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  • Bruce Robbins–Life Wisdom: Learning from Kluge and Kiefer

    Bruce Robbins–Life Wisdom: Learning from Kluge and Kiefer

    Life Wisdom: Learning from Kluge and Kiefer

    Bruce Robbins

    A Review of Alexander Kluge and Anselm Kiefer, Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances. Trans. Alexander Booth. London: Seagull, 2025. 

    When the German writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge died on March 25, 2026 at the age of 94, a translation of his exchange with the painter Anselm Kiefer had just been published. Also just published, or perhaps just about to be published—when someone dies, the chronology gets blurred—was Ben Lerner’s novel Transcription. Lerner had joined up with Kluge in the astonishing collaboration The Snows of Venice (2017): early poems by Lerner inspiring texts by Kluge, which inspired further texts by Lerner. The collection is illustrated with artwork by painter Gerhard Richter, Kluge himself, and others. Presumably Lerner did not anticipate when he gave the manuscript of Transcription to his publisher that its publication would coincide with Kluge’s death. But in the character of Thomas, who does die in the course of the novel but does not share all his details with Kluge, Lerner nevertheless delivers a heartbreakingly beautiful portrait of the artist. Any English speaker who desires an introduction to Kluge’s many-sided work could go there first.

    As a novelist, Lerner won’t let the reader forget that the artist is also a parent, which is to say condemned to emotional imperfection. I did not know Kluge well enough to judge whether Thomas’s tendency to always retreat into “some weird allegory, some kind of prose poetry, or an impossible string of references (many of which were probably fictional)” (94) from painful dilemmas of parenting and grandparenting was true of Kluge as well. What I recognized immediately in Thomas were Kluge’s gentleness, his experience of being bombed as a child, and his tendency to hear angels in voices on the radio. I recognized, too, the love of dreams, and changing eye-colors, and cave painting. What I would have liked to see more of in Thomas was Kluge’s ability to make art and politics converge in unpredictable ways. Lerner has proven himself politically inventive as well, for example in his perhaps-autobiographical, auto-fictional story about the political hacking of Wikipedia, “The Hofmann Wobble”.  

    Consider how this—the convergence of art and politics—happens in Kluge. A young woman walks in slow motion across the screen. The camera, motionless, watches her pass from across the street. Then a voice-over stops the action, and the camera zooms in. First, on a swath of her dress. Where was the fabric manufactured? The camera moves to her boots—same question. To her handbag—what is the history behind its making? Leather craft, we are told, goes back to the Middle Ages. There are histories behind everything we have been seeing: the building in the background, the intercom on the door, the company that invented the intercom, the door lock, the grating in the sidewalk, partially blocked up, the brightly-colored signs on the wall marking the presence of gas and water pipes under the street, along with the amenities they enable, the dried-up chewing gum and the cigarette butts in the cracks between the cobblestones, the cobblestones themselves.

    The histories come fast and furious. It’s hard to focus on any one of them. If what you want is to watch the woman, you will be disappointed. Still, the total effect is weirdly entertaining. The film seems to be about capitalism, and there is no doubt that it disapproves, but the disapproval doesn’t leap out at you. Discovering the hidden background of things doesn’t always provoke the expected indignation. You might even say that it brings with it a perverse kind of pleasure. 

    The Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein had a plan to adapt Marx’s Capital. In 1929 he went to Paris to meet with the author of Ulysses to discuss the project. The film, Eisenstein thought, had to put everyday life at the center, as James Joyce did. For example, Eisenstein would not film the stock exchange as part of the project. Joyce was not interested, however, and the movie didn’t get made. But in 2008 Kluge took the project in hand. A memorable part of it, a collaboration with Tom Tykver available from the Kluge archive at Cornell, is the deep dive into the objects surrounding the young woman on the sidewalk. It’s entitled “All Objects Are Enchanted People.” 

    The title is not a bad translation of what Marx in Capital called the fetishism of the commodity, the process that allows me to forget, lifting a sack of rice or unpacking a new laptop, the lives and labors of invisible people far away that brought the commodity here to my hands. By making the labors and the lives visible again, Marx wanted to define the fetishism of the commodity and demystify it. Demystification is not quite right, however, as a description of Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances, another collaboration with an artist, reveals. Kluge, a philosopher in the lineage of the Frankfurt School and a filmmaker sometimes described as the German Jean-Luc Godard, enters into dialogue here with the celebrated German painter Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945). The book is more interested in life wisdom than Capital is and less interested in demolishing falsehoods as a way of life. It makes you realize, however, that demolishing falsehoods is only part of what Marx was up to in Capital. In the background of that book too, there is a vision of how life might be lived.

    ***

    This dialogue between Kluge and Kiefer is entitled (you may need reminding—I did) “Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances.” Borrowed from the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, that title is paradoxical enough to count as advice on how to live. It implies that there is no principled way of reconciling principles with changing circumstances. Since circumstances can be relied upon to change, especially political circumstances, it follows that remaining faithful to your principles can only be achieved by the practice of an art (Kunst) and that art cannot itself hew to absolute principles. Artists should therefore expect to be criticized by political allies who think their principles have been violated, and both Kluge and Kiefer have been. The tone of their book, however, is not defensive. And it invites the reflection that, since the art in question is intelligence itself, it can be practiced equally by people who are not professional artists. One moral for the rest of us is that, however overwhelming the urgencies of the present, it’s useful to stock up on knowledge of the lives and labors of the artists, writers, and thinkers of the past, however distant. Or, as Kluge puts it: “I faithfully memorize—with music in operas, without music in storytelling and with particular relish in film and visual art—all the errors which have been made and the experience they contain. These will-o’-the-wisps are more trustworthy than all of the rules of wisdom.”

    Quality time spent in the company of the dead will send you back to your principles, however indirectly. An example: Immanuel Kant remaining faithful to the French Revolution despite bad news from Paris about the guillotine. Another example, also from the French Revolution: the woman in Beethoven’s Fidelio who, faithful to her lover, rescues him from death amidst seemingly incomprehensible shifts in ruling regime. Life wisdom: revolutions, like lovers, are not easy to be faithful to. Faithfulness requires the exercise of intelligence.

    Kluge and Kiefer’s book is a treasure-house of plot sketches and anecdotes, many on the brink of breaking into parable. One might describe it as a companion, though not in the usual reference-book sense of a “companion-to-X”. Intelligence offers friendly companionship to those of us who are struggling in isolation (and who isn’t?) to remain faithful to our principles.

    Kiefer was born in the small southern German city of Donaueschingen, which is credited by some as the source of the Danube. The Wikipedia entry on the city does not mention that it was devastated by an Allied bombing raid on March 4, 1945, four days before Kiefer’s birth. As the book reminds us, he was born in a bomb shelter. A month later, on April 8th, the city of Halberstadt, where the 13-year-old Kluge was living, was largely destroyed by another air raid, leaving some two to three thousand of his neighbors dead. Kiefer was too young to remember the bombing, but he would have heard stories. It seems likely that these two contemporary German masters were drawn together by common memories of a hometown devastated from the air.

    Kluge published about the bombing in different forms, including a short, collage-like, somewhat absurdist book. Air Raid has been accused of heartlessness for its failure to empathize sufficiently with the victims. It dramatically omits his personal feelings about being bombed. It’s as if the occasion was too big for personal feelings; in Transcription, Lerner makes much of this emotional evasiveness in Thomas. Much of Kiefer’s painting, famous for its mixing of paint with materials like straw, ash, and sand, could also be seen as a reference both to the Holocaust and to the bombing. It reproduces a haunting atmosphere of ruination, most often without revealing who or what is bring haunted or mourned. It’s easier to see Kiefer’s career as aiming to cut through the complacencies and euphemisms of the “Wirtschaftswunder,” the economic miracle of Germany’s post-war recovery, and to insist on (to paraphrase Kluge) the blood and horror lying at the bottom of all good things. But that is not the only sense that has been made of him. Was he pointing his finger at the Nazis? Or (as German romanticism has always tended to suspect) blaming modern technology? His Norse gods and dark green forests left the question open. Of course, any German artist who dared step into the minefield of Holocaust memory, and did so by returning to the seemingly anachronistic genre of representational painting, would have to expect controversy even if he did not begin his career, at age twenty-four, with a series of photographs in which he gives a sarcastic “Heil Hitler” salute at different locations in Europe.

    In a review of Air Raid, Katie Trumpener notes that Kluge’s early films were on the receiving end of feminist critique for their depiction of post-war women as bumbling and confused. It’s true that Air Raid, too, does close-ups of women in the midst of the bombing of Halberstadt who cannot take in what is happening around them: the ticket-taker at the local cinema who tries to tidy up with a broom after half the building has been blown away, the mother of three who tries to protect her three small children from the falling bombs with a random sheet of tin. But no one in Halberstadt, male or female, can make much sense of what is happening. The same is true in the aftermath, when the war is over (the war ended shortly after the bombing, which served no military purpose) and an American investigator asks the locals who is to be blamed for the mass killing. The Americans? The Nazis? War as such?

    The question was of some interest to me when I first read Kluge’s book some years ago, as I had recently discovered that a squadron of B-17s that bombed Halberstadt on April 8th, 1945 was commanded by my father, Captain Eugene Rabinowitz. (I write about this in Atrocity: A Literary History [2025], and, now that I think of it, in other places as well). When I had the good luck to meet Kluge in 2016 and talk about all this, he steered the conversation gently toward other acts of violence in the more distant past. My notes from that meeting also include some poetry, though I can’t remember who it was from: “Like a tornado touching down, the dream selects its sleeper.” (In Transcription too, Thomas has much to say about dreams.) As a motive for reflecting on the distant past, present violence in its most tornado-like aspect sends me back to my own dreams and sleeper-like passivity, but also to the project of filming Capital: how deep into the background of objects does one want or need to go? Is there a point where one goes too deep—so deep as to lose the thread of present indignation?

    Kiefer’s mentor, Joseph Beuys, had tried to “do” Auschwitz without human figures, relying instead on objects like a dead rat, vials of fat, and moldy sausage. The assemblage allowed for considerable uncertainty of interpretation. Like Beuys, Kiefer is experimental in his recourse to materials, but he is unafraid to paint human figures, even mythological ones like Wagner’s Nibelungen that the Nazis seemed to have rendered taboo even for would-be satirists. Was this a humanizing of Germany, critics asked, a covert participation in Germany’s rightward turn, a step toward national reconciliation with the horrors of the past? Maybe not. Andreas Huyssen understands Kiefer’s imagery as either deliberately ironic or as performing a necessary working through, given that, in spite of the Nazis, the imagery still carries emotional weight. Many of the black-and-white illustrations in Intelligence are fabulous, but they are perhaps not the best way for the uninitiated to catch up on either the irony or the working through. I would watch the Wim Wenders documentary, Anselm, instead. Film, Kluge’s other medium, is better able than a book to transmit the scale of Kiefer’s massive architectural sculptures, as monumental as the Nazi structures they satirically echo. A book is a small thing, physically speaking. Still, it is Kiefer who in the opening pages praises the book as a physical object: “I don’t think Noah’s ark was full of animals, but books” (2). And the colorlessness of his visual contributions to Intelligence is not an accident attributable to the costs of book publication. The grayness is intentional.

    In deference to Paul Celan, Kiefer shows us dark, dead sunflower stalks in a snowy field with no sun. As the Wenders documentary reveals, he burns straw and undergrowth on a wall using a flame-thrower and the wall becomes a painting. In an assemblage, sunlight shines on empty white dresses, the heads replaced by bricks, plastic cases, books, barbed wire. In another painting, metal rods stick out of cracked slabs of concrete, the ruins of some habitation. After Gaza, Kiefer’s work has come to seem less commemorative than prophetic.

    Intelligence foregrounds Kiefer’s Celan-inspired Margarete/ Shulamith series, where as Huyssen observes, Kiefer’s remembrance of the Holocaust comes through brilliantly. Those paintings are a tribute to the poetry of Celan, the Romanian-Jewish German-language poet who lost his parents in the Holocaust and himself survived one of the forced labor camps. They reference in particular Celan’s most famous poem “Todesfuge”, “Death Fugue”:

    Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
    we drink you at noon death is a master from Deutschland
    we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and drink
    death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue
    he strikes you with lead bullets his aim is true
    a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
    he sets his dogs on us he gifts us a grave in the air
    he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master from Deutschland

    your golden hair Margarete
    your ashen hair Shulamit

    In one painting you see a German woman’s blonde hair against a dark, barren landscape. In another you see a Jewish woman’s black hair superimposed on a memorial to the German war dead. “Mother,” Celan wrote in “Wolfbohne”, “they are writing poems.” It is good that art continues, adapting our principles and our circumstances, even if, as here, the artistic act is pitifully incommensurable with its occasion.

    ***

    Besides family memories of the Allied bombing, the two artists are also joined by the pleasure they both take in large time scales. “What moves me about Anselm Kiefer’s work (and has led to our collaboration),” Kluge writes, “is the timespan of over 300 years (oftentimes over 3,000 or even 40,000 years) in which its actuality moves” (110). Both artists show a confidence that time spent in deep or mythic background will not be wasted. I noticed a leaden B-17 in an assemblage that Kiefer had labeled “The Argonauts.” Intelligence features a daisy chain of poets, starting with Pindar, the archaic (that is, pre-classical) Greek poet whose poetry is saturated in an era when the Olympian gods had not yet taken over. Hölderlin, who translated Pindar, also influenced Celan. Kiefer pays tribute to all three. And Kluge ends the book by recalling the potentiality embodied in Pindar’s centaurs, a potentiality which persists despite “the Big Five in Silicon Valley, those modern usurpers who are building a new Valhalla on an imaginary stage by Richard Wagner” (203). Today’s world is much like the world ruled by Zeus. But enchantment has not disappeared. “Nothing has been irrevocably decided. No reason for fatalism” (203).

    In Transcription, a child’s seemingly incurable eating disorder—labelled an “art of hunger” by Thomas in one of his evasive moves–does what a novelist is obliged to do: it brings the temptation of hopelessness closer to the everyday life of people today who purchase and read novels. Like Lerner, Karl Ove Knausgaard is another novelist who has spent years contemplating a great artist. In his 2020 profile of Kiefer, entitled “Into the Black Forest With the Greatest Living Artist,” Knausgaard does not try to refute Kiefer’s greatness, but he does include a reference to bad parenting and he notes–whether at his own expense or at Kiefer’s is unclear—that Kiefer sometimes does not seem to know his name, and sometimes seems to have forgotten him altogether. In Transcription too, Thomas sometimes treats the Lerner avatar as an old friend and sometimes just as cheerfully confuses him with someone else. Is this blitheness a characteristic of the great artist, or of the artist as seen by the novelist? Or might it be an instance of life wisdom, the art of remaining faithful under shifting circumstances that Kluge and Kiefer discuss? The eating disorder in Transcription, it’s worth noting, is eventually cured by the application, perhaps intelligent and perhaps merely lucky, of parental indifference. Perhaps indifference, then, is part of what’s needed to stay the course. 

    Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He has authored several books, among them Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (Stanford, 2022). He is a long-time member of the b2 and b2o editorial boards. 

  • Bruce Robbins — Return of the Plague

    Bruce Robbins — Return of the Plague

    by Bruce Robbins

    The period of intense anxiety that did not begin with Joe Biden’s undeclared electoral victory on November 3, 2020 and that has now (on November 15th) been stretched to the breaking point by the incumbent’s refusal to concede and by fears that he is preparing a coup attempt—this is not the ideal sort of moment for humanist academics to weigh in about. On the whole, we tend to write on a slower and more reflective timescale. We wait for the dust to settle. At least I do. I talk about books for a living, most of them books that weren’t published yesterday. When big news is being announced hour by hour and even minute by minute, each item potentially big enough to alter the political landscape and even to make it unrecognizable, my impulse is to shut up and listen.

    I will match my personal disgust for the incumbent with anyone’s, blow for blow, round for round, point for point. But the spectacle would not be edifying. About the 70,000,000 who voted for him despite knowing what they might not have known about him in 2016 but had ample chance to find out over the past four years, I am no longer willing to bend over backwards, as so many of us did four years ago, putting most of the blame on the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee for going to Wall Street instead of to Michigan and Wisconsin. Yes, that’s what they did, and odds are they’ll do it again, just as the pollsters will undercount the Trump voters of Michigan and Wisconsin again. Where racism and sexism and xenophobia are concerned, when those who are privileged by their whiteness and maleness and Americanness continue to translate equality as oppression, we are in for a very long haul.

    Still, my own privilege has occasioned one small qualifying thought about the 70,000,000. I am cushioned both from the coronovirus and from its economic consequences: I can work from home, and my income has been unaffected.  I am not threatened with eviction. I do not own a small business that could very well go under for good. I am imagining, not having consulted such figures as are no doubt available, that a certain percentage of these Trump voters, and perhaps especially the slightly higher proportion of people of color who voted for him this time over last time, were inspired to do so by the pandemic. Not, of course, because they think Trump has dealt with it competently and responsibly, but because they have been rendered so economically desperate that they simply can’t take any more. Under those circumstances, I can conceive that Biden’s nuanced position on the pandemic would read simply as “lockdown” and Trump’s open-up-the-economy position would read as their only hope, in spite of the health risks to themselves and their loved ones. This thought helps me avoid falling into the “deplorables” trap, which this go-round has become harder to steer clear of.

    While awaiting January 20th and the vaccine, relatively optimistic about both, I read books, think about them, teach them remotely.

    The June 2020 issue of Harper’s includes a letter written by Albert Camus in 1943, during the Nazi occupation of France. Camus, whose novel The Plague (1947) has been enjoying a large and easily understandable revival since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, says what he is called upon to say on behalf of the Resistance: “the only chance we have of improving our fate is to act, organize, and stay vigilant.” But the letter’s most striking words are “anguish” and “uncertainty.” For “we are watching history run its course, and know nothing about the intentions of those in charge.” You can see he feels that the intentions that matter, the intentions that dictate the course history will run, are the intentions of “those in charge,” not our intentions, and this is one reason for all the uncertainty and doubt, even about joining the Resistance. This also holds for the fictional plague-ridden Oran he was then inventing, which seen in retrospect takes some of its emotional too-bigness from the French occupation of Algeria (something Camus notoriously didn’t know what to do with) as well as the Nazis, and for that matter also from the historical plagues he was researching in order to write the novel. When the plague struck in the past, as he was learning, very little useful knowledge was available as to where it came from or what to do about it.

    In today’s plague, however, useful knowledge is available. Actions and consequences have been pretty well aligned. Places whose leaders have done the right thing have reaped the benefits of their actions—a flattened curve, a drop in infections and mortality, the availability of equipment and hospital beds for when a next wave hits. Europe, where people got complacent and got hit by a second wave, is now locking down and already seeing the benefits of doing so. Places whose leaders haven’t done the right thing, like the US, have reaped the whirlwind, and will keep reaping it. To our vast surprise, history has made sense.

    Is there a larger moral here? Acknowledging the absurdity or existential meaninglessness of things always makes you seem smart, and in a time of pandemic that disabused tone may even be inevitable. Who wants to sound dumb? But maybe intentions and consequences are not always mysteriously fated to misalign. Maybe the times demand that we read not just Camus, but H.G. Wells (see the NYRB July 23, 2020). Maybe we have underestimated the extent to which history, pace Camus, does after all have some meaningful outlines.

    Camus is not wrong, on the other hand, when he suggests at the end of The Plague that plagues always come back. His plague is not just pre-modern, in the sense of being inexplicable; it is also metaphorical. It is inside all of us. That’s why it repeats and repeats, rendering history absurd. Wrong conclusion, but I am a little more inclined to forgive Camus for striking that “myth of Sisyphus” note even here, even about something as unfunny as a plague, because like many others I have also been re-reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), and Atwood makes more sense of the return of the plague. People forget that the immediate cause of the Christian reactionary coup in The Handmaid’s Tale is another plague, a plague of infertility caused by environmental toxicity. From this environmental perspective, Atwood’s pre-coup past doesn’t look so very good after all. She allows us to feel a certain subtle ambivalence even toward the austerity of the post-coup present, despite its hypocrisies and its violent authoritarianism. These are signs of a novel’s greatness. Like the MaddAddam trilogy that followed it, The Handmaid’s Tale is a prep session for the future plagues that have to be expected, after the inevitable relief that will follow the arrival of a vaccine and having an adult in the White House, as long as we keep steamrolling biodiversity and, more generally, mistreating the planet as we have been in the bipartisan habit of mistreating it.

  • Sandra Ponzanesi – Review of Paulo Lemos and Bruce Robbins’s “Cosmopolitanisms”

    Sandra Ponzanesi – Review of Paulo Lemos and Bruce Robbins’s “Cosmopolitanisms”

    Cosmopolitanism(s) Interrupted

    Horta, Paulo Lemos and Robbins, Bruce. eds. 2017. Cosmopolitanisms. New York: New York University Press.

    reviewed by Sandra Ponzanesi

    This edited volume reignites many of the incessant debates on cosmopolitanism, its origin, development, and raison d’être, not only from difference disciplinary traditions and “world views” but also from different points in time. The volume is a revisitation of cosmopolitanism, offering a new take on many of the ongoing debates and querelles, while also making headway by reorienting the field of cosmopolitan studies as such. The vibrancy of the field is shown by the list of influential critics in this volume, who do not take the notion of cosmopolitanism for granted but engage with it from positions that are both critical and creative. These engagements show how the notion or the ideal of cosmopolitanism is far from being obsolete but on the contrary demands, now more than ever, a deep critical engagement. While critics continue to retain the assumption that cosmopolitanism’s appeal lies in its universal principles, there is a sense that “The Times They Are A-Changin’” as Bob Dylan would put it[1], and therefore new realities call for new paradigms. The accelerated process of globalization has allowed many of cosmopolitanism’s aspirations to come true (increased international mobility of people and markets, waning borders, and an increase in supranational institutions). Yet the total deregulation and decentralization brought about by globalization and the associated backlash bring the very principles of cosmopolitanism into disarray by challenging the very notion of commonality and shared values, with a resurgence of new, localized identities, nationalism, and ethnic strife. Therefore, even though the world is becoming increasingly interconnected and shaped by global forces, this does not mean that the world has become more cosmopolitan. On the contrary, the challenge of cosmopolitanism remains as prominent as ever, because as Spivak has phrased it in other contexts, cosmopolitanism is “what one cannot not want” (Spivak 1999: 110). To dispense with cosmopolitanism would mean to relinquish our ideal of a common humanity and with it the principle of human rights and an ethical responsibility to fellow citizens. Cosmopolitanism, as a notion, has accompanied Western civilization from the very beginning. Yet the term and its meaning have shifted and been transformed through time and context, showing a resilience unmatched by other intellectual paradigms. From the Stoics to cosmopolitanism in the age of the Anthropocene and cyberspace, the term has evolved, retaining a flexibility as well as a foundational necessity to continue to exist.

    It was with Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace (1999 [1795]) that it reached its most authoritative moment, with the birth of modern nation-states and the moral dilemma of keeping peace, in part to promote effective transnational trade. Cosmopolitanism became a comrade in arms of capitalism, and the many paradoxes of its affirmation constituted by colonialism, imperialism, and slavery, where the mobility of the elites went hand in hand with the forced uprooting and exploitation of others. Cosmopolitanism has, moreover, often been linked only to the mobility of the elites and privileged, who, through education or financial means, were able to cross borders, languages, and political systems. Kant’s moral ideal of cosmopolitanism was a given for the happy few. The idea of the Grand Tour and Sentimental Journey was not open to lower-class and uneducated people. With the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the enterprising bourgeoisie in the wake of industrialization, the notion of cosmopolitanism underwent a shift, becoming more embroiled with new technologies of communication (the telegraph, fax, and phone) and faster and more accessible forms of transportation (trains, cars, planes). This more emancipatory cosmopolitanism started to emerge as an intrinsic aspect of modernity, a modernity that hardly had room for vernacular forms and alternative ideas of culture Appadurai, 1996). In the light of these many transitions, this volume proposes a provocation by courting cosmopolitanisms in the plural rather than offering a single notion of cosmopolitanism. To speak of multiple cosmopolitanisms could seem like a contradiction in terms. But is it really? Cosmopolitanism as a way of thinking, feeling, and acting beyond one’s own particular community has been seen as a universalism of a Western particular. In their introduction to the special issue on “Cosmopolitanism” that appeared in Public Culture in 2000, the guest editors—Carol A. Breckenridge, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi K. Bhabha, and Sheldon Pollock—focus on the critique of cosmopolitanism’s Eurocentric bias, debating how most cosmopolitan formations are interconnected with forms of coercion or inequality, such as slavery, colonization, and imperialism. So for them the question is whether it is possible to have a cosmopolitanism, with its promise of universal knowledge, that also foregrounds a noncoercive and egalitarian politics. They open with a disorienting idea of what “cosmopolitanism” is or might be, precluding any normative fixing:

    “For one thing, cosmopolitanism is not some known entity existing in the world, with a clear genealogy from the Stoics to Immanuel Kant, that simply awaits more detailed description at the hands of scholarship. We are not exactly certain what it is, and figuring out why this is so and what cosmopolitanism may be raises difficult conceptual issues. As a practice, too, cosmopolitanism is yet to come, something awaiting realization.” (Breckenridge et al. 2000: 577)

    After that open-ended consideration, the guest editors nevertheless circle around a possible misapprehension about the use and abuse of the term: “Cosmopolitans today are often the victims of modernity, failed by capitalism’s upward mobility, and bereft of those comforts and customs of national belonging. Refugees, peoples of the diaspora, and migrants and exiles represent the spirit of the cosmopolitical community.” (Breckenridge et al. 2000: 582) The guest editors of Public Culture thus move skillfully to the use of cosmopolitanisms in the plural by subscribing to the “other” forms of cosmopolitanisms that have remained in the shadow or have been cast as “unauthorized forms of cosmopolitanism.” These refer to manifestations of cosmopolitanism among people at the margin of histories who are part of minoritarian constellations, although they might not be so minoritarian in terms of numbers:

    “…cosmopolitanism must give way to the plurality of modes and histories—not necessarily shared in degree or in concept regionally, nationally, or internationally—that comprise cosmopolitan practice and history. We propose therefore that cosmopolitanism be considered in the plural, as cosmopolitanisms” (Breckenridge et al. 2000: 577).

    It is an invitation to look at cosmopolitanism beyond the binarism of the local versus global, but also to look for cosmopolitanism outside the dominant schemata, from the Stoics to Kant, that would limit the way we look at and understand what cosmopolitanism can be about. By embracing a look at cultures across space and time, and how they engage with feeling and acting beyond the nation, a new array of possibilities might emerge that are not prefabricated or constrained by Western paradigms. That is also how Paul Gilroy’s notion of conviviality emerged, inspired by Spain’s multicultural Moorish culture of coexistence and cohabitation (convivencia) (Gilroy 2004), steering away from multiculturalism without abandoning the aspiration of cosmopolitanism. The guest editors of Public Culture conclude that we should first radically rewrite the history of cosmopolitanism and redraw its map by thinking “outside the box of European intellectual history” (Breckenridge et al. 2000: 586), and secondly rethink the range of practices that might allow for new and alternative theorizations.

    The volume edited by Bruce Robbins and Paulo Lemos Horta rises to this challenge by embracing cosmopolitanisms in the plural, not as a fashionable label but as the fruit of decades-long engagement with the field. Bruce Robbins has written extensively on cosmopolitanism from different entry points, taking stock of the idea of cosmopolitanism in deep time too, therefore venturing outside the paradigm of European history (2016); his latest book The Beneficiary deals with cosmopolitanism from the viewpoint of inequality and is a sequel to Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (2012). His previously co-edited volume Cosmopolitics. Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Robbins and Cheah 1998) makes a point in not wanting to disentangle the culturalist approaches to cosmopolitanism from its political relevance, and claims the resurgence of cosmopolitanism as a viable alternative political project. Besides the double introduction by the editors themselves, with Robbins responsible for Part I on “Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism” and Pheng Cheah producing Part II on “The Cosmopolitical-Today,” Cosmopolitics contains contributions that are still cutting-edge today. This includes the two full-length chapters by Robbins and Cheah themselves and chapters by contributors such as Gayatri Spivak, Benedict Anderson, Etienne Balibar, James Clifford, and Anthony Appiah, who also wrote the afterword for the later Cosmopolitanisms.

    In his own chapter “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms” (already used in the plural in 1998 before the special issue of Public Culture), Robbins brings forward the institutional entanglements and explores the possibility of “comparative cosmopolitanisms” that seek to reconcile a self-conscious academic professionalism with a worldly and political engagement. The book emerged at the height of the debate about multiculturalism as merely particularistic and investing in cosmopolitanism as striving towards mutual common ground, extending political practice beyond national borders and including non-citizens as equally valid members of the cosmopolitan polity. Robbins is aware of the risks of cosmopolitanism in restricting the space of others, especially in the case of what are termed diasporic actions that impact on local politics, and of the dangers of falling outside the security of nation-state regulation. Yet he does not give up on the possibilities that international alliances can offer or the potential of actually existing cosmopolitanisms. This is in light of what he phrased as the existence of inevitable paradoxes and contradictions within the field, which nonetheless has not exhausted its purpose. As Robbins writes:

    “If we agree that there is ‘no easy generalization,’ don’t we want to retain the right to difficult generalization?” (Robbins 1998: 251)

    The question remains whether in the attempt to safeguard cosmopolitanism, other insurrections that traditionally may not fall under the aegis of cosmopolitanism, such as transnationalism, diasporic formations, and postcolonial alliances, might be overlooked or unwillingly appropriated by cosmopolitanism’s historically and theoretically dominant discourse. Yet, it is in the acknowledging of these new intersections between cosmopolitanism and the above mentioned insurrections that Robbins charts the ‘difficult generalization.’

    Paul Lemos Horta is a scholar of world literature and has worked at length on cultural productions beyond their point of origin, including the cross-cultural collaborations that influenced The Thousand and One Nights and its reception. In his book, Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights (2017) Horta reports on a number of conversations between Europeans documenting the tales and their interlocutors. In this volume, Horta offers a very fine reading of Richard Burton, the British explorer, as a cosmopolitan or counter-cosmopolitan in the light of Anthony Appiah’s engagement with the explorer and translator. In Appiah’s eyes, Burton is a cosmopolitan who seeks to engage with difference but he is also a counter-cosmopolitan because he cannot escape the prejudices of his British upbringing. Horta remarks at the end that it might be wrong to attribute Burton’s cosmopolitanism only to his exposure to other cultures and attribute his counter-cosmopolitanism only to his inescapable Englishness. Rather, Horta suggests, we should take Burton’s counter-cosmopolitan biases as part of his self-fashioning as a cosmopolitan. Aware of the long genealogy of the term, Horta and Robbins prefer to engage in their volume with the “new cosmopolitanism” that emerged after the 1990s. As Pnina Werbner notes, the theories of cosmopolitanism after the 1990s, including those by Breckenridge et al. and Cheah and Robbins, have sought to go beyond an interpretation of cosmopolitanism as only universal, open, and above all “Western” in order to include local, rooted, and historically and geographically situated dimensions, “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” and local, cultural, and rooted proximities, foregrounding the role of urban space and connectivity of both difference and diversity, and the role of diasporic groups in leading to a rethinking of the universalism of cosmopolitanism. This implies also inserting a new definition of cosmopolitanism from below by incorporating a more “metaphoric designation” that includes various groups of migrants: “expatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants, and ethnic and racial minorities tout court” (Safran 1991: 83). Certain geopolitical transformations, such as mass migration, and waves of refugees and asylum seekers—a consequence of the colonial expansion—and the post-Socialist reconfiguration of nation-states, meant that the study of diasporas and cosmopolitan identities had to take into consideration both historical and cultural specificities. These configurations mark the move towards “a nomadic turn in which the very parameters of specific historical moments are embodied and … are scattered and regrouped in new points of becoming” (Evans-Braziel and Mannur 2008: 3). This volume joins and enriches an existing debate from which new, provincialized conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism have emerged, such as “critical cosmopolitanism” (Rabinow 1986), “postcolonial cosmopolitanism” (Parry 1991), “rooted cosmopolitanism” (Cohen 1992; Ackerman 1994), “nomadic subjects” (Braidotti 1994), “discrepant cosmopolitanism” (Clifford 1992), “vernacular cosmopolitanism” (Bhabha 1996; Beckenbridge et all, 2000; Werbner 2006; Gunew 2012), “patriotic cosmopolitanism” (Appiah 1998), “border cosmopolitanism” (Mignolo 2000), “planetary cosmopolitanism” (Spivak 1999; Gilroy 2004), “banal cosmopolitanism” (Beck 2002), “subaltern cosmopolitanism” and “cosmopolitan legality” (De Sousa Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito 2005), “indigenous cosmopolitanism” (Goodale 2006; Forte 2010), “emancipatory cosmopolitanism” (Pieterse 2006), “ordinary cosmopolitanism” (Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbis 2007), “postcolonial cosmopolitanism” (Bhambra 2011; Baban 2016), “Cosmopolitan Europe” (Hall 2003; Pichler 2009; Ponzanesi 2018), “libidinal cosmopolitanism” (Boston 2016), and “accidental cosmopolitanism’ (Titley 2005).

    Is the multiplication into various inflections of “cosmopolitanism” (Horta and Robbins 2017) not an undermining of the very notion of cosmopolitanism itself and an attempt to save the concept from its Eurocentric origin? For the editors, the triumph of the descriptive plural over the normative singular opens up as many questions as it answers (Horta and Robbins 2017: 1). The plural is a celebration of the particulars, but also a way out of the positive/negative, center/periphery, normative/descriptive binarism. It is not simply the celebration of a cosmopolitanism from below, but the awareness that we are now capable of perceiving emotional attachment to distant others in ways that were not possible in the past. The editors mention Luc Boltanski in their introduction, referring to a new idea of common humanity, which makes distant suffering, or the attachment to distant people, possible through new features of modern humanitarianism. According to Lilie Chouliaraki, whose work has elaborated on Boltanski with reference to media and spectatorship, “the representation of proximity/distance to the scene of suffering” is therefore part of “the analytics of mediation” or The Spectatorship of Suffering—as one of her books is titled (2006: 8). The reading of Chouliaraki is relevant to the shift in notions of cosmopolitanism theorized in the 1990s and more recently as it implies significant changes in the structure of feeling and thinking beyond the nation as allowed by new technologies and digital media culture. This new form of universalism is very much defined by and through mediated encounters between different places and “worlds”. Chouliaraki rightly states that “the question of solidarity (…) cannot be examined separately from the communicative structure that has made this discourse available to us in the first place” (2013: 15). It is through these encounters with mediated suffering that we share a sense of common humanity (as proposed in Boltanski 1999 and Sontag 2003). Through empathy with unfortunate others, we can also scrutinize how these cosmopolitan imaginaries are circulated. The rise of digital technology and social media complements more traditional forms of communication, leading to enhanced possibilities to forge bonds of solidarity between different worlds (including through fundraising and humanitarian campaigns).

    Chouliariaki’s The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in an Age of Post-Humanitarianism (2013) builds on her previous work on the mediatization of distant suffering, and states that forms of solidarity have changed substantially in recent decades in tandem with the shifts in media, technology, markets, and politics. Solidarity, she states, is not based on pity with distant Others any more (as Boltanski had argued), rather it is based on self-fulfillment, a self-oriented morality that centers around doing good to Others based upon “how I feel” (2-3). As Christensen and Jansson write, the moral and post-humanitarian subject of cosmopolitanism emerges as a narcissistic agent that is self-benefitting, and acts in order to just fulfil their own self-gratifying vision rather than acting and engaging politically (Christensen and Jansson 2015: 4) Though this volume does not engage with media perspectives on cosmopolitanism, there is an engagement with cosmopolitanism as an unfinished business that remains, as Robert Young writes in his contribution to this volume, between national sovereignty and cosmopolitanism. “Can the nation-state […] stretch itself to protect the mobile, migratory, multiply-loyal subjects that nationalism has excluded but that are now so characteristic of our time? It is only in such embodiments, Young suggests, that the cosmopolitan idea truly exists—if indeed cosmopolitanism exists today as such an idea rather than a pressing series of unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions” (13). Robert Young asks “How can we translate the cosmopolitan idea into a transformative reality?” (140). “The question presupposes that, even if we seek to describe its actually existing shapes and spaces, cosmopolitanism remains for us a strenuous aspiration” (16). James Clifford’s idea of discrepant cosmopolitanism, mentioned above and discussed in Robbins and Cheah’s Cosmopolitics, foregrounds the notion of cosmopolitanism not as a form of elitism but as applicable also to the servants, maids, guides, and translators who accompanied educated travelers and explorers as they moved through cosmopolitan hubs.

    Cosmopolitanism was not only for gentlemen travelers, but it applied also to the people of color who were the servants of those travelers, who had their own specific cosmopolitan viewpoints. Even the organized coercion of people produces “cosmopolitan workers.” This challenges the notion that certain classes of people are cosmopolitan (travelers) while the rest of us are local (natives). Questions of power aside, “they” and “we” can no longer be divided into local and cosmopolitan. (Clifford 1992: 107-8) For the poor, the experience of cosmopolitanism can be at times more an experience of loss than of luxury but it can also refer to more popular forms of cosmopolitanism, such as the cosmopolitanism encountered in the Brazilian favelas, that can account for a more vibrant and innovative articulation of cosmopolitanism from below. This cosmopolitanism of the poor as theorized by Silviano Santiago in the context of Afro-Brazilian culture is a way of subscribing to the multiple(s) contained in the notion of cosmopolitanism(s), a form of resistance to mainstream culture as well as the reality of the postmodern megapolises that are serviced by those poor ethnic and socially marginalized groups. But the culture of the poor finds expression in other cosmopolitanisms and transnational cultural forms too, such as Kizomba, an African word meaning an encounter of identities, which is now becoming a dance hype around the world. Originating in Angola, it was transmitted through slavery and black culture to Brazil to transfer further in modern times from the global south to the north, where many Kizomba festivals abound. Kizomba has moved away from its roots in a history of trauma and suffering to become a celebration of multicultural consumption (Kabir 2013). Cosmopolitanisms is full of complex negotiations between what the term cosmopolitanism has meant in its overused history and the obligations it has for its future aspiration. As Robbins points out in his chapter on “George Orwell, Cosmopolitanism, and Global Justice,” cosmopolitanism is still pretty much about our obligations to others, not only in “emotional” terms, by suffering with them, but also as an economic recognition of the need for a redistribution between rich and poor (the rich having clearly benefitted from the poor in material, symbolic, and ideological ways) if we think global justice means pushing for a more equitable distribution of the world’s material resources. The question Robbins poses is a central one: “…is it possible to see the new cosmopolitanism as also a redistributive cosmopolitanism?” (43). The waning of the nation-state and the rise of transnational neoliberal models has also meant the collapse of the welfare state (at least for those countries that actually had one) and with it the erosion of national solidarity and, in tandem, international solidarity. This connects to David A. Hollinger and his “Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Solidarity,” which goes beyond that of the color divide. For Achille Mbembe, “Afropolitanism” is the cosmopolitan awareness of African origin, which rejects the essentialist and nativist discourse of Negritude and Pan-Africanism. Afropolitanism is also not just about being in the diaspora and a classy African citizen of the world (see figures such as Teju Cole or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Taiye Selasi or No Violet Bulawayo, often included in the new generation of glossy representatives of the African “identity” in the diaspora); it is more about a poetic and aesthetic that implies the multitudes of belonging without necessarily doing away with the politics of oppression and the violence inflicted on their continent and their people. But Afropolitanism or “Afropolitism” is more about Africans outside of Africa, who experience several “worlds” and develop a new transnational culture that draws on multiple legacies and rewrites African modernity. This is further elaborated by Emma Dabiri in her “The Problems and Pitfalls of Afropolitanism” in which she lays out her reservations about the term and the various debates and responses to the embracing or rejection of the new fandom. Though empowering and clearly celebratory, the term, which seems to have been used for the first time in 2005 by Taiye Selasi, reeks of neoliberal ideology. In this chapter, Dabiri distances herself from Achille Mbembe’s position on Afropolitanism, which according to him is a way of renouncing pernicious racialized thinking in favor of more fluid and interconnected identities (along the lines of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and his rejection of “black race” as a unifying code) (Gilroy 1993). Mbembe is also critical of the idea of African tradition, as such a mythology reminds us of Fanon’s warning against the pitfalls of nationalism. Yet Dabiri’s reservations about the consumeristic nature of Afropolitanism, seen as a boutique for African commodities packaged in intellectual attire, remain. The Afropolitan class (or elite class) replicates so many of the clichés and privileges associated with old European notions of cosmopolitanism; furthermore, how does it contribute to the improvement of conditions on the African continent and the salvaging from the rapacious operations of the IMF and World Bank? This is of course the warning that Ellis Cashmore gave in his book The Black Cultural Industry (1997): the commodification of hip-hop and rap has not meant financial revenues for either the black groups or their surroundings, but primarily income for the record labels, often controlled by white people. Moreover, the consumption of “black music” has not automatically fostered cultural integration or understanding among different groups but, as Cashmore writes, has created a cordon sanitaire around the dangers and risks of blackness by consuming, at a safe distance, some of its products and spirit (Cashmore 1997). This is also Paul Gilroy’s position. He has argued that commodification has destroyed what was wonderful about black culture to the advantage of corporate interests, though he stills see the contradictions and potentiality of music as a unique transmitter of cultures across diaspora (Gilroy 1993, 2011).

    If, for Dabiri, Afropolitanism is too glossy, polite, and compromised by its associations with big business and capitalism, and too much a digestible narrative of Africa rising that the West is willing to promote and embrace, we should not forget that Afropolitanism is not homogenous in itself, and following the adoption of the plural in cosmopolitanisms, we might dare to address it in its plural form, Afropolitanisms. Even though it may not be an alternative to Adichie’s “danger of a single story” and is too close to African narratives of Afro-pessimism and poverty porn, it is also something that should not be denied the power of resistance and criticism just because of its “stylistic” embracement of a “hipster” African experience. As I argued elsewhere, the postcolonial cultural industry is not just about the fashionability of Third World culture on sale. It is also a way of striking back by at times “formally” abiding by the rules of the marketplace while undermining the very system from within (Ponzanesi, 2014). It would be unfair to disregard the impact of writers such as Chimamanda Adichie and her critique of Western visions of race and African identities as merely cool and trivial because of her great popularity and success among Western readers. This would lead the debate back to the diatribe between Wole Soyinka (who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986) and Chinweizu, who claimed that Soyinka had won not as a true representative of the African continent but because he had applied enough “Africanesque patina and inlays to satisfy Western tourist taste for exotica” (in Gibbs and Lindfors 1993: 346). The decision to give the first Nobel Prize in Literature for an African writer to Soyinka rather than the much older Senghor, father of the Negritude movement, was interpreted as the Swedish Academy’s preference for a postcolonial, avant-gardist and therefore globally more palatable writer over the old, anti-colonial, black nationalist, and francophone writer. Besides reflecting the competition between two linguistic centers, Paris and London, this was also due to the anti-colonial struggle’s loss of traction in the new era of rampant globalization. The debate between Mbembe and Dabiri has wider implications not only for the idea of Afropolitanism but also for the recent uprising in South Africa with the Rhodes Must Fall movement. Monuments of European heritage were attacked and libraries were burned as all knowledge stemming from the West and from the Empire was seen as ideologically tainted and oppressive. However, as Achille Mbembe responded (2016), to burn Western books is not a way to decolonize the university and start all over with a clean slate. He notes that history is not the same as memory and that we cannot just erase history; we should engage with memory as a way of putting history to rest, especially histories of suffering, trauma, and victimization (Mbembe 2016: 30). I believe that this current take on cosmopolitanism, from the global south, can contribute to a revamping of the term, not for purely intellectual and academic practices, but to initiate new economic mobilities that would have otherwise not been possible. In his contribution, “Accra’s Cosmopolitan Constellations,” Ato Quayson brings the world to Africa, and in a way reverses the claim of Afropolitanism as Africans being diasporic in the world. Here instead, the cities in the global south are shown as not only the new metropolises, but also the places where new forms of cosmopolitanism(s) take place and materialize through an urban scriptural economy: billboards, posters, advertisements contributing to a mixing of oral and written imported traditions, now hybridized and shaped anew. What Quayson argues is that Accra has always been a place of transnational connections, and the interconnectedness to global cultures has been going on for a very long time. He claims that “The world of Facebook, Twitter, and Gollywood is but one instalment of this continuing transnationalism” and that despite the usual claims of Africa as the underbelly of the world, people in Africa have the same “capacity for reimagining the world as do people born in Mississauga, or New Jersey, or Bromley or Leiden” (219). Talking about the Afro-Brazilian returnees from Bahia to Accra (Tabon) in the nineteenth century, as a group of Africans from the faraway lands of enslavement, the process of settling into their new homeland was far from smooth, underlining the fact that even in Africa ethnicity and multiraciality can give rise to xenophobia and conflict. If this still makes cosmopolitanism a requisite of the middle classes and transnational groups, then cosmopolitanism has little impact on a local level. However, if cosmopolitanism becomes a choice among the many identities available, some of which are deeply ethnic, then it can be considered part of constellations that are already intrinsic to African culture and future imaginations. The quizzical afterword by Anthony Appiah shows this through a personal anecdote. Appiah’s complex extended family is an example of a globally interconnected world. Appiah’s notion of cosmopolitanism remains anchored in the idea of dialogue and conversation across cultures, in order to reach if not agreement at least fair conditions for disagreement. Appiah’s notion of cosmopolitan cohabitation is something we cannot escape. In addition to the invocation of cohabitation and conversation as the only way forward to rescue cosmopolitanism, I would invoke the figuration of connections as also raised by Craig Calhoun in his chapter on “A Cosmopolitanism of Connections.” “We have heard many times that we now live in an interconnected world, but what does that mean exactly? That we all have Wi-Fi? That we all live in a platform society? That we all watch the same Netflix series? That we live in a borderless world?” As Calhoun writes: “We are connected but incompletely” (198). We have responsibilities because of these connections, which affect us and others, and are not just marked by abstract similarities. The specificities for these interactions vary according to the individual, cultural context, and historical period, so connections are not abstract figurations. Therefore, cosmopolitanism is not only about the easy mobility of the privileged, or the forced mobility of the disadvantaged, but about specific webs of connections that position us in the world, and function at different scales, from the local to the global. And because of digital connectivity we can navigate different worlds at the same time, belong to different constituencies without renouncing either the local, or the national or even the global. It is in the hypertextual embrace of multiple paths that cosmopolitanisms might offer new opportunities for thinking and feeling beyond methodological nationalisms.

     

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    Safran, William. 1991. “Diasporas in Modern Societies. Myth of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora 1, no. 1: 83-99.

    Skrbis, Zlakto and Ian Woodward. 2007. “The Ambivalence of Ordinary Cosmopolitanism: Investigating the Limits of Cosmopolitan Openness.” Sociological Review 55, no. 4: 730–47.

    Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador.

    Spivak, Gayatri C. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271-313. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

    Spivak, Gayatri C. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Titley, Gavan. 2005. “Accidental Cosmopolitanism. Connectivity, Insistence and Cultural Experience.” PhD diss., Dublin City University at Dublin, Ireland. http://doras.dcu.ie/18245/.

    Werbner, Pnina. 1999. “Global Pathways: Working-Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds.” Social Anthropology 7, no. 1: 17–35.

    Webner, Pnina. 2006. “Understanding Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” Anthropology News 47, no. 5: 7–11.

    Webner, Pnina. 2006. “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” Theory, Culture & Society 23, nos. 2–3: 496-98.

    [1] Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (1964).

  • Bruce Robbins – Thank You For Your Service

    Bruce Robbins – Thank You For Your Service

    by Bruce Robbins

    Even if they haven’t seen the movie, people above a certain age will remember Jack Nicholson’s final speech in A Few Good Men: “You don’t want the truth, because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.” Nicholson, a colonel in the Marines, is confessing to his guilt for having had one of his men beaten to death. He confesses because he believes he was right, and he believes that, deep down in places they don’t talk about at parties, his fellow Americans know he was right. Sometimes defending the nation will require breaking the rules.  It will require getting your hands dirty.

    In the midst of America’s many high-energy debates about immigration and the building and manning of walls, there is a simple moral truth that has been overlooked.  It’s that truth, I think, that has made this maiden effort by Aaron Sorkin one of the most quoted speeches in Hollywood history.  It’s the same truth that gives such emotional sizzle to the formula “thank you for your service,” and does so even when those words sound, as they often do, and not just to veterans, shallow, ignorant, and insufficient.  The truth is that we depend on people far away over the horizon, doing and suffering unspeakable things so that we can live our more or less ordinary, more or less comfortable lives.  We are the beneficiaries of their labors.  And we know it.

    This is clear enough where the subject is the uniformed men and women who are placed, as the saying goes, “in harm’s way.” As an Air Force pilot told journalist David Wood in 2014, “There are two kinds of people: those who serve, and those who expect to be served.”  The thing is, this division of humanity doesn’t only apply to civilians thinking about what is done and suffered by soldiers. As the pilot’s words involuntarily suggest, it also applies to patrons being served in a restaurant–very likely by people who have also come from somewhere beyond the horizon.  It applies to anyone who has a cup of coffee or checks her iPhone.  We are also the beneficiaries of the people who cultivated the coffee beans and put the chips in the iPhone. Many of whom have to deal with as much harm and unpleasantness as the soldiers who serve the country overseas.

    They too get their hands dirty. Perhaps dirtier.  And again, we know it.  The rash of suicides at Foxconn, where many of the chips are manufactured, became common knowledge in 2010, as did the installing of suicide nets to stop more workers from throwing themselves off the roof and further threats of mass suicide in 2016.  Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer, has been accused of exploiting its workers under conditions “analogous to slavery.”  When we pronounce the innocent-sounding words “global economic inequality,” what we’re talking about is violence on the other side of the wall.

    In spite of this knowledge, little is being done about global economic inequality. Why not? It’s not enough to say that poor foreigners don’t vote in American elections. They don’t but neither do many poor Americans.  Where Americans feel responsible, they are often willing to take some sort of action.  The problem is that most people don’t feel responsible–don’t feel personally responsible–for global economic inequality. And as Yascha Mounk argued in The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice and the Welfare State, published by Harvard last year, we have been told again and again that the only real responsibility is personal responsibility.

    That’s why it’s good to remember “thank you for your service.”

    Anyone who pronounces those words of heartfelt gratitude or resonates to them when they are pronounced by others is offering evidence that they do, after all, believe in collective responsibility. Collective responsibility: our responsibility as beneficiaries of the system to feel the weight of what is done on our behalf beyond the horizon and to make sure that those who do it are justly rewarded for it.  If we are capable of feeling collectively responsible for the actions of the military, then we should be able to expand the geographical and social scale of our gratitude. Why should it not extend from those who serve not with arms, but by their work?  Why should it not pass from Americans on the wall (whom you may still want to reserve the right to judge) to non-Americans in the fields, on the assembly lines, and sometimes trying to escape violence by passing over to our side of the wall?  Deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you know you owe them, too, a debt.

    Bruce Robbins is the author of The Beneficiary, which came out from Duke University Press in December 2017.

     

  • Bruce Robbins–On the Non-representation of Atrocity

    Bruce Robbins–On the Non-representation of Atrocity

    by Bruce Robbins

    The closing day of the V21 conference featured a formal keynote address by Bruce Robbins, followed by responses.  While the keynote practices a rousing, engaged, presentist, theoretical Victorian studies, the responses by Zach Samalin and Molly Clark Hillard, and the heated discussions at the symposium, point to other futures. Elaine Hadley integrated a number of the arcs of discussion while also highlighting what remains to be argued. We are grateful to b2o for providing this catalyst for yet more.    

    This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

    Toward the end of Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient (1992), the young Canadian ex-nurse Hana writes in a letter home to her stepmother: “From now on, I believe the personal will forever be at war with the public” (Ondaatje 1992, 292).

    Hana has just heard about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, news that has shocked her Sikh lover Kip into leaving both her and the anti-Nazi war effort.  The unending war between the public and the personal that Hana dates “from now on” is the result of what we have come to call an atrocity: an act of extreme cruelty that is collective, unnecessary, and indiscriminate, the latter two adjectives judged to apply because (here I quote Jacques Sémelin’s definition of “massacre” in his book Purify and Destroy) it is “aimed at destroying non-combatants” (Sémelin 2007: 4). I will withhold comment for now on whether the war between the public and the personal (which echoes a vocabulary put in play a few years earlier by Fredric Jameson) is as new as Hana thinks; it sounds pretty Victorian to me.  But the atom bomb was definitely new.  And as a concept, the atrocity is also pretty new.  The idea of the “non-combatant” dates only from the Napoleonic Wars.  Both “non-combatant” and “atrocity” would seem to require the modern weakening of membership–the still recent assumption that individuals should not be held responsible for actions taken by the families or nations to which they belong.  “Cruel” and “fierce,” the meanings of “atrox,” the Latin source word for “atrocity,” did not begin their lives as pejoratives, but picked up pejorative meanings only as physical violence came to seem a less dependable aspect of ordinary lives, something that generally could and should be avoided.  The re-classification of violence as out of the ordinary is again associated, perhaps only wishfully, with modernity.

    But you only feel how very modern Ondaatje’s naming of the atom bomb as atrocity is when you add one more element.  Kip and Hana are recoiling from an action performed by their own side.  This is a moment of civilizational self-accusation.  It belongs to the very special subset of atrocity-response in which “we” accuse ourselves of doing something outrageously cruel, collective, and indiscriminate to “others.”

    Yes, Ondaatje is a Canadian and a Sri Lankan; Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five might have been a better as well as an earlier example.  And yes, to play up the look-at-us-admitting-the terrible-things-we-did-to-others criterion, as I’m preparing to do, could be seen as a celebratory re-write of Enlightenment self-scrutiny, in other words as a way of once again giving credit to the modern West for a virtue on which it has often prided itself, perhaps excessively.  Undeterred by these objections, I am going to forge ahead, assigning atrocity as self-accusation an important part in the long-term moral history of humankind and indicating a desire, at least, to place the novel within that larger history.  This of course assumes there exists such a thing as the long-term moral history of humankind.  It assumes that history need not be understood as a finer and finer discrimination of differences (a habit that I think the V21 group has very usefully expressed its impatience with) but can also be thought of as a series of experiments in the synthesis of differences—bold generalities, even “grand narratives.”

    It’s from the perspective of the long-term moral history of humankind that the question of atrocity is most interesting, and most humbling, for specialists in nineteenth-century British literature.  In the late 1970s, the editors of the journal New Left Review conducted a book-length series of interviews with Raymond Williams.  The interview that hit me hardest at the time dealt with Williams’ admiration for the novels of the 1840s, about which I had just heard him lecture.[i]  “In that decade,” the interviewers say,

    there occurred a cataclysmic event, far more dramatic than anything that happened in England, a very short geographical distance away, whose consequences were directly governed by the established order of the English state.  That was of course the famine in Ireland—a disaster without comparison in Europe.  Yet if we consult the two maps of either the official ideology of the period or the recorded subjective experience of its novels, neither of them extended to include this catastrophe right on their doorstep, causally connected to socio-political processes in England. (Williams 1981, 170)

    If this is true for catastrophic events in Europe, how much more true is it, the interviewers ask, for more distant colonies like India, where events were again directly affected by the imperial system?

    The NLR interviewers are asking us to imagine that even the English literature of the 1840s we most admire today was unable to represent disasters or cataclysmic events for which England was itself responsible, directly or indirectly.  It does not seem implausible that atrocity-representation in the narrow, self-accusatory sense might simply be missing from the history of the 19th century novel.  If you think of its greatest works, direct representations of any atrocity are certainly not the first things that come to mind.  We know our authors could express horror at the 1857 Mutiny in India or the Bulgarian Atrocities (committed by the Ottomans) or King Leopold’s mischief in the Congo or the occasional scene of mob violence.  But perhaps they simply could not summon up any English equivalent to Vonnegut’s horror at the Allied bombing of Dresden.  Perhaps the English could not imagine accusing themselves, at least not from the viewpoint of the non-English, at least not when the accusation would have been damning.  Were we to accept this hypothesis, which I offer up here as nothing more than a hypothesis, it seems clear that some of the going rationales for nineteenth-century studies, and maybe even for literary criticism in general, would be in jeopardy.

    In self-defense, we could of course argue that the criterion of self-accusation is unacceptably presentist. How could one expect the great epoch of European realism to “do” atrocity in the particular, self-accusing sense? Arguably such representations only became possible after European civilization has been shocked out of its pre-Copernican complacency by, for example, the Holocaust and the rise of anti-colonial movements. In the nineteenth century, those shocks were still to come. It would therefore be anachronistic to expect European literature to have re-set its default settings, which were presumably nationalist or at least national, and to have experimented even intermittently with cosmopolitan self-consciousness. Another field-defensive move would be to focus on the canon’s experimental outliers. As some of you probably know, there exists a body of scholarship qualifying the claim that outside Ireland the Irish Famine did indeed go unrepresented. Much of that scholarship deals with minor works by Trollope. To me, those works seem both aesthetically and politically uninspiring. But perhaps one can do better. More inspiring, among the potential counter-examples, would be Multatuli’s 1860 novel Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, which has been credited with starting the anti-colonial movement in Indonesia.  Or Tolstoy’s final work of fiction, Hadji Murat.

    Hadji Murat is set during the mid-19th century Russian conquests of the East that Tolstoy himself participated in as a young man and that so neatly mirror the genocide of the Native Americans that the US was carrying out in the same years in the American West.  At one point it describes the destruction of an indigenous village in the Caucasus in what would now be called Chechnya.  Tolstoy shows us the army’s burning of the Chechen village through the eyes of a Russian soldier.  The Russian’s mind is elsewhere, preoccupied with a theme that could not be more conventional for people like him: money he has lost at cards.  For him it is an unremarkable day, so the reader sees nothing remarkable: “War presented itself to him only as a matter of subjecting himself to danger, to the possibility of death, and thereby earning awards, and the respect of his comrades here and of his friends in Russia. . . . The mountaineers [he does not call them Chechens] presented themselves to him only as dzhigit horsemen from whom one had to defend oneself” (Tolstoy 2009: 78). Given this failure of imagination on the Russian side, the narrator must step in and, somewhat intrusively, make a connection on the next page that no one within the novel’s world is there to make:

    The aoul devastated by the raid was the one in which Hadji Murat had spent the night before his coming over to the Russians. . . . When he came back to his aoul, [Sado, at whose house we have seen Hadji Murat greeted hospitably in the novel’s first scene despite the extreme danger the host is in] found his saklya destroyed: the roof had fallen in, the door and posts of the little gallery were burned down, and the inside was befouled. His son, the handsome boy with shining eyes who had looked rapturously at Hadji Murat, was brought dead to the mosque on a horse covered by a burka. He had been stabbed in the back with a bayonet. (Tolstoy 2009, 79).

    The sentence about the child bayoneted in the back does not end the paragraph.  There is no pause for the drawing of conclusions, moral or otherwise.  It’s as if, from a Russian point of view, a Chechen child who has been bayonetted in the back is not ethically or emotionally forceful enough to interrupt the flow of narration, not enough to justify even the briefest of hesitations.  It’s not surprising that Tolstoy could not get that book published in full in his country in his lifetime.  It’s surprising that he left this record at all.

    Something could no doubt be said about the depiction in nineteenth-century literature of the poor and the homeless as internal aliens, hence sufficiently “other” to count as victims of atrocity in my limited sense.  I’m thinking of, say, Victor Hugo (the army firing on the barricades in Les Misérables) or Bleak House’s description of the death of Jo: “And dying thus around us every day” (Dickens 1998, 677).   One could also go back to the criterion that the NLR interviewers apply to Raymond Williams (and that Williams himself does not dispute): the premise that criticism should aim to reconstruct, through literature, “the total historical process at the time” (Williams 1981, 170).  Who says the novelists of the 1840s were obliged to talk about the Irish Famine, a (to them) invisible part of the (to us) larger causal system?[i] Perhaps this is asking for something the novel simply could not and even cannot deliver. Perhaps we should content ourselves with what it can deliver, even if that seems a humbler thing.  This line of thinking may have encouraged some critics to urge a dialing back of the political and ethical claims we make.  A modest anti-presentism of this sort would certainly make it easier for those 19th century specialists who are professionally uncomfortable with atrocity to return to what they were already doing, undisturbed by any nagging sense of responsibility to imperatives they see as coming from outside the field.

    My own impulse is not to back down from “the total historical process” criterion.  Which means I’m stuck with atrocity, however presentist the topic may seem.  What I’d like to try out therefore is a different negotiation between present imperatives and period loyalties, between history as the proliferation of differences (differences that may turn out to be trivial) and history as synthesis (synthesis that avoids triviality but could seem to lack rigor as the field defines it).

    The concept of atrocity may be new, but the thing of course is not. It seems admirable to me that much new scholarship is willing to hold off on the familiar nominalist-historicist move (there is no true history but the recent history of the name, the concept) and instead to take on the deeper history of as yet unnamed things, a trans-historical history much of which (like the atrocity) is inescapably pre-modern.  I’m thinking for example of the thunderous “no!” to periodization itself that is proclaimed in Susan Stanford Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms and the challenge to “periodizing divisions between premodern and modern” in the introduction that Saher Amer and Laura Doyle wrote to ”Reframing Postcolonial and Global Studies in the Longer Durée,” a special section of the latest PMLA (Friedman 2015, 331). Both texts accuse conventional periodization of sustaining Eurocentrism.  It seems to me that both share important concerns with the V21 manifesto and its impatience with period-centered thinking.

    I hope you agree that the V21 project belongs in the context of a broader acknowledgment that learning to work in an enlarged, trans-period time scale is no longer optional.  The reasons behind this new temporal common sense are not unfamiliar, but it may be helpful to gather a few of them together. Among the best known is the emergence of the term “anthropocene” to mark the salience of an ecological perspective at the level of the planet.  Among the least known is the emergence of an international movement of indigenous peoples, one premise of which is that colonialism is not something done solely by European settlers or done solely after 1492.  Joining the two are books like Pekka Hämälainen’s The Comanche Empire, which gives the Comanches credit, if that’s the right word, for themselves practicing colonialism, and justifies their conduct (again, if justifying remains a pertinent concept) in terms of their superior ecological adaptation.  Logically enough, the new sub-disciplines of “world” history and “big” history are notable for an impulse, sometimes conscious and sometimes not, to do without moral judgment entirely. Some declare that to arrange history around the values of “democracy,” for example, would be inexcusably teleological and provincial. The same vector appears in another important zone of temporal stretching: the postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism. Here of course it seems even more paradoxical, dependent as postcolonial studies has been on a politicized model of European core, non-European periphery. But as Alexander Beecroft has argued, this model, useful enough for the recent past, simply doesn’t apply for most of the world’s cultures during most of the world’s history. China and India two or three or four thousand years ago were in no sense peripheries to Europe’s core.  It would be temporally parochial, therefore, to take the particular inequalities and injustices of the recent past as a guide to the interpretation of Indian or Chinese culture. Thus the cosmopolitanism with which we are most familiar, call it cosmopolitanism in space, brings with it a corresponding cosmopolitanism in time, and this temporal cosmopolitanism ends up undermining habits of ethico-political judgment based on an outmoded core-periphery geography. Here I am re-describing the emergence of a somewhat depoliticized “world literature” out of a very political “postcolonial studies.” For better or worse, re-describing it in this way makes it harder to complain about.

    Expanding our time-frame seems inevitable. As does some evening out of the blame for imperialism, which can no longer seem the moral burden of Europe alone. The long-term question for V21, it seems to me, is how to manage this expansion beyond the period while sustaining the moral and political commitments that make the critical enterprise worth doing at all.  The immediate question is where in this revisionist scale and sense of history I can find a home for my interest in atrocity, an interest that takes for granted the centrality of critique.

    From this perspective, the first thing I notice about interesting new work on an expanded time-scale is that atrocity tends to get left out. For Amer and Doyle, the familiar European version of imperialism was only one in a long series of imperialisms before 1500, many of them non-European. Rather than insisting that the presence or absence of capitalism made all the difference, they suggest, we need to find a way of talking about European and non-European imperialisms in the same breath. That seems right. But what this can mean in practice is that imperialism’s violence is omitted, perhaps because it is assumed that moral critique of imperialism would be anachronistic and/or Eurocentric or because blaming has come to seem pointless and irrelevant.  Hence there is no vocabulary for atrocities. Historically speaking, Amer and Doyle are gradualists. The premodern for them was already modern; the difference is merely a matter of detail and degree. From their moderate anti-periodization position, anything that looks like violent rupture, such as modernity, is actually always the result of small, slow accretions.  It’s as if their distaste for violent rupture at the level of periodization is duplicated in a distaste for violence as social content. Violence exists for them, of course, but not as a conundrum; it’s not interesting enough to demand interpretation. What’s interesting about the world’s interconnectedness is commercial contact and cultural exchange. There are empires, but when it’s pre-moderns or (especially) non-Europeans who are doing the slaughtering and conquering, what suddenly kicks in is a great deal of respect for the empire-builders and for the cultural consequences of their empire- building.  Coercion is not absolutely forgotten, but it’s rarely stage center. This is arguably just as presentist as the older focus on domination and atrocity, but it’s presentist in a different way: a projection onto the past of globalization’s smug, all-cultures-are-equal case, a case which does not harp on inequalities of economic and political power.

    The closest Susan Stanford Friedman comes to a statement on imperial coercion is as follows: “empires typically intensify the rate of rupture and accelerate change in ways that are both dystopic and utopic” (Friedman 2015, 337). What she calls “brutalities” can of course be recognized, but only as a general phenomenon that 1) is balanced in advance by the “utopic” aspects of empire, and in part for that reason, 2) is in no way interesting or worthy of being investigated (Friedman 2015, 337). The problem here is not the reluctance to innovate of a sluggish, fuddy-duddy field.  The problem is the innovation, an anti-rupture position that makes things like atrocity harder to see, or to teach.  Sometimes that seems to be the whole point of innovating. I think for example of Rita Felski’s mobilizing of Actor Network Theory against “the rhetoric of negativity that has dominated literary studies in recent years: a heavy reliance on critique and the casting of aesthetic value in terms of negation, subversion, and rupture.”

    Neither history’s narrative form nor its social content can be all rupture all the time.  But unless it has rupture in it, it’s not history at all.  And even those of us who are most impatient with the restrictiveness of existing periodization should not want, finally, to give up on history as such.  Laura Doyle notes that there were slave revolts in the Abbasid Empire of the 9th century just as there were “anticolonial movements” in the twentieth century (Doyle 2015, 345). This observation only becomes genuinely historical if one goes on to ask whether the slave revolts of the 9th century might have been different in kind–more precisely, whether they were in fact anti-colonial or anti-imperialist.  They may have been, and they may not have been. These may have been slaves who not unreasonably preferred to have slaves rather than to be slaves.  The difference is important.  In order to know, you would have to be interested not just in the history of imperialism, but in the history of anti-imperialism.  You would have to decide that anti-imperialism has a history.  It’s the difference between asking when people were merely complaining that we suffer under imperial rule (probably as long as there have been conquests) and when they began saying that others may have suffered under our rule–a universalizing moment that is probably more recent and more rare. This would bring us back to the representation of atrocity as self-accusation.

    If there was a moment when the feeling “I am angry at your country for conquering mine and ruling it by a harsher standard than you apply to your own” metamorphosed into something like “it is wrong for any country, including my own, to conquer any other,” wouldn’t we want to know something about it?  It might turn out that this only occurs with or after that violent rupture we call modernity.  As a historical fact, wholesale raping, pillaging, plundering, and slaughtering are of course characteristic of many if not most pre-modern societies.  I think for example of the ethnic cleansing of the Midianites in the Old Testament, which raises a red flag for Moses only because his troops left the very old and the very young Midianites alive, alongside the nubile maidens, and therefore had to be told to go back and finish the job.  The chapter on the ancient Near East and classical Greece in David Johnston’s magisterial history of justice concludes that “commitments to freedom and equality” are “nowhere to be seen” in the domestic laws of ancient world, but it doesn’t even bother to ask about foreign policy–about the possible existence of scruples as to, say, violence against members of other groups, tribes, nations (Johnston 2011, 15).   For “our” treatment of “them,” there were no rules.  As Michael Freeman says in the entry for “Genocide” in the Dictionary of Ethics, Theology and Society: “Genocide was not a moral problem for the ancient world.  It is for the modern world because moral and political values have changed” (Clarke and Linzey 1996, 403). As everyone knows, the Greek word from which we get apology, apologia, “does not involve an acknowledgement of transgression and, thus, needs no request for pardon or forgiveness” (Lazare 2004, 24). Atrocity is everywhere in ancient times, but not (to my knowledge) as representation.  In the West, at any rate—I can’t speak for other cultures, and I have some trouble pretending to speak for the West—it is only when “the moral and political values have changed” that one can expect to see representations of atrocity.  If we say that the atrocity is a construct, one thing we would mean is that in order for it to be discussed, a moral norm that it violates first had to emerge or be invented.  It’s in this sense that, even if representations of atrocity are indeed missing from the great literature of the 19th century, the atrocity is also a nineteenth century topic.

    I am not talking here about Steven Pinker’s highly questionable argument that modernity is in some fundamental way opposed to violence.  (This from someone whose book has no entry in its index for “colonialism”!)  I am talking only about the emergence of moral norms, whether or not those norms were violated in practice.  This story is untellable without the nineteenth century.  You know the moments of emergence I have in mind: the transfer of Jacobin ideals to the Haitian Revolution, Burke on Warren Hastings, Marx on the British in India, Henri Dunant deciding at Solferino that warfare had to be regulated, Tolstoy deciding that the Chechens should be permitted to survive as Chechens, and so on. I think it’s also a story that we could find, if we chose to look, entangled in the forms of the 19th century canon.

    What would it say about us if, for fear of falling into Whiggish triumphalism, we turned out to be incapable of acknowledging even that moral history, partial and incomplete and unsatisfying as it is?  One thing it would say is that we prefer to leave atrocity without a history.  I hope we don’t.  There is of course a deep, largely unacknowledged tension between the working assumptions of the humanities and the idea of progress—progress even as a possibility.  Any admission of possible progress threatens the value of canonical texts. That’s arguably why we have been so eager to prostrate ourselves before Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History rather than asking, in a secular and open-minded way, whether what we see before us is really nothing but an ever-increasing accumulation of ruins.

    According to Helen Small’s definition in The Value of the Humanities, the humanities “respect the products of past human endeavors in culture, even when superseded” (Small 2013, 57).  “Even when superseded” is a phrase you don’t hear much in literature departments.  To admit that cultural products and endeavors might ever be “superseded” is to call in question our presumptive respect or rather reverence for them, which Small is trying here to affirm, and that is a prospect that critics less courageous than she is would prefer not to recognize.  And yet there are moments when, like Helen Small, we are all brave enough to admit to some some progressive thinking.  About our assumptions on race, class, gender, and sexuality, which we assume (correctly) to have improved.  Or about “our own work.”

    In her book The Deaths of the Author, Jane Gallop notices that when Gayatri Spivak talks about her work as the author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, she uses the word “progress,” as in the sentence, “My book charts a practitioner’s progress” (Gallop 2011, 130). “‘Progress,’ Gallop goes on, “does not seem like a word one would expect Spivak to use.  The word ‘progress’ generally denotes the most triumphant relation to temporality.  ‘Progress’ here represents the least troubled or troubling, the most positive version of a writer’s change over time” (Gallop 2011, 130).  In fact, she concludes, this somewhat conventional phrasing is “quite atypical of the book” (Gallop 2011, 131).[iii]

    A similar inconsistency pops up in Max Weber’s famous lecture Wissenschaft als Beruf (Scholarship as a Vocation).  It is the strong argument of that lecture that we have fallen into what Weber calls polytheism, a somewhat melancholic condition in which progress is impossible because each collectivity follows its own gods and there is no commonly shared membership, no overarching religious or political principle that would adjudicate among them or mark out any course of action as an advance over any other.  And yet Weber also says that scholars-to-be must resign themselves to seeing their work rendered obsolescent by those researchers who come afterwards.  Unlike art, where “there is no progress,” Weber says, scholarship or Wissenschaft (the translation calls it “science”) “is chained to the course of progress” (Weber 1946, 137).  “In science,” as a result, “each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years.  That is the fate to which science is subjected; it is the very meaning of scientific work … Every scientific ‘fulfilment’ raises new ‘questions’; it asks to be ‘surpassed’ and outdated.  Whoever wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this fact” (Weber 1946, 138). If our work will be surpassed and outdated, that is not just something to which we have to resign ourselves; it’s not just a grim fate to which we are “chained.” It’s also a fact that ought to give us a certain satisfaction. It means we belong to a collectivity which recognizes the value of our work, takes advantage of it, and builds on it. The suggestion here is that you would need to feel you belong to a relatively tight collectivity in order to be able to experience progress. So there is such a thing as progress after all— progress at the level of research, progress within the community of scholars, provided that the community of scholars really is in a strong sense a community.

    I have made a little collection of instances like these in which a scholar will deny progress in general but affirm it within the domain of scholarship.  The point is not to poke fun.  This apparent contradiction can be explained, I think, without any indignity to the scholars concerned.  The reason we can acknowledge progress within scholarship is that as scholars we feel ourselves to belong to a collectivity. As citizens, on the other hand, collectivity of this sort is not something we tend to experience on a regular basis or indeed to seek out. At a recent conference on Stuart Hall, I found myself saying that if Hall defended the now old-fashioned-sounding idea of “theoretical gains,” it was because he thought of himself first and foremost not as a writer and scholar but as a member of a movement. If you are a member of a movement, you have a rough measure by which progress can be calculated. Progress is no longer unthinkable or embarrassing.  Hall’s example is worth contemplating, and not just so as to achieve consistency. I don’t see why those of us who think of ourselves as progressives–and there are a lot of us– are so reluctant to seek real-world equivalents for the scholarly experience of collectivity, thereby permitting us to recognize in the world we write about more of the progress we sometimes recognize in our own writing.

    I’m not trying to encourage Whiggish or Eurocentric complacency.  At present, all I really have is questions and areas for further research. I for one would like to know how it was possible for Ishikawa Tatsuzo’s 1938 novel Soldiers Alive to document atrocities committed by his fellow Japanese against Chinese civilians within months of the 1937 Rape of Nanjing.[iv] Were there precedents in the Japanese literature of the 19th century that prepared for this extraordinary feat?  Or perhaps earlier?  I’m sure there is more than one path leading to national self-accusation, both on the global scale and within the various European traditions.  At whatever risk to the hypotheses advanced thus far, I would like to know more about Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus, with its extraordinary accounts of the atrocities committed during the Thirty Years’ war, or before that Bartolomé de las Casas, with his extraordinary accounts of atrocities committed during the Spanish conquest of the Americas, or before that Euripedes’s Trojan Women.  It seems odd to me that no one considered it essential to my education–that I was not taught, and still don’t know when North Americans became conscious that there might be an ethical problem with the genocide of the Native Americans. I’m convinced that with a little work, we could come up with trans-periodic constellations of both research and pedagogy that would link earlier and later texts, and would do so in a way that is concretely rather than abstractly respectful of the past—that is, would take the past as something more than an empty figure of resistance to a present about which all we need to know is that we are against it.

    The 19th century’s failure to produce representations of atrocity as self-accusation, if that is indeed the case, can be explained by the non-existence in the 19th century of a “public” on an international scale, a public capable of demanding or enforcing scrutiny of ourselves from outside.  Incomplete as it may be, it seems to me there is a story here about the emergence of such a public.  Publics get constructed. The process of construction takes time: alien voices must be gathered and listened to.  It also takes an attitude toward time.  We cannot imagine ourselves as engaged in the process of constructing anything if we see every “chain of events” as (you will recognize the quotation) “one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage on wreckage” (Benjamin 1969, 257).  What we ask our fellow specialists to join is a story with a future.

    References

    Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books.

    Clarke, Paul A. B., and Andrew Linzey. 1996. Dictionary of Ethics, Theology and Society. London: Routledge.

    Dickens, Charles. 1998. Bleak House. Edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Doyle, Laura. 2015.  “Inter-Imperiality and Literary Studies in the Longer Durée,” PMLA 130:2 March 2015, 336-347.

    Felski, Rita. no date. “Comparison, Translation, and Actor-Network Theory,” manuscript available from the author.

    Friedman, Susan Stanford. 2015. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Gallop, Jane. 2011. The Deaths of the Author Reading and Writing in Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Johnston, David. 2011. A Brief History of Justice. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

    Lazare, Aaron. 2004. On Apology. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Ondaatje, Michael. 1992. The English Patient. Vintage.

    Sémelin, Jacques. 2007. Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide. London: Hurst & Company.

    Small, Helen. 2013. The Value of the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Tolstoy, Leo. 2009. Hadji Murat. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage.

    Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Edited by Hans Heinrich Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Williams, Raymond. 1981. Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. London: Verso.

    Notes

    [i] I realized how hard the Williams/NLR interview hit me only after noticing, while preparing this essay, that I had already used it to begin one of my own early publications, an essay on Bleak House written in the 1980s and published in Homi Bhabha’s collection Nation and Narration.

    [ii] Perhaps this is not the proper or precise sense in which novels belong to history, and history belongs in novels.

    [iii] This and the following paragraph appear in my article “Hope,” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, posted November 2015, www.politicalconcepts.org/hope-bruce-robbins.

    [iv] Ishikawa was arrested by the Japanese authorities and convicted, but then released and allowed to return to China on condition that he never write anything like that again.  He didn’t.  Despite my complete ignorance, I have the fantasy of trying to create a global counter-history of such moments of national self-critique.

     

  • "The Absence of Imagination" by Bruce Robbins

    "The Absence of Imagination" by Bruce Robbins

    boundary 2 presented a talk “The Absence of Imagination” by editor and contributor Bruce Robbins at the University of Pittsburgh on March 30, 2015.

  • Bruce Robbins reports from MLA debate on Israel

    MLA 2014

    Bruce Robbins covers the recent MLA debate and resolution on Israel’s denials of entry of U.S. academics to the West Bank.

    Read his full article here.

  • Experiments in Listening–boundary 2 annual conference

    Experiments in Listening–boundary 2 annual conference

    **PLEASE NOTE THE LOCATION CHANGE FOR SATURDAY DUE TO THE HUGHES FIRE**

    Experiments in Listening

    Friday, January 24-Saturday January 25, 2025

    University of Southern California and California Institute of the Arts

    Supported by the MA Aesthetics and Politics program and the Herb Alpert School of Music at the California Institute of the Arts; the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab; the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts; and boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture. 

    With additional support from the Dean of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts; the USC Dornsife Graduate Dean and Divisional Vice Dean for the Humanities, the USC Department of Comparative Literature, and the USC Department of English. 

    This event is also supported by the Nick England Intercultural Arts Project Grant at CalArts. 

    Organized by Arne De Boever, Kara Keeling, Erin Graff Zivin, and Michael Pisaro-Liu. 

    “To anyone in the habit of thinking with their ears…” Thus begins Theodor W. Adorno’s famous essay “Cultural Criticism and Society”. But what does it mean to think with one’s ears? How does one get into the habit of it? And what are the critical and societal (ethical and political) benefits of thinking with one’s ears?

    “Experiments in Listening” proposes to address these questions starting from the experimental performing arts. Conceived between an arts institute, a university, and a contrarian international journal of literature and culture, the conference seeks to “emancipate the listener” (to riff on Jacques Rancière) into considering their ears as not only aesthetic but also political instruments that are as central to how we think, make, and live as our speech.

     

    Friday, January 24

    University of Southern California

    10am-12n

    ROOM: USC, Taper Hall of Humanities (THH) 309K

    boundary 2 editorial meeting for boundary 2 editors 

    Lunch for boundary 2 editors and conference speakers

    *

    1:30pm-3:15pm

    ROOM: USC, SCA 112

    Listening session/ Moderator: Erin Graff Zivin 

    Gabrielle Civil, “listening: in and out of place”

    Fumi Okiji, “To Listen Ornamentally” 

    Josh Kun, “Migrant Listening”

     

    3:30-5:30pm

    ROOM: USC, SCA 112

    Listening session/ Moderator: Kara Keeling

    Michael Ned Holte, “Looking for Air in the Waves”

    Mlondi Zondi, “Sound and Suffering” 

    Leah Feldman, “Azbuka Strikes Back”

    Nina Eidsheim, “Pussy Listening”

     

    6pm-7:30pm

    Dinner for conference speakers — USC

     

    8:00-10pm

    ROOM: CalArts DTLA building. 1264 West 1st Street. 

    8pm: Reception

    8:30pm: Screening of Omar Chowdhury, BAN♡ITS (17m22s, 2024) (in progress).

    Out near the porous, lawless eastern border between Bangladesh and India, a diasporic artist returns to make works with a band of washed up ban♡its who are obsessed with Heath Ledger’s Joker. As they comically re-enact their glorified past, we confront the divergent histories and philosophies of peasant banditry and political resistance and its unexpected causes and contexts. The resulting para-fiction questions its authorship and morality and asks: when the art world comes calling, who are the real ban♡its?

    9pm: Performance by Notnef Greco (Deviant Fond and Count G).

     

    Saturday, January 25

    The REEF building (1933 South Broadway, Los Angeles, California 90007)

    10-11:50am: 

    ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor 

    Coffee and pastries.

    Listening session/ Performance. Moderator: Arne De Boever

    Arne De Boever, “Silent Music”

    Michael Pisaro-Liu, “Experimental Music Workshop” (1 hour). Performance of Antoine Beuger, Für kurze Zeit geboren: für Spieler/ Hörer (beliebig viele)/ Born for a Short Time: For Performers/ Listeners (as many as you like) (1991). 

    Conference speakers will participate in the performance. Performance will be audio/video-recorded and posted at boundary 2 online. A livestream will be available here. Composer Antoine Beuger will be joining us for the Q&A after the performance via zoom. 

    Lunch for conference speakers–Commons, 12th floor

    1:30pm-3:15pm

    ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor

    Coffee and pastries.

    Listening session/ Moderator: Kara Keeling

    Gavin Steingo, “Whale Song Recordings”

    Natalie Belisle, “Inclination: The Kinaesthesis of Afro-Latin American Sound”

    Stathis Gourgouris, “The Julius Eastman – Arthur Russell Encounter”

     

    3:30-5:15pm

    ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor

    Listening session/ Moderator: Erin Graff Zivin

    Edwin Hill, “On Acoustic Jurisprudence”

    Bruce Robbins, “Listening On Campus” 

    Jonathan Leal, “If Anzaldúa Were a DJ, What Would She Spin?”

     

    5:30-6:15pm

    ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor

    Student Theory Slam/ Moderator: Arne De Boever

    Reina Akkoush 

    Jacob Blumberg

    Sean Seu

    Inger Flem Soto

    …

     

    6:30pm-8pm

    Dinner for conference speakers–Commons, 12th floor

     

    8pm 

    ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor

    8pm: Reception

    8:30pm: Tung-Hui Hu, “How to Loop Today”

     

    Listener Biographies

    Reina Akkoush is an award-winning Lebanese graphic and type designer currently pursuing an MA in Aesthetics and Politics at the California Institute of the Arts. Research interests include Middle Eastern design, Arabic typography, Marxist critical theory, cultural memory and decolonial thought in the global south. 

    Natalie L. Belisle is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at the University of Southern California, where her research and teaching focus on contemporary Caribbean and Afro-Latin American literature, cultural production, and aesthetics. Professor Belisle’s first book Caribbean Inhospitality: The Poetics of Strangers at Home will be published by Rutgers University Press in 2025. 

    Jacob Blumberg is an artist and producer working across the disciplines of music, film, photography, fine art, performance art, and religious art. Global in scope and local in focus, Jacob’s work as a collaborator and creator centers deep listening, voice, and play.

    Arne De Boever teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. He is the author of seven books on contemporary fiction and philosophy, as well as numerous articles, reviews, and translations. His new book Post-Exceptionalism: Art After Political Theology was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2025.

    Omar R. Chowdhury is a Bangladeshi artist and filmmaker. He creates para-fictional installations, films and performances that animate the fault lines of diasporic life and its various radical histories. He has had recent presentations and performances at Busan Biennial 2024 (South Korea), Contour Biennial 10 (Mechelen), Dhaka Art Summit, Beursschouwburg (Brussels), De Appel (Amsterdam), and screenings at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Film and Video Umbrella (London), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), and Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane) for Asia Pacific Triennial 8.

    Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. Her most recent performance memoir In & Out of Place (2024), encompasses her time living and making art in Mexico. The aim of her work is to open up space. 

    Nina Eidsheim is a vocalist, sound studies scholar and theorist. She brings extensive knowledge, experience and innovative approaches to practice-based research that focuses on sound and listening. The author of Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice and The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music. 

    Inger Flem Soto is a doctoral student in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at USC. She is interested in issues of sexual difference, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and Latin American feminist thought. Her dissertation focuses on the mother figure in Chilean works of literature and philosophy. 

    Stathis Gourgouris is professor of classics, English, and comparative literature and society at Columbia University. He is the author of several books on political philosophy, aesthetics, and poetics, the most recent being Nothing Sacred (2024).

    Edwin Hill is Associate Professor in the Department of French and the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His research lies at the African diasporic intersections of French and Francophone studies, sound and popular music studies, theories of race.

    Michael Ned Holte is a writer, curator, and educator living in Los Angeles. Since 2009, he has been a member of the faculty of the Program in Art at CalArts, and he currently serves as an Associate Dean of the School of Art. He is the author of Good Listener: Meditations on Music and Pauline Oliveros (Sming Sming Books, 2024). 

    Tung-Hui Hu is a poet and media scholar. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Greenhouses, Lighthouses, which grew out of his graduate studies in film, as well as two studies of digital culture, A Prehistory of the Cloud and Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection, an exploration of burnout, isolation, and disempowerment in the digital underclass. 

    Kara Keeling is Professor and Chair of Cinema and Media Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Keeling is author of Queer Times, Black Futures (New York University Press, 2019) and The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007). 

    Josh Kun is a cultural historian, author, curator, and MacArthur Fellow. He is Professor and Chair in Cross-Cultural Communication in the USC Annenberg School and is the inaugural USC Vice Provost for the Arts.

    Jonathan Leal (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Dreams in Double Time (Duke University Press, 2023), which received an Honorable Mention for Best Book of History, Criticism, and Culture from the Jazz Journalists Association. His next book, Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape, is under contract with Duke University Press. 

    Fumi Okiji is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She arrived at the academy by way of the London jazz scene and draws on sound practices to inform her writing. 

    Michael Pisaro-Liu is a guitarist and composer. Recordings of his music can be found on Edition Wandelweiser, erstwhile records, elsewhere music, Potlatch, another timbre, ftarri, winds measure and other labels. Pisaro-Liu is the Director of Composition and Experimental Music at CalArts. 

    Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author of Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (1993), Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (2012), and, most recently, Atrocity: A Literary History (2025).

    Gavin Steingo is a professor in the Department of Music at Princeton University. He is working on a series of books and articles about whales, music, politics, and the environment. 

    Sean Koa Seu practices dramaturgy, theater direction, and production. He has credits with the National Asian American Theatre Company, Transport Group, and Lincoln Center Theater. He produced the short documentary The Victorias, which was acquired by The New Yorker in 2022. 

    Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, where she is Director of the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab. She is the author of three books—Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading (Fordham UP, 2020), Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic (Northwestern UP, 2014), and The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Duke UP, 2008)—and is completing a fourth book entitled “Transmedial Exposure.” 

    Mlondi Zondi (they/he) is an assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Southern California. In addition to scholarly research, he/they also work in performance and dramaturgy. Mlondi’s writing is forthcoming or has been published in TDR: The Drama Review, ASAP Journal, Liquid Blackness, Contemporary Literature, Text and Performance Quarterly, Mortality, Canadian Journal of African Studies, Safundi, Performance Philosophy, Espace Art Actuel, and Propter Nos.

  • 2022 boundary 2 Annual Conference-50th Anniversary Meeting Videos Available Now

    The 2022 boundary 2 Annual Conference was held from March 31-April 2 at Dartmouth College. The meeting also celebrated the 50th anniversary of the journal. Talks from the conference are now available online below and via YouTube.

    Paul A. Bové: The Education of Henry Adams

    Charles Bernstein: Reading from his Poetry

    Arne DeBoever: Smears

    David Golumbia: Cyberlibertarianism

    Bruce Robbins: There Is No Why

    Christian Thorne: “What We Once Hoped of Critique”

    Jonathan Arac: William Empson and the Invention of Modern Literary Study

    Stathis Gourgouris: No More Artificial Anthropisms

     

    Donald E. Pease: Settler Liberalism

    Lindsay Waters: Still Enmired in the Age of Incommensurability

    R.A. Judy: Poetic Socialities and Aesthetic Anarchy

    Hortense Spillers: Closing Remarks

     

  • stop the right | dossier

    stop the right | dossier

    This dossier reflects on the rise of the right in the United States, and considers how to stop it. Part I is edited by David Golumbia and Paul Bové. Part II is edited by members of the b2o editorial board. 

    Part I

    1. David Simpson — About “Bedwetting Democrats”
    2. Anthony Bogues — Chaos and the Trumpian Project
    3. Bruce Robbins — Return of the Plague
    4. Margaret Ferguson — Doing Some of the Work: Grief, Fear, Hope
    5. Hortense J. Spillers — Fly Me To The Moon (from the ground)
    6. Julia Chan — #hkfortrump: How American Liberals Have Failed Hong Kong’s Democracy Movement
    7. Elissa Marder — Beyond the Reality Principle Like You Wouldn’t Believe: Reflections on the US Election

    Part II

    1. Taddeo Lorenside–Modernity, Lebensreform, and MAGA’s Grassroots: On Some Economic Contradictions of Trumpism 
    2. Johs Rasmussen–Nasty Politics 
    3. Paul Bové–The Way-Out-There Right: The Claremont Institute
    4. Travis Alexander–Rise of the Biological Conservatives: Or, The Curious Case of Marjorie Taylor Greene
    5. Aya Labanieh–Cynical Uses of Suffering: Gaza, Antisemitism, & the New Digital Right
    6. Johannes Voelz–Disinhibited Informalization: Talk Radio, Bro Podcasts and the Aesthetics of Populism
  • b2@PITT boundary 2’s Spring 2019 Conference

    b2@PITT boundary 2’s Spring 2019 Conference

    The spring 2019 conference will be at the University of Pittsburgh, from April 5-6.

    The event schedule is listed below. Events are free to the public and in the Cathedral of Learning at the Humanities Center (Room 602).

    Friday, April 5, 2019

    1 – 1:50 PM, Jason Fitzgerald, University of Pittsburgh, “Making Humans, Making Humanism: History and Universalism on Amiri Baraka’s Black Nationalist Stage”

    2 – 2:50 PM, Nancy Condee, University of Pittsburgh, “Wishful Thinking: The End of Sovereignty”

    3 – 3:50 PM, Gavin Steingo, Princeton University, “Reinterpreting Culture with Hildred Geertz”

    4 – 4:50 PM, Margaret Ferguson, UC Davis, “Unquenchable Myths of Hymen in Hymenoplasty Surgery, Crowd Virginity Testing, and Other Social Sites Present and Past”

    5 – 5:50 PM, Annette Damayanti Lienau, Harvard University, “Islamic Egalitarianism and (French) Orientalism: Re-reading the ‘Margins’ of the ‘Muslim World’”

    Saturday, April 6

    9 – 9:50 AM, Bruce Robbins, Columbia University,  “Single? Great? Collective? Frederic Jameson’s World History”

    10 – 10:50 AM, Piotr Gwiazda, University of Pittsburgh, “Ghosts and Anchors: Translingualism in Contemporary US Poetry”

    11 – 11:50 AM, Bécquer Seguin, The Johns Hopkins University, “Imagination Burning: On Lorca’s Anti-Colonialism”

    1 – 1:50 PM, Kara Keeling, University of Chicago, “Queer Times, Black Futures”

    2 – 2:50 PM, Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College, “Indigeneity, ‘Americanity, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Romance with Settler-Colonial Capitalism”

    3 – 3:50 PM, Reading by Dawn Lundy Martin, University of Pittsburgh

    4 – 4:50 PM, In Memoriam, Joseph A. Buttigieg

  • Madeleine Dobie — Edward Said on The Battle of Algiers: The Maghreb, Palestine and Anti-Colonial Aesthetics

    Madeleine Dobie — Edward Said on The Battle of Algiers: The Maghreb, Palestine and Anti-Colonial Aesthetics

    This essay is part of a dossier on The Maghreb after Orientalism.

    Among the many commentaries devoted to The Battle of Algiers, a film widely hailed as a classic of anti-colonial cinema and perhaps the most significant political film since Battleship Potemkin, are Edward Said’s essay, “The Quest for Gillo Pontecorvo,” published in the volume Reflections on Exile (Said 2000) and his contributions to a documentary, Pontecorvo: the Dictatorship of Truth, which is included among the bonus features of the Criterion Collection’s 2004 remastering of the film (Curtis 1992). Both pieces draw on a conversation between Said and Gillo Pontecorvo that took place at the director’s Rome apartment in 1988. The encounter between one of the foremost scholars of cultural imperialism and the most celebrated filmic portrayal of anti-colonial revolt would seem to be an ideal pairing. Battle of Algiers, after all, exemplifies the interweaving of politics and aesthetics that is the central concern of Said’s work. Yet in the end, the match-up falls short. Curiously, Said says little about either the film or the Algerian War of Independence as a watershed moment in the history of decolonization. Instead, both his essay and the documentary focus on the film’s Italian director, exploring the reasons for his relatively low productivity and what Said clearly perceived as his failure to make a film about the struggle of the Palestinian people. As the title of his essay announces, instead of focusing on the filmic object before him, Said embarks on a “quest” to understand the director’s artistic conflicts. Below, I consider this missed encounter from several perspectives, situating it in both the wider context of Said’s work and in relation to broader questions raised in colonial/postcolonial and Middle East studies.

    Battle of Algiers (1966) is the product of a remarkable, perhaps unique partnership between a film maker and a cohort of political actors. Though it is often portrayed as the masterwork of Gillo Pontecorvo or, albeit less often, as the most significant aesthetic achievement of Algerian national cinema, it was in fact a product of collaboration and negotiation. While imprisoned in France, Saadi Yacef, commander of the Front de libération nationale (FLN) forces in Algiers during the ‘Battle of Algiers’—the dramatic standoff between French paratroopers and Algerian militants that ran from late 1956 to the fall of 1957—wrote a memoir revisiting events that had captured the imagination of people in and beyond Algeria (Yacef 1962). After his release at the end of the war, Yacef, who as a child had adored movies, wrote a film treatment based on his memoir and pitched it to some of the leading Italian directors of the day. Rejected by Francesco Rosi and Luchino Visconti, he met with interest from Pontecorvo, a left-wing film-maker who had already visited Algeria with his longtime collaborator, the screenwriter Franco Solinas, with the goal of making a film about the Algerian revolution.  Pontecorvo initially planned to foreground the perspective of a French paratrooper. Though this might seem to be a surprising angle given that Pontecorvo had led the antifascist militia in Milan in the 1940s, it is consistent with his previous film, Kapo (1960), which explored the Holocaust from the viewpoint of a young Jewish girl who, under a borrowed identity, becomes a guard in a concentration camp. These somewhat unexpected perspectives reflected, among other things, the director’s commitment to exploring the political and psychological investments of actors on all sides of a violent conflict.

    The meeting of Yacef and Pontecorvo yielded a film that was neither the version of events offered in the former’s treatment—which Pontecorvo and Solinas dismissed as wooden and purely ideological—nor the execution of the latter’s initial plan to examine the internal conflicts of a French soldier, an angle that Yacef could not have embraced. If the artistic choices of the film—the casting of non-professional actors, the imitation of the style of newsreel and the iconic soundtrack by Ennio Morricone—must be credited to the Italian team, Yacef, backed by the newly installed FLN government, provided historical detail as well as logistical support and much of the funding. In recognition of this collaboration, the film was registered as a co-production between the Rome-based company, Igor Film and Yacef’s startup, Casbah Film.[1]

    This merger of different perspectives and contributions disappears in Said’s commentaries, which treat the film as a pure product of Pontecorvo’s cinematic vision and political consciousness. While the documentary The Dictatorship of Truth includes sections on the director’s important collaborations with Franco Solinas, Ennio Morricone and cinematographer Marcello Gatti, it says next to nothing about the involvement of Algerians, noting only that one of the non-actors hired to perform in the film happened to be the former commander of the FLN in Algiers! Said speculates that several scenes may have been based on Pontecorvo’s experiences, twenty years earlier, as a leader of the Partisans in Milan, missing the seemingly obvious point that his Algerian collaborators had just lived through the events that were reenacted in the film, some of which are remembered in Yacef’s memoir.

    Said’s neglect of the Algerian roots of Battle of Algiers in favor of the creative process of its European director reflect broader emphases and exclusions of his work. My observations about these tendencies, will, however, be ventured less with the goal of criticizing Said—already the object of so many critiques as well as a great deal of veneration—than to highlight wider patterns in the scholarship devoted to the Middle East and North Africa and to the interfaces of colonialism and culture. I argue that Said’s approach illustrates a dominant reception of Battle of Algiers as a monument to decolonization as an international political movement, a take that is certainly not ‘wrong,’ but which underrepresents the film’s specific rconnection to Algerian nationalism (Daulatzai, 2016). In Said’s case, I suggest that this reading was shaped by a deep-seated reticence toward nationalism and preference for internationalist and exilic politics and culture. I also highlight the difficult relationship between—to put things rather schematically—anti-colonialism and postcolonialism, decolonization and decoloniality as these modes of intellectual and political engagement are reflected in Said’s engagement with the cultural productions of non-Western writers and artists.

     

    1. Locating Decolonization: the Maghreb and the Middle East

    The fact that Said finds little to say about Battle of Algiers as a product and account of Algerian nationalism at first glance mirrors the broader geopolitical compass of his work. Algeria, and indeed the entire Maghreb region are scarcely mentioned in Orientalism (Said 1978), Said’s pioneering study of European discourses about the Arab and Muslim East. The travel narratives, political treatises and novels examined in this seminal work bear for the most part on Egypt, the Mashrek and India, not the French colonies of North Africa. In a particularly glaring omission, Said states that “by the time of the Bandung Conference in 1955 almost all of the Orient had gained its political independence from the Western empires” (1978: 104), overlooking the war in Algeria, which raged until 1962 and which was the region’s most significant episode of anti-colonial violence. This seeming blind spot in relation to the Maghreb is, however, not limited to Said. To put it in context, we need to consider the relationship between colonialism and Orientalism, at least in the French context, as well as the contours and divisions of the contemporary academic landscape.

    Orientalism posits a direct connection between colonial history and Orientalist representation.That is to say, Said claims that European authors wrote obsessively about the regions that their nations were in the process of occupying and governing. Yet, at least in the case of French history and literature, there was actually something of a disconnect between the colonial occupation of North Africa and the most prevalent subjects of Orientalist literature and art. Though a few French-language artists and writers traveled to and/or wrote about the Maghreb (Eugène Delacroix, Eugène Fromentin, Théophile Gautier, and Isabelle Eberhardt are among the main examples), many more visited and fantasized about Egypt, Turkey and the lands of the ‘Levant.’ For example, neither of the French writers who are most central to Said’s analysis—Gérard de Nerval and Gustave Flaubert—visited or wrote about France’s most important colony. In my book Foreign Bodies, where I discuss this ‘displacement,’ I suggest that one explanation is that colonial rule and the hybrid social and cultural forms to which it gave rise militated against the exotic tendencies of Orientalism (Dobie 2001: 4-6). The upshot is that Said devotes more time to French works about Egypt than to texts that represent Algeria.

    If the Maghreb is relatively marginal to orientalist discourse, it has also been neglected in the intersecting fields of Middle East Arabic literary studies as they have developed in and beyond United States. Built around the Cold-War model of area studies, American departments of Middle East studies have foregrounded the regions and issues that are of greatest strategic interest to the United States, notably Israel, Palestine, Egypt and the nations of the Persian Gulf. Language has also been an important factor in this distribution. Shaped by the history of British colonialism, these regions share a legacy of English, particularly in sectors such as education and culture. The Maghreb, by contrast, bears the distinctive imprint of French colonialism and French remains an important language of communication and administration. Though language is clearly not an impermeable barrier to cultural exchange or to scholarship, its role in shaping academic fields and areas of scholarly expertise shouldn’t be underestimated. Many leading specialists of Algeria are based in French studies or history departments rather than in Middle East Studies programs. Only since 2011, when events in Tunisia and Libya ignited the ‘Arab spring,’ has the Maghreb begun to come into focus as an important terrain for research on democracy, religion and the role of civil society.

     

    1. Algeria, Palestine and the Pitfalls of Nationalism

    But if at first it seems possible to connect Said’s curious silence on the Algerian context of Battle of Algiers to the broader marginality of the Maghreb within Orientalism and the field of Middle East studies, a more extensive reading of his work yields a more complex picture. Though Algeria doesn’t receive much attention in Orientalism, it is discussed in a number of other texts, including many interviews and the final chapter of Culture and Imperialism, in which  the Emir Abdelkader—the 19th-century leader of resistance to the French conquest—and Frantz Fanon are invoked as examples of anti-colonial resistance. Fanon was a frequent point of reference for Said, and indeed furnished one of his main examples of the politically-engaged intellectual. Considering these various texts together, I think it can be said that Algeria played two different and, in some ways, opposed roles in Said’s thought. On the one hand, it offered an important point of comparison with the Palestinian national struggle. On the other, it provided an illustration of the failings of nationalism.

    In relation to Palestine, Algeria represents primarily a source of hope: the promise of a successful overthrow of colonial occupation. In an interview with Timothy Appleby, Said noted, for example, that although the French always proclaimed that would never leave Algeria, they ultimately did (Said 1986a). In imagining how an end to the occupation of Palestinian lands might occur he emphasized that while he didn’t endorse terrorism, he did support territorial resistance on the model of the Algerian revolution. In another interview, with Bruce Robbins, Said compared the protests of the Palestinian Intifada to “scenes from The Battle of Algiers” (Said 1998: 325).

    The comparison between the two situations and Said’s apparent hope for an Algerian-style reversal of entrenched colonial domination in Palestine hovers in the background of his discussion of Pontecorvo’s career. As we have seen, Said frames his encounter with Pontecorvo and his work as a “quest” to understand why, after making two of the most important films about “politically engendered violence,” Battle of Algiers and Burn! [Queimada!], which depicts a slave revolt in Cuba, he didn’t achieve a third success. He goes so far as to say that he is “haunted” by the question of Pontecorvo’s disappearance from public view and speculates about the impediments that may have forestalled subsequent projects. He characterizes Ogro, the director’s 1979 film about Basque nationalists, as much too tentative, a failing that he attributes to the tense political situation in Italy at the time. Finally, he wonders why Pontecorvo abandoned a project on the Palestinian Intifada that would have been the “logical contemporary extension” of his work in Battle of Algiers (Said 2000: 289).

    Said conversation with Pontecorvo’s about Palestine during their 1988 interview, seems, at least from Said’s account, to have been strained. He reports that Pontecorvo accepted his characterization of the Israel-Palestine relationship as a colonial situation, but then disagreed with almost everything else that he said about it. Said recalls airing the idea that Battle of Algiers was possible because the Algerian revolution had been successful and that a parallel European film about the Palestinians couldn’t be made since the conflict remained unresolved. Pontecorvo disgreed, venturing that it would be possible to make a film about a failure, but observed that the situation between Israelis and Palestinians was more complicated and less clear-cut than that of the French in Algeria. Unhappy with this response, Said, in turn, replied that “to us it is clear.” As the exchange continued, Said asked Pontecorvo whether being Jewish affected his judgment of the situation and Pontecorvo testily insisted tthat it did not prevent him from fully grasping the Palestinians’ perspective  (Said 2000: 290). Said ends the essay by acknowledging that the interview was tense and highlighting the paradoxes of a man who, in his eyes, sublimated politics to music and image and who was unable to carry his political engagement into the present (Said 2000: 291). This summary of Pontecorvo’s artistic and political dilemmas is clearly mediated by Said’s own preoccupations and probably reveals more about the critic than about the director. The issues that Said flags, i.e. the tensions between aesthetics and politics, were central to his own intellectual project and loom large in most critical readings of his work. Returning to the question of the presence/absence of Algeria in Said’s work, I would say that the interview, as replayed in the essay, illustrates a dynamic by which Algeria primarily came into focus as a counterpart to the Palestinian conflict.

    If Said saw Algeria as a model of decolonization that the Palestinians could potentially emulate, he also deployed it as a repoussoir: an example of failed nationalism and indeed of the failings of nationalism. Though he certainly acknowledged the crucial role of nationalism in forging the political solidarity required to overthrow colonial rule, he also expressed deep reservations about its propensity to suppress internal difference and to become a theology or a fetish. “For all its success—indeed because of its success—in ridding many territories of their colonial overlords, nationalism remains a deeply problematic enterprise,” he observes in Culture and Imperialism (Said 1993: 223). In this and other works, Said contrasts what he regards as the narrow identitarianism of nationalism with “a more generous and pluralistic vision of the world.” He invariably prefers this hybrid, exilic or contrapuntal vision to separatist or nativist creeds and he repeatedly contests the conflation of nationalism and political independence with emancipation (Said 1993: 277).

    Said indeed goes so far as to identify nationalism as one of the principal foundations of modern political authoritarianism. Drawing on Fanon’s analysis of the deviations of national consciousness in the postcolonial state and on Eqbal Ahmad’s reflections on the “pathologies of power,” he observes that colonial domination was often replaced by class domination at the hands of new post-colonial elites (Ahmad 1981). Algeria furnished one of his main examples of this kind of derailment. He described it unsparingly as “a one-party state with dictatorial rule and . . . an uncompromising fundamentalist opposition” (Said 1993: 226). He indeed went so far as to characterize the Front islamique du salut, the Islamist opposition party founded in the late 1980s, as the dialectical opposite of the degraded nationalist party (Said 1996). In the final chapter of Culture and Imperialism, which delves into the history of opposition to colonialism, Said contrasts the campaign waged against the French conquest by the Emir AbdelKader with the later militancy of Fanon. Whereas the former’s resistance was grounded in Sufi-inspired nativism (Said 1993: 332), Fanon, for whom Said expresses deep admiration, came to Algeria, and thus to nationalism, as an outsider. As this contrast illustrates, Said’s ambivalence toward nationalism was interwoven with his stance in favor of (a cautiously defined) secularism and his distaste for the merger of political and religious fundamentalisms.

    Battle of Algiers is, of course, on one level a film about nationalism, though it can and often has also been approached more broadly as a celebration of popular resistance to power. To approach it as a film specifically about Algerian history is to be forced to confront the downward turn of Algerian nationalism starting with the rapid transformation of the FLN from nationalist insurgency to authoritarian, single-party regime. The almost unbearable character of this transition may be one reason why Said, like so many other viewers, elected to approach the film through a wider lens as a monument to the international movement of decolonization.

     

    1. The Auteur and Collective Politics

    If Said’s reading of Battle of Algiers as the product of the genius of a European director reflects his complex relation to the Maghreb, Algeria and its history of nationalism, it also illustrates signature elements of his critical methodology, notably his belief in the value of great works and his fascination with the complex figure of the engaged intellectual. Meditations on the dilemmas and private and public struggles of Gramsci, Foucault and Fanon, among other major thinkers, appear throughout Said’s work. This attentiveness to the relationship between political activism and the biographical context of the production of ideas was interwoven with his concern with the often unacknowledged relationship between academic disciplines and politics, a concern first articulated in Orientalism (Said 1978: 6-12). It was certainly also a reflection of his own bifurcated position as a literary scholar and unofficial spokesperson for the Palestinian cause. His perception of Battle of Algiers as a manifestation of Pontecorvo’s aesthetic vision and political history was in many ways consistent with these wider preoccupations.

    One of the recurrent elements of Said’s reflections on the engaged intellectual is the contrast that he draws between Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon (Said 1993: 335, Said 1985: 39-40). Though Foucault’s concept of the discursive formation provides one of the theoretical scaffolds of Orientalism, the French thinker’s model of power circulating through society is—as many critics have observed—hard to reconcile with Said’s emphasis on the top-down exercise of colonial domination. Said himself quickly recognized this problem and gradually distanced himself from the work of Foucault, whom he characterized as brilliantly inventive but increasingly apolitical, interested in the “micro-physics” of power but lacking a theory of and even a real interest in resistance (Said 1993: 29). In his writing, this portrait of Foucault is often supported by a counter-image of Fanon, whom Said came to embrace as an intellectual and political model. Somewhat reductively, Said painted Foucault as an individualist, preoccupied with the meaning of power for the self, the body and identity, while acclaiming Fanon as the advocate of a collective politics that transcends the individual (Said 1986b: 51).

    Given this judgment, it’s somewhat ironic that Said approaches Battle of Algiers, which was both the fruit of a collaboration and a representation of collective political solidarity through the exclusive lens of its meaning within Pontecorvo’s career. Pontecorvo and screenwriter Franco Solinas were well acquainted with Fanon’s work, and traces and even paraphrases of Wretched of the Earth can be found throughout the film, from the opening sequence on the divided colonial city to the portrayal of women’s politicization and the representation of nationalism as a vehicle for anti-colonialism (Srivastava 2006). Strangely, however, Said’s commentary neglects the film’s depiction of the collective politics of protest theorized by Fanon. His literary methodology, constructed around his admiration for great writers, was fundamentally in conflict in this instance with his political vision.

     

    1. The Battle of Algiers and ‘The Voyage In’

    One of the most common criticisms leveled at Orientalism has been that in describing the prison of dominant representations, Said leaves no room for alternative, non-European perspectives or for voices raised in resistance. In responding to this objection, Said often noted that he was a specialist of European literature and not, say, the Arabic literary tradition. But he also took the opportunity to take a conceptual stance by rejecting the idea of replacing the canon of European works with a counter-canon of non-European literature (Sprinker 1992). But if Said offers explanations for this rejection of alternative and counter canons, his work at times seems to betray an attachment to European culture that simply precludes awareness of other traditions. Take, for example, his observation that Pontecorvo’s take on cinéma vérité had a profound influence on subsequent political filmmakers such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Costa-Gavras and Oliver Stone—all European or American directors (Curtis 1992). Though he could have included in this list figures such as the Egyptian Khaled Youssef or the Algerian Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina (who worked with Pontecorvo’s cinematographer, Marcello Gatti), these names apparently didn’t come to mind.

    Instead of mapping disparate world traditions, Said writes about the grafting of anti-colonial and Third-Worldist visions such as those of Fanon onto the thought of European thinkers such as Hegel and Marx. One of his terms for this hybridization of political theory—the counterpart to European representations of other parts of the world—is the “voyage in.” In Said’s eyes, modern world culture is shaped by exchanges and cross-pollinations, yet bears, above all, the mark of engagement with European influences. This perspective, aligned with his theory of “contrapuntal” culture and “exilic” consciousness, is at once celebratory and tragic. If Said consistently expresses a preference for the hybrid or creolized over the presumed purity of the “native,” he also acknowledges the anguish involved in repurposing European epistemologies to critique European hegemony.

    I would propose that, although Said clearly didn’t see it that way, Battle of Algiers can be seen as an example of the “voyage in.” Saadi Yacef, the revolutionary turned film producer, was a movie lover who thought that the aesthetic techniques of Italian neorealist cinema could be marshaled to memorialize the struggle for Algerian independence. The alchemy of his partnership with Pontecorvo played an important role in turning his country’s revolution into a world historical event. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the film put Algiers on the map of revolutionaries from the Black Panthers to the Red Army Faction. The fact that Said saw the film as an example of European political film-making rather than as a merger of different motives, experiences and political visions, exposes the always fragile boundary between the recognition and celebration of postcolonial hybridity and the re-canonization of European culture.

     

    Madeleine Dobie is Professor of French at Columbia University. Her publications include Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism (2001), Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (2010) and, with historian Myriam Cottias, a critical re-edition of two mid twentieth-century novels by the Martinican writer, Mayotte Capécia (2012). She is currently working on a monograph titled After Violence, about literature and cinema since the Algerian Black Decade. Her piece, “The Battle of Algiers at 50: From ’60s Radicalism to the Classrooms of West Point,” appeared in The LA Review of Books in September 2016.

     

    References

    Ahmad, Eqbal. 1981. “The Neo-Fascist State: Notes on the Pathology of Power in the Third World.” Arab Studies Quarterly 3, no. 2: 170-180.

    Bensmaïl, Malek, dir. 2017. La Bataille d’Alger: un film dans l’histoire.

    Algeria/France/Switzerland: Ina, Ciné+, Histoire, Imago, Radio­te­le­vione Svizera, Hikayet Films, Al Jazeera, Radio-Canada/RDI

    Curtis, Oliver, dir. 1992. Pontecorvo: the Dictatorship of Truth. United Kingdom: Channel Four and Bandung Films.

    Daulatzai, Sohail. 2016. Fifty Years of “The Battle of Algiers”: Past as Prologue. Minneapolis: University of Minnestoa Press.

    Dobie, Madeleine. 2001. Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language and Culture in French Orientalism Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Fanon, Frantz. 1968. Les damnés de la terre. Paris: Maspero.

    Pontecorvo, Gillo, dir. 1966. The Battle of Algiers. Italy and Algeria: Igor Film and Casbah Film.

    Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

    —. 1985. “In the Shadow of the West” Interview with Jonathan Crary and Phil Mariani, Wedge. Reprinted in Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, edited by Edward Said and Gauri Viswanathan, 39-53. New York: Pantheon.

    —. 1986a. “Can an Arab and a Jewish State Coexist?” Interview with Timothy Appleby, The Globe and Mail. Reprinted in Power, Politics and Culture, 287-291.

    —. 1986b. “Overlapping Territories; the World, the Text and the Critic” Interview with Gary Hentzi and Anne McClintock. Critical Text. Reprinted in Power, Politics and Culture, 53-68.

    —. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf.

    —.1996. “Language, History and the Production of Knowledge.” Interview with

    Gauri Viswanathan.” Reprinted in Power, Politics and Culture, 262-279.

    —. 1998. “American Intellectuals and Middle-East Politics.” Interview with Bruce

    Robbins, Social Text. Reprinted in Power, Politics and Culture, 323-342.

    —. 2000. “The Quest for Gillo Pontecorvo.” In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 282-292. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.

    Srivatava, Neelam. 2005. “Anti-colonial Vioelnce and the ‘Dictatorship of Truth’ in the Films of Gillo Pontecorvo. An Interview.” Interventions 7, no. 1 : 97-106.

    Yacef, Saadi, 1962. Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger, décembre 1956-septembre 1957. Paris: Julliard.

    Sprinker, Michael and Jennifer Wicke. 1992. “Interview with Edward Said.” In Edward Said, a Critical Reader, edited by Michael Sprinker, 221-264. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

     

    I would like to thank Marco and Simone Pontecorvo and Malek Bensmaïl for their help with the preparation of this essay.

    [1] A new documentary about The Battle of Algiers reveals that Yacef was given a large sum in cash by the FLN leadership, which saw him as a potential political threat and was therefore eager to divert his attention to international film-making (Bensmaïl, 2017).

     

  • Olivia C. Harrison — Maghreb as Method

    Olivia C. Harrison — Maghreb as Method

    This essay is part of a dossier on The Maghreb after Orientalism.

     

     “Se décoloniser, c’est cette chance de la pensée.”

    (Decolonization is this chance of thought.)

    Abdelkebir Khatibi, “Pensée-autre”[1] 

    al-maghrib

    Unlike North Africa, the expression most commonly used in English to refer to the westernmost part of the Arabic-speaking world, al-maghrib is a term that is attested in medieval Arabic historiography, in the expression jazirat al-maghrib (island of the Maghreb), which gives Algeria (al-jaza’ir, the islands) its poetic name (Adelson 2012; Brown 1997: 8). A pre-colonial Arabic term, al-maghrib is in this sense indigenous to the region it names, although it has gradually been eclipsed since the anti-colonial period by the framework of the nation-state, and compromised by postcolonial territorial conflicts.[i] And yet as Edward Said’s work teaches us, there is no doubt that, as an area of study, Maghreb studies took shape within Orientalist, colonial, and anti-colonial discourses. Transliterated in French, the proper name used in this dossier, Maghreb (with a hard /g/ and guttural rolled /r/), betrays the fact that many of its contributors discovered Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian literature as students of French literature. Despite a welcome shift away from an unexamined focus on French-language classics alone (Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, Tahar Ben Jelloun), Maghreb literature scholars still work primarily on French-language texts, with a secondary emphasis on Arabic, Tamazight (Berber), Spanish, and Italian-language works. In David Seddon’s pithy formulation, “the colonial experience created the Maghrib as a European periphery” (2000: 198). The Maghreb has, in turn, always been a marginal sub-specialty within the Eurocentric discipline of French and Francophone studies, when it has been included at all. It remains marginal, too, in the fields of Middle East and Arabic studies, a paradoxical result of the relative success of French acculturation, particularly in Algeria (Rouighi 2012). If the Maghreb remains our preferred “unit of analysis,” how can we, Maghreb scholars, acknowledge the troubled history of the production of the term (Brown 1997)? And if, heeding Said, we remain suspicious of an area studies approach to the Maghreb, what work must we do to denaturalize our own object of study?

    Following Edward Said’s call to “methodological self-consciousness” and philological rigor (2003, 326), I begin this essay with a reflection on the proper name al-maghrib, a name that does not appear in his landmark work Orientalism even though its phantasmatic image, eloquently captured in Eugène Delacroix’s 1832 painting Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Women of Algiers in their Apartment), pervades much of the Orientalist discourse Said examines in that book. My aim is not to fault Said for omitting the Maghreb from his study of Orientalism. Instead, I will take this omission as an invitation to read between the lines of Orientalism and across his oeuvre for traces of al-maghrib, as it is imagined contrapuntally by the Moroccan writer Abdelkebir Khatibi, whose critique of Orientalism rivals that of Said in scope and ambition as a “horizon of thinking.”[ii] To paraphrase what Said famously said about the Orient (2003, xviii): the Maghreb does not exist; and yet it can be imagined otherwise, according to what Khatibi calls “une pensée-autre” (an other-thinking, 1983: 12) – that is, as decolonial method. Said and Khatibi never met or corresponded, nor do they seem to have had much interest in each other’s writings.[iii] Reading their Maghrebi and Palestinians writings together nevertheless sheds important light on the decolonial stakes of their projects: in particular, their insistence on decolonization as an unfinished process aimed at both foreign control (imperial or neocolonial) and the internal exclusions of ethno-nationalism.

    Surprisingly, given Said’s decades-long engagement with the Palestinian question, Palestine is conspicuously absent from Orientalism. As we will see, Khatibi’s writings on the Maghreb are, in turn, haunted by the figure of Palestine. This essay connects these two elusive figures, Palestine and the Maghreb, and argues that they are in fact central to the critique of colonialism offered in Said’s and Khatibi’s oeuvre. Picking up from the conclusion of Orientalism, which gestures toward the “‘decolonializing’ new departures in so-called area studies” (325), and Khatibi’s reflections on the Maghreb and Palestine as “horizons of thinking,” I read Said and Khatibi through the lens of what Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih call “transcolonialism”: the myriad connections linking formerly and still colonized peoples across imperial formations, in this case, the Maghreb and Palestine (2005: 11).[iv] I end the essay with a reading of the second book in Said’s Orientalist trilogy, The Question of Palestine, which pioneered transcolonialism as a decolonizing methodology, decades before the term came into use in academia. This essay is an attempt to think the Maghreb through Palestine, after Said and Khatibi, and thus elucidate the stakes of transcolonial critique in a present too quickly characterized as postcolonial.

     

    The Maghreb as Horizon of Thinking

    Exile, displacement, strangeness, foreignness, West, Occident… These are some of the words derived from the trilateral Arabic root gh/r/b, which gives us the place name al-maghrib, the westernmost part of the Arabic-speaking world, stretching, in most accounts, from Tunisia in the east to Morocco in the west.[v] And yet al-maghrib remains a most fluid and slippery place name. Like the cardinal direction to which it refers, it is a relative term, one that invites relational thinking: west in relation to what, or whom? A syntagmatic unit denoting location (place names in Arabic are formed by placing the letter “meem” before the trilateral root: ma-gha-ra-ba) al-maghrib is also a trope, a common place, metonymically, a crossroads of continents, languages, cultural spheres, histories.

    As those familiar with the work of the Moroccan writer Abdelkebir Khatibi will be quick to recognize, my reading of the Maghreb as a relational metaphor is based on his influential writings on the Maghreb, and in particular “Le Maghreb comme horizon de pensée” (“The Maghreb as Horizon of Thinking”). Written for a 1977 special issue of Les Temps Modernes devoted to the then precarious project of Maghrebi unity, this important essay is best known in its final, augmented form as “Pensée-autre” (“Other-Thinking”), published in 1983 in Khatibi’s landmark collection of essays, Maghreb pluriel (Plural Maghreb). If I begin with the first and least well-known version of this essay, it is because it makes explicit the stakes of what Khatibi calls double critique, and the proximity of this method to that developed by Said in his writings on imperialism, from Orientalism to his posthumous essay “On Jean Genet” (2006).

    In their brief introductory remarks to “Du Maghreb,” co-editors Khatibi, Noureddine Abdi, and Abdelwahab Meddeb (Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian, respectively) co-sign a declaration that clarifies their intent, beyond ideological and other differences, to think “a radical Maghreb”: “le Maghreb radical demeure impensé. Radical dans le double sens du mot: racines et rupture” (a radical Maghreb remains unthought. Radical in the dual sense of the term: roots and rupture). The language of the opening editorial is unmistakably Khatibian: “Tel écart tourné vers la pensée de la différence, nommons-le Maghreb” (We call Maghreb this deviation turned toward a thinking of difference (1977: 5).) Written against the backdrop of an accelerating contest between the Moroccan state and the Western Sahara – which continues, fifty years later, to fight for independence – Khatibi’s essay imagines the Maghreb as a site of “double critique”:

    Critique des deux métaphysiques, de leur face à face. En fait, un choix, un seul choix est possible: penser le Maroc tel qu’il est, comme un site topographique entre l’Orient et l’Occident. Le Maroc, en tant qu’horizon de pensée, est encore innommable. (Critique of both metaphysics, of their confrontation. In fact, there is no choice. We must think Morocco as it is, as a topographical site between the Orient and the West. As a horizon of thinking, Morocco remains unnamable.) (1977: 20)

    The slippage from the titular Maghreb of the essay to Morocco as horizon of thinking in this passage betrays one of the ambiguities of the term al-maghrib, which in modern-day parlance is commonly used to designate the nation-state of Morocco (the official name of the country is al-mamlaka al-maghribiya, the Maghrebi Kingdom). Whether or not this slippage was intentional, Khatibi corrected it in the expanded version of the essay, replacing Morocco with the Maghreb in the corresponding paragraph (1983: 38-39).

    But I want to focus on another variation that in fact narrows the scope of Khatibi’s double critique: the occlusion of Palestine from Khatibi’s imagined Maghreb. In “Le Maghreb comme horizon de pensée,” Khatibi’s articulation of the Maghreb as a site of double critique immediately follows an unambiguous condemnation of what, in his writings on nationalism, Said would call “the export of identity” (2006: 85), here applied not to the Maghreb, but to Palestine:

    Et il y a d’autres écarts, d’autres ruptures qui déchaînent la violence des uns et des autres. L’identité aveugle et la différence sauvage en sont des démonstrations visibles à coup de mitraillette. Au nom de l’unité communautaire des Arabes, on massacre la Palestine. (And there are other deviations, other ruptures that unleash the violence of this or that party, as evidenced by the machine gun fire of absolute identity and savage difference. In the name of the communal identity of the Arabs, Palestine is slaughtered.) (1977: 20)

    Khatibi’s articulation of double critique makes very clear that the brand of “savage difference” exemplified by Black September, the massacre of thousands of Palestinian feda’in and civilians by Jordanian troops, is a dialectical, if circuitous response to the savage difference of colonialism.[vi] Unnamed in the expanded version of this essay, Palestine in “Pensée-autre” is replaced by a vague mention of “examples all over the Arab and Iranian world,” weakening the thrust of Khatibi’s critique of imperialism as the export of identity (1983: 38).

    Khatibi had already written an eloquent book about Palestine, Vomito blanco: le sionisme et la conscience malheureuse (Vomito Blanco: Zionism and Unhappy Consciousness, 1974), which, like Said’s Question of Palestine, takes aim at Western and Israeli exceptionalism, and advocates in unambiguous terms for “a secular and democratic state in Palestine for Arabs and Jews” (Said 1980: 220; see Khatibi 1974: 14). Like Said’s Palestine, Khatibi’s Maghreb is not, in fact, a region or area. It is rather an idea, or even a methodology, akin to the two-pronged process that Said poses as the condition for decolonization in his readings of Frantz Fanon: “Liberation as a process and not a goal contained automatically by the newly independent nations (Said 1993: 274). Maghreb as method, then. Palestine is, in Said’s writings, another name for this process.

     

    Palestine as metaphor[vii]

    Palestine plays a cardinal role in Khatibi’s theorization of the Maghreb as a “horizon of thinking,” as a “method” enabling the double critique of Western colonialism and Arab nationalism. In what follows, I argue that the Maghreb and Palestine function in much the same way in Said’s work, and this despite the omission of both figures from Orientalism. Toward the end of the first chapter of the book, “The Scope of Orientalism,” Said makes the puzzling assertion that, by the 1955 Bandung Conference that marked the birth of the Third World project, “the entire Orient had gained its political independence from the Western empires” (2003: 104).[viii] A quick look at the roster of countries invited to participate in the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia in April of that year reveals that this was not the case, as Said knew only too well: absent are Morocco and Tunisia, which were on the cusp of independence; Algeria, then in the early stages of one of the bloodiest wars of decolonization; and Palestine, which had no autonomous political representation at the time. And although Vietnam – which, unlike the Maghreb, Said does include in the purview of the Orient (2003: 41) – was present, its hard-won independence from France was being sorely contested by the ascendant US empire.

    It is remarkable that the one and only mention of anti-colonialism and decolonization in Orientalism so clearly excludes both the Maghreb and Palestine, if not from the “scope” of Said’s project then from the map of decolonization – even if, as Ann Laura Stoler rightly insists, the much less commented upon third chapter of the book, “Orientalism Now,” which takes up nearly half of the tome, takes direct aim at US and Israeli imperial exceptionalism (Stoler 2016: 42-45).[ix] If, in the above quote, Said gives the somewhat cavalier impression that direct colonial rule of “the Orient” ended in 1955, in “Orientalism Now” and, even more explicitly in Culture and Imperialism, he makes it very clear that “imperialism did not end, did not suddenly become ‘past,’ once decolonization had set in motion the dismantling of the classical empires” (1993: 282). But it is in the book he published immediately after Orientalism, The Question of Palestine (1979) – which, along with Covering Islam (1981), he conceived as part of a trilogy on the modern relationship between the Arab world and the West (Said 1997: xlix) – that the stakes of Said’s double critique are most urgently felt.

    The Question of Palestine begins with a paradox. If one of Said’s principal aims is, pace Golda Meir, to demonstrate that Palestine exists, one of the most compelling aspects of the book is its exploration of Palestine as utopia. “In a very literal way the Palestinian predicament since 1948 is that to be a Palestinian at all has been to live in a utopia, a nonplace, of some sort” (1992: 124). Rooted in the tragedy of Palestinian dispossession, Palestine as nonplace offers a paradoxical “chance of thinking” (Khatibi 1983: 16), capturing what Said would later call the process of liberation (as opposed to liberation as a telos or goal). “At its best,” Said writes in Culture and Imperialism, “the culture of opposition and resistance suggests a theoretical alternative and a practical method for reconceiving human experience in non-imperialist terms” (1993: 276). This is, Said claims, what explains the enduring allure of Palestine for what he calls “the nonwhite world.” For the Egyptians and the Iranians Said mentions in 1979, for the Tunisians and Syrians of the twenty teens, the protestors at Standing Rock, and the activists of Black Lives Matter, Palestine continues to serve as “rallying cry . . .  and symbol for struggle against social injustice”:

    There is an awareness in the nonwhite world that the tendency of modern politics to rule over masses of people as transferable, silent, and politically neutral populations has a specific illustration in what has happened to the Palestinians—and what in different ways is happening to the citizens of newly independent, formerly colonial territories ruled over by antidemocratic army regimes. The idea of resistance gets content and muscle from Palestine; more usefully, resistance gets detail and a positively new approach to the microphysics of oppression from Palestine. If we think of Palestine as both a place to be returned to and an entirely new place, a vision partially of a restored past and of a novel future, perhaps even a historical disaster transformed into a hope for a different future, we will understand the word better. (1992: 125, original italics)

    Despite his insistence throughout The Question of Palestine on the uniqueness of the Palestinian predicament – and in particular the “burden of interpretation” placed on Palestinians by virtue of the fact “that the state preventing us from having a future of our own has already provided a future for its own unhappy people” (122) – Palestine is also, in Said’s account, exemplary of the colonial condition, writ large to include “the tendency of modern politics to rule over masses of people as transferable, silent, and politically neutral populations.” If direct colonial rule is the principal target of the first two chapters of Orientalism, Said’s oeuvre as a whole diagnoses “the question of minorities” (Fanon 1968: 80; Mufti 2007), the abuses of postcolonial authoritarian regimes, and the accelerating phenomenon of mass migration as by-products of European imperialism. Palestine crystallizes the link between direct colonial rule (ongoing in Israel-Palestine) and the fallout from imperialism, from authoritarian postcolonial regimes buttressed by Western powers in the name of security to the mass population transfer from south to north. The link between the Palestinian predicament and the condition of migrants and refugees would become even more apparent in subsequent decades, prompting Said to write, in Culture and Imperialism, that “it is one of the unhappiest characteristics of the age to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles than ever before in history, most of them as an accompaniment to and, ironically enough, as afterthoughts of great post-colonial and imperial conflicts” (1993: 332).

    Writing about The Question of Palestine some forty years after its publication, Stoler expands on Said’s remarks about Palestine’s paradoxical exemplarity: “This is not to argue that Palestine is the Ur-colonial situation or that Israel is the quintessential colonial state. Instead, it is to see how the dispossession of the Palestinians articulates the so carefully crafted and normalized segregationist policies used to achieve it, providing a window onto forms of duress that are less visible elsewhere, forms that in Palestine are being made acutely resonant and recognizable” (2016: 54). Palestine as method reminds us that the colonial is not past, whether we are speaking of “classic” forms of colonial rule or the less easily diagnosable phenomenon of mass migration.

     

    Toward a Transcolonial Reading of Edward Said

    My objective, in this essay, has been to activate hidden links across the formerly and still colonized world, in this case between the Maghreb and Palestine, in a renewed critique of colonialism. Reading Said’s landmark book against the grain of The Question of Palestine and Khatibi’s Maghrebi and Palestinian writings also throws into sharper relief the anti-colonial critique of Orientalism, which Said insisted, in his 1994 preface, was aimed not only at the colonial past but more pervasively at “the immense distortion introduced by empire” from the time of colonial conquest to the purportedly postcolonial present (2003: xxii). Although the Maghreb is not named in Orientalism, and although Palestine is evinced from Khatibi’s “Pensée-autre,” Said and Khatibi offer Palestine and the Maghreb as horizons of thinking against the still “redoubtable durability” of Orientalism, imperialism, and other exports of identity (Said 2003: 6). Or, as Said put it in the central chapter of Culture and Imperialism: “How can a non- or post-imperialist history be written that is not naively utopian or hopelessly pessimistic, given the continuing embroiled actuality of domination in the Third World?” (1993: 280). In the wake of the uprisings that rippled from Tunisia to Egypt, Syria and beyond in the twenty-teens, and the ongoing dislocations bracketed under the expression “refugee” or “migrant crisis,” we would do well to respond to Said’s call with a view not just to the past, but to the future, the still uncompromised space of utopia. In this analysis, Palestine and the Maghreb are not simply areas or geographical referents. As method, the Maghreb and Palestine represent a “chance of thinking,” or what Khatibi names “decolonization.”

     

    Olivia C. Harrison is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization (2016) and co-editor of Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (2016). Her manuscript-in-progress, Banlieue Palestine: Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France, charts the emergence of the Palestinian question in France, from the anti-racist movements of the late 1960s to contemporary art and activism. Her most recent article, forthcoming from diacritics, examines the recuperation of minority discourses by the French far and alt right.

     

    References

    Abdi, Noureddine, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Abdelwahab Meddeb. 1977. Introduction to special issue, “Du Maghreb.” Les Temps Modernes 375 bis: 5-6.

    Adelson, Sheldon. 2012. “British and US Use and Misuse of the Term ‘Middle East’.” In Is There a Middle East? The Evolution of a Concept, edited by Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat, and Michael Ezekiel Gasper, 36-55. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Anidjar, Gil. 2006. “Secularism.” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1: 52-77.

    Brown, L. Carl. 1997. “Maghrib Historiography: The Unit of Analysis Problem.” In The Maghrib in Question: Essays in History and Historiography, edited by Michel Le Gall and Kenneth Perkins, 4-16. Austin: University of Texas Press.

    Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Darwish, Mahmoud. 1997. La Palestine comme métaphore. Translated by Elias Sanbar and Simone Bitton. Paris: Actes Sud.

    Fanon, Frantz. (1963) 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press.

    Khatibi, Abdelkebir. 1983. “Pensée-autre.” In Maghreb pluriel, 9-39. Paris: Denoël.

    —. 1977. “Le Maghreb comme horizon de pensée.” Les Temps Modernes 375 bis: 7-20.

    —. 1974. Vomito blanco: le sionisme et la conscience malheureuse. Paris: Union Générale d’Editions.

    Lionnet, Françoise. 2011. “Counterpoint and Double Critique in Edward Said and Abdelkebir

    Khatibi: A Transcolonial Comparison.” In A Companion to Comparative Literature, edited by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, 388-407. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

    — and Shu-mei Shih. 2005. “Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally.” In Minor Transnationalism, edited by Lionnet and Shih, 1-23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Mufti, Aamir R. 2009. Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    —. 1998. “Auberbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture.” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 1: 95-125.

    Robbins, Bruce. 1994. “Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other Transgressions: On Edward Said’s ‘Voyage In’.” Social Text 40: 25-37.

    Rouighi, Ramzi. 2012. “Why Are There No Middle Easterners in the Maghrib?” In Is There a Middle East? The Evolution of a Concept, edited by Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat, and Michael Ezekiel Gasper, 100-116. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Said, Edward. 2006. “On Jean Genet.” In On Late Style, 73-90. New York: Vintage Books.

    —. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf.

    —. (1981). 1997. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the

    Rest of the World. New York: Vintage Books.

    —. (1979) 1992. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books.

    —. (1978) 2003. Orientalism. New York, Vintage Books.

    Seddon, David. 2000. “Dreams and Disappointments: Postcolonial Constructions of ‘The Maghrib’.” In Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib: History, Culture, and Politics, edited by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, 197-232. New York: Palgrave.

    Stoler, Ann Laura. 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

     

    [i] To the extent that one considers the Arabic language to be indigenous to northwest Africa. Many Amazigh, or Berber, activists would not. Before the Islamization of the Maghreb in the late seventh century A.D., the populations of the region spoke dialects of the Afroasiatic language Tamazight.

    [ii] I am riffing off the title of a recent book similarly concerned with questioning the assumptions of area studies while exploiting the full potential of a decolonial retooling of the area studies model, Kuan-Hsing Chen’s Asia as Method (2010).

    [iii] Said disparaged Khatibi as a “peripheral” figure, “a kind of Moroccan equivalent of Derrida,” in a 1998 interview published in Al-Jadid (cited in Lionnet 2011: 399). This essay builds on Françoise Lionnet’s article on Said and Khatibi, which explores the “uncanny similarities” and “telling differences” in the trajectories, writings, and reception of these exilic thinkers (2011: 389).

    [iv] The expression “imperial formations” is Ann Laura Stoler’s: “I use the term ‘imperial formations’ . . . as an alternative to empire . . . to signal the temporal stretch and recursive recalibrations to which we could be looking” (2016: 56).

    [v] Different sources have, at times, included present-day Libya, Mauritania, the contested Western Sahara, and what was known, until 1492, as Al-Andalus in the region known as al-maghrib.

    [vi] Said offers a similar critique of the dialectical response to colonial racism toward the end of Culture and Imperialism: “[The] worst and most paradoxical gift [of imperialism] was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental” (336). There lies, for Said, the importance of dissident French writer Jean Genet’s thinking on the Maghreb and Palestine: “Above all, given Genet’s choice of sites like Algeria and Palestine, identity is the process by which the stronger culture, and the more developed society, imposes itself violently upon those who, by the same identity process, are decreed to be a lesser people. Imperialism is the export of identity” (2006: 85). While I share Gil Anidjar’s misgivings about the use of the term secular in a postcolonial context (2006), I am building here on the important insights offered by Bruce Robbins and Aamir R. Mufti who, in different ways, argue that for Said, “secular criticism” is one of the names of anti-identitarian critique (Robbins 1994: 26-27; Mufti 1998: 106-107). One of the virtues of “double critique,” compared with “secular criticism,” is that it allows Khatibi not only to avoid the risk of Orientalist dualities (Islam versus the secular West) but performatively to deconstruct them as well.

    [vii] I am borrowing Mahmoud Darwish’s felicitous expression, “la Palestine comme métaphore,” from the title of a collection of interviews with the late Palestinian poet (1997).

    [viii] As critics have noted, “the Orient” is a slippery term in Orientalism. If Said insisted again and again that he was writing about the phantasmatic Orient of Orientalism rather than an actual place, he also used the term in empirical terms, as in the above passage, to designate a geographic area, albeit one with fluid borders.

    [ix] Stoler forcefully argues that Said’s unsparing critiques of US and Israeli imperialism were ironically sidelined by the field Orientalism helped launch, postcolonial studies: “Was not the field of (post)colonial studies (and an entire multidisciplinary initiative to document colonial situations and their effects) made safe for scholarship from its very beginning by an occlusive process that, among other things, held the two texts, Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, apart?” (2016: 53).

     

  • Our Neoliberalism Conference is on YouTube!

    Our Neoliberalism Conference is on YouTube!

    All of the talks from b2‘s recent conference, “Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski”, are now posted on our YouTube channel!

    Talks include:

    Philip Mirowski: Hell Is Truth Seen Too Late

    Bruce Robbins: Liberal Elites

    Chris Connery: China, Neoliberal Constellations and the Left

    Professor Robbins and Professor Connery’s post-talk Q&A panel can be found here.

    Frank Pasquale: Rethinking the Knowledge Problem: Preserving Professional Judgment in an Era of Metric Power

    Leah Feldman: Post-Soviet, Neoliberal, New Right Formations

    Christian Thorne: The Paleo-Neo and the New New: Periodizing Liberalism

    Professor Feldman and Professor Thorne’s post-talk Q&A panel can be found here.

    David Golumbia: Mirowski As Critic of the Digital

    Annie McClanahan: Serious Crises: Rethinking the Neoliberal Subject

    Donald E. Pease: The Cultural Fantasy-Work of Neoliberalism

    James Livingston: Fuck Work

  • Conference Announcement — Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski

    Conference Announcement — Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski

    LIVESTREAMING NOW: WATCH HERE

    boundary 2 is pleased to announce Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, a conference at the University of Pittsburgh. All talks will appear on boundary 2’s YouTube channel after the conference.

    Schedule

    Friday, March 17, 2017

    1:30pm EST – Panel: Bruce Robbins and Chris Connery

    Liberal Elites – Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University

    China: Neoliberal Constellations and the Left – Chris Connery, Professor of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz

    3:00pm EST – Rethinking the Knowledge Problem: Preserving Professional Judgment in an Era of Metric Power – Frank Pasquale, Professor of Law, Francis King Carey School of Law, University of Maryland

    4:30pm EST – Keynote: Hell is Truth Seen Too Late – Philip Mirowski, Carl E. Koch Professor of Economics and Policy Studies and the History of the Philosophy of Science, University of Notre Dame

    Saturday, March 18, 2017

    9:00am EST – Panel: Leah Feldman and Christian Thorne

    Post-Soviet, Neoliberal, New Right Formations – Leah Feldman, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Chicago

    The Paleo-Neo and the New New: Periodizing Liberalism – Christian Thorne, Professor of English, Williams College

    10:45am EST – Mirowski as Critic of the Digital – David Golumbia, Associate Professor of English, Virginia Commonwealth University

    1:30pm EST – The Cultural Fantasy-Work of Neoliberalism – Donald E. Pease, Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, Dartmouth College

    3:00pm EST – Serious Crises: Rethinking the Neoliberal Subject – Annie McClanahan, Assistant Professor of English, University of California, Irvine

    4:30pm EST – Fuck Work – James Livingston, Professor of History, Rutgers

     

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