Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality [Core Textbook ed.] 9781400823062

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REFASHIONING FUTURES

E D I T O R S

Sherry B. Ortner, Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley

A LIST OF TITLES IN THIS SERIES APPEARS A T T H E B AC K O F THE BOOK

REFASHIONING FUTURES

CRITICISM AFTER POSTCOLONIALITY

David Scott

Copyright  1999 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scott, David, 1958– Refashioning futures : criticism after postcoloniality / David Scott. p. cm. — (Princeton studies in culture/power/history) Includes bibliographical references and index. eISBN 1-4008-0720-4 1. Developing countries—Historiography. 2. Culture—Study and teaching. 3. Political science. I. Title. II. Series. D883.S36 1999 907′.2—dc21 98-33354 CIP This book has been composed in Sabon http://pup.princeton.edu

For Nimal AND HIS FUTURES

I must be given words to shape my name to the syllables of trees

I must be given words to refashion futures like a healer’s hand

(Kamau Brathwaite, “Negus,” The Arrivants)

Contents

Introduction Criticism after Postcoloniality

3

PART ONE: RATIONALITIES

21

Chapter 1 Colonial Governmentality

23

Chapter 2 Religion in Colonial Civil Society

53

Chapter 3 The Government of Freedom

70

PART TWO: HISTORIES

91

Chapter 4 Dehistoricizing History

93

Chapter 5 “An Obscure Miracle of Connection”

106

PART THREE: FUTURES

129

Chapter 6 The Aftermaths of Sovereignty

131

Chapter 7 Community, Number, and the Ethos of Democracy

158

Chapter 8 Fanonian Futures?

190

Coda After Bandung: From the Politics of Colonial Representation to a Theory of Postcolonial Politics

221

Acknowledgments

225

Index

227

REFASHIONING FUTURES

INTRODUCTION

Criticism after Postcoloniality I honour the moment that I am trying to surpass. . . . I’m not afraid of positionalities. I am afraid of taking positionalities too seriously. (Stuart Hall, “Politics, Contingency, Strategy”)

CRITICISM AND STRATEGY

What is the demand of criticism in the postcolonial present? I mean this question in a double sense, in the sense of a double demand. On the one hand, what does our cognitive-political present demand of a practice of postcolonial criticism? And on the other, what ought postcolonial criticism’s demand on this present to be? Assuming, as I will, that the answers to these questions are not transparently self-evident and not adequately covered by the vocabularies of the cultural-political we currently inhabit, how do we begin to formulate responses to them? How, in other words, and with what conceptual resources, do we begin to extract a new yield, a new horizon of possibilities, from within the moral and epistemic contours of our postcolonial present? These are the questions that map the area of my preoccupation in this book. It seems unnecessary these days to belabor the point that criticism cannot operate in the manner of a General Hermeneutic, a Master Narrative, a View from Nowhere (or from Everywhere), the Panoptic of a Critical Theory. A number of critics, thinkers of varying disciplinary persuasions—among them, Zygmunt Bauman, Talal Asad, Reinhart Koselleck, John Gray, Partha Chatterjee, Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking, Alasdair MacIntyre, Stuart Hall, Michael Walzer, Richard Rorty, William Connolly, and Edward Said (to name only some of those whose work has been helpful to me in this book)—have all been reiterating this point in useful ways for a number of years.1 In their variously conceived projects, these 1

I am thinking of work such as: Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988); John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics

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INTRODUCTION

critics have been working with the antifoundationalist claim that the philosophical anthropologies that have sought to provide criticism with a Final Ground in relation to which its purposes are to be secured and its appeals guaranteed are in fact no more than local (European) stories backed up by the power to authorize what counts as truth and what does not. I take this historicizing and anthropologizing move to be important and endorse it insofar as it challenges the grandiosity of the Enlightenment project and the Europe made over in its normalizing image. I agree in general with the view that positions are to be read as contingent, histories as local, subjects as constructed, and knowledge as enmeshed in power. Indeed I take this move to constitute something of a new theoretical threshold—a new context of thought as such—in the sense that very little work is now needed to establish its claim and to demolish rival ones. However, it seems to me that the force of the antifoundationalist claim is considerably undermined (if not completely discredited) when it is taken to authorize a simple anti-essentialism according to which hitherto existing strategies of criticism are found out, admonished, and dismissed for their epistemological naı¨vete´. Much of what goes under the name of postmodernism in contemporary cultural theory turns on this effort to demonstrate the essentialism of an adversary as though the assumption of an essence by itself were cognitively, morally, and politically unsupportable. Something very curious is at work here. In their zeal for their own version of epistemological purity, the anti-essentialists show themselves unable to put away or suppress their own desire for mastery, for certainty, for the command of an essential meaning. It were as though, as Stuart Hall has put it, if they go on “thinking about Heidegger and Derrida long enough [they] will come to a moment when all will be transparent, and . . . will hold.”2 In effect, then, what starts out being a welcome humbling of certain hegemonic regimes of Truth turns out to be little more than the adoption of an updated counter-design procedure, a counter-rationalism, a counter-claim to the right way for criticism to carry on. My own view is that if criticism cannot be understood as knowing omnisciently in adand Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (New York: Routledge, 1995); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2d ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984); Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso, 1988); Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); and Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). 2 Stuart Hall, “Politics, Contingency, Strategy,” Small Axe 1 (March 1997): 157.

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vance of any cognitive-political contingency or historical conjuncture what demand it has to meet, what its tasks are supposed to be, what target ought to make a claim on its attention, and what questions ought to constitute its apparatus and animate its preoccupations, then its theoretical claim has to be a somewhat differently formulated one. And one way of reformulating the claim of criticism so as to answer the antifoundationalist critique of the Enlightenment without at the same time reinscribing a new rationalism is to understand criticism as a strategic practice. I am, of course, well aware that thinking of criticism in relation to a notion of strategy is not itself a novel proposition. But the view of this relation that I shall advance here is not the more familiar one of a “strategic essentialism.” On this view, simplifying somewhat, there are occasions of political conjuncture in which essentialisms are appropriate—indeed perhaps even required—and there are others in which they are not.3 I have a different view, and in what follows I spell out what I will want to mean by the relation between strategy and criticism in this book. R. G. Collingwood is helpful for what I am after here. Readers of Collingwood’s An Autobiography—the “story of his thought,” as he described it—will recall the central chapter in which he outlined what he called “a logic of question and answer.” This logic, Collingwood argued, was in fact nothing new; it really only restated a classical principle, namely: the principle that a body of knowledge consists not of “propositions,” “statements,” “judgments,” or whatever name logicians use in order to designate assertive acts of thought (or what in those acts is asserted: for “knowledge” means both the activity of knowing and what is known), but of these together with the questions they are meant to answer; and that a logic in which the answers are attended to and the questions neglected is a false logic.4

On this view, then, to understand any proposition it is first necessary to identify the question to which the proposition may be regarded as an answer. And in consequence, as Collingwood goes on to argue, you cannot find out what a man means by simply studying his spoken or written statements, even though he has spoken or written with perfect command of language and perfectly truthful intention. In order to find out his 3 This is, of course, a view that has been associated with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. See her “Criticism, Feminism, and Institution (with Elizabeth Grosz),” in Sarah Harasyn (ed.), Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990); but perhaps more usefully, her “In a Word: An Interview,” Differences 1 (1989): 124–56. 4 R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), pp. 30–31.

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INTRODUCTION

meaning you must also know what the question was (a question in his own mind, and presumed by him to be in yours) to which the thing he has said or written was meant to be an answer.5

As Collingwood elaborated it, this is an important principle for any practice of historical or philosophical (and I might add, anthropological) understanding. Contrary to the rationalist view (as prevalent among contemporary anti-essentialist postmodernists as among the essentialists they attack), you cannot simply read off the error of a proposition without the prior labor of reconstructing the question to which it aims to respond. This is because propositions are never answers to self-evident or “perennial” questions—for Collingwood there are no such things—and therefore you cannot assume in advance that you know the question in relation to which the text constitutes itself as an answer. Collingwood’s logic of question and answer has perhaps not received the attention it deserves.6 One thinker who has made much of it, however, is Quentin Skinner. It is from Collingwood, Skinner writes in the course of responding to a number of his own critics, that he has derived his most “fundamental assumptions as an intellectual historian.” This is the assumption that “the history of thought should be viewed not as a series of attempts to answer a canonical set of questions, but as a sequence of episodes in which the questions as well as the answers have frequently changed.”7 Reading Collingwood through the language philosophy of J. L. Austin, Skinner argues that in order to understand a proposition, you have to understand it not merely in its internal logical status but as a “move in an argument.” You have, therefore, to grasp why it was “put forward” in the way that it was in the first place, and to do this you have to “recapture the presuppositions and purposes that went into making it.” “I am claiming,” Skinner says, “that any act of communication always constitutes the taking up of some determinate position in relation to some pre-existing conversation or argument. It follows that, if we wish to understand what has been said, we shall have to be able to identify what exact position has been taken up. . . . I have expressed this contention in terms of Austin’s claim that we need to be able to understand what the speaker or writer may have been doing in saying what was said. But it is 5

Ibid., p. 31. For a general discussion of Collingwood’s work, see Louis O. Mink’s excellent book, Mind, History, and Dialectic: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). Collingwood, Mink remarks in the opening to this book, is coming to be “the best known neglected thinker of our time” (1). 7 See Quentin Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” in James Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 234; and Tully’s own consideration of Skinner’s work, “The Pen Is a Mighty Sword,” in the same volume. 6

CRITICISM AFTER POSTCOLONIALITY

7

I think a fascinating though unnoticed feature of Austin’s analysis that it can in turn be viewed as an exemplification of what Collingwood called the ‘logic of question and answer.’ ”8 It seems to me that this principle of “question and answer” (and especially Skinner’s formulation of it in terms of moves and positions in an argument) can profitably be extended to what I should like to call a strategic practice of criticism. Whereas in Collingwood’s and Skinner’s conception of it, this question/answer principle was to be applied to reading the past with a view perhaps to understanding the present, a strategic practice of criticism is concerned more with reading the present with a view to determining whether (and how) to continue with it in the future. By this I mean that a practice of strategic criticism is concerned with determining at any conjuncture what conceptual moves among the many available options will have the most purchase, the best yield. On this view, a critic has not only to be concerned with whether or not the statements that might be made are logically adequate answers to the questions that can be shown to underlie them (the burden of Collingwood’s preoccupation), but with whether or not these questions themselves continue, in the conjuncture at hand, to constitute questions worth having answers to. If, for Skinner, an existing proposition has to be understood as a move in an ongoing argument, I mean to urge that criticism must understand itself self-consciously as a practice of entering an historically constituted field of ongoing moral argument, of gauging that argument’s tenor, of calculating the stakes (what might stand and what might fall as a result of a particular move), of ascertaining the potential allies and possible adversaries, of determining the lines and play of forces (what might count and what might not as a possible intervention), and so on. This is the problem of strategy for criticism. A strategy, as Carl von Clausewitz argued in his discussion of war, is the use of “engagements” in a field of agonistic forces, in a field of conflict.9 It is only by understanding criticism in this way that we can determine the contingent demand of—and on—criticism in any conjuncture. These 8

Skinner, “Reply,” pp. 274–75. There are points of contact between this “dialectical” conception of a question/answer complex and the more “archaeological” conceptions of a truth/falsity complex advanced by Ian Hacking, and the conception of a history of modes of problematizations suggested by Michel Foucault. See Ian Hacking, “Language, Truth and Reason,” in Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982); and Michel Foucault, “History of Systems of Thought,” in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Donald F. Bouchard (ed. and intro.) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). 9 See Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), chapter 3, “On Strategy in General.” I agree with Spivak’s contention that a “strategy suits a situation; a strategy is not a theory.” “In a Word,” p. 127.

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INTRODUCTION

conjunctures are in effect “problem-spaces”; that is to say, they are conceptual-ideological ensembles, discursive formations, or language games that are generative of objects, and therefore of questions. And these problem-spaces are necessarily historical inasmuch as they alter as their (epistemic-ideological) conditions of existence change. Thus although there may well be a logical complimentarity, a cognitive corelativity (in Collingwood’s sense), between question and answer, as the problem-space changes this complex as a whole may come to lack critical purchase. In other words, the problem-space in which a question has emerged as a question demanding an answer may have altered, thereby altering the critical (if not necessarily the logical) status of that question—leaving it recognizably coherent but largely academic. For what has happened in such an instance is that a new problem-space has emerged constituting a new set of demands on criticism. Part of my argument here is the Kuhnian one regarding the emergence and consolidation of a paradigm of “normal” science.10 These are problem-spaces in which the objects have all but become self-evident so that the questions through which they were called into being in the first place have faded from view. They are no longer simply available on the surface of the text. They are embedded precisely because they have become taken for granted. And what replaces a debate over appropriate questions is a debate over adequate answers to a question that is now, effectively, in the background. The problem-space has now, so to speak, reached a threshold. It has become a “normal” discursive-space; it has become normalized. The theoretical apparatus by means of which answers are generated is rapidly accepted and is simply applied without further thought given to the domain of questions that constitute the problem-space; so much so that once the game is known it is possible to anticipate in advance the moves that are to be made in an argument. This is clearly so, for instance, in the essentialism/anti-essentialism debate. Within this space new knowledge is produced, but it is only possible to go on producing knowledge that has assumed a regularity, a stable shape. This is where the problem of strategy becomes crucial. My point is that a strategic practice of criticism will ask whether the moment of normalization of a paradigm is not also the moment when it is necessary to reconstruct and reinterrogate the ground of questions themselves through which it was brought into being in the first place; to ask whether the critical yield of the normal 10 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Needless to say there has been considerable debate around Kuhn’s conceptual apparatus, and it is not my intention here to enter into it. See, however, the useful volume edited by Gary Gutting, Paradigms and Revolutions: Appraisals and Applications of Thomas Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980).

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problem-space continues to be what it was when it first emerged; and, if not, to ask what set of questions is emerging in the new problem-space that might reconfigure and so expand the conceptual terrain in which an object is located. Let us return to the anti-essentialists. For the anti-essentialists, as I suggested, criticism is a practice of demonstrating the epistemological naı¨vete´ of their adversaries. For them, for example, it is something like an epistemological law that cultures are not pure or homogeneous; that subjectivity is never outside the discursive practices that constitute it; that identities are never fixed or immutable; that the boundaries of communities are not given but constructed; and so on. Their adversaries—often an older generation of critics—who appear to hold contrary views, who attribute essences to culture, subjectivity, and so on, are summarily dismissed. The anti-essentialists, in other words, are not interested in what constellation of historically constituted demands may have produced the supposedly “essentialist” formulations. They are not interested in determining what the strategic task at hand was or what the epistemic and ideological material conditions were that formed the discursive context in which their moves were made and their positions taken. They are only interested in establishing their own epistemological superiority. In my view, the main problem with the anti-essentialists is that like all rationalists they read as though the questions to which answers are to be sought are perennial or canonical questions, as though the questions to which the essentialists they are criticizing were responding are necessarily the same as their own. In other words, the anti-essentialists fail to problematize the question/ answer field—the problem-space—as such in which their own preoccupations as a whole are inserted. As a result, they can always read off the error of their adversaries from the presents they themselves contingently inhabit. The anti-essentialists are historicists. But they historicize the answers, not the questions. Since it is no longer possible to endorse a single principle of political calculation and a single horizon toward which politics ought to lead— this was implicit in the radical no less than the liberal versions of the Enlightenment story of progress toward democracy and it is implicit in all versions of the political “development” narrative—the question of the cognitive-political resources of our various and variously interconnected moral traditions has to be rethought. Indeed, the concept of a “tradition” has to be crucial to such a rethinking of the political. In this book I am indebted to Alasdair MacIntyre’s way of conceiving it. For MacIntyre, a tradition is not taken in the sense of what was prior to modernity, what is untouched by reason, or what endures without conflict; these, he says, are the tediously familiar Enlightenment or “Burkean” uses that continue

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INTRODUCTION

to animate moral-political discourse.11 He wants us to understand a tradition in the far more productive sense of an historically extended, socially embodied argument, an argument which, as he says, is at least in part about what constitutes the goods that give point and purpose to that tradition. As such, a tradition cannot have a life without density, without conflict, without alteration, without intensity, and without instability. And criticism that explicitly locates itself within the terrain and thus the vocabulary of a tradition is criticism that enters into the moral space of such an argument simultaneously to contest/confirm it and reshape/retain it. Such a criticism, then, always has to be strategic, for it can never know in advance how and in relation to what ends its moves are to be undertaken. Moreover, note that I do not suggest that this moral space of a tradition is a homogeneous or transparently unitary one. I do suggest, however, that it is a coherent one in the sense that it is constituted through an always reshapable ensemble of stakes, concepts, practices, virtues, commitments, identities, desires, and aspirations.

AFTER POSTCOLONIALITY

The essays that comprise this book offer so many studies in the strategy of a postcolonial criticism at a certain historical-conceptual moment. Their labor is therefore self-consciously exploratory. They are seeking to gain a purchase on a global moment of considerable instability and uncertainty. It is a moment when hitherto established and authoritative conceptual paradigms and political projects (those defined in relation to Marxism and cultural nationalism, for instance, or various admixtures of nationalism and socialism, and so on) seem no longer adequate to the tasks of the present, and when, at the same time, new paradigms and projects have yet to assert themselves fully in the place of the old. These essays inhabit, in other words, a sort of Gramscian interregnum, a transitional moment that I shall characterize as “after postcoloniality.” In order to clarify what project such a criticism—after postcoloniality—takes up I need to sketch out, in the mode of the kind of strategic reading I have been advocating, something of the problem-space of two prior moments: postcoloniality itself and the anticoloniality it criticized. What was the implicit or explicit demand that each was formulated to meet? I shall foreground the analytic involved in a deliberately schematic way. In the late 1970s and 1980s—at a time when the “new nations” norm of political sovereignty established by the great anticolonial nationalist movements in South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean was beginning to 11

See MacIntyre, After Virtue, chapter 15.

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unravel; when new forces of capitalist globalization were rearranging the local/global articulation and with it, the field of sovereignty; when Left anti-imperialist regimes were imploding; when the new international economic order of South solidarities was a rapidly retreating vision; when, in short, the liberationist Third Worldism of Bandung was in decline— a new field of cognitive-political discourse about colonialism emerged. Located geographically and institutionally in the North Atlantic academy (the United States and Britain, in particular) and driven most often by diasporic and exilic intellectuals of Third World origin, this field of theoretical discourse was concerned to reproblematize the understanding of colonialism formulated by the nationalist theorists (both liberals and Marxists) of the anticolonial struggle. Of especial concern to the new theoretical discourse was the dependence of the anticolonial nationalists on certain epistemological assumptions regarding culture, class, subjectivity, history, knowledge, and so on. This is the moment—and politicaltheoretical problem-space—of postcoloniality. And the text that played the most important part in opening it up and making it visible as a space of criticism was Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978.12 The problem-space of the anticolonial project had, of course, been defined by the demand for political decolonization, the demand for the overthrow of colonial power. Its goal was the achievement of political sovereignty. In the anticolonial story, colonial power had been understood principally in the register of a social, economic, and political force blocking the path to freedom and self-determination of the colonized. The colonized had been dispossessed, materially and psychologically, and the task of the anticolonial project was the restoration of the colonized to full self-possession. In this understanding, the problem of the relationship between colonialism and knowledge consisted in the problem of the discrepancy between Europe’s (mis)representations and the reality of the colonized: the problem, in other words, of the inauthenticity of colonial knowledge. If colonial power had produced this representation/reality split (the well-known split of colonial alienation in which the colonized subject is divided from his/her authentic self, and the whole problem, derived from that split, of the “national culture” of the colonial intelligentsia),13 then the task of decolonization consisted in the demand of selfrepresentation, a process of restoring an authentic relationship between representation and reality. What the anticolonial moment demanded, 12

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). See also his later reflections on it in “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Race and Class 27 (Autumn 1985):1–15. 13 This is famously theorized, of course, in the work of Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Vintage 1967); and Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral (New York: Africa Information Service, 1973).

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INTRODUCTION

therefore, was first and foremost a theory of politics, a theory of liberationist politics that would bring about this restoration. What was not theorized (or anyway, what remained undertheorized) in this space of anticoloniality—and this not because the anticolonial nationalists were simple-minded essentialists, but because it had not yet become visible as the question of moment—was the whole question of the decolonization of representation itself, the decolonization of the conceptual apparatus through which their political objectives were thought out. It is this register of the politics of colonialist representation that postcoloniality opened up in the late 1970s. The new question for postcoloniality turned not so much on the old idea of colonialism as a structure of material exploitation and profit (the question for anticoloniality) as on the idea of colonialism as a structure of organized authoritative knowledge (a formation, an archive) that operated discursively to produce effects of Truth about the colonized. Understood as a complex ensemble of knowledge/power, colonialist discourse constituted a will-to-truth about the colonized as part of the larger project of Europe’s will-to-mastery of the nonEuropean world. Moreover, what counted as the Truth of the colonial space was authoritatively produced through regimes of representation— and through protocols of discursive formation—that cut across simple ideological lines such as liberal/Marxist. As a political-theoretical project, then, postcoloniality has been concerned principally with the decolonization of representation; the decolonization of the West’s theory of the non-West.14 Postcoloniality altered the question about colonialism and provided a new set of conceptual tools with which not merely to revive colonialism as a going problematic, but to reframe it in terms of the relation between colonial power and colonial knowledge. It thereby enabled a systematic reinterrogation of contemporary practices in terms of the extent to which (or the senses in which) they reproduced forms of knowledge that emerged as part of the apparatus of colonial power. In the almost twenty years since Orientalism was published, whole fields of canonical knowledge have been reopened for redescription through the protocols of the critique of colonialist discourse.15 Much of 14 The work of Homi Bhabha is located in this space. It has been particularly instructive at the level of the detailed deconstruction of the colonialist statement, in demonstrating, for instance, that such statements are not identical with themselves (with their intentions), and are always in fact marked by an internal instability and ambivalence. See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995). 15 The literature is much too voluminous to list in full. For some useful signposts, see Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986); Philip Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992);

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this work has been concerned with the thematization of the agency of the colonized, with writing back against colonialism, with the deconstruction of European cultural reason, and so on.16 It was this space of postcoloniality that many like myself, coming from various parts of the Third World, occupied as graduate students in the North Atlantic academy in the middle to late 1980s. Working in and through and across a number of disciplinary arrangements in the social sciences and the humanities—history, anthropology, literature, philosophy—we undertook to interrogate various aspects of the archive of colonialist discourse. My own earlier book, for example, Formations of Ritual, was worked out as a contribution to deepening and broadening this space.17 It sought in part to understand the relation between the contemporary anthropological description and analysis of religion and ritual in Sri Lanka and the nineteenth-century missionary discourse in which these practices first became visible to the West. The argument (one, it seems to me, still not sufficiently recognized) was that anthropological objects are not simply given in advance of anthropological projects, but are constructed in conceptual and ideological domains that themselves have histories—very often colonial histories. My point, therefore, was that unless anthropology attends in an ongoing and systematic way to the problem of the conceptual-ideological formation of the objects that constitute its discourse, it will not be able to avoid the reproduction of colonialist discourse. The cognitive-political space of postcoloniality, in other words, operated in relation to a certain demand of criticism: the demand for the decolonization of representation, the decolonization of the West’s theory of the non-West. This space of postcoloniality has profoundly altered our ways of thinking about colonialism. We now write about colonialism on the Nicholas B. Dirks, Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and his edited collection, Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler (eds.), “Tensions of Empire,” the special section of American Ethnologist 16 (November 1989); Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery in the Colonial World (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Press, 1986); and Gyan Prakash (ed.), After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 16 The seminal work of the Subaltern Studies Collective, while not responding to a North Atlantic demand, can also be located here. More recently, Said expanded the scope of Orientalism to make a more general argument about representations of the non-European worlds in the West and to take into account the problem of resistance which, as he says (and was said repeatedly by others), was absent in the first book. See his Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). 17 David Scott, Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

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INTRODUCTION

new threshold brought into being by the displacement of anticoloniality by postcoloniality. There is a real sense in which we now write in the wake of Edward Said. The point I want grasped here for the kind of strategic reading I am commending in this book is that there were at least two conditions that made possible the posing of this question of the politics of colonialist representation as a question in the first place: one was precisely the existence of the space enabled by the prior moment of anticoloniality in which the problem of the horizon of politics (i.e., nation-state sovereignty) had appeared resolved; the other was the emergence in the humanities and social sciences of practices of criticism (call them post-structuralist) concerned with the interrogation of representation as such. These latter made visible the persistence of the colonial in the heart of sovereignty (in the vocabulary of anticoloniality, these were theorized as neocolonialism and cultural imperialism) and enabled postcoloniality to problematize colonialism as a discursive formation enduring into the present. At the same time, however, this practice of criticism—like its affiliated practices in cultural criticism—operated through a certain suspension or deferral of the question of the political, a deferral of the question of the renewal of a theory of politics. Or, rather, postcoloniality operated by implicitly occupying the horizon of nationalist politics already defined by the anticolonial project. It is, in a sense, precisely this deferral of the question of the political that made possible a sustained interrogation of the internal structures of the cultural reason of colonialist knowledges. However, there is reason to doubt the contemporary efficacy of this strategy of criticism. This doubt is not about its internal cognitive coherence, but about, on the one hand, whether there is much more (in terms of the expansion of discursive space or the creation of new objects) that can be accomplished with it; and, on the other, whether the new global conditions (defined by the collapse of the Bandung project and, with the dismantling of the Soviet Union, of the international communist movement as well, and the rise of a revived/revised liberalism) do not urge us to rethink the target that this criticism was constructed to meet. This is what this book is about. With the collapse of the Bandung and socialist projects and with the new hegemony of a neoliberal globalization, it is no longer clear what “overcoming” Western power actually means. Moreover, with the weakening of the cognitive-political vocabularies of nation and socialism in which oppositional Third World futures were articulated, it is no longer clear how alternatives are to be thought, much less defended. In short, there is now a fundamental crisis in the Third World in which the very coherence of the secular-modern project— with its assurance of progressive social-economic development, with its dependence upon the organizational form of the nation-state, with its

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sense of the privilege of representative democracy and competitive elections, and so on—can no longer be taken for granted. This crisis ushers in a new problem-space and produces a new demand on postcolonial criticism.

STUDIES/POSITIONS/ARGUMENTS

While not constituting a monograph, the chapters—or studies, as I will call them—in this book nevertheless form an interconnected whole. Each of them can be read separately, to be sure, and in any order for that matter, but each of the book’s parts constitute a sort of thematic unity, and the three together work through the movement of what I hope is a coherent argument. Moving from a discussion of some of the rationalities that made up the colonial projects in Sri Lanka and Jamaica, through a consideration of some ways in which debates about the past have been deployed in nationalist discourses about collective identity in the present, to an interrogation of contemporary cultural-political predicaments, the studies are all centrally concerned with the problem of gaining a purchase on the postcolonial present we inhabit. Conceived in this way, the book aims to intervene in—so as to contribute in some way to altering—the existing configuration of the discursive space inhabited by postcolonial criticism. Part 1, “Rationalities,” consists of three studies. Each of these is concerned with the problem of how in the present to think colonial history critically. They are concerned with histories, in other words, of the postcolonial present. But part of the point I want to press here is that the critical demand that constitutes such presents in relation to which histories of the colonial are constructed ought not themselves to be taken as transparent or self-evident. Histories of the present, in other words, ought to be attentive not only to the shifting contours of the pasts they interrogate, but to the shifting contours of the presents they inhabit and from which they are being written. The argument of this book hangs, in fact, on what I take to be the altered character of the demand that a postcolonial criticism of the present makes on the construction of the colonial past. If the question that animated the nationalist/liberationist histories of the colonial turned on the question of the colonial attitude toward the colonized, or the extent of inclusion/exclusion practiced by colonial power, the question that animates the new demand is a different one, namely, what are the conceptual and institutional dimensions of our modernity? This question seeks to explore the new concepts—and the institutions based on these concepts—that colonial/Western power inscribed into the social terrain and to inquire into the nature of the transformations and reorganizations that were effected by this new form of power. Spe-

16

INTRODUCTION

cifically, I want to urge that we seek to understand the colonial in such a way as to bring into focus the inscription of modern power into its practices of rule. It is especially important to grasp the colonial modern as constituting a particular alteration in the political rationalities of rule. And reform, I argue, was crucial to the new rationality of rule that at least in some places we can see coming into being by the second quarter of the nineteenth century. What is distinctive about the project of reform is that it was not worried simply with the detail of discrete behaviors; it was worried about the totality of the social, about an interconnected order of life.18 Reform, in which power came to operate in and through the very discourse of progress and improvement, reorganized the institutional terrain on which and the discursive frames through which collective life was conceived and lived. In particular, then, what is crucial to this investigation is an analytical description of the form of power that altered not merely the balance of forces in the struggle between colonizer and colonized, but that altered the terrain of struggle itself. This is much of what modern power is all about. Modern power—governmental power in particular—is a form of power that operates not so much on the details of behavior as on the conditions in which behaviors are obliged to assume their form; it operates by bringing into being a new horizon— the social—in relation to which action is defined, experienced, and transformed. Notice what is being urged here. What is called for is not a new chapter in that familiar anticolonial story according to which the “agency” denied by Eurocentrism has to be restored to the colonized. This story is concerned to show that, its self-understanding notwithstanding, European power was never all-encompassing, never total, and that the colonized always resisted, always (in the familiar phrase) made their own history. What I am suggesting here is that in a critical investigation of colonialism in the postcolonial present we inhabit, what is at stake is not the assertion (or resurrection) of the humanity of the colonized. What is at issue is not whether the colonized accommodated or resisted. What is at issue is how (colonial) power altered the terrain on which accommodation/resistance was possible in the first place. Attention has now to be turned, therefore, to a description of that terrain and the power that produces the alteration—i.e., a description of modern power. In one version of the anticolonial story (the liberal-rationalist version) modernity was to be embraced; in another version (the cultural-nationalist version) modernity 18 In this regard, I think that Timothy Mitchell’s description of the colonial project in Egypt in terms of the alterations of the terrain on which, say, instruction was conceived and villages were rebuilt, is most instructive. See his Colonising Egypt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), especially chapters 2 and 3.

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was to be eschewed; and in yet another (the Marxist version) a bourgeois modernity was criticized in favor of a socialist one. But in all versions of this story modernity was always-already inserted into a normative narrative. In these narratives, modernity was never itself the object of a nonteleological investigation, a nonteleological criticism. This is what the postcolonial present demands. Rather than the anticolonial problem of overthrowing colonialism (or the West), or the decolonization of the West’s representation of the non-West, what is important for this present is a critical interrogation of the practices, modalities, and projects through which modernity inserted itself into and altered the lives of the colonized. In the three chapters that make up this section of the book, I trace out some of these alterations on the terrain of Sri Lanka and Jamaica. In doing so, I obviously do not mean to imply that just such alterations took place everywhere in the colonial world, or took place in the same way. The point I am after does not stand or fall on the generalizability of the actual histories. The point I am after stands or falls on the coherence of the theoretical claim about ways of reading the colonial past in relation to the postcolonial present. What I am after is a form of description of the modern colonial past that enables us to appreciate more deeply the contours of the historical present we inhabit, and to appreciate it in such a way as to enlarge the possibility of reshaping it. Part 2, “Histories,” consists of two essays. Each of them is concerned with the problem of the “past” in the “present”; more specifically, with the ways in which the-truth-about-the-past is mobilized to guarantee cultural-political claims in the present—in one instance, constructions of the truth of the Sinhala past, and in the other, constructions of the truth of the Afro-Caribbean past. In each case I am concerned to think through positions (R. A. L. H. Gunawardana’s critique of Sinhala chauvinism in one, and Kamau Brathwaite’s critique of Eurocentrism in the other) that have, in their respective postcolonial locations—Sri Lanka and the English-speaking Caribbean—been enormously important contributions. Both have been central to opening up or enabling conceptual space for practices of social, political, and cultural criticism. Indeed, in many ways, their interventions have been central to redefining the terms of such criticism, so much so that we who come after necessarily work on the terrain they have made available to us. I disagree, however, with the formulation of “pasts” offered by each. But this is not because in either case I think them to be wrong in some foundational epistemological sense and that they ought therefore to be surpassed, gotten beyond. As I suggested earlier, this is where I am in fundamental disagreement with the anti-essentialists. My own preoccupation is a different one; I am interested in a practice of criticism that establishes both connections and disconnections. This entails recognizing the

18

INTRODUCTION

ways in which the answers critics produce are connected to questions thrown up by the demand of the problem-space they occupy. This is why, for me, criticism is a strategic practice. For me, therefore, the central issue is not that we need more anti-essentialist answers to the questions Gunawardana and Brathwaite worried over: Sinhala identity, black identity. Rather, the issue for me is that the questions that define our own conjuncture have perhaps changed fundamentally. We no longer inhabit the problem-space from which Gunawardana and Brathwaite wrote. Consequently, what is at issue is the new demand, the new question, that the emerging problem-space is producing. Understood in this way, rather than an arrogant history of errors, one can think of constructing critical intellectual traditions—that thematize Sinhala identity, that thematize black Caribbean identity—around cultural-political interventions into what are, in effect, historically shifting problem-spaces. Part 3, “Futures,” consists of three essays. These are much more concerned with engaging the present with a view to “refashioning” the promise of alternative futures. Chapter 6 is the only one of the eight chapters that does not work specifically on material from either Sri Lanka or the Caribbean. It sets out something of the more general features of the historical and conceptual terrain on which the question of “futures” as such (anyway, as I understand it) rests. The essays are concerned with folding the politics of theory that has characterized postcoloniality into a new theory of politics. This is what I take to be the central demand after postcoloniality. As I have suggested, postcolonial criticism has been a participant in the larger project of contemporary cultural criticism. And one of the moves that has characterized this practice of criticism is a certain suspension of the question of the political, or rather a certain indefinite deferral of it. The reason for this is well-enough known. This practice has urged that what is important is the systematic interrogation of the assumptions (epistemic assumptions, gender assumptions, race assumptions, nation assumptions, humanist assumptions) through which contending conceptions of the political (Marxist conceptions most particularly) have been constructed and authorized. Moreover, it has been argued that these assumptions are in a very crucial sense themselves “political” assumptions inasmuch as they are concerned with relations of power. (The uses of the Gramscian concept of “hegemony” have, of course, been significant here.) I have no quarrel with this. This move has done much to widen our notion of the political. It has usefully insisted that the field of the political is not to be limited to discourses and practices around the occupation of the state. At the same time, however, now that the political horizon, as such, of Left oppositional politics has been dismantled, the purchase of this strategy of criticism has altered. The whole problem about political judg-

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ment, questions about political representation and community, about rights and justice, about the good, about obligation, have to be reintegrated into the field of our preoccupations: from a politics of theory to a theory of politics. In this, the accent is on political rather than cultural criticism, which is not to displace the field of problems raised and addressed in the cultural critique of Europe but to fold them into a strategy of criticism that comprehends macropolitical questions. If we take the contemporary predicament of criticism seriously then a whole field of assumptions about our contemporary languages of the political must come under scrutiny. For example, we now have to reexamine our assumptions about the radical/conservative distinction that has so shaped and guided our modern/modernist ways of thinking about political affiliation, our ways of affirming or disaffirming positions in the arena of politics. We have to ask ourselves about the extent to which and the sense in which that distinction hangs on our buying an Enlightenment story about progress, reason, and emancipation. For in that story it is understood that to be a “radical” is to occupy a certain relation to a community of practice one is criticizing; a relation of externality, of conceptual distance from its errors and its naı¨vete´. This is because the radical already knows in some fundamental sense, knows in virtue of already having the singular principles on which true knowledge is founded. To be “conservative” by contrast, is to be mired in “tradition,” unyielding to change, unwilling to acknowledge the obvious advances of our modernity, and to recognize the obvious efficacy of Reason (or Theory). Non-Marxist antiliberals like Michael Oakeshott and Alasdair MacIntyre have taught us a good deal about the poverty of this story, about its rationalism, and also about its hubris.19 Whatever its virtues in a prior historical conjuncture, if we are to confront our present in terms adequate to its intelligibility, we have little choice but to give up that story of radicalism and conservatism and find another whose vocabulary distributes its distinctions differently across the field of the political. This is, of course, one way of understanding what the concept of govenmentality seeks to do in the Foucauldian story in which it operates. In addition to Michel Foucault, political thinkers like John Gray and William Connolly are also useful in thinking against the presents we inhabit.20 They both want to work against the normalizations of identity that constitute the seeming immobility of the present. This is why they both stress agonism, difference, and contingency. It is not that they think that “agonism” is more essential, more fundamental, to human flour19

I have in mind Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1962); and MacIntyre, After Virtue. 20 See Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake; and Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization.

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INTRODUCTION

ishing than consensus. Rather it is that the theorists of consensus (whether of a Habermasian or a Rawlsian persuasion) tend to seek a rationalist and universalist ground in order to secure the social contract. And this invariably depends upon a regulative ideal that promises to seal politics off from the play of contending differences. Gray and Connolly want to honor such constitutive differences and to find a space for contending selves within the public life of politics. At the same time, against liberals and postmodernists (but together with communitarians like Michael Sandel),21 they are suspicious of the view that reifies difference, that takes contingency merely to authorize a voluntarist conception of the self, a self with an unlimited capacity to choose and unchoose its ends. Both acknowledge forms of contingency—“entrenched” or “branded” contingencies, Connolly calls them (what the Frankfurt school called “second nature”)—that are more deeply inscribed than others; they both acknowledge that identity is not only made (the constructivist claim) but found. This is why they both give some recognition to the tragic in human life, to what Gray calls “historical fate.” But it is precisely because difference is irreducible to rational choice that politics is indispensable and that it is futile to try to preempt the risk of the political, to secure (and thus displace) the political through metaphysical guarantees. It is precisely because paradox is ineradicable that it is necessary to face up to the political as a domain not of principle but of peace, not of Truth but of partial and contingent settlements; a sphere in which difference and ambiguity can be engaged and negotiated rather than concealed. In short, what I am after in all of this is a practice of criticizing our postcolonial present that is not the old Marxism with its assured knowledge of a mastered future, nor the more recent poststructuralist cultural criticism with its accent on rationality-deconstruction, and still yet not the liberaldemocratic political criticism (in any of its Rawlsian or Habermasian versions) that valorizes a consensualist plural individualism. I believe that the present invites us to take up the more difficult task of thinking fundamentally against the normalization of the epistemological and institutional forms of our political modernity. How we meet this challenge must, I think, have consequences for the prospect of imagining an alternative to what Partha Chatterjee once poignantly described as our “postcolonial misery.”22 This book is an effort in that direction.

21 See Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See also his more recent Democracy’s Discontents: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996). 22 Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, p. 11.

Part One R AT I O N A L I T I E S

CHAPTER 1

Colonial Governmentality Maybe what is really important for our modernity—that is, for our present—is not so much the e´tatisation of society, as the “governmentalization” of the state. (Michel Foucault, “Governmentality”) Within the modern world which has come into being, changes have taken place as the effect of dominant political power by which new possibilities are constructed and old ones destroyed. The changes do not reflect a simple expansion of the range of individual choice, but the creation of conditions in which only new (i.e., modern) choices can be made. The reason for this is that the changes involve the re-formation of subjectivities and the re-organization of social spaces in which subjects act and are acted upon. The modern state—imperial, colonial, post-colonial—has been crucial to these processes of construction/destruction. (Talal Asad, “Conscripts of Western Civilisation”)

REFORMULATING THE QUESTION ABOUT COLONIALISM

The above remarks on modernity by the late Michel Foucault and Talal Asad mark out the problem-field in which the argument in this chapter is to be situated. I want to inquire into what appears to me a problem in the now considerably advanced discussion about colonialism—a problem that turns very much on the question of what is distinctive about the political rationality of forms of power, on the one hand, and on the other, on those transformations effected by modern power, the consequence of which is that the old, premodern possibilities are not only no longer conceptually approachable except in the languages of the modern, but are now no longer available as practical historical options. Stated baldly (and therefore at the risk of some simplification) the problem that animates

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this chapter is the following: If it is the case, as many critics of colonialism now agree, that Europe has been too much at the center of our theoretical knowledges of the colonial and postcolonial world—and that, in virtue of this, these knowledges typically privilege the colonial state’s autobiography, its cultural values, its presumption of an all-pervasive and totalizing influence, its marginalization of resistance and the many local ways of incipient anticolonial refusal—what then is the conceptual level to be assigned to “Europe” understood not merely as a geographical space but as an apparatus of dominant power-effects? My question, it is easy to see, presupposes that the critique of European hegemony in the construction of knowledges about the non-European world—the “decentering” of Europe—ought not to be confused (as I think it very often is) with programmatically ignoring Europe, as though by doing so one would have resolved the problem of Eurocentrism.1 My question presupposes, in other words, that there is a difference—and a consequential one—between the polemical dismissal of Europe and its conceptual repositioning, between the Fanonian rhetoric of forgetting Europe and an investigation in which those structures and rationalities through which Europe’s colonial projects were organized comes more prominently into view.2 My question, in short, is aimed at interrupting that conceptual formulation that seeks little more than an inversion of the colonial habit of deploying “Europe” as the universal subject of all history. In recent years, a good deal of the discussion about colonialism has tended to center on colonialism’s attitude toward the colonized and the question of its exclusionary discourses and practices—whether these discourses and practices have to do with exclusion of the colonized from humanity (colonialism’s racism), or their exclusion from the institutions of political sovereignty (colonialism’s false liberalism). Thus, one strand of the critique of colonialist discourse, for instance, one which owes much to Edward Said’s Orientalism, has been centrally concerned to demonstrate how colonialist textuality works at the level of image and language to produce a distorted representation of the colonized. This strategy has sought to expose the devices through which the colonized have been de1 For one recent and interesting attempt to grapple with this problem, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations 37 (1992): 1–26. As will be evident from what follows, I do not entirely share his diagnosis of the problem of Europe or the solution he provides. 2 We all recall those stirring closing passages of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Penguin, 1967), p. 251, in which he exhorts us, “Leave this Europe where they are never done talking about Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.” Part of the point I want to make is the obvious one that the politics of our critique of colonialist discourse cannot be the same as it was for Fanon.

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nied voice, autonomy, and agency. Another strategy, less concerned with the rhetorical economy of texts and more with the institutional mechanisms of colonial dominance, has sought to show the hollow—indeed, the ideological—content of colonialism’s claim to have introduced the colonies to liberal-democratic political principles, the principles of good and humane government, and thus to have enabled that modernizing transition from the “rule of force” to the “rule of law.” It has been easy to demonstrate that these exalted liberal principles never entailed a political equality between colonizer and colonized.3 In large measure, therefore, the critique of colonialist discourse has constituted itself as a kind of writing back at the West, as a critical practice of making visible, on the one hand, the internal economy of this discourse, as well as, on the other, the active resistances of the colonized. Assuredly, these strategies have operated different thematic domains, but they both share the field of a general problematic in which what is at stake is the way colonialism as a practice of power works to include or exclude the colonized. I should like to set this problematic aside and introduce in its place one that is not centrally concerned with whether or how power works to include or exclude portions of the colonized, and that in consequence is not concerned with the arrogance or even with the “epistemic violence” of colonialist discourse as such. The problematic with which I am concerned takes as its object what I shall call the political rationalities of colonial power. By this obviously Foucauldian formulation I mean those historically constituted complexes of knowledge/power that give shape to colonial projects of political sovereignty. A colonial political rationality characterizes those ways in which colonial power is organized as an activity designed to produce effects of rule. More specifically, what I mean to illuminate are what I call the targets of colonial power (the point or points of power’s application; the object or objects it aims at; and the means and instrumentalities it deploys in search of these targets, points, and objects) and the field of its operation (the zone that it actively constructs for its functionality). What this reformulation of the question of colonialism is seeking to do, therefore, is to suggest a way of bringing into conceptual view, of bringing into critical thought, the problem of the formation of historically heterogeneous rationalities through which the political sovereignties of colonial rule were constructed and operated. Conceived in this way, the problem about “Europe” for colonialism ought to be re-posed. Because if, as I argue is the case, what ought to be understood are the 3 One significant articulation of this argument is to be found in Ranajit Guha’s celebrated essay, “Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography,” in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies VI: Writings in South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 210–309.

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political rationalities of colonial power, then what now becomes important is not a “decentering” of Europe as such, but in fact a critical interrogation of the practices, modalities, and projects through which the varied forms of its insertion into the lives of the colonized were constructed and organized. In this chapter, then, what interests me about the problem of colonialism in relation to the political forms of modernity is the emergence at a moment in colonialism’s history of a form of power—that is, therefore, a form of power not merely coincident with colonialism—which was concerned above all with disabling old forms of life by systematically breaking down their conditions, and with constructing in their place new conditions so as to enable—indeed, so as to oblige—new forms of life to come into being. I am concerned with a way of understanding colonial power that brings this transformation into focus. For what is at stake in this transformation is not merely the notion of a “break” with the past. After all, such a notion is very familiar to us in the liberal and nationalist narratives of modernization. What is at stake is how this break is configured and what it is understood to consist in. And where the stories of modernization conceive of this break as producing an expansion of the range of choice, the expansion of freedom, the problematic with which I am concerned is interested in the reorganization of the terrain in which choice as such is possible, and the political rationality upon which that reorganization depended. Reiterating, then, the provisional nature of my explorations, what I propose to do is the following: First, I will spell out some aspects of one recent argument about colonial power with a view to setting off the kinds of questions I think are important. Here, it should be clear that what I am attempting to do is to focus on the problem of power and the modern in their colonial career in such a way as to cast into relief the conceptual level at which they have often been thought out. Second, I try to say how the problem of modern power might more usefully be thought for my purposes and why I think Foucault’s notion of “governmentality” and the kind of investigation it is concerned to illuminate might be helpful in this. And third, I will attempt to rethink in these terms the story of the formation of modern colonial power in Sri Lanka.4 4 See, in this regard, Nicholas Thomas’s recent book, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). That Thomas and I share some concerns will be quite evident. He is concerned, as he says, with an “historicization of colonialism” (p. 19), with a more “nuanced understanding of the plurality of colonial endeavours” (p. 20). However, it seems to me that Thomas shares with many others—but not with me—that conceptual problematic in which the overriding concern is de-

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THE PROBLEM ABOUT COLONIAL POWER

The thrust of my argument can be clarified if I set it off against a recent intervention to which it is allied but with which it differs in certain important respects. Partha Chatterjee has criticized with considerable force the liberal historiography of colonialism that reproduces the view “that colonial rule was not really about colonial rule but something else.” He begins by posing the following questions: Does it serve any useful analytical purpose to make a distinction between the colonial state and the forms of the modern state? Or should we regard the colonial state as simply another specific form in which the modern state has generalized itself across the globe? If the latter is the case, then of course the specifically colonial form of the emergence of the institutions of the modern state would be of only incidental, or at best episodic, interest; it would not be a necessary part of the larger, and more important, historical narrative of modernity.5

In this formulation of the problem of colonial power, Chatterjee marks a distinction between colonial and modern power in such a way as to bring into focus the specificity of the former. In Chatterjee’s view, unless we produce this conceptual distinction we shall be left with no recourse but to see the colonial as little more than an episode in modern—Europe’s— history. We shall see in a moment why Chatterjee feels obliged to formulate the relation between colonialism and modernity in the way he does, that is, as a simple opposition. On my view, however, this formulation is not a conceptually adequate one. This is not because I think the question—What is the specificity of colonial power?—irrelevant, but because, as I shall suggest, I think that unless the formulation of that question is made to depend upon a prior reconstruction of the historically differentiated structures and projects of colonial rule (the discontinuities within the colonial, in other words), we run the risk of a too-hasty homogenization of colonialism as a whole. In other words, my worry is that in formulating the question as he does (in a simple counter-position of colonial and modern), Chatterjee preempts an inquiry that would allow us to sort out those political rationalities that constituted colonialism in its historically varied configurations, and therefore enable us to mark the modernity of a turn in the career of colonial power. termining the nature of colonialism’s attitude toward the colonized. My view, once again, is that we ought to give up this preoccupation. 5 Partha Chatterjee, “The Colonial State,” in The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 14.

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Chatterjee’s argument—carried out on the terrain of the historiography of colonial India—is perhaps most importantly directed not so much at older schools of blatantly colonialist historians as at more recent “revisionist” schools—and the “new Cambridge” school in particular.6 On his account of it, there are two parts to the revisionist argument. The first involves a periodizing distinction between earlier and later phases of colonial rule in which the crucial period of “transition” is roughly 1780– 1830.7 On the revisionist view, the earlier colonial regimes are argued to be largely “continuations” of prior indigenous regimes. What seems to be suggested is that colonialism, far from constituting a complete break with the past (as had hitherto been assumed by both colonialist and nationalist historians), can be shown to have an organic, internal connection to it. The second part of the revisionist argument turns on the assignment of “agency” in the establishment of empire. The revisionists, influenced by recent trends in historical writing (world-systems theory, for example) and mindful of recent criticisms made by radical Third World scholars (regarding the question of making history), are explicitly concerned to show that contrary to the conventional colonialist view, Indians have always been the active subjects of their own history and not the mere passive victims of it. Ironically however, Chatterjee argues, their seemingly benevolent bestowal of agency only has the effect of making the colonized the authors of their own domination and, in so doing, safely deflects the force of anticolonial politics. On the whole, then, Chatterjee maintains that in this revisionist view, colonialism as a distinctive formation all but disappears. For what this view does, he says, is to “spirit away the violent intrusion of colonialism and make all of its features the innate property of an indigenous history.”8 It is evident, then, that Chatterjee interposes the questions with which he begins in order to take issue with a very prominent view in the contemporary historiography of colonial India. They are meant to operate as a critique of the persistence into the present of an ideological erasure in 6

See, for example, Burton Stein, “State Formation and Economy Reconsidered,” Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 3 (1985): 387–413; Frank Perlin, “State Formation Reconsidered,” Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 3 (1985): 415–80; David Washbrook, “Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History, c. 1720–1860,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 1 (1988): 57–96; Christopher Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and idem, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989). 7 Vincent Harlow, of course, argued that this was the period in which there emerged a “new imperial system” or second British Empire. See his “The New Imperial System, 1783– 1815,” in J. Holland Rose, A. P. Newton, and E. A. Benians (eds.), The Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Growth of the New Empire, 1783–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940). 8 Chatterjee, “The Colonial State,” p. 32.

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liberal historiography by means of which the assumptions of universal history work to displace—indeed one might say, to repress—the specificity of colonial power. This is all very well. But, its polemical cash value aside, it is not clear to me why this kind of critical move need hang on a conceptual opposition that makes colonialism a singular reiterated instance. It seems to me important to insist upon a certain kind of historicization of Europe’s power, one that clarifies the distinctiveness of—and the transformation entailed in—the making of modern power in its colonial career. On my view, therefore, the distinction between earlier and later forms of colonial rule is a potentially useful one, though what is crucial for me is the kind of elaboration of the structure and project of colonial power it is made to turn on.9 For Chatterjee, what is distinctive about colonial power is its deployment of what he calls a “rule of colonial difference,” the rule or principle by which, across differently inflected ideological positions within the field of colonialist discourse, the colonized are represented as inferior, as radically Other. And on his view, “race” is the defining signifier of this rule of difference. It is “race” that marks the specificity of colonial power. As he puts it, “the more the logic of a modern regime of power pushed the processes of government in the direction of a rationalization of administration and the normalization of the objects of its rule, the more insistently did the issue of race come up to emphasize the specifically colonial character of British dominance in India.”10 But this very formulation itself (with its accent on temporality, and suggestive therefore of the historicity of the colonial) urges us to ask at least three questions. First, did this rule of difference operate in the same way across the entire length of colonial dominance? Or ought there to be a way of understanding this rule in relation to differently configured modes of organization of power, different political rationalities, over the historical period of colonial dominance? Part of the point here is that as a classificatory signifier, what constituted “race” (and therefore what uses it was available for) altered between, say, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and, most important, within the latter. Second, if the rule of colonial difference is a rule of exclusion/inclusion (and all power may be said to operate through the construction of such a principle of difference) what are the specific power-effects of “race”? In other words, even if as a system of representation “race” can be shown to operate across the colonial period, what also needs to be understood and specified is when and through what kind of 9 For a recent work that employs such a distinction between different political rationalities within the colonial period, see Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 10 Chatterjee, “The Colonial State,” p. 19.

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political rationality it becomes inserted into subject-constituting social practices, into the formation, that is to say, of certain kinds of “raced” subjectivities.11 But third, to even assert that “race” can be said to characterize the Othering practices of colonialist discourse as such—that is, in all its historical instantiations—is, to begin with, a very shortsighted claim. As a number of students of the European encounter with peoples in the New World in the sixteenth century have argued, for instance, it was not “race” but “religion” (or more properly, the lack of one) that constituted the discursive frame within which the “difference” of the nonEuropean was conceived and represented.12 The point, therefore, is that the crucial question is not whether there is a difference between the colonial state and forms of the modern state in Europe, but how to impose an historicity on our understanding of the rationalities that organized the forms of the colonial state. This is because on my view, something called “the colonial state” cannot offer itself up as the iteration and reiteration of a single political rationality. Rather what is necessary to understand, it seems to me, is that within the structures and projects that gave shape to the colonial enterprise as a whole, there were discontinuities in which different political rationalities, different configurations of power, took the stage in commanding positions. To be sure, modern power in its colonial career may indeed have operated by “rules of difference” nonidentical with those in its European career. But for me, approaching this entails a prior understanding of the alteration that brings into being the distinctively “modern” in which this rule of difference was to produce its effects. So that, on my view, side by side those questions in which the central problem about colonial power is whether or not and by what sign of difference power included or excluded portions of the native population, there are another set of questions. And these 11 Students of colonial plantation slavery in the Americas will perhaps be more keenly aware of the vicissitudes of “race” as a signifier of difference. See Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America, rev. ed. (New York: Schocken, 1987), though even here the concern is exclusively with the classificatory and representational side of the question. For a useful discussion of aspects of the transformation of the concept in the nineteenth century, see George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 12 See, for example, Michael Ryan, “Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 4 (1981): 519–38; Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (New York: Methuen, 1986); and Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). For an interesting attempt to sketch the discontinuities in European discourses of the Other between the Renaissance and the emergence of modern professional anthropology, see Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

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take the following form: In any historical instance, what does colonial power seek to organize and reorganize? In other words, what does colonial power take as the target upon which to work? Moreover, what project does it require that target-object for? And how does it go about securing it in order to realize its ends? In short, what in each instance is colonial power’s structure and project as it inserts itself into—or more properly, as it constitutes—the domain of the colonial? These questions, it seems to me, do not deny the relevance of the idea of a rule of colonial difference, but its comprehension is now framed by a differently inflected problematic. And what is crucial to this problematic is historicizing European colonial rule in such a way as to distinguish different modes of organizing colonial power and the different political rationalities they depended upon. The important questions, in other words, have to do with the nature of the terrain available for the colonized to produce their responses. For what is important to understand, as I shall try to outline in a moment, is that with the formation of the political rationality of the modern colonial state, not only the rules of the political game but the political game itself changed13—not only did the relation of forces between colonizer and colonized change, but so did the terrain of the political struggle itself. And therefore, on my view, not only accommodation but resistance as well would have to articulate itself in relation to this comprehensively altered situation.

THE PROBLEM ABOUT MODERN POWER

In effect, then, not less Europe, but a differently configured one; not a reified Europe, but a problematized one. The point is that an understanding of the non-Western world’s modernities ought to be informed by a more nuanced and discerning understanding of Europe’s pasts and its modernities, grasping especially “its peculiar historicity, the mobile powers that have constructed its structures, projects, and desires.”14 The reason for this is obviously not because the modernities of the non-Western world are somehow “derived” from Europe’s and that therefore an understanding of the “original,” as it were, would repay the effort. Rather it is because those “structures, projects, and desires” of Europe generated 13

I take this metaphor from J. C. Heesterman’s. “Was There an Indian Reaction? Western Expansion in Indian Perspective,” in H. L. Wesseling (ed.), Expansion and Reaction (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1978), p. 52. Also cited in John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 189. 14 Talal Asad, “Introduction,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 23–24.

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changing ways of impacting the non-Western world, changing ways of imposing and maintaining rule over the colonized, and therefore changing terrains within which to respond. Needless to say, this is not the place to pursue an elaborate discussion of European modernities. But it is important to note, I think, that recently, and across a variety of intersecting theoretical discourses, the story of those modernities has been undergoing a considerable critical reexamination and revision. This has started to alter the picture we have of Europe’s pasts in a manner that interrupts, indeed sweeps away, the consoling fable of the Enlightenment’s long developmental march of reason and freedom.15 What I should like to do here, however, is to foreground two distinctive features of the political rationality of modern power that have a special bearing on the problem of the colonial modern that I take up in the following section of this chapter. Following on my earlier remarks on political rationality, the first of these features will have to do with the point of application of modern power; the second, with the field of its operation. My argument is that historicizing Europe by way of an attention to these features is indispensable for a more discriminating inquiry into the modernities of the colonial and postcolonial world because it will enable us to understand the specificity of the terrain—including, most crucially, the specificity of the apparatus of power—in relation to which the colonized constructed their own very varied forms of response. As Talal Asad has suggested, modern power is distinctive not so much—as varieties of modernization theory would have it—for its relation to capitalism or to the social and institutional differentiation that expands the possibility for individual freedom.16 Rather, modern power is distinctive for its point of application. And the point of application of modern power is not so much the body of the sovereign’s subject (we are all familiar with the stunning image of Michel Foucault’s “body of the condemned”)17 as the conditions in which that body is to live and define its life. This is, of course, because of modern power’s relation to Enlightenment reason. As we know, the Enlightenment belief in progress rested on an idea of reason that was irreconcilably opposed to forms of understanding and action that depended upon what it called superstition and prejudice. For these, it argued, by disabling individual rational judgment 15

One might think, in this regard, of work such as Zygmunt Bauman’s excellent Legislators and Interpreters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 16 See Talal Asad, “Conscripts of Western Civilisation,” in Christine Gailey (ed.), Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond, vol. 1, Civilization in Crisis (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), p. 337. 17 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan (trans.) (New York: Vintage, 1979).

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and encouraging timidity and fear, left people in blind obedience to the capricious tyranny of despots and priests. However, the emancipation from this moral slavery and the eradication of benighted ignorance could not be carried out by the mere alteration of a few false notions and the superficial tinkering with behaviors. What was required instead was first, their fundamental uprooting by means of a broad attack on the conditions that were understood to produce them, and second, their systematic replacement by the inducement of new conditions based on clear, sound, and rational principles.18 At the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, this view was engaged in argument with an older way of thinking best exemplified perhaps in the “traditionalist” thought of Edmund Burke. For Burke, as he asserted nowhere more viscerally than in the Reflections on the Revolution in France, the institutions of political society were not to be understood by means of a handful of abstract maxims regarding the general nature of society as such. These institutions, being the product of the accumulation of generations of specific experience built up slowly over the course of uncountable years, changing and adjusting as contingencies warranted, could only be judged with reference to this immemorial usage, with reference, that is, to custom. This is not to say that Burke was hostile to reform as such—he was hostile only to what he considered a dogmatic, arrogant, and dangerous spirit of reform which believed that by the application of a priori principles, a society which had existed time out of mind could be suddenly, irrevocably, pulled down and constructed anew in conformity with reason.19 To this, of course, Enlightenment reason responded with confident scorn. For on the view it advanced—and one sees this, for instance, as much in Jeremy Bentham’s early work, A Fragment on Government, published more than a decade and a half before Burke’s Reflections, as in Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, which was a response to it—reason, seeing as it did into the very nature of things, had a prescriptive and an aggressively programmatic mission, the accom18

Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951). Of course, in this sense, the Evangelicals were also but children of the Enlightenment. See Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989 [orig. 1959]), p. 33. 19 For a very acute discussion of this aspect of Burke’s thought, see J. G. A. Pocock, “Burke and the Ancient Constitution: A Problem in the History of Ideas,” in Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Elie Hale´vy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, Mary Morris (trans.) (New York: MacMillan, 1928), pp. 155–81. And for a discussion of the importance of the kind of thinking represented by Burke’s “traditionalism” for the colonial project in India, see Stokes, The English Utilitarians, pp. 8–25.

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plishment of which entailed striking uncompromisingly at the presumed foundation of error.20 This, then, is the first distinctive feature of modern power that needs to be foregrounded. And it is in this sense too—the sense of an alteration of grounds, of fundamental bases—that it is important to speak of the modern as forming a break with what went before, a break beyond which there is no return, and in which what comes after can only be read in, read through, and read against the categories of the modern. This is the point, I think, that Zygmunt Bauman is urging in the following very striking passage regarding the inauguration of the modern: This world which preceded the bifurcation into order and chaos we find difficult to describe in its own terms. We try to grasp it mostly with the help of negations: we tell ourselves what that world was not, what it did not contain, what it was unaware of. That world would hardly have recognized itself in our descriptions. It would not understand what we are talking about. It would not survive such understandings. The moment of understanding would be (and it was) the sign of its approaching death. And of the birth of modernity.21

At the same time, if modern power is concerned with disabling nonmodern forms of life by dismantling their conditions, then its aim in putting in place new and different conditions is above all to produce governing-effects on conduct. Modern power seeks to arrange and rearrange these conditions (conditions at once discursive and nondiscursive) so as to oblige subjects to transform themselves in a certain, that is, improving, direction. And if this is so, if the government of conduct is the distinctive strategic end of modern power, then the decisive (which is not to say the only) locus of its operation is the new domain of “civil society.” The idea of civil society, now enjoying something of a revival, belongs, of course, to an old, premodern tradition of political thought reaching back at least to Aristotle’s Politics.22 In its modern career, however (that is, roughly since those remarkable moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment 20

In England, in the second decade of the nineteenth century, when the movement for Parliamentary reform was gathering pace after the long period of war and political reaction, there emerged a distinction between “Radical Reformers” and “Moderate Reformers”— between “those who wished to alter the constitution in accordance with some grand general sweeping plan” and “those who were content with partial alterations, applicable to what they deemed particular grievances.” Hale´vy, Philosophic Radicalism, p. 261. More generally, see also Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 1783 to 1867 (London: Longman, 1979). 21 Zygmunt Bauman, “Modernity and Ambivalence,” Theory, Culture & Society 7 (1990): 163. 22 For useful discussions of the concept of civil society, see John Keane, “Despotism and Democracy: The Origins and Development of the Distinction between Civil Society and

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like Adam Ferguson, whose Essay on the History of Civil Society appeared in 1767), it has come to mark off a domain separate and distinct from the state. In other words, the modern concept of civil society amounted to an attempt to think the emerging forms of relation that were organized by new regularities, new forms of skeptical knowledge, new grounds for judgment, and new communicative technologies—the emerging forms of a relation that signal, in a phrase, “the rise of the social,” as Hannah Arendt aptly called it.23 This is, of course, the great theme of Ju¨rgen Habermas’s early work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.24 It will be recalled that what Habermas is concerned to do in this now much discussed book is to provide an historical and sociological account of the emergence—and subsequent decomposition—of a domain distinctive, even constitutive, of the European modern: the bourgeois “public sphere.”25 This public sphere emerges in the eighteenth century as a product of new commercial relationships that involve a traffic in commodities and news—and indeed in news as a kind of commodity. It forms a component of that wider realm of civil society that is establishing itself at the same time as a corollary of the depersonalized state and as the realm of commodity exchange and social labor governed by its own regularities in such a way that what is effected is a convergence between private interest and public good. The public sphere, Habermas argues, is preeminently that sphere in which private individuals come together as a public to make use of their reason as the ground of critical authority and judgment. However, since for Habermas this story of the public sphere of civil society is by and large a chapter in the story of the progressive emancipation of an enlightened domain of unrestricted and rational discussion of matters of general interest (and of the contemporary threat to that progress in the widespread the State, 1750–1850,” in John Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London: Verso, 1988); and Adam Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society (New York: Free Press, 1992). 23 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 38–58. 24 Ju¨rgen Habermas, The Structure Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Burger (trans.) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). This early work (first published in German in 1962) has recently begun to exercise an impressive influence on reexaminations of the Enlightenment and modernity. See, for example, Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, Lydia G. Cochrane (trans.) (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); and Mary Jacobs, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 25 For a discussion, see Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).

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advance of technocratic consciousness), it still reads like the familiar improving story of modernization.26 And therefore, sociologically rich as it may appear to be as an historical account, what gets elided from its comprehension of modernity is of course power—power understood not as the antithesis of freedom and reason (in which freedom emerges as a product of the progressive rationalization of power), but power as the general name of a relation in which differential effects of one action upon another are produced. More specifically, what gets elided is the emergence of a new—that is, modern—political rationality in which power works not in spite of but through the construction of the space of free social exchange, and through the construction of a subjectivity normatively experienced as the source of free will and rational, autonomous agency. It is this conception of a form of power, not merely traversing the domain of the social, but constructing the normative (i.e., enabling/constraining) regularities that positively constitute civil society, that Michel Foucault tries to think in his work on “governmentality.”27 In some of his later lectures at the Colle`ge de France and elsewhere (in a period in which, as we know, the entire History of Sexuality project was being rethought),28 Foucault devoted a good deal of attention to the theme of modern political power—its rationality, its sources, its character, its targets—constructing a story, as one can well imagine, as much historical as historiographical, as much substantive as critical.29 Part of the point of this work is to invite us to rethink the story told by liberalism and Marxism alike, according to which the state is the privileged site of an immense and magical power standing in opposition to a civil society imagined as the absence of power and the fulfillment of freedom.30 What interests Foucault is the emergence in early modern Europe of a new form of political rationality that combines simultaneously two seemingly contradictory 26 In some sense, Habermas’s later work has constituted an attempt to formulate a theory of modernity that is less susceptible to this kind of criticism. See Ju¨rgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991–92). 27 See Colin Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” and Graham Burchell, “Peculiar Interests: Civil Society and Governing ‘The System of Natural Liberty,’ ” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 28 For a discussion, see Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, Betsy Wing (trans.) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); and James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London: HarperCollins, 1993). 29 See, for example, Michel Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values 2 (1981): 225–54; idem, “The Political Technology of Individuals,” in Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 1988); and idem, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect. 30 See Foucault, “Governmentality,” p. 103.

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modalities of power: one, totalizing and centralizing, the other individualizing and normalizing.31 This form of political rationality he calls “governmental” rationality or “governmentality.” “How to govern oneself, how to be governed, how to govern others, by whom the people will accept being governed, how to become the best possible governor—all these problems,” writes Foucault, “in their multiplicity and intensity, seem to me to be characteristic of the sixteenth century, which lies, to put it schematically, at the crossroads of two processes: the one which, shattering the structures of feudalism, leads to the establishment of the great territorial, administrative and colonial states; and that totally different movement which, with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, raises the issue of how one must be spiritually ruled and led on this earth in order to achieve eternal salvation.”32 Now on his account, the first threshold of this governmental form of political rationality is that complex early modern ensemble of power known as mercantilism. However, while there emerges in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries systematic disciplinary techniques for working upon latent individual capacities and reconstructing individual behaviors,33 and the institution of “police” for the detailed regulation of order and the maintenance of good conduct in the community,34 mercantilism by and large remains within the objectives of an older political rationality, that of “sovereignty.” This is because the problem of politics remains above all the preservation and strengthening of the state, the enhancement of the prince’s wealth and power against his military and commercial rivals through the conquest, colonization, and exploitation of the non-European world. It is in fact only with the emergence of “population” as an object of political calculation at the end of the eighteenth century that there comes into being the historical 31

In a phrase, omnes et singulatim, all and each. See Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim.” Foucault, “Governmentality,” pp. 87–88. 33 See James Tully, “Governing Conduct,” in his An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Tully’s thesis is that between the Reformation and the Enlightenment there emerges a new practice of governing conduct. “This mode of governance links together probabilistic and voluntaristic forms of knowledge with a range of techniques related to each other by a complex of references to juridical practices. Its aim is to reform conduct: to explain and then deconstruct settled ways of mental and physical behaviour, and to produce and then govern new forms of habitual conduct in belief and action. Finally, this way of subjection, of conducting the self and others, both posits and serves to bring about a very specific form of subjectivity: a subject who is calculating and calculable, from the perspective of the probabilistic knowledge and practices; and the sovereign bearer of rights and duties, subject to and of law from the voluntaristic perspective. The whole ensemble of knowledge, techniques, habitual activity, and subjection I will provisionally call the juridical government” (p. 179). 34 See Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), especially chapters 2, 4, 9, and 15. 32

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conditions for the displacement of the problematic of sovereignty by “government.” Now, I want to draw out two distinctions in Foucault’s conceptualization of the political rationality of government. The first is between sovereignty and government; and the second between discipline and government. Within the political rationality of sovereignty, individuals are dependent upon the absolute authority of the prince; they are subjects of, and subject to, his power and protection. Here law is deployed as an instrumentality, a direct means toward the primary political end of commanding obedience. With government, by contrast, says Foucault, “it is a question not of imposing law on men, but of disposing things: that is to say, of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such and such ends may be achieved.”35 That is to say, with the political rationality of government it is a question, as that preeminent “governmentalist” Jeremy Bentham had suggested, of artificially so arranging things that people, following only their own self-interest, will do as they ought.36 And if with sovereignty, the relation between ruler and ruled is such that power reaches out like an extension of the arm of the prince himself, announcing itself periodically with unambiguous ceremony, with government, governor and governed are thrown into a new and different relation, one that is not merely the product of the expanded capacity of the state apparatus but of the emergence of a new field for producing effects of power—the new, self-regulating field of the social. It is here that the new problem of government (of which the specific problem of the state is now but one component) is articulated. For it is here, by the arrangement and disposition of the instrumentalities and institutions that sustain it—public opinion, private property, the division of labor, the market, the judiciary—that the tendency toward the identification of interests operates to ensure that the new rights-bearing and selfgoverning subjects do as they ought.37 Foucault’s discussion of discipline—to turn now to the second distinction I want to focus on—belongs to a period in his work when he was elaborating the “micro-technology” of power. Disciplinary power typically operates at the microlevel and through technologies and apparatuses. Specifically, discipline has to do with habituating the mind or body to a particular activity. It does this by systematically working upon mental or physical capacities and building these up into discrete abilities by the continual repetition of complex actions broken down into simple opera35

Foucault, “Governmentality,” p. 95. See Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988 [orig. 1776]). 37 See Asad, “Conscripts of Western Civilisation,” p. 336. 36

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tions. The rationality of government operates differently. Whereas discipline is concerned to work actively upon subjects (the intellectual discipline of school, the bodily discipline of the workhouse or factory, or the social discipline imposed by police), government does not regulate in this kind of detail. As James Tully has lucidly suggested, for writers of the late eighteenth century, the most striking feature of commercial society was the seeming self-sustaining character of its basic institutions. This they attributed to the division of labor and specialization. “In virtue of being caught up in the practices of division of labour in economic, political, and military life,” Tully writes: [I]ndividuals were constrained to behave in ways which—willy-nilly and unintentionally—led to the overall improvement and growth of these societies. In addition, individuals constrained to act in this way would gradually become “polished”, “disciplined”, “civilized”, and “pacific”. If behaviour within the causal constraints of divisions of labour within commercial society explained the growth of European society, then the regulation and governance of every area of life in the seventeenth century could be seen as unnecessary.38

Now to be sure, between the Whig protagonists of the natural identification of interests and the Benthamite theorists of the artificial identification of interests there was disagreement regarding the degree of coordination these autonomous governmental processes required. But they were all agreed, as Tully says, on their existence and their effects. The important point about these distinctions, tentative and overlapping as they may be, is that here as elsewhere, what Foucault is engaged in is tracing in outline the sources of the modern form of political reason, as well as interrupting those political histories in which the object is taken to be a singular evolving reason for which each instance is but the reiteration of an identical functionality. The kind of investigation Foucault undertakes (in however sketchy and incomplete a manner, and with however narrow a geographical focus) encourages those of us interested in the problem of the specific effects of colonialism on the forms of life of the colonized to historicize European rule in a way that brings into focus the political rationalities in relation to which this rule was effected. For of course the colonial enterprise spans precisely these centuries in which there are significant alterations and discontinuities in European conceptions and practices of political power. Again, the point here is not the banal one that the forms of the state in Europe are simply replicated in the colonies (and that therefore one need only inquire into the former to grasp the latter). The point is that to understand the project of colonial 38 James Tully, “After the Macpherson Thesis,” in Approach to Political Philosophy, p. 92.

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power at any given historical moment, one has to understand the character of the political rationality that constituted it. And what is crucial to such an understanding is not what the attitude of colonialism was toward the colonized nor whether colonial power excluded or included natives as such. Rather what is crucial is trying to discern what the point of application—the target—of colonial power was, and what the discursive and nondiscursive field it sought to encompass was.

GOVERNING COLONIAL CONDUCT

The general line of my argument should now be clear enough. Critically rethinking the problem about the modern in its relation to the colonial ought to entail displacing the modernization narrative such that not only can modernity no longer appear to us as the normalized telos of a developmental process, but consequently colonialism can no longer seem to consist in the mere historical reiteration of a single political rationality whose effects can be adequately assessed in terms of the “more or less” of force, freedom, or reason. And in a refigured narrative such as I would wish to commend, the formation of colonial modernity would have to appear as a discontinuity in the organization of colonial rule characterized by the emergence of a distinctive political rationality—a colonial governmentality—in which power comes to be directed at the destruction and reconstruction of colonial space so as to produce not so much extractive-effects on colonial bodies as governing-effects on colonial conduct. Part of the point I am making here is the one made many years ago by Eric Stokes in his classic work, The English Utilitarians and India. Readers of that book will recall that its argument turns on a significant if subtle distinction between two historically successive moments in the insertion of English political ideas into colonial rule in India, moments linked to the alteration of the raison d’eˆtre of colonial rule effected by the Industrial Revolution, the Reform movement, and Evangelicalism. The first moment is that associated with the names of Cornwallis and Munro and their reforms in Bengal and Madras respectively; and the second with that of the liberals, Evangelicals, and Utilitarians. On Stokes’s account, the important difference between these moments does not have to do with the mere adoption of English political ideas as such—the rule of law, for example, or the fundamental place of the institution of private property rights in land. Rather the important difference has to do with the spirit and target of the colonial power whose ends they participated in— that is, the colonial project into which these were inserted. Corwallis’s and Munro’s reforms were far from identical, but inserted as they were into the mercantilist colonial project of tributary extraction, they were,

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as Stokes puts it, essentially “defensive” and “conservative,” power seeking to make changes as expediency and experience dictated. The liberal and Utilitarian reforms, on the other hand, were inserted into a colonial project in which the mercantilist end of the aggrandizement of the state was being displaced, as one nineteenth-century writer put it, by the “surer foundation” of a “dominion over the wants of the universe.”39 Now colonial power came to depend not merely upon inserting English ideas here and there, but upon the systematic redefinition and transformation of the terrain on which the life of the colonized was lived. It became, in short, “revolutionary,” inasmuch as, guided by abstract, universal principles regarding the supposed relation between moral conditions and moral character, it now saw as integral to its task the rational possibility of so altering those conditions as to alter fundamentally that character in an improving direction. And with the assumption of this project, colonial power came to be, as Stokes so acutely puts it, “consciously directed upon Indian society itself.”40 It is, it seems to me, in the discerning articulation of this transformation in the structure and project of colonial power that the whole genius of Stokes’s book lies. What his book does not do, however, is elucidate the principle of the new political rationality that required and indeed constructed the domain of “society itself.”41 I now wish to turn briefly to one historical instance, that of Sri Lanka, and to the story of the making of its colonial modernity. What interests me here, I should emphasize, is not by any means a full historical account, but an attempt to shift the conceptual register or alter the narrative frame in which such an account of modernity might be resituated. In the writings of colonialist and nationalist historians alike, the story of Sri Lanka’s insertion into the regime of British colonialism has been told and retold through a familiar set of events and a familiar narrative plot. That story is generally told as a succession of three episodes that chart a progressive journey of transition from the medieval to the modern.42 The first episode in this transition to the modern (1796–1802) is 39

Quoted in Stokes, The English Utilitarians, p. 43. Ibid., p. 27, my emphasis. 41 Compare, in this regard, Mitchell, Colonising Egypt. 42 In more or less explicit terms, this is the case from the colonialist history of Sir James Emerson Tennent, Ceylon, vol. 2 (Colombo: Tisara Prakasakayo, 1977 [orig. 1859]), to the nationalist histories of G. C. Mendis, Ceylon under the British (Colombo: Colombo Apothecaries’ Co., Ltd., 1944); Colvin R. de Silva, Ceylon under the British Occupation, 1795–1832, 2 vols (Colombo: Colombo Apothecaries’ Co., Ltd., 1941–2); and most recently, K. M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 40

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the brief story of the capture of the maritime provinces of the island from the Dutch, its unsettled fate as a colony during the Anglo-French War, and its mismanagement at the hands of the Madras administration of the English East India Company. The second episode (1802–1832) takes the story from the beginnings of Crown Colony status and plots the early building up of the apparatuses of the colonial state, the political resolution of the problem of territorial integrity with the ceding of the Kandyan Kingdom, the construction of the institutions of civil and judicial administration, the growth of plantation agriculture, and the development of the infrastructure of communication in roads and bridges and canals and post. In the overall economy of the colonialist and nationalist narratives, these first two episodes form a sort of backdrop: they enumerate the cumulative improvements that will culminate in the third episode which tells the story of that watershed of reform when the recommendations of Commissioners W. M. G. Colebrooke and C. H. Cameron were implemented and modernity, a mere glimmer until now, burst in upon the colony.43 In the story of the formation of Sri Lanka’s modernity, the reforms known historiographically as the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms established the definitive moment of the break with the “medieval” or “feudal” past. These reforms were far-reaching and comprehensive: they led to the unification of the administration of the island, the establishment of executive and legislative councils, judicial reform, the development of capitalist agriculture, and of modern means of communication, education, and the press. Emphasizing the progressivist direction of the transition the reforms made possible, G. C. Mendis—first of the modern professional (and liberal-nationalist) Sri Lankan historians—wrote as follows in his introduction to The Colebrooke-Cameron Papers: “[T]he reforms recommended by Colebrooke and Cameron have contributed greatly to the advancement of Ceylon. They have turned the course of the history of Ceylon in a modern direction and enabled Ceylon to fall in line in many ways with modern developments and ultimately to attain to the stage to which it has risen today as an equal member of the Commonwealth of 43

For the circumstances that brought the Commission of Inquiry to Ceylon in 1829, see G. C. Mendis, Introduction to The Colebrooke-Cameron Papers: Documents on British Colonial Policy in Ceylon, 1796–1833, 2 vols., selected and edited by G. C. Mendis (London: Oxford University Press, 1956). See also Vijaya Samaraweera, “The Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms,” University of Ceylon History of Ceylon, vol. 3 (Colombo: University of Ceylon Press, 1973). The papers were published in a period of great nationalist debate, indeed in a year—1956—of tremendous political significance for Sinhala Buddhist nationalism since it witnessed the electoral victory of the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna led by S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party.

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Nations.”44 In this kind of account, therefore, the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms form the crucial moment in an approved journey of progress in which modernity and the nation are linked stages of attainment. My problem with this story is not the proposition of a “break” as such, the idea of a “discontinuity” that inaugurates the modern, but rather the progressivist plot into which the modernization narrative inserts it. Because, working as it does through the familiar counter-positioning of power and freedom (the modern as the rationalization of power), what it invites us to suppose is the unfolding trajectory of the teleological path of a single political rationality. And in so doing what it masks is the nature of the transformation that the modern seeks to induce, and the new political rationality by which it seeks to accomplish this. If, however, we take the important point about colonial power to be its structure, its project, and its target, then a different sort of story ought to be told about the formation of Sri Lanka’s colonial career, one whose principal axis is the displacement of one kind of political rationality—that of mercantilism or sovereignty—by another, that of governmentality. On this view, colonial power in Sri Lanka between 1796 and 1832 will be understood to be largely organized around the mercantilist rationality of sovereignty. The principal object of this colonial project was the extraction of tribute— tribute for the security and aggrandizement of the state and crown. In marking off this period, the crucial point is not the degree of oppressiveness or corruption of colonial officials (as in the period of East India Company administration), nor even the steady, as it were, incremental rationalization and humanizing of absolutist-autocratic colonial rule (as during the early phase of crown colony administration). Therefore, the increase or decrease of the level of taxation or the variety of things taxed may have been more or less oppressive; the officials who collected revenues may have been more or less corrupt; forms of forced labor may have been administered in such a way as to have been more or less onerous. But none of this changes the point of application of power. Power deployed through this form of political rationality is directed principally at the points of extraction of wealth. This is because tributary power was largely concerned to ensure that bodies knew their place, that they obeyed when commanded, but it did not need to work on reorganizing the conduct or habits of subjects themselves. What is important about sover44

Colebrooke-Cameron Papers, vol. 1, p. lxiv. For a discussion of Mendis, see K. M. de Silva, “History and Historians in Twentieth Century Sri Lanka—the G. C. Mendis Memorial Lecture,” Sri Lanka Journal of the Social Sciences 1 (1978): 1–12. I am grateful, too, to Mrs. Sita Pieris, Mendis’s daughter, for discussing some aspects of her father’s career with me.

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eignty from the point of view of the modern then is that in this strategy of rule, the “lives” of the colonized population—their “local habits,” their “ancient tenures,” their “distinctions,” and “religious observations”— were not a significant variable in the colonial calculus (at least so long as they did not interfere with the immediate business of extraction). And what is crucial about the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms is that, with their implementation, colonial power came to depend precisely upon the systematic attempt to intervene at this level of what Stokes calls “society itself.” To understand the new political rationality that was now about to displace the old, it is necessary to open up the Colebrooke-Cameron recommendations for reform to a reading that, partial though it will necessarily be, aims to make visible the altered project of colonial power. I would suggest that the configuration of that project of colonial power—the new target it would now aim at bringing within its reach, the new knowledges it would now depend upon, the new technologies it would now seek to deploy, the new domains it would now need to construct as the field of its operations—can be discerned if we inquire into the kinds of effects that Colebrooke and Cameron sought to produce in each of three domains whose systematic reform they recommended. These domains—government, the economy, and the judiciary—which they marked out (or rather, which were marked out for them in their “Instructions” from the Earl of Bathurst)45 as preeminently warranting attention, were of course domains that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were constructing as distinct if integrated domains, each with its own level of rationality, its own laws of motion, and its own corresponding sciences. They were, moreover, precisely those domains that the political rationality of governmental power sought at once to construct and work through in order to induce its improving effects on colonial conduct. In his report on the administration of government, W. M. G. Colebrooke, for the most part a Whig liberal, vigorously opposed the absolute and autocratic control exercised by the governor. It hindered, he maintained, the development of commerce, the movement of voluntary labor, and the development of a press. Colebrooke recommended instead the formation of executive and legislative councils (the latter of which would admit native representation) to limit the arbitrary power of the governor. Much of this was argued in relation to the principle of the “natural” rights of the people. The people, said Colebrooke, “are entitled to expect that their interests and wishes may be attended to, and their rights protected; and although the ignorance and prejudice which still prevail generally 45 See “Instructions to the Commissioners of Inquiry,” in Colebrooke-Cameron Papers, vol. 1, pp. 4–8.

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throughout the country may preclude the adoption of their views upon all subjects, it would be consistent with the policy of a liberal government that they should have an opportunity of freely communicating their opinions of the effects of the legislative changes that may be proposed.”46 But we ought, I think, to avoid reading this claim from within the narrative of the progress of democratic principles and institutions, and not only for the obvious reason that native members (who only began sitting in 1835) were nominated rather than elected and had no control of government expenditure. The crucial point here is not whether natives were included or excluded so much as the introduction of a new game of politics that the colonized would (eventually) be obliged to play if they were to be counted as political. And one of the things the new game of politics came to depend upon was the construction of a legally instituted space where legally defined subjects could exercise rights, however limited they were. This is why Colebrooke was concerned with the creation of the instrumentalities and technologies of “public opinion”—specifically, those great Whig principles of an English education and a free press. The old form of the colonial state had no need of “public opinion” because then colonial power did not depend upon the productivity and consumption of an improving public. By contrast what the new form of the colonial state required was not self-aggrandizement but a form of power that could exercise a “dominion over the wants of the universe.” What it needed, therefore, was to seek to produce the conditions of self-interest or desire in which these wants would tend to be of certain kinds and not others. Or to put it another way, if the new form of colonial power depended upon the idea of the identification of interests, it was necessary to provide the means of inducing an understanding of what those interests were (or ought to be). For this, a press involved in the diffusion of useful knowledges (and with the criticism of ignorant and prejudicial ones) would be indispensable. The very limited operation of these presses [i.e., those run by the government and the missionary societies] has tended to check the progress of moral and intellectual improvement; and in those parts of the country where there is little intercourse with Europeans the ignorance and prejudices of the people have been perpetuated, and have greatly tended to obstruct the improvement of the country and the amelioration of its institutions.47

At the same time, there is another reason besides the direct effect on the moral conduct of people whose want of intercourse with Europeans was the source of the perpetuation of their prejudices. The institutional46 47

Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 75.

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ization of the public use of reason, on Colebrooke’s view, would in turn also have an effect on the government of the state itself: In a political point of view the unrestricted operation of the colonial press would have a direct tendency to promote good government in the island, and to diminish the influence of those classes who are interested in upholding the ignorant prejudices of the people, and who retain them in servile dependence on themselves.48

By creating a rational public, the press would promote good government so that not only would public opinion depend upon the liberal government of the state, but the state would also depend upon the play of a reasoned public opinion. In other words, a more public circulation of reason would serve to undermine and break down the supports of native knowledges, to disqualify them. It would, in effect, help to put in place a public sphere in which only certain kinds of knowledges—and not others—could circulate with any efficacy; a sphere in which fluency in these knowledges (in part determined by the ability to point out the unreason in the old) would be a condition of participation; and in which participation would be the only rational and legal way of exercising influence in what now counted as politics.49 By the early nineteenth century “economy,” no longer understood at the level of “family” but, as Foucault suggests, on the bio-political level of “population,” was becoming a distinctive domain of reforming intervention articulated through the emergence of the new science of political economy—“the governmental discourse of the modern world,” as Denis Meuret puts it (echoing Adam Smith’s famous characterization of political economy as “a branch of the science of the statesman or legislator”).50 This was because in that representation of “economy” that Smith’s The Wealth of Nations did so much to establish, a new relation was being constructed among the state, the economy, and that new comprehensive domain of the social in which “the principle of population” operated. “The emergence of political economy,” Meuret suggests a bit later, “is 48

Ibid. For an important—because critical—discussion of the place of “public opinion” in the formation of liberal political theory, see Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Ellen Kennedy (trans.) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988 [orig. 1923]). 50 See Denis Meuret, “A Political Genealogy of Political Economy,” Economy and Society 17, no. 2 (1988): 227. For a more general discussion of Adam Smith in relation to the emerging science of the political in Edinburgh in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Donald Winch, “The System of the North: Dugald Stewart and His Pupils,” in Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and John Burrow (eds.), That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 49

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inseparable from the movement by which, in the eighteenth century, the public, which in the seventeenth century was still only an object of discourse, begins to intervene as an explicit actor in an intellectual debate for which it was, at the same time, the stage.”51 It was only to be expected then that Colebrooke would seek to interrupt and transform the existing relation between economy and the state, that relation that had been constructed through the idea of the state’s responsibility for commercial strength. His design, of course, was to introduce conditions for the development of private property, market relations, and capitalist agriculture. As we know, Colebrooke particularly objected to the government’s mercantilist monopolies of cinnamon and salt. They were, he said, “injurious to commerce and to the influx and accumulation of capital.” And most particularly it is why he objected to the system of “compulsory service” known as ra¯ja¯ka¯riya upon which these monopolies rested. Indeed, both in his general report and in the special report on “compulsory services,” ra¯ja¯ka¯riya appears as a sort of key to the structure of the old society. Colebrooke objected to ra¯ja¯ka¯riya on several grounds. Principally it was, he said, “unfavourable to agricultural industry and improvement,”52 insofar as it prevented people from attending continuously to their own cultivation and hindered the development of a free market in labor. Colebrooke was also of the view that ra¯ja¯ka¯riya exposed the people to undue hardships because of the manner of its administration. Moreover, he argued, it rested on and worked to maintain “absurd distinctions” based on “race” and “caste.” Now again, this ought not to be read as the rationalization of the economy, the breakup of “feudal” forms of economic relation. It ought instead to be read as a concern to introduce the conditions for a new order of social power wherein conduct was enabled and disabled by the automatic regulation of free exchanges. These new conditions amounted, in fact, to new social and legal conditions of property and labor, a new social and legal space for the desiring subject. To create them colonial power had to direct itself at breaking down those “ancient usages” that irrationally connected people to obligations of service (those, in fact, that it had itself formerly made use of) and, through the construction of a notion of rights, to shift the site of agency such that it now came to be assigned to the private sphere of an individuality regulated not by the personal discretionary demands of a sovereign extracting tribute but by the internal volitional agency of a rational free will. In other words, the new order of private landownership and market relations that was to be promoted required that new habits of social discipline be acquired by the native population, in particular, the improving 51 52

Meuret, “Political Genealogy,” p. 228. Mendis, Colebrooke-Cameron Papers, vol. 1, p. 51.

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habit of self-propelled industry. Now the native would be obliged to learn the new relation between temporality and voluntary productiveness, but not by the old forms of authority and hierarchy that ra¯ja¯ka¯riya entailed, those based principally on caste. For now the only principles of economic authority and distinction to be allowed were those defined by the abstract and self-regulating demands of the market, which operated not on such aggregates as caste but on individuals responding only to the rational or natural pressure of want and self-interest. Here, in short, was a new organization of social power in which the division of labor and the exchange mechanism of the market were to operate in such a fashion as to oblige a progressive desire for industry, regularity, and individual accomplishment. For Utilitarians, important as public opinion and schooling were in effecting a progressive improvement in human conduct, nothing could be as instrumental in this endeavor as the scientifically arranged technologies of the legal and judicial establishments. And here, on Bentham’s juridical theory, the task of arriving at that identity of interests requisite for a harmonious society could not be left to the spontaneous working of Adam Smith’s hidden hand, but rather depended upon a calculus of pleasures and pains artificially established by the legislator and the magistrate.53 Charles Hay Cameron—“ultimately the last disciple of Jeremy Bentham,” as Sir Leslie Stephen called him, and who was charged with reporting on the judicial establishments in Ceylon—was a legal scholar keenly preoccupied with this Benthamite principle of inducing desired effects on conduct by a careful and economic weighting of rewards and punishments.54 In his meticulously systematic report, he repeatedly returned to this theme. In Cameron’s view, moreover, Ceylon was an especially favorable field for experimenting with legal reform because, unlike India (where he would work alongside Macaulay on the penal code some four years later),55 “the courts of justice in that island, and the forms of their proce53 For a discussion of this aspect of Bentham’s thought in relation to Adam Smith, see Hale´vy, Philosophic Radicalism, pp. 89–120. 54 Quoted in Stokes, The English Utilitarians, p. 223. Sir Leslie Stephen was, of course, the first great memorializer of the Utilitarians. It is perhaps not altogether irrelevant to recall that this last Benthamite is in fact buried in Sri Lanka, to which he returned in 1875 at the age of eighty to take up the life of a planter. For some details see Mendis, ColebrookeCameron Papers, vol. 1, pp. xxxii–xxxiiin. 55 A curious—or, perhaps, not so curious—couple if one recalls both the rivalry and the kinship, the divergences as well as the convergences, between philosophic Whigs like Macaulay and philosophic Radicals like Cameron in the first half of the nineteenth century. The dispute between James Mill and Macaulay over the best approach to the “noble science of politics” is one of the most memorable and most instructive exchanges around emerging liberal conceptions of good government. On this relation in general, see Donald Winch, “The Cause of Good Government: Philosophic Whigs versus Philosophic Radicals,” in That Noble Science of Politics.

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dure are, without exception, the creations of the British Government, and have not in the eyes of the natives anything of the sanctity of religion or of antiquity.”56 There was therefore little to fear in disabling existing practices since, on this view, they were neither deeply entrenched nor legitimized by native religion. And so, with that cheerful expectation of wonderful improvements that characterized liberalism in the first blush of its youth, he declared: “A fairer field than the island of Ceylon can never be presented to a legislator for the establishment of a system of judicature and procedure, of which the sole end is the attainment of cheap and expeditious justice.”57 In the opening paragraph of his report Cameron set down the rationale for what was to follow (some twenty-five sets of recommendations in all). “The condition of the native inhabitants of the Island of Ceylon,” he wrote, “imposes upon a government which has their improvement at heart, the necessity not only of providing cheap and accessible judicatures for the relief of those who have suffered injury, and the punishment of those who have inflicted it, but also of guarding with peculiar anxiety against the danger that the judicatures themselves should be employed as the means of perpetrating that injustice which it is the object of their institution to prevent.” The precise “danger” which provoked this “peculiar anxiety” stemmed from the colonial view that in Ceylon the “restraints” on “bad passions” were “deficient to such a degree” that “each individual owes nearly all the security he enjoys to the protection of the law.” “The disregard of an oath,” he lamented, “and of truth in general among the natives is notorious; not less so is their readiness to gratify their malignant passions through the medium of vexatious litigation.”58 This gave to the legislator of colonial reform a responsibility far greater than would be the case in Europe simply because the stakes of moral improvement were greater. Unlike Europe, where the moral disposition was such that it did not require so many artificial constraints, in Ceylon the natives had at every turn to be met with devices and measures which constrained them against “immoral conduct.” The truth is, that the administration of justice to natives is of far more importance than its administration to Europeans, because they are so much less disposed to do justice to each other voluntarily; and I know of no instrument so powerful for gradually inducing upon them habits of honesty and sincerity as a judicial establishment, by which fraud and falsehood may be exposed to the greatest possible risk of detection and punishment.59 56

Mendis, Colebrooke-Cameron Papers, vol. 1, p. 164. Ibid., p. 165. 58 Ibid., p. 121. 59 Ibid., p. 136. 57

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A colonial difference, in Chatterjee’s sense, is quite evidently at work here. But again, this is less significant than the fact that what the rationality of colonial power is doing is inscribing a new authoritative game of justice into the colonized space, one which the colonized could accept or resist, but to whose rules they would have to respond. One site for inducing these effects on colonial conduct was the courtroom itself and particularly the jury system. A jury system had been introduced by Chief Justice Sir Alexander Johnston by the Charter of 1810. Cameron, who like most Utilitarians was generally not well disposed toward juries (seeing them as cumbrous and wasteful),60 felt that in the special case of Ceylon it was a useful, indeed indispensable, institution. “I attended nearly all the trials by jury which took place while I was in the island,” he wrote, “and the impression on my mind is, that an institution in the nature of a jury is the best school in which the minds of the natives can be disciplined for the discharge of public duties.” The jury was exemplary of a certain arrangement, the aim of which was to constrain the native’s behavior in a ceratin direction. As with the school proper, crucial to the working of this technology was the overseeing “eye” of the European: the courtroom was to produce the effect of a panopticon. “The juror performs his functions under the eye of an European judge,” Cameron continued, “and of the European and Indian public, and in circumstances which almost preclude the possibility of bribery or intimidation.”61 The point, in other words, was to establish a regulatory technique that would reach down to the very “motives” of the native and not only constrain or induce him to alter them but also encourage him to appreciate the alteration. Moreover, governmental rationality sought to organize things such that the native was made to work upon himself; he was now conceived as a productive agent. “In such a situation he has very little motive to do wrong, and he yet feels and learns to appreciate the consciousness of rectitude. The importance which he justly attaches to the office renders it agreeable to him; and he not only pays great attention to the proceedings, but for the most part takes an active part in them.”62 In my view, then, the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms ought to be inserted into an altogether different problematic about the modern than the 60

This institution, which was “the pride of English liberalism,” the Utilitarians held in contempt. See Hale´vy, Philosophic Radicalism, pp. 256, 375, 400. 61 Mendis, Colebrooke-Cameron Papers, I, p. 146. 62 Ibid., pp. 146–47. It is well to note that Cameron’s advocacy of the jury system also stemmed from considerations of the conduct of the European judges: “It is invaluable, I think, everywhere; but in our Indian possessions, it is . . . the only check and the only stimulus which can be applied to a judge placed in a situation remote from a European public, and necessarily almost insensible to the opinion of the native public, with whom he does not associate” (p. 168).

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one into which the modernization story has inserted it. If in that story the reforms mark a great leap forward in the march of rationality, progress, and freedom, in the story I want to tell they signpost the reconfiguration of colonial power—its redistribution and redeployment in relation to new targets, new forms of knowledge, and new technologies, and its production of new effects of order and subjectivity. Summing up the project of the reforms, G. C. Mendis, that consummate liberal-nationalist historian, remarked: “Thus both Colebrooke and Cameron believed that the bond between Britain and Ceylon could be maintained not by retaining British ascendancy in Government but by sharing power with the people, by giving them offices of trust, maintaining good relations between Europeans and Ceylonese and imparting justice equally to all both rich and poor.”63 However, what Mendis reads here as a democratization of power, as the generosity of a liberal British colonialism yielding a measure of autonomy to the natives, I would read rather as a transformation of power, as colonial power adopting a different strategy, working on and through different targets. On this view, the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms are significant in that they displaced the old mercantile politics of territorial expansion and introduced into the colonial state a new politics—a politics in which power was now directed at the conditions of social life rather than the producers of social wealth, in which power was now to operate in such a way as to produce not so much extractive-effects on colonial bodies as governing-effects on colonial conduct. For what was at stake in the govermental redefinition and reordering of the colonial world was, to paraphrase Jeremy Bentham once more, to design institutions such that, following only their self-interest, natives would do what they ought. To sum up, I have been trying to urge an approach to colonialism in which Europe is historicized in such a way as to bring into focus the differentia in the political rationalities through which its colonial projects were constructed. Europe, between the early modern sixteenth and the late modern nineteenth centuries, was an arena of profound alterations in the languages of the political—the concepts that it depended upon, the technologies that enabled it, the institutional sites through which it operated, the structures that guaranteed it, and the kind of subjectivities it required.64 How these languages in turn altered the construction of the colonial project—that is, how colonial spaces were constructed as such and 63 Ibid., p. xlii. See also G. C. Mendis, “The Evolution of a Ceylonese Nation—The Attainment of Independence in 1948 and the Conflicts That Arose from 1956,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Ceylon Branch), n.s., 11 (1967): 1–22. I am grateful to Anoma Pieris for bringing this late lecture of her grandfather’s to my attention. 64 See Anthony Pagden’s edited volume, The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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organized and inserted into this project as products of these changing rationalities—is still, I think, very poorly understood. Among these political rationalities, of course, the modern is crucial in large part because it remains, if in a tenuous and embattled way, our postcolonial present. In the colonial world the problem of modern power turned on the politico-ethical project of producing subjects and governing their conduct. What this required was the concerted attempt to alter the political and social worlds of the colonized, an attempt to transform and redefine the very conditions of the desiring subject. The political problem of modern colonial power was therefore not merely to contain resistance and encourage accommodation but to seek to ensure that both could only be defined in relation to the categories and structures of modern political rationalities. This is what Charles Trevelyan urged when he wrote in the late 1830s (when liberalism was still aggressively optimistic) that whereas independence for India was inevitable it would come in one of two ways: reform or revolution. “The only means at our disposal for preventing [revolution] and securing [reform],” he said, “is to set the natives on a process of European improvement, to which they are already sufficiently inclined. They will then cease to desire and aim at independence on the old Indian footing.”65 If we are to grasp more adequately the lineaments of our postcolonial modernity, what we ought to try to map more precisely is the political rationality through which this old footing was systematically displaced by a new one such that the old would now only be imaginable along paths that belong to new, always-already transformed, sets of coordinates, concepts, and assumptions.

65 Quoted in Stokes, The English Utilitarians, p. 47. In Sri Lanka as in India, colonial liberalism would grow more authoritarian, more paternalistic, and more racist in the latter half of the nineteenth century. See de Silva, History of Sri Lanka, chapter 23.

CHAPTER 2

Religion in Colonial Civil Society It has been often said, “Mahinda brought Buddhism to Ceylon.” If he did, he did not know it. (John Ross Carter, “A History of Early Buddhism”)

RELIGION IN SRI LANKAN HISTORY

It is generally assumed that religion has always played a political role in Sri Lankan history. After all, so it is said, since the dawn of recorded history in the island, there has been a well-established relation between Buddhism and the state, one moreover which, it is further supposed, has shaped to a very considerable degree the “national identity” of the Sinhalas. Consider, for example, the following passage taken from a recent book by the estimable Sri Lankan historian, K. M. de Silva: The introduction of Buddhism to the island around the third century BC had an impact on the people as decisive as the development of irrigation technology was in economic activity. Buddhism became in time the state religion and the bedrock of the culture and civilization of the island, so much so that the Sinhalese grew accustomed to regarding themselves as the chosen protectors of Buddhism. Sri Lanka itself was viewed as, “a place of special sanctity for the Buddhist religion”, a concept that linked the land, the people, and the Buddhist faith, in brief an intermingling of religion and national identity which has always had the most profound influence on the Sinhalese.1

This is the familiar story about Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Told in more or less complicated ways, popular ways, learned ways, the general features are much the same. The Sinhalas have an old and deep religious tradition, one indeed that is the very foundation of their culture and civilization. That religion, Buddhism, almost as soon as it arrived in the island more than 2,500 years ago, entered into a special relationship with the state and with the people, the former seeing itself as its institutional guarantee, 1 K. M. de Silva, Managing Ethnic Tensions in Multi-ethnic Societies: Sri Lanka, 1880– 1985 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986), p. 9.

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and the latter as its most ardent supporters. So that on the whole, religion—specifically Buddhism—is understood to be profoundly intertwined in the fabric of Sinhala lives. In the configuration of this story, “religion,” “state,” “culture,” and “identity” are made to refer to a set of social realities, as defining for the world of Mahinda as that of twentieth-century Sinhalas. And such is the contemporary naturalization of these concepts that arguments (about politics, say, about, for example, the relations among religion, the state, and violence in Buddhist history in Sri Lanka) can proceed by a mere passing reference that calls into play the tropic structure of the story, which will then serve as a background to what is thought to be the more important, the more pressing labor of the narrative. And the reason this is possible, of course, is because these categories are the authoritative categories through which Universal History has been written and through which the histories of the colonial and postcolonial worlds have been constituted as so many variations on a common and presupposed theme. But the familiarity of this story about Buddhism in Sri Lanka is misleading for at least one important reason, the one captured nicely in John Ross Carter’s observation in the above epigraph. The point of Carter’s discerning and perhaps disconcerting remark about Mahinda is to interrupt the naturalization of Buddhism in the conventional narrative of its history and to call to our attention the constructed and thus historical character of such categories as “religion.” Carter’s remark seeks to urge upon us a skeptical attitude toward the claims of Universal History, and on the view it suggests, part of the problem with the relations among religion, politics, and identity constructed in such formulations as de Silva’s (quoted above) is that they treat Buddhism as self-evident. In other words, that something—more specifically a “religion”—called “Buddhism” has always been available for political use—for a politics, moreover, of “identity”—ought not to be taken as axiomatic. If we follow Carter, our suspicion ought to be that its availability is a rather recent, indeed distinctively modern, affair. Moreover, the theoretical implications of this view are radical in this sense that if you concede the repositioning entailed in the conceptual move that Carter makes, then there is no way back to a sociological functionalism that reads the history of Buddhism as so many vicissitudes of an essential structure whose definition is alwaysalready framed by the categories of Universal History, that is, the categories of modernity. In this chapter I have a fairly circumscribed project. It is a critical one. My concern is not directly with the matter of national identity or nationalism, but with a reflection on the narrative of modern Buddhist history in Sri Lanka, one that, to be sure, informs nationalism. Nor do I aim to

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introduce new and compelling evidence for “what really happened” to Buddhism in the nineteenth century, but rather to inquire into some aspects of the way that story has generally been told, the rhetorical economy through which it has been constructed, and to suggest—at least in outline—why and through what concepts it ought to be recast. Indeed, the task here is only to try to produce something of a revised conceptual terrain in which a different sort of history of the relation between Buddhism and modernity in Sri Lanka might usefully be written. As we know, the familiar story of Buddhism in this period recounts how in the confrontation with a hostile and aggressive Christianity, indeed in its resistance to it, Buddhism reinvented itself. However, that story I believe, has also to be a story of how the conditions for the emergence of this new modernist or Protestant Buddhism (as it has been variously called) were defined by new forms of power, new social technologies, new forms of knowledge, new modes of social organization and political mobilization, and new forms of subjectivity that mark out the modernizing and, specifically, secularizing space of what might be called colonial civil society.

A HISTORY OF CONCEPTS

In the article from which I have taken my epigraph, a penetrating intervention published over a decade and a half ago, John Ross Carter sought to develop Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s observations in The Meaning and End of Religion regarding the recency and Western origin of such concepts as “religion,” “religions,” “Hinduism,” and “Buddhism.”2 Smith’s book is of decisive importance because what it seeks to show is that the concept of “religion” as a demarcatable system of doctrines-scriptures-beliefs, and that of its plural, “religions,” understood as rival ideological communities, are Western inventions, early modern ones that begin their recognizable existence only in and through the great ideological disputes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (For the medieval Church, the word dominating theological discussion was “faith.” By contrast, “religion” had a restricted and technical use, referring to the state of life bound by monastic vows. In fifteenth century England, therefore, when one spoke of “religion” one typically had in mind the monastic orders.)3 But the more profound aspect of this story of “religion” and “the religions”— one not emphasized by Smith—is that their rise coincides and indeed is 2 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991 [1962]). 3 See Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 11; and Smith, The Meaning, pp. 31–32.

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interconnected with the emergence of other transforming social processes in early modern Europe: most notably, the emergence of the new science and of Reason as the new adjudicating truth discourse, the rise of the modern secular state, and, of course, the great march of European colonial expansion. So I would suggest that the significant point that The Meaning and End of Religion throws into relief is not merely the question of whether to drop the Enlightenment concept of “religion” (this is the thrust of Smith’s own argument), but the need to understand the ways in which Europe, in its world-conquering project of empire, altered the conditions of the lives of non-European peoples in ways that obliged them too to reconstitute themselves as members of one exclusive “religious” community against others. If one task of the critical interrogation of our postcolonial present is to understand the processes through which the categories of the modern—that is, of Universal History—have been inscribed into the texture of our lives, then it is this transformation that bears careful inquiry. It is the translation argument—an important one in its own right— rather than the political one that interests Carter. It is the relation between them that concerns me. Concepts, Carter rightly says, have histories, which is only to say that employing concepts like “religion” to study discursive traditions other than those from which such concepts are derived entails, or should entail, careful attention to the changing assumptions embedded in them within their own traditions. (And this, I would add, is perhaps all the more important when we remember that in the world economy some conceptual languages have more purchase than others for reasons that have nothing to do with their own internal cognitive resources.) Carter carries on his discussion in relation to the tradition of Therava¯da in Sri Lanka. Until comparatively recently, he says, the languages of this tradition, Pa¯li and Sinhala, did not have words representing the concepts “religion” and “Buddhism.” Pious men and women in Sri Lanka, he suggests, had doubtless thought a good deal about the Buddha, about his dhamma, about the Five Precepts and the Three Refuges, about the consequences of their good and bad actions, and so on; but they had not thought about “religion” in the modern sense of a natural, abstract, systematic entity and thus had not imagined themselves to possess one distinctive member of the family of such entities, that is, “Buddhism”— about which, so far as we know, the Buddha never spoke. It is only recently—in the last two hundred years, thinks Carter—that Sinhalas have become acquainted with the concepts of “religion” and “Buddhism.” What interests me is not so much the emergence of these new concepts in themselves but the new discursive practices and the new subject-positions these concepts made possible in the context of colonial Sri Lanka.

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Among the terms Carter discusses—budu-samaya, sa¯sana, a¯gama, buddha¯gama—it is the last two that are most frequently used by Sinhalas to represent the concepts “religion” and “Buddhism” respectively.4 A¯gama, as Carter says, is an old Sanskrit and Pa¯li word, the basic meaning of which is “coming, approach, arrival” but is also used in the sense of “authoritative text.” Carter’s guess is that it was during the latter part of the eighteenth century or the early part of the nineteenth that a¯gama came to be used to represent the concept “religion” and buddha¯gama to represent “Buddhist religion.” His suspicion is that this must have had to do with contact with Christian missionaries, but he is cautious about committing to this view. Kitsiri Malalgoda, who in a 1972 review article of Richard Gombrich’s Precept and Practice had already made critical mention of this use of a¯gama to denote “religion,” is more emphatic in attributing the invention of the usage to the colonial Christian missionaries of the British period, and therefore more inclined to give it no earlier than a nineteenth century date of birth. As he put it, the term a¯gama as the general equivalent of “religion” [was] introduced by the Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century. . . . Buddha¯gama was the term that the missionaries used to refer to Buddhism; it was only later that it gained acceptance among the Buddhists themselves as a term of selfreference.5

There is here, undoubtedly, a genealogy waiting to be written. My concern, however, is not to decide between Malalgoda and Carter on this matter. It is sufficient for my present purposes that both would agree that by the mid-nineteenth century the terms were in use, that both would grant that the encounter with Western practice precipitated it, and that this was, as Malalgoda acutely puts it, “accompanied by significant changes in [the Sinhalas’] conceptual apparatus.”6 Indeed, what I am concerned with is the nature of the transforming conditions produced by 4

Budu-samaya: samaya is the crucial word (budu is an adjective meaning “Buddhist”); it literally means “coming together” and by extension “convention” both in the sense of what is shared by Buddhists—i.e., tenets or opinions—and in the sense of a collectivity or community. Sa¯sana: the term basically means “instruction, admonition, message, order” and this in an historical sense, too. As Carter says, this term has had a history. See John Ross Carter, “A History of Early Buddhism,” Religious Studies 13, no. 3 (1977): 246–70. 5 Kitsiri Malalgoda, “Sinhalese Buddhism: Orthodox and Syncretistic, Traditional and Modern,” Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Sciences (n.s.) 2, no. 2 (1972): 164. The first comprehensive Sinhala-English dictionary, compiled by the Wesleyan missionary Benjamin Clough and published in 1830, notes that “the word is universally used in colloquial intercourse to express religion.” See Clough, Sinhalese-English Dictionary, new and enlarged edition (Colombo: Wesleyan Missionary Press, 1892), p. 63. 6 Malalgoda, “Sinhalese Buddhism,” p. 164.

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colonial rule that obliged these changes in the “conceptual apparatus” of the Sinhalas. These conditions, I would suggest, not only produced the new conceptual space of “religion” as such, but the space of its potential ideological and political appropriations as well.

THE RISE OF “RELIGION”

If the process by which this text-connoting word, a¯gama, came to be chosen to represent “religion” in Sinhala is not yet clear, it may nevertheless be useful to recall something of the process by which “Buddhism” came to be identified and indeed constituted in European discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century. First of all, it needs to be remembered that by the early eighteenth century in Europe, “religion” had come to mean not monastic discipline, and not piety, or faith, but a body of systematic discursive knowledge. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith writes: In pamphlet after pamphlet, treatise after treatise, decade after decade the notion was driven home that a religion is something that one believes or does not believe, something whose propositions are true or are not true, something whose locus is in the realm of the intelligence, is up for inspection before the speculative mind.7

Similarly, non-Christian “religions,” newly discovered around the world, were conceived to exist as sets of propositions, the truth statuses of which could be rationally investigated, compared, and disputed.8 As Peter Harrison reminds us in his remarkable book, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment, the emergence of the modern concept of “religion” and its plural, “the religions,” occurred pari passu with the emergence of the comparative science of religion. Each was, so to speak, the condition of the other’s possibility.9 It may not be difficult to appreciate, then, that as the new object “Buddhism” was constituted by the West—particularly in England—in the first decades of the nineteenth century, it came to exist, as Philip Almond says, “in its texts and manuscripts, at the desks of the Western savants who interpreted it. It had become a textual object, defined, classified, and interpreted through its own textu7

Smith, The Meaning, p. 40. See Talal Asad, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category” in his Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 9 Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 8

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ality.”10 It is on the terrain of this construction of their “religion” that the Buddhists in Sri Lanka would be called upon to respond by the Christians. That a reified, ideological entity “Buddhism” or “buddha¯gama” had become available for polemical use by the middle of the nineteenth century is demonstrated, Carter maintains, by the character of the series of va¯dayas (controversies, debates) between representatives of the Buddhist and Christian communities in Sri Lanka between the middle 1860s and 1880s. However, what is notable about these va¯dayas, he suggests, is that in them “two monolithic giants . . . clashed, the one something called Christianity (kristiya¯ni a¯gama) and the other something called Buddhism (buddha¯gama).” In some of the texts recording these debates, one notes the occurrence of a¯gama meaning “religion” and occasionally in the plural, “religions.” Throughout some of these sources the terms buddha¯gama and kristiya¯ni a¯gama occur frequently. So thoroughly reified are the concepts “religion,” “Buddhism” and “Christianity,” that the debaters found it intelligible to speak of the untrueness of Buddhism or the untrueness of the Christian religion or Christianity, the trueness of Buddhism, to say that Christianity is a deceitful religion, to attempt to argue that Christianity is not an authentic religion, and to maintain that Buddhism is a true religion.11

The story of the Buddhist-Christian confrontation of the latter half of the nineteenth century to which Carter refers here is in fact the subject of Malalgoda’s important book, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society.12 That story is, needless to say, a very involved one, with a long and complex background. But one of its more notable episodes has to do with the fact that although the Christian missionaries courted controversy and conflict from the time of the establishment of their missions (the Baptists in 1812; the Wesleyans in 1814; and the Church Missionaries in 1818), believing that a militant aggressiveness would hasten the downfall of Buddhism, they were returned no active resistance from Buddhist monks until the 1860s, a good half century into their concerted assault.13 Indeed, not only did the monks not retaliate when provoked, they were positively welcoming to the missionaries, never failing to offer shelter and hospitality, even allowing them the use of their temples for preaching, and so on. The missionaries, as may be imagined, were much perplexed by this attitude 10

Philip Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 13. 11 Carter, “A History,” p. 272. 12 Kitsiri Malalgoda, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 1750–1900: A Study of Religious Revival and Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 13 Actually, from the 1820s monks were sending petitions of complaint to colonial governors. See ibid., p. 214.

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of stolid accommodation. But what they saw in it was not the absence of “religion”—properly so called—but incontrovertible evidence of the indifference of Buddhists toward their version of it (i.e., toward “Buddhism”). For instance, Robert Spence Hardy, one of the foremost Wesleyan missionaries in Sri Lanka during this period, wrote of his colleagues: “Instead of the strife of theology, they have to overcome the apathy of indifference, and experience has proved that they encounter a more formidable opponent in the stupor of ignorance than in the dialectics of skepticism.”14 On Malalgoda’s reading, this “lack of resistance” on the part of the monks is to be understood as following from the traditional Buddhist attitude of “tolerance.” Significantly, he argues, this was to change in the period from the 1860s onward. This period marks what he calls a transition from the “traditional attitude of tolerance towards other religions to active and militant resistance leading eventually even to manifestations of intolerance.”15 Buddhists, in this account then, had had enough; they were justifiably fed up with the Christian provocations. Far from being returned in kind, their open-hearted generosity had only, and repeatedly, been abused. My own reading of this significant shift in the attitude of the Buddhists toward the Christians is somewhat different from Malalgoda’s, however, in part because I think there is a connection between this “transition” to “militant resistance” and what I have quoted him above as saying about a¯gama. Without in any way detracting from the value of tolerance to Buddhist discourse, I should like to suggest that the reason for the lack of resistance on the part of the Buddhists was that for them there was not really a “religion”—one called “Buddhism”—to defend, in the way that there would certainly have been for the missionaries a very distinct “religion”—one called “Christianity”—doing the attacking. Buddhism, in short, had not yet come into being as a deployable ideological entity. And consequently there was not really an “identity”—in the modern sense of that word—to defend either.16 Both of these—a “religion” called “Buddhism” rivaling “Christianity,” and an associated “identity” constituted precisely by the seeming threat of rival identities—had first to be constructed. In this sense, therefore, my argument is that “Buddhism” (the “religion”) was constituted as such in an adversarial relation in as much as all “religion” necessarily is. 14

Quoted in ibid., p. 212. Kitsiri Malalgoda, “The Buddhist-Christian Confrontation in Ceylon, 1800–1880,” Social Compass 20, no. 2 (1973): 173. 16 See, usefully, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). 15

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It is true, of course, as Malalgoda shows in great detail in part 1 of his splendid book, that there have ever been conflicts and controversies within the sangha (the Order of monks) in Sri Lanka. The point here though is that these were controversies about such technical matters as the correct interpretation of the vinaya rules for the conduct of monks or the proper understanding of a section of the dhamma—disputes that involved not so much matters of “belief” or “unbelief” as matters of heterodoxy; matters of potential threat to the ecclesiastical authority of the dominant fraternity in Kandy. What they certainly were not about was the propositional “truth” or “untruth” of a reified entity called “Buddhism.” This is what is new. And to my mind it is in this that the profound significance of the va¯dayas or controversies of the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s lies. It is not only because the Buddhists (led by that redoubtable monk, Mohottivatte Gunananda of Kotahena) carried the day (even by Christian accounts), or even because their victories demonstrated that contrary to colonial Christian characterization Buddhism was not on the verge of collapse (“by the testimony of all Buddhism is effete; its hold on the people is as slight as it is possible to be,” wrote Bishop Jermyn of Colombo in 1874).17 Rather, the significant fact about these debates is that they indicated that something new had come to occupy the social and political landscape of colonial Sri Lanka: a propositional “religion” called “Buddhism” available for modern ideological work against rival “religions.” As Peter Harrison has suggested, “when there is no propositional ‘religion’ supposedly at the heart of the religious life, and when there are no ‘religions’ construed as mutually contradictory sets of propositions, then the modern problem of ‘conflicting religious truth claims’ cannot come into play.”18 This is the point that has to be underlined. The Buddhist monks of course did not themselves choose the terrain for their encounter with the Christian missionaries. But what is important to understand, I think, is that the monks arrived at a point at which they were obliged to respond on the terrain chosen for them. Surely the reason for this is that their “traditional” terrain was being systematically displaced by—or reconstituted into—a new one that in definitive ways rendered the old options inefficacious. In other words, what is important to understand is that the adversarial confrontation between Christianity and Buddhism was taking place as colonial power was radically altering the very social and political field in which dispute as such could be constructed, negotiated, and resolved. 17 18

Quoted in Malalgoda, Buddhism, p. 231. Harrison, “Religion,” p. 14.

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THE STORY OF PROTESTANT BUDDHISM

Now there is, of course, a well-known narrative in which the story of the making of modern Buddhism in Sri Lanka is told. This is the story of “Protestant Buddhism,” a term introduced into the theoretical field by Gananath Obeyesekere in a pioneering article, “Religious Symbolism and Political Change in Ceylon,” first presented in 1966 (though only published in 1970).19 I would suggest that the theoretical value of Obeyesekere’s formulation lies first in the fact that it enabled a conceptual purchase on what he called “the emergent political and social self-consciousness of urban Buddhists.”20 That is to say, it enabled the organization of an array of observable practices into a distinctive object-field, into a coherent ensemble with articulable internal and external relations. More important, though, concerned as it was to consider the problem of religious change, it enabled the conceptual formulation of this ensemble into an historical narrative that could link transformations in politics with changes in religion. It performed, in short, a labor that opened the space for the telling of a conceptually coherent story about the relation between Buddhism and modern, specifically nationalist, politics. It is to the assumptions that govern this story that I now wish to turn.21 As we know, the sociohistorical challenge issued by the concept “Protestant Buddhism” was taken up by Kitsiri Malalgoda in Buddhism in Sinhalese Society. What I am interested in here is the way he sets up his argument to tell the story about the relation between religion and colonialism and, by extension, between religion and modernity in Sri Lanka. Buddhism in Sinhalese Society positions itself in a direct filiation with Weber’s The Religion of India, offering in fact an account of a second great transformation in Buddhist history as important as the latter’s account of a first. The book is divided into two parts. The first part deals essentially with the Buddhist Order, the sangha, in the hundred years between 1765 and 1865. What particularly concerns Malalgoda in this part 19 In this essay’s best-known passage, Obeyesekere defines “Protestant Buddhism” in the following way: “The term ‘Protestant Buddhism’ in my usage has two meanings. (a) As we have pointed out many of its norms and organizational forms are historical derivations from Protestant Christianity. (b) More importantly, from the contemporary point of view, it is a protest against Christianity and its associated Western political dominance prior to independence.” Obeyesekere, “Religious Symbolism and Political Change in Ceylon,” Modern Ceylon Studies 1, no. 1 (1970): 46–47. 20 Ibid., p. 51. 21 For a recent criticism, see John Clifford Holt, “Sri Lanka’s Protestant Buddhism?” Ethnic Studies Report 8, no. 2 (1990): 1–8. It should be evident from what follows that I think Holt has largely missed what is theoretically germane about the concept of “Protestant Buddhism.”

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of his narrative history are the controversies and schisms that recurred within the sangha over these years. He traces the fracturing dominance of the Siyam Nika¯ya and the breakdown of the relation between Buddhism and the colonial state in the wake of the latter’s withdrawal of political and financial support. This “disestablishment” of Buddhism was widely seen by Christian contemporaries—missionaries like Robert Spence Hardy, administrators like James Emerson Tennent, and Ceylonese intellectuals like James de Alwis—as a sign of the general decline of Buddhism. Malalgoda dissents from these “prophecies of doom,” as he calls them, and argues convincingly that what in fact occurs is a “shift” of Buddhism’s center—from Kandy (where there was a decline) to the Low Country (where there was a revival in Matara, followed by Galle, then Colombo). In the second part of the book, treating the period after 1865, the focus shifts abruptly, but significantly. Rather than pursuing the problem of the internal politics of the sangha, what interests Malalgoda is the problem of “Protestant Buddhism” and the “Buddhist-Christian confrontation” in relation to which it defined itself. His rationale is that this confrontation had a more momentous impact on Buddhism among the Sinhalas than changes within the Order. He discusses the missionary strategies of conversion; their provocations; the Buddhists’ initial reluctance to being drawn into debate; their eventual entry into the fray; and the boost eventually provided by the Theosophists. Yet, there is a link between the book’s two parts, and it is the argument that constructs this conceptual connection that shapes in fact the rhetorical, even polemical, thrust (if I can call it that) of the book. This is the argument that “it was the strength derived from the internal organizational changes in the first half of the nineteenth century that enabled Buddhists to withstand the external threat of British missionary activities in the latter half of the same century.”22 I want to notice something about this formulation of Malalgoda’s because I take it to be a formulation crucial to the point of his overall project. The governing distinction (and, therefore, relation) between colonizer and colonized that is at work in his narrative of the formation of modern Buddhism is between “strength” and “weakness” of respective adversarial forces. The focus here is on what is argued to be the “strength” derived from changes in the sangha that enabled the Buddhists to “withstand” the colonial threat. It is in fact crucial to the point of Malalgoda’s story that the Christians badly miscalculated on this matter of relative strengths, overestimating theirs and fatally underestimating that of the Buddhist monks. Notice, then, that the account is to be cast in the form 22

Malalgoda, Buddhism, p. 7, my emphasis.

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of a story about Buddhism’s resistance and survival. Indeed, Malalgoda later notes that Buddhism emerged “even stronger” than it had been in the immediate precolonial period.23 Essentially, therefore, the account is inserted into the familiar narrative of liberal nationalism. For recall that the point of the liberal nationalist story of resistance to colonialism is to retain the overall framing of the colonialist narrative but to reverse the plot so that, in effect, the nationalist can appropriate the place hitherto assigned to the colonialist. What interests me, however, is something else about the relation between religion and colonialism, namely, how the terrain on which the sangha operated changed in such a way as to urge or oblige the mastery of new (i.e., modern) technologies. What concerns me, in other words, is not a story about the relative strengths of the colonizer and colonized, but one about the conditions that configured the terrain on which the confrontation was engaged. In keeping with this problematic of “strength” and “weakness,” what interests Malalgoda are the Buddhist responses “which are of lasting result.” So that it is, as he says, Low Country (rather than the Kandyan), urban or semi-urban (rather than rural), and modern (rather than traditional) responses with which he is concerned. There is also, therefore, a modern/traditional distinction at work in Malalgoda’s text which is useful to note. The traditional response to British colonialism, says Malalgoda, was much “less ‘rational,’ ” and “by virtue of its political aims, it was not destined to have lasting success after the British had firmly established their strength in the Kandyan areas.”24 The “traditional” responses manifested themselves in a series of “millennial” episodes which were “restorative.” The common millennial dream underlying them all was the emergence of Kings through the help of the “guardian deities” of Ceylon for the redemption of the Sinhalese and their religion. There were several episodes of this nature from the time of the cession of the Kandyan Kingdom to the British in 1815 until almost the end of the 19th century. Some of them were probably not even noticed by the government; and the rest were quelled without much difficulty, except during the very first outbreak in 1817–18, when effective leadership of the movement was taken over by some Kandyan chiefs and when fighting dragged on for several months.25

So the problem of the rational vs. the irrational and modern vs. traditional maps (by way of “success” vs. “failure”) onto that of the governing problem of strength and weakness. The question here though is: Is it merely 23

Ibid., p. 262. Buddhism, p. 7 25 Ibid., pp. 7–8. For more details, see Kitsiri Malalgoda, “Millennialism in Relation to Buddhism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 12, no. 4 (1970): 424–41. 24

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the undoubted strength of the colonial state against the undoubted weakness of the “millennialists” that it is important to understand? Or is there something about the transformation of the politico-conceptual terrain that increasingly made “millennialist” restorative responses inefficacious, anachronistic? My problem is not the tradition/modernity distinction as such but Malalgoda’s formulation of it. For him the distinction is inscribed in a normative-progressivist narrative. What is interesting to me— and here I agree with Malalgoda that the problem might be thought of as lying across the threshold of colonial modernity—is the nature of the political rationality that worked to erase the efficacy of such “restorative” practices and to erect in their place an entirely new game in which the political efficacy itself of any practice was redefined. Malalgoda’s book, it is easy to see from the way he sets up his argument, is an anticolonial text. It is essentially a critique of the view that the Buddhist Revival owes its origin to the Theosophists (to Henry Steel Olcott, in particular). On the contrary, Malalgoda argues, the Theosophists owe their success in Sri Lanka to the revival already under way and to the monks (like Mohottivatte Gunananda and Hikkaduve Sumamgala) who spearheaded it. In this sense, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society is a brilliantly conceived critique of Eurocentrism, a critique of those kinds of colonialist narratives that seek to suppress the agency of the non-European and to make the “West” the central Subject of History. However, it is equally clear that Malalgoda’s argument depends on a certain notion of secularization and modernization, one in fact that depends in turn on a Weberian notion of rationalization. The problem with this sort of story is that it makes it difficult to understand how the conditions for the emergence of the new practices that constitute “Protestant Buddhism” were defined by new forms of power, new forms of knowledge, and new forms of subjectivity. I want to suggest, therefore, that we ought to set aside this liberal-nationalist and normative-progressivist story and construct a different story, one articulated through a revised conception of secularization, and thus a different understanding of modernity.

SECULARIZATION AND MODERN POWER

The story of secularization, of the separation of social and political life from ecclesiastical control and direction, forms a crucial chapter in the larger narrative of modernity. Indeed, insofar as the self-consciousness of the modern is of the sovereignty of desacralized reason, it may be said to form the defining chapter in that overall narrative. But more often than not, the story of secularization has been told as the story of the decline of religion and of the efficacy of the supernatural (the rise of “unbelief” in

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Lucien Febvre’s terms) in the face of the progress of scientific reason.26 In this narrative, of course, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment mark so many successively cumulative signposts in the breakup of the closed medieval mentality and the formation of the modern skeptical attitude based on a rational, naturalistic account of things. Peter Burke, for example, suggests that secularization is most usefully understood as “primarily the process of change from the interpretation of reality in essentially supernatural, otherworldly terms, to its interpretation in terms which are essentially natural and focused on this world.”27 Secularization, on this account then, is mapped onto the story of the linear progression of rationalization. More recently and instructively though, as part of an ongoing interrogation of the understanding of European modernity, there has been in some quarters an effort to criticize this progressivist story and to offer up another in which the modern is seen not as the natural end of a normalized teleological history, but as a comprehensive alteration in the forms of social life and in the conceptual categories that define it. This alteration is one in which the modern is understood not so much as the appearance of new signs as in the construction of new conceptual distinctions, new alternatives, and new options: order/chaos, for example, or rational/irrational, or traditional/modern.28 In his wide-ranging reexamination of the secularization of early modern England, for example, C. John Sommerville has suggested that we put aside this familiar idea of secularization as a decline in religion or the religious and understand it instead as mapping a break in which the cognitive position, the institutional placement, and the positive form of what constitutes “religion” are fundamentally altered in a certain direction.29 What Sommerville describes are alterations in conceptions of space and time, transformations in patterns of association and in the configurations of power, that mark a fundamental shift from what he calls “religious culture” to “secular culture.” Whereas in a “secular culture,” he says, an effort of thought is needed to connect activities to religious ends, “in a 26 See Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). 27 See Peter Burke, “Religion and Secularisation,” in New Cambridge Modern History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Of course, as is well known, the term “secularization” was first used in the seventeenth century to describe the seizure of church property, particularly monastery lands, during the Reformation. 28 See Stephen L. Collins’s very interesting From Divine Cosmos to Sovereign State: An Intellectual History of Consciousness and the Idea of Order in Renaissance England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), and Zygmunt Bauman’s remarks on it in “Modernity and Ambivalence,” Theory, Culture & Society 7 (1990): 163–64. 29 See C. John Sommerville, The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

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thoroughly religious culture translations of the whole range of activities into religious concepts are unnecessary. These activities are not just guided by religion, they are the religion itself.”30 The point, of course—which Sommerville perhaps does not sufficiently theorize—is that in what he calls “religious culture” these distinctions themselves would not have obtained. It is precisely the modern that brings them into being as operative distinctions. “There is no doubt,” Sommerville himself recognizes, “that we live on one side of a great divide, where religion is something one thinks about rather than something one does.”31 This divide is—or ought to be—what we mean by modernity. On this account of modernity, secularization is understood as describing a shift on several levels: it describes a set of institutional differentiations in which the ecclesiastical establishment comes to be assigned a new position in social and political life. From a position within effective power, it comes institutionally to be but one of many politicizable spaces in the social field—regulated, circumscribed, encouraged, limited, in any case acted upon or not from elsewhere. This institutional differentiation forms part of a much larger transformation in a modern direction in which commercial market relations come to define and regulate the emergent field of “the social,” a field understood to be composed of distinct but interconnected institutions: the economy, schools, churches and church associations, literary and fraternal societies, newspapers and magazines, lending libraries and reading rooms, professional associations and clubs—institutions that constitute the public sphere of modern civil society. They define and establish the normative spaces in which debates and controversies are to take place as well as the normative discourse in which they are to be carried out. It is in and through them, therefore, that the new categories of universal history are inscribed on the social and institutional terrain. At another level, secularization describes not only the formal institutional separation of church and state but an epistemic shift in which a field of discourse and practice comes to be constituted as “religion” as such. This involves, as Sommerville suggests, a cognitive alteration in which “religion” ceases to be the background of thought and becomes one among many objects of thought. As he says, by the mid-sixteenth century, “the term ‘religion’ began to replace faith and in the seventeenth century became the favored term. But whereas faith had indicated a whole dimension of life and consciousness, religion now denoted an explanation of life or a set of propositions.”32 Secularization entailed, therefore, a process of objectification and reification such that the new concept of “reli30

Ibid., 9. Ibid. 32 Ibid., p. 16. 31

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gion” mapped discourses and practices now available for consideration “from the outside” as it were, now open to rational investigation. And in consequence one could now speak not only of “religion” but of “religions,” that plurality or series of similarly objectified systems of doctrine each with its own distinctive claim to propositional truth. Finally, with the reorganization of social/institutional and discursive space there emerge both new kinds of available subject-positions and a new kind of problem for what might be called religion’s constituency. This is not merely a matter of the well-known increased role of the laity that accompanies secularization. Rather, on the one hand, with religious life being defined by propositional religion, subject-positions have now to be defined and constructed in relation to conflicting religious truthclaims, and in virtue of this now constitute always potentially adversarial identities. On the other hand, with the de-authorization of the old ecclesiastical patterns of power, organized religion is now obliged to employ the new institutions and technologies of the public sphere to perform the ideological work of religious mobilization. The general point, in other words, is to displace the narrative in which secularization is understood in terms of the “more or less” of “religious belief” by one that seeks to understand it as mapping a comprehensive alteration in which there emerges a new social space (that of civil society as a differentiated field of seemingly self-sustaining institutions), a new social and conceptual object (that of “religion” as a reified entity known through its propositional structures, its doctrine), and a new form of subject (that of a laity whose business it is to take positions on the assumed truth or untruth of religious propositions). It is in relation to such a notion of secularization that I think the story of the relation between Buddhism and modernity in colonial Sri Lanka ought to be retold. What this conceptualization potentially brings into focus is not the liberal-nationalist problematic of the rational and the irrational or the strong and the weak, but a problematic of formations and transformations of the political rationality that defines institutional and conceptual space. And therefore what it makes possible to illuminate is the political rationality through which the old terrain and its forms of social construction were dismantled and a new one established in its place, one, importantly, in which the categories of universal history were inscribed. It will be remembered that one of the key episodes in Malalgoda’s dramatic narrative is that in which he sketches the shift of the center of power of the sangha from Kandy to Colombo. It is in this episode that the new forms of religious practice and new forms of religious subject make their appearance and that, in consequence, the problems of secularization and modern colonial power are most acutely at stake. As he describes it, the ecclesiastical establishment in Kandy traditionally derived

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the force of its authority not internally (i.e., from the vinaya regulations that governed the behavior of monks) but from the whole structure of social and political power with which it articulated. With colonial control of the Maritime Provinces, however, the effective range of Kandyan authority was circumscribed, and this, as Malalgoda suggests, altered the position of the Low Country sangha. On the one hand, they had now to turn to the colonial administrators to back up their offices, titles, and honors; on the other, they had to depend more on such individual aptitudes as piety and learning to secure a constituency. But it seems to me that we need to understand something else besides this, something that has to do with the destruction and construction of the conditions in which the choices that inform these practices are emerging: In what ways did the construction of a new social grid from the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms of the 1830s onward—with its new social institutions and social spaces in which it was now the public use of reason which was formally the new arbiter of claims to legitimacy and truth— alter the terrain on which monks and laymen could interact and open before them choices that effectively urged them in the direction of the modern? And in what ways did the production by the new institution of the modern individual—constructed as a disciplined, receptive, reasoning subject with a sharply delineated identity—alter the conditions in which what Malalgoda so aptly calls the “conceptual apparatus” of the Sinhalas was constructed? It seems to me that these secularizing displacements ought to be central to the narrative history of modern Buddhism because it is through them that the conceptual shifts urged by the missionaries in the nineteenth century were secured, that is, became the terrain on which Sinhalas reconstituted themselves as members of one “religious” community against rival ones. To sum up, the labor of this chapter, as I said at the outset, has been a critical one in this circumscribed sense that it has sought to dismantle the conventional space of the story of Buddhism and modernity in Sri Lanka and to construct an alternative conceptual space for revisiting that story. Positively reconstructing the modern in Buddhist history in Sri Lanka against the grain of those categories of Universal History through which it has been normalized requires another labor. It should be evident, however, that central to the case I have been trying to make is that it is not so much more data as more critical concepts that we are most in need of in attempting to free ourselves from colonialist as well as liberal-nationalist narratives of the past. And in this regard I have wanted to suggest that one such concept is a revised notion of secularization.

CHAPTER 3

The Government of Freedom Time is still waiting in the heart of the oldest lands in spite of a victory of man over slavery that seems more legendary than true. And in the desert of culture the wind or earthquake comes and tumbles the patience of history, the tribe or woman who is forgotten but remembers her own bitter love like a far distant sail in the darkening west. (Wilson Harris, “Spirit of the Labyrinth”)

THE DARKENING WEST

Reading and writing after Michel Foucault it is scarcely a controversial matter to assert that the investigation of the past ought to be connected to questions derived from the present. This, after all, is the now familiar idea of a history of the present. Such histories are concerned to destabilize the seeming naturalness or inevitability of the present, to show the ways in which the present is in fact assembled contingently and heterogeneously. They are concerned, in short, to historicize the present, in order to enable us to act—and act differently—upon it. But while this Foucauldian idea may now be more or less axiomatic, what is still not thought through often enough is that one implication of so understanding the theoretical project of historical (or genealogical) investigation is that alterations in the present we inhabit ought to urge us to alter the questions through which the past is made a resource for contemporary intellectual reflection. If, in other words, what we want the past to illuminate for us ought to be guided by the task of understanding the predicament in which we find ourselves, then as that predicament itself alters what we ask the past to yield up to us has also to alter. Surely the project of writing histories of the present, if they are not to be merely academic exercises, ought to hang on some such focus on a changing present.

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Now, clearly, one of the conceptual-ideological fields in which the Foucauldian exercise of writing histories of the present has been pursued with much sophistication in recent years is the field of the recharacterization of colonialism. This exercise has indeed constituted an important strategy in postcolonial criticism. Part of the critical point of these exercises has been to demonstrate (against the claims of, say, liberal-rationalist historiographies, or Eurocentric ones) the hegemonic persistence into the postcolonial present of aspects of colonialist discourse and practice. I do not doubt the importance of these moves; indeed they have been enormously enabling in my own work.1 However, the protagonists of these revisionist efforts (myself included) seem to have taken it for granted that we already know under (or in relation to) what general description of the present these recharacterizations of the colonial past are supposed to perform their labor of criticism. So that while the colonial past’s supposed transparency is subjected to a searching skepticism, and meticulously scrutinized and deconstructed, the self-evidence of the postcolonial present is assumed and stands unexamined, indeed unproblematized. One consequence of this is that it always remains unclear exactly what demand in the present these historiographical strategies are being mobilized to meet, and therefore there is no way to judge whether in fact they are adequately doing so. In the last decade or so, one of the questions that has acquired a new cognitive-political resonance and a new ideological salience for the present is the question of freedom. Indeed, “freedom” is one of the defining watchwords of the so-called New World Order which, supposedly, has come into being with the end of the cold war. Freedom, so we are told, has finally, after a long and difficult ordeal in the struggle with its totalitarian adversaries of the Left and Right, assumed its proper place as the supreme value, acknowledged and unchallenged, not only in the local history of Western culture, but in the History of Culture as such. The force of this story of our time is evident in the fact that the new discourse of freedom has reorganized the very context of cultural-historical and ethical-political debate, and in doing so has reorganized the old distinction between conservatives and radicals, between progressives and reactionaries. But even if we have to acknowledge the force of the historical claim that neoliberalism’s freedom has hegemonized contemporary global politics, and even if we cannot now not write from within a present marked by this transformation, do we need to embrace it normatively? This is the question. For those of us who are skeptical of the claims of the protagonists 1 See my Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

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of the “liberal revolution” and of democracy’s “third wave”2 surely the present also exerts a counter-demand, namely the demand to problematize precisely the seeming transparency of these normalized claims to the self-evidence of freedom. This is the challenge that Thomas Holt has taken up in his remarkable study of the problem of slave emancipation in colonial Jamaica. In the course of introducing this study, Holt reflects in the following way on the link between the historical matters that constitute the focal object of his investigation and the contemporary intellectual-political predicament that frames the conceptual problematic through which his questions emerge as visible questions of moment. This study grew out of, is connected with, and was partly formed by the concerns of my historical present—the decade of the 1980s. That amazing decade began with the election of Ronald Reagan to the American presidency; it ended with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the threat of its collapse in the Soviet Union itself. Reagan’s simple and forceful message was that the best policy was to let the market govern social relations and that those who did not make it in modern America had only themselves to blame. Thus, while in contemporary usage Democrats claimed the liberal label, Reagan and his modern conservative allies took up many of the essential elements of the original nineteenth-century liberalism, which differs from the so-called advanced liberalism of the late nineteenth-century. Reagan’s seemingly new and fresh approach had a powerful appeal, especially to people looking for respectable ways to evade the failure of American society to satisfy the basic needs of large sectors of its population. It is not irrelevant to the composition of this book that the 1980s were a period when the gap between rich and poor grew wider and racial tensions and despair grew worse. At the same time, self-determination and free enterprise were conflated in public discourse, and democracy and capitalism became synonyms.3

Holt’s work is staged on this connection between slave emancipation and the contemporary predicament of freedom. It is the latter, in fact, that gives to the historical problem of the former its compelling significance. As I understand him, Holt wants to make it impossible for us to buy the seeming transparency of contemporary liberalism’s self-congratulatory story of freedom, particularly the claim that the “free market” is the neutral space of impartiality and equality, especially for those—like 2 “Liberal revolution” is Bruce Ackerman’s phrase. See his The Future of Liberal Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). The idea of a “third wave” of democracy is Samuel Huntington’s. See his The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). 3 Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. xviii–xix.

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peoples of African descent in the New World—who have historically been objects of modern forms of systematic discrimination. He seeks to do this by exposing the contradiction—between freedom and constraint, autonomy and authority—that on his view is internal to, and constitutive of, liberalism as such. For Holt, liberalism is not what it takes itself to be in its autobiography—i.e., the unceasing extension of individual freedom. To the contrary, in his reading the story of liberalism is the story of the simultaneous extension/containment and expansion/contraction of freedom. And what is illuminating for Holt about British slave emancipation is that in it, liberalism’s constitutive contradiction stands out in sharp relief—and stands out, moreover, in the register of race. In this chapter I will examine the story Holt tells about the problem of black freedom in post-emancipation Jamaica. I want to worry about the kind of historiographical project into which it is inserted—the politicotheoretical demand in the postcolonial present to which it takes itself to be responding—and to consider whether the conception of freedom that supports his argument is one with a continuing warrant, a continuing critical purchase in the postcolonial present. It is here that the whole question of what I will call the “government” of freedom is to be posed. I will employ this Foucauldian notion to rethink our assumptions about “freedom” and to urge a different conceptualization of “the problem of freedom” in post-emancipation Jamaica than the one urged by Holt. I should make it clear, however, that I do not intend in this exercise to offer even a partial rewriting of this post-emancipation history. The labor I offer is of another kind, one both more and less than such a history might purport to be. What I intend to offer is a reconsidered conceptual terrain upon which that history might be written. It is more in the sense that it seeks to be a critical inquiry into the assumptions through which the claims of history are made intelligible; it is less because it does not suppose itself to be a substitute for such a history, but only a recurrently necessary preface to it. I shall begin elsewhere, however, with a different telling of the story of slavery and freedom than the one Holt offers, though arguably one as concerned as his is with the present from which he writes, and one that crosses many of the same intellectual debates. I am thinking of the work of Orlando Patterson.

FREEDOM IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF WESTERN CULTURE

It is not an exaggeration to say that Orlando Patterson has, over the course of an immensely productive career, been almost single-mindedly preoccupied with the problem—perhaps I should say, with the value—of freedom. One can trace, through all his major works (of both fiction and

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nonfiction), a relentless thematization of the value of freedom.4 Recall, for example, the way he uses Albert Camus’s The Rebel to stage the existential scenario with which he closes the otherwise academic prose of The Sociology of Slavery. Patterson is endeavoring to explain how it is that slaves who had been born into slavery and who therefore had never known freedom (i.e., creole slaves) could nevertheless have desired it so fervently as to give their lives for it. He has in mind, of course, the greatest of all slave rebellions in British colonial Jamaica, the so-called Christmas Rebellion of 1831/32 led by Sam Sharpe. What then, accounts for the presence of this need which seems to survive under conditions which in every way conspire to smother it? Every rebellion, Camus has written, “tacitly invokes a value”. This value is something embedded deep in the human soul, a value discovered as soon as a subject begins to reflect on himself through which he inevitably comes to the conclusion that “I must become free—that is, that my freedom must be won”. In the final analysis it is the discovery of this universal value which justifies and stimulates the most tractable of slaves to rebel.5

On my reading of Orlando Patterson, everything follows from this central paradox of the birth of the desire for freedom in the breast of the slave. All of his mature work has been an attempt to give an historical-sociological account—to form a theoretical understanding—of this animating paradox. I do not agree with the argument Patterson develops; in my view the story he ends up telling turns out to be an autobiographical account of Western culture’s self-image of freedom. However, there is something of fundamental importance for us in the itinerary of Patterson’s preoccupation, something that has to do with his pursuit of that question that animates him, the internal—dialectical—connection between slavery and freedom. To get at his existentially defined question—How could a slave who had never known freedom nevertheless conjure up the desire for it, and formulate an idea of it?—Patterson feels constrained to pose and pursue a prior and more fundamental question, namely, what, in its essentials, is slavery? His second major book, Slavery and Social Death, is an attempt to give an answer to this question. Slavery, he says, is to be defined as “a permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishon4 His three works of fiction, The Children of Sisyphus (Kingston: Bolivar, 1974 [1964]); An Absence of Ruins (London: Hutchinson, 1967); and Die the Long Day (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1972), center on the dialectical tension between forms of unfreedom and the desire for freedom. 5 Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery (Kingston: Sangster’s, 1973), pp. 282–83.

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ored persons.”6 But even as he pursued that question of the fundamental definition of slavery, the original question of freedom forced itself into his preoccupations. It has been my objective to come to a definitive statement of the fundamental processes of slavery, to grasp its internal structure and the institutional patterns that support it. Throughout this work, however, the ghost of another concept has haunted my analysis. . . . That is the problem of freedom. Beyond the socio-historical findings is the unsettling discovery that an ideal cherished in the West beyond all others emerged as a necessary consequence of the degradation of slavery and the effort to negate it. The first men and women to struggle for freedom, the first to think of themselves as free in the only meaningful sense of the term, were freedmen. And without slavery there would have been no freedmen. We arrive at a strange and bewildering enigma: are we to esteem slavery for what it has wrought, or must we challenge our conception of freedom and the value we place upon it?7

Or as he put it at the beginning of the book that followed this one, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture: Originally, the problem I had set out to explore was the sociohistorical significance of that taken-for-granted tradition of slavery in the West. Armed with the weapons of the historical sociologist, I had gone in search of a mankilling wolf called slavery; to my dismay I kept finding the tracks of a lamb called freedom. A lamb that stared back at me, on our first furtive encounters in the foothills of the Western past, with strange, uninnocent eyes. Was I to believe that slavery was a lamb in wolf’s clothing? Not with my past. And so I changed my quarry. Finding the sociohistorical roots of freedom, understanding its nature in time and context, became my goal.8

The project of this book, then, is an attempt to show the intimate interconnection between slavery and freedom as values, and the theoretical implications that follow from this. The basic argument is that the value of freedom was historically generated out of the experience of slavery. People, he says, came to value freedom, “to construct it as a powerful shared vision of life, as a result of their experience of, and response to, slavery or its recombinant form, serfdom, in their roles as masters, slaves, and nonslaves.”9 6 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 13. 7 Ibid., pp. 341–42. 8 Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (London: I. B. Tauris, 1991), p. xiii. 9 Ibid.

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Whether or not you are persuaded by the details of Patterson’s argument there is a significant achievement here. Patterson has situated the institution and ideology of slavery in its widest possible sociohistorical context—not merely in the social history of capitalism, or of the West, but of humanity as such—and by so doing has helped to make the point that slavery anywhere cannot ever be taken as a merely marginal, local practice. So that those Jamaican slaves in Montpelier, St. James, with whom he begins his scholarly career can no longer be seen as isolated characters in a minor drama in a no-longer-consequential colony. For in his narrative they now take their place as central characters in the much larger story of the rediscovery—out of their own historical conditions— of a fundamental transhistorical human value: the value of freedom. This is the scope of Patterson’s existential humanism. There is, too, a compelling moral at work here, namely, that our most cherished and elevated ideals are often born out of our most debased institutions and practices. Patterson is an unremitting dialectician. His project has been to gift to Hegel the benefit of a professional historical sociology. The history of freedom and its handmaiden, slavery, has bruited in the open what we cannot stand to hear, that inhering in the good we defend with our lives is often the very evil we most abhor. In becoming the central value of its secular and religious life, freedom constituted the tragic, generative core of Western culture, the germ of its genius and all its grandeur, and the source of much of its perfidy and its crimes against humanity. On both the secular and religious levels, its separate elements remained yoked in continuous, creative tension within themselves, and with each other, each at once good and evil, bearing the dread mark of its birth and the glow of its possibilities.10

But it is here that Patterson unfortunately joins the chorus of voices that take the West as a sort of historical plateau. “Individually liberating, socially energizing, and culturally generative, freedom is undeniably the source of Western intellectual mastery, the engine of its extraordinary creativity, and the open secret of the triumph of Western culture, in one form or another, over the other cultures of mankind.”11 But is this uncontroversially so? Whatever the virtues of Western culture—and no doubt there are such virtues—why are these to be taken uncritically as spelling out the best form of human flourishing? Leaving aside the large question of whether we buy Patterson’s account of Western freedom, what of other virtues sheltered by other forms of life, in other traditions of human society—the virtues of courage, civic activism, social justice, or self-govern10 11

Ibid., p. 402. Ibid., p. 403.

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ment? Part of the problem with Patterson’s argument, in other words, is that while it claims to be an historical sociology what he is really doing is inscribing the story of slavery and freedom into a Universal History. This is why Thomas Holt’s The Problem of Freedom provides a useful contrast.

LIBERALISM’S SLAVE EMANCIPATION

The Problem of Freedom is constructed as an intervention in the historiography of New World slave emancipation. It is, I think, an immensely important intervention. I want to say why I think this is so, and why also, in the end, I have a doubt about the purchase of the story he tells for the postcolonial conjuncture we inhabit.12 The question that has preoccupied modern historians concerned with the issue of slavery abolition in the British Caribbean is: What prompted the timing of its occurrence? Was slavery abolition the consequence of humanitarianism (the story of the rise, in the last decade and a half of the eighteenth century, of an organized abolitionism that captured the moral imagination of the British public and forced the hand of Parliament); of economics (the story that capitalism first encouraged slavery and then, when it began to impede further development, helped to destroy it); or of slave resistance (the story that were it not for the radical agency of the slaves themselves, especially the creole slave rebellions of the first decades of the nineteenth century—Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823, and Jamaica in 1831/32—the British Parliament would not have acted when it did)? Or what combination among these, or balance between them, is responsible for the timing of freedom? There is now a multi-volume archive of important historical work that addresses itself to the professional debate over these questions.13 What interests me here, however, is not the empirical merit of one or another of these interpretive positions—how the historical evidence stacks up on one side as opposed to another—or 12

For one critical appreciation of Holt’s book that differs in some respects from mine, see Catherine Hall, review of The Problem of Freedom, by Thomas Holt, Slavery and Abolition 14 (April 1993): 229–32. 13 The literature is much too vast to list in full here. But see in particular the following: Roger Anstey, “Capitalism and Slavery: A Critique,” Economic History Review 2d ser., 21 (1968): 307–20; Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (London: Macmillan, 1986); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975); idem, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776 to 1848 (New York: Verso, 1989); and James Walvin, Questioning Slavery (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1997).

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whether (to use Collingwood’s terms) the answers provided by one or another hermeneutic constitute logically appropriate answers to their underlying questions. Rather, what interests me is what I might call the political unconscious of the problem-space in which these interpretive apparatuses operate/operated. The question for me is not who got it right but what cognitive-political demand set the discursive conditions in which the interpretative questions as such were formulated, and whether this demand continues to exercise a legitimate claim on us. This is a strategic question. It is concerned with understanding the extent to which the questions in relation to which we have fashioned our practices of criticism continue to be questions worth having new answers to in any given conjuncture. When, for instance, in the 1930s and 1940s respectively, C. L. R. James and Eric Williams challenged the hitherto hegemonic Whig story that British colonial slavery was brought down by William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, and the other “Saints” sensitizing the British conscience to the evils of plantation slavery, there was more at stake than the professional academic question of the proper weighing of the facts.14 There was a crucial cultural-politics of the contemporary colonial present at stake. Both Williams and James were, in effect, writing nationalist, anticolonial histories: Williams, a liberal-nationalist history, and James a nationalist-liberationist one.15 In other words, the critical purchase of these antihumanitarianist versions of the story of slavery abolition has depended upon an anticolonial nationalist/liberationist demand to demonstrate the falseness of Europe’s humanity (its hollow patronizing racism) and to set against that falseness the fullness and the legitimacy of the humanity of the colonized. The anticolonial story’s critical purchase has depended upon the nationalist/liberationist demand to secure the view that far from being the self-present agents of Universal History that they took themselves to be, Europe was obliged by the hitherto denied agency of the slaves themselves to accede 14

I am referring to C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York: Vintage, 1963 [1938]); and Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). For an overall view of the debate over Williams’s work, see Barbara Solow and Stanley Engerman (eds.), British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). On James’s account, he was centrally involved in Williams’s formulation of his argument. See “Interview with C. L. R. James,” in Ian Munroe and Reinhard Sander (eds.), Kas Kas: Interviews with Three Caribbean Writers (Austin: African and Afro-American Research Institute, 1972), pp. 36–37. 15 This Jamesian theme of liberationist resistance would become more prominent from the late 1960s through to the 1980s. See Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); and Richard Hart, Slaves Who Abolished Slavery, 2 vols. (Kingston: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1980/85).

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to a new history. In short, that story of resistance and heroism—of slaves making their own history—has been crucial to the self-image of the emergent new nations, the legitimacy and dignity of whose sovereignty has not had the historical privilege of self-evidence. My own suspicion, though, is that there is not much more that this particular story of resistance and agency can yield because the postcolonial present does not offer a problem-space shaped by a nationalist/liberationist demand. Holt wants to displace the centrality of these animating questions: What are the true causes of abolition? What is the appropriate weight to give to economics, humanitarianism, and slave resistance? While clearly sympathetic to the critique of Eurocentrism implied in Williams (and James, too, I imagine, though he is not named in this connection), Holt wants to redirect our attention to another issue.16 What he wants to understand is this: What forces shaped the British government policymaker’s perception of the alternatives to slavery and of how to achieve those alternatives?17 Holt is interested, then, not so much in what the causes of abolition were, as in what went into the making of emancipation; not whether freedom was taken or given, but what the ideological materials were out of which freedom was constructed. With this shift the whole shape of the kind of social history of slave emancipation available to be written alters. Essentially it enables Holt to frame a story with a different set of preoccupations—one that examines the moral and political assumptions that underpinned the design and implementation of the project of emancipation. This, in turn, enables him to link the story of slave emancipation to the much larger story of liberalism, indeed to implicate deeply the project of the one in the conceptual-institutional claims of the other. So that the story of slave emancipation has now to be read as a central episode in the story of the social and political forms of modern power. Formulated in this way the story of race and freedom that shapes liberalism’s slave emancipation can be connected to the story of race and freedom that shapes liberalism’s present. I fully endorse this move. The question for me, however, is whether the particular story of liberalism Holt tells is the most adequate one for the present we inhabit. Or, to put it another way, in displacing the animating questions of an older radical-abolitionist problematic, does Holt manage to displace the nationalist/liberationist narrative in which they were posed? 16 It is perhaps W. E. B. DuBois who is the nationalist/liberationist figure looming in the background of Holt’s narrative. 17 Holt, The Problem of Freedom, p. 28.

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The Problem of Freedom is the story of a slave emancipation conceived and delivered in liberalism’s name. The “liberal awakening”18 of the first decades of the nineteenth century and its political victory in the Reform Act of 1832 constitute the discursive space in which the formal “problem” of slave emancipation was given shape and articulated in colonialist discourse. Liberalism, in other words, provided the basic political and economic vocabulary—of rights, of individual autonomy, of interests, of the market, etc.—out of which the British colonial policymakers fashioned the Emancipation Act and imagined the transformation of a slave economy and society into a free one. Holt’s story of British slave emancipation is framed by Eric Hobsbawm’s famous concept of the “dual revolutions”—economic and political, Industrial and French—that are the defining coordinates of the long European nineteenth century.19 The “dual revolutions” constitute the defining coordinates of the new conception of “individual freedom” that emerged in this period. Holt’s concern here is to highlight the social and historical character of liberal freedom in two important senses: first, to suggest the historical novelty of the liberal idea of the individual, of a disembodied, self-possessed individual whose social relations were essentially contractual and entered into voluntarily on the basis of a rationally deduced self-interest; and second, to elaborate the internal paradox of liberal freedom that consists in the impossibility of reconciling economic and political freedoms. As Holt argues, capitalist society required for its justification formal equality in rights yet inherently generated class differences in effective rights, powers, and possessions. Freedom defined by capitalist market relations “inevitably produces unequal class relations which undermines the substantive freedom of most members of the society. On the other hand, the freedom defined by civil and political institutions—to the extent that society is democratic and egalitarian—must threaten an economic system based on inequality.”20 Consequently, he goes on, though theoretically conjoined, “the dual revolutions rushed down two separate, mutually incompatible courses: the economic demanded greater scope for individual expression; the political required greater constraint.”21 Holt’s point here is that this contradiction is constitutive of liberalism; and the history of liberalism, therefore, is the history of the unfolding of this internal contradiction. For Holt, this contradiction internal to liberalism is crucial to an understanding of British slave emancipation inasmuch as the dual revolutions 18

The phrase is Elie Hale´vy’s. See his useful history, The Liberal Awakening (1815–1830) (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1987 [1926]). 19 See Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: Mentor, 1962). 20 Holt, The Problem of Freedom, p. 6. 21 Ibid.

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constituted the discursive frame within which the freedom of the slave was conceived. This is because the fundamental problem for British colonial policymakers and planters alike was how simultaneously to free the slaves and maintain the central features of the old social, economic and political order. The several proposed emancipation schemes—those of Henry Taylor, Henry Grey, Edward Stanley, and James Stephen—tilted on this dilemma. They all, to one degree or another, defended the right of the ex-slave to formal legal equality and rights. As Holt says: All four rejected racist interpretations of slave behavior and insisted that blacks shared the basic, innate traits of other human beings, that is, that all human beings could be motivated by self-interest and the desire for selfimprovement. This was the mainspring of social action in a rationally ordered society. They were committed to laissez faire, though to differing degrees. Artificial and arbitrary constraints on the free exercise of self-interested behavior must be removed to ensure an efficient and productive economy.22

At the same time, however, since a ready supply of cheap, continuous labor was the overriding concern of the plantation economy, it was understood that essential elements of the social order and its power structure were to be maintained. “They would be free, but only after being resocialized to accept the internal discipline that ensured the survival of the existing social order. They would be free to bargain in the marketplace but not free to ignore the market. They would be free to pursue their own self-interest but not free to reject the cultural conditioning that defined what that self-interest should be. They would have opportunities for social mobility, but only after they learned their proper place. This at least was the intent of the British policymakers who framed and implemented emancipation.”23 Holt’s point I think is clear. British slave emancipation was organized around a certain economy: the problem of the extension and containment of freedom. On this account, British colonial policy toward Jamaica between 1838 and 1938 constituted a series of departures, each of which sought simultaneously to extend and to contain freedom. Of the departures that came in the wake of the labor revolt of 1938 he writes: But again, as in 1838, the policy and its ideological analogue sought to embed dependence within independence, to confine self-determination within vaguely defined, non-threatening limits. As in 1838, what was envisioned was a “freedom” drained of the power of genuine self-determination: materially, a freedom stripped of control over basic material resources; ideologically, a

22 23

Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 53.

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freedom that internalized its own antithesis. After a century-long struggle for freedom, Afro-Jamaicans confronted new forces on new terrain, yet the fundamental structure of the contest—the combatants, the ideological content and discourse—remained much the same.24

The success or failure of the liberal project of emancipation hangs on this tension. The problem of liberalism’s freedom is that the freedoms it extends are invariably limited and are moreover “drained” or “stripped” of real content. And the moral point of the story is that slavery emancipation failed and this failure was not fortuitous. To the contrary, as Holt says, this failure “was not so simple a matter as a wish by the powerful not to see it succeed, or errors of judgment or policy. Something was amiss in the very project of emancipation, in the very premises on which it was founded. And those premises appeared to be linked to its outcomes and to the extreme racism that followed in its wake in the late nineteenth century.”25 The problem of race in post-emancipation Jamaica, in other words, constitutes something of a limit to the promise of liberal freedom. For Holt, in fact, it is on the horns of race that the liberal project collapses. I have a doubt about this story. Whereas Holt has displaced the nationalist preoccupation with whether freedom was given or taken he nevertheless reproduces a story about the ultimate failure of the liberal emancipation project to confer substantive freedoms. His concern in effect is to demonstrate the failure of a liberalism that gives freedom with one hand only to take it back with the other. So that although his narrative eschews the liberal story of a steady unfolding of freedom it nevertheless treats freedom as a normative horizon. I suspect, in other words, that his narrative harbors a progressivist faith and a liberationist desire: an eschatology that envisages freedom as an overcoming, as the other side of domination, or as an end of constraining determinations.26 I am not against normative horizons per se, but I doubt whether a story about slavery emancipation told in terms of success/failure and a story about freedom told in terms of extension/containment continues to offer the kind of critical purchase our postcolonial present demands. I wonder whether the anticolonial liberationist project of reading for the failure of liberalism (or indeed of the West, more generally) continues to be the reading of the colonial past most crucial to a present in which the Marxist and nationalist languages through which counter-horizons of freedom were defined and defended are no longer the options they used to be. These languages depended upon a direction of social emancipation and a conceptualization of sovereignty 24

Ibid., p. xxv. Ibid., p. xix. 26 For some useful theoretical discussion, see Ernesto Laclau, “Beyond Emancipation,” in his Emancipation(s) (New York: Verso, 1996). 25

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which are, at least, no longer clear. On my view the postcolonial present demands a different story, one concerned less with the ideological dispute between liberalism and its adversaries and more with the illumination, in a more considered and systematic way, of the conceptual-institutional space created by the reorganizing project of modern power. This is why the Foucauldian story of “government” and its relation to modern power is useful. In his later work (as he turns his attention away from practices of modern sexuality to practices of modern politics), Foucault sketches in outline a form of power—government—that, he suggests, is intimately tied to the history of liberalism, or more properly, tied to a history of liberal political reason. The distinction is a crucial one because Foucault is not really interested in liberalism in the traditional sense of a political philosophy or a political ideology. As Graham Burchell has usefully summarized it, Foucault’s approach to liberalism “consists in analyzing it from the point of view of governmental reason, that is from the point of view of the rationality of political government as an activity rather than as an institution. On this view, liberalism is not a theory, an ideology, a juridical philosophy of individual freedom, or any particular set of policies adopted by a government.”27 Rather, it is a form of political reason, a political rationality. Foucault, in other words, is concerned to illuminate something else about liberalism besides its ideological function, something about its modes of problematization and style of reasoning and about its distinctive targets, spaces, technologies, and modalities. And what is distinctive about the political reason of liberal government is that it constitutes a form of power that utilizes a range of strategies that support the civilizing project by shaping and governing the capacities, competencies, and wills of the governed. Government, in other words, is about “the conduct of conduct.” Like Holt I want to insist that freedom cannot be understood except in relation to power. But what interests me is not whether power negates freedom or empties it of real content. What interests me is how freedom is positively shaped by power—the shaping quality of the power that comes to reconstruct, or make over, the lives of the ex-slaves. Because Foucault is interested in how power shapes conduct, how it actively creates conditions that oblige behavior, freedom cannot appear as a desideratum, as what is left when restraint (i.e., negative power) is lifted. Rather what comes to be crucial is an understanding of the emergence of freedom as a central element in practices of rule—how, in effect, freedom has 27 Graham Burchell, “Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self,” in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (eds.), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, NeoLiberalism and Rationalities of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 21.

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emerged as the condition and ground of political government, as well as an understanding of the conditions within which certain practices of freedom have been possible—those that have to do with the shaping and regulation of autonomy and free choice, with the emergence of a “responsibilized” liberty. As Nikolas Rose has put it, what is at stake in a Foucauldian understanding of liberal political reason is neither a matter of celebrating liberty (as a liberal might) nor of condeming it as an ideological fiction (as a Marxist might). What is at stake, rather, is understanding that “the freedom upon which liberal strategies of government depend, and which they instrumentalize in so many diverse ways, is no ‘natural’ property of political subjects, awaiting only the removal of constraints for it to flower forth in forms that will ensure the maximization of economic and social well-being. The practices of modern freedom have been constructed out of an arduous, haphazard and contingent concatenation of problematizations, strategies of government and techniques of regulation. This is not to say that our freedom is a sham. It is to say that the agonistic relation between liberty and government is an intrinsic part of what we have come to know as freedom.”28

REFORM AND THE GOVERNMENT OF EX-SLAVES

How, then, do we sketch the story of liberalism in post-emancipation Jamaica from the point of view of governmentality? From the perspective of a liberalism understood not as an internally contradictory social and political philosophy or ideology but as a political rationality of rule, through what kinds of concepts would one think the history of the inscription of a liberal technology of government into the politico-institutional terrain of post-emancipation Jamaica? This is what interests me. The moral-political question that confronted the construction of liberal mentalities of government consisted in this: How can a set of conditions be contrived such that the governed pursue ends that are only of value if pursued voluntarily? The liberal art of government depends, as Burchell suggests, upon the governed adopting “particular practical relations to themselves in the exercise of their freedom in appropriate ways.” It thus depends upon an ensemble of governmental institutions that oblige or promote a rational and responsible self-conduct—“the promotion in the governed population of specific techniques of the self around such questions as, for example, saving and providentialism, the acquisition of ways of performing roles like father or mother, the development of habits of 28 Nikolas Rose, “Governing ‘Advanced’ Liberal Democracies,” in Foucault and Political Reason, pp. 61–62.

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cleanliness, sobriety, fidelity, self-improvement, responsibility and so on”; in a word: reform.29 Central to the political rationality (and political vocabulary) of nineteenth-century liberalism was the project of reform. Now “reform” cannot be understood as merely the hoped-for end of liberal ideology and liberal policy, the naturalized horizon of a Universal History. It is important to detach the problem of reform from the normative liberal-progressivist narrative in which it is typically located. Reform has to be understood, rather, as central to modern power, to modern forms of political rationality. In this sense the problem of reform is connected to the construction of a certain kind of knowledge (a rationalist, universalist knowledge), a certain kind of division of social-institutional space (the secular/religious, state/civil society divisions), a certain kind of historical understanding (a teleological and progressivist history), and a certain kind of subject (a self-improving one). In other words, reform depends upon a “norm of civilization”; to put it another way, reform produces the fundamental link, internal to liberal political reason, between liberty (as individual autonomy) and social and moral progress. And in the nineteenth century, it did so in the register of “character.” As Stefan Collini has suggested (and as Richard Bellamy has explored fruitfully in relation to J. S. Mill, T. H. Green, and L. T. Hobhouse), the problem of “character” played a crucial role in Victorian political discourse.30 Character was a central issue of liberal government. As a political rationality, what reform worked on was character. Individual liberty was crucial to the liberal project not so much because of its intrinsic value but because it was understood as a necessary condition for the reforming selfimprovement of character. Understood in this way, it is not a matter of the constraints reform exercises on freedom or how much freedom is left over after reform, but what kind of freedom reform positively seeks to shape. On this view, it is not reform that is central to freedom but individual freedom that is an indispensable condition of reform, a condition of the improving project of liberal reason. Read this way, the liberal project was not so much about freedom but about reform; not so much about liberty but about improvement. Maurice Cowling, the conservative critic of liberalism’s self-image, has brought this out very nicely in his discussion of the work of J. S. Mill. As he says, the emphasis in Mill’s justification of freedom “is neither on its intrinsic goodness nor on any belief man may have in its natural rightness, but on the fact that a free individual is more likely than an unfree one to 29

Burchell, “Liberal Government,” p. 26. See Stefan Collini, “The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 35 (1985): 29–50; and Richard Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). 30

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contribute to the higher cultivation.”31 For Mill, in other words, contrary to normative readings of him (whether dismissive Marxist readings or congratulatory liberal ones), liberalism’s claim on us is not derived from the intrinsic goodness of freedom, but from the part freedom plays in what Norbert Elias would call “the civilizing process.” [Mill’s] detailed delimitation of the power of society (and government) in relation to the individual is made, not in view of the natural right of individuals to be free, but from regard to the consequence to the general interest of imposing limitations on the exercise of social pressure to conform. For natural rights Mill had as much dislike as Bentham. Pursuit of individual liberty for Mill is not by itself and without regard to its consequences, a proper end of social action. Individuals must be left as free as possible from social pressure, not because they have a right to consideration of this sort, but because, if they are not left free, society may find it more difficult than otherwise to achieve the ends for which it exists.32

And what are these “ends”? They consist in the rational cultivation of secular truths. “The demand for liberty is not the assertion of a fundamentally binding end, but the designation of a means to the end—the end of allowing men to approach as close as possible to that highest of all pleasures which comes from mental cultivation of the closest approximation possible to knowledge of what is True.”33 Reform therefore depends upon a “norm of civilization” and a division between those who are ready for citizenship and those who have to be made ready for it (blacks, women, the colonized, the working class). This is why it is no contradiction for Mill to declare in On Liberty that liberal principles only applied to “human beings in the maturity of their faculties” and therefore naturally excluded “those backward states of society in which the race itself was in its nonage.” A paternalistic despotism was appropriate for them “provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.”34 The point here, though, is not simply to dismiss Mill as a racist liberal but to grasp the political rationality at play in his argument. From the point of view of governmentality, then, the story of slave emancipation has to be the story of the putting into place the rationalities, institutions, and apparatuses of reform (in this expanded sense of the term). It ought to be the story of how the liberal project sought to alter the existing relations of power so that power would no longer operate 31

Maurice Cowling, Mill and Liberalism, 2d ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 30. 32 Ibid., p. 41. 33 Ibid., p. 42. 34 J. S. Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978 [1859]), pp. 9–10.

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(primarily) directly upon the body in the service of extraction, but would seek to operate upon character through the newly emerging space of the “social” in order to construct a “responsibilized” freedom or a rationalized self-conduct. This is not to denounce the freedom won by the slaves as a sham, insufficient, or contradictory. Rather it is to urge the writing of the history of the institutional spaces upon which that freedom depended and to write the history of the relations, conditions, discourses, and practices that have shaped modern colonial freedom. It is to write the history of an alteration in the conditions of the lives of the slaves such that they would be obliged to perform their freedom not merely in the ways they chose but in “appropriate” ways, such that they would be obliged (whether they liked it or not) to become modern, to exercise modern choices, and to acquire modern habits and tastes. This project of colonial reform itself, however, has also to be understood historically. Colonial liberalism itself, as Holt rightly argues, alters across the nineteenth century. Recall that a central episode in the story he tells about the dilemma of freedom in post-emancipation Jamaica is that episode in which there is a shift in the ideological emphasis of colonial liberalism. This is a shift away from the Glenelg doctrine of the first decade of emancipation (a nonracist, civic egalitarian liberalism) to a more authoritarian, more paternalistic liberalism of the second half of the nineteenth century. On this account, the first decade of emancipation was governed by the optimistic liberal view that the freed people were to enjoy a substantive freedom: equal protection under the law, equal access to public institutions, the exercise of the franchise on the same property basis as whites. Moreover, references—implicit or explicit—to the race of the ex-slaves were to be expunged from colonial law. However, between the end of the first decade of emancipation and the middle decades of the second, there was a noticeable shift in colonial policy away from freedom and in the direction of constraint. And this constraint is articulated in terms of race. Colonial power is directed no longer at protecting the rights of freed people but at placing obstacles in the way of black political power. Over the course of these emancipation years freed people had demonstrated a desire to be their own freeholders and they had withdrawn their labor as far as possible from the control of the plantation. They were seeking, as Holt argues, not merely to be free laborers but to be a free people. For the colonial policymakers and for the planters, however, the refusal of the freed people to submit entirely to the plantation was interpreted as a regression to “African barbarism.” As Holt writes: These years, 1844–54, constitute a transitional era in British politics, colonial policy and racial ideology; changes in all these areas stimulated new approaches to the problem of freedom. The political dimensions of that prob-

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lem for British policymakers paralleled the economic: how to reconcile freedom with coercion, or more specifically, how to structure a political system in the colonies nominally consistent with liberal democratic principles, while maintaining ultimate control over black political expression.35

This shift is crucial to the overall story because it illustrates the claims Holt wishes to make about liberalism, namely the general claim about the constant tension between liberty and constraint, and the more specific claim that the racism that comes to define the later period was no anomaly but internal to liberalism’s logic. For Holt, the crucial story about race is that black power was thwarted, blocked, constrained. Like David Goldberg in his discussion of the relation between racism and modernity, the problem of racism is framed largely in terms of power’s practice of exclusion/inclusion.36 Without denying the importance of this story I want to suggest that there is another story about race in post-emancipation that is worth telling and that has a more critical purchase on our present. This is the story of the relation between race and the rationalities of reform. In this story it is necessary to understand the following: How does reform—the relations among power, self-interest, and character—come to depend upon a discourse of race? How was race inscribed into the social formation such that it came to be central to self-fashioning in everyday life? What we need to understand is how—through what conceptual apparatuses and through what grids of social division—we have been produced (and have produced ourselves) as the sorts of raced subjects we are, with the sorts of raced self-understandings we possess. It is this story that needs to be told. This is important for our present because the contemporary postcolonial demand cannot simply be for inclusion into what colonialism has hitherto excluded us from (whether on the basis of race, class, or gender), nor can it be a matter of denouncing colonialism’s (despotic, paternalistic, racist, etc.) attitude toward us. It must be a demand to understand in more profound ways than we do the cognitive-political game of power, the mentalities of rule, and the rationalities of government into which we have historically been inserted, or in which we ourselves have—however misguidedly—sought so far to play in the free exercise of our postcolonial self-conduct. From where we stand today, the problem of freedom cannot be a problem of the more or less of it, of the extension or limiting of it, or of the illusion or truth of it. If I agree with Holt that the problem of slave emancipation in Jamaica can teach us something about the problem of freedom in the modern world, 35

Holt, The Problem of Freedom, p. 217. See David Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). 36

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that lesson is not that we have not really obtained freedom yet or that the promise of that August emancipation has been a false one. Rather it is simply that black freedom is a project, not a teleological movement in the direction of an already existing horizon. The issue today is not that we resisted colonialism or complied with it, but how the epistemological/ institutional terrain on which resistance/compliance could appear as options as such was historically constructed. The issue today is not what attitudes of liberationist defiance we have struck up, but the senses in which the language through which those attitudes were constituted and its liberationist hopes embodied are governed by the normative assumptions of modernity. To sum up, the question is, how do we think a history of the post-emancipation present, and with it the historical project of black freedom in the New World. I have not endeavored to rewrite such a history, but only to consider critically a particularly instructive telling of it—Thomas Holt’s. What has interested me in large part has been the rhetorical economy of Holt’s story of freedom, the conceptual protocols through which it is constructed—in a sense the politics of the kind of story he thinks ought to be told about post-emancipation Jamaica. What makes his story of special importance is not only its unsurpassed erudition and its deeply sympathetic narrative, but the connection he draws between the ideology of liberalism and the freedom of the ex-slaves. The importance of this connection hangs—as Holt himself well recognizes—on the relation between nineteenth-century classical liberalism and late twentieth-century neoliberalism; the connection hangs, in other words, on historicizing our present. The rhetorical thrust of Holt’s story turns on the failure of liberal freedom, the inability of liberalism to overcome its constitutive contradiction, and in particular its giving rise to and sheltering racism. As Holt tells it, the story of liberal freedom in post-emancipation Jamaica is the story of the successive embattlement of freedom with its constituent unfreedoms. I have offered the view that perhaps there is another story to be told about the problem of freedom in post-emancipation Jamaica, one about an alteration in the political rationality of colonial rule in which a new rationality comes to be inscribed into the cognitive-institutional terrain of social and political life, in which power seeks to operate through the shaping of conduct rather than the shaping of bodies. The central category of this rationality is reform. Liberal freedom does not exist outside of the project—and the constitutive apparatuses and technologies—of reform. Liberal freedom depends upon constructing a relation between government and governed that obliges individuals to become the “subjects of their lives,” obliges them to exercise a responsible self-conduct, and

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this in turn depends precisely upon the “character” that an improving reform seeks to bring into being. On this reading the story of the relation between liberal reason and racism in mid to late nineteenth-century Jamaica is not (or not only) a story about the exclusion of blacks from access to political power on the basis of “race,” but the story of the (re)organization of the rationalities, modalities, and instrumentalities through which raced subjects (and raced bodies) were constituted as such, and through which the conduct of conduct could come to articulate itself in the register of race.

Part Two HISTORIES

CHAPTER 4

Dehistoricizing History [H]istory—if we can remove this word from its metaphysical, and therefore historical, determination—does not belong primarily to time, nor to succession, nor to causality, but to community, or to being-in-common. (Jean-Luc Nancy, “Finite History”)

PROVOCATIONS

My concern in this chapter is to engage Jean-Luc Nancy’s provocation quoted above—a provocation, as I shall read it, to dehistoricize history— on the intellectual and ideological terrain of the contemporary debate about the relation between community and history in Sri Lanka.1 In so doing I wish to take issue with a prevalent way of conceiving this relation between community and history, one that makes the shape of the former dependent upon the story the latter tells about the past. The crux of my preoccupation here is with the seeming nature of this dependence. How we make a (political) determination about community today, so it is widely believed, ought to be derived from our knowledge of the nature of the pasts of such communities. The shape of the past ought to guarantee the shape of the present. Knowledge of the pasts of such communities, it has to be assumed therefore, is transparently available for translation in the present. Or to put it another way, such knowledge has, at least in principle, to be “objective” in the sense of being a mirror of what really happened in the past to which it refers. I shall argue against this view, not merely because I think it is epistemologically untenable, but, more important, because I think that the political implications of it in Sri Lanka today are unbearable. Let me begin by putting a somewhat perverse question to what is perhaps one of the best-known scholarly texts concerned with the reconstruction of the relation between community and history in Sri Lanka, 1 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Finite History,” in David Carroll (ed.), The States of “Theory”: History, Art, and Critical Discourse (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 149.

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R. A. L. H. Gunawardana’s “ ‘The People of the Lion.’ ”2 In this essay, a meticulously exhaustive exercise in historical reconstruction, Gunawardana traces the successive forms of collective identity in Sri Lanka. He moves, on the basis of a vast amount of historical data, from those most obscure beginnings when “Sinhala” (“The People of the Lion”) is but the name of the circumscribed royal kin group to the more recent past when “Sinhala” is reconstituted as the name of a “race” of people. My question is this: What if, at the end of this essay, at the end of this masterful tour de force, Gunawardana had simply and deliberately asked: But so what? What does this history really prove? How does it help us decide the question of political community in Sri Lanka today? A cunning laughter might have rippled through the sluice gate of that gesture, the low, derisive laughter of a profound and carefully laid hoax, of a scandalous, almost malicious irony. How could he, we would have asked ourselves incredulously, how could this esteemed professor of ancient and medieval Sri Lankan history, an historian so well known for his commitment to the craft, to the technologies of its muse, to its forms of narrative, to its orders of evidence, how could he, in so singular and intemperate a gesture, heap such thoughtless ridicule upon this distinguished practice of Truth? But of course Gunawardana did not append this Nietzschean question. Unlike Nietzsche, Gunawardana perhaps believes too much in history— that is to say, in History.3 Yet my point is this that the question itself—But so what?—may well have been unavailable to him, and not on account of his personal style (his judicious and always reasonable sentences), or his scrupulous attention to his discipline (the unassailable seriousness with which he treats—and trusts—the past and its essential representability). It may have been, in fact, unthinkable to him within the discursive space at hand in virtue of the configuration of a political (or anyway, a politicized) debate in which a “past” was being mobilized and deployed as the guarantee of claims about community in the present. This, in any case, is the way that I will read “ ‘The People of the Lion.’ ” I will read it as an essay framed by the horizon of questions demanded 2

R. A. L. H. Gunawardana’s “ ‘The People of the Lion’ ” has already had an astonishing career, one indeed itself worth inquiring upon. First published as “ ‘The People of the Lion’: The Sinhala Identity and Ideology in History and Historiography,” Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities 5 nos. 1, 2 (1979): 1–36; it was subsequently published as “ ‘The People of the Lion’ ”: Sinhala Consciousness in History and Historiography,” in Ethnicity and Social Change (Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 1984); and most recently with its original title in Jonathan Spencer (ed.), Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict (New York: Routledge, 1990). 3 I am thinking, of course, of the Friedrich Nietzsche of “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in his Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983 [1873/76]).

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by its own politico-discursive present. And yet each time I return to Gunawardana’s already classic text—return to it now from within the new horizon of discursive space that by its formidable labor of criticism it has made available—I imagine him asking that question—But so what?—I imagine him risking it. I imagine it because history (or History) appears to us today in Sri Lanka (but also I think more generally in this transnational age of culture) as the natural and sovereign horizon of adjudication for rival claims about community. How might we change this thought about history? How might we so alter the presuppositions by which we conventionally think community in history, the past’s authority in the present, that pasts can no longer be understood as fixed and resolute presences by which our politics of community is guaranteed? Part of such a task may well entail thinking of the present as a kind of project that involves inhabiting (to paraphrase Stuart Hall) a community without guarantees.4

HISTORICAL CRITICISM

R. A. L. H. Gunawardana’s “ ‘The People of the Lion’ ” has been our first threshold in the attempt to formulate critically the relation between history and community in Sri Lanka. But this very distinction, I submit, and the commanding place it occupies (as that text which, ever before us, has always to be acknowledged, negotiated, passed through), ought to urge us to read it and not merely to be read by it. For my purposes, I shall read “ ‘The People of the Lion’ ” as participating in a certain conception of the past’s relation to the present, a conception that Jean-Luc Nancy has characterized as “historicism.” Historicism, Nancy writes, “is in general the way of thinking that presupposes that history has always already begun, and that therefore it always merely continues. Historicism presupposes history, instead of taking it as what shall be thought.”5 This in fact will be the central thrust of my argument here, that history ought to be taken as what shall be thought. And I shall understand the “unthinkableness” of the question—But so what?—as a product of the implicit historicism of “ ‘The People of the Lion,’ ” as a product of its not selfconsciously taking history as what shall be thought, but as a self-evident, 4 See Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986): 29–45. For one very thoughtful attempt to disrupt the naturalization of community by a theoretical labor of “supplementarity,” see William Corlett, Community without Unity: A Politics of Derridean Extravagance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989). 5 Nancy, “Finite History,” p. 152.

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causally self-successive flow, the proper elucidation of which can offer assurance and secure guidance to the present. However, this will not entail on my part a reading of this remarkable essay that merely criticizes it for something like epistemological naı¨vete´, or error. We can well appreciate these antiessentialist/antifoundationalist days the theory-presumption, the theory-conceit of readings of that sort. Rather, I am concerned with another practice (and politics) of reading, namely, one that seeks to make visible the productive space of the text’s questions—that seeks to make visible the text’s problem-space. The primary concern of this practice of reading is to enable us to gauge not merely whether the text’s answers are adequate to the questions at hand, but whether these questions themselves continue to be questions worth responding to at all. In other words, the reading which I wish to undertake is concerned less with the substantive details of the text’s preoccupation (with what, to put it crudely, it is about) than with the critical formulation of the target to be aimed at. This is because what interests me more generally is the problem of strategy in its relation to the intervention of criticism. What I want to understand about any practice of criticism is not so much the adequacy of its internal cognitive apparatus, but more what its activity produces or enables in terms of opening up new discursive space. In this it will be understood that for me our critical concepts are really no more than artisanal implements (“A theory is exactly like a box of tools,” as Gilles Deleuze has said) by means of which we attempt to move “obstacles” or “blockages” and to lever open discursive space for political/intellectual work.6 Central to my reading of Gunawardana’s essay, therefore, is less the history it so masterfully accomplishes than the historiographical strategy that informs it. Consequently, the question I want to put to it is whether there is still discursive room left within its historicist problematic for the critical work of thinking community in history in Sri Lanka, or whether what appears possible within it is, while topically interesting, no more than academic. Or to put it another way, even if there is no a priori way 6

It is easy to see here the influence not only of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault but also of Richard Rorty, for all of whom theory is not the name of a General Hermeneutic, a Panoptic uncovering General Truths, but an ensemble of devices for opening up discursive space. For Deleuze and Foucault, see “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,” in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Donald F. Bouchard (ed. and trans.) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). For some of Rorty’s remarks on theory, see “Feminism and Pragmatism,” Michigan Quarterly Review 30, no. 2 (1991): pp. 231–58. See, too, Nancy Fraser’s very pointed response to some of the implications of Rorty’s argument in “From Irony to Prophecy to Politics: A Response to Richard Rorty,” Michigan Quarterly Review 30, no. 2 (1991): 259–66.

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of ruling out the critical usefulness of the kind of history that “ ‘The People of the Lion’ ” so eloquently exemplifies, there is, nevertheless, the necessity of always asking at any given conjuncture (by which I mean more the discursive conjuncture of a theoretical argument than that of a sociologically identifiable context) whether this kind of history performs the critical labor that our present demands. I shall want to suggest that in order to carry forward the political project of “ ‘The People of the Lion’ ” in the wake of the recent criticism of it, it is at least worth raising the question whether what our Sri Lankan present demands is not a dehistoricized history. Before I present that argument, however, let me first sketch out something of the problem-space of Gunawardana’s text.

HISTORICIZING HISTORY

“ ‘The People of the Lion’ ” is an intervention. It more or less explicitly announces itself as such in its opening passages. The Sinhala ideology in its contemporary form, with its associations with language, race and religion, forms an essential part of contemporary Sri Lankan culture and has succeeded in thoroughly permeating such areas of intellectual activity as creative writing, the arts, and historical writing. It is not an exaggeration to say that during the last hundred years the Sinhala ideology in its contemporary form has radically refashioned our view of our past. Since many writers assume that the Sinhala ideology in its current form has a very old history, it may be relevant to point out that even in the European languages the word race . . . dates only from about the sixteenth century and that the biological definition of the term as denoting a group distinct from other members of the species by specific physiological characteristics is of even more recent origin. In both Sinhala and Tamil, it is difficult to find a satisfactory equivalent to this word. Hence it does not seem likely that racial consciousness can be traced back very far into the past of these two linguistic groups. Thus when an author of popular historical writings speaks of the mythical Vijaya as having been anxious to find a queen “of his own Aryan race” and further states that “his pride of race revolted at the thought of any but a pure Aryan succeeding to the Government which he had striven so laboriously to found” or when academic historians writing about ancient Sri Lanka refer to “the Sinhala race,” they are all presenting a view of the past moulded by contemporary ideology.7

Here, succinctly, are the concerns of “ ‘The People of the Lion.’ ” But what is the problem-field into which it seeks to insert itself, whose as7

Gunawardana, “ ‘The People of the Lion,’ ” (1979) Version, p. 1.

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sumptions it wishes to disrupt, to undo? This is important to make explicit, as I have suggested, in order to read the theoretical unconscious of the historiographical strategy that it employs. In Gunawardana’s text this problem-field is defined in relation to the popular discursive apparatus of Sinhala ideology. I should like to argue that the propositional structure of this discursive apparatus operates at two intersecting but analytically distinguishable levels. The first is that level at which a certain kind of story about what-the-past-of-Sinhala-asa-community-really-was is constructed. The fundamental view here of course is that Sinhala consciousness—that is, the collective racial/ethnic awareness of a singular identity or community—is immemorial and continuous. This continuity, as we know, is constructed through those foundational narratives (of Vijaya’s inauguration of an authentic community; of the Buddha’s bestowal upon that community of a permanent benediction as the true island of his dhamma; of the rise of Anuradhapura as the site of civilization; of Dutuga¨munu’s heroism against the Tamil King, Ela¯ra, and so on) that mark out the epic of a community which, in a certain sense, comes before history, and that enters it, when it does, under constant threat from “invaders” to the north and through cycles of loss and restoration. The second level of the propositional structure of this apparatus is the register in which a certain notion of the relation between that history of Sinhala-as-a-community and the present as an opening of political options for the construction (or invention) of community is articulated. It is central to the apparatus of Sinhala ideology that the idea of the historical continuity of an inaugural and authentic community informs and indeed serves to guarantee the legitimacy of political claims in the present. The point here is the obvious one (though, I think, one not sufficiently attended to) that the ideological construction of the past is not an academic exercise on the part of Sinhala nationalists, but is a structure of representations inserted into a political project. That is to say, it is in virtue of that past—its identifiability, its representability, its age, its beleagueredness—that the privileged claim to priority in the institutional apparatus of the nation-state is to be judged not only plausible and creditable, but persuasive. My argument shall be that the historiographical strategy of “ ‘The People of the Lion’ ” consists in formulating as its target the first of these levels of proposition (i.e., the continuity argument), but not the second. And I shall argue, moreover, that by so doing (by not, in effect, explicitly uncoupling the historical problem of what the past was from the political problem of the legitimacy of present claims about community) it leaves itself vulnerable to both historicist criticism and academic recuperation.

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In the 1970s the urgent labor of historical critique—or of history deployed as a mode of ideology-critique—was mobilized by concerned Sri Lankan scholars in relation to this formidable discursive structure of Sinhala ideology. The immediate political-intellectual problem at hand was the demystification of the Sinhala past, to intervene in such a way as to win the terrain of the reconstruction of that past away from ideologues and chauvinists who perpetuate myths about the past, and to establish the terms for a rational-historical discourse based on the professional examination of the relevant evidence. It was a concern to call into being, as it were, what Habermas might call a sphere of rational-critical debate that would inform contemporary public opinion and perhaps even the contemporary political process itself.8 This project of a rational historiography, of a public and secular intellectual discourse guided by the reasoned assessment of the “facts”—rather than by “myths”—was central to the task undertaken by the newly formed Social Scientists’ Association (SSA, a forum for broadly Left intellectual discussion) in the seminar they organized in December 1979 around the theme: “Nationality Problems in Sri Lanka.” (The very formulation of the theme is perhaps itself suggestive of the crisis of the Left, of theory grappling with its own inadequacy, endeavoring to reinvent itself in a vocabulary with which to think the new destabilizing object of “ethnicity.”) The cogency of the dilemma—to gain a threshold of critical historical reason in a time of unreason—was poignantly captured by the editors of a volume of essays, Ethnicity and Social Change, that eventually (in 1984) brought the seminar contributions together: Discussion of ethnic or nationality problems in Sri Lanka, particularly the relationship between the Sinhala and Tamil communities has always been charged more with fervour than with intellectual analysis. Emotional bias has been more in evidence than a correct interpretation and analysis of the problem. It was against this background that the SSA organised this seminar. It was significant and indeed path breaking in that it was the first occasion on which Sinhala and Tamil intellectuals had gathered together to discuss and analyze some aspects of the social, economic and ideological roots of the continuing ethnic conflict.

Moreover, in the wake of the violence in July 1983, the editors went on to say: We have now seen that the ideological and economic forces behind ethnic conflict can lead to savagery that puts in question the very civilizations we 8

For an account of the rise and decline of such a sphere in European history, see Ju¨rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Burger (trans.) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).

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call ourselves heirs to. It is our hope that the papers in this volume will at least force some of the exponents of Sinhala and Tamil nationalism to look more closely at the myths, misinterpretations and misunderstandings that have nourished their ideologies.9

The volume’s task was perhaps most pointedly carried out in (besides Gunawardana’s essay, to which I turn in a moment) Senake Bandaranayake’s concern to “disestablish” the “cultural structures of communalism” and to erect in their place a “modern scientific consciousness in matters of history and ethnicity”; in W. I. Siriweera’s endeavor to show that the “Mahavamsa-Pujavali tradition” has to be understood in relation to the historical contexts in which these texts were written; in Kumari Jayawardena’s argument that communalism’s “ethnic” autobiography has to be read, as it were, symptomatically, that is against the grain of its own elision of class; and in Charles Abeysekere’s demonstration that certain Sinhala claims—such as the claim that minority ethnic groups are disproportionately represented in the higher state services—are empirically unfounded. A certain conception—and expectation—of history emerges in this volume, namely the conception that history consists in the objective representation of what actually happened in the past, and the expectation that such a representation of the past would lay to rest the falsehoods put about by chauvinists and allow us to arrive more rationally at a design for the present. Now, if the discourse of Sinhala nationalism turns on the notion of an immemorial identity, a continuous authentic identity, then “ ‘The People of the Lion’ ” is the most timely and formidable of possible interventions. This is because of the extraordinary comprehensiveness of its historical critique. Taking the entire historical record of Sri Lanka as the object of its inquiry, it sets out to be no less than a thoroughly exhaustive response to the claim to a continuous Sinhala identity. Its target therefore is the actual core of the Sinhala chauvinist argument. What the essay persuasively demonstrates, through the patient reconstruction it undertakes, is precisely that Sinhala history, like all history perhaps, moves not by continuities but by a play of breaks and discontinuities, and that the forms of collective identity that emerge within any moment of its movements are not natural but constructed. What Gunawardana effectively demonstrates, in short, is that Sinhala is always-already the proper name of a signifying category and therefore always-already within quotation marks. It is easy to see the theoretical purchase that Gunawardana’s brilliantly conceived essay enables for those of us who would argue against the view 9 The quotations are from the unpaginated introduction of Ethnicity and Social Change (Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 1984).

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that Sinhala identity is primordial, and for the modernity—the colonial modernity—of Sinhala nationalism. This essay, more than any other, enables us to gain the threshold of a rational historiography of the Sinhala past. Gunawardana, here as ever the historian’s historian, relieves us of our anxiety about the past of “Sinhala.” Not only is that past rationally reconstructible within the ordered prose of professional history but the evidence assembled pointedly demonstrates that history is, as it were, on our side. Indeed, “ ‘The People of the Lion’ ” completely refigures the terrain of possible intellectual debate about history and community in Sri Lanka. Henceforth, everything else has to be written, so to say, in its wake, in (or at least in relation to) the critical discursive space it has levered open. “ ‘The People of the Lion’ ” can now operate more or less implicitly as the master-text, its absent presence merely signaled from time to time to indicate the general coordinates of our own perhaps differently engaged but nevertheless affiliated critical moves. This theoretical purchase, however, like every theoretical purchase I would argue, is bought at a price. This seems to me hardly something to despair about, though, for if we openly embrace—as I believe we should—the discursive and therefore always positioned character of historical narrative, of writing (if we agree with Foucault in effect that truth is but a thing of this world),10 then we should simply give up the consoling idea that there is really an intervention that can be thought of as putting into place once and for all a guaranteeable strategy. “ ‘The People of the Lion’ ” eventually pays the price for the historicism that undergirds its strategy, the very historicism that had been its enabling conceptual handle in displacing the misrepresentations of Sinhala ideology in the first place. The text’s strategy entails the assumption that if its reconstruction is correct, if it gets its history right, the nationalist claim is destroyed, for that claim stands or falls (or so the discourse of rational historiography assumes) on the validity of its representation of the past. This is its wager, and so far it has been an eminently productive one. However, performed as it is on the terrain of a notion of history in which what is at stake is a 10 “The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth is not the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regimes of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.” Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972– 1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 131.

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correct representation of a succession of social facts, it invited precisely the kind of criticism recently leveled against it by K. N. O. Dharmadasa. Dharmadasa has argued essentially that Gunawardana has gotten his history wrong.11 Now, suddenly, the productive—that is, politico-critical—use of “ ‘The People of the Lion’ ” is cast into doubt. Suddenly a fresh set of daunting questions seem to present themselves, questions about adequate data, sound scholarship, sources of evidence, strategies of reading, etc. Suddenly we seem on the verge of collapsing into an academic argument about which of the two has actually gotten the Sinhala past right, and even whether there is some room for reconciliation between them. Politically speaking, of course, these are bad omens. What Dharmadasa’s response unwittingly achieves—through no foresight of his own—is to change the terrain on which the “past” can be mobilized as critique, and with that the critical yield of “ ‘The People of the Lion.’ ”12 Now history, a rational, representable succession, is not so much confronted with its Other—legend, myth, superstition—as merely with a different, indeed rival, position within its own discursive field of historicist history. It is useful to recall here another remark of Nancy’s: [A]s Nietzsche already knew, the more history becomes a broad and rich knowledge, the less we know what “history” means, even if historical knowledge is also an excellent critical and political tool in the fight against ideological representations and their power. It does not, however, at the same time allow for the possibility of a radical questioning of the representation—and/ or the presentation—of history as such. And, therefore, this word runs the risk either of silently keeping a kind of para- or post-Hegelian meaning or slowly returning to the Greek meaning of historia: the collection of data.13

In my view, with Dharmadasa’s intervention, we are at another crucial juncture in the discussion of history and community in Sri Lanka. And for a political criticism of Sinhala nationalism the stakes are of some moment. This is because what becomes important at this point in addressing the strategic question of formulating an adequate response to Dharmadasa is whether to proceed along the already marked out historicist path, or to pursue some other, as yet undesignated one. 11 K. N. O. Dharmadasa, “ ‘The People of the Lion’: Ethnic Identity, Ideology and Historical Revisionism in Comtemporary Sri Lanka,” Ethnic Studies Report 10, no. 1 (1992): 37– 59, and in Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities 15, nos. 1, 2 (1992): pp. 1–35. 12 I think this is so, its belatedness notwithstanding. The essay comes more than a decade after the first publication of the text it criticizes. For an account of the reasons for this, see Dharmadasa’s note in “ ‘The People of the Lion’ ” Ethnic Studies Report, p. 56. 13 Nancy, “Finite History,” pp. 152–53.

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DEHISTORICIZING HISTORY

The paradox of proceeding along the historicist path and of trying to reconcile at this juncture the objective of an antinationalist critique with the kind of history “ ‘The People of the Lion’ ” employs becomes evident if I ask another question, one even more perverse perhaps than that with which I started: What if Gunawardana had now to concede to Dharmadasa or to someone else for that matter, on the rational terrain of the “facts” themselves that constitute the agreed-upon site of dispute, on the basis of newly discovered inscriptions, say, that provided irrefutable evidence of a continuous Sinhala identity from the dawn of historical time to the present? What then? Inasmuch as on the approved notion of history the past is a “storage closet where all the costumes are kept” (in Nietzsche’s well-known image in Beyond Good and Evil) that merely provides the fitted suits that guarantee the present, then of course it would mean Gunawardana’s granting the claims of Sinhala ideology. Such, it seems to me, is the logic of rational historiography. Needless to say, Gunawardana would strongly renounce any such reading. But my point is that what we can now more clearly discern in virtue of the altered conditions of reading produced by Dharmadasa’s intervention is that rather than disclaiming the game itself, and with it its rules of formation and validity claims, Gunawardana’s move is played out within the same language-game of history—or historicism—as that of his intellectual adversaries. Because what it grants—implicitly, of course—is that there is, in principle, a natural or necessary link between past identities and the legitimacy of present political claims. It grants in principle that consciousness can have an “age,” reiterable or changeable across the selfsuccession of time. It grants in principle that a politics of the present can be wagered on a reconstruction of what community might have been in the past. Gunawardana’s effort in this wager is not to refute the nationalists on the ground of their assumptions about what it is history is supposed to guarantee politically, but only to say that the nationalists have gotten their history wrong, and therefore that their political claims are untenable. In effect then, for Gunawardana no less than for his adversaries, history is a constant flow from the past, from before, heading somewhere: it has always-already begun. And therefore, history is such that one can gauge the direction of this flow and measure its pace, intensity, and volume; history is something about which one could calculate, or, disastrously, miscalculate, as though one could thereby be confirmed in one’s community or else be betrayed in it, by history. But perhaps Gunawardana is not alone in this. Perhaps many of us who have been trying to think about contemporary Sri Lanka have been

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playing the same game of “historicism,” repeating with it the modernist dream, so naturalized since Hegel, so politically correct since Marx, that history can somehow redeem us, save us from ourselves.14 And perhaps it is now time to rethink this dream and with it those consoling stories that endlessly evoke for us the absent stages of the coming-into-being of our presence. I want it to be unambiguously clear that my argument here is not that historicist conceptions of history are always irrelevant to the strategic problem of disarming nationalist discourse. My argument has rather to do with the question how to gauge in the conjuncture at hand what kind of historiographical strategy will be most adequate to the target to be addressed. The brilliance of Gunawardana’s essay lies precisely in its untimely timeliness (to continue interrupting him with Nietzsche), in its precise assessment of the immediate task of intervention, of the object to be unmasked. And the point is that Dharmadasa’s criticism only has force if we continue within the discursive field of historicist questions: the whatis-the-real-truth-of-Sinhala-history sorts of questions. On my view there is little or no “cash-value” (as Richard Rorty might cynically have put it) in seeking to decide who is right and who is not in this dispute.15 Therefore, on the view I wish to commend, a “response” to Dharmadasa ought to take the form of changing, not the answer to a question already presupposed in which what history is is self-evident, but rather of changing, the question itself and with it the problematic in which what history can be in a discourse about community in Sri Lanka’s present can itself be rethought. Because what is signaled by the availability of Dharmadasa’s response, if nothing else, is that there is very little if any discursive room left within the historicist problematic at the present juncture for a labor of antichauvinist critique. It should be evident now that what I have been trying to suggest is that had Gunawardana, at the end of “ ‘The People of the Lion,’ ” said to the nationalists, in effect, “But so what?” what it would have signaled is not merely that the accurate reconstruction of the past of Sinhala identity is perhaps really not the crucial point after all, but, more important, it would have disconnected the story of the past from the politics of the 14

I am reminded here of Hayden White’s fine reading of Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981) itself a seminal work in Marxist cultural theory, and whose memorable opening sentence is the imperative: “Always historicize!” (p. 9). See White’s “Getting Out of History: Jameson’s Redemption of Narrative,” in his The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 15 In fact, in Gunawardana’s own response (written and published after the original version of this chapter was published) he argues just this. See his Historiography in a Time of Ethnic Conflict: Construction of the Past in Contemporary Sri Lanka (Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 1995).

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present and thus made itself invulnerable to historicist criticism. Moreover by so doing, it would have served to indicate that the political task of theoretical intervention is to refuse to be governed by the questions of one’s adversaries, that the task in fact is to will, perhaps even to risk changing the problematic in which those questions have appeared to us natural, legitimate, or even imperative. For this might have made it possible to refuse history its subjectivity, its constancy, its eternity; to think it otherwise than as the past’s hold over the present, to interrupt its seemingly irrepressible succession, causality, its sovereign claim to determinacy. For in this thought a different possibility of community might have been made visible—community as a project. Community, to quote Nancy one last time, “is not historical as if it were a permanently changing subject within . . . a permanently flowing time. . . . But history is community, that is, the happening of a certain space of time—as a certain spacing of time, which is the spacing of a ‘we.’ ”16 Here, perhaps, is a provocation that would be useful to think with, and not as the penultimate gesture in an overcoming, a getting beyond, so much as the initial move in what needs to be an extended elaboration. What the configuration of that discourse of community might be (and no doubt it will have to be one in which the political forms of being-incommon—those of obligation, of friendship, of citizenship—are reformulated) is not entirely clear. (I take up some aspects of it in chapter 7.) All I have sought to sketch here is the thought through which “ ‘The People of the Lion’ ” has brought us to the point at which we cannot refuse its urgency.

16

Nancy, “Finite History,” pp. 161–62.

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“An Obscure Miracle of Connection” in december to about april every year, a drought visits the islands. the green canefields take on the golden deciduous crispness of scorched parchment. the blue sky burns muted. it is our tropical winter. this dryness, unexplained, is put down to “lack of rain.” but living in st lucia at this time, i watched this drought drift in towards the island, moving in across from the east, obscuring sails beating towards castries and i suddenly realized that what i was witnessing—that milky haze, that sense of dryness—was something i had seen and felt before in ghana. it was the seasonal dustcloud drifting out of the great ocean of sahara— the harmattan. by an obscure miracle of connection, this arab’s nomad wind, cracker of fante wood a thousand miles away, did not die on the sea-shore of west africa, its continental limit; it drifted on, reaching the new world archipelago to create our drought, imposing an african season on the caribbean sea. and it was these winds too, and in this season, that the slave ships came from guinea, bearing my ancestors to this other land. . . .

“THIS OTHER LAND”

These inimitable sentences are, recognizably, Kamau Brathwaite’s.1 They are, to my mind, among the most movingly evocative sentences in black diaspora writing. For what they summon up so vividly is something of the quality of a black diasporic form of belonging. I read them in fact as 1 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature,” in Sidney Mintz (ed.), Slavery, Colonialism, and Racism (New York: Norton, 1974); also collected in Kamau Brathwaite, Roots (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). I will be quoting from this latter edition.

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offering to us the vision of a very special kind of community: the community of those for whom “Slavery” is the permanent name of a trial and tribulation which they are yet to overcome, and “Africa” the name of a difference, of a refusal, and therefore of a horizon of hopes at once moral and historical, aesthetic and political. But I have a certain doubt. It is not about Brathwaite’s vision itself, which I inhabit, but about the analytical procedures through which—in his cultural-critical work most particularly—he feels urged to guarantee it. For a long time now Brathwaite has been a sharp critic of the view that the African presence in the Caribbean is a negligible or unimportant one. To the contrary, as the above passages so richly suggest, he has been concerned to urge the view that the trace of Africa in the Caribbean is in fact an indelible, if sometimes obscure, one. What we have to know, he seems to be saying, is how to read the evidence of those traces in the cultural materials at hand. In what Brathwaite calls the “anti-African view” (and where the anglophone Caribbean is concerned, he has in mind people like the late M. G. Smith and Orlando Patterson),2 the Middle Passage is held to have destroyed the culture of the African slaves; indeed it is understood to have been “such a catastrophic, definitive experience that none of those transported during the period from 1540 to 1840 escaped trauma.” And this trauma erased any semblance—certainly any meaningful semblance—of distinctively African practice. In Brathwaite’s view, however, modern anthropological scholarship of the African diaspora, in particular that version of Boasian anthropology inaugurated by Melville J. Herskovits, has conclusively shown that this is not the case, that in fact “African culture not only crossed the Atlantic, it crossed, survived, and creatively adapted itself to its new environment.” Therefore, even if Caribbean culture is not to be understood as somehow “pure African” it is, nevertheless, to be thought of as “an adaptation carried out mainly in terms of African tradition.”3 I disagree with this claim. Or anyway, I disagree with it insofar as it purports to be an anthropologically authorized claim. I have elsewhere elaborated my disagreement with the cultural anthropology that grounds this authorization of the African presence in the New World and will not repeat that argument in its entirety here.4 For present purposes, however, suffice it to say the following: The anthropology of the African diaspora has been largely verificationist in its epistemology. By this I mean to say 2 See, for example, M. G. Smith, “The African Heritage in the Caribbean,” in Vera Rubin (ed.), Caribbean Studies: A Symposium (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1960); and Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery (Kingston: Sangster, 1973). 3 Brathwaite, “The African Presence,” p. 192. 4 See David Scott, “That Event, This Memory: Notes on the Anthropology of African Diasporas in the New World,” Diaspora, 1, no. 3 (1991): 261–84.

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that it has been concerned, whether implicitly or explicitly, to answer such questions as whether or not or to what extent Caribbean culture is authentically African; and whether or not or to what extent Caribbean peoples have retained an authentic memory of their past, in particular a memory of slavery. My argument has been that this verificationist paradigm is compelling only insofar as, on the one hand, you accept its conceptual premise, namely that pasts are such as can be identified in their authenticity and represented in their transparency; and, on the other, that you share the ideological assumption that the special task of an anthropology of peoples of African descent in the New World consists in providing the theoretical and methodological apparatus for corroborating such pasts in the present. I have indicated that I neither accept the one nor share the other, and in consequence I have urged that the anthropology of the African diaspora (insofar as there is to be one) give up altogether the ideological desire to supply a foundational past and the sustained epistemological preoccupation with verification and corroboration that depends for its plausibility upon the seeming oppositional virtue of that desire. (Indeed, my object here is to raise a suspicion about precisely this virtue.) Such an anthropology, I argue, ought rather to concern itself with a different conceptual enterprise, namely that of describing the tradition of cognitive-ideological discourse and social-institutional practice in which “Africa” and “Slavery” participate as animating, constitutive figures; the situated network of power and knowledge in which these figures are mobilized and deployed; and the sorts of moral identities they serve to fashion. Note the nature of the delimitation. I do not aim to end anthropology, only to insist that a critical anthropology of the African diaspora has to be constituted through a close attention to the history of its own categories and to the extent to which it assumes their transparency. Part of what I am after here more generally is disabusing anthropology of the moral purchase it claims (or which is claimed for it) in virtue of its supposed relation to culture. On my view, therefore, that anthropology to which Brathwaite appeals cannot do the kind of cognitive or conceptual work that he wants it to do; it cannot provide the justificatory or second-order backup that he thinks is necessary to support his case against the anti-African view. However, this is not to say that in my view Brathwaite ought then to give up that vision in which Africa and Slavery operate as central, indeed as generative tropes in the narrative of an Afro-Caribbean tradition. Nor does it follow that in the end I agree with the anti-African view that the presence of Africa in the Caribbean is too attenuated to be discernible. My point in fact will be a quite different one, namely, that both these views (the one that seeks empirically to confirm continuity with Africa and the one that seeks empirically to deny or disconfirm it) share or at

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least depend upon a single epistemic-ideological problem-space, one defined by the historically conditioned salience of the tension between the (very often racist) liberal-rationalist and the (very often emancipatory) cultural-nationalist construction (or, following V. Y. Mudimbe, “invention”) of Africa as an object of dispute.5 To my mind, however, it is not in Brathwaite’s seeming allegiance to the sympathetic science of anthropology that the contemporary significance of his work is to be found. What is crucial about Brathwaite’s preoccupation with that “african season on the caribbean sea,” in my view, is precisely that he is not primarily trying to make a specifically anthropological point. His project is not the demonstration in itself of the African origins of—or African retentions in—the cultural discourses and practices of Caribbean peoples.6 True, he has written a brilliant introduction to the Doubleday edition of Melville Herskovits’s Life in a Haitian Valley, but this is not because they share the same intellectual project or the same ideological location.7 Herskovits was concerned to demonstrate anthropologically (that is, within and through the protocols of an empiricist science of culture) that there are measurable cultural continuities between Africa and the New World.8 Though obviously located within a contested conceptual-ideological domain, the point of the project—its thrust and its impetus—was principally constituted through the formation of a disciplinary object.9 In Brathwaite’s project, by contrast, the primary stakes are not disciplinary but turn rather on the elaboration of a cultural-politics of identity\difference. Citing (or producing) the “African” character of a discourse or practice is never the terminus for Brathwaite’s investigations; these investigations are, so to put it, always on their way elsewhere, always folded into another project, namely the normative imagining of a moral-political vision of black diasporic community. As a cultural critic, 5 I am alluding, of course, to V. Y. Mudimbe’s well-known book, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 6 Compare Brathwaite’s project in this regard with, for example, Mervyn Alleyne’s Roots of Jamaican Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1989). The problem with this book is not its undoubted erudition, but that its intellectual horizon is defined by the question whether or not Jamaican culture is African. In general I wish to urge that—insofar as we speak as cultural critics—we give up all such originary questions. 7 See also Edward Brathwaite, “The Contribution of M. J. Herskovits to Afro-American Studies,” ASAWI Bulletin 5 (Dec. 1972): 85–94. 8 I do not wish to deny that disciplinary practices can themselves be read for their cultural-politics. I only want to emphasize what should be obvious, namely that the stakes involved in those politics are largely—if not entirely—professional ones. 9 For a discussion of Herskovits, see Scott, “That Event, This Memory.” See also Walter Jackson, “Melville Herskovits and the Search for Afro-American Culture,” in G. W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).

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Brathwaite’s work is not about the past as such but the present. This is why he is not so much concerned to track down origins for their own sake but to join history to a notion of “tradition,” where tradition is understood as what generates, what provides (as Brathwaite will say) the sources and the “dynamo” of our historical and expressive imaginary. Herskovits is important to him, therefore, insofar as his anthropology provides a way of epistemologically grounding this cultural-political project. Or so anyway I will read him. It will be my contention that it is really the cultural-political project rather than the anthropological guarantees that is important to his work. The principal question for me, therefore, is the strategic—not the epistemological—one. I am not concerned to read Brathwaite’s anthropologically grounded black cultural nationalism as theoretical error. This is not only because I believe that to be a spurious category, but because the question of this Truth-ground is immaterial to what I take to be the moral-political significance of his practice of criticism. I want to argue that as West Indian critics we now stand in the politico-epistemic space made possible by Brathwaite’s cultural-critical interventions. I want to suggest that these interventions opened up discursive space for a certain kind of critique—a radical cultural-nationalist critique—of Eurocentrism and for the construction of a practice of criticism from within. Brathwaite’s work constitutes one of our conditions of possibility for the kind of moral criticism I wish to endorse. The critical task for those of us who think and write in the wake of his work, therefore, is to pass through and re-position his thought in relation to the distinctive demand of our present. This is not a matter of either getting beyond that thought or dispensing with it; nor is it a matter of simply (that is, uncritically) reproducing all of its assumptions. It is a matter rather of deploying that work as the basis of simultaneously continuing an ongoing argument about black criticism and tradition, and reformulating the demand of the present in relation to which that argument is organized and undertaken. What I am undertaking here is a contribution to this effort. I propose to do the following: first I want to reconstruct/redescribe the emergence of a concept of “tradition” in Brathwaite’s early cultural-critical essays. I want to read this concept as Brathwaite’s attempt to formulate a response to a specific conceptual-ideological problem-space. This response, a cultural-nationalist one, is now in crisis and can perhaps no longer perform the critical labor for which it was formulated in the anticolonial and immediate postcolonial period in the anglophone Caribbean. Second, I want to examine one very interesting recent attempt to reformulate the concept of a tradition that seeks to get out of the cultural-nationalist dependence

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on a racial essentialism, namely, Paul Gilroy’s. Part of what is significant about Gilroy’s work is its attempt to meet the contemporary demand for a black diaspora criticism that neither homogenizes blackness nor empties it of a politics of identity\difference. Third, disagreeing with some central aspects of Gilroy’s formulation of the concept of a tradition, I shall endeavor to provide a somewhat different formulation that answers more effectively the demand of a black diaspora criticism, and one into which I will urge that we fold the critical project of Kamau Brathwaite.

“A SUFFICIENT SWEETNESS OF MATURITY”

Between 1957 and 1969 Brathwaite wrote and published a number of cultural-critical essays that, together, sought to remap the relations among cultural-aesthetic production, community, and history in the anglophone Caribbean.10 The problem-space into which these texts were inserted was a profoundly complicated and multifaceted one. But for my purposes here I want to highlight two aspects that will enable us to grasp both the yield and the limit of Brathwaite’s critical exercise. The important thing, I want to argue, is to understand Brathwaite’s formulation, within the problemspace at hand, of the demand of a black diasporic criticism. In the first place, this problem-space was defined conceptually through the hegemony of a Eurocentric or colonialist construction of the “AfroCaribbean.” The now familiar figure of the New World African as bereft of authentic sources of history and culture and as parasitic on Europe scarcely requires recapitulating. The point here is that the rationalist historiography through which this normalizing narrative was produced set the epistemic terrain of the debate about the sources of Afro-Caribbean culture. If you wanted to enter this debate—to make, for example, a counter-claim about identity—you were virtually obliged to provide the counter-evidence (the historical and ethnographic evidence) to demonstrate that as a people your cultural sources were not (or not only) European ones. This is why Herskovitsian anthropology became so important to cultural-nationalist black diasporic discourse in the 1960s and 1970s.11 It made it possible to offer an answer, within the terrain of positive (i.e., scientific) evidence, to the Eurocentric rationalist claim that Afro-Caribbeans were a people without history and therefore a people without culture. 10

For a comprehensive bibliography of Brathwaite’s work, see Doris Brathwaite, EKB: His Published Prose and Poetry, 1948–1986 (Kingston: Savacou, 1986). 11 It ought to be remembered that The Myth of the Negro Past, first published in 1941 and out of print for many years, was reissued in 1958. For some useful remarks, see Sidney Mintz, “Introduction” to the 1990 Beacon Press edition of Myth.

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In the second place, the problem-space into which Brathwaite’s work entered was characterized ideologically by a broad swell of cultural and political upheaval in the English-speaking Caribbean, in the black diaspora, and indeed in the Third World generally. They were years of constitutional decolonization in the British Empire (especially of Ghana in 1957), of the Bandung Conference in 1955, and of the first International Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956. This was also the period of the rise of the civil rights and subsequently Black Power movements in the United States. They were years, too, however, when it was already clear what kind of sovereignty political independence would bring and what kinds of cultural and political values would drive the new postcolonial states. The British Guiana crisis in 1953, the rise and fall of the idea of a West Indian Federation between 1948 and 1962, and the violent repression of Rastafarians in Jamaica in the late 50s and early 60s offered tangible evidence that the authoritarian Eurocentric values of the old colonial order would persist into the postcolonial (or neocolonial) period.12 In Cheddi Jagan’s very vivid phrase, the West would have to be put “on trial.”13 And one of the sites of this “trial” of the West in the Caribbean was that body of creative writing that began to emerge across the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Much of this writing sought to question the cultural values of the emerging order, to try to bring other— subaltern—voices into the field of the political. (One thinks of the novels of Roger Mais, Neville Dawes, Wilson Harris, and George Lamming; the poetry of Martin Carter, Louise Bennett, and Derek Walcott; and the art of Aubrey Williams.) These artists, moreover, were concerned to think critically and self-consciously about the relation between the artist and community, between the artist and his or her sources of cultural/aesthetic/ political value. It is this debate that Brathwaite joins just prior to his return to the Caribbean in 1962 from an eight-year sojourn in Ghana.14 Brathwaite’s point of departure in his seminal essay in West Indian literary-cultural criticism, “Sir Galahad and the Islands” (which first appeared in 1957), is what he calls the West Indian writer’s awareness of the “cultural poverty” out of which s/he writes.15 In the work of these writers 12

For details, see Gordon K. Lewis, The Growth of the Modern West Indies (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968). 13 The West on Trial: The Fight for Guyana’s Freedom was the title of Cheddi Jagan’s autobiographical account of the trauma of decolonization in Guyana. It was first published in London by Michael Joseph in 1966. 14 See Brathwaite, “Timehri,” in Orde Coombs (ed.), Is Massa Day Dead: Black Moods in the Caribbean (New York: Anchor Books, 1974). For an extended and unsurpassed discussion of Brathwaite’s work, see Gordon Rohlehr, Pathfinder: Black Awakening in the Arrivants of Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Tunapuna: Gordon Rohlehr, 1981). 15 Kamau Brathwaite, “Sir Galahad and the Islands,” in Roots, pp. 7–27 (originally published in Bim 25 [July–Dec. 1957]: 8–16).

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Brathwaite finds two sorts of response to this condition, neither of which is satisfactory. On the one hand he finds that in novelists like Roger Mais and poets like Derek Walcott this sense of cultural poverty imposes an “impassioned hopelessness.” This is contrasted on the other hand with the poet E. M. Roach, who, Brathwaite says, is not content with hopelessness. And this more positive assessment, he argues, is on account of the “heritage” this poet claims as the source of his creative writing. Roach, Brathwaite writes, is “in possession of a fact, a feeling, that aligns him with folk, with peasant tradition.”16 This contrast urges Brathwaite to formulate a more general and more profound question, namely, whether West Indian society can produce enough writers “with talent and insight to use folk material creatively,” not in the superficial way of mere reportage, but, as he says, with “a sufficient sweetness of maturity to establish a tradition.”17 Here is the preoccupation of Brathwaite’s that I want to mark and concern myself with—the desire for a mature sense of a living, embracing, generative tradition. For Brathwaite it is not merely a matter of the appearance on our horizon of a few remarkable individual talents, of an artist with a notable gift; it is a matter of community, of those sustaining sources and resources that are the context in which the virtues of what is called talent are themselves defined. He continues: “We could not do without the poetry of Derek Walcott, honest and unflinching testimony as it is of our condition; but his position forces the recognition upon us that individual talent is not enough. On the other hand, we recognize that Roach, the folk writer, if he is to develop the richness and the promise which is his, needs not luck, but the whole living support of an indigenous tradition.”18 This is the central animating theme of Brathwaite’s essays in these years. In his next major essay, “Roots,” published in 1963, this thematic question of the relation between talent and tradition is significantly amplified.19 Here Brathwaite writes: Whichever way we put the question we find ourselves up against the same inescapable fact of the “individual talent” and the realization that talent can do little more than describe the society from which it emerges with help from the tradition into which it is borne. If the society is “whole”; if, that is, it is working on its own cultural and spiritual dynamo, it will be only reasonable to expect talent which reflects this. If by a tradition we mean a living, acceptable, recognizable force, a body of achievement to which both the artist and his public can refer, then we can expect the artist to “use” his tradition and 16

Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 17. 18 Ibid., p. 19. 19 Kamau Brathwaite, “Roots,” Roots, pp. 28–54 (originally published in Bim 37 [July– Dec. 1963]: 10–21). 17

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be “used” by it. No novelist, no writer—no artist—can maintain a meaningful flow of work without reference to his society and its tradition. That is why, perhaps, we find the “rejected” West Indian writer an eccentric at home and an exile abroad; in both cases, working from an ex-centric position.20

It is this sense of a living ensemble of references that provide both the background of intelligibility, and the working sources of aesthetic excellence and moral purpose, that is missing in West Indian writing—or more exactly, missing from Afro–West Indian writing. For interestingly enough, this sense is discernible in East Indian West Indian writing. In the early work of V. S. Naipaul, most particularly in A House for Mr Biswas, Brathwaite sees the potential for a different kind of novel, one working from within and on and over tradition. As he put it: “This, it seems to me, is the essence of Naipaul’s ‘message’ and achievement: the perception that art and coherence can come only out of a coherent pattern of traditional values, no matter what kind of variations the individual may choose to play upon them.”21 The world brought to life in Naipaul’s novel, in other words, is immediately part of a recognizable coherent background of values, sensibilities, historical memories, and desires. The characters that populate its pages have a solidity and density imparted to them, breathed into them, by this context of a tradition. In sketching the contours of this argument Brathwaite is openly indebted to T. S. Eliot’s famous essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”22 In this essay, Eliot is critical of the modernist’s antagonism toward “tradition.” If all one means by tradition is blindly following in the footsteps of the generation before ours then, Eliot agrees, this is to be discouraged. He, however, has another view to offer: Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense. The historical sense is the sense not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence as well. The historical sense compels a poet to write not only with his own generation in his bones but with the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and a simultaneous order. . . . No poet, no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone. His significance is derived from seeing him in relation to, against the background of, the poets and artists who have gone before.23

20

Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 48. 22 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in his Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (London: Faber and Faber, 1932). 23 Ibid., p. 14. 21

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It is not hard to see what Brathwaite, from within the context of his own concerns, might find salient in this account of a tradition. For what it foregrounds (its explicit Eurocentrism notwithstanding) is that a tradition is an active process; that it depends on a social will, on an active and ongoing labor; that it is not about the past as such but its connection to the present and an anticipated future. On this account, in other words, a tradition is not merely—indeed not at all—about received wisdom or about the mere celebration of what we suppose our forefathers did. For tradition is not merely an inheritance, something that you get. Tradition is not a passive, absorptive relation between the past and the present. Rather tradition presupposes an active relation in which the present calls upon the past. In this sense, then, tradition always implies an ensemble of practices and insititutions that actively produce and reproduce the virtues understood to be internal to that tradition. In this sense, too, tradition is not principally about what happened in the past: it is less nostalgia than memory, and memory more as a source and sustenance of vision.24 Tradition is about the way the past is made to operate in and upon the present. It is about giving the absent past a presence—a compelling presence—so that the creative imagination always lives/thrives in an implicit context of a tradition, of an intersecting ensemble of texts, discourses, and references. This is not to say that the imagination is determined by tradition, that it can only reflect that tradition, but rather that it is, so to speak, set in motion within tradition’s milieu. And for this reason tradition provides the ground and sources from which the reproduction of the imaginative or creative talent is possible. However, it is equally clear that Brathwaite wants to complicate or decenter Eliot’s understanding of tradition. Whereas Eliot presupposes a homogeneous tradition or, if you like, privileges the dominant hegemonic tradition, Brathwaite, formed as he is by raced and colonial dominance (a dominance that has at once imposed one tradition and marginalized— made invisible—another), disrupts the serenity of this normalizing account by introducing the question of power and therefore of opposition. The labor Brathwaite undertakes in his critical essays is to produce the sources of this counter- or alternative tradition. This problem of an alternative and oppositional tradition begins to take shape in “Jazz and the West Indian Novel,” published in 1967.25 Here Brathwaite begins to sketch out a possible model for handling an alterna24

I allude here to Edward Baugh’s well-known study, Derek Walcott, Memory as Vision: Another Life (London: Longman, 1978). 25 Kamau Brathwaite, “Jazz and the West Indian Novel,” Roots, pp. 55–110 (originally published in Bim 44 [Jan.–June 1967]: 275–84; Part 2, Bim 45 [July–Dec. 1967]: 39–51; and Part 3, Bim 46 [Jan.–June 1968]: 115–26).

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tive historical sense. The model is jazz, the archetype of New World protest music. “We will, in other words, be looking for some mode of New World Negro cultural expression, based on an African inheritance, no matter how unconsciously but also (and this goes without saying), built (increasingly firmly?) on a superstructure of Euro-American language, attitudes and techniques.”26 Brathwaite wants to hear in the West Indian novel the “jazz” sounds of the folk imagination—in words, in rhythm, in imagery, in improvisation. He poses the question: “I am asking here whether we can, and if it is worthwhile attempting to, sketch out some kind of aesthetic whereby we may be helped to see West Indian literature in its (it seems to me) proper context of an expression both European and African at the same time. And if in this essay I stress the African aspects of this literature, it is not, I submit, because I am not aware of the other, but because in most of the critical work so far available on this subject, ‘Africa’ has been neglected in a way which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to view the West Indian contribution in a meaningful, West Indian way.”27 What Brathwaite is attempting in this piece is to trace the “delineation of a possible alternative to the European cultural tradition which has been imposed upon us and which we have more or less accepted and absorbed, for obvious historical reasons, as the only way of going about our business. Or, to put it more accurately: I’m trying to outline an alternative to the English Romantic/Victorian cultural tradition which still operates among us, despite the ‘colonial’ breakthrough already achieved by Eliot, Pound and Joyce; and despite the presence among us of a folk tradition which in itself, it seems to me, is the basis of an alternative.”28 In “Caribbean Critics,” a 1969 review of The Islands in Between edited by Louis James,29 Brathwaite criticizes the “King/James” version of criticism of Caribbean literary practice. This familiar version goes as follows: “The West Indies have no definitive and exclusive culture. Its peoples have come to the West Indies as travellers, forced or of their own will from Africa, Asia and Europe. Any claim that there is one West Indian voice, at least as yet, does not bear examination. Secondly, for better or worse, 26

Ibid., p. 61. Ibid., p. 63. 28 Ibid., pp. 72–73. 29 Kamau Brathwaite, “Caribbean Critics,” Roots, pp. 111–26 (originally published in Critical Quarterly 11 [Autumn 1969]: 268–76; and New World Quarterly 5 [Dead Season– Croptime 1969]: 5–12). The Islands in Between: Essays on West Indian Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1968) is significant because it was the first volume of critical essays on Caribbean literature. Louis James, moreover, was a participant in the early emergence of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) founded by Brathwaite, Gordon Rohlehr, and Andrew Salkey in London in the mid-1960s. For some useful details, see Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History (London: New Beacon Books, 1993). 27

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although the great majority of West Indians have an African background, the peculiar circumstances of Caribbean history, its slavery and its emancipation, its educational and governmental systems, have all been within the European system.”30 As Brathwaite says, this is “a terrifyingly simple and Eurocentric view of the matter. . . . What one is asking is that the mind be left open for the discussion of the possibility that the Caribbean, inspite of the operation upon it of the ‘European system’, inspite of— indeed, because of—‘the peculiar circumstances’ of its history, contains within itself a ‘culture’ different from, though not exclusive of Europe. If this culture is weighed in the balance and found wanting it is more than likely that its social and literary expression will be found so too.”31 Here, then, is Brathwaite’s predicament, his problem-space. The hegemonic Eurocentric object (what the “Afro-Caribbean” supposedly is) is established in the domain of a rationalist-colonialist historiography. This object Brathwaite rightly understands to be an ideological one, indeed to be a racist one. It seeks to deny that Afro-Caribbeans can speak other than through the idiom of Europe, other than in the image of themselves authorized in the discourses of Europe. It seeks, in effect, to deny their difference. What Brathwaite grasps and articulates with a profound acuteness is that if the Afro-Caribbean writer is to gain that “sweetness of maturity” that would enable her/him to speak from—and to—a community of identity\difference, s/he would have to actively construct a countergenealogy, a counter-tradition. Within the problem-space inhabited by Brathwaite’s essays, this is the demand of criticism. It is a cultural-nationalist one. To meet the challenge of a dominant Eurocentric cultural-historical archive therefore it was necessary to mobilize the counter anthropological evidence. It is at this point—in essays such as “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature” and “Kumina: The Spirit of African Survival in Jamaica,” both published in the 1970s—that Brathwaite turns emphatically to anthropology.32 Suppose, however, we were to refuse Eurocentrism the very terrain on which the question itself—whether Europe or Africa—is posed? Suppose we were to admit that this terrain is not merely ethnographically mistaken but fundamentally—that is, conceptually—incoherent and therefore does not merit a response? And suppose then that we were, instead of laboring to find the ethnographic counter-evidence that would settle the matter of our identity once and for all, to dispense with the preoccupation as a whole of finding in ourselves the authoritative proof of an alternative 30

Quoted in Brathwaite, “Caribbean Critics,” p. 113. Ibid., p. 114. 32 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Kumina: The Spirit of African Survival in Jamaica,” Jamaica Journal 42 (1978): 45–63. 31

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authentic origin? Or again (to shift the register) suppose that the configuration of the postcolonial situation itself had altered such that meeting the claim against Europe no longer carried the same political-ideological urgency, the same strategic value, the same stakes of identity\difference, as they did in the formative years of political independence? Suppose, in other words, that the demand of a black diaspora criticism had altered? For after all it ought to be remembered that within the narrative of anticolonialism the claim to cultural authenticity was always connected to a claim about political entitlement. The critical force of the anthropologically authorized demand for the recognition of the African roots of Caribbean culture derived in large part from its ability to articulate vividly this claim against colonialism’s hegemonic raced exclusions. And if in the moral economy of the anticolonial project the purchase of “Africa” as a signifier of dispossession—and therefore of entitlement—performed an important ideological labor, I want to suggest that the increasingly audible competing claim of the Indo-Caribbean to cultural authenticity puts paid to that signifier’s particular oppositional privilege. Or to put this another way, the increasing normalization of the place of the African as the hegemonic value in the creole politics of the postcolonial state in the Caribbean alters the force of an anthopologically authorized black diaspora criticism. This is why it is imperative to rethink the practice of black diaspora criticism. Doing so requires the formulation of a notion of tradition (black diaspora tradition) that relies on the assumption of neither rationalist historiography nor cultural nationalism.

REFIGURING BLACK DIASPORA CRITICISM

In recent years, one of the most instructive attempts in the field of black diaspora criticism to break with rationalist historiography and cultural nationalism has been the work of Paul Gilroy. His book, The Black Atlantic,33 in particular, offers a challenging approach to (re)thinking the cultural politics of the African diaspora, an approach that seeks to locate the problem of black diaspora politics in relation to debates about the Enlightenment, and about modernity more generally. It is part of Gilroy’s argument (one with which I concur) that it is a telling and unfortunate 33

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). See also the essays collected in Gilroy’s Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1993), which are in many ways preliminary sketches of the argument elaborated in the full-length Black Atlantic.

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feature of the contemporary discussion of the Enlightenment that it has almost systematically passed over the relation between New World plantation slavery and the “unfinished project” of modernity.34 As a result the whole problem of race and modern power has not been adequately formulated, much less adequately elaborated and addressed. Gilroy’s critical concern, then, is to complicate the picture of black diaspora politics and its relationship to the modern. His fundamental disenchantment is with what he calls the politics of “ethnic absolutism” or “ethnic insiderism” (i.e., the variety of positions that depend for their justification upon the idea of an essential racial or ethnic self). But while his own conceptual apparatus owes much to the historicizing, localizing, and contextualizing endeavors that have helped to take the wind out of black nationalisms, he is not convinced by any simpleminded anti-essentialism (of, say, the sliding signifier variety). He wants in fact what he calls an “anti anti essentialism,” a strategy which entails finding a way of talking about black cultural politics that moves beyond understanding them “either as the expression of an essential, unchanging, sovereign racial self or as the effluent from a constituted subjectivity that emerges contingently from the endless play of racial subjectification.”35 Gilroy is suspicious (and not unreasonably so) of what he calls the “easy postmodernism” that “attacks both rationality and universality through an obvious and banal relativism.”36 There is much in this with which I am sympathetic. However, what is of particular interest to me is the fact that one of the concepts through which Gilroy attempts to remap black diaspora criticism is the concept of a “tradition.” Clearly this is a concept that has seemed indispensable in formulating an understanding of the black diaspora. The reason no doubt is at least twofold: in the first place “tradition” is precisely what peoples of African descent in the black diaspora have been said to lack, have been denied, and thus it has seemed necessary to show that this is not in fact the case. In the second place, it is a concept that gives some discursive density to the signifying field or imagined community within which the black diasporic artist produces. That is to say, it is a concept 34 See in particular his cogent remarks on Zygmunt Bauman whose Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) evidently had a significant impact on his own thinking. 35 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, p. 36. He has in mind on the one hand, the Afrocentrism of Molife Asante (see for example, his Afrocentricity [Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1989]), and on the other, the postmodernism of Kobena Mercer (see for example, Welcome to the Jungle [New York: Routledge, 1995]). 36 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, pp. 44–45. For my own concern with this problem see David Scott, “Criticism and Culture: Theory and Post-colonial Claims on Anthropological Disciplinarity,” Critique of Anthropology 12, no. 4 (1992) 371–94.

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that allows one to think a relation between past and present. I, too, have sought to work in a preliminary way with a (revised) concept of a tradition.37 However, although Gilroy and I quite evidently intersect in our concerns, in our sense of what kind of black criticism our present demands, our formulation and deployment of the concept of a tradition is different, and indeed different in significant ways. As might be expected, Gilroy is troubled by black nationalist or Afrocentric deployments of the concept of a tradition. In these deployments, as he rightly suggests, tradition operates as a mode of racial assurance, a way of keeping the racial self secure against the ambiguities of the “double consciousness” which black modernists like W. E. B. Du Bois and Richard Wright explored. As such it operates as what stands before or anyway outside of, and in antagonism with, modernity. What Gilroy aims to do is to rethink this concept in such a way that it can no longer function as modernity’s “polar opposite.” The idea of tradition gets understandably invoked to underscore the historical continuities, subcultural conversations, intertextual and intercultural cross-fertilisations which make the notion of a distinctive and self-conscious black culture appear plausible. This usage is important and inescapable because racisms work insidiously and consistently to deny both historicity and cultural integrity to the artistic and cultural fruits of black life. The discourse of tradition is thus frequently articulated within the critiques of modernity produced by blacks in the West. It is certainly audible inside the racialised countercultures to which modernity gave birth. However, the idea of tradition is often also the culmination, or centrepiece, of a rhetorical gesture that asserts the legitimacy of a black political culture locked in a defensive posture against the unjust powers of white supremacy. This gesture sets tradition and modernity against each other as simple polar alternatives as starkly differentiated and oppositional as the signs black and white.38

In this conception of tradition, slavery—that irreducible link to modernity—gets elided or erased and in its place is invoked an old and anterior black civilization. What is needed, Gilroy suggests, is a different, and as he says, more modest formulation of tradition, one that begins by asking whether the essentialist preoccupation itself has not to be understood in relation to the history of the Middle Passage, plantation slavery, and postemancipation political disempowerment and disenfranchisement. I find this very suggestive. These are claims I have little trouble endorsing—at least as general claims. But what is the specific working content 37 38

See Scott, “That Event, This Memory.” Gilroy, Black Atlantic, p. 188.

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of the concept of a “black Atlantic” for a black diaspora criticism? What are the positive effects that it produces? Here is where I have some doubts about the formulation that Gilroy offers.39 For Gilroy, as I have already noted, the concept of the “black Atlantic” is supposed to interrupt essentialism, to make it unavailable for black diaspora criticism. And for him, black musical practices best illustrate what he means by this. As he puts it: “[T]he circulation and mutation of music across the black Atlantic explodes the dualistic structure which puts Africa, authenticity, purity, and origin in crude opposition to the Americas, hybridity, creolisation, and rootlessness.”40 This is because there has been, he says, a two-way traffic between continental African cultural forms and the political cultures of diaspora blacks; and he can supply the historical ethnography to demonstrate the “untidy elements in a story of hybridisation and intermixture that inevitably disappoints the desire for cultural and therefore racial purity.”41 Somewhat later he concludes: “The most enduring Africanism of all is not therefore specifiable as the content of black Atlantic cultures. It can be seen instead not just in the central place that all these cultures give to music use and music making, but in the ubiquity of antiphonal, social forms that underpin and enclose the plurality of black cultures in the Western hemisphere.”42 Notice that in this view, what is crucial about a black Atlantic concept of black musical cultures is that you can identify the mobile plurality of shared constituent elements or formal features across a range of practices. There is implicit in this an unproblematized identification/representation apparatus. It is hard for me to see the real difference between this conception and a more or less sophisticated anthropological syncretism of, say, the Boas/Herskovits variety or the Mintz/Price one. For all the difference in the ambiance of their textual construction notwithstanding, what they share is the assumption that the history and culture of peoples of African descent in the New World has 39 For a very interesting critique of Gilroy, see Norval (Nadi) Edwards, “Roots and Some Routes Not Taken: A Caribcentric Reading of The Black Atlantic,” Found Object 4 (Fall 1994): 27–35. Edwards argues in effect that Gilroy’s historical ethnography is a limited one inasmuch as he largely neglects Caribbean black diaspora writers (including, significantly, Kamau Brathwaite). Edwards is no doubt right that this neglect is a telling one especially because some of these Caribbean writers—Brathwaite in particular—have explored precisely such concepts as “hybridity” and “creolization,” which are crucial to Gilroy’s apparatus. My own view, though, is that this strategy of criticism already accepts that the terrain of historical ethnography is the relevant one in the first place. I do not accept this. For me, as will be clear, rethinking the black diaspora ought not in fact to depend upon something like an ethnographic sufficiency, but on conceptual adequacy. 40 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, p. 199. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., p. 200 (my emphasis).

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to be argued out anthropologically in terms of an identifiable authentic past persisting into the present. Gilroy doubtlessly complicates the anthropological field—but he does not break with the conceptual need for an anthropological authority to guide and ground the voice of a black diaspora criticism. Part of the problem is that while it is true that in mobilizing such concepts as “hybridity,” “creolization,” “intermixture,” and in foregrounding “form” rather than “content,” there is an altogether admirable attempt to dispense with the supposed privilege of an authenticity understood as homogeneity, authenticity still lingers in the idea of a cultural tradition understood as an identifiable and representable ensemble of essential—if now heterogeneous—elements.43 My worry is that insofar as the authority of a black diaspora concept of a tradition continues to depend upon the identification of positive social and cultural features (however these features are understood and however sophisticated the apparatus of identification), we will still require a meta-discourse or a truth-apparatus, at the very least a cultural theory, to help us determine its distinctive content. And this, to me, is the problem. What I am after, by contrast, is a black diaspora criticism that does not depend for its authority upon such a cultural theory. The position I will outline in what follows, however, is not necessarily incompatible with what I take to be the crucial thrust of Gilroy’s argument—namely, the concern to answer the demand for a black cultural criticism that is neither too tightly scripted (the nationalist position), nor not scripted at all (the postmodernist position).44 My concern is only to reformulate the concept of a tradition so that a black diaspora criticism does not depend upon the authorizing apparatus of anthropology for the identification-recognitionrepresentation on which Gilroy continues to rely.

TRADITION AS AN EMBODIED ARGUMENT

In his exquisitely delicate poem “Construction,”45 the late Dennis Scott gets at a way of handling the concept of a discursive tradition that is very close to what I have in mind. 43

The best critique of this is still Talal Asad, “Anthropology and the Analysis of Ideology,” Man (n.s.) 14 (1979): 607–27. I think that this anthropologism constitutes a fundamental and unresolved tension throughout Gilroy’s work. See David Scott, “Sir Jack Union and the Immigrants,” review of There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, by Paul Gilroy, Emergences 2 (Spring 1990): 165–70. 44 I borrow this term—“scripted”—from K. Anthony Appiah, “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction,” in Amy Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 45 In Dennis Scott, Uncle Time (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), p. 12.

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Some time in de greathouse wall is like a thumb mark de stone, or a whole han. Granny say is de work sign, she say it favor when a man tackle de stone, an’ mek to tear it down, till de mortar tek de same shape as him han. But I feel say is like summaddy push de wall up an’ hole it dere until de brick dem dry out. Now dat is hard.

Everything in this poem hangs on the idea of an ongoing embodied argument within—and especially between—the generations over the meaning of the imprint in the greathouse wall, the meaning in the present of our past. The material evidence itself (whether it is a thumb or a whole hand that is actually imprinted there) is inconclusive and will perhaps ever remain so. But this inconclusiveness of the evidence, whatever it may mean to the social historian or to the archaeologist, is in itself less important to the concept of a discursive tradition than is the conflict of moral perspectives on the past’s place in the present it makes possible, invites, even obliges. For notice that in the poem’s subtle framing each generation assumes the central place of that signifier of slavery, the greathouse, as something to be argued about, as perhaps something over which there has been an argument for as long as anyone can remember, and that something of moral importance about “who we are” depends—not on whether, because we must—but on how we read it. Everything hangs on that moment when a new reading of this signifier offers a doubt and a disagreement about those readings that have gone before, offers a respectful if agonistic challenge, and offers another interpretation. It is this ongoing dispute that is the stuff of a discursive tradition. And it is only from a place within this embodied dispute that critical positions and counter-positions are legitimate. I would like to agree with those critics—Talal Asad, Michael Walzer, and Alasdair MacIntyre—who think that it is possible to formulate a concept of criticism that is neither universalist nor nativist, a criticism that depends upon neither a transcendental outside nor a transcendental inside.46 The key concept in this attempt to refuse the old opposition is the 46 I am thinking in particular of Talal Asad, “The Limits of Religious Criticism in the Middle East: Notes on Islamic Public Argument,” in his Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virture (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).

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idea of a “tradition” understood as a socially embodied and historically extended argument. What these critics want, it seems to me, is to displace the modernity/tradition distinction through which the universalist/nativist opposition operates. They do not accept the idea that tradition is best undestood as what-was-prior-to-modernity or what-is-untouched-by-reason or what-endures-without-conflict. These are the Enlightenment or, as MacIntyre says, the “Burkean” senses of the concept of a tradition. These critics therefore rightly refuse the contrast between tradition and reason, and argue that in fact all reasoning takes place within a tradition, within a tradition of moral argument. On this view, the concept of a “tradition” is essentially a discursive (as opposed to a sociological) concept. A tradition, that is to say, is not mapped by race, territory, or language as such, though “race,” “territory,” or “language” can constitutively come to be crucial to the idiom of a particular tradition’s style of reasoning. However, a tradition is, of course, a special sort of discursive concept in the sense that it performs a distinctive labor: it seeks to connect authoritatively, within the structure of its narrative, a relation among past, community, and identity. A tradition, therefore, is never neutral with respect to the values it embodies. Rather a tradition operates in and through the stakes it constructs—what is to count and what is not to count among its satisfactions, what the goods and excellencies and virtues are that ought to be valued, preserved, and inculcated, and what the practices and institutions are that will enable (or disable) the achievement of its preferred mode of human flourishing. In a word, a tradition seeks to secure community. On this view, moreover, if tradition presupposes “common possession” it does not presuppose uniformity or plain consensus. Rather it depends upon a play of conflict and contention. It is a space of dispute as much as consensus, of discord as much as accord. Like the imprint in the greathouse wall, what is shared is what is argued about. There may be dispute over how to understand a particular event or practice, or how to take up a position in relation to some moral-political claim, but what is not in doubt is that finding an understanding about that event or practice, or taking up a position in regard to that claim is a matter of significance. It is in these terms that I want to come at the idea of a black diaspora and of a black diaspora criticism. In the view that I want to commend, the black diaspora constitutes a discursive tradition or a discursive community. This community and tradition, I want to suggest, are discursively constituted principally (though not exhaustively) in and through the mobilization of a common possession, namely, the historically constituted figures of “Africa” and “Slavery,” and their deployment in the ideological production of effects of identity\difference, of community. Understood in this sense of a discursive tradition, the black diaspora constitutes an al-

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ways situated argument over our relation to Africa and to plantation slavery, over the sense or senses in which we are “African” and the children of slaves, over the virtues and goods and excellencies or duties, obligations, and rights that are to follow from this, and over the embodied practices—of self-fashioning, familial organization, musical production and appreciation, sartorial representation, social and political affiliation and disaffiliation, etc.—that serve to enable or disable their sustenance and regeneration. Of course, to say as I do that the black diaspora community is discursively and contingently constructed is not to say that it is simply available for occupation by just any subject. This is the now tediously familiar postmodern (and liberal) view according to which the unencumbered self can step back from the identifications that have, so to speak, imprinted upon it the form in which it finds itself at any conjuncture and choose from among the elastic range of available options. I disagree with this view. We do not simply choose our selves. One is not black simply by choice; one’s identity is always in part constituted—sometimes against one’s own will—within a structure of recognition, identification and subjectification. On my view, the black diaspora subject is a subject whose “historical fate” has been to be produced as “black” in and through raced social relations, ideological apparatuses, and political regimes.47 This is why the black diaspora tradition is always at least potentially a critical one: it is historically constituted as a tradition, as a community of discourse as such, in an embattled relation with the social institutions and technologies of a globalized raced domination. To be black in the New World (perhaps, to be black in the modern world) is to carry the traces of this historical fate. Now it is certainly the case, as Gilroy has so suggestively argued, that this tradition is a translocal (and specifically a trans-Atlantic) one. This is important, I think, because it enables us to refuse the naturalization or normalization of certain forms of community as the privileged unit of affiliation or identification—that of the nation-state, for instance. However, in my view the point of this ought not to be an ethnographic one; it ought not to depend upon the formal similarities and differences among black cultural practices. Rather I take the point of understanding diaspora in this way as an attempt to signal the ideological convergences and divergences in the way cultural practices across the black Atlantic put “Africa” and “Slavery” to use. And I want to suggest that this translocality is best understood in something like Michael Walzer’s distinction between the 47

I take this idea of “historical fate” from the work of John Gray. See, for example, his “After the New Liberalism,” in his Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (New York: Routledge, 1995).

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“minimal” and “maximal” meanings of moral terms, and the “thick” and “thin” accounts we can give of them.48 On this view, the minimal condition of participation in the moral community of a black diaspora discourse or tradition is the mobilization of the common possession of the figures of Africa and slavery as markers or assertions of identity\difference. In this way, insofar as these figures are in play, there is the potential for recognition and solidarity on the part of a black diasporic subject. At the same time there are maximal meanings and a thick account of Africa and slavery that necessarily turn on the concrete local histories that determine the idiomatic modalities and ideological stakes through which these figures are articulated and elaborated. For example, the dispute between W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey around black identity and community in the 1920s looks very different depending on whether you are reading from within an African-American location or an Afro-Jamaican one. Or again, “dreadlocks,” a recognizably black Atlantic “hair style/politics” (to borrow Kobena Mercer’s idiom), have a different set of resonances between New York and Kingston.49 To sum up, it is this embodied conflict, this materialized argument, as a whole, as a rich and multifaceted ensemble of texts, practices (social, political, and aesthetic), movements, and institutions through which the figures of Africa and slavery are mobilized and ideologically inscribed to produce subject- (and subjectifying) effects of identity\difference—this ensemble in all its continuities and discontinuities—that constitutes the black diaspora. I want to insist that its criticism does not need anthropology (in the way of an epistemological guarantee), does not require a metadiscourse (something like a Critical Theory) to back up its claims. Though a black diaspora criticism may well find it useful to work in the light of such a genealogy as a way, for example, of positioning its own argument in relation to the wider field of black diaspora discourse, it is not limited to it. This is because in my argument to enter a community of discourse, criticism has to enter into the body of moral knowledge and moral argument that constitutes the goods—and thus the stakes of identity\difference—of that tradition. Unlike the anthropologist (however critical he or she may be) the cultural critic must decide what commitments to make, whether to act one way or another in any given conjuncture. This entails not only entering the idiom and the style of reasoning through which that tradition formulates its preoccupations but standing on judgments, 48 See Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995). 49 See Kobena Mercer, “Black Hair Style/Politics” in his Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994).

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claims, and positions. In fact, cultural criticism has not merely to stand on the judgments and claims it makes and the positions it takes but to seek to persuade its interlocutors that these are worth adopting and defending. This is the critical vocabulary into which I want to inscribe Kamau Brathwaite’s vision of that “african season on the caribbean sea.” It is not either a universalist or a nativist vocabulary; indeed it seeks to leave that alternative aside. What it is, rather, is a vocabulary that attempts to free black diaspora criticism from the seeming need for the guarantee of an authoritative Outside: call it Anthropology. It is not thereby, however, an attempt to do away with all authority, with all grounds for argument. But it does wish to seek that authority—those grounds—elsewhere, that is, within the tradition of discourse and argument out of which its own questions and preoccupations (and, too, the idiom in which they are folded) emerge in the first place. I take it to be a demand of black diaspora criticism in the present that it neither wants the cultural nationalist dream of a full and homogeneous “blackness” nor the postmodern hope of an arbitrary, empty, and “unscripted” one. This is clearly why Gilroy is so concerned to find an analytical space between essentialism and anti-essentialism. I agree with him. And this is why I want to disarticulate Brathwaite’s vision from the anthropological epistemology through which he seeks to guarantee it. For me Brathwaite’s vision—with its evocation of a community of those for whom slavery is the name of a trial and a tribulation, and Africa the name of an identity\difference—is a profoundly oppositional Afro-Caribbean vision. I do not wish to dispense with it, only to reposition it in relation to the arguments that support it and the entitlements it supports. The task he inaugurated in those seminal essays of excavating a discursive tradition for an Afro-Caribbean identity to inhabit productively has, it seems to me, to be carried on. My contention is simply that it must do so now on a different ground of raced difference. The cultural-nationalist project of grounding this difference in the science of anthropology (or in any rationalist epistemology) ought to be put aside. However, insofar as we live in and through technologies of raced domination in the Caribbean, the project of producing the discursive context of a critical black tradition—of a black tradition of criticism—is not one we can or should relinquish.

Part Three FUTURES

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The Aftermaths of Sovereignty . . . as a child treads soft in new school shoes, and a man is nervous who knows his first night watch may be among thieves; so the rhythms are not sure, but their hands must be attentive: and so recent is the season of adventure, so fresh from the miracle of their triumph, the drums are guarding the day: the drums must guard the day. (George Lamming, Season of Adventure)

POSTCOLONIALITY BETWEEN DEFERRAL AND DOUBT

When Aijaz Ahmad published his notable reply to Fredric Jameson’s characterization of Third World literatures as “national allegories,” there was a modest enough elation among the Left postcolonial intelligentsia, those of us anyway who were, in Amitav Ghosh’s felicitous phrase, “travelling in the West.”1 Ahmad’s intervention struck a chord. It did so, at least in part, because its “postcolonial” criticism of a sophisticated Marxist for his Eurocentric construction of the “Third World” and the cultural practices that were supposed to be representative of it was nevertheless instituted within the theoretical field of Marxism itself. So that from a point of view sensitive to the discursivities of Europe’s hegemony (a central thematic of postcolonial criticism), Marxism appeared at once reprimanded and reaffirmed. This was important because for those of us born into the uncertain aftermath of sovereignty Marxism had defined in a very fundamental way the ethical-political horizon of our visions of— and commitments to—the making of just and independent societies. And although our intellectual preoccupations had in the meantime been traversed and repositioned by the postmetaphysical critiques of Marxism, we were still haunted by the specter of a theory that would enable us to deduce a set of rational political practices and procedures for the radical 1

Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’ ” Social Text 17 (1987): 3–25. This was a reply to Frederic Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. Ghosh’s very memorable

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transformation of our societies. This attitude was, if you like, a remnant of our nostalgia. It was part of an old and familiar longing, in Bernard Yack’s terms, for total revolution.2 However, the enthusiasm that gathered about Ahmad’s essay on Fredric Jameson quickly turned into something else—something like dismay, and in some quarters, even indignation—when a few years later his In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures was published, and we read in it his essay on Edward Said.3 For now the signifying complex was a differently configured one, and in consequence we sensed that the stakes for a postcolonial criticism were sharply altered. Taken as a whole Ahmad’s book was quite evidently inspired by a Marxism more assertively progressivist, more narrowly sectarian, than the Jameson essay (now included in the volume) had seemed on its own. But what was more disconcerting (to call it only that) was the way this Marxism was being marshaled and deployed to overcome or destroy a conceptual space that many of us were finding useful to think in, think about: a space opened up, we would argue, in Said’s seminal work, Orientalism most particularly.4 And whether or not we agreed (then, or, from here looking back, continue to agree) line for line with Said’s formulations, whether or not we could detect in the formation of his theoretical objects insupportable assumptions and faulty or implausible arguments, it nevertheless seemed to us that the general project of reinterrogating colonialism, of applying the tools of a Foucauldian reading to the archive of Europe’s hegemonic knowledges about non-European discourses and practices, or those of a Derridean deconstruction to the “logocentrism” of Europe’s conceptual apparatuses, was of critical importance. For two reasons at least. First, to expose the implication of ideological projects in the making of forms of knowledge still dominant in the present; and second, to produce the counter-space for the practice of constructing alternative histories of the present. phrase is taken from “The Imam and the Indian,” Granta 20 (Winter 1986): 145, and now also in In an Antique Land (Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1992), p. 236. 2 Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophical Sources of Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). I take up various aspects of this most illuminating book in my essay, “Revolution/Theory/ Modernity: Reflections on the Cognitive-Political Crisis of our Time,” Social and Economic Studies 44, nos. 2, 3 (1995): 1–23. 3 See Aijaz Ahmad, “Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said,” in his In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York: Verso, 1992). His more recent “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” Race and Class 36, no. 3( 1995): 1–20, is more of the same. 4 This is not to say that Orientalism was the first to raise the kinds of questions it raised. See, for example, Talal Asad, “Two European Images of Non-European Rule” in his Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1973).

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To respond, then, to so wounding and so vituperative an attack on this discursive space we would naturally be tempted to put into practice these Foucauldian and Derridean strategies themselves and to unravel with them the complicities of Ahmad’s own text: the complicities with rationalism say, with essentialism, with historicism. Moreover, we might also be tempted to unmask the familiar play of postcolonial discontent and resentment in the rhetorical structure of his text—to read in its ambivalent agitations the uncertainties, entanglements, and vulnerabilities of Derek Walcott’s “fortunate traveler.” But the existential defensiveness and reactiveness of these sorts of temptations, even as they would make visible the investments through which Ahmad’s text was constructed and the presuppositions through which it operated, could only belie our own resentments, uncertainties, entanglements, and vulnerabilities.5 This is because Marxism remained for us (whatever we made of Ahmad’s version of it, and however we impugned its philosophical or epistemological arguments) the positive sign of an affirmative claim on the political construction of postcolonial futures. And therefore it continued to evoke real questions regarding the ethical-political tasks of our postcolonial—and now equally our postcommunist—present; questions to which our critical practice could supply no adequate answers. This failure to address itself to the impasses that mark our political modernity is at least one aspect of what we might call the predicament of postcolonial criticism. It suffers, like many other kindred orientations within the fields of contemporary cultural theory, from a loss of discernible political objects. It is with a clarification of this loss that I am concerned in this chapter. Two larger discursive contexts frame what I shall have to say: for the sake of the argument call one “postcommunist” and the other “poststructuralist.” They are interconnected, but they are not identical. Together, however, they capture something salient about the frame of our present. “The cycle of events which opened with the Russian Revolution,” Ernesto Laclau has written, “has definitively closed, both as a force of irradiation in the collective imaginary of the international left, and also in terms of its ability to hegemonize the social and political force of the societies in which Leninism, in any of its forms, constituted a state doctrine.”6 If this is so—and I believe that it is—then the conceptual and political implications for those oppositional practices and positions “irradiated” by those “events”—and this of course means significant sections of the movements that carried forward the anticolonial projects and gave sustenance to the politics of anti-imperialism in the first decades of politi5

For some responses to Ahmad’s In Theory, see Public Culture 6 (Fall 1993). Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (New York: Verso, 1990), p. xi. 6

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cal independence—are such as cannot be easily ignored. For it can scarcely be denied that we inhabit an historical moment of profound cognitivepolitical uncertainty. It is a moment in which the basic political categories that have, for the better part of this century, defined and animated the conceptual terrain of Left oppositional discourse—those, for example, of “revolution,” “socialism,” “proletarian democracy,” “imperialism” (the classic signifiers of the political imaginary of the modern/modernist Left)—appear to have lost their conceptual purchase on political problems. It is a moment, moreover, in which those great categorical distinctions that have organized the salient political affiliations—those between Left and Right, between liberals and socialists, between radicals and conservatives—seem no longer to capture adequately available political options and rival political positions. What is historically curious about this moment, however, is not the mere displacement of one political contender by another—(this, after all, was always intelligible within the available vocabulary of the dialectic—but the seeming erasure as such of what could count as a plausible political alternative to our present. In part, of course, it is this pervasive sense (inflected here by despair, there by euphoria) that inspires the “endism” that is so marked a feature of contemporary political commentary. In short, we inhabit a paradoxical historical moment in which we appear, in Zygmunt Bauman’s very vivid phrase, to be “living without an alternative.”7 And if, as he notes, a “world without alternatives needs self-criticism as a condition of survival and decency,” it may be suggested that one of the things that this criticism of our present ought to be about is reexamining the normative vocabulary of our social and political hopes. My concerns in this chapter are situated, too, within the context of arguments about using the theoretical apparatus of poststructuralism to illuminate ethical and political—as opposed to only cultural and epistemological (that is to say, rationality)—questions.8 Postcolonial criticism has constituted one wing of the so-called cultural Left, that “Rainbow Coalition” (in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s colorful language) of contemporary critical orientations that have as one of their generative theoretical moves a suspicion of the conceptual assumptions—about rationality, 7 Zygmunt Bauman, “Living without an Alternative,” Political Quarterly 62 (Jan.– March 1991): 35–44. 8 There are a number of important contributions to this debate. Some that I have found useful include Stephen K. White, Political Theory and Postmodernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); William E. Connolly, Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Romand Coles, Self/Politics/Other: Political Theory and Dialogical Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

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about individual autonomy, about historical development—inherited from the Enlightenment.9 These, needless to say, are assumptions that continue to define in crucial ways the moral and intellectual space of our modernity. At any rate, the suspicion of the transcendentalist claims of Enlightenment Reason (Lyotard’s famous “incredulity towards metanarratives”) has urged an attitude of aversion toward, or at least of ironic distance from, normative political theorizing and encouraged a perpetual deferral of any engagement with “traditional” political theory questions (for example, about legitimacy and political community, obligation and citizenship, rights and justice). In other words, postcolonial criticism, like other orientations on the cultural Left, has (to borrow Stephen White’s useful terms) privileged the “responsibility to otherness” over the “responsibility to act”—the opening up of cognitive space for the play of difference over the affirmation of institutional frameworks that embody normative political values and normative political objectives.10 Foucault and Habermas have often been employed to represent the virtues of these two antagonistic, mutually exclusive positions—one taken as the embodiment of an ironic politics of difference, and the other of an affirmative politics of consensus. At the same time, the revival (so-called, anyway) of Anglo-American political theory in the wake of John Rawls’s much argued-about A Theory of Justice—the seemingly unending debate between “liberals” and “communitarians” precipitated by it—has stimulated renewed rethinking of questions fundamental to the substantive design of political institutions.11 Arguably there is much that is doubtful—even within the terms of a liberal discourse—about the political philosophy 9 Whatever its prior symbolic value, the phrase “cultural left” appears to have come of age at the conference, “Liberal Arts Education in the Late Twentieth Century: Emerging Conditions, Responsive Practices,” held in 1988 at Duke University and the University of North Carolina. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., seems to have given it an inaugural visibility in “The Master’s Pieces: On Canon Formation and the African-American Tradition,” in Daryl J. Gless and Barbara Herrnstein Smith (eds.), The Politics of Liberal Education (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 95. This was seconded by Richard Rorty in “Two Cheers for the Cultural Left,” in ibid., p. 233. According to the perturbed editors of the volume of conference essays, “The phrase ‘cultural left,’ used wryly by one of the speakers [Gates presumably] and repeated, also with some irony, by a second [Rorty presumably], was seized upon by an attending journalist and has now become an easy label.” See Gless and Smith, “Introduction: The Public, the Press, and the Professors,” in ibid., p. 2. 10 White, Political Theory and Postmodernism, p. 20. 11 For some critical discussion of Rawls, see Norman Daniels (ed.), Reading Rawls: Critical Studies of A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975). For an excellent discussion of attempts to move away from neo-Kantian political theory (even though I have reservations about the “critical naturalism” he ends up advancing), see Ian Shapiro, Political Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

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inaugurated by Rawls and company.12 Be that as it may, one aim of this chapter is to urge those who, like myself, are concerned with the aftermaths of political sovereignty to enter in a concerted and critical way into the space of this argument. The rest of the chapter is organized around three principal moves. In the first, I want to argue that a critical response to the case advanced against postcolonial criticism by critics like Aijaz Ahmad ought not to take the form of merely deconstructing their conceptual assumptions. My argument though, let me stress, will not be that this order of criticism should be set aside so much as that it ought to be folded (to borrow an apt metaphor from William Connolly) into another that has, ultimately, a different target, one that brings the political question of postcolonial futures into view. This argument is in fact part of a larger argument that I want to make regarding the general relation between the tasks of criticism and the formulation of its strategies. In the second move (and in support of the one I urge in the first), I want to suggest that the collapse of Soviet-style communism and the resurgence of neoliberalism alters the cognitive-political context in which postcolonial criticism can operate, and therefore the demand criticism is called upon to meet. Finally, in a third move, I offer a partial reading of some aspects of those claims and categories of our political modernity that ought to be part of any interrogation of the meanings of our postcolonial present and any argument for alternative postcolonial futures.

THE POSTCOLONIAL AND ITS CRITICS

Aijaz Ahmad, needless to say, is not the only critic of postcolonial criticism. In recent years, in fact, various criticisms have been offered from more or less sympathetic quarters.13 For my purposes here, though, I would like to bypass the arguably important questions regarding, for instance, the identity of the “postcolonial” (exactly where and when it is to be located), and focus on one aspect of recent criticism.14 This is the neo12

For a spirited critique of the assumptions and claims that animate this renewal, see John Gray, “Against the New Liberalism: Rawls, Dworkin and the Emptying of Political Life,” Times Literary Supplement, July 3, 1992, pp. 13–15. 13 For example, Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Postcolonialism’ ” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 84–98; and Ella Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’ ” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 99–113. 14 It should, however, be clear that I am using these terms in specific ways: by “postcolonial criticism” I have in mind a largely (though not exclusively) metropolitan production in the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism, but I am interested in this only insofar as its object

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Marxist criticism according to which there is a complicitous and ideological relation between the conceptual themes and theoretical strategies of postcolonial criticism on the one hand, and the contemporary character of capitalism on the other. Arif Dirlik makes no bones about his hostility toward postcolonial criticism.15 However, I do not wish to treat him merely as an adversary to be found out, ridiculed, and dismissed, but as an instructive provocateur, one who provides less the occasion for detailed (defensive) response than for (positively) rethinking the strategic objectives of postcolonial criticism itself. This is because while I do not share Dirlik’s overall view that postcolonial criticism is no more than an ideological reflection of global capitalism, and I disagree in general with the sorts of theoretical strategy he would have us endorse, I do share some of what I take to be his disquiet regarding the direction of this criticism. I sympathize, moreover, with the social hopes he expresses (in particular in After the Revolution) for alternative futures and thus with his worry that our present demands a target of criticism that postcolonial criticism as presently constituted does not adequately supply. In consequence of this, the weight of my concern is with making that target more visible and not with exploiting either my (quite substantial) disagreements with Dirlik, or with defending his main adversary, Gyan Prakash, with whom, arguably, I share much. Indeed, what I want to offer is a skepticism—and this purely on grounds of strategy—about whether the conceptual dispute to which both Dirlik and Prakash are party continues to be one worth investing in at all. My reason is that the rival positions they have staked out—those that are more or less adequately mapped by the oppositions modern/postmodern, essentialist/ anti-essentialist, foundationalist/antifoundationalist—are not only already exhaustively well-rehearsed ones (so much so, in fact, that each move made on one side can immediately call into play an already-plotted counter-move on the other), but more importantly that the dispute as a whole within which their functionality is inscribed is staged in such a way that what really counts are epistemological claims. My doubt is that this is where the stakes ought to be. I shall argue that on this terrain neither is able to produce an adequate conception of the political, which is where the demand of postcolonial criticism now lies. is the problem of politics and society in those formerly colonized territories that gained their independence in the years after the Second World War. Similarly, “postcolonial critics” are those critics who deploy postcolonial criticism, not necessarily intellectuals of Third World origin, those whom I would call the “postcolonial intelligentsia.” 15 See Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994): 328–56, and idem, After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994). For a similar sort of criticism, see also Masao Miyoshi, “A Borderless World: From Colonialism

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The central line of Dirlik’s attack on postcolonial criticism is that the themes that animate its practice are to be understood in (ideological) relation to recent transformations within the capitalist world economy, those that have been characterized in terms of such features as the transnationalization of production, its increased spatial extension and speed, the flexibility and mobility of production locations which give maximum advantage to capital against labor, and so on. These transformations, he suggests, have rendered untenable all those earlier conceptualizations of global relations—for example, those organized around colonizer/colonized, First World/Third World, etc.—that assumed the nation-state to be the analytically significant unit of political organization. The new “respectability” of postcolonial critics and their critical orientations is, he says, “dependent on” the “conceptual needs” thrown up by this “new world situation.” And while this dependence is itself hardly good cause for suspicion, what is, Dirlik argues, is that postcolonial critics have by and large been “silent on the relationship of the idea of postcolonialism to its context in contemporary capitalism.” Not only this, however, they have actively “suppressed the necessity of considering such a possible relationship by repudiating a foundational role to capitalism in history,” and so have been in effect complicit in the hegemony that global capitalism exercises.16 It is this denial of capitalism as a theoretical First Principle, then, that is the central target of Dirlik’s criticism. The practice of postcolonial criticism is characterized by Dirlik in large part through a reading of some of Gyan Prakash’s recent work in which, as Dirlik rightly suggests, the animating question is: How does the Third World write its own history?17 This is the animating question because what postcolonial criticism has so far sought principally to respond to are the hegemonic narrative frames and rhetorical devices through which colonialist (and more generally, Western) discourses have sought to establish authoritative knowledges about the colonized and the ex-colonized. This colonialist discourse grounds its own authority in justificatory apparatuses derived from the Enlightenment project, and thus depends upon the assumption of a transcendentalist and universalist Reason, a progressive unfolding of Universal History, and a sovereign rational and selftransparent subject. Constituting, as I have suggested, one wing of a broader assault on the assumptions of the Enlightenment, postcolonial to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State,” Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993): 726–51. 16 Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura,” pp. 330–31. 17 See Gyan Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 2 (1990): 383–408; and idem, “Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography,” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 8–18.

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criticism’s oppositional strategy has entailed a rejection of these justificatory or legitimizing assumptions. It rejects the view that assumes, as Prakash puts it, “that history is ultimately founded in and representable through some identity—individual, class, or structure—which resists further decomposition into heterogeneity.”18 Dirlik is not mischaracterizing, then, when he says that “postcolonial criticism repudiates all master narratives, and since the most powerful master narratives are the products of a post-Enlightenment constitution of history, and therefore Eurocentric, postcolonial criticism takes the critique of Eurocentrism as its central task.”19 This is indeed the case. And for postcolonial critics, there follows from this rejection of Enlightenment rationality a number of implications for the reading of history. Not the least of these is a rejection of the progressivist Marxist narrative that founds modern history in the unity of capital. This is what Dirlik finds particularly disturbing and regrettable. On his reading, the “most significant conclusion to follow from the repudiation of foundational historiography is the rejection of capitalism as a foundational category.”20 For postcolonial critics, however, this is hardly a devastating critique, because while it is true that on their view capitalism can no longer be read as an all-embracing structuring principle, on the base/ superstructure model, it is equally true that this does not thereby commit them to reading determinations of capital out of history. On the contrary, what is encouraged are only more partial and more situated determinations. Prakash admits as much.21 And some who, like Stuart Hall, are always within, as he says, “shouting distance of Marxism,” have in fact argued with much force in just this way.22 Within the current terms of the debate, therefore, postcolonial critics might plausibly respond that Dirlik’s case would have been more persuasive had he argued against them in a less totalizing and essentializing fashion. For it may well be the 18

Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories,” p. 397; and quoted also in Dirlik, “Postcolonial Aura,” p. 334. 19 Dirlik, “Postcolonial Aura,” p. 334. 20 Ibid. 21 “It is one thing,” Prakash writes, for instance, “to 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.” Prakash, “Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography,” p. 13. 22 See Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986): 29–45. The remark about his proximity to Marxism is made in Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in Lawrence Grossberg, Gary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 279.

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case, for instance, that one condition for the rise of “postcoloniality” as a going category especially in the North Atlantic academy is the transformation of capitalism. It would be an interesting question whether the themes and modalities that animate its deployment in critical practices are in some ways dependent upon the material conditions produced in the wake of the rise of a distinctively transnational or global capitalism. But to acknowledge that a practice has determinate conditions does not thereby make it a mere ideological reflection of any one of them. My principal concern, though, is not to pursue this line of response available to postcolonial criticism because what concerns me is that despite the quite evident differences between them—their diametrically opposed attitudes toward foundations—Prakash nevertheless shares with Dirlik the metatheoretical view that what is at stake in this debate ought to be something epistemological: precisely this quarrel, in other words, over foundations. Richard Rorty (with whom I shall disagree in a moment) is right I think to chide “posties” like Prakash on this score. For my part, I would like to urge postcolonial critics to drop this preoccupation for one that brings the problem of the political more sharply into the foreground. Dirlik, it is true, is primarily motivated by a political problem, the problem of “alternative futures”; this is how he means his book After the Revolution to be read.23 His neo-Marxist critique of postcolonial criticism is part of a broader criticism of theoretical moves that have lost the direction and force of this political concern. The problem, however, is that the realization of this concern is unthinkable within the rationalist and determinist problematic in which he operates, because this problematic works to make the political—the level, that is, of antagonism and hegemony—a mere effect of deeper underlying forces. Dirlik subscribes to a theory of history in which history is the working out of a more or less logical sequence of moments in the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production that constitute the objective structure of the mode of production. Not only is a dubious unity ascribed to “capitalism,” but in this scheme politics can only be understood heteronomously, as appearances of a more fundamental rationality; or else—what amounts to the same thing—this rationality (in the order of capital) provides the First Principle or decision-procedure that forecloses the necessity of politics.24 My point, in short, is simply the one made by Laclau among others that once it is admitted that antagonism is not reducible to the internal dialectic of a logical contradiction but is dependent upon rela23

“Alternative futures” is a phrase he uses. See Dirlik, After the Revolution, p. 10. For a concern to think about the problem of the heteronomy of the political within Marxism, see Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx, James Swenson (trans.) (New York: Routledge, 1994). 24

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tions “outside” those structured by capital (gendered relations, raced relations, etc), their intelligibility (as, too, their resolution) has to be sought at the level of the political—that is, in contingent relations of hegemony and counter-hegemony.25 However, if there is no way back to embracing Dirlik’s neo-Marxist story about politics, I want to resist the easily available poststructualist dismissal because it achieves little these days beyond concealing its own apoliticality. It will be recalled that what worries Prakash, in staking out his argument for an antifoundationalist postcolonial criticism, is that both the nationalist and Marxist critiques of colonialism operate within a master narrative that puts Europe at the center. He wants to destabilize this Eurocentrism. I endorse this, and with it more generally the kinds of poststructuralist theory-moves he makes—the repudiation of grand narratives, the antisubstantivist or relational conception of selves, the contextualist approach to rationality, the foregrounding of the interpenetration of knowledge and power, the critique of the metaphysics of presence, and so on. I am skeptical, nevertheless, about the critical payoff this emphasis on epistemology provides, not because it is somehow cognitively bankrupt, but because in it the political as such does not appear. To make the political appear requires an attention to the relation between criticism and strategy. It seems to me that this has been an inadequately thought-out relation, but one which bears serious consideration. For if we give up the idea that the targets of criticism are somehow given to us a priori, in advance, by a transcendental hermeneutic (Marxism’s, let us say), that identifies once and for all criticism’s project, then how and in relation to what ends criticism is put to work has now to be a question rather than an assumption. What I want to understand about criticism is not merely the adequacy of its internal cognitive apparatus (I am not especially interested, for instance, in whether Prakash’s antifoundationalist history is coherently formulated), but more what the particular strategy employed enables in terms of the construction of discursive space in which theoretical objects can emerge. Central to thinking about this relation is the “contrast-effect” that criticism produces. The force of any critical operation derives, in part at least, from the contrast-effect it produces—from the way it produces a difference in the discursive field. When criticism enters a field it does so in relation to some target and with the implicit or explicit self-understanding that that target is worth aiming at, and that it is worth aiming at because disabling it will have desired effects. 25 This, it will be remembered, is the whole point of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). See also Laclau’s more recent “New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time,” in his New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time.

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One crucial way of producing contrast-effects is by bringing new targets into view. Indeed, the question that I want to pose to any particular strategy of criticism is not whether the answers it derives from the questions that preoccupy it are adequate ones so much as whether those questions themselves in relation to which its strategy is formulated are questions worth continuing having answers to at this conjuncture. It is in these terms that I am skeptical about the continued strategic value of antifoundationalism for postcolonial criticism. The argument that second-order justifications—i.e., backup claims—are contingent rather than transcendental may be a truth to fight for if one’s adversary holds a position worth displacing her or him from, if something stands or falls on occupying that position. If not, however, contingency in itself may amount to little more than a mere trivial truth, one that, to be sure, ought not to be put aside, but which might more usefully be folded into a critical strategy staking out a different target, a political one. This anyway is my view. But in part, too, the reason for my skepticism is that this emphasis on epistemology, on the give-and-take between foundationalists and contextualists, keeps us in a particular game. This is the game of asking, with Prakash and others, “how” sorts of questions—how ought the Third World to rewrite their histories?—rather than “to what end” sorts of questions—into the political project of what futures is this rewriting to be inserted? That is to say, the epistemological questions keep us in the game of deconstructing Europe’s assumptions and reconstructing alternative histories. It keeps us debating which philosophy provides us with the best view. This is an important ongoing project; it buys Prakash and other postcolonial theorists cognitive space for the reinterrogation and recharacterization of colonialism, and I am not advocating abandoning it. But I am impatient to see this cognitive space built into another kind of project in which the critical yield is defined not in relation to the epistemological quarrel about foundations, but in relation to the political horizon of debates about postcolonial futures. I am impatient, in other words, to see another candidate folded into the field of discussion, a candidate concerned to raise the question of prospective political forms of community. On the whole, then, although I am sympathetic to the kind of antifoundational moves of which Prakash is an advocate, I agree with William Connolly that whereas genealogy and deconstruction may be indispensable to “ethicality”—by which he means “the cultivation of care for the strife and interdependence of identity\difference”—they are by themselves insufficient to sustain a theory of politics.26 This is where the crucial stakes are to be found. I want to take up this question in relation to the political 26

See Connolly, Identity\Difference, p. 184.

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categories of our modernity, but first I want to set out further the case for a political postcolonial criticism by exploring something of the altered political-cognitive context produced by the collapse of Soviet-style communism and the resurgence of neoliberalism. This new context has implications for how we work poststructurally with a practice of deferral.

“THE WORLDWIDE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION” AND “THE END OF HISTORY”

I think that one of the things that postcolonial criticism (as deconstruction of the logos of Eurocentrism, and genealogy of the legacy of Europe’s categories and institutions) has tacitly depended upon is the political horizon of “actually existing socialism.” I do not mean to suggest by this that all postcolonial critics are, or have been, self-identifying socialists. This is no doubt not the case. I mean to suggest, rather, that since colonialism and neocolonialism were defined in relation to the globalization of capitalism, this criticism has always operated at least implicitly within the frame of that ideological opposition—capitalism/socialism—which defined up until recently the political terrain of the twentieth century. While this is so, however, it is not insignificant that when postcolonial critics criticize Marxism’s developmentalist teleology what is at stake, by and large, is the cultural problem of Europe’s hegemony (the fundamental assumption of a gap or a lack, and thus of the rational direction in which they are to be progressively overcome), not the ethical-political problem of criticizing the present in relation to the project of possible postcolonial futures. To put it another way, when Marxism is criticized, what is at stake is the theoretical apparatus for reading history rather than the political question of the critieria by which the shape of an alternative future can be affirmed or refused. The point I am after here is that if it is true that an anticapitalism and an antiliberalism have often circulated through postcolonial criticism, it is as true that the implications of these for a theory of politics have been little more than gestural. And one of the conditions that has enabled this deferral, this postponement, of the question of the political is that our political futures were assumed to be covered by the moral authority of (some version of) socialism. It is this that can no longer be taken for granted. Our postcolonial present is not only defined by the legacy of colonialism. A generation (in some instances more, in some rather less) into political sovereignty, what also defines this present is the collapse of the great experiments with socialism that characterized what Samir Amin, in his

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intellectual memoir, has called the Bandung Era.27 Roughly 1955–1975— from the Bandung Conference to the call by the nonaligned movement and the Group of 77 for a new international economic order—this was a period of extraordinary global change and confrontational political realignment. In it, the only recently constituted “Third World” became the site of intense debates regarding options for “development,” and the early “Bandung regimes” as Amin calls them (Nehru’s India, Nasser’s Egypt, Sukarno’s Indonesia, Nkrumah’s Ghana) the stage for arguments regarding the plausibility of what came to be called, in the now fading language of Progress Publishers, a “non-capitalist path to socialism.”28 Moreover, from the late 1960s through the 1970s there emerged a number of radicalizations of the Bandung project—Salvador Allende’s Chile, Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania after the Arusha Declaration, Michael Manley’s democratic socialism in Jamaica, Maurice Bishop’s Grenada, and Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s Sri Lanka. In each of them “socialism” was the name of a variously configured oppositional idea of political community defined largely in terms of anti-imperialism, national self-determination, and anticapitalism. The point is that in a quite remarkable sea change the Bandung Era has passed. The 1980s witnessed its eclipse. The Bandung experiments have collapsed, partly under internal pressures and partly under the weight of World Bank “structural adjustment” programs, but all within the terms of a new alignment of global forces that have removed them from the field of possible contemporary options. And now, collapsed too are those regimes that gave these experiments political cover throughout the antagonistic years of the cold war.29 However, our postcolonial present is altered not only by the fact of the collapse of the noncapitalist experiments in the Third World or of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but also by the fact of a resurgent liberalism that has stepped onto the stage to claim for itself a victory, to claim in fact that it constitutes 27 Samir Amin, Re-reading the Postwar Period: An Intellectual Itinerary (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994). 28 Progress Publishers was a Moscow publishing house that provided the Left in the Third World with an important source of inexpensive and authoritative communist literature. On the noncapitalist path, see for example, V. I. Solodovnikov and V. V. Bogoslovsky, NonCapitalist Development: A Historical Outline (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975). The theory of the noncapitalist path to socialism was developed by Soviet scholars in the 1960s. They argued that in Third World countries, where imperialism and dependency had obstructed capitalist development, it was possible to bypass capitalism in the construction of socialism. For some critical remarks on this notion see Amin, Re-reading the Postwar Period, pp. 110, 133, 135. 29 See the useful collection edited by Robin Blackburn, After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism (New York: Verso, 1991), especially the articles by Ralph Miliband, Fredric Jameson, Ju¨rgen Habermas, and Robin Blackburn.

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our only possible future. Not so very long ago when liberalism (politically discredited by the First World War) was on the defensive, Marxism could confidently claim socialism as the way of Universal History. Now the tables are dramatically turned and a rejuvenated liberalism has put Marxism in the shade and is claiming for itself the necessary, even inevitable, path of World History. As a December 1993 Time cover story on Cuba put it reassuringly, “Already Fidel Castro’s Cuba is no more. Whether he is leading the way or merely acquiescing to it, the socialist Utopia he built is sliding inexorably toward capitalism. . . . The struggle under way is between Castro and the forces of history: Can he control Cuba’s mutation to his liking, or will freeing the economy steal the country out from under him?”30 What is notable about these remarks is that the problem with Cuba is no longer the old cold war problem of containing the communist threat, but more simply, more confidently, more ominously, that it is out of sync with the forces of history. “The triumph of the West.” “The end of history.” “The victory of liberalism.” “The failure of communism.” “The passing of Marxism-Leninism.” These are the kinds of aggressively euphoric declarations that have moved into the foreground of our intellectual and political present. And Francis Fukuyama is one of the more provocative apostles of this new world order of triumphalist liberalism, startling the world—conservatives, liberals, and progressives alike—with the bold eschatology of his 1989 essay, “The End of History?”31 Fukuyama’s thesis (such as it is) is simply this: the changes and transformations taking place around the world today—from the uprising at Tiananmen Square to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall; from the demise of General Pinochet to the breakup of the Soviet Union—ought not to be seen as isolated, contingent events. In them a “larger process” can be discerned which gives “coherence and order” to the whole. This process, he says, is characterized by the exhaustion of all viable alternatives to Western liberalism (communism and fascism having been the two main rivals in the twentieth century). “What we may be witnessing,” he writes in that now famous passage, “is not just the end of the cold war, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”32 There are now no fundamental contradictions that cannot be resolved within the context of liberal democracy because the basic principles of the liberal democratic 30

Johanna McGreary and Cathy Booth, “Cuba Alone,” Time, December 6, 1993, p. 45. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18. 32 Ibid., p. 4. 31

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state are themselves beyond improvement. Of course, not all has yet been materially achieved—by no means. Indeed, the liberal democratic triumph is first of all only an idea, though, in virtue of the “pull” of this idea, the historical direction is clear. Thus for Fukuyama, it is of little moment what challenges are posed by “crackpot messiahs,” and what “strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkino Faso” because these are marginal to the main trend. And in any case, as he says, “at the end of history it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society.”33 Subsequently, his book, The End of History and the Last Man sought to map these claims onto a grand overall theory of human nature and universal history, onto a sort of philosophical anthropology that explains why some societies move into the era of the “posthistorical” while others remain mired in the conflict-ridden zones of the “historical.” (Needless to say, it is easy to tell which are which.)34 And in the spectacular closing passages of this book, the process and its general direction are summed up in a How-TheWest-Was-Won vision of the metaphorical wagon train of history: Rather than a thousand shoots blossoming into as many different flowering plants, mankind will come to seem like a long wagon train strung out along a road. Some wagons will be pulling into town sharply and crisply, while others will be bivouacked back in the desert, or else stuck in ruts in the final pass over the mountains. Several wagons, attacked by Indians, will have been set aflame and abandoned along the way. There will be a few wagoneers who, stunned by the battle, will have lost their sense of direction and are temporarily heading in the wrong direction, while one or two of the wagons will get tired of the journey and decide to set up permanent camps at particular points back along the road. Others will have found alternative routes to the main road, though they will discover that to get through the final mountain range they must all use the same pass. But the great majority of wagons will be making the slow journey into town, and most will eventually arrive 33

Ibid., p. 13. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1992). For a discussion of the intellectual history of end-of-history narratives, see Perry Anderson, “The Ends of History,” in A Zone of Engagement (New York: Verso, 1992). Many Marxists were quite taken by Fukuyama’s argument. Anderson, for example, writes admiringly: “Here, for the first time, the philosophical discourse of the end of history has found a commanding political expression. In a remarkable feat of composition, Fukuyama moves with graceful fluency back and forth between metaphysical exposition and sociological observation, the structure of human history and the detail of current events, doctrines of the soul and visions of the city. It is safe to say that no one has ever attempted a comparable synthesis—at once so deep in ontological premise and so close to the surface of global politics” (p. 341). 34

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there. The wagons are all similar to one another: while they are painted different colors and are constructed of varied materials, each has four wheels and is drawn by horses, while inside sits a family hoping and praying that their journey will be a safe one. The apparent differences in the situations of the wagons will not be seen as reflecting permanent and necessary differences between the people riding in the wagons, but simply a product of their different positions along the road.35

It is easy to see that this is the old liberal progressivism, its ethnocentrisms scarcely disguised. So it may well be, and it may be felt, rightly or wrongly, that The End of History, elegant and learned as it may appear, is merely the work of a U.S. State Department ideologue and therefore hardly worth reflecting upon. And it may be unlikely that at the end of the twentieth century— after Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein—many will buy his story. But even so, what is more interesting from the point of view of the postcolonial wing of the cultural Left, is that many intellectuals who would quickly dismiss the kind of progressivism and foundationalism that Fukuyama unapologetically defends, who do not believe, for instance, that we need either a theory of history or a theory of nature, who think that all such talk of deep underlying forces is mere chimerical nonsense, nevertheless share in his uncomplicated celebration of the so-called rich North Atlantic democracies.36 Think of Richard Rorty, whose phrase this is. Rorty is a contemporary U.S. liberal whose recasting of the story of Western philosophy has been enormously enabling for the cultural Left as a whole precisely because he has been concerned (since his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) to undermine the metaphysical assumptions that conceptually support teleological narratives of the Fukuyama sort. For postcolonial criticism more particularly, his interruption of Europe’s philosophical autobiography enables us to historicize more adequately Europe’s knowledges of the knowledges of non-European others. But Rorty has been critical of this cultural Left, too. He has been skeptical of their abiding belief in philosophy or theory, and of their corollary political faith in the worldly effects of the deconstruction of texts.37 As I have already suggested, I happen to think that this skepticism is salutary and timely. However, where it seems to lead Rorty (as he tries to work out the political implications of his antifoundationalism), is into the embrace of a complaisant Americanism that merely acclaims rather than questions the contemporary character of the liberal democratic state. 35

Fukuyama, The End of History, p. 339. See Richard Rorty, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” The Journal of Philosophy 80, no. 10 (1983): 585. 37 See, for example, Rorty, “Two Cheers for the Cultural Left.” 36

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Responding recently to the “failure of socialism” in Eastern Europe, for example, Rorty suggested that the lesson for “American leftist intellectuals” (among whom he included himself) is that they ought now to give up the vocabulary in which their political goals have hitherto been described, because “not only socialism but all the other words that drew their force from the idea that an alternative to capitalism was available have been drained of that force.”38 This vocabulary—with phrases like “unjust society,” “capitalist economy,” and “bourgeois culture”—was only intelligible, he says, when we thought we knew what the alternative to them would look like. And now it is patently evident that we do not. Rorty shares here with radical democratic theorists like Laclau and Mouffe the view that a whole conception of socialism, and with it a whole conceptual apparatus of political argument and political calculation in which the idea of revolution was central, have now to be set aside. At the same time, however, whereas Laclau and Mouffe’s skepticism urge them to rethink (however problematically) the basis of political criticism and with it democratic politics, Rorty’s urges him in the opposite direction. He wishes to persuade us in fact that we are in a situation in which, like it or not, the poor performance of socialism leaves us with no other conclusion than that “bourgeois democratic welfare states are the best we can envisage.”39 Reform we may—indeed ought to—pursue; but all the fixing that we can imagine can be done within the framework we now have. This is surprisingly (and disturbingly) close to Fukuyama’s argument.40 At a certain level, in other words, the only difference between Rorty’s “endism” and Fukuyama’s is that for Rorty there is no need to worry ourselves with the sort of fairy tale about technology and recognition that Fukuyama thinks is necessary to justify or legitimize the positive description of the institutions of liberal democracy. For Rorty, liberal democracy may need “philosophical articulation” (“a theory of the human self that comports with the institutions he or she admires”), but it has no need of “philosophical back up.”41 38 Richard Rorty, “The Intellectuals at the End of Socialism,” The Yale Review 80 (April 1992): 2, his emphasis. 39 Ibid., p. 5. 40 “We who live in stable, long-standing liberal democracies face an unusual situation. In our grandparents’ time, many reasonable people could foresee a radiant socialist future in which private property and capitalism had been abolished, and in which politics itself was somehow overcome. Today, by contrast, we have trouble imagining a world that is radically better than our own, or a future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist.” Fukuyama, The End of History, p. 46. 41 Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Merrill D. Peterson and Robert C. Vaughan (eds.), The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: Its Evolution and Consequences in American History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 260.

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My point here is a simple one. Ours is a time when the demand that postcolonial criticism has to meet has changed because the cognitivepolitical context it has inhabited has changed. And this change is fundamental—as they say, world-historical. As a consequence, the old positions and the old theoretical operations, even where seemingly available to us, can no longer carry the same force, and therefore can no longer perform the same critical labors as under the old regime of antagonisms. Indeed, in the reconfigured cognitive-political space we now inhabit a different set of questions than the ones in relation to which postcolonial criticism has constituted itself in the last decade and a half or so have imposed themselves upon us. What this reconfigured context of communist collapse and liberal self-congratulation throws into the sharpest relief is the need to rethink the story of liberalism and democracy that has for more than a generation informed our visions of political sovereignty. Or to put it another way, insofar as this triumphalist story of Western liberalism inscribes the non-West into its privileged telos (as it does explicitly with Fukuyama and implicitly with Rorty), it becomes imperative for postcolonial criticism to begin to fold into its practice a criticism that distances itself from the Enlightenment project of both Marxism and liberalism and constructs a problematized relation to the claims and the categories of our political modernity.

POSTCOLONIAL CLAIMS ON THE CATEGORIES OF POLITICAL MODERNITY

I have been sketching an argument for a revision of postcolonial criticism. I have so far offered a skepticism regarding the epistemological objects that sustain this critical practice in its more prominent formulations. I have suggested, too, that the altered terrain of our political present—the collapse of the socialist project and the euphoria of neo-liberalism—has fundamentally altered the demand that criticism has to meet. In my view the demand is for a criticism of our political modernity. I want to turn now to some of what I take to be the central claims and categories through which the supposed privilege of this political modernity is produced. And on the view that seemingly attractive positions are precisely those that warrant our scrutiny, I do so by way of a criticism—from the side of the postcolonial criticism that I would like to commend—of a recently emergent post-Marxist or “radical democratic” story of our present. The story goes somewhat as follows. In the wake of the political upheavals of the past five or six years the error of the Marxist road is now clear: it lies not only in its epistemological naı¨vete´—the reductionism of the base/superstructure model, and the teleology of its mode of produc-

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tion narrative—but more tragically in its cavalier attitude toward individual rights and the norms of democratic procedure. Today, as we bear witness to the dismantling of totalitarianism, we simply have to face up to the evidence around us and adopt a different—more embracing—attitude toward modern liberal democracy. While of course not blinding ourselves to its faults and weaknesses, its atomistic individualism for example, and its rationalism, we have now to be willing to acknowledge its achievements. And these achievements of liberal democracy lie chiefly in its articulation—by the middle of the nineteenth century in the work of John Stuart Mill, for example—of the Lockean discourse of liberty and natural rights with the discourse of civic and political equalities. This constitutive articulation (the contemporary self-consciousness of which owes much to the historicizing work of C. B. Macpherson),42 forms a kind of watershed, and on this view, the contemporary task of political criticism lies in “deepening and extending” these achievements while at the same time working to displace two kinds of assumptions: the metaphysical assumptions— regarding history, subject, knowledge, community—that attempt to provide the guarantee of classical liberalism’s account of them; and the assumptions that lead, as with Rorty, to a conflation of political with economic liberalism. Indeed the radical democracy project sees itself as a kind of double: it sees itself as simultaneously modernist and postmodernist—as simultaneously pursuing Habermas’s “unfinished project of modernity” while rejecting the Habermasian desire for the “epistemological perspective of the Enlightenment”; as pursuing Rorty’s prescriptive contingency while rejecting his assumptions about the role of capitalism.43 In a certain sense, then, radical democracy is animated by the view that the ideals of liberal democracy—those of liberty and equality—are an unsurpassable political horizon requiring only better arguments than those so far deployed to secure them. And one of the interesting such arguments turns on a view of political modernity inspired in part by the work of Claude Lefort.44 According to Lefort, politically speaking modernity is characterised by a “democratic revolution.” This revolution is at the origin of a new institution of the social in which power becomes an 42 One thinks of works such as C. B. Macpherson’s The Real World of Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), and The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). For a very useful collection of essays discussing Macpherson’s contribution, see Joseph Carens (ed.), Democracy and Possessive Individualism: The Intellectual Legacy of C. B. Macpherson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). 43 Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (New York: Verso, 1993), p. 10. 44 See, for example, Claude Lefort’s “The Question of Democracy,” in his Democracy and Political Theory, David Macey (trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

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“empty place,” by which is meant that power, law, and knowledge are exposed to a radical indetermination. Thus, for example, Chantal Mouffe writes: “The absence of power embodied in the person of the prince and tied to a transcendental authority preempts the existence of a final guarantee or source of legitimation; society can no longer be defined as a substance having an organic identity. What remains is a society without clearly defined outlines, a social structure that is impossible to describe from the perspective of a single, or universal, point of view. It is in this way that democracy is characterised by the ‘dissolution of the markers of certainty.’ ”45 It is quite obvious why this story of the inauguration of the modern is an appealing one—after all, its notion of the emergence of conditions of “indetermination” gives a seeming sociohistorical assurance to the antifoundationalism of postmodern perspectives. What worries me about it, though, are two things. One is its implicit progressivism—not necessarily in the sense of the nineteenth-century perfectibilism of, say, Mill or Marx (this kind of explicitly stagist progressivism is easily enough put aside these days), but in the sense of the normalization of modernity. That is to say, in this account the story of democracy is one in which the forms of political order that it displaced can only be viewed as fundamentally insufficient with reference to the features of democracy. So normalized, democracy appears to us as a world-historical plateau, not necessarily as a crudely evolutionist point of convergence but nevertheless as a privileged point of vantage, and one to which we are invited (where not obliged) to aspire. It comes therefore to set the standard for the assessment of all political institutions and political discourses—and not only those of Europe’s own past, of course (the absolutism of the ancien re´gime, say), but those as well of the non-European worlds whose political presents have been reconstructed in colonialism’s wake. The point is this: within the narrative plot offered by such post-Marxist accounts—no less than in the one offered by the Enlightenment’s more enthusiastic supporters— postcolonial formations must fare badly inasmuch as their modernities can only be questionable (questionably adequate, questionably secure) ones. Their nonmodern, nonliberal, and nondemocratic forms of political community can only appear as, at best, a safely past past, and they can only be urged to enter more conscientiously—that is, less ideologically— upon the project of perfecting their modernities, where it is assumed of course that this task can only take place within the concepts and institutions through which their social lives have been reshaped by the intrusion of Western power. What I am trying to get at here in short is that whereas it purports to be critical of the “epistemological perspective of the Enlight45

Mouffe, The Return of the Political, p. 11.

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enment,” the account of democracy offered by post-Marxists participates very much in a point of view that makes the supposed accomplishment of modern democracy the unchallenged regulative norm in relation to which all other forms of political community are to be judged. The other—related—thing that worries me about this story of political modernity is the conception of power it depends upon. A predemocratic regime is one of substantive power—embodied, centralized, directing power—power that imprints itself in an uncompromising but also malevolently restrictive way upon the subject. By contrast, the “democratic revolution” inaugurates a regime of power which, because of its “indetermination,” allows the subject a wider field of choice, a sort of deliberative or volitional ambiguity, of being neither one thing nor another, or several things together. It seems to me hard not to see in this view the familiar Enlightenment picture according to which the modern appears as the inauguration of a benevolent and liberating form of power that carries with it the new possibility of freedom and agency. Contrary to this view, however, I would argue that modern power, and its political embodiment liberal democracy, constitute a regime in which power is inscribed within a new field of functionality (that of the social), in relation to a new target (the government of conduct), and in relation to new guiding or normative concepts (among them, freedom, procedural justice, legal equality, representative government, and public opinion). By this I mean that if premodern forms of power are concerned with subduing the body, with taking hold of it and directly extracting from it a useful surplus, modern power is concerned above all (though, needless to say, not exclusively) with identifying and restructuring the conditions of subject formation and action so as to oblige these to take a desired direction. In this sense, modern power is, in Michel Foucault’s vocabulary, “governmental”; it is concerned to “structure the possible field of action of others.”46 This, obviously, does not make modern power “indeterminate,” as the radical democracy theorists would have it; it only makes it differently distributed and differently organized in relation to targets, instrumentalities, and forms of knowledge. Understood in this way, as a restructuring of the field, configuration and project of power, one has then to read the inscription of the modern into colonial space not as the emergence of an “empty space” or of an “indeterminate” power but as a governmental reorganization of the existing institutional and political space such that by a certain 46

Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 221. See also his “Governmentality,” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

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number of transforming arrangements and calculations the conduct of the colonized is constrained or urged in an improving direction. Therefore, the great story of that memorable “age of reform” which witnessed the abolition throughout the British colonial territories of forms of forced labor (plantation slavery in Jamaica, for example, and ra¯ja¯ka¯riya in Sri Lanka) and the construction of the conceptual and institutional space of the secular modern, cannot be read as an episode in the drama of the progressive emergence of freedom, but has rather to be understood as the construction of a distinctive political rationality in which power seeks to work through the construction of the space of “free” social exchange, and through the constuction of a subjectivity normatively experienced as the source of “free will” and rational autonomous agency.47 Now a central theme of the story I am examining here is the project of rethinking the idea of the subject in relation to social and political identity and agency. It is in this regard, for instance, that the reproblematization of citizen and community is offered. Part of the attempt has been to produce a conceptual space between the rights-based liberalism of John Rawls and the substantive liberalism or communitarianism of people like Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre. Post-Marxist theorists are inclined to be sympathetic to the revised Rawls of Political Liberalism inasmuch as this Rawls is disclaiming any universal validity for justice as fairness, and only trying, he says, to settle fundamental disagreements within a modern democratic society.48 Thus the basic principles that are now understood to guide the formulation of a theory of justice are not ones given in advance, derived from a neutral nowhere, but simply those that we can find already embedded in what he calls the “public political culture of a democratic society.”49 Justice as fairness thus appears more situated, more contextualized. Moreover, what is particularly appealing about this Rawls to radical democracy theorists is that he is no longer seeking a comprehensive liberalism, but only a political one. That is to say, the principles of justice have at once to acknowledge the fact of pluralism and express a shared and public political reason. To accomplish this they have to be arrived at independently of any moral, religious, or philosophical conceptions that may be affirmed by its citizens. The radical democracy theorists are in agreement with this. What they object to is not this thesis as such but the defense of it. What Rawls requires, they argue, is a conception of community and identity that does not reinscribe the reductionism and essentialism of classical liberalism. Rawls’s error, they 47

See chapters 1 and 3. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), in particular part 1. 49 Ibid., p. 13. 48

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argue, is that in the construction of his pluralism he fails to acknowledge the contingency and ambiguity of every identity as well as the constitutive character of social division and antagonism. Against Rawls’s essentialism that supposes some original unfissured identity, it is suggested that the social agent has to be thought as the articulation of an always unstable ensemble of subject-positions constructed through and within specific discursive formations. Identity, in short, can only be constituted through acts of identification.50 It is evident from what I have said earlier in relation to postcolonial criticism that there is much in this view that I am sympathetic with. But at the same time the story of the self and identity offered by these theorists is not altogether satisfactory. One of the things that seems to me unsatisfactory about it is that it depends unproblematically on a notion of a self/ identity that is always available for unmaking and remaking; indeed more than this, one that thrives on such unmaking and remaking. It depends upon a self/identity that can choose to step back from its moral commitments, and through its autonomy-grounding faculty of critical reason, suspend its particularist entanglements and enter into the public space of shared political reason.51 It is not that such selves do not exist (they constitute perhaps a recognizable American norm, and psychoanalytic critics like Joel Kovel and cultural historians like Christopher Lasch have given us an account of their internal economies), but do we all have to endorse them as the norm? Again, in this view of the self, the differences that constitute our moral and cultural differences—interesting and perhaps even indispensable for our private lives—are not essential to claims about the political forms of human flourishing. One reason why this picture of the self is indispensable of course is because on this view autonomy is the first of individual virtues, and this autonomy requires a critical morality that allows it to constitute and reconstitute its ends or goods as it wishes. But several questions arise here: Even if we reject the essentialist view of originary identity, is it the case that we simply construct our identities in the way suggested here? After all, isn’t there always a subject-position from which our identifications are constructed? And if this is so, even if we are “sutured” at the intersection of often competing discursive claims, aren’t our options constrained in various ways? Therefore, do we not, in part at least, live a fate that is the burden of a history imprinted in us? Moreover, are we obliged to affirm autonomy as the most desirable form 50 See, for example, Chantal Mouffe, “Democratic Politics Today,” in Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (New York: Verso, 1992). 51 See Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987) for an instructive criticism of this view of the self’s relation to its commitments.

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of human being? Why should we not treat it as merely one among many plausible human goods? One general consequence for these theorists therefore is that (like the Rawlsian liberal individualism they claim to criticize) the demand that cultural identity has a political embodiment can only appear in the disparaging language of essentialism or fundamentalism, as attempts to revert to a premodern conception of community. There is an all-too-familiar hubris in this that is worth a hard look, indeed that we ought to reject.52 I want to emphasize here that it will not do to offer the disclaimer that this description of political concepts, practices, and institutions applies only to modern democracies in the industrial West. (One encounters this line of retreat from Eurocentrism with increasing frequency in recent years.) This disclaimer not only misunderstands the problem of Eurocentrism but it also misconstrues what the critical practice of “situating” an argument entails. Such a practice, I would argue, entails the construction of a relation—and thus of a difference—so as to enable a locational contrast to appear. An Other is always at work in such a practice. Simply saying that this is what we do where we come from cannot, therefore, constitute a critical practice of location. Moreover, if non-Western societies are in large part produced through the restructuring colonial insertion of the concepts and institutions of modern democracy, the question arises: What counts as “modern” and “democratic,” or more aptly as successfully modern and democratic? At what point in the career of modernization can we assert with Rawls that ours are merely the assumptions of a “democratic culture”? Even as they inhabit the field that reproduces the discursive rhythms of our political modernity the post-Marxists have yet to pose adequately much less adequately respond to such questions as these. To this extent, their critique of our political present is as flawed as those they themselves oppose. It seems to me that postcolonial criticism needs a different kind of account of our political modernity, a different account of the political dead ends at which we have unquestionably arrived. Such an account would have to challenge the assumption that what this present demands is merely giving up Marxism and its revolutionary hopes, rather than giving up the Enlightenment project as such in which both Marxism and liberal democracy have sought their futures, and to which, as we have seen, even 52 For a critique of some of these assumptions, see Talal Asad, “The Limits of Religious Criticism in the Middle East: Notes on Islamic Public Argument,” in his Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). For an attempt to think against the grain of secular universalism, see Partha Chatterjee, “Secularism and Toleration,” Economic and Political Weekly, July 9, 1994, pp. 1768–76.

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post-Marxists are committed.53 Such an account would have to take seriously the prospect that if we are to give up this project, and with it the arrogance that the world’s forms of life (transformed as they have been by one embodiment of that project’s universalist desire) ought to converge on the consensual norm of a secular reason and rational morality, then we have to give up the seemingly powerful corollary presumption that liberalism and indeed democracy (even a purportedly radical one) have any particular privilege among ways of organizing the political forms of our collective lives.54 This, of course, is not the same as saying that democracy ought not to be one among our options; nor is it to suggest that there are premodern possibilities available to us. Rather it is to reject the view that it is possible—or even desirable—to arrive at a single political principle that all forms of life ought to subscribe to, and it is to affirm the validity of a variety of moral traditions and forms of political reasoning which, however reconfigured by modern power, produce the varied goods of human flourishing. To sum up briefly, I have been trying to make a number of linked arguments in the course of this chapter. Together they hang on a certain conception of criticism as a self-consciously strategic practice, as a practice cognizant not only of its partialness but of itself as a practice of entering an always-already constituted field of argument and having, at any given conjuncture within this “zone of engagement” to decide on how to proceed, against what adversaries, with the support of which allies, by the mobilization of what apparatus, and so on. On this view the force of a critical practice depends in large part on the contrast-effect it can produce, on its ability to open up space for new questions. I have tried to suggest in this regard that the contrast-effects produced by the epistemological critique to which postcolonial criticism (like Left cultural criticism more generally) has been committed for the last decade and a half or so has lost much of its critical force, and I have tried to suggest that this is in part because our present, marked by the collapse of those modernist hopes that animated our political preoccupations in the aftermaths of sovereignty, provokes another demand than the one this criticism was designed to meet. This new demand, I think, is a demand for rethinking the claims 53 This is a point well made by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). 54 For one instructive argument in this direction, see John Gray, “After Liberalism,” in his Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1989), and more recently, “After the New Liberalism,” in his Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (New York: Routledge, 1995). I have found Gray’s work insightful and provocative. One does not have to agree with his occasional gratutious antiMarxism to recognize the value of his critique of liberalism.

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and the categories of that very political modernity in which these hopes found the voice—that of a morally neutral citizen-subject—in which to speak. Finally, meeting this demand, I want to urge, entails folding the critique of the Enlightenment project into a practice in which our target is defined in terms of challenging the story of our political present (and thus of our prospects for alternative political futures), according to which there is a single horizon toward which it is desirable for us all to head.

CHAPTER 7

Community, Number, and the Ethos of Democracy A particular action . . . never begins in its particularity, but always in an idiom or a tradition of activity. (Michael Oakeshott, “Rational Conduct”)

SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT on April 20, 1995, women divers, cadres of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the principal Tamil politicomilitary organization, bomb-blasted two gunboats belonging to the Sri Lankan navy at anchor in the Trincomalee harbor. It marked the sudden end of the Cessation of Hostilities that had been formally signed into effect by LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, and the head of state of Sri Lanka, President Chandrika Kumaratunga, in early January of the same year.1 It had been the most optimistic three and a half months in recent Sri Lankan history. The Sinhala chauvinism that had so disfigured the 1980s and the early part of the 1990s—the period of the 1983 anti-Tamil riots and its aftermath, of the emergence and consolidation of an authoritarian presidency (an elitist one in the figure of J. R. Jayewardene, and subsequently a populist one in Ranasinghe Premadasa) and the undermining of Parliament, of the gradual militarization of the Sinhala state, and the rise and fall of an insurgent Sinhala nationalist organization, the Janata Vimukthi Peramuna—seemed to be in retreat, and many had felt, albeit cautiously, that here at last was a real chance for peace. But a peace of what kind? This is the domain of my preoccupations here. The contemporary peace discourse in Sri Lanka is almost entirely a constitutionalist one, perhaps for understandable reasons. The regime of President Kumaratunga—an alliance of political parties called the People’s Alliance led by her own party, a much reformed Sri Lanka Freedom Party—had come to power less than a year before the Cessation of Hostilities (in August 1994) in part on a mandate to devise a framework in which 1 The LTTE had in fact sent the president a note on April 18 indicating that they were withdrawing from the negotiating process and the Cessation of Hostilities. In June 1990,

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to arrive at a just political resolution to the prolonged ethnic crisis which, since 1983, has now witnessed three rounds of devastating war between the armed forces of the Sri Lankan state and Tamil militants. The LTTE have been fighting in the name of a separate state (Eelam) comprising the Northern and Eastern Provinces, which Tamils think of as their “traditional homelands,” but it is no longer clear that even for them complete separation is still on the agenda.2 In fact, since the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord of July 1987 established the principle, it is now generally agreed among most parties to the debate (except perhaps for extreme sections of Sinhala and Tamil nationalism) that any just political resolution to the conflict has to involve a significant devolution of autonomy and power to these provinces and, by extension, to all the provinces that constitute the island state.3 The implication of this, of course, is that a fundamental federal restructuring of the Sri Lankan state is going to be entailed. (At present the idea that Sri Lanka is a “unitary state” is entrenched in the [1978] constitution.) Indeed this is what the so-called package of constitutional reforms presented to the public as the framework for a negotiated settlement in August 1995 by President Kumaratunga envisages.4 These are the seeming options then: on the one hand, war, which neither side has much hope of winning outright; and on the other, a comprehensive constitutional package based on the principle of regional autonomy the LTTE had also unilaterally withdrawn from a cease-fire agreement, on that occasion with then (now late) President Ranasinghe Premadasa. 2 This is not the place to enter into a wide-ranging discussion of the LTTE and its controversial politics. However, one of the interesting features of the present period, one that reflects both local and global shifts in the understanding of what a “progressive” politics might be (its modes of organization, its horizons, and so on), is the emergence of a marked antipathy toward the LTTE on the part of intellectuals in the south who are nevertheless committed to a radical restructuring of the state to allow for Tamil autonomy. This has only become more widespread in the post–April 1995 period. There is now an important critical literature on the LTTE. See, usefully Ram Manikkalingam, “Tigerism,” Pravada 1 (March/ April 1992): 7–9; idem, “Tigerist Claims: A Critique,” Pravada 1 (July 1992): 11–15; Qadri Ismail, “Boys Will Be Boys,” Pravada 1 (July 1992): 11–15; and Sasanka Perera, “Peace, LTTE and Tamil Intellectuals,” Pravada 3 (November/December 1994): 5–8. 3 The so-called Indo-Lanka Peace Accord was signed by the late prime minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, and former president of Sri Lanka, J. R. Jayewardene, on July 27, 1987. It not only established the principle of devolution and placed the matter of the merger of the northern and eastern Provinces firmly on the agenda of Sri Lankan politics, but it brought into being the institution of Provincial Councils. Needless to say, the politics of the accord and its aftermath are deeply controversial. For an appreciative reflection on its legacy, see Jayadeva Uyangoda, “In Memory of the Indo-Lanka Accord,” Pravada 1 (August 1992): 21–22. 4 For a discussion of this package, see Jayadeva Uyangoda, “The Package and Its Politics,” Pravada 4 (July/August 1995): 5–7.

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and the “de-communalization” of public institutions. In this chapter I will explore something of the conceptual area in which it might be possible to consider an alternative to these seeming options—war or liberal peace— that define this Sri Lankan political present.

THE PURSUIT OF INTIMATIONS

There can be little doubt that the politico-conceptual questions that define this Sri Lankan crisis are enormously complex ones. It should be obvious, therefore, to any observer of the course of modern politics in Sri Lanka— especially modern postcolonial politics—that there can be no simple solutions. It is facile to think that there ought to be. Anyone venturing to write critically about the contemporary crisis and the debate around it (especially someone writing from afar) has a responsibility to write carefully. In what follows, then, I shall not be so bold as to seek to offer a fully fleshed-out alternative or way out. I am concerned to offer, however, what Michael Oakeshott would perhaps have called an exploration of some “directions of profitable advance” in the current conjuncture. This evocation of the late Michael Oakeshott may well be thought a curious one, and at the least, certainly a misplaced one in the context of a Third World political criticism. I do not think so. Central to what I want to think about is what I have been calling the demand of criticism, and I believe Oakeshott’s thought (some aspects of it anyway) is useful in this regard. In particular I want to make use of his idea of the study of politics (and of an education in political thinking) as a “pursuit of intimations.”5 Michael Oakeshott’s idea of a pursuit of intimations is profoundly suggestive. He means to use this idea, in the way of a workman’s rule of thumb, to explore the practice of political thinking and political criticism. For Oakeshott, the conduct of criticism—which is always a practical and therefore moral affair—cannot be divorced from its circumstances and contingencies. Oakeshott’s point here, though, is not the now tediously familiar anti-essentialist one that in the conduct of political argument there are no standards or points of reference. To be sure, so far as he is concerned there certainly does not exist any “mistake-proof manner of deciding what should be done.”6 But this is not the same as abandoning 5

See Michael Oakeshott, “Political Education,” in his Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, new and expanded ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1962), pp. 66–69. For some appreciative discussion of Oakeshott, see John Gray, “Oakeshott on Law, Liberty, and Civil Association,” in his Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1989); and idem, “Oakeshott as a Liberal,” in his Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (New York: Routledge, 1993). 6 Oakeshott, “Political Education,” p. 68.

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the idea that in political reasonings (which is to say, reasonings which are by their very nature, unstable and conflicted) one makes no reference or relies on no standards. This, he would suggest, is merely the old rationalism reasserting itself. His argument is a different one, namely, that such standards have to be understood as situated within—in the sense that they only emerge in relation to—what he calls “a whole moral tradition.”7 (It is true that Oakeshott imagines this as a more or less serene “conversation,” but it need not be so as Michael Walzer has suggested.)8 This means that criticism is necessarily a strategic affair, never knowing in advance of a particular cognitive-political conjuncture what demand it is being called upon to meet, what its tasks are supposed to be, what targets ought to command its attention, and so on. It also means that criticism is best understood as a practice of moral argument connected to and carried on within a tradition of moral discourse. On this view, criticism is one mode of finding our way—of finding better ways—within the moral worlds that shape our categories, structure our relationships, inspire our aspirations, and command our commitments. If this is so then how we as critics stand in relation to our political present has to be rethought in fundamental ways. It can scarcely be denied that in the wake of the political transformations of the last decade or so, the coherence of the assumptions regarding the political forms of our collective lives has been thrown into doubt—assumptions regarding, for instance, the nation-state as the formal political embodiment of a rational polity, or regarding the ideal and principle of democracy as the most egalitarian mode of organizing political power, and so on. What has been thrown into doubt, in effect, is the feasibility and the desirability of the whole tradition of political rationality that has characterized our modernity. What is thrown into doubt are those distinctions that have, in so many profound ways, animated modern oppositional discourse: the radical/conservative distinction, for example. The poverty of the story in which this distinction operates is now hard to miss. The Enlightenment assumptions about reason, theory, secularism, tradition, etc., on which it has hung are now difficult to defend coherently and consistently. Whatever its virtues in a prior historical conjuncture, if we are to confront our present in terms adequate to its intelligibility, we have little choice but to give up that story of radicalism and conservatism (and other modernist stories as well) and find another whose vocabulary distributes its distinctions differently across the field of the political. 7

Michael Oakeshott, “Rational Conduct,” in Rationalism in Politics, p. 127 Oakeshott, “Political Education,” pp. 57–58. See Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 28–29. 8

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If this is the case, I would argue that a significant demand on something like an oppositional criticism is to fold into its fields of visibility a reexamination of the inscription of liberalism and democracy into the colonial and postcolonial state (see chapter 6). What gets inscribed into these polities, of course, is not one or two institutions or concepts but the efficacy of a whole new game of politics (see chapters 1, 2, and 3). And one aspect of this new game, and in particular its “democratic” political rationality, is its reliance on “number”—on the principle, that is to say, of majoritarianism.9 In the late modern political world we inhabit it appears selfevident to us that rule ought to be in the hands of the largest number, that is, of the majority. There is a relationship between abstract number and political representation that we take for granted as defining the field of possible argument about justice, and there is a calculus of probabilities that we can invoke to supply—and ground—the rationality that connects the distribution of number and political outcomes. Moreover, we instinctively recoil from those who appear to resist this transparent principle of political arithmetic inasmuch as what seems necessarily to be implied by such resistance is that rule ought then to be in the hands of the lesser number, the minority. If not one then the other: majority rule or minority rule. The binary is fixed. In the modern world defined by a calculating rationality, these are our moral-political alternatives. I shall suggest that they are merely seeming ones. Needless to say, that the impasse that marks the politics of Sinhala dominance and the counterclaims of Tamils and Muslims turns in fundamental ways on this predicament of number has not gone unrecognized in contemporary intellectual-political debates in Sri Lanka. In the course of an instructive discussion of the crisis of constitutionalism and the legalpolitics of devolution, Radhika Coomaraswamy (an important voice in the debate) makes the comment that the “belief that majoritarianism is always democracy has been one of the major fallacies of Sri Lankan political thinking and one of the major causes of ethnic conflict. In fact,” she goes on, “to use such procedures to resolve the issues of minorities is actually anti-democratic because it inevitably spells the tyranny of the majority.”10 It is perhaps easy to hear in this worry an echo of the liberal 9

The interest in number and colonialism is, of course, not new. One thinks of Bernard S. Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,” in his An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); and more recently (and much inspired by Cohn) Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (eds.), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). 10 Radhika Coomaraswamy, “The Crisis of Constitutionalism: Devolution and the Sri Lankan Constitution,” Thatched Patio, special issue, 3 (May/June 1990): 40; and idem,

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anxieties of John Stuart Mill and his friend Alexis de Tocqueville. Both, it will be recalled, worried a good deal about the implications of a democratic logic for individual liberties. But there is more to Coomaraswamy’s concern than this, I suspect. She is pointing in effect to an intimate connection that is of the very essence of not only the liberal democratic but the social democratic imagination as well, a connection between modern political legitimacy and the rationality of number. Coomaraswamy wants to mark this connection and make it available for criticism. She does not actually say so but one may reasonably suppose that what she would like is to disconnect or disarticulate the seeming logic of majoritarianism from democracy so that the latter concept can be made available for a new— i.e., nontyrannical—political content. Coomaraswamy would like a democracy that does not depend for its efficacy upon the seeming ideological neutrality of pure number. She does not, it is true, go on to supply this new content but I would like to note that what remains normative in her formulation of the relation between number and political legitimacy is that a concept of “democracy” ought to be the name of our political aspiration, the name of a direction to be progressively arrived at. I am perhaps less sanguine than Coomaraswamy is that there is something to be retrieved from this concept. I want to use this occasion to try to explore this doubt. What I propose to do in the remainder of the chapter is the following: First I shall sketch out something of the argument made by the Donoughmore commissioners in 1928 when they introduced the majoritarian principle into colonial Ceylon politics. I will emphasize the assumptions regarding number, progress, and political order that governed these arguments. Second, I shall suggest how these assumptions work in the historiography of political modernity in Sri Lanka and what the implications are for thinking about community and difference in the present. Third, I shall sketch out some aspects of the contemporary debate within liberal theory so as to illustrate the way attempts by liberal theorists to address the question of the collective rights of minorities take for granted the transparency of number and the normalization of majoritarian politics. I will argue that the inability of liberal theory to resolve this problem adequately constitutes a fundamental indictment of the liberal project as such. Finally, I will suggest that thinking through the contemporary crisis in Sri Lanka requires working against this normalization of the features of political modernity and attempting to open up space for an alternative ground of conceptualization, and that this entails perhaps less the kind of Lockean “Devolution, the Law, and Judicial Construction,” in Sunil Bastian (ed.), Devolution and Development in Sri Lanka (Delhi: Konark, 1994), p. 137.

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preoccupation with legal and constitutional First Principles that now pervades the debate about devolution, and more an Hobbesian and Machiavellian one with political settlements. THE DONOUGHMORE COMMISSION AND THE ETHOS OF DEMOCRACY

The crucial historical moment for the emergence of the majoritarian principle as an institutionalized feature in Sri Lankan political life is that period known historiographically as the Donoughmore Period, 1931–1947. In 1927, a Royal Commission of Inquiry chaired by Lord Donoughmore, a former undersecretary of state for war and a man of decided views on the nature of democracy, was appointed to report on the working of the existing constitutional arrangements in Ceylon and to consider the question of whether further constitutional reform was warranted. In the 1920s there was a growing sense among senior officials in the Colonial Office that some accommodating gesture to the altogether mannered aspirations of the constitutionalist-minded Sri Lankan nationalists (who wanted a greater measure of responsibility) was in order. The commissioners (who, in addition to Lord Donoughmore, were Sir Geoffrey Butler, a don at the University of Cambridge and a Member of Parliament; Sir Matthew Nathan, a former governor of Hong Kong; and Dr. T. Drummond Shiels, a Scottish Fabian, and member of the British Labor Party) visited the island between November 13, 1927 and January 18, 1928, and carried out, so they later said, a “prolonged, exhaustive, and sympathetic study of the situation in Ceylon.” The report was presented in June 1928. There had of course been changes to the colonial Ceylon constitution prior to the Donoughmore reforms—specifically in 1910, 1920, and 1924—but these changes were largely adjustments within the parameters of Crown Colony rule.11 By contrast, however, the Donoughmore Reforms and the new constitutional arrangements that followed in 1931— the so-called Donoughmore Constitution—are generally thought of as being of inaugural importance in Sri Lankan constitutional history. This is because they mark a crucial stage in the progressive advance of the colony toward responsible self-government and political independence. Indeed it is hard not to talk of the Donoughmore Reforms in other than slightly reverential tones. They are, after all, the reforms that introduced universal franchise to the colony12 and through which colonial lib11 See K. M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), chapters 27–30. 12 It is almost obligatory in the historiography of Sri Lanka to add at this point that this grant of universal suffrage was unprecedented in the colonial world, and moreover, came a

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eralism sought incisively and self-consciously to disable the atavism of “communal politics,” and to urge Ceylon along the path of what they were pleased to call a less “artificial” democracy. In a certain sense, these reforms were as decisive as the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms of almost exactly a hundred years before in the project they undertook to alter the forms of political life in the colony in a progressive direction (see chapter 1). Indeed it is possible to read the Donoughmore Reforms as further elaborating the logic of the progressivist alteration inaugurated by the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms of the early nineteenth century. Where the earlier reforms sought to reorganize the colonial polity in a modern direction through the inscription of a liberal rationality (fashioning the kinds of economy, society, and subjectivity such a rationality depended upon), the later reforms sought to reshape that emerging modern order through the scope of an explicitly democratic reason. They are, in other words, successive moments in the inauguration and reorganization of a colonial modernity. There are at least three interconnected stories that form the background to the central story about the Donoughmore Commission and the new constitutional reforms that followed in the wake of its recommendations, but for the sake of focus I am not going to do more than indicate in outline what these stories are. The first of these is the story of the emergence of constitutional reform agitation between 1908, when James Peiris submitted his memorandum for reform of the legislative council, to November 1926, when Governor Sir Hugh Clifford sent his celebrated secret dispatch to the Colonial Office making known his dissatisfaction with the existing (i.e., Manning) constitution and urging (as he put it) that a “radical revision of the existing Government machinery is urgently demanded in the interests of all concerned.”13 This is the crucial story of the rise of the new or Western educated elite in colonial Ceylon politics, their internal rivalries and jealousies, their disavowal of mass participatory politics, and their pursuit of political influence through the formation of a number of reform associations, including the Ceylon Reform League in 1917 and, mere two years after its introduction in Britain. It is hardly necessary to comment on the implicit progressivism in these comments. 13 Clifford went on to say that such revision should be “designed [so] as to place real and direct responsibility upon the unofficial members of the Legislative Council and strengthen and not weaken the Executive Government. . . . [The] new measures [should be] designed to train the Ceylonese for eventual self-government which is the object that all the reforms granted up to now have conspicuously failed to achieve.” Quoted in de Silva, History of Sri Lanka, p. 418. See also Michael Roberts, “Elites, Nationalisms and the Nationalist Movement in Ceylon,” in Michael Roberts (ed.), Documents of the Ceylon National Congress and National Politics in Ceylon 1929–1950, vol. 1 (Colombo: Department of National Archives, 1977).

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most important, the Ceylon National Congress in 1919. It would also have to be the story of Ponnambalam Arunachalam, perhaps the preeminent figure in the reform movement in the years following the 1915 riots and the founding president of the Congress.14 The second of these stories is that of the machinations of the colonial government—the role it played in fomenting suspicions and distrust among caste, religious, and ethnic groups. In particular this would be the story of the governorship of Sir William Manning (1918–1925) and of his intrigues with Kandyan and Tamil politicians against the Low-Country Sinhala–dominated Ceylon National Congress.15 The third of these stories is one of the rise and troubled fortunes of a more radical anticolonial nationalism with the formation of the Young Lanka League (in March 1915), and of a more militant working-class movement under the leadership of A. E. Goonesinha. This is the story of the intensity of labor and trade union activity in the 1920s, of the founding of the Ceylon Labour Union in 1922, of Goonesinha’s alignment with the Ceylon National Congress, his alienation from them especially over the issue of manhood suffrage (which he was unsuccessful in getting them to support), his subsequent break with them (in 1927), and his founding (in 1928) of the short-lived Ceylon Labour Party.16 My concern with the Donoughmore Commission, as I have indicated, however, is not to reconstruct its social and political history. Others have undertaken this task.17 Rather my concern is a more circumscribed and critical one, namely, to try to understand some of the conceptual and ideological assumptions through which the liberal-democratic project was institutionally inscribed into the political domain in colonial Sri Lanka. This is why I am particularly interested here in the arguments the commissioners made for two of their celebrated recommendations: first, the unprecedented recommendation to introduce universal franchise; and second, the recommendation to abolish the mechanism of communal representation. 14 See K. M. de Silva, “The Formation and Character of the Ceylon National Congress 1917–1919,” Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies 10, nos. 1, 2 (1967): 70–102. 15 See L. A. Wickremeratne, “Kandyans and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: Some Reflections,” Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies, n.s., 5, nos. 1, 2 (1975): 49–67. Manning is particularly interesting from a comparative colonialism point of view because he was governor of Jamaica prior to going to Ceylon. 16 The definitive work on the working-class movement in colonial Ceylon is, of course, Visakha Kumari Jayawardena, The Rise of the Labor Movement in Ceylon (Durham: Duke University Press, 1972). 17 K. M. De Silva, History of Sri Lanka; idem, Managing Ethnic Tensions in Multi-ethnic Societies: Sri Lanka, 1880–1985 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986); and Jane Russell, Communal Politics under the Donoughmore Constitution, 1931–1947 (Dehiwala: Tisara Prakasakayo, 1982). See also, more recently, Nira Wickramasinghe, Ethnic Politics in Colonial Sri Lanka (Delhi: Vikas, 1995).

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The Ceylonese advocates of reform had for some time been pressing for a more responsible form of participation in the affairs of government. The Manning Constitution of 1924 had introduced a measure of representative government by constituting a legislative council with an elected unofficial majority. These elected members, moreover, had been able to exert a fair amount of influence through the system of committees and boards where legislative matters were discussed. However, ultimate responsibility for government still resided with the governor. The Donoughmore commissioners were not unsympathetic to this demand for greater responsibility, but they were struck, and indeed profoundly disturbed, by the fact that the reform leaders of the Ceylon National Congress showed little or no regard for the interests of the masses of the population to whom (as far as the democratically minded commissioners were concerned) political responsibility was owed. On the matter of “manhood suffrage,” the Congress leaders had resisted Goonesinha’s persistent attempts to make it one of the delegation’s demands, and had in fact explicitly stated in their memorandum to the commission that they were not going to raise the subject at all. In fact they were adamant, when the matter arose, that the vote should be severely restricted (to those earning at least Rs.50 per month) so as to disenfranchise undesirable elements of the society.18 The unabashed elitism of the constitutional reformists did not endear the commissioners to them. And not surprisingly, they rationalized this attitude in Orientalist terms. If we consider how recent is the development of democratic institutions in the East, and the centuries of patriarchal and feudal government in these countries, the attitude of the Sinhalese and Hindu leaders is not altogether surprising. The various social strata have for so long been definitely marked off, the transition from the lower to the higher has been practically impossible, and no one has questioned the supreme right of one or a few to dominate the lives of the multitude. There are gratifying signs that the rigidity of these social divisions is lessening. Democratic and electoral institutions are being accepted and even demanded, but the modern principle of political equality that goes with them has not yet been fully grasped. In view of the history of Great Britain and other countries, this is not to be wondered at, but at the

18 “The insensitivity of the official Congress delegation over universal suffrage served to alienate the Commission (in particular its most active and effective member Dr Drummond Shiels) and to confirm its impression of the Congress as a rigidly conservative, oligarchic body determined to maintain the sectional interests of a group of landowners and capitalists in preference to the larger interests of the people as a whole. Shiels soon developed a close association with Goonesinha, whom he regarded as the representative of the democratic and radical forces in the country, and a politician whose views were all the more valuable on that account.” De Silva, History of Sri Lanka, p. 420.

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same time, we could not recommend a further grant of responsible government unless that government were to be made fully representative of the great body of the people.19

This is very significant, inasmuch as it points to the paradox of the colonial liberal-democratic project. It points to the gap that would forever haunt colonial and postcolonial politics—the gap between the superficial, even opportunistic, demand for democratic rights and institutions on the part of the nationalist elite, and their acquisition of a sufficiently democratic ethos. As the commissioners woefully asserted of the Congress leaders, “Democratic and electoral institutions are being accepted and even demanded, but the modern principle of political equality that goes with them has not yet been fully grasped.”20 The Western-educated colonial elite—men like Ponnambalam Arunachalam, founding president of the Congress; E. W. Perera, president of the Congress during the sitting of the commission; D. B. Jayatilaka; and Francis de Zoysa—were men who desired little more than a greater participation for themselves in government and administration. (Indeed there were those, somewhat older like James Peiris, who maintained that Ceylon was not yet ready for even this.)21 Adopting the language of the liberal constitutional game, therefore, they urged the introduction of mechanisms and institutions for responsible representation. This demand, however, was not accompanied by any appreciable embrace of that principle which constitutes the heart of modern political subjectivity and a veritable condition of modern citizenship: the principle of political equality. And this is why, reluctant as they were, the commissioners recommended the granting of universal suffrage. It was an experiment in colonial governmentality. Universal suffrage was to have an educative, or rather, a governing, effect on the conduct of the political elites. It was an instrument in a new apparatus of colonial rule. By making the elite dependent upon a mass electorate, colonial power intended to deploy universal suffrage as a tactic (as Foucault might have called it) by means of which to oblige them to refashion their political sensibilities in the direction of acquiring a more democratic and more egalitarian ethos. This concern with the inculcation of a more democratic ethos is perhaps most evident in the commissioners’ elaborate discussion of the question of “communal politics.” The commissioners, it needs to be understood, were not men without a certain cosmopolitan sense of cultural diversity. 19 See House of Commons, “Report of the Special Commission on the Constitution of Ceylon,” Reports from Commissioners, Inspectors, and Others, 1928, vol. 7, p. 83. 20 Ibid. 21 De Silva, History of Sri Lanka, p. 420.

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They did not, for instance, think that there was any one way to go about living. Even where it repelled them (as it so often did), they could appreciate the “ethnographic” fact of cultural or value difference. So far as they were concerned, therefore, the central debilitating problem in places like Ceylon was not difference as such but its intrusion into political affairs. The problem had to do with the legitimate place of diversity in the public life of the community. This liberal view depends upon a certain differentiation—an institutional as well as epistemological differentiation—that allows the public/private distinction to emerge as salient in the first place. It depends, in other words, on the coming into being of colonial civil society and of the hegemony of a secular rationality understood to constitute the privileged medium in which the modern subject of rights and freedom is formed and articulated (see chapters 1, 2, and 3). On this view, difference belongs to the sphere of private life (the home, the club, the temple). The intrusion of diversity into politics, the commissioners argued, would have the unhappy consequence of making it impossible to arrive at anything like a common consensus. Particularist interests, in other words, were out of place in the public life of politics. And the refusal on the part of the communities in Ceylon to identify their interests with a “national interest” appeared to the commissioners as the failure of the Ceylonese elite to appreciate cogently and grasp cognitively the essence of the democratic spirit. The commissioners’ understanding of communalism and its relation to the building of democratic institutions is spelled out in the following remarks. One of the most difficult problems in connection with the formation or alteration of constitutions for the various overseas countries of the Empire is that of communal representation. The populations are made up of diverse elements, often with fundamental racial and religious differences. Even within the same racial or religious community caste distinctions may be responsible for [a] rigid division of classes. These diverse elements and distinct classes, even if not antagonistic to each other, are in more or less separate compartments, this resulting in a lack of homogeneity and of corporate consciousness which make it difficult to achieve any national unity of purpose. Communal representation was devised with a view to assisting the development of democratic institutions in countries of different races and religions and in the hope of eliminating the clash of these various interests during elections. It was expected to provide, peacefully, an effective legislative assembly which would give a fair representation of the different elements in the population and would also tend to promote unity. Unfortunately, the experiment has not given the desired results, but has had, if anything, the opposite effect. The

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representatives of the various communities do not trust one another, and communal representation has not helped to develop a uniting bond or link. The minority communities are fearful that any preponderance of governmental power held by another community will inevitably be used against them and are keenly on the alert for signs of discrimination.22

Ceylon provided a perfect illustration of this thesis. Notice that the apparatus of communal representation had itself been an experiment in colonial government, a tactic in a colonial governmental calculus. Its project was to facilitate, in conditions of potential communal conflict, a movement in the direction of democracy. After all, democracy constituted an attainment to be arrived at only through a kind of educative process. This experiment with communal representation, however, had not yielded the desired results. Distrust and disunity continued to prevail among representatives of the various communities. Therefore, as the commissioners said, the continued reliance on communal representation now constituted “a serious obstacle to the development of Ceylon into a free, united and democratic nation.”23 It was generally admitted, even by many communal representatives themselves, that the communal form of appointment to the Legislative Council was a necessary evil and should only continue until conditions of friendliness and acknowledgment of common aims were developed among the different communities. It is our opinion, however, that the very existence of communal representation tends to prevent the development of these relations, and that only by its abolition will it be possible for the various diverse communities to develop together a true national unity.24

And they went on significantly: Communal representation in Ceylon has no great antiquity to commend it, and its introduction into the constitution with good intention has had unfortunate results. As has already been suggested, it tends to keep communities apart and to send communal representatives to the Council with the idea of defending particular interests instead of giving their special contribution to the common weal. We very gladly recognise that most of the communal representatives have risen superior to this natural tendency and have shown an interest in matters affecting the general welfare of the Island. We believe, however, that if these same representatives were elected, as we hope they may be, as territorial representatives, they will be able to give a fuller contribution, 22

“Report of the Special Commission,” pp. 90–91. Ibid., p. 91. 24 Ibid., p. 99. 23

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unhampered by having to be constantly on the watch, fearful of the antagonism or the oppressive action of the other communities.25

The contrast here, obviously enough, is with India, where communalism was understood to be deeply entrenched, to be an old and pervasive institution.26 Ceylon, on the other hand, provided the hopeful prospect of a colony where communalism had relatively shallow roots and where, therefore, governmental reforms could be expected to be more readily accepted.27 Here, then, the rational/neutral principle of territory had a substantial chance of success. On the one hand, the commissioners felt that communal representation had not produced the desired result of encouraging a national unity of purpose among the communities; on the other hand, from the standpoint of the horizon of secular democratic reason, it was in any case an inferior form of determining representation. Candidates for political office ought, on their view, to be supported on the basis of more rational criteria: for their “ability” and their “character” rather than their race or religion or caste. The Donoughmore commissioners, then, were engaged upon a double endeavor. The constitutional impasse in the middle 1920s was such that new reforms had to constitute a break with the presuppositions of Crown Colony rule and a definite policy in the direction of responsible representation. The difficult question at hand for the commissioners, however, was how to concede the mechanisms of democratic practice that were being demanded by the colonial elite (and that seemed increasingly difficult to deny them) and at the same time to oblige them to give up the atavistic inclination to embody their particularistic or communal interests in a political form. Universal suffrage and territorial representation were the key elements in the governmental strategy designed to accomplish this. They would, it was hoped, inculcate a secular democratic ethos into the new political subjects. In the event, this project also failed. The secular Enlightenment project inscribed into the organization of colonial Ceylon politics by the Donoughmore Commission merely enabled, from the 25

Ibid. For a discussion of the place of “communalism” in the British colonial discourse on India, see Gyanendra Pandey, The Colonial Construction of Communalism in British North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990). 27 This contrast between Ceylon and India is indeed a constant theme throughout nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonialist discourse on South Asia. Invariably in this discourse Ceylon emerges as a place where Reason has a greater hope of being successful than in India. I have discussed some aspects of this in relation to “religion” (the relation/ difference between Hinduism and Buddhism) in my Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), chapter 5. 26

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1930s onward, the emergence of the political dominance of the majority—i.e., Sinhala—community. As A. Jeyaratnam Wilson, with understandable cynicism, put it: The fact is that in modern Ceylon a strong Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist identity has been established. That identity seeks to lay the largest claim to all that is available in the state coffers. The claim is sustained by the Westminister-style, democratic system given to the island by Britain. This system, in the final instance, depends on the counting of numbers. The Sinhalese constitute the numerical majority.28

THE POLITICAL PRINCIPLE OF NUMBER

In the historiography of the Donoughmore Constitution—and I am thinking here of the authoritative work of K. M. de Silva and Jane Russell, in particular—there is a more or less explicit endorsement of the progressivisms of political modernization. That is to say, they take it to be the case, normatively, that the implementation of the recommendations of the Donoughmore Commission “mark a crucial watershed in Sri Lanka’s political evolution. These changes amounted, in effect, to a crossing of the constitutional barrier towards self-government, a path on which the white dominions had embarked in the mid-nineteenth century.”29 This progressivism is no more than one would expect, since, after all, their work by and large participates in a quintessentially empiricist social historiography, the protocols of which lend themselves to historicism (see chapter 4). This by itself is hardly interesting. What is interesting and important, however, is the narrative construction of the claims that hang on these teleological assumptions and what their implications are for thinking our Sri Lankan political present. What interests me is how the historiography of the Donoughmore Constitution rationalizes the postcolonial present of Sinhala dominance through the kind of story it tells about the colonial past; or more specifically, how this historiography normatively links the transformations brought by the Donoughmore reforms to the more abstract horizon of the democratic project in a postcolonial society. This is what I want to explore briefly here. There is a familiar story, reiterated by both de Silva and Russell (with perhaps only some inflected differences in tone and sympathy separating them), that between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the end of the 1920s there was a reversal of the respective places of eminence 28

A. Jeyaratnam Wilson, The Break-up of Sri Lanka: The Sinhalese-Tamil Conflict (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988), p. 32. 29 De Silva, Managing Ethnic Conflict, p. 52.

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occupied by Tamil and Sinhala politicians. The Tamils, so it is said, were (and had been for some time) far more advanced in their political thinking than the Sinhalas. (This is, of course, in part the story of the curious indifference of the Sinhalas to politics until it became apparent to them that through it—or the modern reorganization of it—they could reassert what they took to be their historical hegemony.) During this period the Tamils did not think of themselves as a “minority” but as on a footing of political—if not numerical—equality with the Sinhalas. For the Tamil politicians there were in fact two majority communities (as there technically were more or less under the restricted franchise of the successive constitutions prevailing between 1833 and 1931). The Donoughmore Constitution altered this fundamentally. De Silva’s comments on this situation are worth quoting at length: In the last decade of the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth there was . . . a remarkable contrast between Tamils and the Sinhalese in their political attitudes: the former were far ahead in political consciousness and receptivity to nationalist ideas then emerging in the Indian sub-continent. This lead they maintained till the early 1920s. During this period they did not regard themselves as a minority, but aspired to equality with the Sinhalese as one of two majority groups in the island as indeed their enfranchised segment was under the restricted franchise then prevailing. This state of affairs was too good to last. In democratic politics, which the political leadership of the island was pledged to uphold, numbers were inevitably a decisive factor. Soon numbers began to count, and when that happened, or was seen to be happening, the artificiality of the “two majority communities” concept was easily exposed.30

This is a remark of profound cognitive-political significance, because if we accept its assumptions (essentially those of Lord Donoughmore and a whole paradigm of modern political thinking), there is no way out of the political impasse about which Coomaraswamy’s anxiety concerning majoritarianism has alerted us. Let us therefore examine some of the assumptions that inform de Silva’s remark. In de Silva’s formulation, democracy is completely normalized. For him it is transparent that democracy constitutes the single and singular normative principle for political organization. It is similarly transparent therefore that insofar as the political leadership accepted this principle their political thinking eventually would have to be constituted through and articulated in a discourse of number. Notice here that de Silva does not consider that it is number that produces the majority/minority distinction in the first place. That the Sinhalas constitute a “majority” and the 30

Ibid., pp. 58–59.

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Tamils a “minority” and that this is a significant fact for political representation is as self-evident to de Silva’s historical narrative as it was for the Donoughmore commissioners. He does not wonder what kind of alteration in our modalities of political thinking must have occurred to produce the conditions of possibility for this conception. Yet it is evident that he does conceive of a shift of some kind. There is an exposure and displacement of an artificial mode of determining representation by one which, in virtue of the numerical rationality that constitutes it, is presumably more rational—more modern and therefore more legitimate. Obviously enough, there is a normative-progressivist narrative of a specific sort at work here. The alteration constitutes a stage in the overall alteration of colonial politics by the principles of a democratic ethos. In his important book The Taming of Chance (as well as elsewhere), Ian Hacking has done much to illuminate the emergence of the statistical and probabilistic rationality upon which these assumptions regarding the constitutive privilege of number depended and the importance of this for the governmentalization of the state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.31 He speaks of an “avalanche of numbers” in this period.32 Surely there is a connection between the increasing hegemony of practices of enumeration, tabulation, and classification of people—the general subjection of population to a numerical ratio (or more properly, the emergence of the biopolitical phenomena of population as a numerical-statistical ratio) that operates across a neutral field of space—and the emergence of majoritarian-territorial representation as a privileged political principle. Indeed the point is that political representation itself (as we know it today) is the product of a probabilistic rationality. Number was, so it seemed, least implicated in traditional or atavistic claims. Number was disinterested and therefore did not—could not—harbor artificial concerns (like caste, race, ethnicity, community, religion). It is, therefore, a paradigmatically secular principle. Moreover, number was self-regulating (as governmentalizing practices had to be). It corresponded only to a natural order, an impersonal series, or at least to a normal curve. And it was calculable. Therefore it could comprehend/produce the new regularities at work in large populations, from rates of suicide to voting patterns. At any rate, this numeric-probabilistic political rationality has crucial consequences for what Hacking elsewhere calls our “styles of reasoning,” 31 Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and his earlier The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). See also Gerd Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 32 See Ian Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” Humanities in Society 5 (1982): 279–95.

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and therefore how we now think our possibilities in the present.33 This is at once the conceptual site of de Silva’s historiography and the political zone of Coomaraswamy’s anxiety. This is what interests me here: the effect this assumption has in the historiographical narrative that positions (in the present or near-enough present) us in relation to the outcomes of the Donoughmore Reforms. In this narrative the interconnection among progress, democracy, and number makes it appear inevitable—if unfortunate—that the Tamils should lose their parity with the Sinhalas. And in the logic of rationalist (which is to say, antipolitical) history, it is, in a certain sense, simply too bad for the Tamils. After all, they also desire— or ought to desire—to become modern and democratic, to rid themselves of the supposed claim of community and govern their conduct by an abstract egalitarian ratio. This is certainly one of the main thrusts of Jane Russell’s painstaking history of “communal politics” during the Donoughmore Period. Discussing the reversal of Tamil political fortunes, she writes: The Ceylon Tamils never quite recovered from the loss of this ascendancy. Their opposition to the Donoughmore Constitution in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and the “fifty-fifty” demand formulated by G. G. Ponnambalam [one of the foremost Tamil nationalists of the period], were vain attempts to capture their lost power and status. The Ceylon Tamil demands were in fact stimulated by a nostalgia for an era when their community had shared “majority” status with the Sinhalese. That era had passed, however, and could not be revived.34

History, in short, had moved on in the progressive direction of secular democracy, and the anachronisms (like parity) that such Tamil politicians as G. G. Ponnambalam wanted to reintroduce, charming as they might have been and animated as they no doubt were by a fond memory for a bygone era, were now uncompromisingly, irrevocably obsolete. What is more, in this progressivist narrative those Tamil intellectuals who opposed universal suffrage can appear to be not only elitist and communal, but worst of all in collaboration with the colonial government, while those in favor appear as forward-looking, national-democratic, and anticolonial.35 33 Ian Hacking, “Language, Truth and Reason,” in Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982). 34 Russell, Communal Politics, p. 336. 35 Classic in this regard is the difference between Ponnambalam Arunachalam and his brother Ponnambalam Ramanathan. The former is typically represented as a progressive secular-nationalist open to harmonious relations with the Sinhala community, while the latter is generally seen as a more communal and divisive politician, keen to emphasize the differences rather than the similarities between Tamils and Sinhalas. See, for exam-

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The point I am after here is that if one concedes this politico-numeric logic—and thus the conceptual parameters of the debate about political community and political order—then it must be the case that although liberalism can perhaps find within itself the resources to meet the demands of cultural pluralism, this can only be in the way of ameliorating “adjustments” to the self-evident hegemonic principle of number, and ad hoc measures here and there to “protect” the collective rights of Tamils, Muslims, and other minorities against the unjust excesses of the Sinhalas. It can, in short, only be negative; it cannot offer the prospect of a positive reimagining of the ground of political possibilities in contemporary Sri Lanka. Yet it is quite clear that it is a demand for just this sort of bold reimagining that forms the generative heart of Coomaraswamy’s intervention. Her suspicion is precisely that this seeming democratic priority of abstract number masks the operations of an ethnic dominance, and that insofar as we continue to take this priority as a transparent principle in the determination of political community we will be trapped within a terrain of politico-epistemic assumptions that cannot but reproduce the subordination of the Tamils. The real question, then, is whether the liberal-democratic imaginary is capable of so transforming itself as to meet Coomaraswamy’s concerns.

LIBERALISM AND MINORITY RIGHTS

I do not think that there is much that can be done with this state of affairs within the terms of the liberal-democratic project. In the political vocabulary of liberalism this set of assumptions is too deeply rooted to be undone without unraveling the governing Enlightenment assumptions of the liberal tradition itself. Let me turn to this problem of liberal theory’s relation to community, and in particular to one important attempt to think the Sri Lankan present within a liberal-democratic discourse. Liberalism, on any account of it, is the moral-political philosophy of individualism. Its vocabulary is largely concerned with the relationship between the individual and the state, and with limiting the effects of the latter on the former. However, some recents liberal theorists, Will Kymlicka for instance, have offered the view that there is to be found in liberalism (whether implicitly or explicitly) an account of the relation between individuals and their membership in a community or culture.36 These are ple, de Silva, Managing Ethnic Conflict, pp. 59–60. Part of the point I am making in this chapter (indeed throughout this book) is that such progressivist narratives need to be seriously reconsidered. 36 See Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

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theorists who have been exercised by two kinds of worries. On the one hand, they are worried by the “communitarian” criticisms of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin leveled by people like Michael Walzer, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael Sandel.37 There is, of course, no single view, but on the whole the communitarians argue that liberals have a mistaken understanding of the relationship between the self and community and think somehow that the self can stand apart from its embeddedness in community. As Sandel, for instance, writes of the deontological view of the self held by rights-based theorists: For justice to be the first virtue, certain things must be true of us. We must be creatures of a certain kind, related to human circumstance in a certain way. We must stand at a certain distance from our circumstance, whether as transcendental subject in the case of Kant, or as essentially unencumbered subject of possession in the case of Rawls. Either way, we must regard ourselves as independent: independent from the interests and attachments we may have at any moment, never identified by our aims but always capable of standing back to survey and assess and possibly to revise them.38

Critics like Kymlicka suggest, however, that where this account of liberalism’s deficiencies is not simply an improbable one, it is ungenerous. These communitarian critics, he suggests, have not, so to speak, read for the best Rawls, because there is in fact in Rawls’s work an account of cultural membership. Or, at least, Rawls has to be read as depending upon such an account. On the other hand, Kymlicka is worried about the disregard—even hostility—of liberal theorists like Rawls and Dworkin to the centrality of the problem of collective rights of minorities. It is misleading, he argues, to think that cultural plurality does not raise crucial problems for liberal political theory. On the contrary, he says, it goes to the heart of liberal claims about the individual and equality. The common presumption is that a liberal theory of justice ought not to have special provision for minority cultures to develop their distinct cultural life. Such provisions would be inconsistent with the principle of impartiality. Liberals like Kymlicka are worried by this view because they see provisions for the protection of minorities as having been important for the stability of many multicultural societies such as Canada or the United States. On Kymlicka’s view, in order to argue a defense of minority 37 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971); idem, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977); Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); idem, Whose Justice, Which Rationality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988); and Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 38 Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, p. 175.

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rights from within liberalism it is necessary to show that cultural membership has a more important status in liberal thought than is usually recognized. It is necessary, in fact, to demonstrate two things: one, that liberal theory does recognize individuals as members of particular cultural communities and that this membership is an important good; and two, that members of minority cultural communities may face particular kinds of disadvantages with respect to the good of cultural membership, disadvantages whose rectification requires and justifies the provision of minority rights.39 On Kymlicka’s view, thinking this through requires a distinction between different senses of cultural belonging, between what he calls “cultural structure,” on the one hand, and the “character of a cultural community” on the other. Cultural structure, he says, provides the individual with a “context of choice,” a background of sensibilities. As he puts it, “cultural membership is not a means used in the pursuit of one’s ends. It is rather the context within which we choose our ends, and come to see their value, and this is a precondition of self-respect, of the sense that one’s ends are worth pursuing.”40 This notion of culture, one already implicit in liberalism, is the only one that gives rise to legitimate claims and is consistent with liberal equality.41 The second sense, that of the “character” of a culture, is apparently that which understands culture as being constitutive of collective ends, that has ends built into it. This is the strong communitarian claim. (Not surprisingly, “Islamic fundamentalism” supplies one of the key examples of this notion of what is entailed in cultural belonging.) This conception, Kymlicka suggests, ought to have no claim on our liberal reason. I have two observations regarding Kymlicka’s formulations. The first has to do with the coherence of his distinction between culture as a context of choice and culture as constitutive of ends. On Kymlicka’s view, the subject-matter of our ends is still, centrally, the individual. The person is situated, but only against a background and only with the proviso that she or he can stand forward from that situation and assess it from the vantage of a critical morality which itself is unsituated. As John Gray has suggested of the new liberalism (of Rawls, Dworkin, and company) in general, “it embodies a distinctive philosophical anthropology, for which cultural difference is an inessential, and—in its political manifestations, at any rate—a transitory incident in human affairs. It is not that the pro39

Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, chapters 8 and 9. Ibid., p. 192. 41 This view of cultural membership, he says, is already implicit in Rawls and Dworkin, only they falsely assume that there is only one such cultural context at work in any political community. See ibid., p. 177. 40

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pensity of human beings to exhibit distinctive cultural identities is denied, or that a future condition of mankind is envisaged in which cultural difference has wholly disappeared; but, rather, that distinctive cultural identities are seen as chosen lifestyles, whose proper place is in private life, or the sphere of voluntary association.”42 And therefore the demand that cultural identity have a political embodiment is taken to be a species of antimodern atavism. Moreover, although Kymlicka stages his view as a novel move on his part (a way of steering a path between Rawls and Sandel), it is really an old liberal distinction. It is the one, for example, we have already met in the Donoughmore Report when those distinguished commissioners lamented the fact that the “communal representatives” in Ceylon pursued particular—i.e., communal—interests rather than employing their varied backgrounds to enhance the common weal. Like Kymlicka and the later Rawls, what worried the commissioners was not the “racial,” “religious,” and “caste” variety of colonial Ceylon as such. They, too, believed in the liberal distinction between two kinds or aspects of community: a political community of citizens and a cultural community of culture-bearers. Their worry was rather the intrusion of this variety into the political sphere and its corruption thereby of reasonable political ends. The second observation has to do with the fact that Kymlicka’s scheme for a liberalism sensitive to cultural pluralism (like de Silva’s and Russell’s rehearsal of the story of democracy in modern Sri Lanka) does not even question much less displace the fundamental distinction between majority and minority. This distinction remains intact. It forms, as it were, Kymlicka’s own context of choice. Like all progressivists, he also assumes the normality of the political dominance of the greater number. And therefore within the terms of his own problematic the question of cultural rights can only be articulated on the ground of “disadvantages” that cultural minorities suffer in political conditions of cultural pluralism. He only wants to build in the relevant safeguards that will ensure the extension of the liberal principles of respect and equality to those whose number alone prevents them from being in the position of dominance. What he cannot imagine is a pluralism that refuses the particular privilege of liberalism. He cannot imagine what Gray calls a “modus vivendi pluralism,” one that affirms “the ultimate validity of a diversity of polities, moralities, forms of government and economy and of familial and social life.”43 Rawlsian approaches to the political conditions of cultural pluralism nevertheless appear attractive. Part of the reason, perhaps, is its appeal 42

John Gray, “After the New Liberalism,” in his Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 124. 43 Ibid., p. 126.

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to a rational choice morality. Or so anyway Jayadeva Uyangoda argues. Uyangoda is one of the most insightful theorists writing about contemporary Sri Lankan politics.44 He has offered a very sensitive argument for what he calls “a contractarian alternative” as a way of arriving at a constitutional settlement to the ethnic crisis in Sri Lanka.45 In this essay, originally his S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike Memorial Lecture delivered in September 1993, Uyangoda sets out to reframe the “consociational democracy” argument (of Arend Lijphard and Eric Nordlinger) so as to ground it in a liberal social contract theory. Consociational democracy is an attempt to define an adequate institutional framework in which to manage the conflicts that arise in ethnically divided societies such as Sri Lanka. Among the conditions it stipulates for managing conflicts in such societies are the formation of a “grand ethnic coalition” of all ethnic groups; proportional representation in government; and the guarantee of ethnic autonomy through a system of federalism or devolution.46 On the whole, Uyangoda is sympathetic to the consociational project. He is in agreement with its aims and with the constituent conditions it stipulates. What he is worried about are its premises, which he finds too pragmatic or “utilitarian.” In the current formulations of consociationalist democracy, it is understood that “political institutions can and should be manipulated as and when needed for the benefit of the greatest number.”47 This, he says, is “a dangerous premise, politically as well as philosophically.” It is groundless; it lacks, as he puts it, a “lasting moral [basis].” Consociationalist alliances are generally “devoid of explicit 44 See, for instance, his very useful essay, “The State and the Process of Devolution in Sri Lanka,” in Sunil Bastian (ed.), Devolution and Development in Sri Lanka (New Delhi: Konark, 1994). Uyangoda is one of the most important participants in the public sphere debate on Sri Lanka’s crisis. He is co-editor (with Charles Abeyesekere) of the monthly magazine Pravada, which has, since it started publication in December 1991, provided a crucial forum for intellectual discussion and analysis. 45 Jayadeva Uyangoda, “Sri Lanka’s Crisis: Contractarian Alternatives,” Pravada 2 (September/October 1993): 5–11. 46 One of the interesting things that Uyangoda is trying to do in this essay is read Bandaranaike, rather paradoxically, as a “proto-consociationalist.” In the 1920s Bandaranaike made a number of speeches expressing support for a federalist constitution (the most oftenquoted of which is the one reported in The Morning Leader of July 17, 1926). Moreover in July 1957, within a year of his becoming prime minister, he entered into an agreement with the leader of the Ilankai Thamil Arasu Kadchi (ITAK) or the Tamil Federal Freedom Party (FP), S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, known as the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact. See Uyangoda, “Sri Lanka’s Crisis,” pp. 5–7. The Sinhala opposition to the pact was such that in 1958 Bandaranaike abrogated it. For the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact in general, see Wilson, The Break-up of Sri Lanka; idem, S. J. V. Chelvanayakam and the Crisis of Tamil Nationalism, 1947–1977 (London: Hurst, 1994), pp. 86–88; and James Manor, The Expedient Utopian: Bandaranaike and Ceylon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 284–86. 47 Uyangoda, “Sri Lanka’s Crisis,” p. 9.

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moral and normative links between ethnic leaders and the society. The consociational approach, as it has so far been conceptualised, does not say why the minority leaders should trust the majority leaders.”48 This does not mean that we should abandon consociationalism, however. It only means that we need to ground it in the foundation of a new social contract “which provides to ethnic communities the moral and normative bases for re-union.”49 And this new social contract Uyangoda derives in large part from a reading of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. In this scheme, the moral basis of the new social contract is “ethnic fairness and justice,” which can provide the normative framework for the terms of an egalitarian ethnic/social contract. Uyangoda defines what he means by “ethnic fairness and justice” as follows: In order to manage and resolve Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict, it is essential that the terms of association with the Sri Lankan state are re-defined for the ethnic minorities. It means that all ethnic groups in the polity are moral equals and equally valued. When the ethnic groups join the association of the state through this contract, they do not consider their ethnic identity; to be equal and equally valued they disregard whether they are Sinhalese, Tamils or Muslims. The communities enter the contract with the privilege of ignorance of their ethnic identity. To use John Rawls’ philosophical language with some modification, they become participants to the contract behind a veil of ethnic ignorance. Thus, the privilege of ignorance enables them to choose the principles of ethnic justice/injustice while being in a position to define “fairness” untainted by ethnic interests or prejudices.50

And he goes on a bit later: My plea is that at this stage of the contract, ethnic groups need to formulate just institutions by ignoring their ethnic identities and perhaps by locating each group in the ethnic identity of another. . . . If this capacity to claim for oneself the ethnicity of another is achieved by all ethnic groups in their search for just political institutions, I am sure that new and hitherto unknown possibilities for justice and reconciliation can emerge. Once ethnic justice is defined and just institutions identified, ethnic groups can go back to their respective identities.51

Like Kymlicka, and other Rawlsian liberals, Uyangoda can only resolve the tension between consensus and difference, between politics and culture, by retreat to a metaphysics of the deontological self—a Sinhala self, a Tamil self, and a Muslim self that have to be able to stand back from or transcend Sinhalaness, Tamilness, and Muslimness, respectively—and 48

Ibid. Ibid. 50 Ibid., p. 10. 51 Ibid., p. 11. 49

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a philosophical anthropology in which culture, as Gray says, is an inessential element in political affairs. It is easy to see in Uyangoda’s argument not only the Rawlsian assumptions—regarding the priority of the self to its commitments, the idea of culture as detachable rather than constitutive, and so on—but also the older assumptions of the Donoughmore commissioners regarding the separation of the private life of ethnicity from the public life of political decision. I shall come back to this at the end where I will suggest a somewhat different ground for community, for identity\difference, but the general point here can be stated simply. The liberal attempt to grapple with the matter of cultural plurality and the political citizenship of “minorities” has failed because the Enlightenment project that has sustained its basic assumptions is unable to think its way out of the historical impasse we inhabit. This impasse in part presents itself in the demand on the part of minorities that the liberal-democratic desire for an abstract principle— the abstract principle of number—as the adjudicating principle of political community be recognized as at best incoherent because it works to deny their difference. The secular-rationalist morality of number does not in fact embody a universal ideal but a normalizing one. Moreover, the very desire to disembody our political claims in the name of such an ideal is politically disastrous. My concern is to refuse this normalization and to attempt to think forms of political community that embrace our difference rather than disavow it. If this is so then the contemporary crisis of the modern nation-state obliges us to look for a language of political community other than one articulated through the abstract principle of number.

A POLITICS OF SETTLEMENTS

So far I have been trying to do the following: (1) I have suggested that Coomaraswamy’s intervention drawing our attention to the complicity between the rationality of democratic number and Sinhala political dominance has far-reaching implications for how we think an alternative to our Sri Lankan present; (2) I have indicated some of the underlying assumptions through which this governmentalizing logic was inserted into colonial Ceylon politics by the Donoughmore Reforms and the constitutional arrangements it introduced in 1931; (3) I have shown how the progressivist canonical historiography of the Donoughmore Commission— its recommendations and the responses to them—traps us within a framework in which the subordination of minorities can be rationalized (that is, rationalized away); and (4) I have inquired critically into some aspects of contemporary liberal theory’s attempt to deal with the resurgent de-

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mands of community, and in particular into one instructive attempt to think through the Sri Lankan political present in a Rawlsian contractarian language. In this final section I want to do two things: first, to rehearse briefly one useful attempt to interrupt the liberal discourse of community and to reassert the primacy of the political, and with it, a politics of settlements rather than one of constitutional First Principles; and second, to explore what some of the institutional implications might be of deploying this sort of concern with political settlements in the context of the ethnic crisis in Sri Lanka. John Gray has been arguing for a number of years now that we live among the ruins of the Enlightenment project, that massive world-historical attempt at giving human institutions a claim on Reason that has a transcendental and universal authority. But Gray’s demand in the present is not the simpleminded abandonment of liberalism. We are in part, after all, what we have been made by the cultural-political traditions through which our understandings and our aspirations have been (contingently) constituted as understandings and aspirations as such. And certainly it is undeniable that at least for those of us whose histories are now forever after colonialism one of these traditions is the liberal tradition, from Locke to Mill. There is, in short, no simple exit from the modernity we inhabit. Rather what Gray is after, as I understand him, is a coherent way of refusing liberalism its normalizing universalist pretensions without yielding to either the nostalgic idea of a return to The Way We Were, or the utopian desire to leap into a radical beyond. In a certain sense, this is about repositioning the liberal form of life in relation to the irreducible plurality of forms of life. In other words, Gray wants to urge us to entertain the possibility of (as he puts it) “retheoris[ing] liberalism as itself a particular form of common life.”52 I find this an attractive position, not because I think liberalism is the only form of common life worth repositioning (it seems to me, for instance, that rethinking the communist tradition and the forms of life it aspired to is another demand of our political present), and certainly not because I think it an especially privileged one, but simply because its tradition is, for reasons of historical circumstance, a hegemonic one. One of the things Gray hopes a dismantling of the Enlightenment project (liberal as well as Marxist) will yield is a reassertion of the primacy of the political, understood as the domain of settlements. The classical tradition of liberal political philosophy depends upon a rationalist morality—on the existence, that is to say, of a First Principle (or ensemble of such principles) by means of which a rational choice among moral options can be made. In this sense, the domain of the political in traditional liber52

John Gray, “Agonistic Liberalism,” in Enlightenment’s Wake, p. 66.

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alism is reduced to an effect of a calculus. If, however, we do not buy the philosophical anthropology upon which this argument is erected, and if we take it that the diversity of values and the different forms of life in which these values are embodied are irreducible to some singular principle, are, at least potentially, incommensurable and uncombinable—a moral view Gray calls “value-pluralism”—then rational choice has reached its limit. On Gray’s view the kind of conflicts that mark our historical presents (those conflicts in which historical communities make claims for the political embodiment of their cultural identities) have thrown rational choice morality into crisis because these conflicts cannot be resolved by recourse to the abstract legalism of liberal constitutionalism. What is required in our present, he suggests, is a political philosophy in which the centrality of a practice of political settlements is asserted. As opposed to traditional liberalism, then, Gray defines another, “agonistic” liberalism. [This liberalism] does not claim a universal authority in reason, it understands commitment to a liberal form of life to be a matter of historical contingency and loyalty, not rationality. Since it recognizes that incommensurabilities may break out even in the heart of liberal ideals of liberty and equality, it rejects the legalist model that dominates American liberal thought, according to which the structure of basic human liberties can be prescribed by a jurisprudential or constitutional theory, in favour of a political model, in which these liberties and equalities cannot be made fixed or determinate by any theory or legalist device, but are themselves changeable episodes in political conflict and the results of political settlements.53

Or, as he says elsewhere: The crucial truth affirmed in the pluralist perspective is . . . that any legal order will promote or facilitate harmonious co-existence among different communities, only if it embodies and expresses a balance of claims and interests among the various communities that is relatively stable—only, in other words, if it rests on a successful political settlement. In political life, of course, no settlement is final, and only the provisional is permanent; so the legal framework in which any particular political settlement finds embodiment will be subject to recurrent revision, and eventual breakdown. But this is only to say that stability in political affairs is found in motion, if it is found at all, and not in the fixity of structures of basic liberties, and similar legalist constructions. It is to say that stability in political life is an artifice, necessarily fragile and easily destroyed, of the political arts—of statecraft.54 53 54

Ibid., p. 67. Gray, “After the New Liberalism,” p. 128.

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At once Hobbesian (in its invocation of the good of peace) and Machiavellian (in its reliance on politics rather than general legal principle), Gray is urging that we abandon the old Enlightenment concern to inscribe First Principles into the common forms of our political life. On this view, then, the political is essentially the domain in which temporary settlements of incommensurable differences are sought—or as Gray says, it is “a domain devoted not to the pursuit of truth but of peace.”55 This is crucial because if this is so then what we ought to demand in our Sri Lankan present is not the secular liberal option that Uyangoda believes in (his understandable fear of the legitimization of chauvinism notwithstanding). This Rawlsian option depends upon the privilege of a veil of ethnic ignorance, a disembodied or unencumbered self that can step back from its substantive (Tamil or Sinhala or Muslim) commitments, values, and ends to choose from a range of equally plausible options, and a rationalist transcendental morality in whose language to make such choices. It is an option that, as Gray and others (like Sandel and Tully) make clear, is an unworkable one, not only because it impoverishes us, but because it is incoherent. What we ought to be systematically exploring in Sri Lanka are ways and means of inventing, cultivating, and institutionalizing cultural-political spaces in which groups (“minorities” as well as the “majority”—though in my view this entire language of number ought to be put aside as irrelevant) can formulate and articulate their moral-political concerns and their self-governing claims in the (natural and conceptual) languages of their respective historical traditions.56 What I am after, then, is not the depoliticization of community, not the exclusion of Muslim, Tamil, and Sinhala cultural values from the domain of public political life, but the fashioning of the institutional means of enabling tradition-bearing Muslims, Tamils, and Sinhalas to be active participants in their own self-government. This is the task. These traditions are to be understood as ongoing embodied arguments. I have discussed this conception of tradition at length in a different cultural-political and historical context in chapter 5. Suffice it to say here that traditions are the discursive modes in which the historical forms of a common life carry on a normative moral debate about who they are, why they are who they are, and what will enable them to remain who they are: in other words, a debate about identity, value, and history. Note, however, that to think in these terms is emphatically not to assume that 55

Gray, “Agonistic Liberalism,” p. 74. See James Tully, Strange Multiplicities: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), for a discussion of the problem of constituionalism. 56

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Muslimness, Tamilness, or Sinhalaness (or whatever other identity is in question) is any one thing. I am not essentializing here. I am not, as some might be inclined to think, advocating the communalization of institutions. Were I doing this I would be assuming, as the nationalists do, that there is an authoritative transcendental horizon from which real Sinhalaness, Tamilness, or Muslimness can be identified and represented. I do not accept this, which is not the same as saying (as the anti-essentialists do) that there is in fact no real Sinhalaness, Tamilness, or Muslimness. To the contrary (as I have been arguing throughout this book), this whole line of preoccupation in which the search is constantly on for an epistemological vantage from which the supposed realness—or the absence of such realness—is to be determined should be set aside. What I am suggesting— indeed want to insist on—is something else, namely, that what constitutes the lived reality of these identities is, at the least, an embodied historical argument in which Sinhalas and Tamils and Muslims have respectively been engaged upon—among themselves (in the first instance), but also with each other. Take, as an example with which I have some familiarity, the question of the Sinhala tradition. This tradition is constituted precisely by an ongoing historical argument, embodied in a variety of discursive and institutionalized practices—from the Sangha to the company of healing specialists (a¨duras), from texts like the Mahavamsa to the kavi (poems) used in rituals—in which “what Buddhism is” (its true virtues, borders, entitlements, its legitimate spokespersons, its relation to the historical identity of Sinhala) is a matter of dispute and debate over which no “constitutive outside” has authority.57 As well it ought to be. Conceiving of such traditions as ongoing embodied moral-political arguments, then, the task would be to find the modalities by which both to enable the relative sovereignty of these historical forms of life and to provide space for their mutual recognition and for stimulating and sustaining an intercultural dialogue between them. It is not enough, in other words, for Tamils, Sinhalas, and Muslims to be able to argue within their own discursive traditions about who they are respectively and what they want; it is necessary to create such public spaces in which these traditions meet, in which disagreement and discord can be voiced, claims and counterclaims negotiated, and accommodations, compromises—i.e., settlements (albeit temporary ones)—arrived at. This is the domain of the political. However, it is a political that is not reducible to the calculus of the state. Indeed, moving in this direction entails refusing to think in the state’s terms or on the state’s terrain. This is part of the problem with the 57

I have discussed this at greater length in Formations of Ritual, chapter 6.

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prevailing language of the constitutionalist debate in Sri Lanka: it proceeds almost entirely in the register of the state. In this I want to endorse a point Partha Chatterjee makes in the course of a most illuminating discussion of forms of institutional arrangement that fracture the seculardemocratic structure of contemporary India: “I am not arguing from the position of the state; consequently, the problem as I see it is not what the state, or those who think and act on behalf of the state, can grant to the minorities. My problem is to find a defensible ground for a strategic politics, both within and outside the field defined by the institutions of the state, in which a minority group, or one who is prepared to think from the position of a minority group, can engage in India today.”58 Chatterjee is refusing the abstract legalism of the liberal state that seeks to establish in advance the neutral framework of rights and procedures within which to encompass difference—that seek, in effect, a progressivist convergence toward uniformity that either excludes or assimilates difference. This is why what he is undertaking to do is to think the subaltern means through which a “minority” can refuse to be hegemonized (assimilated/excluded) in the name of a dominant “reasonableness.” The Sinhala state, and those intellectuals who think on behalf of it, are always demanding reasonableness from the Tamils and their representatives, are often surprised by what they take to be a certain unaccountable arbitrariness in the latter’s approach to negotiations, and are constantly being brought up short by the seeming willingness of the LTTE in particular to sacrifice a reasonable constitutional arrangement (with maximum devolution, a provision for deciding the controversial question of the unit of devolution, and so on) on the altar of “symbolic” matters. In an interesting reflection on the sudden LTTE withdrawal from the January 1995 Cessation of Hostilities, Uyangoda suggests that they were apparently upset at the low-level nature of the government team conducting the negotiations. He asks why was this so. The answer, as far as I can see . . . lies in the fact that the LTTE leaders consider themselves as rulers of a political entity of a sovereign nation. This political entity I have called elsewhere a quasi-state. Any visitor to Jaffna in recent times . . . would not have failed to notice the enthusiasm with which the LTTE demonstrated all the trappings of a separate state—protocol, symbolism and all that. Mr. Thamil Selvan, the political wing leader of the LTTE, would certainly have preferred Minister G. L. Peiris to Secretary Balapatabendi, to be his counterpart at the negotiating table, not because he was 58

Partha Chatterjee, “Secularism and Toleration,” Economic and Political Weekly 29 (July 1994): 1775. I am deeply indebted to this essay and have previously commented on it in “A Note on the Demand of Criticism,” Public Culture 8 (Fall 1995): 41–50.

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impatiently waiting to discuss complex constitutional problems involving the political package, but because he viewed a Minister’s presence as a proper demonstration of state to “state” protocol. . . . The LTTE wanted a settlement with honour, but also a path that assured them of the recognition of their own sense of dignity and honour, arising from their being rulers and defenders of a nationality group.59

This is an observation of considerable insight, one with significant and inescapable implications for the peaceful negotiation of our Sri Lankan futures. But these implications depend on giving up the presumption of the state and being able to recognize alternative sources and representatives of popular sovereignty. Quite apart from the obvious strategic questions regarding the etiquette of diplomacy in conflict resolution (weighty and difficult no doubt in themselves), there is the larger question of the creation of the forms and modalities of intercultural exchange that shelter honor and civic dignity and that encourage diverse participation as equals, and the cultivation of an atmosphere of more than a superficial respect for the demand for sovereignty on the part of other moral-political traditions and the languages in which they are embodied. In sum, on my view the argument that Sinhala dominance in Sri Lankan politics is the mere effect of the free play of a democratic calculus and that the best we can hope for is a few constitutional safeguards against the excesses of extremists or racists has to be rejected. This may well entail rejecting the view that democracy constitutes the single principle in relation to which Sinhala and Tamil and Muslim flourishing in Sri Lanka can be imagined. I cannot see what Coomaraswamy hopes for in disconnecting democracy from the majoritarian principle. Modern liberal democracy is inseparable from this statistical principle. I agree with repudiating the abstract privilege of number, but I do not see the point in continuing to try to convince ourselves that we are doing this in the name of a better democracy. For if we give up the Enlightenment aspiration for a future already held in trust by history then surely we have also to give up the abstract principle by which such “betterness” can be measured. On my view, we ought rather to be repudiating this principle in the name of a practice of political criticism and a practice of political conduct that seeks to connect us to refashioned forms of moral and political community. The view that I am commending here, therefore, is that what is crucial is not arriving at a priori constitutional arrangements—a new ethnic/ social contract—on the basis of liberal First Principles regarding autonomy, equality, impartiality, and so on. The task rather is to find the institu59

Jayadeva Uyangoda, “Breakdown of ‘Peace Talks,’ ” Pravada 4 (May/June 1995): 19.

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tional arrangements in which to embody the forms of life of historical communities and then determining what kinds of mediating frameworks can be established in which these groups can negotiate their claims. What this means, in effect, is the establishment of intersecting public spaces— spaces that practice different forms of belonging, in which different self-governing practices can be cultivated, in the different languages of identity.

CHAPTER 8

Fanonian Futures? The greatness of a man is not to be found in his acts but in his style. Existence does not resemble a steadily rising curve, but a slow, and sometimes sad, series of ups and downs. (Frantz Fanon, quoted in Peter Geismar, Fanon: A Biography) When I write, I do it above all to change myself and not to think the same thing as before. (Michel Foucault, “How an ‘ExperienceBook’ Is Born”)

THE FUTURE OF THE PRESENT

The postcolonial state in Jamaica is in crisis. Indeed, more fundamentally than this, the entire thirty-odd-year-old project of what I shall call the postcolonial nationalist-modern in Jamaica is in a profound crisis. This project, principally of course a “creole” middle-class project, really begins its cultural-political career in the nationalist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, and finds its paradigmatic embodiment in the People’s National Party of (its founding leader) N. W. Manley and subsequently (in radicalized form) his son, Michael Manley.1 What this nationalist-modern project was about, what distinguished it from its immediate competitor (a more commercialist-modern, embodied in the figure of Alexander Bustamante, founding leader of the Jamaica Labour Party), was its devotion to the cultivation of an enlightened, humanist, and morally and socially reforming modernity.2 This was, in many ways, the Jamaican version of 1

Arguably it begins a century earlier than this with the emergence of the so-called Free Coloureds as a significant social and political force in the first third of the nineteenth century. See Mavis C. Campbell, The Dynamic of Change in a Slave Society: A Sociopolitical History of the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1800–1865 (Madison, Wisc.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976); and more importantly, Gad Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloureds in Jamaica, 1792–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981). 2 See Rex Nettleford, “N. W. Manley and the Politics of Jamaica: Towards an Analysis of Political Change in Jamaica, 1938–1968,” in Rex Nettleford (ed.) N. W. Manley and the

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the Bandung project. The ideological commitments that sustained it were an ethos of egalitarianism and social justice, a social democratic welfarism, a sense of service, and a faith in its own basic reasonableness and decency. In short, the project of this middle-class nationalist-modern was to integrate progressively the social and cultural formations that composed the plurality of Jamaica around a single conception of the national good and a single portrait of the national citizen-subject. So that by Independence in August 1962 the new nation could congratulate itself on its achievement of a seemingly viable pluralist consensus (i.e., the “Out of Many, One People,” proclaimed by the national motto).3 It is this reformist project that is in crisis. And it is, in my view, a fundamental and irreversible crisis. It signals the exhaustion, if not the failure, of a certain vision of our postcolonial futures.4 One index of the contemporary crisis of this project is the prevailing anxiety over “the popular,” or the popular-modern.5 This is an anxiety over the moral values embodied in contemporary popular practices—contemporary popular musical practices especially—and “dancehall” in particular. I shall return to this complex social-cultural-musical form later in this chapter but suffice it to say for the present that dancehall is simultaneously a social site and an ensemble of cultural practices that circulate around music and dance; it is at once a venue (where the popular is constituted and performed) and a style of (sartorial and linguistic) self-fashionNew Jamaica (London: Longman, 1971); Trevor Munroe, The Politics of Constitutional Decolonization: Jamaica, 1944–1962 (Kingston: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1972); George E. Simpson, Alexander Bustamante and Modern Jamaica (Kingston: Kingston Publishers, 1975); and, most impressively, Ken Post, Arise Ye Starvelings: The Jamaican Labour Rebellion of 1938 and Its Aftermath (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978); and idem, Strike the Iron: A Colony at War: Jamaica 1939–1945, 2 vols. (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981). 3 For a normative “new nations” history, see Wendell Bell, Jamaican Leaders: Political Attitudes in a New Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964). For a more critical account, see Obika Gray, Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica, 1960–1972 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991). 4 For a discussion of the contemporary Jamaican “moment” with which I am in substantial agreement, see Brian Meeks, “The Political Moment in Jamaica: The Dimensions of Hegemonic Dissolution,” in his Radical Caribbean: From Black Power to Abu Bakr (Kingston: The Press University of the West Indies, 1996). 5 For one useful attempt to think the question of the “popular,” see Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’ ” in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). What I am trying to capture with this distinction between “nationalist-modern” and “popular modern” is a distinction between two (in Raymond Williams’s terms) structures of feeling, at once political, aesthetic, and social. This distinction has emerged for me in discussions with Tejaswini Niranjana, and I give thanks.

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ing.6 One prominent expression of the anxiety over the popular-modern goes roughly as follows: Dancehall is a disturbing mirror of contemporary Jamaican society. It embodies a set of debased values—values that openly embrace materialism, hedonism, and violence—that reflect the growing anarchy and cynicism afflicting our society. Where once the youth were socialized by the church, the family, and the school, these institutions have lost their moral authority. They no longer generate the signifiers of moral sanction, or the symbols of social solidarity that are understood to give coherence and cohesion to the social and political order. This loss, it is argued, reflects a fundamental breakdown in the structures of civil society and a disillusionment with the ordering values of the “establishment”— decorum, civility, responsibility, thrift, sexual propriety, civic decency, and so on. Dancehall has replaced these socializing institutions as the generative source of the authoritative signifiers of an approved life. A number of artistes are implicated in the moral discourse on dancehall, but in recent years Bounty Killer and Beeni Man have been singled out as especially exemplifying the extremes of dancehall decadence. The music of Bounty Killer is said to be the embodiment of the glorification of violence, while the music of Beeni Man is said to be the personification of a profligate sexuality and a sexist irresponsibility—what in Jamaican creole is known as slaknis. The critics of these artistes are not against popular music per se. They often extol the virtues of (at least some of) the music of the late Bob Marley, for example. Indeed, this is precisely the point: employing a certain resignification of Marley—a recuperated Marley who now stands for “culture” against “slaknis”7—these critics want contemporary performers to sing more socially conscious and morally uplifting songs that will inspire the young to value hard work, honesty, clean living, and the family. In their view, the only performers who are singing constructive songs are people like Everton Blender, Luciano, the recent Buju Banton, and Capleton, singers/deejays who are part of what is being hailed as a “revival” of Rasta-conscious music.8 6 There is as yet no adequate cultural-history of dancehall, nor indeed of the “popular” in Jamaica. For a useful discussion that begins to map out such a history, see Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (London: MacMillan, 1993). For a useful history of popular Jamaican music, see Amon Saka Sakaana (Sebastian Clarke), Jah Music: The Evolution of Popular Jamaican Song (London: Heinemann, 1980). See also Louis Chude-Sokei, “The Sound of Culture: Dread Discourse and the Jamaican Sound Systems,” in Joseph K. Adjaye and Adrianne R. Andrews (eds.), Language, Rhythm, and Sound: Black Popular Cultures into the Twentyfirst Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997). 7 On the culture/slaknis distinction, see Cooper, Noises in the Blood, chapter 8. For a corrosive critique of the nationalist-modern’s notion of “slackness,” listen to Lady Saw, “What Is Slackness” on her album Give Me the Reason (VP Records, 1996). 8 Listen, for example, to Everton Blender, Lift Up Your Head (Heartbeat, 1994); Luciano, Messenger (Island, 1997); Buju Banton, ’Til Shiloh (PolyGram, 1995); and Capleton, I Testament (Rush Associated Labels Recordings, 1997).

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How are we to read this anxiety of the nationalist-modern middle class? It seems to me that an important shift has taken place between the 1960s and the present in the moral-political space occupied by both the popularmodern and the reforming nationalist, middle-class modern, and in the relation between them. The story of this shift, needless to say, is an immensely complicated one crossing several registers. But the plot essentially describes, on the one hand, a decline of the hegemony of the middleclass nationalist-modern, a reduction in the purchase of the ethos that sustained it, an enfeebling of the ethical-political languages through which its vision was articulated, and a contracting of the very social space it occupies in the public sphere; and on the other hand, an increasing moral, social, and economic autonomy of the popular classes, an expansion of their ability to insert themselves into the global economy in ways (whether legal or illegal) that circumvent or bypass the middle class–controlled state and the capitalist-controlled economy. In this void, interestingly enough, Rastafari has suddenly appeared to be the only moral force in the inner cities. Suddenly they appear to be the only communities with both local legitimacy and a coherent set of values recognizable to the middle class: an ethical code, a respect for fatherhood and family, as well as hierarchy and authority, a sense of rectitude, and so on. Suddenly, they seem the only hedge against complete disorder and anarchy, against the young barbarians (the jenarieshan a vaipaz [generation of vipers], as Anthony B.9 calls them) who could not care less for the “civilizing mission” of the middle class. In this context, Everton Blender’s “Lift Up Your Head” and Luciano’s “Guess What’s Happening” are melodic evocations of an assured faith in a kind of uplifting humanism and an elevating moral progress the middle class can (even if reluctantly, ambivalently, with reservation) endorse. With Beeni Man and Bounty Killer, with Lady Saw and Patra, however, the recuperation is harder because the ground of values is more radically divergent.10 It is this shift that lends to the Jamaican middle class present its atmosphere of (often acute) anxiety about the popular. There is a profound sense of a crisis of middle-class values because there is a threat to their historical hegemony.11 Influential local commentators—university lectur9 See David Scott, “Wi a di Govament: An Interview with Anthony B.,” Small Axe 2 (Sept. 1997): 93. 10 There is a slightly younger group of deejays who embrace Rastafari (Boboshanti, in particular) whose music is socially conscious but at the same time antihumanist, more in the genealogy of Peter Tosh than of Bob Marley. I am thinking about deejays like Anthony B. (So Many Things . . . , [VP Records, 1997]); Sizzla (Burning Up [RAS, 1995]; and idem, Black Woman and Child [Brickwall, 1997]). 11 Rachel Manley’s Drumblair: Memoir of a Jamaican Childhood (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1996) is perhaps the most evocative portrait of this project, and the nostalgia with which its publication was greeted is perhaps the most telling sign of the end of an era.

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ers, psychologists, journalists, radio talk-show hosts, politicians—lament the moral crisis and urge a more uplifting tone and a more responsible attitude among singers and performers. What seems clear is that middleclass values—the values that underwrote the formation of the postcolonial state, the values in the name of which the dominant Jamaican modern has been constructed—no longer have the seamless authority they once had (not even among the new managerialist middle class). These values are no longer transparently and self-evidently worthy of widespread emulation. The working classes no longer feel obliged to inculcate them, to inscribe their seeming virtues into their lives, to aspire to their supposed internal goods. But what is particularly striking about the new sense of social division that marks the Jamaican present is that this division is characterized neither by the ready assumption of the moral authority of the middle class, nor by its ability to bring the political force of the state it manages to bear on the cultivation of these values. In short, in the postcolonial present, it can no longer be said that the working classes are “alienated” from middle-class values. It has now to be said that they are simply indifferent to them. In this chapter, I want to reflect on some aspects of this crisis of the Jamaican cultural-political present. As with the previous chapter, my overall aim is a form of reflection that historicizes the present conjuncture as a way of creating politico-conceptual space for transgressing its limit. First I will critically discuss some aspects of the Fanonian narrative of liberation through which the radical story of postcolonial futures has, for at least two generations, been thought and enacted. My concern here is not simply to dismiss this narrative, however, but as I have sought to do in the other engagements that make up this book, to try to grasp the problemspace in which its questions about colonial power and the anticolonial project that overcomes it have been posed. The aim in doing this, of course, is to discern whether these Fanonian questions (whatever their adequacy for the problem-space within which they originally emerged) continue to be the questions in relation to which the limits of our own postcolonial present ought to be addressed. My strong suspicion is that they are not. Second, I will suggest that the upshot of this critical reading is that Fanon ought to be read out of the alienation/realization paradigm in which he formulated his own analyses and folded into another. In my view, this alienation/realization paradigm has depended not only upon certain questionable epistemological assumptions, but more important it has depended upon the moral-political progressivism that inspired the nationalist-modern desire for a suitably reformed, disciplined, and uplifted popular. I will urge that the later Foucault is helpful in disrupting/ displacing the presumption of this “revolutionary” reading of the popu-

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lar. My argument will be that reading Fanon with Foucault—or folding one into the other—will enable us to keep alive a productive tension between (simplifying somewhat here) a demand for the closure of politics and a demand for the deferral that makes space for a genealogical ethics. Finally, emerging from this refiguring detour, I will turn back to the problem of thinking critically—by which I mean thinking critically against— the Jamaican political present. I want to reflect upon that figure in the imagination of the popular-modern that in so many ways embodies the disruption of the project of the postcolonial nationalist-modern in Jamaica—the figure of the ruud bwai (rude boy). In the late 1960s and early 1970s the ruud bwai was a paradigmatic Fanonian figure, the embodiment of an internalized colonial violence and the practitioner of alienated rituals of resistance that could be read (and was read) into the vision of total anticolonial overcoming. Today (at the end of the 1990s), the ruud bwai is the unassimilable embodiment of a pure apolitical violence. I shall offer a somewhat different—an antiteleological—reading that neither romanticizes nor dismisses the ruud bwai but that tries to open up a space in which to rethink the popular and its connection to politics. On the view that I will want to commend, what is at stake in thinking at the limit of the Jamaican present is the cultivation of a new kind of politics, indeed a new pluralizing domain of the political. This will require something more—or rather, something other—than the formation of a new political party (such as the National Democratic Movement founded in 1995) that enters the old game of (“tribal”) politics, no matter its claim to be “new and different.” It will require something more fundamental, namely an altogether new game of politics that is not primarily constituted in and through the field defined by representative-electoral politics, the field defined by the terms of the contemporary form of the postcolonial state in Jamaica.

A NOTE ON “FANON STUDIES”

Before I enter upon this set of discussions, however, let me briefly locate my own uses of Fanon within the context of the recent and continuing debate over his work. Fanon today is a figure of very large and very complex dimensions.12 By the late 1970s, as political independence became the accepted norm in the Third World and the hard years of new nationhood 12 Fanon, so it is said, is now being turned into a “global theorist.” See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Critical Fanonism,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Spring 1991): 457; and a response to it in Cedric Robinson, “The Appropriation of Frantz Fanon,” Race and Class 35, no. 1 (1993): 79–91.

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displaced the epic vision of the anticolonial liberation struggle, Fanon’s name faded somewhat from the front line of Third World intellectual preoccupation. It was not until the middle 1980s that he was rediscovered, “remembered.” And this remembering took place not so much in the Third World but in the metropolitan diasporas. If the 1980s were “lost years” in the Third World (structurally adjusted years, years of the systematic dismantling of the Bandung project), they were years of a certain cultural-intellectual awakening in the North Atlantic postcolonial diasporas, certainly in Britain. What is at stake in this cultural-political site is the negotiation of forms of raced individualization and subjectification, raced representation and exclusion in the context of the Reagan/ Thatcher axis of North Atlantic politics. And thus, perhaps not surprisingly, the text through which Fanon is reread in this new space of diasporic displacement is not so much (indeed hardly at all) the manifesto of Third World revolution, The Wretched of the Earth, as the earlier meditation on the psycho-political aporias of black identity, Black Skin, White Masks (originally published in 1952). The most provocative work here, of course, has been that of Homi Bhabha.13 More recently, however, there has been a growing skepticism regarding the purchase of the critical strategies through which (and the cultural-political project into which) this “poststructuralist” Fanon has been read. These are scholars who want to reinstate what they think of as a more politically engaged, a more thoroughly activist Fanon. For them, Fanon was principally the architect of a revolutionary cultural nationalism, not, as one commentator rather angrily put it, “some trendy postmodern bullshitter.”14 Some of these scholars, moreover, are concerned with thinking through Fanon less in relation to the identity predicaments that have arisen in metropolitan geopolitical locations, and more in relation to the urgent problems of social and political transformation that have emerged in contemporary Third World ones—more, for instance, in relation to what Ato Sekyi-Otu (one of the chief protagonists of this version of Fanon) calls the “disasters of the postindependence experience in Africa.”15 13 See Bhabha’s well-known essays now collected in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995). See also the volume edited recently by Alan Reed, The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996), especially the essays by Stuart Hall (“The After-Life of Frantz Fanon”) and Bhabha (“Day by Day . . . With Frantz Fanon”). Situated here, too, is Isaac Julien’s documentary, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1995). Indeed the contrast between the earlier uses of Fanon and present ones can be gauged by juxtaposing Julien’s film with Gillo Pontecorvo’s great national liberationist film, Battle of Algiers (1966). 14 See “Dialogue,” in The Fact of Blackness, p. 41. The member of the audience was addressing some remarks to Bhabha. 15 Ato Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 2. I reviewed Sekyi-Otu’s book in American Journal of Sociology 103

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As is evident from my argument in earlier chapters in this book (chapter 6, especially), my own preoccupations cross both these readings but fall neatly into neither. This is because whereas I share Bhabha’s epistemological antifoundationalism and appreciate his subtle reading of a “transgressive” Fanon treading the unstable edges among Hegel/Marx, Sartre, and Freud/Lacan, and whereas I substantially agree that Fanon is not reducible to “events and eventualities,” the nature of my geopolitical concerns are different from his and compel therefore a differently located set of questions.16 At the same time, although I do not share Sekyi-Otu’s dismissal of the theoretical strategies of poststructuralism, nor his desire to recuperate a “universalist” and a “revolutionary” Fanon, I am nevertheless sympathetic to his worry that in the “postie” Fanon a certain kind of question about the political remains unasked: the question specifically of a postcolonial politics after Bandung. I understand his concern, therefore, that in the formulation of their readings the metropolitan diasporas have implicitly or explicitly come to be constructed as the privileged site of the colonial condition and the postcolonial problem. So that, in the process, even as Fanon is being remembered, the Third World to which he addressed himself is being forgotten.17 As will become clear in the course of this chapter, I am concerned neither to rescue Fanon from himself nor to condemn him to history. Nor am I concerned with who gets Fanon right and who does not. Rather I am concerned with what I take to be the larger question, namely, the question of the horizon in relation to which a Fanonian politics of postcolonial futures can be articulated today.

THE NARRATIVE OF LIBERATION

Until relatively recently, oppositional discourse—whether cultural-nationalist or Marxist—confidently imagined Third World futures through a narrative of liberation. It is this narrative, for example, that animated (January 1998): 1110–13. Other kindred work includes Lewis Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Lewis Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renee T. White (eds.), Fanon: A Critical Reader (New York: Routledge, 1996). 16 See Homi Bhabha, “Foreword: Remembering Fanon,” in Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto, 1986), pp. viii–x. 17 I appreciate, therefore, the form of Sekyi-Otu’s question: “But what if your return to Fanon is solicited by a somewhat different situation in the world, a somewhat different geopolitical affiliation? In the following pages I undertake a rereading of Fanon prompted by the postcolonial condition, here understood as the determinate experience of postindependence African societies, in relation to contemporary world history.” Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, p. 11.

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the radical projects of what Samir Amin has called the Bandung Era,18 those Third World experiments with anti-imperialist self-determination, with political and economic nonalignment, and in the case of nationstates like Tanzania and Jamaica, with varieties of socialism. One of the great texts through which this narrative of liberation is articulated—indeed, one might say, through which it is defined—is of course Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, completed and first published shortly before his untimely death at the end of 1961.19 More than any other work on the cultural-politics of decolonization (on what Ngugi would summarize in his memorable phrase, “decolonising the mind”)20 this book captures the spirit of militant insurgency that characterized the refusal of colonial subordination and tutelage and the unequivocal demand for absolute political sovereignty that marked the Bandung years. Few of us who came of political age in the Third World of the 1970s, who neither bought wholesale the official Marxism of the communist parties nor the noisy complacency of the national and comprador bourgeoisies, were not infected by Fanon’s diagnosis of the colonial situation and the dramatic narrative of social and political emancipation through which he took us beyond it. For what we found in the work of this Martinican intellectual, in his style (as he might have preferred it put),21 was an uncompromising refusal to be governed by the authoritative regimes of colonial and neocolonial representation, and a defiant willingness to risk an exploration into yet uncharted regions. So that his work (and his life) entered into our predicament with a profound intimacy and a decisive strategy. However, the cognitive-political world of The Wretched of the Earth has significantly altered in the last ten to fifteen years or so—altered, I believe, irrevocably. Many of the epistemological assumptions that held 18 Samir Amin, Re-reading the Postwar Period: An Intellectual Itinerary (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994). 19 Fanon died on December 6, 1961. In what follows I use the Penguin edition first published in 1967. It should be clear that I shall not mean to suggest that The Wretched of the Earth, much less Fanon’s entire oeuvre, can be reduced to this narrative. Obviously Fanon is far too complex a thinker to be reduced in any direction. My target here is not Fanon as such, but rather the theoretical structure of the narrative of liberation and its implication for thinking through the political. The Wretched of the Earth, apart from whatever else it is, is a site for one classic statement of this narrative. 20 See, of course, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s book of the same title, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986). 21 This whole question of style has been of importance to George Lamming as well, a consummate Fanonian intellectual. Recall his lecture on Edgar Mittleholzer, “But Alas Edgar,” in which he wrote: “Nothing matters more than a man’s discovery of his style, a discovery which is also part of his own creation, and style—not a style—but style as the aura and essence, the recognised example of being in which and out of which a man’s life assumes its shape.” Conversations: Essays, Addresses and Interviews, 1953–1990 (London: Karia Press, 1992), p. 34.

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it together and guaranteed the salience of its emancipatory hopes—assumptions about history, about culture, politics, resistance, freedom, subjectivity—have been steadily eroded by the labor of antimetaphysical and antiteleological strategies of criticism. These critical strategies, important among them those that have sought to dismantle the Eurocentrisms of Enlightenment-driven oppositional theory, make it difficult to embrace coherently the universalist ideal of an emancipated society toward which, by reform or revolution, we are supposed to be converging. Moreover, the global political-economic structures and relations in terms of which these emancipatory hopes appeared a possible—and, indeed, a practically achievable—horizon have been systematically dismantled. To put the matter briefly, we no longer live in the bipolar global order of the cold war era in which the Soviet Union (whatever you made of it) maintained at least a strategic interest in blocking U.S. hegemony in the Third World. The Gulf War of 1991 signaled, perhaps even more than the events of 1989, the demise of this global order and the emergence of a “new world order” in which the United States has staked a virtually unchallenged claim to a unipolar hegemony. Yet (and this what is signal about 1991) the demise of the old order has of course not been accompanied by a decline in international antagonisms; it has only altered the axis along which these antagonisms are articulated: from capitalism/socialism to North/South. (It is worth recalling, as Noam Chomsky reminds us, that the first act of post–cold war U.S. aggression was the invasion of Panama, Operation Just Cause, December 1989.) Moreover, the organization of the world into nation-states determined by the old colonial powers in the early part of this century is disintegrating, and the “nationalisms” in the name of which the new separatisms are being urged are scarcely recognizable in terms that Fanon would have been familiar with. We live in a world in which the relative prestige that social-democratic energies (and radical-democratic ones as well) had in the 1960s and 1970s—a concern with social justice, a commitment to equality, a simple regard for the poor, a distrust of instrumentalism—has almost completely faded. It is a world in which even the United Nations (not to speak of those other multilateral institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, etc.) has become an unabashed tool of U.S. foreign policy.22 In short, standing where we are, we no longer look into the same future that Fanon did almost three and a half decades ago. We do not because we cannot. And we cannot, I believe, because the shift that is taking place around us is altering the very enabling/disabling conditions of possibility of political criticism itself. We stand, I suspect, in an historical predica22 See, very usefully, Phyllis Bennis and Michel Moushabeck (eds.), Altered States: A Reader in the New World Order (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1993).

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ment in which the old languages of Left politics—that is to say, the oppositional languages of emancipation—are no longer effective. And therefore the question that arises for us (or which ought to arise for us) is: What is the yield and what is the limit of the Fanonian narrative of liberation in the cognitive-political present? If it is true (as I think it is) that this narrative of liberation can no longer do the same conceptual-political work that it has long been assumed to do, if it can no longer produce the same effects in terms of hegemonizing the field of the political (because the conditions of possibility are no longer what they were), then the urgent questions before us ought to be ones that take the following shape: How, and with what cognitive resources, do we revise the horizon of Third World politics? How, and with what cognitive resources, do we begin to imagine alternative hopes and to assemble the normative political strategies by means of which these hopes can be placed on the agenda of the present? This is what I want to explore in this chapter. I do not want to abandon The Wretched of the Earth, however, because I recognize too much of myself in its criticisms and its hopes. I do not want to give up the corrosive critique it offers of the false humanity of Europe and of the brazen vacancy of the mimic-men who have installed themselves as captains of the postcolonial state. Nor do I want to live without its poignant hopes for overcoming the debilitating forms of social and psychic misery that haunt the colonial and postcolonial worlds. My labor, then, has to be a different one, namely a practice of sustaining a relation to a long tradition of anticolonial criticism while offering a respectful challenge to specific assumptions. This entails not a forgetting but a repositioning of Fanon’s criticisms and hopes. And I want to do this by reading them out of the “alienation model” of the narrative of liberation in which they are formulated. I shall try to do this by urging that we read Fanon not as we conventionally do with that great philosopher of engagement, Jean-Paul Sartre (a reading authorized as we know by Fanon himself),23 but rather with Michel Foucault. If Fanon is the revolutionary architect par excellence of anticolonial liberation, Foucault is the paradigmatic agon of settled fictions and normalized modes of identity and community. If Fanon’s is a demand for an immediate resolution of the normative question of a new form of political community, Foucault’s is a demand for an indefinite deferral of any such resolution in order to gain space—to buy time—for the work of ethicality. I want to use Fanon to help me stake a positive claim on a politics beyond the present. But I also want to use Foucault to work against the strong desire in Fanon for collective realization and consensual harmony, to unsettle his yearning 23

See Peter Geismar, Fanon: A Biography (New York: Dial Press, 1971), p. 180.

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for the redemption of colonized humanity, his anticipation of the birth of the New Man. Or to put this another way, I want to fold Foucault’s dissonant practice of genealogical suspicion and what William Connolly calls his ethic of responsiveness to identity\difference (that is to say, his sensitivity to the constitutive tension between identity and difference) into the Fanonian politics of liberation.24 In this way I hope to keep alive a productive tension between, on the one hand, a politics that aims to find a ground for consensus, and on the other, an ethics that is suspicious of any normative foreclosing of the assertion of difference.

FANON AVEC FOUCAULT

As I say, I want to read The Wretched of the Earth as an instance or elaboration—perhaps the most profound instance or elaboration—of the narrative of Third World liberation. By a “narrative of liberation” I mean a more or less structured story that progressively links (through such generative tropes as Repression, Alienation, Consciousness, Awakening, Resistance, Struggle, and Realization) a past and a present of Domination to an anticipated future of Freedom.25 A narrative of liberation, on this view, works through the construction of a certain economy of discourse, the central elements of which are not hard to identify: it operates by constructing, for instance, a teleological rhythm in which the various moments and maneuvers that constitute the struggle are identified in their succession; by constructing a repressive power that denies the subjugated their essential humanity, and whose absolute overcoming constitutes the singular objective and destiny of the struggle; by constructing a subject who moves from alienated dehumanization to self-realization; and by constructing a “beyond” in which there emerges a new and unencumbered humanity. I want to approach The Wretched of the Earth through an exploration of this narrative not because I think that it is the only approach to this restless and provocative work; no doubt it is not. Rather, I want to approach it in this way for two reasons: one, because I think that part of the compelling force of this book has to do with the operations of this narrative of liberation, that is to say the way it interpellates us (read24 I am indebted to William E. Connolly, especially his Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991): and idem, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), for many of the ideas I try to work with in this chapter. 25 Patrick Taylor has written a book titled The Narrative of Liberation: Perspectives on Afro-Caribbean Literature, Popular Culture, and Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). It will be clear that, interesting in many ways as this book is, I share neither Taylor’s conception of this narrative nor his appreciation of it.

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ers) as subjects of a certain Third World desire; and two, precisely because this narrative still interpellates us so powerfully in this way in a world so altered we ought perhaps to pause and open ourselves to the question whether or not we want to continue seeking an image of Third World futures in this familiar idiom. The Fanonian story is narrated as a step-by-step encounter with and overcoming of the obstacle of colonial domination. It is the story of the nature and the path of decolonization. In this story, the colonized are physically and psychologically dehumanized. In a fundamental sense they are denied their humanity. At first the response to this domination on the part of the colonized is inchoate: it takes the form of more or less disorganized violence and forms of ritual possession and magic. Much of this violence is initially directed inward, at the colonized themselves. However, these outbursts are important for at least two reasons. First, because they allow the colonized a concrete outlet for their pent-up rage; and second, because they signal to the colonizer that there is too much disorder to continue ruling in the old way. It is at this moment that, as Fanon puts it, the “familiar dialogue concerning values” is undertaken between certain colonized intellectuals and the colonizer. The natives are, however, not persuaded by this discourse about morality. Eventually the native learns that the settler is not the superhuman he makes himself out to be. His glance ceases to turn the native to stone. As the disorder grows, moreover, a section of the intelligentsia goes over to the side of the people. The aggressivity and violence of the natives are rechanneled away from themselves and given a political, and specifically anticolonial, focus. This is a turning point. It is, for the colonized, the moment of Consciousness; the moment of Awakening—the creation of what one might call an anticolonial Will. The criminal is turned into an activist; the lumpen becomes a militant. Moreover, through this canalization of the violence of the colonized there also begins a period of psychic healing, the reconstitution of the alienated self of the colonized. The “New Man” of whom Fanon speaks begins to emerge. The point here is not to offer some gratuitous criticism of Fanon, to point out, for instance, what is epistemologically incoherent or implausible in his account of decolonization. Let us leave that fault-finding obsession to the academic traders in what is called the “failure” of the Third World. From the point of view of the present as a structure of possibilities and limits, the intelligibility of the Fanonian anticolonial project and of the narrative of liberation through which it is articulated has at least in part to be sought within the politico-epistemic problem-space in which it was situated, in which it intervened. And in the text of the The Wretched of the Earth that problem-space is defined in relation to what Fanon understands as the implacable obstacle of colonial power. In this text, colo-

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nial power constitutes a total regime of systemic and systematic brutality, occupying simultaneously physical and psychological space, inscribing its effects in the very organization of desire of the colonized. It is a form of power that is, moreover, resistant to reason and therefore to negotiation. Colonialism, as Fanon puts it, “is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”26 It is in relation to this obstacle that the contingent historical task of the Fanonian anticolonial project is imagined, defined, and set in dramatic narrative movement. Inasmuch as colonialism calls into being the colonizer/colonized as a dialectically interdependent complex, there is a necessary and reciprocal relationship between the structure of the dehumanizing power that constitutes the colonial order and the project of decolonization. In this project therefore decolonization can have little meaning unless it, like the power it is displacing, is total, absolute. As Fanon argues, decolonization achieves everything if it achieves anything at all. Decolonization is a complete, a total, an unequivocal affair. “Without any period of transition, there is a total, complete, and absolute substitution.”27 This absolute is for Fanon the minimum demand of the colonized. Or as he says in another passage: “In decolonization, there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question of the colonial situation. If we wish to describe it precisely, we might find it in the well-known words: ‘The last shall be first and the first last.’ Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence. That is why, if we try to describe it, all decolonization is successful.”28 In the Fanonian problematic, therefore nation-state sovereignty constitutes the privileged political space of freedom, that space in which the ex-colonized are restored to their own history, and their humanity. The Fanonian demand is a demand for nation—a radical nation, of course, but a territorial nation nonetheless—as the self-evident site of the quest for autonomy and self-determination. It constitutes a threshold. And inasmuch as colonialism constitutes the fundamental obstacle to the achievement of that threshold of national-territorial sovereignty, the Fanonian narrative is launched to mobilize the oppositional energies that will most effectively enable its decisive and unequivocal overthrow. Its organization, then, its momentum, and its polemical thrust ought to be read as elements in a strategic politico-conceptual calculation that operates in the paramount service of achieving this threshold. Standing where we do, however, so to speak, after colonialism, we do not share this politico26

Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, p. 48. Ibid., p. 27. 28 Ibid., p. 28. 27

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epistemic space with Fanon. (It is, I believe, a romance, the self-indulgent nostalgia of late modernity, to read Fanon as though we were about to join him in the trenches of the anticolonial national liberation struggle.) From where we are now, several decades into the project of constructing the political forms of our national sovereignty (sovereignty for which people like Fanon paid dearly), our questions cannot continue to be those of realizing that threshold. A Fanonian politics of national liberation is only intelligible when the currency of nation-state sovereignty has value as an unattained aspiration that counts in global politics. Today, not only do we inhabit the normative terrain of that threshold (in the sense that an anticolonial argument does not have much work to do to produce effectively its legitimacy), but simultaneously the currency value of that national sovereignty has vastly declined. To gain any sort of critical purchase, therefore, our oppositional questions, the revised questions about our futures, have rather to be those of unsettling the settled settlements of this very postcolonial sovereignty itself. At the same time that I want to appreciate the problem-space in relation to which the Fanonian narrative is articulated, I also want to resist some of its normative implications, in particular those that bear on how we seek to derive affirmative claims about the preferred forms of political community in postcolonial society. In the Fanonian story the idea is that the colonized are alienated from a harmonious identity; that this alienation is fostered by colonial institutions that repress the colonized self and prevent the colonized people from achieving a higher and unifying consensus. The redemptive project of overcoming colonialism is to return the natives to themselves. But who exactly are these “natives”? What is their gender? What is their ethnicity? What is their class? What is their sexual orientation? What are their modes of self-fashioning? My worry is that the Fanonian story underwrites too much—or gives too much space to—the normalized centrality of a specific identity, even though an identity argued to have suffered particular injuries under colonial domination. I suspect, for example, that the emergence of an increasingly vocal Indo-Caribbean critique of Afro-Caribbean hegemony has very much to do with the presumed privilege of Afro-Caribbean identity that Independence installed. The story of the postcolonial state in the Caribbean, in other words, is normalized as the story of the empowerment of peoples of African descent, as peoples whose “authentic suffering” has guaranteed them a special and permanent dispensation.29 I am arguing, in short, 29 One of the earliest critiques of this view was offered by Derek Walcott in his “What the Twilight Says: An Overture,” in his Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970). He writes, for instance: “Yes. But we were all strangers here. The claim which we put forward now as Africans is not our inheritance,

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that the Fanonian story licenses too unreflexive an idea of an essential native subject.30 It is this idea that I want to resist, urging that we mobilize Michel Foucault in our efforts to effect this resistance. In an interview that took place some six months before his own untimely death (in June 1984), Foucault offers an instructive doubt about narratives of liberation. He said in part: I’ve always been a little distrustful of the general theme of liberation, to the extent, that, if one does not treat it with a certain number of safeguards and within certain limits, there is the danger that it will refer back to the idea that there does exist a nature or a human foundation which, as a result of a certain number of historical, social or economic processes, found itself concealed, alienated or imprisoned in and by some repressive mechanism. In that hypothesis it would suffice to unloosen these repressive locks so that man can be reconciled with himself, once again find his nature or renew contact with his roots and restore a full and positive relationship with himself. I don’t think that is a theme which can be admitted without rigorous examination. I do not mean to say that liberation or such and such a form of liberation does not exist. When a colonial people tries to free itself of its colonizer, that is truly an act of liberation, in the strict sense of the word. But as we also know, that in this extremely precise example, this act of liberation is not sufficient to establish the practices of liberty that later on will be necessary for this people, this society and these individuals to decide upon receivable and acceptable forms of their existence or political society.31

He goes on, drawing a parallel with his work on sexuality, that other domain in which a narrative of liberation has been put to considerable work: I encountered that exact problem in dealing with sexuality: does the expression “let us liberate our sexuality” have a meaning? Isn’t the problem rather to try to decide the practices of freedom through which we could determine what is sexual pleasure and what are our erotic, loving, passionate relationships with others? It seems to me that to use this ethical problem of the definition of our practices of freedom is more important than the affirmation . . . that sexuality or desire must be set free.32

but a bequest, like that of other races, a bill for the condition of our arrival as slaves” (p. 10). 30 It may be worth reading in this connection Stuart Hall’s essay, “New Ethnicities,” ICA Documents 7 (1988): 27–31. Here he thematizes the question of the end of the “essential black subject.” 31 Michel Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 12 (1987): 113–14. 32 Ibid., p. 114.

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The Fanonian problematic of liberation (a liberation which is, of course, simultaneously a liberation of colonial desire) too often presupposes the metaphysical idea of an essential nature, an essential human foundation that is prior to the imposition of the historical repression. Repressive power on this view, whether it be colonial or sexual, denies to its victims an authentic expression of their inner potential, of their Real Selves which are concealed from themselves. This alienation model depends on the hydraulic counter-positioning of power and freedom. It fosters the idea that what is necessary is lifting the lid of repressive power so that the self can be set free. And once this is done, so the story continues, the self that has long been alienated is restored to itself; the split of alienation, of division, is healed. The Foucauldian problematic encourages a suspicion of this whole metaphysics of self and power. Because for Foucault power is—most importantly anyway—productive rather than repressive (that is to say, because power produces a reorganization of subjectivity and a reorganization of the games of truth rather than a repression of essential ones), a different and more useful set of questions animates his concern: What is the relation between the colonized/postcolonized subject and the games of truth into which s/he is inserted, through which s/he has been produced as a colonized/postcolonized subject? What are the apparatuses, disciplines, and institutions through which colonial/ postcolonial subjectification has been enacted? Moreover (and I shall return to this whole set of questions), what are the practices of self-formation in which the colonized/postcolonized subject is engaged? How do these practices operate in relation to the hegemonic practices of colonial/ postcolonial power? Note, though, what Foucault is not saying here. He is not saying that it is illegitimate to speak of the overthrow of a colonial regime as a liberation. He embraces this in fact. Such an overthrow, he says, is liberation in the strict sense of the word inasmuch as it breaks a state of domination. What he is skeptical about, however, is whether the political processes of liberation through which this break is produced are adequate to the task of constructing the ethical practices of freedom through which the postcolonial community is to be fashioned. He intimates that this is doubtful. From this point of view what is important is Foucault’s relation to what is called “politics.”33 On any account of his later work, it is this relation (or more precisely the seeming lack of one) that has always been so confounding to liberals and Marxists alike: it has resisted simple categoriza33

For a very thoughtful discussion of Foucault’s relation to the problem of politics and the domain of the political, see Jon Simons, Foucault and the Political (New York: Routledge, 1995).

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tion along the spectrum of normal politics.34 Foucault himself has described his concern as an “ethics” rather than a “politics,” or better, as a “politics as ethics.”35 What this means is that rather than asking questions from the point of view of a political ideology or a political regime Foucault has been concerned to interrogate the normalized conception any given politics has of itself: “I have never tried to analyze anything from the point of view of politics,” he has said, “but always to ask politics what it had to say about the problems with which it was confronted . . . the positions it takes and the reasons it gives for this.”36 For Foucault, therefore, politics must never be allowed to rest on the satisfaction of its own self-conception, on the identities it affirms as the constituents of its community. Politics, of course, necessarily depends upon an affirmative consensus, upon what Foucault calls a specific “totalisation.” There can be no political community, that is to say, without the constitution of a boundary. Every political order produces an exclusion. This is no less the case for postcolonial political orders, even, perhaps most particularly, those established out of the ordeal of a revolutionary national liberation struggle. But precisely because this is what politics depends upon, what is important for Foucault is how, within the context of any such totalization, to pose, as he says, a certain number of questions to politics—genealogical questions, in effect, about the edges that such a totalization excludes, the otherness it produces, and the difference it seeks to obliterate as the condition of its identity.37 Foucault’s work on madness, illness, crime, discipline and punishment, and sexuality has to be read as interrogations of the enlightened self-identity of political modernity, as investigations that show how its fabricated unity depends upon the exile, incarceration, ostracization, and marginalization of specific other identities. [I]n these analyses [of madness, etc.] I do not appeal to any “we”—to any of those “we’s” whose consensus, whose values, whose traditions constitute the framework for a thought and define the conditions in which it can be validated. But the problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a “we” in order to assert the principles one recognises and the values one accepts; or if it is not, rather, necessary to make the future forma-

34 See, for instance, the discussion in Michel Foucault, “Politics and Ethics: An Interview,” in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). 35 Ibid., p. 375. 36 Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview,” in The Foucault Reader, p. 385. 37 For a very interesting attempt to argue for “an affirmative trajectory in Foucault’s thought” that fruitfully employs a concept of “edges,” see Romand Coles, Self/Power/ Other: Political Theory and Dialogical Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

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tion of a “we” possible, by elaborating the question. Because it seems to me that the “we” must not be previous to the question; it can only be the result— and the necessarily temporary result—of the question as it is posed in the new terms in which one formulates it.38

As William Connolly has suggested, Foucault uses genealogy to force into view those tendencies in our thought to naturalize positions we endorse.39 Politics-as-ethics wants us to be responsive to the question of the “we,” to the “we” as a question we ask ourselves even as we position ourselves in relation to some organization of community. It is in the moment of this interruption constituted by the question—what is the “game of truth” upon which this identity secures its presumed unity and privilege, and how might we unsettle its hegemonic boundaries?—that Foucault locates the ethical practice of liberty.40

RUUD BWAI SELF-FASHIONING

One crucial site for the performance of this practice of liberty is the site of the body. As we know, in the Fanonian narrative the movement from colonial domination to decolonization, from repressed alienation to liberated self-realization, depends upon the work of violence, and especially the work of violence upon the body of the colonized. The functional centrality of this complex, body/violence, represents, of course, one of the most controversial—and at the same time one of the most fundamental— areas of Fanon’s revolutionary thought. And we also know that the problem of the body and the variable effects of power on it are central to Foucault’s attempt to displace the kind of “repressive hypothesis” upon which the Fanonian conception of the self hangs.41 I think that we ought to use Foucault to redescribe (and reposition) Fanon’s conception of the relations among the body, desire, violence, and the practice of freedom. Anyone familiar with the uses of the body in the cultural-politics of colonial and postcolonial Jamaica (the enslaved body, the violated body, 38

Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, Problematizations,” p. 385. See Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, p. 222n. 19. 40 It may be useful to recall what Foucault means by a “game.” “[W]hen I say ‘game,’ ” he writes, “I mean an ensemble of rules for the production of the truth. It is not a game in the sense of imitating or entertaining . . . it is an ensemble of procedures which lead to a certain result, which can be considered in function of its principles and its rules of procedures, as valid or not, as winner or loser.” Foucault, “The Ethic of Care,” p. 127. 41 See, of course, the first chapter of The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1978). And among many other possibilities, see also “Body/Power,” in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980). 39

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the black body, the defiant body, the body in pain, the body of pleasure) will immediately recognize the importance of this register for thinking an ethics of identity\difference and a practice of freedom.42 The Jamaican body is evidently an historical site of multiple effects of power/knowledge. Indeed one can almost project the Fanonian thematization of the body in The Wretched of the Earth—the body inscribed with colonial violence, the body in revolt against that inscription—directly onto the body of Jamaican popular culture. My concern here, though, is not with a comprehensive remapping of our understanding of the Jamaican body, but only with sketching an indication of some coordinates through which a reading of one postcolonial practice of freedom on the site of that body might be pursued. I want to do this by way of a reflection on the figure of the ruud bwai (rude boy). This is a figure, as I have suggested, at the center of middle-class anxiety over the popular and of the public sphere debate about the moral-political crisis of the contemporary postcolonial state in Jamaica. The ruud bwai is at once a figure of intense fascination and mortal dread, of urban folk-heroization and draconian police operations, at once an emblematic Fanonian figure of internalized violence and rituals of embodied resistance, and the incarnation of a desperate, even pathological, criminality and lawlessness. I want to historicize this figure by showing something of the shift that has taken place in the moral-conceptual space it (and by extension, the transgressive popular more generally) inhabits in postcolonial Jamaica. Garth White’s essay “Rudie, Oh Rudie!” published a little more than three decades ago, is the most explicit attempt to sketch a Fanonian political sociology of the figure of the ruud bwai (or ruudi [rudie]).43 White’s essay, itself with its own significant political sociology, emerges at—and indeed programmatically registers—a moment of crisis in the Jamaican postcolonial state. By 1967 when it was published, the “new nation” (a mere five years into formal Independence) had been contending with prolonged unrest among urban popular social forces, especially in West Kingston.44 And among the more visible of these social forces threatening the order of the nationalist-modern were the ruud bwais who struck up an attitude of defiance toward the authority of the state, its police, and its judicial system. In Derrick Morgan’s memorable hit song of 1966, 42 There is an historical anthropology waiting to be written about this body. For one attempt, see Elisa Sobo, One Blood: The Jamaican Body (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). Though useful in some of its ethnographic detail it is deeply problematic in its framing arguments. For a review of Sobo’s book, see Erna Brodber, review of One Blood, by Elisa Sobo, Caribbean Review of Books 10 (November 1993): 11–12. 43 Garth White, “Rudie, Oh Rudie!,” Caribbean Quarterly 13 (Sept. 1967): 39–44. 44 For a useful social-historical account, see Gray, Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica, chapters 3 and 4.

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“Tougher Than Tough,” for instance, ruud bwais are solemnly brought before the judge for “gun-shooting, ratchet-using, and bomb-throwings.” When asked what they have to say for themselves, their famous reply is, “Yur ana, ruudis doan fier [Your honour, rudies don’t fear].”45 As its crisis of legitimacy deepened, however, the state responded with increasingly drastic measures, and in October 1966, unable to contain the militant unrest, a state of emergency was declared.46 This is the political-ideological moment of White’s intervention. In his emphatically Fanonian account, the ruud bwai is a figure—young, urban, black, and angry—that has come to haunt the middle-class imaginary of post-independence Jamaica, a figure signifying not merely a lack of the esteemed rationality and preferred values of respectable society but a positive contempt for, and refusal of, them. The ruud bwai, in White’s crisp delineation of them, constituted a positive danger to the normal politics of the new nation. [The] rude bwoy is that person, native, who is totally disenchanted with the ruling system; who generally is descended from the “African” elements in the lower class and who is now armed with ratchets (German made knives), other cutting instruments and with increasing frequency nowadays, with guns and explosives. This last condition and to some extent a lesser ambivalence toward the culture of the metropolitan oriented “other” society is what really distinguishes between the rude bwoy and the other angry elements in similar station. In addition rude bwoys are largely central in those urban areas that suffer from chronic depression and to which migration from rural areas was largely directed in the 50’s and 60’s.47

Reading through Fanon, White goes on to discuss, among other things, the crucial relation between ruud bwai culture and the musical practices through which it has been fixed in the popular imaginary.48 He rehearses the Fanonian conception of a colonial violence absorbed and internalized such that the body of the colonized literally becomes a container of aggressivity that has to be displaced until it is finally rechanneled along the path of a productive release in revolution. Paraphrasing Fanon, White writes that dance “provides relaxation which takes the form of a muscular orgy, in which the most acute aggressiveness and the most impelling violence 45

Derrick Morgan, “Tougher than Tough,” on The Story of Jamaican Music (Island Records, 1993). 46 See Terry Lacey, Violence and Politics in Jamaica: 1960–1970 (London: Manchester University Press, 1977), pp. 49–50. 47 White, “Rudie,” p. 39. 48 See also Gordon Rohlehr, “Sounds and Pressure,” in his My Strangled City and Other Essays (Port-of-Spain: Longman, Trinidad, 1992).

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are canalized, transformed and conjured away. [The colonized] then discovers reality and this is transformed into the pattern of his customs, into the practice of violence and into his plan for freedom.”49 He continues: The Rudie “dance”, an extension of the principle that resulted in the slowing down of tempo in ska music has not cooled down the lower class native. Rather it has caused numerous fights and recently even gang warfare at these dances. The muscular tension now finds outlet in gang wars. The fraternal blood-bath allows for procrastination of the choice, nonetheless inevitable, of armed resistance to the oppressors.50

There is a profound insight in the Fanonian reading of a colonial power inscribed not merely as an externality on the surface of social relations, or in the plan of the city, but directly in the very body of the colonized. And of course the whole conception is connected to White’s oppositional reading of the imminent (he says inevitable) prospect of armed resistance. But reading through Foucault I would like to dispute the animating idea of a body in the grip of a repressed truth buried under the ponderous weight of a repressing colonial power, that can only be realized through the cleansing force of a counter-violence. To be sure this has been a compelling conception, but it is questionable insofar as it depends upon the familiar model of alienation/realization.51 However, this model has depended upon more than a set of epistemological assumptions. In the historical context of colonial/postcolonial Jamaica, it has also depended upon the nationalist-modern project that established the horizon in relation to which the movement from alienation to realization was judged. In the immediate post-independence period, the 1960s and 1970s, when the figure is named as such in popular musical discourse, the ruud bwai outlaw-as-folk-hero was recoupable for a Fanonian narrative of revolutionary-liberationist overcoming (from alienation to realization, from lumpen to militant). In the 1980s and 1990s, however, this recuperation is no longer possible because with the collapse of the Bandung project in Jamaica (and this ends basically with the defeat of Michael Manley at the polls in October 1980) the new politicalideological problem-space does not enable that progressivist narrative a positive purchase. That narrative is now either dead, or alive only in the limp middle-class moralizing of ex-leftists. Today, the context of the incor49

White, “Rudie,” p. 42. Ibid. 51 One has only to think of the figure of the Atlantic Ocean in Paule Marshall’s novel, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (New York: Vintage, 1969): the sea, which, having absorbed the violence of colonial slavery for countless years, now cleans itself in an annual ritual, vomiting up its insides in a convulsive redemption. 50

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porative middle-class project of the late 1930s through the late 1970s that envisioned a social contract formed on the basis of its enlightened welfarist values has faded (if not completely disappeared), and the figure of the ruud bwai now appears as little more than the detached embodiment of a life of unpoliticizable criminality to be dealt with by the police and the prisons, or an irredeemable vulgarity to be censored by the media.52 Reading through Foucault, and thus interrupting the Fanonian alienation/realization model, I want to rework this idea of the relation between the body of the colonized/postcolonized and power. I want to read those contracted muscles, that contorted face, and the deliberate movements not as the repressed internalization of colonial violence, but as the positive signs of a certain practice of self-formation. This is not to deny the direct inscription of colonial/postcolonial violence on the body of the subject, but I want to focus not so much on the side of dominant power as on the side of those who make their lives in its shadow. Reading the colonized/ postcolonized body out of the story of repression and alienation, then, I want to understand the sense of menace, threat, and imminent possibility of explosive violence that one reads around the body of the ruud bwai, inscribed in his very presence, as aspects of a practice of self-cultivation: the cultivation of a certain mode of being that I shall call “ruud bwai selffashioning.”53 This practice of self-fashioning entails the cultivation of, for example, a certain gait, a certain bearing, a certain poise, a certain deportment, a certain way of holding and moving the body through (urban) space such that the body becomes, in the sense of turned into, an embodiment of menace, threat, and imminent violence. In his version of The Harder They Come Michael Thelwell produces description after description of this ruud bwai self-fashioning. One consummate description is the scene where: Ivan, the novel’s protagonist, has just emerged from 52

To see that this nationalist-modern recuperation is no longer available it is necessary only to contrast the construction of the ruud bwai in The Harder They Come (1973) with that in the more recent Dancehall Queen (1997). In the former film, the ruud bwai (Rhygin, who is also the protagonist) is situated in a social and historical context that makes his predicament intelligible. He has a temporal depth (we follow him from country to town, we suffer his humiliations with him, we witness his transformation from innocent to outlaw). We understand therefore that the life he lives is a consequence of his social conditions. Moreover, because he is betrayed by a police informer he is available for folk-heroization. He earns our sympathy. In Dancehall Queen, by contrast, the ruud bwai (no longer the protagonist) is not provided with any context whatsoever. Priest, the ruud bwai, does not inhabit a life the shape of which we are urged to see against a larger background. In consequence he appears to us as a figure of pure violence. No sympathy is sought from us for him. When he dies we are only relieved. 53 I have borrowed the term and the concept of “self-fashioning” from Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

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the cinema, that locus classicus for the Jamaican idealization of the image of the outlaw. He has just seen Gunfight At O.K. Corral twice. As he walks along he is joined by Bogart and his gang. Suddenly Bogart bent over wheezing for breath. A fit of hollow consumptive and explosive coughs rattled in his chest. He made an effort to control the coughing, failed, and was thrown to one knee by the vehemence of the fit. He didn’t seem to have long for this world. Then he stood, gasping uneven gusts of air into his tortured chest, with an open ratchet dangling ever so casually from his hand. The expression on his face was one of pure malevolence. “Oowee!” Ivan shouted, laughing with delight and unfeigned admiration. “Doc Holliday to raas!”54

Notice the contrived moment between excessive drama and casual display of malevolence, and the play between effort and effortlessness. What interests me here is this imposition on the body of a whole style of masculinist discipline, of a poetics and aesthetics of agonistic restraint that masters and redeploys the body’s energies in such a way as to produce across its surface what Gordon Rohlehr has brilliantly described as “a brooding melancholy which seems always on the verge of explosion.”55 More than this, however, I want to understand this practice of ruud bwai self-fashioning as an instance of what Foucault, in his later work, would call “an ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom.” That is to say, I want to read in this practice a cultural-politics. In his later work following the publication of the first volume of the History of Sexuality, Foucault turned his attention away from questions regarding the relationship between the formation of the subject and coercive games of truth (psychiatry, for example, or the penitentiary) and toward those practices by means of which, as he puts it, the self works upon the self. Foucault is trying here (in part, at least) to meet the criticism that his work leaves no space for the thematics of “resistance.” He still rejects this notion insofar as it is tied to a general model of alienation/realization, but he wants nevertheless to create a conceptual space among relations of power in which the self acts not in relation to others but in relation to the self, in which it is possible to see, not the self overcoming power, but realigning it, turning it elsewhere, turning it toward itself. He wants to understand, that is to say, the ways in which the self produces effects of power upon the self—by the application of exercise, for example, by a dietary regimen, 54

Michael Thelwell, The Harder They Come (New York: Grove Press, 1980), p. 197. See Gordon Rohlehr, “West Indian Poetry: Some Problems of Assessment,” in My Strangled City and Other Essays, p. 116. 55

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an imposition of interdictions, or a regular and progressive shaping of movements. These are practices of freedom, then, not because they are beyond power (for Foucault there are no such practices),56 but because they are practices by means of which the subject deliberately acts upon the self in an effort to alter the dimensions already imposed upon it, to reconstitute the energies already shaped by existing relations of power. It is in this sense, too, that they are ethical practices. They are, Foucault suggests, what one might call “ascetical” practices, “giving the word ‘ascetical’ a very general meaning, that is to say, not in the sense of abnegation but that of an exercise of self upon self by which one tries to work out, to transform one’s self and to attain a certain mode of being.”57 My concern is to understand ruud bwai self-fashioning in this “ascetical” sense as an ethical practice of freedom. It seems to me that ruud bwai self-fashioning poses the fundamentally ethical question: How is it possible to practice freedom within the prevailing relationships of power, within the prevailing hierarchies of civility and citizenship? I want to think ruud bwai self-fashioning as a concrete practice of the self that produces a transgressive interruption of the circulation of normalized consensual identities in urban postcolonial Jamaica—those identities that are taken to define who belongs (as well as how one belongs) to the body-politic. The figure of the ruud bwai disrupts the dominant regime of culturalpolitical truth that bodies are to be educated into a particular raced/ classed regime of sensibility, breeding, and conduct. It constitutes a site of internal danger to the norms of bourgeois-liberal civility. Ruud bwai self-fashioning constitutes a practice of the self by means of which the (typically) young, working-class male refuses the disciplined body of postcolonial order, refuses to be a “docile body” available to be worked over by capital, to be worked over by the police, or to be counted by the statistical ideologues of representative democracy. Rather than submit to these disciplinary regimes the ruud bwai sets out to take hold of the body’s energies himself and to impose upon it a new regularity, a new order, a new set of rules and values, a new pattern of pleasures. And central to this new order of the body is precisely the cultivation of an agonism, a decidedly truculent rhythm, and a menacing surface that tears the edges of the governing classed/raced cohesion. 56

Foucault: “I don’t believe there can be a society without relations of power, if you understand them as means by which individuals try to conduct, to determine the behavior of others. The problem is not [one] of trying to dissolve them in the utopia of a perfectly transparent communication, but to give one’s self the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of self, which would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination.” “The Ethic of Care,” p. 129. 57 Ibid., p. 113.

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To think the figure of the ruud bwai in this way it is possible to interrupt the Fanonian alienation/realization model of liberation without foreclosing the possibility of a politics of liberty. Indeed, I will argue that there is an important subaltern cultural-politics around this figure of the ruud bwai (and the popular more generally), a politics, however, neither of Fanonian revolution nor of the liberal state, but one that depends upon a fundamental reimagining of political subjectivity and of the modalities of political community.

REWORKING THE LIMITS OF THE PRESENT

We inhabit, I believe, a moment of possibilities. We inhabit a moment of crisis, which is at the same time a moment of possibilities. It is a moment in which the relations upon which the progressivist national-modern project in whose image the postcolonial state was established are no longer hegemonic in the sense that they can no longer be taken for granted. The old options are widely felt to be unattractive but new ones have yet to define themselves. The real question before us is whether or not we take the vernacular voices of the popular and their modes of self-fashioning seriously, and if we do, how we think through their implications. Taking them seriously does not mean mobilizing them in the service of an epic emancipatory story of total overcoming. Nor, however, does it mean seeking to draw them into a recast game of the liberal “representative” electoral politics they know with certainty to have failed—and indeed to have exploited— them.58 These, however, are not our only options. Indeed, these are options that keep us in an elitist and exclusionary game in which the popular are spoken for by the secular-modernist middle classes, whether liberal or socialist. They both depend upon the Enlightenment project of integrating individuals around some single or transcendental conception of the good. Rather, what taking these dissonant voices seriously means, first of all, is a willingness to recognize the popular desire to resist precisely this integration into the available forms of middle-class identification offered by the postcolonial state. It means taking seriously the radical form of this refusal articulated, for instance, in Bob Marley’s “Babylon System.” Wii refuz to bii wat yu wantid us to bii wii ar wat wii ar dat’s di wie its gweng to bii 58

For one sustained discussion of the question of the refusal of the rationality of party politics (what Peter Tosh called “politriks”), see Anthony B.’s remarks in Scott, “Wi a di Govament: An Interview with Anthony B.”

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(ef yu doan kno) Yuu kya edikiat us far no eekwal opatuuniti Taakin bout ma friidom Piipl, friidom an libertii We refuse to be what you wanted us to be We are what we are that’s the way it’s going to be (if you don’t know) You can’t educate us for no equal opportunity Talking ’bout my freedom People, freedom and liberty59

Internationally Marley was perhaps Jamaica’s best-known ruud bwai. Notice his clear insight that “equal opportunity” is not some transparent nonideological virtue to which it is self-evidently reasonable to aspire, as the middle-class nationalist-moderns would like us to believe, but rather is a fundamental part of a regime of knowledge/power, part of a distinctive rationality of (liberal-democratic) government. This regime, he clearly understands, demands as a condition of his participation that he be “educated” for it, which is to say, transformed, made over into a liberal citizensubject who knows to leave his disreputable, unrepresentable difference behind when he enters the public realm. It is a regime of power/knowledge that, in effect, requires him to be responsibilized by the liberal rationality of progressive reform (see chapter 3). What Marley is pointedly indicating here, however, is that he refuses to be subjected to this identity; he does not—and will not—share in the horizon of intelligibility or significance through which the “integrative” middle-class vision of the postcolonial state (whether liberal, Marxist, or Fanonian) has been constructed. Against the repressive conformism that defines the “out of many, one” of “equal opportunity,” Marley not only insists on preserving the autonomy of his unassimilable difference (“we are what we are”), but he insists on casting it in the explicitly political language of self-government (“freedom and liberty”). My argument here is simply that taking the popular seriously entails thinking through the ethical-political from within the field defined by Marley’s oppositional claims, from within the field defined by his ruud bwai refusal. If this is so, then mapping a way out of the crisis of the Jamaican postcolonial state entails, principally, exploring a new conception of the ethicalpolitical, and this means cultivating forms of ethical-political practice that will promote a responsiveness to what Connolly calls the exclusions and 59

Bob Marley and the Wailers, “Babylon System,” on Survival (Tuff Gong, 1979).

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injuries produced by the existing shape of political community. This will enable me to think of political society in Jamaica not as a domain centered on the state and the competition for its offices, but as a field of interdependent pluralities governed simultaneously by a desire for settled identities and by an unsettling genealogical ethic of pluralization. On the one hand, I want to imagine a diverse field composed of multiple public realms, constituencies, or ensembles that constitute in effect different ways of being-in-common, different ways of being citizens or women or black or whatever, and in which, therefore, different but mutually recognized modalities of collective identity are voiced and practiced. And on the other hand, I want to imagine an ethos, or perhaps even a habitus, of critical responsiveness to the tendency of such identities to harden into patterns of exclusion that seek to repel or abnormalize emergent or subaltern difference. On the one hand, I want to imagine spheres or constellations of discursive and performative activity which would be semi-autonomous and self-governing in relation to each other, and in which embodied subjects—that is, not merely rights-bearing subjects, but subjects embodying living historical traditions—would be able, so to speak, to stand forth and represent themselves in their own languages, stories, images, and so on. On the other hand, I imagine that while these spheres would presuppose something held in common, they would not be presumed to be internally homogeneous. In other words, I am not romanticizing community. I am not assuming that the “we” constitutes some transcendent unity— quite the contrary. I am assuming that these are spheres of internal debate; indeed I am assuming that these are spheres constituted by a distinctive historical tradition of argument about the borders, virtues, and entailments of the identity in question (see chapters 5 and 7 especially). And precisely because they are traditions of argument they are not internally seamless or homogeneous but are marked by conflicts of interpretation, by rival perspectives, by an agonism, that potentially disturbs the complacency of the established self-image and redistributes the boundaries of the identity. Take dancehall, for instance. Let us imagine that dancehall is one of these situated public realms that constitute the uneven field of the political in contemporary Jamaica. It is one sphere in which the popular “appears” or is constituted more or less outside the sphere of middle-class hegemony. In fact, one might say (with Garth White) that dancehall is a Fanonian space, inasmuch as within it the vernacular voice(s) of the popular is (are) enacted in speech and in song, in which the rhythms of popular dance expression are performed, and in which, in general, popular forms of selffashioning are practiced. I should like to think of dancehall not merely as a narrowly cultural-expressive form but as an institutionalized moral-

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political practice as well. That is to say, I should like to understand it as embodying moral-political claims about being-in-common. Dancehall pluralizes the political field, both by interrupting the normalized middleclass nationalist-modern whose “out of many, one” creole universalism has sought either to exclude, assimilate, or contain, and by asserting, projecting, or cultivating other raced and gendered identities that require cultural space in which to grow. These identities are generated outside the locus of the postcolonial state—they are not enacted within the frame of a liberal representationalism—and thus are not specifically seeking to challenge its territorial claims. What they are after is their own positive enactment. At the same time precisely because it embodies an historical tradition of music (from ska through rocksteady to that post-1980s version of reggae known as dancehall), dance, and self-fashioning, dancehall is not to be thought of as a homogeneous sphere but an internally contested one. There is no single way of being a Rastafarian (Luciano’s humanist way, for instance, of being a Rastafarian, and of speaking in the name of Rastafari, is not identical to Anthony B.’s more militant, more ruud bwai way). Nor is there a single position on the supposed relation between violence and dancehall music (the problem of “gun lyrics”), or on what constitutes the appropriate modes of dress, the pleasures, and so on. And not only will there be no single position, no essential subject of the popular in other words, but the internal debate around these matters will be a normative one, a debate over the values and virtues that constitute the popular. At the same time, however, what this sphere will want to insist on is that no other sphere will be able to speak for it, to represent it, to make claims on its behalf. And therefore the presumption of the middle classes who arrogate to themselves the interpretive prerogative of Reason and reasonableness, and on this basis to pronounce on the meaning of the activity of the popular (as well as everything else), will find no moral sanction and no political legitimacy. On this view, politics in Jamaica would no longer be about political parties, periodic elections, or even Parliament. This is not to say that these need necessarily disappear. The point rather is to multiply the relational identities that can be enacted or practiced, the subjectivities that can appear as constituent members of a pluralizable, public political sphere. Nor, it should be obvious enough, is a liberal constitutionalism that merely alters the relationship between the executive and legislative branches of government going to enable or empower those constituencies whose voices are excluded from politics, and whose difference is always being converted into Otherness. At best, these constitutional reform energies might succeed in installing a more or less wide political pluralism.

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What they fall short of, however, is the mobile cultivation of those pluralizing energies that keep reminding us, as William Connolly does, that there is no identity without difference. To sum up, I am in search here of a both/and—rather than an either/or— logic for a cultural-politics in terms of which to think critically a way through the contemporary crisis of the postcolonial state in Jamaica, a crisis, as I have been arguing, that has to do with the collapse of the project of the middle-class nationalist-modern. I am urging that we need both Fanon and Foucault—and then some—for the task at hand. That is to say, we need them folded into an analytical embrace such that they work together, not in a relation of harmonious settlement, nor in a relation of dialectical displacement, but in a relation of strategic supplementarity. We need Fanon today because politics depends upon decision, sometimes radical—but always affirmative—decision. The Fanonian risk consists in the unequivocal refusal of the “European game” of colonial and neocolonial dependence and mimicry; it consists in its responsiveness to the subaltern demand for a future constructed in its own vernacular image; it consists in the insistence that the last shall be first. But we also need Foucault. My aim in installing Foucault in this affirmative narrative of liberation is to lodge a dissonant reminder to ourselves that any such decision as the Fanonian politics demands produces an exclusion. This is always the case. The Foucauldian risk is to challenge every such tendency toward normalization, to illuminate the Otherness at the heart of order, the difference that identity invariably denies. I am suggesting that coupling Fanon and Foucault in this agonistic way, folding one obliquely into the embrace of the other, allows us to (re)vision that paradigmatic Fanonian figure of the ruud bwai. It enables us to think him not as the containment of a suppressed energy waiting to be canalized in the direction of revolution, but rather as a distinctive mode of popular self-fashioning whose transgressive difference is constituted precisely at the point where the postcolonial state seeks to inaugurate and sustain itself as an assimilating/containing middle-class unity, and whose discordant practice of freedom consists in working/unworking/reworking the limit of that seeming singularity and in the mocking refusal of its consensus. Reading with Foucault, in other words, it is possible to fissure the Fanonian narrative of liberation and the alienation/realization model of the political subject it depends upon without foreclosing the possibility of a politics of liberty. But this itself, as I suggest, will depend upon a fundamental reimagining of the project of politics/ethics more generally in postcolonial Jamaica. And part of what will be entailed in this reimagining is a displacement of the nationalist-modern vision of the postcolonial state that

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has sought to integrate individuals around a single conception of the good and of the citizen-subject by a vision of an ethical-political field of pluralizations of identity\difference; an agonistic field of differently constituted vernacular public spheres in which different ways of being-in-common, different modes of flourishing, are practiced.

CODA

After Bandung: From the Politics of Colonial Representation to a Theory of Postcolonial Politics City lights, diamond like Cradled in a valley of dismay This tinsel town’s an eiderdown Of good fortune and those who fall prey Looking down from the hillside Looking up from the shore A thousand fireflies How do I close my eyes to the truth that is a lie? The skyline’s a front line (Della Manley, “City Lights”)

THE DEATH OF Michael Manley on March 6, 1997, signals much more than the death of one of Jamaica’s—or even the Caribbean region’s— most distinguished statesmen and political visionaries. His death has a larger, a Third World, signification. It signals, in a very tangible way, the end of Bandung. By this I mean that Michael Manley’s death at the age of seventy-two, after a long and eventful political career on the local and international stages, signals the end of the historical form of the whole problem of anticolonial sovereignty in the postcolonial world. This is an historical form of the nation-statehood problematic that emerged as an ideological and political project with the nationalist movements for political independence across South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and for which the great conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955, is iconic. Jamaica, not yet independent, was not represented at the conference (though it is important to remember that Sri Lanka—that other cultural-historical space discussed here—was instrumental in its planning and organization). But two decades after that historic meeting Michael Manley came to embody the hopes, the vision, and the purpose of a certain radicalizing moment in the unfolding of the Bandung project—a moment characterized by intense ideological polarization between procapitalist and prosocialist directions, by a sharpening of the anti-imperialist critique of political, economic, and cultural depen-

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dence on the West, and by the articulation of the demand for self-reliant self-determination and nonaligned Third World solidarity. Manley belonged to the second of what I like to think of as the three Bandung generations. The first Bandung generation was born around the turn of the century, men and women who were already intellectually and politically active during the interwar years and who were largely responsible for founding and leading the nationalist movements toward political independence. The second Bandung generation was born between the wars and whose intellectual lives and political careers begin in the 1950s. This is Michael Manley’s generation. His father, N. W. Manley (“Father of the Nation” as he is known locally), belonged to the first, representing the founding moment of the Bandung project in Jamaica. The third Bandung generation, the last of them in my estimation, was born just after the war. These are intellectuals and political activists who were formed during the radical 1960s (many being profoundly affected by the Cuban Revolution) largely through varieties of subaltern cultural nationalism and varieties of New Left Marxism. Michael Manley was, in many ways, this generation’s visionary. He offered them leadership. He transformed the anticolonial vision of self-determination articulated by the first generation when he took over the leadership of the People’s National Party upon his father’s retirement in 1969 and subsequently led that party to power in 1972. Where the expectation of the earlier generation is perhaps summed up by Kwame Nkrumah’s famous dictum, to “seek first the political kingdom,” now the problem of sovereignty was considerably widened, having to be rethought in terms of economic independence, popular power, social justice, and cultural dignity. It is here that Michael Manley emerged as a leader of world stature, and what was crucial to this emergence was his ability to link persuasively—indeed, passionately—the local questions of popular empowerment to the international questions of Third World solidarity and a New International Economic Order. When Edward Said’s Orientalism was published in the North Atlantic in 1978, Michael Manley was almost two years into his second term of office as Prime Minister, having won a victory at the polls in December 1976 that seemed to many to validate the socialist radicalization of the Bandung project he was undertaking. But even as Orientalism was inaugurating the space of postcoloniality there were signs that Manley’s project would be undone. Already in 1977, in an increasingly volatile local situation Manley had signed an agreement with the International Monetary Fund that effectively began the structural adjustment of the economy and the unraveling of Bandung. In 1980, as the economic crisis worsened and as the ideological polarization deepened, he was voted out of office. When he returned to office in 1989, it was in a profoundly altered local and global context, and he was a profoundly altered politician and

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thinker. Gone was the anti-imperialist rhetoric of socialism and Third World solidarity; gone were the signifiers of the critique of the hegemony of the West. Now the language was pragmatic and private-sector oriented, the tone was accommodating to international corporate capital, and the symbols emphatically Western. And in September 1990 he startled many with his announcement of a “radical change in direction” that would involve the free play of the market and complete liberalization. It was the end of Bandung. Here in fact lies the tragic paradox of Michael Manley: he presided over both the initiation of one of the most promising experiments in the history of the Bandung vision, and its formal dismantling and abandonment. The years of the rise and fall of this experiment, however, were simultaneously the years of the rise of postcoloniality in the North Atlantic. Thanks to this work, we now understand a great deal about the ways in which the colonial text—administrative texts, literary texts, historical texts, missionary texts, and so on—operates at the level of language and image, concept and metaphor. We understand how, through what kinds of juxtapositions, what kinds of metaphors, and what kinds of binaries the colonial text has been able to produce its effects of dominance and control. Moreover, we understand a good deal about the ways in which these representations were connected to and inserted into technologies of colonial power (at the level of school, plantation, asylum, and so on). We understand, too, much about how these representations worked at the level of the disciplines in the social sciences and humanities—in anthropology, history, the study of literature, geography, and so on. We understand, for example, how a nineteenth-century Christian demonology can come to inhabit a late twentieth-century academic anthropology and govern the contemporary (postcolonial) construction of authoritative knowledges about non-European practices. But now, after Bandung, after the dissolution of the project of antiimperialist sovereignty, after Michael Manley, we do not inhabit the same political horizons as before; nor do we inhabit the same intellectual and ideological context of options. That dream is over. Therefore, we have to ask ourselves (postcolonial intellectuals and critics, and critics and intellectuals of the postcolonial) whether we want to continue to pursue this line of preoccupation opened up by postcoloniality on the very eve of Bandung’s decline. We have to ask ourselves what the yield will be of continuing to deepen our understanding of a conceptual space whose contours we have now become so familiar with, and whose insights are rapidly on their way to becoming a new orthodoxy. We have to ask ourselves whether it might not be more useful to try to expand the conceptual boundaries themselves by altering the target of our criticism. This, it seems to me, is the challenge of our present.

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The shift I have in mind, as I have been arguing throughout this book, is not a matter, on the one hand, of reverting to the old theory of politics that governed the thinking of the anticolonial nationalists—though I have been urging that these nationalists neither be dismissed (as the anti-essentialist postmodernists would do), nor simply reembraced in the hope that we can salvage a familiar politics through them (as they themselves want to do), but reread and repositioned in terms of the new problem-space, the new context of questions, that defines our present. Nor is it a matter, on the other hand, of simply abandoning the tools of the deconstruction of colonialist representation that have defined postcoloniality for a recuperation of the old apparatus of Master Narratives and Transcendental Theories (as some neo-Marxists would urge). To the contrary, I have been arguing that what we need is a practice of folding these tools into a new domain in which a new set of preoccupations becomes visible, a set of preoccupations defined not so much by the politics of epistemology as by a renewal of the theoretical question of the political. This would effectively shift the focus away from postcoloniality’s concern with the politics of colonialist representations and in the direction of the problem of rethinking the present in terms of new conceptualizations of postcolonial politics. On this terrain of preoccupations, it may be possible to imagine joining the radical political tradition of Bandung (in which Michael Manley remains one of our most instructive luminaries) to an ethos of agonistic respect for pluralizations of subaltern difference.

Acknowledgments

THE ARGUMENTS in this book are in many ways the outcome of a conversation carried on now over many years with four people: Vivek Dhareshwar, Tejaswini Niranjana, Satish Deshpande, and Mary John. These four friends are present in all the foregoing pages. I cannot write without hearing their doubts, without imagining their cross-examination, without hoping for their approval. I do not know how to thank them. Our friendship is such that I do not know that it is possible to thank them. The book is written also with another constant interlocutor: Talal Asad. Indeed the chapters may well be read as so many attempts to spell out (to myself and to others) what I have learned from his work and where, folded in this direction or in that, this work might usefully take us. Much, too, has been learned from two other presences in my recent thinking and rethinking of the postcolonial condition: Partha Chatterjee and Stuart Hall. Their work, their advice, and their encouragement over the course of fashioning and refashioning my arguments have meant a great deal. I actually began writing this book in 1993/94 when I had the good fortune to be a fellow at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) in Colombo. This Centre under the directorship of Neelan Tiruchelvam and Radhika Coomaraswamy, provided a stimulating environment in which to think and write. I should like to record here my deep gratitude to Drs. Tiruchelvam and Coomaraswamy for their hospitality and many kindnesses, and to the other fellows and members of the staff who together make ICES such a vital part of the public intellectual life of contemporary Sri Lanka. I would especially like to thank three other people whose example of the vocation of the critic has been profoundly inspiring to me: Reji Siriwardena, Kumari Jayawardena, and R. A. L. H. Gunawardana. Thanks, too, go to Pradeep Jeganathan and Malathi de Alwis, with whom I have discussed every move made in this book; suffice it to say that their warm friendship and intellectual solidarity have become a permanent and sustaining part of my life. Although I started writing this book in Colombo, it took its final shape during the years I spent teaching in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. I have very fond memories of those years at Chicago and of the conversations that enlivened them. Conversations with Raymond Smith, Tom Holt, Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, Jean Comaroff, Andrew Apter, and Barney Cohn are, in more or less tangible ways, part of the fundamental background of intellectual engagements against which this book was written. More materially I am especially

226

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

indebted to John Comaroff, who read an early draft of the whole manuscript and commented on it at length in his characteristically detailed and challenging way. I should also like to thank the many students whose provocative questions have sent me back to the drawing board, especially those students who participated in my “The Problem of Emancipation” seminar at the University of Chicago and, more recently, my “After Postcoloniality” seminar at Johns Hopkins University. I actually completed the book (revising the last chapters, writing the introduction and coda) in yet another location: the University of the West Indies, Mona, where I was a research fellow at the Institute of Social and Economic Research. There, too, I have accumulated many intellectual debts. Three in particular cannot go unmentioned. Nadi Edwards read and commented on a number of the chapters with his usual uneven mix of care and cavalier dismissal; Clement Branche sought on more than one occasion to bring me back to the subversive aspects of the theme of the care of the self; and Michael Witter urged a more grounded vocabulary in his reading of an early version of the last of my chapters. I have profited from each, needless to say, and to them all I give thanks. Many of the chapters, in earlier incarnations, were given as lectures in various places, among them the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, the University of Peradeniya, the University of Ghent, the University of the West Indies, the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, and Johns Hopkins University. I am very grateful to these institutions for having hosted me and to the participants at each of these occasions for their comments and criticisms. I am also grateful to my editor, Mary Murrell, for her wit, for the positive way in which she responded to the manuscript, and also for shepherding it—and me—through the various stages of its production. Last but most, Annie Paul has sheltered my life and anchored my hopes. She has been a spare and often reluctant critic of this book. But most of all, she has been, in George Lamming’s finest phrase, a native of my person. Parts of this manuscript were published in somewhat different form in the following publications: chapter 1 appeared as “Colonial Governmentality,” in Social Text 43 (Summer 1995): 191–220; chapter 2 as “Religion in Colonial Civil Society,” in Cultural Dynamics 8, no. 1 (1996): 7–23; chapter 4 as “Dehistoricizing History,” in Unmaking the Nation: The Politics of Identity and History in Modern Sri Lanka, ed. Pradeep Jeganathan and Qadri Ismail (Colombo: Social Scientists Association, 1995), 10–24; chapter 5 as “ ‘An Obscure Miracle of Connection,’ ” in Small Axe 1 (March 1997): 17–36; and chapter 6 as “ ‘The Aftermaths of Sovereignty’ ” in Social Text 48 (Fall 1996): 1–26.

Index

Abeysekere, Charles, 100 Africa, 107, 108, 118, 124, 125, 126, 127; nationalist movements, 10 African diaspora, 107, 108, 118 Afro-Caribbean, 127, 204 After the Revolution (Dirlik), 140 a¯gama, 57, 60; representing religion, 58 agonistic liberalism, 184 Ahmad, Aijaz, 131, 132, 132n, 133; postcolonial criticism, 136 Almond, Philip, 58 Amin, Samir, 143; Bandung Era, 198 Anglo-American political theory, 135 Anthony B., 193, 218 anthropology, 13, 110, 117, 122, 127; of African diaspora, 108; Boasian, 107; science of culture, 109 anti-coloniality, 10, 13; theory of politics, 11–12; neocolonialism, 14 anti-essentialism, 4, 9 antifoundationalism, 4 anti-liberalism, 19. See also Oakeshott, MacIntyre Anuradhapura, 98 Aristotle, Politics, 34 Arunachalam, Ponnambalam, 165, 168 Asad, Talal, 3, 23, 31n, 123, 132n; on modern power, 32, 32n Austin, J. L., 6 Bandung, 11, 197, 198, 221; Conference, 112, 144; end of, 14, 223; Era, 144; generations, 222; in Jamaica, 211; project, 191, 196; tradition of, 224 Banton, Buju, 192 Bauman, Zygmunt, 3, 134; on modernity, 34 Beeni Man, 192, 193 Bellamy, Richard: on character, 85 Bennett, Louise, 112 Bentham, Jeremy, 48, 51; Fragment on Government, 33; governmentalist, 38 Bhabha, Homi, 197; poststructuralist Fanon, 196 black diaspora: community, 125; criticism, 118, 121, 122, 124, 127; discourse, 126; tradition, 122

black freedom, 89 Black Power, 112 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 196 black tradition, 127 Blender, Everton, 192, 193 Bounty Killer, 192 Brathwaite, Kamau, 18, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 127; black diaspora writing, 106; cultural nationalism, 110; on Eurocentrism, 17, 117; on Herskovits, 109; on Naipaul, 114; on tradition, 110 British Caribbean, 77 British colonial Jamaica, 74 British Empire, 112 British Guiana, 112 British slave emancipation, 73, 81. See emancipation; slave emancipation Buddha, 56, 98 buddha¯gama, 57, 59 Buddhism, 54, 55, 56, 57, 60, 61; and Christianity, 64; disestablishment of, 63; in European discourse, 58; and modernity, 62, 68, 69; and politics, 53; and Sinhala tradition, 186. See also buddha¯gama Buddhism in Sinhalese Society (Malalgoda), 65 Buddhist-Christian confrontation, 59, 63 budu-samaya, 57 Burchell, Graham, 84; liberalism, 83 Burke, Edmund, 33; Reflections, 33 Burke, Peter, 66 Bustamante, Alexander, 190 Cameron, C. H., 42, 44, 51; on judicial establishments, 48 Camus, Albert (The Rebel), 74 capitalism, 140, 143 Capleton, 192 Caribbean, 17, 18, 110, 111, 112, 117, 204, 221; African presence 107; culture, 108; nationalist movements, 10 “Caribbean Critics” (Brathwaite), 116 Carter, John Ross, 55, 56, 57, 57n, 59; on Buddhism 53; on Mahinda, 54 Carter, Martin, 112

228 Castro, Fidel, 145 Ceylon, 42, 48, 49, 51, 163, 164, 165, 168, 169, 170, 171, 179, 182 Ceylon Labour Party, 166. See also Goonesinha Ceylon Labour Union, 166. See also Goonesinha Ceylon National Congress, 166, 167 Ceylon Reform League, 165 character, and reform, 85, 90. See also Collini, Stefan; Bellamy, Richard Chatterjee, Partha, 3, 20; colonial difference, 29, 50; on colonial India, 28; on liberal historiography, 27; on seculardemocracy, 187 Christianity, 55, 60, 61; kristiya¯ni a¯gama, 59 civil society, 85; and colonialism, 55, 169; modern concept of, 35 Clarkson, Thomas: abolition of slavery, 78 Clausewitz, Carl von, 7 Colebrooke, W. M. G., 42, 44, 46, 51; on economy, 47; on public opinion, 45 Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms, 42, 44, 50, 69; relation to Donoughmore Reforms, 165; and modernity, 43. See also Mendis, G. C. Collingwood, R. G., 6, 7, 78; logic of question and answer, 5 Collini, Stefan: on character, 85 colonial difference, 29. See also Chatterjee, Partha colonial governmentality, 168 colonial Jamaica, 72 colonial liberalism, 87 colonial modernity, 101, 165 colonial power, 11, 15; modern, 27, 68; project of, 25, 31, 40 Colonial Office, 164 colonialism, 11, 27, 51, 64, 71, 143; attitude of, 24; Fanon’s account, 203; and indigenous regimes, 28; and knowledge, 12; problem of, 23, 26 colonialist discourse, 13, 71, 138 communalism, 171; and representation, 170 communism, 136, 143, 149 communitarianism, 135, 177 community, 103, 104, 105, 107, 127; and history, 93 Congress of Black Writers and Artists, 112

INDEX

Connolly, William, 3, 19, 20, 136, 142, 201, 219, 216; on Foucault, 208 consociational democracy, 180, 181 Coomaraswamy, Radhika, 163, 173, 175, 176, 182, 188; on majoritarianism, 162 counter-tradition, 117 Cowling, Maurice, 85 criticism, 17; and antifoundationalism, 4; demand of, 3, 160; and post-structuralism, 14; and strategy, 5, 7, 96, 136, 161; and tradition; and postcoloniality, 10 Crown Colony rule, 171 Cuba, 145. See also Castro, Fidel cultural criticism, 14, 18 cultural difference, 179 cultural identity, 179, 184 cultural nationalism, 10, 118 cultural-politics, 215; in Jamaica, 208 cultural rights, 179 cultural theory, 133 culture, 108 dancehall, 191, 192, 217; and pluralization, 218 Dancehall Queen (film), 212n Dawes, Neville, 112 de Alwis, James, 63 de Silva, K. M., 53, 54, 174, 175, 179; on Donoughmore Constitution 172; on majoritarianism, 173 de Zoysa, Francis, 168 decolonization, 208; Fanon’s account, 202, 203; of representation. See also political decolonization Deleuze, Gilles, 96 democracy, 149, 151, 156, 161, 162, 165, 170, 173, 179, 188; and number, 163, 175; and progress, 175 dhamma, 61, 98; and Buddha, 56 Dharmadasa, K. N. O., 103, 104; on Gunawardana, 102 diaspora: and metropole, 197; postcolonial, 196 Dirlik, Arif, 139, 140, 141; on postcolonial criticism, 137, 139 Donoughmore, Lord, 164, 173 Donoughmore Commission, 165, 166, 171, 172, 182 Donoughmore commissioners, 167, 171, 174, 182; on majoritarianism, 163 Donoughmore Constitution, 164, 172, 173 Donoughmore Period, 163, 175

INDEX

Donoughmore Reforms, 163, 172, 175, 182; relation to Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms, 165 Donoughmore Report, on communal representation, 179 Du Bois, W. E. B., 126; and black modernism, 120 Dutuga¨munu, 98 Dworkin, Ronald, 177, 178 East India Company, 42, 43 economy, 46 Edwards, Norval (Nadi), 121n Ela¯ra, 98 Elias, Norbert, 86 Eliot, T. S., 114, 115 emancipation, 82, 87; schemes, 81. See also British slave emancipation; slave emancipation “End of History?” (Fukuyama), 145 England, 55, 58, 66 Enlightenment, 66, 135, 138, 139, 150, 152, 151, 161, 176, 182, 183, 185, 188, 199, 215; and black diasporic politics, 118; and democracy, 9; and freedom, 32; and progress, 32; project, 4; and reason, 33; religion, concept of, 56; Scottish, 34; and slavery, 119; story of, 19; tradition, concept of, 124 essentialism, as a problem, 4 Ethnicity and Social Change, 99 Eurocentrism, 65, 71, 79, 110, 115, 139, 141, 143, 155, 199; and the Afro-Caribbean, 111; Brathwaite’s critique, 17; as a conceptual problem, 24 Europe, 19, 24, 27, 31, 49, 51, 58, 111, 117, 118, 131, 132, 141, 142, 143, 147, 151; as conceptual problem, 25; decentering of, 26; early modern, 56 Fanon, Frantz, 190, 194, 197, 199, 202, 203, 204, 210; on anticolonial struggle, 196; with Foucault, 195, 219; Wretched of the Earth, 24, 198 Febvre, Lucien, 66 Ferguson, Adam: Essay on the History of Civil Society, 35 Five Precepts, 56 Foucault, Michel, 3, 7n, 19, 23, 32, 38, 39, 135, 168, 190, 194, 201, 211, 212; discipline and government, 38; with Fanon, 195, 200, 219; freedom, practices of,

229 213, 214; on genealogy, 208; governmentality, 26, 36, 83, 152; history of the present, 70; on liberation, 205; politics and ethics, 207; on power, 206; on Truth, 101, 101n Formations of Ritual (Scott), 13 freedom, 71, 72, 82, 84, 88, 89, 152, 169; and the body, 209; and civilizing process, 86; and government, 73; “responsibilized,” 87 Freud, Sigmund, 147 Fukuyama, Francis, 145, 147, 148, 149; The End of History, 146, 146n. See also “End of History?” Garvey, Marcus, 126 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 134, 135n Ghosh, Amitav, 131 Gilroy, Paul, 111, 121, 122, 125; Black Atlantic, 118; black criticism, 120; black diaspora politics, 119 Glenelg doctrine, 87 Goldberg, David, 88 Gombrich, Richard: Precept and Practice, 57 Goonesinha, A. E., 166, 167, 167n government, 38; of conduct, 34; Foucauldian story, 83 governmentality, 19, 37. See also Foucault, Michel Gray, John, 3, 19, 182, 185; on historical fate, 20; the “new liberalism,” 178; on pluralism, 179; on value-pluralism, 184 Green, T. H., 85 Gunananda, Mohottivatte, 61, 65 Gunawardana, R. A. L. H., 18, 94, 96, 100, 102, 103, 104; “ ‘People of the Lion,’ ” 95, 97, 101; Sinhala ideology, 17, 98 Habermas, Ju¨rgen, 99, 135; modernity, 150; Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 35 habitus, 217 Hacking, Ian, 3, 7n; Taming of Chance, 174 Hall, Stuart, 3, 95, 139, 191 Harder they Come (film), 212n Harder they Come (novel), 212–13. See also Thelwell, Michael Hardy, Robert Spence, 60, 63 Harris, Wilson, 70, 112

230 Harrison, Peter, 61: “Religion” and the Religions, 58 Hegel, Georg, 104 Herskovits, Melville J., 107, 110, 121; his anthropology, 111; Life in a Haitian Valley, 109 Hinduism, 55 historicism, 95, 104 History of Sexuality (Foucault), 213 Hobhouse, H. T., 85 Hobsbawm, Eric, 80 Holt, Thomas, 72, 73, 79, 80, 81, 82, 87, 88, 89; freedom and power, 83; Problem of Freedom, 77 India, 29, 40 Indo-Caribbean, 118, 204 Indo-Lanka Peace Accord, 159 Jagan, Cheddi, 112 Jamaica, 15, 17, 73, 81, 82, 88, 112, 191, 198, 210, 211, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222; plantation slavery, 153; the postcolonial state, 190, 195; slaves, 76 Jamaica Labour Party, 190. See also Bustamante, Alexander James, C. L. R., 78, 79 James, Louis: Islands in Between, 116, 116n Jameson, Fredric, 131, 132 Janata Vimukthi Peramuna, 158 Jayatilaka, D. B., 168 Jayawardena, Kumari, 100 Jayawardene, J. R., 158 jazz, 116 “Jazz and the West Indian Novel” (Brathwaite), 115 Johnston, Sir Alexander, 50 Kandy, 61 kavi, 186 Koselleck, Reinhart, 3 Kovel, Joel, 154 Kuhnian (Thomas Kuhn), 8, 8n Kumaratunga, Chandrika, 158, 159 Kymlicka, Will, 177, 178, 179, 181; minorities, 176 Laclau, Ernesto, 133, 140, 148 Lady Saw, 193 Lamming, George, 112, 131, 198n Lasch, Christopher, 154

INDEX

Lefort, Claude, 150 Leninism, 133 liberal democracy, 145, 150, 152 liberal nationalism, 65 liberal-rational historiography, 71 liberalism, 12, 14, 36, 72, 83, 145, 149, 153, 154, 156, 162, 175, 183, 184; contradictions of, 80; and cultural membership, 178; and ex-slaves, 89; failure of, 82; and Foucault, 83; freedom of, 80, 82; and liberty, 84; and Mill, 86; and pluralism, 179 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), 158, 159, 187, 188 Locke, John, 183 Luciano, 192, 193, 218 Macaulay, Thomas, 48 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 3, 10n, 19, 123, 153, 177; on tradition, 9 Macpherson, C. B., 150 Mahavamsa, and Sinhala tradition, 186 Mahinda, 53, 54 Mais, Roger, 112, 113 majoritarianism, 162, 173; and democracy, 163. See also Coomaraswamy, Radhika majority, 185, 187 Malalgoda, Kitsiri, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69; Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 59, 62; on Gombrich, 57 Manley, Michael, 190, 211, 223, 224; Bandung generation, 222; death of, 221 Manley, N. W., 190, 222 Manning, Sir William, 166 Marley, Bob, 192; “Babylon System,” 215–16 Marx, Karl, 104 Marxism, 10, 12, 20, 36, 82, 131, 132, 133, 139, 141, 143, 145, 149, 155, 198, 222; and liberty, 84; on Mill, 86 Meaning and the End of Religion (Smith), 56 memory, and tradition, 115 Mendis, G. C., 42, 51 mercantilism, 37 Mercer, Kobena, 126 Middle Passage, 107, 120 Mill, John Stuart, 85, 150, 183; and democracy, 163; On Liberty, 86 millennialism, 64, 65 minority, 173, 185, 187

INDEX

missionaries, 57, 59, 61 modernity, 16, 17, 31, 65, 66, 67, 89, 151; and black criticism, 120; and black politics, 118; and Buddhism, 55; Europe’s, 32; Jamaica’s, 190; political categories and forms of, 26, 143; and power, 16, 23, 26, 32, 52; and slavery, 119; Sri Lanka’s, 42 monks, 61, 69 Morgan, Derrick: “Tougher than Tough,” 209–10 Mouffe, Chantal, 148, 151 Mudimbe, V. Y., 109 Naipaul, V. S., House for Mr Biswas, 114 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 93, 95, 102, 105 nationalism, 54 nationalist-modern, 191, 193, 219 neoliberalism, 136, 143 “new Cambridge” school, 28 New World Negro, 116 New World Order, 71 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 94, 104, 147; Beyond Good and Evil, 103 Nkrumah, Kwame, 222 normative-progressivism, 65 number, 174, 176, 179, 182; and democratic rationality, 162; as a political principle, 173 Oakeshott, Michael, 158, 160, 161; antiliberalism, 19 Obeyesekere, Gananath: on Protestant Buddhism, 62, 62n Olcott, Henry Steel, 65. See also Theosophists Orientalism (Said), 12, 132 Paine, Thomas: Rights of Man, 33 Pa¯li, 56, 57 panopticon, 50 Patra, 193 Patterson, Orlando, 73, 74n, 76, 77, 107; Freedom, 75; Slavery and Social Death, 74; Sociology of Slavery, 74 “ ‘People of the Lion,’ ” 94, 98, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105. See also Gunawardana, R. A. L. H. People’s Alliance, 168 People’s National Party, 190, 222 Peiris, James, 165, 168

231 Perera, E. W., 168 pluralism, 153, 218; relation to liberalism, 179 political decolonization, 11 political modernity, 133, 136, 149, 157, 163 political rationalities, 23, 25, 30, 43, 52, 68, 153; and colonial power, 25, 26; and modern power, 32 politics of liberty, and ruud bwais, 215 Ponnambalam, G. G., 175 popular-modern, 191, 193 postcolonial criticism, 3, 71, 134, 136, 137, 139, 142, 143, 149, 154, 155, 156; and political modernity, 133 postcolonial futures, 136, 191 postcolonial Jamaica, 214 postcolonial politics, 160, 168 postcolonial sovereignty, 204 postcolonial state, 200, 218, 219; in Jamaica, 190, 194 postcolonial world, 54, 221 postcoloniality, 10, 11, 12, 14, 140 postemancipation Jamaica, 84, 87, 89 “posties,” 140 postmarxism, 153, 155, 156 postmodernism, 4 poststructuralism, 141 Prabhakaran, Velupillai, 158 Prakash, Gyan, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142 Premadasa, Ranasinghe, 158 Problem of Freedom (Holt), 80 problem-space, 8 Protestant Buddhism, 55, 62, 65. See also Obeyesekere, Gananath public opinion, 45 public sphere, 35. See also Habermas, Ju¨rgen race, 47, 73, 87, 90, 94; and colonial difference, 29; in colonialist discourse, 30; and essentialism, 111; and modern power, 119; and reform, 88 racism, 88; and liberal reason, 90 radical democracy, 150, 153 ra¯ja¯ka¯riya, 47, 48 Rastafari, 112, 193, 218 rationalism, 150 Rawls, John, 136, 153, 154, 155, 177, 178, 179; Political Liberalism, 153; Theory of Justice, 135, 181

232 Reason, 56 reform, 86, 148; and character, 90; and liberalism, 85; and modern power, 16 Reform Act, 80 Reformation, 66 religion, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66, 67; representing a¯gama, 58; in colonialist discourse, 30; Enlightenment concept, 56; in Sri Lankan history, 53 Renaissance, 66 Roach, E. M., 113 Rohlehr, Gordon, 213 “Roots” (Brathwaite), 113 Rorty, Richard, 3, 104, 135n, 140, 149, 150; failure of socialism, 148; Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 147 Rose, Nikolas: on liberalism, 84 ruud bwai, 195, 209, 210, 212, 216, 218, 219; politics of liberty, 214, 215; selffashioning, 213 Russell, Jane, 179; on communal politics, 175; on Donoughmore Constitution, 172 Said, Edward, 3, 14, 132; Culture and Imperialism, 13n; Orientalism, 11, 24, 136n, 222 Sandel, Michael, 153, 177, 179, 185 sangha, 61, 62, 63, 64, 68, 69; and Sinhala tradition, 186 Sanskrit, 57 Sartre, Jean-Paul: and Fanon, 200 sa¯sana, 57 Scientific Revolution, 66 Scott, Dennis: “Construction,” 122 secular state, 56 secularization, 66, 68, 69; and modernity, 67; story of, 65. See also Sommerville, C. John Sekyi-Otu, Ato, 197; on Fanon, 196 Sinhala chauvinism, 17, 158. See also Gunawardana, R. A. L. H. Sinhala dominance, 188 Sinhala identity, 98, 100, 101, 103 Sinhala ideology, 99, 101, 103 Sinhala nationalism, 100, 101, 102 Sinhala state, 187 Sinhalas, 53, 54, 58, 69, 162, 172, 173, 175, 176, 181, 188; and tradition, 185 “Sir Galahad and the Islands,” 112

INDEX

Skinner, Quentin, 6, 6n, 7, 7n slaknis, 192 slave emancipation, 72; and liberalism, 79. See also British slave emancipation; emancipation slavery, 74, 124, 125, 126; abolition, 77; and community, 127; and diaspora, 106; and memory, 108; and tradition, 120 slaves, 79, 125 Smith, Adam, 48; Wealth of Nations, 46 Smith, M. G., 107 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 56, 58; Meaning and End of Religion, 55 Social Scientists’ Association, 99 socialism, 14, 143, 144, 148, 198 Sommerville, C. John, 67; and secularization, 66 South Asia, 10 sovereignty, 37, 38. See also mercantilism Soviet Union, 14, 199 Spivak, Gayatri C., 5n, 7n Sri Lanka, 13, 15, 17, 18, 41, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 68, 69, 93, 95, 96, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 159, 160, 162, 163, 172, 176, 179, 183, 185, 187, 188, 221; and Buddhist history, 53, 54; colonial career, 43; and ethnic crisis, 180; and modernity, 26, 42; ra¯ja¯ka¯riya, 153; and Therava¯da, 56 Sri Lanka Freedom Party, 158 Stokes, Eric, 41, 44; The English Utilitarians, 40 “strategic essentialism,” 5 strategy, 8; and criticism, 14, 96 Subaltern Studies Collective, 13n Sumamgala, Hikkaduve, 65 Tamils, 159, 162, 173, 174, 175, 176, 181, 185, 187, 188; and tradition, 185 Tanzania, 198 Tennent, James Emerson, 63 Thelwell, Michael: Harder They Come, 212–13 Theosophists, 63, 65 Therava¯da, 56 Third World, 11, 13, 14, 28, 112, 144, 163, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 221, 222, 223 Three Refuges, 56 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 163 totalitarianism, 150

INDEX

tradition, 113, 114, 115, 118, 127, 183, 185, 186, 217, 218; as embodied argument, 124; and black criticism, 119, 120; concept of, 9, 10; and slavery, 120 Trevelyan, Charles, 52 Tully, James, 37n, 39, 185 Universal History, 54, 56, 69, 78, 138, 145 universal suffrage, 164, 168, 171 Utilitarians, 48 Uyangoda, Jayadeva, 180n, 182, 185, 187; on contractarianism, 180; on Rawls, 181 va¯dayas, 59, 61 value-pluralism, 184. See also Gray, John Vijaya, 98 vinaya rules, 61, 69 violence, 208

233 Walcott, Derek, 112, 133 Walzer, Michael, 3, 123, 125–26, 161, 177 Weber, Max, Religion of India, 62 West, 58 West Indian critics, 110 West Indian Federation, 112 White, Garth, 209, 210, 211, 217 White, Stephen, 135 Wilberforce, William, 78 Williams, Aubrey, 112 Williams, Eric, 78, 79 Wilson, A. Jeyaratnam, 172 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 147 Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 196, 200, 201, 209 Wright, Richard, 120 Yack, Bernard, 132 Young Lanka League, 166. See also Goonesinha, A. E.

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