Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture 9781472449986, 9781315563060

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Time and Memory “After” Colonial Governmentality
Part I: Continuities: Neocolonialism and Governmentality
1 Regarding Self-Governmentality: Transactional Accidents and Indigeneity in Cape York Peninsula, Australia
2 Postcolonial Security, Development, and Biopolitics: Targeting Women’s Lives in Solomon Islands
3 “Backdoor Entry” to Australia: A Genealogy of (Post)colonial Resentment
4 Interculturalism, Settler Colonialism, and the Contest Over “Nativeness”
Part II: Literature and Culture After Colonial Governmentality
5 “The World is Spoilt in the White Man’s Time”: Imagining Postcolonial Temporalities
6 Remembering Histories of Care: Clinic and Archive in Anil’s Ghost
7 Embodied Memories: Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Multiple Genealogies in Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir
8 Post-Presentational:The Literature of Colonial Memory in Australia and Latin America After Neoliberalism
9 Sedimented Colonizations in the Maghrebine Writings of Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, and Paul Bowles
10 Memory is an Archipelago: Glissant, Chamoiseau, and the Literary Expression of Cultural Memory
11 Precarious/Sense: Memory and the Poetics of Spatial Performance
12 “Speaking Darwish” in Neoliberal Palestine
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture

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Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture

Edited by Michael R. Griffiths University of Wollongong, Australia

First published 2016 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2016 Michael R. Griffiths and the contributors Michael R. Griffiths has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Biopolitics and memory in postcolonial literature and culture / edited by Michael R. Griffiths. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-4724-4998-6 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Postcolonialism in literature. 2. Social justice in literature. 3. Psychic trauma in literature. 4. Memory in literature—Congresses. 5. Identity (Psychology) in literature. I. Griffiths, Michael R., editor. PN56.P555B56 2016 809’.933581—dc23 2015022652 ISBN 9781472449986 (hbk)

Contents Notes on Contributors   Acknowledgements   Introduction: Time and Memory “After” Colonial Governmentality   Michael R. Griffiths Part I

vii xi 1

Continuities: Neocolonialism and Governmentality

1

Regarding Self-Governmentality: Transactional Accidents and Indigeneity in Cape York Peninsula, Australia   Timothy Neale

29

2

Postcolonial Security, Development, and Biopolitics: Targeting Women’s Lives in Solomon Islands   Anita Lacey

47

3

“Backdoor Entry” to Australia: A Genealogy of (Post)colonial Resentment   Maria Elena Indelicato

63

4

Interculturalism, Settler Colonialism, and the Contest Over “Nativeness”   Bruno Cornellier

77

Part II

Literature and Culture After Colonial Governmentality

5

“The World is Spoilt in the White Man’s Time”: Imagining Postcolonial Temporalities   Asha Varadharajan and Timothy Wyman-McCarthy

6

Remembering Histories of Care: Clinic and Archive in Anil’s Ghost   121 Sandhya Shetty

7

Embodied Memories: Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Multiple Genealogies in Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir   137 René Dietrich

8

Post-Presentational:The Literature of Colonial Memory in Australia and Latin America After Neoliberalism   Nicholas Birns

9 Sedimented Colonizations in the Maghrebine Writings of Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, and Paul Bowles   Michael K. Walonen

103

153

165

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Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture

10 Memory is an Archipelago: Glissant, Chamoiseau, and the Literary Expression of Cultural Memory   Bonnie Thomas

179

11 Precarious/Sense: Memory and the Poetics of Spatial Performance   193 José Felipe Alvergue 12 “Speaking Darwish” in Neoliberal Palestine   Ala Alazzeh and Rania Jawad

207

Bibliography   219 Index 241

Notes on Contributors Ala Alazzeh is a faculty member in the Sociology and Anthropology Department of Birzeit University, Palestine. He is co-author of a recent monograph on Popular Resistance in Palestine published by the Institute of Palestine Studies. José Felipe Alvergue is Assistant Professor of twentieth and twenty-first-century American Literature and Transnationalism at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. A graduate of both the Buffalo Poetics Program (PhD) and the Cal Arts Writing Program (MFA School of Critical Studies), his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Comparative Literature, the minnesota review, Jacket 2, SubStance, and College Literature. Nicholas Birns is Associate Professor at Eugene Lang College, the New School. He is the author of Understanding Anthony Powell (University of South Carolina Press, 2004) and the co-editor of A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900 (Camden House, 2007), which was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book of the Year for 2008, and of Vargas Llosa and Latin American Politics (Palgrave, 2010). His book Theory After Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory From 1950 to the Early 21st Century appeared from Broadview in 2010. He is currently co-editing the MLA publication Options for Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature. Bruno Cornellier is Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Winnipeg. His book on the politics of indigenous representation in Québec and Canada is currently under contract with Nota Bene. He has also published articles in Settler Colonial Studies, the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, the London Journal of Canadian Studies, and Nouvelles Vues. René Dietrich holds a post-doc research post funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation) as principal investigator and leader of the project “Biopolitics and Native American Life Writing” at the Transnational American Studies Institute, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz. He holds a PhD from the University of Giessen, studied at Freiburg University and Whitman College, WA, and is the author of Revising and Remembering (after) the End: American Post-Apocalyptic Poetry since 1945 from Ginsberg to Forché (Wiss. Verlag Trier 2012), as well as the co-editor of Lost or Found in Translation? Internationale/ Interkulturelle Perspektiven der Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften (WVT 2011) and A History of American Poetry: Contexts-Developments-Readings (WVT, 2015 [forthcoming]). His publications also include published and forthcoming essays on Settler Colonial and Indigenous Studies, Native American writing, contemporary American poetry, drama, and TV series, postmodernist fiction, as well as on the (post-)apocalyptic in

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American culture, literature and film in Anglia, Amerikastudien/American Studies, and several edited volumes. Michael R. Griffiths is Lecturer in the Department of English and Writing at the University of Wollongong. Prior to this he taught for two years at Columbia University as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. He has published articles on topics ranging from indigenous writing to whiteness in the settler colonial public sphere to Daniel Defoe and critical animal studies to Alfred Hitchcock and Gilles Deleuze in such venues as Dicourse, Postcolonial Studies, Postmodern Culture, Humanimalia, Antipodes, and Australian Literary Studies, as well as several edited collections. Maria Elena Indelicato has a BA and MA in Communication Studies, La Sapienza University of Rome and a PhD from the University of Sydney. During her time at La Sapienza, she was involved in several research projects, including the ethnography of a Bororo funeral in 2007. She recently completed her doctorate, as an international candidate, at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney. During her candidacy, she was also involved in two research projects on the history of Italian migration to Australia besides working as Research Associate on the project “More than family history: race, gender and the Aboriginal family in Australian history” with Dr. Victoria Grieves. With regard to the intersection of race and emotions in public discourses, she also published with Dr. Sarah Cefai “No Such Thing as Standard Beauty: Intersectionality and Embodied Feeling on America’s Next Top Model,” Outskirts: Feminisms along the Edge 24 (2010). Rania Jawad is a faculty member in the Department of English at Birzeit University and the author of articles in such forums as the Journal of Dramatic Criticism. Anita Lacey is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of Auckland. She is an activist academic and her research, teaching, and activism intersect. She has published Governing the Poor: Exercises of Poverty Reduction, Practices of Global Aid (with Susal Ilcan). The book explores the governance of global poverty and the new global aid regime. She has also published a number of journal articles and chapters on resistances to neoliberal globalization, nongovernmental organizations, protest and gendered protest spaces, and development and women’s livelihoods. Anita is currently researching urbanization, gendered insecurities, and women’s livelihoods. Timothy Neale is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society. His research bridges the fields of Cultural Studies, Human Geography, Critical Theory and Environmental Humanities, and addresses questions of how knowledge practices—Indigenous, settler and otherwise—are mobilised and transformed in relation to environments in peri-urban, rural and remote Australia. His doctoral project focused on the Wild Rivers Act 2005 (Qld), examining how

Notes on Contributors

ix

questions of belonging, sustainability and development were articulated through the controversial law in far north Queensland. His current position is within the “Scientific diversity, scientific uncertainty and risk mitigation policy and planning” project, funded by the Bushfires & Natural Hazards CRC. Sandhya Shetty is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire where she teaches postcolonial theory and literature. She is completing a book on the medical dimensions of colonial South Asian politics and culture. Her publications have appeared in major venues, including Diacritics, differences, and Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Bonnie Thomas is Associate Professor in French Studies at the University of Western Australia. She has published widely in the field of French Caribbean literature including in such venues as Small Axe, The French Review, and the International Journal of Francophone Studies. She is also the author of Breadfruit or Chestnut?: Gender Construction in the French Caribbean Novel (Lexington, 2006). Asha Varadharajan is Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University, Canada. She is the author of Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak (1995). Her most recent essays have appeared in Modern Language Quarterly, CSAAME, University of Toronto Quarterly, TOPIA, Kunapipi, College Literature, and Dictionary of Literary Biography. Her writing engages the broad sweep of postcolonial, cosmopolitan, global, secular, rights, and development debates. She continues to participate in projects that intervene in the mediated public sphere to promote the humanities and the causes of justice and community. Michael K. Walonen is Assistant Professor of English at Bethune-Cookman University. A specialist in transatlantic modern and contemporary cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and world literature, Walonen is the author of the book Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature and articles that have appeared in the journals Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Studies in Travel Writing, African Literature and Culture, and African Studies Quarterly, as well as the collections Geocritical Explorations and On and Off the Page: Mapping in Text and Culture. Tim Wyman-McCarthy is an MA candidate in Human Rights Studies at Columbia University. Building on his work with Amnesty International, he will research the politics and history of reconciliation in the aftermath of colonial governmentality. He holds a BAH from Queen’s University, Canada, and an MSt. in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, where he focused on South African literature and culture, with a thesis titled “Rhetorics of Suspense: Communication, Development, and Democracy in the Fiction(s) of Zakes Mda.” He has published on Henry James and queer theory in Postgraduate English (2013) and on social media and the posthuman in HARTS & Minds: Postgraduate Journal of the Arts and Humanities (2013).

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Acknowledgements This edited book was conceived initially while I was still a graduate student at Rice University, initiated while I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and completed at the institution where I currently teach, the University of Wollongong in Australia. The unseen mark of various individuals at those respective institutions no doubt left some traces on my thinking as I brought the book together and should be acknowledged. My primary advisory team at Rice University included Cary Wolfe, Betty Joseph, and James Faubion, who were each highly influential in the development of my thinking around biopolitics and its relation to literature and culture in a postcolonial context and beyond. Friends too numerous to name, but notably including Dustin Atlas, Erik Davis, Maria Vidart, and Lina Dib, amongst others, made up a wonderful intellectual community at that time. At Columbia University, the opportunity to work with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Rosalind Morris, and Charles Armstrong on a project unrelated to this book nonetheless shaped my thoughts about the space of the university in globalizing times. Other scholars who formed a deeply supportive intellectual community there include Mick Taussig, Audra Simpson, Stathis Gourgouris, and Bruno Cornellier. My teaching collaborators Hsun-Hui Tsing and Shi-Yan Chao also deserve a vote of thanks. A wonderful intellectual community of young scholars and graduate students in New York City at the time no doubt affected my thinking, these include: Hadeel Assali, Matan Cohen, Deniz Duruiz, Julia Fierman, Peter Lagerquist, Les Sabiston, Teresea Montoya, Stephen “Stron Softi” Jackson, and Jarrett Martineau. Good people like Amelia Biewald, Tim Cinead, Sydnie Keeter, Jeff Toohig, and Susie Silbert made the time in New York memorable in a way that allowed me to work on projects such as this. The book was nearing completion when I arrived at my current post at the University of Wollongong. Nonetheless, the supportive environment fostered by all my colleagues has been indispensable as I finalize the project. While all my colleagues deserve thanks, I would like to thank Amanda Lawson and Sarah Miller for aiding my transition into this position. I thank Guy Davidson also, who as the discipline leader for English and Writing, has patiently helped me into my teaching role, allowing me time to work on such endeavors as this. Similarly, Leigh Dale in particular deserves acknowledgement for her endless wisdom as does Paul Sharrad for his kindness and commitment to scholarship. Thanks are also due to Adrienne Corradini and Thomas Lace for their editorial assistance in formatting and indexing for this book. All the contributors deserve thanks for their excellent respective contributions, but in particular Nicholas Birns, Asha Varadarajan, Tim Neale, Maria Elena Indelicato, Ala Alazzeh, and Rania Jawad have been respected supportive

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Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture

colleagues and friends. And I offer great respect and admiration to the book’s cover artist Mujahed Khallaf. Last of all I thank my parents Gareth and Carolyn and my brothers Aneurin and Paul for their great support and love, which I return. There are no doubt others who deserve thanks for aiding me in the period during which this book came together—my apologies for any such omission.

Introduction: Time and Memory “After” Colonial Governmentality Michael R. Griffiths

The idea that there is an aftermath to colonial governmentality is a claim that initiates this collection as a problematic to be explored and not a conclusion settled in advance. The project of unsettling the assumption of an aftermath, however, must also acknowledge the multiple imaginaries that authorize and rely on this too-frequent assumption. To examine what comes “after” colonial governmentality is not, then, to assume an end to violent or more covertly coercive forms of power in the (post)colonial world. It is rather to address the shifting terrain within which populations are managed through modes of disciplinary, sovereign, and governmental technologies of intervention, along with correlative forms of governing life and death: biopolitics and necropolitics. Furthermore, it is to simultaneously underscore the ongoing forms of governmentality that subsist, persist, and transform today as well as to examine the cultural imaginary of aftermath that conjures itself whether we like it or not. The legacy of colonial violence has been various and multiple. From the Middle Passage with its reduction of human subjects to the status of “death-in-life” to the attempted destruction of indigenous societies across so many territorialities worldwide, the legacy of colonialism’s attempt to transform the mode of life of colonized peoples has been central to the phenomenon called globalization.1 How such histories of violence and dispossession are remembered is therefore hardly without consequence for the present. Even as we accept that such apparently elapsed forms of colonial governmentality are not easily isolated from the present, we can, in short, accept that the terrain of the postcolonial is replete with practices of memory that figure and, indeed, disfigure the mnemonic and, also, political status of these technologies of power, their continuities and legacies. These often well-intentioned, at times even laudable, practices of memory are nonetheless culturally specific and given to particular patterns and histories. Although the play of memory by which the criminality or culpability of states, colonists, settlers, international bodies, and the subtle war machines of para-state power often function in the realm of the ethical,

1  Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” tr. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40, 21.

Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture

2

their primary locus is in the public sphere and, by extension, the political stage.2 The memorialization of colonial violence, conquests, and dispossessions performs remembrance in such a way as to divide ethics and politics. This is so even as this memorialization at turns, both opens and forecloses political reparation through the moralization of politics or, indeed inversely, ethical closure through the play of political reason.3 Attentiveness to imaginations of aftermath might change how we inhabit and imagine the so-called postcolonial in such a way as, perhaps, to animate a more meaningful thought of decolonization or, failing that, at least a more robust ensemble of imaginaries through which globalization and its limits can be assessed and addressed. But it might do to step back from these initial and introductory formulations momentarily in order to think more rigorously the genealogy of the notion of colonial governmentality that lends its name to the title of this book. From there, we will need to engage—as well, indeed, as to interrogate—the question of “after,” which is to say, of memory and its play of recognition and normativization, that we have conjoined to governmentality, Michel Foucault’s central conceptual elaboration. Colonial Governmentality Readers of Michel Foucault will, perhaps, have already been somewhat taken aback by the scope and scale with which colonial governmentality is deployed as a term in what I have written so far. Colonial and postcolonial forms of governmentality, this collection postulates, are annexed to a wide panoply of powers, techniques, and apparatuses for intervention into populations, and regulative forms of intervention into life, death, and the body, as such intervention is constituted at the intersection(s) of race, gender, class, sexuality, and species. Governmentality, for Foucault, was a way to think the constitution of the subject, the body, and life itself, as power over these often novel targets and domains was transformed in early modern Europe. For Foucault, this conceptual paradigm shift represented an attempt to counter contemporary efforts to think power in only repressive terms 2

 While the state is often the locus of resistance and the agent of subjugation, as Foucault explains, many of these technologies emerge in subtler forms, so that there is not so much a theory of state as an understanding of the state annexation and cooptation of a more diffuse panoply of powers over life and the population. This logic is perhaps best developed in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of the war machine. See Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–84. Volume 3, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: Allen Lane, 2002), 201–22. See also Deleuze and Guattari, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 351–423. 3  Barbara Cassin, ““Amnistie et pardon: pour un ligne du partage entre éthique et politique.” in Verité, réconciliation, reparation, ed. Barbara Cassin, Olivier Cayla, and Philippe-Joseph Salazar (Paris: Editions Du Seuil, 2004), 37–53, 52–3.

Introduction

3

and, in a related move, to reify the state as a kind of magical entity which unified modern power. Foucault’s famed critique of economism can be seen in light of his hesitance to limit analysis to critique of the state.4 “Maybe,” Foucault postulated in his 1977–78 lectures at the College de France, “what is really important for our modernity—that is, for our present—is not so much the statization [étatisation] of society, as the ‘governmentalization’ of the state.”5 As such, governmentality emerges in Foucault’s genealogy from a tradition of attempts to think or rethink governing beyond the conceptualization of sovereign power (from Machiavelli to Guillaume La Perrière to Hobbes to, of course, Jeremy Bentham) or indeed, to rethink modes of governing self and others in order to comprehend how power manifests itself through but never wholly reduces to such sovereign power. In light of Foucault’s paradigm shift, it has become crucial to think how the forms of intervention at the level of the population (as opposed to the people or the state) and at that of the body at its anatomo-physical level came to displace the great metaphors of sovereignty: the state as family, the prince as father or pater familias, etcetera. As such, under modernity, societies are governed not so much or at least not only through sovereign power but through specific practices of intervention into bodies and into the population they make up, while simultaneously interventions are made into things, commodities, and the economy that acts as their medium. In this way, governmentality diffusely engages the organization of and intervention into the bodies and things that are the purview of the state but also circulate in what has traditionally been defined as “civil society” from Aristotle to Hegel to, latterly, Habermas.6 As such, “governmentality, which is at once internal and external to the state, … is the tactics of government that makes possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private and so on.”7 Governmentality, then, comes to pervade the various means by which subjects of power are made, intervened into, in short, governed, but not to displace or replace earlier and co-emergent practices of power tout court. Instead, Foucault insists, “in reality one has a triangle, sovereigntydiscipline-government.”8 Governmentality, then, is a way of thinking the modern 4  Economism refers to Foucault scepticism about a tendency not so much in Marx, but in, as he put it, “a certain contemporary conception that passes for the Marxist conception,” to analyze relations of power and knowledge in terms that drew entirely from a positivist account of materialism and a reduction of the role of knowledge to the status of superstructural in the analysis of power. See Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–6, tr. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 13. See also Aijaz Ahmed, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 1–42, 159–242. 5  Foucault 2002, 220. 6  Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, tr. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Boston: MIT Press, 1991). 7  Foucault 2002, 221. 8  Foucault 2002, 219.

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mode of power annexed to but not limited to the state and including the colonial and postcolonial states. The study of governmentality—in the (post)colonial setting and otherwise— has given rise to a whole conceptual tradition with its own lexicon of terms. Since many of these related terms will be employed by the contributors to this book, it would do to parse a number of them. In the mid-1990s, several landmark writings opened the space of thinking governmentality and indeed, its related concepts, biopolitics and biopower, to colonial and postcolonial sites and concerns. These writings refused to see colonial and postcolonial apparatuses of power as appendices to European modernity, defining them, instead, as constitutive of modernity and necessary to any adequate thinking of it. One notable text in this recent tradition is Ann Laura Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire, after which it becomes impossible to continue to pretend that the apparatuses by which race and gender constructed citizenship at the apparent margins of the imperial world were extraneous to the mode by which Imperial centers made themselves and made their modernity.9 Writing in the same year as Stoler, David Scott postulated that it was “obviously not that the modernities of the non-Western world are somehow ‘derived’ from Europe’s and that therefore an understanding of the ‘original,’ as it were, would repay the effort.”10 Instead, like Stoler, Scott insists that bringing to bear governmental analysis on the colonial world does not simply reveal that these processes were engaged beyond Europe’s borders, but also that an understanding of the modernity that has so overwhelmingly been located in Europe cannot function without an understanding of the constitution of imperial power outside these borders. As Scott puts it: “it is that those ‘structures, projects, and desires’ of Europe generated changing ways of impacting the non-Western world, changing ways of imposing and maintaining rule over the colonized, and therefore changing terrains within which to respond.”11 In conceiving the mode of governmentality in its colonial form, Scott emphasizes that it is not enough simply to see how colonialism wrenches from the colonized modes of agency, but it is also necessary to consider the particular forms of intervention into the corporeal, social and economic life traditional to the society being colonized. While it has been easy, Scott asserts, to show that the “exalted liberal principles” of the Enlightenment were unequally distributed between European Imperial centers and their various colonial potentates, what is more difficult to assess and conceive is the mode by which such liberalism insisted on fragmenting and replacing indigenous cultural practices as a way of making the colonized into certain kinds of passive subjects.12

9  Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). 10  David Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” Social Text 43 (Autumn 1995): 191–220, 198. 11  Scott 1995, 198. 12  Scott 1995, 192.

Introduction

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For Scott, then, the study of colonial governmentality attempts to rigorously delineate and define the emergence at a moment in colonialism’s history of a form of power—that is, therefore, a form of power not merely coincident with colonialism—which was concerned above all with disabling old forms of life by systematically breaking down their conditions, and with constructing in their place new conditions so as to enable—indeed, so as to oblige new forms of life to come into being.13

As such, one needs to understand the mode by which the emergent forms of freedom and agency that are associated with the Enlightenment are calculated and evaluated within the twin logics of the market and of demographic vitality. As Scott puts it, In the colonial world the problem of modern power turned on the politicoethical project of producing subjects and governing their conduct. What this required was the concerted attempt to alter the political and social worlds of the colonized, an attempt to transform and redefine the very conditions of the desiring subject. The political problem of modern colonial power was therefore not merely to contain resistance and encourage accommodation but to seek to ensure that both could only be defined in relation to the categories and structures of modern political rationalities.14

What precipitates agency in the liberal terms of colonial modernity even at the level of forms of resistance and of perceived flourishing is, then, determined by what forms of life can be valued and according to what particular rationalities of governmental evaluation. According to this logic, forms of life that flourish in colonial modernity do so because they have been encouraged to sustain themselves in response to particular forms of intervention. Since these important contributions, the uses of such concepts as governmentality and biopolitics in the analysis of the colonial and postcolonial world have proliferated exponentially. Indeed, it is beyond the scope of this introductory essay to survey them all. As we have seen, however, colonial governmentality has most generally been a species of power designed for the purposes of, in Scott’s terms, “disabling old forms of life” in order “to oblige new forms of life to come into being.” Yet, for Foucault, governmentality in the form he would subsequently elaborate—biopolitics—concerns not only this government of the disposition of forms of life but also the modes by which forms of life can be permitted, or indeed, obliged to live according to a prescribed mode or, alternately, compelled to pass away. In his 1975–76 lectures at the College de France, Foucault elaborated the means by which sovereign power, with its capacity to take life and let live, remains in play as an immanent horizon of the newer forms of biopower that function primarily through the imperative to make subjects live and do so in particular 13

 Scott 1995, 193. Original emphasis.  Scott 1995, 214.

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modes, while only under the severest circumstances permitting them to die.15 While Foucault often focused his critiques on Eurocentric topoi, sovereign power’s return would be thus announced in this fleeting moment wherein the question of race would be explicitly engaged by this maître à penser. Racism, Foucault argues, is “compatible with the exercise of biopower,” even as the latter inverts the role of sovereignty in the distribution of life and death.16 This is so, Foucault argues, because it is on the basis of race that the distribution of desirable and undesirable forms of life is determined from the late nineteenth-century biological racisms into the twentieth century; on the basis of race, “the death of the other” comes to imply the health and vitality of the dominant population so desired in biopolitical modes of governmentality.17 Of course, since Foucault wrote, scholars from Stoler onward have augmented and developed a more comprehensive logic of life and death not only around race but also gender, sexuality, ability, and species. Foucault’s turn to race with respect to the genealogy of biopower precipitated the possibility of undertaking the task of thinking biopower in colonial, postcolonial, neocolonial, and late-colonial settings. Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics may be the most explicit and extensive development of this logic of race and sovereignty’s immanent relation to governmentality in biopolitical times. While acknowledging the camp as the paradigm of the modern (Agamben) and while not necessarily diminishing the importance of the immunitary logic of the state (Esposito), Mbembe nonetheless insists on sovereignty’s specific forms as they have traversed colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial landscapes from the Middle Passage and its legacies to the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the ongoing dispossessions each differently embody. For Mbembe, there are multiple sovereignties that operate differently (though comparably) in such colonial and variously paracolonial circumstances. Mbembe’s analysis departs from an attempt to draw out the mode of “death-inlife” to which the chattel slave of the trans-Atlantic trade and the plantation is subject. As Mbembe puts it: The slave is … kept alive but in a state of injury, in a phantom-like world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity. The violent tenor of the slave’s life is manifested through the overseer’s disposition to behave in a cruel and intemperate manner and in the spectacle of pain inflicted on the slave’s body. Violence, here, becomes an element in manners like whipping or taking of the slave’s life itself: an act of caprice and pure destruction aimed at instilling terror. Slave life, in many ways, is a form of death-in-life.18

For Mbembe, this form of death-in-life also points to the persistence of extreme forms of sovereign power in the constitution of colonial modernity from the Black 15

 Foucault 2003, 239–64.  Foucault 2003, 255. 17  Foucault 2003, 255. 18  Mbembe 2003, 21. 16

Introduction

7

Atlantic to Apartheid-era Bantustan. Mbembe, developing Foucault’s own brief remarks on race, shows that sovereign power does not vanish with the arrival of newer, putatively softer and more liberal modes of biopower but rather nestles within this biopolitical ordering of the contemporary. This is particularly the case in the (post)colonial dispensation. And this is variously the case from the “plantation system” to “the colony and under the apartheid regime” as well as in the situation of “late colonial occupation” most exemplified by the Occupied Palestinian Territories, each with their own technologies of organizing life, death, and, indeed, death-in-life through suppression, cruelty, and intervention in the body and territory to be expropriated.19 Similar developments in the thought of (post)colonial biopolitics and, arguably, settler colonial biopolitics have deepened the analysis of the role of race in the thought of colonization.20 It has become clear that to understand colonial power and the forms of death-in-life it bequeaths, it is not possible to think of the theory of the state or of economy without an analysis of the distribution of life and death. Yet, more recently, scholars have also moved to think the increasingly globalizing neoliberal modes by which life and its relation to death are purchased, sold, and otherwise distributed through economic means. One could cite, for instance, Lauren Berlant’s work on “slow death,” wherein “the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population … is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence”—a condition that Berlant opposes to an emphasis on crisis and the emergency.21 As Édouard Glissant puts it, echoing this sense of slow death, not all exercises of colonial governmentality or sovereign power result in “great catastrophes that are like monumental phenomena in the history of the world,” rather, one often finds, instead, “the shadowy accretions of misfortune, the unseen erosion of a cornered people, the unnoticed disappearance, the slow loss of identity, the suffering without consequence.”22 For many indigenous persons, as well, in a different way, for displaced and diasporic subjects, the state of exception often does distribute suffering, precarity, and death-in-life, but for many more, such suffering cannot be described through the temporality of the crisis so much as through the very condition of the everyday and the ordinary. As Elizabeth Povinelli puts it so well:

19

 Mbembe 2003, 22, 25.  Along with such figures already cited as Stoler and Mbembe, see more recent work in settler colonial studies on the global geopolitical centrality of biopolitical modes of dispossession and colonization, for instance: Scott L. Morgensen, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now,” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 52–76; Mark Rifkin, “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the ‘Peculiar’ Status of Native Peoples,” Critical Inquiry 73 (Fall 2009): 88–124. 21  Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death: Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Summer 2007): 754–80, 754. 22  Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, tr. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 169. 20

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What Foucault did not discuss was that neoliberalism transformed an older liberal governance of life and death. Neoliberalism has not merely mimicked the move from faire mourir ou laisser vivre to “faire” vivre et laisser “mourir.” It has resuscitated faire mourir into its typology of faire vivre and laisser mourir, even as the more dominant powers of making live and letting die have changed the techniques of state killing. Any form of life that could not produce values according to a market logic would not merely be allowed to die, but, in situations in which the security of the market (and since the market was now the raison d’etre of the state, the state) seemed at stake, ferreted out, and strangled.23

From remote indigenous communities in Australia to maquiladoras in postNAFTA Mexico (to name only two distinct exempla), many peoples’ conditions of suffering, even death-in-life, are an experience of the everyday. This does not, of course, mean that people’s suffering is not governed by states of exception in many sites of legal abandonment, but what is presented as a crisis is often only the quotidian condition by which neoliberal logics of market value and their annexation in modes of governing determine who is deserving of a flourishing life. As such, to the extent that this volume invests in thinking the various temporalities of sovereign power, discipline, and governmentality in the (post) colonial landscape, it will be necessary to consistently remind ourselves that there is not a linear genealogy maneuvering us from an early modern European terrain of sovereignty to a liberal, if sometimes slightly objectionable, mode of multicultural dwelling alongside that can simply be augmented and perfected. Rather, sovereign power and discipline, however much “older” they may be in Foucault’s own genealogy, are distributed within a nexus of life, death, value, and meaning that can only be made sense of as a nonlinear trajectory. And this is to say nothing (yet) about the mode of memorialization that relegates certain forms of colonial governmentality, necropower, and biopower to the settled past, though much remains to be examined in this light “after” colonial governmentality. Athena Athanasiou, in a recent conversation with Judith Butler, provides a useful “caveat regarding the ways neoliberal governmentality invests in the matter of the human”—one that it is worth underscoring here. “Contemporary forms of liberal governance,” she notes, “have not been merely regressing to earlier, negative, nonhumanistic, and injurious forces. Nor should we invoke the repressive hypothesis in order to challenge late liberalism and its excesses.”24 Athanasiou usefully points to the kind of “non-linear critiques of contemporary formations of power and modes of constitution of subjectivities” that I have just advocated here, in relation to the distribution of life and death “after” colonial governmentality, when liberalism, progress, and the putative end of history so obscure the existence of

 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 22. 24  Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 29–30. 23

Introduction

9

ongoing distributions of suffering.25 Such a non-linear analysis, underscoring not so much the “return” as the transformation of sovereign power according to new neoliberal biopolitical emphases, should permit scholarship “to account for and critically engage the integral coimplication and coevalness of ‘repressive’ and ‘productive’ formations of governing the self and others.”26 A key point here is that, as much as Foucault challenged the repressive hypothesis and dismantled the strong theory of the state that obscured so much, nonetheless, we must not throw out the baby of the state with the bathwater of statist liberal critique, nor forget the modes of repression that subsist even after the turn to more insidious practices of governmental normativization and soft power. As Scott had it, colonial governmentality does not merely “oblige” forms of life tolerable to the imperial orders to come into being, it also obliges the obliteration of older forms. Governmentality and Memory on Global Terrain One leitmotif of the process of memory “after” colonial governmentality, along with its exigencies and its attendant problems, is the process of truth and reconciliation most famously arising in South Africa and subsequently proliferating across the globe. As Jacques Derrida has argued, the tendency in the practices of memory best exemplified in the TRC manifests a Christian-centered Eurocentrism that he names “globalatinization,” even, ironically, as such practices seek to repair the imposition of European imperialisms on non-Western societies.27 Derrida deploys the logic of globalatinization to designate the mode by which the proliferation of Latinate linguistic, ethical, and political forms also carries with it a religious logic, one that is “essentially Christian, to be sure.”28 In doing so, it infects and limits the political and juridical institutions that derive their authority from Abrahamic and, particularly, Christian, transcendentalism; the effect of these practices is to displace the possible thought of justice and to institute in its place such Christianinfluenced practices as confession and forgiveness.29 This is problematic not only because of the cultural specificity and hence epistemic violence manifest in and through such globalatinization, but also because the force of law’s filtration through the Christian emphasis on forgiveness can often be observed to displace more robust applications of justice and, potentially, decolonization. It is not only the Abrahamic and, particularly, Christian cultural form of the pardon that conditions practices of saying and recognizing, but also its secularization in the liberal public

25

 Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 30.  Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 30. 27  On this concept in Derrida, see for instance his Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002), 67 and passim. 28  Derrida 2002, 67. 29  See for instance Derrida’s “On Forgiveness,” in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, ed. and tr. Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney (London: Routledge, 2001). 26

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sphere as a site for which testimony and its acknowledgment comes to function as a juridical process. As Joseph Slaughter has argued, Human rights law and discourse valorize the public sphere as a primary location of the enjoyment and protection of an individual’s human rights; however, historical assumptions about the civic virtue and emancipatory character of publicness also make it a primary site of human rights violation—a place where citizens are exposed to each other and to the repressive potential of the state. Thus, the public sphere is also a place of discrimination, disadvantage.30

As Butler explores in conversation with Athanasiou, the spacing between normativization and recognition of violation and state crime produces a play of memory that often forecloses as much as it performatively produces. As Butler puts it, concretizing some of what is implicit in Slaughter’s statement, Sometimes … violation is recognized but through terms that introduce new problems. This is one of the debates that is central to the new tribunals, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, and to other legal processes that seek to provide an alternative to adversarial lawsuits. On the one hand, recognition is conferred on a violation, but only insofar as the narrative presentation conforms to certain standardized accounts of victimization. Or, as is widely reported, the legal process is experienced as a further violation. And even further, the one who narrates the suffering or violation that has been undergone implicitly agrees to give up the idea of seeking legal redress for the crime. So we might say that recognition sometimes comes at a cost, and sometimes at too high a cost. On the other hand, if there were no venues for recognition at all, that would be unacceptable in a different way.31

As Butler and Athanasiou discuss, this process disavows in advance claims to prosecution and material recompense and, indeed, normativizes related liberal modes of toleration and multiculturalism that demand a standard account of plurality and pluralism in the political present. Similarly, agency is supplanted by the mere status of having suffered as victims, or, indeed, juridically guaranteed only on the basis of an adoption of victimhood. The category of the victim, then, can be seen as a necessary but insufficient juridical concept “after” colonial governmentality. Such normativization of the performativity of concepts at the intersection of the ethical and political can be seen as, itself, a mode of foreclosure not only of claims to justice arising from past dispossession, but also of the promises of future forms of productive political organization, ethical cohabitation, and dissensual belonging. In this terrain, the parajuridical transforms recognition from a political exigency and an ethical promise to a politico-ethical staging of multicultural normativity.  Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 148. 31  Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 90–91. 30

Introduction

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In the Australian example of the politics of recognition and reconciliation around indigenous peoples—the case with which I am personally most familiar— one can demonstrate many of the fraying and fragmented modes by which justice is constrained within the play of memory that arises at the level of states to recognize (as well as disavow), and address (as well as displace), the practices of colonial governmentality that have taken place in the past and continue in shifting forms into the present. Along with wide-ranging thought surrounding land dispossession and the attendant mode of recognition that pervades the contemporary culture of land rights (formally known as “Native Title” in the legal language of the Australian state), the legacy of child removal—along with its attendant effects into the present and the specter of genocide which it represents for the history of Australia—has been a central point of contention in the practices of reconciliation. The apology to the Stolen Generations, coming as it did almost 10 years after the first government report on the Stolen Generations, represents a central political event in these practices of memory.32 Yet, as Cape York Indigenous leader Noel Pearson observed at the time, there are pressing material questions that have been excluded from the purview of the implementation of reparation for the wrongs done to the Stolen Generations survivors.33 As Pearson puts it, The majority of white Australians will be able to move on (particularly with the warm inner glow that will come with having said sorry), but I doubt that indigenous Australians will. Those people stolen from their families who feel entitled to compensation will never be able to move on. Indeed too many of them will be condemned to harbour a sense of injustice for the rest of their lives. Far from moving on, these people—whose lives have been much consumed by this issue—will die with a sense of unresolved justice.34

Pearson’s criticism emphasizes the charge that has come from both the Australian right and left that the official apology risks tokenism unless complemented by measures of material redress. Where critics differ in their characterization of this claim lies largely in the form that it is understood such material redress should take. Some, particularly on the right but also across the moderate political spectrum, espouse the view that state intervention into contemporary indigenous people’s lives is warranted if it provides meaningful vital outcomes (such as addressing health and welfare disparities); this was the thinking behind the Northern Territory  Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Canberra: Government Printer, 1997). 33  Throughout this book, I varyingly capitalize the term “indigenous,” or leave it lower case. Where indigenous is an adjective, I leave the term uncapitalised. When it refers to a particular group, individual (as in this case) or to a concept such as sovereignty which implies specificity, I capitalize the term. Individual authors have been given the freedom in this volume to decide whether to capitalize the term for themselves. 34  Noel Pearson, “When Words Aren’t Enough,” The Australian, February 12, 2008. 32

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Emergence Response Act (known as “the Intervention”), which has had several subsequent incarnations. It is a telling feature of the complexity of the play between the culture of memory instantiated in reconciliation (with its logic of forgiveness) and ongoing neoliberal governmentalities of dispossession that Pearson—this very incisive critic of reconciliation’s limits and contradictions—himself embraced the Australian government’s ideology of what former Prime Minister John Howard first termed “material reconciliation” and, as such, has been an advocate of the Intervention. Consistent efforts enacted within the apparatus of neoliberalism’s own unique regime of governmentality have led to this logic of material redress and recompense as a parajuridical process of paternal care for the lives of indigenous subjects to the exclusion of either self-determination and sovereignty on the one hand or just acts of redress at the level of the state on the other. This process is also imbricated in the neoliberal distribution of lives in a field of market value. In recent Native Title claims, for instance, powerful international business interests have frequently used their instrumental influence to displace indigenous claims to self-determination through the promise of “economic development.” One glaring case in point is that of Fortescue Metals Group in northwest Australia. FMG fosters initiatives with noble-sounding names like “Generation One” and noble-sounding projects such as the provision of development and employment to indigenous communities. Yet FMG, most glaringly in the case of Yindjibarndi land in the Pilbara region of western Australia, attempted to use this language of economic development through non-government-sector employment and development initiatives as a means to avoid primary monetary compensation for mining on land held by the Yindjibarndi under Native Title. Similarly, Woodside Petroleum is, as I write, still making its case for a natural gas hub in the Kimberley region on precisely the same basis and this has filtered into the discourse of politicians whose entire framework falls within such parameters of neoliberal governmentality: development and employment have become the substitutes for rights and aspirations beyond market evaluation.35 Australia is not the only site or space where the neoliberal practice of governmentality as “economic development” has been deployed in the public sphere as a justification for constraining the rights of indigenous subjects. Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Canadian government through its C45 bill has since 2012 engaged in reforms that push back against watershed aspects of previous indigenous-oriented legislation. By streamlining previous consultative procedures requiring referenda at the level of First Nations bands prior to industrial and commercial development on indigenous lands, the Harper government, through its C45 legislation aims to assert the political priority of the neoliberal  “Approval for $40bn gas giant at James Price Point ‘unlawful,’” The Australian, August 20, 2013. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/approval-for-40bn-gasgiant-at-james-price-point-unlawful/story-fn59niix-1226700212878 [accessed October 3, 2014]. 35

Introduction

13

logic of economic development over the rights of indigenous peoples to determine the nature of their aspirations on their own land. In both these examples from Australia and Canada, it is the promise of development and employment that is deployed not only as a neoliberal smokescreen for resource extraction, but also as a mode of what Jacques Rancière calls the “policing” of the visible and sayable around the status of political selfdetermination.36 For Rancière, what can be expressed within a particular regime of perception and representation is not yet political; rather, it is merely the regulation, or “policing” of what can be perceived in the public sphere. Within the contemporary neoliberal logic of settler colonial governmentality, as it thrives by enlisting and employing—while never purely and simply inhabiting—the coercive powers and public discourses of the state, what can be understood as a right to subjective flourishing is constrained by the language of economic empowerment. Being a flourishing subject, here, means being a functioning, able-bodied, citizensubject in active economic activity; a discourse with little regard for the aspirations of an economy of potentially being otherwise than homo oeconomicus on a European model. Modes of life not thinkable in neoliberal economic terms are policed in this new terrain. Which is to say they are understood as neither livable nor worth providing for within late-liberal “economies of abandonment.”37 It is this market calculation of worth that has led to the many ways in which typologies of make live and let die retain and replenish new mechanisms for putting to death Indigenous lives and ways of living. The logic of colonial governmentality and in particular biopolitics is, as Giorgio Agamben has shown, very often (though not always, as we have seen) produced through the logic of the exception. Perhaps the most glaring instance whereby a particular form of neocolonial power functions through legal exceptionalism is the case of the occupation and dispossession of the Palestinian people. Palestinians are dispossessed through the continued occupation of their lands as well as according to a global order of legal exceptionalism generated through post-war internationalism as it attends upon the rights of refugees. At the same time, those diasporic Palestinians who might wish to claim Al-Awda (the right of return) face the precarious and exceptional status of being managed through international institutions otherwise than are other refugees. Palestinian people who were forcibly removed or fled from their homes in 1948 are not managed, for instance, by the United Nations through the International Refugee Convention but rather through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Middle East (UNRWA). While diasporic Palestinian refugees are not ignored by the United Nations, they are managed under a regime of difference that occludes the status of their claims for just repatriation, and focuses on the amelioration of adverse conditions and material exigencies rather than taking seriously the claim  Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, tr. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 21–42. 37  Povinelli 2011. 36

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to Al-Awda as a mode comparable to the rights of resettlement or repatriation made possible for refugees under the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), or its 1947 predecessor the International Refugee Commission. This legal division posits the status of Palestinians as objects of care, but possessing differing rights from other living human subjects who might claim the rights emerging from refugee status under the present geopolitical logic of international human rights. It is useful then to deploy a concept of Butler and Athenasiou’s, which they term “humanitarian governmentality.” Humanitarian governmentality parses the mode by which humanitarian practices produce particular forms of power, subjecthood, and dispossession, rather than, as is often assumed, inflect transcendental conditions of humanity whose universal claims lead directly to equally accessible systems of rights.38 Before limning further examples, it would do to turn to a key concern of this book: how time and governmentality are governed through public practices of memory. I will do so through a series of theoretical reflections on the relation between individual and collective memory and the place of affect, particularly in the latter, before returning to examine the Australian case as an example of the operation of such a play of memory in practice. These theoretical preliminaries will operate to unveil how such practices of public memory often constrain the possibility of justice and normativize processes of state recognition as well as also acting to restrict the capacity to conceive the continuance of projects of governmentality in the (post)colonial world. Ethics, Politics, Memory Much of the discussion of the politics of memory in spaces of state crime turns on the various domains of memory and of politics that are divided from one another— necessarily, or de facto. Barbara Cassin, drawing lessons from the TRC in South Africa asserts that such truth commissions operate by producing a fundamental division (partage) between the ethical and the political.39 Cassin’s revelation of the radical dividing line (ligne de partage) between ethics and politics can have both positive and negative consequences. This can lead to the form of tautological assent of the law as to absolute locus and resolution of crime—with, as Ricoeur sees it, the effacement of the rights of the victim. But it can also, and we must be wary, lead to a justification of this process: the law speaks only of law, in the space of politics and of the community, and is, in its divergence from the ethics of individual experiences of “wrong,” not responsible to the individual. As Ricoeur further notes, this substitution of law for violence both reveals and conceals the

38

 Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 113.  Cassin 2004, 37–53.

39

Introduction

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constitutive violence of the state per se.40 This is what Ricoeur calls the blind spot of the legal system itself.41 Related to this division between ethics and politics (though also functioning in a zone of distinction) is the division between individual and collective memory. Ricoeur has developed the case for taking collective memory seriously in phenomenological terms, beyond its status as metaphor—a case that is a precondition for any meaningful practice of memory after colonial governmentality (whether positive or negative, promoting healing or, indeed, risking absolution where it is not warranted).42 From his earlier work in Time and Narrative, Ricoeur had developed the notion of time as phenomenologically constitutive of being in the world, drawing this out through analyses of the thought of subjectivity and its relation to memory (and anticipation) from Augustine to Husserl.43 In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur draws from the work of Maurice Halbwachs to delineate the degree to which this constitutive subjective function of time is also affected by the social and collective experience of being with others. Ricoeur summarizes Halbwachs most succinctly: “to remember, we need others.”44 Halbwach’s notion, as examined by Ricoeur, begins with the proposition that memory is formed constitutively by the process of narrating or telling the fragmentary nodes of recollection that one encounters as an inchoate phenomenological singularity. Memory, then, while built from the experiences of the individual does not make sense until it is narrated to others and as such, memory is a social process. Recollection is a poor experience, one might say, without the recognition of others. Ricoeur is at pains to caution in his reading of Halbwachs, that this primacy of the social in the process of memory cannot evacuate the individual from this process (here, indeed, we will find once again the shadow of the path that leads from ethics to politics, from individual to social responsibility). Nonetheless, conjoining Halbwachs and Husserl, Ricoeur finally concludes by arguing for a version of “the extension of phenomenology to the social sphere,” without which history would, he argues, be rendered impossible.45 As he puts it,

40

 Paul Ricoeur, “Avant la justice non violente, la justice violente.” in Cassin et al. 2004, 162. Ricoeur says as much without mentioning Walter Benjamin’s thought of law preserving violence, though this concept is, no doubt, not too distant from his thinking. See Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings: Volume 1. 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 236–53. 41  Ricoeur in Cassin et al. 2004, 162. 42  Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, tr. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 93–132. 43  See for instance Ricoeur, Time and Narrative: Volume 1, tr. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 44  Ricoeur 2004, 120. 45  Ricoeur 2004, 130.

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The shared experience of the world rests upon a community of time as well as of space. The originality of this phenomenology of shared memory resides principally in the arrangement of personalization, and inversely of anonymity, between the poles of an authentic “us” and that of “one” of “them.” The worlds of predecessors and successors extend in the two directions of the past and the future, of memory and expectation, those remarkable features of living together, first deciphered in the phenomenon of contemporaneousness.46

Ricoeur then embraces the concept of collective memory, without which history and indeed, the practices of public memory I have heretofore discussed, would take on a different, less potent meaning. Yet this embrace also offers a caveat: that there exist multiple intersecting modes of personalization by which one differentiates whose memories belong to whom and how. In postcolonial space, this caveat is very significant: the memory of Apartheid, for instance, might function very differently for members of the oppressed black majority than it does for the perpetrators offered amnesty in the process, to say nothing of the division of each into multiple collectivities: amaXhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Afrikaaner, English, to name a few. Yet truth commissions are almost always practices of imagining community at the national level: one could indeed say, that at the level of a production of collective memory, the particular nationalist mode of many truth commissions functions temporally much as Benedict Anderson’s famed exemplum of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier does spatially for the postcolonial nation state.47 However, let us remain with this question of the divisions between individual and collective memory. If I criticize the nationalism of many processes of truth and reconciliation it is not to say that such practices of public memory could not have been otherwise: truth and reconciliation are not analytically bound to nationalism, but nationalism has, it seems, consistently been deployed as necessarily connected to these otherwise autonomous concepts. Whether we accept or resist the consequences of the line of division between ethics and politics, or the difficult ethical process of opening individual memory to testimony, shadowed as it is by the legal blind spot it tautologically underscores (as Ricoeur reminds us), nonetheless, as Derrida might further remind us, the globalatinized ubiquity of the discourse of reconciliation may indeed make such a discourse insurmountable. It is for this reason that, accepting the forms of public memory after colonial governmentality and its capture by state violence, we might consider such dominant forms of memorialization as reconciliation through the terms of the Pharmakon. The pharmakon describes the tension between living memory and its written supplement: history. Derrida draws out of Plato’s Phaedrus with its discussion of the myth of the Egyptian invention of writing, transferred as it is from the Gods (and the scribal deity Thoth in particular) to man, the strange logic of 46

 Ricoeur 2004, 130.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 10. 47

Introduction

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pharmakon. The pharmakon describes the Platonic conception of a potion or drug that is undecidable in its capacity to either cure or harm, act as poison or remedy. As Derrida defines it: “Pharmacia (Pharmakeia) is … a common noun [in Greek] signifying the administration of the pharmakon, the drug: the medicine and/or poison.”48 Derrida focuses on the Platonic attempt to derogate the pharmacological, so to speak, dimension of written script as opposed to the full plenitude of thought located in dialectics, memory, and ultimately, spoken discourse. For Ricoeur, similarly, the salient aspect of the pharmakon as it brings Egyptian myth into dialogue with Platonic thought, is the writing of history as a process of memory.49 Ricoeur focuses particularly on this doubled dimension of history: as the writing of the narrative of a collective that acts not so much as an aid to remembering as to reminding; history records, it does not remember, it allows the archivist to remind the reader of history of important, even evil, events and as such it functions according to the dictates of the prosthetic that is writing. This will lead Ricoeur to a crucial and direct question: “must we not ask whether the writing of history … is memory or poison?”50 I would like to extend this question. Should we not also ask whether the public events authorizing certain memorializations and commemorations have a similarly double-edged character? If history is both remedy and poison, must we not say the same transpires (perhaps even more so) in the case of those specific practices of memory that authorize official state and international discourses on what cannot be forgotten and how these unforgettable events must be remembered? Can reconciliation, for instance, wound as well as heal? Can it heal as well as wound? This simple analytic observation might do a great deal to unveil the kind of ambivalence previously exemplified in my discussion of the processes of memory around stolen indigenous children in Australia and their capacity to function as a political displacement of related processes of reparation and recompense. No critic that I know of who has dared to critique the salience of reconciliation processes in their various forms has done so without also noting the therapeutic, healing effects of the discourse, which apologizes even as it displaces, grants amnesty even as it requests forgiveness, speaks in the name of a nation whose histories are multiple. Who, indeed, would wish to be seen as a critic of such great and admirable figures as Nelson Mandela or Desmond Tutu? Yet perhaps the reason for this ambivalence in the critique of the culture of reconciliation that has come to dominate global acts of memory after colonialism’s putative end is not explicable entirely or only by the coincidence of the desire for greater justice along with the acknowledgment of the admirable individuals, the Mandelas of the world, who arguably surrendered much for the purpose of national healing after colonial governmentality. Perhaps rather, the

 Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–171, 70. 49  Ricoeur 2004, 141–5. 50  Ricoeur 2004, 141. 48

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logic of reconciliation itself is fundamentally a pharmakon: able to heal even as that which it elides might operate to produce a certain further dehiscence. If this is the case, we must ask, at least provisionally, what mode of memory might be most appropriate in public acts of commemoration after colonial governmentality. What Ricoeur identifies as the most harmful poison of memory arising in the writing of history (and we might add, in the authorizing acts of commemoration that animate it in the public sphere) is that of a certain rote memorization: memory without affective internalization of the experience remembered. Ricoeur designates this “memory by default” with the term “memorization.”51 What can act as a remedy in the pharmakon of memory is internal, affective memory and this is opposed to memorization qua calculation. At the level of individual memory, Derrida has similarly noted such a distinction, for which he employs the Hegelian distinction between Gedächtnis, or memorization (to use Ricoeur’s terms), and memory as the internalization of the affective condition of the initial, even traumatic, imprint, Erinnerung.52 This process, animated in the work of mourning, whereby recollection/memorization (Gedächtnis, thinking memory) becomes Erinnerung (interiorizing memory) is non-dialectical. The affective experience of mournful recollection, Derrida insists, is neither extricable from the process of memorization nor is it entirely internal to it. Hence, no doubt, the aspect of the pharmakon that attends on memory: at once both wounding and potentially healing. As such, if we are to think public memory as not only a political but also an ethical and a therapeutic process, then we will need to navigate the two key diads heretofore discussed: on the one hand, individual memory and collective memory and, on the other, memorization as either Gedächtnis (thinking memory) or Erinnerung (interiorizing memory). Between these two diads, we might then assert that the beginning of ethics in public displays of memorialization is predicated on (though not guaranteed by) the alignment of Erinnerung with collective memory. Yet, what must also be held in suspension is any elision of individual Erinnerung by a collective Erinnerung. There must remain a right on the part of the survivors of colonial violence to maintain the dignified autonomy of their individual memory of trauma and to do so in a mode distinct from the public institutions of collective memory and mourning. Let us, then, investigate the concrete displacements of justice through public acts of memory by recourse to a particular example, acknowledging, as we do so, the degree to which such acts necessarily stage both poison and remedy, dehiscence as retraumatization and as work of mourning.

51

 Ricoeur 2004, 142.  Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, tr. Avital Ronnell and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 106–7 and passim. 52

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The Materiality of Reconciliation To return to my (perhaps overly brief) Australian case study—itself an instance of “material reconciliation,” as a governmental discursive instantiation of humanitarian governmentality. In this instance we might highlight not only the example of the shift in the implementation of Native Title, from rights to land to its displacement into access to (in the neoliberal terms of the discourse) “economic opportunity.” One might also examine the gap between avenues for compensation of Stolen Generations survivors and the implicit parajuridical elision of this possibility given in the mode by which apology and reconciliation has been implemented by the Australian state. Such a case study, which is fleshed out in many related contexts in some of the essays collected here, tells a stark narrative of the way “after” colonial governmentality, modes of remembrance not only eschew material forms of reparation; they also displace and replace such possible material reparation and rights with modes of postcolonial governmentality that increasingly define what it means to be compensated in terms of market values—a further neoliberally inflected form of ongoing, if distinctly novel governmentality. Here, the play of memory is both poison and remedy. In the case of compensation for survivors of the Stolen Generations, while some expert commentators have noted that the costs of protracted legal battles far outweigh the Bringing Them Home Report’s recommendation of a commission on compensation for those who suffered removal, the Australian government has consistently avoided the issue of such a commission.53 Three major civil suits have been fought to date, with only the most recent meeting with success. Prior to the publication of the findings of the 1995 Inquiry, a case was fought by Alec Kruger, who was removed at the age of two from the central Australian Arrernte people. Kruger’s case rested on questioning the 1918 Northern Territory Aborigines Act in relation to the Australian Constitution; it argued that, in authorizing the removal of indigenous children from their families, the Act breached constitutional guarantees of freedom of movement and association, as well as freedoms of religion, and of political speech.54 The plaintiff’s counsel also made a series of arguments about the constitutional protection from attempts at genocide. Kruger’s case was unsuccessful. It is not my aim to provide detailed legal commentary and I will therefore not discuss every minute aspect of this case or the other pertinent cases. Nonetheless, it is necessary to broadly lay out the juridical process with its regulation, formalization, and foreclosure of indigenous claims to justice in the wake of what has been dubbed the legacy of child removal. Much of the dismissal of Kruger’s claim against the Commonwealth dealt with technicalities surrounding the application of 53

 As Lawyer Claire O’Connor stated after the Treverrow case, “the case shows that a government compensation scheme would be more affordable and efficient than lengthy legal fights.” “More Compo in Stolen Generations Case,” ABC News, February 1, 2008. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/01/2152429.htm [accessed October 3, 2014]. 54  Kruger & Ors v Commonwealth of Australia M21/1995 [1995] HCA Trans 204.

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Commonwealth law, and the status of the Constitution in the Northern Territory at the time of Kruger’s removal. The case did make the astounding revelation that the Australian Constitution provides no protection against genocide. Constitutional basis for finding that Kruger’s removal could be understood in genocidal terms was therefore deemed extra-legal. Justice Brennan asserted that in order for the Genocide Convention to be relevant, genocidal intention would need to be shown within the ambit of the 1918 Act; suffice to say, he determined that this was not the case. This was seen to be so, based—in part at least—on the technicality that “[t]he Genocide Convention post-dates the Ordinance and has never been part of Australian law.”55 As such, Brennan’s decision implicitly contends that, as far as the law is concerned, it is not possible to conceive events prior to 1948 in terms of genocide. Brennan also denied that other freedoms had been breached. Legal exceptionalisms here abound. Genocide, in being acknowledged as a particular and contingent legal construct (which it no doubt is) is ironically barred off from application to events prior to the founding legal instantiation of the concept itself (which is, at best, arguable). The precedent established by Kruger v Commonwealth goes to the heart of the questions of intention and the juridical qualifications attendant on cultural remembrance that are at issue in the present chapter. Several cases that have followed have attempted to clarify the legal implications of the Kruger case. As has been seen, questions of intention have been central. The other category at issue has been the framing notion of “values and attitudes” of the wider community at the time of removal. Simply put, the notion of the “values and attitudes of the time” was deployed by Brennan to insist that the legal implications of those engaged in child removal be assessed through the cultural prism of the white Australia of assimilation. As Brennan put it, “Whether or not a detention falls within an exception to the rule that the power to order involuntary detention is an incident of judicial power depends on the purpose of the legislation judged by the values and standards of the time.”56 Outside the legal technical apparatus that frames this judgment, one may assess the discursive implication of this legal contention. Since Brennan found that the UN Genocide Convention did not apply to Alec Kruger’s case, theoretically at least, the case may well have been dismissed even if the values and attitudes surrounding Kruger’s removal could be shown to indeed be rooted in genocidal intent. The problem is that the intention to cause the breakdown of Aboriginals both as a people and as a society was often continuous with what, according to settler norms, constituted the “values and attitudes of the time.” Such colonial governmentality, with its thanatopolitical dimension was immanent to, indeed, constitutive of, the very values of the settler colony in its self-understanding. Defenders of the assimilationists insist that indigenous children were removed on bases of welfare. Nonetheless, ostensibly benevolent  Kruger & Ors v Commonwealth of Australia, Case Summary [1997], Australian Indigenous Law Reporter 2, no. 3 (1997). 56  Kruger & Ors v Commonwealth of Australia, Case Summary [1997]. 55

Introduction

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desires to educate, uplift, and “civilize” were often framed through the concept of race under the assumption that removal and upbringing in “white” European circumstances was itself a matter of welfare. The very discourse of the welfare of children, then, cannot be extricated from colonizing conceptions of the primacy of European cultural (particularly linguistic, social, and religious/economic) norms. One might invoke, here, Ricoeur’s contention, made in relation to Apartheidera South Africa, that the discourses of reconciliation often take the law as both the tautological locus of wrong and the means of recompense—forgetting in the process the implacable wrong falling upon the victim him- or herself. Ricoeur speaks of this tautology as a “scandal . . . over which reason stumbles,” such that: these are the arguments supposed to justify the pain in a system of thought which takes as its central reference point the law (la loi) and does not consider the wrong done to the victim that as an infraction of the rules and the offense of the accused as offense to the law.”57

Many of the framing contentions of the period were manifestly interested in the crypto-thanatopolitical disappearance of Aboriginal people according to a sovereign decision on the Australian population. This tautology of law as locus of justice is, indeed, scandalous. Ten years after Kruger’s case, when the Australian government offered its apology, it was again on the basis of “good intentions” understood in terms of such values and attitudes, the then-opposition leader Brendan Nelson attempted to exonerate the thanatopolitical actions of past Australian governments. Through this particular juridical logic of intentionality, claims to (post)colonial justice are consistently constrained by the spacing of cultural values and attitudes, within the sphere of the juridical. To intend well for children, however much we might insist it is not easily extracted from discourses of colonial governmentality shading into genocide, nonetheless functions to provide a bulwark against such claims in the (post)colonial public sphere. Such ideas of intention draw a path to exoneration at worst and globalatinizing apology without reparation at best. In this way, governmentality operates at two echelons: first through the practice of memory and legal justification, and second through the late-liberal recoding of the meaning of reparation (to say nothing of decolonization). I leave open the question of whether such a legalization of memory permits (or whether it, and I think this more likely, problematizes) the possibility of genuine mourning, which we have attempted to theorize as an Erinnerung of the collective: the affective, interiorizing memory of trauma experienced at the level of a society. Indeed, this focus on the biopolitical aftermath of child removal cannot be separately considered from the previously discussed shift in the terrain of Native Title and the neoliberal implementation of juridical means to provide recompense. The economic interests of neocolonial agencies enable the neoliberal hegemony to decide, first, who should live today and how, and second, whose death is, 57

 Ricoeur 2004, 161.

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to use Butler’s terms, grievable and indeed, subject to legal recognition and recompense.58 In the Australian context that has been my exemplum, the discursive hegemony of “material reconciliation” and its implicit dominance has arguably installed nothing more than the rearticulation of materiality as an alibi for settler paternalism in an insidious new neoliberal form, attuned to the brighter and more accessible multicultural image that the settler population demands of the putatively postcolonial state.59 The more recent emphasis on economic prosperity and opportunity that pervades the language of the Canadian Harper government shows how effective a form of subjugation this can be after colonial governmentality shifts to neoliberal emphasis on prosperity, care, and security and, in the process, thwarts indigenous aspirations to justice and more robust political formations that might provide an alternative to such hegemony. This example and the others to which I have all too briefly referred highlight the way differing apparatuses of colonial governmentality and the parajuridical practices of memory surrounding them often possess several uncanny similarities. They divide, hierarchize, and indeed even intermittently foreclose, the proper recognition of experiences of suffering and the modes of memory attendant on that suffering. As such, Biopolitics and Memory seeks, through a series of case studies, to address the way memory is constrained in the postcolony, as well as addressing works of poetics that exceed and challenge the legacy of a colonial governmentality which is not yet settled, finalized, or past. These case studies are divided into two sections. The contributors to Part I, “Continuities: Neocolonialism and Governmentality,” emphasize the degree to which (post)colonial governmentality is not simply a topos wherein traumas are to be memorialized, it is also marked by ongoing practices of dispossession on a global scale. The contributors to Part II, entitled “Literature and Culture after Colonial Governmentality,” closely read literary texts and canons to identify the specific contours of time and memory that emerge in postcolonial literary and aesthetic texts. As such the collection is structured around a series of case studies that are then complemented by discussion of the relation between memory and biopolitics in literature and culture. Some contributions celebrate the way memory practices in representational topoi are used to overcome the limits of governmental practices of memorialization, while others retain a necessary vigilance and skepticism in relation to such practices of memory. Timothy Neale draws a genealogy of the governmentality around indigenous Australian lives in a particular geographic space: Cape York Peninsula. In doing so, his argument calls into question the histories that inform calls for lateliberal modes of self-determination in such a way as to unpack the way various forms of governing indigenous cultural difference become normalized and even  Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004). 59  Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 58

Introduction

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internalized. Neale’s argument is that what is often understood in terms of the politics of reconciliation in (post)colonial nation states is frequently a question of the ongoing reproduction of governable indigenous lives and populations. In this way, (post)colonial governmentality solicits the legitimacy of an intervention that is, if not identical, at least continuous with the colonial form it inherits. Most ironic is the degree to which this strategy can be framed in such a way as to elicit the legitimization of leaders in indigenous communities and their allies. Neale’s essay strongly emphasizes the continuities outlined in the present chapter. The first part of this book, then, turns on an insistence that, while practices of memory certainly inform a relation to colonial governmentality, this is not to say that there are not also multiple ongoing instantiations of intervention and dispossession. Just as governmentality often articulated itself through a liberal rhetoric of care, protection, and civilization, so contemporary discourses of neoliberalism often contain practices of governmentality within articulations of, for instance, development. Anita Lacey outlines just such a governmentality of development as it pertains to the gendering of population in Solomon Islands. Maria Elena Indelicato shows how contemporary anxieties around international students in Australia are continuous with a long genealogy of economizing and governing people of color and their aspirational migrancy that stretches back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Indelicato’s essay reveals that this governance of settler colonial affect and its relation to the migrant other is rendered not only in economized but also in affective terms; following Sara Ahmed’s work, she shows how emotional relation to the other becomes a means and a condition of governing difference. Bruno Cornellier critiques an exemplary mode by which settler-nation statehood produces itself through revised multicultural policy. By focusing on the contemporary Quebecois politics of interculturalism, Cornellier shows that settler colonial gestures of multicultural incorporation can operate as a means to cover over Indigenous claims to sovereign status. Asha Varadharajan and Tim Wyman-McCarthy open Part II with close analysis of three African literary texts in order to draw out from them the temporal “embodiment of decolonization.” Varadharajan and Wyman-McCarthy convincingly show that questions of temporality in such spaces of necropolitics as the African subcontinent are essential not only to postcolonial conceptions of time but to the ongoing articulation of the meaning of temporality globally. Varadharajan and Wyman-McCarthy challenge the degree to which biopolitics overdetermines practices of reorienting time in relation to postcolonial imaginaries, showing the range of possibilities that emerge in the multi-sited context of this book’s broad scope. Sandhya Shetty takes an alternate but complementary approach in her essay, emphasizing the Nietzschean politics of ethical remembering—which sometimes involves forgetting—as a means to breathe life into history. Shetty argues that the form that Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost takes in its approach to history risks reinstating a form of (Sinnhala) nationalist obsession with the greatness of Sri Lanka’s medical past, its history of clinics and spaces of healing. Instead, the essay argues, the form of internecine violence that has occupied Sri Lanka’s

24

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present must be given full weight in its exceptional dimension. Shetty’s argument, then, implicitly goes beyond Ondaatje’s text to emphasize the way both memory and medicine can be put to work for problematic ends in postcolonial spaces. Implicit also is a critique of the idea that discourses of healing can apply only to the deep past when ongoing state violences continue in the present. Representations of the biopolitical policing of indigenous people’s lives is also addressed in this volume. René Dietrich addresses the practice of life writing to foreground the complex and multiple genealogies emergent as such genres aim to build a chronicle of indigenous dispossession in the United States. Nicholas Birns examines two comparable but divergent literary traditions in their approach to the aftermath of imaginaries of colonial governmentality. While Australian and Latin American literary traditions have each had to contend with the question of indigeneity, Birns argues that it is their conjugation of these concerns with the insistence of neoliberalism in the contemporary global order that persists in either distinct case. Michael K. Walonen makes a nuanced case for the particular form of creolism emergent in the Maghreb. Walonen invokes the Glissantian notion of Relation to reveal the way a supple response to the varying sediments of colonization that have characterized the region is more pliable than an insistence on a fixed and rooted Maghrebian identity. Interestingly, it is through the more autochthonous of the writers that he surveys—Kateb Yacine and Assia Djebar— that this conception is most extensively delineated and ironically, the expatriate writer Paul Bowles emerges as the most enthusiastic advocate of a kind of rootedness that risks ahistorical fixity. That the politics of Walonen’s essay, like that of the writers he treats, diverges somewhat from the politics that runs through many of the other contributions in this book merely emphasizes that there is no singular model of memory in the wake of conquest and colonization. The concern with Relation is emphasized further still in Bonnie Thomas’s essay, which critically and extensively delineates the world-historical role that Martinican writers Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau have played in practices of public memory in the French postcolonial world. Limning crucial concepts of memory, relation, and diversity that emerge from the lexica of these two poets, Thomas’s essay shows the role of literature in ethical relations to cultures of remembrance. José Felipe Alvergue’s essay diverges from literary culture to meditate on the role of performance and aesthetics between the global south and the global north. Alvergue deploys the notion of polemos—a Heideggerian analysis of the political in the aesthetic—to unpack the way public art projects by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Kim Jones (aka Mudman) map the alternative temporal and geographical coordinates of precarious subjects such as the refugee and the veteran. For Alvergue, the aftermath of colonial governmentality is shown by these artists to be located spectrally at the center of the neoliberal empire—the United States. Rania Jawad and Ala Alazzeh’s essay rounds out the collection by, in a sense, combining the concerns of both of its parts. Jawad and Alazzeh trace varying representations of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Representing a turn

Introduction

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in Darwish’s work from the canonization of his early writing as the poetry of Palestinian national liberation to the reception of a supposedly discrete later Darwish of universal humanism, they argue, suggests that there can be no relation between the politics of national liberation and the aspiration toward the universally human. Through a reading of Frantz Fanon’s varying approaches to the relation between national liberation and humanism, they suggest that this understanding of Darwish (and of literatures of national liberation more broadly) positions a false dichotomy. Yet, while affirming the falsity of this dichotomy, Jawad and Alazzeh nonetheless point crucially to the possibility of cynical appropriations of such a humanist nationalism for neoliberal ends. Pointing to the Palestinian Authority’s use of such icons of Palestinian nationhood in the post-Oslo years, they assert that the PA uses Darwish to legitimize the neoliberal state project they manifest, “which is based on institutionalized power and a neoliberal economy,” and “transforms a nationalist imaginary into empty emancipatory signification in order to maintain control over the population while furthering the interests of a bourgeoisie elite.” Jawad and Alazzeh’s essay is a powerful critique of the disjuncture—which the Fanon of the Wretched of the Earth recognized long ago— between national liberation and the parties that propound it. I will leave this example to linger and the grid of memory—collective and individual, of memorization and interiorization—as a prospect to be explored, a pharmakon that will not easily find closure. In closing, I recall for us the words of Édouard Glissant, who has been both a great intellectual of public memory and a vociferous critic of the legacy of the Middle Passage in particular and colonialism more generally. For Glissant, the experience of memory is not locatable in the various systems of reckoning time according to the quantifications of demography and market. “Memory,” in Glissant’s favored works of new world and postcolonial poetics “is not that of the calendar,” but is instead of a wholly other temporality: And when, in the end, it all will have changed, when it rather collapses on itself, when the unstoppable movement will have depopulated this closed place in order to amass this population on the fringes of the towns, that which will have remained, that which remains still, is the darkness of this impossible memory, which speaks more boldly and whose voice carries further than the chronicles and the censuses.60

Through such analyses, this volume begins to examine the way colonial governmentalities are so often reproduced through practices of memorialization even as they are often simply replicated and reproduced in neoliberal modes of ongoing dispossession.

60  Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 86. Author’s translation.

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Part I Continuities: Neocolonialism and Governmentality

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Chapter 1

Regarding Self-Governmentality: Transactional Accidents and Indigeneity in Cape York Peninsula, Australia1 Timothy Neale

Introduction In June 2011 I attended a panel devoted to the anthropologist Peter Sutton’s monograph The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus. The book had drawn much interest since its publication in 2009, as it argued that the well-publicized conditions of remote Indigenous communities in Australia were in a substantial way the result of their residents’ persistent “classical social behaviors.” More specifically, Sutton claimed that the comparatively high levels of domestic violence, alcohol abuse, and child abuse recorded in these sites were, in his opinion as a leading Australianist anthropologist, partially explained by the continuity of “cultural traditions.”2 These traditions had survived the prohibitions of the missionary era between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, he argued, as well as the acquiring of civil and limited community administration rights between the late 1960s and late 1980s. Sutton described this latter period—often known as the “self-determination era”—as “entry into the gates of hell,” claiming that systems of control and repression imposed on indigenous people by church, state and private enterprise were generally displaced by the freedoms of liberal

I would like to thank Gillian Cowlishaw and Michael Griffiths for their comments on drafts of this chapter. Any errors are, of course, my own. 1  “Indigenous” can be a contentious term in Australia, where individuals and groups may foremost identify as being Aboriginal or belonging to a more specific regional identity (such as Koori, Murri, Nunga, Palawa, Yolngu, Noongar, or Anangu). In Cape York Peninsula, many people identify as being Murri or Pama people as well as through a given language group. Centuries of trade and migration both to and from the Torres Strait Islands makes it difficult to use such generalizations though, and thus I use “Indigenous” throughout but not so as to imply a homogeneous coherence among Indigenous peoples in Australia. 2  Peter Sutton, “The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Policy in Australia since the 1970s,” Anthropological Forum 11 (2001): 148–52.

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democratic policy and its emphasis on community self-management and indigenous self-determination.3

Socially progressive “liberal” policy passed control back to Indigenous groups unprepared for the responsibility while socially relativist “liberal” tolerance, he added, had prevented political elites from intervening. While Indigenous “culture” was a proximate cause of poverty and alcoholism, Sutton suggested, a “liberal consensus” to dogmatically defend rights to difference was also culpable.4 This iconoclastic argument earned the acclaim of many, and when the book won Australia’s most eminent non-fiction prize in late 2010 it proved an opportune time to reflect on its content. The June event included contributions from other prominent anthropologists, ending with Sutton’s own thoughts and, ultimately, an anecdote. As Sutton told it, he had been in a restaurant in New York and discovered, to his surprise, that a young Indigenous man was serving him. Not only was his waiter born in a remote community, he explained, but it was a community in Cape York Peninsula, the massive spur of northeastern Australia where Sutton had spent much of the past three decades working. The coincidence, he added, had deep significance. Sutton’s implied object here was to dispute the problematic contention that Indigeneity is synonymous with life in remote Australia and anathema to cosmopolitan modernity; that Indigenous people can “escape” remote communities and thrive. After the panel, I attempted to explain the anecdote to several friends. It was a banal tale, but one which aligned neatly with the work of the Indigenous public intellectual Noel Pearson, whose reform agenda hopes to help Indigenous people move between cultures “from Cape York to New York.”5 From Sutton’s mouth, Pearson’s catchphrase seemed less cosmopolitan than diasporic. Was Sutton, I wondered, imagining a geography of relays and returns, or one in which social hope was synonymous with exit into diaspora? Since 2000, Pearson has been central to public policy interventions in Australia generally and Cape York Peninsula specifically. An activist and advocate turned policymaker, since the early 1990s he has become the most influential private citizen in debates over Indigenous land rights, health, education, and service delivery. Like Sutton, he is typically framed as an agitator or outsider, though this chapter repositions such work as internal to processes of colonial governmentality. While outspoken in their criticisms of certain state actors, neither Sutton nor Pearson question the technical ability of the state, the validity of its metrics, or

3

 Sutton 2001, 128–30.  The Politics of Suffering (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2009). For a critical summary of this argument see Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandoment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Timothy Neale, “Staircases, Pyramids and Poisons: The Immunitary Paradigm in the Works of Noel Pearson and Peter Sutton,” Continuum 27, no. 2 (2013). 5  Suzanne Smith, “Cape York Students Apply for Prestigious Boarding Schools Positions,” ABC Lateline (2007). 4

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the legitimacy of its foundation in dispossession.6 Metapolitical authority, or “the ability to define the content and scope of ‘law’ and ‘politics,’” remains with the settler state.7 Similarly, while Pearson’s work is often historically situated within the “postcolonial” context of official “Reconciliation,” this chapter suggests it is better understood within a longer history of attempts by administrators to construct (and disassemble) different localized groups as both Indigenous and governable; interminable attempts, following Rowse, to produce and manage Indigenous “populations.”8 As Tony Bennett has argued, one dominant way in which this occurred in the early twentieth century was through “race,” a category derived from the measurements of different sciences and then redeployed as a matrix of governance.9 Bennett notes, following Foucault, that race is only one instance of such réalités de transaction (transactional realities).10 “Culture,” for instance, may denote or map parts of an autonomous Indigenous domain, but it is also a lens whose application has been incorporated within, and become consistent with, liberal governance.11 Culture, for instance, both works to name an autonomous Indigenous domain of distinct knowledges, practices, jurisdictions, topologies, and so on—in short, Indigenous worlds—while at the same time being a lens whose application has been enthusiastically incorporated within liberal governance. As anthropologist Tess Lea and others have suggested, the “cultural,” like the biomedical and the economic, are naturalized categories in policy today; bureaucrats’ interventions into Indigenous worlds are preceded by training in “Indigenous culture.”12 As such, while I will not place scare quotes around it, the word culture is used throughout this essay with this caveat. Thus, I am led to ask how Pearson, and the biopolitical interventions he articulates, fit within the production of such transactional realities to constitute and govern “Indigenous people.” To this consideration of the production of “surfaces” for governance I would like to add an historical-geographical account of the space of governance. Since 6

 This is a point made by Dombrowski in relation to Sutton. See: “The White Hand of Capitalism and the End of Indigenism as We Know It,” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 21 (2010). 7  Mark Rifkin, “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the ‘Peculiar’ Status of Native Peoples,” Cultural Critique 73 (2009): 90. 8  Tim Rowse, Rethinking Social Justice: From “Peoples” to “Populations” (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2012). 9  Tony Bennett, “Making and Mobilising Worlds: Assembling and Governing the Other,” in Material Powers, ed. T. Bennett and P. Joyce (London: Routledge, 2010). 10  Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France, 1978–1979, ed. M. Snellart, tr. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 296–7. 11  Francesca Merlan, “The Objectification of ‘Culture’: An Aspect of Current Political Process in Aboriginal Affairs,” Anthropological Forum 6, no. 1 (1989). 12  Tess Lea, Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts: Indigenous Health in Northern Australia (Sydney, NSW: UNSW Press, 2008).

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the first concerted settler invasion in the 1870s, the region of Cape York Peninsula in far north Queensland has presented a particular problem to administrators who have, at turns, attempted to create a permanent settler population and “protect” its Indigenous residents. Today, the region—larger than Greece—has a population of fewer than 18,000 people, the majority of whom identify as Indigenous (approximately 55 percent). Almost three-quarters of the region is claimed or possessed as Indigenous land and approximately a fifth is listed as reserve or national park,13 but it remains a highly disadvantaged region, with 83 percent of its residents in the most deprived 20 percent of Queensland’s population.14 Its high levels of unemployment render it an obvious target for various development “solutions,” though, as in the past, the catch-cries of reformists are rarely moderated by the region’s scarcity of private labor markets, its dearth of private capital, its distance from markets, and the universal poverty of its soils. As Bird Rose argues, while the relative depopulation of remote places leads to their rote representation as “wilderness”—caught in the “year zero” of settler incursion— such characterizations perform a twofold forgetting.15 That is to say, they occlude not only the long history of Indigenous occupation but also the shorter history of what historian Noel Loos has called the Peninsula’s “uncompleted” settlement by white settlers.16 I will suggest that Pearson’s work should be understood in the context of the latter ongoing and faltering attempts to govern this place as isomorphic space, as a site whose ecology and population are devoid of alterity; an entirely knowable and predictable site. While its name presents it as a deceptively discrete and naturalized entity, “Cape York Peninsula” is an object indelibly shaped by administrators’ attempts to know it and render it governable. The politics, processes, and outcomes of Pearson’s reforms are of interest in part due to his unprecedented level of influence as an advocate and administrator. Singularly favored within the context of the grossly underfunded Indigenous policy sector, the reception of his “Cape York agenda” as a “success” has led to Pearson being recently commissioned by the federal government to pen a national policy for “empowering communities.”17 Prime Minister Tony Abbott often describes 13  The predominance of Indigenous title in Queensland is claimed or possessed as Native Title under the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth), though some parcels are instead claimed or possessed as Aboriginal Land under the Aboriginal Land Act 1991 (Qld). 14  Interdepartmental Committee, “Submission to House of Representatives Review of the Wild Rivers (Environmental Management) Bill 2010,” in Submission 31 (Department of Families, Housing Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, 2011). 15  Deborah Bird Rose, “The Year Zero and the North Australian Frontier,” in Tracking Knowledge in North Australian Landscapes, ed. D. Bird Rose and A.F. Clarke (ANU North Australia Research Unit, 1997). 16  Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance: Aboriginal-European Relations on the North Queensland Frontier 1861–1897 (Canberra, ACT: ANU Press, 1982). 17  E.g. Patricia Karvelas, “Noel Pearson’s Cape York Trial ‘Changing Lives,’” The Australian, March 28, 2013; Patricia Karvelas and Paul Kelly, “Tony Abbott to Fund Noel Pearson Gap Plan,” ibid., August 24.

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Pearson as a “prophet.”18 At the same time, this favor has come in the context of a renewed questioning of the value and efficacy of Indigenous difference, one in which Sutton’s hypothesis regarding the pathological “culture” of remote communities has been highly influential.19 A second factor motivating this chapter is that Pearson’s avowedly novel approach resembles past attempts to construct both people and place in very clear ways. The launch of a government-funded multimillion-dollar reform project has involved Pearson “seeing like a state,” insisting on the ultimate reality of homo œconomicus—the familiar economically rationalist subjectivity—and the “real economy” of market labor; there is “no separate development path” for Indigenous people, suggesting remote residents should “orbit” out if there is insufficient employment.20 As such, it is particularly pressing to consider how the “Cape York agenda” is articulated in relation to the “surfaces” produced and promoted by state governmentality and to consider its “accidents” in attempting to produce self-governing individuals. Its reification of the “real economy” has made it necessary to, sometimes explicitly, attempt to remake Indigenous people as diasporic subjects. Eliciting Surfaces For almost four decades after its foundation in 1859 there were no enforced legal protections for Indigenous people in the State of Queensland.21 Subsequently, thanks to a series of complaints by both humanitarians outraged by settler conduct and settlers outraged by Indigenous presence in towns, a system of official “protectionism” was established in 1897.22 Modeled on systems in Australia’s southeast and incorporating its own novelties, the system dictated the conditions under which an individual “under the Act” could labor, marry, travel, own property, raise children and, in short, live.23 Whereas in Queensland’s south the regime was designed to “protect” by strictly regulating labor and criminalizing alcohol and opium use, the primary aims in the north were to create, as its architect Archibald Meston proposed, “self-supporting” institutions administered by white

 Tony Wright, “Noel Pearson Is a Prophet Says Tony Abbott,” The Age, August 28, 2013. 19  Neale 2013. 20  Noel Pearson, “Conservatism, Too, Is Relevant to Our Culture,” The Australian, July 31, 2010. 21  The one ordinance that did exist—the Native Labourers Protection Act 1884 (Qld)—was not enforced. 22  Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 (Qld). It is a cruel irony to have to use the word “protectionism” to describe a regime that oversaw the dispossession and subjection of thousands of Indigenous people. 23  For more see: Benjamin R. Smith, “Still under the Act? Subjectivity and the State in Aboriginal North Queensland,” Oceania 78 (2008). 18

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“protectors.”24 Meston hoped to create autonomous “native” settlements, but the government immediately passed responsibility in the Peninsula to Moravian and Presbyterian missions, which administered large areas of reserved land and were equipped with the power to summarily discipline and “remove” individuals to, or between, these institutions. By 1935, the region’s nine missions held 3,000 individuals as effective “inmates in perpetuity,” approximately a quarter of the population then “protected” in Queensland.25 To the State’s settler public, the oppressive system quickly became “an issue as remote as that of gaols or asylums.”26 There have been over 67 identifiable classifications or definitions of Indigenous people in Australian legislation since 1788, each attempting to make Indigeneity legible as an object of government.27 As in the 1897 protectionist Act, these have often been serological conceptions that are defined through biological descent according to categories such as “full-bloods” and “half-castes.” For their part, senior administrators avowed that they were securing Indigenous peoples’ right to “retain their racial entity,”28 monitoring this entity by criminalizing sex between categories (between Indigenous women and non-Indigenous men, specifically) and coordinating marriages within categories or “castes.” A sociological framework underpinned this medical and moral policing, many administrators professing that employment and cultivated monogamous patriarchal and matriarchal obligation would elicit all the desired elements of “a settled life” and “social responsibility.”29 The “key to the problem,” in the words of the longest-serving Chief Protector, was “the family.”30 This paternalistic biopolitical system hoped to preserve “Aborigines” through domestic obligation and a complex process of typological filtration,31 segregating those who fit within its matrixes and excepting, through force, those deemed to lack a “preponderance of blood” in order to socially assimilate them. Scholarly attention to protectionism has been largely focused upon its privations, sensitive to how it covertly functioned to appropriate the labor of its wards while at the same time failing, often disastrously, in its task of

24  See: Gordon Reid, That Unhappy Race: Queensland and the Aboriginal Problem 1838–1901 (Kew, Vic.: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2006). 25  Loos 1982, 182. 26  C.D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (Sydney, NSW: Pelican Books, 1970), 184. 27  John McCorquodale, “Aboriginal Identity: Legislative, Judicial and Administrative Definitions,” Australian Aboriginal Studies 2 (1997): 24. 28  Russell McGregor, Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal People and the Australian Nation (Acton, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2011), 6. 29  Rosalind Kidd, “Regulating Bodies: Administrations and Aborigines in Queensland 1840–1988” (PhD Thesis. Griffith University, 1994), 291. 30  John W. Bleakley, The Aborigines of Australia: Their History, Their Habits, Their Assimilation (Brisbane, Qld.: Jacaranda Press, 1961), 123. 31  Kidd 1994, 364.

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guardianship.32 But while the economic and social consequences of the system are well documented—if popularly ignored—little attention has been paid to the system’s geographical structure. As Meston stated in 1896, the lack of a significant settler population indicated that the Peninsula was “not required for settlement,” making it an ideal space for segregation. During protectionism there were only two major retrenchments of the resulting reserves when, in 1957 and 1975, the government granted titles over bauxite deposits to multinational miners. Beyond these areas, land was either Crown property or temporarily leased to scattered white pastoralists, a situation perhaps best illustrated demographically by the 54 percent fall, to 1,545 people, in the region’s non-Indigenous population between 1911 and 1954. Variously, government reports considered how to attract “new [white] blood,” but overall cattle holdings grew by just over 20 percent between the late 1950s and the late 1980s.33 The causes of this economic depression were numerous, though the most significant were the lack of a road into the region until 1967 and legal decisions, in the 1960s, which clarified the illegality of paying Indigenous workers less than the award wage. By 1970, as protectionism began to be slowly disassembled, many pastoral leases had never actually been occupied, while over a sixth of the region was still ostensibly held “in trust” for Indigenous people.34 Though the financial and social unfeasibility of the “protection” project was apparent to administrators from the 1920s onwards, the State government nonetheless worked studiously to defer the inevitable assumption of responsibility. Missions, one clergyman wrote, cultivated “specialists in nothing … having no money or other exchange-economy,” but the government itself refused to plan for a permanent Indigenous presence, foreclosing opportunities to own homes or property.35 Between 1959 and 1968 it reluctantly assumed administrative control over most of the region’s missions. Meanwhile, major changes were occurring in regard to the governance of Indigenous people nationally,36 in particular through the 1967 Constitutional Amendment. While voters across Australia ostensibly voted “Yes for Aboriginal Rights” they had, technically, empowered the federal

 See: Trustees on Trial: Recovering the Stolen Wages (Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006). 33  Based on five-year averages compiled by McKeague, The Cattle Industry of Cape York Peninsula, Cape York Peninsula Land Use Strategy (Brisbane, Qld.: Department of Primary Industries, 1992). 34  John Holmes, “Cape York Peninsula, Australia: A Frontier Region Undergoing a Multifunctional Transition with Indigenous Engagement,” Journal of Rural Studies 28 (2012): 258. 35  Noel Loos, “From Church to State: The Queensland Government Take-over of Anglican Missions in North Queensland,” Aboriginal History 15 (1991): 74–7. 36  Frank Brennan, Land Rights Queensland Style: The Struggle for Aboriginal SelfManagement (St Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press, 1992), 9–11. 32

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government to make laws specifically for Indigenous people.37 By making “the Aboriginal race” the object of both State and federal management, the amendment undermined Queensland’s monopoly on racial governance. Second, it reified this category by initiating what John Taylor describes as a “postcolonial demography,” mandating the separate enumeration of this population in the national census through an expandable range of specified data.38 The transactional reality of race was becoming newly calculable in the name of remedial social justice. At the time, social justice arguments had little penetration with the infamous Bjelke-Petersen government in Queensland, which reformed (rather than repealed) protectionism in 1971. Equally, the administration worked to block various aspects of the federal “self-determination” policy. When, in the mid1970s, a federal agency sought to buy land for Indigenous pastoralists, the BjelkePetersen government listed the properties as national parks.39 In policy terms what followed between 1976 and 1986 was a two-part process of administrative transfer and defunding, summarized by Kidd as “a gross perversion of community management processes.”40 As responsibilities were transferred to new Indigenous community councils, State-funded administrative roles were reduced by twothirds and federal grants were rerouted by State agencies to fund State obligations. In most cases, community beer canteens, which had been founded by the State to recapture residents’ (federal) social welfare payments, were the only profitable enterprise passed on to councils.41 Then, in 1989, as the title to reserve lands were passed on to these councils, their funding was dropped a further 30 percent. As one federal committee noted, without financial resources “the fact that [communities] are empowered to do much more is of little consequence.”42 From this account, it is possible to comprehend how protectionism had, in all its heterogeneity, produced Cape York Peninsula as a distinct space. In 1990, the region had nine communities with between 200 and 1,000 residents, almost all of whom were Indigenous-identifying, and one mining town with approximately 2,000 non-Indigenous residents. While 10 percent of the area was now national park and 68 percent remained pastoral leases, many of these leases were “unimproved” and would be eventually surrendered.43 It was a comparatively discrete region  Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997). 38  John Taylor, “Postcolonial Transformation of the Australian Indigenous Population,” Geographical Research 11, no. 49 (2011): 287. 39  One instance, in the Peninsula, was subsequently deemed to be racially discriminatory in the 1982 Koowarta decision. See: Neva Collins, “The Wik: A History of Their 400 Year Struggle,” Indigenous Law Bulletin 4, no. 1 (1997): 6. 40  Kidd 1994, 639–69. 41  Brennan 1992, 113. 42  Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs, Our Future, Our Selves: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community Control, Management and Resources (Canberra, ACT: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1990), 93. 43  Holmes 2012. 37

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whose comparatively discrete population was both calculable and locatable through existing “surfaces.” Since this time, critical focus has often fallen upon the different State and federal frameworks that, since 1991, have worked to recognize symbolically significant, but legally limited, Indigenous land rights over much of the region. While these have provided further sites of regulation, the changes in this sphere are less relevant, for our purposes, than the progressive fixation of social policy upon statistical equality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations.44 Initially labeled “practical reconciliation” by the Howard federal government in 1998, the focus on demographic parity was further entrenched between 2005 and 2008 through the formulation and adoption of the “closing the gap” policy. Under successive federal administrations the statistical “gap” has remained the ubiquitous measure and justification of governance interventions. The result has been the foundation and embedding of a national “Indigenous governance machine,” in the words of anthropologist Emma Kowal, composed of government-sponsored community bodies and service delivery agencies delegated to “close” differences in employment, housing, education, health, and so on.45 This integrated layer of local organs is ultimately accountable to government agencies that are, themselves, accountable only to “taxpayers”;46 the sole Indigenousdirected government agency was dissolved in 2005. At one level this “machine” functions, therefore, to distribute culpability to diverse actors who may or may not be soliciting it. Further, as Kowal argues, though this machine is made and measured through calculation, its localized workings produce “friction” as they attempt to regulate subjects who are neither pliant nor predictable. The resulting periodic condemnations of specific “policy failures” are nonetheless fundamentally productive, Tess Lea argues, as each justifies a new measure without undermining their interventionist premise: “the gap.”47 The workings of this machine should also be viewed in the context of the return amongst policymakers, noted by Sanders, to the ideas of negative difference and guardianship prevalent in 1930s policy.48 As the following section indicates, Pearson has been particularly influential in reframing Indigenous people “as [potentially] not knowing their own best interests,

 Jon Altman, Beyond Closing the Gap: Valuing Diversity in Indigenous Australia, Caepr Working Paper No. 54 (Canberra: ANU, 2009). 45  Emma Kowal, “Postcolonial Friction: The Indigenous Governance Machine,” in Force, Movement, Intensity, ed. Ghassan Hage and Emma Kowal (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2011). 46  Tim Rowse, “The Reforming State, the Concerned Public and Indigenous Political Actors,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 56, no. 1 (2010). 47  Tess Lea, “When Looking for Anarchy, Look to the State: Fantasies of Regulation in Forcing Disorder within the Australian Indigenous Estate,” Critique of Anthropolgy 32, no. 2 (2012): 119. 48  Will Sanders, “Ideology, Evidence and Competing Principles in Australian Indigenous Affairs,” Australian Journal of Social Issues 45, no. 3 (2010). 44

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and hence as in need of guidance and direction.”49 In doing so, he and others within the machine naturalize the “surfaces” and authority of settler governance. Accidents of Governmentality Noel Pearson’s rise to his current prominence began, in earnest, with the selfpublication of his essay Our Right to Take Responsibility in 2000, suggesting that Indigenous communities were “addicted” to social welfare payments and that governments needed to “reinstitute reciprocity.”50 Whereas, he argued, the pre-colonial “traditional economy” of Indigenous people “was a real economy and demanded responsibility,” just as the “real economy” of missionary administrations had maintained that “work was imperative to survive,” the introduction of equalitarian civil rights and access to social welfare payments in the late 1960s had supplied a “gammon economy” that disastrously uncoupled survival from labor.51 Present conditions, he argued, had their origins in the failure by governments to substitute one functioning labor paradigm for another when it supplied (civil) rights without (mutual) responsibilities. Access to “money for nothing” had terminated any reciprocity between the recipient and the state and with it the ethic of reciprocity itself, fostering the abuse of addictive substances and an aversion to individual culpability; social welfare payments were “a poison” within Indigenous communities that was “killing our people.”52 It was a story with clear appeal to multiple blocs, including those sympathetic to neoliberal critiques of social welfare and, quite separately, those frustrated by the gridlock in government Indigenous policy. This novel narrative also had a deep appeal to the settler majority, in part because it relieved them of the burden of historical guilt by severing “blame” (causal responsibility) from “responsibility” (primarily prospective responsibility for taking action).53 Though Pearson agreed with others that dispossession mattered to present disadvantage, and present and past traumas render people “susceptible to problems,” such matters were figured as irrelevant to remediating

49  “Changing Agendas in Australian Indigenous Policy: Federalism, Competing Principles and Generational Dynamics,” Australian Journal of Public Administration 72, no. 2 (2013): 166. 50  Tony Koch, “Pearson Hits Welfare Poison,” The Courier-Mail, April 30, 1999. 51  Noel Pearson, Our Right to Take Responsibility (Cairns: Noel Pearson and Associates, 2000), 26–7. 52  Pearson 2000, 21. 53  Emma Kowal, “The Subject of Responsibilities: Noel Pearson and Indigenous Disadvantage in Australia,” in Responsibility, ed. G. Hage and R. Eckersley (Melbourne, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2012), 45.

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Indigenous lives.54 Citing the work of psychiatrist Nils Bejerot,55 Pearson detached “addictions” from their origins, insisting that alcoholism and welfare dependency were self-perpetuating epidemics that required “enforced treatment” and the end of “unconditional support.”56 As such, it was a narrative that reframed the settlerIndigenous relation as one premised on the (failed) subjectivization of individuals and not material and political dispossession. In this sense, like Sutton’s own thesis, it was a pervasively biopolitical account, recasting the political crises of colonial dispossession and ongoing Indigenous disadvantage as a crisis in the condition of specific bodies and their agency, which, in Lauren Berlant’s words, was “deemed to be fundamentally destructive.”57 The transactional reality of “culture,” so important to Sutton’s analysis, was (and remains) an ambivalent presence in Pearson’s work, neither pathologized nor redemptive. The problem is not cultural continuity or marginalization but that Indigenous people “do not know the selves that they are.”58 Pearson’s conceptual solutions to the deficit of “responsibility” have emerged in the years since Our Right and primarily revolve around a teleology of individualism. To borrow his suggestion and imperative, “we should think of the Aboriginal Australian peoples as a population of individuals,” as “should” they.59 Pearson has often recast the suppositions of Enlightenment humanism as truths, citing the works of David Hume and Adam Smith and assuring audiences that “selfinterest” is “an innately human machine … ultimately sourced in our biology” even if it may seem “culturally alien” to Indigenous people.60 Subsequently, the insistence that eliciting greater self-interest will cultivate “social norms” and “responsibility” is expressed in two familiar ways, the first being a moral insistence on employment in “real jobs” within the “real economy,” celebrating the ameliorative power of wage labor, while the second is the nuclear family. Pearson’s conviction in this regard extends to the point of his having contrived recursive proofs of individualism, comparing progress to a “staircase,” where “each rung on the stairs must be climbed by individual human beings”; solely “individuals clutching their children to their breast can ascend two by two.” The

 See Pearson, Our Right; “Land Rights and Progressive Wrongs,” Griffith Review 2 (2003): 158. 55  Peter d’Abbs, “Silence of the Sociologists: Indigenous Alcohol Use, Harm Minimisation and Social Control,” Health Sociology Review 10, no. 2 (2001): 42–3. 56  Noel Pearson, “On the Human Right to Misery, Mass Incarceration and Early Death,” Quadrant 45, no. 12 (2001): 13. 57  Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry 33 (Summer 2007): 765. 58  Neale 2013, 184. Emphasis added. 59  Noel Pearson, “Radical Hope: Education and Equality in Australia,” Quarterly Essay 35 (October 2009): 66. 60  “Pathways to Prosperity for Indigenous People,” in Sir Ronald Trotter Lecture 2010 (Auckland, New Zealand: New Zealand Business Roundtable, 2010), 21. 54

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conceptual and sociological incoherence underpinning this analysis, identified by several scholars, has not affected its popularity with policymakers.61 To be clear, this is not to dispute the seriousness of the disadvantage experienced in remote Indigenous communities in Cape York Peninsula or elsewhere. Rather it is to clarify how these conditions have been rearticulated as a biopolitical crisis by certain key figures, whose rhetorical and historical work has, in turn, molded and justified major policy interventions. Since Our Right, Pearson has become bound up in “partnerships” with forms of state power, enabled by a network of organizations beginning, in 2002, with a coordinating organization (Cape York Partnerships) and a policy body (the Cape York Institute) in 2004. Out of the swarm of acronyms that have followed two particular initiatives stand out, the first being the installation of bans or limits on alcohol in Indigenous communities, implemented since 2002,62 the second being the Cape York Welfare Reform Trial (CYWRT), a pilot intervention in four Indigenous communities. The latter’s lead initiative, the Family Responsibilities Commission (FRC), empowers a community panel to quarantine up to 75 percent of the incomes of welfare recipients who breach any of several “behavioral obligations.”63 At the end of the initial trial period in December 2011, $100 million in government funds had been spent on administering the CYWRT, amounting to over $36,000 per Indigenous resident over four years.64 There is much to say about these interventions though I will focus on three key aspects of their governmental character. The first is that, in order to appeal to his immediate patrons, Pearson’s interventions have had to “see like a state,” acting upon and discursively producing Indigenous subjects as manageable objects of technical intervention.65 In seeking to “reform” communities, the CYWRT engages in practices of statecraft whose efficacy is, in turn, measured through the collection of a spectrum of quantitative data including school attendance, child protection notifications, alcohol restriction breaches, violent crime convictions, offences and unique offenders, breaches of public housing agreements, unemployment, literacy and numeracy scores, aeromedical retrievals and so on. Whether or not the CYWRT “empowers” communities, it manifestly deploys a raft of measures to  David F. Martin, Is Welfare Dependency “Welfare Poison”?: An Assessment of Noel Pearson’s Proposals for Aboriginal Welfare Reform, Discussion Paper No. 213 (Canberra, ACT: CAEPR, ANU, 2001); Tim Rowse, “Mcclure’s ‘Mutual Obligation’ and Pearson’s ‘Reciprocity’: Can They Be Reconciled?” Australian Journal of Social Issues 37, no. 3 (2002); Neale 2013. 62  CYI, “From Hand out to Hand Up: Cape York Welfare Reform Project,” (Cairns: CYI, 2007), 23. 63  Noel Pearson, “Sense of Obligation a Route out of Handout Hell,” The Australian, December 22, 2007. 64  FaHCSIA, Cape York Welfare Reform Evaluation 2012 (Canberra: Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, 2013), 10. 65  James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 61

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make their residents legible, and thereby calculates and adjudges their subjective “normalization.” It is also worth specifying that both the alcohol and welfare measures are possible precisely because of the continued presence of race as a transactional reality in Australian law. Just as the 1967 referendum maintained the government’s constitutional “race power” to make racially targeted laws, the nation’s racial discrimination legislation, implemented in 1975, makes an exception for “special measures” intended for “securing adequate advancement of certain racial or ethnic groups or individuals.” The enabling legislation, and a High Court decision in 2013, has made clear that the agenda amounts to allowable discrimination.66 Subsequently, the second aspect of such programs is that they have produced the unpredictable outcomes immanent to such technical intervention. At one level, these accidents include the concerted pushback from targeted communities to these “community-driven” initiatives, the design and implementation of which has become progressively more “top down.”67 Amongst its principal achievements, the CYWRT argues, is that it has been “mostly successful in generating understanding and acceptance of the reforms.” In Pearson’s hometown of Hopevale there has been marked hostility to the trial and 56 percent of the community engage with none of its programs.68 At another level, the unexpected feedback has been more definitely quantifiable. For instance, the alcohol limits introduced in 2002 have been succeeded by increases in cannabis use and cannabis-related psychosis and the criminalization of residents through the fourfold growth in charges related to alcohol possession, followed by fines, driver’s license suspensions, and jail.69 Contrary trends from the CYWRT itself include the plateau in unexplained school absences across targeted communities, barring one, and the evidence that any statistical rise in educational attainment is likely “part of a broader trend” across comparable sites. As the trial’s major (and largely undigested) assessment report states, it “is not possible to attribute any uniform trends in levels of crime and alcohol abuse in the trial communities to the implementation of welfare reform.”70 This is not to lapse into the convenient position of labeling these interventions “failures,” leaving the conceits of “policy” intact. Rather, it is to note how the programs have travelled the familiar arc of Indigenous social policy outlined  Simon Rice, “Joan Monica Maloney V the Queen,” Indigenous Law Bulletin 8, no. 7 (2013). 67  Philip Martin, “Whose Right to Take Responsibility?,” Arena Magazine 95 (2009); Sarah Maddison, Black Politics (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2009), 41–2. 68  Emphasis added. See: State of Queensland, Cape York Welfare Reform: Consultation Report (Brisbane, Qld.: Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Affairs, 2011), 6. 69  India Bohanna and Alan R. Clough, “Cannabis Use in Cape York Indigenous Communities: High Prevalence, Mental Health Impacts and the Desire to Quit,” Drug & Alcohol Review 31, no. 4 (2012); Chris Cunneen, “Racism, Discrimination and the overRepresentation of Indigenous People in the Criminal Justice System: Some Conceptual and Explanatory Issues,” Current Issues Criminal Justice 17, no. 3 (2006). 70  FaHCSIA 2013, 224–32, 5. 66

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by Lea and others.71 From the beginning, such initiatives explicitly or implicitly accept the precepts of state governance, including not only the power of technical intervention but also its intelligibility. But the effects of such interventions are not only unpredictable, as shown above; they are also largely unknowable in the short term, except through the statistical metrics of state governmentality. Caught within these terms, it is unsurprising that many initiatives are deemed “failures” when, necessarily, one cannot easily summarize the multitudinous effects of dozens of programs on hundreds or thousands of lives in different locations. Thus, the third key aspect of the reform agenda has been its own propensity to act in “state-like” ways. This includes not simply its use of disciplinary measures, but also, more profoundly, its ability to make an exception of itself. Initially justified as an exemplar of new “evidence-based” policy, the recent CYWRT Evaluation Report concludes that there are actually “no externally valid measures of the outcome” desired, celebrating “subtle but fundamental shifts in behavior” that it cannot quantitatively demonstrate.72 Equally, there has been no evaluation of the costeffectiveness of the reforms, despite its inclusion in the initial proposal.73 In a more general sense, the “trial” has been excepted by becoming temporary in name alone, being thrice extended, potentially past 2015.74 Over 15 initiatives are now included in the CYWRT, ranging from financial management and parenting skills training to home renovation grants. As such, the CYWRT is one exemplar amongst several of the return to models of “vulnerability, protection and guardianship.”75 Just as in the Northern Territory Emergency Response (or “the Intervention”), administrators’ promises to “stabilise, normalize, and exit” Indigenous communities have been promptly forgotten.76 The “emergency” disciplinary measures implemented in the Northern Territory in June 2007—including the criminalization of alcohol and pornography, the compulsory acquisition of land, and the quarantining of welfare payments—were retained and rebranded in November 2011 as the 10-year “Stronger Futures” policy.77 Facing the social “crisis” of Indigenous disadvantage, a remedial intervention silently becomes ongoing guardianship, expanding beyond its initial aims and parameters into the default administration. One clear conclusion from this brief survey is that Pearson’s agenda, mediated through the transactional realities of colonial governmentality, has elicited the accidents, uncertainties, and incoherence expected of any technical attempt to 71

 Lea 2008.  FaHCSIA 2013, 5, 7–13. 73  Michael McKenna, “Call to Find Cuts in Cape York Welfare Scheme,” The Australian, April 2, 2013; CYI 2007, 127. 74  The Reform Trial was extended first to December 31, 2012, then to December 31, 2013 and then extended again in early 2013 for an indefinite period. 75  Sanders 2010, 318. 76  See Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson, Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia (North Carlton, Vic.: Arena Publications, 2007). 77  Jon Altman and Susie Russell, “Too Much ‘Dreaming’: Evaluations of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Intervention 2007–2012,” Evidence Base 3 (2012). 72

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govern life. Premised on subjective uniformity, it is nonetheless made possible by racialized legal and political difference. Underwritten by a narrative of state failure, it is nonetheless entirely comprised of state-like interventions. Evidently, the novelty of the reforms being directed by an Indigenous figure has not necessarily made them significantly more accountable or responsive than other government initiatives, though it has arguably enabled their survival. Within this underfunded sector, there are no parallels for the level of financial or political support enjoyed by the agenda and its “prophet.” To some critics, this fact is attributable to Pearson’s implicit support for settler metapolitical authority and, by extension, its right to intervene, adding his moral weight to the fundamentally conservative social policies of recent governments.78 But such analyses should be balanced against Pearson’s success in establishing and defending his agenda. When, in March 2013, the Queensland government signaled it might no longer fund an unproven policy, Pearson’s well-publicized response was sufficiently vehement to make it back down within days.79 It may be that within the Australian context a figurehead of Pearson’s influence, politics, and methods is best positioned to achieve this pocket of relative autonomy. It offers some insight into the emergent impasses of liberal governmentality in a remote space. Conclusion Many parties share in the will to improve. They occupy the position of trustees, a position defined by the claim to know how others should live … [but] the objective of trusteeship is not to dominate others—it is to enhance their capacity for action, and to direct it. Tania Li, The Will to Improve80

Like others within the Indigenous governance machine, Pearson has taken up the position of a trustee for a certain population. This position is conceptualized in terms similar to those used by Li, in that Pearson and his associated institutions explicitly seek to enhance the capacity of Indigenous individuals to, using Amartya Sen’s phrase, “choose lives they have reason to value.”81 But in seeking 78

 See: J. Rob Bray et al., “Evaluating New Income Management in the Northern Territory: First Evaluation Report,” (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2012); Philip Mendes, “Compulsory Income Management: A Critical Examination of the Emergence of Conditional Welfare in Australia,” Australian Social Work 66, no. 4 (2012). 79  Patricia Karvelas, “Campbell Newman Backs Down over Noel Pearson Welfare Reform Trial,” The Australian, March 28, 2013. 80  Tania Murray Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 4–5. 81  Pearson differs from Sen when it comes to the question of how prescriptive one can be in determining which “kind of lives” are worthy of value. As Corbridge notes, Sen’s work is radically tolerant because he allows that a community may want to opt out of “conventional development” models. See: “Development as Freedom,” Progress in Development Studies 2, no. 3 (2002): 202.

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to direct the residents of Indigenous communities towards certain economic and social behaviors, Pearson has insisted upon the reality of a subjectivity whose ratio and redemption is reducible to a single financial value. In short, the analytical reification of the “real economy” of private labor by Pearson and others has moral consequences. What may be less apparent to those endorsing and evaluating this agenda is that it conceals another argument that is both biopolitical and geographical, particularly when applied to remote regions such as Cape York Peninsula where there is almost no private employment. If the “real economy” is singularly redemptive then the continuation of life within such sites is, fundamentally, non-redemptive and potentially pathological. Perhaps the greatest “accident” of Pearson’s Cape York agenda is not its retention of colonial governmentality’s “realities,” but its articulation of an economic subject for whom migration and viability are synonymous: a diasporic subject.82 For such a subject, Hage argues, the question of exit is foundational, as exit is conflated not only with aspirational goals but, more generally, with viable life. But space is not so simply isomorphic as capital imagines. For many Indigenous people, space is place, as a given “country” or place is understood and expressed as both singular and ontologically constitutional. Such relations to country—so often glossed and governed as “culture”—constitute who one is and who one is obligated to be.83 While Pearson rarely ventures into this subject, he has stated that communally-owned lands constitute the “cultural hearth” of Indigenous peoples,84 offering two apparent fixes to the resulting tension between the transcendental “real economy” and the placed-ness of country. One is to attract economic development to remote Australia, a prospect that faces many obstacles and has, to this point, been largely unsuccessful in the Peninsula. New mines are the most likely short-term possibility in this regard, though they historically offer limited equity to Indigenous groups.85 The second fix, favored by Pearson, is that remote residents should “orbit” between their country and sites of economic and educational opportunity.86 Often presented as a researched solution,87 programs have recently been established to encourage “orbiting” even though there is no

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 This idea is strongly informed by the work of Ghassan Hage. See: “What Is a Critical Anthropology of Migration?,” in Contemporary Cultures and Societies Seminar Series (Melbourne: University of Melbourne School of Social and Political Sciences, 2014). 83  See: Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture, 2nd ed. (Oakleigh, Vic.: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 84  Pearson 2009, 72. 85  Timothy Neale, “‘A Substantial Piece in Life’: Viabilities, Realities and Given Futures at the Wild Rivers Inquiries,” Australian Humanities Review 53 (2012). 86  E.g. Noel Pearson, “A People’s Survival,” The Australian, October 3, 2009; “Walking in Two Worlds,” The Australian, October 28, 2006. 87  Patricia Karvelas, “Less Than One in Five Indigenous Youth in Work and Study,” ibid., 8 April 2014.

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evidence regarding its effects or whether people will return.88 Logically, at least, “orbiting” is founded on a contradiction, as it implies that people leaving to engage with the “real economy” would have no “real” reason to return to the Peninsula in its “unreal” state.89 In the meantime, culpability for a lack of change in Indigenous well-being is understood, increasingly, as belonging to those with a “right to take responsibility.” Trustees, Li suggests, are defined by their claims to knowledge, claims which require processes to render the targets of reform technically knowable and governable. It is a process animated not simply by a “will to improve” but, as Heron suggests in his reading of Agamben and Foucault, by “the ungovernable.” This inspiration, which put governmentality in motion, does not diminish with time or effort.90 Life continues to remain ungovernable, evading perfect management, while management, in practice, continues to remain animated by its original problem, producing novel “accidents.” In settler colonial states, this can be thought through in relation to the governance of Indigenous peoples, whose very existence puts in question the constitutional basis of a settler order.91 Activated by the task of governing “prior” peoples, the settler order deploys “theoretical and empirical tools that classify, serialize, and regulate collectivities,”92 engendering these collectivities in unpredictable ways and rendering their subjection to a new governing order. Dispossession by the state is forgotten, as Indigenous people are now (and ever) re-remembered as dependents, their dependence being “a function of natural facts, pre-political or apolitical conditions.”93 Enamored of the fantasy of perfect governmentality, the settler order goes in search of better “solutions,” sometimes delegating functions to Indigenous trustees. It is a productive machine, to use Kowal’s metaphor, in the sense that it reproduces itself and produces new and finer “surfaces” to act upon.94 In his 1978–79 lectures, Foucault points out that it is contradictory to conceptualize economically rationalist subjectivity as something that might be

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 Burke is one of the few to attempt an ethnography of an “orbiting” group (See: “Indigenous Diaspora and the Prospects for Cosmopolitan ‘Orbiting’: The Warlpiri Case,” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 14, no. 4 (2013). 89  There is, of course, a third possible approach, which is to grant Indigenous people proprietary rights to their traditional resources, though this remains politically intolerable in Australia. 90  Nicholas Heron, “The Ungovernable,” Angelaki 16, no. 2 (2011). 91  Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a White Postcolonizing Society,” in Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Miration, ed. Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castada, Ann-Marie Fortier, Mimi Sheller. (London: Bloomsbury, 2003). 92  Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 81. 93  Rifkin 2009. 94  For Australian examples, see: Lea 2008; Kowal 2011.

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elicited or fostered by the state.95 How could it hope to teach self-interest to the self-interested? Nonetheless, as Foucault also notes, this does not prevent states from imagining that those who appear less perfectly governable might be improved through the right apparatus: the right incentives, the right coercions, and so on. What this eliminates is the possibility that the objects of governance are already acting in their self-interest. In his analysis of Pearson’s work, anthropologist David F. Martin has pointed out exactly this occlusion, noting that his social models do not marry with those in the Peninsula and are unable to contemplate subjective assemblies where serving “self-interest” may amount to capital disbursement or a disinterest in full-time employment.96 What if kinship obligations, resource sharing, and apathy to state authority are, potentially, self-interested investments in the everyday civic life of discrete Indigenous communities? Such objections have not troubled the moral and analytical investments of Pearson and others in the liberal discourse of homo œconomicus, continuing to produce various— and often quite different—types of what Martin labels “magical” or alchemical thinking. What unites Pearson and more conservative policy specialists, Martin suggests, is their tendency to abstract situations from their historical complexity and propose, in turn, that they would be transfigured through one new policy or one almighty and novel actor.97 The twin to this governmental dream is the reality of the recent policy interventions in Cape York Peninsula, where the result has been an institutionally dense administrative order of rolling reform. Its effects, like its initiatives, are increasingly difficult to isolate, as it has transformed from an explicitly political project adorned in the rhetoric of empowerment into a depoliticized administration. What it reveals is the extent to which the question of Indigenous empowerment in Australia has been increasingly displaced by the question of technical management, a dynamic parallel to the displacement of the matter of collective rights by the matter of economic integration. The Howard administration project of “mainstreaming” is expressed now in the workings of the Indigenous governance machine and, at a political level, by the minimization of the potential for any greater recognition of Indigenous political authority or autonomy by the settler government, let alone the creation of an Indigenous-directed governing body within that government. Pearson represents a singular case within this present moment, having shaped and been shaped by its imperatives and models, though the acquisition of influence has involved the forfeiting of Indigenous politics beyond the settler regime. On the one hand, it is apparent that certain kinds of appeal to or against the state become impossible from this position. On the other, it is also clear that whether or not, in his terms, Indigenous people “choose lives they have reason to value,” the governance machine will not cease to act. 95

 Foucault 2008, 270.  David Martin 2001. 97  “Political Alchemy and the Magical Transformation of Aboriginal Society,” in Ethnography & the Production of Anthropological Knowledge: Essays in Honour of Nicolas Peterson, ed. Yasmine Musharbash and Marcus Barber (Canberra, ACT: ANU EPress, 2011). 96

Chapter 2

Postcolonial Security, Development, and Biopolitics: Targeting Women’s Lives in Solomon Islands Anita Lacey

Introduction In many putatively postcolonial nation spaces, populations are formed and targeted in the name of development as a governable mass. The ensuing gendering of such analysis reduces gender to an object of governance. In the case of contemporary development programs in Solomon Islands, women are governed by development organizations as though their gender and their specifically gendered lives do not exist or matter, except for when and if their gender defines them as victims; as victims, for example, of violence and/or of so-deemed economic underdevelopment, or as undiscovered leaders. This essay seeks to examine this diffuse governmentality of life and the imminent threat of (violent) death in the postcolonial context. Women are governed biopolitically, according to rationalities of leadership, entrepreneurialism, responsibilization, and as peacemakers. This postcolonial biopolitical governmentality is demonstrated through analysis of the Australian development aid program to Solomon Islands. Development aid donors, local government, and networks of non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations engage in a myriad of interwoven governance practices that concurrently stress advanced liberalism’s extension of formal market relationships and relationship orientations in all spheres of life and exercise power over individual and collective life itself. This is a Foucauldian reading of biopolitics as an effect of power/knowledge and the discipline, biopolitics, racism triplet.1 While such governmentalities are globally diffuse, including in postcolonial contexts, I make use of a case study approach in order to better illuminate the nature of postcolonial governmentalities, and their key local particularities. I also explore the ways in which notions of development and security act as rationalities and programs of government.

1  Mathew Coleman and Kevin Grove, “Biopolitics, Biopower, and the Return of Sovereignty,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009): 505.

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It is vital at this point to acknowledge some limitations to the ensuing analysis, and to the methodological set employed. This analysis of the biopolitical governance of Solomon Islander women’s lives makes use of a number of methodological tools. It draws from fieldwork research in both Honiara, the capital of Solomon Islands, and Munda, in the Western Province of Solomon Islands, and examines development aid projects and interventions focused on gender and economic livelihoods as well as potential resistances to these. Field interviews were conducted in Solomon Islands with personnel from a range of local and international development and security organizations and I employ discourse analysis of publications from these organizations. The analysis does not attempt to draw on or provide an ethnographic account of Solomon Islander women’s own experiences of biopolitical governance of their lives, an account that I hope will be possible in the future. Instead, it is an unearthing, to use the language of Michel Foucault, of technologies of governance of a population.2 A second limitation of this analysis is the danger of providing a totalizing account. While I write of the lives of Solomon Islanders and Solomon Islander women it is imperative to acknowledge that clearly not all Solomon Islanders live the same experience. This account of their lives and the biopolitical governance of their lives, and deaths, is situated in the idea of governance through the formation of a singular population, in this case, that of Solomon Islander women, despite their many differences. This essay is thus necessarily a partial account, but one that can perhaps be related to peoples’ experiences of postcolonial biopolitical development governance in other sites. Contemporary development policy in Solomon Islands reveals the creation and governance of a falsely singular, “othered,” homogenous population in need.3 It is made visible by explicit use of critical development and postdevelopment scholarship, as well as feminist international relations and feminist development studies scholarship. Vitally, this consideration is, however, also shaped by postcolonial and governmentality scholarship.4 I continue to work explicitly  Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction, tr. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978). 3  Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. M. Senellart, tr. G. Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Chandra T. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,”’ boundary 2 12/13, no. 3 (1984): 333–58. “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles,” Signs 28, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 499–535. 4  See, for example, Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995; Foucault 1978; Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. M. Bertani and A. Fontana, tr. D. Macey (New York: Picador, 2003); Barry Hindess, “Citizenship and Empire,” in Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World, ed. T. Blom Hansen and F. Stepputalt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 241–56; Jonathan Xavier Inda, Anthropologies of Modernity: 2

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in a postcolonial framework, recognizing that so much thinking in terms of women and politics, of feminisms, and of development has been devoid of explicit considerations of race.5 Moreover, as I seek to demonstrate, race and difference are explicitly absent forthright frameworks or considerations in the governmentalities of development and security, despite populations in such postcolonial contexts as Solomon Islands being governed according to race and the continuation of racialized politics and practices of colonial rule. In this piece, I pursue McWhorter’s idea of a genealogy-based politics in order to understand the biopolitical governmentalities of contemporary development.6 Such a politics allows for simultaneous consideration of the colonial present and past, while it also allows for recognition of the ways in which power operates in a networked fashion.7 A Postcolonial State Solomon Islands gained independence from Britain in a relatively peaceful process in 1978 but has since experienced sporadic political tensions.8 This turmoil has arisen over access to resources, intense poverty and inequality, growing urban populations, and displacement from traditional lands and their matriarchal, tribal ownership.9 The period between 1998 and 2003 saw widespread conflict, which Foucault, Governmentality and Life Politics (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); U. Kalpagam, “Colonial Governmentality and the ‘Economy,’” Economy and Society 29, no. 3 (2000): 418–38; Wendy Larner and William Walters, Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge, 2006); Tania Murray Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development and the Practice of Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); WilliamWalters, Governmentality: Critical Encounters (London: Routledge, 2012). 5  Mohanty 1984; Sarah C. White, “The ‘Gender Lens’: A Racial Blinder?” in The Women, Gender and Development Reader, 2nd Edition, ed. N. Visvanathan, L. Duggan, N. Wiegersma, and L. Nisonoff (London: Zed Books, 2011), 95–8. 6  Ladelle McWhorter, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009). 7  Foucault 1978, 92–3. 8  Glenn Banks, “Understanding Resource Conflicts in Papua New Guinea,” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 49, no. 1 (2008): 23–34; Sinclair Dinnen, “A Comment on State-building in Solomon Islands,” Journal of Pacific History 42, no. 2 (2007): 255–63; Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka, “Beyond Ethnicity: The Political Economy of the Guadalcanal Crisis in Solomon Islands,” State Society and Governance in Melanesia Working Paper 01/1, State Society and Governance in Melanesia Project (Canberra: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 2001), 1–24. 9  Judith Bennett, “Roots of Conflict in Solomon Islands: Though Much is Taken, Much Abides: Legacies of Tradition and Colonialism,” State Society and Governance in Melanesia Discussion Paper 02/5, State Society and Governance in Melanesia Project (Canberra: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 2002), 1–16.

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Solomon Islanders call “the troubles” or “the tensions.”10 Long-standing hostilities over land ownership had culminated in violent uprisings, as migration from the largest island, Malaita, to the most populous, Guadalcanal, increased rapidly. Violent insurgencies, counter-insurgencies, and a coup, resulting in deaths, displacement, and loss of livelihoods and property occurred throughout the fiveyear period.11 In the light of the tensions or troubles,12 the Solomon Islands government asked for outside assistance. In October 2000, parties signed a peace deal that the Australian government helped to broker. But lawlessness continued, and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) was deployed in July 2003. Australia and New Zealand established the military response, with other Pacific states joining later.13 Its original mandate was to restore law and order,14 and the mission remains in place today, albeit with a smaller presence.15 The particular effects of the civil conflict, or tensions, on women’s lives were often publicly ignored and Amnesty International reported in 2004 the sense of collective frustration felt by survivors of rape and other forms of violence during the conflict that perpetrators had not been brought to justice. Women were instrumental in establishing peace talks to end the tensions and campaigned vehemently for a truth and reconciliation process that would, among other things, recognize and address that gender-based violence against women and girls had been a feature of the tensions.16 Gender-based violence is not, however, limited  Clive Moore, Happy Isles in Crisis: The Historical Causes for a Failing State in Solomon Islands, 1998–2004. (Canberra: Asia Pacific Press, 2004). 11  Jon Fraenkel, The Manipulation of Custom: From Uprising to Intervention in the Solomon Islands (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2004). See also, Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “Final Report: Confronting the Truth for a Better Solomon Islands,” unpublished document, 2012. 12  See Fraenkel 2004 and Moore 2004 13  Moore 2004, 20–24, and Moore, “External Intervention: The Solomon Islands beyond RAMSI,” in Security and Development in the Pacific Islands: Social Resilience in Emerging States, ed. M.A. Brown (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2007), 169–96. 14  Moore 2007, 131. See also Sam Alasia, “Rainbows across the Mountains: The First Post-RAMSI General Elections in Solomon Islands, April 2006, and the Policies of the Second Sogavare Government,” Journal of Pacific History 42, no. 2 (2007): 165–86; RAMSI, “RAMSI’s Mandate,” 2008. Available at www.ramsi.org/node/6 (accessed 16 July 2008). 15  RAMSI, “RAMSI’s Future: Transition,” 2013b. Available at http://www.ramsi.org/ ramsis-future/transition.html (accessed 25 February 2013). 16  Amnesty International (AI), “Solomon Islands: Women Confronting Violence,” 2004. Available at http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ASA43/001/2004/en/f9274312d581–11dd-bb24–1fb85fe8fa05/asa430012004en.pdf (accessed 2 August 2006). See also Jennifer Corrin, “Ples Bilong Mere: Law, Gender and Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands,” Feminist Legal Studies 16, no. 2 (2008): 169–94; Dalcy Tovosia Paina, “Peacemaking in Solomon Islands: The Experience of the Guadalcanal Women for Peace Movement,” Development Bulletin 53 (2000): 47–8; Alice Aruhe’eta Pollard, “Resolving Conflict in the 10

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to the time of the conflict and international actors argue that Solomon Islands has one of the world’s highest rates of violence against women.17 As will be seen in the analysis of the current AusAID program, violence against women features largely in the postcolonial biopolitical governmentalities deployed in Solomon Islands. RAMSI’s presence and its actions in shadowing government agencies and personnel, providing physical security, and reforming economic, bureaucratic, and judicial governance have, I argue, further incorporated both the people and state into the new global aid regime. The relative peace that it has helped create has enabled a wide range of regional and international agencies to establish themselves in Solomon Islands.18 Thus, Solomon Islands represents a pattern of intervention Duffield labels as “governance states.”19 In these so-termed “fragile,” sovereign, postcolonial states, international development organizations and donors operate with the national government and its people through complex development-aid arrangements.20 The linking of security and development has made residents rather than the state the designated site of security, with social bodies as sites of intervention, monitoring, and securitization. Nation-states in the South such as Solomon Islands are losing relevance, except as sites for reform or reconstruction within this new public-private security framework.21 Donor agencies take little notice of local particularities, except as sites for reform.22

Solomon Islands: The Women for Peace Approach,” Development Bulletin 53 (2000): 44–6; Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission 2012. 17  AusAID, “Solomon Islands Country Report, Stop Violence: Responding to Violence against Women in Melanesia and East Timor. Australia’s Response to the ODE Report,” 2008. Available at www.ausaid.gov.au/Publications/Documents/ResVAW.pdf‎ (accessed 23 April 2013). Amnesty International (AI), “Solomon Islands: End Impunity Through Universal Jurisdiction,” 2009. Available at http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/ asset/ASA43/002/2009/en/672ab71d-4996–4216–913d-a9bf3999563b/asa430022009en. pdf (Accessed 1 October 2014). Amnesty International (AI), “Solomon Islands: Amnesty International welcomes commitment to criminalize violence against women, including spousal rape, and urges renewed action to ensure women’s freedom from violence in informal settlements,” 2011. Available at http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ ASA43/002/2011/en/20ed06b8-a1a6–47a9-beee-6cc2a3598ed7/asa430022011en.pdf (Accessed 1 October 2014). 18  No gross data exist on flows of development aid to Solomon Islands. 19  Mark Duffield, “Global Civil War: The Non-insured, International Containment and Post-interventionary Society,” Journal of Refugee Studies 21, no. 2 (2008): 145–65. 20  Duffield 2008. 21  Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams, Security Beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Mark Duffield,Development, Security and Unending War (London: Polity, 2007). 22  Caroline Hughes and Vanessa Pupavac, “Framing Post-Conflict Societies: International Pathologisation of Cambodia and the Post-Yugoslav States,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 6 (2005): 873–89.

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Biopolitics and Exception Mitchell Dean’s exploration of exceptionalism in liberal governance gives us insight into such interventions. Agents of governance can call on security crises and create states of emergency, or moments of exception,23 which can be “formally declared or simply announced by employing a specific language.”24 Dean, in contrast, thinks these moments increasingly common and even continuous, rather than momentary, covering “not only declared or undeclared emergencies but also the entire mass of exceptions to what are construed as the normal forms of life in contemporary liberal democracy.”25 Populations, including women in Solomon Islands, become biopolitical subjects of governance in the name of development and its contemporary complement, security, and, inversely, insecurity. Increasingly, development is reinvented by both development and security actors as being co-dependent on security, and vice versa.26 This relationship facilitates biopolitical governmentalities that target the very essence of the ways in which people engage in their own life and death, and in which their lives and deaths are governed.27 Agamben sees the exercise of biopolitical power not only through the capacity of life, but also via the threat of death.28 Death looms as readily as life is promised by development aid and poverty reduction in Solomon Islands.29 Dillon and Reid write of “global biopolitics” and the role of threat and violence in liberal governance;30 the threat of a return to pre2003 violence is used to justify RAMSI’s ongoing role in Solomon Islands as well as the broader, penetrating biopolitical governmentalities in the name of security and development. The lives of Solomon Island women are in part governed by a politics of ongoing exception, a politics that calls on the threat of insecurity and imminent death. I deliberately write in part in recognition of the way in which power 23  Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, tr. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 24  Dean Mitchell, Governing Societies: Political Perspectives On Domestic And International Rule (New York: McGraw-Hill International, 2007), 185. 25  Mitchell 2007, 188. 26  Mark Duffield, “The Liberal Way of Development and the Development-Security Impasse: Exploring the Global Life-chance Divide,” Security Dialogue 41, no. 1 (2010): 53–76. 27  Foucault 2003. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 28  Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 29  Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15 (Winter 2003): 11–40. Sheila Nair, “Sovereignty, Security and the Exception: Towards Situating Postcolonial ‘homo sacer,’” in Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political Theory, ed. G. Delanty and S.P. Turner (Milton Park, UK: Routledge, 2011), 386–94. 30  Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, “Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30, no. 1 (2001): 44–66.

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operates, recognizing that such governmentalities are not totalizing in their reach or effects and that women in Solomon Islands can and do negotiate, resist, and enact alternatives to and with these governmentalities.31 Broadly, the politics of exception that has been particularly virulent since the 2003 deployment of RAMSI has, nevertheless, enabled a postcolonial governmentality of Solomon Island women’s lives that can render them as a singular population. Christine Sylvester’s stick figures of development, drawing from Agamben’s notion of bare life, are useful in identifying these totalizing conceptions.32 Sylvester argues that these stick figures are central to development itself, given that it “often operates on the basis of an impoverished image of the ‘other’ as the development recipient.”33 For development, the ultimate other are women, who are rendered as stick figures— unidimensional, desiring and perhaps worthy of only basic needs and rights, their humanity reduced to “matters of reproduction, literacy, health, household, and the power relations of men and donors.”34 My use of the stick figure analogy does not seek to trivialize these issues or the lives of the women themselves; rather, I seek to expose the powerful, limiting way that postcolonial biopolitical governmentalities in Solomon Islander women’s lives have rendered them for much of the international security and development policy community as without individual characteristics, without unique and diverse stories or experiences, and without futures of their own determining and making. This diminution of agency is dependent on racialized otherness, where racism itself should be understood as a political technology of colonial and postcolonial governance that renders obsolete distinctiveness, individual identity, and agency.35 Solomon Islander women have become a singular population to be governed and “improved” according to their gender and to three key ideas: women’s untapped market potential; women as victims of violence; and women as leaders. These rationalities of the governance of women’s lives in Solomon Islands can be seen in operation in a tightly networked regime of international, regional, and local development aid. Indeed, it is difficult and perhaps arbitrary to hone in on one of this regime’s actors. A full genealogy of the impacts of this global aid regime on women’s lives is, however, beyond the scope of this chapter, and perhaps, while highly desirable, impossible, given the intricacies of networked

 Anita Lacey, “Gender and Sustainable Livelihoods in Urban Honiara,” in Women Reclaiming Sustainable Livelihoods: Spaces Gained, Spaces Lost, ed. W. Harcourt (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 238–56. 32  “Christine Sylvester: Personal Page, Lund University, Department of Political Science,” 2010. Available at http://www.svet.lu.se/Dynamic/personal_page/personal_ homepage.lasso?-token.kod=CSY&-token.language=eng (accessed 20 November 2011). 33  Christine Sylvester, “Development Studies and Postcolonial Studies: Disparate Tales of the ‘Third World,’” Third World Quarterly 20, no. 4 (1999): 703–21. Sylvester 2010. 34  Sylvester 2010. 35  Barnor Hesse, “Im/plausible Deniability: Racism’s Conceptual Double Bind,” Social Identities 10, no. 1 (2004): 9–29. 31

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relationships as well as their scale and geographic reach in the remote archipelago.36 I draw on the Australian aid agency’s, AusAID’s, own accounts of the Australian development aid program as a prime example of these rationalities of postcolonial biopolitical governmentality in effect, though I would contend that aspects of these governmental rationalities are evidenced throughout the new global aid regime in Solomon Islands.37 Australia is the largest single bilateral donor of aid to Solomon Islands and the presence of Australian aid,38 and Australian government and non-government personnel, is palpable in Solomon Islands, just as the wider new global aid regime is physically tangible there. It is, as a white, first-generation Australian,39 privileged academic, facing a difficult or problematic reminder of Australia’s colonial role in the Pacific, linked to that of Britain, and an ongoing one today that I enter this space as a researcher. AusAID and Postcolonial Biopolitical Governmentality of Solomon Island Women’s Lives In 2012–13, the Federal Australian Government directed over $100 million AUD in bilateral aid and through the RAMSI intervention to Solomon Islands, with an additional $120 million AUD given through Solomon Islands government departments, regional and international funding obligations, and volunteer schemes.40 Moreover, Solomon Islands will be the target of additional aid specifically directed towards gender programs as part of the Australian Federal Government’s 2012 announcement of the 10-year $320 million AUD Pacific-wide Pacific Women Shaping Pacific Development initiative that aims “to help improve the political, economic and social opportunities of Pacific women.”41 This aid reflects a concerted increase in the aid program since RAMSI’s intervention, and an ongoing focus with over $160 million budgeted in aid for Solomon Islands over the next two years.42 AusAID’s online country report features a profile of development aid programs for women in Solomon Islands. Indeed, if one looks online into the activities of AusAID in Solomon Islands, one is immediately struck by the focus on women, with an AusAID homepage feature on “Real women, real stories: 36

 The Solomon Islands is a sparsely populated country on the whole, with a total population of approximately 515,870 people living across a stretched archipelago of 9,000 islands and islets in the western Pacific. 37  Suzan Ilcan and Anita Lacey, Governing the Poor: Exercises of Poverty Reduction, Practices of Global Aid (Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). 38  AusAID, “Solomon Islands Overview: How We Are Helping,” 2013b. 39  Albeit an Australian who does not reside in Australia and has not done so for over 10 years. 40  AusAID 2013b. 41  AusAID 2013b. 42  AusAID 2014. “Where We Give Aid: Solomon Islands.” Available at http://aid.dfat. gov.au/countries/pacific/solomon-islands/Pages/default.aspx (accessed 8 August 2014).

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women in Solomon Islands making a difference.”43 The simple message from this broad focus and this feature is that AusAID is engaged with women’s issues in post-conflict Solomon Islands. Four success stories are provided, accompanied by photographs of smiling women. These success stories are worthy of focus, as they reveal the broad postcolonial biopolitical governmentalities of the AusAID program, of development in Solomon Islands, and of women’s lives there. The first story features Ethel Sigimanu, holding ginger flowers at the Honiara Central Market, and the story proclaims that “the voices of women in Solomon Islands are being heard.”44 Sigimanu’s role as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Women, Youth and Children’s Affairs is outlined. This ministry had been abolished during the period of the tensions and reformed in 2007. Sigimanu has been in the post since then and recognizes the ongoing challenge of bringing about positive changes to gender equality in the country.45 AusAID’s proclamation of success seems at odds with Sigimanu’s own words, warning “we are dealing with complex and very entrenched views and attitudes, so while we are making progress, it will take time and a strong commitment.”46 The account of Sigimanu’s work in the ministry and the ministry’s role stresses national leadership as a central focus and the need for ongoing building of leadership on issues “such as violence against women and the low participation of women in decision-making roles.”47 Sigimanu herself recognizes the need to work with men as part of any solution to a culture of violence in the community and also importantly argues that “change is not about a lone woman in parliament. Change is about having a critical mass of women who by nature of being females, can bring different ideas, experiences and values to decision-making.”48 The overall impression of the account, however, is that singular women in powerful, formal (governmental) leadership roles can bring about widespread societal change and that all other women, peaceable by virtue of their gender, are waiting to become leaders. This formal stress on women taking leadership roles is entrenched in security and developmental rationalities in Solomon Islands. Some programs have been implemented to help facilitate women taking formal leadership positions, such as RAMSI’s Women in Government Strategy49 whereby women undertake 43  AusAID, “Real Women, Real Stories: Women in Solomon Islands Making a Difference,” 2013a. Available at http://www.ausaid.gov.au/countries/pacific/solomonislands/Pages/pif-case-studies.aspx (accessed 15 February 2013). 44  AusAID 2013a. 45  AusAID 2013a. 46  AusAID 2013a. 47  AusAID 2013a. 48  AusAID 2013a. 49  RAMSI, “Launch of the Solomon Islands Women in Government Strategy,” 2007. Available at www.ramsi.org/Media/docs/071109-Special-Coordinator-Tim-George--Women-in-Government-Strategy-launch-35e579df-9ab1–4336-a56f-fec661e26d98–0.pdf (accessed 16 July 2008). RAMSI, “Women in Government,” 2013c. Available at www. ramsi.org/our-work/machinery-of-government/women-in-government.html (accessed 25 February 2013).

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leadership training, a database of women working in leadership positions in the community, government, and industry sectors has been created, and an account of the experiences and life stories of women in leadership positions has been collated and published.50 In spite of these continuing efforts, formal leadership positions remain overwhelmingly dominated by men and, argues Atenasi AtaWasuka, “Solomon Islands’ traditional belief in ‘big man’ leadership also means that leadership in many communities is seen as exclusively a male domain.”51 Women played an active role in peace work during the tensions period.52 This role and women’s activities as peacemakers and negotiators both traditionally and contemporarily received little official recognition, however, at the time of the official peace negotiations or in accounts of the formal peace process and RAMSI intervention.53 This role for women as peacemakers is concurrent to the widespread reporting of women as victims of violence, both during the conflict and since, and in, as discussed, their role as peacemakers, rendering women as “suffering a ‘double invisibility’ as victims of the conflict and as potential peaceworkers restoring human rights and calm to their country.”54 AusAID’s account of leadership is a simplistic one of both an individual woman’s, Sigimanu’s, complex political and social roles and also of the challenges facing women and Solomon Islands’ communities more broadly in combating such diverse issues as violence against women and under-representation of women in formal political positions.55 A counter-argument might be that this snippet is only that, a snapshot or highlight of a success story that, by featuring Sigimanu, puts flesh on the stick figures of Solomon Islands women as development subjects. I argue, in contrast, that this serves only to highlight the anonymity and homogeneity of all other women in Solomon Islands, who are the passive objects of these highlighted “success” stories. If the account of Sigimanu is one of elite-level leadership, the next feature from the AusAID website is that of the potential for “bottom up” change, but  Alice Aruhe’eta Pollard and Marilyn J. Waring, eds., Being the First: Storis Blong Oloketa Mere Lo Solomon Aelan (Auckland: Pacific Media Centre, AUT University, 2009). 51  RAMSI, “Atenasi Ata-Wasuka: Leader in Waiting?” 2013a. Available at www. ramsi.org/Media/docs/Ramsi-IB-10f-4e14–425f-9639-b4b86b31d3cc-0.pdf (accessed 18 March 2013). 52  Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka, “A Weak State and the Solomon Islands Peace Process,” East West Center Working Papers, Pacific Islands Development Series No 14 (Hawaii: East West Center, 2002); Pollard 2000. 53  John Braithwaite, Sinclair Dinnen, Matthew Allen, Valerie Braithwaite, and Hilary Charlesworth, Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2011), 31. 54  Amnesty International 2004, 3. 55  B.K. Greener, W.J. Fish, and K. Tekulu, “Peacebuilding, Gender and Policing in Solomon Islands,” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 52, no. 1 (2011): 17–28; Heather Wallace, “Paddling the Canoe on One Side: Women in Decision-making in Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands,” Development 54, no. 4 (2011): 505–13. 50

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again stressing women as leaders. It is an account of former RAMSI-award winner, Beverly Komasi, who established a school in 2004 in a Honiara squatter settlement at Burns Creek. It is a story of simplified change, of transformation, of starting an open-air classroom under a mango tree and forming a school with “more than 600 students, six classes and eight teachers … . As well as improving children’s opportunities, Mrs Komasi is also proving that women leaders can influence change at all levels, one school and one community at a time.”56 The account of Komasi’s Burns Creek School implies to the reader that such transformation is possible in any community across the country, given the existence of an individual like Komasi. Again, my intention is not to deride the extraordinary success of Komasi and the school, nor to take away from the individual and collective hard work behind this story of success. Indeed, it is perhaps the lack of attention to that hard work that I would draw attention to, combined with a lack of attention to structural issues, such as low levels of public infrastructure funding, low participation rates, and poor employment conditions for teachers.57 In spite of this lack of broader context, the role of the individual as leader is emphasized by Komasi herself in the account given, when she argues: Everybody is born a leader and we are all children of Solomon Islands. I wanted to stop complaining and blaming the leaders at the top and get up and do something good by building this school … I want to raise good leaders for Solomon Islands. That is my way of contributing to building my nation.58

Komasi indicates that she saw it as her responsibility to “do something,” rather than rely on the state. This is a pertinent echo of the extent of the governmental rationale of responsibilization underlying new global aid regime interventions in Solomon Islands.59 It also tells nothing of the difficulties encountered by countless parents and caregivers in Solomon Islands in paying children’s school uniforms costs, costs which act as a de facto school fee.60 These costs, which also extend to equipment costs, are persistent and continue despite efforts by donors, including AusAID, to remove school fees, a major barrier to school attendance. Responsibilization resonates in the webpage’s next profile, entitled “Women in business the road to success.”61 It is an account of business mentoring, 56

 AusAID 2013a.  Patricia Rodie, “The Perceptions of Beginning Secondary Teachers about their Professional Learning Experiences in the Solomon Islands Context” (PhD Thesis, University of Waikato, 2011). Available at http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/handle/10289/5976 (accessed 25 February 2013); UNESCO, “Education (All Levels) Profile: Solomon Islands,” 2012. Available at http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/TableViewer/document. aspx?ReportId=121&IF_Language=eng&BR_Country=900&BR_Region=40515 (accessed 15 January 2014). 58  AusAID 2013a. 59  Ilcan and Lacey 2011. 60  Interviews with the author 2007, 2009, 2013. 61  AusAID 2013a. 57

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which promises a communal approach to “women’s leadership and economic empowerment,”62 and profiles Julie Haro, President of the Solomon Islands Women in Business Association. Haro echoes Sigimanu, calling for greater representation, leadership, and economic empowerment for women. Again, Haro is a success story: she established a real estate business in 2009 and now runs four different companies with 12 staff members. She argues that women “need to be empowered economically as ‘they are often the ones making the money in a family but lack the decision-making power about how to spend the money.’”63 Her sentiments about the need for structural changes to gender power relations are over-simplified, however, by the presentation of her story; rather than focusing on this message of structural change, the account presents Haro as one woman who individually succeeded. It is a business-oriented success that is perhaps neither desirable nor achievable for a majority of Solomon Island women, who live rurally and according to a subsistence lifestyle.64 Haro herself recognizes that there would need to be cultural changes, given the expectation that “as a wife and a mother, you are expected to stay at home.”65 The idea that women simply stay at home undervalues their contributions to work in the home garden, growing and gathering essential food and firewood, their work as caregivers, and their work exchanging food at local marketplaces.66 The account provides little in the way of reflection on how to overcome structural inequalities, in spite of Haro’s own words recognizing their role in shaping women’s lives. The simplistic header calls for women to be responsibilized entrepreneurs, in line with growing global calls for tapping into women’s untapped economic potential,67 a sentiment echoed in AusAID’s framework for gender programs in the Pacific, Pacific Women Shaping Pacific Development 2012–2022.68 This reflects wider biopolitical governmental rationalities concerning women and development, whereby interventions, albeit consultative ones, aim to transform women from the global South into rational and autonomous individuals who are in control of both their environment and futures, through a wholesale adoption of scientific

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 AusAID 2013a.  AusAID 2013a. 64  Lacey 2012. 65  AusAID 2013a. 66  Interview with the author 2013. 67  This language of a vast population of women entrepreneurs waiting to be brought into the formal market and to have their economic potential realized is widespread in consultancy and some business and academic circles. See, for example, Tatli et al., “An Unrequited Affinity between Talent Shortages and Untapped Female Potential: The Relevance of Gender Quotas for Talent Management in High Growth Potential Economies of the Asia Pacific Region.” International Business Review 22, no. 3 (2012): 539–53. 68  AusAID, “Delivery Strategy: Pacific Women Shaping Pacific Development 2012– 2022,” 2012a. 63

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knowledge and technological innovations, including monetarized and marketoriented ones.69 The fourth and final vignette from the AusAID Solomon Islands country profile brings to the fore by now familiar themes of an individual’s capacity for change, as well as the promotion of individual leadership as a means of solving wider issues of gender inequality, economic empowerment, and ending violence. This final account is that of Emma Garo, and features a photograph of Garo standing beside the sign of the Central Magistrate’s Court. Garo is Acting Deputy Chief Magistrate and the story tells of her ambition to be the first Solomon Islands woman to be appointed to the High Court. This ambition is set alongside an account of the ways in which her role in the Magistrate’s Court “means she sees firsthand [sic] the devastation caused by domestic violence in Solomon Islands, and the impact on families across the country.”70 Garo offers a number of potential solutions to the issue of violence against women in Solomon Islands, including the need for women to “unite to protect each other,” for “our mothers and sisters to make a stand,” and for chiefs “to show courage and leadership to protect their wives, daughters, sisters and aunts,” but also states that “the media has an important role to inform men and women alike, to educate and to influence change.”71 This is seemingly a relatively holistic account of ways of tackling violence against women in Solomon Islands. It does not pay heed, however, to the roles played by the legacies of colonial rule or economic power relations in violence. Perhaps this is too much to ask for a relatively brief insight into the issue. What is of particular note is the championing again of one woman’s role, in this case in the fight against violence against women. Indeed, the webpage’s four stories end with the claim that “These women are the drivers of change for gender equality in Solomon Islands.”72 This is a strident individualization of women’s, and communities’, needs and desires. The four stories of four remarkable women present images of women who have made it, according to the donor’s and the minority world’s view, reflective of a desire to mirror these world views in the lives of others, in this case Solomon Island women as a singular, homogenous population of simple stick figure individuals. These four stories of transformation and success are women who hold formal employment positions, who live at least some of their time in urban centers, and who are depicted as conforming to minority world ideas of women’s success. They are idealized postcolonial subjects. In reality, however, there is no singular version of how women in Solomon Islands experience life; their relationships to employment, work and labor, to their families and their tribes and to the wider 69  Nilanjana Chaterjee and Nancy E. Riley, “Planning an Indian Modernity: The Gendered Politics of Fertility Control,” Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26 (2001): 811–45. 70  AusAID 2013a. 71  AusAID 2013a. 72  AusAID 2013a.

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wantok (“one talk”) or ethnic group, to land, food acquisition, shelter, formal and informal employment are complex and are not at all conveyed in this summation of women’s lives and their contributions to life in Solomon Islands. The biopolitical governmentality of women’s lives according to a rationality of perpetual threat of male-perpetrated violence is pervasive in the Australian Federal Government’s campaigning around the flagship AusAID program Pacific Women Shaping Pacific Development 2012–2022.73 In what is termed an Infographic brochure for the program, for example, domestic violence is highlighted as potentially leading to disability, which can affect women’s abilities to fully participate in social, political, and economic life.74 What’s more, this simplistic equation goes on to argue, “women who are free from violence contribute to economic growth, have better health outcomes, gain more leadership and education opportunities.”75 In a diagrammatic representation of women’s stick figure lives, women are rendered as victims of violence, under-represented in national parliaments, and unable to be full economic subjects due to violence and exclusion from employment opportunities. They are flat stick figures, without any intersecting dimensions to their lives, nor with desires or hopes beyond these representations. According to the diagrammatic representation of the program, the solution to these issues would simply bring about greater production and more equitable access to food. Rationalities of biopolitical governance of women as victims of violence, women as potential leaders, and women’s economic potentials inform the AusAID Pacific gender program. A counter-reading of this program’s governmentalities exists, however, and that is that many thousands of women are in effect resisting these rationalities. Women continue to demonstrate alternative rationalities of governance in their daily lives, passively and actively resisting calls to become more entrepreneurial, to become community leaders, for example, and instead live according to their immediate needs and/or desires. This is not a rejection of potential or transformation, but an acknowledgement that women’s lives are far more complex than this postcolonial biopolitical typology would have us believe. Many women’s lives are untouched by aid programs or potentially negatively impacted by them, while other women adapt their participation in aid programs and projects in ways that are perhaps alternate to the original plans, or an extension of them.76 This is a call then to consider the diversity of biopolitical governance of women’s lives in Solomon Islands, as a postcolonial site of intervention, as well as the potential counter-governmentalities that may exist.

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 AusAID 2012a.  AusAID “Women in the Pacific: Challenges and Opportunities,” 2012c. 75  AusAID 2012c. 76  Lacey 2012. 74

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Conclusion This essay has explored the targeting of women for development interventions. Women in such postcolonial sites as Solomon Islands are governed as a singular population, with little regard for difference or diversity. While it is their gender that marks them as a specific and governable population in need of reform, their particular gendered lives seem ignored in the governmentalities enacted. I have examined the ways in which development in a postcolonial state like Solomon Islands facilitates far-reaching interventions in women’s lives. I argue that Solomon Islands is a governance state, whereby the legacy of colonial rule and new forms of colonial intervention have been facilitated by and facilitate ongoing development and security initiatives. These initiatives often conceive of and render postcolonial subjects as stick figures, as anonymized individuals, without flesh or agency. Finally, I call for an approach that would—in Sylvester’s terms— put the flesh back on these stick figures, and in so doing recognize the multiple, intersecting life circumstances and identities that women and men in postcolonialgovernance states embody. I have argued that AusAID’s Pacific Women Shaping Pacific Development initiative for Solomon Islands women has been facilitated by the intervention of RAMSI and the international securitization efforts following a period of civil unrest and violence. The relative peace brought about by the RAMSI intervention has seen a burgeoning of development efforts in Solomon Islands and new governance rationalities. An examination of the AusAID program reveals that three rationalities of governance shape the dominant postcolonial biopolitical governmentalities of women’s lives in Solomon Islands: that the economic potential of women is untapped and essential to their well-being, that women are victims of violence, and that women should be shaped into leaders. Solomon Islands women are made responsible for their success and individual leadership is promoted as a means of solving wider issues of gender inequality, economic empowerment, and ending violence. It is a development aid program that renders diverse women as a singular population, as unidimensional stick figure development “subjects.” Finally, this examination is a powerful reminder of the need to not only put the flesh back on gendered, postcolonial subjects of development, but to also look at the ways in which this is already being done.

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Chapter 3

“Backdoor Entry” to Australia: A Genealogy of (Post)colonial Resentment Maria Elena Indelicato

Introduction In “Colonial Governmentality,” David Scott invites colonial historiographers to investigate the governmental rationalities by which different colonial powers created and maintained their political sovereignties.1 He does so to encourage a historically differentiated understanding of colonialism, and thus the mapping of the specific conditions whereby the colonized could generate “their own varied responses.”2 This invitation simultaneously complements and problematizes Partha Chatterjee’s conceptualization of colonialism as a distinctive form of state power due to the employment of the “rule of colonial difference,” which is the principle by which the colonized are represented as inferior and fundamentally other.3 For Chatterjee, this rule is signified by race, the use of which in British India had increased proportionally to the “rationalisation of administration and the normalisation of the objects of its [British colonial] rule.”4 For Scott, if this is the case, instead of promoting a homogenizing understanding of colonialism, a historically articulated study of the application of this rule would seek to shed light on the specific governmental technologies employed to produce the colonized as “‘raced’ subjectivities.”5 In this regard, this essay undertakes the task of producing such an historical account with but one important exception: Australia never ceased to be a settler colony and, as such, its current political regime cannot qualify as postcolonial. In Settler Colonialism, Lorenzo Veracini argues to distinguish conceptually between settler colonial and colonial formations on the basis of a few but significant structural differences.6 Amongst these differences, for the purposes of this chapter,  David Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” Social Text 43 (Autumn 1995): 191–220, 191–8. 2  Scott 1995, 198. 3  Scott 1995, 196. 4  Scott 1995. 5  Scott 1995, 196–7. 6  Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–15. See also Patrick Wolfe’s definition of settler colonialism which distinguishes between colonial and settler colonial regimes on the basis of their different 1

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the most significant pertains to the bio-political management of populations, the control of which is, according to Veracini, crucial to settler attempts to mark their independence from imperial centers, hence functioning as a marker of “substantive sovereignty.”7 From this perspective, the subjugation of “indigenous colonised and a variety of differently categorised alterities” to the bio-political control of the settlers is as important as it is different.8 Whereas the projected disappearance of each group is desired by the settler population, the technologies employed to achieve this double objective are different: “extermination, expulsion, incarceration, containment and assimilation” for the former and “restriction and selective assimilation” for the latter.9 It is not by chance that Australia became an independent federation by the constitutional mandate “to make laws for the peace, order and good government of the Australian Commonwealth with respect to naturalisation and aliens; the people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any state, for whom it was deemed necessary to make special laws, emigration; and relations of the Commonwealth with the Islands of the Pacific.”10 From this perspective, Veracini regards Chatterjee’s rule of colonial difference applicable to settler colonies insofar as it takes into account the triangular quality of its power relations, according to which it is because, and not in spite, of the dialectical relationship existing between indigenous and exogenous other populations that the settlers established themselves as normative and hegemonic.11 Likewise, Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos have demonstrated that settlers’ authority to “exercise orderly possession and control” over the land and its population has stemmed from the positioning of non-white migrants as “perpetual foreigner” in concomitance to the iterative rendering of Aboriginal populations as non-Australian.12 Within this theoretical framework, this essay investigates resentment as an affective governmental technology employed over time to exercise control on the relation to indigenous populations, which are regarded by the former as “indispensable” to the end of economic exploitation and as “dispensable” by the latter to the end of territorial appropriation: Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1998), 163. 7  Veracini 2010, 12. 8  Veracini 2010. 9  Veracini 2010, 12–13. 10  Maria Giannacopoulos, “Nomophilia and Bia: The Love of Law and the Question of Violence,” Borderlands E-Journal 10, no. 1 (2011): 1–19, 8. The British Parliament unified Australia’s colonial states as a federation with the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act in 1900. The same Act endowed the Australian Federal Parliament with the mandate quoted above. 11  Veracini 2010, 18. 12  Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos, “Racism, Foreigner Communities and the Onto-pathology of White Australian Subjectivity,” in Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004).

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increasing number of “Asian” international students coming to Australia to stay temporarily or permanently on the basis of their representation as “fundamentally other.” Following Sara Ahmed’s theorization of emotions in public discourses, resentment will not be analyzed as an emotion per se but as an effect of the metaphor of “backdoor entry” as employed in discourses regarding the regulation of the entry and stay of “Asian” international students in Australia.13 Moreover, in tracing the history of the uses of this metaphor back to the time preceding the passing of the infamous White Australia Policy in 1901, this essay will illustrate the continuities existing between past and present settler colonial governmental technologies employed to restrict the movement of “undesirable” Asian migrants alongside the pernicious persistence of the fear of territorial invasion and racial dilution in multicultural Australia. The “Back Door” of Australia: “Asian Invasion” and the Colombo Plan In the drastically changed geo-political scenario of the world at the end of the Second World War, white Australia had to carve a new position for itself in the rapidly decolonizing Asia-Pacific region. When China became communist and the West was swept by a flourishing of national and international movements fighting for independence, racial equality, and civil rights,14 it had to abandon any fantasy of political and geographical isolationism and face the reality of a world no longer dominated by the British and other European colonial powers. As part of this realization, Australia decided to take up the “White man’s burden” to assist war-impoverished Asian-Pacific countries by means of international aid, hence its offer of leading the Commonwealth humanitarian project popularly known as the “Colombo Plan.” To establish this leadership, white Australia had to first counter Asian countries’ accusations of racism. To do so, the federal government created the Overseas Student Plan in 1951,15 by which thousands of selected South and Southeast Asian students16 were allowed to come to Australia to gain the  Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 12–13. 14  Howard Winant, The New Politics of Race. Globalism, Difference, Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), ix–xx; 159–60. 15  For further details on the Colombo Plan and the related Overseas Students Plan also see: G. Jackson, Report of Committee to Review the Australian Overseas Aid Program (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1984); David Lowe, “The Colombo Plan,” in Australia and the End of the Empires, ed. David Lowe (Geelong, Victoria: Deakin University Press, 1996). 16  Most of the students who came to study in Australia at the time were not sponsored by the Australian government but partly or completely privately funded, yet as they were allowed to study in Australia as a way of promoting development in their own country, they were all generally regarded as recipients of Australian aid; see Drew Nesdale, Keith Simkin, David Sang, Bryan Burke, and Stewart Fraser, International Students and Immigration, Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research (Canberra: Australian 13

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knowledge and technological skills deemed necessary to develop their countries of origin while promoting cultural understanding and exchange.17 At that time, the Immigration Restriction Act, popularly known as the White Australia Policy, was still enforced to prevent non-European migrants from entering the country. This act was introduced in the first sitting of the newborn Australian Federal Parliament in 1901, yet it was not the first piece of legislation promulgated in order to fabricate and maintain racial homogeneity in Australia. As Myra Willard has documented at length, the White Australia Policy has a history which traces back to approximately 1855, when the government of the colony of Victoria decided to restrict the number of Chinese migrants entering its territory by limiting the number of them which any vessel could bring to Australia, and imposing the payment of a capitation fee with the justification of creating a fund for “the relief, support and maintenance of such immigrants.”18 By that time, restriction and regulation of Chinese arrivals had become the lynchpin of most of the colonial governments in southeastern Australia and cause of conflict with the motherland. Starting from 1855, policies specifically aimed at reducing Chinese migration, by means of exceptional restriction and taxation, were likewise passed by the government of the colonies of South Australia in 185719 and New South Wales in 186120 in spite of England’s reservations on the basis of its diplomatic and commercial interests in the “East” and China’s opposition on the basis of their discriminative nature.21 As these measures proved to be effective, Chinese migrants shifted to the colony of Queensland, where their increased presence led the state government to pass similar polices in 1877–78.22 By the early 1880s, all of the Australian colonies agreed on passing uniform legislation for the restriction of Chinese migration. By 1886, “a barrier to restrict the immigration of Chinese was erected all around Government Publishing Service, 1995). However, the number of private students was far greater than that of sponsored students. From 1951 to 1967, the number of the former rose from just over 1,500 to 10,000; see Lyndon Megarrity, “Under the Shadow of the White Australia Policy: Commonwealth Policies on Private Overseas Students 1945– 1972,” Change: Transformations in Education 8, no. 2 (2005): 31–51, 34. These students were predominantly ethnic Chinese from Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong and were mostly enrolled in secondary school and universities (p. 34). Conversely, from 1951 to 1956, the total number of the latter was less than 5,500, the vast majority of whom were from Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and Ceylon. A few were from Burma, Brunei, Cambodia, Korea, and Afghanistan (p. 179). 17  Daniel Oakman, Facing Asia: A History of the Colombo Plan (Canberra: Australian National University E-press, 2010), 182–3. 18  Myra Willard, History of the White Australia Policy to 1920 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970), 21. 19  Willard 1970, 28. 20  Willard 1970, 33. 21  Willard 1970, 33–6. 22  Willard 1970, 50–51.

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Australia with the exception of the Northern Territory.”23 In this territory, Chinese migration was instead encouraged to develop tropical agriculture and settlement by the government of South Australia.24 By the late 1880s, in spite of the decreased Chinese migration in all of the colonies, with the exception of the Northern Territory, it was decided in concert that it was time to move from a policy of restriction to one of virtual exclusion of all Chinese.25 This decision was mostly motivated by the fear that Chinese migration “was assuming a new and dangerous form,”26 which is the formation of a colony in the only Australian territory scarcely populated with white settlers: the Northern Territory (for instance, in 1888, there were between 5,000 and 6,000 Chinese and 700 adult Europeans).27 To counter such a threat, the South Australia government was pressured into closing the “door” to Chinese migration, which it did by passing similar restrictions in the same year.28 Similarly, all of the colonies committed to pass legislation which effectively barred all Chinese migrants from entering Australia.29 By the beginning of the 1890s, this commitment was extended from only Chinese migrants to all those migrants whose race was deemed “coloured.”30 This extension is telling of the colonies’ desire for “substantive sovereignty,” for which British imperial principles of free intercourse and trade were construed more and more often as an impediment to Australian settlers’ right to self-determination with regard to migration and population management.31 In a bid to avoid diplomatic objections from the governments of China, Japan, and from Indian British subjects, the British government accepted the principle of exclusion provided that the colonies disguise the racial rationale underpinning their forthcoming legislation. It then suggested following the Natal model,32 which the colonies adopted by introducing the “Education Test” as an effective measure to reject any migrant deemed undesirable without specifying either race or class as criteria of 23

 Willard 1970, 68.  Willard 1970, 65–6. 25  Willard 1970, 69–73. 26  Willard 1970, 70. 27  Willard 1970, 72. Whereas there is no available data regarding the total number of Aboriginal people living in the Northern Territory in 1888, it is possible to deduce that this was far larger than that of Asian migrants and white settlers taken together on the basis of the 1911 census. According to this census, in 1911 there were 22,000 Aboriginal people living in the Northern Territory alongside 2,185 European settlers and 1,305 Asian migrants (NAA: A1, 1911/16191). 28  Willard 1970, 73. 29  Willard 1970, 90. Few categories of Chinese nationals, such as students, officials, and visitors, were exempted. For further details on similar exceptions before and after the passing of the Immigration Restriction Act, see also: 89–90; 126–7. 30  Willard 1970, 99–118. 31  Willard 1970, 99. 32  Natal was a self-governing British colony located in South Africa. For further Information on Natal and the Natal Act, see: David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 178–9. 24

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exclusion.33 Thus, by the beginning of the new century, all the elements of the White Australia Policy were already set in motion. Previous colonial technologies of migration regulation (for example, number restrictions and ad hoc taxation) had paved the way for this federal legislation that was as much racially exclusive in its effects as raceless in its form. In spite of the protection afforded by the White Australian Policy, anxieties over territorial and racial integrity surfaced again in Australia at the end of the Second World War when—with the obvious exception of Japan, which was most feared for its military prowess—Asian countries were characterized discursively as an indistinct and overpopulated whole, whose geographical proximity posed a concrete threat to the integrity of the Australian territory.34 Taken together, overpopulation and geographical proximity constituted the fundaments of the infamous rhetoric of “Asian invasion” by which the Australian government had legitimized the expansion of the Migration Program to “white” migrants historically deemed less desirable than the Anglo-Celtic ones: Southern and Eastern Europeans, and Levantines.35 Once again, territorial anxieties coagulated into the Northern Territory, which bounty of “unoccupied” land lent itself to renewed fears of settlers’ dispossession at the hands of their “Asian” neighbors. For instance, as the news that the Northern Territory was found suitable for rice growing spread, the then Secretary of the Rice Association, Taylor Douglas, conveyed popular anxieties as follow: Thoughtful Australians have always been concerned about our great empty spaces in the north-west … . It is certain that the existence of the tremendous rice-growing areas of the Northern Territory will be headlined in the newspapers of the East, and especially in the South-west Pacific area … . What can be done to protect the so-called “back door of Australia”? There is only one effective method of protecting it: Fast development.36 33

 Willard 1970, 111–13. For further information on the genealogy of the Dictation Test as a technology of racial exclusion see: Marilyn Lake, “From Mississippi to Melbourne via Natal: The Invention of the Literacy Test as a Technology of Racial Exclusion, in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, ed. Marilyn Lake and Ann Curthoys (Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2005), 209–29. In this essay, Lake traces the history of the Natal Model back to American migration policies of racial exclusion and African-American political disenfranchisement in the nineteenth century. Moreover, she argues that literacy tests such as the Australian Dictation Test had consolidated the “understandings of ‘race’ in terms of a dichotomy of whiteness and non-whiteness across the world,” thus providing the basis for a “transnational political identification and a subjective sense of the self” for all of the white settlers of northern America, southern Africa, and Australia, 229. 34  Rachel Burke, “Constructions of Asian International Students: The ‘Casualty’ Model and Australia as ‘Educator’,” Asian Studies Review 30, no. 4 (2006): 333–54, 336. 35  Jon Stratton, “Preserving White Hegemony: Skilled Migration, ‘Asians’ and Middle-class Assimilation,” Borderland e-journal 8, no. 1 (2009): 2 36  The Sydney Morning Herald, June 20, 1950, 2, emphasis added.

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This passage aptly illustrates how the metaphor of the “back door” to Australia had by this time crystallized past and present settler colonial anxiety of territorial and racial vulnerability as interspersing in the geographical space of its natural border with Southeast Asia, where white settlement had had a very long history of failures.37 In light of this history of settler colonial anxiety, the Australian government’s implementation of the Overseas Student Plan appears somewhat contradictory. In “Construction of Asian International Students,” Rachel Burke shows how Australia’s participation in the Colombo Plan was accompanied locally by the emergence of a new humanitarian rhetoric with regard to Asian populations.38 As she illustrates, Australian newspapers provided detailed accounts of the suffering they endured and overwhelmingly appealed to the government to alleviate such suffering by means of humanitarian intervention.39 For Burke, this depiction was not divorced from the concomitant representation of “Asia” as a threatening indistinct and overpopulated whole. Rather, she argues, the two rhetorics went hand in hand and together engendered an international positive image for Australia as a responsible, generous, and hospitable nation, which was moreover ready to take up the role of leading and educating its “Asian neighbours.”40 Conversely, Colombo Plan students were represented as “surrogate children” of Australian responsible “parents”41 in charge of their needs as determined by both their original conditions of poverty and their status as foreigners in Australia.42 For Burke, the representation of Asian students as “casualty” had the merit of facilitating public acceptance of their racially visible presence because it appealed to Australians’ civic sense of social justice and moral duty.43 In this sense, their temporary inclusion in the territorial and cultural borders of Australia was premised on a feeling of humanitarian compassion, the consequences of which will be further explored in the next section. “Backdoor Entry” to Australia: Love and Resentment in Multicultural Australia In 1985, the Hawke government phased out the Overseas Student Plan and gradually replaced it with a full-fee system. Commonly known as the passage from aid to trade, this shift illustrates the marketization of Australian education whereby international students were to be considered more as consumers of educational  See also Alan Powell, Far Country: A Short History of the Northern Territory (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996). 38  Burke 2006, 333–54. 39  Burke 2006, 335. 40  Burke 2006, 336–7. 41  Burke 2006, 339. 42  Burke 2006, 343. 43  Burke 2006, 350–51. 37

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services than recipients of aid.44 In so doing, the Hawke government opened the education sector to the global market and publicly positioned the new industry as an important asset to strengthen Australia’s economic position in the Asia-Pacific region. As a consequence, international students’ contribution to the well-being of Australia was mostly measured in terms of financial costs and benefits. This decision was not exclusively economic in that, throughout the 1970s, successive representatives of the Immigration Department had advocated for the introduction of a full-fee system as a means to counter the use of the Overseas Students Plan as a form of “backdoor entry” to Australia. By this time, the metaphor was used mostly to refer to private international students applying for a change of status45 while still studying in Australia and strictly circulated within the small circle of federal agencies involved in their administration. According to the Goldring Report, the practice of applying for a change of status in the 1970s was so common among private international students that an estimated 75 percent of them obtained permanent residency by doing so.46 Considering the demise of the White Australia Policy in 1973, the then Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs was not as concerned with the number of students applying for a change of status as it was with the risk that studying in Australia could be misunderstood as “de facto immigration entry in Australia rather than developing aid.”47 The implementation of a full-fee payment system was hence understood as a deterrent to “Asian” international students circumnavigating the rules set in place to regulate population growth and social harmony by means of migration. In this sense, the metaphor of “backdoor entry” to Australia bespeaks the move from a fear of territorial invasion and racial dilution to a fear of loss of cultural hegemony in a context of increased diversity. Throughout the 1970s, this concern was ultimately overlooked in favor of the diplomatic value attached to the Overseas Student Plan but nonetheless led to the Fraser government’s decision to limit international students’ application for residency to the stream of skilled migration, whose selective criteria were meant to guarantee their capacity for cultural assimilation. The 1980s were rather different. Prior to the marketization of education, most students came from Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong, which are all former British colonies “characterised by strong education links with Britain and  Industry Commission, Exports of Education Services (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1991), 35–48; Nesdale et al. 1995, 20–21. 45  By change of status is meant the possibility for holders of temporary visas to apply for permanent residency under certain exceptional circumstances such as marriage with an Australian citizen or relevance of the job skills possessed by the applicant. For further information on this practice during the 1980s, see: Secretariat to the Committee to Advise on Australia’s Immigration Policies, Understanding Immigration (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1987). 46  J. Goldring, Mutual Advantage: Report of Committee of Review of Private Overseas Student Policy 1984. (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1984), 65–6. 47  Jing Shu and Lesleyanne Hawthorne, Asian Student Migration to Australia (Melbourne: Bureau of Immigration, Multiculturalism and Population Research, 1996), 68. 44

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English-based secondary teaching.”48 Many students came from Indonesia too, whose educational, trade, and technical cooperation with Australia had increased considerably over time.49 In contrast to them, Chinese students were barely represented before 1985 and their cultural differences thus perceived as utterly unassimilable. Yet, their presence increased dramatically: from only 1,881 in 1986 to 22,547 in 1990.50 In 1989, half of them were concentrated in English Language Intensive Courses (ELICOS) and represented the principal source of income for this industry. This increased presence soon became cause of concern for the governmental departments in charge of the overseas students and compounded by the perception that they were using their visa for non-educational purposes: work and permanent migration.51 They were also found to be the largest group of visitors overstaying their visa.52 To counter the risk of Chinese students using their visa as “de facto” migration to Australia, several discriminating measures were employed immediately to reduce their number. These measures inadvertently led to the financial collapse of part of the ELICOS industry on the occasion of the Tiananmen Square uprising in June 1989.53 For Australia, this uprising had the potential of exacerbating the problem of Chinese students overstaying to the point of crisis. To avoid this, the Australian government temporarily closed its visa facilities in Beijing, generating a backlog of 26,000 applications, and instructed all educational providers not to accept applications from Chinese students until January 1990. Moreover, it further tightened student visa requirements and restrictions to reduce the entry of all students who intended to apply for ELICOS or similar courses.54 As a result, thousands of Chinese students caught in the backlog were denied entry to Australia and many ELICOS providers could not refund their prepaid tuition fees and living expenses. Part of the industry collapsed leaving an unspecified number of students stranded in Australia alongside thousands of other students overseas to be refunded.55 To recover from this crisis, the Industry Commission was charged in 1990 with the task of assessing the “benefits and costs” of the export industry of international education against the problem of overstaying and other forms or visa non-compliance.56 Because of this mandate, an entire chapter of their report is dedicated to overstaying Chinese international students, which highlights right from the beginning the contradictory nature of their status as both consumers and temporary migrants: 48

 Shu and Hawthorne 1996, 73.  Shu and Hawthorne 1996, 74. 50  Industry Commission 1991, 24. 51  Industry Commission 1991, 50; Nesdale et al. 1995, 12. 52  Industry Commission 1991, 58–62. Nesdale et al. 1995, 13. 53  Nesdale et al. 1995, 12. 54  Industry Commission 1991, 51–2. 55  Industry Commission 1991, 52–4. 56  Industry Commission 1991, 1–10. 49

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Unlike most of Australia’s exports, a large part of education exports occurs through the buyer coming to Australia and consuming goods and services here. This process gives temporary immigration policy a major role to play. Australia’s temporary resident entry policy seeks to facilitate the entry, for a maximum stay of four years, of people who can contribute to the social, economic and cultural development of Australia.57

At this stage of the report, the Commission does not clarify how exactly temporary migrants like international students are expected to contribute to the social, economic, and cultural development of Australia. Yet, it is already possible to extrapolate how international students, like any other category of immigrants, are expected to respect the discriminating objective of the Australian Migration Program to be let in: Concerns about upholding the integrity of Australia’s immigration policy underpin many of the policy changes affecting the export of education services in recent years. Foremost among these concerns is the problem of applicants who are not genuine about wishing to study and who may intend to overstay their visas or fail to adhere to other visa conditions.58

As this passage illustrates, the capacity of the Migration Program to serve the best interests of Australia relies on its integrity. If this integrity is diminished for any reason so is the security and well-being of the nation in its entirety. In this sense, the Migration Program can be understood as a metonymic extension of the territorial and socio-cultural borders of Australia. By securing its integrity, the nation itself can be considered secured too from the threat of being overwhelmed by undesirable and uninvited migrants. In this sense, the case of overstaying Chinese students in the late 1980s resonates with Sara Ahmed’s analysis of the politics of love in contemporary discourses about migration and multiculturalism in the UK.59 In this analysis, Ahmed suggests that the opening of the UK to non-white migrants has been discursively elaborated in public discourses as an extension of the love of the nation for them.60 Since it is represented as motivated by love, or similarly, by compassion, as in the case of Colombo Plan students in the past and asylum seekers in the present, this opening is simultaneously represented as an act of generosity and proneness to the injury of being taken in by migrants while taking them into the nation.61 To counter this risk, as Ahmed notes, a nation requires its prospective migrants, whether temporary or permanent, to return the love extended to them by making the host nation become the object of their love, thus meeting the “conditions” established to guarantee its security: 57

 Industry Commission 1991, 49, emphasis added.  Industry Commission 1991. 59  Ahmed 2004, 133–43. 60  Ahmed 2004, 133. 61  Ahmed 2004, 134. 58

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the nation and the national subject can only love incoming others—“embrace them”—if the conditions that enable security are already met. To love the other requires that the nation is already secured as an object of love, a security that demands that incoming others meet “our” conditions. Such conditions require that others “contribute” to the UK through labour, or by showing they are not bogus asylum seekers. When such conditions have been met they will “receive the welcome they deserve.”62

For migrants, thus, taking a nation as the object of their love amounts to proving they do not pose a threat to its security. If they succeed in doing so, they will be not only welcomed, but also commended as subjects deserving the love of the nation extended to them. If they fail, they will be not only excluded but also subjected to negative forms of assessment if not abjection. In this sense, the conditions of security established by a nation to discriminate deserving from not deserving migrants can also be understood as a form of moral commitment for which migrants can be held responsible when failing to conduct themselves as expected. It is then relevant to investigate why and how overstaying Chinese students were represented as posing a threat to the security of the nation and the kind of measures taken to discourage this practice. To do so, the remainder of this section will analyze the metaphors of “jumping the queue” and “backdoor entry” as they circulated in governmental discourses regarding the regulation of international students’ entry in Australia. In the Commission’s report the metaphor of “jumping the queue” appears when explaining the rationale behind governmental concerns about people overstaying their visas in general: People who overstay may have deliberately misrepresented their purpose for entry, and effectively jump the queue for de facto residence in Australia ahead of legitimate applicants for immigration … . Perceptions abroad that temporary immigration provides an easy avenue for extended stay can be quickly formed and only slowly eroded. There is a significant danger when overstay rates rise in the short term that this will generate a rapid decline in the integrity of the immigration system, as potential entrants with dubious motives learn of the situation.63

As the above passage shows, the deployment of the metaphor of “jumping the queue” specifies the risk of overstaying as being double. Firstly, overstaying temporary migrants are represented as a current threat to the integrity of the Migration Program in that their practices risk damaging other prospective migrants who are willing to abide by the conditions of security and love established by the nation. In contrast to them, overstaying international students are portrayed as being deceiving and thus, non-deserving of the love of the nation. Secondly, overstaying international students are construed as posing a threat in the future 62

 Ahmed 2004, 133–43.  Industry Commission 1991, 58, emphasis added.

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to the integrity of the Migration Program in that their practices might encourage other “potential entrants with dubious motives” to avail themselves of the Overseas Student Program for purposes different from education. As a result, Australia as a nation is depicted as under the threat of double injury: losing legitimate migrants while attracting ill-intentioned ones. A narrative of fear is thus deployed to align overstaying international students with other migrants who are preemptively represented as being deliberately planning to hurt the nation for their own advantage. Over time, the practice on the part of Chinese students of overstaying became associated with another breach of the conditions of their student visa, namely working illegally for more hours than they were allowed. For instance, in a research paper for the Bureau of Immigration, Multiculturalism and Population Research, Jing Shu and Lesleyanne Hawthorne emphasized: Though the ELICOS industry seemed lucrative on paper, many PRC ELICOS students had perceived enrolment as an opportunity for “backdoor migration” or “English for Visa” … . Entitled to work 20 hours towards their support, evidence from ELICOS providers suggests that large numbers of PRC students in fact sought and filled one or more full-time or part-time jobs, frequently in the untaxed low paid black labour market. Rather than pay for Australian courses with Chinese capital, many PRC students remitted Australian earning home in order to cover debts incurred against the amount borrowed to cover cost of fares and tuition.64

This passage illustrates Australia’s expectation for international students to secure its economy by means of investment in education and expenditure in other services and goods to be considered as deserving subjects of the love of the nation. Hence the employment of the metaphor of “backdoor” migration or entry, which further emphasizes the vulnerability of the Australian nation as represented metonymically by its Migration Program. For causing or just revealing such proneness to injury, Chinese students were moreover represented as hurting the nation by direct misuse of the privileges granted to them by their student visa, thus becoming the object of national resentment. In “Multiculturalism and Resentment,” Duncan Ivison argues that resentment can be conceptualized in two ways with regard to multicultural societies such as Australia. The first way is strictly related to Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment, which highlights the feeling of powerlessness associated to subordinated people’s anger and hate for those groups or classes which they perceive as preventing them from achieving what they need or desire.65 The second way is, instead, a matter of

64

 Shu and Hawthorne 1996, 80–81.  Duncan Ivison, “Multiculturalism and Resentment,” in Political Theory and Australian Multiculturalism, ed. Geoffrey Brahm Levey (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 129–48, 129. 65

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moral assessment in that it implies the existence of socially established values and related rules of conduct: A second form of resentment is of a more moralised kind, a reactive sentiment bound up with holding another morally accountable for their action. I resent your curtailment of my liberty, for example, just because I believe we share certain moral commitments—for example, a commitment to justify any such interference in an appropriate way, which you fail to satisfy, and so on.66

Considering that overstaying Chinese students were named as subjects hurting all of the Australian population, the second definition of resentment is thus more pertinent. Resentment can be then understood as the feeling that the community of legitimate Australian settlers and migrants were interpellated to “feel” as an appropriate affective response to Chinese students’ infringement of the rules established to regulate their partial inclusion in the nation. Moreover, despite claiming that resentment is a “reactive sentiment,” Ivison’s definition has the merit of drawing attention to the unmediated status of this feeling. To hold somebody morally responsible for her actions, these actions must first be valued as being wrong or unjust. There must be time to reflect on and assess accordingly. Yet, this definition runs the risk of reifying resentment as if it were an object, which individuals can claim to possess, pass on, or share with others. Most importantly, it would not explain why not all migrants are assessed likewise when infringing the conditions of their entry and stay in Australia: would British backpackers ever be publicly named as objects of national resentment for overstaying their visas? Could their legal violation ever extend to their production as such an object? In The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Ahmed rejects the theorization of emotions as a property of either individuals or societies and argues in favor of a model which apprehends emotions as shaping the very bodily and social boundaries of individuals and collectives by alignment (“us” who fear to be overtaken versus them who make us fear).67 From this perspective, emotions are shaped by how subjects and objects engage in contact with each other and, most importantly, by how these contacts come to be read and assessed by individuals and collectives over time.68 The emotions so produced further accumulate affective value by circulation in discourses such as the one regarding population management and multiculturalism. Yet, they are not emotions per se that circulate. What circulates, instead, are those signs and objects to which emotions have become attached through histories of previous contacts (see the figure of the “bogus migrant”). In this sense, the circulation of emotions is not free but determined by past associations between signs, objects, and affective values attached to them consequently.69 Bearing Ivison’s definition of resentment and Ahmed’s model of 66

 Ivison 2008.  Ahmed 2004, 8–12. 68  Ahmed 2004, 5–8. 69  Ahmed 2004, 11–12. 67

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emotions in mind, we can then understand how Chinese students’ practices per se were not the cause of resentment inasmuch as resentment was not the affective response following the breaching of the conditions of security established by the Australian nation by default. Rather it was the reading of them in terms of a threat that made these practices, hence the subjects associated with them, the object of national resentment. The reading of the breaching of the visa conditions as a threat is thus determined by the history of previous contacts between white Australians and “Asian” migrants, especially the Chinese. As discussed earlier, this history is replete with negative associations of Chinese migrants with fear of territorial and cultural invasion. Yet, as this essay illustrates, this history has also been open to new associations, affective narratives, and lines of action. Counter-narratives of humanitarian compassion and economic competiveness had been offered as competing readings of the opening of Australia to Asian international students respectively at the end of the Second World War and during the creation of the export industry of education in the 1980s. These narratives did not contradict each other but were employed simultaneously to distinguish international students into deserving and non-deserving migrants. It is in this sense that it is possible to conclude that, with regard to “Asian” international students, resentment has operated in multicultural Australia as an affective governmental technology of racial exclusion while upholding the national ideal of Australia as a generous, hospitable nation open to “differences.”

Chapter 4

Interculturalism, Settler Colonialism, and the Contest Over “Nativeness” Bruno Cornellier

Settler colonialism in the Anglo-American “New World”—which also includes Québec—is a white supremacist project vested in the replacement of Indigenous peoples, sovereignties, and epistemologies. And yet, its operations go far beyond the Indigenous/white settler divide and reveal new struggles and new divisions along complex racial and ethnic boundaries born out of the specificities of colonial demands. Settler colonialism constitutes a multipartite struggle as part of which Indigenous peoples, members of the white Euro-descended majority, and members of immigrant and/or racialized, non-Indigenous groups are mobilized and asked to interact within gendered, race-based, and capitalistic relations of power. These relations of power in turn affect the normative socio-institutional formations that are meant to maintain and reproduce the dominant group’s hegemony. This accounts for many scholarly efforts to critically address the rhetorical and discursive sublimation of the racial-colonial divide at the core of our liberal, multicultural settler societies.1 Such criticism suggests that by focusing on the selfevident virtues of racially-neutral and pan-human forms of sociality and intimacy, liberal multicultural settler policies would not so much “reform” as defer the racial, gender, and cultural biases underlying the liberal democratic forms of citizenship and national belonging that are meant to replace Indigenous socialities. As historian Lorenzo Veracini explains, settler societies are articulated to a historical trajectory  Himani Bannerji, The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism, and Gender (Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, 2000); Richard J.F. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (New York: Routledge, 2000); Eve Haque, Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race, and Belonging in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Sherene Razack, ed., Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2008); Sherene Razack, Malinda Smith, and Sunera Thobani, eds., States of Race: Critical Race Feminism in the 21st Century (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2010); Sunera Thobani, Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 1

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culminating in settler colonialism’s own self-supersession.2 In other words, the decisive triumph of settler colonialism corresponds to such a moment of deferral when settler societies manage to represent or declare themselves not colonial anymore—a moment that is often coterminous with a celebratory and ostentatious repudiation of race, understood as the principal visible marker of the colonial “past.” And yet, it remains evident that the cleansed futurity of a settler state that is thus attempting to redraw its futurity on a historical blank slate, far removed from any consideration of race and coloniality in the present, nevertheless remains haunted by what the nation seeks to suspend into “the past.” It is this type of settler historical consciousness that I wish to critically examine in this paper, most notably in relation to recent Québécois discourses and debates about interculturalism as a policy model that, allegedly, would be better suited for the management of “ethno-cultural”3 diversity in an increasingly plural Québec. Even though the term “interculturalism,” in an effort to de-ethnicize the national reference, appears in policy discourses and documents since at least the 1980s4 it is only recently that it became the object of increased media, scholarly, and public scrutiny, both during and since what is commonly referred to as the 2007 BouchardTaylor Commission on cultural differences and accommodation practices.5 In their publicly mandated report, co-commissioners Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor define interculturalism as an alternative to Canadian multiculturalism. Fashioned on the metaphor of an allegedly de-centered cultural mosaic, multiculturalism has often been represented by members of the Québécois intellectual and political elite as disabling the majority/minority dynamic of Canadian foundationality, and thus negating Québec’s rights and equal privilege as a founding nation, next to  Lorenzo Veracini, “Introducing Settler Colonial Studies,” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 3. 3  I write “ethno-cultural” in scare quotes as a way to highlight the unease that this euphemism is meant to appease and conveniently brush aside: race and racism. I develop this argument further in the remainder of this paper. 4  Gérard Bouchard, L’interculturalisme: Un point de vue québécois (Montréal: Boréal, 2012), 48–50; Danielle Juteau, “The Citizen Makes an Entrée: Redefining the National Community in Quebec,” Citizenship Studies 6, no. 4 (2002): 444–6; Micheline Labelle, Racisme et antiracisme au Québec: Discours et déclinaisons (Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2011), 7–8. Furthermore, Pierre Anctil and Lomomba Emongo each identify some pre-1980 precedents to the notion of interculturalism and its public life in Québec, starting as far back as the 1930s. Pierre Anctil, “Le Congrès Juif Canadien et la Promotion de l’Éducation Interculturelle (1947–1975),” in L’interculturel au Québec: Rencontres historiques et enjeux politiques, ed. Lomomba Emongo and Bob W. White (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2014); Lomomba Emongo, “Panikkar, l’Interculturalisme et le Québec,” in L’interculturel au Québec: Rencontres historiques et enjeux politiques, ed. Lomomba Emongo and Bob W. White (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2014), 137–54. 5  Jorge Frozzini, “L’Interculturalisme et la Commission Bouchard-Taylor,” in L’interculturel au Québec: Rencontres historiques et enjeux politiques, ed. Lomomba Emongo and Bob W. White (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2014), 46. 2

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the English.6 Instead, Bouchard and Taylor reassert interculturalism as a policy model that fosters a civic pluralism predicated on the harmonious and reciprocal integration of “ethnocultural minorities” into a normative, socio-institutional framework that is contingent upon the precarious futurity of a foundational, francophone majority culture. The project is meant to strike a balance between the rights and the needs of each pole of this dual relationship, as long as minority or particular rights do not put “unreasonable constraints” upon the fundamental and non-negotiable values of the majority (including values such as gender equality, secularism/laïcité, and the priority of the French language). Since then, co-commissioner Bouchard, a celebrated Québec historian and novelist, and a well-known academic and public intellectual, has become the most visible and influential porte-étendard for interculturalism and its implementation as a policy model for Québec.7 In this paper, I argue that in attempting to theorize the acquired status of a racially neutral concept of “nativeness,” Bouchard’s understanding of interculturalism completes the political self-supersession of Québec’s specifically settler colonial claims to nationhood and foundationality. Hence, despite statements that, in the spirit of a nation-to-nation dialogue, the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, its report, and Bouchard’s subsequent prises de position each refrained from addressing concerns relative to Indigenous peoples, I demonstrate that this particular brand of interculturalism is nonetheless predicated on a peculiarly Québécois settler historical consciousness according to which the multipartite struggle over “nativeness” necessitates the paradoxical neutralization of Indigeneity as a precondition for the settling of non-Indigenous racialized and ethnic groups. First, I will theorize the settler historical consciousness that has become instrumental to the naturalization and the de-racialization of settler occupancy in such liberal, settler spaces as Québec, before analyzing more closely how Bouchard’s liberal twist on the notion of foundationality and cultural precedence, at the core of his intercultural model, completes this historical trajectory of erasure of the coloniality of Québec as a white settler nation.

 Bouchard 2012, 93–105; Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation. Report, Gouvernement du Québec, Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accomodement reliées aux differences culturelles, 2008, 19: http:// www.accommodements-quebec.ca/documentation/rapports/rapport-final-integral-fr.pdf [accessed August 15, 2014]; Chedly Belkhodja, “Le discours de la ‘nouvelle sensibilité conservatrice’ au Québec,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 40, no. 1 (2008): 83–5; Micheline Labelle, “Les intellectuels québécois face au multiculturalisme: Hétérogénéité des approches et des projets politiques,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 40, no. 1 (2008): 39–40. 7  Jorge Frozzini, “L’interculturalisme selon Gérard Bouchard,” in L’interculturel au Québec: Rencontres historiques et enjeux politiques, ed. Lomomba Emongo and Bob W. White (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2014), 91. 6

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The Time of Settlement: Settler Common Sense and its Historical Consciousness In her groundbreaking work on liberal multiculturalism in the settler context of Australia, Elizabeth Povinelli discusses the temporality of today’s loss of moral certainty around the national hegemonic project globally, and the reactions and expressions of panic accompanying this loss. More specifically, she interrogates the “global adjustments of the constitution of public and legal national imaginaries as state institutions and public sympathy attempt to address the multiplicity of social identities and traditions constituting and circulating through the contemporary nation.” She explains how the discursive lives and memories of civil rights abuses operate alongside contemporary acknowledgements that the nation’s moral sensibility—or its adjudication of what is repugnant and needs to be excluded, sometimes violently—puts hegemonic national subjects in a vulnerable position, as they are faced with the factual, undisputable knowledge that they (or “we”) may have caused wrongs. If, Povinelli explains, public expressions of historical shame often serve as a cleansing agent for the soul of “the liberal subject who wielded the frontier blade and nearly fatally wounded himself in the process,”8 we may also infer that the very violence that this liberal subject must henceforth defer into the past starts to take a life of its own—and even more so if this past is indeed to be detached from “us” in the present. As such, in its legal, cultural, and political (re)assertions of what is repugnant and intolerable—or what Povinelli calls “the intimate communal aversion to the barbaric” or the “pageantry of corporeal shame and revulsion”—the liberal, multicultural settler subject remains haunted by the panic that comes with any fleeting reminder of the “past” wrongdoings “we” may have caused in the name of such moral decency and certitudes. Hence this hesitation, or this self-policing, when “we” attempt to set the boundaries of the “civilized” and the “proper,” while managing the best “we” can the possibilities, now or later, of being (or being seen as) racist or intolerant. In other words, in the face of radical alterities or competing life worlds, Povinelli infers that liberal multiculturalism and its legal and state apparatuses are relentlessly haunted by the following future perfect proposition: “we will have been wrong.”9 Thus, one is led to argue that one of the constitutive failures of liberalism’s aspiration to produce justice would lie in its lack of humility in the face of the exclusionary violence that its language of universalism and humanism constantly needs to defer in a somewhere else and a sometime ago. As Povinelli seems to suggest, if “we” cannot survive the knowledge that “we” may be wrong, then “we” will have been wrong.10 8

 Povinelli 2002, 26, 28, 53.  Povinelli 2002, 28, 33. 10  In his book on imperialism and British liberal thought, Uday Singh Mehta also insists that certainty, or a lack of humility in the encounter with the unfamiliar and/or with other “life worlds,” is and was a major hindrance to what is otherwise conceived as liberalism’s desire to produce justice. Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 9

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This proposition, and the humility it invites, is rendered muddier or more opaque by the peculiarity of Québécois discourses about “cultural” (and never racial) diversity, and by the modalities of the nation’s assessment of what would be a “just” management of “ethno-cultural” diversity. This peculiarity originates in the standard historical narrative according to which Québec, contrary to Povinelli’s Australia, is not haunted by its historical wrongdoings, but is presented instead as a nation whose political imagination is that of a group of settlers (the white francophone Québécois) who are the ones who have been historically wronged. As such, coloniality is doubly complex in Québec, a province that effectively functions as a small settler nation whose sovereign ambitions have occupied Canadian constitutional debates over the past few decades. On account of the francophone majority’s declared state of minorityhood on a continental level, Québec has not only disassociated itself from settler colonialism per se, but its own claims over identity, sovereignty, home, and nationhood appear not to require the rhetorical suppression (or shameful cleansing) of a colonial historical legacy. Quite to the contrary, Québec’s colonial “past” most often serves as a historical reminder that, next to Indigenous peoples, the French majority’s nationhood and cultural specificity stem from a similar or equivalent history of struggle under British colonial domination. Predictably, the Bouchard-Taylor Report and Bouchard’s subsequent writings on interculturalism perpetuate such historical consciousness, which imagines Québec as a non-colonial, national entity striving in the margins of Empire. French Canadian specificity is indeed described in the report as being rooted in a history and memory of decolonization, and in a lengthy struggle for cultural survival.11 This historical consciousness also animates and supports the moral architecture of Bouchard’s subsequent writings about interculturalism as a model meant to strike a “just” balance between the fundamental rights of minorities and the inalienable right of the majority as a “culture fondatrice.” He writes: Francophone Québec is a former colony which herself had to suffer the domination of a prideful [colonial] power convinced of her superiority. On multiple occasions, French Canada had to resist assimilation attempts as well as diverse forms of discrimination. And when, from the 1960s on, and driven by a new nationalist fervor, francophone Québécois showed determination in emancipating and asserting themselves collectively, then what did they do? They distinguished themselves with a series of progressive, liberal, and pluralist policies that were without precedent in their history, and that were upheld by a democratic ideal geared towards social equality.12 11

 Bouchard and Taylor 2008, 212.  Bouchard 2012, 171; my translation and emphasis. In “What is Interculturalism?” Bouchard also relies on this tired assumption. He writes: “when speaking about Quebec one cannot ignore its more than two centuries of struggle for survival in a context marked by an unfavourable population imbalance, unequal power relations, and by the various assimilation policies of the colonial authorities. Memories of this period naturally feed 12

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Bouchard then insists that if Québec’s pre-1960 record of discrimination and injustices certainly isn’t immaculate, the nation nevertheless fares quite well and shouldn’t be ashamed when compared to other (and allegedly worse) Western nations, including English Canada.13 Bouchard thus obfuscates the doubly complex coloniality of Québec by deferring its settler colonial foundationality (and futurity) into a henceforth irrelevant, and/or “not as bad,” past. With this vision of Québec’s historical present, Bouchard stands in direct continuity with mid- to late twentieth-century cultural and intellectual history in Québec. In a short essay on Québec literature in the postcolonial era, Lise Gauvin summarizes quite well these modern and recurrent Québécois intellectuals’ attempts to resolve Québec’s ambiguous historical record as a colony and/or as a colonized people.14 Gauvin describes with great accuracy the move within neonationalist intellectual milieus of the 1960s, under the leadership of the socialist journal Parti Pris, to align French Canadian struggles with the global movement of decolonization in the European colonies of Africa, Asia, and beyond.15 In response to the obvious ethical and historical shortcomings inherent in such crude transnational comparisons, Gauvin then suggests the term “pericolonialism” as a possible alternative to “postcolonialism” in scholarly conversations about Québec literature. By doing so, she wishes to move away from common understandings of Québec as a de/colonized people, proposing instead a definition of a minority nation living in the periphery of Empire and sustaining itself in the face of conflicting and competing cultural influences. The problem with such a definition is that, like so many of her contemporaries, Gauvin quickly brushes aside the question of settler colonialism, which becomes a significant but bygone moment preceding British rule and the infamous Durham report.16 Once again, settler colonialism does not seem to weigh in the balance when it comes to understanding the current political present-day anxieties. They also provide a constant reminder for vigilance. The current advocates of a francophone Quebecois identity (although sometimes in opposition to the supposed ‘excesses’ of pluralism) are one manifestation of this. They cannot be ignored.” Bouchard, “What is Interculturalism?” McGill Law Journal 56, no. 2 (2011): 450. 13  Bouchard 2012, 171. 14  Lise Gauvin, “Post ou péricolonialisme: L’étrange modèle québécois,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 10, no. 3 (2007): 433–8. 15  For a more detailed discussion about this 1960s Québec “literature of decolonization” and its historical-political context, as well as a further critical assessment of Gauvin’s work in relation to a much wider scholarly literature on Québec and the postcolonial paradigm, read Diana Brydon and Bruno Cornellier, “Canadian Postcolonialisms,” in The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature, ed. Cynthia Sugars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 16  The 1839 Report on the Affairs of British North America, penned by John George Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham, was commissioned by the Crown in order to elucidate the causes of the Patriots’ Rebellion of 1838–39. In the report, Durham insists that the French presence in Lower Canada impinges on economic development and that the state of insecurity the French convey is an impediment to industry and property. As a justification for his recommendations to merge Upper and Lower Canada and thus encourage assimilation,

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community’s naturalized claim to legitimacy, sovereignty, and/or foundationality on Indigenous land. According to such discursive logic, the yet-to-be sovereign Québec nation becomes not so much a liberal, settler colonial political entity, but rather a pericolonial national entity drawing its strength and creativity from its peripheral status and locale. That being said, one cannot deny that the relations of power opposing Indigenous people to the Québec state and, more broadly, to the non-Native population, have been historically (and increasingly) maintained to the disproportionate advantage of francophone Québécois settlers and their institutions.17 Hence, the underlying anxieties sustaining these recurrent attempts to morally sanitize the history of “our” coloniality end up revealing how debates about identity politics and race relations in Québec also presuppose, as is the case in English Canada and the neighboring United States, the permanency or the “givenness” of the settler, national formation.18 Mark Rifkin evocatively deploys the phrase “settler common sense” to describe and critically assess this “givenness,” that is, “the ways the legal and political structures that enable non-native access to Indigenous territories come to be lived as given, as simply the unmarked, generic conditions of possibility of occupancy, association, history, and personhood.”19 Interestingly, Rifkin argues that the cultural texts and policies which, at face value, seem to have very little (if anything) to do with Indigeneity, are those that most powerfully contribute to naturalizing settler sovereignty over territories for which Indigeneity may or may not (or may sometimes, but not always) be part of the conversation or the equation. Accordingly, I am particularly interested in Bouchard’s interculturalism on account of the ways his liberal defense of cultural pluralism, next to his (unsubstantiated and untested) celebration of a nation-to-nation dialogue with Indigenous peoples outside his commission’s mandate,20 ironically naturalizes settler colonialism by effectively anchoring it to the lived experiences of members Durham famously states that the French populations of Canada are a people with neither history nor literature. 17  Daniel Salée, “L’évolution des rapports politiques entre la société québécoise et les peuples autochtones depuis la Crise d’Oka,” in Les Autochtones et le Québec: Des premiers contacts au Plan Nord, ed. Alain Beaulieu, Stéphan Gervais, and Martin Papillon (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2013), 339. 18  Andrea Smith, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,” Global Dialogue 12, no. 2 (2010), par. 12: http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488 [accessed August 15, 2014]. 19  Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xvi. 20  Laura M. Schaefli and Anne M.C. Godlewska, “Ignorance and Historical Geographies of Aboriginal Exclusion: Evidence from the 2007 Bouchard-Taylor Commission on Reasonable Accomodation,” The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien 20, no. 20 (2013): 1–13; Schaefli and Godlewska, “Social Ignorance and Indigenous Exclusion: Public Voices in the Province of Quebec, Canada,” Settler Colonial Studies 4, no. 3 (2014): 227–44.

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of the francophone, settler majority as unmarked bodies assuming the status of the new “native” population. We may therefore infer that if positive changes are to happen in the relations between the francophone majority, Indigenous peoples, and “ethnic minorities” in Québec, the implicit assumption is that such changes are to unavoidably occur within the democratic and institutional confines of what Québec already is, as a putatively non-colonial national-statist entity and/or as a non-racial state. It is with their feet deeply rooted in such liberal, historical common sense that Gérard Bouchard and philosopher Charles Taylor,21 in their publicly commissioned report on cultural differences and accommodation practices in Québec, defended interculturalism as a model for the management of diversity that is better suited for the historical trajectory and precarious futurity of Québec. Subsequently, Bouchard’s very public opposition to the republicanism of the proposed (and controversial) “Charter of Values” of the minority government of Pauline Marois’s Parti Québécois (PQ),22 in 2013–14, contributed to his stature as the public voice of interculturalism.23 It is this heated context during which interculturalism gained such public prominence—as an antidote and/or a further peril to multicultural angst or “panic”—that I now wish to discuss briefly, before I can proceed with my critical analysis of the settler specificity of Bouchard’s brand of interculturalism. Interculturalism and the Bouchard-Taylor Commission: Context, Definition, Criticisms On February 8, 2007, Liberal Premier Jean Charest mandated the Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accomodements reliées aux différences culturelles (CCPARDC), better known to the public as the Bouchard-Taylor Commission. A three-month-long process of public consultations held across rural and urban 21

 As mentioned earlier, my paper focuses mostly on Bouchard’s understanding, as well as his subsequent defense of interculturalism. For a review of the connections between Charles Taylor’s philosophical thought and the work of the commission, read Bernard Gagnon, “Charles Taylor, la neutralité de l’État et la laïcité ouverte,” in La diversité québécoise en débat: Bouchard, Taylor et les autres, ed. Bernard Gagnon (Montréal: Québec Amérique, 2010). 22  The “Charter of Values” or “Charte des valeurs québécoises,” later rebranded as a “Charte de la laïcité” (or Bill 60), was introduced by the PQ minority government in 2013, under the leadership of Premier Pauline Marois and her Minister responsible for democratic institutions and active citizenship, Bernard Drainville. The objective was to amend the Québec Charter of Human Rights and Freedom and implement a robust and clearly defined model of laïcité at the state level. Its most controversial aspect was a proposal to prohibit all public sector employees from wearing and displaying religious symbols. The PQ was defeated in a 2014 general election and the proposed Bill was immediately shelved by the new majority Liberal government, under the leadership of Premier Philippe Couillard. 23  Bouchard, “Drainville doit démissionner,” La Presse, May 6, 2014; Bouchard, “La démagogie au pouvoir,” La Presse, January 10, 2014.

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Québec, the commission was meant to mitigate public outrage against what was deemed “unreasonable” accommodation practices24 to ethnic and religious minorities. This atmosphere of discontent was largely triggered by the Canadian Supreme Court decision in Multani v. Commission scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeois that allowed a Sikh student to wear, under certain restrictions, his kirpan (a blunt, ceremonial knife) in school. This decision was followed by a series of incidents, often misconstrued and inflated by the media and by some populist politicians,25 relating principally to Jewish and Muslim communities’ alleged request for “unreasonable” religious accommodations. In light of such controversies, the commission’s mandate was to provide a snapshot of accommodation practices in Québec, to conduct a comprehensive consultation on this issue, and to provide the Québec government with a series of recommendations to help better adjust accommodation practices to the core values of Québec society—values defined as those of a “pluralistic, democratic, egalitarian society.”26 The premier’s statement that accompanied the official announcement of these public consultations also specified that Québec’s fundamental values, that is, those values that “cannot be the subject of any accommodation,” included “gender 24

 In an essay published in his co-edited volume on the Bouchard-Taylor Report, Pierre Anctil explains that the “Canadian legal concept known as ‘reasonable accommodation’ … states that in obvious cases of discrimination, in the case of a particular plaintiff, the courts may agree to an adjustment of a universally applicable legal regulation. This option thus prevents, in certain specific cases, a tribunal’s just and equitable ruling—arrived at with respect to a general institution—from perpetuating or reproducing injustices when applied to an individual belonging to a national minority, an Aboriginal community, or any other group recognized as being the target of unacceptable forms of prejudice. It is also possible to use reasonable accommodation to deal with the situation of people identified in the Charter as being vulnerable to certain violations of their fundamental rights, such as the handicapped, pregnant women, people with minority sexual orientation, or those who publicly affirm their religious beliefs.” Anctil, “Reasonable Accomodation in the Canadian Legal Context: A Mechanism for Handling Diversity or a Source of Tension?” in Religion, Culture, and the State: Reflections on the Bouchard-Taylor Report, ed. Howard Adelman and Pierre Anctil (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 26. 25  Chief among these right-wing, populist politicians was Mario Dumont, leader of the conservative (and now defunct) Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ). Dumont popularized (with others) the idea of “accomodements déraisonnables” and encouraged his fellow Québécois to free themselves from their colonized or minority complex and have the courage to proudly assert their values, that is, those values “[d]e souche européenne de par l’origine de ceux et celles qui ont fondé le Québec.” Mario Dumont, “Une constitution québécoise pour encadrer les ‘accommodements raisonnables’—Pour en finir avec le vieux réflexe minoritaire,” Bulletin, January 16, 2007: http://bulletin.adq.qc.ca/ bulletins/2007–01–17_25.html [accessed August 15, 2014]. 26  Bouchard and Taylor 2008, 17; Leslie F. Seidle, “Testing the Limits of Minority Accommodation in Quebec: The Bouchard-Taylor Commission,” in The Ties that Bind: Accommodation and Diversity in Canada and the European Union, ed. John Erik Fossum, Johanne Poirier, and Paul Magnette (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2009), 88.

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equality,”27 the primacy of the French language, and the separation of religion and the state.”28 Scholarly interventions into the debates triggered by the so-called “crise des accommodements” and the aftermath29 of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission are far too numerous to enumerate and discuss exhaustively here.30 Suffice to say that 27  For a detailed critical account of the strategic, nationalist deployment of discourses of gender equality in the context of the so-called “crise des accommodements,” read Sirma Bilge, “Mapping Québécois Sexual Nationalism in Times of ‘Crisis of Reasonable Accommodation,’” Journal of Intercultural Studies 33, no. 2 (2012): 303–12; Jennifer A. Selby, “Un/veiling Women’s Bodies: Secularism and Sexuality in Full-face Veil Prohibition in France and Quebec,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses (2014): 1–28. 28  Quoted by Seidle 2009, 88. 29  Here, I am referring, of course, to the heated debate and political climate, in 2013– 14, surrounding the proposed Bill 60 (better know as the PQ’s “Charter of Values”), but also to proposed Bill 94, introduced to the National Assembly in March 2009 by the Minister of Justice of Jean Charest’s Liberal government. The proposed legislation never became law. It implicitly targeted Muslim women wearing face or full body veils (most specifically those wearing a niqab or a burqa), and insisted that providers of public services, as well as those to whom services are being provided, must always show their faces. On this topic, read Chantal Maillé, Greg M. Nielsen, and Daniel Salée, eds., Revealing Democracy: Secularism and Religion in Liberal Democratic States (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2013). 30  A growing number of scholarly interventions have been and are currently being published on Québec identity politics, immigration policies, public controversies, and the state’s management of diversity during and since the 2007 so-called “crise des accommodements.” At least three edited volumes dealing specifically with the BouchardTaylor Report and the intercultural debate have appeared, Howard Adelman and Pierre Anctil, eds., Religion, Culture, and the State: Reflections on the Bouchard-Taylor Report (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); Bernard Gagnon, ed., La diversité québécoise en débat: Bouchard, Taylor et les autres (Montréal: Québec Amérique, 2010); Lomomba Emongo and Bob W. White, eds., L’interculturel au Québec: Rencontres historiques et enjeux politiques (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2014); as well as many journal articles or book chapters, including (among many others) Howard Adelman, “Contrasting Commissions on Interculturalism: The Hijbãb and the Workings of Interculturalism in Quebec and France,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 32, no. 3 (2011): 245–59; Bilge 2012; Cory Blad and Philippe Couton, “The Rise of an Intercultural Nation: Immigration, Diversity and Nationhood in Quebec,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35, no. 4 (2009): 645–67; Diana Brydon, “Negotiating Belonging in Global Times: The Hérouxville Debates,” in Crosstalk: Canadian Global Imaginaries in Dialogue, ed. Diana Brydon and Marta Dvořák (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012); JeanFrançois Dupré, “Intercultural Citizenship, Civic Nationalism, and Nation Building in Québec: From Common Public Language to Laïcité,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 12, no. 2 (2012): 227–48; Monika Kin Gagnon and Yasmin Jiwani, “Amplifying Threat: Reasonable Accommodations and Quebec’s Bouchard-Taylor Commission’s Hearings (2007),” in Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies, ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Robert Zacharias (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012); Cory Legassic, “Reasonable Accommodation as a Settling Concept,” Canadian Women Studies 27, no. 2/3 (2009): 46–52; Darryl Leroux, “The Many Paradoxes of Race in Québec: Civilization,

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the inherent tension (or apparent contradiction) in the language of the commission and the report between, on the one hand, reciprocity and equality, and, on the other, the non-negotiable precedence of majority rights and values, informed much of the criticism directed towards such understanding of interculturalism. To that effect, I contend, with many of these scholars, that what has generally been occluded from discourses surrounding the commission and its aftermath was the structural racial privilege and the systematic practices of racial exclusion that are inherent (as opposed to punctual and individual) to the Québec nation as a Western, white liberal (bio)political formation. The dominant public, media, and politician discourses surrounding the commission seemed little concerned with the direct experiences of socio-economic precariousness of many non-white, non-francophone, and/or non-Christian Québécois, who are interpellated as “others” and as problems to be discussed, solved, and managed for the benefit of an historically insecure and allegedly vulnerable majority whose “whiteness” needs to constantly remain under erasure. As Darryl Leroux expertly summarizes,31 terms like “culture,” “laïcité,” and the debate over the democratic rationale behind the notion of “accommodation practices” have effectively replaced “race” in contemporary Québec and deflected away from the historical consciousness of “our” own vulnerability any consideration of (or implication in) race-thinking and white privilege. In other words, the whiteness of the national reference, which positions “us” advantageously as unmarked bodies in the (settler) colonial division of land, labor, capital, and citizenship in contemporary Québec (and, for that matter, in the global West), is conveniently left out of sight. One may even argue that such rhetorics of deflection are inherent to Western liberalism itself, an ideology according to which one’s rational and autological capacity to contract into citizenship, rights, and property allegedly frees one from the irrationality of race or the decrees of genealogy (ethnic, religious, or otherwise).32 Laïcité and Gender Equality,” in Critical Inquiries: A Reader in Studies of Canada, ed. Lynn Caldwell, Carrianne Leung, and Darryl Leroux (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2013); Darryl Leroux, “Québec Nationalism and the Production of Difference: The Bouchard-Taylor Commission, the Hérouxville Code of Conduct, and Québec’s Immigrant Integration Policy,” Québec Studies 49 (2010): 107–26; Gada Mahrouse, “‘Reasonable Accommodation’ in Québec: The Limits of Participation and Dialogue,” Race & Class 52, no. 1 (2010): 85–96; Daniel Salée, “Penser l’aménagement de la diversité ethnoculturelle au Québec: Mythes, limites et possibles de l’interculturalisme,” Politiques et Sociétés 29, no. 1 (2010): 145–80; Schaefli and Godlewska 2014; Schaefli and Godlewska 2013; Seidle 2009; Selby 2014; Daniel Weinstock, “La ‘crise’ des accommodements au Québec: Hypothèses explicatives,” Éthique Publique 9, no. 1 (2007): 20–27; Alan Wong, “The Disquieting Revolution: A Genealogy of Reason and Racism in the Québec Press,” Global Media Journal—Canadian Edition 4, no. 1 (2011): 145–62. 31  Leroux 2010; Leroux 2013. 32  On liberalism’s malleability and its capacity to constantly be moving the target between autology and genealogy—or between a self-made (or self-sovereign) subject and the constraints of a genealogical society, read Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

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As I repeatedly suggested earlier, there is yet another crucial dimension to the recent “intercultural debate” that has been neglected in the responses to this socalled “crisis” and its aftermath: settler colonialism. If a few scholars, including Leroux and Gada Mahrouse, do discuss in passing the contradictions stemming from the settler colonial history and futurity of the Québec nation, very few critics offered a sustained analysis of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, as well as its corresponding definition of interculturalism, from the critical perspective of Indigenous and settler colonial studies. There are a few exceptions, of course. In an argument at the crossroad between queer studies, disability studies, and settler colonial studies, Cory Legassic describes “reasonable accommodations” as a “settling moment … where those who are settling (settlers) find comfort, stability, and power in their subject-position, and a colonial ‘common sense’ prevails,” most notably for those assumed to be the ones performing the accommodation and bestowing it onto other, non-normative subjects.33 More recently, Laura Schaefli and Anna Godlewska offered a particularly significant contribution to this critical scholarship.34 Their detailed critique focuses on the flawed justifications offered by co-commissioners Bouchard and Taylor for the exclusion of “the Indigenous question” from the proceedings of the commission and its report. Importantly, Schaefli and Godlewska also theorize and analyze the colonial instrumentality of “social ignorance” in the commission’s work, in its final report, and in the many written briefs submitted to the commissioners by members of the public. According to these scholars, ignorance, “far from being incidental or neutral … [constitutes] a mechanism through which colonial logic is reproduced and settler continuity ensured.” In such a context, terra nullius becomes more than a territorial and settling concept; it is also a frame of mind and an epistemological condition of possibility for the assumed “French-Canadian majority’s right to determine the parameters of belonging in Quebec while removing the possibility of Aboriginal challenges to that position.”35 In conversation with these crucial scholarly contributions, my critical work proposes to do something else. I do not elaborate a critique of the BouchardTaylor Commission and its proceedings. Instead, and more broadly, I critically explore the very notion of interculturalism, (re)defined and vigorously defended by commissioner Bouchard since the commission, as a particularly powerful modality of such settler common sense. Bouchard’s Interculturalism My analysis focuses on the following (and aforementioned) documents that form the gist of Bouchard’s contribution to the promotion, defense, and definition of interculturalism as a policy model: the 2008 Bouchard-Taylor Report, co-written 33

 Legassic 2009, 47.  Schaefli and Godlewska 2013; Schaefli and Godlewska 2014. 35  Schaefli and Godlewska 2014, 228, 241. 34

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with Charles Taylor under the title Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation;36 Bouchard’s 2011 article, published in the McGill Law Journal and translated into English under the title “What is Interculturalism?”; and finally, his book-length study, L’interculturalisme: Un point de vue Québécois, published by Boréal in 2012. In the book and the 2011 article, Bouchard replies to many of the critiques waged against the Bouchard-Taylor Report, while laboring to respond to what he considers to be the persistent lack of a precise definition of Québécois interculturalism. For Bouchard, integration constitutes a reasonable middle ground between assimilation and social segmentation, with a focus on interactions and the promotion of a “common culture in a spirit of respect for rights and diversity.”37 According to Bouchard, what is unique to his intercultural model, as opposed to republican and multicultural models, is the honest, realistic, and unavoidable recognition of an effective duality between a majority and some minorities within the (or any) nation. This duality, he insists, is obscured or inhibited by multiculturalism, which does not officially recognize a majority culture, and thus politically disarms Québécois foundationality. As for republicanism, Bouchard claims that it weighs too heavily in favor of the majority culture, thus condemning minority groups to assimilate and become second-class citizens within a formal, ethnic-statist hierarchy. In other words, interculturalism, as an “integrating pluralism” (pluralisme intégrateur),38 constitutes, according to Bouchard, a just and specifically Québécois solution to the management of diversity. It “recognizes”39 the fundamental rights of the individual members of minority groups, while recognizing as well the right of the (white, settler) francophone majority to protect its collective identity in light of what Bouchard repeatedly describes as its “legitimate” historical insecurity as a continental minority. Contrary to the French republican model (or the republicanism of the PQ’s “Charter of Values”), this harmonious balance between majority and minority rights, insists Bouchard, is arbitrated by a principle of reciprocity, at the core of his specific brand of interculturalism. In “What is Interculturalism?” Bouchard indeed explains that his plural model of citizenship “seeks harmonization through mutual adjustments according to a principle of reciprocity.”40 He insists that such adjustments must be predicated on the fact that “all societies need a symbolic foundation (identity, memory, belonging, and so forth) to sustain their equilibrium, reproduction, and development, since the legal framework alone (or so-called civic principles) does not adequately fulfill  The French title is Fonder l’avenir: Le temps de la conciliation. For the purpose of this article, I will cite the official English translation of the report. 37  Bouchard 2012, 51; my translation and my emphasis. 38  Bouchard 2012, 12. 39  For a critique of the relation of power inherent to liberal politics of “recognition” in a Canadian settler colonial context, read Glen Coulthard’s penetrating and oft-cited essay on the topic. Glen Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada,” Contemporary Political Theory 6 (2007): 437–60. 40  Bouchard 2011, 454. 36

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this function.”41 In the language of the Bouchard-Taylor Report, this meant that the pursuit of consensus in the face of plurality, as well as the recognition and defense of a collective, national self (as opposed to a series of juxtaposed “selves” or “Nous”), constitute the social basis of a harmonious, evolving, and just society. In his book, Bouchard clarifies this argument by insisting that minority groups are allowed and invited to preserve and share their attachment to their own particular (or “ethno-cultural”) selves/Nous, but on the condition that their attachment to this particular Nous does not infringe on their potential participation in the “common public culture.” This notion of a “common public culture,” which is overdetermined by the majority’s undisputed foundationality and its location as the simultaneously asserted yet discursively deflected center of politics, thus reveals how the reciprocity that sustains the whole moral architecture of Bouchard’s intercultural model, and allegedly protects it against the “hierarchization of rights between minorities and the foundational majority,”42 remains filled with unresolvable contradictions. As I am about to explain, such intellectual gymnastics, which allows Bouchard to selectively and alternatively superpose and separate liberal universalistic claims about cultural specificity and group foundationality, is where Bouchard’s concept of interculturalism is most revealing of this ongoing naturalization of settler occupation and settler nationalism. Foundationality, Nationality, and the Settler Contract According to Bouchard, it is a very specific type of collectivity whose symbolic foundation must be privileged for this society—or “all societies”—to thrive. In his writings, the author clearly states that the nation (and national culture) does and must override all other forms of political affiliation. That being said, the moral imperative or inalienable political principles allegedly supporting the unquestioned privileging of national forms of belonging over any others aren’t clearly stated. The Bouchard-Taylor Report pushes this privileging into unexpected territory when it puts individualism on par with social movements in terms of their effect on group solidarity and other “greater” issues. Hence, ecological movements, the defense of aboriginal and minority rights, and the movement of resistance against capitalist globalization are described by Bouchard and Taylor as “partial solidarities,” whereas nations or national political communities, as well as national political parties, are described as the “large entities” that are being fragmented by such partial solidarities.43 In L’interculturalisme, Bouchard reiterates this argument and insists that in a context of tensions, changes, and crises, only the existence of broadly shared markers, or more precisely of a specific culture and national identity, 41

 Bouchard 2011, 455; my emphasis.  Bouchard 2012, 190; my translation. 43  Bouchard and Taylor 2008, 192. 42

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may sustain the elements of belonging and solidarity that are at the basis of any form of collective mobilization for the pursuit of the common good (reduction of social inequalities, improvement of health care, environmental policies, etc.). It is under these conditions that democracy, civic participation, social justice, and a sense of mutual responsibility may thrive; these conditions must never be taken for granted.44

Hence, it is from the particularities of discrete (and allegedly unproblematic) national identities that broader and more “universalistic” civic principles and institutions do or can emerge. In other words, the “common good” is uncritically and, I would argue, contradictorily predicated on the supremacy of national identities and the protection of allegedly neutral and panhuman civic institutions.45 Contradictorily indeed, these institutions would not and should not be subjected to the whims and particularities of identities (read: “other” identities, those who are not part of the “common” public culture of a culturally and historically specific “large national entity” of white, francophone settlers, and one that is allegedly sustained by universalistic, liberal, and democratic ideals). Furthermore, it isn’t to any form of national entities that Bouchard refers, but to one that is historically constituted and bears an identifiable beginning, a foundational act or moment from which its legitimacy and futurity emanates. For Bouchard, Québec would be traversed by three such foundational national entities: the French Canadian/Québécois foundational majority, as well as the AngloQuébécois and First Nations minority cultures. Bouchard writes: [T]here is in Québec one national culture, one official language, one majority culture and some cultural minorities—including a national minority of AngloQuébécois. It is from these components that a new We is currently being built, which incorporates all diversity and gives a new face to Québec as a NorthAmerican francophonie.46

If Indigenous people are conveniently left out of this narrative, Bouchard insists elsewhere that the (non-Indigenous) National Assembly’s recognition of Aboriginal rights, in 1985 and 1989,47 must also be accounted for in the state’s management of diversity. As such, this recognition (granted to them by us) shall inform an interculturalism that will recognize the cultural specificities and the

44

 Bouchard 2012, 185; my translation and my emphasis.  And quite ironically, it is this time the supremacy of this national culture that is “tenue pour acquise.” 46  Bouchard 2012, 75; my translation. 47  I am referring here to the 1985 and 1989 resolutions adopted by the National Assembly that politically recognizes 11 Aboriginal and Inuit nations in Québec, as well as their right to preserve and develop their culture, their identity, their economy, and their autonomy. On the topic of the political limits of such statist “recognition” and its concomitant principle of nation-to-nation cooperation, read Schaefli and Godlewska 2013, 7. 45

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rights of these “minority populations.”48 However, within an intercultural model predicated upon the effective recognition of a majority/minority duality, not all foundationalities, it goes without saying, are equivalent and bear the same political weight next to “the foundational majority” as the “vector of integration.”49 It is quite ironic that Bouchard ends up reproducing against Indigenous peoples what many Québécois have chastised Canadian multiculturalism for doing all along. Indigenous populations, under the intercultural model, are politically demoted to the rank of a mere (and less than foundational) minority that is ultimately invited to be part of the intercultural encounter under the protective eye of a eurocentric, yet-to-be sovereign nation-state. That being said, I contend that beyond this lively contest between competing foundational national cultures, the coloniality of the very notion of foundation, which is instrumental to Bouchard’s argument, must first be challenged. Here, the work of political theorist Robert Nichols on what he refers to as the “settler contract” is particularly illuminating.50 In his critical assessment of the function of social contract theory in European political thought, Nichols explains that the imagination of an “original situation … wherein individuals encounter each other in a presocial, prepolitical state of nature and contract together to form the basis of a collectivity,” has served as a “primary justificatory device” for settler colonialism in the Anglo-American world.51 Nichols’s notion of the settler contract is best understood in relation to previous work by Carole Pateman52 and Charles Mills,53 who respectively argue that such presumably neutral accounts of the origins of civil society correspond in effect to a patriarchal “sexual contract” and a white supremacist “racial contract.” In Contract & Domination, Pateman and Mills joined their efforts and explained how this racial-sexual contract may also be redefined as a (white) settler contract.54 Following their lead, Nichols explains: “The Settler Contract refers to the dual legitimating function of the philosophical and historical-narrative device of the ‘original contract’ as the origins of societal order.”55 Accordingly, contract theory presupposes that the originality of Indigenous, non-Western societies precedes government, property, and politics,

48

 Bouchard 2012, 47.  Bouchard 2012, 232; my translation. 50  Robert Nichols, “Contract and Usurpation: Enfranchisement and Racial Governance in Settler-Colonial Contexts,” in Theorizing Native Studies, ed. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Nichols, “Indigeneity and the Settler Contract Today,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 39, no. 2 (2013): 165–86. 51  Nichols 2014, 100–101. 52  Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 53  Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 54  Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, Contract & Domination (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2007). 55  Nichols 2013, 168. 49

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on account of what is assumed to be the “prior absence of civil society” in these communities.56 Bouchard’s insistence on foundationality serves as a similar “justificatory device,” even though it does recognize the competing foundationality, and thus the political existence—at least in liberal terms—of Indigenous civility. By “culture fondatrice,” Bouchard refers to cultures whose genealogy can be found in an original act of settlement (or “peuplement”) that is sustained in the long term.57 He writes: I include as foundational any culture resulting from the history of a community that has occupied a single area for a long period (one century, several centuries, or several millennia); that has formed a territory or settlement (what certain geographers call “territoriality”) with which it identifies; that has developed an identity and a collective imagination expressed through language, traditions, and institutions; that has developed solidarity and belonging; and that shares a sense of continuity based in memory. In such societies, long-established minorities can also hold the status of foundational cultures. In Quebec, examples include the Aboriginal communities, which were founded before the majority culture, in addition to the Anglophone population.58

Accordingly, Québec’s history would have less to do with a history of conquest and more to do with a history of successive, migratory settlements, with British domination as the only truly imperial exception.59 In order for a foundational group to politically qualify as legitimate, its modes of belonging and occupation must therefore stem from the group’s reasoned agency in its own and constantly evolving becoming thyself here. In other words, and according to this liberal logic, political groups or entities are not simply here or from here; they are founded here. This argument shares similarities with Lockean and colonial notions of terra nullius, with the exception that in Bouchard’s argument the doctrine of terra nullius equally seems to apply to Indigenous polities as to those of early “settlers.”60 As one of the three recognized national entities who, according to Bouchard, can legitimately claim such foundational status, First Nations are indeed assumed— just like “us,” but earlier—to have migrated and settled here, thus creating out of the state of nature a social/political order where there was none before. It is then implied that the Anglo-Québécois foundational minority and the francophone foundational majority did the same and founded competing or complementary political orders. “Our” cultural present would thus stem from a series of discrete acts of migration, foundation, and transformation through intercultural contacts 56

 Nichols 2013, 168, 175.  Bouchard 2012, 33. 58  Bouchard 2011, 442. 59  Bouchard 2012, 22. 60  Even though we must concurrently insist that arguments in favor of the doctrine of terra nullius have historically been made in Québec in an effort to invalidate Indigenous claims to land. Salée 2013, 333. 57

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and exchanges, whereas the resulting foundational, francophone majority culture occupies the “legitimate” center of the political exercise, and even more so on account of its status as a historically vulnerable minority on a continental level. In other words, Bouchard’s conception of foundationality, which is peculiarly related to the settler contract theorized by Nichols, is entangled in a similar liberal logic according to which autological, reasoned, and self-sovereign subjects constitute the political subjects par excellence, those who will freely and contractually consent to forms of sociality, civility, and (eventually) democracy where none existed before. The ideal (and “legitimate”) liberal-national political community is thus a community born out of foundationality, and not Indigeneity, since the latter suggests a genealogical already thereness, as opposed to the autology (or the sovereign and reasoned self-making) of a becoming here. In this narrative, one is not “native” from a land or territory. Rather, one becomes “native” if he or she is born from (or has been integrated into) a group with a specific and historically identifiable founding act. In other words, the temporality and the rationality of foundationality, as the ethico-political anchor for Bouchard’s interculturalism, sustains a liberal political imagination according to which “nativeness” constitutes a racially neutral and contractually acquirable category. The effect is to de-racialize coloniality, to depoliticize race, and to politically disqualify the very notion of Indigeneity. Race, Indigeneity, and “Nativeness” in the Liberal Settler Colony And yet, contrary to such a racially neutral civic ideal, settler colonialism remains a white supremacist project of replacement of Indigenous peoples, societies, and sovereignty. As Sherene Razack reminds us, the dispossession of Native populations in the making of a white settler society is “structured by a racial hierarchy” privileging European settlers who “thus become the original inhabitant and the group most entitled to the fruit of citizenship.”61 But once the colony is established (or successfully “settled”), the racial hierarchy does not magically become extinct or obsolete. It continues to structure settler society, and it does so beyond the Indigenous/settler divide. Hence, it is upon all newcomers that the Euro-sovereign henceforth prevails in a land that only He has the authority to signify, map, and legislate as His “home and Native land.”62 The “new” state’s normative socio-institutional configurations are then meant to sustain the political and cultural hegemony and moral legitimacy of white settler culture. Hence, if Indigenous people, immigrants, and non-Indigenous racialized subjects all experience the enactments of white supremacy in separate and distinct ways, there nonetheless exists an interrelated logic to the constitution of white supremacy in a nation-state born out of capitalist, colonial, and imperial demands. 61

 Razack 2008, 1–2.  This, of course, is an excerpt from the famous first line of the Canadian national anthem. 62

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In an effort to bring this argument closer to contemporary Québec, I would add that Québécois nationalist resistance to Anglo-Canadian and American imperial demands—which Bouchard also relays in his embrace of the givenness of this standard narrative of Québec’s historical trajectory of victimhood—is likewise caught in a web of complementary liberal-capitalist and colonial demands that haunts the national project. This explains why, for nationalists and sovereigntists, conversations about the role of Indigenous peoples in the past and future of a Québec state are often limited to romantic expressions of historical brotherliness and shared expressions of conquest and colonial victimhood, next to benevolent reassurances that in an independent Québec, the government would respect the cultural rights of Indigenous peoples.63 Yet, such a well-mannered invitation demonstrates very limited attention to the political and sovereign consequences of what would be a genuine nation-to-nation coexistence between Indigenous communities and a Euro-descendant majority hungry for the natural resources of northern Québec.64 Dismantling settler colonialism demands much more than a polite or humanistic contest over the Indigenous/settler racial binary. Indeed, a genuine intercultural model for Québec would necessitate a broader de-structuring of the white supremacist logic that sustains the racial state, as well as calling for a profound questioning of the givenness of settler sovereignty—or what Rifkin describes as its geopolitical commonsensicality. To that effect, Bouchard’s clumsy attempt, in his 2011 article, to legally anchor his intercultural model to a discussion about cultural antecedence, primogeniture, and Indigeneity, is evocative of the ways he keeps stumbling upon a settler common sense that shan’t be named nor questioned. He asks if “the advantages conferred by virtue of seniority” over the land, as is the case with ancestral aboriginal rights, could be “transposed to the world of intercultural relations as the basis for an ad hoc precedence in favour of foundational majorities.” Here, Bouchard’s description of primogeniture (or the birthright of the first child) as an analogy to illustrate his argument for the recognition of “the value of antecedence” can be likened to the Bouchard-Taylor Report’s definition of “nativeness.”65 By making being native (in French: natif) equivalent to “[living] in the national territory where [one] was born,”66 the Bouchard-Taylor Report re-signifies settlement as a color-blind fantasy. Indeed, anyone regardless of their race can be born here, and any group, in time, can eventually qualify as foundational and/or “native” to this land. And yet, it remains both “legitimate” and necessary, in the name of antecedence, to protect the primacy and priority of French Canadian culture and history over any other claims to “nativeness.” 63  Salée 2013, 331–2; Parti Québécois (PQ), “Agir en toute liberté”: Programme du Parti Québécois, 2011, art. 3.5: http://mon.pq.org/documents/programme2011.pdf [accessed August 15, 2014]. 64  Schaefli and Godlewska 2013, 8–11. 65  Bouchard 2011, 454. 66  Bouchard and Taylor 2008, 288.

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In other words, being Québécois is implicitly defined as being part of a simultaneously bound and open cultural and ethnic entity that finds itself in a constant state of tension between ideas of “nativeness,” foreignness, and Indigeneity. “Nativeness” is then neutralized as something that any newcomers (including Indigenous populations, understood as early migrants) can acquire with time. This timeliness (the “it has been a while”) of settler occupancy thus becomes the ultimate guarantee of the group’s native becoming, next to Indigenous and Anglophone “foundational minorities.” Here, foundationality, primogeniture, and “nativeness” (to be natif de, to be born from this land) are awkwardly interconnected as potential models for citizenship, regardless of the fact that an effective hierarchy remains in place between some people’s antecedence (or some people’s “nativeness”) and others’. Of course, the undeniable antecedence (or primogeniture, as Bouchard would have it) of Indigenous peoples inevitably troubles this narrative, and the author offers very little in terms of an explicit or detailed response to this conundrum. Here, one is led to assume that Bouchard’s argument in favor of the inalienable rights of the foundational majority would trump antecedence—or, more surrealistically, would suggest that primogeniture could also be acquired in an act of foundation, as long as there are more of us. In other words, the fact that Indigenous “settlements” are less populous than those of the francophone majority would naturally weigh in favor of the latter’s antecedence, and without regard to the colonial operations that led to such historical population imbalance.67 Once again, the selective malleability of Bouchard’s conceptual borrowings—most acutely noticeable in his loquacious silences about how Indigeneity challenges and contradicts the allant de soi of some of his propositions—perhaps constitutes the most evocative testament to the liberal, settler logic that animates his intercultural model. It then comes as no surprise that Bouchard later abandoned the ethically inhospitable notion of ad hoc precedence, and replaced it with the more restrained notion of “ad hoc leeway” (marge de manoeuvre ad hoc).68 And yet, I would argue that the distinction is negligible, since the ad hoc distribution of this leeway remains unequally articulated in relation to an indirect hierarchy between the foundationality—as well as the political weight of the “nativeness”—of one group over all others—despite Bouchard’s desperate attempt to convince us otherwise. To sum up, the intercultural struggle to strengthen the cohesion and cultural/ political survival of the majority culture in the face of ethnic/immigrant difference is presented by Bouchard as a settler colonial struggle over “nativeness,” all while he benevolently excludes Native peoples from the conversation. If “aboriginal cultures” are indeed presented as foundational, never are they implicitly or explicitly understood as contestants for the unambiguously Euro-descendant 67

 On this last point about the historical conditions leading to such population imbalance, I would like to acknowledge the contribution of Darryl Leroux, who pointed out to me this inalienable fact during conversations around this work. 68  Bouchard 2012, 190.

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status of host society (or société d’accueil), which constitutes both the end point and the raison d’être of the process of integration. This argument more broadly relates to the historical ellipsis in the sovereign narrative of the nation nouvelle, at a moment when we have strangely reached a historical juncture at which the benevolent recognition of aboriginal ancestral rights as a co-foundational culture paradoxically disqualifies Indigenous peoples from taking part in an exclusively Franco-Anglo contest over sovereignty and socio-institutional authority. In other words, there is very little in Bouchard’s writing about interculturalism that would take into account the political and sovereign consequences of Indigenous foundational rights (let alone of Indigeneity tout court) once the process of replacement of an aboriginal host society by that of the settler has been discursively and politically completed. Furthermore, to be natif or to be lawful through birth as a full citizen on settled land means that immigrant groups, people of color, non-Christian religious subjects, and other new members of the host society can and will acquire “nativeness” once “they” accept, as minorities, to integrate into the normative socio-institutional and legal framework of a white, Euro-descendant society—a society which, in the spirit of Lockean natural law, can unquestionably claim precedence over any other claims to “nativeness.” Furthermore, whereas the conservative backlash against the BouchardTaylor Commission seemed to primarily originate in multicultural angst about the perception that minority rights prevailed over those of a vulnerable francophone foundational majority,69 the report and its recommendations seemed correspondingly catered to assuage these very anxieties and make a claim for interculturalism as a project oriented towards the futurity and ultimate legitimacy of a Euro-settler majority. In such a context, the bodies and subjects who are being disciplined by this proposed interculturalism are not so much those of the racist, xenophobe, or assimilationist voices that poison what is otherwise (and fallaciously) assumed to be an inherently accepting and plural society. Rather, the disciplined bodies are those of these racialized or “othered” subjects who are failing to properly integrate into the “reciprocally” negotiated “common culture” of a self-evidently righteous, secular, liberal, francophone, and white postEuropean settler nation. For the Québécois majority-as-continental-minority to be able to claim cultural, political, and sovereign precedence over First Nations and the management of ethno-cultural diversity, the nation must first be able to locate where colonialism lies, that is, outside of itself. That being said, such criticism, it must be noted, should not be read as an indictment of Québec as a nation on account of its being more (or less) racist than the rest of Canada or other Western liberal democracies. Such a futile and counterproductive quarrel has too often taken central stage in recent debates over interculturalism. This was best illustrated by Martin Patriquin’s controversial

69  About the “new conservative sensibility” in Québec and some of its most representative young writers-essayist, read Belkhodja 2008.

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article,70 published on Maclean’s website, in which the author ironically reveals his own xenophobic (and anti-academic) bias when he lambastes scholar Alan Wong’s work71 on racism and the debate over reasonable accommodation, before proceeding to a predictable and vain demonstration about how Québec is and has historically been more open and accepting of ethnic and sexual diversity when compared to the rest of Canada. Against such self-commending efforts to repudiate racial hegemony in the name of competing forms of minorityhood and benevolence, I explained throughout this paper how structural racial privilege and the fragile temporality of settler authority and sovereignty must be taken in consideration if we wish to accurately understand the peculiar and doubly complex coloniality of Québec as a nation which, despite its declared state of continental minorityhood as a historically conquered people, continues to articulate its own claims to nationhood, statehood, and sovereignty in relation to a similarly eurocentric and putatively neutral economy of race, difference, and belonging. As it seeks in interculturalism (or concurrently in republicanism) an alternative model to official Canadian multicultural policies, Québec is ironically destined to replicate the same racialized dynamic of power unless it accepts, with much needed humility, to recognize and confront the hegemonic logic that is also inherent to the state’s own polite and cosmetic celebration of the cultural differences of “others.” This is why Daniel Salée,72 in one of his recent and most significant critical contribution to the debate over interculturalism in Québec, insists that the institutional answer to the challenges posed by diversity in our liberal democracies cannot simply be answered by corrective forms of public education or governmental programs that would seek to reform mentalities and insure a proper, integrated “vivre ensemble” within an already defined and non-negotiable socio-institutional framework. In order for a truly intercultural democracy to achieve its more radical potential, Salée invites us instead to embrace disagreement and the provisory nature of hegemony, as opposed to universalistic and humanistic imperatives of unity in difference. This would not only entail that we denaturalize the state’s claim to sovereignty, but also that we take seriously the political (and not only cultural) implications of such a challenge to settler authority and precedence over Indigenous land. French philosopher Jacques Rancière73 proposed an analogous theoretical argument when he famously explained that what he understands as the dead end of political action and reflection is owing to the identification of politics with the self of the political community—or in the language of Bouchard and the BouchardTaylor Report, to the development of an intercultural model in which openness to “others” would first and foremost contribute to salvaging Québécois identity and  Martin Patriquin, “Quebecers: The New Racists!” Macleans.ca, December 15, 2011: http://www.macleans.ca/general/quebecers-the-new-racists/ [accessed August 15, 2014]. 71  Wong 2011. 72  Salée 2010. 73  Jacques Rancière, “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization,” in The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (New York: Routledge, 1995). 70

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nationhood from slippages away from itself as it seeks to respond to the complex challenges posed by globalization and “ethno-cultural” diversity. For Rancière, the political rather corresponds to a time and state of in-betweenness; it is this moment of disidentification during which the self, incapable of truly identifying with a subject experiencing a wrongdoing unknown to his or her own experience, will concurrently question his or her identification with the “people” (Québécois, French, Canadian, etc.) in the name of which this wrongdoing is perpetrated. For francophone Québécois such as myself, such an understanding of the political constitutes an invitation to actively express our profound disagreement with nationalist assumptions according to which, in the name of our nationhood, our minorityhood, and our values, pundits, politicians, intellectuals, and lawmakers seek to institutionalize and naturalize the majority’s unilateral right to police appropriate modes of Indigenous and “ethno-cultural” belonging to land, territory, nation, religion, or citizenship.

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Part II Literature and Culture After Colonial Governmentality

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Chapter 5

“The World is Spoilt in the White Man’s Time”: Imagining Postcolonial Temporalities Asha Varadharajan and Timothy Wyman-McCarthy

Our essay takes its cue from Michael Griffiths’s call for “attentiveness to imaginations of aftermath”1 that might contribute to a more meaningful account of the experience and embodiment of decolonization. We conceive of what follows as an elaboration of the question of what comes “after” that forms a chief concern of the collection, one that emphasizes its duration rather than its regulation, disposition, progress, or regress, and that meditates on forms of life that refused to be “compelled to pass away”2 or “oblige[d] … to come into being.”3 Reading Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze’s “Language and Time in Postcolonial Experience” (2008) inspired us to engage this conception of a refusal of colonial governmentality and biopolitics.4 His chiastic exploration of “the concept of time from the point of view of experiences usually characterized as postcolonial” while “think[ing] through what the expression ‘postcolonial’ could mean from the perspective of a general concept of time” seems crucial in the context of a collection of essays devoted to the bio- and necropolitics of governmentality, to the consideration of life, death, and death-in-life.5 All these are resolutely temporal categories and predicaments but with radically different import in imperial/neocolonial and (post)colonial worlds. We were also attracted, predictably enough, to Eze’s conviction that “both the times and the experiences of postcolonialism” could be “most insightfully traced” in literature.6 He, like us, is predominantly concerned with African literatures. We have included Michelle Cliff in order to articulate the difference between the Caribbean and African experiences, where one relies on generation and the other on reclamation. Moreover, Eze’s essay is the first we have read that attempts to put philosophical or theoretical definitions of temporality and modernity into conversation with modern, postcolonial literary 1

 Michael Griffiths, introduction to this volume, 2.  Ibid., 5. 3  David Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” Social Text 43 (1995): 191–220, 193. 4  Emmanuel Chukuwudi Eze, “Language and Time in Postcolonial Experience,” Research in African Literatures 39, no. 1 (2008): 24–47. 5  Eze 2008, 24. 6  Eze 2008, 24. 2

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efforts “to grasp the meaning of time.”7 In our view, Eze purposefully revives Stephen Slemon’s argument in “Post-colonial Allegory and the Transformation of History” (1988) that postcolonial investment in the rhetoric of temporality at the heart of allegory manifests itself not only in the imaginative reconstruction of cultures that have been subject to historical erasure but in the institution of specific cultural typologies that underlie allegorical codes of recognition.8 This distinction is crucial if the postcolonial appropriation of the allegorical mode is to signify as more than a displacement and recontextualization of a universal cultural thematics or code of signification and value. Eze thus conducts his analysis on the terrain of writing as itself “a mark of the time of deconstruction, transformation and renewal”9 but does not remain content with inflecting temporality with the accents of cultural difference or with mapping geographical boundaries. The process of mending “a tradition in ruin” is equally an effort “to mend time itself.”10 Therefore, postcolonial cultures are never merely derivative, nor are they ever satisfied with the prospect of conscientious post-imperial cultures acknowledging the instrumentality of colonized societies to the European project of modernity; rather, their ambition exceeds the dialectic between “artistic invention and existential repair”11 to create for themselves “a different order of reality … , a second handle on existence … .”12 We believe the texts we have chosen describe “cultures as ‘broken’ by the experience of colonialism (and the economic forces of an ideologically cultural modernity), but also [appear] to experience language itself … as re-enactment of otherwise de-centered traditions.”13 While Wole Soyinka’s and Michelle Cliff’s works may be more accurately described as “embodiment[s] in thought [and writing] of time-in-motion,”14 all four texts “allow one to estimate the value—metaphysical, epistemological, moral, and aesthetic—of writing itself as an act of mending not only an individual’s memory, but also the historical selfunderstanding of a people, a culture, or a tradition.”15 If Slemon’s important essay multiplies textual evidence without providing a detailed examination of any single example, Eze’s provocative one is limited to suggestive comments about the uses of fiction and the appropriation of historical pasts without engaging in patient literary interpretation. Our effort, here, is thus a modest attempt to create whole cloth out of their speculative pieces.

7

 Eze 2008, 25.  Stephen Slemon, “Post-Colonial Allegory and the Transformation of History,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 23, no. 1 (1988): 157–68, 165. 9  Eze 2008, 26. 10  Eze 2008, 26. 11  Eze 2008, 26. 12  Chinua Achebe, quoted in Eze 2008, 28. 13  Eze 2008, 25. 14  Eze 2008, 25. 15  Eze 2008, 29. 8

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We begin with Wole Soyinka’s play, Death and the King’s Horseman (1975),16 because “it is an effort to grasp the meaning of time” and is concerned with “tradition as in itself a form of historical experience.”17 The drama, based on archival evidence of a real incident, tells the story of how Elesin, the King’s horseman, fails to fulfill his duty of escorting the soul of the recently deceased King to the afterlife by way of a ritual suicide. As Elesin prepares to fulfill his duty the suicide is stopped by Simon Pilkings, a colonial official who views Elesin’s act as barbaric. With the King’s soul now adrift the Yoruba community accuses Elesin of leaving them in a void. In an attempt to rescue the community, Olunde, Elesin’s son who has just returned to Oya from studying in Europe, attempts to take his father’s place by enacting his own ritual suicide, in response to which Elesin kills himself as well. Using the Yoruban worldview and idiom as a way to show the continuing relevance of mythology as a legitimate temporal category, Soyinka dramatizes how a culture deeply immersed in the politics and metaphysics of life, death, and death-in-life responds to its own seeming destruction. Memory and history do not exist in the Yoruban mind represented by Soyinka because for his characters even the gods against whom Elesin, the protagonist, sins cannot die and so they cannot be disabled or the tradition they represent ruined, as Eze implies in comparing the writing of Chinua Achebe with Soyinka’s. The conflict in the play registers on the metaphysical level rather than in the historical “time” of colonization (Pilkings’s time), which is merely incidental. If Soyinka elaborates how time means to a devastated yet continually vital culture, Michelle Cliff’s 1987 novel No Telephone to Heaven,18 brings the tool of myth available to and utilized by Soyinka into the Caribbean context to reveal what Eze describes, borrowing from Henri Bergson, as “an own inner experience of time.”19 Cliff tells the story of how Clare Savage, a light-skinned child from Jamaica, moves to America where she contends with racial segregation, travels to England to study at university, and finally returns to Jamaica and joins a revolutionary group, taking part in an uprising during which she dies. Alongside the story of Clare we learn about Christopher, a servant who kills his master and his master’s family because the former refused to help him locate his grandmother’s burial site in order to lay to rest her spirit. Christopher is subsequently considered a prophet (called “the watchman”) by the community. Clare is in search of a genealogy or tradition in which to place herself, and it is precisely because of the devastation and displacement wrought by the triangulation of the slave trade—a movement which the novel’s protagonist Clare mirrors—that the gods in the new mythology Clare reaches for must not only be invoked but also continually re-

 Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman, ed. Simon Gikandi (New York: Norton, 2003 [1975]). 17  Eze 2008, 25, 28. 18  Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (New York: Plume, 1987). 19  Eze 2008, 27. 16

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imagined. The experience of time in Cliff’s novel is an ever-present look forward which also gropes through the ruins of a compromised past. Mark Behr, in his 1995 novel The Smell of Apples,20 uses the context of Apartheid in South Africa to elaborate how an ideological system necessitates collective memory and personal mythologies. The novel tells the story of how Marnus, an 11-year-old Afrikaner boy growing up in a 1970s Cape Town household steeped in Apartheid ideology, struggles with the dissonance between what he has been taught to remember and believe on the one hand, and his experience on the other. Taught that his ancestors were exiled from Tanzania by “the blacks,” Marnus imbibes the Apartheid rhetoric his father—a general for the Apartheid state— feeds him. However, Marnus is forced to confront a truth about his father when he witnesses him rape his best friend, Frikkie, who has been staying with his family for the summer. Despite the shock of the incident, Marnus knows that Frikkie will never tell anyone about what happened and that it will remain a secret between them. The narrative is interrupted by a number of flash-forwards to Marnus as a soldier fighting in Angola around a decade later. The novel’s attention to silence, conspiracy, and secrets, all of which are what made Apartheid possible, allows the narrative to signify on both the individual and national level. Behr’s choice of the allegorical mode demonstrates how time in this context is doubled, always existing simultaneously as refuge and reality. That the everyday world of a child living a sleepy child’s-life can be momentous is what the novel shows in its grappling with memory that cannot but must be retrieved. Completing our selection of signal texts, Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie’s graphic novel Aya,21 published in 2007 and set in the Ivory Coast, uses irony to show how the nostalgia associated with that country’s failed transition to capitalist modernity does not preclude continued optimism and vitality. The many characters who populate Abouet and Oubrerie’s world revolve around Aya, a young woman living an unremarkable young person’s life. When her friend Adjoua has a baby with Moussa, only to have Moussa’s family question whether the baby is in fact his, Aya becomes ensnared in the controversy and spends a great deal of time tending to the child, Bobby. The graphic novel presents a world of vibrant advertisements, nightclubs, and wealthy government officials and businessmen alongside depictions of traditional healing, poverty, and corruption. The attempt of the characters who color the pages of Aya to live a life they never find demonstrates the experience of “failed” postcolonial states that live in an impossible “past or endless future.”22 If in Behr’s novel denial is interrupted by memory, in Aya desire is complicated by nostalgia.  Mark Behr, The Smell of Apples (New York: Picador, 1995).  Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie, Aya (Montréal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2007). 22  Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, ed. Wlad Godzich, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1983), 187–228, 226. 20 21

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We have paired these texts into two generations that, together, constitute “a site of a different kind of historical signification.”23 All of them contend with traditions in (apparent) ruin and negotiate both the loss of historical pasts and the temptation to fill this void while standing on the threshold of the “uncertain future of a new and untested form of postcolonial experience.”24 Their representation of temporality is distinguished by the persuasiveness with which their respective fictions allow “a disabled tradition, a broken time, to appear at another level of consciousness as intense, if suspended history.”25 The complications that emerge are, first, that in Soyinka’s controversial depiction of the Yoruban world, the disabled tradition of which Eze speaks is neither suspended nor ruined; it is merely interrupted. Second, the suspended history in Behr’s world is that of the Apartheid state rather than of its victims although that, too, as we shall see, may be too simplified a response. Finally, in Aya, the hope lies (disturbingly) in the temporarily disabled incursions of economic, epistemological, and cultural modernity, while Cliff’s novel may be the only work that illuminates the promise of the history that appears as intense, suspended, and simultaneously supra- and sub-conscious. Our scrutiny of these texts attends as scrupulously as possible to differences in genre and mode to distinguish between Behr and Abouet and Oubrerie’s deployment of allegory and irony to describe temporality and Soyinka and Cliff’s thematization of temporality in and through tragedy and myth, thus rendering time phenomenological. In discerning whether the texts of our choice recuperate, redeem, displace, or annihilate the past,26 we hope to construct a new “counter-culture of the [postcolonial] imagination,”27 one critically attuned to “the existential coming-to-form of a world itself.”28 To Touch the Moon’s Moment Discussions about the temporal dimension of postcolonial resistance have for the most part adopted one of two broad positions. On the one hand, critics argue that incommensurable, pre-modern experiences of temporality can be accessed and invoked as forms of resistance, dismissing, in the process, history as a “white mythology” and clocks and calendars as tools of oppression.29 On the other hand, they contend that colonialism introduced an irrevocable break from these pre-modern temporal epistemologies, leaving the “clock and calendar” as sole temporal rulers of the globe. Most recent commentators, however, mediate 23

 Eze 2008, 26.  Eze 2008, 26. 25  Eze 2008, 28. 26  These are Slemon’s distinctions; see Slemon 1988, 158. 27  Michael Dash, as quoted in Slemon 1988, 165. 28  Eze 2008, 31. 29  See Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York: Routledge, 1990). 24

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between these stark oppositions to treat Eurocentric and African temporalities as overlapping.30 This  negotiated  position, generally consonant with Achille Mbembe’s “time of entanglement,”31 explains how “colonial and post-colonial histories in fact consist of a plurality of heterogenous temporalities.”32 In this essay, we inhabit this middle ground because, rather than countering “the grotesquely accelerated transformations of capitalism”33 with static myths, we hope to provide a framework within which African literatures can be used to “chart [the] political and social realities” that helped create the world as Africans know and experience it today—to allow, that is, for the development of a “world-historical temporal narrative.”34 Our consideration of Death and the King’s Horseman and No Telephone to Heaven bears Eze’s cautions in mind: Pilkings’s actions threaten “the very construction of a sense of home on earth, no matter how transient, that has been forcibly rendered, however momentarily, ritually impossible”35 and thus Soyinka’s play asks, “How does one celebrate a tradition whose sense of truth and time and history has been shattered?”36 Cliff’s novel, in turn, asks, “How does one conserve a culture essentially defined by acts of violent dismemberment, exile, and diaspora?”37 In our view, Cliff’s writing is subtly different from Soyinka’s because she seeks to “grasp and re/write the idea of history” itself and does so from an embodied and phenomenological perspective whereas Soyinka jousts with the ontological course of Yoruban existence that is simultaneously socio-cultural and economic.38 Both writers, however, believe that the category of time makes human experience possible and meaningful even if the thrust of their works is concerned precisely with how time (in the guise of colonial history) has failed those governed by its rhythms and exclusions.39 Crucially, we share Eze’s invocation of trust “in one’s own—particular, historically locatable— forms of experience” as the source of the wisdom, rather than knowledge, that Soyinka and Cliff communicate, one that is exquisitely “chastened” rather than “naïve.”40 It is this chastened quality that lends credibility to their structures of belief and imagination.

 Russell West-Pavlov, Temporalities (New York: Routledge, 2013), 171.  Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 16. 32  West-Pavlov 2013, 166. 33  Adam Barrows, “The Static Clock and the Old Manchild: Temporality in TwentiethCentury African Literature,” Literature Compass 5, no. 3 (2008): 633–44, 641. 34  Barrows 2008, 641. 35  Eze 2008, 31. 36  Eze 2008, 32. 37  Eze 2008, 32. 38  Eze 2008, 39. 39  Eze contends with Soyinka’s writing but not with Cliff’s. We find his distinctions, however, equally illuminating of Cliff’s accomplishment.  40  Eze 2008, 29. 30 31

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Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven portray competing temporal tendencies at the moment of colonial and revolutionary encounter and the uncertain or overtly devastating consequences that follow: both refrain, that is, from treating myth as the static “other” of the clocks and calendars of global capitalist modernity while maintaining myth’s status as a formidable counter-narrative. Importantly, in these accounts mythic time and linear time do not merely coexist on an equal footing, which is what Soyinka objects to in his preface as the reliance on the clash of cultures model of historical understanding and cultural transformation.41 Rather, both works chart a movement from myth to modernity, or vice versa, and ask us to consider some crucial questions: Can alternative temporal experiences be invoked as ways of highlighting the fissures in the hegemony of the current temporal system? Can myth engage, in intelligent or interrogatory ways, with that which has usurped its place as primary temporal heuristic? Cliff and Soyinka show that critics arguing for the irreversible success of global capitalist modernity miss a step; that is, they fail to distinguish in this process the role of colonial intervention that occurred at a particular moment of interaction and invasion and in relation to pre-existing systems. Both Soyinka and Cliff are invested in reclaiming the past, though not as a way of using it to replace the present or define the future. Soyinka emphasizes the resilience of Yoruban culture despite its devastation; Cliff, on the other hand, introduces a stutter in colonial hegemony that, by the end of her novel, becomes the glimmer of new beginnings. In No Telephone to Heaven, Christopher’s violent murder of the family for whom he works is represented twice, once as focalized through Paul, the lone surviving member of this family, and once as focalized through Christopher; these two accounts differ primarily in their representation of temporality. The narrative as told through Paul’s perspective highlights the extreme linearity of his temporal experience. Not only does the narrative follow Paul as he methodically walks from room to room in his house, but it is a narrative fully aware of its own teleology—the bedrooms are the end towards which he will systematically progress. The minute details of Paul’s movements, coupled with his desire to prolong the inevitable by contemplating the abundance of flies, draw out the time interminably, in the process directing the reader’s attention to the standard, linear (albeit sluggish) notion of temporality witnessed through Paul’s perspective. The account of this crime as focalized through the perpetrator, Christopher, differs drastically in its firm rejection of linear time in favor of abstract timelessness. Immediately prior to murdering his master the reader is provided with Christopher’s perception of himself: “A force passed through him. He had no past. He had no future. He was phosphorus. Light-bearing. He was light igniting the air around him.”42 Unlike the linearity-centered focalization through Paul, the perspective provided by Christopher negates not only the move from past to present, but the very concepts 41

 Soyinka 2003, 3.  Cliff 1987, 48.

42

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of past and present, situating him in an “experience” that cannot be accounted for by clock and calendar. Elesin in Death and the King’s Horseman enacts a similar rejection of colonial temporality, albeit through the inverse of Christopher’s tactic: instead of denying the past and future, he frequently anticipates, and then looks back upon, an ambiguous “moment” which the reader is denied witnessing in the present. In Act III the reader is informed that “it is nearly time” and that Elesin’s spirit is eager, only to be denied direct access to the event when he says, “but wait a while my spirit. Wait. Wait for the coming of the courier of the king.”43 Following this speech Elesin enters into a trance facilitated by the Praise-Singer, who employs the rhetoric of the senses—sight, sound, and touch—to draw the King’s Horseman into the mental state necessary to commit the ritual suicide for which he is destined. Yet as much as this invocation of the senses may appear to draw the reader closer to the “experience” of Elesin, it in fact does just the opposite: while the PraiseSinger repeatedly asks about his sensory experience—“is your flesh lightened Elesin … Are there sounds there I cannot hear … Is the darkness gathering in your head Elesin?”44—Elesin never proffers a reply, leaving little evidence of what, precisely, he perceives as occurring in that moment. More important than this anticipation of the moment, however, is the reflection back on having missed it, which draws attention to the impossibility (for both Elesin and the reader) of truly grasping the Yoruban concept of temporality. Elesin attempts to explain to Pilkings the nature of the moment he missed: It is not an entire night but a moment of the night, and that moment is past. The moon was my messenger and guide. When it reached a certain gateway in the sky, it touched that moment for which my whole life has been spent in blessings. Even I do not know the gateway. I have stood here and scanned the sky for a glimpse of that door but, I cannot see it. Human eyes are useless for a search of this nature.45

A historian’s eyes, while no doubt perceptive when it comes to collecting evidence in support of a particular narrative, would be useless in a search for this moment, this experience. As beautiful as is the image of the moon touching a moment, it is nonetheless incomprehensible within the epistemological framework of the colonizer. In a way, the impossibility of locating this moment in the present does, like Christopher, deny the reader knowledge of the past and future, despite the frequent references to them, for as Soyinka explains in his essay “The Fourth Stage,” “life, present life, contains within it manifestations of the ancestral, the living and the unborn. All are vitally within the intimations and affectiveness of

43

 Soyinka 2003, 32–3.  Soyinka 2003, 36. 45  Soyinka 2003, 51. 44

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life, beyond mere abstract conceptualization.”46 The past, present, and future— the worlds of the dead, the living, and the yet-to-be-born—are so inextricably entwined that to deny the experience of one of them, such as the present moment, is to render a complete appreciation of the others impossible. Cliff, for her part, resists the conventionality of linear narrative by replacing it with a series of snapshots, stories, images, or ideas, which, when unified, present a way of understanding how the world came about in and through supra-human beings. Not only can both Christopher and Clare be recognized as supra human— the former is “phosphorus … [l]ight-bearing”47 and the latter is simultaneously “the albino gorilla” as well as “White. Black. Female. Lover. Beloved. Daughter. Traveler. Friend. Scholar. Terrorist. Farmer … ”48—but they are also both concerned with the conscious creation of something new. In the same “albino gorilla” sequence Clare recognizes how “the longing for tribe surfaces—unmistakable. To create if not to find.”49 That Clare’s travels mirror the triangulation of the slave trade reveals her attempt to find her tribal identity, an identity so powerfully shaped by the slave trade; yet, as she feels more and more removed from her homeland she considers abandoning the search to focus instead on creation. It is, fittingly, directly after Christopher’s act of violence—when as phosphorus he rejects the colonial version of temporal orderliness—that the emphasis on creation brought about by action rather than passivity is clear: “NO TELEPHONE TO HEAVEN. No miracles. None of them knew miracles. They must turn the damn thing upside down. Fight fire with fire. Burn.”50 With the possibility of a miracle out of the question, Christopher and Clare are forced to turn to their own agency to create a new way of understanding the world: to do this all the baggage of the old world must be stripped away, cleansed through flame. Contrary to this more revolutionary vision of myth, Death and the King’s Horseman sees Yoruban mythology as already fully formed and as existing independently from the epistemological system of the colonizers. In the opening exchange of the play the Praise-Singer reminds Elesin that “our world was never wrenched from its true course.”51 The Praise-Singer’s insistence on the one true Yoruban world set on one true course from which it has not yet faltered is supported by the intense parabolic and proverbial idiom of the opening sequence of the play. When the Praise-Singer asks Elesin, “what tryst is this the cockerel goes to keep with such haste that he must leave his tail behind?” and is countered a few lines later with the question, “when the horse sniffs the stable does he not strain at the bridle?”52 Soyinka is drawing attention to how the Yoruban system  Wole Soyinka, “The Fourth Stage,” in Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976), 143–4. 47  Cliff 1987, 48. 48  Cliff 1987, 91. 49  Cliff 1987, 91. 50  Cliff 1987, 50. 51  Soyinka 2003, 6. 52  Cliff 1987, 5. 46

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of signification—informed as it is by a particular set of stories, a different mythology—differs strikingly from that of the colonial administrators who appear in Act II. Olunde gives voice to the autonomy of Yoruban mythology when, in an attempt to comfort Pilkings, who he assumes is upset at the news of Elesin’s ritual suicide, he says, “I can see you are shocked by the whole business. But you must know by now there are things you cannot understand—or help.”53 At the beginning of Act V Elesin draws attention to Pilkings’s inability to employ his own standard of temporality in the service of understanding the “moment” missed by Elesin: “You are waiting for dawn white man. I hear you saying to yourself: only so many hours until dawn and then the danger is over. All I must do is to keep him alive tonight. You don’t quite understand it all but you know that tonight is when what ought to be must be brought about.”54 Despite the attempts of the rhetoric of colonial temporality to invade that of Yoruban mythology, Elesin makes clear that categories such as “hours,” “dawn,” and “tonight” fail to properly characterize “the moment.”55 Although Soyinka dramatizes the successful invasion of traditional Yoruban notions of temporality by the linearity of colonialist historical narratives, Western colonial time is proven to be a weak and ineffective hermeneutic system. It is this attitude towards myth—that it cannot be affected or debunked by the colonial administration—that advances Soyinka’s goal of preventing Death and the King’s Horseman from falling victim to the “clash of cultures” cliché.56 No Telephone to Heaven picks up where Death and the King’s Horseman’s sense of history invading myth leaves off by presenting an account of myth fracturing and undermining history. Two of the representations of extreme violence in the novel—the revenge of Christopher and the revolutionary end of Clare—begin with history in the mode of chaos and conclude with myth and the possibility of order. When Christopher releases his master and mistress from life he sends their souls “spinning through the room in confusion … He left them in their confusion and wandered into the girl’s room, where he released her soul as well.”57 Yet it is precisely out of the confusion of his victims’ souls that fuel for a soon-to-be-mythologized Christopher arises, for he has merely started along the road to becoming a prophet. Later the narrator raises the question of Christopher’s relation to a Yoruban god: “Had he been intimate with this ancient God … Had the young man Christopher suspected the power of Ogún in him.”58 This invocation of the Yoruban belief system, coupled with the consistent comparison of Christopher to Christ, universalizes his supra-human status by tying him to both exclusively African and pan-African world views. Furthermore, the chaos of Christopher’s second act of violence—the burning of the old women—leads directly to the 53

 Cliff 1987, 47.  Cliff 1987, 51. 55  Cliff 1987, 51. 56  Cliff 1987, 3. 57  Cliff, 1987, 48. 58  Cliff 1987, 177. 54

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creation of myth, for it is “legend now, song now, recognized by spectators drawn by the light and the heat and the terrible smell.”59 Once more Christopher is the embodiment of light, but this time it is a light that draws people to him, a light which reveals him to be a prophet and among the mythic revolutionaries who (indirectly) inspire Clare in her act of revolutionary violence. The slow breakdown of language in the final moments of Clare’s world is the primer for a new system of language and myth that will not be predicated on the sounds of downpression—“Poor-me-one … Whip-whip-whip … Backraw, back-raw … .”60 The final two words Cliff writes indicate that Clare has, in fact, fulfilled her objective of constructing a new mythology: if day were to “break” in the present tense there would be no indication that the actions of the revolutionaries were remembered; instead, day “broke,”61 in the past tense, thus invoking Clare and her revolutionaries as part of a shared past which is to be considered a foundational story for the dawning of a new age. The “Dark Background” of Allegory Slemon’s challenge to the imperial provenance of post-structuralist articulations of allegorical practice resides in his encapsulation of the agonistic relation between postcolonial allegory and history: Whatever the specific tactic, the common pursuit is to proceed beyond a “determinist view of history” by revising, reappropriating, or reinterpreting history as a concept, and in doing so to articulate new “codes of recognition” within which those acts of resistance, those unrealised intentions, and those reorderings of consciousness that “history” has rendered silent or invisible can be recognised as shaping forces in a culture’s tradition.62

Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples certainly turns allegory into the structuring principle of his narrative in the manner Slemon describes, for his narrator, Marnus, is both reader and witness, and the history and legacy of Apartheid are “read in adjacency to a fictional re-enactment of it.”63 Behr intrigues us because the focalization in The Smell of Apples is naïve rather than knowing or self-conscious, and he deploys the principle of adjacency to produce the “binocular” vision or “depth perception” Slemon advocates to rather different and thought-provokingly complex ends.64 Frikkie’s fate is adjacent to Marnus’s—the shame and guilt of one dependent on the suffering of the other—but both their fates mirror that of burnt and colored Little Neville who is described in oblique, even aleatory fashion. The 59

 Cliff 1987, 179.  Cliff 1987, 208. 61  Cliff 1987, 208. 62  Slemon 1988, 159. 63  Cliff 1987, 160. 64  Cliff 1987, 160. 60

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adjacency is thus of a piece with the doubling common to allegorical form with the further complication that Behr leaves ambiguous who suffers most: the witness to the crime or its victim? Moreover, both Afrikaner and colored children inhabit a chain of equivalence rather than the logic of difference. The cultural thematics that contributes to the novel’s anteriority (Moby Dick and the Garden of Eden) remains universal; thus, like Slemon’s argument about J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Behr’s allegorical repetition is accompanied by displacement and his work is anti- if not post-colonial. The liberatory dimensions of postcolonial allegory are both nuanced and fragile in Behr’s wielding of it because he publishes his critique of Apartheid in the wake of its dismantling, thus making allegory rather than history contingent and subject to transformation and re-vision. Their fragility is witnessed most clearly in the scene when Marnus’s father pins to his camouflage suit the epaulettes given to him by the general from Chile, Mr. Smith, who had been staying with the family. When Marnus is asked by his father to open the gift his reaction reveals his deep, affective rejection of the horror he has witnessed: “I don’t want to open it. I don’t want anything from the General and I hate Dad.”65 Marnus is told that it is a “great honour”66 to receive the epaulettes and that he should change into his camouflage suit—“Frikkie and I both got one when Dad came back from overseas”67—in order to wear them. After changing, however, Marnus refuses to come close enough to his father to receive the epaulettes; standing in a suit identical to that of the violated Frikkie, he freezes, hearing only “a silence all around.”68 The standoff between father and son ends when Marnus’s father beats him for refusing the epaulettes and both embrace, crying, before his father “pulls a funny face … so that I start to laughing.”69 Both return to the room where his sister and mother are waiting, and Marnus’s father “picks up the epaulettes and fastens them on the shoulder of my camouflage suit.”70 The symbolic dimension of the camouflage suit enhances Behr’s allegory showing how the very moment of illumination is a descent into an abyss of darkness. Refusing the epaulettes would have been a moment of illumination where Marnus sees the truth of his situation; his ultimate succumbing to the pressure to accept them shows that such an epiphany is not possible for, as the last line of the novel attests, “the Lord’s hand is resting over False Bay.”71 That is, False Bay is perennially making history’s façade implacable rather than penetrable or decodable and allegory diffident rather than masterful. And yet, as the epaulettes are given as a complicating and complicit gift to Marnus, so Behr gives his work, The Smell of Apples, as a gift to the reader, and as a memorial to Frikkie and Little Neville. 65

 Behr 1995, 194.  Behr 1995, 195. 67  Behr 1995, 195. 68  Behr 1995, 196. 69  Behr 1995, 197. 70  Behr 1995, 197. 71  Behr 1995, 200. 66

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At the end of his essay, Eze describes letting “the spirits of ancestors die” as “a profound act of betrayal” which throws into question whether “time will allow memory to go on” and ensure “that one’s work is … being confided” to the living rather than the dead.72 These questions become profound in the context of both The Smell of Apples and Aya. In the former, betrayal is an act of conscience and of postcolonial resistance while it remains unclear what the impact of confiding might be and whether memory as a testament to the impossibility of escaping history is shared by others trapped in the mythology of Apartheid. In the latter, Abouet and Oubrerie resurrect the past that never happened as an act of hope while rendering the choice between tradition and modernity both unconscionable and aporetic. Is Aya addressed to its failed present and impossible future and thus ironic in its nostalgia? The air of gossip and rumor that percolates in its pages does give it the intimacy of confidences exchanged in the present among the friends and family who shared Aya’s idealized vision once. Negotiating this impasse requires, in our view, a return to Paul de Man’s “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1983).73 In other words, Slemon’s emphasis on the revisionist and transformative dimensions of allegory in the expression of postcolonial resistance does not help us account for the place of “ruin” and fragment in Behr’s imagination or of nostalgia and irony in Abouet and Oubrerie. By the same token, the principles of adjacency and of suspension (in Eze) to which their respective allegory and irony correspond require us to re-examine de Man’s claim that allegory is a quintessentially temporal mode that denies simultaneity, spatiality, or instantaneity. Andrea Mirabile’s “Allegory, Pathos, and Irony: The Resistance to Benjamin in Paul de Man” (2012)74 brilliantly juxtaposes the writings of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man to represent each as the other’s complement and supplement and in the name of a more productive discussion of allegory and irony. Her essay helped us explain the puzzling dimensions of allegory in The Smell of Apples while confirming for us that Aya is indeed its appropriate companion as de Man is Benjamin’s. As is probably obvious, Behr’s allegories are fragmentary and discontinuous; that is, the relation between the novel and its pretexts is neither sustained nor readily mapped onto a grid of correspondences and produces an impression of “semiotic regression”75 to an undisclosed origin. Marnus’s naïve focalization inadvertently reveals the gaps and contradictions in the mythology of Apartheid which itself precludes coincidence or identity of word and world (the attributes of the symbol as opposed to allegory). Behr creates an unlikely allegorical form in which the allegory’s distance from its origin does not entail “renouncing the nostalgia and desire to coincide”76 with it; in fact, the pain and 72

 Eze 2008, 41, 42.  de Man 1983. 74  Andrea Mirabile, “Allegory, Pathos, and Irony: The Resistance to Benjamin in Paul de Man,” German Studies Review 35, no. 2 (May 2012): 319–33. 75  Mirabile 2012, 326. 76  de Man 1983, 207. 73

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pathos in the work comes precisely from the inability of Marnus to renounce this desire. Both Benjamin and de Man would agree that the fragmentariness of allegory is crucial to the process of demystifying the symbolic totality of Apartheid but the dry version of allegory that de Man describes as a dialectic between the self and non-self is not Behr’s. Rather, his includes the pathos and melancholy of Benjamin’s formulation, incorporating Benjamin’s allusions to “ruins and death, darkness and fall.”77 His epigraphs confirm that his betrayal is also an act of mourning, as Benjamin suggests of allegory. “Nonetheless,” as Mirabile explains, Benjamin’s understanding of allegory simultaneously contains, at least potentially, an element of hope and salvation. Allegory appears as a way to escape from human temporality, and as a form of preservation: “An appreciation of the transience of things, and the concern to rescue them for eternity, is one of the strongest impulses in allegory.”78

The first epigraph, by Boris Pasternak—“Thank you, forgive me, I kiss you, oh hands / Of my neglected, my disregarded / Homeland, my diffidence, family, friends”—suggests this doubled aspect of Behr’s novel: he mourns his betrayal of his past and his family and friends but recognizes that such betrayal is the means to salvation for both himself and his friends and family. This is complicated further in that his loyalty to his family betrays his friendship with Frikkie just as the book betrays his family in order to preserve his friendship with Frikkie. And yet, their mutual silence is represented as a mark of friendship in the novel. Does that mean his speaking now is really a betrayal? For these reasons, Eze’s word “confiding” is particularly compelling. The tense and modality of the second epigraph, from Antjie Krog—“Only one life we have in which we wanted merely to be loved forever”—reveals the doubled nature of the allegory in a different sense: both the symbolic totality of Apartheid and Marnus’s yearning for love embody the impulse to rescue things for eternity, thus exposing the depth of Behr’s conception of allegory. It is to a large extent through the thematics of sound and silence that the allegory of Behr and irony of Abouet and Oubrerie reveal ruin and resistance or reclamation to be coincident rather than mutually exclusive. Behr, for instance, articulates a new “code of recognition” by turning silence into trust, understanding, friendship, loyalty, and love as much as into conspiratorial Apartheid-era mute witnessing. Thus Behr is attentive to the ways silence both signifies forgetting as well as compels remembrance. The Smell of Apples portrays, on the one hand, the rote memorization required by Apartheid ideology, and, on the other, the conspiratorial silence held between friends. Early in the novel Marnus reveals history to be equivalent with memorization—“you can get to know our whole history, just by knowing the uniforms and the different wars” (9)—but later sees understanding to be born of silence—“it’s as if I suddenly know: it’s better that Frikkie didn’t tell 77

 Mirabile 2012, 324.  Mirabile 2012. Emphasis in original.

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me this morning. We know everything about each other. We don’t share our secrets with anyone except each other.”79 Saying or doing without thinking is put at odds with the silence of friendship, which is thinking and doing without saying. Here, silence is not forgetting; rather, it indicates the way allegory (and Apartheid) work on what is not said. Behr thus uses allegory and narrative focalization to convey a truth about the Apartheid world, for Apartheid itself is conspiratorial and the whole novel revolves around what is kept secret and what is presented, memorized, and regurgitated in its stead. De Man argues that “the prevalence of allegory always corresponds to the unveiling of an authentically temporal destiny. This unveiling takes place in a subject that has sought refuge against the impact of time in a natural world to which, in truth, it bears no resemblance.”80 It is precisely the investment Marnus’s family makes in Apartheid ideology that indicates that they seek refuge against time, and this is what leads to one of Marnus’s most profound observations: “Death brings its own freedom, and it is for the living that the dead should mourn, for in life there is no escape from history.”81 The silence of Apartheid is escaping history, whereas the silence shared between Frikkie and Marnus, and the work of fiction (Behr’s own novel) to which it leads, is an acknowledgement, however oblique or coded, of history’s inescapability and the future’s necessity. As de Man writes, “[d]econstructions of figural texts … engender lucid narratives which produce … a darkness more redoubtable than the error they dispel.”82 Yet it is also, Mirabile notes, “a productive darkness,”83 because, for instance in the case of Behr, it shows how allegory is able to hold together both the thematics of ruin, mourning, loss, and mystification as well as those of hope, the future, salvation, and illumination. The area it traces “that resists dissection and maybe must be left intact”84 is also that which may be given as a gift of memory and as an act of love, and in which is held “the future story of allegory.”85 In contrast to Behr, the lively chatter in Aya is generative and vital, forgetting itself as soon as it appears; life here is living, not significance. In Behr each sentence is portentous because speech in the South African context makes silence safe: words spoken cannot be forgotten because of the significance of uttered truth. Abouet and Oubrerie see forgetting as part of living whereas for Behr remembering—but remembering silently—is part of living. For the characters in Aya, as Alisia Grace Chase writes in her introduction, “life seemed promising enough to be pedestrian.”86 The point, for Abouet and Oubrerie, is not to make suffering banal, but rather to make promise pedestrian, whereas it is precisely 79

 Behr 1995, 199.  de Man 1983, 200. 81  Behr 1995, 198. 82  Quoted in Mirabile 2012, 330. 83  Mirabile 2012, 330. 84  Mirabile 2012, 330. 85  Mirabile 2012, 330. 86  Alisia Grace Chase, introduction to Abouet and Oubrerie, Aya (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2008). 80

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the everyday instantiations of Apartheid ideology that make the pedestrian in Behr momentous rather than promising. The irony in Aya is seen most clearly in the juxtaposition of a bright, colorful palette representing rosy-hued capitalist euphoria alongside the dark tones and desolate settings that are the underside of such a world. And it is precisely the dexterity with which About and Oubrerie exaggerate the (false) claims of capitalist modernity to determine the forms their characters’ lives may take that indicates these characters are nostalgic for a world they never found; that is, the characters’ experience of the dark side of this bright world shows that the latter was always already lost. The loud and colorful edifice constructed by Abouet and Oubrerie casts before itself the shadow of its own ruin because it represents the pedestrian promise of a world that never was. It is in the cracks and interstices of this edifice—of the euphoria of the everyday— that we see “ruin.” For instance, the controversial aspect of the graphic novel is that the panels employing a thematic and illustrative darkness adhere to the scenes of domestic strife, such as abuse (the beating of Adjoua by her father) and philandering. Instead of a rosy-hued view of community, tradition, and family life we find the opposite, for the graphic novel’s overwhelming impression is that the bright yellows and pinks are attached to modernity whereas the scenes of darkness have to do with the world’s domestic underbelly, giving the work a gendered perspective. What is intriguing is that the graphic novel is able to convey so much by way of sound. The scenes depicting the dark underbelly of Aya’s world are far from silent or conspiratorial; rather, these moments are just as instigative of chatter and conversation, even as the moments seem to recede quickly from memory. In Aya, sound without meaning is life, vibrancy, and hope. “Ruinate” The word “ruinate” not only anticipates ideas of “slow death” and destruction, but at the same time reveals such return to the bush to be generative.87 Suffering implies a certain kind of duration, and in the world of biopolitics it is slow, inexorable, and all-encompassing. Instead of accepting this experience of both suffering and its time, these texts invoke the complexity of memory and nostalgia, expectation and desire, and pasts, aftermaths, and futures that allow for both the inevitability of compromise as well as the necessity and vitality of re-generation. If biopolitics has questioned the efficacy of memorialization, these texts broaden the effective terrain of memory to think of nostalgia, desire, silence, speech, destruction, and creation as equally vital interventions into the single “way of life” obliged by colonial governmentality while at the same time acting as memorializations in their own unique (and complicit) ways. The language of biopolitics is productive insofar as it allows us to see the relationship between power and slow violence—the attrition of lives—that 87  Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death: Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Summer 2007): 754–80.

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continues to manifest itself in postcolonial societies. Such a vocabulary retains a diagnostic power because it introduces in the postcolonial critical sensibility a kind of insistence and persistence that prevents it from being easily fooled by the manifestations of resurgence, authenticity, or prosperity. The works of our choice, however, suggest that the discourse of biopolitics misses a whole dimension of both postcolonial resistance as well as its aftermaths. What is the after? The after is full of emotions, affects, and modes of being not credited in the analytics of power, violence, biopolitics, and devastation. From the perspective of the colonized, one cannot afford to stop hoping or believing.

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Chapter 6

Remembering Histories of Care: Clinic and Archive in Anil’s Ghost Sandhya Shetty

The past was always useful. Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost Every past … is worthy to be condemned. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

A surfeit of losses brings on a surfeit of memories in Anil’s Ghost (2000), Michael Ondaatje’s novel about the Sri Lankan civil war. Traveling in the medium of retrospection, everyone remembers, and Ondaatje’s traveling doctors remember as much as anyone. In fact, the clinic,1 the novel’s primary site for the display and mending of bodies broken by “careless power” also serves, more covertly, as a site for the retrieval/conservation of Sri Lankan pasts.2 While it has been noted that a medical imaginary shapes Anil’s Ghost’s general participation in the reparative work of reviving and conserving worlds demolished by internecine violence, the surprising manifestation of the contemporary clinic as “an archivalgrammatological order”3 in the killing fields has not yet been recognized. Mainly, it is the young surgeon, Gamini, chief witness and repairman of war-torn bodies, who serves as chief spokesman for past medical history, colonial as well as precolonial. “We have no time to remember,” laments the doctor, reminding the 1

 I use the term “clinic” to signal a number of different things, but chiefly as metonym for the disciplinary space where face-to-face contact occurs between subjects and objects of medical scrutiny or surgical intervention. As such, the clinic as a site of treatment also names ways of doing and knowing technically distinguishable from other physicalconceptual sites, such as “the library” or “archive” or “the laboratory,” that adjoin it and are sometimes collated and conflated with it in the novel. In these latter instances, “the clinic” indexes a broader segment of the dispositif of modern medicine. 2  Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (New York: Vintage International, 2000), 119. Ananda’s artisanal work crafting likenesses and mending broken statues constitutes a second site of figurative healing that mirrors surgical restoration. The healing art of surgery and the restorative acts of ritual sculptural arts constitute an important biomoral conjunction in Anil’s Ghost’s imagination of counterpoints to violence. 3  Allen Feldman, “Inhumanitas: Political Speciation, Animality, Natality, Defacement,” in In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care, ed. Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 115–50, 122.

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novel’s diasporic heroine, Anil, of a golden age of Sri Lankan medicine and urging her to visit Mihintale, the ruins of the world’s oldest hospital. On other occasions, his memories of anecdotes heard or books read stud the narration with cameos of inspiring colonial-era Burgher doctors. What is the meaning and value of such an excess of remembering and retrieving of pasts in emergency conditions? What is at stake in the striking convergence of past history and current practice of medicine, antiquarian knowledge and urgent medical intervention, wartime surgery and writing/reading in Anil’s Ghost? How are the traces of a medical heritage scattered across the novel related to its imagination of the contemporary clinic as an ethical site of wartime hospitality and as the space of a hospitality “to come” outside of everything that was and is? What or who is served by the war clinic as instrument of memory and as the locus of two quite different projects of preservation—biological and historical—on the highly contested territory of Sri Lanka’s “northeast”?4 In Untimely Meditations, Friedrich Nietzsche urges some wariness about “contentment,” a term he employs to mark an anti-cosmopolitan relation to the past evident in certain forms of cultural-nationalist nostalgia.5 Gamini, Anil’s Ghost’s chief physician-character’s bookish accounts of the medical-professional past carry a hint of such “contentment.” Indeed, as per Nietzsche’s reflections, Gamini’s remembering “in the middle of civil war” bears an “antiquarian” and “monumental” relationship to the island’s medical pasts, each age he recalls appearing in pastoral (bucolic and governmental) forms worthy of professional emulation. While, understandably, the grim novelty of his situation sends him to anodyne history, it is noteworthy that the doctor’s “backward glances” turn the desperate work of cure and care in a contemporary state of emergency into a melancholic project of knowledge—into an element within a cultural tradition, into a certain theory or story of a people who “were always good with illness and death.”6 This retreat into retrograde “national” history rather than distance from it recalls a third and contrasting mode of relating to the past Nietzsche identifies as “critical” history.7 The critical mode is salutary, for it limits “the fever of history” which burns up individuals, people, nations, placing a term on that which, certainly in the case of Sri Lanka’s internecine politics, has proven to be, quite literally, injurious to the body of the people. Arguing against too much remembering, Nietzsche claims that if the past is to serve life, then it must itself suffer: every past by virtue of 4

 See Suvendrini Perera’s account of the highly charged landscape of Sri Lanka’s North and Eastern provinces. Suvendrini Perera, “Sri Lanka: Landscapes of Massacre,” in Torture: Power, Democracy, and the Human Body, ed. Shampa Biswas and Zahi Zalloua (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 215–43. 5  This paragraph draws on Friedrich Nietzsche, “On The Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, tr. R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 57–124. 6  Ondaatje 2000, 192. 7  Nietzsche 1997, 75–6.

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having been “is worthy to be condemned”; it is possible, nay, sometimes necessary to live unhistorically: “The unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of a people, and of a culture … . The question of the degree to which life requires the service of history at all … is one of the supreme questions and concerns in regard to the health of a man, a people, or a culture.”8 As Jeffrey Blustein arguing in the same spirit and insisting on the importance of linking memory with identity and obligation points out, “it would be foolish to claim, that remembering is a good at all times and in every circumstance.”9 Such measured caveats against historical memory in public space have especial merit in cases of postcolonial “ethnic outbidding,” which freezes floating collections of myth, facts, and lore into “what was the case,” that is, into canonical history insensitive to secular, democratic obligation or, in posthumanist terms, to hospitality beyond emplacement and reason. In milieux where ethno-nationalisms turn necropolitical, the “supreme” question must indeed be the “question of the degree to which life requires the service of history at all.”10 That Anil’s Ghost is not insensitive to this question is clear enough in its provocative (if abbreviated) tale of Dr. Linus Corea which broaches the possibility of nonsovereign medical hospitality, linked fundamentally to radical deterritorialization. To return to Nietzsche’s question: obviously, no one appraisal of history’s necessity to life/biology can fit all conceivable situations and contingencies, but in the case Anil’s Ghost brings forward—a state of emergency marked by “the declension of biopolitics into its thanatopolitical reverse”11—the jury is no longer out on history’s services. It is widely acknowledged that contested historical memories and endlessly cited ethno-nationalist myths have serviced Sri Lanka’s protracted civil war, a matter, really, of massacres, graphically revealed in Anil’s Ghost through the prism of “doctors and nurses in hospitals of chaos and dedication.”12 What has not been acknowledged is how the novel’s penchant for marking out certain “more innocent times” for melancholic remembrance and representation casually assembles a bricolage of medical pasts that bolsters majoritarian-nationalist history and geography. In contexts of violence, surely, a critical narrative that acknowledges the uses of the past, yet hews to the maxim 8

 Nietzsche 1997, 63, 67 (emphasis added).  Jeffrey Blustein, The Moral Demands of Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 2. 10  Of course Nietzsche’s “life” has a unique valence. I read his health metaphorics catachrestically—literally—to signify species life, in the sense it has in discussions around biopolitics. 11  See Timothy Campbell, “Translator’s Introduction” to Esposito 2008, ix. 12  Ondaatje 2000, 309; Krishna’s Postcolonial Insecurities provides detailed demonstration of how the national imaginary and the Sinhalese past prove injurious to a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. Sankaran Krishna, Postcolonial Insecurities: India, Sri Lanka, and the Question of Nationhood (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Perera’s “Landscapes of Massacre” is an equally compelling discussion of how antiquarian history becomes a charter for massacre. Perera 2011. 9

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that “every past … is worthy to be condemned” would be more compelling as an exercise in responsible, strategic ab/use. Gamini’s, and Anil’s Ghost’s, backward glances occasionally flicker, yet the rhetoric of doubt fails to preclude the fiction’s extensive mobilization of divisive scripts of colonial and pre-colonial history, including medical history. The novel’s encrypted and long-form invocations of a Sinhala medical past become especially problematic with respect to representations of the humanitarian labors of contemporary doctors on a terrain the novel non-showily designates as “the northeast.”13 Narratively archived through abundant textual ephemera— anecdotes recounted, books and book titles cited, or codified historical knowledge periodically regurgitated—the medical past limns a genealogy for the novel’s entrepreneurial Sinhalese doctors caring for faceless populations on this “landscape of massacre” where war machines do the dismembering work of necropower both on bodies and on the land as well.14 Interestingly, Anil’s Ghost’s scenes of biopolitical work (as opposed to emergency treatment of wartime casualties) are all located on this historically charged landscape centered on the base hospital at Polonnaruwa in the North Central Province. Depictions of medical work in the storied environs of ancient Polonnaruwa are quite differently textured from scenes set in the urban hospitals and laboratories of Colombo where Anil begins her human rights investigation. The novel thus divides the space and labor of the clinic between two distinct geographies, each corresponding to the declared war zones of the secessionist north and east and the Sinhala-dominated south and west. The former cast as anomic “wilderness” are recreated as “the northeast,” the fiction’s staging ground for bookish and caring medical men who not only solve and salve the “human” problem, but in so doing enact, this essay’s final section shows, complex relations between medicine and government, surgeons and sovereignty in the Sri Lankan state of exception. As the primary location of biopolitical care, the clinic in the northeast is not only set off from the capital/and the southern and western Sinhala-dominated regions of Sri Lanka, but it is also, noticeably, saturated by all sorts of writing: certainly by disciplinary inscriptions of biopower (devoted to producing docile bodies and preserving the bare life of traumatized populations) and the violent writing of necropower (given to the incisive marking of bodies brilliantly captured in Achille Mbembe’s phrase, “demiurgic surgery”).15 Ondaatje’s clinic 13  The conflation of the two provinces in Ondaatje’s fictional “northeast” and its location in the purview of the Polonnaruwa force field seems to have something to do perhaps with the fact that the two provinces were for a period (1988–2006) amalgamated ahead of a planned referendum, which was then rescinded as illegal by the Supreme Court in 2006. 14  Perera highlights how the ethno-nationalist past not only imaginatively shapes the understanding of the present, but is also translated into the actual material re-engineering of terrain in the east and in the borderland areas between north and south; Perera 2011, 229. 15  If Agamben explicitly articulates the historical place of medicine in the “biopolitical praxis” of fascist and liberal political orders, Mbembe’s suggestive poetic conceit constellates

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accommodates writing in the narrow sense as well. Anil’s Ghost’s doctors are indeed great bibliophiles, immersed in a culture of books and reading. Their common room at the base hospital in the North Central Province, where much of the medical action is set, boasts a motley set of volumes: Elective Affinities, books by Carl Jung, more “porous paperbacks” like Rosemary Rogers’s Harlequin romance, The Tea Planter’s Bride, and, of course, textbooks on surgery.16 The novel thus makes a great point of entangling in script and scripting the wartime praxes of medical-surgical care on the charged landscape of terror and massacre. Immersed in the work of reading, writing, remembering as well as caring and curing, the clinic accommodated within a biopolitical-archival/grammatological order navigates a series of material and conceptual gaps between present and past, medicine and politics, life and history, techne and mneme.17 In what follows, I explore this strange biopolitical-grammatological/archival ordering of bodies, conduct, and memory at the site of the clinic in the civil war Sri Lanka Ondaatje fictionalizes. I am specifically interested in the way the sketch of the northeast as a morally charged heterotopia of healing comes to bear the imprint of “antiquarian” inscriptions of Sinhalese-Buddhist medical pasts. Although an the seemingly opposed worlds of the surgeon and the death squad in the postcolony around the figure of the demiurge. A complex notion, the demiurge has both religious and politicophilosophical significance in antiquity. It is my sense that Mbembe’s usage invokes the political crafting of public life that is one meaning of the word, “demiurgery.” My interest in the notion however stems from its ironic appearance in the phrase “demiurgic surgery.” Intended to characterize the “creative” and public handiwork of death in the postcolony, Mbembe’s phrase draws attention to the etymological and locational intimacy between the handiwork (urg) of the surgeon and of the public butchers for whom the (violent) inscription of bodies through massacre constitutes a political task. The medical metaphor serves Mbembe’s account of the scandal of life and death in the postcolony well. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998); Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” tr. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40, 21. 16  Joseph Slaughter is one of the few critics to notice the linking of Ondaatje’s doctors to humanist reading/writing practices. His discussion however brackets the specificity of the medical. Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham UP, 2007), 185–98. 17  Feldman 2010, 115–50. Feldman’s reading of the inscriptive praxes of biopower, specifically his formulation that biopower is supremely archival, offers a useful application that helps us understand the log and logic of Anil’s Ghost’s navigation of the chasm between the biological and the archival in the Sri Lankan context of majoritarian violence, specifically its refraction of doctors’ labors within a necropolitical order. Reading Giorgio Agamben, Feldman posits that a bio-archive (or biopolitical-grammatological order) is integral to thanatopolitics, which involves not just the banning of “bare life” to an anomic wilderness “beyond the archive” (123) but the grammatizing and thereby subjecting of life to “archival mortification” (122). I am indebted to his abstract theoretical elaboration of the dynamics of the bio-archive, which provides me with the key notion of a biopoliticalgrammatological order.

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admiring discourse mediates the novel’s depictions of heroic Sinhala doctors caring for a besieged (Tamil) population “a long way from government, media, and financial ambition,” this discourse of remedy and rescue is precisely that which operationalizes modern biopolitical power alongside the other violent rationales of power working over the northeast as “camp.”18 Cohabiting the same terrain as the warmongers, the clinic as the site of first response also attempts to engage in more than a “minimal biopolitics,”19 intensifying the regulation of conduct deemed beneficial to life—indeed to the life of those very “enemy” populations from whose well-being the law has detached itself. Thanks, the narrator insists, to the grace and skill of fearless and dedicated doctors, vitamins are supplied, pregnant mothers checked for diabetes, elective surgery undertaken, and life lived and treated for the long haul. Doctors in the northeast thus continue to facilitate the population’s access to health care; or, shall we say, they facilitate health care’s, which is to say governmental power’s, continued access to a population trapped and brutalized by Emergency Regulations and The Prevention of Terrorism Act which legitimized a “repressive ecology.”20 Integral as well to the de-centralized clinic that nevertheless brings relations of force into play even as it preserves life is the third prong of inscriptive praxes: the acting out of a medical heritage that serves ideologically to re-territorialize and sequester species life on rebel-controlled terrain. The specific scripts and texts that suffuse the consciousness and practice of doctors suggest Ondaatje’s medical scenarios in insurgent space are encrypted citations of a phantasmatic SinhaleseBuddhist “origin.” In other words, the wartime medical humanitarianism (call it biopolitical labor) of Sinhala doctors in the troubled national present iterates the topos of a glorious medical past. This covert link established between biopolitical work in the northeast and medieval medical organization not only ties civil war doctors and hospitals to a mythopoetic Sinhalese-nationalist archive, but also co-opts the emergent ethical potential that any deterritorializing praxis “far from government, media, and financial ambition” might come to possess. Arguably, the double writing of populations and geographies via the privileged figures of Sinhala-speaking doctors associated with the Polannaruwa hospital, an institution in the dry zone redolent of Sinhalese-nationalist nostalgia, constitutes a worlding 18

 Agamben 1998.  Peter Redfield, Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors without Borders (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). See for a discussion of “minimal biopolitics.” 20  Daya Somasundaram, “Collective Trauma in Northern Sri Lanka: A Qualitative Psycho-Social Ecological Study,” International Journal of Mental Health Systems 1, no. 5 (2007): 11–12, 12. Nimmi Gowrinathan and Zachariah Mampilly point out that during the civil war a “skeletal administrative structure in LTTE-controlled territory retain[ed] some semblance of state control” in matters such as health despite security being under rebel control. Ondaatje’s fictional depictions resonate with this scenario of a mix of rebel and government control in this area. “Aid and Access in Sri Lanka,” Humanitarian Exchange Magazine 43 (2009): 3–4. 19

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that re-territorializes “foreign” and centrifugal potentialities (not excepting the clinic itself) on revered historical terrain turned modern badlands.21 The Library and/in the Clinic: Archive as Pharmakon The broad relation of a modern Sinhalese ethno-nationalist past to the “sinister triumph of a necropolitical body politic”22 has been better understood than the precise mechanics and ideological effects of the way doctors and hospitals in Anil’s Ghost, animated by medical-professional history, both mediate and complicate that relation. To its representation of the already complex work of biological preservation (and nourishment) in the exceptional space of the contemporary northeast, the novel adds a philological flair that draws medicine into its archival-historical loop. As mentioned, Ondaatje presents his doctors as old-style bibliophiles and antiquarians.23 In the midst of civil war, Rohan the anesthetist, for instance, travels to Colombo from the northeast to “hear a local or visiting South Asian writer read from a new book at the Kelaniya campus.”24 And, to Gamini is given the task of understanding his own and his profession’s current fate in terms of deep history, which he is able fluently to recall. An urgent space of technical expertise focused on manual doing, Ondaatje’s clinic comes to possess a melancholic, “impractical” literary and historical texture as well by virtue of its immersion in memories, history, books, writing, and reading (seemingly in excess of what is required for the service of life). Feldman’s intriguing analogy between grammatology and thanatopolitics illuminates the logic of the presencing of the library (or archive) in Anil’s Ghost’s clinic and helps span the conceptual and narrative caesura between the novel’s thematics of bio/thanato/necropolitical power (focused on bodies) and memory/archive/history (focused on land and identities).25 Even as it medically/ 21

 I return briefly to this point about the nomadic clinic’s deterritorializing critical force at essay’s end, but am unable fully to develop important aspects of my claim that the novel’s investment in past medical history deflects attention from more radical possibilities of hospitality, signaled by the war clinic in flight from sites of organized care and territory worlded by majoritarian narratives. 22  Perera 2011, 240. 23  Readers are asked to place this against the known history of disciplinary differentiation that created the continental divides separating “library” from “clinic,” and clinic, in turn, from laboratory. 24  Ondaatje 2000, 228. 25  Feldman 2010. What grammatology is to living voice (phonē) and memory (mnēmē) so, Feldman suggests, biopower (thanatopolitics and its obverse, biopolitics) is to living being. (Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy” is of course the now-classic posthumanist critique of this opposition between living voice and writing.) On Feldman’s account, just as writing (and other forms of hypomnēmata) preserve living voice or memory in deferred and deadened ways, so thanatopolitics conserves disqualified life in a rigid way. In both conceptual fields, the seizing hold whether of the past or of living being follows a similar path.

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biopolitically preserves endangered living beings, the clinic as a reading, writing, remembering site (as a space of grammatology) on highly disputed terrain animates and conserves disqualified life as nonlife (within the Sinhalese nationalist imaginary). In other words, we witness fictional doctors laboring to repair and preserve species life; yet, at the same time, medical work functions surreptitiously as a mnemotechnology that repeats and conserves an ethno-nationalist version of Buddhist-Sinhala caritas. The narrative’s operation of a synaptic link between modern emergency and biopolitical care and medieval medical administration is tantamount in effect to “mortifying”26 bare life in the “repressive ecology” of the northeast. This multi-level work of clinical and mnemic remedy, recovery, and preservation aimed at disqualified life in the space of exception is, arguably, the pharmakon (poisonous mixture) that manages the crisis of life within a necropolitical order. In this section I focus on the precise modes in which the grammatologicalarchival work of the clinic serves as a silent point of relay away from the present spectacle of bodily carnage and the urgencies of care toward fragments of a medical past culled by seemingly haphazard memory from books and stories. Despite Gamini’s observation that “we have no time to remember,” this past makes its way everywhere in Anil’s Ghost, not just directly invoked in his individual acts of remembering but also more holistically coded in action and in allusions that swarm across the text’s surface, opening onto ghosted older landscapes that remain clandestinely active. Indeed, the novel boasts an archival effervescence that generates a dense network of cross-referenced literary and historical citations that make its pages look like a hypertextual storehouse where readers can retrieve and link an explosion of non-sequential historical information. Many of these proper names lead to glosses that describe pre-colonial and colonial pasts, revealing the long and storied history of curing and caring on the island that lies just on the verso of the disastrous “medical” landscape of contemporary Sri Lanka the novel paints. The intensity of this focus on bodily remains and the representational primacy accorded to the main plot of forensic detection tend to dim the archiving force of these scattered proper names—Mihintale, Polannaruwa, Kynsey Road Hospital, Dr. Spittel, Great Days, and of course Ceylon itself—that simultaneously recess and signpost medicine’s past. But attuned to this mode of encrypted citation, readers can, like the epigraphist Palipana, discover through these allusions the past secreted in the present, the dead in the living—everything on the same landscape. Apropos to this furtive grammatological-archival method is Sarath’s memory of Palipana’s work on the Anuradhapura era (before the twelfth century) which illustrates the epigraphist’s ability to inhabit the past and present simultaneously, to erase “borders and categories, to find everything in one landscape and so discover the story he hadn’t seen before.”27 I take this description of the archeologist’s method as metacommentary on the mode of reading/writing that allows readers 26

 Feldman 2010, 123.  Ondaatje 2000, 191–3.

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of Anil’s Ghost to discover bankrupt mythic pasts secreted away in the novel’s adulatory representation of health-care delivery in the law-less contemporary northeast. Let us take a closer look at another moment and mode in which Anil’s Ghost actively conserves rather than strategically forgets an ethno-nationalist medical past within its narrative action. The scene in question involves a three-way conversation between Sarath, Anil, and Gamini one night on Galle Face Green, following the emergency treatment of the crucified Gunesena. On this occasion, Gamini openly produces a distinctly “antiquarian” discourse on the order and organization of medieval Sinhalese-Buddhist medicine, prompted by recall of blast injuries and amputations—horrors of the surgery to which contemporary doctors have become accustomed, thanks, he bitterly suggests, to Tamil “freedom fighters.”28 If Sarath’s is the archeologist’s past of rocks and royal parks, Gamini’s is the past of dispensaries, maternity hospitals, villages for the blind. Anil is caught in the downpour of his memory which invokes Mihintale and the sophistication attained by Sinhalese medicine “by the twelfth century”: “We have no time to remember. Get Sarath to show you Mihintale,” Gamini urges her in a confused lament for the present that makes a bid to reclaim national-medical prowess.29 This was a civilized country. We had “halls for the sick” four centuries before Christ. There was a beautiful one in Mihintale. Sarath can take you around its ruins. … By the twelfth century, physicians were being dispersed all over the country to be responsible for far-flung villages, even for the ascetic monks who lived in caves. That would have been an interesting trek, dealing with those guys. Anyway, the names of doctors appear on some rock inscriptions. There were villages for the blind. There are recorded details of brain operations in the ancient texts. Ayurvedic hospitals were set up that still exist —I’ll take you there … . We were always good with illness and death. We could howl with the best. Now we carry the wounded with no anaesthetic up the stairs because the elevators don’t work.30

This equation of civilization with the expansion of organized medical care in Gamini’s account is not at all at variance with modern liberal governmentality’s elevation of public health and medicine, nor is it irrelevant to the novel’s later extensive representations of Sinhala doctors in the northeast. Here however Gamini’s retrospective on national grit and adeptness at treating “illness and death” gains a wistful cast as the third world of medicine—the breakdown of organized medical practice and of civilization itself—is positioned in stark 28

 To recall Nietzsche once again: “monumental” memory becomes an inspiration to the “man of action” to do better, to model himself on exemplary medical figures of the past and continue the greatness of great days against a present that cries “no.” Antiquarian memory generates veneration and contentment with “home” associated with anticosmopolitan nationalism. 29  Ondaatje 2000, 192. 30  Ondaatje 2000, 192.

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contrast to ayurvedic hospital traditions that flourished under such sovereigns as King Sena II or Mahinda IV. This production of an idealizing contrast between the medical inefficiencies of the postcolony in a state of emergency and the medical goodness of a golden age, however, seems a trifle distracted and distracting, not to mention tendentious. Exasperation and encomia elide what is fundamental in the present: not non-functioning elevators or a painful shortage of anesthesics (unhelpful as these are), but the radical and comprehensive demolitions—material and ideological—wrought by total war, a war that necessitates a Nietzschean condemnation of the past, so that everything that was can be reimagined in the service of life. Gamini’s pedagogical recollection of a textbook Sinhala past entails nothing more or less than a pharmakon (in the Derridean sense), namely, a revival and conservation of the dead, a grammatization that dehistoricizes and numbs rather than reimagines the real “truth of the[] times.”31 To reiterate my main point: the function of the archive or library’s presencing in Anil’s Ghost’s clinic is precisely to deaden while grammatizing or inscribing. Aarthi Vadde notes that Ondaatje’s archival method proliferates images, allusions, histories, and objects that dislocate and expand the frame of reference of any one given theme or issue.32 This is certainly true of the medical theme, which unfolds in a prolific and variegated way, but despite some rhetoric about the teaching of doubt at the heart of every faith, there is little to suggest that the novel undermines Gamini’s excursion in the medical archive. Far from being deflated through “reinscri[ption] … within networks of transnational memory,” or relativized by memory of intra-national cosmopolitanism, Gamini’s “antiquarian” lesson is surreptitiously inflated and steadied as an object of anti-cosmopolitan contentment. As we’ll see, his mnemic invocation of the past is encrypted, ghostly yet vital, in the later narration of fictional doctors at work in and around the base hospital at Polannaruwa, a site on the medical heritage tourist trail no less.33 Both medical past and present are here elevated through valorizing investment in the itinerant figure of the (Sinhala) physician, provocatively identified as a “rough brother of justice,” 31

 Ondaatje 2000, 128.  Aarthi Vadde discusses Anil’s Ghost’s expansion of the definition of archive to include “a variety of traces, documents, and artifacts” (268). While I concur with her understanding of Ondaatje’s “archival method,” we part on the question of its ideological valence. Vadde, “National Myth, Transnational Memory: Ondaatje’s Archival Method,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 257–75. 33  The novel’s deployment of Polannaruwa is significant. Its fall as a political center—an event connected in Sinhalese historiography to invasion from the north and the much-cited abandonment of the dry zone and migration of the Sinhalese south and west— marks the end of the Anuradhapura-Polannaruwa age, considered the peak of medieval Sinhalese civilization. See Margaret Trawick, Enemy Lines: Warfare, Childhood, and Play in Batticaloa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 35–7; Perera 2011, 226–7, and Sankaran 1999, for discussion of the links between this historiography and the contemporary manipulation of spatiality in eastern Sri Lanka. 32

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traveling through thick and thin amidst far-flung villages in the North Central and Eastern provinces no one “had ever heard of” or “could even locate on a map—Araganwila, Welikande, Palatiyawathe.”34 In representing the medieval Sinhalese system of health care and contemporary wartime medical practice as almost the same landscape, Anil’s Ghost prompts doubt that its “archival method” consistently demystifies the spatial ground of national projects, as Vadde argues. Rather, the clinic in the northeast, occupying the troubled space between the state and the war machines its failures spawn remains ultimately “home-bound,” colluding with a nativist “renovation of communal myths.”35 Like the Foucauldian archive, the novel’s own grammatological-archival order keeps pasts in play, fully enclosing the subject of medicine, determining enunciation within a certain script, binding medicine’s civil war apparatus to a mythopoetic professional “home” and, by extension, a certain nation. The Powers of Care in a Garrisoned Land If the urban Colombo hospitals in Anil’s Ghost are the site where Thanatos, chaos, and pandemonium rage, the hospitals of the North Central Province in and around Polonnaruwa appear as models of government. If Dr. Perera, the presiding genius of Colombo’s Kynsey Road Hospital, is identified via western literary allusions as Cerberus and as the twin of the good Dr. Jekyll, then the presiding genius of the provincial hospitals, far from the capital, is no less than the Buddha himself: “there was a small Buddha lit with a low-watt bulb in nearly every ward, and there was one in surgery as well” 36 This passing allusion to the Buddha, again belatedly, splices scenes set in the provincial hospitals and village clinics of the northeast and Gamini’s earlier antiquarian discourse on the dispensaries and maternity homes of ancient Mihintale, chronicled in the sixth-century Mahavamsa and its later editions. This section focuses primarily on the biopolitical rationale of power that doctors, dubbed “rough brothers of justice,” mediate. Not only is it the case that a few hardy doctors embark on an affirmative biopolitics, but, as discussed in the preceding section, in so doing they reprise the very vision of medieval Sinhala medical organization we’ve heard Gamini articulate on Galle Face Green. While Gamini’s recall of a textbook past prompts us to connect these later depictions of Sinhalese doctors’ wartime labors and the myth-history of a golden age of medical care, his recollections also underline modern medicine’s complex position in relation to the state, to responsibility, and to sovereignty. As we’ll see, the base 34

 Ondaatje 2000, 229.  Vadde 2012, 259. 36  Ondaatje 2000, 242. The image serves as a reminder of Buddha as Sakyamuni or physician, giving to wartime clinical work a distinctly Sinhalese religious inflection. The novel weaves this association between medicine and Buddhism into its closing scene where Ananda’s artisanal care restores to wholeness the broken body of the Buddha statue. Surgery, art, and religion in Anil’s Ghost offer solutions of a distinctly ethnic Sinhalese cast. 35

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hospital in Polonnaruwa and makeshift clinics in “half-built schoolrooms” that Skanda, Lakdasa, and others set up in remote villages subsist in a peculiar relation to the law and the state (sovereignty), on the one hand, and justice and the ethical (responsibility), on the other. While the urban hospital in Colombo is a sort of Hell, or liminal space just this side of hell populated by the living and the dead, the provincial base and peripheral hospitals in the North Central Province are subtly framed by a “medievalist” discourse that inscribes the past within the present of biopolitical work in the northeast.37 Their hospital existed like a medieval village. A chalkboard in the kitchen listed the numbers of loaves of bread and the bushels of rice needed to feed five hundred patients a day. This was before massacre victims were brought in. The doctors pooled money and hired two market scribes as registrars who moved alongside them in the wards listing and recording the patients’ names and their ailments. The most frequently seen problems were snakebite, rabies caused by fox or mongoose, kidney failure, encephalitis, diabetes, tuberculosis, and the war.38

Albeit in a state of siege, these caring spaces “in a garrisoned land” remain selfsufficient in the manner of “medieval” villages, “islands” of improvised, yet well-run relief for fractious populations.39 The difference between then and now, however, is that the structure of health-care delivery in the contemporary civil war context is essentially headless, that is, missing a centralizing state or some external and unified sovereign directive. In the absence of a pastoral state, the besieged and underequipped hospital in Anil’s Ghost stands as the nerve center of a tenuous force—the only force—that remains to battle, to defend, and host life on inhospitable terrain. Let us take a closer look at the novel’s depiction of responsible work carried out by the war clinic moving on the peripheries, bringing a barely functioning health-care system to bear on rebel-controlled terrain. The double entendre of responsibility for “far-flung villages” the narrator invokes can be glossed variably as rational, administrative strategy (governmentality) and/or ethical/moral duty. The medics’ intense engagement with “bare life” remote from government and politics is presented as a matter of “moral force” and justice, and there’s no 37  Ondaatje shows a fondness for the term “medieval” in his descriptions of the modern administration of care. Elsewhere, too, the twelfth century is frequently cited. Gamini’s memory fixes readers’ attention on this era as a significant cut-off point. In Sinhalese-Buddhist historiography, Magha’s invasion from the north in the thirteenth century is thought to have ended the glorious Anuradhapura-Polonnaruwa age and returned the northeast to a “dark wasteland” (Sankaran 1999, 44). In Anil’s Ghost the persistence of Sinhala doctors on the same terrain suggests they bring to this wilderness a benign government of care with “solution[s] and victory for all.” 245. 38  Ondaatje 2000, 245. 39  Ondaatje 2000, 245.

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reason to reject this characterization. On the other hand when Lakdasa, reportedly the apogee of this moral force, declares “the problem up here is not the Tamil problem, it’s the human problem,”40 the practical work conducted in the name of responsibility, justice, and “the human” does raise the question of governance as much as ethics. Lakdasa and Skanda’s dedicated surgical, preventive, and bureaucratic labors are in fact readable as realizations of a biopolitical agenda notwithstanding the narration’s careful detachment of them from discernible links with a regulative state. Certainly, Ondaatje’s doctors cannot be simply reduced to experts passively executing the state’s interests or the law; but their active response to “the human problem” does unfold not only within the space of humanitarianism, but also as a biopolitics within the space of legal exception. As one parastatal element amongst other sovereignties, the doctors operate in a peculiar “gray zone,” Mariella Pandolfi’s apt term for the space of humanitarian/biopolitical governance occupied by local elites and “migratory sovereignties” (such as MSF and other NGOs) that make up “the humanitarian industry” in globalization.41 In this military-humanitarian “gray zone” of the northeast, exposed to the violence of competing sovereignties, both curative and medical administrative work falls to the lot of local doctors because “no one from the Ministry of Health had ever come to the border villages.”42 The young doctors, most of them in their thirties, carry out on their own all aspects of the medical regulation of the disaffected, minority population in the governing vacuum left by the war and the breakdown of state-sponsored infrastructure. Despite the attendant difficulties of medical work in conditions of open and indiscriminate violence, we see the doctors continue to manage births, maternity care, vaccinations, epidemic control, all classic sites of medical intervention that require relations to be established between a state and its population.43 In village clinics, records are filled out and pregnant women checked for diabetes and anemia. Nurses dispense vitamin pills to mothers and howling babies get the needle “in the small shack that served as a medical outpost” for “four hundred families from the area as well as three hundred from an adjoining region.” The narrator writes, there was “solution and victory for all”:44

40

 Ondaatje 2000, 245.  Mariella Pandolfi, “Laboratories of Intervention: The Humanitarian Governance of the Post-Communist Balkan Territories,” in Postcolonial Disorders, ed. Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Hyde, Sarah Pinto, and Byron J. Good (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 157–86, 161, 164. 42  Ondaatje 2000, 241. 43  Sujit Sivasundaram, Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 271–81. Sivasundaram elaborates how, historically, state formation in colonial Ceylon was enabled by local professionals engaged in caring for the health of people. 44  Ondaatje 2000, 245. 41

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The specialists who came north seldom worked only in their specific area of knowledge. They were in Pediatrics one day, but might spend the rest of the week helping to contain an outbreak of cholera in the village settlements. If cholera drugs were not available they did what doctors in another era had done—dissolved a teaspoon of potassium permanganate in a pint of water and poured it into every well or standing pool. The past was always useful.45

In the place of a state prepared to both kill and “let die” the local populace, the base hospital at Polonnaruwa takes on surrogate functions of modern (and, according to Gamini, ancient) government, with doctors, the “rough brother[s] of justice,” acting in loco parentis.46 Marking the novel’s fine if unstated sense of the “statishness of medicine,”47 Anil’s Ghost’s stories of doctors on rebel terrain give literary heft to the point that medicine is always a useful association for states seeking “benevolent” means of radiating power and producing authority. As benign proxies of a pastoral state (real or ideal), these doctors who, we are told, refuse the relative safety of private practice in the south manage and minimize the crisis of the law’s violence in the north. The “landscape of massacre” thus functions to provide young doctors a practicum on government. The independent-minded, skilled, and hard-working professionals, a “long way from governments and media and financial ambition,”48 here learn to become a force, in more than one way and in all senses of the word, especially the Foucauldian. As I’ve been suggesting, this Foucauldian sense of force (the camouflage of peace that renders war invisible in politics) is in fact the secret burden of the encomium-laden diegetic commentary on the humanitarian work of doctors in the northeast, and read against the grain, this account of responsible medical care reveals how in “the gray zone” analgesic-curative imperatives act as a good-natured, redemptive alibi for mediated relations of force between marked populations and the violence of a besieged, de-legitimized state. Ondaatje’s novel puts its finger on how “when the time comes” for the unleashing of massacre unmitigated by law, the clinic—chief bearer of humanitarian-ethical imperatives—goes into high gear, but not simply as a radically oppositional agency that operates from a free, exterior or transcendent space.49 Rather, the war clinic in the midst of massacre functions as immanent and available technology to manage the crisis of law and legitimacy.

45

 Ondaatje 2000, 240.  Ondaatje 2000, 245. 47  Sivasundaram 2013, 281. 48  Ondaatje 2000, 231. 49  Critics Gillian Roberts and Jon Kerzer take a different view. They regard Ondaatje’s doctors as straightforwardly transcending politics. Gillian Roberts, “Ethics and Healing: Hospital/ity and Anil’s Ghost,” University of Toronto Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2007): 962–76; Jon Kertzer, “Justice and the Pathos of Understanding in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” English Studies in Canada 29, no. 3–4 (Sept./Dec. 2003): 116–38. 46

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Lest this discussion contract the compass and complexity of medicine as an ethical force too much, let us concede that the commitment to caring for vulnerable and dispossessed populations marks the clinic as also a hospitable force, ethically tangential to the prevailing order of necropolitical sovereignty. Even so, it is hard to know exactly what kind of pressure the narration exerts on the complex term “justice.” While the word recalls the agendas of other sorts of more violent brotherhood exemplified by Tamil guerillas or the army, the text also pits the clinic and the laboring fraternity of young doctors against the military-humanitarian state (whose routine biopolitical functions have lapsed) and against the insurgent war machines in armed conflict with it. “Driving through jungles and garrisoned land to meet … patients,” local doctors function, after all, as the narrator points out, as “rough brother[s] of justice.” The phrase is suggestive, designating a stateless improvised regiment, taking responsibility for tortured and injured life. Given this open-endedness, a case can be made that the hospitality of Ondaatje’s medical fraternity bears a critical potential condemnatory of the necropolitical order and the mythopoetic past that incites it. But in the end, the novel, I believe, fails fully to endorse or develop this iteration of the clinic as an ethical space of making live that bears on futurity and thus escapes “the service of history.” Anil’s Ghost’s doctors (with the exception of Corea) remain positioned as a fraternal cohort devoted to another still top-down or pastoral vision of justice. Discoursing on medieval Sinhalese ritual arts sometimes performed by the king, Palipana tells Anil, Netra Mangala is “better done by a professional artificer, the craftsman … Netra Mangals is better without kings.”50 This differentiation between the political figure of the king and the skilled civil figure of the public artisan or craftsman haunts the novel’s medical thematic as well. For the surgeon-craftsmen in the northeast, too, the practice of medicine is better “without kings,” and the narrative nudges us to imagine these “rough brothers of justice” as mobile sovereign agents of caring power divorced from any hint of likeness with the negativity of the death-function exercised by state and nonstate sovereignties. Yet, witnessing the skilled handiwork of medicine operating in proximity with its ghastly supplement, the “demiurgic surgery” that usurps and mimics the surgeon’s skilled handiwork, we are faced with différance rather than opposition. As Agamben has it, biomedicine’s highly valorized humanitarian work on behalf of rights and bodies “can only grasp human life in the figure of bare and sacred life, and therefore, despite [itself], maintains a secret solidarity with the very powers [it] ought to fight.”51 In Ondaatje’s civil 50

 Ondaatje 2000, 97.  Agamben 1998, 133–4. See note 16. Anil’s Ghost leverages the clinic above history and politics on the basis of links it establishes between medicine and arts/artisanship/religion. As I’ve been suggesting, these linkages do not necessarily disallow the critique that medical care possesses a “secret solidarity” with biopolitical sovereignty. Nor do they necessarily absolve the religio-aesthetic simply because of their healing aspect or aspiration. While in spirit and principle, art and the aesthetic provide curative-analgesic succor, given their thorough immersion in the specificities of the Sinhalese ethno-nationalist imaginary, they 51

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war Sri Lanka, medicine has no direct relation with thanatopolitical violence (as in the case of National Socialism); nonetheless, its archival-grammatological turn creates a relation of proximity or “secret solidarity” with a dominant Sinhalese political sovereignty. Part of the clinic’s armamentarium—of use in managing the crisis produced by violent majoritarianism—is a nostalgia-generating archive that gives Sinhalese medical myth-history, indexed in Anil’s Ghost by proper names like Mihintale and Polannaruwa, new meaning as a “lived practice.”52 Indeed, as Sankaran claims, mythic material “attain[s] completion in the realm of … action,” becoming a ghostly charter for the present in the postcolony and, as I’ve been arguing, in the postcolonial literary text as well.53 Although the makeshift clinic’s assumption of ethical responsibility for life sets it on a trajectory of flight from centers of organized medicine in the Sinhala-dominated south (most clearly in the episode focused on Corea’s experience as hostage), the novel’s grammatological/ archival thrust re-territorializes its incipient critical energy, (re)binding the clinic, along with “the northeast,” to the official domicile of the nation. In grounding the nomadic war clinic in a phantasmatic origin, the novel’s archive turns medical hospitality as ethics into hospitality as heritage.

fail fully to escape the charge of ideological co-implication in the material havoc wreaked by “demiurgic surgery” on behalf of majoritarian health. See Pradeep Jeganathan’s discussion of the artist Shanananathan’s work for an alternative model of visual art markedly in contrast with mainstream nationalist reverence for Sinhalese monumental art. Shanananathan exposes what “demiurgic surgery” does to bodies in bio/necropolitical contexts, without mnemic recourse to the “antiquarian” or “monumental,” to recall Nietzsche’s terms, and in a way that supplements theoretical critique of necropolitical demiurgery. Pradeep Jeganathan, “Disco-very: Anthropology, Nationalist Thought, Thamotharampillai Shanananathan and an Uncertain Descent into the Ordinary,” in Violence, ed. Neil Whitehead (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2004), 185–203. 52  Sankaran 1999, 35. Perera, too, echoes this point in her discussion of how the practice of the “rituals of development” attempts to bring to fruition the “scholarship of conjectural heritage and the politics of invented homelands.” Perera 2011, 229. 53  Sankaran 1999, 35.

Chapter 7

Embodied Memories: Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Multiple Genealogies in Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir René Dietrich

“Indian” is arguably the paradigmatic term for how the US conceptualizes Indigenous peoples and the resulting settler-Indigenous relations. As it cuts across various discourses, it significantly intertwines those of biopolitics and memory. In biopolitical terms, “Indian” categorizes a racialized population in the political-judicial discourse of the US in the moment the US seeks to legitimize and at the same time to disavow its settler colonial rule via its very constitution as a nation; and in a strongly parallel development, the category of the “Indian” serves to construe a pervasive monolithic image of the “savage,” in noble or wild form, installing “American Indian lives … in a past tense lament that forecloses futurity”1 in the settler memory culture that continues to displace the plural and present Indigenous peoples living on the territory occupied by US settlers. The title of Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir thus resonates with the interrelation between a biopolitical regime of homogenization and pervasive control, and a parallel regime of constructing “Indianness” in the settler imaginary and its culture of memory. Such a constructed “simulation,” as Gerald Vizenor names it, of Indigeneity forms and perpetuates the racialized population of “Indians” in settler memory as an embodiment of the past that had to be abandoned for a present defined by undisputed US territorial sovereignty.2 Accordingly, this essay wants to show how Miranda’s memoir explores this interrelation beyond its title. With a focus on the history of colonizing Indigenous peoples in California by Spanish and US powers, Miranda interrogates various biopolitical regimes of regulating Indigenous bodies and lives, addresses how these policies are regularly elided, distorted or mythologized in official settler memory practices, and portrays the lasting effects of these biopolitical regimes and their elision through the figure of embodied memories that bring to light genealogies of violence as well as continuities that might enable communal regeneration.  Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxxv. 2  Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 15. 1

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“Indians” between Biopolitics and Memory The categorization of the diverse North American Indigenous peoples under the common moniker “Indian” significantly served the European settlers’ interest in what Mark Rifkin has recently referred to as “turning peoples into populations.”3 He describes what is arguably the central biopolitical operation of the US settler (post) colony as “the ways the US government produces ‘Indians’ as a racial population in ways that facilitate the promulgation of regulations that encompass all Indigenous people”;4 i.e. removal, containment, assimilation, and most recently limited selfgovernment, depending on the US government’s interest at the particular historical moment. The biopolitical operation of “turning peoples into populations” allows then for the installation of a regime of biopolitical regulation of “Indians,” in ways that disregard or seek to dismantle the status of Indigenous peoples as political entities so as to constitute and preserve the undisputed sovereignty and territorial unity of the US. The production of the “Indian” as a homogenous and largely apolitical category in the biopolitical discourse is strongly paralleled by firmly establishing the “Indian” as the embodiment of an ahistorical and uncivilized state of humanity in the settler imaginary. While the biopolitical regulation of Indigenous peoples has only been interrogated more recently,5 the critique of the dominant stereotypical image of the “Indian” as (mis)representing Indigenous peoples to damaging effect has a longer tradition. Louis Owens and Gerald Vizenor in this respect have pointed out how the paradigmatic “Indian” produced through the dominant cultural imaginary serves to displace the notion of Indigenous peoples as diverse polities from the public sphere so as to assume their place. Owens to this end argues that when Indigenous people do not fit the criteria of what settlers have biopolitically produced as the racialized category of “Indians,” the refusal of ascribing authentic “Indianness” to Indigenous people serves as an instrument towards their “official” disappearance.6 And Gerald Vizenor makes a related point when he states, “the

3  Mark Rifkin, “Turning Peoples into Populations: The Racial Limits of Tribal Sovereignty,” in Theorizing Native Studies, ed. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2014), 149. See also Mark Rifkin, “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the ‘Peculiar’ Status of Native Peoples,” Cultural Critique 73, no. 3 (2009): 8–24. 4  Rifkin 2014, 149. 5  See also Scott Lauria Morgensen, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now,” Settler Colonial Studies 1 (2011): 52–76; Michael R. Griffiths, “Biopolitical Correspondences: Settler Nationalism, Thanatopolitics, and the Perils of Hybridity,” Australian Literary Studies 26, no. 2 (2012): 20–42; Morgan Brigg, “Biopolitics meets Terrapolitics: Political Ontologies and Governance in Settler-Colonial Australia,” Australian Journal of Political Science 42, no. 3 (2007): 403–17. 6  See Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 3–4.

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indian is a simulation, the absence of natives.”7 Of course, when the simulation assumes a dominant position in the public sphere through being (re)produced in the settler imaginary, it further helps to create the very “absence of natives” it suggests. The predominance of the “Indian” helps to erase the actual presences and silence the stories of Indigenous peoples in mainstream historical accounts and forms of cultural remembering that simultaneously are founded on and support the “disavowed relationship to the constitutive role of settler colonization in the foundation, development and structure of the United States.”8 Kevin Bruyneel thus importantly shows how these processes make up the dominant settler imaginary and memory, thereby constituting a crucial dimension of US colonial rule, as it silences Indigenous presence through conjuring a simulated “Indian” past that, in Jodi Byrd’s terms “forecloses futurity.” Consequently, the thus constructed and perpetuated “economic, cultural, and political narratives place temporal boundaries [of colonial rule] between an ‘advancing’ people and a ‘static’ people, locating the latter out of time” and furthermore serve to “frame settler-state sovereignty as legitimate and indigenous people’s sovereignty as illegitimate, because the former is progressive and civil and the latter is archaic and savage.”9 The influential cultural narratives of “Indianness” that perform a “mnemonic iteration” of this logic of settler dispossession and naturalize settler colonialism while disavowing it crucially participate in establishing “the entangled discursive relationship of history and memory that is critical to the logic and legitimacy of settler colonialism in … the United States.”10 Both aspects have thus been investigated independently—but looking at them in relation brings to light how the depoliticization of Indigenous peoples prevalent for the biopolitical categorization and cultural construction of “Indians” operates in both cases strongly through the body as a particular signifier of “Indianness.” In the discourse of the biopolitical regime, “techniques of governance are (re)cast as necessarily following from innate bodily qualities.”11 As Indigenous identity becomes associated with these “bodily qualities,” consequently, measures to assimilate Indigenous peoples toward perceived norms along the lines of gender, race, sexuality, and class, as one form of biopolitical regulation, are registered on the body in the form of appearance and social practice.12 Similarly, in the representational regime helping to constitute a dominant part of the settler imaginary and memory, the “Indian” serves as the literal embodiment of a past that, with Byrd, 7

 Vizenor 1998, 15.  Kevin Bruyneel, “The American Liberal Colonial Tradition,” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–4 (2013): 311. 9  Kevin Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 2, 8. 10  Bruyneel 2013, 315–16. 11  Rifkin 2014, 150. 12  See for the Australian context Michael R. Griffiths, “The White Gaze and Its Artifacts: Governmental Belonging and Non-Indigenous Evaluation in a (Post-)Settler Colony,” Postcolonial Studies 15, no. 4 (2013): 425. 8

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“forecloses futurity.” Accordingly, the “Indian” body itself is constructed as a site for projecting settler anxieties of and desires for the “other” as threatening, exotic, or otherwise essentially different in ways that, at the same time, help to form the idea of the norm constituting “civilized” America.13 While biopolitical regulation thus operates on the level of the body and seeks to produce conforming apolitical Indigenous bodies that are to constitute one minority population among many in the people that make up the US, the dominant mechanisms of representing Indigenous peoples and installing them in settler memory provide a concurrent image by creating an authentic “Indian body” as sign and evidence of an ahistorical and apolitical natural, “savage” state of Indigenous life. At the same time, biopolitical regulation creates a norm up against which all other images of Indigeneity are to be measured and evaluated, with every deviation noted as a deficiency with respect to pure “Indianness” (and thus also not possessing the right characteristics to represent “Indians” and promote the “Indian” cause).14 The depoliticization of Indigenous peoples through their categorization and construction as “Indians” further allows the US in its dominant memory culture to celebrate westward expansion and the conquering of the “wilderness” embodied through the “Indian” while renouncing the political colonial domination of Indigenous peoples past and present based on the theft of Indigenous lands. Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians reframes this particular conceptualization of the “Indian” through the body as signifier. She addresses the diverse histories of colonization and ongoing (post)colonial governance in California under Spanish and US rule with the body acting as a sign and site of the direct effects and ongoing legacies of (post)colonial biopolitical regulations and genocidal techniques. Through her writing she asks how an exploration of colonial violence and regimes of disciplining and regulation in their effects on Indigenous bodies— and the possibilities of healing, regeneration, and transformation expressed via the same bodies—can help to explore the multiple genealogies established through the complex relations between biopolitics and processes of memory production, erasure, or reconstruction in the settler (post)colony of the US. She thus provides a pertinent example of how North American Indigenous life writing engages the colonial biopolitical paradigm underlying US-Indigenous relations by (re)creating the body as a site from which to mobilize an Indigenous critique of colonial biopolitics and counteracting a settler memory that reproduces “Indianness” and simultaneously disavows US settler colonialism past and present.

13

 See for various non-Indigenous appropriations, and also Indigenous reclaiming, of the body, Indigenous Bodies: Reviewing, Relocating, Reclaiming, ed. Jacqueline FearSegal and Rebecca Tillett (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013). 14  For an examination of the way Indigenous authenticity can reproduce settler dispossession, see Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

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The Body in Bad Indians as Sign and (Memory) Site of Colonial Biopolitics In the introduction to her memoir, Miranda narrates an encounter with a girl in fourth grade at the Mission Dolores who is preparing a video as part of her “Mission projects.” This rendering of Spanish colonization as made up of hardworking Indians and benevolent Franciscans through such a “Mission Mythology” is, Miranda reveals, a consistent part of primary school education in California, perpetuating the lies about a past form of colonialism by turning it into a “Mission Fantasy Fairy Tale” while disavowing any form of ongoing colonialism since the military takeover of California by the US.15 In the anecdote, Miranda behaves in a friendly and supportive manner towards the girl and her mother (“I am not a Political Correction Officer prowling the missions, hoping to ruin some hardworking child’s day”), and while the mother, upon the revelation that Miranda was a live Mission Indian, “was beside herself with pleasure,” the girl experiences a different reaction: Little Virginia, however, was literally shocked into silence. Her face drained, her body went stiff, and she stared at me as if I had risen, an Indigenous skeleton clad in decrepit rags, from beneath the clay bricks of the courtyard. … Having me suddenly appear in the middle of her video project must have been a lot like turning the corner to find the (dead) person you were talking about suddenly in your face, talking back.16

While the notion of Indigenous peoples being dead and disappeared is a common enough aspect of settler colonial mythology, particularly so ever since the “vanishing race” theory around the turn of the twentieth century, this rendering of the trope is noteworthy for its specificity and corporeality. The “Mission Mythology” of institutionalized Californian settler memory relegates Indigenous peoples to a past that “forecloses futurity,” situated at a moment even before the arrival of the US and thus entirely divorced from any temporality of the US settler (post)colony. Thus the appearance of an actual Indigenous woman such as Deborah Miranda is registered by the girl as a disturbance of the boundaries separating the realm of the living from that of the dead. The Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen woman is not even noticed with surprise that Indigenous peoples are still alive; rather, Miranda portrays the girl’s reaction as a shock about the disruption of natural laws, seeing as in a gothic horror tale someone who is already dead, who has to be dead, return as the haunting figure of an “Indigenous skeleton,” a ghost or another species of the living dead who—which might be the most disturbing aspect—can confront you, “suddenly in your face” and claim agency, contribute to or renounce the story you are telling about the allegedly dead and gone Mission Indians, “talking back.” The perception of the Californian Indigenous woman as a corpse, a “skeleton,” or some such figural remnant, however, has another dimension to it which more  Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (Berkeley: Heyday, 2013), xix.  Miranda 2013, xix.

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strongly comes to light in the course of the memoir. In being taught about the Spanish missionization and colonization of California Indians, the girl inadvertently sees a truth in the specter of dead bodies haunting present-day Indigenous peoples— which remains cheerfully unacknowledged by her mother. As Miranda’s memoir poignantly outlines, the pervasive missionization of Indigenous peoples in Spanish colonial and present-day California by the Franciscans, coercively formed the lives of the Indigenous nations according to a rigorous regime and following an understanding of what constitutes a good and proper life specific to the Catholic order in disregard of any part of Indigenous existence in terms of society, politics, culture, community, apart from what the Franciscans constructed as “indios.” Since their measures were to a large degree fundamentally incompatible with Indigenous lifeways, instead of fostering lives the treatment of Indigenous people as material for missionization and conversion produced at a regularly high rate violence, disease, and death, and further created a legacy that “has taught us how to kill ourselves and kill each other with alcohol, domestic violence, horizontal racism, internalized hatred.”17 That the girl, in Miranda’s account, perceives her as an impossible survivor to the point of not being alive at all, but being one of the living dead, only possibly existent as a corpse, recalls Achille Mbembe’s analysis of necropolitics as well as Jodi Byrd’s assertion that “the living dead of empire exist within the juridical corpus nullius” for which “Indianness [served as] the cultural and legal precedent.”18 The girl sees in Miranda nothing but what can be regarded as the logical and calculable outcome of a long-standing history—and its simultaneous disavowal—of a biopolitical regulation toward death executed through various colonial regimes and at turns more open or more covert forms of genocidal violence.19 Miranda configures her memoir as her very own “Mission project,” which she never designed as part of her fourth grade education, since she “left California after kindergarten.”20 For the creation of the conventional Mission project “[i]ntense pressure is put upon the students (and their parents),” and Miranda describes the result as “too often a lesson in imperialism, racism, and Manifest Destiny” that “glorifies the era and glosses over both Spanish and Mexican exploitation of Indians, as well as American enslavement of those same Indians during American rule.”21 Accordingly, she sees her book as one effort, among many others by Californian Indigenous writers and artists, to counter, and, indeed, “to kill a lie.”22 Her tribal memoir can thus be read as the reconstruction of a counternarrative to the official, institutionalized discourse of memory in California under Spanish, 17

 Miranda 2013, xix.  Byrd 2011, 226. 19  For the genocidal policies under US rule following missionization and secularization, see Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846–1873 (Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 2012). 20  Miranda 2013, xvii. 21  Miranda 2013, xvii. 22  Miranda 2013, xx. 18

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Mexican and US rule. In regard to this history, the central question is still not so much about the complexities of reconciliation, but about acknowledging this history and its memory as one that might pose the issue of reconciliation or related practices of memorialization in the first place. The question is thus how one can challenge the mythologization of Spanish colonization as the romantic story of California’s origin along the teleological path to its putatively proper place in the modern US nation-state and instead bring attention to Spanish, Mexican, and US rule as equal forms of damaging and destructive colonialism, what Miranda calls a “Genealogy of Violence.”23 Tracing this genealogy, Miranda makes clear that her particular counternarrative to the official discourse is not merely one of Indigenous survival through various hardships imposed by colonialism. Instead, the particular strength and poignancy of her work comes from outlining the complex intertwinement between biopolitical regimes of regulating, strangling, and abandoning lives and lifeways, on the one hand, and the erasures, disruptions, and troublesome continuities in memory discourses and practices, on the other, with the body figuring as sign and site of this intertwinement. In her approach to create her very own Mission project, Miranda uses in her memoir a compositional technique of compilation and juxtaposition, integrating various materials from diverse sources—excerpts from anthropological records, historical scholarship, newspaper articles, children’s storybooks (often with comments and notes of her own), as well as images and photographs. She simultaneously works with various genres and forms—poems, testimony, short stories, oral histories, charts. What thus emerges as her narrative whole from the arrangement of these elements does not aspire to an untarnished coherence—one which glosses over any inconsistency, disturbance, or disruptions—but instead highlights the centrality of such productive disruption to the poetics and formal grammar of her personal Mission project. This work with texts from various sources and various genres that interweave personal and tribal communal history recalls seminal Native American life writing texts such as N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller. Miranda’s approach differs from these earlier texts in that she much more directly interrogates the colonial history and its resulting “genealogy of violence.” Furthermore, one might consider her approach more radical for its wider implications, since her literary technique reproduces on a textual level what she imagines as a possibility for the self-understanding of “Californian Indian communities” after their “shattering and fragmentation since contact.”24 When she contemplates this in the small prose piece “A California Indian at the Philadelphia Airport,” her thoughts describe her compositional technique as projecting a vision of self and community for present-day Californian Indigenous peoples. Avoiding the frustrating work of recreation, since something broken cannot be made whole

23

 Miranda 2013, 2.  Miranda 2013, 135.

24

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again, Miranda suggests that one can nonetheless use the broken pieces “to construct a mosaic.” She further elaborates: You use the same pieces, but you create a new design from it. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. … [If] we pick up the pieces and use them in new ways that honor their integrity, their colors, textures, stories—then we do those pieces justice, no matter how sharp they are, no matter how much handling them slices our fingers and makes us bleed.25

Indicative of the close relation between the memoir’s larger themes and its form, the image both speaks to Miranda’s literary practice of compositional mosaic, and the way such a practice is related to the larger work of the cultural regeneration of Californian Indian communities. At the same time it also suggests the relevance of the body as a site where one can register the lasting damage of regimes of coercion, imposition, and violence as well as experience, in the very same body, possibilities of unexpected transformation—“new designs.” Through this compositional technique, the memoir addresses first, moving chronologically in four parts from the Spanish colonial period to the present, the biopolitical regime of the missionization of present-day Californian Indigenous peoples by the Franciscans. The first chapter, “The End of The World: Missionization 1770–1836,” points at its very beginning to the violent disruptions that characterize the history of colonialism for present-day Californian Indigenous peoples and that disable its telling in a linear coherent account. Instead, the only strictly linear rendering of this history is based precisely on these disruptions and their consequences in the perverted ancestry chart titled “Genealogy of Violence, pt. I,” (pt. I and pt. II bracket the chapter at beginning and end), in which “Spain” and “Catholic Church” bring forth “Soldiers/Rape” and “Franciscans/Missionization/ Land Theft” in turn leading to long-lasting damage such as “Domestic Violence,” “Child Abuse,” “Maternal Mortality” and “Gold Rush/Environmental Rape,” “Poverty,” and “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” to name a few.26 In the first chapter, this outline of what occupies Bad Indians throughout is complemented by two poems (one of them in a form, Pantuom, with its own colonial legacy, being derived from a Malay verse form, and based on the writing of Junipero Sera, founder of San Francisco), a children’s coloring book excerpt with comments by Miranda, and stories about the Indigenous experience of the missions, preserved by an anthropologist who thought the “tribe” whose stories he recorded would soon be extinct. All of the pieces that make up the first chapter speak in their own way of the difficulty of tracing this genealogy of violence to its beginning via incomplete and biased records, second-hand accounts, or forms that are embedded in their own colonial history, and also point to the work of research, representation, and imagination involved in approaching and attempting to reconstruct a story that has been erased from the dominant memory culture—as 25

 Miranda 2013, 135.  Miranda 2013, 2.

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Miranda states: “Erasure is a bitch, isn’t it?”27 In “My Mission Glossary,” the centerpiece of the first section, Miranda engages most directly the institutionalized US settler memory by using the form of the conventional school mission project in its romanticization of Spanish colonialism (and absolute disavowal of ongoing US colonialism), with sometimes ironic evocation of the diction of a fourth grader (“Mission building is smelly business,” “Honest.”).28 This becomes a vehicle, though, to analyze the biopolitical regime of the Franciscans as they sought to form the lives and bodies of the “Indians” according to their own interests and beliefs, with the goal of producing a Catholicized workforce rigorously supervised and controlled to the end of ostensible “salvation.”29 In this version, which strips Californian settler memory culture of its romanticizing and glorifying characteristics, the Mission turns into a “Massive Conversion Factory … dependent on a continuing fresh supply of human beings, specifically Indian.”30 To the end of conversion, the factory imposes forms of life alien to the customary lifeways on Indigenous peoples so as to “strip them of religion, language, and culture, and melt them down into generic workers instilled with Catholicism”—and thereby meeting the Franciscans’ (“a well-meaning European religious order”) ideal of what should constitute a good pious life in obedience to God.31 With the regulation and disciplining of Indigenous peoples— gathered almost arbitrarily together in the missions as one undifferentiated group of pagans to be converted—in order to meet the standards of this imposed form of life, the “production of converts” follows David Scott’s analysis of colonial governmentality cited in this volume’s introduction as intent on “disabling old forms of life by systematically breaking down their conditions … so as to enable—indeed, so as to oblige new forms of life to come into being.”32 In the case of the Franciscan missions, though, the incompatibility of the forcefully abandoned “old” and imposed “new forms of life” results in, as Miranda puts it, “physical and psychological resistance to conversion (rebellion, murder, self-destructive behaviors, chronic depression, and a catastrophically low birthrate).”33 Additionally, the spread of illnesses imported from Europe, some of them through the enforced or consensual sexual encounters with Spanish soldiers (with 27

 Miranda 2013, 25.  Miranda 2013, 6, 7, 14. 29  Cf. for a comprehensive account of how the Franciscans installed the Missions governed by what they perceived as essential to a good and pious life for the betterment of the Indigenous people, the regularly disastrous effects of this imposition, and the ways in which the Indigenous people adapted and maintained a sense of agency, Steven W. Hackel’s historical study Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: IndianSpanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 30  Miranda 2013, 16. 31  Miranda 2013, 16. 32  David Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” Social Text 43 (Autumn 1995): 192. 33  Miranda 2013, 16. 28

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syphilis leading to infertility), and the hard labor and harsh physical punishment imposed by the padres on the neophytes for any form of disobedience, led to the missions being not so much a factory of conversion and a new mode of life as of disease and death on a large scale. The missionization, functioning as a form of cultural genocide rooted in a deep-seated sense of European supremacy, had an actual genocidal effect, with “80 percent of California Indians dead in a sixtyyear period.”34 The effect of violently imposing a largely unwanted form of life through such genocide leads Miranda to make not unwarranted comparisons to Nazi concentration camps and the US South’s slavery plantations.35 Further entries in the “Mission Glossary” include “Adobe Bricks,” “Bells,” “Discipline.” Indeed, throughout Miranda portrays life in the missions as a number of routines between discipline and coercion to which the bodies of the Indigenous peoples were subjected. Although the ultimate goal of the Franciscans explicitly was the salvation of the soul, it was the body that was to be molded into a form that fit the life that the missionaries had envisioned for the Indigenous peoples as “neophytes,” administered in such a rigorous fashion that the process regularly produced broken and damaged bodies, with lasting effects for the psyches of generations to come. In “Bells,” Miranda sketches the strict everyday routine of the mission, determined by the clockwork of the bells: “Bells return us to our labors, bells demand prayers or instruction in prayer, bells determine evening meal, … [bells] give us permission to sleep.”36 This almost military routine operates as an instrument of assimilation that evokes the “civilizing machine” Zitkala-Ša describes in her account of the boarding school, only in the modified form of what could be called a catholicizing machine.37 The extended control over all areas of life—work, religious practice, habitation, sexual and matrimonial relations, child education—that constituted the biopolitical regime of the missions was secured and fortified through the disciplinary practice of whippings and beatings, by which the padres demonstrated their status as parents over the “neophytes” consigned to a “childlike existence” and which served to imprint the negative consequences of any wrongdoings on the bodies of the culprits, the Bad Indians, the “Bestias.”38 Just as the padres physically punished their “children” for disobedience, so they taught the same to the “neophytes” as part of the appropriate manner to raise their children. In “Genealogy of Violence, pt. I,” the intergenerational consequences are captured through a succession in the chart from “Floggings, Stocks, Manacles” to “Domestic Violence” and “Child Abuse.” Accordingly, in “Genealogy of Violence, pt. II,” which closes the chapter on missionization, an account of Miranda’s father beating her four-year-old little brother with a belt is 34

 Miranda 2013, 17.  See Miranda 2013, xvii, 188–91. 36  Miranda 2013, 9. 37  Zitkala-Ša, American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 2003), 96. 38  Miranda 2013, 17, 18. 35

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interspersed with statements ascribed to various missions on the relation between Indigenous parents and children that did not meet the contemporary educational standards of the Franciscans (“this love [of the parents] is so excessive that it is a vice, for the majority lack the courage to punish their children’s wrongdoings and knavery”), and on the consequent need to instruct the parents in child upbringing that met these standards, with satisfaction expressed at the results observed: “Some parents who are a little better instructed punish their children as they deserve while others denounce them to the missionary fathers.”39 Passages such as these cut apart the account of the traumatic childhood memory, visually set apart from the rest of the text by a larger font as well as by lines above and below each passage, pointing both to the presence of this past as well as how it continues to violently disrupt and infiltrate the contemporary lives of present-day Californian Indigenous people such as Miranda’s Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen family. While these two text levels are merely juxtaposed at the beginning, towards the end of the narrative Miranda comments on the “genealogy of violence” their pairing represents: [The] arc of my father’s arm is following a trajectory I know too well, the arc of leather, sharp edges of cured hide, instrument of punishment coming from two hundred years out of the past in a movement so ancient, so much a part of our family history that it has touched every single one of us in an unbroken chain from the first padre or the first soldado at the mission to the bared back of the first Indian neophyte, heathen, pagan, savage, who displeased or offended the Spanish Crown’s representatives.40

In this instant, the father’s body in his beating of the son becomes the site in which a past of colonial biopolitical violence, erased from official memory discourse and never acknowledged for its lasting damage, is enacted in the present through an unconscious and highly disturbing transfer from padre and neophyte to parent and child that at the same time demonstrates, in interaction with the quotations, the disastrous success of the missionaries’ instructions in violence. As an intergenerational trauma, which is strikingly seen not as external but instead integral to “our family history,” the violence endured at the hands of the colonizers seeking to form the bodies, minds, and lives of the Indigenous people in a particular way, resurfaces as an embodied memory that has not been worked through but is acted out in a reproduction of the link between pain and utter powerlessness. In some ways, this form of embodied memory, a concept most influential in trauma theory, might be read as a supplement to N. Scott Momaday’s influential trope of “blood memory.”41 Momaday’s trope can be best understood as a means to 39

 Miranda 2013, 34, 35.  Miranda 2013, 34. 41  See N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969); for a comprehensive analysis see Chadwick Allen, Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2002), 175–91. 40

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capture the imaginative capacity to connect to a time and place before one’s birth and thereby to constitute a sense of self rooted in this felt connection to Native traditions. By contrast, what I call embodied memories in Miranda’s writing largely represent a form of acting out what has been internalized, suppressed, and passed on from generation to generation in an unconscious manner as the result of having been subjected to all-pervasive colonial biopolitical regimes and that end up forming contemporary Indigenous identities in fundamental ways: Whatever you call it, this beating, this punishment, is as much a part of our inheritance, our legacy, our culture, as any bowl of acorn mush … . More than anything else, we brought with us out of the missions, we carry the violence we were given along with the baptism, confession, last rites.42

After the violent imposition of alien forms of life through missionization and indeed after attempted genocide, slavery, and intensive land theft under ongoing US (post)colonial rule, Miranda makes poignantly clear that it is no longer possible to simply resist the damaging force of colonial bio- and necropolitics, or remember the forms of resistance against it as a sufficient means of confrontation. Instead for her it is paramount to acknowledge how its lasting consequences have not simply done harm to one’s family and culture, but that they have become integral to her family history, are a defining part of her Indigenous Esselen culture. Furthermore, “this movement so ancient” has signified the Indigenous body in new and disturbing ways, as both an unconscious perpetuator of colonial violence and as a victim of the same violence. This violence and its unbroken legacy have been carried through the bodies from the missions and US settler colonialism “[m]ore than our black hair, brown eyes, various hues of brown skin flecked with black beauty marks … our sweet voices and tendency to sing, to make music and tell stories.”43 Defying the easy formula of a counternarrative to colonialism as a number of hardships that have been endured and can now be overcome, or a countermemory to the official discourse which can help to “right the wrongs,” Miranda rather seeks to convey in passages such as these a thinking of Indigeneity that has not just suffered under but is in the present moment inextricably tied to conditions of colonialism. At the same time, she counteracts settler memory precisely in the way this thinking of Indigeneity not merely against, but through colonialism forces an acknowledgment of Spanish and US colonial structures of genocidal elimination in their histories, continuities, and lasting effects. Indigeneity is thus envisioned in equal measure, and simultaneously, defined by traditional lifeways, socio-political formations of extended kinship networks, and cultural expressions of song, dance, and stories, as well as by a “genealogy of violence” carried on from the past to the present under various (post)colonial biopolitical regimes that have regularly had genocidal impact, just as they habitually elide the violent history of their colonial rule as well as disavow its continuity in the present. As a consequence, 42

 Miranda 2013, 35.  Miranda 2013, 35.

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such antagonistic oppositions, if fully acknowledged, might not only have the force to create in communities and individuals an unbearable tension and selfdestructive dissociation, but also may offer the potential to fully realize an inherent heterogeneity in self and community leading to the possibility of a “new design,” as Miranda puts it, in the self-understanding of present-day Californian Indigeneity. Throughout the memoir, the body is the site in which these conflicting and sometimes contradictory significations, born out of a history of irresolvable conflicts, collide. The two seemingly contrary aspects of Indigeneity may appear then as embodied memories of two varieties, the former with Momaday’s “blood memory” as a vital link to Indigenous traditions, and the latter as the internalized acted-out violence of colonial rule. While quoting Linda Hogan, “I am the result of the love of thousands,” Miranda also adds at the end of the second chapter (1836–1900), “sometimes we are the result of the bitter survival of thousands … . Sometimes our bodies are the bridges over which our descendants cross, spanning unimaginable landscapes of loss.”44 With the emphasis on bodies the text points out how, after missionization, secularization, and US invasion, and any loss of culture as a result, the physical survival of the bodies was all that was left to Californian Indigenous peoples at the turn of the twentieth century. Caught within the “biopower” administered by different regimes “at the intersection of life, death, law, and lawlessness,”45 the “Bad Indians” of Miranda’s memoir appear reduced to the status of “bare life,” in Agamben’s sense, after the dismantling of all social structures, and figure in state-sponsored campaigns for Indigenous scalphunting as the homo sacers upon whose killing without murdering the Californian state sought to erect its undisputed sovereignty and territorial as well as ethnic purity. At the same time, the body still figures as a form of excess to that reduction to “bare life,” and as a “bridge” extending beyond itself it becomes the possible site for creating a connection between past and present. And simultaneously the body brings with it the “unimaginable landscapes of loss” it also helps to span, the bitter survival after so much violence endured, as well as, possibly, love as a way towards transformation and regeneration in the form of a “new design.” As in “Genealogy of Violence, pt. II,” the body of Miranda’s father becomes in the final section of Bad Indians the prime example of such troublesome continuities and an Indigeneity defined through irresolvable contrasts and conflicting tensions. Towards the end of Miranda’s account of the relationship to her father, he has already emerged as a character of stark contrasts whose moments of generosity and tenderness coexist with violent beatings and abuse, regularly fueled by alcohol. It is only when “the last shred of pretense” is shorn, as her sister makes clear that their father did not serve an eight-year prison sentence because a consensual sexual encounter with a minor who claimed to him she was 18 was turned into an accusation of rape due to her fear of her older brothers, but because a waitress rejected him and later in the parking lot he “beat her, Deby, he broke 44

 Miranda 2013, 74.  Byrd 2011, 228.

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her jaw, he cut her face, he broke her ribs. Then he raped her. And just left her.”46 In his violent sexual abuse, the behavior of the father suggests yet another violent genealogical link to the Spanish soldiers and padres in the missions.47 And this realization motivates a portrayal of the father in all his irresolvable duality, with implications for the larger community: My father. Bully, drunk, violator of anything precious that was withheld from him. My sister’s words opened up a door to the conflict at the center of this struggle to reunite a fragmented tribe, a tribe in which my father is a direct link to one of the first Esselen families taken into the Carmel mission. It is his blood that gives our bid for federal recognition real teeth, authority that the government can’t deny. It is our father who remembers family names, stories, clues we are desperate to record. It is our father whose body is the source of the most precious part of our identity, and the most damning legacies of our history.48

In more ways than one, the body of Miranda’s father thus emerges as an ambiguous site for the (counter)memorialization of colonial biopolitics. In one genealogy, the US biopolitical administration of Indigenous peoples through blood quantum makes his “blood” necessary in the struggle of the Ohlone/Castanoan-Esselen nation to be federally recognized again after a faulty census at the beginning of the twentieth century led to the “Esselen” being “cheerfully recorded as the first tribe in California to be declared extinct.”49 In another sense, he provides a link to traditions via his memories that are indispensable in reconstructing “a fragmented tribe,” suffering under centuries of colonial coercion and regulation. And in yet another sense, and at the same time, the pattern of violence and abuse connect him intricately to the regimes of biopolitical coercion and violent force, “the unimaginable, savage splintering that my ancestors—and my father, my sisters, my brother, my self—had endured.”50 And it is quite telling for the central position that Miranda’s father assumes in the memoir that the moment she fully realizes his duality and confronts “the two divergent images” becomes also the moment in which for “the first time I really understood, in my bones, the unimaginable, savage splintering.” For the first time she dares to ask: “Was there no way out of this selfperpetuating cycle of cruelty?”51 Intriguingly, the very same contradictions and irresolvable tensions point, towards the close of the memoir, to the possibility of multiple significations and thus an opening to this closed system producing “Indians,” good, bad, and dead, locked in a past that “forecloses futurity.” 46

 Miranda 2013, 171.  Miranda 2013, 22–9. 48  Miranda 2013, 171–2. 49  Miranda 2013, 69. 50  Miranda 2013, 172. 51  Miranda 2013, 173, 172. 47

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3. Multiple Genealogies, Presents, Futures, and the Counteracting of Settler Memory in Indigenous Memoirs Just as the radically different sides of Miranda’s father cannot be collapsed into one coherent image, but rather converge in all their contrasts in one body, with one side endlessly inflecting and complicating the other, it becomes clear that the “Genealogy of Violence” is one genealogy amongst many, and that it is the multiplicity of genealogies, and the awareness of these multiple genealogies— without attempting to create a monolithic linear narrative from them—that also enable multiple ways of being in the present, multiple paths into the future in which there are alternatives to a “cycle of cruelty,” and a multiplicity of directions from which Indigenous memoirs disrupt a collective settler memory. In the prose piece “Coyote Takes a Trip,”52 one genealogy that is uncovered and recovered is that of two-spirit erotics, in the tradition of a cross-dressing that upsets strict gender binaries, and which has been violently suppressed under the sexual regimen of the missions. Its recovery figures the body also as a site for joyful regeneration, transformation, and healing; in a more personal account, this is also demonstrated in Miranda’s telling of her first intimate encounter with another woman.53 Experiences of lived and storied continuities such as these become a stronger presence toward the end of the book, with the final section titled “Teheyapami Achiska: Home, 1961–Present,” portraying a struggle to reclaim an Indigenous sense of self and community in the ways that are still available after and in the midst of damaging histories of colonialism. In this regard, the final sentence of the memoir, “Our bodies, like compasses, still know the way,”54 also restates the idea of the body as a force of transit between past and present in a new way. The memoir closes by alluding to the possibility that the body can touch on a notion of home situated both in a past beyond the originary site of colonial trauma of the missions and in a contemporary present on the territory of the settler (post)colonial state of the US, with all the geopolitical implications this term carries in US-Indigenous relations—the body thus pointing also to the possibility of unsettlement. Such an example demonstrates how the Tribal Memoir which serves as Miranda’s subtitle, similar to Linda Hogan’s subtitle to her memoir The Woman Who Watches Over the World as a Native Memoir, pertains not only to purposeful embedding of the personal within a communal, tribal, or Native history. More than that, “tribal memories” are addressed as processes of dislodging the past, its accounts, and its presence in the contemporary moment from being determined through the settler colonial imperative of adhering to concepts of life, body, time, and space defined by and made intelligible to settler discourses of authority that are variously indifferent, incompatible, or hostile to Indigenous religious, philosophical, intellectual, and socio-political ways of thinking and living. 52

 Miranda 2013, 178–85.  See Miranda 2013, 117–18. 54  Miranda 2013, 208. 53

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Conversely, Indigenous memoirs that designate themselves as specifically tribal or Native are misunderstood when simply read as emphasizing what it means to be Native in the present-day US. Instead, marking themselves as “tribal” and “Native” highlights in turn the unmarked and normalized accounts of the past and its presence within the dominant culture of the US as “settler memories.” This is specifically the case when these accounts are designed to perform and justify the structural “elimination of the native”55 in settler colonial societies through the production of an archaic, ahistorical, and apolitical racialized “Indianness” as well as to elide and disavow the very same settler colonial structures in their significance for US society and its ongoing cultural memory production. In the conclusion to her Transit of Empire, Jodi Byrd commands that “it is time to imagine indigenous decolonization as a process that restores life and allows settler, arrivant, and native to apprehend and grieve together the violences of U.S. empire.”56 Similarly, the potential of North American Indigenous memoirs such as Miranda’s might be understood as a means to restore the past, the memory of the past, and the presence of the past in the current moment through acknowledging the “genealogies of violence” of European and US colonialisms and empires on the Americas. Such a restoration and acknowledgment of the past in its genocidal violence might then allow the multiple genealogies initiated through the “savage splintering” of this trauma, and otherwise averted and silenced, to assert themselves in the present as a new ground for unsettling the future—maybe even to move towards the vision of a future past coloniality—specifically as they uphold the irresolvable dualities and contradictions that have emerged out of these histories. In the appendix to her memoir, the “Genealogy of Violence” is not so much countered as supplemented with an “Ancestry chart.”57 Its arrangement does not place Deborah Miranda as the last of the line, as an impossible survivor of Bad Indians, but in the lower fundament in the midst of an extended kinship network. Being placed in this position with the awareness of the connections and tensions of the family network extending into all directions of its histories makes it possible for this memoir to trace these embodied memories, outline the multiple genealogies, and suggest the multiple directions from which to dislodge a settler hold on the past, present, and future. Assuming this multidirectional perspective the reader is positioned to look, through a story about Miranda’s grandfather Tom, at a light: It appears as a mythical sight coming from a place sacred to Californian Indigenous peoples as a “place of emergence” guiding Tom on his journey, and originates as an electric impulse “in the first Airplane beacon erected in California” set on the same sacred site, signifying a “terrible violation” and a “brutal loss of that which is sacred to him”; such a focus on this light through Miranda’s dual vision enables one to take a “look at both the blessing and the genocide.”58  Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387. 56  Byrd 2011, 229. 57  Miranda 2013, 213–16. 58  Miranda 2013, 195–6. 55

Chapter 8

Post-Presentational: The Literature of Colonial Memory in Australia and Latin America After Neoliberalism Nicholas Birns

Pascale Casanova has described world literature as a series of presentations made by peripheral cultures to those claiming to be at the center. Yet this leaves unaddressed the condition of post-presentational literature, after the initial exposure of the peripheral literature to what Casanova calls “those spaces most endowed in literary resources” has occurred.1 This essay will discuss how narratives of postcolonialism need to be supplemented by those of postpresentationalism. It will further contend post-presentationalism actually might have a more active role for cultural memory than narratives subtended by a tacit acceptance of neoliberal premises. Postcolonialism as an idea has often been used to signify forward progress in today’s world. Notwithstanding the inevitable qualifications, the very term indicates a forward step from the colonial to the postcolonial. An optimistic view of neoliberalism as removing all exceptions, all inefficiencies from the market, can be strangely in synch with the optimism of postcolonialism. Against this too-glib assumption of forward motion, David Scott has proposed the idea of “colonial governmentality” as a paradigm that takes into account Europe’s constitution of “an apparatus of dominant power-effects” and does not automatically oppose the colonial and the modern.2 Scott’s call for recognizing “discontinuities within the colonial” particularly resonates with the case of Australia, where there is no single moment of cathartic institutional break with a colonial past.3 Australian literature is further dominated by representations of the past in a way that evokes the residuality of colonial governmentality. This essay will examine several generations of Australian writers, from Eleanor Dark to Kim Scott, in order to explore how a more flexible sense of the persistence and resilience of paradigms of colonial authority and control can explain Australian literature more than can the facile rhetoric of casting off colonial shackles.  Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, tr. M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 108. 2  David Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” Social Text 43 (Autumn 1995): 195. 3  Scott 1995, 195. 1

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The essay will then turn to examine Latin American literature, postulating three waves of perspective on this issue. The Indigenista novels of Miguel Angel Asturias and José Maria Arguedas were construed as “backward” by the simplified reading of them fostered by the internationally prominent wave of writers from Latin America of the Boom era such as Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa. The Boom mined Latin American history for material bizarre and surreal (at least to metropolitan eyes), but eschewed any concentration on what they would see as the merely folkish or populist. Interestingly, the post-Boom writers prominent in Latin America now eschew even the presentational aspects of the Boom writers; Latin American writers now feel little need to package Latin America to the world. Non–Latin American subjects, often northern European, are often chosen, as for instance in the work of the Mexican Jorge Volpi or the Argentine Andrés Neuman. Alternatively, an emphasis on global popular culture, as seen in the fiction of Alberto Fuguet, predominates in a way less appealing to multinational tastemakers than the magic realism still associated with the Latin American “brand.” On the other hand, leading authors from Australia today nearly all foreground Indigenous dispossession as a key theme. Aside from the Indigenous writers Kim Scott and Alexis Wright, the white Australian authors Alex Miller and Gail Jones would also fall into this category. The awareness of the status of Indigenous life in these writers goes beyond such writers of the previous generation as David Malouf and Peter Carey, whose books are certainly aware of the issue but not dominated by it. For the generational equivalents of Carey and Malouf among presentational Latin American writers, the goal was to supersede a nationalism largely associated with indigenizing settler identity. For the presentational Australian writers, the goal was to outsoar a local nationalism that was only sporadically interested in the issue of indigenous dispossession. Australia is moving more and more towards foregrounding the Indigenous, Latin America further from such a tendency, but both literatures consciously see themselves as moving towards transnationalism in a neoliberal era, thereby further signaling the pre-eminence of neoliberalism across divergent settler colonial spaces. Thus the post-presentational writers of both regions, coming from different trajectories, are yet equally challenged by the difficulty of distinguishing globalization from neoliberalism. One strand actively solicits memory; another says that memory would only be a nostalgic crutch, aligning the post-presentational with what Jon Befasley Murray calls the posthegemonic, the constellation of power that exists outside the traditional apparatus of the nation-state, and its corollary imaginaries.4 Yet this essay will contend that Australian and Latin American writers insist on the ineffability of memory in a way that nonetheless complicates simple neoliberal assumptions. The Australians do this by privileging memory. The Latin Americans do so by, in effect, saying no matter how global they become, there remains an indelible difference. David Scott sees the modern as a turn within the colonial, such that the apparatus of colonialism is not securely figured in one time frame but can extend 4  Beasley Murray, Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011).

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into several.5 With respect to colonial governmentality in Australian historical fiction, one should distinguish between the represented time of governmentality and its representing time, while taking account of the implied reception of that representation. From the beginning of Australian literature written by white settlers, the convict experience, and that of first contact with Indigenous people, has been a paramount motif. Indeed, most people’s idea of Australian fiction contains within it some instantiation of often brutal and authoritarian governance, often personified in a figure who represents a dominant regime of imperial control and inhibition, against whom is set the hero of the book—a dissident, a rebel, a nonconformist. In the historical record, this occurred at the Eureka Stockade, as chronicled by Raffaele Carboni, where Governor Charles Hotham’s cruelty and authoritarianism often impeded the negotiation of the grievances of the miners.6 An obvious instance of this in fiction is in Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life (1874), where Maurice Frere, the Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, is the antagonist of our virtuous but wrongly maligned hero, Rufus Dawes. Frere was paralleled by such earlier colonial/penal governors as James Thomas Morriset, who both administered a territory as Commandant of Norfolk Island and disciplined bodies as a penal warden. In Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land (1941), the Eora man Bennelong (spelled “Bennilong” by Dark) is contrasted to Arthur Philip, the captain of the First Fleet, in an archetypal confrontation between colonizer and colonized. In Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2001), although Police Constable Alex Fitzpatrick is not the conventional, Inspector Javert-like incarnation of the law’s conformism and inflexibility, he does, Judaslike, betray Ned and Ned’s sister Mary after earning their trust.7 The character can be read as the subaltern willing to turn and embrace colonial authority. In David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon, the lost white child who has been raised by Indigenous people, Gemmy Fairley, is estranged from the community after momentarily finding harbor with an array of dissidents and eccentrics such as the McIvor family and Mrs. Hutchence. This depiction of an incarnate personification of colonial governance remains intact in texts penned by Indigenous authors. The Nyoongar writer Kim Scott’s Benang (2000) the first novel by an Indigenous writer to win Australia’s major literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, includes (fictive) letters from A.O. Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines (a title whose inherent irony would not find it out of place in archives mined by Michel Foucault) in Western Australia as an example of the administrative sadism and obsession with whiteness that inhabited the policy of assimilation.8 In Scott’s most recent novel, That Deadman Dance, the persistence of colonial governmentality is even figured into the name of the white family who first embraces and then spurns the protagonist Bobby Wabalanginy: Chaine. If Bobby, during his brief idyll of amity with and acceptance by whites, is ever tempted to forget the fundamental preconditions of white-indigenous relations as authoritarian and quasi-penal, the 5

 Scott 1995, 196–7.  Raffaele Carboni, The Eureka Stockade (Ballarat: Hayes Barton, 1983). 7  Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang (New York: Knopf, 1999). 8  Kim Scott, Benang: From the Heart (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1999). 6

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name itself prevents him. In other Australian books, this pattern of domination is translated into sexual politics, as in Kate Grenville’s Albion diptych, whose portrait of ruthless power on the part of a father in the domestic sphere can be linked to her representation of the ill effects of European conquest in her later Colonial Trilogy. In all these texts, a residual colonial resistance to liberty and social possibility is expressed in the form of personalities. This is the total reverse of what Foucault himself meant by his term “governmentality.”9 He sought to go beyond the idea of an official institution or a person wielding power in a strictly sovereign capacity to move instead to account for a host of techniques by which people controlled themselves and others, from the “care of the self,” a deliberately sculpted selfpresentation, to a whole slew of approaches to control through means often indirect and seemingly benign. David Scott, for whom colonial governmentality represents not power as melodramatically opposed to freedom but “power as the general name of a relation in which differential effects of one action upon another are produced,” adapts this logic to the context of colonial liberalism.10 Governmentality should not have just one face. The colonial governor in the Australian novel over the long arc from Marcus Clarke to Kim Scott is in a sense a concession to the dramatic form required by the novel genre. But its repetition—the way this trope remains as the default villain for Australian fiction—suggests precisely the reverse. The problem is not one of individual pathology or temporal condition but systemic deficiency. In other words, this personification of colonial governmentality, by dint of its sheer repetition and elongation, may be an acknowledgment rather than an evasion of it. To see this, we have to ask, with respect to these various Australian books, what is colonial governmentality opposed to? Across this long arc from convict fiction to contemporary Indigenous innovative novels, the presented governmentality does not change. In other words, the procedures of administration of the late eighteenth-century Australian colony do not change in themselves. But once they are being represented in different time periods, the purposes of their representation do change. This is true even if the moral vantage point of the representation is similar. One can take two books 60 or 70 years apart, both representing early settlerIndigenous contact, both taking a strongly anti-racist, anti-colonizer position, and yet see totally different articulations of governmentality and its desired ends. In Eleanor Dark’s Timeless Land trilogy, the first volume of which has already been noted, the settler author’s sympathy lies with the plight of Indigenous people. But this sympathy is always elegiac. It calls out for a paradisiacal order that has been violated by the uncouth intrusion of the Europeans. Today, in the wake of such books as Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth, there is awareness that Indigenous peoples of New South Wales managed their land in a self-conscious and predicated fashion, that their attachment to the land was neither simple,  Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–84. Volume 3, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: Allen Lane, 2002), 201–22. 10  Scott 1995, 201. 9

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unmediated, nor “one with nature” after the fashion of the noble savage imaginary.11 But Dark makes it seem as if the man/nature dyad were unproblematically unitary until the unseemly intrusion of European colonizers. Thus Dark presents the (for postmodern eyes) curious spectacle of someone who, despite being so intensely against colonialism, does not believe in the possibility of hybrid space. In the first book, the white baby Johnny Prentice is lost in the bush, but instead of a Gemmy Fairley–style becoming-(para)Indigenous he is quickly rescued and reincorporated into the white community, although with the ability to relate to Indigenous communities. In the second book, The Storm of Time, Dilboorn, the daughter of Bennelong, is “reared from infancy among white people” and within white society, but cannot belong there.12 Moreover, Dark must find some way to mark this inability to belong and cannot ascribe it to culture as, like so many future Aboriginal children, she was not permitted to be raised by her own people, “knowing no other kind of habitation” but that of the whites. It is therefore striking that at strategic points in the book, Dark refers to Dilboorn as “atavistic” or being possessed by “atavism.” Even amid her white-fostered upbringing, for instance, she is “atavistically receptive” to the idea of magic, and fears travel because of some “atavistic instinct” that to leave one’s town was no small matter. But atavism certainly cannot withstand the whites’ new “present.” The storm of time is a tempest Dilboorn, uprooted from her proper world and unable to find a toehold in her improper one, cannot endure. It is an ill-omened storm, but an inevitable one, and Dark herself is its product. Atavism is used as a term to suggest that, without Indigenous “nurture,” yet also without an essentialist, genealogical foundation, Aboriginal heritage will nonetheless come out, and it will do so in a way receptive to Western notions of rationality and, here, even travel, seen only as a Europedescended perquisite. Dark was both a Marxist (she was opposed to American military might and popular culture and was friendly to the Soviet Union) and a modernist (her non-historical works are introspective experiments in technique and psychology that can be profitably compared to the works of Virginia Woolf). These affiliations gave her great insight. But they also help explain her problematic framing of the Indigenous question. Her Marxism made her believe in a forward thrust to history in which Australian Aborigines had no role, even though wronged and victimized by a colonialism Dark fundamentally opposed. Her Modernism made her prefer the pure to the impure, for the same reason the formalist US New Critics wanted to concentrate on the poem itself, not its writer or its reader: the pure, the unimpinged-upon, was simply higher. Hybridity in Dark’s Anglophonemodern era was bad hybridity, something bastard, adulterated, miscegenated. But Dark cannot make everything pure, or simply constitute a binary between bad, pure, victorious colonialism and good, pure, doomed Indigenous people.  Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 2011). 12  Eleanor Dark, The Storm of Time (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 2013). Kindle edition, n.p. 11

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Indeed, as Susan Lever has pointed out, although the trilogy was a popular success, its high-literary reception was always muffled by critics who felt historical fiction was inherently second-rank precisely because it was not purely literary.13 This generic impurity is troped in some of the white characters, like Johnny Prentice, who in his emotional relations reaches across racial barriers, or even Governor Hunter himself, who feels at times shackled by the stern and strict rules he must needs, by virtue of his position, enforce. In speaking of Governor Hunter, who is running the New South Wales colony during the time span of the book, Dark envisions him planning for a colony “not merely a penal settlement, but a community of peasant farmers,” smallholders who will provide, as de Tocqueville envisioned with respect to the United States, a backbone of constructive free citizens. This vision, different from the idea of Australia as simply a space to punish surplus prisoners, augurs future liberal schemes for free, constructive colonization, as pioneered by Edward Gibbon Wakefield in South Australia and New Zealand.14 But even here Hunter operates through “administering a colony in accordance with set instructions, and a rigid policy.” Freedom is encouraged, but in accordance with rigid planning. This paradox takes up the later and darker Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America, which brilliantly wonders if excellence and freedom can truly coexist, if art can still be found in the absence of hierarchy.15 More generally, it foregrounds a tension in the fiction of writers such as Carey and Malouf. They depict, as it were, an opposition to colonial governmentality, the daring, carnivalesque subversion of Ned Kelly, the culture-bending of Gemmy Fairley and the sensitive, quirky people who support him. These are incipient political alternatives, but Carey and Malouf do not show them actually assuming power, even as in both books there is a hope that a future Australia can accommodate those tendencies. But this hope is unfulfilled. This is at least partially because both Carey and Malouf are tacitly cautious about whether Australia even today can avoid what Alison Ravenscroft calls the white spectator’s enjoyment.16 There is the fear that an alternative reformed consensus will be but another avatar of colonial governmentality, as Dark’s very phraseology concerning the administrative bind Hunter is in—given rigid orders to foster freedom—displays. Yet it is undeniable that, for Dark’s whites, a third term between melodramatically opposed purities is achievable. This is not in store for the Indigenous people depicted in her novels. We are all postmodern now. Hybridity is good. The more adulterated the better. The more diasporic, the more hip. It is interesting to see this embraced in Australia even by contemporary Indigenous writers, who as first peoples, otherwise resist  Susan Lever, “The Changing Meanings of The Timeless Land: An Examination of the Television Version of White’s Novel.” academia.edu [accessed January 11, 2014]. 14  Peter Alan Stuart, Edward Gibbon Wakefield in New Zealand: His Political Career, 1853–4 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1971). 15  Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (New York: Knopf, 2010). 16  Alison Ravenscroft, The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 151. 13

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simple assimilation into multiculturalism—erecting what Gayatri Spivak has termed a strategic essentialism to safeguard these claims to anteriority. But in Scott’s That Deadman Dance, for instance, it is clear that Bobby’s aspirations are hybrid ones.17 He falls in love with a white woman and tries to help the whites adapt to their new land, all the while trying to preserve autonomy and dignity for himself and his people. In Bobby’s eyes and in the reader’s, he can pull this off, he can achieve a cultural synthesis that is the best of both worlds. It is the existing power structures, which enforce purity as a corollary of governmentality, that will not let this transpire and that doom even the hyper-kinetic Bobby. Noticeably, though, the forms of colonial governmentality that restrain the Chaine family from fully embracing Bobby as they should are the same that abject Dilboorn. Dark’s characters are castigated for despoiling Aboriginal purity and creating hybrids that can succeed nowhere; in Scott, they are castigated for engendering a beneficial hybridity, which they will not acknowledge. In Dark, the hybrid is a tragic result of the colonial encounter, something that never should have been, and something lamentable: a testimony to the horrors of colonialism. In Dark, contact seems in and of itself to be tragedy. In Scott, contact is not a tragedy, but a historical event whose malign outcome is not historically predestined. For Scott, the hybrid is a possibility colonialism raised only to squash and squander. The problem for Scott is not contact itself. It is the mode of implementing contact and its unbalanced asymmetrical power structure. This leads to rhetorics and practices of white racism. But, for Dark and Scott, it is more or less the same colonial governmentality that is the enemy. Hybridity can air it out. But it cannot rescind it. This is true even of a novel set in the future, Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013).18 This apocalyptic fantasy novel by a prominent Aboriginal author is set in the aftermath of devastating climate change that has led an increasing number of refugees to seek harbor in Australia. The young Aboriginal heroine, Oblivia (her name clearly denoting the dangers of cultural forgetting) is mentored by Bella Donna, a woman of European origin, and together they figure a renovated hybrid commonwealth that can take in refugees across the world; ironically, Aboriginal sovereignty over the Swan Lake region contends for recognition worldwide simply because of this willingness to take in those from outside. Thus are people of good will of every possible origin included under the Indigenous umbrella, and at the novel’s beginning Wright deliberately eschews a “nostalgie de la boue,” a foregrounding of a predetermined land over a heterogeneous people. “Indigenous” becomes a catch-all term, including everyone who is a refugee or a stateless person, a category which, as Alex Murray says of Giorgio Agamben, becomes for Wright “the decline and erosion of the modern nation-state,” potentially its “embodiment” or its “dissolution.”19 As Half Life explains to Oblivia, “We are Aboriginal herds-people with bloodlines in us from all over the world … . Arabian,  Kim Scott, That Deadman Dance (New York: Norton, 2012).  Alexis Wright, The Swan Book (Artarmon, NSW: Giramondo, 2013). Kindle edition, n.p. 19  Alex Murray, Giorgio Agamben (London: Routledge, 2010), 72. 17 18

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African, Asian, Indian, European all sorts, plus pacific Islander—anywhere else I didn’t mention?” This sense of operating outside national norms replaces, in The Swan Book, testified relation to place as the ultimate criterion, as if refugees, or even the non-human forms indicated in the book’s title, imagery, and action, can be adopted in the spirit (Romans 8), can become part of the people of the land, by grace rather than birth. The Swan Book’s model of being Indigenous becomes like mestizaje in Latin America—a conception of indigeneity that embraces the hybrid and the mixed and can include everyone from the university-educated, Europeanized intellectual to coca growers and chicha vendors. The Swan Book reconfigures indigeneity as not a special property but an emergent center-left consensus, a coalition of the outcast and the abject that, in the manner of Latin American populist movements from Cuba to Bolivia, can someday rule. It is as if the coalition of the outsider, the sympathetic, and the quirky that Carey and Malouf look to in order to oppose colonial governmentality, but which their books cannot quite consolidate or usher into office under the leadership of rogue, maverick whites, succeeds in Wright by unfurling an inclusive umbrella of the Indigenous. Even here, though, the villain is similar to that in the Australian novels we have previously discussed. It is residual colonial governmentality. In Wright, though, rather than being embodied in some garden-variety Europe-descended sadist, it is personified in none other than Warren Finch, the world-renowned first Indigenous prime minister of Australia. With respect to Finch, “‘Australian political hero’ rolled easily off the tongue and put brains on fire.” But Finch is temperamentally an outsider to the Brolga people from whose sovereignty claims he has built his political career. With his “media throng” and “familiar grey suit,” Finch looks “1950s quintessentially Australian,” virtually Robert Menzies in Indigenous drag. Furthermore, Finch is sexually domineering towards the much younger Oblivia, personifying, as with Kate Grenville’s Albion, the extension of colonial governmentality towards the sphere of gender and of patriarchy. Wright may be satirizing an Aboriginal public figure like Noel Pearson, once thought to be a future prime minister of Australia.20 Pearson’s “shift to a responsibility agenda,” as Emma Kowal puts it, has seen him repudiated by the “progressive Left” who formerly saw in him such hopes.21 Interestingly, when Finch dies, and Indigenous people wish to reclaim and bury him, for all his flaws, the rump (white) Australian authorities try to check the credentials of the Indigenous people involved. In order to prevent his Indigenous burial, the government rushes through legislation which claims Finch is “the blood relative of every Australian” and thus can be buried where the government wishes. While the text does not position Finch as entirely abject or exclude him from its 20

 Chris Graham, “Telling Whites What They Want To Hear.” http://www.abc.net.au/ unleashed/29750.html [accessed January 11, 2014]. 21  Emma Kowal, “The Subject of Responsibilities: Noel Pearson and Indigenous Disadvantage in Australia,” in Responsibility, ed. Ghassan Hage and Robyn Eckersley (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2012).

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sense of positive values, a more liminal figure like the half-Aboriginal HarbourMaster, or Oblivia herself, is more what Wright privileges: mythic yet mobile, lyrical yet diasporic. Warren Finch is the colonial governor figure internalized by the oppressor, both messiah and caudillo, and in either capacity tragic and unsatisfactory. The change in stance towards hybridity in The Swan Book has not altered the depiction of colonial governmentality. There are obvious and probative difference between Australia and Latin America. One was settled largely by Protestants and in the twentieth century has had uninterrupted democratic governance, the other is largely Catholic and has seen the governance of nearly every nation in the region interrupted by authoritarian coups. Both Latin America and Australia had democratic and egalitarian aspirations. But whereas Australian ideologies of a fair society had at least some truth to them, in Latin America, as Susana Rotker has put it, “schematic models of modernity and progress” got in the way of the practicalities of actual progress and modernity.22 Australia is seen as a smaller and more sedate version of the US. Latin America is seen as a region perpetually overshadowed and derogated by the Colossus of the North. That being said, both regions have been sites of colonial violence and the dispossession of Indigenous people. Doris Sommer says about Indigenous people in Peru, that “they are either its deepest soul or its most stubborn obstacle to national development,” though Australia’s far greater racism meant this was ventilated in public debate much later than in Peru.23 Pertinently, though, there are very few Latin American novels about explicit colonial governance, in other words novels that have villains like Hotham, Frere, Morriset, or their latter-day descendants. Ángel Avendaño’s Túpaq Amaru: Los Días Del Tiempo Profético, a minor book by a contemporary Peruvian activist, is one of the few exceptions.24 Latin American fiction does, though, feature the novela del dictador, the dictator-novel, from Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in the nineteenth century to books by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Asturias, and Augusto Roa Bastos in the later twentieth century. Saying Latin America has had dictators and Australia has not is insufficient. The real question one must ask is: given that the two regions each had long periods of explicit colonization, why is there so much emphasis on colonial governmentality in one region, so little in the other? One can speculate that the answer has to do with sovereignty. In Latin America, the Spanish conquered huge, heterogeneous, and complex empires, like the Inca and the Aztec, and, for instance, the polities of present-day Mexico and Peru, as state structures, are heirs of the Aztec and Inca empires. This was not true of all of Latin America, but its prominence in major episodes of colonization has led scholars such as Walter Mignolo to speak of “enunciation and knowledge-making”  Susana Rotker, “The Oppositional Writing of Simon Rodriguez,” in The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited in Latin America, ed. Doris Sommer (Durham: Duke, 1999), 119–33. 23  Doris Sommer, Proceed With Caution, When Engaged With Minority Writing in the Americas (Cambridge: Harvard, 1999), 236. 24  Angel Avendaño, Tupaq Amaru: Los Dias Del Tiempo Profetico (Lima: University of San Marcos Press, 2006). 22

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in pre-conquistador empires that are comparable to those found in Europe.25 This institutional density meant that in Peru, for instance, the memory of Inca authority never went away, as seen in the late eighteenth-century rebellion where a claimant to the Inca imperial legacy styled himself Tupac Amaru II: this is the event depicted in Avendaño’s novel. Even though the rebellion failed, as John Beverley puts it, there is a palpable sense of “the continuity between that rebellion and the liberal revolution of the creoles nearly half a century later.”26 Even though liberal elites might have seen themselves in very different terms to the Tupac Amaru insurgency, they were not inherently opposed the way an Indigenous rebel and an early Federation statesman would have been in Australia. In Latin America, the “lettered city” (to use Ángel Rama’s famous term), for all its intellectual rigor and emphasis, for instance, on the literate over the oral, does not exclude memories and manifestations of Indigenous sovereignty. Indeed, as Octavio Paz has noted, the authority of the Indigenous empires can be so great that it has the potential to hold Latin America back in a surplus of tradition, operating like a reservoir of anteriority analogous to what Carl Schmitt, in the European context, has called a katechon, that which both sustains and holds back, undergirds and represses (in the manner of the European classical/imperial legacy).27 Europeans, on the other hand, did not for the longest time acknowledge Indigenous Australian people as exercising sovereignty within a constituted polity—a consequence of the British imperial doctrine of terra nullius. We see this in Dark’s The Timeless Land where Bennelong is seen as a part of nature violated by colonialism, not part of a structure of political authority. Pierre Clastres has argued, the primordial fall into state authority occurred in the late Neolithic era, and the state is a kind of potential failure embedded in any human society.28 Clastres did his anthropological fieldwork among the Guayaki people in Paraguay, a group far less hierarchical and differentiated than the Inca or Aztec, and the thrust of his work is to disentangle sovereignty from elaborate formal structures such as those of the Aztec, Roman, or British empires. Whereas Clastres presumably would have seen Bennelong’s Eora people as characterized by patterns of authority comparable to those obtaining among the Guayaki, Dark’s paradisiacal Aborigines are seen as being on the other side of the state wall, in a benign, prelapsarian state where they can nonetheless not exercise agency. As Wright’s The Swan Book makes clear, one of the possibilities latent in the recognition of Indigenous land rights in the 1992 Mabo High Court decision is the possibility that configurations of aboriginal sovereignty can resonate on a national, or, in Wright’s futuristic postclimate-change apocalypse, international level. But, traditionally, a more robust  Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke, 2011), 126. 26  John Beverley, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (Durham: Duke, 1999), 51. 27  Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 316–18. 28  Pierre Clastres, Society Against The State, tr. Robert Hurley (Brooklyn: Zone, 1989). 25

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Indigenous sovereignty has not been recognized in Australia. Thus sovereignty is replaced by an ostensibly benevolent mode of colonial governmentality. In Latin America, on the other hand, authority can be seen as a perennial problem, stemming more or less equally from cacique and conquistador, and the twentieth-century dictator can be seen as a descendant of both. Latin America can see the Aztecs and Incas as possessing both good and bad elements in their polity. In Australia, though, pre-settlement aboriginality is either a primitivism to be dismissed or, until at least the work of Gammage, a state of undifferentiated happiness and oneness with nature, and, as in Dark’s paradigm, cruelly violated by the rapacious whites. Thus in Australia, colonial governmentality is needed to represent sovereignty, whereas in Latin America colonial governmentality, in effect, is elided into statist governmentality. Today, Latin America and Australia have another commonality: their unique traits are supposed to have been flattened out and ameliorated by global neoliberalism. In Australian studies, exponents of the transnational turn assure us that there is no need any more for a nationalist approach that would try to foreground what is unique and specific about Australia. Australian literatures become valuable only insofar as they reflect the global, which in this epoch can only be the neoliberal. Equally, today’s Latin American literature, replete with the pop-culture references of a Fuguet or the European concerns of a Volpi or a Neuman, seems to have given up the idea of separate development which, as Juan E. De Castro pointed out, was essential to the canonicity of the magical realism of the Boom, the terms in which in a Casanovan way, it was presented to the world.29 But transnationalism seems to suggest in both cases that the two regions should concentrate on what they have in common with the rest of the world, not how they are different. Neoliberalism offers the illusion of the lifting of hierarchies, the dissolution of routines and bureaucracies in one cathartic leveraged spree. There is also a genuine connection between neoliberalism and hybridity. Timothy Brennan asserts that bromides about difference and pluralism can easily complement neoliberal clichés about freedom and individualism.30 A good hybridity that is trimmed to suit metropolitan tastes is an instance of the presentational. Yet there are other hybridities, not trimmed to suit conventional tastes, which would be connected to a post-presentational that tries to avoid neoliberal desires. Neoliberalism, though, supposes that what Joseph Mensah calls “spatial mobility,” and the corollary portability of cultural capital, can erase structures of sovereignty, and hence that in neoliberalism, colonial governmentality is no longer part of the story.31 This is seen even in would-be Marxist critiques of neoliberalism, 29  Juan E. de Castro, “Magical Realism and Its Discontents,” in Magical Realism, ed. Ignacio Lopez-Calvo (Pasadena: Salem Press, 2013). 30  Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia, 2006). 31  Joseph Mensah, Neoliberalism and Globalization in Africa: Contestation on the Embattled Continent (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 122.

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such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s critique of global empire, which has little place in it for scrutiny of the specifically colonial, and its hostility to “the poisoned gift of national liberation” seems to rejects any critique of the center which does not in some way come from the center.32 Twenty-first-century Australian and Latin American literatures, though, suggest otherwise. We have already seen that, even as Wright envisions the possibility, in a less hierarchic, more plural world, of an Australian prime minister who is Aboriginal, a figure like Warren Finch still residually holds on to highly colonially inflected 1950s notions of what it is to appear as and to act like a statesman. In Latin America, even though writers such as Roberto Bolaño are applauded, by those who have not read them in depth, for writing about European rather than Latin American history, not only are Bolaño’s By Night In Chile and Distant Star about dictatorship in his native Chile, but even the books of his that are preoccupied with Nazism very much draw links between the political pathologies of Europe and Latin America. Even Fuguet’s evocation of global film as cultural commodity in The Movies Of My Life is freighted with the difference of these films being seen under the authoritarian Pinochet dictatorship—which, we might recall, was the first government to systematically practice neoliberal economics. Alfred Stepan has referred to the Chilean and Argentine dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s as exemplifying bureaucratic authoritarianism, not simply an old-style dictatorship but more of an administrative tyranny coeval with the insights of the then still-living Foucault. Just as Alexis Wright’s character, Warren Finch, shows colonial governmentality reformulating itself in new guises, so was Pinochet’s regime a neoliberal manifestation of statist governmentality.33 In other words, just because Australian and Latin American literatures have earned their stripes in the world republic of letters in a prior generation does not mean that they relinquish specificities endemic to peculiar historical and governmental patterns. This is not to fetishize the differences of these regions, but rather to forestall fetishization of “the same” in a mode of neoliberal euphoria. To read with a heedless transnationalism, with respect to both Australia and Latin America, risks jettisoning how understanding regional legacies makes these books less cheerful, more sobering. It is only if we keep in mind that neoliberalism consists of what David Scott calls “always already transformed sets of coordinates, concepts and assumptions” that the postpresentational, in Beasley Murray’s term the posthegemonic, will ever have any chance of achieving the high threshold of being genuinely postcolonial.34 Even in a mobile world, the memory of sovereignty still lingers, and indeed remains rather more than a memory.

 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 122. 33  David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 34  Scott 1995, 215. 32

Chapter 9

Sedimented Colonizations in the Maghrebine Writings of Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, and Paul Bowles Michael K. Walonen

Pioneering literary-geographical theorist Bertrand Westphal argues that literature is “the cornerstone of the imaginative project” of diachronically establishing senses of place, that writing “does not mimic [spatial] reality, but [rather] actualizes new virtualities hitherto unexpressed.”1 Writing about place is thus less an attempt, more or less distorting or verisimilitudinous, to render a spatial entity existing in sharply delineated and readily accessible terms, than it is one of the discursive negotiators that helps to formulate the bounds within which given places can be comprehended. Commonsensically, we hold that someone born and raised in a given place will have an immediate, ingrained feel for the spatial dynamics of that place; this is what we refer to as “nativeness.” While it is true that one brings different sorts of point of view to bear in their representations of place based on their degree of insiderness—Westphal distinguishes between endogenous (familiar, native), exogenous (foreign, outsider), and allogeneous (settled in a place but still negotiating it as one bearing the stigma of the outsider) perspectives on place—all modes of relating to place are fragmentary and imaginatively forged. This is particularly the case when it comes to interrogating place on the scale of region, which exists to an even greater degree on the level of the mythic or imaginary communitarian (to use Benedict Anderson’s terminology) than places that can be experienced on an immediate “street” level. In seeking to understand the nuances of regional place through its representational history, a critic can accordingly make profitable use of the work of cultural producers approaching the region from a mixture of endogenous, exogenous, and/ or allogeneous perspectives. This is particularly true when it comes to a region that has seen a tremendous historical flow of different peoples across its territory, as in the case of the Maghreb—the northwest corner of Africa, bordered to the north by the Mediterranean Sea and the south by the Sahara and currently divided into the countries of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The Maghreb was occupied variously by Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Germanic Vandals, and Arabs during its pre-modern history and by the French and Spanish (in parts of Morocco) during 1  Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, tr. Robert T. Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 33, 103

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the early twentieth century’s vast European colonization of Africa. While each successive conquering people left its mark on the terrain and social space of the Maghreb, the Arab influence still predominates overwhelmingly. Arab culture and institutions, particularly those relating to Islam, had and continue to have a dominant influence upon the worldviews of the inhabitants of the Maghreb and the segmentation of the space of their daily lives. The majority of the institutions, cultural practices, and forms of architecture which have come to largely constitute the space of the Maghreb were brought into the region by the Arabs, though all of these were considerably inflected and transmuted by local traditions and other cultural differences.2 The culture and spatiality of the region were further transformed during the modern era when the Ottoman Empire took control of the part of the Maghreb east of the Atlas Mountains (which today divide Algeria and Morocco) early in the sixteenth century, and again when the Ottomans were gradually succeeded in their control of the region by the French. France began colonizing the Maghreb with its 1830 invasion of Algiers and continued up through the 1912 Treaty of Fez, which divided Morocco into zones of French, Spanish, and International control.3 The Ottomans imported a number of social institutions that markedly impacted the spaces of the Maghreb, such as the hammam,4 while the French set up villes nouvelles, separate European quarters adjacent to but socially and architecturally distinct from a number of large Maghrebine cities. However, despite the colonial administrators and settlers sent by the Ottomans and then the French, the core culture of the Maghreb remained predominantly Arab-Berber, even as new forms of urbanism were introduced to the region. The ways that the sediments of these successive colonizations have developed and inflected the culture and spaces of the Maghreb have not been lost on the region’s literary chroniclers. Just about every writer who has represented the region at length has had to come to terms with the social products of this particular history. Their responses have ranged from critical wonderment at the intersecting cultural trends that have continually transformed the Maghreb over time, to enthusiastic celebration of the rich hybrid culture these have occasioned, to rejection of these successive colonial importations in favor of an imagined purer and more authentic regional culture. Three of the names most commonly associated with the literature of the region, Algerian authors Kateb Yacine and Assia Djebar and longtime 2

 For example, a people interfaces with its land through its language (following the logic of the Whorf hypothesis), which develops as the people interacts with the land over time. With the Arab invasion Arabic replaced Latin and Greek as the principal language spoken in the Maghreb at the time, but it was adapted into local dialects as a response to the conditions of life in the different areas of the Maghreb. In addition, contact and exchange with neighboring linguistic groups inflected these dialects; Moroccan Arabic, for example, draws markedly from Spanish in a way that other forms of Maghrebine Arabic don’t due to over a thousand years of interaction across the Strait of Gibraltar. 3  C.R. Pennell, Morocco: From Empire to Independence (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2003), 136. 4  Public bath houses.

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American expatriate resident of Morocco Paul Bowles, offer three nuanced, contrasting visions of the history of colonization in the Maghreb. Collectively, they offer a rich appraisal of the bittersweet legacies of colonization in the region, and in their various individual valuations of these waves of exogenous influence and possession they give a sense of the range of possible apprehensions of this history, of how the consensually agreed-upon dates and names that constitute one version of Maghrebine history can be pressed into the hermeneutic service of explicating the complex realities of the region’s contemporary spaces and cultures. In analyzing the work of Kateb,5 Djebar, and Bowles in this regard, this essay takes up the task driving this collection of attending to how “imaginations of aftermath might change how we inhabit and imagine the so-called postcolonial in such a way as, perhaps, to animate a more meaningful thought of decolonization” and, furthermore, how works of narrative culture can “exceed and challenge the legacy of colonial governmentality which is not yet settled, finalized, or past” by contesting the constrained framework of memory within postcolonial society (Algerian and Moroccan in this case) situates itself.6 Kateb Yacine’s novel Nedjma (1956) is a captivating attempt to write a book that textually incarnates the essence of Algeria,7 a territory which has never been acolonial. In evoking Algeria in the midst of its war of independence, Kateb not only ponders over the successive waves of colonization that have constituted Algeria, he adopts a hybrid form befitting a hybrid, multisemous nation, drawing on the high lyricism of the Arab-Islamic literary tradition and the genre of the novel, a “Western” literary form traditionally unknown in the Maghreb as throughout the Arab world. On the narrative plane, Nedjma is the story of four young friends—Lakhdar, Mourad, Mustapha, and Rachid—longing for the novel’s title character in a time of revolution. Nedjma symbolizes the land of Algeria itself: both are the product of miscegenation and rapine—Nedjma was conceived when her Jewish-French mother was “ravished” in a short space of time by four “suitors,” including the fathers of her future husband and two of her would-be paramours—and each is lusted after by multiple parties who want to take possession of her. In fact, at the thematic heart of Nedjma is the dialectical tension between incest and miscegenation. Algeria, like Nedjma, is the product of the encounter and intermixing of disparate peoples, but at the same time both are defined by an incestuous impulse as well. Over half of the men who arduously desire Nedjma may be her brother; Rachid, one of them, gives voice to the novel’s lament over the insular tribalism that has made the people of Algeria resistant to the new practices and other cultural forms that have washed upon the country 5

 The author’s family name.  Michael Griffiths, introduction to this volume, 22. 7  Regarding this aspect of the text and its narrative structure, Bernard Aresu notes that “[h]aving always preferred to see in the novel a projection of the collective essence of Algeria, [Kateb] insisted … that he had ‘to try all conceivable combinations to hold together the potential novel of a conceivable Algeria.’” Aresu, introduction to Nedjma, by Kateb Yacine (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), xlv. 6

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with each new group of foreign soldiers and settlers: “our ruined tribe refuses to change color; we have always married each other; incest is our bond, our principle of cohesion since the first ancestor’s exile.” It is only when this incestuous tribal instinct can be broken that Algeria can be born as a nation: “the nation’s tree [will take] root in the tribal sepulcher.”8 It appears that Nedjma, set amongst the milieu of Algerian revolution, heralds the occurrence of this transformation—if Nedjma stands for Algeria, being the first woman of her line to effectively resist ravishment and abandonment would seem to promise a new day for Algeria. But the novel is just as much, if not more, concerned with the area’s past, and it explores how the land’s stubborn insularity has been challenged by the violence and struggle for hegemony that have been endemic to it. Mustapha reflects at one point that his country is “a fatherland of invaders.”9 At first blush this statement is somewhat oxymoronic—the fatherland relationship is predicated on nativeness, while to be an invader is, commonsensically, to be an interloper, an outsider. However, what the text considers here is the extent to which invasion is indigenous to Algeria, how Algeria becomes a home, in the most familial sense of the term, to its invaders because the cyclical pattern of invasion is woven into its basic social structure. But regardless, even if this ontologically complicates the ownership claims of more longstanding residents of Algeria, Kateb shows that invasion has almost invariably brought forms of oppression with it. Imprisoned for killing a French landowner, Mourad muses that Lambese, site of the penitentiary where he is jailed, was founded as a penal colony under the rule of Napoleon III on the site of a former Roman military camp. The players may have changed, at least generationally, but the drama and the consecration of the site remain constants, Mourad reflects: “it’s Corsicans instead of Romans now; all Corsicans, all prison guards, and we play the slaves’ roles, in the same prison, near the lion pit, and the sons of the Romans do guard duty with rifles on their shoulders.” But between the Romans and these “sons” of theirs came the Ottomans, who, the text notes, stamped out the anarchic, wandering spirit then prevailing in the land: “three hundred years old, a prow mounting the horizon, the minaret intimidates the concrete armada buttressed between heaven and earth as it conquered nomads and pirates in the city fallen before the boldness of the new sites it delays and invests.” The French, by contrast, set up a settler colony predicated on the appropriation of massive swathes of land. This has left the likes of Mourad and Rachid in a state of dispossession and destitution compared to the state of their ancestors, though in the latter case the divided loyalties of Rachid’s Keblouti tribe make them, and implicitly the larger nation, complicit in their dispossession. On the whole though, Nedjma presents the social changes brought on by French colonialism as essentially mixed, the French

 Kateb Yacine, Nedjma, tr. Richard Howard (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 249–50. 9  Aresu 1991, xx. 8

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legacy being one of exploitation and destruction of older social forms, but also one of wealth creation and territorial development.10 But the novel equally takes up the impetuses of the various colonizers of Algeria, their drives to take root. “[T]he conquest” of Algeria by France, Kateb writes, “was a necessary evil, a painful graft promising growth for the nation’s tree slashed by the foreign axe; like the Turks, the Romans and the Arabs, the French could only take root here, hostages of the fatherland-in-gestation whose favors they quarreled over.”11 So the violent conquests of Algeria, productive of national growth, marked efforts to create spaces of belonging on the part of groups of people otherwise lacking them. Spatially and existentially adrift, these people have found themselves trying to replicate the models set down by the past and/ or unwittingly following its preordained patterns, Kateb shows. A revolutionary pamphlet Mustapha is accused of writing while in school points out that the French colonization of Algeria follows the formula employed by the Romans in their conquest of Gaul:12 “Do you know what I read in Tacitus? These lines, which occur in the translation from Agricola: ‘The Bretons were living like savages, always ready to make war; in order to accustom them, by the pleasures of life, to peace and tranquility, he (Agricola) had the children of the leaders educated, and suggested that he preferred to the acquired talents of the Gauls the natural spirit of the Bretons, so that these peoples, lately disdaining the Roman language, now prided themselves on speaking it gracefully; our very costume was given a place of honor, and the toga became fashionable; gradually, they yielded to the seductions of our vices; they sought our porticos, our baths, our elegant banquets; and these inexperienced men gave the name civilization to what comprised part of their servitude … .’ That is what you can read in Tacitus. That is how it is that we, descendants of the Numidians, now undergo the colonization of the Gauls.”13

So the pamphleteer accuses the French of using a strategy of divide and conquer and the veneer of cultural superiority14 to try to achieve the sort of geopolitical dominance the Romans did over their forefathers two millennia prior. The validity of this accusation is reinforced by the observations of Si Mokhtar, an aging libertine who may have fathered Nedjma, regarding the French emulation of Roman tactics of territorial occupation: The situation of Mount Nadhor [mountain in eastern Algeria] is already a clue— it’s a sheltered site that makes it possible to hold a territory long coveted by the conquerors; the Romans had a garrison not far from there … they had two other 10

 Yacine 1991, 56, 98–9, 102, 168–70, 135–6.  Yacine 1991, 135. 12  Popularly seen in France as the originating moment of its social history. 13  Yacine 1991, 297–8. 14  Edward Said analyzes this latter colonizing strategy illuminatingly in his Culture and Imperialism (New York: Verso, 1993). 11

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strongholds, Hippone on the Carthage littoral, and Cirta, seat of the Numidian province that then included all of North Africa. After the siege of Constantine, the French followed the old Roman tactics point by point; once their soldiers were garrisoned in the walls of ancient Cirta and ancient Hippone, they headed for the Millesimo region; they sent out patrols and reconnaissance missions, expecting to establish bases.15

Within this context of repeated pasts, the Roman roads mentioned in the text,16 ancient but still in use, take on a metaphorical aspect: the possible routes of navigation—social, spatial, and existential—have been set down in the past; due to their continued utility and the difficulties inherent in establishing new byways, they continue to comprise the possible avenues of action and choice. The upshot of this, in terms of the spaces Kateb represents, is that Algeria is a palimpsest of successive socio-spatial orders, a changing assemblage of earlier historical survivals. These may be forgotten—“What does it matter that Cirta17 is forgotten … . Let the tide’s ebb and the flow play with this country until its origins are blurred by the stormy languor of a people in agony”18—however, their remnants are still discernable within the sedimented layers of Algeria’s constituent locales. For example, the text notes that the river Wadi El Kebir was named by Islamic refugees of the Spanish Reconquista in memory of the Guadalquivir. But beyond naming and the intangibilities of memory, the cities occupied by the successive peoples of Algeria still manifest traces of the urbanism and architecture of their past waves of inhabitants.19 Constantine, the city built on the ruins of Cirta that serves as the setting for parts of Nedjma, commemorates 10 years of successful anti-colonial resistance to French control in its very plateau topography, but its past also manifests itself in its admixture of modern European-style structures, Ottoman buildings, and even a Roman bridge, each bearing resonances of its era and its constructors’ modes of translating their culture into urbanism. Rachid finds himself thus a product of this past—he feels a filial relationship to the Romanconquered Numidians and their king Jugurtha.20 He also uses it to make sense of his life, interpreting his attraction to Nedjma and his failed attempts to possess her through the figure of the Carthaginian princess Salammbo.21 But it is not just its natives who are shaped by palimpsest Algeria; the land changes the “ambitious races” who seek to dominate it but find themselves 15

 Yacine 1991, 166.  Yacine 1991, 264–5. 17  Capital of pre-Roman Numidia, destroyed in the fourth century AD. 18  Yacine 1991, 245. 19  Yacine 1991, 92. 20  Yacine 1991, 203–4, 206, 234. 21  Made famous as the title character of Gustave Flaubert’s 1862 novel, set amidst the mercenary revolt against Carthage at the time of the Punic Wars. Flaubert’s darkly cruel fantasy of the Maghreb in ancient times can be seen as part of a growing French possessive fascination with the region during the time of its early Algerian colonization efforts. 16

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“disappointed, mingled, confused, constrained to creep upon ruins,” even as they make their contribution to rewriting the spatiality of the land. Nedjma describes the city of Bône, built up by Roman legionnaires and Ottoman Janissaries, as having a siren-like influence upon the agents of French colonialism: “its wine intoxicated them, its tobacco drew them to the harbor … . Neither the soldiers nor the colonists who followed them could leave the city—neither leave it nor keep it from growing.”22 One is a product of one’s placement in the space-time continuum, the novel reflects in reference to Rachid’s father; therefore, colonial Algeria—itself the product of waves of invasion and resistance—is seen to exert a determinant influence on colonizer and colonized alike.23 Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (1985) similarly interrogates the multisemous Algerian spatial orders produced by the territory’s history of repeated colonization. Djebar’s work is, intertwiningly, autobiography, ethnography of the experiences of female Algerian Revolutionary War veterans, and history of French colonization of Algeria. These three faces of Fantasia are really just aspects of a single textual impetus, in that the central theme of the book is how Djebar and her countrywomen are, in different ways, products of the hybrid fusion of French, Arab, and Berber cultures that took place over the roughly 130 years of French rule in Algeria and of the series of conflictive encounters that marked this period. For Djebar, the French colonial legacy is multivalent: on the one hand, she chronicles the atrocities perpetrated by the French during more than a century of attempts to pacify her land; on the other, she observes that the French language allowed her father to rise from poverty and was a major contributing factor in allowing her to avoid the confining female domestic spaces of the harem. As Nancy von Rosk observes, the central question of Fantasia is “What does it mean to write in the language of yesterday’s enemy?”24 In the text Djebar describes her relationship to the French tongue in terms of spaces of the presidio and the rebato inaugurated by earlier Spanish colonial incursions onto the Algerian coast: just as the Spanish established fortified garrisons (presidios), the French language has entrenched itself deeply within her, from whence it ventures forth to clash in rebato (quick skirmish launched from the presidio) with the oral culture of her darija25 mother tongue. At times, Djebar notes, she sides more with one side, at other times, with the other. French provides her with ingress to vistas of liberation, but it also serves as a mask behind which, she finds, one can hide their innermost vulnerabilities. For all that, the language and, by extension, the French part of her cultural heritage, has been formative for Djebar, but while it is familial, it

22

 Yacine 1991, 245–6.  Yacine 1991, 133. 24  Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, tr. Dorothy S. Blair (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993), 65. 25  Dialect of Arabic, which is the indigenous language of the Maghreb. 23

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still exists at a degree of alienness. Along these lines, she evokes it through the metaphor of the stepmother—a parent, but not a blood relation. 26 Djebar sees this uneasy relationship to the language of the colonizer as part of the larger pattern of conquest and cultural imposition that has historically defined the Maghreb. She evokes the condition of the region as the product of a series of colonizations through the symbolically loaded case of the village of Ain Merian: during the 1845 “pacifications” of the Algerian countryside the French forces exterminated the better part of the Sbeah tribe, and shortly thereafter settlers founded a village named Rabelais on the site of the tribe’s former encampment.27 The act of grafting a new spatial order onto the foundations of an older settlement here significantly testifies to the manner in which colonial cultural imposition takes hold, but equally significant is the name of the village. One of France’s most canonical and seminal writers—its Shakespeare, if you will—Rabelais is commonly seen as embodying the core Gallic characteristics of earthiness and joviality. So the village of Rabelais places in evidence how exogenous forms of culture make inroads in a place by latching onto and building upon preexistent structures, as well as the lengths to which the colonizer will go to import its values and totems. This kind of layered contribution of the colonizer also speaks, for Djebar, to the issues of language and cultural disjunction explored above. She relates her linguistic situation to that of fellow Maghreb natives Saint Augustine and Ibn Khaldun:28 each makes his mark, is called upon to express himself, using a language “introduced into the land of his fathers by conquest and accompanied by bloodshed! A language imposed by rape as much as love.” But these writers are not just inheriting subjects of the colonizer’s cultural legacy; they in turn perform an act of colonization or appropriation, which they deploy on the language itself, stretching it in new directions, rendering it more “flexible,” in Djebar’s terminology.29 So even if, for Djebar as for Stephen Dedalus, history is a nightmare from which she is trying to awaken, and her base language of literary creation is the progeny of the language of Caesar’s imperialist brutalities30 and, farther down the lineage, of the military leaders and bureaucrats who forcefully instituted French dominion over Algeria, she nonetheless is a product of that language. As such, she can bend it to her purposes of asserting a subaltern voice and commemorating past colonial traumas in a manner that both treads the fine line between the collective and individual dimensions of memory and adopts a felt, interiorized rather than abstract, calculated mode of remembrance (Erinnerung rather than Gedächtnis, 26

 Djebar 1993, 128, 181, 214–15.  Djebar 1993, 77. 28  Neo-Platonist theologian who exerted a tremendous formative influence on the early Christian church and groundbreaking historian/social philosopher, respectively. Both were from locations in what is now Algeria. 29  Djebar 1993, 216. 30  Djebar 1993, 56. 27

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in Hegelian terms)—both essential aspects of negotiating the transition into postcoloniality, as Michael Griffith’s introduction to this volume delineates. Standing in stark contrast to Djebar’s sense of Maghrebine place is that of Paul Bowles, the region’s most renowned expatriate resident and chronicler.31 In his often-overlooked piecemeal, episodic evocation of Moroccan history, Points in Time (1982), Bowles employs a structure that presents history in terms of discontinuity, as a haphazard series of events lacking an underlying unifying narrative. He presents disparate vignettes from the 24 centuries of Morocco’s recorded history without any form of interrelation, transition, or contextualizing exposition. This conveys a sense of history as something orderless and random, an impression that is reinforced by the book’s title—the points Bowles represents occur in time in discrete fashion rather than as manifestations of an overarching flow or progression. This is not to say, however, that Bowles denies that events happening in time can have a profound impact on successive events. One of the central themes of Points in Time is the deleterious influence of the different colonialist incursions onto Moroccan soil. The eighth section of the book represents European colonialism, starting with a brief evocation of the Riffian Berber rebellion against Spanish colonial occupation of northwestern Morocco in the late nineteen-tens and early twenties: “At night in the courtyards of the Rif, grandfathers fashion grenades. Each rock in the ravine shields a man. The Spaniard in the garrison starts from his sleep, to find his throat already slashed.” This section of the text ends with revolutionary violence against the colonizer as well—“the bodies of Frenchmen and their families were left lying along the roads … among the smoking ruins of the little villas”32—and thus this “bookending” structure emphasizes the violent rejection of the colonial presence by the native population to whom it is alien. Between these snapshots of anti-colonial violence are brief passages testifying to the sense of boredom and displacement felt by the French legionnaires who make their country’s occupation of Morocco possible and to the machinations by which the French foster divisive conflict between the country’s Jewish and Muslim populations. Also falling between them are the translated lyrics of a popular song from the period, which convey the sense of cultural disruption and imposition felt by Moroccans in the face of the large-scale American presence in the country

31

 Bowles lived in Morocco, with periodic extended absences, for 50 years (Gena Dagel Caponi, Paul Bowles [New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998], xi–xiii). He consciously chose to position himself on the margins of Moroccan culture, never fully assimilating yet actively shirking much of his American cultural inheritance. This places his body of work captivatingly between national and cultural (Arab-Islamic versus “Western”) literary traditions in a manner that I analyze more fully in my book Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011). 32  Paul Bowles, Points in Time (New York: Ecco Press, 1982), 67–70.

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during World War II and the International Zone Era.33 Situated as these lyrics are in the middle of the section of Points in Time dealing with the modern colonial chapter of Moroccan history, the text clearly implies that America’s midcentury involvement with Morocco had a colonialist logic or bent to it. As Brian Edwards argues in his Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, From Casablanca to the Marrakech Express, this song, Houcine Slaoui’s “Al Mirikan,” presents the inroads of American material and vernacular culture into Morocco first ushered in by American GIs as “polluting” and “interrupt[ing]” longstanding local customs and traditions.34 So throughout the text foreign occupation and the exogenous cultural diffusion that proceeds from it are presented as forms of encroachment, and any positive hybridizing influence that might proceed from them goes unremarked. In the one textual instance in which such an influence is noted—that of a stronger, more aggressive variety of deer that has resulted from the local population breeding with those imported by Spaniards from the Pyrenees—it is presented as destabilizing and destructive.35 This somewhat nativist position espoused by the expatriate Bowles is less surprising when one takes into account the tension between Arab-Islamic and Berber cultures in Morocco that he decries elsewhere in his writings and public pronouncements. In an interview with Abdelhak Elghandor published in 1994 Bowles offers the view that Morocco is not part of Islam. Morocco is not Arab, is it? It’s Berber. It’s a Berber country invaded by the Arabs, ruined by the Arabs, I think. I think it would have been much better for Morocco if the Arabs had never come here at all and just left the Berbers by themselves, and not try to hybridize them. Of course, it’s true, I mean, thousands, millions I suppose, of Moroccans are mestizos … . Morocco has become like any other country—yeah, any other third-world country. Obviously, any writer who believes as I do is bound to write what you’ve called “lopsided” versions [laughs] of the culture, because I don’t consider the Arab culture of any importance at all. I don’t think Morocco is an Arab country. I know it’s not an Arab country. It’s a country where Arabic has

33

 In November 1942 Operation Torch saw America’s occupation of Morocco and entry into World War II. The US continued its military presence in Morocco throughout the war, and, in the form of a number of air bases and a sizeable radio broadcasting station, well into the early Cold War era. Additionally, the postwar rise of Tangier as a boomtown of easy financial speculation and access to “vice” drew considerable amounts of American capital and a large number of American expatriates, including Bowles himself. For a fuller discussion of the culture of Tangier during this period of international administration, see Michelle Green’s Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), Iain Finlayson’s Tangier: City of the Dream (New York: I.B. Taurus, 2014), and chapter 2 of Walonen 2011. 34  Brian Edwards, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, From Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 59. 35  Edwards 2005, 73.

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been forced onto the culture. Also Islam was forced onto the Berbers. You can’t do anything about that.36

Similarly, in his article “Africa Minor” (1959), first published in Holiday magazine and later included in the collection of travel writing pieces Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue, Bowles argues that the infusion of Arab-Islamic culture into Morocco is and was only ever partial and secondary in importance to indigenous Berber culture: The Encyclopedia Britannica estimate of the percentage of Arab stock in the population of Morocco [is] ten percent … . The remaining ninety percent of the people are Berbers, who anthropologically have nothing to do with the Arabs. They are not of Semitic origin, and were right where they are now long before the Arab conquerors ever suspected their existence.37

He goes on to assert, through the example of Moroccan regional idiosyncratic religious practices, that pre-Islamic Berber folkways are just as essential to the country’s cultural practice and that they are more authentically Moroccan. While the case of Morocco is somewhat different from that of Algeria, Kateb’s and Djebar’s observations analyzed above regarding the sedimented historical colonial influences that comprise contemporary Maghrebine social space belie Bowles’s position, as does the spatio-cultural history sketched briefly at the beginning of this essay. Abdellah Hammoudi also refutes some of this amateur cultural anthropology of Bowles and his friend Brion Gysin, documenting the more recent and Islamic origins of certain cultural practices to which the two had ascribed more ancient, pagan origins.38 The essentialist logic of Bowles’s position can be read as a strategy for contesting what he saw as the corrupt westernizing transformations sweeping through the region of his expatriation in the wake of postcolonial independence. In as early a work as The Sheltering Sky (1949) Bowles decries the imitations he sees of European urbanism and cultural practices in the large coastal cities of Algeria; throughout his ensuing oeuvre he bitterly complains of a drift towards imitating Western architecture, consumer goods, and lifeways that threaten to rob his adopted home of the “magic” that drew him there in the first place. In particular, in his foreword to Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue Bowles speaks up for indigenous culture against what he sees as the depredations of first-world cultural influence propagated by the intelligentsia of the developing world: My own belief is that the people of the alien [non-Western] cultures are being ravaged not so much by the by-products of our civilization, as by the irrational 36

 Abdelhak Elghandor, “Atavism and Civilization: An Interview with Paul Bowles,” Ariel: A Review of International English 25, no. 2 (April 1994): 7–30, 12–13. 37  Paul Bowles, “Africa Minor,” in Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue: Scenes from the Non-Christian World (New York: Ecco, 1984), 23. 38  Edwards 2005, 286.

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longing on the part of members of their own educated minorities to cease being themselves and become Westerners. The various gadget-forms of our “garbage” make convenient fetishes to assist in achieving the magic transformation. But there is a difference between allowing an organism to evolve naturally and trying to force the change. Many post-colonial regimes attempt to hasten the process of Europeanization by means of campaigns and decrees. Coercion can destroy the traditional patterns of thought, it is true; but what is needed is that they be transformed into viable substitute patterns, and this can be done only empirically and by the people themselves.39

Problematically, however, this presupposes that a people can successfully abjure exogenous cultural influence and that it has a pristine base of discrete, authentic cultural identity that it can work off of in producing a postcolonial cultural and spatial order. As Kateb and Djebar have shown, and as is possibly true for some other postcolonial societies, this is simply not the case in the Maghreb. Bowles was driven by a Romantic vision of folkloric purity—in such pieces collected in Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue as “The Rif, to Music” (1960) and “The Route to Tassemsit” (1963) he narrates his efforts to document Moroccan folk music for the Library of Congress, and the literary production of the latter half of his career consisted of collaborations with Moroccan storytellers geared towards preserving their traditional forms of narration. As such, his successes in this phase of his work, less renowned than that of his novelistic production, were often those of the early nineteenth-century folklorists of Europe: not in the enduring validity of their claims, but in their preservation of and drawing of attention to overlooked cultural practice threatened with eclipse. In a region with so rich and complex a history of cultural confluence, such an achievement is not to be deprecated. What the sometimes tense, sometimes natural interweaving of disparate cultural practices these three authors point to illustrates is the need for postcolonial nations to arrive at a condition of what Édouard Glissant terms “Relation,” a sociospatial order that Kateb and Djebar, each in their own way, tentatively approach in their textual excavations of the Maghreb. Relation is a mode of existing that is not rooted or monological, but rather one in which “identity is extended through relationship with the Other.” It is a rhizomatic (in the sense proposed by Deleuze and Guattari) rather than rooted mode of thinking and engaging with the Other, one opposed to generalization, absolutism, and all forms of what Glissant terms totalitarian thought—that is, thought that seeks to dominate through imposing and legitimizing a single tradition of thought, expression, and being in the world. It is a means of not being fixed and chauvinistic, of living in a creolizing manner— which Glissant sees as a continuing process, not a multisemous yet fixed kind of being or essence.40

39

 Bowles 1984, xxii–xxiii.  Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, tr. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 11, 89. 40

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For Glissant, Relation is an essential state for postcolonial societies, because of the tendency of decolonizing movements to be driven by a rooted, monological sense of identity, which perpetuates the hostile and uneasy Western binary of civilized Us versus barbaric Them. Rather, Relation allows for a more inclusive embracing of different strains of culture, and at the same time relativizes notions of territory and belonging over which so much blood has been shed in the wake of the colonial era: “When the very idea of territory becomes relative, nuances appear in the legitimacy of territorial possession.”41 As the preceding analysis has shown, not adopting this sort of stance paves the way to reactionary forms of intolerance, to a schizophrenic condition in which one integral part of a nation’s identity is pitted against another and the intricacies of history are thereby denied. In light of this, the importance of adopting a mode of Relation, in the Maghreb as in other societies attempting to come to terms with the legacies of the past while moving beyond colonial governmentality, is clear enough.

41

 Glissant 1997, 14–15.

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Chapter 10

Memory is an Archipelago: Glissant, Chamoiseau, and the Literary Expression of Cultural Memory Bonnie Thomas

Martinican authors Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau have made a significant contribution to postcolonial literature and memory studies in their diverse body of work that encompasses both fiction and non-fiction. They have collaborated on a number of works that focus on the place of slavery and colonialism in contemporary cultural memory, most notably the short pamphlet Quand les murs tombent: l’identité nationale hors-la-loi? (2007). Glissant, until his death in 2011, was a well-established contributor to debates on the complex relationship between the past, present, and future in Martinique, and he remains a key francophone figure in the Anglophone-dominated realm of postcolonial studies. This chapter will explore the ways in which Glissant and Chamoiseau view memory and its relationship to identity in the contemporary world and in particular, how they express this understanding through their literature. It will consider the historical context from which they write and some of the cultural commemorations surrounding the memory of slavery that already exist before proceeding to an analysis of Glissantian concepts imagined through contrasts such as continent and archipelago, rhizome and single-rooted identity, and Chamoiseau’s notion of memory-traces. It will also demonstrate how slavery and colonization in the Americas resulted in a distinct creolization that models a way of interaction that is crucial for the world today. The chapter will conclude with an overview of Chamoiseau’s most recent publication, Césaire, Perse, Glissant: Les liaisons magnétiques (2013), which offers a compelling insight into the literary expression of cultural memory from a Glissantian standpoint. Together and separately, Glissant and Chamoiseau’s fictional and non-fictional body of writings constitutes a rich source for the theorization of memory in both a Caribbean and global context. Glissant’s early works such as Soleil de la conscience (1956) present a Caribbean-focused view of the theme of memory and colonialism while his later books such as Mémoires des esclavages (2007) attempt to draw together all those who have suffered from oppression. Chamoiseau, as one of the founding intellectuals of Créolité (Creoleness) and producer of works such as the Prix Goncourt–winning novel Texaco (1992), has been instrumental in shaping an approach to the past that brings to light “those who are forgotten by

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the colonial chronicle,”1 uncovering a kaleidoscope of histories that speak both for the individual and the community. Both Glissant and Chamoiseau harness images from the Caribbean environment as a way to express their vision of how to present and preserve a colonial past. They emphasize the need to acknowledge in a public and symbolic way the crimes of history, while at the same time looking to the future and underlining the connections that exist between us all. For both of these writers, Glissant’s model of Relation is pivotal in construing the relationship between past, present, and future. Before moving to a discussion of how Glissant and Chamoiseau explore cultural memory through their literature, it is important first to examine the context from which they write as their conception of creolization in the New World is central to their thought. Both authors come from the French Caribbean island of Martinique, which was colonized by the French in the sixteenth century. Like many surrounding islands in the Caribbean, Martinique was subjected to the traite négrière, which imported slaves from Africa to work on the sugar plantations. Slavery and colonialist rule dominated Martinique until its abolition in 1848. In 1946, the country became an overseas department of France (DOM), which guaranteed the same legal rights as the metropole, but also ensured an ongoing relationship with France. The way in which the colonial history of Martinique is remembered has been the subject of much discussion by the country’s intellectuals. The issue rose to the forefront in the “history wars” of 2005 when then-president Jacques Chirac attempted to highlight the “positive” role of colonialism through Article 4 of the law of February 23, 2005. His efforts to whitewash this shameful episode in France’s history by focusing on its so-called benefits is a striking example of the policing of memory—a form of governmentality. However, in this instance the resulting public outcry was so intense that Chirac was forced to abolish the controversial article and reassess the French government’s attitude to its colonial past. Although the government had adopted the historic loi Taubira in May 2001, which declares slavery as a crime against humanity, little had been done by way of practical recognition of this fact, again emphasizing that Chirac’s government was merely paying lip service to any serious acknowledgement of the effects of this damaging policy. As the discussion below will reveal, writers and academics have been crucial in determining how the memory of slavery and colonialism is represented in public discourse. Maeve McCusker asserts that the “current prominence of memory, as subject and as rhetorical trope, is largely driven by the writers of the Antilles, who frequently combine a prolific literary output with a strong political presence, ensuring that they play an active part in shaping collective memory.”2 Glissant and Chamoiseau have been particularly important in this process of exploring cultural memory after colonialism, consistently  Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Eloge de la Créolité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 101. 2  Maeve McCusker, Patrick Chamoiseau: Recovering Memory (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 3. 1

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challenging Chirac’s attempt to paint over the horrors of slavery’s legacy through their insistence on the formal acknowledgement of France’s historical crimes. In the public sphere, a number of different initiatives exist that are worthy of consideration alongside the literary expressions of memory that are the subject of this chapter. The loi Taubira, with its recognition of slavery as a crime against humanity, paved the way for the creation of a committee of qualified persons in order to preserve “the continuity of the memory of this crime through the generations.”3 This committee was initially headed by Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé (2004–08), was subsequently presided over by Réunionnaise academic Françoise Vergès (2008–12) and since 2013, by historian Myriam Cottias. In 2009, Article 4 of the decree of May 6 sharpened the aim of the committee to “assist the Government with its opinions and recommendations on questions relative to the research, teaching, conservation, diffusion or transmission of the history and memories of the slave trade, slavery and its abolition.”4 In May 2013, the committee underwent a name change from the comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage to the comité national pour la mémoire et l’histoire de l’esclavage, indicating a new focus to its role. Its membership increased from 12 to 15 and appointments were to be made for three years by the Prime Minister. A key function of the committee is to oversee the annual day of commemoration for the 1848 abolition of slavery in the French colonies, which was announced by Jacques Chirac as May 10 in a ceremony in Paris in January 2006. This commemorative move marks a stark contrast to the early pages of Glissant’s Discours antillais in which he demonstrates that 1848 was not the end of exploitation in the French colonies. Indeed, Glissant’s assertions trouble the notion of a historical past that can be clearly and completely relegated to the past. By continually drawing the links between past, present, and future, Glissant underlines the persistent effects of history in the contemporary world and the fact that methods of policing memory are potent indeed. In this same speech, which was made in the presence of Condé, Glissant, other members of the comité, and government ministers, Chirac declared the appointment of Glissant as the director of a future national museum to be devoted to the memory of the slave trade and its abolitions: “I’ve decided to confer upon Monsieur Edouard Glissant, one of our greatest contemporary writers, a man of memory and the universal, the directorship of a planned national Center dedicated to the slave trade, slavery and their abolition.”5 Although this project 3  Comité national pour l’histoire et la mémoire de l’esclavage. http://www.cnmhe.fr/ spip.php?rubrique1 [accessed June 16, 2014]: “la pérennité de la mémoire de ce crime à travers les générations.” 4  Comité national pour l’histoire et la mémoire de l’esclavage. http://www.cnmhe.fr/ spip.php?rubrique1 [accessed June 16, 2014]: “assister de ses avis et recommandations le Gouvernement sur les questions relatives à la recherche, l’enseignement, la conservation, la diffusion ou la transmission de l’histoire et des mémoires de la traite, de l’esclavage et de leur abolition.” 5  “Allocution de Jacques Chirac à l’occasion de la réception en l’honneur du Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage,” January 30, 2006. http://www.voltairenet.org/

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never came to fruition, the planning behind it became the subject of Glissant’s 2007 book Mémoires des esclavages: la fondation d’un centre national pour la mémoire des esclavages et de leurs abolitions, which is an important source for his theorization of memory. In Mémoires des esclavages Glissant argues that the far-reaching effects of slavery are difficult to grasp: “An impressive mass, guarded by sleepless towers which don’t let anything pass: victims fear the light, the profiteers have at their disposal all imaginable lights.”6 A recurrent and favorite image of Glissant is that of the contrast between continents and archipelagos, the former of which is suggested in the above quotation through the idea of a mass. According to the Collins Dictionary, an archipelago is “a group of islands or a sea studded with islands,”7 while a continent is “one of the earth’s largest land masses, a continuous extent of land.”8 As the above citation suggests, the memory of slavery is generally expressed in the colonial chronicle as an immutable and ungraspable historical fact. However, as we will see, Glissant, and later Chamoiseau, advocate for a view of history that is more akin to an archipelago whose natural openness allows for flux, change, and multiple interpretations. As Michael Dash affirms, “[i]slands ha[ve] sea horizons and [a]re always connected with other islands. They ha[ve] no meaning in themselves but c[an] only be understood in terms of a chain of succession.”9 H. Adlai Murdoch asserts, furthermore, that “it is the structure and thought of the archipelago that find themselves located at the forefront of a nonhierarchical world.”10 A fundamental principle of Glissantian thought, therefore, is this ability to avoid hierarchies and the value judgments they entail. By contrast, he urges the tolerance and support of differences, which allow diversity to unsettle received notions in a non-threatening manner. Glissant exemplifies this theme with his notion of “a single-rooted identity … which testifies to a sovereign thought of the One, its magnificence and its calamities”11 whereas “identities that communicate in the manner of rhizomes,

article134814.html [accessed July 15, 2014]: “J’ai décidé de confier à Monsieur Edouard Glissant, l’un de nos plus grands écrivains contemporains, homme de la mémoire et de l’universel, la présidence d’une mission de préfiguration d’un Centre national consacré à la traite, à l’esclavage et à leurs abolitions.” 6  Edouard Glissant, Mémoires des esclavages: la fondation d’un centre national pour la mémoire des esclavages et de leurs abolitions (Paris: Gallimard, 2007a), 24: “Une masse impressionnante, gardée par des tours de veille, qui ne laissent rien passer: les victimes craignent la lumière les profiteurs disposent de tous les leurres imaginables.” 7  Collins Concise Dictionary (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1999), 315. 8  Collins Concise Dictionary, 70. 9  J. Michael Dash, “Remembering Edouard Glissant,” Callaloo 34, no. 3 (2011): 675. 10  H. Adlai Murdoch, “Edouard Glissant’s Creolized World Vision: From Resistance and Relation to Opacité.” Callaloo 36, no. 4 (2013): 876. 11  Glissant 2007a, 33: “une identité racine unique … qui témoigne pour une pensée souveraine de l’Un, ses magnificences et ses calamités.”

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relational identities”12 are those that allow for changing dynamics and multiple meetings. According to Glissant, “it is the cultural and societal practice of creolizations … [that] constitutes neither a weakness, nor a lack, nor a sickness of identity, but on the contrary a bold and generous projection of the vision of the humanities today.”13 More specifically in relation to memory, Glissant develops this idea with his comparison of “the memory of the Earth collectivity … an archipelagic thought, which invents at each moment the effects of Relation”14 and what he calls la mémoire de la tribu. “Through what we will call the memory of the tribe, we act in our place; by the memory of the Earth collectivity, we think with the world.”15 Throughout his vast body of work Glissant emphasizes this notion that we must not restrict ourselves to a particular way of thinking or being; rather, we must continually reinvent ourselves in the image of an outward-facing archipelago. Most importantly, this task must be undertaken through interaction with others. Glissant gives a specific example of this manner of conceptualizing experience in his 2010 pamphlet entitled 10 mai: mémoires de la traite négrière, de l’esclavage et de leurs abolitions. This text gathers together a series of writings that formed the basis of a public recitation at the first commemoration of the abolition of slavery in the French colonies, held at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris in 2007. Inside the front cover Glissant lists all the countries that were subject to la traite and the dates of the abolition of slavery. Inside the back cover there is a list of 23 “héros de la liberté” who helped combat slavery and its terrifying consequences from a variety of countries, including Toussaint Louverture and Dessalines from Haiti, Delgrès and Solitude from Guadeloupe, Victor Schoelcher from France, and Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King from the United States. Glissant opens the book with an observation that the May 10 commemoration may relate specifically to the 1848 abolition of slavery in the French Caribbean colonies, but he is quick to widen the focus of this annual occasion to encompass other slaveries such as those in trans-Saharan Africa and contemporary society. Moreover, he emphasizes that the reason to explore and preserve the memories of slaveries—referred to in the plural form—is to “join memories, to liberate them through others, it is opening the paths of global Relation.”16 It is apparent 12

 Glissant 2007a, 38: “des identités qui communiquent à la manière des rhizomes, des identités relation.” 13  Glissant 2007a, 38: “c’est la pratique culturelle et sociétale des créolisations, … [qui] ne constitu[e] ni une faiblesse, ni un manque, ni une maladie de l’identité mais au contraire une projection hardie et généreuse de la vision des humanités d’aujourd’hui.” 14  Glissant 2007a, 166: “la mémoire de la collectivité Terre … une pensée archipellique, qui invente à chaque moment les effets de la Relation.” 15  Glissant 2007a, 166: “Par ce que nous appellerions la mémoire de la tribu, nous agissons dans notre lieu; par la mémoire de la collectivité Terre, nous pensons avec le monde.” 16  Edouard Glissant, 10 mai: mémoires de la traite négrière, de l’esclavage et de leurs abolitions (Paris: Editions Galaade, 2010), 5: “[c]onjoindre les mémoires, les libérer les unes par les autres, c’est ouvrir les chemins de la Relation mondiale.”

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here that Glissant’s notion of memory is closely linked to his concept of Relation, which he expresses geographically through the image of the archipelago. This concept will be further examined later in the chapter. Glissant’s ultimate aim in his understanding of the memories of slavery is to “reconcile memories”17 in such a way that “our intuitions meet each other, that in the whole-world our truths relate to each other.”18 In a similar way to the manner in which he emphasizes the ongoing and non-linear relationship between past, present, and future, Glissant also opens up the notion of each country or social group remaining isolated entities in their histories. In Glissant’s model, the memory of slavery in Martinique, for example, becomes linked to that of other societies who have suffered under the plantation system and indeed, to any society which has experienced trauma. While Glissant acknowledges that facing the past without any comforting illusions may be uncomfortable, he also locates this experience as a starting point for new and positive connections that allow a more realistic interrelationship between the past and the present. He thus focuses attention on the liberating possibilities of interacting in a relational way. Chamoiseau expresses similar ideas about the symbolic meaning attached to May 10. In an interview with Maeve McCusker on May 10, 2008, he is asked to reflect on the progress of this commemorative event. While he agrees that “[i]nsofar as France is concerned, there has been considerable progress,” he nonetheless argues that what “we need now is an international day of commemoration, in which all memories of genocide, crimes and attacks against humanity, might find symbolic recognition.”19 He remarks, moreover, that colonialist mentalities remain even if colonial consciousness has evolved, which means that there are “narrow-minded people who haven’t understood that we are demanding neither repentance, nor flagellation, nor accusation. We are attempting to translate the crime into experience … so that it becomes inscribed on the collective imagination, thereby enabling each memory of a crime to become an opening onto memories of other crimes.”20 For both Glissant and Chamoiseau, then, it is crucial to speak of oppression openly in order to allow for healing and a positive move towards the future. In some ways their prescription for historical reconciliation is like a powerful individual psychological session where raw and painful truths are confronted and grieved for before finding an appropriate place in the person’s psyche. On a collective level, once that recognition has occurred, it is possible to figuratively link arms with others and forge a different path ahead. 17

 Glissant 2010, 7: “concilier les mémoires.”  Glissant 2010, back cover: “nos intuitions se rencontrent, qu’au tout-monde nos vérités se relaient.” In Poetics of Relation Glissant discusses this idea in a chapter entitled “Relinked, (Relayed), Related.” See Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, tr. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 169–79. 19  Maeve McCusker, “On Slavery, Césaire and Relating to the World: An Interview with Patrick Chamoiseau,” Small Axe 30 (2009): 74. 20  McCusker 2009, 75. 18

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Given Glissant and Chamoiseau’s emphasis on the broadening of experiences into what Chamoiseau has termed diversalité21—which is the opposite of universality—it is useful to pause on the notion of Relation, which forms its theoretical backdrop. Glissant’s 1990 publication, Poétique de la relation, offers his most explicit unraveling of the concept. However, he has significantly developed this line of thought through his fictional and non-fictional books. Most notably, in 2009, he published Philosophie de la relation where he revisits a number of key ideas relating to this poetic and political stance. In his chapter on “the thought of Relation,”22 he characterizes Relation as a force that “at once relinks, relays, and relates. It doesn’t mix things up to be the same, it distinguishes between differences, in order to give greater importance to them.”23 The book is structured around musings on significant Glissantian ideas such as archipelagic thought, the thought of trembling, the thought of wandering, and the thought of creolizations,24 all of which attest to the inescapable need to integrate differences without seeking to minimize them or be threatened by them. For Glissant, what is essential is that differences are treated as both primordial and enriching. As he asserts in a recent interview, “it’s of fundamental importance in today’s world to say that everything is happening in a rhizome world, that is, roots that intertwine, mix, and mutually assist each other … .”25 Critic Eric Prieto argues that Glissant has created with Relation a theory of interdependence based on “an understanding of the world as a single interlocking system, in which the most minute remote events can be felt locally at some level.”26 It is this manner of shining a spotlight on the complexity and interlocking nature of the world, and thereby resisting the temptation to create grand narratives, which informs Glissant’s approach towards the past, present, and future. Glissant urges an imaginative revolution in which one’s history must be faced head on and in all its nuance in order to move forward. Glissant draws from the specific context of his island homeland, which he believes perfectly encapsulates a paradigm for the future applicable to any society. In doing so, he illustrates that one specific example can nonetheless support diverse circumstances. As we will see below, Glissant’s conception of history is intimately bound up in the physical environment of the Caribbean.

 See, for example, Patrick Chamoiseau, Césaire, Perse, Glissant: Les liaisons magnétiques (Paris: Philippe Rey, 2013), 36. 22  “la pensée de la Relation.” 23  Edouard Glissant, Philosophie de la relation (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 72: “à la fois reli[e], relai[e], et relat[e]. Elle ne confond pas des identiques, elle distingue entre des différents, pour mieux les accorder.” 24  la pensée archipélique, la pensée du tremblement, la pensée de l’errance and la pensée des créolisations. Original italics. 25  Manthia Diawara, “Edouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia Diawara,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 28 (2011): 9. 26  Eric Prieto, “Edouard Glissant, Littérature-monde, and Tout-monde,” Small Axe 33 (2010): 118. 21

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In his groundbreaking Le Discours antillais, published in 1981, Glissant declares that “[o]ur landscape is its own monument: its meaning can only be traced on the underside. It is all history.”27 For Glissant, the Caribbean environment not only constitutes a physical archive of the multiple histories excluded by the colonial chronicle, but it is also symbolic of a more inclusive approach towards the transmission of cultural memory in its archipelagic shape. The Caribbean landscape contains, for example, the mornes, or hills, which served as a sanctuary for the runaway slaves successful in escaping from their masters. Abandoned cases, or huts, overrun by vines, remain as a reminder of the painful reconstitution of families shattered under slavery. Fragments of old tools lost in the soil give an insight into the Amerindian peoples who inhabited the islands before the Spanish arrived in the fifteenth century. Most important, though, is the way in which landscape bears the scars of many of the battles between colonizer and colonized. In an interview Glissant gave as part of a collection entitled Pour une littérature-monde, which attempts to displace the dominance of France at the center of francophone literature and instead views it as a body of work that just happens to be in French, he asserts that before one can contemplate the idea of littérature-monde one must first resolve the problem of colonialism. For him, the persistent relationship between France as colonizer and a host of colonized nations can be understood in terms of landscape. Glissant argues that the way one interacts with the physical environment of a place, which is a major focus of conquest and domination under colonialism, is central to a revisioning of history. “When we are not master of, when we don’t freely frequent our space, there is a whole series of barriers between you and the landscape which are those of dispossession and exploitation, the relationship to landscape is obviously limited and garrotted.”28 However, “to liberate the relationship to landscape through the poetic act, through the poetic word, is to do the work of liberation.”29Aimé Césaire’s revolutionary poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) is perhaps the most famous example of how one can reappraise history through a poetic reimagination of landscape. For these authors poetry and politics are intimately linked and an engagement with landscape forms an important part of their critique of colonial rule. Chamoiseau develops this inclusive approach towards the environment in his own literary explorations of history. In an interview with Paola Ghinelli in 2005, he interprets Glissant’s assertion about landscape in Le Discours antillais to mean that “in the reading of landscape we will find the lost memory of those  Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, tr. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 11. 28  Edouard Glissant, “Solitaire et solidaire: entretien avec Edouard Glissant,” in Pour une littérature-monde, ed. Michel le Bris and Jean Rouaud (Paris: Gallimard, 2007b), 78: “Quand on ne maîtrise pas, qu’on ne fréquente pas librement son espace, qu’entre le paysage et vous il existe toute une série de barrières qui sont celles de la dépossession et de l’exploitation, la relation au paysage est évidemment limitée et garrottée.” 29  Glissant 2007b, 79: “libérer la relation au paysage par l’acte poétique, par le dire poétique, est faire l’oeuvre de libération.” 27

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who didn’t have the word, who didn’t write, who didn’t tell stories.”30 Chamoiseau extends this notion and coins the term trace-mémoires to encapsulate the kind of history and memory that falls outside the annals of official History. “This notion of memory-traces opens us to a memory that is much more complete than that which would simply be linked to the written trace or the spoken word.”31 Chamoiseau argues, moreover, that “[w]hen you do the tourist circuit, 80% of the edifices comes from colonization, and it’s that which serves as an apparent cultural heritage. But underneath, there is something else, and that’s what we need to find.”32 Chamoiseau draws on this insight in his 1994 collaboration with photographer Rodolphe Hammadi, Guyane: Traces-mémoires du bagne, which is a literary and photographic investigation of a ruined prison in French Guiana. According to Max Silverman, this book is “not only a critical response to the official writing of history but also a riposte to the republican story of national memory recounted in Pierre Nora’s vast project Les lieux de mémoire.”33 Following Glissant’s lead of reading the Caribbean landscape as history, Chamoiseau argues that what can be uncovered in the physical environment is a rich array of trace-mémoires “whose symbolic, affective, functional impact, whose open, evolutionary, living significances surpass by far the immobile equation of traditional monuments that are recorded in western Memory.”34 Chamoiseau and Hammadi’s exploration of the abandoned prison through word and image plays a similar role to a traditional historian piecing together a forgotten story from the archives. However, their method tells the stories of those marginalized by official History. Importantly, though, for both Glissant and Chamoiseau it is paradoxically the experience of slavery and colonization that provides the elements for liberation from the shackles of history. As a result of the inherent diversity that is born of creolization—what Chamoiseau describes as “the accelerated and massive coming

 Patrick Chamoiseau in Paola Ghinelli, Archipels littéraires (Montréal: Mémoire d’encrier, 2005), 18: “dans la lecture du paysage nous pourrons trouver la mémoire perdue de ceux qui n’ont pas eu la parole, qui n’ont pas écrit, qui n’ont pas raconté.” 31  Chamoiseau in Ghinelli 2005, 18: “Cette notion de trace-mémoires nous ouvre à une mémoire bien plus complète que celle qui serait tout simplement liée à une trace écrite ou à la parole verbalisée.” 32  Janice Morgan, “Re-Imagining Diversity and Connection in the Chaos World: An Interview with Patrick Chamoiseau,” Callaloo 31, no. 2 (2008): 446. 33  Max Silverman, “Memory Traces: Patrick Chamoiseau and Rodolphe Hammadi’s Guyane: Traces-mémoires du bagne,” Yale French Studies 118/119 (2010): 225. See also Patrick Chamoiseau and Rodolphe Hammadi, Guyane: Traces-mémoires du bagne (Paris: Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, 1994), 16. 34  Chamoiseau and Hammadi 1994, 16: “dont la portée symbolique, affective, fonctionnelle, dont les significations ouvertes, évolutives, vivantes, dépassent de bien loin l’équation immobile des traditionnels monuments que l’on répertorie dans la Mémoire occidentale.” 30

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together of peoples, languages, cultures, races, world views, and cosmogonies”35— the Caribbean becomes an exemplary model for how to operate in a world that cannot be reduced to continent-like immutable masses. Glissant argues that “black reality in the New World is the truth of multiplicity, the truth of the step towards the other … ”36 while Chamoiseau affirms that “[o]ur communities begin—not under the form of a genesis that opens up to a founding myth, a History—but under the form of di-genesis, that is to say that the tale opens and creates within diversity.”37 For both Glissant and Chamoiseau, this diversity is embedded in the Creole imaginary and is the key to reshaping our relationship with past, present, and future. “Born of our Culture … the imaginary becomes master of our relationships to the world, which produce it in turn. It is an immanent, collective-individual, individual-collective authority which conditions one’s being, determines the unconscious, organizes the unconscious, rules over the high threshold of the conscious where the True, the Just, the Beautiful, the wantingto be, the wanting-to do lies … .”38 Finding a concrete image in the Caribbean archipelago, the Creole imaginary incarnates a new way of engaging with history and memory. As Chamoiseau asserts, “it’s the structure of the imaginary that is going to give the real connections … . That’s what is fundamental and changes everything: the literature that we make, the identity of clarifications that we explore, the modalities of linguistic confrontation that we examine.”39 An analysis of Chamoiseau’s most recent work of non-fiction, Césaire, Perse, Glissant: Les liaisons magnétiques, gives a poignant and pertinent example of how the Creole imaginary has the power to change the way we interpret the world. In both subject matter and structure, the book strives to create connections where previously there was disparity and discontinuity. The book is particularly powerful as it not only provides an insight into the literary heritage of the Caribbean, but also functions as a homage to Glissant in the wake of his death in 2011. In Césaire, Perse, Glissant: Les liaisons magnétiques Chamoiseau draws together three Caribbean thinkers whom he refers to as his “sentimenthèque,”40 a neologism he coins to describe the people who are of both sentimental and literary value to him, or a kind of affective library. The book is therefore a meditation on both individual and collective memory and seeks to situate these three writers, 35

 Chamoiseau 2013, 18: “la mise en contact accélérée et massive de peuples, de langues, de cultures, de races, de conceptions du monde et de cosmogonies.” 36  Diawara 2011, 9. 37  Morgan 2008, 447. 38  Patrick Chamoiseau, Ecrire en pays dominé (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 275: “Né de notre Culture … l’imaginaire devient maître de nos rapports au monde, lesquels le produisent à leur tour. C’est une autorité immanente, collective-individuelle, individuellecollective, qui conditionne l’être, détermine l’inconscient, organise l’inconscient, régente la frange haute de conscient où se tiennent le Vrai, le Juste, le Beau, le vouloir-être, le vouloir-faire … .” 39  Morgan 2008, 447. 40  Chamoiseau 2013, 11.

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who are generally discussed in isolation from one another—particularly in the case of Perse who is Guadeloupean-born but white—in a network formation that is reminiscent of Glissant’s Relation. Chamoiseau announces the personal nature of the essay from the outset by explicitly inserting himself into the narrative, beginning with his dedication of the book to Glissant’s son Mathieu, “a son really, in August, in Montblanc, shared in Diamant,”41 and describing himself rereading the French poet René Char as he ponders what the new year will hold for him. The book is structured in the form of a chronicle progressing through the months of the year, although it is clearly rooted in the Caribbean with chapter headings such as “Carême,” or dry season, and “Saison-pluies,” or rainy season. This chronicle is succeeded by a brief chapter where Chamoiseau explores the literal and figurative value of “Crépuscules,” or dusk, before concluding with a separate homage to each of the three poets in which Chamoiseau reflects on the influence they have had on both him and on literature more generally. Chamoiseau first presented his “Récitation pour Ed” at the wake held for Glissant in Martinique in February 2011 and this final tribute is particularly poignant given the close relationship between the two writers and the indelible personal and literary influence Glissant had on his younger compatriot. In fact this whole book functions as a kind of literary memorial to Glissant as each meandering turn of Chamoiseau’s thought is shaped by his belief in the powers of Relation. This philosophical adherence is most evident in the continued bringing together of people or ideas who might classically be considered antagonistic to each other. Chamoiseau establishes this unconventional and Relation-influenced stance early in the book with an explanation of his subject matter. In rich Creole-infused language, Chamoiseau affirms that the three writers who form its focus are generally studied apart: “Our Caribbean habit is rather to live them one by one. Like a succession of gwoka solos without the big choir of the ‘voices behind.’”42 Immediately, though, Chamoiseau invokes Glissant as a visionary who is able to look beyond such superficial differences to see the unifying possibilities in their diversity. Despite his initial horror at the thought of writing on Perse, a béké, Chamoiseau is led by Glissant to embrace this seemingly unimaginable relationship by grouping Césaire, Perse, and Glissant together. “It was his way of designating a marvel to me … . The three thus met in me without being mixed up or distorted.”43 As established earlier in this chapter, Chamoiseau reveals that it is the shared plantation society which constitutes the vital first link between the three writers, in particular the process of creolization that occurred during the period of slavery and colonialism. The diversity of ethnic and cultural groups that were 41

 Chamoiseau 2013, dedication: “fils vraiment, en août, en Montblanc, en Diamant partagé.” Diamant is a famous rock off the coast of Martinique and can be seen from the cemetery where Glissant lies. 42  Chamoiseau 2013, 12: “Notre habitude antillaise est plutôt de les vivre un à un. Comme une succession de solos de gwoka sans le grand choeur des ‘voix-derrière.’” 43  Chamoiseau 2013, 13: “Ce fut sa manière de me désigner une merveille … . Les trois se sont ainsi rencontrés en moi, sans se confondre ni se dénaturer.”

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forcibly brought together meant that the Caribbean’s inhabitants had to “learn to be reborn together, to live together, to get on with each other, to exchange with each other in unharmonious, violent, and hazardous conditions.”44 Moreover, as both Chamoiseau and Glissant repeatedly affirm, the very nature of plantation society resulted in the fact that “we will not have one Genesis, nor one founding Myth, nor one masterly History … [but] a cacophony of multiple narrations.”45 Like Glissant, Chamoiseau links creolization to multiplicity and therefore it is a natural embodiment of Relation. Chamoiseau’s decision to study three quite different poets in this relational way is an example of how to adopt Glissant’s philosophical thought to engage with history and memory in an innovative way. Whilst the Caribbean past is fundamental to Chamoiseau’s thought, he does not only look backwards in Césaire, Perse, Glissant. Equally important is his engagement with the pressing issues of today and he cites many maladies which plague the modern world such as religious intolerance, ethnic cleansing, and the demonization of immigration, underlining the fact that in some ways we have not strayed far from colonialist mentalities.46 Like Glissant, Chamoiseau arrives at the conclusion that the poet, or what Chamoiseau has termed a “Warrior of the imaginary,”47 is an instrumental player in reshaping the world according to Relation. The reason for this is that poetry contains the artistic qualities of this philosophical bent: “it distils no doctrine, no dogma, no certitude, no truth. It represents nothing, affirms nothing, expresses nothing. It contents itself with being a flash of intelligence and soul which mysteriously nourishes what life and human dignity require at the highest level.”48 It is not surprising, then, that Chamoiseau chooses to focus on three poets as a way both to illustrate how the thought of Relation can be applied in the present and to pay homage to Glissant. Indeed, in some ways Chamoiseau’s reflections on Glissant, and the contrasting complementarity of their works, enacts in itself a kind of Relation. The title of the present book, for example, alludes to an earlier Glissant work, La terre magnétique: Les errances de Rapa Nui, l’île de Pâques (2007), in which Glissant explores the mysteries of Easter Island. In Césaire, Perse, Glissant Chamoiseau deepens and extends his understanding of Relation through the contrast of “la terre magnétique,” which is represented by Glissant’s Easter Island, and “les liaisons magnétiques,” which is the relationship he finds between the three Caribbean writers. Ultimately he finds that Relation can exist in any bringing together of differences: “the magnetic liaison opens infinitely, and instructs us in some of 44

 Chamoiseau 2013, 20: “apprendre à renaître ensemble, à vivre ensemble, à s’accorder, à échanger dans des conditions disharmonieuses, violentes et hasardeuses.” 45  Chamoiseau 2013, 70: “on n’aura pas une Genèse, ni un Mythe fondateur, ni une Histoire magistrale … [mais] une cacaphonie de multiples narrations.” 46  Chamoiseau 2013, 30. 47  Chamoiseau 1997, 274: “Guerrier de l’imaginaire.” 48  Chamoiseau 2013, 32: “elle ne distille aucune doctrine, aucun dogme, aucune certitude, aucune vérité. Elle ne représente rien, n’affirme rien, n’exprime rien. Elle se contente d’être un éclat d’intelligence et d’âme qui nourrit mystérieusement ce que la vie et la dignité humaine exigent de plus élevé.”

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the alchemies of Relation.”49 Césaire, Perse, Glissant constitutes a compelling presentation of how a philosophical stance, which has deepened and developed since Glissant first began exploring it in the 1950s, can be a valuable tool in the unveiling of cultural memory in the present. As the above discussion illustrates, Glissant and Chamoiseau have forged a rich body of literature that gives dynamic insight into the cultural and historical intricacies of their Caribbean homeland. Both have crossed genres and styles in their craft, but each oeuvre is underpinned by an adherence to Glissant’s notion of Relation. As Kasereka Kavwahirehi asserts, the “poetics of relation is inseparable from a reinvestment of history, literature, and philosophy.”50 Each author draws heavily on the Caribbean environment as a way to convey their vision of history and its relationship to identity, in particular how this approach can be imagined in the contrast between a continent and an archipelago of islands. While the Caribbean context forms a fundamental backdrop to Glissant and Chamoiseau’s work, both writers display a commitment to extending their insights beyond their immediate environment. For them, the experience of slavery and colonization in the Americas bequeathed a creolized model of existence that pivots on the necessity of engaging with others. Glissant underlines the significance of this revisioning of history in his call that “if we want to share the beauty of the world, if we want to show solidarity in its suffering, we have to learn to remember together.”51 For both Glissant and Chamoiseau, then, this task of remembrance must be carried out in harmony with others and is facilitated through the model of the Creole imaginary. The goal is “not to think in the world, which could reinvent the idea of conquest and domination, but to think with the world, from which come all sorts of relationships and equivalents (of differences).”52 Glissant and Chamoiseau’s insistence on the interconnected nature of past and present exceeds and overcomes the management of memory produced by official discourse. This approach is most evident in the idea that history cannot be relegated to a finite past; rather, it is a dynamic entity that has powerful implications for the present and future. It is for this reason that Glissant, Chamoiseau, and others so firmly denounced Chirac’s efforts to relegate France’s less worthy acts to the “dead past.” By contrast, for these Caribbean thinkers, true liberation can be found in the notion that memory is an archipelago and we are its islands, led by the wind to embrace new ways of being.53 49  Chamoiseau 2013, 16: “la liaison magnétique ouvre infiniment, et nous instruit de quelques-unes des alchimies de la Relation.” 50  Kasereka Kavwahirehi, “Edouard Glissant et la querelle avec l’Histoire ou de l’Unmonde à la Relation,” Etudes littéraires 43, no. 1 (2012): 136: “poétique de la relation est inséparable d’un réinvestissement de l’histoire, de la littérature et de la philosophie.” 51  Edouard Glissant, Une Nouvelle Région du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 161: “si nous voulons partager la beauté du monde, si nous voulons être solidaires de ses souffrances, nous devons apprendre à nous souvenir ensemble.” 52  Glissant 2009, 46: “de penser non pas dans le monde, ce qui aurait pu réinventer l’idée de la conquête et de la domination, mais de penser avec le monde, d’où toutes sortes de relations et d’équivalents (de différents).” 53  Glissant 2006, 163.

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Chapter 11

Precarious/Sense: Memory and the Poetics of Spatial Performance José Felipe Alvergue

I attempt to detect and trace conditions of life under the illusion or delusion of freedom—the hypocritical life we lead when we take refuge from full ethical responsibility. Krzysztof Wodiczko, Critical Vehicles (1999)

Wodiczko’s comment calls attention to the importance for liberal forms of governance of securitizing the beliefs of a public through the instrumentalization of memory. In the act of securitizing the beliefs of a public, the particular form of government also masters the illusion of choice in how, through its physical and emotional publics, subjects choose how to be in relationships with others. Memory gives the illusion or delusion of choosing ethically within the parameters of a liberal, social, and political history. But performance art, and public installations of performative work that use media to disrupt the day-to-day rhythms of life reveal how this manner of choice in the recognition of our liberal neighbors and others works purely within a mathematics of the “dyad,” the exclusion of an other for the inclusion of oneself, or vice versa.1 “Responsibility,” in other words, a measure of a government’s domestically and globally understood historical maturity, is revealed to be merely the dyadic and default choosing from which, subsequently, mnemonic narratives on the ethical history of events are constructed. In the case of our contemporary liberal era, public space is deployed as a sensory matrix for the dissemination of such a concept and working of ethos, which I examine below as one that creates and exploits sites of precarity as a way of building upon exclusions and dispossessions. Once installed as a spatial experience, precarity is preserved through acts that simultaneously create refugees as well as securitize places of selective refuge. To give refuge is to act squarely within the illusion and delusion of a distributive dimension of power as a condition of space. Hence a question: what are the “conditions,” as Wodiczko calls them, revealed when a public follows the traces of power in the performance of disidentificatory rehearsals by soldiers and veterans of contemporary liberal wars? 1  Stephen David Ross, Plenishment in the Earth: An Ethic of Inclusion (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 75. 

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Given, especially, that liberal wars function in the extension of territories for democracy, while relying on the domination of physical violence and eradication? The unconventional incorporation of memory in Mudman’s “Wilshire Blvd. Walk” (1976) and Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Lincoln Monument Projection (2012) unsettles the experiential encounters with the spatialization of liberal democratic ideals. In each case, a form of the body situated dimensionally infiltrates the same emotional, mnemonic, and sensorial avenues activated in learning liberal identity. These works de-instrumentalize the figure of the soldier as an embodiment of liberal democracy, and an agent of its globalized exercise of force. Furthermore, performance is enacted to draw attention to three things. First, states are spatialized, as such we must attend to neoliberal and now post-neoliberal spaces, as well as how space is made sensorial, moral, or political.2 Second, undergirding spatial objectivism are complex precarities between subjective memories in the active state of making sense of intra/inter-governmental partnerships; and third, it is precisely this phenomenon of memory and precarity that unfolds as a plasticity of sorts, one capable of accommodating both paradigms designed for the facilitation of dominance in specific governmental arrangements predicated on the extension of power, as well as, perhaps even polemically, the extension of form itself in the transformative sense of performing a radical, power-disinterested manner of occupying public space. As Wodiczko asserts, the “illusion or delusion of freedom” is indeed a dominant paradigm of inattention through which liberal publics today define subjective and objective relationships and congruities with war, choosing, as best fits ethical narratives of liberal ideals, what elements of power and domination in acts of war are to be “welcomed” back into the daily life of liberal geographies. But the precarious distinction, illusion or delusion, also leaves room for us to consider the transformative potential in acts that reveal one as the other, that uncloak mnemonic determinism in our actions, beliefs, and forms of communal bonds. As I argue here, the locations of refuge/expulsion/dispossession elicited by illusiondelusion, of what Slavoj Žižek calls our liberal “fetishistic disavowal” must first materialize through a complex of learned moral, and sensory, perceptions of a given governmental temporality.3 Thus, the question of performance art becomes an interesting one where the form of the body, the soldier’s body in this case, extends into the shared locations of disavowal. And in doing so, the disruption of space, the creation of temporary experiences of attentiveness in public, provoke the static politics within our shared sensorial matrices to reveal the traces of generational bonds that must also be examined. The distinctions, in other words, between periods of governance as eras defined by the active polities within them, become less legibly demarcated. What we are left with is power, bare and violent; yet on the other hand, also memory. The latter can be either obfuscated and instrumentalized or attentive to the present in a readiness towards temporal plasticity. 2

 James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality,” in Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics, ed. Jonathan Xavier Inda (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005). 3  Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008).

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Performance and the Politics of Address and Recognition Performance, in these two examples, describes a mode of address expressed through the situational nature of the veteran’s body, voice, and mobility, elements which are interlocked in the durational gesture of a subject category excluded from the anonymity of democratic life by way of war’s complex ethical status. The nature of recognition extended to veterans, in an almost compulsory fashion— “thank you for your service,” “support our troops,” and so forth—instigates what Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou problematize in theorizing a politics of recognition. But more so, the works examined here reveal our public treatment of veterans as an extra-liberal category, one where a necessary empathy is coupled to a simultaneously impoverished material aid. It reveals, in problematic fashion, the artificialization of refuge as a cure for a condition that is first created, the actions in the condition disavowed, and thus the new subject category managed through building a set of relationships, protocol, and geographic experiences. In this tension we witness the impossibility of redress, which solidifies the contemporary era as one not fully enacted through a purely conceptualized form of governmentality, but rather one amalgamated by memories and bodies in binds of precarity. This, however, is an important detail. Amalgamation is neither a postmodern condition described in the flattening totality of heterogeneities, which in the end erase one another unconditionally, but rather a hierarchy of erasures and exceptions that are sentient and emotionally motivated; actions that are purposeful, intentional, and supported by the exclusive ownership of dominant memories and the paradigmatic power inherent to them. When we consider how performance troubles “the ontological grounding of norms simultaneous with continuous acknowledgment of the unequal and unjust ways” that “precarity is differentially distributed as a condition of social ontology,” we are offered an opportunity to actually map the publics upon which this ontological shift occurs.4 Mudman’s Los Angeles in the late seventies, and contemporary New York City in Krzysztof Wodiczko’s projection are kept from simply articulating, spatially, a coherent identity when it comes to modes of dominance, governance, and the very “freedom of choice” which Global North urban landscapes provide their citizenry. The presence of a degraded body, Mudman’s persona, and the mediated projections of soldiers onto Abraham Lincoln’s sculpted semblance, coupled with the stripped-down agency in the form of Mudman’s walking and the personal narratives cast into the public space of Union Square in Wodiczko’s work, force us to reconsider the way recognition, the identification and categorization of subject categories, is often deterministically aligned to governmental agency and its own agenda for legibility in the social sphere. By applying Butler and Athanasiou’s political and theoretical framework to aesthetics and the after-colonial reframing of contemporary spatial experiences, we can examine how performance art “addresses, questions, and unsettles the 4  Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 102.

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common perception of the sate or other apparatuses that monopolize power as natural mechanisms of recognition.”5 In doing so we then also disrupt the manner in which mnemonic derangements of ethical bonds manifest themselves in public spaces, working in conjunction with the very architectural and environmental experience of the locales wherein imaginaries of governance are reified. The polemos at stake opens a space in the question of recognition and the performance of address. In such a space, aesthetic-time provides an opportunity to examine the nature of contemporary governmentality via the installation of performance. Namely, the spatialization of a government’s identity encounters the performed forms of being intentionally deployed to reveal problematic scaffolds in the otherwise legible definitions of colonial versus postcolonial temporalities. Being Audience to Precarity Mudman’s performance, recorded in photographs and in writing, involved the artist, Kim Jones, walking the length of Wilshire Blvd. east to west, wearing combat boots, covered in mud, and wearing two lattice structures, one on his back, the other on his head. Jones, a Vietnam veteran, evokes a spatiotemporal conflict of precarities disclosed along a spatialized formation of capitalism. More than just a manifestation of the way liberal ideology in the twentieth century becomes spatialized, Wilshire Blvd. models memories, cutting as it does across contrasting economic communities from Downtown to Beverly Hills. It traverses a varying social topography and facilitates the way in which the residents of West LA, sheltered by wealth and liberal ideals, were not in the seventies bound to the same personal memories that were formative in how Black and Latino neighborhoods, whose youth fought in higher numbers in Vietnam, developed indentificatory definitions of their own citizenship, of power-disempowerment, of structural and environmental inequalities, etc. The subtlety of his ubiquitous presence, resonating in the lattice structure, simultaneously interwove the global conflict of war, and the universal sociality of democratic space confronted by the strict, domination-oriented territorializations of nation-state power. Yet, iterated in each step along the expanse of Wilshire Blvd., was an unraveling of the cloak behind which governmentality obfuscates the existential desires for personhood within any formation of political agency. Mudman’s lack of legible allegiance in the symbolic forms of the time, and his bare existence in a uniform of war without markings of a specific army, expended “power” itself in the domination of a body’s form undergirding the event of war— not national bonds, or political affiliations, and not the events of a war. Mudman’s walk worked as expenditure. Mudman also exploited the audience’s memory of soldiers depicted in media images—soldiers walking through devastated urban landscapes, jungles, or patrolling ravaged migratory roads. And, in an understudied and even perhaps 5

 Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 83.

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unspoken way, the global allegiances between Vietnamese subjects and Chicano subjects born from domestic postcolonial politics over the authority to “textualize” the experience of war themselves; that is, to transform precarity into the temporality of being. One which describes a narrative application of memory rather than an imposed historicist matrix. George Mariscal, a scholar and Vietnam veteran, notes how the narrative myopia imprinted onto postcolonial relationships extended towards Vietnamese, or rather imprinted through those relationships, reduces the epistemological capacity to fully share in the events of a historical moment. And I would add to this the significance of historical moments as transformative, plastic durations for performance. “The pitfall,” Mariscal argues, “is that by narrowing the critical focus to the constituent parts of a given representation, one loses sight of the fact that ‘something’ actually did happen before the production of the text.”6 As Mariscal and others correctly note, this is not a condition of narratological precarity experienced only by refugees telling their stories inside the publics of the West. It maps a geographic situation experienced by multiple marginalized and excluded subjects, and as such we are afforded the opportunity to identify what emancipates difference across the material and representational worlds from which these subjects gather and make meaning while not foreclosing on the specificity of those worlds. In clarifying how this narrowing works, Mudman’s open-ended, yet specific appearance opens up the potential for spatializing multiple heterogeneities via his pedestrianization, rather than a reductive paradigm managed via forms of liberal refuge. Mariscal’s assessment points to a situation that is articulated into the shared spaces of contested publics simultaneously, and even violently articulated as enclaves, and sutured by the very actions of revolt, especially during events like the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles. This also provides a way of viewing Mudman’s performance as more than a romanticized effort to promote a discourse for “peace.” In fact neither Mudman nor Wodiczko’s work accomplishes such a reductive task. He was, in his own words, someone “the military could spare and didn’t need.”7 A body, a person, self-identified from within the available choices in the military industrial complex as a “speed bump” in place to “slow them down.” As Catherine Malabou writes, “the only possible way out from the impossibility of flight appears to be the formation of a form of flight.”8 Not only do neighborhoods strive for the true freedom to perform these flights, but so too do the subjectivities onto which inflexible matrices are imposed. It is from within that temporal reality that the body transforms towards the semblance of flight; one that is in actuality a  George Mariscal, introduction to Aztlán and Viet Nam: Chicana and Chicano Experiences of the War, ed. George Mariscal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 25. 7  Quoted in Sandra Q. Fermin and Julie Joyce, eds., Mudman: The Odyssey of Kim Jones (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007), 62. 8  Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, tr. Carolyn Shread (New York: Polity, 2012). 6

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display of the traces that keep it bound to the objective and subjective structures inherent to spatialization.9 The of Sense Empathy/Place for Empathy Precarity is twofold, and perhaps this reveals something about its potential/ danger; on one hand is Fanon’s argument in Black Skin, White Masks on the unavailability of recognition and thus the degradation of the human in colonial contexts.10 On the other hand is a public, precarious relationship to ontology itself, if that ontological lifeworld is merely a construct of privileges accentuated by frameworks and mechanisms of power. Precarity is not an extension of empathy towards the melancholic as a site of deranged privilege, but rather a concern over the very definition of the ontological in spatiotemporal definitions, relationships, and performances. This is brought to the fore in Wodiczko’s work, which exposes the state of inattention in contemporary urbanity and uses the same, contemporary, mediated technologies that sustain inattentiveness in order to lure the public into transforming itself as audience via the very same precarity which liberal communities disavow in the consumerist behaviors that pre-occupy daily life. Key here is understanding how a legacy of multi-sensory experience became degraded following the events of September 11, 2001, and how this very same degradation came to function as a modality of liberal wars in the Middle East, and Afghanistan afterward. But the veterans of these current, ongoing conflicts are no less traumatized by the unspoken physicality of combat. Moreover there is an objective violence when the instrumentalization of “freedom” and “democracy” become abstracted further, evacuated of the necessary empathies required in liberatory politics, and yet applied as an organizing ethos to the public spaces shared between veterans and liberal civilians.

9

 This makes it clearer how even free, public space and the spaces occupied by war are both constructed via the same instrumentalizations. In fact, it shows that the differences are marked by the privatization of war-space, and the privatization of public space by the affecting of the active-memory in question here. We act in remembrance for the liberal ideals that are always both in a state of selling themselves, and in crisis. For more on polemos, particularly as it arises in the examination of “difference” and “inclusion” in Heidegger studies, see Stephen David Ross (1995, 341). The reading I propose of the term polemos is situated between Catherine Malabou’s theorization of plasticity, difference, and aesthetics, and Gregory Fried’s concise reduction of Heidegger’s question on politics, pertinent to this essay, as one concerned with articulating “the process of identification and differentiation at work in any assertion of community, of any belonging-to … at issue is the Being of our politics.” Gregory Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 3. 10  Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008).

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Wodiczko’s use of visual and audio projection technology speaks to the way trauma is argued to be an ethnography of memory, framed by the very mechanisms and technologies through which force works in the artificialized ways that create traumatized thoughts and images from spatiotemporal experiences.11 Our representational images of soldiers, for example, run the spectrum of ready-made subjects. From idealized commercials for the armed services, wherein the functions of power are equated to potential career decisions applicable after war, and thus to the capitalist system of productive efficiency. To the de-bodied visual projections of maps of conflict, including the infrared bombings during the war in Iraq, and the strategic, two-dimensional maps used by media outlets, which resemble simplified board games. Both our sense of geography as well as our attentiveness to the architectural capacity to transmit empathy through place, are lost. And lost with these attributes is a stable awareness of our governmental temporality. While both Mudman’s walk and Wodiczko’s projection highlight the instrumentalization of space as an imaginary cast upon the abstraction of democratic liberalism, it is specifically what Michael Bull refers to as the “urban disposition” that is problematized in Wodiczko’s relationship to audience.12 Bull, describing this dispositional expectation as a “sensory complexity,” accomplishes two important clarifications regarding our liberal relationship both to space, and to the ways in which definitions of national identity become spatialized either through our ability or inability to sense the events of spatial experience. Bull argues that we are trained by the particular forms of sensory mediation to rely on a certain set of moral ambitions. His pioneering writing on the role of the Walkman in public space, for example, and his more recent work on the iPod, reveal how “choice” and “shuffling” change the ambitions of being-in-public, and our pedestrian identities, by removing the contingency of alterity as experienced in the spontaneity of urban rhythms; this includes the alterity of the Other, as well as the unwanted temporality of time itself, its unwanted and unproductive open-endedness.13 These changes, in turn, dictate the capacity for empathic responses at both the precise cognitive level of our actual sensory capacity to process spatialized and mediated information, as well as the less precise level of a broad set of engagements we might term “social” or “moral” or “ethical.” Watching a video documentary of Wodiczko’s Abraham Lincoln projection provided by More Art, these socialized relationships to space, its objects, and the bodies amidst its architectures described by Bull are illustrated in the figure

 Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 12  Michael Bull, “Sound Mix: The Framing of Multi-Sensory Connections in Urban Culture,” Sound Effects 3, no. 3 (2013): 27–46, 27. 13  Michael Bull, Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Bull, “No Dead Air! The iPod and the Culture of Mobile Listening,” Leisure Studies 24 no. 4 (2005): 343–355. 11

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of the pedestrian.14 Focusing on the pedestrian in New York City, the short video depicts an incongruent behavior to public space, in that the very nature of pedestrianization, being on foot and thus locked into the architectures of the landscape, is upset by what Bull argues is one of the most challenged aspects of our transformed relationship to space: empathy. Rather than providing a map of empathic and shared experience with space via the individuated decisions and actions of sensory interaction, public space has become commodified by the instantaneousness of the dispersed informationalization of space. Its abstraction from situated experience reifies its symbolic value as a representational “freedom” for mobility and choice—and thus ableist, masculinist, and otherwise socially privileged paradigms that have accommodated to the expansive and de-localized abstraction of accumulation that now dominates public ambition, over nationstate capitalisms. At the center of this pedestrian traffic, of a mobility without direction, purpose, or sociality (that is, pedestrians locked in an individual, not shared, locative experience at Union Square), the state of Abraham Lincoln stands isolated and forgotten. As the video progresses, it cuts to a night scene where the animated projection of soldiers on Lincoln’s body captivates large groups of pedestrians, who in their attention become a sort of audience. In the dark of night one can even see how the veterans’ postures mimic Lincoln’s pose, a hand across the torso and head titled high and back. The public, suddenly as an audience, is not only enacting a contemporary mode of empathic listening, but is also re-enacting a historical mode through which democratic politics once disseminated its syntax and ideals, spatially: the speech. Wodiczko amplifies both the absence of soldiers’ accounts in the daily routine of urban life—so often cited by pro-war discourse as the epitome of freedom for which soldiers risk their lives abroad (and in the case of New York also the site of the original transgression, 9/11)—as well as the presence of memorializing war in the history of American mythology. The city functions as a fluid mnemonic history between the ideals of Lincoln’s union of America, the voices of soldiers, and the attention of isolated pedestrians towards the ethnographies performed in the projection of voice into Union Square. Both of these works engage the public as a location where one side of our liberal identity is obfuscated by the overabundance, or amplification of the mythic and allegorical nature of a democratic ethos when it comes to validating, historically, a politics of recognition. These performances interrogate the constitution of our identity in this conflict, and how this dynamic, in turn, informs the historicity of colonial-postcolonial governmentality. As an audience, our own legibility between address and recognition is encapsulated by the public nature of attention towards the precarious identities aligned or misaligned with public space.

14  Krzysztof Wodiczko, “Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection,” moreart.org. Accessed at 13 September, 2015, http://moreart.org/projects/krzysztof-wodiczko/.

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Performance and the Aesthetics of Polemos Rather than being structured along the expectations of colonial-postcolonial limitations, performance raises the potential of the impossible. I use the notion of polemos here in a distressed sense, an application of the term as a way of underscoring how aesthetic work that is political in register, even if not overtly or rhetorically politicized, highlights the spatiotemporal urgency of the daily.15 Public is read as the locale where conflicting frameworks and lifeworlds compete for the same “attention” of history. The expenditure of form into space occurs via the mitigating aesthetic concerns in performance, whether expended in form against the public backdrop of economically segregated geographies, realities in conflict, or expended in the re-animated statue, through the body, and/or as familial forms engaged in a war of posture-gesture. But performance also involves the reiteration of practices aligned to modes of power exercised onto sovereign bodies in the name of governmentality and involves the question on politics within the regime, which, subsequently, echoes the questions on Being. To quote Malabou: When form steps over the line, it becomes the form of a new familiarity, a new kinship between these exchanges or passers-by; it becomes likeness, family resemblance, as-yet unseen aspect. The “truly creative” spirits—the artist-thinkers—show that metamorphosed Dasein has a physique: its face, its very body, and its “identity” attest to the force of transformation of posthistorical plasticity. In a certain sense, the contemporary claims of absolute selffashioning—the priority of molding over generic determination—manifest this plasticity. Being, as Heidegger says, is befremdlich, astonishing. Couldn’t this word also be translated as queer? So that it would convey the strange and bizarre but also, as we know, another gender or genre?16

Governmentality always participates in describing how address is permitted and performed, because its legibility casts an idiom through which actions and forms are measured and given value. Recognition, on the other hand, provides a form of imagining and transforming the public. But if a public determines and is likewise determined by a preconception of a certain historical stage of governmentality, for example a postcolonial generation of relationships and ethos, then what of actual transformation? Transformation as an existential and material event inherent to aesthetic experience dissociated from the limitations of dyadic paradigms? 15

 Polemos is a crucial feature of the examination of “difference” and “inclusion” in Heidegger studies, see Stephen David Ross (1995, 341). The reading I propose of the term polemos is situated between Catherine Malabou’s theorization of plasticity, difference, and aesthetics, and Gregory Fried’s concise reduction of Heidegger’s question on politics, pertinent to this essay, as one concerned with articulating “the process of identification and differentiation at work in any assertion of community, of any belonging-to … at issue is the Being of our politics” (Fried 2000, 3). 16  Catherine Malabou, The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy, tr. and ed. Peter Skafish (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 283.

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Temporality, radically experienced through the impossible as the cadence to which the permissible is formed or given architectural and spatial embodiment such that we might interact with time, is brought forth in the materialization of these works. An illustration of the impossible is gleaned from Wodiczko’s use of projection technology, which as is his intention, is already operative in the moral-sensorial determination of liberal consciousness. Returning to Bull, he recounts how coverage of the September 11 attacks introduced the projection of voice as a narrative of history in the making. Divorced from the events transpiring, voices cast into the informationalized public attached to televisions became emblematic of the tragedy. The effect of this physical divorcement between the event—as transpiring on US soil only ideologically, that is, mitigated through the emotionalmoral agenda of the narratives constructed by newscasters “in a very similar position to that of the viewers”—and the locale of the event facilitated, in turn, the rise of jingoism and nationalism that would support going to war unconditionally.17 The shared “position” between narrators and listeners makes the lack of attention to the complex details and political nuance permissible as a form of acknowledging patriotic citizenship. Making, thus, the conclusion of “it’s hard to put into words,” which Bull notes “has become the norm,” acceptable for the public not to expect language for the global economy of emotions tied to atrocity.18 Action, remembered as war, becomes the only performance. Thus when Wodiczko projects voices into Union Square, and voices engaged in the narrative acts of bringing locality to the event of war, it creates an impossible state of attention that requires a completely new set of moral senses and expectations when dealing with war as conflict. The bringing of locality refers to the content of the veterans’ depictions of their unique time in war, from the harrowing accounts of makeshift morgues and surgery in the field, to the underconsidered experiences of calling home and being surprised by the distant, even changed voices on the other end. An ethnography of memory and trauma reveals a troubling relationship to the truth of violence; its methods of constructing the spaces wherein it must operate contaminate the methods which forms of being have at their disposal for recounting the experience of witnessing the facades in cities of violence during the process of their being built and the aftermath of decimation, destruction, and plasticity. The avenues cleared for the dispensation of force are the same avenues through which these two works function as performance. The methods for soldiers, moreover, in articulating their protocol must later be accommodated to the methods the pedestrian has for articulating their sense of mobility and space in daily life. The being who witnesses the emergence of violence in its form as spatial object is no longer the same person for which a sense of truth of the account is available. But that is not to say there is no way of being, afterward.

17

 Bull 2013, 36.  Bull 2013, 37.

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The dispensation of power is a learned paradigm of colonial spatiality, but must be administered. The impossibility lies in existing environmentally-situated while succumbing to the managerial ethos of spatialized existence. In the context of liberal wars the soldier is thusly transformed into a paradox; at once the living memory of learned behavior, action, and performed violence and the deadened machinery in the materialization of colonial governmentality wherever it is intended to be installed. The soldier is an image of the embodiment of what Achille Mbembe terms “necropolitics,” the management of forms of being that exist in a state toward death, instrumentalized as a means of facilitating their organization into grouped forms and associations that befit the political body, but also what he refers to as “age” and “durée.”19 In his analysis of postcoloniality, with a specific lens to Africa as an example of both the territory-based and accumulation-based forms of contemporary globalized modes of domination, Mbembe asserts the necessity of “rehabilitating” the notions of age and durée, rather than construing a wholesale denouncement of “power,” as such.20 By age and durée Mbembe has us understand that there is a more intricate manner of charting the evolution of governmentality as a spatialized experience of temporality, one constituted by “a number of relationships and a configuration of events—often visible and perceptible, sometimes diffuse,” as well as “multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelop one another: an entanglement.”21 Polemos can only hold its sway on the attention of the public where the group of associations, sharing time and space and a common disattention to the performativity of morality in the forms of experience they are accustomed to, are entangled with the objects, gestures, and avenues through which an aesthetic register installs itself, and thus “astonishes” us, to use Malabou’s description above. In this entanglement the public might also come to an awareness of how space is instrumentalized for authoritarianism, for example, as Wodiczko notes in an interview with Roger Gilroy, “the public is subjected daily, by billboards and advertisements, as well as political propaganda, to an enormous amount of manipulative material.”22 But one can see even in the short film on the Lincoln projection how Wodiczko captivates, astonishes an audience without deluding, constructing illusions, or necessarily re-constructing an authoritarian relationship between them and public space. In fact, it is precisely their relationship to their surroundings that is liberated by being confronted with the impossible nature of the veterans’ stories, their sudden re-emergence in the social milieu that expulses their reality as human beings for its own sense of well-being, or the illusiondelusion of ethical purity. 19  Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 14–15. 20  Mbembe 2001, 14. 21  Mbembe 2001, 14. 22  Krzysztof Wodiczko, Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), 172.

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Conclusion: Refuge, Refugee, Refuge A place; a person; the articulation of an empathic extension; form-endured-asaesthetic. Or, as Wodiczko claims, “I am a nomad … contrary to public opinion, nomads are not detached from their terrain, but in fact try to continuously affix themselves to it, and must know the characteristics of the terrain well in order to be able to do so.”23 The refugee, as described by Athenasiou, is a person who exists before our social eyes as “the ‘self’ … who struggles for recognition and self-recognition,” as a subject who “has been violently misrecognized,” and “constituted as radically or uncannily unfamiliar by a recognizable self-same human.”24 As public works Mudman’s walk and Wodiczko’s projections are concerned with reintroducing the twentieth- and twenty-first-century soldier to a social domain for which the status of the liberalized refugee is unavailable, but whose mnemonic constitution exists specifically in shared paradigms of force and violence associated with refugees of contemporary liberal wars. The forms of the body in each example and the performance of bodily memories—the muscle memory of walking, the memory of Lincoln’s repose cast in new figure, with new voice—exist before public eyes as just this “self” described above. But more than this, the body challenges conventional frameworks through which to analyze and discuss dispossession as it works in the public figure of the refugee. Moreover, these two performances raise interesting complexities regarding exile and expulsion, as well. The veteran of contemporary liberal war in both works deranges, by a critical presence, the public mechanisms of colonial power experienced through the architectures of political status in that the memory of force evoked during performance elicits a shared postcolonial provocation on the condition of the privileged present under which states of exception build their mythic genealogies of governance. In the polemos of unsyncopated expressions for refuge, for help, in the social response of aid, of acceptance, “the economy of recognition gets potentially and provisionally destabilized” and the “unintelligible and uneconomic self (emerging in conditions of alienation/dispossession, rather than in conditions of plentitude/possession and through matrices of belonging and co-belonging)” is no longer “reducible to the regulatory discourse of tolerable and inclusive recognition, but rather contingent on rupture in proper iterability.”25 The incoherence of the body-in-performance draws attention to the utter incommensurability of spatial narratives that reify dis-embodied governmental identities, their corresponding mythologies, and the subsequent actions that emerge from such false identifications within a completely falsified political association, albeit with very real consequences.

23

 Wodiczko 1999, xi.  Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 66. 25  Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 66. 24

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“[T]he gift of freedom,” writes Mimi Thi Nguyen, “calls for the realignment of heterogeneous social forms of organization with abstract categories and properties, rendered natural, ineffable, and inalienable, but also objectified, calculable, and exchangeable.”26 “Gift of freedom” is Nguyen’s way of describing the complexity behind refugee assimilation or adoption of the cultural values inscribed in the social contexts of their new environments. The “gift” is of course a misnomer in that it signals the inauguration of psychic and emotional degenerations via the pressures of debt, a reverse cognitive plasticity in how forms of being adapt to their belongingness within an environmental reality. While we can think of the reductive manner in which the categories and properties of “freedom” operate in refugee assimilation, it is less clear how these events also affect soldiers. Particularly since soldiering is indeed a career within a complex of capitalist expectations, but soldiers themselves expulsed to the outsides of public space. Even as they are simultaneously elevated or privileged within them. This presents another way of problematizing the “gift,” here in relation to both refugees and veterans, and that is the forced or imposed categorical dispossession in each. The refugee is acknowledged only by way of territorial and linguistic dispossession, which together form experiences in both the symbolic and objective forms of violence under examination; the veteran on the other hand is acknowledged with the gifts of social attention, “thank you for your service,” but also by way of a dispossession in that this “service” is an outsourcing of a kind of labor that has no place in the liberal publics of the West—namely the application of violence. They are dispossessed from the present, particularly the domain and the world of the present as constructed in the Western exceptionalism of the abstract “city,” and thus the ethical question becomes one of giving and providing refuge in a space-time that must also, itself, be transformed into a consciousness spatialized but not instrumentalized as a symbol of governance. The true ethical question in regard to this sort of recognition thus becomes the one which asks how one recognizes the unethical definition of creating and instrumentalizing dispossession in the first place.27 The impossible geography brought forth in the social poetics of the polemos specifies shared axes with available forms for thinking through the regimes fluctuating between the colonial and postcolonial. The latter serve as axes of moral sense that are, in many ways, out of a public’s control, but utterly responsible for the decisions and actions a public takes, towards making, for itself, a hospitable place for its own subjects, and victims of the forces at work against them. As Athanasiou points out, “dispossession implies our relationality and binding to others—in all its subtleties of anguish and excitement—but also our structural dependence on norms that we neither choose nor control.”28 It is the way in  Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 13. 27  Butler and Anathasiou 2013, ix. 28  Butler and Anathasiou 2013, 92. 26

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which these norms affect a public that both Mudman and Wodiczko exploit. “Dispossession,” continues Athanasiou, “entails the different and differential manner in which the anxieties and the excitements of relationality are socially distributed,” and so then we must ask, what, specifically, are the “anxieties” and “excitements” deployed in the public performance of the precarity inherent to dispossession in these two works? What impossible structure between the public and the political is deployed with each iteration of a step from Mudman’s body, each city block of Wilshire Blvd., each attentive glance towards Lincoln’s reanimated statue, each clear and public iteration of voice from somewhere inside Union Square? Moreover, the questions lead us to reconsider the very sense of a polity as temporally illustrative of its ethos (or vice versa) in that the means of distribution shared between the critical posture of the performance work and the reductive domination of ideology, enlighten our gestures and relationships, which are otherwise mitigated by a “structural dependence.” Can the impossible argument be made for complete expulsion from the deranged localities of capitalism, for a refuge that is, fundamentally, open-ended? The occupancy of any one particular sense of identification is merely a performance chosen within the contingencies of inattention and precarity. But plasticity could still be available to a public as a counter-logic to the measure of “ethical responsibility” aligned to either colonial or postcolonial generations. It must be jarred loose in a temporal manner. The power in the destructiveness of plasticity, or time, must be performed as “a power that forms” and not a domination over the forms of being public.29

29

 Malabou 2013, 75.

Chapter 12

“Speaking Darwish” in Neoliberal Palestine Ala Alazzeh and Rania Jawad

From a State of Siege to a State On September 23rd, 2011 Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas addressed the United Nations General Assembly. The speech was the first among many calling on the UN to recognize Palestine as a (non-member) state.1 In the closing remark of his speech, Abbas cited a verse from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “State of Siege,” stating: “My people desire to exercise their right to enjoy a normal life like the rest of humanity. They believe what the great poet Mahmoud Darwish said: ‘Standing here, staying here, permanent here, eternal here, and we have one goal, one, one: to be.’”2 Abbas’s excerpted use of the infinitive “to be” shifts the focalization and signification of Darwish’s words in the context of his poem from that of national being to—in Abbas’s context in front of the General Assembly— being a state. Such a shift marks the move from what we call a Palestinian “state of being,” an anti-colonial existential question of the nation, to an institutionalized, territorially-based state project as end goal. “To be” is no longer an emancipatory vision of a nation of people exercising liberation from anti-colonial subjugation, its modality of control, and ethnic and cultural oppressions. Rather, “to be” a state is the exercise of governance, or in other words, an exercise of power over people. Written under the 2002 Israeli military siege of Palestinian West Bank cities and towns, Darwish’s poem speaks of exercising a national being, a collective 1

 The Palestinian Authority’s (PA) initial attempt to gain member state status in 2011 failed to gain full approval from all United Nations Security Council members, for the US threatened a veto. In 2012, the PA’s second attempt was modified to request non-member observer state status, which is gained through a UN General Assembly vote. Non-member status, a particular category now held by the Vatican and Palestine, means restricted participation, especially concerning the ability to vote or propose resolutions. Since 1974, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has held permanent observer status at the UN in the context of a national liberation organization. The change in status marks a shift in Palestinian official political strategy from self-determination as part of Third World decolonization to normalizing Palestine though institutionalization within a world-state-system. For more information, see: http://palestineun.org/status-of-palestineat-the-united-nations. 2  A translation of Abbas’s speech can be found here: http://www.haaretz.com/news/ diplomacy-defense/full-transcript-of-abbas-speech-at-un-general-assembly-1.386385 [last accessed October 10, 2014].

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existential position that Palestinians have translated into sumoud (steadfastness: remaining on the land of Palestine despite processes of ethnic cleansing). For decades, Palestinians have been denied the collective right of self-determination, and the nation in effect is made invisible. Those Palestinians who remained on their lands in 1948 when the state of Israel was declared are discursively covered over by the category of “Israeli-Arab,” as those in the diaspora are denied the right of return and those living in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) are enclavized away behind literal concrete walls. In contradiction to the iterative pronouncements and settler colonial practices demanding that the Palestinian nation does not exist, Israeli colonial control makes Palestinians visible to the colonial apparatus, as well as to international aid and humanitarian interventions. The state of being for the Palestinian nation arises from a colonial modality that recognizes the indigenous population of Palestine as Palestinians yet denies them the recognition of nationhood or political rights. Darwish elsewhere describes the dilemma of Palestinians needing to prove their presence, wherein “philosophically you exist but legally you do not.”3 Thirty years earlier, during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Darwish wrote “In Praise of the High Shadow,” an epic poem describing the state of siege as an existential question of being for the Palestinian nation. Using again the “to be” infinitive and this time explicitly referencing Hamlet’s oft-cited soliloquy, the poem is addressed to the Palestinian fighters in Lebanon: It is for you to be, or not to be, It is for you to create, or not to create. All existential questions, behind your shadow, are a farce, And the universe is your small notebook, and you are its creator. So write in it the paradise of genesis, Or do not write it, You, you are the question. … What do you want? For you are the master of our soul, The master of our ever-changing existence. You are the master of the ember, The master of the flame. How large the revolution, How narrow the journey, How grand the idea, How small the state!4

 Mahmoud Darwish, Journal of an Ordinary Grief (Beirut: Dar al-Awda, 1973).  Excerpts of the poem are translated into English by Saifedean Ammous and can be found at: http://electronicintifada.net/content/mahmoud-darwish-palestines-prophethumanism/7665. 3 4

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The two experiences of siege (1982 and 2002) are often set in contrast to one another by the Arab reader: the Darwish of 1982 is the poet of the nation and what comes to be termed “later” Darwish is the universalist, humanist (Palestinian) poet. The assumption that Darwish moved beyond the question of nationalism to take on humanist universal concerns is based on an understanding that anticolonial nationalism does not have a humanist component. The contradiction between nationalism and humanism is constructed through a liberal imaginary that places the universal in a static, separate relationship from nationalism as an emancipatory state of being. For Third World intellectuals like Darwish, anticolonial nationalism is part of a larger humanistic internationalism. Juxtaposing Darwish’s later work onto earlier writings on the question of being exemplifies an understanding of nationalism not as essentialist ideological indoctrination nor deep historical existence, but rather a constant quest of emancipation, struggle, and a search for meaning and justice. Darwish’s humanist sentiment in his nationalist poetry can be compared to the Fanonian characterization of anti-colonial nationalism that has a clear humanistic vision “for Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity.”5 Unlike most readings of Fanon’s work, Nigel Gibson identifies in Fanon three forms of anti-colonial nationalism as opposed to two: one that seeks power but remains subordinate to the colonial external power; one that seeks to overthrow the colonial regime and maintain “genuine” political independence; and one grounded in what Fanon calls “a new humanism and an internationalism.”6 In the third, the intellectual has a role in the revolutionary praxis to produce a new consciousness that moves beyond the Manicheanism of colonized and colonizer. It is here that we can understand a consistency in Darwish’s poetry over the decades. Accordingly, the reading and speaking of Darwish as a national poet simultaneously circumscribes his work within the first two nationalist ideologies. On the one hand, the anti-colonial ideology of the PLO that sought genuine independence claimed his work and person as of the nation. Darwish’s words were celebrated by the PLO as part of the Palestinian revolution, and were consistently used in political posters and politicizing education campaigns. Unofficially designated as the poetic voice of the revolution, his words were put to music, his books of poetry and live recordings of readings were widely distributed among Palestinians. The limitations of this political nationalist ideology, however, led its exponents to view the later humanist nature of his work as no longer nationalist. PLO ideology located the later Darwish in the character of the cosmopolitan poet who moved beyond his national/cultural identity toward a universalist identity. Such an understanding locates cosmopolitan humanism in a binary with nationalism, as the cosmopolitan is an atomized subject, an individual that is not seen in relation to ethnocultural collectivities.  Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963).  Nigel Gibson, Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 179. 5 6

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On the other hand, the Palestinian Authority (PA) manipulates a new humanist nationalism to legitimize the characterization of Fanon’s first nationalist ideology, in other words, the desire for a state within the parameters of the colonial condition. In a 2010 speech announcing that the PA will donate half a million dollars to build a monument for Darwish, former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said: “The state we want to build is not only a state of all Palestinians wherever they may be, but a state of noble humanist values. … Mahmoud Darwish was victorious in his humanism which humanized us.”7 The PA’s use of Darwish to validate its state project, which is based on institutionalized power and a neoliberal economy, transforms a nationalist imaginary into empty emancipatory signification in order to maintain control over the population while furthering the interests of a bourgeois elite. In 2012 Abbas again addressed the UN General Assembly in another politics of appeal for Palestine state recognition. Affirming (and reaffirming) the PA’s ability to build “an effective, modern State” through transparent and accountable institutions, finance management, and rules of good governance, Abbas evoked the names of Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said. The two figures serve as rationale for Palestine’s “positive, constructive contribution” to the international community, the notion that Palestine is capable of producing universally credited intellectuals. The humanist poetics and ethics of Said and Darwish are thus claimed by the PA to legitimize its acceptance into the neoliberal political ideology of a world state system. The institutionalization of Darwish within the state-building project began during his lifetime and accelerated following his death. A few days before his passing, the Palestinian Ministry of Telecommunications and Information announced the issuing of a commemorative postage stamp bearing the image of Darwish in order to honor his creative work in the international and Arab cultural sphere. Shortly thereafter, the Universal Postal Union announced efforts to further integrate the Palestinian postal service into the world postal community. The PA iconization of Darwish worked hand in hand with other state-sponsored institutions and projects to establish Darwish not so much as a figure of anti-colonial liberation but rather a founding father of the state. As Laleh Khalili notes, the liberationist discourse of the PLO was transformed by the PA into a “biography of the nation,” where heroism, national struggle, and commemorative practices are institutionally and symbolically tamed and transformed into state signifiers, such as the postage stamp, the flag, bureaucratic ministries and offices, and stately rituals.8 As markers in the liberation struggle are nicely fit into a progressive narrative of achieving statehood, the body is used as a metaphor for the nation. Abbas made this clear when he appealed to the UN 7

 Authors’ translation. A selection of the talk in Arabic can be found at: http://www. maannews.net/arb/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=268450 [last accessed October 10, 2014]. 8  Laleh Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 191.

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General Assembly to issue a birth certificate to the state of Palestine, and when the PA Cabinet announced the commemoration of Darwish’s day of birth as Palestine’s National Culture Day. Even earlier, less than two months following Darwish’s death, Abbas declared a presidential decree to create the Mahmoud Darwish Foundation. The first Board of Trustees required PA approval and the vast majority of members are PA-affiliated figures, including a number who hold ministerial positions. The first project of the Foundation was the planning and execution of the Mahmoud Darwish Museum, a three-acre space that houses Darwish’s grave, a commemorative gallery, a hall for cultural events, and a large, terraced, landscaped garden area. In contrast to the gravesite erected in the days following Darwish’s burial, which was simple and minimal with mourners leaving hand-written messages and picked flowers, the Museum is now a landmark memorial site that delegations, schoolchildren, and tourists to Ramallah visit, as they also do Arafat’s tomb in the Presidential compound. Many commentators compare Darwish’s funeral to the state funeral given to Arafat, as both were helicoptered to Ramallah, received by thousands of mourners, and followed by days of national mourning. Although the significance and resonance of Darwish’s poetics and intellectual positioning in Palestinian and Arab political and cultural experience goes without question, the death of the poet who represents a subaltern voice of the Palestinian people became institutionalized to legitimize the mainstreaming of Palestine in the world system. Appropriations of posthumous Darwish within a “state-building” project also institutionalized a way of reading Darwish as a poet’s progression from an anti-colonial resistance poetry to a universalist aesthetics. As the two poles are said not to meet, the emancipatory and humanist nature of his poetry became a tool in creating the cultural capital of the Palestinian state. “National” Trademark: “We Love Life” Continuing the tradition of evoking Mahmoud Darwish in his appeal to the UN, Mahmoud Abbas closed his September 2014 remarks with a phrase from Darwish’s poetry now so heavily cited that it has taken on the character of a slogan. “We love life if we can find a way to it,” quoted Abbas, as he again affirmed the need and urgency for an independent Palestinian state. In citing this particular line, Abbas’s usage of Darwish is not mere political rhetoric but is here coupled with a deeper sentiment found in socio-cultural Palestinian life following the second intifada. This desire to affirm hope in life under military occupation arises in response to the ongoing destruction and death caused by the Israeli regime, and in part to counter Orientalist, colonial representations of Palestinians as glorifying death and martyrdom (or what is crudely called a “culture of death”). The “we love life” in Darwish’s poem comes at a moment of reflection on the period of time between the killing of one Palestinian and the next. The context is one of colonial violence, an inescapable field of violence imposed on Palestinians,

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and within which they attempt to find moments of pleasure in life. In line with the logic of rewriting nationalist slogans to reflect contemporary sentiments— “We die for Palestine to live” transformed into “We live for Palestine to live,” as one example—the post–second intifada usage of Darwish’s line refashions and re-presents the Palestinian as a lover of life. Here, the colonial violence is elided, and it is assumed that the one who loves life eschews violence.9 This “new Palestinian”10 is also imaged as throwing off the weight of the past, not focused on rectifying historical injustices per se but rather facing the future. This reframing of the meaning of life is comparable to a nonviolence industry prevalent in the oPt that reproduces itself by playing on Western Orientalist and essentialist imaginaries of Arab-Muslim-Palestinian culture as violent. Most of the rhetoric produced around nonviolence is directed toward “international” (a category that constantly evokes Western Europeans and North Americans) audiences. The marketing of nonviolence is based on producing moral sympathy rather than political solidarity. The resignification of life as exemplified in the sloganization of Darwish’s line presents the Palestinian as both nonviolent and “human,” in other words, a disciplined population deserving of statehood. The phenomenon of extracting these particular lines from Darwish’s poem and its socio-historical production context is not limited to individuals but is widely used by NGOs and corporations. In an image used by Wataniya, a telecommunications mobile company, we see a young Palestinian boy holding up high a white dove against a grayed background filled with rubble, the piled remnants of Israeli destruction of Palestinian homes. Printed onto the image in white are the same lines by Darwish: “We love life if we can find a way to it.” In the top left corner, the word “Gaza” is circumscribed by a heart, and in the top right is the Wataniya symbol. Adhering, however clichéd, to the content of Darwish’s poem that juxtaposes the desire for life in the midst of colonial destruction, the advertisement’s primary function is for profit. Capitalizing on nationalist sentiment is a recurring technique used by corporations targeting the local population. Jawwal, a Palestinian telecommunications group that has monopolized the local market for years, makes use of another phrase of Darwish’s (“Think of others”) in a 2012 image that visualizes the cause of Palestinian political prisoners who are on hunger strike protesting conditions of imprisonment. The irony here is the smalltext print at the very bottom of the image that states this is not an advertisement but a gesture of solidarity to support the political prisoners. On the anniversary of Land Day, which commemorates Palestinian resistance to Israeli land confiscation policies, the Palestinian Telecommunications Company 9  See also Mayssoun Sukarieh’s discussion of a similar phenomenon in Lebanon, specifically the USAID campaign titled “I love life.” Mayssoun Sukarieh, “We love life whenever we can,” Electronic Intifada, January 8, 2007. 10  Here, we reference US security envoy Keith Dayton as he applauds the performance of the US-funded and trained Palestinian National Security Force. See http://www. washingtoninstitute.org/html/pdf/DaytonKeynote.pdf.

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produced an advertisement that makes use of another highly-cited phrase by Darwish that carries the “we love life” connotation.11 Printed over an image depicting a field of olive groves are Darwish’s words: “On this earth is what makes life worth living.” The very serene photograph, depicting any Mediterranean landscape, is cleansed of political references and stands in contrast to the sentiments often felt in relation to Land Day. Most Land Day commemorative posters are full of political imagery, including symbols of the peasant, the map of Palestine, and destruction of the land, thus emphasizing Israeli colonial policies that confiscate Palestinian land and ghettoize the Palestinian population. Text directly under the Telecommunications Company’s advertisement asks viewers to circulate the image via social media and the two individuals who invite the most Facebook friends to “like” the company’s page will win a laptop. A third laptop, the text ambiguously states, will be issued to the one who posts on Facebook what the company considers to be the “best” comment. In the top left-hand corner under the Company’s symbol are the words “Your life as you wish it to be.” The blatant appropriation of Darwish’s words in this case explicitly evacuates both politics and aesthetics from the poetry as the meaning of life is not merely alienated from colonial violence but also based on consumption of the latest technology. Such an advertisement adheres to the dominant ideology of making homo economicus subjects by exploiting any cultural meaning to produce profit. Darwish is not alone in the commodification of armed struggle iconography and anti-colonial prose. The kuffiyeh is perhaps the most visible example.12 A nationalist symbol that became a signifier of Palestinian anti-colonial revolt dating back at least to the Palestinian 1936 General Strike, the kuffiyeh has a long and sundry history of commodification. Critiquing the transformation of revolutionary icons into products to be consumed, Palestinian artist Amer Shomali reproduced one of the iconic images of the Palestinian armed struggle as an art piece. He used 3,500 lipsticks of different shades to depict the iconic image of Leila Khaled holding a Kalashnikov and wearing a kuffiyeh and a ring she made from a bullet and the pin of a hand grenade.13 In his commentary, Shomali writes that commercial advertisement employs “popular visual elements as a method to associate companies with our collective memory, marketing the companies as a national capital, and its profit as collective national achievement, using the same visuals despite the fact that the national goal nowadays is economical, in contradiction with the ’70s aspiration for ‘freedom.’” 11

 Land Day, March 30, 1976, specifically commemorates the general strike organized in the Galilee (northern Palestine) in protest of expanded Israeli land confiscation policies of Palestinian lands inside the Israeli state. During the protest, six Palestinians who held Israeli citizenship were killed by Israeli forces and hundreds imprisoned. 12  See Ted Swedenburg, “From Resistance Symbol to Retail Item?” Talk given at The Jerusalem Fund, April 8, 2010. The video can be accessed here: http://www. thejerusalemfund.org/ht/d/ContentDetails/i/10464. 13  See http://www.amershomali.info/the-icon [last accessed October 10, 2014].

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The diverse ways and contexts in which Darwish is cited—or what we call “speaking Darwish”—are numerous and extend beyond institutionalized usage. Nevertheless, after Darwish’s death, the usage associated with the PA, NGOs, and corporations has dominated the public sphere due to power disparities regarding access to resources and media. By mapping ways that “speaking” Darwish particularly allows for the claim and accumulation of capital, whether cultural, symbolic, and/or financial, we locate a specific modality that targets an emerging middle class defined by a neoliberal social imaginary. While sociologist Jamil Hilal describes the emergence of a middle class in the oPt as a marked transformation within Palestinian society yet not one unified culturally or politically, sociologist Lisa Taraki identifies consumption practices as a unifying component that contributes to social stratification.14 This middle class is characterized by the desire to fulfill individualist dreams and a life trajectory based on entrepreneurship and personal achievement. A common consumption practice of a Ramallah middle class is the frequenting of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars, which gives the sense of living a “normal” life. The normalization of life in effect serves to normalize social stratification.15 Consumption practices are not only the result of differences in capital distribution but also a political economy of cultural symbolism. A certain social stratum within the Palestinian middle class aims to project international sensibilities alongside national sentimentalities. Upon entering what was one of the most popular restaurants in the Ramallah area, one encounters a large framed photograph of Darwish. On a back wall, one finds more images of Darwish as if the back sitting area has been officially dedicated to the poet. The restaurant, located in an old stone house in the historical part of the town of Birzeit (and later relocated to the Bethlehem area) markets itself as an “authentic” Palestinian setting offering “traditional” home-cooked dishes. The “national” dishes, we are told, are made from organic, locally-grown ingredients. The combination of anti-colonial signs in a neoliberal setting that internationalizes consumption practices is a recurring phenomenon in the most popular restaurants, bars, and cafés in the Ramallah area. The notions of Palestinianness and cosmopolitanism are brought together to attract both internationals and a particular Palestinian middle-class cultural elite. Locally-grown products (referred to as baladi in Arabic) have a history among Palestinians in the oPt as part of an anti-colonial strategy to withdraw from a dependency relationship with the Israeli economy. “Return to the land” was a slogan for a mobilization movement started in the 1970s meant to de-accelerate 14  Jamil Hilal, The Palestinian Middle Class: Research into the Confusion of Identity, Authority and Culture (Beirut: The Institute for Palestine Studies, 2006) [Arabic]; Lisa Taraki, “The New Social Imaginary in Palestine After Oslo,” Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology 26–7 (Spring–Summer 2014) [Arabic]. 15  Lisa Taraki, “Enclave Micropolis: The Paradoxical Case of Ramallah/Al-Bireh,” Journal of Palestine Studies 37, no. 4 (2008): 16–18.

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and confront the colonial process of proletarianizing Palestinian society for the benefit of the Israel economy and away from what was a predominantly agriculturally-based economy in Palestine. The first intifada marked a peak in the practice of creating economic autonomy to counter the colonial modality of control.16 In contrast to the anti-settler colonial connotations of local baladi, the new terminology of “organic” to describe local produce references a global discourse to counter mass-production, industrialized agriculture.17 The hybridity between local authenticity and a Western middle-class imaginary signifies new sensibilities that are being marketed and consumed as such in the oPt. The juxtaposition of national/anti-colonial and cosmopolitan/global signifiers is also played out in the restaurant’s choice of background music. Equipped with a sophisticated sound system, the sounds of what are perceived by the cultural elite as high-culture music (in contrast to the pop songs that fill many shops in the Arab world) contribute to the restaurant’s appeal. One of the most noticeable tracks often played (especially during the restaurant’s opening months) was the voice of Darwish reciting his poetry accompanied by Le Trio Jubran, a band comprised of three Palestinian brothers each playing the ‘oud, a classical Arab stringed instrument. The practice of putting Darwish’s poetry to lyrics is not uncommon. The Lebanese musician Marcel Khalife is most famous for putting Darwish’s poetry to song, and the association between Darwish and Khalife is one of patriotic, anti-colonial, revolutionary rhythms. In contrast to the earlier Darwish poems that Khalife put to song in a rhythm of mobilization, Le Trio Jubran’s accompaniment to Darwish’s later works are quite meditative with a piercing gravity. Darwish has a prominent presence, whether as icon (his visual image) or as literary text (his words), in Ramallah middle-class consumption practices. From his poetry stenciled onto the curtains of a popular bar or printed on a highlyfrequented café’s napkin to his voice permeating shop sound systems to restaurant owners proudly advertising their place as Darwish’s choice spot to eat, Darwish as poet and persona is capitalized on to evoke nationalist sentiments and attract “cosmopolitan” consumers. This phenomenon contributes to the façade of Ramallah as a city celebrated by local and international media, the PA, and the tourism industry for its cosmopolitan lifestyle while also functioning as a parallel process to official, state representations of Palestine and the Palestinians. Locating the ways individuals, corporations, and businesses cite and reference Darwish reveals a transformation in post-Oslo Palestine where the anti-colonial struggle is simultaneously institutionalized and commodified. Ironically Darwish harshly critiqued a similar modality that he now is being appropriated to serve. In his description of Beirut in the early 1980s, Darwish writes “Beirut, markets on the  Linda Tabar and Ala Alazzeh. Al-Muqawamah al-Sha’biya Al-Filistiniya taht AlIhtilal: Qira’ah Naqdiyah wa-Tahlilyah [Palestinian Popular Resistance under Occupation: A Critical and Analytical Reading] (Beirut: Institute of Palestine Studies, 2014) [Arabic]. 17  There is no equivalent for the word “organic” in Arabic except in the terminology of chemistry. 16

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sea / an economy that destroys production in order to build restaurants and hotels. … I see cities that crown its conquerors and export its martyrs to import whiskey.”18 Utilizing Darwish as poet and icon has not been limited to political and commercial purposes, as his person has also been used by individuals for selfpromotion and publicity. Cultural figures, politicians, and ordinary individuals evoke their personal relationship or encounters with Darwish as a way to position themselves in the Palestinian cultural scene, understanding that associating one’s self with Darwish will add to their cultural portfolio and authority. Literary texts, journalistic accounts, and personal memoirs based on a writer’s personal relationship to Darwish have been published.19 In addition to the cultural authority these writers gain, they are also profiting financially. Outside of such printed accounts, “I met Darwish,” “Darwish told me,” “I know Darwish” are variants of a common trope used by Palestinian cultural figures to capitalize on Darwish’s legacy. There is also a genuine tendency among many Palestinians to connect with Darwish’s poetry and person, as we often heard individuals recount stories of meeting Darwish, chance encounters, and memorable exchanges. These accounts nearly always merged into recitations of Darwish’s own poetic words, as if Darwish and his text were/are inseparable. Despite the systematic efforts within neoliberal Palestine to monopolize Darwish to serve economic and institutional gains, Darwish remains honored and celebrated at the grassroots level. Although he has been institutionally designated as the national poet, his work has not been subject to copyright. In the streets of Arab cities, including Palestine, one can find many copies of his works published in violation of official copyright. Despite the fact that copyright has not been enforced in many Arab countries, many Palestinian readers perceive his work as public property considering the particular positioning of Darwish in Palestinian society and especially following his death. On one occasion, we questioned an owner of a Ramallah bookshop who had noticeable photocopied versions of the majority of Darwish’s work. His response concisely articulated the subject position of the poet in the Palestinian collective imaginary. He said with a smile: “Darwish is collective property. He wrote us [the Palestinians] and we’ll keep his words alive.” Ironically, the oversaturation of citing and referencing Darwish has become a source for Palestinian critique and satire. Muhannad, a Palestinian graphic designer and writer, narrates to us the moment of taking a photograph of a major billboard at the entrance of Ramallah located by an Israeli military checkpoint: After we passed Qalandia checkpoint on our way to Ramallah, my eyes spotted a commercial advertisement containing Darwish’s words: “On this earth is what makes life worth living” (a statement found nearly everywhere, even on 18

 Authors’ translation. http://www.darwishfoundation.org/printnews.php?id=832.  See the series of essays written by Darwish’s former wife Rana Kabbani published in Al-Quds Al-Arabi. See also Sarah Irving, “Collaborating with Mahmoud Darwish without his consent,” The Electronic Intifada, May 23, 2014. http://electronicintifada.net/content/ collaborating-mahmoud-darwish-without-his-consent/13411. 19

“Speaking Darwish” in Neoliberal Palestine yogurt containers and egg cartons). What grabbed my attention was that the statement was placed on such a huge billboard like a plant growing out of a pile of trash. Imagine the scene: a refugee camp, the chaos of cars, a soldier repeatedly screaming through a loudspeaker, long lines of people [waiting at the Israeli checkpoint] who have no voice and are fighting over who was in line first, a soldier in broken Arabic putting them in order, children in dirty clothing knocking on [car] windows trying to sell Chinese products. The advertisement shines, resembling [an Israeli] settlement, clean, a discrepancy between the statement and the reality. Even worse, it was written in gold letters (the only metal that does not rust in the checkpoint scene beside the soldiers’ guns). That’s why I took the picture from an angle of a pile of trash. I saw a mise-en-scène of post-Oslo Palestine where rust grows everywhere. And then I saw a carton of Marlboro cigarettes. What’s the relation? I don’t know. But I thought it added more drama to the photograph, as I recalled a scene from a play: “Marlboro, the most smuggled cigarette in the world.” I asked my friend for a Gauloises cigarette as we dived into Ramallah.

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Index

1967 Constitutional referendum 35–6, 41 Abouet, Marguerite 106–7, 115 Achebe, Chinua 104–5 afterlife 105 Agamben, Giorgio 13, 45, 52–3, 124–6, 135, 138, 149, 159 Ahmed, Sara 65, 72, 75 Al-Awda 13–14 Allen, Chadwick 147 allusion 128, 130–31 analgesic 134–5 Anderson, Benedict 16, 165 antiquarian 122–3, 125, 127, 129–31, 136 Anuradhapura 128, 130, 132 Apartheid 7, 16–17, 21, 106–7, 113–18 Archipelago 179, 182–4, 188, 191 archival 121, 125, 127–8, 130–31, 136 Arguedas, José Maria 154 Aristotle 3 Asturias, Miguel Angel 154, 161 Ata-Wasuka, Atenasi 56 atavism 157 Athanasiou, Athena 195, 205–6 Augustine 15 AusAID 51, 54–61 Australian Indigenous Legislation Kruger & Ors 19–21 Northern Territory Aborigines Act (1918) 19 Northern Territory Emergency Response Act (Intervention) 12, 42 authoritarianism 155, 164 Avendaño, Ángel 161–2 bare life 124–5, 132, 135, 149 Bastos, Augusto Roa 161 Behr, Mark 106–7, 113–18 The Smell of Apples 106, 113–16 Bejerot, Nils 39

Benjamin, Walter 15, 115–16 Bennelong 155, 157, 162 Bennett, Tony 31 Bentham, Jeremy 3 Bergson, Henri 105 Berlant, Lauren 39 on slow death 7 Beverley, John 162 Bowles, Paul 24, 167, 173–5 bibliophile 125, 127 biopolitics 1, 6, 21, 124–6, 128, 131–5, 138–40, 142, 150 bio-archive 125 biopower 124–5, 127, 137, 140, 142–4, 146–52 global biopolitics 52 homo sacer 125, 149 and race 5–6 settler colonial biopolitics 137–45, 148 Bird Rose, Deborah 32 blood blood memory 147, 149–50 blood quantum 150 Blustein, Jeffrey 123 body 139–41, 143–4, 146–51 embodiment 137–9 Bolaño, Roberto 164 Boom, the 154, 163 Bouchard, Gérard 78–86, 88–98 Bowles, Paul 165, 167, 173–6 Brennan, Timothy 163 Bruyneel, Kevin 139 Bull, Michael 199 Burke, Rachel 69 Butler, Judith 8, 10, 14, 195 Byrd, Jodi A 137, 139, 142, 149, 152 C45 Legislation 12 California 137, 140–47, 149–52

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Californian Indigenous peoples 141–5, 147, 149, 152 camp 126, 146, 168 Canada French Canada 81–3, 89, 98 Québec 77–88, 91, 93, 95, 97–8 Cape York Welfare Reform Trial 40–42 Carboni, Raffaele 155 care 121–2, 124–9, 131–5 as paternal and neoliberal 12, 14 Carey, Peter 154–5, 158, 160 Casanova, Pascale 153, 163 Cassin, Barbara 14 Castro, Juane E De 163 Ceylon 128, 131 Césaire, Aimé 179, 188, 190–91 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) 186 Chamoiseau, Patrick 24, 179–80, 182, 184–91 on diversalité 185 chaos 112, 131 Chase, Alisia Grace 117 Chatterjee, Partha 63–4 Chirac, Jacques 180–81 civil war 121–3, 125–7, 130–32, 135 Clarke, Marcus 155–6 Clastrés, Pierre 162 Cliff, Michelle 103–9, 111–13 No Telephone to Heaven 105, 108–9, 111–12 clinic 121–2, 123–8, 130–36 Colombo Plan 65, 69 colonization and cultural memory in the Maghreb 167, 172 and the literature of the Maghreb 24, 167, 172 Condé, Maryse 181 Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences (Québec) 79, 84–5 cosmopolitan(ism) 30, 122, 129–30, 209, 214, 215 Cottias, Myriam 181 (counter)memorialization 150 Creolization 179–80, 183, 185, 187, 189–90 curative 133–5

Dark, Eleanor 153, 155–9, 162–3 Darwish, Mahmoud 24–5, 207–16 Dash, J. Michael 182 Deleuze, Gilles 2, 176 demiurgery 124–5, 135–6 Derrida, Jacques 9, 16–17 on the pharmakon 16–18 deterritorialisation 123, 126–7 disavowal 142, 194 disciplinary power 1, 8, 42, 124, 127 dispossession 1, 2, 6, 7, 11, 13–14, 23, 25, 31, 38, 39, 45, 95, 139, 154, 161, 168, 186, 204, 206, 193–5, 204–6 Djebar, Assia 24, 165–7, 171–3, 175–6 DOM (département d’outre-mer) 180 Douglas, Taylor 68 Duffield, Mark 51–2 durée 203 emergency 122–4, 126, 128–30 encryption 124, 126, 128, 130 entrepreneurialism 47, 60 Eora people 155, 162 ethical 122, 126, 132–6 ethnonationalism 123–4, 127–9, 135 exile 106, 108 experience 103–11, 118 Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi 103–5, 107–8, 114–16 Fanon, Frantz 25, 198, 209–10 Black Skin White Masks 198 Feldman, Allen 121, 125, 127–8 flight 197 force 124, 126, 132–5 Foucault, Michel 31, 45–6, 48, 131, 134, 155–6, 164 foundationality 78–9, 82–3, 89–97 Franciscan order 141–2, 144–7 Frere, Maurice 155, 161 Fuentes, Carlos 154 Gamini 121–2, 124, 127–34 Gammage, Bill 156, 163 gender-based violence 50–51 genealogy 3, 6, 8, 49, 53–4, 87, 143–4, 146–52 genocide 11, 19, 145, 148, 152

Index cultural genocide 146 genocidal violence 140, 142, 146, 148, 152 U. N. Convention on 19–20 Glissant, Edouard 24, 176–7, 179, 180–82, 184–91 government 121–2, 124, 126, 129, 131–2, 134 governmentality 1, 3–4, 5, 129, 132, 195–6, 200–201, 203 as administrative strategy 132–3 colonial governmentality 4–5, 8–9, 19–22, 24, 153, 155–6, 158–61, 163–4, 200, 203 and time 14 gray zone 133–4 Great Days 128–9 Grenville, Kate 156, 160 Guattari, Félix 2, 176 Hammoudi, Abdellah 175 healing 121, 125, 134–5 health care 123, 126, 129, 131–3 Hegel, G. W. F. 3, 18, 173 Heidegger, Martin 201 heritage 122, 126, 130, 136, 157, 171 history 104–5, 107–8, 115, 121–5, 127–8, 131, 135–6 Hogan, Linda 149, 151 The Woman Who Watches Over the World. A Native Memoir 151 homo oeconomicus 33, 46 hospital 122–36 hospitality 122–3, 127, 135–6 humanitarianism 126, 133 hybridity 157–9, 161, 163 imagination 103, 107–8, 115 “Indian(s)”/Indianness 137–42, 152 indigeneity 79, 83, 94–97 indigenous lifeways 142–3, 145, 148 information (-ization, -ized) 199, 200, 202 insurgent 126, 135 interculturalism 23, 78–9, 81–4, 86–98 instrumentalization (-ized) 193–4, 198–9, 203–5 irony 106–7, 115–16, 118 Ivison, Duncan 74–5

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Jones, Gail 154 Jones, Kim 196 See also Mudman justice 130–35 Kavwahirehi, Kasereka 191 Komasi, Beverly 57 Kowal, Emma 37, 45, 160 Krog, Antjie 116 Kynsey Road Hospital 128, 131 law 125–6, 129, 132–4 laïcité (secularism) 79, 84, 86–7 Lea, Tess 31, 37 Leroux, Darryl 87–8 liberalism 4, 80, 87, 199 late liberalism 8 life writing 24, 137–54 linearity 109, 111–12 Llosa, Mario Vargas 154 Locke, John 93, 97 Loi Taubira 180–81 McCusker, Maeve 180, 184 majoritarian 123, 125, 127, 136 Malabou, Catherine 197, 201, 203 Malouf, David 154–5, 158, 160 Man, Paul de 106, 115–17 Mandela, Nelson 17 massacre 122–5, 132, 134 Mbembe, Achille 108, 124, 142, 203 medicine 121–2, 124–5, 127–9, 131, 134–6 medieval 126, 128–32, 135 memory 104–6, 115, 117–18, 122–3, 125, 127, 129, 130, 132 collective memory 15–16 in Glissant 25 memory culture 137, 140, 144–5 memory by default in Ricouer 18 memory discourse 142–3, 147–8 memory as Gedächtnis and Erinnerung in Hegel and Derrida 18, 21 memory site 141–4, 149–52 memory-traces 179, 187 settler memory 137–41, 145, 148, 151–2 Meston, Archibald 33–5 Mexico 8, 147, 161, Middle Passage 1, 6, 25

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Mirabile, Andrea 115–17 Miranda, Deborah 137, 140–52 Bad Indians. A Tribal Memoir 137, 140–41, 144, 146, 149–50, 152 Mihintale 122, 128–9, 131, 136 mission 141–8, 150–51 mission Indians 141 mission projects 141–5 mission mythology 141 missionization 142, 144, 146, 148, 149 Mneme 125 modernity 103–4, 106–7, 109, 115, 118 Momaday, N. Scott 143, 147, 149 Monumental 122, 129, 136 Morriset, James Thomas 155, 161 MSF 133 Mudman (Kim Jones) 24, 194–7, 199, 204, 206 multiculturalism 10, 72, 74–5, 77–8, 80, 84, 89, 92, 97–8 Murray, Jon Beasley 154, 164 myth 105–9, 111–13, 115 mythopoetic 126, 131, 135

Palestinian Authority 25, 210 Pandolfi, Mariella 133 pastoral 122, 132, 134–5 pathos 115–16 Paz, Octavio 162 Pearson, Noel 11, 31–3, 37–44, 46, 160 pedestrian (-ization) 197, 199, 200, 202 performance 193–8, 200–202, 204, 206 Perse, Saint-John 179, 185, 188–91 pharmakon 127–8, 130 philological 127 Polannaruwa 126, 128, 130, 136 politics of address 195–6, 200–201 postcolonial postcolonial allegory 104, 107, 113–17 postcolonial biopolitical governmentality 47–9, 53–4, 60 Povinelli, Elizabeth 7, 80–81 precarity 193–8, 206 Prevention of Terrorism Act 126 polemos 196, 198, 201, 203–5 post-presentationalism 153–4, 163 public space 193–203, 205

NAFTA 8 nationalism 123, 129 nation-state 154, 159 necropolitics 1, 6–7, 103, 123, 125, 127–8, 135–6, 142, 148 neoliberalism 7–9, 12, 21, 153–4, 163–4 Nietzsche, Friedrich 23, 74, 121–3, 129–30, 136 Northeast 122, 124–9, 131–6 nostalgia 106, 115, 118, 122, 126, 136 Neuman, Andrés 154, 163

RAMSI 50–57, 61 Rancière, Jacques 13, 18, 98–9 reasonable accommodations 85–6, 88 reconciliation 17, 19–22 material reconciliation 19, 22 refuge 193–5, 197, 204–6 Relation 180, 183–5, 189–91 responsibility 131–3, 135–6 responsibilization 47, 57–8 re-territorialization 123, 126–7, 136 Ricoeur, Paul 14–18, 21 Rifkin, Mark 83, 95, 138–9 rhizome 179, 182–3, 185 ruinate 118

Occupied Palestinian Territories 7 Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen nation 141, 147 Esselen 141, 147, 148, 150 Ohlone 141, 147, 150 Ondaatje, Michael 23–4, 121, 124–7, 130, 133–5 order 111–13 Oslo Accords 25 Oubrerie, Clément 106–7, 115–18 Aya 106–7, 115, 117–18 Palipana 128, 135

self-determination 29–30, 36 settler colonialism 63–4, 77–9, 81–5, 87–9, 91–5, 97–9, 137–41, 145, 148, 151–2 settler colonization 139–41, 152 settler contract 90, 92, 94 settler cultural memory 81, 93 settler memory 136, 140–41, 145, 148, 151–2

Index Scott, David 4–5, 9, 63, 145, 153–4, 156, 164 Scott, Kim 153–6, 159 Benang 155 That Deadman Dance 155, 159 Shu, Jing 70, 74 Sigimanu, Ethel 55–6, 58 silence 106, 114, 116–18 Silko, Leslie Marmon 143 Sinhala 124, 126, 128–32, 136 Slemon, Stephen 104, 107, 113–15 Solomon Islands 47–61 Sommer, Doris 161 sovereignty 124, 131–2, 135–6, 137–9, 149, 159–64 sovereign power 1, 8 Soyinka, Wole 104–5, 107–12 Death and the King’s Horseman 105, 108–12 Spanish colonialism Spanish colonial rule 137, 140, 142–3, 148 Spanish colonization 140–43 Spanish missionization 141–5, 147–8, 150 spatialization (-ized) 194, 196–9, 203, 205 Sri Lanka 121–6, 128–30, 133, 136 Stolen Generations (Australia) 11–12 Bringing Them Home Report (1997) 19 Sutton, Peter 29–31, 33, 39 Sylvester, Christine 53, 61 Tamil 126, 129, 133, 135 Taylor, Charles 78–9, 81, 84–6, 88–90, 95, 97–8 temporality 103–4, 107, 109–10, 112, 115–16

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thanatopolitical 123, 125, 127, 136 time 103–10, 112–13, 115, 117–18 tradition 104–8, 112–13, 115, 118 Traite négrière 180, 183 trauma intergenerational trauma 146–7 colonial trauma 151–2 tribal memoir 137, 141–3, 151–2 Truth Commissions 16 TRC in South Africa 9–10 two-spirit 151 United Nations Convention of Genocide 20 High Commision for Refugees (UNHCR) 14 Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) 13 unsettlement 151 Vadde, Aarthi 130–31 Veracini, Lorenzo 63–4, 77 violence 111–13, 118–19 Vizenor, Gerald 137–9 Volpi, Jorge 154, 163 war 121–8, 130–36 Wodiczko, Krzysztof 24, 193–5, 197–200, 202–4, 206 work of mourning 18, 21 Wright, Alexis 154, 159–62, 164 Yacine, Kateb 24, 165–67, 169–71 Yindjibarndi people 12 Zitkala-Ša 149