Plebicitos y referendum honduras

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Intervention

Figures of Cosmopolitanism in the Postcolonial Present

In the first decade of the new century, the United States, as the post– World War II inheritor of Western Europe’s colonial past, has seen the category of the postcolonial newly transformed in the wake of two catastrophic events: 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. In both cases, the legacy of Western political economy and racial thought, in a world now divided between North and South, was put on brutal display. As the television images poured in and the stories were given shape, one event found cause in the Global South; the other produced a result that only seemed to emanate from there. Nevertheless, the realities and representations of each event unmistakably brought North the darker side of a globe long-​​ordered by Western interests. The U.S. response was telling: in the first case, an open act of fundamentalist defiance was met in kind by the Bush administration, creating a state of permanent emergency in which to combat and contain the alien forces of the Islamic world. In the second, the storm’s revelation of a state of abjection, particularly in the New Orleans African American community, was met by the administration with a listless response that matched the country’s enduring malaise about race relations. Both states of being are symptomatic of an emerging epoch in which the distances and distinctions—cultural, economic, and geographical—that have ordered boundary 2 37:2 (2010) DOI 10.1215/01903659-​2010-​008 © 2010 by Duke University Press

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and defined the postcolonial world are collapsing, like so many towers and levees, as the past rushes in as the global present. The historical turn marked by these events demands renewed attention to methods of interpreting the present moment. Paul Gilroy, for his part, traces its emergence through the entanglement of modernity and racial thought, and in Postcolonial Melancholia (2004), he writes with cautious hope from a specifically post-​​9/11 present in the midst of the Bush and Blair era. The guideposts offered by the Enlightenment and twentieth-​​ century decolonization frame his long view of the modern period, and for Gilroy, I would argue, two critical perspectives—racialism and cosmopolitanism—converge and are rearticulated in their enduring forms in the work of Kant. From Gilroy’s particular humanist perspective—as an ambivalent participant in the Kantian tradition—the tension engendered by the yoking together of these incommensurable terms has never been resolved. Thus, when he looks to the “interventionist and dissident work” of W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and C. L. R. James within this frame, he sets out to trouble the tradition of thought established by this convergence.1 Gilroy marks “race” as a “discursive arrangement, the brutal result of the raciological ordering of the world, not its cause” (39), one that produces “unnatural realm[s]” (41) mistaken for historical and universal truths. By establishing a countertradition of “anti-​​racist humanism” (37) populated by thinkers whose diasporic cosmopolitanism was rooted in (and routed by) this long raciological process, he participates in an ongoing intellectual project that refuses to react to “race” as ontology but, rather, engages with the systems of thought (bound up with nation, colony, and empire) that produced the discourse of race and continue to reproduce our understanding of it. A humanist, yet dissident, cosmopolitanism therefore provides the lens through which Gilroy traces the transformation of racial thought in a post-​​9/11 world. In his account, as Western reaction pushed monolithic thinking to a new scale, the visions of a “messianic civilizationism” (60) proffered by the Bush and Blair administrations engendered an “ethnic absolutism” (63) that reinscribed a fundamental division of the world along racial and cultural lines. Masquerading as cosmopolitan democracy (itself often a guise of global capitalism), such civilizationism suppresses dissent at home and “makes the improvement of a resentful and unappreciative world by imperial powers into a matter of morals” (62). As a corollary, by 1. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 32. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically by page number only.

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trafficking in the always potent fear of difference, such absolutism gives rise to an “armored cosmopolitanism” (63) that categorizes individuals outside the lines into groups whose labels quickly change from different to potentially dangerous, and therefore subject to exceptional treatment. To check and disrupt the emergence of yet another “unnatural realm” of race fueled by imperial designs, Gilroy counters with a cosmopolitanism that values “translocal” solidarities, one that presents the cross-​​cultural “challenge of being in the same present, of synchronizing difference and articulating cosmopolitan hope upward from below rather than imposing it downward from on high” (67). In my estimation, the contested discourse of cosmopolitanism therefore provides one of the locations for the “postcolonial culture building” (146) he calls for at the end of the essay, and I read his “postcolonial present” (149) as the temporal location of this struggle. Clearly, Gilroy’s cosmopolitanism offers a form of “oppositional reflection” (32) resistant to the globalization of civilizationist racial thought; however, his definition of the postcolonial present is left as a provocation. If it indeed offers a “novel space” (32) in which to continue the work he calls for, the postcolonial present must be more definitively imagined. Gilroy’s interest in the unique temporality of antiracist thought provides a starting point. Like Fanon, who refused “to accept the present as definitive” (40), Du Bois was a theorizer of race who made repeated gestures to the future-​​to-​​come that would emerge from the unfinished history of the Negro in the United States and the world. In Gilroy’s words, he sought a way to “reconcile the contending attractions of people, race, and nation to harness them into a higher service that can be defined as the figuration of a modern humanity shorn of its historic attachments to racism and equipped with a renewed concept of raceless democracy” (34). As thinkers who held a prophetic vision of the future of race and who were directly engaged with the historical experience of race in Europe and the Americas, the work of Du Bois and Fanon provides the most concrete way to introduce a hypothesis that posits a partial fulfillment of their imagined futures in the postcolonial present introduced by Gilroy. Operating from a late position within the genealogy of cosmopolitan thought established by these writers, including James, Gilroy uses their work to critique the history of race and the politics of difference with a method that roots itself in the present but also carries a historical presence through which it might disrupt contemporary figurations of race. Cosmopolitanism, now and in the past, may therefore be viewed as a mode of thought and action that draws on a long tradition of antiracist humanism.

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However, if this tradition of antiracist thought offers an alternative future located in the present moment, Gilroy, following Du Bois and Fanon, seems to linger on the edge of this future’s arrival, and it is on this point that our imaginings begin to diverge. As he puts it, “I would argue that the ability to imagine political, economic, and social systems in which ‘race’ makes no sense is an essential, though woefully underdeveloped part of formulating a credible antiracism as well as an invaluable transitional exercise” (54). Here, the postcolonial present—though a site of productive struggle—is spoken of in terms of transition. Instead, my formulation of Gilroy’s postcolonial present emphasizes its nowness, while keeping in play the other temporalities that it bundles together: it is a present that emerges from the history of the colonial world as well as the postcolonial future of that history, itself now past. My argument, and the ability to push Gilroy’s thinking forward, depends on amplifying the temporality of the postcolonial present and its historical relationship to the past and the future of race, as well as its relationship to the precedents located in the narrative of antiracist thought presented by Gilroy. The postcolonial present is not absolute in either case. It neither completes nor determines; instead, it marks only a juncture of fulfillment and prefiguration. It takes becoming as its telos, and in this schema the past’s raceless future is an eternally emergent possibility. While complicated, this kind of formulation is necessary because it raises the question of how to effectively historicize the present while making intelligible the structures from which it is emerging. One answer lies in a strategy explicitly informed by the work of Erich Auerbach, an approach that will provide clearer vision of the precedents for the thought and action Gilroy sees as necessary, as well as the narratives that he chooses to characterize the challenges faced by cosmopolitanism in the present moment. By invoking Auerbach, particularly Mimesis and his presentation of figura, I have in mind his insistence on the historical specificity of each of the figures in such a schema as well as their inherent provisionality in this context. In his reading of the Divine Comedy, for example, Auerbach does not divorce (or make allegorical) Dante’s literal depiction of the eternal from the historical events that produced his vision; instead, he sees Dante’s depiction of the eternal—specifically the encounter with Farinata and Cavalcante—equally in terms of its own historical presence.2 Hayden White’s 2. See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (1953; repr., Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 174–202. Also, “Figura,” trans. Ralph Manheim, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 56–60.

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work further grounds Auerbach’s study of figuration in the distinct historical moment, a method he calls “figural causation.”3 He argues that in Mimesis, “this mode of being in the world is represented as one in which individuals, events, institutions, and (obviously) discourses are apprehended as bearing distinctively ‘figural’ relationship to one another.”4 Reading Gilroy through Auerbach’s lens, especially with the expanded frame provided by White, reveals not only a richer periodization of the history of antiracist humanism that Gilroy seeks to define but also reveals richer correspondences between the figures and figurations that mark this narrative. The goal is a more focused cosmopolitan vision that will better engage with the possibilities of an emerging postcolonial present. A turn to the work of James will help collapse the distance between Auerbach and Gilroy. Though not made explicit, a figural mode of reading history and culture is likewise embedded in James’s study of Moby-​​Dick in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. Like Auerbach’s take on Dante, James offers a vision of Melville’s novel in which the historically particular holds a potential that finds its fulfillment not in a future-​​to-​​come, but in a universal space that occupies an eternal present. In his analysis, James suggests that labor, work itself, is the primary bond that unites the multicultural crew of the Pequod, and that this solidarity transcends obligations to the owners of the ship and its captain, as well as their individual affiliations to ancestry, country, or color. According to James, the novel’s hellish and historically realistic depiction of factory labor in the Pequod’s tryworks “at first sight is the modern world—the world we live in, the world of the Ruhr, of Pittsburgh, of the Black Country in England. In its symbolism of men turned into devils, of an industrial civilization on fire and plunging blindly into darkness, it is the world of massed bombers, of cities in flames, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world in which we live, the world of Ahab, which he hates and which he will organize or destroy.”5 What strikes me most about the passage is its complex temporality: taking Melville’s mid-​​nineteenth-​​century depiction of the tryworks as a starting point, James describes the specific experience 3. Hayden White, “Auerbach’s Literary History: Figural Causation and Modernist Historicism,” in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. Seth Lerer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 125. 4. White, “Auerbach’s Literary History,” 137. 5. C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953; repr., Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2001), 45.

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of this diverse group of workers in its synchronic historical moment, while simultaneously presenting the long history of the modern industrial world as a whole as diachronic, as “a panorama of labor through the ages.”6 With this image in mind, James’s attention to the crew’s multiculture takes on added significance, because it allows the temporal space of the tryworks to be defined as one that synchronizes difference, yet holds the potential to distribute this synchronicity across historical time. Furthermore, because his vision comes from a socialist point of view that takes the national out of the picture, James is not talking about the crew as a prefiguration of a multicultural America, as has Ronald Takaki, for instance, but as a figuration of a multiracial community of workers who already occupy a space that is at once local and global.7 If the broader picture that emerges in James’s interpretation of the Pequod’s bleak mission is that of modern civilization rushing headlong to destruction, then the crew’s changeless existence, their consistent performance of the work necessary to fulfill that mission, may nonetheless be seen as a hopeful counterpoint: they prefigure and fulfill a racially transcendent solidarity that may be extended to the resistant cosmopolitanisms of the postcolonial present. While more than a degree of utopian socialism informs James’s placement of the crew at the center of his apocalyptic vision of Moby-​​Dick, I would echo Gilroy’s emphasis on his work in the context of an interventionist and antiracist humanism. James wrote Mariners from a position of exile while confined by the U.S. Department of Immigration and facing deportation, evidence that he was fully invested in the present moment and not just interested in placing Moby-​​Dick within a programmatic vision of a world-​​to-​​ come. Driving his interpretation is the idea that Melville’s 1851 novel anticipated, even prefigured, the emerging totalitarianisms present to him in a world recently reordered by World War II, and there is no question that James imagined an affinity with the Pequod’s crew one hundred years later as he awaited his fate at Ellis Island. By looking back to Moby-​​Dick, James located a promise of solidarity that Du Bois and Fanon could only imagine as they looked forward to a postrace world. Fractured as it may be at the present time, that promise must find its fulfillment now, and the rearticulation of the postcolonial present in figural terms yields the pasts and futures gestured to by these thinkers. A reading of Gilroy along these lines will illustrate how this moment is taking shape. 6. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, 44. 7. See especially Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little Brown, 1993), 425–26.

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Certain political and cultural narratives set the field for the antiracist figurations embedded in Gilroy’s thought, and I would like to consider how his critique controls, yet is challenged by, the narratives it seeks to contain. The primary example of his work in this direction may be seen in the analysis he offers of the interventionist “translocal human rights movement” in Gaza and elsewhere (26). The other has to do with the emerging “ordinaryness” (119) of racial difference that he sees manifested in Britain in the popular productions of musicians and entertainers such as Mike Skinner, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Ricky Gervais. Gilroy’s discussion of the second category of narratives is of vital importance to his project, because it illustrates the ways that popular culture often transcends the essentializing tendencies of multiculturalism and the absolutism of political correctness to find its own space to confront and dismantle the discourse of race. However, the following discussion will focus only on the first category, the translocal political narratives, because I will close by addressing the contending narratives—and corresponding figurations—that have emerged in a world ordered by civilizationism, global capitalism, and neo-​​imperialism. By doing so, the frictive figurations that have come to articulate the contested cosmopolitanism of the present moment will be made more explicit. Gilroy’s analysis of this new activism grows out of the attention he pays to George Orwell, whose cosmopolitanism was shaped by the self-​​ enforced state of exile or vagrancy in which he lived and worked. Gilroy sees dissidence and the democracy of permanent emergency as incompatible: “civilizationist common sense,” he says, “scorns the idea that public dissidence could ever be a measure of the buoyancy and health of a democracy” (24). He therefore suggests that to emulate Orwell’s state of permanent exile (even while at home) is one way to create the intellectual distance required for intervention. To broaden this view of exile, Gilroy provides additional examples: Theodor Adorno’s thought on the “radical homelessness of the intellectual” and “Erich Auerbach’s hopeful recycling of Hugo St. Victor’s prescient observation on the perfection of the man for whom ‘the whole world is as a foreign land’” (24). Also compelling is his invocation of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters as a text performing cultural critique in a negative mode, by turning the exotic East back on the French metropole. In the Enlightenment context, it provides a marker of how cosmopolitan thought emerged through its entanglement with racial and cultural difference. Something more than cosmopolitan thought, however, is at stake in Gilroy’s choice of Orwell. His consideration of Orwell’s political ambiguities—fiercely cosmopolitan, yet patriotic to a fading ideal

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of Britishness—is especially provocative in its description of the mark left by his colonial experience. While discussing “A Hanging,” he pauses over Orwell’s turn “inward on the body” in order to locate a profound solidarity with the condemned man: “this vital humanity,” Gilroy states, “which can only be realized in the overthrow of justice, directs attention away from all anthropology and toward the ‘bestial floor’ of human being in the body, in particular to ordinary experiences of sickness and suffering” (78). Here, a new possibility emerges, a cosmopolitanism of bodies, a direct human-​​to-​​ human contact that transcends philosophy and gestures beyond a humanist cosmopolitan tradition. Under this emerging category of cosmopolitanism, the thought and action of Orwell may be extended to the present-​​day activism that constitutes Gilroy’s political narrative of a translocal human connection. Gilroy describes this new engagement as an effort on the part of these activists “to bear active witness to distant suffering and even to place their lives at risk in many parts of the world as human shields” (79). In putting their lives on the line in this manner, he sees them as representative of the “undoing of identity politics,” and it is at this point that Gilroy offers the work of these activists, such as Tom Hurndall and Rachel Corrie, who lost their lives in Gaza in 2003, a place in his narrative of antiracism: “Theirs is a translocal commitment to the alleviation of suffering and to the practical transfiguration of democracy which is incompatible with racism and ethnic absolutism. It is only racism that acknowledges the difference between their rights-​​bearing bodies and those of the rights-​​less people they protect by their presence.” On one level, the negative formulation of human rights that comes through the collateral targeting of “rights-​​bearing bodies” as they come into contact with and (become in essence) “rights-​​less people” might be seen as a fulfillment of past visions of raceless democracy. However, the instances of cosmopolitan solidarity exercised by these activists, the interventions they perform with their bodies in these specific historical encounters, are better understood as figures and fulfillments of an emergent postcolonial present. Gilroy bears witness to a form of cosmopolitanism in which the inspiration behind Orwell’s essay spills over into action, and his vision of this moment is not unlike James’s glimpse of the Pequod ’s tryworks. Solidarity arrives not in a future moment of collective democracy in which distinct racial groups come together in human brotherhood, but in a present moment of “demotic” cosmopolitanism (67) in which “slightly different” (79) individuals come together to expose the oppressive logic of race thinking. In this case, a cosmopolitanism of exile disrupts, if only for

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a hopeful moment, the states of permanent emergency and abjection that compete for space in the postcolonial present. Yet, as much as I value Gilroy’s reaffirmation of cosmopolitanism as a racially transcendent form of thought and action, there are certain questions yet to be fully explored. In the examples he chooses, why do citizens from the overdeveloped world, especially young people, look overseas to engage their social consciousnesses and to combat political injustice? Why do they take their rights-​​bearing bodies abroad when similar forms of intervention might be performed closer to home? And, despite their deployment of national identity to disrupt oppression, is there, nonetheless, a degree of playing the “good” neo-​​imperial Western citizen in these performances? As Gilroy himself asks in Between Camps, “Can an engagement with translocal histories of suffering help to accomplish the shift from Europe-​​centered to cosmopolitan ways of writing history?”8 To that, one might add a shift away from European and North American–centered modes of cosmopolitan performance. Though it is the global examples, such as the International Solidarity Movement, that often garner the most attention, there are corresponding examples of translocal, perhaps intralocal, solidarity—what Gilroy calls spontaneous “conviviality” (124)—that may be performed at home. Citing Orwell’s chosen status as a world citizen, Gilroy illustrates the need to undergo a process of defamiliarization in order to engage with the structures of inequity produced by one’s own ideological framework, and I would like to consider this idea within the context of an event, like Hurricane Katrina, which forces the process of defamiliarization upon the citizens of a nation as well as a locality. As the rest of the world looked on, U.S. citizens had to recognize that the space between the American South and the Global South was not so distant after all. Crossing an ocean or border was no longer necessary. In some cases, one need only cross the street. In this context, coming to the aid of one’s “slightly different” neighbors is not just a local act; it is a local act performed on a global scale. Hurricane Katrina was an event that revealed the depth of an existing crisis in New Orleans and not its cause, a catastrophe through which a nation saw one of its cities come into a sharper, global focus. To place the example of post-​​Katrina New Orleans within my broader consideration of the contested space of the postcolonial present, I will suggest that the temporal experience of many New Orleanians, especially in 8. Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures, and the Allure of Race (New York: Routledge, 2004), 95.

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the days immediately following the storm, may also be articulated in figural terms. Keith Cartwright describes the scene in New Orleans in this way: “Packed into shelters in the Superdome and the Morial Convention Center, the city’s innermost residents—mostly black, mostly poor—awaited aid. As promises were bandied about like the ‘bright ironical names’ of slave-​​ ships, conditions deteriorated into a massive approximation of the Middle Passage’s initiation into shared trauma.”9 Like the historical constellation of industry and exploited labor presented by James, such an event belongs to its own historical constellation of abjection, one that might include the situation in Gaza, and bringing them together illustrates the deeper temporality of an eternal present that also binds them. That an event like the hurricane can synchronize racial sameness, to turn Gilroy’s formulation around, again reveals that the deep structures of racial thought that shaped the history of the modern world must still be contended with in the global present. In closing, the glimpses of cosmopolitan hope illustrated by the preceding examples must be placed against a background that more fully incorporates the contending forms of figuration that compete for precedence in the postcolonial present. Briefly, the dissident formulation of postcolonial present as a response to the discourse of colonialism has no analogue when compared to the related discourse of imperialism. Within the limits defined by Gilroy, postimperial exists neither as a term to denote a postimperial historical moment nor as a term that designates a subversive unraveling of the imperial condition. Likewise, to harness it to the term present does not produce a point of critique. Instead, because the imperial enterprise of past centuries has not just reproduced itself but has been transformed on a global scale, the only roughly corresponding term we have at our disposal is neo-​​imperial. In fact, to follow Gilroy’s lead and tie the term neo-​​imperial to the term present, the result is an antithesis of the postcolonial present that shares the same space. If this neo-​​imperial present is characterized by its own temporal categories, they include the already introduced states of permanent emergency and abjection, products of current politics and racial thought, yet symptomatic of the imposition of order characteristic of the imperial past. Just as the examples of interventionist humanism or human-​​to-​​ human contact that inform Gilroy’s cosmopolitanism in the postcolonial present may be better defined by exploring their figural relationships, so 9. Keith Cartwright, “‘To Walk with the Storm’: Oya as the Transformative ‘I’ of Zora Neale Hurston’s Afro-​​Atlantic Callings,” American Literature 78, no. 4 (2006): 744–45.

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too may the corresponding examples that shape this contested space. If Gilroy’s vision of a postcolonial present is partially fulfilled by demotic, from below, elements such as “vernacular dissidence” (99) and translocal agency, then the state of permanent emergency is a fulfillment of oppressive, downward from above, elements such as the “info-​​war” (24) and restricted civil rights. Given such considerations, what must be amplified in Gilroy’s project is neo-​​imperialism’s claim to its own emergent time and “novel space” for reinforcing its agenda, one in which its adherents waged the war on terror by suspending the civil rights of perceived enemy combatants and creating yet another figuration of changeless existence in the form of their detention at Guantánamo Bay’s Camp Delta. Though Gilroy holds up Bush as an exemplar of such essentialist thinking, one only has to look back to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to see that such thought is not specific to our particular political or historical moment. These examples of synchronizing sameness in the name of national security are not presented simply to run counter to Gilroy’s examples of synchronizing difference in the pursuit of a translocal, cosmopolitan democracy. Rather, the efficacy of each mode of figuration must be tested within the contested time and space of the postcolonial present. Ultimately, what chance does “cosmopolitan solidarity” have when set against “the war on terror”? Likewise, what is the potency of the individual narratives of solidarity and sacrifice seen in Gaza, when they are set against the narratives of immigrant alienation that Gilroy traces in the figures of Zacarias Moussaoui or even Richard Reid? Further, if between these two groups we place American John Walker Lindh, whose intellectual formation and political awareness Gilroy follows from an interest in militant hip-​​hop, to Malcolm X, and then on to radical Islam, how do we characterize his form of bourgeois alienation? Why did he seek a “fundamentalist utopia” (126) rather than translocal solidarity, or does this remain a matter of perspective? Was he, in fact, seeking a form of the latter when he joined the Afghan army? A brief return to James’s reading of Moby-​​Dick will unravel some of these complexities if Lindh’s narrative—or even those of Corrie or Hurndall—is compared to Ishmael’s oscillation between the extremism of Ahab and the solidarity of the crew. Ishmael, who James describes as a model of middle-​​class discontent, an “intellectual Ahab”10 he places within the captain’s totalitarian complex, is defined early in the novel by his perception 10. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, 41.

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of Queequeg. In the depths of Queequeg’s eyes, in his bearing, Ishmael perceives a solution, an alternative, to the world he lives in, a world that he is in the process of rejecting. The question emerges, therefore, of how to effect the connection—or solidarity—that Ishmael seeks, and it is here that I would like to bring Lindh, and Corrie and Hurndall back into the picture. Following James’s lead, one might argue that Ishmael failed to cross the ideological breach that separated him from Queequeg and the crew, yet this failure may ultimately be characterized as an inability to share in their common humanity. In this respect, how and to what extent may the stories of Lindh, and Corrie and Hurndall be seen as figural fulfillments of Ishmael’s? As postcolonial historical avatars of Melville’s fictional character, how do these actors stand in relationship to the monolithic political formations and perceptions that shaped their individual pursuits of solidarity? Which, through cosmopolitan thought and action, engaged from a perspective of self-​​enforced exile, found a home in a world bounded by the postcolonial present, and which remained isolated, like James’s estimation of Ishmael, “enclosed in the solitude of his social and intellectual speculation”?11

Matthew Suazo

11. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, 41.

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