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  • Anissa Daoudi – Introduction : Narration et traduction de la Violence sexuelle en temps de guerre dans le Moyen Orient et l’Afrique du Nord

    Anissa Daoudi – Introduction : Narration et traduction de la Violence sexuelle en temps de guerre dans le Moyen Orient et l’Afrique du Nord

    Anissa Daoudi

    English | العربية

    Si naturelle est l’impulsion de la narration, si inévitable est la forme de récit qui rapporte la manière dont les choses se passent réellement, que la narrativité ne paraît problématique que dans une culture où elle était absente, absente ou, comme dans certains cas absente … par refus programmé.

    Hayden White (1980), “La valeur de la narrativité dans la représentation de la réalité”.

     

    “La vérité pour quiconque est une chose très complexe. Pour un écrivain, ce que vous dites en dit autant que les choses que vous incluez. Qu’est-ce qui est au dela de la marge du texte? Le photographe encadre sa photo; les écrivains encadrent leur monde. Mme Winterson s’est opposée à ce que j’avais mis, mais il me semblait que ce que j’avais laissé de côté était le jumeau silencieux de l’histoire. Il y a tellement de choses que nous ne pouvons dire, car elles sont trop pénibles. Nous espérons que les choses que nous pouvons dire apaiseront le reste ou l’apaiseront d’une façon ou d’une autre. Les histoires sont compensatoires. Le monde est inéquitable, injuste, impénétrable, hors de contrôle. Lorsque nous racontons une histoire, nous exerçons le contrôle, mais de manière à laisser un écart, une ouverture. C’est une version mais jamais la dernière. Et peut-être nous espérons que les silences seront entendus par quelqu’un d’autre, et l’histoire peut continuer, on peut la raconter. Lorsque nous écrivons, nous offrons le silence autant que l’histoire. Les mots sont la partie du silence qui peut être prononcée. Mme Winterson l’aurait préféré si j’avais été silencieux.

    Vous souvenez-vous de l’histoire de Philomel qui a été violée et ensuite sa langue fut arrachée par le violeur pour qu’elle ne puisse jamais le dire? Je crois à la fiction et au pouvoir des histoires parce que de cette façon, nous parlons en langues. Nous ne sommes pas réduits au silence. Nous tous, lors d’un traumatisme profond, nous hésitons, nous balbutions; il y a de longues pauses dans notre discours. La chose est bloquée. Nous retrouvons notre langue dans la langue des autres. Nous pouvons nous tourner vers le poème. Nous pouvons ouvrir le livre. Quelqu’un a été là pour nous et s’est plongé dans les mots. J’avais besoin de mots parce que les familles malheureuses sont des conspiratieurs de silence. Celui qui brise le silence n’est jamais pardonné. Il ou elle doit apprendre à se pardonner. “

    Jeanette Winterson (2011), Pourquoi être heureux lorsque vous pourriez être normal? 

    Narrer et traduire la violence sexuelle au Moyen-Orient et en Afrique du Nord est le thème principal de cette édition spéciale, qui est guidée par l’impulsion, pour emprunter les mots de White, de narrer et traduire le savoir en dire. Culturellement, dire les histoires de violence a été intimement lié à des luttes de pouvoir; toutes les histoires ne peuvant être racontées, particulièrement sous les régimes autoritaires. Dire des histoires est un acte de pouvoir qui s’articule autour de qui dit quoi et à qui? (Foucault, 1977). En racontant et en disant les histoires de ce qui s’est réellement passé, le but n’est certainement pas de reproduire la violence, mais de donner la parole aux femmes arabes silencieuses pour raconter leurs histoires afin de contrer les discours hégémoniques sur la violence sexuelle en temps de guerre dans la région du Moyen Orient et l’Afrique du Nord (MENA). Les contributeurs de ce numéro spécial sont des universitaires de différentes disciplines, activistes et féministes de la région et des écrivains; ils sont conscients de l’importance de dire des histoires qui remettent en question les discours existants et dévoilent les couches distordues du discours en vue d’éclairer le présent mais également le futur. Dire est également importan : ce qui a été laissé de côté, avoir un œil pour les détails, cadrer les histoires dans un style et un genre spécifiques, en utilisant un langage précis choses tout aussi importantes. Dire de la manière dont l’affirme Jeanette Winterson «Lorsque nous racontons une histoire, nous exerçons le contrôle, mais de manière à laisser un écart, une ouverture», elle ajoute que notre histoire est «une version mais jamais la dernière», elle est une addition importante aux grappes d’histoires qui forment le(s) discours (s). Cet acte de dire ou d’écrire est ce qui construit et produit des versions particulières du monde comme le dit Baker (2006: 28):«des histoires personnelles que nous nous racontons sur notre place dans le monde et notre propre histoire personnelle». En positionnant les femmes arabes dans le monde, nous (les contributeurs de ce volume) nous sommes places dans un réseau de pouvoir, comme Foucault le définit (1978) et nous sommes d’accord avec l’idée de pouvoir de Foucault “Il faut cesser une fois pour toutes de décrire l’effet du pouvoir en termes négatifs, il exclut, il «réprime», il «détecte», il «résume», il «masque», il «dissimule». En fait, le pouvoir produit;il produit la réalité; Elle produit des domaines d’objets et des rituels de la vérité ” (Foucault, 1977: 194).

    Ce Numéro Spécial est une contribution originale autour de trois axes. Pour commencer, c’est la première fois que le sujet du viol en temps de guerre, un sujet considéré comme tabou, est discuté ouvertement par rapport à la région MENA par des militants, des universitaires et des écrivains littéraires de la region et cela en trois langues: français, arabe et anglais. Comme notre cadre théorique est basé sur l’importance de la traduction comme moyen de défier les discours établis (Apter, 2013), il est devenu crucial que ce projet unique apparaisse dans les trois langues de travail de la région MENA pour mettre l’information à la disposition des chercheurs, des militants, des décideurs, des étudiants au niveau local et mondial, car nous pensons que la violence sexuelle en temps de guerre est un phénomène mondial. La deuxième originalité des articles porte sur le contenu qu’il révèle pour la première fois, en particulier en ce qui concerne l’Algérie, où la Loi d’Amnistie constitue une barrière contre la vérité. Cette édition spéciale est un appel à la justice et un clair rejet de la Loi d’Amnistie (2005). Le troisième point, et le plus crucial, est de lutter contre le silence des femmes et leur permettre de raconter leurs histoires afin d’écrire une version complète de l’histoire. En faisant cela, les femmes ne font pas que régler leurs comptes, mais aussi aident d’autres femmes (localement, régionalement et globalement) à avancer dans leur juste lutte contre le patriarcat, l’injustice et l’inégalité et de ne pas réinventer la roue.

    Pour ce Numéro Spécial, je me tourne vers le passé pour comprendre le présent et contribuer à l’avenir. En d’autres termes, poser la même question que Turshen (2002), qu’est-il arrivé aux femmes algériennes qui étaient autrefois actives pendant la guerre de libération et sont devenues passives durant la guerre civile? Turshen commence son article par deux citations: l’une qui se réfère aux Mudjahidats décrivant un endroit où elles ont planté des bombes pendant la guerre de Libération et une autre citation qui se réfère à une femme algérienne, capturée par des islamistes pendant la guerre civile, utilisée comme esclave sexuelle et pour d’autres emplois domestiques pour «l’Amir» (le terroriste). Ces deux images semblent à des siècles d’intervalle. La question est de demander, de façon indirecte, aux Mudjahidats (combatantes pendant la guerre Libération) quelle a été leur contribution aux «grands récits» de la guerre d’Algérie. Il est question, d’une certaine manière de les tenir responsables de ne pas dire leurs histoires, de ne pas être devenues des modèles pour les générations algériennes à venir, et de ne pas avoir été les moteurs du changement comme lorsqu’elle le furent durant la guerre de Libération. Ce projet aspire à découvrir des “couches de distorsions/constructions” pour utiliser les termes de Tamboukou (2013), non seulement sur ce que les Mudjahidats n’ont pas dit, mais aussi pourquoi et comment leur silence a eu lieu. Ce faisant, le regard ne se pose pas seulement sur le passé, mais plutôt sur le présent et le futur des femmes algériennes. Dans la section suivante, l’analyse des raisons et des manières dont ce silence est arrivé s’est produit.

    I.         Genrer la violence en Algérie: le rôle du langage

    L’Algérie est connue sous le nom des Trois Djamilas, un nom arabe signifiant «beau» se référant à trois vétérantes de la guerre d’Algérie (1954-1962) appelées Djamila Bouheird, Djamila Boupasha et Djamila Bouazza, qui sont soulvées contre le colonisateur. Alors que cette métaphore des «Trois Djamilas» a été utilisée et abusée dans toute la culture arabe, la contribution des femmes algériennes à la Guerre de Libération est présente dans la mémoire collective algérienne. L’abus commence dès lors que, comme le souligne (Mehta, 2014: 48), l’image créée est ‘l’equation de la terre et du corps de la femme, réduisant les femmes aux symboles abstraits de la nation sans droits de citoyenneté. Cette terre-mère apparaît trop souvent dans la rhétorique nationaliste (McMillin, 2007). C’est la même stratégie hégémonique qui empêche les femmes de participer activement au processus de la construction de la nation. De ce fait, la métaphore de la terre peut être analysée plus étroitement selon le principe de la «théorie de la métaphore conceptuelle», par Lackoff et Johnson, 1980, dans laquelle le domaine cible est lié à l’image de ‘cultivation’, ‘force’ et ‘sécurité’. Cette métaphore ne laisse aucune place à une association négative avec les mudjahidats. Cependant, en définissant les Djamilas comme des filles «musulmanes» algériennes «françaises» éduquées, les «abus», pour utiliser le mot «violence culturelle» de Thomas, deviennent plus clairs, en particulier avec le mouvement d’arabisation algérienne après l’indépendance dans les années 1970. Où les mêmes femmes «françaises» ont été renvoyées dans la sphère privée parce qu’elles ne maîtrisaient pas «l’arabe standard», la langue officielle selon la constitution algérienne. L’histoire a été écrite par des hommes algériens, ne laissant aucune place aux femmes pour narrer ou archiver leurs histoires. En 1974, le ministère de Mudjahideen (ministère des Anciens Combattants) a signalé que 11 000 femmes algériennes avaient lutté pour la libération (environ 3% de tous les combattants); Amrane Minne (1993) pense que c’est une sérieuse sous-estimation de la participation des femmes. Elle ajoute que de ce nombre, 22% étaient urbaines et 78% proviennent de zones rurales; ces pourcentages reflètent exactement le taux d’urbanisation en Algérie à cette période. La bataille des Mudjahidats n’était pas seulement contre le colonisateur, mais aussi de libérer les femmes de l’ignorance et de la servitude. Les femmes instruites urbaines se sont jointes aux forces rebelles et sont allées dans les villages où elles ont enseigné, à des paysans analphabètes, les raisons de leur lutte pour l’indépendance. Des études révèlent qu’après l’indépendance, beaucoup ont été confrontées à des rejets de la société et n’ont pu y être réintégrées car certaines ont été violées, ou parce qu’elles avaient fréquenté des hommes. Parmi celles qui ont réussi à trouver un emploi, certaines ont été obligées par leurs maris de revenir à des emplois plus traditionnels. Le film La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua d’Assia Djebar (1978) est une représentation du colonialisme ainsi que de la culture féminine. Dans ce film, Djebar souligne l’importance de l’histoire et de la mémoire et pose des questions suivantes: à qui appartient l’histoire de l’Algérie ? Qui la raconte et à qui? Et dans quelle langue? L’exclusion des femmes algériennes instruites en français ne se limita pas aux Mudjahidats, mais comprenait aussi une génération d’Algériennes éduquées en français; et cela même des décennies après l’indépendance (voir le chapitre premier). La section suivante fournira une analyse de ce que l’on ressentait lorsque l’on était une femme dans les années 1990, une periode connue sous le nom de «décennie noire» en Algérie.

     II.         Souvenirs des femmes algériennes durant les années 1990

    La guerre civile a été décrite comme l’une des périodes les plus brutales dans l’Algérie indépendante. On estime que plus de 200 000 personnes ont été tuées et des milliers de personnes «brutalement blessées, déplacées, enlevées et violées sexuellement, selon le rapport d’Amnesty International de 1996» (Mehta, 2014: 69). L’Algérie indépendante n’a pas connu autre chose que le régime répressif d’un seul parti, où la corruption, le chômage, le népotisme, la discrimination fondée sur le genre et la ségrégation des minorités étaient monnaie courante. Dans les années 1980, le pays était prêt à exploser. La crise s’est sentie économiquement, politiquement, socialement et les gens sont descendus dans la rue dans ce que l’on appelle les «émeutes du pain» du 5 octobre 1988. Le soulèvement a commencé pacifiquement, mais sitôt les militaires ont brutalement écrasé les manifestants. Les islamistes ont capitalisé sur ces tensions et ont commencé à se présenter en tant que sauveteurs du pays. Ils voulaient être considérés comme ceux qui allaeint réinventer l’identité algérienne, qui était selon eux encore francophone. Comme l’affirme Zahia Salhi (2010), les militaires sont devenus plus militarisés et les islamistes se sont engagés dans la lutte armée et, par conséquent, le pays a été entraîné dans l’un des moments les plus horribles de son histoire. Les civils étaient les ultimes victimes, en particulier les femmes. En fait, Salhi croit que les femmes sont devenues une cible délibérée pour les fondamentalistes islamiques dès les années 1970. Elle explique comment la disposition discriminatoire du Code de la famille a exacerbé et légitimé la violence à l’égard des femmes et a rendu difficile pour ells de faire face aux conséquences des violations abusives des droits de l’homme (2010). Marnia Lazreg nomme l’année 1984 “l’année de la rupture entre les femmes et leur gouvernement et le questionnement radical de la légitimité de l’Etat par les femmes”.

    Dalila Lamarene Djerbal décrit la situation:

    La violence physique à grande échelle, puis les meurtres de femmes qui ne respectent pas le code vestimentaire ou les règles de conduite; l’assassinat de femmes citoyennes chargées de soutenir les autorités ou les femmes liées aux membres des services de sécurité; l’obligation pour les femmes et les familles de soutenir les groupes armés et les débuts du viol par des mariages forcés, la multiplication des enlèvements, le viol sous le couvert de ce qu’on appelle zawāj mut’a, les enlèvements de femmes, la ségrégation, le viol collectif, la torture, le meurtre et la mutilation de l’ensemble du territoire.

    La citation ci-dessus illustre la violence physique exercée contre les femmes algériennes, ce qui a sans aucun doute laissé des cicatrices psychologiques. Elle résume les différents prétextes sous lesquels les femmes étaient ciblées. Le premier concerne les femmes dans la sphère publique et le code vestimentaire et la conduite «respectable». Le concept du hijab (le voile) a commencé à circuler au milieu des années 1970 et au début des années 80, importé par des professeurs arabes qui sont venus dans le pays lors du mouvement d’arabisation, et qui avaient des liens avec les mouvements des Frères musulmans. Leur but était l’islamisation de l’Algérie qui selon eux était encore francophone. Un grand nombre de femmes algériennes ont été forcées de porter le hijab et celles qui ont refusé de le faire ont reçu des menaces de mort et, dans certains cas, ont été tuées, utilisées comme exemples pour terroriser d’autres femmes. Une Fatwa légalisant l’enlèvement et le mariage temporaire des femmes a été publiée, de manière très similaire à la façon dont les femmes Yazidi sont traitées selon la règle d’ISIS aujourd’hui. Selon les islamistes, le hijab est ce qui distingue une femme musulmane d’une femme non-musulmane. C’est aussi ce qui établit les limites entre les sphères privée et publique. Toutes ces strictes règles justifiaient la violence physique et le meurtre de femmes qui refusaient de respecter la règle religieuse. La première victime fut le célèbre cas de Katia Bengana, une jeune fille de 17 ans de Blida, qui avait été mise en garde, mais a dit à sa mère: “même si un jour je suis assassinée, je ne porterai jamais de hijab contre ma volonté. Si je dois porter quelque chose, ce sera la robe traditionnelle de la Kabylie plutôt que le hijab importé qu’ils veulent nous forcer”(Turshen, 2002: 898). La déclaration de Katia montre combien elle était provocante, même si elle soupçonnait qu’elle serait tuée pour ses idées bien arrêtées. De plus, son identité kabyle était plus importante pour elle. Elle se réfère au hijab comme une idéologie importée de la péninsule arabique en référence à l’idéologie Wahhabi, et et forcée sur les Algériennes. Ce sentiment a été partagé par un grand nombre d’Algériennes qui affirment que leur islam algérien, sous lequel elles ont été élevés, avait ses propres particularités et qu’elles n’avaient pas besoin d’enseignements sur l’islam provenant d’ailleurs.

    Vingt ans plus tard, sa sœur écrit un article sur Facebook et dit: “Je pleure, je rage contre ces femmes voilées qui pensent qu’elles sont libres pendant qu’elles sont muselées. Katia est une fille qui a décidé pour elle-même, ne pas se pencher vers l’obscurantisme machiste des islamistes. Combien de Katia(s) nous faut-il pour qu’un jour ces femmes puissent enfin être libres? Katia devrait être considérée comme un symbole de la lutte contre les esprits médiévaux. Elle était courageuse et était prête à aller jusqu’au bout de ses convictions, une femme libre, une vrai Tamazight comme l’était la Reine des Aurès, un exemple de force et d’intelligence”(26.01.17). Lors de la conférence tenue à l’Université de Birmingham, en octobre 2014 sur «la Narration et la traduction de la violence sexuelle dans la région MENA: le rôle du langage», Mme. Wassyla Tamzali, a parlé du cas de Katia et a souligné que l’on ne devait pas se souvenir d’elle comme étant berbère, elle devrait être célébrée en tant que femme algérienne. Elle ajoute qu’en divisant les citoyens en berbères et en arabes, les Algériens entrent dans l’idéologie coloniale de «diviser pour mieux régner». Katia n’a pas été tuée parce qu’elle était berbère, mais parce qu’elle a refusé l’islam politique. Pour Tamzali, parler au nom de Katia est crucial et faire entendre la voix de Katia est tout aussi important. Elle a choisi de rendre le cas de Katia un problème national car elle est consciente qu’il y a plus de femmes comme Katia en Algérie. Les récents rapports provenant de zones d’Irak et de Syrie, sous contrôle ISIS, montrent comment les femmes sont encore soumises à des circonstances similaires de viol, de meurtre et d’esclavage sexuel. Ainsi, l’appel de Tamzali est d’une importance mondiale et est le résultat de ses années de travail pour les Nations Unies, lorsqu’elle etait en charge du sort des femmes en Bosnie.

    Le second point dans la citation de Lamarene concerne le ciblage de citoyennes «chargées de soutenir les autorités (le pouvoir) ou les femmes liées aux membres des services de sécurité». Cette catégorie de femmes comprend un large segment de la population algérienne, qui sont des épouses, des sœurs ou des mères d’hommes travaillant pour les services de sécurité, la force de police, l’armée, appelés par les fondamentalistes les «tyrans», taghut en arabe. Ce mot de l’arabe classique nous renvoie aux usages de ce mot dans un passé lointain. Le mot est mentionné dans le Coran (surat al Nahl /L’Abeille). Dans ce cas, le «tyran» ou le souverain, dirigeant, désigne le ‘mal’. L’éradication du mal devient ainsi un devoir pour le croyant. Cette métaphore conceptuelle peut être utilisée pour expliquer le processus par lequel l’extermination du non-croyant s’est normalisée. L’utilisation de l’image du taghut évoque diverses images directement liées au Coran et aussi à la période pré-islamique où les gens adoraient d’autres formes de dieux, ce qui différenciait le croyant du non-croyant. Le terme rappelle l’image du “mal” et du “dirigeant injuste”. Ces deux concepts sont suffisants, par exemple, pour le grand Mufti de l’Arabie Saoudite pour justifier la peine de mort.

    Actuellement, d’autres concepts ont commencé à apparaître dans la société algérienne: Dalila Lamarene Djerbal se réfère à Zawāj al Mut’a, un terme introduit par les islamistes nommant une forme de mariage temporaire pratiqué par certains musulmans chiites au Moyen-Orient mais pas en Afrique du Nord; inconnu en Algérie, où la majorité de la population est sunnite. D’autres formes de mariage sont également apparues avec la montée de l’islamisme, comme zawāj al misāyr (encore une forme temporaire de mariage acceptée dans la secte sunnite du wahhabisme). D’autres formes d’attaque contre les corps des femmes ont commencé à pénétrer la société algérienne et cela sous différentes terminologies Le roman de Fadhila Al Farouq se réfère au mot de viol en arabe et le place entre des virgules inversées ” الاغتصاب “/al ightisāb/comme un terme controversé. Pourtant, elle explique explicitement ses racines étymologiques liées à l’arabe classique. En faisant cela, Al Farouq attaque implicitement l’institution religieuse pour l’utilisation des «concepts islamiques» les transformant en capital symbolique (voir le chapitre premier).

    La citation de Djerbal capture les atrocités que les femmes algériennes ont traversées pendant la «décennie noire». La violence était à la fois réelle et symbolique contre les civils, en particulier les femmes qui, comme a indiqué Djerbal, ont été violées, torturées et assassinées collectivement de la manière la plus dramatique (voir ci-dessous la discussion sur le meurtre de femmes dans la partie oueste de l’Algérie). Dans les années 1990, d’ordinaires Algériennes sont descendues dans la rue pour dénoncer les discours violents prononcés contre elles. En 1994, le Groupe islamique armé (GIA) a appelé à un boycott des écoles. Cependant, en dépit de nombreuses écoles brûleées et des meurtres d’enseignants, les femmes ont néanmoins, par défi, accompgné leurs enfants à l’école. La violence a augmenté au fur et à mesure de la résistance du gouvernement et des citoyens, y compris les femmes. Les terroristes “ont intensifié leurs activités, établissant des barrages routiers et tuant de cette manière lors d’embuscades “ (Turshen, 2002: 897). D’autres actes dirigés contre les femmes comprenaient la délivrance de la fatwa légalisant le meurtre de filles et de femmes qui ne portaient pas le hijab. Une autre fatwa a légalisé l’enlèvement et le mariage temporaire des femmes. Selon le FIS, le hijab est ce qui distingue une musulman d’une f non-musulmane. C’est aussi ce qui délimite les sphères privées et publiques. Tous ces édits justifiaient le meurtre de femmes qui refusaient de respecter les règles religieuses. La prochaine section met en lumière les organisations de femmes algériennes et leur lutte contre ce qui se passe.

    III.         Le rôle des organisations de femmes en Algérie dans la décennie noire: résilience

    Les femmes algériennes étaient soumises aux pires types de violence bien avant la guerre civile. Dans les discours publics du Parti islamique (FIS), certaines femmes, les féministes par exemple, ont été représentées comme non croyantes, occidentales, immorales et, par conséquent, il était urgent de les ramener à leurs rôles traditionnels. Elles occupaient, selon la FIS, des emplois censés être pour des hommes. Ce discours particulier a été favorisé par les hommes au chômage au moment où la crise économique a frappé le pays en raison de la corruption, de la chute des prix du pétrole dans un pays qui s’appuyait principalement sur les ressources naturelles. L’Algérie est devenu de plus en plus hostile à la présence de femmes dans la sphère publique. Les féministes ont été harcelées, empêchées de faire leur travail et même pas autorisées à vivre sans un parent masculin (comme un frère, un mari, un fils, ce qu’on appelle mahram). La loi de 1984 (comme expliquée au chapitre premier) n’a pas aidé non plus. En fait, cette loi a institutionnalisé la violence et la discrimination à l’égard des femmes. Ait Hamou (2004, 117), l’un des membres fondateurs du Réseau Wassyla soutient que le gouvernement algérien a coopté les conservateurs et plus tard les fondamentalistes musulmans pour protéger leurs intérêts et rester au pouvoir. De nombreux gouvernements ont compromis et ont sacrifié les droits des femmes pour maintenir la paix avec les fondamentalistes. Par exemple, en 1989, «les conservateurs du FLN ont colludé avec les islamistes pour introduire des mesures contre l’émancipation de la femme, par exemple une éducation plus religieuse dans les écoles primaires; le sport non obligatoires pour les filles, et ainsi de suite “(ibid). En d’autres termes, la complicité du FLN, dans le système éducatif en Algérie, dure depuis de nombreuses années.

    À l’échelle globale, lorsque les femmes faisaient quotidiennement face à la violence, le monde entier restait aveugle à qui se passait. Selon Ait-Hamou, «depuis le 11 septembre, le monde et, en particulier, les États-Unis, semble soudain se rendre compte que l’intégrisme musulman, dans sa forme extrême de terrorisme, est une menace réelle”. Elle ajoute que “beaucoup d’entre nous ne peuvent que se sentir amères face à une telle attitude, car nous avons combattu le fondamentalisme et le terrorisme isolément, à mains nues pendant de nombreuses années, alors que les fondamentalistes qui ont commis les crimes les plus atroces dans nos pays ont été soutenus par les mêmes gouvernements qui dictent aujourd’hui au reste du monde comment “combattre le terrorisme””. Ce sentiment d’amertume, d’être laissées seules, sans soutien ni de le part de leurs compatriotes Arabes, ni du reste du monde, c’est ce que les femmes et les hommes répètent maintenant lorsqu’on leur demande pourquoi ils ne se sont pas joints au soi-disant «Printemps arabe». Une autre question prégnante à laquelle Ait-Hamou fait référence est la loi d’amnistie de 1999, qui est à ce jour critiquée par la plupart des organisations féministes.

    Le but de la loi d’amnistie était de mettre fin à la guerre civile algérienne en proposant une amnistie pour la plupart des violences commises. Le référendum a eu lieu le 29 septembre 2005, et il a été mis en œuvre en tant que loi le 28 février 2006. Les critiques, cependant, le qualifient de déni de vérité et de justice pour les victimes des abus et pour leurs familles. Un exemple de voix qui se sont élevées contre la loi d’amnistie est Cherifa Keddar, fondatrice de l’Association Djazairouna, créée le 17 octobre 1996, à la suite de l’assassinat de sa soeur et de son frère après une attaque ciblée contre sa famille, y compris de leur mère par les islamistes. Cherifa s’est unie aux survivants du terrorisme pour leur donner une voix qui dénonce la loi d’amnistie et demander justice. Bennoune fournit des informations détaillées sur le travail de cette organisation dans ce numéro.

    Les organisations féministes luttaient contre le fondamentalisme, basé sur la théocratie et le patriarcat, et à l’origine de la violence. Elles ont toutes perçu que le début des années 1980 marquait le début du fondamentalisme en Algérie. Elles conviennent que les sermons du vendredi diffusés sur les haut-parleurs, se concentrant sur les corps féminins, les décrivant comme immorales en ce qui concerne par exemple le port du rouge à lèvres ou le fait de sortir non voilée. Les campus universitaires ont également été attaqués et les autorités ont fait profil bas. En juin 1989, un groupe d’intégristes a mis le feu en public dans une maison qui appartenait à une femme divorcée, qui vivait avec ses enfants. Ses trois enfants ont été brûlés jusqu’à la mort. Les groupes de femmes ont dénoncé ce crime et ont organisé la première manifestation dans les rues d’Alger. La complicité silencieuse de l’État a aidé la croissance de l’islamisme. Dans les années 1992-1993, des milliers d’hommes et de femmes ont été tués et le pays a vécu dans la terreur. La première femme assassinée fut Karima Belhadj, secrétaire à l’Office général de la sécurité nationale. Les organisations de femmes en Algérie ont eu peu de choix. Elles devaient survivre stratégiquement aux atrocités, certainse portaient le voile pour éviter les affrontements d’autres résistèrent à cela. Il faut maintenant regarder la société algérienne pour se rendre compte que plus la moitié des femmes est voilée. Les militantes des droits de la femme adoptèrent une stratégie nationale pour lutter contre l’intégrisme en produisant des contre-discours, ells ont occupé la rue à plusieurs reprises portant des photos de ceux qui ont été tués, alors que le reste de la population était terriffiée. La première réunion publique a été organisée en 1993 par le rassemblement des femmes démocrates algériennes (RAFD), a mis en scène un tribunal contre le terrorisme (Ait-Hamou, ibid). Les organisations de défense des droits de la femme ont également dénoncé les discours américains et européens qui sous le nom de la démocratie, ont désigneé les islamistes commes victims. Ces organisations ont également contribué aux débats internationaux par voie de chaines de presse étrangères et en participant à des conférences internationales. Elles ont créé de nombreuses associations de femmes comme SOS Femmes en Détresse, RAFD et RACHDA qui continuent à lutter pour le droit des femmes et à produire un contre-discours face au fondamentalisme.

    L’histoire de la violence que les femmes algériennes ont subi de la part des groupes djihadistes il y a de cela 20 ans maintenant, la façon dont cela s’est passé, la façon dont ceal a été négligé, la façon dont les victimes ont été négligées, négligées et oubliées – devrait provoquer une indignation mondiale comme le souligne Bennoune dans ce numéro. Car cette violence ne concerne pas que les femmes algériennes, mais est un problème mondial et comprendre cette violence permet d’apprhender les violences d’ISIS aujourd’hui. L’essai de Bennoune, dans ce numéro, traite du viol en Algérie durant la «décennie noire» et est une image fidèle de ce qu’était l’Algérie pendant la guerre civile. Bennoune scrute les façons dont le viol a été narré en interviewant des survivants, tâche difficile en vertu de la loi d’amnistie. Son expertise en droit et sa recherche sur le terrain sur le thème du viol en Algérie et dans d’autres parties du monde musulman contribuent au caractère interdisciplinaire de cet essai et des questions qu’ils pose. Son essai montre sa connaissance de l’Algérie de l’intérieur et de son analyse pertinente des éveénements.

    Pour compléter l’article de Benoune, Daoudi souligne la production culturelle des années 1990 en Algérie. Son article intitulé «L’intraduisibilité de l’Algérie» conteste le concept de “non traduisance” d’Apter (2013) et le présente non comme une entité homogène mais comme une notion multiple. La traduction comme outil de  discours dérangeant (Apter, 2013) est à la base des vues sur les rôles sexuels et contribute aux récits de l’Algérie coloniale et postcoloniale. La traduction aide à démanteler les récits qui ont été écrits par des hommes et à mettre en évidence des discours passés sous silence. Grâce à une analyse approfondie des divers discours de genre sur la violence en Algérie, cet article montre les manipulations de discours à propos des femmes algériennes au cours de l’Algérie coloniale et postcoloniale. Cet article traite également du rôle des écrivains algériens qui donnent une voix à leurs compatriotes sans voix pour aider à archiver leur histoire et à construire leur mémoire sociale et collective. En outre, cet article souligne les rôles du langage et de la traduction dans la construction d’une Algérie en constante évolution en mettant en perspective les années 1990, années de la guerre civile.

    Spcialiste en études du genre et d’études islamiques, Amel Grami, qui a travaillé avec des femmes jihadistes dans la région MENA, met en perspective des thèmes peu étudiés et connexes tels que ‘al sabi’ et ‘jihad al-nikah’, sujets que Grami a largement étudiés et publié. «Jihad al-nikah», en particulier, fut un sujet de controverse en Tunisie après le printemps arabe. Grami rappelle les déclarations officielles du ministère de l’Intérieur tunsies selon lequel il existe des groupes de jeunes tunisiennes qui se sont rendues en Syrie dans le but de «Jihad al-nikah». Grami met en exergue d’autres récits sur la violence sexuelle en Tunisie. Le but de la narration de ces histoires n’est pas d’étudier le passé mais d’essayer de comprendre le présent, de comprendre par exemple le viol des femmes Yazidi dans la région MENA (voir l’article de Grami dans ce numéro spécial).

    La lutter contre l’intégrisme et le silence des femmes algériennes n’a pas été le seul fait des activistes des droits des femmes sur le terrain. Les écrivains ont également combattu avec leurs stylos. Djebar, en tant que pionnière de la génération qui a vécu le colonialisme et Mokadem, sont le noyau de l’essai écrit par Imen Cozzo dans ce numéro. Cozzo suggère que le silence des femmes algériennes pourrait être interprété comme un acte social involontaire, un acte culturel et idéologique de résistance, un moyen d’enterrer la vérité atroce et de la sceller dans une tombe oubliée. Le silence a été imposé par une réalité coloniale et continue d’être appliqué par une tradition et une société postcoloniales. Après l’indépendance, de nombreux écrivains algériens ont utilisé la langue même du colonisateur pour résister à leur assimilation, et cela dans un processus inverse, dans une lutte entre les espaces “extérieurs” et “intérieurs”. Par conséquent, Cozzo soutient que le silence devient un acte politique par lequel les femmes subissent le discours des oppresseurs, en conservant leur monde/ mot secret.

    La violence dans les années 1990 dans les films algériens: Rachida, Le Harem de Madame Osmane et Barakat! sont les thèmes que Rym Quartsi discute dans son article. Elle analyse les films comme un autre moyen par lequel les réalisateurs algériens ont communiqué le traumatisme et la douleur de la décennie noire. Dans son essai, elle explore la relation entre genre, violence et langage. La décennie noire est la période où la plupart des artistes ont fui le pays après avoir reçu des menaces de mort. Cela a entraîné le démantèlement de l’industrie cinématographique et les films produits ont été réalisés en dehors de l’Algérie ou avec un financement externe.

    Dans une étude comparative, Bedjaoui rappelle la «décennie noire» par le travail des deux écrivaines francophones Assia Djebar et Maisa Bey. Les romans étudiés, se concentrent sur la violence du fanatisme religieux qui a terrifié la société algérienne dans les années 1990. De même, Tamzali écrit une lettre à katia Benghena, la fille qui a défié les islamistes et a refusé de porter le voile. Tamzali met en garde contre la division de la société algérienne en berbère, arabe, francophone et arabophone. Elle nous rappelle que Katia est une femme algérienne et n’est pas seulement une femme berbère. En décrivant la manierre dont l’on vivait en Algérie pendant la décennie noire, Tamzali déclare: “le pays était plongé dans la guerre civile, des voisins et des frères se tuant. La douleur et la peur ont dominé le regard de nos mères et nos vies se dirigeaient vers la barbarie au son des lourdes bottes et des cris de “Allahu Akbar”. La mort s’est répandue dans tous les coins et la puanteur de sombres nuages ​​a rempli l’air”. Enfin, une sélection de textes littéraires de Fadhila Al Farouq et d’Inam Bioud sont présentés dans les trois langues. Al Farouq est la première écrivaine algérienne, qui a choisi de se battre avec sa plume au péril de sa vie, afin de documenter des cas de viol dans les années 1990. Le poème de Bioud remplit notre cœur de tristesse et nous rappelle les atrocités de la «décennie noire».

    IV.         Conclusion

    La violence au cours des dernières années s’est intensifiée, ou du moins l’intensification des technologies de l’information l’a fait apparaitre comme étant intensifeée. C’est dire que la violence a toujours existé, mais les gens n’entendent pas nécessairement parler de cela et n’ont absolument pas l’habitude de la voir en direct. L’Internet a facilité le mouvement de l’information, par exemple, l’image de la femme égyptienne dans son soutien-gorge qui a été traînée par l’agent de police égyptien à la place Tahrir est devenue virale sur les médias sociaux et est devenu  «l’événement du soutien-gorge bleu». D’autres événements dans la région arabe «le soi-disant Printemps Arabe / révolution» sont caractérisés par des réactions intéressantes sur le rôle des femmes dans la lutte pour la liberté, divers histoires ont émergeé : femmes soumises par le gouvernement égyptien soumis à des «tests de virginité», et d’autres histoires terribles de viol collectif sur la place Tahrir (Le Caire), aux appels d’un prédicateur de la guerre sainte sexuelle  connue sou le nom de ‘djihad al nikah’ (qui offre essentiellement des services sexuels pour conforter les combattants qui se battent contre le régime syrien), en utilisant une terminologie de l’arabe classique pour se référer à la guerre sainte dans ce nouveau contexte. Toutes ces histoires et beaucoup d’autres sont racontées et, dans certains cas, utilisées et abusées pour légitimer les réactions violentes. Elles font également partie de l’histoire, qui est construite à travers la récitation de couches d’histoires complexes entrelacées. Homi Bhabha, déclare que «raconte des histoires qui créent le réseau de l’histoire et change la direction de son écoulement» (cité dans Gana et Härting, 2008: 5). Cette opinion est également partagée par Mona Baker qui soutient que les récits construisent des réalités. C’est cette ligne de pensée qui nous anime, universitaires de la region, , écrivains, réalisateurs de cinéma, etc, en publiant ce numéro spécial visant à démanteler les récits officiels et donner une voix aux récits restés sous silence des années 1990. En faisant cela, nous ne parlons pas des récits de l’autre qui peuvent être géographiquement éloignés, mais nous racontons la violence comme un phénomène mondial, en tant que problème éthique et surtout comme une recherche continue de la vérité. Les mots de Tahar Djaout reflètent l’esprit de ce numéro spécial.

    Le silence, c’est la mort,

    Et toi, si tu parles tu meurs,

    Si tu te tais tu meurs,

    Alors, parle et meurs!

    Tahar Djaout

    Remerciments

    Le projet actuel n’aurait pas vu le jour sans le travail acharné des femmes qui y croyaient et qui croyaient en ses buts. Je remercie particulièrement le professeur R.A. Judy de l’Université de Pittsburgh pour sa collaboration et son soutien dès le début du projet, et pour sa croyance en la nécessité d’un échange entre les chercheurs de l’Occident et du monde Arabe. Il est convaincu que tout changement de discours nécessite les efforts des hommes et des femmes à la fois, puisque le discours féministe ne devrait pas être limité aux femmes et devrait être la responsabilité de la société dans son ensemble.  Ma gratitude va au professeur Zahia Salhi et au professeur Marnia Lazreg, deux figures fondatrices de la recherche sur la violence contre les femmes en Algérie, pour leur soutien et leur foi dans le projet.  Je remercie toutes ces écrivaines algériennes, en particulier Fadhila Al Farouk et Inam Bayoud, qui ont consacré leurs écrits à donner la parole aux femmes algériennes.

    Mes remerciements vont en particulier aux traductrices et traducteurs qui ont consacre du temps et des efforts pour traduire ce projet.  Vers l’Arabe, je cite: Dr. Muman Al Khaldy, Dr. Nermeen Al Nafra, Waleed Al Subhi, Dr. Ghada Arab, Hisham Muhra, and Moura Al Rasheed.   Vers le Français: Dr. Wafa Bejaoui et surtout je remercie Rym Ourtsi pour sa traduction de la plupart des articles.   Je remercie egalement Walid Boughnima pour sa revision des textes en Arabe et Dr. Lynda Nawal Tebanni et Dr. Imen Daoudi pour les textes en Français.

    Je voudrais reconnaître et valoriser la contribution de M. Denis Martinez qui a estimé qu’il était de son devoir, en tant qu’artiste et ami de Tahar Djaout et de nombreux intellectuels assassinés pendant la période sanglante, de partager avec nous et avec les femmes algériennes le sentiment de perte. Il a gracieusement offerts des images de ses peintures pour accompagner la présente cette publication. Le photographe et réalisateur Mohamed Lamin Bisker a pris les photos et contribué à la logistique: je lui dois mes remerciements. Enfin, je voudrais exprimer ma gratitude au Leverhulme Trust pour son soutien au projet, et à l’Université de Birmingham pour avoir accueilli l’atelier «récits et traductions de la violence sexuelle contre les femmes dans la région MENA».

  • Sadia Abbas – Of Things to Come: Review of Amitav Ghosh’s “The Great Derangement”

    Sadia Abbas – Of Things to Come: Review of Amitav Ghosh’s “The Great Derangement”

    by Sadia Abbas

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial collective. It is part of a dossier of texts on Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement. boundary 2 also published a conversation between J. Daniel Elam and Amitav Ghosh in March 2017. 

    Less than ten pages into The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, in a passage that also explains the title of the book, Amitav Ghosh summons the judgment of people from a future in which Kolkata, New York and Bangkok are uninhabitable, and the Sundarbans have been swallowed by rising seas.[1] In this time:

    When readers and museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance?  And when they fail to find them—what should they—what can they—do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight? Quite possibly, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness will come to be known as the Great Derangement (Ghosh 2017: 11).

    Ghosh’s summoning of the future enables a series of dismissals of literature, which are in turn, shakily poised on shifting claims about literary fiction.  The book is divided into three parts—”Stories,” “History,” “Politics”—each of which serves in different ways to address the crisis of climate change and the “great derangement” of our times.  Yet, despite its division into these three parts, the rather protean claims about literature, with art thrown in, frame, drive, and are symptomatic of, many of the confusions of the book.  The target keeps shifting, literature and art changes to mostly literature (art has done better it turns out), to realist literature, to literary fiction, to the gatekeepers of literary fiction.

    If the book launches the attack on the failures of art and literature in our times early, it concludes with a rousing vision of their possible transformation:

    The struggle for action will no doubt be difficult and hard fought, and no matter what it achieves, it is already too late to avoid some serious disruptions of the global climate.  But I would like to believe that out of this struggle will be born a generation that will be able to look upon the world with clearer eyes than those that preceded it; that they will rediscover their kinship with other beings, and that this vision, at once new and ancient, will find expression in a transformed and renewed art and literature (162).

    And yet, so much has been discarded along the way, so many times has the argument stumbled and contradicted itself, that this conclusion is anything but convincing.

    Assuming, for a moment, that the future would care about us, enough of what we have to say and produce would survive, that anything we produce would (or should) be intelligible to those who come long after us, and that summoning such a judgment is not merely an act of historical narcissism, one might be tempted to give counter-examples: for instance, sticking with the mostly Anglophone for now, what would this putative future audience do if the art and literature that survives is (say) a fragment or two of the David Mitchell novels, Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks, Wilson Harris’s Guyana Quartet, Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel, Ceremony and memoir, The Turquoise Ledge, Andreas Gursky’s photographs of landfills, an online curated exhibition such as the Philippines-centered Center for Art and Thought’s Storm: A Typhoon Haiyan Recovery Project,[2] Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, any one of a series of Mahasweta Devi short stories, Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book and Carpentaria, Shahzia Sikander’s reimagining of oil extraction machines as Christmas trees in her animation Parallax, any of the three novels in Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood, Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s X/Self and  China Mieville’s The Scar?  As is probably evident, most of these examples are taken from Australian and American Native, Carribbean and African-American writers, many address the crisis of climate change in the context of the crisis of modernity, race, racialized gender violence, and capitalism ranging back to the sixties.  My point, of course, is that writers and artists have been addressing climate change and its relation to capitalism and modernity with subtlety, care and broad visions of social transformation for a long time.

    But the structure of the book is such that the argument is, in fact, impervious to counter-example—not because the broad generalizations hold true and counter-example would be trivial and miss the point, but because Ghosh alternately spins around and hollows out his claims. He gives numerous names of people who are apparently doing some sort of acceptable or even good (Barbara Kingsolver and Liz Jensen) literary work but that turns out not to be enough. Even as much is let back in in bits and pieces, the general dismissal is never withdrawn, which makes one wonder what the function of the qualifications is.[3] How many does it take to make a trace?[4]

    It is around the concept of literary fiction that most of the contradictions cluster. Ghosh tells us that, when writing The Hungry Tide, he encountered the challenges presented by the “the literary forms and conventions” that gained ascendancy in the very era during which the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was coming to reshape the future of the earth (7).  The limitations there, it turns out, were those of the realist novel. This then leads into the next section, which begins with the failures of literary fiction understood as, at least in part, failures of reception and designation by such publications as “the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times Review of Books [sic]” where, when the subject of climate change comes up, it is usually in reference to non-fiction, where, moreover, the mention of the subject is enough to “relegate” a novel or a short story to the genre of sci-fiction (7)

    This would seem like a great opportunity to question the very distinction between literary and genre fiction, to go, for instance, where Kazuo Ishiguro does—magnificently. Not only has Ishiguro written a powerful and profoundly ironic detective novel, When We Were Orphans, an eerie and haunting science-fiction novel, Never Let me Go, and a wonderful fantasy one, The Buried Giant, he has also refused to get drawn into the debate pitting genre against literary fiction, despite Ursula K. LeGuin’s accusation that he was denigrating fantasy in the service of lit-fict. loftiness, for which Le Guin subsequently apologized (LeGuin, 2015).

    Ishiguro’s responses about both Never Let me Go and The Buried Giant are instructive.  About Never Let Me Go: “I think genre rules should be porous, if not nonexistent. All the debate around Never Let Me Go was, ‘is it sci-fi or is it not?’”

    About Le Guin’s challenge and The Buried Giant:  “I think she [Le Guin] wants me to be the new Margaret Atwood…. If there is some sort of battle line being drawn for and against ogres and pixies appearing in books, I am on the side of ogres and pixies… I had no idea this was going to be such an issue.”  By contrast, Ghosh writes: “It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel” (7).  Invoking the authority of Margaret Atwood, later in the book, he dismisses sci-fi and cli-fi to argue that they do not help as they deal with the future and not the present and the past.

    So, of course, examples such as Butler, Mitchell, Mieville, Wright are of no use here, regardless of the fact that all of these writers provide imaginative and thoughtful literary engagements with precisely what it means to exist in the age of mass consumption and hubristic technological madness, what it means to encounter the non-human and attempt to co-exist, what it means also to confront the brutal cupidity and indifference to the planet that has brought us where we are today. Moreover, it would appear that “traces and portents,” including in—perhaps specially in—disaster stories and apocalyptic narratives, are precisely what speculative fiction/sci-fi/ cli-fi (choose your designation) offer.  Why, in any case, should we assume that, even if the future is interested in the mess we bequeath (assuming that there is a human future to bequeath it to), it will share our literary prejudices?

    Reducing speculative fiction, sci-fi or apocalyptic fiction merely to futures, interplanetary travel and disaster, as if those themselves have no signifying capacity beyond pure plot and event, seems to suggest that allegory, metaphor, symbol, figuration itself have no role to play.  Moreover, it suggests a rather circumscribed notion of reading practices:  Can a book about the future or about the past not be about the present? Really?

    There is occasion here for re-thinking the history of the novel from which the gothic, ghost stories, H.G Wells somehow fall off in the twentieth-century.  In other words, it’s an opportunity to argue that literary fiction—especially as defined by Ghosh and as practiced in the U.S.—is too truncated and accepts a profoundly evacuated genealogy.  Ghosh does this perhaps most successfully in his critique of John Updike’s dismissal of Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt, picking up on an argument he first made in his seminal essay, “Petrofiction,” which is frequently referred to in works in the environmental humanities. Yet again, however, the attempted account of the history of literature gets bogged down in claims about science fiction, as we’ll see a little later.

    There is much at stake in Ghosh’s argument. The transformation of literature he imagines is merely a part of the larger need for the transformation of society as a whole, including the rethinking of modernity, for which many have been calling for a long time.  One iteration of this in the environmental humanities is presented in Ursula Heise’s description of her thesis for Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species:

    however much individual environmentalists may be motivated by a selfless devotion to the well-being of non-human species, however much individual conservation scientists may be driven by an eagerness to expand our knowledge and understanding of the species with whom we co-habit the planet, their engagements with these species gain socio-cultural traction to the extent that they become part of the stories that human communities tell about themselves: stories about their origins, their development, their identity, and their future horizons (Heise 2010: 5).

    Some of the challenges that Ghosh addresses in “Petrofiction” are taken up in The Glass Palace in the representation of the way the teak industry transforms social life and with more power and success in the Sea of Poppies, in which he undertakes the task of critically representing capitalism from below.  The novel presents the stories of a number of people who come together as coolies and indentured workers on a ship bound for Mauritius, in the context of the Opium trade.  It’s a powerful representation of the transformation of social life by the commodity. The poppy is everywhere, threaded into everyday life even as the colonial demand for its cultivation restructures society completely, forcing people into poverty and starvation.  There are many wonderful things about the novel:  the bringing together of the ensemble cast of renegades, fugitives and castaways on the symbol of capitalist modernity: the repurposed slave ship; the careful examination of caste, scenes of the growing friendship in prison between the Chinese-Parsi opium addict Ah Fatt and aristocratic Brahmin, Neel, that perform a way of “being together in brokenness” (Harney and Moten, 19),[5] the wonderful ending that doesn’t end, leaving the fugitives in the middle of the ocean, a powerful narrative correlative of Fred Moten’s and Stephen Harney’s fugitivity.

    In the very different, The Hungry Tide, the novel that perhaps most explicitly resonates with the challenge Ghosh presents (or confronts) in The Great Derangement, Ghosh stages a confrontation between a technocratic secular modernity that has little understanding of the environment and an older knowledge of the earth, in a love triangle involving a marine biologist, Piya, looking for the river dolphin, Orcaella brevirostris, a fisherman, Fokir, and translator and businessman from Delhi, Kanai.  Fokir’s wife, Moyna, who desires an urbanized upward mobility is aligned with Kanai. Fokir is a particularly fine creation—a usually silent, to many: sullen, man, with a profound and largely unappreciated knowledge of the rivers and the region. The biologist needs the fisherman’s knowledge of the river and is able to recognize its value and is thus able to see him in a way that others around him cannot. Some of the most powerful scenes in the novel are on the river or on its banks.  It is an imaginative reconciliation of modern science and indigenous, older knowledge which nonetheless exposes the limitations of managerial technocracy, and my somewhat clinical and synoptic description does not do justice to the novel, which is moving and, in its engagement with nature, quite powerful, precisely because it risks sentimentality but manages not to be maudlin.

    So why would a writer who can do this, who can manifest such a sympathetic imagination be so needlessly dismissive?

    Perhaps the answer lies in two incidents:

    In 1978 Ghosh survived a tornado.  As he describes it: “the tornado’s eye had passed directly over me. It seemed to me that there was something eerily apt about that metaphor: what had happened at that moment was strangely like a species of visual contact, of beholding and being beheld.”  Since then, he tells us, he has returned repeatedly to the cuttings he made from newspapers at the time with the hope of putting those events into a novel but has failed at every attempt—this leads into a long bit on notions of probability and improbability and how they affect the parameters of novelistic form.

    In a section discussing the vulnerability of cities like Mumbai to climate change, he recalls approaching his mother after reading a World Bank report that made him realize that the house in which his mother and sister live borders one of the neighbourhoods most at risk.  When he suggests that she move, however, she looks at him as if he had “lost [his] mind” (53).  This encounter makes him realize that individuals can’t be relied on to act rationally on this; there will have be collective, institutional and statist responses to the reorganization of living required by climate change.

    Both incidences are instances of Ghosh’s powerlessness: as a writer unable to represent a moment of helplessness and terror in which he thinks he wasn’t invisible to the power that could have killed him and as a son unable to get his mother to let him protect her.  Neither instance is trivial, but when they are held up to the terms of his own argument they become part of its contradictions, and perhaps explain the rhetorical decibel level of the book.

    The underlying suggestion in the book, that writers, critics, literature itself and to a lesser extent artists have failed Ghosh because they are unable to account for, or give voice to, his encounter with the tornado or because they cannot provide the tools to get his mother to move, makes his own concerns and experiences central in a way that would seem to align him with the high bourgeois and Romantic tradition that is very much an aspect of the era of carbon accumulation and extraction.  It is a constitutive part of a moment that gives us the rise of the novel and the emergence of the modern bourgeois subject, for whom the world must turn, that Ghosh seems to want to surpass.

    Yet, that Ghosh has a particular fondness for Romanticism is evident from the way that Rilke figures in The Hungry Tide.  Moreover, in section 16 of Part one of The Great Derangement, Ghosh argues that the partitioning of “Nature and Culture” was resisted in “England, Europe and North America under the banners of romanticism, pastoralism, transcendentalism, and so on. Poets were always in the forefront of the resistance, in a line that extends from Holderlin and Rilke to such present day figures as Gary Snyder and W.S. Merwin” (Ghosh 2017: 69). This is also the section in which Ghosh begins by seeming to protest the hiving of science fiction from “serious” literature and ends by confirming the distinction while invoking Atwood. How Ghosh can reconcile his critique of Updike’s demand for “individual Moral adventure” in Munif’s work, and his own synoptic (and in academic circles standard and somewhat routinized) critique of the rise of Protestantism and of Protestant individualism and moralism with such an account of transcendentalism and Romanticism is a question for a longer essay.

    In the preceding segment (section 15), Ghosh discusses the famous vacation that Byron, John Polidori and the Shelleys took together in 1816.  Some of the writing that came out of it is mentioned: Frankenstein, Byron’s “Darkness,” Polidori’s The Vampyre.  “Darkness” is cited as an example of “climate change despair,” Frankenstein as a piece of fiction that had not yet been hived of from “serious” literature” but soon would.[6] It might be useful to think about a poem that Ghosh doesn’t mention but which also came out of that vacation: Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni.” The poem provides a vivid meditation on the difficulty of an encounter with the non-human, especially the non-human as encountered as sheer, raw, indifferent power and nature.  At the same time the concluding (and baffling) three lines seem to articulate the human need to repudiate that which will not make itself available, that will not, that is, make itself intelligible:

    And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, 

    If to the human mind’s imaginings 

    Silence and solitude were vacancy?

    In this era of what we now sometimes call the Anthropocene, what if what’s truly unthinkable is that, even as we have the power to affect the earth’s destiny, wrapped in its raw power, the non-human (the cyclone, the tornado, the mountain, Shelley’s “Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane”) whether thunderous or silent, does not see us?  What if any engagement with the non-human will have to take more seriously its sheer recalcitrance, its unavailability and opacity?

    At the same time, one might remember the challenge that Edward Kamau Brathwaite poses to Shelley in his own poem “Mont Blanc,” in X/Self, a line (“it is the first atomic bomb”) from which, he writes in the notes, is: “the pivot of the Euro-imperialist/Christine [sic] mercantilist aspect of the book” (Brathwaite 1987, 118).  Of course, in some ways what Brathwaite says of that line applies to the poem as whole, which thus works in powerful counterpoint to Shelley’s “Mont Blanc.” I quote here the opening:

    Rome burns

    and our slavery begins

    in the alps

    oven of europe

    glacier of god…” (31)

    The poem goes on to become a powerful meditation on the relationship between Europe and Africa, empire, apocalypse, European empire as apocalypse, climate change and nature.  If we are to speak in broad historical terms then, even in the Romantic literary tradition, the non-human and the inhuman—the inhumanity of Europe in the name of the human—are not always easily separated. And thus, as Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin have written in the context of a reading of X/Self, Carpentaria, and Curdella Forbes’s Ghosts, in a passage in which they also addresses Dipesh Chakrabarty’s two essays on climate change from which much of Ghosh’s argument seems derived and in response to which he appears to develop some of his arguments about the non-human:

    One scenario…involves a rethinking of the human; another requires thinking beyond it. For Dipesh Chakrabarty, who is primarily concerned with the first, global warming poses a new challenge to postcolonial criticism in so far as it enjoins postcolonial critics to think, not just of the continuing history of inequality on the planet, but of  ‘the survival of the species’ and the future of the planet itself (2012:15). At another level, however, global warming requires postcolonial critics to do just the opposite: to return to basic questions of inequality, including those linked to histories of slavery and colonialism, but to rethink these in ecological terms. (Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 90).

    It’s probably clear by now that I don’t disagree with Ghosh that our imaginative structures and modes of identification, dominant forms of urban life, city planning, the culture of extraction and consumption, notions of the sovereign subject and habits of bourgeois moralism need to be rethought.  Moreover, although The Great Derangement doesn’t much engage justifiable questions—about why the era should be called the Anthropocene and not for, instance the Capitolocene, or why the indigenous in numerous contexts whose habits of existence were not historical contributors to climate change should be yanked into the Anthropos designated by the Anthropocene—it does raise some important questions, not least for postcolonial studies: for instance did colonialism slow climate change by arresting development in places like India? What would be the consequences for re-imagining postcolonial states and political structures with that in mind? Equally significant is his argument for engaging and understanding the importance of Asia to any account of climate change, both for reasons of geography and of the size of the continental population.[7]

    It is not clear to me, however, that framing the issue around the question of literature as reduced to literary fiction, even as a symptom of the undeniable imaginative social failures of modern capitalism and neoliberalism gets us there—especially as so many artists and writers and critics are trying, however inadequately, to confront the looming disaster. I say “inadequately” not because of the limitations of the work but because of the magnitude of the task and the power of the resistance to change. Perhaps the bourgeois realist novel is indeed part of the problem, especially as product of the social transformations attendant on the rise of capitalism, but then perhaps Ghosh’s sticking to an elaboration of why that is the case and of what its failures are emblematic might have helped. Misreading symptoms doesn’t often enable recovery.

    The transformations of community, society and imagination needed may take many expressions, novels—realist, sci-fi, cli-fi, magical-realist, young adult—films, paintings, animations, short stories, fables, dastaans, pamphlets, tracts, synopsizing popularizations like The Great Derangement, khutbas, Papal Encyclicals… It may benefit from the talent of the griot and the skill of the journalist. And yet “revolution will come in a form we cannot yet imagine” (Harney and Moten, 11).  If the argument is indeed about forms of expression and styles of thinking it needs to be made with more thought and care.

    As I hope is evident from my far too short readings above, I have considerable admiration and respect for what Ghosh pulls off in Sea of Poppies and The Hungry Tide, which is what makes this book’s disappointments so very painful. At a moment in history when we urgently need to think collectively, when we need solidarity and a reconfigured sociality which, indeed, as Ghosh—like so many others—recognizes, requires (among other things) a planetary transformation of the relationship with the non-human, the dismissal of so many who are engaging in precisely the imaginative work required, simply in the service of an inflated rhetorical gesture, is more than merely baffling.  To conclude, then, with the language of portents: The posture of last man standing (or, for that matter, first man railing) is no propitious augury of a transformed imagination and society to come.

    References

    Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1987. X/Self. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry, 33 (Winter).

    Ghosh, Amitav. 2017. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    __________ 2008. Sea of Poppies.  New York: Picador.

    __________ 2005. ‘Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel,” Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

    __________ 2005. The Hungry Tide. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

    __________ 2002. The Glass Palace. New York: Random House.

    Heise, Ursula. 2016. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Huggan, Graham and Tiffin, Helen. 2nd ed. 2015.  Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. New York: Routledge.

    Harney Stefano, and Moten, Fred.  2013.  The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.  New York: Minor Compositions.

    Ishiguro, Kazuo.  “Writers’ indignation: Kazuo Ishiguro rejects claims of genre snobbery” The Guardian, March 8, 2015

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/08/kazuo-ishiguro-rebuffs-genre-snobbery, accessed August 16, 2017

    Le Guin, Ursula K. 2015. a “96. Addendum to “Are they going to say this is fantasy?”” Ursula K. LeGuin’s blog, 2015.  http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Blog2015.html, accessed Aug. 10 2017

    __________b. “Are they going to say this is fantasy?” Ursula K. LeGuin’s blog, 2015.

    http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Blog2015.html, accessed Aug. 10 2017.

    Notes

    [1] My thanks to R.A. Judy, Biju Matthew, Christian Parenti and Sarita See for conversation about this review.

    [2] http://centerforartandthought.org/work/project/storm-typhoon-haiyan-recovery-project?page=3

    [3] Would it matter, for instance, that there are numerous literary critics doing powerful and thoughtful work in the growing field of environmental humanities, and at the intersections of environmental humanities and Native Studies, Black studies and Postcolonial Studies?

    [4] Obviously these examples are not even close to being comprehensive and are far too Anglophone–this is quite simply an effect of the limitations of my knowledge.

    [5] The phrase is actually from Jack Halberstam’s wonderful introduction to The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.

    [6] Although, I must say I know of no literature departments in which Frankenstein would not be thought of as serious literature, partitioning or not.  Moreover, having been mentored early in my current job by my dear, and now retired, colleague, Bruce Franklin, it’s a little hard to take these claims seriously.

    [7] For some of the discussions about these issues in postcolonial studies, see (along with Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” and the Volume of New Literary History, The State of Postcolonial Studies. 43:2, 2012, which contains responses to Chakrabarty’s essay in the previous volume, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change”) Ashley Dawson, Extinction: A Radical History. New York: OR Books, 2017. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, New York, Routledge, 2015. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.  Jennifer Wenzel et al. Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.  Of course, this list is far from exhaustive.

  • Zachary Loeb – Shackles of Digital Freedom (Review of Qiu, Goodbye iSlave)

    Zachary Loeb – Shackles of Digital Freedom (Review of Qiu, Goodbye iSlave)

    a review of Jack Linchuan Qiu, Goodbye iSlave: a Manifesto for Digital Abolition (Illinois, 2016)

    by Zachary Loeb

    ~

    With bright pink hair and a rainbow horn, the disembodied head of a unicorn bobs back and forth to the opening beats of Big Boi’s “All Night.” Moments later, a pile of poop appears and mouths the song’s opening words, and various animated animal heads appear nodding along in sequence. Soon the unicorn returns, lip-synching the song, and it is quickly joined by a woman whose movements, facial expressions, and exaggerated enunciations sync with those of the unicorn. As a pig, a robot, a chicken, and a cat appear to sing in turn it becomes clear that the singing emojis are actually mimicking the woman – the cat blinks when she blinks, it raises its brow when she does. The ad ends by encouraging users to “Animoji” themselves, something which is evidently doable with Apple’s iPhone X. It is a silly ad, with a catchy song, and unsurprisingly it tells the viewer nothing about where, how, or by whom the iPhone X was made. The ad may playfully feature the ever-popular “pile of poop” emoji, but the ad is not intended to make potential purchasers feel like excrement.

    And yet there is much more to the iPhone X’s history than the words on the device’s back “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” In Goodbye iSlave: a Manifesto for Digital Abolition, Jack Linchuan Qiu removes the phone’s shiny case to explore what “assembled in China” really means. As Qiu demonstrates in discomforting detail this is a story that involves exploitative labor practices, enforced overtime, abusive managers, insufficient living quarters, and wage theft, in a system that he argues is similar to slavery.

    illustration
    First published by Greenpeace Switzerland

    Launched by activists in 2010, the “iSlave” campaign aimed to raise awareness about the labor conditions that had led to a wave of suicides amongst Foxconn workers; those performing the labor summed up neatly as “assembled in China.” Seizing upon the campaign’s key term, Qiu aims to expand it “figuratively and literally” to demonstrate that “iSlavery” is “a planetary system of domination, exploitation, and alienation…epitomized by the material and immaterial structures of capital accumulation” (9). This in turn underscores the “world system of gadgets” that Qiu refers to as “Appconn” (13); a system that encompasses those who “designed” the devices, those who “assembled” them, as well as those who use them. In engaging with the terminology of slavery, Qiu is consciously laying out a provocative argument, but it is a provocation that acknowledges that as smartphones have become commonplace many consumers have become inured to the injustices that allow them to “animoji” themselves. Indeed, it is a reminder that, “Technology does not guarantee progress. It is, instead, often abused to cause regress” (8).

    Surveying its history, Qiu notes that slavery has appeared in a variety of forms in many regions throughout history. Though he emphasizes that even today slavery “persists in its classic forms” (21), his focus remains on theoretically expanding the term. Qiu draws upon the League of Nation’s “1926 Slavery Convention” which still acts as the foundation for much contemporary legal thinking on slavery, including the 2012 Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery (which Qiu includes in his book as an appendix). These legal guidelines expand the definition of what constitutes slavery to include “institutions and practices similar to slavery” (42). The key element for this updated definition is an understanding that it is no longer legal for a person to be “formally and legally ‘owned’ in any jurisdiction” and thus the concept of slavery requires rethinking (45). In considering which elements from the history of slavery are particularly relevant for the story of “iSlavery,” Qiu emphasizes: how the slave trade made use of advanced technologies of its time (guns, magnetic compasses, slave ships); how the slave trade was linked to creating and satisfying consumer desires (sugar); and how the narrative of resistance and revolt is a key aspect of the history of slavery. For Qiu,  “iSlavery” is manifested in two forms: “manufacturing iSlaves” and “manufactured iSlaves.”

    In the process of creating high-tech gadgets there are many types of “manufacturing iSlaves,” in conditions similar to slavery “in its classic forms” including “Congolese mine workers” and “Indonesian child labor,” but Qiu focuses primarily on those working for Foxconn in China. Drawing upon news reports, NGO findings, interviews with former workers, underground publications produced by factor workers, and from his experiences visiting these assembly plants, Qiu investigates many ways in which “institutions and practices similar to slavery” shape the lives of Foxconn workers. Insufficient living conditions, low wages that are often not even paid, forced overtime, “student interns” being used as an even cheaper labor force, violently abusive security guards, the arrangement of life so as to maximize disorientation and alienation – these represent some of the common experiences of Foxconn workers. Foxconn found itself uncomfortably in the news in 2010 due to a string of worker suicides, and Qiu sympathetically portrays the conditions that gave rise to such acts, particularly in his interview with Tian Yu who survived her suicide attempt.

    As Qiu makes clear, Foxconn workers often have great difficulty leaving the factories, but what exits these factories at a considerable rate are mountains of gadgets that go on to be eagerly purchased and used by the “manufactured iSlaves.” The transition to the “manufactured iSlave” entails “a conceptual leap” (91) that moves away from the “practices similar to slavery” that define the “manufacturing iSlave” to instead signify “those who are constantly attached to their gadgets” (91). Here the compulsion takes on the form of a vicious consumerism that has resulted in an “addiction” to these gadgets, and a sense in which these gadgets have come to govern the lives of their users. Drawing upon the work of Judy Wajcman, Qiu notes that “manufactured iSlaves” (Qiu’s term) live under the aegis of “iTime” (Wajcman’s term), a world of “consumerist enslavement” into which they’ve been drawn by “Net Slaves” (Steve Baldwin and Bill Lessard’s term of “accusation and ridicule” for those whose jobs fit under the heading “Designed in California”). While some companies have made fortunes off the material labor of “manufacturing iSlaves,” Qiu emphasizes that many companies that have made their fortunes off the immaterial labor of legions of “manufactured iSlaves” dutifully clicking “like,” uploading photos, and hitting “tweet” all without any expectation that they will be paid for their labor. Indeed, in Qiu’s analysis, what keeps many “manufactured iSlaves” unaware of their shackles is that they don’t see what they are doing on their devices as labor.

    In his description of the history of slavery, Qiu emphasizes resistance, both in terms of acts of rebellion by enslaved peoples, and the broader abolition movement. This informs Qiu’s commentary on pushing back against the system of Appconn. While smartphones may be cast as the symbol of the exploitation of Foxconn workers, Qiu also notes that these devices allow for acts of resistance by these same workers “whose voices are increasingly heard online” (133). Foxconn factories may take great pains to remain closed off from prying eyes, but workers armed with smartphones are “breaching the lines of information lockdown” (148). Campaigns by national and international NGOs can also be important in raising awareness of the plight of Foxconn workers, after all the term “iSlave” was originally coined as part of such a campaign. In bringing awareness of the “manufacturing iSlave” to the “manufactured iSlave” Qiu points to “culture jamming” responses such as the “Phone Story” game which allows people to “play” through their phones vainglorious tale (ironically the game was banned from Apple’s app store). Qiu also points to the attempt to create ethical gadgets, such as the Fairphone which aims to responsibly source its minerals, pay those who assemble their phones a living wage, and push back against the drive of planned obsolescence. As Qiu makes clear, there are many working to fight against the oppression built into Appconn.

    “For too long,” Qiu notes, “the underbellies of the digital industries have been obscured and tucked away; too often, new media is assumed to represent modernity, and modernity assumed to represent freedom” (172). Qiu highlights the coercion and misery that are lurking below the surface of every silly cat picture uploaded on Instagram, and he questions whether the person doing the picture taking and uploading is also being exploited. A tough and confrontational book, Goodbye iSlave nevertheless maintains hope for meaningful resistance.

    Anyone who has used a smartphone, tablet, laptop computer, e-reader, video game console, or smart speaker would do well to read Goodbye iSlave. In tight effective prose, Qiu presents a gripping portrait of the lives of Foxconn workers and this description is made more confrontational by the uncompromising language Qiu deploys. And though Qiu begins his book by noting that “the outlook of manufacturing and manufactured iSlaves is rather bleak” (18), his focus on resistance gives his book the feeling of an activist manifesto as opposed to the bleak tonality of a woebegone dirge. By engaging with the exploitation of material labor and immaterial labor, Qiu is, furthermore, able to uncomfortably remind his readers not only that their digital freedom comes at a human cost, but that digital freedom may itself be a sort of shackle.

    In the book’s concluding chapter, Qiu notes that he is “fully aware that slavery is a very severe critique” (172), and this represents one of the greatest challenges the book poses. Namely: what to make of Qiu’s use of the term slavery? As Qiu demonstrates, it is not a term that he arrived at simply for shock value, nevertheless, “slavery” is itself a complicated concept. Slavery carries a history of horrors that make one hesitant to deploy it in a simplistic fashion even as it remains a basic term of international law. By couching his discussion of “iSlavery” both in terms of history and contemporary legal thinking, Qiu demonstrates a breadth of sensitivity and understanding regarding its nuances. And given the focus of current laws on “institutions and practices similar to slavery” (42) it is hard to dispute that this is a fair description of many of the conditions to which Foxconn workers are subjected – even as Qiu’s comments on coltan miners demonstrates other forms of slavery that lurk behind the shining screens of high-tech society.

    Nevertheless, there is frequently something about the use of the term “iSlavery” that seems to diminish the heft of Qiu’s argument. As the term often serves as a stumbling block that pulls a reader away from Qiu’s account; particularly when he tries to make the comparisons too direct such as juxtaposing Foxconn’s (admittedly wretched) dormitories to conditions on slave ships crossing the Atlantic. It’s difficult not to find the comparison hyperbolic. Similarly, Qiu notes that ethnic and regional divisions are often found within Foxconn factories; but these do not truly seem comparable to the racist views that undergirded (and was used to justify) the Atlantic slave trade. Unfortunately, this is a problem that Qiu sets for himself: had he only used “slave” in a theoretical sense it would have opened him to charges of historical insensitivity, but by engaging with the history of slavery many of Qiu’s comparisons seem to miss the mark – and this is exacerbated by the fact that he repeatedly refers to ongoing conditions of “classic” slavery involved in the making of gadgets (such as coltan mining). Qiu provides an important and compelling window into the current legal framing of slavery, and yet, something about the “iSlave” prevents it from fitting into the history of slavery. It is, unfortunately, too easy to imagine someone countering Qiu’s arguments by saying “but this isn’t really slavery” to which the retort of “current law defines slavery as…” will be unlikely to convince.

    The matter of “slavery” only gets thornier as Qiu shifts his attention from “manufacturing iSlaves” to “manufactured iSlaves.” In recent years there has been a wealth of writing in the academic and popular sphere that critically asks what our gadgets are doing to us, such as Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together and Judy Wacjman’s Pressed for Time (which Qiu cites). And the fear that technology turns people into “cogs” is hardly new: in his 1956 book The Sane Society, Erich Fromm warned “the danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots” (Fromm, 352). Fromm’s anxiety is what one more commonly encounters in discussions about what gadgets turn their users into, but these “robots” are not identical with “slaves.” When Qiu discusses “manufactured iSlaves” he notes that it represents a “conceptual leap,” but by continuing to use the term “slave” this “conceptual leap” unfortunately hampers his broader points about Foxconn workers. The danger is that a sort of false equivalency risks being created in which smartphone users shrug off their complicity in the exploitation of assembly workers by saying, “hey, I’m exploited too.”

    Some of this challenge may ultimately simply be about word choice. The very term “iSlave,” despite its activist origins, seems somewhat silly through its linkage to all things to which a lowercase “i” has been affixed. Furthermore, the use of the “i” risks placing all of the focus on Apple. True, Apple products are manufactured in the exploitative Foxconn factories, and Qiu may be on to something in referring to the “Apple cult,” but as Qiu himself notes Foxconn manufactures products for a variety of companies. Just because a device isn’t an “i” gadget, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t manufactured by an “iSlave.” And while Appconn is a nice shorthand for the world that is built upon the backs of both kinds of “iSlaves” it risks being just another opaque neologism for computer dominated society that is undercut by the need for it to be defined.

    Given the grim focus of Qiu’s book, it is understandable why he should choose to emphasize rebellion and resistance, and these do allow readers to put down the book feeling energized. Yet some of these modes of resistance seem to risk more entanglement than escape. There is a risk that the argument that Foxconn workers can use smartphones to organize simply fits neatly back into the narrative that there is something “inherently liberating” about these devices. The “Phone Story” game may be a good teaching tool, but it seems to make a similar claim on the democratizing potential of the Internet. And while the Fairphone represents, perhaps, one of the more significant ways to get away from subsidizing Appconn it risks being just an alternative for concerned consumers not a legally mandated industry standard. At risk of an unfair comparison, a Fairphone seems like the technological equivalent of free range eggs purchased at the farmer’s market – it may genuinely be ethically preferable, but it risks reducing a major problem (iSlavery) into yet another site for consumerism (just buy the right phone). In fairness, these are the challenges inherent in critiquing the dominant order; as Theodor Adorno once put it “we live on the culture we criticize” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 105). It might be tempting to wish that Qiu had written an Appconn version of Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, but Qiu seems to recognize that simply telling people to turn it all off is probably just as efficacious as telling them not to do anything at all. After all, Mander’s “four arguments” may have convinced a few people – but not society as a whole. So, what then does “digital abolition” really mean?

    In describing Goodbye iSlave, Qiu notes that it is “nothing more than an invitation—for everyone to reflect on the enslaving tendencies of Appconn and the world system of gadgets” it is an opportunity for people to reflect on the ways in which “so many myths of liberation have been bundled with technological buzzwords, and they are often taken for granted” (173). It is a challenging book and an important one, and insofar as it forces readers to wrestle with Qiu’s choice of terminology it succeeds by making them seriously confront the regimes of material and immaterial labor that structure their lives. While the use of the term “slavery” may at times hamper Qiu’s larger argument, this unflinching look at the labor behind today’s gadgets should not be overlooked.

    Goodbye iSlave frames itself as “a manifesto for digital abolition,” but what it makes clear is that this struggle ultimately isn’t about “i” but about “us.”

    _____

    Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, and is currently working towards a PhD in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ideologies that develop in response to technological change, and the ways in which technology factors into ethical philosophy – particularly in regards of the way in which Jewish philosophers have written about ethics and technology. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog Librarian Shipwreck, and is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

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    _____

    Works Cited

    • Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max. 2011. Towards a New Manifesto. London: Verso Books.
    • Fromm, Erich. 2002. The Sane Society. London: Routledge.
  • b2o: an online journal

    b2o: an online journal

    b2o: an online journal is an online-only, open access, peer-reviewed journal published by the boundary 2 editorial collective, and edited by a standalone Editorial Board.

    b2o: an online journal is published 2 or 3 times each year, with general issues (often featuring pieces on topics of a particularly immediate nature) as well as special topic issues, many of which focus on topics of particular relevance to the online context, and/or feature pieces that take advantage of the affordances of networked digital media. Although collected into 2 or 3 numbered and dated volumes each year, pieces in b2o: an online journal are, when feasible, made available online ahead of their formal publication date.

    b2o: an online journal accepts unsolicited submissions.

    b2o: an online journal Editorial Board includes:

    • Arne De Boever and Christian Thorne, editors
    • David Golumbia (†)
    • Jonathan Arac
    • Charles Bernstein
    • Leah Feldman
    • Stathis Gourgouris
    • R. A. Judy
    • Bruce Robbins
    • Hortense Spillers
    • Henry Veggian
    • Paul Bové, ex officio

    ISSN: 2639-7250 

    Copyright on the contents of b2o: an online journal is held by the boundary 2 Editorial Collective and the authors; please contact us for permissions. 

  • The Social Construction of Acceleration

    The Social Construction of Acceleration

    Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time (Chicago, 2014)a review of Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (Chicago, 2014)
    by Zachary Loeb

    ~

    Patience seems anachronistic in an age of high speed downloads, same day deliveries, and on-demand assistants who can be summoned by tapping a button. Though some waiting may still occur the amount of time spent in anticipation seems to be constantly diminishing, and every day a new bevy of upgrades and devices promise that tomorrow things will be even faster. Such speed is comforting for those who feel that they do not have a moment to waste. Patience becomes a luxury for which we do not have time, even as the technologies that claimed they would free us wind up weighing us down.

    Yet it is far too simplistic to heap the blame for this situation on technology, as such. True, contemporary technologies may be prominent characters in the drama in which we are embroiled, but as Judy Wajcman argues in her book Pressed for Time, we should not approach technology as though it exists separately from the social, economic, and political factors that shape contemporary society. Indeed, to understand technology today it is necessary to recognize that “temporal demands are not inherent to technology. They are built into our devices by all-too-human schemes and desires” (3). In Wajcman’s view, technology is not the true culprit, nor is it an out-of-control menace. It is instead a convenient distraction from the real forces that make it seem as though there is never enough time.

    Wajcman sets a course that refuses to uncritically celebrate technology, whilst simultaneously disavowing the damning of modern machines. She prefers to draw upon “a social shaping approach to technology” (4) which emphasizes that the shape technology takes in a society is influenced by many factors. If current technologies leave us feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and unsatisfied it is to our society we must look for causes and solutions – not to the machine.

    The vast array of Internet-connected devices give rise to a sense that everything is happening faster, that things are accelerating, and that compared to previous epochs things are changing faster. This is the kind of seemingly uncontroversial belief that Wajcman seeks to counter. While there is a present predilection for speed, the ideas of speed and acceleration remain murky, which may not be purely accidental when one considers “the extent to which the agenda for discussing the future of technology is set by the promoters of new technological products” (14). Rapid technological and societal shifts may herald the emergence of a “acceleration society” wherein speed increases even as individuals experience a decrease of available time. Though some would describe today’s world (at least in affluent nations) as being a synecdoche of the “acceleration society,” it would be a mistake to believe this to be a wholly new invention.

    Nevertheless the instantaneous potential of information technologies may seem to signal a break with the past – as the sort of “timeless time” which “emerged in financial markets…is spreading to every realm” (19). Some may revel in this speed even as others put out somber calls for a slow-down, but either approach risks being reductionist. Wajcman pushes back against the technological determinism lurking in the thoughts of those who revel and those who rebel, noting “that all technologies are inherently social in that they are designed, produced, used and governed by people” (27).

    Both today and yesterday “we live our lives surrounded by things, but we tend to think about only some of them as being technologies” (29). The impacts of given technologies depend upon the ways in which they are actually used, and Wajcman emphasizes that people often have a great deal of freedom in altering “the meanings and deployment of technologies” (33).

    Over time certain technologies recede into the background, but the history of technology is of a litany of devices that made profound impacts in determining experiences of time and speed. After all, the clock is itself a piece of technology, and thus we assess our very lack of time by looking to a device designed to measure its passage. The measurement of time was a technique used to standardize – and often exploit – labor, and the ability to carefully keep track of time gave rise to an ideology in which time came to be interchangeable with money. As a result speed came to be associated with profit even as slowness became associated with sloth. The speed of change became tied up in notions of improvement and progress, and thus “the speed of change becomes a self-evident good” (44). The speed promised by inventions are therefore seen as part of the march of progress, though a certain irony emerges as widespread speed leads to new forms of slowness – the mass diffusion of cars leading to traffic jams, And what was fast yesterday is often deemed slow today. As Wajcman shows, the experience of time compression that occurs tied to “our valorization of a busy lifestyle, as well as our profound ambivalence toward it” (58), has roots that go far back.

    Time takes on an odd quality – to have it is a luxury, even as constant busyness becomes a sign of status. A certain dissonance emerges wherein individuals feel that they have less time even as studies show that people are not necessarily working more hours. For Wajcman much of the explanation is related to “real increases in the combined work commitments of family members as it is about changes in the working time of individuals” with such “time poverty” being experienced particularly acutely “among working mothers, who juggle work, family, and leisure” (66). To understand time pressure it is essential to consider the degree to which people are free to use their time as they see fit.

    Societal pressures on the time of men and women differ, and though the hours spent doing paid labor may not have shifted dramatically, the hours parents (particularly mothers) spend performing unpaid labor remains high. Furthermore, “despite dramatic improvements in domestic technology, the amount of time spent on household tasks has not actually shown any corresponding dramatic decline” (68). Though household responsibilities can be shared equitably between partners, much of the onus still falls on women. As a busy event-filled life becomes a marker of status for adults so too may they attempt to bestow such busyness on the whole family, but busy parents needing to chaperone and supervise busy children only creates a further crunch on time. As Wajcman notes “perhaps we should be giving as much attention to the intensification of parenting as to the intensification of work” (82).

    Yet the story of domestic, unpaid and unrecognized, labor is a particularly strong example of a space wherein the promises of time-saving technological fixes have fallen short. Instead, “devices allegedly designed to save labor time fail to do so, and in some cases actually increase the time needed for the task” (111). The variety of technologies marketed for the household are often advertised as time savers, yet altering household work is not the same as eliminating it – even as certain tasks continually demand a significant investment of real time.

    Many of the technologies that have become mainstays of modern households – such as the microwave – were not originally marketed as such, and thus the household represents an important example of the way in which technologies “are both socially constructed and society shaping” (122). Of further significance is the way in which changing labor relations have also lead to shifts in the sphere of domestic work, wherein those who can afford it are able to buy themselves time through purchasing food from restaurants or by employing others for tasks such as child care and cleaning. Though the image of “the home of the future,” courtesy of the Internet of Things, may promise an automated abode, Wajcman highlights that those making and selling such technologies replicate society’s dominant blind spot for the true tasks of domestic labor. Indeed, the Internet of Things tends to “celebrate technology and its transformative power at the expense of home as a lived practice.” (130) Thus, domestic technologies present an important example of the way in which those designing and marketing technologies instill their own biases into the devices they build.

    Beyond the household, information communications technologies (ICTs) allow people to carry their office in their pocket as e-mails and messages ping them long after the official work day has ended. However, the idea “of the technologically tethered worker with no control over their own time…fails to convey the complex entanglement of contemporary work practices, working time, and the materiality of technical artifacts” (88). Thus, the problem is not that an individual can receive e-mail when they are off the clock, the problem is the employer’s expectation that this worker should be responding to work related e-mails while off the clock – the issue is not technological, it is societal. Furthermore, Wajcman argues, communications technologies permit workers to better judge whether or not something is particularly time sensitive. Though technology has often been used by employers to control employees, approaching communications technologies from an STS position “casts doubt on the determinist view that ICTs, per se, are driving the intensification of work” (107). Indeed some workers may turn to such devices to help manage this intensification.

    Technologies offer many more potentialities than those that are presented in advertisements. Though the ubiquity of communications devices may “mean that more and more of our social relationships are machine-mediated” (138), the focus should be as much on the word “social” as on the word “machine.” Much has been written about the way that individuals use modern technologies and the ways in which they can give rise to families wherein parents and children alike are permanently staring at a screen, but Wajcman argues that these technologies should “be regarded as another node in the flows of affect that create and bind intimacy” (150). It is not that these devices are truly stealing people’s time, but that they are changing the ways in which people spend the time they have – allowing harried individuals to create new forms of being together which “needs to be understood as adding a dimension to temporal experience” (158) which blurs boundaries between work and leisure.

    The notion that the pace of life has been accelerated by technological change is a belief that often goes unchallenged; however, Wajcman emphasizes that “major shifts in the nature of work, the composition of families, ideas about parenting, and patterns of consumption have all contributed to our sense that the world is moving faster than hitherto” (164). The experience of acceleration can be intoxicating, and the belief in a culture of improvement wrought by technological change may be a rare glimmer of positivity amidst gloomy news reports. However, “rapid technological change can actually be conservative, maintaining or solidifying existing social arrangements” (180). At moments when so much emphasis is placed upon the speed of technologically sired change the first step may not be to slow-down but to insist that people consider the ways in which these machines have been socially constructed, how they have shaped society – and if we fear that we are speeding towards a catastrophe than it becomes necessary to consider how they can be socially constructed to avoid such a collision.

    * * *

    It is common, amongst current books assessing the societal impacts of technology, for authors to present themselves as critical while simultaneously wanting to hold to an unshakable faith in technology. This often leaves such texts in an odd position: they want to advance a radical critique but their argument remains loyal to a conservative ideology. With Pressed for Time, Judy Wajcman, has demonstrated how to successfully achieve the balance between technological optimism and pessimism. It is a great feat, and Pressed for Time executes this task skillfully. When Wajcman writes, towards the end of the book, that she wants “to embrace the emancipatory potential of technoscience to create new meanings and new worlds while at the same time being its chief critic” (164) she is not writing of a goal but is affirming what she has achieved with Pressed for Time (a similar success can be attributed to Wajcman’s earlier books TechnoFeminism (Polity, 2004) and the essential Feminism Confronts Technology (Penn State, 1991).

    By holding to the framework of the social shaping of technology, Pressed for Time provides an investigation of time and speed that is grounded in a nuanced understanding of technology. It would have been easy for Wajcman to focus strictly on contemporary ICTs, but what her argument makes clear is that to do so would have been to ignore the facts that make contemporary technology understandable. A great success of Pressed for Time is the way in which Wajcman shows that the current sensation of being pressed for time is not a modern invention. Instead, the emphasis on speed as being a hallmark of progress and improvement is a belief that has been at work for decades. Wajcman avoids the stumbling block of technological determinism and carefully points out that falling for such beliefs leads to critiques being directed incorrectly. Written in a thoroughly engaging style, Pressed for Time is an academic book that can serve as an excellent introduction to the terminology and style of STS scholarship.

    Throughout Pressed for Time, Wajcman repeatedly notes the ways in which the meanings of technologies transcend what a device may have been narrowly intended to do. For Wajcman people’s agency is paramount as people have the ability to construct meaning for technology even as such devices wind up shaping society. Yet an area in which one could push back against Wajcman’s views would be to ask if communications technologies have shaped society to such an extent that it is becoming increasingly difficult to construct new meanings for them. Perhaps the “slow movement,” which Wajcman describes as unrealistic for “we cannot in fact choose between fast and slow, technology and nature” (176), is best perceived as a manifestation of the sense that much of technology’s “emancipatory potential” has gone awry – that some technologies offer little in the way of liberating potential. After all, the constantly connected individual may always feel rushed – but they may also feel as though they are under constant surveillance, that their every online move is carefully tracked, and that through the rise of wearable technology and the Internet of Things that all of their actions will soon be easily tracked. Wajcman makes an excellent and important point by noting that humans have always lived surrounded by technologies – but the technologies that surrounded an individual in 1952 were not sending every bit of minutiae to large corporations (and governments). Hanging in the background of the discussion of speed are also the questions of planned obsolescence and the mountains of toxic technological trash that wind up flowing from affluent nations to developing ones. The technological speed experienced in one country is the “slow violence” experienced in another. Though to make these critiques is to in no way to seriously diminish Wajcman’s argument, especially as many of these concerns simply speak to the economic and political forces that have shaped today’s technology.

    Pressed for Time is a Rosetta stone for decoding life in high speed, high tech societies. Wajcman deftly demonstrates that the problems facing technologically-addled individuals today are not as new as they appear, and that the solutions on offer are similarly not as wildly inventive as they may seem. Through analyzing studies and history, Wajcman shows the impacts of technologies, while making clear why it is still imperative to approach technology with a consideration of class and gender in mind. With Pressed for Time, Wajcman champions the position that the social shaping of technology framework still provides a robust way of understanding technology. As Wajcman makes clear the way technologies “are interpreted and used depends on the tapestry of social relations woven by age, gender, race, class, and other axes of inequality” (183).

    It is an extremely timely argument.
    _____

    Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working towards an MA in the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ethical implications of technology, infrastructure and e-waste, as well as the intersection of library science with the STS field. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog Librarian Shipwreck and is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

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  • There’s a Riot Going on: From Haiti to Tunisia

    There’s a Riot Going on: From Haiti to Tunisia

    by R. A. Judy

    “The true scandal is not in the proposition of analogy between the Haitian and Tunisian revolutions, but in this epistemological failure, which perpetuates the refusal to recognize that they are not derivative analogues of the French Revolution or the European Spring of Revolution, but are distinctive events of social transformation, which while in part stimulated by a certain set of Enlightenment concepts and institutions, have taken a course that cannot be charted according to the dominate mapping of our common modernity…”

    Given on May 17 2014 at The Tunisian Revolution: Causes, Course and Aftermath Conference, Saint Anthony’s College, Oxford University, Oxford UK

    ©Ronald A. Judy
    (Do not quote or cite without the author’s express permission)

    I should like to take full measure of the gravitas of my charge today, which is to locate the Tunisian Revolution in its international dimension. In doing so, I begin by pressing some on two of the crucial terms of that charge: locate and international. Without appealing to the rather authoritative force of etymology—itself a mode of placement and so begging the question—I’ll merely point out that locating something is to place it within some set of boundaries and to so settle it; to situate it. How does one situate or settle revolution, except to, as in the manner of the National Convention in 1795, having just repressed the last uprising of the Revolutionary Parisian sans-culottes and yielding power to the Directory, stabilize it. Nor is it a trivial fact to our purposes here that chief among the institutions of stability was the comprehensive public education law enacted in October of that year, establishing the Institut national de sciences et arts (National Institute of Sciences and Arts), whose expressed mission was indeed to advise the Directory about intellectual work, both scientific and literary, in France and abroad, which might have been of use in stabilizing the energies of the revolution—in other words, their management for the glory of the republic. This was perhaps most successfully realized in the work of the Institut’s second class, the Classe des sciences morales et politiques (Class for Moral and Political Sciences), in which de Tracy’s Idéologues held considerable sway; a heuristic of some of the pitfalls involved in the academicization of revolution well worth attending to now. Nonetheless, it warrants pointing out that in its voluminous work of memoirs, the Institut national de sciences et arts achieved a corpus of psychological social science, including theories of mind as well as ethics, all focused on the well-tempered individual as the proper embodiment of revolutionary force, that still contributes to our understanding of proper social order in change. And that is precisely why we cannot “locate” the Tunisian Revolution, per se. Even if we were to locate it in the seemingly straightforward geo-political sense of placement, I should still dissent, because it is not merely circumscribed within the ambit of the Arab World in any easy way, and it remains porous both northerly and southerly in a way that severely troubles the distinguishing boundaries of Europe, Mediterranean, and Africa.

    So, then, rather than locating the Tunisian Revolution in its international dimension, I raise, and will try to address the question of what and how it is meaningful as an earthly historic human event. The most succinct answer to this question is that the Tunisian Revolution, “which we have seen unfolding in our day, whether it may succeed or miscarry . . . finds in the hearts of all spectators (who are not engaged in the game themselves) a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm, the very expression of which is fraught with danger; this sympathy, therefore, can have no other cause than a moral predisposition in the human race.” The last sentence sums things up: this revolution is evidence that humanity can progress of its own accord. That, I think, is the significance of the Tunisian Revolution of Dignity in all the details of its events beginning in Gafsa in 2008 up through to the moment. And, in that regard, it is far more analogous to the events that shook the Caribbean Island of Saint Domingue from 1791-1804, when the independent republic of Haiti was established,1 than it is to either those that transformed France from 1789 to 95, or those from 1848 to 71, which ushered in the hegemony of the European bourgeois liberal nation-state. I know this seems like a radical provocation. I do not, however, intend it as a scandalous remark, but rather as a serious proposition aimed at getting us to think something else. Its seeming scandalous has to do with its incomprehensibleness, which in turn has to do with a failure of knowledge regarding those events of Haiti that, as the Haitian anthropologist, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, asserted in 1990, persist as “‘unthinkable’ facts . . . for which one has no adequate instruments to conceptualize.”2 The true scandal is not in the proposition of analogy between the Haitian and Tunisian revolutions, but in this epistemological failure, which perpetuates the refusal to recognize that they are not derivative analogues of the French Revolution or the European Spring of Revolution, but are distinctive events of social transformation, which while in part stimulated by a certain set of Enlightenment concepts and institutions, have taken a course that cannot be charted according to the dominate mapping of our common modernity.

    What I am proposing, then, is that in order to address the significance of the Tunisian Revolution, to seriously ask what this is as an earthly historic human event, we need another historiography of revolution, one that not only makes use of alternative archives but also deploys an alternative anthropology. In addressing the question what is this, we need ask what does it look like; hence, my answer: Haiti. To the extent that this entails locating the Tunisian Revolution within an international milieu, it means situating it in the lineage of, to put it bluntly, “other-than-European” popular revolution. This does not mean non-European, which would assume that the question of Europe itself is settled; which it is not, remaining instead the principal conundrum of modern political science, as well as human sciences: What are we and how can we see ourselves in common? The incomprehensibleness of the commonality of the Haitian and Tunisian revolutions to the current political and sociological analysis is indicative of the utter failure of these sciences to adequately address that question. In the case of Haiti, this is expressed as an outright hostility to the possibility of there ever being let alone ever have been a revolution. In the case of Tunisia, it is manifested as an equally assertive indifference. Both responses have a similar effect: the blockage of destructive neglect of the revolutionary momentum. There are two specific points of analogy to which I wish to draw attention today. The first has to do with why both Haiti and Tunisia are incomprehensible as revolutions in their own right. The second has to do with, incomprehensibleness notwithstanding, the Haitian and Tunisian revolutions’ function in common as actual catalysts for worldwide revolution. Both are emblematic of the movement of les damnes of modernity to realize the better aspirations of humanist modernity: Universal human dignity and rights. This has certainly been so for Haiti historically, which has long been an emblem of radical revolutionary freedom among radicals, and not just Black radicals for 200 years despite, no precisely because of the efforts of the great powers to erase it. Tunisia may perhaps, and this is the aspirational bit, come to be the same for our era.

    Taking up the first point, I’ll remark what I am sure many of you already noted, which is that my proposition the Tunisian Revolution is evidence humanity can progress of its own accord is a paraphrasing of Immanuel Kant’s assessment of the French Revolution given in his treatise on education, Der Streit der Fakultäten (The Conflict of the Faculties). Kant’s pronouncements of revolution have come under considerable scrutiny among political philosophers of late in accordance with a renewed investment in his conception of cosmopolitanism; the reason having to do with the idea that we may be indeed approaching such a world order. Of course, Kant is notoriously counterrevolutionary, precisely because, as Lewis Beck and even Chris Surprenant have pointed out, his theory of the deontological foundation for the origins of civil society dictates absolute prohibition on violent rebellion. Nonetheless, he did publicly express enthusiasm for the French Revolution, seeing in the events of 1789 to 1798, when he wrote The Conflict, a mode of thinking—we might best call it, daring to correct him, an emergent intelligence—that “demonstrates a character of the human race at large and all at once.” That this should have emerged all at once, spontaneously, among the populous without the benefit of the discipline, Zucht, achieved through cultured pedagogy, trending toward instituting a civil constitution is precisely what recommends it as evidence of human progress. It was evidence of the inherent universal human tendency of progressive change, where the movement is towards realizing a common association of life and living. The fact that even though, for Kant, this is expressly a communicative association in reason, its conceptual schemata is principally a function of imagination need not concern us here. I merely want to mark it as a useful insight for understanding the eventfulness of Abou el-Kacem Chebbi’s 1933 poem, “If the People One Day Will to Live,” in the spontaneity of the Tunisian’s popular uprisings and their manifesting a certain sort of sovereignty as self-conscious autopoesis; and that it is precisely the unlawfulness of such collective imagination that inclined Kant to view the events unfolding on Saint Domingue during the same time as those in France as the purest instance of collective irrational emotion— in the sense of ill-directed public commotion and unrest: riots—acting against moral-reason, and so absolutely an illegitimate eruption of violence against not only government but also civil society. By that same token, I’ll not rehearse Kant’s account of the origins of civil society, with its complicated elaboration of duties of right—virtue to the self and justice to others—and his notion of authorized reciprocal coercion, which lays the foundation for his views on revolution. It suffices to remark here that his account turns on the postulate that humankind is comprised of individuals who, even in the state of nature, are all rational, autonomous beings. These two aspects of Kant’s thinking are key reasons why all he could see happening in Saint Domingue was a Negro slave rebellion. It is crucial we understand that this was not a failure of personal morals, or some kind of irrational reaction to human difference. It was a fundamental function of Kant’s transcendental deduction, which is to say his account of what is our reality and how we have it, and so what it means to be a free human subject capable of enlightenment, of warranting the motto Sapere Aude. In his assessment of all that, the Negro is a type of hominid firmly situated in the natural domain of things governed by physical law, but not so fully within the supranaturalistic domain of persons governed by the rational moral law. In that light, the basis of the Haitian Revolution’s incomprehensibleness Trouillot references has precisely to do with the priority of the individual in the tradition of European political philosophy; it is because the Negro can not be admitted into the ranks of rational cosmopolitan individuals, and so cannot be the generator of civil society that the prospect of a revolution forming a republic—that is, constituting a civil society—is unfathomable, and nearly unimaginable. My point here— and it is a complicated one that I shall have to make quickly yet I hope coherently—is not about race. Rather, what gets expressed in Haiti’s case as a problem of race is indicative of a more fundamental problem of anthropological psychology and philosophy. That is the long enduring premise that only one mode of subjectivity drives the history of knowledge, as well as history, and it has a definitive singular formation.

    The Haitian Revolution’s being a contradictory corrective to this premise was announced by Jean-Jacques Dessalines on April 28 1804, when he justified the recriminatory violence that had just taken place against the island’s whites with the words: “We have paid these true cannibals back in full; war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage. . . . I have saved my country. I have avenged America.” Just fourth months earlier, Dessalines had declared the establishment of the Republic of Hayti, in his capacity as its first president. Naming the new country by the assumed Taino term for the island of Hispaniola—the very first place to see the arrival of Iberian colonists and the emergence of Europeans on the world stage—was a symbolically powerful statement, as was his reversing the accusation of cannibalism that had long justified the autochthonous people’s enslavement and murder. Dessalines’ April 28 statement signified an act of solidarity with not only all the oppressed populations, les damnes, of the Western hemisphere, but also the entire world, as was made explicit in the language of the 1804 constitution. One is inclined to agree with Nick Nesbitt and recognize in that constitution the first attempt to construct a society in accordance with the radical Enlightenment axioms of universal emancipation and universal human autonomy, in which all human subjects retain their autonomous constituent power. Dessalines thus defined the Haitian Revolution as a war of worlds, one that in “saving” Haiti from colonial slavery had avenged an entire hemisphere. In so doing, he expressly took up the Radical Enlightenment, further radicalizing in turn that very Enlightenment, which had refused to address anyone other than Whites as full subjects of human rights. As Nesbitt characterizes it, the Haitian Revolution amounted to an “invention of an egalitarian freedom unknown in the North Atlantic.” One might quibble with the term “invention,” preferring manifestation, yet concur fully with the assessment of the revolution’s scope, articulating a distinctive historical subjectivity—that is, distinct in its formation from that of the bourgeoisie of the Enlightenment. This articulation was remarked by the first properly Haitian theorist and polemicist for the revolution, Pompee-Valentin baron de Vastey, in his An Essay on the Causes of the Revolution and Civil Wars of Hayti where he writes of a population that only twenty-five years earlier was “in slavery and the most profound ignorance, with “no idea of human societies, no thought of happiness, no kind of energy, yet through massive spontaneous individual autodidactic effort— many of them learned to read and write of themselves without an instructor. They walked about with books in their bands, inquired of persons whom they met, whether they could read; if they could, they were then desired to explain the meaning of such a particular sign, or such a word — produced in the span of one generation a corps of indigenous Haitian notaries, barristers, judges, statesmen, that “astonished every one by the solidity of their judgment.” Even more significant than this being a direct contradiction of Kant’s dismissal of the Negro as an inferior more natural hominid, is that the facts of Haitian auto-didacticism is in evidence of his theory of humankind’s capacity for autopoetic progression, and that, even more than the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution proves this. So what the incomprehensibleness of the events of the Haitian Revolution clearly indicates is not merely that they are unthinkable in accordance with the reigning cosmology, but that the cosmology is woefully, on its fundamental premises, incapable of yielding any truly adequate knowledge about the eventfulness of humankind, about how the societies in which we actual live are as they are. Which is to say they are a far ways away from giving a full picture of how humanity lives life in our world.

    To see how this problem of incomprehensibleness and contradiction relates to the Tunisian Revolution, and so underscore this point about the resemblance between the events begun at Bois Caïman on August 28 1791 and those that began at Sidi Bou Zid on December 17 2010, we need merely recall Alain Badiou, just 5 days after the fall of Ben Ali, designating the events in Tunisia as Les émeutes en Tunisie. What struck Badiou about the events in Tunisia was they contradicted the «fin de l’histoire» thesis of globalization that postulates “the end of eventful history (le fin de l’événementialité historique), the end of a moment where the organization of power could be overthrown in favor of, as Trotsky said, ‘the masses entering on the stage of history.’” So that precisely such events as Tunisia were supposedly no longer possible. For the past thirty years, neoliberal globalization has been, as Badiou says, “The only tenable norm of general subjectivity (la seule norme tenable de la subjectivité générale).”

    Once again, we are held captive by a powerful idealist concept of things—and especially so when it is touted as a reductive behavioralism or functionalism—that interferes with our capacity to see what is unfolding before us. Certainly, this subjectivité, this person, becoming the global norm has been the meaning of globalization until now. It has been a globalization from above that we have called, in the French mode, “Américanisation,” underscoring its association with imperialism, or more consistently “neoliberalism,” which is characterized by the premise that market values — the dynamics of high capitalist finance — are the absolute measure not just of human progress but existence as well. And so, the economy of consumption and desire, desire and consumption has been the sole determinate of what we are. Until now. I say until now, because what the Tunisian émeutes have unleashed is another mode of globalization, one expressly based on a set of values — dignity, liberty, and social justice — the very same ones espoused by the Haitians. And as with them, these values were not espoused by the intellectuals of the elite classes (whether bourgeoisie of petty bourgeoisie) functioning as the avant-garde to the masses, but by the masses on their own. “What is fascinating above all else in the Tunisian events,” according to Badiou, “is their historicity, they demonstrate that the capacity to create new forms of collective organization is intact (la mise en évidence d’une capacité intacte de création de nouvelles formes d’organisation collective).”

    I draw your attention here to this distinction between the processes of market- driven subjectivity and the capacity of the Tunisian revolution to create new forms of collectivity. In both instances, we are talking about some process of individuation that has the practical and very material function of socialization, of creating a certain type of individual suitable for a certain type of sociality. The individuation process of the capitalist market — and I mean throughout its history from the early commodity markets of tenth-century Europe to the current neoliberal market of global finance — may indeed have engendered the normative subjectivity of the market through its endless refashioning and management of desire and imagination, but it also engendered something else, as is evidenced by the Tunisian Revolution. This something else is what Zygmnt Bauman termed an aesthetic sociality, the spontaneity of subjective feeling into volatile and unpredictable occasions of consensus. As he says: “The instantaneous sociality of the crowd is a counter-structure to socialization’s structures.” We can understand by this that the cumulative institutionalized practices of disciplining normality, the genealogies of which Foucault elaborated under the lose rubric of biopolitics—to which Bauman includes the legislative rationality of cognitive space thereby referencing the methodological practices of the human sciences in the university—are interrupted by the faceless agency of the crowd.

    On this point, I emphasize the importance of the Tunisian Revolution’s displaying the very real capacity of the spontaneous intelligence of the people to create, to generate new forms of sociality independent of the market-based processes of socialization. These “émeutes” hold the promise of what Frantz Fanon referred to 43 years ago in his hopeful analysis of the potential of the Algerian Revolution as “doing something new,” and which gets paraphrased as neo-humanism, but I prefer to call radical humanism. And what I mean by this is a humanism predicated on something else than the processes of bourgeoisie or even proletariat individuation; that is to say, its values are not reducible to matters of exchange or even the practical, in the Kantian or even pragmatic sense of the term, matters related to exchange-value. I am brought, thus, to the second point of analogy I wish to mark today. Both the Tunisian and Haitian revolutions give manifest expression to a type of human intelligence articulating a self-consciousness that is not identical to the transcendental self behind subjective, as well as objective idealism. It is, in distinction from that subjectivity, an articulation of being among things in the world. It is a figure for a distinctly different epistemology than that of the bourgeoisie, even in the latter’s revolutionary articulations.

    Such was highlighted early on in the revolution by Mongi Rahoui who, just one month after Ben Ali’s flight from power, during a symposium convened at the Temimi Foundation, proclaimed: “I personally do not belong to any party or any association; I have my personal affiliation—I belong to myself . . . I want to be a member of ‘a stone in a larger dam,’ paying the revolution forward together and giving attention to its accomplishments, saying it is from beginning to end a revolution of freedom and dignity.” With this blunt assertion for the self, and his identifying this self-awareness as the fundamental revolutionary project to actualize a free society, Rahoui raises to prominence the question of ethical relations: How am I engaged in ethical relation with others? He has publicly insisted on the centrality of this question in the political process of the revolution in his role as the representative of Jendouba in the National Constituent Assembly, which was charged with drafting the new constitution. Just this January, when the constitution was being finalized, Rahoui became embroiled in a pivotal debate with Habib Ellouz, a founding member of the Nahda over the relationship between the language of Article 1 of the newly drafted constitution, resulting in the language in Article 6 expressly prohibiting charges of apostasy (تكفﯿﻴر /takfir) and incitement to hatred and violence—a clear indication as any that this revolution, whatever it is, is not theocratic. It is not inconsequential that Rahoui’s debate with Ellouz garnered considerable attention in Tunisia and the Arab World precisely because it is a heuristic of the struggle between the native secularism expressed in the spontaneous prolonged insurrection of the streets that began in December 2010 and continued well through to September 2013, and the Islamist agenda to impose what the Tunisian activist and philosopher Muhsin al-Khouni, calls a utopian fiction of the Islamic heritage: their conception of sharī‘a. Nor is it inconsequential in that regard that Rahoui is now the sole member of the leftist Mouvement des Patriotes Démocrates, (Democratic Patriots’ Movement, or MOUPAD) to hold a seat in the National Constituent Assembly. Ideologically Marxist and ardently secular and anti-Islamist, MOUPAD was part of the Popular Front that was formed in October 2012, bringing together various leftist and progressive parties into effective political block. It was the assassination of MOUPAD’s Secretary-General, Chokri Beliäd, by Salafist in February 2013 that precipitated the national crisis in which the coordinated efforts of the Popular Front, the UGTT, and street demonstrations eventually led to the Nahda government’s collapse this January.

    Rahoui’s persistence in emphasizing the Tunisian Revolution’s fundamental insistence on individual responsibility for life in association with others in the political reformation of Tunisia gives a certain actuality to what was initially signaled by the multitude in the streets with the slogan كراﺍمة اﺍلإنسانﻥ (kāramat-ul-insān/ “human dignity”) during the initial insurrection, and was fiercely defended by the syndicalists during the Nahda government. It is a manifestation of what the late Chokri Beliäd spoke about as the “Tunisian intelligence” (al-dhikā al-tunisī/ لذكاء اﺍلتونسياﺍ) by which he meant a critical mass of educated subjects, including the labor movement and the various institutions of civil society, formed through a specific educational system and a confluence of historical and geographic factors, unique to the country. That intelligence, he argued, is both what would save the nation, having sparked the revolution, and what the emerging constitutional order should invest in and strive to preserve.

    Beliäd’s designation and description of Tunisian intelligence, Rahoui’s activism, and especially the vernacular invocation of human dignity are all indicative of a particular process of individuation that was not so much inaugurated by the postcolonial Bourguiba government’s enactment of the Education reform law number 58-118 of November 1958, but rather traceable back to the older Tanzimat- style reforms implemented by Khaïreddine al-Tunsi in the nineteenth-century at al- Zaytouna University and Collège Sadiki, which the 1958 reform gave a more popular institutionalization and instrumentality. This process of individuation can be regarded as resonant with Gramsci’s fundamental focus on the relationship between material conditions of life- practices and the institutions of human intelligence, so that the popular Tunisian intelligence Beliäd described is an emergent formation—it is a moment of subalternity, the precise moment when a set of life- practices give expression to a set of intellectual practices of reflection and organization that articulate a narrative of historical constitution and change. Mahmud al-Mas‘adi, who undertook institutional execution of the 1958 reform as Secretary of State for Education, Youth and Sports, designated this condition “restlessness” ( َعلى قَلَ ٍق /‘ala qalqin), describing a mode of sociality in which each individual accepts the responsibility, as well as risk of living life in relation and common with others. In effect, the Bourguiba/Mas‘adi reform engendered a population that is قلوقﻕ / qalūq (restless), capable of an ongoing open-ended practice of discovery, which is precisely what Fanon was describing with the term individuation. The Tunisians’ identification of this restlessness with كراﺍمة اﺍلإنسانﻥ (kāramat-ul-insān) is akin to what Tony Bogues has recently designated as “common association” in his attempt to think the centrality of artistic and poetic expression in the Haitian peoples effort to actualize a free revolutionary subject in the immediate aftermath of the 1804 revolution. Indeed, The 1958 Bourguiba law was as extensive in scope as were the education law promulgated by Henri Christophe when he became King of Haiti in 1811 after the dissolution of Dessalines’ imperium with his death in 1806, precipitating the division of the country into warring northern and southern realms; and then again in 1816 by Pétion who, after Christophe’s assassination, restored the united republic and established an extensive system of education, including a national school of secondary education for girls in Jacmel, as well as the Pensionnat National des Demoiselles in Port-au-Prince declaring: “Education should be the fundamental basis of any program in a true democracy, because education raises man to the dignity of his being.” In that vein, the human condition both the Haitian and Tunisian revolutions describe as well as enact is perennially transitional, or to use an older language, metabolic. This, I think, is currently at stake in Tunisia right now, expressed in the eloquent local metaphor شرﯾﻳعة اﺍلثورﺭةﺓ. /shari‘at-u-thawra. I translate this in deliberate deviation as “the ethics of the revolution,” rather than the more conventional “law [as in Sharia] of the revolution,” to remain in solidarity with the Youth of the Revolution in their ambition to sustain an open-ended possibility for a myriad of ways of taking care of the self, an unending restlessness.

    Arguably, the spontaneity with which the people of Kasserine established structures of order in all the chaos during those dark days of early January 2011 is illustrative of such restlessness as a societal force. And when those events are considered in light of Mohamed-Salah Omri’s claim that a constancy of Tunisian social life is the culture of dialogue and what may be called institutionalism, we must seriously ponder the hard question of whether the Tunisian events of this moment, like the Haitian events of the long nineteenth century, do not so much announce a new paradigm of revolutionary transformation, as they manifest a history of individuation in modernity that escapes comprehension from a certain perspective. This is a matter of the seer and the seen. And, in that regard, the assessment of the Tunisian revolutionary unionist and theorist, Mouldi Guessoumi, is extremely pertinent: “This is a revolution that has not affected Tunisia’s mode of production, or the overall structure of its society, or even the political consciousness and reasoning. Rather, it has been a surgical intervention undertaken by the citizenry in the daily life practices of society.” Perhaps the clearest, although not simplest, illustration of this is the insistence of the people in Sidi Bou Zid that they be able to eat bread without having to beg. Calling this كراﺍمة اﺍلإنسانﻥ (kāramat-ul-insān), human dignity, they aim at achieving a society in which one’s desire is not the instrument of one’s exploitation.

    notes:
    1. Make note that when President Boyer secured France’s recognition of the republic in 1825 at a devastating cost, he effectively ended the revolution’s political expression.
    Back to the essay

    2. He made this assertion in Haiti: State against Nation. The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism, reiterating what he had already set out in his landmark 1977 work, Ti difé boulé sou Istoua Ayiti, which was the first book-length monograph in Haitian Creole on the origins of the Haitian Revolution.
    Back to the essay

  • Legacies of the Future

    Legacies of the Future

    On the Life and Work of Edward Said
    – November, 2013:

    Video coverage of boundary 2‘s Fall conference, featuring Joseph Cleary, Aamir Mufti, Nuruddin Farah, Wlad Godzich, Stathis Gourgouris, RA Judy, QS Tong, Jonathan Arac, Donald Pease, Bruce Robbins and Paul Bové.

  • Mohamed-Salah Omri’s "The upcoming general strike in Tunisia: a historical perspective"

    boundary 2 extends the work begun by RA Judy in his important dossier on Tunis.

    Tunisian Unrest

    The upcoming general strike in Tunisia: a historical perspective
    by Mohamed-­Salah Omri
    St, John’s College, Oxford

    The first general strikes in Tunisia since 1978 takes place in a much-­‐changed country and against old friends but for rather similar reasons.  To understand post independence Tunisia, one must get to grips with its labour movement.  Successive governments tried to compromise with, co-­‐opt, repress or change the union, depending on the situation and the balance of power at hand.

    In 1978, the powerful General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) went on general strike to protest what amounted to a coup perpetrated by the Bourguiba government to change a union leadership judged to be too oppositional and too powerful. The cost was the worst setback in the union’s history since the assassination of its founder, the legendary Farhat Hached, in 1952.  The entire leadership of the union was put on trial and replaced by regime loyalists. Ensuing popular riots were repressed by the army, resulting in tens of deaths. In few years, however, the formidable trade union would rise gain and continue to play a crucial role as locus of resistance and refuge for activists of all orientations, down to the present time.

    UGTT has been the outcome of Tunisian resistance and its incubator at the same time since its founding in 1946.  Because of that birth, in the midst of the struggle for liberation from French colonialism, the union had  political involvement from the start, a line it has kept and guarded vigorously since. In 1984, it aligned itself with the rioting people during the bread revolt.  In 2008, it was the main catalyst of the disobedience movement in the Mining Basin of Gafsa.  And come December 2010, UGTT, particularly its teachers’ unions and some regional executives, became the headquarters of revolt against Ben Ali.

    After January 2011, UGTT emerged as the key mediator and power broker at the initial phase of the revolution, when all political orientations trusted and needed it. And it was within the union that the committee which regulated the transition to the elections was formed. At the same time, UGTT used its leverage to secure historic victories for its members and for workers in general, including permanent contracts for over 350,000 temporary workers and pay rises for several sectors, including teachers.

    Despite various lacunae, UGTT remained democratic throughout.  All its bodies were elected freely, even as dictatorship continued to be consolidated over the country as a whole.  A combination of symbolic capital of resistance accumulated over decades, a record of results for its members and a well-­‐oiled machine at the level of organisation across the country and every sector of the economy, made UGTT unassailable and unavoidable at the same time.  But it also became the force to beat for anyone bent on gaining wider control in Tunisia.  In other words, as Tunisia moved from the period of revolutionary harmony in which UGTT played host and facilitator, to a political, and even ideological phase, characterised by plurality of parties and polarisation of public opinion, UGTT was challenged to keep its engagement in politics without falling under the control of a particular party or indeed turning into one.  But, due to historical reasons, and partly because of the nature of trade unionism in a country such as Tunisia, UGTT remained on the left side of politics and, in the face of

    rising Islamist power, became a place where the left, despite its many newly-­‐formed parties, kept its ties and even strengthened them.  It is no secret that the top leadership of UGTT is largely leftist, or at least progressive in the wide sense of the term.  For these reasons, UGTT remained strong and decidedly outside the control of Islamists. This was not for lack of trying, through courtship initially, appeasement afterwards and finally and coercion.

    On December the 4th, 2012 as the union was gearing up to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the assassination  of its founder,  its iconic headquarters,  Place Mohamed  Ali, was attacked  by groups known  as  Leagues  for  the  Protection  of  the  Revolution.  The  incident  was  ugly,  public  and  of immediate impact. These leagues, which originated in community organisation in cities across the country designed to keep order and security immediately after January 14, but were later disbanded, are now dominated by Islamists of various orientations. They have been targeting the media, artists and members of the former regime under the slogans: purification  or cleansing of the old regime and protection of the revolution.  A prominent action was their violent attack against the party Nida Tounes, headed by former Prime Minister, Beji Qaid Sebsi, which resulted in the first political killing after the revolution, that of Nida member Lotfi Nagadh in the southern town, Tataouine.

    UGTT sensed in the  attack, which was the latest in a series of actions, such as throwing trash at the unions offices in several regions few months ago, a repeat of 1978 and an attempt against its very existence.  It responded by boycotting the government, organizing regional strikes and marches, and eventually calling for a general strike on Thursday the 13th of December, the first such action since

    1978. For the first time, UGTT came clearly against Nahdah party and declared it enemy number one after stating on many occasions that it stands at the same distance from all parties.  Anti-­‐Nahdah parties and individuals are now banking on this and backing UGTT.  In Tunisia, contradictions have suddenly sharpened, rather not unlike the situation in Egypt, where President Morsi managed to unite warring opposition groups against his party when he gave himself sweeping powers.

    Tunisia today stands divided, with UGTT heading one side and Nahdha on the other.  If history is any guide, UGTT will overcome this time as well. What is in doubt is the cost to a revolution plagued by a set of circumstances and developments largely beyond the control of the country.   This is also Nahdah’s toughest test, internally and internationally.  Internally, UGTT is forcing a rift between the government and the party which dominates it by challenging the former to protect a national organization and apply the rule of law. Internationally, UGTT has already laid bare the para-­‐military nature of the Leagues as danger to social peace in Tunisia, on one hand, and rallied the union’s powerful friends in the international labour movement.  As the 13th approaches, Tunisia is holding its breath, and everyone is involved in one way or another to head off what could be a collision of titanic proportions.

  • Audio Links to the Sovereignty Seminar of November 3, 2012 at the University of Pittsburgh

    Paul Amar, UC Santa Barbara/Cairo:   Triangulating New Prerogative Subjects in Egypt’s Brotherhood State, and the “Sha’abiya” of New Popular Sovereignty Alternatives

    and

    Wlad Godzich, UC Santa Cruz:  Sovereignty and University

    click this link

    Tony Bogues, Brown University:   Popular Sovereignty and the Practices of Freedom: Or How Do We Make a New Beginning? Notes towards working through a Conundrum

    Ronald Judy, University of Pittsburgh:   Restless Freedom and the sources (masādir) of siyāda sha’abiya: the Tunisian Question

  • A boundary 2 symposium

    A boundary 2 Symposium

     

    Saturday, November 5, 2011 – CL 501

     

    What Is the Proper Agenda for a Critical Journal?

     

     

    9 – 9:50 AM, Ronald Judy, Pittsburgh:  Poetic Socialities:  Signs of a Neo-Humanism

     

    10 – 10:50 AM, Bruce Robbins, Columbia:  Cosmopolitanism, Time, and Inequality

     

    11 – 11:50 AM, Aamir Mufti, UCLA:  Real Life:  Lyric and the Critical Imagination

     

    Lunch

     

    1 – 1:50 PM, Daniel O’Hara, Temple:  A Poetics of the Imagination

     

    2 – 2:50 PM, Jonathan Arac, Pittsburgh:  Writing Presentist Historical Criticism

     

    3 – 3:50 PM, Richard Purcell, CMU:  The University, the Journal, and Proper Education

     

    4 – 4:50 PM, Daniel Morgan, Pittsburgh:  French Moralism Revisited: Cinephilia and Criticism, Imagination and Ethics

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