a review of Houria Bouteldja, Whites, Jews and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love (The MIT Press, 2017)

Revolutionary Love in Dark Times[1]

By Joëlle Marelli

Translated by Jim Cohen

« What counts, when one wants to read a book, is to read the book. »

Rabbi Itzhak Sagmal

1/ In April 2018, the French singer Jacques Higelin passed away. A whole generation of fans has been in mourning. In 1969, he sang, with Areski Belkacem:

J’aurais bien voulu t’écrire / I’d have liked to write you

Une chanson d’amour / A love song

Mais par les temps qui courent / But these days

Ce n’est pas chose commode / It’s not the most convenient thing

It wasn’t convenient in 1969 and it would possibly be even less so today. It may be a love song that speaks to the impossibility of a love song, but above all it’s a quatrain that contains in a single phrase the song and its absence : an enigmatic reference to the era and to the idea that at the present time – or in the time that remains–it’s not possible to write a love song, or that the time might perhaps be better used for something else. However, in 1969, could there have been anything better to do if one was a young singer and poet who would soon become the « crazy singing man » of France’s  thirty « Glorious Years » of economic growth, than writing love letters? True, Higelin had already written many love letters a few years earlier,[2] and maybe it was time to move on to other things. Maybe he felt the urge to write for a broader public than the very limited one to which love letters are usually addressed. In any case, beneath the light irony of those lines, a theme appears which places in tension the private temporality of passionate love and the « universal »   of belonging to a world that transcends the community of lovers. It seems things were different for Mahmoud Darwish, a poet of the same generation, for whom « writing a poem of love under occupation was both a form of resistance »[3] and something prohibited to him; a form of resistance, thus, to be conquered. In any case, what is fascinating in Higelin’s lines is that they take the form of a trivial excuse (« I would have brought flowers, but the shop was closed », or some other admission of a lover’s inevitable shortcomings), while at the same time pointing to the abysmal inadequacy of the division of labor between private and public.

Since Whites, Jews and Us was published in France (2016), the book and its author, Houria Bouteldja, have been the target of attacks that have often been vicious, sometimes trying to be fair, too often failing in these efforts for being mired in the felt need to attend to prejudices entertained and nourished by mainstream media against what the Indigènes de la République, the political party Bouteldja co-founded, stand for. Any attempt to show that equality doesn’t exist in France causes malicious backlash. Any endeavour to think about race, religion, and gender in terms that vary from the prescribed institutional frameworks (unquestioned brands of universalism and secularism, as well as intrumentalized versions of feminism or opposition to antisemitism ; and an antiracism that is opposed to any input from racialized people, indeed more and more refusing the very category of « racialized people » – « personnes racisées ») is an opportunity for abuse. Most readings – however critical – have failed to make an actual effort to take what the book has to offer. In the best cases, we have seen a recurring theme: « I do not agree with everything she says » – that certain way of conveying an air of sound judgment before expressing a measured agreement. One might ask when one is ever in agreement with « everything » an author writes?  The problem is having to provide guarantees of propriety, for Bouteldja as for anyone.  The questions will then be : what is a demanding text?  What kinds of demands can texts pose for readers? And is it acceptable for subalterns to make demands?[4]

Indeed, it seems to me that Houria Bouteldja could, today, recite or sing, with just as much melancholy and irony as Higelin, or even more : « I would have liked to write you a love song, but these days it’s not the most convenient thing. » The meaning of the words would be somewhat different but no less poignant.

2/ In the most beautiful dialogues of Partage de midi, a play where the dreadful Paul Claudel relates the love and death of white people in the colonies, the severe Mesa asks the indolent Ysé : « What’s that book you’re reading there, which is worn out like a book of love ? » Ysé replies : « A book of love. »[5] Does a lovely scene and some beautiful dialogue, and the author’s rhythmic flair and the fact that the play was written « long ago » (originally in 1906) pardon the abjection of a life’s work shot through, almost completely, with the worst passions of the most bourgeois and reactionary Christianity (moralism, racism, sexism and antisemitism)?  This of course did not prevent Claudel’s works from being incorporated without discussion into the French canon and being regularly produced by the most prestigious directors. In any case these lines, too, continue to trot around in our heads each time learned people claim to tell us the meaning of a book written by an indigène[6]. Like Claudel and like any true Christian, even a lapsed one, Mesa is, in principle, a specialist of true love, which is of course not not that of the flesh, as « poor Ysé » believes, leading him to follow her to doom. But he promptly confuses the word and the thing, a book and that of which it speaks (love), and condemns Ysé’s « worn-out » book without having read it. For there are those who know what love is and those who don’t, just as there are those who know what a song (or poem, or book) of love is, and those who don’t.  There are those who don’t need to read a book to understand that it needs to be burned and its author denounced – as racist, antisemitic, sexist and homophobic (no less!). And finally there are those who claim to read the book better than the others – « between the lines » – and who tell us what is not in the text and what we were in danger of not seeing. Missing from this list are those who would do for this book what they know how to do for others: give it an actual reading, such that what is transformed is less the book than the reader (« split open the wall of the human heart » – Claudel). They take the risk of being « read » and transformed by the book. We do this with certain books. What are the criteria that cause us to decide not to do it with others?

3/ In 1962, just a few short years before Higelin and Areski sang of the impossibility of writing a love song, Hannah Arendt wrote a few lines to James Baldwin in reponse to his article in the New Yorker entitled « Letter from a Region of My Mind », a text from from which Bouteldja quotes several passages and which ends as follows:

If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time! [7] 

Even as Hannah Arendt expresses her overall admiration for Baldwin’s text, she returns – showing her slightly stubborn side that causes us not to « agree with everything she says » – to what she considers to be a mistake: according such an important place to love in the realm of politics:

What frightened me in your essay was the gospel of love which you begin to preach at the end.  In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.  All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people.  They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs.  Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes.  Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive;  you can afford them only in the private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.[8]

Something frightened Arendt, although she had seen plenty of other frightful things in her life: the « gospel of love » that Baldwin  preaches  at the end of his text. Let us reestablish some balance, she seems to say: « Love is foreign to politics. » The positive qualities that Baldwin finds in black people (beauty, aptitude for joy, warmth, humanity) are not only defining traits of oppressed people – or, as Arendt calls them, pariahs – but they are the result of situations of oppression. Freedom (or, better still, emancipation, justice, equality) causes these qualities to disappear; they do not survive for even five minutes. Arendt adopts here the same terms she used in 1959 in her acceptance speech for the Lessing prize in Hamburg,[9] developing a recurring position of hers.[10] Behind the cliché of love being just as destructive as hate, from which is it indissociable (in the work of an author who finds nothing more repugnant than clichés), there is the idea that affects, which pertain to the domain of the particular, cannot be incorporated into the universal sphere of politics. Love and hate are luxuries that  « you can afford (…) only in the private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free. » If we shed light on this question from The Origins of Totalitarianism, this disabused attitude constitutes a more elaborate formulation of a theme that is proliferating in its most trivial forms today in France[11] under the effects of an intense preoccupation – more or less subterranean, that is, both conscious and unconconscious – over the past two centuries or more with the inexhaustible question of what makes a group fit or unfit for universalism, that is, for its disappearance as a group:

Since the Greeks, we have known that highly developed political life breeds a deep-rooted suspicion of this private sphere, a deep resentment against the disturbing miracle contained in the fact that each of us is made as he is – single, unique, unchangeable. This whole sphere of the merely given, relegated to private life in civilized society, is a permanent threat to the public sphere, because the public sphere is based on the law of universal difference and differentiation. […] The great danger arising from the existence of people forced to live outside the common world is that they are thrown back, in the midst of civilization, on their natural givenness, on their mere differentiation. They lack the tremendous equalizing of differences which comes from being citizens of some commonwealth and yet, since they are no longer allowed to partake in the human artifice, they begin to belong to the human race in much the same way as animals belong to a specific animal species[12].

It is this singularity, according to Arendt, which calls for love and which is addressed by what she calls love; a singularity which has nothing to do with politics. Worse still:

The danger in the existence of such people [i.e. the « pariahs », those who live outside the « commonwealth »] is twofold : first and more obviously, their ever-increasing numbers threaten our political life, our human artifice, the world which is the result of our common and co-ordinated effort in much the same, perhaps even more terrifying, way as the wild elements of nature once threatened the existence of man-made cities and countrysides.[13]

The conclusion drawn in these passages, as well as other comments by Arendt on the notion of pariah, do not allow us simply to classify her arguments within the historical current which holds that the separation of the spheres is a criterion for sorting out barbarians from civilized peoples:

The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages.[14]

Though I won’t cease repeating that « I don’t agree with everything she says », clearly here Arendt comes close to playing the role of a seer or prophet in describing our contemporary reality and thus converging with Houria Bouteldja and a few others when they tie the history of postcolonial immigration to France, and the treatment of immigrants and their descendants, to the recent eruptions of delirious ideologies accompanied by upsurges in violent behaviors. In Bouteldja’s words:

We have realized the white prophecy: to become non-beings or barbarians. Our complexities and our nuances have evaporated. We have been diluted, confiscated from ourselves, emptied out of all historical substance. We claim to be what we have been but are nothing but fantasmatic, disarticulated caricatures of ourselves. We cobble together disparate scraps of identity, held in place with bad glue. Our own parents look at us, perplexed. They think, “Who are you ?”[15]

We’ll need to return to this « we » which valiantly refuses to repeat the operation of sorting-out, instead obstinately politicizing, over and against the paradoxical imperative that the pariah extract herself from her condition. This is not the romanticism of an outcast subject, but rather an assuming of the risk and of the Arendtian imperative: every member of a pariah group must choose between being a rebel and being « partly responsible for his own position. »[16]  Let us posit for the moment that this « we », fundamentally impure and thus fundamentally political, is in constant construction, and that its corresponding « you » is no less polymorphous and unstable.[17]

The position taken by Hannah Arendt in her letter to Baldwin is in accord with what she famously replied a few months later, on June 23, 1963, to Gershom Scholem, who, after the publication of her Eichmann in Jerusalem, had accused her of lacking « love for the Jewish people » (« ahavat Israel »). Indeed, she retorted, she believed she must reserve the sentiment of love for those close to her, and more precisely for her friends, rather than for ethnic, national, or political groups, or « anything of that sort »: « I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons. »[18]  Such robust common sense is proferred in this context in useful opposition to Scholem’s nationalist and ethnocentric mystique, which in this period, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has shown,[19] represented an abandonment of the lucid and disillusioned analyses of the early years of his residence in Palestine under the British mandate, when, with the Brit Shalom movement, he advocated a form of Zionism compatible with the binational idea. In 1931 he had criticized the alliance Zionism had made with « the manifest force, the aggressor » that is imperialism, forgetting to « link up with the hidden force, the oppressed, which [would] rise and be revealed soon after », by which he was referring to « the revolution of the awakening Orient », a revolution which then seemed imminent and which in his view would force Zionism to choose its camp. This choice could owe nothing to cowardice or opportunism because the danger was equally real, according to Scholem, on both sides of the divide between the imperialist West and the revolutionizing East. Zionism would either be « washed away along with the waters of imperialism » to which it had allied itself at the moment of the Balfour Declaration, « or it [would] be burned in the fire of the revolution of the awakening Orient. »  « Mortal dangers beset her on either side, and, nevertheless, the Zionist movement cannot avoid a decision », he continued, only to end on this apocalyptic note:

If it is still possible for an entire movement to change its ways and attempt to join up with the powers that will determine the shape of the coming generation, this I do not know. But I do know that, but for this attempt, it has no other way […] Better that the movement again become small but confident in its ways and pregnant with possibility, than that it remain in its state of disintegration and falsehood and die with the reactionary forces that it followed as a result of the original sin: false victory. And if we do not win once again, and the fire of revolution consumes us, at least we will be among those standing on the right side of the barricades.[20]

By 1963, however – that is, after the catastrophe, as Raz-Krakotzkin points out – Scholem had long abandoned his initial commitment to binationalism and had moved progressively toward the most irresponsible versions of Zionism.[21] Arendt’s reply (« I love only my friends »), which is tantamount to « love has nothing to do with politics », cannot have the same meaning when addressed to Scholem, who claims to justify the censorship of the criticisms of the Judenräte by « love of the Jewish people», as when it is addressed to Baldwin, who calls for whites and blacks to think of each other, together, « as lovers ».

When addressed to the old and reactionary Scholem, Arendt’s reply attests to her freedom and her obstinacy in critical thinking, but when it is delivered to Baldwin, who speaks of « changing the history of the world » (a formula to which she should have been sensitive), her opinion as a specialist of the impossible relationship between private affect and worldly engagement resembles the skeptical frown of a fussy old professor. She does not see that when Baldwin speaks of love and politics, it is in the idiom of another  « tradition of the oppressed» – one which has reinterpreted the imperative of love in a manner that could be called Spinozian, that is, turning it into a configuration capable of overpowering the profoundly destructive negativity of affect produced in oppressed subjects by situations of oppression. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin writes: « I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. »[22] » It is not – or is not simply – « Christian » love or « love of one’s neighbor », much less love for one’s enemies.[23] Nor is it about a « demand for love ». As Baldwin further writes: « […] I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. » [24] The dizzying passage in this sentence from a descriptive « they » to a subjectivizing « we » opens a path for us to understand what he means by « love ». In Just Above My Head Baldwin gives an implacable and terrifying description of the destructiveness of exposure to racism:

It’s a dreadful place to be. I’ve been there a few times since – hope never to go there again. There is a blood-red thunder all around you, a blinding light flashes from time to time, voices roar and cease, roar and cease, you are in the grip of an unknowable agony, it is in your shoulders, your arms, your hands, your breath, an intolerable labor – and, no, it is not at all like approaching an orgasm, an orgasm implying relief, even, sometimes, however desperately, implying the hope of love. Love and death are connected, but not in the place I was that day.[25]

It is to this kind of negativity, which the oppressor seeks to turn into the distinctive sign of the oppressed, and to which the history of oppression seeks to condemn them, that Baldwin accuses Richard Wright of binding black Americans:

To present Bigger as a warning is simply to reinforce the American guilt and fear concerning him, it is most forcefully to limit him to that previously mentioned social arena in which he has no human validity, it is simply to condemn him to death. [26]

Oppression inevitably produces Bigger Thomases,[27] and when they are judged,

It is useless to say to the courtroom in which this heathen sits on trial that he is their responsibility, their creation, and his crimes are theirs ; and that they ought, therefore, to allow him to live, to make articulate to himself behind the walls of prison the meaning of his existence. The meaning of his existence has already been most adequately expressed […] Moreover, the courtroom, judge, jury, witnesses and spectators, recognize immediately that Bigger is their creation and they recognize this not only with hatred and fear and guilt and the resulting fury of self-righteousness but also with that morbid fullness of pride mixed with horror with which one regards the extent and power of one’s wickedness.[28]

But in the time preceding these little ends of the world, these apocalypses within the dimension of a human life, and which prefigure others of greater magnitude, in the time that remains, as we have seen, Baldwin invites « relatively conscious » blacks and whites « to act like lovers », that is, to try to produce more conscience in each other and to persevere in this pursuit without faltering in order to « change the history of the world », failing which the apocalpytic post-Biblical prophecy of the slaves will come to pass: « God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time ! »

While the choice posed by Baldwin cannot be understood by the – in this case – stubborn common sense of Hannah Arendt, there is good reason to believe that it would have been heard by Walter Benjamin[29] and no doubt as well, by the Gerschom Scholem of 1931. If one accepts these parallels, then the political love called for by Baldwin is perhaps something like Benjamin’s « real state of exception ». We can call it friendship if we wish, or philia; we may ask to what extent Baldwin’s formulation of revolutionary love would escape Jacques Derrida’s dubious diagnosis in The Politics of Friendship, and wonder how he, Baldwin, would resolve the question – a central one, as Gil Anidjar has shown[30] – about  numbers: May I ever embrace, in my friendship or my love, more than a handful of individuals who resemble me? Can these affects, without losing everything that gives them their sensible character, be anything else but elective? One could also consider that the love Baldwin speaks of is a bit like the « proposition » made by C.L.R. James, whom Bouteldja recognizes as a « partisan of revolutionary love » : « These are my ancestors, these are my people. They are yours too if you want them. »[31]. And it must be admitted that there is more love there, without a doubt, but also – to borrow a phrase that has its obscure side and its luminous side – an « offer » that is considerably more « generous » than what is conveyed in apparently symmetrical manner in Nicolas Sarkozy’s phrasing of the « imperative of assimilation »: « As soon as you become French, your ancestors are Gauls. ‘I love France, I learn French history, I live like a French person’ is what each person who becomes French must tell himself/herself »[32]. In Baldwin’s « proposition », and in that of James, and those of Bouteldja[33] there is the proposal for a paradigm change – what Rancière might call a new distribution of the sensible, which presupposes a transformation of the gaze[34] and affective alliances based on new representations of « self », « same », « others » « alike », « neighbour » etc. – that is, a new political subjectification,[35] of a type that immediately creates the conditions for peace[36]. In an article written in 1995, Jacques Rancière relates his reflection on « political subjectification » – and it’s certainly no accident – to his pondering over the impact of the Algerian War on his generation and on the effect it could (should?) have had regarding « the difference internal to citizenship that is the mark of politics » if the forgetting of « internal alterity » had not taken place instead. [37] But these moments and narratives, and the conceptualizations to which they give rise, provide orientation to the living compass that we are, collectively, to ourselves.

Without wishing to speak for Houria Bouteldja, it seems to me that she could say (or could she sing it?) that she would have liked to write a book of love, but that in these times it’s not a convenient thing.  It is to « us » that this book appears to be addressed[38] –  to us whites, us Jews, us indigenous women, us indigènes – since by the end of the book the reader’s labor of disidentification and (re)subjectification has necessarily begun, that is, if it hadn’t already begun before. It may be to avoid this labor that so many people have brutalized the book and its author. (« What are you reading there, and dissecting  – which is not the same as reading – with as much malevolence as a book of love would be dissected by an Inquisition, if the book is about revolutionary rather than « Christian » love (whatever that might be)? « A book of love – revolutionary love. ») Bouteldja aptly quotes Baldwin:

The Negro came to the white man for a roof or for five dollars or for a letter to the judge; the white man came to the Negro for love. But he was not often able to give what he came seeking. The price was too high; he had too much to lose. And the Negro knew this, too. When one knows this about a man, it is impossible for one to hate him, but unless he becomes a man – becomes equal – it is also impossible for one to love him.[39]

Revolutionary love, I hope to have shown, is not the demand for love, nor is it « Christian love », nor loving one’s neighbor nor one’s enemy. It is a disidentifying transformation, a political subjectification that operates at the moment where equality is affirmed. Rancière reminds us that equality is not something that one pursues or obtains but a postulate that becomes actualized through operations made necessary (and are created) for its verification[40]. The performative effect of this postulate and the constant process of its verification on the « supposedly natural logic of domination » is to produce politics. « That means that there is not always politics. It is indeed present quite little and rarely.»[41] That is very different from saying, as Arendt does, that the human group (the Jews in this case–but today it would be the inhabitants of popular districts, or a given category of workers (animal laborans[42])–are « worldless » (weltlos), a privation (Weltlosigkeit, worldlessness) synonymous with a lack of aptitude for politics, of which love, beauty and « anything of that sort », perceived as collective qualities and not reserved to the « private » domain, are the clearest signs. This Weltlosigkeit whose conditions of humanization (or rehumanization?) are the stakes of a tight negotiation with Martin Heidegger, would be known in the French idiom of today, and more trivially, as « communautarisme », that is, the supposed inability or unwillingness of immigrant groups, including generations of their offspring, to assimilate because of their preference for group attachment over universal values and identification with the broader community of citizens. This in turn is why multiculturalism is such a vilified notion in France.

It seems to me that the notion of revolutionary love, as mobilized by Bouteldja (who in turn says she borrowed it, without truly thematizing it, from Chela Sandoval[43]), is one of the possible procedures for the pratical verification of equality. To use Rancière’s terms, it is a « method of equality ».[44] In this process, as it plays out here, equality is verified by a demanding kind of generosity : The Whites, Jews and Us is both a demanding and a generous book. Since when do the subaltern formulate demands? Ever since they have made generous offers, but while also, each time, tirelessly verifying the equality of the relationship; they give the oppressor a chance to dis-identify with the oppressive identity, thus producing a new political subjectification.

One might say – and I will not hesitate to say it, because it’s no doubt the book’s most precious lesson – borrowing and modifying an insight by Hannah Arendt, that every member of a pariah group must not only choose between being a rebel and being « responsible for his/her own oppression »,[45] but must also find the means to escape from the affective negativity engendered by his/her condition. To that end there are only two possible paths: revolutionary violence or revolutionary love. Baldwin reproached Wright for binding African Americans to an imposed negativity. But he also knew, and said so directly, that when the oppressor refuses the generous proposal made by the oppressed (and when has that ever not happened?), it’s the fire next time. Scholem understood that faced with the « fire of revolution », (even when that fire is destined to devour us), one must choose « the right side of the barricades », and not just to save our lives – Scholem was pessimistic in those years but he was clearly not a coward – but in order that, in a way that brings us closer to Kafka, and where we find common ground with Arendt, something other than shame may survive us.[46]

Notes

[1] A short version of this was published on The Immanent Frame, July 12, 2018, under the title « Love in Dark Times », https://tif.ssrc.org/2018/07/12/love-in-dark-times/

[2] Cf. Lettres d’amour d’un soldat de vingt ans (Love letters of a 20 year-old soldier), Grasset, 1987.

[3] Mahmoud Darwish, « Je suis malade d’espoir » (I am sick with hope), interview with Gilles Anquetil, Le Nouvel Observateur n° 2154, August 11, 2008.

[4] Careful observation of what has taken place in France around the book shows that most, if not all the critiques have tended to be rooted not in sound analysis but in what their authors thought they already knew about Bouteldja’s stances, as well as their dismissal of the Parti des Indigènes de la République (PIR : actually a group that started in 2004, with an appeal for the recognition of the colonial roots of the systemic discriminations that affect offsprings of immigrants from former French colonies ; it became a « party » in 2010 – albeit one that never ran for any election).. Much of the literature and thought that have sustained Bouteldja’s thinking, as well as that of other racialized representants of political, as opposed to moral, antiracism (that is, an antiracism that is more interested in pointing to systemic discriminations than in denouncing individual shortcomings) are largely unknown in France : mostly untranslated, but when translated, unread and untaught. This is why and how Bouteldja, the PIR, and other groups and individuals representing racialized minorities, are often attacked for what is interpreted as their subtext, rather than their text.This is also why I have tried to think with the book here, to use it as a toolbox for thinking. I have wondered why no actual conversation has been possible, in France, about it. I have tried to address the book itself (or some aspects of it), rather than the aura of scandalousness around Bouteldja. I have, in short, tried to actually read the book, while leaving aside what I thought I knew about her or about the Indigènes de la République (and I should specify, here, that I was one of the first signatories of the Indigènes’ appeal ; but that I am not part of the PIR).  I have to read the book  as seriously as I would any other book. This has meant letting the book be inscribed in a network of other writings–one among many possible networks, to be sure. Since that network is made of writings I value, it is a subjective network. Still, it is one that, in my view, is deeply relevant to Bouteldja’s book. As some have shown (Roland Barthes most famously), this subjective networking is what we call reading.

[5] Paul Claudel, Partage de midi, Paris, Gallimard, 1949, coll. Folio, p. 38.

[6] The term indigène (rendered by Bouteldja’s translator as « indigenous ») was used for the first time in the recent French history of postcolonial struggles in a manifesto published in January 2005 under the title « Nous sommes les indigènes de la République » (« We are the indigenous of the Republic »). It refers critically to the status of « natives’ » within the colonial-era French legal system. See Houria Bouteldja, Whites, Jews, and Us. Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love, translated by Rachel Valinsky, with a foreword by Cornel West, Semiotext(e) intervention series n°22, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England, 2017.

[7] James Baldwin, « Down at the Cross. Letter from a Region in my Mind », in Collected Essays, Literary Classics of the United States, New York, N.Y., 1998, p. 346-7.

[8] http://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/95/156,

[9] « The humanity of the insulted and injured has never yet survived the hour of liberation by so much as a minute. This does not mean that it is insignificant, for in fact it makes insult and injury endurable; but it does mean that in political terms it is absolutely irrelevant. » Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” trans. Clara and Richard Winston, Men in Dark Times by Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993) 3-31.

[10] This position can be traced back to the first theoretical elaborations in her biography of Rahel Varnhagen, or even to her thesis on the concept of love in Augustine, and which can be found in different forms in The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition (1944) and in the first section of The Origins of Totalitaritarianism.

[11] Also in Germany and elsewhere, but nowhere with such candid bonne conscience as in France.

[12] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harvest Book, Orlando, Austin, New York, San Diego, London, 1976, p. 301-2.

[13] Ibid. 302.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Bouteldja, op. cit., p. 103.

[16] H. Arendt, « The Jew as Pariah : A Hidden Tradition », Jewish Social Studies, vol. 6, No 2 (Apr. 1944), pp 109. The German edition of this essay has « Unterdrückung » (oppression) instead of « position ». Die verborgene Tradition, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1976, p. 57.

[17] On the central question of dialogue in Houria Bouteldja’s book and elsewhere, and on the manner in which it necessarily causes identity to vacillate, see Gil Anidjar, « Jackals and Arabs (Once More: the German-Jewish Dialogue) », forthcoming.

[18] “Eichmann in Jerusalem: An Exchange of Letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt,” Encounter 22, No. 1. January 1964; reprinted in Arendt Hannah, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (Ron. H. Feldman, ed.), New York: Grove Press, 1978, p 246.

[19] Exil et souveraineté. Judaïsme, sionisme et pensée binationale, translated from Hebrew into French by Catherine Neuve-Eglise, Paris, La Fabrique, 2007, p. 170-183; see also « Exile and Binationalism – From Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt to Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish »,  Carl Heinrich Becker Lecture, Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, 2011 (http://www.eume-berlin.de/en/events/carl-heinrich-becker-lecture/2011-amnon-raz-krakotzkin.html) and « “On the Right Side of the Barricades”, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and Zionism », in Comparative Literature 65 :3, University of Oregon, 2013 (https://read.dukeupress.edu/comparative-literature/article-abstract/65/3/363/7798).

[20]  Scholem, “Bemai Ka’Mipalgi.” Od Davar. Tel Aviv, Am Oved, 1987. 57–59. Quoted by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, in « On the Right Side of the Barricades », art. cit., p. 375-6. I used the French translation of Scholem’s article : « Qui sont les diviseurs ? (1931) », in Le prix d’Israël. Ecrits politiques, Paris, éditions de l’Eclat, 2003. My emphasis.

[21] Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, art. cit.

[22]  Baldwin, « Down at the Cross », op. cit., p. 341.

[23]  See Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, a History of the Enemy, Stanford University Press, 2003.

[24] Baldwin, ibid, p. 299.

[25] James Baldwin, Just Above My Head, Random House, 1979, p. 81.

[26] Baldwin, « Notes of a Native Son », in Collected Essays, op. cit., p. 33.

[27] Main character of the novel by Richard Wright, Native Son (1940), HarperCollins Publishers, NY, 1993.

[28] « Notes of a Native Son », op. cit., p. 33..

[29] « There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. […]The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that accords with this insight. Then we will clearly see that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency… » Walter Benjamin, « On the Concept of History », Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 392.

[30] Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, op. cit.

[31] C.L.R. James, The Making of the Caribbean People, » in Spheres of Existence : Selected Writings (London : Allison and Busby, 1980), p. 187 ; quoted by Bouteldja, op. cit., p. 50. In a somewhat different formulation, but not so far removed, see Mahmoud Darwich : « My problem resides in what the Other has decided to see in my identity. Yet I tell him: here is my identity, share it with me, it is broad enough to welcome you. » Mahmoud Darwich, La Palestine comme métaphore, Arles, Actes Sud, 2003, p. 36.

[32] http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2016/09/19/97001-20160919FILWWW00356-des-que-l-on-devient-francais-nos-ancetres-sont-gaulois-sarkozy.php

[33] To « whites » : « If things were as they should be, the most conscious among you would be tasked with making us a proposition to avoid the worst. But things are not as they should be. It is incumbent on us to fulfill this task. […] What would be convincing enough to make you give up on defending the racial interests that comfort you out of your downgrading and thanks to which you have the satisfaction of dominating (us)? Other than peace, I don’t know what it would be. By peace, I mean the opposite of « war », of « blood », of « hatred ». I mean: living all together peacefully. » (49) To « the Jews »: « You are still in the ghetto. Why don’t we go out of there together? » (72)

[34] « The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed. Having a particular ‘occupation’ thereby determines the ability or inability to take charge of what is common to the community; it defines what is visible or not in a common space, endowed with a common language, etc. » Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated with an introduction by Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004, p. 12-13. Even while relying on Rancière himself, we may argue that « occupation » is not the only factor determining who has or doesn’t have a share in the community (see « The Cause of the Other », art. cit.). Indeed, so do skin-color, religion, colonial history, etc.

[35] Jacques Rancière, Disagreement. Politics and Philosphy, translated by Julie Rose, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London, 1999. « Politics is a matter of subjects or, rather, modes of subjectification. By subjectification I mean the production through a series of actions of a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience. » (35). « Any subjectification is a disidentification, removal from the naturalness of a place, the opening up of a subject space where any­one can be counted since it is the space where those of no account are counted, where a connection is made between having a part and having no part. » (36)

[36] In his Love Letters of a 20 Year-Old Soldier, Higelin tells how, the day Algerian independence was proclaimed, he left the barracks, went out into the streets filled with joy and was immediately recognized as an ally by the Algerians he met: « A teenage boy came toward us, with transfigured traits, incapable of saying a word, overwhelmed with emotion. He shook our hands with passion. He slapped me on the back. […] His look told me : ‘You understand, you came to share, it’s so great!’ »[36] However, it would be pointless to give in to political sentimentalism. In what follows in his correspondence, the young soldier Higelin in Algeria returns quickly to his story of passionate love, not without its narcissistic side, to the detriment of his historical testimony.

[37] Jacques Rancière, « The Cause of the Other » (1998), Parallax 4 :2, p. 32.

[38] Cf. Gil Anidjar, « Jackals and Arabs », forthcoming.

[39] Baldwin, « Letter from a Region of My Mind », op. cit., p. 345. Quoted by Bouteldja, op. cit., p. 51-52.

[40] Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, translated with an introduction by Kristin Ross, Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 137.

[41] The Disagreement, op. cit., p. 17. The phrase « supposedly natural logic of domination » was not translated from the French in the English language edition of Rancière’s La Mésentente.

[42] H. Arendt, Condition de l’homme moderne, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1961 et 1983, p. 147-156.

[43] Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

[44] Rancière, La Méthode de l’égalité. Entretiens avec Laurent Jeanpierre et Dork Zabunyan, Paris, Bayard, 2012.

[45] The Jew as Pariah, op. cit.

[46] See Arendt’s beautiful reading of The Trial: « It has been characteristic of our history-conscious century that its  worst crimes have been committed in the name of some kind of necessity  or in the name — and this amounts to the same thing — of the “wave of  the future.” For people who submit to this, who renounce their freedom  and their right of action, even though they may pay the price of death  for their delusion, anything more charitable can hardly be said than the  words with which Kafka concludes The Trial: “It was as if he meant  the shame of it to outlive him. » in « Franz Kafka, a Revaluation », in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954. Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, Jerome Kohn (ed.), Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994, p. 71.

David Alworth, Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018)

by Myka Tucker-Abramson[i]

David Alworth’s Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form (2015) is an illuminating product of the reading debates that have erupted since Bruno Latour unilaterally declared the exhaustion of critique and the non-existence of society. It is, as Lee Konstantinou aptly notes, the first book (and certainly the first book on US literature) that “practices the new mode of reading it also proposes” (2018: 1). Where most anti-critique theorists simply criticise critique whilst proscribing other modes of reading, Alworth’s book actually enacts his. And he has been lavishly praised for doing so. Site Reading has been called “bracing and beautiful” (Konstantinou 1) and “ingenious” (Davidson 2017: np), celebrated for providing “ontological solutions” to a fundamental “fear of the other […and] the future of the West” (Raw 2017:183), and heralded as telling “the genuinely exciting story not only of postwar American fiction but also of a young scholar coming to claim a voice of his own” (Fleissner 2016: np). But while Alworth’s attempt to both proscribe and perform a New Materialist literary criticism does make Site Reading an important book, its importance lies neither in its “ingenuity” or the “exciting” event of a Harvard professor finding his scholarly voice. Rather, the book’s importance is as a case study for why academics at elite universities are excited about this post-critical turn and why the rest of us should be deeply concerned.

“Site reading,” as a new mode of reading, draws together Latourian “sociology,” “environmental criticism,” and new “textual-materialist approaches” (2015: 2) in order to answer the question: “How does literary fiction theorize social experience?” (2). Alworth argues that it does so by “transposing real sites into narrative settings and thereby rendering them operative, as figures in and of collective life” (2). Site Reading thus claims to be theorising (or perhaps simply appreciating the theorisation that the novels are already doing? It’s not quite clear given the book’s New Materialist claims that novels seem perfectly capable of theorising all on their own) the new form of sociality or collectivity that the novel, and this new way of reading the novel, reveals. I will return later to this question of what kind of new mode of collectivity such a reading generates, but first we need to lay out Alworth’s argument.

At the heart of Site Reading are four basic claims. First, that Latour’s vision of the social – which he defines as “not a constituted setting or container where anything can be situated, but a ‘process of assembling’ whereby persons, things, texts, ideas, images and another entities (all of which are considered actor or actants) form contingent and volatile networks of association” (3) – is vastly superior to the Durkheimian understanding of the social as a form of totality, “the supreme class under which all other classes must be subsumed” (Durkeim qtd on p3) and thus that Latour should be the model of sociology we use in literary studies. Second, that in fact literary fiction already does the kind of sociology Latour advocates for and so we have much to learn from novels. Third, that literature does this Latourian sociology through its engagement with “sites,” a term that Alworth draws from the confluence of Michel Foucault’s assertion in the heterotopias lecture of 1967 that “our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites” (qtd. on 22) and Robert Smithson’s claim in Artforum that “the unknown areas of sites can best be explored by artists” (22). And fourth, that this process is easier to see if we read literary texts through and alongside artistic texts because of the way that site-specific artworks, specifically the US ones produced in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, is so explicit in its embeddedness with sites.

It’s worth noting given the reception of Alworth’s book that most of these moves – reading literature as sociology, focusing on location or sites, and reading across art and literature – are not new. They are the standard fare of literary criticism. And this means that the stakes of the book’s repetitive claims to newness rest almost entirely on Alworth’s distinction between Durkheimian and Latourian sociology. Alworth belabors this distinction because, he claims, this distinction amounts to nothing less than a paradigm shift in literary studies. Most notably, he argues that Durkheim’s notion of the social “has been widely (if implicitly) accepted within literary studies” (3) and has even formed the basis for the form of reading that now gets called critique. As proof of this, Alworth cites Frederic Jameson’s placement of Durkheim’s definition of society as a totality as the second epigraph to Political Unconscious. In Alworth’s account, Jameson reads literary texts as “socially symbolic acts” (3-4), that are ultimately subsumed by the totality of the Durkheimian social, and thus, presumably because of Jameson’s popularity, this kind of sociological thinking has become the unconscious operation that critique-based modes of literary criticism carry out. There are serious questions to be asked about this very peculiar elision of Jameson with Durkheim, and Alworth’s lack of direct engagement with Jameson, given that Durkheim plays a quite minor and often antagonistic role in Political Unconscious.[ii] There are also serious questions about his claim that Durkheim of all people is the sociological unconscious of all Jameson-inspired literary criticism. However, we need to accept this premise if we are to engage with Alworth’s argument so we will do so—at least for now.

The experiment of Site Reading is thus to ask what literary studies (or at least post-war US literary studies –questions of scale or periodisation are never really dealt with) looks like when read via a Latourian mode of sociology in which “there is no such thing as society” (4)? What new form of sociality or collectivity will emerge? Alworth terms this new sociology “Supermarket Sociology” and whilst it is largely derived from Latour who illustrates his Actor Network Theory through the example of a supermarket, it also takes the literariness of Latour’s method. Thus, Alworth’s “supermarket sociology” comes equally from novels (namely Don DeLillo’s White Noise) and artwork (especially that of Andy Warhol), and the supermarket itself, which he ultimately argues might also be “the origin of postmodernism” (38). Here we catch a glimpse of what might be new about Alworth’s methodology: Alworth identifies the origin of social science methodologies in literary artefacts, at the same time that those literary and cultural artefacts are themselves shown to be generated at and even authored by sites themselves, which are in turn theorised by sociologists.

Having established the book’s Ouroborusian ethos and methodology in Chapter 1, Alworth organizes the rest of the book around four sites: dumps, ruins, roads, and asylums. Each of those sites, he argues, is key to understanding post-war US politics and culture, and each serves as a laboratory where he can test his new sociological-literary methodology. Each chapter presents a crowded assemblage of predominantly white and hyper-masculine novels, artworks, and spaces. For instance, in the chapter on “dumps,” William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch is put into conversation with Don DeLillo’s Underworld, John Dos Passos’s The Garbage Man, the work of the criminally underappreciated artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty; the chapter on “roads” brings together Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays with Robert Creeley’s poem “I know a Man,” the Merry Pranksters, the work of Tom Wolfe, the photographs of Robert Frank, Ed Ruscha, the crushed-car sculptures of John Chamberlain, the art writing of Michael Fried and Robert Smithson, and the urban activism and writings of Ralph Nader and Jane Jacobs. By far one of the most exciting aspects of Alworth’s experiments are the encounters, or even collectivities, that emerge between these texts. As well, these pairings and the connections he draws across them draw our attention to the rich world of objects and sites underpinning post-war American fiction – from the kotex and washing machines of the dump to the camera, brief-case, chain link, and phonograph in the asylum.

However, what is less immediately evident is exactly how Alworth is de- or re-materialising post-war American fiction through the figure of the site or why he is so keen to draw a distinction between traditional categories such as space or place. How exactly is Alworth’s new materialism, which locates the origins of postmodern in the supermarket, or minimalism’s origins in “road trip” (91) different from the kind of “old” materialist work carried out by Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey or Kristin Ross in their work on Paris? From Neil Smith’s work on New York? Eric Avilla’s work on suburbanising post-war Los Angeles? Or even Jameson’s engagement with the Bonaventure hotel in downtown LA? Aren’t all of those critics committed to thinking spatially and materially about culture, sociality, ideology, and collectivity?

I use urban examples deliberately because one of the notable things about Alworth’s sites is that they are predominantly connected to post-war processes of urbanization and suburbanization. Yet the city or urban space is inexplicably absent in his account of the site. This is particularly important given that the vast majority of his sites are located in New York City (and to a lesser extent Los Angeles) between the end of World War II and the foreclosure of what Joshua Freeman calls “Working-Class New York” with the fiscal crisis and financial takeover of the city in 1975 (often read as one of the originary moments of neoliberalism [Harvey 2005: 44-8]). What is the relationship between sites and the urban? Or for that matter, the national or the international, given the book’s completely untheorized US-focus? And why, for Alworth, is Site Reading distinct from work on what Kanishka Goondewardena terms the “urban sensorium,” that is work that theorises the crucial role that “urban space” plays in “media[ing] space and produc[ing] hegemony while aestheticizing politics” (2005: 46)? This is particularly curious given the historical relationship between situationism, psychogeography, urban studies (especially Lefebvre) and site-specific art work. Because Alworth never seriously engages with these thinkers aside from an epigraph by Lefebvre (a somewhat bewildering choice given the book’s critique of society as a meaningful category), a casual reference or two to Ross, and a few lines of Benjamin (which are filtered through other scholars), there is no explicit answer.[iii]

I suspect Alworth’s response would be that, as with Jameson, these authors’ Marxism means they subscribe to a kind of Durkheimian social totality and thus social determinism. But given Jameson’s own critique of Durkheim’s “conservative […] positivism” (288) and his fundamentally dialectical methodology, which emphasizes that Totality, the Real, or History (and thus the “social”) are always immanent, in flux, and ultimately changeable, this is not a satisfying answer. Instead, I think we have to, as Alworth himself recommends (via his second favourite sociologist, Irving Goffman), use an “inductive” (134) methodology to ascertain the actual nature of Alworth’s disagreement with Jameson and his Marxist ilk.

And I think we can posit a couple of disagreements. While all of the “old ‘materialist’” scholars I mentioned previously focus on place or space, their interest is ultimately not in space itself, which they are all careful to emphasize is not absolute but rather determined or “produced” by “actual process of capital accumulation” (Smith 2008: 113). For these thinkers, sites can never be examined in isolation, but rather are always connected to the interlinked processes of colonialism and the formation of the world market. This means spatial thinking still upholds the centrality of the human and human action. As Neil Smith bluntly puts it, “there can be no apology for […] anthropomorphism […]: with the development of capitalism, human society has put itself at the centre of nature” (8).

For Alworth, by contrast, (as with much of what is alternately called new materialism, or object-oriented ontology), anthropomorphism is one of the big failings of traditional sociology. Thus he wants to refigure sites and objects as independent actors, or actants, that are able to act upon the world, shaping societies and even authoring texts. In his reading of Smithson’s nonsite art work, for instance, he argues that “the site itself has already performed some measure of authorial labor, furnishing source materials (i.e., ‘the physical, raw reality’) as well as a certain logic that the artist, as ‘geologic agent’ is excavating and presenting” (104). One claim Alworth makes repeatedly is that society is constructed by the “flux of interactions between humans and nonhumans” (33), and that the sociology these novels and artworks do is one of theorising this flux. Thus, Site Readings is organised around these reorientations from a sociology based on social struggle to one based on the scandal of the nonhuman—consider, for example, his reading of John Updike’s short story “A&P” which narrates a psychosexual conflict when three girls walk into an A&P wearing nothing but bathing suits. But, Alworth argues, “The scandal of these girls […] is not their premature sexuality but their unwitting seizure of a display technology intended to ensure that nonhumans are always constituted as the objects of human attention” (40). Similarly, in his chapter on dumps he argues that the real shock of Naked Lunch isn’t its obscenity, but its refiguring of the “the social as rather than in a dump” (69, emphasis in original).

But this then leads to a further question. If this decentering of the human is the main intervention of Alworth’s book, then why isn’t Alworth engaging in a conversation with the vast and diverse body of indigenous scholarship, which like the urban geographers mentioned above, is also resolutely place-based, but (like Alworth) breaks down the relationship between human and nonhuman actors? We can think, for example, of Kim TallBear’s work which “pushes back” against “scientific narratives of indigenous American genetic ‘origins’ by emphasizing “their emergence as particular cultural and language groups in social and cultural relation with nonhumans of all kinds – land formations, nonhuman animals, plants, and the elements in very particular places – their ‘homelands’ or ‘traditional territories’ for example” (2007: 186). Or we can think of what Glen Coulthard terms “grounded normativity” (2014: 53) to describe the “forms of knowledge” produced by Indigenous peoples out of “Indigenous struggles against capitalist imperialism” that are not only oriented around “struggles not only for land, but also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of reciprocal relationship (which is itself informed by place-based practices and associated form of knowledge) ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative” (60). Where the social and geographic thinkers mentioned above all make at least a cameo in Site Reading, no indigenous scholarship is present. This is striking given the obvious resonances. It also means that again we have to be somewhat speculative in our articulation of how Alworth’s book differs from already existing work.

Here too we can make a few inferences. First, whilst Alworth is interested in nonhuman actors, he does not seem to be particularly interested in land or nature. Sites are as much an alternative category to nature as they are to place, space or the urban. One thing that is striking about Alworth’s choice of sites, in fact, is that they are all human-built constructions. In fact, his sites are mostly forms of fixed capital designed and built at the moment of the US’s radical reorganisation of its own urban space and (as Alworth himself shows in his readings of Tangier in Burroughs and Malta in Pynchon) soon the world’s as it attained global hegemony. This leads to something of a conundrum in Alworth’s work: he wants to emphasize the relationship between human and nonhuman actors, but he wants to focus almost entirely on the relationship between humans and the things and spaces that humans have constructed under very specific historical circumstances.

Second is that, as with theorists of the urban sensorium, much indigenous theory insists on something like totality in its focus on interconnection and systematicity, one that often returns to questions of capitalism and colonialism. Alworth, in contrast, wholly rejects totality and in fact one of the promises of the “site” is that it can be lifted up from its larger world and studied in isolation. Ultimately, what seems to differentiate “sites” from spaces, places, or nature, then, is that sites can be extricated from the social, political, and ideological processes that produced them. Read thusly, Alworth’s meaning of “site” is more rooted in the thinking of Irving Goffman (Alworth’s other favourite sociologist), who as Mark McGurl explains pays attention to the local stripped of its determinants or “historical consciousness” (2010: 334), than the 1970s site/nonsite artists. More specifically, Alworth’s understanding of a site can best be understood as an iteration of Goffman’s idea of that “total institution” (130), which Alworth takes up and defines as a “place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life” (qtd in 182).

Indeed, throughout Site Reading, ruins, dumps, roads, and asylums are transformed into isolated, unique spaces that, while occasionally intersecting with larger social or political questions, can ultimately be extricated or separated from such questions and repurposed or resignified through individual acts of resistance. This isn’t to say these sites are entirely stripped of context: Alworth doesn’t think that context stinks. The road is mentioned alongside the Interstate Highway Act, the asylum is rooted in problems of segregation, and the ruins of Malta are tethered to the violence of World War II and the problem of how to rebuild. But while brushing up against these contexts, the sites themselves can ultimately moult these contexts to reveal broader, ontological “truths” about the nature of sites, human-nonhuman relations, or sociality.

In that vision of extractable sites, we can finally grasp one of the key ways that Alworth breaks away from Jameson. For Jameson, famously, “history is what hurts” (102). In Alexander Galloway’s wonderful gloss,

History hurts because history is full of the violence of capitalism, or what Jameson described as ‘the scars and marks of social fragmentation and monadization, and of the gradual separation of the public from the private’ and ‘the atomization of all hitherto existing forms of community or collective life.’  History hurts because of unemployment, proletarianization, and ‘pauperism.’  History hurts whenever material necessity wins out over social collectivity. (2016: 129)

In his sites, Alworth has created a history and geography that doesn’t have to hurt. Sites after all are spaces where it doesn’t even make sense to speak of a distinction between social collectivity and material necessity both because the collective is ultimately between the individual and his or her materials and because sites themselves can be isolated and extracted from any kind of necessity. This is one of the promises and seductions of Alworth’s sites: that they are enclaves, isolated spots that allow us to escape the nightmare of history and geography. Thus, at every turn the book attempts to achieve isolation in the face of the horror of interconnection.

Alworth’s operation is staged most explicitly in his reading of Naked Lunch. The chapter opens with a retreat from Tangier as the site of Naked Lunch to “the small room in the Villa Muniria where its author sat at his typewriter” (54) and ends with a description of the potential pitfall of Latour’s “actant” vision: namely “a junk world where no ontological distinctions matter because everything is destined to become a single degraded substance, call it abdicated flesh, rotten ectoplasm, or putrid lymph” (72). Most of the chapters open with some fearful vision of this “single degraded substance” – the mass of objects in the supermarket which so often end up as a putrid mass at the dump or the bomb-blasted sites that compose the ruins section – before offering a containment strategy, a “shoring up” (120) against this chaos. We can see this containment in Alworth’s focus on the equally hermetic space of the car in the Roads chapter and in the refiguring of the section on Ruins into a study of bomb shelters and the megaliths of Hagar Quim.

Perhaps the most fleshed out example of this “shoring up” is in the only not exclusively white chapter, on the “Asylum,” in which Alworth refigures the manhole where Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man concludes as a “site of refuge from” (127) both the the national “system of constitutionally sanctioned segregation” (146-7) and the “pathogen[esis]” of Harlem (139) – a questionable term given the history of urban planners deploying the public health language of “pathogenesis” in order to justify the displacement and gentrification of black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods (Corburn 2009: 27). In Alworth’s account, the narrator achieves this diminished suffering by replacing the troubled community with a community of objects, both by “tapping into the electrical grid” (146) and by “tinker[ing] with objects and fantasiz[ing] about acquiring more” (143). The site of diminished suffering, then, is one that is free of others, a site in which communities of people are replaced with the community between a man and his possessions.

This passage is important because it provides a roadmap to Alworth’s own methodology: the identification and celebration of “sites of diminished suffering” that swap out the social for the object which is really the commodity. But this strategy comes at a cost. While Ellison’s subterranean hole may offer an escape against the national problem of segregation, it is also a site of escape from Harlem itself and the actual communities and fraught collectivities therein (the communist party, the black nationalists, the rioters, and so forth). Not only does Alworth’s solution replicate the Cold War strategy of buying off and privatizing certain facets of the (largely white) working-class with the promise of private, individualized spaces and a dizzying array of goods while criminalizing and neglecting the (largely racialized) rest, but Alworth’s levelling equation of Ellison’s critique of nation-wide segregation with his critique of Harlem and specific movements therein is precisely the problem with this methodology. It flattens out very uneven histories and makes questions of power or social sedimentation illegible. And this finally brings us closer to understanding the new form of collectivity that Alworth is after: one between a man and his objects, and thus one free of social antagonism, conflict, and the messiness of actual collectivity and sociality.

For Jameson, by contrast, collectivity is a necessarily political and antagonistic project; collectivity by its very nature emerges “as a result of the struggle between groups or classes” (1982: 289). All forms of collectivity, Jameson writes, are first and foremost expressions of some kind of “class consciousness” (290-1). And while this may not be ideal, he argues, “in a fragmented social life – that is, essentially in all class societies – the political thrust of the struggle of all groups against each other can never be immediately universal but must always necessarily be focused on the call enemy” (290). It is ultimately this struggle that Alworth seeks to escape. In his luscious descriptions of supermarkets and dumps, asylums and roads, Alworth seeks to rewrite these sites – sites of some of the most pitched, collective battles over the meaning of US global power – into spaces of evenness free of social strife, or at least into space where strife is resolvable. This is a collectivity that seeks to imagine the recent past as already in this Utopian or classless society and thus one that is free of desire or demand, which is to say free of politics. But in a society that isn’t classless and that is wrenched with racial, gendered, and classed antagonisms, such a projection can only end up serving the most reactionary and conservative of politics.

Peculiarly, Alworth seems aware of, and averse to, this result. Throughout the book he wrestles with this problem of isolationism, concluding somewhat remarkably with a denunciation of it in his coda, “Site Unseen.” In this coda, Alworth turns to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which he reads as imagining another kind of site/enclave: the bunker. Alworth is at his most powerful in this coda where he argues that the fantasy the bunker fulfills is to allow the “the two main characters [to] inhabit the fantasy of a preapocalyptic ordinary. Their interactions bespeak a kind of subdued pleasure” (150). Their desire for this “preapocalyptic ordinary,” Alworth rightfully reads as symptomatic of a contemporary desire for the same, something that Alworth, here if not in the rest of the book, roundly rejects. “In such a world,” he argues, “the bunker can provide only false recuperation, until the potentially redemptive moment of the Rapture, as the scene’s final simile suggests by likening its ‘faintly lit hatchway’ to ‘a grave yawning at judgment day in some old apocalyptic painting’” (152). This seems to be the moment when Alworth “comes to claim his voice,” to return to Fleissner’s glowing review, by recognizing the fatal flaw in his own book, that his sites are ultimately a literary criticism from the position of the bunker, an attempt to “inhabit the fantasy of a preapocalyptic ordinary” (150). Its “potentially redemptive” focus on the site is necessarily false, because it is based on willful blindness to the world in which these books were written and the world in which he writes, something that becomes most evident if we turn to what is ultimately the most important “site” in the whole book: the twinned sites of the fictional room in Emma Donoghue’s Room and Alworth’s own classroom.

The introduction focuses on Room’s main character, Jack, as a model of the kind of human/non-human collectivity Alworth imagines. “It is easy,” Alworth writes, “to say that this utterly traumatized subject looks to objects, the only objects he has ever known, for stability amid stress and chaos, but there is more to Donoghue’s project […] As Jack familiarizes himself with Outside Space, he defamiliarizes our world for us, spotlighting its conventionality and artificiality” (9). Alworth is absolutely right to note that “Jack’s Room constitutes a social dystopia that nonetheless registers as a structuralist utopia” (10). But what I’m interested in here is the indirect link that Alworth draws between the Jack and his mother’s room in Room and the imagined or ontological classroom with which Site Reading opens. Alworth describes the classroom, which comes to frame the book, thusly:

The class appears to be an ordinary social unit, composed of people and their internalized protocols of behavior, and this unit appears to be acting out its own protocols in this setting (the setting of the classroom) through a discussion of narrative setting. But then, much to the chagrin of a certain student, something happens. As the instructor is introducing the novel, a loud ringtone interrupts her remarks, and suddenly everybody looks away from the Powerpoint. (4)

Alworth’s classroom is, like all his sites, buzzing with the relationships between human and nonhuman actors. And this he argues isn’t a bad thing at all. The disruptions of cellphone rings – the chagrin of all of us in the classroom– is in fact “central to the pedagogical enterprise” (5). This, for Alworth, exemplifies his claim that “it makes no sense to distinguish the class (as a social unit) from the material environment of the class” (5). Of course Alworth’s choice of the class is important because while Alworth can see the space of the class as equally important to the social unit of the class, there is a class that remains absent: the class structure underpinning both the built environment and social unit of the class. This is presumably a class at Harvard, after all.

While Alworth can think about space and technology, like Jack in Room, Alworth cannot or will not think about the Outside Space of his (class)room. He doesn’t ask if the classroom is at an Ivy League university, a state university, at a community college, or perhaps even at a for-profit university like the University of Phoenix. He doesn’t ask about who the students are – whether they’re relatively privileged students whose parents are able to pay, whether they’re crippled by debt or working multiple jobs; whether they’re mature students; UPS workers taking night classes at 3am, – or about the conditions of the teacher – is (s)he tenured, permanent, precarious, working across multiple campuses, waking at 3am to teach workers at night school – or about the city or state or country, or world that that learning takes place in. He doesn’t ask if #metoo has entered his classroom or #whyismysyllabussowhite; if the classroom is at Harvard, whether the students have joined striking dining workers; or how students are responding to the newly unveiled plaque revealing the centrality of slave money to its founding, or how any of these experiences might shape the students or teacher’s relationship to literature, history, or theory. He doesn’t ask who is calling or what the phone is being used for or what the processes are that made the phone. Object, sites, and social units all appear without a history, fully formed and autonomous within an isolated site.

Thus we are able to arrive at sentences like this: “On those serendipitous afternoons, when the discussion of literary art assumes a kind of urgency and tacks in a surprising and challenging direction, the social network can feel quite immediate and intimate: just the teacher and the students thinking together with the text” (5). But when is it ever “just the teacher and student thinking together with the text”? When is the classroom ever free of its larger pressures? This is ultimately what Alworth wants from Latour and Goffman: a “site” stripped of its determining factors. Thus, when Alworth claims that Durkheimian society is too deterministic, it is difficult not to read this as a form of willful blindness, both to the forces that shape a text and more immediately to the academic system for which he labours.

And yet, again, Alworth does smuggle such histories into his book, particularly if we consider the second text about a violent and troubled man who builds a bunker that Alworth (via Donoghue) brings into the introduction: namely Robinson Crusoe. Alworth somewhat improbably reads Ian Watt’s well known claim in Rise of the Novel that Defoe “‘annihilated the relationships of the traditional social order’” and in its place constructed “‘a network of personal relationships on a new and conscious pattern’” (qtd in 9) as referring to his protagonist’s “interactions with human others, nonhuman animals, and even material things” (9). For Watt, Robinson Crusoe is a parable of the development of “homo economicus” and “puritan individualism” (1967: 74, emphasis in original) alongside the development of capitalism, but also registers the conditions of the parable: specifically, the “fortunate decease of all the other potential stockholders” and his “looting” of tools from the shipwreck (87) and more generally, the extraction of “gold, slaves, and tropical products” from the colonies “on which the future progress of capitalism depended” (67). And indeed, if we consider the violence that led to Jack’s birth, Room’s operation is not so very different. Alworth, however, pushes this context to the side, arguing that whilst “by the end of the novel, long after he has discovered the cannibals and enslaved Friday, Crusoe certainly envisions himself as an emperor surrounded by subjects and treasures [….] his arduous journey to that point occasions one of literary history’s most searching mediations on social ontology” (9). Just like The Road’s protagonists in the bunker, hidden away from the world, Alworth’s “social” ontology refuses to engage with the social itself. This also suggests that Alworth’s imagined classroom with its harmonious collectivity between human and nonhuman actors is, like Crusoe’s Island, dependant on an erasure of the conditions of violence, enclosure, enslavement, and theft that underpin the University (and especially the elite university) system.

We can now begin to understand what Jord(ana) Rosenberg means in their stunning reading of the new materialisms or “ontological turn” (2014: np), when they argue that “the urge towards objects comports itself in a very particular fashion, one that will be familiar to scholars of colonialism and settler-colonialism, and that calls to mind any number of New-World-style fantasies about locations unmediated by social order” (np). For Rosenberg, this new form of ontology enacts: “a primitivist fantasy that hinges on the violent erasure of the social: the conjuring of a realm – an ‘ancestral realm’ – that exists in the present, but in parallax to historical time […and] a terra nullius of the theoretical landscape […that] mediate a dual intensification specific to the present: that of neoliberal forms of settler colonialism and financialized capital accumulation” (np). Read alongside Rosenberg, the seemingly disparate elisions and erasures in Alworth’s argument that I have been tracing come into relief. His erasure of the history of objects, his erasure of indigenous forms of scholarship that deal with questions of animate and inanimate objects; his erasure of social antagonisms implicit in the history of these objects, his overwhelmingly white archive, and his erasure of the conditions of the academic system he labors under all emerge as a unified and cohesive strategy to violently “wrench matter free of the social, of mediation, of relation” (np).

But Alworth’s book also helps to illustrate Rosenberg’s argument by laying bare the ideology of the ontological. Rosenberg argues that the lure of this ontological turn provides a “line of flight […] a way out of capitalist logics and repetitions” (np). What Alworth reveals is one form of fantasy this line of flight takes: isolationism. But this isolationism doesn’t get us out of the material conditions of neoliberal, financialised, and global capitalism, but only embeds us more deeply within them. And if there is any doubt about the intrinsic connection between these neoliberal forms of settler colonialism and financialisation on the one hand and the ideology of isolationism on the other, we need only turn to the new fantasy of populist political isolationism that Donald Trump has evoked through the US-Mexico wall, the increased policing of its borders through policies like the Muslim ban, and its detention of migrants and especially migrant children, all of which serve to promote the fantasy that the US can cast off globalisation, history, and even ecological limits and return to some prelapsarian state of isolated, yet all-powerful greatness.

In what ultimately turns out to be Alworth’s most important contribution, then, Site Reading provides us with an answer to the question of what exactly these new materialisms do: they conjure a literature and a literary history that doesn’t hurt, and in doing so, promise to make literary criticism great again.

WORKS CITED

Alworth, David. 2015. Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Brennan, Timothy. 2010. “Running and Dodging: The Rhetoric of Doubleness in Contemporary Theory.” New Literary History, 41.2, 277-299.

Coulthard, Glen. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Corburn, Jason. 2009. Toward the Healthy City: People, Places, and the Politics of Urbna Planning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Davidson, Michael. 2017 “From Classroom to Asylum.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 50.1, 123-127.

Fleissner, Jennifer. 2016. “Jennifer L. Fleissner reviews Site Reading.” Critical Inquiry. https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jennifer_l._fleissner_reviews_site_reading/

Freeman, Joshua. 2001. Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II. New York: The New Press.

Galloway, Alexander. 2016. “History is What Hurts: On Old Materialism.” Social Text 34.2, 125-141.

Goonewardena, Kanishka. 2005 “The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology, and the Aestheticization of Politics.” Antipode 37, 46-71.

Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jameson, Fredric. 1982. Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,

Konstantinou, Lee. 2018. “Review of Site Reading.” ALH Online Review, Series XIV. https://academic.oup.com/DocumentLibrary/ALH/Online%20Review%20Series%2014/14Lee%20Konstantinou.pdf

McGurl, Mark. 2010. “Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present.” New Literary History 41.2, 329-349.

Raw, Lawrence. 2017. “Review.” Journal of American Culture 40.2, 183-4.

Rosenberg, Jordana. 2014. “The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present.” Theory & Event 17.2.

Smith, Neil. 2008. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

TallBear, Kim. 2017. “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking, and the New Materialism” in Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, edited by Radin, Joanna and Emma Kowal, 179-202. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Watts, Ian. 1967. The Rise of the Novel. London: Lowe & Brydon.

[i] Thanks to Molly Geidel, Nicole Aschoff, and Arne DeBoever for the conversations and feedback that helped shape this review.

[ii] In fact, Alworth’s engagement with Jameson is limited to this comment about the Durkheim passage quoted above: “While this passage encapsulates precisely what Latour rejects, the notion of society as a sui generis totality that ‘includes all things,’ it also forms part of the second epigraph to one of the most influential works of literary criticism, Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981). The latter, as Best and Marcus explain, ‘popularized symptomatic reading among U.S. literary critics,’ establishing the protocols for a certain method of historicism that remains important to this day” (3). Alworth in other words doesn’t actually read or engage with Jameson or any of the US literary critics who engage with him. Instead he flattens all of Jameson’s work, not to mention all of the US criticism that engages with Jameson into a bad reading of Durkheim based solely on an epigraph and a single comment by two other critics.

[iii] In this, Alworth’s work is underpinned by one of the key “theoretical gestures” (280) that Timothy Brennan has identified as marking this new literary sociology: namely a retreat from the dialogic in which a statement is “always an engagement with the thought of others” (282, emphasis in original). As Brennan explains, contemporary theory has been marked by a strange tendency in which “Although its arguments are fierce and unyielding, and although it views its opponents as implacable enemies, it never argues with them by identifying a counterauthority against which new evidence of reasoning has to be offered. Instead, it associates conceptual depth and gravity with the disembodied utterance” (282).  

Cosmopolitanism(s) Interrupted

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

reviewed by Sandra Ponzanesi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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