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  • Michelle Chihara–Return of the Repressed: Oceanwide’s Angeleno Ghost City

    Michelle Chihara–Return of the Repressed: Oceanwide’s Angeleno Ghost City

    This article is part of the b2o: an online journal Special Issue “The Gordian Knot of Finance”

    Return of the Repressed: Oceanwide’s Angeleno Ghost City

    Michelle Chihara

    In the early 2000s, the American press became fascinated with Chinese “ghost cities.” Images of darkened condo towers in new but empty districts appeared across the media, from Al Jazeera to CNN.  In Ordos, at the edge of the Gobi desert, a modernist museum like a flattened Lego egg sat surrounded by canyons of silent skyscrapers. Tianducheng was a faithful mini-recreation of the city of Paris, France, complete with flower boxes and Tour Eiffel, that stood eerily quiet. Other extravagant developments were never finished or occupied, from Chenggong to Guangzhou.[1]

    China’s unprecedented boom cycle had provoked a building frenzy far beyond what the economy could absorb. When the bubble burst, thousands of newly middle-class Chinese investors lost their savings and never received the homes they had been promised. The results looked post-apocalyptic. Trampled banners in deserted ballrooms and parkways gathered dust, among row upon row of echoing McMansions, with vines crawling up the unused walls.

    Across the press, and in Chinese official discourse itself, the ghost city trope “supplied a charged new metaphor through which to report on China’s property sector” (Woodworth 2017, 1273). The idea never gained a precise sociopolitical definition. It was always a phrase that served as a lightning rod for controversy and debate, even as it gained currency within China itself. The state worried about ghost cities, as it sought to balance its command-and-control policies with the actions taken by Chinese families now free to use real estate—in the proud US tradition—as both shelter and primary investment strategy (Ibid.).

    Most of the journalists writing for North American audiences assumed that ghost cities were the problems of a planned economy not our own. Some economic papers on the topic also functioned on the premise that authoritarian capitalism and its failure to respond to market signals were to blame for “government subsidized overbuilding.”[2] Both presumed that the ghosts were exotic and foreign, fallout from misguided policies. But the realities of the global economy have brought these specters back to haunt the West.

    One critic calls London’s architectural trend of catering to the needs of empty luxury dwellings the necrotecture of the global super-rich (Atkinson 2019). Dubai and South Korea have ghost cities; the website Vacant New York tracks empty commercial and residential properties; historic chateaux listed as short-term luxury rentals on AirBnB dot the French countryside amongst the overcrowded and under-funded banlieues. To many Marxist critics, this is garden-variety over-accumulation. These are simply the busts at the end of the boom cycles, they’re endemic to capitalism, authoritarian or liberal. And it’s true that, like the original ghost towns of frontier California, the Ordos Municipality was built on speculative mining profits.

    Even if they’re not new, however, the dynamics that created ghost cities in China persist and metastasize. If anything, they’re getting more severe. The Western coverage of China may have been laden with the ironies of Orientalist clichés, and yet, the aesthetics were a transnational means of involving the public. Ghost cities give democratic stakeholders a way to see the severity of the problem, a way to grasp the local consequences of finance’s Gordian knot, in all its international interconnectedness.

    ***

    In downtown Los Angeles, about a year ago, base jumpers and graffiti artists claimed an abandoned development as their own by filming viral videos from inside the empty towers. On Instagram, one video is captioned “the calm before the storm.” It opens with a wide shot, drone footage set to hip hop.

    Two young men stand at the top of an unfinished building. On iron girders high above the city, they swim in golden sunset light. As they move catlike across the bare beams, they look deliberate but impossibly relaxed. They control the swoop of their cameras with their thumbs.

    In the next beat, they base jump. A series of five narrow rectangular parachutes glides down, flashes popping off all around. But if the silks spiraling between the graffitied towers were the main attraction, the preamble at sunset best captures the lonely dangerous beauty of the act.

    Every floor of these unfinished high-rises–on every level, in every window–was tagged by a graffiti crew. Leaving a mark on the buildings became, through online subcultures, a sine qua non of street self-branding. The aesthetic additions to the abandoned towers, at the heart of the city, brought press attention and sparked global interest. The police stationed themselves around the perimeter, parked at every corner of the lot, to shut it all down.[3]

    Most of the public discussion at the time centered on whether or not the graffiti was art. Should taxpayers should be responsible for the clean-up and police patrols? But in February, the Los Angeles Times’ last article about the empty buildings called them a “Capital Fail”(Miranda 2024). Of the many journalistic articles about the towers, this one, in the Arts and Culture section, came the closest to articulating what the ghost towers in eye of the storm truly represented: The fact that land use in global cities, including in the heart of urban America, is being driven by the opaque needs of international capital.

    ***

    The original project in the heart of downtown L.A. was built by a Chinese company called Oceanwide (now Tonghai), through a funding mechanism known as the EB-5 visa program. This program has been inviting foreign investment into the US since the 1990s, giving predominantly Chinese and sometimes Indian people a way to transform their home currencies into dollars, while essentially purchasing green cards. If they invest a certain amount, they receive a financial path to permanent residency and citizenship. The program is a highly-contested set of rules, subject to multiple news investigations and Senate hearings, with detractors labeling it “Citizenship-for-Sale.”[4] EB-5 investments have raised persistent concerns about fraud and money laundering.[5] And yet, despite recent controversies around Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner using the program to finance part of a deal in New York, the program was recently renewed (Hackman and Putzier 2022; Democracy Forward 2022). EB-5 was originally supposed to create American jobs in rural areas or districts with high unemployment. The evidence suggests that it has, instead, primarily served the needs of international real estate developers.

    Oceanwide is down the block from the Metropolis, another EB-5 project created by some of the same players. The Metropolis was completed, and it includes a finished boutique hotel with requisite rooftop pool and spa, plus luxury condos. The developer sold the complex at a loss in 2022 (TRD staff 2022). The owners have had trouble filling the sparkling columns. It’s not so much a ghost city as a glass zombie.

    Commercial vacancy rates are at a record high in downtown Los Angeles, and EB-5 investments have contributed to a glut of overly-vacant luxury units, in an area desperately in need of affordable housing.[6] Some of the Oceanwide contractors are now suing to get paid. The property was named in an FBI warrant targeting the corrupt city councilman, Jose Huizar, who is serving time for fraud related (of course) to real estate development and a bribery scheme with yet another Chinese developer.[7] The results, in other words, for the city, are an aesthetically interesting mess. And as with the scandals around the mayor of New York taking bribes from Turkey, local politics have become inseparable from the demands of far-flung developers.

    During China’s boom, unsurprisingly, the economy provided Chinese investors with myriad methods of circulating their funds into global dollars, like EB-5. But this isn’t exactly what Xi Jinping wanted. Since 2016 or 2017, Jinping has been cracking down on capital controls. By 2020 and 2021, the Chinese state was locked in a game of chicken with its own real estate giant, Evergrande. The Communist Party had generally worked to backstop problems in its economy, to stop them from spreading. But in the face of $300 billion debts and the need to slow overheating markets, Evergrande was ultimately forced to back down, all the way down, into liquidation (Wu and Steinberg 2017; Saeedy and Feng 2024). You can now see some of Evergrande’s ghost cities being demolished online.

    The CCP wanted to water its local economy with more of its own funds, it wanted investors to spur growth at home. It also wanted to discourage high-risk, high-reward speculation. These goals are sometimes at odds.

    Money created quickly is fast money. It carries a certain momentum when it goes looking for high rates of return. It needs appreciating asset classes in which to park itself. Much of the capital that has fled China has gone against the wishes of the CCP, but not all, and not all fast money can technically be counted as fraud.

    Money laundering, in the original sense, meant hiding the criminal source of profits by routing the funds through legitimate businesses. But much of the fast money coming out of China falls into more of a grey area, within systems that obscure all profit sources equally. Drug cartels, Eastern European oligarchs, crooked Malaysian prime ministers, American tech entrepreneurs, and middle-class Chinese investor—they all share the same access to financial anonymity.

    Capital flees into dark money, increasingly out of reach of the regulations of any one nation. As soon as Chinese developers amass a certain level of capital, they become international players. Once fortunes reach a certain size, they enter a space in some ways above and between Wall Street and The City, above and between the laws on the books in any one center of global finance—what one financial journalist calls Moneyland (Bullough 2019a).

    The US national security state does sometimes lash out against truly illicit money, with tools largely provided by the Patriot Act. The Department of Justice has powerful allies and works with NGOs like Global Financial Integrity. And at the same time, the US is the fastest growing tax haven in the world (Bullough 2019; Bullough 2019b). It has brought the race to the bottom of the deregulation barrel back to its own shores. While the US is the home base for the most powerful shadow banks and hedge funds, capital flows with no restrictions across borders, hunting for the next loophole or program that might provide an edge or an arbitrage opportunity. The aftermath of the 2008 crisis has only entrenched the dynamics that knit high-end real estate developers across the globe into one unstable, highly speculative market.

    Many middle-class Chinese investors have lost out through the EB-5 program, alongside Angeleno taxpayers. But the needs of finance’s big dogs never jibed with the needs of regular people. International capital pushes funds into luxury building trends that don’t take their cues from local markets. The result is almost never good local jobs, the erstwhile promise of EB-5. It’s empty towers in the midst of a housing crisis, as the tent cities continue to rise around the tagged and abandoned monuments to indifferent global wealth.[8]

    ***

    The drone footage at sunset—with the bright painted letters popping against a tangerine sky and the young people dangling their legs off sky-high rafters—was created by young street artists and influencers. They were looking to create value, for themselves, on the social media platforms owned by corporate America. They incidentally aestheticized faultlines in the global regime. But the images haunted the public and drew audiences because they expose a tear in the fabric of the city.

    The display of daring by the base jumpers invites comparison with an iconic 1932 photograph of iron workers in New York City. The New York Herald-Tribune’s black-and-white image of “Lunch Atop A Skyscraper” similarly captured the public’s attention. In that moment, workers on a beam 850 feet in the air—eating and smoking— sat in for the aspiration and hopes of a generation of immigrants. Their bravado became the symbol of the skyscraper itself, an incarnation of the zeitgeist.

    Today, the young men on the girders with their drones are the dystopic version, Miracle on 34th Street reshot as Blade Runner. Romanticizing the bravery of the Irish laborers in the ‘30s validated their role in the emerging financial order, just before the New Deal. The 21st century ghost towers in L.A. are more counter-cultural, more cyberpunk than daily news, more dystopic carnival than imagined community.

    At the same time, the taggers and base jumpers created a kind of impromptu and spontaneously vibrant public space. They acted as a reminder that in the wake of hollowed-out cultural institutions, in search of least a certain density of weak ties, people will take back the city center. The aesthetic is the only way for the public to engage, on the ground, with the consequences of dark global finance.

    ***

    In moneyland, it’s almost impossible for local municipalities like Los Angeles to hold developers accountable. The concrete construction of the Oceanwide towers means the luxury units can’t be remodeled into smaller apartments. Even demolishing the towers represents an extraordinary expense in a dense urban context.

    Corporate partnerships that span both countries, and currency-sterilization in a dollar-based global economy, are pulling China and the US deeper into an increasingly complex relationship. Conflict has been growing around everything from the Belt and Road program to China’s push to control resources in Africa to the data and IP policies of social media giant TikTok. International security concerns and trade wars, state capitalism and crony capitalism and the gray areas in-between, all are increasingly enmeshed. Local interests are increasingly pit against the needs of capital, with no resolution in sight, as the temperature rises (Loughlin and Grimsditch 2021; Ip 2024).

    There are coalition groups like the Hedge Clippers (as in, they clip the excess growth of hedge funds) trying to address issues like the carried interest tax loophole, a boring-sounding but multi-billion dollar glitch that lets hedge funds avoid massive amounts of taxation. Organizations like LAANE and SAJE, here in Los Angeles, are doing the long slow work of organizing community stakeholders across sectors. These groups seek to hold big, international money locally and democratically accountable. Aesthetics will always play a part in that organizing work.

    Ghost cities may once have seemed exotic and foreign. But the street artist Nick Sozonov’s drone shots of Oceanwide bring the trope home and give local audiences purchase on the topic. Attention spans now move at the speed of TikTok. It’s hard to keep people focused on the details of financial loopholes, they keep slipping away behind a cat meme. But art reminds us that when we look in the mirror, the empty towers are still there, looming right behind us.

    Michelle Chihara is Associate Professor of English at Whittier College, where she teaches media studies, contemporary American literature, and journalism. Recent peer-reviewed publications include chapters in Money and American Literature and Los Angeles, A Literary History, both forthcoming in Cambridge University Press (2025. Other essays have appeared in Post45: Contemporaries, Politics/Letters, Bloomberg, n+1 and Avidly.org. She was formerly the section editor for Econ & Finance at The Los Angeles Review of Books, where she also served as Editor-in-Chief. Her current book project is a journalistic trade book about behavioral economics, working title Behave! The science of influence in American culture.

    References

    Atkinson, Rowland. 2019. “NECROTECTURE: Lifeless Dwellings and London’s Super-Rich.” INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH 43 (1): 2–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12707.

    “BASE Jumper Leaps from Graffitied Towers in Downtown L.A.” 2024. KTLA News at 5. KTLA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9dEFqbgX-Q.

    Bullough, Oliver. 2019a. Moneyland. New York: NY: St. Martin’s Press.

    ———. 2019b. “The Great American Tax Haven: Why the Super-Rich Love South Dakota.” The Guardian, November 14, 2019, sec. World news. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/the-great-american-tax-haven-why-the-super-rich-love-south-dakota-trust-laws.

    Chan, Melissa. 2009. “China’s Empty City.” Al Jazeera, November 09, 2009. YouTube https://youtu.be/0h7V3Twb-Qk?si=1p3oQJcXuaBSuBcB

    Chung, Stephy. 2016. “Abandoned Architectural Marvels in China’s Largest Ghost Town.” CNN, November 21, 2016. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/china-ordos-ghost-town/index.html.

    Democracy Forward. 2017. “Uncovering Kushner’s Involvement in Renewing Visa Program,” 2017. https://democracyforward.org/lawsuits/uncovering-kushners-involvement-in-renewing-visa-program/.

    Hackman, Michelle, and Konrad Putzier. 2022. “Congress Set to Revive EB-5 Program Giving Green Cards to Foreign Investors.” The Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2022. https://www.wsj.com/articles/congress-set-to-revive-eb-5-program-giving-green-cards-to-foreign-investors-11646861559.

    “Hearing on ‘Citizenship for Sale: Oversight of the EB-5 Investor Visa Program’ before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on June 19, 2018 | USCIS.” 2018. June 19, 2018. https://www.uscis.gov/tools/resources-for-congress/testimonies/hearing-on-citizenship-for-sale-oversight-of-the-eb-5-investor-visa-program-before-the-senate.

    Huang, Josie. 2017. “As DTLA Vacancies Rise, Landlords Increase Breaks on Rent, Parking | LAist,” September 15, 2017. https://laist.com/news/kpcc-archive/in-high-vacancy-dtla-landlords-offer-move-in-speci.

    Ip, Greg. 2024. “America Is Sliding Toward Chinese-Style Capitalism.” The Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2024. https://www.wsj.com/economy/america-is-sliding-toward-chinese-style-capitalism-fff67df4.

    “L.A. Joins Ranks of Cities with ‘ghost Towers’ with Graffiti-Covered Oceanwide Plaza.” 2024. Los Angeles Times. February 10, 2024. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/newsletter/2024-02-10/la-oceanwide-plaza-essential-arts-arts-culture.

    Lloyd, Annie. 2017. “Downtown L.A. Vacancy Rate Highest In 17 Years | LAist.” LAist, September 16, 2017. https://laist.com/news/downtown-la-vacancy-rate-highest-in.

    Loughlin, Neil, and Mark Grimsditch. 2021. “How Local Political Economy Dynamics Are Shaping the Belt and Road Initiative.” Third World Quarterly 42 (10): 2334–52.

    “Newly-Discovered EB-5 Scam Highlights Fraud, National Security Weaknesses, Need for Long-Term Reform.” 2017. https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/newly-discovered-eb-5-scam-highlights-fraud-national-security-weaknesses-need.

    “Our Latest Report: Housing Shortage on the Rise in LA – The Angeleno Project.” 2023. https://theangelenoproject.org/the-hard-facts/.

    Saeedy, Alexander, and Rebecca Feng. 2024. “Evergrande Was Once China’s Biggest Property Developer. Now, It Has Been Ordered to Liquidate. – WSJ.” The Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2024. https://www.wsj.com/articles/evergrande-faces-imminent-liquidation-after-talks-with-top-creditors-break-down-4af5f657.

    TRD staff. 2022. “Greenland Sells Metropolis Apartment Tower for $504 Million.” The Real Deal, November 9, 2022. https://therealdeal.com/la/2022/11/09/greenland-sells-metropolis-apartment-tower-for-500m/.

    Witthaus, Jack. 2023. “Downtown in Distress: Los Angeles Signals Why Nation’s Office Space Headaches Could Last for Years.” CoStar, March 19, 2023. https://www.costar.com/article/531623023/downtown-in-distress-los-angeles-signals-why-nations-office-space-headaches-could-last-for-years.

    Wu, Jane, and Julie Steinberg. 2017. “Big Chinese Deals Stall on Capital-Outflows Clampdown.” The Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2017. https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-chinese-deals-stall-on-capital-outflows-clampdown-1485563072?mod=article_inline.

    Zahniser, David, Emily Alpert Reyes, and Joel Rubin. 2019. “FBI Corruption Probe Goes beyond L.A. Councilman Jose Huizar to Include Other City Hall Figures.” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 2019, sec. California. https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-huizar-warrant-20190112-story.html.

    [1] Al Jazeera (Chan, 2009) and CNN (Chung, 2016) are just two of many examples.

    [2] See Ghost Cities of China website at MIT (http://ghostcities.mit.edu/)

    [3] This was widely covered in the news, but see (“BASE Jumper Leaps from Graffitied Towers in Downtown L.A.” 2024)

    [4] See (“Hearing on ‘Citizenship for Sale: Oversight of the EB-5 Investor Visa Program’ before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on June 19, 2018 | USCIS” 2018)

    [5] See (“Newly-Discovered EB-5 Scam Highlights Fraud, National Security Weaknesses, Need for Long-Term Reform” 2017)

    [6] See (Witthaus 2023), (Huang 2017) (Lloyd 2017)and (LA CAN) and (SAJE) reports.

    [7] See LA Times article for a link to the federal warrant (Zahniser, Reyes, and Rubin 2019)

    [8] (“Our Latest Report: Housing Shortage on the Rise in LA – The Angeleno Project” 2023)

  • Experiments in Listening–boundary 2 annual conference

    Experiments in Listening–boundary 2 annual conference

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

    Experiments in Listening

    Friday, January 24-Saturday January 25, 2025

    University of Southern California and California Institute of the Arts

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    Friday, January 24

    University of Southern California

    10am-12n

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

    boundary 2 editorial meeting for boundary 2 editors 

    Lunch for boundary 2 editors and conference speakers

    *

    1:30pm-3:15pm

    ROOM: USC, SCA 112

    Listening session/ Moderator: Erin Graff Zivin 

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

    Fumi Okiji, “To Listen Ornamentally” 

    Josh Kun, “Migrant Listening”

     

    3:30-5:30pm

    ROOM: USC, SCA 112

    Listening session/ Moderator: Kara Keeling

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

    Mlondi Zondi, “Sound and Suffering” 

    Leah Feldman, “Azbuka Strikes Back”

    Nina Eidsheim, “Pussy Listening”

     

    6pm-7:30pm

    Dinner for conference speakers — USC

     

    8:00-10pm

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

    8pm: Reception

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

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

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

     

    Saturday, January 25

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

    10-11:50am: 

    ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor 

    Coffee and pastries.

    Listening session/ Performance. Moderator: Arne De Boever

    Arne De Boever, “Silent Music”

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

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

    Lunch for conference speakers–Commons, 12th floor

    1:30pm-3:15pm

    ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor

    Coffee and pastries.

    Listening session/ Moderator: Kara Keeling

    Gavin Steingo, “Whale Song Recordings”

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

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

     

    3:30-5:15pm

    ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor

    Listening session/ Moderator: Erin Graff Zivin

    Edwin Hill, “On Acoustic Jurisprudence”

    Bruce Robbins, “Listening On Campus” 

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

     

    5:30-6:15pm

    ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor

    Student Theory Slam/ Moderator: Arne De Boever

    Reina Akkoush 

    Jacob Blumberg

    Sean Seu

    Inger Flem Soto

     

    6:30pm-8pm

    Dinner for conference speakers–Commons, 12th floor

     

    8pm 

    ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor

    8pm: Reception

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

     

    Listener Biographies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Nitzan Lebovic–Complicity 4 Our Time

    Nitzan Lebovic–Complicity 4 Our Time

    Complicity 4 Our Time

    Nitzan Lebovic

    One buoyant image I’ll remember from the Gaza protests of last spring is the photograph of students at Sciences Po in Paris flashing victory signs over a placard that read “Sciences Po Complice” (Sciences Po is accomplice). The sign hung, alongside a number of Palestinian flags, from the rail outside a university room they had occupied. The protest in Paris followed similar protests, and signs, carried by students in the encampment movement, or activists in the Black Lives Matter protest. Like them, it constituted a rebellion against institutional complicity. The image from Paris was burnt into my memory not only because France has often been identified with the starting point of revolutionary movements, but because it captured a cultural and a discursive shift regarding complicity, a rejection of the politicized opposition between perpetrator and victim, active and passive, action and inaction. But before we discuss the present investment in complicity, what is it, exactly?

    The Word

    The term complicity was first used by Thomas Blount, a reader of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), in his Glossographia, which appeared in 1656. Blount wrote: “Complices: from complex, icis: companions, or partners in evil.”[i] Blount reached back to the 1400s, when the term complicare was current, applying it to the mechanism that enabled the sovereign to overcome the danger of stasis, or civil strife. For Blount, and his friend Hobbes, civil war (1642-1651) and complicity with tyranny were not abstract threats.

    The word did not catch on immediately, but resurfaced in North America, during the early nineteenth century, to describe the accountability of the individual before the law. After 1945 complicity felt different: if for Blount complicity was related to a new understanding of sovereignty and “a complicit multitude for good or/and evil,” after 1945 the word was privatized: In the “subsequent Nuremberg proceedings” against Nazi industrialists and legalists, the military tribunals insisted on linking complicity in genocide to named perpetrators, rather than hosts of complicit actors, or corporations. It was a surprising but wise idea to include “complicity in Genocide” as article IIIe of the Genocide Convention (1948), but the meaning of “complicity” was not explained. Two years later, the US Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee conditioned its agreement to ratify the Genocide Convention by asking “the words ‘complicity in genocide’ to mean participation before and after the fact…in the commission of the crime of genocide,” so it is clear that the US, or its ally the West German government, cannot be accused of complicity. The Cold War made it necessary to separate the world into good and evil, right and wrong, Americans and Russians. Complicity changed its meaning yet again.

    Once it enters the language of modern power-relations, complicity grows like a fungus,  its etymological mycelia entwining (πλέκω, plékō: weave, tangle) social solidarity, cultural symbols, and political legitimacy. Within each of these elements complicity focuses on a short-term, present-oriented benefit. In other words, the political semantics of complicity follow its historical form as a passive-active entanglement that is always partial, and always hiding in the lowlands dominated by striking peaks. Digging it out means excavating a political mechanism buried deep underground. Complicity thrives where knowledge is suppressed. It spreads in hierarchical systems but is hard to explain if one looks for simple good vs. evil sort of rhetoric.

    Complicit Entanglement

    Complicity is a form of entanglement. It is impossible to understand complicity without knowing something about its context, the before and after of what one is complicit with. The writers who suffered the consequences of World War II knew that. They noticed that complicity proposes a better explanatory framework for atrocities than the usual focus on perpetrators and victims, leaders and the masses, generals and soldiers. The deeply traumatizing experiences the Jewish-Italian author Primo Levi analyzed in his writing, the dark coercive atmosphere the German author Hans Fallada portrayed in his novels, and the “perpetual state” the German-Jewish political thinker Hannah Arendt warned about were not the result of spontaneous acts of violence but the result of a carefully crafted system that made violence a condition. The Nazis made a systematic effort to blind followers to the act, while blaming its victims for it. As Levi wrote in The Drowned and the Saved, while gesturing towards T. S. Eliot, “most Germans behaved in the twelve years of Hitler, in the illusion that not seeing was not knowing, and that not knowing relieved them of their own share of complicity or connivance.” As for the victims, they “bind them with guilt, cover them with blood, compromise them as much as possible. A bond of complicity is thus forged between them and their masters, and there is no turning back.” Indeed, the Nazis made both their subjects and their victims accomplices to the crimes they designed planned and executed. Recent studies show that there were more Ukrainian, Romanian, and Baltic guards, Jewish capos, and simple German soldiers managing the killing than Hitlers, Himmlers, and SS sadists with whips. Said differently, though eruptions of evil tend to be associated with a single person, a single party, a single country, those who endure these crises know they can only happen when countless individuals—with and without jackboots—take on countless different chores. Complicity is moving on a spectrum, not a single static disposition. One can be actively complicit by aiding the criminal action, or passive as a bystander who ignores it and denies any knowledge of it. As Arendt explained, without complicity both totalitarian and liberal systems would break down, their terrorist or consumerist logic sapped of vigor.

    The most famous accounts of the Holocaust are taught as exceptional representations, the experiences of individuals. (We all know the name of Anne Frank.) Levi warned against this when he depicted the concentration camp as a “Grey Zone,” where victims were coerced into committing inhumane acts, with the implication that they shared responsibility with their torturers for what happened in the camps. Fallada’s protagonists experienced an emotional “state of emptiness” that made it possible for them to aid enthusiastic perpetrators, with or without agreeing with their ideology. And Arendt noted, in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), the different forms of “banality” with which Eichmann (who we now know was not just powerful but deeply committed anti-Semite)—and the Jewish councils he beat into docility—carried out the orders to transport Europe’s Jews to the death camps. But despite the efforts of some to insist on the uniqueness of their experiences, Levi, Fallada, and Arendt were not alone. Other postwar writers underlined the place of complicity in new forms of politics. In 1959 Eugène Ionesco, the French playwright of Romanian descent, nicknamed complicit behavior “rhinoceritis.” A few years later, Rolf Hochhuth accused Pope Pius XII of collusion with the Nazis (The Deputy, 1963). Shortly thereafter, Peter Weiss’s play The Investigation (1965) presented the accused in the Auschwitz trials as complicit with the Holocaust’s “industrial killing.” Ironically, it is precisely because complicity requires a context and a spectrum of, often conflicting, positions, that literature was quicker to realize its explanatory power.

    The Legacy of Complicity

    The lesson had not been learned. Since 1945, complicity did not just spread but it became the condition of our political lives. During the Cold War, intelligence services offered Nazi criminals impunity and prosperity. Later apartheid in South Africa (1948–94) and the ongoing colonization of Palestinian land (1948-present) met with self-serving justifications, and sometimes open approval, by the international community. By 1989, the anticolonial theorist Mihaela Mihai writes, complicity had turned into a social norm, “interstitial and anchored in a series of practices, relationships, attitudes, and institutions.” That same year, in South Africa the Durban Democratic Association declared, in a pamphlet titled “The State of Emergency Is beyond the Rule of Law,” complicity so evident and its attendent political condition, emergency, so normalized that the very purpose of emergency laws was to encourage complicity. And the Truth and Reconciliation report admitted the failure of the Commission “to spread wide enough its examination of civil society’s complicity in the crimes and misdeeds of the past.”

    One of the outstanding moments of the past year was Jonathan Glazer’s speech at the Oscars. By loitering in the walkway, potting shed, and bedrooms of the Höss family home beside Auschwitz, Glazer’s movie, The Zone of Interest (2023), spotlit the complicity of German civilians—even children—with all that happened on the far side of the garden wall. Philippe Sand’s The Ratline (2021) is dedicated to the family and friends of the Nazi criminal Otto Wächter. Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize–winning novel, Prophet Song (2023), focused on Eilish, a wife and a mother who’s doing her best to ignore a coming civil war, and whose father tells her, “You are lying to me, you are always lying, I knew you would be complicit in this.” All she wants is to close her eyes and nod off, so naturally she is told, “All your life you’ve been asleep, all of us sleeping and now the great waking begins.” Those who see complicity for what it is understand that change cannot occur without a complete shakeup of structures, without removing the agents of complicity from positions of power.

    And let us not neglect the academic discussion of complicity. After a recent wave of headline-grabbing resignations, the leverage elected officials and rich donors wield over university policies can’t be denied, the flipside of which is the presumption that deans, presidents, professors will wordlessly adopt the official line. Recent journal articles attest to the history of academic complicity, a given since neoliberalism brought university accountants to heel. For the political sociologist Thomas Docherty, intellectuals and academic institutions became complicit with power when they abandoned the vocabulary of dissent, adopting instead the lexicon of petty politics, social norms, and economic dictates. As Alice Gast, the president of London’s Imperial College (2014-2021) and a board member of Chevron, put it, professors are expected to behave like “small business owners.” Rather than offer a measured critique, business owners are expected to sell their products to customers.

    Michael Rothberg, an American professor of comparative literature, explains that implication, originated in complicare, forms “a realm where people are entangled in injustices that fall outside the purview of the law and where the categories into which we like to sort the innocent and the guilty become troubled.” John Hamilton, a professor of German and expert in classics at Harvard explains that “The complacent” [from the Latin verb placere “to be pleasing or satisfying”] are too “inappropriately pleased with [themselves] or with a situation to the point where any change, reconsideration, or improvement is dismissed as unnecessary.” He means his fellow academics.

    The historians of the Holocaust Robert Ericksen, Doris Bergen, and more recently Mary Fulbrook, updated the discussion of complicity and “bystanders” by applying it to those within academia who collaborated with the Nazi regime while “considering themselves respectable scholars.” The celebrated philosopher Susan Neiman argued, in recent articles to the New York Review of Books (October 23, November 3, 2023), that German institutions replaced their former complicity with historical anti-Semitism, with the Israeli apartheid. In a recent book, Maya Wind points to the deep and consistent complicity of Israeli universities with the security services and the occupation. Will universities learn the lesson its own faculty is warning them about? Probably not—there’s too much money at stake, as the baffling attacks on its own student bodies, in the different encampments and protest, proves.

    If change will not come from the academic institutions, where could it come from? The legal sociologist Francine Banner explained, “After decades of treating risks to society as stemming from individual bad choices, systems are being called to account for the risks created through processes of disenfranchise[ment]. . . . Complicity is at the forefront of these conversations.”

    The imprint of complicity is too visible to be ignored. After all, article IIIe of the Genocide Convention (1948) denounced “complicity in genocide,” and among those tried at Nuremberg were industrialists and judges deemed complicit in crimes against humanity. But the Genocide Convention did not trigger action against those complicit in genocides, and the big corporations that financed and armed Nazi Germany were acquitted or released with a slap on the wrist. A new branch of international law attempted—and failed—to figure out the right relationship between criminal law and complicity, but as the German legal theorist Helmut Aust explained, a “community-oriented law fails to provide convincing reasons why complicity is no longer to be tolerated in international law,” recommending instead a comprehensive international reform addressing state complicity. In contrast, Francine Banner’s freshly published book recommends a more cautious approach to complicity within the limits Aust identified as “community-oriented,” but also pointed out the failure of the justice system to take on complicity. She acknowledges that recent appointments to and rulings by the United States Supreme Court had led many interpreters to speak of “‘complicit bias,’ a recognition that institutions like courts are not neutral but play a significant role in sustaining inequalities.” So again, who will take complicity by its horns?

    Complicity 4 Our Time

    Complicity, complacency, and bystander are important categories because, as the historian Victoria Barnett observed already two decades ago, “they helped create a world in which genocide was possible.” Discussing “complicity” is not an easy task, and not only because we are not used to thinking of it as a historical category. Complicity adds another layer of institutional complication to an already dark story about the destructive character of humanity. More specifically, the question of complicity is relevant not only to the genocidal violence the US and the EU are currently supporting in the Middle East but to the planetary struggle against climate change. After all, lucrative weapon deals will not help fighting the massive process of desertification large swamps of the world is experiencing, at the moment. Not knowing complicity from dissent will not relieve us of our share of complicity or connivance with more and greater forms of destruction. The students in the encampments have shown us a different path.

    Nitzan Lebovic is Professor of History and the Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values at Lehigh University. Nitzan published books about the history of life-philosophy and biopolitics, the history of melancholy, nihilism and catastrophe. His forthcoming book is titled Homo Temporalis: German-Jewish Thinkers on Time (Cornell University Press, 2025). For other essays of his about the history of complicity see Comparative Literature and Culture (2019), History & Theory (2021), and the forthcoming “Forms of Complicity: History and Law in the Kastner Affair” (Journal of the History of Ideas, 2025).

    [i] T. Blount, Glossographia; or a Dictionary Interpreting the Hard Words of Whatsoever Language, now used in our refined English Tongue (London, Tho. Newcomb, 1681 [1656]), 148.

  • Darren Byler — Discovering “Terrorists” among “Friends”: Policing in Xinjiang in the 1990s and 2000s

    Darren Byler — Discovering “Terrorists” among “Friends”: Policing in Xinjiang in the 1990s and 2000s

    by Darren Byler

    When Tursun decided to become a police officer in 1992, it seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime.[1] The state had just opened up a pathway for Uyghur high school students who excelled in Mandarin and political theory to study in elite policing academies and other schools in Eastern China (Grose 2019). At the end of the 6 years of training, a secure posting in an urban police department was virtually guaranteed. For someone who came from a village near China’s border with Kazakhstan, it promised a way out of rural poverty and, Tursun believed, a way of creating a more just society. But at the time Tursun was not yet fully aware of the fact that resource disputes between native Uyghurs and newly arrived Han settlers in the desert oases of Southern Xinjiang was one of the reasons why he was being trained to join the Xinjiang police force.

    As I write in my book Terror Capitalism (2022), the intensification of policing in Northwest China, coincided with a development of a Han migrant settlement campaign to “Open up the Northwest.” This campaign which centered on natural resource extraction and industrial farming in the ancestral lands of the Uyghurs in the Southern part of the region precipitated flashes of violence related to land theft, systemic ethnic discrimination and new restrictions on Uyghur autonomy. In April 1990, in the community of Barin, a village near the city of Kashgar, tension over access to irrigation and land, boiled over into a brief farmer-led Uyghur insurgency (Roberts 2020). A detachment of armed police and military arrived within several days and opened fire on the farmers who occupied a community government building armed primarily with hunting rifles and farming tools. Those who I interviewed who were in the surrounding communities at the time said that bodies of the insurgents were loaded in trucks and taken away.

    But there was a more fundamental change in the community beyond the disappearance of those directly involved in the uprising. Now, it appeared, that state authorities viewed the majority of Uyghur villagers in the surrounding communities as “troublemakers” simply because of their ethnicity and their proximity to the farmer uprising. Over the next several months nearly 8000 people were officially arrested (Roberts 2020). Vast numbers of people in the prefecture were forced to attend self-criticism sessions and study political ideology. They were asked to search their hearts and consider how they might have contributed to a lack of loyalty to the Party’s mission to develop and extract regional economic resources for the benefit of “the masses.” Did they consider Uyghur possession of their own lands more important than contributing to the wealth of the county? Didn’t they know that when they questioned the settlement and land distribution policies they were challenging the correctness of the Party?

    Uyghurs in this community said that it felt like the Maoist ideological campaigns that had ended with the Cultural Revolution in 1976 were returning, but that this time they were pointed not at “counterrevolutionary” enemies who supported the “capitalist road,” but rather at Uyghurs who opposed the preferential treatment for Han settlers in the new state-directed export-oriented capitalist economy. They came to understand that they were seen as impediments to the development of what was now becoming an internal settler colony in China’s post-Cold War economic rise. In the new social order, civilization itself was equated with state-led market development. Over the next two decades Uyghurs came to see how a discourse of terrorism could be used to deem them both an internal enemy of the state and of the civilized world in general if they opposed this disempowering form of development (see also Fischer 2013).  As always-already potentially terrorists Uyghurs could be framed by an internal otherness that justified drastic policing measures and eventually led to mass internment and imprisonment. Over time, the specter of the terrorist produced a fear-driven economic and political logic for the state, and the corporations it partnered with, that resulted in billions of dollars of investment in counter-terrorism surveillance in Uyghur communities.

    As social theorist Michael Dutton has argued (2005), since policing in China emerged out of this revolutionary context of the 1950s, rather than, for example, the hunting of slaves as in the United States or the pacification of the working class in Britain, Chinese policing was organized primarily around a friend or enemy distinction—with “friend” (pengyou) figured as the revolutionary masses, or the people, and the enemy figured as foreign imperialists and domestic counterrevolutionaries. Importantly, because of the revolutionary impulse of Chinese policing the latter category of enemies could at times be rehabilitated through education and carceral punishment if they were able to recognize the liberatory potential of socialist mass struggle.[2] They were, regardless of their ethnicity, still potential “compatriots” (tongbao) in the multi-national Chinese revolutionary project. But what happens when such compatriots are deemed “separatists” or “terrorists”? This is the central question this essay will explore.

    Mao’s 1957 essay on the “Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” supplies a rationale for making fine distinctions between enemies and wayward friends. This sorting and productive capacity of policing as a tool of educating and persuading provided an opening for “thought work” (sixiang gongzuo)—communal struggle sessions where those deemed out-of-line proclaimed self-criticisms and professed their new understandings of Maoist thought. Such targeted individuals were often placed under concentrated surveillance in reeducation and labor camps as internal enemies, or at a minimum, they were stigmatized in their home communities and they were viewed as compatriots who had failed in their revolutionary resolve. Their fellow community members were tasked with observing their progress, looking for any slip-up in submissive attitudes. At the end of the Maoist campaigns in 1976, the spectrum of what counted as friend was expanded to include former political prisoners and these “wayward friends” were reunited with the masses through a process called “rehabilitation” (pingfan). This process was organized by “rehabilitation committees” (pingfan weiyuanhui) who considered formal appeals those on watchlists and petitions of family members on their behalf, and organized periods of close surveillance in the communities where the wayward friends returned.

    Throughout the 1980s democracy movements, particularly on college campuses, accompanied an emergence of capitalist production and export-oriented economy. And for a time, it appeared as though the category of the internal enemy was on the verge of disappearing. Then in 1989 that prospect collapsed with the mass killing in Tiananmen Square and subsequent disappearances of thousands of democracy activists—mostly Han college students, but also Uyghur and other ethnic minority young people—all of whom were deemed internal enemies of the state.

    With the violence in Barin in 1990, as noted at the beginning of this essay, a further reorientation of “enemies” and “friends” distinctions toward Muslims in Xinjiang demanded a new police force that was equipped to decode Uyghur opposition to the state—elaborating a new sub-category in the friend-enemy continuum—“separatists” (Ch: fenlie zhuyi zhe; Uy: bölgünchi)—and  the threat it posed toward settler claims to possession of Uyghur lands (Tynen 2020). Over the next decade, teams of state workers, would be tasked with surveilling families in communities where discontentment was most pronounced. As one of these surveillance workers put it, “We worked for months on end without any days off, rummaging through the villages and homes of Uyghur farmers, making lists of names of so called ‘separatists’ and reporting their names to the upper-level officials. As human surveillance workers we searched people’s homes, sometimes even at late night hours, looking for any suspicious books that might be spreading a ‘separatist” ideology’” (Ayup 2022, 27).

    In Xinjiang the term separatist, which emerged in Chinese state discourse in relation to Taiwan’s autonomy in the 1950s, rose to replace the Maoist term “counterrevolutionary” in the 1980s as changing cold war dynamics and the turn toward a market economy following Mao’s death made “national unification” (Ch: guojia tongyi) with Taiwan appear to be more of a possibility. The term was extended by Chinese state discourse beyond Taiwan to discussions in Tibet and Xinjiang in the 1990s in response to the rise to international prominence of the Dali Lama and Tibetan government in exile. As the Dali Lama garnered support in India and the endorsement of international celebrities, the Chinese authorities worried that the Free Tibet movement might spark a “ethnic separatist” revolt within      China’s borders. This fear was given more force with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the independence of the Central Asian republics. In Xinjiang these factors solidified a shift toward policing the perceived Muslim “separatist” threat (Becquelin 2000).

    Chinese leaders viewed the Barin Uprising as a sign of Uyghur desires for greater self-determination. Increasing Han settlements in Uyghur majority areas had the benefit of both gaining access to natural resources, but also, as a result of the fracturing of the Soviet Union—China’s long-term rival—building new avenues for Chinese markets in Central Asia and attending to the resource needs of Chinese manufacturers. These economic and geopolitical factors precipitated a change in policing in Xinjiang—a change that Tursun, the Uyghur police officer whose story begins this essay, would be a part of.

    But, of course, historical changes are difficult to recognize at first, especially when they are orchestrated behind closed doors in the headquarters of the Ministry of State Security. About the time Tursun graduated from the police academy another major incident occurred. In 1997, near his home village in Ghulja, Uyghurs protested the breakup and arrest of a youth organization that taught Islamic and Uyghur moral behavior and traditions (Roberts 2020). Although the state denies this figure, it is likely that more than 100 Uyghurs were shot in the streets and more than a thousand more were taken away, arbitrarily detained in an opaque process that ranged from “reeducation through hard labor” in camps to more formal imprisonment. Some Uyghurs fled across the border to Central Asia, eventually fleeing to Afghanistan to escape extradition back to China only to be turned over to the U.S. military and sent to Guantanamo Bay where they were eventually released without charge.

    When Tursun graduated with a degree in policing science in a Chinese-language policing academy the next year, he found himself thrust almost immediately into a hunt for phantom “separatist gangs” like the protestors who organized the marches. Throughout the Xinjiang police force, officers were tasked with implementing a “hard strike campaign”—part of a series of campaigns that would culminate, as I will explain below, in the “People’s War on Terror.”  One of Tursun’s roles was to act as interpreter and translator, turning Chinese language policing science and directives into action in Uyghur communities by interpreting Uyghur confessions for Han police commanders. His beat was nearly exclusively in Uyghur neighborhoods and villages where he was often accompanied by a non-Muslim partner. He was to be the eyes, ears, and voice of the state.

    Then, almost immediately after September 11, 2001, a new category in the friend-enemy continuum was introduced in Chinese policing rhetoric and theory. “Now we were supposed to call them ‘terrorists,’” Tursun told me in Uyghur, interjecting the Chinese word for “terrorist” (Ch: kongbu fenzi). “The vast majority of the groups we found were not separatists or terrorists at all. These were labels we gave to people who committed other crimes, or didn’t commit any crime at all, but who had no one to defend them.” As Gardner Bovingdon (2010) shows in an encyclopedic index of state documents from this period, terrorism charges proliferated in the 2000s with crimes as minor as a Uyghur neighbor accused of stealing a cow from a Han settler being labeled a terrorist activity. Eager to associate the “Uyghur problem” with the Global War on Terror, Chinese officials removed most instances of the term “separatist” from official histories of the 1990s and replaced them with the term “terrorist.” The new term had a different utility. In the post-9/11 context “terrorism” allowed the Chinese state to position itself as an ally to the West and Central Asian republics in the global war against so-called Islamic “extremism” and terrorism. By offering Central Asian republics policing technology, training, and intelligence in addition to infrastructure development projects and trade incentives, Chinese authorities used a security framework to build strategic economic and political relationships that would eventually turn into its ambitious Belt and Road Development Initiative.

    Even more importantly, back in Xinjiang the terrorism label also hardened the “enemy” categorization of Muslims who opposed state-directed development and settlement of their land. No longer were “enemies” viewed simply as counterrevolutionaries or separatists, that is, those who were nevertheless compatriots and who could potentially be rehabilitated.

    For Tursun, “discovering” hidden terrorists became a primary objective. Police units that identified such “gangs” were given large rewards. From Tursun’s perspective, it was as though the policing came to serve a larger disinformation campaign. By “discovering” terrorists, the police units fulfilled their obligation in the crackdown and concealed the structural factors that caused Uyghur protest in the first place. Over and over again Tursun observed or participated in turning informants, forcing them to identify “terrorists,” and using them to break up community networks:

    We had a policy which encouraged people to spy on each other. Often they did this for money, or because we threatened them or their families. Of course we knew that a lot of our tips were just false accusations. Some people did that for money, while some people did that to take revenge on others. But we would arrest people regardless of the truth of information. For example, if four or five people gathered together for activities such as visiting a friend or attending a funeral and someone said it was an illegal gathering to teach Islam or plan violence we would arrest everyone who attended and label the host the ringleader. Everyone knew that at a funeral, people are required to conduct religious rituals. This is normal since Uyghurs are Muslim. But the spy would exaggerate and say it was extremist or terrorist. People who were being accused have no way to prove that they are innocent. Often they ended up being sentenced to 4 or 5 years in prison or “education through hard labor” camps. The informant was given money and we received our commendation. This was so common.

    Tursun found this form of state violence morally repugnant. “Most Uyghurs I met were disgusted by the very idea of terrorism,” he said, “They wanted a peaceful life, a better world for their children.” But he worried that a generation of Uyghur young people who grew up in this atmosphere, where disappearances of Uyghur community leaders became so common, would lash out. Indeed, as Sean Roberts has shown, in some instances the “terrorism” label became a self-fulfilling prophecy (Roberts 2020). While not the norm in Uyghur crimes labelled as terrorism, in a handful of cases in 2013 and 2014, Uyghurs did attack Han civilians in organized suicide attacks. These specific attacks did appear to meet international standards of what constitutes a terrorism crime—though even they may be more appropriately understood to be horrific incidents of mass murder that arise from colonial circumstances. Soon after the terrorism label arrived, Tursun tried to quit his job as an officer. He was told that he needed to serve at least 10 years before he could even begin to consider early retirement. Because he had been granted access to state secrets, quitting would be a slow process. He was told he could be arrested if he quit without a justifiable excuse.

    Over time it became clear that the hopes Tursun had for criminal justice reform would never happen. When he first joined the Public Security Bureau he thought that the presence of college-educated Uyghur officers would help improve the situation. Instead, he saw his fellow Uyghur officers, many of them who he had known for over a decade be worn down by the system. He saw many turn toward alcoholism and become withdrawn from their families. Uyghur police officers were treated with deference and fear by other members of the Uyghur community. It was good to have a friend who was a police officer, since the officer might be able to protect them from the counter-terrorism system by vouching for them. But this friendship was a guarded, political relationship. After all it was a relationship with the eyes and ears of the state, and what stood between being deemed a terrorist-enemy and a friend.

    Even though Tursun was eventually able to leave the Bureau and, through a loophole in the system, escape to Europe, he knows that had he stayed he would have been pressed into service of the mass internment camp system that was put in place in the mid-2010s. “At this point I can’t say that every Uyghur retains some aspect of their humanity,” he said quietly. “Some Uyghur officers will do anything to show their loyalty to the government, no matter what kind of suffering they cause. All they care about are the benefits and power they get from their position. I know there are some Uyghur police who feel bad about the torture that Uyghur detainees are going through now in the camps, but the percentage of those who care are not that high. At this point they are numb.”

    Although policing in China began in a revolutionary moment and was driven at first by Maoist “counterrevolutionary” politics, in the 1990s and 2000s in Northwest China it gave way to colonial-capitalist and counter-terrorism logics that participate in familiar forms of ethno-racialization and dehumanization found in post-9/11 policing systems and counter-terrorism around the world in which Muslims are racialized as deviant others. Although, they emerge from different histories, extrajudicial detention and surveillance of refugees and other unwanted populations from Kashmir, to Palestine, to France and the United States produce similar effects at differential scales (Byler 2022). As China was pulled into a global capitalist economy and the logic of developmentalism settled on a Han-centric mythos of China’s reemergence as a global power, the revolutionary multi-national inclusiveness of China’s framing of political struggle was deeply diminished.

    In 1990s China the Maoist frame of friends and enemies was folded into a concern with “unifying” the country to benefit the masses—understood as the Han majority to the East and the Han settlers who came to the frontier to claim resources for them. Here “friends” came to be those who supported this project, and “enemies” became Uyghur “separatists” who protested these settler claims. Then, in the 2000s, the discourse of Uyghur “separatist” enemies hardened into “terrorists.” Over time, the possibility of full citizenship as “friends” has severely narrowed for Uyghurs. Since 2017, hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs have been warehoused in an expansive prison system for alleged terrorism crimes (Byler 2022). Hundreds of thousands more whose “extremism and terrorism activities are not serious” have been placed in internment camps for reeducation (United Nations 2019). After an intensive period of Chinese language assimilation, ideological indoctrination, and brutal punishment, they are placed in securitized factories where they labor apart from their families and under intensive forms of technological and human surveillance. Together these carceral systems result in the largest internment of a religious minority since World War II. Uyghurs, as always-already “enemy” terrorists have become internal others, marking a turn from compatriot rehabilitation to new policing technologies of control and incarceration derived from global models of the war on terror.

    Darren Byler is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City and In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony. His current research is focused on policing and carceral theory, infrastructure development and global China.

    Works Cited

    Ayup, Abduweli. 2022. The Detainment Factory: A Memoir. Manuscript.

    Becquelin, Nicolas. 2000. “Xinjiang in the Nineties.” The China Journal 44: 65-90.

    Bovingdon, Gardner. 2010. The Uyghurs: Strangers in their own land. Columbia University Press.

    Byler, Darren. 2022. Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Dutton, Michael. 2005. Policing Chinese Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Fischer, Andrew Martin. 2013. The disempowered development of Tibet in China: A study in the economics of marginalization. Lexington Books.

    Grose, Timothy. 2019. Negotiating Inseparability in China: The Xinjiang Class and the Dynamics of Uyghur Identity. Hong Kong University Press.

    Roberts, Sean R. 2020. The War on the Uyghurs. Princeton University Press.

    Tynen, Sarah. 2020. “Dispossession and displacement of migrant workers: the impact of state terror and economic development on Uyghurs in urban Xinjiang.” Central Asian Survey 39.3: 303-323.

    United Nations (UN). 2019. Information Received from China on Follow-Up to the Concluding Observations on its Combined Fourteenth to Seventeenth Periodic Reports. 8 October. Geneva: Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Available from: undocs.org/CERD/C/CHN/FCO/14-17.

    References

    [1] Although “Tursun” is now living in Europe, he has asked me to use a pseudonym to protect his identity from Chinese authorities and the stigma associated with his past work as Xinjiang police officer.

    [2] Dutton (2005) relies quite heavily on Carl Schmitt’s theorization of political struggle in his analysis of Chinese policing. Scholarship on Maoist intellectual and grassroots history since Dutton’s important contribution to Chinese political theory shows that the generative potential of Maoist framings of revolutionary struggle demands a re-examination of Schmitt’s work and the fascist context it reflects.

  • LI Zhimin and Daniel Braun — The Linking Matters: An International Poetics of Sense-Making and Innovation

    LI Zhimin and Daniel Braun — The Linking Matters: An International Poetics of Sense-Making and Innovation

    by LI Zhimin and Daniel Braun

    This article was peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 Editorial Collective.

    A subtle chain of countless rings

    The next unto the farthest brings;

    The eye reads omens where it goes,

    And speaks all languages the rose;

    And, striving to be man, the worm

    Mounts through all the spires of form.

    ——Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Charles Bernstein has been, of all contemporary American poets, the one who has done the most to bring back those important words and phrases that tend to be “excluded” from circulation.

                                          ——Marjorie Perloff

    When a mother gives an egg to her child and says “egg” at the same time, she is helping her child establish “a link” between language and the world. But what is the nature of this link? As the great Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure explained, langue (by which he meant particular languages, like French, or English, or Mandarin Chinese) is a system of signs which parcels out the world of sense into discretely sayable things. The signs that comprise this system are complex: they are composed of a signifier – the acoustical image, as he called it, that is formed from a combination of a given language’s phonemes – and a signified – the conceptual image or item recalled and indivisibly linked with that string of phonemes. The linguistic sign is not the thing in the world which it names.[1] In the scene described, the mother teaches the child the link between all three elements in a single stroke, bringing the child irrevocably into the world of language – both the particular language, through which this introduction is made, and language in general, what Saussure called langage. Eventually, the child will learn to draw a self-conscious distinction between language and the world which it denominates, between what is sometimes called the linguistic functions of use and mention, as when he refers to ‘egg’: not the reproductive ovum and its nutriment, but the three-letter word spelled /e/g/g/. The creation of these links is the foundation for all human thinking, upon and out of which all of our most complicated thoughts are built. It is from the perspective of these links that we can examine some of the most pressing questions concerning what I will call international poetics, the communication of innovations and norms within and between the poetry of particular languages and cultures, and beyond.[2]

    The best recorded story to demonstrate how the first links between a signified, a signifier, and the real world are created is that of Helen Keller. As she recalled: “As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!”[3 In this passage, Keller vividly describes the moment when “the link” between the word “water”, and the wonderful cool flowing water of the world that was impressed upon on her mind. Though the signifier of the linguistic sign is objective, common to all speakers of a language, the cognitive image to which it is linked, and the emotional associations it bears, are personal, subjective and changeable. The significance of this division between the objective elements of language, and the subjective half to which they are bound and supported, is significant to the study of poetics.

    T.S. Eliot’s theory of an “objective correlative” is a case in point. He states: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”[4] Eliot is correct in suggesting that such an emotion can be “evoked”. However, it is mistaken to assume that “the link” between “the evoker” and “the evoked” is objective. In fact, as exemplified in the case of Helen Keller above, the emotional association with the image of a particular object in one’s mind is formed by a combination of personal experience and collective instruction, the results of which are at once common enough to allow communication among speakers, yet irreducibly individual, and variable among one another, such that we can never know if our signifieds are identical to each other’s. This is indeed one of the great mysteries and miracles of language. Beyond this brute difference of other minds, there are the idiosyncrasies and vagaries of experience that contribute to the formation of our sense of our language. For Helen Keller, the emotional response evoked by the word “water” included the unique joy and enlightenment she experienced when she learned the word. The word retained for her a sense of the discovery of its link to the world. Another reader, one perhaps not deprived of their senses in the way Keller was, might have a completely different emotional response to “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events,” not only with respect to other readers, but to the artist endeavoring to evoke the objective correlative itself.

    Yet people do share certain common experience, which is what makes Eliot’s theory possible in the first place. All human beings, being human, share certain life experiences and outlooks upon the world that enable them to enjoy the same literary works. The notion of a classic work, enjoyed by people of all nations around the world, is tacit proof of the commonalities across regional differences that make international literary and artistic success possible. People of the same national or cultural background will of course share more personal experience than those of different national or cultural backgrounds. There are artistic works that are highly favored in one culture while not well regarded in others. A good example is the novel A Dream of Red Mansions (《红楼梦》,1744-1754)[5] which is regarded as the best novel ever written in Chinese, yet hardly read in the west.

    Literature often serves a pedagogical function. The degree to which works are read, and continue to enjoy success, often depends on their ability to continue to teach readers something about themselves, and their world. Ezra Pound, another remarkable theorist of literature (and poet), is among the most vociferous exponents of this theory of literary efficacy. He vividly describes the rewards a fruitful reading experience offers as “that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.”[6] Indeed, rewarding reading experiences are those that enlighten and develop our minds, stimulating them to great satisfaction. At the root of any literary judgment, the overall motive force by which literary traditions are sustained, is this affective dimension of reading. To read in an engaged way, to persist in reading, is to be somehow moved by it.

    How does this affective core of reading, which binds traditions and communities together in spite of their differences and distances, hold for the international communication of modern poetry, not least when even the most highly experienced reader of one culture can feel lost in the works of another. Bewilderment occurs not just with respect to the idiomatic sense of another language and culture but, when it comes to poetry especially, the ways in which an artist plays and puns with every level of that language. A story told by the distinguished scholar Huang Yunte about his colleague Zhang Ziqing, is illustrative. Reading Charles Bernstein’s poem “Fear of Flipping,” Zhang persistently asked the poet for the lexical meaning of the words in the poem. Huang explained, “the poet is more invested in the ring of echoes of wall, ball, fall, all, and even the half- rhyming repel, than the lexical meaning of these words. The ricochet of sounds and syllables, creating the titular fear of flipping, like a flip or slip of tongue, looks to walls to keep it inside or floors to hold it up.”[7] In other words, Bernstein is experimenting with the sonic dimension of poetic lines; indeed, one could say that the ‘meaning’ of his verse here is produced by his play effects with the reverberation of rhyming syllables across the poem. Poetic meaning is therefore not restricted to, or even primarily, lexical here. The title of the poem sets the terms for this play by punning on the phrase “fear of falling,” a substitution of one term / phobia for another, which flips the sense of the phrase on its head. The echoing internal rhymes create a verbal image which gives shape and body to this gesture of flipping, retaining the ghost of the original phrase even as it ricochets across the altered soundscape of the lines. This practice will no doubt be recognizable to readers who are familiar with the poetics of the Language School. The play serves as a framework for linking mind and world beyond and between the confines of individual languages, and is definitive of Bernstein’s practice.

    Huang Yunte’s interpretation is not difficult to understand. However, it was wholly foreign to Zhang Ziqing, and would almost certainly be to anyone who did not come to Bernstein’s work with the framework of sound and cognitive play in mind. Modern poetry like his is not unique in being theory-laden – that is, constructed and expounded according to the unique poetics of its practitioners. Nevertheless, modern poetry and poetic theories are two sides of a coin; they stand by working together – all the more so as poetry becomes esoteric in form, further removed from the conventions of ordinary language use, and governed increasingly by rules of composition unique to it. Without knowledge of the theories which govern such an esoteric art, therefore, one can find oneself at sea while reading a modern poem.[8] This is especially true of poetry where innovation does not occur at the lexical level either: indeed, where the poetry at stake is not a matter of lexical play. The divergence of modern poetry from the rules which governed previous traditions – rules of a more subtle kind of artifice intelligible to a broader literate class – has made the dissemination of its doctrines and theories a necessary part of its reception and interpretation. The difficulty a lay but native reader faces with work like Bernstein’s is exacerbated in the international context, where neither fluency in the language of composition, nor education within a broadest concept of the originating culture, can serve as sure guides. It is paramount that Chinese scholars introduce both modern poetry and modern poetic theories together, teaching them as two facets of the same literary phenomenon.

    Many modern poems make good sense in a lot of ways other than the traditional lexical one, which is why they seem quite difficult to understand. T. S. Eliot once said: “We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”[9] Indeed, modern poetry is as difficult to comprehend as modern civilization. The difficulties are comparable, mimetic even, in so far as the poet is driven, in Eliot’s reasoning, by a vocational maxim to both reflect and train the sensibility of his audience to his work through the dislocations of language he performs. The difficulty of modern poetry is a difficulty inherent in its context: modern civilization. What of its value, the other aspect (ever present) of Eliot’s judgment. A difficult poem is good not because it is difficult. In fact, the difficulty of many poems is not that difficulty of modernity refracted, but rather a failure to adequately make sense of the incoherence the poet intuits. It is a subtle difference, one with which Eliot was principally concerned. A difficult poem is good only when it creates one more possibility, “forcing language into meaning,” in an unconventional way. Again,“Fear of Flipping” is exemplary. From the perspective of linking, it is an exploration of more possible ways to make new, and possibly more efficient, thought ways and patterns. The poem’s difficulty is likewise a function of the way in which it is approached. Though Eliot would demur to such a consequentialist proposition, perhaps the test of a difficult poem’s quality may be the very satisfaction of mind, its inspiration and development, that has affectively and cognitively bound generations of poetry readers to one another in a tradition millennia-old, and world-wide.[10]

    What then of the transposition of these difficult poems into foreign contexts. From one perspective, it would be easy to conclude that poems like“Fear of Flipping” simply cannot be translated into Chinese. Semantics are not what a translator ought to target here, yet there are no characters in the Chinese language that reproduce the poem’s soundscape either: wall, ball, fall, all, and repel, are constructions of the sound system of English. Chinese phonology simply does not permit their formation. Yet this perspective is impoverished, for the link the poem creates (the link which is its essential, creative practice and energy) is certainly “translatable.” The poem’s signature effect, its ‘fear of flipping’ so to speak, can be reached in the target language of Chinese, and the minds of readers from this or another culture, like those of its author and his native culture, can be enlightened and developed by a translation which ‘translates’ those effects. From the linking perspective, the reward for reading a poem is to build up some new and better links, so that the minds of its readers can grow. In bringing, i.e., “translating”, poems like “Fear of Flipping” to readers in China, we need to explicate them in detail, line by line, giving more detailed interpretations than what Huang Yunte does in his essay; but we also must consider the general theory and framework of mind that the poem conjures. For it is only by doing both that Chinese readers will be rewarded in their encounter with the difficulty of works like those of Bernstein, or his Language School peers. This is the true project and mission of translation.[11] To deal with such poems that stand closely with the linguistic features of the particular language in which it is written that cannot be replicated in Chinese, the strategy for translation is not to focus on the technical details of linguistic features, but on helping readers in China in understanding the ways, i.e., the frameworks of mind presented in the poems, so that they could not only understand them but also create links in Chinese in the same spirit – and to replicate the features where possible, according to the rules of Chinese.

    Marjorie Perloff has noted: “Charles Bernstein has been, of all contemporary American poets, the one who has done the most to bring back those important words and phrases that tend to be ‘excluded’ from circulation.”[12] In other words, the contribution Bernstein’s works have made is not only to serve an individual reader by promoting his/her intellectual and emotional growth, but also, and more importantly, to serve contemporary American language and culture as a whole. With poems like“Fear of Flipping”, Bernstein has been constructing and reconstructing some delicate links to promote the growth of contemporary American thought capacity. That is to say, his work has contributed to the growth of the thinking capacity of the American cultural being, which, if well “translated”, can help other cultural beings develop in similar, relevant areas too.

    Different from lyrics, narrative works, both in verse and prose, tell stories that define the formation of certain links, as well as the associated emotions, so that they can often be translated in the traditional way. Story travels across cultural borders much more freely than poetic technique.

    In the field of international cultural communications, a mind, or a culture at large, grows in two ways: one is of transplantation, the other of inspiration. The key difference between these two learning ways is that the former offers something that cannot be logically developed out of the exercise of the learner’s own mind or the recipient culture’s institutional self-renewal, while the latter brings something that can be logically achieved by the recipient person or culture.

    Here are a few examples to further demonstrate the difference. When Sun Yat-sen established the Republic of China in 1911, he attempted to “transplant” the whole American political system into China, which was a failure because it did not function well in the Chinese culture by then. After the May Fourth Movement in 1919 (五四运动), the western ideology of free love and free marriage were introduced into China, which inspired many young people, who totally understood them, cherished them and were willingly guided by them, because in Chinese history there had been many people who had fought for their freedom of love and marriage, though they had not developed the theory of these practices to the degree the west had. In some cases, the transplantation model and the inspiration model are combined together, such as in the Socialism with Chinese Characteristics; Socialism was transplanted from the former Soviet Union, while Chinese Characteristics refers largely Chinese people’s own innovation, partly on basis of traditional Chinese political practice, and partly inspired by Western political practices.

    When a Chinese student learns English, s/he needs to learn a vocabulary and a grammar / syntax (words, and the rules for their formation and combination). In this way, his/her mind grows by “transplantation”. When a Chinese scholar learns Charles Bernstein’s poetics, acquiring a totally new way of thinking, it is also of transplantation. Inspiration, by contrast, is the event of learning something that can be interpreted, understood, and made good sense of in the context of one’s already established knowledge. For example, all traditional western poetry, especially Romanticist’s works, such as those by William Wordsworth, can be easily understood by Chinese readers, as they share much of the spirit with traditional Chinese poetry.

    Where do these processes of transplantation and inspiration fit in the current world of international poetics? Among the most interesting instances in the communication of inspirational learning is what one may call mis-interpretive innovation. These are cases defined by a fortunate mistake, in which the application of a norm in the target language and culture to the translation of a work produces something incongruous with the original cultural perspective. One famous example is Ezra Pound’s invention of the “Ideogrammic method”. As Xie Ming said, “This etymological, compositional theory of the ideogram, from which Pound derived his ‘ideogrammic’ method, had an enormous impact on his thinking about poetry and other cultural matters, and on the writing of the Cantos.”[13] The method has influenced many poets in the west: “An American mind, brought to ideographs by an art historian of Spanish descent who had been exposed to Transcendentalism, derived Vorticism, the Cantos, and an ‘ideogrammic method’ that modifies our sense of what Chinese can be.”[14] Indeed, it is for this reason that Pound is said, in a well-known oxymoronic idiom, to have ‘invented Chinese poetry in English”. And yet, as explained on the back cover of the book The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, the Chinese language is just a set of signifiers, like the English language or any other languages.[15] This now seems to be common knowledge to most English readers. However, Ezra Pound’s invention of the “Ideogrammic method” made perfect sense in its context, and it was a wonderfully productive method for the composition of his works. It was an extremely valuable invention in poetics in English, inspired indeed.

    There are many more examples of mis-interpretive innovation. Let us offer a personal one. When Li Zhimin was invited to give a talk on Ezra Pound’s lyric “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”, Li found the other three panelists interpreted the poem as a war poem, the context for which was England’s involvement in WWI.[16] This appeared quite strange to him, as Li had been accustomed to interpretating the poem in the cultural context of its original author, the great Chinese poet Li Bai (701-762). In the traditional Chinese cultural context, this poem is normally taken as a love poem that romanticizes the mutual love and devotion of a young couple, which is considered a key virtue of the family ethics highly valued by Confucianism. Li found his American colleagues’ new (to me) interpretation compelling, making good sense as it does of the historic context in which the poem was translated and read in England. In fact, this new interpretation is inspiring and fascinating, and has contributed to the growth of Li’s understanding of the original and translated poem. What we can see from this example is that poetry not only exists in its original or translated context, but between them, in the historical and cultural rhymes that mutually illuminate diverse regions of the literary tradition.

    Let us give another example that illuminates the importance and shifting influence of context. A famous Chinese scholar prof. Yue Daiyun once held a seminar and discussed a novel entitled “Marriage of Xiao‘erhei (小二黑结婚)” with her American students. In the novel, there is a character named Sanxiangu (三仙姑) who often makes herself up to look more beautiful, which is meant to be inappropriate as she is of the working class, so that the conventional comments in the proletarian literary circle in China on this character is always negative. However, Yue Daiyun found all her American students were supporting Sanxiangu, as they thought there was nothing wrong with her making herself up. On the contrary, they considered Sanxiangu to be an admirable woman, as she seemed to them to love life.[17] Yue Daiyun came to agree with her American students’ comments, and has been retelling their views to her students and colleagues back in China, which is surely a contribution to the interpretation of the character Sanxiangu as well as the whole novel in China.

    The purpose of international interactions is not to make all cultures the same. Rather, international interactions can make all parties more perfect in their own way. We learn from each other in the transplantation model only when there is no alternative. We apply the model of inspirational learning in most cases. The overriding principle to decide whether any international communication is fruitful or not is whether it makes good sense in terms of the recipient individual or culture, indeed, whether it enriches the recipient through the change it rings.

    In the model of inspirational learning, the exchange can move in both directions: the innovative knowledge produced by the recipient may depart from the codes and conscience of the original culture, and yet in doing so inspire something novel in return, within the original culture. With the back and forth of such international communications, human knowledge on the whole is greatly expanded. In fact, the method of international communication, especially of the mind-expanding forms of poetry, is perhaps the best way for humanity to develop itself by diversifying itself: that is, to resist the pull of sameness.

    International interaction follows more or less the same principles in other fields. For example, in the field of politics, China and the West have learned and benefited from each other, and will continue to do so in the future. Jacques Gernet has said: “China furnished the first example of a disciplined, rich, and powerful state which owed nothing to Christianity and seemed to be based on reason and natural law. It thus made a powerful contribution to the formation of modern political thought, and even some of its basic institutions were imitated by Europe.”[18] Indeed, he convincingly argues that what the West has learned from China it has learned in the inspirational model. In return, China has learned a lot from the West as it developed during the modern age, much of which has transformed Chinese society to a great extent, such as in the fields of education, industrialization, urbanization and so on. And again, perhaps in the future, some of modern China’s successful institutions might serve as good examples from which the West might learn, and so on in perpetuity.[19]

    Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that all forms of life are linked: “A subtle chain of countless rings/ The next unto the farthest brings”[20] as he writes in the poem which prefaces his essay “Nature.” Helen Keller’s story about the creation of the link between the signifier “water,” the concept water the signified on her mind, and the water out there in the world, is a story about the origination of thought, without which she would have lived in a kind of intellectual darkness all her life. But the story is general: if human beings could not create links between the world and the world of signs, human beings would have lived in the darkness as well. Without poetry to further enhance these links, or to break and remake them, and without its transposition between languages, in which it is once more remade into a monster of linguistic and cultural confusion (in the etymological sense of this word), our thought would be even darker. The linking is everything; it is, as Emerson reminds us, life itself.

                                              2022/04/18

    _____

    LI Zhimin is “Guangzhou Scholar” Distinguished Professor of English at School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University (Guangzhou, China, 510006). He serves as President of Foreign Literature Society of Guangdong Province. His research interests focus upon studies on modern poetics, culture (philosophy) and English Education (Email: washingtonlzm@sina.com).

    Daniel Braun is English Lecturer with Special Honor at School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University. He got his PhD in English literature Studies in Princeton University in 2019.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, Trans. Wade Baskin, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 65-66.

    [2] More discussions on the formation, nature and functioning of such links are made in Li Zhimin’s monograph The Good and the True of Knowledge (Beijing: The People’s Press, 2011) [黎志敏:《知识的“善”与“真”》。北京:人民出版社2011年版。]

    [3] Helen Keller, Story of My Life (C. Rainfield, 2003), 11. This ebook was produced by Project Gutenberg. It is available at: http://www.CherylRainfield.com.

    [4] T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Methuen, 1920), 92.

    [5] TSAO Hsueh-Chin and Kao Heo, A Dream of Red Mansions, Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994). TSAO Hsueh-Chin and Kao Heo are of the Wade-Giles System. In modern Pinyin system, they are Cao Xueqin and Gao E respectively.

    [6] Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect”. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (Toronto:George J. Mcleod Ltd., 1968), 4.

    [7] Yunte Huang, “Ten Plus Ways of Reading Charles Bernstein: Improvisations on Aphoristic Cores,” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2021, p. 275.

    [8] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “Modern English Poetry: Innovation through Theory,” Foreign Language and Literature Research, Vol. 35, No. 5, 2020, pp. 27-34. [黎志敏:《理论主导下英语诗歌的现代转型》,《外国语文研究》2020年第5期。] In this essay, Li argued that modern poetry and modern poetic theories have to be read side by side to make good sense of both of them.

    [9] T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 289.

    [10] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “Innovative Spirit of Modern Poetry: To Develop Human’s Intellectual and Emotional Capacities,” Foreign Languages and Cultures, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2021: 1-8. [黎志敏:《现代诗歌的创新精神》,《外国语言与文化》2021年第2期。] In this essay, Li argues that one major function of modern poetry is to promote the development of human’s intellectual and emotional capacities.

    [11] In fact, this is what we have done in our on-line bilingual course on modern poetry in English. This on-line course can be reached at: https://www.ulearning.cn/course/25598. In this course, Charles Bernstein is invited to have given a talk on an excerpt from Dark City, in which he gives a line to line interpretation. This is indeed the best way to “translate” a difficult modern poem.

    [12] Marjorie Perloff, “Introduction to Charles Bernstein’s Distinguished Wenqin Yao Lectures at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Fall 2019,” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture. Vol. 48, No. 4, 2021, p. 86.

    [13] Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999), 236-237.

    [14] Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 162.

    [15] See the note on the back cover in the book: Ernst Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1936).

    [16] A discussion of Ezra Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife” by Al Filreis, Emily Harnett, Josephine Park, and Li Zhimin. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/app/public/watch.php?file_id=208367

    [17] Yue Daiyun and others, “Feminism and Literary Criticism,” Free Talks on Literature, No. 6, 1989, p. 19. [乐黛云等:《女权主义与文学批评》,《文学自由谈》1989年第6期。]

    [18] Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. J. R. Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 523.

    [19] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “The One Way Model of Cultural Interaction: Literary Interactions between China and Cambridge,” The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2012: 111-127.

    [20] R.W. Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, 2009), 18.

    _____

    Works Cited

    • Eliot, T. S. “The Metaphysical Poets.” In Selected Essays, edited by T. S. Eliot, 281–291. London: Faber and Faber, 1954.
    • ——. “Hamlet and His Problems.” In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, edited by T. S. Eliot, 87–94. London: Methuen, 1920.
    • Emerson, R.W. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Brooks Atkinson. New York: The Modern Library, 2009.
    • Gernet, Jacques. A History of Chinese Civilization, translated by J. R. Foster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
    • Huang, Yunte. “Ten Plus Ways of Reading Charles Bernstein: Improvisations on Aphoristic Cores.” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, no. 4 (2021): 255–278.
    • Keller, Helen. Story of My Life. C. Rainfield, 2003. This ebook was produced by Project Gutenberg. It is available at: http://www.CherylRainfield.com.
    • Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era. London: Faber and Faber, 1972.
    • Perloff, Marjorie. “Introduction to Charles Bernstein’s Distinguished Wenqin Yao Lectures at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Fall 2019.” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, no. 4 (2021): 85-90.
    • Pound, Ezra. “A Retrospect.” In Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, edited by T. S. Eliot, 3-14. Toronto: George J. Mcleod Ltd., 1968.
    • Saussure, Ferdinand De. Course in General Linguistics, translated by Wade Baskin, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. NY: Philosophical Library, 1959.
    • Xie, Ming. Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999.
    • Yue, Daiyun and others. “Feminism and Literary Criticism.” Free Talks on Literature, no. 6 (1989): 18–24.

    _____

    Additional Reading

    Read more about Charles Bernstein’s writing and see responses to translations of his work in the boundary 2 special issue “Charles Bernstein: The Poetry of Idiomatic Insistences” (volume 48, issue 4).

  • Amit R. Baishya — Passions of the Political (Review of Anustup Basu’s Hindutva as Political Monotheism)

    Amit R. Baishya — Passions of the Political (Review of Anustup Basu’s Hindutva as Political Monotheism)

    a review of Anustup Basu, Hindutva as Political Monotheism (Duke, 2020)

    by Amit R. Baishya

    This article was peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 Editorial Collective.

    “In studying its (Hindutva as political monotheism) long genesis, my objective is not to advance toward a prognostic reading of the present…My purpose will instead be to explore, with some degree of speculation, the ground of the present.”

    (Anustup Basu, Hindutva as Political Monotheism, 10)

    The sentences above are crucial for approaching the novelty of Anustup Basu’s approach in his monograph Hindutva as Political Monotheism. Studies of Hindutva usually focus on its historical geneses, its sociological impact, and its anthropological dimensions.[1] Basu’s monograph is a path-breaking attempt to trace its genealogy as a political monotheism. This effort, he says, is not “a presentist elaboration of what we are witnessing now, but a deep search of its (Hindutva’s) historical origins” (2). The key analytical optic he deploys to understand Hindutva as a political monotheism, as an ideology that seeks a “unifying ethnocultural consistency rather than a theological unity,” and as “a monotheme of religiosity rather than religion itself” are the works of the hard-right thinker and one-time Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt (5). Schmitt’s theses on the concept of the political assists Basu in drawing out a “tacit monotheistic imperative in European organic theories of religious and ethnocentric nationhood” that he explores in detail in his first chapter (5). This monotheistic impulse utilizes the colonial epistemological category of “Hinduism” to invent it as a “jealous” political and national identity that eventually colonizes the apparatus of the post-colonial state. In an introduction and four subsequent chapters, Basu traces the development of this monotheistic impulse as a literary and cultural project in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its eventual replacement by “Hindutva 2.0”—an advertised and informational experience of urban modernity—in the contemporary period. Basu does not conduct this inquiry by presenting a chronological narrative of the development of core Hindutva ideas; rather, the word “speculation” in the epigraph above signals his eclectic and creative juxtaposition of multiple primary sources to trace a genealogy of Hindutva as a political monotheism.

    Hindutva as Political Monotheism (henceforth Hindutva) locates the search for a fully developed political monotheism in India in relation to two dimensions of inquiry. The first is the colonial epistemological invention of “Hinduism,” the larger arcs of modernity in India, and the drafting and implementation of post-colonial India’s constitution in 1950. The second places the contemporary rise of Hindutva within the broader global crisis of liberalism and the concomitant rise of ethic-national chauvinisms. Two conceptual terms serve as touchstones in the four chapters. The first is axiomatic that is derived from William Connolly’s work on American evangelical-capitalism in Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (2008). The axiomatic, Basu writes, is a “singular religious passion that does not necessarily depend on theological consistency” (5). This observation connects with his argument broached earlier that Hindutva is more about religiosity than about religion per se. He further specifies that the axiomatic is “a techno-social regime of governmentality than simply a theologico-pastoral formation” (5). The second term is parabasis, which he draws from Gayatri Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999). This term emerges from classical Greek theater and refers to the duration in the play when the actors leave the stage, and the chorus addresses the audience. Basu deploys parabasis to explore the “historical roots of a relatively recent voice of a wider urban consensus beyond usual suspects such as the ardent disciple of (M.S.) Golwalkar or the angry foot soldier of (Narendra) Modi” (9).[2] This urban consensual voice, while constituted by dissonant timbres, converges in crucial aspects to consolidate and sustain “the increasing metropolitan revision of regional eccentricities and the fervor for security and techno-financial growth” (10). The genealogical precedents and rise to prominence of this “electronic Hindu political monotheism,” which surpasses the older impasses of print capitalism, is the central knowledge-object Basu focuses on in Hindutva.

    Chapter One—“Questions Concerning the Hindu Political”—lays the theoretical foundations by elaborating some key concepts from Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (2007) and Political Theology (2006). The key extension that he makes to Schmitt’s vitalistic conceptualization of the political as the realm defined by the friend-enemy antagonism is by reading it as a “fundamentally monotheistic calling” and not via the German thinker’s observation that all secular concepts are at their base sublimated religious ones (14). This austere notion of the political is a “mythopoetic automaton” that enables the imagination of a unified people and the state only after having “categorically distinguished the believer from the infidel” (14). This “passion” is monotheistic by “secular transposition, because it has to be a singular impelling of devotion to the nation and the state” (14). In the colonial/post-colonial Indian context, this monotheism is conceived by the Hindu right as constitutively Hindu, an axiomatic that is then opposed to rival monotheistic axiomatics like Islam and, to a lesser extent, Christianity. A fiction of a primordial, prepolitical Hindu India is, thus, disseminated which has supposedly survived and persisted despite Islamic, and later, British colonization of what is now a nation-state.

    Basu states that he isn’t interested in an “instrumental” reading of the Indian context in Schmittian terms (23). Schmitt’s theorizations are not used as a mechanical explanatory model applied to the Indian context; rather, his “sparse” invocation is useful in highlighting three important themes of particular pertinence to nation-thinking and imaginaries of sovereignty: “the modern understanding of religion, the romance of the past, and the concomitant monotheistic imperative of political theology” (14).  Basu is interested in mining the connection between Schmitt’s notion of the political and Hindutva for three specific reasons. First, there has been a consistent monotheistic impulse in the discursive invention of “Hinduism” from the nineteenth century onwards. The Abrahamic cast endowed to Hinduism from that period paves the way for its consolidation as a political and nationalist identity that desires the state form. Second, Hindu nationalism is thoroughly Eurocentric and Orientalist at its core, a fact underscored rather risibly, as reported in the news portal The Wire (2021), in a recent revision to the history curriculum of Delhi University where the Mughal emperor Babur’s entry into India is termed “invasion” while the East India Company’s rule is couched under the more benign term “territorial expansion.” Third, when Hindu nationalism became institutionalized as a political movement in the 1920s and 30s, it was directly influenced by European fascisms and Herderian romantic-organicist formulations (17). But what makes Schmitt particularly relevant to Basu’s project is his identification of the passion of “jealousy” as the core of the monotheistic distinction between friend and enemy in the realm of the political. This passion facilitates the imagination of a Hindu India as “an organic whole rather than an associational pact” and is often summoned to judge the contrarian pressures of regionalism or to condemn secularism and federalism in the Indian context (151).

    Let us tarry with some of the distinctive features of Basu’s reading of the passion of “jealousy” in Schmitt awhile. In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt argues that the friend-enemy distinction is the central antagonism in the political sphere. Given Basu’s focus on “grounds,” it is crucial to note the way he distinguishes Schmitt’s friend-enemy antagonism and its relation to sovereign decisionism from the Hobbesian model of decisionism. Hobbes begins from the contractualist fiction and not the primordial time-space that precedes the contract. In contrast, for Schmitt, this primordial is the settlement of the question of friend and enemy. Thus, the friend-enemy antagonism and its settlement prior to social contracts or associations constitutes the very grounds of the political. Basu writes:

    The political is decided by a primal pathology prior to self-conscious peopleness; it…has to be an already-there organic unity. It cannot be associational or contractual precisely because it must express a singular and undivided will before reason and talk can proceed. Schmitt’s political theology therefore necessarily defines the bearer of the political as a monotheistic congregation, jealous of any apostates, pagans or heretics in its midst. (18)

    The passion of jealousy points us towards the chilling imperative that a war for extermination between both parties is possible at any time. The purpose of the state is to respond to this fear at every step. When the juridical resources of the state cannot fulfil this expectation, a “secular miracle” is called for—the exception.[3] This sovereign decision can either be a war against “internal” enemies or a “perpetual civil war as an index of relentless determination or purification” (18). The chilling imperatives of Hindutva as political monotheism, which can be conducted both as a war on internal enemies and a permanent civil war, echo these Schmittian postulations.

    Chapter Two (“The Hindu Nation as Organism”) is the core of Hindutva. This chapter juxtaposes philosopher Bimal Krishna Matilal’s work on Indic “little traditions” with modern Hindutva’s organismic invented “grand” tradition that attempts to subsume a massive plurality of identities via a “unifying ethnocultural consistency rather than a theological unity” (5). Basu deploys Aamir Mufti’s Enlightenment in the Colony (2007) to caution that there is no “pristine truth of pluralism” to contrast with the pristine truth of monotheism—both desires are sullied by the colonial modern. They gesture to a lost excess beyond the organizing frames of colonial taxonomies. But what is missing, Basu writes, in Hindutva discourses is the “critical admission of irony and amnesiac mourning—an understanding of the bygone as necessary fiction with a phantom aspect…” (34). This differentiates Hindutva’s monotheistic search for lost origins from the double consciousness that marks scholars like Matilal, Mufti, and, indeed, works like Hindutva itself.

    In contrast to Hindutva’s modernist desire for a theistic unity and consistency in line with the Abrahamic traditions, Matilal’s works on “little traditions” show that while the numerous South Asian scriptural traditions have “involved themselves with logic and epistemology, religious duties and rituals, metaphysics and soteriology,” they have hardly ever “furnished a constitutive moral worldview” (38). This seeming lack of a constitutive, coherent moral worldview and a massive polyphony of voices within what is called the Hindu tradition has led many Western thinkers to posit that “Indian religion was inseparable from Indian mythology” (Hegel) or that there was “no concept of morality in Sanskrit” (Max Weber) (39-41). To make Hinduism “necessarily Brahminical and resolutely monolingual,” as Hindutva attempts to do, would involve the negation of the dynamic osmosis among the tremendous babble of “little traditions” into a “manufactured and jealous ‘Epic of Traditions’…in order to institute a masculine, Savarna national morality robbed of all errant and queering energies” (41). This is a project still in the making, but one which has become more prominent and public in recent times.

    The other insuperable bottleneck that Hindutva faces is that of caste. While Hindutva discourse insists on the “original Varna as a recognition of merit over birth,” the questions of Jati and Varna are always complicated by plural traditions that are “artisanal, ecological, and based on everyday customs and pieties” (44-6). The problem here lies in Hindutva’s uncritical adoption of the Western anthropological category of religion itself. As Basu says, quoting Matilal: “‘The social reality [called] religion did not exist in ancient or classical India’—at least in a core, etymological root sense of the word, as reliq, or that which binds and relegates” (47). Responding to this absence, Hinduism is invented as a monotheism and as resolutely monolingual by Hindutva. The valorization of Brahminical theodicy in this monolingual reformulation is a manifestation of the desperate desire of Hindutva historicism to respond to and rectify the purported lack posited by the Orientalizing gaze of the big colonizing Other.

    The tour de force in this chapter is Basu’s analysis of the “pieties” of Hindutva discourse and the problems it encounters in endowing the nation an organismic cast. For Hindutva thinkers like MS Golwalkar and Deen Dayal Upadhyay, the Hindu nation in its essence is paradoxically predicated on “terrestrial homogeneity as well as cosmogonic inequity” (32). Once this promised Hindu punyabhumi (consecrated land) is achieved via the revival of Hindu virtue:

    …this nation, in its perfection, will be marked by a balanced metabolism of natural caste patrimony and a principled docility of the lower orders. Citizenship shall be defined by selfless service and sacrifice, not by individual rights and interests. The state here can only be an organic expression of an originary Brahminical peace; it may not be a profane artifice to ward off a natural state of (caste) war. (32)

    This invocation of Brahminical peace and caste war leads directly to Basu’s fascinating consideration of Hindutva’s “primal origin myth” and evocation of “deep time” that he conducts via an elaboration of four themes: “Time and Origins,” “Race and Law,” “Territory, Imaginative Geography, Identity,” and “Language, Countermemory, and Culture.” I won’t go into the details of each theme but will explicate Basu’s theorization of Hindutva “deep time” through a contrast with an interesting moment in a well-known South Asian fictional text. Nirmal, a central character in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2006), tries to explain how he will attempt to communicate the vastness of geological timescales to a group of rural children in Bengal:

    It’s not just the goddesses—there’s a lot more in common between myth and geology. Look at the size of their heroes, how immense they are—heavenly deities on the one hand, and on the other the titanic stirrings of the earth itself—both equally otherworldly, equally remote from us…And then, of course, there is the scale of time—yugas and epochs, Kaliyug and the Quaternary. And yet—mind this!—in both, these vast durations are telescoped in such a way as to permit the telling of a story. (150)

    Nirmal’s homology between myth and geology shows how the vastness of geological time is conceptualized by different epistemological formations in varied yet comparable ways. As the medievalist Jeffrey J. Cohen (2015) writes—“Every historical period works with the conceptual tools it inherits but is never bound by that heritage to the replication of that which is already known” (83). Nirmal seems to intuitively understand the connection between such different epistemological attempts at comprehending the vastness of temporal scales. He uses this understanding and tries to channel it creatively towards a pedagogical goal—how to make his students grasp the vastness of the temporal scales of geohistory.

    Is the Hindutva homology, or rather the erasure of the gap between myth and history the same as what Nirmal institutes between myth and geology? Time, as Basu says, in its Hindu-Aryan naissance “is geological” (49). Basu succinctly distinguishes imaginaries of temporal scale in Puranic cosmologies and the way Hindutva banalizes them for statist ends. Deep time in Puranic texts is not quantifiable in literal terms, and function as “pure magnitudes to invoke fear, shame and reverence…” (51). Such pure magnitudes create an “existential distance between humans of the present and the Dharmic exemplum” (52). Time-reckoning in the ancient era could simultaneously exist as cyclical in terms of cosmology and linear in terms of the moment of the here and now. The problem with Hindutva thinking lies in “making the two identical, and then vectorizing the whole thing in terms of statist mythography” (52). The complexities of the temporal imaginaries that so invigorate Nirmal to help his students encounter questions of geological scale is rerouted via colonial historiography by Hindutva discourse into “coarse positivisms of rise and fall” (53).  Invocations of deep time in Hindutva discourse is not a contention with different timescales, but a negation of timeliness and metric history, as for example in Golwalkar’s rhetorical flourish that Hindus ruled India for ten thousand years before a “foreigner” set foot in it (54-5). Metric time and history are conceptualized as a form of rupture. The original period of Hindu glory cannot be located within temporal frameworks; instead, history begins with a curving towards Kaliyuga (end times). Secular history is a fall from a myth of origins, while the myth of the golden Hindu past exists in a time before time.

    This conceptualization of deep time before historical time proper is also imagined as a period of Brahminical peace. The invocation of a mythic past in terms of Varna is necessary for Hindutva because it is predicated “in the form of a Jati revenge against Islam, not Jati parity within Hinduism” (56). The monotheme of a jealous Hindu identity ranged against rival axiomatics can only be consolidated by “foreclosing the emergence of countermemories and competing fictions of Jati identity” (56). Deploying Michel Foucault’s ideas on race war from Society must be Defended (2003), Basu argues that for this Hindu monotheme to emerge and to anticipate a possible future when this essence is restored, the link between history and caste-war must be actively denied or forgotten:

    No matter how far back one goes, profane historical knowledge does not present nature, right, order, or peace for Hindutva. Hindutva’s historicism is therefore founded on an idealism that knowledge and truth belong to the order of Brahminical peace; that they cannot belong to the side of violence, miscegenation, and relentless caste war. (62)

    Besides the potential extermination of the enemy and forgetting of caste war, this narrative of Hindu redemption is predicated on the concurrent remembering of an ideal Hindu subject that is “apparently different from the profane, modern one, yet one that is lost in an ever-receding past that in itself cannot be viewed other than through the prism of the modern” (86). This ideal Hindu subject, simultaneously ancient and modern, must be reinstated as sovereign among the plurality of identities in the subcontinent. This is one of the core elements of the Hindutva project.

    Chapter Three—“The Indian Monotheism”—moves away from Hindutva discourse to an analysis of “normative Hinduism,” a secularized, albeit Hinduized, sensus communis that has been the bedrock of the post-colonial nation-state. This discourse of “soft” Hinduness ranges across a spectrum from “benign to sharp.” It also oscillates between a patronizing benevolence towards Islam and a paranoid hauteur directed towards the jealous monotheism of Hindutva (124). In recent decades, Basu writes, this “apparently benign Hinduness has increased its powers as a psychological parabasis for a majoritarian nation” (88).  Chapter Three looks at “discursive antecedents” in the “broader nineteenth-century Indological identification of ‘Hinduism’ and the discourses of Hindu reform, Hindu anthropology, jurisprudence, and history” (7). This “benign” discursive trajectory of a Hindu monotheme has increasingly been replaced with “ritualized pathological expressions” (88). The fact that benign Hinduness and ritualized pathological Hindutva are often substitutable with each other reveal that they are secret sharers drawing from the same wellspring of the Hindu monotheme.

    In terms of specifics, “The Indian Monotheism” considers a broad “constellation of moments”—the Vedantic reform of Raja Rammohan Roy, the literary moment of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s universalization of the caste question, and the “pacific paternalism” of M.K. Gandhi (146).  Crucial to this discursive project of a “monothematic Hindu becoming in anticipation of the nation-state” is the furnishing of “imagined communities and personages with a subjectivity and a historical agency pertinent to the overall invention of a Hindu past” (147). This occurred in several ways—the elevation of neo-Vedantic monism as a counter to the messy facts of polytheism in Hindu practices (evident, for instance, in the literary interventions of Roy), the institutionalization of the Bhagawad Gita as the holy book of the Hindu people (a reading very prominent in Bankim), and the portrayal of figures like Rama and Krishna as prophetic personages greater than Christ or the Buddha. In each case, the development of the Hindu monotheme necessitated arguments with colonial Reason and the subsumption of ambiguous and scattered elements within the ambit of “antiquarian or monumental” histories that corresponded to nationalistic desires (147). All these moments of argumentation had major differences with Hindutva—for instance, Rammohan Roy’s Hindu monism as universal religion bypassed the passion of jealousy altogether, while Radhakrishnan’s pragmatic defense of Varna differs from the theologico-cosmogonic cast that Hindutva ideologues like Golwalkar posited. What unites them though is the deep desire for a quintessentially Hindu-Indian axiomatic.

    The discussion of the trajectory from Roy to Radhakrishnan is bookended by Hegel’s philosophical critique of the Gita on the one hand and B.R. Ambedkar’s critique of Hinduism on the other. Hegel’s 1827 civilizational diagnosis that the “absence of a monotheistic esprit de corps” in the Gita compromises the nation’s “security in a world of lordship and bondage,” serves as a foil for the intellectual ripostes by Rammohan Roy and Bankim (101). Much more interesting though is Basu’s discussion of Ambedkar’s Jacobin critique of Hinduism. I will highlight one aspect of Ambedkar’s radical critique of Hindu monotheism through a contrast with Radhakrishnan. For Radhakrishnan, caste became a means to contain race conflict in India. The genius of the Indian caste system, for Radhakrishnan, was the prevention and containment of race war (which was supposedly common in all societies) via a process of harmonization rather than the alternatives of enslavement or extermination (129). Caste, thus, is presented as not ontologically unique to Indian society. According to Radhakrishnan, it is a feature of all societies. It is just that it happened to be a practical and harmonious way to stave off race war perfected in the Indian context.  This universalization of the caste question and its specific flowering in Indian climes produced a “democracy of spirit,” although it was not amenable to the accumulation of wealth or political power (129).

    Ambedkar, Basu says, rejects the “naturalistic, race-based exoneration” of caste in the Gandhi-Radhakrishnan trajectory of Hindu reformism. The caste imaginary’s strict adherence to notions of purity and endogamous marriage went against a phenomenology of biological race—a fair-skinned lower caste person would still be ostracized while a dark-skinned Brahmin would not (136). From a political economic perspective, caste was not division of labor, but “a calibrated division of laborers” that could not be encompassed by economism alone (137). The essence of caste does not depend on a naturalistic explanation but is a “sublimation in time” (137). It shifts and mutates in a historical field “pertaining to shifts in custom, culture, production, theology, or the aesthetics of self-making” (137). Caste discrimination was a disciplinary framework that combines “a libidinal economy of desire with a political one of interest” (140). This notion of disciplining the caste other is fundamentally inimical to the idea of democracy that Ambedkar draws from his teacher John Dewey—“…a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (142). The problem with Indian nationalism, suffused by reformism of the Gandhi-Radhakrishnan type, is that it short-circuited social revolution in favor of a political one (143). In doing so, “soft” Hinduism suffused with the “lure of temperate Brahminism” became the raison d’etre of the post-colonial state. This constituted the “parabasis of the new Hindu normal” whose affective power rendered the “Indian constitutional revolution passive by foreclosing a constitutional morality” (145). Hegemonic Indian nationalism viewed the spiritual work of the nation as already complete millennia ago—all that was necessary was reform and revival (149). Rare exceptions like Ambedkar and Rabindranath Tagore, whom Basu considers briefly at the end of this chapter, went against the grain of this Hindu-normative common sense.

    Chapter Four—“Hindutva 2.0 as Advertised Monotheism”—considers Hindutva monotheism from the other end of the temporal spectrum: “in terms of millennial mutations in the era of information and globalization” (7). This chapter is a return to familiar turf for readers familiar with Basu’s earlier work on film and media cultures. The two key conceptual terms in this chapter—“Hindutva 2.0” and “advertised modernization”—fuses the analysis of contemporary media ecologies with considerations of affect. Thus, the assemblage of Hindutva 2.0 presumes a “neuropolis of populations” and sustains itself on “industrialized instincts of jealousy and anxiety” (166). As a mediatized phenomenon, predicated on the rapid proliferation of cellphones, the internet and digital technology, it does not depend on some of the established avenues of modernity like newspapers, books or university spaces. It is not dependent on “traditional” orders like shakhas or temples either. Instead, it works “primarily by way of loose, fungible distributions of affect, spectacle and…the substance of the advertised” (158). In an age of Whatsapp forwards, or what is colloquially called the “Whatsapp University,” it hollows out historical consciousness and reduces it to the syncopated form of a meme or a short message that can be forwarded virally. Hindutva 2.0 also establishes new synergies between “being Hindu and neoliberalism, one taking place on a plane of marketable desires and terrors” (158). In doing so, it spreads both soft and hard versions of the Hindu normal across the entire digital spectrum.

    The other key term—advertised modernization—draws on trajectories of affect studies that point towards “a neuropolitics of the twenty-first century in which multidirectional stimulations, attention spans, diversions, ennui, or boredom become potent political factors” (180). “Advertised” is a conceptual metaphor which goes beyond questions of truth and falsehood; instead, it renders “an innocuous ‘take away,’ a ‘feel good’ sensation, or in some cases, a consumable fear” (180). In such an advertised scenario, which is also necessarily majoritarian, there is “no narrative obligation to truth or closure”; rather, it is the affect it evokes and the sense of belonging it creates to a particular brand that counts (180). Probably its most well-known global manifestation in recent times is the “pure gesture” of the Trumpian lie. As is obvious, most of what Trump (or Modi) utter in public can be debunked with minimal fact-checking; yet, for the devout Trump or Modi follower, they operate as “pure gestures advertising a new covenant between tradition and modernity, rather than as dialectical matters of an Aristotleian politics aimed at virtue…” (181). The Trumpian statement itself may be outrageously false, but it comes straight from the heart for legions of acolytes.

    The Trump-Modi performatives also thrive in a changed scenario of the advertisement. The older model of the fifteen to thirty second advertisement emerging from “vertical models of mass culture” is passé. What has taken its place is an “order of convergence marked by nondirectional flows between platforms, instant audience migrations, and corporate cooperation” (181). In this changed scenario, political campaigning itself becomes interactive and is constituted by feedback loops and the processing of data that occur 24/7—consider here, for instance, the use of holograms and selfies during Modi’s 2014 campaign. The political personality becomes a brand that proliferates across a wide mediaverse circumnavigating a multidirectional circuit of affect. Branding, in Basu’s words, “becomes a matter of controlled chaos, leveraged in order to achieve critical densities of affect, recall value, or regularities of reference” (182). In this altered mediascape, the monotheme of Hindutva does not operate through a straightforward invocation of jealousy against the infidel; instead, congregations of believers coalesce in “virtual affinity spaces” that cut across older divides of city and country.

    Basu also provides a contrast between two different historical constellations to outline the specificity of Hindutva 2.0. This contrast is set up through his discussion of the journalist Akshaya Mukul’s book Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (2015) at the beginning of the chapter. Mukul’s fascinating book received a fillip when he came across the “Poddar papers,” a massive archive of correspondence, pamphlets and manuscripts by, on or written to Hanuman Prasad Poddar, who along with Jaydayal Goyandka founded the Gita Press in Gorakhpur in 1923. Mukul writes:

    As Gita Press stands within striking distance of a century, the only organization that may be said to parallel its success is the Bible Society. No other publishing house in India has marketed religion so successfully. (430)

    Through cheap editions of Hindu religious texts in multiple languages, its Hindi monthly Kalyan (first published in 1927) and its English avatar Kalyana-Kalpataru (first published in 1934), Gita Press made deep inroads throughout India, even into Hindu homes that wouldn’t identify necessarily with Hindutva. Espousing conservative upper caste-Hindu values and functioning as a foot-soldier of the Sangh Parivar, despite its claims that it maintains a safe distance from politics, Gita Press also managed to get a wide spectrum of notable figures of varying ideological proclivities, ranging from Golwalkar to Gandhi, to write for Kalyan. The notable absentee unsurprisingly was Ambedkar, a figure Kalyan was scathingly critical of.  Often deploying what Basu calls a “paranoid style” (155), Gita Press at various times has also effectively deployed the language of hate and insular religious identity.

    While Gita Press is still influential, Basu extensively discusses Mukul’s book to show how Hindutva 2.0 is a massive shift in amplitude in the era of new media forms and the neoliberal order. This is especially evident with the rise of Narendra Modi as a media phenomenon—a process that demonstrated “the advertised realignment of tradition and modernity” for a “virtual Hindu congregation” (182). In this new distributional matrix of information, the divergent energies constituting the virtual Hindu congregation could touch the “Brahminical sensible” [a term Basu reworks from Jacques Ranciere’s idea of the distribution of the sensible from Dissensus (2015)] at various points without being subsumed within a monolingual Hindutva discourse. Basu concretizes the difference between Hindutva 2.0 and the older model of print capitalism thus:

    That older revivalist discourse, as have seen in the case of Gita Press…struggled to subsume the modern disciplines and the physical sciences into an apex Hindu vision. It had to world the caste question afresh in an altered universe of rights, freedoms and irreverent democratic tempers. It attempted, at every turn, to reconcile mythology with history, science and realism, or theodicy with justice. Such discursive efforts—rarely sublime, often ludicrous—have had a long history and continue to this day. However, in this new ecology, they acquire fresh powers of particularization and shooting through. (183)

    The neuropolitical dimension in this new informational ecology enables the collapse of traditional distinctions between city and country and epistemologies like Vedic cosmogony and astrophysics. The public this ecology subsumes can react in a variety of ways within the frame of this Hindu normativity—ranging from indulgence to outright dismissal, from neurosis to humor. But the key difference between this moment and the “traditional” print capitalist one, as Basu says, is that “it can bravely ‘touch upon,’ without obligation, many matters that traditional Hindu nationalist discourse has either avoided or approached gingerly” (183).

    In a broader spectrum of culture, advertised modernity is also evident in the shifts in the fantasy machine of Bollywood in the era of neoliberalization. Basu’s earlier work on the “geo-televisual aesthetic” (2010) is particularly relevant here in mapping these shifts.[4] On the one hand, post-1990 Bollywood films are marked by the gradual disappearance of the rural sphere, the poor, Dalit or Muslim character, and an obliteration of what film scholar Ranjani Mazumdar (2007) calls, the presence of the street; on the other hand, we notice the gradual rise to prominence of what Mazumdar calls the “lifestyle mythology” of the urban elite (143). Basu argues in Hindutva that advertised modernization operates at “the level of colors, saturations, textures, magical transportations, luminosities, and sonorous resonances” by which the “new, urban Hindu elite…[presents]…its life and aspirations as artwork” (191-2).  Vedic and Puranic cosmologies exist side by side with a muscular patriotism and an open (and opulent) celebration of right-wing mythologies as in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s controversial film Padmavat (2018).

    The underside of this glossy normative Hindu advertised fantasy is the proliferation of gritty, stylish films usually about Bombay’s underbelly. The “encounter” film—which revels in vigilante justice and extrajudicial killing meted out to characters from the underworld—has become a sub-genre in its own right. Basu reads it as a symptom of a persisting fascination with sovereign decisionism and of vigilante violence (especially against Muslims and Dalits, phenomena that spill from reel to real life) in the Indian context. A good example here would be Shimit Amin’s 2004 noir film Ab Tak Chappan (Till Now Fifty-six), which valorizes the life of the “encounter specialist” of the Mumbai Police Force, Daya Nayak. The title refers to the “encounter score” of fifty-six extrajudicial killings that Nayak purportedly participated in.

    This acceptance of extrajudicial violence, of course, is not a new phenomenon in Indian public life as the long and controversial histories of legal instruments like the AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act) and TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act) easily illustrates. What the contemporary “encounter” film does though is to stage the majoritarian desire for sovereign decisionism with a “cool” dressing of the gritty, seductive style of noir. At the level of cultural fantasy, the proliferation of such films signals two things. First, it “presents a metropolitan caste Hindu existence as the only form of life worth living” (199). Islam enters this cultural fantasy only when assimilated into “an overall civic religiosity of the (Hinduized) market” as in the celebration of figures like former President APJ Abdul Kalam or the three superstar Khans—Shahrukh, Aamir and Salman—of Bollywood (199). Otherwise, the Muslim is completely othered. Second, such fantasies also present the “urban caste Hindu existence as the only secure form of life worth living” (200). In this variation of the fantasy, the Muslim becomes the security threat against which society must be defended. As Basu writes, this “perception of Islam as an absolutist ethics is important for the cult of the encounter because it authorizes the state to respond with fearful symmetry and an instant theodicy of its own” (200). The bleed between reel and real could not be more chilling than this.

    No account of the urban Indian fascination with sovereign decisionism can be complete without reference to the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In one respect, Modi represents the open vocalization of certain desires that lay immanent before 2014: the fascination with a strong leader, alternative history scenarios where Vallabhbhai Patel or Subhash Chandra Bose led India instead of the “soft” Nehru, and the long-standing admiration for Hitler’s works in many middle-class Indian homes. Basu’s focus, however, is only incrementally with the personality of Modi and more with the images projected of Modi as a media phenomenon. What interests Basu is how the new “congregational plane” of advertised modernization “animated by instantaneous and wide dissemination” effectively negated an old truism about India as a coalition at the altar of Modi’s charismatic aura. At another level, this proliferating form of advertised modernization also brought together two elite urban population categories that had hitherto remained apart. Basu calls these two population subsets the Gentoo (the colonial term for “Hindu” that draws on the Portuguese gentio—pagan) and the Dehat (the Hindi term for rustic). The Gentoo is the technocratic elite enamored with neoliberal development. Within this category there is a spectrum of possibilities: the Gentoo wedded to hard Hindutva, the Gentoo who imagined the metropolitan good life as indistinguishable from Hinduness, and finally, the secular-neoliberal who conditionally supported Modi’s economic “reform” persona without going the whole hog with his cultural nationalist project. The Dehat, on the other hand, was the vernacular elite that emerged from the rich farming and privileged caste groups.

    Before 2014, at best only a provisional and uneasy Gentoo-Dehat coalition could be imagined. The media phenomenon that Modi became from around 2006 onwards with the celebration of the mythologized “Gujarat model of development” brought these two subsets together on the congregational plane. For the Gentoo especially, “Modi was a Dehat who could talk the talk of the Chicago boys and talk it well” (173). The public personality of Modi that was projected coalesced the images of the neoliberal messiah who would turbocharge the Gentoo model of development, the “strong” and decisive Hindu leader who would not compromise on national security against internal and external enemies, and the “saintly” man of sewa (service) who rose above petty politicking and remained untouched by the profanity of corruption. This could not have happened without the new media ecology that was “marked by speedy informational flows and feedback loops independent of traditional institutions of news and veracity” and where “one could freely disperse affects and expressions without disciplinary enunciation or narrative form” (170). In short, Hindutva 2.0 as advertised monotheism.

    Hindutva is an eclectic and multidimensional work that makes major interventions in multiple knowledge-fields like media and cinema studies, religious studies, postcolonial studies, South Asian studies, studies of nationalism and affect studies. Readers of Carl Schmitt can also deploy Basu’s reading of “jealousy” to read the mutation of the German thinker’s later work such as his theorization of the “absolute enemy” in The Theory of the Partisan (2007). Schmitt’s work, written in the wake of guerrilla movements and anticolonial revolutions during the Cold War period, prefigures how the contemporary juridical category of the “terrorist” envisaged as a figure relegated outside the sphere of the law, follows the tracks of earlier legal categorizations like “pirate” or “guerrilla.” Schmitt’s underlying argument that the contemporary partisan (or “terrorist”) is no longer an enemy, but a “satanic pursuer” who attempts to create ex nihilo (quoted in Ulmen 2007, xviii), would be useful to analyze via Basu’s categories of the passion of jealousy and its relation to the primordial settlement of the political.

    Moreover, while anchored strongly in the Indian context, Hindutva also has global relevance. While analyses of phenomena like the Trumpian lie clearly illustrates the broad reach of Basu’s work, his conclusion clearly shows how the insights of Hindutva can be utilized to contend with our current global conjuncture. I highlight one passage from the conclusion as an illustration:

    In a world dominated by a cartel of international banks, a transnational plutocracy, and North Atlantic military powers and their constable states, the nation is no longer the seat of those two immense themes of the liberal tradition: self-determination and the rights of the people. Yet paradoxically, and perhaps precisely because of this, the nation has to be defined as a progressively more insular cosmology of justice. It has to be relentlessly purified and made to close in upon itself; the country has to be at once achieved and repeatedly taken back. (206)

    This paradoxical movement of simultaneous achievement and the repeated taking back of the spectral nation is not limited to Hindutva 2.0 and the rise of Narendra Modi alone. With proper contextualization, these insights can also apply to Trumpian America, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Duterte’s Philippines, Orban’s Hungary, Putin’s Russia and Erdogan’s Turkey among others. Indeed, as Basu writes, twenty-first century “fascism is about focalizing…intense localisms and threading them into a nationalist politics of rage and revenge banks” (206). The strongman (and it is usually a man, with Marine Le Pen one of the exceptions) is he who cuts through the patina of incessant talk (what Schmitt in an earlier Fascist conjuncture criticized about procedural liberalism) by monopolizing widespread public skepticism about corruption and about information culture. He promises to replenish the masculinity of the nation by simplifying discourse and identifying the enemy clearly.

    That said, I advance one critique of Hindutva from my own location as a scholar of the borderland region of Northeast India. While I grant that Northeast India isn’t the focus of Hindutva, there is a missed opportunity here for framing a more complicated account of the political in the South Asian context. In the first chapter, Basu writes that the specter of the concentration camp “hovers around the National Register of Citizens (NRC) project that the present Hindu nationalist government in India has reactivated in the Indian northeastern state of Assam” (19). I do not disagree that the ruling BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) has weaponized the NRC as a pan-Indian phenomenon, and that detention centers are a grim reality in Assam today. But the word “reactivated” above, to use Basu’s own terms against himself, seems to make Hindutva the only player in town in Assam (204). The BJP is a relative late entrant into the NRC process. The genealogy of the NRC predates the BJP becoming a major player in this borderland state and has to be located in the complex politics of what the political essayist Sanjib Baruah in In the Name of the Nation (2020) calls a “settlement frontier” of the erstwhile colonial state (47-75). As Ornit Shani (2018) writes in her book on the creation of independent India’s first set of electoral rolls:

    In Assam…ethno nationalist attitudes manifested particularly towards the non-Assamese ‘floating population,’ many of whom are Bengali speaking Hindus from East Pakistan. Local authorities expressed a view of membership from a state that was defined by a descent group and delimited to ‘children of the soil,’ who were eligible to have full rights. Thus, ethno nationalist conceptions were not necessarily on the basis of religion. (72)

    This long history shapes the institutionalization of the NRC as a discriminatory citizenship regime. These facts show that the grounds of the political in such borderland contexts are not exclusively determined by religious binaries and its attendant passion of jealousy familiar to scholars of mainland South Asia.

    To be sure, there have been synergies between ethnonationalism and Hindutva in recent times. But the completion of the NRC process also reveals the faultlines between Hindutva and ethnonationalist politics. When the NRC was published in 2019, for instance, the BJP was disappointed that many Hindus were included in the list. They have recently promised a new, updated NRC. This faultline between Hindutva and ethnonationalism has hardened with the implementation of the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) in December 2019 which proposes to give citizenship to Hindu refugees, even though the BJP went on to win a majority in the state elections in 2021. None of these complexities are however mentioned in Basu’s account. In fact, in footnote twenty-five of Chapter One, the only source Basu cites about the NRC is an NPR report. He also writes in that same footnote that after “lying dormant for decades, it (the NRC) became politically relevant once more after Modi came to power” (213). Anyone familiar with Assam’s political scenario would be quick to point out that this discourse has not been dormant in the region at all, and that while Modi’s coming to power may have made it visible to mainstream Indian political discourse, the Northeastern borderlands have long been wrestling with this issue prior to 2014. In comparison to the eclectic historical and theoretical sketch of Hindutva, one is left wishing for a more complex rendering of the political in a borderland space such as Assam in this portion of Basu’s book.

    By way of a conclusion and drawing further from my own location in Northeast Indian studies, I initiate a brief conversation between Basu’s book and another major book on Hindutva that was published recently: Arkotong Longkumer’s ethnographic study The Greater India Experiment (2021). Hindutva is essentially correct, I think, in drawing a genealogy of an urban Hindu normativity. But what about Hindutva’s spread in locales beyond the Gentoo-Dehat urbanscape, especially in places that have been to a large extent inimical to the idea of India such as the borderland Northeastern region?  In his fascinating discussion of Hindutva worldings in the Northeastern region, Longkumer shows how within the larger monotheme of Hindu religiosity that Basu identifies, actual Hindutva practices are defined by shape-shifting and flexible positionalities as it tries to draw the divergent cosmologies of “tribal” religions within its fold. Of particular interest here is how Hindutva actors in Northeast India deploy the language of global indigeneity, polytheism and paganism to show connections between indigenous religions in the region and Hinduism. For instance, Longkumer writes that a 2005 BJP party document titled “Evolution of the BJP,” draws on the works of anthropologists on local and global aspects of indigeneity to argue that:

    …paganism relates, crucially, to local gods and ancestors of the land based on ideas of polytheism…In summing up the basic overlap between paganism and Hinduism, the BJP text says: ‘In a sense at the basic level Hinduism is a pagan religion. As Paganism allows for evolution Hinduism too allows for evolution. Since Paganism is belief in many Gods there is generally no fight over Gods. This is the greatest virtue of Polytheism…Once Hinduism is expressed along these lines, then, it has the potential to relate with other native traditions that are intimately connected to land. (115-16)

    While Hindutva proselytization in Northeast India is still an ongoing and contested process, such sentiments about polytheism are often invoked by Hindutva activists on the field to contest the animosity that monotheistic faiths like Christianity display against “pagan” and animist belief systems. An urban Hindu monotheme that has become dominant with advertised modernity and a flexible deployment of polytheism as a proselytizing strategy in the borderlands—these are two torn halves that do not constitute a whole, but gesture towards a larger and still developing story of why Hindutva has become the dominant political discourse in India today.

    _____

    Amit R. Baishya is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Contemporary Literature from Northeast India: Deathworlds, Terror and Survival (Routledge, 2018) and the co-editor of Northeast India: A Place of Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Postcolonial Animalities (Routledge, 2019), and a special issue of the journal Postcolonial Studies titled “Planetary Solidarities: Postcolonial Theory, the Anthropocene and the Nonhuman” (2021-22).

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] For examples, see Jaffrelot (1995); Hansen (1999); Vanaik (2017).

    [2] M.S. Golwalkar (1906-73) was a prominent early ideologue of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), the apex body in what is called the “Sangh Parivar.”

    [3] Schmitt’s views on the connection between exception and miracles comes out most clearly in his reading of Chapter 37 of Hobbes’ Leviathan in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1996). Schmitt says—“A miracle is what the sovereign state authority commands its subjects to believe to be a miracle; but also—and here the irony is especially acute—the reverse: Miracles cease when the state forbids them” (55).

    [4] Basu defines the geo-televisual as a cinematic idiom that emerged from the mid-90s onwards and which cannibalized and combined heterogenous elements (MTV, video games, international travel, spiritualism et al) in a “fungible yet sensuous style—one that begins to operate at the level of the tissue and the nerve” (7). We notice an early intimation of the neuropolitical here.

    _____

    Works Cited

    • Amin, Shimit. 2004. Ab Tak Chappan. Mumbai: K Sera Sera, Varma Productions.
    • Baruah, Sanjib. 2020. In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
    • Basu, Anustup. 2010. Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geo-Televisual Aesthetic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
    • Bhansali, Sanjay Leela. 2018. Padmaavat. Mumbai: Viacom 18 Motion Pictures.
    • Cohen, Jeffrey J. 2015. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis: University of      Minnesota Press.
    • Connolly, William E. 2008. Christianity and Capitalism, American Style. Durham: Duke University Press.
    • Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76. Translated David Macey. New York: Picador.
    • Author. 2010. “Title” In Editor, ed. Title. Volume: Issue (Month). Place: Publisher. Pages.
    • Ghosh, Amitav. 2006. The Hungry Tide: A Novel. Boston, MA: Mariner Books.
    • Hansen, Thomas Blom. 1999. The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
    • Hobbes, Thomas. 1997. Leviathan. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
    • Jaffrelot, Christophe. 1995. The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. New York: Columbia University Press.
    • Longkumer, Arkotong. 2021. The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
    • Mazumdar, Ranjani. 2007. Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Mufti, Aamir R. 2007. Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
    • Mukul, Akshaya. 2015. Gita Press and the Making of Modern India. New Delhi: Harper Collins.
    • Ranciere, Jacques. 2015. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Translated Steve Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
    • Schmitt, Carl. 2005. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.     Translated George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    • —.2007. The Concept of the Political (Expanded Edition). Translated George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    • —. 1996. The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol. Translated George Schwab. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
    • —. 2007. The Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the    Political. Translated George Ulmen. New York: Telos Press.
    • Shani, Ornit. 2018. How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the UniversalnFranchise. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
    • Spivak, Gayatri C. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
    • “UGC’s New Draft History Syllabus Plays Up Mythology, Faces Allegations of Saffronisation.” The Wire, March 23, 2021. https://thewire.in/education/ugcs-new-draft-history-syllabus-plays-up-mythology-faces-allegations-of-saffronisation.
    • Ulmen, G.L. 2007. “Translator’s Introduction.” The Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political. New York: Telos Press, ix-xxi.
    • Vanaik, Achin. 2017. The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism: Secular Claims, Communal Realities. London: Verso.
  • Aamir R. Mufti — Qadri and I: A Personal Remembrance

    Aamir R. Mufti — Qadri and I: A Personal Remembrance

    by Aamir R. Mufti

    ~
    Sometime during the last week of May, 2021, my dear friend Qadri Ismail “shuffled off this mortal coil” in his apartment in Minneapolis. He was 59 years old and Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. Shuffled off this mortal coil—this strained and irreverent Shakespearean diction would have, I think, pleased and amused him, because he (like me) had received an early education anchored in a colonial concept of English literature, a concept each of us had learned to revile and treat with heavy irony. But his love of John Donne and the Metaphysical poets, and mine of George Eliot and the Victorian novelists, was abiding. To be willing to love what you also hold in contempt—we recognized this strange cultural attitude in each other more or less instantaneously.

    We met at Columbia University in 1989. I was a first year graduate student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature after abandoning a graduate career in anthropology, and Qadri had just started an MA in international studies as a Fulbright scholar, which he himself abandoned two years later to move to English. Each of us recognized a kindred spirit in the other. We had grown up in different parts of South Asia, fifteen hundred miles and more away from each other and in very different cultural contexts—he in Colombo, me in Karachi. But we shared an almost physical revulsion for the nationalisms and nation-states of our region. As a political reporter and columnist in Sri Lanka, he had lived through the brutal civil war between militants of the Tamil-Hindu minority and the Sinhalese-Buddhist dominated state. And my entire life had been shaped by the partition of British India along religio-national lines many years before my birth, my family having been part of the accompanying transfer of populations.

    I don’t think I’ve known anyone to take writing as a responsibility as seriously as Qadri did, with the possible exception of Edward Said. Soon after we met in New York, the editor of a locally based academic journal (which I later joined) asked Qadri and me to contribute essays concerning the so-called Rushdie Affair, the Islamic protests worldwide against the novelist for writing a novel, The Satanic Verses, which the protestors, and ultimately Ayatollah Khomeini, believed to be blasphemous toward the Prophet of Islam. (The invitation came at the post-midnight tail-end of a party—many of the most memorable experiences involving Qadri came at that witching hour.) I had an MA essay on the topic I could further develop. Qadri wrote from scratch at journalist speed and produced a hard-hitting piece defending Rushdie against his Islamist detractors, but I procrastinated in my usual way, taking months to sort out what I wanted to do with the essay.

    One evening Qadri came for dinner to the Victorian rowhouse in Harlem where I rented a room and, on his way out, stopped in the dark hallway and started berating me for taking so long with the essay. “Why should I bother with you,” he said, “if you’re not going to do your work?” (The definite article and an expletive separated the first two words in that sentence.) It was not a casual remark. It was pointed, meant to have an effect, and effectual it certainly was: it shook me to the core. I returned to the essay with an almost panicked sense of urgency and completed it in a few weeks. It was my first academic publication—so, at the very beginning of my writing career, there was Qadri.

    I was so traumatized by the brutal directness of his chastisement, it took me some time to realize that it was a gesture of friendship, a slap to the back of the head of a friend, an admonition to get my act together for my own sake. Qadri was equally legendary for making new friends with remarkable ease as he was for “abiding by” old ones. I take this phrase from his own writing, where he turned it into a concept of the complex political and ethical responsibilities of Global North scholarship concerning Global South societies.

    This first academic book of his, Abiding by Sri Lanka: On Peace, Place, and Postcoloniality (Minnesota, 2005), examined the ways in which disciplines like history and anthropology conceive of “ethnic conflicts” in postcolonial societies like Sri Lanka and argued that in one way or another, they reproduce and enforce the dominant nationalist approaches to the question of identity and social cohesion. His second work, Culture and Eurocentrism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), takes as its focus the concept of culture as it appeared and became established in Anglo-America in the course of the long nineteenth century. Nationalisms worldwide have based their claim to represent society as a whole on the basis of a supposedly shared and uniform culture. Qadri’s work exposed this claim to reveal the colonial origins of the very concept of culture. His death left two more book projects at various stages of completion: one, a study of the U.S. Declaration of Independence as (fascinatingly) an immigrant document, and the other an extended essay, inspired by C.L.R. James’s magisterial book, Beyond a Boundary, on the relation of cricket to Sri Lankan culture and society.

    Despite teaching in the U.S. and publishing his books with American publishers, Qadri seemed to care not a fig about the protocols of professional development in this country. Consequently, I suspect that most gatekeepers of the profession in America are largely unaware of his corpus of writing. But, for the Sri Lankan reading public he addressed often directly in both his journalism and the scholarship, and for a wider group of Global South humanities scholars in many parts of the world—India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa—his death means the premature removal from our midst of a first class and uncompromising critical mind.

    He and I never explicitly discussed this, but I like to think that our academic writings constituted something like a shared project: a critique of the cultural claims and hierarchies of majoritarianism and the nation-state, a critique, in fact, of all identitarian logics, and an insistence on honoring the secular and worldly nature of human life. “Minority” was for Qadri, as it is for me, not the affirmation of this or that sectional identity but rather a space for the questioning of dominant ideas and narratives of social life, a space which, in principle, anyone can come to inhabit. Of course we had strong intellectual differences, expressed freely and often, in robust arguments. I felt that his enthusiasm for theoretical critique was not always accompanied by a skepticism about the lack of historical and political self-reflection in the institution of Euro-American theory. And he thought that I was sometimes hopelessly naive in the manner of my continued attachment to questions concerning the aesthetic, the philological, and the historical.

    In our shared New York years, Qadri’s generosity was a fabled thing. Late evenings routinely gravitated toward Qadri’s tiny student apartment. Typically, sometime after midnight a group of us regulars would stagger in, Qadri having also picked up a straggler or two along the way. Then, in no time, after putting on some music, which, in my recollection, was often Bob Marley or Miriam Makeba, he would disappear into the kitchen and eventually produce a beautiful Sri Lankan meal for five, six, seven—a fiery curry, steamed rice or “string hoppers,” yellow “milk daal,” accompanied by a range of sambol and pachadi condiments. Somehow, he managed to do this without missing out on the many conversations going on at once in the apartment. From time to time, he would stomp out of the kitchen and, right arm pointedly raised, forcefully declaim to the entire company his position on the topic of the moment, before returning to work on the meal just as abruptly.

    Qadri Ismail, Aamir R. Mufti, and others, Colombo, Sri Lanka, Jan 2012. Photo: Saloni Mathur)
    Qadri Ismail (R), Aamir R. Mufti (L), and others, Colombo, Sri Lanka, Jan 2012 (Photo: Saloni Mathur)

    He repeatedly told me and others over the years that he loved my beef nihari, a strangely alluring dish tied to the traditional culture of the historical, walled city of Delhi. And I adored these beef, lamb, fish, or chicken curry meals from Sri Lanka. Food was central to our friendship. For someone to “eat my food, machang,” as he often put it, using the beautiful Sri Lankan word for friend, mate, or companion, which he popularized among us—it is used by both Sinhala and Tamil speakers, I believe—was an almost sacred commitment to all the ties and obligations of friendship. At the center of his life, there was this ethics and politics of friendship. If there was anything truly sacred, that was it. It is not an accident that the one word all his non-Sri Lankan friends associate most with him is this (for us) foreign word meaning “friend.”

    The conversations that took place in Qadri’s apartment were addictive and transformational. Funny though it may seem to those who were present, I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that he presided over a salon, but a sort of counter-salon, where discussion took “contrapuntal” form, in Edward Said’s sense of that word, restless and international, ranging across vast distances, histories, cultures. It seemed like we talked about the politics and culture of every nook and cranny of the world. The living room often resembled the forecastle deck of the whaling ship Pequod in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Ireland, Palestine, South Africa, Singapore, New Zealand, different regions of the U.S., France, England, and many other places—it was as if every corner of the world had sent its representatives.

    I met extraordinary people in that apartment—many, who were simply passing through, only once. As for our cohort of graduate students in different disciplines at Columbia, we were, as I see it, lasting influences on each other’s intellectual lives. These new friends and colleagues were some of the most brilliant people I had ever met, and Qadri brought us all together regularly through his extreme form of conviviality. I think it was an extraordinary and perhaps unrepeatable moment in the history of the English department and the humanities sector of the university. In later years, Said used to speak of this period that way—“when the graduate students started coming,” he would say. Each of us who came up through that period bears a responsibility to live up to its expectations. Qadri certainly did.

    This entire experience of encounters in Qadri’s living room provided a remarkable education about the world, one for which you cannot but be grateful for the rest of your life. I learnt at least as much in these discussions and arguments as I did in the formal graduate seminars, and possibly more. The arguments could be fierce, even ruthless. Everyone had opinions. Of course there was competitiveness, and sometimes, feelings could be hurt. We also had to put up with the overflow from the toxic, baronial conflicts between some of the senior faculty. I personally didn’t care much about any of that and wasn’t affected by it, though that wasn’t true for all of us. In any case, Qadri’s apartment, and our other gathering places, were to a great extent a respite from that silliness. The point of the conversations was to challenge each other, test our ideas, share our bits of knowledge. One evening I flippantly said to a South African visitor I was meeting for the first time, “Afrikaans is the oppressor’s language.” (This was sometime during the transition from the apartheid regime.) The person was of the mixed-race community of Cape Town, and Afrikaans was his native tongue. What I got in response was a fiercely delivered lesson in the politics of language in South Africa, and by implication the colonial politics of language as such, that still informs my thinking on the subject. Qadri was amused by the thrashing I received.

    Despite the accident of naming—to stay with the Moby-Dick analogy—Qadri was almost certainly the Ahab of this motley crew of women and men, than its Ishmael. We always joked about the hint of monomania to his personality, but that singularity of focus was directed toward the possibilities for joy in companionship, the creative energies and drives of human lives. When I met him, I was a bit at sea in the world and had, in particular, lost a creative relationship to my origins in South Asia. It was Qadri and another new friend of this period in my life, of Indian origin, who led me back bit by bit to a critical engagement with the question of origins. It was an incalculable gift for which I shall never stop being grateful to either of them. Like Qadri and I, many of us were displaced from our places of origin and struggling to recalibrate a relationship to home without succumbing to national sentimentality or aspiring to American cosmopolitanism.

    A friend recently said to me that Qadri and I both affected each other’s lives in significant ways. But the truth is that he affected mine profoundly. I don’t know if I ever said that to him directly, though I doubt it. It feels so ridiculous now that we didn’t speak to each other that way, but I desperately hope that he knew it.

    No doubt there was an element of the Rabelaisian about Qadri—big appetites, forceful rejection of primness, propriety, or pomposity, a raucous sense of humor, a fantastically foul mouth. The most baroque cuss involving one’s siblings or parents would leave his lips transformed into a profession of affection, even love. In all these years I didn’t once see anyone whose relatives were being thus maligned not smile or even grin and feel loved. It was commonplace in our relationship that one of us would start laughing in anticipation the very moment it was apparent that the other was about to make a funny remark or start telling an amusing story. Qadri’s spectacularly incongruent nickname for Said was Eddie Baby.

    I mourn my friend, I rage at his absence, I am remorseful for all the missed opportunities. But no one who wishes to honor Qadri’s life can allow themselves to wallow in grief or self-pity for very long, as a mutual friend from Ireland rightly reminded me. Qadri’s real legacy for his friends is his profane love of life, love of friendship and conversation, love of food and the sharing of food. These were, as I see it, at the core of his being and inspired his writing. It is for this I want to remember him.

    I shall never again be able to cook nihari without thinking of Qadri.

  • Ali Behdad — The Afterlife of Orientalism (Review of Leah Feldman’s On the Threshold of Eurasia)

    Ali Behdad — The Afterlife of Orientalism (Review of Leah Feldman’s On the Threshold of Eurasia)

    Review of Leah Feldman, On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018)

    By Ali Behdad

    Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism has been one of the most influential works in modern literary studies. As a political critique of European representations of the “Orient,” this pioneering text galvanized into existence the vital fields of postcolonial theory and criticism in the United States academy. Orientalism not only riveted the attention of the intellectual establishment on the issue of colonial power by rigorously interrogating the ideological underpinnings of familiar scientific and artistic representations of “otherness” in modern European thought, but it also played a pivotal role in shifting the focus of literary, aesthetic, and cultural criticism from a concern with apolitical formalism to political history. To be sure, from the very moment of its publication, Said’s groundbreaking work attracted more than its fair share of critics. While reactionary commentators such as Bernard Lewis and Robert Irvine[1] attacked Said for misrepresenting the project of Orientalism, the more intellectually rigorous scholars like Ajaz Ahmad and James Clifford challenged Orientalism’s “high humanism,” while taking issue with its use of Foucault’s theory of knowledge-power and indicting its omission of German and Russian Orientalisms.[2]

    Despite this barrage of criticism, Said’s almost singularly generative text inspired a whole new generation of scholars who have developed his critique by exploring its implications in novel, and sometimes unexpected, arenas. Scholarly engagements with Orientalism initially were marked by critical revisionism. Lisa Lowe and I, for example, built on Said’s critique of the complicity of European knowledge about the Middle East in the history of Western colonialism by elaborating the complexities of power relations between French and British Orientalists and their objects of representation.[3] Rejecting the monolithic account of Orientalism as a reductive and one-directional discourse of power, we independently argued that difference, ambivalence, and heterogeneity are the fundamental attributes of Orientalist discourse that have ensured its cultural hegemony and political longevity to this day. Meanwhile other scholars set out to rectify Said’s neglect of German and Russian Orientalisms. For example, while Suzanne Marchand has traced the origins of German Orientalism to Renaissance philology and early modern biblical exegesis to address its development in the context of debates about religion and classical schooling during the nineteenth century,[4] David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and Michael Kemper have explored Russian and Soviet Orientalisms as ambivalent, and at times anti-imperialist, modes of representation.[5]

    In recent years, scholarly engagement with Said’s Orientalism has been conspicuously marked by methodological and ideological orthodoxy. As Aamir Mufti laments, “At the present moment, at least in literary studies, attention to Orientalism seems to have reverted more or less exclusively to the form of cataloguing representations of this or that social collective in this or that body of Western literature.”[6] Such an approach, Mufti further observes, is partly the consequence of the dominance of an anglophone form of “world literature” in the Euro-American academy that perpetuates the hegemony of English as the language of critique and literary studies. “If Orientalism, despite its wide reputation, remains still a strangely misunderstood and underexplored book,” he explains, “this is possibly because readers in the literary-critical disciplines are generally still not trained to be at ease in at least some of ‘Orientalist’ archives with which it engages, and those readers who are professionally assigned the mastery of those archives in the division of labor in the humanities sometimes respond defensively to its relentless (and occasionally overreaching) criticism of their disciplinary methods and procedures” (28). Considering this predicament, Mufti cogently argues that “the critique of Orientalism must ultimately lead us to the Orientalized spaces themselves” (24).

    Leah Feldman’s On the Threshold of Eurasia[7] offers a compelling example of what the exploration of an “Orientalized space” by a scholar “trained to be at ease” in a non-Western Orientalist archive can productively yield. The book is chronologically organized in two parts. The first “recounts the story of Russian and Muslim cultural interactions” during the revolutionary transition and the second “chronicles the gradual disappearance of heterological networks that connected the Russian, Persian, and Ottoman empires with the creation of new forms of Bolshevik national consciousness” (25, 33-34). At first glance, Feldman’s book appears to be a narrowly focused study of a marginalized, if not marginal, body of literary works by Turkic Muslim writers positioned on the periphery of Russian Empire and Soviet Union, during the revolutionary period from 1905 to 1929 when an alternative or avant-garde Azari literary aesthetic emerged. But the book also offers a nuanced account of an unexamined interplay between Russian Orientalism and anticolonial Marxism. The book provides not only a rich portray of Eurasian literary modernity but “an opportunity to critically assess and develop postcolonial theory to accommodate a world literary scope” (26). In these ways, On the Threshold of Eurasia makes important contributions to recent debates in the field of comparative literature concerning translation studies and world literature.

    If, as Emily Apter urges us to do, one were to “imagine a program for a new comparative literature using translation as a fulcrum,”[8] On the Threshold of Eurasia would provide a perfect example of what such a program would look like. Like Apter, Feldman views translation studies and comparative literature as commensurable in that both challenge monolingualism to engage in transnational literary and cultural exchanges. In first part of the book, Feldman addresses the reception and translations of canonical Russian writers such as Nikolai Gogol and Alexander Pushkin by Azeri writers Celil Memmedquluzade and Mirze Feteli Axundov. In the opening chapter, Feldman adopts Said’s comparative methodology to read Gogol’s parodic prose contrapuntally alongside Memmedquluzade’s free translations to “illustrate the role of Russian imperial literature more broadly in forging cultural connections and anticipating ruptures between the Muslim South Caucasus, the Russian imperial metropole, and the transnational Turkic Muslim world” (41). In 1909, the Azari writer and critic introduced the figure of “Qoqol,” a transliteration of the Russian realist writer’s name, in the satirical, eight-page Azerbaijani periodical, Molla Nesreddin, which he edited. Memmedquluzade’s stories pivot around the figure of Molla Nesreddin, the infamous Sufi wise man-cum-fool, to create at once a parody of the imperial literature and a new literary language that fuses Turkic, Persian, and Russian references. Far from merely reproducing Gogol’s text, or even borrowing his plotlines, Feldman convincingly argues that Memmedquluzade’s translations of the Russian writer’s works constitute a political form of literary appropriation which “reframed Gogol’s critique of tsarist bureaucracy through the colonial context and reinvisioned the imperial canon through this Turkic translation of Russian prose” (45). The story “Qurbaneli Bey,” for example, which is a translation, or more accurately an adaptation, of Gogol’s 1836 short story “The Carriage,” is set in the South Caucasus and draws on Gogol’s formal devices such as sound repetitions and metonymy to satirize the class pretentions of landowning Russified Azari elite. In so doing, the story draws attention to the ways class and imperial power are imbricated in Russia’s periphery. As Feldman demonstrates, Memmedquluzade’s appropriation of Gogol’s “narrative about the Russian provinces in the context of the imperial Caucasus [thus] undermines the authority of the Russian imperial bureaucracy, while it offers a metacommentary on the unequal processes of linguistic and literary exchange that occur in translation” (60).

    In the second chapter, Feldman explores the literary relation of Azeri poets such as Axundov and Abbas Sehhet with Russian Romantic writers like Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. If the parodic works of Gogol provided Memmedqulzade with a model of social critique, the works of Russian romantics furnished Azeri poets with a “counterpoint” they used  both to imagine “a new civic identity and modern subjectivity” and to negotiate “the intertwining influences of Russian, Ottoman, and Persian poetics into an ethos of empathy, staged in a sublime Caucasus imaginary on the threshold of revolution” (83, 82). The process of translating the works of Russian romantics in this case entailed a multilingual form of textuality that “blended revolutionary politics with classical forms of mystical poetry” (86). Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s theory of translation and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope, Feldman discusses Axundov’s and Sehhet’s intertextual dialogues with Russian Orientalists, an engagement that generated “a new type of cultural identity based in part on Russian romantic poetics but oriented toward pan-Turkic and pan-Islamic forms of cultural and civic identity” (86). Sehhet’s 1912 translations of European and Russian classics, for example, appropriated Orientalist representations of Caucuses to “render the figure of the Muslim Other with dignity and heroism in his native tongue” (102). As a scholar equipped with knowledge of several languages, including Russian, Persian, and Azeri Turkish, as well as being trained to work in non-Western archives, Feldman is able to insightfully identify Sehhet’s translations as the site of a multi-lingual exchange that draws on Persian and Ottoman literary forms such as ghazal and qaṣīda to “provide a vision of poetic intuition, which reinscribes the search for esoteric knowledge onto the sublime poetic topography of the Russian orientalist canon” (104). Feldman’s reframing of “Azeri literary modernity through spaces of critical dialogue” can serve as a model for a new comparative literature that avoids encoding the kind of neocolonial geopolitics that Anglo-centric or Franco-centric studies of world literature often do, however inadvertently (110). Complicating the postcolonialist binaries of center/periphery and power/resistance, Feldman’s discussion of the dialogical nature of modern Azeri poetry thoughtfully attends to “the interlingual, intercultural, and intersubjective experience of being in the world of the text exposed at the threshold sites of intertextual dialogue” (119).

    In the second part of On the Threshold of Eurasia, Feldman demonstrates the broader reach of her argument about the heterodoxy of Azeri poetry in the context of the Soviet annexation of its eastern frontier after the October revolution of 1917. Scholars of early Soviet Russia like Michael Kemper and Boris Groys[9] have demonstrated the continuity between Soviet “red Orientalism” and classical Russian Orientalism on the one hand, and pre- and post-revolutionary Russophone aesthetics on the other. Following their lead, Feldman examines the revolutionary vision of literary modernity of Russian and Russophone Azeri writers in Baku where avant-garde Russian poets immigrated during its annexation from 1919-1920 to avoid censorship, and where Azeri poets fashioned a new Turkic poetry marked by a fusion of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics and Arabo-Persian and Ottoman poetic traditions. In chapter 3, Feldman complicates our understanding of Soviet Orientalism which, like its Russian precursor, relied on the work of literary artists, linguists, and social scientists for its discursive power. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s critical genealogy of avant-garde art and politics in the Politics of Aesthetics, and mining a wide range of Soviet writers and intellectuals, including Sergei Gorodetsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Viacheslav Ivanov, Tatiana Vechorka, and Grigory Zinoviev, Feldman elucidates the contours of the Janus-faced project of Soviet Orientalism. While much of the scholarship on Soviet Orientalism focuses either on its opposition to the bourgeois Russian tradition of Oriental scholarship or its support for the liberation of East from Euro-American imperialism, Feldman offers a more nuanced understanding of it as a paradoxical discourse that simultaneously celebrates and rejects the past. She shows that much of the Soviet avant-garde poetry produced between 1919 and 1920 relied on a Russian romantic Orientalist imaginary of the Caucasus while simultaneously aiming to create a Muslim communist subjectivity to free the “brave” Caucasian from the shackles of Euro-American imperialism. As Feldman puts it, “while the image of the Caucasus as the center of the new Soviet Orient formally denounced the imperial imaginary, it simultaneously drew on its discursive power to instrumentalize Muslim support for the Bolshevik revolution, mapping imperial Eurasian geopolitics onto a Marxist-Leninist anti imperial ideological platform” (127).

    In the concluding chapter, Feldman engages the formal and ideological ambivalences of post-revolutionary poetry produced by the Azari Writers’ group Red Pens, created by the Soviet Council of Propaganda in 1925. Borrowing Fredric Jameson’s model of narrative as a socially symbolic act, presented in his 1981 The Political Unconscious, Feldman considers a series of works, including Huseyn Cavid’s play Ibis, Nazim Hikmet’s Song of the Sun Drinkers, and Süleyman Rüstam’s From Sadness to Happiness, to trace their role in the formation of a “national Bolshevik political unconscious” and to invent a new Turkic poetics (207). Like their pre-revolutionary counterparts, these poets retained “ties to the romantic symbolism of the Arabo-Persian-Ottoman lyric tradition” (178). Yet, Feldman argues, what distinguishes the works of these writers from those of Memmedqulzade, Axundov and Sehhet is the instrumentality of their art as they repurposed the pan-Turkic oral cultural tradition for propagandist revolutionary purposes. Culturally influenced, if not politically pressured, by the aesthetic materialism of Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Mayakovsky, who considered art a “hammer with which to shape society,”[10] Rüstam and his Red Pen colleagues saw their work as a vehicle to move the supranational Pan-Turkic community towards a Muslim communist future. Both Rüstam and Hikmet, for example, deployed the genre of the Turkic folk ballad to “excite and organize the Muslim worker-reader as central to the creation of postrevolutionary Azeri poetry under the first years of Soviet control” (177).

    In “Traveling Theory,” Said warned us that a theoretical or methodological “breakthrough can become a trap, if it is used uncritically, repetitively, limitlessly,” reiterating Raymond Williams’ prescient observation that “once an idea gains currency because it is clearly effective and powerful, there is every likelihood that during its peregrinations it will be reduced, codified, and institutionalized.”[11] It is ironic, but hardly surprising, that this predicament characterizes much of scholarship that has engaged with Said’s Orientalism. Against this background, reading On the Threshold of Eurasia feels like a breath of fresh air, both intellectually and politically. What is refreshing about Feldman’s book is that it avoids the trap of Saidian orthodoxy which would have resulted in an application of Orientalism to the Eurasian context. Instead, Feldman broadens Said’s theoretical insights by attending to the complex “imbrications of imperial and anti-imperial discourses that animate literary representations across the empire and their role in the formation of Russian and Soviet literary modernity” (26). Reading together the poetic representations of the Caucasus by Azeri and Russian/Soviet writers, Feldman thus provides readers with an intricate understanding of not only the “orientalist vision of Eurasia and its attendant Bolshevik Eastern International but also the ways in which these discourses informed the creation of a modern Turkic literary subjectivity” (215).

     

    Ali Behdad is John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and the Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA. He is the author of Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Duke University Press, 1994), A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (Duke University Press, 2005), Camera Orientalis: Reflections on photography of the Middle East (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and the co-editor of A Companion to Comparative Literature (Blackwell, 2011) and Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation (Getty Research Institute, 2013).

     

    [1] Bernard Lewis, “the Question of Orientalism,” Islam and the West, (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 99-118; Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies, (London: Allen Lane, 2006).

    [2] Ajaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992); James Clifford, “On Orientalism,” in Predicaments of Culture (Harvard University Press, 1988), 225–76.

    [3] Lisa Lowe, Critical terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).

    [4] Susan Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: religion, Race and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

    [5] David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Michael Kemper, “Red Orientalism: Mikhail Pavlovich and Marxist Oriental Studies in Early Soviet Russia,” Die Welt des Islams 50 (2010): 435-476; Michael Kemper, “The Soviet Discourse on the Origin and Class character of Islam, 1923-1933,” Die Welt des Islams 49 (2009): 1-48.

    [6] Aamir Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 23.

    [7] Leah Feldman, On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018).

    [8] Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 243.

    [9] Michael Kemper, “Red Orientalism: Mikhail Pavlovich and Marxist Oriental Studies in Early Soviet Russia,” Die Welt des Islams 50 (2010): 435-476; Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, Trans. Charles Rougle, (London: Verso, 2011).

    [10] As Feldman notes, this statement has been attributed to both Bertolt Brecht and Vladimir Mayakovsky, and further elaborated by Leon Trotsky in his 1924 treatise Literature and Revolution, 179. The Azeri post-revolutionary poets, Feldman further observes, were also inspired by the Marxist spiritualism of the Polish polymath Alexander Bogdanov who in his 1918 essay “The Proletariat and Art” theorized the function of art as the “weapon or tool of the social organization of people” (183).

    [11] Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 239.

  • Peter Valente — The Body’s Prehistories (Review of Hervé Guibert’s Written in Invisible Ink)

    Peter Valente — The Body’s Prehistories (Review of Hervé Guibert’s Written in Invisible Ink)

    The Body’s Prehistories: On Hervé Guibert’s Written in Invisible Ink

    by Peter Valente

    One of the many pleasures of reading Hervé Guibert’s collection of stories, Written in Invisible Ink (Semiotext(e), 2020), is following his development as a writer from the earliest  stories in this volume, which date from the late 1970s, to the latest (which were collected in 1988’s Mauve Virgin). According to his widow Christine Guibert, he did not write any stories after 1988 and focused more on longer works such as the novel To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990).[1] Several of the stories published in this present volume have never been published before. Interestingly, the ones collected here, chosen by the translator Jeffrey Zuckerman, coincide with Guibert’s time as a journalist; many of the texts have the journalist’s attention for details that will capture a reader’s attention.

    The stylistic difference between Propaganda Death, the earliest of his books, and the later stories is between the raw passionate writing of the former and the more controlled prose of the latter. Guibert was one of first French writers of “autofiction,”: he used writing from his diary as well as memoir and fiction to complicate the narrative “I.” The writing in Propaganda Death is almost cinematic in its cataloguing of physical violence to the body mixed with an unbridled sexual urge: “My body, due to the effects of lust and pain, has entered a state of theatricality, of climax, that I would like to reproduce in any manner possible: by photo, by video, by audio recording” (27). Its scenes of the savage torturing and disemboweling of the human body, amidst slaughterhouses and hospitals, exhibit the frightening transparency of what lies beneath the skin, revealing its secrets: “no need for candles to brighten this night of the body; its internal transparency illuminates all” (27). In “Final Outrages” Guibert imagines himself as the young girl Ophelia, “stolen away in the bloom of youth by an ailment gnawing slowly at her interior (while making her exterior radiate!)” (81). In “Five Marble Tables”, he writes, imagining himself dead: “I won’t let go of my body, I cling to it, I push out everything I can inside but it all stops immediately, I’m clean forever now, my muscles tear apart, I can’t go back in myself anymore and I leave this deserted place, all the fight gone, all the fury slain” (70). Death in life is imagined as transformative; in a later work, Crazy for Vincent (Semiotext(e), 2017), published in 1989, a year after the latest stories in this volume, Guibert writes: “I struggle with the mystery of the violence of this love…and I tell myself that I would like to describe it with the solemnity of the sacred, as if it were one of the great religious mysteries…I don’t have too many sexual thoughts, of fucking or of defilement, violent hallucinations that would bring sex or lechery into play, but rather the suspended grace of bearing witness to a transfiguration” (85). The thrust of these stories is away from materiality, and toward a refiguring of the male body as a site for spiritual transformation.[2]

    Propaganda Death is also an ecstatic fantasy of destruction, desecration, and horror, calling for nothing less than the annihilation of the petit-bourgeois world through a complete reversal of cherished mores and customs, and its obsession with good hygiene, both physical and mental: “I’d like to smear my gonorrhea over the entire world, infect the planet, contaminate dozens of asses at a go, …my bed every morning is a field of carnage, a slaughterhouse” (51).  He continues: “Let’s open abscesses in all this stupid flesh!…Let’s love ourselves and hate them! Let’s orgasm as we pull our heads from our bodies!” (47). Wayne Koestenbaum writes:

    Filth is Guibert’s passport to infinity. Filth, as literary terrain, belongs to de Sade, but Guibert reroutes s/m through the pastoral landscape of religious interiority, as if ghosted by hungry Simone Weil, or by Wilde’s scarified, Christological denouement. (To skeptics, such spirituality might seem papier-mâché, but I’m a believer.) Guibert sees a cute young man at a party and “instead of imagining his sex or his torso or the taste of his tongue, in spite of myself it’s his excrement I see, inside his intestines.” (Kostenbaum 2020)[3]

    These passionate, anarchic early texts are difficult to read. They are unpolished, raw, unedited, obsessed with the violence of desire, and with orifices; but nevertheless, they are works of great intensity, written when Guibert was 21 years old, and likely to shock a reader into a recognition of his/her own body, and its impermanence, and the weakness of the flesh. They are performance, spectacle, and indeed, propaganda in defense of homosexuality and the violence of desire.

    Guibert seeks to “to uncover my body’s prehistories,” the traces of the animal inside the human. In the story, “Flash Paper,” he writes that while kissing Fernand, he imagines that “Out of the extended, warm pleasure of the kiss came other visions: we were two animals that had met on the terreplein, each from our own half of the forest, two horned beasts, two giant snails, two unhappy hermaphrodites” (Invisible Ink 230-31). And, continuing with this theme in the same story: “His wide-opened eye had awakened mine and did not leave it: we had become insects” (232). He and Fernand are, “two poor shameful animals” (233). Finally, he writes: “we danced like two spider crabs being boiled, destroying everything in their path” (234). The erotic charge of an encounter turns men into animals searching for their release. There is danger and excitement in the kill, the sexual energy of it: “If I fuck him, if I decide to fuck him, it’s first to annihilate him.”[4] This is “no simple sadism…no simple equation of fucking and killing, of penetrating and violating – instead, the wish to fuck or be fucked…is a sensation of being voided, chiseled, scalded, disemboweled. Is this consciousness a queer privilege? Is it shamanistic? Is it in fact not trans or queer or anything of the sort, but simply poetic?” (Kostenbaum 2014). Guibert could certainly be melodramatic, as well as poetic. Sex in his work is theatrical; he plays a game of hide and seek with a reader; but he doesn’t sugar coat desires that are complex or grotesque and this is what makes his work so valuable as a document of honest writing in a time such as ours when the line between truth and falsity has been blurred.                            

    In the section, “Personal Effects” Guibert examines objects rather than bodies and reveals their hidden meanings or forbidden histories. About the “Cat o’Nine Tails”, for instance, he writes: “The cat o’ nine tails has been hung, among the cobwebs dusters, from ceiling hooks, in the dim backroom of the hardware store. It carries within itself, in its unmoving straps, the screams of battered children, it exhales the pleasure of perverted lovers” (Invisible Ink 97). Gloves are a normal part of winter wear or when working in the garden, or in construction et cetera, but Guibert reminds us that “it should never be forgotten that the hands they’re keenest to help are those of thieves and stranglers” (103). With regard to the “vibrating chair,” he notes that the dukes of Pomerania found “extravagant” uses for it, including attaching a large dildo to its seat (107). This section of the book is representative of Guibert’s poetics. As a journalist, he was accustomed to examining the forbidden histories behind things which elude the eye of the observer. In “Newspaper Clipping,” he talks about certain facts concerning the death of a person and cautions about imaginatively reconstructing the scene. “Let’s come back to reality!,” he writes, concluding that “…everything, for now, remains purely hypothetical” (56). The secret will not reveal itself easily and it requires patient and research to reveal a truth perhaps stranger than fiction.

    In the world of these stories, love is essentially a complex power game, where the weak person is always at a disadvantage. Guibert is not a psychological writer, concerned with exploring in depth the subjective feelings of lovers. There is no utopian idea about love in these stories. Love is often deceptive, leading to betrayals and even violence. “For P. Dedication in Invisible Ink,” concerns a young writer who has complex desires toward an older, more established writer, and is called upon to help him write a book. At the end of the story, the young writer speaks of their erotic dynamic in the following way:

    The king of the jungle had been tamed, or maybe it was the lion that subdued its tamer, but one or the other, at his point of submission, attacked the other in hopes of breaking him, and these visits grew increasingly rare. The break-up happened over the course of the seventh year, bit by bit, as if by blows, and neither the assailant nor the stronghold, at risk of breaking their necks, wanted to bow down. (159)

    Love often begins with a kind of “tacit contract” that one or the other eventually betrays. In one of the central stories, “The Sting of Love,” love is imagined as a liquid that is injected in the lover. The story traces its various effects on those who have been “infected” and concludes:

    A happiness so great becomes unbearable unless one is shackled, or better yet, in bed, because the effect of this injected liquid doesn’t end with any climax, it persists all the way into sleep. It is impossible here to determine the specific link between consciousness and dreams. Anyone who wants to fight against this surreptitious transition with conscious effort, who is afraid because the dream, at first still just as wholly gentle, slowly turns into nightmare, flickering with swift animal shapes, anyone who wants to prolong this amorous stupor indefinitely with a second injection is struck with melancholy, as with a tarantula’s bite, and loses speech, nails, job. (135)

    Physical attraction is just as capricious and mysterious and not necessarily the result of erotic language: “We sat facing each other in the small, unlit kitchen, and I immediately felt within his physical presence a sense of elevation, adventure, freedom. The words he had said had nothing overtly erotic about them, but they suddenly, mysteriously had my penis swelling” (182). There is no attempt to seek a reason for his desire which would amount to a kind of defense; Guibert was open about his homosexuality and its relation to danger as well as pleasure. Furthermore, this physical excitement can suddenly turn into potential violence: “two years earlier, walking behind him, I had suddenly wanted to use all my force to hit the back of his neck with the heft of the camera hanging by a strap around my wrist” (178). In “For P. Dedication in Invisible Ink”, Guibert writes, “My feelings about this man were skewed: even as I could have said that I loved him, when I found myself before him, at long last, I wanted to go for his throat” (153).

    Danger extends to sexual encounters in the park. In “A Lover’s Brief Journal,” Guibert relates an incident in the Tuileries, where, after “a guy whispers the word cop,” he and another man get dressed, and leave the park; but Guibert is then assaulted: “the first one punches me in the face, another kicks me in the balls, right after a third guy takes a running start to headbutt me, I fall down, I get back up, I shout for help without thinking about it, they run off, I run in the other direction, I turn around, I see one of them hurrying to pick up the coins that fell out of my pocket, hungry, greedy” (48-49). The violence has as much to do with money as with sexuality: the link here is between capitalist greed and homophobia.  Though capitalism created the material conditions so that both men and women could lead independent sexual lives, it also, at the same time, imposed heterosexual norms on society to create an economic, ideological, and sexual regime, centered in the family. In the present time, when Trump, a symbol of capitalist greed, is seen as a spokesman for the white, heterosexual male, and encourages violence against marginalized groups on the basis of their skin color, religion or sexual preference, it is no surprise that we see a rise in violence against gay and trans men and women.

    For the narrator of “Flash Paper,” love is, “ a voluntary obsession, an unsure decision” (239). But Guibert writes of the man who died in “A Man’s Secrets,” “All the strongholds had collapsed, except for the one protecting love: it left an unchangeable smile on his lips, when exhaustion closed his eyes” (254). And the aging star in “The Desire to Imitate” says, “In this impossibility of love there will have been all the same a little love” (212). In these stories, love and cruelty are woven together; this unholy union was born of Guibert’s hatred of his own body, his self-pity, his anger, his theatricality, his passion for the grotesque. He is attacking bourgeoise values, and inherited ideas about morality, thus turning our assumptions about love and hate upside down. Men who knew him said he was cruel but he hated pity and charity; Marie Darrieussecq writes that he preferred real friendship and despised cowardly people (“Guibert’s Ghost” 2015). For Guibert, true love may be impossible, but all the same, he valued the love that was possible in genuine friendships. He sought the truth in himself by testing the limits of his body and of his desires. In a world where our freedoms are being assaulted by both far right conservatives and neoliberals, a writer like Guibert is necessary and should be read, because he questions our conventional ideas about the nature of sexuality, love and hate.

    Death hovers on the periphery of the stories in Written in Invisible Ink, and is often a central theme, and linked mysteriously with desire. In “Five Marble Tables,” Guibert imagines himself on a laboratory table, communing with other bodies, one of which is a young child. As I suggested earlier on, in the story Guibert feels in some way liberated: “I’m clean forever” (Invisible Ink 70). Guibert speaks of the dream, a kind of death-state in itself, as concealing, “a geography of pleasure, an itinerary with its impasses, its openings, its stairwells, its gulfs, its forbidden directions. Desire is there alone, idealized, freed of all materiality” (75). It can also contain, “desirable monsters,” such as the man whose “suffering was immense” because his “head is four times larger than his body” (129) and who believes the hand that gives him his food through a trapdoor is the hand of God. The monstrous, the forbidden, is a gateway to the spiritual.

    In this palace of desirable monsters are men with “dog’s or wolf’s heads” or with “scales or moss growing on their skin” (129, 128). The animal and the vegetal are mixed and the monstrous appears beautiful. A world based on reason, a human creation, gives over to the animal, the irrational, the monstrous. This space contains an alternate time that exists simultaneously with the real world. In “Posthumous Novel,” one of my favorite stories, Guibert writes of a space where, as a result of a “deatomization effort” in Holland, “countless words, incomplete sentences” are “hanging like clumps off of trees and, broken and sown over the ground” (143). Words are not necessarily attached to sentences but exist alone as fragments. In the story, Guibert writes that when one is travelling by train, one’s thoughts release, “more or less clouded and blinded” words into the air of the surrounding countryside and that they take root in the “roadside dust, a branch shaken by the wind, setting sun” (144). These words or sentences, cast into the world by the living, are “nourishment for the dead…a vital message of what happens in the hereafter” (144). By accessing these “sentences” through “x-raying” the “final trajectories” of the young writer in the story who committed suicide, the author is able to partly reconstruct the dead man’s novel (146). The narrator is like Orpheus, in Cocteau’s film, listening to the transmissions on the radio which are actually the voices of the dead. These words of the dead need to be remembered. History must be remembered in order not to repeat the same mistakes to the point of unconsciousness.

    It is in this forbidden space, this underworld that does not obey the laws of physics, that Guibert, a kind of Orphic figure, is able to imagine a language that is not bound to its materiality; it exists in the air, unrealized, incipient, spiritual, the image of a ghost. It is here where the monstrous, the aborted, the abject thoughts reside, and where the dead dwell. It is a land that “had never been described or transcribed on a map” (220). It is a forbidden and magical place, where one has the “courage to be oneself, to present oneself, and to liberate every secret, to invent them” (150). Guibert wrote this book in “invisible ink,” from that place, as if the stories themselves are only the visible traces of what lies behind them: the sexual encounters that produced them.[5]

    In January, 1988, Guibert was diagnosed with AIDS. As a result, he immediately found himself the focus of media attention and appeared on numerous talk shows. Early in his career, Guibert was openly gay and unashamed of his homosexuality and this, according to his translator Jeffrey Zuckerman, “was not meant as a provocation” but as “a quietly revolutionary stance in line with his particular brand of rebelliousness, in which, to quote a line from the end of “Ghost Image,” ‘secrets have to circulate” (“Translator’s Preface”13). Furthermore, Zuckerman writes, “When I began this project, all of Guibert’s translated novels were out of print – even To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. At the time, it felt symbolic yet saddening: if gay rights were moving so steadily forward toward equality with the broader population, why preserve this particular, liminal past? Indeed, such an unprecedented nationwide – and even global – sea change in attitudes toward gay marriage and adoption risked effacing the long struggle that came before it, from Oscar Wilde’s trials and Alan Turing’s cyanide-laced apple to the Stonewall riots and the ACT-UP movement” (“Translator’s Preface” 15). And for this reason, the stories in Written in Invisible Ink are a valuable addition to Guibert’s work in English, and a good starting point for the reader unfamiliar with his work.

     

    Peter Valente is the author of A Boy Asleep Under the Sun: Versions of Sandro Penna  (Punctum Books 2014), which was nominated for a Lambda award, The Artaud Variations (Spuyten Duyvil 2014), Let the Games Begin: Five Roman Writers (Talisman House 2015) and Catullus Versions (Spuyten Duyvil  2017). He has also published translations from the Italian, Blackout by Nanni Balestrini (Commune Editions 2017) and Whatever the Name by Pierre Lepori (Spuyten Duyvil 2017), Two Novellas: Parthenogenesis & Plague in the Imperial City (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017). He is the co-translator of the chapbook Selected Late Letters of Antonin Artaud, 1945-1947 (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs,2014), and has translated the work of Gérard de Nerval, Cesare Viviani, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. His poems, essays, and photographs have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Mirage #4/Periodical, First Intensity, Aufgabe, Talisman, Oyster Boy Review, spoKe, and Animal Shelter. His most recent book is a co-translation of Succubations and Incubations: The Selected Letters of Antonin Artaud (1945-1947). Forthcoming is a collection of essays, Essays on the Peripheries (Punctum 2020) and his translation of Guillaume Dustan’s Nicolas Pages (Semiotext(e) 2021).

    Works Cited

    Darrieussecq, Marie. “Guibert’s Ghost.” Tin House, 13 January, 2015: https://tinhouse.com/guiberts-ghost/

    Guibert, Hervé . 2020. Written in Invisible Ink. trans. Jeffrey Zuckerman. Los Angeles:  Semiotext(e).

    —-  2017. Crazy for Vincent. trans Christine Pichini. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

    Kostenbaum, Wayne. “The Pleasures of the Text.” Book Forum, June-August, 2014: https://www.bookforum.com/print/2102/herve-guibert-s-unbridled-eroticism-13298

    Zuckerman, Jeffrey. “Translator’s Preface” in Written in Invisible Ink. trans. Jeffrey Zuckerman. Los Angeles:  Semiotext(e), 2020, 1-15.

     

    Notes

    [1] Guibert married Christine in 1989, so that she could protect his estate and so that the royalty from the sale of his books would go to her children. The publication of the mentioned novel, in which Guibert told the world he had AIDS, caused a scandal because in it he disguised Michel Foucault, who had the same disease, under another name (Muzil). However, the public discovered that this was Foucault; he had been dead for six years (reportedly from cancer) at the time of the publication of Guibert’s book.

    [2] For Bataille, the indulgence in “perversity” also contained a strong drive for the metaphysical, for that which lies beyond the body.

    [3] I would also add Artaud to the list above in his researches into “fecality.”

    [4]Quoted in Kostenbaum, The Pleasures of the Text,” accessed on May 17, 2020, https://www.bookforum.com/print/2102/herve-guibert-s-unbridled-eroticism-13298

    [5] In “A Lover’s Brief Journal,” Guibert writes, “I got completely undressed, I write and that gets me hard, I jerk myself off with one hand…” Hervé Guibert, Written in Invisible Ink, 49.

  • Muneeb Hafiz — What is a Key Worker?

    Muneeb Hafiz — What is a Key Worker?

    This essay is a part of the COVID-19 dossier, edited by the b2o editorial staff. 

    By Muneeb Hafiz

    In the UK, Black people across England and Wales are more than four times as likely to die from Covid-19 as white people; Bangladeshi and Pakistani people around three and a half times more likely; and those of Indian origin two and a half times as likely. Two thirds of British Bangladeshi men over the age of sixty have a long-term health condition that puts them at particular risk from infection, while underlying health conditions are also especially prevalent among older people of a Pakistani or Black Caribbean background. “Minority” groups are over-represented by as much as 27% in the overall Covid-19 death toll and 63% of the first 106 health and social care staff known to have died from the virus were Black or Asian. Around a third of all working-age people from Black African backgrounds, and over a fifth from Indian backgrounds are employed in “key worker” roles (Office for National Statistics, 2020; Siddique, 2020).

    Body-Capital-Breath

    Across the long night of capitalism, embodiment – skin, flesh, colour, labour – and the struggle to breathe have constituted its fundamental questions (Alcoff, 1999; Weheliye, 2014). Is it not true that in one way or another, in the end, everything brings us back to the body? That whatever our descriptive statement of the human (Wynter, 2003), whatever substance or hue is its form, the absorption of oxygen and release of carbon dioxide, the resuscitation of muscle and tissue, the creation of energy (to live and, more importantly, to work) through a series of dynamic exchanges, is what it all comes down to? Is life not at least in part an essential question of embodiment, and embodiment a question of what constitutes proper life? (Spillers, 2003).

    And, thus, does its opposite, death, not become both an immanent question of how to dispose of the body that has ceased to breathe, and a transcendental question of what happens to the body in the time after it is no longer kept alive? Surely any assault on the body – saying nothing of the many wars on life which plague, and have constituted our modern moment – must have breath as both its affect and effect. Pain, grief, loss, anxiety, exhaustion, disease each having discernible if shifting consequences for one’s breathing.

    What has capitalism – work and its faceless workers, labour and its mystification, multiplying services and its veiled supply chains – been founded upon if not the attempt to master the breath of countless hordes, to mobilise the metabolic and reproductive energies produced, and life sustained by their exhalation? (Hartman, 1997). Taking the long view, with the advent of the New World and the constitutive excrement of its discoveries – genocide, (trans)plantations, ecological catastrophe, disease, psychic, spiritual and familial alienation, human-wood, human-metal – to the appearance of the so-called “industrialised races” (of Europe) some several centuries later, the struggle to breathe of some, and the will to suffocate of others has been a world-founding dialectic (Wallerstein, 2011).

    Capital’s Other

    This back and forth between breath and its suffocation, between beings and those who would spit at them, between peoples simultaneously denied their humanity and put to work precisely on the basis of human creativity, has cleared the terrain, both physical and symbolic, for the assembly-line Products of “Liberty,” “Welfare” and the “Rights of Man” (Lowe, 2015). These gifts of progress are weighed down with the unanswered, unaccounted – though never completely invisible – subjects of the marked; the breath stifled, the beings told that they are not. For the conditions of their possibility (or, production) at home, among those who delegated to themselves sovereign will and the space to breathe, have required whole economies of silhouetted peoples denied their own, and industries of death elsewhere that have been modern Capital’s nuclear power plant.

    There were always Others with whom nothing could be shared or owed, peoples turned into ghosts of an inaudible, imperceptible, delimited condition, despite the essential relation of dependence – or indebtedness – others have to them, and through whom their own lives are sustained. These people have been made to work for another who refuses to see her as such, who, in truth, could never allow cognition of the uneliminable fact of their shared embodiment. While both, ‘human’ (Man) and ‘labourer’ (ghost), require the space to exert energy and breathe, the spectre of the Other becomes also a vehicle for contamination who everywhere – in schools, in hospitals, in custody – challenges the sacred, but always already provincial, boundary of proper life due a share of the world, of the genre of the human constituted under regimes of capital. It is only he who is truly of here that becomes signatory to a contract of care and (re)cognition as an entity owed certain obligations. Those unfortunate Wretcheds over there, or indeed here, that is, the half-subjects of Capital’s bloody service supply chain, whose existence is registered as mere happenstance or as singular function, must instead be spoken for and kept clocking in (Fanon, 2001).

    Despite the work they do and the forms they must fill, with bodies that move and hands that write and feel as well as work, these transients are the subjects par excellence of the application clause, or its internal logic of the exception: If you insist on being here then you must not be seen. If you insist on being seen then you must not be heard. If you insist on being heard then it must be in a tongue and with sentences of our choosing. And if you do indeed pick up this new language of ours then you would do well to forget your mother’s.

    Dark mortalities

    Our moment of mass death and the makeshift morgue, more corpses than we are willing to bring ourselves to count, drives home the inescapable limit of the body and breath. This despite the principle of unequal shares through which certain lives become disproportionately superfluous or at risk, and others naturally secured. To be sure, this virus has brought with it notions of a great levelling (Alexander, 2020). The reality that anyone, anywhere is vulnerable and, thus, its attack on our shared embodiment speaks to a planetary predicament in which each and every human is caught It is this reason that today death is measured as being in excess.

    But just as the breathing or gasping body lives and labours in the midst of certain historical, social, political and economic tendencies, this levelling, which has brought on an hour of autophagy – bodies devouring themselves of the capacity to draw breath and live on – also shares in those tendencies. “Disease is never neutral,” Anne Boyer (2019) has told us, “treatment never not ideological. Mortality never without its politics.” This longstanding politics of mortality, which draws a great separation between the visible person and invisible worker, and has been instituted through industrial progress, its colony, outpost, and tax haven, is the systematic legislation of death and an all-out war on life. The freedom to live and breathe is made possible by many more who cannot.

    It is not clear that this fundamental relation of my life to the death or murder of an Other has left us (Mbembe, 2003). Before the arrival of this virus, humanity – as both physical subject and ethical concept – was already threatened with suffocation (Mbembe, 2020). Entire segments of the earth’s population, entire races caught and mobilised in an intense struggle to breathe when others would have them disappear, or more fittingly under the reign of capitalism, die at work.

    The sharing of tendencies between virus and the worldly context of its transmission, a world not so much of a great levelling but one built on a great separation (Fanon, 1967); of my body, breath and labour kept a world- and time-apart from the Other’s, thus speaks to and amidst certain regimes of erasure. Because of the industries of strangulation upon which the modern world was founded and continues to proceed, that the makeshift morgue has already been a central logic of capitalism, we were always already haunted by the supposed excess (death) of the Other long before this virus’s eruption.

    This disproportionate risk, exposure and perishing to the virus is among peoples already marked, as Black, brown, poor, jobless, homeless, unsettled, resident with no recourse to public funds. That is, names which sanction the deaths of Others whose work sustains life elsewhere, a haunted exchange that should be set in the larger contexts of, and intimacies between, breathing, labouring bodies across time and space.

    The relation of my life to the disproportionate death of an Other, a worker whose ‘key’ status is contingent on his/her ability to labour but whose humanness as worthy of protection has long been in question, speaks to a profound emergency that could never be recognised as such. This is a loss not merely of Black and brown life, of the marked person’s ability to breathe freely. It rather amounts to an exit from a confrontation with the scale of mass death, mapped yesterday onto faraway frontiers and processes of extraction, accumulation, settlement and repopulation, with all the skeletal and geologic spikes that were their castoff, and that today is right here, seeking answers.

    A day after

    The body of the Other has long been drawn as a vehicle for contamination, a haunting figure, who is there but not, who must be kept at bay, locked down but productive, one whose own suffocation or deportation allegedly spells safety for those unmarked. In this negative relation of my body to the breath of the Other, we have never learned how to die, never mind how to live, in a world that was always and remains the only one we have, and which we must share with everything that breathes.

    The contingency of my breathing freely on the stifling of an Other (what is that if not at core a definition of freedom as it arose from colony), bespeaks the pathogenic quality of capitalism. The great levelling of this new virus that is transmitted and kills indiscriminately does its work in a world of deep discrimination. The profound unmooring of untimely death and grief drift through an earthly condition in which the premature death of its simultaneously marked (hypervisible) and neglected (masked) peoples is proposed as the natural order of things.

    It is not a question, then, of pre- and post-COVID. There must be a more expansive notion of the day after. It must be one in which to have a body – at the level of species-being – is to be owed the space to breathe. The delimiting terms of the political sphere, of law and state, capital and its endless abstractions will no longer suffice if we are to learn how to live and die in-common, as occupants of ultimately transitory but visible life (Glissant, 1997). These are questions biospheric in nature and planetary in scale. We are from the very beginning “given over” (Butler, 2004) to the world of an Other – human and natural, this distinction can no longer be allowed to hold – however much their presence is denied. Each of us must now answer to our own names, and are to be held responsible for an Other’s share, for their right to breathe clean air, if this earth is to survive.

    Now it is true that the day after may herald an even greater separation than before, that the relation of the body who lives and breathes to the many more who suffocate and die is deepened as a logic of our world, and given renewed legitimacy through euphemisms of economic recovery, (bio)political security and national integrity.

    Living and dying together, breath and its expiration, however, is an, if not the unassailable surplus of being. Hard as some might try to graft the ephemeral and elementally vulnerable nature of our embodiment to the machine – the birth of the new synthetic-body or object-body or digital-body – living and dying together will remain our lot as beings on this earth-not-of-our-making. At least for now.

    A proper day after will only come through today’s and yesterday’s reckoning, of both its light and dark faces, its breathing and gasping bodies. Until we bring ourselves to confront premature death’s relation to the manmade, though no less extrahuman, factors of race, gender, labour, wealth, citizenship and much more, our existence will be forever haunted by the lives and death of Others; our own bodies weighed down by the breathless who may well be gone but whose body-the-same-as-mine can never truly be denied.

     

    Muneeb Hafiz is an Associate Lecturer in International Relations at Lancaster University, UK. His current research concerns the intersections between race, subjectivity and ecology.

     

    Alcoff, Linda Martin. 1999. “Towards a phenomenology of racial embodiment.” Radical Philosophy, no. 95: 15-26.

    Alexander, Ella. “Coronavirus is not a great leveller: we do not suffer the same.” Harper’s Bazaar, 12 April 2020. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/culture/culture-news/a32107262/coronavirus-is-not-a-great-leveller/

    Boyer, Anne. 2019. The Undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

    Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

    Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.

    Fanon, Frantz. 2001. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin.

    Glissant, Edouard. 1997. Poetics of relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

    Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The intimacies of four continents. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1: 11-40.

    Mbembe, Achille. 2020. “The universal Right to Breathe.” Critical Inquiry, 13 April 2020. https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/

    Office for National Statistics, “Coronavirus (COVID-19) related deaths by ethnic group, England and Wales: 2 March 2020 to 10 April 2020.” ONS, 7 May 2020. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/coronavirusrelateddeathsbyethnicgroupenglandandwales/2march2020to10april2020.

    Siddique, Haroon. 2020. “British BAME Covid-19 death rate ‘more than twice that of whites’” The Guardian, 1 May 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/british-bame-covid-19-death-rate-more-than-twice-that-of-whites.

    Spillers, Hortense. 2003. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”, in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, pp. 203–229. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2011. The Modern World System. 4 vols. London: University of California Press.

    Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation. An Argument.” New Centennial Review no. 33: 257-337.