Search results for: “godzich”

  • The Life and Work of Edward Said: lectures by Wlad Godzich and Stathis Gourgouris

    The Life and Work of Edward Said: lectures by Wlad Godzich and Stathis Gourgouris

    As a part of b2‘s series on Legacies of the Future: The Life and Work of Edward Said, Wlad Godzich presents “The Stateless and the Proper,” and Stathis Gourgouris on “The Epistemology of Edward Said.”

  • Wlad Godzich at Pitt

    Coinciding with the time of the b2 editorial board meeting and conference, Wlad Godzich will present two additional lectures:

    Friday, November 2, 2012 2 PM, “Conceptions of the Human, Conceptions of the Humanities,” 35th floor of the Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh sponsored with the Undergraduate Honors College.

    Tuesday, November 6, 2012, “Pseudophilia, Truthiness, and the University,” The Humanities Center of the University of Pittsburgh, room 602 Cathedral of Learning.

  • Of Human Flesh: An Interview with R.A. Judy by Fred Moten

    Of Human Flesh: An Interview with R.A. Judy by Fred Moten

    This is the second part of an interview of R.A. Judy conducted by Fred Moten in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, over the course of two days, May 26-27, 2017. The first half of this interview appears in boundary 2, vol. 47, no. 2 (May 2020): 227-62.


    Fred Moten: I want to return again, now, to the question concerning the fate of (Dis)forming the American Canon. The question of the fate of how it will be read in the future is obviously connected to the question of how it was read when it first came out. So, let’s revisit a little bit the reception and maybe think in a very specific way about the different ways in which it was received in different disciplines and in different intellectual formations.

    RA Judy: Well, yes my earlier response to the same question focused on the idea of the book; that is, how that idea was received or not received in the discipline or field of black studies. In fact, the book had quite a different reception in the fields of cultural studies, comparative literature, and what was then being called critical race studies, or what became known as critical race theory and Africana philosophy. In some sense, this was understandable, given that I am a comparativist, and it was composed as a comparativist essay meant to be a bringing of the issues of what you and I call Black Study into the ambit of comparative literature, even though it ended up being marketed as a particular kind of Afro-centric work, which it never was, at least not in the political or academic position of Afro-centrism. For instance, the first chapter of the book which is a very careful critique and analysis of the formation of black studies, is about the university and the formation of the university, and McGeorge Bundy’s intervention at that important 1977 Yale seminar on Afro-American literary theory, which Henry Louis Gates and Robert Stepto were instrumental in organizing as a sort of laying of the foundation of what would become African American Studies. Bill Readings in his University in Ruins, found that chapter to be an important account, anticipating the neoliberalization of the university as he was trying to analyze it, and his taking it up became important; it led to not only a citation in his book, but other work that I began to do in boundary 2 and elsewhere. So that’s one point of, if you will, positive reception where (Dis)forming was taken up. The fourth chapter, “Kant and the Negro,” got a tremendous amount of positive reception and prominence, and was even been translated into Russian and was published as an essay in Readings’ pioneering online journal Surfaces out of the University of Montreal.[1] And then it got republished by Valentin Mudimbe in the Journal for the Society for African Philosophy in North America (SAPINA) in 2002. “Kant and the Negro” circulated widely and it got a great deal of attention from people like Tommy Lott, and Lucius Outlaw, and Charles Mills. In other words, it was well received and proved to be an important piece in the area of African and Africana philosophy. Lewis Gordon, as a result of that work, and this is when I was still very much involved with the American Philosophical Association, ended up producing one of my pieces in his Fanon Reader.[2] In Cynthia Willett’s Theorizing Multiculturalism, there’s a  prominent piece, “Fanon and the Subject of Experience,”[3] which kind of refers to one of the points I was trying to make yesterday about individuation. I want to read to you, if I may, the opening passage from that 1998 essay:

    If we accept along with Edward Said that was is irreducible and essential to human experience is subjective, and that this experience is also historical, then we are certainly brought to a vexing problem of thought. The problem is how to give an account of the relationship between the subjective and historical. It can be pointed out that Said’s claim is obviously not the polarity of the subjective and the historical, but only that the subjective is historical. It is historical as opposed to being transcendent, either in accordance with the metaphysics of scholasticism and idealism, or the positivist empiricism of scientism. Yet to simply state that subjective experience is also historical, is not only uninteresting, but begs the question, “how is historical experience possible?” The weight of this question increases when we recall the assumption that the subjective is essential to human experience. Whatever may be the relationship between subjective and historical experience, to think the latter without the former is to think an experience that is fundamentally inhuman. Would it then be “experience”? That is, to what extent is our thinking about experience, even about the historical, contingent upon our thinking about the subject?

    This is how, then, I take up the approach to Fanon as bringing us to this question. And we see that already there I’m trying to interrogate the inadequacy of the notion of the subject in accounting for the question of the historical nature of thinking-in-action, and that thinking-in-action always entails what we were talking about yesterday as the individual as discrete multiplicity in action. And how we think about it, and that’s where I’m trying to go with the second book which I’m sure we’ll talk about in a minute, and also the third book with Fanon, but that’s coming out of (Dis)forming as a formulation of individuation. Again, this is in the Willett piece that is an elaboration on what is at the crux of the project in “Kant and the Negro.” That is to say, it’s not that there is no discrete articulation of multiplicity that is fundamental to what we may consider experience, or what others might call the situation or the situational; the question is how we think about it, and whether the current discourse we have of it is adequate or even if its’s possible to still think about it once we dispense with that discourse. I mark the latter by trying to make a differentiation between what I consider the historical formation of bourgeois subjectivity as a particular way of understanding the relationship between thinking and history, of thinking the event, and other formations that I think are inadequately accounted for because we don’t have the language for it, and that’s the point of the current work, is to try to formulate such a language. Tommy Lott, as well found “Kant and the Negro” very important; I ended up doing a piece in his volume, A Companion to African-American Philosophy, and I believe it was called . . . Yes! “Kant and Knowledge of Disappearing Expression.”[4] In that piece I, at Tommy’s invitation, took up the philological problematic that Ben Ali posed as an important case or instance of not really the limitations of Enlightenment theories of the subject, but also as pointing to other possibilities as a concrete instance in Ben Ali’s stories.

    FM: So, this leads me to two questions, one that emerges from this different reception. It has to do with the relationship between black studies and other disciplines, specifically with comparative literature but also with philosophy, and then with mathematics, and, finally, with their convergence. So, the question is what do those disciplines have to do with black studies? How does that relation manifest itself, not only in your work but in a general way? So, that’s one question. The other question, which is connected to it, is this: once one begins to think about the confluence of black study, mathematics, philosophy, how does that coincide with a project, or at least what I take to be part of your project, which is not a renewal or a rescue of the subject of experience but is, rather, a new way of thinking the the relation between individuation, as you have elaborated it here, and historical experience?

    RAJ: I’ll first make a remark about “the subject of experience.” In the Lott piece and in another piece that I did at the invitation of Robert Gooding-Williams in the special issue of the Massachusetts Review he edited, on Du Bois, “Hephaestus Limping, W.E.B. Du Bois and the New Black Aesthetics,”’[5]in which the work of Trey Ellis is my point of reference, I talk about what I designate, the subject of narrativity, as distinct from the subject of experience, or the scientific subject. And in an effort to try to elaborate how I think what’s at play in a whole series of texts, Ellis’ Platitudes and others, the Ben Ali texts, I’ve gone on to other novels and such that are doing this thing, including Darius James’ Negrophobia, and Aṭ-ṭāhir wa ṭṭār’s book that has yet to be translated into English, Tajriba fī al-‘ašq (Experiment in Love) to Ibrahīm al-Konī’s work, and of course Naguib Mahfouz’s Tulāthīya (The Cairo Trilogy). In each of these cases, I’m trying to show that what’s at work is the formulation of a kind of subject, a representation of it; in calling it the subject of narrativity, that’s a precursor to what I referred to yesterday as the subject of semiosis. And in that working through, the thinking of Charles Sanders Peirce is really central and instrumental. I mentioned Vico earlier, and Spinoza, Peirce and Du Bois, these are principal texts for me in the Western tradition, as is al-Ghazālī, as well as the Tunisian writer, al-Mas’adī, as well as Risāla al-ghufrān by al-Ma’arrī, and the work of al-Jāḥiẓ, particularly his Kitāb al-hayawān (Book of the Animals), and Kitāb al-bayan wa a-tabiyīn (Book of Eloquence and Demonstration). This is kind of like my library, as it were. And Peirce, to stay focused on the question about the philosophical and the mathematical, in his effort to try to arrive at a logical-mathematical basis for human knowledge in a very broad sense, which he calls “semiosis” around the same time de Saussure discovers “sémiologie, gives us a very specific conceptualization of community in narrative, community in process, whereby truth is generated in the dynamics of ongoing open-ended signification. I come to Peirce through my formation as a comparativist— Peirce’s work was of some importance in Godzich’s Comparative Literature Core Seminar at the University of Minnesota in a particular kind of engagement with Husserl, Derrida and Lyotard and others who had looked over at Peirce—but more importantly through Du Bois. In reading through Du Bois’ student notebooks, I find clear traces . . . echoes of Peirce.  Although Peirce isn’t named in those note books, Royce, with whom Du Bois studies and whose theory of community he was critically engaged in, was. And Royce expressly admitted he was using Peirce’s semiosis in elaborating his theory of community. This is one of the portals of the mathematical concern for me, with respect to the question of individuation, minus Peirce’s agapism; that is to say, minus Peirce’s teleology. Once again, Du Bois instructed me in a major way; this time to be critical of teleology, understanding the fact that it is the persistence of the teleological that leads to particular ethical impasses, or what I like to call the crisis in and of ontology. A crisis in which the event of the Negro always highlights, always marks the break, the gap, the hole in the ontological project. So, that even the invention of the Negro in seventeenth-century legislation of slavery is an effort to try and fill that gap. And that’s where I begin to situate the question of what you like to call Black Study. Now, that’s my way of thinking, to begin to address your question about the different disciplinary responses. To my recollection something begins to happen around the work of black philosophy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I’m thinking of the of work Nathaniel Hare and what he began publishing in The Black Scholar from its inaugural issue in November 1969, where we find Sékou Touré’s “A Dialectical Approach to Culture,” and Stanislas Adotevi’s “The Strategy of Culture.” The next year in volume 2, issue 1 of that same journal, we find the remarkably provocative the interview with C. L. R. James, in which he challenges the then prevailing identitarian notion of black study. That same issue had an essay that, at the time—1970 when I was a sophomore in High School still aspiring to be a physicist and astronaut—so caught my attention that I’ve keep a copy of it, S.E. Anderson’s “Mathematics and the Struggle for Black Liberation,” in which he states something to the effect that “Black Studies programs then being instituted were white studies programs in blackface aimed at engendering American patriotism through militant integrationism. What he argued for instead was a revolutionary humanism. My point is there was a radical intellectual tradition that lay the foundations of much of what is being done now as Black Study, that most certainly was foundational to my thinking and work. Essays published in The Black Scholar during the early 1970s that still reverberate with me are

    Abdl-Hakimu Ibn Alkalimat’s “The Ideology of Black Social Science,” Sonia Sanchez’s “Queens of the Universe,” Dennis Forsythe’s “Frantz Fanon: Black Theoretician,” and George Jackson’s “Struggle and the Black Man.” Just as important are people like Cedric Robinson, Tommy Lott and Lucius Outlaw, who are approaching the question of blackness in a vein that I think is a continuation of what Du Bois was trying to do, and what people like Harold Cruse and Alain Locke were trying to do.

    FM: Would you include the folks who were doing a certain kind of theological reflection that at some point came to be known as black liberation theology, people like James Cone, and even his great precursor Howard Thurman? Was that work that you were attuned to at that same time too? Because they were concerned with these kinds of ontological questions as well.

    RAJ: Yes, I was reading James Cone and Howard Thurman; and before that, William Jones’s 1973 book, Is God a White Racist? While they were concerned with the same questions, they were emphatically still invested in the teleological. But yes, I include that, although that part of the reception of (Dis)forming is complicated—I’m thinking of Corey T. Walker’s reading of it— because the canon that they’re trying to form is—what can I say—is around the church, and around the theological questions of the church and the performance of community in the church, the church as community. It is post-secular in a way that (Dis)forming is not. And so, the question of style is an important question for me and the question of the forms that are being explored is an important question for me, and I couldn’t follow them in those forms. Significantly enough, Hortense Spillers does both anticipate and follow because one of Spillers’ earliest concerns is to understand the genealogy of the sermon, in all of its various forms including its forms among early English Protestants and its rhetorical structures. You can see this in what she’s doing with Roland Barthes and the question of structuralism in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” You can also see it in her essay on Harold Cruse, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual; A Post-Date,” a long meditation on the question of style and the analogy between musical style, and the question of whether or not the black intellectual can be capable of a certain kind of thinking, which, by the way, is a very interesting engagement with Althusser and Balibar’s Reading Capital. “America and Powerless Potentialities”[6] considers Spillers’ engagement with these questions along these lines in tandem with Du Bois’ 1890 Harvard commencement speech. So yeah, there’s a certain engagement, but one that is, let us say, appositional, a certain . . .  I have an allergy to the teleological, to the extent that I keep trying to make sure that I can ferret out its persistent or residual workings in my own thinking.

    FM: Yeah, I was thinking of them, just because sometimes when I go back and look at that stuff, it seems like teleology gives them the sniffles sometimes, too, you know?

    RAJ: Cone’s work, for example, has led to a very particular swing over the past 8 years now of trying to reclaim Du Bois as a Christian thinker. I’m thinking, for instance, of work by Jonathon Kahn, who takes into account the arguments of Cone, but also Dolores Williams and Anthony Pinn, in his reading of Du Bois work. Or that of Edward Blum and Phil Zuckerman. The work of Cone and company is there yes, but in a particular kind of way, as that with which I’m flying but out of alignment. On the issue of the disciplines, it’s very interesting that (Dis)forming was well-received by African American philosophers, such as Lott and Outlaw, Paget Henry and Lewis Gordon, Robert Gooding-Williams, Tony Bogues and Charles Mills, all of who are doing significant work, trying to take up these issues, as issues relating to, forgive the phrase, the general human condition. These issues, referring to the problematics of blackness, or black study, where black study is about a particular tradition of thinking and thinking in the world, proved to be quite enabling, and proved to be one of the initial fronts, or at least openings, for a, I don’t want to quite simply say “revitalization” because that gives a certain weight, perhaps disproportionately, to what was happening at San Francisco State in 1968-69, although I think it’s important when you go over the material being generated in the 1980s and 1990s  to bear in mind that that movement in ’68 initiated by the Third World Liberation Front—a coalition of the Black Students Union, the Latin American Students Organization, the Filipino-American Students Organization, and El Renacimiento —was expressly predicated upon Fanon’s understanding of the prospects of a new humanism, and so its ambition was to try to model, what would be broadly speaking, a new humanism, which is why that is going to eventually lead to the creation of what I believe was the first autonomous department of Black Studies and Ethnic Studies under Hare’s directorship. It’s no small matter that the Black Panther Party’s National Minister of Education, George Mason Murray, was central to that movement. So, that initial institution of Black Studies conceived itself, presented itself, and aspired to be a reimagining of the history of humanity along a very specific radical epistemological trajectory. Now, how that gets lost is another question, and we can talk about the difference between San Francisco State in 1968 and the establishment of a black studies program at Yale in the same year. But, to stay focused, I don’t want to say that what Lucius Outlaw, Tommy Lott, Lewis Gordon, Charles Mills, Tony Bogues and others are doing is simply a revival of San Francisco State in 68; although I do think it is taking up that epistemological project. We see this, for instance, with Hussein Bulhan’s 1985 book, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, which was trying to lay down a radical humanist conception of humanity predicated upon psychoanalysis, in that way, taking up Lacan’s anti-philosophy. Not so much the anti-philosophy, but trying to make philosophy do something different, and think about the individual in ways that was more complicated and more adequate than the theory of the subject that people were rallying against. All of those were efforts that come out of Fanon and were expressly thinking about the question of, what you and I call Black Study, as an instantiation of the question of the human, in which the particularities of the style of response of black people to certain things, the forms of thinking that those we call “black” were engaging in, said something, or had resonances, broad resonances. Without, then, just simply assuming to occupy the position of the normative subject, the transcendental subject, into which the hypostatized bourgeois had been placed in the philosophical discourse of the Enlightenment: the convergence of the subject of science with that historical bourgeois subject, or the subject of knowledge with that historical bourgeois subject, or even the subject of experience with that historical bourgeois subject, or even the subject of the spectacle, the subject who is seeing Merleau-Ponty tries to problematize. That Black Study attends to those particularities of style and thinking without trying to simply have the “black” occupy that subject position. The aim, instead, is to open up the project of thinking so that there isn’t that positionality at all. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier as displacement, that the Negro has no place, and is not about making place. But I like your phrasing, the “consistent and intense activity of displacement.” So, they’re doing that, these black philosophers, and they open up a front, they open up a Black Studies, in a way that retrieves the momentum of 68’ in a powerful way. And that work finds a particular institutional toehold. Bulhan will subsequently establish the Frantz Fanon University in Somaliland in, I think, 2010. And at Brown University’s Africana Studies Department, in contrast to what takes place at Temple and the creation of Africana Studies there, will include the work of Lewis Gordon, Tony Bogues, and Paget Henry . . .  So, the reception of (Dis)forming in those quarters was predictable. Those quarters were quarters of important experimentation, that have played no small role in the kind of transformation we have seen in Black Study, where increasingly this kind of work is becoming important. What’s interesting is what begins to occur in this century. One can begin to look at works that you’re starting to produce around 2000, where the revivification of that initial articulation I’m talking about, is taken up in poetic discourse. And in that form, begins to find its way, slowly—and it’s a struggle— into traditional institutional programs of what we now refer to as African American or African Studies. But it only begins to do so, because we’re still looking at a situation, if we look at Harvard, or Yale, or Princeton, or UC San Diego, we’re looking at programs that are still pretty much organized around the sociological model, that aren’t taking up these questions in this way. So that’s how I understand the institutional relationships, the disciplinary relationships, and account for the difference in reception of (Dis)forming.

    FM: The way you’re characterizing this raises a couple of questions for me, because I’m thinking specifically now of a particular work by Du Bois, which you first made available to contemporary readers some years ago, “Sociology Hesitant,” in which it appears to be the case that Du Bois is making a distinction within sociology, or between modes of sociology, or between possible modes of sociological reflection. It is that distinction we talked about a little bit earlier, a distinction regarding the difference between the calculable and the incalculable. My understanding of the essay is that it allows for maybe a couple of different modalities of the sociological, one that operates along a certain kind of positivist axis, and another that would take up what he talks about under the rubric of “the incalculable,” which would allow us to pay attention to these modalities of style you touched on earlier. Well, in that essay he talks about it in relation to the activities of the women’s club, but we could imagine he might also assert those activities as extensions of the church service as a scene in which the exegetical and the devotional are joined and shared. But the point is that there are a couple of different modalities of sociological reflection, one of which would entail something you would talk about under the rubric of the humanistic, or the philosophical, or the literary.

    RAJ: A prefatory remark about how I came to that essay. I just handed you an envelope from the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, dated, as you can see January 20, 1987. At that time, reading through the scholarship on Du Bois, I encountered many references to “Sociology Hesitant,” which reported its being lost. And I wanted to read this piece so badly because of the references. Anyway, in the course of reading through the microfilms of the W.E.B. Du Bois Collection, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Library, which the University of Minnesota Library owned, I came across a reference to “Sociology Hesitant,” in Robert W. McDonnell’s Guide and found it there in the microfilms. So I wrote the Special Collections and Archives office at Amherst, requesting the certified copy of it you’ve just looked at. I was like blown away when I actually read the essay, and blown away for the reasons that you’re posing right now. This does indeed go to our remarks earlier about individuation and what I was trying to say about the issues of paradox. In “Sociology Hesitant,” which is written in 1904-1905 in the context of the St. Louis world’s fair, Du Bois critiques sociology for a confusion of field and method. He traces that confusion back to Comte’s Positivism which, reducing the dynamics of human action to axiomatic law, postulates society as an abstraction; something that is “measureable . . . in mathematical formula,” as Du Bois puts it. Indeed, a fundamental dictum of Comte’s Positivism is that there is no question whatever which cannot ultimately be reduced, in the final analysis, to a simple question of numbers. And in this regard, we should bear in mind that his sociology entailed two orders of mathematical operations, which he calls “concrete mathematics” and “abstract mathematics” respectively. Du Bois tracks how this axiomatic arithmetization of human action gets deployed in Herbert Spencer’s descriptive sociology, and Franklin Gidding’s theory of consciousness of kind, as well as Gabriel Tarde’s theory of imitation. Regarding these various attempts at reducing human action to mathematical formula, he writes, “The New Humanism of the 19th century was burning with new interest in human deeds: Law, Religion, Education. . . . . A Categorical Imperative pushed all thought toward the paradox; the evident rhythm of all human action; and the evident incalculability in human action.” The phrase, “New Humanism,” translates Friedrich Paulsen’s designation, “Neue Humanismus,” which he also conflated as “Neuhumanismus”,” and so is usually rendered in English as “Neohumanism.” Paulsen coined the term in 1885 to designate the nineteenth century German cultural movement stemming from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s and Friedrich August Wolf’s ideas that classical Greek language and literature was to be studied because of its absolute value as the exemplary representation of the idea of man.” The Neohumanists held that nothing was more important than knowledge of Greek in acquiring self-knowledge (Selbsterkenntnis) and self-education (Selbstbildung). This Hellenophilia, bolstered by Christian Gottlob Heyne’s “scientific” philology, informed Friederich Gauss’s work in the arithmetization of analysis. We know about Du Bois’ German connections. His usage of the phrase strongly suggests that he’s thinking about the arithmetization of analysis, and he talks about what he calls “the paradox of Law and Chance” in terms of physics, and the developments of physics, and those who try to model the social on the physics. He maintains that the very project of the measurement exposes that there is something that is working here that is not measureable, that cannot be reduced to arithmetic expression, pace Comte’s positivist dictum. Du Bois effectively argues that Comte is wrong about mathematics. It does not tell us everything.” What it does is tell us a great deal about the physical world, even the physical nature of the human if we want to bring in the biological. But, while it tells us all of that, what keeps being exposed in the course of its discoveries is something that exceeds it in a way that really echoes Dedekind’s understanding of arithmetic definition and the limit problem, where something else emerges; which is what Du Bois pointedly calls, “the incalculable.” He proposes a different way of doing sociology. He says, “the true students of sociology accept the paradox of . . . the Hypothesis of Law and the Assumption of Chance.” They do not try to resolve this paradox, but rather look at the limit of the measureable and the activity of the incalculable in tandem, to, as it were, measure “the Kantian Absolute and Undetermined Ego.” Du Bois says this rather tongue-in-cheek because he’s continually challenging the Kantian proposition that this ego is not measureable to say that indeed we can say something about it and its traces, we just can’t say it in terms of numbers, we can’t count it. So, his proposition for sociology is one where we have the mathematical working and then we have these other incalculable activities. And in the space of the paradox, the break, he situates, 1) the event of human social organization; 2) that event can be seen from the perspective of a mediating discourse that will help mathematics recognize what it’s doing as an ontological project—which he wants to be critical of—and also will help chance appear in an important dynamic relationship to that ontological project. There is a way in which Du Bois is challenging not only Comte’s basing sociology so absolutely on arithmetic analysis but the predominate trend of statistical sociology—of which he was a leading practitioner, producing the second major statistical sociological study in the English language of an urban population, The Philadelphia Negro, in 1899— for, as he says in a 1956 letter to Herbert Aptheker, “changing man to an automaton and making ethics unmeaning and reform a contradiction in terms.” In that same letter, he effectively summarizes the critique of knowledge in “Sociology Hesitant” as the crux of his life-long intellectual project, or “philosophy,” as he calls it; which he characterizes as the belief that the human mind, human knowledge, and absolute provable truth approach each other like the asymptotes of the hyperbola. Although Du Bois attributes this analogy to lessons learned in High School mathematics, it is also a deployment or reference to the Poincaré asymptote, which is something he would have known very well as one of the premiere statisticians of his moment. The significance of Du Bois’ situating his thinking at the crux of paradox, the crossroad where the measurable and incalculable meet, to his thinking on the Negro is one of the things explored rather carefully in the book manuscript I’ve just finished, Sentient Flesh (Thinking in Disorder/Poiēsis in Black).

    FM: Earlier you expressed a certain kind of critical skepticism with regard to the very idea of a mediating discourse, or a third discursive frame, or a conceptual frame from which to adjudicate between these two.

    RAJ: Yeah, there I depart from Du Bois, hence, my remarks about the sociological, in the sense of the academic discipline.

    FM: So, you’re not advocating or enacting in your work anything like what he might call the “truly sociological.”

    RAJ: No, I am, but not in the sense of a normative disciplinary methodology, a unifying theory. Remember, Du Bois says “true students of sociology embrace the paradox.” I would paraphrase this as “true student of sociality,” because he is expressly arguing against “sociology” for not be capable of adequately studying the dynamic relationship between the ideological elements and the material practices constituting society. Anyways, when he says this, he is pushing against axiomatic absoluteness and not the tendency to generate law or axiomatic definition. The true student of sociality, then, is not hyper-invested in a transcendent disciplinary methodology, but rather in constantly moving along asymptotic lines. In that respect, I’m also taking up something that Du Bois does in his literary work. I offer as example, two texts: “Of the Coming of John,” and Dark Princess. One could pick more, including a wild piece of experimental writing that I found at Fisk back in 2011. In Sentient Flesh, I focus on “Of the Coming of John,” a very rich and important piece. I look at something he’s doing in that literary work, which is different from what he does, or let’s say stands in a particular kind of dynamic relationship to what he’s doing in his theoretical, sociological, political and editorial work. The nature of that relationship is indicated by his remarks in the 1956 Aptheker letter, but it is clarified in a piece that is arguably one of the scattered fragments he’s written that he alludes to there, in which he expressly theorizes the relationship between human mind and provable truth. That piece is the 56 page-long student essay he wrote in 1890 while studying at Harvard, “The Renaissance of Ethics,” for the year-long course, Philosophy VI, taught that year by William James. What one finds in that essay is a very sustained, very cogent critique of the history of modern philosophy from Bacon on. Actually, it begins with scholasticism to lay out what’s at stake in theistic teleology, and then talks about the extent to which the Galilean-Baconian revolution achieves a certain kind of transformation in the area of natural philosophy, the arithmetization of nature, but ethics lags behind. Ethics becomes metaphysics, and metaphysics just continues the teleological, and hence there is no renaissance of ethics that is comparable to what has happened in the physical sciences through arithmetization. Du Bois then claims the ascendency of the novel as evidence of what he calls the demand for a “science of mind” as the basis for a “science of ethics.” What I’m getting at with all of this is that what Du Bois is working towards in his account of the novel— and I would say also in the formal composition of The Souls of Black Folk —is illustrating there’s not so much a confrontation or a tension between, let us say, the mathematical and the poetic, but that they are working together. What I’m trying to point out is that, in Du Bois’ own account and performance, their working together, their relationship is not mediated by a transcendent third disciplinary discourse: the sociological. But rather, their working together is expressed in the activity of intellect-in-action, which is not disciplinary. In fact, I would say it is a thinking-in-disorder, which is what I’m calling “para-semiosis;” where semiosis is not a position—this relates to what I’ve said about the subject of narrativity—but is the activity of signification that is always multiple in its movements, multi-linear, and again even in terms of the individual expressions of elements, they themselves are multiple multiplicities; which are, as you say, “consistent and insistent.”

    FM:  Is what Du Bois calls the science of mind in “The Renaissance of Ethics” differentiated from what he calls true sociology? And if it is, is it differentiated at the level of its objects of analysis?

    RAJ: Yes. And if you look again at “Sociology Hesitant,” he also makes that differentiation. They’re both speculative texts. And he’s calling for a different way of thinking. The distinction, is part of a distinction of his thinking. Du Bois is full of all kinds of contradictions, right? And in trying to follow that distinction, in “Sociology Hesitant,” he’s talking about the prospects of a scholarly discipline, and he’s arguing for the discipline to be better oriented. That’s how he begins. And the reason that discipline is poorly oriented is because it’s grounded in a particular kind of idealism. That’s his charge against Comte and Spencer, against Gidding and Tarde; they’ve postulated a totality, a whole, without any conceptualization of relationships between elements. And so they’re not actually studying the multiplicities that constitute human reality, they’re putting forward an abstraction, and it’s an abstraction that’s driven by Comte’s commitment to number, as I’ve already remarked. So, the discipline has to be corrected if it is to actually consider what is of importance in this moment of modernity and capitalism; and that is the ways in which . . . how socialities are being constituted. Du Bois’ point is to critique sociology, and when he says true students of sociology, he says if you’re going to do sociology, you would have to do it in a way that attends to the paradox. But the moment you begin to do that, then you’re doing something quite different from sociology as we understand it, because that’s going to take you, as it takes him, to questions about epistemology, about what’s the nature of intelligence, what’s the nature of thinking in the world, what is the nature of duty, what, indeed, is our theory of mind. He comes to these questions in “The Renaissance of Ethics” in the course of trying to understand duty in terms of interpersonal relationship, or reciprocity, sociality. What is the good and how do we get at the good? On that score, there is a very subtle, profoundly important move he makes. Taking on Hume’s theory of causality—according to which the human mind, incapable of directly observing causal relations only conceptualizes sequences of events, one following another—Du Bois argues that it’s all about structural process and movement, stressing the point that if one element in the process shifts, the relationship shifts, so that not even sequence is consistently necessary. He offers in illustration a grammatical example. If you change the term “bonus” in the phrase vir bonus (“good man”) to “bona,” the alteration changes the terms of relation—in accordance with Latin grammatical rule, making the adjective in this phrase feminine, bona, dictates that the noun vir (“man”) becomes mulier (“woman”). But this changes a great deal more, given the provenance of the phrase. In classical Latin, vir means interchangeably “hero,” “man,” “grown-man,” and “husband.” Vir bonus, “the good man,” belongs to the discourse of public conduct. In short, vir bonus is the virtuous man of masculine polity. If you feminize this statement of the virtuous political conduct, it becomes something else. This is no offhanded remark on Du Bois’ part—remember that for two years in his first job at Wilberforce, he taught Latin and Greek—and when you explore it in the context of the essay’s topic, renaissance of ethics, what he’s suggesting is a critique of the fundamentals of the millennia-long tradition of virtue ethics. Much of “The Renaissance of Ethics” is committed to deconstructing the phrase, summum bonum (“the highest “good”), which is Cicero’s Latin rendering of the Platonic /Aristotelian Greek term, eudaimonia. He’s saying that we must begin to reimagine what and how we conceive to be the human. He gives considerable emphasis to “how” we conceive; and that’s where the question of duty comes up. It’s in trying to think about how we can think duty that he starts to shift into questions about how we think about intelligence.   Accordingly, he ends up with this call for the need of a science of mind.

    FM: So, are you then saying at a certain point there is a convergence between true sociology and science of mind, insofar as true sociology’s actual object of study is mind?

    RAJ: Yeah. And here’s where he’s following Comte. Comte’s whole positivist science is about epistemology, about the structure of knowledge.  Du Bois point is that Comte is approaching the question of intelligence on a false premise. We have to understand and begin to think about it differently as a practice, which for Du Bois means attending closely to life practices: the multiplicities of discrete things that people do.  He approaches these in a way that’s really quasi-structuralist. Here, there’s an echo of Aristotle, he begins to use Aristotelian terms and movement, beginning from there to track patterns and structures. We’re talking, then, about what is thinking, what is intelligence. What and how are we? So the statement about true students of sociology is somewhat ironic, as well as being critical and corrective. Spencer, Giddings, Tarde, and their respective disciples aren’t true students of sociology, if they were, they would do this. And if they did this, it’s would take them beyond the numeric, beyond just counting.

    FM: So then, is the true student of sociology a scientist of mind?

    RAJ: Well, I’m not prepared to say that. If one took Du Bois at his word, one could, in a certain way, say that. I’m not prepared to say it because there’s a great deal of slippage and movement in both these texts I’m referring to. As I say, they’re speculative. He’s reaching, he’s trying to find a way to give a sort of coherent and adequate expression to what he imagines to be the project. So I’m not prepared to say that the true student of sociology is a cognitive scientist. But I am prepared to say that in Du Bois’ conceptualization of what the nature of the project is, he’s not, in the end, positing sociology as a transcendent mediating discourse that’s going to make mathematics work with poetry. And so what I am saying is that in his performance—and this is where I take a cue for the idea I have of semiosis and para-semiosis—in his performance and the reaching for I’ve just described, in which he’s situating these things in a certain kind of relationship, this is where the thinking is taking place. What he calls intellect-in-action is what he’s reaching for, what he’s performing. What I’m saying, in addendum, is if we focus on intellect-in-action as process, as semiosis, and think about the problematic he is approaching, which is the problematic of blackness, in those terms, we arrive at what I call the poiēsis of blackness. The poiēsis of blackness is itself a process of thinking, of thinking in and with signification. We could very-well consider it a practice of Black Study.

    FM: When we go to look for the poiēsis of blackness, when we seek it out as an object of study, where do we seek it out? In other words, let’s say that there must be slippage between ‘true sociology’ and ‘science of mind’; then, by the same token we could say that in spite of the fact that there is this precarious pathway from one to the other, that precarious pathway is a pathway that Du Bois takes, and that he encourages us to take, so that we are on our way, as it were, towards a science of mind, which would take up and be interested in, and be concerned with, while also enacting in that study, what you’re calling, after Du Bois, intellect-in-action, but what you would also call a poetic sociality. I want to hear you say a little bit more, and be a little bit more emphatic, about what the object of study is or whether there is, in fact, an object of study that can be differentiated from the mode of study. Where do we go to look for this intellect-in-action? Where do we go to look for this black poetic sociality?  Am I right in assuming that where we go to look for it is in what you described earlier as these discrete multiplicities, which we are, in fact, enacting in that search?

    RAJ: The poiēsis of blackness, and this is what I argue Du Bois performs, I want to be emphatic here, is process and object. It’s doing what it’s talking about. As I’ve already said, I paraphrase Du Bois’ term, intellect-in-action, as “thinking- in-action.” Hence, the title of my new book is, Sentient Flesh (Thinking in Disorder/ Poiesis in Black). There is an emphasis on disorder, precisely because this thinking is not already circumscribed—and here I have in mind Heidegger’s notion of the concept’s circumscription by order. But it’s a thinking that occurs in the fluidity of multiplicities, and in its articulation, articulates discrete orders that have a particular life in activity but aren’t eternal. They’re always on their way to the next. This is what Du Bois talks about as the asymptotes of the hyperbola, invoking the continuum hypothesis; that these things approach one another toward infinity without ever touching. Assuming human knowledge and provable absolute truth to be the hyperbola in Du Bois’ analogy, there’s a long discussion we can have about ethics being the point at the center of the hyperbola where the transverse axis, “law,” and the conjugate axis, “chance,” meet. Any such point of conjunction becoming what Comte calls états, “states,” and we can call orders of knowledge.  We might, in that Comtean way, understand these états as expressions that articulate specific institutions— now I’m speaking very much like Vico— that have material traces, that we can call “culture” or “civilization,” we have all kinds of names for these, but that are fundamentally dynamic, and so are not enduring in themselves. What endures is the process. So, the object is precisely these discrete multiplicities at many registers. We could talk about this in terms of sets. But as the object of knowledge and analysis, it is so performatively. One does not come at that object from someplace else, but one is doing the very thing that one is talking about, and so it becomes a way of attending to one’s thinking in action which I’ve called elsewhere “eventful thinking.”

    FM: You just said it is a way for one to attend to one’s thinking in action. But earlier you spoke of thinking-in-action, intellect-in-action, discrete multiplicity, in what might be called set-theoretical terms. Is it, in fact, more accurate to say that it is the individual who is engaged in both the enactment and the study of intellect-in-action?

    RAJ: It’s the individual, as I said in our earlier discussion of this, in relation; and it’s a dynamic relation. So, it’s not the individual standing alone; it’s not the individual as one, but the individual as an articulation of the semiosis in tandem with other individuals. And I put it that way because one must be careful . . .  I’m not arguing for what Husserl calls the transcendental subject, where there is this notion of the articulation of the individual in relation to others, but it’s raised up to another, again, transcendent level at which there is a particular kind of integrity that then filters down. There is no transcendence here. By my reading, there is no transcendent position in what Du Bois is trying to do, and what I’m trying to do with what Du Bois is trying to do. The reason there is no transcendent position in what Du Bois is trying to do specifically, and this is expressly in his work, is because his immediate object of concern is “the Negro.” And he’s trying very hard to understand how the Negro is, what the Negro is.

    FM: When you say “the Negro,” do you mean a Negro?

    RAJ: No. Because Du Bois doesn’t mean a Negro. He’s talking about what one could call an event. And when he’s asking how it is, he’s trying to understand the situation of the event. In other words, he’s trying to understand the ways in which what we would call modernity has articulated this event, and not only what that event is, but how that event is articulated, how that event works, how it acts. What is activity within, around that event? Or to put it differently, this is why when he talks about it in terms of “the souls of black folks,” he’s not being Hegelian, he’s not talking about Geist. He’s concerned with the ways in which that event, in its historical specificity, permits, enables, and encourages particular sorts of activity; and he wants to know what that activity tells us or says about the human condition or possibility. Nahum Chandler talks about situatedness at that level in Du Bois, and what he says it does is, “engenders a paraontological discourse.” I want to avoid, for reasons we can go into, the paraontological. Some of the reason has been indicated in what I’ve been saying about Du Bois’ critique of teleology, his critique of the limitations of number, which has to do with eschewing a very specific investment in a transcendent discourse of being qua being. And I’m thinking very specifically about the provenance of the term “paraontology.” Oskar Becker coins the term, “Paraontologie,” or “paraontology” as a corrective augmentation to Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis. A mathematician, Becker was also one of Husserl’s students, along with Heidegger at Freiburg. In fact, both served as his assistant, and his expectation was that the two of them would continue his phenomenological research, with Heidegger doing so in the human sciences and Becker in the natural sciences. Anyway, Becker coined the term in his 1937 essay, “Transzendenz und Paratranszendenz” (“Transcendence and Paratranscendence”), to counter Heidegger’s displacement of Husserl’s eidetic reduction in favor of the existential analytic. Becker tries to counter Heidegger by reconstructing eidos as the primordial instance when the possibility of interpretation is presented. He calls this primordial presentation of presentation a Paraexistenz, “paraexistence,” and its phenomenological investigation is the Paraontologie, “paraontology.” This is a challenge to Heidegger’s claim that existential analytic of Dasein brings us to fundamental ontology. Becker wishes, thereby, to redeem the possibilities of a super discourse of being qua being. A key element in his argument with Heidegger is the identification of mathematics and ontology. Along those lines, he was making a particular kind of intervention into set theory. When Lacan some years later begins to pick up the issues of set theory before moving onto topology, he deploys a term that is very similar in connotation to Becker’s paraontology, par-être, “the being beside.” But even Lacan’s articulation of par-être, as a way of trying to move against the philosophical discourse of ontology— psychoanalysis as the anti-philosophy—runs the risk, as Lorenzo Chiesa has said, of slipping back into the ontological. Of course we know Badiou, who follows Lacan expressly in this, like Becker, identifies mathematics with ontology, maintaining that while mathematics does not recognize it is ontological in its project, philosophy is there to recognize it and to mediate between it and poetry. This is one of the reasons I have a problem with paraontology, it takes us back to the position wherein the discourse of philosophical ontology is reaffirmed as dominant. While I trouble Chandler’s sense of the situatedness of the Negro generating the discourse of the paraontological, I concur with his gesture to try and find the adequate language to denote the same process I’m calling para-semiosis. This process is what I think he’s reaching for when he says the paraontological. I just wouldn’t want to call it paraontological, I would want to call it precisely para-semiosis, or para-individuation; where, again, it is not the individual as the one, but the way in which the individual— we talked about it in terms of impersonation earlier—is in relationship to others who are being articulated; and their articulation exposes the conjunction of law and chance, as Du Bois would put it. I say, the conjunction of multiplicities of semiosis, or para-semiosis.

    FM: So, when we seek to pay attention to the event of the Negro, or try to understand the way in which the event of the Negro is articulated, what we must seek out and what we are trying to pay attention to are Negroes-in-relation, or a-Negro-in-relation?

    RAJ: I would put it somewhat differently. I wouldn’t say the event of the Negro. I said Du Bois was focused on the Negro as event. He’s very emphatic on using the term, “Negro,” and his emphasis is instructive. In his argument with Roland Barton about it, he’s actually arguing for multiplicity, that the term “Negro” designates multiple multiplicities. It’s a term that in its usage connotes multiplicities; and it connotes the historicity of multiplicities, and that’s why he wants to keep it. And so when I say that the immediate object of his concern is the Negro as event, I mean multiplicities as event. So one can say that Du Bois’ is really concerned with the event. Not the only event, but Negro as event, Negro as an instantiation of event, and in understanding the particularities of that instantiation, we begin to understand the situatedness and the eventfulness of thinking.

    FM: And what do these particularities of instantiation look like? Where do we seek them out? How do we recognize them?

    RAJ: This is where I agree with Du Bois, in the million life practices of those pressed into embodiment as Negro . . .  that flesh which is disciplined and pressed into those bodies, which can purport this eventfulness in all of its historicity, what you would be calling “a Negro,” or in another sense, Negroes, or black. In being so disciplined to embody the event in this way, as Negro, that flesh manifests this eventfulness in its life practices and performances. And we can begin to look at specific discrete forms in dance, juba dance, or the Buzzard Lope dance— something I always talk about because I’m preoccupied with it a bit lately—and, as we talked about earlier, musical forms in which this enactment of eventful thinking is formally immanent. Not only formally but conceptually. I mean that those performing these activities have an expressed poetic knowledge, a technē poiētikē, wherein there is no hard distinction between fleshly performance and conceptualization of being-in-the-world. In other words, the performance articulates a conscious existential orientation. Take, for instance, the Buzzard Lope. Referring back to Bess Lomax Hawes’ 1960 film of the Georgia Sea Island Singers of Sapelo island performing the dance, in her interviews with them, they explain the choreography and what is the significance of what they’re doing in great detail; we would say, they’re theorizing it in a way that exhibits how they are cognizant of the event of the thinking.

    FM: But what’s crucial, what is absolutely essential to this articulation, is the disciplining of flesh into discrete and separable bodies. It seems to me that what you were saying, and I’m trying to make sure I’ve got it straight, is that what’s absolutely essential, or what is a fundamental prerequisite for paying attention to this thinking, or this intellect in action, is a process through which flesh is disciplined. And by disciplined, I take that to mean also separated into individual bodies, which can, then, become an object of analysis and understanding and accounting at the same time that they can also becomes a condition for this other, anti-disciplinary articulation.

    RAJ: And then it becomes an object. Yes, this is central to my thinking. Here I want to mark again a difference between me and Du Bois. For Du Bois, it is an unavoidable irreducible historical event and fact itself; which is the reason why he thinks the Negro is an important instance for understanding how humanity constitutes itself. He talks about this in “My Evolving Program,” where he says something to the effect, “that here we have human beings whose conditions of formation under tremendous violence are a matter of documented record. The juridical discourse is rich; the commercial discourse is rich. And what they’ve done under those circumstances, tells us something about how and what humans are.” This was behind his directing of the projected 100 year Atlanta Study project. When I talk about this in terms of the existential issue of the flesh being disciplined I’m paying very close attention to Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby and Papa’s Maybe” in this regard, because one of the things that I think needs to be attended to in that essay is that there is no moment in which flesh is not already entailed in some sort of semiosis, that it isn’t written upon or written into some order of signification. In other words, that flesh coming out of Africa is not a tabula rasa. There is no such thing as a homo sapiens tabula rasa. By definition, homo sapiens is that creature of semiosis, so it becomes then an issue of multiple orders of signification and semiosis in relationship to one another. And of course in the history of the constitution of the Negro, it becomes one of a putative hierarchy of semiosis and the conceit that it is possible to eradicate other semiosis in the favor of one. The fact that this flesh isn’t tabula rasa, it is always baring some hieroglyphic traces as it were, and we should not confuse those hieroglyphic traces, embodiment, with the flesh. So the flesh does not disappear. Here’s where I’m riffing on Spillers –flesh does not come before the body; flesh is always beside the semiosis. There’s a very particular statement from a 1938 WPA slave narrative that I find very useful, and that is Thomas Windham’s remark: “Us deserve our freedom because us is human flesh,” in which he’s articulating a conceptualization of a taxonomy of flesh, of humanity, in which fleshiness is not a substance underneath in which other things are written over, but it is an ineraseable constitutive element in the articulation of thinking, of being. Also inerasable—think of this in terms of a palimpsest— are all of the various ways in which there has been a writing with the flesh.

    FM: When Windham says, “Us is human flesh,” is this “us” to which he refers, and this “human flesh” to which he refers, didivdual or individual? Or a better way to put it would be, is it separable from itself? In other words, is there discretion in and of the flesh before the imposition of body as a specific modality of semiosis?

    RAJ: I’m not sure I understand your question, if I take it at its face value, either I’m suggesting or you’re construing me as positing the flesh as some sort of ideal substance. I thought I just said it’s not a tabula rasa.

    FM: It doesn’t matter to me if it’s a tabula rasa or not, and I would agree that there’s no flesh independent of semiosis, but we’re talking about a specific semiosis, namely the specific semiosis that imposes upon flesh the discipline of body. The reason I‘m asking the question is because it struck me, though maybe I misunderstood, when you said that when we start to pay attention to whatever you want to call it, black poetic sociality, or intellect- in-action, there’s a specific process by which it comes into relief. And one aspect of that process, which I called crucial—but I’m happy for you to explain why “crucial” is not the right word—is a kind of disciplinary element in which flesh has imposed upon it body, in which flesh has body written onto it or over it. Can you say something more about that process?

    RAJ: When I said “crucial,” I meant crucial for me and not crucial for Du Bois. And I was trying to mark how, for Du Bois, the constitution of the Negro is a historical fact; that here we have a population, to put it poorly, which has been stripped bare, and in that moment of being stripped bare, stripped of its own mythology, stripped of its own symbolic orders, is compelled to embody a whole other set of meanings, which it embodies. What they do in those given bodies is what he wants to focus on as showing what humans can do. I will take “crucial;” I say “crucial” because, for me, the intervention of modernity, the moment in 1662 in Virginia, or in the code of Barbados, or in the Code Noir—all of which expressly as juridical discourses define the Negro body—that is the superimposition of embodiment onto the flesh. Remember the Christian missionary-cum-ethnologist, Maurice Leenhardt’s conversation with the Canaque sculptor, Boesoou, on New Caledonia, where he suggests to Melanesian that Christianity’s gift to their thinking was the concept of the spirit. Boesoou has a retort, something like: “The spirit? Bah! You did not bring the spirit. We already knew the existence of the spirit. We were already proceeding according to the spirit. But what you did bring us was the body.” The spirit he refers to is not the Cartesian qua Christian esprit but the Canaque ko, which circumscribed, let’s say, by marvelous ancestral influx. Leenhardt, of course, misconstrues Boesoou’s retort as confirmation that the Canaque had created a new syncretic understanding of human being, combining the circumspection of ko with the epistemology of Cartesianism. The body becomes clearer as the physical delimitation of the person, who is identified with marvelous ancestral world, or as Leenhardt puts it,” the mythical world.” Roger Bastide will rehearse Leenhardt’s exegesis of Boesoou’s response some twenty-six years later and critique it as being no more than a scholastic reformulation of Aristotle’s notion of matter as the primary principle of individuation. Instead of an affirmation that the Canaque had assumed the Western concept of bodily delimited personhood, Bastide reads in Boessou’s retort affirmation of a continuing Canaque semiosis, in which personhood—personal identity, if you want—is not marked by the frontiers of the body.  Rather, it’s dispersed at the cross-roads of multiple orders of referential signification, semiosis, which, I would say, are in relation to the flesh. In other words, there are multiplicities of hieroglyphics of the flesh, to use Spillers terms, indicating a divisible person akin to Du Bois’ “double-consciousness,” and which should not be confused with psychosis. So, for me it’s crucial, just as it is for Spillers, that “body” ‘belongs to a very specific symbolic order. We can track its genealogy in what we would call loosely the Judeo-Christian tradition, or if you want, Western Modernity; and by the time it gets to the 17th century it has a very specific articulation, which Michel Foucault and Sylvia Wynter have tried to trace for us. And so, yes, that moment is crucial because that moment is a beginning moment; not in terms of origin because, in that invention of body, in imposing it upon the flesh in this way, it does indeed reveal, highlight fleshliness, and the inerasibility of flesh, as well as the inevitability and inerasibility of acts of writing on the flesh.  So that what Spillers calls “African forms” in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” are semiosis that write the flesh, they don’t write the flesh in terms of body, but they still write the flesh and they don’t go away.

    FM: Yes!

    RAJ: Even though the moment of the Code Noir is meant to completely suppress them. As Barthes would say, whom Spillers is using in that essay, would somehow steal the symbolic significance from those other semiotic orders for its purpose. The fact of theft notwithstanding, it never quite does completely steal it away.  And we know this. To talk about the specifics, when Lucy McKim, William Francis Allen. and Charles P. Ware begin to collect spirituals on the South Carolina Sea Islands during the Civil War, they’re writing in their notes and in their published pieces about how they hear rumors of these worldly songs, or the ways in which looking at those forms that the slaves are performing, there are recognizable Christian traces, structures and forms, but then there’s this other stuff that’s there they call “African,” and their slave informants called “worldly.” Those are indications of not only the continuation of the other semiosis that articulated relation to the flesh, but also a theorization of it in the fact that the informants are saying this is “worldly.” Those early collectors of spirituals borrowed from their informants this sense of, “oh, there are these worldly songs and these work songs that are doing this and that.” Beginning with McKim, who was the first one to actually try to notate the sonics of Negro-song, they all relate a certain “untranslatability” of these worldly forms. She says flat out that she can’t notate them. They are forms and structures and sounds that exceed the laws of musical notations. So we have these express references to the para-semiosis – and that’s why I call it para-semiosis – at work associated with the particularity of those populations called ‘Negro’, and that para-semiosis is brought into relief by the imposition of a body. Yes, it’s crucial, it’s an inaugural moment in the association of those human beings designated and constituted within the political economy of capitalist modernity as “Negro” and the poiēsis of blackness as para-semiosis. But I want to be clear, while the poiēsis of blackness has a particular association with the Negro, as para-semiosis, it is not just particular to the Negro. What is particular to the Negro with respect to para-semiosis is that the imposition of Negro embodiment brings into stark relief—and in a remarkably singular way—para-semiosis as species-activity. Para-semiosis does not begin with the Negro—demonstrably, it is prevalent among the Africans pressed into New World slave bodies, which is why Sidney Mintz called it “pan-Africanization.” I do not mean to suggest para-semiosis is uniquely African, whatever that term connotes, but it is, perhaps distinctively so. Distinctively African para-semiosis notwithstanding, I am in accord with Du Bois: in the very the forcefulness of Negro embodiment, the recognizable persistence of para-semiosis—call it what you may: syncretism, creolization, Africanism, of even poiesis of blackness—is indicative of a species-wide process. To say that poiēsis of blackness equates with pan-Africanization is to mark the historicity of the Negro as a specific embodiment of sentient flesh in space and time. That is to say, the specific situation that instantiates its poiēsis. Yet, insofar as that poiēsis is a function of para-semiosis, it’s a potentiality-of-being that might very-well attend other embodiments of flesh.

    FM: It is part of the general history of the imposition of the body which is brought into relief at this moment as a function of our particularity.

    RAJ: And what interests me tremendously, and here I am now pushing beyond what Du Bois sets out to do, is the fact that those semiosis not only are continually articulated and become part of improvisation, but they are articulated in a way that is consciously about multiplicities, para-semiosis! So, there’s a way of thinking that attends to the event, that is eventful, that does not forget the event, that does not try to re-cast the event as origin, does not try to re-imagine the flesh as a pre-eventful origin to which one can be returned, and does not try to escape the event; but rather, because the imposition of the flesh necessitates a perpetual movement to escape the deadly effects of the body. One way that I talk about this in Sentient Flesh is in terms of the way in which the disciplining of the body is systematized, legalized, and is about what Derrida calls, the cannibalism inherent to capitalism. And there are numerous stories about the practices of consuming these Negro bodies, acts of torture where they’re consumed for the economy, but also acts of simple pleasure. There’s the story of Thomas Jefferson’s nephew by his sister Lucy, Lilburn Lewis, who butchered alive his seventeen-year-old slave, George, in the kitchen-cabin before all his other slaves by cutting off his limbs one by one, starting with the toes, pausing with each cut to give homily to the gathered slave. Returning home, to the Big-House, he then tells his wife, who has asked about the horrific screams she’d heard, that he had never enjoyed himself so well at a ball as he had enjoyed himself that evening.

    FM: This is so interesting. It brings to mind a recent book that I’ve found very instructive, Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told. I think what he’s very effective at showing how what he calls “second slavery” is an intensification of both the economic and erotic investment in the imposition, and then in the subsequent subdivision, of so-called black bodies.

    RAJ: And the consumption of them! So the point I‘m making, then, is that precisely while they’re not trying to escape the event, they are in flight from the deadly consequences of embodiment, of the body being consumed. And being in flight, in movement, they continue to articulate eventful thinking. To try and anticipate the question you’re going to raise about specificity and concreteness, Frederick Douglass is upset with what he calls “Juba beating.” He’s scandalized by it because it serves the capitalist consumption of time and of consciousness and it’s barbaric. One of the interesting things about it is that the very thing he doesn’t like is part of what I’m calling “the flight from” that is not escaping the event of the superimposition of body upon flesh, but in fact marking the continuation of other semiosis that is foregrounding the eventfulness of being in the flesh, which is why I take Windham’s remark, “Us is human flesh,” as being very important. Because Juba is about beating the body. Think about it in terms of the story I just told you about Lilburn Lewis. Here we have – and there are many, many stories we know that—here we have a systematic structure that is about disciplining and consuming and torturing the body, beating the body in the service of either commercial consumption or . . .  much of the torturing of the body is simply erotic. And with juba, the bodies that are being treated in this way— again the flesh that has been disciplined to be this body – here they’re beating the body, but they’re beating the body in accordance with another semiosis, that of producing rhythmic sounds for dance. And many of the juba lyrics parody the consumption structure of capital, so they are also resistant. In the performance, they are continuing the eventfulness of being in the flesh, and they’re working the flesh.

    FM: They’re refusing, in a sense.

    RAJ: And in working the flesh in that way, they’re showing that the flesh can be worked, can be written upon in a way that is other than the body.

    FM: It is a refusal of the body, in a sense.

    RAJ: They can’t refuse the body; which is why I call it para-individuation and para-semiosis.

    FM: But I say a refusal of the body in full acknowledgement of the fact that when all is said and done, the body can’t be refused. It’s an ongoing process of refusal that does not produce or finish itself.

    RAJ: I hear what you’re saying. I would agree with that. More than the refusal of the body, however, I want to emphasize the articulation of the eventfulness of writing flesh. The reason I want to emphasize this is because, to give a concrete example, when you listen to Peter Davis—who was one of the performers of the Buzzard Lope reported on by Lydia Parrish and subsequently recorded by both Alan Lomax and Bess Lomax Hawes—talk about what they’re doing with juba and what they’re doing with the Buzzard Lope, he’s presenting the aesthetics that they’re invested in, this is the act of poetic creativity, where they’re generating, transmitting and generating, a way of being.

    FM: It’s an extension and renewal of a semiosis of the flesh.

    RAJ: That is, again, an articulation of those semiosis already there when the semiosis of the body is superimposed on the flesh. Those semiosis have to be modified with the imposition of the body, they have to work with the body. I agree with you about refusal, but I’m wanting to emphasize what it is that they’re creating, that thinking, that eventful thinking; which is something not even more than refusal, but other than refusal. And, it’s in that otherness than refusal; which is my way of seeing in these particulars something of what Fanon talks about in terms of “doing something else.” In that other than refusal, there may—and here I’m again agreeing with Du Bois—there may be there signs of how humans can endure, if you will, capitalist modernity, and that’s why I draw analogies to what happens in Tunis, when the slogan, “Ash-sha‘ab yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām” (The people want to bring down the regime), which paraphrases a hemistich  from Chebbi’s 1933 poem, Itha a sha‘ab yumān arād al-hiyāh—commonly translated as “Will to Live,” but more literally rendered as “If the People One Day Will to Live”— functions as a way of articulating a certain kind of collectivity in relationship to juba and buzzard lope. They’re doing something very analogous to juba and Buzzard Lope.

    FM: But the reason why it seems that refusal is an appropriate terms is based on my understanding of something you just said which is that what refusal does is both acknowledge the event of embodiment, while at the same time constituting itself as something like what maybe Derrida would call, after Nietzsche, an active forgetting of the event. Because, as you said, there’s no running away form that event that will have arrived, finally, at something else; there is no simple disavowal of that event, and if there is no simple disavowal of that event, then the event is acknowledged at the very moment, and all throughout the endless career of that refusal, which never coalesces into some kind of absolute overcoming. That’s why I was using the term, which, of course, doesn’t preclude your interest in and elucidation of something more or other than refusal. Maybe there’s always something other than or more than a refusal, though refusal is always there, as well.

    RAJ: I’ll accept your account of refusal, and still insist on the particular emphasis I’m giving to the eventfulness of writing flesh. It’s interesting you mention Nietzsche, because in Sentient Flesh, I elaborate on the way in which Du Bois’ 1890 commencement speech critiques the Nietzschean concept and project. First, by paraphrasing Nietzsche very closely in its account of the Teutonic and problematizing the tension or the dyad, Teutonic/submissive, Teutonic/Negro. And then secondly, by foregrounding, at least in my reading of it, the imperative not to forget in the Nietzschean way. So I’m willing to say, yes it is refusing the body, but not forgetting the eventfulness of the imposition of the body, the perpetual imposition of the body, what Tony Bogues refers to as “continual trauma.” But, in that not forgetting, performs other possibilities of being, I’m wanting to avoid the therapeutic gesture of forgetfulness, which for Nietzsche, of course, has to do as well with a need of forgetting the foundational cruelty of man.

    FM: There is something that I have thought about a lot, so I’m interested in whether you think this, too. It comes back to Spillers’ work and specifically “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” What you’re talking about alongside Spillers, you recognize it as something that is explicit in Spillers. But there is something about it that could be mistaken for implicit, which therefore makes it vulnerable to being forgotten. It’s this ongoing semiosis that I won’t say is before, or I won’t say precedes, but that shows up, let’s say, or comes into relief, in another semiosis, which is, in fact, this imposition of body. But so many of the readings of Spillers that have become prominent are readings that are really focused on what she talks about elsewhere in that essay under the rubric, “theft of body.” So I wonder if part of what made the reception of (Dis)forming the American Canon so difficult for Afro-American Studies, or for that particular formation in the academic institution, was that those studies had become so primarily focused on what Spillers refers to as the theft of body, which she associates with slavery. This emerges in another way, much later on, without any reference to or acknowledgment of Spillers’ prior formation of it, in the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates who also speaks of this theft of body.

    RAJ: Yes, this has become a predominant and unfortunate misreading, in my view, of “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” It is explicit, remember she talks about captive and slave bodies. This is very careful phraseology on her part. She’s marking the movement in which the flesh becomes these bodies so that they can be captured. And so the focus becomes on that second move forgetting that no, no, no she’s giving us an account of how this body gets constituted, which is central to the whole piece. And then there’s her elaborate engagement with Barthes; she says she’s talking about Barthes’ theory of myth. And if you go and you read what Barthes has done there and what she’s doing with it, this is exactly what she’s focusing on, the semiosis of the body’s theft of the signification of the flesh, and then from that point on, this becomes the captive enslaved body.

    FM: But there are just so many readings which are so focused on the theft of body, perhaps because “theft of body” is a resonant phrase that has no analogue that shows up in the text say as “imposition of body.” Perhaps the focus on “theft of body,” emerges from the way it resonates with another phrase, “reduction to flesh.”

    RAJ: That reception of Spillers’ essay is less a reception in Black Studies than it becomes a reception in Feminist Studies in Critical Studies, and Sedgwick and Butler and many others who have their own critiques and investments in the problematic of the body, investments that are themselves circumscribed within the discourse of the body; so, they read Spillers accordingly. Nevertheless, Spillers’ is quite explicitly attending to the way the semiosis, the symbolic order of the myth of the body, in Barthian terms, steals the signification of the fleshly semiosis.

    FM: I’m not trying to make the argument that it is not explicit in Spillers. I’m trying to make the argument that it does not manifest itself with regard to a phrase that is easily detachable from the rest of her argument, from the rest of the article. For some reason, the phrase, “theft of the body,” has been detached from the rest of that essay. And similarly, “reduction to flesh” has been detached from the rest of that article. And what I’m trying to suggest is that this tells us something not only about the reception of her essay in 1987, but the reception of your book in 1993. And I’m not talking about the (white) feminist reading or the women’s studies reading, I’m really specifically trying to zero in on something that happened in Afro-American Studies, including in its crucial and foundational feminist iterations. So when I think through the question of the fate of your first book, my hope for the renewal of a reading of it, is tied to my hope for the taking up, in a much more rigorous way, of the analytic of the flesh that Spillers is a part of, that obviously Du Bois is a part of, that you are a fundamental part of. That hope, with regard to a renewed engagement with Spillers, has been borne out in a lot of recent work. One thinks of Alexander Weheliye in particular, but there are many others. So, it makes me think a renewed engagement with (Dis)Forming the American Canon is sure to follow.

    RAJ: I know I’m making a hard case, and I understood your question. When I point to what happens with readers like Sedgwick and Butler, and others along that line, I’m underscoring a fundamental point I make in the opening chapter of (Dis)forming that is a critique of Black Studies, in which I recount the statement made by McGeorge Bundy, in his capacity as president of the Ford Foundation, to those individuals gathered at Yale in 197. What he told them was something to the effect that by instituting the field of Afro-American Studies the way they had, they were subjecting it to the metrics of academic scholarship. That statement was expressly endorsing the way Yale had gone about things, and implicitly differentiating it from the event of rupture at San Francisco State in ‘68 and ‘69, which was about a radical epistemological project breaking up the metrics of the academy, an attempt to reorganize the structures of knowledge in accord with profound dynamic social transformations. The Department of Black and Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State is not about business as usual, it’s about, and this is why they’re expressly invoking Fanon, taking seriously the notion of a new humanism and Fanon’s claim that the European moment is dead and now it is time to attend to our own demons and articulate something else, avoiding tribalism and other forms of reactionary identity such as religious doctrine that pose the greatest threats. In its Yale context, Bundy’s remark is implicitly against that, against the instituting of that. It’s as though he was saying: “No, this African-American Studies is going to be a continuation of the humanities as is.” At which point, what gets instituted is fully in accord with those other disciplinary discourses and it becomes part of the established hierarchical humanities. That continuation, which I refer to as “incorporation” in (Dis)forming, is what I was setting out to trouble, to mark that what was happening in African American Studies, per se, was merely part and parcel of what becomes a certain crises of the humanities in general . . .

    FM: It’s a re-imposition of the body.

    RAJ: . . . and epistemologically, it is continuing that story. So, it’s counter Fanon’s proclamation that the European epistemic moment is over with, and it’s a revivification and continuation of the European epistemic moment. Consequently, we’re forever talking about, frankly, the crisis and redemption of the bourgeois formation: Nativism versus cosmopolitanism, post-secularism, racial qua cultural authenticity versus appropriation, etc. To go back to the San Francisco State University moment, to take up a project like what I’m arguing is at stake in Spillers’ work, in Sylvia Wynter’s work—and I don’t think these gender issues are irrelevant— is to revive in the way in which the philosophers I was talking about earlier, Tommy Lott, Charles Mills, Tony Bogues, Lewis Gordon, and others, to revive that project of epistemic rupture, which would be a transformation of black studies as we know it.

    FM: But this is why I always thought the way Derrida glossed it was pretty cool, because the activity of forgetting is itself more along the lines of what we were talking about before as a kind of consistent and insistent displacement; that insofar as the activity of forgetting persists, it does not produce a thing which is forgotten, or does not produce the forgottenness of the thing. By that same token, the activity of forgetting does in fact manifest itself as memory precisely because it is the condition that allows us to access what comes before the event of embodiment even if at the same time we can never return to the moment of what’s before.

    RAJ: I’m trying to avoid the psychoanalytic accounts. Hence, when I say that with the event of the superimposition of the body, there are residual semiosis, those are residual in relationship, in adaption, to the moment of the event. They’re not before, but they’re brought into relief with the event of the body. It brings into relief the fact that the body is always inscribed upon, or rather that flesh is always written. In this moment of the event of the Negro, the Foulah, say, discovers his “Foulahness.” So, to pick an illustration from (Dis)forming, Kebe can say to Theodore Dwight, “I am not a Negro. You think I am a Negro but I am not a Negro because I speak and write Arabic. I am something else.” Now, what is brought into relief is the process by which another semiosis, in this case Foulahness, somehow as related to Arabic—which is why, then, the Foulah become characterized as the intermediary between the Negro and whatever—is brought into relief but only with the event of embodiment, which is one of the fundamental points I’m trying to make about Ben Ali and Lamen Kebe, and others.

    FM: The question I have now is about the relationship not between “thinking in disorder” and “sentient flesh,” but that between those two things and “subjective experience.” For me, there appears to be a paradox between subjective experience on the one hand, and thinking in disorder and/or sentient flesh, on the other hand. So can you explain to me why it is the case that these things are in fact not paradoxical?

    RAJ: This is a warranted question. In order to answer it I have to go back a bit to what is at stake for me in terms of the history of ideas, or knowledge, in what we’ve been calling “the event,” and specifically the event of the disciplining of the flesh as the body, the event of the Negro. What’s at stake there, and this is one of the points that I elaborate in the third chapter of (Dis)forming, when I start talking about Cugoano’s account of the encounter with the Incas, and Pagden’s account of the crisis that is precipitated by the discovery of the Aztecs. He of course presents this as a profound crisis, and it was, of cosmogony.  A very specific understanding of the order of the universe, predicated on scripture, which dictated that there were first and second order principles grounding the world. The ultimate source for the first order was scriptural truths; the second— physical things like cities of masonry, but also symbolic systems such as complex social hierarchy and structures of knowledge— was necessarily grounded in and affirmed the first. The event of the Aztec challenged that cosmogony because they exhibited the second order principles without the first. And this precipitated a huge crisis, manifested with the publication of Cortes’ letters. I understand that cosmogony in relation to the tradition of philosophical ontology—recall my earlier remarks about Du Bois’ critique of theistic teleology in “The Renaissance of Ethics,” in which he sees the crux of the problem in the historical alignment of Christian theology and Platonic-cum-Aristotelean ontology. Going back to the issue of the event of the Negro, I think it as well as the Aztecs are different moments of the same crisis inherent in the foundational elements of that cosmogony. And it is most specifically inherent in the discourse of philosophical ontology precisely because of its account of the relationship between subjective experience and intelligence, and thinking, and the way in which it posits subjective experience as being grounded in some transcendental or transcendent realm, which gets articulated in different ways in the language. The problem inherent in the discourse of philosophical ontology is that it cannot adequately account for the eventfulness of subjective experience, how subjective experience comes to be in the world and how it relates to the diverse events of the world, what we’re calling multiplicities, except that it has to somehow negate or do violence to those multiplicities in order to subsume everything to its proposition, which is the proposition of the ‘I’, of the one. This tension inherent within the discourse of philosophical ontology presents itself at different moments with different resolutions. What occurs with both the Aztec and the Negro is a solution to that crisis reaching a very particular moment. In the case of the Aztec, of those who come to be designated Amerind, among other things, such as Native Americans—a truly oxymoronic designation—the resolution is lost souls, souls whose redemption through evangelizing mission, whether coercive or persuasive, is divine mandate, thereby rescuing the integrity of the theological cosmogony. In the case of the Negro solution is reached in the context of the emergence of an order of political economy, capitalist modernity, which recalibrates and orders things in ways that are departing from the theological cosmogony. And one of the concrete manifestations of this departure is the enslavement of let’s say people from Africa, and they’re being subjected to a particular kind of very systemic and barbaric regimen of discipline. This generates very real crises: How can we do this to these people? What’s at stake in both these cases is precisely this perpetual crisis within the discourse of ontology, which they bring into relief and which must then be solved. The Amerind, the “Native” and “the Negro” become a solution. The problem is old and foundational, as I say. Aristotle is confronted with it in the Politics. In order to resolve the contradiction of a polis fundamentally grounded in anti-despotism and the necessity of patriarchal despotism in the maintenance of that polis, he has to discover a certain binary hierarchy in nature—which he genders— in order to make a distinction between orders of sentience and reason. Thereby he provides the warrant for the natural slave who is essential for the maintenance of the polis that is the ideal space in which the fulfillment of the human can occur. That’s one iteration of how this crisis is fundamental. It presents itself again, however, with the discovery of the New World, and the imposition of capitalist slavery; and the Negro, as well as the Native, are invented as a solution. So, when the Negro is invented, what comes into relief is the flaw in the philosophical ontology’s way of thinking about the experience and the individual, which is what I have been referring to as the concept of subjective experience. And what we’ve been talking about is the way in which, looking at Windham, there are other semiosis that are antecedent in their expression to that moment of invention and that continue within that moment. The confluence of these semiosis is what I refer to as para-semiosis as the event of thinking with the flesh, which involves or entails processes for articulating individuals who have experience, for lack of a better word, who not only don’t look like the subject who falls into the world, but the very material ways in which they express and articulate—the example given earlier was in ring dances and juba—are distinctively different from that. So the question becomes how do we think about or talk about that, and here’s where I want to use individuation because it foregrounds the semiosis, it is a process of semiosis, a way of trying to think about it in its operations, as opposed to slipping back to thinking about it in terms of what I referred to earlier as “white supremacy,” which would simply be preserving the place of that transcendent subject and filling it with a different color, or a different ethnicity. This, I think, is some of the problem of Black Liberation Theology, or the eschatological based notion of social justice that informs a good deal of one tradition of black resistance. In illustration, let me briefly remark the contrast between Windham’s assertion, “Us is Human Flesh,” and the distinction Frederick Douglass makes between hogs, horses and humans. Douglass is asserting that Negroes deserve liberty because they are transcendent beings, are fundamentally like everyone else. Windham asserts we deserve our liberty because we are human flesh. That’s the distinction I want to make between subjective experience and sentient flesh.  Individuation, and thinking in disorder becomes a way of trying to, first, in the instance of Du Bois because I associate it with Du Bois’ project, recognize, think with, that kind of process. We don’t want to Africanize America, but nor do we want to lose ourselves in America. What is this process? How do we talk about it? What is it doing? Now, I think that ‘Of the coming of John’, and John Jones, and what happens with John Jones there, becomes a way in which he can try to represent in literary terms such an individual, and precisely in the tension Jones has to the congregation of Altamaha and the terms of that tension.

    FM: I guess there’s one other question that I can ask, but you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to. Insofar as part of what your work entails is a recasting or retooling or reconfiguration of a term like ‘subjective experience’, it also includes a recasting, a reconfiguration, a rescue, whatever you would want to say, of other terms that have been placed under a certain kind of interdiction, like ‘the human’. And so the final question concerns what Nahum Chandler invokes with the term “paleonymy.” Again, I don’t know what the proper word would be—renewal or rescue, or rehabilitation, or re-inhabitation. How do you deal, how are we to deal, with the language of what, and where we’re going through?

    RAJ: A point of clarification and it’s important, it’s my slip, I introduced the term subjective experience when I read the passage from “Fanon and the Subject of Experience.” The point there was to mark a certain trajectory of my thinking and how long I’ve been trying to think through this. Fanon is a very particular point of departure where a certain set of questions about what is the nature of subjective experience and the possibility of its being historical occur and I explore them. I don’t talk about “subjective experience” in that way anymore, especially in Sentient Flesh. I concur with Nahum’s sense of paleonymy. I have a very particular investment in philology, which is part of my interest and training. What interests me is the way in which terms, in their changing connotations, still carry traces of antecedent thinking about certain problems. With regard to “the poetic” and “the human,” for example, poiēsis as a modality of generative creative representation, mimesis, specific to the biological species homo sapiens, is a key concept for the way in which Aristotle tried to define anthropos, what it is to be human. As the Islamicate philosophers understood, taking up the Alexandrian School’s inclusion of the Poetics in the Organon, the issue of poiēsis is related to Aristotle’s effort at addressing a problem that is still with us. That’s the problem of, one could say, the relationship between our thinking, our intelligence, and our fleshliness. As a problem of community or polity, it presents a series of questions. What are we? Why are we here, what is our purpose? How are we to be in relation to one another? In the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, these questions get addressed in terms of the relationship between reason, structures of knowledge, and virtue, or ethics, putting in play a series of discourses and responses that bring us up to the crucial moment of the imposition, the discipline of the body. And all of those responses, all of those moments are still carrying through and are still in play now. Sometime around 1935-36 Heidegger started his effort at overcoming metaphysic, to which he traced the provenance of the concept of race. More specifically, he discovered the metaphysical basis of thinking about race was in subjectivity. He makes this discover just two-years after cofounding the Kulturpolitische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Hochschullehrer,“Political-Cultural Community of German University Professors,” which was organized to regroup those professors and rectors who were committed to a National Socialist renewal of the German university system—and eight-years before Endlösung, “the Final Solution.” An event about which he cannot otherwise speak, and even speaking about it in this evasive way . . . no, because he speaks about it in this evasive way, he draws full attention to his culpability in suborning the ideology behind it. Nevertheless, there’s a critique there of the aspirations of humanism; not humanism as the Greeks articulated, but humanism as it emerges out of the early modern period, which take the Greeks as their model. And precisely because Heidegger’s effort to correct that taking of the Greeks as their model, to go back to the Greeks of his imagination, is tainted, it is instructive. It reveals the deep roots of European racism, which, Black Notebooks notwithstanding, he traces to the Platonic beginnings of what becomes ontology.  Those are moments that are addressing very particular local situations. Albert Murray eloquently explained the general significance of such moments when he describes his coming to realize that all expressions are metaphor, by which, he said, he means poetry. He’s clearly meaning that capacious Greek sense of poiēsis, it’s all art, it’s all creativity, it’s all metaphor. And that includes quantum physics and its attendant mathematical analysis. Murray expressly says that quantum theory understands this, and so it becomes a question of the necessity to constitute orders that are always contingent. This is his argument for the necessity of contingency, and each one of those particular ways of responding are style, and style matters. And the particularities of those styles can have resonance beyond that particular moment. As he says, the social sciences may be able to count and tell us what happened, but it is the metaphor, the poetic that speaks about what is mankind. Baldwin makes a very similar remark in his wonderful 1964 talk on the artist, the task of the artist, where he says that the statistician and the banker and the general may be able to perform all sorts of things but they cannot present to us what we are in the same powerful way that the poet does. So, my persistence in posing the question, who can speak for the human? Or even, how is the human? This is part of the commitment to understanding the multiple situations in which, let us say, human intelligence predicates itself on violence declaring beauty, truth, the good. There can be no generative history of the species if these cancerous growths are banished from sight. We must keep track of their traces. I don’t want to lose track of those traces, and that’s consonant with my notion of para-semiosis. In other words, those questions are still with us, and the controversy around the term is still alive, and it’s a controversy which means it’s unsettled. One particular aspect of its unsettledness, I think, has to do with the fact that, in all of that controversy, there has been disregard or little regard given, except in very specific quarters of black study. How those who were compelled and disciplined to embody Negroness address the question of human being needs to be explored. Not as an object of ethnographic or sociological analysis, or, especially, of primitivist Negrophilia. So that’s my investment, along with Chandler, in the continued commitment, the attentiveness to, the polyvalence, and the resonances, or reverberations to be more precise, of concepts that are attached to terms and the different concepts. And the same thing would apply then to the poetic for the moment along very similar lines. Hence, Windham’s remark, and the way that the tripartite movement you rightly noted is at play. There is there a conceptualization of the human that is useful in its inclusiveness in the same way that the 1805 Haitian constitution will go to extreme extents to forbid the presence of whites on the island, and then exempt Germans and Poles who fought for the cause, and then go on to talk about how Haiti is a family and the state is their father, and that it will now call Haitians ‘black’, and then Dessalines is asserting that Haiti as so named is not just a revolution for this place, but for all oppressed peoples of the world. So there is in that I’m saying an analogous effort to define the human to take up the concept as a broad species encompassing activity, and to name it, and to indeed recognize what is useful in the enlightenment conception of humanitas, which has a very complicated genealogy, and if we go back to Pico Mirandola.[7] who gave us the so-called manifesto of the renaissance, he attributes to the Muslims, to Muhammad. When he asks, ‘What’s the most spectacular spectacle?’, nothing more spectacular than man because of man’s capacity for auto-creativity, etc. etc. That is to mark that ‘humanism’ does not just come from the so-called tainted Greek tradition and its translation, but it comes to a point where we have this idea of a possibility of an inclusive universal species being that eschews, supersedes, family, clan tribe, nation, and if we take Du Bois at his word and his notion of ‘submissive man’ in the 1890 commencement speech, civilization.

    FM: Thanks, man, for everything.

     

    R.A. Judy is professor of critical and cultural studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He authored the groundbreaking book (Dis)forming the American Canon: The Vernacular of African Arabic American Slave Narrative (1992). His latest book is Sentient Flesh (Thinking in Disorder/Poiēsis in Black) (Duke University Press, 2020).
    Fred Moten teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. His latest book is all that beauty (Letter Machine Editions, 2019).

     

    Notes

    [1]. “Kant and the Negro,” Surfaces, 1 (October 1991): 1-64; reprinted in (Society for African Philosophy in North America (SAPINA), ed. Valentin Mudimbe.

    [2]. “Fanon’s Body of Black Experience,” Fanon Reader, ed. Lewis Gordon (London: Blackwell, 1996), 53-73.

    [3]. “Fanon and the Subject of Experience,” Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate, ed. Cynthia Willett (Blackwell, 1998), 301-333.

    [4]. “Kant and Knowledge of Disappearing Expression,” A Companion to African-American Philosophy, ed. Tommy L. Lott and John P. Pittman (London: Blackwell, 2006), 110-124.

    [5]“The New Black Aesthetic and W.E.B. Du Bois, or Hephaestus, Limping,” Massachusetts Review Vol. 35, No. 2, Summer 1994. Eds. Jules Chametzky and Robert Gooding-Williams.

    [6]. “America and Powerless Potentialities,” Theories of American Culture Theories of American Studies, Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, volume 19, ed. Winfried Fluck and Thomas Claviez (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2003), 129-154.

    [7] Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. A. Robert Gaponigri (Washington D.C.: Gateway Editions).

  • About the Local and What All Hold in Common: Belarusian Human Rights Activist Ales Bialiatski in Conversation with Olga V. Solovieva

    About the Local and What All Hold in Common: Belarusian Human Rights Activist Ales Bialiatski in Conversation with Olga V. Solovieva

    Note on Belarus

    Wlad Godzich

    Belarus has not figured prominently, if at all, on most anglophone readers’ attention horizon. Things are beginning to change, and Belarus will prove to be interesting geopolitically and even epistemologically.

    Belarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the East, Poland to the West, Ukraine to the South, and Lithuania and Latvia to the North. It is roughly the size of Spain but has only nine and a half million inhabitants. Forty percent of the land is covered with forests, including the last primeval forest in Europe, shared with Poland. It owes its name to medieval chroniclers who divided the land invaded by Vaerengians (Eastern Vikings), called Rus’, into Black Rus’, White Rus’ and Red Rus’ (Ruthenia in Latin.) The boundaries of these color-coded lands were not clearly established, nor do we know why these three colors were used. Belarus is the contemporary version of White Rus’.

    No country existed under that name in the middle ages, when some of it was ruled by a local dynasty. It was absorbed into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and then into the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania when the two countries merged. It became an object of contestation between the Grand Duchy of Muscovy and the Commonwealth, with many of the battles between the two fought on its territory. It was eventually absorbed into Muscovy, which took on the name of Russia, with the decline of the Commonwealth. When the Russian Revolution broke out, a Byelorussian Soviet Republic was proclaimed, and this Republic joined the Russian Soviet Federation and the Ukrainian Socialist Republic in the foundation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1921. Much of the war between newly independent Poland and the USSR was fought on Byelorussian territory, and large part of the west of it was awarded to the victorious Poles by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

    World War II devastated Byelorussia. Under Hitler’s master plan, all of its land was to be cleared of its inhabitants and then accommodate German settlers in need of Lebensraum. All the cities were levelled to the ground and one third of the population was killed by summary execution, including almost all of the Jews. To this day, mass graves are discovered in the Belarusian forests. Belarus rebuilt its cities during the Cold War and, as a result, has some of the most modern cities in Europe. The capital, Minsk, is particularly well-designed with large avenues, parklands, and an excellent subway system. Belarus became an important industrial producer during this period, with raw materials imported from the rest of the USSR and then resold within it. It became one of the world’s largest manufacturer of heavy agricultural equipment and the foremost producer of tractors.

    The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic retained a largely Stalinist structure and ethos up to the end of the Soviet Union. The breakup of the Soviet Union was legally effected by the signing of the foundational charter of the Commonwealth of Independent States (C.I.S.) with headquarters in Minsk and a Byelorussian as its head. Belarus, as it now called itself, was ruled by Aleksandr Lukashenko who described himself as an “authoritarian.” He rejected all attempts and calls to liberalize his country. He entered into a prolonged negotiation with President Yeltsin of Russia to define the relations between the two countries. In 1997, with Yeltsin very diminished by alcoholism and illness, a treaty was signed. It stipulated that the two countries would form a “Union State,” have a single joint parliament, one defense and foreign affairs policy, free circulation of citizens, and a single currency. A rather long and sloppy document, it cribbed the European Union treaties, with some echoes of the treaty that created the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania several centuries earlier. Lukashenko did not hide his ambition to eventually become the President of the Union State, expecting the transition to this position to occur upon Yeltsin’s death. He was taken by surprise by Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. He even went as far as to propose that Putin be Prime Minister of the Union State that he would head. In later years, he claimed it was a joke. What was not a joke was his distrust of Putin.

    Putin began to assert his dominance by tightening the screws on Belarus’ economy, raising the price of oil and gas, among other things. During the Soviet period, Byelorussia refined a great deal of Russian oil that it imported as low cost and then resold to Russia at a handsome profit. Putin viewed this arrangement as a subsidy to Belarus and he kept raising the price of the unrefined oil, and thus breaking Belarus’ growth.

    Putin’s interest is twofold. The extension of NATO deep into Eastern Europe and the Baltics made him fear what he perceived as a policy of encirclement. It was the prospect of NATO and EU membership for Georgia and Ukraine that led him to wage open war on the former, and semi-covert war on the latter (including the annexation of Crimea). Belarus had to return to its historical role of buffer and glacis between Russia and a hostile West. The largest ever anti-NATO maneuvers were staged on Belarusian territory, and over a hundred thousand Russian troops have stayed in Belarus. Putin has asked Lukashenko openly to give Russia a military base, something that Lukashenko has refused.

    Putin’s second interest is personal. By 2024 he will have exhausted his right to stay on as President of Russia legally. For some time now, he has been looking for an escape and he recently proposed amending the Russian Constitution. On the surface, the proposal is surprising: the President would be limited to two terms, whether consecutive or not; his powers would be greatly diminished, with many of them being transferred to a Prime Minister answerable to a greatly reinforced Duma (Parliament). In speeches presenting these proposals, Putin evoked what he called the sad spectacle of the Soviet Union in the eighties when, lacking an orderly mechanism for the transfer of power, it had to go through increasingly ill old leaders waiting for their death. In effect, Putin has coopted the arguments of his opponents. At the same time, he has been holding long and pressing discussions with Lukashenko about the Union State that he now claims must be properly set up. In his view, the Union State, as a new entity, would have to create a new position of Chairman of the Council. In effect, he proposes the return of the Politburo with himself as Chairman for life. Belarusians, including Lukashenko, see this as a step toward the annexation of Belarus within Russia, and his citizens have staged large demonstrations against this prospect. Political demonstrations have been severely repressed by Lukashenko in the past, but these were tolerated, and even surreptitiously encouraged by him. Talks between Putin and Lukashenko have broken down and, by December 31, 2019, Putin cut off oil and gas supplies to Belarus. Their flow has been restored recently when Lukashenko negotiated a makeshift arrangement with Norway (a NATO member.)

    Lukashenko understands his predicament well. He may have a hope of staying in power if he is able to establish quickly good relations with the European Union, an organization that has criticized his constant violation of human and civil rights, the rigging of elections, and his maintenance of the death penalty (the last European country to do so), earning him the description of “the last dictator in Europe.” His immediate goal is to show his own population, as well as the European Union, that he has a plan for a viable Belarus independent of Russia. The central element of this plan is drawn from the history of the Varangians, who sailed from the Baltic to the Black Sea (and the Caspian Sea) to trade with, and occasionally raid and sack,

    Constantinople and its possessions, and the Arab merchants of what is today Azerbaijan. Lukashenko proposes to enlarge an existing canal in Poland, dredging rivers between

    Belarus and central Ukraine and building port facilities on the Black Sea. Belarus has been trading agricultural equipment to Turkey and other nations of the Eastern Mediterranean. It has also developed tourism with the Gulf States, offering mild temperatures and safe surroundings for families during the high-temperature months of the Gulf area. Lukashenko has discussed these plans with the Poles, who seem interested: they are building a Liquid Natural Gas port on the Baltic to bring in American and Norwegian gas, and thus freeing themselves from Russian dependency. He has also held talks with the Ukrainians who are more lukewarm to the idea. Much of the dredging would have to be done in the north of Ukraine in the area of Chernobyl, and the Ukrainian do not see themselves as beneficiaries of the waterway. Lukashenko, with the help of Sweden, has calculated that the canal and river work would cost around six billion Euros, and he has started negotiations with the European Union for this sum. He is aware of the fact that the EU will want action on all the conditions and practices it has condemned. He has not indicated whether he intends to comply with EU demands, stressing instead that he alone can prevent Russian annexation.

    The second part of his strategy is to secure the support of his population, a rather daunting task, given his history of repression and his boasts of being an authoritarian. He has released some prisoners as a gesture of good will. His principal tool is to reinvent himself as a Belarusian nationalist and as the leader of a populist movement. On this score, he is falling back on an established historical force in Central and Eastern European history of nation-building: the defense and illustration of the national language.

    This is where the epistemological dimension of what may be called, by historical analogy, The Belarus Question emerges on the horizon of attention. Language-grounded arguments for national identity and independence were the products of the German-style national philology that emerged in the eighteenth century and became dominant in the nineteenth. The object of this philology was to identify, describe and purify the “true” language that expressed the “real spirit” of a “people.” These ideas were central to the project of German unification and they animated the Romantic view of language. National philology brought together the resources of historical linguistics and literary studies and fostered nationalism. We may want to recall how French philologists, forced to acknowledge the importance of Germanic tribes such as the Franks in the formation of a country named after this tribe, nonetheless argued that only barbaric elements were inherited from this source and they were offset by the rational and harmonious contribution of Gallo-Romans, apparently evident in the Latin derivation of the language.

    Invoking national philology to help create a Belarusian national-populism [no hyphen?] runs quickly into a series of problems: whatever Ruthenian (the preferred designation of philologists) may have been like, its speakers were subjected to forceful acculturation first by the Poles and then by the Russians. The philologists at the universities of Vitebsk and Minsk were trained in German methodology and worked in Russian and saw other “Ruthenian” languages as adjuncts of Russian. We ought to bear in mind that the word ‘ukrainets’ (Ukrainian) designated a nationalist rather than a status. In any case, only one third of the inhabitants of Belarus speak Belarusian at home; the rest speak Russian, with small minorities of Polish, Ukrainian and Lithuanian. Asserting the primacy of Belarusian would require a major effort and many years to succeed.

    The major reason that national philology has been retreating is that its foundations have crumbled. These foundations were ontological: there is a language X, there is a spirit X’, there is a people X”, and therefore there is a nation XXX. All of these claims are fictions: their objects have no ontological status. They are constructs of ideologically driven disciplines. It is not surprising that the Poles, who believe they survived the partitions of Poland thanks to their faith in their language and their religion, have supported Belarusian nationalists living in exile in Poland and broadcasting in Belarusian. The revival/invention of Belarusian is not going to save Lukashenko.

    What could unite the inhabitants of Belarus is a reflection on the exterminating policies of the Nazis in World War II. Unlike the genocides carried out against Jews and Roma, and the killings of homosexuals, political opponents, and disabled—all of which targeted people because of who they were, that is, on the basis of their ontology— the mass massacres of Belarus were carried out on the basis of where people were. The first, “ontological massacres” were entrusted to the SS; the latter “place-based” genocide to the Sonderkomandos (special units) of the Wehrmacht.

    Belarusian, as a language, needs to be described not through an ideal type grammar, but through actual practices and competencies of its speakers. Many areas of the world, from the Middle East to China, would benefit from such an approach. Such areas are inhabited by people who have various levels of competence in the registers and speech genres of more than one ‘language.’ They achieve varying degrees of comprehension and mutual understanding over an area that would best be described through the resources of fuzzy logic rather than clearly delineated maps. Such an approach would bring out the fact that cities are overlaid with many communicational competencies and may well differ from their surroundings.

    The subjective dimension of whereness, i.e. hereness, could well be the starting point for building a sense of community and belonging. This starting point already exists: many people in the lands of Rus’ and beyond describe themselves as “tuteyshe,” a word that means “from here.” They do not invoke borders, boundaries, nation states, languages or religions, but the facticity of location, a location defined by a deictic and therefore portable. Deictics do not have coordinates but they do have horizons.

    About the Local and What All Hold in Common: Belarusian Human Rights Activist Ales Bialiatski in Conversation with Olga V. Solovieva

    This interview took place during the workshop “Cultures of Protest in Contemporary Ukraine, Belarus and Russia” at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, 03/01/2019.

    Transcribed by Ekaterina Lobanova
    Translated by Oliver Okun

    Olga V. Solovieva

    Ales Bialiatksi was born September 25th, 1962, in Vyartsilya, Sortavalskiy District, Karelia, in the Russian Federation. He is a Belarusian human rights activist, a specialist in literature, and an essayist. In 1965 the Bialiatski family returned to the Svietlagorsk District of the Gomel Region of Belarus. Starting in 1982 Ales Bialiatski began taking part in an illegal national-democratic youth movement. In 1984, he completed his studies as a specialist in teaching Belorussian and Russian language literature at Gomelsk University. In that same year he entered the Institute of Literature at AN BSSR in Minsk as a graduate student. In 1985 through 1986 Bialiatski served in the Russian army and simultaneously continued his graduate studies. He became one of the founders of the informal partnerships of young literary specialists, «Тутэйшыя», and actively participated in communal democratic processes during Perestroika. He was one of the organizers of the large-scale civil act known as «Дзяды», in 1988 in Minsk. He was also one of the founders of the first mass protest by the Belorussian People’s Front. In 1989 Bialiatski was elected as the director of the museum of literature Maksim Bogdanovich, and worked there until 1998. In 1990 he became a deputy of the Minsk city council. Bialiatski managed the Human Rights Center «Вeсна», which was engaged in aiding the victims of political repression. In 1998 Bialiatski began working full-time at «Вeсна». He was arrested in 2011 and held in prison until 2014 for his human rights activities. While in prison he received the first human rights award from the European Union Václav Havel. He was nominated several times for a Nobel Peace Prize, and he is the author of eight books.

    Olga Solovieva: Ales, to begin with could you please say a few words about Belarus as a state? Even though it is a large country in the very center of Europe many of our readers don’t know about its existence. It is the classic proverbial elephant in the room. What’s going on here?

    Ales Bialiatksi: Not long ago a huge area in the east that stretched from Brest to Kamchatka was considered one country, and there lived the Soviet people. But, for various reasons, the Soviet Union collapsed and the citizens of Europe realized, much to their surprise, that to the east there were not only Russians, but also countries like Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova in Eastern Europe, each with its own people, culture, and history. This was the discovery of the Eastern European Atlantis. Throughout the last two-thousand years Belarusians, either independently or in partnership with neighboring peoples made an effort to preserve, establish, and find themselves. They were heavily influenced by their neighbors, who by the way were also influenced by us, but the Belarusians never lost their own identity. Belarus’s development was not simple, and in some historical processes we developed slowly, but we are definitely not outsiders on the map of Europe. While president Lukashenko says that Belarus is the geographical center of Europe, in reality we live along the eastern outskirts of Europe. But Europe itself is made up of such outskirts. Oslo, Lisbon, Istanbul are all on Europe’s outskirts, just as Minsk is.

    The problem is that thanks to the post-Soviet politics of the contemporary Belarusian authorities Belarus has long been a closed country, a reserve or a fragment of the Soviet regime, and a terra incognita for the whole world. It was only in 2018 that the visa system was changed, allowing citizens of the EU and the USA to come to Belarus for one month. That is the beginning of the gradual opening of the country.

    Olga Solovieva: The whole world knows you as a human rights advocate, but you were not educated as a sociologist, a political scientist, or a lawyer, but as a philologist, and a specialist in Belarusian literature. How did you go from literature to human rights advocacy? What is the link between literature and human rights?

    Ales Bialiatksi: It’s natural. Many journalists, and intellectuals with background in humanities end up working in human rights. I’m no exception. Many of my colleagues involved in human rights were also educated in humanities. Actually, the main reason behind human rights activism can be expressed with the rather banal slogan, “let’s make life a little better for the people around us.” This desire to make life better lies at the foundation of all human rights endeavors. Therein lies the motivation for my work. I have been involved with the civil activism for a long time, since I was a student. Back then, in the Soviet Union of the 1970s and 80s, we had groups that tried to stop the processes of denationalization and russification of Belarus. I took part in such groups. They were national-democratic groups. The various values that we searched for and tried to develop were not just nationalist, but also democratic. This connection had always existed. Not long ago I was looking over the documents that we published in the early 80’s. They express an entire series of democratic demands, including freedom of speech, freedom of information, and equal rights. In the Western world these values were so widely accepted, that they are considered incontestable. At the time these values, along with the vision of an independent and democratic Belarus sounded to us like a revolutionary idea. We saw the ideas of independence and democracy as deeply interconnected.

    OS: In Belarus as in many other former Tsarist and then Soviet regions, democracy was understood as the right to national self-determination. But what would guarantee that the national-democratic balance would not turn into nationalism? Consider what happened with such revivals of national consciousness in the post-Soviet Russia and Poland, where the cultivation of national specificity turned into nationalism, chauvinism, and racism. Tatars, Jews, Roma, Russians, and Poles all live in Belarus. Where is their place in the national-democratic model?

    AS: Vasil Bykov, the famous Belarusian writer, a contemporary of ours, who was very concerned with the future of the Belarusian people said, “a large nation’s nationalism inevitably leads to chauvinism, while a small nation’s nationalism is firstly directed towards its own survival among other nations.” The government has a huge responsibility to preserve the rights of minorities. But in today’s Belarus paradoxical things are happening. Mentally, Belarus remains a post-colonial country. Belarusian language and culture continue to die out, just as they did in the Soviet Union. The government does not support or promote the Belarusian national identity, as if we were further constructing the common “Soviet People.” But as I advocate for the development of Belarusian culture, I don’t want the rabid nationalism ever to come to power in Belarusian politics. In prison, where I served my sentence, one of the major rules of co-existence was “live and let live.” I consider this to be the golden rule of uttermost importance to us as citizens of Belarus, as well as in all other situations in life.

    OS: Was your decision to study the Belarusian language and literature in the context of the russification of Belarus a political decision?

    AS: In the beginning, no. I simply wanted to study philology and, above all, Belarusian literature, before we, already as students, came to realize through our experience that the government’s politics was directed towards containment and, in fact, destruction of Belarusian culture and language. The government’s position had an impact on schools and the press (which were generally in Russian), and the study of Belarusian history and culture. The official doctrine was that all peoples would integrate. The official doctrine was about the fusion of all nations. We were taught that all nations will merge into one mythical, large nation of “Soviet citizens.”

    OS: And nevertheless, this mythical Soviet nation was being created on the foundation of the Russian language, and not on some language like Esperanto. By the way, this truly international language was outlawed in the Soviet Union. But Russian, of course, was served up to the people in the form of the Soviet ideological cult of personality. Do you remember Mayakovsky’s verse “I would learn Russian for that alone that Lenin spoke it…”?

    AS: As students of Belarusian philology we did not like this disregard for our culture. We fought back because we understood that with the implementation of this doctrine there would be no place for our and other cultures. This destruction took place right before our eyes and aroused feelings of protest.

    OS: And which language did you grow up speaking?

    AS: Russian. My parents lived in Russia for a long time. My father lived there for twenty-five years and my mother for fifteen years. And when they returned to Belarus they came back to an industrialized city, Svetlogorsk, where they could find work in the 60s. Kindergarten through high school were all in Russian. I heard Belarusian from the older generation. My grandmothers spoke only Belarusian. One of them lived in Russia for twenty-five years, but never stopped speaking Belarusian. My other grandmother didn’t speak Russian at all. She lived in Polesie her whole life. When I would go and visit her when I was five and chatter in Russian, they would laugh. Older women of my grandmother’s generation would put me on the chair and ask, “Sashik, say something in Russian,” and they would laugh because they so rarely heard Russian. So I always had this ancestral connection to the Belarusian language. It was hurtful when I started realizing that this all was vanishing. My parents spoke Russian. My mother resumed speaking Belarusian when I changed to Belarusian.

    OS: What is the difference between Belarusian and Russian? What are the particularities of the Belarusian language? At Moscow State University we learnt that Belarusian was considered a Russian dialect, and only in 1944 earned its status as a separate language.

    AS: That’s complete nonsense. I’ve also read how the state “scholars” of the 19th century wrote about Polish as a Russian dialect. In the medieval state of Belarusians, Lithuanians, and western Ukrainians known as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Belarusian was the language of the government, and they conducted all state affairs in Belarusian. Belarusian was the first East-Slavic language in which the Bible was printed. And where did the folklorists hide the tens of thousands of folk songs, fairy tales, sayings, legends written in poetic Belarusian? Was this all put in an archive and forgotten?

    The particularities of all Slavic languages lie in the fact that we all came from rather similar closely related accents and dialects, but that was so long ago! Many common words were preserved, but often these words have entirely different meanings in our languages. For example, the word, благо (good) is добро (good) in Russian.[1] Полночь (midnight) in Russian, as in the middle of the night, is поўнач in Belarusian, which means “north.” Листопад in Russian entails the process of leaves falling, while in Belarusian лістапад means “November.” [2] “Dog,” “medal,” and “steppe” are all masculine in Belarusian, whereas the same words are feminine in Russian. In Belarusian there is no soft “r” (р) or “shch” (щ), sound, but there are “dz” and “dzh” sounds in Belarusian etc. As far as lexicon is concerned Belarusian is much closer to Ukrainian. We understand each other without translation. Perhaps in Belarusian there aren’t as many sonorous sounds as there are in Romance languages, but it is rather soft and with many aspirations. As for pronunciation, Belarusian is somewhere between Russian and Polish. In Belarusian there are very few Old Church Slavonic words, but there are many ancient Slavic words that were long forgotten in other Slavic languages. I very much love the Belarusian language.

    OS: It is interesting that you identify with the Belarusian language of your grandmothers and not with Russian of your parents, the language in which you thought and spoke.

    AB: It was a certain process, but there was also a trigger that led to all this. After my second year at the university, during my travels around Belarus to visit historical memorials, I encountered artists who spoke Belarusian. It was the first time I saw people who weren’t paid to speak Belarusian. Cultured people, artists, who painted and spoke Belarusian. I stood there with my mouth agape. One of the artists turned to me and asked in Belarusian, “what’s your name?” I said, “Sasha.” He replied, “No, you aren’t Sasha, you are Ales.” And ever since I have been Ales.

    I changed to Belarusian when I was nineteen. At the time it was a provocation. In the beginning all of my peers laughed at me, because they knew me as a Russian speaker. In the Belarusian classes we spoke Belarusian, but after class everyone would instantly switch to Russian. Even my good friend, the poet Anatol Sys, would say, “Just give up! You won’t manage it.” All these guys who studied Belarusian philology, like Sys, were from villages and Belarusian was their mother tongue. They always spoke Belarusian. They studied in Belarusian schools. When they went to university they switched to Russian to be like everyone else, or they spoke Trasianka, a mix of Belarusian and Russian. But just in two months everyone was surprised when I had to speak Russian for one reason or another. I started speaking Belarusian alone after that memorable encounter with the artists, but my friends quickly joined in. We formed a group. In our circle there were first just five or six of us. Two years later, by the time we finished our studies at the university there were already about forty people speaking Belarusian.

    By speaking Belarusian my friends and I propagated Belarusian culture. Some professors looked at us askance. Even though Belarusian philology was our official specialization, some professors considered us nationalists. I remember how one professor was outraged and tried to convince me that the future lies in Russian. And what is Belarusian? A return to the past? That was the relationship many had to Belarusian.

    OS: Belarusian is connected with the idea of challenging the Soviet regime and protest. What is Russian associated with? After all you grew up speaking Russian.

    AB: Russian is, first of all, a huge cultural layer – it represents an understanding of things connected with good and evil, with right and wrong, and all that’s connected with classic Russian literature, as a part of European literature. I’ve read through many of the Russian classics many times. But at the same time there was an understanding that Belarusian literature also exists, is quite developed and offers enough material for building one’s character and for grasping some universal human concepts. One could grow and mature as a person by reading it. A rather rich body of literature written in Belarusian was and still is one of the arguments for the Belarusian language. We have medieval literature and modern Belarusian literature, and such authors as Vasil Bykov, Vladimir Karatkevich, Yanka Bryl, Vyacheslav Adamchik, Ivan Shamiakin among dozens and hundreds of others. Literature is what gives languages the right to exist if not for eternity, then at least for a long life, that’s for sure. For me, the switch to the Belarusian platform of world view was a civilizational, cultural, humanitarian, political decision – everything was connected. At one point after university I completely refrained from reading Russian literature in order to better immerse myself in Belarusian culture. To better understand what Belarusian writers were writing and living I needed to limit myself. It was a professional decision.

    OS: In the long run the choice to study Belarusian philology became an act of political dissent. But was Russia and the Russian language, besides being the layer of culture and classics, associated with Soviet ideology?

    AB: It was and still is. Russian was an instrument of Soviet ideology, and that is why it is important to Lukashenko. It is an ideological symbol, like a flag or emblem, Soviet street names, death penalty. It’s a full set of symbols that underline the continuity of the Soviet Union in today’s Belarusian regime.

    OS: This connection brings to mind an analogy. The poet and film director Pierre Paolo Pasolini, as a young man during the Second World War, started studying and eventually writing poetry in Friulian dialect because he considered the literary Italian language to be compromised by the official structures of the government during fascism. It seems to me that your turning to a different language was done in the same spirit.

    AB: That’s not entirely the case, in the sense that I never considered Russian to be “my” language. Belarusian was not an alternative, but a return to my own culture. I quickly realized that opposing this governmental system alone is impossible, and so we started broadening our connections and building a network of likeminded individuals. The artists introduced me to a larger group of students in Minsk who were more focused and active. Our group of students at the university in Gomel joined them. We consciously gathered people who spoke the same language and thought about the same things. We were trying to dig things up from our forbidden Belarusian history and shared it with each other through samizdat (underground publications). The first youth organizations in Minsk were formed in 1978 and 1979. The understanding that we were not alone was very important, and these connections have endured to this day.

    OS: How did the authorities react to this?

    AB: The KGB quickly became interested in our activities because speaking Belarusian at that time was considered suspicious. In the 1930s there were executions, and there was a merciless fight against the Belarusian underground youth organizations in the 1950s. Everything related to the Belarusian language was considered nationalist. There was even such special term as “bourgeois-nationalist.” There was however also a corpus of Soviet Belarusian writers who were permitted to write in Belarusian. Perhaps some of them were not Soviet, but they didn’t demonstrate their sentiments of opposition. The state allowed for one official part of Soviet Belarusian culture, which was kind of Belarusian ghetto.

    OS: And you traveled throughout Belarus in order to study the part of the culture which was not sponsored by the state?

    AB: Yes, so I could see the historical sites. For me it was a blind study of Belarus. At the time there were no normal travel guides. It was all considered unnecessary and was being destroyed. From various small articles I gathered information about where certain monuments and historical sites might be, and I created a route for myself. For a month I traveled around Belarus, either by foot or hitchhiking.

    OS: It is remarkable to see how culture and politics overlap in your personal and Belarusian history, how this purely cultural interest ultimately triggered your conversion to the political activity.

    AB: Yes, during this trip I met these artists who put me in touch with my better organized peers. After a year of contacts with them, I learned about the existence of a political and conspiratorial group with its own structure and rules, whose goal was the independence of Belarus. This was already not a merely cultural goal, nor merely cultural program. They called themselves a political party, but in reality they were just about fifteen people. But they were very motivated. I joined them. We paid membership fees, were buying type writers, and circulating samizdat. We often printed the negatives of photographed banned books. A part of Belarusian literature was banned for one reason or another, and was kept in special archives. Those who had access to them photographed them, and then I brought the negatives to Gomel, where the negatives were printed by red light in bathrooms in the old-fashioned way. We then glued the pages into the covers of permitted Belarusian books and read them like underground literature. This was 1982 to 1984. In 1984 I graduated from the university.

    OS: And was the liberation of Belarus understood as liberation from the Soviet regime, or from Russia?

    AB: Both. We considered liberation as creation of an independent and democratic state. In the 80s dreams of an independent Belarus were completely fantastical, and moreover, very dangerous. If the KGB caught wind of our activities, the whole thing would have ended very badly. We were lucky; in our group there was not a single informant.

    OS: That’s rare.

    AB: Yes indeed, but the KGB was all around us, because one of the goals that we set for ourselves was the formation of “informal” groups. Perestroika began in 1985. I served in the army for a year and a half from 1985 to 1986. When I returned in the autumn of 1986 the situation had completely changed. It wasn’t clear what direction we were headed, but there were already various informal groups and discussion clubs. Rather quickly a network of informal groups covered all of Belarus. in 1987, with just one year of development, there were already over one hundred organizations involved in preserving monuments, folklore, historical research, restoration, ecology, and culture. For example, a group of technology students started publishing a magazine “Студэнцкая думка” (Student Thought). And two young writers and I who were part of our underground group called “Liberation,” created an organization of young Belarusian writers that created quite a stir. The group was rather scandalous and quite successful. At first there were seven of us, but after three months we were eighty strong. We practically gathered everybody in our generation who wanted a change.

    OS: And what did you do?

    AB: It was an explosion of freedom. We traveled around Belarus, listened to lectures, helped with excavations and restorations, took part in ecological protests, and, most importantly, we gathered and discussed our texts, and organized group readings. We called ourselves the Comradeship of Young Literati, “Tuteishye” (Тутэйшые), which in translation means, “those who are from here,” or “locals” (in Russian “тутошние”). Instead of saying that we were Belarusians, we referred to ourselves as simply locals. This meant: “Are we Belarusian? The language is dying out, the culture is in shambles. We are simply locals (tuteyshie), not Belarusians. We’re not yet Belarusians.” At the time that name was also a challenge to others.

    OS: Locals? This name was meant critically to emphasize the lack of identification with the Soviet State on the one hand, and the lack of Belarusian national identity, on the other.

    AB: Yes, locals…  One of our goals was to strike the bell and to awaken a sense of national self-consciousness among Belarusians. We met practically every week and discussed what we could accomplish together, what kind of burning questions we had, the questions that we needed to turn our attention to. That was really important because we didn’t have sufficient education in a political sense, and we didn’t have enough new ideas. The youth organization gave us the opportunity to discuss, create, and publish. Then for the first time we openly proclaimed that we had our own coat of arms, our own non-Soviet flag, and that we had our own rather rich history that was withheld from us.

    OS: Since your “Belarusian platform” was not merely about language, but also about a worldview and civil stance, I would like to ask you about the concrete topics you were interested in as a literary scholar.

    AB: As a specialist in literature, I published several articles about the banned poetry, several dozen poems by the Belarusian classic Yanka Kupala. For the first time in many years, I analyzed the works of Belarusian writers and social activists whose names had been erased from the history of the cultural and political life of Belarus.

    OS: Why did they ban Yanka Kupala’s poetry?

    AB: Because it was anti-Soviet. In 1918 he wanted an independent Belarus. He was very wary of the arrival of the Bolsheviks. When the Bolsheviks were not there he wrote the marching hymns for the Belarusian army. Yanka Kupala wrote also other poems which were banned for touching on this national problematic.

    OS: I would like to ask you about the Perestroika period. What did Perestroika mean for Belarus? How was all this political activity connected with Perestroika? Was it Perestroika that make this all possible?

    AB: Yes. All of our activity became possible within the framework of Perestroika, but it seemed to me that we went a step ahead. The generation before us, born right after the war, were also rather active. But they fell under repressions. When the so-called nationalist groups were discovered in the 70s, some of the activists were fired from work, others were removed from their studies, and they even revoked some scholar’s PhD. It also affected artists and historians. Some were permitted to publish and put on exhibitions, but some were prevented from doing the same. Therefore, there were significantly less activists left from that generation, and psychologically they were impeded by their previous negative experience. In the 1960s and 1970s they were in deep defense and constantly under surveillance. When Perestroika began in the mid-1980s they were very wary, and did not believe it was truly happening. Based on their life experience it was not clear to them where this was all going. As for us, well we weren’t afraid and flew forward, and we tried as best as we could to accomplish and seize this opportunity … Although it wasn’t clear to us either how it would all end. Would they arrest us? Would they stop us, or not? In 1987 and 1988 the situation was still very uncertain. For example, they were expelling me from my graduate program. There was a big meeting at the Belarusian Academy of Sciences where I was a graduate student, and the scholar and writer Ivan Naumenko figuratively said, “I can’t understand how one graduate student could screw up two members of the Academy and eight professors!”

    OS: Why?

    AB: Because in 1988 I was among the organizers of the demonstration called Dzyady (Дзяды), and was detained, brought before a judge, and fined.

    OS: What kind of demonstration was it? Can you explain what Dzyady means, and where you got the idea?

    AB: The word signifies the traditional commemoration of our dead ancestors. It’s an ancient holiday of sorts that we have for the departed loved ones in our region, in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus. In the 19th century Adam Mickiewicz who was from Novogrudok wrote an entire poem called Dzyady. Evocation of this holiday was one of the ways we used to show the terrifying results of Stalin’s repressions. We first organized a demonstration in 1987. It was fifty years after the mass repressions of 1937, and we demonstrated without state permission. We did however apply for authorization beforehand, but the authorities didn’t even respond. Unexpectedly two hundred people showed up. It was one of the first of those kinds of actions that started to happen in Minsk after a long period of time when nothing was happening.

    OS: How did you get the word out?

    AB: Well, by word of mouth between informal organizations, writers, artists, and among those who were hooked by the idea, a lot of people who heard about it joined in.

    OS: You protested the Stalin era repressions by using a traditional holiday. How did the authorities react to your activities?

    AB: Yes. It was, of course, unexpected. The authorities had to outlaw the holiday. Even though we didn’t officially celebrate it in the Soviet Belarus, it still wasn’t explicitly forbidden in the Soviet times. The authorities did not know how to react. They ended up in a very uncomfortable position. We gathered in the center of Minsk at the monument to Yanka Kupala, and we read the names of the poets who were shot on October 30th, 1937, some writers spoke, one of our older friends sang a song. Our guys from “Tuteishye”  read poetry. It all turned out quite beautifully.

    The next year in 1988 when we started organizing Dzyady, the authorities did not permit our demonstration. We had a month-long fight with the authorities where they tried to somehow prohibit and smear our actions. They formed a security detachment in charge of protecting the monuments in order to control us, and it didn’t work, but in the end they managed to prohibit us. I was one of the organizers along with the poet Anatoly Sys, who also applied for permission for the demonstration. They summoned us to the prosecutor’s office, and officially warned us that we would be held responsible for the possible mass disorder to come. It really felt like they could just imprison us at any moment, provoke some kind of disorder, and that would be it. We put up the announcements all around the city. We secretly printed twelve thousand little invitations somewhere in the institute of physics, where they printed drafts. We had friends there. But the authorities made the mistake of announcing on the radio that our demonstration was prohibited. This is how it became well known from that moment on. As a result, much to our surprise, in 1988 thousands of people came to celebrate Dzyady. The year before, in 1987, only two-hundred people came, but in 1988 ten to twelve thousand people showed up.

    OS: That was already after they opened the NKVD execution site in Kurapaty? [3]

    AB: Yes, that happened soon thereafter. Information about Kurapaty was made public in the summer of 1988. The information was already gathered and prepared a year before. Zenon Poznyak, the man who had been investigating this issue, did not reveal the truth about Kurapaty earlier because he was afraid that all the evidence could be destroyed. He gathered testimony from eye-witnesses from neighboring villages. He gathered material evidence from the digs of the “shadow” diggers, who were probably looking for gold in the mass graves. There were bones along with the rotting clothes of the executed scattered about. But most importantly, his article about Kurapaty was based on the memories of the people who were young at the time, or even young children, and who saw all this with their own eyes. The area was surrounded by tall fences, but children climbed over it, hunting for berries or mushrooms. They would witness the executions, but didn’t speak of it their entire lives. People who lived nearby would hear the gunfire from the executions, and some of them even had family members in the NKVD who took part in the killings. Poznyak gathered dozens of pieces of living evidence and held on to it in absolute secrecy, and once the opportunity arose and the newspaper “Literature and Art” started publishing bolder things during Perestroika, such as banned poetry and information about the repression of writers, he arranged with the editor to publish his materials… When they published his article it was, of course, an explosion.

    OS: It was one of the very first revelations about the execution sites, right?

    AB: At the same time there were findings in Ukraine and Katyn. And it became very topical. But for us it was, of course, the place of foremost significance because the scale of it was enormous. Tens of thousands of people were executed there.

    OS: Did you learn about this from the newspaper?

    AB: Yes, and that newspaper had an edition of twenty or thirty thousand copies, which is pretty large for Belarus. Peole read it to pieces. It was a bestseller, and that information of course significantly changed society. The truth about these mass executions resonated with people in a powerful way. Initially, we didn’t plan to lead the demonstration Dzyady of 1988 to Kurapaty. We gathered at the Moscow Cemetery, where famous Belarusian poets and artists were buried, but the militia dispersed the demonstration with batons and tear gas, and detained dozens of people, including me. It felt like a catastrophe to me, we didn’t even get to hold our rally. However, people organized themselves and divided themselves up; and then one group went to Kurapaty and another group of a few thousand people went to an open field on a hill and held the rally there. There were so many people that militia didn’t know what to do with them.

    The community’s reaction was completely different from what the authorities expected. The dispersion of the rally caused intense indignation and anger, and from that moment one a democratic movement began rapidly developing, quickly becoming a social and political movement that had as its goal the removal of the communists from power. By not admitting their crimes the authorities were in fact confirming that they were the successors of the Stalinist ideological foundations of the 1930s. This was a punch in the government’s gut. Plus, at the time the economic situation was so bad that people had nothing to eat. That combined with the state’s desire to cover up the Chernobyl catastrophe, and our efforts to reveal the true picture of what happened there caused everything to evolve very quickly. This all lead to the signing of the 1991 Belovezha Accords. In 1990 the first elections were held, and a few democratic deputies entered the Supreme Soviet. It was a small group, but they were very active. They managed to force the Supreme Soviet to implement democratic reforms in 1990 and 1991. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 Belarus at last became an independent state.

    This all happened right before our eyes. If in 1987 we were an underground organization, four years later in 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, and I became a deputy of the Minsk City Council, I was twenty-nine years old. We had real opportunities to influence the general situation of our country at various levels.

    OS: You became known in connection with Kurapaty and through the organization of these demonstrations?

    AB: Well, in narrow circles.

    OS: Clearly the circles weren’t that narrow if you were elected for city council…

    AB: No, it wasn’t because of Kurapaty. First, they elected me as director of the Literary Museum of Maksim Bogdanovich, who was a classic Belarusian writer, and a modernist. People knew me as the director of the museum, of course, because earlier I worked at the Museum of Belarusian Literary History. There was an election campaign throughout the Soviet Union. Directors were elected at all institutions and levels, directors of factories, businesses, collective farms, etc., and so they happened to select me as the director of the museum.

    OS: Did you have to stop your graduate studies then? Or did you complete them?

    AB: In 1989 I completed my graduate course work and wrote a dissertation, but I did not defend it, because I became the director of the museum. I ran for municipal elections as part of the Belarusian People’s Front, which was a social movement for Perestroika, and as the director of the museum. The Belarusian People’s Front was a proto-party, we can’t even call it a party because it contained people with many different political views, but it was a large democratic movement. We actively advocated for our campaign, and people believed us and voted. I was, however, very young, but that’s what it was like back then.

    OS: I am interested in your experience with official state institutions such as the university, academy, and the museum… On the one hand we have these governmental institutions and on the other hand we have your informal cultural-political activism. How did the two coincide? Did they allow you to do all that within these state-sponsored organizations?

    AB: Well, at the university they didn’t come around to expel us by the time we graduated. The KGB did however show up right after our graduation in 1984, but they were too late. They were trying to kick me out of the graduate program at the Academy. But two weeks after they said in a general meeting, “that’s it, you’re expelled!” I went to the director to pick up my documents and he said to me, “just go on working, Ales, go on working.” They played as if they were expelling a black sheep for the Academy’s party committee and for the KGB, but in fact they were protecting me. I was lucky. But the minister of culture didn’t touch me at the museum. I looked at the museum as a platform for realization of my initiatives and ideas.

    The museum is in the center of the city, a great location. And everybody was gathering there, and all kinds of things were done there. Uniates gathered there, along with Christian democrats, democrats, youth organizations, the Belarusian People’s Front, and worker movements, and they even held various kinds of concerts there. In the early years the first independent democratic Belarusian newspapers, “Svoboda” (Freedom) and “Nasha Niva” (Our Pasture), worked there. I allowed all the democratic groups and initiatives to use the museum’s address for legal purposes. Several dozens of NGOs were registered in a small room of just eight square meters. The minister of culture did not bother us. The major thing for them was that we did our work in a professional manner. And we worked well, because I had a young collective that was prepared, educated, and motivated to work hard. We opened new branches of the museum, and installed new expositions and exhibitions. We worked really hard, and others took us as their model. We even did an exposition at the museum of Maksim Bogdanovich in Yaroslavl, where the Bogdanovich family lived at the beginning of the 20th century.

    OS: How did you go from that type of activity to human rights? And why in 1996? At that time you created a human rights center, what was the reason for doing that?

    AB: Already back in 1988 we organized “The Martyrologue of Belarus,” it was an organization dedicated to memorializing the Stalin era repressions. We were collecting information about the repressions. One of the problems our organization was addressing was the question of how to memorialize Kurapaty, and so gathering information, preserving the memory of the repressions, finding survivors and helping them has been part of my work since 1988. Then when I became a deputy of the City Council I joined the city commission for the rehabilitation of the victims of political repressions. We worked on the rehabilitation of the people who, for various reasons, haven’t been rehabilitated yet.

    OS: Did you have access to KGB documents?

    AB: Yes, the access to the documents of the victims was guaranteed by the format of our work. If there was an official request from people, then KGB would give us information about that person, and we would make decision about rehabilitation, and the decision would become legal.

    OS: And now that committee probably doesn’t exist?

    AB: No, that committee has been disbanded as soon as Lukashenko took power. Everything was dissolved.

    OS: But the committee had worked for several years?

    AB: Yes, yes. And while I was a deputy, this all was interesting and important to me, and I took part in it all, but…

    OS: 1996?

    AB: Lukashenko rose to power in 1994…

    OS: And you created a human rights center in 1996?

    AB: Yes, he came to power in 1994, and the repressions began. After the first crackdown on demonstrations in 1988, they practically ceased to combat the demonstrations. There were some clashes with the authorities, for example in 1990 there were an anti-communist demonstration. They opened a criminal case about that demonstration, but they still didn’t disperse it. The first demonstration that they actually dispersed in 1996 was a march called the Chernobyl Way (in Belarusian, Чарнoбыльскі шлях), dedicated to the problem of recovery from the atomic disaster in Chernobyl. These marches took place annually since 1989, when the Belarusian People’s Front raised the Chernobyl issue, and showed that tens of thousands of people were still living on contaminated land, where they shouldn’t have been living. The government was concealing this information, and when these facts were made public it really angered people, and so in 1990-1991 the government was forced to relocate those living on polluted land. From that moment on, the Chernobyl Way march became a tradition, and we held it every year to memorialize the catastrophe in Chernobyl. In 1996 the protest took on an anti-Lukashenko character. About forty-thousand people gathered, which is a pretty large crowd for Minsk, and they mercilessly dispersed it. And yet again we found ourselves in the same situation as we were in 1988. We organized a quick response team to gather information about people who were arrested because they would hide them, and no one knew where they were held. Generally, people were imprisoned on administrative charges, two organizers were imprisoned on criminal charges.

    OS: And what were these charges?

    AB: Public disturbance. “Public disturbance” was a provision of both administrative and criminal law. I attended a few of these legal proceedings as a witness.

    OS: Not long ago Arseny Roginsky, the late director of “The Memorial,” spoke of the direct connection between the historical research and political activism, and about a connection between the collection of facts about the crimes the government committed against its citizens and the fight for a different democratic form of government that respects and defends human rights. This is exactly the connection I see here, the connections between recognizing the rights of those killed in Kurapaty and the political activism recognizing the rights of the living citizens and your human rights work for acknowledging the victims of historical and of contemporary crimes of the government. What was your experience in this human rights organization in 1996? How long has it been around?

    AB: We have been around for twenty-two years. We started to develop it as a public initiative with practically no money at all. We worked for two years as volunteers as we looked for money. I just grabbed a plastic bag and walked around rallies, and people would toss me “bunnies” (money) – that’s what we called Belarusian currency because some animals were printed on it. Bags because of the inflation money was cheap. We would give out this money to the families of the victims of political repressions, because ever since 1996 there was essentially never a time where there were no political prisoners. And that’s how the bitter opposition between civil society and government began, and it continues to this day.

    OS: And the government didn’t object to the existence of this organization?

    AB: It was an informal initiative. At first, in 1997, we registered as a city center. It was possible back then. I still worked as the museum director then, and was detained for the first time in 1997 for 24 hours. Several months after I was released, they summoned me to the ministry and said, “Choose; either you continue your political activities, or you are the director, because we’re being strangled from above.

    OS: And for what reason did they detain you?

    AB: Because we picketed and protested against detaining the activists. They detained me for 24 hours pretty often, or fined me. There were literally dozens of people being detained. I was younger then, and I was eager to fight. The years 1997, 98, 99 and 2000 were very rich in activism.

    OS: Those were very liberal years in Russia.

    AB: Those were terrible years for us. We were losing one position after another, and it all went along with the tightening of laws. They created even harsher laws regarding public activism, dissemination of information, and public organizations. The first re-registration process began in 1999.  But still we continued developing as an organization, because there was such public …

    OS: … support …

    AB: Need, I would say. We simply saw that our work was needed.

    OS: And did you accomplish anything? Did you see any results? Did they release anyone?

    AB: Yes, yes, we even had the opportunity to participate in the legal criminal proceedings as public defenders. But then they forbade us to act in this role. We participated in proceedings, we connected with the defense lawyers, and searched for help for the victims of political repression. In 1998 I definitively left the museum and started to work professionally at the Human Rights Center “Viasna” (Spring). We constantly had problems with the authorities. They searched our offices, confiscated our first computers, and oppressed us in various other ways. But the group of people that had gathered around me were truly brave.

    OS: And how did you financially support this organization? Through donations?

    AB: We received our first grant in 1998. And from then on we searched for legal grant opportunities, whichever we could find. At first it was legal, but eventually the government closed everything and created laws making it impossible. No human rights organization has received a single legal grant since 2000. All of that help is called “humanitarian aid” and it passes through the Office of Presidential Affairs, and nobody ever gets anything. Neither the Helsinki Committee, nor journalist organizations, human rights organizations, nor us for that matter, have received any type of official support.

    OS: Are there many human rights organizations in Belarus?

    AB: There are quite a few because there is a need for such organizations. In spite of the fact that the government is constantly trying to limit us, there are people who take the risk and continue their work, thank God. I’m not just talking about people in our organization, there are others too. Generally, in the last few years young volunteers have become more and more numerous. For a long time there had been a problem that young people simply didn’t show up. They preferred to get involved with political youth organizations, but now they volunteer for various human rights organizations, and that is really good. This is not political activity, but all the same it is activism and what they are doing is real and effective, and people see that.

    OS: And you were the leader of “Viasna”?

    AB: Yes, I am still the chair of this organization. We have a council and regional branches. We are active in sixteen cities all over Belarus. We are always looking for support not just in Minsk, but also in every region in Belarus. That fact is important to us because it gives us the opportunity to gather information about human rights violations, and to monitor elections all throughout the country. We work closely with other human rights organizations. The Belarusian Helsinski Committee has branches in various cities. Then PEN International and the Belarusian Association of Journalists defend the freedom of the press and free speech, along with directly defending journalists themselves. We also work in tandem with other human rights organizations who might not be as strong as we are, but nevertheless are quite active. All of this is important for the creation of an environment that is conducive to human rights. It is easier to kill one single organization, but our statements regarding political prisoners are usually signed by ten to twelve different organizations. When many different human rights organizations all declare someone a political prisoner it is very difficult to refuse such declaration. Working together is crucial for us, and life simply forced us to stick together, and for the time being that is how we carry on.

    OS: What lead to your arrest specifically, … if I may ask?

    AB: Of course. In 2003-2004 the government purged the sector of nongovernment organizations, just as they did in Russia in 2012. In Russia they called them, “foreign agents,” here they withdrew various organizations’ registration and effectively liquidated them. They conducted a concentrated campaign. With the decision of the Supreme Court they eliminated the registration of about three-hundred nongovernmental organizations. And we were affected by this purge. They took away our registration in 2003. As a result, we were yet again an informal organization. For me, psychologically, it was not a catastrophe, because back in the 80s I had experience with exactly the same situation. Back then there was no registration and everything was done de facto.

    OS: Under what pretext did they close your organization?

    AB: They used a rather formal pretext. The government found fault with us for allegedly breaking law as we observed the elections in 2001. Two years went by, and then they took away our registration. We turned to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights. The Committee found the Belarusian Court’s decision to be unfounded. They requested that the Belarusian government renew our registration, but the government, of course, did nothing. They simply ignored the U.N. Committee and their request regarding our registration. In 2006 the Belarusian authorities criminalized activities organized by unregistered organizations, and things suddenly became really dangerous.

    They started to investigate mainly young activists, those involved in informal youth organizations and groups. They still considered whether to harass us or not, but for the time being they didn’t. In 2007-2008 a particularly strong wave of propaganda against us came out in all the government owned means of information, including television, practically implicating us as enemies of the ruling power. But at that same time, in 2007, the government began flirting with the European Union, and Lukashenko was required to release all political prisoners, and so they left us alone as well.

    This is how it went on until the presidential elections of 2010 which ended up in a crackdown on all oppositional parties, and many people were imprisoned. Dozens of criminal proceedings were held against political activists, and in the midst of that mess they did not forget about human rights organizations and set their sights on our organization. The problem was that the financial grants were transferred to our accounts in Poland and Lithuania, and we reported directly to these foreign grant giving foundations and organizations. The KGB gathered information on the accounts that belonged to me and to the deputy director of our organization, Valentine Stefanovich, and the Belarusian Ministry of Justice appealed to the governments of Poland and Lithuania. In Poland the General Prosecutor’s Office dealt with this issue, and in Lithuania the Minister of Justice was responsible for doing the same. The Department of Financial Investigations, responsible for conducting the formal review, ended up receiving this information because there was an agreement between these governments about the information exchange in the struggle against corruption. But it was clear that on the Belarusian site, the KGB was behind the Ministry’s audition request.

    OS: I heard that the Polish government later apologized for this.

    AB: As did the Lithuanian government. They didn’t think that their bureaucratic system under the auspices of the fight against corruption would give up financial information about human rights defenders and their organizations. It was a shock for them too, at least in a political sense. They made an official apology to my wife because I was already in prison.

    OS: And what were the accusations against you?

    AB: Tax evasion, because the money that went to the organization passed through my personal account and through the account of my deputy. Well, at least what they found. The sum found in Valentin Stefanovich’s account was not large enough to constitute a criminal offense. They punished him through an administrative procedure, whereas the sum in my account was larger. They seized all of our grants and the total sum was large enough to incur a criminal offense for tax evasion. However, before the trial they gave me the opportunity to escape.

    OS: Escape, you mean emigrate?

    AB: Yes, they just wanted me to leave. Then they would be able to say that this so-called human rights advocate is actually a vicious criminal, who doesn’t pay taxes, and that’s why he left the country. That is how they wanted to compromise my reputation and the reputation of Viasna, and of all human rights organizations. They waited for a month and a half but I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t do anything on purpose, because I knew that there would be no way to defend my reputation from abroad. No matter what, you’re guilty, if you ran away. I was happy with the court hearing because it came out that this was all a KGB operation. The financial review at the core of the process was indeed requested by the KGB. The information and the xerocopied documents, their argument was based on, were obtained illegally. We didn’t know that! And the KGB documents were all part of the trial. They showed the documents to me and throughout the trial I had been reading them. The documents demonstrated that the head of the KGB wrote to the state inspection agency: “I am requesting permission to review the computers that were confiscated from the “Viasna” offices. Perhaps you would find information about Bialiatksi and Stefanovich that would serve as the foundation for criminal charges against them.” There were such documents in our case. Everyone was in shock. The trial made it clear that there was a meeting between two KGB officers and a prosecutor where they discussed tactics concerning the review of our accounts. All of this information came to light during the trial, as did the documents proving that money from the Dutch government and from our Swedish partners was given in support of our organization’s activities. Still they considered the money to be part of my personal income, even though on the eve of the trial the Dutch government sent an official letter where they confirmed that they received complete records on how the funds were spent, and had no complaints against us. It also became clear during the trial that the majority of the grant was spent in Lithuania.

    By sending me to prison the government and the KGB thought that they were sending a message to the entire human rights community in Belarus – look, the same will happen to you if you continue. At that time we were very active because dozens of people were sitting in jail. We were crying out in their support at the top of our lungs, appealing to international organizations such as the OSCE, the European Council (even though we are not the members of the European Council), and the European Union, to do something to get our government to release political prisoners.

    OS: Did you return to your literary activities in prison? You published your first book after graduation, and there was a kind of break, or did you continue to write throughout that period?

    AB: There was a while when I stopped writing at all. It felt irrelevant, as if the printed word’s time had passed. Nevertheless in 2006 I published a book Пробежки по берегу Женевского озера (Jogging Along the Shore of Lake Geneva), a collection of essays about human rights work, observations, and various travels – so I was still writing. After ending up in prison I suddenly had the time that I didn’t have before … However, paradoxically, I actually didn’t have much time there at all.

    OS: Imprisoning intelligentsia is dangerous because in prison they start writing … Think of Gramsci…

    AB: If they give them that kind of opportunity, or at least don’t bother them … I was writing and sending off what I wrote in letters, although all letters had to pass through a censoring process, and was sent out with a stamp “checked,” or returned.

    OS: So you wrote in the form of letters?

    AB: Those were letters that I wrote to my colleagues. Two topics were taboo: anything about Lukashenko, or about the prison location, which at first was the pre-trial detention center and then a penal colony. But we were allowed to write, for example, memoires. I practically wrote an entire book-length essay about the troubled period of 2010 before I was imprisoned, more precisely before August 2011. The book was called Ртутное серебро жизни (The Silver Mercury of Life). There was not much there about Lukashenko. If I wrote about him I would mask it by either writing “he” or something similarly ambiguous. I depicted those troubled months, and each moment connected with their efforts to force me out of Belarus, and everything about the arrests, and the crackdowns on demonstrations during elections. I depicted it all in detail. The searches were endless. They searched our offices three times after the elections. They immediately ripped all of our computers right out of our offices the first night after the elections. A month later they raided our offices again. We were on the ground floor, so my colleagues took their laptops and jumped out the windows in a neighboring kitchen. They evacuated. Valentine Stefanovich and I opened the doors together. Much to the surprise of the KBG agents they found an empty room. Afterwards they summoned me to the Attorney General’s office and gave me a warning. Then they searched us again. I was in Vilnius when they searched us that time. I wildly screamed on the phone, “Don’t let them in!” When my colleagues gave phone to a militia man I yelled at him, so he started apologizing, “oh well, they sent us here…” Strange.

    OS: So being imprisoned gave you time to document all this history.

    AB: Yes, and support of my colleagues…

    OS: During your time in prison did your organization continue its work?

    AB: Yes, and this was the strongest moral support for me, because the government’s goal was to destroy our organization, and they failed to do that. The organization remained, and no one left. Everyone continued to work even though they confiscated our office space. The office was registered under my name as personal property, and so they confiscated the apartment. This was a huge challenge for us. We did not know if the organization would survive or not. I did my best to support them through my letters. I would tell them that I was fine. “You guys keep doing your job, and I’ll keep doing mine – sitting in jail.” All that I wrote in prison can be divided into two parts: everything that I wanted to say about literature, because during that time my desire to write about literature came back, and the other part is made up of memories and essays about what was going on in the country. These were memories about the 80’s and 90’s. There I recorded everything that I’m telling you now.

    OS: It is considered that you introduced the term “Belarusian prison literature”?

    AB: I don’t know if I introduced it or not, however I did write about our poets Vladimir Negliaev’s and Aleksandr Feduta’s first books; they were arrested in December of 2010. They wrote their first books in prison, and when I was imprisoned they sent me their books. I received them and wrote a short essay about them, and recalled that in the past other Belarusian writers wrote from prison as far back as in the Tsarist times, not to mention those who wrote from prison under Stalin between the 30’s and the 50’s.

    OS: So Lukashenko, so to say, revitalized this literary genre …

    AB: In that essay I first used the expression “Belarusian prison literature,” and it took on. After that other political activists who had been imprisoned published their memoires. We then started publishing an entire series of Belarusian prison literature. Six books came out, all written by former political prisoners. We started this literary process.

    OS: It is interesting how in your story the development of literature directly intersects with politics, and how in response to politics new genres appear or reappear, just as the genre of “martyrologue” appeared after the discovery of Kurapaty, and how this genre of prison literature came to be…

    AB: That’s not new. A rather large corpus of similar literature exists in Russia, not to mention the books written by Andrey Marchenko, Vladimir Bukovski, Pyotr Grigorenko, and the memoirs of Andrey Sakharov, along with other political prisoners such as Eduard Kuznetsov, and Yuri Orlov among others. They left behind very powerful books that became part of the canon. They aren’t just any ordinary notes. They have been a source of amazement for me for a lont time. I wanted that we also have something similar in order to record what is happening right now, because right now in Belarus this period of political persecutions is not over – it continues. It is vital that this remains in people’s cultural memory.

    OS: You found a kindred spirit in the literature of Russian political dissidents.

    AB: Yes, and not only in Russia. I admired the collection of poetry called Песня прощания (Farewell Song), written by the former Turkmen minister of foreign affairs Batyr Berdiev who was imprisoned in 2002 by the Turkmen government; he then simply disappeared. But he managed to prepare a small collection of poems which by some miracle made it out of the Turkmen prison and was released in Russia. Aesthetically speaking the poems are not strong, Russian, after all, is not his native tongue, and he wrote there under whatever conditions, but this is definitely a literary testament to the hundreds, if not thousands, of political prisoners in Turkmenistan. Almost twenty years went by and still no one knows Batyr Berdiev’s fate; we do not know if he’s alive or dead, imprisoned or free. These things concern our entire post-Soviet community.

    And my Georgian friends. Levan Berdzenishvili, a politician and social activist, wrote his memoirs about the 1980’s. He still managed to experience that period before they imprisoned him for three years. Not long ago, he wrote his memoirs about the 1980’s, and his prison entitled Святая мгла: последние дни ГУЛАГa (The Sacred Darkness: The Final Days of the GULAG). This tradition comes from the severe realities of our lives, starting in the Soviet Union, and then under post-Soviet regimes where a confrontation between civil society and authorities continues to this day.

    During my time in prison I wrote, and wrote, and wrote. Some of what I wrote was published while I was still in prison. Some of it is still coming out now, because my goal was to write at least one page a day. While in prison I worked in a garment factory as a packer, and that took up most of my time. Whether you liked it or not you had to work for eight hours in addition to inspections. We had one day off, Sunday, one day to pull yourself back together. On Sundays there was always something to fix, or clean, or what-have-you. There was almost no free time. I adapted, and had about one or two hours a day, sometimes three, where I responded to letters and managed to write my one page a day.

    OS: Three-hundred and sixty-five pages a year.

    AB: Yes, each year, and I spent almost three years there, so I wrote quite a few pages. That kind of thing doesn’t happen when you’re free.

    OS: It is ironic that your imprisonment not only gave you time to record all of this, but also drew international attention to human rights in Belarus, and to you personally, resulting in you becoming well known throughout the world in addition to receiving many international awards.

    AB: These awards were sent rather as “black spots” to the Belarusian government: “You should do something! You should release political prisoners, and not just Bialiatski, but others too…” These awards were acts of solidarity and pressure on the Belarusian government. I understood perfectly well that the prize wasn’t as much for me as it was a tool to draw attention to human rights issues in Belarus. The same thing happened with Oyub Titiev in Chechnya. In 2018 he received the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize from Europe, and I received the same award earlier in 2013. I was its first laureate. After me my good friend from Azerbaijan Anar Mammadli won the prize. He was involved in monitoring elections and he too spent time in prison. In 2017, before Oyub, the Turkish lawyer Murat Arslan was awarded the prize, who is in prison now. It is a sad prize to win… It turns out that they only give this award to prisoners and those who have seriously suffered….

    OS: All your friends… Your biography gives quite a strong impression of fearlessness from the beginning to the end. Where does this fearlessness come from in a society built on fear?

    AB: Well, it is difficult to talk about fearlessness, because we are all products of the society in which we live. Still there are some compromises that you make in life. They’re there and they’re not going anywhere. Uncompromising people don’t last long in Belarus, or in any authoritarian societies. There system either eats them up or tosses them out.

    OS: But you knew and understood that you could be arrested at any moment during any of your activities…

    AB: I was intensely motivated to change life for the better, and to do my best to at least do something, and that motivation remains to this day, I want to do something more with the time I have.

    OS: Does that motivation come from your family, or just from your personal character?

    AB: I don’t know. Maybe it comes from a little bit of everything, because I wouldn’t say that my family had a strong spirit of opposition. At the same time my family was cold toward the Soviet Union. My mother just laughed the Soviet reality off whenever she could, even though she was a simple worker. My father however perceived the Soviet power as something foreign. They were forced to leave Belarus because practically everything was taken from them. They escaped Belarus because of the famine that occurred in Belarus at the end of the 30’s. My father suffered from serious trauma his whole life, because at one point they had a financially secure life, but then they ended up fighting for survival. I remember how they dragged him to join the party. He was also a worker. They would come and say, “Come, Ustinovich, you’re such outstanding worker.” But he would always refuse: “No, I’m not worthy.” And then he would discuss it with my mother: “They must think I’m an idiot.” As to my mother, it bothered her that he would have to contribute to the party from the worker’s salary.

    OS: The Soviet authorities prohibited any kind of grassroots initiative, along with any kind of activism, and yet your whole life is based on activism and various kinds of initiatives and organizing activities; where does this come from?

    AB: It happened gradually. All of my years at the university were a farewell to the Soviet ideology and customs, which had been hand-fed to us since birth. Everything happened quickly, but unevenly. It was not as if I just woke up as a different person one morning. I was in the communist youth party until 1988, until it almost fell apart. It was my way of compromising with Soviet reality. If I were truly and honestly one-hundred percent anti-Soviet I would have left that party a lot sooner, but I didn’t. What really opened my eyes was stumbling upon the archives where I saw the names of banned writers, like Ales Garun, a wonderful Belarusian poet who wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century. This made an impresssion. Garun was banned because he was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR), and one of the members of the Belarusian Military Commission, which was in charge of creating the army of Belarusian People’s Republic in 1918-1920 to protect Belarus as an independent state. He was simply erased from literature and history. No matter that he served ten years of hard labor in the camps under the Tsarist regime. They imprisoned him when he was barely twenty years old for his work in an underground printing house of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Minsk. No matter that he became a classic of Belarusian literature and the Belarusian literature of the 1920’s all the way until the Stalin era is unimaginable without him. No matter what enormous talent he had, from 1931 to 1988 this writer was simply erased from our culture. He was only published abroad. And there are dozens of other names that met the same fate. Learning about this shocked me. It was clear that we were being robbed of what we should know, of what should be a normal part of our culture. It incited protest.

    OS: Ironically, activism, the desire to change one’s situation was presumably at the foundation of Soviet ideology. Revolutionaries wanted to change the Tsarist regime, and free many national minorities from oppression…  But liberating revolutionary ideas of the pre-Bolshevik Russian Empire ultimately transformed into the rigid Soviet dictatorship. To a certain degree your opposition to Soviet oppression goes back to these liberating, revolutionary ideas of the many revolutionary groups fighting for independence already back in the late nineteenth- early twentieth century…

    AB: Yes, we also wanted to change Belarusian reality but then Lukashenko came over our shoulders…We still have not achieved our desired outcome. For the moment everything remains uncertain.

    OS: Is there any hope?

    AB: Well, yes, of course. But it is a slow process. At the end of the 80’s and the beginning of the 90’s we thought we just needed to take one decisive step forward, then the democrats would take power, and all the changes would be final. We thought everything would go the same way as it did in the Baltic countries and in Poland. We saw it happen. These were all demonstrable examples of positive change, that all took place in countries belonging to the so-called socialist camp. It seemed to us that we just needed a bit more time and then it would all change for us. But no. A significant portion of the population lived under different laws, about which Svetlana Aleksievich wrote in Second Hand Time. The majority of people perceived the collapse of the Soviet Union as a catastrophe. For us it was a liberation; the prison of nations fell apart in the end. We couldn’t imagine that this would happen in our lifetime. But 1994 was like being doused in ice water. It was only then that I understood that we had a long march ahead of us. It was a process of returning to the past. It was clear that Lukashenko came not just for a year or two. So we had to be patient and simply do what we felt we should do, and the rest would be what it would be. He was almost impeached in 1996. History could have drastically changed, but not much depended on us. At that time everything depended on the deputies of the Supreme Soviet, and those who were in charge of making decisions. Unfortunately, they were not able to actively prove themselves, and as a result Lukashenko stayed in power and usurped this power completely. We then understood that this will be a long process, and in an open confrontation one would only lose. It means we needed different methods, based on profound societal changes. If we don’t help society to change, after one Lukashenko will simply come another. We see this happening all the time. When the first Orange Revolution took place in Ukraine President Viktor Yshchenko had all the power to make changes. What exactly kept him from enacting democratic reforms? The elites surrounding him were not ready. And the society did not force him to make these changes, as a result they returned to Yanukovich, who practically led Ukraine to catastrophe.

    OS: Approximately what happened also in Russia…

    AB: And in Syria? Revolutionary spirit passes quickly, but the social problems remain. That is why during the last few years our programs have been directed at supporting democratic activists, education, and at changing such crucial things as the death penalty and torture, which are integral parts of this regime. If changes occur in people’s minds, and in their system of values, only then we will win, but such changes won’t happen in one year’s time. We have to work calmly and diligently and there will be enough work to do for a very long time. Yet again, we see how quickly people return to reactionary positions even in democratic societies in response to problems which have very little to do with you or even your country. One million refugees appear in Europe, and bam! suddenly right parties rise to power. Who would have thought that in France of all places Le Pen’s team would come in second?

    OS: Without conscious solidarity nothing will work out.

    AB: And that is precisely why we continue with our work and will work further.

    OS: Thank you.

    [1] Both words exist in both Belarusian and Russian, but have different meanings.

    [2] In both cases the two words are almost identical, but have different meanings in Belarusian and Russian. For instance in Russian the word “midnight” is almost the same as the Belarusian word for “north.”

    [3] A Stalin era execution site in the forest outside Minsk.

  • Olivia C. Harrison — Introduction: Dossier ‘The Maghreb After Orientalism’

    Olivia C. Harrison — Introduction: Dossier ‘The Maghreb After Orientalism’

    In his path-breaking book Orientalism (1978), Said does not mention the Maghreb by name (al-maghrib, “the place of the setting sun” in Arabic, a region designating northwest Africa, and in particular the French former colonies of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia), even though French Orientalism and imperialism play, alongside their British and American counterparts, a lead role in producing what Said calls “the Orient.” Said is deliberately vague in delimiting the contours of this much fantasized region. After all, the Orient is not a place, but rather “an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery and vocabulary,” as he was continuously at pains to explain (Said 2003: 4). And yet the absence of even an imagined Maghreb in Said’s account of Orientalism – Delacroix’s paintings, Théophile Gautier’s sketches and stories, Malek Alloula’s collection of “harem” postcards – is all the more striking by virtue of the fact that the vast archive he mobilizes, beginning with Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 invasion of Egypt and the “takeover of North Africa” that ensued, is in large part a French colonial one, stretching from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Pacific shores of Indochina (Said 2003: xxii). As wryly noted by an otherwise sympathetic critic, “an Algerian . . . could not possibly have written a study of Orientalism and neglected completely, as Said neglects, the French relation to North Africa” (Musallam 1979: 22). And although Said does not detail what he calls “the dialectical response” to imperialism in Orientalism (2003: 104), anti-colonial writings from France’s colonies, and in particular from the Maghreb – by Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Abdelkebir Khatibi, among others – have been seminal to the development of the field Said’s work helped launch in the English-speaking world: postcolonial studies.

    Said in part redressed this imbalance in his sequel to Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism, a book that supplements his analysis of imperialist representations – including Albert Camus’s Algerian writings – with a renewed focus on “resistance against empire” by the likes of Aimé Césaire, Fanon, and Abdallah Laroui (1993: xii). And yet the Maghreb remains peripheral in Said’s work, symptomatic not only of the vicissitudes of biographical origins and itineraries, but also, as Françoise Lionnet has suggested, of “the long imperial history of conflicting Anglophone and Francophone spheres of political and cultural influence in relation to the Arab civilizations of the Maghreb and the Mashriq” (2011: 399). Said’s Palestinian and Egyptian background, and his location in the English-language academy, partly explain his critical orientation toward the Arab east (al-mashriq). With the exception of Laroui, whom Said cites at several points, and a brief if admiring mention of “the decolonizing literature of the time, whether French or Arab – Germaine Tillion, Kateb Yacine, Fanon, or Genet” at the end of his long analysis of Albert Camus’s Algerian writings, there is little evidence of a sustained engagement with Maghrebi literature and theory in Culture and Imperialism (Said 1993: 185).

    It is not our task to fault Said with yet another critical lacuna on empirical grounds. Much ink has been spilt on the absence of the German, Russian, Spanish, etc., empires in Orientalism, despite Said’s explicit insistence that his focus was on methodology rather than exhaustiveness (Said 2003: 4). Our aim, rather, is to imagine what conclusions Said might have drawn had he more fully engaged with Maghrebi anti-colonial literature and theory. What can the Maghreb teach us about Orientalism, and Orientalism? In turn, and equally important, Said’s work continues to ask crucial and difficult questions of Maghreb scholars. In light of his deconstruction of naturalized areas of study, what are the stakes of our ongoing commitment to an area studies model born out of Orientalism and the Cold War era shift to American ascendency? What does the Maghreb, as frame of analysis, enable, and what does it foreclose?

    For those of us who work on the Maghreb, one of the most important lessons of Said’s Orientalism is what he called “methodological self-consciousness”: the call to interrogate, denaturalize, and historicize the borders of the regions we study (2003: 326). If Said was not the first to draw attention to the colonial production of areas of study – Mohamed Sahli, Laroui, Mohammad Abed Al-Jabiri, and Khatibi are some of his Maghrebi predecessors – Orientalism has had by far the greatest impact in terms of global reach and academic dissemination, a feature of the unequal translation and distribution of intellectual capital, no doubt, but also of Said’s preternatural capacity to synthesize an encyclopedic amount of scholarship into forceful, and often polemical, argument. Translated into more than thirty languages, Said’s best-known work has become an unavoidable reference for students of the Maghreb, from Colombia to Japan – and this despite the fact that Orientalism overlooks the Maghreb in locating the stretch of European imperialism “from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean to Indochina and Malaysia” (41).

    In this dossier, we ask what it would mean to think the Maghreb after Orientalism, forty years after the publication of a work that invites us to denaturalize our disciplinary formations and areas of specialization. “After” is here both a marker of the time that has elapsed since the publication of Said’s watershed book, and an acknowledgment of the debt owed in Maghreb studies to Said. With a nod to Ali Behdad’s 1994 special issue of L’Esprit Créateur, “Orientalism after Orientalism,” we also seek to supplement, expand, and critique some of the tenets of Orientalism. As a number of scholars working in the wake of Said have shown, the Maghreb is in a number of ways exemplary of the colonial condition, from the production of ethno-racial identities in the colonial laboratory (Lorcin 2014, Anidjar 2003, Hochberg 2009) to the occlusion of the colonial past (Stora 2005, Shepard 2006) and the transfer of legal and discursive practices of governmentality from colony to metropole (Hajjat 2012, Le Cour Grandmaison 2010). Since Said’s untimely passing, the Maghreb has come into view in spectacular fashion. In the wake of the mass popular movements ignited in Tunisia in 2010 and the refugee crisis still unfolding before us, how might a renewed focus on the Maghreb allow to us to revisit and update Orientalism? Expanding our focus yet further, what might Said have made of the shift of geopolitical gravity away from Europe and the United States – a shift he already acknowledged in Culture and Imperialism, without elaborating upon its consequences for our understanding of cultural imperialism (1993: 284)? The essays published in this dossier seek to explore the critical role of the Maghreb in understanding, and undermining, the political, military, and epistemic forces that Said bracketed under the term Orientalism.

    Said was not the first to expose the imperial workings of what Moroccan poet Adbellatif Laâbi called “colonial science”: the disciplines that make up the field of Orientalism (1967: 3). In her essay, Susan Slyomovics uncovers a rich archive of efforts to decolonize the social sciences in the Maghreb, from official appeals to ban ethnology in Algeria and Pierre Bourdieu’s damning sociology of colonial Algeria, to the playful writings of Habib Tengour and the literary criticism of Khatibi. David Fieni takes up Khatibi’s essays and poetry to offer a Saidian model of “portable theory.” Against the idea that theoretical paradigms originate in a particular place (Europe, say, or the Maghreb), Khatibi’s “transversal intersemiotics” become an invitation to think across colonial cartographies – metropole and colony – without losing sight of the power differential that produced them as discrete sites. This transcolonial methodology animates Olivia C. Harrison’s essay, which turns to Khatibi’s writings on the Maghreb as a “horizon of thinking” and Said’s notion of Palestine as “utopia” to elucidate a neglected dimension of Orientalism: Said’s attachment to decolonization as an ongoing process, one that requires anti-colonial critique in the present.

    The next two essays in the dossier take up a medium that is absent from Orientalism, but was nevertheless important to Said: film. Brian T. Edwards tracks the coincidence of American ascendancy and Orientalist representations in Hollywood, starting with the 1942 film Casablanca, which ushers in new forms of Orientalist representation even as it rescripts classic tropes. Madeleine Dobie elaborates on Said’s paradoxical relationship to the Maghreb in her essay on the iconic film of the Algerian revolution, Battle of Algiers. If the Maghreb is absent from Orientalism, Said’s public comments on Gillo Pontecorvo’s film make clear the importance he attached to Algeria as both model of decolonization and admonition against unrestrained nationalism.

    Algeria is, in this sense too, a figure for Said’s Palestine, even though he did not locate the separation of the twin figures of the Semite – the Arab and the Jew – in the Maghreb. Reflecting on Hélène Cixous’s and Jacques Derrida’s notion of “the cut” that separates Arab and Jew, Gil Z. Hochberg concludes this dossier by reading the “impossible figure” of the Arab Jew into Orientalism to supplement, and complicate, Said’s critique of colonial discourse.

    Written forty years after Said’s field-defining book, the essays in this dossier reflect a deep engagement with his thinking, sketching in broad strokes several areas of research on “the Maghreb after Orientalism.”

     

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

     

    References

    Alloula, Malek. 1987. The Colonial Harem. Translated by Myrna Godzich and Vlad Godzich. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

    Anidjar, Gil. 2003. The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Behdad, Ali. 1994. “Orientalism after Orientalism.” L’Esprit Créateur 34 (2): 3-11.

    Gautier, Théophile. (1845) 1973. Voyage pittoresque en Algérie. Geneva: Droz.

    Hajjat, Abdellali. 2012. Les frontières de l’“identité nationale”: l’injonction à l’assimilation en France métropolitaine et coloniale. Paris: La Découverte.

    Hochberg, Gil. 2007. In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of the Separatist Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Laâbi, Abdellatif. 1967. “Le gâchis.” Souffles 7-8: 1-14.

    Le Cour Grandmaison, Olivier. 2010. De l’indigénat. Anatomie d’un “monstre” juridique: le droit colonial en Algérie et dans l’empire colonial français. Paris: Zones.

    Lionnet, Françoise. 2011. “Counterpoint and Double Critique in Edward Said and Abdelkebir Khatibi: A Transcolonial Comparison.” In A Companion to Comparative Literature, edited by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, 388-407. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

    Musallam, Basim. 1979. “Power and Knowledge.” MERIP Reports 79: 19-26.

    Lorcin, Patricia. (1995) 2014. Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

    Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf.

    —. (1978) 2003. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

    Shepard, Todd. 2006. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Stora, Benjamin. (1992) 2005. La gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie. Paris: La Découverte.

  • Mandela's Reflections: Meditations and Interventions from the b2 Collective

    Mandela's Reflections: Meditations and Interventions from the b2 Collective

    Editor’s Note
    from Paul Bové
    _

    Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013. Tony Bogues, a member of the boundary 2 Collective, was in South Africa, watching the endless coverage of the news and of Mandela’s life. Bogues had met Mandela during his time with the Jamaican government of Michael Manley, and he has spent considerable time working in South Africa, especially in Cape Town, on questions of freedom, archives, African and African Diaspora intellectual history, and political thought.

    At least one generation of intellectuals had stood against apartheid and reflected on Mandela as a political figure of freedom and liberation. Mandela never produced anything equivalent to the political writings of a Gramsci, Fanon, or Césaire. Because of the media and the global support for the struggles he led, Mandela acquired a resonance with effects across the globe. His career, with all its changes, posed challenges for thinking about politics.

    It seemed right that boundary 2 should take notice of Mandela and his influence. We decided to gather responses to Mandela as a political figure. b2 issued a call for very brief papers from several spots on the globe and from different generations. Our contributors have given us reason to feel this attempt was a success.

  • Mandela's Reflections

    At least one generation of intellectuals had stood against apartheid and reflected on Mandela as a political figure of freedom and liberation. Mandela never produced anything equivalent to the political writings of a Gramsci, Fanon, or Césaire. Because of the media and the global support for the struggles he led, Mandela acquired a resonance with effects across the globe. His career, with all its changes, posed challenges for thinking about politics.

    Nelson Mandela

    Editor’s Note from Paul Bové

    Preface by Anthony Bogues

    Mbu ya Ũrambu: Mbaara ya Cuito Cuanavale / The Cry of Hypocrisy: The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

    Discomforts by Hortense Spillers

    The Mandela Enigma by Wlad Godzich

    Mandela, Charisma, and Compromise by Joe Cleary

    Nelson Mandela on Nightline; or, How Palestine Matters by Colin Dayan

    Or, The Whale by Jim Merod

    Malaysian Mandela by Masturah Alatas

    Mandela, Tunisia, and I by Mohamed-Salah Omri

    Nelson Mandela by Ruth Y. Y. Hung

    Mandela Memories: An African Prometheus by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

    Nelson Mandela: Decolonization, Apartheid, and the Politics of Moral Force by Anthony Bogues

    Mandela’s Wholeness, Perhaps Infinite by Dawn Lundy Martin

    [untitled] by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

    Mandela’s Gift by Sobia Saleem

  • Mandela's Reflections: The Mandela Enigma

    Nelson_Mandela_1998Nelson Mandela has been an enigma to me. I have read his autobiography and many of his speeches, listened to him on tape, and watched him on television, all the time wondering how someone becomes Nelson Mandela. Jean-Paul Sartre explained how Gustave became Flaubert because of his early identification as “the idiot in the family,” but it took him three volumes and thousands of pages, and he still left the job unfinished. Most accounts of the great figures of history focus on their sense of self and their sense of mission. Mahatma Ghandi, who is often invoked in discussions of Mandela, provides the best example of such an account: the epiphany on the train in South Africa, when he understands the nature of racial and political oppression and his growing sense of being endowed with a spiritual mission to carry out political liberation. The lives of these figures seem to fit preexisting narratives and allow us to consider them with equanimity since they comfort our expectations, exceeding them only in magnitude but not in nature or scope.

    This is not the case with Mandela. To be sure, he starts out with a pretty good pedigree as a member of a royal family, but he is the product of a morganatic union and thus cannot inherit any titles, privileges, or honors. There is no evidence that he resented this status, or rather the lack of it, and it would be unwarranted speculation to suggest that he derived a sense of justice or an ambition to affirm his value from it. If anything, the evidence points to the fact that he was comfortable with his standing in the family, retaining his links to it and returning to it even in death.

    So what made him tick? And even more important, what made him the outstanding figure he became? Determinists who assert that the actor matters far less than the agent, and that the latter’s agency derives from a conjunction of forces, would find it difficult to maintain their clever distinction. Their approach is based on the assumption that anyone else thrust in the same situation would do as well differing only in idiosyncratic ways. Even the most stubborn of them would find it impossible to equate Mandela with the featureless “anyone” of their equations.

    This leaves us with the oldest differentiating factor of all in discussions of exceptional figures: character. Character evokes notions of honor, will, integrity, moral rectitude, strength, resolve, steadfastness, courage, fidelity, and so on. It would not be too difficult to sketch a portrait of Mandela by combining these traits and adding a few more personal ones, such as his sense of humor or his patience. Other aspects would be more difficult to include: his undeniable spirituality devoid of any appeal to Providence or any other transcendental.

    The invocation of character may be satisfying, but it may also mask a deeper problem. Mandela at no time displayed two features associated with character: amour propre, self-interest and self-possession. He was not selfless; he was indifferent to the notion of the self. A telling exchange occurred between him and a journalist who charged him with inconsistency when he failed to publicly condemn the Burmese junta whom he had earlier excoriated for its treatment of political prisoners and specifically Aung San Suu Kyi: “That was prisoner Mandela,” he replied. “But this is President Mandela. And President Mandela is a prisoner of the Office of the President.” What is remarkable about this reply is that the author of The Long Walk to Freedom continues to consider himself a prisoner. His actions and statements are constrained now as they were then, in fact perhaps even more now than they were then. Mandela is not engaging in casuistry here; he is telling us about his relationship to history.

    There is no reference to self, or its current political sound-bite version, “core values.” The constant prisoner status is a contingent condition, and the possibilities inherent in it, though limited, are further constrained by other contingencies. Mandela was giving the journalist a lesson in reading: read your circumstances, and if you apply some intelligence to this action, you will be capable of the type of discernment that makes action possible.

    Intelligence, reading, and discernment are, in my view, the keys to Mandela’s enigma, and to his uniqueness.

    -Wlad Godzich

  • Summer 2014: Volume 41, Number 2

    Summer 2014: Volume 41, Number 2

    In Memoriam of Stuart McPhail Hall

    Each crisis provides an opportunity to shift the direction of popular thinking instead of simply mirroring the right’s populist touch or pursuing short-term opportunism. The left…must adopt a more courageous, innovative, “educative” and path-breaking strategic approach if they are to gain ground.
    –Stuart Hall and Alan O’Shea, “Common-sense Neoliberalism”

    Summer 2014: Volume 41, Number 2

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    Intervention / Mandela’s Reflections

    Editor’s Note from Paul Bové:
    …We decided to gather responses to Mandela as a political figure. b2 issued a call for very brief papers from several spots on the globe and from different generations. Our contributors have given us reason to feel this attempt was a success.

    Preface by Anthony Bogues

    Mbu ya Ũrambu: Mbaara ya Cuito Cuanavale / The Cry of Hypocrisy: The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

    Discomforts by Hortense Spillers

    home_cover
    The Mandela Enigma by Wlad Godzich

    Mandela, Charisma, and Compromise by Joe Cleary

    Nelson Mandela on Nightline; or, How Palestine Matters by Colin Dayan

    Or, The Whale by Jim Merod

    Malaysian Mandela by Masturah Alatas

    Mandela, Tunisia, and I by Mohamed-Salah Omri

    Nelson Mandela by Ruth Y. Y. Hung

    home_cover

    Mandela Memories: An African Prometheus by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

    Nelson Mandela: Decolonization, Apartheid, and the Politics of Moral Force by Anthony Bogues

    Mandela’s Wholeness, Perhaps Infinite by Dawn Lundy Martin

    [untitled] by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

    Mandela’s Gift by Sobia Saleem





    _____

    Three Models of Emergency Politics by Bonnie Honig

    Democracy: An Unfinished Project by Susan Buck-Morss

    The Future of Reading? Memories and Thoughts toward a Genealogical Approach by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

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    b2 Interview
    History Unabridged: An Interview with Stefan Collini with Jeffrey J. Williams

    _____

    Articles
    King Kong in America by Arif Dirlik

    How Global Capitalism Transforms Deng Xiaoping by Ruth Y. Y. Hung

    Is Dasein People? Heidegger According to Haugeland by Taylor Carman

    It’s Only the End of the World by Ben Conisbee Baer

    Passive Aggressive: Scalia and Garner on Interpretation by Andrew Koppelman

  • Spring 2014: Second-Hand Europe

    Spring 2014: Second-Hand Europe

    Spring 2014: Volume 41, Number 1

    Second-Hand Europe: a special issue edited by Wlad Godzich and Anita Starosta
    _________________________________________________________________________

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    1.cover

    Contents

    Wlad Godzich
    Sekend-Hand Europe

    Yuri Andrukhovych
    From Twelve Circles

    Anita Starosta
    Imagine an Albanian Joyce: An Interview with Yuri Andrukhovych

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    Aleš Erjavec
    Eastern Europe, Art, and the Politics of Representation

    Miglena Nikolchina
    Inverted Forms and Heterotopian Homonymy: Althusser, Mamardashvili, and the Problem of “Man”

    Ivaylo Ditchev
    Spaces of Desire: Consumer Bound and Unbound

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    Anikó Imre

    Balázs Trencsényi
    Beyond Liminality? The Kulturkampf of the Early 2000s in East Central Europe

    Alexander Etkind
    Post-Soviet Russia: The Land of the Oil Curse, Pussy Riot, and Magical Historicism

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    Zhivka Valiavicharska

    Anita Starosta

     

     

    ~

    Cover photo:
    Dwarf graffiti by Orange Alternative, 1982,
    Marszałkowska Street at People’s Army
    Avenue, Warsaw, photo by Tomasz Sikorski