Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Pramod K. Nayar
Dept. of English
University of Hyderabad
pramodknayar@gmail.com
International Conference on Postcolonial Literatures and the Transnational
7-9 April 2010, Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut, India.
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Postcolonialism offers a new way of thinking through the transnational
and the cosmopolitan condition. Its overarching emphasis, as critical theory and
pedagogic practice, has been on emancipation from oppression, agency and
dignity. How can the postcolonial be reconfigured in the age of the transnational?
Postcolonialism has begun to address questions of globalization, and the
problematic role of the postcolonial nation-state in the age of global capital, flows
of people, finance and information, cybercultures and genetic racisms embodied
in science and technology projects like HGP and VHP. It has addressed, if I may
offer a quick inventory:
Globalization of the Third World economy,
Cultural globalization involving both, American and European
products supplanting local/native ones and the global circulation of
ethnic products (such as the Indian curry or Hindi cinema),
A facile and commercialized multiculturalism,
Increasing fundamentalisms internally, accompanied by revanchist,
reactionary cultural nationalisms,
Greater hybridity of Third World citizens,
The erosion of the powers of the nation state in the age of
multinational capital and newer forms of imperialism by bodies
like the IMF.
In this talk I want to explore the possibilities of reconfiguring the postcolonial in
the age of the transnational, and to realign celebratory readings of the
transnational with all its hype of flows, space-time compressions, disjunctures
with the postcolonial.
Postcolonialism offers a new way of thinking through the transnational
and the cosmopolitan condition. Its overarching emphasis, as critical theory,
analytics and pedagogic practice, has been on agency, dignity and emancipation
from oppression. It is the academic, intellectual, ideological and ideational
But, she notes, different kinds of refugees have also been differently perceived
and received by peoples. National policies about refugees have often changed the
moral status of the refugee (79).
Ongs key argument is that the refugee and the citizen are not
irreconcilable opposites. Rather, she writes, the refugee and the citizen are the
political effects of institutional processes that are deeply imbued with
sociocultural values (79). Ongs reading of the refugee throws up several racerelated concerns that intersect with Critical Race Studies and cosmopolitanism.
Once the refugee has been instituted as refugee (in opposition to the
citizen) then mechanisms and technologies that change her/his status will come
into play. Here racialized discourses about the refugees health, welfare, economic
means come into force. As Ong notes:
the legacy of racializing expectations with regard to market potential,
intelligence, mental health, and moral worthiness came to influence at the
practical, everyday level the experiences and understanding of both the
newcomers and the long-term residents who assisted them.
(82-3)
Ongs work demonstrates how racial discourses merge with discourses of
health, economy, nationalism, morality and welfare in order to position the
refugee in particular ways. These discourses determine the ease or difficulty of the
refugee becoming a citizen. The task of postcolonialism within contexts of global
migration, increasing refugee populations and globalized capitalism is to inquire
into how the refugee is constructed within discourses of charity, responsibility and
eligibility. Just as the native was once subject to scrutiny as a good citizen of the
empire, the refugee becomes an ethical figure who needs to qualify as a citizen in
the postnational, globalized context. Postcolonialism must, therefore, examine the
conditions under which the Third World refugee is evaluated as a possible
citizen in any part of the First World. Does the refugee have to subscribe to EuroAmerican notions of the family and the individual? Can the refugee who retains
her/his native cultures for which s/he has been targeted, attacked and yet be a
responsible citizen in any part of the globe? Or are the obligations of the EuroAmerican globalized worlds such that difference is respected and protected? In
an age where most individuals already have mixed cultural identities and
heritages, can we think of a distinctive ethno-cultural or even national identity,
even in the case of the nostalgic refugee?
With the suffering, problematically constructed subject, the refugee as a
backdrop, I now turn to three improbable articulations that help a postcolonialinflected cosmopolitanism.
II: Frantz Fanon and a New Humanism
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In his Black Skins, White Masks, Fanon argues that all forms of
exploitation are the same, all racisms are the same. Fanon opens his BSWM with
some interesting declarations: Mankind, I believe in you (1) and I believe that
the individual should tend to take on the universality inherent in the human
condition (3). It is significant that Fanon, for all his rootedness in Algeria and
Africa, is emphatic about the need to address universals. This universalism stems
from a particular humanist component of his thought.
Fanons humanism is the solidarity with the worlds suffering, irrespective
of race, colour or geography. He writes:
The new relations are not the result of one barbarism replacing another
barbarism, of one crushing of man replacing another crushing of man.
What we Algerians want is to discover the man behind the colonizer;
this man who is both the organizer and the victim of a system that has
choked him and reduced him to silence. (DC 20)
Fanon has aligned the colonizer white man with the colonized black as victims
together of a cruel process. Fanons work, I believe, is about the worlds
oppressed, and when he includes the white man as a victim of colonialism he has
sought to move beyond the racial binary. Suffering and oppression are unifying
factors for his thoughts about humanism and these factors enable him to call for
a consciousness beyond nationalisms. In another essay, Letter to the Youth of
Africa, Fanon writes:
It is essential that the oppressed peoples join up with the peoples who are
already sovereign if a humanism that can be considered valid is to be built
to the dimensions of the universe. (TAR 114)
Once again Fanon is speaking of an alignment between races.
If the color black is virtuous, I shall be all the more virtuous the blacker I
am. With this savagely ironic comment Fanon proceeds to reject the myth of
authenticity in TAR (23). He speaks of people living in the great black mirage
(27) and of blacks who aspire only to one thing: to plunge into the great black
hole (27). Ross Posnock argues that Fanons rejection of such racial binaries
enables him to move beyond identity to action (Posnock 1997: 339). This
action, as Posnock sees it, is intellectual work. This intellectual work in the
decolonizing phase is essentially, in Fanon, a turn away from the traditional
national liberation politics towards an internationalism and universalism, what
Nigel Gibson identifies as the third mode of nationalism in Fanon or nationalism 3
(see Gibson 2003, chapter 8). Like Posnock who detects in Fanon a call to
recognize humans by their actions rather than racial or ethnic identities, Gibson
argues that this nationalism3 is marked by a celebration of human action and a
critical attention to hazards of national consciousness (180). In other words, what
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achieved through the recognition of shared suffering. This is yet another strand to
Fanons universalist humanism.
Building solidarities on the basis of a shared history of suffering no
matter what your racial-ethnic identity might be is a form of humanism that
Fanon seeks. To reiterate Fanons view of the responsibility of the postcolonial:
the time [that] must no longer be that of the moment or the next harvest but
rather of the rest of the world. This anticipates, I suggest, Ashis Nandys views
on cosmopolitanism.
III. Ashis Nandy and Affective Cosmopolitanism
In two major essays, Towards a Third World Utopia (1987) and A New
Cosmopolitanism: Toward a Dialogue of Asian Civilizations (1998), Ashis Nandy
calls for a new solidarity of peoples, one based on an economy of suffering.
Nandy writes:
The only way the Third World can transcend the sloganeering of its wellwishers is, first, by becoming a collective representation of the victims of
man-made suffering everywhere in the world and in all past times, second,
by internalizing or owning up the outside forces of oppression and, then,
coping with them as inner vectors and third by recognizing the oppressed
or marginalized selves of the First and Second Worlds as civilizational
allies in the battle against institutionalized suffering. (2004 [1987]: 441)
This is Nandys reasoning: If the Third Worlds vision of the future is
handicapped by its experience of man-made suffering, the First Worlds future,
too, is shaped by the same record (467, emphasis added). R. Radhakrishnan
points out that Nandy is arguing a case for seeing suffering as a universal and
omni-locational phenomenon, where the Third World is an imaginative topos
that seeks to bring about reciprocal recognition between vectors of oppression
that are external and those that are internal (2003: 98-9).
Ulrich Beck speaks of cosmopolitan memory using the example of the
Holocaust (2002). A cosmopolitan memory, of which the transnationalisation of
the Holocaust (20) is an example, is a global history of suffering and trauma.
Beck argues that such a cosmopolitan memory can energise thinking about a
shared collective future, which contradicts a nation-based memory of the past
(27). Nandy is speaking of suffering as providing the basis of particular forms of
archiving but also of critical knowledge. One can generate civilisational allies on
the basis of this shared recognition of suffering and therefore, envision a different
future based on this recognition. Becks new cosmopolitanism is, as I see it, is one
that Nandy anticipates in his vision of a utopia based on the recognition of cosuffering. Nandys inter-civilisational perspective on suffering comes close to
Becks formulation.
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(i)
(ii)
References
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2004.
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