Religion is not what it used to be. That might seem like a pre-requisite for writing the history of religion, and yet the discipline also demands thatReligion is not what it used to be. That might seem like a pre-requisite for writing the history of religion, and yet the discipline also demands that there be some stable referent, something which despite all transformation can be identified as religion from ‘from Lascaux to New Age California’ (p. 165). Dubuisson, and a host of other scholars since (Mazusawa, McCutcheon, Chidester, etc.), have worked hard to question the concept of religion itself. For them, the structure of Western culture, which has stratified and divided up social life into different concepts (the state, civil society, religion, science, etc.) has been projected and forced onto other cultures. Western institutions, the result of a particular historical trajectory, is assumed to be universal and ‘read into’ the social life of other people. Presumably this same process is at work across different fields, but is particularly visible—because particularly virulent—in the case of religion, which Dubuisson finds to be the central and organizing self-concept of Western exceptionalism. This is for me a fascinating thesis, not only because it historicizes a category which I long took for granted, but also because it potentially radically enhances the ‘otherness’ of other cultures, and offers a new post-secular standpoint from which to criticize my own. Dubuisson’s book is one of the early classics in this current, and quite aware of the strangeness of his point he painstakingly maps and repeats his argument to make it more familiar. This is both the strength and the weakness of the book, which is very theoretical and often repetitious, and I wish he had spent more time marshalling concrete examples of non-Western cultures escaping the procrustean bed of religion. Instead he just hammers his thesis on and on, quoting himself at length and referring mostly to the historiography of religion. In terms of arguments, I have two issues with Dubuisson’s thesis: he overemphasises the homogeneity and isolation of Christianity. His repeated insistence that the concept of religion is based on the very particular and typically occidental social form of Christianity, ends up reproducing the exceptionalism from which he tries to free himself. Thus in the rare instances were he gives lapidary counter-examples, he turns to distant examples like Voudoun or Confucianism, but never pause to consider the various Oriental Orthodox Churches, and so far as I can tell, does not in the whole book even mention Islam. Islam is obviously an important cousin (arguably, a descendant) of Christianity, which is both emphatically non-Western and yet shares many of the structures of Western Christianity, so I would expect it to raise some issues with his model. The other problem is his image of Christianity as homogenous. His thesis that the late-XIXth century paradigm of history of religion is in good part a secularisation of liberal-Protestant assumptions seems to me perfectly agreeable, even if the proofs are to be found elsewhere (i.e. Robert Yelle). But his reduction of Western Christianity to liberal-Protestantism once again seems to reproduce the ‘progressist’ ideology for which he blames the XIXth century. Undoubtedly liberal-Protestants, in Germany and elsewhere, played a central role in historicism, and to a lesser extent in positivism, but they were not the only game in town, and in fact his selective reading of phenomenology conspicuously ignores the whole Catholic branch of the movement. Christianity, however much it shaped the discipline, was not homogenous but riven by internal conflicts (ritualist/antiritualists, Catholic/Protestants, fundamentalists/historicists, traditionalists/charismatics, etc.) which produced an internally-and historically-differentiated concept of religion. For all that, the power of Dubuisson’s original thesis—that it is all well and good to doubt the existence of God, but that it is now high time to doubt the existence of religion—retains its force. The hit-piece on Eliade, if by now common-knowledge, was important when the book was published. I only wish Dubuisson had also turned his righteous anger to Jung: the circularity of this particular school of phenomenology of religion, which finds in cherry-picked phenomena the proofs of a universal religious experience, and then define religion by listing the phenomena which it has just singled out, has long struck me as dishonest, and more worthy of Guenonian ‘rejected knowledge’ than of the academic honours it was granted. This seems to be changing, and the wishy-washy New Age conservatism of ‘archetypes’ and ‘monomyths’ which once pervaded the discipline is clearly receding, though it survives of course in those fringes were popular culture fills in the shoes of dying academic debates: the comforts it once offered the dilettante by pointing to familiar patterns in faraway countries, it now provides by finding analogies between the complexities of politics, and Hollywood or videogame classics. Meanwhile the paradox of looking for universalism in pristine traditions is recast as populist elitism....more
Arrighi was one of the leading figures in that leftist mixture of economic and political analysis known as 'world-system theory', pioneered by ImmanueArrighi was one of the leading figures in that leftist mixture of economic and political analysis known as 'world-system theory', pioneered by Immanuel Wallerstein and-I would imagine-much indebted to the Annales. Adam Smith in Beijing is the third instalment in an informal trilogy covering the spread and transformation of Capitalism, particularly focused on the XXth century.
Provocative as it may sound, the title actually captures the essence of the book: the author contends throughout the book that China, if it can become the leader and model for the Global South it seems bound to become, will soon replace the U.S. China's developmental path, which he reads in an extended historical context, he takes to reflect much more accurately than Britain did in the XIXth century, the prescriptions of Adam Smith. Not unlike Jerry Muller's Adam Smith in His Time and Ours: Designing the Decent Society though from a markedly left-wing (anti-imperialist, in particular) perspective, Arrighi, in the book's first part, endeavours to salvage Adam Smith from the claims of free-market fundamentalists. Calling upon Schumpeter and Marx, whose account of capitalism as creative destruction he contrasts with Smith's defense of 'mere' markets, as a tool for governing rather than an end in itself. As Braudel once did, Arrighi, and Smith in his account, in fact defend the markets, as a nationally bound and balanced institution, against the emergence of capitalism proper. Whereas the markets are largely agrarian and depend on the national population and its wealth, capitalism instead periodically migrate toward ever larger host organisms, leading nations toward expansion at the expense of the 'optimisation' of their home-markets.
It is refreshing to find to read such unapologetically 'grand' narration at the world-scale, covering in some depth the twin monsters (Behemoth and Leviathan!) of economics and politics, at the national and international level, accounting for social movements, ecology, technology and culture, all with a steady hand and a profuse bibliography. This, however, does not make for an easy read: this reader, very much ignorant of economics and largely unschooled in the intricacies of international politics, sometimes found himself convinced he had bit more than he could chew. The economic section of the second part (concerned with the downfall of US authority) was particularly difficult, and aside from the urgent realisation that I needed to upgrade my understanding of financial and fiscal history, I am not sure I have gotten much out of it. The scope and mastery of Arrighi's account also have the 'unintended consequence' of underlining what is absent from his account: changes in information circulation, or legal frameworks, for example, which in the case of China's eventful transformation have probably had a crucial influence. In the comfortably retrospective position of 2018, it is also, unfortunately, clear that Hu Jintao's commitment to a 'New Socialist Countryside' was quite as likely to be an accident on the capitalist road, as to be a legacy of China's revolutionary tradition. As consumerism takes control throughout the layers of Chinese society, it also seems unclear how long the benefits of its 'industrious revolution' will last. Furthermore, Xi Jinping's sometimes forceful usage of economic diplomacy might indicate that China's approach was or became purely pragmatic, rather than in any committed sense concerned with 'the global south'. Finally, a contention I am sure a more competent reader would be easily able to dispel, I was surprised by Arrighi's insistence on Smith as an apostle of the social (as opposed to technical) division of labour. Having since started reading The Wealth of Nations, I find it very difficult to interpret Smith's prescriptions as anything but a precursor of taylorism. I will have to finish the book, and probably read a little more on the subject before I can decide firmly whether, as Arrighi seems to contend, Smith was indeed defending small(ish) specialised production units with a high degree of flexibility....more
From 1768 until his death in 1779, James Cook conducted three expeditions in then unmapped Polynesia, with the blessing of the British admiralty, the From 1768 until his death in 1779, James Cook conducted three expeditions in then unmapped Polynesia, with the blessing of the British admiralty, the backing of the Royal Society and the acclaim of the European public. In Obeyesekere's own words, his travels "heralded a shift in the goals of discovery from conquest, plunder, and imperial appropriation to scientific exploration devoid of any explicit agenda for conquest or for the exploitation and terrorization of native peoples." (5) Cook has since remained a favourite figure of both sympathetic and critical imperial histiography, sometimes an example of that rare breed of humane, pragmatic yet fearless imperialists, heralds of our liberal, global society. Yet the tale, as it reaches its end, sours. His third and last voyage, ostensibly to return to his homeland Omai, a Tahitian he had brought back to England from his second voyage, ends in blood, fire and tears: after leaving Omai in Tahiti, he sailed North and became the first European to make contact with Hawai'i. He then left the island to go and map the coast of Alaska. Returning to Hawai'i the next year, he apparently arrived during a religious festival known as Makahiki, celebrating the periodic return of the peace god Lono. The reverence and awe manifested by the natives at Cook's return, and the role he was given in the celebration, led some in the ships' crew and many more in Europe, at the time and later, to claim Cook had been 'deified' – had been mistaken by the Hawaiians for their benevolent god Lono. After he eventually left the island to return to England, a storm damaging one of the boats of his expedition forced him to return to Hawai'i, where his welcome was not this time quite as warm. Following a theft committed by one of the islanders and brutal retaliation on the Captain's part, Cook was eventually beaten to death by a mob in unclear circumstances. Obeyesekere's book take issue with this story, and in particular with a reading fellow anthropologist Marshall Sahlins make of it to support a broadly structuralist theory: for Obeyesekere, "[t]his "European god" is a myth of conquest, imperialism, and civilization" (3) – that is, it is a myth not of the Hawaiians, but of the conquering Europeans. While Sahlin's books, which I have not read, make use of the same, limited amount of primary sources as Obeyesekere, mostly ship-logs and the many diaries which a media-savy crew kept in view of their publication, the later promise us a more skeptical reading, intent on bringing to the fore contradictions, prejudices and re-writings, through close attention to the different versions, published and unpublished, of those texts. Obeyesekere is scornful of one of Sahlins' analogies, comparing his reconstruction of the events with a detective story: it is hard not to follow Sahlins on this, although it should be said straight-away that this is not an adventure novel, but rather a very scholarly study, where much time is spent arguing about the meaning of words, the reliability of witnesses and the availability of information at this or that period. In other words, from an exciting premise (as, disturbingly often, imperial histories proove to be) we actually end up with a somewhat dull, but short, book. It is not focused on theory, anthropological or otherwise (for this the reader should turn to Clifford Geertz' review article 'Culture wars' in the NYRB), nor is it an exposition of facts. Mostly, it is about splitting hairs and finicking about terms, a most scholarly pursuit if there ever was one. Was the conjunction of subject and premises not so compelling, I would never have bothered. But how compelling is that subject! What better illustration -or battle-ground- could we dream of for the debates on 'orientalism'? Whether we follow the traditional interpretation, according to which the natives actually deified Cook, or that pushed by Obeyesekere, this story has it all: imperial contradictions, religious imaginings, technological divides, noble savages and noble explorators—all the drama of modernity in one nutshell, on one island! Is Obeyesekere's thesis convincing, though? In a sense it is, but in the tradition of Said he seems to be overstating his case: as he interprets it, Cook when alive was not deified, but merely accepted in the ranks of the island's chiefs - their 'nobility'. This could seem a minor difference in the widespread context of sacred kingship, but Sahlin's theory, grounded unquestionably on a more thorough knowledge of Hawaiian culture, is based on the opposition between king and god – Obeyesekere however admits he might have been divinised post-mortem. Given that there is little theoretical content in the book, beyond refuting that put forward by Sahlins, the significance of this relatively minor difference is sometimes hard to grasp. What is not hard to grasp, however, is the deep, possibly personal dislike that Obeyesekere has for Sahlins. As Clifford Geertz note there is a distasteful vehemence in Obeyesekere's attacks on Sahlins, compounding as they do charges against structuralism in general, Western cultural imperialism throughout history, with more personal reproaches for bad faith or shaky scholarship. More than once the author seems to spend suspicious amounts of ink over very minor points of Sahlins' interpretation, and to be indulgently finicking. Although some of his points -in particular those regarding the credibility of the many accounts provided by the Brits, their overlaps and their contradictions- are compelling, it ultimately seems the very same lack of contemporary native accounts which he levels against Sahlins' interpretation also plays against his own.
The kernel of Obeyesekere's work then should have been his analysis not of the Hawaian myth of Captain Cook, but rather of the Western one: this clearly is where, fact-checking and cross-references aside, his theory departs from Sahlins and innovates: the function of the story in which Cook becomes a god for the natives, in the Hawaian context, is transparent enough. It allows the transition from traditional Hawain culture and beliefs into Western modernity, and reorganises the social hierarchies to accomodate the monopoly on power (technological, economic, moral and cultural) held by the white colonisers. The function it holds for European society is however less clear. I see at four important elements, only the first of which is covered by Obeyesekere in his short chapter on European myth-making, while the second is merely hinted at: 1/ It acts, of course, as a justification for (liberal) imperialism. As the author correctly note, the Cook story encapsulates a new vision of imperialism as a humanitarian project, aimed at the liberation and civilisation of 'savages'. This is quite a novelty, and is reflected in the often noted (by Sahlin for example) measure and relative responsability displayed by Cook and his team when approaching the natives. If, however, they chose him as a god, they implicitly reject their traditional cultural order and, in a fashion, welcome the western yoke. The ludicrous paradox is that the the apotheosis, taken here as the silent approval of the Hawaian community, express itself in a pre-modern language, which is then commodified, separated from its context, and appropriated by Westerners as a 'spoil of conquest'. 2/ But Cook's grisly end comes to complicate the myth. Not only does it dignify the story by giving it a tragic element eminently palatble to Western taste, but it also attaches a sub-text of morality tale, and one much less optimistic and tolerant. Cook's humanist attempt at treating the natives on a (relative, as Obeyesekere shows) equal footing ultimately yields for him a deadly outcome. The later missionaries would re-write the myth of Cook's death as a divine judgement passed against his hubris and his dalliances with Hawaian women. But even at the increasingly dominant secular level, his death must have been seen as proof of the unbridgeable chasm separating culture, promoting a soft 'ethnodifferentialism' (as the modern far-right calls it) : beyond issues of racial hierarchies, the fundamental differences are too wide to be papered over by dialogue, and objective, bureaucratic force only can function as interface between the two cultures. 3/ Obeyesekere considers Cook's story to be typical of Enlightenment imperialism. In Britain as we know, Enlightenment and Romanticism were peculiarly intertwined, already before the American and French revolutions. The topos of apotheosis was a classic and neo-classic one, but would be gladly taken up and transformed by early romantics, especially those of non-conformist inclinations such as Blake. Cook then sits at the crossroad between the Western civilizer, the self-less law-giver, herald of Reason, and on the other hand the Romantic celebration of the subject as a world upon itself, and of creativity as a godlike attribute. Although his own writing shows little sign of a romantic style or mindset, this thesis is warranted by the ambiguous continuation of apotheosis and imperialism as tropes within English romanticism, even when, as with Burns, it is put to use against actually existing imperialism. 4/ My last two points are related. The changing Western relationship to spatiality and distance is, I think, peculiarly captured by the myth of Cook's apotheosis: throughout the XIXth century the popular meaning of imperialism shifts from infinite expansion into terra nullius (itself a rather Romantic conception, but an apocryphal term, btw) into the sense of a finite, knowable and known world, where real-politik must aportionate resources and glory. In Cook's time, however, distance still retains its mystique: in the Western myth of Cook's apotheosis, it is as much the superiority of British technology over Hawaii's stone-age, as it is Cook's ability to travel 'between worlds', as it were, which leads natives to believe in his divinity. Distance, here, is reconfigured as transcendence, a transcendence that can be mastered by the European through technology and military or economic expansion. 5/ Finally, the Western myth of Cook's apotheosis constitute the perfect example of what I would call 'pizza-effect re-enchantment' if it wasn't sounding so undignified! In my review on here of Kipling's Kim, I had suggested how the native perception of the Western technology and culture as 'magic' allowed, at the turn of the XXth century, for the re-enchantment of a metropolitan society largely regarded as ossified and infertile. Here we can see the process did not await the aftermath of positivism: the West, already at the early stages of the Romantic transition, sought in its empire a mirror, in which its image appeared less petty, less materialistic, less bourgeois: in a word, more palatable to an European imagination raised on the myths and histories of organic civilisations, free from the split between concrete or rational realities, and religious-cultural imaginaries....more
When we think of globalisation or the industrial revolution, we generally think of supply-led, 'producer capitalism': consumerism and its attendant dyWhen we think of globalisation or the industrial revolution, we generally think of supply-led, 'producer capitalism': consumerism and its attendant dynamics of fashion and cyclical class differentiation only come to the fore in the second half of the XIXth century. Yet a closer look at economic history is quick to reveal the centrality that textile - and by extension, dress - has played in the development of modern production technology and economic patterns: the jacquard loom was among the first forms of 'automated' production, silk and cotton greatly spurred the various imperial projects of Europe, while wool carding and leather tanning, as early as the middle-ages, prefigured in many regards the modern division of labour. Fashion, which after James Laver is generally seen to arise at the height of the European Renaissance, constituted beyond doubt a motor of economic modernity. I personally suspect that the overly neat separation between a fashion-less pre-modern era and a status-obsessed, fickle modern one, is too romantic to be credible - the distinction between ritual decay and fashionable innovation is in need to be deconstructed, but more on that another time... Ross' book in fact deals very little, if at all, with the macro-economics of the textile industry, which is all the more surprising given his book focuses on dress (clothing, in his jargon) and globalisation. Instead he takes a largely cultural angle and explore the evolution of dress, thematically and geographically, from the beginning of colonisation until today. The book starts with a look at the ever fascinating subject of sumptuary laws - the eternal attempt at regulating consumption in general, and dress in particular. The practice is omnipresent in the earliest codes of law of the ancient world, and its failures just as frequently attested by modern historians. The demands of the market for permanent renewal, and those of the social order for stasis and discipline, seem to formulate a contradiction constitutive of society as such, belonging maybe more closely to anthropology than to history. Anthropology is however largely absent of Ross' book, who then move on to an overview of Western fashion, incomplete but efficacious for his true purpose, which is to explore the reception of Western clothing in the colonial context. This he does area by area, with particular emphasis on Africa (he teaches African history) but also on East Asia, South America and Japan. Australia, South Asia and the Middle-East feature for specific case studies, but Russia beyond the reforms of Peter I, or the Maghreb, or less 'eastern' but well defined areas like Scandinavia, for example, are largely ignored. This springs no doubt from conventions in the genre of 'global history' that emphasise, maybe rightly, non-western cultures at the expense of the 'liminally western' ones. Ross moves on to look at the sometimes contradictory sartorial projects advanced by those seeking a workforce in the colonies, those seeking a market, and the missionaries, often at odds with the rest of the process, in their attempt to bridge with religion and life-style the 'uncanny valley' of colonial exploitation that the others were all to keen to maintain. Thus by the end of the XIXth century, the changing program of British imperialism for example increasingly attempted to forbid western dress to the natives, so as to emphasise the (hierarchical) difference between them and the colons, whose style of dress, in turn, became increasingly ossified and formal despite the rigour of the climate. At this stage the adoption of Western dress was a somewhat subversive decision, demanding equal recognition to that given to the white man. But soon enough, as images of the liberation from the colonial yoke moved from Restoration of past orders onto a new nationalist agenda, the need to 'invent traditions' that could homogenize the necessarily diverse costume of the local tribes made itself felt. From there on, the dilemma between modern, western dress and 'traditional' (yet frequently unhistorical) fokloric costume gave birth to a variety of hybrids, from the modern saree to the batik shirts of Mandela, which Ross makes a great job to list and to explain, if not always to illustrate. As this is my professional field, although I am not reading into it as much as I should, I follow closely enough the publications in the field of dress history: despite a growing number of area-specific studies of colonial and post-colonial fashion, this is to my knowledge the only one with a truly global scope. Ross book is 'theory light' - there is no deep questions on the nature of fashion in and out of capitalism, and Ross seems to find it a necessary concession to individual freedom. The book is in fact largely a compilation of articles and books, but as such it works extremely well, and gives to the lay-man in dress and global history alike, a great and highly enjoyable overview of the fascinating and resilient diversity of modern dress. If anything, more than the economics of the phenomenon, I regret Ross did not explore the 'mirror image' of cultural imperialism, namely, the western appropriation of non-western dress. The issues of 'cultural appropriation' have a high visibility today, and are problematic in so many ways, but simultaneously they have been a constant of history, and indeed predate imperialism however you might want to define that. From Diderot in his banyan to the maoist Left the use of 'Other' style has been central to the discursive articulation of subversion. Recognising this would then allow for the analysis of how and how much such identification with the 'others' was in turn acknowledged, and sometimes appropriated by non-western cultures, in a pizza effect which I find to be central to any reflexive understanding of globalisation....more
I've been meaning to read a bit of Tagore for a long time now – I am not hugely familiar with the Indian subcontinent, beyond reading some CoomaraswamI've been meaning to read a bit of Tagore for a long time now – I am not hugely familiar with the Indian subcontinent, beyond reading some Coomaraswamy many years ago, but Tagore seemed very interesting, and probably not a bad place to start for an ignorant westerner. I was discussing where to start with some Bengali friends and they surprised me with this lovely little book, in French, to my surprise. I don't think the same stories have been printed together in English, unfortunately so as they work very well together. The fantastic short-story is a bit of an 'exercice de style' – they usually follow a single, predictable but winding path to a tragic conclusion, and as such make for great comparisons across authors and culture: Tagore follows closely the model in the footsteps of Maupassant 'le Horla' and other similar classics of the genre, with indirect narrations, a generous scoop of late-romantic set pieces peppered with more realistic and modern elements: the narrator meets a man who recalls a story carefully crafted to leave the reader -and frequently enough, the characters themselves- wondering whether the strange events are the fruit of supernatural forces or of creeping insanity. Thus here one story tells of the sleepless conversation of man with a skeleton, another of the return of a woman drowned by her greed, while a third one that of a poet haunted by his dead wife. The plots themselves are typical, and the supernatural elements, although sometimes alluding to the local folklore, could easily be transposed in another setting – yet one can only be struck, after a few stories, at the fact that most of those ghosts are female: that is indeed where the book's strength is, for in Tagore's stories as in many of his Western colleagues, the fantastic is primarily a tool to comment and dramatise the encounter with modernity. In particular, as with others around the fin-de-siecle, Tagore uses it to express and explore his male anxiety at the changing status of women in his society. Yet here, none of those vamps or nefarious femme fatales that inhabits the western imagination of the time, but rather a deep and thoughtful ambivalence, that often simultaneously acknowledges the impossible and demeaning nature of the woman's position in traditional Indian society, while simultaneously bemoaning, frequently with a touch of humour, the modern male incapable to cope with those shifting gender roles. Romantic love inherited from ancient poetry seems to haunt the mind of those men, who fail, despite their best efforts, to live up to the impersonal standard of colonial modernity. From one story to another the register change drastically, and while in one, the author can comment on the fact that a kind hearted man too compliant with his wife ended up creating a selfish, materialistic and ultimately self-destructive monster (that eventually comes back to haunt him even after her demise) – leaving no room at all for agency or soul to the female character – in another, the narrator's wife, always pragmatic but also profoundly dedicated to her husband, is revealed to be the deeper and the more admirable of the two when she reaches her death-bed. The husband's unspoken love, mixed with regrets and shame, hounds him in his new marriage as the new wife fails to live up to the standards of the deceased. That one is deeply moving and possibly one of the most striking depiction of married life I have encountered in such a short format....more
I must be growing up because I enjoyed the mixture of patois and phonetic writing in which most of the book is written, something I couldn't stand onlI must be growing up because I enjoyed the mixture of patois and phonetic writing in which most of the book is written, something I couldn't stand only a few years back: seeing Celie's style evolve over the course of the novel is probably as much of a pleasure as to see her breaking free from the gruesome oppression in which she is born and married. Walker is very good at depicting the debased, alienating existence of a black woman in the American South of the interwar, and the reader will alternate between utter disgust at the corrupt social order, frustration at the narrow confines of its culture, and fascination for those rare characters who manage to rise above it. Unfortunately this might be were the book's problem is: about half-way through, there starts being more and more such strong female characters, and the mood starts to lighten somewhat, as the protagonist Celie makes the necessary moves to take back ownership of her life; But the higher reaches of the intellect which then open to her -religion, politics, even design or music- are treated with a rhetorical confidence that clashes with the relative simplicity of the ideas enunciated. Starting as an understated study of daily life in poverty, the book try to become a novel of ideas and falls short to live up to its promises. ...more
I think Ferguson's book is good in form (very readable, good balance of quotes/stats/narration... I'll try to watch the shows at some point) but prediI think Ferguson's book is good in form (very readable, good balance of quotes/stats/narration... I'll try to watch the shows at some point) but predictably flawed in its argument: his justification of British imperialism oscillates conveniently between realpolitik (it was the lesser of the imperial necessary evils) and high-minded liberalism (the British empire afforded more Freedom to its colonial subjects than their traditional rulers), plugging the two with a dose of development ideology when the need arise... Notions of culture, identity or dignity are only ever considered in relationship to the metropolis, except for Islam which is presented alternatively as ripe for instrumentalisation by the West, or as fundamentally illiberal, border-line clash of civilisations... I have ordered myself James Morris' An Imperial Progress, which I was told make for a good corrective to Ferguson....more
The plight of the Goodreads user: you read a book, you have a lot to say about it, but little time to write it down. You delay writing your mandatory The plight of the Goodreads user: you read a book, you have a lot to say about it, but little time to write it down. You delay writing your mandatory review, and in the meantime you read another, and another, and another, and so on. And then you just don't remember what you wanted to say about it in the first place, or at least much of it has become blurry and vague. What you do remember feel somewhat common-place, but you really can't keep any longer that long finished book on your 'currently reading' shelf - I mean, what would people say?!? - so although you do know the right thing to do would be to go back to your copy of the book and read through your marginalia, in the end you just write a mediocre review during your lunch-break: The bright side of things is that I've had time to read quite a few papers on Forster and India in the mean time - there is those who see first the political parable, those who discern the modernist groping in the dark for the absolute, those who find a taste for orientalise homosexual fantasies, and multiple admixtures of those thee components - I am not sure Forster was too sure himself, and I most certainly am not: is he ironical or stalwart in his critic of the colonial administration? And in his portrayal of the Indian nationalist movement? And what about the Marabar caves: are they sacred places of encounter with an eastern Other than the western mind can only feel as aggression, or empty holes in which both the locals and the visitors project their mediocre and incompatible fantasies? I think they might be both, inasmuch as Forster remain ultimately a humanist, whose humanism is grounded in his direct first-hand experience of specific people, rather than humanity as a collective. If the locus of value is located in particular people, rather than institutions, processes or concepts, all the rest, all that is not, in the context of a novel, characters and dialogues, has to be drowned in the most unforgiving irony, so that it turns into a flat and passive surface on which to lovingly outline people. Be it the Marabar caves, with their vague but recurrent hints of non-dualism, the pathetic failures and hypocrisy of colonial society or the comical idealism of the natives, all have little value in and of themselves, as Forster's dilettante engagement in politics (beyond a careful liberalism) shows well enough. And we must be grateful because it is not with ideas that Forster's great gift lies, but with characters, and those are absolutely delightful. True connexion might still elude the characters themselves at the end of the story, but the repeated failure of friendship ('not here, not now') helps dismiss the idealised friendship for a more contingent and ad-hoc relation, one I think maybe closer to that formed by the reader with the said character. Anyway - it's a brilliant book, duly regarded as a classic, and one that willingly leaves the reader a little baffled, but also that leaves him with memories of characters that will not go, that will remain the scale on which future characters will be measured. If you haven't you ought to go and read it now! ...more
There seems to be no reason to think Fanon had read Sorel, but I'm not surprised that Sartres, in his preface, take the pain to dissociate Fanon from There seems to be no reason to think Fanon had read Sorel, but I'm not surprised that Sartres, in his preface, take the pain to dissociate Fanon from the 'fascist' Sorel: both find in violence an end rather than a mean, with its value given as "ethical" by the later, and constructed as "therapeutic" by the former. Neither's vision would be for me enough to qualify them as fascists, but even in Fanon the legitimacy of violence seems grounded in a disingenuous and dangerous notion of "absolute identity": its salutary purpose of fostering an adversarial black consciousness to oppose the white claims to a monopoly on Civilisation, as developed in Black Skin White Masks, seems to slide, in The Wretched, only too easily in the contorted shapes of nationalism itself quite mimetic. The core issue, it seems to me, is however that claims to "absolute identity" here as elsewhere opens the way for claims to "absolute victimhood", claims which by assigning the monopoly of guilt to the colonial oppressor, ends up obscuring the uneven distribution of power within the particular group, typically along ethnic, gendered or even class terms: hence idealist pronouncements such as 'black can't be racists'. In other words, by elevating the experience of oppression to the status of what Sorel would have called a myth -a "sacred" image meant to mobilise for collective action- the colonised must stamp and enforce an imperfect identity onto all constituent groups. This "absolute identity" might well be a potent, maybe even a necessary tool in the liberation of colonised people, but it also seems to me that in the post-colonial period it all too often turns into a repressive apparatus in the hands of a dominant class or tribe, all too happy to blame their own crimes on the colonial legacy or neocolonial presence. With this said, violence only constitutes a fragment of Fanon's book, although it has often attracted much attention. What I found most interesting was actually the anecdotes and stories which come throughout illustrate the analysis, and which give some sense of what the (anti) colonial experience might have been in the post-war period. ...more
This is the third volume of Hobsbawm's thematic history of the long XIXth century: I have not read the two previous ones, but I now intend to. It is aThis is the third volume of Hobsbawm's thematic history of the long XIXth century: I have not read the two previous ones, but I now intend to. It is also understandably a reference, although one maybe best appreciated by those who already have a sense of the events of the period: the author prefers, against the usual chronological take of those kinds of broad histories, to tackle the following themes in separate chapters: economy, imperialism, the bourgeoisie, the working classes and socialism, nationalism and reaction, the "crisis of liberalism", women and the emergence of feminism, arts and culture, the radical changes in hard and social sciences, the revolutions accross the globes, and he conclude with an analysis of the debates concerning the origins of WW1. If that list did not convince you, let me add this is a tour de force, effortlessly combining political, economic and intellectual history into a coherent rather than militant narrative. There are of course omissions and discussable opinions too, the chapter on the arts for example, being rather weak, or at least betraying a certain disregard of the author for "myth" of the originality of the avant-garde ("What led the avant garde artists forward was therefore not a vision of the future, but a reversed vision of the past." p.234.) We might also complain that although the political aspects are approached on a global scale, his cultural and social history are very much western-centric, but then again you can't fit everything in! Other chapters, however, are absolutely brilliant: the chapters on sociology and the fin-de-siecle scientific upheavals, focusing as it does on mathematics and physics, do a great job of sketching out "the revolt against positivism", maybe a better one actually than Stuart Hughes, often regarded as the reference. The final chapter on the sources of the war is also brilliant, taking more distance towards his subject than the previous ones, Hobsbawm provides us with an insight into the whole of XXth century historiography for whom this was such a central question. ...more
Spanos catered to my most secret and shameful vice: he deploys a bulky, exotic and intimidating terminology, push it on his unsuspecting reader thanksSpanos catered to my most secret and shameful vice: he deploys a bulky, exotic and intimidating terminology, push it on his unsuspecting reader thanks to his gifts and his dedication, as well as, in the last instance, to the relative simplicity of his argument, and once you are hooked, high on jargon and your new-found ability to grasp it effortlessly, you find yourself following him wherever he goes. Luckily, he seems like a relatively stand-up chap, so you wont come down to any nasty STDs. Said, the central figure of his narrative, despite stretching his roots in the post-structuralist soil (Foucault in particular), famously rejected that school and its antihumanism, in favour of a somewhat nebulous alternative I have had difficulties reconciling with the sweeping, genealogical statements he is known for. Spanos, a Heideggerian literary scholar, Saidian in mood but "de-(con)strukt(ion)ist" in practice, sets out to argue against the words of Said himself in his last book, that his decolonial project can only be fulfilled with a critique of the onto-theological tradition, and proposes a corrective. I should say I, myself, harbour some doubts as to the methodological consistency of Said's approach in Orientalism (many of which are expressed better than I ever could put them in James Clifford's article 'On Orientalism') - in particular when it comes to the tension between the historicity and ontological character of the East-West relation as depicted by Said. As such I was probably a favourable terrain for Spanos' thesis: Spanos attempts to link Said's critique of Western knowledge and taxonomies, by way of (genealogical) Foucault and (pre-black notebooks...) Heidegger, with the post-structuralist critique of presence, of "identity as the condition of difference". This he does first by "re-constellating" (one of his absolute favs, along with "de-structing" and "over-dertermination") Heidegger's elusive critique of imperialism, which he does thanks to a little known (at least, to me) text of his, the Parmenides lectures he gave during WW2: Spanos makes a compelling case, out of a few quotes, for reading Heidegger's thought as concerned with the (substantial, self-same) humanism having emerged from the Roman recycling and systematising of Greek post-socratic philosophy - with the transition from aletheia (truth, literally "unveiled") to veritas (truth, not as a lack but as presence). He then proceeds to tie it all to Foucault's panopticism, via various philogical reflections, evidencing the fact that both Said's "taxonomic" orientalism and Heidegger's "ontologic" tradition, relie on visuality, as much as does Foucault's critique of the power/knowledge relation. At this point if you have not read Foucault or Heidegger, all this might sound a bit forbidding, so let me stress that neither have I: Foucault I never got around, despite some indirect knowledge of his concepts, while Heidegger's linguistic fortifications have so far thwarted all my attempts at entering Being and Time. So fear not, Spanos' thesis could have fitted in a journal article: he takes such pains for making it accessible, if not to the lay reader, then at least to the non-specialist, that I think anyone who has read Orientalism will find it all understandable enough - and even enjoyable, if you are as vain and insecure as me. After introducing this Heidegger (ontology) / Foucault (institution) / Said (imperialism) axis, Spanos reads three books of Said, namely Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism and his posthumous Humanism and Democratic Criticism, before concluding with a separate chapter, by recollecting his youthful experiences and his encounters with Said, musing somewhat surprisingly (for a vocally "secular" thinker in a book concerned with a radically "secular" one) on the impact of the Christian existentialist movement (Union Theological Seminary, mainly) on the protest movements of the sixties. All in all, beyond the guilty pleasure of reading and understanding effortlessly something that looks very complicated (but which is actually quite simple) the book is quite good: I am not much familiar with any of the thinkers or movements at its core, but I feel Spanos' thesis, if it wouldn't have pleased any of them, none the less makes much sense, and in a way shed some light on my own reservations as to Said: in that regard, by bringing to the surface the relationship between Said's idea of Orientalism and the "ontological tradition", Spanos makes apparent (but does not mention) one obvious paradox: the Greek -Aristotelian in particular- tradition, that which privileges identity over difference, was by no means exclusively occidental... The "occultation" or internalisation of the disciplinary, which seems ascribed to modernity, was in fact already at play in religions and culture all over the world. The book also makes (this I will have to confirm) a good introduction to Foucault, and might well also contribute to making Heidegger less unreadable. Spanos himself seems like a lovely chap, with an interesting, unusual career, and a gifted pedagogue. I shall try and get hold of his textbooks on existentialism....more
You see those "very short introductions" pretty much everywhere, but I think that's the first one I actually read: in France, we have the older and paYou see those "very short introductions" pretty much everywhere, but I think that's the first one I actually read: in France, we have the older and parallel institutions of the "Que sais-je?" which endeavours, I think similarly, to publish short surveys of particular (or less particular) fields by leading academics. I suppose Young's approach, even compared to the rest of the collection, is rather unorthodox: He does not provide a survey of the issues engaged by postcolonialism, which would likely have been impossible given the vagueness and/or controversial nature of its boundaries. Neither does he attempt to position and list the theories and their authors which constitute it, which once again, as anyone who has tried Spivak or Bhabha knows, wouldn't be easily fitted in an "introduction"; Instead he opts for "montage", hopping from continent to continent (Africa, Asia and South America), from the colonial experience to the liberation struggles, to our present days, from one facet (say, land-reform) to another (feminism), and so on. The result read somewhat like a travelogue or like journalism; Do we get the general picture we most likely came for? To an extent: I think the book was written as a kind of sentimental appeal directed to the westerns, and as such it works quite well. Save for a necessarily short comparative excursus on Fanon and Che, however, we do not get much in the way of theory beyond the occasional quote used as chapter heading. What we do get, however, is the desire to learn more; If not as an introduction to the field, then as an introduction to an introduction, the book works rather well. ...more
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