b2o: boundary 2 online

Search results for: “bruce robbins”

  • 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.

     

    References

    Ackerman, Bruce. 1994. “Rooted Cosmopolitanism.” Ethics 104, no. 3: 516-35.

    Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Appiah, Kwamw Anthony. 1998. “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah, and Bruce Robbins, 91-114. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Baban, Feyzi. 2016. “Cosmopolitanism from the Margins. Redefining the Idea of Europe Through Postcoloniality.” In Postcolonial Transitions in Europe. Context, Practices and Politics, edited by Sandra Ponzanesi and Gianmaria Colpani, 371-90. London: Rowman and Littlefield International.

    Balibar, Étienne. 1998. “The Borders of Europe.” In Cosmopolitics. Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 216-29  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Bauman, Zygmunt. 2016. Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

    Beck, Ulrich. 2000. “The Cosmopolitan Perspective. Sociology and the Second Age of Modernity.” British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 1: 79-105.

    Beck, Ulrich. 2002. “The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies.” Theory, Culture and Society 19, nos. 1-2: 17-44.

    Beck, Ulrich. 2010. “The Cosmopolitan Manifesto.” In The Cosmopolitan Reader, edited by Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held, 217-28. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

    Breckenridge, Carole Anne, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi K. Bhabha, and Sheldon Pollock. eds. 2000. “Cosmopolitanisms.” Special issue, Public Culture 12, no. 3: 577-89.

    Bhabha, Homi K. 1996. “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” In Text and Nation, edited by Laura Garcia-Morena and Peter C. Pfeiffer, 191-207. London: Camden House.

    Bhabha, Homi K. 2000. “The Vernacular Cosmopolitan.” In Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa, edited by Ferdinand Dennis and Nasseem Khan, 133-142. London: Serpent’s Tail.

    Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2011. “Cosmopolitanism and Postcolonial Critique.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, edited by Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka, 313-28. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.

    Boltanski, Luc. 1999. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

    Boston, Nicholas. 2016. “Libidinal Cosmopolitanism: The Case of Digital Sexual Encounters in Post–Enlargement Europe.” In Postcolonial Transitions in Europe. Context, Practices and Politics, edited by Sandra Ponzanesi and Gianmaria Colpani, 291-312. London: Rowman and Littlefield International.

    Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Cashmore, Ellis. 1997. The Black Cultural Industry. London: Routledge.

    Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike. eds. 1983. Towards the

    Decolonization of African Literature. Vol. I. Washington: Howard University Press.

    Chouliaraki, Lilie. 2006. The Spectatorship of Suffering. London: SAGE Publications.

    Chouliaraki, Lilie. 2013. The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

    Clifford, James. 1992. “Traveling Cultures.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, 96-116. New York: Routledge.

    Clifford, James. 1998. “Mixed feelings.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 362–70. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Cohen, Mitchell. 1992. “Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Thoughts on the Left, Nationalism, and Multiculturalism.” Dissent 39: 478-83.

    Christensen, Miyase and André Jansson. 2015. Cosmopolitanism and the Media:

    Cartographies of Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. 2002. Toward a New Legal Common Sense: Law, Globalization, and Emancipation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

    De Sousa Santos, Boaventura and César A. Rodríguez-Garavito. eds. 2005. Law and

    Globalization from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

    Evans-Braziel, Jana and Anita Mannur. 2008. Theorizing Diaspora. A Reader. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

    Forte, Maximilian C. ed. 2010. Indigenous Cosmopolitans: Transnational and Transcultural Indigeneity in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Peter Lang.

    Gibbs, James and Bernth Lindfors. 1993. Research on Wole Soyinka. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

    Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso.

    Gilroy, Paul. 2004. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Gilroy, Paul. 2011. Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Goodale, Mark. 2006. “Reclaiming Modernity: Indigenous Cosmopolitanism and the Coming of the Second Revolution in Bolivia.” American Ethnologist 33, no. 4: 634–49.

    Gunew, Sneya. 2012. “Estrangement as Pedagogy: The Cosmopolitan Vernacular.” In After Cosmopolitanism, edited by Rosi Braidotti, Patrick Hanafin, and Bolette B. Blaagaard, 132-48. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

    Hall, Stuart. 1992. “The Question of Cultural Identity.” In Modernity and its Futures: Understanding Modern Societies, edited by Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew, 273-326. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

    Hall, Stuart. 2003. “‘In But Not of Europe’: Europe and its Myths.” In Figures d’Europe / Images and Myths of Europe, edited by Luisa Passerini, 345-46. Brussels: Peter Lang.

    Kabir, Ananya J. 2013. “The Dancing Couple in Black Atlantic Space.” In Diasporic

    Women’s Writing of the Black Atlantic. (En)Gender Literature and Performance, edited by Emilia Durán Almarza and Esther Álvarez López, 133-150. London and NY: Routledge, 2013.

    Kant, Immanuel. [1795] 1999. “Toward Perpetual Peace.” In Practical Philosophy. Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Translated by Mary J. Gregor. 311-352. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

    Kendall, Gavin, Ian Woodward, and Zlatko Skrbis. 2009. The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism: Globalization, Identity, Culture and Government. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.

    Lemos Horta, Paulo. 2017. Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Leurs, Koen and Sandra Ponzanesi. eds. 2018. “Connected Migrants. Cosmopolitanism and Encapsulation.” Special Issue, Popular Communication. The International Journal of Media and Culture 16, no. 1: 4-20.

    Mbembe, Achille. 2016. “Decolonizing the University: New Directions.” Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 15, no. 1: 29-45.

    Mignolo, Walter. 2000. “The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism.” Public Culture 12, no. 3: 721-48.

    Parry, Benita. 1991. “The Contradictions of Cultural Studies.” Transition 53: 37–45.

    Pichler, Florian. 2009. “Cosmopolitan Europe. Views and identity.” European Society 11, no. 1: 3-24.

    Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. 2006. “Emancipatory Cosmopolitanism: Towards an Agenda.” Development and Change 37, no. 6: 1247–57.

    Pollock, Sheldon I., et al. 2002. “Cosmopolitanisms.” In Cosmopolitanism, edited by Carole Anne Breckenridge et al., 1-14. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Ponzanesi, Sandra. 2014. The Postcolonial Cultural Industry. Icons, Markets, Mythologies. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Ponzanesi, Sandra. 2018. “Cosmopolitan Europe. Postcolonial Interventions and Global Transitions.” In Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies, 2nd ed., edited by Gerard Delanty, 564-574. London: Routledge.

    Rabinow Paul. 1986. “Representations Are Social Facts.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 234-261. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

    Robbins, Bruce. 1998. “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms.” In Cosmopolitics. Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 246-64. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Robbins, Bruce. 2016. “Prolegomena to a Cosmopolitanism in Deep Time.” Interventions, International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 18, no. 2: 172-86.

    Robbins, Bruce. 2017. The Beneficiary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    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. Matti Leprêtre–Modernity, Lebensreform, and MAGA’s Grassroots: On Some Economic Contradictions of Trumpism 
  • 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

More posts