The Affaire Gita Sahgal: New Fault Lines

As someone whose research has explored the nearly insurmountable contradictions in the conflicts over the "right to represent" in the international women's question, I was primed to react in a certain way to the news that Gita Sahgal was suspended from her post as head of Amnesty International's Gender Unit. She had called attention to the organisation's suspect association with Moazzam Begg, former Guantanamo prisoner and head of charity Cageprisoners, which supposedly has links to the Islamic Right (for instance, by promoting the notorious Anwar al-Awlaki). Her statement and story here:
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264244
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264315

My reaction, especially after seeing Salman Rushdie's spirited defence of Sahgal, was suspicion. I remember seeing Rushdie speak ca. 2004, just as my own views on the invasion of Iraq were changing, and realising with some chagrin that he had become in some important ways an apologist for neo-conservative neo-imperialism. But is Sahgal another Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an "establishment feminist" championed by the "enlightened" anti-Muslim literati, hiding a sinister agenda? A glance at the petition supporting her should dispel such doubts:
http://www.human-rights-for-all.org/spip.php?article15

As an aspiring academic, I have my intellectual heroes and political guiding lights. Much to my surprise, so many of them are here: Sumit and Tanika Sarkar, Romila Thapar, Amitav Ghosh, Gayatri Spivak, Ramachandra Guha, Dilip Simeon, Chitra Joshi, Sumit Guha, Suvir Kaul, Raka Ray, Zoya Hasan, Amita Baviskar, Madhu Sarin, Priyamvada Gopal, and more.
One astonishing thing about this list is that it includes both mainstream liberals and various shades of Left-Marxist academics and activists. The even more astonishing thing is that almost all are fierce critics of communalism and imperialism.

This event shows that opposing the formulation of a Muslim problem with the potential of disrupting peaceful co-existence in India and beyond (which I have written about in my previous posts on the legacy of Gujarat and the controversy at the Jaipur Lit Festival) does not, should not, and can never imply fear or retreat from criticising Islamic Right ideologies. The strongest weapon in the hands of people like Hirsi Ali, Rushdie, Hitchens, Pascal Bruckner and the whole "new Enlightenment" intelligentsia is the idea that Left intellectuals are "soft on Muslims." This also forces us (I humbly include myself in the latter category) to desperately contemplate the impossibility of ethical action in the space between the Taliban and the neo-con. What Gita Saghal can teach us, apart from how to bravely go about doing this, is that there are points of commonality and even solidarity between these two factions of "late liberalism." Being vigilant about the dangers of extremisms of all kinds, and yes, still ever-conscious of the vast challenges facing women under various regimes of patriarchal oppression, is quite simply the right thing to do. Convergence on this point has the potential to restructure the intellectual and political field away from the many harmful complicities of the 2000s, and just maybe salvage the integrity of "human rights."

That Was the Revolution That Was: 1989 at 20

In post-communist Romania, history repeats itself as farce every winter, when talking heads and gray beards congregate on television to re-hash, ostensibly as a form of public service, what exactly happened in 1989. The stale, hours-long "debates" revolve around a set of questions that are both uninteresting and ultimately unanswerable, when those with the most at stake in covering up the truth are the ones being asked. First, there is the "coup d'etat vs. popular revolt" dichotomy, with its faithful subplot: the degree of outside involvement, mainly Gorbachev's and the KGB's. Second, the admittedly important problem of the mysterious "terrorists" whose rumoured presence in the capital led to thousands of deaths. Third, a more expansive chronology argument: was the revolution "stolen," and if so, when and by whom? What were its precise turning points, and how did contingency and conspiracy interact?

Not all of these lines of inquiry are relevant; indeed, keeping the focus on these mostly superficial formulations has allowed Iliescu & co. to spin a lot of yarn in weaving a veil of deceit over an exhausted public's eyes. Every so often, someone comes out of the woodwork claiming to hold the key to the whole highway; this year, it was Gen. Victor Stanculescu, former defense minister during the revolution and immediately after, now in prison for giving orders to shoot before his miraculous conversion to the revolutionary cause. He claims it was all a Soviet plot, and the "terrorists" were partly KGB agents. Provocative, and virulently anti-Iliescu on the surface, yet still not the story. Too much agency is handed over to the best-laid plans - for historians, this cannot do.

The long-term dynamics of Ceausescu's fall are not hard to track: since the 1970s Iliescu was his anointed heir, and his long exile in the wilderness proves the old man was aware of the danger. The "Letter of the Six," reformist communists who in March 1989 publicly challenged Ceausescu, represented but a small opening in the shifting tectonics of Party structures under the Leader. Indeed, the crucial question that no one directly asks the eminent revolutionaries is how and why were they so ready to form a new government hours after Ceausescu's flight? Where did Iliescu and the FSN (National Salvation Front) come from? Such a body does not form overnight; instead, it had probably been busy consolidating itself for most of the 1980s, making connections and building up support. The Letter was a kind of testing of the waters, and Ceausescu's loyal Securitate elements were quick to repress; yet who knows how much of the apparatus was quietly shifting its loyalties? As for the Soviets, they did not need to directly intervene. Gorbachev was certainly against the hard-line regimes of both Ceausescu and Honecker, personally and politically. He saw his own attempts at reforming socialism stymied by the intransigence of Moscow's old-style erstwhile allies. Iliescu's own penchant toward a perestroika-type society is well documented. Believing Ceausescu to have "sullied the ideals of socialism," the FSN was confident at first in its public proclamations to appeal to a vision close to Moscow (and even, in a telling but brief moment, to direct Soviet military support). Gorbachev's silent policy of non-intervention emboldened the growing second-rank communist movement that became the FSN to act; they waited for their opening and seized the day in December '89. They did so because they were convinced that the country was doomed under the status quo, that socialism had to be saved - in this they were close to Gorbachev's ideas. Yet Ceausescu himself held on to a hard-line position for the very same reason, and was paradoxically proven right by history. Once the iron grip was loosened, the game was up and socialism did crumble. Perhaps no one was more aware of the fragility of the regime, both economically and politically, than Ceausescu in his final days. His stubbornness was the sign not of a man who had lost the plot, but simply of one who had run out of options. This also explains his summary trial and execution, by any account a clear perversion of justice. Iliescu & co. tend to stress the necessity of such a move to "reassure" the population in those heady and uncertain days. While this may have been true, what did Ceausescu know and say publicly about those who had pulled the rug out from under him? The point is, we'll never find out. In the end, Soviet involvement is a great canard. Gorbachev may not have even foreseen or approved of the events of 1989 as they unfolded, but he certainly enabled and inspired them. The revolution was neither a coup nor a popular uprising, but a structural re-aligment: a complex, factional transfer of sovereignty involving different elements of party cadres, the Securitate, and the army. The only certainty is that the FSN was left standing as a solid, powerful entity with the will, capacity and legitimacy to govern as 1990 began.

On the second question of the "terrorists," there are many competing theories, ranging from KGB agents to loyal internal Securitate men to, well, nobody - merely a confused population who had been given arms to defend itself against an invisible enemy and had ended up shooting each other. A bombshell revelation, if it were to help resolve anything, would be needed here. But it may not matter all that much, despite the horrific death toll. It seems callous to say, but the greatest tragedy of the revolution has been the seeming irrelevance of its victims' sacrifice. For what did people die in the streets of Timisoara and Bucharest? Violence was a manifestation of a moment of suspended sovereignty, a kind of state of exception (where would we be without Agamben and Schmitt?) that allowed the new structures of power to consolidate. The price of the new regime was exacted in blood, not once but several times until the end of the following year.

If there was indeed a true opening for revolutionary action, it was not in the confusion of 1989 but in the growing discontent of 1990, when breakaway elements of the FSN -mainly former dissidents- and returned expatriate parties staged protests against Iliescu's decision to contest the first elections. This led to the infamous mineriads, when Iliescu repeatedly called on miners to march on the capital and beat up the "intellectual" protesters, condemning them as fascists and foreign agents. We are not necessarily dealing either with a genuine popular revolution that was "stolen," nor with an all-powerful coup methodically eliminating its enemies. Indeed, the extraordinary and naked violence of the mineriads, conducted unashamedly and out in the open (unlike 1989), should be read as a recognition by Iliescu's FSN of its limits: a serious crisis of incipient sovereignty. Provoking violent inter-class conflict was the only language with which Iliescu could face this challenge. The story since, wherein by 2009 Iliescu is an elder statesman and ex-FSN members form the backbone of all the major political parties left standing, does make a rigged game seem like the most logical frame. The answer is more subtle. Most remarkably of all, the structures of power put together by second-rank communists in the 1980s were able to outmaneuver both Ceausescu and the few dissident voices from the other side and creatively respond and adapt to the events of 1989-90, including the overthrow of the communist system (which they may not have anticipated, at least so suddenly) and electoral politics, to constitute themselves into an ever-expanding and tightening oligarchy. Such an analysis takes both contingency and large-scale determinants into view, stressing their mutual influence and constitution.

Historians of Romania (I am not one of them, though I could be considered a Romanian historian) face two urgent and monumental tasks in the years ahead. The first, to re-write the history of the revolution "from above," namely: working with Romanian and Soviet archives to trace the relationships between the Ceausescu regime and the outside world; assessing the strength of party structures in the 1980s, especially the development and internal conflicts of different Securitate and army factions - a utopian project, at least until Iliescu and his acolytes are dead or significantly marginalized; above all, explaining how the FSN and other forces became revolutionaries against, and heirs to, Ceausescu's regime. A range of methodologies, from diplomatic history to economics to political science approaches, would have to all be applied in concert. The second angle would make progress on the revolution "from below," namely establish a comprehensive history of popular protest against communism and its effects. One mostly neglected subject of research is the 1987 Brasov workers' revolt, one of the most important moments of resistance against the state. It is not enough to argue for simple causality or prefiguring, nor is it plausible to suggest that people ventured out into the streets out of the blue for the first time in 1989. The successes and failures of these movements, as well as their connection to the institutional story told above, must be carefully built up from still-restricted official documents and popular memory. Indeed, a great work on the genealogy of popular protest under communism going back to the mountain fighters of the early 1950s still remains to be written. Romanian historiography needs its own Ranajit Guha to write an Elementary Aspects of peasant and worker insurgencies. The day when all these levels of analysis can be integrated into a definitive account is far off, and may never come if political conditions in Romania remain as unfriendly to serious historical thinking as they are today.



*FURTHER READING:
The exhaustive blog of tireless researcher Marius Mioc collects video recordings, transcripts, and many other sources on the revolution and is a good place to start piecing it all together:
http://mariusmioc.wordpress.com/
See also Richard Andrew Hall's excellent dissertation:
http://romanianrevolutionofdecember1989.wordpress.com/

Technologies of Non-Violence: Bayard Rustin in India

After Proposition 8 passed in California last year, there was much discussion about the "black vote" and how it had damaged the cause of gay rights. Here was a sad case of two kinds of minority politics clashing with each other amidst a dizzying variety of overdetermined oppositions (black v. white, urban v. suburban/rural, middle class v. working class, religion v. secularism).

The figure of Bayard Rustin, civil rights leader and organiser of the 1963 March on Washington, as a black, gay, and labour activist all in one, is occasionally brought up as a hopeful reminder that we can live outside these binaries. Rustin is often quoted in the service of "coalition building," particularly this 1986 speech: "The new 'niggers' are gays. … It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change. … The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people."

But Rustin's life is exemplary in one more sense, demonstrating how certain organisational methods for social movements, particularly techniques of non-violent protest, circulate across borders. We are told that the civil rights movement was "inspired by" Gandhi's efforts against the British. But how did this transfer actually happen, and what tensions did the process reveal? Rustin's trip to India in 1948 provides a sketch of the painstaking ways in which the transfer of ideas happens "on the ground."

Rustin's visit must be placed in the context of a decades-long relationship between African-Americans and India, cultivated by prominent figures like W.E.B. DuBois, and of international pacifist networks in which Rustin participated. He was there for the precise purpose of drawing some lessons from the Indian experience with a view to applying them to the U.S. In other words, Rustin did not come as a wayward traveler: he had a definite agenda and mission, and he was immediately critical toward nationalism and militarism in India as he saw them. John d'Emilio's book Lost Prophet reveals how Rustin was severely disappointed that the Gandhian cause had ultimately served nationalism, and concluded that it was "non-violent in its means, but essentially violent in its ends." At the same time, Rustin tried during his stay to influence Nehru to move in a more pacifist direction (this is, we must remember, the high point of the nation-state's birth, the time of Kashmir and Telangana).

Where should these technologies of non-violence be situated? Did they happen "in India" and were then "brought over" to the United States? Were they located instead in the insitutional workings of international pacifist organisations, or in the very minds of individuals like Rustin, in their ideologies and convictions? We should be aware of the conditions that give rise to certain openings for communication, to exchanges of people and ideas that can be traced, to use that ugly term, "transnationally." The many possibilities of the postwar moment to forge such links, whether in the service of anti-colonialism, anti-racism or anti-nationalism, can serve as examples and warnings for the fractured resistances of today.

The Post-Colonial State in Our Time

Yesterday, I attended a talk given by Vijay Prashad, professor at Trinity College in Connecticut and author, most recently, of The Darker Nations: A People's History of The Third World. Much of what he said is not strictly speaking original, but the interpretive framework he is after promises to bring together many disparate phenomena operating across the developed/developing world divide, from urban gentrification to the creation of financial bubbles. To understand the current world order, Prashad takes us back to the imagination of an alternative path, the Third World dream of liberation and self-assertion; through it, as Fanon once said, formerly colonised societies would achieve what Europe could not.

From an economic and geographic perspective, this vision is decidedly not new: we see the invocation of the old I.S.I. (import-substitution-industrialisation) model set against today's neoliberal tyranny, the South-North resource flow as "accumulation by dispossession" (Prashad quotes David Harvey on this), and so on. But in a cultural sense, the awareness of the immediate postwar aftermath as an age of new global connections, which I discussed earlier in the context of Amitav Ghosh's essay on Hindi films in the non-Western world, is a fruitful area of historical thinking that is just now coming to the fore. Prashad's focus on major state figures like Nehru, Nasser and Sukarno, and on high-level events like the Bandung conference, thus serves a dual purpose: to render new cultural meanings to traditional diplomatic and political narratives (showing how these figures were important to a deep and wide movement that thought of the world differently, not just seeing them as another Cold War power bloc), and to argue that the idea of the Third World was institutionally anchored in state and transnational power (the implicit contrast is to today's fragmented, subterranean, ragtag resistances epitomised by the World Social Forum). The destruction or "assassination," in his term, of these power structures represented the real death of the dream in the late 1970s.

After his vibrant and provocative presentation, I asked Prashad a nagging question. On the one hand, he still views the "Global South" as a viable force in international relations, and he is interested in studying the developmental models and pathways of "BRIC" (Brazil-India-China) nations as an alternative to the current U.S.-dominated world order. But on the other hand, he rightly pointed out that India's current government continues to send heavy subscriptions to the IMF and is even seeking to restart the Doha round. Is the post-colonial state not now part of the very process that creates an "accumulation by dispossession"? Can it be part of a "globalising" world economy and a source of resistance to it at the same time? Prashad's answer was that elections matter and things may change. The Indian state does not essentially have one role or another, but its policies swing back and forth; therefore, it is also susceptible to influence, to the contingent democratic process. An electoral victory, for example, would presumably reconfigure the state on the world stage. Such a faith in popular democracy to triumph over large-scale structures is in many ways not traditional Marxism at all. It relies instead on forging innovative links between local resistances and state power, and not in the least on a considerable degree of optimism.

Netaji and the Naxalities: Violence, Politics and History

A few days ago, I was sitting on a bench in a small park behind the Jama Masjid in Delhi on a beautiful afternoon. I was talking to a young man named Mohammed Khan, a schoolteacher from the town of Jhansi in U.P. I looked up at a martial statue in the middle of the park and asked him who the figure was. Subhas Chandra Bose, came the reply. I asked my new friend what he thought of him. He nodded energetically, "Very great man." "You are a Muslim," I said, "and he is a Bengali Hindu." It didn't matter one bit. Netaji was a great man to all Indians because he fought for his country.

This conversation reminded me of another talk I had with a friend in Berkeley, who astutely complained that the problem he had with the Subaltern School historians, many of them Bengali bhadralok (I assume he was speaking of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty et.al.), was their romanticization and glorification of violence. This meant they were prone to expressing at least some degree of affection toward the ongoing Maoist Naxalite rebellion in West Bengal, Orissa and Chattisgarh, but also admired that far more mainstream revolutionary, Subhas Chandra Bose (conveniently ignoring his alliance with the Axis and his un-democratic aspirations for India). In one sense, Netaji and the Naxalites are far apart on any spectrum, whether political, ideological or even from the standpoint of Bengali history. The Naxalites are leading a peasant revolt that seeks to destroy that stratum of middle-class life and culture so carefully built up by the bhadralok over the last two hundred years. They are even fiercely against the Communist government of West Bengal, who they accuse of readily capitulating to bourgeois interests (the Nandigram massacre of two years ago represents only the most visible and shocking aspect of the growing divide between peasants and the CPI(M) elite in Calcutta). Bose, while not entirely de-coupled from a kind of authoritarian socialist philosophy by his Axis alliance (a marriage of convenience), represents something totally different: he was the last vessel into which the bhadralok placed their hopes and dreams, the final attempt to rescue the leadership of the nationalist movement from its westward drift to Gandhian ashrams in Gujarat and Nehru's parliamentarianism in New Delhi. Bose, an educated, cosmopolitan, and charismatic leader, shares with the low-class Naxalite agitators only the principle of an ethics of organised violence as the solution to a political claim.
Indeed, Bose is often viewed as Gandhi's counterpart, the other side of the conventional wisdom that India's freedom was won by non-violence. He is also the alternate examplar to emerge from the freedom movement. A recent obituary in the Economist of the Tamil Tiger leader, V. Prabhakaran, tellingly noted that his hero was "not Gandhi but Subhas Chandra Bose."

While having these thoughts, I happened to be reading Ramachandra Guha's collection of essays, The Last Liberal. Guha is one of the most (and few) popular historians in India, and he has undergone something of a transformation in his scholarly career. He made his name by writing a detailed sociological analysis of Chipko, the famed environmental protest movement in the Himalayas. This great book, hitting all the right notes in the "history from below" category, gave way to an increasing focus on individuals and a shift to politics Guha himself describes as "liberal." Aside from withering criticism of Marxist academics and the Communist political establishment in Calcutta, Guha calls himself as a Nehruvian and tries to establish the Congress leadership of newly independent India as the "Founding Fathers" of a democratic, secular and liberal country. This is all well and good, but it raises the most interesting questions when considering the relationship of the historian to social protest and resistance.

For one thing, as Guha points out, historians often confuse their scholarly methodology with their political beliefs. Someone who works on peasant rebellions in Bengal is quite likely to be sympathetic to the Naxalites, while someone who condemns the Indian Left is more likely to view history not as struggle and resistance but as other kinds of narratives, most notably a modernising and democratising trajectory that views violence and "identity politics" as obstacles to be overcome. For the Subalternists and those who Guha quite uncharitably calls "so-called feminists," it's hard to be ideological allies with bands of terrorists who have repeatedly expressed their desire to do away with intellectuals altogether. For those Subalternists working in well-funded academic establishments in the United States, the contradiction is even more glaring. On the other hand, it's hard to be a convincing critic of caste and patriarchy while reflexively reacting against any form of political organisation of the oppressed classes. Guha may have activist clearance on the environmental front, but he dismisses Dalit parties and the "so-called feminists" all too easily.

This brings us to the Indian election of 2009. The defeat handed to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in U.P. by the Congress was seen by many Western-oriented, modernising observers as a defeat of the "politics of caste" by the benign and rational considerations of economic development. Mayawati, while easily hailed by leftist historians as a hero (a Dalit woman in charge of India's most populous state), is considered by urban liberals to be a corrupt gangster. Lalu Prasad, formerly chief minister of Bihar and railway minister, is a garish thug, who presided over the most backward and violent of all Indian states. The greatest difficulty lies here for the historian: as well-meaning and anti-caste as one can be, there is simply no way to justify or even excuse the rise of a man like Lalu in Indian politics. No amount of caste oppression can adequately explain the arrogance and venality of such a figure. On the other hand, it's nearly impossible to take on caste without a radical challenge to the establishment - which may involve the rise of Mayawatis and Lalus in the bargain. Dismissing them as "identity politics" isn't very useful when caste or regional identity in India cannot simply be made to go away by being wished away, or not thought of at all.

The historian of India today has few options. One can always be a card-carrying communalist, writing textbooks about Muslim invasions and finding a safe home in the arms of the BJP. One can be a righteous leftist going on about protest and resistance while the backyard burns from Naxalite murders and bombs. Or, one can try and walk the middle path, conscious that most historians are middle-class people working in that bastion of middle-class respectability: the university. If, however, one decides to forge this happy compromise and label oneself as "liberal," more questions are raised about what gets left out in such a definition, and whether there is any serious message to the contemporary world of politics left to offer.

Democracy and Popular Protest in India

Perhaps the most remarkable outcome of last month's attacks in Mumbai was not the sudden realisation by many in the West that India, as the world's largest democracy, was an ally worth standing by far more so than our friend for so many decades, Pakistan. There are serious questions on a large geo-political scale that need asking, but they are part of the ebb and flow of statecraft in South Asia and will not find easy answers soon.

No, what is downright amazing is a less-reported story that, following a wave of popular protests over the handling of the attacks by the Indian government, the Home Minister and national security adviser resigned. The BBC says "hundreds of people took to the streets" in a show of demanding accountability for the government's failure to protect its citizens:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7757122.stm

Reading this story from the U.S., where the parallel with 9/11 has been pushed repeatedly by an unimaginative media, one is struck by the incongruity of such a response: after all, when their country was attacked, why did Indians not rally around their leaders and give Manmohan Singh a 90% approval rating, as George W. Bush was honoured seven years ago? The answer lies, shockingly for Westerners accustomed to believing that their variant of "democracy" is the highest stage of political development, in the truly substantive nature of Indian democracy. The Indian public sphere is not content to shore up the establishment in a show of good faith and solidarity, as the docile and ill-informed American public did. No, the supposedly flawed and backward Indian democracy produced a textbook response to the failure of its government. Where were the masses of people in the streets demanding to know what the Bush administration knew, and did, about terrorism in the year before 9/11? Why was that infamous P.D.B. of August 2001 entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike inside the U.S." not burned in effigy by angry mobs on the streets of New York, Cleveland, and Omaha? And why, if Bush and his national security team presided over the most devastating attack on American soil in history, were they furthermore given carte blanche on their judgment in starting a war?

The answer lies in different traditions of democracy in the U.S. and India, indeed in the differential basis of the nation-state. The U.S. government is an entrenched and hegemonic apparatus that presides over an apathetic and generally politically uninvolved consumer society. In India, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has brilliantly pointed out in a recent essay entitled "'In the Name of Politics': Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in India," traditions of popular protest by workers, peasants, and other marginalised groups survive from the early 20th-century struggles of the independence movement to challenge the nation-state. Nehru was opposed to any kind of "unrest," believing it to be incompatible with a "civilised" and mature democracy (where tamer forms of accountability like petitions and the ballot box should prevail). Of course, what the nationalist elites continually failed to understand about the character of the Indian nation was the vast spectrum of minority interests found within it that could not be cajoled, appeased, or integrated without a painful process of adjustment (in other words, that hegemony was hard to come by). In all, this adds up not to a backward and unruly system but to a rich, vibrant, and relevant sense of democracy in India, which should give skeptics about India's future at least some consolation in these dark times.

Eagleton's Manifesto

Feel how you like about Terry Eagleton and his politics: the man has the unique talent to cut with razor-sharp language. They are precision cuts, even paper cuts that get under the skin of his intellectual opponents, who often find themselves unable to muster replies of comparable clarity. I have to say at the outset, I do not agree with Eagleton's far-too-orthodox-for-the-21st-century Marxist programme, but his critiques must be not only addressed, but embraced, by those of us who care about post-colonialism and theories of resistance.

His stone-cold brilliant essay on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, entitled "In the Gaudy Supermarket," is the single most important piece on the use of language in contemporary thought since George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." It should be more than that: a manifesto for the academic, the polemicist, and anyone interested in promoting a critical view of the world. The link to the whole thing is here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n10/eagl01_.html

and though it is worth a careful read, all one really needs to quote to get the point across is this wonderful opening salvo:


"The second rule of this samizdat handbook reads: ‘Be as obscurantist as you can decently get away with.’ Post-colonial theorists are often to be found agonising about the gap between their own intellectual discourse and the natives of whom they speak; but the gap might look rather less awesome if they did not speak a discourse which most intellectuals, too, find unintelligible. You do not need to hail from a shanty town to find a Spivakian metaphorical muddle like ‘many of us are trying to carve out positive negotiations with the epistemic graphing of imperialism’ pretentiously opaque. It is hard to see how anyone can write like this and admire the luminous writings of, say, Freud. Post-colonial theory makes heavy weather of a respect for the Other, but its most immediate Other, the reader, is apparently dispensed from this sensitivity. Radical academics, one might have naively imagined, have a certain political responsibility to ensure that their ideas win an audience outside senior common rooms. In US academia, however, such popularising or plumpes Denken is unlikely to win you much in the way of posh chairs and prestigious awards, so that left-wingers like Spivak, for all their stock-in-trade scorn for academia, can churn out writing far more inaccessible to the public than the literary élitists who so heartily despise them."



Any college undergraduate can sympathise with the quotes he chooses from Spivak (they are only infinitesimally more comprehensible when in context), having encountered such "drivel" many times in their education. But what is at stake is not by any means the desire to simplify complex matters for the sake of understanding. On the contrary, Eagleton argues, there is something profoundly pernicious about this kind of hyper-language because it conceals fairly modest and muddled politics. What kind of resistance can this inspire? What kind of intellectual clarity will this provide to someone mired in Enlightenment assumptions and all the other post-colonial bogeys? The tragic thing about Spivak and the hundreds of critics in her wake is that they make post-colonial thought, which is at heart a remarkably incisive body of knowledge, into something obscure and unappealing. Even Foucault, buried underneath the impossible sentence formation of his rather clumsy French, has a certain impishness and instability that can captivate the reader. Most of the post-Saidian academic world in the US and UK is dry as dust by comparison. So what if their politics are modest? To me it seems such politics are preferable to Eagleton's Marxism. But not if they are served to the world as cold porridge and serve to inspire in students looking for alternatives to the dominant discourses an overwhelming feeling of "meh."

Even bona fide revolutionary heroes, like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose book Empire was a global best-seller in 2000 and advocated a comprehensive, original worldview of our globalised world, fall prey to this. Their politics are the very opposite of modest; their language is the stilted jargon of post-colonialism's muddy waters. Consider this:
"Precisely by bringing together coherently the different defining characteristics of the biopolitical context that we have described up to this point, and leading them back to the ontology of production, we will be able to identify the new figure of the collective biopolitical body, which may nonetheless remain as contradictory as it is paradoxical."
Needless to say it's a far cry from "Workers of the world, unite," and raises the question as to whom is this work even meant to speak? Certainly not the multitude, whose spontaneous acts of resistance, from the LA riots to the World Social Forum, are grounded in much more prosaic concerns than, "How contradictory is the collective biopolitical body?" The audience is more likely a coterie of Western academics who have accumulated enough to immerse themselves in Foucault and Deleuze at their leisure, and a marginalised group of radical activists who form as far from a "multitude" as conceivable. Indeed, Hardt and Negri's attempts to provide Marx-like imagery, as in their modification of his working-class-as-mole metaphor to resistance-as-a-snake, are pale imitations and do not burn with the urgency of now. Marx and Engels's manifesto required nothing from its readers than an observant eye to the realities of the world, and their language reflected this (thus, the notion of the expanding bourgeoisie was not just a nice turn of phrase but described a tangible process raging all around). For whatever their ideas were worth, they were expressed in a uniquely purposeful language (Eagleton uses Freud as an example, who also fits this description).

The way to inspire resistance, both as critical inquiry within academia and as political activism, is to use metaphors that are fiery and earthy, not airy and watery. This means they have to be urgent and contextually grounded, not abstract or muddled. The post-Foucauldian concern with the body is a perfect example of how a valuable perspective can be lost. When the body became a mere "site of resistance" or "vehicle of power" and theorists stopped talking about the body, materiality was lost and we came down the winding road to Hardt and Negri's generally superficial references to the "biopolitical." This confuses and turns off even the most well-meaning students, even those with an understanding of Foucault (perhaps especially them).

Critics have responded to Eagleton's attack in a predictably dull fashion. Judith Butler complained that Eagleton doesn't get how much Spivak's work has "inspired" all sorts of activists around the world. To which the rejoinder would question how much of Spivak they really understood, what they actually did with this theory, and whether they're succeeding. Not to mention how much more inspired they could have been with clearer prose. These are simple considerations, perhaps below Butler and the academic establishment's wide horizon. But Occam is due for a comeback sometime this century. Perhaps the most inspiring thing Spivak ever produced is not her venerable body of obscurantist text but her charitable foundation promoting literacy in India. And perhaps post-colonial theory needs re-directing to that most simple concept of all, the American grammar school's number one rule of writing: show, not tell.