subjectivity.26 When Fanon begins his investigation of cross-racial identifications in Black Skin, White Masks with a chapter called "The Negro and Language," he does so to emphasize the importance of speech to the assumption of subjectivity: "to speak is to exist absolutely for the other" [17]. Moreover, "to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. The Antilles Negro who wants to be white will be the whiter as he gains greater mastery of the cultural tool that language is" [38]. Racial difference operates in this context as a linguistic construct bounded and defined by opportunities of class and education. Fanon recognizes that his facility with the French language accords him what he calls "honorary citizenship" as a white man [38]. He also re-

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cognizes that this citizenship is never more than "honorary," insofar as a racialist discourse of immutable biological difference ceaselessly works to "seal" the white man in his "whiteness' and the black man in his "blackness" [9]. To his white European patients, Fanon is ineluctably black— "the Negro doctor" [117]. To his black Algerian patients, Fanon is white: a French-educated, upper-middle-class professional who cannot speak the language. Identifying with both groups but accepted by neither, Fanon's shifting and contradictory subject positions keep identity perpetually at bay. It is precisely identity that is suspended or deferred by the work of identification, identity that remains in a state of internal exile. Put another way, Fanon's own identifications are in constant translation, caught in a system of cultural relays that make the assumption of racial identity both necessary and impossible.27 In light of his own ambivalent identifications, Fanon's attempt to perform a sociohistorical analysis of the process of psychical incorporation takes on singular political importance. Interestingly, the question of the politically of Fanon's psychoanalytic theory is a contentious, even divisive issue for his biographers. Irene Gendzier's important biography of Fanon notes that although Fanon was aware of a connection between psychiatry and politics, he nonetheless "abandoned" the one in his quest for the other [64]. Gendzier expresses the view held by many readers of Fanon's life and work that it was necessary for Fanon, after the publication of his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, to repudiate "psychoanalysis" to access "politics." Jock McCulloch's carefully researched study of Fanon's often overlooked clinical writings makes the counterargument that "there is no epistemological or methodological break between Fanon's earlier and later works" and that indeed "all of Fanon's works form part of a single theoretical construct" [3].28 The critical debate over the relation between Fanon's psychiatric training and his political education—posed in the oppositional terms of dramatic break or seamless continuity—obscures the critical faultlines upon which Fanon's own work is based, for Fanon himself was interested precisely in the linkages and fissures, the contradictions and complications, the translations and transformations of the theory-politics relation. I have tried to explore in this essay the way in which, in Fanon's thinking, the psychical and the political are hinged together on the point of identification. I am reminded of the concluding line of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's study of mimesis: "why would the problem of identification not be, in general, the essential problem of the political?" [Typography 300]. Fanon's own politics takes the multifarious form of an extended investigation of the psychopathology of colonialism that not only describes imperial practices but also, where sexual differences are concerned, problematically enacts them. When addressing the politics of sexual identifications, Fanon fails to register fully the significance of the founding

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premise of his own theory of colonial relations, which holds that the political is located within the psychical as a powerful shaping force. I take this working premise to be one of Fanon's most important contributions to political thought—the critical notion that the psychical operates precisely as a political formation. Fanon's work also draws our attention to the historical and social conditions of identification. It reminds us that identification is never outside or prior to politics, that identification is always inscribed within a certain history: identification names not only the history of the subject but the subject in history. What Fanon gives us, in the end, is a politics that does not oppose the psychical but fundamentally presupposes it. Works cited Abel, Elizabeth. "Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation." Critical Inquiry 19.3 (Spring 1993): 470-98. Alexander, M. Jacqui. "Redrafting Morality: The Postcolonial State and the Sexual Offences Bill of Trinidad and Tobago." Mohanty, Third World 133-52. Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem. Trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich. Intro. Barbara Harlow. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Benjamin, Walter. "The Task of the Translator." Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken, 1969. 69-82. Bergner, Gwen. "Who Is That Masked Woman? Or, the Role of Gender in Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks." PMLA 110.1 (forthcoming January 1995). Bernheimer, Charles. "Fetishism and Decadence: Salome's Severed Heads." Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. 62-83. Bhabha, Homi K. "Interrogating Identity: The Postcolonial Prerogative." Anatomy of Racism. Ed. David Theo Goldberg. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.183-209. . "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse." October 28 (Spring 1984): 125-33. . "The Other Question." Screen 24.6 (Nov-Dec 1983): 18-36. . "'Race', Time and the Revision of Modernity." Oxford Literary Review 13.1-2 (1991): 193-219. . "Remembering Fanon." Foreword to Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto, 1986. . "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817." Race, Writing, and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.163-84. . "Sly Civility." October 34 (Winter 1985): 71-80. Boons-Grafe, Marie-Claire. "Other/other." Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary. Ed. Elizabeth Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 296-99. Bouvier, Pierre. Fanon. Paris: Editions universitaires, 1971. Boyarin, Daniel. Lacan's Couvade. Berkeley: U of California P, forthcoming. Bulhan, Hussein Abdilahi. Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression. New York: Plenum, 1985.

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INTERIOR COLONIES Burgin, Victor, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan, eds. Formations of Fantasy. London: Methuen, 1986, 45-61. Burton, Richard F. The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night. Vol. 10. London: Burton Club, 1885. Capecia, Mayotte. Je suis martiniquaise. Paris: Editions Correa, 1948. Caute, David. Fanon. London: Collins, Fontana, 1970. Ching-Liang Low, Gail. "White Skins/Black Masks: The Pleasures and Politics of Imperialism." New Formations 9 (Winter 1989): 83-103. Davis, Angela. "Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist." Women, Race, and Class. New York: Random House, 1981. 72-201. Decker, Jeffrey Louis. "Terrorism (Un)veiled: Frantz Fanon and the Women of Algiers." Cultural Critique (Winter 1990-91): 177-95. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1983. Trans, of L'anti-Oedipe. Paris: Minuit, 1972. Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Ed. Christie V. McDonald. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Schocken, 1985. Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1991. Dyer, Richard. "White," Screen 29.4 (Autumn 1988): 44-64. Edelman, Lee. Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 1993. Ellis, Havelock. Sexual Inversion. 1897. New York: Arno, 1975. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967. Trans. oiPeau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil, 1952. . A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1965. Trans, of L'an cinq, de la revolution algerienne. Paris: Fra^ois Maspero, 1959. . Toward the African Revolution. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove, 1967. Trans, of Pour la revolution africaine. Paris: Fran§ois Maspero, 1964. . The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1963. Trans, of Les damnes de la terre. Paris: Fransois Maspero, 1963. Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth, 1953-74. Fuss, Diana. "Freud's Fallen Women: Identification, Desire, and 'A Case of Homosexuality in a Woman.'" Yale Journal of Criticism 6.1 (Spring 1993): 1-23.. Gaines, Jane M. "Competing Glances: Who Is Reading Robert Mapplethorpe's Black BookT New Formations 16 (Spring 1992): 24-39. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Critical Fanonism." Critical Inquiry 17.3 (Spring 1991): 457-70. Geismar, Peter. Fanon. New York: Dial, 1971. Geller, Jay. "Freud V. Freud: Freud's Reading of Daniel Paul Schrebcr's Denkwurdigkeiten Eines Nervenkranten." Reading Freud's Reading. Ed. Sander Oilman, Jutta Birmele, Jay Geller, and Valerie D. Greenberg. New York: New York UP, 1994. 180-210. 1125

T H I N K I N G / W O R K I N G THROUGH RACE . "'A glance at the nose': The Inscription of Jewish Difference." American Imago 49 (1992): 427-44. Gendzier, Irene. Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study. New York: Grove, 1973. Oilman, Sander. Freud, Race, and Gender. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Hatem, Mervat. "Toward the Development of Post-Islamist and Post-Nationalist Feminist Discourses in the Middle East." Tucker 29-48. Heath, Stephen. "Joan Riviere and the Masquerade." Burgin 45-61. Hegel, G. W. F. "Lordship and Bondage." The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J. B. Baillie. New York: Humanities, 1977. Hesnard, Angelo Louis Marie. L'univers morbide de lafaute. Paris: PUF, 1949. Irigaray, Luce. "Any Theory of the 'Subject' Has Always Been Appropriated by the 'Masculine.' " Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.133-46. . This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Krupat, Arnold. Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics. Ed. Christopher Fynsk. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. "The Unconscious Is Destructured Like an Affect." (Part 1 of "The Jewish People Do Not Dream.") Stanford Literature Review 6 (Fall 1989): 191-209. Lloyd, David. "Race under Representation." Oxford Literary Review 13.1-2 (1991): 62-94. Lucas, Phillippe. Sociologie de Frantz Fanon. Alger: SNED (Societe nationale d'edition et de diffusion), 1971. McCulloch, Jock. Black Soul, White Artifact: Fanon's Clinical Psychology and Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Memmi, Albert. "Fanon." New York Times Book Review, 14 March 1971: 5. Mercer, Kobena. "Black Hair/Style Politics." New Formations 3 (Winter 1987): 33-54. . "Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary." New Formations 16 (Spring 1992): 1-23. Mernissi, Fatima. Beyond the Veil. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1975. Minces, Juliette. "Women in Algeria." Women in the Muslim World. Ed. Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978.159-71. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. "Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism." Mohanty, Third World 1-47. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. Mowitt, John. "Algerian Nation: Fanon's Fetish." Cultural Critique 22 (Fall 1992): 165-86. Odeh, Lama Abu. "Post-colonial Feminism and the Veil: Thinking the Difference." Feminist Review 43 (Spring 1993): 26-37. 1126

INTERIOR COLONIES Peteet, Julie M. "Authenticity and Gender: The Presentation of Culture." Tucker 49-62. Riviere, Joan. "Womanliness as a Masquerade." Burgin 35^14. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978. . "Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors." Critical Inquiry 15.2 (Winter 1989): 205-25. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. New York: Grove, 1960. . Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. London: Methuen, 1957. Trans. of L'etre et le neant. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. . Orphee noir. Preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache. Paris: PUF, 1948. [Black Orpheus. Trans. S. W. Allen. Paris: Presence africaine, 1963.] Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. Silverman, Kaja. "White Skin, Brown Masks: The Double Mimesis, or With Lawrence in Arabia." differences 1.3 (Fall 1989): 3-54. Tucker, Judith, ed. Arab Women: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Tyler, Carole-Anne. Female Impersonators. Forthcoming. Wallace, Edwin R. Freud and Anthropology. New York: International UP, 1983. Woddis, Jack. New Theories of Revolution. New York: International Publishers, 1972. Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. New York: Routledge, 1990. Zahar, Renate. L'oeuvre de Frantz Fanon. Trans. R. Dangeville. Paris: Maspero, 1970.

Notes * I would like to thank Judith Butler, Eduardo Cadava, Eric Santner, and especially Carole-Anne Tyler for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. 1 Later in this chapter I discuss more fully Fanon's problematic use of the masculine as both the point of departure and the final referent for a new theory of the subject. Suffice it to say here that Fanon's powerful anticolonial polemics remain completely caught up in the masculinist presuppositions of the discourse they seek to displace. 2 In Lacanian terms, these two concepts can be distinguished in at least three ways: first, the other (small o) denotes a specular relation to an Imaginary rival, while the Other (capital O) designates a linguistic relation to a Symbolic interlocutor; second, the other depends upon a narcissistic relation, while the Other marks the locus of intersubjectivity; and third, the other is produced as an effect of primary identification in which the subject recognizes itself in its own image, while the Other is constructed as an effect of secondary identification in which the subject shifts its point of address to another speaking subject. For a much fuller discussion of the psychoanalytic definition of alterity, see BoonsGrafe. For a deconstruction of the psychoanalytic distinction between primary and secondary identification, and its normative applications, see my "Freud's Fallen Women." 3 In "Race under Representation," David Lloyd emphasizes the explicitly metaphoric pretenses of a white mythology: "this Subject becomes representa1127

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4

5

6

7

8

9

10

live in consequence of being able to take anyone's place, of occupying any place, of a pure exchangeability" [70]. Deconstructing the category white therefore involves making visible its founding metaphorics and ideology of invisibility. For more on the culturally constructed category of whiteness, see Morrison; Dyer; Gaines; Abel; and Mercer, "Black Hair." See Sartre, Being. Fanon takes his theory of "recognition" from the section on "Lordship and Bondage" in Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind [228-40]. The subject of Fanon's interest in Hegel and Sartre has received extended treatment elsewhere. See, for example, Gendzier; McCulloch. To avoid terminological confusion, let me note that the "Other" for Sartre refers to a specular, dyadic order similar to Lacan's idea of the Imaginary. Sartre's "Other" thus corresponds roughly to Lacan's "other," the other of the mirror stage. Eve Sedgwick has recently made a very similar point about the colloquial use of the term "Other": "the trope of the Other . . . must almost a priori fail to do justice to the complex activity, creativity, and engagement of those whom it figures simply as relegated objects" [147]. I should clarify here that Fanon's profound discomfort with Sartre's endorsement of negritude in Orphee noir is provoked not by Sartre's use of the dialectic per se but by the specific place that negritude is made to occupy within it. Sartre's dialectic of thesis (white racism), antithesis (negritude), and synthesis (humanism) assigns "black" to the role of negation in what is essentially, for Fanon, a dialectics of racial assimilationism. See Sartre, Orphee noir. The works of Aime Cesaire, Leopld Senghor, and Leon Damas, featured in the negritude anthology prefaced by Orphee noir, provide Fanon with an alternative philosophical and political position from which to critique Sartre's controversial introduction. This theory of subversive mimicry finds its most extended treatment in the work of Luce Irigaray. See Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One. Carole-Anne Tyler's Female Impersonators offers a careful and thorough critique of the problems with Irigaray's mimicry/masquerade distinction as it falters on the twin grounds of intention and reception. Bhabha, whose work centers on investigating the place of fantasy and desire in the exercise of colonial power, is one of the first cultural theorists to think through the ambivalences of identification in terms of its inscription in colonial history. Bhabha's most influential essays all take Fanon as their theoretical point of departure. In addition to "Of Mimicry and Man," see also "The Other Question," "Sly Civility," "Signs Taken for Wonders," "Remembering Fanon," "Interrogating Identity," and " 'Race,' Time and the Revision of Modernity." One instance where Fanon does talk about this phenomenon is in a brief footnote where he lists a series of cultural impersonations in which white "admiration" for black culture masks a hidden identification: "white 'hot-jazz' orchestras, white blues and spiritual singers, white authors writing novels in which the Negro proclaims his grievances, whites in blackface" [Black 177]. In the same volume, in an essay entitled "Authenticity and Gender: The Presentation of Culture," Julie M. Peteet speaks of the "remarkable flexibility" of a symbol like the veil, whose use can be "both calculated and creative": "the same veil that symbolized a militant, female activism now is used to circumscribe women's presence in the workplace and confine them to the home" [52]. Both Hatem and Peteet interrogate women's semiotic role as bearers of culture. Hatem notes that "while men were expected to interact with their changing environment, women were relegated to the task of being the conscr-

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11

12

13

14

15

16

vators of the traditional culture" [43]. Peteet points out that this is true whether women symbolize progress or tradition; either way, they are still considered repositories of "authentic culture" [60]. See also Minces. For more on the figure of the veil, see Mernissi; Alloula. Lama Abu Odeh, discussing the veil in a contemporary context, observes that many Muslim women typically wear Western clothes under their veils, further complicating the question of sartorial impersonation and cultural resignification. For a more extended treatment of this theme, see Jeffrey Louis Decker's "Terrorism (Un)veiled: Frantz Fanon and the Women of Algiers." John Mowitt investigates Fanon's fetishistic investment in the category of nation in "Algerian Nation: Fanon's Fetish." For an interesting reading of the etymological link between fetish and masquerade, see Charles Bernheimer's "Fetishism and Decadence: Salome's Severed Heads." See Joan Riviere's "Womanliness as a Masquerade," Stephen Heath's "Joan Riviere and the Masquerade," and Mary Ann Doane's two essays "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator" and "Masquerade Reconsidered: Further Thoughts on the Female Spectator," both in Femmes Fatales. Fanon does not get away from the problem of intentionality here; indeed, Fanon's point is that politics necessarily resides in intentionality. Fanon's strategy is to reconstruct the possibility of agency that colonialism vitiates, and he does this by locating "politics" in the space where imitation exceeds identification. The clearest statement of Fanon's view that identification itself is a pathological condition produced by the colonial relation comes in Black Skin, White Masks, where Fanon suggests, again using Sartrean terms, that "as long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion . . . to experience his being through others" [109]. For Fanon it is not the case that unconscious racial identifications create the colonial drive for assimilation, but rather that colonial dominations produce the phenomenon of racial identification. No identification without colonization. A significant body of work already exists on the role nineteenth-century racial models of the Jew play in shaping Freud's work. See, for example, Geller; Boyarin. Most recently, Sander Oilman's Freud, Race, and Gender argues for understanding Freud's theory of femininity as an anxious displacement of dominant racial representations of the male Jewish body. Something rather similar may be going on in Fanon's passages on femininity and homosexuality, where the popular colonialist caricature of the black man as castrated and sexually degenerate is seamlessly transposed onto women and gay men. In this section I briefly discuss Fanon's complicated negotiations of colonial representations of black sexuality—racial epistemologies in which Freud is inevitably implicated. For Fanon, the problem of anti-Semitism and racism are not unrelated. Fanon in fact models his investigation of Negrophobia in Black Skin, White Masks on Sartre's study Anti-Semite and Jew, adapting Sartre's claim that "it is the antiSemite who makes the Jew" into his own formulation on racism, "it is the racist who creates his inferior" [Black 93]. The representational history of Jews as "the Negroes of Europe" [cited in Oilman 20] provides the basis of a powerful and ambivalent identification for Fanon with the figure of the male Jewish intellectual. For Fanon's comparisons in Black Skin, White Masks of the Jew and the Negro, the anti-Semite and the Negrophobe, see especially 87-93, 115-16,157-66, and 180-83. The original citation is from Angelo Louis Marie Hesnard's L'univers morbide de la fante [37].

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THINKING/WORKING THROUGH RACE 17 I refer to Freud's favorite example of hysteria: the woman who plays both parts of a seduction at once, tearing her dress off with one hand ("as a man") and pressing it to her body with the other ("as a woman"). See Freud's "Hysterical Phantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality" (1908), 9: 155-66, and "Some General Remarks on Hysterical Attacks" (1909), 9: 227-34. 18 In "Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema," Doane helpfully suggests that we think of psychoanalysis "as a quite elaborate form of ethnography—as a writing of the ethnicity of the white Western psyche" [211]. 19 For just such a careful analysis of the racialized class field of sexuality, see, for example, M. Jacqui Alexander's "Redrafting Morality: The Postcolonial State and the Sexual Offences Bill of Trinidad and Tobago." In "Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism," Chandra Talpade Mohanty also analyzes how "racialized sexual violence has emerged as an important paradigm or trope of colonial rule" [17]. 20 Fanon immediately undermines this disclaimer by extending the myth of rape fantasy to black women, asserting in the very next line that light-skinned Antillean women also have fantasies of rape, masochistic wish fantasies in which the role of aggressor is played by black men of darker skin color than their own. While Fanon sympathizes with black men who are constrained under colonial domination to identify with white men, his comments on black women's identification with white women are comparatively harsh and unsympathetic. See Fanon's reading of Mayotte Capecia's autobiographical book, Je suis martiniquaise, in chapter 2 of Black Skin, White Masks. For a more extended analysis of Fanon's dismissal of Capecia's book, see Bergner. 21 After all, "the revolutionary is the first to have the right to say: 'Oedipus?' Never heard of it" [Deleuze and Guattari 96]. 22 In addition to Gendzier's biography, several other critical studies on Fanon appeared in the early 1970s. See Bouvier; Caute; Lucas; Woddis; Zahar; and Geismar. 23 Most of what Freud has to say on race can be found in his anthropological work, where Gustave Le Bon's use of the phrase "racial unconscious" as a synonym for "archaic" or "primitive" is revised and expanded by Freud to include his theory of repression. For Freud's most extended treatment of the subject of race, see Totem and Taboo (1913), 13:1-162. For the influence of Darwin on Freud's theory of race, see Edwin R. Wallace's Freud and Anthropology. Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) provides us with a psychoanalytic theory of racism that may not be without interest in the context of the present chapter: "Closely related races keep one another at arm's length; the South German cannot endure the North German, the Englishman casts every kind of aspersion upon the Scot, the Spaniard despises the Portuguese. We are no longer astonished that greater differences should lead to an almost insuperable repugnance, such as the Gallic people feel for the German, the Aryan for the Semite, and the white races for the coloured" [18: 101]. See also Oilman. 24 Burton writes: "There exists what I shall call a 'Sotadic Zone,' bounded westwards by the northern shores of the Mediterranean (N. Lat. 43°) and by the Southern (N. Lai. 30°). Thus the depth would be 780 to 800 miles including meridional France, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and Greece, with the coastregions of Africa from Marocco to Egypt" [206]. See Burton's Terminal Essay for the full coordinates of the Sotadic Zone, too lengthy to be cited here. 25 There is considerable disagreement over the extent of Fanon's language skills

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and its consequences for his professional work, a dispute that in the level of its intensity underscores how very high are the stakes involved. Fanon's most sympathetic biographer, Peter Geismar, claims that by the end of 1956, several years after arriving in Algeria, Fanon could "understand most of what his patients were telling him" [86]. Irene Gendzier provides a sharply differing account, describing Fanon's efforts to learn Arabic as "stillborn" and personally anguishing [77]. For Albert Memmi, Fanon's refusal to learn the language of the patients he was treating constituted nothing less than a "psychiatric scandal" [5]. 26 Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator" takes as its thesis the useful notion that any language is a place of exile, that "all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages" [75]. Benjamin's interest in translation, however, lies in the "suprahistorical kinship of languages" or "the relatedness of two languages, apart from historical considerations" [74]. The theoretical move to banish history from the realm of translation operates to conceal, and ultimately to preserve, a colonizing impulse at work in translation; Benjamin's "great motif of integrating many tongues into one true language" [77] represents an imperialist dream, a fantasy of linguistic incorporation and cultural assimilation. If it is impossible to read translation outside the history of colonial imperialism, then it may also be the case that colonial imperialism operates as a particular kind of translation. In the round table discussion on translation included in Derrida's The Ear of the Other, Eugene Vance poses the question in its simplest rhetorical form: "Isn't the colonization of the New World basically a form of translation?" [137]. For more on the imperial history of translation, see Krupat 193-200. 27 Complicating matters further is the question of Fanon as object of identification. In "Critical Fanonism," Henry Louis Gates, Jr., demonstrates how Fanon is inevitably a repository for his critic's projective identifications: "If Said made of Fanon an advocate of post-postmodern counternarratives of liberation; if [Abdul] JanMohamed made of Fanon a Manichean theorist of colonialism as absolute negation; and if Bhabha cloned, from Fanon's theoria, another Third World post-structuralist, [Benita] Parry's Fanon . . . turns out to confirm her own rather optimistic vision of literature and social action" [465]. To this list I would have to add my own identification with Fanon the psychoanalytic theorist, practicing clinician, and university teacher. 28 For another detailed study of Fanon's contributions to clinical psychiatry, see Bulhan.

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YELLOW SKIN, WHITE MASKS Race, Class, and Identification in Japanese Colonial Discourse Leo Ching From Kuan-Hsing Chen (ed.) Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Routledge, 1998, 65-86

Not white, not quite, yet alike 'Somehow, I still do not quite understand. I am simply marveling at the Japanese of old who had chosen a quiet view such as this as one of the Three Scenes of Japan. There is no scent of human being in this scenery. The people of my country would find this solitude unbearable.' 'What province are you from?' I asked earnestly. He smiled in a strange manner and looked at me in silence. Although I was somewhat puzzled, I asked again. 'The Tohoku region, isn't it?' All of a sudden, he became visibly irritated, 'I am from China; you cannot not have known.' (Dazai Osamu, Sekibetsu (Regretful Parting))1 This scene, played out in the province of imperialist Japan, tells of the sudden and fortuitous discovery of an imperial subject. It is a scene of misrecognition and mis-identification where personal and national identities are destabilized and conflated by the likeness of the bodily signs and the ambivalence of a linguistic signifier - both 'country' and 'province' can be expressed by the word kuni in Japanese. Unlike the European encounter with its racial Others, this absence or invisibility of otherness posits a moment where a deferral between seeing and knowing, perceiving and

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YELLOW SKIN, WHITE MASKS conceiving is enacted, an instant where difference would be suspended and displaced if silence was kept. Generally speaking, Western imperial and colonial theatre is framed and firmly inscribed in the familiar duality of West and non-West, 'white' and non-'white', self and other. It is where the site/sight of domination is always emanated from a white gaze, perusing the bodies of the non-white others as fixed objects, ontological impossibilities. It is a drama of oppression that Fanon painstakingly describes: I had to meet the white man's eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me . . . In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity . . . I move slowly in the world . . . I progress by crawling. And already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed. (Fanon, 1967:116) For Fanon, the 'eyes of the white men' constitute the agonizing psychic identification of the Negro. What else can a Negro be but 'an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage' spattered with black blood? In this particular colonial society, the appearance, the difference, the 'fact of blackness' is an 'unalterable evidence', inescapable from white voyeuristic gaze. A Negro of Antilles might have acquired the fluency of the French language and the culture of the metropolis, but he or she is still incarcerated by the 'racial epidermal schema, unable to be assimilated, unable to pass unnoticed'.2 'Race' - in its most commonsensical conception of 'black' and 'white' - becomes a trope of an ultimate, irreducible difference, acting as a powerful ideological formation which disavows and sublates the otherness (alterity) that constitutes the symbolic domain of colonial identification. The manichean division and social antagonism coloring Western colonial relations is, for a moment and on the face of it, masked in the Japanese case thereby bringing to light a particularity of Japanese colonial discourse:3 that is Japan as the sole non-Western (read non-'white') colonial power whose imperial dominions and colonial possessions are populated with peoples not utterly different from themselves in racial make-up and cultural inventions. Western imperialism and subsequent colonization found their victims dispersed far from the European continent and their remoteness and differences (seen from the European point of view) were easily reified, idealized, debased and negated. The proximity - in both geographical and cultural terms - of Japan to its empire requires the Japanese to create rather different sets of what Edward Said has called the 'strategy of positional superiority' (Said, 1978: 7).4 In other words, caught in between the contradictory positionality of not-white, not-quite and yetalike, Japan's domineering gaze towards its colonial subjects in the East

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must always invariably redirect itself, somewhat ambivalently, to the imperialist glare of the West.5 What characterizes Japanese colonial discourse then, is this uneasy oscillation between being both the seeing subject and the object being seen. Put differently, within Japan's immediate colonial theatre (Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, and arguably China), the concept of 'race', in its initial manifestation, loses its readily identifiable referent, and not unlike 'class', the central category of Marxist social analysis, it becomes an abstraction, not deducible from the biological system itself. Since racial taxonomy was already well inscribed into the imperialist world system in which Japan made its untimely (from the Japanese perspective, of course, timely) entry, Japanese race-writing must rearticulate and recontextualize the existing Eurocentered racial schematization externally, and construct and invent an ideology of racial affinity internally in fostering what Benedict Anderson (1983) has called an 'imagined community'. To this external-internal dialectic, as the following pages attempt to show, Japan's 'othering' of its colonized becomes indispensable. Furthermore, I would like to argue, within the above-mentioned dialectic, Japan's racialism is incumbent and crucial in concealing, and even suppressing, a very real and material exigency of early Meiji nation formation: that is, class struggle. This however, is not to insist on the primacy of class as an analytical category over other relevant social constructs such as gender, ethnicity or religion, but only to draw attention to two important, but often neglected, observations in the studies of imperialism and nationalism in which the concept of race has provided the ultimate trope of difference. First, as J. A. Hobson's classic study of British imperialism has shown, imperialist expansion, by securing the 'acquiescence . . . of the body of a nation . .. partly by appeals to the mission of civilization, but chiefly by playing upon the primitive instincts of the race,' only benefited a particular class of people, namely the financiers and the investors (1965: 212). Second, recent theorization of race has warned against the conceptualization of racial ideologies as wholly autonomous, disengaged from the various social conflicts, and the facile reduction of these ideologies to the effects of these other relations. As Paul Gilroy writes, '[rjaces are not. . . simple expressions of either biological or cultural sameness. They are imagined - socially and politically constructed - and the contingent processes from which they emerge may be tied to equally uneven patterns of class formation to which they, in turn, contribute' (1990: 264). The discussion of race in colonial Japan therefore, must finally open up to symbolize a wider antagonism to which the very enunciation of race attempts to obfuscate. Scientific racism, a discourse closely linked to Europe's encounter with the non-Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, justified and legitimized the imperial ideology that the 'lesser' races demanded imperialization and colonization, and that it was the 'white man's burden'

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to brighten the dark continents with light. It is in this highly racialized world between lightness and darkness, white and non-white, colonizer and the colonized, that the 'yellow' people of Japan made their anomalous imperialistic entry. It is Japan's contradictory historical positionality in between the margins of 'white' and 'black', colonizer and colonized, that the articulation and rearticulation of 'race' has taken place in Japanese colonial discourse. In other words, how did imperial Japan position and imagine itself racially (and of course culturally and nationally) in relation to both the 'white' imperialists and its 'yellow' and later 'brown' colonial subjects? More importantly, as I would like to argue, it is this globalized imperialist structure and colonial endeavor that enabled Japan's racial imaginings in the first place, and not the other way around. On the one hand, Japan needed to respond to the prevalent racist-thinking in order to elevate itself above and differentiate itself from the wretched of the earth in identification with the 'white' colonial powers. Yet on the other hand, paradoxically and concomitantly unable to escape the epidermal classification of this very scientific racism, it consequently constructed a racial and cultural interconnectedness with its 'yellow' neighbors in justifying its own colonial endeavor. It is through the readings of two Meiji intellectuals, Okakura Tenshin and Taguchi Ukichi that this contradiction and incoherence between identification and disidentification, avowal and disavowal that the arbitrariness and inventiveness of racial identities become evident and crucial in the analysis of Japanese imperialism and its subsequent colonization of Asia. Historically speaking, the writings of Okakura and Taguchi are crucial not only in their exigency exhibited amidst the tension between Japan and the West, mediated by the discourse on Asia, but that they are also texts on the verge of the emergence of what Karatani Kojin has called, the 'consciousness of autonomy' (jizokuteki ishiki) - a way of thinking and talking about Japan, about 'things Japanese' (Karatani, 1990: 22). Furthermore, these texts provide a glimpse of the contours of Japanese colonial technology. Okakura's call for trans-Asian value-system and a unique position for Japan in it was taken up by the nationalist ideologues in the early 1940s to intensify Japan's imperialistic endeavors in Asia. The problematic exemplified by Taguchi's racialism continued to surface in the debate on colonial policies in delineating the relative cultural and racial positions of the colonized to the Japanese colonizer.

'Asia is one' Okakura Tenshin begins his The Ideal of the East with the following notorious passage: Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilizations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and

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the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal, which is the common thought-inheritance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce all the great religions of the world, and distinguishing them from those maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the Particular, and to search out the means, not the end, of life. (Okakura, 1904:1) Okakura wrote most of his important works in English and published them overseas (in Great Britain and the United States, to be specific). The Ideal of the East, perhaps his most representative work, was first published in London by John Murray in 1903. It was in 1922 when Nihon Bijutsuin published Okakura Tenshin Zenshu6 that The Ideal of the East was first translated and made available to the Japanese. But it was not until the early years of Showa, in anticipation of an all-out war, that Okakura's translated texts began to be read widely.7 What is striking about the above passage is not only Okakura's flawless English but also his allencompassing tone. As a geographical entity, Asia has historically been inhabited by various civilizations which have interacted with one another. Despite this intercourse, historical developments have prevented the emergence of anything like a single Asian culture, not to mention race. Obviously Okakura himself is not oblivious to the heterogeneity and diversity within Asia. Upon returning from his four-month journey to China in 1893 Okakura published a number of articles in Japanese in which he observed the regional differences and local complexities within China. In 'Shina nanboku no kubetsu' (Distinction Between North and Southern China), he argues that two distinctive Chinese cultures have developed, one along the Yellow River to the north and the other around the Yangtze River to the south. The two regions are visibly different: as Okakura 'crosses the Luo Water moving to the West', he sees the vestige of Han and Tang, but he is greeted by the appearance of Sung as 'the scenery changes completely when he steps out of Chengdu', a city in the upper stream of the Yangtze (quoted in Irokawa, 1970: 26-7, and Ooka, 1985:18-19). In another article titled 'Shina no bijutsu' (The Art of China), contrary to common belief and perception, Okakura boldly draws the similarity between China and Europe, and stresses China's dissimilitude with Japan. He writes: What has impressed me deeply, is none other than the relationship between China and Europe. As one studies that relationship from Japan, one cannot help but to hold on to the feeling that

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China and Europe are drastically different. However, as one enters the interior and investigates in detail, one finds that rather than Japan, China has more in common with Europe. (quoted in Ooka, 1985: 26) The herders on horseback driving the sheep in the sunset of Luoyang, and the scattered tiles and bricks of the old capital, all created the illusion for Okakura of being in Rome. He further points out that 'lifestyle in China is acutely different from that of Japan': from the shoes the Chinese wear for walking, the table they use for dining to the bricks and tiles they cover for sheltering, 'their lives seem to share many similarities with Westerners'. The interesting thing about both articles is that they are observations made from Okakura's own experience in China, not a removed or secondhand speculation from Japan. From the above publications in Japanese for a readership in Japan, it is apparent that Okakura's personal experience (his being there) has convinced him of the irrefutable 'differences' existing in China, not to mention throughout Asia. So why does he insist that Asia is one in a book addressed to a Western readership? How is Asia one? Why must Asia be one, and more importantly, what entitles Okakura, a Japanese, to speak of Asia as one? I must emphasize here that Okakura is not speaking of an Asia that has reached a fixed, rigid, finished, and final form. The unity of Asia, despite periodical inter-tribal upheavals and numerous ethnic conquests, lies in the 'old energy of communication' embodied by Chinese humanism (Confucianism) and Indian spirituality (Buddhism). Furthering his logic on this premise, Okakura argues that 'it is also true that the Asiatic races form a single mighty web' (Okakura, 1904: 3). In spite of irreducible historical contingencies and differences in particular regions or locales, there exists a perceivable unitary structure: 'Arab chivalry, Persian poetry, Chinese ethics, and Indian thought, all speak of a single ancient Asiatic peace, in which there grew up a common life, bearing in different regions different characteristic blossoms, but nowhere capable of a hard and fast dividing line' (ibid.: 3-4). It is not difficult to discern here the Hegelian organicist philosophy which Okakura has taken from his mentor and friend Ernest Fenellosa.8 Asia is organic in character, a functional interdependence of parts; each is a necessary part of the organic growth and unity of all of Asia. Therefore, it is by no means preposterous to suggest that 'Islam itself may be described as Confucianism on horseback, sword in hand' (ibid.: 4). Historical changes (dynastic upheavals, imperial conquests, etc.) do occur, but they do not negate the fundamental totality of Asia. From India to China, from the 'Mohammedan conquest' to the 'Mongol tyranny', from the 'Tartar hordes' to the 'Hunas, the Sakas, and the Gettaes', each struggles and at times displaces the other, but they do not falsify each other

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(ibid.). Historical conflicts and their ensuing changes are the necessary developments to the dynamic growth of Asia. Putting aside the problematic in Okakura's crude and groundless, if not idealistic formulation of an Asian unity, the historical context to which his proposition evolved cannot be overlooked. It goes without saying that Asia is not simply and straightforwardly a geographic category. Like 'the very invention of Africa (as something more than a geographical entity), [Asia] must be understood, ultimately, as an outgrowth of European racialism . . .' (Appiah, 1991: 151). Asia is neither a cultural, religious or linguistic unity, nor a unified world. The principle of its identity lies outside itself, in relation to (an)Other. If one can ascribe to Asia any vague sense of unity, it is that which is excluded and objectified by the West in the service of its historical progress. Asia is, and can be one, only under the imperial eyes of the West. Therefore, Okakura's Pan-Asianism must be understood not as a self-reflexive realization based on any genuine cultural commonality, but a historical construction deeply implicated within the historic-geopolitical East-West binarism in which the putative unity of Asia, or the East, is 'invented' or 'imagined' in direct opposition to another putative unity of the West. Hence it is not at all surprising that many Japanese scholars have interpreted Okakura's assertion of a single Asian consciousness as a passionate and desperate call for solidarity against Western imperialism and colonialism. But only in that context. A yellow shade of pale In Jack Snyder's Myths of Empire (1991), which analyzes the various overextensions committed by the great powers in the industrial era, a painting depicting a Japanese attack on a Russian position near the Yalu River during the Russo-Japanese War is used as the cover illustration. The representation provides an interesting glimpse of racial visualization and identification in early-twentieth-century Japan. Although I have yet to determine the artist of this painting, the portrayal of the Japanese soldiers in poses of heroic determination - stabbing the Russian soldier, uprearing the imperial flag and brandishing the saber in striking motion - amply suggests the work of a Japanese. However, dispositions aside, there appears to be no physical difference between the Japanese and the Russians. The Japanese bear a strong facial resemblance to the Russians and look distinctly 'European' in their military mustaches and well-trimmed haircuts. In fact, they are virtually identical except for the military hats, the darker uniforms and the red-colored bag that distinguished the Japanese soldiers from their Russian counterparts. It is obvious from this representation that a mechanism of identification is at play in which a fantasmatic image of a rather extraordinary 'Japanese1138

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ness' is being constructed. However, this process of identification is not an uncomplicated one. The initial attachment can take on a 'hostile coloring' and become identical with the wish to replace. As Freud writes, '[i]dentification, in fact, is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone's removal' (Freud, 1958: 47). Here, of course, Freud is speaking of the boy's identification with the father in the early stage of the Oedipal complex. Simultaneously or soon after the initial identification with the father, the boy develops a 'straightforward sexual object-cathexis' towards his mother. Initially, these two expressions co-exist without mutual influence or interference. Later however, the two psychologically distinct ties converge as required by the resolution of the Oedipal complex, the boy recognizes the father as the impediment in his way to his mother and wishes to take his father's place. What is important in the context of our discussion is that identification is inherently conflicting and even contradictory, characterized not only by what one would like 'to be', but also what one would like 'to replace'. Although in the artist's portrayal the Japanese soldiers are physically identical to the Russians, the identity of Japan as an imperial power is constituted only by the differentiation and hence the annihilation of the Russians. One only has to remember that the Russo-Japanese War was a Japanese attempt to remove Russia's military influence and to replace its imperial dominance in the Korean peninsula. One also should recall that it was the outcome of the Russo-Japanese War that changed the way Japan was to be perceived by both its Asian neighbors and the Western powers. For an instant at least, Japanese victory suggested a possibility that a nonWestern, non-white power can successfully challenge Western imperialism; a psychological impact that gave great impetus to nationalistic movements throughout Asia.9 And yet under Western eyes, the Japanese behavior appeared to be rather uncharacteristic for a 'lesser' race. Henceforth, on the one hand, Japan was to be considered a political threat to the balance of power in Asia, and on the other hand, it was soon to be bestowed the approbation of 'honorary whites,' and to join the ranks of the colonial powers.10 Japan's identification with the 'white' race is of course far from being a 'natural' one. Visible morphological characteristics such as skin, bone and hair that enabled the categorical division of people into broad racial groupings such as 'white', 'black', or 'yellow' in the first place cannot simply be altered or transformed through representation. What imperial Japan needed in justifying its newly found status was not only a rhetoric of identification with the West, but also a systemic differentiation and dissociation - on biological and sociohistorical grounds - from its Asian neighbors. In his 'Refuting the Yellow Peril', written during the Russo-Japanese War, Taguchi Ukichi undertakes the seemingly improbable if not impossible task of demonstrating the 'truth of the Japanese race' - that the

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Japanese belong not to the 'yellow' but the 'white' race. As apparent from the title of the essay, Taguchi's purpose is to undermine the West's fear of the alleged danger of a predominance of the yellow race, with its enormous numbers, over the white race. The point here, however, is neither a refutation of the arbitrariness of the racial category 'yellow,' nor the rejection of a Western racist paranoia. To Taguchi, the yellow race does exist, it's just that the Japanese did not belong to it! 'The Yamato people', Taguchi asserts, are 'racially distinguished' from the Chinese, whom he sees as the embodiment of the yellow race, and are 'racially similar to peoples of India, Persia, Greece and Rome'. As a result, if one can only recognize the erroneousness that classified both the Japanese and Chinese as the yellow race, then 'the yellow peril is nothing but a groundless rumor' (Taguchi, 1990a: 485). If the yellow peril is only 'an illusive dream of some Europeans', and yellowness is a misnomer wrongly applied to the Japanese race, then what exactly distinguishes and exempts the Japanese from the yellow peoples? Taguchi admits that 'the so-called yellow blood' people and 'the descendants of the aborigine' exist in the Japanese race, but historically 'those who occupy the superior position in Japanese society are definitely not the yellow people'. These aristocrats and well-to-dos have stored in their veins the 'blood from the descendants of the heavenly gods' (ibid.: 485-6)." Once the origin of the Japanese race is located and anchored in this mythological divine will, it becomes a transcendental signifier to which all other meanings can only concur. It is interesting, and yet ultimately crucial, that Taguchi conceives of Japanese racialism in class terms. There are two sets of contradictions implicit in his text, one external, the other internal, that he and the emerging Meiji nation-state must confront. First of all, how to recontextualize Japan's seemingly color-coded racial affinity apart from the Chinese, the consummate embodiment of the yellow people, and to simultaneously articulate an immanent whiteness that on the face of it, is nonexistent? Secondly, how to negotiate the disparity between the aristocracy and the wealthy who are racially pure and the masses of the lower classes who exhibit traces of yellowness, in constructing the myth of a collective Japanese people in which that very difference must, at least on the surface, be erased? These contradictions are resolved, or appear to be resolved, by Taguchi through a metanarrative of the history of the Japanese people. According to Taguchi, upon their mythical descent, the imperial race were encountered by the early inhabitants who had 'burrowed and nested' on the island of Japan. Despite their initial resistance and subsequent rebellion against the imperial people, they were easily defeated and subjugated by the imperial army. Unlike the 'Anglo Saxon that exterminated the native inhabitants in North America, and unlike the Spaniards that practiced miscegenation with the indigene in South America, [the imperial

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people] used a different method in subduing and domesticating [the early inhabitants]: slavery' (ibid.: 488). Furthermore, historically, the people of Japan are divided into two general groupings: the ryd, the good, and the sen, the lowly.12 Taguchi observes that nevertheless, 'with the passage of time and the effect of humanness', (saigetsu no keika to ninjo no dori) the slaves were emancipated and allowed to intermarry. Taguchi is also quick to add that in reality, the slaves have become 'free citizens' long before the official abolishment of slavery; the master-slave relationship has long ceased, and evolved into more of a landlord-tenant, employer-employee relationship (ibid.: 491). As a result, the blood has become 'very contaminated', so even he can hardly 'recognize the differences between the imperial people and the domesticated native inhabitants'. Since, however, there are essential 'good and evil in human nature', (ninjo ni wa onozu kara kou ari} it is not difficult, even today, to 'distinguish the racial differences'. The history of Japan then, according to Taguchi's narrative, becomes the realization of its superior racial essence through the conquests and subjugation of the lesser people despite the eventual intermixing/contamination of its blood by the offspring of the native inhabitants. The historical presence of the enslaved indigene is responsible for the West's mis-recognition and mis-classification of the entire Japanese race as yellow people together with the Chinese race. Ironically, it is through this very 'contamination' this mixing of the 'higher' and the 'lesser' bloods - that a 'homogeneous' Japanese race - regardless of the asymmetrical power relations and antagonism inherent in social categories such as class and gender - can be constructed. It is important to underscore here that Taguchi's effort to distinguish and differentiate the imperial race from the yellow race, not unlike Okakura's writing in English, is constituted and conditioned on how the Japanese race is seen by the Western/white surveying eye. Despite the visible traces of yellowness amongst the Japanese people, if one were to, as suggested by Taguchi, 'investigate in detail the extremes between beauty and ugliness,' one is likely to see beyond/behind the observable yellowness and discover the latent, but obscured whiteness (ibid.: 497).

'Race' make-up Since the Japanese possesses only the appearance of the yellow race, once make-up is applied and embellishments are adorned, Taguchi claims, the Japanese still 'might fall short of the very fine Anglo Saxon race, but is definitely a cut above its inferiors' (ibid.). Consequently, Taguchi suggests two ways in which the Japanese race can raise its respectability in Western eyes: proper grooming and the prolonging of youthful prime. He argues that the main reason for the West's derision is the Japanese inattention to proper grooming. First of all, Taguchi decries, there are too few women

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over the age of thirty who powder their face, and too many men still compelled by the feudal custom to regard grooming and Western clothing as unsoldierly and disgraceful. As a remedy, Taguchi believes that 'wearing hats would have the advantage of not only whitening all Japanese men and women's faces, but also ennobling their status. And by putting on little pretty suits, [the men] would become gentlemen at once' (ibid.: 499). Secondly, according to Taguchi, the 'prosperous age' (seiji) of Japanese men and women is rather brief as compared to their Western counterparts. The 'beauty of their colors' lasts from the age of 15 or 16 to 35, and 22 or 23 to 50 for both women and men respectively. Beyond that, 'their faces wrinkle and their vigor lessens'. Taguchi contends that if Japanese citizens consisted of only 'beautiful men and women in their prime', Japan would 'certainly come to be respected by the rest of the world'. The most urgent task then, is to 'prolong the youthful prime of Japanese men and women' (ibid.: 499-500). Taguchi offers the Japanese two highly dubious and gender specific ways in achieving this. He urges the men to eschew what he perceives as the 'excessive protectiveness' from their parents which he contrasts with the supposedly extreme individualistic behavior of the Anglo Saxon race. And he encourages the women to change their feudal demeanor and to engage in more physical exercises in order to have healthier babies.13 What Taguchi calls the 'social reform' which is imperative for improving the perception of the Japanese abroad, can be achieved only through the collective 'shedding of the remaining feudal practices' (ibid.: 500). The yellow peril then, concludes Taguchi, is 'principally a problem regarding the features of the Japanese race' (ibid.); a sur/facial misperception by the West. Lurking beneath Taguchi's racialism is the assumption that the Japanese race already possesses a priori, a particular 'epidermis' that distinguishes itself from the yellow race, and if the Japanese would only comport itself accordingly, its affinity to whiteness will become discernible. What is further implied here then, perhaps inadvertently, is that whiteness and the attributes associated with it, is not an inherent property of a particular race per se, but a position that is occupiable, a role that is playable, through certain corporal objectifications and social articulations. That is to say if the yellowness of the Japanese race is 'made-up' by Western racialist classification, then its whiteness can be (re)covered through proper 'make-up'. At first glance, Taguchi's argument seems to question and even resist the dominant scientific racialist discourse that arbitrarily posits a direct correspondence between gross morphology and cultural capacity. For if the Japanese race has displayed characteristics that are incongruous to the very racial classification that underpin the hierarchical (social, cultural and political) explanation of all human beings, then the color line that divides and separates becomes merely imaginary and even traversable. However, as aforementioned,

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YELLOW SKIN, WHITE MASKS Taguchi does not refute the theoretical underpinnings of Western racialist discourse; his interest lies only in extricating and thereby elevating Japan from one racial category to another. Taguchi's rebuttal of racialist classification is not a rejection, but a revaluation and celebration thereof. He merely displaces or shifts the valuations attached to the racial vocabularies onto another, and accepts the terms and rules set by the dominant discourse. For him, whiteness still represents non-violable human/societal characteristics that are reflective of its superior status in the world system. And yellowness still reflects the inherent inferiority that is represented by the backward-looking Chinese society. In fact, by projecting yellowness onto the Chinese and away from color per se, Taguchi internalizes the terms of Western racialized and scientized discourse, and in turn distances Japan from complete application of the negative elements of racialist discourse to itself. Furthermore, by emphasizing the differences with the Chinese/yellow race - creating new facts that supports the distinctions Taguchi conveniently recontextualizes Japan out of Asia. Taguchi's argument for Japan's identification with the white race seems to follow a simple syllogism, a series of logical deductions based on the premises of equivalence or inequivalence of two binary oppositions. First of all, he begins with the dominant racial supposition that whiteness is not yellowness (whiteness ¥= yellowness). Secondly, he follows with the identification of the yellow race with the Chinese race (and Chinese = yellowness). Thirdly, Taguchi asserts the absolute difference between the Chinese and the Japanese races (since Japanese ¥= Chinese). And finally through logical deduction, Taguchi concludes with the similarity between the Japanese and whiteness (therefore, Japanese = whiteness). The dialectics of identity and difference Although Okakura's Asian culturalism and Taguchi's de-Asianizing racialism appear to be articulating two opposing positionalities of Japan in relation to its Asian neighbors, it soon becomes apparent that they are two sides of the same imperialist coin. Okakura's Asianism is merely a backdrop to a thinly disguised celebration of Japan's 'manifest destiny' and an essentialist advocating of Japan's uniqueness. And Taguchi's de-Asianism is a conscious attempt to conceal the historical interconnectedness between Japan and Asia in light of Japan's imperialist expansionism. For Okakura, China and India, the two once great traditions of Asia, now lie in ruins: 'Dynastic upheavals, the inroads of Tartar horsemen, the carnage and devastation of infuriated mobs . . . have left to China no landmarks, save her literature and her ruins, to recall the glory of the Tang emperors or the refinement of Sung society' (Okakura, 1904: 5). Similarly in India, '[tjhe grandeur of Asoka - ideal type of sovereigns of Antioch and Alexandria - is almost forgotten among the crumbling stones of Bharhut 1143

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and Buddha Gaya' (ibid.: 5-6). While past glories of China and India can now only be recognized amidst ruins, '[i]t has been, however, the great privilege of Japan to realise this unity-in-complexity with a special clearness' (ibid.: 5). And we can observe here the facile conflation and substitutions of categories such as 'culture,' 'nation' and 'race'. The privilege of Japan, according to Okakura, rests in the particular identity of the Japanese race. He writes: The Indo-Tartaric blood of this race was in itself a heritage which qualified it to imbibe from the two sources, and so mirror the whole of Asiatic consciousness. The unique blessing of unbroken sovereignty, the proud self-reliance of an unconquered race, and the insular isolation which protected ancestral ideas and instincts at the cost of expansion, made Japan the real repository of the trust of Asiatic thought and culture. (1904: 5) Although articulated differently than Taguchi's - association rather than disassociation - what we have here is another example of blatant ethnocentrism and cultural essentialism: a 'chosen people' whose racial superiority is assumed, not unlike Taguchi's Japanese who have in their veins the 'blood from the descendants of the heavenly gods'. It is therefore not surprising when Okakura comes to a predictable conclusion that '[i]t is in Japan alone that the historic wealth of Asiatic culture can be consecutively studied through its treasured specimens' (ibid.: 6, emphasis added). Following a kind of a Hegelian dialectic, Okakura sought to discover in Japan a higher synthesis of Indian 'individualism of the Vedas' (thesis) and Chinese 'communism of Confucius' (antithesis). For Okakura, as for Hegel, history is teleological. And the 'history of Japanese art becomes thus the history of Asiatic ideals - the beach where each successive wave of Eastern thought has left its sand-ripple as it beat against the national consciousness' (ibid.: 8-9). Japan is more than the 'real repository' of Asian spirituality, it has now been endowed with the historical mission not only to represent, but also to speak for the highest ideal of Asia. The 'glory of Continental Asia' has always brought inspiration to Japan, but it is now Japan's 'unassailable original destiny', its 'most sacred honor' to 'hold itself invincible, not in some mere political sense alone, but still more and more profoundly, as a living spirit of Freedom, in life, and thought, and art' (ibid.: 20). What then emerge from Okakura's nebulous and amorphous unity of Asia are equally mystified nativist characteristics particular to the Japanese which enabled Japan to 'welcome the new without losing the old'. Here one senses not an organic 'similarity' of, but distinctive 'difference' advocated between Japan and Asia. And 'equality' and 'superiority' can 1144

YELLOW SKIN, WHITE MASKS be easily substituted for 'similarity' and 'difference' respectively. Okakura's conviction of Japan's uniqueness14 is evident in his description of Japan's landscape: The waters of the waving rice-fields, the variegated contour of the archipelago, so conducive to individuality, the constant play of its soft-tinted seasons, the shimmer of its silver air, the verdure of its cascaded hills, and the voice of the ocean echoing about its pinegirt shores - of all these was born that tender simplicity, that romantic purity, which so tempers the soul of Japanese art, differentiating it at once from the leaning to monotonous breadth of the Chinese, and from the tendency to overburdened richness of Indian art. (1904:16) Through Okakura's prolific prose writing, an essentialized and idealized image of Japan is rendered for the consumption by the West. In this representation, Okakura in fact, to borrow Said's phrase, 'participates in [his] own Orientalizing', in representing Japan as the West would want to see it (Said 1978: 325). Furthermore, obviously with Western readers in mind, the superiority of Japanese art, imbued with indigenous nourishing, is stressed and differentiated from the 'monotonous' Chinese and 'overburdened' Indian counterparts. What sets Japan apart from other imagined communities - hence its uniqueness, its supremacy - is Japan's 'racepride and organic union [that] has stood firm throughout the ages'; the 'national genius' that has never been overwhelmed by periodic continental surges. As a result, there 'has always been abundant energy for the acceptance and re-application of the influence received, however, massive' (Okakura, 1904: 19-20). In other words, Japan's uniqueness lies in its ability to adopt and to adapt to external influences without losing its own 'essence'. But why is this attribute uniquely Japanese? Did Buddhism travel from India through China to Japan unmediated? What about Korea's indigenous appropriation and modification of continental cultures? One might speak of the 'extent' of acculturation or transculturation, but even such generalization must be grounded within specific historical contexts and their respective geopolitical power relations. Whereas for Okakura the uniqueness of the Japanese race is embedded in Japan's past historical relationship to the Asia continent, for Taguchi however, it is the historical present that Japan's uniqueness is to be articulated. In 'A Study of the Japanese Race' published in 1906, Taguchi observes that Japan's recent behavior has brought doubts to the minds of the Europeans in their racial classification. For Japan's defeat of imperial China and its subsequent victory over the 'first-class nation Russia', suggest that perhaps the Japanese are 'a peculiar, an extraordinary race', 1145

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probably a different breed all together from the peoples of Asia. The West's apprehension and incredulity stem from, according to Taguchi, the unprecedented brevity to which Japan has elevated its status from 'halfbarbarian' to an imperial power. And it is the 'Meiji revolution', a 'revolution' that surpasses even the British and French revolutions, that is responsible for 'Japan's achieving in half of a century, the civilization that took European nations hundreds of years to develop' (Taguchi, 1990b: 503). It is to close in this disparity between appearance and content, sur/face and depth, in the eyes of the West that Taguchi begins his study of the Japanese race. For Taguchi, only the extraordinary/non-yellow people, with their essential attributes - that are similar to the superior white race can accomplish what the Japanese are capable of. The classification of the human races in the Western mind depends on the circular analysis that relates the visible to the invisible and back to the visible only to reaffirm the existing hierarchy of human societies. It is a process in which the baseness of the character of the non-West is deduced from the relation of the visible (from the imperial gaze of the West) to the invisible, and then projected back onto the concrete and the observable.15 Although the Japanese race displays the visible signs of an inferior race (yellowness), it also already possesses the appearance of the white race (in terms of modernization, militarism, etc.). And only by differentiating and denying its visible sign of yellowness, and concomitantly eliminating the invisible lowliness associated with it, can Taguchi locate an inherent/invisible Japanese racial essence that corresponds outwardly with its imaginary whiteness. The process of differentiation and identification is not, as Taguchi would have it, a result of an a priori essentialized Japanese racial identity, but rather, it is an a posteriori effect of enunciation within a specific historical contextuality. In fact, as Taguchi's own text has shown, racial identity is unstable, never secured and even usurpable. And its production is an ongoing process of differentiation - Japaneseness is what yellowness is not. What is essential here, to quote Joan W. Scott in a different context, 'is to historicize the question of [that particular racial] identity, to introduce an analysis of its production and thus an analysis of constructions of and conflicts about power' (Scott, 1991: 16). Contrary to the commonsense belief that racial hierarchy and discrimination exist because of people's existing and inherent differences, rather, as I have tried to suggest with the production of Japanese cultural and racial discourse, that it is incumbent upon colonial expansionism. It is the process of exploitation and discrimination itself that produces and establishes racial identities and differentiation in a system of asymmetrical power relationship, not the other way around. Taguchi's denigration of the Chinese race should not be interpreted as the recognition of inherent differences (morphological and cultural) between two distinct categories of peoples - for the very categorical notions of 'Chinese' or 'Japanese' are discursive entities emerging only as 1146

YELLOW SKIN. WHITE MASKS a reactionary response to the process of global imperialism. The very process of dissociation and differentiation from Asia is a historical contingency, an retroactive gaze and an inverse act that aims to conceal the historical interconnectedness between Japan and Asia, and to overturn Japan's historical 'subordinated' positionality in relation to China. In other words, in order to sustain its colonial economy, Japan must reinvent, reconstitute previous imaginings of Asia, and establish the superiority, the typicality of itself in terms of the inferiority or atypicality of its Asian neighbors. It is only through the dislocation of itself from the putative unity of Asia can Japan relocate its position amongst the Western imperial powers. Ironically, it is precisely against this 'modern' appearance of Japan in which Taguchi celebrates that Okakura evokes his culturalism. Japanese consciousness must be revitalized, argues Okakura, if Japan were to preserve its sovereignty from the portentous danger of Western encroachment. 'The opium war in China, and the gradual succumbing of Eastern nations, one by one, to the subtle magical force which the black ships brought over the seas' are all sad lessons which made Japan 'keenly alive to the necessity of unity at any cost' (Okakura, 1904: 212). And on Japanese soil, Okakura sees that a battle is waged between Asiatic ideal and European science. Japan, he writes, ever since the arrival of Commodore Perry, was eager to clothe herself in new garb, discarding the raiment of her ancient past. To cut away those fetters of Chinese and Indian cultures which bound her in the maya of Orientalism, so dangerous to national independence, seemed like a paramount duty to the organisers of the new Japan. (1904: 219) Reproaching the 'inexperienced' and 'undiscriminating' Meiji leaders for embracing Christianity with the same enthusiasm with which they welcomed the steam engine, adopting Western costumes as easily as machine guns, appropriating political theories and social reforms already worn out in the land of their birth, Okakura warns against the 'frenzied love of European institutions' which has brought 'wholesale ravages' of Japan's ancient customs. The 'strange tenacity' of Japan, however, Okakura tells his Western readers, will not succumb to the domination of the West. Japan's unbroken sovereignty and its empowerment as the sole heir to Asian ideals have enabled Japan to remain true to itself. The 'instinctive eclecticism of Eastern culture' which Japan owes to Asia, has 'made her select from various sources those elements of contemporary European civilization that she required' (ibid.: 222-3). Not only will Japan persist, but so will the 1147

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ideals of the East. For Okakura, the East is what the West is not; and the 'simple life of Asia need fear no shaming from that sharp contrast with Europe in which steam and electricity have placed it today' (ibid.: 236). While the West has 'time-devouring locomotion', Asia enjoys the 'far deeper travel-culture of the pilgrimage and the wandering monk'. While Europe is materialistic, competitive, particular, Asia is spiritual, peaceloving and universal. Okakura writes: [T]he glory of Asia . . . lies in that vibration of peace that beats in every heart; that harmony that brings together emperor and peasants; that sublime intuition of oneness. . . . It lies in the dream of renunciation that pictures the Boddhi-Sattva as refraining from Nirvana till the last atom of dust in the universe shall have passed in before to bliss.... It lies in that worship of Freedom. (1904: 238-9) And the spirituality of the East will overcome the materiality of the West. Okakura is quite right, of course, in his assessment of what was the imminent threat of European imperialism to Japan.16 And his critique of Japan's undiscriminating and heedless 'Westernization' in the early Meiji period reflects the exigency and chaos to which the conflation of modernity and modernization is always an inevitability for the non-West. However, what appears to be Okakura's critique of modernity is, in fact, a celebration thereof. His attempt at counterhegemonic cultural analysis fails to recognize the historicity of the East/West, spiritual/material, premodern/modern binary oppositions in which his argument is grounded. This binarism is firmly entrenched in the geopolitical configuration of the world in which the West has constantly to exclude, suppress and eliminate Others in order to ceaselessly transform its self-image. And much like Taguchi's acceptance of pre-existing racist categories, not only is this binarism never interrogated, it is even tacitly accepted, reproduced and reinforced. What we see in Okakura is what Kwame Anthony Appiah has called a 'reverse discourse' where 'the terms of resistance are already given us, and our contestation is entrapped within the Western cultural conjuncture we effect to dispute. The pose of repudiation actually presupposes the cultural institutions of the West and the ideological matrix in which they, in turn, are imbricated' (Appiah, 1991: 145). Okakura's fetishist attitude toward 'tradition' or 'past ideals', as mentioned earlier in his geographic description of Japan, reproduces exotic particularizations for the consumption of his Western readership. In other words, Asia is (re)presented as refined, delicate and harmonious, not rational, powerful and competitive. Asia is defined and can only be defined through negation, by what the West is not; the Other whose subjectivity is forever denied. In 1148

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the end, Okakura's defiant rhetoric and nativist assertion only serve to reconfirm and reinforce the universalist position of the West. Furthermore, the monolithic notions of an Eastern ideal or Asiatic mode (or an equally unitary Western or European consciousness) are nothing but constructed identities. Like nationalism which is essentialized through narrative with the careful selective remembering and forgetting (not to mention inventing) of the past that underpins group identity, regionalism is constructed through a projected suppression of topographical differences (historical and cultural) into a homogeneous legacy of values and experience. After all nationalism and regionalism are not that different; regionalism is only a concealed version of nationalism. Behind Okakura's noble plea for Asian nations to protect and restore Asiatic modes, to recognize and develop consciousness of those modes, lurks Japan's fateful mission '[n]ot only to return to [Japan's] own past ideals, but also to feel and revivify the dormant life of the old Asiatic unity' (Okakura, 1904: 223). Hence it is easy for Okakura to overlook and even endorse Japan's homegrown imperial venture into Asia. The SinoJapanese war (1894-5) is nothing but 'a natural growth of the new national vigor . .. [that] revealed [Japan's] supremacy in the Eastern waters . .. and which has yet drawn [Japan and China] closer than ever in mutual friendship'. Furthermore, the victory over China has 'aroused Japan to the grand problems and responsibilities which await [Japan] as the new Asiatic power' (ibid.: 223).

The nation-thing and its contradiction Once the invention of a unique Japanese race is established, it is only a quick step to a hasty conception of what by now has become a familiar imperial ideology: the civilizing mission. For Taguchi, revolutions - like the Industrial and the French - are essentially 'contagious' (densenteki seishitsu). And so is Japan's. He writes: When we reflect on the records of the revolution of Japan's restoration (nihon no ishin no kakumei) from its beginning to the present, it is not appropriate for [Japan] to have all to itself the taste of four-classes equality and constitutional government (shimin byodo rikken seifu). Because it would be good to distribute them to Korea, and in order to provide people's rights movement to China, we are trying to spread (densen) the neighboring countries with that revolution. And finally we are about to attack Russia. How to infect (kansen) Russia still remains a question; however, I believe this is where us Japanese will display our skill. (Taguchi, 1990a: 504) 1149

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What is noteworthy here, aside from Taguchi's apparent indifference to the inherent contradiction between revolution and restoration, is his reference to the 'taste' (aji) of the supposedly developmental and universal fruit of 'modernity' which Japan must share with, or rather bring to, its neighbors. This notion of a sensory fulfillment, or what Slavoj Zizek, following Lacan, has called enjoyment, is useful here in teasing out the paradoxical nature of Taguchi's racialism. According to Zizek, it is the specific enjoyment, that excessive 'substance', that must be added so that a Cause, or what he calls the Nation Thing, can obtain its positive ontological consistency: A nation exists only as long as its specific enjoyment continues to be materialized in a set of social practices and transmitted through national myths that structure these practices. To emphasize in a 'deconstructionist' mode that Nation is not a biological or transhistorical fact but a contingent discursive construction, an overdetermined result of textual practices, is thus misleading: such an emphasis overlooks the remainder of some real, nondiscursive kernel of enjoyment which must be present for the Nation qua discursive entity-effect to achieve its ontological consistency. (Zizek, 1993: 202) In other words, it is the particular ways in which a given ethnic community organize its enjoyment through national myths that constitute its nationalism. And ultimately it is the threat of that enjoyment by the presence of the 'other', and their differing enjoyments that incite and promote ethnic and racial tensions. In the context of our discussion then, Japan's 'taste', or rather its enjoyment, of 'modernity' is perceived to be threatened by the presence of the yellow people, and their association with Japan. It is as if China and Korea, with their stubborn clinging of feudal practices, their inability to change, and their refusal to enjoy 'modernity', are thus the thieves of Japan's own enjoyment. For if the West continues to lump the Japanese in with the yellow race, Japan will be deprived of its recognition as an emerging world power, as destined by its racial constitution. The threat here is that the Asians, or the yellow people, will 'invalidate' them and the Japanese will thus lose their unique racial/national identity. As a result, a distinct color line must be drawn. It is as if only through imperialist coercion, to make them 'more like us', learning Japan's way of enjoying, can Japan sustain its enjoyment. It is here, however, where the paradox of Japan's racial essentialism and its imperialist aggression lies: since Japaneseness, with its constituting uniqueness and superiority, is inaccessible to other Asians, its imperialist and colonial endeavor will ultimately threaten that very ontological existence. Put differently, if Japan's enjoyment is only possible through the differing enjoyment of the

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'Others', would not the annihilation of that difference eradicate Japan's own enjoyment? What this paradox reveals, to quote Zizek again, is that '[w]hat we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us' (1993: 203). Therefore, isn't the hatred of the yellow people also the hatred of the questionable 'modernity' of Japan - a particular moment that Okakura wants to replace with a universal Asiatic ideal? Isn't it precisely that progressive surface - the seemingly 'modern' Japan - assumed by Taguchi before he can unveil the hidden Japanese racial essence, the kernel of his despising? Isn't it the concealment or the repression of those contradictions, or what Fredric Jameson (1981) has called the strategy of containment - that denial of those intolerable contradictions lies hidden beneath the social surface, and the simultaneous projection on that very ground a substitute that renders existence partly bearable - the foundation to which Taguchi's racial theorization can even begin? If we are to insist on the internal-external dialectics of Taguchi's racialism, and to investigate the gaps and contradictions in what he has called the 'revolution of Japan's Meiji restoration', I think what Taguchi's racialism - demarcating and forging racial lines that have never existed - and Okakura's culturalism implicated in the ubiquitous West and deeply entrenched in a nationalistic rhetoric - eventually attempted to conceal is none other than the internal contradictions of Japan's nascent state-directed capitalist development. By positing an essential racialism through the myth of class equality or cultural unity, it is as if all social contradictions - the continuing impoverishment of the peasantry, the displacement of the rural population, the proletarization in the state-directed industries, the exploitation of female factory workers, etc. - which are inherent and indispensable to the emergence of the Meiji state and Japanese capitalism, can presumably be annulled. Furthermore, if we are to read Taguchi's text not simply as the undertaking of a historian, a literary writer or a social critic, but also of an economic thinker who was lauded as the Adam Smith of Japan for his fervent advocacy of free trade and market economy in compliance with the early Meiji state ideology, his racialism cannot be reduced to the rearticulation of racial category alone. It is Japan's capitalist development, and the concomitant repression of the very contradictions of that development, that Taguchi's text is able to recontextualize the already existing conceptual category of race, and to dissociate Japan from the fear of the yellow peril.

References Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities, London: Verso. Appiah. K. A. (1991) 'Out of Africa: Topologies of nativism', in D. LaCapra (ed.)

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The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bhabha, H. (1984) 'Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse', October 28:125-33. Fanon, F. (1967) Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. L. Markmann, New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Freud, S. (1958) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans, and ed. J. Strachey, standard ed., New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Gen, An-sei (1991) Nihon ryugaku seishin shi (The History of Studying Abroad in Japan), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Gilroy, P. (1990) 'One nation under a groove', in D. T. Goldberg (ed.) Anatomy of Racism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hobson, J. A. (1965) Imperialism, introd. P. Siegelman, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Irokawa, Daikichi (ed.) (1970) Hihon no Meicho, vol. 39, Okakura Tenshin, Tokyo: Chuokoron sha. Jameson, F. (1981) The Political Unconscious, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Karatani, Kojin (1990) Shuen o megutte (Regarding the End), Tokyo: Fukutake shoten. Komagome, Takeshi (1996) Shokuminchiteikoku nippon no bunka togo (The Cultural Integration of Colonial Japan), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Okakura, Tenshin (1904) The Ideal of the East With Special Reference to the Art of Japan, 2nd edn, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Ooka, Makoto (1985) Okakura Tenshin, Tokyo: Asahi Shinbumsha. Ozaki, Hotsuki (1991) Kindai bungaku no shokon (The Scar of Modern Literature), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Said, E. (1978) Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books. Scott, J. W. (1991) 'Multiculturalism and the politics of identity', October 61:12-23. Snyder, J. (1991) Myths of Empire, Domestic Politics and International Ambition, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Spurr, D. (1993) The Rhetoric of Empire, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taguchi, Ukichi (1990a) 'Ha kokaron (Refuting the yellow peril)', in Teiken Taguchi Ukichi zenshu, vol. 2, Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 483-500. (1990b) 'Nihon jinshu no kenkyu (A study on the Japanese race)', in Teiken Taguchi Ukichi zenshu, vol. 2, Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 501-14. Zizek, S. (1993) Tarrying With the Negative, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Notes 1 Regretful Parting, narrativized through the recollection of an old Japanese doctor who was a classmate of Lu Xun at Sendai medical school, chronicles the Chinese writer's renowned 1902 sojourn in Japan. Dazai's work, written in early 1945, owes its very production to Japanese wartime imperialist policy and its phantasmagoric vision of a Greater Eastern Co-Prosperity Sphere. Commissioned by the Japan Literature Patriotic Association (nihon bungaku hdkokukai), the government organization that sponsored three Greater East Asian Writers' Conferences in 1942, 1943 and 1944 respectively, Regretful Parting was to be published in accordance with the Association's policy to

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2

3

4

5 6 7

8

9

'create and to publish novels of grand scale and conception, to announce to the people of Greater Eastern Asia the tradition and ideal of the imperial nation, and to instill in them the great spirit of the Joint Proclamation'. For a more detailed account of the Conferences and Dazai's involvement in it, see Ozaki (1991), especially chapters 1 & 2: 'Daitoa bungakusha taikai ni tsuite' (On the Greater East Asian Writers' Conference), and 'Daitoa kyodo sengen to futatsu no sakuhin' (Greater East Asian Joint Proclamation and Two Literary Works). Fanon is careful to caution us that blackness is not simply a natural and biological 'fact', but a 'fact' that is at once historically and socially constituted and politically constitutive. He writes, 'Below the corporeal schema I had sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements I used had been provided for me not by 'residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character,' but by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories' (Fanon, 1967: 111). Blackness, whiteness, or any other identities, have to be constructed, narrated, learned, and played out. The point, of course, is not to single out Japanese imperial and colonial experience as particularly particular thereby running the risk of acquitting them of their criminality and vileness. What I am attempting is to draw attention to the complexity of different colonial experiences at their specific historical contexts and to show how imperial exploitation and colonial oppression manifest themselves in different guises. I should underscore here that even the seemingly apparent cultural or racial 'affinity' between the Japanese and their colonial neighbors should be grasped as a historically specific discourse that is not based on some 'natural' or 'visual' evidence, but is itself a rather contradictory and highly contested system of colonial enunciation and definition. See, for example, Komagome (1996). I borrow the not-quite/not-white formulation from Bhabha (1984:132). The collected works were edited by Saito Takazo and published almost ten years after Okakura's death in commemoration of Nihon Bijutsuin's twentieth anniversary. Okakura's other works in English were also published abroad and translated into Japanese first in the 1922 zenshu by Nihon Bijutsuin and various translations and retranslations were done thereafter. The Awakening of Japan was first published in 1904 by Century of New York and in 1905 by John Murray of London. Different versions of the Japanese translations were published in 1939 and 1940. The Book of Tea was first published in May 1906 by Fox Duffield of New York and in 1935 by Angus & Robertson of Sydney. Japanese versions were first translated in the zenshu of 1922, then in 1929 and 1939. Ernest Fenellosa came to Japan in 1878 as an instructor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo. Okakura studied under Fenellosa and served as his interpreter in their effort to restore and preserve Japanese artifacts which were largely neglected and even destroyed under the torrent of 'Westernization'. Despite Fenellosa's sincere interest and genuine enthusiasm for Japanese art, he qualifies as unmistakably Orientalist. Fenellosa saw in 'traditional' Japanese art the spiritual values with which to resist the materialistic and depersonalized industrialization of the nineteenth-century West. It must be underscored here that the initial favorable responses by the Asians to Japan's victory over Russia has less to do with the preference of Japanese aggression than the resentment against Western imperial and colonial presence. For example, Eastern Journal, an all-round magazine in Shanghai had the following analysis of the Russo-Japanese war:

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THINKING/WORKING THROUGH RACE There are two large questions lingering on the minds of the Chinese people. First, between despotism and constitutional government. . . . Second, the question of survival of the fittest between the yellow race and the white race. If Russia wins and Japan loses, our citizens will certainly see 'white prosper, yellow decline' as the axiom of the law of nature, that even a self-determining nation like Japan cannot contend . . . If the hearts of the people are dead, all far-reaching schemes will disappear, can there be such a fearful darkness like this? (Gen An-sei, 1991:153) 10 The complicity between the Western colonial powers and Japan is evident when Theodore Roosevelt, despite pleas from the US minister of legation in Seoul to intervene, saw Japan's control over Korea as an appropriate checkand-balance to further Russian expansion. In the Taft-Katsura Agreement of July 1905, the US acknowledged Japan's predominance over Korea in exchange for Japan's recognition of American hegemony over the Philippines. And England too, in negotiating the terms of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in August 1905, acquiesced to Japan's political, military and economic interests in Korea. 11 The literal translation of 'tenson jinshu' would be 'the people descending from Ninigi no mikoto, the grandchild of Amaterasu omikami'. It is a widely held myth that the Japanese imperial line is traced to Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess. 12 The lowly are further divided into four classes with the first three originally belonging to the imperial race. These four classes consist of first, ex-officials who were released from duties due to crimes such as the violation of law, conspiracy against the imperial throne, etc.; second, the guardians of the imperial grave sites; third, servants and peoples of the aristocrats, and finally, slaves made of captives from Korea and native inhabitants. According to Taguchi, strict hierarchization of class has prohibited inter-marriage not only between the ryomin and the senmin, but also amongst the subdivisions of the lowly people, so as to prevent the intermixing of bloods. 13 This overtly paternalistic formulation of the sexual division of labor is of course, symptomatic of a covertly chauvinistic discourse of nation-building that reinforces and is complicit to the existing patriarchal structure. 14 I should mention here that the conviction of ethnic uniqueness is not unique to Japan. My interest here, however, is to analyze the relation between Okakura's nativist assertion and his alleged pan-Asianism in its specific historical context. 15 This system of classification and understanding, which David Spurr (1993) has termed the 'rhetoric of empire', emerged when a paradigm shift occurred in the development of natural history at the end of the classical period. Classification, which hitherto primarily concerned itself with the mere 'nomination of the visible', began to establish for each natural being, a 'character based on the internal principle of organic structure', and to create a hierarchy based on the relative complexity that each species demonstrates. This mode of perceiving and conceiving, according to Spurr, requires a complicated process of seeing beyond the seeming: to classify therefore meant no longer simply to arrange the visible, but to perform a circular analysis that related the visible to the invisible, its 'deeper cause', then rose again toward the surface of bodies to identify the signs that confirmed the hidden cause. The key to knowledge then, is grasped through an invasive thrust into the inleriority of the examined object. Upon withdrawing, the interior 'truth' give rises to meaningful differences and differentiation which more often than not, confirm and reaffirm the a

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YELLOW SKIN. WHITE MASKS priori commitment to hierarchization and preconceived differences manifested on the exteriority. This functionalism, when applied to the classification of human beings, requires and privileges a penetrating I/eye over a fixed 'them,' and firmly establishes an asymmetrical power relationship and an irreconcilable gap between the viewing/examining subject and the viewed/observed object that is by now made familiar by the critique of anthropology and ethnography. Furthermore, this investigation of the Other does not end 'there'. It always returns to 'here'. The imperialist gaze upon the Other sets up a mirror that inevitably produces an inverted self-image of the West. See Spurr (1993). 16 One must remember here that The Ideal of the East was written in 1903, eight years after the Sino-Japanese war, merely a year before Japan's defeat of Russia. Japan by then was already a proud possessor of its first colony, Taiwan. Japan's military strength has ensured that any serious threat from the European powers was improbable.

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8.1

ALGERIA UNVEILED Frantz Fanon From Haakon Chevalier (trans.) A Dying Colonialism, Monthly Review Press, 1965, 21-52. Originally published as L'An Cinq de la Revolution Algerienne, Maspero, 1959.

The way people clothe themselves, together with the traditions of dress and finery that custom implies, constitutes the most distinctive form of a society's uniqueness, that is to say the one that is the most immediately perceptible. Within the general pattern of a given costume, there are of course always modifications of detail, innovations which in highly developed societies are the mark of fashion. But the effect as a whole remains homogeneous, and great areas of civilization, immense cultural regions, can be grouped together on the basis of original specific techniques of men's and women's dress. It is by their apparel that types of society first become known, whether through written accounts and photographic records or motion pictures. Thus, there are civilizations without neckties, civilizations with loin-cloths, and others without hats. The fact of belonging to a given cultural group is usually revealed by clothing traditions. In the Arab world, for example, the veil worn by women is at once noticed by the tourist. One may remain for a long time unaware of the fact that a Moslem does not eat pork or that he denies himself daily sexual relations during the month of Ramadan, but the veil worn by the women appears with such constancy that it generally suffices to characterize Arab society. In the Arab Maghreb, the veil belongs to the clothing traditions of the Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan and Libyan national societies. For the tourist and the foreigner, the veil demarcates both Algerian society and its feminine component.1 In the case of the Algerian man, on the other hand, regional modifications can be noted: the fez in urban centres, turbans and djellabas2 in the countryside. The masculine garb allows a certain margin of choice, a modicum of heterogeneity. The woman seen in her white veil unifies the idea that one has of Algerian feminine society. Obviously what we have here is a uniform which tolerates no modification, no variant. 3 The haik4 very clearly demarcates the Algerian colonized society. It is

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of course possible to remain hesitant before a little girl, but all uncertainty vanishes at the time of puberty. With the veil, things become well-defined and ordered. The Algerian woman, in the eyes of the observer, is unmistakably 'she who hides behind a veil'. We shall see that this veil, one of the elements of the traditional Algerian garb, was to become the bone of contention in a grandiose battle, on account of which the occupation forces were to mobilize their most powerful and most varied resources, and in the course of which the colonized were to display a surprising force of inertia. Taken as a whole, colonial society, with its values, its areas of strength and its philosophy, reacts to the veil in a rather homogeneous way. The decisive battle was launched before 1954, more precisely during the early 1930s. The officials of the French administration in Algeria, committed to destroying the people's originality, and under instructions to bring about the disintegration, at whatever cost, of forms of existence likely to evoke a national reality directly or indirectly, were to concentrate their efforts on the wearing of the veil, which was looked upon at this juncture as a symbol of the status of the Algerian woman. Such a position is not the consequence of a chance intuition. It is on the basis of the analyses of sociologists and ethnologists that the specialists in so-called native affairs and the heads of the Arab Bureaux coordinated their work. At an initial stage, there was a pure and simple adoption of the well-known formula, 'Let's win over the women and the rest will follow.' This definition of policy merely gave a scientific coloration to the 'discoveries' of the sociologists.5 Beneath the patrilineal pattern of Algerian society, the specialists described a structure matrilineal in essence. Arab society has often been presented by Westerners as a formal society in which outside appearances are paramount. The Algerian woman, an intermediary between obscure forces and the group, appeared in this perspective to assume a primordial importance. Behind the visible, manifest patriarchy, the more significant existence of a basic matriarchy was affirmed. The role of the Algerian mother, that of the grandmother, the aunt and the 'old woman', were inventoried and defined. This enabled the colonial administration to define a precise political doctrine: 'If we want to destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer the women; we must go and find them behind the veil where they hide themselves and in the houses where the men keep them out of sight.' It is the situation of woman that was accordingly taken as the theme of action. The dominant administration solemnly undertook to defend this woman, pictured as humiliated, sequestered, cloistered. . . . It described the immense possibilities of woman, unfortunately transformed by the Algerian man into an inert, demonetized, indeed dehumanized object. The behaviour of the Algerian was very firmly denounced and described as medieval and barbaric. With

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infinite science, a blanket indictment against the 'sadistic and vampirish' Algerian attitude towards women was prepared and drawn up. Around the family life of the Algerian, the occupier piled up a whole mass of judgements, appraisals, reasons, accumulated anecdotes and edifying examples, thus attempting to confine the Algerian within a circle of guilt. Mutual-aid societies and societies to promote solidarity with Algerian women sprang up in great number. Lamentations were organized. 'We want to make the Algerian ashamed of the fate that he metes out to women.' This was a period of effervescence, of putting into application a whole technique of infiltration, in the course of which droves of social workers and women directing charitable works descended on the Arab quarters. The indigent and famished women were the first to be besieged. Every kilo of semolina distributed was accompanied by a dose of indignation against the veil and the cloister. The indignation was followed up by practical advice. Algerian women were invited to play 'a functional, capital role' in the transformation of their lot. They were pressed to say no to a centuries-old subjection. The immense role they were called upon to play was described to them. The colonial administration invested great sums in this combat. After it had been posited that the woman constituted the pivot of Algerian society, all efforts were made to obtain control over her. The Algerian, it was assured, would not stir, would resist the task of cultural destruction undertaken by the occupier, would oppose assimilation, so long as his woman had not reversed the stream. In the colonialist programme, it was the woman who was given the historic mission of shaking up the Algerian man. Converting the woman, winning her over to the foreign values, wrenching her free from her status, was at the same time achieving a real power over the man and attaining a practical, effective means of destructuring Algerian culture. Still today, in 1959, the dream of a total domestication of Algerian society by means of 'unveiled women aiding and sheltering the occupier' continues to haunt the colonial authorities.6 The Algerian men, for their part, are a target of criticism for their European comrades, or more officially for their bosses. There is not a European worker who does not sooner or later, in the give and take of relations on the job site, the shop or the office, ask the Algerian the ritual questions: 'Does your wife wear the veil? Why don't you take your wife to the movies, to the fights, to the cafe?' European bosses do not limit themselves to the disingenuous query or the glancing invitation. They use 'Indian cunning' to corner the Algerian and push him to painful decisions. In connexion with a holiday - Christmas or New Year, or simply a social occasion with the firm - the boss will invite the Algerian employee and his wife. The invitation is not a collective one. Every Algerian is called in to the director's office and invited by

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name to come with 'your little family'. 'The firm being one big family, it would be unseemly for some to come without their wives, you understand? . . .' Before this formal summons, the Algerian sometimes experiences moments of difficulty. If he comes with his wife, it means admitting defeat, it means 'prostituting his wife', exhibiting her, abandoning a mode of resistance. On the other hand, going alone means refusing to give satisfaction to the boss; it means running the risk of being out of a job. The study of a case chosen at random - a description of the traps set by the European in order to bring the Algerian to expose himself, to declare: 'My wife wears a veil, she shall not go out,' or else to betray: 'Since you want to see her, here she is,' - would bring out the sadistic and perverse character of these contacts and relationships and would show in microcosm the tragedy of the colonial situation on the psychological level, the way the two systems directly confront each other, the epic of the colonized society, with its specific ways of existing, in the face of the colonialist hydra. With the Algerian intellectual, the aggressiveness appears in its full intensity. The fellah, 'the passive slave of a rigidly structured group', is looked upon with a certain indulgence by the conqueror.7 The lawyer and the doctor, on the other hand, are severely frowned upon. These intellectuals, who keep their wives in a state of semi-slavery, are literally pointed to with an accusing finger. Colonial society blazes up vehemently against this inferior status of the Algerian woman. Its members worry and show concern for those unfortunate women, doomed 'to produce brats', kept behind walls, banned. Before the Algerian intellectual, racialist arguments spring forth with special readiness. For all that he is a doctor, people will say, he still remains an Arab. 'You can't get away from nature.' Illustrations of this kind of race prejudice can be multiplied indefinitely. Clearly, the intellectual is reproached for limiting the extension of learned Western habits, for not playing his role as an active agent of upheaval of the colonized society, for not giving his wife the benefit of the privileges of a more worthy and meaningful life. . . . In the large population centres it is altogether commonplace to hear a European confess acidly that he has never seen the wife of an Algerian he has known for twenty years. At a more diffuse, but highly revealing, level of apprehension, we find the bitter observation that 'we work in v a i n ' . . . that 'Islam holds its prey'. The method of presenting the Algerian as a prey fought over with equal ferocity by Islam and France with its Western culture reveals the whole approach of the occupier, his philosophy and his policy. This expression indicates that the occupier, smarting from his failures, presents in a simplified and pejorative way the system of values by means of which the colonized person resists his innumerable offensive. What is in fact the assertion of a distinct identity, concern with keeping intact a few shreds of national existence, is attributed to religious, magical, fanatical behaviour.

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This rejection of the conqueror assumes original forms, according to circumstances or to the type of colonial situation. On the whole, these forms of behaviour have been fairly well studied in the course of the past twenty years; it cannot be said, however, that the conclusions that have been reached are wholly valid. Specialists in basic education for underdeveloped countries or technicians for the advancement of retarded societies would do well to understand the sterile and harmful character of any endeavour which illuminates preferentially a given element of the colonized society. Even within the framework of a newly independent nation, one cannot attack this or that segment of the cultural whole without endangering the work undertaken (leaving aside the question of the native's psychological balance). More precisely, the phenomena of counter-acculturation must be understood as the organic impossibility of a culture to modify any one of its customs without at the same time reevaluating its deepest values, its most stable models. To speak of counteracculturation in a colonial situation is an absurdity. The phenomena of resistance observed in the colonized must be related to an attitude of counter-assimilation, of maintenance of a cultural, hence national, originality. The occupying forces, in applying their maximum psychological attention to the veil worn by Algerian women, were obviously bound to achieve some results. Here and there it thus happened that a women was 'saved', and symbolically unveiled. These test-women, with bare faces and free bodies, henceforth circulated like sound currency in the European society of Algeria. These women were surrounded by an atmosphere of newness. The Europeans, over-excited and wholly given over to their victory, carried away in a kind of trance, would speak of the psychological phenomena of conversion. And in fact, in the European society, the agents of this conversion were held in esteem. They were envied. The benevolent attention of the administration was drawn to them. After each success, the authorities were strengthened in their conviction that the Algerian woman would support Western penetration into the native society. Every rejected veil disclosed to the eyes of the colonialists horizons until then forbidden, and revealed to them, piece by piece, the flesh of Algeria laid bare. The occupier's aggressiveness, and hence his hopes, multiplied ten-fold each time a new face was uncovered. Every new Algerian woman unveiled announced to the occupier an Algerian society whose systems of defence were in the process of dislocation, open and breached. Every veil that fell, every body that became liberated from the traditional embrace of the ha'ik, every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer. Algerian society with every abandoned veil seemed to

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express its willingness to attend the master's school and to decide to change its habits under the occupier's direction and patronage. We have seen how colonial society, the colonial administration, perceives the veil, and we have sketched the dynamics of the efforts undertaken to fight it as an institution and the resistances developed by the colonized society. At the level of the individual, of the private European, it may be interesting to follow the multiple reactions provoked by the existence of the veil, which reveal the original way in which the Algerian woman manages to be present or absent. For a European not directly involved in this work of conversion, what reactions are there to be recorded? The dominant attitude appears to us to be a romantic exoticism, strongly tinged with sensuality. And, to begin with, the veil hides a beauty. A revealing reflection - among others - of this state of mind was communicated to us by a European visiting Algeria who, in the exercise of his profession (he was a lawyer), had had the opportunity of seeing a few Algerian women without the veil. These men, he said, speaking of the Algerians, are guilty of concealing so many strange beauties. It was his conclusion that a people with a cache of such prizes, of such perfections of nature, owes it to itself to show them, to exhibit them. If the worst came to the worst, he added, it ought to be possible to force them to do so. A strand of hair, a bit of forehead, a segment of an 'overwhelmingly beautiful' face glimpsed in a streetcar or on a train, may suffice to keep alive and strengthen the European's persistence in his irrational conviction that the Algerian woman is the queen of all women. But there is also in the European the crystallization of an aggressiveness, the strain of a kind of violence before the Algerian woman. Unveiling this woman is revealing her beauty; it is baring her secret, breaking her resistance, making her available for adventure. Hiding the face is also disguising a secret; it is also creating a world of mystery, of the hidden. In a confused way, the European experiences his relation with the Algerian woman at a highly complex level. There is in it the will to bring this woman within his reach, to make her a possible object of possession. This woman who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer. There is no reciprocity. She does not yield herself, does not give herself, does not offer herself. The Algerian has an attitude towards the Algerian woman which is on the whole clear. He does not see her. There is even a permanent intention not to perceive the feminine profile, not to pay attention to women. In the case of the Algerian, therefore, there is not, in the street or on a road, that behaviour characterizing a sexual encounter that is described in terms of the glance, of the physical bearing, the muscular tension, the signs of disturbance to which encounters have accustomed us. The European faced with an Algerian woman wants to see. He reacts in 1164

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an aggressive way before this limitation of his perception. Frustration and aggressiveness, here too, evolve apace. Aggressiveness comes to light, in the first place, in structurally ambivalent attitudes and in the dream material that can be revealed in the European, whether he is normal or suffers from neuro-pathological disturbances.8 In a medical consultation, for example, at the end of the morning, it is common to hear European doctors express their disappointments. The women who remove their veils before them are commonplace, vulgar; there is really nothing to make such a mystery of. One wonders what they are hiding. European women settle the conflict in a much less round-about way. They bluntly affirm that no one hides what is beautiful and discern in this strange custom an 'altogether feminine' intention of disguising imperfections. And they proceed to compare the strategy of the European woman, which is intended to correct, to embellish, to bring out (beauty treatments, hairdos, fashion), with that of the Algerian woman, who prefers to veil, to conceal, to cultivate the man's doubt and desire. On another level, it is claimed that the intention is to mislead the customer, and that the wrapping in which the 'merchandise' is presented does not really alter its nature, nor its value. The content of the dreams of Europeans brings out other special themes. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his Reflections sur la question juive, has shown that on the level of the unconscious, the Jewish woman almost always has an aura of rape about her. The history of the French conquest in Algeria, including the overrunning of villages by the troops, the confiscation of property and the raping of women, the pillaging of a country, has contributed to the birth and the crystallization of the same dynamic image. At the level of the psychological strata of the occupier, the evocation of this freedom given to the sadism of the conqueror, to his eroticism, creates faults, fertile gaps through which both dreamlike forms of behaviour and, on certain occasions, criminal acts can emerge. Thus the rape of the Algerian woman in the dream of a European is always preceded by a rending of the veil. We here witness a double deflowering. Likewise, the woman's conduct is never one of consent or acceptance, but of abject humility. Whenever, in dreams having an erotic content, a European meets an Algerian woman, the specific features of his relations with the colonized society manifest themselves. These dreams evolve neither on the same erotic plane, nor at the same tempo, as those that involve a European woman. With an Algerian woman, there is no progressive conquest, no mutual revelation. Straight off, with the maximum of violence, there is possession, rape, near-murder. The act assumes a para-neurotic brutality and sadism,

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even in a normal European. This brutality and this sadism are in fact emphasized by the frightened attitude of the Algerian woman. In the dream, the woman-victim screams, struggles like a doe, and as she weakens and faints, is penetrated, martyrized, ripped apart. Attention must likewise be drawn to a characteristic of this dream content that appears important to us. The European never dreams of an Algerian woman taken in isolation. On the rare occasions when the encounter has become a binding relationship that can be regarded as a couple, it has quickly been transformed by the desperate flight of the woman who, inevitably, leads the male 'among women'. The European always dreams of a group of women, of a field of women, suggestive of the gynaeceum, the harem - exotic themes deeply rooted in the unconscious. The European's aggressiveness will express itself likewise in contemplation of the Algerian woman's morality. Her timidity and her reserve are transformed in accordance with the commonplace laws of conflictual psychology into their opposite, and the Algerian woman becomes hypocritical, perverse, and even a veritable nymphomaniac. We have seen that on the level of individuals the colonial strategy of destructuring Algerian society very quickly came to assign a prominent place to the Algerian woman. The colonialist's relentlessness, his methods of struggle, were bound to give rise to reactionary forms of behaviour on the part of the colonized. In the face of the violence of the occupier, the colonized found himself defining a principled position with respect to a formerly inert element of the native cultural configuration. It was the colonialist's frenzy to unveil the Algerian woman, it was his gamble on winning the battle of the veil at whatever cost, that was to provoke the native's bristling resistance. The deliberately aggressive intentions of the colonist with respect to the haik gave a new life to this dead element of the Algerian cultural stock - dead because stabilized, without any progressive change in form or colour. We here recognize one of the laws of the psychology of colonization. In an initial phase, it is the action, the plans of the occupier that determine the centres of resistance around which a people's will to survive becomes organized. It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the Negro who creates negritude. To the colonialist offensive against the veil, the colonized opposes the cult of the veil. What was an undifferentiated element in a homogeneous whole acquires a taboo character, and the attitude of a given Algerian woman with respect to the veil will be constantly related to her overall attitude with respect to the foreign occupation. The colonized, in the face of the emphasis given by the colonialist to this or that aspect of his traditions, reacts very violently. The attention devoted to modifying this aspect, the emotion the conqueror puts into his pedagogical work, his prayers, his threats, weave a whole universe of resistances around this particular element of the culture. Holding out against the occupier on this

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precise element means inflicting upon him a spectacular setback; it means more particularly maintaining 'co-existence' as a form of conflict and latent warfare. It means keeping up the atmosphere of an armed truce. Upon the outbreak of the struggle for liberation, the attitude of the Algerian woman, or of native society in general, with regard to the veil was to undergo important modifications. These innovations are of particular interest in view of the fact that they were at no time included in the programme of the struggle. The doctrine of the Revolution, the strategy of combat, never postulated the necessity for a revision of forms of behaviour with respect to the veil. We are able to affirm even now that when Algeria has gained her independence such questions will not be raised, for in the practice of the Revolution the people have understood that problems are resolved in the very movement that raises them. Until 1955, the combat was waged exclusively by the men. The revolutionary characteristics of this combat, the necessity for absolute secrecy, obliged the militant to keep his woman in absolute ignorance. As the enemy gradually adapted himself to the forms of combat, new difficulties appeared which required original solutions. The decision to involve women as active elements of the Algerian Revolution was not reached lightly. In a sense, it was the very conception of the combat that had to be modified. The violence of the occupier, his ferocity, his delirious attachment to the national territory, induced the leaders no longer to exclude certain forms of combat. Progressively, the urgency of a total war made itself felt. But involving the women was not solely a response to the desire to mobilize the entire nation. The women's entry into the war had to be harmonized with respect for the revolutionary nature of the war. In other words, the women had to show as much spirit of sacrifice as the men. It was therefore necessary to have the same confidence in them as was required from seasoned militants who had served several prison sentences. A moral elevation and a strength of character that were altogether exceptional would therefore be required of the women. There was no lack of hesitations. The revolutionary wheels had assumed such proportions; the mechanism was running at a given rate. The machine would have to be complicated; in other words its network would have to be extended without affecting its efficiency. The women could not be conceived of as a replacement product, but as an element capable of adequately meeting the new tasks. In the mountains women helped the guerrilla during halts or when convalescing after a wound or a case of typhoid contracted in the djebel.9 But deciding to incorporate women as essential elements, to have the Revolution depend on their presence and their action in this or that sector, was obviously a wholly revolutionary step. To have the Revolution rest at any point on their activity was an important choice. Such a decision was made difficult for several reasons. During the

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whole period of unchallenged domination, we have seen that Algerian society, and particularly the women, had a tendency to flee from the occupier. The tenacity of the occupier in his endeavour to unveil the women, to make of them an ally in the work of cultural destruction, had the effect of strengthening the traditional patterns of behaviour. These patterns, which were essentially positive in the strategy of resistance to the corrosive action of the colonizer, naturally had negative effects. The woman, especially the city woman, suffered a loss of ease and of assurance. Having been accustomed to confinement, her body did not have the normal mobility before a limitless horizon of avenues, of unfolded sidewalks, of houses, of people dodged or bumped into. This relatively cloistered life, with its known, categorized, regulated comings and goings, made any immediate revolution seem a dubious proposition. The political leaders were perfectly familiar with these problems, and their hesitations expressed their consciousness of their responsibilities. They were entitled to doubt the success of this measure. Would not such a decision have catastrophic consequences for the progress of the Revolution? To this doubt there was added an equally important element. The leaders hesitated to involve the women, being perfectly aware of the ferocity of the colonizer. The leaders of the Revolution had no illusions as to the enemy's criminal capacities. Nearly all of them had passed through their jails or had had sessions with survivors from the camps or the cells of the French judicial police. No one of them failed to realize that any Algerian woman arrested would be tortured to death. It is relatively easy to commit oneself to this path and to accept among different eventualities that of dying under torture. The matter is a little more difficult when it involves designating someone who manifestly runs the risk of certain death. But the decision as to whether or not the women were to participate in the Revolution had to be made; the inner oppositions became massive, and each decision gave rise to the same hesitations, produced the same despair. In the face of the extraordinary success of this new form of popular combat, observers have compared the action of the Algerian women to that of certain women resistance fighters or even secret agents of the specialized services. It must be constantly borne in mind that the committed Algerian woman learns both her role as 'a woman alone in the street' and her revolutionary mission instinctively. The Algerian woman is not a secret agent. It is without apprenticeship, without briefing, without fuss, that she goes out into the street with three grenades in her handbag or the activity report of an area in her bodice. She does not have the sensation of playing a role she has read about ever so many times in novels, or seen in motion pictures. There is not that coefficient of play, of imitation, almost always present in this form of action when we are dealing with a Western woman.

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What we have here is not the bringing to light of a character known and frequented a thousand times in imagination or in stories. It is an authentic birth in a pure state, without preliminary instruction. There is no character to imitate. On the contrary, there is an intense dramatization, a continuity between the woman and the revolutionary. The Algerian woman rises directly to the level of tragedy.10 The growth in number of the F.L.N. cells, the range of new tasks finance, intelligence, counter-intelligence, political training - the necessity to provide for one active cell three or four replacement cells to be held in reserve, ready to become active at the slightest alert concerning the front cell, obliged the leaders to seek other avenues for the carrying out of strictly individual assignments. After a final series of meetings among leaders, and especially in view of the urgency of the daily problems that the Revolution faced, the decision concretely to involve women in the national struggle was reached. The revolutionary character of this decision must once again be emphasized. At the beginning, it was the married women who were contacted. But rather soon these restrictions were abandoned. The married women whose husbands were militants were the first to be chosen. Later, widows or divorced women were designated. In any case, there were never any unmarried girls - first of all, because a girl of even twenty or twentythree hardly ever has occasion to leave the family domicile unaccompanied. But the woman's duties as mother or spouse, the desire to limit to the minimum the possible consequences of her arrest and her death, and also the more and more numerous volunteering of unmarried girls, led the political leaders to make another leap, to remove all restrictions, to accept indiscriminately the support of all Algerian women. Meanwhile the woman who might be acting as a liaison agent, as a bearer of tracts, as she walked some hundred or two hundred metres ahead of the man under whose orders she was working, still wore a veil; but after a certain period the pattern of activity that the struggle involved shifted in the direction of the European city. The protective mantle of the kasbah, the almost organic curtain of safety that the Arab town weaves round the native, withdrew, and the Algerian woman, exposed, was sent forth into the conqueror's city. Very quickly she adopted an absolutely unbelievable offensive tactic. When colonized people undertake an action against the oppressor, and when this oppression is exercised in the form of exacerbated and continuous violence as in Algeria, they must overcome a considerable number of taboos. The European city is not the prolongation of the native city. The colonizers have not settled in the midst of the natives. They have surrounded the native city; they have laid siege to it. Every exit from the kasbah of Algiers opens on enemy territory. And so it is in Constantine, in Oran, in Blida, in Bone. The native cities are deliberately caught in the conqueror's vice. To get

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an idea of the rigour with which the immobilizing of the native city, of the autochthonous population, is organized, one must have in one's hands the plans according to which a colonial city has been laid out, and compare them with the comments of the general staff of the occupation forces. Apart from the charwomen employed in the conquerors' homes, those whom the colonizer indiscriminately calls the 'Fatmas', the Algerian women, especially the young Algerian women, rarely venture into the European city. Their movements are almost entirely limited to the Arab city. And even in the Arab city their movements are reduced to the minimum. The rare occasions on which the Algerian woman abandons the city are almost always in connexion with some event, either of an exceptional nature (the death of a relative residing in a near-by locality, or, more often, traditional family visits for religious feasts, or a pilgrimage). In such cases, the European city is crossed in a car, usually early in the morning. The Algerian woman, the young Algerian woman - except for a very few students (who, besides, never have the same ease as their European counterparts) - must overcome a multiplicity of inner resistances, of subjectively organized fears, of emotions. She must at the same time confront the essentially hostile world of the occupier and the mobilized, vigilant and efficient police forces. Each time she ventures into the European city, the Algerian woman must achieve a victory over herself, over her childish fears. She must consider the image of the occupier lodged somewhere in her mind and in her body, remodel it, initiate the essential work of eroding it, make it inessential, remove something of the shame that is attached to it, devalidate it. Initially subjective, the breaches made in colonialism are the result of a victory of the colonized over their old fear and over the atmosphere of despair distilled day after day by a colonialism that has incrusted itself with the prospect of enduring forever. The young Algerian woman, whenever she is called upon, establishes a link. Algiers is no longer the Arab city, but the autonomous area of Algiers, the nervous system of the enemy apparatus. Oran, Constantine develop their dimensions. In launching the struggle, the Algerian is loosening the vice that was tightening around the native cities. From one area of Algiers to another, from the Ruisseau to Hussein-Dey, from El-Biar to the rue Michelet, the Revolution creates new links. More and more, it is the Algerian woman, the Algerian girl, who will be assuming these tasks. Among the tasks entrusted to the Algerian woman is the bearing of messages, of complicated verbal orders learned by heart, sometimes despite complete absence of schooling. But she is also called upon to stand watch, for an hour and often more, before a house where district leaders are conferring. During those interminable minutes when she must avoid standing still, so as not to attract attention, and avoid venturing too far since she is

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responsible for the safety of the brothers within, incidents that are at once funny and pathetic are not infrequent. An unveiled Algerian girl who 'walks the street' is very often noticed by young men who behave like young men all over the world, but who use a special approach as the result of the idea people habitually have of one who has discarded the veil. She is treated to unpleasant, obscene, humiliating remarks. When such things happen, she must grit her teeth, walk away a few steps, elude the passersby who draw attention to her, who give other passers-by the desire either to follow their example, or to come to her defence. Or it may be that the Algerian woman is carrying in her bag or in a small suitcase twenty, thirty, forty million francs, money belonging to the Revolution, money which is to be used to take care of the needs of the families of prisoners, or to buy medicine and supplies for the guerrillas. This revolutionary activity has been carried on by the Algerian woman with exemplary constancy, self-mastery and success. Despite the inherent, subjective difficulties and notwithstanding the sometimes violent incomprehension of a part of the family, the Algerian woman assumes all the tasks entrusted to her. But things were gradually to become more complicated. Thus the unit leaders who go into the town and who avail themselves of the womenscouts, of the girls whose function it is to lead the way, are no longer new to political activity, are no longer unknown to the police. Authentic military chiefs have now begun to pass through the cities. These are known, and are being looked for. There is not a police superintendent who does not have their pictures on his desk. These soldiers on the move, these fighters, always carry their weapons automatic pistols, revolvers, grenades, sometimes all three. The political leader must overcome much resistance in order to induce these men, who under no circumstance would allow themselves to be taken prisoner, to entrust their weapons to the girl who is to walk ahead of them, since it is up to them, if things go badly, to recover the arms immediately. The group accordingly makes its way into the European city. A hundred metres ahead, a girl may be carrying a suitcase and behind her are two or three ordinary-looking men. This girl who is the group's lighthouse and barometer gives warning in case of danger. The file makes its way by fits and starts; police cars and patrols cruise back and forth. There are times, as these soldiers have admitted after completing such a mission, when the urge to recover their weapons is almost irresistible because of the fear of being caught short and not having time to defend themselves. With this phase, the Algerian woman penetrates a little further into the flesh of the Revolution. But it was from 1956 on that her activity assumed really gigantic dimensions. Having to react in rapid succession to the massacre of Algerian civilians in the mountains and in the cities, the revolutionary leadership found

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that if it wanted to prevent the people from being gripped by terror it had no choice but to adopt forms of terror which until then it had rejected. This phenomenon has not been sufficiently analysed; not enough attention has been given to the reasons that lead a revolutionary movement to choose the weapon that is called terrorism. During the French Resistance, terrorism was aimed at soldiers, at Germans of the Occupation, or at strategic enemy installations. The technique of terrorism is the same. It consists of individual or collective attempts by means of bombs or by the derailing of trains. In Algeria, where European settlers are numerous and where the territorial militias lost no time in enrolling the postman, the nurse and the grocer in the repressive system, the men who directed the struggle faced an absolutely new situation. The decision to kill a civilian in the street is not an easy one, and no one conies to it lightly. No one takes the step of placing a bomb in a public place without a battle of conscience. The Algerian leaders who, in view of the intensity of the repression and the frenzied character of the oppression, thought they could answer the blows received without any serious problems of conscience, discovered that the most horrible crimes do not constitute a sufficient excuse for certain decisions. The leaders in a number of cases cancelled plans or even in the last moment called off the fida'in assigned to place a given bomb. To explain these hesitations there was, to be sure, the memory of civilians killed or frightfully wounded. There was the political consideration not to do certain things that could compromise the cause of freedom. There was also the fear that the Europeans working with the Front might be hit in these attempts. There was thus a three-fold concern: not to pile up possibly innocent victims, not to give a false picture of the Revolution, and finally the anxiety to have the French democrats on their side, as well as the democrats of all the countries of the world and the Europeans of Algeria who were attracted by the Algerian national idea. Now the massacres of Algerians, the raids in the countryside, strengthened the assurance of the European civilians, seemed to consolidate the colonial status, and injected hope into the colonialists. The Europeans who, as a result of certain military actions on the part of the Algerian National Army in favour of the struggle of the Algerian people, had softpedalled their race prejudice and their insolence, recovered their old arrogance, their traditional contempt. I remember a woman clerk in Birtouta who, on the day of the interception of the plane transporting the five members of the National Liberation Front, waved their photographs in front of her shop, shrieking: 'They've been caught! They're going to get their what-you-call-'ems cut off!' Every blow dealt the Revolution, every massacre perpetrated by the

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adversary, intensified the ferocity of the colonialists and hemmed in the Algerian civilian on all sides. Trains loaded with French soldiers, the French Navy on manoeuvres and bombarding Algiers and Philippeville, the jet planes, the militiamen who descended on the duwars12 and decimated uncounted Algerians - all this contributed to giving the people the impression that they were not defended, that they were not protected, that nothing had changed, and that the Europeans could do what they wanted. This was the period when one heard Europeans announcing in the streets: 'Let's each one of us take ten of them and bump them off and you'll see the problem solved in no time.' And the Algerian people, especially in the cities, witnessed this boastfulness which added insult to injury and noted the impunity of these criminals who did not even take the trouble to hide. Any Algerian man or woman in a given city could in fact name the torturers and murderers of the region. A time came when some of the people allowed doubt to enter their minds, and they began to wonder whether it was really possible, quantitatively and qualitatively, to resist the occupant's offensives. Was freedom worth the consequences of penetrating into that enormous circuit of terrorism and counter-terrorism? Did this disproportion not express the impossibility of escaping oppression? Another part of the people, however, grew impatient and conceived the idea of putting an end to the advantage the enemy derived by pursuing the path of terror. The decision to strike the adversary individually and by name could no longer be eluded. All the prisoners 'shot and killed while trying to escape', and the cries of the tortured, demanded that new forms of combat be adopted. Members of the police and the meeting places of the colonialists (cafes in Algiers, Oran, Constantine) were the first to be singled out. From this point on the Algerian woman became wholly and deliberately immersed in the revolutionary action. It was she who would carry in her bag the grenades and the revolvers that a fida'i would take from her at the last moment, before the bar, or as a designated criminal passed. During this period Algerians caught in the European city were pitilessly challenged, arrested, searched. This is why we must watch the parallel progress of this man and this woman, of this couple that brings death to the enemy, life to the Revolution. The one supporting the other, but apparently strangers to each other. The one radically transformed into a European woman, poised and unconstrained, whom no one would suspect, completely at home in the environment, and the other, a stranger, tense, moving towards his destiny. The Algerian fida'i, unlike the unbalanced anarchists made famous in literature, does not take dope. The fida'i does not need to be unaware of danger, to befog his consciousness or to forget. The 'terrorist', from the

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moment he undertakes an assignment, allows death to enter into his soul. He has a rendezvous with death. The fidai, on the other hand, has a rendezvous with the life of the Revolution, and with his own life. The fidai is not one of the sacrificed. To be sure, he does not shrink before the possibility of losing his life or the independence of his country, but at no moment does he choose death. If it has been decided to kill a given police superintendent responsible for tortures or a given colonialist leader, it is because these men constitute an obstacle to the progress of the Revolution. Froger, for example, symbolized a colonialist tradition and a method inaugurated at Setif and at Guelma in 1954.13 Moreover, Froger's apparent power crystallized the colonization and gave new life to the hopes of those who were beginning to have doubts as to the real solidity of the system. It was around people like Froger that the robbers and murderers of the Algerian people would meet and encourage one another. This was something the fidai knew, and that the woman who accompanied him, his woman-arsenal, likewise knew. Carrying revolvers, grenades, hundreds of false identity cards or bombs, the unveiled Algerian woman moves like a fish in the Western waters. The soldiers, the French patrols, smile to her as she passes, compliments on her looks are heard here and there, but no one suspects that her suitcases contain the automatic pistol which will presently mow down four or five members of one of the patrols. We must come back to that young girl, unveiled only yesterday, who walks with sure steps down the streets of the European city teeming with policemen, parachutists, militiamen. She no longer slinks along the walls as she tended to do before the Revolution. Constantly called upon to efface herself before a member of the dominant society, the Algerian woman avoided the middle of the pavement which in all countries in the world belongs rightfully to those who command. The shoulders of the unveiled Algerian woman are thrust back with easy freedom. She walks with a graceful, measured stride, neither too fast nor too slow. Her legs are bare, not confined by the veil, given back to themselves, and her hips are free. The body of the young Algerian woman, in traditional society, is revealed to her by its coming to maturity and by the veil. The veil covers the body and disciplines it, tempers it, at the very time when it experiences its phase of greatest effervescence. The veil protects, reassures, isolates. One must have heard the confessions of Algerian women or have analysed the dream content of certain recently unveiled women to appreciate the importance of the veil for the body of the woman. Without the veil she has an impression of her body being cut up into bits, put adrift; the limbs seem to lengthen indefinitely. When the Algerian woman has to cross a street, for a long time she commits errors of judgement as to the exact distance to be negotiated. The unveiled body seems to escape, to dissolve. She has an

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impression of being improperly dressed, even of being naked. She experiences a sense of incompleteness with great intensity. She has the anxious feeling that something is unfinished, and along with this a frightful sensation of disintegrating. The absence of the veil distorts the Algerian woman's corporal pattern. She quickly has to invent new dimensions for her body, new means of muscular control. She has to create for herself an attitude of unveiled-woman-outside. She must overcome all timidity, all awkwardness (for she must pass for a European), and at the same time be careful not to overdo it, not to attract notice to herself. The Algerian woman who walks stark naked into the European city relearns her body, reestablishes it in a totally revolutionary fashion. This new dialectic of the body and of the world is primary in the case of one revolutionary woman.14 But the Algerian woman is not only in conflict with her body. She is a link, sometimes an essential one, in the revolutionary machine. She carries weapons, knows important points of refuge. And it is in terms of the concrete dangers that she faces that we must gauge the insurmountable victories that she has had to win in order to be able to say to her chief, on her return: 'Mission accomplished . . . R.A.S.'15 Another difficulty to which attention deserves to be called appeared during the first months of feminine activity. In the course of her comings and goings, it would happen that the unveiled Algerian woman was seen by a relative or a friend of the family. The father was sooner or later informed. He would naturally hesitate to believe such allegations. Then more reports would reach him. Different persons would claim to have seen 'Zohra or Fatima unveiled, walking like a. ... My Lord, protect us! . . .' The father would then decide to demand explanations. He would hardly have begun to speak when he would stop. From the young girl's look of firmness the father would have understood that her commitment was of long standing. The old fear of dishonour was swept away by a new fear, fresh and cold - that of death in battle or of torture of the girl. Behind the girl, the whole family - even the Algerian father, the authority for all things, the founder of every value - following in her footsteps, becomes committed to the new Algeria. Removed and reassumed again and again, the veil has been manipulated, transformed into a technique of camouflage, into a means of struggle. The virtually taboo character assumed by the veil in the colonial situation disappeared almost entirely in the course of the liberating struggle. Even Algerian women not actively integrated into the struggle formed the habit of abandoning the veil. It is true that under certain conditions, especially from 1957 on, the veil reappeared. The missions in fact became increasingly difficult. The adversary now knew, since certain militant women had spoken under torture, that a number of women very europeanized in appearance were playing a fundamental role in the battle. Moreover, certain European women of Algeria were arrested, to the

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consternation of the adversary who discovered that his own system was breaking down. The discovery by the French authorities of the participation of Europeans in the liberation struggle marks a turning point in the Algerian Revolution.16 From that day, the French patrols challenged every person. Europeans and Algerians were equally suspect. All historic limits crumbled and disappeared. Any person carrying a package could be required to open it and show its contents. Anyone was entitled to question anyone as to the nature of a parcel carried in Algiers, Philippeville or Batna. Under those conditions it became urgent to conceal the package from the eyes of the occupier and again to cover oneself with the protective ha'ik. Here again, a new technique had to be learned: how to carry a rather heavy object dangerous to handle under the veil and still give the impression of having one's hands free, that there was nothing under this ha'ik, except a poor woman or an insignificant young girl. It was not enough to be veiled. One had to look so much like a 'fatma' that the soldier would be convinced that this woman was quite harmless. Very difficult. Three metres ahead of you the police challenge a veiled woman who does not look particularly suspect. From the anguished expression of the unit leader you have guessed that she is carrying a bomb, or a sack of grenades, bound to her body by a whole system of strings and straps. For the hands must be free, exhibited bare, humbly and abjectly presented to the soldiers so that they will look no further. Showing empty and apparently mobile and free hands is the sign that disarms the enemy soldier. The Algerian woman's body, which in an initial phase was pared down, now swelled. Whereas in the previous period the body had to be made slim and disciplined to make it attractive and seductive, it now had to be squashed, made shapeless and even ridiculous. This, as we have seen, is the phase during which she undertook to carry bombs, grenades, machinegun clips. The enemy, however, was alerted, and in the streets one witnessed what became a commonplace spectacle of Algerian women glued to the wall, on whose bodies the famous magnetic detectors, the 'frying pans', would be passed. Every veiled woman, every Algerian woman became suspect. There was no discrimination. This was the period during which men, women, children, the whole Algerian people, experienced at one and the same time their national vocation and the recasting of the new Algerian society. Ignorant or feigning to be ignorant of these new forms of conduct, French colonialism, on the occasion of 13 May 1958 re-enacted its old campaign of westernizing the Algerian woman. Servants under the threat of being fired, poor women dragged from their homes, prostitutes, were brought to the public square and symbolically unveiled to the cries of 'Vive 1176

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I'Algerie franqaiseT Before this new offensive old reactions reappeared. Spontaneously and without being told, the Algerian women who had long since dropped the veil once again donned the ha'ik, thus affirming that it was not true that woman liberated herself at the invitation of France and of General de Gaulle. Behind these psychological reactions, beneath this immediate and almost unanimous response, we again see the overall attitude of rejection of the values of the occupier, even if these values objectively be worth choosing. It is because they fail to grasp this intellectual reality, this characteristic feature (the famous sensitivity of the colonized), that the colonizers rage at always 'doing them good in spite of themselves'. Colonialism wants everything to come from it. But the dominant psychological feature of the colonized is to withdraw before any invitation of the conqueror's. In organizing the famous cavalcade of 13 May, colonialism has obliged Algerian society to go back to methods of struggle already outmoded. In a certain sense, the different ceremonies have caused a turning back, a regression. Colonialism must accept the fact that things happen without its control, without its direction. We are reminded of the words spoken in an international assembly by an African political figure. Responding to the standard excuse of the immaturity of colonial peoples and their incapacity to administer themselves, this man demanded for the underdeveloped peoples 'the right to govern themselves badly'. The doctrinal assertions of colonialism in its attempt to justify the maintenance of its domination almost always push the colonized to the position of making uncompromising, rigid, static counter-proposals. After 13 May the veil was resumed, but stripped once and for all of its exclusively traditional dimension. There is thus a historic dynamism of the veil that is very concretely perceptible in the development of colonization in Algeria. In the beginning, the veil was a mechanism of resistance, but its value for the social group remained very strong. The veil was worn because tradition demanded a rigid separation of the sexes, but also because the occupier was bent on unveiling Algeria. In a second phase, the mutation occurred in connexion with the Revolution and under special circumstances. The veil was abandoned in the course of revolutionary action. What had been used to block the psychological or political offensives of the occupier became a means, an instrument. The veil helped the Algerian woman to meet the new problems created by the struggle. The colonialists are incapable of grasping the motivations of the colonized. It is the necessities of combat that give rise in Algerian society to new attitudes, to new modes of action, to new ways.

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Appendix17 ON the Algerian earth which is freeing itself day by day from the colonialist's grip, we witness a dislocation of the old myths. Among things that are 'incomprehensible' to the colonial world the case of the Algerian woman has been all too frequently mentioned. The studies of sociologists, Islam specialists and jurists are full of observations on the Algerian woman. Described by turns as the man's slave or as the unchallenged sovereign of the home, Algerian woman and her status absorb the attention of theoreticians. Others, of equal authority, affirm that the Algerian woman 'dreams of being free', but that a retrograde and ferocious patriarchy opposes this legitimate aspiration. The most recent debates in the French National Assembly indicate the interest attached to a coherent approach to this 'problem'. The majority of the speakers describe the fate of the Algerian woman and demand an improvement in her status. This, it is added, is the only means of disarming the rebellion. Colonialist intellectuals consistently use the 'sociological case study' approach to the colonial system. Such and such a country, they will say, called for, was crying for conquest. Thus, to take a famous example, the Madagascan was described as having a dependency complex. As for the Algerian woman, she is 'inaccessible, ambivalent, with a masochistic component'. Specific behaviours are described which illustrate these different characteristics. The truth is that the study of an occupied people, militarily subject to an implacable domination, requires documentation and checking difficult to combine. It is not the soil that is occupied. It is not the ports or the aerodromes. French colonialism has settled itself in the very centre of the Algerian individual and has undertaken a sustained work of clean-up, of expulsion of self, of rationally pursued mutilation. There is not occupation of territory on the one hand, and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction. Under these conditions, the individual's breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing. From this point on, the real values of the occupied quickly tend to acquire a clandestine form of existence. In the presence of the occupier, the occupied learns to dissemble, to resort to trickery. To the scandal of military occupation, he opposes a scandal of contact. Every contact between the occupied and the occupier is a falsehood. In forty-eight hours the Algerian woman has knocked down all the pseudo-truths that years of 'field studies' were believed to have amply confirmed. To be sure, the Algerian Revolution has brought about an objec1178

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tive modification of attitudes and outlook. But the Algerian people had never disarmed. 1 November 1954 was not the awakening of the people, but the signal it was waiting for in order to get into motion, in order to put into practice in full daylight a tactic acquired, and solidly reinforced, in the heyday of the Franco-Moslem period. The Algerian woman, like her brothers, had minutely built up defence mechanisms which enable her today to play a primary role in the struggle for liberation. To begin with, there is the much-discussed status of the Algerian woman - her alleged confinement, her lack of importance, her humility, her silent existence bordering on quasi-absence. And 'Moslem society' has made no place for her, amputating her personality, allowing her neither development nor maturity, maintaining her in a perpetual infantilism. Such affirmations, illuminated by 'scientific works', are today receiving the only valid challenge: the experience of revolution. The Algerian woman's ardent love of the home is not a limitation imposed by the universe. It is not hatred of the sun or the streets or spectacles. It is not a flight from the world. What is true is that under normal conditions, an interaction must exist between the family and society at large. The home is the basis of the truth of society, but society authenticates and legitimizes the family. The colonial structure is the very negation of this reciprocal justification. The Algerian woman, in imposing such a restriction on herself, in choosing a form of existence limited in scope, was deepening her consciousness of struggle and preparing for combat. This withdrawal, this rejection of an imposed structure, this falling back upon the fertile kernel that a restricted but coherent existence represents, constituted for a long time the fundamental strength of the occupied. All alone, the woman, by means of conscious techniques, presided over the setting up of the system. What was essential was that the occupier should constantly come up against a unified front. This accounts for the aspect of sclerosis that tradition must assume. In reality, the effervescence and the revolutionary spirit have been kept alive by the woman in the home. For revolutionary war is not a war of men. It is not a war waged with an active army and reserves. Revolutionary war, as the Algerian people is waging it, is a total war in which the woman does not merely knit for or mourn the soldier. The Algerian woman is at the heart of the combat. Arrested, tortured, raped, shot down, she testifies to the violence of the occupier and to his inhumanity. As a nurse, a liaison agent, a fighter, she bears witness to the depth and the density of the struggle. We shall speak also of the woman's fatalism, of her absence of reaction in the face of adversity, of her inability to measure the gravity of events.

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FEMINISMS AND GENDER ANALYSIS The constant smile, the persistence of an apparently unfounded hope, the refusal to go down on her knees is likened to an inability to grasp reality. The humour which is a rigorous appraisal of events is unperceived by the occupier. And the courage that the Algerian woman manifests in the struggle is not an unexpected creation or the result of a mutation. It is the insurrectional phase of that same humour. The woman's place in Algerian society is indicated with such vehemence that the occupier's confusion is readily understandable. This is because Algerian society reveals itself not to be the womanless society that had been so convincingly described. Side by side with us, our sisters do their part in further breaking down the enemy system and in liquidating the old mystifications once and for all.

Notes 1 We do not here consider rural areas where the woman is often unveiled. Nor do we take into account the Kabyle woman who, except in the large cities, never uses a veil. For the tourist who rarely ventures into the mountains, the Arab woman is first of all one who wears a veil. This originality of the Kabyle woman constitutes, among others, one of the themes of colonialist propaganda bringing out the opposition between Arabs and Berbers. Such studies, devoted to the analysis of psychological modifications, neglect considerations that are properly historical. We shall presently take up this other aspect of Algerian reality in action. Here we shall content ourselves with pointing out that the Kabyle women, in the course of 130 years of domination, have developed other defence mechanisms with respect to the occupier. During the war of liberation their forms of action have likewise assumed absolutely original aspects. 2 djellaba - a long, hooded cloak. (Translator's note.) 3 One phenomenon deserves to be recalled. In the course of the Moroccan people's struggle for liberation, and chiefly in the cities, the white veil was replaced by the black veil. This important modification is explained by the Moroccan women's desire to express their attachment to His Majesty Mohammed V. It will be remembered that it was immediately after the exiling of the King of Morocco that the black veil, a sign of mourning, made its appearance. It is worth nothing that black, in Moroccan or Arab society, has never expressed mourning or affliction. As a combat measure, the adoption of black is a response to the desire to exert a symbolic pressure on the occupier, and hence to make a logical choice of one's own symbols. 4 The hdik - the Arab name for the big square veil worn by Arab women, covering the face and the whole body. (Translator's note.) 5 See Appendix at the end of this chapter, p. 1178. 6 The ground is prepared in the school establishments as well. The teachers to whom the parents have entrusted their children soon acquire the habit of passing severe judgement on the fate of woman in Algerian society. 'We firmly hope that you at least will be strong enough to impose your point of view. . . .' Schools for 'young Moslem girls' are multiplying. At their pupils' approach to puberty, the teachers or the nuns exercise a truly exceptional activity. The mothers are first felt out, besieged, and given the mission of shaking up and convincing the father. Much is made of the young student's prodigious intclli-

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7 8

9 10

11 12 13 14

gence, her maturity; a picture is painted of the brilliant future that awaits those eager young creatures, and it is none too subtly hinted that it would be criminal if the child's schooling were interrupted. The shortcomings of colonized society are conceded, and it is proposed that the young student be sent to boarding school in order to spare the parents the criticism of 'narrow-minded neighbours'. For the specialist in colonial affairs, veterans and the 'developed' natives are the commandos who are entrusted with destroying the cultural resistance of a colonized country. The regions are accordingly classified in terms of the number of developed 'active units', in other words, agents of erosion of the national culture that they contain. fellah - a peasant. (Translator's note.) Attention must be called to a frequent attitude, on the part of European women in particular, with regard to a special category of evolved natives. Certain unveiled Algerian women turn themselves into perfect Westerners with amazing rapidity and unsuspected ease. European women feel a certain uneasiness in the presence of these women. Frustrated in the presence of the veil, they experience a similar impression before the bared face, before that unabashed body which has lost all awkwardness, all timidity, and become downright offensive. Not only is the satisfaction of supervising the evolution and correcting the mistakes of the unveiled woman withdrawn from the European woman, but she feels herself challenged on the level of feminine charm, of elegance, and even sees a competitor in this novice metamorphosed into a professional, a neophyte transformed into a propagandist. The European woman has no choice but to make common cause with the Algerian man who had fiercely flung the unveiled woman into the camp of evil and of depravation. 'Really!' the European women will exclaim, 'these unveiled women are quite amoral and shameless.' Integration, in order to be successful, seems indeed to have to be simply a continued, accepted paternalism. djebel - mountain. (Translator's note.) We are mentioning here only realities known to the enemy. We therefore say nothing about the new forms of action adopted by women in the Revolution. Since 1958, in fact, the tortures inflicted on women militants have enabled the occupier to have an idea of the strategy used by women. Today new adaptations have developed. It will therefore be understood if we are silent as to these. fida'i- a death volunteer, in the Islamic tradition. (Translator's note.) duwar - a village. (Translator's note.) Froger, one of the colonialist leaders. Executed by a fida'i in late 1956. The woman, who before the Revolution never left the house without being accompanied by her mother or her husband, is now entrusted with special missions such as going from Oran to Constantine or Algiers. For several days, all by herself, carrying directives of capital importance for the Revolution, she takes the train, spends the night with an unknown family, among militants. Here too she must harmonize her movements, for the enemy is on the lookout for any false step. But the important thing here is that the husband makes no difficulty about letting his wife leave on an assignment. He will make it, in fact, a point of pride to say to the liaison agent when the latter returns, 'You see, everything has gone well in your absence.' The Algerian's age-old jealousy, his 'congenital' suspiciousness, have melted on contact with the Revolution. It must be pointed out also that militants who are being sought by the police take refuge with other militants not yet identified by the occupier. In such cases the woman, left alone all day with the fugitive, is the one who gets him his food, the

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FEMINISMS AND GENDER ANALYSIS newspapers, the mail, showing no trace of suspicion or fear. Involved in the struggle, the husband or the father learns to look upon the relations between the sexes in a new light. The militant man discovers the militant woman, and jointly they create new dimensions for Algerian society. 15 R.A.S. - Rien a signaler - a military abbreviation for 'Nothing to report'. We here go on to a description of attitudes. There is, however, an important piece of work to be done on the woman's role in the Revolution: the woman in the city, in the djebel, in the enemy administrations; the prostitute and the information she obtains; the woman in prison, under torture, facing death, before the courts. All these chapter headings, after the material has been sifted, will reveal an incalculable number of facts essential for the history of the national struggle. 16 See Chapter 5. 17 This text, which appeared in Resistance Algerienne in its issue of 16 May 1957, indicates the consciousness that the leaders of the National Liberation Front have always had of the important part played by the Algerian woman in the Revolution.

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8.2

UNDER WESTERN EYES Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses Chandra Talpade Mohanty From Boundary 2,12:3/13:1 (Spring/Fall 1984): 333-58

It ought to be of some political significance at least that the term "colonization" has come to denote a variety of phenomena in recent feminist and left writings in general. From its analytic value as a category of exploitative economic exchange in both traditional and contemporary marxisms (particularly contemporary theorists such as Baran, Amin and Gunder-Frank)1 to its use by feminist women of color in the U.S. to describe the appropriation of their experiences and struggles by hegemonic white women's movements,2 colonization has been used to characterize everything from the most evident economic and political hierarchies to the production of a particular cultural discourse about what is called the "Third World."3 However sophisticated or problematical its use as an explanatory construct, colonization almost invariably implies a relation of structural domination, and a supression—often violent—of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question. What I wish to analyze is specifically the production of the "Third World Woman" as a singular monolithic subject in some recent (Western) feminist texts. The definition of colonization I wish to invoke here is a predominantly discursive one, focusing on a certain mode of appropriation and codification of "scholarship" and "knowledge" about women in the third world by particular analytic categories employed in specific writings on the subject which take as their referent feminist interests as they have been articulated in the U.S. and Western Europe. My concern about such writings derives from my own implication and investment in contemporary debates in feminist theory, and the urgent political necessity (especially in the age of Reagan) of forming strategic

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coalitions across class, race, and national boundaries. Clearly Western feminist discourse and political practice is neither singular nor homogeneous in its goals, interests or analyses. However, it is possible to trace a coherence of effects resulting from the implicit assumption of "the West" (in all its complexities and contradictions) as the primary referent in theory and praxis. My reference to "Western feminism" is by no means intended to imply that it is a monolith. Rather, I am attempting to draw attention to the similar effects of various textual strategies used by particular writers that codify Others as non-Western and hence themselves as (implicitly) Western. It is in this sense that I use the term "Western feminist." The analytic principles discussed below serve to distort Western feminist political practices, and limit the possibility of coalitions among (usually White) Western feminists and working class and feminists of color around the world. These limitations are evident in the construction of the (implicitly consensual) priority of issues around which apparently all women are expected to organize. The necessary and integral connection between feminist scholarship and feminist political practice and organizing determines the significance and status of Western feminist writings on women in the third world, for feminist scholarship, like most other kinds of scholarship, is not the mere production of knowledge about a certain subject. It is a directly political and discursive practice in that it is purposeful and ideological. It is best seen as a mode of intervention into particular hegemonic discourses (for example, traditional anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, etc.); it is a political praxis which counters and resists the totalizing imperative of age-old "legitimate" and "scientific" bodies of knowledge. Thus, feminist scholarly practices (whether reading, writing, critical or textual) are inscribed in relations of power—relations which they counter, resist, or even perhaps implicitly support. There can, of course, be no apolitical scholarship. The relationship between "Woman"—a cultural and ideological composite Other constructed through diverse representational discourses (scientific, literary, juridical, linguistic, cinematic, etc.)—and "women"— real, material subjects of their collective histories—is one of the central questions the practice of feminist scholarship seeks to address. This connection between women as historical subjects and the re-presentation of Woman produced by hegemonic discourses is not a relation of direct identity, or a relation of correspondence or simple implication.4 It is an arbitrary relation set up by particular cultures. I would like to suggest that the feminist writings I analyze here discursively colonize the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the third world, thereby producing/re-presenting a composite, singular "Third World Woman"— an image which appears arbitrarily constructed, but nevertheless carries with it the authorizing signature of Western humanist discourse.5 I argue that assumptions of privilege and ethnocentric universality on the one

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hand, and inadequate self-consciousness about the effect of Western scholarship on the "third world" in the context of a world system dominated by the West on the other, characterize a sizable extent of Western feminist work on women in the third world. An analysis of "sexual difference" in the form of a cross-culturally singular, monolithic notion of patriarchy or male dominance leads to the construction of a similarly reductive and homogeneous notion of what I call the "Third World Difference"—that stable, ahistorical something that apparently oppresses most if not all the women in these countries. And it is in the production of this "Third World Difference" that Western feminisms appropriate and "colonize" the fundamental complexities and conflicts which characterize the lives of women of different classes, religions, cultures, races and castes in these countries. It is in this process of homogenization and systemitization of the oppression of women in the third world that power is exercised in much of recent Western feminist discourse, and this power needs to be defined and named. In the context of the West's hegemonic position today, of what Anouar Abdel-Malek calls a struggle for "control over the orientation, regulation and decision of the process of world development on the basis of the advanced sector's monopoly of scientific knowledge and ideal creativity,"6 Western feminist scholarship on the third world must be seen and examined precisely in terms of its inscription in these particular relations of power and struggle. There is, I shall argue, no universal patriarchal framework which this scholarship attempts to counter and resist—unless one posits an international male conspiracy or a monolithic, ahistorical power hierarchy. There is, however, a particular world balance of power within which any analysis of culture, ideology, and socio-economic conditions has to be necessarily situated. Abdel-Malek is useful here, again, in reminding us about the inherence of politics in the discourses of "culture": Contemporary imperialism is, in a real sense, a hegemonic imperialism, exercising to a maximum degree a rationalized violence taken to a higher level than ever before—through fire and sword, but also through the attempt to control hearts and minds. For its content is defined by the combined action of the militaryindustrial complex and the hegemonic cultural centers of the West, all of them founded on the advanced levels of development attained by monopoly and finance capital, and supported by the benefits of both the scientific and technological revolution and the second industrial revolution itself.7 Western feminist scholarship cannot avoid the challenge of situating itself and examining its role in such a global economic and political framework. To do any less would be to ignore the complex interconnections between

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first and third world economies and the profound effect of this on the lives of women in these countries. I do not question the descriptive and informative value of most Western feminist writings on women in the third world. I also do not question the existence of excellent work which does not fall into the analytic traps I am concerned with. In fact I deal with an example of such work later on. In the context of an overwhelming silence about the experiences of women in these countries, as well as the need to forge international links between women's political struggles, such work is both pathbreaking and absolutely essential. However, it is both to the explanatory potential of particular analytic strategies employed by such writing, and to their political effect in the context of the hegemony of Western scholarship, that I want to draw attention here. While feminist writing in the U.S. is still marginalized (except from the point of view of women of color addressing privileged White women), Western feminist writing on women in the third world must be considered in the context of the global hegemony of Western scholarship—i.e., the production, publication, distribution and consumption of information and ideas. Marginal or not, this writing has political effects and implications beyond the immediate feminist or disciplinary audience. One such significant effect of the dominant "representations" of Western feminism is its conflation with imperialism in the eyes of particular third world women.8 Hence the urgent need to examine the political implications of analytic strategies and principles. My critique is directed at three basic analytic principles which are present in (Western) feminist discourse on women in the third world. Since I focus primarily on the Zed Press "Women in the Third World" series, my comments on Western feminist discourse are circumscribed by my analysis of the texts in this series.9 This is a way of limiting and focusing my critique. However, even though I am dealing with feminists who identify themselves as culturally or geographically from the "West," what I say about these analytic strategies or implicit principles holds for anyone who uses these methods, whether third world women in the West, or third world women in the third world writing on these issues and publishing in the West. (I am not making a culturalist argument about ethnocentrism; rather, I am trying to uncover how ethnocentric universalism is produced in certain analyses, and in the context of a hegemonic First/Third World connection, it is not very surprising to discover where the ethnocentrism derives from.) As a matter of fact, my argument holds for any discourse that sets up its own authorial subjects as the implicit referent, i.e., the yardstick by which to encode and represent cultural Others. It is in this move that power is exercized in discourse. The first principle I focus on concerns the strategic location or situation of the category "women" vis-a-vis the context of analysis. The assumption of women as an already constituted, coherent group with identical inter-

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ests and desires, regardless of class, ethnic or racial location or contradictions, implies a notion of gender or sexual difference or even patriarchy (as male dominance—men as a correspondingly coherent group) which can be applied universally and cross-culturally. The context of analysis can be anything from kinship structures and the organization of labor to media representations. The second principle consists in the uncritical use of particular methodologies in providing "proof" of universality and crosscultural validity. The third is a more specifically political principle underlying the methodologies and the analytic strategies, i.e., the model of power and struggle they imply and suggest. I argue that as a result of the two modes—or, rather, frames—of analysis described above, a homogeneous notion of the oppression of women as a group is assumed, which, in turn, produces the image of an "average third world woman." This average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being "third world" (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, familyoriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions. The distinction between Western feminist representation of women in the third world, and Western feminist self-presentation is a distinction of the same order as that made by some marxists between the "maintenance" function of the housewife and the real "productive" role of wage labor, or the characterization by developmentalists of the third world as being engaged in the lesser production of "raw materials" in contrast to the "real" productive activity of the First World. These distinctions are made on the basis of the privileging of a particular group as the norm or referent. Men involved in wage labor, first world producers, and, I suggest, Western feminists who sometimes cast Third World women in terms of "ourselves undressed" (Michelle Rosaldo's term),10 all construct themselves as the referent in such a binary analytic.

"Women" as category of analysis, or: we are all sisters in struggle By women as a category of analysis, I am referring to the critical assumption that all of us of the same gender, across classes and cultures, are somehow socially constituted as a homogeneous group identified prior to the process of analysis. This is an assumption which characterizes much feminist discourse. The homogeneity of women as a group is produced not on the basis of biological essentials, but rather on the basis of secondary sociological and anthropological universals. Thus, for instance, in any given piece of feminist analysis, women are characterized as a singular group on the basis of a shared oppression. What binds women together is a

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sociological notion of the "sameness" of their oppression. It is at this point that an elision takes place between "women" as a discursively constructed group and "women" as material subjects of their own history. Thus, the discursively consensual homogeneity of "women" as a group is mistaken for the historically specific material reality of groups of women. This results in an assumption of women as an always-already constituted group, one which has been labelled "powerless," "exploited," "sexually harrassed," etc., by feminist scientific, economic, legal and sociological discourses. (Notice that this is quite similar to sexist discourse labeling women weak, emotional, having math anxiety, etc.) The focus is not on uncovering the material and ideological specificities that constitute a particular group of women as "powerless" in a particular context. It is rather on finding a variety of cases of "powerless" groups of women to prove the general point that women as a group are powerless. In this section I focus on five specific ways in which "women" as a category of analysis is used in Western feminist discourse on women in the third world.11 Each of these examples illustrates the construction of "Third World Women" as a homogeneous "powerless" group often located as implicit victims of particular socio-economic systems. I have chosen to deal with a variety of writers—from Fran Hosken who writes primarily about female genital mutilation, to writers from the Women in International Development school who write about the effect of development policies on third world women for both western and third world audiences. The similarity of assumptions about "third world women" in all these texts forms the basis of my discussion. This is not to equate all the texts that I analyze, nor is it to equalize their strengths and weaknesses. The authors I deal with write with varying degrees of care and complexity. However, the effect of the representation of third world women in these texts is a coherent one, due to the use of "women" as a homogeneous category of analysis, and it is this effect I focus on. In these texts women are defined as victims of male violence (Fran Hosken); victims of the colonial process (M. Cutrufelli); victims of the Arab familial system (Juliette Minces); victims of the economic development process (B. Linsday and the [liberal] WID School); and finally, victims of the Islamic code (P. Jeffery). This mode of defining women primarily in terms of their object status (the way in which they are affected or not affected by certain institutions and systems) is what characterizes this particular form of the use of "women" as a category of analysis. In the context of Western women writing/studying women in the third world, such objedification (however benevolently motivated) needs to be both named and challenged. As Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar argue quite eloquently in a recent essay, "Feminist theories which examine our cultural practices as 'feudal residues' or label us 'traditional,' also portray us as politically immature women who need to

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be versed and schooled in the ethos of Western Feminism. They need to be continually challenged... ."12 Women as victims of male violence Fran Hosken,13 in writing about the relationship between human rights and female genital mutilation in Africa and the Middle East, bases her whole discussion/condemnation of genital mutilation on one privileged premise: the goal of genital mutilation is "to mutilate the sexual pleasure and satisfaction of woman" ("FGM," p. 11). This, in turn, leads her to claim that women's sexuality is controlled, as is their reproductive potential. According to Hosken, "male sexual politics" in Africa and around the world "share the same political goal: to assure female dependence and subservience by any and all means" ("FGM," p. 14). Physical violence against women (rape, sexual assault, excision, infibulation, etc.) is thus carried out "with an astonishing consensus among men in the world" ("FGM," p. 14). Here, women are defined consistently as the victims of male control—the "sexually oppressed." Although it is true that the potential of male violence against women circumscribes and elucidates their social position to a certain extent, denning women as archetypal victims freezes them into "objects-who-defend-themselves," men into "subjects-who-perpetrate-violence," and (every) society into powerless (read: women) and powerful (read: men) groups of people. Male violence must be theorized and interpreted within specific societies, both in order to understand it better, as well as in order to effectively organize to change it.14 Sisterhood cannot be assumed on the basis of gender; it must be forged in concrete, historical and political practice and analysis. Women as universal dependents Beverly Lindsay's conclusion to the book Comparative Perspectives of Third World Women: The Impact of Race, Sex and Class states: ". . . dependency relationships, based upon race, sex and class, are being perpetrated through social, educational, and economic institutions. These are the linkages among Third World Women."15 Here, as in other places, Lindsay implies that third world women constitute an identifiable group purely on the basis of shared dependencies. If shared dependencies were all that was needed to bind us together as a group, third world women would always be seen as an apolitical group with no subject status! Instead, if anything, it is the common context of political struggle against class, race, gender and imperialist hierarchies that may constitute third world women as a strategic group at this historical juncture. Lindsay also states that linguistic and cultural differences exist between Vietnamese and Black American women, but "both groups are victims of race, sex and

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class." Again Black and Vietnamese women are characterized by their victim status. Similarly, examine statements like: "My analysis will start by stating that all African women are politically and economically dependent."16 Or: "Nevertheless, either overtly or covertly, prostitution is still the main if not the only source of work for African women."17 All African women are dependent. Prostitution is the only work option for African women as a group. Both statements are illustrative of generalizations sprinkled liberally through a recent Zed Press publication, Women of Africa: Roots of Oppression, by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, who is described on the cover as an Italian Writer, Sociologist, Marxist and Feminist. I wonder if, in 1984, anyone would write a book entitled "Women of Europe: Roots of Oppression"? What is it about cultural Others that make it so easy to analytically formulate them into homogeneous groupings with little regard for historical specificities? Again, I am not objecting to the use of universal groupings for descriptive purposes. Women from the continent of Africa can be descriptively characterized as "Women of Africa." It is when "women of Africa" becomes a homogeneous sociological grouping characterized by common dependencies or powerlessness (or even strengths) that problems arise. Descriptive gender differences are transformed into the division between men and women. Women are constituted as a group via dependency relationships vis-a-vis men, who are implicitly held responsible for these relationships. When "women of Africa" as a group (versus "men of Africa" as a group?) are seen as a group precisely because they are generally dependent and oppressed, the analysis of specific historical differences becomes impossible, because reality is always apparently structured by divisions—two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive groups, the victims and the oppressors. Here the sociological is substituted for the biological in order, however, to create the same—a unity of women. Thus, it is not the descriptive potential of gender difference, but the privileged positioning and explanatory potential of gender difference as the origin of oppression that I question. In using "women of Africa" (as an already constituted group of oppressed peoples) as a category of analysis, Cutrufelli denies any historical specificity to the location of women as subordinate, powerful, marginal, central, or otherwise, vis-a-vis particular social and power networks. Women are taken as a unified "Powerless" group prior to the analysis in question. Thus, it is then merely a matter of specifying the context after the fact. "Women" are now placed in the context of the family, or in the workplace, or within religious networks, almost as if these systems existed outside the relations of women with other women, and women with men. The problem with this analytic strategy is that it assumes men and women are already constituted as sexualpolitical subjects prior to their entry into the arena of social relations. Only if we subscribe to this assumption is it possible to undertake analysis

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which looks at the "effects" of kinship structures, colonialism, organization of labor, etc., on women, who are already denned as a group apparently because of shared dependencies, but ultimately because of their gender. But women are produced through these very relations as well as being implicated in forming these relations. As Michelle Rosaldo states: "... woman's place in human social life is not in any direct sense a product of the things she does (or even less, a function of what, biologically, she is) but the meaning her activities acquire through concrete social interactions."18 That women mother in a variety of societies is not as significant as the value attached to mothering in these societies. The distinction between the act of mothering and the status attached to it is a very important one— one that needs to be made and analyzed contextually. Married women as victims of the colonial process In Levis-Strauss's theory of kinship structures as a system of the exchange of women, what is significant is that exchange itself is not constitutive of the subordination of women; women are not subordinate because of the fact of exchange, but because of the modes of exchange instituted, and the values attached to these modes. However, in discussing the marriage ritual of the Bemba, a Zambian matrilocal, matrilineal people, Cutrufelli in Women of Africa focuses on the fact of the marital exchange of women before and after Western colonization, rather than the value attached to the exchange in this particular context. This leads to her definition of Bemba women as a coherent group affected in a particular way by colonization. Here again, Bemba women are constituted as victims of the effects of Western colonization. Cutrufelli cites the marriage ritual of the Bemba as a multistage event "whereby a young man becomes incorporated into his wife's family group as he takes up residence with them and gives his services in return for food and maintenance."19 This ritual extends over many years, and the sexual relationship varies according to the degree of the girl's physical maturity. It is only after the girl undergoes an initiation ceremony at puberty that intercourse is sanctioned, and the man acquires legal rights over the woman. This initiation ceremony is the most important act of the consecration of women's reproductive power, so that the abduction of an uninitiated girl is of no consequence, while heavy penalty is levied for the seduction of an initiated girl. Cutrufelli asserts that the effect of European colonization has changed this whole marriage system. Now the young man is entitled to take his wife away from her people in return for money. The implication is that Bemba women have now lost the protection of tribal laws. However, while it is possible to see how the structure of the traditional marriage contract (versus the postcolonial marriage contract) offered women a certain amount of control over their marital relations, only an analysis of the political significance of the

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actual practice which privileges an initiated girl over an uninitiated one, indicating a shift in female power relations as a result of this ceremony, can provide an accurate account of whether Bemba women were indeed protected by tribal laws at all times. However, it is not possible to talk about Bemba women as a homogeneous group within the traditional marriage structure. Bemba women before the initiation are constituted within a different set of social relations compared to Bemba women after the initiation. To treat them as a unified group characterized by the fact of their "exchange" between male kin, is to deny the socio-historical and cultural specificities of their existence, and the differential value attached to their exchange before and after their initiation. It is to treat the initiation ceremony as a ritual with no political implications or effects. It is also to assume that in merely describing the structure of the marriage contract, the situation of women is exposed. Women as a group are positioned within a given structure, but there is no attempt made to trace the effect of the marriage practice in constituting women within an obviously changing network of power relations. Thus, women are assumed to be sexualpolitical subjects prior to entry into kinship structures. Women and familial systems Elizabeth Cowie, in another context,20 points out the implications of this sort of analysis when she emphasizes the specifically political nature of kinship structures which must be analyzed as ideological practices which designate men and women as father, husband, wife, mother, sister, etc. Thus, Cowie suggests, women as women are not located within the family. Rather, it is in the family, as an effect of kinship structures, that women as women are constructed, defined within and by the group. Thus, for instance, when Juliette Minces (Zed Press, 1980)21 cites the patriarchal family as the basis for "an almost identical vision of women" that Arab and Muslim societies have, she falls into this very trap. Not only is it problematical to speak of a vision of women shared by Arab and Muslim societies without addressing the particular historical, material and ideological power structures that construct such images, but to speak of the patriarchal family or the tribal kinship structure as the origin of the socio-economic status of women is to again assume that women are sexual-political subjects prior to their entry into the family. So while on the one hand women attain value or status within the family, the assumption of a singular patriarchal kinship system (common to all Arab and Muslim societies) is what apparently structures women as an oppressed group in these societies! This singular, coherent kinship system presumably influences another separate and given entity, "women." Thus, all women, regardless of class and cultural differences, are affected by this system. Not only are all Arab and Muslim women seen to constitute a homogeneous oppressed group, 1192

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but there is no discussion of the specific practices within the family which constitute women as mothers, wives, sisters, etc. Arabs and Muslims it appears, don't change at all. Their patriarchal family is carried over from the times of the prophet Mohammed. They exist, as it were, "outside history." Women and religious ideologies A further example of the use of "women" as a category of analysis is found in cross-cultural analyses which subscribe to a certain economic reductionism in describing the relationship between the economy and factors such as politics and ideology. Here, in reducing the level of comparison to the economic relations between "developed and developing" countries, any specificity to the question of women is denied. Mina Moderes, in a careful analysis of women and Shi'ism in Iran, focuses on this very problem when she criticizes feminist writings which treat Islam as an ideology separate from and outside social relations and practices, rather than a discourse which includes rules for economic, social and power relations within society.22 Patricia Jeffery's otherwise excellent work on Pirzada women in purdah (Zed Press, 1979),23 considers Islamic ideology as a partial explanation for the status of women in that it provides a justification for the purdah. Here, Islamic ideology is reduced to a set of ideas whose internalization by Pirzada women contributes to the stability of the system. However, the primary explanation for purdah is located in the control that Pirzada men have over economic resources, and the personal security purdah gives to Pirzada women. By taking a specific version of Islam as the Islam, Jeffery attributes a singularity and coherence to it. Modares notes, " 'Islamic Theology' then becomes imposed on a separate and given entity called 'women.' A further unification is reached: Women (meaning all women), regardless of their differing positions within societies, come to be affected or not affected by Islam. These conceptions provide the right ingredients for an unproblematic possibility of a crosscultural study of women."24 A number of cross-cultural studies of women's position which subscribe to this kind of economic reductionism do so by collapsing all ideological specificities into economic relations, and universalizing on the basis of this comparison. Women and the development process The best examples of universalization on the basis of economic reductionism can be found in the liberal "Women in Development" literature. Proponents of this school seek to examine the effect of development on third world women, sometimes from feminist perspectives. At the very least, there is an evident interest in and commitment to improving the lives of 1193

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women in "developing" countries. Scholars like Irene Tinker, Ester Boserup, and Perdita Huston25 have all written about the effect of development policies on women in the third world. All three women assume "development" is synonymous with "economic development" or "economic progress." As in the case of Minces's patriarchal family, Hosken's male sexual control, and Cutrufelli's Western colonization, Development here becomes the all time equalizer. Women are affected positively or negatively by economic development policies. Cross-cultural comparison between women in different "developing" countries is made both possible and unproblematical by this assumption of women as a group affected (or not affected) by economic policies. For instance, Perdita Huston states that the purpose of her study is to describe the effect of the development process on the "family unit and its individual members" in Egypt, Kenya, Sudan, Tunisia, Sri Lanka and Mexico. She states that the "problems" and "needs" expressed by rural and urban women in these countries all center around education and training, work and wages, access to health and other services, political participation and legal rights. Huston relates all these "needs" to the lack of sensitive development policies which exclude women as a group or category. For her, the solution is simple: improved development policies which emphasize training for women field workers, use women trainees, women rural development officers, encourage women's cooperatives, etc. Here, again, women are assumed to be a coherent group or category prior to their entry into "the development process." Huston assumes that all third world women have similar problems and needs. Thus, they must have similar interests and goals. However, the interests of urban, middleclass, educated Egyptian housewives, to take only one instance, could surely not be seen as being the same as those of their uneducated, poor maids. Development policies do not affect both groups of women in the same way. Practices which characterize women's status and roles vary according to class. Women are constituted as women through the complex interaction between class, culture, religion and other ideological institutions and frameworks. They are not "women"—a coherent group—solely on the basis of a particular economic system or policy. Such reductive cross-cultural comparisons result in the colonization of the conflicts and contradictions which characterize women of different social classes and cultures. Thus, according to Perdita Huston, women in the third world countries she writes about have "needs" and "problems," but few if any have "choices" or the freedom to act. This is an interesting representation of women in the third world, one which is significant in suggesting a latent self-presentation of Western women which bears looking at. She writes, "What surprised and moved me most as I listened to women in such very different cultural settings was the striking commonality—whether they were educated or illiterate, urban or rural—of their most basic values: the

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importance they assign to family, dignity, and service to others."26 I wonder if Huston would consider such values unusual for women in the West? * ** What is problematical, then, about this kind of use of "women" as a group, as a stable category of analysis, is that it assumes an ahistorical, universal unity between women based on a generalized notion of their subordination. Instead of analytically demonstrating the production of women as socio-economic political groups within particular local contexts, this move limits the definition of the female subject to gender identity, completely bypassing social class and ethnic identities. What characterizes women as a group is their gender (sociologically not necessarily biologically defined) over and above everything else, indicating a monolithic notion of sexual difference. Because women are thus constituted as a coherent group, sexual difference becomes coterminus with female subordination, and power is automatically defined in binary terms: people who have it (read: men), and people who do not (read: women). Men exploit, women are exploited. As suggested above, such simplistic formulations are both reductive and ineffectual in designing strategies to combat oppressions. All they do is reinforce binary divisions between men and women. What would an analysis which did not do this look like? Maria Mies's work is one such example. It is an example which illustrates the strength of Western feminist work on women in the third world and which does not fall into the traps discussed above. Maria Mies's study of the lace-makers of Narsapur, India (Zed Press, 1982)27 attempts to carefully analyze a substantial household industry in which "housewives" produce lace doylies for consumption in the world market. Through a detailed analysis of the structure of the lace industry, production and reproduction relations, the sexual division of labor, profits and exploitation, and the overall consequences of defining women as "non-working housewives" and their work as "leisure-time activity," Mies demonstrates the levels of exploitation in this industry and the impact of this production system on the work and living conditions of the women involved in it. In addition, she is able to analyze the "ideology of the housewife," the notion of a woman sitting in the house, as providing the necessary subjective and socio-cultural element for the creation and maintenance of a production system that contributes to the increasing pauperization of women, and keeps them totally atomized and disorganized as workers. Mies's analyses show the effect of a certain historically and culturally specific mode of patriarchal organization, an organization constructed on the basis of the definition of the lace-makers as "non-working housewives" at familial, local, regional, state-wide and international levels. The intricacies and the effects of particular power networks are not only emphasized, but they form the basis of Mies's analysis of how this particular group of women is situated

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at the center of a hegemonic, exploitative world market. This is a good example of what careful, politically focused, local analyses can accomplish. It illustrates how the category of women is constructed in a variety of political contexts that often exist simultaneously and overlaid on the top of one another. There is no easy generalization in the direction of "women" in India, or "women in the third world"; nor is there a reduction of the political construction of the exploitation of the lacemakers to cultural explanations about the passivity or obedience that might characterize these women and their situation. Finally, this mode of local, political analysis which generates theoretical categories from within the situation and context being analyzed, also suggests corresponding effective strategies for organizing against the exploitations faced by the lace makers. These Narsapur women are not mere victims of the production process, because they resist, challenge and subvert the process at various junctures. Here is one instance of how Mies delineates the connections between the housewife ideology, the self-consciousness of the lace makers and their inter-relationships as contributing to the latent resistances she perceives among the women: The persistence of the housewife ideology, the self-perception of the lace makers as petty commodity producers rather than as workers, is not only upheld by the structure of the industry as such but also by the deliberate propagation and reinforcement of reactionary patriarchal norms and institutions. Thus, most of the lace makers voiced the same opinion about the rules of purdah and seclusion in their communities which were also propagated by the lace exporters. In particular, the Kapu women said that they had never gone out of their houses, that women of their community could not do any other work than housework and lace work etc. But in spite of the fact that most of them still subscribed fully to the patriarchal norms of the gosha women, there were also contradictory elements in their consciousness. Thus, although they looked down with contempt upon women who were able to work outside the house—like the untouchable Mala and Madiga women or women of other lower castes, they could not ignore the fact that these women were earning more money precisely because they were not respectable housewives but workers. At one discussion, they even admitted that it would be better if they could also go out and do coolie work. And when they were asked whether they would be ready to come out of their houses and work in one place in some sort of a factory, they said they would do that. This shows that the purdah and housewife ideology, although still fully internalized, already had some cracks, because it has been confronted with several contradictory realities.28

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UNDER WESTERN EYES It is only by understanding the contradictions inherent in women's location within various structures that effective political action and challenges can be devised. Mies's study goes a long way towards offering such analysis. While there are now an increasing number of Western feminist writings in this tradition29 there is also unfortunately a large block of writing which succumbs to the cultural reductionism discussed earlier.

Methodological universalisms, or: women's oppression is a global phenomenon Western feminist writings on women in the third world subscribe to a variety of methodologies to demonstrate the universal cross-cultural operation of male dominance and female exploitation. I summarize and critique three such methods below, moving from the most simple to the most complex methodologies. First, proof of universalism is provided through the use of an arithmetic method. The argument goes like this: the more the number of women who wear the veil, the more universal is the sexual segregation and control of women.30 Similarly, a large number of different, fragmented examples from a variety of countries also apparently add up to a universal fact. For instance, Muslim women in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, India and Egypt all wear some sort of a veil. Hence, this indicates that the sexual control of women is a universal fact in those countries in which the women are veiled.31 Fran Hosken writes "Rape, forced prostitution, polygamy, genital mutilation, pornography, the beating of girls and women, purdah (segregation of women) are all violations of basic human rights" ("FGM," p. 15). By equating purdah with rape, domestic violence and forced prostitution Hosken asserts its "sexual control" function as the primary explanation for purdah, whatever the context. The institution of purdah is thus denied any cultural and historical specificity and contradictions and potentially subversive aspects of the institution are totally ruled out. In both these examples, the problem is not in asserting that the practice of wearing a veil is widespread. This assertion can be made on the basis of numbers. It is a descriptive generalization. However, it is the analytic leap from the practice of veiling to an assertion of its general significance in controlling women that must be questioned. While there may be a physical similarity in the veils worn by women in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the specific meaning attached to this practice varies according to the cultural and ideological context. For example, as is well known, Iranian middle class women veiled themselves during the 1979 revolution to indicate solidarity with their veiled working class sisters, while in contemporary Iran, mandatory Islamic laws dictate that all Iranian women wear veils. While in both these instances, similar reasons might be offered for the veil (opposition to the Shah and Western cultural colonization in the first case, and the true

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Islamicization of Iran in the second), the concrete meanings attached to Iranian women wearing the veil are clearly different in both historical contexts. In the first case, wearing the veil is both an oppositional and revolutionary gesture on the part of Iranian middle class women; in the second case it is a coercive, institutional mandate.32 Only through such contextspecific differentiated analysis does feminist theorizing and practice acquire significance. It is on the basis of such analyses that effective political strategies can be generated. To assume that the mere practice of veiling women in a number of Muslim countries indicates the universal oppression of women through sexual segregation would not only be analytically and theoretically reductive, but also prove quite useless when it comes to political strategizing. Second, concepts like reproduction, the sexual division of labor, the family, marriage, household, patriarchy, etc., are often used without their specification in local cultural and historical contexts. These concepts are used by feminists in providing explanations for women's subordination, apparently assuming their universal applicability. For instance, how is it possible to refer to "the" sexual division of labor when the content of this division changes radically from one environment to the next, and from one historical juncture to another? At its most abstract level, it is the fact of the differential assignation of tasks according to sex that is significant; however, this is quite different from the meaning or value that the content of this sexual division of labor assumes in different contexts. In most cases the assigning of tasks on the basis of sex has an ideological origin. There is no question that a claim such as "women are concentrated in serviceoriented occupations in a large number of countries around the world" is descriptively valid. Descriptively, then, perhaps the existence of a similar sexual division of labor (where women work in service occupations like nursing, social work, etc., and men in other kinds of occupations) in a variety of different countries can be asserted. However, the concept of the "sexual division of labor" is more than just a descriptive category. It indicates the differential value placed on "men's work" versus "women's work." Often the mere existence of a sexual division of labor is taken to be proof of the oppression of women in various societies. This results from a confusion between the descriptive and explanatory potential of the concept of the sexual division of labor. Superficially similar situations may have radically different, historically specific explanations, and cannot be treated as identical. For instance, the rise of female-headed households in middle class America might be construed as greater independence and feminist progress, whereby women are considered to have chosen to be single parents (there are increasing numbers of lesbian mothers, etc.). However, the recent increase in female-headed households in Latin America where women might be seen to have more decision-making power, is concentrated among the poorest strata, where life choices are the

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most constrained economically.33 A similar argument can be made for the rise of female-headed families among Black and Chicana women in the U.S. The positive correlation between this and the level of poverty among women of color and White working class women in the U.S. has now even acquired a name: the feminization of poverty. Thus, while it is possible to state that there is a rise in female-headed households in the U.S. and in Latin America, this rise cannot be discussed as a universal indicator of women's independence, nor can it be discussed as a universal indicator of women's impoverishment. The meaning and explanation for the rise obviously varies according to the socio-historical context. Similarly, the existence of a sexual division of labor in most contexts cannot be sufficient explanation for the universal subjugation of women in the work force. That the sexual division of labor does indicate a devaluation of women's work must be shown through analysis of particular local contexts. In addition, devaluation of women must also be shown through careful analysis. Concepts like the sexual division of labor can be useful only if they are generated through local, contextual analyses.34 If such concepts are assumed to be universally applicable, the resultant homogenization of class, race, religious, cultural and historical specificities of the lives of women in the third world can create a false sense of the commonality of oppressions, interests and struggles between and amongst women globally. Beyond sisterhood there is still racism, colonialism and imperialism! Finally, some writers confuse the use of gender as a superordinate category of organizing analysis with the universalistic proof and instantiation of this category. In other words, empirical studies of gender differences are confused with the analytical organization of cross-cultural work. Beverly Brown's review of the book Nature, Culture and Gender35 best illustrates this point. Brown suggests that naturexulture and female:male are superordinate categories which organize and locate lesser categories (like wild/domestic and biology/technology) within their logic. These categories are universal in the sense that they organize the universe of a system of representations. This relation is totally independent of the universal substantiation of any particular category. Her critique hinges on the fact that rather than clarify the generalizability of nature: culture::female:male as superordinate organizational categories, Nature, Culture and Gender, the book, construes the universality of this equation to lie at the level of empirical truth, which can be investigated through field work. Thus, the usefulness of the nature:culture::female:male formulation as a universal mode of the organization of representation within any particular socio-historical system is lost. Here, methodological universalism is assumed on the basis of the reduction of the nature:culture::female:male analytic categories to a demand for empirical proof of its existence in different cultures. Discourses of representation are confused with material realities, and the distinction made earlier

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between "Woman" and "women" is lost. Feminist work on women in the third world which blurs this distinction (which is present in certain Western feminists' self-representation) eventually ends up constructing monolithic Images of "Third World Women" as women who can only be defined as material subjects, not through the relation of their materiality to their representations. To summarize: I have discussed three methodological moves identifiable in feminist (and other academic) cross-cultural work which seeks to uncover a universality in women's subordinate position in society. The next and final section pulls together the previous sections attempting to outline the political effects of the analytical strategies in the context of Western feminist writing on women in the third world. These arguments are not against generalization as much as they are for careful, historically specific complex generalizations. Nor do these arguments deny the necessity of forming strategic political identities and affinities. Thus, while Indian women of different religions, castes, and class might forge a political unity on the basis of organizing against police brutality towards women,36 any analysis of police brutality must be contextual. Strategic coalitions which construct oppositional political identities for themselves are based on generalization, but the analysis of these group identities cannot be based on universalistic, ahistorical categories.

The subject(s) of power This last section returns to an earlier point about the inherently political nature of feminist scholarship, and attempts to clarify my point about the possibility of detecting a colonialist move in the case of a hegemonic firstthird world connection in scholarship. The nine texts in the Zed Press/Women in the Third World series that I have discussed37 focused on the following common areas in discussing women's "status" within various societies: religion, family/kinship structures, the legal system, the sexual division of labor, education, and finally, political resistance. A large number of Western feminist writings on women in the third world focus on these themes. Of course the Zed texts have varying emphases. For instance, two of the studies, Women of Palestine (Zed Press, 1982) and Indian Women in Struggle (Zed Press, 1980) focus explicitly on female militancy and political involvement, while Women in Arab Society (Zed Press, 1980) deals with Arab women's legal, religious and familial status. In addition, each text evidences a variety of methodologies and degrees of care in making generalizations. Interestingly enough, however, almost all the texts assume "women" as a category of analysis in the manner designated above. Each text assumes "women" have a coherent group identity within the different cultures discussed, prior to their entry into social relations. Thus, Omvedt can talk about "Indian Women" while referring to a particu-

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U N D E R W E S T E R N EYES lar group of women in the State of Maharashtra, Cutrufelli about "Women of Africa" and Minces about "Arab women" as if these groups of women have some sort of obvious cultural coherence, distinct from men in these societies. The "status" or "position" of women is assumed to be selfevident, because women as an already constituted group are placed within religious, economic, familial and legal structures. However, this focus on the position of women whereby women are seen as a coherent group in all contexts, regardless of class or ethnicity, structures the world in ultimately binary, dichotomous terms, where women are always seen in opposition to men, patriarchy is always necessarily male dominance, and the religious, legal, economic and familial systems are implicitly assumed to be constructed by men. Thus, both men and women are always apparently constituted whole populations, and relations of dominance and exploitation are also posited in terms of whole peoples—wholes coming into exploitative relations. It is only when men and women are seen as different categories or groups possessing different already constituted categories of experience, cognition and interests as groups, that such a dichotomy is possible. What does this imply about the structure and functioning of power relations? The setting up of the commonality of third world women's struggles across classes and cultures against a general notion of oppression (primarily the group in power—i.e., men) necessitates the assumption of what Michel Foucault calls the "juridico-discursive" model of power,38 the principle features of which are: "a negative relation" (limit and lack); an "insistence on the rule" (which forms a binary system); a "cycle of prohibition"; the "logic of censorship"; and a "uniformity" of the apparatus functioning at different levels. Feminist discourse on the third world which assumes a homogeneous category—or group—called women necessarily operates through the setting up of originary power divisions. Power relations are structured in terms of a source of power and a cumulative reaction to power. Opposition is a generalized phenomenon created as a response to power—which, in turn, is possessed by certain groups of people. The major problem with such a definition of power is that it locks all revolutionary struggles into binary structures—possessing power versus being powerless. Women are powerless, unified groups. If the struggle for a just society is seen in terms of the move from powerless to powerful for women as a group, and this is the implication in feminist discourse which structures sexual difference in terms of the division between the sexes, then the new society would be structurally identical to the existing organization of power relations, constituting itself as a simple inversion of what exists. If relations of domination and exploitation are defined in terms of binary divisions—groups which dominate and groups which are dominated—surely the implication is that the accession to power of women as a group is sufficient to dismantle the existing organization of relations? But women as a group arc not in some sense essentially superior or infallible. 1201

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The crux of the problem lies in that initial assumption of women as a homogeneous group or category ("the oppressed"), a familiar assumption in Western radical and liberal feminisms.39 What happens when this assumption of "women as an oppressed group" is situated in the context of Western feminist writing about third world women? It is here that I locate the colonialist move. By focusing on the representation of women in the third world, and what I referred to earlier as Western feminisms' self-presentation in the same context, it seems evident that Western feminists alone become the true "subjects" of this counter-history. Third world women, on the other hand, never rise above their generality and their "object" status. While radical and liberal feminist assumptions of women as a sex class might elucidate (however inadequately) the autonomy of particular women's struggles in the West, the application of the notion of women as a homogeneous category to women in the third world colonizes and appropriates the pluralities of the simultaneous location of different groups of women in social class and ethnic frameworks. Similarly, many Zed Press authors, who ground themselves in the basic analytic strategies of traditional marxism also implicitly create a "unity" of women by substituting "women's activity" for "labor" as the primary theoretical determinant of women's situation. Here again, women are constituted as a coherent group not on the basis of "natural" qualities or needs, but on the basis of the sociological "unity" of their role in domestic production and wage labor.40 In other words, Western feminist discourse, by assuming women as a coherent, already constituted group which is placed in kinship, legal and other structures, defines third world women as subjects outside of social relations, instead of looking at the way women are constituted as women through these very structures. Legal, economic, religious, and familial structures are treated as phenomena to be judged by Western standards. It is here that ethnocentric universality comes into play. When these structures are denned as "underdeveloped" or "developing" and women are placed within these structures, an implicit image of the "average third world woman" is produced. This is the transformation of the (implicitly Western) "oppressed woman" into the "oppressed third world woman." While the category of "oppressed woman" is generated through an exclusive focus on gender difference, "the oppressed third world woman" category has an additional attribute— the "third world difference!" The "third world difference" includes a paternalistic attitude towards women in the third world.41 Since discussions of the various themes I identified earlier (e.g., kinship, education, religion, etc.) are conducted in the context of the relative "underdevelopment" of the third world (which is nothing less than unjustifiably confusing development with the separate path taken by the West in its development, as well as ignoring the directionality of the first-third world power relationship), third world women as a group or category are automatically and necessar-

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ily defined as: religious (read "not progressive"), family-oriented (read "traditional"), legal minors (read "they-are-still-not-conscious-of-theirrights"), illiterate (read "ignorant"), domestic (read "backward") and sometimes revolutionary (read "their-country-is-in-a-state-of-war-theymust-fight!"). This is how the "third world difference" is produced. When the category of "sexually oppressed women" is located within particular systems in the third world which are defined on a scale which is normed through Eurocentric assumptions, not only are third world women defined in a particular way prior to their entry into social relations, but since no connections are made between first and third world power shifts, it reinforces the assumption that people in the third world just have not evolved to the extent that the West has. This mode of feminist analysis, by homogenizing and systematizing the experiences of different groups of women in these countries, erases all marginal and resistant modes of experiences. It is significant that none of the texts I reviewed in the Zed Press series focuses on lesbian politics or the politics of ethnic and religious marginal groups in third world women's groups. Resistance can thus only be defined as cumulatively reactive, not as something inherent in the operation of power. If power, as Michel Foucault has argued recently, can really be understood only in the context of resistance,42 this misconceptualization of power is both analytically as well as strategically problematical. It limits theoretical analysis as well as reinforcing Western cultural imperialism. For in the context of a first/third world balance of power, feminist analyses which perpetrate and sustain the hegemony of the idea of the superiority of the West produce a corresponding set of universal images of the "third world woman," images like the veiled woman, the powerful mother, the chaste virgin, the obedient wife, etc. These images exist in universal, ahistorical splendor, setting in motion a colonialist discourse which exercises a very specific power in defining, coding and maintaining existing first/third world connections. To conclude, then, let me suggest some disconcerting similarities between the typically authorizing signature of such Western feminist writings on women in the third world, and the authorizing signature of the project of humanism in general—humanism as a Western ideological and political project which involves the necessary recuperation of the "East" and "Woman" as Others. Many contemporary thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Deleuze, and Said have written at length about the underlying anthropomorphism and ethnocentrism which constitutes a hegemonic humanistic problematic that repeatedly confirms and legitimates (Western) Man's centrality.43 Feminist theorists like Luce Irigaray, Sarah Kofman, Helene Cixous, and others have also written about the recuperation and absence of woman/women within Western humanism.44 The focus of the work of all these thinkers can be stated simply as an uncovering of the political interests that underlie the binary logic of

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humanistic discourse and ideology whereby, as a valuable recent essay puts it, "the first (majority) term (Identity, Universality, Culture, Disinterestedness, Truth, Sanity, Justice, etc.), which is, in fact, secondary and derivative (a construction), is privileged over and colonizes the second (minority) term (difference, temporality, anarchy, error, interestedness, insanity, deviance, etc.), which is in fact, primary and originative."45 In other words, only in so far as "Woman/Women" and "the East" are defined as Others, or as peripheral, that (Western) Man/Humanism can represent him/itself as the center. It is not the center that determines the periphery, but the periphery that, in its boundedness, determines the center. Just as feminists like Kristeva, Cixous and others deconstruct the latent anthropomorphism in Western discourse, I have suggested a parallel strategy in this paper in uncovering a latent ethnocentrism in particular feminist writings on women in the third world. As discussed earlier, a comparison between Western feminist selfpresentation and Western feminist re-presentation of women in the third world yields significant results. Universal images of "the third world woman" (the veiled woman, chaste virgin, etc.), images constructed from adding the "third world difference" to "sexual difference" are predicated upon (and hence obviously bring into sharper focus) assumptions about Western women as secular, liberated, and having control over their own lives. This is not to suggest that Western women are secular, liberated and have control over their own lives. I am refering to a discursive self-presentation, not necessarily to material reality. If this were a material reality there would be no need for political movements in the West—a ridiculous contention in these days of the imperialist adventures of Jerry Falwell and Indiana Jones! Similarly, only from the vantage point of the West is it possible to define the "third world" as underdeveloped and economically dependent. Without the overdetermined discourse that creates the third world, there would be no (singular and privileged) first world. Without the "third world woman," the particular self-presentation of Western women mentioned above would be problematical. I am suggesting then that the one enables and sustains the other. This is not to say that the signature of Western feminist writings on the third world have the same authority as the project of Western humanism. However, in the context of the hegemony of the Western scholarly establishment in the production and dissemination of texts, and in the context of the legitimating imperative of humanistic and scientific discourse, the definition of "the third world woman" as a monolith might well tie into the larger economic and ideological praxis of "disinterested" scientific inquiry and pluralism which are the surface manifestations of a latent economic and cultural colonization of the "non-Western" world. It is time to move beyond the Marx who found it possible to say: They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. Cornell University 1204

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Acknowledgments This paper would not have been possible without the challenging and careful reading and editorial suggestions that S. P. Mohanty provided. I would also like to thank Biddy Martin for our numerous discussions about feminist theory and politics. They both helped me think through some of the arguments in this paper.

Notes 1 Paul A. Baran, Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1962); Samir Amin, Imperialism and Unequal Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977); Andre Gunder-Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967). 2 See especially essays in Cherrie Moraga & Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983); Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983); Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis, Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981); Cherrie Moraga, Loving in the War Years (Boston: South End Press, 1984). 3 Terms like "third" and "first" world are very problematical both in suggesting over-simplified similarities between and amongst countries labelled "third" or "first" world, as well as implicitly reinforcing existing economic, cultural and ideological hierarchies which are conjured up in using such terminology. I use the term "third world" with full awareness of its problems, only because this is the terminology available to us at the moment. The use of quotation marks is meant to suggest a continuous questioning of the designation "third world." Even when I do not use quotation marks, I mean to use the term critically. 4 I am indebted to Teresa de Lauretis for this particular formulation of the project of feminist theorizing. See especially her introduction in de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984); see also Sylvia Wynter, "The Politics of Domination," unpublished manuscript. 5 This argument is similar to Homi Bhabha's definition of colonial discourse as strategically creating a space for a subject peoples through the production of knowledges and the exercise of power. The full quote reads: "[colonial discourse is] an apparatus of power . . . an apparatus that turns on the recognition and disavowal of racial/cultural/historical differences. Its predominant strategic function is the creation of a space for a 'subject peoples' through the production of knowledges in terms of which surveillance is exercised and a complex form of pleasure/unpleasure is incited. It (i.e., colonial discourse) seeks authorization for its strategies by the production of knowledges by coloniser and colonised which are stereotypical but antithetically evaluated." Homi Bhabha, "The Other Question—the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse." Screen, 24 (November-December 1983), 23. 6 Anouar Abdel-Malek, Social Dialectics: Nation and Revolution (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1981), esp. p. 145. 7 Abdel-Malek. Social Dialectics, pp. 145^6. 8 A number of documents and reports on the U.N. International Conferences on 1205

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Women, Mexico City, 1975, and Copenhagen, 1980, as well as the 1976 Wellesley Conference on Women and Development attest to this. Nawal el Saadawi, Fatima Mernissi and Mallica Vajarathon in "A Critical Look At The Wellesley Conference" (Quest, IV [Winter 1978], 101-107), characterize this conference as "American-planned and organized," situating third world participants as passive audiences. They focus especially on the lack of selfconsciousness of Western women's implications in the effects of imperialism and racism in their assumption of an "international sisterhood." A recent essay, by Pratibha Parmar and Valerie Amos, is titled "Challenging Imperial Feminism," Feminist Review, 17 (Autumn 1984), 3-19. Parmar and Amos characterize Euro-American feminism which seeks to establish itself as the only legitimate feminism as "imperial." 9 The Zed Press "Women in the Third World" series is unique in its conception. I choose to focus on this series because it is the only contemporary series I have found which assumes that "women in the Third World" is a legitimate and separate subject of study and research. A number of the texts in this series are excellent, especially those texts which deal directly with women's resistance struggles. However, a number of the texts written by feminist sociologists, anthropologists, and journalists are symptomatic of the kind of Western feminist work on women in the Third World that concerns me. Thus, an analysis of a few of these particular texts in this series can serve as a representative point of entry into the discourse I am attempting to locate and define. 10 M. Z. Rosaldo, "The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding," Signs, 5, no. 3 (1980), 389-417, esp. 392. 11 My analysis in this section of the paper has been influenced by Felicity Eldhom, Olivia Harris and Kate Young's excellent discussions in "Conceptualising Women," Critique of Anthropology, "Women's Issue," 3 (1977), 101-103. Eldhom, Harris and Young examine the use of the concepts of "reproduction" and the "sexual division of labor" in anthropological work on women, suggesting the inevitable pull towards universals inherent in the use of these categories to determine "women's position." 12 Amos and Parmar, "Challenging Imperial Feminism," p. 7. 13 Fran Hosken, "Female Genital Mutilation and Human Rights," Feminist issues, 1 (Summer 1981), 3-24 (hereafter cited in the text as "FGM"). Another example of this kind of analysis is Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology. Daly's assumption in this text, that women as a group are sexually victimized leads to her very problematic comparison between the attitudes towards women witches and healers in the West, Chinese footbinding, and the genital mutilation of women in Africa. According to Daly, women in Europe, China, and Africa constitute a homogeneous group as victims of male power. Not only does this label (sexual victims) eradicate the specific historical and material realities and contradictions which lead to and perpetuate practices like witch hunting and genital mutilation, but it also obliterates the differences, complexities and heterogeneities of the lives of, for example, women of different classes, religions and nations in Africa. As Audre Lorde pointed out, women in Africa share a long tradition of healers and goddesses that perhaps binds them together more appropriately than their victim status. However, both Daly and Lorde fall prey to universalistic assumptions about "African women" (both negative and positive). What matters is the complex, historical range of power differences, commonalities and resistances that exist among women in Africa which construct African women as "subjects" of their own politics. See Mary Daly.

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14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33

Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), esp. pp. 107-312; Audre Lorde, "An Open Letter to Mary Daly," in Moraga and Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983), pp. 94-97. See Eldhom, Harris and Young, "Conceptualising Women," for a good discussion of the necessity to theorize male violence within specific societal frameworks, rather than assume it as a universal fact. Beverly Lindsay, ed., Comparative Perspectives of Third World Women: The Impact of Race, Sex and Class (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1983), esp. pp. 298, 306. Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Women on Africa: Roots of Oppression (London: Zed Press, 1983), esp. p. 13. Cutrufelli, Women of Africa, p. 33. Rosaldo, "The Use and Abuse of Anthropology," p. 400. Cutrufelli, Women of Africa, p. 43. Elizabeth Cowie, "Women As Sign," mlf, 1 (1978), 49-63. Juliette Minces, The House of Obedience: Women in Arab Society (London: Zed Press, 1980), esp. p. 23. Mina Modares, "Women and Shi'ism in Iran," mlf, 5 & 6 (1981), 61-82. Patricia Jeffery, Frogs in a Well: Indian Women in Purdah (London: Zed Press, 1979). Modares, "Women and Shi'ism in Iran," p. 63. Ester Boserup, Women's Role in Economic Development (New York: St. Martins Press, 1970); Irene Tinker and Michelle Bo Bramsen, eds., Women and World Development (Washington, D.C.: Overseas Development Council, 1972); Perdita Huston, Third World Women Speak Out (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1979). These views can also be found in differing degrees in collections like: Wellesley Editorial Committee, ed., Women and National Development: The Complexities of Change (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977), and Signs, Special Issue, "Development and the Sexual Division of Labor," 7 (Winter 1981). For an excellent introduction to WID issues see ISIS, Women in Development: A Resource Guide for Organization and Action (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1984). Huston, Third World Women Speak Out, p. 115. Maria Mies, The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market (London: Zed Press, 1982). Mies, The Lace Makers, esp. p. 157. See essays by Vanessa Maher, Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson, and Maila Stevens in Kate Young, Carol Walkowitz and Roslyn McCullagh, eds., Of Marriage and the Market: Women's Subordination in International Perspective (London: CSE Books, 1981); and essays by Vivian Mota and Michelle Mattelart in June Nash and Helen I. Safa, eds., Sex and Class in Latin America: Women's Perspectives on Politics, Economics and the Family in the Third World (Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey, 1980). Ann Dearden, eds., Arab Women (London: Minority Rights Group Report No. 27,1975), esp. pp. 4-5. Dearden, Arab Women, pp. 7, 10. See Azar Tabari, "The Enigma of the Veiled Iranian Women," Feminist Review, 5 (1980), 19-32, for a detailed discussion of these Instances. Olivia Harris, "Latin American Women—An Overview," in Harris, ed., Latin American Women (London: Minority Rights Group Report, No. 57, 1983),

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34 35 36 37

38 39

40 41

42

43

44

pp. 4-7. Other MRG Reports include Ann Dearden, 1975, and Rounaq Jahan, ed., Women in Asia (London: Minority Rights Groups Report No. 45,1980). See Eldhom, Harris and Young, "Conceptualising Women," for an excellent discussion of this. Beverly Brown, "Displacing the Difference—Review, Nature, Culture and Gender," mlf, 8 (1983), 79-90; Marilyn Strathern and Carol McCormack, eds., Nature, Culture and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980). See Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita, eds., In Search of Answers: Indian Women's Voices from Manushi (London: Zed Press, 1984), for a discussion of this aspect of Indian women's struggles. List of Zed Press Publications: Patricia Jeffery, Frogs in a Well: Indian Women in Purdah, 1979; Latin American and Carribbean Women's Collective, Slaves of Slaves: The Challenge of Latin American Women, 1980; Gail Omvedt, We Shall Smash this Prison: Indian Women in Struggle, 1980; Juliette Minces, The House of Obedience: Women in Arab Society, 1980; Bobby Siu, Women of China: Imperialism and Women's Resistance 1900-1949,1981; Ingela Bendt and James Downing, We Shall Return: Women of Palestine, 1982; Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Women of Africa: Roots of Oppression, 1983; Maria Mies, The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market, 1983; Miranda Davis, ed., Third World/Second Sex: Women's Struggles and National Liberation, 1983. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), esp. pp. 134-45. For succinct discussions of Western radical and liberal feminisms see Hester Eisenstein, Contemporary Feminist Thought (Boston: G. K. Hall & Company, 1983); And Zillah Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (New York: Longman, 1981). See Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," Socialist Review, 80 (March-April 1985), 65-108, esp. 76. Parmar and Amos describe the cultural stereotypes present in Euro-American feminist thought: "The image is of the passive Asian woman subject to oppressive practices within the Asian family with an emphasis on wanting to 'help' Asian women liberate themselves from their role. Or there is the strong, dominant Afro-Caribbean woman, who despite her 'strength' is exploited by the 'sexism' which is seen as being a strong feature in relationships between AfroCaribbean men and women" ("Challenging Imperial Feminism," p. 9). These images illustrate the extent to which paternalism is an essential element of feminist thinking which incorporates the above stereotypes—a paternalism which can lead to the definition of priorities for women of color by EuroAmerican feminists. This is one of M. Foucault's central points in his re-conceptualization of the strategies and workings of power networks. See his Power/Knowledge, 1980, and his History of Sexuality Volume One (New York: Random House, 1978). Foucault, Power/Knowledge and History of Sexuality; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974); Julia Kristcva. Desire in Language (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1980); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978); Gilles Dcleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Viking Press, 1977). Luce Irigaray, "This Sex Which Is Not One," and "When the Goods Get

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Together," in Elaine Marks and Isabel de Courivron, eds., New French Feminisms (New York: Schoken Books, 1981), pp. 99-110; Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," in New French Feminisms, pp. 245-68. For a good discussion of Sarah Kofman's work, see Elizabeth Berg, "The Third Woman," Diacritics (Summer 1982), 11-20. 45 William V. Spanos, "boundary 2 and the Polity of Interest: Humanism, the 'Center Elsewhere,' and Power," in this issue.

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NOT YOU/LIKE YOU Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference Trinh T. Minh-ha From Inscriptions 3-4 (1988): 71-7

To raise the question of identity is to reopen again the discussion on the self/other relationship in its enactment of power relations. Identity as understood in the context of a certain ideology of dominance has long been a notion that relies on the concept of an essential, authentic core that remains hidden to one's consciousness and that requires the elimination of all that is considered foreign or not true to the self, that is to say, non-I, other. In such a concept the other is almost unavoidably either opposed to the self or submitted to the self's dominance. It is always condemned to remain its shadow while attempting at being its equal. Identity, thus understood, supposes that a clear dividing line can be made between I and not-I, he and she; between depth and surface, or vertical and horizontal identity; between us here and them over there. The further one moves from the core the less likely one is thought to be capable of fulfilling one's role as the real self, the real Black, Indian or Asian, the real woman. The search for an identity is, therefore, usually a search for that lost, pure, true, real, genuine, original, authentic self, often situated within a process of elimination of all that is considered other, superfluous, fake, corrupted, or Westernized. If identity refers to the whole pattern of sameness within a being, the style of a continuing me that permeated all the changes undergone, then difference remains within the boundary of that which distinguishes one identity from another. This means that at heart X must be X, Y must be Y, and X cannot be Y. Those running around yelling X is not X and X can be Y, usually land in a hospital, a rehabilitation center, a concentration camp, or a reservation. All deviations from the dominant stream of thought, that

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is to say, the belief in a permanent essence of woman and in an invariant but fragile identity whose loss is considered to be a specifically human danger, can easily fit into the categories of the mentally ill or the mentally underdeveloped. It is probably difficult for a normal, probing mind to recognize that to seek is to lose, for seeking presupposes a separation between the seeker and the sought, the continuing me and the changes it undergoes. Can identity, indeed, be viewed other than as a by product of a manhandling of life, one that, in fact, refers no more to a consistent pattern of sameness than to an inconsequential process of otherness. How am I to lose, maintain, or gain a female identity when it is impossible for me to take up a position outside this identity from which I presumably reach in and feel for it? Difference in such a context is that which undermines the very idea of identity, differing to infinity the layers of totality that forms I. Hegemony works at leveling out differences and at standardizing contexts and expectations in the smallest details of our daily lives. Uncovering this leveling of differences is, therefore, resisting that very notion of difference which defined in the master's terms often resorts to the simplicity of essences. Divide and conquer has for centuries been his creed, his formula of success. But a different terrain of consciousness has been explored for some time now, a terrain in which clear cut divisions and dualistic oppositions such as science vs. subjectivity, masculine vs. feminine, may serve as departure points for analytical purpose but are no longer satisfactory if not entirely untenable to the critical mind. I have often been asked about what some viewers call the lack of conflicts in my films. Psychological conflict is often equated with substance and depth. Conflicts in Western contexts often serve to define identities. My suggestion to the "lack" is: let difference replace conflict. Difference as understood in many feminist and non-Western contexts, difference as foreground in my film work is not opposed to sameness, nor synonymous with separateness. Difference, in other words, does not necessarily give rise to separatism. There are differences as well as similarities within the concept of difference. One can further say that difference is not what makes conflicts. It is beyond and alongside conflict. This is where confusion often arises and where the challenge can be issued. Many of us still hold on to the concept of difference not as a tool of creativity to question multiple forms of repression and dominance, but as a tool of segregation, to exert power on the basis of racial and sexual essences. The apartheid type of difference. Let me point to a few examples of practices of such a notion of difference. There are quite many, but I'll just select three and perhaps we can discuss those. First of all I would take the example of the veil as reality and metaphor. If the act of unveiling has a liberating potential, so does the act of veiling. It all depends on the context in which such an act is carried out,

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or more precisely, on how and where women see dominance. Difference should neither be defined by the dominant sex nor by the dominant culture. So that when women decide to lift the veil one can say that they do so in defiance of their men's oppressive right to their bodies. But when they decide to keep or put on the veil they once took off they might do so to reappropriate their space or to claim a new difference in defiance of genderless, hegemonic, centered standardization. Second, the use of silence. Within the context of women's speech silence has many faces. Like the veiling of women just mentioned, silence can only be subversive when it frees itself from the male-defined context of absence, lack, and fear as feminine territories. On the one hand, we face the danger of inscribing femininity as absence, as lack and blank in rejecting the importance of the act of enunciation. On the other hand, we understand the necessity to place women on the side of negativity and to work in undertones, for example, in our attempts at undermining patriarchal systems of values. Silence is so commonly set in opposition with speech. Silence as a will not to say or a will to unsay and as a language of its own has barely been explored. Third, the question of subjectivity. The domain of subjectivity understood as sentimental, personal, and individual horizon as opposed to objective, universal, societal, limitless horizon is often attributed to both women, the other of man, and natives, the Other of the West. It is often assumed, for example, that women's enemy is the intellect, that their apprehension of life can only wind and unwind around a cooking pot, a baby's diaper, or matters of the heart. Similarly, for centuries and centuries we have been told that primitive mentality belongs to the order of the emotional and the affective, and that it is incapable of elaborating concepts. Primitive man feels and participates. He does not really think or reason. He has no knowledge, "no clear idea or even no idea at all of matter and soul," as Levi-Bruhl puts it. Today this persistent rationale has taken on multiple faces, and its residues still linger on, easily recognizable despite the refined rhetoric of those who perpetuate it. Worth mentioning again here is the question of outsider and insider in ethnographic practices. An insider's view. The magic word that bears within itself a seal of approval. What can be more authentically other than an otherness by the other, herself? Yet, every piece of the cake given by the master comes with a double-edged blade. The Afrikaners are prompt in saying, "you can take a Black man from the bush, but you can't take the bush from the Black man." The place of the native is always welldelimitated. "Correct" cultural filmmaking, for example, usually implies that Africans show Africa, Asians Asia, and Euro-Americans, the world. Otherness has its laws and interdictions. Since you can't take the bush from the Black man, it is the bush that is consistently given back to him, and as things often turn out it is also this very bush that the Black man

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shall make his exclusive territory. And he may do so with the full awareness that barren land is hardly a gift. For in the unfolding of power inequalities, changes frequently require that the rules be reappropriated so that the master be beaten at his own game. The conceited giver likes to give with the understanding that he is in a position to take back whenever he feels like it and whenever the accepter dares or happens to trespass on his preserves. The latter, however, sees no gift. Can you imagine such a thing as a gift that takes? So the latter only sees debts that, once given back, should remain his property - although land owning is a concept that has long been foreign to him and that he refused to assimilate. Through audiences' responses and expectations of their works, nonwhite filmmakers are often informed and reminded of the territorial boundaries in which they are to remain. An insider can speak with authority about her own culture, and she's referred to as the source of authority in this matter - not as a filmmaker necessarily, but as an insider, merely. This automatic and arbitrary endowment of an insider with legitimized knowledge about her cultural heritage and environment only exerts its power when it's a question of validating power. It is a paradoxical twist of the colonial mind. What the outsider expects from the insider is, in fact, a projection of an all-knowing subject that this outsider usually attributes to himself and to his own kind. In this unacknowledged self/other relation, however, the other would always remain the shadow of the self. Hence not really, not quite all-knowing. That a white person makes a film on the Goba of the Zambezi, for example, or on the Tasaday of the Philippine rainforest, seems hardly surprising to anyone, but that a Third World member makes a film on other Third World peoples never fails to appear questionable to many. The question concerning the choice of subject matter immediately arises, sometimes out of curiosity, most often out of hostility. The marriage is not consumable for the pair is no longer outside/inside, that is to say, objective vs. subjective, but something between inside/inside - objective in what is already claimed as objective. So, no real conflict. Interdependency cannot be reduced to a mere question of mutual enslavement. It also consists in creating a ground that belongs to no one, not even to the creator. Otherness becomes empowerment, critical difference when it is not given but recreated. Furthermore, where should the dividing line between outsider and insider stop? How should it be defined? By skin color, by language, by geography, by nation, or by political affinity? What about those, for example, with hyphenated identities and hybrid realities? And here it is worth noting, for example, a journalist's report in a recent Time issue which is entitled, "The Crazy Game of Musical Chairs." In this brief report attention is drawn to the fact that people in South Africa who are classified by race and place into one of the nine racial categories that determine where they can live and work, can have

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their classification changed if they can prove they were put in a wrong group. Thus, in an announcement of racial reclassifications by the Home Affairs Minister one learns that nine whites became colored, 506 coloreds became white, two whites became Malay, fourteen Malay became white, 40 coloreds became Black, 666 Blacks became colored, and the list goes on. However, says the minister, no Blacks apply to become whites. And No whites became Black. The moment the insider steps out from the inside she's no longer a mere insider. She necessarily looks in from the outside while also looking out from the inside. Not quite the same, not quite the other, she stands in that undetermined threshold place where she constantly drifts in and out. Undercutting the inside/outside opposition, her intervention is necessarily that of both not-quite an insider and not-quite an outsider. She is, in other words, this inappropriate other or same who moves about with always at least two gestures: that of affirming T am like you' while persisting in her difference and that of reminding 'I am different' while unsettling every definition of otherness arrived at. This is not to say that the historical I can be obscured and ignored and that differentiation cannot be made, but that I is not unitary, culture has never been monolithic, and is always more or less in relation to a judging subject. Differences do not only exist between outsider and insider - two entities. They are also at work within the outsider herself, or the insider, herself - a single entity. She who knows she cannot speak of them without speaking of herself, of history without involving her story, also knows that she cannot make a gesture without activating the to and fro movement of life. The subjectivity at work in the context of this inappropriate other can hardly be submitted to the old subjectivity/objectivity paradigm. Acute political subject awareness cannot be reduced to a question of selfcriticism toward self-improvement, nor of self-praise toward greater selfconfidence. Such differentiation is useful, for a grasp of subjectivity as, let's say, the science of the subject or merely as related to the subject, makes the fear of self-absorption look absurd. Awareness of the limits in which one works need not lead to any form of indulgence in personal partiality, nor to the narrow conclusion that it is impossible to understand anything about other peoples, since the difference is one of essence. By refusing to naturalize the I, subjectivity uncovers the myth of essential core, of spontaneity and depth as inner vision. Subjectivity, therefore, does not merely consist of talking about oneself, be this talking indulgent or critical. In short, what is at stake is a practice of subjectivity that is still unaware of its own constituted nature, hence, the difficulty to exceed the simplistic pair of subjectivity and objectivity; a practice of subjectivity that is unaware of its continuous role in the production of meaning, as if things can make sense by themselves, so that the interpreter's function consists of

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only choosing among the many existing readings; unaware of representation as representation, that is to say, the cultural, sexual, political interreality of the filmmaker as subject, the reality of the subject film and the reality of the cinematic apparatus. And finally unaware of the inappropriate other within every I.

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FEMINIST FICTIONS A Critique of the Category 'Non-Western Woman' in Feminist Writings on India1 Julie Stephens From Ranajit Guha (ed.) Subaltern Studies VI: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Oxford University Press, 1983, 92-125

'a feminism that cannot criticise itself cannot, in the last analysis, serve as the bearer of emancipatory possibilities .. .'2

The 'said' A distinguishing feature of contemporary feminist discourse is that it purports to speak about 'real' women. It claims to record 'the direct experiences of women',3 to understand 'the reality of being a woman in an Indian village',4 and to examine how 'lower-class women in India really feel about being women'.5 This emphasis on realness, this faith that the descriptions of Indian women it offers are unproblematic representations of the objective, separates feminism from other discourses dealing with the same subject. Feminist studies aim to present 'a vital and living portrait'6 of Indian women which supplants the mythic and idealized 'Indian womanhood' of the nationalists or the objectified 'woman' of orthodox anthropology. Yet, in a discourse so concerned with challenging the very process by which traditional 'images' of women are produced, it is surprising to find feminist texts blind to their own image-making and laying claim to accurately portray 'real' Third World women.7 The following is an exploration of a textual body of knowledge on Indian women with particular reference to the problem of the unmediated association between representation and reality that surfaces when nonWestern women are the object of feminism's gaze.8 What is addressed is the overlap between Indian and Western feminist portraits of Indian women. Whilst this overlap is a textual one—thus excluding important 1216

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instances of women's protests informed often by more heterodox ideologies—and covers only a section of the literature, it is large and significant enough to warrant discussion.9 The discussion therefore concerns a strain of feminism operating at the intersection of East and West, the Third and First Worlds. The purpose is to examine this juncture as the point at which feminism collides and colludes with the discourse of Orientalism. The institutional site from which feminism speaks of Indian women is 'the field'. It shares this site with anthropology but adopts a particular style and approach to it. 'The field' in feminist studies of Third World women is more than simply an area for specialist academic research; it is stressed as the place where 'everyday' experiences occur. A deliberate attempt is made to bypass theoretical frameworks in favour of the 'direct experience'.10 Value-free commentary, academic prose and the idea of objective scholarship, all common features of the orthodox anthropological study, are rejected. The texts do not set out 'to compile a book of academic essays . . . but to publish little-known material based entirely on the direct experiences of women activists from the Third World'.11 They prefer 'the conversational mode to the structural interview technique', using no formal questionnaire12 and 'attempt to recapture the turmoil and exhilaration of that period'.13 The aim is to fill the gap between an 'unashamedly critical' approach to the study of Indian women and 'dispassionate documentation'14 and to separate 'what people really do from what they say they do'.15 'These are not academic studies carried out in social and political isolation', claims a review of three texts from this strain of feminism, but an 'attempt to transmit the immediacy of experience and knowledge gained in struggle, in order to overcome the split between theory and activism'.16 There are countless ways of marking a text as 'information', and this deliberately non-theoretical approach is one of them. Verisimilitude is established by stressing 'the field' as the site of the discourse. While fieldwork is not a device in itself which necessarily legitimates a narrative, the way it is invoked, in this type of feminist research, assumes that it does. The discourse places great emphasis on the 'immediacy' and the 'directness' of the investigator's experience. Often the lengthy descriptions of atmosphere and surroundings are written in the present tense, restructuring time to reinforce place;17 the picture is of the investigating subject 'really being there'. This endorses the text as credible, legitimate information. It also makes the image of Indian women conveyed appear more like a photograph than a portrait. Predicating 'the field' and the indisputability of the eyewitness report operate as a very persuasive truth tactic. The effectiveness of the 'I was there so it must be true' position rests on an assumed unfiltered identity between fieldwork (as presented in feminist texts) and reality. This identity appears as taken for granted. The narrative techniques borrowed from realist fiction which create this identity are

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hidden. The fieldwork experience not only legitimates feminist texts on Third World women, but it also structures all description and analysis.18 In these texts the link between fieldwork and reality is forged by a category granted a peculiar objectivity in the discourse: the 'direct experience'. Feminism paradoxically insists that the 'direct experience' textually conveyed is somehow more real than the indirect textual experience, thus denying that its own textual productions are implicated in another kind of image-making. Alongside the positivist empiricism of the 'I was there so it must be true' position is the position 'I am a woman, so it must be true'. What Elshtain describes as the 'mask of unquestioned, inner authenticity based upon claims of the ontological superiority of female being-in-itself can be recognized again and again in the texts under scrutiny.19 For example, 'women as women" are seen to have a 'special drive for liberation';20 what are considered 'questionable' research methods are replaced by the unchallengable 'we were simply women talking together'.21 However, the most frequently used claim to truth is the inclusion of and emphasis on the 'voice' of non-Western women. The discourse prides itself on being unique in providing the opportunity for Third World women to 'speak for themselves'. But what does 'speaking for themselves' mean in this context? Firstly, it certainly does not mean that these women actually do speak. Feminism laments the silencing of 'our Third World sisters',22 chides itself for ever trying to speak for them and then 'grants' them a voice in much the same way as women are 'given' equal rights. It 'allows', 'encourages', or 'lets' them speak; it claims not to speak for them. The problems inherent in such premises need further examination. In 'Sexual Class in India',23 Mody and Mhatre simultaneously assert that Indian women are capable and incapable of 'speaking'. They argue that 'the public voice [of the Indian woman] has long been stifled' by a 'male-dominated society' and see 'her present silence on the problems she faces' as connected to 'a self-image [which] is severely distorted and repressed'.24 Their interview and subsequent article provide the forum or the 'little encouragement' needed for the Indian woman, 'to shake off this imposed reticence and speak on her own behalf of her problems and their solutions'.25 Yet whose voice is it that we hear in what follows? After a brief description of 'the field', in this case the slums of Bombay, we are introduced to three women who live there. The first interview begins: 'Janabai gives her age as forty-five. Though she appears much older, her tiny frame is erect and strong'.26 What follows are details of Janabai's life, her attitude to Congress and her views on the problems of Bombay. They are listed in simple, unadorned prose giving the appearance that Janabai's words are being read directly, and not those of the writers. However, to return to these opening lines, it is not Janabai saying she is forty-five that we hear. It is Mody and Mhatre who intervene with 'she

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gives her age as forty-five although she appears much older'. The italicized words place the reader alongside the investigator, observing Janabai. We are invited not to believe Janabai's knowledge of her own age but rather the initial impressions the interviewers have of it. Why not begin (if indeed the aim is to present genuine interviews) with, 'Janabai is forty-five'? Clearly the answer is that it would both convey too little and that the discourse wants to make the investigating subject appear invisible, not actually be invisible.27 As it stands, the opening lines economically build a picture of 'the Other', the tiny but strong, overworked ('she appears much older') peasant woman trapped in an urban slum. These lines tap into a familiar and cliched picture which hardly requires the 'two dozen green bangles' and 'decorative tattoos' as elaboration. Janabai, Lucy and Shevanti's words are stifled by those so desperate to hear them. Instead of interviews with questions and answers and direct speech, we are given summaries, edited into a neat and tidy package written from the point of view of the investigator. Nevertheless the appearance that Third World women are 'speaking for themselves' is maintained despite the constant interruptions and corrections made to their so called speech. For example Perdita Huston breaks the 'direct record' of the words of a Kenyan woman with, 'The old woman made two comments that seem contradictory . . . In fact, these comments were common misinterpretations of the results of improved health care'.28 If anyone is actually 'speaking out', it is the interviewer, yet the discourse repeatedly insists that it 'does not speak for' the non-Western woman. It attempts to resolve these contradictory contentions by the reluctant admission that some of these women are, as yet, incapable of speech, thereby strengthening the impression that feminism is a logical and coherent system. The semblance of coherence is sustained by the argument that a woman such as Janabai, for example, has no voice because she speaks in the mode 'of the social mechanism which represses women'.29 According to Mody and Mhatre, 'she has not the ability to think or act otherwise'.30 What then constitutes a voice in the feminist discourse if it is not women actually speaking? How do these researchers, who choose 'the field' as the site legitimating their own speech, identify amongst the babble of tape recordings and sheets of notes, what is and is not a voice? Voice and consciousness are linked in confusing and inconsistent ways. Some texts see 'the woman's lack of consciousness of rights which should be hers' as preventing her 'from acting on her own behalf'.31 Consciousness therefore comes from outside, when women 'are encouraged to voice their resentment, to identify their oppressors and to struggle to improve their condition'.32 The unresolved paradox here is that consciousness relies on voice to be recognized and generated yet there can be no voice without consciousness.

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Various journalistic techniques are used to signal what is 'information' in contemporary texts on Third World women. They create the 'mood of involvement and style without commentary' of the deliberately antitheoretical approach adopted by this branch of the discourse.33 These strategies range from the telegraphic messages of the headline-like chapter headings ('Encounter with an Agricultural Labourer', for example) and focusing on small detail, to visual descriptions that are frozen in the 'anthropological present'.34 It is worth examining in detail, Gail Omvedt's description of the first village she visited, not to single out her techniques as exceptional, but to assess how the reader is made complicit with the text in this branch of feminism.35 Note the opening lines. 'Bori Arab: village on the sun-baked plateau of central India, with little to distinguish it from hundreds of thousands of other Indian villages except that I have decided to visit it for my first encounter with agricultural labourers'.36 The brevity and urgency of the first part of this sentence is that of the telegraphic newspaper report (Stop Press! Bori Arab: village on the . . .) or the travel documentary rather than the specialist academic study. The clipped phrasing and cliched images (sun-baked plateau) are so familiar the reader is almost immediately receptive to the 'information' that is to follow. The discourse calls on a Western culture's collective idea of a typical village (as Bori Arab is 'like hundreds of thousands of other Indian villages') and asks us to place the hero of this narrative, Gail Omvedt, in it, as the village's only distinguishing feature. The reader collaborates in the meaning process—filling in the gaps left by such compact journalese. We prepare ourselves to follow Gail Omvedt on her feminist odyssey where she will 'encounter' (rather than meet) the strange and exotic and 'have experiences'. As this description is in the present tense, the reader is on the bus while Bhimrao ('a young union organizer friend') is allowed to 'speak for himself. The attention to detail like 'He pauses as the jolting bus swings aside to pass a bullock cart',37 both establishes verisimilitude and positions the reader alongside the narrator as though approaching Bori Arab for the first time with excitement and trepidation. The impression is successfully created that we are on the bus seeing the India of the traveller flash past the window. Instead of viewing the comments that follow on the position of women in India as conveniently placed background information, the complicit reader is blind to textual strategies, seeing only what appear as innocent musings on the part of the narrator. If the text opened with an account of Bori Arab where the retrospectivity of the writing was acknowledged, the reader would be in a position to choose whether what was presented was 'respectable information' or travel-slide reminiscences. The text, however, is built in such a way that the reader's options are limited. As we are placed on the bus with Omvedt, to reject what she sees would be like disbelieving what is in front of our own eyes. In this respect, the

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FICTIONS

techniques which appear crude when singled out, are sophisticated in their combined effect. Note the following comments: 'Merchants sit in their shops and stare as we walk past; off to the right is a school and what is probably a village council building set back from the road in a compound flanked with trees and a few flowering shrubs'.38 It is not the attention to detail that stamps this extract as information but the calculated use of the word 'probably'. Gail Omvedt knows very well it is a village council building when she writes this (she visits it after lunch that day). The appearance of doubt in the retrospective description is to make the text seem less textual; like untidy reality rather than a literary construct. Moreover, to successfully carry off such ploys, the discourse has to be tuned all the more finely. Similar techniques of legitimation are used by others. Patricia Jeffery also highlights small detail, writes in the present tense and takes the reader with her through her 'first time' experiences,39 as does Perdita Huston, although her textual strategies are not as elaborate.40 A uniform style and approach is adopted from text to text within this branch of the discourse. The T is simultaneously emphasized and de-emphasized, functioning to both highlight the significance of the personal revelations of the investigator and hide the investigator's presence. For example, Gail Omvedt writes 'and finally I found myself there in Ahmednagar, talking in a tumultuous hall thronged with women',41 thus making her presence appear right, natural and inevitable. Another way the 'investigating subject' is 'rendered transparent'42 is through the impression that the subjects under investigation have themselves initiated the research. 'This has been a book forced on me by the women themselves', writes Jeffery.43 Such comments in the 'speaking for themselves' category (as though the researchers had little control over being there, let alone selecting issues and topics for discussion) verify what is being described. What is interesting is not the fact of legitimation—all texts legitimate themselves—but the conflict between the techniques used and the discourse's feminist concerns. It would seem that as feminism weaves its picture of non-Western women, so it undoes many of its own aims. The 'already said' Feminism is validated by the existence of the sovereign female subject. The concept of a separate and identifiable feminist consciousness relies on the discourse's capacity to demonstrate that women are capable of being the creators of history; that they are active, autonomous subjects 'in their own right'. Yet it is in its search for the sovereign female subject and in its attempt to define the autonomy of the Third World woman that feminism gets entangled with nationalism and Orientalism. Ironically, the trajectories of feminist and imperialist thought cross at the very point where 1221

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feminism aims to distance itself from these discourses. It is at this point that the 'half silent murmur' of Orientalism becomes audible in feminism. Feminism universalizes itself by negating, thus transcending its Western origins. It saves itself from appearing imperialistic by celebrating cultural specificity or 'difference' in the lives of non-Western women. This abhorrence of 'sameness' in the Third World woman, however, raises interesting problems for the discourse's call for an international sisterhood. An examination of the complicated interplay between sameness and difference reveals that feminism has not cleaned itself of the Orientalist problematic. Within feminist discussion on Third World women, two solutions are offered to the problem of how and on whom subject status can be conferred. Subjecthood is not granted to just any woman. Certain women, or groups of women, qualify by fulfilling a set of criteria which varies according to the particular brand of feminism at work. The two under discussion here are the feminist solution and what may be called, in the Indian case, the nationalist-feminist solution. The first is typified by the work of Gail Omvedt, and the second by that of Madhu Kishwar and some articles in Manushi. My aim is to map the considerable overlap between these two feminisms, to identify the points at which they diverge, and to look at what the solution of 'putting women back into history' doesn't solve. In contemporary studies of Third World women, the sovereign female subject cannot be Western/Westernized. This proposition is shared by those speaking from either Kishwar's or Omvedt's perspective. Erasing 'the West' has come to be a prerequisite for subjecthood and hence liberation. Almost without exception, any recent feminist statement about Third World women is prefaced by the qualification, 'As a western feminist. . . .'44 What 'Western' stands for in this context is far more than simply an area on a map; moreover, its meaning is considered to be self-evident and no accompanying explanation is deemed necessary. Obviously, enclosed in the term is the history of European enlightenment and colonization—the West as constantly spreading its material and cultural domination— particularly as it is mentioned as a point of contrast, a mark of difference, although in the contemporary feminist debate it also refers to a restriction or boundary to 'true' understanding and liberation. Elsie Boulding, for example, opens her study with the comments, 'I am a Westerner, with all the limitations of insight, experience and sensitivity that being a Westerner in the late twentieth century involves'.45 Her statements are typical of the type frequently encountered in this branch of the feminist debate, where the tone is confessional and the experience (of discovering these boundaries) revelatory. The label 'Western feminist' is always derogatory, not least when it is used by women who fit into the classification themselves. In its extended version, 'white, middle-class, Euro-American feminists',46 the pejorative nature of the sign is made more explicit, yet this is hardly necessary, as the

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term 'Western' adequately covers a whole range of negative associations. It is never used to indicate something positive. Rather it signals guilt and discomfort and functions as a mark of self-denigration.47 To be 'Western' is to be in a kind of purdah; it is to be blind, restricted and limited. Ironically, these are the very characteristics feminists once ascribed to women of non-Western cultures. To use the label 'Western', however, is to unveil oneself, thus transcending what the term designates. Its invocation reverses what Western signifies, and it no longer operates as a sign of imperialism within the feminist discourse but rather indicates the anti-imperialist intentions of feminism. The frequency with which the apology 'As a western feminist . . .' is mentioned in the contemporary discussion has importance as an antiimperialist strategy. As the debate on feminism and imperialism has become increasingly sophisticated, so the tactics used to dissociate one from the other proliferate. Nevertheless, these are not simply confined to the feminist discourse that is generated from Western countries; nor does the sign take on an entirely different set of meanings depending on the geographic location or ethnicity of the speaker using it. There is considerable overlap in what 'Western' stands for in nationalist-feminist discourses on women and in the contemporary feminist discourse on imperialism. Those using the term 'Western feminist' to signify limitations and shortsightedness do so from a shared cultural background; they speak either from the privilege of the West or from a position of access to the privileges 'the West' stands for. Hence Madhu Kishwar is able to describe herself as a 'Westernized modernist, completely alienated from [her] own culture and the people who hold it dear'.48 According to this perspective 'Westernized feminists' face a similar barrier to understanding their own culture as 'Western feminists' do in understanding someone else's. The barrier in this case is their Westernization. Kishwar's comments possess the same selfdeprecatory tone as those cited from feminists in the West. She writes: Those of us who wish to combat or reject these 'cultural ideals of womanhood' have, however, been largely ineffective because we tend to do so from a totally 'Western modernist' standpoint. The tendency is to make people feel that they are backward and stupid to hold values that need to be rejected outright. We must learn to begin with more respect for traditions which people hold dear.49 The 'we' in this statement would have to include the 'Western feminist'. However, there is a point at which she is excluded, and this is where feminism takes on a specifically nationalist character. While the sign 'Western' as a critique of itself is shared across both discourses, the category 'Western woman' has an additional meaning specific to Indian nationalist thought. This complicates an Indian feminism

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strongly shaped by nationalism because the rejection of 'the West', including Western women, has been part of a nationalist tradition. While the nationalist construction of 'the Western woman' is a separate study, some comments made by Vivekananda in his lectures in America provide a useful illustration of the blueprint of Indian versus Western womanhood which later appears in feminist texts from India. A newspaper report records: [Vivekananda] stated that in India the woman was the visible manifestation of God and that her whole life was given up to the thought that she was a mother, and to be perfect mother she must be chaste. No mother in India ever abandoned her offspring, he said, and defied anyone to prove the contrary. The girls in India would die if they, like American girls, were obliged to expose their bodies to the vulgar gaze of young men.50 This same opposition occurs in feminist texts published almost a century later.51 This is not the self-image of Western feminism. While the idea of the West/Westernization as a restriction may be shared throughout the discourse, this view of 'the Western woman' is purely a nationalist construction. This is where Indian feminism creates its own discursive space. The opposition between 'the Indian woman' as chaste spirituality or maternal sensuality and the unchaste, cold, sexual consumerism of 'the Western woman' is the same spiritual/material, East/West dichotomy generated by the Orientalist. As Partha Chatterjee has demonstrated, Indian nationalist thought has itself been shaped by the dominating frameworks of Orientalism.52 It should not be surprising then that a selfconsciously nationalistic Indian feminism is similarly influenced. Note some further comments by Madhu Kishwar: For most modernists, for example, Sita represents the hallmark of women's subservience. But Gandhi's Sita is not the self effacing, fire ordeal facing Sita. Gandhi's Sita is a woman who will not let her husband touch her if he approaches her in a disrespectful way, nor dared the mighty Ravana ravish Sita against her will even though she stayed captive in his kingdom for many years. She also becomes a symbol of Swadeshi. She is the woman who will not dress up in foreign finery in order to appear attractive and be a sex object.53 Here, what is not-Indian is dressing up in foreign finery and behaving like a sex object. Conversely, Indian womanhood is synonymous with chastity. It is possible, however, to be Indian and not really be 'Indian' by being a 'westernized modernist'. However, one's Indianness can be restored and

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liberation achieved by the rejection of the modernist notion of Sita as the 'hallmark of women's subservience' and the embracing of a nationalist one: Gandhi's Sita. What is particular to nationalist-feminism in this case is that the liberating experience for women is that of nationalism. Nationalism transforms the 'subservient, uneducated and secluded upper class woman of the nineteenth century' into the 'articulate, educated' woman of the mid twentieth century, active in professions and public life.54 According to the discourse, Westernization does not lead to this transformation but rather produces 'educated women in India, who, in the name of modernity, are ready to sacrifice even the best of their culture and traditions and become Westernized butterflies'.55 So the nationalistfeminist project in India posits a paradoxical solution to the 'woman question': it is a search for a truly indigenous, and in that sense particularistic, culture capable of achieving the 'universal' goals of feminism. Thus Kishwar again writes Our cultural traditions have tremendous potential within them to combat reactionary and anti-women ideas, if we can identify their points of strength and use them creatively. The rejection of the harmful is then made much easier than attempts to overthrow traditions totally or attack them arrogantly from outside, as most of us Westernized modernists tend to do .. ,56 As the search for a sovereign female subject in nationalist-feminism becomes an endeavour to find 'India', an autonomous culture, then it is immaterial whether subjecthood is granted to the elite or non-elite woman. What is deemed important by Kishwar's feminism is not the class background of the women who are classified as subjects 'in their own right', but rather the extent to which they have rejected 'the West'. Therefore, the nationalist-feminist resolution of the problem of women's autonomy is conditional on the absence of the West. This discussion, however, is not intended to divide feminism along ethnic or geographic lines as 'Indian' or 'Western'. This would be reproducing the very categories and divisions (West-non-West) I seek to unravel. The nationalist problematic is shared by some 'Western' scholars as well. For example, Meredith Borthwick's study of middle-class Bengali women from 1895-1905 is part of Kishwar's, not Omvedt's, variety of feminism. This alignment is evident both in the contradictions which emerge in her conclusion, and the way she goes about resolving them. The central conflict is that while the notion of women as subjects of their own history runs throughout her study, 'in the final analysis, the bhadramahila were not in a position to transform their lives according to their own needs and wishes'.57 This contradiction is resolved through the adoption of a nationalist solution: by equating modernity (i.e. Westernization) with this

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lack of sovereignty. The bhadramahila were acting out the history of male social reformers ('They accepted the value system of the dominant male group'58) by embracing the 'modern' and representing new values of 'cleanliness, orderliness, thrift, responsibility, intelligence, and a moderate interest in and knowledge of the public world of men'.59 A peculiar kind of subjecthood, however, is bestowed on them through emphasizing the way they 'harmonized' or 'synthesized' the modern and traditional. They become 'autonomous' by accepting nationalism and resisting 'the West'. 'They implicitly resisted simple Westernization and attempted to harmonize what they valued in society with what they saw as worthy of imitation in the ways of Victorian women'.60 It is this resistance to 'simple Westernization' that makes the bhadramahila the subject of their own history, according to Borthwick. Conversely, the limit or restriction to the bhadramahila's status as 'autonomous' is in the implicit nature of this resistance. This raises another point about the problem of women, subjecthood and history. Resistance, for it to equal full autonomy or sovereignty, must be active and explicit. Hence, the apology that even though 'the bhadramahila perceived that women were subject to social oppression', 'they did not react to this awareness by what we would now describe as group militancy'.61 Activity thus has come to be a further necessary condition for women to qualify as subjects. In fact the discourse is beginning to censor the very notion of the non-active woman. The portrait of the veiled, submissive Indian woman, 'beaten down and subjugated by the arranged marriage system—a woman ruled by the wishes of her family—a woman not able to assert her own ambitions and desires . . .' is increasingly viewed as a fiction, as a figment of racist imaginings stemming from an 'ideology of passivity, created as a means of subjugation by colonialists'.62 So the current rendering of 'the Indian woman' by nationalist feminists has the following features. Firstly, for women to be subjects in their own right, the non-West must be literally present. In Kishwar and Borthwick this presence can be found in both elite and non-elite women because it is represented by a nationalist resistance to the West, either in the form of its complete or partial (hence harmonizing East and West) rejection. Secondly, the subject must be the active participant in the making of her own history, not the passive recipient of someone else's. Thus the high profile given to women's movements in studies of Third World women. In nationalist-feminism, these movements do not have to be specifically feminist.63 Involvement in the nationalist struggle can be seen as suitable qualification for subjecthood.64 Non-nationalist feminism, despite considerable overlap, constitutes the female subject in a different way. The portrait of Indian women drawn by feminists such as Omvedt is the militant tribal activist breaking through police lines in the forefront of marches, or the toiling woman, marching

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through villages, singing and shouting about 'wife beating, dowry, rape, as well as economic and tribal oppression'.65 Within a non-nationalist perspective, elite or middle class women are denied any independent or autonomous role in history. The West is not sufficiently purged from this class for the discourse to grant them such a role. Instead, non-elite women are the repositories for what are considered to be the necessary requirements for subjecthood. They signify a complete absence of the West (hence autonomy) and embody activity, particularly tribal women who are consistently described as 'vigorous', 'toiling', 'labouring', 'struggling' or 'fighting'. Omvedt's discussion separates itself from that of Kishwar not in its description of non-elite women but by representing elite women as somehow less 'authentic' Indian women, less 'subjects in their own right' than tribals, peasants, or women from urban slums. Proving the absence of the West, both in the investigating subject and in the subject under investigation is part of feminism's critique of its own imperialism. As the discourse makes 'the West' and 'imperialist' interchangeable, getting rid of one is viewed as a way of discarding the other. The (West/non-West) distinction therefore is placed at the very core of feminist studies of Third World women. Texts centre around questions like 'women in India obviously had different problems from women in the United States but exactly how different were they?'66 The biologism of the 'all women are the same' proposition is rejected. In its place is the sensitivity to cultural specificity and an abhorrence of sameness. Yet while 'difference' and the distinction between the 'West' and the 'non-West' is emphasized as a way of signifying the anti-imperialist intentions of feminism, the idea of 'an international sisterhood' remains intact. The discourse simultaneously asks, 'Is Western feminism yet another form of imperialism dressed up in radical clothes?', and hails the creation of 'an international movement among women'.67 So despite the abhorrence of sameness reflected in Kishwar's Sita or Omvedt's tribals, feminism still maintains that there is a universal sisterhood where women, regardless of culture, have something in common. This pattern is illustrated in Miranda Davies' Preface to Third World: Second Sex. This book is a compilation of interviews and articles by women from the Third World. The voices speaking here are very diverse. They belong to women from countries as different as Oman, Bolivia, India, Mauritius and Zimbabwe. These women share no one single approach to women's liberation, but together they all show the revolutionary emergence of a new feminist consciousness amongst women in the Third World . . . Whether at home, in the street, in the workplace or fighting in a guerrilla army, we all experience sexism in our daily lives. By revealing the deep-rooted

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similarities, as well as some of the many differences between women's struggles in the West and in the Third World, the following collection aims to help build some of the links needed for the development of women's liberation on a truly international scale.68 I quote this extract at length, to show how difference and sameness interconnect in the discourse. Firstly, difference is not situated in the women themselves but rather in the countries from which the women speak (Oman, Bolivia, Zimbabwe, etc.). As the discussion runs, it is the experience of culture that makes for the diversity in voices. This different experience may be identified as 'being directly involved in an armed struggle',69 attending a certain type of college ('Indian college students are so different from Western ones'70) or simply by a particular setting, 'a cattle field in Kenya or a tea bush in Sri Lanka', for example.71 The contemporary feminist discourse stresses such difference and places women, with great care, in a specific cultural environment; not to do so would foster charges of imperialism. Yet, despite this emphasis on differences between women, widely differing experiences do not, as might be expected, produce contradictory feminisms. Rather, the opposite occurs and while as the extract argues no 'one single approach to women's liberation is adopted', together these diverse voices 'all show the revolutionary emergence of a new feminist consciousness amongst women in the Third World'. This position is crystallized in a recent edition of Feminist Review entitled 'Many Voices: One Chant'.72 Hailing the prospect of a 'universal sisterhood' seems to be the end product of much feminist research into Third World women, regardless of claims that 'Western feminism is based on a concept of freedom that does not exist in the Third World',73 or conversely that the specific situations that give rise to 'a feminist consciousness in the Third World' will 'be unfamiliar to feminists in the West'.74 No matter how complete the difference may be between cultures, the women themselves remain the same. What unites women, then, must be something beyond culture. So cultures can be different; women cannot. Sameness, or what links women to each other, is the 'experience of being a woman', according to the discourse, because it is the same despite differences in culture. Cultural (i.e. historical) differences are irrelevant to any understanding of this 'experience', which is thereby situated in something universal to all human cultures and beyond the pale of history. The concept of a 'universal sisterhood' or 'women's liberation on a truly international scale'75 is based on an essentialist notion of womanness beyond history, nation and class. And what is this womanness if it is not constituted by woman's experience of her biology, or nature? Take these examples from Huston. She writes, 'We were simply women talking together. In a cattle field in Kenya, beside a

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tea bush in Sri Lanka or sheltered from the sun in a palm-roofed hut in the Sudan. . . .'76 Later she expresses surprise at the 'striking commonality' between women in different cultural settings, 'whether they were educated, literate, urban or rural'.77 Obviously the discourse is not so crude as to suggest that it is only the possession of a woman's body that creates this 'commonality' between women, thus dissolving vast cultural, economic and geographic boundaries into 'we were simply women talking together'. Rather, experience is identified as the factor producing these common links. Whether this 'experience of being a woman' is described in terms of sharing 'the most basic values' or being treated in a sexist fashion,78 the fact remains that the discourse places this type of experience at the conjunction of Nature and Culture, and in so doing undoes what has been a major project for twentieth-century feminism. Interestingly, this placement occurs even in texts which attempt to transcend the biological location of woman. Examine Robin Morgan's comments, for example, when she writes: 'Nor is there anything mystical or biologically deterministic about this commonality [between women]. It is the result of a common condition which, despite variations in degree, is experienced by all human beings who are born female.'79 Female 'experience' and being 'born female' are collapsed in this discourse. Note the development of her argument countering charges of biologism: 'Rape, after all, is an omnipresent terror to all women of any class, race or caste. Battery is a nightmare of emotional and physical pain no matter who the victim. Labor and childbirth feel the same to any woman.'80 Suffice it here to say that this extract goes a step further in absolutely denying the role of culture in creating ideas of childbirth, notions of pain, technologies for dealing with pain or what is classified as violence, let alone what constitutes the category 'woman'. Her words sit very uneasily with second-wave feminism's struggle in the West to prove that 'biology is not destiny'. Much cross-cultural research has attempted to show that on the basis of biology 'each culture elaborates an entire configuration of values, attitudes and expectation'.81 What 'woman' is seen to be by a particular culture, depends on a cultural definition of woman, not simply on some primal experience of certain universal biological facts. For this to be ignored in feminist studies of Third World women, and for the sign 'woman' to be taken as a biological-experiential given, representing much more Nature than Culture, is not only to undermine what is at the heart of the feminist problematic but to yet again reproduce an Orientalist perspective of nonWestern cultures. Perhaps this is better argued in the form of an equation. According to this discourse: DIFFERENCE = EXPERIENCE SAMENESS

OF THE NON-WEST OF THE BIOLOGICAL

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Axioms of imperialism cross this equation in two ways.82 Firstly, it would be unacceptable to align 'Woman' and 'Nature' if First World women were the object of study. In studies of the Third World, such a connection goes unnoticed. Both this connection and its invisibility stem from a tradition of power and domination over the object being represented. Secondly, regardless of whether other cultures are classified along geographic, economic or ethnic lines as India, the East, the Third World, the non-Western world, they are consistently represented as essentially different from that to which they are constantly compared: the West. It is the construction of a non-West along essentialist lines that marks feminism as Orientalist; the Orient being essentially non-West. In the words of Fanon, they are 'fixed in a dye' as the 'Other'.83 Women in India obviously had different problems from women in the United States', writes Omvedt.84 It is this obviousness that needs to be exposed, for to define difference in this way as expected and natural is to link feminism and Orientalism. 'Difference', in the etherizing process of feminism, is located in the exclusion of 'the West'. And it is the 'not being something' that defines it as immutably different. What is pushed into Nature is the 'non', the category of the Third World, India or 'other' cultures. Accordingly, what makes 'the Third World woman' both different and the same is that she is placed beyond Culture in the experience of Nature. Such an equation subverts the central aims of the discourse posing it, thus reflecting an unresolved problem within feminist thought. This is the problem of the relationship between history and the question of women's liberation and the hence uncertain epistemological status of the category 'woman's experience' that informs feminist debate. The 'never said' What is 'not said' in the feminist discussion of Third World women ensures that contingent utterance has the status of unconditional truth. The 'never said' enables certain categories to be produced which appear self-evident and beyond question. Feminism, to convincingly portray itself as universal, relies on premises which are taken as givens, above challenge. It is validated as much by what it does not say as by what it actually says. The notion of an 'international sisterhood' is founded on the proposition that a woman's experience is true—'experience' being treated as an objective category in the discourse—and that women can learn from the experience of women in other cultures because in some ways, 'they' are better/stronger /more militant than 'us'. However, the questions not asked are: what constitutes 'experience' in the discourse and how do some subjects of feminist research come to be unqualifiedly valorized? Contemporary feminist studies of Third World women emphasize the directions or the 'day to dayness' of the experiences of the women they 1230

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represent. The discourse attempts to offer 'glimpses of the vast, complex and unplumbed reality of the day to day struggles of millions of ordinary women in India',85 to present the 'everyday reality experience by Indian Muslim women'86 or to capture 'the direct experiences of women activists from the Third World'.87 In ascribing value to the ordinary, feminism is inverting the traditional patriarchal view that the day to day activities of women are trivial. It is a reaction against discourses which concentrate on 'images of women' over what women actually do.88 This rebellious inversion is crystallized in the feminist motto of the seventies, 'the personal is political'. While this position has become increasingly sophisticated as second-wave feminism has developed,89 it is still the case that if something is recorded as a direct experience it is automatically given the status of 'objective', scientific truth. This is particularly evident in feminist studies of Third World women where the category of 'experience' has not been challenged. Even when the discourse reproaches itself for its own imperialism, the prestige of 'experience' remains unquestioned. Experience is seen to be something concrete, quantifiable ('women have had half of the world's collective experience'90) and objective; a pure state, on which the validity of a feminist analysis rests. What then constitutes 'experience' in the discourse? Despite its apparent simplicity, 'experience' in studies of Third World women is not a simple construct. Three different types of experience interlock to form what is designated as 'the experience of being a woman'. Firstly, there is the experience of the subjects under investigation. Secondly, there is the experience of the investigating subject, the woman conducting the research, the narrator of the texts. Thirdly there is the experience of the hypothesized woman reader, an integral part of the textual construction. Feminism considers all aspects of a woman's experience to be important. Nevertheless, what is identified as an 'experience' conforms to a particular pattern. It is not just any event or happening in a woman's life that earns the status of an experience in feminist utterance. A process of selection occurs (certain types of events are included and others excluded) despite the discourse's claim to simply record the direct experiences of women. This pattern of inclusion and exclusion in feminism is not created by 'the experience itself, but by what a particular experience represents. Take the subject under investigation, a woman going to fetch water at the well, for example. Such an event is deemed 'an experience' only because of what it signifies. If it can be made to demonstrate the hardship of a woman's lot, the extent to which she is oppressed or her strength in adversity, then it is included. An event not fulfilling these criteria simply would not be recorded, or if mentioned would be passed off as a false experience. Note the analysis that follows Janabai 'speaking for herself in 'Sexual Class in India'.

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FEMINISMS AND GENDER ANALYSIS She relies on myth and religious doctrine to explain the events of her life. It was to her undeniably, the snake who evicted them from the village rather than the probable poverty of a small peasant. And her concept of their son as the reincarnation of the paternal head of the feudal family, clearly indicates the extent to which she depends on that framework for her own behaviour . . . Thus Janabai unselfconsciously acts out a definite role in the social mechanism which represses women. Thoroughly repressed herself, she has not the ability to think or act otherwise.91 In this case, the discourse contradicts its position on the importance of all aspects of a woman's experience; some obviously are more important than others. Why, when Janabai says her family left the village because of the retribution of an angry snake, is the experience not ranked as being as true as Shevanti's comments that 'a woman must work outside the home, not only because it is necessary to provide extra income, but also to avoid being dependent on anyone else'?92 Clearly there is no such thing as the 'experience-in-itself or the pure, direct experience without a subject denning it as such. Moreover, the experiencing subject, as depicted in these texts, often involves the investigating subject as well. Great weight is placed on 'experience' in Manushi. However, in 1982 a new editorial policy was developed in response to readers' comments about the journal's emphasis on 'reports of oppression, exploitation and violence against women'.93 A decision was made to include other kinds of women's 'experience', so, first the experience of ordinary women who have, in their own varied ways, combated oppression and moved towards achieving a modicum of independence and self-expression. Second the experience of exceptional women who have been able to make a noteworthy contribution in their chosen fields, thereby exposing the lie that women are innately inferior to men .. ,94 The impression is thus created that all types of women's experience will be covered in the journal. However, the attendant process of selection, excluding some events as experiences (tenderness between husbands and wives), while privileging others, is hidden. For example, for an event to become an 'experience', it must be combined with a vital ingredient, consciousness,95 and be identified by the authenticity or directness of its 'voice'. Yet this process is not unmediated. The investigating subject (in this case Manushi) is implicated in it by identifying what is 'consciousness', an 'authentic voice' or an 'ordinary woman'. It is not the case that

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Manushi simply has to reveal the direct experiences of the subjects under investigation. For 'experience' is a contingent category, formed and reconstituted by a continuous process of exclusion. It is not a given, something that is 'out there' for people to 'have'; it is created and has a history. Clearly, it would appear that what comes to be designated as 'experience' (and what is identified as a 'voice') is often that which most closely resembles the thought-world of the investigating subject. S/he is the lynch-pin, holding together two levels of the category. The person conducting the research (in these cases a woman) usually identifies strongly with the subjects under investigation even to the extent of dressing like them, and living as they do. The investigating subject goes to great lengths in the text to establish her credentials, or 'right', to conduct the research. She has access to the culture most others would lack, therefore, the record of her experiences must be true and reliable. This credibility is often demonstrated by the hardship and sacrifice involved in conducting the research. 'I sat endless hours on cowdung plastered floors', writes Jacobson, 'and plodded through numerous rice paddies and blazing hot wheat fields. I joined villagers in short pilgrimages, saw babies being born . . .', etc.96 Her list is one which is not unfamiliar in the discourse. Substantiating the reliability of the first person narrator is a literary convention usually confined to realist fiction. In feminist studies of Third World women, the narrator appeals to the 'authority of experience' to establish her qualifications. While that experience may involve identifying with her subject, Indian women, what constitutes 'experience' for her is very different from what she sees 'experience' as being for them. The experience of the investigating subject is present in the texts as positive. The research is portrayed as a journey of discovery, which, while having its ups and downs, is full of surprises. 'I tried to capture the turmoil and exhilaration of that period', Omvedt writes.97 The narrator often projects herself as being naive (at the same time demonstrating her suitability for the task) or as having a particular set of assumptions which are all challenged during the research.98 The research becomes a feminist odyssey, a revelation either that women do not passively accept the institution of purdah, or that 'women are most militant',99 or better still that there is a basis for a 'genuinely international sisterhood'.100 The positive nature of these experiences stands in marked contrast to the way the 'lives and struggles of their [Indian] sisters' are treated in the texts.101 'Suffering' and 'struggle' unrelentingly characterize what the discourse designates as 'experience' for them. Repeatedly, stories are told about wife-beating, rape, economic exploitation and dowry deaths. Once these particular textual portraits102 are given the status of objective, unmediated 'experience', and the process and politics of textual production overlooked, their truth is guaranteed. Gail Omvedt writes, 'International Women's Year brought, for me, a wealth of encounters with

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Indian women of all classes, and turned my research into an experience with Indian women . . .'103 The unquestionables operate precisely at this point, where research is transformed into 'an experience' that is beyond all critical interrogation. It is here, when experience is invoked as a given, that censorship mechanisms limiting what can be said come into being. The way 'experience' is produced in the texts as an unconstructed, natural thing that simply happens or occurs, makes the discourse blind to certain possibilities. Gail Omvedt's reporting of her 'experiences' in Bori Arab illustrates this point. After having lunch, she wanders outside to find 'the women and children listening to some worker and peasant songs recorded on [her] tape recorder'. After further discussion, she visits the school. Note her comments which end the chapter entitled 'Women have to do double work: Encounter with an Agricultural Labourer'. I face a class of young girls and boys, many from poor peasant and agricultural labourer, and Dalit families. The questions they ask show their underlying concerns. Is there inflation in America? What about racism? Finally a boy from the back of the room who was one of those sitting around the edge of the women's meeting, rises to plead, 'Play the songs.' He means the revolutionary music I have on my tapes. I try to catch Bhimrao's eye: is it alright, here in the school? He nods, he seems to think it's a good idea. And so, with some trepidation, in the schoolroom of a village dominated by seven rich landlords where the poor have not found any strength of organization but only 'endless sorrows', I play a song of revolt, written by a male agricultural labourer from another district and sung by another woman labourer: The blazing torch in our hands, The red sun in the east, With the gleaming scythe of unity We will cut the throats of the rich!104 This extract functions in several ways. It sets itself up as a simple account of 'what happened' in Bori Arab. A non-complicit reading, however, reveals the careful selection process involved in the way these events are presented as information. The story, like any narrative, makes sense because of what it excludes. It operates by channelling the reader into a single interpretation of the 'experience' and closing off the text to a whole range of interpretations which may or may not be equally valid. The characters in this story are introduced in the opening sentence; they are not the children from the seven rich landlords. The protagonist is the narrator who orchestrates the events, answers questions and plays the

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songs. It is her feelings of apprehension and exhilaration that the reader follows. Because she tells us that these children from poor peasant or Dalit families have an underlying concern about inflation in America,105 the information does not seem incongruous. She describes the boy's request for songs from the tape recorder as a 'plea', creating the impression that there has been awakened in him 'a revolutionary spirit'. This perception is reinforced by the quick pace of the last few sentences, culminating in the cry 'We will cut the throats of the rich!' The textual fabrication is such that this revolutionary cry is no longer linked with the tape recorder but is attached to the poor children in the classroom, particularly the boy who has made the initial request. This call is universalized by the reference to the 'male agricultural labourer from another district' who wrote the song and the 'woman labourer' who sang it. The desire for revolution is made to cross region and gender. The story is organized so that it is read in a specific way. Why, for example, has Omvedt chosen to finish on the last line of what may be the first verse of the song or perhaps its chorus? Why hasn't the whole song been included? The answer would be that she wants her 'experience' to be read as a sign that the spirit of revolt is smouldering away in the children of the poor. This may be the case but equally it is a figure woven by the discourse.106 Just because 'what happened' in the school is presented as her experience, what she saw with her own eyes, does not make it incontrovertibly true and objective. Perhaps the boy asked to hear the songs for reasons unknown to us. Perhaps the students do not have an underlying concern with inflation in America but asked questions prompted by other thoughts. Perhaps not. Nevertheless, the discourse censors such contingencies to produce the single interpretation required by an ideological system. Implicit in the textual construction of 'experience' is a hypothesized complicit woman reader. The discourse appeals to this woman's 'experience' as the ultimate gauge for the validity of what it claims. Of all the 'truth-effects' operating in the discourse, this is supposed to provide the absolute seal of the accuracy and Tightness of the feminist project. The woman reader is often insinuated in the 'we' of the texts. For example, when Davies observes, 'We all experience sexism in our daily lives',107 she does not have a male reader in mind, nor does Omvedt when she defines her aim as giving 'women in other parts of the world some understanding' of woman in India.108 The assumption is that one's womanness automatically makes it easy as a reader to identify with the experiences of the women represented in the texts. This position has been challenged by some feminist literary critics who view reading as 'a learned activity, which like many other learned interpretive strategies in our society is inevitably sex-coded and gender-inflected'.m It is therefore possible for a woman to read as a man, and vice versa. Unfortunately this is not how reading is seen in feminist studies of Third World women. In fact, the premise that

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the Western woman reader from an intellectual elite can identify with the suffering of a bidi roller in Calcutta or an adivasi woman making cow-pats in Maharashtra is perhaps the most highly problematic assumption on which the call for an international sisterhood is based. As Jonathan Culler points out, 'to ask a woman to read as a woman is in fact a double or divided request. It appeals to the condition of being a woman as if it were a given and simultaneously urges that this condition be created or achieved.'110 Without wishing to over-schematize the way the category of experience functions in the discourse, it is possible to simplify it in point form. 1 2 3

Experience of the subject under investigation = an event which illustrates feminist concerns (i.e. 'suffering', 'struggle'). Experience of the investigating subject = positive and revelatory. Experience of the hypothesized woman reader = identification.

It is interesting that the woman reader is urged not to identify with the investigating subject—with whom it could be assumed that she shared the same language and culture if not similar 'experiences'—but instead is directed to the subject under investigation, with whom she shares only her womanness. The woman reader is positioned alongside the investigator, but is asked to identify with those being investigated. The discourse creates the illusion that (1) and (3) are in a direct relationship and that if (2) is there at all, it is simply to reveal, like a window, the direct experiences of (1). This impression is maintained despite the language of feminist individualism used to described the investigator's 'extraordinary experiences', where the T of the texts is simultaneously emphasized and de-emphasized. What the manifest discourse does not disclose is that in many respects the T is the central subject of the texts. What sustains the impression that the T is invisible is a range of textual conventions already mentioned: the notion of women speaking for themselves; journalistic techniques designed to make the reader feel she is really there; hiding the retrospectivity of the narrative; the idea that the investigator was invited to do the research ('this is a book forced on me by the women themselves'111) and the unquestioned status of 'experience' in the discourse. If the 'not said'—that experience is a contingent, subjective, textually-woven fiction—is said, then the belief that feminist concerns are international contradicts the very standards the discourse itself sets. Only if 'experience' as a 'never said' is taken to be a series of actual observations and facts beyond question can feminism claim to be universal. Adulatory terms are often used to describe particular groups feminist research investigates. Tribal or peasant women are hailed for their strength, resistance or militancy, and the cultures these groups inhabit are portrayed as unusual and exotic. Vivid details are provided on how people

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FICTIONS

dress ('the women in colourful red, green and blue saris'112) as well as the setting for the investigator's experience (the heat, smell, tastes and physical environment), the West being a constant point of comparison; the norm by which the exceptional is judged. In the manifest discourse, the West (or the West within) is described as commonplace, somehow less than the culture being represented. This is a deliberate inversion of the Orientalist perspective on the inferiority of the East; an attempt to dissociate feminism from such discourses. India, the Third World, or tribal women on the other hand, are seen as important because they offer vital insights and answers not to be found in the West or the Westernized modernist. However, this valorization rarely includes all women or all Indian women, nor does it romanticize everything about 'the Other'. What is 'not-said' is that behind the unqualified commendation of any particular group lies a whole system of values which, in the final analysis, serves to divide women, thereby undercutting the discourse's claim for a universal sisterhood. One stage in the history of marxist thought (and not in Marx's own thought) now mirrored in feminism was the quest for the most oppressed. The search is for the model example of all the ideology stands for. The more oppressed, the 'truer' the subject. Omvedt finds her target in some of the tribal groups she 'encounters', celebrating, in one instance, the fact that a particular woman with whom she is fascinated comes from one of India's 'most oppressed sections'.113 According to this formula, mapped in the cosmology of the Left, the poorer or the most oppressed equals the more militant.114 It would seem that a hierarchy can exist within feminism which is based more on class than gender and which corresponds to a descending scale of 'realness' from the worst to the least oppressed. The more 'other' some women appear, the more elevated they become. Note the description of middle-class women as 'sheltered children of the rich', and as being 'like caged birds, excited and fluttering, running around the house eager to talk'.115 These ornithographic metaphors signifying frivolity and femininity are in marked contrast to the robust, solid, vigorous images of tribal women. 'They' are sturdy, and independent whereas middle-class women are described in slightly derisive tones as 'wives of government clerks who were members of a local "women's club" '.116 For example, 'the city girls' voices are cracking with the cold, but Tanubai and the other village singers shrug it off ... Her singing style itself, a vigorous, belting ballad style, is for me more reminiscent of the black musical tradition in the U.S. than any other Indian music I have heard.'117 Tribal women are always 'tall, and magnificently striking'.118 Their culture is typified as being more egalitarian and less puritanical than Hindu and Muslim culture. The discourse claims that if they had been left in their 'pure state' they would have a subsistence mode of production, with no territory, no vertical stratification, a symmetrical division of labour and a complete absence of poverty.119 They are described as more 'free spirited' and 'collective'.120

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There is much of the 'noble savage' in such laudatory characterizations. The downgrading of middle-class women (who are always there for an unfavourable comparison) is in stark contrast to the idea of a universal sisterhood. The particulars of the admiration of the investigating subject very much depend on the feminism from which she speaks. Omvedt's marxist feminism shapes the system of values she employs to see some as unquestionably good and others bad. Mody and Mhatre, however, use a liberal framework (in spite of the radical feminist sounding title of the article) as the basis for their valorization of the 'modern'. Take Janabai again as an example. She has all the right credentials, crushing poverty, infant deaths, beatings by her husband, yet she is dismissed as superstitious, feudal and contributing to the oppression of women. Shevanti, on the other hand, who is much better-off economically and socially, is praised in glowing terms. 'If Janabai is part of the problem', they write, 'Shevanti is part of the solution'. She is a remarkably independent and outspoken young woman and has waged a consistent struggle in her own life against the forces oppressing her . . . Shevanti sees education and knowledge of vocational skills for woman not just as an economic necessity but as a prerequisite to an independent life. She seems to be able to do without marriage as necessary for establishing her identity as an individual.. ,121 She is made positive in the discourse because she has embraced bourgeois, liberal values: education and individualism. The extract even goes on to mention her desire for greater privacy in the Bombay slum where she lives. What is important in determining whether something is given the status of being 'unquestionably good' in the discourse is whether what the subject signifies corresponds to the semiotic system of the interviewer. The constant then in the discursive pattern of organization has little to do with Indian women or other such subjects under investigation. Once again, what is valued as real is that which most closely reflects the thoughtworld of the researcher. The arbitrary nature of the sign makes it possible for tribal women, for example, to stand for anything: Utopian natural democracy, sexual freedom or devastating oppression. However, it is not what women do that is important, or who they happen to be, but what their actions mean in a particular context. The constructed meanings vary. Indian women, at the moment, stand for something positive in the contemporary feminist discourse, the Third World Woman being a particularly 'hallowed signified'.122 In Katherine Mayo's day Indian women were viewed as a scale by which Indian civilization was measured. Yet these two perspectives are generated from the same discourse; the discourse of Orientalism. Despite reversing the Orientalist

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problematic the terms of inferiority and superiority are still meted out by those observing the culture; in denning what is good and bad in Indian society it is their cultural hegemony that is maintained. Valorization as a strategy aimed at dissociating feminism from the imperialist West does not work. Once the language of 'more than', 'less than', 'better than', 'worse than' comes into play, with only one side making the rules, the relationship between knowledge and power becomes more explicit. This can and has been interpreted as yet another form of racism. At the heart of all the studies discussed in this critique is a belief that they serve the purpose of fostering mutual understanding between women of the world. This is expressed as shedding new light on the question of the position of women in India,123 of showing 'women from many countries stitching together a truly international feminist consensus based on their experiences in many different cultures',124 or as building 'a genuine international sisterhood, on the basis of mutual understanding'.125 But while this international sisterhood needs to be created ('the following collection aims to build some of the links needed for the development of women's liberation on a truly international scale'126) by connecting through discourse the 'diversity of women's experience', it is also viewed as something that already exists in the 'deep-rooted similarities'127 between women's experience, and which is simply waiting to be revealed. Women can, feminism asserts, learn from the variation and diversity of the lives of women in other cultures, but in the interplay between sameness and difference in studies of Third World women there is only sameness. The experiences of Indian women are shown to be just like the experiences of all women in the world.128 Despite the acknowledgement of minor variations, such as the way women dress, cook their food, etc., the essence of the 'experience of being a woman' is changeless. The process of communicating these experiences, then, becomes one of endless repetition. There can be no 'new light' shed on the question of women in India. If it is accepted that the currency of experience retains its value because it circulates the same experience, the question of whose experience it is and who gains from learning about it must be asked. The texts make sense because they are filled with a series of reference points from Western (or Westernized) culture: 'The international debate on housework which was initiated by the women's movement';129 Berkeley and the 'big years' of student unrest;130 Girl Scout camps;131 the civil rights movement; 'rather a kind of combination of rally and encounter group';132 and 'more and more, sexuality is becoming a leading issue amongst Third World women'.1" Paradoxically, the Other is created from the familiar landscape of the investigating subject's imaginative geography. Even if the portraits of tribal women are generated by Indian feminists, the same rules are followed and the etherizing process applies.

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The fact that all women are placed under a feminist umbrella while the focus is on women with least access to a shared feminist vocabulary (tribal women and Indian peasants for example) further complicates problems inherent in universalist feminist notions. The claim that women throughout the world benefit from the sharing of their experiences is severely diminished by the manifest discourse's definition of what is shared and between whom. The question of who benefits becomes rhetorical when the never-said is said. This problematic relationship between knowledge and power in the discourse is summed up in Kaminibai's comments on Omvedt's research. Their inclusion in We Will Smash This Prison creates a moment of self-criticism in the text. She'll write something worth reading and writing, but it will be in thin, small letters and we won't be able to read it, not at all, there will be no profit or loss to us. (General laughter). Is this true of false bai, what I am saying to you? Understand, we will show our difficulties to you, you send from there some paper, and some educated person, some children, will read to us, and we know nothing, whatever they tell us or explain to us we will understand. If we even have the time.134 In challenging the hierarchy of categories that is recycled in feminist texts on Third World women, particularly the unquestioned status of 'experience', I have touched on a problem which is at the heart of the feminist debate. This is the problem of the uneasy relationship between feminism and history. While marxism historicizes even the origins of oppression, feminism is as yet undecided on whether women's oppression can be seen to have an historical origin. Because of this indecision, the 'universals' in feminism have an uncertain epistemological status. One project of this essay has been to highlight the inconsistencies in the feminist discourse that arise from this uncertainty. I am not arguing that these inconsistencies can be ironed out by an act of will. Feminism without a universal concept of itself and its adversary would lack the premise on which a feminist politics is based. Such a premise prevents women's protests from dissolving into individual, fragmented and empirical acts. I therefore recognize the immediate 'political' need for universals. Yet, a 'universal' that has not been sufficiently thought out creates problems for the development of feminist theory. As Alice Jardine has said, capturing the feminist dilemma on this point, to universalize 'woman' as beyond culture is to return to anatomical definitions of sexual identity, but to see woman solely as a cultural construction, as a metaphor 'means risking once again the absence of women as subjects . . ,'135 A theoretical orthodoxy which could, in the short run, inform and

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support a feminist politics is no resolution to the problem that Jardine mentions. It may well be a political choice for us to accept at a theoretical level the 'undecidable' nature of the relationship between women's oppression and history. Yet, as I have argued here, the risk in such a choice is that we are then unable to purge our language of axioms of imperialism. Another theoretical choice available is to force the tension between feminist thought and 'history' in search of an approach that can critically engage within itself all tendencies to create closures at the same time as it fights orthodoxies outside.136 Notes \ Editor's Note. This is a revised version of the author's paper presented at the Second Subaltern Studies Conference in Calcutta (January 1986). We publish it together with a comment contributed by Dr Susie Tharu at our request. It is our hope that the debate which took place at the conference on the issues raised in the paper may continue in the pages of Subaltern Studies and elsewhere. The concurrence of the Editorial Team with the views expressed by Stephens or Tharu may not be presumed. 2 Jean Bethke Elshtain, 'Feminist Discourse and its Discontents: Language, Power and Meaning', Signs, vol. 7, no. 3,1982, p. 612. 3 Miranda Davies (ed.), Third World, Second Sex: Women's Struggles and National Liberation (London, 1978), p. i. 4 Doranne Jacobson, 'Studying the Changing Roles of Women in Rural India', Signs, vol. 8, no. 1,1982, p. 137. 5 Gail Omvedt, We Will Smash This Prison: Indian Women in Struggle (London, 1980), p. 4. 6 Ibid., p. 5. 7 For a more detailed analysis of the texts under scrutiny see my MA thesis 'Feminist Fictions', University of Melbourne, 1985. 8 The point is not to prove that these portraits are unreal or less real than they claim to be. Such an exercise would involve the contraposition of evidence and counter-evidence. 9 This overlap can also be observed in common institutional and cultural practices, Women in Asia conferences or titles of feminist texts advertised in Manushi for example. 10 See Helen Roberts (ed.), Doing Feminist Research (London, 1981), p. 98. 11 Davies, p. i. 12 Perdita Huston, Third World Women Speak Out (New York, 1979), p. 12. 13 Omvedt, p. 155. 14 Patricia Jeffery, Frogs in a Well: Indian Women in Purdah (London, 1979), p. 1. 15 E. S. Kessler, Women: An Anthropological View (New York, 1976), p. 8. 16 N. Murray, 'Book Review', Race and Class, vol. xxv, no. 3, Winter 1984, p. 91. 17 See Omvedt's description of Bori Arab, p. 9; and Jeffery's Old Delhi, p. 7. 18 A similar trend in experimental anthropology has been discussed by G. E. Marcus and D. Cushman, Annual Review of Anthropology, 1982, 1 1, p. 29.

19 Elshtain, p. 605. 20 Eleanor Leacock, 'Women, Development and Anthropological Facts & Fictions', The Politics of Anthropology, ed. G. Huizcr (The Hague, 1979), p. 132.

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FEMINISMS AND GENDER ANALYSIS 21 Huston, p. 12. 22 Editorial statement, 'Third World: The Politics of Being Other', Heresies, vol. 2, no. 4,1979. 23 S. Mody and S. Mhatre, 'Sexual Class in India', B.C.A.S., vol. 7, no. 1,1975. 24 Ibid., p. 50. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 This is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's phrase. 28 Huston, p. 21. 29 Mody and Mhatre, p. 54. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., p. 56. 32 Ibid. 33 Omvedt, p. 155. 34 See M. King Whyte, The Status of Pre-Industrial Societies (New Jersey, 1978), p. 20. 35 Authors' names appear in this discussion to mark certain texts. If in fact they no longer subscribe to the positions outlined here this does not alter the central tenets of the argument. 36 Omvedt, p. 9. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., p. 12 (my emphasis). 39 See Jeffery, p. 9. 40 See Huston, p. 20. 41 Omvedt, p. 1 (my emphasis). 42 I am grateful to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for this insight. 43 Jeffery, p. 30. 44 For examples see Heresies, vol. 2, no. 4, 1981; Frontiers, vol. vii, no. 2, 1983; Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 5, no. 2,1982. 45 Elsie Boulding, Women in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1977), p. 10. 46 V. Amos and P. Parmar, 'Challenging Imperial Feminism', Feminist Review, 17, 1984, p. 6. 47 For examples see Davies, p. viii, and J. Minces, The House of Obedience: Women in Arab Society (London, 1980), p. 13. 48 M. Kishwar and R. Vanita (eds.), In Search of Answers: Indian Women's Voices from Manushi (London, 1984), p. 47. 49 Ibid., p. 46. 50 Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Calcutta, 1964), vol. iii, p. 506. 51 See for example P. Asthana's Women's Movement in India (Delhi, 1974), p. 239. 52 P. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London, 1986). 53 Kishwar, p. 47. 54 J. Matson Everett, Women and Social Change in India (New York, 1979), p.l. 55 Asthana, p. 159. 56 Kishwar, p. 47. 57 Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1894-1905 (New Jersey, 1985), p. 359. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., p. 358. 1242

FEMINIST FICTIONS 60 Ibid., p. 360. 61 Ibid., p. 361. 62 Parita Trivedi, To Deny Our Fullness: Asian Women in the Making of History', Feminist Review, 17,1984, p. 38. 63 See Davies, p. ii. 64 See Borthwick, p. 361. 65 V. Patel, 'Adivasi Women on the Warpath', in Davies, pp. 249-52; see also Omvedt. 66 Omvedt, p. 3. 67 Barbara Alpern Engel, 'Introduction: Feminism and the Non-Western World', Frontiers, vol. vii, no. 2, pp. 1-3. 68 Davies, p. i. 69 Ibid. 70 Omvedt, p. 33. 71 Huston, p. 12. 72 Feminist Review, 17, Autumn, 1984. 73 Belinda Aquino, 'Feminism Across Cultures', Women in Asia Workshop Papers, Monash University, July 1983. 74 Davies, p. i. 75 Ibid. 76 Huston, p. 12. 77 Ibid., p. 115. 78 Davies, p. i. 79 Robin Morgan, Sisterhood is Global (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 4. 80 Ibid., p. 20. 81 P. Hammond and A. Jablow (eds.), Women Cultures of the World (California, 1976), p. 5. 82 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's phrase. 83 F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York, 1976), p. 109. This 'fixing' is not simply textual. 'Authentic' Third World women can be exhibited at conferences in Australia both as curios and to legitimize the projects of First World feminists. 84 Omvedt, p. 3. 85 Kishwar, p. i. 86 Jeffery, p. i. 87 Davies, p. i. 88 See Hammond and Jablow, p. i. 89 See The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. L. Edwards and A. Diamond (Amherst, 1977). 90 M. Mclntosh, "Comments on Tinker's 'A Feminist View of Copenhagen' ", Signs, vol. 6, no. 4,1981, p. 774. 91 Mody and Mhatre, p. 54. 92 Ibid., p. 52. 93 Manushi, 18,1982, p. 2 94 Ibid. 95 Feminism, like marxism, has not quite resolved the problem of 'false consciousness'. 96 Jacobson, p. 133. 97 Omvedt, p. 155. 98 See Jeffery, pp. 2 & 13. 99 Omvedt, p. 2.

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100 Davies, p. i. 101 Omvedt, p. 6. 102 See Manushi or the portraits in M. Mukhopadhyay, Silver Shackles: Women and Development in India (1984). 103 Omvedt, p. 5 (my emphasis). 104 Ibid., p. 20. 105 I have ignored the ambiguity of this statement about 'underlying concerns'. 106 I do not mean a deliberate distortion. 107 Davies, p. i. 108 Omvedt, p. 6. 109 A. Kolodny, quoted in J. Culler's On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism, London, 1983, p. 51. 110 Ibid., p. 49. 111 Jeffery, p. 14. 112 Omvedt, p. 24; see also p. 115. 113 Ibid., p. 73. 114 Ibid., p. 75. 115 Ibid., p. 34. 116 Ibid., p. i (my emphasis). 117 Ibid., p. 72. 118 Ibid., p. 151. 119 Maria Mies, 'Capitalist Development and Subsistence Reproduction: Rural Women in India', B.C.A.S., vol. 12, no. 1,1984, pp. 3-13. 120 Omvedt, p. 93. 121 Mody and Mhatre, p. 54. 122 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives', History and Theory, vol. xxiv, no. 3,1985, p. 247. 123 Jeffery, p. 13. 124 Mclntosh, p. 774. 125 See J. Everett, 'The Upsurge of Women's Activism in India', Frontiers, vol. vii, no. 2, p. 18. 126 Davies, p. i. 127 Ibid., p. i. 128 See Omvedt, p. 50. 129 Mies, p. 3. 130 Omvedt, p. 1. 131 Ibid., p. 93. 132 Ibid., p. 102. 133 Davies, p. v. 134 Omvedt, p. 18. 135 A Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (New York, 1985), p. 37. 136 I would like to particularly thank Dipesh Chakrabarty for his generous intellectual contribution to this paper. The writings and comments of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have also stimulated much of my thinking here. Thanks are extended to Ranajit Guha and Pat Grimshaw for their detailed comments on an earlier draft and to Sandra Zurbo and Rosemary Smith.

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8.5

RESPONSE TO JULIE STEPHENS Susie Tharu From Ranajit Guha (ed.) Subaltern Studies VI: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Oxford University Press, 1989,126-31

One welcomes a study of the politics of representation as one has welcomed feminist critiques of cultural artefacts and Said's magistral Orientalism. However, several problems, many of them evident in Julie Stephens' exercise, attend such an effort, especially when it seeks to analyse a subaltern as against a hegemonic or dominant discourse. 'Feminist Fictions' does make some useful observations and is harmless enough as an initial, if somewhat mechanical, exploration of new-found tools and concepts, but its theoretical formulations are prematurely applied and altogether inadequate. Set up, therefore, as an analysis and judgement of 'contemporary feminist discourse', it is politically irresponsible. Since I have deliberately chosen in these comments to focus on major areas of disagreement, I want also to say that there are major areas of concurrence. I broadly accept the important theoretical ground that the article charts out and I hope in the discussion to extend rather than deny its possibilities. There are many instances where I find it difficult to agree with particular formulations and dissociate myself totally with the tone and the conclusions, but regard the arguments that lead up to them as generally valid. Though the discussion is marred by a tendency to chase, often at the cost of the main theme, down by-lanes to catch a writer out and establish her duplicity or bad faith (e.g. 'Omvedt knows very well it is a village council building when she writes this (she visits it after lunch that day).'), I have little to add to Stephens' powerful demonstration of how much the field remains the institutional site from which some feminist discourses have spoken of Third World women, or indeed how deeply and subtly imbricated with Orientalist assumptions these discourses can be. However, as I said earlier, I have several problems with the article. Let

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me begin with the troubles in the theoretical engine which, despite being new, is belching a great deal of smoke. Stephens invokes the concept of representation/ideology as discursively produced, rejecting, as it were, the notion of ideology as an expression of class interest or representation merely as a reflection of reality. One of the reasons why such an approach seemed a major advance over earlier expressive and totalizing ways of thinking was that coupled with the idea of 'relative autonomy' it opened up the possibility of understanding the ideological as an articulation of complex, sometimes contradictory and unevenly determining practices. As a consequence a theory of struggle within the ideological became possible. In Stephens' analysis, however, the multi-accentuality of the sign, its plurality or overdetermination, is closed off and a kind of 'structural causality', tailormade for caricature, established. For all practical purposes the domain of ideology is reduced to the domain of a monolithically conceived 'dominant ideology'. This is evident in the statement of purpose in which feminism is reduced to a functional support for Orientalism, but more so in the sense her argument exudes of having arrived at an adequate analysis once Omvedt or Kishwar or Jeffery is shown up as 'Orientalist' or 'Nationalist' and labelled as such (Nationalism of course being very simply another face of Orientalism). The labels are no longer 'bourgeois' or 'semi-feudal' but they are labels all the same. Once all practices are conceptualized as buttresses for a given dominant system of representation, the field is rendered inert. The new totality may be Spinozean rather than Hegelian, but notions of contradiction and struggle are as consistently undermined here as they were in the earlier conceptions. Obviously the discourses of our time will constitute our worlds as much as they do our subjectivities. It is not difficult to accept that feminism 'collides or colludes', to use Stephens' somewhat unhappy phrase, with Orientalism—as it obviously will with other contemporary discourses that construct class and gender. But to suggest that that collusion is a total or adequate characterization of what takes place is to let the contestatory nature of feminist or subaltern discourses slip through a theoretical sieve too gross for such fine gold. Stephens' methodology is peculiarly insensitive to the subversions, elaborations, hybridizations, transformations, realignments or reappropriations that do take place within oppositional discourses and must be taken into account by any historically informed analysis. What should have been staged as a mise-en-scene of a struggle is reduced to a narrative that accepts as inevitable, even as it bemoans, the victory of the Great White Patriarch (a personage, by the way, produced and firmly enthroned by Stephens' discourse). Part of the problem arises from a reading of Orientalism itself (not encouraged but not actively discouraged, either, by Said's book) as a self generating, formalist system. Within such an ahistorical, structuralist scheme all specific instances can be explained as an effect of the system's

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general concepts, and historical configurations or events are merely a contigency. Foucault's critique of 'formalization' is too well known now to need much rehearsal. But it does seem imperative that if we (Indians, feminists, etc.) are to use the ideas of Orientalism to analyse subaltern discourses, we should strain against a reading of it as a coercive totalist system and doggedly hold on to a more historicized reading of it as a 'regularity' of discursive practices. The problematic of Orientalism, then, is to be understood not as a pollutant that a discourse must be cleansed of, but as an enabling heuristic device that refines and extends our understanding both of power and of resistance. Stephens does, towards the end of her essay, gesture vaguely in the direction of history as a problem which she sees as lying at the 'heart' of the feminist debate. In contrast to Marxism, she writes, feminism is undecided (fie, ye fickle women!) on whether women's oppression should be regarded as having an historical origin. But might we not do well to lay the essentially teleological question of origins aside, as we also lay aside the 'vantage point of an absolute distance' that makes the idea of origin possible? For only then can we take the heterogeneous history of the struggles that went into making these discourses seriously. Or, to put it in other words, only then can we (if we so desire, of course) illuminate not only the burdens they carry but what is at stake in them. Closely, perhaps inextricably, tied with the need to historicize is the need to place the discourse in a specific socio-political context. No discourse operates in a vacuum, and neither its meaning nor the subjectpositions it constitutes can be simply read off from its discursive strategies. Yet Stephens casually prises texts totally loose of their contexts and recreates them in a subdued global light in which these efforts are reduced either to collaboration or to a colourless flailing in the face of an Implacable Absolute. If Omvedt or Kishwar are to be read in the context in which they wrote, then they have to be read not only in relation to the discourses they inherit and reproduce, but in relation to the other discourses they align or engage with, and the specific rearticulations they are forcing. That on the one hand. What we also have to bear in mind is that a 'context' is not just a context for writing, it is also a context for the reader, who is not merely inscribed monotonically into a text, but is a subject in history, living in a specific socio-political context. In other words, a reader lives in a network of discursive and symbolic systems and always exceeds the subject implied by a specific text because s/he as reader-subject is also placed by a heterogeneity of other cultural systems. Since this question has been debated at length elsewhere I will not pursue it here. Omvedt's feminist reader can refuse the complicity the text demands of her, just as the women in the Calcutta audience that January afternoon so vociferously refused the subjectivity Stephens' text constituted for us.

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The argument is also marred by gross overgeneralization that compounds the totalist effects of its theory. Four collections, all published around the same time, three from London (Davies 1978, Jeffery 1979, Omvedt 1980) and one from New York (Huston 1979) account for over 70 per cent of the footnoted references to the discourses Stephens analyses. Of the six references to Manushi, which is a bi-monthly, appearing alternate months in Hindi and English, five are taken from a selection published in book form by Zed Press, and of those three refer to p. 47, one to p. 46. Perhaps these are the only texts about feminism in India that Stephens has ready access to, even in 1986, located as she is in Melbourne, but it doesn't seem to restrain her from making sweeping claims on almost every page about 'feminism' and about 'non-western' women. Take for example: The institutional site from which feminism speaks of Indian women is "the field" ', or, 'as feminism weaves its picture of non-western women, so it undoes many of its own aims', and in conclusion: 'In challenging the hierarchy of categories that is recycled in feminist texts on Third World women . . .'. And as feminism is featured thus as a homogeneous universal its construct, the Third World woman, equally monolithic (sometimes physically exhibited, we are told, at conferences in Australia), emerges like a figure in an animated cartoon. Stephens does briefly acknowledge the limits of her exercise as she begins, and makes fairly well-defined, moderate claims: 'What is addressed is the overlap between Indian and Western feminist portraits of Indian women'. The overlap, she admits, 'covers only a section of the literature' but the claim that it is 'large and significant enough to warrant discussion' seems to be a sanction for all scruples to be set aside from the next paragraph onwards. Where, and for whom, I want to ask, are these four (or six) books a 'large and significant' body of work? I live in India and have had some aspirations to feminism, but of the four main sources I had read only one. I had occasionally met references to Jeffery and Davies. I came across Huston for the first time in Stephens' paper, which is also where I first heard of Mody and Mhatre. Subsequently I asked friends and searched through the libraries in Hyderabad (which has three universities and two large research libraries) and was able to locate Davies. It had been bought in 1980, but had never been checked out by anybody. Yet every week there are three or four major pieces I cut out from newspapers and journals. The paper bags on my shelves are crammed with cyclostyled articles, circulars, pamphlets, newsletters, souvenirs, appeals, announcements, investigative reports, judgements on cases filed in courts. None of the names that appear and reappear in this collection, except Kishwar perhaps, are those Stephens studies so elaborately. The point I'm trying not so subtly to make is that perhaps Huston and Co. are important. Perhaps they are the texts that help open up the problem of representation in the context of Indian Studies abroad and no doubt some of the ques-

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tions that arise are also of interest here. But to speak of these texts as though they constituted a timeless, universal 'feminism' and determined the limits of 'feminist' struggle the world over is ludicrous. That brings me to what I regard as a major problem with Stephens' piece. As a critic, Stephens herself would appear to have no stakes in the game, no commitments anywhere. The third person mode of the exposition maintains a sterile, 'objective' distance from the discourses it dissects. The opening declaration of purpose identifies neither with feminists, nor with Third World women (the Third World feminist is, for Stephens' text, an unspeakable hybrid) and poses its thesis as a theoretical one: 'The following is an exploration of a textual body of knowledge on Indian women with particular reference to the problem of the unmediated association between representation and reality . . .'. I feel it is the lack of personal investment that allows Stephens to pose the problem of feminism and writing so reductively. There would seem to be little left of Manushi (not that it would worry Manushi) after she has run it down to the ground of her argument, and the study, by the author's own admission, fails to inform a feminist, or an anti-Imperialist politics, a problem, she seems to find no difficulty in declaring, which can be traced back to feminism's own inadequate theory. Within its problematic feminist politics remains a 'dilemma'. A concession is made: T therefore recognize the immediate "political" need for universals', but is hastily withdrawn, for politics is an irritant to this theory: 'Yet a "universal" that has not been sufficiently thought out creates problems for the development of a feminist theory.' Unfortunately the analysis does not merely hover thus, at the edge of the political. It degenerates into a moral stick to beat feminists of all hues. We are accused of duplicity: 'it is surprising to find feminist texts blind to their own image-making and laying claim to . . .' (my italics); of contrivance: 'not to do so would foster charges of imperialism'; of collusion; of not being 'cleansed' of an Orientalist problematic; of being unable to 'purge our language'. Add to this unfortunate (and pre-theoretical) phraseology the dismissiveness of the tone and (if I may coin a phrase) the 'annoyance potential' of Stephens' piece is multiplied. Feminism's use of 'experience' and the slogan 'the personal is the political' is called a 'rebellious inversion'. Madhu Kishwar's discussion of Gandhi is dismissively summarized as: 'However, one's Indianness can be restored and liberation achieved by the rejection of the modernist notion of Sita . . . and the embracing of a nationalist one: Gandhi's Sita.' A large part of the women's movement in India is reduced to an absurdity in: 'The portrait of Indian women drawn by feminists such as Omvedt is the militant tribal activist breaking through police lines in the forefront of marches, or the toiling woman, marching through villages, singing and shouting about "wife beating, dowry, rape as well as economic and tribal oppression".' The

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supercilious distance from which Stephens views and passes judgement on the muddy world in which we feminists live and fight, 'entangled' in nationalism and not 'purged' of the axioms of Imperialism and so on, quite takes one's breath away.

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8.6

U N V E I L I N G ALGERIA Winifred Woodhull From Genders 10 (Spring 1991): 112-31

The national guise In 1964, Germaine Tillion, a French ethnographer known for her extensive work on male-female relations in Algeria, writes that "on the Muslim side of the Mediterranean, the veil . . . constitutes not just a picturesque detail of costume, but a veritable border. On one side of this border, female societies stagnate; on the other side there lives and progresses a national society which, by virtue of this fact, is but half a society."1 To her credit, Tillion painstakingly emphasizes, in the essay in which this sentence appears, the lines of continuity between social practices in the Northern and Southern parts of the Mediterranean in order to counter the view, widespread among her compatriots, that women's oppression in Muslim societies stems uniquely from the supposed barbarity of Islam. As a survivor of the concentration camps, Tillion is keenly aware of Europe's capacity for savagery toward its own people; and as a critical observer of her country's relation to Algeria, she repeatedly calls her readers' attention to the abuses of colonialism, particularly as they have affected women.2 Yet in the sentence quoted above, Tillion poses the question of women and nationalism in contemporary Muslim societies in terms which, today, obstruct, as much as they enable, feminist analysis of the problem. In setting the tradition-bound female sphere in opposition to the modern nation and in underscoring women's exclusion from national life in Muslim societies, Tillion's formulation is typical of much Western scholarship on women in Algeria since the nation achieved independence in 1962. For example, David Gordon states in 1968 that "with the dawn of independence, confused and economically ominous as the atmosphere was, the expectations of and for women were high. But the force of the legacy of centuries was soon to make itself felt. The gap between promise and reality, law and fact, was to widen. . . . While one does, of course, see

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women unveiled in the streets, working in ministries, serving as deputies, working by the side of men in welfare centers and such, the role of even these 'evolved' women is peripheral."3 Nearly twenty years later, Catherine Delcroix poses the problem in similarly dichotomous terms: "It is certain that, in view of the Algerian woman's higher level of education today, her underrepresentation [in political institutions] can only foster frustration and obstruct the evolution of her personal status, and thus, of her emancipation."4 Delcroix contends that responsibility for women's exclusion lies with the traditionalist mentality of the electorate, both female and male, and with "the ideological system itself, which doesn't sufficiently mobilize the female population, for fear of seeing woman transgress her role as guardian of traditional values" (pp. 138-39). Like the veil, then, which Tillion had identified as "a veritable border" internally dividing the national territory, "the ideological system" is said to bar women from meaningful participation in public life. The opposition that structures the arguments of Tillion, Gordon, and Delcroix bears testimony to conditions that prevailed during the Algerian Revolution and at the time of independence, when the emerging nation still held the promise of social equality for women, whose role in the war had been recognized by the National Liberation Front: "Since 1954, there have been many changes. In most households, men are absent—they are in prison, in combat, or dead. Women have learned to get along on their own; they work, they manage their own money, they take care of their children. It is an established fact of the Revolution; there is no turning back. Habits have changed, too . . . I think men understand that it is in their interest to give their wives some responsibilities, and that they will let them take some initiative, even when peace has been restored."5 Unfortunately, the promise of social equality for women faded after 1962, and this failure on the part of the nation that had played an exemplary role in anticolonial struggles provoked bitter disappointment, as Fadela M'rabet's work, for example, makes clear.6 The realignment of women with tradition, and their consequent exclusion from public life, was considered by feminists to be a betrayal both of the women who had fought for the nation's freedom and of the revolution itself. The oppositional relation between women and the nation thus accounted for an important dynamic of the 1960s, one that is undoubtedly still operative in Algeria today and has a place in feminist analyses which must, of course, affirm the possibility of a nation in which women are on an equal footing with men. Since independence, however, a quite different relation has emerged between Algerian women and the nation, one which must be taken into account, I believe, if women's situation in Algeria is to be changed. An articulation of this other relation is already apparent in Gordon's 1968 study, which maintains that "as far as many women are concerned, Algeria lives between two worlds, the modern and the traditional"; remarking on

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the tension between the contradictory aims of the Algerian Revolution— the establishment of a modern socialist nation on the one hand, and, on the other, the restoration of a culture that French colonialism had all but destroyed—Gordon goes on to suggest that "women are the victims of this tension, and their present condition might be seen as its symbol" (p. 83, my emphasis). Here, women are identified less with tradition as such than with Algeria's "betweenness," its traversal by irreconcilable modern and traditionalist currents. Tillion situates women in a similar fashion when she says that they are "the principal victims of the irresistible slippage that draws nomadic populations toward the towns and cities [insofar as it results in stricter practices of seclusion and veiling]. This slippage lies at the source of a conflict, persisting into the present, between two types of structures: the society of citizens, and tribal society. There is conflict between individuals, and within each one of them. . . . In this conflict, the 'noble personality' opposes the promiscuities that the human density of the cities or towns apparently makes inevitable, for the daily contact with nonrelatives will wound and irremediably compromise this 'personality' " (p. 30). As the embodiment of conflicting forces that simultaneously compose and disrupt the nation, women are both the guarantors of national identity—no longer simply as guardians of traditional values, but as symbols that successfully contain the conflicts of the new historical situation—and the supreme threat to that identity, insofar as its endemic instability can be assigned to them. Gordon's and Tillion's analyses imply, further, that women symbolize, and are called upon to stabilize, Algeria's irreducibly contradictory identity in and through their "present condition" of subordination. They are victims, to be sure, but not, as it still appeared in 1968, simply by virtue of their exclusion from a national life that could have included them as equals; rather, women's exclusion increasingly constitutes the Algerian nation after independence, just as their veiling—at once a social practice and a powerful symbol—plays a central role in producing and maintaining both Algeria's difference from its colonial oppressor, and the uneasy coalition of heterogeneous and conflicting interests under a single national banner. Writing in 1987, in the wake of Algerian feminism's twenty-five-year struggle against the forms of exclusion and appropriation that have prevailed under the socialist state, Peter R. Knauss recasts the problem Gordon had broached regarding women's symbolic function in the revolution and its aftermath: "Algerian women became both the revered objects of the collective act of national redemption and the role model for the new nationalist patriarchal family."7 Granted, Knauss's rhetoric often echoes Gordon's in its use of antithetical formulations that oppose traditional Algerian culture to modern nationalism as if each were a self-contained entity, albeit one capable of dressing up in the other's clothes (Knauss 1253

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speaks, for instance, of "the ideology of cultural restoration wrapped in the mantle of radical nationalism," p. xiii). Nonetheless, Knauss's analyses of present-day male-female relations show that the government's legitimation of traditions that disempower women works to "contain the social consequences of significant changes that have taken place in education and employment," and does so (this is how his position differs from Delcroix's) in the name of a "patriarchy which has become part of the warp and woof of Algerian political culture" (pp. 137,141). From 1964 on, successive versions of the Charter of Algiers affirm women's formal political equality with men in the new socialist state, calling for their integration into every level of the work force as well as national political organizations. However, Islamic law, eventually formalized in the state's Family Code of 1984, officially sanctions traditional social practices that persist in the postrevolutionary years, practices that effectively cancel the principles set forth in the Charter. Women remain legal minors, for example, until they marry, whereas men attain adult status at age eighteen whether they are married or not; women's, but not men's, decision to marry must be authorized by a guardian; the dowry system is maintained; married women must obey their husbands, and must have their husbands' permission to gain employment; while men retain the rights of polygamy and repudiation of their wives, it is difficult and costly for women to initiate divorce; and finally, one man is considered equal to two women in matters of inheritance.8 The integration of women into public life is hindered by other factors as well. Despite gains in recent years, large numbers of women continue to be excluded from education, for instance, and birth control is still widely discouraged by both Muslim conservatives and Algerian nationalists, who regard it as "unnatural" interference in the production of children, an important source of national wealth and family honor.9 Moreover, because Islamic fundamentalism has gathered new force in Algeria since the Iranian Revolution, there is at present little possibility of change that would ensure women's equality with men. In fact, in the municipal elections of last June, "the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), swept every major city in the country, capturing all thirty-three municipal councils in the capital city of Algiers, even those councils in well-to-do neighborhoods populated by wealthy businessmen and Cabinet ministers."10 The stunning electoral victory of the fundamentalists bears grim testimony to the growing strength of the claim made nearly a decade ago by President Chadli in response to feminist protests of a 1981 draft of the Family Code: "No place whatever exists for anarchy [that is, feminist opposition to government policy] in a society that is building itself and constructing the foundations for its future."11 Ever since independence, feminists have deplored the cynicism of political regimes that promote oppressive Islamic traditions and dismiss the

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relevance of basic civil rights to "the Arab and Muslim Algerian woman."12 If North African feminists are right to argue that the current political function of misogynistic customs is to forge solidarity among men who are otherwise deeply divided, while maintaining what is perceived as a crucial distinction between Muslim and Western societies, then it is reasonable to say that the oppression of women has become the national necessity in Algeria.13 There has been a vast unemployed or underemployed male population in Algeria for twenty-five years now, as well as ongoing strife between the petty bourgeoisie and the wealthy elite. The events of October 1988 in particular—mass riots to which the government responded with shootings and torture of protesters—mark the degree to which economic divisions are threatening to rend the social fabric in Algeria. The outcome of these violent conflicts was sadly predictable where women's rights are concerned: when the government moved to institute economic reforms, eliminate widespread corruption, and give political parties some freedom to assemble and air their demands, political groups—including the Parti de FAvant-Garde Socialiste (the reincarnation of Algeria's Communist Party)—refused to call for a single change in the Family Code despite pressure from feminists like Fetouma Ouzegane and Khalida Massaoudi.14 In its effort, then, to mute economic conflict between men, and also to forestall violent struggle between fundamentalist groups such as the Muslim Brothers and "progressive" nationalist factions, the state has fixed upon "the Arab and Muslim Algerian woman" as the indispensable unifying force, a symbol whose power is turned against Algerian women (whether Arab or Berber, Muslim or atheist) in the name of national cohesion and stability. The government's exploitation of this symbol to erase differences among women, neutralize women's differences with men, and overcome men's differences with each other finds its mirror image in the fundamentalists' designation of woman as the cause of these differences. In their version, woman embodies fitna,15 the dangerous force that disrupts the community of believers: "To all the social ills from which Algeria is suffering," writes a group of North African intellectuals in January 1990, "the fundamentalists ascribe a single origin: woman. They intend to find a way out of the real crisis the country is experiencing by depriving Algerian women, as a group, of their civil and moral rights."16 Clearly, something more, and something other, than women's exclusion from the nation's political life is at stake in Algeria today. For though women are indeed underrepresented in political institutions, silenced in public debates, and denounced as anarchists whenever they make themselves heard, they are, at the same time, the embodiment of Algerian national life, whether in its "progressive" or regressive guise. In wearing the veil, Algerian women bear responsibility for the nation's conflicts and

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assume the risks of its uncertain identity: in covering over the social and psychic divisions in the Algerian "personality," veiled women present a reassuring aspect; in baring them, they become the objects of fear, hatred, and vitriolic attacks, both verbal and physical. Because the women of Algeria have been fashioned as living symbols of the independent nation, feminist analysis must come to terms with, and begin to dismantle, this aspect of national identity, rather than simply call for women's integration into an order whose very constitution depends on their exclusion as agents who produce social meanings that contest tradition or, more dangerously still, attest the "betweenness" of Algeria, which has been projected onto their veiled bodies. This is not to discount the view, recently put forth by Fatima Mernissi, that "the conservative wave against women in the Muslim world, far from being a regressive trend, is on the contrary a defense mechanism against profound changes in both sex roles and the touchy subject of sexual identity."17 Mernissi shows that unveiled, urban, middle-class women's access to education has put them in competition with the fundamentalist men seeking power, men "mostly from newly urbanized middle- and lowermiddle-class backgrounds" who are calling for the revelling of their new rivals (p. 9). Access to education has in turn "dissolved traditional arrangements of space segregation" since it either places women in the classroom with men or, at the very least, encourages the mixing of men and women in public: "simply to go to school, women have to cross the street!" (p. 11). Finally, access to education has produced what Mernissi calls a "demographic revolution" in Muslim societies by dramatically increasing the number of unmarried adolescent women: "The concept of an adolescent woman, menstruating and unmarried, is so alien to the entire Muslim family system that it is either unimaginable or necessarily linked withfitna (social disorder)" (p. 11). Mernissi's strategy of underscoring the reality of progressive change in Muslim women's lives constitutes an important challenge to the "selfrepresentation" of conservatives who claim that Muslim societies are inherently traditional and that "their women miraculously escape social change and the erosion of time" (p. 8). Still, it seems to me that her flat denial of fundamentalism's regressive character obscures another, equally important reality, namely, fundamentalism's regressive effects in the social field, where it is working to reverse feminist gains by restricting women's mobility and visibility. More and more women are wearing the veil again, whether as an expression of religious faith, a sign of national solidarity, or a means of escaping harassment. In the case of Algeria in particular, it is essential to acknowledge the mobilization of the veiled woman as a national symbol that not only defends against the progressive changes Mernissi points to, but also helps to produce a new social configuration in which "betweenness," rather than "pure" archaism, works to constrain

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women. Because it is the political effectiveness of a representation that is at issue here, the border dividing culture from politics in feminist analysis must be opened. Refashioning national identities The cultural record makes clear that women embody Algeria not only for Algerians in the days since independence, but also for the French colonizers who conquer them militarily, control them administratively, study them as sociologists, ethnographers, and historians, and represent them in both high and popular forms of art and literature. Whether one considers the "colonial perversion" of nineteenth-century army officers who capture Algerian women, sell them at auction, or ship them off to other colonies; the strategies of administrators—including liberals like Maurice Viollette—who institute campaigns for medical assistance and education aimed primarily at women as a means of regulating families; the theories of intellectuals who see the power of Islam as inextricably tied to endogamy and, above all, to women's traditionalism; or the imaginings of writers and painters who exoticize the native population through its figurations of women, it is evident that, for France, Algerian women are key symbols of the colony's cultural identity.18 They are at once the emblem of Algeria's refusal to accept what the Islamicist Octave Depont calls France's "emancipatory seed" and the gateway to penetration: "As long as ... the miserable condition of the native woman is not improved, as long as endogamy causes Muslim society to close in on itself, the door to this society will open to outside influences only with difficulty. We can attempt rapprochement and fusion, but these efforts are liable to weaken, if not shatter, at the feet of this woman, unyielding and faithful guardian of the home, its traditions and, in a word, the preservation and conservation of the race."19 Thus, whether the imagined contact between races or peoples involves a perilous siege or easy pleasure, the point of contact, where Algeria is concerned, is woman. Not surprisingly, in the face of French aggression, including its medical, hygienic, philanthropic, pedagogic, and social forms (such as the tea party),20 Algerians respond with various "attitudes of refusal" which, according to Abdallah Laroui, mark the emergence of nationalism and the delegitimation of French rule in the 1930s. These attitudes of refusal, which include "withdrawal into private life, non-cooperation, personal and familial independence, disobedience, slovenliness, and finally, destructive individual revolt,"21 are retroactively symbolized in terms of the veil by Frantz Fanon when, in 1959, the fifth year of the Algerian Revolution, radical changes in women's situation make it possible to ascribe to the veil a "historic dynamism" dating back to the rise of nationalism in the 1930s. Challenging the idea that Algeria is mere "prey disputed with equal ferocity by Islam and the Western power, 1257

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France," and that cultural regression—including anachronistic forms of women's oppression—is Algeria's only alternative to assimilation, Fanon rearticulates the symbolic link between the veil and Muslim traditions in his essay "Algeria Unveiled."22 In the early phases of the independence struggle, he says, wearing the veil signaled women's allegiance to cultural traditions and forms of existence, such as the extended family, that enabled the emerging nation to forge an identity. This identity, then, grew out of resistance to France's strategy of combatting nationalism by "unveiling" Algeria, that is, regulating private life through assistance campaigns aimed at women and children, and promoting the liberation of Algerian women through education—"encouraging" them, as Maurice Viollette puts it, in their movement toward Europeanization. Subsequently, according to Fanon, the veil became an instrument in armed resistance to the French forces, once women became actively engaged in guerrilla activity and began hiding explosives under their veils. Later, Algerian women began carrying out their militant actions in Western dress, concealing bombs in their purses rather than in the folds of their veils. When these tactics were discovered by the French, however, militants again wore the veil in order to escape detection by the occupiers. Also, the readoption of the veil came in response to a demonstration that followed the army officers' revolt of May 13, 1958, when officers' wives presided over the public unveiling of Algerian women whose slogan was "Let's be like the French woman."23 In this context, says Fanon, donning the ha'ik showed that "it isn't true that woman liberates herself at the invitation of France and General De Gaulle" (p. 46). Fanon's outline of this development is fleshed out by his attention to the historic dynamism of Algerian women's bodies in relation to the veil. It is by means of the veil, he writes, that the nubile body is "revealed" to the Algerian woman; that is, the veil "covers the body and disciplines it, tempers it at the very moment when it knows its greatest effervescence" but also "protects, reassures, insulates." According to Fanon, who was a psychiatrist at the hospital in Blida-Joinville, dream material shows that the woman accustomed to wearing the veil is disoriented when she begins to move about in public space unveiled; for instance, she has trouble judging distances in the street and even finds it difficult to mark out the contours of her own body: "the unveiled body seems to get away from itself, to go to pieces. There is an impression of being improperly dressed, even nude." Accordingly, Fanon argued that during the revolution, the Algerian female combatant in Western dress entered the European district of the city "completely nude" and so must "relearn her body, reinstall it in a totally revolutionary way" (p. 42). In 1959, when Fanon's "Algeria Unveiled" was first published, it was of undeniable strategic importance to assert a "historic dynamism of the

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veil" unfolding within a cultural territory free from French influence, given the fact that the colonizers had positioned Algerian women as living symbols of both the colony's resistance and its vulnerability to penetration. The hypocrisy and brutality of France's stance toward Algerian women at this time is indisputable: shortly after the wives of the rebellious army officers invited Algerian women to "liberate" themselves by making a public spectacle of their unveiling, the army opened women's prisons for the female combatants they captured and tortured.24 And clearly, the extension of voting rights to Algerian women in 1958 was intended primarily as a divisive tactic to promote women's support for a French, rather than an independent, Algeria. (By contrast, when the Paris government proposed the same move in 1947, the Franqais d'Algerie, who were in a much stronger position at the time and thus saw no need to make this concession, vigorously opposed it. They responded to the bill with irony— because Algerian women were considered too ignorant and backward to vote—and even made outlandish statements in defense of "the veil that was being trampled": "Tomorrow the young girl, the wife, the mother will be summoned to the disputes of the forum," they lamented, calling on their (male) "Muslim friends to stop the evildoers who are weakening the age-old foundation on which our households rest." Here, as in so many other instances, the veil emblematized, for the French, both Muslim tradition and the means to effective colonial domination.)25 In presenting the "historic dynamism of the veil" as a fundamentally nationalistic, anti-French development, Fanon does not necessarily succumb to the inevitable limitations of a French-educated secular intellectual in underestimating the force of Islam and its effects on women, as critics of the time claim.26 Nor does he necessarily allow his engage zeal to blind him to the importance of the colonial relation itself—the implantation of an industrial economy and Western ideology—in preparing the ground for the radical transformation of women's lives during the revolution, as Andre Adam contends.27 The writing of "Algeria Unveiled" cannot be accounted for by invoking the opposition between "scholarship" (with its supposed disinterestedness and historical "accuracy") and "polemic" and situating it, however sympathetically, on the side of the latter, as Adam and others have done. Rather, this essay must be understood as a cultural intervention that both articulates and reinforces a political development whose outcome, in 1959, remains uncertain. "Algeria Unveiled" is a cultural-political move—a failed one, as it turns out—to enable the unveiling of Algeria. In light of developments since independence, however, it is important, from a feminist standpoint, to note that Fanon's strategy of articulating Algerian feminism as a fundamentally indigenous movement—one as independent from Western feminism as it is inextricably bound up with emergent nationalism—works, in today's context, to underwrite

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nationalism's sacrifice of women's liberation to its own cause. In "Algeria Unveiled," Fanon elides the positive effects, for Algerian women, of the colonial relation: enfranchisement, education, medical assistance, and, for example, the reform of marriage laws in 1959, which henceforth forbid child marriage and required that divorce proceedings be brought before a judge. He also omits reference, for example, to Algerian women's successful manipulation of the ambiguities within both the Muslim and French legal codes, and their productive exploitation of conflicts and gaps between those codes, to improve their economic and social conditions.28 And finally, Fanon suppresses the emancipatory dimension of ties between Western feminists and Algerian women, both in the 1930s and during the revolution. For example, the sociological and ethnographic studies that Fanon denounces as mere ammunition for the Bureaux Arabes (p. 18) include work presented at the Etats Generaux du Feminisme held during the International Colonial Exposition of 1931. They include, too, the work of scholars like Mathea Gaudry, who applauds the resourcefulness and independence of Kabylian women in terms that complicate (even though they don't negate) the colonialist view of Algerian women as the weak link in the nationalist chain.29 And as Denise Brahimi shows, the work of Gaudry, Henriette Celarie, and other French women writing in the first half of the twentieth century discloses that the writers' sympathy with Algerian women emerges alongside expressions of frustration with the social and political circumstances of women in France where, throughout the 1930s, for example, the National Assembly defeats proposals to extend voting rights to women.30 Similarly, though Fanon implicitly aligns the Algerian female combatants in Western dress with the European women of Algeria who are arrested for supporting the liberation struggle in the mid-1950s (p. 44), he makes no explicit mention of feminist support for the revolution, support which is manifested most clearly two years after "Algeria Unveiled," in 1961, when Simone de Beauvoir and other French women working in concert with the Tunisian lawyer Gisele Halimi protest the arrest and sexual torture of the militant, Djamila Boupacha, by the French forces.31 In writing that the Algerian female combatant in Western dress enters the European district of the city "completely nude," Fanon unquestionably strips her of the attire that symbolically links her to Western feminism. Thus, the unveiling performed by Fanon's text, while clearly intended to enable the Algerian woman to "relearn her body, reinstall it in a totally revolutionary way," nonetheless establishes, between European and Algerian feminism, a border which today's feminist analysis must reopen if women's relation to Algerian national identity is to be refashioned. According to Mai Ghoussoub, it is the case today, not only in Algeria, but throughout the Arab world, that the streets are filled not with women who have relearned and reinstalled their bodies, but with "women

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shrouded in black, seeking the respectability of a cloak for their corporeal existence. .. . The bitter reality is that Arab feminism, in the modern sense of the term, exists as a force only in the student milieux of Europe and America to which a privileged few can escape, and in a growing but still very modest academic literature. The double knot tied by the fatal connections in Arab culture and politics between definitions of femininity and religion, and religion and nationality, have all but throttled any major women's revolt so far. Every assertion of the second sex can be charged— in a virtually simultaneous register—with impiety to Islam and treason to the nation."32 In light of this development, it is important for feminist critics to acknowledge the ways cultural texts underwrite nationalism's current exploitation of women—not just as victims of the revolution's betrayal, but as living symbols required to mediate and to contain, as well as to assume responsibility for, threatening social divisions within the nation. Where Algeria is concerned, a reading of Malek Alloula's The Colonial Harem can be exemplary in this regard.33 Alloula analyzes the scenes et types postcards circulating widely in Algeria and France between 1900 and 1930. As their name suggests, the postcards are underwritten by the ethnographic alibi of surveying Algerian landscapes and customs. Alloula is concerned with the best-selling subgenre picturing Algerian women in various guises: traversing public space in billowing white veils; imprisoned in the dark recesses of the harem; modeling exotic headdresses and jewelry, in various stages of native dress and undress; and finally, nude women surrounded by the props of the coffee ceremony, entwined in the coils of the hookah, or reclining in lascivious abandon on a divan in the manner of the odalisque. Evident in these photographs, Alloula argues convincingly, is the desire of the colonial photographer to render Algeria transparent. His fascination with veiled and unveiled Algerian women betrays his wish to strip Algeria of its cultural identity, deny the existence of its male population, and possess it through its women. This dream of transparency and possession places the photographer in solidarity with the colonial administration whose principled denunciation of the veil (the emblem of women's oppression) is belied by its policies. Its seizure of lands, for instance, disrupts the traditional family patterns of vast numbers of Algerians, forcing displaced rural women into prostitution in the cities.34 One of the services performed by these displaced and impoverished women is to pose for photographers aiming to capitalize on the fantasies ofpieds noirs and tourists. The complicity between photographer and administrator extends to the intellectual as well. Mathea Gaudry's La Societe feminine au Djebel Amour et au Ksel, for instance, provides striking evidence of the permeable boundary between "serious" sociological study and its vulgarized forms.35 Gaudry's book includes photographs, in the style of the postcards, that document women's dress in

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the region under study. Plate 20 shows an anonymous veiled woman, presumably "typical" of the region; but in plate 50, in her place and in the same setting, there appears a woman unveiled, with hands on hips and a cigarette hanging from her lips: "Khanoussa, a former courtisan, now a duenna." Alloula is thus right to argue that the postcard is embedded in a complex and extensive network of colonialist activity. I would disagree, however, with his claim that as a "ventrilocal art, the postcard—even and especially when it pretends to be the mirror of the exotic—is nothing other than one of the forms of aesthetic justification of colonial violence" (p. 76, my emphasis). Far from merely giving voice to a preexisting colonial ideology or justifying violence serving "real" economic and political interests, the postcards articulate a dream of ravishment, a colonizing desire that not only invests and orients administrative activity but helps to produce the interests it serves, for example by establishing a libidinally charged solidarity between colons divided by class, ethnicity, and nationality. And since postcards form part of the growing tourist industry and the everyday correspondence between France and its colony, they also forge ideologically loaded bonds between the French in Algeria and those in the metropolitan center.36 In short, they work to make "L'Algerie Franchise" a creditable proposition. That a French Algeria is produced in and through culture, as well as by military and administrative means, is evident from the stated aims, for example, of the International Colonial Exposition held in Paris in 1931. "The public . . . must realize that the 'current miracle' of Greater France rests upon a persistent and longstanding colonizing tradition."37 The goals of the Exposition are presented in more aggressive terms by its organizer, Marshall Pierre Lyautey, who wants "to give the French public a punch in the eye so that it will finally pay attention to the number and quality of our overseas possessions."38 In Algeria, the Centenary celebration of the French conquest in 1830 is one of the most important cultural forces at work. Charles-Robert Ageron shows, for example, that "a committee was specifically assigned the task of 'creating a lasting movement of opinion in metropolitan France in favor of African France' "; "the French press was subsidized and received 2,075,971 francs to 'campaign in favor of Algeria,' " despite natives' protests at the prospect of such a humiliating spectacle (pp. 403-404). The main intent of the Centenary is clearly to create an idealized picture of Algeria as a desirable partner for France, rather than to garner support for concrete improvement of conditions in the colony. For instance, while there is a concerted effort to sell the Centenary celebration in the French schools ("It is above all in the schools that our propaganda must strike," declares the general secretary of the metropolitan committee on the Centenary), Ageron observes that when the budget committee extends a credit of one hundred million francs for social assistance and

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education (based on its "intuition that France should at least make a charitable gesture in favor of the Muslims"), "the Financial Delegation [whose members were mainly French Algerians] . . . refused this important credit on the pretext that the Chamber of Deputies had overstepped its powers by designating Algeria as the target of a subsidy. The Financial Delegation reminded the Chamber that it alone controlled the granting of credits in Algeria's budget. This explains why only five million francs were allocated, in the end, for the assistance of natives" (p. 410). In addition to an intensive press and education campaign, a radio station is set up to broadcast propaganda throughout Algeria and the other French colonies; tourism is encouraged; museums are opened, and art exhibits are organized to demonstrate that "here [in Algeria] there is truly a new France . .. and that [its] people have but one desire, one ambition: to be intimately fused with the Mother Country."39 The postcards analyzed by Alloula must be set within the frame of this mass cultural picture. In this context, it is worth considering Roland Barthes's observation, quoted by Alloula, that "the age of photography corresponds exactly to the irruption of the private in the public, or rather, to the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly."40 The circulation of postcards placing the natives' private life on display (for purposes of appropriation) complements a politics of the family which is seen as central to the colonizing project as outlined, for example, in the Congress on Rural Colonization held in Algiers in May 1930: "the creation of [centers of colonization] has entailed the assembly—I would even say mobilization—on the designated point, of many dozens of French families that are in general healthy, fully prolific, and whose conditions of existence encourage fecundity more than they limit it. 'A seminary of the French race': the center of colonization presents itself thus."41 At issue, then, in the circulation of the postcards, is not simply the fact that the figures of the harem inscribed on them are hypocritically justified, as Alloula points out, by legends identifying them as mere family portraits. As important as the use of European family ideology to veil sexual exploitation; as important as the postcards' function of putting formerly secluded and veiled Algerian women on public display, ensuring their symbolic availability to the conqueror, is the ideological work of implanting in Algeria the economy of the relation between public and private that is developing in Europe at the time. This comes to have decisive importance after independence when conservative and progressive forces alike justify breaking their promises to grant women basic civil liberties by pointing to the degradation of Western women within the economy of mass culture, as if real or symbolic prostitution represented the only alternative to seclusion and veiling.24 The postcard photographer's dream of transparency and possession 1263

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places him in solidarity not only with the colonial administration in the early twentieth century, but also with the French army's fight against Algerian revolutionaries in the period 1954-1962. The army's antinationalist strategy of dispersing village communities and resettling their inhabitants involves forcing female detainees to unveil before military photographers assigned the task of producing photos for the French national ID cards that these unwilling Algerians are to be required to carry. One of the army photographers, Marc Garanger, denounces the army's policy—and the role he is forced to play in carrying it out—by publishing and exhibiting these photographs in various places during and after the Algerian war, notably in the Illustre Suisse in 1961 (when Garanger is still doing his military service in Algeria) and then some twenty years later in a collection entitled Femmes algeriennes I960.43 The forced unveiling documented in these photos at once parallels the unveiling staged by the army officers' wives in May 1958 and, through its critical reframing in Garanger's book, signals the coercion at work in the production of the postcards analyzed by Alloula. More starkly than the postcards, Garanger's photos disclose the photographer's desire and its collusion with other forms of colonial violence. However, they also mirror the postcards as inscriptions of what Alloula terms the photographer's impotence. On the postcards, as Alloula notes, the haunting images of women in veils, relentlessly opaque rather than transparent, floating rather than fixed within the frame, and also the distracted or downright disgusted look of many of the models, mark the photographer's incapacity to ravish his female subjects. Similarly, the dishevelment and disarray of the women photographed thirty years later during the war bespeak contempt and defiance as much as discouragement and defeat. In his introduction to Femmes algeriennes 1960, Garanger remembers being "hit by their look at pointblank range" (p. 3). Leila Sebbar attributes a similar interpretation of the Garanger photos to the Algerian teenage protagonist of Sherazade: "all of these Algerian women had the same look—intense, ferocious, so savage that the image would only be able to record it, without ever controlling or dominating it".44 But here we encounter a problem regarding Alloula's critique of the colonial photographer's gaze, the global political context in which his critique is generated, and the relation of both to Arab feminism. On the one hand, Alloula's analysis discerns in the postcard images contradictions that are specific to the photographic medium in the colonial situation, contradictions which he uses effectively to reflect back to the French photographer a critical image of the gaze he casts on Algeria. By returning these postcards to their sender, Alloula dislocates a set of colonialist male fantasies embodied in the haunting figure of the Algerian woman. On the other hand, however, Alloula's analysis is itself haunted by a kind of spectral presence, that of an undivided Algeria, an emerging

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nation in which the conflicting interests of men and women are first and foremost the product of the conqueror's sexual fantasies and administrative policies. Despite occasional references to the postcards' effects on women—for instance, his remark in the final pages that the images represent "the deceitful expression of [their] symbolic dispossession" (p. 76)— Alloula never really addresses the question of women's interests. Instead, he repeatedly invites readers to deplore the French imposter's efforts either to insinuate himself into the closed space of the harem in order to take what he (the imposter) imagines to be the native man's place, or to destroy the forms of solidarity that make anticolonial struggle possible. What Alloula deplores is the rape of an Algeria in which women's differences with men remain veiled. Implicitly, Alloula subscribes to the same view that Fanon articulates in "Algeria Unveiled," namely that the affirmation of cultural traditions such as seclusion and veiling of women is necessary at a certain point in Algeria's history. But in suggesting this, without revision, nearly twenty years after independence, Alloula repeats the gesture of the colonizer by making of the veiled woman the screen on which he projects his fantasy (an idealization fueled, perhaps, by his exile in France)—that of an Algerian nation untroubled by questions of women's oppression.45 The problem posed to feminism by Alloula's book resurfaces in Barbara Harlow's informative and nuanced introduction to it. Her essay is particularly illuminating insofar as it sets Alloula's analysis in relation to the history of the French occupation of Algeria, including the intellectual and aesthetic strands of that history, which extend through the revolutionary period, for instance in the writing of Camus. Equally helpful is the way it situates the book in relation to the critical rewriting of North African history and culture by influential figures such as Kateb Yacine, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and feminists Assia Djebar, Fadela M'rabet, and Fatima Mernissi. Valuable as it is, though, it seems to me that Harlow's essay tries to cover over, rather than come to terms with, a fundamental contradiction between the demands of North African feminists and the Maghreb's affirmation of its Islamic identity. This leads Harlow to give undue approval, for example, to "reforms" of women's civil status in Arab countries, reforms unequivocally denounced by the very feminists she cites.46 In her otherwise compelling account, in Resistance Literature?1 of the interconnections between writing, political struggle, and imprisonment in the life of Egyptian feminist Nawal al-Saadawi, Harlow likewise ignores the basic conflict between feminism and nationalism in Muslim societies, a conflict which often results in what Mai Ghoussoub calls "accommodation to obscurantism" by feminists engaged in the struggle against Western imperialism. In the same essay I cited earlier, Ghoussoub asks, "How many times, over successive generations, as the tides of religious fundamentalism (or opportunism) ebbed and flowed, have we seen women

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who were once courageous in their rejection of mystification and oppression eventually bow before them and on occasion even end by defending them! Fear of being accused of the contagion of 'Occidental values' all too easily leads to discovery of the superior virtues of the Harem, compared to Western marriage and adultery, as many examples show. Some of the most outstanding contemporary feminists, daunted by the scale of the tasks before them and the isolation in which they stand, have changed their tone recently."48 Of Nawal al-Saadawi, Ghoussoub writes with bitter irony, "she too is now starting to claim . . . that Arab women really are more politicized than their Western counterparts, because they are more concerned to change the political system under which they live [a system based on the exploitation of one class by another] than its mere consequences, the superficial features of women's oppression" (p. 18). If Ghoussoub is right—that is, if in Arab countries where there exists an oppositional socialist movement, women are again subordinating the women's struggle to the supposedly "larger" class struggle; and if, throughout the Arab world, women are bowing to Islamic fundamentalism's antifeminism in the name of nationalism or Arab unity—then it is essential to renew the effort to dismantle modes of cultural-political analysis that ignore or rationalize the suppression of Arab feminism by national and anti-imperial struggles. Among other things, this means attending to the politics of the veil as an urgent question indissociable from issues of national and cultural identity in the Muslim World. Today, the politics of the veil is the subject of impassioned debate not only with respect to Muslim societies such as Egypt and Algeria but also in France where North African lyceennes are demanding the right to wear the veil in school despite injunctions from administrators (defending the national commitment to separation of church and state) and criticism from various sectors of the North African immigrant community (whether liberals favoring assimilation to French national norms, or left feminists denouncing the equivalence posited between wearing the veil and exercising a "right"). Gisele Halimi, in particular, condemns France's implicit encouragement of reactionary state policies in North Africa.49 The issue has sparked reflection on racism in France, the function of human rights discourses in antiracist struggles, relations between national and sexual identity, and the effects of one nation's public policy on global politics. The question this raises for Western feminists is how we can best engage with the political and cultural work of Arab feminists in "the student milieux of Europe and America," while at the same time taking account, self-critically, of the "boundary problems" cited by Mernissi in her enumeration of forces that are "tearing the Muslim world apart": colonization ("trespassing by a foreign power on Muslim community space and decision making"); contemporary human rights issues ("the political boundaries circumscribing the ruler's space and the freedoms of the

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government"); integration of technological information "without deluging our own Muslim heritage"; international economic dependency; and "the sovereignty of the Muslim state vis-a-vis voracious, aggressive transnational corporations."50 It seems to me that, however we go about it, our efforts will be useful only on condition that we elude fascination by our own counterideologies, particularly if they work, paradoxically, to screen out the very voices and bodies they ostensibly address. Above all, this implies, at every moment, guarding against what Ghoussoub calls "the contemptuous anti-Arab racism of American society, and its hypocritical indignation at the fate of Arab women" (p. 18).

Notes 1 Germaine Tillion, "Les Femmes et le voile," in Pierre Marthelot and Andre Raymond, comps., Etudes Maghrebines: Melange Charles-Andre Julien (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), 29. Future references to this text will appear in parentheses. In Republic of Cousins: Women's Oppression in Mediterranean Society (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1983), in which another version of this essay appears, Tillion gives a finely nuanced account of the historical shifts in practices such as veiling, and the disinheritance of daughters as an effect of endogamy, in terms of relations between men and women, urban and rural societies, native and colon cultures. It is only the problem of women's relation to the emerging nation that is presented in a dualistic manner. 2 It is true that in her controversial essay Algeria: The Realities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), Tillion opposes Algerian independence, mainly on grounds that economic disaster would befall the country if France withdrew. Even here, though, she calls for industrialization, and the guarantee of education and employment for Algerians of both sexes. 3 David C. Gordon, Women of Algeria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 61, 64. Future references to this text will appear in parentheses. Similar analyses appear in Attilio Gaudio and Renee Pelletier, Femmes d'Islam, ou le sexe interdit (Paris: Denoel, 1980), 89-106, and Juliette Minces, "Women in Algeria," trans. Nikki Keddie, in Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie, eds., Women in the Muslim World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 159-71. 4 Catherine Delcroix, Espoirs et realties de la femme arabe (Algerie-Egypte) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1986), 139. Future references to this text will appear in parentheses. 5 Interview with a combatant in the National Liberation Front's official organ, El-Moudjahid 72 (1 November 1960), in Andre Mandouze, ed., La Revolution algerienne par les textes (Paris: Maspero, 1961), 106. 6 Fadela M'rabet, La Femme algerienne, suivi de les Algeriennes (Paris: Maspero, 1969). 7 Peter R. Knauss, The Persistence of Patriarchy: Class, Gender, and Ideology in Twentieth Century Algeria (New York: Praeger, 1987), xiii. Future references to this text will appear in parentheses. 8 See M'rabet, La Femme Algerienne', Knauss, Patriarchy, 97-140; Minces, "Women in Algeria"; and Nadia Ai'nad-Tabet, "Participation des Algeriennes

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20

21 22

23

24 25 26

a la vie du pays," in Christiane Souriau, ed., Femmes et politique autour de la mediterranee (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1980), 235-50. See A'inad-Tabet, "Participation," and Camille Lacoste-Dujardin, Des Meres contre les femmes (Paris: La Decouverte, 1985). "Islam Fundamentalism Sweeps Over Algeria Like Desert Wind," Los Angeles Times, 16 June 1990, sec. A. President Chadli, quoted in Knauss, Patriarchy, 134-35. Chadli, quoted in ibid., 135. See Ratiba Hadj-Moussa, Les Femmes algeriennes entre I'honneur et la revolution (Quebec: Laboratoire de recherches sociologiques, 1984). See "No Future a Bab-el-Oued," L'Express, 6-12 October 1989, 27-29. See Fatna A. Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (New York: Pergamon Press, 1984). Le Nouvel Observateur, 22-28 February 1990, 23. Fatima Mernissi, "Muslim Women and Fundamentalism," Middle East Report 153 (July-August 1988): 11. This essay is adapted from the introduction to the revised edition of Mernissi's Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987). On the fantasies expressed in the official and unofficial writings of army officers, see Mostefa Lacheraf, L'Algerie: Nation et societe (Paris: Maspero, 1969), 255-56; on the infiltration of Algeria through its families, especially its women, see Maurice Viollette, L'Algerie vivra-t-elle? (Paris: Alcan, 1931) and le Docteur Calmette, "Les Principes de la politique franchise coloniale," in Gabriel Hanotaux, comp., L'Empire colonial franqais (Paris: Plon, 1929), 143-58; on Algeria's endogamy as the "massive obstacle" to penetration, see E.-F. Gautier, L'Algerie et la metropole (Paris: Payot, 1920), 249. Octave Depont, L'Algerie du centenaire (Bordeaux: Cadoret, 1928), 46. In L'Algerie vivra-t-ellel, Viollette provides evidence of the social pressures to which Fanon claims the Algerian "evolue(e)s" were subject when he refers, for instance, to tea parties given by his wife, where Algerian women were, in his view, to be encouraged in their "serious movement" toward Europeanization (415, 417-18). Abdallah Laroui, L'Histoire du Maghreb (Paris: Maspero, 1970), 355. Frantz Fanon, "L'Algerie se devoile," in Sociologie d'une revolution (Paris: Maspero, 1968), 23; in English, "Algeria Unveiled," in A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 35-67. Pierre Bourdieu discusses this dynamic in similar terms in "Guerre et mutation sociale in Algerie," Etudes Maghrebines 1 (Spring 1960): 25-37. See Hal Lehrman, "Battle of the Veil," New York Times Magazine, 13 July 1958, 14, 18. Lehrman notes that Algerian women organized a counterdemonstration and demanded the release of political prisoners. In L'Alienation colonialiste et la resistance de lafamille algerienne (Lausanne: La Cite, 1961), Saadia and Lakhdar accuse the French organizers of the May 13 event of coercing their maids, as well as Algerian prostitutes, into participating in this "grotesque effort," 143. On the establishment of women's camps, see Patrick Kessel and Giovanni Pirelli, Le Peuple algerien et la guerre: Lettres et temoignages d'Algeriens (Paris: Maspero, 1962), 537, n. 4. Ageron, Histoire, 609, my emphasis. See Mostefa Lacherafs comments in Revolution Africaine, 1 December 1963. 18-19, and 19 December 1963, 22-23.

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UNVEILING ALGERIA 27 Andre Adam, "Chronique sociale et culturelle," Annuaire de I'Afrique du Nord 1 (1962), 545-62. See, for example, "On National Culture," in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968), where Fanon points out that "the colonized man who writes for his people ought to use the past with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope" (232), and that "we find today the Arab states organically linked once more with societies which are Mediterranean in their culture. The fact is that these states are submitted to modern pressure and to new channels of trade" (216). 28 See Yvonne Knibiehler and Regine Gontalier, La Femme au temps des colonies (Paris: Stock, 1985); "Kif-Kif la Fran$aise," Time, 23 February 1959, 26; and Jean-Paul Charnay, La Vie musulmane en Algerie d'apres la jurisprudence (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965). 29 See Mathea Gaudry, La Femme Chaou'ia de VAures: Etude de sociologie berbere (Paris: Geuthner, 1929) and Laure Bousquet-Lefevre, La Femme Kabyle (Paris: Viard, 1939). 30 Denise Brahimi, Femmes arabes et soeurs musulmanes (Paris: Editions Tierce, 1984), 175, 238-39; on women's political and social struggles, Knibiehler and Gontalier, Colonies, 268, and Knauss, Patriarchy, 52. 31 Simone de Beauvoir and Gisele Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, trans. Peter Green (New York: Macmillan, 1962). 32 Mai Ghoussoub, "Feminism—or the Eternal Masculine—in the Arab World," New Left Review 161 (January-February 1987): 3, 17. Future references to this text will appear in parentheses. 33 Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Future references to this text will appear in parentheses. 34 On the displacement of Algerians as a result of colonial land policies, see Lacheraf, L'Algerie, 16-25, 70-71, and Pierre Nora, Les Franqais d'Algerie (Paris: Julliard, 1961), 90-93. On the prostitution that results, see Knibiehler and Gontalier, Colonies, 248, and Jacques Berque, Le Maghreb entre deux guerres (Paris: Seuil, 1962), 357-59. 35 Mathea Gaudry, La Societe feminine au Djebel Amour et au Ksel (Algiers: Societe Algerienne dTmpressions Diverses, 1961). 36 On the second-class status of French Algerians (both economic and cultural), and on Frenchness as the force that mediates ethnic and class conflicts among them by differentiating them from the Algerian natives, see Nora, Les Franqais d'Algerie, 133-43,150-51. 37 Maurice Besson, "La Premiere Exposition Coloniale," Bulletin du Comite de I'Afrique Franqaise 2 (February 1931): 123. 38 Quoted by C. M., "Autour de 1'Exposition Coloniale," Bulletin du Comite de I'Afrique Franqaise 11 (November 1931): 734. 39 Text of a speech by Gustave Mercier, general commissioner, "The Results of the Algerian Centenary," Bulletin du Comite de I'Afrique Franqaise 6 (1930): 391,393. 40 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 98. 41 Proceedings of the Congress on Rural Colonization, Bulletin du Comite de I'Afrique Franqaise 9 (September 1930): 521-22. 42 The implantation (and negative reinterpretation) of this ideology is evident from the 1930s through the 1960s. On the Muslim reformers' view of the beaches and dance halls as scenes of "fornication," see Ali Merad, Le

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43

44 45

46 47 48

49 50

Reformisme musulman en Algerie de 1925 a 1940 (Paris: Mouton, 1967), 328, 329, n. 2. On the official pronouncements of the Algerian government after independence regarding Western women's eternal and inevitable subordination in "consumer society," see Hadj-Moussa, Femmes algeriennes, 166-69. Marc Garanger, Femmes algeriennes 1960 (Paris: Contrejour, 1982). In Revolution en Algerie (Paris: France Empire, 1956), Rene Schaefer notes that, during the revolution, certain Algerian women were required to unveil for photos that appeared on food cards needed to obtain provisions (147). On the regrouping of Algerian populations during the revolution, see Lacheraf, Algerie, 265-66; Bourdieu, "Mutation sociale," 32-33; and Patrick Eveno and Jean Planchais, La Guerre d'Algerie (Paris: La Decouverte, 1989), 221, 223-28. Leila Sebbar, Sherazade (Paris: Stock, 1982), 220. In "Algeria, Conquered by Postcard" (New York Times Book Review, 11 January, 1987, 24), Carol Schloss remarks, in a similar vein, that, despite Alloula's effort to construct a countermemory by restoring the postcards to their original context, "the cultural dialogue he initiates remains male-centered and concerned with women as property and as symbolic marks of (dis)honor or status for the men in their families." However, Schloss accepts Alloula's view of the postcards as a "surrogate" for political and military conquest. Another brief critique of Alloula's male-centered interpretation appears in Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (London: Pandora Press, 1989), 42, 44. See, for instance, Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, and Assia Djebar, "Forbidden Sight, Interrupted Sound," Discourse 8 (Fall-Winter 1986-87): 39-56. Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987), 137-40. Ghoussoub, 17. In the discussion that follows (17-18), she illustrates changes in the work of Ijlal Khalifa, author of books on the history of the women's movement in Egypt and Palestine; Aziza al-Hibri, a feminist Marxist philosopher; and the noted Egyptian feminists Leila Ahmed and Nawal al-Saadawi, all of whom have recently defended antifeminist Islamic practices (or denied the fundamental antifeminism of Islam) in the name of national integrity or pan-Arab solidarity. See Diana Johnstone, "In 'great kerchief quarrel' French unite against 'AngloSaxon ghettos,' " In These Times, 24-30 January 1990,10-11. Mernissi, "Muslim Women," 9.

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8.7 SPEAKING IN TONGUES A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers* Gloria Anzaldua From Chern'e Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (eds) This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color, Persephone, 1981, 165-73

21 mayo 80 Dear mujeres de color, companions in writing I sit here naked in the sun, typewriter against my knee trying to visualize you. Black woman huddles over a desk in the fifth floor of some New York tenement. Sitting on a porch in south Texas, a Chicana fanning away mosquitos and the hot air, trying to arouse the smouldering embers of writing. Indian woman walking to school or work lamenting the lack of time to weave writing into your life. Asian American, lesbian, single mother, tugged in all directions by children, lover or ex-husband, and the writing. It is not easy writing this letter. It began as a poem, a long poem. I tried to turn it into an essay but the result was wooden, cold. I have not yet unlearned the esoteric bullshit and pseudo-intellectualizing that school brainwashed into my writing. How to begin again. How to approximate the intimacy and immediacy I want. What form? A letter, of course. My dear hermanas, the dangers we face as women writers of color are not the same as those of white women though we have many in common. We don't have as much to lose - we never had any privileges. I wanted to call the dangers "obstacles" but that would be a kind of lying. We can't transcend the dangers, can't rise above them. We must go through them and hope we won't have to repeat the performance. Unlikely to be friends of people in high literary places, the beginning woman of color is invisible both in the white male mainstream world and in the white women's feminist world, though in the latter this is gradually changing. The lesbian of color is not only invisible, she doesn't even exist. 1271

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Our speech, too, is inaudible. We speak in tongues like the outcast and the insane. Because white eyes do not want to know us, they do not bother to learn our language, the language which reflects us, our culture, our spirit. The schools we attended or didn't attend did not give us the skills for writing nor the confidence that we were correct in using our class and ethnic languages. I, for one, became adept at, and majored in English to spite, to show up, the arrogant racist teachers who thought all Chicane children were dumb and dirty. And Spanish was not taught in grade school. And Spanish was not required in High School. And though now I write my poems in Spanish as well as English I feel the rip-off of my native tongue. I lack imagination you say No. I lack language. The language to clarify my resistance to the literate. Words are a war to me. They threaten my family. To gain the word to describe the loss I risk losing everything. I may create a monster the word's length and body swelling up colorful and thrilling looming over my mother, characterized. Her voice in the distance unintelligible illiterate. These are the monster's words.1 Cherrie Moraga Who gave us permission to perform the act of writing? Why does writing seem so unnatural for me? I'll do anything to postpone it - empty the trash, answer the telephone. The voice recurs in me: Who am I, a poor Chicanita from the sticks, to think I could write? How dare I even considered becoming a writer as I stooped over the tomato fields bending, bending under the hot sun, hands broadened and calloused, not fit to hold the quill, numbed into an animal stupor by the heat. How hard it is for us to think we can choose to become writers, much less feel and believe that we can. What have we to contribute, to give? Our own expectations condition us. Does not our class, our culture as well as the white man tell us writing is not for women such as us? The white man speaks: Perhaps if you scrape the dark off of your face Maybe if you bleach your bones. Stop speaking in tongues, stop writing left-

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handed. Don't cultivate your colored skins nor tongues of fire if you want to make it in a right-handed world. "Man, like all the other animals, fears and is repelled by that which he does not understand, and mere difference is apt to connote something malign."2 I think, yes, perhaps if we go to the university. Perhaps if we become male-women or as middleclass as we can. Perhaps if we give up loving women, we will be worthy of having something to say worth saying. They convince us that we must cultivate art for art's sake. Bow down to the sacred bull, form. Put frames and metaframes around the writing. Achieve distance in order to win the coveted title "literary writer" or "professional writer." Above all do not be simple, direct, nor immediate. Why do they fight us? Because they think we are dangerous beasts? Why are we dangerous beasts? Because we shake and often break the white's comfortable stereotypic images they have of us: the Black domestic, the lumbering nanny with twelve babies sucking her tits, the slant-eyed Chinese with her expert hand - "They know how to treat a man in bed," the flat-faced Chicana or Indian, passively lying on her back, being fucked by the Man a la La Chingada. The Third World woman revolts: We revoke, we erase your white male imprint. When you come knocking on our doors with your rubber stamps to brand our faces with DUMB, HYSTERICAL, PASSIVE PUT A, PERVERT, when you come with your branding irons to burn MY PROPERTY on our buttocks, we will vomit the guilt, self-denial and race-hatred you have force-fed into us right back into your mouth. We are done being cushions for your projected fears. We are tired of being your sacrificial lambs and scapegoats. I can write this and yet I realize that many of us women of color who have strung degrees, credentials and published books around our necks like pearls that we hang onto for dear life are in danger of contributing to the invisibility of our sister-writers. "La Vendida," the sell-out. The danger of selling out one's own ideologies. For the Third World woman, who has, at best, one foot in the feminist literary world, the temptation is great to adopt the current feeling-fads and theory fads, the latest half truths in political thought, the half-digested new age psychological axioms that are preached by the white feminist establishment. Its followers are notorious for "adopting" women of color as their "cause" while still expecting us to adapt to their expectations and their language. How dare we get out of our colored faces. How dare we reveal the human flesh underneath and bleed red blood like the white folks. It takes tremendous energy and courage not to acquiesce, not to capitulate to a definition of feminism that still renders most of us invisible. Even as I

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write this I am disturbed that I am the only Third World woman writer in this handbook. Over and over I have found myself to be the only Third World woman at readings, workshops, and meetings. We cannot allow ourselves to be tokenized. We must make our own writing and that of Third World women the first priority. We cannot educate white women and take them by the hand. Most of us are willing to help but we can't do the white woman's homework for her. That's an energy drain. More times than she cares to remember, Nellie Wong, Asian American feminist writer, has been called by white women wanting a list of Asian American women who can give readings or workshops. We are in danger of being reduced to purveyors of resource lists. Coming face to face with one's limitations. There are only so many things I can do in one day. Luisah Teish addressing a group of predominantly white feminist writers had this to say of Third World women's experience: "If you are not caught in the maze that (we) are in, it's very difficult to explain to you the hours in the day we do not have. And the hours that we do not have are hours that are translated into survival skills and money. And when one of those hours is taken away it means an hour not that we don't have to lie back and stare at the ceiling or an hour that we don't have to talk to a friend. For me it's a loaf of bread." Understand. My family is poor. Poor. I can't afford a new ribbon. The risk of this one is enough to keep me moving through it, accountable. The repetition like my mother's stories retold, each time reveals more particulars gains more familiarity. You can't get me in your car so fast.3 Cherrie Moraga "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage."4 Naomi Littlebear Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice. Because I must keep the spirit of my revolt and myself alive. Because the world 1 create in the

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writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and hunger. / write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you. To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispell the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit. To show that I can and that I will write, never mind their admonitions to the contrary. And I will write about the unmentionables, never mind the outraged gasp of the censor and the audience. Finally I write because I'm scared of writing but I'm more scared of not writing. Why should I try to justify why I write? Do I need to justify being Chicana, being woman? You might as well ask me to try to justify why I'm alive. The act of writing is the act of making soul, alchemy. It is the quest for the self, for the center of the self, which we women of color have come to think as "other" - the dark, the feminine. Didn't we start writing to reconcile this other within us? We knew we were different, set apart, exiled from what is considered "normal", white-right. And as we internalized this exile, we came to see the alien within us and too often, as a result, we split apart from ourselves and each other. Forever after we have been in search of that self, that "other" and each other. And we return, in widening spirals and never to the same childhood place where it happened, first in our families, with our mothers, with our fathers. The writing is a tool for piercing that mystery but it also shields us, gives a margin of distance, helps us survive. And those that don't survive? The waste of ourselves: so much meat thrown at the feet of madness or fate or the state. 24 mayo 80 It is dark and damp and has been raining all day. I love days like this. As I lie in bed I am able to delve inward. Perhaps today I will write from that deep core. As I grope for words and a voice to speak of writing, I stare at my brown hand clenching the pen and think of you thousands of miles away clutching your pen. You are not alone. Pen, I feel right at home in your ink doing a pirouette, stirring the cobwebs, leaving my signature on the window panes. Pen, how could I ever have feared you. You're quite house-broken but it's your wildness I am in love with. I'll have to get rid of you when you start being predictable, when you stop chasing dustdevils. The more you outwit me the more I love you. It's when I'm tired or have had too much caffeine or wine that you get past my defenses and you say more than what I had intended. You surprise me,

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shock me into knowing some part of me I'd kept secret even from myself. - Journal entry. In the kitchen Maria and Cherrie's voices falling on these pages. I can see Cherrie going about in her terry cloth wrap, barefoot washing the dishes, shaking out the tablecloth, vacuuming. Deriving a certain pleasure watching her perform those simple tasks, I am thinking they lied, there is no separation between life and writing. The danger in writing is not fusing our personal experience and world view with the social reality we live in, with our inner life, our history, our economics, and our vision. What validates us as human beings validates us as writers. What matters to us is the relationships that are important to us whether with our self or others. We must use what is important to us to get to the writing. No topic is too trivial. The danger is in being too universal and humanitarian and invoking the eternal to the sacrifice of the particular and the feminine and the specific historical moment. The problem is to focus, to concentrate. The body distracts, sabotages with a hundred ruses, a cup of coffee, pencils to sharpen. The solution is to anchor the body to a cigarette or some other ritual. And who has time or energy to write after nurturing husband or lover, children, and often an outside job? The problems seem insurmountable and they are, but they cease being insurmountable once we make up our mind that whether married or childrened or working outside jobs we are going to make time for the writing. Forget the room of one's own - write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals, between sleeping or waking. I write while sitting on the John. No long stretches at the typewriter unless you're wealthy or have a patron you may not even own a typewriter. While you wash the floor or clothes listen to the words chanting in your body. When you're depressed, angry, hurt, when compassion and love possess you. When you cannot help but write. Distractions all - that I spring on myself when I'm so deep into the writing when I'm almost at that place, that dark cellar where some "thing" is liable to jump up and pounce on me. The ways I subvert the writing are many. The way I don't tap the well nor learn how to make the windmill turn. Eating is my main distraction. Getting up to eat an apple danish. That I've been off sugar for three years is not a deterrent nor that I have to put on a coat, find the keys and go out into the San Francisco fog to get it. Getting up to light incense, to put a record on, to go for a walk - anything just to put off the writing. Returning after I've stuffed myself. Writing paragraphs on pieces of

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paper, adding to the puzzle on the floor, to the confusion on my desk making completion far away and perfection impossible. 26 mayo 80 Dear mujeres de color, I feel heavy and tired and there is a buzz in my head - too many beers last night. But I must finish this letter. My bribe: to take myself out to pizza. So I cut and paste and line the floor with my bits of paper. My life strewn on the floor in bits and pieces and I try to make some order out of it working against time, psyching myself up with decaffeinated coffee, trying to fill in the gaps. Leslie, my housemate, comes in, gets on hands and knees to read my fragments on the floor and says, "It's good, Gloria." And I think: / don't have to go back to Texas, to my family of land, mesquites, cactus, rattlesnakes and roadrunners. My family, this community of writers. How could I have lived and survived so long without it. And I remember the isolation, relive the pain again. "To assess the damage is a dangerous act,"5 writes Cherrie Moraga. To stop there is even more dangerous. It's too easy, blaming it all on the white man or white feminists or society or on our parents. What we say and what we do ultimately comes back to us, so let us own our responsibility, place it in our own hands and carry it with dignity and strength. No one's going to do my shitwork, I pick up after myself. It makes perfect sense to me now how I resisted the act of writing, the commitment to writing. To write is to confront one's demons, look them in the face and live to write about them. Fear acts like a magnet; it draws the demons out of the closet and into the ink in our pens. The tiger riding our backs (writing) never lets us alone. Why aren't you riding, writing, writing? It asks constantly till we begin to feel we're vampires sucking the blood out of too fresh an experience; that we are sucking life's blood to feed the pen. Writing is the most daring thing I have ever done and the most dangerous. Nellie Wong calls writing "the three-eyed demon shrieking the truth."6 Writing is dangerous because we are afraid of what the writing reveals: the fears, the angers, the strengths of a woman under a triple or quadruple oppression. Yet in that very act lies our survival because a woman who writes has power. And a woman with power is feared. What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmother's time? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood. - Alice Walker.7 I have never seen so much power in the ability to move and transform others as from that of the writing of women of color.

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In the San Francisco area, where I now live, none can stir the audience with their craft and truthsaying as do Cherrie Moraga (Chicana), Genny Lim (Asian American), and Luisah Teish (Black). With women like these, the loneliness of writing and the sense of powerlessness can be dispelled. We can walk among each other talking of our writing, reading to each other. And more and more when I'm alone, though still in communion with each other, the writing possesses me and propels me to leap into a timeless, spaceless no-place where I forget myself and feel I am the universe. This is power. It's not on paper that you create but in your innards, in the gut and out of living tissue - organic writing I call it. A poem works for me not when it says what I want it to say and not when it evokes what I want it to. It works when the subject I started out with metamorphoses alchemically into a different one, one that has been discovered, or uncovered, by the poem. It works when it surprises me, when it says something I have repressed or pretended not to know. The meaning and worth of my writing is measured by how much / put myself on the line and how much nakedness I achieve. Audre said we need to speak up. Speak loud, speak unsettling things and be dangerous and just fuck, hell, let it out and let everybody hear whether they want to or not.8 Kathy Kendall I say mujer magica, empty yourself. Shock yourself into new ways of perceiving the world, shock your readers into the same. Stop the chatter inside their heads. Your skin must be sensitive enough for the lightest kiss and thick enough to ward off the sneers. If you are going to spit in the eye of the world, make sure your back is to the wind. Write of what most links us with life, the sensation of the body, the images seen by the eye, the expansion of the psyche in tranquility: moments of high intensity, its movement, sounds, thoughts. Even though we go hungry we are not impoverished of experiences. I think many of us have been fooled by the mass media, by society's conditioning that our lives must be lived in great explosions, by "falling in love," by being "swept off our feet," and by the sorcery of magic genies that will fulfill our every wish, our every childhood longing. Wishes, dreams, and fantasies are important parts of our creative lives. They are the steps a writer integrates into her craft. They are the spectrum of resources to reach the truth, the heart of things, the immediacy and the impact of human conflict.9 Nellie Wong

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Many have a way with words. They label themselves seers but they will not see. Many have the gift of tongue but nothing to say. Do not listen to them. Many who have words and tongue have no ear, they cannot listen and they will not hear. There is no need for words to fester in our minds. They germinate in the open mouth of the barefoot child in the midst of restive crowds. They wither in ivory towers and in college classrooms. Throw away abstraction and the academic learning, the rules, the map and compass. Feel your way without blinders. To touch more people, the personal realities and the social must be evoked - not through rhetoric but through blood and pus and sweat. Write with your eyes like painters, with your ears like musicians, with your feet like dancers. You are the truthsayer with quill and torch. Write with your tongues of fire. Don't let the pen banish you from yourself. Don't let the ink coagulate in your pens. Don't let the censor snuff out the spark, nor the gags muffle your voice. Put your shit on the paper. We are not reconciled to the oppressors who whet their howl on our grief. We are not reconciled. Find the muse within you. The voice that lies buried under you, dig it up. Do not fake it, try to sell it for a handclap or your name in print. Love, Gloria

Notes * Originally written for Words In Our Pockets [Bootlegger: San Franciscol], the Feminist Writers' Guild Handbook. 1 Cherrie Moraga's poem, "It's the Poverty" from Loving In The War Years, an unpublished book of poems. 2 Alice Walker, editor, "What White Publishers Won't Print," / Love Myself When I am Laughing - A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, (New York: The Feminist Press, 1979), p. 169. 3 Moraga, Ibid. 4 Naomi Littlebear, The Dark of the Moon, (Portland: Olive Press, 1977) p. 36. 5 Cherrie Moraga's essay, see "La Giiera." 6 Nellie Wong, "Flows from the Dark of Monsters and Demons: Notes on Writing," Radical Woman Pamphlet, (San Francisco, 1979). 7 Alice Walker, "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South," MS, May, 1974, p. 60. 8 Letter from Kathy Kendall, March 10, 1980, concerning a writer's workshop given by Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Meridel LeSeur. 9 Nellie Wong, Ibid.

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8.8 THE DISCOURSE OF THE VEIL Leila Ahmed From Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate, Yale University Press, 1992,144-68

Qassim Amin's Tahrir al-mar'a (the liberation of woman), published in 1899, during a time of visible social change and lively intellectual ferment, caused intense and furious debate. Analyses of the debate and of the barrage of opposition the book provoked have generally assumed that it was the radicalness of Amin's proposals with respect to women that caused the furore. Yet the principal substantive recommendations that Amin advocated for women—giving them a primary-school education and reforming the laws on polygamy and divorce—could scarcely be described as innovatory. As we saw in the last chapter, Muslim intellectuals such as al-Tahtawi and 'Abdu had argued for women's education and called for reforms in matters of polygamy and divorce in the 1870s and 1880s and even earlier without provoking violent controversy. Indeed, by the 1890s the issue of educating women not only to the primary level but beyond was so uncontroversial that both state and Muslim benevolent societies had established girls' schools. The anger and passion Amin's work provoked become intelligible only when one considers not the substantive reforms for women that he advocated but rather, first, the symbolic reform—the abolition of the veil—that he passionately urged and, second, the reforms, indeed the fundamental changes in culture and society, that he urged upon society as a whole and that he contended it was essential for the Egyptian nation, and Muslim countries generally, to make. The need for a general cultural and social transformation is the central thesis of the book, and it is within this thesis that the arguments regarding women are embedded: changing customs regarding women and changing their costume, abolishing the veil in particular, were key, in the author's thesis, to bringing about the desired

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general social transformation. Examining how Amin's recommendations regarding women formed part of his general thesis and how and why he believed that unveiling was the key to social transformation is essential to unraveling the significance of the debate that his book provoked. Amin's work has traditionally been regarded as marking the beginning of feminism in Arab culture. Its publication and the ensuing debate certainly constitute an important moment in the history of Arab women: the first battle of the veil to agitate the Arab press. The battle inaugurated a new discourse in which the veil came to comprehend significations far broader than merely the position of women. Its connotations now encompassed issues of class and culture—the widening cultural gulf between the different classes in society and the interconnected conflict between the culture of the colonizers and that of the colonized. It was in this discourse, too, that the issues of women and culture first appeared as inextricably fused in Arabic discourse. Both the key features of this new discourse, the greatly expanded signification of the veil and the fusion of the issues of women and culture, that made their formal entry into Arab discourse with the publication of Amin's work had their provenance in the discourses of European societies. In Egypt the British colonial presence and discursive input constituted critical components in the situation that witnessed the emergence of the new discourse of the veil. * ** The British occupation, which began in Egypt in 1882, did not bring about any fundamental change in the economic direction in which Egypt had already embarked—the production of raw material, chiefly cotton, to be worked in European, mainly British, factories. British interests lay in Egypt's continuing to serve as a supplier of raw materials for British factories; and the agricultural projects and administrative reforms pursued by the British administration were those designed to make the country a more efficient producer of raw materials. Such reforms and the country's progressively deeper implication in European capitalism brought increased prosperity and benefits for some classes but worse conditions for others. The principal beneficiaries of the British reform measures and the increased involvement in European capitalism were the European residents of Egypt, the Egyptian upper classes, and the new middle class of rural notables and men educated in Western-type secular schools who became the civil servants and the new intellectual elite. Whether trained in the West or in the Western-type institutions established in Egypt, these new "modern" men with their new knowledges displaced the traditionally and religiously trained 'ulama as administrators and servants of the state, educators, and keepers of the valued knowledges of society. Traditional knowledge itself became devalued as antiquated, mired in the old "backward" ways. The 'ulama class was adversely affected by other developments as well: land-reform measures enacted in the nineteenth century led

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to a loss of revenue for the 'ulama, and legal and judicial reforms in the late nineteenth century took many matters out of the jurisdiction of the shari'a courts, over which the 'ulama presided as legislators and judges, and transferred them to the civil courts, presided over by the "new men." The law reforms, under way before the British occupation, did not affect the position of women. The primary object of the reforms had been to address the palpable injustice of the Capitulary system, whereby Europeans were under the jurisdiction of their consular powers and could not be tried in Egyptian courts. (The Capitulations were concessions gained by European powers, prior to colonialism, which regulated the activities of their merchants and which, with the growing influence of their consuls and ambassadors in the nineteenth century, were turned into a system by which European residents were virtually outside the law.) The reforms accordingly established Mixed Courts and promulgated civil and penal codes applicable to all communities. The new codes, which were largely based on French law, bypassed rather than reformed shari'a law, although occasionally, concerning homicide, for instance, shari'a law, too, was reformed by following an Islamic legal opinion other than the dominant opinion of the Hanafi School, the school followed in Egypt. This method of reforming the shari'a, modifying it by reference to another Islamic legal opinion, was followed in Turkey and, later in the twentieth century, in Iraq, Syria, and Tunisia—but not Egypt—in order to introduce measures critically redefining and amending the law on polygamy and divorce in ways that fundamentally curtailed male license.1 Other groups besides the 'ulama were adversely affected by Western penetration and the local entrenchment of Western power. Artisans and small merchants were unable to compete with Western products or were displaced by the agents of Western interests. Others whose circumstances deteriorated or whose economic advancement was blocked by British administrative policies were rural workers who, as a result of peasant dispossession, nocked to the cities, where they swelled the ranks of urban casual laborers. A growing lower-middle class of men who had received a Western-type secular education up to primary level and who filled the lower ranks of the administration were unable to progress beyond these positions because educational facilities for further training were not available. The British administration not only failed to provide more advanced facilities but responded to the problem by increasing fees at primary level to cut enrollment. Measures such as these, which clearly discriminated in favor of the well-to-do and frustrated the hopes and ambitions of others, accentuated class divisions.2 The British administration pursued its educational policy in the teeth of both a popular demand for education for boys and for girls and the urgings of intellectuals of all political and ideological complexions that the administration give priority to providing more educational facilities because of

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the importance of education to national development. The British administration espoused its restrictive policy partly for political reasons. Cromer, the British consul general, believed that providing subsidized education was not the province of government, and he also believed that education could foster dangerous nationalist sentiments.3 Even this brief outline of the consequences of the increasing economic importance of the West and of British colonial domination suggests how issues of culture and attitudes toward Western ways were interwined with issues of class and access to economic resources, position, and status. The lower-middle and lower classes, who were generally adversely affected by or experienced no benefits from the economic and political presence of the West had a different perspective on the colonizer's culture and ways than did the upper classes and the new middle-class intellectuals trained in Western ways, whose interests were advanced by affiliation with Western culture and who benefited economically from the British presence. Just as the latter group was disposed by economic interests as well as training to be receptive to Western culture, the less prosperous classes were disposed, also on economic grounds, to reject and feel hostile toward it. That attitude was exacerbated by the blatant unfairness of the economic and legal privileges enjoyed by the Europeans in Egypt. The Capitulations— referred to earlier—not only exempted Europeans from the jurisdiction of Egyptian law but also virtually exempted them from paying taxes; Europeans consequently engaged in commerce on terms more favorable than those applied to their native counterparts, and they became very prosperous. Conflicting class and economic interests thus underlay the political and ideological divisions that began ever more insistently to characterize the intellectual and political scene—divisions between those eager to adopt European ways and institutions, seeing them as the means to personal and national advancement, and those anxious to preserve the Islamic and national heritage against the onslaughts of the infidel West. This states somewhat simply the extremes of the two broad oppositional tendencies within Egyptian political thought at this time. The spectrum of political views on the highly fraught issues of colonialism, westernization, British policies, and the political future of the country, views that found expression in the extremely lively and diverse journalistic press, in fact encompassed a wide range of analyses and perspectives. Among the dominant political groups finding voice in the press at the time Amin's work was published was a group that strongly supported the British administration and advocated the adoption of a "European outlook." Prominent among its members were a number of Syrian Christians who founded the pro-British daily Al-muqattam. At the other extreme was a group whose views, articulated in the newspaper Almu'ayyad, published by Sheikh 'Ali Yusuf, fiercely opposed Western

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encroachment in any form. This group was also emphatic about the importance of preserving Islamic tradition in all areas. The National party (Alhizb al-watani), a group led by Mustapha Kamil, was equally fierce in its opposition to the British and to westernization, but it espoused a position of secular rather than Islamic nationalism. This group, whose organ was the journal Al-liwa, held that advancement for Egypt must begin with the expulsion of the British. Other groups, including the Umma party (People's party), which was to emerge as the politically dominant party in the first decades of the twentieth century, advocated moderation and an attitude of judicious discrimination in identifying political and cultural goals. Muhammad 'Abdu, discussed in chapter 7, was an important intellectual influence on the Umma party, though its members were more secular minded; he had advocated the acquisition of Western technology and knowledge and, simultaneously, the revivification and reform of the Islamic heritage, including reform in areas affecting women. The Umma party advocated the adoption of the European notion of the nation-state in place of religion as the basis of community. Their goals were to adopt Western political institutions and, at the same time, to gradually bring about Egypt's independence from the British. Umma party members, unlike Mustapha Kamil's ultranationalists or the Islamic nationalists, consequently had an attitude, not of hostility to the British, but rather of measured collaboration. Among its prominent members were Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid and Sa'd Zaghloul. The colonial presence and the colonizer's economic and political agenda, plus the role that cultural training and affiliation played in widening the gap between classes, provided ample ground for the emergence at this moment of the issue of culture as fraught and controversial. Why the contest over culture should center on women and the veil and why Amin fastened upon those issues as the key to cultural and social transformation only becomes intelligible, however, by reference to ideas imported into the local situation from the colonizing society. Those ideas were interjected into the native discourse as Muslim men exposed to European ideas began to reproduce and react to them and, subsequently and more pervasively and insistently, as Europeans—servants of empire and individuals resident in Egypt—introduced and actively disseminated them. The peculiar practices of Islam with respect to women had always formed part of the Western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam.4 A detailed history of Western representations of women in Islam and of the sources of Western ideas on the subject has yet to be written, but broadly speaking it may be said that prior to the seventeenth century Western ideas about Islam derived from the tales of travelers and crusaders, augmented by the deductions of clerics from their readings of poorly understood Arabic texts. Gradually thereafter, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, readings of Arabic texts became

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slightly less vague, and the travelers' interpretations of what they observed approximated more closely the meanings that the male members of the visited societies attached to the observed customs and phenomena. (Male travelers in Muslim societies had extremely limited access to women, and the explanations and interpretations they brought back, insofar as they represented a native perspective at all, essentially, therefore, gave the male point of view on whatever subject was discussed.) By the eighteenth century the Western narrative of women in Islam, which was drawn from such sources, incorporated elements that certainly bore a resemblance to the bold external features of the Islamic patterns of male dominance, but at the same time it (1) often garbled and misconstrued the specific content and meaning of the customs described and (2) assumed and represented the Islam practiced in Muslim societies in the periods in which the Europeans encountered and then in some degree or other dominated those societies to be the only possible interpretation of the religion. Previous chapters have already indicated the dissent within Islam as to the different interpretations to which it was susceptible. And some sense of the kinds of distortions and garbling to which Muslim beliefs were subject as a result of Western misapprehension is suggested by the ideas that a few more perceptive Western travelers felt themselves called upon to correct in their own accounts of Muslims. The eighteenthcentury writer and traveler Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, attacked the widespread belief among her English contemporaries that Muslims believed that women had no souls, an idea that she explained was untrue. (Montagu believed that many of the misapprehensions of her contemporaries about Islam arose from faulty translations of the Quran made by "Greek Priests, who would not fail to falsify it with the extremity of Malice.") She also said that having herself not only observed veiled women but also used the veil, she was able to assert that it was not the oppressive custom her compatriots believed it to be and in fact it gave women a kind of liberty, for it enabled them not to be recognized.5 But such rebuttals left little mark on the prevailing views of Islam in the West. However, even though Islam's peculiar practices with respect to women and its "oppression" of women formed some element of the European narrative of Islam from early on, the issue of women only emerged as the centerpiece of the Western narrative of Islam in the nineteenth century, and in particular the later nineteenth century, as Europeans established themselves as colonial powers in Muslim countries.6 The new prominence, indeed centrality, that the issue of women came to occupy in the Western and colonial narrative of Islam by the late nineteenth century appears to have been the result of a fusion between a number of strands of thought all developing within the Western world in the latter half of that century. Thus the reorganized narrative, with its new focus on women, appears to have been a compound created out of a

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coalescence between the old narrative of Islam just referred to (and which Edward Said's Orientalism details) and the broad, all-purpose narrative of colonial domination regarding the inferiority, in relation to the European culture, of all Other cultures and societies, a narrative that saw vigorous development over the course of the nineteenth century. And finally and somewhat ironically, combining with these to create the new centrality of the position of women in the colonial discourse of Islam was the language of feminism, which also developed with particular vigor during this period.7 In the colonial era the colonial powers, especially Britain (on which I will focus my discussion), developed their theories of races and cultures and of a social evolutionary sequence according to which middleclass Victorian England, and its beliefs and practices, stood at the culminating point of the evolutionary process and represented the model of ultimate civilization. In this scheme Victorian womanhood and mores with respect to women, along with other aspects of society at the colonial center, were regarded as the ideal and measure of civilization. Such theories of the superiority of Europe, legitimizing its domination of other societies, were shortly corroborated by "evidence" gathered in those societies by missionaries and others, whose observations came to form the emergent study of anthropology. This same emergent anthropology—and other sciences of man—simultaneously served the dominant British colonial and androcentric order in another and internal project of domination. They provided evidence corroborating Victorian theories of the biological inferiority of women and the naturalness of the Victorian ideal of the female role of domesticity. Such theories were politically useful to the Victorian establishment as it confronted, internally, an increasingly vocal feminism.8 Even as the Victorian male establishment devised theories to contest the claims of feminism, and derided and rejected the ideas of feminism and the notion of men's oppressing women with respect to itself, it captured the language of feminism and redirected it, in the service of colonialism, toward Other men and the cultures of Other men. It was here and in the combining of the languages of colonialism and feminism that the fusion between the issues of women and culture was created. More exactly, what was created was the fusion between the issues of women, their oppression, and the cultures of Other men. The idea that Other men, men in colonized societies or societies beyond the borders of the civilized West, oppressed women was to be used, in the rhetoric of colonialism, to render morally justifiable its project of undermining or eradicating the cultures of colonized peoples. Colonized societies, in the colonial thesis, were alike in that they were inferior but differed as to their specific inferiority. Colonial feminism, or feminism as used against other cultures in the service of colonialism, was

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shaped into a variety of similar constructs, each tailored to fit the particular culture that was the immediate target of domination—India, the Islamic world, sub-Saharan Africa. With respect to the Islamic world, regarded as an enemy (and indeed as the enemy) since the Crusades, colonialism—as I have already suggested—had a rich vein of bigotry and misinformation to draw on. Broadly speaking, the thesis of the discourse on Islam blending a colonialism committed to male dominance with feminism—the thesis of the new colonial discourse of Islam centered on women—was that Islam was innately and immutably oppressive to women, that the veil and segregation epitomized that oppression, and that these customs were the fundamental reasons for the general and comprehensive backwardness of Islamic societies. Only if these practices "intrinsic" to Islam (and therefore Islam itself) were cast off could Muslim societies begin to move forward on the path of civilization. Veiling—to Western eyes, the most visible marker of the differentness and inferiority of Islamic societies—became the symbol now of both the oppression of women (or, in the language of the day, Islam's degradation of women) and the backwardness of Islam, and it became the open target of colonial attack and the spearhead of the assault on Muslim societies. The thesis just outlined—that the Victorian colonial paternalistic establishment appropriated the language of feminism in the service of its assault on the religions and cultures of Other men, and in particular on Islam, in order to give an aura of moral justification to that assault at the very same time as it combated feminism within its own society—can easily be substantiated by reference to the conduct and rhetoric of the colonizers. The activities of Lord Cromer are particularly illuminating on the subject, perfectly exemplifying how, when it came to the cultures of other men, white supremacist views, androcentric and paternalistic convictions, and feminism came together in harmonious and actually entirely logical accord in the service of the imperial idea. Cromer had quite decided views on Islam, women in Islam, and the veil. He believed quite simply that Islamic religion and society were inferior to the European ones and bred inferior men. The inferiority of the men was evident in numerous ways, which Cromer lists at length. For instance: "The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he loves symmetry in all things . . . his trained intelligence works like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the Oriental on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description." 9 Cromer explains that the reasons "Islam as a social system has been a complete failure are manifold." However, "first and foremost," he asserts, was its treatment of women. In confirmation of this view he quotes

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the words of the preeminent British Orientalist of his day, Stanley Lane-Poole: "The degradation of women in the East is a canker that begins its destructive work early in childhood, and has eaten into the whole system of Islam" (2:134,134n). Whereas Christianity teaches respect for women, and European men "elevated" women because of the teachings of their religion, Islam degraded them, Cromer wrote, and it was to this degradation, most evident in the practices of veiling and segregation, that the inferiority of Muslim men could be traced. Nor could it be doubted that the practices of veiling and seclusion exercised "a baneful effect on Eastern society. The arguments in the case are, indeed, so commonplace that it is unnecessary to dwell on them" (2:155). It was essential that Egyptians "be persuaded or forced into imbibing the true spirit of western civilisation" (2:538), Cromer stated, and to achieve this, it was essential to change the position of women in Islam, for it was Islam's degradation of women, expressed in the practices of veiling and seclusion, that was "the fatal obstacle" to the Egyptian's "attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilisation" (2:538-39); only by abandoning those practices might they attain "the mental and moral development which he [Cromer] desired for them."10 Even as he delivered himself of such views, the policies Cromer pursued were detrimental to Egyptian women. The restrictions he placed on government schools and his raising of school fees held back girls' education as well as boys'. He also discouraged the training of women doctors. Under the British, the School for Hakimas, which had given women as many years of medical training as the men received in the School of Medicine, was restricted to midwifery. On the local preference among women for being treated by women Cromer said, "I am aware that in exceptional cases women like to be attended by female doctors, but I conceive that throughout the civilised world, attendance by medical men is still the rule."11 However, it was in his activities in relation to women in his own country that Cromer's paternalistic convictions and his belief in the proper subordination of women most clearly declared themselves. This champion of the unveiling of Egyptian women was, in England, founding member and sometime president of the Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage.12 Feminism on the home front and feminism directed against white men was to be resisted and suppressed; but taken abroad and directed against the cultures of colonized peoples, it could be promoted in ways that admirably served and furthered the project of the dominance of the white man. Others besides the official servants of empire promoted these kinds of ideas: missionaries, for example. For them, too, the degradation of women in Islam legitimized the attack on native culture. A speaker at a missionary

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conference held in London in 1888 observed that Muhammad had been exemplary as a young man but took many wives in later life and set out to preach a religion whose object was "to extinguish women altogether"; and he introduced the veil, which "has had the most terrible and injurious effect upon the mental, moral and spiritual history of all Mohammedan races." Missionary women delivered themselves of the same views. One wrote that Muslim women needed to be rescued by their Christian sisters from the "ignorance and degradation" in which they existed, and converted to Christianity. Their plight was a consequence of the nature of their religion, which gave license to "lewdness." Marriage in Islam was "not founded on love but on sensuality," and a Muslim wife, "buried alive behind the veil," was regarded as "prisoner and slave rather than . .. companion and help-meet." Missionary-school teachers actively attacked the custom of veiling by seeking to persuade girls to defy their families and not wear one. For the missionaries, as for Cromer, women were the key to converting backward Muslim societies into civilized Christian societies. One missionary openly advocated targeting women, because women molded children. Islam should be undermined subtly and indirectly among the young, and when children grew older, "the evils of Islam could be spelled out more directly." Thus a trail of "gunpowder" would be laid "into the heart of Islam."13 Others besides officials and missionaries similarly promoted these ideas, individuals resident in Egypt, for example. Well-meaning European feminists, such as Eugenie Le Brun (who took the young Huda Sha'rawi under her wing), earnestly inducted young Muslim women into the European understanding of the meaning of the veil and the need to cast it off as the essential first step in the struggle for female liberation. Whether such proselytizers from the West were colonial patriarchs, then, or missionaries or feminists, all essentially insisted that Muslims had to give up their native religion, customs, and dress, or at least reform their religion and habits along the recommended lines, and for all of them the veil and customs regarding women were the prime matters requiring reform. And all assumed their right to denounce native ways, and in particular the veil, and to set about undermining the culture in the name of whatever cause they claimed to be serving—civilizing the society, or Christianizing it, or saving women from the odious culture and religion in which they had the misfortune to find themselves. Whether in the hands of patriarchal men or feminists, the ideas of Western feminism essentially functioned to morally justify the attack on native societies and to support the notion of the comprehensive superiority of Europe. Evidently, then, whatever the disagreements of feminism with white male domination within Western societies, outside their borders feminism turned from being the critic of the system of white male dominance to being its docile servant. Anthropology, it has often been

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said, served as a handmaid to colonialism. Perhaps it must also be said that feminism, or the ideas of feminism, served as its other handmaid. * ** The ideas to which Cromer and the missionaries gave expression formed the basis of Amin's book. The rationale in which Amin, a French-educated upper-middle-class lawyer, grounded his call for changing the position of women and for abolishing the veil was essentially the same as theirs. Amin's text also assumed and declared the inherent superiority of Western civilization and the inherent backwardness of Muslim societies: he wrote that anyone familiar with "the East" had observed "the backwardness of Muslims in the East wherever they are." There were, to be sure, local differences: "The Turk, for example, is clean, honest, brave," whereas the Egyptian is "the opposite."14 Egyptians were "lazy and always fleeing work," left their children "covered with dirt and roaming the alleys rolling in the dust like the children of animals," and were sunk in apathy, afflicted, as he put it, "with a paralysis of nerves so that we are unmoved by anything, however beautiful or terrible" (34). Nevertheless, over and above such differences between Muslim nationals, Amin asserted, the observer would find both Turks and Egyptians "equal in ignorance, laziness and backwardness" (72). In the hierarchy of civilizations adopted by Amin, Muslim civilization is represented as semicivilized compared to that of the West. European civilization advances with the speed of steam and electricity, and has even overspilled to every part of the globe so that there is not an inch that he [European man] has not trodden underfoot. Any place he goes he takes control of its resources . . . and turns them into profit . . . and if he does harm to the original inhabitants, it is only that he pursues happiness in this world and seeks it wherever he may find it. ... For the most part he uses his intellect, but when circumstances require it, he deploys force. He does not seek glory from his possessions and colonies, for he has enough of this through his intellectual achievements and scientific inventions. What drives the Englishman to dwell in India and the French in Algeria . . . is profit and the desire to acquire resources in countries where the inhabitants do not know their value nor how to profit from them. When they encounter savages they eliminate them or drive them from the land, as happened in America . . . and is happening now in Africa. . . . When they encounter a nation like ours, with a degree of civilization, with a past, and a religion . . . and customs and . . . institutions . . . they deal with its inhabitants kindly. But they do soon acquire its most valuable resources, because they have greater wealth and intellect and knowledge and force. (69-70)

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Amin said that to make Muslim society abandon its backward ways and follow the Western path to success and civilization required changing the women. "The grown man is none other than his mother shaped him in childhood," and "this is the essence of this book. . . . It is impossible to breed successful men if they do not have mothers capable of raising them to be successful. This is the noble duty that advanced civilisation has given to women in our age and which she fulfills in advanced societies" (78; emphasis in original). In the course of making his argument, Amin managed to express not just a generalized contempt for Muslims but also contempt for specific groups, often in lavishly abusive detail. Among the targets of his most dismissive abuse were the rulers of Egypt prior to the British, whom he called corrupt and unjust despots. Their descendants, who still constituted the nominal rulers of the country, were championed by some nationalist antiBritish factions, including Mustapha Kamil's party, as the desirable alternative to British rule. Amin's abuse thus angered nationalists opposed to the British as well as the royal family. Not surprisingly, Khedive Abbas, compelled to govern as the British wished him to, refused to receive Amin after the publication of his book. And Amin's eager praise of the British also inflamed the anti-British factions: he represented British dominion in Egypt as bringing about an age of unprecedented justice and freedom, when "knowledge spread, and national bonding appeared, and security and order prevailed throughout the country, and the basis of advancement became available" (69). In Amin's work only the British administration and European civilization receive lavish praise. Among those singled out as targets of his abuse were the 'ulama. Amin characterizes them as grossly ignorant, greedy, and lazy. He details the bleakness of their intellectual horizons and their deficiencies of character in unequivocal terms. Our 'ulama today . . . takes no interest in ... the intellectual sciences; such things are of no concern to them. The object of their learning is that they know how to parse the bismillah [the phrase "in the name of God"] in no fewer than a thousand ways, and if you ask them how the thing in their hands is made, or where the nation to which they belong or a neighboring nation or the nation that occupied their country is located geographically and what its strengths and weaknesses are, or what the function of a bodily part is, they shrug their shoulders, contemptuous of the question; and if you talk with them about the organization of their government and its laws and economic and political condition, you will find they know nothing. Not only are they greedy . . . they always want to escape hard work, too. (74)

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Those for whom Amin reserved his most virulent contempt—ironically, in a work ostensibly championing their cause—were Egyptian women. Amin describes the physical habits and moral qualities of Egyptian women in considerable detail. Indeed, given the segregation of society and what must have been his exceedingly limited access to women other than members of his immediate family and their retinue, and perhaps prostitutes, the degree of detail strongly suggests that Amin must have drawn on conceptions of the character and conduct of women based on his own and other European or Egyptian men's self-representations on the subject, rather than on any extensive observation of a broad-enough segment of female society to justify his tone of knowledgeable generalization.15 Amin's generalizations about Egyptian women include the following. Most Egyptian women are not in the habit of combing their hair everyday . . . nor do they bathe more than once a week. They do not know how to use a toothbrush and do not attend to what is attractive in clothing, though their attractiveness and cleanliness strongly influence men's inclinations. They do not know how to rouse desire in their husband, nor how to retain his desire or to increase it. ... This is because the ignorant woman does not understand inner feelings and the promptings of attraction and aversion. . . . If she tries to rouse a man, she will usually have the opposite effect. (29) Amin's text describes marriage among Muslims as based not on love but on ignorance and sensuality, as does the missionary discourse. In Amin's text, however, the blame has shifted from men to women. Women were the chief source of the "lewdness" and coarse sensuality and materialism characterizing Muslim marriages. Because only superior souls could experience true love, it was beyond the capacity of the Egyptian wife. She could know only whether her husband was "tall or short, white or black." His intellectual and moral qualities, his sensitive feelings, his knowledge, whatever other men might praise and respect him for, were beyond her grasp. Egyptian women "praise men that honorable men would not shake hands with, and hate others that we honor. This is because they judge according to their ignorant minds. The best man to her is he who plays with her all day and night. . . and who has money . . . and buys her clothes and nice things. And the worst of men is he who spends his time working in his office; whenever she sees him . . . reading . . . she . . . curses books and knowledge" (29-30). One further passage about Egyptian women is worth citing for its surely unwarranted tone of authority. It is also interesting for the animus against women, perhaps even paranoia, that it betrays.

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Our women do nothing of housework, and work at no skill or art, and do not engage themselves in the pursuit of knowledge, and do not read and do not worship God, so what do they do? I will tell you, and you know as I do that what occupies the wife of the rich man and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, master and servant, is one thing . . . which takes many forms and that is her relationship with her husband. Sometimes she will imagine he hates her, and then that he loves her. At times she compares him with the husbands of her neighbors.... Sometimes she sets herself to finding a way to change his feelings toward his relatives.... Nor does she fail to supervise his conduct with the servant girls and observe how he looks when women visitors call . . . she will not tolerate any maid unless the maid is hideous.. . . You see her with neighbors and friends, . . . raising her voice and relating all that occurs between herself and her husband and her husband's relatives and friends, and her sorrows and joys, and all her secrets, baring what is in her heart till no secret remains—even matters of the bed. (40) Of course, not many women would have had the wealth to be as free of housework as Amin suggests, and even wealthy women managed homes, oversaw the care of their children, and saw to their own business affairs, as I described in an earlier chapter, or took an active part in founding and running charities, as I will discuss in the following chapter. But what is striking about Amin's account (addressed to male readers) of how he imagined that women occupied themselves is that even as he describes them as obsessed with their husband and with studying, analyzing, and discussing his every mood and as preoccupied with wondering whether he hates them and whether he is eyeing the maid or the guest, Amin does not have the charity to note that indeed men had all the power and women had excellent reason to study and analyze a husband's every mood and whim. On a mood or a whim, or if a maid or a guest caught his fancy, they could find themselves, at any age, divorced, and possibly destitute. To the extent, then, that Amin was right in his guess as to what women discussed when no men were present—and some women did endlessly talk about their husbands—perhaps those that did, did indeed need to be vigilant about their husbands—moods and conduct and to draw on their women friends for ideas. On the specific measures for the "liberation" of woman that Amin called for, and even what he meant by liberation, the text is turgid and contradictory to a degree attributable variously to intellectual muddle on the part of the writer, to the intrinsic confusion and speciousness inherent in the Western narrative, which he adopted, and to the probability that the work was the fruit of discussions on the subject by several individuals,

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whose ideas Amin then threw together. Indeed, the contribution of other individuals to the work was apparently more than purely verbal: certain chapters, suggests Muhammad 'Amara, editor of Amin's and 'Abdu's works, were written by 'Abdu. One chapter that 'Amara argues was 'Abdu's is distinctly different in both tone and content and consequently will be discussed here separately. It may be noted in this context that one rumor in circulation when the book was published was that it had been written at Cromer's urgings. Given the book's wholehearted reproduction of views common in the writings of the colonizers, that idea was not perhaps altogether farfetched.16 Amin's specific recommendations regarding women, the broad rhetoric on the subject notwithstanding, are fairly limited. Among his focuses is women's education. He was "not among those who demand equality in education," he stated firmly, but a primary-school education was necessary for women (36). Women needed some education to enable them to fulfill their function and duty in life as wives. As Amin spelled it out: "It is the wife's duty to plan the household budget . . . to supervise the servants . . . to make her home attractive to her husband, so that he may find ease when he returns to it and so that he likes being there, and enjoys the food and drink and sleep and does not seek to flee from home to spend his time with neighbors or in public places, and it is her duty—and this is her first and most important duty—to raise the children, attending to them physically, mentally, and morally"(31). Clearly there is nothing in this definition to which the most conservative of patriarchs could not readily assent. Amin's notion that women should receive a primary-school education similarly represented the conservative rather than the liberal point of view among intellectuals and bureaucrats of his day. After all, Amin's book was published in 1899, thirty years after a government commission had recommended providing government schools for both boys and girls and toward the end of a decade in which the demand for education at the primary and secondary level far exceeded capacity. In the 1890s girls, it will be recalled, were already attending schools—missionary schools and those made available by Muslim benevolent societies as well as government schools—and they flooded the teacher-training college with applications when it opened in 1900. In 1891 one journal had even published essays on the role of women by two women from the graduating class of the American College for Girls. Amin's call for a primary-school education for women was far from radical, then; no one speaking out in the debate sparked by his book contested this recommendation. The demand that was most vehemently and widely denounced was his call for an end to segregation and veiling. Amin's arguments, like the discourse of the colonizers, are grounded in the presumption that veiling and seclusion were customs that, in Cromer's words, "exercised a baneful

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effect on Eastern society." The veil constituted, wrote Amin, "a huge barrier between woman and her elevation, and consequently a barrier between the nation and its advance" (54). Unfortunately, his assault on the veil represented not the result of reasoned reflection and analysis but rather the internalization and replication of the colonialist perception. Pared of rhetoric, Amin's argument against seclusion and veiling was simply that girls would forget all they had learned if they were made to veil and observe seclusion after they were educated. The age at which girls were veiled and secluded, twelve to fourteen, was a crucial age for the development of talents and intellect, and veiling and seclusion frustrated that development; girls needed to mix freely with men, for learning came from such mixing (55-56). This position is clearly not compatible with his earlier statement that anything beyond a primary-school education was "unnecessary" for girls. If intellectual development and the acquisition of knowledge were indeed important goals for women, then the rational recommendation would be to pursue these goals directly with increased schooling, not indirectly by ending segregation and veiling so that women could associate with men. Even more specious—as well as offensive to any who did not share Amin's uncritical and wholesale respect for European man and his presumption of the inferiority of native practices—was another argument he advanced for the abandonment of the veil. After asserting that veiling and seclusion were common to all societies in ancient times, he said: "Do Egyptians imagine that the men of Europe, who have attained such completeness of intellect and feeling that they were able to discover the force of steam and electricity . . . these souls that daily risk their lives in the pursuit of knowledge and honor above the pleasures of life,.. . these intellects and these souls that we so admire, could possible fail to know the means of safeguarding woman and preserving her purity? Do they think that such a people would have abandoned veiling after it had been in use among them if they had seen any good in it?" (67). In one section of the book, however, the argument against veiling is rationally made: the chapter which 'Amara suggests was composed by 'Abdu. 'Abdu points out the real disadvantages to women of segregation and veiling. These customs compel them to conduct matters of law and business through an intermediary, placing poor women, who need to earn a living in trade or domestic service, in the false and impossible position of dealing with men in a society that officially bans such dealings (47-48). The section as a whole is distinctly different in tone and ideas from the rest of the work, and not just in the humane rather than contemptuous prose in which it frames its references both to women and to the Islamic heritage. As a result, some of the views expressed there contradict or sit ill with those expressed elsewhere in the book. There is surely some discrepancy, for example, between Amin's view that women are "deficient in

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mind, strong in cunning" (39) and need no more than a primary-school education, on the one hand, and the sentiments as to the potential of both sexes that finds expression in the following passage, on the other: "Education is the means by which the individual may attain spiritual and material happiness. . . . Every person has the natural right to develop their talents to the limit. "Religions address women as they do men. . . . Arts, skills, inventions, philosophy . . . all these draw women as they do men. . . . What difference is there between men and women in this desire, when we see children of both sexes equal in their curiosity about everything falling within their ken? Perhaps that desire is even more alive in girls than in boys" (22-23). Passages suggestive of careful thought are the exception rather than the rule in this work, however.17 More commonly the book presented strident criticism of Muslim, particularly Egyptian, culture and society. In calling for women's liberation the thoroughly patriarchal Amin was in fact calling for the transformation of Muslim society along the lines of the Western model and for the substitution of the garb of Islamic-style male dominance for that of Western-style male dominance. Under the guise of a plea for the "liberation" of woman, then, he conducted an attack that in its fundamentals reproduced the colonizer's attack on native culture and society. For Amin as for the colonizers, the veil and segregation symbolized the backwardness and inferiority of Islamic society; in his discourse as in theirs, therefore, the veil and segregation came in for the most direct attack. For Amin as for Cromer, women and their dress were important counters in the discourse concerning the relative merits of the societies and civilizations of men and their different styles of male domination; women themselves and their liberation were no more important to Amin than to Cromer. Amin's book thus represents the rearticulation in native voice of the colonial thesis of the inferiority of the native and Muslim and the superiority of the European. Rearticulated in native upper-middle-class voice, the voice of a class economically allied with the colonizers and already adopting their life-styles, the colonialist thesis took on a classist dimension: it became in effect an attack (in addition to all the other broad and specific attacks) on the customs of the lower-middle and lower classes. The book is reckoned to have triggered the first major controversy in the Arabic press: more than thirty books and articles appeared in response to its publication. The majority were critical, though the book did please some readers, notably members of the British administration and proBritish factions: the pro-British paper Al-muqattam hailed the book as the finest in years.18 There were evidently many reasons for Muslims and Egyptians, for nationalists of all stripes, to dislike the work: Amin's adulation of the British and of European civilization, his contempt for natives and native ways, his insulting references to the reigning family and to spe-

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cific groups and classes, such as the 'ulama (who were prominent among the critics of his book), and his implied and indeed explicit contempt for the customs of the lower classes. However, just as Amin had used the issue of women and the call for their unveiling to conduct his generalized assault on society, so too did the rebuttals of his work come in the form of an affirmation of the customs that he had attacked—veiling and segregation. In a way that was to become typical of the Arabic narrative of resistance, the opposition appropriated, in order to negate them, the terms set in the first place by the colonial discourse. Analysts routinely treat the debate as one between "feminists," that is, Amin and his allies, and "antifeminists," that is, Amin's critics. They accept at face value the equation made by Amin and the originating Western narrative: that the veil signified oppression, therefore those who called for its abandonment were feminists and those opposing its abandonment were antifeminists.19 As I have suggested, however, the fundamental and contentious premise of Amin's work was its endorsement of the Western view of Islamic civilization, peoples, and customs as inferior, whereas the author's position on women was profoundly patriarchal and even somewhat misogynist. The book merely called for the substitution of Islamic-style male dominance by Western-style male dominance. Far from being the father of Arab feminism, then, Amin might more aptly be described as the son of Cromer and colonialism. Opponents with a nationalist perspective were therefore not necessarily any more antifeminist than Amin was feminist. Some who defended the national custom had views on women considerably more "feminist" than Amin's, but others who opposed unveiling, for nationalist and Islamist reasons, had views on women no less patriarchal than his. For example, the attacks on Amin's book published in Al-liwa, Mustapha Kamil's paper, declared that women had the same right to an education as men and that their education was as essential to the nation as men's—a position considerably more liberal and feminist than Amin's. The writers opposed unveiling not as antifeminists, it seems, but as cogent analysts of the current social situation. They did not argue that veiling was immutable Islamic custom, saying, on the contrary, that future generations might decree otherwise. They argued that veiling was the current practice and that Amin's call to unveil was merely part of the hasty and unconsidered rush to imitate the West in everything.20 This perspective anticipates an incisive and genuinely feminist analysis of the issue of the veil and the accompanying debate offered a few years later by Malak Hifni Nassef, discussed in the next chapter. Tal'at Harb's nationalist response to Amin, in contrast, defended and upheld Islamic practices, putting forward a view of the role and duties of women in society quite as patriarchal as Amin's; but where Amin wanted to adopt a Western-style male dominance, describing his recommendation 1297

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as a call for women's liberation, Harb argued for an Islamic patriarchy, presenting his views quite simply as those of traditional, unadorned, Godordained patriarchy. Harb invoked Christian and Muslim scriptures and Western and Muslim men of learning to affirm that the wife's duty was to attend to the physical, mental, and moral needs of her husband and children21—the same duty that Amin ascribed to her. Their prescriptions for women differed literally in the matter of garb: Harb's women must veil, and Amin's unveil. The argument between Harb and Amin centered not on feminism versus antifeminism but on Western versus indigenous ways. For neither side was male dominance ever in question. * ** Amin's book, then, marks the entry of the colonial narrative of women and Islam—in which the veil and the treatment of women epitomized Islamic inferiority—into mainstream Arabic discourse. And the opposition it generated similarly marks the emergence of an Arabic narrative developed in resistance to the colonial narrative. This narrative of resistance appropriated, in order to negate them, the symbolic terms of the originating narrative. The veil came to symbolize in the resistance narrative, not the inferiority of the culture and the need to cast aside its customs in favor of those of the West, but, on the contrary, the dignity and validity of all native customs, and in particular those customs coming under fiercest colonial attack—the customs relating to women—and the need to tenaciously affirm them as a means of resistance to Western domination. As Frantz Fanon was to say of a later battle of the veil, between the French and the Algerians, the Algerians affirmed the veil because "tradition demanded the rigid separation of the sexes" and because "the occupier was bent on unveiling Algeria" (emphasis in original).22 Standing in the relation of antithesis to thesis, the resistance narrative thus reversed— but thereby also accepted—the terms set in the first place by the colonizers. And therefore, ironically, it is Western discourse that in the first place determined the new meanings of the veil and gave rise to its emergence as a symbol of resistance. Amin's book and the debate it generated, and the issues of class and culture with which the debate became inscribed, may be regarded as the precursor and prototype of the debate around the veil that has recurred in a variety of forms in a number of Muslim and Arab countries since. As for those who took up Amin's call for unveiling in Egypt (such as Huda Sha'rawi), an upper-class or upper-middle-class background, and to some degree or other a Western cultural affiliation, have been typical of those who became advocates of unveiling. In Turkey, for example, Ataturk, who introduced westernizing reforms, including laws affecting women, repeatedly denounced the veil in terms that, like Amin's, reproduced the Western narrative and show that his concern was with how the custom reflected on Turkish men, allowing them to appear "uncivilized" and

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objects of "ridicule." In one speech Ataturk declared: "In some places I have seen women who put a piece of cloth or a towel or something like that over their heads to hide their faces, and who turn their backs or huddle themselves on the ground when a man passes by. What are the meaning and sense of this behaviour? Gentlemen, can the mothers and daughters of a civilised nation adopt this strange manner, this barbarous posture? It is a spectacle that makes the nation an object of ridicule. It must be remedied at once."23 Similarly, in the 1920s the Iranian ruler Reza Shah, also an active reformer and westernizer, went so far as to issue a proclamation banning the veil, a move which had the support of some upper-class women as well as upper-class men. The ban, which symbolized the Westerly direction in which the ruling class intended to lead the society and signaled the eagerness of the upper classes to show themselves to be "civilized," was quite differently received by the popular classes. Even rumors of the move provoked unrest; demonstrations broke out but were ruthlessly crushed. For most Iranians, women as well as men, the veil was not, as a historian of Iranian women has observed, a "symbol of backwardness," which members of the upper classes maintained it was, but "a sign of propriety and a means of protection against the menacing eyes of male strangers." The police had instructions to deal harshly with any woman wearing anything other than a European-style hat or no headgear at all, and many women chose to stay at home rather than venture outdoors and risk having their veils pulled off by the police.24 In their stinging contempt for the veil and the savagery with which they attack it, these two members of the ruling class, like Amin, reveal their true motivation: they are men of the classes assimilating to European ways and smarting under the humiliation of being described as uncivilized because "their" women are veiled, and they are determined to eradicate the practice. That is to say, theirs are the words and acts of men exposed to the Western discourse who have accepted its representation of their culture, the inferiority of its practices, and the meaning of the veil. Why Muslim men should be making such statements and enacting such bans is only intelligible against the background of the global dominance of the Western world and the authority of its discourses, and also against the background of the ambiguous position of men and women of the upper classes, members of Muslim societies whose economic interests and cultural aspirations bound them to the colonizing West and who saw their own society partly through Western eyes. * * * The origins and history, just described, of the idea of the veil as it informs Western colonial discourse and twentieth-century Arabic debate have a number of implications. First, it is evident that the connection between the issues of culture and women, and more precisely between the cultures of

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Other men and the oppression of women, was created by Western discourse. The idea (which still often informs discussions about women in Arab and Muslim cultures and other non-Western world cultures) that improving the status of women entails abandoning native customs was the product of a particular historical moment and was constructed by an androcentric colonial establishment committed to male dominance in the service of particular political ends. Its absurdity and essential falseness become particularly apparent (at least from a feminist point of view) when one bears in mind that those who first advocated it believed that Victorian mores and dress, and Victorian Christianity, represented the ideal to which Muslim women should aspire. Second, these historical origins explain another and, on the face of it, somewhat surprising phenomenon: namely, the peculiar resemblance to be found between the colonial and still-commonplace Western view that an innate connection exists between the issues of culture and women in Muslim societies and the similar presumption underlying the Islamist resistance position, that such a fundamental connection does indeed exist. The resemblance between the two positions is not coincidental: they are mirror images of each other. The resistance narrative contested the colonial thesis by inverting it—thereby also, ironically, grounding itself in the premises of the colonial thesis. The preceding account of the development of a colonial narrative of women in Islam has other implications as well, including that the colonial account of Islamic oppression of women was based on misperceptions and political manipulations and was incorrect. My argument here is not that Islamic societies did not oppress women. They did and do; that is not in dispute. Rather, I am here pointing to the political uses of the idea that Islam oppressed women and noting that what patriarchal colonialists identified as the sources and main forms of women's oppression in Islamic societies was based on a vague and inaccurate understanding of Muslim societies. This means, too, that the feminist agenda for Muslim women as set by Europeans—and first devised by the likes of Cromer—was incorrect and irrelevant. It was incorrect in its broad assumptions that Muslim women needed to abandon native ways and adopt those of the West to improve their status; obviously, Arab and Muslim women need to reject (just as Western women have been trying to do) the androcentrism and misogyny of whatever culture and tradition they find themselves in, but that is not at all the same as saying they have to adopt Western culture or reject Arab culture and Islam comprehensively. The feminist agenda as defined by Europeans was also incorrect in its particularities, including its focus on the veil. Because of this history of struggle around it, the veil is now pregnant with meanings. As item of clothing, however, the veil itself and whether it is worn are about as relevant to substantive matters of women's rights as the social prescription of one or another item of clothing

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is to Western women's struggles over substantive issues. When items of clothing—be it bloomers or bras—have briefly figured as focuses of contention and symbols of feminist struggle in Western societies, it was at least Western feminist women who were responsible for identifying the item in question as significant and defining it as a site of struggle and not, as has sadly been the case with respect to the veil for Muslim women, colonial and patriarchal men, like Cromer and Amin, who declared it important to feminist struggle. That so much energy has been expended by Muslim men and then Muslim women to remove the veil and by others to affirm or restore it is frustrating and ludicrous. But even worse is the legacy of meanings and struggles over issues of culture and class with which not only the veil but also the struggle for women's rights as a whole has become inscribed as a result of this history and as a result of the cooptation by colonialism of the issue of women and the language of feminism in its attempt to undermine other cultures. This history, and the struggles over culture and between classes, continues to live even today in the debates on the veil and on women. To a considerable extent, overtly or covertly, inadvertently or otherwise, discussions of women in Islam in academies and outside them, and in Muslim countries and outside them, continue either to reinscribe the Western narrative of Islam as oppressor and the West as liberator and native classist versions of that narrative or, conversely, to reinscribe the contentions of the Arabic narrative of resistance as to the essentialness of preserving Muslim customs, particularly with regard to women, as a sign of resistance to imperialism, whether colonial or postcolonial.25 Further, colonialism's use of feminism to promote the culture of the colonizers and undermine native culture has ever since imparted to feminism in non-Western societies the taint of having served as an instrument of colonial domination, rendering it suspect in Arab eyes and vulnerable to the charge of being an ally of colonial interests. That taint has undoubtedly hindered the feminist struggle within Muslim societies. In addition, the assumption that the issues of culture and women are connected—which informed and to an extent continues to inform Western discussions of women in Islam and which, entering Arabic discourse from colonialist sources, has become ensconced there—has trapped the struggle for women's rights with struggles over culture. It has meant that an argument for women's rights is often perceived and represented by the opposing side as an argument about the innate merits of Islam and Arab culture comprehensively. And of course it is neither Islam nor Arab culture comprehensively that is the target of criticism or the objects of advocated reform but those laws and customs to be found in Muslim Arab societies that express androcentric interests, indifference to women, or misogyny. The issue is simply the humane and just treatment of women, nothing less,

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and nothing more—not the intrinsic merits of Islam, Arab culture, or the West. I suggested in an earlier chapter that Western economic penetration of the Middle East and the exposure of Middle Eastern societies to Western political thought and ideas, though undoubtedly having some negative consequences for women, nonetheless did lead to the dismantling of constrictive social institutions and the opening up of new opportunities for women. In the light of the evidence reviewed in the present chapter it appears that a distinction has to be made between, on the one hand, the consequences for women following from the opening of Muslim societies to the West and the social changes and the expansion of intellectual horizons that occurred as a result of the interest within Arab societies in emulating Western technological and political accomplishments and, on the other hand, the quite different and apparently essentially negative consequences following from the construction and dissemination of a Western patriarchal discourse targeting the issue of women and coopting the language of feminism in the service of its strategies of domination. True, reforms introduced by upper- and middle-class political leaders who had accepted and internalized the Western discourse led in some countries, and specifically Turkey, to legal reforms benefiting women. Ataturk's programs included the replacement of the shari'a family code with a code inspired by the Swiss family code, which at once outlawed polygamy, gave women equal rights to divorce, and granted child-custody rights to both parents. These reforms benefited primarily women of the urban bourgeoisie and had little impact beyond this class. Moreover, and more importantly, whether they will prove enduring remains to be seen, for even in Turkey, Islam and the veil are resurgent: militant Turkish women have staged sit-ins and hunger strikes to demand the right to veil.26 Reforms in laws governing marriage and divorce that were introduced in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s, though not as far-reaching as Turkish reforms, have already been reversed. Possibly, reforms pursued in a native idiom and not in terms of the appropriation of the ways of other cultures would have been more intelligible and persuasive to all classes and not merely to the upper and middle classes, and possibly, therefore, they would have proved more durable.

Notes 1 See J. N. Anderson, "Law Reform in Egypt: 1850-1950," in Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt, ed. P. M. Holt (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 209-30; and Noel J. Coulson and Doreen Hinchcliffc, "Women and Law Reform in Contemporary Islam," in Women in the Muslim World, ed. Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 37-51. 2 Robert L. Tignor, Modernisation and British Colonial Rule in Egypt, 1882-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1966), 324.

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THE D I S C O U R S E OF THE VEIL 3 Ibid., 324-6. 4 In Dante's Divine Comedy, for instance, in which Muhammad is relegated to one of the lowest circles of hell, Muhammad is associated with a figure whose transgressions similarly were in the area of what he preached with respect to women. See The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Dorothy Sayers (Penguin Books, 1949), Canto 28, 346-47, 251. For some accounts of early Western representations of Islam see Norman Daniel, Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966); and R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). 5 The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 2 vols., ed. Robert Halsband (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:318. She corrects "our Vulgar Notion that they do not own women to have any Souls" but perpetuates a modified version of that error in writing, " Tis true, they say they [women's souls] are not of so elevated a kind, and therefore must not hope to be admitted into the paradise appointed for the Men." Ibid., 1:363. For her statements on polygamy and the parallel "inconstancy" of European men see ibid., 1:329. Montagu also points out in this context that Muslim women of the upper classes owned property in their own right and thus were less at the mercy of men than their Christian sisters. For her remarks on the veil see ibid., 1:328. 6 Timothy Mitchell's Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) offers an interesting and valuable exploration of the issues of colonialism and its discursive designs. 7 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). 8 For discussions of the uses of anthropology to colonial theory and its uses in reinforcing sexist views of women see Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock, "Introduction," in Women and Colonisation: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Etienne and Leacock (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1980), 1-24; Susan Carol Rogers, "Women's Place: A Critical Review of Anthropological Theory," Comparative Studies in Society and History 20, no. 1 (1978): 123-62; Elizabeth Fee, "The Sexual Politics of Victorian Social Anthropology," in Clio's Consciousness Raised, ed. M. Hartman and L. Banner (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1974), 86-102. 9 Earl of Cromer, Modem Egypt, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 2:146; hereafter cited in the text. 10 A. B. De Guerville, New Egypt (London: William Heinemann, 1906), 154. 11 Cromer Papers, cited in Judith E. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 122. 12 Cromer was so prominent in the antisuffrage movement that it was sometimes called the Curzon-Cromer combine after Cromer and Lord Curzon, first marquis of Keddleston. See Constance Rover, Women's Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain, 1866-1914 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 171-73; see also Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women's Suffrage in Britain (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1978). 13 Rev. Robert Bruce, in Report of the Centenary Conference on Protestant Missions of the World Held in Exeter Hall, London (June 9-19th), 2 vols., ed. James Johnston (New York: F. H. Revell, [1889]), 1:18-19; Annie van Sommer and Samuel M. Z,wemer, eds., Our Moslem Sisters: A Cry of Need from Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It (New York: F. H. Revell, 1907), 27-28; van Sommer and Zwemer, eds., Daylight in the Harem (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier, 1911), 149-50. 14 Qassim Amin, Tabrir al-mar'a, in Al-a'mal al-kamila li Qassim Amin, 2 vols., 1303

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15 16

17

18 19

20 21 22

23

24 25

ed. Muhammad 'Amara (Beirut: Al-mu'assasa al-'arabiyya lil-dirasat wa'l nashr, 1976), 2:71-72; hereafter cited in the text. All quotations from Tahrir almar'a are from vol. 2. For a discussion of Amin's family life see Mary Flounders Arnett, Qassim Amin and the Beginnings of the Feminist Movement in Egypt (Ph.D. diss., Dropsie College, 1965). 'Amara, "Hadith 'an al-a'mal al-kamila" (Discussion of the works of Amin), in Al-a'mal al-kamila li Qassim Amin, ed. 'Amara, 1:133. 'Amara mentions that the work was the outcome of a gathering in Geneva in 1897 attended by Muhammad 'Abdu, Sa'd Zaghloul, Lutfi al-Sayyid, and Qassim Amin. Indeed, 'Amara points to particular sections that he believes were written by Muhammad 'Abdu. Ibid., 1:139. Perhaps passages such as the above were contributed by 'Abdu or by others— Sa'd Zaghloul or Lutfi al-Sayyid—who have also been mentioned as collaborating with Amin. See Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt and Cramer (London: John Murray, 1968), 187. Mukhtar Tuhami, Al-sahafa wa'l-fikr wa'l-thawra, thalath ma'ariq fikriyya (Baghdad: Dar ma'mun lil-tiba'a, 1976), 28. Among the more interesting pieces on the subject are Judith Gran, "Impact of the World Market on Egyptian Women," Middle East Research and Information Report, no. 58 (1977): 3-7; and Juan Ricardo Cole, "Feminism, Class, and Islam in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt," International Journal of Middle East Studies 13, no. 4 (1981): 394-407. Tuhami, Thalath ma'ariq fikriyya, 42-45. Tal'at Harb, Tarbiyet al-mar'a wa'l-hijab, 2d ed. (Cairo: Matba'at al-manar, 1905), e.g., 18,19,25,29. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 65. A useful discussion of the interconnections between thesis and antithesis and the ways in which antithesis may become locked in meanings posed by the thesis may be found in Joan W. Scott, "Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism," Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (1988): 33-49. Ataturk, speech at Kastamonu, 1925, Quoted in Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 165. For further discussions of Turkish articulations of the issue see S. Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962); and O. Ozankaya, "Reflections of Semsiddin Sami on Women in the Period before the Advent of Secularism," in Family in Turkish Society, ed. T. Erder (Ankara: Turkish Social Science Association, 1985). Guity Nashat, "Women in Pre-Revolutionary Iran: A Historical Overview," in Women and Revolution in Iran, ed. Nashat (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1982), 27. One problem with rebuttals of the Islamicist argument voiced by women of Muslim background (and others) generally, but not exclusively, based in the West is the extent to which they reproduce the Western narrative and its iteration in native upper-class voice without taking account of the colonialist and classist assumptions in which it is mired. This silent and surely inadvertent reinscription of racist and classist assumptions is in rebuttals offered from a "Marxist" perspective as much as in rebuttals aligned with the Western liberal position. See, for example, Mai Ghoussoub, "Feminism—or the Eternal Masculine—in the Arab World," New Left Review 161 (January-February 1987): 3-18; and Azar Tabari, "The Women's Movement in Iran: A Hopeful Progno1304

THE D I S C O U R S E OF THE VEIL sis," Feminist Studies 12, no. 2 (1986): 343-60. The topic of Orientalism and the study of Arab women is addressed with particular acumen in Rosemary Sayigh, "Roles and Functions of Arab Women: A Reappraisal of Orientalism and Arab Women," Arab Studies Quarterly 3, no. 3 (1981): 258-74. 26 See Deniz Kandiyoti, "Women and the Turkish State: Political Actors or Symbolic Pawns?" in Women—Nation—State, ed. Nira Yuval-Davis (London: Macmillan, 1989), 126.

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8.9

POSTMODERN BLACKNESS bell hooks From Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics, South End Press, 1990, 23-31

Postmodernist discourses are often exclusionary even as they call attention to, appropriate even, the experience of "difference" and "Otherness" to provide oppositional political meaning, legitimacy, and immediacy when they are accused of lacking concrete relevance. Very few AfricanAmerican intellectuals have talked or written about postmodernism. At a dinner party I talked about trying to grapple with the significance of postmodernism for contemporary black experience. It was one of those social gatherings where only one other black person was present. The setting quickly became a field of contestation. I was told by the other black person that I was wasting my time, that "this stuff does not relate in any way to what's happening with black people." Speaking in the presence of a group of white onlookers, staring at us as though this encounter were staged for their benefit, we engaged in a passionate discussion about black experience. Apparently, no one sympathized with my insistence that racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated solely with concrete gut level experience conceived as either opposing or having no connection to abstract thinking and the production of critical theory. The idea that there is no meaningful connection between black experience and critical thinking about aesthetics or culture must be continually interrogated. My defense of postmodernism and its relevance to black folks sounded good, but I worried that I lacked conviction, largely because I approach the subject cautiously and with suspicion. Disturbed not so much by the "sense" of postmodernism but by the conventional language used when it is written or talked about and by those who speak it, I find myself on the outside of the discourse looking in. As a discursive practice it is dominated primarily by the voices of white male intellectuals and/or academic elites who speak to and about one another with coded familiarity. Reading and studying their writing to understand postmodernism in its multiple manifestations, I appreciate it but feel little

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inclination to ally myself with the academic hierarchy and exclusivity pervasive in the movement today. Critical of most writing on postmodernism, I perhaps am more conscious of the way in which the focus on "Otherness and difference" that is often alluded to in these works seems to have little concrete impact as an analysis or standpoint that might change the nature and direction of postmodernist theory. Since much of this theory has been constructed in reaction to and against high modernism, there is seldom any mention of black experience or writings by black people in this work, specifically black women (though in more recent work one may see a reference to Cornel West, the black male scholar who has most engaged postmodernist discourse). Even if an aspect of black culture is the subject of postmodern critical writing, the works cited will usually be those of black men. A work that comes immediately to mind is Andrew Ross's chapter "Hip, and the Long Front of Color" in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture; while it is an interesting reading, it constructs black culture as though black women have had no role in black cultural production. At the end of Meaghan Morris' discussion of postmodernism in her collection of essays The Pirate's Fiance: Feminism and Postmodernism, she provides a bibliography of works by women, identifying them as important contributions to a discourse on postmodernism that offer new insight as well as challenging male theoretical hegemony. Even though many of the works do not directly address postmodernism, they address similar concerns. There are no references to works by black women. The failure to recognize a critical black presence in the culture and in most scholarship and writing on postmodernism compels a black reader, particularly a black female reader, to interrogate her interest in a subject where those who discuss and write about it seem not to know black women exist or even to consider the possibility that we might be somewhere writing or saying something that should be listened to, or producing art that should be seen, heard, approached with intellectual seriousness. This is especially the case with works that go on and on about the way in which postmodernist discourse has opened up a theoretical terrain where "difference and Otherness" can be considered legitimate issues in the academy. Confronting both the absence of recognition of black female presence that much postmodernist theory re-inscribes and the resistance on the part of most black folks to hearing about real connection between postmodernism and black experience, I enter a discourse, a practice, where there may be no ready audience for my words, no clear listener, uncertain then, that my voice can or will be heard. During the sixties, black power movement was influenced by perspectives that could easily be labeled modernist. Certainly many of the ways black folks addressed issues of identity conformed to a modernist universalizing agenda. There was little critique of patriarchy as a master

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narrative among black militants. Despite the fact that black power ideology reflected a modernist sensibility, these elements were soon rendered irrelevant as militant protest was stifled by a powerful, repressive postmodern state. The period directly after the black power movement was a time when major news magazines carried articles with cocky headlines like "Whatever Happened to Black America?" This response was an ironic reply to the aggressive, unmet demand by decentered, marginalized black subjects who had at least momentarily successfully demanded a hearing, who had made it possible for black liberation to be on the national political agenda. In the wake of the black power movement, after so many rebels were slaughtered and lost, many of these voices were silenced by a repressive state; others became inarticulate. It has become necessary to find new avenues to transmit the messages of black liberation struggle, new ways to talk about racism and other politics of domination. Radical postmodernist practice, most powerfully conceptualized as a "politics of difference," should incorporate the voices of displaced, marginalized, exploited, and oppressed black people. It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of Otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge. If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact, then a critical break with the notion of "authority" as "mastery over" must not simply be a rhetorical device. It must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter. Third world nationals, elites, and white critics who passively absorb white supremacist thinking, and therefore never notice or look at black people on the streets or at their jobs, who render us invisible with their gaze in all areas of daily life, are not likely to produce liberatory theory that will challenge racist domination, or promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and thinking about reality, ways of constructing aesthetic theory and practice. From a different standpoint, Robert Storr makes a similar critique in the global issue of Art in America when he asserts: To be sure, much postmodernist critical inquiry has centered precisely on the issues of "difference" and "Otherness." On the purely theoretical plane the exploration of these concepts has produced some important results, but in the absence of any sustained research into what artists of color and others outside the mainstream might be up to, such discussions become rootless instead of radical. Endless second guessing about the latent imperialism of intruding upon other cultures only compounded matters, preventing or excusing these theorists from investigating what black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American artists were actually doing.

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Without adequate concrete knowledge of and contact with the nonwhite "Other," white theorists may move in discursive theoretical directions that are threatening and potentially disruptive of that critical practice which would support radical liberation struggle. The postmodern critique of "identity," though relevant for renewed black liberation struggle, is often posed in ways that are problematic. Given a pervasive politic of white supremacy which seeks to prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity, we cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity politics. Any critic exploring the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial difference and racial domination would need to consider the implications of a critique of identity for oppressed groups. Many of us are struggling to find new strategies of resistance. We must engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful chances of survival even as we must simultaneously cope with the loss of political grounding which made radical activism more possible. I am thinking here about the postmodernist critique of essentialism as it pertains to the construction of "identity" as one example. Postmodern theory that is not seeking to simply appropriate the experience of "Otherness" to enhance the discourse or to be radically chic should not separate the "politics of difference" from the politics of racism. To take racism seriously one must consider the plight of underclass people of color, a vast majority of whom are black. For African-Americans our collective condition prior to the advent of postmodernism and perhaps more tragically expressed under current postmodern conditions has been and is characterized by continued displacement, profound alienation, and despair. Writing about blacks and postmodernism, Cornel West describes our collective plight: There is increasing class division and differentiation, creating on the one hand a significant black middle-class, highly anxietyridden, insecure, willing to be co-opted and incorporated into the powers that be, concerned with racism to the degree that it poses contraints on upward social mobility; and, on the other, a vast and growing black underclass, an underclass that embodies a kind of walking nihilism of pervasive drug addiction, pervasive alcoholism, pervasive homicide, and an exponential rise in suicide. Now because of the deindustrialization, we also have a devastated black industrial working class. We are talking here about tremendous hopelessness. This hopelessness creates longing for insight and strategies for change that can renew spirits and reconstruct grounds for collective black liberation struggle. The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair,

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uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance. Radical postmodernism calls attention to those shared sensibilities which cross the boundaries of class, gender, race, etc., that could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy—ties that would promote recognition of common commitments, and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition. Yearning is the word that best describes a common psychological state shared by many of us, cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual practice. Specifically, in relation to the post-modernist deconstruction of "master" narratives, the yearning that wells in the hearts and minds of those whom such narratives have silenced is the longing for critical voice. It is no accident that "rap" has usurped the primary position of rhythm and blues music among young black folks as the most desired sound or that it began as a form of "testimony" for the underclass. It has enabled underclass black youth to develop a critical voice, as a group of young black men told me, a "common literacy." Rap projects a critical voice, explaining, demanding, urging. Working with this insight in his essay "Putting the Pop Back into Postmodernism," Lawrence Grossberg comments: The postmodern sensibility appropriates practices as boasts that announce their own—and consequently our own—existence, like a rap song boasting of the imaginary (or real—it makes no difference) accomplishments of the rapper. They offer forms of empowerment not only in the face of nihilism but precisely through the forms of nihilism itself: an empowering nihilism, a moment of positivity through the production and structuring of affective relations. Considering that it is as subject one comes to voice, then the postmodernist focus on the critique of identity appears at first glance to threaten and close down the possibility that this discourse and practice will allow those who have suffered the crippling effects of colonization and domination to gain or regain a hearing. Even if this sense of threat and the fear it evokes are based on a misunderstanding of the postmodernist political project, they nevertheless shape responses. It never surprises me when black folks respond to the critique of essentialism, especially when it denies the validity of identity politics by saying, "Yeah, it's easy to give up identity, when you got one." Should we not be suspicious of postmodern critiques of the "subject" when they surface at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time. Though an apt and oftentimes appropriate comeback, it does not really intervene in the discourse in a way that alters and transforms. Criticisms of directions in postmodern thinking should not obscure

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insights it may offer that open up our understanding of African-American experience. The critique of essentialism encouraged by postmodernist thought is useful for African-Americans concerned with reformulating outmoded notions of identity. We have too long had imposed upon us from both the outside and the inside a narrow, constricting notion of blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of self and the assertion of agency. Employing a critique of essentialism allows African-Americans to acknowledge the way in which class mobility has altered collective black experience so that racism does not necessarily have the same impact on our lives. Such a critique allows us to affirm multiple black identities, varied black experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of black identity which represent blackness one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy. This discourse created the idea of the "primitive" and promoted the notion of an "authentic" experience, seeing as "natural" those expressions of black life which conformed to a pre-existing pattern or stereotype. Abandoning essentialist notions would be a serious challenge to racism. Contemporary African-American resistance struggle must be rooted in a process of decolonization that continually opposes re-inscribing notions of "authentic" black identity. This critique should not be made synonymous with a dismissal of the struggle of oppressed and exploited peoples to make ourselves subjects. Nor should it deny that in certain circumstances this experience affords us a privileged critical location from which to speak. This is not a re-inscription of modernist master narratives of authority which privilege some voices by denying voice to others. Part of our struggle for radical black subjectivity is the quest to find ways to construct self and identity that are oppositional and liberatory. The unwillingness to critique essentialism on the part of many African-Americans is rooted in the fear that it will cause folks to lose sight of the specific history and experience of African-Americans and the unique sensibilities and culture that arise from that experience. An adequate response to this concern is to critique essentialism while emphasizing the significance of "the authority of experience." There is a radical difference between a repudiation of the idea that there is a black "essence" and recognition of the way black identity has been specifically constituted in the experience of exile and struggle. When black folks critique essentialism, we are empowered to recognize multiple experiences of black identity that are the lived conditions which make diverse cultural productions possible. When this diversity is ignored, it is easy to see black folks as falling into two categories: nationalist or assimilationist, black-identified or white-identified. Coming to terms with the impact of postmodernism for black experience, particularly as it

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changes our sense of identity, means that we must and can rearticulate the basis for collective bonding. Given the various crises facing AfricanAmericans (economic, spiritual, escalating racial violence, etc.), we are compelled by circumstance to reassess our relationship to popular culture and resistance struggle. Many of us are as reluctant to face this task as many non-black postmodern thinkers who focus theoretically on the issue of "difference" are to confront the issue of race and racism. Music is the cultural product created by African-Americans that has most attracted postmodern theorists. It is rarely acknowledged that meic is far greater censorship and restriction of other forms of cultural production by black folks—literary, critical writing, etc. Attempts on the part of editors and publishing houses to control and manipulate the representation of black culture, as well as the desire to promote the creation of products that will attract the widest audience, limit in a crippling and stifling way the kind of work many black folks feel we can do and still receive recognition. Using myself as an example, that creative writing I do which I consider to be most reflective of a postmodern oppositional sensibility, work that is abstract, fragmented, non-linear narrative, is constantly rejected by editors and publishers. It does not conform to the type of writing they think black women should be doing or the type of writing they believe will sell. Certainly I do not think I am the only black person engaged in forms of cultural production, especially experimental ones, who is constrained by the lack of an audience for certain kinds of work. It is important for postmodern thinkers and theorists to constitute themselves as an audience for such work. To do this they must assert power and privilege within the space of critical writing to open up the field so that it will be more inclusive. To change the exclusionary practice of postmodern critical discourse is to enact a postmodernism of resistance. Part of this intervention entails black intellectual participation in the discourse. In his essay "Postmodernism and Black America," Cornel West suggests that black intellectuals "are marginal—usually languishing at the interface of Black and white cultures or thoroughly ensconced in EuroAmerican settings." He cannot see this group as potential producers of radical postmodernist thought. While I generally agree with this assessment, black intellectuals must proceed with the understanding that we are not condemned to the margins. The way we work and what we do can determine whether or not what we produce will be meaningful to a wider audience, one that includes all classes of black people. West suggests that black intellectuals lack "any organic link with most of Black life" and that this "diminishes their value to Black resistance." This statement bears traces of essentialism. Perhaps we need to focus more on those black intellectuals, however rare our presence, who do not feel this lack and whose work is primarily directed towards the enhancement of black critical consciousness and the strengthening of our collective capacity to engage in

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meaningful resistance struggle. Theoretical ideas and critical thinking need not be transmitted solely in written work or solely in the academy. While I work in a predominantly white institution, I remain intimately and passionately engaged with black community. It's not like I'm going to talk about writing and thinking about postmodernism with other academics and/or intellectuals and not discuss these ideas with underclass nonacademic black folks who are family, friends, and comrades. Since I have not broken the ties that bind me to underclass poor black community, I have seen that knowledge, especially that which enhances daily life and strengthens our capacity to survive, can be shared. It means that critics, writers, and academics have to give the same critical attention to nurturing and cultivating our ties to black community that we give to writing articles, teaching, and lecturing. Here again I am really talking about cultivating habits of being that reinforce awareness that knowledge can be disseminated and shared on a number of fronts. The extent to which knowledge is made available, accessible, etc. depends on the nature of one's political commitments. Postmodern culture with its decentered subject can be the space where ties are severed or it can provide the occasion for new and varied forms of bonding. To some extent, ruptures, surfaces, contextuality, and a host of other happenings create gaps that make space for oppositional practices which no longer require intellectuals to be confined by narrow separate spheres with no meaningful connection to the world of the everyday. Much postmodern engagement with culture emerges from the yearning to do intellectual work that connects with habits of being, forms of artistic expression, and aesthetics that inform the daily life of writers and scholars as well as a mass population. On the terrain of culture, one can participate in critical dialogue with the uneducated poor, the black underclass who are thinking about aesthetics. One can talk about what we are seeing, thinking, or listening to; a space is there for critical exchange. It's exciting to think, write, talk about, and create art that reflects passionate engagement with popular culture, because this may very well be "the" central future location of resistance struggle, a meeting place where new and radical happenings can occur.

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8.10 WOMAN SKIN DEEP Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition Sara Suleri From Critical Inquiry 18.4 (Summer 1992): 756-69

Given the current climate of rampant and gleeful anti-intellectualism that has overtaken the mass media at the present time, both literary and cultural interpretive practitioners have more than ample reason to reassess, to reexamine, and to reassert those theoretical concerns that constitute or question the identity of each putatively marginal group. There are dreary reiterations that must be made, and even more dreary navigations between the Scylla and Charybdis so easily identified in journalism as a conflict between the "thought police" on the one hand and the proponents of "multiculturalism" on the other. As readers of mass culture, let us note by way of example the astonishing attention that the media has accorded the academy: the Gulf War took up three months of their time, whereas we have been granted over a year of headlines and glossy magazine newsworthiness. Is our anathema, then, more pervasive than that of Saddam Hussein? In what fashion is the academy now to be read as one of the greatest sources of sedition against the new world order? The moment demands urgent consideration of how the outsideness of cultural criticism is being translated into that most tedious dichotomy that pits the "academy" against the "real world." While I am somewhat embarrassed by the prospect of having to contemplate such a simplistic binarism, this essay seeks to question its own cultural parameters by situating both its knowledge and its ignorance in relation to the devastating rhetoric of "us and them" that beleaguers issues of identity formation today. Grant me the luxury, then, of not having to supply quotation marks around several of the terms employed, and—since the time of life is short—an acknowledgement that the "we" to which I am forced to take recourse is indeed very, very wee.

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WOMAN SKIN DEEP The sustained and trivializing attack on what is represented as academic self-censorship cannot be segregated from current reformulations of cultural identities: the former will continue to misconstrue deliberately questions of marginality into solutions of frivolity, or cultural criticism into tyrannical cliches about the political correctness of the thought police. And, if the debate on multiculturalism simply degenerates into a misplaced desire for the institution of rainbow coalition curricula, its shadow will fall in all heaviness on those disciplines most responsible for producing the kind of rhetoric that is presently castigated for its political rectitude. Discursive formations that question canonical and cultural censors, in other words, are precisely the ones to be singled out as demonstrative of the academy's spinelessly promiscuous submission to "correctness." The list of public enemies thus produced is hardly surprising: our prostitution is repeatedly characterized by intellectual allegiances to the identity of postcolonialism, of gender, of gay and lesbian studies, and finally, of the body. The academy has subcultured itself out of viable existence, we are told, and the subtextual moral that attends such journalistic cautionary tales is almost too obvious to merit articulation: if they left hand offendeth thee, cut it off. Since none of us are partial to being lopped, the only resort appears to be a two-tiered response to the anti-intellectualism that is our "fin de siecle" fate. First—as has been clear for at least the last year—the world lies all before us; we have and must continue to respond. While much of the material that has appeared in the popular press is so low-grade as to disqualify itself as discourse, the academy must persist in making a resolute attempt to present some firm alternative opinions within those very columns. On a very simplistic and pragmatic level, if we must be freaks, let us be freaks with a voice. It may well be that this effort at articulation will yield some useful readings of the peculiar identity of the professional academic: how plural are we in our constructions of singularity; and how singular in our apprehensions of the plural? The second tier of any sustained response consists of an attempt to engender within the academy an overdue exchange about the excesses and the limitations that marginal discourses must inevitably accrue, even as they seek to map the ultimate obsolescence of the dichotomy between margin and center. For until the participants in marginal discourses learn how best to critique the intellectual errors that inevitably accompany the provisional discursivity of the margin, the monolithic and untheorized identity of the center will always be on them. The following readings seek an alignment with the second strategic tier to contain anti-intellectualism—that is, an essay into the methodology through which contemporary academic discourse seeks to decontaminate itself of territorial affiliations and attempts instead to establish the proliferating and shifting locations of the margins of cultural identities.

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The specific margin that is my subject is one most virulently subjected to popular parodies and to the label of irrational rectitude: the work conducted around theoretical intersections of feminism and gender studies. It would be unproductive to demonstrate that journalists are shoddy readers, or that the "elevation" of Camille Paglia's words to the pages of a softcore porn magazine is in fact quite apposite with her discourse. An alternative margin might be found in the tensions incipient within the critical practice itself: are the easy pieties that emanate from the anti-thoughtpolice press in any way implicit in academic discourse on this keen cultural problem? Is girl talk with a difference, in other words, at all responsible for the parodic replays that it has engendered in the scurrilous imaginations of North American magazines? If the academy chooses to be the unseen legislator through which cultural differences is regulated into grouped identities of the marginal, then an urgent intellectual duty would surely be to subject not merely our others but ourselves to the rigors of revisionary scrutiny. If you will allow me some further space-clearing generalizations, I would claim that while current feminist discourse remains vexed by questions of identity formation and the concomitant debates between essentialism and constructivism, or distinctions between situated and universal knowledge, it is still prepared to grant an uneasy selfhood to a voice that is best described as the property of "postcolonial Woman." Whether this voice represents perspectives as divergent as the African-American or the postcolonial cultural location, its imbrications of race and gender are accorded an iconicity that is altogether too good to be true. Even though the marriage of two margins should not necessarily lead to the construction of that contradiction in terms, a "feminist center," the embarrassed privilege granted to racially encoded feminism does indeed suggest a rectitude that could be its own theoretical undoing. The concept of the postcolonial itself is too frequently robbed of historical specificity in order to function as a preapproved allegory for any mode of discursive contestation. The coupling of postcolonial with woman, however, almost inevitably leads to the simplicities that underlie unthinking celebrations of oppression, elevating the racially female voice into a metaphor for "the good." Such metaphoricity cannot exactly be called essentialist, but it certainly functions as an impediment to a reading that attempts to look beyond obvious questions of good and evil. In seeking to dismantle the iconic status of postcolonial feminism, I will attempt here to address the following questions: within the tautological margins of such a discourse, which comes first, gender or race? How, furthermore, can the issue of chronology lead to some preliminary articulation of the productive superficiality of race?

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WOMAN SKIN DEEP Before such questions can be raised, however, it is necessary to pay some critical attention to the mobility that has accrued in the category of postcolonialism. Where the term once referred exclusively to the discursive practices produced by the historical fact of prior colonization in certain geographically specific segments of the world, it is now more of an abstraction available for figurative deployment in any strategic redefinition of marginality. For example, when James Clifford elaborated his position on travelling theory during a recent seminar, he invariably substituted the metaphoric condition of postcoloniality for the obsolete binarism between anthropologist and native.1 As with the decentering of any discourse, however, this reimaging of the postcolonial closes as many epistemological possibilities as it opens. On the one hand, it allows for a vocabulary of cultural migrancy, which helpfully derails the postcolonial condition from the strictures of national histories, and thus makes way for the theoretical articulations best typified by Homi Bhabha's recent anthology, Nation and Narration.2 On the other hand, the current metaphorization of postcolonialism threatens to become so amorphous as to repudiate any locality for cultural thickness. A symptom of this terminological and theoretical dilemma is astutely read in Kwame Anthony Appiah's essay, "Is the Postin Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?"3 Appiah argues for a discursive space-clearing that allows postcolonial discourse a figurative flexibility and at the same time reaffirms its radical locality within historical exigencies. His discreet but firm segregation of the postcolonial from the postmodern is indeed pertinent to the dangerous democracy accorded the coalition between postcolonial and feminist theories, in which each term serves to reify the potential pietism of the other. In the context of contemporary feminist discourse, I would argue, the category of postcolonialism must be read both as a free-floating metaphor for cultural embattlement and as an almost obsolete signifier for the historicity of race. There is no available dichotomy that could neatly classify the ways in which such a redefinition of postcoloniality is necessarily a secret sharer in similar reconfigurations of feminism's most vocal articulation of marginality, or the obsessive attention it has recently paid to the racial body. Is the body in race subject or object, or is it more dangerously an objectification of a methodology that aims for radical subjectivity? Here, the binarism that informs Chandra Mohanty's paradigmatic essay, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," deserves particular consideration. Where Mohanty engages in a particular critique of "Third World Woman" as a monolithic object in the texts of Western feminism, her argument is premised on the irreconcilability of gender as history and gender as culture. "What happens," queries Mohanty, "when [an] assumption of 'women as an oppressed group' is situated in the context of Western feminist writing about third world women?" What happens, apparently, begs her question. In contesting 1317

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what she claims is a "colonialist move," Mohanty proceeds to argue that "Western feminists alone become the true 'subjects' of this counterhistory. Third World women, on the other hand, never rise above the debilitating generality of their 'object' status."4 A very literal ethic underlies such a dichotomy, one that demands attention to its very obviousness: how is this objectivism to be avoided? How will the ethnic voice of womanhood counteract the cultural articulation that Mohanty too easily dubs as the exegesis of Western feminism? The claim to authenticity— only a black can speak for a black; only a postcolonial subcontinental feminist can adequately represent the lived experience of that culture— points to the great difficulty posited by the "authenticity" of female racial voices in the great game that claims to be the first narrative of what the ethnically constructed woman is deemed to want. This desire all too often takes its theoretical form in a will to subjectivity that claims a theoretical basis most clearly contravened by the process of its analysis. An example of this point is Trinh Minh-ha's treatise, Woman, Native, Other,5 which seeks to posit an alternative to the anthropological twist that constitutes the archaism through which nativism has been apprehended. Subtitled Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Trinh's book is a paradigmatic meditation that can be essentialized into a simple but crucial question: how can feminist discourse represent the categories of "woman" and "race" at the same time? If the languages of feminism and ethnicity are to escape an abrasive mutual contestation, what novel idiom can freshly articulate their radical inseparability? Trinh's strategy is to relocate her gendering of ethnic realities on the inevitable territory of postfeminism, which underscores her desire to represent discourse formation as always taking place after the fact of discourse. It further confirms my belief that had I any veto power over prefixes, postwould be the first to go—but that is doubtless tangential to the issue at hand. In the context of Trinh's methodology, the shape of the book itself illuminates what may best be called the endemic ill that effects a certain temporal derangement between the work's originary questions and the narratives that they engender. Woman, Native, Other consists of four loosely related chapters, each of which opens with an abstraction and ends with an anecdote. While there is a self-pronounced difference between the preliminary thesis outlined in the chapter "Commitment from the MirrorWriting Box" to the concluding claims in "Grandma's Story," such a discursive distance is not matched with any logical or theoretical consistency. Instead, a work that is impelled by an impassioned need to question the lines of demarcation between race and gender concludes by falling into a predictable biological fallacy in which sexuality is reduced to the literal structure of the racial body, and theoretical interventions within this trajectory become minimalized into the naked category of lived experience. When feminism turns to lived experience as an alternative mode of

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WOMAN SKIN DEEP radical subjectivity, it only rehearses the objedification of its proper subject. While lived experience can hardly be discounted as a critical resource for an apprehension of the gendering of race, neither should such data serve as the evacuating principle for both historical and theoretical contexts alike. "Radical subjectivity" too frequently translates into a lowgrade romanticism that cannot recognize its discursive status as pre- rather than post. In the concluding chapter of Trinh's text, for example, a section titled "Truth and Fact: Story and History" delineates the skewed idiom that marginal subjectivities produce. In attempting to proclaim an alternative to male-identified objectivism, Trinh-as-anthropologist can only produce an equally objectifying idiom of joy: Let me tell you a story. For all I have is a story. Story passed on from generation to generation, named Joy. Told for the joy it gives the storyteller and the listener. Joy inherent in the process of storytelling. Whoever understands it also understands that a story, as distressing as it can be in its joy, never takes anything away from anybody. [WNO, p. 119] Given that I find myself in a more acerbic relation both to the question of the constitution of specific postcolonialisms and of a more metaphoric postcolonial feminism, such a jointly universalist and individualist "joy" is not a term that I would ordinarily welcome into my discursive lexicon. On one level, its manipulation of lived experience into a somewhat fallacious allegory for the reconstitution of gendered race bespeaks a transcendence—and and attendant evasion—of the crucial cultural issues at hand. On a more dangerous level, however, such an assumption serves as a mirror image of the analyses produced by the critics of political rectitude. For both parties, "life" remains the ultimate answer to "discourse." The subject of race, in other words, cannot cohabit with the detail of a feminist language. Trinh's transcendent idiom, of course, emanates from her somewhat free-floating understanding of "postcoloniality": is it an abstraction into which all historical specificity may be subsumed, or is it a figure for a vaguely defined ontological marginality that is equally applicable to all "minority" discourses? In either case, both the categories of "woman" and "race" assume the status of metaphors, so that each rhetoric of oppression can serve equally as a mirrored allegory for the other. Here, Woman, Native, Other is paradigmatic of the methodological blurring that dictates much of the discourse on identity formation in the coloring of feminist discourse. To privilege the racial body in the absence of historical context is indeed to generate an idiom that tends to waver with impressionistic haste between the abstractions of postcoloniality and the

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anecdotal literalism of what it means to articulate an "identity" for a woman writer of color. Despite its proclaimed location within contemporary theoretical—not to mention post-theoretical—discourse, such an idiom poignantly illustrates the hidden and unnecessary desire to resuscitate the "self." What is most striking about such discursive practices is their failure to confront what may be characterized best as a great enamorment with the "real." Theories of postcolonial feminism eminently lend themselves to a reopening of the continued dialogue that literary and cultural studies have—and will continue to have—with the perplexing category known as realism, but at present the former discourse chooses to remain too precariously parochial to recognize the bounty that is surely its to give. Realism, however, is too dangerous a term for an idiom that seeks to raise identity to the power of theory. While both may be windmills to the quixotic urge to supply black feminism with some version of the "real," Trinh's musings on this subject add a mordantly pragmatic option to my initial question: "what comes first, race or gender?" Perhaps the query would be more finely calibrated if it were rephrased to ask, "What comes first, race, gender, or profession?" And what, in our sorry dealings with such realisms, is the most phantasmagoric category of all? According to Woman, Native, Other, such a triple bind can be articulated only in order to declare that bonding is all. An opening section of that text is in fact titled "The Triple Bind"; it attempts to outline the alternative realism still to be claimed by the postcolonial feminist mentality: Today, the growing ethnic-feminist consciousness has made it increasingly difficult for [the woman of color who writes] to turn a blind eye not only to the specification of the writer as historical subject . . . but also to writing itself as a practice located at the intersection of subject and history—a literary practice that involves the possible knowledge (linguistical and ideological) of itself as such. [WNO, p. 6] Here the text evades the threat of realism by taking recourse to the "peaceable" territory of writing, on which all wars may be fought with each discursive contingency in deployment. While writing may serve as a surrogate for the distance between subject (read self) and history, Trinh unwittingly makes clear her academic appreciation of alterity: the female writer, or the third person "she" that haunts her text, "is made to feel she must choose from among three conflicting identities. Writer of color? Woman writer? Or woman of color? Which comes first? Where does she place her loyalties?" (WNO, p. 6). The hierarchy of loyalties thus listed illustrates the danger inherent in such cultural lists: the uneasy proclama-

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WOMAN SKIN DEEP tion with which Woman, Native, Other sets out to be the "first full-length study of post-feminism" (according to the book's jacket) is a self-defeating project, for feminism has surely long since laid aside the issue of an individualized female loyalty as its originating assumption. If race is to complicate the project of divergent feminisms, in other words, it cannot take recourse to biologism, nor to the incipient menace of rewriting alterity into the ambiguous shape of the exotic body. The body that serves as testimony for lived experience, however, has received sufficient interrogation from more considered perspectives on the cultural problems generated by the dialogue between gender and race, along with the hyperrealist idiom it may generate. Hazel Carby helpfully advocates that black feminist criticism [should] be regarded critically as a problem, not a solution, as a sign that should be interrogated, a locus of contradictions. Black feminist criticism has its source and its primary motivation in academic legitimation, placement within a framework of bourgeois humanistic discourse.6 The concomitant question that such a problem raises is whether the signification of gendered race necessarily returns to the realism that it most seeks to disavow. If realism is the Eurocentric and patriarchal pattern of adjudicating between disparate cultural and ethnic realities, then it is surely the task of radical feminism to provide an alternative perspective. In the vociferous discourse that such a task has produced, however, the question of alternativism is all too greatly subsumed either into the radical strategies that are designed to dictate the course of situated experience, or into the methodological imperatives that impell a work related to Woman, Native, Other such as bell hooks's Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. While the concept of "talking back" may appear to be both invigorating and empowering to a discourse interested in the reading of gendered race, the text Talking Back is curiously engaged in talking to itself; in rejecting Caliban's mode of protest, its critique of colonization is quietly narcissistic in its projection of what a black and thinking female body may appear to be, particularly in the context of its repudiation of the genre of realism. Yet this is the genre, after all, in which African-American feminism continues to seek legitimation: hooks's study is predicated on the anecdotes of lived experience and their capacity to provide an alternative to the discourse of what she terms patriarchal rationalism. Here the unmediated quality of a local voice serves as a substitute for any theoretical agenda that can make more than a cursory connection between the condition of postcolonialism and the question of gendered race. Where hooks claims to speak beyond binarism, her discourse keeps returning to the banality of

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easy dichotomies: "Dare I speak to oppressed and oppressor in the same voice? Dare I speak to you in a language that will take us away from the boundaries of domination, a language that will not fence you in, bind you, or hold you? Language is also a place of struggle."7 The acute embarrassment generated by such an idiom could possibly be regarded as a radical rhetorical strategy designed to induce racial discomfort in its audience, but it more frequently registers as black feminism's failure to move beyond the proprietary rights that can be claimed by any oppressed discourse. As does Trinh's text, hooks's claims that personal narrative is the only salve to the rude abrasions that Western feminist theory has inflicted on the body of ethnicity. The tales of lived experience, however, cannot function as a sufficient alternative, particularly when they are predicated on dangerously literal professions of postcolonialism. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, hooks's more recent work, rehearses a postcolonial fallacy in order to conduct some highly misguided readings of competing feminisms within the context of racial experience. She establishes a hierarchy of color that depressingly segregates divergent racial perspectives into a complete absence of intellectual exchange. The competition is framed in terms of hooks's sense of the hostility between African-American and Third World feminisms: The current popularity of post-colonial discourse that implicates solely the West often obscures the colonizing relationship of the East in relation to Africa and other parts of the Third World. We often forget that many Third World nationals bring to this country the same kind of contempt and disrespect for blackness that is most frequently associated with white western imperialism. . . . Within feminist movements Third World nationals often assume the role of mediator or interpreter, explaining the "bad" black people to their white colleagues or helping the "naive" black people to understand whiteness.. .. Unwittingly assuming the role of go-between, of mediator, she re-inscribes a colonial paradigm. What is astonishing about such a claim is its continued obsession with a white academy, with race as a professional attribute that can only reconfigure itself around an originary concept of whiteness. Its feminism is necessarily skin deep in that the pigment of its imagination cannot break out of a strictly biological reading of race. Rather than extending an inquiry into the discursive possibilities represented by the intersection of gender and race, feminist intellectuals like hooks misuse their status as minority voices by enacting strategies of belligerence that at this time are more divisive than informative. Such claims to radical revisionism take refuge in the political untouchability that is accorded the category of Third

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World Woman, and in the process sully the crucial knowledge that such a category has still to offer to the dialogue of feminism today. The dangers represented by feminists such as hooks and Trinh is that finally they will represent the profession as both their last court of appeal and the anthropological ground on which they conduct their field work. The alternative that they offer, therefore, is conceptually parochial and scales down the postcolonial condition in order to encompass it within North American academic terms. As a consequence, their discourse cannot but fuel the criticism of those who police the so-called thought police, nor is it able to address the historically risky compartmentalization of otherness that masquerades under the title of multiculturalism. Here it is useful to turn to one of the more brilliant observations that pepper Gayatri Spivak's The Post-Colonial Critic. In concluding an interview on multiculturalism, Spivak casually reminds her audience that if one looks at the history of post-Enlightenment theory, the major problem has been the problem of autobiography: how subjective structures can, in fact, give objective truth. During these same centuries, the Native Informant [was] treated as the objective evidence for the founding of the so-called sciences like ethnography, ethnolinguistics, comparative religion, and so on. So that, once again, the theoretical problems only relate to the person who knows. The person who knows has all of the problems of selfhood. The person who is known, somehow seems not to have a problematic self.9 Lived experience, in other words, serves as fodder for the continuation of another's epistemology, even when it is recorded in a "contestatory" position to its relation to realism and to the overarching structure of the profession. While cultural criticism could never pretend that the profession does not exist, its various voices must surely question any conflation of the professional model with one universal and world historical. The relation between local and given knowledge is obviously too problematic to allow for such an easy slippage, which is furthermore the ground on which the postcolonial can be abused to become an allegory for any one of the pigeonholes constructed for multiculturalism. Allow me to turn as a consequence to a local example of how realism locates its language within the postcolonial condition, and to suggest that lived experience does not achieve its articulation through autobiography, but through that other third-person narrative known as the law.

2 I proffer life in Pakistan as an example of such a postcolonial and lived experience. Pakistani laws, in fact, pertain more to the discourse of a

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petrifying realism than do any of the feminist critics whom I have cited thus far. The example at hand takes a convoluted postcolonial point and renders it nationally simple: if a postcolonial nation chooses to embark on an official program of Islamization, the inevitable result in a Muslim state will be legislation that curtails women's rights and institutes in writing what has thus far functioned as the law of the passing word. The Huddood Ordinances in Pakistan were promulgated in 1979 and legislated in 1980, under the military dictatorship of General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq. They added five new criminal laws to the existing system of Pakistani legal pronouncements, of which the second ordinance—against Zina (that is, adultery as well as fornication)—is of the greatest import. An additional piece of legislation concerns the law of evidence, which rules that a woman's testimony constitutes half of a man's. While such infamous laws raise many historical and legal questions, they remain the body through which the feminist movement in Pakistan—the Women's Action Forum—must organize itself. It is important to keep in mind that the formulation of the Hudood Ordinances was based on a multicultural premise, even though they were multicultural from the dark side of the moon. These laws were premised on a Muslim notion of Hadd and were designed to interfere in a postcolonial criminal legal system that was founded on Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. According to feminist lawyer Asma Jahangir, the Hudood Ordinances were promulgated to bring the criminal legal system of Pakistan in conformity with the injunctions of Islam. . . . Two levels of punishments are introduced in the Ordinances. Two levels of punishment and, correspondingly, two separate sets of rules of evidence are prescribed. The first level or category is the one called the "Hadd" which literally means the "limit" and the other "Tazir", which means "to punish".10 The significance of the Hadd category is that it delineates immutable sentences: Tazir serves only as a safety net in case the accused is not convicted under Hadd. These fixed rules are in themselves not very pretty: Hadd for theft is amputation of a hand; for armed robbery, amputation of a foot; for rape or adultery committed by married Muslims, death by stoning; for rape or adultery committed by non-Muslims or unmarried Muslims, a hundred public lashes (see HO, p. 24). While I am happy to report that the Hadd has not yet been executed, the laws remain intact and await their application. The applicability of these sentences is rendered more murderous and even obscenely ludicrous when the immutability of the Hadd punishments is juxtaposed with the contingency of the laws of evidence. If a man is seen stealing a thousand rupees by two adult Muslim males, he could be pun-

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WOMAN SKIN DEEP ished by Hadd and his hand would be amputated. If an adult Muslim stole several million rupees and the only available witnesses were women and non-Muslims, he would not qualify for a Hadd category and would be tried under the more free-floating Tazir instead. "A gang of men can thus rape all the residents of a women's hostel," claims Jahangir with understandable outrage, "but [the] lack of ocular evidence of four Muslim males will rule out the imposition of a Hadd punishment" (HO, p. 49). Such a statement, unfortunately, is not the terrain of rhetoric alone, since the post-Hudood Ordinance application of the Tazir has made the definition of rape an extremely messy business indeed. Here, then, we turn to Zina, and its implications for the Pakistani female body. The Hudood Ordinances have allowed for all too many openings in the boundaries that define rape. Women can now be accused of rape, as can children; laws of mutual consent may easily convert a case of child abuse into a prosecution of the child for Zina, for fornication. Furthermore, unmarried men and women can be convicted of having committed rape against each other, since a subsection of the Zina offense defines rape as "one where a man or a woman have illicit sex knowing that they are not validly married to each other" (quoted in HO, p. 58). In other words, fornication is all, and the statistics of the past few years grimly indicate that the real victims of the Hudood Ordinances are women and children, most specifically those who have no access to legal counsel and whose economic status renders them ignorant of their human rights. Jahangir cites the example of a fifteen-year-old woman, Jehan Mina, who, after her father's death, was raped by her aunt's husband and son. Once her pregnancy was discovered, another relative filed a police report alleging rape. During the trial, however, the accused led no defense, and Mina's testimony alone was sufficient to get her convicted for fornication and sentenced to one hundred public lashes. That child's story is paradigmatic of the untold miseries of those who suffer sentences in Muslim jails. Let me state the obvious: I cite these alternative realisms and constructions of identity in order to reiterate the problem endemic to postcolonial feminist criticism. It is not the terrors of Islam that have unleashed the Hudood Ordinances on Pakistan, but more probably the United States government's economic and ideological support of a military regime during that bloody but eminently forgotten decade marked by the "liberation" of Afghanistan. Jehan Mina's story is therefore not so far removed from our current assessment of what it means to be multicultural. How are we to connect her lived experience with the overwhelming realism of the law? In what ways does her testimony force postcolonial and feminist discourse into an acknowledgement of the inherent parochialism and professionalism of our claims? I will offer a weak bridge between the two poles of my rhetorical question: a poem by the feminist Pakistani writer, Kishwar Naheed. Her

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writing has been perceived as inflammatory, and she has been accused of obscenity more than once. The obscenity laws, or the Fahashi laws, are another story altogether. Once they were passed, they could not be put in print because the powers that be declared them to be too obscene. The poem below, however, is one that could easily earn the poet a prison sentence in contemporary Pakistan: It is we sinful women who are not awed by the grandeur of those who wear gowns who don't sell our lives who don't bow our heads who don't fold our hands together. It is we sinful women while those who sell the harvests of our bodies become exalted become distinguished become the just princes of the material world. It is we sinful women who come out raising the banner of truth up against barricades of lies on the highways who find stories of persecution piled on each threshold who find the tongues which could speak have been severed. It is we sinful women. Now, even if the night gives chase these eyes shall not be put out. For the wall which has been razed don't insist now on raising it again. It is we sinful women. who are not awed by the grandeur of those who wear gowns who don't sell our bodies who don't bow our heads who don't fold our hands together.11 We should remember that there remains unseen legislation against such poetry, and that the Hadd—the limit—is precisely the realism against which our lived experience can serve as a metaphor, and against which we must continue to write. If we allow the identity formation of postcolonialism to construe itself only in terms of nationalism and parochialism, or of gender politics at its most narcissistically ahistorical, then let us assume that the media has won its battle, and the law of the limit is upon us.

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Notes * Sara Suleri teaches English at Yale University. She is the author of Meatless Days (1989) and The Rhetoric of English India (1992). 1 James Clifford's course, "Travel and Identity in Twentieth-Century Interculture," was given as the Henry Luce Seminar at Yale University, fall 1990. 2 See Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York, 1990). 3 See Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?" Critical Inquiry 17 (Winter 1991): 336-57. 4 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), p. 71. 5 See Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington, Ind., 1989); hereafter abbreviated WNO. 6 Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the AfroAmerican Woman Novelist (New York, 1987), p. 15. 7 bell hooks [Gloria Watkins], "On Self-Recovery," Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston, 1989), p. 28. 8 hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston, 1990), pp. 93-94. 9 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Questions of Multiculturalism," interview by Sneja Gunew (30 Aug. 1986), The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York 1990), p. 66. 10 Asma Jahangir and Hina Jilani, The Hudood Ordinances: A Divine Sanction? (Lahore, Pakistan. 1990), p. 24: hereafter abbreviated HO. 11 Kishwar Naheed, "We Sinful Women," in Beyond Belief: Contemporary Feminist Urdu Poetry, trans. Rukhsana Ahmad (Lahore, Pakistan, 1990), pp. 22-23.

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8.11 WHY KEEP ASKING ME ABOUT MY IDENTITY? Nawal El Saadawi From The Nawal El Saadawi Reader, Zed Books, 1997, 117-33

Every time I come to a conference dealing with African identity or culture held in Europe or North America, I ask myself why these conferences are held, why the organizers and most of the participants live in England or Germany or Switzerland or the United States, are citizens of these lands, scholars, researchers, intellectuals, writers in different institutions. This conference is being held in the United States with American money, American logistical and informational facilities provided by American institutions. And here I am after a long journey from Africa, sitting in my seat on time, ready to talk about my 'identity', an identity which I am asked about over and over again. It makes me turn your question round and round. Why does no one ask you what is your 'identity'? Is it that the American 'identity', American culture, does not require any questioning, does not need to be examined, or studied or discussed in conferences like this? So far I have not heard of a conference held in Africa or Asia or even in America dealing with Pan-Americanism as related, for example, to North and South America ever since the Munro Doctrine made of South America your backyard. Neither have I heard that Pan-Americanism, just like Pan-Africanism, requires some updating so that we can understand a little more of what is going on in this world of ours - so that 'identity polities' does not remain the exclusive tool of the powerful against the peoples who are being postcolonialized. Words whose meanings are obscure sometimes open up vistas in the mind. They may, however, be a shroud, a mask that hides: such are 'God' and 'Satan', or 'free trade', or 'democracy' in my country or in the countries of the West. The game of words continues all the time. Some years ago my 'Arab identity' was a fact of politics and culture and of life. Today

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it has become a taboo, a curse for those who insist on saying they are Arabs. Now a new identity has been coined for me by the global powers. Our region is 'the Middle East', refurbished to include Israel, Turkey, and perhaps a subdued Iran. If I am asked I should say my identity is Middle Eastern, not Arab at all. That way I can be postmodern, updated, moving with the times. The Arab nation, Arab unity, Arab nationalism are over. These are the relics of the past, like other backward national identities that belonged at one time to the 'third', or the fourth or perhaps even the fifth world, not euphemistically designated as the 'South' where the marginalized 'Confucian', or 'Islamic', or 'Hindu' hordes teem, and starve and die, threatening to clash with the 'Christian' civilization of professors Huntington and Bernard Lewis. My backward national identity has been replaced by more advanced, more civilized identities. A 'Middle Eastern', or 'American', or 'Israeli', or maybe a global identity with no place for secondary national identities like mine. Recently I was asked, 'What country are you from?' I said Egypt, and the man said, 'Do you consider Egypt to be in Africa?' So I found Egypt being uprooted from Africa too, after it had ceased to be a part of the Arab world. Now I no longer know the continent in which Egypt can be found, nor do I know if I am Arab, or African, or whether I should be here at all. And in early 1996 I watched the leaders of the world as they sat in Egypt, in Sharm Al-Sheikh, beside the Red Sea, discussing so-called terrorism and updating things. They called themselves the 'makers of peace' and established a new map for Africa and the Middle East. Their friends and business partners and followers of their creed were identified as the 'angels of this peace', and others who did not agree to their view of things were called 'terrorists', backward barbarians with no soul. These 'makers of peace' forgot that Hamas had been nurtured and used by Israel against the Palestine Liberation Organization. They forgot Deir Yasseen and the children of the Intifada with broken bones and plastic bullet wounds to their heads. People asked me where I stood, did I identify with the angels, makers of the peace, or with the devils, the makers of war, the aggressors, the terrorists. I am not a terrorist, nor will I ever be. But I believe that without justice there is no peace. Ever since I was born, the events in my region have proved that to me. 'Identity' is a discourse, and it is essential to know who is using it, who decides, who labels me, what all this interest in 'cultural identity' means, where does it lead. That is what I want to keep in mind as I address the issue of identity and language. When I was a child I was told to 'hide' my brown complexion under a coating of white powder. I was born in the early thirties and at that time Egypt was under the rule of the British and the royal descendants of the Albanian Turk Mohammed Ali who overthrew the Mameluke dynasty. At that time a 'white' skin meant that one came from the upper

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classes, for both the British and the Turks had fair complexions. Beauty was therefore to have white skin. To be brown or dark-skinned was ugly, related to the lower, poorer classes of society. I wasted many years of my life before I would feel comfortable with a brown skin, before I gained sufficient self-confidence and understanding to see that my brown skin could be different and yet beautiful, before I could wash off the coating of white powder and live in the world with my real face, my real identity. Later I asked myself a question: Ts my identity related to the colour of my skin and what was I doing covering it with a coating of white powder? Does not the coating reflect a migration of the mind, an alienation from my mind?' Migrating words and worlds is a theme I relate to the general problems we are facing in the countries of our African continent. These problems to my mind are not, as some people tend or like to think, related to questions of identity or to what we now designate as a 'global culture' crossing national, ethnic and geographic boundaries and overcoming the frontiers, the delimitation resulting from land, language, state, colour, race and religion. For four years from 1992 I lived in the United States in what may be considered a form of exile. Before they were over I realized that I had to go back home to my country, my land, my people, my language. My home, my country, could not be the United States. In the USA I am a stranger, an 'alien'. There I discovered that Americans are attached to their country, to their nation and their national identity to a greater degree than most peoples of the world. They take great pride in being American, in being patriotic. Yet they are surprised when other people take pride in being African. Perhaps they think that the only country worth being proud of is the United States. And this is the case even amongst learned people in the academy. This probably has a lot to do with how the world is divided today despite the fact that we have moved out of the so-called modern era of thinking into the so-called postmodern era, which implies an important step forward. But in this postmodern era the struggle has intensified over sources of wealth and power and therefore over people's minds, over culture. What decides the issue of these struggles, however, is not justice or human rights but multinational economic power and monopoly, intensified a hundred times by the backing of military power at the core of which resides the club of states possessing nuclear and postnuclear weapons. Much effort goes into the drive, led by the United States, to break down boundaries, destroy frontiers, dissolve nation-states and national entities. But it is these multinational powers who decide which frontiers, which boundaries, which entities should disappear and which should be maintained and injected with new strength. The black peoples of Africa, the poor of Africa, are required to 'overcome the limitations of their blackness, their languages, their international or national frontiers in the name of 'one world', of humanity, of a

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'human universalism'. They are required to soar towards the ever-widening horizons of postmodernism, where everything is fragmented, diffused, splintered to the advantage of a handful of rich people. The economic and the cultural Never before in the history of the world has there been such a concentration and centralization of capital in so few nations, and in the hands of so few people. The countries that form the Group of Seven, with their 800 million inhabitants, control more technical, economic, informational and military power than the rest of the world's people, the approximately 430 billion who live in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Five hundred multinational corporations account for 80 per cent of world trade and 75 per cent of investment, and their number is dropping each year as a result of mergers and the elimination of the relatively smaller ones. Half these multinational corporations are based in the USA, Germany, Japan and Switzerland. The OECD group of countries contributes 80 per cent of world production. Since around 1970, technological advances have reduced the amount of raw materials used per product by more than one third. This dematerialization of production has resulted in a tendency for the real prices of fifty principal raw materials to fall. Price deterioration has been ever more pronounced in recent years. Dematerialization of production combined with automation means that labour loses value. People are losing their value or are no longer needed. The South including Africa, which depends on raw materials and labour, suffers most. Plunder of the South, including Africa, is now taking place under new names, such as 'aid' or 'free trade' or even 'development'. About $220 billion were transferred from the Third World to commercial banks in the West during the period 1986-92. What the World Bank calls structural adjustment is potential economic genocide. Its essence is to raise prices in the so-called developing countries to world levels - yet average earnings in the South are seventy times lower than in the North. 'Free trade' means an expanding world market for the multinational corporations. It means breaking down customs, subsidies, tariffs, quotas, ending cheap adaptations of patents - breaking everything that protects the weaker. It means protection when necessary for the stronger. Witness the wrangles between the USA and Europe or Japan over 'free trade'. Double standards have always been used to defend privilege. To expand their world market, the multinational corporations use economic power, buy governments and rulers, play politics, and have recourse to armed force where necessary through the UN, or away from it, according to circumstances. It becomes easier, however, if people can be convinced to do what the masters of the global economy want them to do. 1331

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This is where culture comes in. And culture includes identity, migrant words, and migrating worlds. Culture can serve in different ways to help the global market reach out all over the world, expand to the most distant regions. Culture can also serve to reduce or destroy, or prevent, or divide, or outflank, the resistance of people. At the disposal of culture today are powerful means which function across the whole world: the media. To expand the global market, to increase the number of consumers, to make sure that they buy what is produced for sale or offered as services, to develop needs and desires, and to multiply them, to create a fever for consuming; culture must play its role in developing certain values, certain patterns of behaviour, certain visions of what is happiness or success in the world, certain attitudes towards sex, beauty, and love, including a cult of pornography and desire and violence. Culture must fashion the global consumer. Africa: a giant suffering fragmentation In this global economy Africa, so rich in potential power and resources, remains the poorest of the poor. It has a debt of $317 billion - on which $10 billion are paid as interest every year - 50 per cent of the cases of malaria in the world, 17 million cases of tuberculosis, and 45 per cent of all the people below the UN poverty line. The global culture which aims at expanding, homogenizing and unifying the world into one market seems to be contradicted by another movement towards cultural division, fragmentation and strife, towards the multiplication of ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious identities. It militates against Pan-Africanism or, more precisely, against African unity. It serves the purpose of the multinationals. It is a postmodern application of the old adage 'divide and rule'. The movement towards a global culture is therefore not contradicted by this postmodern tendency towards cultural fragmentation and identity struggles. They are two faces of the same coin. To unify power, economic, or cultural, at the top it is necessary to fragment power at the bottom. To maintain the global economy of the few, of the multinationals, unification must exist at the top, amongst the few, the very few. It must not take place at the bottom, in Africa, and especially not amongst the many, amongst the African peoples. There should be no African unity. People should remain divided, fragmented, confused. And new slogans, new catchwords, new worthy causes must be found to hide this truth. 'Identity', 'multiculturalism', 'respect for other cultures', 'cultural studies', the list will go on proliferating, so that as soon as we unveil one world another is found to replace it, so that our African peoples remain perpetually confused, so that our African intellectuals and thinkers and writers are drawn into the noose. Instead of struggling for economic identity, for political identity 1332

WHY KEEP ASKING ME ABOUT MY IDENTITY? and for cultural identity, instead of making links between them, they forget that there is no culture without an economy to support it, without political institutions to defend it, without a land in which it can strike its roots. That 'cultures' and 'identities' are doomed without a material base, condemned to wither away. That the struggle for 'identity' is a total struggle, like the struggle for my personal identity depends on my integrity, my originality, my mind, my thoughts, but also on my material existence, my economic independence, my capacity to earn and produce. Otherwise culture, identity, multiculturalism become an exhibition, a spectacle for the pleasure of others to see, to consume. Like the festivals of African culture I have seen in London, or Copenhagen or New York. Like the visibility of African-Americans in music, dance and sports and their almost total exclusion from the decisive levels of banking, production, business and other areas linked to intellectual or administrative or economic power. Migrating words, migrating worlds Globalization has meant different things at different levels for different categories of people. Millions of farmers, immigrants, poorly qualified urban workers, youth, and especially women in Africa suffer globalization's negative consequences. They are marginalized and excluded from the new world economy as a result of structural changes imposed by World Bank policies and multinational intervention. Africa, with its rivers and fertile lands, imports 10,000 million dollars' worth of foodstuffs every year. The phenomenon of globalization has brought with it massive international migration on a scale never seen before in history. Whereas in the nineteenth century Europeans left their homes in great numbers to colonize the United States, today the poor populations of the South are travelling in an opposite direction. Accepted at one time as cheap sources of labour or in order to lure the best brains of the South into the scientific, technological, academic, information and intellectual institutions of the North, they are now being sent home again. Multinationals can exploit their physical and mental capacities more effectively in their home countries. Borders are closing, immigrants and refugees are being rejected, and xenophobic ideologies are once more on the rise. Xenophobic, chauvinistic and fundamentalist movements are also multiplying in the South. Fuelled by the quasi-genocidal economic difficulties, despair and loss of faith in past experiments and in the leaderships imposed by the new colonial powers, these movements are being used in the power game to contain progressive forces, exert pressures and provide alternative regimes when others have done their time. They are also part of the identity game of fragmentation and the policies that divide. 1333

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So where is the place of the migrant word, the migrant intellectual, the migrant writer from Africa in this global world of ours? What roles can he or she play, and what roles should he or she avoid? My experience with the migrant world in exile As I noted above, between 1992 and 1996 I was a migrant from my country, Egypt, to the United States. I opened my eyes one morning just before dawn to the sound of knocks on the door of my flat in Giza. At the door was a police officer in plainclothes accompanied by two other men. He had come to install armed guards around my home and to place bodyguards who would accompany me wherever I went. He told me the state had decided to take these measures to protect my life. They had information that indicated that my life was in danger, that the religious fundamentalists had put my name on a death list and that they might try to kill me. My life was now at the mercy of a state apparatus that I opposed and that throughout the long years had done its best to silence and oppress me in different ways. This oppression had included banning my books, firing me from my post in the Ministry of Health, and a period of imprisonment. The last measure taken against me had been the arbitrary and illegal closing down of the Egyptian branch of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association in June 1991 and the banning of its magazine Noon. My life was thus caught in the crossfire between the state security forces and the terrorist movements that concealed their aims behind a religious facade. I did not know where the bullets would come from, who would aim their guns at me, and to what end - to fulfil the desire of the state, or to serve the aims of the fundamentalist movement? Would the fatal bullet be shot in my back by a bodyguard, or from the front by a youth wearing a religious mask? As I sat in my home surrounded by enemies on every side, not knowing what to do, fortune intervened. An American student named Elizabeth had come to Cairo to pursue some studies and by sheer accident she decided to take a chance and visit me after failing to get through to me by phone. At one time she had been a student at Duke University, and when she saw the armed guards around my home she suddenly said to me, 'Why don't you leave?' I said, 'Where to? I cannot leave like that just to any place. I must know where I'm going, and what I'll do.' Next day she phoned up a friend of hers at Duke, Professor Miriam Cooke, who taught Arabic literature, including several of my novels. And that's how I became a migrant and an exile, living in the USA for four years as a visiting professor at Duke. They were good years and I was happy to be there. But as the years went by I felt I must return even if my 1334

WHY KEEP ASKING ME ABOUT MY IDENTITY? life was in danger. Back in my country even if there is a threat I am where I belong, I am more at ease. I am not an 'alien', as they call me in the United States. In the USA I'm treated as an alien even though I pay my taxes, the same taxes as a US citizen pays. I do not have the same rights. I cannot even get a certificate to say that I pay taxes in the USA so that I can be exempted from paying taxes elsewhere. So when I was in the USA I was paying double taxes, and if I had a book translated, which happens quite a lot, I was paying taxes in three places at the same time. Within Duke University I was treated like other colleagues who were aliens: in a different way. I was not like a US professor, even though I might be more efficient and more gifted in many ways. It was not only a matter of pay. There was no equal pay for equal work. It was the way academia valued me as a person. It was as though US professors alone had knowledge, alone would deal with theory, alone had higher thoughts. There were a few exceptions of course, but Africans or Arabs like me were of inferior intelligence and standing. And if we had thoughts, or theories, or contributions to make they were necessarily limited, localized, one-sided. The higher, holistic, global thinking was the realm of the American. He or she alone could see across the world, englobe it in a total vision, explore the horizons as they opened up, soar with daring up, up and far away. He or she was not limited by geography, or history, or language, or culture. He or she could speak of Africa with authority, deal with so-called Third World culture better than I could. To them this seemed natural, despite the outward veneer of polite tolerance. After all the USA was the leader of the world, with a global reach. And English was the global language. All other languages were limited, local, they could not leap across frontiers to reach as far as English went. American culture alone was universal. All other cultures were narrow in scope, backward, biased, prejudiced, unable to deal with the world as it is today, unable even to deal with their own problems and find a way out. People in my part of the world were corrupt, accustomed to bend their backs, knew little about the human essence, and less about human rights. This is how identity was seen by the bulk of academics. Their postmodern vision and thinking fragmented us into a colourful mosaic. Interesting they would say, delightful. To study the other gave them a thrill. But the other was not of great weight, not of real value in the future of the world. The other could not become a part of self. Identity was there, but it was there for intellectual fun. Yet US academic life has left open a space, a limited space, for us African migrants. We can find a corner in which to rest, perhaps to find some peace from ruthless tracking down by corrupt states, from the gangs in the political game, or the bands of fundamentalists pointing guns. And we must admit that, after all, the US academy is more tolerant, more flexible, than the academy in Europe, or the universities of African countries

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from which we come. Here there is more room to learn, to argue, and to think. I would never have found a place in England, or in Germany, or in France. Even Switzerland, the 'neutral' paradise, was closed to me. In the US academy there are men and women who welcome us, open their arms, help us to find our way, exchange their thoughts with us. They learn from us and we from them. We exchange on equal terms. We become friends. And together we forge a new image of what America is, of what it can be, a new image of Africa and of what it can become - a new image of a future world in which our identities are genuine though distinct, yet unified by a common endeavour for what is human and best in both of us. I lived in North Carolina for four years. I was at the margin of the intellectual life in Duke, and of the wider spaces of thought outside the narrow confines drawn by forest trees around the campus grounds. I was hemmed in. My voice was not able to reach into the media because I was the bearer of a different thought, of an Arab-African identity misunderstood and distorted by those who monopolize the word, including the word of migrants like myself. For despite all the talk about diversity, difference, respect for other cultures, despite the postmodern discourse about multiculturalism and identities, there is no space in the media, or even in the academy, for a real, in-depth discussion of who I am, and who you are. Of who each one of us really is. In the United States the same process of exclusion operates that we have in Africa. The mechanisms are different, more sophisitcated, more economic, less evident. Africans appear here and there as samples. My experiences with American TV and radio have shown me time and time again that my real identity is something that should be concealed. My sentences are amputated, my words are rearranged, my thoughts are distorted, even my features are made to be angry when I should smile, made to smile where I am rebelling. Fresh Air radio programme wanted to interview me after the publication of one of my books by California Press. But when I expressed some of my opinions on the phone, the person responsible for the arrangements cancelled the interview. For when I, as an Arab woman, say what I think about what is happening in my region I am made to disappear or portrayed as an Arab terrorist thirsty for blood. If I say something with which my US interviewers agree, I am called a peacemaker, or a postmodern thinker. Never am I allowed to be myself and yet an Arab woman. At each moment I am robbed of my true identity to fit in with the views of those otherwise in control. After four years of exile I decided to go back to my country where I belong. To the land where I was born and where I shall die. To the people who speak my language and understand what I say. To the men and women with whom I have shared the struggle and with whom I will share the hope and the pain of the future.

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My identity I have tried to tell you about my identity. I hope I have been able to make you understand what African woman I am. But we are so engrossed in defining our identities, when they are changing all the time. Instead of stressing what is different perhaps we should spend more time discovering what is common to you and me. Or perhaps we cannot do one without the other. Our humanity is common but it takes many forms. For me there is no identity without home, no identity without a land on which I can stand, without a language, without the means to keep it alive and help it to flourish and grow, without an organization and a pen with which to struggle for freedom and justice and love and peace, for women to know that they are human beings, for blacks to feel that all the colours in the world are what make it glow. I am an Arab woman fighting for a peace that will last. Not a surrender to the US and Israeli nuclear arsenal, nor the peace that fundamentalism wishes to impose by bullets and terror in the United States and also in Egypt. Not the peace of fanatic religious movements, whether Muslim, or Christian, or Jewish. I am against the identities built on religion because the history of religion was written in the endless rivers of blood flowing in the name of God, in the name of a land chosen by Him for His people, in the name of any god-chosen race or nation on earth. I am against a nationalism, a patriotism, that does not see the rest of the world. I am against privilege of the rich against the poor, against privilege of man against woman. I am an Arab woman. But in my body run the rivers of Africa, that flow through Africa from Jinja and Tana. I am African and Arab and Egyptian because my genes were drawn from all these, because my history goes back in Egypt for seven thousand years, to Isis and Ma'at and Noon. I am a woman who is Arab, who writes in Arabic, struggles in the Arab region and belongs to the world. Is my identity Mediterranean? Some people say Egypt is not an African country but is in fact linked not only geographically but also culturally to the Mediterranean basin. They organize conferences and meetings, establish institutions and carry out other activities which group the Mediterranean countries including Egypt in a cultural complex. They bestow upon us a new 'identity', separating culture and economics, culture and the right of people to self-determination, culture and the rights of the Palestinians to their land. They forget that the Lebanese have been chased out of south Lebanon and that the Syrians have been forced to accept the Israeli occupation of Golan. Am I a woman whose past and future are linked to Black Africa? Or am I a white Egyptian whose land is bathed by the Mediterranean Sea like Italy and Greece and France and Spain? Does this make North Africa a 1337

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part of Europe rather than of the continent from which it draws its name? Does the Sahara Desert decide my culture for me? This difference of opinion related to identity involves an argument about the statue of the sphinx that lies at the foot of the pyramids not far from my house in Giza. Was Abul-Houl black or white? Was his nose fleshy and flat like that of black Africans or was it sharp and prominent but lost its shape when Napoleon fired his guns during the French invasion and clipped it off? And Cleopatra: were her ancestors black or white? Who discovered the continent of America? Was it a black man from Mali who sent his ships across the ocean more than two centuries before Christopher Columbus set out from Spain? Was the beginning of Greek civilization a movement that spread across the Mediterranean from Egypt as Martin Bernal maintains in his book Black Athenal1 Or was Greek civilization newborn in Greece and therefore European in origin, untained by the Egyptian civilization that had preceded it and developed over thousands of years before we heard of Greece? Do I inherit my identity from my female ancestors Ma'at (the goddess of justice and truth), Isis (the goddess of knowledge and freedom), Sekhmek (the goddess of medicine and health) and Hypathia (the philosopher born and burnt in Alexandria with the library of the city)? The struggle over history, over identities and their origin, is part of the struggle over power which has never ceased throughout the centuries. It is those who possess military and nuclear and economic power, those who invade us and take away our material and cultural sustenance, those who rob us of our own riches and our labour and our history, who tell us what our identity is. Throughout the ages it has been like this. How can I, Nawal El Saadawi, have an identity if my history is effaced? If my female ancestors are forgotten, buried in oblivion? If Ma'at, Isis, and Sekhmet are not spoken of? If Khadija the wife of Prophet Muhammad (who was the first to call him Prophet, to tell him not to fear or doubt but go on with courage) is not spoken of, although if it were not for her courage Islam might have been born not through him but perhaps through someone else. Is it I who decides what my identity is or those who have the power, and the money, and the arms and the media, and the global market and the multinational corporations in their hands? How can I defend my real identity against the international and national forces that wish to take it away from me, or distort it, or change it into something else, into the identity of a slave who does and says what he or she is told, who speaks the language of the masters of this world? A few days ago, in Cairo, I read the weekly issue of the most important weekly women's magazine in Egypt (24 March 1996). This women's magazine was first published after the Egyptian government authorities took the decision to ban our women's magazine Noon.

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The magazine in question, Nisf Al-Dunia, whose Arabic name means 'Half the World', was celebrating 8 March, International Women's Day. The first page was an editorial written by a man whose name is Ibrahim Nafi. He is head of the biggest newspaper complex in Egypt, Al-Ahram. In his editorial defining feminine identity, or rather women's identity, Ibrahim Nan took as his reference Jean Jacques Rousseau, whom he quoted as having written that a woman is like a cat - if you show affection to her she keeps rubbing up against you. This is the identity that the man in charge of this women's magazine finds suitable to describe the traits that distinguish a woman. If she is treated well she turns her back on those who were good to her: she is traitorous and not to be trusted. If she is treated badly she becomes servile and tries to endear herself. On the front page there was the photograph of a woman ostensibly depicting the ideal woman, with a demure face like a kitten's, covered in makeup: a postmodern veil hiding her real features just like the hijab hides the face of women, their history, their authenticity, their true identity, in the name of religion. A role for migrant intellectuals Many of those who have migrated from Africa have built their lives, and see their future, elsewhere. Some of them would like to go back but cannot for political or other reasons. What role can the migrant world and the migrant word they carry with them fulfil? 1. When speaking of cultural, multicultural or intercultural writings and studies in the academy, in various institutions, or in conferences, we Africans should struggle against the tendency to deal with issues of identity, of ethnicity, of language and of national or local or subaltern cultures as such, separately. To separate, to deal with culture and identities apart from the economic and the political, serves the purposes of the neocolonialist approach. We cannot understand the role which culture plays, or how it is and what it does, if we fail to link it to the power struggle, to the dynamics of gender and class, to rulers and people, to economic interests. Perhaps cultural, multicultural and intercultural studies need to identify themselves more clearly. What path or paths would enable cultural studies to prove a greater concern with and solidarity for people and their cultures in the African continent? How can we transfer knowledge and technology to those working in the area of culture without appropriating them to the power system? Does this not involve avoiding being appropriated ourselves or at least maintaining a sufficient distance so that we see through eyes that remain focused on Africa as it is and can be in the twenty-first century? The forces of globalization are homogenizing indigenous African cultures everywhere. In villages that continue to be deprived of the basic 1339

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necessities of life it is possible to see Star TV, MTV, Zee TV, cable TV and blue movies. The cultural invasion by consumerism is spreading, creating a severe conflict between what is available and what is desired. The invasion by images is critical. For the first time in the history of cultures like ours we are watching the homogenization of Western or Northern culture into a consolidated, alluring image of the other, of a liberal, capitalist, materially and sexually enticing market, of a world that in comparison with our life we can see only with envy and even reverence. What can writers and multicultural scholars or academicians from Africa do to appraise critically the image created, which we know is quite false? 2. When cultural and identity studies speak of the 'other', the two poles involved are usually North and South. Yet I as an Egyptian and we as Africans can look in our continent to many directions, to the north or the south, to the east or the west, to the sixty or so countries or entities that exist in Africa. Religious, ethnic and racial strife are increasing the gaps and reinforcing barriers between people in many parts of the world. The 'other' is a matter related not only to North and South but also to South and South, to differences and similarities between African countries where culture and cultural identity are concerned. What we might call intracultural studies and writings can therefore be useful in bridging the dichotomies of a bipolar world, in coming closer to a global world not from above but from below. In such a global world, people would understand one another and come closer - despite 'identities' and 'diversities' through joint ventures, writing, and research, rather than maintaining a hegemonic, pyramidal world where culture and identities are decided in the boardrooms of multinational media, companies, and institutions run or influenced by them. The Orient, or the South, or Africa have served long enough as sources of self-definition to the West or the North. This process has been going on for over four centuries. The mechanism used has remained the same: taking the societies, the ways of life, in Africa and elsewhere in the South out of their socioeconomic and historical context so that they appear unreal, strange, foreign; distancing them as much as you can. And this process still happens on a wide scale today. Time and time again I have attended African art festivals, or cultural events, or exhibitions, that were displays of disparate samples brought to entertain and to delight without any reference to the societies, the miseries, they represent and the factors behind them, including relations with the North. 3. Books that are translated are a glaring example of this tendency to choose the exotic or the strange or to misrepresent. French publishing houses are past masters at this art, more often than not aided and abetted by North African Arabs or sub-Saharan Africans living in France. US publishing houses are rapidly picking up the same trick. The modern writings,

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WHY KEEP ASKING ME ABOUT MY IDENTITY? novels produced in Africa and the South, especially if they deal with the reality of relations between Africa and the North, or with gender and class, are not considered to be suitable consumption in the North. 4. New media technology has opened up wide vistas to small groups, and even to individuals. In the countries of Africa even the production of long feature films is relatively inexpensive, probably around $300,000. My son directed a short feature film called Bride of the Nile for a production cost of $12,000, and it won six international prizes. The possibilities opened up in the cultural field by film and above all by video are enormous. Africans in academia, in media and other institutions can think along these lines; the material costs are limited and can be found. Migrant Africans can cooperate with local groups, and this form of North-South networking can do a lot in many fields. Problems exist, but how much have we Africans in northern countries, including the United States, been oriented to think this way? How much have we thought of building up the expertise and knowledge of people still living in the countries from which we came? There is so much that migrant Africans can do. They are living in advanced countries. They have access to knowledge and technological means that their brothers and sisters at home are deprived of. By networking with them they can help in many ways, build up a global solidarity from below. Step by step, over the years, they can help to resist marginalization of the millions back home. Step by step they can participate in creating a global force from below, an alliance of peoples united in a universal human endeavour which is able to respect cultures and identities and yet unite in struggle for true democracy, justice, peace and a better future for all people. 5. Some of the African emigrants in the North are working in academia, in culture, in science, in the media. Many of them are intellectuals and writers, and quite a number have become prominent or even eminent contributors to the fields in which they work. It is natural that those of them who are involved in literature, the arts, the humanities, in writing and culture should become involved in multicultural and intercultural thought, in the problems of identity, of migrants' words, migrants' worlds, and migrants' thoughts. They represent more than one culture or possess a dual one. They reflect this dual culture and are better equipped to navigate between the two cultures to understand the changes that are producing a new international body of mankind and womankind. The mutual fertilization of two cultures is an asset, or can be an asset if well used, used for their people, for their migrant communities, and for their fellow citizens in what has now become their home. The dual culture can give insights into the twin poles of North and South, Africa and the United States. Migrant intellectuals have at their disposal all the accumulated knowledge provided by modern information technology, and

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its means, as well as the discipline, the training, the frame of mind, the habits, which motivate research, understanding and initiative. If courageous, these intellectuals can help to bridge the gap between Africa and the North, to bring people closer, to emphasize what is good, and to criticize what is negative on both sides. However, they cannot replace those who continue to struggle and work at home in Africa. Representation is never easy. And there is no real representation if you are not part of people's everyday life, of their failures and their successes, their misery and their joy, their despair and their passion, their margins of freedom and their prison bars. Some Africans have thought that they can represent their people better than their counterparts in Africa because of the sophistication, the means, the knowledge at their disposal. This is an illusion. This is what the global powers tend to encourage. They want to separate the intellectuals and the peoples who resist at home. They want to play another power game, to stand them up one against the other. We Africans should not let them play that game. In the early part of 1996, I was invited to Paris to celebrate International Women's Day on 8 March. The invitation came from Iranian women exiled in France and in other countries of the world. Those women have never ceased struggling to change the Iranian regime, which under the Shah oppressed women and the poor in the name of modernization and now oppresses them in the name of the mullahs and Islam. They have formed an alliance, a front of women and men, which is growing in strength. Their resistance movement is well organized and enlightened in its approach. They have a parliament in exile composed of 560 members, of which 52 per cent are women. In 1993 this parliament elected a woman as president of the new Iranian regime that they are struggling to create. These people have succeeded in developing a new personality for both men and women, a new identity, where gender discrimination is disappearing through the conscious effort of women, but also men. They want to build a different country, a different economy where the gap between the rich and poor is gradually bridged, where Islam, or 'aid', or 'development' under the guidance and the pressures of the World Bank can no longer be used for the benefit of the few at the expense of those who work. This is a new identity. It is created by people who struggle in exile, who see exile not only as the path to self-improvement, but also as a chance to help in changing things in their own country. For them, exile is no longer just exile. It is a way to change the world, by changing the societies from which we came. The migrant word is no longer just a changing word, it is an act, it is a part of the struggle against injustice and oppression. This struggle for change, for revolution, can unite us across differences in colour, in race, in language, in culture, in sex, in identity. To end, let me quote from an interview given by the former Black

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WHY KEEP ASKING ME ABOUT MY IDENTITY? Panther activist and journalist Mumia Abu Jamal, while on death row waiting to die (Al-Ahram Weekly, Cairo, 21-27 March 1996): The color of power in the courtroom can often be white. And the color of dispower in the courtroom can often be black. But the most consistent variable that determines power in the courtroom is the color of green, the color of money, the power of wealth. He says: We spent our energy in professional illusion: fighting with words, debating identity, culture, and diversity without understanding that the essential truth, the essential element that is real, is revolution, and that revolution must enthuse, feed and give life to every facet of our being or else will fail. And he says: The spirit of freedom, of human liberation, cannot be held within one vessel. It is like holding air in a glass: The rest of the area around that glass is not a vacuum, it doesn't stop there. It's the same for the spirit of revolution. I am just one vessel. There are many other vessels. Let's keep pouring and pouring it on until it becomes the air we breathe. [Keynote address to the African Literature Association Twenty-second Annual Conference, 'Migrating Words and Worlds: Pan-Africanism Updated', held in New York, 27-30 March 1996]

Note 1 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasian Roots of Classical Civilization, Rutgers University Press, 1987.

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