From Harvey To Our Historic Moment
At Johns Hopkins--I was there from 1985 to 1992--Harvey was one of the star professors, widely admired for his readings of Marx. He was also known to be a major detractor of emerging postcolonial critique. In what appears, in retrospect, to have been a bit of a tactical miscalculation on his part, he may have wildly underestimated both the intellectual richness and the moral power of the postcolonial wave that was reaching the US at the time. Or, simply, he was just to eurowhite for the task. Either way, he just couldn't, wouldn't accept the idea that postcolonial thinkers, most clearly the Subaltern Studies group, but also many others, from Latin America to the Caribbean, not to mention Africa and east Asia, etc., were standing, as Stuart Hall so famously quipped, "within shouting distance to Marx.” In other words, Harvey failed to note that the postcolonial challenge did, or could have done, a major service to help Marxism avoid becoming irrelevant by ossification. Nor did he see, or he was not magnanimous enough to stop his own flow of reading Marx, for a moment, and appreciate the degree to which postcolonial scholarship stood "on the shoulders" of Marx and Marxists--most prominently, in the case of south Asians, Gramsci. That spot blindness is particularly ungenerous as Guha’s or Chatterjee’s work could not be more explicit about their deep debt to Gramsci. The very term chosen as a label to the south Asian movement Subaltern Studies is a warm embrace and a very respectful bow to Gramsci.
Of course some of what appeared as Harvey's rigidity may have just had to do with scholarly habitus, styles of argument-making: I remember, for instance, how Harvey, his department and his students organized a "study tour" for Hopkins graduate students to West Baltimore—a site of extreme urban poverty, much of which has been so memorably depicted in the breathtaking tv series The Wire a few years later. Standing in an urban ghetto that looked like a war zone, in the devastated streets with no-one but pushers and gang soldiers around, Harvey would keep offering an impressive array of references to Marx to his students busy taking notes. . .
A striking thing about scholars working in postcolonial frames was, in contrast, that they did not repeat their predecessors' arguments, as do exegetical Marxists, Gramscians and Wallersteinians). They assumed that there was a "we" and "we" had already read and digested the classics--and moved on.
But there were deeper, more fundamental fissures, issues that go to the heart of what critical theory is and how it inserts itself into the deep tissue of human life. They had to do with two additional "provocations" accomplished by Postcolonial Studies:
They changed the narrative perspective in pretty radical ways. They refused to "report" to eurowhiteness, the white European erstwhile-masters any more. They chose to speak, instead, "laterally", as David Scott pointed it out most succinctly, to “fellow postcolonials.” We have multiple crises in the world today. A fundamental question—at the heart of power and the transformative potential of humankind in today’s crises—has to do with this problem> who will be allowed to frame the crisis for whom, and in what terms. The virus is "only" a trigger. The crisis is genocidal capitalism. Who will be allowed to say that to whom, on what terms, and with what consequences?
The best among postcolonial intellectuals also refused to accept the practice of using a heavy-handed, streamlined, and idealized set of imageries from the history of west European societies—or, to be more precise, from an idealized narrative of the history of the "epochal" drama of the conflict between propertied, middle-aged, educated, bourgeois white men from the erstwhile colonial centers of western Europe and their co-ethnic, co-citizen (mainly factory) labor at home—as “the generic model” for the world, let alone a telos worth mentioning. They retreated to two rearguard positions: foregrounding, again and yet again, the suffering of the west European working classes (as if anybody in the postcolonial group had denied that), and made rather absurd, at best vulgar-materialist, superficial-reductionist references to “race” as "secondary," overdetermined by class, or outright “epiphenomenal.” The only way to do that is if they denied the existence, or were blissfully unaware (I'm not sure which is worse), of the tradition of materialist, Marxist or Marxisant postcolonial criticisms of racism, a tradition that has at least as deep roots in the history of critical public theorizing about the social as do narratives that absolutize a stylized narrative of west European history as a world model. Given their breathtakingly eurocentric and global white education, they thought (think?) even Du Bois didn't happen, let alone Black Marxism, and that is just the US, not mentioning the entire world whose intellectual history is, in a certain, fundamental way, nothing but a devastating critique of the eurocentrism of the mainstream. Or is it meanstream?
That refusal to forget the real, tangible, material experiences of that 95% of humankind who is not part of the eurowhite male [bourgeois -> <- proletarian] heterosexist "majority" over the last five centuries—which is, in my understanding, at the heart of the postcolonial challenge to critical-left social theory—is what made a fairly significant part of the ‘old-fashioned” left deeply skeptical or dismissive toward, or even a sworn enemy of, postcolonial theorizing. That, in turn, is at the root of the current, devastating chasm among the not particularly numerous “camp” of critical scholars of global, (post)colonial, “racial,” genocidal, total capitalism.
Of course some of what appeared as Harvey's rigidity may have just had to do with scholarly habitus, styles of argument-making: I remember, for instance, how Harvey, his department and his students organized a "study tour" for Hopkins graduate students to West Baltimore—a site of extreme urban poverty, much of which has been so memorably depicted in the breathtaking tv series The Wire a few years later. Standing in an urban ghetto that looked like a war zone, in the devastated streets with no-one but pushers and gang soldiers around, Harvey would keep offering an impressive array of references to Marx to his students busy taking notes. . .
A striking thing about scholars working in postcolonial frames was, in contrast, that they did not repeat their predecessors' arguments, as do exegetical Marxists, Gramscians and Wallersteinians). They assumed that there was a "we" and "we" had already read and digested the classics--and moved on.
But there were deeper, more fundamental fissures, issues that go to the heart of what critical theory is and how it inserts itself into the deep tissue of human life. They had to do with two additional "provocations" accomplished by Postcolonial Studies:
They changed the narrative perspective in pretty radical ways. They refused to "report" to eurowhiteness, the white European erstwhile-masters any more. They chose to speak, instead, "laterally", as David Scott pointed it out most succinctly, to “fellow postcolonials.” We have multiple crises in the world today. A fundamental question—at the heart of power and the transformative potential of humankind in today’s crises—has to do with this problem> who will be allowed to frame the crisis for whom, and in what terms. The virus is "only" a trigger. The crisis is genocidal capitalism. Who will be allowed to say that to whom, on what terms, and with what consequences?
The best among postcolonial intellectuals also refused to accept the practice of using a heavy-handed, streamlined, and idealized set of imageries from the history of west European societies—or, to be more precise, from an idealized narrative of the history of the "epochal" drama of the conflict between propertied, middle-aged, educated, bourgeois white men from the erstwhile colonial centers of western Europe and their co-ethnic, co-citizen (mainly factory) labor at home—as “the generic model” for the world, let alone a telos worth mentioning. They retreated to two rearguard positions: foregrounding, again and yet again, the suffering of the west European working classes (as if anybody in the postcolonial group had denied that), and made rather absurd, at best vulgar-materialist, superficial-reductionist references to “race” as "secondary," overdetermined by class, or outright “epiphenomenal.” The only way to do that is if they denied the existence, or were blissfully unaware (I'm not sure which is worse), of the tradition of materialist, Marxist or Marxisant postcolonial criticisms of racism, a tradition that has at least as deep roots in the history of critical public theorizing about the social as do narratives that absolutize a stylized narrative of west European history as a world model. Given their breathtakingly eurocentric and global white education, they thought (think?) even Du Bois didn't happen, let alone Black Marxism, and that is just the US, not mentioning the entire world whose intellectual history is, in a certain, fundamental way, nothing but a devastating critique of the eurocentrism of the mainstream. Or is it meanstream?
That refusal to forget the real, tangible, material experiences of that 95% of humankind who is not part of the eurowhite male [bourgeois -> <- proletarian] heterosexist "majority" over the last five centuries—which is, in my understanding, at the heart of the postcolonial challenge to critical-left social theory—is what made a fairly significant part of the ‘old-fashioned” left deeply skeptical or dismissive toward, or even a sworn enemy of, postcolonial theorizing. That, in turn, is at the root of the current, devastating chasm among the not particularly numerous “camp” of critical scholars of global, (post)colonial, “racial,” genocidal, total capitalism.
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