Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and The Future of Critique: Critical Engagements With Benita Parry

Marxism, Postcolonial Theory
and the Future of Critique
Using the aesthetic and political concerns of Parry’s oeuvre as a touch-

stone, this book explores new directions for postcolonial studies, Marx-
ist literary criticism, and world literature in the contemporary moment,
seeking to re-imagine the field, and alongside it, new possibilities for
left critique. It is the first volume of essays focusing on the field-defining
intellectual legacy of the literary scholar Benita Parry. As a leading
critic of the post-structuralist turn within postcolonial studies, Parry
has not only brought Marxism and postcolonial theory into a produc-
tive, albeit tense, dialogue, but has reinvigorated the field by bringing
critical questions of resistance and struggle to bear on aesthetic forms.
The book’s aim is two-fold: first, to evaluate Parry’s formative influence
within postcolonial studies and its interface with Marxist literary crit-
icism, and second, to explore new terrains of scholarship opened up by
Parry’s work. It provides a critical overview of Parry’s key interventions,
such as her contributions to colonial discourse theory; her debate with
Spivak on subaltern consciousness and representation; her critique of
post-apartheid reconciliation and neoliberalism in South Africa; her ma-
terialist critique of writers such as Kipling, Conrad, and Salih; her work
on liberation theory, resistance, and radical agency; as well as more
recent work on the aesthetics of “peripheral modernity.” The volume
contains cutting-edge work on peripheral aesthetics, the world-literary
system, critiques of global capitalism and capitalist modernity, and the
resurgence of Marxism, communism, and liberation theory by a range of
established and new scholars who represent a dissident and new school
of thought within postcolonial studies more generally. It concludes with
the first-ever detailed interview with Benita Parry about her activism,
political commitments, and her life and work as a scholar.
Sharae Deckard is Lecturer in World Literature at University College

Dublin. She is the author of Paradise Discourse, Imperialism and Glo-
balization (Routledge 2010) and co-author (with the Warwick Research
Collective) of Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New
Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool UP 2015). She has edited spe-
cial issues of Ariel, The Journal of World-Systems Research, Green
Letters, and The Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her research centres
on world-ecology and world-systems approaches to postcolonial and
world literature.
Rashmi Varma teaches postcolonial and world literature and trans-

national feminist theory in the Department of English and Compara-
tive Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of
The Postcolonial City and Its Subjects (2012) and of the forthcoming
Modern Tribal: Representing Indigeneity in Postcolonial India. She is
a founding editorial collective member of the journal Feminist Dissent.
Most recently, she has co-edited (with Subir Sinha) a symposium on
Marxism and postcolonial theory for the journal Critical Sociology.
Routledge Research In Postcolonial Literatures
Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial
Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide
range of research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the
field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in
previously (or presently) colonized areas, and will include material
from non-anglophone as well as anglophone colonies and literatures.
Series editors: Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney
57 Zoë Wicomb & the Translocal

Writing Scotland & South Africa
Edited by Kai Easton and Derek Attridge
58 Olive Schreiner and African Modernism

Allegory, Empire and Postcolonial Writing
Jade Munslow Ong
59 Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations

Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine
Lindsey Moore
60 Critical Branding
Postcolonial Studies and the Market
Caroline Koegler
61 Anglo-American Imperialism and the Pacific

Discourses of Encounter
Edited by Michelle Keown, Andrew Taylor and Mandy Treagus
62 Popular Postcolonialisms
Discourses of Empire and Popular Culture
Edited by Nadia Atia and Kate Houlden
63 Marxism, Postcolonial Theory and the Future of Critique

Critical Engagements with Benita Parry
Edited by Sharae Deckard and Rashmi Varma
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Marxism, Postcolonial
Theory and the Future
of Critique
Critical Engagements with Benita Parry
Edited by Sharae Deckard and

Rashmi Varma
First published 2019
by Routledge
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Foreword xi
N E I L L A Z A RU S
Against the Grain: An Introduction to Benita Parry’s

Intellectual Itinerary 1
S H A R A E D E C K A R D A N D R A S H M I VA R M A
PART I
Aesthetics 19
1 Against Modernism 21
T I MOT H Y BR EN NA N
2 “I remember, I remember so as not to forget!” Orhan

Pamuk’s Melancholic Agency and the Splenetic Périples
of Mediterranean Writing 37
N O R B E RT B U G EJ A
3 “Broken Histories”: The Tribal and the Modern in Arun

Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas 61
R A S H M I VA R M A
4 Peripheral Irrealisms: Water-Spirits, World-Ecology, and

Neoliberalism 78
M ICH A EL N IBLET T
5 “Not even a sci-fi writer”: Peripheral Genres, the World-

System Novel, and Junot Díaz 96
SH A R A E DECK A R D
viii Contents
PART II
Politics 115
6 Towards a Pre-History of National Liberation Struggle 117

P E T E R H A L LWA R D
7 Disaffection, Sedition, and Resistance: Aurobindo Ghose

and Revolutionary Thought 141
K E YA G A N G U LY
8 Revolutionary Nationalism and Global Horizons:

The Ghadar Party on Ireland and China 165
P R A N AV J A N I
9 The Limits of African Nationalism: From Anti-Apartheid

Resistance to Postcolonial Critique 191
DAV I D J O H N S O N
10 Maverick Marxism? Eclipsed Enlightenments, Horizons

of Solidarity, and Utopian Realism 213
C A RO L I N E RO O N E Y
PART III
Interlocutions 235
11 “It could be otherwise, it should be otherwise”:

A Conversation with Benita Parry 237
S harae D eckard ( S D) and R ashmi Varma ( RV )
12 “Intellectual Life: A Duty to Dissent”:

A Graduation Address Delivered
at the University of York, 12 July 2006 261
B E N I TA PA R RY
13 Benita Parry’s Position: Address delivered at the

University of Warwick, 17 November 2001 264
T I MOT H Y BR EN NA N
Notes on Contributors 275

Bibliography of Benita Parry’s Works 279
Index 283
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the reviewers for important feedback on our

book proposal, as well as the editorial team at Routledge and series ed-
itors Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney for their support of this col-
lection in the first instance.
Thanks are also due to Divya Rao for patiently transcribing Benita’s
interview for publication, to Kaitlyn Picard for editorial assistance, and
to Lucy Potter for indexing.
We are grateful to all our contributors for their patience and commit-
ment to this project.
This book comes out of our long association with Benita as a col-
league, teacher, mentor, comrade, and friend. It is deeply imbued with
memories of long and intense conversations nourished by the warm
hospitality of Bill and Benita Parry in their beautiful home in Marton,
Warwickshire. We also wish to thank Rachel, David, Sasha and J essie—
Benita’s beloved family—for being a continuous source of love and sup-
port for Benita in Wales, where her home continues to provide joy and
intellectual comradeship to her many friends.
Finally, we would like to thank all of Benita’s colleagues, friends, stu-
dents, mentees, and interlocutors, too many to be included in a single
volume and too numerous to be named individually, who are an im-
portant part of her intellectual and personal journey. We hope that this
collection of essays is only the beginning of our expression of solidarity
and critique, which for Benita, always go hand in hand.
Foreword
Neil Lazarus
It is both a privilege and a pleasure for me to be able to contribute this

foreword to a collection of essays engaged with and inspired by Benita
Parry’s extraordinary scholarship in a career that is now approaching
five decades. I first met Benita at a symposium on colonial discourse and
postcolonial theory at Essex University in 1991, and we’ve been close
friends—as well as colleagues and allies—ever since. Since moving from
the US to Britain in 1999, I’ve spent hours and hours—most often at
Benita’s beautiful, spacious, atmospheric home in Marton, where we
would typically sit in the kitchen over dinner with her beloved Aga range
behind us—talking about life and literature, politics, philosophy, and
postcolonial studies, Nadine Gordimer (whose writing Benita dislikes:
we disagree on this) and Bruce Springsteen (whose music Benita loves:
we agree on this)… I have learned a very great deal from these conversa-
tions, which I have treasured also for the comradeship and intellectual
solidarity they have offered. For twenty-five years, Benita has been so
close and valued an interlocutor of mine that she has come to stand in my
mind’s eye as the first reader of whatever I write of an academic nature.
By the time I first met Benita at the Essex symposium, I had already
been reading her work with growing admiration for fifteen years or
so—ever since Peter Hulme suggested to me, when I was still an MA
student at the University of Essex, that I take a look at a book called
Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagina-
tion, 1880–1930. Appearing originally in 1972 (and later republished
by Verso [1998]), Delusions was a pioneering study of Anglo-Indian lit-
erary culture: surveying diaries, letters, fiction, journalistic and policy
writing, it offered a discriminating and wide-ranging commentary on
British colonial ideology in India across the tumultuous century from
1857 to decolonization in 1947. When Benita’s second book, Conrad
and Imperialism, appeared in 1980, I got hold of it as soon as I could.
It proved to be a superb, nuanced study of the politics of Conrad’s fic-
tion, delving into questions that even Edward Said had failed to raise
in his own early study (1966) of the “fiction of autobiography” in Con-
rad. Conrad and Imperialism gave me confidence that I sorely needed
in 1980, when I was finding it quite hard to hold my nerve in my own
xii Foreword
doctoral thesis on A frican literature and Africanist literary criticism.
I’ve often thought that the book is best read in conjunction with Jonah
Raskin’s The Mythology of Imperialism (itself recently re-issued, after
having been allowed to lapse into relative obscurity in the 1980s and
1990s) and Chinua Achebe’s powerful essay, “An Image of Africa,”
whose counterposed (and overstated) positions Benita’s book might be
said to contest and mediate. No subsequent study of Conrad—not even
Said’s later treatment of the author in his magisterial 1993 volume, Cul-
ture and Imperialism—has bettered Benita’s incisive analysis of the con-
tradictory brilliance of Conrad’s political insight.
It is hard to overstate the originality and daring of these two books
of Benita’s, published well before the emergence of the disciplinary sub-
fields of “colonial discourse theory” and “postcolonial studies.” It is
still true, nevertheless, that Benita’s international renown as a scholar
is due less to them than to her crusading (not to say, coruscating) essays
on postcolonial theory, which have appeared over the course of the past
thirty years. By far the most influential of these essays is “Problems in
Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” a ground-breaking piece, first
published in 1987, in which she comprehensively upset the apple cart by
offering a bracing critique of the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
and Homi K. Bhabha. The broader burden of “Problems” was to sug-
gest that, for all its avant-gardism and professed radicalism, much of
what was then being produced and rising so quickly to academic vogue
in postcolonial studies ran counter to the liberationist politics of the
great anti-imperialist struggles of the decolonizing era. In the case of
Bhabha—no great friend of the left—this was and is perhaps a less elec-
tric charge than in the case of Spivak. But Benita also argued point-
edly that Spivak’s highly influential conceptualization of subalternity in
terms of speechlessness or structured inarticulacy has the paradoxical
effect of desensitising her to insurgency and resistance everywhere in
evidence in the colonial world. As Benita read it, Spivak’s purportedly
anti-imperialist theory tended to represent imperialism as utterly and
implacably hegemonic, hence as insuperable.
In her subsequent work, Benita consolidated and extended her rep-
utation as a radical theorist of colonial discourse theory and “postco-
loniality.” She wrote further—and always tellingly—in criticism of the
postcolonialist scholarship written under the flag of “post-“ theory:
post-structuralist, post-Marxist, post-nationalist, post-modernist, etc.;
she contributed authoritatively to the field-defining debate over the sta-
tus of Aijaz Ahmad’s book, In Theory; she commented searchingly and
astutely on Said’s intellectual production (she enjoyed a warm friendship
with Said that did not in the least prevent her from criticizing aspects
of his work—sometimes quite sharply). Some of her best and most rep-
resentative essays were collected in Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist
Critique, a volume published in 2004. The titles alone of several of the
essays in this volume give a sense of the cut and thrust of her work, of its
Foreword xiii
engagement, criticality, polemical intent, and intellectual commitment:
“Directions and Dead Ends in Postcolonial Studies,” “Internationalism
Revisited or in Praise of Internationalism,” “Liberation Theory: Varia-
tions on Themes of Marxism and Modernity.” I have always particularly
relished an early moment in her essay on “Resistance Theory/Theoriz-
ing Resistance or Two Cheers for Nativism,” in which, without actually
naming the subaltern studies theorists or Spivak, Benita quite simply and
properly sets their work to one side as being profoundly misconceived:
“There is of course,” she writes, “abundant evidence of native disaffec-
tion and dissent under colonial rule, of contestation and struggle against
diverse forms of institutional and ideological domination.” Note that
“of course”! It directly countermands the subalternist suggestion that
“popular consciousness” exists only in suppressed, displaced or frag-
mentary form in the evidence (official or unofficial) consulted by histo-
rians, anthropologists, journalists, and writers, and so must remain in a
profound sense irrecoverable by them.
But Benita’s writing is not primarily or even pre-eminently meta-
theoretical in thrust and tenor. On the contrary, one could plausibly
argue that her most important essays and interventions have been those
in which she has been concerned to develop new ideas or advance new
readings, rather than to restrict herself to criticism of “dead ends” and
roads wrongly taken. Her work on national liberation, imperialism, and
Marxism in the (post-) colonial world falls into this category, as do her
several pieces on post-apartheid South African culture and politics and
her research into “peripheral modernity” and “critical irrealism” (These
latter ideas have been central to the understanding of “world-literature”
developed by the Warwick Research Collective, of which Benita con-
tinues to be a member). She has also sustained and developed her long-
standing research interests in the literature of imperialism, hence her
many essays on Kipling, Conrad, Wells, and Forster.
For many of the contributors to this volume, Benita Parry is not sim-
ply a critical scholar—even one of uncommon significance—but also
a friend, colleague, or mentor. We can gain a sense of her in these per-
sonal (and personal-professional) aspects by looking quickly at what
those who have come to know her well, or who have worked closely
with her, have tended to say about her in the “acknowledgements” of
their published books (you can learn a lot about the kinds of people that
intellectuals or academics really are by paying attention to what other
intellectuals or academics say about them in their acknowledgements).
In Benita’s case, it is striking that she doesn’t usually feature in a mere
listing of names—one rarely sees a sentence of the type: “I would like to
thank x, y, z, and Benita Parry for reading drafts of this manuscript and
for being supportive of my ideas.” Instead, she tends to be individually
identified and thanked for having been so open and generous in sharing
something qualitative and unique—something incommensurable, like
friendship. Of course, her former doctoral students do thank her (and
xiv Foreword
quite appropriately) for the acuity and expertise of her supervision. But
they almost always go on to say that what really matters to them is the
ongoing nature of the bond that they have forged with her. So in her
book on J.M. Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship, Jane
Poyner thanks Benita for her continuing warmth and support; in Kazuo
Ishiguru Wai Chew Sim thanks Benita “for her continued guidance and
for helping to launch this project”; and Sharae Deckard writes in her
book, Paradise Discourse, Imperialism and Globalization, not only that
she “could not imagine a warmer or more inspiring supervisor and men-
tor,” but that “My life is deeply enriched by her continued friendship.”
Nor is it only her former students who think of Benita in this way. In
her monograph, The Postcolonial City and its Subjects, Rashmi Varma
thanks her as “a powerful source of inspiration and an amazing friend.”
Laura Chrisman dedicates Reading the Imperial Romance to her, writ-
ing that she “owe[s] an especial debt to Benita Parry, to whom this book
is dedicated with love. Her extraordinarily generous and invaluable
critical input, scholarship, encouragement and stimulation have accom-
panied each stage of this project.” Timothy Brennan thanks Benita in
Borrowed Light “for being a daily confidant, and for the million conver-
sations in Marton, where my thinking finds a home.”
I don’t think that there is anyone whose work better embodies the
Saidian ethic of “secular criticism” than Benita, who has also brought
her fierce, engaged and unsentimental critical gaze to bear reciprocally
upon Said’s work, which she has long championed and challenged,
fought for and contested. “Ruthless criticism of everything existing” is
the old Marxist slogan—and certainly Benita’s writing takes no prison-
ers. Her language and tone are so distinctive: austere, formal, unsparing,
often allusive, soaked in historical and political reference. But there’s
a profound ethical sensibility at work in her criticism also, which this
particular Marxist slogan doesn’t capture. Perhaps one can get closer to
the heart of her work by slightly amending one of Said’s best-known slo-
gans. “Never solidarity before criticism,” he used to say. Benita’s work
seems to say something slightly different: always solidarity and criti-
cism. Which is why what Priyamvada Gopal has written about her in
the acknowledgements to her second book, The Indian English Novel,
seems so apt: “With gratitude to… Benita Parry for getting on my case.”
Benita Parry’s writing has always been engaged, without illusion, and
deeply ethical. Reading it in retrospect, I am reminded of Trotsky’s in-
sight that “Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely
and for ever.” The essays in this volume testify to the undimmed and
unquenchable intellectual passion that has driven Benita’s scholarship
from beginning to end.
Against the Grain
An Introduction to Benita
Parry’s Intellectual Itinerary
Sharae Deckard and Rashmi Varma
This volume of essays is the first ever collection to critically assess, elab-
orate, and expand on the work of Benita Parry, a leading scholar of
Marxist postcolonial literature and theory. In Culture and Imperialism
(1993), the late Edward Said had recognized her as a founding figure in
colonial discourse analysis. In spite of that acknowledgement from Said,
no published academic forum has focused on the sheer depth and orig-
inality of Parry’s scholarship over a long and rich intellectual life. We
therefore see this work as a task that is long overdue.
At the same time, we are also motivated to take up the challenge
offered in Benita Parry’s 2012 Edward Said Memorial Lecture at the
University of Warwick, entitled “What’s Left in Postcolonial Studies?”
Parry posed this question at a time of an intensifying crisis of the hu-
manities in general and of postcolonial studies in particular. This spe-
cific crisis appears in the aftermath of a decidedly neoliberal turn within
higher education that has depleted material resources and channelled
learning into marketable skills, and a political situation worldwide in
which a range of right-wing political formations have had a disturbing
resurgence, while hopes of liberation seem to be ever receding. But in-
stead of responding to the situation in despair, Parry’s question looks
forward to a consideration of the future stakes of postcolonial studies.
The pun in her lecture title on the word “left” implies what could still
be salvaged from a field increasingly seen as having exhausted its crit-
ical potential, but also the renewed importance of a left approach to
postcolonial criticism, an approach that has characterized Parry’s own
distinguished contribution to the field.
This ability to simultaneously look back critically while keeping an
eye on the future has indeed been a defining characteristic of Parry’s
work throughout, underscoring the ways in which her scholarship
stands the test of time. Indeed, Timothy Brennan comments on her early,
ground-breaking study Delusions and Discoveries: India in the British
Imagination 1880–1930 (1972; republished 1998), saying that it “ex-
plored the topics now associated with postcolonial studies a full two
decades before others encountered them” (Brennan 2001). Similarly,
Michael Sprinker remarked of her discussion of Anglo-Indian writing
2 Sharae Deckard and Rashmi Varma
in his preface to the second edition of Delusions, “No one before—or
since—has so thoroughly plumbed the depths of racism, xenophobia,
and jingoism that dominated the self-image forged by the Anglo-Indian
community for public consumption” (Sprinker 1988, viii). For Sprinker,
however, Parry’s aims not only consisted of a “passionate indictment” of
Anglo-Indian ideology, but also moved beyond colonial discourse anal-
ysis to foreground the material conditions of capitalist exploitation of
which colonialism was first and foremost an instrument. As such, her
work prognosticated a path for materialist postcolonialist studies:
Rather than pursuing such ignes fatui as colonial hybridity, speech-

less subalternity, sly civility, or the fragility of colonial power,
postcolonial studies could more profitably follow in her footsteps,
exploring the complex symbiosis between dialogical elaboration and
economic imperatives that made the British Empire such a sturdy
edifice in its heyday and a well-nigh indestructible idea today, long
after its material substance has been reduced to nought.
(Sprinker 1988, xii)
As both Brennan and Sprinker observe, Parry’s work has always been
ahead of the times in its prescient ability to anticipate what does and
should matter most. As such, her writing always looks to possibilities in
the as-yet-unimagined turns to the left in both politics and scholarship
that may open new futures for critique and hopes for liberation.
Politics and Formation

Parry’s political formation can be traced back to left circles in South
Africa, where her participation in left-wing politics under apartheid led
her to a firm commitment to internationalism. It was here that she first
encountered and read anti-colonial works from around the world. The
Non-European Unity Movement with which she was affiliated believed
firmly that national liberation struggles needed to be rooted in class
and race analysis. Parry left South Africa before apartheid ended, but
in her writings she has powerfully expressed her disappointment at the
ways in which the new South African state has embraced neoliberalism,
thereby extinguishing the hopes of the country’s struggling poor for real
liberation. This early political commitment to the realities of struggles
against apartheid in South Africa travelled with her to England, where
she forged an intellectual life that remains charged with questions of
political transformation.
Benita Parry’s decisive contributions to postcolonial studies are all the
more remarkable, coming as they did from an always only tenuously
professionalized association. Her intellectual formation occurred largely
outside of formal academia, unlike that of other leading postcolonial
Against the Grain 3
critics who occupied tenured and endowed positions at elite American
and European universities. In this sense, Parry exemplifies the very
model of an engaged and autonomous intellectual who remains uncom-
promised and untethered to institutional demands even when occupy-
ing a precarious position professionally and financially. However, this
autonomy has also meant that many of the fruits of professional life
that academics of similar standing take for granted—big research bud-
gets, plentiful research assistance, and at times, even basic library access
to contemporary scholarship, for instance—were not easily available to
her. Writing at the same time as Said was deftly negotiating metropol-
itan theory, Palestinian resistance and anti-colonial writings from his
location in Columbia University and his position as an endowed pro-
fessor, Parry occupied a decidedly more peripheral location in Britain’s
West Midlands. In spite of this (or perhaps because of this), much of her
field-defining work was carried out as an independent scholar, and it
was only after some of her major essays were already published that she
was invited by Warwick’s English Department to serve as an honorary
professor in the 1990s.
During her tenure at Warwick, Parry proved to be an exemplary
teacher and mentor as she sustained and nourished innumerable gradu-
ate students and early career colleagues. The subsequent arrival of Neil
Lazarus from the US to Warwick strengthened Parry’s position and to-
gether they helped forge Warwick’s English Department as one of the
world-leading institutions for Marxist postcolonial studies. But Parry’s
intellectual life was never just contained within Warwick. She developed
a strong following among Marxist postcolonialists globally, many of
whom sought her mentorship and guidance (and many of whom are con-
tributors to this volume). A key feature of Parry’s scholarship has been
collaboration, working alongside colleagues and comrades who con-
stantly engage her insights and contributions to register their own dis-
sent in a field that was rapidly being absorbed into the critical orthodoxy
of the decades of 1980s–1990s, i.e. post-structuralist postcolonialism.
Literary Criticism beyond Textualism

Benita Parry reads the literature of the British empire—the writings of
Conrad, Kipling, Forster, Wells—as none other. Her readings illustrate
both a keen ear for the salience of the literary in the cultural field, as well
as a political commitment to move literary criticism away from textu-
alism. Parry’s work embodies the most important aspects of materialist
reading practices in the ways in which it combines close, detailed read-
ings of canonical and non-canonical writers with an incisive analysis
of social and economic formations that undergird the literary texts. As
such, her literary criticism models a mode of reading that can pierce
through the relations between base and superstructure, economy and
literature. In Conrad and Imperialism, for instance, Parry examines how
innovations from within the form of Conrad’s colonial fictions “produce
a contrapuntal discourse where the authentic rendering of imperialism’s
dominant ideological categories is undercut by illuminations of the mis-
recognitions and limitations in a form of cognition which saw the world
in black and white” (Parry 1983, 2). She suggests that Conrad’s rhetor-
ical obscurity gestures towards meanings that the novel cannot under-
stand, enmeshed as it is in an imperialist episteme, but that are perceived
as there and awaiting a time when they will be spoken: “Ironically…
the symbols of anticipation inhere in experiences…disparaged by the
texts—in the many auguries of a fuller and more extensive human condi-
tion prefigured in moments of ontological awakening which are formally
denigrated” (Parry 1983, 16). Returning to Conrad in her later book,
Postcolonial Studies, Parry displays the same “persistent sensitivity to
imponderables and mysteries” which she attributed to Edward Said’s
own readings of Conrad (Parry 2010, 502). Reading Heart of Darkness,
she argues that the opacity of the text, its allusive, indirect language, de-
notes a failure of representation reflective of the apprehension of “over-
whelming” realities that lie beyond the fiction’s cognitive horizons. The
text displays a self-reflexive awareness of its own nescience: that is, its
lack of knowledge of the complex indigenous cultures and subjectivities
in the Congo (Parry 2004).
This dialectical mode of reading, attentive both to the “misrecogni-
tions” born of the social determinations in which texts are grounded
but also to their intimations of alternative knowledge and realities, is
characteristic of her literary criticism. As Laura Chrisman notes, Parry
recuperates metropolitan and imperialist writers like Conrad or Kipling,
indicting the ways in which they “ultimately fail to produce a vision
beyond imperialism,” but at the same time, “establish[ing] a utopian
dimension in their work, and go[ing] on to distinguish its emancipatory
from its dominatory forms” (Chrisman 2003, 164–165). More recently,
her analyses of Tayeb Salih continue her dedication to a hermeneutic
inspired by Herbert Marcuse’s theory of the literary, which insists on
“revaluing the realms of subjective unconscious and the unconscious”
and thus seeks to uncover how the dialectic between the “perception of
the historical world” in novels like Season of Migration to the North
and the “transfiguration of the empirical realm into fiction can be seen
as emerging from the power of aesthetic form to estrange and subvert the
quotidian by ‘accusing’ dominant social practices and ordinary modes
of consciousness” (Parry 2005, 73). For Parry, as for Marcuse,
The radical qualities of art, that is to say, its indictment of the es-
tablished reality and its invocation of the beautiful image (schöner
Schein) of liberation are grounded precisely in the dimensions where
art transcends its social determination and emancipates itself from
Against the Grain 5
the given universe of discourse and behaviour while preserving its
overwhelming presence.
(Marcuse 1979, 6)
This passage from Marcuse is often cited in her work, acting as a kind
of theoretical touchstone in her understanding of literary mediation and
its potential for critique, as is the assertion from Adorno, from which it
closely follows, that “There is no material content, no formal category of
artistic creation, however mysteriously transmitted and itself unaware of
the process, which did not originate in the empirical reality from which
it breaks free” (Adorno 1980, 190).
Perhaps more controversially, Parry has been a trenchant critic of the
Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee, producing some of the best
work on his fiction and arguing against Coetzee’s distaste for political
language rendered as a form of disengagement from worldly connections.
For Parry, this form of detached writing that may well be a reaction to
some of the excesses that reside within shrill demands for literature to di-
rectly serve the purpose of political transformation results, in Coetzee’s
work, in a veritable erasure of “the temporal and spatial specificity”
of South Africa (1994, 160). In her essay “Speech and Silence in the
Fictions of J.M. Coetzee,” she points to the constrained framework of
Coetzee’s literary universe that remains tethered to a Europe-centred
perspective rendered in “a poised, even hieratic prose uninflected by
South Africa’s many vernacular Englishes” (150). While acknowledging
Coetzee’s excoriating interrogations of colonialism’s discursive power
and his novels’ “excavations of the uneasy but timid white South African
liberal consciousness” as “amongst the most far-reaching,” she sharply
points out that “despite the fictions’ disruptions of colonialist modes,
the social authority on which the rhetoric relies and which it exerts is
grounded in the cognitive systems of the West” where only “Europe-
ans possess the word” (150–151). This produces for Parry a debilitating
silence in Coetzee’s texts, a silence that “signifies what cannot be spo-
ken,” and not necessarily that which has been rendered mute by colonial
violence (154). Through meticulous readings of novels such as The Life
and Times of Michael K, Foe, and Waiting for the Barbarians, Parry
highlights the contradictions at the heart of Coetzee’s literary works in
which “the homages to the mystical properties and prestige of muteness
undermine the critique of that condition where oppression inflicts and
provokes silence” (158). Her readings of Coetzee’s work demonstrate her
characteristically courageous and patient stance as a politically engaged
reader who deftly works through the slippery ground of Coetzee’s fic-
tional universe to assess critically how his fiction begins by engaging the
pathologies of apartheid South Africa but ends up “dissipating the en-
gagements” the novels inscribe because of the privileging of a detached
aesthetic (163–164).
Against the Cultural Turn
Benita Parry emerged as a key interlocutor of the ascendancy of post-
structuralism that derided materialist approaches during the politically
ambivalent “cultural turn” that influenced much of academic theorizing
in the Euro-American academy from the 1980s onwards. Parry was a
leading critic of this turn, as exemplified in her path-breaking critiques
of the stranglehold of post-structuralism within postcolonial literary
studies. In a series of essays written in the 1980s and 1990s, culminat-
ing with the publication of her book Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist
Critique (2004), Parry offered a rigorous critique of post-structuralist
strategies as divorced from the materiality of texts and politics and pro-
posed new directions for the field.
In Parry’s Marxism, political economy, social history and cultural
critique come together in a powerful combination. Drawing on the writ-
ings of foundational Marxist literary critics such as Lukács, B enjamin,
Adorno, Brecht, Bloch, Raymond Williams, and Gramsci, Parry has
made a crucial contribution towards reinstating culture as a crucial
form of struggle constantly being created under “determinate histor-
ical and political conditions” (Parry 2004, 5). Her work continually
strives to understand the relationship between culture and history, and
politics and economy, beyond the crude base/superstructure argument.
Although Parry’s Delusions and Discoveries had clearly anticipated
the whole sub-field of colonial discourse theory, it was her article,
“Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse” (1987), that
provoked a wide-ranging discussion within postcolonial studies. It was
the first comprehensive critique of many of postcolonial studies’ key as-
sumptions, and her debate with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on subal-
ternity and intellectual practice subsequently became well known and
frequently cited. The article concentrated the basis of Parry’s overall
critique of postcolonial studies as it was emerging in the late 1980s.
Even as postcolonial theory appeared to be entering academia as its rad-
ical other, Parry was pointing out how it was becoming a prisoner to
its own success. The proliferation of postcolonial studies may have sig-
nalled to some critics a triumphant overcoming of traditional modes of
reading literature tied to Eurocentric curricula, but to Parry it signified
a debilitating ahistorical ungroundedness. She registered her disquiet at
the ways in which the material project of dispossession, economic ex-
traction, exploitation, and repression had “receded from view” (3) and
was being rendered almost exclusively at the symbolic and textual level,
erasing the prospect of collective agency. Moreover, the increasingly
fashionable emphasis on discursive violence over physical and structural
violence also meant that antagonism between the colonizer and the col-
onized was reinterpreted as negotiation and reconciliation.
Although she herself had helped underscore the salience of culture in
the project of colonialism, mostly notably in her Delusions and Conrad
Against the Grain 7
books, Parry was profoundly critical of the variety of postcolonial stud-
ies in which colonialism was re-functioned and refashioned as a cultural
project above all. An explanation for what was in essence a profoundly
ideological field was, at least on the face of it, emanating from a lack of
interest in political economy, state formation, and in historical and so-
cial explanation itself within postcolonial studies. In an important essay
identifying the “countercurrents and tensions” in Edward Said’s critical
practice, in which she describes a central aspect of the “labor of criticism”
(2010, 499) as attending to contradictions, she emphasizes the extent to
which the brilliance of Said’s critique of imperialism was complicated by
“the overt avoidance of dialectic” (2010, 504) and a tendency to focus on
the formation of ideologies ratifying European hegemony without “spec-
ifying capitalism’s world system” or the specific relations of exploitation
and domination it entailed (2010, 508). In contrast, for Parry, the capi-
talist trajectory of imperialism is absolutely central to any understanding
of power in the modern world. Racial domination is linked to capital-
ism’s forced incorporation of peripheries into the world-system of labour
exploitation. Categories such as capitalism, inequality, and combined
and uneven development are therefore indispensable to Parry’s study of
colonialism and late imperialism and are themes that she has continued
to develop and sharpen throughout her scholarly career.
Critical (Inter)nationalism
A key category that Parry resuscitates from the ruins of postcolonial stud-
ies’ dismantling of Enlightenment grand narratives of history and reason
is that of nation and nationalism. Parry is chiefly interested in the nation’s
revolutionary history and politics, particularly in the context of colonial-
ism when anti-colonial movements forged a strategic and emancipatory
unity from the rubble of colonial violence and exploitation. It is this his-
tory, in which nationalism emerges out of anti-colonialism, that her re-
search has tried to foreground incessantly. Here it would be important to
distinguish Parry’s position from those romantic supporters of national-
ism who tend to seek comfort in recreating some kind of an ideal, pristine
pre-colonial past. Instead, Parry asserts her commitment to excavating
the sources of the modernity of the indigenous anti-colonialisms predi-
cated on the repudiation of an archaic and oppressive past. She writes:
This capacity to disengage from the past and imagine a transcen-

dence of the existing social order makes liberation theory an origi-
nal and indigenous project of modernity, neither enforced nor gifted
by a predatory colonialism which had institutionalised economic
and social retardation to further its own interests and inhibit colo-
nial peoples from experiencing and conducting themselves as mod-
ern subjects.
(2004, 9–10)
Thus, throughout her contributions, Parry’s lifelong engagement with
nationalism and liberation struggles reverberates powerfully. Commit-
ment to the project of national liberation drives her insistence that post-
colonial studies pay greater attention to the writings of anti-colonial
revolutionaries like Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon: “The recuper-
ation of liberation theory as an articulation of a distinctive modernity
is urgent in an intellectual climate where there are postcolonial critics
who disavow its prior anticolonial critique, traduce its positions, and
trivialize its achievements” (Parry 2002, 143). A powerful belief in
emancipation in the real world drives her call for a postcolonial studies
that is rigorously interdisciplinary, one that is able to link discursive
analysis of texts to historical, economic, and political understandings of
nation-state, empire, and capitalism. Whether discussing imperialism,
anti-colonial resistance, or anti-capitalist solidarity, her writings retain
a utopian dimension, persistently articulating “optimistic belief in the
achievability of political solidarity and common understanding across
races, nations and cultures, brought together in the struggle for human
freedom” (Chrisman 2003, 164).
But equally, Parry’s work points sharply to the disillusionment
that emerged in the wake of independence as more and more new
nation-states attempted to stitch together a top-down false unity that
elided class struggle and the role of the peasantry and the working
classes in the making of the postcolonial nations. Parry’s interventions
into contemporary South African cultural and political discourse, in-
cluding critiques of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commis-
sion as an “officially instituted memory loss,” are extremely powerful
and persuasive (2004, 183). Distancing herself from categories of mercy
and atonement that tend to draw upon theological discourse, Parry
questions if any political authority, be it the state or a state-appointed
commission, has the “moral authority to grant a people’s acquittal of
their erstwhile oppressors” (183). For Parry, in order for the crimes of
the past to be “properly transcended,” first “a radical restructuring
of those economic, social, political and cultural circumstances” must
take place (183). On her reading, the TRC ended up deflating the rev-
olutionary energies within South Africa and paving the path towards
an embrace of neo-liberalism as economic and social policy. In one of
her most passionately written chapters at the conclusion of Postcolonial
Studies, Parry sums up her criticism of the TRC with a statement that
resounds throughout her writings:
The problem for theoretical work then presents itself not as one of
aligning reconciliation with remembrance, but rather of joining re-
membrance of the past with a critique of the contemporary condi-
tion… For our best hope for universal emancipation lies in remaining
unreconciled to the past and unconsoled by the present.
(193)
Against the Grain 9
Parry’s critical retrieval of the emancipatory politics of nationalism
can also be seen as an elaboration of an internationalism committed to
class struggle and anti-imperialism worldwide. Parry has always made
a critical distinction between internationalism and cosmopolitanism,
since the latter can be more readily assimilated into elite accounts of the
movement of ideas and people (2004, 11). More recently, her writing
has turned a sharp critical eye towards the global neoliberal turn and
the structures of neo-imperialism and globalization as the contemporary
incarnation of capitalism. For Parry, globalization represents a realign-
ment of contemporary capitalism, one that makes it ever more urgent to
revivify “a borderless resistance to capitalism’s unbounded oppression”
(2004, 102).
The World-Literary Turn

If her earlier literary criticism established Parry as the leading figure
in postcolonial Marxist literary studies, her most recent interventions
hold the promise of opening up new arenas for research and recon-
ceptualising the fields of comparative and world literatures and post-
colonial studies through the mapping of the lineaments of combined
and uneven development as they are mediated in aspects of peripheral
aesthetics. In 2004, Parry began developing a theory of the aesthetics of
peripheral modernity, which she presented in a seminar paper titled “A
Third World Aesthetic?” to the Department of English and Compara-
tive Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. The question mark
in the title telegraphed the paper’s conjectural nature, which sought to
discover a better method of literary comparison that, rather than focus-
ing solely on a postcolonial interpretation of thematic homologies of
identity, culture, race, and gender across texts, would instead read the
stylistic particularities shared by literary and cultural forms from the
periphery as arising from their concrete situations in capitalist moder-
nity. She proposed that these particularities of style might be explored
through the prism of “unevenness,” interpreting the aesthetic inven-
tions of non-metropolitan locations in light of Leon Trotsky’s theory
of uneven and combined development, which posited that imperialism
tended to introduce the most advanced means of commodity production
and capitalist relations into the non-capitalist world while preserving
pre-capitalist, often feudal, social arrangements and residual forms of
economic life. Her paper’s articulation of an aesthetic of “thirdness”
as corresponding to this contradictory amalgam of social forms began
from a desire to recuperate the idea of Third World solidarity as an in-
ternationalist challenge to capitalism, looking back to the significance of
the Bandung moment of the mid-1950s when states like India, I ndonesia
and Egypt came together to propose an anti-imperialist socialist world
order that was a rejection of the bipolar world being underwritten by
the US and the USSR.
In the collective discussion that followed, “thirdness” as a conceptual
category evolved into, and was supplanted by, a world-systems vocab-
ulary of “periphery” and “semi-periphery,” partly inspired by Franco
Moretti’s description of world literature as “literature of the capitalist
world-system,” originating in a “world literary system” that is “one,
yet unequal” and characterized by systemic asymmetries between cores
and peripheries (Moretti 2000, 56). Parry’s subsequent usage of core,
semi-periphery, and periphery did not designate “homogeneous or static
geographical region[s],” but rather those “clusters of internally differen-
tiated nation-states, the peripher[ies] existing in an asymmetrical rela-
tionship to the older imperialist centres which had pursued capitalism’s
unilateral intrusion into pre-capitalist worlds” (Parry 2009, 27).
In moving beyond a strictly postcolonial model to an emphasis on
the ways in which world literature from different kinds of peripheries—
both (post-) colonies in the classical sense, but also peripheries in Europe
and other locations that had never been formally colonized yet whose
situations were determined by socio-economic inequality and hierar-
chical domination—might consciously mediate the asymmetries of the
capitalist world-system, the “Third World Aesthetic” seminar would
prove to be pivotal. It inspired a reading group on world literature in the
department that would eventually coalesce into the Warwick Research
Collective (WReC), with whom Parry would collectively author a mono-
graph, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory
of World-Literature. The collective was comprised of scholars drawn
from different sub-disciplines, including postcolonial studies, A merican
studies, comparative literature, and devolutionary literary studies. Their
compulsion to a collective elaboration of a new theory of world-literature
was rooted in their sense of a disciplinary crisis within postcolonial
studies and literary studies more generally. Intensified by the violence of
the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, this crisis could be characterized
by the field’s inability to offer sufficient critique of the contemporary
phenomena of late twenty-first century capitalism: from the failure to
criticise varieties of new imperialism in the era of A merican hegemony
or to comprehend modes of neoliberal accumulation and their accom-
panying forms of dispossession in relation to longue durée of capitalist
plunder and enclosure.
For Parry and the WReC, a world-literary approach grounded in a
constellation of the theory of combined and uneven development and a
world-systems vocabulary crucially enabled a new object of study that
into took account not only all the new valences of late capitalism cited
earlier, but which could also enable a new form of comparativism that
would move beyond the reified binary of the “West” vs. the “Rest” in
order to comprehend the multi-scalar hierarchies governing polygonal
relations between cores, semi-peripheries, and peripheries. As she would
later write in a searing critique of Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory
Against the Grain 11
and the Specter of Capital, which she castigated for “reading Subaltern
Studies as postcolonial theory,”
[The] explanatory power of Uneven and Combined Development in

understanding the internal conditions of societies conscripted into
capitalism is cast aside [by Chibber], as are the resources of Marxist
cultural criticism in writing a metanarrative of these consequences
in all of their aspects: economic, social, cultural and experiential—
omissions that paradoxically are to the fore in postcolonial theory.
(Parry 2017, 185)
Parry has been careful to emphasize that any turn to world-literary crit-
icism must not lose sight of the historical particularities and peculiar
violence of formal imperialism and colonization that differentiated post-
colonies from other kinds of peripheries, which should still remain a
vital object of analysis for postcolonial studies. Rather, its aim should
be to show how the particular configurations of social experience and
traumatic historical legacies in those once-colonized colonies could be
understood in relation to other peripheries that shared similar dynamics
of asymmetrical relationship, not only to older imperialist centres, but
to newly emergent or ascending cores, foregrounding capitalism as the
baseline of comparison (Parry 2009, 27).
Modernism and World Capitalism

Over the next decade, Parry began to evolve a theory of how aesthetics
might dramatize the “trauma of peripheral modernity” (2005, 73). In
her 2005 article, “Reflections on the Excess of Empire in Tayeb Salih’s
Season of Migration to the North,” she brings together a rich constel-
lation of theorists of modernity and modernism in order to formulate
a theory of temporal and cultural incommensurability as the aesthetic
mediation of unevenness. In contrast to readings of the novel celebrating
its putative ‘hybridity’ or syncretism, she reads the text’s uneven aesthet-
ics as constituting Salih’s invocation not of a valorized “zone between
cultures,” but rather “representation of the archaic within modernity”
(2005, 75):
When accounting for the ‘power and possibilities’ of high mod-

ernism, Fredric Jameson has located its conditions of possibility
in ‘the coexistence of realities from radically different moments
in history’—a concept derived from Ernst Bloch’s observation of
‘the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous’, the ‘synchronicity of the
non-synchronous’, although used by the two thinkers to very differ-
ent ends and with distinctive implications. Such incommensurability
structures a novel where existence is marked by the discontinuous
temporalities attendant on the precipitate and selective introduction
of capitalist modes of production into pre- or nascent capitalist so-
cieties. Season is thus inhabited by a consciousness not only of the
unevenness between the metropolitan and the peripheral, by the dis-
junctions between the colonial environment where the socialities,
cultural forms, cognitive traditions, affective inclinations and eth-
ical sensibilities of both the ancestral and the modern overlap. In
this sense the book can be seen as staging a scenario which theorists
have abstractly proposed as the conjunctural, but in no way seam-
less, relationship between material modernization, the ideological
and psychological processes of modernity and modernism, this last,
it has been suggested, providing a vocabulary for the lived experi-
ence of radical social and psychic transformation.
(2005, 73)
This triangulation of modernity, modernism, and modernization—

wherein literary modernism corresponds to the uneven space-time
sensorium of capitalist modernization within the modernity of the
world-system—is further developed in her seminal article in Ariel on
“Aspects of Peripheral Modernisms” (2009), where she asks, “Can we
consider the possibility of detecting likenesses among the many periph-
eral modernisms, these understood as the aesthetic forms generated be-
yond capitalism’s cores?” (Parry 2009, 27). These homologies consist of
“formal qualities—whether realist, fabulist or avant-garde—[that] can
be read as transfiguring and estranging incommensurable material, cul-
tural, social and existential conditions attendant on colonial and neo-
colonial capitalism” (Parry 2009, 33).
As such, Parry has intervened into the “expanded modernisms” de-
bate that has sought to resituate literary modernism within wider spatial
and temporal perspectives than that of modernist literature as solely the
product of Western Europe in the early twentieth century. However, she
has criticized many of the attempts to expand the modernist canon as
having failed to adequately rethink the corresponding category of mo-
dernity, or as having posed celebratory categories of “alternative moder-
nity” that in their attempt to avoid the perils of a Eurocentric category
of modernism, omit acknowledging that
For materialist theorists of modernity the only satisfactory semantic

meaning of modernity lies in its association with worldwide capital-
ism (Jameson Singular 13). Thus the historian Harry Harootunian
insists that the simultaneous experiences of change and upheaval
precipitated transnationally by capitalism, even if at different speeds
and to varying degrees, makes inappropriate “fashionable descrip-
tions” such as “alternative,” since these imply the existence of an
“original” that was formulated in Europe, followed by a series of
“copies” and “lesser inflections.” Naming modernity as “a specific
cultural form and a consciousness of lived historical time that differs
according to social forms and practices,” Harootunian states that
these varying inflections of the modern promised, “not alternative
modernities, but coeval... modernities or, better yet, peripheral mo-
dernities... in which all societies shared a common reference pro-
vided by global capital and its requirements” (History’s Disquiet
62–63, 163).
(Parry 2009, 27–28)
As Parry developed this idea of peripheral modernity, she has made cru-
cial use of Michael Löwy’s idea of “critical irrealism” to break open the
stale impasse of the modernism/realism debate, exploring the ways in
which literary texts from peripheries might combine impure mixtures
of realist and irrealist aesthetics: “the juxtaposition of the mundane and
the fantastic, the recognizable and the improbable, the seasonal and the
eccentric, the earthborn and the fabulous, the legible and the oneiric,
historically inflected and mystical states of consciousness” (Parry 2009,
39). She reads those moments of ‘peripheral irrealism’ that irrupt in texts
as “abstract significations of the incommensurable and the contradictory
which are concurrent in the material and cultural worlds of a periphery”
(39), but also, crucially, as critical rejections of capitalist realism, which
refuse to contemplate the possibility that there is no alternative to the
reality of the present economic system.
Towards Futurity
In what could be called Parry’s “late” writings, following her appre-
ciation of Adorno’s discussion of “late style,” there is an unflagging
commitment to critique and unblinking testimony to the catastrophes
of capitalism’s continued unfolding. Her friend, poet Peter Larkin, once
described her critical procedure as characterized by an unflinching “aus-
terity” of vision, refusing false consolations, but also ceaselessly faithful
in its commitment to discovering prefigurations and configurations of
the realm of imaginary freedom. Her aspiration in her writing, as she
describes it in her interview in this volume, was always to “austerity,
lucidity and informality,” and as a doctoral supervisor, she once memo-
rably exhorted a student to aspire to write prose that was “distilled like a
fine whisky”: condensed, shimmering with a brilliant clarity, purified of
obscure or self-indulgent language and terminology. Parry’s scholarship
can be understood in the terms that she uses to describe Said’s own late
work, as “exercising a critical consciousness that spurns imaginary solu-
tions to real conflicts and refuses the solace of utopian expectations,”
but also as “intimating incompletion not as a sign of failure but of fu-
turity, of history as having no ending” (2010, 509). As Laura Chrisman
remarks, Parry’s criticism both eschews “post-structuralist pessimism
premised upon convictions of epistemic violence, the impossibility of
‘unlearning privilege’ and adequately ‘representing alterity’” and also
“precludes the easy refuge of a postmodern optimism,” insisting that
“the utopian drive cannot be realized without extraordinary struggle”
(Chrisman 2003, 172) Like Bloch, she seeks out signs of “the principle
of hope” in the contemporary political situation, even when it may seem
most blocked or thwarted, but never endorses programmatic or rigidly
schematized methods of political transformation. Instead, she detects,
as in liberation theory, “a particular sensibility to modernity on colo-
nial terrains, its intellectual imaginative horizons extending from indig-
enous cultural and cognitive forms to premonitions, not blueprints of the
post-capitalist” (emphasis original; Parry 2002, 147).
As such, her work crucially anticipates the contemporary resurgence
of Marxism in a variety of disciplines in the humanities and the social
sciences, a turn that must be understood in the context of the deep
ecological and economic crisis of global capitalism and the challenges
to its hegemony being mounted by a wide variety of social and political
movements. As she remarks in a characteristically robust assessment
of the state of the field in 2012, while many prominent postcolonial
critics in the 1980s and 1990s had dismissed Marxism as “founda-
tional, indifferent to culture as well as to non-European cultures, and
wedded to metanarratives,” this kind of “insouciant gesture may be
less easy to perform now that Marxism has regained a significant place
in the wider intellectual discussion” (Parry 2012, 342). As such, she
points to the “vigor of current discussion on Marxism and commu-
nism in the distinctive nonuniform writings of such as Slavoj Žižek,
Peter Hallward, and Bruno Bosteels” and the unflagging dedication of
intellectuals such as Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Neil Smith and
Alex Callinicos in pursuing the “‘unrenounceable Marxist project’ of
elaborating globalization as a totality, essence and appearance” (Parry
2012, 342).
Structure of the Volume

Using the aesthetic and political concerns of Parry’s oeuvre as a touch-
stone, this collection of essays explores new directions for Marxist lit-
erary criticism and postcolonial studies in the contemporary moment,
seeking to re-imagine the field, and alongside it, new possibilities for
left critique. The concrete aim of the edited collection is two-fold: first,
to evaluate Parry’s influence within postcolonial studies and its inter-
face with Marxist literary criticism; second, to explore new terrains
of scholarship opened up by Parry’s work. The authors represented in
these essays, including a range of influential established interlocutors of
Parry’s writing as well as new scholars inspired by her work, have come
to represent a dissident school of thought within postcolonial studies
and world-literary studies more generally.
The first two sections of the volume are organized around the twin
prisms of aesthetics and politics. The first set of essays examines new
approaches to literary form, offering cutting edge work on peripheral
aesthetics and the world-literary system. Timothy Brennan’s “Against
Modernism” intervenes with characteristic vigour in the ongoing debates
over the periodization, location, and aesthetic constitution of modern-
ism and realism, advocating a re-valuing of a tradition of civic realism in
literary aesthetics. In suggesting a critical praxis that draws on a longer
tradition of ‘civic hermeneutics,’ it valuably intersects and interrogates
the concerns of Benita’s recent work on peripheral modernism while of-
fering a new political potential, or reinvigorated direction, for Marxist
world-literary criticism.
In “‘I remember, I remember so as not to forget!’ Orhan Pamuk’s Mel-
ancholic Agency and the Splenetic Périples of Mediterranean Writing,”
Norbert Bugeja sensitively explores the negotiation of the politics of mel-
ancholia and memorialization in Orhan Pamuk’s work, demonstrating
how Pamuk’s formal manoeuvres recuperate post-imperial historical
consciousness from the vantage of the afterwardly. Bugeja goes on to
suggest that Pamuk’s work is exemplary of a larger tendency of writing
across the Mediterranean littoral whose splenetic register derives from
the struggle to preserve the memory of multiple localities of protest and
dissent across the region, even in the face of repression and erasure.
In her essay “Broken Histories: the Modern and the Tribal in Arun
Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas,” Rashmi Varma takes up

Parry’s figuration of “broken histories” that are the product of violent
colonial encounters to look at the ways in which Arun Joshi’s somewhat
neglected novel from the early 1970s conjures a disenchanted, bureau-
cratic world’s crushing evisceration of indigenous society. The novel’s
uneasy formal amalgamation of the real and the phantasmatic through
the ruse of a “strange case” of Billy Biswas, an American-educated
I ndian anthropologist who disappears among the forests in central
I ndia, reprises Parry’s theorization of peripheral aesthetics that dialecti-
cally brings together seemingly incommensurable genres, materials and
histories in order to register the traumatised modernity of the tribal in
Joshi’s fiction.
In a different but related vein, Michael Niblett’s “Peripheral Irre-
alisms: Water-spirits, World-Ecology, and Neoliberalism” combines
Parry’s understanding of peripheral modernism with a world-ecological
perspective on world-literature that extends her critique of the salience
of irrealist literary aesthetics as mediating not only socio-economic un-
evenness, but also the ecological contradictions through which capitalist
modernization unfolds. He performs an exemplary reading of the irreal-
ist figure of the water-spirit in Caribbean and African fiction not only as
a mediation on the socio-ecological violence unleashed by the transition
to the neoliberal regime of accumulation in the 1970s, but also as the
imaginative projection of the possibility of resistance to dispossession.
Our concluding essay in this section, Sharae Deckard’s “‘Not Even
a Sci-Fi Writer’: Peripheral Genre, the World-System Novel, and Junot
Díaz” furthers the focus on the aesthetics of peripheral irrealism, exam-
ining the generic admixture of speculative and realist aesthetics through
which Díaz’ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao figures the uneven
relations of cores and peripheries in the world-system, particularly the
role of US hegemony in the Americas, while interrogating the limits of
the novel’s capacity to summon a utopian dimension alongside its cri-
tique of the longue durée of capitalist modernity.
The second set of essays examines new political articulations in re-
lation to the contemporary recuperation and resurgence of Marxism,
revolution, and liberation theory. We have arranged the essays in this
section in a roughly chronological sequence in order to trace the geneal-
ogy of revolutionary movements that Parry has spent a lifetime trying to
analyse and learn from—from the eighteenth-century slave uprisings and
the Haitian revolution to the early anti-colonial movements (before their
fully-fledged formation within a “national” movement) in India and the
Indian diaspora, through to the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa
and the Arab Uprisings of the twenty-first century.
Taking his cue from Parry’s work on liberation theorists such as
Cabral and Fanon, Peter Hallward’s essay, “Towards a Pre-History of
National Liberation Struggle,” references the national liberation move-
ments of the 1950s–1970s in countries like Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam and
Angola to identify the set of shared principles among them. Central to
these were principles of direct popular revolutionary mobilization, the
achievement of genuine popular sovereignty and the popular will, and
a re-envisioning of the nation space for collective struggle and as step-
ping stone for a wider internationalist solidarity. Hallward’s method
for assessing these principles’ political efficacy today is to delve into a
pre-history of these movements, via Gramsci, Lenin, and Marx, to the
French and Haitian revolutions as important to understand in order to
renew the revolutionary traditions and histories that Parry has so ably
and passionately defended throughout her work.
Keya Ganguly’s essay, “Disaffection, Sedition, and Resistance:
Aurobindo Ghose and Revolutionary Thought,” challenges contempo-
rary renderings of resistance in “quietist” and accommodationist terms
and works against the dominant Eurocentric understandings of forms
of resistance. In doing so, the essay elaborates on one of Parry’s abid-
ing interests: the role of violence in revolutionary movements. In partic-
ular, Ganguly’s essay looks at anti-colonial nationalism in India, best
known as having been spear-headed by Gandhi and his principles of non-
violence, in order to reassess the role of violence in it. Taking the political
thought and actions of the early twentieth-century revolutionary nation-
alist Sri Aurobindo as a focal point, Ganguly critically assesses the role
of violence in revolutionary nationalism as a “contingency of political
thought and action rather than as an absolute,” such that violence then
emerges as constitutive of the colonial encounter, not outside it.
Pranav Jani’s essay “Revolutionary Nationalism and Global Horizons:
The Ghadar Party on Ireland and China” similarly builds on Parry’s
long held defence of anti-colonial nationalism and liberation theory and
the necessity of critically examining actual histories. Like Hallward’s
and Ganguly’s contributions, Jani’s essay turns to an earlier historical
moment that offers crucial insights into contemporary critiques of co-
lonialism and possibilities for internationalist solidarity. Taking up the
case of the diasporic Hindustan Ghadar Party’s responses to the Irish
Easter Rebellion in 1916 and the Chinese revolution of 1925–1927, Jani
presents an incisive account of the debates within Marxism concerning
the relationship between anti-colonial nationalisms and class struggles
between and within nation-states, as well as on the limits and possi-
bilities of global solidarity, debates that resonate ever more urgently in
contemporary crises such as the one unfolding in Syria.
David Johnson’s essay, “The Limits of African Nationalism: From
A nti-Apartheid Resistance to Postcolonial Critique,” revisits Parry’s
time in 1950s Cape Town and the left-wing student movements that
Parry participated in there, particularly the Non-European Unity Move-
ment. Johnson argues that Parry’s association with NEUM and her im-
mersion in the left-wing political milieu of that time and place has played
a critical role in her subsequent formation as a formidable critic of apart-
heid and colonialism. NEUM’s political positions have left “deep traces”
in Parry’s theoretical work within postcolonial studies, particularly the
internationalism of NEUM intellectuals, which is based on an under-
standing of capitalism as a world-system and the imagining of Utopian
futures.
The final essay of this section, Caroline Rooney’s “Maverick Marx-
ism? Eclipsed Enlightenments, Horizons of Solidarity, and Utopian
Realism,” looks at the “maverick” case of the Arab Uprisings, which,
although they did not occur under the banner of Marxism, could nev-
ertheless be read as a revolt against neoliberalism. She uses this opening
as a frame through which to examine the non-programmatic aspects
of Parry’s work on Marxism and political movements. Via critique of
theories of performativity of power, Rooney lays bare the underlying
link between performativity and textual idealism and points to their
limit in offering a critique of both authoritarian capitalism (neoliber-
alism) and authoritarian religion. The essay concludes by revisiting a
series of themes central to Parry’s thinking about revolutionary change,
especially the possibilities of solidarity and a rethinking of Utopia as a
possibility.
The volume concludes with a series of interlocutions between Parry
and some of her key “comrade-colleagues.” We present the first-ever
detailed interview with Benita Parry about her activism, political com-
mitments, and life and work as a scholar, and the first print publica-
tion of an address given by Parry, on receipt of an honorary doctorate
at the University of York, in which she exhorts the next generation of
intellectuals to take up the duty of dissent and opposition. We are also
privileged to carry Timothy Brennan’s previously unpublished address,
delivered at the University of Warwick in 2001 at a symposium honour-
ing Benita Parry. Finally, it is fitting that Parry’s long-time collaborator
and colleague Neil Lazarus provides the foreword to this collection.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. 1980. “Commitment.’” In Aesthetics and Politics, edited by
Ronald Taylor. London: Verso, 177–195.
Brennan, Timothy. 2001. “Benita Parry’s Position.” Talk given at the Benita
Parry Conference. University of Warwick. Reprinted in this volume.
Chrisman, Laura. 2003. Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of
Race, Imperialism and Transnationalism. Manchester: Manchester Univer-
sity Press.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1979. The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of
Marxist Aesthetics. London: Macmillan.
Moretti, Franco. 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1
(January–February): 54–68.
Parry, Benita. 1983. Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Vi-
sionary Frontiers. London: Macmillan.
Parry, Benita. 2002. “Liberation Theory: Variations on Themes of Marxism
and Modernity.” In Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, edited
by Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 125–149.
Parry, Benita. 2004. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London:
Routledge.
Parry, Benita. 2005. “Reflections on the Excess of Empire in Tayeb Salih’s Sea-
son of Migration to the North.” Paragraph 28 (2): 72–90.
Parry, Benita. 2009. “Aspects of Peripheral Modernisms.” Ariel 40 (1): 27–55.
Parry, Benita. 2010. “Countercurrents and Tensions in Said’s Critical Practice.”
In Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, edited by
Adel Iskander and Hakem Rustom. Berkeley: University of California Press,
499–512.
Parry, Benita. 2012. “What Is Left in Postcolonial Studies?” New Literary His-
tory 43 (2): 341–358.
Parry, Benita. 2017. “The Constraints of Chibber’s Criticism: A Review of Post-
colonial Theory and the Specter of Capital by Vivek Chibber.” Historical
Materialism 25 (1): 185–206.
Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books.
Sprinker, Michael. 1988. “Foreword.” In Delusions and Discoveries: India
in the British Imagination, 1880-1930, written by Benita Parry. London:
Verso, vii–xiii.
Part I
Aesthetics
1 Against Modernism
Timothy Brennan
To know whether twentieth-century literary modernism was more

worldly than previously thought, more politically sensitive to the out-
looks and practices of non-European peoples—which so many critics
now contend—we would have to think more carefully about a neglected
tradition of civic letters. The background story of what I am calling
“civic letters” can be found in the vernacular theories of poetic language
derived from ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century, Giambattista Vico
and Johann Gottfried Herder in the eighteenth, and in other figures
of a lineage about which I have written at length elsewhere (Brennan
2017). Their leads, along with their many differences, branched out
in acts of deliberate emulation to form artistic practices as varied as
the theories of popular epic literature explored by Antonio Gramsci in
his writing on the novels of Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, and Leo
Tolstoy. In Gramsci’s wake, and with an identical sensibility, came his
contemporary avatars in the mythic revolutionary novels of Italy’s Wu
Ming collective, strangely ignored in world literature circles (Wu Ming
1 2008); and it finds expression as well in the philological avant-garde
of 1940s L eningrad celebrated by Kirill Medvedev (Medvedev 2013,
77–79). The modern linguistic basis of the civic tradition is richly
theorized, moreover, in the work of Valentin Voloshinov, G raziadio
Isaia Ascoli, and N ikolai Marr, and forms the core ideas of early
t wentieth-century Marxist literary theory, which I mention here in or-
der to suggest that that theory is often mischaracterized at present as
being primarily about committed art, reflection theory, or the solution
in literary form of otherwise intractable social contradictions. It is, I am
saying, about something else and much older—a lineage of civic letters.
What we normally consign to the concept of realism, whether social
or socialist (in Pranav Jani’s useful distinction) is more accurately con-
ceived instead as the work of a lineage of thought emerging from civic
letters (Jani 2010). The consequences of such a shift in terminology
would be to take public or political art out of the historical ghetto
of Marxism, seeing it as being of longer standing—as being, in fact,
many centuries old—with a subtler and more enriching experience
22 Timothy Brennan
of literary form. In civic letters, the art of figural language derives
not only from the vulgate, but also from the entombed memories of
human pre-history. Logic in that distant time was incapable of ab-
stractions, and so had to reason by means of the instruments of a
worldly, situated, earthy myth. Invention was artistic, but not with
the connotations of that term today. There is the sense that whatever
seems most contemporary, individual, and of the “now” is fundamen-
tally an improvisation on the inherited techniques of anonymous and
now-forgotten precursors. Separated by vast geographical spaces un-
bridgeable in an ancient past lacking modern transportation, the first
humans acted on their own without instruction or direction. And yet
they arrived at similar laws, clearing forests, fashioning a secular no-
tion of the sacred based on labour and their transformation of nature
into culture, devising monuments to the spirit, and building the first
cities. Perceived by its makers in antiquity as an anthropologic-artistic
creation, the political state itself emerged at first as the brutal impo-
sition of tyrannical families enslaving those outside their bloodlines,
but gradually it developed into a medium of collective values, and was
retrospectively admired as a hard-won human invention, as liminal as
the invention of the wheel.
To see the state as born in poetry is, among other things, to be forced to
see language as basically interpretable. In lieu of devotion to the cryptic
or the hieratic, and in place of a meaning wilfully improvised by work-
ing on texts as though they were the inert raw material of pure invention,
the idea here is rather that meaning is retrieved from texts in a labori-
ous weighing of connotations, evaluating contexts, and considering the
social scenes of their utterance. Textual evidence, rather than textual
authority, is what matters. A civic hermeneutics of this sort evokes the
oral performance of language: personalities in place and time, capable of
physically touching one another, where language is a matter not only of
inherited definitions or syntax but of bodily gestures, impromptu inno-
vations, intonations of voice. Everything from one’s fatigue to ambient
smells and the weather affect the experience of meaning in a present
moment that cannot be transported elsewhere without loss, and that
attaches itself to authors as part of their place-specific identities. Mean-
ing is not targeted in advance as a sacrifice to semantic infinitude and
indeterminacy. It evolves rather by way of a dialogue of those present to
one another. Staking out a territory tangential to modernism, the civic
tradition sees literature as an agreed-upon indirection, as the register of
the conflict of constituencies wanting to be heard and seeking resolution.
Language, rather than being a sacred law or a shrine to the futility of
truth, is a creation that, like other civic creations (including civil law
itself), is a human defence. It is not—just as in a different context the
state is not—an alien master from which literature sets out to establish
its own estrangement.
Against Modernism 23
The Limits of Peripheral Modernism
Benita Parry is the postcolonial critic who has done most to promote
the notion of “peripheral modernism” and to redefine the term to in-
corporate practices critical of literary modernism as it is normally un-
derstood in our graduate programs. Her discrepant attitudes expresses
themselves in a piercing analysis of peripheral modernism and its critics
in “A Departure from Modernism: Stylistic Strategies in Modern Pe-
ripheral Literatures as Symptom, Mediation and Critique of Modernity”
(2018), where her achievement is to redefine the contours of modernism,
reclaiming it for a sensibility that the urbane disillusion of canonical
Anglo-American modernism would not easily fit.1 The effort is to in-
sist that modernism has been created anew in places where a history of
metropolitan violence and invasion is still deeply felt and in which the
articulation of one’s culture is devised as an antagonism to the imperial
metropole and without the crushing burden of feeling oneself a mere
borrower of others’ techniques.
From the vantage point of civic letters, peripheral modernism has,
however, an important drawback. Here, once again, modernism is
prioritized—if we understand by that term not an embrace of the un-
even social forms of transnational community, or brave and astute
experimentation per se (as most critics do, following Virginia Woolf’s
“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” while counter-posing modernism to a
ham-handed realism). Modernism, rather, from the civic point of view
is understood above all not as a mode, style, or critical stance, but as
an authorized list of writers etched over five decades into professorial
syllabi and the mental repertoires of high profile magazine reviewers.
Kafka, Borges, Woolf, and Stevens are, in this milieu, the automatic and
inevitable last word in wry indirection and the sophisticated helplessness
of the brave truth of modernity. There modernism constitutes a carte
d’identité for entry into a system of evaluative assumptions continually
reinforced in higher education, the media, and the art world. However
brittle or belated Georg Lukács may appear today in the age of Twitter,
he was the first to describe with philosophical precision the attitudes
of this canon, to which he gave the name the “ideology of modernism”
(Lukács 1995). There, he assembles a set of features that guides him in
his reading with abundant textual support: an exaggerated concern with
form; an elevation of the fragmentary, occasional, or temporary over
anything monumental; a preference for sense data over ideas; an onto-
logical view of man as solitary, asocial, unable to enter relationships;
and a purveyor of phenomenological clichés.
He was talking not just about a period designation or a chronolog-
ical span of time, but also, as Edward Said was fond of observing, a
cultural expression of “insurgent” market modernity—one that carried
over into our contemporary period and is still exorbitantly on display in
24 Timothy Brennan
seminar reading lists and the implicit postures of left cultural theory. A
sceptical and at times hostile take on modernism was, in fact, a constant
Lukácsian theme of Said’s work, from his essays in the early 1970s to his
reflections on modernism almost twenty years later in Culture and Impe-
rialism, where Lukács again is brought centrally into the discussion. In
“Arabic Prose and Prose Fiction After 1948,” for example, Said praised
the didactic appeal of Sadiq Jalal al-Azm’s prose, and extolled the tech-
niques of isnad (support, witness) and of episodic storytelling techniques
recalling for Said the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht. Al-Azm, he points
out, upheld the pursuit of the “exact detail of everyday life” that must
involve a reviling of the political quietism of “absurdist pastiche” (Said
2000, 50, 57). The homiletic quality of this aesthetic—“homiletic” be-
cause it bears witness in public, exhorts, and calls for a secular dialogue
about interpretable texts—is non- or un-modernist just as modernism is
explicitly anti-homiletic.
The significance of these strands of influence to any peripheral aesthet-
ics of anti-colonial thought has been more or less completely ignored. In
the case of that vast side of world-literary criticism devoted to the digital
humanities, it has been dismissed as obsolete. Whereas the euphoria of
new modernism studies has looked to the global sweep and demonstra-
ble variety of modernist artistic expression—as though that sweep were
not itself a confirmation of the imperial routes of its transmission—there
has been little respect paid to the substantive and formal qualms with
modernism as an aesthetic ideology that we have inherited from this
paradigmatic interwar discussion.2 As a consequence, the focus shifts
to the diverse racial and ethnic sites of modernism’s composition, to the
transnational avenues of its circulation and away from its political im-
port as a mode of expression laden with the reflexes of a disavowed
political position. As in so many other areas of our discourse, by these
means one moves away from ideas to bodies, which then retroactively
deliver us symbolically to an ontological politics. To put this in the form
of a question: what is the relationship between being against modernism
(as Lukács and Said conceived of it, at any rate) and the aesthetic expres-
sion of anti-colonial thought? That is the question I pose later, by way of
reading of a neglected anti-colonial masterpiece from the civic tradition
of letters.
All of this would seem to speak more directly to current theory, in that
critics invested in the modernist canon and professionally identified with
its authors and journals have. in an outpouring of articles and books
over the last decade, sought to demonstrate that the postcolonial critique
of modernism has seriously misrepresented its varieties and subtexts.
This argument has taken different forms: (1) that modernism was never
monolithic, and always included alternative traditions, including those
peripheral areas of Europe (Ireland, Russia, Eastern Europe) where its
earliest creativity, and even origins, can be found; (2) that modernism’s
transnational circulation and translation suggest a global, not merely
metropolitan, reach and appeal; and (3) that modernism challenged im-
perialism by creating a new vision of cosmopolitan community (Mao
and Walkowitz 2008, 737–749).
From the present perspective, this collection of critical attitudes, which
have lately coalesced as a highly publicized and well-funded movement
with several book series dedicated to developing its arguments, seems
compromised in some respects, although not all.3 The bewildering com-
plexities of mixed agendas, combined and uneven experiences, and in-
finite possibilities of literary form admittedly leave many openings to
those who complain that the characterization of modernism has been
simplistic in the past. On the other hand, the guiding principle of inclu-
sion has led to a persistent blurring of the lines between the avant-garde
and modernism—the key distinction, perhaps, in Raymond Williams’
The Politics of Modernism—and the imprecision of suggesting that lit-
erary realism, insofar as it is found on the periphery, is eligible for entry
into a now-broadened modernist fold.4 And so inclusivity morphs into
the simply malleable, and the exact set of features identified critically by
Lukács, referenced earlier, can then be repeated by the contemporary
critic, without reference to this earlier tradition, as though it demon-
strated only the anti-Eurocentric component of modernism. In Lukács,
modernism’s formal features in ensemble reflect something rather dif-
ferent. They are about the logic of capital.5 The cultural emergent that
Lukács sought to question, and that Said understood as a new dominant,
has remained to this degree an almost environmental form of received
opinion.
If we find here the aporias of an inherited (and wholly expected)
English-studies formalism and canonicity, other challenges arise in the
very counter-movement against such tendencies, for in its recent avatar,
world literature has been characterized not by new modernism studies’
stress on the fertile varieties of world-literary expression or the trans-
national location of its experimentalism, but by a surprising return to
sociology. In the wake of many decades of a deconstructive and discur-
sive euphoria that seemed to preclude it, there is a bending of the stick
in favour of diagnostic flow charts and structural determinations. As
a more or less brutal riposte to discourse theories, the work of Franco
Moretti and Pascale Casanova (not unlike the much earlier work of
Arnold Hauser) has undertaken broad, institutional, market-driven,
macro-projects in which there is little room for individual authors and
almost none for traditions that are chosen or concepts forged by art-
ists and intellectual working against the grain (Moretti 2005; Casanova
2004; Hauser 1999). Paradoxically, then, although they emphatically
disrupt deconstruction’s and discourse theory’s reverent textualisms,
they powerfully reinforce their disarticulation of subjects. As they pres-
ent it, history itself is not very different from the patterned outlines of
26 Timothy Brennan
the impervious langue that it wished to replace. And so, from the point
of view of the tradition of civic letters, there is an impediment to the geo-
graphical mapping aspects of the world-system matrix as adopted from
Immanuel Wallerstein (one of Franco Moretti’s points of departure, for
instance, as well as the W arwick Research Collective’s). In its original
revulsion towards philology, history, and the world of expressive let-
ters (Moretti derives his approach from the explicitly anti-Gramscian
scientism of Galvano Della Volpe), “distant reading” eradicates human
actors in the purported name of a proper materialism (Moretti 2005, 1).
As such, it carries on the emphasis strongly present in the Althusserian
borrowings of Fredric Jameson, which in turn is thoroughly worked out
as a principle in the theory of commodity logic in Moishe Postone—all
of them committed to jettisoning from their inquiries living agents who
read, feel, and conceptualize in actual sites and in varied times in favour
of larger macro-determinants of the social field.6 The ambitious reform-
ist energies of world literature, at least among its leading literary sociol-
ogists, desacralize the canon of modernism only to reassert modernity as
a discourse of the material sciences divorced from the vagaries of taste,
ideology, or invention.
Moretti’s is perhaps the most telling move of this sort, because of its
self-understanding as a grounded social theory hostile to the poses of
poststructuralist discourse, and as the definitive Marxist riposte to an
ambient culturalism. His appeals to the Annales school of historiogra-
phy is similar to his endorsement of Wallerstein as a model for literary
study. Yet his analogies are, in both cases, troubled by the lack of a real
point of contact—one that involves specious analogies between genres
of writing and thinking. His admiration for the Annales historians, for
example, rests on his claim that individual cases (in his analogy, a single
novel) remain conjectural and of doubtful significance whereas broad
patterns (for the Annales group, this meant the meticulous and even
tedious assembling of data on the everyday practices of common peo-
ple over the longue durée of history) are more scientific. But this would
not, as he assumes, lead necessarily to a study based on quantitative
approaches—his “computational stylistics” and “thematic databases”
(Moretti 2005, 4). In other words, there is a vast space between “individ-
ual” and “computational,” the latter being the use of a technology that
can “read” quantities and little else, and therefore must be re-narrated
afterward according to an unexamined personal calculus, since quan-
titative searches have no discernment and must be told by the critic-as-
agent what to count: what bits are to be reconstituted as Moretti’s whole.
A more logical conclusion than the one he draws might have been to
read more novels and in that way avoid settling for “individual cases.”
It may be that Krzysztof Pomian and Lucien Febvre (one of the A nnales
historians whom he discusses) tend in their project not to concen-
trate on singular events, but rather on “units in a series, which reveal
conjunctural variations” (Moretti 2005, 27). But these units are, after
all, composed of events, not raw quantities. His methods and Febvre’s
are not analogous, since in the latter’s method we can still logically talk
about actors, conjunctions, causes, underlying relationships, settings—
all the colour and complexity of the real—rather than the purification
of that reality now distilled into numerical units in which causes and
relationships are slipped in ex post facto by conjectures violently super-
imposed on data.
There are, then, problems with the new sociological turn in world
literature, given that sociology is understood here as graphing and map-
pings that occlude the experiences of writers and their readers in the
act of intellectual exchange. The civic tradition of letters, then, might
be seen today as confronting two very different kinds of alternatives:
one aestheticist, the other determinist. Its reservations with this latter
attempt are no less vital than with the former. Quite apart from the
limits of the analogy between Wallerstein’s graphing of economic cy-
cles and the circulation of literary texts, Moretti’s digital mapping, and
Casanova’s broad, quasi-economic charting of institutions (and similar
attempts by others, such as the Warwick collective), they fail to consider
important amendments to Wallerstein even within his own sociological
milieu. This has a profound effect on any claim to world literature in
its post-Eurocentric phase. Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hege-
mony, for instance, has not even been mentioned among those turning
positively to Wallerstein, and yet she demonstrates that his model fails
to give substance to a narrative of alternative centres of the world-system
prior to sixteenth-century Europe, his point of departure (Abu-Lughod
1991). She identifies, rather a thirteenth- and fourteenth-century world-
system based on the Mongol control of the Central Asian overland
trade routes—neatly echoing, to that degree, the relationship between
K haldun and Vico that I alluded to previously. That she and her husband
Ibrahim are the people to whom Said dedicated Orientalism may only
be anecdotal, but it suggests further the fissures in world literature be-
tween broadly structural and civic traditions of Marxism.
Another reservation has to do with the lack of attention given in post-
colonial studies, world literature, or distant reading to the persistent at-
tack on the modernist aesthetic in peripheral literatures themselves. The
tri-partite rescue of modernism from its earlier detractors on the grounds
of its neglected sensitivities to peripheral situations and attitudes would
have to reckon with the self-conscious rejection of the modernist aes-
thetic on political grounds by writers in colonial formations: Fanon’s
urge to get beyond a “banal search for exoticism” (Fanon 1963, 221);
Ernst Bloch’s parody of Dostoevsky as a “minstrel of the deluge” and
creator of “the beautiful sufferings of a textualized ‘humanity’” (Bloch
1998, 45, 49); and Said’s complaints about the knowing cynicism and
supercilious ethnography of the modernist dissection of the savage soul
28 Timothy Brennan
(Said 1975). Bashir Abu-Manneh, in his excellent study of Palestinian
literature, similarly observes that in Third World contexts, when mod-
ernism arrives on the scene, it is usually to express a movement’s defeat
and dissolution (Abu-Manneh 2016).
Almost nothing has been said of these demurs in new modernism
studies, nor has the texture of its anger been treated as something that
requires explanation. A tradition of satirical dismissal of modernism
seeks liberation from its corrosive ironies, from its hostility to didacti-
cism, its self-satisfied dwellings in dark interiors, and its blasé attitudes.
Eduard Douwes Dekker’s Max Havelaar, published in 1860, is almost
a manual for this dismissal, and its satirical force to that end could not
be more deliberate.
The Anti-Colonial Anti-Aesthetic

Max Havelaar is among the least discussed nineteenth century classics
of realism, in part because it was written in Dutch rather than French,
English, or German. Its neglect has to do also with its startling mix of
hectoring social betterment and metacriticism. It would be hard to find
another novel where the two are so completely intertwined. More than
a Stendahlian depiction of an exact historical situation, it is at the same
time a layered self-study of the depiction itself and, what is more, a the-
ory of the relation between literary mode and historical act. Relentlessly
self-reflexive, there is no work of nineteenth-century realist fiction that
toys so with its own formal elements, bearing the device (as Russian for-
malism would later put it) of its own fictionality even as it laments the
necessity of resorting to literature at all in its mission to expose Dutch
colonial outrages in Java.
At no point, however, does one get the sense of an ambiguity to be
savoured, where the performative contradiction of an author submitting
authorship to public rebuke wishes to dwell in the middle space of its
own contradiction, admiring itself for its feints even as it pretends to
slough off these necessary means to a pedagogical end. There is nothing
of that familiar double-cross we find in Vladimir Nabokov or Franz
Kafka, where the futility of representation is redeemed by the compen-
satory grace and productivity of the means of representation. Form does
not, as in those others, arise again after its initial compromise as its
own ground. Samuel Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I must go on” is alien to
Dekker’s sensibilities, for it is a reflection on the social setting of author-
ship and the ameliorative, even pacifying, properties of the literary that
softens bad news by nudging it categorically towards the comforting
rubric of a generally lamentable nature.
Dekker seems in the novel to already be looking forward to a con-
fusion of categories characterizing today’s media environments, where
famous athletes or film stars become, for that very reason, politicians,
or where authors, by virtue of being authors, are taken to be oracles and
asked to weigh in on major political issues: the novelist Richard Powers
pronouncing on the Holocaust because he wrote a novel about a black
Jewish jazz musician; David Mamet given a cover story on the future of
the internet in Harper’s because he writes his plays on a laptop; Charlton
Heston invited to a television debate on the Middle East because he
played Moses in The Ten Commandments. The political writings of
Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy, similarly, would not be recog-
nized if Devi and Roy had not first become famous as authors of fiction.
The percentage of awards in the humanities at most universities, the
faculty hiring at Bard College and the University of Southern California,
the pattern of fellowships awarded by the Guggenheim Foundation, the
New York Public Library, and the Getty—all of them privilege authors
and artists over critics, theorists, and philosophers. Dekker sees this and
takes advantage of it but reviles the necessity of doing so.
He was himself a highly placed colonial official in the Dutch East
I ndies, Assistant Resident of Lebak in 1856, already working in
I ndonesia for a textile business at the age of eighteen in 1836, and by
1842, appointed District Officer at Natal on the west coast of Sumatra.
His everyday involvements in the colonial administration were extensive,
and his familiarity with the functioning of the state largely personal: in
Sumatra he was “head of police, judge, registrar of births, deaths, and
marriages, postmaster, manager of the salt and rice stores, collector of
taxes, auctioneer, and a few other things” (Meijer 1987, 3), eccentric, a
gambler, involved (albeit unjustly) in financial scandals while working as
an administrator, the writer of absurdly long and literary letters to unap-
preciative superiors, and a dabbler at plays and fictional diaries. Where
the fake and the real Dekkers intersect is in their fierce independence of
mind and, not paradoxically, their pride at being dedicated civil servants.
No radical, Dekker has the distinction of writing a great a nti-colonial
novel without opposing colonialism as such. He sought only its reform.
Why, then, with the sociological goods at his fingertips, did he deliver
his charges against Dutch colonialism through a novel? His authorial
persona, to which he gives the name “Multatuli” (Latin for “I have suf-
fered much”), sums up his mission:
“prove” that what is fiction in particular is truth in general… Hence,

instead of bare names of persons and places, with dates—instead of
a copy of the list of thefts and extortions which lies before me—
instead of these, I have tried to give a sketch of what may go on in
the hearts of poor people robbed of their means of subsistence, or,
more precisely: I have only suggested what may go on in their hearts,
fearing that I might be too wide of the mark if I firmly delineated
emotions which I never felt myself.
(Multatuli 1987, 278, Dekker’s emphasis)
30 Timothy Brennan
And he spends the last pages of the novel, in fact, shedding its fictional
armature, speaking in his own voice as the author of the foregoing novel,
decrying the fact that he had to resort to fiction in order to be heard.
The avant-garde is, according to Peter Bürger, definitionally “anti-
aesthetic”; its aim is to destroy the claims of transcendence on the
grounds that art’s offensive emoluments work through socially paralytic
form (Bürger 1984, 76). The idea is not to come up with a new take on
art, but rather to sweep away the whole decadent enterprise in the name
of the prosaic now. This is one of the conventional distinctions, in fact,
between the avant-garde and modernism (As Williams, I noted earlier,
has remarked). On these grounds, Dekker’s novel can only be called
avant-garde—and yet nothing about Max Havelaar could be mistaken
for the usual avant-garde posture. It is defiantly earnest, demotic, senti-
mental, respectful of authority, eager to partake of government, calmly
pedagogical, and unashamedly hortatory. It is, above all, hostile to the
ironies of the deliberate second-guessing of literary pastiche. It is, if one
can imagine such a position, opposed to irony itself.
Even for a novel— a genre without generic rules, and a jumble of
sub-generic elements—Max Havelaar is arresting for its asymmetries.
Riven between Amsterdam and Lebak, the novel is a remarkable med-
ley of styles—almost a compendium of possible styles—moving from
colourless conversational prose to stilted bureaucratic jargon to social
caricature, and then on to passionate outbursts and the soulless cal-
culations of the factual findings of official reports. Interspersed poems
to the Dutch motherland meet romances in Malay and war songs in
Javanese. The difficulties of translating German are mooted alongside
social realist tales of exploitation straight out of the melodramas of pop-
ular theatre. The titular focus of the novel, Havelaar, does not enter the
narrative until page 88, when he is finally allowed to speak for himself,
having been rendered subordinate to a prolonged reflection on the lies
of literature.
The entire first fifty pages of the novel, set in Amsterdam, involves the
discovered manuscript from which the rest of the novel is supposedly
drawn, as though that second movement was, word-for-word, the very
manuscript found, edited, and traduced in the earlier section. This sec-
ond, anti-colonial portion relates Havelaar’s trials in the Dutch colonies
and his quarrel with his superiors over the exploitation of the rural la-
bourers who are forced to work for free as tribute to the local chieftains
with whom the Dutch are complicit. But what that “found” manuscript
actually contains, or what was done to it in its transmission, is cloaked
in mystery.
It enters the narrative as the possession of a former acquaintance of
Havelaar in the East Indies, a wanderer now homeless on the streets of
Amsterdam, one “Scarfman”—named for the scarf he wears, since he is
nameless. How much of the manuscript is Scarfman’s writing and how
much Havelaar’s is unclear. Scarfman was once “top of the class” and
is now destitute, a “verse-broker” (35) according to the novel’s most
sharply drawn character in the book’s opening pages—a judgmental phi-
listine and hypocritical coffee merchant named Batavus Droogstoppel.
It is to him that Scarfman delivers the manuscript in the hope that he
will preserve and publish it on the basis of the tenuous bond of an old
school tie. Droogstoppel in turn, having little affection for literary
pursuits, hands the manuscript over for editing to an office apprentice
named Stern, a German student who works over the loose collection of
pages found in the shabby shoebox under Scarfman’s arm and moulds it
into the story that comprises the novel’s second, Javan, half. The ruse of
the found “authentic document” has, of course, characterized the novel
since Cervantes— a “certified true copy” in the novel’s sardonic phrase
(56). Here, however, the ambiguous frame only wishes to make the nov-
el’s anti-aesthetic intentions more unambiguous.
Droogstoppel, who dominates the opening pages and pokes his way
into the narrative at various points throughout, is “not in the habit of
writing novels” and doesn’t “even like reading,” since novels “palm off
on you something that never happened” (19). “Public morality,” he cau-
tions, “is sapped by accustoming [the audience] to applaud something
on the stage which, in the world, every respectable broker or business-
man regards as ridiculous lunacy” (22). He despises those who dress up
poverty in “fine words” (34). His entire household is fascinated by the
contents of Scarfman’s parcel, and his son Frits opens it to “extract[ ]
from it a mass of sententiousness and sentimentality” (34), reading parts
of it aloud, whereby everyone is moved by its beauty and feeling. But
along with the love stories that produce this emotion, the manuscript
also contains sections
on Sanskrit as the mother of the Germanic languages… on the de-

cline of civilization since the rise of Christianity… on verse as the
oldest language… on the beauty of the women of Nimes and Arles
and an inquiry into the colonization system of the Phoenicians… on
France’s duty to herself to counterbalance England’s influence in the
Malay Archipelago, on the right of rebellion against oppression, on
the influence of racial intermarriage on the mind, and on the crimes
of the Europeans outside Europe.
(45–50)
Although Droogstoppel continually refers to “my book,” what he refers

to is a manuscript whose composition has been deliberately obscured via
various levels of mediation in a form of collective authorship. Its raw con-
tents come from Scarfman, whose arrangement, editing, and rewriting are
the work of the German Stern (since Germans are “literary,” according
to the author), whose non-native Dutch is corrected by Frits, and whose
32 Timothy Brennan
correction is then transcribed into “fair copy” by his daughter Marie.
Droogstoppel reserves the right, he says, to write a few of the chapters
himself. The “book” that we read is not only a collective project of a cast
of characters who frequently break into the story to express their opinions,
but a composition that is “read aloud every week to the assembled party”
in Amsterdam. Droogstoppel himself declares that he would have the
book be about “millers and the clergy, and the sellers of Holloway’s pills,
and distillers, and tilemakers, and the people who live from gilt-edged
securities, and pumpmakers… and the shareholders in the Dutch trading
company…”—in short, a kind of bourgeois economist realism (54).
This opening section then gives way to Stern’s narration directly, which
(much in the manner of the whaling sections of Melville’s Moby-Dick)
is dedicated to the informational. Over about thirty pages, he describes
and explains what the Dutch East Indies are like ethnographically: what
the relationships are among its various administrators and functionar-
ies, the fealties, the obligations, who profits, how ‘profit’ is buried in cus-
toms, and the complicity of the local chiefs. The European colonial type
yields sharply drawn portraits: “Indolent as long as there was nothing to
do, and quite free from all the fussiness which passes in Europe for zeal,
but zealous where action was necessary” (78). Since the manuscript is
itself a collective project, the opinions and reflections that keep bearing
the device are of uncertain provenance, although they seem very much
to be a composite opinion of Dekker himself.
Dispensed with, then, is the initial possibility that Droogstoppel—
who is monstrously unsympathetic, an unimaginative, money-grubbing
racist and conformist—is meant simply to be the anti-Dekker, the one
whose tirades against literature’s untruth are (as in so much modernist
fiction) precisely the send-up of the philistine who is naïve enough to
rant about a “truth” that the worldly know is always invented. Dekker
foresees this possible misreading, countering it in a footnote:
I am far from disagreeing with everything I put into Droogstoppel’s

mouth. He “normally never had anything to do” with verses of the
kind that follow here. Well, neither have I! The difference lies in
our respective reasons for disliking such verses. It is not only excus-
able, but even positively essential, that young heart with a burning
thirst after poetry, mesmerized by a self-assertive dilettantish lit-
erature unworthy of the name, should fail in its first attempts at
self-expression and take for real something which ultimately proves
to be nothing but empty noise…. [Droogstoppel] is not above but
below making the mistakes of the others…. If Droogstoppel’s down-
to-earth outpourings should serve to put a damper on false poetry
in the minds of our young people, I would heartily recommend them
to the attention of parents, pedagogues and reviewers.
(328–329, Dekker’s emphasis)
Havelaar’s first entrance into the narrative on page 88 complicates these
assertions, however. Clearly a self-portrait to some degree of Dekker’s
own view of himself in Lebak, Havelaar comes off as an idealized hero
of social realism:
a ‘vessel of contradictions’ sharp as a razor, yet tender-hearted as

a young girl, he was always the first to feel the wound his bitter
words had inflicted, and he suffered more from it than the injured
party did. He was quick on the uptake; he grasped at once the most
exalted, most complicated matters… and yet often he could not
understand the simplest thing… Full of love for truth and justice,
he frequently neglected his nearest, most obvious duty, in order to
redress a wrong.
(89)
He has suffered much, writes Dekker in the guise of “Multatuli”: “In

his diary there were fire, riot, assassination, war, duels, wealth, poverty,
hunger, cholera, love and ‘loves.’ He had visited many lands, and had
mixed with people of all races and conditions, customs, prejudices, reli-
gions, and colours” (93).
The appeal of the narrative depends, however, on a literary unliter-
ariness, where the commerce-besotted, soulless merchant Droogstoppel
possesses insights into literature’s dangers, whereas the pure at heart, the
learned and empathetic anti-colonial crusader Havelaar lets his own sin-
cerity get in the way of an effective critique. And yet, his understanding
of realism is precisely Dekker’s:
Havelaar was a true poet… He invented nothing: he heard the tree

speak, and considered he was only repeating what he had so clearly
heard in his poetic inspiration… He did not really like writing verse.
‘It was a nasty corset,’ he said; and if he was induced to read any-
thing he had ‘committed’ as he put it, he took a delight in spoiling
his own work, either by reciting it in a tone calculated to make it ri-
diculous, or by suddenly stopping, especially in a highly serious pas-
sage, and throwing in a quip which was painful to his audience but
which, to him, was nothing else than a satirical comment, wrung
from the heart.
(119–120)
Droogstoppel rightly counsels Stern on how to write, which is all about

getting at the truth rather than being swept away by the beauty of words,
and the need not to choose the exciting or exotic stories—simply be-
cause they are more entertaining—when the truth is rather less exalted
and even ordinary; that is, he is saying there is a dynamic to the very
enterprise of fiction that keeps militating against the true. This is the
34 Timothy Brennan
case even when fictionality has been taken into account to reveal the
essential truth. If the Bible is hateful, in Dekker’s view, for instructing
its readers in the perverse morality of conquest, should we not have our
own Bible (as it were) something that also instructs, using the Bible’s
exhortatory tools to lead in the opposite direction? (147). To explain
to Europeans what the colonies are actually like demands many peda-
gogical digressions. These are necessary acts of potential boredom. As
offensive as they may be to a novel’s ends in entertainment and pleasure,
they are forgivable when measured against their opposite extreme: the
constant ramping up of horrors in order to prompt an emotional engage-
ment in the reader (187). “I renounce all claims to picturesqueness,” he
concludes (189).
In a sense, the tragedy that the novel recounts is the tragedy of
Havelaar’s style; he is shown as being a master of speech in a mellifluous
Malay and an expert at the blandishments of official encounters, where
indirection, courteousness, and calculated humility before power is de-
manded. The author (at the Stern-Droogstoppel-Dekker nexus) says that
if he had had Havelaar’s style, he would not have used it:
If I could write like him, I should write otherwise than he did. Style?
What good has it done him?…. Away with kindly language, away
with gentleness, frankness, clarity, simplicity, feeling! Away with all
that savours of Horace’s justum ac tenacem! Let trumpets sound,
and the sharp clash of cymbals be heard, and the hiss of rockets, and
the screech of unturned strings, and now and then a word of truth,
that it may steak in like contraband under cover of all the drumming
and fifing (236).
He illustrates the point with a short story about one Saïjah and Adindah,
an ill-fated couple whose buffalo is confiscated by the authorities, and
who are then separated, and their parents die of heartbreak—a tale
Dekker sardonically repeats is “monotonous” to his readers, too plain,
too good-hearted, too virtuous to thrill his readers (255–274). By page
317, he has finally had it with the pretence of fiction itself, addressing
the readers directly now, casting the whole Droogstoppel frame away
as the “wretched spawn of sordid moneygrubbing and blasphemous
cant!… I loathe my own handiwork: choke in coffee and disappear!”
The book, he concedes, is “chaotic … disjointed … striving for effect …
the style is bad … the writer lacks skill … no talent … no method. Right,
right, … all right! But … THE JAVANESE IS MALTREATED. For: the
SUBSTANCE of my work is irrefutable!” (319, Dekker’s emphasis). The
beauty of the literary gesture at this point, we can say, is to be against
irony. It is precisely to be at the point of saying plainly, with anger, that
these words have not a single figurative element to them and that they
disable all attempts at multiple interpretations.
Perhaps the key thing, aesthetically, about civic realism in the expanded
definition I am giving it—and so as not to get caught up in disagreements
over mimesis, agitprop, prescriptive aesthetics, or total art—is that it
is no longer simply the “resistance” we hear so much about, the expo-
sure of wrongs, the revolt against inhumanity, the moving description of
colonial atrocities, or the gripping capture of a psychological torment.
Instead, it is about the colonized in power—or the promise of their being
in power—with a stake in the political system, working in the mode of
producing a new way. This view fundamentally disrupts the safe cyn-
icism of the modernist ethos, and is profoundly uncomfortable to the
sanctioned sensibilities of the Western auteur. It is why the heart of civic
(or homiletic) realism is a peripheral aesthetic.
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2 “I remember, I remember
so as not to forget!” Orhan
Pamuk’s Melancholic
Agency and the Splenetic
Périples of Mediterranean
Writing
Norbert Bugeja
Nothing is forgotten in the Mediterranean.

Thierry Fabre
Cette douce mélancolie ne nous a jamais été accordée

Depuis que nous sommes nés dans un faubourg,
Une maison toute noire, dans un sous-sol.
Nâzim Hikmet, ‘Rubaïs’
Ta mémoire est divine à ma mélancolie.

Mario Scalési, ‘Orgueil’
In one of the most striking recollections of his childhood years in the late
1950s and early 1960s, Istanbul-born novelist Orhan Pamuk reminisces
on his native city and its population during those early Cold War years.
This was a politically charged moment in Istanbul’s history—not least
because of the state-sponsored persecution of non-Muslim ethnic groups
under Adnan Menderes’ conservative government, which was subse-
quently found complicit in the violent riots on 6–7 September 1955 tar-
geting the city’s Greek and other non-Muslim ethnic minorities. Pamuk
was born in an Istanbul already irrevocably marked by the effects, on
both its demography and ethno-cultural formations, of the Ottoman re-
public’s demise, and ongoingly experiencing the systematic dismantling
of invaluable elements of its old infrastructure and urban architecture.
In his memoir Istanbul – Memories of a City (2005), Pamuk shapes
his account around this urban economy of dilapidation. Self-consciously
writing at the receiving end of a lineage that includes Théophile Gautier,
Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Roger
Caillois and several others, Pamuk embraces his native space as one
that is culturally nurturing and for that same reason, politically alive,
a city that is legitimised in its aesthetic voicing because of an urban
38 Norbert Bugeja
cartography marked by a century and a half of political and ethnic diffi-
culty on the isthmus that conjoins and divides Europe and Western Asia.
As Pamuk points out:
The melancholy of this dying [post-Ottoman] culture was all around

us. Great as the desire to Westernise and modernise may have been,
the more desperate wish, it seemed, was to be rid of all the bit-
ter memories of the fallen empire: rather as a spurned lover throws
away his lost beloved’s clothes, possessions and photographs. But
as nothing, Western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive
to Westernise amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect
on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine,
otherwise glad of Republican progress, to furnish their houses like
museums. […]
(Pamuk 2006a, 27)
Pamuk goes on to refer this sense of a profound cultural and memorial

decline back to the writer and essayist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, whose
own flânerie through the post-Ottoman city’s impoverished neighbour-
hoods, as the city was being strategically peripheralised in the wake the
country’s shift of its capital city to Ankara in the Republic’s early years,
was later to have a lasting influence on Pamuk. “How many conquests,
how many defeats, how many miseries did [Istanbul’s] people have to
suffer,” Tanpınar had written as he toured the city’s poverty-stricken
backstreets, “to create the scene before us?” (224). Pamuk himself even-
tually recalls that
When, in a single night in 1964, the state forced its Greek inhab-
itants to migrate to Greece, many homes, flats, shops, and offices
[in Istanbul] were vacated in haste. But the deluge of the poor and
unemployed coming from Anatolia had yet to seep and settle into
these spaces. Some parts of these neighborhoods looked like ghost
towns. Imbibing this atmosphere always made me intensely melan-
cholic […].
(Pamuk 2012: 34)
As he embarks on his own périple, through the streets of his own child-
hood, Pamuk seizes upon this wistful aesthetic mooted by the Istanbullu
writers of the early Republic, opening up its conceptual terms even as
he continues to read it—like Tanpınar himself—as an accrued outcome
of the city’s vertiginous cultural-political shift. This essay will approach
Pamuk’s more recent work, and specifically, the complex discursive tran-
sition that occurs between his memoir Istanbul – Memories of a City
and his subsequent novel The Museum of Innocence (2011), in terms of
what Jean Laplanche would term the ‘afterwardly’ inscription, which
“I remember, I remember so as not to forget!” 39
would principally refer to the affective fallout, in Pamuk’s narratives,
from the historic loss sustained by his native city in the wake of the
Ottoman demise. In his work on the concept of “afterwardsness” (1999,
234–265), Laplanche takes up Freud’s work on mourning and melan-
cholia and specifically opens up the afterwardly condition as a mode of
living in relation to a “dead other” (248) whose bequeathed past sign or
message unrelentingly “demands to be deciphered” (263). This demand,
and the preoccupation that the message it harbours “has never been ade-
quately understood, never listened to enough” (254), constitutes a salient
labour for the “immediate consciousness” (238) of those who sustain the
bequest. For Laplanche, the “retrogressive” (265) relation to and articu-
lation of the past other’s demand would be inexorably tied to the present
labour of translation and “retranslation” (265) of its message implanted
within the anxious subjectivity of the present—hence echoing Walter
Benjamin’s own insistence on the Lesbarkeit of the transpired sign of
history—the imperative, that is, for its legibility above and beyond its
mere percolation into the present.
The discursive shift in Pamuk’s itinerary from memoir to memorial
novel is in fact characterised by a transition from the representation of
the haunting, post-Ottoman signifiers of an unquantifiable historical loss
in the memoir to a quasi-obsessive drive to internalise the reticent mean-
ings of this loss, in The Museum of Innocence, as an essential part of
the protagonist’s political subjectivity. In this sense, Pamuk’s work offers
an index to a broader constellation of writing across the Mediterranean
littoral that works under the sign of the afterwardly—insofar as its nar-
ratives are concerned with the continued struggle to render legible, and
to preserve the very legibility of, the historical other’s clamouring voices
across the region’s myriad geo-political scenarios and contexts. From
Tangier to Alexandria, from Ramallah to Istanbul itself as a crucial epi-
centre for many of the European-engineered upheavals that were to alter
the fate of the Eastern Basin following the Ottoman demise, afterwardly
writing continues to reorganise the ensuing losses into a grammar of
self-affirmation, at once political and aesthetic.
The similar bearings that structure Pamuk’s writing as a broader la-
bour of post-memorial crisis are very often the city’s ruins themselves
and the sense of ennui and historical precariousness they intimate,
conditions that fuel the narrative anxieties that layer his depictions of
Cold War Istanbul.1 The subtle and capillary meanderings of narration
through which Pamuk’s melancholy flânerie (both actual and narrato-
rial) mediate and re-mediate the post-Ottoman social space were earlier
explored by Tanpınar, particularly in his magnum opus A Mind at Peace
(2008; Huzur [1949]). Tanpınar’s novel invokes the city’s subdued infra-
structure with a suggestive descriptive-realist pen, such that the social
and architectural spaces of the city threaten to over-determine its in-
habitants’ lives. The novel’s central character, in fact, the young writer
40 Norbert Bugeja
Mümtaz, famously “plod[s] through decrepit, grim neighborhoods,
passing before aged houses whose bleakness gave them the semblance of
human faces” (Tanpinar 2008, 23).
Later on, in the post-war context addressed by Pamuk, this voice
of an irrevocable and haunting historical loss elaborated by Tanpınar
was to acquire a ‘name,’ as well as specific properties that Pamuk dis-
tilled from Tanpınar’s own forlorn spaces. In Pamuk’s hands, the city’s
immanent tristesse acquires a more autonomous—if sometimes more
intransigent—état de l’âme, or what might otherwise be termed a mel-
ancholic agency, one that opens up and taps the historicist sensitivity
of melancholic affect itself as a space that can house the post-imperial
city’s fraught transit into a national consciousness. Speaking of the Re-
publican city’s communal melancholy in its post-war milieu, Pamuk
writes that “Hüzün does not just paralyse the inhabitants of Istanbul,”
but rather, as Pamuk memorably observes, “it also gives them poetic
licence to be paralysed” (Pamuk 2006a, 129). The “poetic licence” de-
rives its legitimation from the tensions that arose between the constitu-
tional totalism of the new Republican polity and the painfully vanishing
vestiges of late Ottoman metropole. For Pamuk, hüzün is not merely a
wistful mood but a mode of enunciation premised on an inescapable
condition: a “paralytic” melancholy, in the sense invoked by Giorgio
Agamben in his excursus on Hegel and the subjectivity of crisis, wherein
he emphasises Hegel’s conception of “pure culture” as a “consciousness
of laceration” (“la coscienza della lacerazione”) (Agamben 1994, 40). In
Pamuk’s hands, hüzün behaves as an important nexus: it functions, in
one sense, as an afterwardly sense of cultural-political ‘laceration’ that
defines Pamuk’s historical subjects—Istanbul’s post-war denizens—and
their ways of weathering and worlding the post-imperial transition. On
the other hand, hüzün in Pamuk’s purview embodies what Benita Parry,
in her seminal work Postcolonial Studies – A Materialist Critique, has
termed “the consciousness of historical continuity” (Parry 2004, 184).
While Parry’s essay in the same book, titled “Reconciliation and
Remembrance,” is concerned with the South African context, her re-
flections on historical consciousness and memory are pertinent to the
circumstances Pamuk is writing in as well as the current situation in
Turkey under the seemingly endless rule of “Sultan” Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan. “Whose interests, we must ask, are advanced by an officially
instituted memory loss?” Parry writes (2004, 183). “Who profits by for-
getting? Is it those who suffered subjugation, or those who instituted and
maintained their condition?” (183). Pamuk’s own melancholy is in large
part attributable to an awareness of the new Turkish national edifice as
having been constructed on the debris of the persecuted and expelled
Jewish, Armenian, Greek and other minority ethnic communities. As
Parry notes in her engagement with Adorno’s work, “the effacement
of memory is a sign that the consciousness of historical continuity has
been atrophied […]” (184). Similarly, the current mythical, glorified re-
workings of Ottoman-Muslim narratives under Erdoğan’s watch must
be questioned in terms of the trail of psychic and social repression his
ascendancy is ongoingly leaving in its wake. For the effacement of mem-
ory either by stealth or by violence, as well as the deployment of what
Parry terms “selective retrospect” (189) are all too familiar scenarios in
today’s Turkey, and hence continue to demand “the responsibility of nar-
rating the past in ways that subject the strategies of validating violence,
exploitation and persecution to scrutiny and judgment […]” (185). For
Parry, a vigilant consciousness of history is predicated on “the constant
renewal of historical memory” as a responsibility towards “the ethical
obligations attendant on rewriting the past” (192). As I will argue later
in the essay, the question of such an ethical obligation may indeed have
compelled Pamuk’s move towards a more overtly social-historical nar-
rative concern in his last two novels, The Museum of Innocence (2011)
and A Strangeness in My Mind (2015).
Pamuk’s fiction betrays a constant effort in this regard: it strives to
replenish a certain crisis of memory as an ongoing struggle to ward
off the danger of a bequeathal of consciousness being rendered illeg-
ible. This undertaking is best summed up, perhaps, in the character
of Celâl’s obsessive exclamation in an early chapter of the novel The
Black Book (2006b): “I remember, I remember so as not to forget!” (20).
Here, the novel’s own consciousness of laceration unfolds in between
the character’s effort to retain before his mind the ability to recall an
ever-receding post-imperial condition, and the burgeoning realization
that such unmediated instances of recall must henceforth be replaced
by the subject’s self-conscious efforts of memorial invigoration and nar-
rative re-assertion. This afterwardly dynamic, I would argue, is true of
the emergent texts dotting the Mediterranean’s south-eastern littoral to-
day, from the increasingly diversified literatures of Palestine to those of
post-uprising Tunisia, from narratives of the periplous as embodied in
the works of Laila Lalami, Tahar ben Jelloun and Amin Maalouf to the
ever-popular metafictions of al-Andalus. The dialectic of continuity and
laceration permeates, above all, Pamuk’s attraction to the city’s derelict
ruins, the “burnt-out lots, workshops, depots and ramshackle wooden
mansions [in] the crumbling and forgotten empty streets of these ‘iso-
lated’ parts” (Pamuk 2005, 223). For Pamuk the memoirist, the latter
behave as mercilessly ontic simulacra, ones that, in their semi-absent,
semi-present state, act as modes of visibility to the state-enforced ab-
sence of the city’s Greek, Kurdish, Armenian and Jewish minorities: a
violence that, in the wake of the rise of Kemalist politics, “made the city
more hellish than the worst Orientalist nightmares” (155).
For Pamuk, who was three years old when Adnan Menderes’ govern-
ment assaulted the city’s non-Muslim ethnic communities in the infa-
mous Septemvriana riots of 1955, hüzün embodies the darkly intimate
42 Norbert Bugeja
nature of historical violence as a constitutive relation. Hüzün is that to
which the remembering subject relates in the quest for historical self-
affirmation, an affect born out of absolute historical necessity, but prac-
tised in the utmost freedom of those subterranean spaces where the city’s
governing discourses come to be reviewed, questioned, and reviewed
again. Pamuk often alludes to the living rooms and museum-like vaults
occupied by the city’s post-war ‘hoarders’ of historical objects: spaces
that often behave in relation to the city as—to echo Laplanche—spaces
that will always remain further inward to its psychic than its own per-
ceived inwardness (Laplanche 1999, 67).
The Politics of l’Après-Coup

To speak of the politics of melancholy in today’s Mediterranean and,
moreover, to speak of a literature of the Mediterranean that rallies
around it, is by no means an easy task. To do so is to begin to confront
those tensions that pitch, a posteriori, the consciousness of laceration in
a struggle with the claims and pressures entailed in the region’s myriad
imperatives of historical continuity—a struggle that occurs, in narrative,
on the inside of a textual corpus beholden to the injunction to exteriorise
its historicity, a literature in thrall to a certain phenomenology of the af-
terwardly condition (see Laplanche 1999, 258–265). To dare to speak of
a politics of l’après-coup (Laplanche’s term), or of the afterwardly con-
dition in today’s Mediterranean is also to call for an unprecedented anal-
ysis of how this region’s diversified narrative efforts are now occupying,
with unprecedented vigour, the fraught cusp of those processes whereby
historical violence and ideologically invested hindsight enter into and
operate in a dialectical relation—one that is, invariably, mediated by
a profound crisis in recall. In Pamuk’s own work, this crisis concerns
the embattled survival [survivir] of an extensive cultural and intellectual
capital that disappeared when Istanbul was systematically cleansed of
its ethnic, confessional and architectonic diversity. One agent coupable
for this century-long agenda was for Pamuk, as it was for many others,
the progressive drive that moulded Turkey’s drive towards Republican-
secularist governance. Pamuk laments the fact that:
The great drive to Westernise amounted mostly to the erasure of

the past […] With its muddy parks and desolate open spaces, its
electricity poles and the billboards plastered over its squares and its
concrete monstrosities, this city, like my soul, is fast becoming an
empty—a very empty—place. […] The darkest, most murderous and
authentic strain of melancholy creeps in from streets too distant to
see, and I can almost smell it—just as an experienced Istanbullu can
tell from the soft scent of algae and sea on an autumn evening that
the south winds are bringing us a storm […]
(Pamuk 2006a, 409)
Pamuk’s choice of the word “storm” here is perhaps not accidental,
in the sense that it iterates the “raging storm” of historical progress
that Benjamin read through Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. Indeed,
Pamuk’s own afterwardly politics takes stock not only of the city
as a constellation of ethno-religious and socio-urban ruin, but also
of the dilapidation or “exhaustion” itself—to apply Wendy Brown’s
concept—of Republican-secularist progressivism that occasioned the
aforesaid devastation (Brown 2001, 152). 2 In this sense, Pamuk’s
critique of the progress-oriented drive that strategically induced the
city’s ethno-memorial hiatus is reminiscent of what Brown, in her
commentary on the ongoing destabilization of the avatars of politi-
cal ‘progress’ that linger on today, describes as the “postprogressive”
present (144). What Brown scathingly diagnoses is a condition as fa-
miliar to present-day Turkey as it is to several other political forma-
tions along the Mediterranean littoral, burdened as they are now with
the effects of long-favoured politics of selective amnesia. Criticising
these paradigms as transferable structures of rhetoric inherited from
a Eurocentric mindset and as showing evident signs today of having
outstayed their time-frame of relevance, Brown discusses the implica-
tions of trying to “figure history at the end of (modern) history, when
the presumption that history progresses has been exposed epistemo-
logically as theological and is experienced practically as a cruel hoax
[…]” (144). The “postprogressive” moment, Brown argues, is one in
which “Our capacity to intervene in the trajectory and the wide range
of effects of capital […] appears exhausted. So history surges on, but
with no promise that past suffering will be redeemed, with no promise
of eventual worldwide or even local emancipation, well-being, wis-
dom, or reduction of suffering. Nihilistic seems far too thin a term to
describe such circumstances” (139).
Despite both their temporal and moral fatigue, Brown argues, these
narratives (amongst which she lists “progress, right, sovereignty, free
will, moral truth, reason, morality, power, conviction, desire” and so
forth) ultimately “remain those by which we live, even in their broken
and less-than-legitimate-or-legitimating form” (3). In this sense, both
Brown’s and Pamuk’s perspectives seem to echo the urge recently felt
by Fredric Jameson to revisit the understanding of political time pace
Lyotard—which Jameson now identifies as “a present of shock, which
arouses a waiting or anticipatory stance that nothing follows” (Jameson
2015, 103). This ‘burnt out’ political condition constitutes, in my view,
a crucial aspect of the dialectical relation that structures the après-coup
politics of Mediterranean writing today. The existential nihilism that
for Brown results from post-progressive time, and that Pamuk captures
in his melancholic vignettes of post-imperial Istanbul, pervades much
of the memorial writing produced in the basin. In Pamuk’s oeuvre,
the struggle over the articulation of consciousness is mediated and re-
mediated through the post-progressive moment: his writing operates in
44 Norbert Bugeja
the fading political light of a secular, modern, progressivist, Kemalist
republicanism.
At a tangent from any nihilistic purview, Pamuk’s own vision of hüzün
as a historic index of loss attempts to endow its melancholic subject with
a certain salvific faculty, mainly through its re-conception of the sense
of historical paralysis that emerges ‘after the blow’ (après-coup, both
in the post-Ottoman and the post-Republican sense)—a poetic licence
to replenish the prerogative of self-narration and to renew the quest for
the literary as, in a sense, a space of refuge-in-writing. On these terms,
hüzün allows its subjects to accede to a manner of survival that could
perhaps be described as a crisis-informed attunement to “the problemat-
ical nature of the past’s manner of persevering in the present,” invoked
by Ricoeur (2004, xvi, 391). In this specific sense, as a space of asy-
lum open for the vagaries of politico-historic transit, literature’s own
après-coup being partakes of an important labour of retrospect: because
“what history is concerned with,” Ricoeur has argued, paraphrasing
one of the Annales school’s central concerns, “is not only the living of
the past, behind today’s dead, but the actor of history gone by, once
one undertakes to ‘take the actors themselves seriously’” (384).
Posing the question of the “actor of history gone by” (Ricoeur 2005,
384–385), or of what Timothy Brennan has phrased as “the ‘demands’
that continue to live in the world the dead left behind” (Brennan 2015,
35) in a Mediterranean context gives us occasion to revisit the litto-
ral’s trajectories of exchange and trade (or bdil, in my native Maltese),
its transmarine histories, and its give-and-take economies, its myriad
itineraries that were historically based on reciprocity as much as on
conflict.3 As I argue elsewhere, the semantics of this horizontal net-
work of exchange-based relations (assessed in so many readings of the
sea, from Fernand Braudel to Peregrine Horden and Nicholas P urcell,
to David Abulafia and Iain Chambers) needs to be diversified in crit-
ical discourse today, and especially so within the emerging field of
Mediterranean Studies, to allow for a vertical analysis of this network
of traversations—of its memorial and affective dialectics of past and
present, therefore, as inevitably anxious vectors of cross-temporal ex-
change. Already Braudel had intimated, in a somewhat cryptic assertion
in his excursus On History, that this vertical periplous, this “step from
bright surface to murky depths—from noise to silence—is difficult and
dangerous” (Braudel 1982, 39). One can’t help but think of the Inner
Sea here not only as the Glissantian ‘republic of the dead’ it has now ev-
idently become, but also as a space that encompasses, within its psychic
as much as its aquatic folds, the urgency to explain the cartography of
human suffering now so evident, ubiquitous, and even foreseeable, from
Syria to Palestine and from Lesbos, Kos and Chios to Tunis and Zwara
and Malta and Lampedusa: to sound its depths to ourselves, because the
last thing it can now afford is our numbness.
Ricoeur’s own mnemonics of crisis certainly recalls Walter B enjamin’s
knowledge that “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the
‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule”
(B enjamin 2007, 257). Literature’s own claim for historical requital
may be seen as obtaining from its “enigmatic” (Laplanche) memorial
inscriptions—ones that, in many of the region’s emergent writings, are
being pitched as values that are morally anterior to the politics that
spawned the very memories of suffering they recall and in relation to
which they sustain an agonistic rapport.4 To speak of a politics of the
afterwardly is to embrace the fact of haunting as inherent to its fab-
ric: the weighing-in of pasts that will only render themselves intelligible
through the inhospitable affective terrain of the ‘after-the-blow,’ and
even so, only to encounter its intransigent existential semantics. 5 It is
such a concern that leads Pamuk to pitch “his darkest, most murderous
and authentic strain of melancholy” as simultaneously a post-imperial
and a post-Republican awareness of Turkey’s present-day politics of
historic irresponsibility, one that, in hindsight, makes Pamuk’s own
Istanbul narratives appear proleptic. In the last chapters of his memoir,
Pamuk returns to that foreboding sense in which the receding fiction
of post-Republican progress becomes both translatable and identifi-
able through the aesthetic of a dying Bosphorus—a project initiated in
The Black Book and recalled in the latter part of his memoir Istanbul
through its imagery of a “soft scent of algae and sea on an autumn
evening” that precedes the returning “storm” of a late capitalist, post-
national violence (Pamuk 2005, 409).
The historical sign of anteriority operates, in this sense, within those
afterwardly spaces of thought that the occurrence of a large-scale psy-
chic violence opens up in between the moral and the memorial. Ricoeur
would describe this a priori presencing as “the distinctive feature of
memory, namely, the anteriority of ‘marks,’ sēmeía, in which the affec-
tions of the body and the soul to which memory is attached are signi-
fied” (12). The ‘anterior’ designation is often deployed in the literature as
a device that discriminates in favour of its narrating or narrated subjects
and affords them the right-to-anteriority reserved to those whose ac-
crued angst predates the progressivist (and amnestic) exhaustion of the
political present. It is also this sense of a seasoned angst that peoples the
contingencies of the Mediterranean basin today, as the force of its lacer-
ated pasts rudely blasts through the general anaesthetic injected around
it by the great powers of our day: the shaky video clips hastily smug-
gled from rebel strongholds in Alep and Misrata, the “no comment”
visages of a Gaza City bombed into stillness, the images of underwater
cemeteries piled up with harraga, the rigor mortis of a dead migrant
couple still locked in a loving embrace off the coasts of Malta, Sicily,
and Lampedusa, the televised panic on the faces of those running short
of basic life supplies across the European meridione from Andalusia to
46 Norbert Bugeja
Greece, the horror stories that keep reaching us, in Malta, from a Libya
foundering into a terrible cross-factional conflict.
This melancholy sēmeíon, this vindicating right-to-anteriority that
percolates through my Mediterranean, and that offers little solace, is
characteristic of many of the narrative routes by which we—writers,
scholars, poets—are choosing to memorialise today. In these parts and
under these conditions, literature here often becomes a quest, some-
times even a ‘contest,’ for believable re-configurations of both fiction
and self-narrative as textual ‘cities of refuge’; a literature, that is, that
can offer forms of asylum-in-writing that does not come across as a nar-
ratorial conceit or an otherwise capricious venture.6 Texts like Pamuk’s
The Museum of Innocence, Mohammed abu Zaid’s Le poème des Ru-
ines, Nouri al-Jarrah’s Le Chemin de Damas, Moëz Majed’s Chants de
l’Autre Rive, Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter, Amin Maalouf’s
Balthasar’s Odyssey, Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun (Bab al-Shams),
and several other works often seek to re-constitute their internal per-
ceptional mechanisms around the tangible physiology of memory as a
lacerating experience: a Ricoeurian eikōn or fluid image that one must
tenaciously retain before one’s mind, that one cannot afford to lose sight
of even if momentarily—a thing that by virtue of its percolation into the
present vindicates its possessing subject’s right to live and to operate in
the afterwardly, to identify afterwardness to oneself as the beginning
of one’s political actorship and activity. This image, which I perceive as
mirroring the other as an auto-reflection of our own historic responsi-
bilities, “contains rather in an immanent fashion something that comes
before - a message from the other. It is impossible therefore to put for-
ward a purely hermeneutic position on this - that is to say, that everyone
interprets their past according to their present—because the past already
has something deposited in it that demands to be deciphered, which is
the message of the other person” (Laplanche 1999, 265). To this extent,
the agency of a ‘Mediterranean’ writing today, as the organising space of
an afterwardly politics, increasingly bears allegiance to the question that
Laplanche has posited at the heart of the enigmatic inscription: “What
does the dead person want? What does he want of me? What did he
want to say to me?” (254–255; my emphasis).
In the region where I live and work, these questions, ripe with the
dialectic of a post-progressive condition and the melancholy voices that
predate it, are detectable in the representations of a certain diversified
languor that continues to characterise novels as different as those of Laila
Lalami, Ismail Kadare, Hisham Matar, Selma Dabbagh, Khaled Khalifa,
Tony Hanania and others. Drawing on Wendy Brown’s terms, this con-
dition, both narrative and experiential, may be formulated, perhaps, as
follows: it concerns the memorial struggles of mediating, of narrating,
in-between the “exhaustion” of the region’s (lingering) p rogress-driven
paradigms and those as-yet-unrequited modes of fractured consciousness
spawned by these self-same discourses. For how do the Mediterranean’s
diversified narrative voices go about the business of stitching together
a discursive and memorial schema of political reaffirmation or eman-
cipation, how can they extract at least these forms of requital, at the
same moment that their historical interlocutors—those self-same

ethical-political frames of reference against or in relation to which they
received their suffering—are themselves now going through a profound
and crippling existential crisis?7 This is an inescapable predicament: to
speak of the afterwardly condition is to accede to the melancholic truth
voiced by M ichael Newman and referenced by Parry, namely, that “The
total recovery of that which has been lost—the forgotten, the dead—is
impossible this side of eschatological redemption. Our relation with time
and history can only be through our finitude, our historicity” (in Barker,
Hulme and Iversen, 1992, 112; Parry 2004, 186). Surrounding us are the
unbearable wraiths, the piles of corpses burgeoning across the central
Mediterranean, their communiqué and their outstanding claim, the at-
tendant anxiety we can never cease to conjure, like Mahmoud Darwish’s
Palestinian ‘malady of hope.’ Ought we, perhaps, be prepared to accept
and reaffirm (re-) writing itself as the only feasible deus ex machina
out of the aporia of historical finitude? This is, perhaps, a question as
perturbing and as merciless as the sea itself—and Orhan Pamuk is no
stranger to it.
Melancholic Groundwork, Splenetic Agency:

From Hüzün to Füsun
Pamuk’s own narrative transition from Istanbul to The Museum of Inno-
cence is characterised by an effort to open up the stakes of post-imperial
recall as an afterwardly condition, to come to terms with the signals of
its communiqué, and to replenish the “continuity of historical conscious-
ness” (Parry 2004, 187) that the latter demands. In this sense, the move
from memoir to fiction marks the author’s shift of focus from the early
Republican polity as a post-imperial ruin (which he depicts and situates
in the 1950s and 60s) to the pitching of Cold War Istanbul in a similarly
degenerative context: as the beginning of a long, post-war deterioration
of the Kemalist politics of ‘secular progress’ in tandem with unchecked
economic speculation, the long-term effects of which are still felt in
Turkey today. The Museum of Innocence, is, in fact, situated in Turkey’s
mid-1970s, right in between the two military coups of 1971 and 1980.
This is a narrative in which, according to Irmak Ertuna, “The inevitable
integration of Turkey into the western capitalist world is depicted along-
side the rise of [a] commodity fetishism” (2010, 104–105) characteristic
of the pro-American economic liberalism that determined Turkey’s direc-
tion during that decade and that was notably endorsed by the Nişantaşı
bourgeoisie into which Pamuk himself was born and brought up.
48 Norbert Bugeja
For Pamuk, the communiqué that ‘demands to be deciphered’
(Laplanche 1999, 265) determines, first and foremost, the contours of
a profound transition in the authorial consciousness of historical con-
tinuity itself. The workings of this subtle shift become visible if one
is prepared to approach The Museum of Innocence as a prosthesis to
those social-historical concerns that Pamuk seems not to have ade-
quately enough addressed in the memoir Istanbul, a text that cemented
his stardom to a global literary readership. In one of his invocations of
hüzün, Pamuk embarks on a litany-like sequence intended to materi-
alise the social aesthetic of the city’s post-imperial melancholy—a chain
of image-laden descriptions that dominates the memoir’s chapter titled
“Hüzün” (2005, 81–96). Pamuk writes that:
To feel this hüzün is to see the scenes, evoke the memories, in which
the city itself becomes the very illustration, the very essence, of
hüzün. I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the
fathers under the street lamps in the back streets returning home
carrying plastic bags. […] of the old booksellers who lurch from one
financial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a cus-
tomer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave
as much after an economic crisis; […].
(84)
Pamuk’s “litany,” largely overlooked in critical readings of Istanbul,

marks the faint beginnings of a more accentuated social-historical desire
that Pamuk opens up in The Museum of Innocence and carries through
to his latest novel, A Strangeness in My Mind (2015). In Pamuk’s effort
to inscribe the imagery of the lives of Istanbul’s post-war suburban un-
derclasses in his reader’s own mind—a concern otherwise present in a
more generic sense in the memoir—the reader senses the laboured but
somewhat inadequate exertions meant to diversify the memoirist’s sub-
altern addressee. This lengthy sequence could be trying to offer a more
socially-attuned voice to the city’s suburban proletariat, one that would
aspire to a more empirical and emphatic form of representation than that
inherited from, for instance, the nineteenth-century French diarists—
whose accounts often relegated the late Ottoman city’s zones of destitu-
tion to, to use Pamuk’s words, a form of “poverty ‘in the wings’” (2005,
201). In a memoir that has come under fire for its broad-brushstroke
treatment of the city’s suburban underclasses, even as it seems to foist
upon them generically the psychic appellation of hüzün, Pamuk’s litany
to the city’s quotidian landscapes comes across as a faint effort at re-
deeming the narrative’s own latent social-historical motivations: indeed,
it may only lend itself to further emphasise what Laplanche would term
the “ipso-centric” disposition evinced in the memoir (194). The litany’s
reticent presence seems to underscore, therefore, the memoir’s perceived
inability to adequate itself to an account of the realities of a social world
which Pamuk himself, having been brought up in a sheltered upper-class
childhood, may never have realistically experienced.
This argument is reaffirmed in Sibel Erol’s trenchant critique of
Pamuk’s Istanbul (Erol 2011, 655–676). Erol reads Pamuk’s stance as
“chronotopic,” insofar as it puts forward “a literary and narratorial
schema that describes the intersection of time, place, and the affective
worldview they constitute as an indivisible unit of comprehension and
representation” (657). Pamuk, she points out, harnesses the melancholic
mood of hüzün as “a psychological dimension of timelessness” that op-
erates through “an abstract subjective present,” locating itself within
a “sense of nebulous and unchanging time” (659). According to Erol,
the memoir forges “a larger generic and archetypal chronotope whose
temporal content corresponds to a biographical outline operating in an
indeterminate time weighted toward the 19th century,” a schema of
abstraction that “helps hüzün transcend its historically specific origin
and become an inward, psychological state […]” (659). What I want to
suggest here is that Pamuk’s chronotopic stance in Istanbul indicated
by Erol may in itself constitute a symptom, an exteriorization of the
vagaries of memorial crisis as the latter struggles to reconstitute it-
self and come to terms with the longer impacts of the Ottoman city’s
demise. In Pamuk’s case, as in many other instances of post-imperial
Mediterranean writing, this crisis sometimes morphs into a quest for
variations of social-historical realism that would lend themselves as nar-
rative codas to the epistemic event itself—endowing the latter with an
afterwardly politics that diversifies the comprehension (Verständnis) of
its repercussions and epistemic fallout. In this sense, Pamuk’s “hüzün of
the ruins” (Pamuk 2005, 126) offers a very specific manifestation of the
“consciousness of historical continuity”: one that pitches Pamuk’s recent
writing squarely within Fredric Jameson’s antinomial predicament of
social-historical form (Jameson 2013).
In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson has considered a definition
of the social-historical in terms of its “storytelling impulse,” its inherent
labour as, amongst other possible roles, a récit (Jameson 2013, 15–26).
The récit as socio-historical narrative impulse is informed by an essential
split or discursive opposition that handles, as its core features, both the
emergence and the dissolution of the form itself. His dialectic, which
sees the impulse towards storytelling as always already fraught with the
injustices of history, crucially pitches the récit as operating in-between
“destiny versus the eternal present,” between the “irrevocable” or “pret-
erite” nature of past events and their ongoing effects in the Jetztzeit
(26, 19, 18). The latter may only obtain, however, as a Sartrean, exis-
tentially anxious “present of consciousness,” “the present of an open,
undecided future, where the die has not yet been cast […] [a present]
in which the choice was in the process of being made or being refused”
50 Norbert Bugeja
(26, 19, 18, 25). This condition marks an end-point at which the confi-
dence of social-historical form—that is, its ethos as verisme—confronts
the unreliability or intransigence through which the epistemic event and
its causal relations, its enigmatic shards, transmit themselves to the pres-
ent. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that one of the scenarios that
Jameson briefly contemplates as a possible end-point of the storytelling
impulse is, precisely, its notional reduction to an ekphrastic role (8).
Jameson’s consideration of ekphrasis as a lapsed narrative limen,
one that would emerge in-between the weight of the preterite event
and its intransigent bequeathal to a Sartrean present, is important in-
sofar as it illustrates the predicament that Pamuk’s own memoir finds
itself in. The effect of Pamuk’s hüzün-defining litany in Istanbul is
in this sense ekphrastic, insofar as it underscores the effort of after-
wardly narration to reconstitute itself in the wake of a century-long
epistemic damage. The lyrical sequence intimates a quest to describe
the quotidian suburban life of the ex-imperial metropolis in the hope
of drawing from this description an insight into the city’s intrinsic
or noumenal affections. Perceived only as such, however, the litany
would add up to little more than a rhetorical conceit: an exercise that
threatens to degenerate into a sequence of mesmerising aphorisms;
ones that would, in the last instance, fold back into the ipso-centric or
chronotopic disposition of the narrative.
A more productive angle on Pamuk’s hüzün of the ruins, in my
view, would be to approach it not as in itself an embodiment of social-
historical verisme, but as a groundwork or preparation for the latter’s
advent, and in this sense, hüzün itself may need its critics to withhold
their outright perception of it as an affection, and think of it instead as
an example of what Jonathan Flatley, in his work on the modernist pol-
itics of melancholy, outlines as a narrative ‘mood’ or Stimmung (2009,
19). Flatley reconceives Stimmung as “a kind of affective atmosphere
[…] in which intentions are formed, projects pursued, and particular
affects can attach to particular objects […] mood provides a way to ar-
ticulate the shaping and structuring effect of historical context on our
affective attachments” (19). Mood, Flatley argues, following Heidegger,
makes itself visible as a “sense of the situation,” “disposition,” or “sit-
uatedness,” a way of “Being-attuned” that carries within it (akin to
the Laplanchean enigmatic communiqué) “a power of disclosure ‘prior
to cognition and volition’” (20, 21). “To be in a mood,” Flatley points
out, “is to ‘be attuned,’ an attunement that is the foundation or starting
place for everything else, the ‘presupposition’ for our ‘thinking, doing,
and acting […]’” (21). Stimmung becomes, in other words, a motivating
force for the reception of the enigmatic inscription as an essential labour
of the “consciousness of historical continuity” invoked by Parry (187).
If hüzün in Pamuk’s memoir is approached on such terms, as a pre-
affectional attunement to a subsequent “present of consciousness,” or to
the social-historical verisme he seeks more intensely in his later fictions,
it becomes easier to grasp the transition from Istanbul to The Museum
of Innocence as one from the memoirist’s discursively ipso-centrist or
chronotopic stance in the memoir to the bourgeois protagonist’s quest
for a radical “self-objectification” in the succeeding novel.8 Already, in
his brooding ruminations on the differences with his native Nişantaşı
bourgeois that emerge early on in the novel, Kemal Basmacı, the nov-
el’s central character, echoes the ipso-centrist disposition underlying
Pamuk’s memoir, admitting that
It is only now, so many years later, that I realize how insular and
intimate was this circle of rich, Westernised families […] Since the
age of twenty I had felt myself protected by an invisible armor from
all variety of trouble and misery. And so it followed that to spend
too much time thinking about other people’s misery might make me
unhappy, too, and in so doing, pierce my armor […]
(Pamuk 2011, 105, 83)
Henceforth, and gradually, Kemal begins to acknowledge within himself

the historical “consciousness of laceration” (Agamben 1994, 40) that
Pamuk, like Tanpınar before him, imbibed from the city’s wilting met-
ropolitan infrastructure and its occupants, and that compels Kemal to
seek a new condition of social fulfilment through a radical labour of self-
objectification. Despite Pamuk’s own bourgeois credentials, this is not
some Byronic conceit of the hero’s social “estrangement” that resolves
in a meandering divertimento on Mediterranean shores. For Pamuk,
self-objectification can only translate into the painstaking experience
of a return to the social world—and to a veriste narrative mode—for
which hüzün itself in Pamuk’s memoir, as a lapsed attempt at the exteri-
orization of melancholy into the post-imperial socius, was only the pre-
paratory mood. In The Museum of Innocence, this self-objectification
is sought by Kemal through his intimate liaison with his lower-class
cousin, Füsun Keskin—herself an allegory of the less privileged subur-
banity towards which Pamuk had not quite directed his narrative in the
memoir. This is the thrust of Irmak Ertuna’s study of Pamuk’s novel
as a “critique [of] the subject embedded in bourgeois rationality,” as a
result of which “the security of a unified subjectivity is challenged and
[a] dissolution of the [bourgeois] self takes place” (Ertuna 100, 99). As
Ertuna observes, Kemal’s love relationship with Füsun is used by Pamuk
as a “means to shatter the safety of Kemal’s subject position,” to “over-
come the boundaries of subjectivity” in Istanbul’s Cold War context,
characterised as it is by “the dark realities of patriarchy, political re-
pression and loss” (99, 101, 105). Ertuna emphasises that “Even though
Kemal remains indifferent to actual politics, he nevertheless enters a po-
litical realm through his encounter with Füsun, his lower class relative.
52 Norbert Bugeja
Füsun […] initiates Kemal’s entry into a world unknown to him […] the
world of social reality” (105).
If Füsun is to be understood as the socialised denouement of hüzün,
as the allegory of a re-initiation into the city’s “poverty in the wings”
(Pamuk 2005, 201), as a resistance to the Republican bourgeoisie’s hi-
jacking of the post-imperial city, then Kemal’s own social “conversion”
becomes an index of the extent to which he, as well as the novel’s nar-
rator, are prepared to take the internal process of self-estrangement
upon which they have embarked. Kemal realises, “The regret and the
guilt-ridden chaos that had enveloped me since my engagement [to Sibel]
grew monstrous with a new realisation: I had betrayed Füsun!” (Pamuk
2011, 177). He continues,
I had to think of her. I had to go at once to the place nearest to

where she was. Eight to ten minutes later I was lying on the bed at
the Merhamet Apartments, trying to pick up Füsun’s scent in the
sheets, and it was as if I was trying to feel her inside me, almost as if
I wanted to become her, but her scent had grown fainter. With all the
strength I could muster, I embraced the sheets and then reached out
to pick up the glass paperweight on the table, desperate for traces
of the scent of her hands. As I inhaled deeply from the glass, I felt
instant relief in my nose, my lungs.
(177)
What Pamuk’s reader experiences here is a very different relation to

the melancholic love-object of historical loss (now embodied in Füsun,
rather than hüzün) than the one experienced in the memoir. The expe-
rience that the novel’s protagonist is seeking here is not an ekphrastic
rendition of—or a fledgling sense of attunement to—the condition of a
post-imperial melancholia. On the contrary, the effort here is to “me-
tabolise,” as Laplanche would have it, the lost love-object (Füsun, in
this case) in a bid to receive a heightened experience of the historical
communiqué—and of the impervious, but by the same virtue, irreduc-
ible, claim for its requital that Füsun embodies (Laplanche 1999, 244). It
is the ingestion of this message (which also bears strongly on the gender
politics that structures their encounter) that Füsun carries into Kemal’s
present—as a Benjaminian emergency that Pamuk uses as a means of
blasting through, of lacerating, the pernicious gravity of bourgeois sub-
jectivity that “dogged” him in his own memoir.
The question of the subject’s act of metabolization is taken up by both
Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben in their respective re-conceptions of
the Hegelian address of absolute subjectivity. For Agamben, “The only
way [the subject] has to possess itself is in fact that of taking upon it-
self, integrally, the state of contradiction and, negating itself, finds itself
again in the lap of extreme laceration” (Agamben 1994, 42, my transla-
tion). In this specific instance, Žižek echoes Agamben’s sentiment in his
ground-breaking excursus on Hegel in a recent edition of The Sublime
Object of Ideology (2008 [1989]). There, Žižek homes in on the notion
that for Hegel, the exercise of the “sublation” (or “notional determina-
tion”) of any aspect of the subjective experience of empirical reality, in-
cluding the historical one, would involve a focus on the unary feature (or
Lacan’s le trait unaire) lying at its core (viii-xi). According to Žižek, “the
reduction to the signifying ‘unary’ feature [of the thing or experience]
contracts actuality to possibility, in the precise Platonic sense in which
the notion (idea) of a thing always has a deontological dimension to it,
designating what the thing should become in order to be fully what it is”
(xi). For Žižek, this potentiality inherent in the thing or experience, this
deontological plane,
is thus not simply the name for the essence of a thing actualised
in the multitude of empirical things. The multitude of a thing’s ac-
tual properties is not simply reduced to the inner core of this thing’s
‘true reality’; what is more important is that the signifying reduc-
tion accentuates (profiles) the thing’s inner potential […] I perceive
its actuality through the lenses of the potentialities hidden, latently
present, in it.
(xi)
Like Laplanche, Žižek invokes the metaphor of ingestion, this time

to describe the projective dynamic of Hegel’s “absolute Substance-
Subject.” In relation to Laplanche, however, the process of ingesting
the historical substance in Žižek’s view is a “more radical” one (x-xiii),
in the sense that it does not halt at a definition of the ingested sub-
stance as “the other implanted in me, […] forever an ‘internal" foreign
body’” (Laplanche 1999, 256). In its “omni-devouring” behaviour, for
Žižek, the absolute Substance-Subject may be described as such—as
Absolute—only insofar as it seeks to sublate the essential core of its
object by absorbing its entirety within its own deep fabric, by “retain-
ing within itself the swallowed content,” such that the subject becomes
the substance itself and is “reduced to the role of pure observer […]
of the self-movement of the content itself” (Žižek 2005, xii). Having
consumed the object of its investment, according to Žižek, the abso-
lute Subject-Substance achieves the form of absoluteness inherent in its
“[becoming] the abrogated/cleansed substance […]” (xiii). Žižek goes
on to translate this transition to (self-) consumption into Lacan’s own
“move from substance to subject” as indicated in the latter’s mathemic
transit from “S” to “barred S” (xiii).
Similarly, Kemal’s desire to “become” Füsun, through an intimate
contact with the objects he associates with her, reveals an urgency to
estrange himself from his own ontological make-up to the extent of
morphing into the (social-historical) love-object he desires, the “barred
substance,” mainly by “sublat[ing] the essential core” of Füsun’s objects,
54 Norbert Bugeja
such that, as Žižek points out, “the signifying reduction accentuates
(profiles) the thing’s inner potential […]” (xi, xiii). This moment in
The Museum of Innocence, the subject’s “constipation” (xii) with the
object-trace of Füsun, I want to argue, serves to chart the memorial tran-
sition from the melancholic mood in the memoir toward what Jonathan
Flatley (2009, 6) terms as “splenetic” affections—in Pamuk’s case, those
of a social attunement that is more palpable in his subsequent novel than
in the memoir itself. What I am suggesting here is that Kemal’s inges-
tion of Füsun’s objects, his “constipation” with her melancholic traces,
betrays an intention to reduce the thing itself—to unearth its “notional
determination”—to its deep embodiment of the communiqué that nour-
ishes the very “consciousness of historical continuity” (Parry 2004,
187). In this sense, the signifier of Füsun acts as that deontology whereby
Kemal’s bourgeois outlook comes to be re-situated within the splenetic
as, in Flatley’s words, “a state in which one is exceedingly aware of,
angry about, and interested in the losses one has suffered […] losses that
[…] have penetrated into the very structure of subjectivity […]” (Flatley
2009, 6).
It is certainly not a coincidence that the perfume Sibel gives Kemal
early on in the novel is named Spleen, as if already to suggest the pro-
foundly animated change, the Baudelairean inner turmoil, that both
novel and protagonist will undergo as the narrative unfolds. As Flatley
has suggested, “affects require objects, and, in the moment of attaching
to an object or happening in the object, also take one’s being outside
of one’s subjectivity” (Flatley 2009,19). Such a statement needs to be
viewed in light of Ertuna’s argument that this is a novel of found objects
based on Kemal’s collection, its narration itself an accrued product of a
lengthy experience of unrequited love. As Ertuna notes, “Life-changing
events in Kemal’s life start with the purchase of a Jenny Colon bag for
his fiancée in the boutique where Füsun works. Once Kemal’s fiancée
realises that the bag is a fake, he has to return it, which opens a new di-
alogue between him and Füsun. From then on, like all the other objects,
the bag becomes an index of mystery that is known as commodity fetish-
ism” (Ertuna 2010, 105). Ertuna refers this context to Marx’s argument:
that value “converts every product into a social hieroglyphic" (106), the
secret behind which we repeatedly try to decode. In this context, Ertuna
notes, “The world of the novel becomes a hieroglyph of consumption
[…] behind the mystical veil [of which] lies the story [of] the problem
of Turkey’s socio-economic development” (106). Most significantly for
Ertuna, Kemal’s collected objects of spurned (historical) love become, in
the fullness of the narrative, “endowed with memories, a force that can
never be reduced to exchange value” (108):
Here I am exhibiting the newspaper advertisements, the commer-

cials, and the bottles of strawberry, peach, orange, and sour cherry
flavors of Turkey’s first domestic fruit soda, Meltem, in memory
of our optimism and the happy-go-lucky spirit of the day. […] As
always, we fiddled with the things in the room—my mother’s dis-
carded dresses, hats, and china figurines […] Instead of pulling you
into our melancholy, let me say that it felt as if Füsun’s mouth had
melted into mine.
(Pamuk 2011, 26, 101)
Pamuk’s is here illustrating precisely Ertuna’s point that memorializa-

tion and the narration of memorial crisis can function to resist assimi-
lation into the circuit of exchange value. Equally significant, however, is
the manner in which Pamuk’s text negotiates the knowledge that “the
very ideology of realism also tends to stage it in terms of content, and
here clearly the realist mode is closely associated with the bourgeoisie
and the coming into being of bourgeois daily life” (Jameson 2013, 5).
Pamuk here effects a specific détournement, for, in his purview, the so-
cial hieroglyphic will not merely sublate its object into an embodiment
of commodity fetishism, but will exploit the superficiality of this very
encoding as a critical pretext and an ulterior desire: to believe that the
object of history, its surviving thing, constitutes an archival embodiment
of historical affections. As such, the ingested historical object can, when
such a gesture is deployed as a quest for the character itself of historical
experience, transport into an internal relation, wherein the message of a
consciousness bequeathed from and deposited by a wounded past makes
itself sensed. This is precisely what distinguishes melancholic narration
as a merely projective mood as opposed to the splenetic sensorium as a
nervous re-entering into the social world via the difficulty posed by the
internal(ised) communiqué.
The Museum of Innocence makes itself comprehensible in this sense:
through a protagonist-collector who, by exhibiting the products of a
complex memorial predicament, chapter by chapter, seeks to gesture
outside the “conceptual mediation” (Žižek xviii) of narrative, and ac-
tually arranging the objects in each of the novel’s chapters vitrine by
vitrine, as they are actually laid out at the Museum of Innocence in
Çukurcuma, Istanbul.9 Coupled with frequent addresses to the reader in
which Kemal considers “pulling you into our melancholy” (Pamuk 2011,
101), the novel comes across as a reluctant fiction, one whose narrative
mechanisms gesture subtly but almost obsessively to return the splenetic
agency forged in narrative to the empirical world, an impassioned attach-
ment to the socius that grafts in the process a renewed and informed sig-
nificance onto the historical condition of crisis. In these terms the novel
returns itself to a post-progressive world not merely qua fiction, but as
a splenetic object, in the sense of its replenished trait unaire, through
narrative as a materialised signifier, as “the physicality of the image,”
to use Brennan’s words, of history’s wounded consciousness (Brennan
2015, 35).10 In this sense, the transition from memoir to object-novel in
Pamuk also registers itself as that post-fictional transition whereby, in
56 Norbert Bugeja
Brennan’s observation, “Staged drama gives way to historical drama”
(35). The tactility of splenetic narrative, of the novel-object, attests to
the stifled agency of those constrained by history to a Füsun-like silence,
bound to that fate whereby “the other who emitted or wrote [the historic
inscription] is no longer there to support it, to be its guarantor or inter-
preter” (Laplanche 1999, 248).
Splenetic Périples
The splenetic dynamic outlined earlier, one that motivates the ingestion
of the melancholic signifier but seeks then to resolve it in an ontic exteri-
orization, is precisely what Žižek has in mind when he argues that
The matrix of the dialectical process is [that of] appropriation fol-

lowed by the excremental move of dropping it, releasing it, letting
go. […] The externalisation which concludes a cycle of dialectical
process is not alienation, it is the highest point of dis-alienation: one
really reconciles oneself with some objective content not when one
still has to strive to master and control it, but when one can afford
the supreme sovereign gesture of releasing this content from oneself,
of setting it free.
(xii)
One cannot, at Žižek’s crucial juncture, not recall the incisive take on
“externalisation” in Timothy Brennan’s recent work, in which the latter
opens up the matter of “peripheral value” with reference to Palestinian
writing (Brennan 30). Žižek’s “excremental” resolution to the dialectic
necessarily re-invokes (and re-constitutes) those conditions wherein, as
Brennan points out, “the meeting of the literary and the political pos-
sesses a subtler force,” one that works as “a countertextual movement
whose representation of situated life constitutes an outward-turning”
(Brennan 35, my italics). In Pamuk’s novel, the Žižekian labour of a
notional ingestion or internalization of (post-imperial) history’s commu-
niqué is inexorably followed, then, by the “outward-turning” quality of
the text indicated by Brennan—a quality that the latter situates in con-
temporary Palestinian poetry as that access into “the bizarre realism of
an endemic brutality” provoked by the text’s “crushing understatement
[…]” (35, 26). In Pamuk’s own questioning of the Republican ethos,
this “outward-turning” quality is spurred ahead in turn through Kemal
Basmacı’s “splenetic” tenor, a state in which “one is exceedingly aware
of, angry about, and interested in the losses one has suffered” (Flatley
2009, 6). This “excessive” sensitivity to historical loss that characterises
the splenetic also records itself in the transferential behaviour that gov-
erns the relationship between Pamuk’s novel and his museum. Here, one
can elicit Brennan’s “outward-turning” quality in relation to Pamuk’s
own museum as much as to the novel itself, because in its own way,
the museum with its numerous objects, its door keys and mannequin
fragments gleaned from the residues of the Republic’s ethno-religious
violence, also “begs to be filled in by the anguish [its author] will not
provide and that we are meant to supply” (Brennan 2015, 35).
Outward-turning: what is spleen if not an opening out of melancholy
itself, such that the latter is extended into an impassioned space of hos-
pitality for and fierce attachment to orphaned affections, sidelined mem-
ory, oppressed chances of recall, and the difficulty of a social world
that is real precisely because not even the schemata of fiction themselves
suffice to exit it?
The splenetic character of Mediterranean writing today may be per-
ceived as various post-imperial narrative routes seeking to re-mediate
their social world through an “ingestion-turned-exteriorisation” of the
melancholic political bequests they are committed to address. Pamuk’s
own stance seems in synch with Jacques Rancière’s own take on the sub-
versive potential of the novelistic form—a potential found in the novel’s
faculty of setting itself up as a mode of fiction that constantly seeks to
place its own fictive status in peril (Rancière 2011, 41–51). Is this not
the self-same dynamics Pamuk’s Kemal Basmacı endeavours to provoke
whenever he draws the reader’s attention directly to the objects that both
nurture and relieve his memorial and existential turmoil, as he copes
simultaneously with Füsun’s absence and the pressures of an entrenched
Republican bourgeois family? In the quest for a closer proximity to the
inheritance of a post-imperial historical consciousness, Pamuk renders
his own novel as memory-object, not least through setting up the a ctual
Museum itself, thus purposely and fatally tearing his writing between
the autobiographic account of a post-imperial coming-of-age and (pro-
voking) its physical dissolution into the (post-) Republican socius by
returning the fiction to an address in Çukurcuma.
To follow such a périple, to speak of a “Mediterranean” novel today,
is to begin to locate the tensions it purposely forges between those mel-
ancholic accidents that happen to its internal processes of recall and
their re-presencing and reception as they accede into a nervous political
world. What we are beginning to witness is a self-consciously endured
process of the novel’s tearing apart of its fictive posturing, a process
the story feels the need to undergo, both as post-imperial object and,
concurrently, as catalyst of the ontology of embattled remembrance.
This inherent tension between narrative and its internal-external sche-
mas of historical accident, one that keeps re-organising the operation of
fiction in the service of historical contingency may perhaps be termed
an “epistemporal” activity. In its role as historical memory-object, the
Mediterranean novel today is learning to recognise and accept itself, its
own inherited identifications, as a lacerated ipse: inexorably split be-
tween the splenetic process of “ingesting” its historical concerns and
58 Norbert Bugeja
the releasing of the resultant angst into an (often amnestic) social world.
The result, in all hope, would be that of a replenished vigilance and at-
tainment to old forms of political oppression in new clothing. To speak
of epistemporal activity, of literature’s “ingestive-excretive” dialectic,
to acknowledge the exertions of a fiction that unrelentingly “pierces its
own armor” and rearranges its memorial crises as its constituent agency,
is to profess a renewed commitment to historical justice in the face of a
post-progressive world order and its ongoing ravages.
Notes
1 The schematic distinction between a historiography of, as opposed to in,
the macro-regional context is elaborated by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas
Purcell in The Corrupting Sea (2000).
2 In the context of a political discourse’s breaching of its own ethical doxa,
Caroline Rooney has drawn attention to the specific case of “the dehuman-
izing limitations of both European humanism and African nationalism as
they betray their own fundamental or founding tenets” (Rooney 2009, 159).
3 Brennan’s word “demands” is quoted from Mourid Barghouti’s poem “Mid-
night,” which Brennan is reading in his own essay.
4 For a discussion of the “enigma” and the anterior nature of the “message
from the past”, see Laplanche (1999, 254–256, 265).
5 For an intriguing take on haunting and revenance, see Brown’s readings of
Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin (2011, 138–174).
6 Jacques Derrida has opened up in detail the question of the “city of refuge”
as a conceptuality (2003, 16, 17, 20).
7 Brown is reflecting on this condition when she writes that “Our capacity
to intervene in the trajectory and the wide range of effects of capital […]
appears exhausted. So history surges on, but with no promise that past suf-
fering will be redeemed, with no promise of eventual worldwide or even
local emancipation, well-being, wisdom, or reduction of suffering. Nihilistic
seems far too thin a term to describe such circumstances” (Brown 2001,139).
8 Self-objectification is a dynamic that both Flatley and Irmak Ertuna deal
with extensively in the respective arguments they make within the texts I
quote here.
9 For more information on The Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, visit the
museum online portal at http://en.masumiyetmuzesi.org/
10 At various junctures in my writing, I refer to a consciousness that “devel-
oped as a result of […] devastating acts of domination, and their lasting
consequences and cultural impacts,” a consciousness that emanates from
“the wounded leftovers of modernity” (Bugeja 2012, 13, 189).
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Archipelago Books.
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———. 2006b. The Black Book. Trans. Maureen Freely. London: Faber and
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———. 2011. The Museum of Innocence. Trans. Maureen Freely. London:
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———. 2012. The Innocence of Objects. Trans. Ekin Oklap. New York: Harry
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60 Norbert Bugeja
———. 2015. A Strangeness in My Mind. Trans. Ekin Oklap. New York: Knopf
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Verso. [1989].
3 “Broken Histories”
The Tribal and the Modern in
Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case
of Billy Biswas
Rashmi Varma
Among the many resonant concepts and critical terms that Benita Parry
evokes very powerfully in her work is that of “broken histories.” Even
though it is not a term that she explores in any specific detail, its power
is felt throughout her writings on the traumatic impact of colonialism
on the lives of the colonized. For Parry, the subjects of these broken his-
tories include “indigenous peoples subjugated, alienated and ultimately
exterminated by early colonial conquest, African slaves sold to the new
world” as well as “East Indian and Chinese indentured labour on the
plantations” (2009, 33). As she suggests, the histories of these conquered
people have not merely been interrupted by the violent force of colonial-
ism, but have actually been torn asunder, broken apart.
But if for Parry such a shattering of the histories of the colonized is one
of the key effects of colonial violence, this does not imply that history
itself constitutes an unbroken continuum—such thinking would be at
odds with the historical materialist method that informs her entire body
of work. But by way of Parry we understand that colonial violence is not
only a force that vanquishes, annihilates, reduces to rubble a swathe of
indigenous economies and cultures, but that it renders the colonized as
passive subjects of history-making, splitting apart the relationship be-
tween history and agency. It thus also produces broken subjects of his-
tory, those thrown adrift or mutilated by the forces of colonial violence
that engulf colonized spaces.
Parry’s materialist reading of colonial violence in part stems from
her criticism of the concept of epistemic violence that Gayatri Spivak
(2006) and other postcolonial theorists have embraced as an interpretive
framework for colonial power. Epistemic violence is purported to ac-
count for the total range of violence unleashed by colonialism, including,
following Foucault, a “complete overhaul of the episteme,” which for
postcolonial theorists concerns the colonial production of knowledge
about natives that comes “to constitute the colonial subject as Other”
(76). But for Parry, the disproportionate emphasis on epistemic violence
within postcolonial theory has resulted in an eclipse of the vital con-
sideration of “military conquest, institutional compulsion and ideologi-
cal interpellation” and other material factors in the analyses of colonial
62 Rashmi Varma
history (2004, 20). This, according to her, has had the deleterious effect
of having “obliterated the role of the native as historical subject and
combatant, possessor of other knowledges and producer of alternative
traditions” (2004, 19). For Parry, even broken histories have resisting
subjects and knowledges, and it is the task of engaged criticism to enable
the recuperation of those histories of resistance that can help forge a
project of liberation for the future.
*****
For many colonized subjects, the colonial encounter that resulted in the
rending apart of their histories came to be synonymous with the expe-
rience of modernity itself. But if Parry is critical of the ways in which
modernity was forcibly inscribed by colonial violence on to native soci-
eties, her critique is markedly different from that propagated by domi-
nant postcolonial theory under the rubric of “colonial modernity.” On
this account, modernity is necessarily inauthentic and alien to colonized
societies. Such a view has consequently led to a denigration of the very
idea of a universal history, which is seen as part of the project of colonial
domination in its occlusion of “the dynamic of colonizer and colonized,
race and reason, Enlightenment and empire” (Dube, 2009, 5).
But for Parry and materialist critics like her, the critical challenge
consists in conceptualising histories of the colonizer and the colonized
not as separate and incommensurable but as part of a capitalist world-
system for which colonialism was a key mode of expansion and accumu-
lation. So for instance, drawing upon the work of the historian Harry
Harootunian (2000), Parry develops the concept of coeval or peripheral
modernity that retains a commitment to universal history and a singular
modernity, albeit as one that is profoundly uneven and non-synchro-
nous. She emphasizes the critical task of grasping the “distinctive expe-
rience of modernity in spaces outside of North America and Europe, but
within an imperialist world-system” (2009, 27). “Broken histories” are
therefore to be understood not in terms of a rupture from the past (as per
the dominant understandings of postcolonial criticisms of modernity as
Western), but as signifying the forcible eviction, indeed extermination,
of certain subjects as modern. Thus, “broken histories” are the histories
of those who have been expelled from modernity as its “others” and
denied presence as historical subjects.
For Parry, the modernity of these “others” is not an alternate moder-
nity, but a peripheral modernity, where the peripherality of its location
precisely reinforces the presence of a capitalist world-system. So a key
characteristic of peripheral modernity, as she puts it, is “the incongru-
ous overlapping of social realities and experiences from radically dif-
ferent historical moments” (2009, 30). Drawing upon Perry Anderson’s
(1992) analysis of the ways in which “Marx’s own conception of the
“Broken Histories” 63
historical time of the capitalist mode of production was of a complex
and differential temporality, in which episodes or eras were discontin-
uous from each other, and heterogeneous within themselves” (quoted
in 2009, 31, Anderson, 101), as well as Neil Larsen’s (2001) account of
peripheral modernity that delineates time as “both modern and tradi-
tional, both ‘ahead of’ and yet ‘behind the times’ at once, as if not one
but two or multiple histories were being lived out in one and the same
space” (2009, 32; Larsen, 139–140), Parry’s work highlights the spatial
and temporal unevenness and disjuncture that is produced by and in
peripheral modernity.
*****
Parry’s evocation of “broken histories” and her emphasis on the periph-

eral modernity arising from them has led her to develop an interpretive
framework for what she refers to as peripheral aesthetics. For this, she
draws upon the idea of “the coexistence of layers of social time” that
a peripheral modernity produces to suggest that “the juxtapositions in
the historical, material, cultural, social and existential conditions which
to a metropolitan eye would seem as chaotic and incongruous” in ef-
fect are precisely the conditions in which “a new aesthetic” arises (33),
one that she develops particularly through her incisive reading of the
Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih’s novel Season of Migration to the North as
well as in her work as part of the Warwick Research Collective (WReC,
2015). Drawing on Roberto Schwarz’s (1992) reading of The Posthu-
mous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis,
a “peculiar” nineteenth-century Brazilian novel that embodies some of
the key contradictions of a former slave society flung into modernity, for
Parry, Schwarz’s development of the notion of “displaced ideas” and his
reading for literary incongruities provides a key to understanding the
dislocated and absurd worlds of nineteenth-century Brazil narrated in a
modernist register, just as it does the discrepant worlds of Salih’s Sudan.
Parry’s work thus emphasizes the ways in which literary codes can
open up ways of reading and understanding reality, as Schwarz, she ar-
gues, “develops the connection between the social ground and the sty-
listics and literary devices of the peripheral novel form” such that “its
formal qualities—whether realist, fabulist or avant-garde—can be read
as transfiguring and estranging incommensurable material, cultural, so-
cial and existential conditions attendant on colonial and neo-colonial
capitalism” (2009, 33). Taking Schwarz’s argument further, Parry sug-
gests that “such proximity of discordant discourses and discrete narra-
tive registers” gives rise to “aesthetic forms that transcend their sources
in the novel’s social ground,” becoming instead “abstract significations
of the incommensurable and the contradictory which are concurrent in
the material and cultural worlds of a periphery” (2009, 39).
64 Rashmi Varma
One key aesthetic mode that Parry has keenly explored as a feature
of peripheral aesthetics is that of “critical irrealism,” a term that she
borrows from Michael Löwy (2007) to refer to non-realist works of art
that do not oppose realism as such, but rather suggest “an absence of re-
alism” (195). For Löwy, most literary texts are mixtures of the two, even
as the “irreal” embodies an oneiric quality that underscores the “logic of
the imagination, of the marvelous, of the mystery or the dream” (194).
In her characteristic way, Parry takes this insight and uses it to illumi-
nate the discrepant realities of the capitalist world-system that shape
peripheral aesthetics in its backward zones.
*****
In this essay, I wish to draw upon Parry’s distinctive theorization of

the novel of peripheral modernity as one that gives narrative shape to
purportedly incommensurable, broken histories and unequal material
conditions generated by colonial capitalism and its continuing depreda-
tions in the postcolonial period. In what is to follow, I read Arun Joshi’s
1971 novel The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (henceforth referred to as
Billy Biswas) as a text that self-consciously attempts to delineate its lo-
cation within a peripheral modernity generated by the colonial and post-
colonial material and cultural extraction of indigenous resources and
cultures. This process of extraction is set against a hegemonic cultural
modernity monopolized by the postcolonial state that renders indigene-
ity on the one hand as being out of time—backward, savage, tribal—
and on the other as cultural and economic resource. Although Parry
has never exclusively focused attention on the category of the tribal/in-
digenous, her prodigious critical forays into excavating the material and
social violence in which an extractive and coercive colonial economy
and culture is imposed upon colonized natives has specific resonance for
the predicament of the doubly colonized, the indigenous populations of
a formerly colonized country such as India.
Billy Biswas is Joshi’s second novel and remains one of the most crit-
ically neglected novels in Indian writing in English (also referred to as
IWE). Although the 1970s saw the publication of numerous novels in
English by Indian, Indian-origin or India-based writers, it was not un-
til the 1981 publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children that
IWE gained international prominence and a growing market abroad, a
phenomenon that has come to be known as “the Rushdie effect.”1 This
has typically implied a general privileging of the aesthetic of migrancy
and hybridity being marketed to a global audience (Lazarus 2002). Jani
(2010) in fact argues that the Rushdie phenomenon of the 1980s contrib-
uted to a neglect of earlier, more nation-centred novels written in realist
modes. This might partially explain why novels such as Joshi’s have not
found their way onto course syllabi or the review pages of prestigious
journals and magazines. In addition, the lack of critical attention to
Joshi’s writings was only exacerbated by his ostensible shunning of pub-
licity as a writer, choosing to publish his novels with the India-based
Orient Longman, even after multinational publishing houses had en-
tered the book trade in India. 2
Yet Billy Biswas seems to trouble the categorizations that have preoc-
cupied discussions of postcolonial Indian literature, particularly IWE,
as a contestation between the social realism of nation-centred literature
and the post-Rushdie modernist, postmodern turn that privileged writ-
ings with a decidedly cosmopolitan and worldly flavour.3 Ulka Anjaria’s
(2016) more recent attempt to re-evaluate the critical social realism
that shaped the emergence of postcolonial Indian writing proposes an
opening up of the category of realism against readings that see it as “a
project of straightforward, mimetic representation” (187). She writes of
the importance of considering “how deeply the writers of social realism
were invested in developing an aesthetics adequate for representing the
instabilities of modern life” (186). On this account, temporal and spatial
dissonances and incongruities are therefore crucial elements of critical
realism. These disrupt the linear time of the nation and point to the brit-
tleness of realism as a category, ring-fenced against those aspects that
unsettle the representation of reality. This reassessment of realism in the
Indian novel, combined with Parry’s theorization of peripheral aesthet-
ics, is key to my reading of Billy Biswas.
*****
Set in New York, Delhi, and the Maikala forest ranges of central I ndia,
Billy Biswas stages a “traumatic” encounter between a bourgeois postco-
lonial society and its simultaneously revered and reviled tribal culture.4
The novel expresses what is a paradox of postcolonial Indian modernity,
in which the tribal has to be assimilated and made into citizen as well
as preserved as different because s/he embodies an unsullied past that
still provides Utopian hopes of freedom. Such hopes for a future that
may heal the wound of the histories broken up by colonialism are often
predicated on a longing for the unrecoverable pre-colonial, pre-capitalist
agrarian past, with the unsettling knowledge that entry into postcolo-
nial modernity entails embracing technological change and material
progress. Post-independence, change and progress were to become the
cornerstones of development ideology and politics in India.
Joshi’s novel is set in the decade and a half immediately following
national independence in 1947 and concludes in the year following
I ndia’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s death in 1964. Although
the novel does not ostensibly historicise the decade of the 1950s during
which it is set, except by way of delineating it as the period of “transi-
tion”, it nevertheless offers a complex portrait of that period in which
66 Rashmi Varma
the social, political and economic contradictions produced by “centu-
ries of foreign rule” seemed to engulf its middle classes into a social
and existential crisis (128). Such a crisis was no doubt precipitated by
the realization that the euphoria of independence was illusory, even for
I ndia’s elites, who are depicted in the novel as a class that struggles to
find purpose and security.
It is significant that the novel marks Nehru’s death towards the end,
insofar as his demise signals the beginning of the end of the period of a
modernist, secular, socialist nationalism committed to national devel-
opment. Although the narrator notes that the disorder expected after
Nehru’s death has been contained, however tenuously, what haunts the
novel’s tense evocation of the time of transition is the implicit sense of
what was to come after Nehru’s death. The “rash of riots” by starving
tribals that are reported at the end of the novel prefigure the real-life
1967 revolt in Naxalbari and a million other mutinies within the na-
tion’s internal margins and at its borders in the decades to come.5
*****
Billy Biswas deploys a doubled register that combines a realistic narra-

tion and tone to tell a “strange” and improbable story. The novel’s nar-
rator, Romesh Sahai (also known as Romi), a young bureaucrat in the
elite Indian Administrative Service, narrates the story of his friend Billy
Biswas, the maverick son of a Supreme Court judge, who relinquishes his
privileged metropolitan life to become a tribal healer in what is now the
state of Chhatisgarh in central India. In this, Joshi’s work recalls novels
such as Alejo Carpentier’s (1953) The Lost Steps (Los Passos Perdidos)
and anticipates later works such as Mario Vargas Llosa’s (1987) The
Storyteller (El Hablador) for their admixture of the improbable and the
real as a generic means for representing the predicament of indigenous
cultures in the capitalist world. Closer home in India, another contem-
porary novel that dealt with the problem of urban estrangement via an
encounter with indigenous culture was Sunil Gangopadhyay’s (1968)
Bengali novel Days and Nights in the Forest (Aranyer Din Ratri), later
adapted for film by Satyajit Ray in 1970. Set in the politically turbulent
time of the 1960s and published during the time of the outbreak of the
Naxalite movement, Gangopadhyay’s novel tells the story of four young
men from Calcutta whose expectations of exotic adventure among the
tribals are belied by the harsh reality of life in rural India. The encounter
with them forces the young men to confront their own inadequacies as
middle-class youth in a nation brewing with discontent.
Novels such as the ones mentioned above, from the world’s periph-
eries, engage in the complex traffic between the real and the strange,
between contrary elements that constitute reality in the margins that
Parry identifies as registering the unevenness of capitalist modernity.
But if Carpentier is credited with devising the concept of “marvelous
realism” that most evocatively captures the coming together of dispa-
rate realities in conditions of backwardness, in Joshi’s novel, it is the
concept of strangeness that provides the means through which the text
defamiliarises and estranges the mundane and the bureaucratic worlds
that the narrator and his circles occupy and that re-engages the world of
the tribals as a possible Utopian project for the new nation. To that end,
the novel deploys at least two senses of the rather nebulous term—the
sense of strange as denoting that which is unfamiliar, distant, foreign,
or other, and the sense of strange as signifying the extraordinary and
the unreal.
The novel’s aesthetic turns on this dual notion of strangeness. On the
one hand, the story that the narrator is poised to tell is strange for the
middle-class characters and the presumed readers precisely because of
their incorporation into the superficial preoccupations typical of a newly
emergent yet effete middle class of “pompous, mixed-up people.” This
class is caught between the ideals of the freedom struggle—simplicity,
sacrifice, inclusiveness—and its desire for belonging to a professional-
ized global class of consumers, albeit ones deeply constricted by for-
eign exchange regulations and the closed, quasi-socialist economy of the
Nehru years. Himself from a similar social milieu, the narrator notes
how he is repelled by the English-speaking elites beset by materialist
desires, greed, and confusion who are the ones in charge to adminis-
ter “this vast and incoherent republic” (27). Billy similarly records his
feelings of unease in being part of this class and its social milieu that is
“artistically…dry as dust”, capable only of “mechanically mouth(ing)
ideas that the West abandoned a generation ago…” (128). He likens his
location within this class as akin to being a visitor in the “marts of the
Big City” in a society obsessed with making and spending money (69).
On the other hand, the strangeness alludes to that part of India that
exists only peripherally in the imagination of these same middle classes.
This is the India of the poor peasants and tribals, consigned tempo-
rally to the past (still to develop) and spatially to the nation’s margins.
Although they are ever-present physically in the nation’s cities, towns,
and villages to provide labour and cultural variety, they are there only
as strangers, embodying a mysterious and incomprehensible otherness.
*****
The novel is told through the perspective of the narrator Romi, and the
first part is rendered as a memoir of his friendship with Billy, from their
first meeting in New York City until Billy’s mysterious disappearance.
In the second part of the novel, a loincloth-wearing Billy reappears ten
years later, astonishing the tribals by speaking in English, to recount
his story through the course of an alcohol-fuelled night followed by a
68 Rashmi Varma
handful of subsequent encounters with the narrator. But when his fam-
ily gathers political and administrative force to rescue him from his life
with the tribals, tragedy ensues and Billy is accidentally killed by a po-
liceman. The novel ends with the narrator’s meditation on the narrative
that he has constructed, and his contemplation on both the futility of
modern, bureaucratic endeavours in the face of extreme inequality and
the immiseration of India’s poor tribals and on the purposelessness of
worldly ambition.
The narrative juxtaposes the mundane but seemingly high-minded
task of administering the vast territories of India and the “mesmeric,”
almost phantasmatic mode of Billy’s narration of his long-held yearning
for the primitive spirit and his subsequent inhabitation of the world of
the Bhil tribes. The split between the rational and the mystical spheres,
what Kumkum Sangari (1987) refers to as “encrustation(s) of colonial-
ism,” is what the novel attempts to repair via the convergence of realist
and irrealist modes of narration in discrepant times and spaces. The
narrator’s struggle to find the right register to interweave Billy’s strange
story of his time with the tribals with his own account of a personal and
social estrangement from his middle class life and career is encapsulated
in these lines: “I have tried to reproduce the account here to the best of
my ability. I have tried to maintain the flat matter-of-fact tone in which
it was said… If his narrative still in places sounds melodramatic, the
reasons must lie in our own narrow range of experience rather than in
anything Billy had to say” (81–82).
Written in retrospect, the narrator tries to distance himself from the
enigma he is creating, and the emphasis on words such as “strange,”
“peculiar,” and “incongruous” throughout the novel serves to heighten
that distance while also revealing the ways in which the strange and the
familiar are in fact intertwined. It is precisely this dissonant coming
together of the strange and the familiar, and the resultant peculiarities
of form and content, that for Parry would be evidence of the generic dis-
continuities and formal unevenness of peripheral texts that register the
combined and uneven development of capitalist modernity, especially in
the postcolonial zones.6
*****
The novel opens against the remembered soundtrack of a Bhil folk song
presumably in an urban setting, a tune that paves the way for an ex-
tended flashback in which the narrator, a twenty-two-year-old graduate
student working on Henry James (a writer best known as a purveyor
of literary realism, interested in psychologically complex characters) at
a university in Minnesota, spends a summer in New York City as a
housemate of Billy’s in a crowded tenement in Harlem (because white
America is “too civilized for him”). Billy had been sent by his family to
Columbia University to study engineering, but had decided to follow his
interests in primitive cultures and esoteric philosophies by pursuing a
degree in anthropology. There, the narrator finds himself mesmerized
by Billy’s bohemian charms, his collection of jazz music, his ability to
play on the bongo drums, and his encyclopaedic knowledge of world
cultures. When not engaged in academic work, Billy hangs out with his
friends, the American George and the Swedish Tuula Lindgren, who is
also interested in the “bizarre spots of North and central America” (103)
and in indigenous rituals and philosophies, areas of fascination for the
counter-cultural rebellion in which a new progressive form of Orien-
talism consisted of an embrace of primitive and exotic cultures as the
conscience of a materialist, rationalist and ego-driven West. But while
family circumstances compel the narrator to return to India and sit for
the civil services exam without finishing his PhD, Billy completes his
degree and returns home to take up a lectureship in anthropology at the
university in Delhi. In India, the narrator’s days and months are caught
up in training to administer the vast lands that comprise the territory of
India that he only knows through books, while Billy, on a field trip with
his students to the Maikala hills, disappears, “so totally without leaving
a trace” (61).
Apart from the “strange case” of Billy’s life that the novel plots in
two sections, the narrative builds up the story through an elaboration of
Billy’s unusual character. The narrator regularly interjects in the flow of
events and incidents to claim not to be interested in the plot of Billy’s life,
but rather in what constituted his restlessness and his “sheer vitality,”
which hint at an inner, unreachable core. In fact, much of the narrative
of the first part of the novel is devoted to evoking the mysterious nature
of Billy’s inner self, as reflected in his “inhumanly sharp eyes” (32) with
“dark depths” (10). Through such descriptions of Billy’s complex interi-
ority, which is the product of his “extraordinary sensitivity to the world”
(51), the narrative signals a depth of character that remains beyond the
grasp of the narrator’s understanding even as he establishes empathy
for Billy’s conflicted self. The tropes of depth and unknowability rein-
force the estranged position of the narrator and, in places, seem to be so
highly wrought as to transfigure Billy into a projection of his own alien-
ated self, rather than a separate individual. The self-conscious crafting
of Billy as the unknowable other partakes in the ideological elaboration
and consecration of bourgeois subjectivity that is predicated on philo-
sophical reflection and contemplation of the world. At the same time,
it is nevertheless doomed to failure in its search for authenticity, depth,
and sincerity (the meaning of life) in an alienated and spiritless world,
under the thrall of the ideology of capitalist development. After all, the
narrator notes ironically that in spite of the mysterious layers to Billy’s
character and “for all the anarchy of his life” (19), he straddles quite
successfully the worlds of business and academia, until, of course, the
70 Rashmi Varma
hidden force inside him is no longer containable, and he becomes a “ref-
ugee from civilization.” His marriage to Meena Chatterjee, a loquacious
socialite who spends her time in beauty salons and the party circuit,
precipitates his estrangement from the trappings of bourgeois social life.
Billy’s eyes and his mysterious character imply the presence of an al-
ternative reality that he conjures for himself and inhabits imaginatively
and that only those who are similarly estranged from the trappings of
bourgeois life could glimpse occasionally. Thus, for the narrator, the
sounds emanating from Billy’s bongo drums are like “little meteors
through the astral night, lighting up landscapes, hills and valleys, gap-
ing chasms of the mind that are otherwise forever shrouded in the black
mist of the unconscious.” This intermediation of sound and light effects
a passage to the other side of reality, into worlds that exist above, be-
yond, and outside those that are perceptible or reachable, worlds that are
not just unknown but are profoundly unknowable. These are also, then,
worlds within the Unconscious, cordoned off yet precariously positioned
against the violence of caste society, capitalist profit, and colonial power.
*****
The novel interweaves passages that dwell on the great mysterious forces
that lie embedded in Billy’s Unconscious, forced there by social conven-
tion and a civilizational imperative, and those that reference the back-
ward zones of tribal social existence. Billy’s feelings of “being in a place
other than where I was, in a place very, very old, at times a wilderness, at
other times full of strange, primitive people” (129) points to the novel’s
placement of the Unconscious not only in an unreachable core of the self,
but in an earlier time. Thus this mysterious force inside Billy is named as
“primitive,” this “great force, urkraft” that Billy tries to suppress but is
waiting to explode (18).
In this, the novel reprises the long history of the intertwining of the
Unconscious with that of primitivism within both anthropological and
psychological discourse. The extraordinary is turned inward as a re-
pressed aspect of human consciousness, while also precariously hinged
on the historically blocked subjectivity of India’s tribal people. Thus
the novel presents consistent shifts of perspective, from an evocation
of Billy’s mysterious nature and his obsession with the primitive force
that revolts against a “stifling system of expectations” (92) to his intel-
lectual and scholarly interest in aboriginal people of the world. Such a
fixation with the primitive, the narrator goes on to remark, may well
be a universal condition of humans in the modern age, for “a phantom
appears before us all” that only “some choose to pursue them to the
ends of the earth.”
The willed conflation of the repressed Unconscious and the structural
contours of tribal society is, of course, foundational to the disciplinary
formation of anthropology in the crucible of the colonial project. In this
novel, the standard romanticist understanding of the primitive being as
universally primal is made to confront the real tribals who are firmly
lodged within a collective national Unconscious. Here both the Uncon-
scious and the figure of the primitive embody modes of cognition beyond
the soulless rationality of the modern West that postcolonial conscious-
ness must repudiate. In this, Joshi’s novel recalls the long history of the
Western encounter with indigenous cultures that has been imbued with
cultural and existential longing for innocence but that is nevertheless
made possible by the force of economic and political extraction and
violence.
In this history that seems internal to the novel’s development of the
figure of the tribal, it is the civilised human who goes native that holds
the greatest hope for recompense. Billy narrates the strange inversion
whereby he becomes the primitive who is the object of anthropological
investigation by urban and Western researchers:
I felt as though I was a tribal myself, that I was one of the primi-
tives about to be investigated and not one of the investigators… The
feeling was so strong that I almost broke into the local dialect. As I
went along I discovered that I was not giving them (the researchers
and administrators) objective facts as I was meant to, but rather the
garbled, highly subjective version of himself that any primitive man
customarily gives you.
(94)
Here we see Billy exposing the assumed objectivity of the social science
that is belied by the “garbled, highly subjective” accounts the native
provides investigators, thereby unsettling the claims to authenticity of
the Western-trained researcher. At the same time, going native emerges
as a performative gesture (“I almost broke into the native dialect”) that
enacts the only ethical position available to Billy in a world where the
tribal is being annihilated.
Although the jungles have made him into an outlaw figure, Billy’s
ability to slide in and out of his dissonant lives marks him and reveals
his embrace of tribal identity as not only precarious but also highly
contingent. As cosmopolitan readers, we could, of course, read Billy’s
claims to being called by the primitive world as precisely the product of
an elite primitivist imagination. After all, the colonial archive is replete
with narratives of the white man who goes native and who is heralded
by the natives as a returned king. Thus Billy describes his first encounter
in the Maikala forests as one where the primitive world called out to
him, “Come. We have waited for you” (88), precipitating a “metamor-
phosis” as the layers of civilization are peeled off and his inner core is
revealed.
72 Rashmi Varma
But what may seem at first a wholly familiar trope of colonial power
to critics of colonial anthropology is complicated through the speaking
part given in the novel to Dhunia, the leader of the Bhil group, who be-
comes a friend of Billy’s. He describes Billy’s arrival into their commu-
nity as a momentous one. For Dhunia and his tribespeople, C handtola,
the village of the white-faced cliffs, came to life again with Billy’s ar-
rival, like the time when they were kings. Their histories, broken by the
violence of non-tribal and colonial rule (they no longer have their own
kings), seem on the verge of being healed by the entry of Billy as the
reincarnation of tribal power in the figure of the king. Here the tribal
reveals himself as more open to the outsider than postcolonial critique of
colonial discourse can allow for.
As the narrator betrays a tone of incredulity towards Dhunia’s seem-
ingly tall tales, what at first seems “simple folklore” (116) is transmuted
via Dhunia’s native tongue Chhattisgarhi, with its “spell-binding inten-
sity that ballads have” (116), into a critique of the narrator’s worldly
preoccupations and his narrow understanding of law. The incommensu-
rability evoked here is not just between Romi’s world and Dhunia’s, but
also between the world of mainstream Hindi (spoken by the narrator)
and Dhunia’s Chhattisgarhi. The tribal tongue speaks of its broken his-
tory, and in the speaking, attempts to repair it, to render it whole, to
restore it to history.
*****
There is an inescapable gendered dimension to the knotting together of

the Unconscious with tribal social life. The recurrent image of “a girl
without a face but with a warm and full body, definitely a tribal girl” (92),
who crosses Billy’s dreams in different forms and infuses an erotic energy
in him, is a figure to be read legible against a whole history of how tribal
women have been objects of sexual obsessions within masculinist colonial
discourse. Whether “nursing a child in the shade of a tree,” “buying ban-
gles at a fair”, or at a tribal dance, or the figure with “her clothes clinging
to her wet body, beside a tank in Benares,” these are classic images of the
sexually predatory projection of the oppressors. Later in the novel, this
generalized image of the strange, anonymous tribal woman takes form in
Bilasia, whose sexuality is described by Billy as being “nearly as primeval
as the forest that surrounded them” (102), comprising the “essence of
that primitive force that had called me night after night, year after year”
(103). The evocation of notions such as “primeval” and of the “essence”
of “primitive force” underscores the novel’s imbrication within a gen-
dered primitivist imagination. The narrator’s more distanced assessment
only reinforces Bilasia as the quintessential natural being, unsullied by
culture, an “embodiment of that primal and invulnerable force that had
ruled these hills, perhaps this earth, since time began…”
The reference here to an ancient tribal polity ruled by a female deity
suggests that a possibly female-centred foundation of tribal society has
been broken up and irrevocably altered by the masculinist violence of
the non-tribal, colonial, and postcolonial forms of rule. The primordial
wholeness that transcends the categories of the erotic and the political
is shattered by the waning of tribal power, resulting in the breaking up
of their histories. When the narrator observes that “she (Bilasia) had
that untamed beauty that comes to flower only in our primitive peo-
ple,” he concludes that “it was as though nature was cocking a snook
at the Meena Biswases of the world…” (103). Here the explicit contrast
between Meena, Billy’s estranged wife, and Bilasia, a sexually liberated
tribal woman who lives life on terms alien to “civilized society,” draws
attention to the norms that repress the sexuality of middle-class women
in urban India. The narrative links this difference to the unrecompensed
ideological and material labour of tribal women, realized in the novel in
the image of the woman “hauling stone for a rich man’s house” or “load-
ing a freight train with sulphur on a siding in one of our eastern parts.”
The split between the domestic sphere of the middle class woman and
that of the labouring tribal woman is predicated on the sexualised labour
of the latter, structuring the public-private division upon which notions
of sexuality and the economy both thrive and marginalize tribal women.
*****
In the passages discussed earlier we see how the narrative precariously

bridges the gap between the idea of the primitive as a socially engendered
Unconscious and the lived social reality of the tribals, whose worlds
are increasingly vulnerable, and in doing so presents a narrative imbued
with a keen awareness of historical consciousness of broken histories,
histories severed by the onslaught of patriarchal capitalism, colonialism
and postcolonial development.
It is important, therefore, that the narrative of the “strange case of
Billy Biswas” is intertwined with that of the narrator’s career in the civil
services. The task of changing the plight of “the great incomprehensi-
ble tragedy that was rural India” is not only “a rather back-breaking
struggle” (51), but involves, quite centrally, the incorporation of the
backward and underdeveloped zones into the logic of capital to ease the
smooth flow of it via the postcolonial state. In the Nehruvian period
during which the novel is set, development was imbricated in notions of
social uplift, welfare, and progress. The resulting uneven development
was the result of the state’s contradictory incorporation of tribal lands
and cultures into the cultural and political economy of the nation. This
consisted of symbolically cordoning off large sections of the nation’s
territory from exploitation in the name of cultural preservation while
in reality opening up tribal lands and forests for capital accumulation.
74 Rashmi Varma
As he tours the drought-hit area of the Maikala hills, a land “per-
ish(ing)” under his very nose (73), the narrator’s experiential and social
estrangement from the subjects of his rule is represented in the distance
from the territory beyond the strip of land that comprises his official
residence. There “lay the jungle, a dark and mysterious shadow whose
mystery very few Collectors had unraveled since the race of Collectors
began” (77). And beyond the impermeable territory “lay the widely
scattered villages of India’s primitive people: the baigas, the gonds, the
pardhans, and several others.” The limits of administrative and anthro-
pological reason coalesce in the narrator’s feelings of helplessness to-
wards these groups of people so assiduously named and classified by the
colonial state.
This tribal world that lies beyond the logic and power of adminis-
tration exists at a “subsistence level” in the doublespeak of economic
nationalism and seems to escape the grasp of the mundane, practical,
and material world of foodgrains, transportation and democracy that is
the narrator’s concern. In contrast, Billy’s assertion that “what kept us
happy…were the same things that have kept primitives happy through
the ages: the earth, the forest, the rainbows, the liquor from the mahua,
an occasional feast, a lot of dancing and lovemaking, and, more than
anything else, no ambition, none at all” (107) mocks the material and
social concerns of the developmentalist state with romantic apprehen-
sions of the free tribal in perfect harmony with an untrammelled na-
ture. But what seems a transhistorical recuperation of the tribal at one
with nature also offers a rebuke to the forced incorporation of the tribal
into the national economy and the destructive procedures of citizenship,
which comprise a ceaseless desire to accumulate wealth and profit and
to harness and exploit land and water. In this, the tribal, by refusing
incorporation, draws attention to the ways in which the disenchanted
world of mainstream India is organized around the fetish of the state, of
markets, and of money.
*****
Billy’s escape to the jungle effects a temporal and spatial interruption of

the narrative of bourgeois personal and national development. His sub-
sequent reappearance and a final clash with the structures of social and
administrative governance point to an inevitable clash of antagonistic
social and economic forms in a society distorted and broken by colonial
rule. As he goes about disposing of Billy’s case from pending official
files, the narrator is made aware of the “blind blundering vengeance”
that state and society enact against those who try to step out of their
confines.
When the narrator has finished narrating his “tragic” tale, he calls
attention to the unreliability of the whole story. The narrator permits
the possibility that Billy may well be a figment of his imagination, a
projection of his own estrangement from the task of development: “…I
don’t know myself how much of what I am telling you is true in the sense
that it definitely happened” (93). So when Billy’s case is done and dusted,
the narrator decides not to go back to the district but to write his story
instead, impelled by “a deep and unrelieved sense of wonder that in the
middle of the twentieth century, in the heart of Delhi’s smart society,
there should have lived a man of such extraordinary obsessions” (7).
The novel’s uneven form abstracts the historical transition of the
1950s such as the time of the perilous coexistence of the primitive and
the modern. The painter J. Swaminathan (1987), writing in the context
of tribal art, pointed out that for non-tribal Indians, tribal art and cul-
ture seems “something removed from us by an ocean of time, something
which even though created amongst us and alongside us, as belonging
to a submerged archipelago within the mainstream of what we consider
to be our present day culture” (7). In embracing a specifically postco-
lonial critique of primitivism via a re-articulation both of colonialist
tropes that rendered the tribal as savage or exotic and of postcolonial
re-engagements of the tribal with national development, the novel pres-
ents a different kind of historical consciousness, dependent neither on
the linear time of capitalist development nor on a frozen time of the
tribals. The tribal world—pre-capitalist, non-capitalist—is broken and
interrupted by the violence of colonialism and development—but heal-
ing that break necessitates a reconceptualization of history in materialist
and dialectical terms.
The region in which Joshi sets his story, now known as Chhattisgarh,
has been the site of accelerated extraction and accumulation, of eco-
nomic penetration and structural underdevelopment, in recent years. In
its Bastar district, there is an ongoing battle between tribals and the
state that is giving away pieces of indigenous lands to Indian and mul-
tinational corporations for mining and other forms of industrial pro-
duction (Sundar 2016). Bastar, whose kingdom had been absorbed into
the republic of India, is now open for full-scale economic exploitation,
but it is not going without a fight. While the old world Dhunia may still
appear vulnerable in front of the bureaucrats and their state machinery,
the novel points to a politics in and of the future when adivasis would
rise in rebellion against their “broken histories”.
The novelistic reflection offered by the retrospective narration is
keenly oriented towards the future. Although Billy Biswas’s literary
mode cannot be categorized as magical realism, its irrealist aesthetics
partake of a turn towards futurity. Such a positioning is particularly
salient for those with broken histories. As Löwy suggests in his reading
of critical irrealism, the “dream of another imaginary world…opposed
to the grey, prosaic, disenchanted reality of modern, meaning capitalist,
society” can lead to “challenging the philistine bourgeois order.” Thus,
76 Rashmi Varma
while a critique of the present can be engendered “through the idealized
images of a different, nonexistent reality” (196), it is vital to remember
that “the aim is not a return to the pre-modern times so much as detour
through the past to a utopian future” (197). Arun Joshi’s novel provides
precisely such a detour through India’s tribal past into its future, when
“broken histories” may yet be healed.
Notes
1 These include novels by Kamala Markandeya (The Nowhere Man, 1972;
Two Virgins, 1973; The Golden Honeycomb, 1977), Arun Joshi (The
Strange Case of Billy Biswas, 1971; The Apprentice, 1974), Nayantara Sah-
gal (The Day in Shadow, 1971; A Situation in New Delhi, 1977), Anita
Desai (Bye, Bye Blackbird, 1971; Fire on the Mountain, 1977), Ruth Prawer
Jhabwala (Heat and Dust, 1975, which also won the Booker Prize), Bharati
Mukherjee (Tiger’s Daughter, 1971; Wife, 1975) and Salman Rushdie’s de-
but novel Grimus (1975).
2 A reclusive literary figure, little is still known about Joshi’s literary influ-
ences, although he went on to win India’s highest literary honour, the Sahi-
tya Akademi Award, for his 1982 novel The Last Labyrinth.
3 Lazarus (2002) has pointed out that those texts that did not fit received
categories and conventions have typically been accorded less prestige within
postcolonial literary studies. (774). On the other hand, critics who were
most enthusiastic about this cosmopolitan turn in IWE defended it against
charges of inauthenticity and derivativeness. They pointed to the longer his-
tory of the Indian novel whose generic predispositions had emerged from the
encounter of Western realism with Indian reality (Mukherjee 1985).
4 India’s indigenous peoples, or tribals as they are popularly known, comprise
about 8% of the country’s population and are among the most marginalized
and deprived sections of the population. The Hindi term (that is also used
through much of India) for tribals is adivasi.
5 The Naxalite movement, a peasant and tribal uprising supported and led by
the Communist Party of India (ML), started in the village of Naxalbari in
West Bengal in 1967.
6 An earlier iteration of this idea can be found in postcolonial analyses of the
literature of literature of magical realism, read as “pressing upon the real at
a time of maximum contradiction”. See Sangari (1987).
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4 Peripheral Irrealisms
Water-Spirits, World-Ecology,
and Neoliberalism
Michael Niblett
“Can we consider the possibility of detecting likenesses among the many

peripheral modernisms, these understood as the aesthetic forms gener-
ated beyond capitalism’s cores?” This question, posed by Benita Parry at
the outset of her essay “Aspects of Peripheral Modernisms” (2009), pro-
vides a valuable starting point for anyone interested in what comparative
literature could be if, to quote Franco Moretti, “it took itself seriously
as world literature, on the one hand, and comparative morphology, on
the other” (2007, 90). Indeed, while Parry’s essay has not provoked quite
the same controversy as Moretti’s various interventions in the field, it
sets out a series of key methodological and analytical propositions for
the study of world literature understood as the literature of the cap-
italist world-system. Citing with approval Fredric Jameson’s assertion
that for materialist critics the only satisfactory semantic meaning of mo-
dernity lies in its association with worldwide capitalism, Parry argues
that any “inquiry into the generic modes and stylistic mannerisms of
modern peripheral literatures since the nineteenth century is insepara-
ble from considering the distinctive experiences of modernity in spaces
outside Western Europe and North America, but within an imperialist
world-system” (27). Shared by the peripheries and semi-peripheries of
core capitalism, she suggests, are “histories which to varying degrees
of magnitude had been interrupted by imperialist expansion, whether
through military conquest, occupation and direct or indirect rule, or
by way of gun-boat diplomacy followed by economic penetration, or
through the export of capital” (27). While Parry carefully distinguishes
between the “exorbitant impact” of imperialism on the Third World and
its somewhat different articulation in, say, Portugal or Eastern Europe,
she nonetheless emphasizes the degree to which such territories, occupy-
ing analogous positions of “structural underdevelopment within an un-
even and unequal world system,” have undergone similar “paradoxical
experiences of transformation” (28, 30).
The paradoxical quality of these experiences is inseparable from the
logic of uneven and combined development, the effects of which have
been especially marked in the peripheries. Here the violent intrusion of
capital and the imposition of new socio-economic structures went hand
Peripheral Irrealisms 79
in hand with the persistence of pre-existing lifeways. Indeed, the agents
of imperialist intervention often deliberately propped up pre-capitalist
systems of organization deemed conducive to maintaining social sta-
bility. Such unevenness provides the social basis for the strange for-
mal combinations and discrepant stylistic mannerisms so often found
in peripheral literatures. As Parry puts it, “the ‘generic discontinuities’
in the art forms of the peripheries demand attention to their ground in
modernities where traditional and emergent social and cultural values
coexisted and clashed, [and] which appear to inhabit manifold material
conditions and temporalities” (32).
Parry borrows Michael Löwy’s concept of “critical irrealism” to help
describe the discordant aesthetics such conditions typically foster. For
Löwy, the term “critical irrealism” can be applied to texts that do not
“follow the rules governing the ‘accurate representation of life as it re-
ally is’ but that are nevertheless critical of social reality. The critical
viewpoint of these works of art is often related to the dream of another,
imaginary world, either idealized or terrifying, one opposed to the
grey, prosaic, disenchanted reality of modern, meaning capitalist, soci-
ety” (2007, 196). Analysing the irrealist tonalities to be found in Tayeb
Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, wherein a realist register is
defamiliarized by its juxtaposition with elements of the fantastic and the
oneiric, Parry contends that such admixtures “can be seen as aesthetic
forms that transcend their sources in the novel’s social ground, becom-
ing abstract significations of the incommensurable and the contradictory
which are concurrent in the material and cultural worlds of a periph-
ery” (39). By gesturing to modes of perception or existence beyond the
reality of modern society, these discordant aesthetic forms trouble the
given universe of discourse and behaviour. Parry reiterates this point
in “Postmodern Marxism: The Seductions of Globalization Theory.”
Referencing Herbert Marcuse’s assertion that literature can constitute
a “subterranean rebellion against the social order,” she emphasizes “the
startling critiques of imperialism and now globalization inhering in the
‘counter-consciousness’ of peripheral modernist literatures that are situ-
ated on the border territory between realism and irrealism, between the
real world estranged, sometimes exceeded, and uncanny realms inhab-
ited by outlandish players” (2011, n.p.).
In this essay, I examine several such critiques of capitalist imperialism
through consideration of narrative fictions featuring images of female
water-spirits. My focus will fall primarily on texts from the Caribbean,
in particular the Guyanese writer Pauline Melville’s short story “Erzulie”
(1998). But I will also draw comparisons with works from West Africa,
specifically those in which the figure of Mami Wata is represented. This
aquatic divinity has “developed from a local water goddess within a
wider pantheon of gods connected with various societies, into an almost
standard, pan-African deity with an autonomous cult, part of a mainly
80 Michael Niblett
urban and popular folk culture” (van Stipriaan 2002, 93; see also Drewal
2008; 2012). Barbara Paxson suggests that Mami Wata “often occurs at
that critical juncture in a society when it is changing from a gift-giving
to a money economy, with all the accompanying shifts in values and
patterns of behaviour” (1983, 417). Prompted by this insight, I analyse
how the figures of Mami Wata and other related water-goddesses have
been mobilized in fiction as a means to express the estranging effects of
analogous periods of transition in the capitalist world-system.
Like Parry, I understand this world-system as having a constitutive
relationship to world literature. As has been argued by the Warwick
Research Collective (of which Parry is a member), capitalism is the
“substrate” of world literature (or better, given its relationship to the
world-system, world-literature); capitalist modernity is “both what
world-literature indexes or is ‘about’ and what gives world-literature
its distinguishing formal characteristics” (2015, 15). To this I would
add, however, that the capitalist world-system must also be grasped, as
Jason W. Moore contends, as a world-ecology, one constituted through
successive reconfigurations in the accumulation of capital, the produc-
tion of nature, and the pursuit of power (Moore 2011; 2012). On this
view, the periodic transformations in human and extra-human nature
through which capitalism unfolds stand as common—if everywhere
unevenly and differentially articulated—reference points for all societ-
ies integrated into the world-economy. Thus, these transformations or
“ecological revolutions” (as Moore terms them) can also be viewed as
what world-literature indexes or is ‘about’: world-literature is equally the
literature of the capitalist world-ecology.
By combining this world-ecological perspective on world-literature
with Parry’s understanding of peripheral modernism, I aim to extend her
critique of the significance of irrealist literary modalities, demonstrating
how the ecological ruptures and antagonisms through which capitalist
modernization unfolds might reappear in texts not only as thematic con-
tent, but as stylistic or formal discrepancies. My specific focus in this
essay is on the disaggregation and restructuring of ecological relations
that took place with the transition to the neoliberal regime of accumu-
lation, beginning in the 1970s. Not only does the irrealist presence of
water-spirits in texts such as Melville’s mediate the phenomenal experi-
ence of a world made strange by the renewed penetration of capitalist
modes and structures; it also provides a means by which to project the
possibility of resistance to neoliberalism’s twinned violence of financial-
ization and accumulation by dispossession.
*****
Variously named the watermamma, Liba-Mama, Watra-Mama, f airmaid,

the rubba missis, mama dlo, or manman dlo, the figure of a beautiful
female water-spirit with fish- or snake-like nether regions is a common
one in folklore from across the Caribbean (De Barros 2004, 40; Warner-
Lewis 1991, 179). The origins of this figure lie in a combination of
A merindian mythology, European mermaid lore, and the water-spirit be-
liefs brought to the region by enslaved Africans (Gill 2009; van Stipriaan
2002). The watermamma, then, could be viewed as emblematic of the
colonial encounter and of the history of creolization it precipitated in the
Caribbean. As such, one might be tempted to read subsequent literary
representations of this water-spirit through the paradigm of hybridity,
which long reigned as the dominant critical rubric within a certain (post-
structuralist-inflected) brand of postcolonial studies. One thinks, for ex-
ample, of the work of Homi Bhabha, in which hybridity is construed as
constitutive of what he calls the “postcolonial perspective” (1994, 173).
Parry, of course, has been one of the most vocal critics of this paradigm,
charging that it recasts “a historical project of invasion, expropriation,
and exploitation” as a “symbiotic encounter” (2004, 76). In so doing, it
displaces the “contradictory, volatile, but all the same structural posi-
tions occupied in analysis by the oppositional conceptual categories of
colonizer and colonized […] by categories of complicity, mutuality, and
reciprocity” (76). This critique is revisited in Parry’s essay on peripheral
modernism. Here, she takes issue with discussions of Salih’s Season of
Migration that perceive colonialism “as an encounter effecting cultural
exchanges, rather than an affliction visited by expansionist imperial-
ism.” “In these readings,” she avers, “modernity is detached from cap-
italism, and the focus is on the novel’s figurations of hybridity and ‘the
in-between’ as the defining features of a new world modernism” (2009,
39). Such readings Parry finds “inadequate to the consciousness of cul-
tural and political conflict permeating the novel” (40), a consciousness
that demands attention to its social ground in a situation of uneven and
combined development.
Thus, while I am interested in examining the watermamma as a man-
ifestation of cultural mixing, it is necessary also, following Parry, to
attend to the social conflicts that this spirit embodies. Indeed, although
often associated with rituals of healing (De Barros 2004, 40), the water-
mamma is frequently conceived as a violent, death-dealing figure, qual-
ities that can be interpreted with reference to the brutal violence and
structural inequalities imposed on the Caribbean by capitalist imperial-
ism. Tellingly perhaps, water-spirits lurk beneath the surface of one of
the emblematic narratives of New World conquest, Walter Ralegh’s The
Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (1596).
Ralegh refers on several occasions to the orejones and the Epuremei,
terms he understood to pertain to an Incan invasion force. As Neil
Whitehead observes, however, Ralegh’s account was based on a mis-
understanding or misrepresentation of the discourse of Topiawari, his
native informant. It is possible that what Ralegh took to be “references
82 Michael Niblett
to the invasion of Incan orejones, led by […] the Epuremei, were in fact
poetic allusions on the part of Topiawari to the oriyu and pululima, the
spirits of water and rain in the Arawakan and Cariban language-families
respectively” (1997, 68). In the confused association Ralegh establishes
between invasion and water-spirits, in a text that stands on the threshold
of the Caribbean’s forcible integration into the world-system, we glimpse
an early, accidental version of the use of the watermamma motif in con-
nection with periods of socio-ecological upheaval.
Given the focus in this essay on Melville’s “Erzulie,” set in Guyana in
the 1990s, a few remarks are in order on the specific historical develop-
ment of the watermamma tradition in that country. William Brett’s 1868
work The Indian Tribes of Guiana describes the oriyu to which Ralegh
inadvertently refers as “a mysterious female inhabiting the waters”: “She
is very capricious, and consequently dreaded by the benighted Indian.
Her supposed form agrees with that of the mermaid of European fancy”
(367–368). In An Enquiry into the Animism and Folk-Lore of the Gui-
ana Indian (1915), the anthropologist Walter Roth not only collates
various colonial accounts of water-spirit beliefs, but also summarizes
what he believes to be “the consensus of Arawak opinion” on the oriyu:
“These Spirits may appear in human shape, impersonating both sexes.
The female sometimes can be seen bathing on the banks of a stream, or
combing her long hair with a silver comb, which she occasionally forgets
and leaves behind in her hurry to return to the water when suddenly
surprised” (2008, 183). However, Roth also stresses that while “some of
the Water Spirits have been repeatedly described by certain authors as
the Water-mamma, they have nothing whatever to do with the African-
Creole superstition represented under that designation” (183). Roth’s
distinction here is too rigid given the intermixing that occurred between
these traditions (Gill 2009; van Stipriaan 2003). Nonetheless, he at least
draws attention to another of the key influences on the development of
watermamma lore: the religious rituals of West African origin known as
Cumfo, popular amongst the enslaved and their descendants in Guyana.
“The word Cumfo,” notes Brian Moore, “is derived from the
Dahomean Komfo, and in Guyana the religious practice was also re-
ferred to as Watermamma (Watra-mamma in Surinam) or Wind (pro-
nounced ‘wine’) in honour of the river gods” (1995, 138). Moore suggests
that Cumfo rituals were very likely a syncretism of those relating to the
worship of river gods common to most West African religions, and that
these “achieved further relevance and significance to the African slaves
and their descendants by virtue of the fact that rivers are so numerous
in Guyana” (138). Cumfo worship involved the performance of a dance
through which the watermamma was invoked and took possession of
the dancer (Gibson 2001, 29–31). These sessions were “generally held
when a misfortune had befallen a family or district,” the aim being to
remove evil or to gather information about the cause of the misfortune
(Moore 1995, 139).
Descriptions of watermamma dances can be found in the work of
a number of explorers and colonists, including Richard Schomburgk
(1922, 47–48), Robert Duff (1866, 134–140), and Charles D. Dance
(1881, 78). According to Dance, it was thought that watermammas often
fall in love with married men, on whom they shower riches:
A young married man is absent for a week or more from his young
wife, whom he persuades to believe he has received a mysterious
mandate to go somewhere, which, on pain of death to him, her, and
their child or children, he may not neglect: when he returns after his
absence, he talks to his wife of heaps of money, for the Water Spirit
is liberal with silver; but the wife sees none of it. The young wife
must bear her wrongs and her grief in silence, lest evil come to her
and her husband and their little ones.
(1881, 78–79)
Dance’s account, with its intimation of the vengeful character of the

watermamma, is indicative of how representations of the spirit were
to evolve. As elements of the Cumfo tradition became creolized with
European mermaid mythology and Amerindian tales of dangerous riv-
er-dwelling spirits, the healing qualities of the watermamma were over-
shadowed by an emphasis on her capacity for violence (Gill 2009, 12–13).
The preface to Roy Heath’s novel A Man Come Home (1974), in which
the central character makes a fateful compact with a w atermamma,
provides a succinct description of contemporary understandings of this
figure:
According to local lore the rivers of Guyana are inhabited by women

called Water People or Fairmaid. On moonless nights they might
be seen in the vicinity of sluice gates—known as kokers—singing
and combing their hair, which hangs in long tresses from a flesh-
less skull. Occasionally, one of them falls in love with a human, on
whom she lavishes gifts, but demands in return that he visit her at
regular intervals. A defaulter is reminded of his obligations by var-
ious signs; and if such warnings go unheeded, the Fairmaid makes
her appearance in the world of men in order to settle accounts.1
(no pag.)
The established image of the watermamma in Guyana, then, must be

seen as the product not only of the intermeshing of various cultural tra-
ditions and beliefs, but also of the plethora of representations (and mis-
representations) of these beliefs in popular and elite discourse.
In her portrayal of the title character in “Erzulie,” Melville draws on
the full range of such influences to create a figure akin to those “outland-
ish players” of which Parry speaks, situated “on the border territory bet
ween realism and irrealism.” Erzulie is associated throughout the story
84 Michael Niblett
with fish, snakes, singing, healing and many of the other features typical
of the watermamma. She also uses the outbreak of a Winti Dance—a
Surinamese religious ritual, the origins of which are bound up with wa-
termamma worship (van Stipriaan 2002, 88–93)—to aid in an escape
from prison. 2 Perhaps most significantly, she is responsible for murder-
ing a series of men, disposing of their bodies along the banks of the
Essequibo River. Her first victim is a sailor from a ship carrying cyanide
compounds necessary for a gold mine at Omai. The mine is supervised
by Armand Jenkins, a Canadian engineer in whose house Erzulie’s dis-
ciple, the deaf-mute Margot, works as a kitchen hand. The implication
that Erzulie’s actions are a response to the environmental degradation
caused by the mine is made explicit later in the story when she kills
A rmand following a massive spillage of toxic materials:
The tailings pond of the mine at Omai—a huge pit into which were
piped cyanide liquids, other chemicals and mill wastes—had devel-
oped cracks on two sides, two hundred metres across and six metres
deep. Three and a half million cubic metres, over three hundred gal-
lons of dangerous toxic waste were cascading into the Omai River
and then rushing in a massive plume down the country’s main wa-
terway, the River Essequibo.
(159)
Melville’s description here is based on the events of the Omai mine disas-
ter of 1995. This incident was inseparable from the unfolding in Guyana
of the ecological revolution through which the neoliberal regime of accu-
mulation re-made the world-ecology. Faced with stagnation in the global
economy in the early 1970s, the core capitalist powers unleashed a new
imperialist offensive against peripheral regions. In conjunction with in-
creasing financialization, this offensive aimed at reviving accumulation
by securing an “ecological surplus” in the form of cheap food, energy,
raw materials, and labour power (Moore 2012). Much of the plunder
was carried out under cover of IMF and World Bank initiatives such
as Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), which required countries
to slash government spending and to pursue export-led growth by sub-
stituting agro-exports for staple foods and prioritizing the extraction
of raw materials. Guyana was subject to the depredations of structural
adjustment in the late 1970s, when a severe economic downturn forced
the government of Forbes Burnham to seek financial assistance from the
IMF. The subsequent aid package entailed a series of demanding auster-
ity measures, including public sector cuts, the removal of food subsidies,
and the driving down of wages (Colchester 1997, 38; Spinner 1984, 167,
184). Burnham, however, resisted the call to open the country to for-
eign capital, a stance that contributed to the IMF terminating its sup-
port in 1983. Following Burnham’s death two years later, his successor,
Desmond Hoyte, came under “heavy pressure from the international
development agencies to liberalize the economy” and to promote ‘non-
traditional’ exports, specifically gold and timber (Colchester, 2). Seeking
a rapprochement with the IMF, Hoyte launched a liberalization pro-
gramme in 1986, which saw the rapid expansion of logging and mining
concerns.
The Omai mining operation was intended as the highlight of Guyana’s
IMF-promoted Economic Recovery Programme. In 1991, following a
major gold find in the Middle Essequibo region, the Hoyte government
struck a deal for its exploitation with the Canadian companies Golden
Star Resources Ltd. and Cambior Inc. (In “Erzulie”, Melville directly
names these companies as Armand’s employers.) The open-pit mine
came on line in January 1993, its operators boasting that it functioned
as a “zero discharge gold producer” (Colchester, 79). By February 1995,
however, it was clear that the tailings pond was filling faster than an-
ticipated, and in August the cracks and subsequent spillage described
by Melville occurred. The cyanide-laced discharge killed off the Omai
River, while on the Essequibo there were reports of dead fish and hogs,
as well as complaints from those living along its banks of skin rashes and
blistering. The government “issued warnings to all residents downriver
of the mine to cease using the river for washing, drinking and fishing”
(Colchester, 82).
In Melville’s narrative, then, Erzulie’s vengeful actions can be read as
a form of rebounding violence that registers not only the inimical effects
of environmental pollution generally, but also the specific violence of
the neoliberal ecological revolution and its ratcheting up of exploitation
in the interests of reviving capital accumulation. Indeed, the murders
she commits offer a mimetic image of the peculiarly ‘cannibalistic’ form
of accumulation by dispossession pursued by neoliberalism. As Moore
has argued, whereas earlier system-wide downturns in the capitalist
world-economy were resolved through a dialectic of productivity and
plunder, what characterizes the history of neoliberalism “is precisely the
absence of a scientific-technological revolution—one that advanced la-
bour productivity and reduced the costs of production” (2012, 244).
Faced with a decline in the growth of annual labour productivity in the
OECD from 4.6% in 1960–1973 to 1.6% in 1979–1997, neoliberal-
ism’s financialized regime of accumulation embarked on “an extractive
strategy that discouraged long-term investments by states and capitals,
and encouraged socio-ecological ‘asset-stripping’ of every sort—pension
funds were raided, state enterprises privatized, water and energy sources
depleted” (Moore 2012, 244, 231). This extractive strategy succeeded in
reviving accumulation, but only by “cannibalizing the accomplishments
of the Fordist-Keynsian order” (231). In short, neoliberalism ate its own
reproductive foundations, including the bounties of ‘cheap’ nature (both
human and extra-human) created in the peripheries of the world-system
86 Michael Niblett
by the relations of power, accumulation, and nature specific to the mass
production capitalism of the twentieth century. Environments and re-
sources were drained and degraded, while the world’s poor were subject
to “dietary immiseration” as a means to drive down the value of labour
(Moore 2012, 237).
If Erzulie’s killings mirror the violence of this socio-ecological asset
stripping, at the level of form the deployment of the folkloric water-
mamma motif within an otherwise realist framework figures the rup-
tures and dislocations it engendered. Indeed, the admixture of realistic
and irrealist elements in the text not only functions as, in Parry’s words,
an “abstract signification” of the uneven development imposed upon
Guyana—it also speaks to the felt experience of periods of ecological
revolution, especially as such revolutions are lived in the peripheries of
the world-system, where they tend to unfold with a peculiar savagery. As
I have argued elsewhere (2012, 21), in contrast to realism, which requires
a “conviction as to the massive weight and persistence of the present as
such” (Jameson 2007, 263), irrealism might be considered particularly
well-suited to the narrative expression of periods in which the stabilized
structures of nature-society relations are disaggregated and reorganized.
“Erzulie” would seem to bear this out, not just with respect to its fan-
tastical protagonist, but also in its descriptions of Guyana’s urban land-
scape. These capture the sense of a world made strange by the neoliberal
restructuring of the economy and the ongoing cannibalization of human
and extra-human natures.
Take the following passage, in which Margot, Armand’s kitchen-hand,
is wandering through Georgetown and sees “as if for the first time, the
situation in which life had placed her”:
She saw streets of tumbling, ramshackle houses, hutches, sheds,

slum dwellings tacked together with criss-cross pieces of fencing,
and she felt as though she herself had become as dry and sucked of
moisture as the sun-bleached grey timbers. […] When she chanced
to catch sight of it, her large face looked grey, the colour of old
lava. The greyness was all around her and everything insider her too
seemed to have crumbled into grey dust. Her shoes had more or less
disintegrated, peeling open like old, blackened banana skins in their
unequal battle against unpaved roads, stones, rains, mud, sun and
dust. Every alley had its own stench of frying food, of fly-infested
garbage, stagnant pools and rotting planks. She felt like a ghost in
her own city. A jumbie.
(143)
The poverty Melville describes here reflects both the economic crisis of
the mid-1970s, which left the country’s infrastructure close to collapse,
and the subsequent SAP, which in forcing through cuts in wages, public
services, and food subsidies further rent the social fabric and immiserated
the population. Margot’s perception of herself and her surroundings as
grey, desiccated, and leached of life speaks to the IMF-driven appro-
priation of human and extra-human energies in this period. The sense
of irreality engendered by such transformations is then emphasized by
Margot’s feeling like a ghost or jumbie.
The text further elaborates on these themes through an account of the
changes taking place in New Amsterdam:
Something had gone wrong in New Amsterdam. After its heyday

in the last century, the town was now in full rigor mortis. […] The
buildings were wooden skeletons, leaning against each other as if
they had a headache. […] Discussion in the town revolved around
health. Half the population had been afflicted with a mysterious
condition which resulted in everyone producing white shit with lacy
fronds.
‘And what is it when you teeth wobble and bleed in you gums?’
asked a man […] [at] the bakery.
‘Me na know,’ replied the proprietor. ‘Everybody sick these days. I
gat pain an’ I vomitin’ some stuff yellow like lemon. Somebody done
this place someting. De whole place gat a spell on it.’
The conversation turned to crime.
‘You hear what happen in new Street? Dey chloroform dem. Dey
woke up on de floor. De bed take away from under dem. […]’
Such stories of a town bewitched ran riot wherever people con-
gregated. One girl came out of her bedroom to find a young woman
calmly removing all her clothes from a wardrobe on the landing out-
side. Another man left a pot of food on the stove for a few minutes
and when he returned, the pot of food had been stolen. The town
seemed to be in the grip of a nightmare.
(149)
The description of the town’s state of disrepair and of the debilitated

condition of its inhabitants connects the long-term stagnation of New
Amsterdam, caused by the decline of the once prosperous sugar industry,
to the latter-day impact of structural adjustment. If Melville’s account of
Georgetown figured the renewed plunder of Guyana’s ecological wealth,
her portrait of New Amsterdam emphasizes the increased waste gener-
ated by this uptick in exploitation and its role in the growing toxification
of human bodies. The crime wave affecting the area might similarly be
said to have its roots in the neoliberal ecological revolution, with rising
poverty and the erosion of social safety nets breeding an aggressive in-
dividualism amongst the town’s residents.3 The text’s presentation of
the residents’ response to these developments again underlines the ten-
dency for capital’s violent reconfiguration of human and extra-human
natures to be experienced in terms of irreality and estrangement (“‘De
whole place gat a spell on it’”; “a town bewitched”; “in the grip of a
88 Michael Niblett
nightmare”). Indeed, in attempting to make sense of the misfortunes
they suffer, the townspeople look to pre-existing cultural codes, articu-
lating the effects of neoliberalization in the popular idiom of spells and
obeah.
Melville’s invocation of the irreal, folkloric presence of the w
atermamma-
like Erzulie can be seen as a literary analogue to such responses. In fact,
Erzulie provides a particularly apt figure for expressing the lived experi-
ence not only of the cannibalistic plunder characteristic of neoliberalism,
but also of the way such violence has been twinned with the increasing
financialization of accumulation. Discussing the image of the siren in
Latin American modernista novels, Persephone Braham notes how this
“hybrid” figure, at once both sublimely beautiful and the object of carnal
desire, represents a contradictory unity of the real and the ideal, the mys-
tical and the material (2012, 36–38). Erzulie, too, combines the ethereal
and the earthly, her fantastic, goddess-like qualities existing alongside the
brutal, visceral fact of her murderous behaviour. Thus, if such behaviour
can be seen to register (and indeed, mime) the violence done to Guyana
and its people by capitalist imperialism, her more ethereal qualities might
be read as encoding the more abstract pressures exerted by finance capi-
tal. Erzulie’s mythical, other-worldly presence gives form to the effects of
the world market and the circulation of fictitious capital as these make
themselves felt at a local level, where they are experienced precisely as
emanating from a distant, abstract force.
Although not foregrounded in the narrative itself, the connection be-
tween the cannibalization of peripheral natures and the power of ficti-
tious capital is underscored by the positioning of “Erzulie” within The
Migration of Ghosts, where it is preceded by “The Sparkling Bitch.” Set
primarily in London, this story is very much concerned with the world
of neoliberal high finance. Melville brilliantly captures the way the new
“phantasmagoria of commerce” is reflected in the changing architecture
of the city:
There was something insubstantial about the new buildings […];

houses of glass cards thrown up overnight by sleight of hand, full
of sharp angles and sharp practice. Tomorrow they might disap-
pear and be replaced by another set of transparent hexagons, pyr-
amids and domes. […] Nowadays it was as if the City of London
had changed sex. Having once been a solid and patriarchal affair
of granite and stone with all the solemn weight of imperialism,
it had now become a sparkling bitch in glass petticoats with see-
through flighty underwear. An alluring transvestite city, light-
headed and capricious but concealing dangerous muscle. After
centuries, the feminine partner in the business tango had finally
decided to reveal herself.
(123–124)
The characterization of the city as capricious and bedazzling and yet
“concealing dangerous muscle” is reminiscent of Erzulie, herself de-
scribed as “sparkling” (143). At the very moment she kills Armand,
squeezing “her two massive thumbs down on [his] windpipe,” her body
is “shining and gleaming, spangled with drops of water” (164). Signifi-
cantly, “The Sparkling Bitch” draws attention to the brutal exploitation
on which the wealth of those companies housed in the City is based.
Focusing on Charles Hay, the head of Hay Oil, the story begins with
the encounter between Charles’s wife, Susan, and a starving boy in
Nigeria. A victim of the poverty caused by the plunderous extraction
of resources by companies like Hay Oil, the boy also embodies the di-
etary immiseration imposed on the poor by neoliberalism’s cannibalis-
tic accumulation strategy. This condition of forced underconsumption
becomes personified in Susan, who after returning from Nigeria is pos-
sessed by the “implacable god of starvation” (130). At the conclusion
of the narrative, an emaciated Susan, moving “like a murderous ghost”
(132), disrupts the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s annual speech at the
Guildhall banquet, much to the disgust of her husband. Her startling
entrance signifies the eruption into the rarefied realm of high finance
of the immiseration and underdevelopment upon which its speculative
activities ultimately depend. Melville then repeats this gesture formally
by having “Erzulie” follow “The Sparkling Bitch,” images of the glass-
plated world of the financialized core being replaced by those of de-
graded peripheral natures.
If, however, Erzulie offers a mimetic image of the violence to which
Guyanese communities have been subjected by the forces of neoliberal-
ism, nonetheless the narrative recasts this violence in a different social
logic, one resistant (as her killing of Armand emphasizes) to the reifying
thrust of capitalist development. Helpful here is Parry’s M arcusean em-
phasis on the radical qualities of art as based “precisely in the dimen-
sions where art transcends its social determination and emancipates itself
from the given universe of discourse and behaviour while preserving its
overwhelming presence” (Marcuse 1978, 6). The irrealist qualities of
Erzulie, while grounded in the contradictions of a specific, peripheral ex-
perience of capitalist modernization, simultaneously point beyond this
reality and project the possibility of organizing nature in ways other
than that imposed by the logic of the commodity form. For in the man-
ner in which she combines various orders of existence—human, reptile,
fish—she stands in opposition to the reification and externalization of
extra-human nature upon which capitalism is predicated. Through its
representation of Erzulie, therefore, the text both transcends yet pre-
serves its social ground, contesting the latest iteration of capital’s relent-
less drive towards the simplification and commodification of all nature.
*****
90 Michael Niblett
Melville is not the only Caribbean writer whose use of the water-
mamma motif functions to register and contest the violence entailed
by capitalism’s periodic reconfigurations of human and extra-human
nature. Comparisons might be drawn, for example, with Roy Heath’s
aforementioned A Man Come Home, set amidst the range yards of
Georgetown in the early years of Guyana’s independence; or with Pierre
Clitandre’s Cathedral of the August Heat (1982), which documents the
immiseration of Haiti under Jean-Claude Duvalier and his US-financed
programme of neoliberal economic reform; or with Nalo Hopkinson’s
The New Moon’s Arms (2007), in which the magical realist presence
of fish people is used to critique “the legacies of slavery, multinational
capitalism, illegal dumping of toxins, excessive touristification, and the
lack of local autonomy” (Nair 2013, 139). Rather than elaborate on
these examples, however, I want to conclude by casting the comparative
net further afield and considering the representation of Mami Wata in
fiction from West Africa.
Like Melville’s Erzulie, Mami Wata seems an especially apt figure
for capturing the felt experience of the neoliberal restructuring of the
world-system as this has unfolded in peripheral regions. Indeed, Mami
Wata as a social phenomenon has spread widely across many parts of
A frica in recent decades, partly in response to changing economic circum-
stances. According to Barbara Frank, under “the conditions of modern
economic life in West Africa, where great differences in income prevail,
belief in a contract with spirits as an explanation for the accumulation
of individual wealth has grown in importance” (1995, 339). The Mami
Wata cult especially, she continues, is “expanding and winning adherents
in great numbers” (342). Capable of bestowing great wealth, yet likely
to demand a substantial sacrifice, Mami Wata ably “represents modern
African life with its possible loss of social and material security”, but
also its opportunities “for extraordinary success” (342; see also Drewal
2012, 79). In this regard, we might view the upsurge in Mami Wata wor-
ship as a response to, and as a way to make sense of, the new velocities
of neoliberalism. Jean and John L. Comaroff have argued that a “strik-
ing corollary of the dawning of the Age of Millennial Capitalism”—
by which they mean capitalism at the millennium and capitalism in its
messianic, salvific manifestations—“has been the global proliferation of
‘occult economies’” (2000, 293, 310). These are a reaction to a world in
which “huge concentrations of wealth” accrue to the global elite, often
through incomprehensible or seemingly magical means—for example,
the “enigmatic new wealth derived from financial investment and man-
agement” (315). They bespeak an effort both to come to terms with such
incomprehensible phenomena and to develop similarly “magical means”
for garnering a comparable level of riches.
The Comaroffs provide numerous examples of occult economies, from
zombies in the South African countryside to fortune-tellers and seers in
Thailand. The increasing popularity of Mami Wata, I think, could be
added to this list as a further manifestation of the allure of accruing
wealth from nothing in a situation where such wealth is increasingly un-
evenly distributed and, for many, further out of reach than ever. The vio-
lence with which the water-goddess is associated—she may, for example,
demand the life of a family member in exchange for her m unificence—
might then be viewed as indicative of the brutal exploitation upon which
the contemporary uneven accumulation of riches is based.
In seeking out possible likenesses between peripheral modernisms,
therefore, we might compare the use of the watermamma motif in
Caribbean literary texts with the mobilization of the Mami Wata figure
in, say, fiction from Nigeria. One thinks, for example, of Flora Nwa-
pa’s Efuru (1966), Idu (1970), and The Lake Goddess (1995), Chinua
Achebe’s “Uncle Ben’s Choice” (1972), and Chris Abani’s GraceLand
(2004).4 It would be necessary in any such comparison, of course, to
mark the specificity of the Nigeria context. Here the transition to neo-
liberalism was signalled by the introduction of an IMF-sanctioned SAP
by the Babangida regime in the mid-1980s, which resulted in a rise in
extreme poverty from 28% in 1980 to 66% in 1996 (Davis 2006, 156).
These developments were inflected by the overdetermination of Nigeria’s
economy by the booms and busts of the oil sector. There is an intrigu-
ing resonance between Mami Wata’s capacity to magically bestow great
wealth and the ‘enchanted’ experience of a petro-economy, where oil
windfalls hold out the false promise of wealth without work, of a fairy-
tale-like sudden endowment of riches. As Andrew Apter observes of
Nigeria’s oil boom of the late 1970s: “oil replaced labour as the basis
of national development, producing a deficit of value and an excess of
wealth, or a paradoxical profit as loss”—a paradox Apter ascribes to the
fact that the value created by oil was “based not on the accumulation
of surplus value” but on the circulation of externally-generated oil rents
and revenues (2005, 201, 14). Thus one might examine how the literary
representation of Mami Wata mediates the lived conditions produced by
the intersection of neoliberal restructuring and the strange realities of a
volatile oil economy, as well as how this figure might serve as a vehicle
through which to express resistance to these conditions. In the realm of
visual practice, for instance, Jill Salmons (2008) has noted the prolifera-
tion of Mami Wata shrines in Ogoniland, where the water-goddess has
emerged as a key symbol of Ogoni national identity in the fight against
Shell and the Nigerian government over the extraction of oil reserves
and the contamination caused by spills on the Niger Delta.
My own conclusion will merely offer a brief reading of a recent short
story by Eghosa Imasuen, which registers explicitly the connection be-
tween the Mami Wata motif, periods of ecological revolution, Nigeria’s
petro-economy, and the violence of imperialist domination. “Wet Hair”
(2009) tells the story of Tonye, an Ijaw girl who is raped and drowned by
92 Michael Niblett
a Portuguese colonizer in the mangroves of the Niger Delta. She subse-
quently becomes a water-spirit, with the local villagers worshipping her
as Mami Wata. Centuries pass, and from the watery depths she watches
the changes occurring in her homeland:
Strange new iron canoes inhabit my waters, with round sharp circu-
lar paddles churning up the surf, leaving in their wake a spray I find
pleasant. I dance with these new ones. New bronze rods pierce my
depths, shiny but soon scarred with barnacles from my teeth. They
leak dark oil that stains my water. Kills the fish; drives away most
of my sisters. But I do not care; I live only for the moonlight and I
sit on the mangrove roots watching my people change. They do not
farm anymore. I see no war canoes with cargo of captured slaves for
the pale Potokri. I see no dark loam, only sterile white sand. I sing
my songs alone. My people forget me. They forget that I am the river
who feeds them.
It is with the penetration of the oil industry into her domain that this
water-spirit finally takes the revenge she has refused to exact up until
then. Encountering a Dutch oil contractor (presumably the oil company
alluded to in the story is Shell), she enthrals him with her song before
kissing him: “Desire is a fever in me. […] I want some of his heat, his
essence that I see pulsing within him. He gasps and I feel it leeching into
me.” In this way she kills him, sucking the life out of him until he is
“grey,” his lips “a shadow of white.” Her actions thus mime the violence
done to Nigeria through the leeching away of its ecological surpluses,
turning the plunderous logic of the oil frontier back on itself.
“Wet Hair,” then, not only connects the appearance of Mami Wata
to the disruptive effects of colonialism, but also gestures to the tendency
for such figures to flourish at moments of the renewed and deeper pene-
tration of capital. As with the other representations of water-spirits ex-
amined in this article, the irreal qualities of Imasuen’s Mami Wata and
the estranging effects of his uncanny narrative function as a means to
register and critique imperialist domination and capitalist unevenness.
They also underscore the felt experience of uncertainty and disconcer-
tion corresponding to the ecological revolutions through which such
domination and unevenness are reproduced. The aesthetic likenesses we
have observed in the depiction of watermammas in otherwise very dif-
ferent texts, therefore, speak to the saliency of Parry’s demand that any
comparative analysis must attend to the social ground of modern pe-
ripheral literatures—to the differently specific experiences of modernity
encountered in regions that nonetheless share a history of imperialist
intrusion and structural underdevelopment. If the startling admixtures
of the realistic and the fantastic to be found in works such as Melville’s
“Erzulie” constitute a “subterranean rebellion” against the inequalities
and depredations of the world-system, it is precisely to this world-system
that we must look to ground a properly materialist understanding of
world-literature and comparative morphology.
Notes
1 See also Persaud’s typological definition of the watermamma (1978: 64).
2 Erzulie’s name also alludes to the watermamma-like vodou loa Ezili of the
Waters. See Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert (2003).
3 As Helen Scott observes of the depiction of city life during this period in the
work of a number of Guyanese writers: “The urban scenes show a world
without safety nets for the poor, the elderly, the unemployed: the old familial
and communal structures have been removed, but nothing has been put in
their place other than relentless individualism, privatization, and dog-eat-
dog competition” (2006, 119).
4 On Mami Wata in the work of Nwapa and Abani, see Krishnan (2012) and
Jell-Bahlsen (1995); on Achebe’s “Uncle Ben’s Choice,” see Frank (1995).
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5 “Not even a sci-fi writer”
Peripheral Genres, the World-
System Novel, and Junot Díaz
Sharae Deckard
Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008) is a novel
that, like its protagonist, Oscar, is in love with “Genres!” (16). The
multi-generational immigrant novel contrasts the short, tragic life of
second-generation “ghetto nerd” Oscar with the experiences of his sis-
ter Lola and excavates the buried history that led his mother to flee the
Dominican Republic to the US (336). The three interweaving timelines
of the Cabral family are embedded in a frame narrative, narrated with
comic brio by Yunior, another second-generation Dominican. However,
this realist narrative is punctuated by non-realist tropes and analogies
appropriated from speculative genres, as when Yunior first describes the
dictator Trujillo:
His power was terminal in ways that few historians or writers have
ever truly captured or, I would argue, imagined. He was our Sauron,
our Arawn…our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outland-
ish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have
made his ass up.
(2–3)
It is precisely because Trujillo seemingly exceeds realist representation

that Yunior appropriates the titles of Dark Lords from fantasy epics
such as The Lord of the Rings, The Once and Future King, and The
Chronicles of Prydain in the attempt to describe his monstrosity. Yet
the narrator’s parodic tone simultaneously signals the limits of even
these analogies, since “not even a sci-fi writer” could have invented
the reality of the dictatorship. China Miéville argues that “the atom
of SF’s and fantasy’s estrangement […] is their unreality function, of
which utopia is but one—if highly important—form” and goes on to
suggest that “taking alterity as a starting point might allow us to trace
structural relations between fantastic genres and the anti-realist avant-
garde” (Miéville 2009, 244). Through allusion to intermedial specula-
tive genres, Oscar Wao exploits this “unreality function” to critique the
extremity of American imperialism and neocolonial conditions within
the Dominican Republic.
“Not even a sci-fi writer” 97
The millennial proliferation of Latin American apocalyptic and dys-
topian fictions serves as a barometer of the mounting contradictions of
the neoliberal regime of capitalism and the socio-ecological violence un-
leashed by structural adjustment and resource extractivism throughout
the Americas (see López-Lozano 2008). However, Oscar Wao differs
from these fictions in its use of a realist formal structure and setting.
The frame narrative is set in the present and the other episodes in the
past of the twentieth century; it neither projects into the future, nor con-
structs an alternate historical universe, nor does it invent counterfactual
technologies or idioms. Although Yunior reports that Oscar wants to be
the “Dominican Tolkien,” the reader’s knowledge of his quartet space
opera Starscourge, like that of Oscar’s last letter, remains second hand.
The novel’s hybridized narration interpolates intermedial references to
graphic novels, Marvel comics, science fiction, fantasy, film, and anime,
but these generic elements are situated alongside the predominantly real-
ist plot conventions of the multi-generational immigrant novel.
Describing examples of African postcolonial novels that combine sci-
ence fictional and realist features, Peter Hitchcock finds in their generic
incommensurabilities a deliberate political logic, contending that “the
ill-fitting tropes of genre identification are productively engaged in a
politics of non-conformance” (Hitchcock 2017, 159). “Counter-fitting,”
that which thwarts or does not fit generic expectation, is for Hithcock “a
politics of aesthetics in which generic authenticity is put into question by
the very unevenness of cultural contact and expression. Like the counter-
feit, however, the counter-fit reveals something of the logic of exchange
in the circulation of genres” (Hitchcock 2017, 159). In this light, Díaz’s
appropriation of North American and European comics and SF conven-
tions can be understood as “counter-fitting” their ideological content to
criticize hegemonic ideas of race, class, and empire in the US core, while
reconfiguring the “unreality function” of their non-realist aesthetics to
express the experience of exploitation and domination in the periphery.
While the novel has most often be read through the lens of diaspora or
transnationalism, I argue that it can be more productively read as what
I have called a “world-system novel,” a sentinel text in which the hori-
zon of capitalism is not some distant or mystified absolute, but rather
immediately and urgently perceptible in its historical character. As such,
I approach the novel through the prism of a world-literary criticism in-
formed by a world-systems analytic of the logistical hierarchies structur-
ing relations between capitalist cores, semi-peripheries, and peripheries,
and in tandem with a theory of combined and uneven development that
prioritizes the mediation of class inequality, social asymmetries, and the
simultaneity of the non-simultaneous in its interpretation of form and
content. Unlike the rubrics of transnationalism or even postcolonial-
ism, the world-systems analytic offers a better understanding of how
literature traversing multiple locations across the global order registers
98 Sharae Deckard
unequal exchanges, not only as transnational corporate relations, ge-
ographies of literary value-accumulation, or imperial applications of
politico-material power, but as the social contradictions produced by
the logics of capital and territory that forcibly transform cities, regions,
and nations in the process of inducting them into circuits of power and
accumulation (Medovoi 2011, 653). Furthermore, as Leerom Medovoi
elaborates, “such transformations are themselves productive of literature
on a variety of levels: they effect the migration of writers, establish the
‘comparative’ spaces that literary texts seek to represent, and, crucially,
lead to retroactive renarrations of both local and world histories that
can make sense of the new spatial arrangements” (Medovoi 2011, 653).
The temporal-spatial shuttling of Oscar Wao’s setting between
countries does not celebrate the transnational liminality of immigrant
experience in border zones, but rather critically exposes the radical un-
evenness and hierarchical inequalities structuring local experiences of
the world-system. The novel trenchantly criticizes nationalist discourses
within the Dominican Republic, yet is not circumscribed by a national
literary tradition, operating instead within a hemispheric conception of
the “Other America” of the extended Caribbean, resistant yet subordi-
nated to the hegemony of the US capitalist core (Dash 1998). Its primary
object is not so much to destabilize the notion of the nation through
hybrid discourse, but rather to criticize US neo-imperialism and global
hegemony, linking US domination of the DR and other sites in Latin
America to the invasion of Iraq from its very first page. At the same
time, the novel’s aesthetics, with their juxtaposition of generic conven-
tions, places, and narrative perspectives and their admixtures of realism
and irrealism, formally register the uneven space-time sensorium of the
Dominican periphery in relation to the semi-peripheral position of im-
migrants in the US core hegemony.
As Michael Löwy remarks, most empirical literary texts do not
strictly correspond to the “ideal-types” of realism as “pure” epistemo-
logical constructions (2007, 195). Rather, they tend towards “impure”
combinations of both realism and irrealism, where “irrealism” does not
describe an opposition to realism so much as the punctuation or inter-
ruption of texts by “a logic of the imagination, of the marvellous, of the
mystery or the dream” (194) on the level of trope, imagery, or plot (195).
Expanding on Löwy’s description of “critical irrealism,” Benita Parry’s
formulation of peripheral aesthetics identifies a tendency to juxtapose
“the mundane and the fantastic, the recognizable and the improb-
able, the seasonal and the eccentric, the earthborn and the fabulous,
the legible and the oneiric, historically inflected and mystical states of
consciousness” (Parry 2009, 39). She heralds critical consciousness of
combined and uneven development on the part of semi-peripheral in-
tellectuals in proximity to social contradictions and political struggle
as likely to result in an elective affinity for experimentation with irreal-
ist narrative techniques that re-activate residual materials and combine
literary and cultural forms: “Such proximity of discordant discourses
and discrete narrative registers, can be seen as aesthetic forms that
transcend their sources in the novel’s social ground, becoming abstract
significations of the incommensurable and the contradictory which are
concurrent in the material and cultural worlds of a periphery” (39). If
Parry’s work has focused more on fabulist, oneiric, and surrealist vari-
eties of “peripheral modernism,” in this essay, I will explore the uneven-
ness of “peripheral genres”: the inter-mixing of SF and fantasy genres
with realist modalities, offering an exemplary reading of Oscar Wao
as a novel that invites a world-systemic reading in its counter-fitting of
speculative genre conventions to create an “extreme narrative” (Díaz
cited in Obejas 2009, 46).
“Some Real Time-Machine-Type Shit”: Traversing the

World-System
Born in the Dominican Republic but having moved to the United States
as a child, Junot Díaz writes and publishes at the heart of the metropol-
itan US literary field, and his novel has been subsequently consecrated,
to use Pascale Casanova’s terminology, with the award of the Pulitzer
Prize, absorbed and commodified in the circuits of literary capital in
the core. Yet Díaz’s semi-peripheral position as an immigrant writer
bestows a bifurcated vision that is world-systemic in its condition of
possibility. His fiction transverses the immigrant communities of New
York and New Jersey Dominicans—whose lifeworlds encompass the
unevenness of the semi-periphery within a capitalist core city—in con-
junction with the Dominican Republic, a peripheral nation-state in the
world-system, dominated externally by the US core and riven internally
by its own divisions between peripheralized campo and urban Santo
Domingo.
The terms periphery and core as used here do not designate static
geographic boundaries, but rather sets of spatialized relations that oc-
cur on multiple scales. The core encompasses those sets of elites who
compete against each other and against outsiders. Core nations are
centralized states that control the traffic in commodities and labour
to their own advantage, in contrast to weaker peripheral states or re-
gions where core zones monopolize strategic terrain and extract cheap
labour and resources. Semi-peripheries are the transistor zones that
bring together the incommensurate social action of core regions with
that of peripheries, transmitting value and translating the commodi-
ties (cultural, financial, economic) of one zone to another as the dis-
possessed from the hinterlands gather to commodify their labour, and
jobbing interests from the core congregate to finance and construct
the apparatuses that will consume their labour-power. The experience
of trauma by peripheral peoples and the speculative entrepreneur-
ship of the core collide in the semi-periphery to produce new forms
100 Sharae Deckard
of representation, especially as they combine both the folk beliefs and
customs of the periphery and the core’s institutionally consecrated
notations and objects.
As such, the title of this essay could perhaps be more properly be
“semi-peripheral genres,” an interrogation of the ways in which the ge-
neric admixtures of a novel such as Oscar Wao negotiate and medi-
ate these processes of transculturation and transvaluation. In an video
for Authors@Google, Díaz makes a telling comment that “all minority
writers in some sense are genre writers,” not merely because of the im-
peratives of the literary field which markets writing by “hyphenated
Americans” as if it were a subgenre of its own, but because their experi-
ences demand modes of representation often unavailable in mainstream
realist fiction, particularly in a literary market shaped by the imperatives
of writing programmes and workshops that disavow the politics of race,
class, and anti-imperialist critique, and which peripheralize speculative
genres in terms of prestige (2007, n.p.). Elsewhere, he describes his own
experience of the peculiar spatial-temporal and cultural juxtapositions
of diasporic experience in science-fictional terms: “I always lived in a
situation of simultaneity. It’s like a science fiction book where an alien or
creature or an artifact exists on two worlds, or on two different planes
at one time” (Díaz cited in Lewis, n.p.).
This condition of simultaneity is striking not merely because of the
bifurcation of individual memory, but because it encapsulates the asym-
metries between core and peripheral zones. Benita Parry describes the
co-existence of radically different temporalities and economic forma-
tions within a singular modernity as central to the mediation of com-
bined and unevenness in peripheral aesthetics:
Echoing but not citing Trotsky, Fredric Jameson has written that
“Modernism must… be seen as uniquely corresponding to an un-
even moment of social development, or to what Ernst Bloch (ad-
dressing a very different situation) called the ‘simultaneity of the
nonsimultaneous,’ the ‘synchronicity of the non-synchronous…
the coexistence of realities from radically different moments of
history--handicrafts alongside the great cartels, peasant fields with
the Krupp factories or the Ford plant in the distance’” (Postmod-
ernism 307). (5) Hence the suggestion that the “generic disconti-
nuities” in the forms of the peripheries demand attention to their
ground in modernities where traditional and emergent social and
cultural values coexisted and clashed, which appear to inhabit
manifold material conditions and temporalities, and to be, as Neil
Larsen puts it “both modern and traditional, both ‘ahead of and
yet ‘behind the times’ at once, as if not one but two or multiple
histories were being lived out in one and the same space (139–140)
(Parry 2009, 32)
For Díaz, this apprehension of unreal simultaneity necessitates the
use of science fictional descriptors: “Jumping between two entire ex-
istences, two entire temporal moments, is what it feels like. […] Even
the terms ‘first world’ and ‘third world’ already intimate science fic-
tive travel between planets” (Díaz cited in Lewis, n.p.). In the novel,
when Oscar’s mother Beli is kidnapped by Trujillo’s henchmen in the
1950s, the metaphor of time travel is deployed to evoke the violence
of unevenness between the urban capital and the canefield on the bor-
der: “[O]ne second you were deep in the twentieth century (well, the
twentieth century of the Third World) and the next you’d find your-
self plunged 180 years into rolling fields of cane. The transition be-
tween these states was some real time-machine-type shit” (Díaz 2008,
145–146).
In contrast, the industrial development of the core is signified by
magic, as in La Inca’s vision of the seeming sorcery of capital in Nueva
York: “Its cities swarmed with machines and industry…a cuco shod in
iron, exhaling fumes, with the fluttering promise of coin deep in the cold
lightless shaft of its eyes” (158). Elsewhere in the novel, the extremity
of underdevelopment in the periphery is signified as alien alterity, as
when Yunior compares Outer Azua to a list of apocalyptic wastelands
borrowed from science fiction: “It was the Outland, the Badlands…it
was Ceti Alpha Six, it was Tatooine.” (256). The passage’s punchline
refers to Planet of the Apes, pointing out to the quintessential image of
core American (galactic) conquest—Astronaut Taylor—that the campo
isn’t an imagined world of the future but rather contemporary reality.
This is characteristic of the novel’s aesthetic strategy, in which the ludic
accumulation of genre tropes sets up a dialectic between estrangement
and revelation. It co-opts the estrangement effect of speculative fiction
by signifying the incommensurabilities of combined unevenness through
tropes of fantastic alterity, but then reverses the traditional cognition
effect which persuades readers to believe in the not-real, shocking them
with the existence of the real (Miéville 2009, 239). Speculative genre
elements lure readers with the charismatic promise of the fantastic into
an encounter with the reality of exploitation, previously mystified but
now unveiled as real.
Speculative tropes in the novel also articulate the silences in official
historical narratives of the trujillato and represent the lingering reso-
nance of Trujillo’s power within the public sphere. As Díaz explains,
“Trujillo had an aspect that was not supernatural, but something else,
like an extreme narrative. It was something I could only explain using
science fiction and fantasy” (cited in Obejas 2009, 46). The material
and discursive sources of Trujillo’s power are mystified through the
“plátano curtain” carved “through a horrifying ritual of silence and
blood…directly into the histories and imaginaries of a people” (225).
While Yunior’s representation of Trujillo’s cruelty as so fantastic that it
102 Sharae Deckard
can only be compared to fictional supervillains is seemingly dehistori-
cizing, his footnotes construct a materialist analysis of how Trujillo’s
seemingly unrepresentable power is actually sustained, through the ap-
paratuses of the Dominican state, the concealed support of the United
States, the silence of cultural historians, and the fearful complicity of in-
dividuals like Abelard, who, we are told, “needed help in the prophetic
department” (227).
As such the novel acts as a zafa, the counterspell to the fukú, a re-
constructed narrative that attempts to fill in the “página en blanco” of
the Cabral family’s history, and by extension that of the nation and the
American hemisphere, and thus to ward off future violence by break-
ing the cycle of the curse. In narrating the subjective perspectives of
each generation of the Cabrals, the novel attempts to reconstitute what
Édouard Glissant refers to as “the obscure areas of lived reality,” the
collective memory of a people which is fractured, susceptible to the “un-
checked process of disintegration” and “nonhistory” that the Americas
have been subjected to since the first colonial invasion of Cuba (1989:
92). According to Glissant, “Histories of peoples colonized by the West
have never since then been uniform. Their apparent simplicity… con-
ceals the complex sequences where external and internal forces lead to
alienation and get lost in obscurity” (1989: 92). The writer’s role, then,
becomes to reveal these forces and how they deform both individual
subjectivities and collective structures of feeling.
The novel’s fukú americanus, a curse radiating out from five hundred
years of capitalist modernity from the Columbian moment through
the trujillato to the haunted, amnesiac present, can be understood in
Glissant’s terms as “the past, to which we were subjected, which has not
yet emerged as history for us, is, however, obsessively present” (1989:64).
This history is not merely national, but rather intimately entangled with
the transnational forces of imperialism, colonization, domination, and
exploitation that connect US imperialist intervention in the Americas
with support of Mobutu’s dictatorship in the Congo and the invasions of
Vietnam and Iraq. Glissant gestures beyond the francophone Caribbean
to the “Other America” when he speaks of “la face cachée de la Terre,”
the “noncreative,” “nonhistorical” periphery to which the West Indies
and its peoples have been systematically relegated. In the novel, Yunior
explicitly cites Glissant’s theory, counter-fitting it to seemingly incon-
gruous references to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s The Fantastic Four in
order to cast himself in the prophetic role of Watcher-writer and to re-
verse the polarities of the Marvel comic to invest them with a spirit
of anti-colonial resistance: “It’s hard as a Third Worlder not to feel a
certain amount of affinity for Uatu the Watcher; he resides in the hidden
Blue Area of the Moon and we DarkZoners reside (to quote Glissant) on
‘la face cachée de la Terre’ (Earth’s hidden face)” (92). Yunior imagines
himself as a prophet whose role is to narrate a history that liberates the
present from the necromantic past, opposing the Watcher’s gaze of won-
der to the necromantic power of Trujillo.
In Oscar Wao, genre elements are mostly figurative rather than re-
alized in the plot, although they could be argued to be heterotopic in
that they cover the full range from apocalypse to utopia, science fiction
to fantasy. The exceptions to this rule are the apparitions of the enig-
matic Mongoose and of the Faceless Man to Beli and Oscar. These
spectral appearances are the only strictly non-realist elements of the
plot, uncanny irruptions into the narrative that blend elements of the
science-fictional, the magical real, and the ecogothic, as Kerstin Oloff
has argued in her powerful world-ecological reading of the novel as a
reinvention of the novela de la caña that utilizes the “saccharine mon-
strous” to critique the violence of the “profoundly patriarchal and mil-
itarized political ecology of sugar” and its role within the world food
system (Oloff 2017, 14). The Mongoose’s first appearance is signalled
as a break from realism—“the strangest part of our tale”—rather than
narrated with the deadpan naturalism of the magical real: “Whether
what follows was a figment of Beli’s wracked imagination or something
else altogether I cannot say. … But no matter what the truth, remem-
ber: Dominicans are Caribbean and therefore have an extraordinary
tolerance for extreme phenomena” (149). However, it is the gendered
violence that Beli suffers at the hands of Trujillo’s henchman that is the
actual or historical “extreme phenomenon”; the mongoose, by contrast,
is the spectral manifestation of a cultural strategy of survival and the
possibility of solidarity (as embodied by the singer with the golden eyes
who rescues Beli).
While in Indian folklore, such as the Panchatantra tale of “The
Mongoose and the Brahmin’s Wife,” the mongoose’s mythic role is
that of the protector of humanity from the king cobra, here Yunior
imagines that its magical properties derive from its status as “one of
the great unstable particles of the Universe and also one of its great-
est travellers. […] Many watchers suspect that the Mongoose arrived
to our world from another” (151). Historically, the mongoose was in-
troduced by Europeans to the West Indies to kill snakes in the sugar
plantations, resulting in a severe imbalance of the ecosystem and the
subsequent banning of the invasive species throughout the Americas.
Its apparition is metonymic of the violent juxtapositions of peoples,
languages, cultures, mythologies, and species under colonialism and
ecological imperialism. Yunior’s description of the mongoose as sci-
ence-fictional, a possible alien from another Universe, reconfigures
the incommensurability of such mixtures as the source of invention.
However, the Mongoose also figures the utopian, urging Beli to sur-
vive for “the ones who await” (149) and singing “Yo me llamo sueño
104 Sharae Deckard
de la madrugada” (emphasis original, 150): I am the dream of dawn.
Near the conclusion, the mongoose appears to Oscar, who lies, like
Beli before him, beaten near the point of death in the canefield, and
asks: “What will it be, muchacho? it demanded. More or less?” (301).
The choice is existential—whether to continue to live or not—but it is
also the utopian question: whether something more, something bet-
ter can be conceived. Oscar’s answer is, of course, “More,” and the
Mongoose’s reply, “----- ----- ------,” is utopian, a blank represented in
dashes, inconceivable except as the negative trace.
“Voodoo Imagination”: Escape or Revelation?

Throughout the novel, the juxtaposition of multiple discourses of the
fantastic and the science fictional, the apocalyptic and the utopian,
also acts to self-reflexively foreground the ideological implications of
different genres. Traditionally, Marxist criticism following Darko Su-
vin’s influential Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) has differ-
entiated between fantasy as a reactionary genre, “committed to the
imposition of anti-cognitive laws into the empirical environmental
sub-literature of mystification,” and science fiction as a progressive
genre, characterized by “cognitive estrangement” which allows it to
creatively extrapolate possible futures. New theorists of the fantastic
have insisted that Suvin’s reductive definition misses the carnivalesque
role that fantasy can play, allowing the radical play of the imagina-
tion. China Miéville argues that some fantasies, like Tolkien’s The
Lord of the Rings, are conservative, based on the notion of the fairy
tale as “consolation,” or structured around an “unmediated numi-
nous,” “not merely reactionary but crypto-fascist” (2009: 242), while
others, like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, offer pointed critique of
crypto-fascist mythology. Equally, science fiction can be a conserva-
tive form allied to empire, but it can also offer radical critiques of
imperialism, capitalism, and coloniality. At first glance, neither tra-
ditional “fanboy” nor Suvinian distinctions between “hard” sf and
“soft” fantasy are drawn in the text. Oscar consumes fantasy and
science fiction indiscriminately, without a sense of the different ideolo-
gies of different texts, loving the nostalgic neo-feudalism of Tolkien as
much as the rational technotopia of Asimov or the anarchist critique
of vigilante superheroes in Alan Moore’s Watchmen. However, the
reader of the novel is in a position to interpret what Oscar cannot:
a politics of genre emerging from the layered narration of the novel,
which stages a critique of fantasy in its conservative mode and which
also references between negative hallucination that mystifies and spec-
ulation that leads to revelation.
As previously suggested, the narrator Yunior uses speculative tropes
to signify the asymmetries between the Caribbean and the US. Thus,
Yunior speculates that Oscar’s “outsized love of genre” (21) may di-
rectly stem from his simultaneous experience of both core and (semi-)
periphery:
It might have been a consequence of being Antillean (who more sci-fi

than us?) or of living in the DR for the first couple of years of his
life and then abruptly relocating to New Jersey—a single green card
shifting not only worlds (from Third to First) but centuries (from
almost no TV or electricity to plenty of both.) After a transition
like that I’m guessing only the most extreme scenarios could have
satisfied.
(22)
However, for Oscar himself, genre fiction serves no function in repre-

senting his reality; it is escape rather than mimesis. In his first return to
the DR, he writes two books about a “young boy fighting mutants at the
end of the world” and takes “crazy amounts of field notes too, names of
things he intended to later adapt for science-fictional and fantastic pur-
poses” but doesn’t “think it worth incorporating [the family curse] into
his fiction” (32). Oscar’s love of genres is primarily escapist, in that his
“growing obsession with the End of the World” (23) derives from per-
sonal disappointments: he dreams of nuclear holocaust as retaliation (in
contrast to Yunior’s use of holocaust to designate the unfolding calamity
of colonialism and capitalism over the longue durée). When discover-
ing, for instance, that one of his infatuations, Ana, has returned to her
abusive boyfriend Manny, Oscar dreams about a “nuclear annihilation”
that would enable him to rescue Ana and win her affections with his
“take-charge genius and by-then ectomorphic physique” (43). Oscar’s
obsession with the Japanese anime Akira is telling, since the film relates
the story of a young boy who is unable to control his god-like psionic
powers and obliterates Tokyo. Oscar’s post-apocalypses do not gesture
towards the emergence of post-national utopia; they function merely as
narcissistic, libertarian fantasies of a world ruled by himself as destroyer
god. When he first meets the gaze of the Golden Mongoose, he refuses
the future it offers and tries to commit suicide instead; he cannot com-
prehend the radical alterity of the encounter, despite his love of magic.
However, after his second visit to the DR, when he receives a near-
fatal beating at the hands of Ybón’s policeman lover, he undergoes a
radical shift in his imagination. He is no longer able to find consolation
in re-reading The Lord of the Rings, previously one of his “greatest loves
and greatest comforts” (307). For the first time, the implicit racism of the
text overwhelms its escapist pleasures; he has become a self-conscious
reader: he “got through almost the whole trilogy, but then the line ‘and
out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls’ and he had to stop, his
head and heart hurting too much” (307). This newly painful awareness
106 Sharae Deckard
is corporeal, the reactivation of the wounds received in his beating.
Throughout the novel, the narratives of state violence, ethnic cleans-
ing, and colour-based racism that constitute the Dominican imaginary
of the Haitian-DR border are represented by Díaz as a curse literally
transcribed onto the bodies and memories of Dominicans that deforms
social relations and haunts the trajectories of individual lives. Awakened
into knowledge of this violent history, Oscar is no longer able to read or
write in the same way. He begins a new project, writing the history of
the family, attempting to find a “cure” to the curse, the “Cosmo DNA”
(333). His interest in the fantastic shifts from the egoistic to the archae-
ological: a desire for revelation rather than gratification.
Earlier in the novel, we are told that Beli “embraced the amnesia that
was so common throughout the Islands, five parts denial, five parts
negative hallucination. Embraced the power of the Untilles. And from
it forged herself anew” (258). Her remaking is extraordinary; she im-
migrates and emerges from out of terror, bearing its secret scars on
her back. But her silence about the past traumatizes her own children.
Her selective amnesia stands in for the silences of a whole culture,
which refuses to examine the deadly legacies of the Trujillo era, and
speaks to a wider historical amnesia about US imperialism and capital-
ist aggression. In the opening pages of the novel, Yunior quips, “Santo
Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq” and confronts the reader:
“You didn’t know we were occupied twice in the twentieth century?
Don’t worry, when you have kids they won’t know the U.S. occupied
Iraq either” (19). During Oscar’s last days, he dreams of an old man
in a “ruined bailey, holding up a book for him to read”: “The old man
had a mask on. It took a while for Oscar’s eyes to focus, but then he
saw that the book was blank” (302). This is the book of the past, the
history that haunts the present but is not recognized as history because
it has not yet been narrated; it is also the future, blank and devoid of
agency without the prophetic vision of the author. It is a collective
dream, like the apparition of the Faceless Man, which will come to
haunt Yunior after Oscar’s death and drive him to write, to exorcise
the spectres of blank pages, nameless acts of violence, the aporias of
official narratives.
When Yunior reflects on the various cultural myths circulating about
the imprisonment of Beli’s father, the passage somewhat paradoxically
implies a critique of narratives that employ the fantastic to represent the
extreme or the unmappable:
Oscar, as you might imagine, found this version of the Fall very very
attractive. […] Mysterious books, a supernatural, or perhaps, alien,
dictator who had installed himself on the first Island of the New
World then cut if off from everything else, who could sense a curse
to destroy his enemies… I’m sure that this is nothing more than a
figment of our Island’s hypertrophied voodoo imagination.
(246)
In the past-tense events of the novel, “voodoo imagination” is repre-

sented as a mode of resistance and agency rooted in peripheral cultural
practices and belief systems, a digression, as Glissant might call it: a
spiritual and psychical survival strategy for the negotiation of peripheral
modernity, as with the prayers of La Inca and her circle of viejas who
resurrect Beli from death. But in the present, as in the previous passage,
Yunior uses the term more critically to indicate the danger of overusing
speculative tropes to mystify the real material conditions and structures
by which totalitarian power is sustained or to escape into compensatory
fantasies. Trujillo is no alien and Dominican history is not a Lovecraf-
tian tale; explanatory myths risk negative hallucination if not critically
interpreted.
In particular, Oscar’s love of postlapsarian narrative problematically
presumes an originary purity. If the Cabral family’s “Fall” is posed as di-
rectly equivalent to the aboriginal trauma of Caribbean modernity—the
fukú americanus radiating back to the Admiral’s arrival—it constructs
an impossible moment of indigenous homogeneity before the Columbian
encounter and imagines the present-day Caribbean as irrevocably fallen,
with no possibility of re-emergence from the nightmare of colonialism
and capitalist exploitation. Furthermore, the myth of fall mystifies the
actual circumstances of the Cabral family’s destruction, which were not
the result of some omnipotent power, but also because of Abelard’s re-
fusal to make a choice, his turning of a blind eye to the regime’s cor-
ruption until his own family was jeopardized, his failure to resist or
even to flee. La Inca’s romanticization of Casa Hatüey, the lost estate
of the Cabrals, is equally problematic: she is so in love with the ideal
of bourgeois respectability—summarized caustically by Yunior as “the
life of the Good People” (78)—that she elides the violence of the class,
race, and gender hierarchies underlying the island’s plantation ecology
in which such privilege is founded. Beli herself vociferously refutes La
Inca’s myths of the Golden Age: “She wasn’t a maldita ciguapa, with
her feet pointing backward in the past. Her feet pointed forward, she
reminded La Inca over and over. Pointed to the future” (81). Beli’s deci-
sion to repress her memories is a decision born of personal trauma, an
attempt to escape the prison-house of the past, but she is unable to con-
ceive of her own history dialectically in relation to the present.
Yet because Yunior is as prone as Oscar to representing Trujillo in
fantastic tropes that mystify his power—“Darkseid’s Omega Effect,”
“Morgoth’s bane” (5)—his critique of Oscar’s solipsistic fantasy is unre-
liable. Furthermore, as narrator, Yunior internalizes patriarchal ideology
108 Sharae Deckard
and replicates the discourses of machismo, particularly in relation to his
own promiscuity, his normative expectations for Oscar’s sexuality, and
his inability to recognize or treat women as possessing full-fledged sub-
jectivities. As Kerstin Oloff observes,
[W]hile Oscar may indeed to a certain extent be unable to fully

participate in the patriarchal order due to his outsider status, he has
certainly imbibed patriarchal narratives of courtship as well as hav-
ing assimilated the hetero-patriarchal power relations on which they
are based - even if perhaps to a lesser extent than Yunior. Indeed,
Yunior is actively engaged in shaping the narrative’s rather abrupt
ending in part 3 in accordance with heteronormative formal con-
ventions: “Oscar’s final transformation from virgin to Dominican
man is part of the foundational logic driving the novel, a consoli-
dating impulse that aligns it with the nationalist novels of Sommer’s
study” (Machado 2011: 526). […Yet ] the narrator’s (and other char-
acters’) ideological contradictions are continually highlighted in the
novel. From Oscar's sexist statements about girls to Yunior’s claims
of being reformed despite seeing several women at the same time,
the novel overall makes it abundantly clear that they are not always
able to extricate themselves from what they partially recognize as
“dreamshit” (87).
(Oloff 2017, 16)
Thus, it is crucial to the novel’s attempt at self-reflexive critique that

Lola’s section is narrated in her own voice, setting up a formal counter-
point of critical female subjectivity that undercuts Oscar’s and Yunior’s
myopic sexism.1 Significantly, Lola is one of the few characters in the
novel who demonstrates the agency to change, to break from the prison-
house of the past.
At the same time, however, the deployment of speculative tropes
in his frame narrative can be partly recuperated when read in light of
Yunior’s desire for a “historical rescue mission” (81) more progressive
than La Inca’s: the desire to reconstruct a history of the intersecting
axes of class, race, and gender-based violence, both national and inter-
national, that exists outside official narratives and whose silences and
incongruities demand a different aesthetics. The first-person unreliable
narration may oscillate between semi-parodic assertions and postmod-
ern denials of the supernatural, but the text itself does not celebrate
post-structuralist strategies of relativism or indeterminacy. Rather, it is
painfully haunted by lost texts—the letter, Abelard’s grimoire, the re-
cords of the Trujillo regime, Oscar’s manuscript history of the f amily—
and convinced of the discursive power of the word to effect change
in the material world, even if this change is only figured through the
conceit of the next generation.
As the Warwick Research Collective has contended, building from
Benita Parry’s conceptualization of peripheral aesthetics, the ideal-type
of realism in literatures figuring semi-peripheral situations is likely to
be disturbed in three key ways: in response to the conjoined sides of
fictitious capital accumulation and violent accumulation via disposses-
sion, the extremity of imperialist violence, and the underdevelopment or
distortion of the various institutional, administrative, and bureaucratic
apparatuses of truth-formation and normative knowledge production
that enhance and maintain the exercise of power, which Michel Foucault
terms the dispositif (WReC 2015, 76). All three of these conditions are
present in the DR, organized around the sugar plantation export econ-
omy and subjected to multiple waves of imperialism both European and
North American—but the latter is most salient in respect to the treat-
ment of history in Díaz’s novel, where the truth-apparatuses and official
archive of the dictatorial state (its own power subordinated to the inter-
ests of US core hegemony) are manifestly suspect, serving to disempower
rather than empower local subjects.
Thus, unlike the footnotes of postmodernist novels that set out to
deconstruct the infinite regression of language, Yunior’s footnotes re-
construct absent or excised historical information, forge connections
between the seemingly incommensurable, and map the geopolitical re-
lations of a world-system dominated by US core hegemony. As a semi-
peripheral author-figure confronted with the distortion and deficit of a
reliable historical archive, Yunior draws on non-realist tropes, vocabu-
lary, and genres to articulate a different reality than the one proffered
by the truth-apparatuses of the peripheral state. As such, the playfulness
of his narration and its paratextual apparatuses disguises a materialist
urgency that exceeds the merely ludic. Lola’s daughter Isis, in reading
Yunior’s recovered narrative of the Cabral family and its shadow his-
tory of the Dominican Republic, may finally be freed from repeating the
mistakes of the generations before her. She figures the futurity of social
reproduction, but also the hope of the emergence of new relations once
the inequities of the current social order, founded in racial, class, and
gender hierarchies and exclusions, are finally recognized and challenged.
She is the fulfilment of the humanist promise sung by the Mongoose: the
dream of dawn and the ones to come.
Yunior’s oscillating narration can be further understood as the self-
reflexive manifestation of the text’s uneasy relation to magical realism
and its own status as a commodity of exchange in a world-literary market.
Alejo Carpentier’s original formulation of lo real maravilloso has been
criticized for perpetrating a myth of total incommensurability created
by the ethnocentric affirmation of Caribbean difference, promulgating
an essentialist binary of irrational, primitive, mythical, or superstitious
indigenous culture in opposition to the putative logic and rationality of
European epistemology (Zlotchew 2007: 16). Slyly remarking on the
110 Sharae Deckard
vulnerability of magical realist aesthetics to commodification within the
world market, Yunior describes the McDonaldization of the politicized
aesthetics of the Boom generation as the transformation of Macondo into
“McOndo” (7). The blurring of the generic boundaries between fantasy
and SF within the novel are partially an attempt to circumvent these prob-
lems, invoking the traditional associations of science fiction with the ra-
tional and the futuristic, rather than primitivism or the irrational—so the
Mongoose is not the embodiment of indigenous myth, but rather, a possi-
ble alien from another universe, a revenant rather than a totem. Likewise,
the speculative descriptions of the asymmetries between the DR and the
United States refer not to esoteric cultural essences, but rather to the exo-
teric structures of capitalist development that produce difference.
Yet fantasy need not always be escapist, even if Oscar’s variety pri-
marily functions as consolation or eucatastrophe. As Lola comments,
narrative can also provide a means of confronting the reality and neces-
sity of struggle: “You can never run away. Not ever. The only way out
is in. And that’s what I guess stories are all about” (Díaz 2008, 209).
China Miéville argues that the bourgeois realist novel could itself be
understood as predominantly escapist, in that it presents a fantasy of
“real” life under capitalism, and that accordingly, “the problem with
most genre fantasy is that it’s not nearly fantastic enough. It’s escapist,
but it can’t escape” (Newsinger 2000, 159). That is, the ideology of pres-
ent social relations is always already embedded into the form of fantasy,
as much as in science fiction or realist fiction. Marx emphasizes the
significance of telos in the process of production: “At the end of every
labour process a result emerges which had already been conceived by
the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally” (Marx 1977,
284). Human creative production is always predicated on a conscious-
ness of the “not-real,” divided into the “possible,” “not-yet possible,”
and “never-possible”: the attempt to transform the world is always pred-
icated against the way it isn’t, and thus consciousness oscillates between
the real and the possible or not yet possible not-real (Miéville cited in
Gordon 2003, 366).
The form of the fantasy genre can be radical in that it enables a creative
legerdemain that opens a space for both reader and author to rethink the
potentialities latent within the real by changing the categories of the not-
real. In narrating the fantastic, the author redefines the not-real by pre-
tending that the impossible is both possible and real. In its estrangement
effect and “sense of wonder,” fantasy bears a structural relation to the
anti-realist avant-garde (Miéville 2009, 244). Oscar Wao does not create
an entire “impossible” world in which the possibilities of the non-real
are explored; instead, Yunior oscillates between the possible and the im-
possible in his use of his descriptors, self-consciously parodying genre in
its reactionary forms even as he yearns for a more radical imagination.
However, the spectre of the Mongoose, otherworldly, speak-singing in
blanks, a generic discontinuity within the realist plot, signifies a moment
of rupture, of the not yet possible: the libidinal desire for “More,” which
Oscar demands, even if what he receives in the end is death.
This utopian moment is held in tension with the plot’s drive towards
ideological containment through the heteronormative romance plot.
Yunior’s heteronormative epilogue informs us that Oscar finally achieved
carnal bliss with Ybón, thus fulfilling the quest for love that structured
Yunior’s narration of his Bildung. Formally, romance is ideological, rei-
fying a patriarchal idea of masculinity and resolving modes of produc-
tion through the alleged “love-match” of heterosexual individuals; in this
case, the fissures of periphery and core opened by the diasporic perspec-
tive are resolved in the union of Oscar and Ybón. Like magical realism,
suburban tropical has been commodified within the North American
literary market, and Yunior’s remark—”Look, he’s writing Suburban
Tropical now … I know I’ve thrown a lot of fantasy and sci-fi in the mix
but this is supposed to be a true account” (285)—self-reflexively stages
the romantic consummation between North American ghetto nerd and
Dominican prostitute as a resolution more “fantastic” or less “true”
than the speculative tropes that have been employed throughout the nar-
rative—that is, more ideological in its mystification of social relations
through the domesticating logic of narrative.
However, Oscar’s death in the canefield refuses total closure, re-opens
the breach of history. His heroic confrontation of the past chooses to re-
member the nightmare of his beating rather than to repress it. Foreswear-
ing his mother’s amnesia and choosing to pursue love, he finally ceases
to be a parigüayo and becomes an agent instead of a mere Watcher. As
such, his death exposes the open wounds of Dominican society and thus
is, in some sense, a revelation, conducted in the realm of the real rather
than figured as fantasy. But his self-immolation also seems semi-futile,
immersed in an ecstatic romantic vision that privileges self-dissolution
over agency and which uncomfortably assumes the symbolic burden
of the violence enacted against Haitians since the 1937 genocide. First
Beli is beaten almost to death near the border and is mistaken for a
“haitiano” as she stumbles out (151), then Oscar is assassinated in the
same canefield where he had been saved from his first beating by two
Haitians. Here the narrative presents the obsessive resurfacing of the
past in the violent inscription of the present body, a fatalistic logic of
history as the “doom” that not only haunts the Island but radiates out
through the diaspora.
Fredric Jameson’s call for “archaeologies of the future” rather than
“forecasts of the past” is useful here in diagnosing the tension between
the accuracy with which the novel reconstructs lost histories and its in-
ability to imagine an alternative future beyond the epilogue’s recourse to
112 Sharae Deckard
the next generation: “A true ontology would not only wish to register the
forces of past and future within that present; but would also be intent on
diagnosing…the enfeeblement and virtual eclipse of those forces within
our current present” (2002, 214–215). For Jameson, utopia cannot es-
cape its ideological moment and imagine another future. The negative
totality of utopic fiction demands an archaeological hermeneutic from
the reader: an excavation of the aesthetic discontinuities of form, genre,
narration, and setting, through which speculative fiction works out the
ideological contradictions of the late capitalist worldview by displacing
them into the future. Oscar Wao’s uneven narration adapts the unreality
function of speculative fiction to figure the mystification of the trujil-
lato and the seeming unreality of radical socio-economic unevenness.
The oscillation between fantastic and realist genre conventions and the
semi-parodic use of supernatural tropes such as the fukú not only rep-
resents the ways in which immigrants negotiate and comprehend the
extreme transitions between periphery and core, but also unmasks the
neocolonial discourses and material conditions which have produced
political corruption, racial discrimination, hierarchical class domina-
tion, and gender oppression in the contemporary Dominican Republic
and its diaspora. The speculative becomes a method of contemplating
the problem of historical amnesia both for the DR and for the US, which
represses its own global history of imperialism.
However, the novel does not fully enter into the genre’s imagination
of alternate future worlds, instead concluding with an act of violence
that seems to fix the island’s history as an endless recurrence of the
past. This seeming failure of the prophetic capacity of the science-
fictional is the climactic realization of the cumulative political blind
spots of the different characters throughout the novel: Abelard’s fail-
ure to resist, Beli’s obsession with the Gangster, which blinds her to
his corruption and to the patriarchal violence of the Trujillo regime,
Oscar’s delirious infatuations, Yunior’s persistent sexism in his treat-
ment of women. In tension with these failed visions, however, the novel
can also be understood as offering an ontology of the present by per-
forming an augury of the future: the haunting of the canefield that will
perpetually reoccur if the ideologies and economies of late capitalism
continue unaltered.
Note
1 The question of how ironically or critically we are to interpret the sexist
aspects of Yunior’s narration—particularly his sexual objectification of
women and cataloguing of their bodies—as well as the heteronormative
thrust of Oscar’s romance plot or the insistence on Beli’s traumatization—
has been rendered particularly fraught in the wake of online accusations
from several women in May 2018 that Díaz exhibited aggressive or misogy-
nistic behaviour towards them. These disturbing reports have emerged just
as this book is going to press, and this article could not be reconfigured to
address their implications at length, nor to discuss Díaz’s April 2018 essay in
The New Yorker on his own childhood abuse. However, as part of the larger
#MeToo media discussion, the allegations draw attention to the gendering of
power relations and persistence of sexism within literary markets and aca-
demic institutions that marginalize women of colour, and to the danger that
consecrated male authors with literary celebrity may not only benefit from
patriarchal institutions in advancing their careers, but also be in a position
to exploit or marginalize women writers and students. In terms of my own
dialectical approach to Oscar Wao, the impulse in this article to uncover the
utopian aspects of the text’s appropriation of speculative genre conventions
and to argue that the novel is frequently self-reflexive in its critique is not to
intended to efface or condone the aspects of the text that are in danger of
replicating masculinist, sexist, heteronormative, or patriarchal discourses.
Rather, I would argue that these are central contradictions within the nov-
el’s form, in that it consciously frames the intersections between unequal
hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality, and exposes the patriarchal
violence that is often unleashed in the service of shoring up fragile constructs
of masculinity, but at the same time risks reaffirming the very gender dis-
courses it frames as problematic.
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Part II
Politics
6 Towards a Pre-History
of National Liberation
Struggle
Peter Hallward
The national liberation movements of the 1950s–1970s in countries like

Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam, and Angola shared a number of specific but
generalisable principles, principles that are also central to Benita P
arry’s
work. I’ll begin this essay with a brief reminder of these principles, be-
fore moving on to consider some essential moments in the arduous his-
tory of their adoption, and finally to evoke the ongoing pertinence of
their implications.
As understood by emblematic figures including Fanon, Che Guevara,
and Cabral, the great anti-colonial liberation movements first assumed,
as their point of departure, a situation structured in intolerable forms
of domination and oppression, forms that rendered appeals to any sort
of gradual reforms evasive and vain. There could be no negotiated set-
tlement with the legacy of European slavery, racism, and settler colo-
nialism; only direct popular pressure, in the form of mass revolutionary
mobilization, offered any real prospect of change.
Second, they assumed that while the emancipatory principles at issue
were universalist and “humanist,” grounded in an unqualified affirma-
tion of human dignity, equality, and social justice, the immediate sphere
of struggle was defined first and foremost by the territory and history of
a specific people or nation. Every Third World nationalist understood
the ambiguous quality of the sphere in which they began to act. The na-
tion may itself have been designed as a means to implement colonial pol-
icies of divide and rule, and its configuration may have been more or less
artificial and more or less forcibly imposed; nevertheless, the national
terrain defines a space that can be re-appropriated by its inhabitants
as the locus for a struggle in which their own collective power might
prevail. The nation provides that dimension of shared cultural affirma-
tion necessary for militant solidarity, while avoiding the twin pitfalls of
parochial, atavistic, or archaic reflexes on the one hand and empty cos-
mopolitanism on the other. Neither too big to be dissolved in an abstract
effort to “change the world” nor too small to be reduced to the mach-
inations of a tribe or clan, anti-colonial militants embraced the nation
as the most auspicious sphere for an engagement that could first unite
the widest feasible alignment of people and then prepare the ground for
118 Peter Hallward
supra-national solidarities at the regional, continental, and eventually
tri-continental level.
As the locus of a patriotic internationalism, the nation was affirmed
as a strategic point of departure, not as an essentialised end in itself. The
achievement of genuine popular sovereignty, however, remains a central
and essential stage along the path to liberation. This is a third princi-
ple shared by Parry’s anti-colonial militants: only truly commanding
or sovereign power, understood in its broadly classical sense as binding
and inalienable, can be adequate to the immensely difficult task of over-
powering the various enemies of the people, both foreign and domestic.
For Che Guevara, for instance, “revolutionary power or political sov-
ereignty” are essentially synonymous expressions, and from an insur-
gent perspective “national sovereignty means […] the right of a people to
choose whatever form of government and way of life suits it”—a choice
that should simply “depend on its will,” to the exclusion of other wills
(Guevara 2003, 99–100). National liberation, echoes Fanon, is not a
matter of top-down reform or improvements in economic indicators, but
instead follows “the grandiose effort of a people […] to rediscover its
own genius, to reassume its history and assert its sovereignty” (Fanon
1967, 83–84). Such effort “not only consecrates the triumph of the peo-
ple’s rights; it also gives to that people consistency, coherence, and homo-
geneity” (Fanon 1968, 292). If the demand for unadulterated sovereign
power distances them both from the myriad critics of sovereignty who
still dominate contemporary critical theory (think of Derrida, A gamben,
Spivak, Foucault…) and from the jaded resignation of contemporary po-
litical “realists” of all stripes, Parry’s liberation theorists are directly in
line with Marx (who emphasised that “the struggle of the proletariat
with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle”), Lenin (for whom na-
tional self-determination was an essential stage of an eventually global
revolutionary process), and Gramsci (for whom resolution of Italy’s
southern question was a precondition of successful national revolution,
itself a precondition for wider international revolution).1
Fourth, they assumed that what would prove decisive in this strug-
gle for national liberation would be the strength, determination, and
resourcefulness of popular consciousness, or the force and clarity of
what might be called popular political will. Parry cites Thomas Sankara
(“the inexhaustible fountainhead of the masses’ creative inspiration lies
in the popular masses themselves”), Amilcar Cabral (who foregrounds
the “aspirations of the masses” and their dauntless resistance to for-
eign rule), 2 and Fanon (for whom what is transformative is the crys-
tallization of popular determination “to fight all forms of exploitation
and of alienation of man”) (Fanon, cited in Parry 2004, 14). As Parry
reads him, in frontal opposition to his later deconstructive or postcolo-
nial critics, Fanon, like his revolutionary contemporaries in Cuba and
Vietnam, strives by every available means “to promote the construction
Towards a Pre-History of National Liberation Struggle 119
of a politically conscious, unified revolutionary self, standing in unmit-
igated antagonism to the oppressor, occupying a combative subject po-
sition from which the wretched of the earth are enabled to mobilize an
armed struggle against colonial power” (Parry 2004, 15). It would be
easy to confirm, and perhaps to radicalise, aspects of Parry’s reading, I
think, by showing how Fanon’s conception of national liberation might
be best understood above all in terms of an emancipatory volition, one
that seeks to free itself from all material, social, and psychological mech-
anisms of domination or determinism.3 What will decide the outcome
of the ongoing African Revolution, as Fanon repeatedly writes on behalf
of the Algerian Front de libération nationale in the late 1950s, is the
“national will of the oppressed peoples,” their “will to independence,”
their “will to break with exploitation and contempt,” and so on. Any
consideration of revolutionary Algeria must begin by recognising “the
will of twelve million people; that is the only reality” (Fanon 1967, 159,
113, 74). On this score, Fanon is echoed by another figure whose life and
work exemplifies the logic of patriotic internationalism, Che Guevara,
who everywhere privileges “the essential will [voluntad] for liberation”
that animates popular struggle (Guevara 1998, 15tm). If the Cuban
“revolution has always acted with the will of the entire people of Cuba,”
Che argues, it’s precisely because this people has proven itself willing
(and therefore able) to do what is required “to liberate ourselves at any
price” (Guevara 2003, 240, 353).
Fifth and final point: unlike the inheritance of a national territory
or state structure, assertion of such a sovereign popular will is itself
an achievement, rather than a point of departure, and this achievement
depends first and foremost on a process of political education. The peo-
ple have not only been disempowered and divided by their oppressors,
they have been actively mis-educated, systematically humiliated, and es-
tranged from their own cultural resources and collectively capacities.
After generations of colonial rule, their “spontaneous” political reflexes
now combine forms of defiance and “passive” resistance together with
forms of submission and compliance. There is no avoiding, then, the
need for some sort of vanguard political actor, a party or movement that
could undertake methodical ideological and organisational work—a
“re-educator,” so to speak, that might help compensate for centuries
of violent distortion. “For liberation theorists,” as Parry explains, “the
necessity of vanguardism was dictated by the strength of the colonial
apparatus and the unpropitious distribution of indigenous class forces.”
But education is not mere indoctrination, and “far from excluding or
manipulating the people, the party depended on their voluntary and au-
tonomous agency”; in the countries colonized by Portugal as much as the
Algeria settled by France, the whole revolutionary strategy demanded
absolutely that the peasants, with the few townsmen who joined them,
participate out of their own will and understanding.”4
120 Peter Hallward
In this respect, Cabral, Fanon and their contemporaries are again
in line with a tradition that reaches back from Gramsci and Lenin
through Blanqui to Robespierre and Jacobin “political pedagogues” like
Billaud-Varenne and Saint-Just. Decisive leadership is essential, based
on clear and unequivocal principles; there can be no evading the con-
sequences of miseducation, which can only be corrected by new, more
inclusive, and more deliberate forms of education. But for Fanon even
more than for Lenin, the goal is to reduce, as fully and as quickly as
possible, any hierarchy between educator and educated to a transitional
minimum and to trigger a process of collective self-education through
which the party comes to figure less as an instructor or guide and more
as an expression of the people in general. Fanon accepts that “the future
remains a closed book so long as the consciousness of the people remains
imperfect, elementary, and cloudy”; the legacy of colonial “discourage-
ment,” compounded by under-developed means of communication and
isolation from the rest of the work, mean that “awakening of the whole
people will not come about all at once” (Fanon 1968, 193–194tm). Nev-
ertheless, this awakening is, for Fanon, both a normative principle and a
demonstrable fact. Whether it’s a matter of growing crops or building a
bridge, “the important thing is not that three hundred individuals form
a plan and decide upon carrying it out, but that the whole people plan
and decide even if it takes them twice or three times as long”—and if then
the building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who
work on it, then that bridge ought not to be built and the citizens can
go on swimming across the river or going by boat. The bridge should
not be “parachuted down” from above; it should not be imposed by
a deus ex machina upon the social scene; on the contrary it should
come from the muscles and the brains of the citizens […]. In this
way, and in this way only, everything is possible.
(Fanon 1968, 193, 201)
The more the people learn, the less need they have of a teacher. “The
more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the
more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and
their salvation lies in their own cohesion, in the true understanding of
their interests, and in knowing who their enemies are” (Fanon 1968,
191). On this condition, the party can and should be understood not
as an administrator or government issuing orders from above (a role
predicated on “the very Western, very bourgeois and therefore contemp-
tuous attitude that the masses are incapable of governing themselves”)
but as “the direct expression of the masses,” their “energetic spokes-
man” and “defender” (Fanon 1968, 188). Here once again Che is an-
other especially clear point of reference in his emphasis on the need to
cultivate the sort of patriotic virtue or “moral incentives” required by
any embattled movement towards socialism. “Society as a whole must
be converted into a gigantic school,” Che argues, in order to enable “the
gigantic change in consciousness necessary to tackle the transition” to a
socialist economy (Guevara 2003, 213, 217). Pending the generalization
and internalization of socialist norms, and for the same sort of reasons
recognised by Blanqui or Gramsci, Che admits the need for a temporary
distinction between vanguardia and pueblo. So long as it might remain
necessary “to force some people to be free,” to invoke Rousseau’s noto-
rious (but equally unavoidable) logic, so there will be a need for peda-
gogical or “moral compulsion”5 —and whether we trace this logic back
to Rousseau or to Robespierre, to Kant or to Fichte, or else to Che and
to Castro, some version of this dialectic between compulsion and au-
tonomy has always been part and parcel of any account of political will
worthy of the name.
In addition to the practical lessons learned by the partisans of the
Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) and the People’s Movement
for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) as well as the theories traced by
Fanon and his contemporaries, Parry’s approach is oriented above all by
revolutionary principles drawn from Marx and Lenin and developed in
particular by Gramsci. She has little difficulty in showing how Cabral’s
approach to ideological struggle is consistent with Gramsci’s prison notes
on the need for a revolutionary “modern prince,” in which he “proposed
a dialectical relationship between the political party and the sponta-
neous actions of the people, citing those exemplary movements where
the leadership had set out to educate and direct spontaneity” (Parry
2004, 96; cf. Gramsci 1971, 198). Much of Parry’s work as a critic,
furthermore, has of course been devoted to reflection on the complex
legacy of the national liberation movements during the often discourag-
ing years that followed (in most cases) their formal victory over the old
colonial powers, while simultaneously defending this legacy against the
discouraging array of alternative theoretical approaches that sought, in
the 1980s and 1990s, to discredit and marginalise it.
In keeping with the forward-driving thrust of the project that inspires
her, Parry has generally focused on ideological battles in the present
and the recent past. In the pages that follow, I would like to take a
further step back and briefly recall some aspects of what I take to be
the “pre-history” of her position. Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci are best
read, I want to argue, and the liberation theorists along with them, as
building on a conception of revolutionary popular sovereignty that was
first anticipated by some of the social contract theorists—and in par-
ticular by Rousseau—and then first asserted in practice by some of the
more radical militants of the French and Haitian revolutions. Recovery
of this conception both expands our political repertoire and helps us
to reclaim a longer and deeper historical perspective, one in which the
recent eclipse of liberation struggle (exemplified by the recent history
122 Peter Hallward
of the African National Congress in South Africa and the MPLA in
Angola) might be understood less as any sort of definitive “end” and
more as a temporary setback in a broader sequence of conflict. There is
no denying that it has been a prolonged and costly setback, both in the-
oretical and practical terms, but it remains a mere setback all the same.
It is best understood in terms of a counter-revolutionary reaction in an
ongoing process, precisely, and not as the closing of that process itself.
It’s not unreasonable to suppose, I might add, that as our understanding
of the consequences and legacy of the anti-austerity and anti-oligarchy
mobilizations that began in various parts of the world in 2011 becomes
clearer, with respect as much to their failures as to their achievements,
we will find further reasons to encourage a renewal of this revolutionary
tradition, whose more recent past Parry has done so much to defend.
Sovereign Command
Even the most cursory return to the modern roots of sovereign power is
enough to foreground what is really at stake in any struggle for popular
or collective self-determination. Such a return also serves as a reminder
of the problematic inflection of absolutist conceptions of state sover-
eignty and of those conceptions’ ambiguous contribution to the subse-
quent revolutionary projects that both draw on and distance themselves
from them.
The first and most essential thing to retain from the classical history
of sovereignty is a point that would once have gone almost without say-
ing but which today bears repeating: sovereignty is first and foremost a
relation of imperative command, a relation that confirms the incontro-
vertible supremacy of one actor or party over another. It is precisely this
notion of an insistently commanding authority that remained foreign to
medieval theories of law and politics, insofar as “the general medieval
conception of law was not that of a command, but of custom.” As one
of the more thorough surveys of this medieval logic explains at length,
such “custom was no enforced no doubt by the community, but [it] was
not, properly speaking, made by the community, but was rather the ex-
pression of its life” (Carlyle and Carlyle 1903, 419). Medieval monarchs
were expected to remain “under” the prevailing law, and were them-
selves subject to those long-established principles that were recognised
by the dominant classes as integral to the preservation of their interests
and position. A distinctively sovereign actor, by contrast—be it a mon-
arch, an oligarchy, a “commonwealth,” a nation, a people—is one that
can purposively and deliberately lay down the law to all the other actors,
including itself, that share its situation or sphere. The logic of sover-
eignty asserts an essential difference between commandment and obedi-
ence, between the actor who demands and the “subjects” who obey (cf.
Bodin 1992, 4, 2).
When Jean Bodin provided the first systematic account of sovereignty
in his Six Books of the Republic (1576), he was fully mindful of this dis-
tinction between custom and command. “Custom acquires its force little
by little,” he notes, “and by the common consent of all, or most, over
many years, while law appears suddenly, and gets its strength from one
person who has the power of commanding all. Custom slips in softly and
without violence; law is commanded and promulgated by power, very
often against the subjects’ wishes…” (Bodin 1992, 58). Whoever they
might be, if they are to be “supreme” over all others then by definition
sovereign actors “must not be subject in any way to the commands of
someone else and must be able to give law to subjects” (Bodin 1992, 11;
cf. David 1996, 67; King 1974, 129). Relying on a similar logic, Spinoza
will subsequently argue that “whether the holder of Sovereign power is
one or a few or all, indubitably the supreme right of commanding what-
ever they wish belongs to him or them”—but only so long as they “truly
hold supreme power” and can truly oblige others to do as they wish
(Spinoza 2007, 202). And for much the same reason it makes perfect
sense, following Blanqui and Marx, to describe capital itself as continu-
ing to exercise a form of sovereign power in our contemporary situation,
insofar as its most essential capacity remains the “command of unpaid
labour” (Marx 1990, 672), or simply insofar as “capital commands but
does not obey” (Blanqui 1885 vol. 2, 226).
As the historian of sovereignty Francis Hinsley points out, however,
Bodin himself was not yet able to break entirely with the medieval em-
phasis on custom, convention, and established precedent. “Bodin had
still set his sovereignty in the framework of the contract of the Ruler with
the People, so he had limited it by natural and customary law” (Hinsley
2009, 143). The decisive step, as far as the general logic of sovereign au-
thority is concerned, is taken when Hobbes reconceives the whole notion
of a social “contract” in such a way as to sever the notion of “law as
command” from any limitation at all, other than those limits that might
be conceived as immanent to the relation of legitimate command as such.
In Hobbes’ conception of things, individuals “contract” only with
other individuals, by agreeing voluntarily to pool their “private” right
and power to defend themselves, thereby investing all such power in a
single and thus literally “all-powerful” agency that now both represents
and rules over them (Hobbes 1994, 109). This unqualified investment
of centralised power is here the sole and sufficient basis of its authority,
which allows Hobbes to bypass any appeal to forms of pre- or extra-
political authority, including social or religious customs, kinship obliga-
tions, traditional morality, established privileges, legal precedents, etc.
Customary or external constraint can pose no legitimate resistance to
this new authority, and whatever it decrees has the force of law merely
because it decrees it. Law, as Hobbes makes clear in On the Citizen,
can thus be defined simply as “a command of that person (whether man
124 Peter Hallward
or council) whose instruction is the reason for obedience” (Hobbes
1998, 154). Spinoza is equally blunt: “the person possessing the sover-
eign power to compel all men by force […] has sovereign right over all
men,” but “will retain this right, though, for only so long as he retains
this power of doing whatever he wishes; otherwise his command will be
precarious, and no stronger person will be obliged to obey him unless
he wishes to do so” (Spinoza 2007, 199). In other words, the sovereign’s
word commands precisely because it has done what is actually required
to solicit obedience from those who obey, in the most literal or concrete
sense, and not because these latter necessarily find it, from their own
particular vantage point, just or beneficial to follow the commands they
receive.
To affirm a sovereign power is thus to affirm a power to command or
to legislate that cannot itself be legitimately coerced or restricted, neither
by restrictions inherited from the past, nor by some kind of superior
power, nor by the sort of “balance” of powers favoured by the aristo-
cratic advocates, from Aristotle through to Montesquieu and Madison,
of a suitably “mixed” constitution. As far as any particular actor is con-
cerned, sovereign power is an unequivocal zero-sum game: one com-
mands or is commanded, and there are no intermediate positions. This
is the sort of power that the Jacobin leader Antoine Saint-Just has in
mind when he declares, in October 1793, after years of battling with
royalist and regionalist resistance to the revolution, that “it is now time
to announce a truth that must never be forgotten by those who govern
France: the Republic will only be securely established when the will of
the sovereign can hold the royalist minority in check, and rule over it by
the right of conquest” (Saint-Just 2004, 629). Lenin and Trotsky, like
Fanon and Che, will evoke a similar power when they come to address
their own privileged minorities.
Sovereign Will
If sovereign power thus essentially takes the form of command, Hobbes
and subsequent theorists of sovereignty further explain that command
itself is best understood as an exercise of political will. If law is com-
mand, command itself is properly “an instruction in which the reason
for following it is drawn from the will of the instructor” (Hobbes 1998,
153). Unlike consideration of counsel or custom, once reduced to its
most basic form the logic of command presumes a situation in which
someone gives the order “do this, or do not this, without expecting other
reason than the will of him that says it” (Hobbes 1994, 165). Again, if
“the Law is a command,” says Hobbes, then “a command consisteth in
declaration, or manifestation of the will of him that commandeth (by
voice, writing, or some other sufficient argument of the same)” (Hobbes
1994, 177). Law, in short, is simply “the declared will of the Sovereign”
(Hobbes 1998, 85). Pufendorf relies on a similar logic when he argues
that “no man can say, Sic volo, Sic jubeo—so I will, and so I c ommand—
unless… Stet pro ratione voluntas—his will is his reason. We obey laws
therefore, not principally upon account of the matter of them, but upon
account of the legislator’s will” (Pufendorf 1729, 59).
This conjunction of law and volition or will indeed amounts to a
genuine theoretical revolution, with respect to both of the key terms in
question. Lawful changes can now be imposed in ways foreclosed by
earlier conceptions of authority and legitimacy, and the faculty of the
will can itself be associated with the dignity and rationality of law-like
principle, rather than scorned as a matter of mere appetite or whim. As
the versatile Catholic critic Pierre Manent notes, rather than appeal to
the authority of the past, and rather than invoke some kind of divine
or transcendent sanction, this newly self-absolutising “power must be
created wholly from scratch, it must be fabricated artificially, that is,
voluntarily, by the purely voluntary act that is the contract” (Manent
1998, 170). (It need hardly be said that it’s precisely for this reason that
Manent himself, like so many recent contemporary philosophers and
postcolonial theorists, rejects both sovereignty and the political volun-
tarism that underlies it).
More precisely, absolute sovereignty as conceived by Hobbes and
other social contract theorists is a matter of volition on at least two
quite separate counts.
First, sovereign power is itself initially generated through the volun-
tary agreement of all those individuals who constitute it—in Hobbes’
case, as we have seen, by transferring their own natural powers to the
new civic actor who will “represent” them all, and act in their place and
on their behalf (Hobbes 1994, 104). Second, the properly sovereign sta-
tus of this new actor will be most clearly indicated whenever it justifies
the decision it takes by reference to what it wills, for “no other reason”
than because it wants or wills it so.
Although this isn’t the place to develop the point in detail, it should
be stressed that given a suitably robust conception of political will, such
reliance on volition need not imply the elimination of all normative
criteria—far from it. Properly conceived, will is not reducible either to
wish, want, or whim; to will X is not reducible merely to wanting X, or
to being indifferent to the assertion of X.6 Well before Kant linked the
exercise of will to practical reason, many political philosophers already
considered the faculties of volition and reason to be inextricably con-
nected. The jurist Burlamaqui, in his analysis of “Sovereignty, or the
Right of Commanding,” for instance, argues that command cannot be
justified simply on the brutal basis of “irresistible power,” i.e. on the as-
sumption that might itself makes right. “It does not follow, that because
I am incapable of resisting a person, he has therefore a right to com-
mand me.” Rightful or lawful command results from a commanding
126 Peter Hallward
will that is itself exercised over the free will of those who obey, which is
to say that it must in principle be possible for them to obey it freely or
willingly. The exercise of lawful power must be such, Burlamaqui con-
cludes, “as will be approved by reason; to the end, that man may submit
to it willingly, and by that inward sense, which produces obligation”
(Burlamaqui 1807, 57–63). By the same token, as Hobbes anticipated
and as Trotsky and some of his contemporaries will remember in due
course, a revolutionary situation arises when a new actor manages to
concentrate enough political strength to pose as a possible alternative
sovereign, i.e. to issue rival commands; to resolve the uncertainty posed
by such “dual power” and thus “to overcome the ‘anarchy’ of this two-
fold sovereignty becomes at every new step the task of the revolution—
or the counter-revolution” (Trotsky 2008, 150; cf. Tilly 1978, 191).
Rousseau and Popular Sovereignty

If assertion of a will to command can justify itself at all, then it can only
be on the basis of volition itself. The difference between the voluntary
and the involuntary is no small thing, and insofar as any voluntary action
involves forms of deliberation, rationality, and freedom that distinguish
it from merely involuntary, coerced, or reflex-like forms of behaviour, so
then even the emphatically top-down version of sovereignty affirmed by
Bodin and Hobbes can indeed appeal to some normative criteria to dis-
tinguish it from the violent exertion of mere force. No one can willingly
submit to commands that unequivocally violate the express purpose that
lies behind the constitution of sovereign power itself—protection of the
lives and well-being of the individuals who constitute it. And insofar as
will differs from wish, furthermore, by the way it involves a capacity ac-
tually to realise its ends (such that “to will the end is to will the means”),
so then the sovereign can also only will what in principle it is capable of
doing. This is why, for instance, for Hobbes as for Spinoza, the sovereign
has no right to govern the (as yet) ungovernable domain of conscience
and religious belief.
Willing and doing, vouloir and pouvoir, remain closely articulated for
Rousseau as well, who argues that “willing and doing are the same for
every free being,” such that “the will of such a being measures exactly
the amount of his force that he uses to accomplish it” (Rousseau 1994,
296–297). “The truly free man,” Rousseau suggests, “wills or wants
only what he can do [ne veut que ce qu’il peut],” and vice-versa: “that
is my fundamental maxim” (Rousseau 2009, 308–309). In keeping with
this maxim, Rousseau insists that “there is no true action without will,”
and that “the principle of every action is in the will of a free being”
(Rousseau 2009, 576ff). Rousseau agrees with Hobbes, moreover, that
sovereign power is best understood in terms of legislation and command,
taking the form of a relation between a will that prescribes and a will
that obeys or consents.
Between Hobbes and Rousseau, however, the nature of this relation
changes fundamentally and is indeed turned upside down. For Hobbes
as for Bodin, sovereign power is both legislative and executive and re-
mains synonymous with the power of a government, a government char-
acterised as unitary and indivisible, whose privileged form remains an
absolute monarchy. In the Hobbesian contract, individuals institute a
common power to govern them and then promise to obey this govern-
ment, relinquishing any pretention to guide, criticise, or challenge it. The
relation of command remains that of the ruling part of society over the
remainder, of a higher class over the lower, and in this sense, the doctrine
of absolute sovereignty remains perfectly consistent with the fundamen-
tal aristocratic principles it assumed as integral to any well-ordered and
well-governed society. With Rousseau and his followers, by contrast,
when a group of individuals voluntarily combine to form a society, they
do not transfer their power to a government that might then represent
and rule over them. On the contrary, by combining together, they both
concentrate and expand their power in forms that vastly exceed their ca-
pacities as isolated or antagonistic individuals. It is the freely associated
people who constitute themselves as sovereign, and not the government
that they appoint to execute what they will. So begins, arguably, the
whole revolutionary tradition that persists through Marx, Lenin, and
Gramsci into the anti-colonial movements and beyond.
With Rousseau, the relation of command is no longer that of a govern-
ment over the people, but of the people over the government. Or more
precisely, in Rousseau’s egalitarian conception of things, the relation of
command is firstly that of the people in general over any self-separating
part or faction of the people that might aspire to oppress or dominate
everyone else (i.e. any aspiring members of a new ruling class), and sec-
ondly, that of the people in general over the government they appoint to
discourage all such oppression (but which itself forever risks becoming,
on account of its executive powers and privileges, a newly oppressive
force). It is not the will of the government that is sovereign, but the will
of the people themselves.7 The people are sovereign insofar as they obey
only that “general will” that they themselves formulate and uphold, as
citizens, whenever they assemble to decide how they should address mat-
ters that concern them all. Rousseau can then define “sovereignty [a]s
nothing other than the exercise of the general will” (Rousseau 1997,
368; cf. Rousseau 2009, 843).
For Rousseau, unlike Hobbes, whenever the question might arise as
to how far or whether the will of the government conforms to the will
of the sovereign who commands it, this must always be addressed as “a
question of which the People is the sole judge” (Rousseau 1994, 315).
128 Peter Hallward
Marat affirms a similar logic in more heated circumstances: “laws only
prevail so long as people are indeed willing to submit to them,” since it is
precisely their will that posits them.8 Saint-Just pushes the point a little
further when he argues that “a people has only one dangerous enemy;
its government” (Saint-Just 2004, 630). In the immediate aftermath of
1789, in the radical Cordeliers district and other highly politicised neigh-
bourhoods in Paris, such theories of popular sovereignty were quickly
put into practice, through the invention of a whole range of new means
for enabling collective surveillance and control over the government, in-
cluding the constitution of local primary assemblies and political clubs,
a highly critical free press, calls for imperative mandates for all elected
deputies and their subjection to local powers of recall, and so on, as well
as demands for mass participation in a new national guard, and recog-
nition, in extremis, of a right to insurrection against any government
deemed to be insufficiently responsive to the general will.9
Three aspects of this new logic of popular sovereignty will prove de-
cisive for the revolutionary actors who would soon embrace it. First of
all, though it is now conceived as self-reflexive or “auto-nomous,” sov-
ereign power nonetheless remains an imperative logic of command, a
matter of laying down the law and of overcoming the resistance of those
who might oppose it. A society is only established, Rousseau assumes,
if a sufficiently forceful number of people are actively or “virtuously”
committed to the common good or to common interests that they all
share; in the absence of such virtuous commitment there remains only
relations of domination and oppression. Rousseau knows perfectly well,
however, that not all individuals or groupings of individuals are equally
committed to the common good, and that les riches in particular, where
they exist, will always seek to promote their own private or class inter-
ests above those of their fellows. There is only a sovereign, in Rousseau’s
sense of the term, insofar as the will and capacity to impose the gen-
eral interest prevails over all other interests: “the true characteristic of
sovereignty is that there is always agreement on time, place, and effect
between the direction of the general will and the use of public force, an
agreement one can no longer be sure of as soon as another will, what-
ever it may be, commands this force” (Rousseau 1994, 296). Rousseau
knows, of course, that “each individual may, as a man, have a particular
will contrary to or different from the general will he has as a Citizen. His
particular interest may speak to him quite differently from the common
interest.” But since only defence of the common interest secures civic
freedom and equality, so then Rousseau follows his argument through
to its conclusion, by recognising that any social compact or convention
worthy of the name “must tacitly include the following engagement
which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey
the general will shall be constrained to do so by the entire body: which
means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free; for this is
the condition which, by giving each Citizen to the patrie, guarantees him
against all personal dependence” (Rousseau 1997, 364).
The apparently tyrannical or terrorising implications of this argument
have been invoked in countless polemics against both Rousseau and the
whole logic of popular sovereignty, of course, not least by those lib-
eral or neoliberal critics whose own priority is precisely to promote the
rights of private property and the interests of the rich, in particular their
right to exploit others without interference or constraint. Anyone who
has ever participated in any sort of project for revolutionary change,
however, knows that as a matter of course it must acquire, one way
or another, the power required to compel compliance from a hitherto
privileged and dominant class. Indeed, anyone who believes that people
should, wherever necessary, be “forced” to obey traffic laws or pay taxes
relies on a version of the same argument.
The second point concerns the consequently relative and relational
nature of such power. It’s true that Rousseau adopts many of the adjec-
tives that Hobbes and other theorists of absolutism use, to describe sov-
ereignty, for instance, as indivisible and inalienable. But Bodin assumed
that the necessary unity of political will could be consistently achieved
only through the unity of the person found in a “prince elevated above all
his subjects, whose majesty henceforth suffers no division” (Baker 1989,
844–845, citing Bodin), while Hobbes’ sovereign transcends his or her
subjects still more absolutely than that of Bodin and is literally absolved
of any political relation with them. It is quite misleading, then, to suggest
(as Keith Baker and his revisionist colleagues do) that Rousseau’s popu-
lar sovereign, and by extension the sovereign affirmed during the most
radical phase of the French Revolution (1792–1793), is simply a prolon-
gation of absolute monarchy, thinly disguised by a democratic façade.
As an expression of a people’s will, sovereignty as Rousseau understands
it varies not only with this people’s capacity to actually and concretely
generalise their priorities and purposes. It also varies most fundamen-
tally with their power to overcome the resistance of any formerly privi-
leged or dominant class, on the one hand, and their power to control the
government employed to overcome such resistance on the other. As both
Rousseau and his Jacobin followers were very much aware, these powers
are emphatically variable and relational, not absolute.
Rousseau’s most basic question is simply this: when a group of people
combine to form a society, will they have the power to prevent a more
narrowly defined grouping or class from emerging as dominant? Since
the power of such a class (wherever one emerges) is relatively concen-
trated by definition, the decisive factor will turn on the capacity of the
people themselves to concentrate their own force in both space and time.
On the necessarily rare occasions when such concentration operates
with maximum effect, i.e. when the people find a way to assemble as far
as possible “in person,” Rousseau assumes that both in principle and in
130 Peter Hallward
practice “all jurisdiction of the Government ceases, the executive power
is suspended, and the person of the last Citizen is as sacred and inviola-
ble as that of the first Magistrate” (Rousseau 1997, 427–428). Versions
of just this argument will be invoked first to organise and then to justify
the great mass insurrectionary mobilizations that changed the course of
the French Revolution, on 10 August 1792 and on 31 May 1793.
Of course, on the other hand, as oligarchic and colonial regimes
have understood since time immemorial, the more easily people can be
dispersed and divided, the more easily they can then be overpowered.
“The people’s force acts only when concentrated,” Rousseau reminds
us, whereas “it evaporates and is lost as it spreads, like the effect of
gunpowder scattered on the ground and which ignites only grain by
grain” (Rousseau 1997, 418–419). For this same reason, considered
from the opposite political perspective, James Madison and his aris-
tocratic contemporaries stressed the great advantages that their newly
independent United States would enjoy as far as its privileged minority
was concerned, thanks to the great size and social diversity of the coun-
try resulting in an unusual “variety of parties and interests.” The more
you can increase this variety and the extent of its distribution across
space, Madison explains, “you make it less probable that a majority
of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other
citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for
all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with
each other” (Madison, The Federalist §10, in Hamilton et al. 2003).
Unlike the turbulent and egalitarian democracy that had prevailed in
ancient Athens, Madison stressed that the “filtering” mechanisms of
political representation intended for the new American republic would
guarantee “the total exclusion of the people in their collective capac-
ity from any share” in its government, thereby leaving the entrenched
social hierarchies and property relations undisturbed.10 The Jacobins
would seek to reverse this formulation point by point and to remind the
national assembly, as one of their orators put it in May 1793, that their
primary role was simply “to obey the sovereign people. You are here as
their representatives, since it necessary that there be a concentration of
opinion and of will, but not on account of your superior wisdom. The
people are more wise than you.”11
The question boils down to this: who will concentrate their forces
more effectively, the mass of the people or an exclusive elite? Or to put
it in what may seem like still more simplistic terms, what is at stake
is a battle of political wills: a generalising and equalising will against
particularising and discriminating ones. Which of these wills is stron-
ger? Which is better informed, better organised, better equipped, better
armed? In the end, Rousseau insists, in terms that apply as much to
political as “personal” situations, “it is only our lukewarm will which
causes all of our weakness, and we are always strong enough to do what
we strongly wish. Volenti nihil difficile [nothing is difficult for he or she
who wills]” (Rousseau 2009, 650–651).
Anyone who suspects that such a position might imply little more than
a retreat to idealist abstraction should remember the kinds of education,
organization, and mobilization that figures like Saint-Just had in mind
when they affirmed “the material will of the people” (Saint-Just 2004,
547) as the sovereign principle of revolutionary France. What is stake in
such a will is not the mere indication of an aggregate preference or the
spread of prevailing opinion (which can itself be trusted to reflect the
prevailing distribution of power and influence). The Jacobin volonté du
peuple presumes instead the active and deliberate capacity of the people
to assemble or mass together in pursuit of those ends or goods that they
deem common to all, i.e. to constitute themselves precisely as masses
of generic citizens—a generalising or inclusive category that, immanent
to the situation, excludes only those who exclude themselves from it by
insisting on special privileges or opportunities (e.g. the right to enrich
themselves at the expense of others).
It should be added, furthermore, that the political weight of this
“mass” need not coincide, at least not initially, with a numerical ma-
jority of the population as it stands, so much as with what can be con-
vincingly anticipated as what the people in general will will, if and when
circumstances allow them to do so. “What generalizes the will is not so
much the number of voices as the common interest that unites them”
(Rousseau 1997, 374), Rousseau argued, and everything depends in
practice on this capacity to generalise and unit. From a Jacobin per-
spective, the people is not reducible to the population or realm, with its
spread of particular interests and divergent opinions, but is rather the
name given to that virtuous collective actor that emerges only with the
invention of ways to transcend just these differences of interest and opin-
ion. This is why Robespierre, in late 1792, can both place all his trust in
the sovereign people, and also reject proposals from his Girondin rivals
in the assembly for a referendum or appel au peuple in order to decide
(or rather, in order to avoid or delay deciding) the fate of the deposed
king. When it comes to fundamental political decisions of this kind, the
properly decisive terms are “neither majority nor minority” but “truth,”
“virtue,” and “the common cause” on the one hand, against deceptive
and divisive “intrigue” on the other. “On this earth, virtue is always in
the minority,” Robespierre admits, but insofar as this minority succeeds
in “making the voice of truth heard,” and in rallying les bons citoyens,
so then it can lead the formation of a more virtuous and more general
will, which should always take shape in “open deliberation” and not
through “secret meetings or around ministerial tables” (Robespierre
1967 vol. 9, 198–199).
132 Peter Hallward
Popular Sovereignty in Practice: Legacies of the
French Revolution
For a brief period during the “Jacobin Republic” of 1792–1794, the
principle prevailed that, as Saint-Just put it, it is the “downtrodden [les
malheureux] who are the true power on earth, and who have the right to
address as their master the governments that oppress them” (Saint-Just
2004, 668). Saint-Just stressed, rather than downplayed, the ground of
such “mastery” in the formulation of collective priorities. “Since the
French people has manifested its will,” he said, “everything opposed to
it is outside the sovereign,” and under conditions of acute social or class
conflict, “whatever is outside the sovereign is an enemy” and should be
treated as such (Saint-Just 2004, 629).
As far as both theory and practice are concerned, it would be hard to
overstate the importance of this unprecedented popular appropriation
of sovereign power in the early 1790s. For most of Europe’s history, the
power to command had rested securely in the hands of one person, or
a small number of people, and overlapped with their power to govern
everyone else. So long as this remained the case there was never any
reason to update the principle that Thucydides already treats as more
or less self-evident: since questions of right and justice can only arise
“between equals in power,,” so therefore the basic rule of politics is that
the strong are free to will and do “what they can,” while the weak are
condemned to “suffer what they must.”12 The elite commands, the peo-
ple obey, and so it always went. In favourable circumstances, the people
could perhaps press for conditions to such obedience, and even (as with
republican theorists like Marsilius and Machiavelli, or the Levellers of
England’s revolution) foreground their consent as essential to a govern-
ment’s legitimacy. But only with the French revolution does the prospect
of mass popular sovereignty, and mass control over government, become
a practical reality.
If Rousseau was the first thinker to consider what would have to be
done in order fully to transfer the power to command from government
to the governed, the revolutionaries who eventually pressed for the over-
throw of the monarchy, three years after the fall of the Bastille in July
1789, were the first to organise and exercise such power in practice (and
in doing so, they distanced their revolution fundamentally from the mere
transition that occurred as a result of the American war of indepen-
dence, a transition from one configuration of the governing class to an-
other slightly different one). From the actors’ perspective, what was at
issue at each of the turning points of those dramatic years was precisely
a matter of how best to concentrate popular power so as to assert the
newly declared sovereignty of the people in the face of a monarch and a
governing faction that had consistently flouted the popular will.
At the most schematic level of analysis, the basic story of the French
Revolution can be told in terms of the series of steps whereby the
people managed to wrest sovereignty away from the king.13 In the
run-up to the crisis, the king could still try to argue, as he did during
the counter-productive séance royale of 19 November 1787, that what
he sought to do “is legal because I will it”—but resistance from the
Paris parlement and from the nation’s creditors proved him wrong. In
a further séance royale of 23 June 1789, which sought to break the
power of the newly self-declared National Assembly, Louis XVI again
insisted on his right to “act alone for the good of my peoples” and to
consider himself their one “true representative”; he was immediately
confounded, again, when the deputies he ordered to disperse instead
stood their ground, insisting that “only the power of the bayonet can
drive us from our seats.” Then, a few weeks later, the events that led to
the destruction of the Bastille demonstrated that the government could
no longer rely on the loyalty of either the professional army or the im-
provised civilian militias that came to serve as the National Guard. The
new balance of power was demonstrated most remarkably, perhaps, in
early October 1789, when a large Parisian crowd (led by women and
supported by thousands of National Guards) massed and marched on
Versailles in order to force the king and the government to relocate to
Paris, where they would remain more directly under popular surveil-
lance and control. The king’s desperate attempt to flee the country in
June 1791 was again confounded by mass political vigilance and proved
the depth of popular investment in the achievements of the revolution.14
In the immediate wake of the king’s escape attempt, the Cordeliers club
urged the Assembly to recognise that the former “pretence of a con-
vention between a people and its king no longer exists […]. We implore
you, in the name of the patrie, to declare straight away that France is no
longer a monarchy, but a republic.”15
It took another year before a new Assembly could be obliged, reluc-
tantly, to concede to this demand, and what forced the issue was again
an unprecedented exercise in the massing of popular power, both politi-
cal and military. All through June and July 1792, the pressure grew, with
a cascade of mass petitions insisting (like this one from Grenoble, read
out in the Assembly on 26 June) that “the people is sovereign. If Louis
XVI does not want to be one with the nation, the nation will rise in its
entirety, and with the Constitution in its hands, it will declare: Louis
XVI king of the French is stripped of the crown.”16 Plans for a massive
show of force quickly took shape, and in the eventual bloody showdown
on 10 August, the king was driven from his palace and into prison. An-
other message sent to Assembly, by the leaders of this insurrection, made
the shift in authority explicit:
The people [le peuple] who have sent us to speak to you on their
behalf, have instructed us to tell you that they are willing to renew
their confidence in you—but have also instructed us to tell you that
134 Peter Hallward
they can only recognise, as entitled to judge the extraordinary mea-
sures to which they have been driven by necessity and by resistance
to oppression, the French people themselves, your sovereign and
ours, gathered in their primary assemblies.17
Both before and after this climactic confrontation, the issue that divided
moderate from radical revolutionaries turned once more on a question
regarding the concentration of popular power: could the will of the peo-
ple be expressed by a resolute vanguard group, assembled together in
a specific place and at a specific time, and claiming to act on behalf
of the nation as a whole? Or was the people’s sovereignty necessarily
dispersed across the full expanse of the realm, such that it could only
find legitimate expression through a suitably mediated mechanism of
representation? Did the power to command always reside necessarily in
a National Assembly that represented the realm or “people as a whole,”
or could it in certain circumstances be appropriated and wielded directly
by citizens massed together in their own local primary assemblies or,
when necessary, on the streets?
In the debates that followed 10 August, the Girondin deputies de-
fended their assembly’s monopoly of power, siding with the authority
of the constituted government over that of the “constituting” people;
against them, the Montagnards and their allies in the Jacobin and
Cordeliers clubs defended the people against the government and ar-
gued with Robespierre that the people alone was entitled to defend
their interests. “The guarantee of the people’s rights must be placed
in their own strength,” argued Robespierre, and “the only tribune
of the people I am willing to acknowledge is the people themselves”
(Robespierre 1967 vol. 9, 499–500). If, after all alternatives fail, the
people can only impose their will through insurrection, then this is
not only their “sacred right” but “the most indispensable of duties”
(Robespierre 1967 vol. 9, 468). And if the only feasible way of organis-
ing an insurrection is to rely on the mobilization and courage of specific
sections of the people at a specific place and at a specific time, then such
a concentrated exercise of sovereign power also needs to be affirmed
against all detractors.
As the Jacobin Robespierre argued against the Girondin Louvet in
his celebrated defence of the 10 August uprising, it is incoherent both
to affirm popular sovereignty and to condemn the measures that alone
succeeded in asserting it. To will the end is to will the means, and if mass
insurrection is required then so is a degree of confidence in its legitimacy.
Abstract judgement is no guarantee of political justice, and a version
of Robespierre’s argument might be used in defence of every great rev-
olutionary project of the twentieth century, of the great anti-colonial
vanguard movements, and of those who have mobilised more recently in
those “concentration spaces” par excellence that include Tahrir Square,
Puerta del Sol, and Place de la République:
Citizens, did you want a revolution without a revolution? […] For

while it is true that a great nation cannot rise in a simultaneous
movement, and that tyranny can only be struck by the portion of
citizens that is closest to it, how would these ever dare to attack it
if, after the victory, delegates from remote parts could hold them
responsible for the duration or violence of the political upheaval that
had saved the homeland? They ought to be regarded as justified by
tacit proxy for the whole of society. The French who are friends of
liberty, meeting in Paris last August [1792], acted in that role, in
the name of all the departments. They should either be approved or
repudiated entirely. To make them criminally responsible for a few
apparent or real disorders, inseparable from so great a shock, would
be to punish them for their devotion.
(Robespierre 1967 vol. 9, 89)
Similar arguments would decide the fate of the Girondins in May-June

1793, and between these two insurgent exercises of sovereign power,
they would also settle the fate of the king, in January 1793: once the
people assert their own sovereignty, abolition of their royal rival follows
as a matter of course.
As everyone knows, the backlash was not long in coming. The im-
passe of the French revolution, as of a good many subsequent revolu-
tions, is that although it succeeded in concentrating enough popular
power to challenge the old order, it was not able to rally sufficient
enthusiasm and force to overwhelm it entirely. The “will of the peo-
ple” may well need some sort of vanguard to help clarify and assert
it, but such a will only endures if it indeed anticipates the priorities
and purposes of the people in general. In the case of France in 1794, it
would be hard to dispute R.R. Palmer’s observation that the policies
pushed through by the Committee of Public Safety “went far beyond
French public opinion,” or at least very large swathes of it, and failed
to do enough to rally general support (Palmer 2013, 385; cf. 277). The
Terror implemented in the autumn of 1793 was essentially an attempt
to contain and resolve what had become a civil war, and continued
reliance on the coercive instrument that allowed the new Jacobin gov-
ernment to win that war over the winter of 1793–1794 also prevented
them from winning the subsequent peace. The counter-revolutionary
reaction that began with the overview of Robespierre and his adher-
ents in Thermidor (July) 1794, and that soon led to the banning of
the Jacobin club and the violent elimination of all significant popular
participation in politics, reversed the Jacobin order of priorities and
136 Peter Hallward
again affirmed government, order, and the rule of property over mass
sovereignty.
As anyone might have expected, the reaction was formulated first and
foremost in terms of a refusal of the very notions of popular sovereignty
and popular will.
On one extreme, seething Catholic resentment found a voice through
figures like Bonald and de Maistre, who (with good reason) singled out
Rousseau for special criticism. Merely human powers, their argument
went, were not capable of crafting viable political institutions, and the
only path to redemption ran through submission to the divinely sanc-
tioned order of things. Legitimate power to command lay with God
alone and not with any merely human contract or association. As Charles
Merriam notes, appeals to religion, to historical tradition, to the weight
of property and la patrimoine, along with some forms of post-Kantian
transcendental philosophy, defined
the principal lines along which the assault upon the eighteenth-
century political theory was conducted. They all converged at one
point, namely the proposition that the state was the result of a con-
tract deliberately made by individuals. They all agree that the state
is something imposed upon the human will, not a pure result of
its own decree. The course of history, rational necessity, the world-
process and the Absolute, the will of God, were so many different
forms of statement for the same fundamental idea.
(Merriam 1900, 22–23)
At the opposite end of the spectrum, liberals or proto-liberals like Con-

stant and Guizot also targeted Rousseau in order to promote commer-
cial and individual freedoms instead. Grounded precisely in the delusion
that “that man is the absolute master of himself, that his will is his legit-
imate sovereign,” popular claims on sovereignty, Guizot argued, must be
resisted as a mere “usurpation of force,” in favour of an orderly repre-
sentation of the realm and the “sovereignty of reason and right” (Guizot,
cited in Rosanvallon 2003, 108). Contemporary neoliberal ideologues
like François Furet or Pierre Rosanvallon carry on a version of the same
anti-voluntarist polemic and embrace the apparent “decline of the will”
as the basis for a more complex and more dispersed conception of so-
ciety: as an intricate assemblage of divergent interests in which nothing
so “simplistic” and reductive as “the people,” let alone any “will of the
people,” can ever be found.18
Contesting this reaction at its liberal height, back in the early 1830s,
Auguste Blanqui formulated what remains our most fundamental polit-
ical choice in helpfully trenchant terms:
Citizens, two principles divide France, the principle of legitimacy

and the principle of popular sovereignty. The first denotes the old
organization of the past. It is the framework in which society lived for
fourteen hundred years and which some seek to preserve out of their
instinct for survival, others because they fear that the framework can-
not be swiftly replaced and that anarchy will follow its dissolution.
The principle of popular sovereignty rallies all men of the future, the
masses who, tired of being exploited, seek to smash the framework
that suffocates them. There is no third flag, no middle term.
(Blanqui 2007, 92; cf. 109)
For several decades following the Second World War, the anti-colonial
movements and the sort of patriotic internationalism championed by
Che and Fanon remained unapologetic champions of the voluntarist
logic that first took shape during the French Revolution. For all their
emphatic differences with the “merely political” priorities of the Jacobin
leaders, I think that Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci are best understood,
as revolutionary actors, in terms of their contribution to an expanded
neo-Jacobin conception of popular sovereignty, rather than a disavowal
of it. Our own immediate task, today, remains the renewal of this con-
ception, in a form that might prove forceful and resourceful enough to
overcome the ongoing neoliberal assault upon its very basis, as much in
theory as in practice.19
Notes
1 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), in Marx 2000, 254;
Lenin, “The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-
Determination” (1915), in Lenin 1964, 143–156; Gramsci, “Some Aspects
of the Southern Question” (1926), in Gramsci 2009, 336–337. “Although
not necessarily acknowledged,” Parry notes, such “perspectives inform
the programmes of liberation movements” (Parry 2004, 83–84). From the
Bolshevik perspective in particular, as Lars Lih explains, in the run-up to
socialist revolution, “the defence of democracy was a national task in which
Social Democracy saw itself as a fighter for the here-and-now interests of
all the non-elite classes. In the Social Democratic narrative, the proletariat
did not look on all the other labouring classes with ‘contempt’ (as is often
stated). The proletariat was rather pictured as the inspiring leader of what
might be called follower classes” (Lih 2006, 710).
2 Sankara 1988, 52; Cabral 1974, 40–42, cited in Parry 2004, 87–88.
3 Cf. Hallward, “Fanon and Political Will,” 104–127.
4 Parry 2004, 86, citing Basil Davidson; cf. James 1982, 102, 109.
5 See in particular Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” in Guevara 2003,
220–221.
6 Cf. Hallward, The Will of the People, introduction.
7 On the significance of this distinction, see in particular David, La Souver-
aineté du peuple, 136, 323; cf. Bacot, Carré de Malberg et l'origine de la
distinction entre souveraineté du peuple et souveraineté nationale (1985).
8 Marat, L'Ami du peuple 52 (18 November 1789).
9 See in particular Nicolai von Eggers, Popular Sovereignty: Republicanism,
and the Political Logic of the Struggles of the French Revolution (2016); cf.
Sophie Wahnich, La Longue patience du peuple, 414–421.
138 Peter Hallward
10 Madison, The Federalist §63.
11 Fabre d’Églantine (Montagnard deputy of the National Convention), speech
at the Jacobin Club, 1 May 1793, in Meillan, Mémoires sur la Révolution
française (annexes), 317.
12 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 5.89.
13 For a good recent overview of the following sequence see Hazan, A People’s
History of the French Revolution (2014).
14 See in particular Reinhard, La Chute de la Royauté, 89, 99–108; Tack-
ett, When the King Took Flight, 222; Tackett, The Coming of the Terror,
115–118.
15 Camille Desmoulins, cited in Mathiez, Le Club des Cordeliers, 47.
16 Moniteur universel XII, 758 (26 June 1792), cited in Wahnich, La Longue
Patience du peuple, 341.
17 Sulpice Huguenin, president of the Insurrectionary Commune, statement to
Legislative Assembly, 10 August 1792, cited in Reinhard, La Chute de la
royauté, 411.
18 See in particular Rosanvallon, “La Démocratie inachevée,” 414–419; cf.
Rosanvallon, Le Peuple introuvable (2002); Colliot-Thelene, “Les Masques
de la souveraineté,” 2.
19 See, for example, Panagiotis Sotiris, “The Realism of Audacity: Rethinking
Revolutionary Strategy Today” (23 November 2015).
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7 Disaffection, Sedition, and
Resistance
Aurobindo Ghose and
Revolutionary Thought
Keya Ganguly
Although the question of resistance has never been far from view in
political struggles, it has made something of a comeback in cultural the-
ory.1 The philosopher Howard Caygill, for instance, has recently written
on resistance, laying out “a philosophy of defiance” (2013); similarly,
Étienne Balibar’s Violence and Civility (translated into English in 2015)
parses the problem of resistance as a relationship to anti-violence or what
he considers its equivalent, civility, while Simon Critchley’s (2007) foray
into the topic in Infinitely Demanding reconstitutes resistance as “eth-
ical action.” In most if not all of these contemporary interventions, re-
sistance is rendered rather toothless—subsumed, as Slavoj Žižek (2007)
has disparaged, under the politics of what is possible in the present.
Žižek’s criticism is one I share, not only given the strangely quietist
and truncated notions of resistance evident in these recent works, but
also because all of the theorists mentioned grant normative centrality to
European ideas about protest, opposition, and militancy in the constitu-
tion of resistance as a political and epistemological dynamic. More par-
ticularly, their understanding of resistance is largely bound by thinking
of political action as divorced from critique, a perspective whose origins,
as the intellectual historian Reinhart Koselleck (1998) has authoritatively
shown, can be traced back to the changing status of political authority
during the age of European Absolutism in the period stretching from
the Treaty of Utrecht to the dusk of the ancien régime.2 As a result, the
elevation of non-political forms of opposition has turned into the default
position in contemporary discussions—even when Algeria or Gandhian
satyagraha or Tahrir Square is the nominal subject of attention.
The current essay, by contrast, offers an account of political resistance
that does not rescind its active, agitational dimensions and, moreover,
takes up the question of resistance in the specific context of anti-colonial
nationalism in India. While my intention is not to universalize the I ndian
experience or the status of anti-colonial resistance as such, neither do
I consider it productive to downplay the degree to which the fight for
self-determination—across the historical and geographical span of the
twentieth century—consistently demonstrates the presence of violence
as a form, both symbolic and material, within acts of resistance (such
142 Keya Ganguly
as a general strike, organized militancy, or direct action).3 In giving vi-
olence its due in the history of resistance, I take my cue from Benita
Parry’s (1994) suggestive leads in her essay entitled “Resistance T heory/
Theorizing Resistance Or Two Cheers for Nativism.” In that venue,
Parry both refuted and rebuked the emerging consensus in mainstream
postcolonial studies about the impossibility of escaping the colonizer/
colonized binary, demonstrating instead the discontinuous motivations
of anti-colonial struggle and the relevance of violence as a modality of
thought and action in overcoming subjugation.
Parry’s work—along with that of scholars such as Rosalind O’Han-
lon (1988), Sumit Sarkar (1973), and others—has enabled a different
inventory of elite and popular forms of opposition to the discourse of
colonialism, whose means have varied from affirmations of otherness
(in the perspectives of négritude, for example), all the way to straight-
forward antagonism and even, of course, armed combat, such as zapa-
tismo, most eloquently contextualized for a wider audience in the work
of Régis Debray (1996). When it comes to the myriad contestations with
imperial power, Parry was emphatic, if out of step with the tenor of our
times, in demonstrating that the practices and ideals of resistance have
tended far less in the direction of “radical melancholia” or “the ability to
tolerate despondent thought”—as Jacqueline Rose (2013) opined in her
glowing review of Caygill’s aforementioned book in The Guardian—
than to unswerving commitment to the goal of liberation, no matter how
deferred its circumstances.4
In what follows, I take Parry’s admonition to heart that we risk doing
damage to the historical record by superimposing our current theoretical
preference for agreeable or, at least, negotiated notions of political con-
duct onto the Manichean agon of anti-colonial opposition. For the latter,
as she has shown, cannot be assimilated to the mainstream consensus
about the illegitimacy of anything more extreme than civil disobedience.
But regardless of how unsuited the radically antagonistic practices and
movements of resistance throughout the twentieth century (and into the
present) may be to such a consensus, it has become customary either to
find them wanting in conceptual maturity or to distort their militant
valences so as to neutralize them. Critics such as Caygill appear to have
seized on the term “resistance” because of its ambiguous meanings—
ranging from the resistance to (psycho-) analysis, and resistance to nor-
mativity, to resistance as force. From a materialist perspective, however,
this deployment of semantic indeterminacy is precisely the problem in
that it dissipates the link between resistance and force. Even the word
“force” has, in the hands of theoretical touchstones such as Derrida,
Foucault, and Deleuze, been retooled—via its Freudian ramifications—
into an ontological category rather than a principle of exertion or might;
the same can be said with respect to “crisis,” which has turned within
academic discourse from connoting the catastrophic or the urgent (for
Disaffection, Sedition, and Resistance 143
example, “the crisis has passed”) to temporizing locutions such as “a
crisis of confidence” or “the crisis of criticism” (see de Man 1983 and
Harpham 2005).
It is only too easy to understand why radical ideas of resistance and
associated notions of force as a response to the crisis of dominance
have drifted away from their historical actualities—even if today’s hip-
sters are still wearing Che Guevara T-shirts or quoting Malcolm X.
And within the larger frame of paranoia created by the so-called war
on terror and events such as the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, it
is well-nigh impossible to take on board the conceptual and political
stakes of resistance as a form of militancy without coming across as an
extremist or a fanatic (or both). Nonetheless, this is the fraught terrain
into which I will venture in order to think through the specificity of
what the British termed “terrorism”: to reconsider what might, in the
light of history, be called “revolutionary resistance” in India’s struggle
for nationhood.
My focus in this essay is on the political philosophy of Aurobindo
Ghose (1872–1950), conventionally referred to by his first name (and
later, as Sri Aurobindo). Poet, polyglot, mystic, and revolutionary, he
was admitted into the select ranks of the Indian Civil Service, and was
responsible for galvanizing the nationalist movement in India well be-
fore M.K. Gandhi entered Indian politics and succeeded in turning the
emphasis of resistance from force into protest. For Aurobindo’s alleged
role in “terrorist” activities, the British authorities mounted the Alipore
Bomb Conspiracy Case, and his trial—as well as subsequent acquittal—
represents a signal moment in the history of modern India. I want to
contextualize the revolutionary ideals of Aurobindo (and his contem-
poraries) in order to examine the conceptual reasons as well as material
realities that grounded their struggle; it should be said that this project
had a philosophical basis no less elaborate or reflective than anything
available in contemporary theoretical or historiographic discussions.
The only difference, of course, is that Aurobindo’s outlooks were geared
towards the future, not the present or the past, and his struggle was con-
crete and real, rather than abstract or hypothetical.
At stake for Aurobindo was a conceptualization of the “life-giving”—
as opposed to annihilating—qualities of revolutionary violence in the
transformation of an oppressed society. To be sure, it is important to
qualify Aurobindo’s advocacy of violence (just as it would be in the case
of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, the Sandinistas, or the mu-
jahideen); indeed, as I hope to elaborate, Aurobindo’s writings invari-
ably pose the question of violence as a contingency of political thought
and action rather than as an absolute. But it is equally important to
remember that all of these radical thinkers, Aurobindo included, took
revolutionary actions, including militant ones, to be a deliberative re-
sponse to normative inequalities.
144 Keya Ganguly
If it is an unfortunate fact of intellectual and political history that
Aurobindo remains largely unknown to scholars, especially outside
India, it is nonetheless the case that he was the first to offer what we
might consider a “revolutionary dialectics” in his program of political
thought, emphasizing the critical idea that revolutionary violence is not
an affirmation, but rather the negation, of death. So my fundamental
contention is that a détournement in our mode of thinking is needed to
enable the recognition that revolutionary violence is the choice of collec-
tive life made possible through the sacrifice of the individual.5 In other
words, the choice of violence neither is made lightly, nor does eschewing
it amount to taking the high road. Rather, such a choice is always the
outcome of a historical conjuncture in which violence is constitutive of
the encounter with power, rather than external to it. My effort will be
to elaborate Aurobindo’s role in India’s nationalist struggle as a way to
shed light on the embedding of violence in colonial experience and, con-
sequently, in its refutation.6
The historiographic point here is one that I touched on earlier. As
Koselleck reminds us, the normalization since the Enlightenment of
the idea that political critique is—or must be—distanced from political
action has produced a contradiction between progressive thought and
action, in turn leading to the inability of critics to conceptualize revolu-
tionary possibilities, even in the face of evidence, in anything other than
rebarbative or reactionary terms. That said, there is a long tradition of
radical writing, specifically Indian, that remains steadfastly outside the
normalized and conventional point of view, simply because its historio-
graphic imperative lay elsewhere. For this reason, I must disagree with
Perry Anderson’s (2013) dismissal of Indian history-writing as follows:
“All countries have fond images of themselves, and big countries, inevi-
tably, have bigger heads than others.”7 I would contend instead that the
Indian experience merits attention, less because of India’s large size or
fond image of itself than because the Machtpolitik of British rule requires
the kind of attention to the historiographic longue durée that A nderson’s
account neglects on two counts: first, he does not consult in any de-
gree of sufficiency this rich tradition of writing over many decades, and
second, he ignores the legacy of the self-conscious and important wars
of position staged in political pamphlets, periodicals, and newspapers
(in which the radical antecedents of India’s anti-colonial struggle first
gained impetus, remaining active up to the moment of decolonization).
So I would say that Anderson’s criticism of the flaccidity of currently
influential scholarship on Indian history is more a comment about the
predicament of contemporary academic trends everywhere than a pre-
cise reflection of the overall historiographic record.
Among the many outlets that published opinion on the place of mil-
itancy in anti-colonial nationalism in India and abroad is the English-
language magazine Modern Review (published since 1907 out of Calcutta
by Ramananda Chatterjee). Earlier—as well as later—works in vernac-
ular Indian languages such as Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, and
Tamil also attest to the wide scope of writings that took resistance to
be a matter of active and stringent opposition rather than passive con-
duct. This scholarship may not have received as much notice as one of
A nderson’s targets—the writings of the latter-day “subaltern” historians
(with their penchant for Foucauldian, and later Heideggerian, ideas); but
the scholarship has existed all along, occupying the same terrain if not
the aura of celebrity philosophers’ pronouncements on disobedience, re-
sistance, and revolution. Since such textured accounts of Indian history
devoid of inflated claims are amply available, what is puzzling is their
elision in the West—not only by Anderson, one of the most eminent Left
historians, but also by Left thinkers in general, such as Badiou, Caygill,
and even Žižek; this is to say nothing of the pallid characterizations of
conventionally Whiggish, postcolonial accounts in which anticolonial
resistance is misrepresented and traduced.8
To make a dent in the unremittingly liberal ways in which the story of
India’s “non-violent” road to independence has recently come to promi-
nence (with associated nods to Thoreau, Martin Luther King, and above
all, Gandhi), I want to consider Aurobindo’s elaboration of a “political
metaphysics,” an orientation to the world in which freedom—understood
as a collective proposition—is the goal of both spiritual enlightenment
and political emancipation. Through his writings in both English and
Bengali and through his crucial role as the leader of an activist group
whose actions set the stage for the extremities of British imperial policy,
Aurobindo’s short career in active politics (1905–1910) presents a very
valuable, if disregarded, illustration of anti-colonial resistance that runs
counter to both the dominant narrative of India’s postcolonial emer-
gence and to the reigning ideologeme of “civility” within broader theo-
retical perspectives on the conduct of modern politics.9
The partition of Bengal in 1905 by Lord Curzon, then Viceroy of I ndia,
represents, in most historical accounts of the struggle for Indian inde-
pendence, the turning point in debates over nationalism and sovereignty.
The resistance movements that emerged directly out of this economic,
social, and political haemorrhaging induced by the administrative act
of severing East and West Bengal formed the crucible of Aurobindo’s
entry into radical politics, a few years after he returned from England
to India in 1893 to serve in the land revenue department of the princely
state of Baroda, and subsequently as a professor of E nglish at the local
university. Drawn to the cause of Indian independence, Aurobindo had
sacrificed the opportunities of his Anglicized upbringing, a degree in lan-
guages from King’s College, Cambridge (with a high first), and success-
ful entrance into the British-administered Indian Civil Service—though
he considered its top-down administrative style unsuited to Indian con-
ditions and got himself disqualified by failing the riding requirement.
146 Keya Ganguly
Historical Precedents
The contemporary penchant for speaking about the affective bonds be-
tween colonizer and colonized notwithstanding, the year 1905 attests to
a historical situation in which the British, in partitioning Bengal, showed
little interest in preserving any bonds of fellow feeling between them-
selves and the natives or even among the natives themselves. Tearing
families and social networks apart, setting Hindus and Muslims against
each other, and separating raw materials in the East from local markets
in the West, Bengal provided the paradigm case for imperial sovereignty
to test its now-familiar axiom of “divide and rule.” But the violence
of the action by the British also produced calculated and spontaneous
reactions, generating alliances between unlikely agents—from lawyers
and students to doctors, engineers, and journalists, all brought together
in a modality of radicalism seldom seen elsewhere or since. The basis of
this alliance was explicitly political rather than ethical, and its goal was,
equally explicitly, national sovereignty tied to international solidarity
with other oppressed people around the globe. Aurobindo stood at the
head of this movement of organized and militant resistance, one that
was thoroughly alienated from what he called the “mendicant policies”
of prayer, protest, and petition of the Indian Congress Party (the moder-
ate wing over which Gandhi later wielded great influence); the full facts
of his leadership were revealed even to his associates only years later.10
These are the broad outlines of the conditions under which an actually
existing revolutionary resistance movement was forged, though it has
mostly disappeared from view.
To account for this disappearance, we may recall an aspect of
A nderson’s criticism of Indian historiography that I think is on target.
It pertains to current trends in scholarship whose liberal bias (however
unconscious) leads its proponents into what he dubs “patriotic reveries”
(7). A key feature of this bias is the portrayal of Gandhi as the chief
architect of the twentieth century’s most successful experiment in demo-
cratic nation-building. Anderson regards this over-valuation of Gandhi’s
place in Indian history and politics to be a by-product of a larger in-
ability to conceptualize national sovereignty outside very conventional
ideas about democracy and personalized political agency. And, indeed,
as principal elements in liberal contract theory, such notions also ac-
count for tendencies in the writing of history. According to Anderson,
the hyperbolic investment in Gandhi leads, he says, to a peculiar “Indian
ideology”: an exceptionalist perception of the historical experience of
modern India and the elevation of Gandhi and Nehru as the main pro-
tagonists in this narrative.
Despite weakening his case with the shortcuts he took to make it,
Anderson is accurate in diagnosing the anodyne predicament of main-
stream postcolonial history and criticism. For even a quick look at ex-
amples of recent scholarship reveals that extremes of exploitation and
deracination are often bracketed in favour of alternative perspectives
more amenable to liberalism; the most notable, if revanchist, outcome of
this tendency has been the installation of subaltern subjects as the true
agents of history. What is more, subalterns are attributed such agency
by dint of their very lack of collective consciousness, force, and organi-
zation.11 A related move has been the assimilation of revolutionary na-
tionalism into a set of ethical-political mobilizations evident, above all,
in the hypostatic ways that Gandhian satyagraha—as the gold standard
of political opposition—is regarded not only in Indian history circles
but also in the broader philosophical positions of Balibar, Critchley, or
Caygill cited earlier.
Along the same lines, arguments on behalf of ethical (rather than po-
litical) action have become the preferred critical gesture in the human-
ities at large, touched as they are by a Kantian aura of disinterested
judgment and a sense of historical ennui about the prospects for radical
political change, past or present. As a result, the messier antagonisms
of politics in general, and radical politics in particular, often come to
be abjured—when they are not actively written out of existence—in the
psychologizing mechanisms that Anderson correctly decries.12 But de-
spite landing its mark, Anderson’s critique of the turn away from radical
perspectives on Indian history leaves us with as many questions as an-
swers. Among these is the place of spiritual or religious thought in polit-
ical practice; so while his critique of Gandhian spiritualism rightly rests
on rejecting psychological or emotive notions of freedom, it is difficult,
if not impossible, to ignore the entwinement of religious and political
ideals of enlightenment and emancipation in the case of India (and per-
haps elsewhere).
An adequate account of India’s past consequently demands that we
not only reckon with the articulation of metaphysical and revolutionary
principles in the resistance to imperial domination, but also consider
why appeals to the spirit were so effective in transforming a nascent anti-
colonialism into a full-blown nationalist consciousness. Even if we agree
with Anderson that the preoccupation with Gandhi’s notions of pacifist
self-consciousness (ahimsa) has produced an elision of the objective and
impersonal determinations of Indian modernity, what is still missing is
adequate consideration of the political efficacy of modes of thought that
took religious or spiritual shape within the overall discourse of nation-
alism. Going back to this history entails a more nuanced examination
of such frameworks, whose explicitly transformative goals accord with
a fuller picture of nationalist practice and its rhetorical entailments.13
Aurobindo and Revolutionary Dialectics

It will not come as a surprise at this point to say that, contrary to re-
ceived wisdom, India’s freedom was not won by non-violent means
alone. Acknowledging this enables a different vein of analysis from the
148 Keya Ganguly
one that privileges the Gandhian take-up of the concept of passive resis-
tance. Indeed, I would argue that we should reconsider India’s freedom
struggle as one of the greatest revolutionary struggles of the modern era.
This is the standpoint on history now being revisited in some quarters,
and it aims to draw the major players from India’s revolutionary past out
from the wings. There is, in other words, growing momentum towards
expanding our understanding of the role that militant and revolution-
ary resistance played in Indian history and a renewed attention to fig-
ures such as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Bagha Jatin (Jatindranath
Mukherjee), Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Vinayak Damodar (Veer) Savarkar,
Bhagat Singh and, in my consideration, Aurobindo himself: the man
who was in his own time called “the prophet of Indian nationalism” (see
Bakhle 2010, Maclean and Elam 2015, and Kamra 2016).
Once inside the political arena, Aurobindo quickly gained the rep-
utation of being, in the words of Lord Minto (the Viceroy who suc-
ceeded Curzon), “the most dangerous man we have to reckon with.”14
A nderson’s criticism of the unalloyed primacy of Gandhi in the nar-
rative of Indian nationalism may be recalled a final time to note that
although the conceptualization of “passive resistance” is now exclu-
sively attributed to the Mahatma, Aurobindo was its original and earlier
proponent. But in stark contrast to Gandhi’s emphasis on submission,
Aurobindo’s conception of passive resistance admitted violence as con-
stitutive of a practice of boycott that rejects the executive powers of an
alien force.15
My focus on Aurobindo dictates that much of this discussion is cen-
tred on activities in Bengal and on the prominence of Bengali examples
though this does not suggest their analytic priority over what happened
in other parts of India—not least because all the early nationalists saw
themselves as involved, precisely, in a national movement and as advanc-
ing a very specific counter to the British government’s administrative
policies geared towards isolating and Bantustanizing regions and actors
deemed to be insurgent and disloyal. To that it should be added that the
1905 partition of Bengal was a cataclysmic event for the entire country,
galvanizing anti-colonial sentiment throughout in unprecedented ways
and generating an urgency about political means and ends that was only
partially dampened by Gandhi’s later rise to prominence.
The mobilization of national consciousness was a rhetorical and po-
litical task oriented nationally, and at times globally, in the sense that
momentum was derived from local imperatives and resources as well as
from international revolutionary movements in places such as I reland,
Mexico, and above all, Russia. To situate revolutionary thought in I ndia
within a non-parochial history of the present (contra Anderson) is to
argue on behalf of a broader view of the geopolitics of radical conscious-
ness and, at the same time, to emphasize the particular political demands
to which the abstract ideals of revolution were, in practice, materially
calibrated. One such point of calibration has to do with the ways that
anti-colonial agitation in India was bound up with its characterization
as seditious extremism and the strange, or at least estranging, logic of
the legal category of “disaffection.”
The Alipore bomb conspiracy case, with which Aurobindo’s name is
above all associated, represents a notable moment in modern Indian his-
tory for its demonstration of two mutually antagonistic problems: on the
one hand, the issue of explicit violence with respect to its intended and
unintended consequences, and on the other, the modalities of implicit
and explicit violence exercised by the colonial state in the maintenance
of its illegitimate power. The folds of time have occluded some details,
but the facts of the matter can be summed up as follows: on April 30,
1908, in retaliation against the British government’s virulent suppres-
sion of radical reactions to the partition of Bengal, which had resulted
in the death of a young radical named Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, two
members of an extremist cell—Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki—
threw a bomb at a carriage that was supposed to be carrying a district
judge in Bihar; instead, it hit and killed two Englishwomen, the wife and
daughter of one Pringle Kennedy (the author of a history of the Mughal
Empire and a person quite uninvolved with the repressive schemes of the
government). Bose was hanged; to this day he is considered a nation-
alist hero in Bengal, even if his name rings few bells on this side of the
Atlantic. Chaki committed suicide to escape the same fate.
Their connection to Aurobindo was indirect, although the latter was
also arrested on May 4, 1908 on charges of treason—one of three sepa-
rate instances in which the British government tried and failed to pros-
ecute him. The chain of events leading from this date, when Aurobindo
was imprisoned in solitary confinement in the stark conditions of
Calcutta’s Alipore Jail, to his ultimate acquittal on grounds of insuffi-
cient evidence on April 13, 1909, constitutes the “conspiracy” against
the British Crown. The political implications of this early twentieth-
century episode in the history of revolutionary struggles extend beyond
its moment, even if the same actions would not be comprehended or
judged in the same way across time.
The idea of a subjunctive tense in which their actions might acquire

legitimacy in the future was very important for Aurobindo and his mil-
itant comrades. For example, one of the chief exhibits in the famous
legal trial (and subsequent judgments) accompanying the Alipore bomb
conspiracy was the confession extracted from Barin (aka Barindra),
Aurobindo’s brother, in which revolution, as well as the freedom it is de-
signed to realize, is described in futural terms: “We were always think-
ing of a far-off revolution and wished to be ready for it.”16 For Barin,
Aurobindo, and their compatriots, a hypothesis of future freedom was
at the core of what they considered their properly historical struggle:
a means to hold out for a time when revolutionary actions could be
150 Keya Ganguly
nderstood as necessary in the conduct of nationalist resistance rather
u
than written off as anarchical and extremist violence. Inasmuch as the
actuality of freedom was (and is) a counterfactual proposition—which
is to say it represents a contingency that has not yet come to pass—
revolutionary activity acquires a metaphysical dimension. It is necessar-
ily, if ambiguously, oriented towards a reality beyond the empirical.
To align this subjunctive impulse of metaphysical thinking with revo-
lutionary practice, including its modalities of violence, is to wrest meta-
physics from a purely ontological and existentialist understanding; the
latter ossifies what is active, conflating existence with latency. In other
words, a very different way of conceptualizing a politically inflected dis-
course of metaphysics is both available and necessary; it requires taking
the measure of what Theodor Adorno (2000), in his reflections on meta-
physics, called the “right conditions” for coordinating human belief with
reality. I find Adorno’s mode of thinking more in line with A urobindo’s
“political metaphysics” —which is to say that I put maximal distance
between Aurobindo’s philosophical outlook and the “anticolonial meta-
physics” Leela Gandhi (2014) discusses with reference to the phenomeno-
logical and spiritualist schemes of various Eastern and Western thinkers,
buttressed by her enthusiasm for Heideggerian hyper-metaphysics and
its alleged superiority to Hegelian thought. Although there is much more
to say about this than space allows, it is perhaps appropriate to note that
the political is rendered dully “given,” rather than actively “made,” in
Gandhi’s accounts of metaphysical projects. Consequently, I would also
say that her conception of “spirit” is quite incapable of speaking to the
political program of Aurobindo or any of the other militant nationalists
of the period.
For it is important to insist that Aurobindo drew on metaphysics with-
out thinking of it ontologically—insofar as the core principle of his po-
liticized conception of metaphysics was sadhana, a concept in Sanskrit
that translates variously as method, realization, or means to comple-
tion. In this principle, the stress is on the discipline of mind over matter,
though crucially, matter itself is neither vacated nor rendered inert: it
becomes (rather than is) the stuff of transformation, realizable rather
than revelatory. I draw attention to this particular emphasis because the
impulse to fashion anti-colonial thought into a series of nominalizations
of Being (à la Heidegger) has become the mode du jour and it is certainly
one that Gandhi follows in her own formulation of the anti-colonial
problematic. Regardless of its appeal for the existentialist turn in theory
today, the goal of national sovereignty was rather a different, material
as well as tangible, proposition in Aurobindo’s hands; it was also not an
obliquely speculative or spiritual ideal, even when routed through decla-
rations about Mother India’s suffering or spirit.
The nuance I am attempting to provide may be deepened by drawing
more directly from Adorno, who helps us understand that “spirit,” in the
Hegelian tradition specifically, is a historical category: that is, it does not
stand in opposition to “matter” (though this is the tired dichotomy that
Gandhi recapitulates from the post-structuralist lexicon). But as anyone
who has read him would know, Hegel held Geist or spirit to be the active
moving force of history, and hence consciousness is always historical,
temporal consciousness, only produced out of the encounter with mate-
rial conditions of reality. In Adorno’s thinking, accordingly, the “axial
turn” in returning to metaphysical questions does not centre on positing
various idealized forces, whether living or inanimate, outside matter.
Rather, he, following Hegel, takes metaphysical aspects of political un-
derstanding to be internal to the workings of history, neither transcen-
dent nor oppositional to it in any simplistic dualism of mind/body.
Metaphysics is, on this reading, the dialectical lever that enables
reality—historical and political reality, above all—to break out of its
negative relationship to the thought of freedom (Adorno 1973, 129;
Cook 2014). Adorno’s commitments were always guided by this way of
conceptualizing the force of the metaphysical in relation to the material.
Such a commitment to the metaphysical as an active dimension of histor-
ical struggle enables a materialist understanding of A urobindo’s political
philosophy while distinguishing it from other variants of Eastern ideal-
ism, especially those that either saw themselves or are seen retrospec-
tively as answering the call of an immaterial “spirit”. Aurobindo’s own
words allow us to make this connection between physis and metaphysis:
“Vedantism accepts no distinction of true or false religions, but consid-
ers only what will lead more or less surely, more or less quickly to mok-
sha, spiritual emancipation and the realization of the Divinity within.
Our attitude is a political Vedantism. India, free, one, and indivisible,
is the divine realization to which we move—emancipation our aim…”
(The Doctrine of Passive Resistance, 78–79). That is to say, the force of
spirit is in moving politics towards the end of freedom.
The Rule of Disaffection

If Aurobindo based his political metaphysics on a conviction about the
subjunctive power of right action, as discussed earlier, this was also a sit-
uated response to the criminalization of native ideas and opinions under
British law. “Disaffection”—and particularly, its excitement—emerged
as the term on which imperial administration settled in order to exercise
its illegitimate force and, correspondingly, around which native resis-
tance was organized. Others have written eloquently about the deploy-
ment of the idea of disaffection in policing dissent, so my discussion here
will to be track the ways that Aurobindo’s political program targeted the
juridical status of disaffection in order to expose the legalisms disguising
imperial dominance.17 My concern with disaffection therefore has to do
with its appearance as a highly charged term in the history of British rule
152 Keya Ganguly
(to be strictly distinguished from its cognates in “affect” or “affection”).
In its visibility as a legal mechanism for policing dissent and a sign of
anxiety over the nature and meaning of colonial sovereignty, disaffec-
tion mutates from a negative structure of feeling (lack of affection) to a
device of total administration (criminal disloyalty). In what follows, I
chart its violent itinerary in order to locate it as the existential preamble
for revolutionary resistance.
The term “disaffection” becomes effective with the enactment of Sec-
tion 124A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) defining the offence of sedition,
with the wording governing disaffection finalized in the amendment of
1870. As a major criterion during the Raj for penalizing disloyalty to the
British Crown (along with separate and later statutes for seditious abet-
ment or treason), its categorical status depended on admitting a wide
range of motivations into the remit of disaffection, as well as blurring
the lines between revolutionary thought and action so as to criminalize
both. To put this differently, one might say that the affect of disaffection
is lost sovereignty—given all manner of deprivation (including death)
resulting from the use of disaffection as the lawful basis for prosecuting
resistance against the state.
The language of Section 124A is instructive in revealing the func-
tional and fungible capacities of disaffection in the vocabulary of colo-
nial offences (it should be noted that the Code remains effective into the
present day, with revisions, and is now used by the postcolonial state
to prosecute Maoists and other political dissenters who continue to be
labelled “terrorists”). Being the long arm of the law, the Code has since
its inception relied on the axiom that states that perceive themselves
to be just (leave alone autocratic or criminal ones) reserve the right of
violence to themselves. For this reason, any critique of revolutionary
violence as excessive needs to take into account the implications of this
exclusive privilege. While it may not justify the principle of revolution
in toto, it establishes, emphatically, that non-violence can be nothing
more than a one-sided proposition. Here is the wording of the relevant
section in the IPC:
Whoever by words, either spoken or written or by signs, or by visible

representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred
or contempt, or excites, or attempts to excite disaffection towards
Her Majesty or the Government established by law in British India,
shall be punished with transportation for life or any shorter term, to
which fine may be added, or with imprisonment which may extend
to three years, to which fine may be added or with fine.
(Ghose 1970, 393; emphasis added)
Perhaps the most important detail to emerge from this passage is that
the weight of Section 124A rests on equating speech and action as well
as intention and effect. Accordingly, penalties could be meted out not
only to those who actively signified their hatred or contempt towards
the colonial government (whether in the personage of Queen Victoria or
her representatives), but also to those who attempted to mobilize such
feelings. “Exciting disaffection” was, thus, less a feature of punishable
speech or activity than a contingency of thought—extending the reach
of law into the minds of subjects, criminalizing intention as well as feel-
ing. Form matters here as much as content; in fact, the slippage between
them disambiguates the distinction we have been schooled to observe
between “discourse” and “reality.” When it comes to imperial rule, this
is a difference that simply does not make a difference, not to put too fine
a point on it.
The utilitarian model of punishment advocated by Jeremy Bentham
in the nineteenth-century (and modified by Michel Foucault in his the-
orization of modern discipline) took proportional punishment and de-
terrence as the governing rationales of penal actions in the West, at least
since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By contrast, the
wording of Section 124A belies these imperatives of “normalization”; in-
stead, it reinforces the exception that is imperial law. On its terms, trans-
portation to penal colonies such as the Cellular Jail in the A ndaman
Islands, solitary confinement in mainland prisons, house arrest, fines,
and occasional beatings and torture—all available punishments for be-
traying loss of affection for the Crown—were the measures used to deal
with what was perceived to be seditious intent, feeling, behaviour, or
influence.
Krishna Deo Gaur’s valuable legal textbook on the IPC tells us that,
“the section places absolutely on the same footing the successful exci-
tation of disaffection and the unsuccessful attempt to [sic] excitation”
(Gaur 2015, 228). What is more, judges and courts had wide latitude
in establishing the fact of disaffection, given its multiple connotations
both at the time and in the present (though we are perhaps more likely
to hear this term now in the parlance of divorce law, where “alienation
of affection” often provides the grounds for dissolving a marital union).
Levity aside, the imperial courts in India interpreted disaffection with
depressing as well as repressive polysemy, as Gaur documents with refer-
ence to several judicial opinions:
1 Disaffection means a feeling contrary to affection, in other words,

dislike or hatred.
2 It means hatred, enmity, dislike, hostility, contempt, and every
form of ill-will to the Government. Disloyalty is perhaps the gen-
eral term, including every possible form of bad feeling towards the
Government.
3 It signifies political alienation or discontent, that is to say, a feeling
of disloyalty to the Government or existing power, which tends to
154 Keya Ganguly
dispose a person not to obey, but rather to resist and attempt to sub-
vert that Government or power. It cannot be construed to mean an
absence of, or the contrary of affection, or love, that is to say, dislike
or hatred.
4 It is a positive political distemper, and not a mere absence or nega-
tion of love or goodwill. It is a positive feeling of aversion which is
akin to disloyalty, a defiant insubordination of authority, or when
it is not defiant, secretly seeks to alienate the people, and weaken
the bond of allegiance, and prepossesses the minds of the people
with avowed or secret animosity to Government, a feeling which
tends to bring the Government into hatred or contempt by imput-
ing base or corrupt motives to it, make men indisposed to obey or
support the laws of the realm, and promotes discontent and public
disorder.
(Gaur 2015, 229–230)
As is evident here, across the range of possibilities attaching to the mean-

ing of disaffection, the incontrovertible fact remains its ontological ex-
istence as an instrument of the law that successively instrumentalized
the mind as the true realm of culpability. Such instrumentalization also
refutes the idea that rationalizing imperatives (expressed in imperial
legal discourses in this example) depend upon a Cartesian separation
of mind and body; to the contrary, judgments of criminal seditiousness
under Section 124A fully presumed that mind and body were entirely
permeable and therefore equally open to legislation. It is relevant here to
mark the distance between this mode of legal enactment and Foucault’s
arguments in Discipline and Punish, because whereas Foucault saw
modern penal techniques as addressing the soul rather than the body,
the operating penal order in late nineteenth- and early-to-mid-twentieth-
century India suggests that the soul—insofar as it was subsumed under
the category of intention—was targeted only to the degree to which it
could be seen as the (disaffected) proxy for the body’s seditious activities
(Foucault 1995).
Although it may appear at first glance that in holding intentions
and motivations equally suspect the law against seditious activity ac-
cords with Foucault’s emphasis on governance of the soul, the subtle
point is that the IPC’s code was designed to disallow the space between
the native’s mind and his actions because of the uncertain and there-
fore irrelevant status of the mind (and, to be sure, the soul) in legal
determinations of disloyalty. The amendment of Section 124A in 1898
was instituted precisely to tighten the grip on sedition because, as Sir
A lexander Mackenzie, Lieutenant Governor of Bengal proclaimed on
one occasion, “It is impossible in India to accept the test of direct incite-
ment to violence, and limit the interference of the Government to such
cases” (Morton 2013, 69). Equating direct and indirect incitement in
the interests of the law, colonial rule proceeded by relegating the soul
to the order of a disturbance in the regime of intelligibility. Under this
protocol, disaffection serves as the carapace for incorporating the total-
ity of insurgent or militant resistance. And as the legal history of sedi-
tion abundantly reveals, retribution depended heavily on the absolute
authority of the law rather than on non-legal evaluations of scientists or
medical personnel that Foucault specifies in his European case studies.
Furthermore, the Section also enabled the enforcement of the dominant
colonial strategy of magnifying (rather than eliminating) pain from the
scene of punishment, again contra Foucault’s account of transformations
in the penal organization of modernity—which he of course regarded as
entirely constitutive.
To think further about the status of revolutionary ideals against the
fundamentally liberal ideas about disciplinarity that Foucault’s work has
popularized, let us recall that in the utilitarian tradition from which
Foucault adapted many of his propositions, the idea of punishment was to
project and prevent the guilt of those who were as yet innocent but might
become guilty or criminal in time. As such, utilitarianism represents a
negative philosophy, one that sought to conceptualize the utility of pu-
nitive measures on the basis of a distinction between apparent and real
guilt, apparent and real punishment, as well as apparent and real good.
Of course, in this particular epistemological regime, it is appearance
that matters more than reality, though to be more precise, we should say
that appearance entirely pre-empts reality (anticipating in essence many
of the arguments we later get with the notion of the simulacrum). As the
downgraded term in calculations of utility, then, reality comes into view
after the fact—not in the Freudian sense of Nachträglich or deferred ac-
tions, but rather as the desideratum of a theological orientation in which
the postulate of man’s fallen nature serves as ultimate basis of judgment
regarding the existence of guilt.
We see shades of this thinking writ large in Bentham’s writings on the
rationality of imprisonment, where he proposes that “It is the idea only
of the punishment (or, in other words, the apparent punishment) that
really acts upon the mind; the punishment itself (the real punishment)
acts not any further than as giving rise to that idea.”18 Key here is the
idea that the virtualized experience of punishment, intended as it was
for everyone other than the punished individual, is designed with poten-
tial guilt in mind. I have lingered over these emphases in the Bentham-
Foucault model in order to show its insufficiency in explaining what
occurred in the colonial theatre; in British India, (the working example
in my discussion), we witness, rather, the indifference under the law of
both appearance and reality when it comes to the reason and object of
punishment.
In its more extreme form, the very being of native subjects (after
1857, and particularly after the 1905 partition of Bengal) betokened
156 Keya Ganguly
the possibility, indeed, the likelihood of criminal dispositions as well
as behaviour; that is to say, the potential was already real. Thus, in
opposition to the utilitarian and liberal view of legality and punish-
ment structured on the basis of a negative logic of preemption, the
IPC’s expanded definition of sedition detected positive—and hence
criminal—evidence of disaffection in the appearance of attributes
such as distemper, ill will, disloyalty, aversion, defiance, contempt,
as well as hatred. As we might expect, the consequence of these en-
largements was extreme and at times hysterical, with “every possible
form of bad feeling” towards the Crown open to being declared a
legal offense.
“Passive” Resistance, Again

The rhetoric of disaffection along with the extremities of its deployment
had a catalytic effect on resistance movements in India, particularly in
authorizing the raison d’etre of revolutionary ideology. The utilization
of disaffection as the means to criminalize the full spectrum of native
behaviour—from actions and opinions to thought itself—left no mean-
ingful non-violent alternative to the wilful and often indiscriminate
actions of the British. It is only under this regime of existence that
Aurobindo’s political metaphysics takes the turn to conceptualize what
he calls “aggressive resistance” as transformative and, moreover, as cor-
rect action. The distinction between passive and aggressive resistance
can be parsed in terms of the distance between law and justice; in accor-
dance with this distinction, Aurobindo derived the idea of passive resis-
tance from the Irish nationalist Charles Parnell—specifying its utility in
rendering unjust institutions ineffective (e.g., non-payment of taxes to
imperial tax authorities). Aggressive resistance, on the other hand, rests
on the justification of violence as a counter to the legislated violence of
the authorities. That is to say, if passive resistance is a redoubt against
the law, the aim of aggressive resistance is justice.
Continuing the justification, he says:
If the instruments of the executive choose to disperse our meeting

by breaking the heads of those present, the right of self-defence [sic]
entitles us not merely to defend our heads but to retaliate on those
of the head-breakers…Nor does resistance pass into the aggres-
sive stage so long as it resists coercive violence in its own kind and
confines itself to repelling attack. Even if it takes the offensive, it
does not by that mere fact become aggressive resistance, unless the
amount of aggression exceeds what is necessary to make defence
effective.
(Aurobindo 1948, 62–63; emphasis added)
There is, in these statements, an immanent justification of violence as
constitutive of resistance, though it should be seen as serving exclusively
as a counter-force in repelling the constitutive violence of empire.19 This
emphasis is, I submit, extremely salient in rethinking the complex of
passive resistance as precisely that: a complex (based on deliberation
and action) rather than an article of faith. Articulated as it was in the
exact shadow of seditious disaffection, Aurobindo inserts a conceptual
fold into the constitution of “passivity” that is quite far from accommo-
dationist views of passive resistance as protest or, at most, disobedience.
If we recall the earlier reference to Aurobindo’s parsing of violence
as integral to the practice of boycott, it is now possible to see its moral
justification when juxtaposed with the legal prohibitions against “ex-
citing disaffection.” We should note further the logical precision of
Aurobindo’s insistence that resistance is by definition reactive, and
thus passive in its essential constitution. Since even “bad feeling” could
be criminalized in given circumstances—as, certainly, patriotism was
in the electrifying trials of the Bangabasi newspaper in 1891 and Bal
Gangadhar Tilak’s in 1897 (as well as 1908)—he deduced that any form
of resistance could be rendered illegal as it suited imperial purposes.
Thus, the self-serving instrumentality of seditious excitement prompted
Aurobindo to conceptualize passive resistance as, in essence, a refusal
of the coercive restrictions on thought, speech, and action imposed
through the arbitrary binary of active and passive. In a masterstroke of
political theorizing, his response was to turn the tables on the colonial
strategy of criminalizing resistance under the rubric of disaffection by
reversing the juridical equation of thought and action into the equation
of action and thought.
By means of such a dialectical reversal, then, passive resistance was
rendered its obverse: a program of militant action whose passivity re-
sided in its status as a counter-discourse. At the risk of belabouring this
point, the tactic of stretching the meaning of passivity so as to overturn
its apparent inertness has to be seen as Aurobindo’s most inventive revo-
lutionary manoeuvre. He accomplishes this first by taking on board the
imperial perception of Indian passivity in formulating his ideal of revolu-
tionary discipline (sadhana); and second, by asserting that the criminal-
ization of feeling involved in the legal indictment of disaffection could
only be rebutted through more active forms of resistance. As he put it
in The Doctrine of Passive Resistance (originally published in 1907 in
his English-language newspaper, Bande Mataram), “It is the nature of
the pressure which determines the nature of the resistance” (Aurobindo
1948, 30). And on this Newtonian basis, passive resistance becomes ac-
tive boycott—a principle of political action that Gandhi later took on
board with his non-cooperation imperatives of the 1920s and 1930s, but
for which Aurobindo is now seldom given credit.
158 Keya Ganguly
Conclusion: Utopian Militancy
Regardless of whether history has given appropriate recognition to the
right source, what remains paramount in Aurobindo’s political philoso-
phy is the articulation of passive resistance within the overall structure
of organized revolt against political oppression. In arriving at this under-
standing, Aurobindo was influenced not only by the proximate situation
of British India but also by the strategies employed in anti-imperialist
struggles in Ireland and, of course, in Russia, which he (like others) con-
sidered the most spectacular triumph of liberation movements. In the ar-
senal of militancy, then, passive resistance is defined less by its difference
from armed action than by its degree of sacrifice; both involve hardship
as well as violence. Indeed, Aurobindo considered the experiment with
“peaceful resistance” to require “as much heroism of a kind and cer-
tainly more universal endurance and suffering.” (Aurobindo 1948, 31;
emphasis added) For this reason, he conceived resistance as necessitating
its own calculus of pressure whose coordinates are determined, contin-
gently, by the specific system of repression at work:
The choice by a subject nation of the means it will use for vindicating
its liberty is best determined by the circumstances of its servitude.
One of the courses… open to an oppressed nation is that of armed
revolt… This is the old time-honoured method which the oppressed
or enslaved have always adopted by preference in the past and will
adopt in the future if they see any chance of success; for it is the
readiest and swiftest, the most thorough in its results, and demands
the least powers of endurance and suffering.
(Aurobindo 1948, 28–29)
Aurobindo’s political vision acquires full significance only if we place

his revolutionary ideals within (rather than adjacent to) his doctrine of
enlightenment. As is well known, upon being released from prison and
before the British could bring new charges of conspiracy against him,
Aurobindo sought asylum in the French protectorate of Pondicherry
(now Puducherry) in 1914 and founded an ashram there in which he
lived until his death in 1950. An extradition treaty was not in place be-
tween the French and the British, even if the real circumstances in which
he was allowed to enter and stay as an internal exile in Pondicherry have
not, to my knowledge, been clarified. It is possible that his renunciation
of politics for a life of asceticism was a by-product of the desire to avoid
ongoing harassment and pressure from the authorities; it may also have
been motivated by an urgency to protect his brother Barin, sentenced
to death for his prominent role in the Alipore Bomb Conspiracy case.
That sentence was later reduced to hard labour and life imprisonment
in the infamous Cellular Jail in the Andamans—from which Barin was
released under a general amnesty in 1920, though by no means freed
from continuing surveillance by colonial authorities.
The silences that emanate from the correspondence of the brothers
leave key aspects of their later life unrevealed, but it is clear that even af-
ter explicitly retiring from nationalist politics, Aurobindo authorized the
ongoing publication of his writings (underwritten by the ashram’s own
funds and now also featuring an online archive of his works). To this
degree, we would have to say that Aurobindo’s recusal from politics per
se did not occasion his disappearance from the political arena, let alone
from the sphere of letters. Only an impoverished view of the political
would exempt the manifest expression of Aurobindo’s voice in multiple
volumes—published in English and Bengali—from its scope; likewise,
only a truncated notion of spirituality (about which Hegel complained
in his critique of Enlightenment utilitarians) would prevent recognition
of its role in the dialectic of enlightenment.
The goal of enlightenment, expressed in the rhetoric of personal and
social emancipation as well as political agitation, was, for Aurobindo,
condensed in form. Accordingly, he says in the essay “The Morality of
Boycott” (that served as one of fifteen hundred prosecutorial exhibits
in his landmark trial), “Justice and righteousness are the atmosphere of
political morality, but the justice and righteousness of a fighter, not of
the priest.” (Aurobindo 1948, 87) This is the reason why, in taking the
measure of the revolutions we witness in our times, we may be advised
to give proper due to the negated, but still unconsumed, flicker of the
metaphysical in our assessments of radical politics. That is to say, the
righteousness that impels Aurobindo has to do with a conviction about
the role of human will in directing action. As he describes it, this is the
will of the fighter, rather than priest—indicating with this distinction a
militancy that is at the same time disciplined.
If today the idea of discipline only evokes the Foucauldian spectre
of an external imposition of power on the body, we should be alert to
Aurobindo’s entirely discontinuous focus on the power of self-restraint—
what, in the Yogic perspective that energized and directed his political
metaphysics, is the principle of sanyam, or command over the senses.
And since it was this alien and mysterious element of resistance that so
flummoxed the British, with their utilitarian calculations about mind
and body, Aurobindo deserves to have the last word, his emphasis on
the divine presenting a paradoxical and immanently human quality he
describes as “incalculable”:
Man is of a less terrestrial mould than some would have him to

be. He has an element of the divine which the politician ignores.
The practical politician looks to the position at the moment and
imagines that he has taken everything into consideration. He has,
indeed, studied the surface and the immediate surroundings, but he
160 Keya Ganguly
has missed what lies beyond the material vision. He has left out
of account the divine, the incalculable in man, that element which
upsets the calculations of the schemer and disconcerts the wisdom
of the diplomat.
(Aurobindo 1948, 88; emphasis added)
Notes
1 Thanks to Antonis Balasopoulos, Sandeep Banerjee, Crystal Bartolovich,
Subho Basu, Timothy Brennan, Rey Chow, Auritro Majumder, Negar
Mottahedeh, and Sergio Valverde, for their comments on portions of this
essay presented as lectures at the University of Minnesota Political The-
ory Colloquium, Syracuse University Humanities Center, and the Franklin
Humanities Institute at Duke University. I would also like to acknowledge
Sharae Deckard’s help with the revisions and Sukeshi Kamra for her insights
into political writings on sedition. Above all, thanks are due to Benita Parry
for her intellectual example and personal generosity.
2 Koselleck’s argument about the “pathogenesis” of modern society centers
on the split between forms of political authority and the private sphere of
critical opinion in the Age of Enlightenment (the goal of which was to trans-
form the public). Emerging out of a standoff with the Absolutist state, the
attempts of Enlightenment thinkers to supersede the absolutist state’s role
as the arbiter of politics on the one hand, and the situation of their own dis-
tance from political authority on the other, produced a distorted assessment
of what was possible in the realm of action; this distortion continues into
the present.
3 The sociologist Asef Bayat (2013) provides a distinction between “revolu-
tions” centered on transformation and “refolutions” that are reformist in
impulse. Bayat credits Timothy Garton with the coinage of “refolution.”
4 This is also the tenor of Edward Said’s (2008) late positions.
5 Along these lines, Arun Chandra Guha (1971) situates the future orientation
of early nationalists in the context of their willingness to sacrifice themselves
for the cause of the nation.
6 Two indispensable sources for the line of argument I pursue are Haridas
Mukherjee and Uma Mukherjee (1958) and Peter Heehs (1998).
7 See Perry Anderson (2013). Anderson has come under fire from historians
such as Partha Chatterjee for lack of familiarity with current historiography;
see Partha Chatterjee (2014).
8 The classic, if misguided, position here is that of Homi K. Bhabha (2005),
“Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” in The Lo-
cation of Culture. London: Routledge, 2005: 121–131. Bhabha’s ideas have
spawned a cottage industry in the humanities and related social sciences and
his following in postcolonial studies is considerable; one study that I do take
up because of its particular relevance to my case is by Leela Gandhi—see
endnote 23.
9 Balibar, cited at the beginning of this essay, is the prototype here, if only
because his writings have the shade of insurrectionary “Theory” behind
them—dating back to his co-authorship, with Louis Althusser, of Reading
Capital (published in French in 1968 by Maspero, followed by its influential
translation into English by Ben Brewster in 1970). On the side of Indian
scholarship, a prominent, contemporary account of Indian emergence sans
any mention of Aurobindo is Sunil Khilnani (2016).
10 In his political biography of Sri Aurobindo, written as a doctoral disser-
tation at Delhi University, Karan Singh (1963), the erstwhile Maharaja
of Kashmir, confirms this on the basis of a note he acquired a note from
Aurobindo’s brother, Barin (aka Barindra) Ghose, also a member of the
group, as follows: “Sri Aurobindo not only made organized efforts on con-
stitutional lines to win Swaraj [independence] through Swadeshi [self-rule]
and boycott of foreign good and practice of passive resistance including
non-payment of taxes if necessary, but he organized the secret societies all
over Bengal, to violently oust the Imperial power through armed resistance
and murder of British officers and judiciary. No way for achievement of
the main object was abhorrent or unwelcome to him. Except the C.I.D.
[Criminal Investigation Department] Department [sic], none in the country
knew that Sri Aurobindo was the inspirer or leader of the Secret Party of
Violence too.”
11 See, for instance, the special issue of Interventions: International Journal
of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2002 edited by Elleke Boehmer and
Bart Moore-Gilbert entitled “Postcolonial Studies and Transnational Re-
sistance.” The extrapolation of the subaltern studies framework for simi-
lar pronouncements in the Latin American context can be found in John
B everley (1999).
12 This move was already analyzed by Neil Lazarus (1994).
13 Let me note that my objective is not to advocate for a particular orientation
in historical writing; nor, for that matter, do I wish to join the otiose debate
over who has the authority to criticize Gandhi. I find Anderson’s argument
about the mystification of Gandhi’s personality and politics largely persua-
sive, though I suggest that the liberalism that colors contemporary Indian
historiography—along with its diminishment of revolutionary radicalism—
is an offshoot of a generalized telescoping of conceptual and political stand-
points in the present. If the story of Indian nationhood continues to deserve
our attention, it is because the complex logics and legal maneuverings of
British rule permit us to see the immense originality and political signifi-
cance of the tactics and strategies of Indian revolutionaries who, in this way,
write themselves into the text of emancipatory politics at large—which is to
say, beyond the Indian case.
14 The danger that Aurobindo represented to the British is a repeated theme
in the correspondence between Lord Minto, Viceroy of India and Viscount
Morley, Secretary of State for India from 1905–1910. The statement refer-
enced here is quoted in Peter Heehs (2008).
15 Sri Aurobindo (1948). A representative example is the following statement:
“There is a limit however to passive resistance. So long as the action of the
executive is peaceful and within the rules of the fight, the passive resister
scrupulously maintains his attitude of passivity, but he is not bound to do so
a moment beyond… The moment coercion […] is attempted, passive resis-
tance ceases and active resistance becomes a duty” (62).
16 Barin’s confession as well as the defense mounted by Chittaranjan Das in
the Alipore Bomb Conspiracy case are available on the Aurobindo Ash-
ram website (under the heading “Twelfth Day’s Proceedings”): http://
motherandsriaurobindo.in/_StaticContent/SriAurobindoAshram/-09%20
E-Library/-04%20Compilations/-01%20English/Alipore%20Bomb%20
Case/-31_Twelfth%20Day%27s%20Proceedings.htm (last accessed on April
12, 2017). The statement is also cited in Papers by Command, Volume 8.
Great Britain, Parliament House, House of Commons, 1918: 17.
17 See Stephen Morton (2013), especially the chapter entitled “Terrorism, Lit-
erature and Sedition in Colonial India” (61–85); see also Elleke Boehmer
and Stephen Morton (2015).
162 Keya Ganguly
18 Jeremy Bentham (1907), Chapter XV: 10. See also the introduction entitled
“An Utterly Dark Spot” by Miran Božovič (2011).
19 The religious motivations of Aurobindo’s acceptance of the principle of vi-
olence are suggested by Vishwanath Prasad Varma (1960) in his early and
important work. See, in particular, the contrast he draws between Gandhi,
whom he calls a “votary of the absoluteness of the creed of Ahimsa,” and
Aurobindo, whom he describes as “a believer in Political Vedantism and
Dharma-Yuddha [who] frankly stated that if passive resistance failed active
resistance should be resorted to. He would not stress passivity at the cost of
resistance.” (246–247)
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8 Revolutionary Nationalism
and Global Horizons
The Ghadar Party on Ireland
and China
Pranav Jani
One of Benita Parry’s core contributions to Marxist scholarship in post-

colonial studies is undoubtedly her robust defence of anti-colonial strug-
gle and liberation theory. The notion that anti-colonial nationalisms
are inherently reactionary, nativist, and elitist has gained the status of
a foundational truth in postcolonial literary studies and related fields
over the last thirty years. Certainly, this is primarily due to the severe
limitations of decolonization in the context of a world still dominated
by former colonial powers. But along with the necessary critique of
bourgeois nationalism and shattered dreams, postcolonial literary and
cultural studies, broadly speaking, have developed a lack of interest in
examining what the anti-colonial movements were actually like, even
as they have formulated far-reaching theories of nationalism, subalter-
nity, and postcoloniality. What were the conditions in which the var-
ious anti-colonial struggles and movements emerged? How were they
constituted, and what ideological and social groupings contended for
leadership within them? How do we explain the various global visions of
solidarity and anti-imperialism that emerged consistently amidst these
nation-centred projects of liberation? Such questions, often cast aside in
the field, are necessary components of developing a critical assessment of
anti-colonial struggles and nationalist movements.
Parry’s scholarship, by consistently alerting us to the progressive and
emancipatory dimensions of anti-colonial struggles and rebellious na-
tionalisms, has stood as a beacon for a different position: that inter-
nationalists and anti-imperialists must critically examine anti-colonial
struggle and defend the right of national self-determination. Beyond
challenging the tendency to erase the histories of struggle that has de-
veloped in postcolonial studies, Parry’s specific and detailed engagement
with revolutionaries and revolutions has allowed an investigation into
the possibilities they unleashed, as well as the causes of their demise.
For those seeking to renew and revise Marxist theory and practice to
the realities of the contemporary world, her work is nothing short of
invaluable. For those of my generation, who did not live through the
fire last time, Benita Parry links us to the knowledge and experience of
166 Pranav Jani
leftists and scholars who were much closer to those struggles and whose
consciousness was fundamentally shaped by them.
This essay on the internationalist politics of the Hindustan Ghadar
Party continues my own engagement with the complexity of anti-colonial
struggle and nationalism as it has expressed itself in different political
and cultural registers. Building my argument on archival research and
primary sources, I use the Ghadar Party’s proclamations and acts of
solidarity to deepen our understanding of what anti-colonial struggle
actually was, as well as to suggest how we might use that knowledge to
address larger historical and theoretical questions around anti-colonial
nationalism. My focus here, on the Ghadar Party’s responses to the Irish
Easter Rebellion in 1916 and the Chinese revolution of 1925–1927,
reveals the complex interaction between left-wing anti-colonial voices
and cross-border solidarity. In their unequivocal embrace of Irish and
Chinese rebels, and their repeated exhortations to Indians—especially
those fighting in the British colonial army—to follow their examples, the
Ghadar Party’s version of nationalist and anti-imperialist consciousness
was not only compatible with a transnational vision and internationalist
consciousness but constituted by it.
Investigating the story of the Party’s remarkable political trajectory, I
propose to intervene in two larger discussions. On one level, I show that
analyzing the history of the Ghadar movement—a diasporic, left-leaning
nationalism, rooted in the lives of South Asian workers and students
of the early twentieth century United States—demands a more flexible
methodology than what emerges from the anti- and post-nationalist the-
ories prevalent in postcolonial studies. Marxist understandings of na-
tionalism, underscoring the progressive potential and yet limited visions
of anti-colonial nationalism, can grapple with the complex intersections
of colonial and racial oppression and their expression in anti-colonial,
national struggles. For Marxists and Leninists, the nationalism of the
oppressed is simply not the same as the nationalism of the oppressor.
Second, rather than simply posing “Marxism” as providing the al-
ternative, my examination of the Ghadar Party on Ireland and China
furthers the discussion of the origins of and shifts within the theory
and practice of Marxist internationalism against changing historical
contexts. A cavernous gap lies between the early Bolshevik positions
on Ireland and the Comintern’s guidance to communists during the
Chinese revolution, one that intensified as the Bolsheviks’ critical de-
fence of anti-colonial struggle metamorphosed into the Soviet Union’s
uncritical defence of nationalism and postcolonial nation-states. While
the Ghadar Party support for Chinese anti-colonial nationalism is a sig-
nificant mark of its own internationalism, the crushing of the Chinese
Communist Party in that revolution by the nationalist Guomindang
(GMD, National People’s Party) reminds us that nationalism, even in
its radical versions, is still a limited ideology that gets turned inexorably
Revolutionary Nationalism and Global Horizons 167
against the most marginalized and oppressed. By going to the histories
and debates preceding the rise of “actually existing socialism,” we can
advance from first-level defences of Marxism in postcolonial studies and
move towards clarifying what we actually mean by internationalism and
national liberation. The Ghadar Party is an integral part of that history,
and opens up new ways of understanding it.
The Ghadar Party: A Brief History

An outline of the Ghadar Party’s origins, influence and trajectory is
necessary given the relative silence surrounding it in the academic and
political left outside India. A revolutionary nationalist organization
founded in Oregon and northern California in 1913 by Lala Har Dayal,
Sohan Singh Bhakna, Kanshi Ram and others, the Ghadar Party drew
together expatriate Indian student radicals, labourers, and farmworkers
of the Pacifist West Coast of the US and Canada, connecting their local
struggles against racial injustice to the demand for Indian independence
from Britain. As Harish K. Puri puts it in Ghadar Movement: A Short
History, the Ghadar Party drew from two communities: “Indian im-
migrants, mostly Punjabis and Sikhs…[a]bout 10,000 [of whom] were
working at the time as laborers and farmers,” and “a small number of
political exiles, radical Indian students and intellectuals… [some] asso-
ciated with revolutionary struggles in India and with Indian revolution-
aries abroad” (Puri xii). The slogan emblazoned over the masthead of
the Ghadar newspaper, “Angrezi Raj Ka Dushman” (“The Enemy of
British Raj”), revealed its radicalism; from the beginning, the Ghadar
Party demanded complete independence of India from British rule, a
position that the Indian National Congress only took up in 1929. The
Ghadar Party’s newspapers and magazines, as well as the personal tes-
timonies of its members, reveal the story of an incredibly dedicated and
passionate group that tied its revolutionary visions regarding Indian
freedom to the concerns of Indian workers and students in Canada and
the United States.
The bulk of this article is dedicated to the Ghadar Party’s internation-
alism, projecting ideas of global solidarity with anti-colonial struggles
outside India, while seeing them as absolutely linked to the political proj-
ect of national independence. But it is important to remember, too, that
the party’s concept of “Indian” was itself diasporic and transnational,
explicitly oriented around Indian freedom from British rule but rooted,
at the same time, in the struggles of Indian migrants within the harsh
anti-Asian climate of early twentieth-century North America. Decades
of anti-immigrant sentiment directed at Asian workers, detailed later,
had already led to the establishment of number of temples, associations,
and cultural centres in the Pacific Northwest. The Ghadar Party was
part of these communities and gave them a clearer political expression,
168 Pranav Jani
especially since it founded itself in the US rather than Canada, which,
though a Dominion since 1867, was still subordinate to the British
parliament.
For a number of reasons, however, mainstream historians of Indian
nationalism have minimized the significance of the Ghadar Party. These
reasons include its roots outside of India; its revolutionary perspectives
and communist inclinations; its many strategic failures in attempting
to foment revolt in India; its restriction to Punjabi Sikhs despite its ef-
forts to be all-India, multi-religious and multi-lingual; and perhaps most
importantly, the obliteration of its base due to anti-Asian laws in the
United States that restricted immigration and stifled the growth of the
South Asian community. Some recent work on the Ghadar Party, espe-
cially Maia Ramnath’s Haj to Utopia (2011), is beginning to correct this

lacuna, revealing the Party’s importance as a centre for anti-imperialist,
anti-racist struggle and explaining its place in the larger arc of the liber-
ation movement.
I was initially led to conduct research on the Ghadar Party by my
ongoing work on the 1857 Revolt in British India—in which mutinous
soldiers, impoverished peasants, and deposed rulers, reeling under the
impact of new transitions in colonial economy and government in the
decades after the industrial revolution, organized an insurgency against
the British that lasted for nearly two years. In my research, I investigate
the complex lenses through which this momentous event has come to
be represented and imagined in Indian political consciousness over the
last one hundred and fifty years and more, such that today, mainstream

Indian nationalism embraces both 1857 and Gandhian non-violence
without missing a beat. The Ghadar party has a central role in this
story: from its vantage point we can look back to 1857 and also ahead
to the Indian radicalism of the 1920s and 1930s, in Punjab and beyond.
The party’s association with 1857 is very direct: the word “Ghadar” is
an Urdu word for “revolt” or “revolution” and directly references the
uprising of 1857.1 Revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh and others were
inspired by the Ghadar Party’s militancy and strategy, and many for-
mer Ghadar party members joined the Communist Party and the Kirti
Communists in the years of radicalization in the 1920s and 1930s—a
period of general disillusionment with M.K. Gandhi for calling off the
Non-Cooperation movement in 1922. Focusing on the afterlife of 1857
through entities like the Ghadar Party illuminates the complexity of
anti-colonial ideology and practice, revealing the fluidity of movement,
at the grassroots level, between various strands of the struggle.
When the Ghadar Party does receive mention, it is often with reference
to the leadership of students like Har Dayal and Taraknath Das, who
left India to study in the United States rather than taking the more cele-
brated route to England. A nationalist framework dominates this narra-
tive, in which the migrant, middle-class, male revolutionary temporarily
leaves the homeland in order to foment revolution elsewhere, but with
their mind always on India. This revolutionary is always identified as
“Indian,” and thus a part of Indian, and not US, history. The migrants
themselves often support such a narrative, whether they do in fact return
to India after a few years, or whether they remain abroad by choice or
due to restrictions by British authorities. 2 But as Ramnath and others
have convincingly argued, local contexts within North America had ev-
erything to do with the mobilization of the Ghadar Party. Whether it
was consciously expressed or not, the group was made up by Americans
and Canadians (by birth, by location, by experience) whose activities
for Indian freedom served important ideological, spiritual, and personal
needs in the face of domestic problems of racism and discrimination.
Highlighting this distinctly diasporic aspect of the Ghadar Party serves
not only to show that it was always already transnational in substance
and internationalist in perspective, but also to push against the erasure
of the thousands who immigrated from India to North America in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—by arrangement with
British colonial authorities—to build the railroads, pick the grapes, and
work the assembly lines on the West Coast.
The rise of anti-Asian sentiments across the North American west
coast with regard to Chinese and Japanese workers is well-documented,
manifesting in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the passage of a
growing number of laws to restrict Asian landownership and citizenship
in the ensuing decades, discrimination against Asians in housing, en-
try into restaurants, and employment, and physical violence. Indian mi-
grants, though comprising a smaller number than those from China or
Japan, were trapped in the same dynamics. For instance, on 4 September
1907, in the US state of Washington, hundreds of white men of the Asian
Exclusion League attacked Indian workers to keep them out of the lum-
ber mills—with the support of virulent racism in the media and po-
lice. Indeed, the mainstream union movement as represented by Samuel
Gompers and the American Federation of Labor maintained its affili-
ations with the Asian Exclusion League, which declared that it would
“guard the gateway of Occidental Civilization [the ports of the West
Coast] against Oriental invasion” (Cahn 2018).
Similarly, acts that were effectively Indian exclusion acts were passed
in Canada in 1908, with the support of the British colonial government
in India. The “continuous journey” law stated that any ship coming to
Canada with passengers intending to immigrate had to arrive directly
from their port of origin. Since there was no way any ship could come
directly from India to the Canadian West Coast, this effectively became
a bar against Indian immigration. Tensions in the local community ran
high after these laws were passed. To take one example: on 23 October
1909, in a meeting at the Vancouver Sikh temple, an ex-soldier from the
14th Sikh regiment of the British army tossed away a medal for bravery
170 Pranav Jani
he had won, saying he would no longer wear anything that reminded him
of his subordination to the British (Puri 35). In fact, the temple executive
committee banned medals, buttons, uniforms, and insignia from being
worn as they signified the wearer was “nothing but a slave to British
supremacy” (35). It was in this environment, a little after the found-
ing of the Ghadar Party, that the Komagata Maru incident occurred in
Vancouver in March 1914, reverberating across the world and exposing
the racism and hypocrisy of British and Canadian societies. In order to
challenge the anti-immigration laws, Gurdit Singh hired a Japanese ship,
the Komagata Maru, to sail into Vancouver with three hundred and
seventy-six men, women, and children on board. Canadian authorities
refused to let the majority of passengers to disembark, forcing three hun-
dred and fifty-two people to stay offshore for nearly two months while
community members and racist groups protested on the shore. Food and
water dwindled; disease spread. Finally, led by Canadian gunships, the
Komagata Maru was forced to leave. When they approached Calcutta,
passengers were treated like criminals and searched for arms and sedi-
tious propaganda; a train was prepared to send many directly to Punjab.
Police charged passengers who refused to follow orders, and nineteen
passengers were killed by police in what is known today as the Budge
Budge Riot.3
These are the contexts in which the Indian community, with Sikh
leadership, was mobilized, leading to the formation of the Ghadar
Party in the summer of 1913, a few months before the Komagata Maru
event. The first issue of the party newspaper, Ghadar, was published on
1 November 1913 in San Francisco, thus launching one of the most pro-
lific and far-reaching underground presses in the history of the British
Empire. The fact that Ghadar was published in Gurumukhi, Urdu,
and other Indian languages indicates not only its assertion of cultural
nationalism, but also the needs of its working-class and peasant audi-
ences—and the unique student–worker alliance it was attempting to
forge. The dynamics of the world war pushed the Ghadar Party into
action. Between 1914 and 1918, a few thousand people associated with
the Party entered British India, participating in assassinations, disrupt-
ing commerce, propagandizing the Indian soldiers in the military, and
even planning an insurrection. In all of these cases, plans were either in-
effective or foiled, and conspiracy trials led to executions, deportations,
and imprisonment. Between 1919 and 1922, acts of government repres-
sion and atrocities in India—with the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre chief
among them—galvanized the Ghadar Party into more radical directions,
in tandem with the Non-Cooperation movement in India, the first major
mass struggle in the Gandhian model. Shifts began in the Party that led
to more formal affiliations with communism in a variety of formations.
The impact of the Ghadar party went far beyond its circles in the
United States. While the Ghadar party and its many branches were
extremely decentred, the Ghadar newspaper and related party publica-
tions were found in the hands of diasporic Indians across the world,
from Argentina to Germany to Persia to China, arming a loose network
of revolutionaries with anti-imperialist propaganda that they attempted
to smuggle into British India and, in some cases, that they used to at-
tempt to win over Indian troops in the British army during World War I.
As Gail Omvedt put it in 1974, the Ghadar party was “the most in-
ternational of all Indian revolutionary organizations, with a sphere of
influence that ran quite literally from Stockton, California to Shanghai,
China.”4 British intelligence of the World War I period certainly would
agree with this statement. In MI5’s 1917 list of the most dangerous se-
ditious publications of the period, many of the top publications were
linked directly to the Ghadar press.5
The following quotations from the first issue of Ghadar—translated
by Puri—give a sense of how the Ghadar Party deftly combined nation-
alism, internationalism, and a sense of Punjabi regional identity. The
November 1 issue explicitly positioned the Ghadar movement as part
of a longer historical struggle against the British: “Fifty-six years have
passed since the ghadar of 1857, now there is urgent need of the sec-
ond one” (Puri xii). The editors embraced their diasporic location as a
launching point for contesting colonialism, which meant acknowledging
the politics of language: “Today there begins, in foreign lands but in the
language of the country, a war against English rule” (Puri 72). Lists of
grievances appeared, often in poetry, that tied together the experience
of colonialism in India and racism abroad and turned the accusations
of criminality back on the colonizers: “We are faced with innumera-
ble miseries / We are called coolies and thieves / Wherever we go in
foreign lands we are treated like dogs […] The cruel English nation is
very wicked / They have looted and eaten up India” (Puri 79–80). And
yet despite all-Indian desires, Ghadar frequently spoke as if Sikhs and
Punjabis alone were part of its audience, repeatedly exhorting them to
become die-hard rebels because Punjab owed the nation a great debt.
The following stanzas refer to Punjabi soldiers’ role in taking the side
of the British and suppressing the Revolt of 1857: “The people say the
Singhs [Sikhs] are very bad / Why was the Ghadar of Delhi not joined
/ Why did the Sikh traitors commit such wrongs? […] We fought many
a battle for the Whites / That was a grave mistake brother” (Puri 80).
Deftly moving from regional religious and ethnic identities to national
ones, from experiences in India to the US, from the past to the present,
and doing all of this in local languages that worked across the student–
worker divide, the Ghadar actively created political and affective com-
munities even as it put forward clearly anti-colonial and radical ideas.
The Ghadar Party also operated in other registers beyond the Gha-
dar newspapers, revealing a depth of understanding about their many
audiences—including the US public and the US government. A broadside
172 Pranav Jani
published in 1917 entitled “A Balance Sheet of the British Rule in
I ndia” put forward a theory of colonialism as underdevelopment that
shows the influence of Indian economists like Dadabhai Naoroji and
M.G. Ranade—drawing out the global contexts of Indian exploitation.6
The statement charges that the British “drain from India and take to En-
gland every year 50 crores of rupees (167 million dollars); consequently
the Hindus have become so poor that the daily average income per capita
is only 5 pices (2½ cents).” British rule means that “famines are ever
on the increase”; tens of millions have died from the plague; “disunion
and disorder” is being fomented in the native states (regions ruled by
Indian elites); laws are made that don’t apply to the British when they
are “murdering Hindus [and] insulting Hindu women”; attempts are
“always made to create enmity between people of different religious de-
nominations”; indigenous arts and handicrafts are being destroyed; and
Indian monies and “the lives of Hindus (as soldiers)” are being sacrificed
to conquer “China, Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, and Persia.” Linking
politics, economics, culture, and ideology, the short document offers a
comprehensive vision of the impact of British rule on Indian life while
noting the centrality of India to Britain’s imperial reach.
The principles underlying this articulation of grievances can be gener-
alized across Ghadar Party publications, and might be summarized as:
1
Internationalism: a global vision to mirror the global British Empire
2
Assertion of self-identity: a rejection of racism and discrimination
3
Secularism: Indian nationalism is the common religion
4
Mass organizing: pamphlets, songs, articles that appeal to students
and peasants-turned-workers
5 Militancy: a need for a new 1857, with rebellious Indian soldiers as
key to victory in India and key to national freedom of other countries
With these political perspectives, it is small wonder that after the British
suppression of the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916, photographs of Irish
activists joined those of Indians in the pages of Ghadar, enshrined as
martyrs in the common cause of fighting the British Empire.
Solidarity with Ireland: The Easter Rebellion of 1916

The Ghadar Party’s solidarity with the Irish in Easter Rebellion of 1916
is part of a larger story of unity and collaboration between Indian and
Irish anti-colonial activists, especially in the US. The trajectories of
I ndians and Irish in the early twentieth century were remarkably parallel,
from the founding of revolutionary societies and formations (Anushilan
and Jugantar, Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers), to the debates between
constitutionalists and militants, to the heroic rebellions (Easter 1916
and the Non-Cooperation movement of 1919–1922), to the traumatic
events of the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre (1919) and the conversion of
the Irish War of Independence to a Civil War (1919–1922). Radicals of
both movements also sought the aid of Germany for arms and funds in
resisting the British, with mixed results. Both Indian and Irish activists
recognized such parallels and referred to them in speeches and pam-
phlets, but, as Michael Silvestri argues in Ireland and India, it was in
the United States that the most direct collaboration between Indian and
Irish radicals occurred. The many Irish republican supporters in the US
gave material assistance to Indian anti-colonial activists, especially in es-
tablishing the Friends of Freedom for India (FFI) in New York. The visit
of republican leader Éamon de Valera to the US in 1919–1920 in order
to raise funds for the War of Independence, and his speech on “Ireland
and India” at a grand FFI dinner in New York, perhaps represented the
high point of Indian–Irish unity—which underwent a significant decline
after the partition of Ireland in 1922.7
The Ghadar Party and affiliated individuals are part of the story of
these Indian–Ireland associations. Here I will highlight two aspects
of Ghadar Party solidarity with Ireland: their coverage of the Easter
R ising in the Ghadar newspaper, and their meeting to honor de Valera
in San Francisco on 21 July 1919. The first set of articles displays the
Party’s unquestioning stance of support for the Irish, and seeks to use
their experience as a lesson for Indians. The meeting with de Valera
roots that international solidarity back into the US context, as it opens
up a discussion about the complex relationship between Irish and I ndian
labour in the US. If we understand that the Ghadar Party was not just
an organization for Indian freedom but also for the self-expression of
I ndians in the United States against racism and prejudice, these two as-
pects of solidarity with Ireland can be drawn together more closely.
The dramatic events of the Easter Rebellion in Dublin in 1916 have
become enshrined both in the official nationalist narratives of the Re-
public of Ireland and in the histories of anti-colonial activists and rev-
olutionaries throughout the world. Although the actual uprising lasted
only from April 24–29, with the British military eventually overwhelm-
ing the band of rebels, the brutal execution of the leadership inspired
Irish anti-colonial organizing on a large scale. Images of the socialist
James Connolly of the Irish Citizen Army, who while being shot was
strapped to a chair to make him sit upright despite his injuries, continue
to grace the murals of Belfast to this day. But the impact of the rebellion
and counterinsurgency among anti-colonial activists was electric far be-
yond Ireland, including within the Indian diaspora. In India, the British
banned the New India magazine after their May 1916 issue praised lead-
ers like Patrick Pearse and Connolly and “blamed the British imperial
‘ruling caste’ for the rebellion” (Silvestri 51). Indians studying in Ireland
at the time of the uprising were quite sympathetic—like V.V. Giri, later
President of India, who said he “felt great affinity for the Irish who were
174 Pranav Jani
also chaffing under British rule, suffering from very similar problems as
Indians” (9). In the US, the Ghadar Party was already familiar with the
European radicals who came through their meetings, whether they were
“Irish ghadari” or “Roosi [Russian] ghadari” (Puri 81). Small wonder
that after the 1916 uprising, their paper was full of reporting on Ireland.
10 May 1916 was the fifty-ninth anniversary of the 1857 uprising,
and an article on the Revolt appeared in Ghadar under the headline:
“No freedom without sacrifice.”8 It needs to be understood that such
open support for the 1857 struggle by Indians were extremely rare, given
the tremendous repression unleashed by the British state. But under this
rubric, the Ghadar issue was able to combine its commemoration of
1857 with its defence of the Easter Rising. In a news report entitled
“The Victory of the Irish,” the paper editorialized: “England is filled
with fear—English officers [are] dishonored […] The patriots have been
overwhelmed by an army. Their lives were promised if they laid down
their arms—but true to her lying deceit [England] shot, hanged, and
imprisoned her trusting victims….” On May 24, an article stated: “The
blood of martyrs is not wasted. The Irish Nationalists who have sought
to liberate their country have again fallen under the power of the tyrant
Government…. But … every crop was as seed sown which has produced
many harvests.” Arguing against nonviolent measures to pressure the
British, the Ghadar article pressed India to follow the Irish example,
saying, “From 1857 to 1907 fifty years passed; in that period what has
India got from the British Government? Slavery.” But the Irish upris-
ing was pressuring legislative change, and all are now being taught that
“these tyrants fear revolution, and hasten to make promises” to the peo-
ple. The Ghadar paper, in a May 31 article called “England’s Deceit,”
pushed further similarities on how England sought to turn the blame
on the Irish and Indians themselves: “When Ireland complains England
explains that the trouble is all attributable to Roman Catholicism on the
one hand and Protestantism on the other. When troubles arise in India it
is found convenient to seek the disturbing cause in religion.” The paper
thus outlined the parallels, but also pointed to its own usefulness as a
voice for secularism: “The ‘Ghadar’ has taught Americans the real truth
of the situation.”
The Ghadar Party’s engagement with Irish anti-colonial radicals
continued years after 1916, until the partition of Ireland in 1922
transformed the India–Ireland relationship. Perhaps the most con-
crete manifestation of this solidarity occurred on 21 July 1919, when
Jagat Singh and Gopal Singh of the Ghadar Party presented Éamon de
Valera with an engraved sword and a silk flag of Ireland upon his visit
to San Francisco. In a statement, the Ghadar Party noted the parallel
experiences of Indians and Irish under colonialism and showed appre-
ciation for Irish labour unions standing up for Indian workers against
deportation, especially the California Convention of the Friends of Irish
Freedom for unanimously adopting “a resolution of protest against the
proposed deportation of several of our country men into the hands of
a British firing squad in India.”9 This incident, in fact, opens the door
to an alternative, submerged current in the story of white–Asian labour
relations on the West Coast in the early twentieth century, a period that
was otherwise dominated by anti-Asian racism from workers and from
the government. That anti-colonial solidarity brought about such a mo-
ment of labor solidarity speaks to both the transnational potential em-
bedded in anti-colonial nationalisms and the importance of the G hadar
Party’s internationalist politics.
As we will see with the Ghadar Party’s overtures to the Chinese
anti-colonial nationalists, the extent of their understanding of the ten-
sions and contradictions among the Irish nationalists is not always clear.
There was a definitive decline in relationships between Indian and Irish
revolutionaries in the US overall, certainly, after the Civil War and Par-
tition of Ireland violently divided former Irish comrades themselves.
The Chittagong Armoury Raid in 1930, modelled very closely after the
Easter Rebellion of 1916, suggests, I argue tentatively, that Indian revo-
lutionaries often venerated the passion of the Irish anti-colonial struggle
without interrogating the specific political debates and social forces op-
erating within the movement. But of course these social and ideological
dynamics are key if we are talking about a more complete liberation.
In both Ireland and India, sectarianism—and encouragement of it by
the various nationalist elites—blunted the revolutionary potential of the
movements.
The Ghadar Party and the Chinese Revolution:

1925–1927
China was always included in the Ghadar Party’s conceptual maps of
British imperialism, along with Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, and Persia.
But the Ghadar Party’s interest in the Chinese revolution of 1925–1927
is marked by a specific circumstance: the presence of (Punjabi) Indians in
the British Army. As stated in the very first issue of Ghadar, mentioned
earlier, the Ghadar Party saw its task as fomenting another nationalist
uprising, centred on the mutiny of Indian soldiers, that would lead to a
revolution in India. While the Party did not have the means of carry-
ing off a coordinated mutiny, records show that Shanghai was one of
the many places around the world where Ghadar cells operated, linking
a radicalizing Indian diaspora through various publications.10 Ghadar
sympathizers in China circulated pamphlets like Hindustan Ghadar
Dhandora among Indian soldiers in the British Army, exhorting them
to refuse to fight against the Chinese uprising (Puri 163). Throughout
176 Pranav Jani
the 1925–1927 revolution, the Ghadar Party therefore recognized the
legitimacy of the uprising of the Chinese against the foreign powers that
continued to dominate China after the nationalist revolution of 1911
and the formation of a Republic.
The Ghadar Party does not seem to have made the crucial differen-
tiation between the Guomindang (GMD) nationalists under Chiang
Kai-shek and those organized under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),
active since 1920 amidst mass student demonstrations and growing work-
ers’ agitation. Indeed, the CCP and the Communist International (Com-
intern) themselves debated over the question—the GMD was admitted
into the Comintern with great fanfare in 1926, for instance—but while
there were different shifts in the relationship, the Chinese communists
subordinated themselves to the GMD, in the main, and paid dearly for it.
Leon Trotsky’s fierce and visible criticism of Comintern policy through-
out this period (his was the sole vote opposed to the GMD inclusion into
the Comintern) reveals the Chinese Revolution as a key historical site for
examining the shifts within Bolshevik policy on nationalism through the
1920s, as well as the overall trend towards subordinating revolutionary
politics to nationalist mobilizations.11
Indeed, the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Chinese Revolution of
1925–1927 were both crucial moments for the development and prac-
tical testing of Bolshevik theories of critically defending anti-colonial
nationalism. Whereas Lenin had already come to the position of de-
fending anti-colonial nationalism by 1914, and expressed this more fully
around the Zimmerwald Conference the next year, his July 1916 essay
on self-determination, drawing much from the Irish rebellion, was cen-
tral to the future position of the Bolsheviks and the Comintern, namely,
to critically defend anti-colonial nationalism while building the indepen-
dent workers’ movement.12 The Chinese Revolution—in which workers
were betrayed and slaughtered by the GMD in April 1927 after staging
some of the most dramatic actions of the revolution—represents an early
example of the Comintern’s rejection of its own commitments to work-
ers’ revolution as opposed to radical nationalism. This passage from
Article 11, passed at the Comintern’s Second World Congress in 1920,
which included representatives from six Asian nations outside the former
Tsarist regime, encapsulates that position:
A determined fight is necessary against the attempt to put a commu-

nist cloak around revolutionary liberation movements that are not
really communist in the backward [sic] countries […] The Commu-
nist International should accompany the revolutionary movement in
the colonies and the backward countries for part of the way, should
even make an alliance with it; it may not, however, fuse with it,
but must unconditionally maintain the independent character of the
proletarian movement, be it only in embryo.
(Comintern, “Minutes”)
The Chinese Revolution might be seen as the beginning of a pattern,
lasting through the Cold War, where Comintern put aside this direc-
tive, placing a “communist cloak” over all sorts of national liberation
movements and independent nation-states, sacrificing any pretence of
defending the “independent character” of workers’ movements stifled by
nationalist elites and postcolonial regimes. Study of the Chinese revolu-
tion needs to be incorporated much more into understandings of nation-
alism and subaltern struggle in postcolonial studies, due to its massive
scope (involving hundreds of thousands over two years), its clear illus-
trations of the power and pitfalls of anti-colonial nationalism, and its
impact on radicalizing movements across the world in the tumultuous
times of the interwar years.
In any event, the Ghadar Party expressed its internationalist poli-
tics through efforts to radicalize the Indian soldier, the transnational
subaltern-in-arms whose labour was being used to suppress Chinese lib-
eration, to strengthen the British, and, consequently, to tighten the noose
around India’s own neck. According to the Ghadar Party, Indians ought
to emulate the Chinese and fight the British, refusing to be the tools for
imperial conquest. In doing so, in fact, Indians would recover their own
anti-colonial legacy, expressed in the mutinies and popular rebellions of
1857. As apparent from the reporting of British intelligence officials, the
Ghadar Party incessantly proclaimed these positions at every forum. An
important Ghadar Party meeting in Marysville, California on 16 August
1925 passed a resolution as follows: “This meeting of Indians heartily
sympathizes with the Chinese in the struggle for freedom and views with
hatred the notion of the Indian Police in firing upon the Chinese.”13
Attendees were instructed to argue with fellow Punjabis that they should
refuse to join the army or go to China. A 1927 issue of the Ghadar stated:
“Indians should regard with the greatest sympathy the struggle of the
Chinese against the foreign oppressors, and should refuse emphatically
to take any part in assisting British military designs in China. England’s
difficulties in China should furnish a golden opportunity to Ghadarites
to show their worth.”14 A February 1927 article addressed to Indian
soldiers in China was much more direct, saying, “[T]he good Chinese
who love their country are fighting for the freedom of their own country!
If you are not prepared to bear some sacrifice in fighting for your own
country, why do you go to another country to die like dogs? […] Why do
you go from country to country to sacrifice yourselves […]? Save your-
selves from the English tyrants!”15 The Ghadar Party intertwined inter-
nationalism and national pride: being truly Indian meant supporting the
Chinese revolution in every way.
Addressing the Chinese in much more formal political language, the
Ghadar Party stated:
We wish to send her message of deep sympathy towards the national

liberation movement of China. Our party wishes the people of China
178 Pranav Jani
to know that India is with China heart and soul. We urge upon all
the Hindustanis in China to cooperate with the nationalist forces
of China. We consider any Hindu a traitor to India if he fires up on
the Chinese on behalf of British imperialism…[W]e shall carry out
our sacred duties and she’ll cooperate with our Chinese comrades in
every way to destroy British imperialism.16
The impact of the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath is clearly dis-
cernable in this manifesto: the terms “national liberation,” “imperial-
ism,” and “comrades” leap off the page in a decade that saw the global
proliferation of Communist Parties and Communist-affiliated forma-
tions like the League Against Imperialism, bringing together a much
wider group of anti-imperialists and nationalists. Once again, the for-
mulation that one who opposes China is a “traitor to India” is simul-
taneously internationalist and nationalist, appealing to those for whom
Indian identity comes first. In the following passage from the same man-
ifesto, there is an overlap between this nationalist audience and a general
one that ought to defend China and India for the cause of humanity
itself: “The victory of the Chinese revolution means the victory of the
movement for the freedom of India. To check the extension of British im-
perialism which is the cradle of imperialism and capitalism of the world,
it should be the sacred duty of every human being to fight the fight of
China and India.”
As Maia Ramnath argues in From Haj to Utopia, the Ghadar proj-
ect moved through various phases, from syndicalism to nationalism to
communism, and their comments on China often reflect these different
trends together. Ghadar activists and references to the Ghadar move-
ment appear again and again in the history of anti-colonial struggle:
Bhagat Singh studied the movement and worked with Ghadar support-
ers around the Kirti magazine in Punjab, Ghadar Communists contested
Punjab Legislative Assembly elections in 1937, Subhas Chandra Bose’s
Indian National Army reflected the Ghadar call for mutinied of Indian
soldiers, and the Naxalite movement too has remembered Ghadar he-
roes (Puri 157–161). Nationalist and internationalist, effective and yet
utopian, the Ghadar Party demands much more attention from the
scholarly and activist left.
Bolshevism, Imperialism, and National Independence

The Indian, Irish, and Chinese anti-colonial movements in the first two
decades of the twentieth century revealed both the potential and the lim-
its of anti-colonial nationalism and were quite significant in shaping the
perspectives of the international Marxist left on this question. Here, I
examine key Bolshevik perspectives and debates on imperialism and na-
tionalism from 1916 to 1922, as referred to earlier, in order to show how
carefully they attempted to respond to the actions, words, and needs
of these and other anti-colonial actions and activists. The documents
demonstrate how difficult it is to balance principles of internationalism
and mass-orientation while engaging practically with struggles against
national oppression—which inherently involve contradictory class inter-
ests and are often affiliated with dominant religious, ethnic, and cul-
tural ideologies. Nevertheless, I maintain, these discussions also reveal a
shared understanding that uncritically adapting to existing anti-colonial
nationalist sentiments and formations spells the death of any revolution-
ary project. All of this changed fundamentally as Stalinism emerged to
“solve” the problem of an isolated revolution in impoverished Russia and
turned to state-led modernization and development on national lines.
The failed Comintern policy during the Chinese revolution was a sign
of what was to come: socialist internationalism came to be understood
not as the solidarity of workers of the world against their bosses, but the
solidarity of nation-states that found themselves within and around the
Soviet orbit.
The historic failure of this revolutionary moment, and not the failure
of theory as such, has led to the crisis in current left thinking on im-
perialism and nationalism. Whereas the academic left tends to dismiss
nationalism outright, the political left has often defended authoritarian
and oppressive movements and regimes that are positioned against US
and Western imperialist policy. The stakes of this discussion are very
high. The failure of the international left, generally speaking, regarding
Syria and Bashar al-Assad’s brutality against his own people will haunt
us for many decades, to say the least. But this is only one instance of the
left getting weak at the knees for any nation-state or formation that uses
anti-Western and anti-imperialist rhetoric to justify its actions and pol-
icies. Returning to and assessing the Bolshevik debates on these issues
allows us to recalibrate our compasses.
The Bolshevik position had three elements: (1) opposing colonialism
and imperialism as central aspects of capitalism’s growth, (2) defending
anti-colonial struggles and national self-determination, and (3) critically
approaching anti-colonial struggles and national ruling classes, as they
may be hostile to mass agitation for social revolution. These perspectives
emerged out of a history shaped not only by imperialism but also by the
struggles against it. Imperialist aggression and anti-colonial uprisings
leading up to World War I forced debates and splits within European
Marxists, leading to the formation of the Third International. In “So-
cialism and War,” the pamphlet that helped precipitate the split, Lenin
polemicized against socialists who defended “their own fatherland” in
this “just” war against aggression from another nation. Instead, Lenin
argued, “if tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, India on
England, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be ‘just,’
‘defensive’ wars, irrespective of who attacked first; and every Socialist
180 Pranav Jani
would sympathize with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal
states against the oppressing, slave-owning, predatory ‘great’ powers”
(“Socialism and War”). Indeed, the target of much Bolshevik agitation
in the World War I period was the racist and imperialist attitudes within
European Marxism.
Essays like “The Discussion of Self Determination Summed Up”
(1916) clarified further that anti-imperialism also meant defending the
rights of nations to self-determination. Here, Lenin looks to the Easter
Rising of 1916 and defends it as a step forward against capitalism and
for freedom, despite its weaknesses. Going through the history of the
“centuries-old Irish national movement” and its mass character, Lenin
suggests that the struggle against national oppression ought to be un-
derstood as part of larger, dynamic, and heterogeneous revolutionary
process—and to fail to grasp this point is to severely misunderstand rev-
olution itself:
To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by

small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary
outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices,
without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian
and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners,
the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc.—
to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. So one army
lines up in one place and says, “We are for socialism”, and another,
somewhere else and says, “We are for imperialism”, and that will
he a social revolution!…Whoever expects a “pure” social revolution
will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution
without understanding what revolution is.
(Lenin, “The Discussion”)
In the global and highly differentiated system of capitalism, resistance

will always be multi-faceted and “impure.” It is important, Lenin con-
tends, to take a position against national, religious, and other oppres-
sions, while understanding the variety of social and ideological forces
and interests also involved in fighting them.
Repeatedly, as in the previous citation, we find that the Bolshevik de-
fence of anti-colonial struggle and national self-determination was not
merely a policy position, but one that was integral to core principles—
and in fact, helped to articulate those principles. Thus “The Revolution-
ary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1915)
exhibits some of Lenin’s best writings on defending democracy and free
speech as essential reforms to win under capitalism. Demands like “a re-
public, a militia, the popular election of officials, equal rights for women,
the self-determination of nations, etc.” are important to support, Lenin
argues, even though “[w]hile capitalism exists, these demands—all of
them—can only be accomplished…in an incomplete and distorted form”
(“The Revolutionary Proletariat”). Rather than either dismissing demo-
cratic reforms or equating them with liberation, Lenin argues for these
reforms and for political revolutions as opening up a process that could
potentially open up into deeper realms of freedom.
In showing that the defence of national self-determination was inter-
twined with the broader struggle against capitalism, Lenin was expand-
ing from Marx’s own insights about Irish colonialism—which changed,
in fact, after Marx’s own practical experience in defending Fenian polit-
ical prisoners in the late 1860s. In 1869, Marx wrote to Engels:
it is in the direct and absolute interests of the English working class

to get rid of their present connexion with Ireland […] For a long
time I believed it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime
by English working class ascendancy… Deeper study has now con-
vinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never ac-
complish anything before it has got rid of Ireland.
(Marx, Letter to Engels; emphasis in original)
Similarly arguing that the colonization of Ireland and the fomenting of

anti-Irish racism was crucial to both the material and ideological arsenal
of the English capitalists, Marx wrote in a 1870 letter that it was the
“central task” of revolutionary and labour leaders “to make the English
workers realize that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is
not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first
condition of their own social emancipation” (Marx, Letter to Meyer
and Vogt; emphasis in original). Rather than a mechanical model of
revolution and struggle in which the English workers’ struggle against
English capital was primary, Marx began to see the struggles against
colonialism in Ireland and capitalism in England as part of one process.
The Bolshevik position on national liberation developed these initial
thoughts much further and put them into practice by actively engaging
with anti-colonial revolutionaries themselves.
One such revolutionary was the ubiquitous and prolific Indian Com-
munist M.N. Roy, whose contributions to developing the Bolshevik
position on critically defending anti-colonial struggles were quite sig-
nificant. Roy’s “Supplementary Theses on the National and Colonial
Questions” were presented alongside and in debate with Lenin’s “Draft
Theses on the National and Colonial Questions” at the Second Congress
of the Comintern in 1920. Both sets of theses, amended over the course
of the dialogue, were accepted by the Congress (Riddell); while they
shared basic principles, their different locations in relation to imperi-
alism changed their points of emphasis. For instance, Lenin’s thesis on
why Marxists ought to defend “bourgeois-democratic liberation move-
ments” in the colonies was amended to read “revolutionary liberation
182 Pranav Jani
movements” given Roy’s analysis of what was happening in India and
elsewhere (Comintern “Minutes”).
The Moscow Congress took place while the Non-Cooperation move-
ment (1919–1922), the first mass movement under the leadership of
Gandhi, was ongoing in British India. In Roy’s theses, which speak of
anti-colonial movements in general, one can hear the emerging critique
of Indian revolutionaries of Gandhian tactics and strategy:
Two movements can be discerned [in anti-colonial struggles] which

are growing further and further apart with every day that passes.
One of them is the bourgeois-democratic nationalist movement,
which pursues the programme of political liberation with the conser-
vation of the capitalist order; the other is the struggle of the property-
less peasants for their liberation from every kind of exploitation. The
first movement attempts, often with success, to control the second;
the Communist International must however fight against any such
control, and the development of the class consciousness of the work-
ing masses of the colonies must consequently be directed towards the
overthrow of foreign capitalism.
(Roy)
The contradiction of class interests within the anti-colonial struggle

ought to be emphasized very clearly from the beginning, Roy argues. His
warning that the bourgeois-nationalist movement “attempts, often with
success, to control the second” is a perfect description of what happened
in British India, as the Indian National Congress gained hegemony over
the movement, marginalized leadership from subaltern classes, enabled
the growth of sectarianism, and marched towards the establishment
of a modern capitalist state under Indian control—even as the Muslim
League manipulated real fears of sectarian violence to carve out a na-
tional space for the Muslim bourgeoisie.
While I read the Lenin–Roy debate as a mark of the Comintern’s
democratic culture at the time, Kris Manjapra seems to suggest, in his
wonderful work on Roy’s life and commitments, that Roy’s call for a
mass line came from outside Bolshevism, representing a fusing of Marx-
ism with a radical Swadeshi modernism that contested the Comintern’s
Eurocentric focus on the Western-educated leaders of Indian and other
anti-colonial struggles (43–44). Manjapra’s otherwise astute reading
freezes the Bolsheviks into the category of “Eurocentrism” without ask-
ing why, then, the Comintern would accept Roy’s theses and orientation
whole-heartedly. In fact, the debate about how Marxists ought to relate
to nationalism, Pan-Islamism, and other political and ideological forma-
tions is quite complicated, especially since the Bolsheviks made delib-
erate efforts to include voices from anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and
anti-racist struggles in many forums, including the Second Congress of
the Comintern (July-August 1920), the First Congress of the Peoples of
the East in Baku (September 1920, drawing close to 2,000 participants
representing twenty-five Asian peoples), and the Fourth Congress of the
Comintern (November–December 1922). The involvement of many led
to a proliferation of rich debates around the need for better understand-
ing struggles and the practical problems involved in putting theory into
practice. In the Fourth Congress, for instance, the Comintern (1) ad-
opted resolutions on Black liberation for the first time after speeches by
US Black radicals like Claude McKay, (2) contended with a questioning
of the Comintern’s critique of Pan-Islamism by Indonesian Communist
Tan Malaka, and (3) sharply censured Europeans in the British and
French colonies who were setting up segregated Communist organiza-
tions, asserting that “[a]ny attempt to build Communist organizations
on ethnic lines contradicts the principle of proletarian internationalism”
(Comintern “Theses on the Eastern Question”).
Stalinism, Nationalism, and Postcolonial Nation-States

Gradually, however, with the ascent of Stalinism and the predominance
of the “socialism in one country” idea that Stalin had first put forward
in 1924, the Comintern began looking to build alliances with the na-
tional bourgeoisie of countries battling imperialism, subordinating the
struggle of workers and peasants to parties led by their direct class ene-
mies.17 The Comintern’s debacle with the GMD in China, as described
previously, was the beginning of this shift, which hardened as the Soviet
Union joined the Allies in World War II and developed fully as the Cold
War began. The fact that Roy himself was one of the leading Comintern
envoys to China, along with Mikhail Borodin, reveals the disjuncture
sharply. As we have seen, Roy participated in shaping core Comintern
principles in 1920, especially the need to be watchful about the nation-
alist parties, yet in the midst of a revolutionary situation and changed
historical circumstances, he often pursued contradictory policies that
went against those principles.
Was Roy responsible for Chinese communists’ adaptation to nation-
alism? While the history of these years is quite complex, outlining Roy’s
position helps to illustrate the challenges involved in putting theory to
practice. Roy’s report to the Comintern after the failure in China em-
phasized that while he and Borodin made the policy of critical collab-
oration with the GMD very clear, the Chinese Communist Party was
too young and experienced to grasp it. “For collaboration they substi-
tuted capitulation,” wrote Roy, and they failed to take an independent
line from the GMD (North and Eudin 127). Manjapra supports Roy’s
self-presentation, saying that Roy kept to his mass line in China: touring
villages, pushing for a radical agrarian line in the programme, and even
making “contact with the Sikh community in Hankow, and distributing
184 Pranav Jani
anti-British literature in Shanghai among the sizable number of British
India troops stationed there” (80).18 Nevertheless, in practice the CCP
did not take a position of encouraging the self-organization of work-
ers and peasants who were challenging the nationalists; rather, they
depended on a left formation within the GMD. Manjapra blames the
conservatism of Borodin for this, but acknowledges Mao’s comment that
there was hardly a difference between Borodin and Roy at this time,
despite rhetorical differences (80).
North and Eudin point to a deeper problem: it was not so much the
question of party politics (should the CCP enter the GMD or not) but the
impact of such decisions on the social forces involved. Agrarian revolts
and strikes were pushing the revolution forward, but their landlords and
bosses actively suppressed them—and the GMD was their party. The
CCP could not give definitive expression to them while locked inside
GMD frameworks. According to North and Eudin, who frequently cite
CCP Politburo member Ts’ai Ho-Sen and other Chinese leaders, Roy
was offering contradictory policies, calling for arming peasants and
workers against repressive (and nationalist) landlords and capitalists
while orienting around battles within the GMD. But “‘[r]evolution from
above’ could not be combined with ‘revolution from below’ without
dangerous confusion and risk of disaster” (North and Eudin 128). In
his introduction to Harold Isaacs’ The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolu-
tion (1938), Trotsky sees this contradictory policy as emanating from
an over-confident Soviet bureaucracy that valued a top-down model of
orchestrating revolutions over the dynamism of the masses themselves,
holding them back while promoting the Chinese nationalists: “Armed
by the authority of the October Revolution and the Communist Interna-
tional, not to mention inexhaustible financial resources, the bureaucracy
transformed the young Chinese Communist Party from a motive force
into a brake at the most important moment of the revolution.” In any
event, Roy’s standing in Moscow sharply declined, and he became the
scapegoat for a confused policy emanating from Moscow itself.
Any steady and consistent position on coalitions with anti-colonial
nationalists and/or other reform-oriented groups more broadly soon dis-
appeared. The Comintern lurched from (1) the ultra-left “Third Period”
line of 1928, completely refusing to work with any and all reformists,
to (2) the “Popular Front” line of 1934, allowing even the merging of
Communists within liberal organizations, to (3) the “people’s war” line,
muting criticism of US racism and British and French imperialism as the
Soviet Union joined the Allies in World War II. Whatever the inconsis-
tencies of these policies were, however, they all shared one idea: an in-
ternational policy that was oriented towards the needs of Moscow. The
consequences of this orientation were severe, including the exodus of
Black radicals from the CPUSA and the isolation of Indian communists
from the massive Quit India movement of 1942. As the Cold War began
and decolonization across Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean became a re-
ality, Third World nation-states, and not the agrarian and urban work-
ers within them, became the targets of international affiliation.
The earlier Comintern debates featured different positions on how
critical Marxists ought to be towards the various strands within the
fights against national oppression, not whether to be critical or not. Af-
ter World War II, “national liberation,” spoken of as a stage to social-
ism, effectively became a substitute for socialist revolution itself. Labels
like “African socialism,” and “Arab socialism,” for example, helped to
justify the formation of new capitalist nation-states within or around the
Soviet orbit, as their ruling classes used the mantle of the hard-fought
political victory against colonialism to justify their policies. But the
problem is not only one of theory or principle, but of the unevenness
of development of capitalism itself. While the working class in an un-
derdeveloped region is crucial to anti-colonial and nationalist agitation
and victory, the same problem of underdevelopment forces a weak and
nervous nationalist middle-class, owning relatively little capital, to wield
centralized state power to build its base. Any self-organized, militant
group separate from the state—whether made up of workers, peasants,
women, and/or other marginalized groups—is seen as a threat. It is
small wonder, then, that the national bourgeoisie coming into power
activates the people, who were always looking for much more than po-
litical independence. But when the left politically and materially sup-
ports those nationalist ruling classes and not the independent agitation
of oppressed groups under their thumbs and boots, they do the work
of the bourgeoisie. Marxists can and should ask critical questions of
scholars of postcolonial and ethnic studies who peremptorily dismiss all
nationalisms. However, explicit or tacit left support for oppressive, one-
party regimes—from African, Asian, and Latin American “socialisms”
to Eastern European dictatorships—hardly answers the questions these
critics are asking.
The minimizing of class inequalities within postcolonial nation-states
informs many of the frameworks we commonly use to understand im-
perialism today. The terms “Global North” and “Global South,” for
instance, effectively describe the international hierarchy of nation-states
but do little to help us analyze the ways in which “southern” ruling
classes work hand-in-glove with imperialism to crush rebellion within
their nations and often forge sub-imperialist regimes to boot. As I argued
in my review of Vijay Prashad’s powerful book The Poorer Nations, for
instance, Prashad draws out the imperialist contexts that have sharply
limited postcolonial development, yet “leaves readers with a sense that
when the southern ruling classes fight northern ones, they are fighting
heroic struggles on behalf of the entire Global South, and that when they
are defeated, they have been pushed towards anti-people policies against
their will” (Jani, “The Destruction”). However tentatively, Prashad
186 Pranav Jani
suggests that the BRICS formation (Brazil–Russia–India–China–South
Africa) represents an alternative for the peoples of the oppressed na-
tions: “The BRICS have their own commitments to neoliberal policies,
but they are no longer willing to bend before imperial power…. This
represents a green shoot in an arid desert” (Prashad 12). But what do
the working classes of the postcolonial world stand to gain from such
allegiances and exchanges? There is a soft spot for state-led economic
development in the work of many left scholars—especially after the rav-
ages of n
eoliberalism—that can lead them right back into the arms of
postcolonial elites, who often use anti-imperialist language to cast their
struggles with rival capitalist classes in terms of older anti-imperialist
struggles.
Benita Parry and Postcolonial Studies

Benita Parry’s scholarship serves as a bridge out to such larger debates
within the Marxist left about nationalism and imperialism, beyond the
limited scope of discussion in postcolonial literary studies. Even when
focused on a first-level defence of anti-colonial nationalism against the
intransigence of postcolonial theorists on the question, Parry’s work
emerges from deep knowledge of historic anti-colonial struggles and
the ideas motivating them that just are not common currency any-
more, whether in the scholarly or the activist left. Take, for instance,
her article “Liberation Theory: Variations on Themes of Marxism and
Modernity” (2004), published as Chapter 5 of Postcolonial Studies: A
Materialist Critique. In one section of the article, Parry cites Kwame
Nkrumah (Ghana), Thomas Sankara (Burkina Faso), Samora Machel
(Mozambique), and Amilcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau) to show how a
range of activists/leaders/politicians recognized the dangers of conflat-
ing national liberation with socialism, criticizing everything from neoco-
lonialism and complicity of the Black ruling classes, to the dangers of the
blurring of classes in the struggle, to the limits of “spontaneity” when it
led in reactionary directions, to elitist vanguardism. Rather than merely
voicing empty slogans to give radical credentials to nationalist move-
ments, Parry suggests, these leaders were themselves aware of the di-
sastrous directions anti-colonial struggles could take. Be that as it may,
what is evident across Parry’s article is a certain constraint: the writer
is aware that there is such a paucity of knowledge about the struggles
she is talking about that their contexts and the statements of their main
participants have to be detailed before even beginning a theoretical dis-
cussion about their limits. The first time I read Parry, I admit, I had to
look up many of the struggles and parties she was referring to because
they simply did not exist in my academic or political universe at the time.
When we move past this first level defence of nationalism, which in-
volves relating basic empirical and biographical data about movements,
leaders, and dynamics, we can ask further and deeper questions: what
happens to questions of Marxism, nationalism, and socialism, for in-
stance, when China and the Soviet Union take opposite sides in the
struggle in Angola? What do we make of the Soviet Union’s support of
Indira Gandhi while she is crushing communists in India, and what im-
pact does this have on “actually existing socialism”? How can we learn
from the brilliance of Amilcar Cabral’s writings on national liberation
and his party’s remarkable efforts at combining political and social lib-
eration, while also grappling with the fact that Guinea-Bissau took ex-
actly the same neoliberal path as so many other, far less radical African
nations? What happens when we combine these political and theoretical
questions with social history, incorporating a knowledge of mass par-
ticipation in nationalist struggle—from workers’ struggle to women’s
independent organizing—while rejecting nationalist historiography?
My brief sketch of the Ghadar Party’s international positions in the
context of their material roots in the US and the global context of revo-
lutions and revolutionary thought is a contribution to this second-level
analysis of nationalism and internationalism in postcolonial studies. In
this I am indebted to the work of Parry, as well as the small but steady
stream of Marxists in postcolonial studies who have refused to forget
the richness of struggles in the past, while also pushing research for-
ward by always linking it back to history, to the activity of the colonized
themselves.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Rashmi Varma for her support of this work, as well
as to participants in three 2015 forums where I presented some of this
material: the South Asian Literary Association conference (Vancou-
ver), the “Race, Place, and Capital” symposium (Bloomington), and the
Féile an Phobail (Belfast). Research at the Bancroft Library at the Uni-
versity of California Berkeley (2013) and the British Library in L
ondon
(2011, 2015) was made possible by a faculty research grant from the
Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State
University, as well as faculty research funds from the E nglish Depart-
ment at Ohio State.
Notes
1 “Gadar” is also a common alternative spelling.
2 The US connections of revolutionaries who spent most of their lives in I ndia
often go unnoticed, but were often quite important to their politicization.
See my article on Jayaprakash Narayan, “Bihar, California, and the US
Midwest.”
3 Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finally delivered a formal apology
for the Komagata Maru incident in May 2016.
188 Pranav Jani
4 South Asians in North America Collection. BANC MSS 2002/78 cz, Box 4.
5 British Library. MSS EUR/E288/1.
6 South Asians in North America Collection. BANC MSS 2002/78 cz,
Box 2, #335.
7 See Silvestri (36–37) for analysis of de Valera’s speech.
8 The translations from Ghadar in this paragraph are taken from British in-
telligence reports, which meticulously document all Ghadar activities. Cf.
British Library, MSS EUR/E288/3.
9 South Asians in North America Collection. BANC MSS 2002/78 cz, Box 2,
#355. Cited in “India in Revolt” by Ed Gammons.
10 Cf. British Library, MSS EUR/E288/1 and IOR/L/PJ/7/1086 (25 Jun 1936-
17 Feb 1942).
11 Cf. Isaacs, North and Eudin, and Trotsky.
12 See later for further discussion of this essay.
13 British Library, IOR/L/PJ/12/754, cited in a October 13, 1925 report from
G.H.H. Willis, Home Department, Government of India. Willis includes
an excerpt from Desh Sevak (“Servant of the Nation”), a newspaper in
Jalandhar, Punjab, containing a report on the Maryville meeting written by
Hakim Singh, Secretary of the Hindustan Ghadar Party of Marysville. The
transnational effort of both organizers and the colonizers is apparent in this
string of exchanges between the Ghadar Party and a Punjabi nationalist pa-
per, on the one hand, and the Government of India, the British government,
and the US government, on the other.
14 British Library, IOR/L/PJ/12/754, cited in a January 27, 1927 report from
the Director of the International Bureau, Home Department, Government of
India.
15 British Library, IOR/L/PJ/12/754.
16 South Asians in North America Collection, BANC MSS 2002/78 cz, Box 5.
17 “Socialism in one country” was directly placed against Trotsky’s theory of
“permanent revolution,” as elaborated in Stalin’s “October Revolution and
the Tactics of the Russian Communists.”
18 It is possible that this literature was in fact published by the Ghadar Party,
given British intelligence reports of its centrality to global Indian dissent.
Works Cited
Archival Material
British Library, India Office Records. 1924–1929. IOR/L/PJ/12/754. Public and
Judicial (S) Department. Separate Papers on “The Ghadr.”
British Library, India Office Records. 1936–1942. IOR/L/PJ/7/1086 (25 Jun
1936–17 Feb 1942). “Passports of People Handing Out Ghadar Party Mate-
rial in Shanghai Confiscated.”
British Library, Manuscripts Collections. MSS EUR/E288/1. “Catalogue of
Hostile Oriental Propaganda Pamphlets” (Old edition). “List of Newspapers
& Pamphlets Designed to Foment Disturbances in India & Egypt & in Other
Oriental Dependencies of the Allies, to Incite Mutiny in Their Native Armies,
to Foster Pan-Islamism or to Create Pro-German Sentiments in Oriental
Countries.
South Asians in North America Collection, Bancroft Library, University of
California-Berkeley. BANC MSS 2002/78 cz (several boxes).
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the Communist International.” Marxists.org. Accessed 8 June 2018. www.
marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch05.htm
———. 1922. “Theses on the Eastern Question.” Marxists.org. Accessed 8
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Isaacs, Harold. 2009. The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. Chicago: Hay-
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Accessed 8 June 2018. www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/pcr/index.htm
9 The Limits of
African Nationalism
From Anti-Apartheid
Resistance to Postcolonial
Critique
David Johnson
Introduction
In anecdotal mode, Benita Parry revealed in a lecture in Cape Town
shortly after the formal end of apartheid that her time in the city in
the early 1950s “was formative of my subsequent intellectual interests”
(Parry 1995, 84).1 Describing a milieu in which “students were able,
despite the threat of its illegality, to debate the competing discourses of
the Congresses, the Communist Party, and the Unity Movement,” Parry
foregrounded “the significance of the theoretical questions rehearsed,
if not necessarily initiated, by student groups more than 40 years ago”
(Parry 1995, 85). Central in shaping these theoretical questions, Parry
argued, was the Unity Movement, 2 an organization that was part of the
global anti-colonial movement comprising “theorist-activists engaged in
liberation struggles which inaugurated the interrogation of colonialism
and imperialism as projects of, and constitutive forces in, western mo-
dernity” (Parry 1995, 85). For Parry, this tradition “is a legacy which
we can both question and criticize, and prize as a resource for under-
standing not only colonialism’s past, but also the contemporary oppres-
sions perpetrated and perpetuated by some post-independence regimes
on their native soil, and by late imperialism across the globe” (Parry
1995, 86). This chapter accordingly returns to the Unity Movement of
1950s Cape Town, not as an act of rescue, but in a spirit of engagement
and critique.
Communities of Resistance
Conforming to the truism that history is written by the victors, histo-
ries of the South African liberation struggle are dominated by the rul-
ing party of the post-apartheid period—the African National Congress
(ANC). But in the years immediately after South Africa’s National Party
took power in 1948, 3 opposition to the new government’s racist laws
was decisively shaped by the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM).4
192 David Johnson
According to Neville Alexander, “[u]ntil 1950–51, there was, indeed,
little to choose between the Congress movement and the Unity move-
ment, as far as numerical strength was concerned” (Alexander 1989,
184). Formed in 1943, the roots of the NEUM lay a decade earlier in
the Workers’ Party of South Africa (WPSA), a Cape-based Trotskyist
group whose programme espoused an internationalism that fused the
idea of permanent revolution with a socialist, rather than nationalist,
commitment to anti-colonial struggle. In December 1935, members of
the WPSA attended the All African Convention (AAC), which sought to
unite African political organisations in opposition to the segregationist
bills of the Hertzog-Smuts government. Tensions soon developed in the
AAC between conservatives like the ANC’s D.D.T. Jabavu (1885–1959)
and the WPSA’s I.B. Tabata (1909–1990), and in August 1943, the na-
tional executive of the AAC attempted to address such divisions by try-
ing to unite the AAC with Indian and Coloured organisations in a broad
front. The AAC’s aspiration to achieve cross-racial solidarity foundered,
however, as the ANC and Natal Indian Congress withdrew their par-
ticipation. In the same year, the NEUM emerged in the wake of this
initiative; it was conceived as a federal structure that would link the nu-
merous sectional organisations, with its two biggest affiliates the AAC
(representing black organisations) and the Anti-CAD, which represented
Coloured organisations and had been formed to oppose the state’s lat-
est agency for enforcing segregation, the Coloured Affairs Department
(CAD). Other NEUM affiliates included the Teachers League of South
Africa (TLSA), the New Era Fellowship (NEF), the African People’s
Organisation (APO), and the Transvaal African Teachers Association
(TATA).5 The NEUM adopted as its founding document the Ten-Point
Programme, a forerunner by twelve years of the ANC’s Freedom Charter.
The NEUM programme expressed minimum demands for a democratic
society: (1) the vote; (2) habeas corpus; (3) equal access to education;
(4) freedom of association; (5) freedom of movement; (6) a bolition of
racist statutes; (7) revision of land legislation; (8) reform of the criminal
code; (9) redistribution through tax reform; and (10) reform of labour
laws. Supplementing these demands, the NEUM was committed to an
uncompromising non-racialism that refused to recognise state-defined
racial categories, and, extending this commitment, adopted the principle
of non-collaboration, a refusal to participate in any racially constituted
state structures (like the CAD) or in state-sponsored events that elevated
the “achievements” of one race (like the 1952 celebrations marking the
tercentenary of the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape).
For Parry, the NEUM provided an alternative world to the University
of Cape Town, where “many students went on dancing at segregated
balls [and] most were intent on learning professional skills” (Parry 1995,
85). By means of books, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, public lec-
tures, and reading groups, the NEUM and its affiliates constituted a
The Limits of African Nationalism 193
political-intellectual milieu resembling what Oskar Negt and Alexan-
der Kluge—extending Jürgen Habermas—describe as “a counterpublic
sphere.” (Negt and Kluge 1993, 91). Under the broad auspices of the
NEUM, three influential books were published, namely The Awaken-
ing of the People (1950) by I.B. Tabata, The Role of the Missionaries
in Conquest (1952) by Dora Taylor (under the pseudonym of Nosipho
Majeke), and Three Hundred Years (1952) by Hosea Jaffe (under the
pseudonym Mnguni). All three were avidly debated within Southern
Africa, but at least as significant were the many more ephemeral publi-
cations—the feature articles in sympathetic newspapers like The Torch
and Ikhwezi Lomso (The Morning Star) and the TLSA’s Educational
Journal; the lectures of the Forum Club published in its journal Dis-
cussion; and occasional pamphlets, like The Boycott as a Weapon of
Struggle (1952) by Tabata, Jan van Riebeeck: His Place in South African
History (1952) by Kenneth Jordaan (1924–1988), and The Contribu-
tion of Non-European Peoples to World Civilization (1953) by Ben Kies
(1917–1979).6 Many of these publications first appeared anonymously
or under pseudonyms, a convention motivated not only by the need to
protect individual authors from the attentions of the security police, but
also by the self-conscious disavowal of the private ownership of the ideas
contained within them.
The ideal of collective intellectual endeavour—as opposed to the el-
evation of individual political theorist-strategists—derived from a par-
ticular understanding of political agency: political change, including
revolutionary change, was a process of popular struggle, not the gift of
charismatic leaders. Phyllis Ntantala (1920–2016) recalls an example
from the early 1950s of how communities of resistance in the Western
Cape interrogated the diktats of their leaders. At a meeting protesting
the imposition of Bantu Education in Langa (Cape Town),
… a strong ANC man… asked the people of the Western Province to

adopt [the resolution] at this meeting. But the people replied: “No,
we have to discuss it first and arrive at our own decision.” This was
what one liked about the people of the Western Cape. They discussed
issues thoroughly and arrived at their own decisions…. The people
worked together, examined the issues, discussed them and arrived at
a consensus, irrespective of which organisation led the fight. There
was hardly any rivalry between the different political organisations.
The people understood that, even though they belonged to separate
bodies, the enemy was the same and their fight was the same fight.
What was important was defeating the ends of the enemy.
(Ntantala 1992, 155, 157)
A consequence of such popular participation was a conception of po-

litical leadership that emphasized accountability. In a 1951 missive,
194 David Johnson
Dan Kunene (1923–2016), secretary of the Society of Young Africa
(SOYA), an affiliate of the NEUM, explained:
We want intelligence rather than romantic enthusiasm; we want pa-

tience and courage rather than exhibitionism and impetuosity. We
want sound co-operation and loyalty rather than personal ambition.
We want loyalty to principle rather than loyalty to personalities. We
want a sound, reliable leadership, rather than a leader.
(Quoted in Rassool 2004, 331)
The language of “we” over “I,” of the collective over the individual,
echoes earlier working-class and anti-colonial struggles, and also antic-
ipates the commitments of subsequent struggles.7 For example, Ntan-
tala and Kunene’s words pre-figure Frantz Fanon’s argument a decade
later in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) that politicising the masses
requires more than making political speeches: “it means driving home
to the masses that everything depends on them, that if we stagnate the
fault is theirs, and that if we progress, they too are responsible” (Fanon
2004, 138). Complementing the NEUM community of political resis-
tance was a determination to generate radical strategy and theory within
a community of intellectual resistance. Such aims were expressed in the
editorials of The Torch, The Educational Journal and Discussion. For
example, Discussion published the talks at the Forum Club in the names
of the lecturers who delivered them, but produced editorials collectively:
“Some of the views expressed are those of Forum Club members; others
are those held by other schools of thought. As far as possible, the Edito-
rial attempts to give prominence to all viewpoints held with the demo-
cratic camp on the problem of national liberation” (Editorial 1952, 8).8
Fanon Before Fanon

The NEUM’s faith in the agency of the colonized—in the South
African context, the agency of the black working class and peas-
antry—was combined with a critique of capitalism and state racism.
The critique was expressed in a variety of forms, from theoretically
ambitious position papers to popular histories and polemics in the
press. At times, the arguments of the different activist–intellectuals
were complementary, at times at odds with each other. Three of the
many elements of this critique still resonate. First, although focused
principally on South Africa, NEUM intellectuals were determinedly
internationalist. Second, cultural imperialism, mediated pre-emi-
nently through education, was identified as essential to securing colo-
nial rule, and anti-colonial strategies accordingly needed to prioritise
breaking the mental shackles of colonial ideology. Third, the commit-
ment to non-collaboration in South Africa produced a critical lens for
reading all postcolonial societies, with NEUM intellectuals attuned
to the limitations of comprador elites fronting postcolonial nation-
alisms, as well as to the persistence of economic exploitation after
political independence.
The internationalism of NEUM intellectuals was based upon a Marx-
ist understanding of capitalism as a world-system. In a pamphlet sur-
veying no less than the contribution of “Non-Europeans” to world
civilization, Ben Kies argues that since the Renaissance “[t]hrough the
development of the world market, production everywhere has taken on
a cosmopolitan character; national self-sufficiency is a thing of the past
and national seclusion, whether in material or intellectual production,
is as difficult for South Africa as it is for the Llamas of Tibet” (Kies
1953, 38). Deploying a dialectical mode of argument, Kies juxtaposes
the progress of civilization and the barbarism shadowing it: “[t]here is
a negative side to this process which carried civilisation a stage further.
It was achieved through plunder, exploitation and national aggression.
British capitalism grew rich upon piracy, colonial plunder and chattel
slavery abroad, plus the wage-slavery of the working class at home”
(Kies 1953, 38). But if the creation of global inequalities has unfolded
on a trans-national scale, resistance to them must be an internationalist
project. An editorial in Discussion rejects the parochialism of discreet
national liberation struggles, arguing:
We must therefore regard all the various demands for national inde-
pendence and the right to self-determination as particles of the gen-
eral democratic world movement: “particles” in the sense that every
national movement is, in the first instance, directed at the overthrow
of Imperialism in its own country; “general” in the sense that, in as
much as Imperialism is a universal system, each dependent country
being a link in an uninterrupted Imperialist chain, every national
struggle has the effect of weakening and undermining the entire
system.
(Editorial 1952, 1)
All national anti-colonial movements therefore share the same ultimate

enemy, but it is still essential to understand the particularities of individ-
ual anti-colonial movements.
Numerous articles in The Torch appealed to the inspiration provided
by the global struggle against imperialism. An editorial in 1946 pre-
dicts the successful conclusion of liberation struggles in China, India,
Indonesia, Egypt, and the Middle East, and anticipates South Africa’s
white rulers going to great lengths to limit news of such victories reaching
South Africa’s oppressed majority, as such knowledge (which The Torch
promises to deliver) “would help to increase the political conscious-
ness of the oppressed and would lead to a clearer understanding of the
196 David Johnson
relation between our struggle for citizenship and the struggles for free-
dom which are being waged throughout the world” (South A frica 1946).
Taking stock of world events at the beginning of 1950, The Torch lists
the anti-colonial wars in China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Nigeria, Kenya, the
Gold Coast, South Africa, Somaliland, and the West Indies, and argues
that “we are entitled to be optimistic” (The Turn 1950). H eralding “the
heroic struggles of the Chinese peasantry,” the editorial concludes, “not
even America could stay the onward march of the Chinese common man
to freedom from the oppression of Chiang and the United States” (The
Turn 1950).
A series of articles in 1953 by “Pèon” on “Colonial Liberation”
extended the internationalist perspective backwards in time and to
Europe, noting the connections, but also the contrasts, between anti-
colonial struggles in Africa and the struggles of working-class move-
ments in Britain, Europe and the United States. The opening article
in the series observes that the successful revolutions of the twentieth
century had occurred not in the developed West, but in “the most back-
ward and undeveloped, the most oppressed, the least enlightened coun-
tries” (Pèon 1953). Attacking the left imperialism of the British Labour
Party, Pèon asks,
how is it that the semi-organised, illiterate, semi-peasant Non-Euro-

pean oppressed of small backward South Africa are politically more
awake and progressive than the highly organised, trade union-con-
scious, fully literate, urbanised working classes of England? The
one, fresh and awaking, the other heavy-lidded and fatigued? The
one building the Non-European Unity Movement in order to win
freedom, the other snoring within the Labour Party, sitting half-
asleep on the slaves of the British Empire? The one indeed being a
disturber of the dull slumber of the other. For what can really rouse
the workers of England, Europe and America except the stirring
beneath them of the colonial slaves?
(Pèon 1953)
NEUM internationalism was unsentimental, premised upon faith in the

radical agency of the colonized and underwritten by class analysis: es-
sential elements underpinning Fanon’s conviction that “African unity
can only be achieved under pressure and through leadership by the peo-
ple, i.e. with total disregard for the interests of the bourgeoisie” (Fanon
2004, 110).
Second, with respect to the Unity Movement critique of cultural im-
perialism, much of Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the consciousness of the
colonized, later applied to South Africa by Steve Biko (1946–1977),
is anticipated in the writings of NEUM intellectuals of the 1940s and
1950s. Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) argued that the
colonized’s inferiority complex was “the outcome of a double process:—
primarily, economic;—subsequently, the internalization—or better, the
epidermalization—of this inferiority” (Fanon 1986, 13); consequently,
essential in all anti-colonial struggles was the imperative to “help the
black man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been de-
veloped by the colonial environment” (Fanon 1986, 30). Biko, in his
essay “Black Souls in White Skins?” (1970), deployed Fanon’s diagnosis
in analysing South Africa in the 1970s, emphasising again the priority
of liberating the consciousness of the colonized: “as long as blacks are
suffering from an inferiority complex—a result of 300 years of delib-
erate oppression, denigration and derision—they will be useless as co-
architects of a normal society” (Biko 1978, 21). A decade after Biko,
another influential critic of colonial ideology, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, looked
back on his colonial education in 1950s Kenya and made a similar point:
“[Colonialism’s] most important area of domination was the mental uni-
verse of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people per-
ceived themselves and their relationship to the world” (Ngũgĩ 1986, 16).
Such insights, fundamental to anti-colonial thought in the decades
of decolonization, were set out in Ben Kies’ 1943 pamphlet “The
Background of Segregation.” Kies’ opening paragraph declares that
“[o]ppressors have used whips and chains; they have used torture, bul-
lets and prisons. But their most important weapon has been the enslave-
ment of the mind” (Kies 1943, 1). A few pages later, Kies reinforces the
point via a rhetorical question and a light (unacknowledged) gloss of
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ The German Ideology:
Why are we in this position today? Why has a white minority been
able to enslave us? The answer is not the obvious one. The answer
is not just “because they own the army, the police force and the
prisons.”…. The bitter truth is that white South Africa still domi-
nates because it has been able to enslave the mind, the ideas of the
Non-European. It is a known historical fact that in any society, the
prevailing ideas, manners and customs of even the oppressed sec-
tion, are the ideas, manners and customs of the ruling class. South
Africa is no exception. Segregation is the prevailing idea of the South
African ruling class and it has created segregationists in our midst.
(Kies 1943, 4–5)9
Kies attributes the success of the white ruling class in enslaving the black
majority first to the fact that “we ourselves have helped to put on the
chains, and to keep them on,” and secondly, the leadership of the liber-
ation struggle, beguiled by white liberals, “has been both segregationist
and reformist” (Kies 1943, 8–9). Responsibility for reversing the slave
mentality, the false consciousness of black South Africans, lies with
the intelligentsia, and especially with the teachers. Again Kies silently
198 David Johnson
appropriates the language of Marx: “it is the duty of the true teacher to
pull off the mask and scrape off the scales of ignorance that blind the
youth. It is the duty of the true teacher to give his pupils knowledge so
that may KNOW the world, and so that they may CHANGE the world”
(Kies 1943, 15).
Kies’ diagnosis of the “slave mentality” of the colonized, as well as
the strategies for resisting it, was elaborated in many subsequent NEUM
publications. In The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest, Dora Taylor
argued that “the African child has to be trained to accept his subordi-
nate position in society; the idea of inferiority has to appear natural to
him…. [I]nstruction is made synonymous with training in obedience,
humility, patience, fear and passivity” (Taylor 1986, 136–7). In The
Awakening of a People, Tabata shifts the focus from the age of military
conquest to period of economic imperialism, and quotes a speech by Ce-
cil John Rhodes explaining the dangers of educating Africans. Accord-
ing to Rhodes, too many schools in the Transkei were teaching Latin and
Greek, and in the process “‘turning out kaffir parsons…. a dangerous
class…. These people will not go back and work and that is why I say
that the regulations of these industrial schools should be framed by the
Government, otherwise these kaffir parsons would develop into agita-
tors against the Government’” (Tabata 1974, 79). Rhodes’ plans for the
vocational education of Africans derived from the nineteenth-century
ideology of indirect rule, which mutated in the twentieth century into
the ideology of segregation. Tabata notes the great damage caused by the
segregationist mantra of “developing along your own lines,” but argues
that it can be successfully opposed:
[Africans] had learned that “developing along our own lines” meant
the acceptance of inferiority and segregation and that the segregated
institutions created for a child-race were instruments for their own
domination. Thus they resolved to reject the whole policy based on
inferiority, with all that it implied; they threw off the shackles of the
whole idea of the inferiority of the Black man.
(Tabata 1989, 188)
The first line of resistance in the fight back against the racism institu-
tionalised under segregation was the classroom. In a Forum Club lec-
ture in 1952, Edgar Maurice noted the “attempts by the ruling class to
twist education to serve their own particular needs,” but contended that
“Non-European teachers have learned in a variety of ways that they
must help to break the prevailing social and political system of this coun-
try” (Maurice 1952, 7). Specifically, Maurice argues that all the avail-
able textbooks sought “to entrench the inferiority of non-Europeans and
to regard the domination and supremacy of the white ruling class as the
unalterable and divine scheme of things for this country,” but faced with
this state-authorised racism, he is confident that teachers can be effective
“in nullifying… the effect of these ideas and doctrines upon the minds of
their charges and in giving children an ideological armoury which will
later serve them in adult society” (Maurice 1952, 9).
Complementing the ideological battle for the minds of the colonized
was the third NEUM concern, namely the commitment to non-collab-
oration in confronting the racist state’s institutions of power. Tabata
continues his examination of Rhodes’ model of colonial governance
by outlining the latter’s plans for supplementing a strictly vocational
educational programme for Africans with native councils designed
to incorporate an obedient African leadership. For Tabata, the na-
tive councils were “dummy institutions,” and the African leaders who
served in them were “policemen-chiefs” and “policemen-intellectu-
als.”10 Black intellectuals were co-opted, and by their participation in
these councils, “they are assisting in the perpetuation of this gross de-
ception” (Tabata 1974, 82). Instead of collaborating with the regime
and working within its system, Tabata argues, black leaders and intel-
lectuals should “use their talents, their education and their energies in
the building up of a powerful movement outside the channels so power-
fully created by the Government” (Tabata 1974, 82). To overcome the
slave mentality inculcated in black South Africans, not only should the
colonizer’s racist myths be driven from the minds of the colonized (with
teachers central to this task), but black South Africans should at the
same time refuse to collaborate in any of the dummy institutions cre-
ated by Rhodes and consolidated by his English liberal and Afrikaner
nationalist successors.
A number of NEUM publications extended the critique of dummy
institutions and policemen-intellectuals in South Africa to the nation-
alist parties and leadership of the newly independent colonies. In the
same way that a class analysis was applied to black political resistance
in South Africa, with the educated elite subjected to critical attack, an-
alytical questions about the class differences in other anti-colonial na-
tionalisms were posed:
Thus each class reads into the term ‘national movement’ its own
meaning according to its own class position and interest…. Each
class will finally attempt to identify the interests of the national
movement with its own peculiar class aims, and dress its class polit-
ical policy in the guise of a national ballroom dress. Thus it will not
only attempt to speak in the name of the entire nation, but in order
to ensure the success of its class policy, it must gain the backing of
the other classes as well.
(Editorial 1952, 3)
200 David Johnson
Applying these questions to India and Indonesia, the euphoria of inde-
pendence from colonial rule is qualified:
Both of these countries were given political independence and sover-

eignty by their respective imperial masters. But does the granting of
political independence by the metropolitan countries automatically
mean that the national struggle has been concluded? Does the grant-
ing of independence mean the elimination of Imperialism in colonial
countries?…. While they have been given political autonomy, this
constitutional independence is merely the screen for the continued
economic exploitation and national oppression of the bulk of the
Indian and Indonesian millions. But this arrangement has only been
made possible by an agreement between the Imperialists and the na-
tive bourgeoisie, an agreement made behind the backs of the peasant
and proletarian millions.
(Editorial 1952, 3)
An article a year later in The Torch re-emphasised the limitations of

Indonesian independence, arguing that although the national struggle
against Dutch colonial rule represented progress, it was but the first
phase of a longer struggle for political and economic self-sufficiency:
“[t]hough Hatta and Soekarno shot down the most democratic section of
the anti-Imperialist army, the working men under the leadership of Tan
Malakka, the first stage of the Indonesians’ struggle towards liberation
is over” (The Turn 1950). In equally acerbic terms, Pèon in The Torch
directs his attack more broadly, complaining that because “[t]hey are
too closely dependent upon the imperialists… Chiang Kai Shek, Nehru,
Soekarno and others were quite incapable of driving the imperialists out,
of unifying their countries, and of achieving national independence on
anything like their own terms” (Pèon 1953a).
Ghana also frequently came in for criticism. In a pamphlet critiquing
Tabata’s The Awakening, Baruch Hirson attacked Kwame Nkrumah
for fetishizing political freedoms, with the “economic struggle against
exploitation… relegated to the distant future” (Hirson 1957, 27). Hir-
son argues that Nkrumah—like the other nationalist anti-colonial lead-
ers of his generation—had “the aspirant bourgeoisie behind his party
and he was protecting his own class interests” (Hirson 1957, 27). What
makes such leaders hard to read is their facility with the radical language
of anti-imperialism, but “[e]ven where men like Nehru and Nkrumah
mouthed socialist slogans we declared that they did so to pay lip service
to the workers’ aspirations in order to utilise these workers for their own
class ends” (Hirson 1957, 29–30). As the disappointments of Ghanaian
independence became more apparent, the NEUM critique sharpened.
A1959 NEUM statement emphasized the sharp divergence between the
interests of the African masses and the newly installed elites:
This is the matter and spirit of Ghana’s message to Africa. To the
African masses: hot air and drums: but to the African middle class
and intelligentsia a new Timbuctoo and a new Mecca of “hope and
glory”, of careers as “leaders” or, more correctly, as leader-goats,
of jobs carrying with them a cut of the profits derived from the ex-
ploitation of the masses. The layer of the comprador class whom
Nkrumah-Nasser-Nehru represent do not want to see real liberation
of the masses, because the privileged positions they and their kind
occupy, their power, their profits, may be swept away (as in China)
in the process, together with the foreign exploiters with whom their
interests are inter-locked.
(Quoted in Van der Ross 1986, 213)
The state-generated national culture, with “hot air and drums” for the
masses, and myths of a “new Timbuctoo” for the elite, is dedicated to
protecting the material interests of the postcolonial “comprador class”
and its sponsors, “the foreign exploiters.”
By their focus on the histories of colonialism and segregation in South
Africa, as well as in their studies of other decolonizing nations, NEUM
intellectuals formulated theoretical insights of general import that pre-
figure the theories of cultural imperialism developed by later anti-colonial
thinkers like Fanon. For Fanon, both the portents and later the evidence
of post-independence betrayals led to his denunciation of neocolonial
elites. According to David Macey, Fanon was “profoundly depressed
about the news of Lumumba’s death. His dream of a united Africa had
been shattered by the realization that black Africans were quite capa-
ble of murdering each other” (Macey 2000, 453). Fanon’s excoriation
of postcolonial Africa’s “national bourgeoisie” in The Wretched of the
Earth accordingly generalizes from several A frican nations—Algeria,
the Congo, Ghana, Guinea, Tunisia, and South Africa—supplemented
with occasional references to the Caribbean. In a comparable spirit,
the NEUM critique of postcolonial despotisms derives from South
A frican examples, with the disappointments of Ghanaian, Indian, and
I ndonesian independence recruited as supporting evidence. In the po-
licemen chiefs and intellectuals serving the dummy institutions under
segregation, NEUM intellectuals saw the direct antecedents of Fanon’s
“native bourgeoisie,” the post-independence ruling elite he described as
“a conveyor belt for capitalism, forced to camouflage itself behind the
mask of neocolonialism” (Fanon 2004, 100–1).
Postcolonial Critique
Many of Parry’s interventions in postcolonial theory and literary criti-
cism from the 1980s to the present bear deep traces of the arguments in
NEUM publications of the 1940s and 1950s. Of course, the polemical
202 David Johnson
contexts are different, the political stakes are different, and the languages
of debate are different. But certain positions adopted and questions posed
by Parry in Anglo-American postcolonial studies re-articulate those of
the NEUM in South Africa’s counter-public sphere in the middle of the
last century.
To note just four examples: first, the faith of NEUM activist-intel-
lectuals in the agency of the colonized, reflected not only in their writ-
ings, but also in their life histories, is re-phrased and directed at new
interlocutors in Parry’s most frequently cited essay, “Problems in current
theories of colonial discourse” (1987). Pèon’s insurgent words on “Colo-
nial Liberation” in The Torch of 1953 are echoed in Parry’s denunciation
of both Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s post-structuralist theorization of
subaltern agency (or the lack thereof), and of Raymond Williams’ Eu-
rocentrism. Parry argues that Spivak’s “axioms deny to the native the
ground from which to utter a reply to colonialism’s ideological aggres-
sion or to enunciate a different self,” and further, that “Spivak in her own
writings severely restricts (eliminates?) the space in which the colonized
can be written back into history, even when ‘interventionist possibilities’
are exploited through the deconstructive strategies devised by the post-
colonial intellectual” (Parry 2004, 23). And Williams is upbraided, along
with his British socialist contemporaries, for paying “scant attention to
the making and articulation of England’s imperialist culture. [His] in-
fluential Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961),
which spanned the years of colonial conquest and the consolidation of
empire, found no place for this narrative” (Parry 2004, 32).
Parry’s insistence upon the agency of the colonized extends to a con-
cern with literature’s capacity to represent such agency, and is the basis
for her critical reading of J.M. Coetzee’s fiction and criticism. Troubled
by Coetzee’s silent black characters—Friday in Foe (1986), the epon-
ymous protagonist in The Life and Times of Michael K (1983), and
Vercueil in Age of Iron (1990)—Parry notes the many examples in
Coetzee’s fiction of woman characters given a voice, and asks the un-
comfortable question, “why does a male novelist take the risk of sim-
ulating women’s speech… while this same white novelist refrains from
dissembling the voices of those excluded from the dominant discourse…
instead elevating their silence as the sign of a transcendent state?” (Parry
1998, 158). And in a review of Coetzee’s study of South African liter-
ature, White Writing (1988), Parry repeats the question in more direct
terms: “does not Coetzee’s own principled refusal to exercise the power
of the dominant culture by speaking for the other itself paradoxically
perform the discursive process of silencing?” (Parry 1991, 199). At the
basis of such questions lies the contrast between the words of histori-
cal “colonial subjects” like Tabata and Kies, and the silences of both
Spivak’s theoretical subaltern subject and of Coetzee’s fictional “colonial
subjects” like F riday and Michael K.
Second, the NEUM’s class analysis of how the culture of imperial-
ism serves the material interests of the colonizer—expressed by Kies on
the background of segregation, by Taylor on the role of missionaries in
conquest, by Tabata on Rhodes’ plans for schooling the colonized, and
by Maurice on Bantu education—underwrite Parry’s critical remarks
on Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of “transculturation” in the “contact
zones” of colonial histories. Parry concedes that “European culture is
undeniably hybrid, as are all cultures,” but insists that the vast power
differentials framing the colonial encounter demand that “this infiltra-
tion of influences should not be represented as a conversation with other
cultural forms and cognitive traditions” (Parry 2004, 9). Pratt’s ideas
of the colonial-encounter-as-conversation, of transculturation between
colonizer and colonized, and of contact zones enabling the emergence of
hybrid cultures, are echoed in anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff’s
work on British missionaries and the southern Tswana. Accordingly,
Parry’s criticisms of Pratt are extended to the Comaroff’s thesis that
the British missionary encounter with the southern Tswana was charac-
terised by reciprocity rather than domination. Parry’s objections to the
Comaroffs reiterate Taylor’s 1952 critique of Christian missionaries in
Southern Africa:
Had the Comaroffs been less preoccupied with making a case for
“reciprocity” they would have shown how the missionaries, what-
ever their kindly or authoritarian individual dispositions, were
agents of capitalism’s penetration into a pre-capitalist world, accel-
erating a process whereby the native peoples became subject to a
money economy, existing social relations and ancient social bonds
were undermined, and new forms of consciousness and modes of
resistance were generated.
(Parry 2005, 184)
Third, such Marxist readings of South Africa’s colonial past are com-
plemented by Parry’s reading of South Africa’s postcolonial present. In
the 1950s, NEUM intellectuals, pre-eminently Tabata, criticised the
ANC both for participating in racially-defined state structures that
obliged them “to make the most obnoxious laws palatable to the peo-
ple” (Tabata 1989, 187), and for seeking alliances with white liberal
organizations like the Torch Commando, United Party and Labour
Party. Such compromising tactics pursued by the ANC in South Africa
prepared the ground for the concessions made to colonial economic in-
terests by Nkrumah-Nasser-Nehru in achieving their respective post-
colonial settlements. For the NEUM, the ANC’s “attachment to the
liberal bourgeoisie… had a powerful influence both upon the outlook
of the leadership of the Congress, on the structure of the organisation
and on the nature of the struggle” (Tabata 1974a, 30).11 The three-part
204 David Johnson
coalition between the ANC’s populist version of African nationalism,
the liberal ideology of its white supporters, and the profiteering logic of
international capital portended a post-apartheid future not of political
and economic liberation, but rather of neocolonialism on the Ghanaian
model. Parry has argued that this NEUM/Marxist perspective “survives
in the critiques now being made of the neo-liberal doctrine and free-mar-
ket practice to which the new South African state is ideologically com-
mitted and practically bound” (Parry 2005, 182); in her own writings,
Parry has quoted extensively from such critiques by commentators like
Trevor Ngwenya, Neville Alexander, and John Saul. In sharp contrast
to the interminable stream of sympathetic publications on ANC figures
from Sol Plaatje (1876–1932) to Nelson Mandela (1918–2013), Parry
has written “against the grain of prevailing orthodoxies, whether con-
trived by neo-imperialists, liberal apologists, or those postcolonialists
desperate to displace a narrative of past and still existing conflict with
one of complicity” (Parry 2005, 183).
Finally, the NEUM’s critique of capitalism, state racism and colo-
nialism was complemented by a utopian vision embodied in the 1943
Ten-Point Programme. The utopian elements in Parry’s thought share
with the NEUM’s Ten-Point Programme a commitment to human rights
(including economic rights) and universal freedoms. In a discussion of
C.L.R. James, for example, Parry attacks the reflex poststructuralist
cynicism about “universals,” declaring contra her sympathy with “an-
ti-colonialist discourses… grounded in a Marxist humanism, seeking to
install an ethical universality and a universal ethic, inspired by commu-
nism’s grand narrative of emancipation and signposting utopia on their
map of the world” (Parry 2004, 82). Parry notes further that James’
anti-Stalinist utopianism was shared by anti-colonial thinkers in other
contexts, including South Africa, Ceylon (as it then was known), and
Mexico, where Trotskyist groups “compiled alternatives to Third In-
ternational perspectives on colonial struggles” (Parry 2004, 82). Mov-
ing closer to the present, Parry quotes with approval Thomas Sankara’s
injunction to demonstrate the “‘courage to turn your back on the old
formulas, the courage to invent the future’” (quoted in Parry 2004, 89),
and also endorses Arif Dirlik’s understanding of the goal of socialist
revolution as being “‘to transcend capitalist modernity to create an al-
ternative modernity closer in its constitution to the Enlightenment vision
of human liberation’” (quoted in Parry 2004, 92).
Writing in another context, Dirlik has defended the return to earlier
traditions of anti-colonial thought as an antidote to poststructuralist
postcolonial theory, arguing first that “[t]o recall the Third [World] is
to recover memories of those utopian projects that are essential to imag-
ining radical alternatives to the present,” and second, that such acts of
recovery are necessary in order “to dissociate those radical alternatives
from the Third World which, in its present reconfiguration, may have
become an obstacle to the imagination, let alone the realization, or any
such radical alternatives” (Dirlik 1998, 147). For Parry, the Unity Move-
ment of the 1940s and 1950s, with its collectively-voiced critique and
imagining of utopian futures, is South Africa’s closest equivalent to the
better-known individual anti-colonial intellectuals she has re-interpreted
or recovered in her work—Fanon, James, Mao Zedong, Kwame Nkru-
mah, Régis Debray, Aimé Césaire, Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba,
Samora Machel and Thomas Sankara. For Parry, the 1959 NEUM dec-
laration that “the layer of the comprador class whom Nkrumah-Nass-
er-Nehru represent do not want to see real liberation of the masses” is
the same in spirit and substance as Cabral’s 1972 statement that “the
liberation struggle is a revolution that does not finish at the moment
when the national flag is raised and the national anthem played” (quoted
in Parry 2004, 85). The challenge—for the postcolonial world, as well
as for the particular case of post-apartheid South Africa—is (adapting
Parry’s terms) to “signpost utopias grounded in Marxist humanism and
communism’s grand narrative of emancipation.”
Conclusion
Looking back at the history of the ANC in The Awakening of the Peo-
ple, Tabata provides a prescient commentary on the need for political
organizations to renew themselves:
In 1912 [the ANC] really was an organisation of the people. It was

representative of a people who had emerged from tribalism and it
was under its auspices that many took part in the struggle for liber-
ation and sacrificed their lives. It is because of this past that the peo-
ple still cling to the ANC. They fail to recognise that the Congress
their fathers knew, died some twenty years ago, and that what mas-
querades as this old organisation of the people is actually a corpse
deliberately propped up by all the agents of the Government in our
midst. An organisation grows as long as it keeps in step with the
times and nourishes itself with current ideas, i.e. keeps itself vital
and alive with progressive trends of thought. The moment it ceases
to do so, it ceases to be healthy, sickens and dies.
(Tabata 1974, 85)
Tabata’s comments stand as a persuasive assessment of the ANC not

only in 1952, but also of the ANC in 2018. But they also stand as a pow-
erful judgment of the NEUM and its successor/ splinter organizations,
including the African People’s Democratic Union of South Africa (AP-
DUSA), the Unity Movement of South Africa (UMSA), the Cape Action
League (CAL) and the New Unity Movement (NUM).12 After the suc-
cesses of the Anti-CAD campaign and the boycott of the Van Riebeeck
206 David Johnson
celebrations in the early 1950s, the NEUM lost momentum. The orga-
nization’s most gifted product, but also its most stringent critic, Neville
Alexander, argued that “non-collaboration,” initially a successful tactic,
congealed from about 1952 onwards into a paralysing orthodoxy:
The tendency to dub every thing and every person that had at one
time or another been involved or somehow connected with collabo-
rationist tactics a “collaborationist” became the besetting sin of the
NEUM…. It painted itself into a corner and dragged at least two
generations of young people in the Western Cape into a political cul-
de-sac…. A whole generation of young intellectuals reared by the
NEUM in the Western Cape… could spit venom at any non-NEUM
initiative on the part of the people but themselves seldom became in-
volved in “mass organisation” and “mass mobilisation”. The policy
of non-collaboration was often transformed from being one of the
most creative ideas of the South African struggle into a pharisaical
cliché which was used to assassinate the political characters of any
who did not agree with the NEUM leadership.
(Alexander 1989, 187–188)
To these objections of the NEUM’s political strategies, many have been

added: that it failed to build meaningful connections with working-class
organizations like trade unions; that it never made significant inroads
beyond the Coloured political constituencies of the Western Cape; that
its theoretical sophistication was never matched by effective praxis; and
that its organizational culture shifted from a collective ethos to one built
upon the authority of individual leaders like Tabata.13
But do these trenchant criticisms negate the NEUM’s political analy-
sis? Weighing up the claims of different historical traditions, Reinhart
Koselleck has argued:
[t]he historian who is on the side of the victor is prone to interpret

short-term successes from the perspective of a continuous, long-term
teleology ex post facto. This does not apply to the vanquished…. It is
thus an attractive hypothesis that precisely from the unique gains in
experience imposed upon [the vanquished] spring insights of lasting
duration and, consequently, of greater explanatory power. If history
is made in the short term by the victors, historical gains in knowl-
edge stem in the long run from the vanquished.
(Koselleck 2002, 76)
Koselleck’s hypothesis fits the historiography of South Africa’s vanquished,

particularly the writings of largely forgotten radical organizations like the
NEUM and their contemporary heirs like Parry. Whereas disillusioned
ANC apologists today bewail the Zuma presidency, cling to the tattered
threads of the rainbow-nation tapestry, express a hand-wringing nostalgia
for the African nationalist patriarchs of the twentieth century, and direct
the discourse of betrayal at their current leaders, the tradition represented
by Parry’s work deploys a problematic “of greater explanatory power.”
Recall the analytical questions posed in the 1940s and 1950s by NEUM
intellectual–activists and repeated in Parry’s writings: Does South Africa
resemble and/or differ from other foundering postcolonial nation-states
like Ghana/India/Indonesia? Do the rainbow nation’s intellectuals func-
tion as apologists for, or critics of, a postcolonial regime presiding over a
capitalist economy? Have appeals to post-1990 national unity contained
the heightening class tensions between the new elite and the impover-
ished majority? Has the asymmetry between political independence and
economic exploitation witnessed in Ghana/India/Indonesia been tran-
scended—or even addressed—in South Africa? Walter Benjamin warned
that “every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one
of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (Benjamin 1968,
255). By repeating such questions, first voiced so urgently by the NEUM
in the 1940s, Parry amplifies Benjamin’s warning.
Notes
1 am grateful to Allison Drew for commenting in detail on an early draft of
this chapter.
The lecture was subsequently revised and re-published in Parry (2004,
179–93).
2 Known in the 1950s as the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM).
3 The first decade of apartheid rule in South Africa is analysed by Posel (1991,
49–90); O’Meara (1996, 59–82); and Breckenridge (2014, 138–63); and in
the Western Cape specifically by Soudien (2000, 23–37).
4 The many competing accounts of the history of the NEUM can be grouped
into six loose categories. First, a number of members and ex-members of
the NEUM have themselves written partisan histories, including: Alexander
(1979, 54–7, 111–15; and 1989, 180–91); Wessels (1982); Jaffe (1992); Hir-
son (1995, 64–93); Fataar (1999); Hassim (2010); and Brown et al. (2017).
Covering the same territory as these histories are two loosely autobiograph-
ical novels by Rive (1988) and Levinson (1966). Second, there have been
several dissertations by subsequent generations of activist-intellectuals, who
were either members of the NEUM or of other left formations that emerged
in relation to and were critical of the Unity Movement, notably by Gentle
(1978); Kayser (2002); and Rassool (2004). Third, several recent scholars
have focused on particular aspects of the NEUM: Nasson (1990) on the
influence of the Unity Movement on history-writing in South Africa; Chi-
solm (1991) on the contribution of Unity Movement intellectuals to edu-
cation struggles; Sandwith (2014, 129–72) on the literary culture of Unity
Movement; and Adhikari (2005) on the NEUM’s influence on South African
racial discourse. Fourth, several histories of twentieth-century South Afri-
can radical politics discuss the NEUM, notably Hommel (1981, 73–143);
208 David Johnson
and Drew (1991, 423–503; and 2000, 241–6 and 266–70). Fifth, there
are a number of general histories of South African Coloured identity and
politics with substantial sections on the NEUM, including Van der Ross
(1986, 209–16 and 233–45) and Lewis (1987, 247–53 and 266–71). Sixth,
also of interest are histories of the NEUM from an ANC and South African
Communist Party perspective by Mary Simons (1976, 223–8); Jack and Ray
Simons (1983, 541–6 and 598–601); and Pallo Jordan (2016, 12–21). Fi-
nally, many individual members, ex-members and critics of the Unity Move-
ment have been the subjects of publications, ranging from hagiographies to
character assassinations, with most inclining to the former. A far from ex-
haustive list of individuals includes: Neville Alexander (1936–2012), R. O.
Dudley (1924–2009), Alie Fataar (1917–2005), Goolam Gool (1904–1962),
Jane Gool (1902–1996), Cissie Gool (1897–1963), Kader Hassim (1934–
2011), Baruch Hirson (1921–1999), Hosea Jaffe (1921–2014), Kenneth
Jordaan (1924–1988), A. C. Jordan (1908–1968), Ben Kies (1917–1979),
Helen Kies (1926–2017), Edgar Maurice (1919–1994), Livingstone Mqotsi
(1921–2009), Phyllis Ntantala (1920–2016), and Dora Taylor (1899–1976).
5 On the establishment and early history of the NEUM, see Karis and Carter
(1973, 71–2, 347–52); and Drew (1997, 16–19).
6 The essential primary documents for this period are collected in Drew
(1997). Key articles by the NEUM and associated anti-Congress organi-
zations have also been re-published in Hommel (1989). Drew (1997) pro-
vides accounts of the individuals, different parties and affiliated groups in
her introductions and notes to the primary documents. Also contributing to
this dissident public sphere in the 1940s and 1950s were the publications of
South African Communist Party members like Edward Roux’s Time Longer
than a Rope: The Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa (1948)
and Lionel Forman’s articles on “people’s history,” subsequently collected in
Forman (1992).
7 Writing about anti-racist communities of resistance in 1970–1980s Britain,
A. Sivanandan expresses a similar faith: “there is an unspoken morality
about these movements which stem from a simple faith in human beings and
a deep knowledge that, by himself or herself, the individual is nothing, that
we need to confirm and be confirmed by each other, that only in the collec-
tive good our selves can put forth and grow” (Sivanandan 1990, 58).
8 For further discussion of the NEUM’s culture of collective intellectual pro-
duction in the 1950s, see Rassool (2004, 330–2) and Wieder (2008, 62–4).
9 Note the echo of Marx’s axiom, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every
epoch the ruling ideas, i. e. the class which is the ruling material force of
society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has
the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time
over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking,
the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it”
(Marx and Engels 1970, 64).
10 See Tabata (1974, 81–4; and 1989, 170–2, 183–7).
11 This particular passage comes from “Memorandum to the Organisation of
African Unity. Analysis of the Political Situation in South Africa” (1963).
12 The NEUM split in December 1958 into two factions, largely along regional
and racial lines. One faction led by Tabata formed the African People’s
Democratic Union of South Africa (APDUSA) in 1961, and argued that the
struggle for radical change should be centred upon the rural peasantry. The
opposed faction led by Kies and Jaffe became the Unity Movement of South
Africa (UMSA) in 1964, and argued that the struggle should be led by the
urban proletariat. In the extended wake of the Soweto Uprising, two further
coalitions rooted loosely in NEUM political thought appeared: in 1983 the
Cape Action League (CAL), a coalition critical of the Unity Movement, was
formed, and in 1985 the New Unity Movement (NUM) emerged. The most
detailed accounts of the NEUM and its successor organizations from the
1950s to the 1990s are those by Rassool and Keyser.
13 For a literary version of this critique, see Frank Anthony’s autobiographi-
cal novel describing a recently released Robben Island prisoner’s journey to
meet a Tabata-like political leader in exile in Zimbabwe (Anthony 1991).
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10 Maverick Marxism?
Eclipsed Enlightenments,
Horizons of Solidarity, and
Utopian Realism
Caroline Rooney
Benita Parry’s critique of the post-structuralist turn of postcolonial stud-

ies can be considered historically vindicated by the uprisings of the Arab
Spring. While these uprisings did not occur under a Marxist banner as
such, they were of course protests against neoliberalism and may be said
to entail a certain “maverick Marxism,” a question of non-conformist
rebelliousness. It is this notion of “maverick Marxism” that this chapter
will explore, with reference to enlightenment perspectives that idealist
legacies of Western Enlightenment thought largely serve to eclipse. In
doing so, the chapter will attend to questions of solidarity and utopia-
nism that Parry’s work serves to raise. My intention thereby is not to cast
Parry as a maverick Marxist, given her long-standing commitment to
Marxism, but to explore aspects of her work that may be seen to imply
the non-programmatic.
In her defence of Marxist cultural analysis in her introduction to Post-
colonial Studies: A Materialist Critique, Benita Parry takes objection to
the post-Marxist left’s claiming of a theoretical superiority through the
assumption that the traditional left seeks, in the words of Judith Butler
as quoted by Parry, “‘to separate Marxism from the study of culture’”
(Parry 2004, 5). In considering this to be a travesty, Parry states: “If
Marxist critics reject procedures which subordinate the real to the cul-
tural and the semiotic, they take full account of both the cultural and
semiotic as social practices, as the negotiated processes within which
subjectivities, cognition and consciousness are made and remade under
determinate historical and political conditions” (5). Accordingly Parry
goes on to maintain that what is needed is the restoring of “the real” to
critical theory.
The prior case is mounted against what Parry terms “textual ideal-
ism,” identified as that which characterizes the theoretical formulations
of post-structuralism or, we could say, critical theory under the con-
ditions of late capitalism (55). In sympathy with this position, I would
add that another way of addressing what is at stake is to consider how
post-structuralist theory is pervasively characterized by its fixation on
a philosophy of the performative, as I have discussed at greater length
214 Caroline Rooney
elsewhere, and will offer here but a brief recapitulation of the argument’s
relevance to Parry’s concerns (Rooney 2007).
Performativity as Conformativity
It was possibly Roland Barthes who introduced the concept of the per-
formative into French philosophy with his famous “Death of the Au-
thor” essay. Barthes writes:
The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate an

operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’ [….]
rather it designates what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy,
call a performative, a rare verbal form […] in which the enunciation
has no other content […] than the act by which it is uttered […] no
other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls
into question all origins.
(Barthes 2004, 259)
Barthes is clearly referring to J.L. Austin’s philosophy of speech acts,

where the speech act does not reflect a given reality but serves to produce
the reality of which it speaks, a literalizing operation. It is strange to
hear Barthes’ phrase “rare verbal form” in the wake of the now-perva-
sive popularization of the performative.
While Barthes sets up performative enactment of given scripts (or
mimetic recycling) in opposition to authorial creativity, Foucault’s fas-
cination with performativity may be said to arise precisely in its differen-
tiation from revolutionary agency. Whilst living in Tunisia in the 1960s,
Foucault witnessed Marxist-inspired student demonstrations that re-
vealed to him a real freedom of spirit, one absent in the West, with this
serving to make him aware of the mimetically conditioned behaviour of
the Western middle classes (Miller 1994, 70–71). For instance, Foucault
states: “We must see our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary
things, tied to our bourgeois way of life…one must put ‘in play,’ show
up, transform, and reverse the systems which quietly order us about”
(Foucault cited in Miller 1994, 180). Foucault’s interest is less in the real
that serves to reveal and flag up the performative nature of “bourgeois
reality” than in the very power of discursive performance and the dis-
cursive performativity of power, which he explores extensively across
his studies of institutions and identity fashioning. Moreover, as Daniel
Zamora points out in his study of Foucault’s attraction to neoliberalism,
Foucault’s wager was that the “age of Revolution” was over (Zamora
2016, 63).
Derrida, of course, disseminates Austin’s concept of the performative
very widely, notably in his critique of Marx in Specters of Marx, where
he argues against Marxist materialism and the affirmation of reality in
Maverick Marxism? 215
favour of the spectrality of the supposedly self-realising theatre of com-
modity production: capitalism as performativity. Derrida writes: “In
Specters of Marx, as in all of my texts of at least twenty-five years, all of
my argumentation has been everywhere determined and overdetermined
by a concern to take into account the performative dimension (not only
of language in the narrow sense, but also of what I call the trace and
writing)” (Derrida 1999, 224).
It is, moreover, this captivation by the performative that runs through
the work of Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler, work that is remarkably
similar in its logic. For Bhabha, colonial discourse is something to be
performatively subverted from within. In “Of Mimicry and Man,” he
writes: “Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask: it is
not what Césaire describes as ‘colonization-thingification’ behind which
there stands the essence of the présence Africaine. The menace of mim-
icry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial
discourse also disrupts its authority” (Bhabha 1994, 88). For Bhabha,
mimicry is only a mirroring effect that may cause reflective distortions
as opposed to a masking effect that may be used to conceal a lived, ex-
istential reality behind it. Bhabha states: “Finally, the question of identi-
fication is never the affirmation of a pre-given identity […]—it is always
the production of an image of identity and the transformation of the sub-
ject in assuming that image” (45). Similarly, Butler writes: “The critical
task for feminism is not to establish a point of view outside constructed
identities…The critical task is, rather, to locate strategies of subversive
repetition” (Butler 1990, 147; my emphasis).
The advocacy of performativity that conditions post-structuralist
thought is a case of what Parry terms “textual idealism,” in that the im-
age, the model, the design, the set script (and so on) serves to reproduce
itself in the manner of a literalization of a text as pretext. And this is
after all the commodity logic of capitalism—whereby the commodity
is the clone of an originating template (itself a master copy to be rep-
licated). This performativity is, in effect, conformativity, set up as it is
against creativity and revolution, as touched on earlier, and a matter of
capitalist complicity. In fact, the creative and the revolutionary are the
foreclosed in order for the performative to function as such—that is, as
auto-enactment and self-referentiality. However, for the post-structural-
ist generation, it is as if the position of “author” is equated with author-
ity, while “performance” is construed as if it were the creative potential
through slippages that deviate from foundational norms while remaining
thoroughly conditioned by them. It is as if the desire were to make the
ideological determine the real, in something of an inversion of Marx’s
inversion of Hegel (Marx showing the ideological to be an effect of con-
ditions of the real, as addressed by Parry before). Put another way, the
cultural is placed entirely on the level of the ideational and ideological,
with a philosophical displacement of life itself as a source of creativity.
216 Caroline Rooney
Recently, Butler has attempted to assimilate revolutionary uprisings
(such as those of the Arab Spring) into the persistence of her theory of
gender performativity, where she considers these uprisings to consist of
public spectacles performed by “bodies,” as she puts it, for media con-
sumption (Butler 2015). This in itself may be seen to be a perception
determined by the mainstream media.
Eclipsed Enlightenments
One of the problems of assimilating postcolonialism into post-struc-
turalism concerns a negation of the genesis of postcolonialism in the
histories of liberation struggles, as Parry’s work extensively shows. In
my own work, my related concern is that post-structuralism derives very
much from German and French Enlightenment philosophies that serve
to eclipse what enlightenment might mean in other cultures. While phil-
osophically speaking, Marxism constitutes a critique of the Hegelian
philosophy of spirit and, more broadly, of religious humanism, postcolo-
nial liberation struggles have variously combined Marxist commitments
with affiliations deriving from alternative spiritual traditions, ranging
from Hinduism to African animist philosophies. And, as regards the
Egyptian revolution, a number of us have recently attended to the fact
that its mobilization drew on the Sufism of Egyptian culture.
Beyond the question of alternative cultural sources, what is at stake
remains also a philosophical question in that Western Enlightenment
philosophy is distinctly at odds with other philosophical traditions such
as animism and Sufism. A condensed way of addressing this predicament
would be to propose that Western Enlightenment philosophy tends to
have a doppelgänger structure—that of a dualism in crisis—governed
by a logic of finitude. That is, the secular rational Western subject is a
Dr Jekyll, set up against a Mr Hyde who is not an other as such so much
as a “not self” that threatens to negate the selfhood of the subject (here
Jekyll) (Stevenson 1979). The duality of the figure of the double actually
arises through a will-to-singularity: it is because Jekyll wishes to cohere
as a single self or individual that Hyde arises as his “not self,” without
being another subject as such.
Otto Rank notes in his psychoanalytic study of the double in G erman
Romanticism that, whereas in earlier literature mortal humans are
accompanied by their immortal souls, from the Romantic period on-
wards, what was the immortal soul becomes the shadowy “not self”
(Hyde) as harbinger or “messenger of death.” That is, being is conceived
as wholly subject to time, with the human subject then haunted by a
logic of finitude and mortality in the form of his ghostly double (what
was once soul).
The structure of the will-to-singularity that gives rise to the contra-
dictions of duality outlined previously plays itself out in various ways
across the Western Enlightenment tradition. In Freudian thought, the
“not self,” or Hyde, is the unconscious, and as Elisabeth Roudinesco has
addressed, for Freud the rational enlightenment is always accompanied
by the dark enlightenment, its evil double: civilization hand-in-hand
with barbarism, as in Walter Benjamin’s analysis (Roudinesco 2009).
As for Hegel, his dialectical method is the endlessly repeated attempt to
overcome contradictions or resistances through a dynamic of usurpation
and assimilation or, we could say, colonization. Thus, for Hegel other
histories are overcome by Western history at the same that this would-be
universal history incorporates into itself those other histories as earlier
stages of itself. Yet every conversion of the other into the self-same can
but give rise to a new “not self,” ad infinitum, as every insistence of a
will-to-singularity on Jekyll’s part fuels the counter-energy of the inas-
similable, or Hyde, as that which remains resistant. Hegelian dialectic is
thus always ultimately thwarted.
If you really wish to turn Hegel on his head, as Marx set out to do,
then you need to engage with Hegel’s foreclosures. In particular, H egel
forecloses Africa as the absolutely non-historical, and with this he fore-
closes the non-dualism of animist philosophy as that which does not
oppose spirit and matter or impose a logic of diachronic finitude. What
Hegelian idealism attempts to do, in my reading, is deny the collective
on a contemporary synchronous level by internalizing and thus privat-
izing the collective within a diachronic, singularized history of ratio-
nal spirit. At stake is a will to self-immortalization, but in temporal
terms; that is, as spirit is transferred to auto-production through mi-
metic appropriation, both spiritual actuality and collective genesis are
denied in a manner that can be seen to coincide with the logic of market
fundamentalism.
A Collectivist Critique of Market Fundamentalism

The prior considerations enable me to elaborate on the question of mav-
erick Marxism raised in the introduction. The term “maverick,” while
denoting non-conformity or not adhering to type, derives from cattle
that are not branded and thus outside of an economy of ownership or
private property. The “brand” and branding are of course key terms for
capitalist logocentrism, a capitalism centred on the logo. In her book
No Logo, Naomi Klein traces the increasing significance of the logo for
capitalism in capitalism’s dissociation of itself from mere commodity
production and the world of things. Klein writes: “The old paradigm
had it that all the marketing was selling a product. In the new model,
however, the product always takes a back seat to the real product, the
brand, and the selling of the brand acquired an extra component that
can only be described as spiritual” (Klein 2001, 21). Over the imperma-
nence of disposable commodities and exhausted/ substitutable labour,
218 Caroline Rooney
the brand maintains the allure of transcendental endurance in its bid
to attract loyal followers, who are drawn to purely mimicked or mere
imagistic versions of what the corporations are actually denying: free-
dom, community, utopianism. Klein notes that where big, impersonal
discount stores “had swapped a sense of community values for a dis-
count, the branded chains would re-create it and sell it back—at a price”
(135). This is similar to Marx’s perception that human beings worship
nothing in the commodity but the sociality of their own labour—only
here it is the transference of community togetherness to the brand (Marx
190, 164–165).
The market fundamentalism of late capitalism is the intensification of
capitalism’s religious self-fashioning: from the spiritualizing of the logo
or brand to the supposedly auto-generative powers of neoliberalism, free
from worldly constraints, to the demands for fanatical loyalty to the
law-unto-itself absolutism of the market.
A correlative of this would-be spiritualization of capitalism has been
the way in which, in Middle Eastern contexts particularly, religions
have been deployed as branding mechanisms. On my part, this insight
emerged through studying the sectarian civil war in Lebanon, with a
number of Lebanese writers speaking of how religion was treated idol-
atrously as a brand to imprint people according to their sects in the
demand for total brand loyalty (Rooney 2013)
Tellingly, Wahhabi Islam and Salafism are both partially founded on
a rejection of shirk, the ascribing of partners to God, such as in the wor-
shipping of idols, amongst other forms of fetishism. However, I would
argue that political Islam or Islamism has run straight into the shirk it
seeks to avoid. In the case of Daesh (or ISIL), Islam has indeed become
a brand and branding mechanism: it has its iconic black flag (inscribed
with the shahada and seal of the Prophet) always in view; it has a recog-
nizable image, with its uniform of identical beards, black clothes, and
balaclava-style masks. As Patrick Cockburn has pointed out, ISIL runs
a very sophisticated online self-marketing operation and brand man-
agement campaign (Cockburn 2014, 116). More than this, brand Islam
insists on a hyper-ritualistic performativity in the literal-minded acting
out of its religious prescriptions that govern all aspects of behaviour. For
ISIL, there is actually nothing outside of the Quranic text, the supposed
basics of which are performatively acted out to the reductive letter.
The authoritarianism of spiritualized capitalism and of religious idol-
atry seems to reside in their denying any source outside of themselves,
their auto-referentiality broking no challenge and compelling complicity.
There are two questions that I wish to address in relation to the previ-
ous point. The first concerns the significance of anti-capitalist solidarity
as constituting instances of loyalty or fidelity completely different to that
of the brand allegiance demanded by authoritarian neoliberalism or au-
thoritarian religion. The second concerns distinguishing the notion of
utopian realism from that of utopian idealism. While historically Marx-
ism has undeniably taken authoritarian forms at times, my consider-
ation is to explore what may be termed a certain Marxist spirit, one
that works against conformativity and dogmatism and does not amount
to one of liberal relativism as a question of the constructed nature of
truths but concerns a faith in the real. In fact, as indicated by my reading
of the conformism of the performative, an emphasis on constructivism
often serves to enforce the authority of the text, even if the intention is
otherwise.
First of all, I wish to propose that the atheism of Marxism is best
understood in terms of Marx’s rejection of the religious humanism or
divinization of humanity to be found in thinkers such as Hegel and
Feuerbach, as well as in terms of Marx’s critique of fetishism, or more
widely, the false promises, mystifications and magical thinking of cap-
italism. That is to say, Marxist critique is not necessarily incompatible
with spiritual philosophies that have an anti-capitalist orientation, as
affirmed by Senghor and even Césaire. Parry also identifies Marxism
with non-dualism. As a case in point, I will now discuss what solidarity
might mean across different cultural and epistemic contexts.
For Marx, what is at stake is essentially a question of surplus labour.
One of Marx’s most significant insights is that labour is capable of pro-
ducing in excess of basic human needs and that it is this surplus that cap-
italism serves to privatize. Thus, labour for the welfare of the collective
is rerouted to the benefit of private ownership. It is precisely the coop-
erative solidarity of labour that is denied by capitalism, and capitalism
stands to be undermined by the restitution of this sociality, through our
coming together in order to put the actual cooperative ethic of labour
into practice through the redistribution of wealth.
The Marxist emphasis on the sociality of labour is very compatible
with beliefs in other cultures that value the primacy of interdependent
coexistence, as can be found in the animist philosophies of unhu and
ubuntu, which maintain that a person is a person because of other peo-
ple. Rather than the collective being the result of a plurality of indi-
viduals, the collective is that which grants a person their personhood.
Beyond the politics of the sociality of labour, it pertains to an ethics
informed by a dynamic ontology of participatory being. Desmond Tutu
states: “A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others…for he or
she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she
belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated
or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed” (Tutu 2000, 35).
What in Africa is addressed in terms of unhu and ubuntu is, in Arab
cultures, addressed in terms of notions such as tawḥīd and sumud.
Tawḥīd pertains to God as the unity of being, although this comes to be
interpreted in diametrically opposed ways. The fundamentalist interpre-
tation (as found in al Qaeda) is that tawḥīd designates the one and only
220 Caroline Rooney
(singular) God. The Sufi interpretation of tawḥīd is that it designates
unbounded oneness and not “the one.” Thus, while the fundamentalists
oppose the gods of other religions, the Sufis welcome other religions.
Tutu, himself a Christian or animist Christian, maintains that “God is
not a Christian” (Tutu 2011). Equally, God is not a Jew and not a Mus-
lim. From an animist perspective, everything in creation is potentially
God’s partner—in working with the real and not against it—without
being God as such.
The notion of sumud pertains more closely to human solidarity and it
may be said that the eighteen days of Tahrir Square (from 25th January
2011) constitute a revolution of sumud, which refers to the steadfastness
of a collective: a steadfastness that arises through joining with others
to affirm a common unity. Quite opposed to this being a matter of the
so-called “faceless masses,” Egyptians found that this experience of the
collective conferred on each and everyone their dignity (karama) as a
person; fellow Egyptians were able to able to look each other in the eye
and acknowledge their common destiny in which each one had a part.
Indeed, a person is a person because of other people. In non-dualist phi-
losophy, the Western Enlightenment opposition between individual and
group is a false one.
What I wish to suggest now is that the Hyde-like “not self” of Western
Enlightenment secular individualism, its shadowy and unwanted accom-
paniment, is often in other cultures our collective consciousness (this
being a question of the real to which I refer). It is Jekyll who tells the
story of Jekyll and Hyde, so the abject Hyde that we see is Jekyll’s vi-
sion. If, however, you were able to cross over to Hyde’s side of existence,
Jekyll would disappear into thin air—in ubuntu philosophy the individ-
ual cut off from the collective is a non-being (Battle 2009, 42)—and you
would find instead, on this other side, a festive, master-free community,
a Tahrir Square.
Returning to Western theory, its bio-political fascination with the fig-
ure of the human who is not quite human, the inhuman human, con-
cerns the rational individualist’s sense of being haunted by the “not self”
(neither self nor other). As I have examined elsewhere, Agamben’s notion
of “bare life” deploys a doppelgänger logic, as he sees the human sub-
ject inevitably bound to its inhuman others forced to align with “bare
life” (Hyde), giving the (Western, male, philosophical) subject the ethical
duty of carrying lower, barely “human” life forms along with it (Rooney
2013, 98). Although it is clear that the attempt is to be sympathetic, what
is problematic is the inability to think outside of the box that frames
other people in monstrous or pariah terms. Notable across Parry’s work
is that she does not treat oppressed others, “subalterns,” as if they stand
in need of rescuing from “their” dehumanization: rather, it is that these
fellow human beings stand to be liberated from the capitalist and colo-
nialist institutions that deprive people of their dignity.
Quite apart from the question of whether patronizing sympathy from
on high is the kind of solidarity the “lowly” would welcome, it is surely
irresponsible to indulge in the gothic whimsies of humans who aren’t
human. Those who are deemed not human are usually those who are
posited as being extraneous to an economy of private property and its
reproducibility. Here the question of “surplus labour” pertains to what
Marx treats in terms of “reserve labour” or unemployment. Increasingly,
as Mike Davis has discussed in Planet of Slums, the megacities of neo-
liberalism generate what may be called their slum “doubles” or “doppel-
gängers” right beside them. The term Davis uses for the slum dwellers is
“surplus humanity” (Davis 2006, 174–198) and while I understand why
Davis speaks as such, I think it is a potentially dangerous term to use, as
“inhuman human” is, in that it serves to reinforce the perspectives of the
neoliberal citizens. What the term “surplus humanity” reveals is in fact a
genocidal logic, even if a slow genocide.
While for the neoliberals the slum constitutes what is deemed not part
of humanity (in a colonization of “the human”), from an animistic per-
spective, it is the privileged gated community (the epitome of neolib-
eralism in my view) that is not part of the life of the whole, while the
supposed “not part” (slum) is where you find the life of the collective,
which for some pertains to the sacred. The gated community is that
which privatizes the good life of the community ideal, securitized or
cut off supposedly from mortal threat in a will to self-immortalization,
projecting its mortality onto “not selves,” but in reality the gated com-
munity is an empty shell and the creative reality of life is in the slum. The
slum, therefore, is not the equivalent of Hyde, but rather where human-
ity is best able to see itself as such.
In NoViolet Bulawayo’s aptly titled We Need New Names, a
Zimbabwean slum child finds herself rescued from poverty when her
family emigrates to Detroit or “Destroyedmychigan” as she calls it.
However, the American dream turns out to be nothing but endless junk
food and disturbing pornography. One day, the protagonist, Darling,
discovers a box of homeland souvenirs, including a depiction of a mar-
ket scene “crazy with life and colour,” which prompts Darling to reflect:
“I’m remembering how beautiful it felt to be in a real scene like that,
everybody just there together, mingling together, living together before
things fell apart” (Bulawayo 2013, 283).
Althusser is sceptical of Marx’s assertion that he sought to turn Hegel
on his head, maintaining that whichever way up the dialectical structure
is, it would remain the dialectal structure. While Althusser maintains
contra Marx that it is not a case of overcoming the dialectic through
extracting the rational kernel from the mystical shell, but rather of treat-
ing Hegelian dialectic as a mystification imposed on a reality that is
over-determined, what may yet be entertained is that what is at issue
is not an up/down reversal but instead an inside/out inversion. From
222 Caroline Rooney
this perspective, I would say that it is a case of freeing the mystical-real
“kernel” from its impossible interiorization within the shell of Hegel’s
rational Spirit, impossible because the privatization of collective oneness
is a delusion. This being said, turning the supposedly entrapped inside
outwards does also entail coming down to earth in a pariah compan-
ionship with those deemed the lowest of the low. Philosophically, you’d
both invert and de-hierarchize, but you don’t actually have to do this,
where you could get stuck in the endless deconstructing of philosophi-
cal idealism: you can just simply join forces with the outward-turning
community.
The question of unity of being pertains not only to human commu-
nities, but also to living alongside non-human animals and all other
species in solidarity with nature. In This Changes Everything, Naomi
Klein states that “without a doubt…neoliberalism’s single most damag-
ing legacy” is “the realization of its bleak vision has isolated us enough
from one another that it became possible to convince us that we are not
just incapable of self-preservation but fundamentally not worth saving.”
(Kelin 2015, 43). Here, the notion of “surplus humanity” is attached to
“surplus nature.” The reality of the collective life of our earthly exis-
tence is what neoliberalism would like to cut itself adrift from, as Jekyll
from Hyde because Hyde is seen merely as the deadly as opposed to the
life of the collective. Klein also states: “The earth is not our prisoner,
our patient, our machine, or, indeed, our monster. It is our entire world”
(279). Further on, she quotes Arundhati Roy (in a briefer version):
If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not lie in climate
change conference rooms or cities with tall buildings. It lies low
down on the ground, with our arms around the people who go to
battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their
rivers because they know the forests, the mountains and the rivers
protect them. The first step towards reimagining a world gone ter-
ribly wrong would be to stop annihilating those who have a differ-
ent imagination…To gain the philosophical space, it is necessary to
concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look
like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our
future.
(Klein 2015, 291)
Postcolonial Theory and Utopianism

I would now like to relate the discussion so far to some of Benita Par-
ry’s most recent critiques of postcolonial theory, in particular, of Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate
Change” and Robert Young’s “Postcolonial Remains.” Whereas Parry’s
earlier critiques attempt to engage theorists invested in textual idealism
with the overlooked real, in her later critiques, the emphasis is more on
what it means to try and radicalize postcolonial theory in a belated and
opportunistic way without taking the legacies of revolutionary Marxism
and anti-capitalist critique seriously into account.
Dipesh Chakrabarty begins his essay by stating how he aims to use the
recent theories of Homi Bhabha to “illustrate how a leading contempo-
rary postcolonial thinker imagines the figure of the human in the era of
what is often called ‘neoliberal” capitalism,’ in order to inflect this with
concerns raised by global warming” (Chakrabarty 2012, 1). “What is
often called ‘neoliberal capitalism’”? Let us see.
Chakrabarty begins by explaining that his own career began with his
aspiring to accord historical agency to the subaltern as if the subaltern
might function as an implicitly Western Enlightenment subject, called a
subject of rights. He states revealingly: “Becoming human was for us a
matter of becoming a subject” (4). That appears to mean you can only be
considered human if you align with a certain construction of the human.
On encountering the work of Spivak and Bhabha, this aspiration then
appeared to him as a naïve enterprise, because he came to realize that
the human was a kind of double: the human as subject and the human
as not subject. This duality, he maintains, is further refined by Bhabha’s
recent work, where apparently Bhabha has come to discover that there
are “new” (as Chakrabarty puts it) subalterns that have arisen in the
global capitalist era, namely, refugees and slum-dwellers. It is hard to
think of this as a new phenomenon exactly, but for Bhabha it is arguably
that his earlier theories pertain only to happily assimilated migrants who
fit in through mimicry, while he has belatedly come to realize that this
postcolonial model does not fit the figure of the non-assimilated refugee.
But at the time when Bhabha was first formulating his theories, Parry
was certainly drawing his attention to overlooked differences of class
(Parry 2004, 73). For surely that is the difference that is at stake here:
class. There have been and continue to be middle-class migrants who are
readily absorbed into neoliberal “democracies,” and there have been and
continue to refugees who are not. Do Bhabha and Chakrabarty not real-
ize that some Palestinians have been living as the stateless inhabitants of
refugee camps since 1948? If there is now an intensification of the effects
of neoliberalism on the displacement of communities, this is likely to no
small degree to be because of the lack of mobilization around previous
anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist initiatives.
While Bhabha’s earlier theories of the assimilated postcolonial citizen
as mimic place doubling as internal to capitalist societies, his new turn
is one that configures the double as the insider human and the “neither
insider nor outsider” refugee or poor migrant (Chakrabarty 2012, 5).
Chakrabarty maintains that for Bhabha the discovery is that the latter
concern is “an area of privation and disenfranchisement” (6). Impressed
by this revelation, Chakrabarty is also enlightened by the further
224 Caroline Rooney
revelation that this means these undercitizens are not freely mobile no-
mads but faced with quite different questions of mobility.
It is not just that the obviousness and belatedness of the theory makes
the positing of it as “new” questionable, but that it remains the same
old “master”/ “slave” logic; Chakrabarty speaks of the one facet of his
human double aspiring to be the “sovereign” subject, while the other
exists only on the level of survival: that is, “bare life,” without any access
to “normative citizenship.” Chakrabarty makes the following sweeping
claim: “Our normative horizons, unlike those of Marx’s classical writ-
ings, say, give us no vantage point from which we could not only judge
but describe and know these classes” (7).
As Engels writes: “He who visits Manchester simply on business or
for pleasure need never see the slums, mainly because the working-class
districts and the middle-class districts are quite distinct… the mid-
dle classes sanctimoniously ignore the existence of their less fortunate
neighbours” (Engels 1958, 4). That is, all you need to do is take a walk
away from your normativity.
My point may be elaborated by a brief anecdote. A few months ago I
met with a friend called Ewan who works with Kent Refugee Help. He
had just collected a Hungarian Roma refugee from the airport, and I
came to meet them with a Hungarian friend. While we had supper in a
central London café, Ewan texted other Roma refugees living in the area
so we could have a street get-together. As we waited at a street corner,
a number of other Roma men started appearing from side streets and
from the back of shops. They were all homeless, but managed to bring
along some wine and snacks (maybe nicked, we didn’t ask), and soon
we were all getting to know each other using a variety of languages.
While the class difference between the refugees and I was quite evident,
there was no difference in our humanity. We liked wine, we laughed at
the same jokes: I did not feel that these Roma men, while living rough,
were a different kind of human being than I am. As it is said in Shona,
murombo munhu: a poor person is also human. So Chakrabarty’s as-
sertion of “a figure of the human that is constitutionally doubled and
contradictory,” with the lower form inscrutable and shadowy, is rather
mystifying: Jekyll and Hyde?
Chakrabarty’s notion of a doubled humanity (beyond class divides) is
a prelude to his concern that global warming serves to place humanity
in an unexpected place. He maintains that due to global warming, hu-
manity has now become a “geophysical force,” and further maintains:
“in becoming a geophysical force on the planet, we have also devel-
oped a form of collective existence that has no ontological dimension”
(Chakrabarty 2012, 13), I think this takes us back to Chakrabarty’s
uncertain opening phrase “what is often called ‘neoliberal capitalism’”.
It is capitalist modes of production together with neoliberalism’s free-
floating irresponsibility for anything outside itself that has caused the
climate change crisis. Turning this into “non-ontological humanity” as
a “geophysical force” is quite an evasion of this all-too-human responsi-
bility of corporate polluters.
It is perhaps a pity that Chakrabarty turned his back on subaltern
historiography. The realization of his error of equating the subaltern
with the Western Enlightenment type of subject (the individualistic citi-
zen), could have lead him in the directions taken by Mahasweta Devi or
Arundhati Roy towards discovering the animistic outlooks of those sub-
alterns who are very much aware of a collective ontology. And from this
perspective, “the geophysical force” would more rationally be carbon
emissions caused by humans, not the science fiction oddity of human-
ity having turned into those carbon emissions quite literally. No won-
der, then, that Chakrabarty despairs of human agency. Parry succinctly
writes that Chakrabarty’s presentation “ignores the logic of capitalist
accumulation on a world scale producing environmental crises, global
capitalism is separated from the degradation of nature, this last emerg-
ing as a transcendental force outside an actually existing world order
and beyond the reach of human agency” (Parry 2012, 347).
Having treated Young’s Postcolonial Remains in another essay
(Rooney 2015), I will not go into any detail concerning it here. How-
ever, in keeping with Parry’s critique of Young and Chakrabarty, what
is problematic is the way in which Young and Chakrabarty posit their
own blind spots and latter-day concerns with what exceeds the Western
high theory of the postmodernist episteme as, ultimately, the narrative of
postcolonial theory itself. In a way, that is all it is—a particular theory’s
own story of itself that has acquired an Hegelian auto-corrective mode
as it absorbs the criticisms made of it concerning its oversights to convert
these into fuel for its renewal in a bid to remain and expand. When I
use the term “remain and expand,” this ironically alludes to the Daesh
motto, “remaining and expanding,” in that what needs to be reckoned
with here are quite different forms of persistence and steadfastness, as
has been the concern of this chapter.
For Robert Young, the remaining and expanding of postcolonial
theory creates an unconvincing set of alliances as he links al-Andalus
with Ottoman Islamic imperialism, the Islamic caliphate of a suppos-
edly radical Al Qaeda, and the multi-cultural neoliberalism of the Gulf,
treating this as the umbrella for the way in which a quasi-messianic or
no longer secular postcolonial studies will serve to rescue hitherto invis-
ible subalterns, both the indigenous and the refugees (Young 2012). It
is as if for Young, the alternative to spiritualized neoliberalism could be
its reverse in neoliberal religion (as discussed previously). In referring to
Althusser on reversals, my point is that some reversals serve to maintain
the same dialectical logic.
If Young seeks a certain accommodation between neoliberalism and
supposedly “radical” religion (where I would speak instead of extremism),
226 Caroline Rooney
my concern is rather with how anti-capitalism and non-Western enlight-
enment philosophies might accompany each other in an over-turning of
the hierarchies of idealism and with respect to a belief in the real that
concerns a certain utopian horizon that I will now address.
Parry addresses Young’s nostalgic post-secularism through referring
to Ernst Bloch’s attempts to address the rise of fascism, stating:
Bloch uncovers the potential danger in a resurgence of survivals and

returns to the past, distinguishing between stale modes of being
and memories out of touch with the times—the “false consciousness
and abstract romanticism” that must be exorcized—and an under-
standing that must “take into its house the subversive and utopian
elements, the repressed matter of that which is not yet past…
(Parry 2012, 353)
Like Parry, I am in agreement with Bloch, and will explain this in con-
temporary terms. It is Wahhabi and Salafi Islam that express an immense
nostalgia for a spiritual past in their idealization of the first generations
after the Prophet. And yet what this pious posturing produces is a kind
of kitsch, stale medievalism that seems to have little authentic about it.
Not only that, the construction of a mere ideal of authenticity presents
itself as that which insists on violently enacting itself: the violent au-
thoritarianism may be said to occur precisely because the ideal lacks au-
thenticity in and of itself and can only be made “real” through barbaric
force. One term for this could be utopian idealism (as distinct from what
I wish to term utopian realism). The attempt to create perfect societies
through imposing blueprints for such on reality is always disastrous.
Such societies are invariably set up against the Hydes of this world, the
pariahs and infidels who cannot be included within the cult precisely
because the so-called pariahs are the true radicals, rebels, non-conform-
ists: the real utopians.
In contradistinction to the previous, there is an animism and a Su-
fism that can indeed be regarded in terms of that which of the past is
not actually the past but ongoing. In fact, what interests me here is the
thoroughly contemporary, the definition of the contemporary itself: “be-
longing to or occurring in the present,” “living or occurring at the same
time” (Oxford Dictionaries online). This concerns, therefore, the syn-
chronous, lateral, or horizontal dimension of non-hierarchal side-by-side
relations. I would say that this dimension concerns a sense of the present
that refers not to that which is always disappearing and thus transient,
but to that which is always carrying on or delivering itself from the past
as past; it is this sense of the present that may be understood both in
terms of steadfastness and utopianism.
Parry admonishes Young for valorising the folkloric and sacred ties to
the land (Parry 2012, 353). While I would affirm that there are dubious
and dangerous forms of this, these are of the nostalgic proto-extremist
utopian idealist variety discussed earlier. In contradistinction to this,
there are other forms of the folkloric worth affirming (as addressed by
Parry in her work on nativism). For instance, in Egypt the Arabic term
‫[( شعب‬al] sha’b), translated in English as “the people,” has in Arabic
folkloric connotations that are hard to capture in English, connota-
tions lacking in terms such as Hardt and Negri’s “multitude.” A recent
L ebanese musical called ‫ ِه ِّش ْك بِ ِّش ْك‬or Hishik Bishik, a tribute show to a
certain Egyptian spirit staged at the Metro al-Madina, serves to cap-
ture what’s at stake. The title Hishik Bishik is a kind of nonsense word,
deriving from references to belly dancing, with a slightly “risqué” and
down-market resonance. This hard-to-capture spirit is a kind of bur-
lesque free-spiritedness that the show puts forward through a cast of
stock Egyptian characters, including an ageing generalissimo and re-
tired army officers, a Sufi dervish, a belly dancer, cabaret singers, and
young lovers who, Nile-like, wend their way from the city of Cairo to
the more African Sa’idi (Upper) Egypt as they sing “Aghani Al B usata’a”
or “Tarab” (populist songs) from Sayyed Darwish, Abdel Halim Hafez,
Mohamed Fawzi, Umm Kulthum, Shadia, Leila Nazim, and so on.
While this inclusive collective spirit was evident in the Egyptian revo-
lution, a show like Hishik Bishik connects the present of this to its past
(especially through music) to make the point that this is the unbroken
spirit of the continuous: the people themselves. Much more could be said
here, but it is of course the case that different cultures have their differ-
ent versions of this, from Chimurenga (liberation) songs important to
the Zimbabwean struggle to workers’ anthems such as “The Red Flag”
(recently sung at Jeremy Corbyn rallies in the UK).
Related to the previous point, the international or the revolutionary
may be said to be that which pops up in different locations, which re-
quires of us that we recognize its itinerant emergences and routes, like an
old friend we sometimes lose sight of to happily find again. Parry writes:
“Derrida elaborates the New International as an alternative to interna-
tionalism, describing this as ‘a link of affinity, suffering and hope, a still
discreet almost secret link…without status, without title, and without
name…without coordination, without party, without country, without
national community…without common belonging to a class’” (Parry
2004, 101). And her response to this is that it is the old internationalism
that carries us forward, as follows: “Far from being an embarrassment
to socialists, Old Internationalism offers an inspiration to those engaged
in reinventing programmes, structures and strategies in the fight against
contemporary global capitalism” (Parry 2004, 102).
Derrida’s New International might at first sound like a maverick one;
however, it is not quite that. Previously he appears to eschew what I have
discussed in terms of the logo: that is, this could be an internationalism
without a brand. Well and good, but the first question is whether this
228 Caroline Rooney
no-brand would still go under the rubric of “Derrida and deconstruc-
tion.” Related to this, Derrida’s version of internationalism promotes
the people as anonymous or faceless masses. How would these (individ-
uals) recognize each other if they rely on but a “discrete almost secret
link,” as if a case of esoteric passwords? How would you conduct a
liberation struggle in terms of “without country, without national com-
munity”? Might this not serve to romanticize homelessness and refugee
non-belonging?
In contradistinction to Specters of Marx, Naomi Klein’s work is at
pains throughout to trace a vast network of named activists and activist
groups. That is, what accompanies her “no logo” position is a meticu-
lous acknowledgment of her fellow rebels. It is the logo-effect that ren-
ders the work and creativity of others anonymous, so it is not that we
need “no names,” but rather that we sometimes may need “new names.”
Klein, quoting Luis Yanza of the Amazon Defense Front on the need for
activists to unite, is very much concerned with alliance-building, and
she maintains that the needed truths emerge not out of some abstract
theory about the commons, but rather out of lived experiences that can
be connected to each other through recognizing their commonalities
(Klein 2001, 291). For Klein, the surprise of moments such as the Arab
Spring lies less in the supposed coming out of nowhere (the capitalist
apparitional effect of commodity production according to Marx), but
in our realizing that there are much more of us concerned with the same
or related struggles than we thought: the point being that we get to see
and know each other. What could be added is that, more than this being
a matter of spontaneity leading to inter-connection, it is when people
come together that results in this spontaneity.
Butler states in her essay “Merely Cultural” (which seeks to defend
an ideological cultural studies of identity politics from Marxist critique)
that it is her strategy not to name those she seeks to oppose: those who
presume “that poststructuralism has thwarted Marxism” (Butler 1998,
1). She states: “If I fail to give the names of those I take to hold these
views, I hope I will be forgiven” (1). She considers that “giving airtime”
to the Marxists who critique the hegemony (renamed “iconicity” by But-
ler) of post-structuralist theory is problematic in that they speak “but to
acquire and appropriate that very iconicity” (1–2; emphasis original).
While Butler clearly sees the investments of the debate to lie in who is
counted “in” and who can be squeezed out (as she forecloses/ silences
the Marxist voices, depriving them of a right to reply but yet potentially
misrepresenting them through a ventriloquism that cannot be cross-
checked), it is instructive to juxtapose Butler with Klein here. Klein,
evaluating the identity politics of the 1990s from its tail end, considers
that the competitiveness of identity politics arose as apparent conditions
of “plenty” led to women and non-whites asserting their share of “the
collective pie,”—these contenders not realizing that they were doing this
because it was actually a “shrinking piece of pie.” With this, “class fell
off the agenda, along with all serious economic—let alone corporate
analysis” (Klein 2001, 122). Klein quotes Tim Brennan as stating in
1991 that the problem with political correctness is “‘that it is not politi-
cal enough—that it is impersonating political struggle’” (122).
Butler objects to the Marxists in that she maintains they advocate
“unity” over difference. She assumes that unity means homogeneity, go-
ing on to oppose “unity” with difference, and concluding: “This resis-
tance to ‘unity’ carries with it the cipher of democratic promise on the
left” (Butler 1990, 8). The notion that “unity” may have to do with uto-
pian solidarity for the Marxists (were they allowed to speak for them-
selves) does not occur to Butler, because in taking difference as primary
she can only see this as being set up against unity-as-homogeneity. At the
same time, difference for Butler (as already discussed) is merely devia-
tion from scripted norms as opposed to creative expression.
Fredric Jameson suggests: “Utopia would seem to offer the spectacle
of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from
its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation” (Jameson
2004, 35). Yet this could not be the mere self-referential performance of
the utopian, for its very reality is at stake.
Utopia is revolutionary, an overturning or inversion of the established
order of things, for it frees everyone to improvise, to make it up as you
go along. Another term for this is to extemporize, from ex tempore. Pro
tempore, or pro tem (for the time being), may refer to a temporary place-
holder. A dictator is a temporary placeholder who seeks to deny their
status as such, and the dictator, in holding on, takes possession of the
place of the people. The word “utopia” means “no place,” rather than
“nowhere,” so this suggests there can be no place holders, other than
temporary ones. This is very much the philosophy of unhu, as Mandova
and Chingombe state:
The Shona proverbs ushe varanda (chieftainship depends on the sub-

jects), ushe ukokwa kuna vamwe (chieftainship is by invitation from
others), ishe vanhu (a king is his subjects), and ushe hauzvitonge
(chieftainship cannot rule itself) articulate a fundamental motif of
traditional African constitutional thought. It stresses the view that
the king owes his status and the powers that go with that status to
the will of his subjects.
(Mandova and Chingombe 2013, 107)
For this reason Mandova and Chingombe state that Gaddafi’s assertion
that leaders have “no sell by date” is thoroughly at odds with unhu.
A revolution, in terms of the previous passage, makes the leaders tem-
porary again, as the people extemporize, where what is truly lasting is
the capacity of the people to make things up as they go along, not merely
230 Caroline Rooney
haphazardly but according to the principle of co-acknowledgment, an
adaptive response to surrounding environments, both social and natu-
ral. And this participatory ethic is not utopian in a teleological sense but
in and of itself.
Finally, Parry’s courageous, principled, and sustained critique of (in
Chakrabarty’s terminology) “leading theorists” cannot be construed in
Butler’s terms as an opportunistic bid for “iconicity.” Rather, I would say
that it is a case of scepticism towards such iconicity as that which serves
in effect to colonize the field of postcolonial studies and divert it from
the emancipatory anti-capitalist struggles of the people. Here, comrade-
ship is leadership. And yet a certain undeniable iconicity of Marxism
remains, but it differs from capitalist iconicity. All too briefly, it concerns
what I call an ostensive sign (Rooney 2007, 1–3) and what Ayman El
Desouky identifies, in an Egyptian context, as amāra (El Desouky 2014).
Such signs point not to themselves, performatively, but rather point out
the way forward. Or, in Laura Chrisman’s phrase for Parry’s utopia-
nism: “you can get there from here” (Chrisman 2003, 164).
Imagine now that you are in a car, seated next to Benita Parry with
her at the wheel. You are hurtling along English country lanes on the
way to the nearest train station after long hours of leftist debate. On the
car’s cd player is a playlist mix blaring out. You’ve just heard Spring-
steen’s “Born to Run” and now Kirsty MacColl’s “They Don’t Know”
comes on. Go Google it, and as you listen to it, its lyrics by now inflected
with maverick Marxism, feel the summer wind from the open car win-
dows as you drive on.
Notes
1 See, for instance, Gilbert Achcar (2013); Samir Amin (2012, 1–2); Caroline
Rooney (2013, 144–163).
2 I owe my exploration of the maverick to a conversation I had with Benita
Parry in which she suggested to me that my work had a maverick quality,
adding that she did not consider this to be a bad thing. While adhering to
classical Marxism, Parry’s work may be said to be receptive of both the radi-
cally non-conventional (or maverick) and, on the other side, to a certain cau-
tious leftism (or reluctant alliance with the revolutionary), as can be found
in the stance of Said, as analysed by Parry in “A Retrospect on the Limits of
Postcolonial Studies” (2015, 59–75). I consider this to be important for the
broad reach of the side-by-side relations with which I am concerned.
3 The six essays that comprise the first part of Parry’s Postcolonial Studies are
centrally concerned with this.
4 I have written about animist liberation culture in African Literature, Ani-
mism and Politics (Rooney 2000) and on Sufism and the Arab Spring in “Sufi
Springs: Air on an Oud String” (Rooney 2015). See also Sahar Keraitim and
Samia Mehrez (2012); and David Lan (1992). Of course, Gandhi’s writings
testify to the influence of Hinduism on his liberation philosophy while there
is also the ongoing legacy of liberation theology in South America.
5 The writers I refer to are Jean Said Makdisi, Etel Adnan and Ghada Samman.
6 See, for example, Wood (2015).
7 See Senghor 1994, 27–35, and Césaire’s attribution of a moral weight to the
animist Sanza Player in A Season in Congo (Césaire 2010).
8 Parry writes: “To take only the most philosophical, Adorno across his writ-
ings followed Marx in elaborating a nondualistic account of the relationship
between matter and mind, human history and natural history” (Parry 2012,
347).
9 For the Al Qaeda interpretation, see Bernard Haykel 2009, 51. For differing
renditions of tawḥīd see Sheik Walī Raslān Ad-Dimashqī (1997).
10 In Postcolonial Studies, Parry writes: “Fanon’s last writings look not to the
fulfillment of the Enlightenment’s ideals within the existing order but to
decolonization as the agency of a transfigured social condition; hence hold-
ing in place that vision of the anti-colonial struggle as a global emancipa-
tory project and projecting the radical hope of a realized humanism” (Parry
2004, 54). This may be juxtaposed with a statement by Louis Althusser of
relevance to my argument, as follows: “Bourgeois humanism made man the
principle of all theory. This luminous essence of man was the visible coun-
terpart to a shadowy inhumanity…In the two forms of this couple inhuman/
human, the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century lived in ‘rational-liberal
form, the German radical intellectuals in ‘communalist’ or ‘communist
form,’ the relations between them and their conditions of existence, as a
rejection, a demand and a programme” (Althusser 1977, 237).
11 Davis, it should be noted, places a question mark after the term “a surplus
humanity.”
12 Althusser writes: “As soon as the dialectic is removed from its idealistic
shell, it becomes ‘the direct opposite of the Hegelian dialectic’… But such an
inversion in sense would leave the dialectic untouched”(1977, 90–91).
13 Benita Parry’s essay “What is Left in Postcolonial Studies?” (2012) is a
response to Robert Young’s “Postcolonial Remains” (2012) and Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change”
(2012) both in a special issue of New Literary History.
14 Neil Lazarus and Rashmi Varma aptly refer to two sides to postcolonial
studies, namely “accommodationist” and “subversive” (Lazarus and Varma
2009, 312).
15 The notion of “utopian realism” is the topic for debate at an ICA symposium
I have organized with the participation of David Bell, David Herd, Rachel
Holmes, Ghada Karmi, Adrian Rifkin, Ahdaf Soueif and Sarah Turner (30
September 2015).
17 I have in mind Spivak’s term “vanishing present” (Spivak 1999).
18 Hishik Bishik Show, Metro al-Madina, dir. Hisham Jaber (March
2013-March 2014).
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Part III
Interlocutions
11 “It could be otherwise, it
should be otherwise”
An Interview with Benita Parry
Sharae Deckard (SD) and Rashmi Varma (RV)
Formations and Bildung

SD and RV: We’d like to start at the very beginning. Can you tell us about
the family you were born in, and your childhood? From there we can
move on to your early political and social formation and then ask if
there is a historical and experiential basis to the joining of margin-
alization and radicalism in your personal trajectory?
BP: As to the last question, this connection is my story. I was born in
South Africa to immigrant parents who left anti-Semitism in E astern
Europe, only to arrive in a land rebuilt by settlers into a bastion of
aggressive racism. So I guess I was programmed to be an unhappy
child with a sense of original displacement that I could not put into
thoughts and words.
RV: Why was that? As a young girl you already sensed the contradictions…?
BP: Only later did I understand that we could never be at home in this
deformed society: existentially alienated from the Afrikaners and
those of British and Western European descent; socially and insti-
tutionally cut off from the indigenous Africans and the long-settled
Coloured and Asian populations. All I knew then was that I lived
within a segment of middle or lower-middle class Jewish immigrants,
including teachers, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, shopkeepers, and
autodidact artisans—tailors, shoemakers, watchmakers—amongst
whom some retained their previously acquired left-wing affiliations.
During the war years, many in this community supported “Friends of

the Soviet Union.” They had a gut feeling of connection to the USSR that
survived their disappointment at the Stalin–Hitler Pact. I recall my par-
ents arguing with a friend who was a passionate defender of the USSR,
a silversmith with long grey hair, shining tooth-fillings, and an artistic
temperament. One of my mother’s friends spoke proudly of being related
to the Menshevik Pavel Axelrod and another wept in the street when the
Spanish Republicans were defeated in 1939. So there was amongst my
parents’ circle this heartfelt attachment to revolution, together with their
living completely shut off from the black community, whom we only ever
238 Sharae Deckard (SD) and Rashmi Varma (RV)
encountered as servants and labourers. As an adult I came to understand
the damage inflicted by this schizophrenic sort of existence and looked
for a place within internationalism—as did those who joined the libera-
tion movements and Communist Party.
RV: What schools did you go to?

BP: My elementary school was just that. The teachers were insular, ig-
norant, racist. Later I went to an okay sort of all-girls state school
called “Good Hope Seminary.” It was neither a seminary, nor was
there any good hope around. We were taught mainly by English-
women, many of whom had lost their guys in the war, and were
seeking sunshine and a better life. The leather-skinned history
teacher, who always smelt of whisky, had to teach a syllabus filled
with “The Kaffir Wars” and “The Great Trek”—the latter being the
dispossession of Africans by the Boers or Afrikaners—about which
she knew nothing, having studied in England. So she read straight
from the prescribed textbooks in a wholly disengaged, indifferent
manner. And there was the Latin teacher who still wore those 1918
dresses, right down to her ankles. On the last day of every term she
threatened us with Ovid, then read us Winnie-the-Pooh.
RV: What kind of people went to this school? What sort of education
did you receive?
BP: Lower-middle class, middle class—but of course, all white. The
teaching in some subjects was adequate, and the achievers put their
heads down, relied on their own resources and got the grades to get
into the professions. Those without ambition were listless, while a
few were ignited by Thelma Tyfield’s English classes. When we were
about to leave school, she invited those who had responded to her
demonstrable love of literature to help in clearing her personal li-
brary. And that is where I found Trotsky. The white population har-
boured a cultivated, disaffected and apolitical minority of artists,
musicians, writers, etc. That particular book of Trotsky’s writings
has since been lost. I can’t remember the other books I took—but
that book, in its red cover, I remember taking and treasuring it.
SD: How did you get politically involved in the Left Zionist movement
when still at school?
BP: It was in the air, you know. Some people had joined through their
older siblings, or because their parents were Zionists; my parents
weren’t Zionists and had in the old days been interested in the
Jewish Bund, a socialist society founded in Russia. When the war
ended, they tried to trace their near relatives in Eastern Europe.
There was no one left, except for one nephew who had joined the
Red army. The rest were… disappeared… into the camps … into the
incinerators. This trauma affected a generation who were already
leading peculiarly fraught lives. So while at high school, we joined
“It could be otherwise, it should be otherwise” 239
the Zionist Socialist movement, where we first came across the writ-
ings of Marx. None of the major works, but we knew of Marx, we
knew of Engels, and we read The Condition of the Working Class
in England and The Communist Manifesto. By the time we went to
university it was clear that Zionism’s intention of dispossessing the
Palestinian people did not conform with the idealistic platform of
the Zionist-Socialists—and this made it impossible for us to remain
in the movement.
RV: What did you study? How did university politicize you?
BP: The University of Cape Town did not have stringent entry require-
ments and my general degree was undemanding—a bit of history,
psychology, English, sociology. I have little memory of lectures or
tutorials, and my academic performance was nil. What redeemed
my time at university was finding extra-mural political discussions
on campus. There is a persistent misconception that all the sorrows
of apartheid began with the Nationalists, but segregation had been
entrenched previously, under the pro-British “United Party.” When
I started, around late 1949, Jan Smuts’ party had been defeated by
the architects of a codified apartheid who hadn’t yet got around
to disciplining the universities. Hence in the still unsegregated re-
fectory white undergrads could meet students from the majority
communities.
Many were children of teachers—teachers in colonized societies being

the core of an intelligentsia. They were a sophisticated bunch and in-
cluded members of the Communist Party and an organization rather
flatly named The Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), with ideo-
logical links to the Fourth International. The recruiters discreetly made
themselves known to anyone showing an interest and would urge us to
read their literature and attend their meetings. Both I and two other girls
joined the Unity Movement—which later became the African People’s
Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA)—but I was the only
one who stayed.
RV: How did your parents react to your joining the movement?
BP: My mother sympathized, while cautioning me that it was going to be
tough. And more, despite being distraught, she remained supportive
when, for a few years, I lived with comrades in District Six. My
father, who had become more and more accustomed to the white
South African way of thinking, was intemperate about my associa-
tion with the “shvartzes,” protesting that this had brought shame on
the family and ruined my matrimonial prospects.
SD: How did the movement function? Where did meetings take place?
BP: Largely in District Six, a spectacular cityscape on the slopes of Ta-
ble Mountain, which was home to the Cape Coloured and Malay
communities and included political dissidents, and a mischievous,
disobedient coterie friendly towards the movement and given to
illicit indulgences. Later this “troublesome” population including
a “lumpenproletariat,” was evicted and their homes razed to the
ground.
In terms of the movement’s functioning, member and fellow travellers

lent out private houses, church halls, community centres. There was also
a discussion club that met in the city centre, the New Era Fellowship.
The majority supported the building of a peasant-based organization.
Most of the black population at the time were landless peasants subject
to a policy of migrant labour devised by the previous segregationist re-
gime and continued by the apartheid government. This forced the men-
folk into long stretches working in the mines, unaccompanied by their
families and without settling. A minority contended that these labour-
ers, ghettoized, enslaved in compounds, would, like their relatives back
home, be cut off from acquiring the experience of urban life and aware-
ness of the larger world, and thus argued that the making of revolution
was the task of the already existing proletariat in the towns and cities.
RV: What was the composition of the movement—was it mostly young

people? Were the African members in a majority in the movement?
SD: Was it gender-balanced; were there both men and women active in
the organization? Or was it “to the kitchens” while the men debated?
BP: Most of the members were young or middle-aged. The ethnic com-
position depended on the location—e.g. Indians were the largest
number in Natal. But yes, African members were overall the major-
ity. The influx of students led to the formation of SOYA, the Society
of Young Africans, an educational and activist group with access
to the urban and rural African populations. And there was support
from peasants engaged in non-cooperation and uprisings that were
ignored by other organizations.
As for the role of women: they were amongst the most theoretically-
minded in the movement: arguing, writing, addressing public meetings.
This was, for the times, anomalous; it seems everything I knew was par-
adoxical, didn’t fit existing models. In retrospect it was extraordinary.
SD: With all the theoretical discussion, was there door-to-door organi-
sation too? Did you campaign, organise events, advertise? What sort
of things did you do?
BP: There was a newspaper called The Torch—oh, the names! We
worked locally, amongst the Coloured, Malay and Asian communi-
ties in the city, as well as the Africans relegated to townships on the
edges, selling our newspaper, distributing pamphlets and leaflets,
and holding local meetings made possible by resident supporters. We
aimed to educate, explaining how and why segregation was installed
and functioned, how resistance through strikes and mass protests
was possible, how we needed to build an all-inclusive “nation.” The
Coloured and Asian constituencies accommodated the white agita-
tors, but the urban Africans were more reserved and mistrustful. As
to organizing amongst the peasantry in the “Reserves” and support-
ing their local struggles against landlessness—that was something
only the black members who spoke the languages could do.
SD: Why do you think the NEUM was ultimately unsuccessful?
BP: I hesitate to say this, but it now seems to me that history took over
and undermined the movement’s analysis. Changing conditions can
render theoretical postulates archaic. The official policy remained
an investment in the land question and the agrarian struggles, which
the NEUM in principled fashion supported, even as developments in
the mode of production were, despite institutional restraints on the
free movement of labour essential to capitalism’s expansion, creating
a proletariat in urban centres. Capitalism goes its own way—it has a
mind of its own—and the punitive measures of an ideologically rigid
regime could not stop a process accelerated by mass defiance of the
pass laws restricting entry to urban areas.
RV: For younger generations who don’t have a sense of the radical pasts
as these were lived in the decades you are talking about, can you
provide a glimpse of how participation in a political organization
affected your thinking and sense of intellectual work? By the same
token, what were the impediments?
BP: At a time when the Communist Party of South Africa was pursuing
a moderate “progressive politics on non-racialism,” the movement
introduced us to the debates before, during, and after the Russian
Revolution, the writings of liberation struggles in China, Africa,
Asia, and Latin America. It instilled a commitment to internation-
alism and a principled politics. Here was a group connected to the
Marxist forums which had existed since the 1920s, brought by im-
migrants from Eastern Europe, both Stalinists and Trotskyists, by
those from the oppressed populations who had attended overseas
universities and returned as communists of one or other persua-
sion, later by refugees from Fascism. These convergences meant that
Marxism was embedded in the intellectual culture of the NEUM,
and although not always implemented, it was there as a direction,
a hope. When I began writing against the grain of postcolonial
theory— against the evacuation of capitalism from imperialism, the
erasure of conflict and struggle in situations of domination, against
a politics of accommodation— this experience shaped my attempts.
The negative aspects are, I guess, common to all far-left organizations:
the pressures of conforming to the party line, the unease at suppressing
doubt and dissent, the indefinite deferment of individual interests.
SD: Did your later interest in Marxist literary criticism have roots in this
period?
BP: Because we were being directed to the literary appreciation of “progres-
sive” writing, we went in search of a more complex left criticism, which
we found in Lukács’ Studies in European Realism (1950); probably his
most prescriptive piece of writing, but one which gave us an insight into
how Marxist criticism could enhance not only the reading of literature,
but an understanding of its time. Much later, I came to grasp how this
methodology was able to explain how the mismatches and implausi-
ble juxtapositions characterizing the literature of the peripheries was
rooted in the contradictions of capitalism’s intrusion into pre- or emer-
gent capitalist social formations, generating a “newness” that was and
remains in excess of metamorphosing received configurations.
RV: You were never attracted to the Communist Party, which had a siz-
able white membership?
BP: No. I had some knowledge of Stalinism and had witnessed the oppor-
tunistic interventions of the Communist Party in South Africa. David
Johnson is currently working on a critical history of the Communist
Party of South Africa based on archival sources, which his chapter
for this volume will draw on. However, my disillusion with the CP
in South Africa never stopped me from acknowledging the courage
of Communist Party members in fighting fascism in Spain, Greece,
France—and it never got in the way of my affiliation with communism.
I have just come across Alain Brossat’s and Sylvie Klingberg’s Revolu-
tionary Yiddishland and I’d like to read out to you some lines from the
introduction that capture my own sense of ongoing affiliation:
‘Communism’ is a signifier that runs right through this book, in all

the ‘chapters’ of history evoked by the militants to whom it gives
voice. In their memories, this word is far more than simply a po-
litical label, a programme or a form of organization. It is a kind of
constant perspective in which the notion of another possibility is
embedded […] The fact that this perspective was most often blocked
by defeat, calculations of realpolitik, the strategic blindness of bu-
reaucracies, etc. in no way changes the fact that the article of faith is
embedded at the core of the hope of these men and women, in their
activity on very front of struggle: another world is possible and the
generic name of this other possibility is ‘communism.’
(Brossat and Klingberg 2016)
Post-University Life
RV: Let’s move on to your life after leaving Cape Town. You worked in
a leftist bookstore in Johannesburg?
BP: This was in the mid-1950s. I had moved to escape a disastrous per-
sonal entanglement. I found mundane work and when I was asked
to leave, having been reported by a co-worker as being a communist,
I was taken on by Vanguard Booksellers—again, the names! My
employer, a Jewish woman, was one of those nonconformists who
had once put her head above the parapet; in a previous existence she
had been a Trotskyist with an impressive record of union organiza-
tion. And she remained aware of what was going on in South Africa
and the world beyond. She lived in a posh area, in a house with a
swimming pool, very handy for a nudist. It was reputed that her first
husband had left to join the Eighth Route Army in China. Later she
married a younger man who had fled with his family from Belgium
during WWII. Although he was a partner in running the bookshop,
my recollections tend to fix on her.
To her credit, she gave work in the shop to named communists and
misfits who, being unemployable, she underpaid. And in the back
room, she hired black sorters with university degrees, whose wages
were above the standards of the time. They put up with her because
as they said, “Ach, she’s a madwoman. But she treats us decently.”
These guys were informed readers, and she encouraged them to borrow
books. I guess they were okay, both our bosses; they let things pass.
They knew that the backroom staff had heated political debates during
working hours; they knew that every Friday the shop assistants would
go out to get the liquor that was illegal for their co-workers to buy.
All the same, they said to the black workers, “Look, we’re all on first-
name-terms here, but we cannot have you in the front of the shop… it’s
just not going to work.”
SD: The white customers wouldn’t come in?

BP: Most would have been embarrassed, disconcerted. Remember, these
were scoundrel times.
RV: What was your job there?
BP: To dust the shelves and serve customers. Very humble, yet we
were expected to converse intelligently with buyers, which meant
speed-reading or at least dipping into books.
RV: The bookshop was, I understand, a real window to the world…
BP: We had all sorts of trade: lefties, mystics, cranks, general intellec-
tuals, avid readers, university people, whose own bookshop was
not well stocked and by then was censoring its purchases. Earlier,
university libraries had disposed of the dangerous material on their
shelves, provoking left-wing students to liberate these for posterity.
Also lots of Brits came in who were fascinated by the country’s mad-
ness or hoping to join the struggle, or on a charitable mission to help
the downtrodden.
It was in the bookshop that I first met Deirdre Levinson, whose motiva-
tion was more political. She soon found more taxing work in the English
Department at University of Cape Town, joined the Unity Movement,
and after leaving, wrote a wonderful book called Five Years: An Expe-
rience of South Africa. She remains a close friend with whom I have for
long exchanged ideas and “tales from the crypt.”
I also came to know a woman with a true voice who on returning
to England became a night-club/cabaret singer; also photographers, as-
piring novelists, even an English aristocrat and academic whom I later
learned was accused of being a government spy. He was a regular visitor
who, in the fashion of the times, would invite me to lunch; this may
have been in pursuit of information about the Unity Movement rather
than eccentric conversation with a wild colonial girl. When he and his
rarity of a wife were made temporarily homeless, she, the baby, and a
cat moved into my one-roomed apartment. This had a balcony where
the lady, discomforted by the heat, used to stroll about naked. When I
protested that I was still trying to be active in a political movement and
did not want to draw attention to myself, her response was to drawl:
“Oh Benita! You are so petit-bourgeois!”
Many Brits and Europeans who had come out because they thought
South Africa would be exciting found a home in the circles around Drum
and The Golden City Post, both black “lifestyle” publications, owned
by a multi-millionaire son of a mine-owner with white editors and a
mainly African staff. The journalists, outlaws but not politically affil-
iated, included writers, poets, musicians, and photographers, talented
and intrepid in exposing the poverty and violence of the townships, as
well as covering the emergence of township jazz and showcasing their
own work. The scene has been described by one of its number as “a
record of naivety, optimism, frustration, defiance, courage, dancing,
drink, jazz, gangsters, exile and death.” The illegal shebeens and private
parties in the townships were a haven for those passing through; and
for the earnestly committed it provided an occasional escape from the
austerities of politics.
RV: Why did you leave South Africa?

BP: It was 1958.Some of the few white comrades had already gone.
Under conditions of increased surveillance the space for the activ-
ism of white members was closing up. After I left, Unity Movement
members were arrested and served long stretches on Robben Island
and other prisons. This is something written out of the history of
resistance recorded by the victors, the African National Congress
and the Communist Party, who presented themselves as the only
ones to struggle and suffer, even though others of different po-
litical persuasions, including pan-Africanists and anarchists, were
also jailed.
About my leaving, and this is something that I could not admit back
then, I was also having doubts about the movement’s direction—despite
which I to this day remain in touch with a number of old comrades.
England and the Turn to Academia

RV: What year did you come to England? What was the political atmo-
sphere on the left during that period?
BP: 1958 was a time of ferment on the left; the USSR’s punitive response
to the Hungarian uprising (made up of right and left dissenters) had
driven many from the Communist Party, and significant numbers
were seeking alternative homes. Hence the sheer number of radi-
cal newspapers, the rise of New Left Review, and the proliferation
of far-left groups: The Socialist Workers Party, The International
Marxist Group, the Socialist Labour League, The Militant, all
Trotskyist in allegiance. A comrade from South Africa was attend-
ing meetings of the Socialist Labour League (SLL), which was to
become the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). Having left one
fraught political situation, I walked straight into another with the
SLL. I also walked into a life-long relationship with Bill (Parry), my
husband, who died in 2006.
I was very naïve about British politics. The SLL’s “leader” was the noto-
rious Gerry Healy. From the start I was alarmed at his maniacal rheto-
ric about the imminence of revolution and repelled by his Svengali-like
control over members. Later, because of his multiple misdemeanours,
there was an implosion in what had become the WRP, leaving some
permanently damaged and alienated not only from “democratic cen-
tralism,” but from left politics. The personal costs were incalculable. In
my case, apart from working with a local anti-fascist association and
a support group during the Miners’ Strike, my political activity grad-
ually dropped away. I guess I piously felt I’d paid my dues… knocking
on doors, talking to often-unresponsive people, handing out leaflets to
sometimes-reluctant recipients, joining picket lines at dawn. For me the
experience with the SLL led to misgivings about hierarchical organi-
zations that “devour souls” and a life-long respect for those who give
up careers, ambitions, and indeed, pleasures, in the belief or hope that
their forfeits will contribute to the making of another world. Because of
this, I despise the facile mockery of such devotions by the literati and the
professoriat.
RV: How did you come to write Delusions and Discoveries?

BP: It’s a long story. Because I lacked a formal education, I had begun
an undergraduate history degree at the London School of Econom-
ics while still in the SLL. During my second year, Bill, who had
just finished his PhD, was offered two academic posts—one in Bir-
mingham, and one at Queen Mary College. We wanted to remain in
London, but we had to get away from the often-perverse demands
of the SLL. So together we chose—and I knew this was not going
to be in my own academic interests—to go to Birmingham, where I
completed my bachelor’s degree. After which I was encouraged by
a professor to stay on and do a Master’s, not a PhD, because my
topic was not in the discipline of history. He offered to supervise
my thesis, and at his suggestion I also arranged to meet Richard
Hoggart in the English and Cultural Studies Departments. Within
minutes of my speaking, it was clear that Hoggart was massively
uninterested. Having introduced myself as Benita Parry, Hoggart
when later speaking with my mentor (who then passed it on to me),
referred to “that student of yours, what’s her name, Rachel Rabino-
vitz.” I had never been a great fan of his. I thought he was insular,
very fixed on Britain, parochial.
SD: How did you start working on that material? You weren’t taught
that, and no one else was writing on it, so why were you drawn to it?
BP: I didn’t feel able to work on South Africa; it still felt too confusing.
So I chose a colonial region with a vast array of printed material
revealing the mind of those who believed that they had some sort
of innate right to rule other people. As well as social and political
books on India, there was a mountain of fiction that has left no trace
on literary history but at the time of its publication had an enormous
circulation at home and abroad.
RV: Did you have your daughter Rachel before or after?
BP: I turned the dissertation into a book while Rachel was a toddler;
I still think this contributed to my being no more than “a good
enough mother”—although Rachel denies this, and as an adult she
and I became and remain close friends.
RV: Did you publish it as a book right away?
BP: I hadn’t thought about publication, until my supervisor mentioned
the thesis to a director at Penguin, a Tory MP from the old school
of gentlemen politicians. Having read the script, he offered me a
contract. I was disconcerted about the ethics of consorting with a
Tory but was rebuked by friends for a futile political correctness. So
with some additional apprehension because I had no chic clothes, I
accepted his invitation to lunch at the then all-male Tory club, and
found that I needn’t have worried—the women lunching there as
guests were exceedingly drab. Anyway, Sir Edward Boyle turned out
to be open-minded despite his political allegiances, and the book
appeared.
RV: Was that a big moment for you?
BP: I don’t really do “big moments.” It had plenty of reviews in the gen-
eral press, many very hostile, expressing outrage at its critique of
their benign view of the Raj. I was told that Paul Scott, author of
The Raj Quartet and considered a critic of British rule in India, also
hated it. It was published in 1972, after which Allen Lane The Pen-
guin Press negotiated a joint publication deal with its Indian part-
ners and the University of California Press. However, whatever the
contract arrangements were and even though the book sold well, I
seem not to have earned so much as 10p out of it. But then again, I
don’t do “big bucks” either.
SD: Was it difficult when you were writing it? “Postcolonial Studies”
didn’t exist as a field yet. Were there influential theorists or critics
for you at the time?
BP: I knew Fanon and some theorists of liberation movements but I had
not read critical theory. And remember, I wasn’t trained in literature
at all, and was a stranger to literary criticism. That is the weakness,
the flaw of the book: a lack of expertise. Later students and col-
leagues told me it had been a stimulus to their own work, and of this
I’m glad. But it is not a book that I could defend now. When Michael
Sprinker wore down my reluctance to revise and republish it with
Verso in 1998, I wrote a preface in which I acknowledged what I
saw to be its defects.
SD: How did you decide to write Conrad and Imperialism after that?
BP: By then, “Literature and Empire” was growing as a subject and nu-
merous studies were coming out, such as Martin Green’s Dreams of
Adventure, Deeds of Empire (1979), M.M. Mahood’s The Colonial
Encounter (1977), Alan Greenberger’s The British Image of India
(1969), Jeffrey Meyers’ Fiction and the Colonial Experience (1973).
However, none of these struck me as methodologically innovative,
except for Jonah Raskin’s The Mythology of Imperialism (1971), a
very different species of criticism, a Marxist critique, which I found
awesome, yet was not acknowledged in the circles where it could have
made a difference. I had read all the literary criticism on Conrad
that I could find, and there was nothing on empire, on colonialism,
on the European gaze on Africa. I had a reader’s ticket to the War-
wick University Library, which is where I got to know the English
subject librarian Peter Larkin, poet, librarian, and scholar, who was
enormously helpful, procuring material from the British Library and
other sources. We have remained friends and as an ecumenical Chris-
tian, he has for long cautioned me that there may be more things
on earth (he knows not to bring heaven into it) than are dreamt of
in Marxist philosophy. For whatever reasons, the book was tight,
closed in on itself, a product of intellectual isolation, its congealed
prose a reprimand to my ambition towards austerity and clarity.
RV: You’re being your modest self here.
SD: Yes, too self-deprecating!
RV: But what’s amazing is the question of your motivation. You were not
after an academic career… why were you writing?
SD: Who were you writing for? What was motivating you to put it in
this work to write about subjects that no one else had, from a new
critical perspective? That’s an unusual trajectory… An intellectual
from outside the system, offering a critique of a canonical writer
that otherwise didn’t exist.
BP: Look, I am neither modest nor self-deprecating; it’s just that I have a
cold-eyed measure of what I can and cannot do, and of what I have
done. As to your other questions: I was following my own interest.
Because I wasn’t in academia, I didn’t have a perception of an audi-
ence. In my later work, I was very aware of whom I was addressing.
But those two books were done because I wanted to understand, to
find out, and of course there was the hope that someone out there
would read what I had written and get back to me.
RV: So who were you in conversation with when you were writing these
books?
SD: Did you attend conferences or go to seminars?
BP: I was not in touch with anyone in academia. . After Delusions was
published, I was invited by a well-established scholar at Cambridge
to contribute essays on Forster for the collections he was editing. But
this did not entail dialogue. I had no interlocutors. I never went to
conferences. By this time Bill was at Warwick university, the faculty
of the English and Comparative Literature Department didn’t know
I was around and I, deterred by my humiliating encounter with Hog-
gart, and in the fashion of Hardy’s Jude The Obscure, felt inhibited
from making myself known to those who had entered the forbidding
and forbidden gates to what then seemed to me intellectual riches.
But because I had published Delusions as far back as 1972, and the
monograph on Conrad in 1983, I was, during these outsider years,
often approached for advice by doctoral students from prestigious
universities, which at the time had no specialists in the fictions of
imperialism and colonialism—all of them later went on to successful
academic careers.
RV: How did your particular set of circumstances—being an émigré,
being part of a marginalized political group, being isolated from the
culture at large in Britain— affect your sense of intellectual mission?
Was there anything specific to being an outsider that generated your
ability to intervene in academic debates, also as an outsider?
SD: Do you think there was any freedom in being outside of the system
that enabled a kind of originality in your work?
BP: I guess my “history” and a political disposition acquired in far-left
groups made it inevitable that I would blunder into disciplinary
fields without observing protocols. Once I was participating in the
postcolonial discussion, my interventions were driven not by a sense
of mission but indignation at the “intellectual disgrace” of profes-
sional academics who gave comfort to an iniquitous system, and
postcolonial theorists flaunting an ostentatious and vacuous radical-
ism. My urge was to restore the writings of theoreticians who were
the architects of anti-imperialist struggles (Amilcar Cabral, Samora
Machel, Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba, José Carlos Mariáte-
gui, Che Guevara, amongst many more, all studiously ignored by
the accredited postcolonialists) to their proper place in anti-imperi-
alist thinking and struggle.
My undergraduate dissertation had been on British working-class per-

ceptions of empire. So from the beginning it was always empire, impe-
rialism, class. And yes, being marginal did bring the freedom to write
from outside institutional perspectives, to speak, if not shout, a visceral
hatred of class exploitation at home and abroad, and to show my solidar-
ity with anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggles.
What I regret is that only later, when contesting the dictums of
post-structuralist postcolonial theory, did my work engage with imperi-
alism as inseparable from capitalism. This raises a question that should
be asked of me: why did I initially write about the imperial mind as if
this was dissociated from its material ground in capitalism? Why did
I not integrate into my work an understanding of the economic disar-
rangements and derangements in the peripheries and semi-peripheries,
producing substantive differences and transformations in new expres-
sions of subjectivity, notions of writing itself, new modes of thought,
new manifestations of modernity? On looking back, the answer has
to be an insufficient understanding of Marxism. The Marxism I knew
from the political movements was about devising programmes for op-
posing regimes and not a dialectical methodology and highly elaborated
theoretical system. This is yet another regret at the belatedness of my
education.
RV: We have come to know you as a leading participant in the postcolo-

nial discussion. How did your academic isolation come to an end?
BP: Around 1983 there was an unexpected opening up of possibilities,
although this took a long time to happen. Abdul JanMohamed asked
me to review his book Manichean Aesthetics: the Politics of Liter-
ature in Colonial Africa (1983) for the Oxford Literary Review. In
the same year Edward Said wrote a critical review of my Conrad
book for the Times Literary Supplement, saying that while I knew
nothing about theory, there was a perspective he found interesting.
Then, at the suggestion of an acquaintance, later a friend, who had
approached me when a student, I went to one of the Essex confer-
ences. That was where I briefly met Said. The conference gave me a
sense of “colonial discourse analysis,” and in the course of reading
the debates, I came to question its theoretical premise. After many
delays, I approached Robert Young, the editor of the OLR, suggest-
ing I do a critique of the field.
RV: This was “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse”?
BP: It took me ages to write. Despite the gap between our positions on
many fronts, Robert was a sympathetic editor. It was only after the
essay appeared in 1987 that I was invited to conferences and sympo-
siums and asked for contributions to edited collections.
SD: Because it was a landmark essay, it was one of the earliest critiques.
BP: I subsequently saw the insufficiencies of the essay. Still it brought me
some “cultural capital.” I suppose this accounts for my habit from
then on of writing essays, rather than embarking on monographs—
this together with approaching the age of 60 by the time I was par-
ticipating in academic discussions.
RV: Was it around this time that you started having formal links with
the University of Warwick?
BP: In the early 1990s, I was asked to teach on an MA course at War-
wick. Those classes were just fantastic; the students were open,
articulate, and enthusiastic. Following this, Jeremy Treglown, a
professor in the department, suggested a more formal connection
with the university, and he engineered a semi-detached post with an
honorarium to match. Later, it was again Jeremy who proposed I be
given an Honorary Professorship, after which I began supervising
PhD students. I was subsequently given a part-time appointment and
the title “Professor of Postcolonial Studies”—very useful for sign-
ing references and left-wing petitions and protests. I have never had
a “proper” career or salary, my anomalous academic association
with its meagre remuneration was only made sustainable by Bill who
shared his earnings and later his pension with me.
SD: You’ve played a huge role as a mentor and supervisor—a Doktormutter,
as they say in German— to several generations of postgraduates, young
researchers, and established scholars. Do you have a philosophy that
guides your teaching and supervision?
BP: It is gratifying to hear this. I guess my long time as an outsider may
have influenced my mentoring; I was all too aware that respectful
critical attention to one’s work is a spur to further adventurous
thinking, and when such recognition is withheld, the consequences
will be intellectual isolation and demoralization. Without belittling
the students’ previously acquired fondness for prevailing theoretical
doxa and received beliefs, I tried to make known what Marxism’s
explanatory system had to offer. I never presented myself as a wise
woman, and always acknowledged that I was learning from them
as well as introducing them to unfamiliar ideas. And without being
the considerable and recognized academic he was, I followed Bill’s
example in trying to “produce better researchers” than he himself
was. And like him, I remained friends with the students, some of
whom are now amongst the “comrade-colleagues.” Other than to
commend to tutors the virtue of modesty and good manners, the
need to encourage imaginative critical thinking, nurture individual
aptitudes, and promote the writing of coherent even elegant prose, I,
as an accidental mentor, don’t do a philosophy of pedagogy.
SD: I know you said when you wrote your first two books, you didn’t
have interlocutors. But looking back on your later work, which crit-
ics, thinkers, or interlocutors have been most important to your own
development as a scholar?
BP: I do not consider myself a “scholar,” but an artisan who works with
reclaimed material—this being the learning, researches and concep-
tual inventions of thinkers and theorists in the Marxist tradition,
past and present. Most of my interlocutors have been and remain
those I call the “comrade-colleagues.” These include but are not ex-
hausted by members of the Warwick Research Collective (WReC)
and my former graduate students. I have also benefitted greatly from
energetic exchanges with Tim Brennan, Laura Chrisman, Keya Gan-
guly, Priya Gopal, Subir Sinha, David Johnson, Rashmi Varma, and
the late Michael Sprinker. Very recently I have been learning from
communication with Harry Harootunian, and regret that these ex-
changes did not happen earlier.
Michael Sprinker, I remember as an impassioned communist, a fierce but

fair critic, and a loyal and generous friend. He was also a subtle literary
critic who, perhaps because of his unusual passage from deconstruction
to Marxism, was able to tease out historical registers and ideological
positions from stylistic practice. His death in 1999 deprived the Marxist
discussion of a formidable intellectual presence whose work on literary
form has not, it seems to me, been properly appreciated.
The importance of discussions over many years with Neil Lazarus
cannot be quantified, and this despite our different tastes in literature—I
accuse him of indiscriminately ingesting books and finding value in even
the most formulaic and pedestrian fiction; he charges me with having
properly read only three novels, Passage to India, Heart of Darkness and
Season of Migration to the North.
I should also mention that some of my most valuable exchanges
have been with those occupying quite other political and/or theoretical
positions: one is Edward Said, who was as closed to Marxism as an
explanatory system as he was open to the work of Marxists, respecting
without sharing their far-left political affiliations. Another is Derek At-
tridge, whose honed critical sensibility and emphasis on the “thisness”
or the quiddity of the literary has served me as an inhibition against any
lapses into instrumental or mechanical readings.
SD: What are some of the currents in the contemporary critical theory
discussion that you feel are “seeds of death,” as Raymond Williams
calls them in The Politics of Modernism? For instance, what do you
make of the attempt to assimilate Frantz Fanon for hybridity and
post-structuralist understanding?
BP: I have for long found contemptible the efforts of revisionist histo-
rians, commentators, and journalists to denigrate the objects of
the left’s communal attachments to the Russian Revolution, the
Easter Rising, the Spanish Civil War, liberation struggles, and
working-class rebellion. To this disparagement of revolution-
ary impulses and energies we can now add the interventions of
critics who consider themselves and are considered to be radical
innovators.
Consider Homi Bhabha’s “Foreword to the republication of The

Wretched of the Earth, where he renders Fanon harmless by presenting
him as a civil libertarian whose heirs are “NGOs, human rights or-
ganizations, international legal or educational bodies” (Bhabha 2004,
xviii). Such outrageous misreadings of Fanon’s specific political com-
mitments provoked sharp criticism from David Macey, Fanon’s most
recent and most important biographer, stating that these were beliefs
for which Fanon had lived and for which he had died (Macey 2012).
Similarly, Leo Zeilig has protested in his article on Fanon for the Inter-
nationalist Socialist, “against the presentation of a decontextualized
Fanon, shorn of history, his revolutionary urgency (and heart) “ripped
out” (Zeilig 2012).
Or consider the multiple makeovers of Gramsci, including that of the
Subaltern Studies project. More recently the editors of The Postcolonial
Gramsci (2012) have set out to liberate him from Marxism, re-present-
ing him as a thinker who confronted the limits of Marxist theories and
fled from Marxism’s economic determinism and “doctrinal inflexibil-
ity”. This is a volume from whose index “communism” is missing! It has
an essay by Robert Young in which he declares that it was Spivak and
not Gramsci who invented “the subaltern” by introducing “the singular
figure of the subaltern woman”—despite Young knowing that Gramsci’s
ultimate and precise use of the term was to identify the class position of
the Southern peasantry within the Italian political order and class struc-
ture of the 1920s (Young 2012, 31–2).
Are we seeing in these reinterpretations of Marxist thinkers an emer-
gent mode of tendentious criticism that can be described as asserting
“the rights of misprision”—one that is not limited to postcolonial stud-
ies? Another instance is Jacqueline Rose’s widely publicized review of
Rosa Luxemburg’s Letters in the London Review of Books. If Rose’s
essay allows that Luxemburg adhered to a Marxist credo, and identifies
her as “one of the first Marxist theorists of globalisation,” it is per-
vaded by frequent allusions to or assertions of Luxemburg’s hostility to
the concept and actuality of the party, and her breach with Lenin and
L eninism—an ideological interpretation culminating with the declara-
tion that to “the immense irritation of her opponents and detractors,
she elevated uncertainty to a principle, a revolutionary creed” (Rose
2011, 5). This pronouncement has not gone unchallenged: Peter Hudis,
one of the editors of the Letters, has restored Luxemburg’s Marxism by
insisting in a piece on the Verso blog that “when it came to tracing out
the trajectory of capital accumulation,” what she emphasized above all
else was “predictability and certainty” (Hudis 2011).
SD: What do you think of “social movements” in our contemporary mo-

ment, these mass movements to reclaim housing, water, environments,
land? What about the political energies of anti-water-privatization
campaigns in Cochabamba, or Occupy and Tahrir Square, or the
Brazil bus riots, or Montreal’s Red Square student movement? Don’t
they suggest an enormous yearning for political alternatives, attempts
to act beyond the impasse of the inability to imagine?
BP: Your wording of the aspiration is fitting. Such social movements have
the capacity to win battles and win back what has been lost, to help
people learn the extent of what they’re up against; they give voice to
the sheer outrage at a system and a longing for something else. They
don’t necessarily offer the prospect of defeating the system as a whole.
It seems to me that because the initiators and participants exclude any
notion of a party, they forgo the one means able to provide disparate
struggles with cohesion and unity, an absence that may dissipate their
political energies. Of course, the very idea of a party has been poi-
soned by Stalinism and the many collapses of revolutionary organiza-
tions, so that those who continue to advocate its necessity can appear
either careless of history and/or mired in old times. I look to the many
alternative, left publications and the various Left Forums internation-
ally to re-examine the notion, and without repeating history.
SD: This reminds me of what you were saying earlier about the Unity
Movement’s arguments over who would be the revolutionary agents.
This remains a burning question. If you look at the peripheries of the
capitalist world-system, there are mega-cities and mass urbanisation,
but so many people are trapped in informal or casualized labour. Do
terms like “proletarian” still apply? What about the agency of indig-
enous peasants in the countryside? What do we make of the role of
the rapid industrialisation of countries like China? Where do you see
change coming from?
BP: I haven’t the intensive and extensive insights of eminent Marxist
thinkers who are able to make informed predictions about incipient
revolutionary tendencies based on analysis of trends and develop-
ments. Regarding the alleged dissolution of former class relation-
ships, this notion is challenged by Marxist political economists who
argue that globalization has created new concentrations of capital
and with it a recomposed urban and agrarian working class.
Even as there are different class agents in different situations, I am un-

convinced by the case made for the multitude, the outcast, the abso-
lutely destitute as bearers of this role. As of now I see urban or agrarian
wage labour, together with the semi-employed and the unemployed at
the mercy of neoliberalism, white-collar workers, and organic left intel-
lectuals as having the structural capacity to fight capitalism.
Postcolonial Studies and Aesthetics

SD: In the final section of this interview, we want to talk more about
postcolonial studies. Is there still potential for a Marxist-inflected
left variety of the discipline to offer methodologies that are crucial to
addressing contemporary problems such as neo-imperialism, ecolog-
ical imperialism, and new forms of accumulation via dispossession
under neoliberal capitalism now? Or should postcolonial studies be
done away with altogether, in favour of something new?
BP: My first response is to say that postcolonial theory has since its in-
ception been in an “epistemological crisis,” its dominant method-
ology being an idealist and anti-materialist position inimical to a
proper understanding of imperialism then and now. As to current
trends, of which there are many, significant work is being done in
Marxist ecological studies investigating capitalism’s rapacious leg-
acies by focusing on the intersection of imperialist practices with
environmental degradation, crises and catastrophes.
The institutional investment in postcolonial studies ensures its continu-

ation, at least in the short term. I am agnostic as to whether the current
work cumulatively registers new theoretical shifts and it is this that will
determine whether Marxists have retained or exhausted their interven-
tionary potential. It could be that existing and potential participants
may find it more urgent to address what you name as the problems “of
capitalism now”—which must include the outcomes of the penetra-
tion of capital in the one-time colonies and semi-peripheries. At hand
is Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development, one that is
capable of explaining a process described by Neil Davidson as having
had internal effects on the totality of a national society, not merely the
economy, producing the incongruous overlapping of “the archaic and
the modern, the settled and disruptive” (Davidson 2010).
SD: What in your view are the most important contributions of post-
colonial theory? To put it another way, riffing on the title of your
E dward Said Memorial Lecture, what is “left” in postcolonial
studies?
BP: Despite fundamental disagreements with post-structuralist postco-
lonial studies, I think we must acknowledge that its rapid growth
obliged metropolitan academia to extend horizons previously re-
stricted to the cognitive systems and cultures of the core capital-
ist world—even when such recognition remains a formality. It also
provoked an awareness of non-metropolitan imaginative literatures
written in the European languages disseminated across the globe
courtesy of imperialism; in transnational languages such as Arabic,
in sub-continental languages (such as Urdu, Hindi, Swahili) and in
countless regional and local vernaculars. This has prompted some
critics to champion the creative energies of colonial and postcolo-
nial cultural production, even while problematically continuing to
situate the metropolitan world as the ultimate fount of these inno-
vations: consider the work of Susan Stanford Friedman, Andreas
Huyssen, and Laura Doyle (about which I have written elsewhere.)
We should also credit postcolonial studies with furthering the global
turn in discussions of modernism where numerous participants now
advance modernism’s “global engagements” and wider vistas, de-
tecting a more diverse genealogy, a longer temporal span, and a
larger geopolitical space.
SD: Conversely, what are the most significant failures or blind spots of
postcolonial studies in the past?
BP: The blind spot is the evacuation of capitalism from the analysis of
colonialism. By using the terms colonialism/imperialism as inter-
changeable, critics and their acolytes conceal the capitalist pene-
tration of nascent, pre- or under-capitalized realms, and disregard
the depredations and immiseration inflicted on the working classes
within the heartlands of capitalism. These deliberated exclusions
erase a long tradition of anti-imperialism in the communist and far-
left movements of the metropoles and betray an ignorance of inter-
nationalist struggles against capitalism.
SD: Do you think world-literary approaches have something to offer to
postcolonial studies or to Marxist literary critique more generally?
What motivated your own elaboration of Trotsky’s theory of com-
bined and uneven development in relation to world-literature?
BP: I had long been thinking about the distinctive lineaments of “periph-
eral aesthetics.” More than a decade ago, I gave a seminar paper at
Warwick University titled “A Third World Aesthetic?” The miscel-
lany of sources, thoughts, and references I crammed into that pa-
per resulted in a presentation lacking in methodological discipline;
however, I did manage to suggest bringing the theory of combined
and uneven development to the understanding of the cultural in-
ventions in non-metropolitan locations. The contradictory amalgam
detected by Trotsky in pre-or under-capitalized societies— the most
advanced means of commodity production and the generation of
capitalist relationships, coexisting with the retention of “archaic
forms of economic life” and the maintenance of feudal social ar-
rangements— seemed to offer a way of understanding how the
contradictions in institutional and social life, together with the ex-
istential trauma inherent in the transition to capitalism, emerged in
fictional forms that exceeded borrowing from or imitating the novel
form as this had developed in the metropolitan spheres.
But it was only with the formation of WReC (the Warwick Research
Collective), a joint venture within the English and Comparative Liter-
ature Department at Warwick, that a number of us were able to pur-
sue the many and surprising articulations of this concept. Whereas my
first articulation corresponded to the “thirdness” of the Third World,
we came to use a world-systems vocabulary to discuss periphery and
semi-periphery.
SD: On a different note (no pun intended), you’ve discussed in the past
Said’s interest in late style, particularly in relation to music, and have
yourself a passion for late string quartets. Do you yourself have a
‘late style’ as a critic which affects your writing or interests?
BP: To begin with, I must confess to illiteracy about matters musical. My
private passions range from Bob Dylan, the Pogues, traditional Irish
popular music, the Rolling Stones, and Bruce Springsteen, to Bel
Canto, Verdi, the operas of Richard Strauss, and the quartets, trios,
and sonatas of Beethoven and Shostakovich. As to my predilection
for chamber music: it is well known that old age can bring a pen-
chant for the intimate interlocution of a small group of musicians.
I used to think that this affection stemmed from an attachment to
camaraderie; but having watched the film A Late Quartet, in which
the frustrations of the second violinist threaten the apparent group
spirit of the band, I am less sure.
In respect to “style,” my own aspiration to austerity, lucidity, and in-

formality has not been successful. But try I did, largely out of distaste
for critics whose bravura performances exceed linguistic protocol, are
a barrier to hermeneutics and may reach an audience as histrionic and
self-promoting. Even as I speak in praise of clarity, I remember the re-
proach from an editor averse to what she called my obfuscating Ger-
manic syntax.
As to any “late” style of my own, this seems to me presumptuous,
and I prefer to speak about an intensified experience of the “mystery”
in highly elaborated literary texts that never quite yield up their secrets
and whose evocative resonances cannot be named—and this without
abandoning the conviction that all writing is worldly, of and about the
real world, and can be grasped as a dialectical relationship between the
secular and its imaginative re-formation—this has been expounded by
Adorno and Marcuse.
SD: I want to ask why aesthetics are important, or literary criticism.

Why have you been consistently drawn to Marxist literary studies?
BP: Theorists from György Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert
Marcuse to Fredric Jameson, Michael Löwy, and Roberto Schwarz,
have restored the cognitive and truth-bearing dimensions of the
aesthetic, without conflating art with politics, without neglecting
the literary and the ineffable, and without disregarding art as social
critique. There is a lexical difficulty in specifying the relationship
between the world as it exists and as it is imagined, or delineating
the coordinates governing the encrypting of the worldly in literary
form. Inert terms such as “register” or “transcribe” do not com-
municate the labour of the writer’s ingenuity in creating scenarios
where reality is internal to the dynamic of the artwork and crystal-
lized in its form. This latter phrase comes from conversation with
Keya Ganguly, who favours Adorno’s term “cipher” in her own
work (Ganguly 2010, 50) and is critical about WReC’s use of “regis-
ter,” “mediate”, “encode,” etc. Even at this late stage I would like to
mend my misuse of passive verbs, and would propose a more taxing
critical practice, one that detects the dialectical relationship between
the real space of the material world and the sublime space of litera-
ture as Adorno describes in “The Handle, the Pot, and Early Experi-
ence” (Adorno 1992). This understanding of the active relationship
between the world and the text can perhaps be described in terms
of Hegel’s conception of Aufhebung—a “dialectical procedure”
that negates and at the same time preserves material reality—this
is what Adorno names as “immanent criticism” (Adorno 1981, 32).
The challenge is to communicate the tension and contradiction that
come from within the work itself. Looking at the innermost struc-
ture is a matter Maria Elisa Cevasco raised in her response to the
Warwick Research Collective’s publication, Combined and Uneven
Development: Towards a New Theory of World Literature (2015),
“The critic’s job is to discover the social forms molding the literary
ones, and thus reveal hitherto hidden aspects of social structures”
(Cevasco 2016, 519). This awareness is manifest in Adorno’s note on
Kafka: “Each sentence is literal and each signifies” (Adorno 1981,
246)—a proposition light years away from both distant reading and
close readings dependent on the concept of registering.
SD: You always gesture to a utopian horizon in your readings of literary
texts. Marcuse’s idea that the necessity of refusing the present is al-
ways tied to the imagination of a future, even though we do not yet
know its contours, reverberates throughout your writing. Yet at the
same time you profess an inability to enjoy science fictional genres.
By way of conclusion, can you say something about the critic’s role
in figuring or recuperating a utopian dimension?
BP: For Marcuse, autonomous art contains the categorical imperative
“things must change” (Marcuse 1978, 13). In Negative Dialectics
Adorno asserted that the responsibility of art is to address human
suffering: “The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition for all
truth’ (Adorno 1973, 17–18). In his essay on commitment, Adorno
went on to attribute a utopian dimension to even the most subli-
mated work of art, within which there is a hidden intimation that
it could be otherwise, it should be otherwise: “As eminently con-
structed and produced objects, works of art, including literary ones,
point to a practice from which they abstain: the creation of a just
life” (Adorno 1980, 194). I know that creators and devotees of sci-
ence fiction claim that the genre does just that. But I guess my block-
age is in finding that literary prefigurations of utopias and dystopias
deflect from rather than enhance consciousness of the atrocities we
already inhabit. I suppose my sympathies lie more with Michael
Löwy’s stance. Disillusioned by all actually existing socialist states,
he speaks in emotive language about the discontents and ignominies
of existence under capitalism— not about an ontological state, or
some invariant situation afflicting all humanity at all times.
The supreme advocate of Marxist revolutionary romanticism is Ernst

Bloch who names the “alien domination of the capitalist mode of pro-
duction” as the condition to be redeemed in a time still to come (Bloch
1986). Although sometimes read as eschatological, Bloch’s vision of the
future is an opening up of limitless new possibilities. Let me end there-
fore by citing these lines from Bloch’s The Principle of Hope:
It is only since Marx that the past has not only been brought into
the present and the latter again into the contemplated past, but both
have been brought to the horizon of the future… that is of an an-
ticipatory kind which by no means coincides with abstract Utopian
dreaminess, nor is directed by the immaturity of merely abstract
Utopian socialism. The very power and truth of Marxism consists in
the fact that it has driven the cloud in our dreams further forward,
but has not extinguished the pillar of fire in those dreams, rather
strengthened it with concreteness.
(Bloch 1986, 894)
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics, trans. by E.B. Ashton. London:
Routledge.
———. 1980 [1977]. “Commitment.” In Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Ron-
ald Taylor. London: Verso. 177–195.
———. 1981 [1967]. Prisms, trans. by Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press.
———. 1992 [1961]. “The Handle, the Pot, and Early Experience.” In Notes
to Literature, Vol. II, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, edited by Rolf
Tiedemann. New York: Columbia University Press. 213–214.
Bhabha, Homi. 2004. “Foreword: Framing Fanon.” In The Wretched of the
Earth, trans. by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. vii–xlii.
Bloch, Ernst. 1986. [1954] The Principle of Hope, 3 vols., trans. Neville Plaice,
Stephen Plaice, Paul Knight. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Brossat Alain, and Sylvie Klingberg. 2016. Revolutionary Yiddishland: A His-
tory of Jewish Radicalism. London: Verso. Kindle.
Cevasco, Maria Elisa. 2016. “First Responses” in “Forum: Combined and Un-
even Development.” Comparative Literature Studies 53.3: 516–520.
Davidson, Neil. 2010. “From Deflected Permanent Revolution to the Law of
Uneven and Combined Development.” International Socialism 128. Accessed
8 June 2018. http://isj.org.uk/from-deflected-permanent-revolution-to-the-
law-of-uneven-and-combined-development/
Ganguly, Keya. 2010. Cinema, Emergence and the Films of Satyajit Ray.
B erkeley: University of California Press.
Hudis, Peter. 2011. “Comments on ‘What more could we want of ourselves!’, Jac-
queline Rose’s Review of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg.” Versobooks.com.
Accessed 8 June 2018. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/595-comments-
on-what-more-could-we-want-of-ourselves-jacqueline-rose-s-review-of-the-
letters-of-rosa-luxemburg
Levinson, Deirdre. 1966. Five Years: An Experience of South Africa. London:
Andre Deutsch.
Löwy, Michael. 1981. The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development:
The Theory of Permanent Revolution. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Macey, David. 2012. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. London: Verso.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1978 [1977]. The Aesthetic Dimension. Trans. by Herbert
Marcuse and Erica Sherove. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Rose, Jacqueline. 2011. “What more could we want of ourselves! Review of
The Letters of Rosa Luxembrug edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and
A nnelies Laschitza, translated by George Schriver.” London Review of
Books 33.12: 5–12.
Warwick Research Collective (WReC). 2015. Combined and Uneven Devel-
opment: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press.
Young, Robert. 2012. “Il Gramsci meridionale.” In The Postcolonial Gramsci,
edited by Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya. London: Routledge.
17–33.
Zeilig, Leo. 2012. “Pitfalls and Radical Mutations: Frantz Fanon’s Revolution-
ary Life.” Internationalist Socialist 134. Accessed 8 June 2018. http://isj.org.
uk/pitfalls-and-radical-mutations-frantz-fanons-revolutionary-life/
12 “Intellectual Life: A Duty
to Dissent”
A Graduation Address
Delivered at the University of
York, 12 July 2016
Benita Parry
I do not think that the young ones of today expect sage counsel from
the mature or the post-mature. I also suspect, despite the long-treasured
conceit, that it has been some time since they did. As far back as 1965,
a bard nearer to my own generation than to yours sang with scorn to a
generic “Mr Jones,” who had consorted with professors and read all the
good books, yet remained uncomprehending: “You’re very well read, it’s
well known/But something is happening here and you don’t know what
it is” (Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man”).
To know more just because one has been around for longer is, of course,
quite compatible with understanding less. But this does not mean that
the passing years have necessarily made all of us strangers to the spirits
of the times. And if we find a prevailing tendency towards individual
self-interest, rather than community solidarity, to be uncongenial, then
there are other sensibilities with which we can identify. So although my
peer group may be separated from yours by our taste in rock music, film,
dress, or choice of expletives, some of us share with some of you a refusal
to accept the way things are as inevitable and permanent. Perhaps this is
naïvely optimistic of us, since we have had a lifetime of disappointment
redeemed by moments of witnessing and recalling redemptive refusals
of iniquity and rebellions against oppression. And because we remain
unreconciled to the present condition, we believe or hope that the work
we do as academics can contribute to making known and accounting for
the grotesquely uneven distribution of resources and possibilities, the
poverty and exploitation that are structural to all societies within the
global order we differentially and inequitably inhabit.
In this we have influential opponents. Every regime, however unjust,
attracts apologists, invariably university graduates and often academics,
who are able and willing to produce disingenuous rationales for social
deprivation at home and aggression abroad. And more, these same de-
fenders of established institutions and orthodox thought have contrived
an ethos where words like freedom, liberal, and civilization are dishon-
oured by being used to signify the freedom of the market, neoliberal
economics, and selected societies in the north-western hemisphere.
262 Benita Parry
In the extravagantly rhetorical stanzas that Auden was later to remove
from “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” written just as Europe was about to
be overrun by fascism, occurs an austere phrase, “intellectual disgrace,”
which I have always found appropriate to a literati and a professariat
who refrain from critical examination of past and present social orders
and instead elaborate the authorized version of how the powerful came
to power (Auden 1939). Thus I would name as intellectually disgrace-
ful the current writings of revisionist scholars who have abandoned the
protocols of their trade in the interest of representing the British Empire
as a virtuous and successful project—which they can only do by delib-
erately neglecting that imperial conquest meant dispossession, the abuse
of human labour and the pillage of natural resources, the political subor-
dination of indigenous populations, and the racist denigrations of their
cultures. This rehearsal of the old account, which is now being widely
disseminated with the aid of the media, licenses contemporary commen-
tators such as Niall Ferguson to celebrate colonialism in an archaic and
discredited idiom celebrating “the rule of law” as the great gift brought
by empire, championing the benefits of Anglo-Saxon culture, and con-
fidently proclaiming that the world would be a better place today if its
norms prevailed universally (Ferguson 2012).
I am not speaking only of intellectual integrity but also of the ethical
stance that would enable professional scholars to invent and broadcast
a benign reinterpretation of violent and predatory historical events at
home and abroad. Here I want to cite the yet more complicated case of
a revisionist historian of the Nakba, whose researches are impeccable
but whose vindication of what he has unearthed from the archives is
reprehensible. During an interview (and elsewhere), the Israeli historian
Benny Morris has stated that the documents he had discovered reveal
how in the months of April–May 1948, units of the pre-state Israeli
defence force were given operational instructions explicitly ordering the
expulsion of Palestinian villagers and the destruction of the villages. Yet
when asked by his interlocutor, Ari Shavit, if he condemned driving a
population from their native land, and whether it posed a problem for
him “morally speaking,” Morris replied: “Without the uprooting of the
Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here. […] Even the
great American democracy could not have been created without the an-
nihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good
justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history”
(Morris 2004).
In one instance, “truths” are hidden from view and replaced by spe-
cious explanations and cosmetic representations; in the other, “truths”
are exposed and then defended as pragmatically necessary and morally
justified. What, then, constitutes ethical responsibility? By this, I mean a
socially conceived and socially lived ethics that abhors and actively op-
poses injustice, exploitation, cruelty, and insult, political and personal,
“Intellectual Life: A Duty to Dissent” 263
an ethics that is mindful of the individual and the collective wretched of
the earth. For some of us, this responsibility lies in understanding the
reasons for the inflictions visited on the dispossessed and in protesting
against these both as citizens and in our academic work—which suggests
that a sense of ethical responsibility is bred in the heart and in the head,
that it stems from passion and is pursued through enquiry and analysis.
The Palestinian activist and literary academic Edward Said once
described the Frankfurt School thinker Theodor Adorno as a “scan-
dalous, even catastrophic commentator on the present”—a role Said
himself played by excoriating the ethos of and actions driven by an
imperial-world view (Said 1995: 275). That he did so without abandon-
ing a learned and refined critical consciousness is a reminder that com-
mitment need not debase thought and scholarship. So I suppose that
without pretending to impart wisdom I do not possess, I can recommend
the integrity of Said’s life’s work, and commend what he said in his 1993
Reith Lectures (reprinted as Representations of the Intellectual) as an
inspiration and an aspiration for those about to enter the volatile arena
of the workplace or who are returning to the cloisters of academia: “It
is a spirit in opposition, rather than in accommodation, that grips me
because the romance, the interest, the challenge of intellectual life is to
be found in dissent against the status quo” (Said 1994: xv).
References
Auden, W.H. 1939. “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” The New Republic, 8 March.
Dylan, Bob. 1965. “Ballad of a Thin Man.” Highway 61 Revisited. New York:
Columbia Records.
Ferguson, Niall. 2012. “The Rule of Law and Its Enemies: The Reith Lectures.”
BBC Radio 4. Accessed 8 June 2018. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jms03
Morris, Benny. 2004. “On Ethnic Cleansing.” New Left Review 26
(March/April). Accessed 8 June 2018. https://newleftreview.org/II/26/
benny-morris-on-ethnic-cleansing
Said, Edward. 1994. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lec-
tures. New York: Pantheon.
Said, Edward. 1995. “Adorno as Lateness Itself.” In Apocalypse Theory and
the Ends of the World, edited by Malcom Bull. Oxford: Blackwell. 264–81.
13 Benita Parry’s Position
Address delivered at the
University of Warwick,
17 November 2001
Timothy Brennan
I
It is harder, not easier, to characterize the achievement of a person about
whom one feels affection, since the process of evaluation is supposed
to be dispassionate. As a defence, I suppose I could concede that I fall
short of being Benita’s close personal friend and confidant—that status
is perhaps enjoyed more by others in this room—simply because our
actual encounters and correspondences have been remarkably few. But
you know how it is; one sometimes shares a person’s feelings completely
within minutes of meeting them, and becomes something like family
even without crossing their paths more than a few times in life. I once
travelled to her home in Marton-near-Rugby to see Benita for the sole
purpose of throwing a manuscript in her lap—a manuscript I let no
one else read and which she later gave me the confidence to publish.
Even earlier in New York, during an interminable car ride through
bumper-to-bumper traffic on Long Island, Benita counselled me on how
to deal with personal attacks in print (a subject about which she had,
needless to say, a great deal of experience!) “Never talk about your-
self” was her motto. Hold yourself with dignity, keep things orderly,
leave it business-like, and then answer them by out-producing them. As
a woman and as an exile, it is remarkable that Benita spares her readers
any authorial self-referentiality. It becomes clear from the start that loca-
tion for her is as much about political communities of belonging as racial
or national points of origin.
What Benita has meant to many of us over the years can be usefully,
if elliptically, encapsulated in three traits. The first leapt out at me in a
review she wrote of a book by Ania Loomba in The Modern Language
Review where she spoke of “the hazards” of the “syncretism of the mid-
dle way,” the self-confounding of its eclectic explanatory modes (Parry
2000a, 498). Although widely seen, I suppose, as a great debunker of
theory in all its varieties, the simple truth is that Benita is no such thing.
She has rigorously developed an epistemological point throughout much
of her writing, especially in the longer definitive essays on Bhabha and,
of course, the oft-cited “colonial discourse” essay. The philosophical
Benita Parry’s Position 265
consistency I would like to highlight resides in a difficult thought, ren-
dered in colloquial terms, that internalizes theory while obliterating its
narrowly textual logic. No one had done as much to expose the dis-
course of “negotiation,” the euphemistic rendering of real antagonism in
the evasive rhetoric of an agonistic encounter in pursuit of what is, in the
end, a reconciliatory stand.
The second trait would be Benita’s canonicity. One can see her as
being on a kind of reconnaissance mission in English literary criticism—
the terrain of the journal Conradiana, for example, or Novel, the terrain
of the ever exegetical. There, she realizes, her sorties can do the most
damage, since this is where so many of the enemy lives, rarely ventur-
ing out into the intellectual neighbourhoods of a public conversation.
Her epistemological premises and political interests are the kind that
typically push one in the direction of a sociology of knowledge, or at
least a version of cultural studies. But this is not what has happened
in Benita’s case. In her two books (as distinct from her essays on the
scenes of theory) she remains in canonical English literature, or—as in
Delusions and Discoveries—the literary and sub-literary atmospheres
of traditional British imperial history. The type and number (as well
as occasional hostility) of the reviews of Conrad and Imperialism, for
instance, suggests that she has been able in this way to speak to people
who hear few voices like hers in a voice they nevertheless cannot tune
out. The evasion of a radical disciplinary stand, if I can put it this way,
has intensified the radical force of the substantive arguments. She prof-
itably recognizes the persistence of an English literature many of us can
no longer take seriously in that older form. Finally, the third trait would
be the way in which she has helped bring the issue of labour into colonial
theory: not the labour-movement, per se, but a tactile sense of intellec-
tual workers in networks and circles.
Let me first look at her theoretical intervention. I think something
needs to be said about the word “Marxist” even though it is not a word
she is likely to brandish for effect. It is not easy to account for how the
word “Marxist” came to connote a hostile or peripheral constituency, a
closed party structure, or set of formalized, unquestioning beliefs. Marx
himself, of course, apart from being among the two or three figures who
helped define modernity, offered an analysis that divided up society into
fields of impure interest. One can hardly be surprised, then, that those
“outed” by the procedure are moved to deny their source, or shunt some
(but of course not all) of its findings to the side, or subtly embrace them
so as to smother them. Benita has always been particularly attentive to
the traditions of thinkers who, in the name of the factual, in the name of
simple scholarship, spoke plainly about where their research had taken
them, whether the English profession liked the results or not.
But it is also the case that period designations are never simply chronolog-
ical. The era of Nkrumah, Sartre, and Lumumba after World War II—as
266 Timothy Brennan
Benita so pertinently evokes them in her essay “Liberation Theory”—
suggests not only a time-designation, but also a particular collision of tra-
ditions against the European backdrop of an emergent anti-foundational
discourse that sought to revive and popularize an actual recidivism
that arose in the era between the Wars. Given our imperial trainings,
“Marxism” is automatically associated in many minds with a declara-
tion of allegiances, as though by invoking it one were saying they were
Marxists, or thought everyone should be Marxists, or that one’s essays
had the instrumental intention of persuading readers to become Marxists.
But this is not the spirit in which Benita discusses Marxism; or, since it
is not really a question of her ever discussing it as such, it may be more
accurate to say this is not how she exemplifies it, or brings it into play in
contingent scholarly tasks. It is impossible to make sense of our present
conjuncture without clearing away the cant that has accreted around our
view of the ensemble known as “Marxism”—the bogey under the bed of
this and other disciplines. Hers is a historical and intellectual argument
that places its emphasis on scholarship by arguing that one cannot claim
to have done their homework, or avoided relying on ready-made truths
no longer subject to question, until they have faced down the mythol-
ogies surrounding our genealogies of a largely disinfected, sublimated
English literary history; nor can one do so without facing the collision
between an anti-imperialist discourse from the colonies (especially Africa
in her case), which drew on both the labour movement and the leads of
Marxist intellectuals, and (on the other hand) the idealizing tendencies—
at times quite conscious and deliberate—of a neoconservative theoretical
aestheticism.
To put this another way, one cannot speak of Marxism and… X, as
though it were a doxa to be added onto some other, clearly demarcated
problem. In practice, Benita does not consider postcolonial studies and
Marxism, since it is already too central a set of propositions, and too
deeply internalized a set of generally accepted findings for anyone in
modernity not to be, at some level, a Marxist, in the same way that we
are Freudians, or Darwinians. Conservatives and liberals alike have now
taken, without acknowledgement, of course, or only with extreme qual-
ifications, concepts like reification, surplus-value, commodity fetishism,
exploitation, and class struggle as givens, and indeed, one of Benita’s sa-
lient points throughout her work—one she demonstrates with methodi-
cal patience—is the covert reliance of postcolonialism itself on precisely
these categories taken from the slandered constituencies of the past.
But although I have been emphasizing here the general intellectual
contribution of what is tendentiously portrayed as particular, Benita is
often more specific than that. What I mean is, despite the enormous risk
to her authority in a climate in which the world has given way to the
word, she reminds us constantly that the philosophy and art we now
immortalize are the products of often endangered or beleaguered con-
stituencies. What is invoked casually today as “Marxist theory,” for
instance, grew out of party engagements, often at great risk to their par-
ticipants. As Benita puts it well, the last few decades have seen attempts
to celebrate hybridization regardless of whether subjects of difference
wished to be hybridized or not, and to displace political organization
with a performative politics of writing. It is in that climate that B enita
rivets our gaze on a story that evokes the organizational basis for the
postcolonial discussion itself. In the “Liberation Theory” essay, we find
alongside a discussion of the turn to language, the philosophical dis-
courses of modernity, and a discursus on the healthy state of an ignored
African philosophy, a mentioning of the unmentionables. Benita, in fact,
dwells on them: the ANC, FRELIMO, the MPLA, the July 26th Move-
ment, and, of course, the French CP, all composed, after all, of people—
flawed, striving, well-read, mutually influencing. This is not merely our
past, but the past of those who would not recognize these organizations
today, or who set out shamefully to discount or deny their contributions.
But what I have been tracing here as the rejection of the “syncretism
of the middle way” has produced its own dilemmas for Benita’s writing.
In a review of Conrad and Imperialism, Edward Said called Benita’s
writing “dense and intelligent,” and then went on to use the term “as-
tringent,” which he intended as a compliment (Said 1984). He meant, I
think, that she is uncompromising about her attacks on the “graceless
syntax” and “obfuscations” of those who want to hyphenate all Marx-
isms to deconstruction (as she puts it)—a point that is never merely about
positions, it must be understood (Parry 2000b, 124). Eloise Knapp Hay,
for example, in Nineteenth-Century Literature, is driven out of her skin
by Benita’s reading of the character of the photographer in Nostromo,
a character she sees as a sign that “radical politics may be the means of
deliverance from an intolerable present” (Hay 1985, 113). The difficulty
of the concept merged with the merciless affront of the optimism have
been challenging to readers within her chosen arenas.
So one finds these schizophrenic outbursts in many reviews of Benita’s
work, obligatory asides that berate her “Marxist-Leninist convictions,”
while implicitly admitting her mastery of craft, her familiarity with
English literature; her obvious belonging in their circles is so obvious
and intrusive that even hostile critics are forced to face its strangeness,
and make sense of it. They are puzzled by the polished beauty of the
thing, the jagged edges of the prose edifice. Her writing presents an ab-
errant portrait in their minds; they seem to be bewildered by the com-
bination of a writer clearly at war with herself, someone who has to
bring an alien artistic and intellectual world, at times ploddingly, into
the clarity of her original understanding, much like Conrad did in an-
other idiom, on behalf of a different set of alien concerns. Benita herself
268 Timothy Brennan
has referred to Conrad’s “anguished books,” and it is an anguish inti-
mated in her writing as well. But unlike Conrad, I would say that Benita
is contending not only with geographic displacement but politically in-
flected internal exile, the dissident as other; and this intense loneliness of
position is more oppressive and disorienting than working, like Conrad,
in a foreign language to a crowd that is nevertheless eager to digest his
world-weariness and an indiscriminate (which is to say, in his readers’
minds, “fair”) brand of cynicism.
The moods of her writing are intellectual and political in surround-
ings that militate against her version of both, so that the meanings are
layered, and the emotions chilled down with the ice-block vocabulary of
Latinate endings. Freed from these particular constraints—for example,
in a review of Coetzee on South Africa—where a confrontation is ex-
pected, where the delineations of the available positions are already well-
known, where the historical background is generally understood—the
prose takes on a transparency that relieves readers of a certain labour,
perhaps, but that also rubs out the physical traces of the struggle that
took place in language. Among the things we are drawn to, in other
words, are those marks of evidence in her language of a war against her
own instincts, her own internal battle over the degrees of assuagement
and contestation. The effect of the language is reminiscent of Conrad’s
in that it is brought under subjection to convey a sensibility that is im-
posing and unique. Benita involves herself much less in the experien-
tial, emotive, romantic, or speculative. Like those who carry prose like
a weapon, and who feel the pressure of sticking out in company, she is
both burdened by meaning and, at the same time, obsessively aware of
the customs against expressing those meanings as she would. She’s lived
in several worlds, in multiple senses, and their legislative setups are at
odds with one another, and therefore there is the imperative to capture
it all—all of it—in a language that must not lose its readers by allowing
them to charge it with superficiality. In a sentence like “conspicuous and
ghostly… signs of empire… written across the body of metropolitan lit-
erature” (Parry 2004, 107), we find some of the dedication of her prose,
which is not the least thing in her work. She writes “acknowledging the
continuities and persistence of indigenous temporalities within trans-
formed and plural cultural formations”—a phrase that is less vivid at
first, but precisely for that reason graceful within abstraction, and there-
fore with a particular kind of beauty that she crafts from essay to essay.
Those of us who have learned from her writing witness this: she has the
quality of giving the very widest circles the compliment of a careful read-
ing. Even those like Arthur Pollard, unsettled by her “politically com-
mitted ideological criticism,” concede that she deals with “both sides
of the argument…” that her “critical intelligence sees the whole field”
(Pollard 1984). What strikes one about the style of her interventions
(and this has a great deal to do with her stature), is its high-mindedness
and impersonality. It is an Olympian style of argument, above the fray
and absent of competitive bias. The rhetoric marches out to meet its in-
terlocutors in their own modes of address.
It is important to notice that her work concedes as much as it con-
tests, and she displays an endearing openness to disagreement not found
in many of her adversaries. She is a generous scholar. She reads the work
of her colleagues and contemporaries closely, continually engaging with
them, citing them, showing her admiration for them. For example, in spite
of her extensive efforts to unpack the work of some of postcolonial theo-
ry’s leading lights, she never seeks to claim her insights for herself alone.
She is not alone, but nevertheless rare in actually reading and under-
standing the full argument of those she cites, never sticking to the most
obvious citations, but summoning articles that prove she has surveyed
a broad terrain and generously (but critically) judged it. I concede I feel
exactly the same thing about Neil Lazarus as well, and that there may
be something to develop here about the shared political ethic responsi-
ble for this seriousness, fairness and completeness. Her review essay on
Bhabha is exemplary in this regard (Parry 1994). Her strategy is that of
a reading-through of key passages on Bhabha’s own terms. This strikes
me as effective, but also furthering a process of evaluation of syntactical
complexity, which is itself related to the salvational literariness inher-
ent in deconstruction. She is always carefully reformulating his syntax
and wording into sentences that are no less sophisticated, no less the-
oretically informed, but crafted in such a way as to expose the hidden
assumptions of his original formulations. In that way, she is more than
careful to imagine his own counter-counter arguments, which are then
articulated for him, before hammering the original point home (but now
qualified). This may be the only acceptable strategy for showing the lim-
itations of Bhabha’s work in some circles.
The rather different strategy of explaining away (as distinct from
interpreting)—one thinks of some of Terry Eagleton’s excellent recent
work in the Illusions of Postmodernism, for example—has a good deal
going for it as well. The targets may label such work anti-intellectual,
or complain of its ideological unsuppleness, since it objectifies critics
like Bhabha as embodiments of interest. But the strategy of “explaining
away” has the merit of addressing the underlying protocol of Bhabha’s
criticism rather than only its internal inconsistencies. The point I am
making is that Benita denies herself the luxury of this move, however
dearly she may be tempted to employ it, but that her graciousness in
this regard is lost on her interlocutors, who feel so exposed by the fair
treatment they immediately accuse her of precisely what she has pains-
takingly avoided in the name of fair play.
Her essay “The Postcolonial: Conceptual Category or Chimera?” (and
I do not mean the Oxford Literary Review essay) checks the easy accep-
tances of a set of hyperbolic linguistic/epistemological postulates that
270 Timothy Brennan
had formed the discursive regime in the United States throughout the
1980s but that she describes as taking over Britain belatedly in the mid-
1990s (Parry 1997). The essay has her usual earmarks of attentiveness to
detail, comprehensiveness in scope, and diplomacy in phrasing, but here
Benita adopts a tutelary posture that gives the writing the value one finds
also in Stuart Hall or Perry Anderson—an unafraid education valuable
to the impatient, rough-and-ready US (and British) minions who have
often not gotten the basic coordinates of the problem right. She tends,
then, to rehearse those coordinates and pin them down.
The structure of “The Postcolonial” displays an “and-and” mode of
argumentation. It develops accretively, which allows her to cover terri-
tory slowly, like a cartographer, and to slip occasionally into the lan-
guage of caution, correction, or addition. It is not a structure designed
to pit constituencies against one another, nor to elaborate a thesis on the
field as a point of departure that her overview is then meant to illustrate.
The care with which she analyzes the treacherous word “dialogue,”
for instance, generously exploring passages from Gyan Prakash where
the term appears, displays itself in elliptical phrasings of this kind.
Christopher Miller, in the same essay, is praised for his talent and learn-
ing if not forgiven for the circular logic of the “dialogue” he employs.
Benita’s discourse is always grand, high—carried out with a dignity be-
yond emotion, and for all that more crushing.
II
Benita Parry explored the topics now associated with postcolonial studies
a full two decades before others encountered them, elaborating them in
Delusions and Discoveries (which was for that reason later reprinted—
an unusual occurrence for a scholarly book two decades after it had fallen
out of print). The reissuing of Delusions and Discoveries in 1998, orig-
inally published in 1972, was prompted both by the success of Salman
Rushdie and by the prominence of South Asian intellectuals in the United
States. To re-read the book today is in many ways to be amazed. An early,
pre-“postcolonial studies” study, the book does at least three or four
things that those of its genre—a genre she in some ways minted—do not,
or could not, do. Clearly Benita’s own background has meshed with the
heady years in which the book was mapped out (the late 1960s and early
1970s, when work from the Third World found its way into English for
the first time) so that there is a poignantly contemporary core to the study
that refuses to be dated, despite her own, rather too giving comments to
the effect that parts of the book are “saturated… in the euphoria of a
credulous counter-cultural era” (Parry 1998, 13). If the late 60s and early
70s forecast many of the themes and inquiries that today arise as colonial
discourse, hers is probably the most stable bridge between the one period
and the other. The value of the book lies not only in its refreshing histor-
ical solidity recounted with an unpretentious narrative economy and flair
(in every chapter, not merely in prefatory comments), or its very welcome
and unusual grace of phrasing or plain intellectual generosity. The value
is not only that, although these alone place it well above other works of
the Anglo-Indian Literature study genre.
For, apart from these strengths, this study prefigures in great de-
tail work that is typically considered much more recent and novel. It
brilliantly intimates, for example, the strategic importance of popular
women novelists to the writing of empire, as well as the historical de-
cisiveness of the Mutiny to the British imagination as it concerned the
subject of women. She concedes that in this early book there is a “no-
ticeable absence of any attention to the circulation of gender in colonial
discourse or to the Anglo-Indian as a gendered category.” But the struc-
ture she offers us in Delusions and Discoveries has yielded, in imitation,
work that explores precisely her dimensions of the colonial archive—the
work of many, but one thinks particularly of Mary Louise Pratt’s Im-
perial Eyes. In Delusions and Discoveries Benita had already begun to
explore the rich topic of travel narrative—again, a genre of imperial
fiction with tight ligatures to largely anonymous women, and with a set
of corresponding tropes that she began to name. Some of these tropes
involved, for example, the ironies of describing a people “with curtains
drawn”; the rank psychology of projection and displacement. But fi-
nally, and perhaps most strikingly, the book simply cannot be read today
without thinking of Said’s Orientalism. And Benita’s book, of course,
predates it. It is not just an exaggeration to say that the points most
associated with that great work—among them, the collusion of a grand
literary machinery in the creation of a space fit for rule, the critique of
supposedly dispassionate ethnographic analysis, the judicious handling
of writers capable both of racial bombast and ennobling sentiments—
all of this is very pronounced and meticulously developed in Benita’s
pre-postcolonial studies book. These aspects, in other words, are not
just implicit in her work, but form its very character. The book has much
of Said’s easy command and conversational breadth, while adding to it a
taste for the out-of-the-way figures of the English canon and the obscure
but representative historical personage.
Several books appearing in the years before Delusions and Discov-
eries’ reissue ostensibly covered the same territory—or some of the
territory—that Benita did. The structural logic of these studies has been
very similar, with opening chapters that comment somewhat generally
about British imperial highlights before working their way to obligatory
readings of Scott, Kipling, and Forster—a logic now repeated widely.
Because of younger scholars in the 1990s who caught our attention for
writing on these themes (using many of the same sources, and with a
272 Timothy Brennan
similar methodological ambition), we are by now familiar with the con-
tinuing attraction of the Anglo-Indian story and of the repetitiveness of
the commentary found in the writing it produced. Benita armed us with
a documentary and contextual reading better than is provided by the
thin exercise of the language of “alterities.”
What strikes one is the grounding it provides in Indian history, an in-
dex of the range of the Anglo-Indian experience as a matter of practice,
along with its mature readings of Anglo-Indian fiction. It just didn’t ex-
ist elsewhere in that combination. The chapters on Edward T hompson,
Kipling, and Forster are compact combinations of biographical infor-
mation, political contextualization, and rhetorical analysis. Greater
than that, however, is the fact that Benita’s book is a sort of primer on
theoretical issues we today call Eurocentrism, cultural imperialism, and
salvage ethnography. In part because those terms did not hover over crit-
icism in quite the same way as when she wrote this book, she was able
to explain their stakes and their mechanisms of control in a colloquially
fresh language and a condensed prose.
III
If Delusions and Discoveries looks forward to Said’s inaugural text,
it is not sufficiently noticed that while granting the power of Edward’s
work, she has not driven home the point that her own lineages—
independent of Edward—are those upon which Edward himself draws.
If the most immediate sources of Orientalism are Giambattista Vico
and Raymond Williams, the overall progenitor of the critique of colo-
nial discourse is found in the anti-imperialist popular cultures created
by a number of earlier sources: the Third International, the Pan-A frican
movements, Garveyism, the European and non-European movements
over the Abyssinian invasion, the Bandung generation, and (most im-
mediately) the salutary “Third World-ism” of the anti-Vietnam war
era, whose era academics inspired Edward directly and forcefully, as
he concedes quite openly in Beginnings. The Williams connection, al-
though important, could not be used easily, since William’s cultural
materialism was resonant primarily by way of his studies of the media,
developed complexly over the course of his career. The signal prob-
lem with his elaboration of this juncture was the evolutionary way he
felt hegemony would arise in Britain—the long revolution, a social-
democratic pastoral. Benita, on the other hand, found herself operating
from a vantage point where it was possible to see that the original
aspects of Orientalism had to do with a polemical use of “humanism”
marshalled against “theory”—not with the rather more familiar idea
that European authors and intellectuals built a largely fictional Orient
whose discursive draping provided the cover for a more material dom-
ination. Benita’s insight, among others, is to angrily remind us of the
materiality of this domination while scouting the terrains of the dis-
cursive. For that reason, she was well situated to explain why the dis-
cursive, rather than the neo-humanist, aspect of Orientalism made it
important in our circles, especially among those who knew little about
the anti-imperial legacies of European socialism.
Do we call a thing by the name that it has, or by the name that it
should have? This has been the problem many of us have confronted
while regarding the name “postcolonial studies.” All of us have looked
to Benita for help in locating both the points of compromise and intran-
sigence, and have inferred that the way to do it was, like her, to take
the high road. This is very important: that careful balance of startling
accusation and embarrassing exposure, on the one hand, and on the
other, a dignified, often even circumspect concession. I do not think it
is unfair to point out that Benita’s mastery of this balance, the obvious
efficacy of the combination in the Bhabha essay, for instance, is what has
brought the fires of hell down on her from time to time (Parry 1994). An
un-circumstanced discursivity knows its enemy.
Benita Parry is not merely a critic, and not merely one who finds oth-
ers wanting. On the contrary, her most recent work offers a positive pro-
posal: namely, the sketching out of a literary aesthetics of the imperial
imaginary. What characterizes Benita Parry’s work is a sharp, warm,
and humane voice, exuberant with the neglected experiences of an ear-
lier transitional generation and yet informed by the concerns of the next.
Benita is a bridge between generations, exhilarated by contemporary
events while tempering them with scepticism.
Works Cited
Hay, Eloise Knapp. 1985. “Review Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideo-
logical Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers.” Nineteenth-Century Literature
40.1: 112–117.
Parry, Benita. 1983. Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Vi-
sionary Frontiers. London: Macmillan.
———.1987. “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse.” Oxford
Literary Review 9.1: 27–58.
———. 1994. “Signs of Our Times: Discussion of Homi Bhabha’s The Location
of Culture.” Third Text 28–29: 5–24.
———.1997. “The Postcolonial: Conceptual Category or Chimera?” Yearbook
of English Studies 27: 3–21.
———. 1998. Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imag-
ination. Foreword by Michael Sprinker. London: Verso. 2nd ed. [1972].
———. 2000a. “Review of Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism.” The
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Parry, Benita. 2000b. “Review of Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in
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Pollard, Arthur. 1984. “Review of Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism.” Lit-
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Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
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Notes on Contributors
Timothy Brennan is the Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities at the

University of Minnesota, and the author of foundational essays in
postcolonial theory. His early study on the role of US book markets
and taste culture in the making of “world literature” can be found
in At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (1997). His essays
on intellectuals, imperial culture, and the politics of popular music
have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, the
Times Literary Supplement, New Left Review, Critical Inquiry, and
the London Review of Books. He most recently authored the first of
a two-volume study, Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel and the Colonies,
which traces the emergence of anti-colonial thought in Europe. He
is currently at work on an intellectual biography of Edward W. Said.
Norbert Bugeja is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at the Medi-
terranean Institute, University of Malta. He has published extensively
on questions of postcoloniality and literature, historical memory, and
political space in the Mediterranean and MENA regions. He is Vice
Chair of Fondazzjoni IDEAT, an intellectual think-tank and member
of the European Network of Political Foundations.
Sharae Deckard is Lecturer in World Literature at University College
Dublin. She is author of Paradise Discourse, Imperialism and Global-
ization (Routledge 2010) and co-author (with the Warwick Research
Collective) of Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New
Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool UP 2015). She has edited spe-
cial issues of Ariel, The Journal of World-Systems Research, Green
Letters and The Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her research cen-
tres on world-ecology and world-systems approaches to postcolonial
and world literature.
Keya Ganguly is Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and
Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. Her research
interests centre on film, critical theory of the Frankfurt School, post-
colonial studies, and the sociology of culture. She is the author of
States of Exception: Everyday Life and Postcolonial Identity (2000)
276 Notes on Contributors
and Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray (2010). She is
currently writing a monograph on the Indian nationalist and revolu-
tionary Aurobindo Ghose.
Peter Hallward teaches at the Centre for Research in Modern E uropean
Philosophy at Kingston University London (UK). He has written
books on the philosophers Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze, on post-
colonial literature, and on recent Haitian politics. He is currently
working on a book entitled The Will of the People (forthcoming from
Verso), alongside brief studies of Rousseau, Blanqui and Marx.
Pranav Jani is Associate Professor of English as The Ohio State Uni-
versity, specializing in postcolonial studies and ethnic studies. His is
the author of Decentering Rushdie (2010) and articles on Marxism,
postcolonial theory, culture, and anti-colonial struggle. Pranav’s cur-
rent work is on the 1857 Revolt in British India and its legacies in the
Indian political imagination.
David Johnson is Professor of Literature at The Open University, the au-
thor of Shakespeare and South Africa (1996) and Imagining the Cape
Colony (2012), and editor of the Edinburgh University Press series
Key Texts in Anti-colonial Thought.
Neil Lazarus is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies
at the University of Warwick. His most recent book is Combined and
Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature,
collaboratively written by the Warwick Research Collective (Liverpool
UP, 2015). Previous publications include The Postcolonial Uncon-
scious (Cambridge UP, 2011), Nationalism and Cultural Practice in
the Postcolonial World (CUP, 1999), and Resistance in Postcolonial
African Fiction (Yale UP, 1990). Edited volumes include The Cam-
bridge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2004) and (with Crystal
Bartolovich) Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (CUP,
2002). He works in the fields of postcolonial and world-literary stud-
ies, with particular interests in Marxism, globalization and imperi-
alism, critical theory, modernity and modernism, realism, and the
novel. His current project is Into Our Labours: Work and Literary
Form in World-Literary Perspective.
Michael Niblett is Assistant Professor in Modern World Literature at
the University of Warwick. He is the author of The Caribbean Novel
since 1945 (2012) and co-editor of Perspectives on the “Other Amer-
ica”: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American
Culture (2009). His most recent book is the co-edited collection The
Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics (2016).
Notes on Contributors 277
Caroline Rooney is Professor of African and Middle Eastern Studies at
the University of Kent. From 2009–2016, she held two Global Uncer-
tainties Fellowships (AHRC/ESRC), with research programs that ex-
plored the differences between radicalism and extremism through the
arts and popular culture. Her articles on Arab literature appear in the
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Journal for Cultural Research
and CounterText. Most recently, she has worked in collaboration
with Mostafa Gad and Fekri Hassan on a Newton-Mosharafa arts
and development project entitled “Egypt’s Living Heritage: Commu-
nity Engagement in Re-Creating the Past.” Her research by practice
includes theatre productions, human rights poetry, and the making
of documentary films, the latest of which is entitled England Times
Palestine (2017).
Rashmi Varma teaches postcolonial and world literature and transna-
tional feminist theory in the Department of English and Comparative
Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of
The Postcolonial City and its Subjects (2012) and of the forthcom-
ing Modern Tribal: Representing Indigeneity in Postcolonial India.
She is a founding editorial collective member of the journal Feminist
Dissent. Most recently, she has co-edited (with Subir Sinha) a sym-
posium on Marxism and postcolonial theory for the journal Critical
Sociology.
Bibliography of Benita Parry’s Works
Books
1972. Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination.
Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, the University of California Press and Longmans
(India).
1983. Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Fron-
tiers. London: Macmillan.
1998. Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination.
With foreword by Michael Sprinker. London: Verso. 2nd ed.
1998. Ansell-Pearson, Keith, Benita Parry, and Judith Squires, eds. Cultural
Readings of Imperialism: Edward Said and the Gravity of History. London:
Lawrence and Wishart.
1999. Chrisman, Laura and Benita Parry, eds. Postcolonial Theory and Criti-
cism. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.
2004. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London: Routledge.
2015. Warwick Research Collective. Combined and Uneven Development:

Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press.
Essays and Articles

1975. “Paul Scott’s Raj: Paul Scott’s Novels as History.” South Asian Review
8.4: 359–69.
1985. “The Politics of Representation in A Passage to India.” In A Passage
to India: Essays in Interpretation, edited by John Beer, 27–43. London:
Macmillan.
1987. “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse.” Oxford Literary
Review 9.1: 27–58.
1988. “The Content and Discontents of Kipling’s Imperialism.” New Forma-
tions 6: 49–63.
1990. “Conrad and England.” In Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of Brit-
ish National Identity, edited by Ralph Samuel, 189-98. London: Routledge.
1989. “Between Creole and Cambridge English: The Poetry of David Dabydeen.”
Kunapipi 10.3: 1–11.
1991. “The Contradictions of Cultural Studies.” Transition: An International
Review 53: 37–45.
280 Bibliography of Benita Parry’s Works
1991. “David Dabydeen’s The Intended.” Kunapipi 13: 85–90.
1991. “Review: J.M. Coetzee, White Writing.” Research in African Literatures
22.4, 199.
1992. “Culture Clash: On Culture and Commitment in South Africa.” Transi-
tion: An International Review 55: 125–34.
1992. “Overlapping Territories and Intertwined Histories: The Postcolonial
Cosmopolitanism of Edward Said.” In Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed-
ited by Michael Sprinker, 335–61. Oxford: Blackwell.
1993. “A Critique Mishandled.” Social Text 35: 121–33.
1993. “Imagining Empire: From Mansfield Park to Antigua.” New Formations
20: 181–88.
1994. “Some Provisional Comments on the Critique of ‘Resistance’ Writing.”
In Altered State? Writing and South Africa, edited by Elleke Boehmer, Laura
Chrisman and Kenneth Parker, 11–24. Sydney: Dangaroo Press.
1994. “Speech and Silence in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee.” New Formations 21:
1–20. Reprinted by Graham Huggan)
1994. “Resistance Theory/Theorising Resistance or Two Cheers for Nativ-
ism.” In Colonial Discourse/ Postcolonial Theory, edited by Francis Barker,
Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, 172–96. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
1994–5. “Signs of Our Times: Discussion of Homi Bhabha’s The Location of
Culture.” Third Text 28-29: 5–24.
1995. “Alterity, Contingency and South African Writing: A Conversation be-
tween Derek Attridge, Homi Bhabha and Benita Parry.” Praxis.
1995. “Reconciliation and Remembrance.” Pretexts 5.1–2: 84–96.
1996. “Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J. M. Coetzee.” In Critical Per-
spectives on J. M. Coetzee, edited by Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson,
37–65. Palgrave Macmillan. (reprint)
1997. “The Postcolonial: Conceptual Category or Chimera?” Yearbook of En-
glish Studies 27: 3–21.
1997. “Narrating Imperialism: Nostromo’s Dystopia.” In Cultural Readings
of Imperialism: Edward Said and the Gravity of History, edited by Keith
A nsell-Pearson, Benita Parry and Judith Squires, 227–46. London: Lawrence
and Wishart.
1998. “Materiality and Mystification in A Passage to India.” Novel: A Forum
on Fiction 31.2: 174–94.
1998. “Tono-Bungay: Modernization, Modernity, Modernism and Imperial-
ism, or The Failed Electrification of the Empire of Light.” New Formations
34: 91–108.
1998. “Liberation Theory: Memories of the Future.” Interventions: Interna-
tional Journal of Postcolonial Studies 1.1: 45–51.
1998. “Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J.M. Coetzee.” In Writing South
Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy 1970–1995, edited by Derek
Attridge and Rosemary Jolly. Cambridge University Press. (reprint)
2001. “The Marxist Legacy in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies: A Return of
the Repressed?” In Common Ground: Crossovers Between Cultural Studies
and Postcolonial Studies, edited by Bernhard Klein and Jürgen Kramer, 9–20.
Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.
Bibliography of Benita Parry’s Works 281
2002. “Directions and Dead Ends in Postcolonial Studies.” In Relocating
Postcolonialism, edited by David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson, 66–81.
Oxford: Blackwell.
2002. “Liberation Theory: Variations on Themes of Marxism and Moder-
nity.” In Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, edited by Crystal
Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, 125–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
2002. “Fanon and the Trauma of Modernity.” New Formations: A Journal of
Culture/Theory/Politics 47: 24–29.
2002. “Signs of Our Times: A Discussion of Homi Bhabha’s The Location of
Culture.” In Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Harry
Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi, 119-149. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press. (reprint)
2002. “Signs of Our Times: A Discussion of Homi Bhabha’s The Location of
Culture.” The Third Text Reader on Art, Culture and Theory. Continuum.
(reprint)
2003. “Internationalism Revisited or in Praise of Internationalism.” Interven-
tions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 5.2: 299–314.
2004. “Edward Said, 1935–2003.” Radical Philosophy 123: 57–60.
2004. “The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Postcolonial Studies, edited by Neil Lazarus, 66–82.
2004. “The Moment and After-life of Heart of Darkness.” In Conrad in the
Twenty-first Century, edited by Andrea White and Peter Mallios, 39–54.
London: Routledge.
2005. “Reflections on the Excess of Empire in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration
to the North.” Paragaph 28.2: 72–90.
2005. “The New South Africa: A Revolution Deferred.” Journal of Postcolonial
Writing 41.2: 179–88.
2006. “The Presence of the Past in Peripheral Modernities.” In Beyond the
Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and Technology, edited by Walter
Göbel and Saskia Schabio, 13–28. London: Routledge.
2009. “Aspects of Peripheral Modernisms.” Ariel 40.1: 27–55.
2009. “Foreword.” In Edward Said and the Literary, Social, and Political
World, edited by Ranjan Ghosh, ix-xviii. London: Routledge.
2010. “Kipling’s Unloved Race: the Retreat from Modernity.” In Kipling and
Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism, edited by Caroline
Rooney and Kaori Nagai, 18–36. London: Routledge.
2010. “Countercurrents and Tensions in Said’s Critical Practice.” In Ed-
ward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, edited by Adel
Iskandar and Hakem Rustom. Berkeley: University of California Press,
499–512.
2012. “What Is Left in Postcolonial Studies?” New Literary History 43.2:
341–58.
2013. “Edward Said and Third-World Marxism.” College Literature 40.4:
105–26.
2015. “A Retrospect on the Limits of Postcolonial Studies.” CounterText 1.1:
59–75.
282 Bibliography of Benita Parry’s Works
2017. “The Constraints of Chibber’s Criticism: A Review of Postcolonial The-
ory and the Specter of Capital by Vivek Chibber.” Historical Materialism
25.1: 185–206.
2018. “The Futures Past of Internationalism: A Conversation with Benita Parry.”
Viewpoint Magazine 1 February. Accessed 8 June 2018. www.viewpointmag.
com/2018/02/01/futures-past-internationalism-conversation-benita-parry/
2018. “A Departure from Modernism: Stylistic Strategies in Modern Periph-
eral Literatures as Symptom, Mediation and Critique of Modernity.” In The
Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature, edited by Ulrike Maude
and Mark Nixon. London: Bloomsbury. (Forthcoming).

Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and The Future of Critique: Critical Engagements With Benita Parry

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Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and The Future of Critique: Critical Engagements With Benita Parry

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Marxism, Postcolonial Theory

and the Future of Critique

Using the aesthetic and political concerns of Parry’s oeuvre as a touch-

Sharae Deckard is Lecturer in World Literature at University College

Rashmi Varma teaches postcolonial and world literature and trans-

57 Zoë Wicomb & the Translocal

58 Olive Schreiner and African Modernism

59 Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations

61 Anglo-American Imperialism and the Pacific

63 Marxism, Postcolonial Theory and the Future of Critique

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.​com

Edited by Sharae Deckard and

ISBN: 978-1-138-18611-8 (hbk)

Against the Grain: An Introduction to Benita Parry’s

2 “I remember, I remember so as not to forget!” Orhan

3 “Broken Histories”: The Tribal and the Modern in Arun

4 Peripheral Irrealisms: Water-Spirits, World-Ecology, and

5 “Not even a sci-fi writer”: Peripheral Genres, the World-

6 Towards a Pre-History of National Liberation Struggle 117

7 Disaffection, Sedition, and Resistance: Aurobindo Ghose

8 Revolutionary Nationalism and Global Horizons:

9 The Limits of African Nationalism: From Anti-Apartheid

10 Maverick Marxism? Eclipsed Enlightenments, Horizons

11 “It could be otherwise, it should be otherwise”:

12 “Intellectual Life: A Duty to Dissent”:

13 Benita Parry’s Position: Address delivered at the

Notes on Contributors 275

We would like to thank the reviewers for important feedback on our

It is both a privilege and a pleasure for me to be able to contribute this

Rather than pursuing such ignes fatui as colonial hybridity, speech-

Politics and Formation

Literary Criticism beyond Textualism

This capacity to disengage from the past and imagine a transcen-

The World-Literary Turn

[The] explanatory power of Uneven and Combined Development in

Modernism and World Capitalism

When accounting for the ‘power and possibilities’ of high mod-

This triangulation of modernity, modernism, and modernization—

For materialist theorists of modernity the only satisfactory semantic

Structure of the Volume

To know whether twentieth-century literary modernism was more

The Anti-Colonial Anti-Aesthetic

“prove” that what is fiction in particular is truth in general… Hence,

on Sanskrit as the mother of the Germanic languages… on the de-

Although Droogstoppel continually refers to “my book,” what he refers

I am far from disagreeing with everything I put into Droogstoppel’s

a ‘vessel of contradictions’ sharp as a razor, yet tender-hearted as

He has suffered much, writes Dekker in the guise of “Multatuli”: “In

Havelaar was a true poet… He invented nothing: he heard the tree

Droogstoppel rightly counsels Stern on how to write, which is all about

Nothing is forgotten in the Mediterranean.

Cette douce mélancolie ne nous a jamais été accordée

Ta mémoire est divine à ma mélancolie.

The melancholy of this dying [post-Ottoman] culture was all around

Pamuk goes on to refer this sense of a profound cultural and memorial

The Politics of l’Après-Coup

The great drive to Westernise amounted mostly to the erasure of

Melancholic Groundwork, Splenetic Agency:

Pamuk’s “litany,” largely overlooked in critical readings of Istanbul,

Henceforth, and gradually, Kemal begins to acknowledge within himself

I had to think of her. I had to go at once to the place nearest to

What Pamuk’s reader experiences here is a very different relation to

Like Laplanche, Žižek invokes the metaphor of ingestion, this time

Here I am exhibiting the newspaper advertisements, the commer-

Pamuk’s is here illustrating precisely Ertuna’s point that memorializa-

The matrix of the dialectical process is [that of] appropriation fol-

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Variously named the watermamma, Liba-Mama, Watra-Mama, f airmaid,