The Economics of Empire: Genealogies of Capital and the Colonial Encounter [1 ed.] 0367425742, 9780367425746

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Notes on contributors
Foreword: postcolonial studies and the history of capital
Preface: the economics of empire: bridging postcolonial studies forward
1 Introduction—empire’s license: Structural thievery and the political life of appropriated capital
2 Decolonizing capital: Indian political economy in the shadow of empire
3 Criminal cities: economics and empire in Belfast and Johannesburg
4 Interrogating legal world-making through genre: Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book and colonial reparations
5 Trading in women’s “Troubles”: fertility control and postcolonial exchanges in Irish history
6 Contemporary plantation narratives and the postcolonial memory of capitalism
7 Waste lands and preserves: Olive Schreiner’s ecological allegories and colonial Zimbabwe
8 Unearthing land and labor disputes in Tunisia: an uneven and combined development approach to tribal/management councils
9 Derailing the rail: Indian–Kenyan solidarity in contemporary Anglophone fiction
10 Coloniality, knowledge production, and racialized socio-economic inequality in South Africa
11 Devalued knowledge: colonized post-socialism
12 Hong Kong and the Sinocentric afterlife of an Anglophone postcolonial discourse
Index

Citation preview

“I am fascinated by the chapters as well as by the overall picture this volume paints. The editors and authors have caught a necessary wave. The overlap between global economic theory and literature will become increasingly important and this strikes me as new material which addresses old issues in a provocative and original manner; the conceptual issues are important, specifically, the relationship between material and ideal structures. That is, the book asks: how do the material structures of global capitalism influence the production of global humanities, literature, and social theory? The book definitely fills a gap—the gap between works on political economy and those working in the tradition of the humanities.” —Naeem Inayatullah, Professor in the Department of Politics at Ithaca College, USA “The Economics of Empire is a rare publication that explicitly focuses on bringing empire and capitalism into conversation through a broadly post-colonial lens. In this respect, the book concretises a debate that has been perennial but has also attracted new scholarly interest in recent years. It offers an important contribution as the timing is ripe for such an explicit intervention in postcolonial critique with a view to renewing the field and linking it to other fields.” —Robbie Shilliam, Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University, USA

The Economics of Empire

The Economics of Empire: Genealogies of Capital and the Colonial Encounter is a multidisciplinary intervention into postcolonial theory that constructs and theorizes a political economy of empire. This comprehensive collection traces the financial genealogies associated with the colonial enterprise, the strategies of economic precarity, the pedigrees of capital, and the narratives of exploitation that underlay and determined the course of modern history. One of the first attempts to take this approach in postcolonial studies, the book seeks to sketch the commensal relation—a symbiotic “phoresy”—between capitalism and colonialism, reading them as linked structures that carried and sustained each other through and across the modern era. The scholars represented here are all postcolonial critics working in a range of disciplines, including Political Science, Sociology, History, Peace and Conflict Studies, Legal Studies, and Literary Criticism, exploring the connections between empire and capital, and the historical and political implications of that structural hinge. Each author engages existing postcolonial and poststructuralist theory and criticism while bridging it over to research and analytic lenses less frequently engaged by postcolonial critics. In so doing, they devise novel intersectional and interdisciplinary frameworks through which to produce more greatly nuanced understandings of imperialism, capitalism, and their inextricable relation, “new” postcolonial critiques of empire for the twenty-first century. This book will be an excellent resource for students and researchers of Postcolonial Studies, Literature, History, Sociology, Economics, Political Science, and International Studies, among others. Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem is Associate Professor of English at The City University of New York/Kingsborough, USA. She also teaches at Drew University, USA, and at The Graduate Center, CUNY, USA. Michael O’Sullivan is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has taught on literature and language in universities in Ireland, the UK, the USA, Japan, and Hong Kong.

Postcolonial Politics Edited by: Pal Ahluwalia, University of South Australia Michael Dutton, Goldsmiths, University of London Sanjay Seth, Goldsmiths, University of London

‘Postcolonial Politics’ is a series that publishes books that lie at the intersection of politics and postcolonial theory. That point of intersection once barely existed; its recent emergence is enabled, first, because a new form of ‘politics’ is beginning to make its appearance. Intellectual concerns that began life as a (yet unnamed) set of theoretical interventions from scholars largely working within the ‘New Humanities’ have now begun to migrate into the realm of politics. The result is politics with a difference, with a concern for the everyday, the ephemeral, the serendipitous and the unworldly. Second, postcolonial theory has raised a new set of concerns in relation to understandings of the non-West. At first these concerns and these questions found their home in literary studies, but they were also, always, political. Edward Said’s binary of ‘Europe and its other’ introduced us to a ‘style of thought’ that was as much political as it was cultural as much about the politics of knowledge as the production of knowledge, and as much about life on the street as about a philosophy of being, A new, broader and more reflexive understanding of politics, and a new style of thinking about the non-Western world, make it possible to ‘think’ politics through postcolonial theory, and to ‘do’ postcolonial theory in a fashion which picks up on its political implications. Postcolonial Politics attempts to pick up on these myriad trails and disruptive practices. The series aims to help us read culture politically, read ‘difference’ concretely, and to problematise our ideas of the modern, the rational and the scientific by working at the margins of a knowledge system that is still logocentric and Eurocentric. This is where a postcolonial politics hopes to offer new and fresh visions of both the postcolonial and the political. Subseries: Writing Past Colonialism The Institute of Postcolonial Studies (IPCS) Edited by: Phillip Darby, University of Melbourne Writing Past Colonialism is the signature series of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, based in Melbourne, Australia. By postcolonialism we understand modes of writing and artistic production that critically engage with the ideological legacy and continuing practices of colonialism, and provoke debate about the processes of globalisation. The series is committed to publishing works that break fresh ground in postcolonial studies and seek to make a difference both in

the academy and outside it. By way of illustration, our schedule includes books that address: • • •

grounded issues such as nature and the environment, activist politics and indigenous peoples’ struggles cultural writing that pays attention to the politics of literary forms experimental approaches that produce new postcolonial imaginaries by bringing together different forms of documentation or combinations of theory, performance and practice

Reconciliation and Pedagogy Edited by Pal Ahluwalia, Stephen Atkinson, Peter Bishop, Pam Christie, Robert Hattam and Julie Matthews From International Relations to Relations International (IPCS) Postcolonial Essays Phillip Darby Gender, Orientalism, and the ‘War on Terror’ Representation, Discourse, and Intervention in Global Politics Maryam Khalid Multicultural politics of recognition and postcolonial citizenship Rethinking the nation Rachel Busbridge Japanese Poetry and its Publics From Colonial Taiwan to 3.11 Dean Anthony Brink Domestic Spaces in Post-Mao China On Electronic Household Appliances Wang Min’an Decolonising Governance Archipelagic Thinking Paul Carter Dipesh Chakrabarty and the Global South Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial Perspectives, and the Anthropecene Edited by Saurabh Dube, Sanjay Seth and Ajay Skaria The Economics of Empire Genealogies of Capital and the Colonial Encounter Edited by Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem and Michael O’Sullivan For more information about this series, please visit www.routledge.com/

The Economics of Empire Genealogies of Capital and the Colonial Encounter

Edited by Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem and Michael O’Sullivan

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem and Michael O’Sullivan; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem and Michael O’Sullivan to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 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. Trademark 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 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ruprecht Fadem, Maureen E., editor. Title: The economics of empire: genealogies of capital and the colonial   encounter/edited by Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem and Michael O’Sullivan. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. | Series:   Postcolonial politics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020032785 (print) | LCCN 2020032786 (ebook) |   ISBN 9780367425746 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367853570 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Imperialism—Economic aspects. | Capitalism. |  Postcolonialism. Classification: LCC JC359 .E37 2021 (print) | LCC JC359 (ebook) |   DDC 330.9171/2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032785 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032786 ISBN: 978-0-367-42574-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-85357-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

[We] cannot be free in America or anywhere else where there is capitalism and imperialism . . . ~Ella Baker, Civil Rights Activist (1903–1986)

Contents

Acknowledgmentsxiii Notes on contributorsxv Foreword: postcolonial studies and the history of capitalxvii DIPESH CHAKRABARTY

Preface: the economics of empire: bridging postcolonial studies forwardxxv MAUREEN E. RUPRECHT FADEM AND MICHAEL O’SULLIVAN

  1 Introduction—empire’s license: Structural thievery and the political life of appropriated capital

1

MAUREEN E. RUPRECHT FADEM

  2 Decolonizing capital: Indian political economy in the shadow of empire

39

VIKRAM VISANA

  3 Criminal cities: economics and empire in Belfast and Johannesburg

57

MOLLY SLAVIN

  4 Interrogating legal world-making through genre: Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book and colonial reparations

73

HONNI VAN RIJSWIJK

  5 Trading in women’s “Troubles”: fertility control and postcolonial exchanges in Irish history

92

CARA DELAY

  6 Contemporary plantation narratives and the postcolonial memory of capitalism MARTA FRĄTCZAK-DĄBROWSKA

107

xii  Contents   7 Waste lands and preserves: Olive Schreiner’s ecological allegories and colonial Zimbabwe

122

DEBORAH SHAPPLE SPILLMAN

  8 Unearthing land and labor disputes in Tunisia: an uneven and combined development approach to tribal/management councils

141

MATT GORDNER

  9 Derailing the rail: Indian–Kenyan solidarity in contemporary Anglophone fiction

164

MEGHAN GORMAN-DARIF

10 Coloniality, knowledge production, and racialized socio-economic inequality in South Africa

181

SAVO HELETA

11 Devalued knowledge: colonized post-socialism

198

JUHO KORHONEN

12 Hong Kong and the Sinocentric afterlife of an Anglophone postcolonial discourse

223

MICHAEL O’SULLIVAN

Index242

Acknowledgments

We must but don’t quite know how to thank our collaborator, Dipesh Chakrabarty. Dipesh, your brilliant work has been a constant inspiration, obviously to us but also to the entire world we occupy as scholars. At this moment of attempting to offer something to that world that might be useful in some way, it had to be you who would position, explain, and frame it for us. Except we never imagined you’d actually be able to do it! Thank you, thank you, thank you. Declan Kiberd, we thank you, we appreciate you, and we’ll see you next time. Sláinte mhaith duit. Michael and Maureen are particularly thankful to have had the honor of working with this group of brilliant postcolonial studies colleagues from all over the world. It is a rare and beautiful thing! We especially appreciate your committed work to bring this volume together during the pandemic of 2020 and your awesome responsiveness in such difficult times as we are in now. We are both so happy to have been on this journey with you all and hope to share other, future journeys with you again! To our team at Routledge, Inc., especially Emily Ross and Hannah Rich, with a shout out to Jessica Holmes. Our most genuine, heartfelt appreciation for your hard, excellent work with us throughout the entire process on this project, for helping us do the work of advancing and enriching our shared field and our various disciplines, to do our part in realizing their radical possibility and promise as research universes. Many thanks to Robert Sorsby for helping us find a home for this volume at Routledge. Our deepest gratitude also to Robert Langham—we appreciated so much your seeking us out. Your early support of the idea for this book meant everything to the editors and to our many gifted contributors. Michael would like to thank Maureen for asking him to work with her on this important and inspiring project. Her vision throughout ensured we would accomplish the task we set ourselves. He also thanks Liu Lurong (Cora) and Raphael Chim for their help with formatting. He thanks the staff at Special Collections at the University Library of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Maureen thanks Michael as well—for his willingness to work with her on this complex project, for his always gracious collegiality, his precise editorial eye, and his kindness which knows no bounds.

xiv  Acknowledgments Maureen’s sincere gratitude also to her teaching home, The City University of New York (CUNY) and The Research Foundation of CUNY, for their generous support of this project in the form a PSC CUNY Grant that was critical to its eventual completion. One last thing: To the many hundreds of postcolonial scholars cited in the fourteen chapters of this book, we appreciate you. We obviously couldn’t have done our work without yours. Let’s keep building the socially just, genuinely free, truly democratic, anti-racist world we want to see by continuing to do this work, together. ¡Solidaridad!

Notes on contributors

Dipesh Chakrabarty teaches History and South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books including Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2008/2000). More recently, Dipesh brought out The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories (New Delhi: Oxford, 2018) and, with Ranajit Das Gupta, Some Aspects of Labour History of Bengal in the Nineteenth Century: Two Views (New Delhi: Oxford, 2019). The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is forthcoming from Chicago University Press in March 2021. Cara Margo Delay is Professor of History at the College of Charleston, USA. Her research analyzes women, gender, and culture in the nineteenth- and ­twentieth-century Ireland, Britain, and the British Empire, with a particular focus on the history of reproduction, pregnancy, and childbirth. Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem is Associate Professor of English at The City University of New York/Kingsborough, USA. She also teaches at Drew University, USA and at The Graduate Center, CUNY, USA. Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Literature and Literary Linguistics at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland. She is conducting research in the field of Anglo Caribbean fiction and postcolonial economics. Matt Gordner is a Tunis-based PhD Candidate and Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and a Senior Consultant for the MunaThara Initiative. His research examines the political economy of “democratization” in Tunisia through “uneven and combined” patterns of development from the beylic period to the present. Meghan Gorman-DaRif is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San José State University, USA. Her research centers on historical revolutionary violence in contemporary Anglophone fiction, focusing on the Naxalite Movement in India and the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya. Savo Heleta works at Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. His research and teaching interests include conflict transformation, post-war

xvi  Notes on contributors recovery and peace-building, international migration, xenophobia, social justice advocacy and activism, decolonization of knowledge, and internationalization of higher education. Juho Korhonen is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boğaziçi University, Turkey. His research focuses on historical transformations of political entities from empire to nation-state, from socialism to post-socialism, and from welfare to post-welfare states. Michael O’Sullivan is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has taught on literature and language in universities in Ireland, the UK, the USA, Japan, and Hong Kong. Honni van Rijswijk is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. She has published on feminist theories of harm, formulations of responsibility in law and literature, the role of history in the common law, and on questions of justice relating to the Stolen Generations. Molly Slavin is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, where she researches and teaches on topics related to crime, cities, and postcolonial literature and theory. Deborah Shapple Spillman is Associate Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, USA, where she specializes in Victorian Literature. Her research interests include British and Anglophone literatures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with particular emphases on ethnography, economics, and the novel. Vikram Visana is Senior Lecturer in South Asian and Global History at the University of Huddersfield, UK. His PhD thesis on Indian political thought examined the political and economic thought of the first non-white member of the British Parliament and a founding father of the Indian National Congress, Dadabhai Naoroji.

Foreword

Postcolonial studies and the history of capital I have to admit that the invitation to write a foreword for this book came to me as a bit of a surprise, though a pleasant one. Let me begin by explaining why the surprise, in this case, was pleasant. Developments of the last decade had led me to assume that scholars who wanted to “return” to materialist—always a charged, coded, militant, and partisan word, a kind of call to arms—analyses in their ­discussions of European empires and capitalism were generally hostile to the body of literature that has come to be known as postcolonial studies (at least the first phase of it). Identified for some decades now as a scholar of the “postcolonial” variety, I am used to being told by younger friends on the Left that the postcolonials of the 1980s and 1990s were no longer the model for radical scholarship in the humanities. They were too “discursive”—too deconstructionist, too Lacanian, too Foucauldian—and not “materialist” enough in their approaches to global capitalism. Nor were they sufficiently attentive to the exploitative functions of imperial and colonial formations the global economy depended on. Libidinal, and not political, economy drove their analytical machinery. Subaltern Studies, the Indian series with which I was associated from its inception in the early 1980s, has also fallen out of favor with several scholars on the Left. There has been a chorus of complaints: that scholars contributing to Subaltern Studies neglected proper analyses of class relations; they were wanting in their understanding of Marx’s theories and/or of the global history of capitalism; they read European history wrongly; and, worst of all, they even ended up producing and peddling some very disturbingly Orientalist images of India! There is, of course, nothing wrong with scholars in a particular field wanting to reorient the field itself. A stimulating review essay by a younger colleague recently asked a question that has much in common with the aspiration of this book: “What might a post-poststructuralist, materialist [that word again!] postcolonial studies look like, one attuned to the resurgence of emancipatory movements across the globe?” (Taylor 2018, 237). The question and the implicit intellectual ambition are laudable. But what I find remarkable is how quickly and readily the metaphor of death comes to characterize the discussion of ideas that the author does not favor. The entire scholarship of Subaltern Studies

xviii  Foreword and “Marxist” arguments against it in the 1980s, 1990s, and in the 2000s are described here as simply “dead.” Impatient that Vivek Chibber’s recent booklength criticism of Subaltern Studies merely wasted the author and his readers’ time by working on “the dead,” this young scholar described Chibber’s entire book as “a work of scholarly necromancy. It resurrects a horde of the dead: dead polemics, dead methodologies, even dead fields” (Taylor 2018, 234). The review actually ends by declaring: “Let the dead bury the dead . . . The nineties were a long time ago. The field has moved. I urge its detractors to move with it” (Taylor 2018, 249). Now, I am old enough to know that the sense of being immortal and invincible belongs, biologically, to the young. But the claim made by someone, who identifies himself as “postcolonial,” that postcolonial scholarship of twenty or thirty years ago was simply “dead” made me wonder about the degree to which even self-described Marxist scholars in the humanities fall prey—in the consumerist US academy—to business school propositions about ideas being “products” and hence subject to the phenomena of “limited product life” and “product obsolescence.” Were “the nineties” really that long ago? Is the relatively new (hardly thirty years old) field that still calls itself “postcolonial studies” one without any sense of a “tradition” or heritage? For when do debates in the humanities ever die? Work in the humanities has always been fundamentally a conversation between the living and the dead, a conversation across generations. Needless to say, this conversation is never premised on agreement. It includes criticism and even downright rejection of ideas that no longer seem persuasive. But we still go to the dead, often the long dead, to renew our thoughts. A philosopher colleague once said in explaining how as a young postgraduate student he chose between history and philosophy: “I wanted to read the same books over and over again.” I told him that historians are no different. There are some historical classics, both ancient and modern, that one goes back to all the time in order to understand what the business of history-writing is all about and how it changes and yet remains faithful to the calling of the historian. Was this cavalier attitude toward the past of one’s discipline that I saw in a young scholar’s essay yet another sign of the much-touted “death of history?” I wondered. All this explains why it was a pleasant surprise to be asked to introduce a collection of essays that, while broadly Marxist in spirit and trenchantly critical sometimes of what the first generation of postcolonial scholars wrote, still wanted to engage the heritage of postcolonial studies. This volume then has its task cut out for it. Since its return to “materialist” analyses of the colonial, imperial, financial, and racial and gendered genealogies of global capital is deliberately set in the context of a critical conversation with “canonical” postcolonial studies, it has to persuade its reader why such a conversation is more useful than a straightforward rejection of the so-called canon by consigning it to what E.P. Thompson once famously called “the condescension of posterity.” It thus falls to this volume to engage—at least implicitly—in the kind of exercise that Croce once carried out with regard to Hegel’s thought to which he no doubt saw himself as an heir, that

Foreword  xix is to find out, as the title of Croce’s book put it, What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel. As the title of Croce’s book suggests, no body of ideas is ever fully “dead.” The essays in this volume collectively address a similar ­question: what indeed is living and what is dead—if we insist on using these terms—in older versions of postcolonial studies. The reader of this volume will be the best judge of its success in this regard. There were always some people on the Left—such as Benita Parry, Aijaz Ahmed, Neil Lazarus, and Arif Dirlik—who had misgivings about postcolonial theory right from its early days. Notwithstanding their critiques, there is no gainsaying that between 1978 and 1994, the years bookended by the publication of Said’s Orientalism (1979) and Bhabha’s Location of Culture, and interspersed with innumerable influential texts, not least Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” were a remarkable period of ferment in modern intellectual history. They saw some unusually liberating winds of ideas blow through the academic corridors of the left in the Anglo-American world. The Marxist Left, a schismatic secular church if there ever was one, became in this period a capacious tent where Marx’s and Marxist theories jostled for space with a diverse body of ideas beginning with structuralism and semiotics and then embracing a range of ideas from post-structuralism and postmodernism and moving all the way to deconstruction. With the Soviet Union seen as the bastion of orthodox, Communist Party Marxism, academic Marxists in the West felt free to experiment with many different ideas. Marxism itself had many variants. There was Euro-Communism, debates between E.P. Thompson’s Gramscian Marxism and Althusserian structuralism, and there was Gramsci himself signaling approaches very different from what Stalin or Mao provided. There were also many old and new—and sometimes mutually incompatible—commentaries on Marx that made for the happy heterodoxy of the period. Think, for instance, of Roman Rosdolsky’s close reading of Marx’s Grundrisse, Jon Elster’s and Gerry Cohen’s “rational Marxism,” reprints of I.I. Rubin’s expositions on Marx’s theories of value, all circulating among groups that dedicated themselves to reading Capital in the 1970s and 1980s.1 They expanded one’s horizons for possible interpretations of Marx. Semiotics was available through the English renderings of Barthes and Jakobson as an instrument with which to demystify ruling-class ideologies. The importance of semiotics in ideology-critiques was made obvious in the work of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige) and in the New Accent series that Terence Hawkes edited. Deconstruction and post-structuralism came as a challenge from within the Left. Indeed, in the early years of their reception in the Anglosphere, there were even attempts to bring them into a productive engagement with Marxism. I think of Michael Ryan’s 1982 book Marxism and Deconstruction that began by acknowledging the contemporary plurality of Marxisms: Marxisms abound, and Avin Gouldner argues that there are at least two major schools, the “scientific” and the “critical.” . . . Because critical marxism is less

xx  Foreword the designation for a school or a system, and more the provisional tag for a plurality of movements, it can more easily be articulated with deconstruction. (xiii) Underlying this search for an internally plural Marxism was a certain vision of emancipation from any “abstractly mediating forms of authority.” “No one needs authority any more,” wrote Ryan (1982), “except left patriarchs.” We are at a point in history when the wealth of struggles has outrun the abstractly mediating form of authority . . . the left needs diverse unity, an articulation of different movements and organizations that elicit multiple interests and address plural needs. . . . Workers cannot legislate for socialist feminists, nor students or intellectuals for workers. . . . It is easier now to threaten capital without authority [of the Communist Party] than with. (217) It was within this vision and value of plurality and difference that the philosophies and philosophers of difference seemed relevant and useful to Marxists like Ryan. Christopher Norris’s (1982) introductory book, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, published in the same year as Ryan’s was broadly similar in spirit. It is not an insignificant fact that the book was published in Terrence Hawkes’s “New Accents” series. The significant difference that Marxist critics like Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson had in their respective intellectual stances toward deconstruction and Derrida was not resolved in favor of one or the other in Norris’s (1982) text. Instead, their coexistence within the broad church of Marxism was what was underlined and celebrated: Deconstruction is inimical to Marxist thought at the point where it questions the validity of any science or method set up in rigid separation from the play of the textual meaning. Jameson and Eagleton represent the opposite faces of a common dilemma, Jameson assimilates history and meaning to an openended free play where . . . historical method becomes little more than an optional gesture of commitment. Eagleton rejects this pluralist outlook and argues resourcefully for a knowledge of the text which would measure its distance from the effects of rhetorical duplicity and error. (83–84) Eagleton may have been opposed to pluralism and Jameson may have been more embracing of it; the point is that between the two of them, they constituted a field of political positions within a Marxism that was irreducibly plural. The three scholars seen as the founders of postcolonial studies—Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi K. Bhabha—all had impeccable ­associations with the Left. Said’s anti-imperial credentials hardly need to be tomtom-ed; Gayatri Spivak has retained a lifelong interest in Marx; and people forget that Bhabha’s (1997) “commitment to theory” came out of his simultaneous and

Foreword  xxi equally serious commitment to “progressive political change in the direction of a socialist society” (21). Subaltern Studies, a series that was launched with the aim of making critical interventions in the historiography of a particular region, South Asia, and that later came to be seen as a particular variety of “postcolonial history,” breathed in this air of Marxist eclecticism of the 1980s and the 1990s. It drew creatively and non-dogmatically on Marx, Hegel, Mao, Gramsci, the structuralists, and later the theorists of post-structuralism and deconstruction—mainly, Foucault and Derrida—without any fear that the project of struggling against the global and homogenizing logic of capital was being compromised by these eclectic appropriations.2 If anything, we felt that the philosophers of difference, for all their different relationship to Marx, were our friends, not enemies. Things began to change, however, once the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet system collapsed, the Chinese Communist Party showed its true colors by brutally suppressing the 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square. The last twenty years of the twentieth century confirmed the rise of a neoliberal economic order throughout the world with growing inequalities of wealth and an unmistakable rise in the number of people whose existence was made precarious. Some tectonic shifts took place in the intellectual landscape of the left at the beginning of the twentyfirst century. There was a legitimate feeling that the analytics of capital must once again take the pride of place. But there was also, if I may say so, an intellectual loss of nerve giving rise to a suspicion that Foucauldian, Lacanian, and deconstructionist readings of the world, left to their own devices, would weaken the anti-capitalist project of Marxism. Deleuze, for instance, was alright only so long as his philosophy serviced the analytics of capital (as in the work of Hardt and Negri about whom more soon). The broad tent that Marxism was in the 1980s and 1990s collapsed and the Left fell back on its schismatic tendencies. The “old”— now pronounced “dead” by some—postcolonial Left, dissident Marxists, were no longer welcome in the eyes of those who saw their main vocation as that of saving the “universality” of Marxism above and beyond all historical differences. Marxism, they thought, had to be inoculated against such tendencies that now came to be seen as definitely wayward if not already compromised by the logic of capital. The signs of these worries were already visible by the early 1990s just as postcolonial criticism was getting into its stride. Christopher Norris’s book, The Truth About Postmodernism, published almost a decade after his introductory book on deconstruction, registered a profound change of mood. Writing in the shadow of the “return of the British Conservative government for a fourth consecutive term of office” and the United States’ first Iraq war, Norris grew particularly wary of all the “skeptical” claims of Lyotard et al. that he identified as postmodern philosophers (1). Norris (1993) would be intolerant now of a “move that presses such skepticism well beyond the point of a[n] argued appeal to the evidence of demographic change”: For it then becomes a pretext for the kind of wholesale nominalist approach that denies what should surely be apparent to any commentator, that is to say, the continuing facts of unemployment, social deprivation, unequal opportunities, two-tier health care, educational under-privilege and the rest. No doubt

xxii  Foreword that these data have to be interpreted . . . [b]ut there is little purpose in pursuing such analyses if they end up, like Lyotard’s obsessive ruminations on the Kantian sublime, by denying both the relevance of class predicates and, beyond that, any version of the argument that would link those predicates . . . to the lived experience of class divisions in an unjust social order. (Norris 1993, 22–23) Norris was one of the early combatants to join the war between Marxism and poststructuralism. The brief entente that began in the late 1970s was ending. The battle was soon extended to the frontier of postcolonial studies. Like all other beginnings, the genealogy here is plural. But a key development certainly was the publication of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire in 2000 when in a section of the book they launched a broadside on Bhabha’s work claiming that his use of difference philosophy only aided the differentiating power and logic of capital. Bhabha assumed, they argued, that power operated “exclusively through a dialectical and binary structure.” Hence Bhabha’s (and by implication the postcolonial) “political project . . . is to affirm the multiplicity of differences as to subvert the power of the ruling binary structures” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 144, 145). Bhabha, in their eyes, targeted forms of sovereignty that actually were passing out of existence (the subject of their own study). And difference, they argued, was nothing more than a marketing ploy of capital: Many of the concepts dear to postmodernist and postcolonialists find a perfect correspondence in the current ideology of corporate capital and the world market. The ideology of the world market has always been anti-foundational and anti-essentialist discourse par excellence. Circulation, mobility, diversity, and mixture are its very conditions of possibility. Differences . . . seem to multiply infinitely in the world market, which attacks nothing more violently than fixed boundaries; it overwhelms any binary divisions with infinite multiplicities. (Hardt and Negri 2000, 150, emphasis added) Having thus established a perfect compatibility between Bhabha’s work and that of the global logic of capital, Hardt and Negri delivered their coup de grâce: Marketing itself is a practice based on differences, and the more differences that are given, the more marketing strategies can develop. Ever more hybrid and differentiated populations present a proliferating number of “target markets” that can each be addressed by specific marketing strategies. . . . Postmodern marketing recognizes the difference of each commodity and each segment of the population, fashioning its strategies accordingly. Each difference is an opportunity. (Hardt and Negri, 152, emphasis added) What can one say or do but sigh after reading this statement? It never entered into the imagination that speaks through the sentences quoted previously that

Foreword  xxiii poverty—and mass poverty at that—bears a contradictory relationship to the logic of capital. The poor are produced on a large scale by the exclusionary operations of capital, no doubt, and yet their being poor means, by definition, that the differences they inhabit and embody cannot be commodified (except very, very partially). Otherwise, the poor would not be poor; they would join the ranks of global consumers! Not every difference is an opportunity for capital. There would be no poverty in the world if it were. That is where we have been for a while. This book makes for a welcome departure. The contributions here draw out meticulously and uncompromisingly the colonial and financial genealogies of global capital. They are clear that this is where “canonical” postcolonial theory was lacking, and the complaint is on the whole Right. And yet this does not become a reason for this volume to declare dead the “canon” of their own field of studies. Instead, the authors assembled here want to reengage the canon to renew it for the present time. In addition, they are also aware that the “materialism” of Marxism is now supplemented of other kinds of “materialistic” approaches that have been pioneered by scholars such as Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, and Donna Haraway, and that now finds expression as “thing theory” in the work of Bill Brown. Contemporary debates on capitalism have also been enriched and extended by the work of Jason Moore and Andreas Malm on the idea of the Capitalocene. There are, in addition, non-Marxist but important historians of energy regimes, developmental states, and capitalism— Kenneth Pomeranz, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Paul Warde, Joel Mokyr, Anthony Wrigley, Timothy LeCain, and others—whose work can be put in conversation with the work that this volume embodies. The time, in other words, is right for rethinking the history of capital and its intrinsic relationship to racial and colonial domination and exploitation. Postcolonial thinkers of all ages and hues will welcome this book. Dipesh Chakrabarty

Notes 1 Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s “Capital,” trans., Pete Burgess (London: Pluto Press, 1977, 1968); Jon Elster, An Introduction to Karl Marx (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and Making Sense of Marx (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); I. I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, trans. Miloš Samardžija and Fredy Perlman (Detroit: Black and Red, 1972, 1928). 2 See the chapter entitled Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Two Histories of Capital,” in My Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008, 2000).

Bibliography Bhabha, Homi K. 1997. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2008. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

xxiv  Foreword Cohen, G. A. 1978. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Croce, Benedetto. 1915. What is Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel. Translated by Douglas Ainslie. London: Palgrave Macmillan. First pub. 1906. Elster, Jon. 1986. An Introduction to Karl Marx. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1985. Making Sense of Marx. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Norris, Christopher. 1993. The Truth About Postmodernism. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1982. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. London: Methuen. Rosdolsky, Roman. 1977. The Making of Marx’s “Capital.” Translated by Pete Burgess. London: Pluto Press. Rubin, I. I. 1972. Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Translated by Miloš Samardžija and Fredy Perlman. Detroit: Black and Red. Ryan, Michael. 1982. Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Taylor, Christopher. 2018. “Postcolonial Studies and the Specter of Misplaced Polemics against Postcolonial Theory: A Review of the Chibber Debate.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5 (2) (April): 234–49.

Preface

The economics of empire: bridging postcolonial studies forward Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem and Michael O’Sullivan

This volume Columbia University professor Eric Foner has in recent years been engaging his history students in a materialist study of the institution now educating them. Their specific focus has been the connections between Columbia and the historical institutions of slavery and imperial colonization, including the school’s indebtedness to human trafficking. In the context of this work, participant and Barnard student Sabrina Singer reflected how, now when she walks around campus, she wonders, “What else is history going to forget?”1 What else, what thefts, together with their short- and long-term impacts, is history going to forget? Outside the context of the university, what else is history going to forget with regard to the economic development of British, American, and other modern empires? What, more precisely, is postcolonial studies going to forget about empire in its endeavors to research and uncover that very knowledge? We were prompted to similar inquiries in the context of another Ivy League institution. A few years ago, Yale’s Peabody Museum offered an exhibition of Elihu Yale’s gemstone collection which, upon seeing it, incited questions touching the economic legacy of Yale and its rootedness in enslavement and imperial plunder. Included in the display was a facsimile of a painting featuring the school’s namesake in which Yale is pictured with a large unfinished diamond ring clearly intended to symbolize Britain’s dominance over India. Yale worked in service of the Empire across his career including, under the auspices of the British East India Company, also known as the EIC, as magistrate of Madras in the southernmost part of the South Asian subcontinent. Yale was famous there not merely for the mining, collection, and processing— that is the theft—of gemstones but also for the enslavement of native residents and, infamously, the public hanging of a six-year old Indian child. In contradistinction, on the other side of the world, Yale is known as the wealthy “collector” of a large number of precious gems used to amass the original endowment establishing one of

xxvi  Preface the most elite universities in the world. Given that he is principal benefactor for the school, the economic history of Yale University is thus part and parcel of a series of historical debts: not merely the resources—precious because economically valuable gemstones in this case—but also the human bodies enslaved in order to mine them and the lives those persons might have lived had they not been colonized or enslaved or violently taken. Add to those the legacies extending from Yale’s appropriation of various natural resources of India in his role as Magistrate. What has the capital bequeathed to this institution functioned to enable or to foreclose in the time since its founding? What role did the transcontinental work of the EIC play in the trajectories of wealth and privilege that connect to and extend from its chartering?2 Such assessments have largely gone missing in our collective valuation of empire in postcolonial studies. It is surprising, in engaging a meta-analysis of the field, to be reminded that the very intellectual terrain established four decades ago to study imperialism and other forms of colonization has yet to seriously and judiciously surmise key aspects of that groundwork: the capitalist mercantilism that defines and was offered as justification for empire itself.3 And yet it is no surprise to find the roots of Ivy League institutions lodged deep in historical slavery and capitalist exploitation. The first such history, actually a student-led effort, came to the “fore in 2001 when a group of Yale students issued an independent report aimed at puncturing what they saw as the school’s selective celebration of its abolitionist past” (Schuessler 2017). Not aiming to isolate Yale, Columbia, or any single institution, note that those histories roughly align with the other Ivies, including Harvard and Brown. The “founders of Brown University, Nicholas and Joseph Brown, got their wealth by manufacturing and selling slave ships and investing in the slave trade” (Robinson 2001, 209). In 2003, the president of Brown “announced a major effort to research that school’s extensive historical ties to” enslavement in particular (Schuessler 2017). Likewise, in 2017, Drew Gilpin Faust, then president of Harvard, presided over a “major public conference exploring the long-neglected connections between universities and slavery” including Harvard’s own (Schuessler 2017). Postcolonial critics at numerous elite schools have begun taking up these matters, in the classroom and in their own research.4 Those broaching the next question—reparations—remain fewer and further between. The work collected in this book takes both questions seriously. In the face of a revisionist revival of the economics of empire, as states, universities, and liberal discourses face calls for reparations, renegotiation, and redress, the field of postcolonial studies responds by recognizing scholarship examining the growth and (re)distribution of capital as at once needed, timely, and promising. Retrieving histories of poverty and plenty explicates the continued popularity of Eurocentrist theory in economically resurgent regions of the Asia–Pacific, for example, at a time when the European project itself is teetering, when resurgent populism drives independence movements in the United States and Britain, the European continent, and the Greater China Region. #Brexit has incited independence and unification debates in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the Irish Republic that are today less nationalistic than they are economic. Hong Kong’s decolonization failed to quell

Preface  xxvii a nostalgia for colonialism that is slowly being diluted in the face of vast Chinese economic designs for the Pearl River Delta Region. The Philippines and Japan also weigh up economic and colonial obligations in light of new fiscal interventions. Founded and fueled by forms of corrupt funding, the imperialist origins of the university extend to and mark other regions created through the colonial trade routes of the British East India Company, some being benefactors of the Yale Corporation itself. As the wealth divide trends toward ever greater polarization, we take the economic histories of abundantly funded schools like Brown, Yale, Harvard, and Columbia as introductory object lessons for a larger inquiry that is global in reach and marks not just educational circuits but modern political history in the broadest possible sense. The groundbreaking, politically critical work Foner is doing, as both a historian and a pedagogue, while revealing a pedagogical dearth and filling that need, serves likewise to betray foundational deficiencies in the scholarship on imperial and anti-imperial histories. In the long past of the institution he serves, the matter of its colonial foundations had at least been understudied and under-taught if not actively concealed. We suggest that the materialist histories Foner is building with his students, and the aligned work being done at other academic institutions, is postcolonial studies—critical subsets of what ought to be thriving scholarly conversations in the field. An account of imperialist capital is ultimately (also) a history of political, economic, and educational systems as of the location(s) of culture (Bhabha 1994). But those aspects are elided or erased in much criticism considered part of this rubric. In the scholarship constructing colonial history and explicating postcoloniality, one finds an abundance of work assessing the consumption and perpetuation of Eurocentrist cultural hegemony but little analysis of the historical and political foundations that underpin and underwrite it—the amassing of property and wealth, the long-term impacts of paid and unpaid labor, the legacies of inheritance enabled by the control of trade. This has meant, to a great extent, ignoring the historical structures permitting the hoarding of capital and the tactical hindering of its accumulation, and its security once obtained, the manufacture of contemporary precarity and, as discussed in Butler’s (2004) Precarious Life, of livability, of grievability, of which bodies and which lives matter, politically and legally, historically and presently. Robert Young (2016) notes how postcolonial thinking inaugurated a “culturalization of academic knowledge” that privileged a “consideration of the subjective experiences of individuals” (8). And Cheta (2018) cites a critical need regarding patterns in the material history of empire and the lived instantiation of that as against familiar subjects of study. Imperialism and “capitalism should not only be studied from the standpoint of those who struggled to upend” or challenge them (4) but also through meta-critiques of political power and how it was garnered and maintained through both discursive and material means. This regards the “techniques” and the “microphysics” of power, to invoke Foucault (2010) here as well, but rather than such ideas being applied to government per se we bring them to bear on the life and progress of empire, procedures of states borne of and by and indivisibly tied to those of capital.

xxviii  Preface This collection advocates for postcolonial studies research aiming to answer that large and also, we believe, urgent Foucauldian query. This would be work that develops epistemologies of wealth and poverty across modernity. This would be the criticism of a scholarly, intellectual, and theoretical rationalization concerned with the material life of the early modern imperialist mercantilisms and the historicity of the global economy of late capital. It could take shape as studies that butt up against “literature’s ontological resistance to capitalism” so as to forge “new ways of thinking about literature as a commodity, literariness as an exportable ideology of creative labor” (Taylor 2018a, 246). Or we find it in analyses that place and think “cultural dynamics within the shifting dynamics of capitalism, providing crucial insights into the contemporary recomposition of capital and the contemporary recomposition of the wretched of the earth” (Taylor 2018a, 237). This project—a(nother) critique of postcolonial reason, to borrow Spivak’s frame (1999)—gathers a set of analyses as “answers” to this vision. The research collected in this volume looks at colonized regions that tend to be overlooked and it revisits sites of oppression well-documented in postcolonial criticism with the aim, now, being to trace the financial genealogies of those histories. The colonial appropriation of capital is viewed as politically and ethically exploitative in the context of international relations of the modern era, seen as the strategic production of precarity vis-à-vis the security it brings for colonizers and the impoverishment for the colonized. Such forms of postcolonial critique are perhaps more readily entertained by today’s “econocracy” (Earle et al. 2017) and in the framework of the new histories of capital taking hold in multiple scholarly conversations. One of the specters bringing us to this scholarly turning, already underway, is that we are called to “make good” on the full potential of the social justice research structure called postcolonial studies. We consider it urgent to sustain and advance the field, if for no other reason than that this framework is indivisibly “high” political. The cache postcolonial studies continues to possess in academia can meaningfully continue, we urge, especially if drawing from the field’s rootedness in contexts fueled by human rights debates around global inequality, access to education, feminism and discrimination, and the need for economic equilibration on an international scale. Such awareness impels the twenty-first century critic toward a social-justice criticism that intersects and integrates the key structures of modernity customarily treated independently—empire and capital—illustrating how they were codependently built and reciprocally sustaining while also examining the relations of power propelling, enabling, or preempting the generation of wealth. The task of the postcolonial critic now is as producer of colonial histories centered on the fiscal circuits established under empire, their status as root and stem of today’s wildly uneven distribution of wealth globally. It is to sketch the collusive concomitancy of capital in and with colonialism, reading these structural histories as linked and in a linked way, through an intersectional methodology conjoining historical and historiographical, economic and class, racial and ethnic, as well as gender and new materialist lenses together with established postcolonial and poststructuralist theories.

Preface  xxix Rather than traditional postcolonial research being seen as antithetical or mutually exclusive, we hope to transform and significantly advance the common rubrics, to show how four decades of criticism logically lead to the economic analytic urged. The Economics of Empire: Genealogies of Capital and the Colonial Encounter is a multidisciplinary intervention that aims to advance the research we’ve started to see assessing modern empire as a political economy, especially in and with capital. This multidisciplinary collection is initiated and informed by questions that arise in surveying the content and character of scholarship in and adjacent to postcolonial studies over the last roughly four decades. This work responds to the fact, as suggested, that the institutionalized study of modern era empire routinely obfuscates the tie between capital and what it is we mean in using that term. It is both a regional and a revisionist study that seeks to unpack the economic disparities produced under empire, to delineate the ­international sites and systems permitting or forestalling the generation of wealth—with and much beyond the international power relations propelling systems of education— and to capture and unpack still living strains of imperialism, often referred to as neocolonialism, that continue to haunt. We position this volume as necessary rejoinder to the reverse rhetoric, now in vogue, that seeks to prove the economic and infrastructural advantageousness for the colonies in having been subjected to colonial domination. A recent populist expression of this idea was seen by Twitter users during the #Brexit debates; a constant refrain of many “Leavers,” in the face of the seemingly recalcitrant opposition from Irish politicians who were simply trying to avoid the “hard border” at all costs, being “but have you forgotten what the Empire did for you?”5 Scholarly precedent for the approach advocated for by this volume’s editors already exists, if only recently and only nascently. Fresh developments in academia, marked by an enhanced interdisciplinarity and intersectionality, both in the abstract space of theory and in real-world institutionality, offer a space for the postcolonial to find and hone that voice, one we have (already, if imperfectly) started to engage as critics and theorists, a new language of enquiry and articulation, novel scholarly lenses that build on established hermeneutics while noticeably departing from them. Long after the heyday of postcolonial studies and the publication of a defining work like The Empire Writes Back, first appearing in 1989, note the emergence of and the momentum around subfields such as Sinophone studies, the new materialism, speculative realism, the new histories of capital, and eco-criticism. New book series—like the one in which this book appears, Postcolonial Politics, as well as Critical University Studies, Studies in World Englishes, and Focus on Global Creative Economy, to name but a small selection—are asking literary critics to reevaluate and reappraise the dimensions of their fields while adapting to the revised needs of readers and the new twenty-first century plateaus. Recent popular studies in economics demonstrate, for example, clear willingness on the part of Nobel Prize-winning economists to relate their work to cultural and artistic practices. Richard Thaler’s work (2016) in behavioral economics argues for a rethinking of the purely rational subject of traditional theory through engagement with some of the metaphors and models of literary production.

xxx  Preface The present collection lines up neatly with the work that develops a renewed “interest in capital and capitalism within postcolonial theory” (Mezzadra 2011, 154) which some are calling the new history of capital. Taylor (2018a) notes various signs, for instance, that the field has started producing work through “materialist analytic frameworks that dialectically engage the globalizing logic of capital and its relation to the concrete locales it subsumes and transforms” (244). Outstanding examples of that kind of ground-turning research include, first and perhaps foremost, the work being done under the guise of the novel and vibrant subfield of decolonial theory, an intervention representing a cogent advancement in the thinking on imperial histories by scholars in Latin American studies primarily.6 Relevant book-length studies from scholars working in other fields include Amedeo Policante’s The Pirate Myth: Genealogies of an Imperial Concept (2016). This volume is on the topic of piracy in relation to histories of imperialism. It asks: “What can we learn from the history of piracy and the ways in which it intertwines with the history of imperialism and international trade?” Policante isolates one strand in the complex fabric of imperialism, a counteragent aiming to undo it. An older book taking up a similar structural analytic is Akhil Gupta’s 1998 Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Like the present text, it synthesizes postcolonial studies both then or traditionally and the new field of today. A value of Gupta’s study is that while the lens adopted is not overtly economic, he yet takes long-standing threads from postcolonial theory and revisions in and as an economics.7 Two additional studies add profitably to the work of scholars like Gupta and Policante, studies of imperialism and capitalism that separate out specific nodes as methods for telling and theorizing those histories. I refer to Gómez-Barris’ The Extractive Zone (2017) and Karuka’s Empire’s Tracks (2019), the former framing modern-era colonization as a process of targeting terrains with the greatest potential for capitalist “mining,” that is for boosting empire’s profit margin, the latter monograph isolating the transcontinental railroad as a through-line for understanding the economic rapaciousness of empire. The decolonial approach, piracy as a through-line, a railroad system as critical thread, an u­ nderstanding of colonial territories as those best suited for capitalist extraction—this is e­ xciting new research in postcolonial studies and none of it relies upon the macro, structural binaries or other lenses routinely deployed. A handful of other publications register as instances of a new postcolonial materialism, such as Inglorious Empire (2018) by Indian M.P., historian, and novelist Shashi Tharoor. The book is truly groundbreaking in looking at the damage and loss of two centuries of British dominion over South Asia. It tabulates the cost not merely of human suffering or the cultural attenuation borne of empire but debts of capital specifically. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has done in the American context—referring to his work on ­reparations—Tharoor makes the case for ­(postcolonial) reparations in South Asia calling for symbolic forms of repair by the United Kingdom. In our shared opinion, that book is required reading for practitioners, Coates’ articles, also required reading. Certainly, we think here of a secondary text like Rutazibwa and Shilliam’s 2018 Routledge Handbook of

Preface  xxxi Postcolonial Politics and of additional recent collections, starting perhaps with Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature from the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) (2015). This book features much in the way of cogent analysis of the symbiotic hinge of empire-and-capital. A few years before that, Pollard, McEwan, and Hughes brought out Postcolonial Economies (2012) and, a few years after, Watson and Wilder published The Postcolonial Contemporary (2018). All these collections represent excellent cultivations of new and decidedly materialist postcolonial analytics for the twenty-first century. One distinction of the present volume is that it looks at the economics of empire in the framework of capital, chiefly, and brings together an international set of analyses, in terms of the range of locations, the subject of study, the location of the scholar, as well as disciplines and methodologies. Living in a society recently described as an “econocracy” (Earle et al. 2017), rather than a “democracy,” this new research at the same time returns the postcolonial to its roots, the political and economic contexts of its various locations of culture. We find such analysis in some of the “forgotten” annals of the postcolonial, research some might now consider dated. Building on Hobson’s early work, historians Davis and Huttenback (1998) argue, in Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860–1912, that the study of empire ought always to have been about its “profitability,” considered as a structure in which “economics hold center stage” (2). Scholars of empire, they say, need to concern themselves with questions like the “rate of return . . . and the flows of capital that underwrote those . . . the groups that paid the costs and those that reaped the economic benefits” (2). It was, they explain, the “potential profits” of empire that “set the rate of imperial expansion,” and indeed “it was profit that dictated the battles to be fought and the societies to be ‘rescued’ ” (5). In the transition from settler colonialism to the later administrative structures, the goal was to achieve “profits without costs” (Davis and Huttenback 1998, 8). Further back in the archive, we find a work like Semmel’s 1970 The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism. He adopts a lens much like the one we encourage, that is a view of empire as, in truth, an “Empire of Free Trade,” the word “free” being in understood, implicit quotes. This new critique is actually quite old, then, it has a longer history as a critical development that was swiftly occluded by methodologies that came to define the field and have held sway for four decades. Coming full circle, these early analyses dovetail with the recent, cutting-edge work of Chris Taylor (2018b), a scholar doing much to goad the needed shift. His article “The Plantation Road to Socialism” is a fine example of a postcolonial criticism that usefully advances this work while also building on existing tenets. Taylor (2018b) argues with and against a general view of the plantation as the “crucible of capitalist modernity” (551) by uncovering a number of post-emancipation historical fragments—discursively “pushe[d] from analytic view”—that reveal the methods by which black subalterns craft new, divergent, and radical economic structures from out of the former subjecting form. That is, “the organizational and imaginative bases of a cooperatively-governed social order opposed to market imperatives, waged labor,

xxxii  Preface and subsistence insecurity” (Taylor 2018b, 551). These individuals “poached aspects of the plantation’s institutional organization as a model for post-emancipation economic collectivity even as they refused . . . enslavement, racial terror, and dependence upon markets for land, subsistence, and wages.” This constitutes a “creative re-use of an institution seemingly impervious to such refashioning” (Taylor 2018b, 555) and at once a “plea for the historical importance, and persistent salience, of impulses not immediately namable as socialist to U.S. and hemispheric left politics” (563). Taylor offers a materialist reading of an imperial history tied inextricably to a capitalist, mercantilist modality and the methods by which those emancipated took it into their own hands, re-crafting a former injuriousness into various liberatory projects (562). He offers for consideration the idea of a “plantation against capitalism” (562) but in nonconforming neo-structures that live, participate, and plateau as part of a general economic schema and in alternative, resistant, communal ways.8 The present intervention makes multiple specific contributions to these trendsin-progress. First, we want to “keep the thing going,” to buttress, solidify, and bridge postcolonial thinking forward. Contrary to those tolling the death knell on the field, we believe it continues to serve as an effective means to produce knowledge on the economics of imperialism. Second, this volume constitutes an intervention into the theoretical articulation of the field—as opposed to postcolonial studies, broadly considered, or whatever type of work taking up empire and capital in the same space—regarding the need for a serious commitment to materialism. Third, an additional vector in the cooperative, historicized methodology put forward in this volume is the new materialism—a body of scholarship deconstructing post-structuralism or we might say deconstructing deconstruction—­which foregrounds the life, viscerality, and sway of material “things,” the props, objects, and bodies, the coins, gems, gold, or papered wealth Wilkie Collins highlighted in his materialist narrative of a magical and imperially purloined diamond. This involves a refusal to invoke the new materialism as rejoinder to the post-structural theory that has been highly influential in postcolonial thought. The rise of these approaches, first in feminist theory and broadening out from there, comprises an analogous co-mutuality in the move from entrenched materialisms to less developed, “new(er)” lenses. Now, it must be brought to bear in the application and development of more greatly materialist modalities of postcolonial reason in the twenty-first century.9 We are mindful of how this book functions differently than some recent metacritiques with regard to the need to reconsider postcolonial analytics in cooperation with the economic analysis. Rather than shunt off one from the other, these developments are best grounded in and deployed in alliance with traditional postcolonial theory. An economic accounting of the political history of modernity, chiefly that surrounding and effectuated by empire, is broad, deep, and complex. It brings the types of analyses urged by Chibber, Cleary, and Tharoor, together with already influential frames and perspectives. We acknowledge rather than rejecting—as Chibber does—the essential tenets of subaltern studies in developing a postcolonial criticism that provincializes Europe and the United States

Preface  xxxiii (Chakrabarty 2008) while developing the contention, in Žižek’s words and matching our own sense that “postcolonial theory [has] ignored the larger context of capitalist relations.” Subaltern Studies is more than the sum of Chibber’s critique and a sagacious analytic allies and aligns postcolonial theory, new and established; it takes a methodological “both/and” posture by building bridges rather than constructing polemics. The intellectual movement urged by Taylor (2018b) or the perspicacious historical accountings found, for example, in Kiberd’s After Ireland (2017), or in the application to tragedy of like questions in Eagleton’s Sweet Violence (2003), critical advances like these come about only after the originary theorizing, in this case of thinkers like Said, Césaire, Spivak, and indeed Chakrabarty. The “new” postcolonial research would attend to the experiences, legacies, and subjectivities associated with generating economic dominance and economic poverty while valuing the critical contributions of over four decades.

Structure and chapters In signifying the notion of an economics of empire we mean to evoke two historical situations. First, that the rise of capital depended on the advent of modern empire and that that structure was in turn reliant on and always instantiated by capitalism, now a global system. Second, we refer to the mechanics of these comutual risings to the privilege accumulated through capitalist appropriation by colonizing nations and to what is owed to (formerly) colonized nations, the debts accrued and which remain at present outstanding. This collection, focusing on the first assumption chiefly,10 demonstrates why those enquiries are critical today and why their study is important in twelve exemplary chapters. It embodies the type of research urged, demonstrates what that criticism looks like through analyses plotted across the globe and across modernity’s longue durée. Forging interdisciplinary, intersectional lenses, this work is grounded in the materiality of history and the use of the archive as well as in state and government sources and field research all for the purpose of extending the reading of postcolonial politics to practices of economics. It takes up a range of geographies some seeing little treatment in the criticism thus marking a clear divergence from the methodological scope for the field of postcolonial studies delineated in a work like The Empire Writes Back and other secondary sources. The contributions to this volume evaluate genealogies of capital in/and the colonial encounter using theories of orientalism, alterity, and racial and ethnic oppression in order to revise the vistas of understanding and knowledge for the field. This book’s chapters are authored by postcolonial scholars—some established, others newly minted—aiming to foreground the systems of consumption and exploitation that created and sustain socio-economic inequality and political disenfranchisement across the modern era. These critics specialize in a rage of disciplines, some having already done groundbreaking work in theirs and address questions surrounding the accumulation and exhaustion of wealth by means of the colonial encounter in Africa—Tunisia, Kenya, Ireland, Zimbabwe, and South Africa—in Asia—India, China, and Hong Kong—in regions of the

xxxiv  Preface former Soviet bloc, in Guyana and Jamaica in the West Indies, Australia in Oceania, and Ireland and Britain in Europe. Contributions to this book are multidisciplinary and cross-sectional in terms of the disciplines represented including History, Sociology, Political Science, Conflict and Development studies, Law and Legal scholarship, and with roughly half of the contributors coming from English literary studies. Taking up disparate perspectives, territories, and histories, this work verges on the boundaries of the postcolonial as accepted and practiced. We are honored, in this effort, to have the partnership of a leading postcolonial thinker, Dipesh Chakrabarty. Dr. Chakrabarty has been a critical voice, a consistent voice of reason, through the history of postcolonial studies. Given his status as “target” of the most recent, over-debated polemic—that is the extensive debates around Vivek Chibber’s polemic, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013)—who better than Chakrabarty to weigh in here and exemplify the bridge-building we see as not just helpful but essential. Chakrabarty, and others thinking and working through Subaltern Studies, has brought much to the conversation that is both highly efficacious and also at times productively controversial. Provincializing Europe (2008) is one of those prescient works that has enabled the production of much of the critical knowledge that brings us to the present mediation. His piece, a foreword titled “Postcolonial Studies and the History of Capital,” is invaluable in terms of offering a longue durée perspective on the field from someone who’s been doing this work during much of its four-decade tenure as well as highlighting the work that remains before us in the twenty-first century. In terms of the structure of the twelve content chapters, the literary critical chapters, comprising roughly half of the content, alternate with those from other disciplines. We likewise felt it useful to forego a thematic organization in favor of allowing each chapter to stand on its own or, if preferred, to be read in the light of its own geography, discipline, methodology, or other variable. However, they are arranged in an unmarked order which roughly aligns with variables that tie back to areas of inquiry under economics: trade, gender, territory, and epistemology. The thematic categorization begins with Conduits of Trade, under and within empire and the chapters by Fadem, Visana, and Slavin. A second set of essays are organized around the theme of Bodies, Capital; they view the body as a forced, coerced adjunct of colonial capital and include research by Rijswijk, Delay, and Frątczak-Dąbrowska. Chapters in the third major section, Landed Poverty, look through geographic frames at the strategic production of economic precarity in settler colonial contexts; these come from scholars Spillman, Gordner, and Gorman-DaRif. A last set of analyses, organized under the framework of Knowledge, Economies, come from Heleta, Korhonen, and the book’s co-editor O’Sullivan; all of these chapters look at the appropriation of colonial pedagogies in/and the university as the modality for imperialist economies. Again, as organized, readers are free to ignore this categorization or not. The concern running through the opening chapters, moving from England to India, then to Belfast and Johannesburg, is the linkage of trade and empire. Chapter 1 is by partition scholar and co-editor Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem. It serves

Preface  xxxv as a theoretical introduction to the book and is titled “Empire’s License: Structural Thievery and the Political Life of Appropriated Capital.” This chapter scrupulously sets up the collection for readers, developing a close reading of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone as embodiment of the form of criticism advocated for. She lays out the umbrella argument and outlines a vision for how such a criticism might look. This chapter makes the case for the theoretical symbiosis at the book’s core which Fadem casts as a historico-political “phoresy,” a non-parasitic, commensal relation between “organisms”—the socio-political systems of empire and capital—for purposes of forward transport. She illustrates why that unpacking is the most necessary postcolonial intervention today. Vikram Visana authored Chapter 2, “Decolonizing Capital: Indian Political Economy in the Shadow of Imperialism.” Visana, a historian of political thought, argues that “one of the unfulfilled tasks of colonial and postcolonial history is to account for . . . divergent forms of capitalist development.” He adopts India as a case study to show how a group of pioneering intellectuals challenged the agency of colonial capitalism by imagining alternative capitalist futures and by addressing the racial, religious, and cultural asymmetries of the colonizer and the colonized. Visana offers a critique of imperial capital that speaks through an Indian economic rubric in order to illustrate how capitalism was refashioned according to specifically Indian lifeworlds. In a clear departure from the laissez-faire “night watchman” state of its Anglo-Saxon counterpart, economic structures were specifically “Indianized” by means of an interventionist bureaucratic state. Chapter 3 is from literary critic Molly Slavin. It follows up on Visana’s focus but now in different, distant contexts. In “Criminal Cities: Economics and Empire in Belfast and Johannesburg,” she offers a careful analysis of the urban space as a “criminal city.” Focusing on Neville’s The Twelve and Beukes’s Zoo City, Slavin puts insights of the Warwick research initiative (WReC) to use especially their contention that the humanities have been too little interested in the uneven development of capital (2015). She proposes “reactivat[ing] the theory of combined and uneven development” according to “an economic system in which capitalist formations exist alongside different, usually older, methods” of economic organization (WReC 2015, 10). Slavin applies this lens to two literary worlds, arguing that to understand them as uneven requires new ways of investigating how the capitalist world-system, born of imperially generated inequalities, continues to shape urban spaces today. The next chapters encompass multiple contexts but all are considerations of the body and gender in imperial contexts. Chapter 4, “Interrogating Legal WorldMaking Through Genre: Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book and Colonial Reparations,” is from legal scholar Honni van Rijswijk. Rijswijk contributes gainfully to the dialogue in postcolonial studies through critical work on reparations regarding events from Australian history and the (still understudied) greater Oceania region. Here, she reads Wright’s The Swan Book centered on an Aboriginal girl from the Northern Territory, “the world’s most unknown detention camp.” Oblivia Ethylene is deliberately mute, refusing to speak since being raped by multiple members of her community. Rijswijk deploys this character as object lesson to re-comprehend genres of the Australian (post)colonial imaginary and to argue for

xxxvi  Preface a radical reconception of reparations. She posits the harms to Wright’s allegorical child figure, symbolizing those committed against Australia’s Stolen Generations, as “official” injuries to laws and sovereignties, thus proffering a powerful new understanding of reparations founded on personal injury. Chapter 5 by historian Cara Margo Delay is titled “Trading in Women’s ‘Troubles’: Fertility Control and Postcolonial Exchanges in Irish History.” This piece looks at case histories of Irish women faced with unwanted pregnancies. Delay details the historicities of Irish women who, to manage their reproduction, were forced to engage in material exchanges—the trade of bodies and material goods between Ireland and Britain and important (but understudied) exchanges associated with birth control in post-independence Ireland. A vital contribution to not just women’s history but to postcolonial studies, Delay’s research extends questions of postcolonial migration and exile to the generations of Irish women who traveled for abortions shedding light on how women’s reproductive lives played out through a nexus of economic exchange and postcolonial geography in ways that challenge contemporary constructions of both Irish womanhood and national identity. In Chapter 6, “Contemporary Plantation Narratives and the (Post)Colonial Memory of Capitalism,” literary critic Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska deploys Ian Baucom’s Spectres of the Atlantic to develop the claim that slaves operated within the colonial mind as allegories of wealth and material profit. She illustrates and historicizes this issue in a painstaking close reading of The Book of Night Women by Marlon James, The Long Song by Andrea Levy, and Johnson’s Dictionary by David Dabydeen. Frątczak-Dąbrowska argues that, though many colonists came from classes of economically deprived Europeans, on the other, the colonial plantation—microcosm of the colonial economy, root of the capitalist and colonial ideology—developed a sophisticated system of symbolic interdependencies in which not only slaves but all individuals in the colonial ecosystem were assigned a monetary value defining their position and their subjectivity. Each chapter in the next group carries a geographical or regional focus. Literary critic Deborah Shapple Spillman  wrote Chapter 7, “Waste Lands and Preserves: Olive Schreiner’s Ecological Allegories and Colonial Zimbabwe,” which reveals how land usage issues afflicting governments today have their origins in colonial pasts. Spillman’s chapter adds much to the conversation in retaining a focus on ecological and environmental issues while providing a powerful analysis of Zimbabwe. Working in the archive, Spillman looks at Olive Schreiner’s “Our Waste Land in Mashonaland” in which the author proposed establishing a vast natural preserve to act as “the World’s Zoological Garden” in a territory she said would “lie waste” until suitable for colonial cultivation. She cites Cooper’s note that waste was “one of the most important categories of capitalist modernity” that enabled imperialists to rationalize “the technological transformation of existing ecologies into” profit. Reading Schreiner’s narrative in relation to changes in land use and preservation, Spillman shows how conservation and capitalism joined forces to police the binary between waste and preservation. Chapter 8, “Unearthing Land and Labor Disputes in Tunisia: An Uneven and Combined Development Approach to Tribal/Management Councils,” is from political scientist Matt

Preface  xxxvii Gordner. Gordner’s contribution continues Spillman’s concern regarding the roots of contemporary land disputes in colonial and pre-colonial pasts. Drawing on the framework of uneven and combined development—what we see Slavin doing in a different way in Chapter 3—and on Chakrabarty’s (2008) notions of History 1 and History 2, he examines the role of tribal/management councils (T/MCs) in recent social transformations demonstrating how the French colonial administration co-opted the tribal myaad system of conflict resolution as a mechanism. Doing so renders explicit the ties between capitalism and imperialism: Tunisia’s post-independence regimes continued to use the T/MC as methods of controlling tribal peoples and lands during the quasi-socialist (1964–1969), liberal (1970–1985), and neoliberal periods (1986–present) while also aiming to eradicate tribal social formations. Constructing a “History 3,” he reveals how the Tunisian narrative pays heed simultaneously to the logic of global capital and to that of local politics. Chapter 9 “Derailing the Rail: Indian–Kenyan Solidarity in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction” is from literary critic, Meghan GormanDaRif. This theoretically informed analysis considers representations of Indian communities in Africa in relation to the building of a railroad line starting in 1895. Gorman-DaRif limns the line connecting colonial history to its economic valences by critically deploying a particular tropological colonial site—railroad construction as locational imperialist nexus. She shows how such sites were used as part of a wider divide and conquer strategy to consolidate imperial sway and capital itself. But Gorman-DaRif goes further, revealing the emergence of solidarities across the lines of difference. She reads Vassanji’s The In-Between Life of Vikram Lall and Kimani’s Dance of the Jakaranda arguing that, while Vassanji depicts an ambivalent relation of Indians and Africans, Kimani emphasizes solidarity, thus making a timely intervention into the imagining of multicultural African collectivities. The final analyses cohere around the theme of knowledge economies and begin with Chapter 10 authored by conflict and post-conflict recovery scholar, Savo Heleta. In “Coloniality, Knowledge Production, and Racialized SocioEconomic Inequality in South Africa” Heleta looks at coloniality as it functions through university and other knowledge systems. He argues that despite the end of apartheid, Eurocentric knowledge rooted in racist colonial education systems continues to displace other knowledges and how this remains a deliberate strategy aimed at the maintenance of white domination in and of the economy. South African academia has largely failed to critically reflect on the true roots of wealth and poverty, a process—as discussed at the start of this preface—likewise only just getting underway on some American campuses. Heleta concludes that in the struggle to dismantle coloniality and decolonize knowledge, it is crucial to re-comprehend the deployment of education as a tool for dehumanization and exploitation and a material modality of socio-economic inequality. Chapter 11, “Devalued Knowledge: Colonized Post-Socialism,” is from sociologist Juho Korhonen. Analyzing a territory and history not generally looked at—though it is trending in recent work by scholars from the region— Korhonen’s research participates in opening the borders of the field. He defines

xxxviii  Preface the colonial encounter in the context of the Soviet “empire” and Soviet satellites’ pre-collapse along with the “economic coloniality” of Western economic flows. He offers a groundbreaking treatment that imagines post-socialism as a form of postcolonial state building and explores the coloniality of peripheral states of the former Second World. It is argued that the influx of Western experts and knowledge into the former Soviet sphere was meant to replace “obsolete” local forms of knowledge production and state-making and pave the way to democratization and capitalism. Korhonen shows how this second colonial encounter devalued socialist statehood and knowledge, decoupled it from economic development, and how this double coloniality reflects the tension of a post-socialist postcolonialism. Chapter 12, by co-editor and literary critic Michael O’Sullivan, brings in the region of Hong Kong. The official Chinese Communist Party ­narrative on Hong Kong does not accept that it was ever a colony and yet for Anglophone postcolonial scholars its coloniality is clear, even if understudied, a territory that on a number of counts helpfully uncovers oversights in postcolonial thinking.11 The closing chapter, titled “Hong Kong and the Violent Sinophone: Afterlife of an Anglophone Postcolonial Discourse,” shows how the very real threat of Chinese recolonization ushered in a postcolonial nostalgia in Hong Kong whereby informal imperialist practices in administration and education have lived on long after British colonialism as Chinese recolonization settled in. He reveals how Hong Kong served as testing ground for economic practices that would lead to the multinational capitalism of the late twentieth century and its academic capitalism. The chapter concludes by looking at the economic origins of the University of Hong Kong, which British colonial authorities regarded to be an “imperial asset.” This book’s chapters are best viewed as exploratory and analytically interstitial. I believe it speaks for all contributors to this volume to say that we felt challenged and at times daunted in the undertaking, faced with creating a language again for postcolonial reason, additional language, additional lenses. This work constitutes a certain scholarly brinksmanship: the forging of a novel analytic and scholarly language that yet builds on existing work in postcolonial studies, Atlantic studies, and North–South frames while noticeably departing from established hermeneutics. We are not entirely certain how far we have come in the present collection or with regard to other scholars in similar efforts. But we are certain to have come some way and that distance, however diminutive, is significant. The discordant, far-ranging chapters of this book reflect the variety of concerns adjoining questions of a materialist postcoloniality and its knowledges, reading colonialism as an economic undertaking through historiographical, economic, racial, and (existing) postcolonial frames.

Notes 1 The video is on the bottom right of this page: https://columbiaandslavery.columbia. edu/. 2 Of interest here may be James Delbourgo’s, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (2019).

Preface  xxxix 3 Some interesting examples of this trend in recent scholarship include Pollard, McEwan, and Hughes 2012; Tharoor 2018; Policante 2016; Karuka 2019; Gómez-Barris 2017. Also see the late 2018 issue of ARIEL dedicated to this book’s topic: https:// muse.jhu.edu/issue/39455. 4 Schuessler reports undertakings at “Harvard, Princeton, William and Mary, Georgetown, the University of Virginia, Rutgers” among numerous others. 5 A spectacle dramatizing this discourse occurred on a recent episode of Good Morning Britain that position being articulated by the two hosts and the one white guest and being essentially eviscerated by program guests Jonzi D. and scholar and progressor Kehinde Andrews”: https://youtu.be/pxAcAnBZ1jo. 6 See under: Walsh (1990), Mignolo (2007, 2011, 2012), Quijano (1971), CastroGómez (2007), and Lugones (2003). See also: Catherine Walsh and Walter Mignolo,, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). A recent master’s thesis usefully applies the decolonial method in an Irish studies context: www.academia.edu/37534873/Awakening_Decoloniality_ in_Irish_Studies?email_work_card=view-paper. 7 We were pleased to see a dedicated issue of the journal ARIEL on the topic of the present volume. It is an alternative version, as a call for literary criticism strictly. This special issue is titled “Literature and Postcolonial Capitalism” and appeared in 2018, see under: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/709901. 8 Taylor (2018b) and Desmond (2019) both make the case for the modernity, rather than the pre-modernity, of the slave plantation. Desmond offers a detailed accounting of aspects of modern and contemporary institutions that find their roots on American plantations; he writes “The cotton plantation was America’s first big business, and the nation’s first corporate Big Brother was the overseer,” that figure allegorized by Toni Morrison in the character schoolteacher in Beloved. 9 See Fadem’s book on Toni Morrison’s Beloved (2021). 10 I plan to bring out a subsequent volume, Imperial Debt, for which the focus is specifically postcolonial reparations—imperial theft, debt, and repair. 11 See, in this volume, chapters by O’Sullivan, Gordner, Delay, and Hill. We were pleased to see the special issue of Interventions 20, no. 8 (2018) on Hong Kong. www.tandfon line.com/toc/riij20/20/8?nav=tocList.

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xl  Preface Chibber, Vivek. 2013. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso. Cleary, Joe. 2012. “Realism after Modernism and the Literary World System.” Modern Language Quarterly 73 (3) (September): 255–68. ———. 2007. Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland. Dublin: Field Day Publications. Collins, Wilkie. 1998. The Moonstone: A Romance. New York: Penguin Books. Davis, Lance, and Robert A. Huttenback. 1998. Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860–1912. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Desmond, Matthew. 2019. “In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation.” The New York Times Magazine, The 1619 Project, August 14, 2019. Accessed September 20, 2019. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/ 14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur. Eagleton, Terry. 2003. Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Earle, Joe, Cahal Moran, Zach Ward-Perkins, and Andrew G. Haldane. 2017. The Econocracy: The Perils of Leaving Economics to the Experts. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Fadem, Maureen E. Ruprecht. 2021. Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”: The Case for Reparations. London and New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 2010. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978—1979. London: Picador Books. Gómez-Barris, Macarena. 2017. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Karuka, Manu. 2019. Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kiberd, Declan. 2017. After Ireland: Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Krishnaswamy, Revathi. 2002. “The Criticism of Culture and the Culture of Criticism: At the Intersection of Postcolonialism and Globalization Theory.” Diacritics 32 (2) (Summer): 106–26. Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Mezzadra, Sandro. 2011. “Bringing Capital Back in: A Materialist Turn in Postcolonial Studies?” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 12 (1) (March): 154–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/1 4649373.2011.532987. Mignolo, Walter D. 2012. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2007. “DELINKING.” Cultural Studies 21 (2–3) (March): 449–514. doi:10.1080/09502380601162647. Naruse, C. N., S. Xiang, and S. Thandra. 2018. “Literature and Postcolonial Capitalism.”  Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 49 (4). doi:10.1353/ ari.2018.0027. Policante, Amedeo. 2016. The Pirate Myth: Genealogies of an Imperial Concept. London and New York: Routledge. Pollard, Jane, Cheryl McEwan, and Alex Hughes, eds. 2012. Postcolonial Economies. London: Zed Books.

Preface  xli Quijano, Anibal. 1971. Nationalism and Capitalism in Peru: A Study in Neo-Imperialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Robinson, Randall. 2001. The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks. New York: Plume. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Schuessler, Jennifer. 2017. “Confronting Academia’s Ties to Slavery.” The New York Times, March 5, 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/03/05/arts/confronting-academias-tiesto-slavery.html. Sinha, Subir, and Rashmi Varma. 2017. “Marxism and Postcolonial Theory: What’s Left of the Debate?” Critical Sociology 43 (4–5) (December): 545–58. Sorensen, Eli Park. 2010. Postcolonial Studies and the Literary: Theory, Interpretation and the Novel. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Spivak, Gayatri. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 1985. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1) (Autumn): 235–61. Taylor, Christopher. 2018a. “Postcolonial Studies and the Specter of Misplaced Polemics against Postcolonial Theory: A Review of the Chibber Debate.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5 (2) (April): 234–49. ———. 2018b. “The Plantation Road to Socialism.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 62 (4): 551–65. Thaler, Richard H. 2016. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Tharoor, Shashi. 2018. Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India. Minneapolis: Scribe Publications. Walsh, Catherine. 1990. Pedagogy and the Struggle for Voice: Issues of Language, Power, and Schooling for Puerto Ricans. Westport, CT: Praeger. Walsh, Catherine, and Walter Mignolo, eds. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Warwick Research Collective (WReC). 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Watson, Jini, and Gary Wilder, eds. 2018. The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present. New York: Fordham University Press. Watson, Matthew C. 2013. “The Poverty of Postcolonial Theory?” Postcolonial Studies16 (2) (September): 230–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2013.805466. Young, Robert. 2016. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Blackwell.

1 Introduction—empire’s license Structural thievery and the political life of appropriated capital Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem

1. Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone: (Imperial) Coin and (Colonized) Trade Authored by a British playwright and novelist in 1868, a noteworthy aspect of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone: A Romance (1998) is that the plot commences with the historical storming of Seringapatam and the raiding of a citadel there. As if a character in an invented story, in the opening pages the author names the actual figure who oversaw this attack occurring under the auspices of the British East India Company (EIC). Collins writes that this military action was led by “General Baird, on the 4th of May, 1799” (11). Indeed it had been, it was the final confrontation in the fourth Anglo-Mysore conflict. The palace at Seringapatam, looted during this incursion, had been legendary. It contained a vast store of “jewels and gold” (Collins 1998, 11). The primary aim of the assault was to sack the palace and transport its contents, without payment, to England, a bevy of vastly valuable things that would now be owned by the Crown in perpetuity. The timing of this instance of imperial thievery is significant; it took place at the very moment “the Company,” moniker for the EIC, reached its pinnacle in terms of size and power. It had become massively distended, counting among its assets around half of the wealth of the globe. For a sense of just how large the organization was at the turn of the nineteenth century, consider that when it became public knowledge, a couple of decades earlier, that it was “left with debts of £1.5m and a bill of £1m in unpaid tax owed to the Crown . . . 30 banks collapsed like dominoes across Europe, bringing trade to a standstill” (Dalrymple 2015). These events were followed by this “hyper-aggressive corporation . . . ask[ing] for a massive government bailout” (Dalrymple 2015). The EIC, as with some of today’s multinationals, was “too big to fail,” Dalrymple says, and in 1773 was “saved by history’s first mega-bailout.” Both that Collins chooses that moment from imperial history as inauguration, that he cites historical figures, place names, and events from Indian colonial history, these are salient matters in any judicious accounting of this novel. There are at least three critical inferences. First, Collins’ Victorian tale is presented as not merely story but as history, a historical novel with a narrative edifice designed to cause readers to automatically understand and “feel” it as true in the phenomenology of reading. The family paper commencing

2  Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem the story reads: “I declare, on my word of honour, that what I am about to write is, strictly and literally, the truth” (11). All parts of this tale are meticulously assigned years, given as if evidentiary, each chapter titled as if witness testimony: Prologue, “The Storming of Seringapatam (1799), Extracted from a Family Paper,” or, The Story, First Period, “The Loss of the Diamond (1848), The Events related by Gabriel Betteredge, House-Steward in the service of Julia, Lady Verinder,” and so on. All are presented as if historical documents or eyewitness testimonials, whether in the form of a letter or procured deposition. Collins is bearing witness, then, and this novel is much more than entertainment, more than romance, greater than the sum of its narrative parts. Vital aspects of the discursive work The Moonstone does—and this is my second point—include offering as central concern what the British took from the subcontinent with the EIC as chief agent. Collins represents the “wealth that was widespread in India” and “­ Britain’s power to extract that wealth” (Tharoor 2018, 13). Critical too is our remembrance that, at the dawn of the empire there, Britain “contributed less than 2% to global GDP” (Dalrymple 2015) whereas India’s “share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together:” However, by the “time the British departed . . . it had dropped to just over 3 per cent” (Tharoor 2018, 3). In part this story reminds us that in the context of empire, the term “trade” was part of a well-honed imperial doublespeak; it meant theft much of the time or, to use Tharoor and Dalrymple’s term, originally from the Hindu, “looting”: [O]ne of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: “loot.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word was rarely heard outside the plains of north India until the late 18th century, when it suddenly became a common term across Britain. Dalrymple likewise notes that “[t]o understand how it took root and flourished in so distant a landscape, one need only visit Powis Castle,” a structure “awash with loot from India, room after room of imperial plunder, extracted by the East India Company.”1 I fill in that blank differently: to understand why that Hindu term was so quickly normalized in the British nomenclature one need only study the material history of modern-era empire while not excluding the economics of it. Furthermore, and this is my third point regarding the novel’s historical nature, it is clear that Collins harbored some amount of historiographical and personal anxiety in penning The Moonstone. His language is quite particular, noticeably fastidious throughout this long, involved Victorian tale. On many pages the author betrays something like nervousness which is resisted by an equally strong will to produce the searing critique this story becomes. A perceptible tension surrounds its reading therefore: The Moonstone is not merely a historical novel, it is a postcolonial novel, and part of the work it does as a public text is to represent empire in an overwhelmingly critical way. We observe this across the development of the action in which, in the course of time, one John Herncastle—the gem’s first British thief—and his

Introduction—empire’s license  3 cousin take part in raiding the palace at Seringapatam. The document from which the details of this incursion come is the first-person account of the unnamed cousin. Just as Collins aims to expose the corrupt nature of empire, the confession of one cousin against another—the letter ostensibly “Extracted from a Family Paper,” and stood in here as Collins’ Prologue (9)—tells of the pilfering of the highly valuable stone and the committing of murder in order to get it. We do not know who disclosed these details, only that it is Herncastle’s more ethical relative, a better man who writes to the family back home in England to testify to these corrupt acts while refusing to go public with the information because, as he says, he did not see his cousin commit either crime (Collins 15–16). (Of course, that letter is written long before Herncastle bequeaths the diamond to his niece, Rachel, which itself serves as material proof.) This is an early allegory in a novel teeming with them: just as the cousin knows Herncastle did both things despite not being witness to them, the people of Britain knew what was being done in their names though most had not seen it with their own eyes. They knew among many other things that in the mid-nineteenth century the Company “ferried opium to China, and . . . fought the opium wars in order to seize an offshore base at Hong Kong” and, in turn, to “safeguard its profitable monopoly in narcotics.” They knew that “it shipped Chinese tea to Massachusetts” (Dalrymple 2015) and other expropriated goods through the colonized ports by which all trade would then take place. Every large and every small part of this story is in essence allegorical and artifactual. The many invented testimonials function to narratively symbolize Collins’ role as both a historical and an anti-colonial novelist. That is to say, he is the member of a nation-family whose criminality is, in these pages, exposed, a tale focused on an embezzled precious stone much like those filched from India by Elihu Yale.2 Collins renders the analogue not just explicit but flagrantly so: “I cannot prevail upon myself to become his accuser,” the better cousin also doing the work of imperialism writes, “[i]f I made the matter public I have no evidence but moral evidence to bring forward . . . I cannot say that my own eyes saw the deed committed” (15–16). Then he appends the comment: “Let our relatives, on either side, form their own opinion on what I have written”—the writer here being the never named cousin but by implication Collins himself—“and decide for themselves whether the aversion I now feel towards this man is well or ill founded” (16, my italics). This regards the thieving that was object and purpose of the great, celebrated undertaking called empire. In the passage it is referent for the text Collins authors, for his judgment of the British Empire, for his feeling of aversion. The Moonstone asks readers if they see what the author appears to see—the rankness of actions taken under those auspices and of its purposes—despite not being eyewitnesses. Collins’ critical object stands as symbolic representation of the economic vectors of modern empire. It is a spectacular mimesis of the direct acts of colonial thieving that occurred structurally, systematically, and globally as well as the inheritance of those many things of value by subsequent individuals—objects, enslaved persons, paper or copper money. Such inheritance legacies are unfailingly and

4  Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem focally represented in the novel through Rachel who, according to the imperialist political economy, is the current “owner” of the moonstone. In this frame it is less surprising to note that thievery is the central plot obsession in Collins’ representation, the question of who is the diamond’s true thief ringing across the novel: is it the imperial general who filched the gemstone at Seringapatam, the individual who stole it from his beneficiary, Rachel—that is Godfrey Ablewhite—, or the three Brahmins who, in the end, take it from him, in search of what was to them not a capitalist enterprise but a sacred one, thus concluding the gem’s protracted odyssey? In other structural saliencies, The Moonstone is partitioned by a border into “First” and “Second” periods, each containing testimonials of various characters as well as those of solicitors and police officials. Those major parts are in turn comprised of four subsections. Note the titles given these smaller, internal pieces in the tale of the stolen “yellow Diamond”: “The Storming of Seringapatam,” when the British take possession of the diamond; “The Loss of the Diamond,” when it is stolen from its British inheritor, Rachel Verinder; “The Discovery of the Truth,” that is of who took the diamond from her, that it was purloined by a British man and not the suspected three Indian Brahmins; and lastly, “The Finding of the Diamond,” when its reparative return to India is witnessed by Anglo-Indian character, Murthwaite (discussed later in this section). Of significance is the fact that, in each segment, that which had been looted— the diamond itself—serves as a centrifugal device for the action. Collins deploys the jewel as through-line inspiring readers to track its trajectory, plot point by plot point. His complex tale involves precisely one endeavor, one that narrowly orbits the allegorical gem it is named for: the hunt for the moonstone, a gem purloined in fact four times. First it is taken by Tippoo, Sultan of Seringapatam under the jurisdiction of the previous Moghul Empire. Collins’ central thingly agent is filched a second time by Herncastle and thirdly by another British man very like him, Ablewhite, the dishonest conniving suitor who aims to disabuse and imperil the economic and personal integrity of the stone’s female “owner”—owner, again, in the framework of the imperial economy and not the perspective of the author— but who, by cunning and a little luck, is saved from harm. These pilferings are followed by a fourth and final incident when Collins’ three Brahmins take it back from Ablewhite, murdering him in the process and restoring the gem at long last to its rightful place in a sweeping finale of postcolonial reparations. The theft and trailing of the moonstone across the novel holds the promise of a clear and convincing anti-colonial critique. That preoccupation is redolent with the idea at the center of this collection: the view of empire as a larcenous undertaking aiming to criminally wrest capital, and resources convertible to capital, from its rightful, lawful owners. Nearly every character participates in the charge to find the appropriated rock—all of the main characters, save Rachel, as well as several minor characters including the three Brahmins (12)—disguised as clowns or jugglers and who are assigned the task of its retrieval by the god Vishnu—or figures such as Detective Sergeant Cuff, multiple servants of Lady Verinder, and the rather pathetic Superintendent Seagrave. There are two reasons Collins’ ensemble cast takes up this

Introduction—empire’s license  5 pursuit: first, because, in the contemporary plot set in 1848–1849, this unique and uniquely valuable gem is, as explained, stolen—from a British woman by a British man, neither its true owner—and, second, because of its value in the two economic systems relevant for the novel. Those political economies, the European system of imperialist capital—or capitalist empire, if one prefers—and the spiritual economy attached to the diamond in the Indian cultural context, are Collins’ true concerns; that is, he is not troubled about retrieving the gem for Rachel but rather retrieving it for India by (fictionally, symbolically) forcing the British to forfeit its possession and return it. The moonstone contains great potency according to sacred dictates, namely the legend that the god Vishnu, the provider and upholder of dharma in the Hindu pantheon, had cursed the original thief; and, as familiar also from Greek myth, Collins’ narrative imagines the playing out of that curse. He takes pains to re-underscore the matter, adding in the Prologue, that, as with Indian superstitions about the diamond: “It is my conviction, or my delusion, no matter which, that crime brings its own fatality with it.” The unnamed composer of the “Extracted Family Paper” harbors a superstition of his own and, using his cousin’s aforementioned thievery as exemplary matter, he adds: I am not only persuaded of Herncastle’s guilt; I am even fanciful enough to believe that he will live to regret it, if he keeps the Diamond; and that others will live to regret taking it from him, if he gives the Diamond away. (16) Collins represents the co-mutuality of and symbiosis in the relation of imperialism and colonialism; and he suggests that empire’s licensed larceny will come to no good. Additionally, although all notable characters act as crime detectives, almost everyone is at the same time some version of a thief. The British characters, in referring to “the thief,” mean the individual who took the diamond from Rachel. The novel, however, deeply undermines this understanding. Theft becomes a play on concepts, a question that echoes not just as “who stole the diamond?” but also “who are this story’s true thieves?” Or, who isn’t a thief? There are several important notes to be made on this, perhaps the most critical that, in all the mayhem and satirical whimsy of this story, it cannot be insignificant that both British thieves providing Collins his springboard larcenies are soldiers fulfilling empire’s capitalist imperative. Herncastle is an officer who is equal parts duplicitous and greedy. The first resource he avails himself of is the gem the book is named for, an object in turn allegorizing the system he is part of. “Hern” is originally an English word, a family name that means “mythical hunter;” it has variants such as Hearne, Ahern, or Hearn. Like many a Victorian character, this one is appropriately named we see; Herncastle is emblematic of the role he plays of diamond hunter except that by attaching the word “castle” to the name it becomes dynastic, clearly signifying the idea of the Crown as if on the hunt. (Read: See in the thieving character of John Herncastle an amalgamation of the work of empire as larcenous undertaking.)

6  Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem As such, it becomes an unmistakable metonym in a book in which empire is represented as thievery and thuggishness and colonial culture as one of pickpocketing. The Moonstone amalgamates this critique in the characterizations of both Herncastle and (later) Ablewhite. The imperial critique is billeted within Herncastle, his actions, his naming, whereas the culture critique is squarely and dramatically found in Godfrey Ablewhite’s characterization—whose name even suggests an absence of morality. Godfrey is readable, especially in Collins’ Victorian episteme, as “God-free,” without God or godliness or goodness. The death by murder of Ablewhite is likewise part of the allegorical assemblage. As the one who stole the gem from Rachel, along with the latterly discovery of the true depths of his debauchery, his death is symbolic of the death or decline of the culture in response to its imperialisms and their general importance historically in the articulation of the nation-state. The first two thievings form a picture of this notion of structural pickpocketing—Mughal, British—whereas the third time it is taken, from one British citizen by another, it is then an intra-imperial, intranational crime thus suggesting the debilitating impacts of empire noted. Recall too that the first content chapter, commencing the imperial allegory, opens with a quote from Robinson Crusoe: “Now I saw, though too late, the Folly of beginning a Work before we count the Cost, and before we judge rightly of our own Strength to go through with it” (21). Other lines from the opening sequence resonate analogously, including multiple references to the ethics of recounting the events of the story for history: “Mr. Bruff thinks, as I think, that the whole story ought, in the interests of truth, to be placed on record in writing,” or “There can be no doubt that this strange family story of ours ought to be told” (21). To not “recognize imperialism” as these histories and these structures “amounts to missing out on an understanding both of colonialism and of contemporary capitalism” (Patnaik and Patnaik 2017, 6–7). That is to say, it misses the key remembrance about modernera empire derivable from Collins’ The Moonstone: its continuing mercantilist constitution in the form of capital. In these developments not only do we recognize the colonial gender politics informing Collins’ design, a valence clearly circling the figure of Rachel, but also how it opens on to an understanding of modern-era empire as a project in capitalist appropriation. I want to return to the conclusion of The Moonstone to unpack the general comment made, finally, on the critical matters outlined. The final events of Collins’ complex detective story cinch the postcolonial reading and reveal the novel’s radical, anti-colonial core. This is clearly felt, first, in the way that the story does not close in London or on the island of England at all, but ends in India, and, without a single British person on the scene. Although the narrative proper had taken place entirely within British shores, it ends with a dramatic globalizing gesticulation, one that, in line with Spivak’s reading of Frankenstein, highlights the novelist’s choice not to contain the stone the book is named for, the critical object representing capital and empire is lost to the empire in the end. This lines up with Shelley’s choice to free and not capture her novel’s protagonist known only as the “daemon;” it aligns with the disposition also of Morrison’s Beloved at the close of the novel named for that character. Both key figures in

Introduction—empire’s license  7 those novels are left as Shelley wrote “in darkness and distance” (Spivak 1985a, 162) as is, we come to see, Collins’ critical gemstone. The Moonstone deliberately “fails” to contain that stone for the empire—that is to say, Collins returns it to its rightful owners and is unsuccessful also in apprehending the three Indian men who retrieve it finally, that is, who “steal” it back, though not precisely, from the one who stole it from Rachel. The Moonstone is a postcolonial novel but an unusual one in that it is politico-economic to its core. Unlike most, Collins’ story represents empire’s economic imperative, its defining role in the rise of capital, while also suggesting that these events can be addressed and redressed. Not only is the diamond lost by the British figures who, if only from the imperial vantage, are its owners, it is followed all the way back to the local—or we might say the “glocal”—location from which it originated. This undertaking is object lesson for and nucleus of Collins’ book; it is that process—pure fiction since it has never come to pass—he takes us to finally, concluding the novel with a global allegory of imperial reparations. Collins gives his reader a final “extra” epilogue which is, in this reading, the single most critical part of the novel. It spectacularly performs the repair of empire’s injuriousness in returning the moonstone to India. This tale of imperialism and its stolen property symbolically overturns empire’s imperative; it redefines modernity’s tablet of commandments regarding who and what matters. In turning the page, from 463 to 464, expecting to find it blank, expecting to breath that sigh of relief one exhales upon finishing a long, winding, happily ended novel, yet there is yet more: “Epilogue: The Finding of the Diamond.” The reader is certain that the novel had ended with the “Eighth Narrative” because Gabriel Betteredge, Collins’ dominant voice, had earlier announced it as being definitely finished and final: “I am . . . the person who is left behind, as it were, to close the story up” (462). And lastly: “When this is said, all is said. Ladies and gentlemen, I make my bow, and shut up the story” (463). Indeed, the surprising case of the pilfered yellow diamond offers readers a treble ending: three last and final testimonials following its previously announced end. The first is by “Sergeant Cuff’s Man,” the second by the sea captain who ferried the three “suspicious” “Hindoos” to freedom. Finally, is the narrative that actually does close the novel, the epistle of a minor character we do not expect to reappear and certainly do not anticipate being the one to bring Collins’ masterful epic to an end. That is Murthwaite, the Anglo-Indian figure mentioned earlier who immediately describes himself on these closing pages as a “semi-savage” (469), that is to say a brown man, who gives himself “out as a Hindoo-Boodhist, from a distant province, bound on a pilgrimage” (470). He continues the self-description: “that I know the language as well as I know my own”—he is British, his mother tongue is English, yet: I am lean enough and brown enough to make it no easy matter to detect my European origin . . . I passed muster with the people readily . . . as a stranger from a distant part of their own country. (470)

8  Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem Murthwaite amalgamates and allegorizes not only the colonizer and the colonized but also the conceptual space between colonialism and nationalism, between empire and capital, between the ideal and the material concerns in the study of modernity in his special knowledge and final tacking or stitching, by Collins, to the fate of the diamond.3 He is the figure in this novel comprising a version of Lloyd’s (1993) “adulteration,” a radically assimilated character present in many postcolonial novels through which the text “insists . . . on a deliberate stylization of . . . inauthenticity, a stylization of the hybrid status of the colonized subject as of the colonized culture, their internal adulteration” (110). Murthwaite’s presence in this novel scrambles the binaries of the colonial, and yet he is also deeply consequent in terms of the final globalizing gesture and the political economy developed in The Moonstone. What Collins essentially gives readers in this, the true closing, is a transformation of the subject of empire and a deconstruction of the system: a brown British English-speaking citizen is converted symbolically into, is playing the part of, an Indian on a Hindu pilgrimage; and, the pilgrimage is one of postcolonial reparations for a past criminal injury committed under the auspices of empire. At the time, Murthwaite had been traveling around the subcontinent only to stumble upon first a pilgrimage and then a celebration. This path he seems instinctively to follow as if his intuition knew there was some impelling reason to take that route and not another; as he walks people start to collect around him, first in small trickles, then in larger numbers and thus does he realize that he has, after all, been headed in the direction of something monumental. And it is only because he follows that path that readers come to see, indeed to witness, the postcolonial reparation, to see the precious gem pilfered by the empire lost again by the empire—again: “‘lost in darkness and distance’ ” (Spivak 1985a, 162, quoting Shelley)—returned to the location and nation from which it was taken. More than that, however, they see it reinstalled in the religious statue from out of which it had been carved by a representative of the earlier Moghul Empire: [T]here, in the forehead of the deity, gleamed the yellow Diamond, whose splendour had last shone on me in England, from the bosom of a woman’s dress! . . . after the lapse of eight centuries, the Moonstone looks forth once more, over the walls of the sacred city in which its story first began. (472)4 Murthwaite happens upon all this and by this means Collins performatively assembles and presents the reparation: the return of the absconded diamond to its rightful owner, a rock worth much in the way of capital, taken by not one but two capitalist empires. And everything is, as it were, deconstructed in these culminating movements. There is yet more to these final developments, however. Collins wasn’t finished recuperating for India that which had been purloined in the name of empire but goes further than even the politically rich denouement above outlined. The postcolonial reparation redoubles and a treble truth emerges in the way that the three Brahmins are brought into a process of caste reconsolidation, a “purification

Introduction—empire’s license  9 by pilgrimage” (471). Collins does not explain this, but part of Hindu practice involves a forfeiture of caste if the individual leaves the shores of the subcontinent and crosses the water; in taking to the sea, a Hindu traditionally loses their spiritual, cultural place in the order of things as it were. The three Brahmins of The Moonstone do exactly that, if in service of the god Vishnu and in line with those sworn duties. However complex the notion of caste reconstitution, still, that status had been lost and is repaired in this novel’s second reparation. Collins’ suggestion is that the spiritual purification of the three Brahmins, as with much of the novel’s content, is allegorical: it pertains, through a strange reversal, to that which remains outstanding still on the part of the British state and its imperialist–­ capitalist history. He was evidently concerned, in the middle of the nineteenth century, about the long-term impacts of the imperial structure, its various farflung systems on both those victimized by it and on his own people. What would those legacies be, he seems implicitly to ask, the inheritances that would be felt long after 1868 when this novel was first serialized? The analogue in this instance is, I think, quite clear: in crossing the water so as to colonize the globe—that is to commit massive and widespread theft while also committing numerous crimes against humanity—Collins seems to suggest that the British lost something sacred even as they gained much in the way of material wealth. What they lost was greater, he seems to imply, something touching the soul of the culture. But this, too, he likewise infers, may be reparable through procedures of reparation, a kind of postcolonial “purification” that would involve wealth redistribution and other forms of large-scale repair vis-à-vis former and present British colonies.

2. A critique of postcolonial reason: the phoretic relation of empire and capital The postcolonial reparation is, in a certain way, the entire point of The Moonstone. Wilkie Collins brilliantly demonstrates what Edgar Allan Poe once called the “single effect” of a finely wrought tale: the imperialist structure is at once lampooned, provincialized, and transformed, empire is a strategy of thievery carried out by avaricious men in search of nothing more “honourable” than coin and who observe little in the way of limitations on how they would obtain it. The Moonstone is particular in its attendance to colonial theft and debt as to the decisive but nearly erased reality of imperialism in its lived, material, and inextricable relation to capital—the “Government” as hinged to the “Company.” It constitutes a critical instance of postcolonial representation composed through a deep concern with the symbiotic relation of imperial colonization and mercantilist capital. The history of empire is not merely commensurate with that of capital; rather it has, from its inception, existed in a commensal and what I see as a “phoretic” relation to capital. The term phoresy is from the Greek: phor or thief, phoras or bearing, as with a vehicle of transport bearing something onward. It refers to a cross-species form of symbiosis that is analogued, in this reading, by the political and the economic. In this type of symbiotic relation, the symbiont is more precisely a “phoront,” meaning the organism of a distinct species or biological “other” that participates

10  Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem in the cooperative relationship. An “other” bears the organism forward in a critical conveyance and is now analogically applied to, say, the concept of development or alternatively to world systems theory, or, more broadly, to the rise of capital and the rise of modern empire which, though distinct systems, were symbiotically inter-reliant. Though the structure of imperialist capital was engaged in a parasitic symbiosis to the colonized, its people, trade, resources, geography, its relation to capital was rather a politico-economic, comutually sustaining phoresy. Dalrymple speaks to this symbiosis of government (empire) to company (industry and the capital it produces) in recalling the words of Horace Walpole. In 1859 Walpole rhetorically asked: “What is England now? . . . A sink of Indian wealth.” Around that time it had been “announced that the Company’s Indian possessions would be nationalized and pass into the control of the British Crown” (Dalrymple 2015, my emphasis). The idea of thievery living etymologically in the term phoresy is suggestive of the Homeric obsession with otherness, the appearance of a stranger assumed to infer a threatening or antagonistic presence, as if the phoretic other is an outsider there to burgle or cause other injury much the way the British Empire made off at a certain point with the treasury of Bengal. The “entire contents of the Bengal treasury were simply loaded into 100 boats and punted down the Ganges from the Nawab of Bengal’s palace to Fort William, the Company’s Calcutta headquarters” (Dalrymple 2015). The notion of a feared pilfering would have been precisely factual if applied to the imperial other: empire’s role was indeed the “phor” and the “phoras” of the term, a thief-bearing enterprise as we see. A kinship of thievery then, the nature of the two systems defining modernity being corroborative, their relation to the peoples and territories they sought to conquer appropriately understood as bloodsucking. All these registers ring, all are key inferences in Collins’ The Moonstone. What is more difficult to grasp is that the analytics common to postcolonial literary criticism make little room for a postcolonial reading of this novel. Indeed, though we might have seen scores of such interpretations, Collins’ story has seen scant engagement in the field. Though it may be one of the most incisive, politically cogent postcolonial novels in English, I find only three articles that fit, unquestionably, into this rubric.5 No familiar lens straightforwardly enables the postcolonial critic to tease out, iron out, or otherwise meaningfully unpack this novel’s rather obvious status as the means of a literary postcoloniality. Postcolonial studies is simply not addressing the questions that prompted Collins’ penning of The Moonstone, such as what happened to the Bengal treasury Dalrymple tells us had been filched in its entirety? Where did it go, to whom, and where next in terms of inheritance? What did it build or buoy or found, how was it deployed as a means to suppress? Despite these forms of silence, my grandiose statement—that The Moonstone is, without caveat, one of the most incisive, politically cogent postcolonial novels in English—is easily defended. The novel serves as answer to Cleary’s (2012) question about the political potential of novelistic realism, that is “whether European realism could ever intellectually grasp the totality of capitalist social relations without intellectually addressing imperialism in both its domestic and geographically distant manifestations” (259). It cannot, and an

Introduction—empire’s license  11 1868 Victorian novel—a notable artifact from the cultural production of Britain— stands as object lesson shoring up that truth. The reading Cleary searches but does not find is the analytic vista this story summons and also does not see purchase in. It is not until we alter or augment the lenses of the field that such a critique authentically commences.6 Cleary (2012) continues: “postcolonial studies has not only often ignored postcolonial realisms,” it has “lacked intellectual criteria by which to evaluate postcolonial modernisms and magic realisms” (265–66). Collins’ novel, as a clear instance of nineteenth-century realism, shines a light on this deficiency, and that is the issue at hand in the present volume. The novel’s prominent placement here, as opening gesture for the book, indexes a still necessary meta-critique around the failure to accommodate relevant work. There is much more to say about Collins’ novel; however, the close reading offered above in truth serves as entrée to this chapter’s look, commencing now, at four decades of postcolonial reason and, in the piece following this section, at the case made for its continuation, sustainment, and growth in fruitful, urgent, and also revised directions. Looking at postcolonial studies scholarship as against the phenomenon of modern empire, recognize the veracity of Cleary’s observations outlined earlier. That is to say, appreciate how limited postcolonial enquiry has been, how many relevant matters have not been routinely, or in a recognizable way, considered, researched, or theorized. Various territorial and national histories remain off radar, such as the watershed moment surrounding the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the concomitant breakup of the Soviet Union. Despite that that history was consequential to the genesis of the field—that is, the “late capitalist and post-Cold War conditions within which postcolonial theory thrive[d] and reproduce[d] itself as a form of knowledge” (Workman 2016, 159), the “key moment that precipitated [its] rise to stardom” (Sinha and Varma 2017, 4)—note the dearth of work touching that time or viewing Russia as an imperializing as opposed to a Cold War power, or as both. Regions in need of consideration include Ireland, Palestine and Israel, and parts of Africa and Asia (Tunisia, Hong Kong, others). Armenia and Cyprus are likewise little treated despite shared histories of Turkish colonization, an instance of imperialism largely ignored in this research tablet. The island of Ireland, off the coast of Europe, sees much postcolonial critique within Irish (area) studies but precious little outside. Carroll and King published Ireland and Postcolonial Theory in 2003 and Graham Deconstructing Ireland in 2001 but this analytic-territorial join remains largely undetectable generally. The histories and geographies perceived to fall within the aegis of the field are too few, the range of analytics too narrow. Why do critics not ask, for example, what historical circumstances created the situation whereby Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy was sustainable for a mere thirteen years? Why do we not find anticolonial critique regarding the full map of modern empire, everywhere it lived and thrived and where it tried but failed to? The field’s incomplete scope was cemented owing to the vastly popular The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft 2002). Still today, thirty years on—a text seen for long as the “Bible” of postcolonial studies—the constrictive structure of the field as represented there continues to prevail. Likewise, all the macro, binary, cartographic lenses—the hemispherical

12  Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem Orientalism, the Global South, the Atlantic paradigm—while all highly useful in different ways, function simultaneously to hobble and delimit knowledge. Pervasive compression in terms of the subject of study has led to an overdetermination by particular theoretical nodes, socio-political issues, and national or continental geographies. This means in turn a too-limited definition of research areas for postcolonial studies faculty. And it explains why a novel like Collins’ is not picked up, one that may be thought genre fiction, a “detective story” about locating the individual who stole property of great value from a British woman, “capital” that unquestionably belonged to her. But that plot line is only chimerical, it porously and imperfectly veils the true story, that of the diamond itself which as suggested is trailed from end to end, designed to be traced in that way too by readers. Of course, Collins’ subtitle adds fuel to the misunderstandings because he suggests it as a romance rather than the serious, sober treatment of imperial history it constitutes. Far beyond titillation, a correct outline for this narrative sees its subject as the grandiose imperial thievings turned to capital, retained still by the colonizing nation, and bequeathed either by the state or by individuals like Elihu Yale. The Moonstone offers a critique that is neither ordinary nor expected: it represents a searing, intensely stark view of British imperialism. Collins’s historical novel may appear to be crime fiction but it goes so far as to include the postcolonial reparation, a development almost every cherished novel broadly considered “postcolonial” fails to enact or even to broach. It has gotten overlooked because, as suggested, there persists an “inadequate connection between the field and the state of the world” (Sinha and Varma 2017, 9), between the fact, for example, that the British Empire was built through the granting of licenses to trade that were in truth licenses to steal. The imperial charterings were equally, coincidingly capitalist charterings: they included both the payment of significant tithes to the Crown as well as express provisions for the waging of war in the pilfering of other nation’s resources, in the gaining of control over their trade routes, and in the procurement of cheap or chattel-enslaved labor, which is to say “looted” labor. In addition to concerns of geographic coverage, postcolonial studies has paid scant attention to the economics founding the rise and fall and neo-rebirth of modern empire. And this means that our comprehension of the very nature of modernity’s imperialisms is actually still in play, still under articulation and sorting. Watson and Wilder (2018) ask what revisions or reworkings of postcolonial methods are needed today in order to grasp the political and economic present. This is precisely the matter at hand; however, it is larger still in that the task regards grasping the past also, more cogently, more inclusively. The story of capital is, as generally recounted, that familiar tale about the evolution of urban life and advent of a bourgeoisie; but it was much more than that and it is the role of and tethering to empire which, far beyond postcolonial studies, gets routinely overlooked. The “origins of capitalist modernity remains a relatively unexplored omission within postcolonial thought” (Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2017, 36), yet the “ ‘crisis of capitalism has been a material precondition for the full flowering of postcolonial studies’ ” (Sinha and Varma 2017, 4, quoting Lazarus). In the tenure of the field, note the absence of work unpacking capital and its palimpsests,

Introduction—empire’s license  13 its proliferation or scarcity, its hoarding, theft, or drought. This is what Sinha and Varma (2017) mean in suggesting that the sharpness of postcolonial research has been “dulled by its . . . limited political horizon” (9), that the “heterogeneity of subjects” under study (Sinha and Varma 2017, 2) and the “lack of interest in Marxist . . . modes of analysis has contributed to the banality and loss of critical potential” for this field in the last two decades (Workman 2016, 158). Taken as a whole, these intermissions in postcolonial thought reductively simplify the research, flattening it like the flat character Miss Clack in Collins’ novel. Graham’s periodization divides the history of the field into major eras that roughly concur with my understanding. A first highly nationalist phase, starting with Said, Césaire, Fanon, in which the nation is “the logical and correct outcome of the process of anti-colonial struggle”; a second moment, influenced by Subaltern Studies, when the nationalism of postcolonial reason came under critique and the focus shifts to the inherent unevenness of it and to the margins of the “postcolonial world of nation-states”; and finally the moment of the liminal in which “imperialist ideology [is] figured as neurotic and uncertain rather than bombastic and unshakable” and the concern becomes “cross-cultural movements rather than . . . simple cultural dichotom[ies]” (Graham 2001, 82–85). All this wends for Graham (2001) around to the ultimate “failure” of the nation-state as a structure of modernity—as articulated in Deane’s work or in other ways by Eagleton—the “conceptual leap from the nation into whatever comes next” (87–88). It is telling that he wrote those reflections in 2001 and that since that time we’ve seen little augmentation of the kinds of lenses that could prove efficacious in reading of a work like The Moonstone.7 The scarcity of new methodologies— though there are some8—has meant obfuscating the historical hoarding of capital under empire in the very research modality designed for its unpacking. Workman (2016) says postcolonial theory largely “forgoes a critique of contemporary capitalism for the sake of an analysis of oppression focused on colonial dynamics” and that what needs to be “confront[ed] is the relationship between its objects of study and the form of capitalism in the historical present” (157). And, I add, in the historical past as well. We encounter a not thorough enough or enough sustained articulation in and with economic policy, economic history, economic ethics, industry and business ethics, reparations and other questions touching capitalism and mercantilism. It is thus crucial to, for example, articulate how “Britain’s industrial revolution was built on the destruction of India’s thriving manufacturing industries” (Tharoor 2018, 5). The better term here is colonization; the British imperial structure colonized Indian manufacturing, materialities routinely shorn in published critique. That problematic stems from the organization of knowledge, such as it is, and the structure of the academic systems that produce it. To be clear, the opposition at issue is not one discipline (English, say, or History) vs. a methodology (the postcolonial); rather it is that the field, as perceived, is dominated by too few disciplines. And these are not merely historiographical matters or as yet undeveloped hypotheses, they are disciplinary enquiries too. They regard postcolonial theory and, with that, the representation and execution of postcolonial studies as a field

14  Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem (publication, teaching, syllabi, etc.). If we list only, say, the ten or fifteen leading scholars, by surveying articles published in Interventions or Postcolonial Studies or ARIEL, we find clear consistencies: a distinct lean in to the humanities— except, too few of its disciplines—including the social sciences. In postcolonial studies courses, most faculty do not teach the history of capital as part of the history of empire, they do not usually teach research coming out of Economics; almost no one teaches Ireland outside Irish studies or counts such expertise as valid in searches for postcolonial faculty. In Economics we find much in the way of the new intervention envisioned, research into the politico-structural symbiosis of empire and capital. A robust conversation has been taking place there for some time. But where and how is that work brought to bear on the scholarship widely regarded as “postcolonial”? Here we uncover one more constraint: fieldwork comes from not just too few disciplines, it is likewise disciplinarily partitioned, English from Economics, History from Food Studies.9 Such critical linkages do not telegraph, the gaps are not bridged. In this, Taylor (2018a) is right to remind us that “postcolonial studies has never been identical with the historicizable body of work canonized as ‘postcolonial theory’ ” (249). However, it is critical to index the absence of interdisciplinary translation in the research into empire and the capital it existed to procure, not to mention how that endeavor—empire’s amassing of capital stolen from the colonies across modernity—actually defines modernity. Were the array of territories or analytics embraced more multiple, this partitioning would in turn destabilize. In our attempts to know and challenge oppressive discourses and consolidated hegemonies, the knowledge is parceled, pried, prised apart, disciplinarily siloed, existing as if preaching to its own choir of analytic systems. That situation produces epistemological blindnesses and the challenge is to recognize and formulate the missing pieces in our abridged hermeneutics through interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, comparative, inter-field, and (outstandingly) intersectional methodologies. Across four decades much time and energy was expended on the twin tasks of the postcolonial meta-critique (such as I offer here, once again) and on the polemical debates in the field. We have seen vociferous back-and-forths about what postcolonial studies ought to be and do, disputes organized around a few ideas, the largest share being the Marxist vs. postcolonial theory quarrel. Critics have taken issue with the fact that poststructuralist perspectives have held sway in the articulation while the economics of empire are habitually curtailed. These Marxist assessments claim, rightly, that postcolonial theory has failed to read “colonialism as part of the historical unfolding of capitalism”; it has looked instead at the perpetuation of cultural othering and how colonial hegemony was discursively constructed and spontaneous consent achieved; it has read empire in other words “in civilizational rather than historical” or high political terms (Rao 2017, 587–88). Cleary (2007a) explains that the field “provokes so much controversy” precisely because it has been “ill-defined” (39–40). He thinks through the more comprehensive framework of “Empire Studies” and suggests that the issue is twofold: the “privileg[ing] [of] cultural diversity over a commitment to

Introduction—empire’s license  15 economic redistribution” along with a “textualist approach to imperialism that lacks purchase on the economics of empire or underdevelopment” (Cleary 2007a, 40). Rao (2017) sees an even more serious problem noting that some work can be viewed as “repudiating capitalism’s foundational role in history” owing to an all too common “valorization” of “hybridity and cosmopolitanism . . . —that best served the needs of a relentlessly mobile late capitalism” (587–88). This is a weightier point than it might seem in that it implies that postcolonial theory, in certain of its fabrics, acts as not merely bourgeois discourse but as colonial discourse itself. For Workman (2016) too, having left “behind its initial interest in Marxism,” this research field got chiseled into a criticism of: [p]oststructuralist platitudes about the virtue of fragmentation and the danger of totalizing theories, and . . . a Marxist approach that sees fragments and difference—as well as identities . . . as having a conciliatory relationship with the social totality constituted by capital. (156) Workman’s remembrance brings up yet another saliency: that postcolonial theory has always been deeply influenced by Marxian paradigms. What is not there, for the most part and specifically, is the critique of capital, elaborations of the life and materiality of capital under empire. This matter has little or no bearing on what is discussed in most analyses. The articulation is characteristically truncated, a kind of blindness one side to the other. Recently, these debates convene around Chibber’s 2013 polemic, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. There, he joins numbers of critics, including the present author, in forwarding a view that postcolonial studies—that is, the criticism, the theory, and the dissemination of those materials and knowledges—has failed to develop a full or sustained Marxian analysis. Chibber (2013) argues that Subaltern Studies, in “separat[ing] the concept from its referent” (25), has gotten the economics wrong by presuming that the social order of the Global South was unsuited to the standard model of European capitalism. He writes that once we [g]enerate a more accurate analysis of European modernization, the apparent deviation of the East from some putative norm is revealed as chimerical . . . the political conflicts, institutional setups, forms of power, and other factors in postcolonial capitalism turn out to be not so very different from those of its European ancestor. (24) Notwithstanding numerous positive responses, this polemic galvanized much in the way of (sometimes even vitriolic) disparagement. Taylor (2018a) strongly critiques Chibber, pointing out that his argument adds up “to a thrice-told tale” (234)—in his own words: that “postcolonial theory mystifies the dynamics of capitalism; that poststructuralist anti-essentialism converts into a culturalist essentialism; that thinkers of difference are the real Orientalists.”

16  Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem At issue for others is that Chibber’s exegesis regarded really only one branch, Subaltern Studies, representing it as “synecdoche for postcolonial theory” (Workman 2016, 160, emphasis added). Workman (2016) says the “claim that only in subaltern studies do we find anything conceptually and empirically substantial to evaluate . . . says more about his unwillingness to work through arguments . . . than to the true exemplarity of the group” (159). Dhawan (2018) goes further, challenging Chibber’s entire premise: “If, as claimed . . . the logic of capital is indeed universal . . . then how can one explain the great varieties of capitalism”— a focus of Subaltern Studies—the many “sections of society which capital’s universal logic failed to assimilate?” (106)10 And, Sinha and Varma (2017) add richly to these awarenesses: [P]ostcolonial theory . . . had made productive use of notions of contingency, incommensurability, ambivalence and hybridity in order to take down the grand narratives of colonialism and cultural essence (and less frequently capitalism). It has offered trenchant critiques of nationalism and Eurocentrism, modernity, class formation, identity, and revolution based primarily on methods and principles drawn from poststructuralist theory. Thus while Marxism provides an overarching analysis of capitalist society, postcolonial theory’s analytic approach has been largely premised on deconstructing what it considers to be the overarching power of Western capitalism, imperialism and “modernity.” (3) Telling are the two references to capital here, the problem being the inclusion of the word “capitalism” in that final sentence whereas the parenthetical statement, qualifying it with the words “less frequently,” is a more correct representation in this historiography. In truth, the “unfortunate terms of this debate . . . make Marxism and postcolonial theory appear at odds by way of a set of old colonial binaries” (Workman 2016, 157)—with which we are already familiar—and the “conditions that sustained such a binary . . . no longer obtain” (Taylor 2018a, 249). This is all to say that the problem is both larger than suggested and also more optimistic, the future of a reinvented postcolonial theory being actually quite promising.11 The critiques, whether debates or not, have been ongoing from the start, since at least In Theory (appearing first in 1992) or other seminal texts like Bartolovich and Lazarus’ collection appearing a decade later, Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (2002), or Ellen Meiksins Wood’s Empire of Capital published a year later.12 Taylor (2018a), for his part, refers to this research terrain as a “polemic-ridden map” (248) and Graham (2001) speaks of selfcritique as “inherent in . . . postcolonial theory,” including in its Irish guises of Field Day and historical revisionism (82). Tharu (2007) describes postcolonial studies as “exceptionally self-reflexive”; she says “half the pages in any reader discuss the field itself. Postcolonial studies is exercised about its constituency, mode, who it speaks as or for” (643). That scholars have been wary of touching imperialism’s third rail—capital and empire as phoretic systems—is ironically,

Introduction—empire’s license  17 a specific effect of colonial discourse, its historicism, its humanism. The denials and erasures that define colonial discourse bleed over into research efforts aimed at challenging it, our scholars’ minds appearing colonized in precisely the way Ngũgĩ has explained the phenomenon.13 The consistent engagement of a self-reflexive polemical criticism in combination with a too restrictive scope, on several sides, all this recommends postcolonial studies itself as a(nother) nervous condition. To hazard a guess, the issues outlined may stem from the political nature of this rubric, its potential as a truly radical intervention. The subject matter of the postcolonial is not a region or territorial swathe or a body of water; it is empire in fact. And the anxiety of authorship discussed by postcolonial literary critics, recognized in writings by novelists, poets, and playwrights, is echoed in the scholarly writing of the critic.14 This is clarified in stepping back to gain a larger perspective on this field historiography-in-progress. The 1950s and 1960s saw inklings of a scholarly movement toward the critique of empire, a thawing out of the “forever” scholarly silence on it in the coming to voice—and importantly to publication—of influential thinkers like Fanon, Césaire, Sartre, and Memmi, a few exemplary figures from this early nascent moment. Then, just over forty years ago, Said published his landmark Orientalism (1978). Recall that, in the late 1970s—the dawn of the post-Civil Rights moment when the strategies to roll back its progressive gains were likewise initiated, 1978 is the year the wheels of mass incarceration started churning—it was still dangerous for Said to take on imperialism in the ways he did in Orientalism and later in Culture and Imperialism (1994). When that book appeared, it was still risky, still seen as offensive even and even unscholarly, to “complain” about Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, to criticize it in what was in truth the relatively timid suggestion that the novel had since 1814 been doing the work of empire, consolidating the capital amassed, justifying not only savage economic violence but the imperialist project at large. The moment he entered the conversation on English literature, the “event” that was Edward Said, the discursive tearing he constituted on behalf of knowledge15—a “tremor that [broke] into the discourse” (Morrison 1992, 9)—represented a seismic shift in the critical landscape of the late twentieth century in terms of the silences: what the critic can say, what scholarship can be or offer, assess or theorize. The genesis of this field occurred, in other words, at a time when Spivak felt compelled to state, in commencing her brilliant essay “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985a), that it “should not be possible to read n­ ineteenthcentury British literature without remembering that imperialism . . . was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English” (235), and critically to the colonies. Such remarks today sound, feel, strike us as redundant; however, they were necessary, compulsory even given the state of English literary studies at that time and in all the time before. The point is that she initiated this work by announcing the presence of a silence within the intelligentsia with regard to the word and the deed: “imperialism.” Postcolonial studies had its genesis from out of a language and speech abyss. Spivak (1985a) had to go on then and redouble the assertion, set there as a kind of podium into or preamble for her speech

18  Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem act, the statement that those “obvious ‘facts’ ” had been routinely “disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature” (235). That is, she iteratively demarcates the silence she had just then, in the previous sentence, underlined. There wasn’t a single individual who didn’t already know that and yet, it had not been said. And it had to be said in order for the work of genuinely and scientifically and critically assessing empire—her “Critique of Imperialism”—to commence. For the postcolonial critic circa 1985, seven years after Orientalism, the silence continued. It remained obligatory to defend the argument before the fact by offering rhetorical scaffolds on the order of a medieval edifice—like those of Chaucer in Canterbury Tales or Christine de Pizan in The Book of the City of Ladies—narrative constructs that protected the author from the charge of having been ill-behaved or outright hegemonically lawless. Pizan had only written down a dream she’d had about a different constitution, life, world for women; Chaucer was not offering a surprisingly modern wholly incisive radical critique, certainly not a denunciation of Christian hegemony, he had merely recorded what others on a pilgrimage had said aloud, had done, a pilgrimage he took part in making him a doubly protected, good penitent. Collins includes a comparable gesture in putting his content off on to his characters, each installment presented as if a historical document as if discovered through research, each listing the date and author and none being Wilkie Collins. Spivak’s is a similar chainmail, her rhetorical declarations protections that were to stave off not a literal beheading or the cross burning of that most tragically misbehaving female, Jeanne d’Arc but that of the scholar who anticipates the eviscerating review, the lambasts to her integrity or the integrity of her research, the failed tenure bid—the work “scorned as ‘biased,’ ‘inflammatory’ and ‘improbable’ ” like the slave narratives too had originally been (Morrison 1998, 187).16 Spivak concludes the essay by returning yet again to the silence that long preceded her, Said, and Fanon. She said the “critic must turn to the archives of imperialist governance” in order to “reopen the epistemic fracture of imperialism without succumbing to a nostalgia for lost origins” (1985a, 254, emphasis added) and in response silencing the critique of imperialism. The nostalgia for empire, an affect that would continually resurge for as long as the capitalism built together with it thrived. This brings us to today. That is the postcolonial condition as it surfaces in the criticism itself. It is good, in this, to remember the silence. The silence on empire, on capital, on all the thievery. Across more than four decades, vital progress was made, new knowledges produced, silences ended to the point at which Spivak’s declaratives are no longer necessary—and in no small part owing to her. At once, because of its momentousness, its radical promise, its critical anxiety—postcolonial studies as nervous condition—this new criticism thrived but also got promptly organized into a narrow (that is to say a controllable, safe, not too threateningly radical, emancipatory) shape, one that as noted would see little development, transformation, or augmentation. That is, until (almost) now. Obviously vast detail has been left out of this bare-bones look at the genesis of the field. And it is true, as is likely clear, that others are saying and have made similar arguments. Yet it all feels necessary to say here, in this way, at this juncture. Why did Chibber’s critique spur the

Introduction—empire’s license  19 upswell it did? One salient point we take away is an awareness that the field is at a critical watershed, a scholarly micro-interregnum when new avenues of inquiry take root, are hearable for the first time, and find support from publishers and peer reviewers. Cleary (2012) notes that modernism was “essentially the literature of an interregnum between the dissolution of one kind of European world-ordering imperialism and the consolidation of a new kind of U.S.-Soviet imperialism” (261). It would likely only ever be at such a turning point that a critique like Chibber’s would find the kind of purchase it captured. And with that a new, decidedly materialist postcolonial critique is only now taking hold. This is attributable to broad consolidations of specific critical paradigms in recent scholarship: the importance of the advent of the new materialism and of intersectional approaches—both originating in feminist theory—cannot be overstated as well as the rise of interdisciplinarity. It is within that constellation that Chibber’s provocative, argumentative argument appeared, appearing to have been timed unwittingly perfectly. This means the field is moving into a transformative, exploratory moment together with a still new century. Notwithstanding the overwhelming response to Chibber’s book, the potentials of a polemical fracas—and I do not deny that they can have value—are well and fully expressed. The issues emerging across the development of postcolonial studies lead us then to this moment when critics, including the present author, herald the call to move off from what has wrongly come to be called “the Chibber debate”—wrongly because “the” debate was several debates in fact and indeed a much older, ongoing tradition, wrongly because we have only just started truly listening to the critiques of postcolonial reason. Samaddar (2018), correctly in my view, rejects the polemic as a useful mode and characterizes the Chibber debate as one in which “grandstanding prevailed at the cost of dialogue and clarity” (v). Sinha and Varma (2017) highlight its reductive quality as well, how the mode boils down complex issues into unhelpful binaries in which there is “considerable overlap,” how the polarized back-and-forths skirt the fact that “neither ‘Marxism’ nor ‘postcolonial theory’ are stable categories” but rather “evolving positions” (2). And Workman (2016) says such oppositional discourses can even be “destructive” (158); he is exactly correct, indeed they may even be regarded as emanations of forms of privilege that obstruct rather than harvest knowledge and which postcolonial analysis critiques and does not perform. I agree with Taylor (2018a) who implores critics to move off from the debates “onto a path of positive construction” (237), to “take Chibber’s polemical resurrection of our shared ‘postcolonial remains’ as an invitation to a new life and a life of a new kind” for postcolonial studies (236). Sinha and Varma (2017) appear to concur saying that there is both a “prevailing sense of exhaustion with the debate, and an increasing sense of a renewed energy for a critical inquiry . . . appropriate for the current global conjuncture” (2). Instead of “materializing the end of postcolonial theory” hear the implicit “invitation to continue the conversation” (Sinha and Varma 2017, 2). Today’s task is to carry this interregnum forward, build the bridges, and produce the knowledge in need of formulation and dissemination by developing these new new post-critiques. Speaking truth to power, rather to the fuller truths of the true powers of imperializing nation-states,

20  Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem their uncanny capacity to reconstitute themselves—this being the DNA of the scholarly ­postcolonial—we engage these questions in order not only to build the ­knowledges but to ask, what is to be done? What is the world going to do about the world-systems hierarchy of developed vs. developing, of first, second, or third nations, about the “great” powers and the great vacuums of power, one nationstate, one para-state to the next?

3. Economic violence, economic justice: rediscovering postcolonial studies It is, we see, the feminist methodology that resolves prickly long-standing issues in this case. Postcolonial studies is now, let us declare it, a feminist undertaking, one in which egoistic forms of a white, male-privileged, masculinist voice are rejected in favor of an unwavering fidelity to the collective. As Anzaldúa (1999) noted, it is easy to stand in one conceptual place like members of a secondary school debate team, pressing and holding a single chosen line to the end. It is another task, an intellectually more efficacious one, to think cooperatively and to synthesize, to bridge and nuance, to think through and from paradoxically intersected spaces. The move to bring the field firmly into the aegis of the new histories of capital is a feminist intervention in that it presents the barbed challenge of building productive theoretical bridges, past to present and across the disciplines. Another feminist reminded us about the true subject matter taken up in the study of empire; her comments usefully point to both the flaws in and the critical potentialities for this field. Toni Morrison (2015) articulates a truer truth regarding the complexities of modern imperialist–capitalist history which are, she reminds us, habitually forgotten: “the source of and reason for our instilled aggression is not only fear. It is also money: the profit motive of the weapons industry, the financial support of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about.” Notably, for me as for the present chapter, she adds: [W]e sometimes forget that colonialism was and is war, a war to control and own another country’s resources—meaning money. We may also delude ourselves into thinking that our efforts to “civilize” or “pacify” other countries are not about money. Slavery was always about money: free labor producing money for owners and industries. Morrison ends by winding her historico-political reflection around to the present day, to late modernity, and late capital: “The contemporary ‘working poor’ and ‘jobless poor’ are like the dormant riches of ‘darkest colonial Africa’—available for wage theft and property theft, and owned by metastasizing corporations stifling dissident voices.” Thus far, the variety of questions seen as appropriate to, the analytics turned to in postcolonial studies touch a minor apportionment of the matters underscored by Morrison. Her words reveal the specter of a vast debt, a debt owing still and a still

Introduction—empire’s license  21 outstanding process of international justice. These matters are a truly problematical oversight in the collective attempt to parse and know modern-era empire. It is well established by now—as she likewise suggests—that “empire itself is under-theorized” (Callinicos 2009, 7) and that the need today is to bridge postcolonial studies over and into the present moment and new century. Sinha and Varma (2017) ask a good question: “What really is left of the debate that deserves to be recuperated for a renewed left politics?” (2) I would say very little and yet a great deal remains in terms of the work postcolonial and postcolonial-adjacent critics are called to. The rushes we have witnessed in the past few decades to declare postcolonial studies at its end appear in this light rather surprising if not also circumspect. Since the turn of the century scholars have been ringing the proverbial death knell on the field. I heard it expressed at a conference at Trinity College Dublin in early 2006. “It’s clear,” my colleague said, “that postcolonial studies has seen its day.” Then in 2018, some twelve years hence, at the annual ACIS conference in Cork, I experienced a déjà vu of the same episode all over again—a couple of delegates declaring postcolonial studies definitely “over,” others, including me, protesting. “If that is true,” I replied, “then we’re bringing it back from the dead.” Taylor (2018a) recalls the 2007 roundtable in PMLA in which “prominent practitioners more or less declared” the field dead with Chibber’s recent polemic constituting, for him, one more attempt to “really, really kill it this time” (235).17 It goes without saying, and I think this is Taylor’s point, that if the end of the field needs continual re-declaring, and over such a span of time, that, as with Mark Twain’s infamous remark, the reports of its death appear much exaggerated. Far from facing its end, postcolonial studies might be seen as just getting underway, the last four decades prelude to various possible and rich futurities. In their defense, that some envision its precipitous demise may be an effect of our failure to open fresh, necessary areas of enquiry. The previous section outlined those concerns, some of which critics are already addressing: the matter of a structural restrictiveness in the subject of study; concerns of a disciplinary partitionism and the need for greater interdisciplinarity and intersectionality; and, a penchant for self-reflexive critique, which this chapter clearly participates in, that often gets expressed as a polemic. I hazarded the notion of what we might call an anxiety of authorship as applied to the scholar-critic. If valid, it is surely an effect of the political nature of this research. And I will add a second hazarding, that if there was ever a reason to insist upon the continuation of a field of study, certainly it is that reason. That this framework directly concerns the domain of state and nation as well as the civic, the local, the cultural makes it uniquely resistant to cooptation and coercion, makes it progressive in a way much research is not. Postcolonial critics think about the nation, absolutely, however as identity, as a ground for the self, as a Heideggerian ontological locale;18 the work before us regards in a certain way filling out the picture of nation as/and the postcolonial—the mercantilism, the colonial state as usurper of trade, the nation or state as definer of modern chattel slavery which both eviscerated the sense of nation-ness and was a literal economics, key appendage in a vast process of amassing capital.

22  Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem Why, Workman (2016) asks, has postcolonial theory “persisted in late capitalism despite its so-called ‘mistakes’?” (159) Why indeed, the truly exigent imperative now being to advance the field as against insinuations of its deadness or its doneness. Modalities of scholarship that constitute modes of resistance are especially crucial in the current international, political, and economic moment. Throughout modern histories of radical struggle, we witness the continual re-entrenchment of conservative “tradition” and the sway of discursively built hegemonies to interpellate, control, and strongarm even the most progressive agents. Hence the urgency around retaining and growing this “nervous” field for the twenty-first century. We pause to consider how and in what places we study empire, what are the precise variables of concern, the methodologies, or what should they be. The concern for the remainder of this chapter is what the future of postcolonial studies looks like. Certainly, it is an efficacious vantage from which to study capital and interconnected economic questions. There is a crucial lesson to be garnered in a “rethinking of economic history” based on a certain starting ground: that “economy and society are inseparable” (Cheta 2018, 2) and that deriving knowledge from that linkage requires materialisms—whether new, old, future, vulgar. Murthy (2015) suggests, for example, that the future dispensation of the field depends on two pivotal questions: 1 How should we think about difference in a global capitalist world, especially with respect to the problem of the universality of the human condition? [and] 2 Can one use the concept of capital to ground both ideals such as the Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment discourse? (116) What is the role of postcolonial theory, that is to say, in understanding and challenging discourses of empire in their humanistic, linguistic, cultural, and conceptual forms and in their corporeal existences especially as economic structures? How did empire amass capital and control its access, and how did those histories shape history, full stop, through to the present? Like Murthy, Callinicos (2009) sees two relevant imperatives for the twentyfirst-century postcolonial critic, but they are different. He writes: “[u]nderstanding imperialism requires close empirical study since it concerns a historical phenomenon that has complex characteristics and is subject to change. But it also demands theoretical reflection on what makes the imperialism we encounter today historically distinctive” (6, my italics). That is to say, we need the poststructuralism of postcolonial theory and the Marxism, the history, the sociology of it if we are to truly comprehend how imperialism is rooted in and developed out of the soil of capital, how capital is rooted in the soil of empire. Callinicos (2009) articulates the missing but sought intersection, the juncture of a methodological materialism that is empirically investigable but also engages the theorizing that would be deployed in its explication. Cleary (2007a) frames the matter in a way that is likewise constructive, proffering once again two major projects for the field: one associates with “Frankfurt School critical theory and/or with . . . poststructuralist

Introduction—empire’s license  23 or deconstructivist theory,” its goal not being to “produce a new body of expert knowledge . . . but to subject the existing bodies of knowledge production . . . to critical scrutiny” (40–41). He refers to Subaltern Studies, I think, or something akin to it and perhaps primarily to the discourse theory inaugurated by Said as well as other versions of discourse theory. This view aligns with part two of Callinicos’ prescription. Cleary’s other “register,” this one lining up with Callinicos’ first task, would “seek to elaborate new kinds of historical narratives that purport to tell the story of empire or the resistance to empire differently,” a body of work that would be “clearly reconstructive rather than interrogatory.” For this, clearly aligning with the argument of the present volume, Cleary says the “goal is not to so much advance strong alternatives to existing scholarship as to create conceptual clearings that might allow alternative modes of analysis . . . to develop” (2007a, 41–42). New modes, yes, room, space, “clearings” through which to build new knowledges are to be scavenged or forged, the gaps found, the critical analytic architecture assembled, the critical language revisioned or invented. To inspire the shifts urged by the critics cited, of special concern is how to “conceive of the relationship between capitalism, thought, and culture”—culture as colonial hegemony specifically—with regard especially to “those countries on the periphery of the global capitalist system” (Murthy 2015, 114), victimized under present economic structures and by the earlier era of imperialist capitalism, those deemed as “developing” in the world-systems framework. Lloyd (2008) amalgamates distinct perspectives usefully, constructing, in his work, some of the methodological crossings urged. He writes, for example, that because “modernization . . . has always been another term for capitalist rationalization” (2), and given empire’s “peculiarly regressive obeisance to the twin fetishes of commodification and development” (3), the “value of a postcolonial critique . . . that emanates from locations once considered peripheral is that it supplements the recognition of the internal contradictions of modernization with the apprehension of other forms of unevenness.” That is, he explains, it calls “into question the historicist narrative that understands modernity as the progress from the backward to the advanced” (3, my emphasis). It is by doing exactly what Lloyd says there, fashioning intellectual cross-sections—say, a unification of the perspectives of Subaltern Studies in and with those of Marxist criticism—that we dredge and construct the contributions of greatest value. Such a criticism would detail the imperial-economic historicities that shaped the world-systems paradigm and its intrinsic hierarchy—balanced on the gerund—of developed vs. developing nations. It would ask, how did that reverse-pyramidal nation-ranking come into existence? It would ask, how consistent is the tie between histories of imperial colonization and the lower, smaller rankings on that list? Not coincidentally, the nations referred to by the incorrect epithet of the Third World are the historically colonized territories, places ruthlessly subdued by protracted, systematic, thoroughgoing theft. We know that “deindustrialization was a deliberate British policy, not an accident” of empire (Tharoor 2018, 33) and that its legacy continues today in negotiations by the World Bank and the WTO. As to the question of “why decades, or in some cases even centuries, of independence

24  Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem had done so little to readjust the fundamental balance of global power” (Cleary 2007a, 14), Tharoor (2018) adds that it is absurd, and I again agree, to “suggest that India’s inability to industrialize while the Western world did so was an Indian failure . . . rather than the deliberate result of systematically planned policies by those who ruled India, the British,” the Portuguese, the French, etc. (34, my italics). Colonized nations were intentionally placed at a disadvantage, forcibly rendered precarious. And these facts do not liken to their being, in the Enlightenment view Lloyd takes issue with—think here also of Chakrabarty’s (2008) History 1—“backward,” or “behind,” or “becoming,” or “developing,” as in evolving toward the West, toward and in likeness of the historical colonizer. Tharoor (2018) notes that “there is no reason to believe that, left to itself, India could not have evolved into a more prosperous, united and modernizing power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (220). The question for today’s postcolonial critic is, how is that massive loss to be assessed and then repaired? The study of imperialism in the framework of capital is, in other words, compulsory given not just their literal co-mutuality but the lack of any movement toward international equilibration and the astounding silence on it that prevails.19 Lloyd concretizes the problem at hand, as does Taylor (2018a) who writes: [t]he research question for postcolonial studies today is: what happens to processes of racialization and gendering in a context where capitalism isn’t so much expanding . . . but . . . managing a crisis of stagnation on a world scale? (248) That is, it is not modernity that dies along with capital—not that which is “late,” aging, vestigial—but empire itself. The observation is critical; it recasts much contemporary thought and, with that, the significant intersectional questions that logically affiliate. Because of course, it isn’t only postcolonial theory, such as it is, that proves inadequate to a full and fully efficacious reading of Collins’ novel. Post-structural theory and the new materialism and Marxism, by themselves, all ill-equip researchers to the task of garnering a new logic and ­language of inquiry. Again, Taylor (2018a) asks: “What might a post-­poststructuralist, materialist postcolonial studies look like, one attuned to the resurgence of emancipatory movements across the globe” (237), one that takes account of the ways and means of imperial capital in assembling a genealogy of precarity and poverty together with one of wealth and inheritance? Articulated another way, how “use the categories developed by Marx, or for that matter Kant or Hegel”—or for that matter Bhabha or Said, Césaire or Fanon, Chibber or Chakrabarty—“to analyze situations these thinkers neither experienced nor foresaw . . . under conditions of geopolitical and historical difference” (Dhawan 2018, 107)? This could be achieved by attempting a cultural, dare I say a post-structural Marxism. Far from impossible, as Chakrabarty reminds us in the Foreword to this volume, that allied analytic exists, has existed since the genesis of not just postcolonial theory but post-structural thought too; but though (and these are critical caveats) not often enough and not enough developed, the field had always-already

Introduction—empire’s license  25 recognized the merger. It is there in the early work of Judith Butler, in at least Bodies that Matter (1993). It is there in Bhabha’s postcolonial–post-structuralism. In “Signs Taken for Wonders”20 (1994) he puts forward a new materialist argument whose springboard object is a book, a book as thingly agent. We see its presence in Fanon as well in the “inescapable relationship between the material and the cultural.” Rao (2017) cites Black Skin, White Masks: [T]he effective alienation of the black man entails an immediate recognition of social and economic realities. If there is an inferiority complex, it is the outcome of a double process:—primarily, economic;—subsequently, the internalization—or, better, the epidermalization—of this inferiority. (596, quoting Fanon 2008, 12–13) Taylor (2018a), once again, notes that the analytic hinge discussed was always perceptible, such as in Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”: “ ‘subaltern’ was one old name for subjects cut off from participation in capitalist circuits of value but still subject to the disciplinary and distribution schema of capitalist property relations” (248). New awarenesses impel the twenty-first-century critic toward an axiological analysis that examines international sites as phoretic power relations that propel, enable, and also preempt the generation of wealth. Such analysis might look like the intersectionality Rao (2017) envisions: “a form of political thought that is situated in a position of productive ambivalence with respect to both postcolonialism and Marxism on account of its refusal to accord any one axis of subordination analytical or normative priority” (596–97). Similarly, the aim, for Cheta (2018) is a “postcolonial theory to historicize the category of ‘economy’ ” as an “artifact that was constituted through . . . a cultural construction based on the production of abstract meaning and a material construction based on real practice” (4). The integrations Taylor, Rao and Cheta argue for are absolutely needed if the knowledge sought is to be found. To elaborate a scholarship intersecting the key structures of modernity, which are customarily treated independently, it is not rigorous enough to place one or the other at the center but rather to affiliate them in partnership. In the era following the high post-structuralism of the 1980s and 1990s and now fully in to the twenty-first century, a crucial development in the thinking on political community announces itself, one in which the postcolonial or other social justice critic works from while revising Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts” or Said’s Orientalism.21 Obliging the call, this would be a criticism of “both/ and”: the conceptualization and the materialization, the post-structuralism and the new materialism. We need all the postcolonial bricolage, in other words, all the resources at hand to pose meaningful challenges to global finance capital and, having speciously reinvented the plantation in the guise of criminal justice, to systems like mass incarceration in the United States, the privatization of the prison there and the rise of a prison industrial complex. This would be cogent, rich research that remains historically specific while questioning the organization of

26  Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem knowledge, such as it is. Manifold “upshots,” to use Taylor’s (2018a) tag, remain to be searched and found in work discerning “how cultural production mediates the political-economic logic of capitalism in a global frame that nonetheless remains sensitive to local particularity” (45). This would be scholarship deploying a “critical synthesis” that is aware of its own “frequently intractable contradictions” (Sinha and Varma 2017, 2), and that, while insisting on theoretical ­linkages—past, present, future—is aware too of the uneven optics regarding matters of clear import that remain under-theorized. A true accounting of the political history of modernity is broad, deep, and complex, an articulation in which the abstract and the real sit together, one that enters the “new history of capitalism” (Cheta 2018, 3) and the new materialism in the same breath. Taylor (2018a) suggests the analysis start where the “seemingly antimaterialist roots of poststructuralist postcolonial theory reveal a materialist opening” (247). Looking for, realizing, and building out those materialist openings mean, for example, that “many canonical postcolonial writers are returned to us as ecological thinkers” (247). Exactly—eco-criticism being a locus in contemporary postcolonial studies,22 small but fast-growing, exemplifying a harmonious encounter of the ideal and the corporeal. Needed is a theory of exile that is poststructuralist and materialist, that regards literal poverty and the truss back to the conceptual or ideal from the vicissitudes and the violence of unequal distributions of wealth and precarity in both inter- and intra-national frames. Needed is to read between economics and culture—through the adjoining interval—to develop “forms of political thinking that enable us to take seriously both the material and cultural roots of injustice in our contemporary world” (Rao 2017, 597). Needed are deep dives into the other side of the culture question, the economic foundations underpinning empire’s cultural hegemonies. This would be a more greatly nuanced theory that draws together disparate perspectives in order to address the significance of imperialist embodiment. This analytic takes Black Skin, White Masks, the discourses of Orientalism, The Location of Culture, Spivak’s theory of a mute subaltern—or, say, a Victorian novel about a stolen thingly agent that holds within its own shiny body the perception of much capital, the agency to free or to keep the othered figure of empire, to return or retain imperially appropriated capital, to provide restitution for the injuriousness experienced by the colonized or not to provide it—and translates that into a political economy, that attending and establishing the subjectivities, the ontologies, the epistemologies, the identities, the alterities we think of when we think of postcoloniality. Needed is the theory of a postcolonial subjectivation (or more broadly a postcoloniality) framed by an intersectional alliance of postcolonial theory and the new materialism, one that looks at the materialities of colonial pilfering, the strategic production of precarity, the legacies associated with economic growth and dominance together with those of economic poverty and poverties of social agency. In the critical and systematic critique of empire an intellectual gulf formed around the reality of its suturing to capital. That blank is to be filled and the phoretic stitch brought to bear, the seaming revealed, the discourse of reparations brought to bear, the social-psychologies of poverty over modernity’s longue durée

Introduction—empire’s license  27 brought to bear, the question of how is economic inequality part and parcel of the social-psychological dispensation and how then is progressive intervention revised given the knowledge produced through a materialist shoring up of the discursively cultural.23 A fundamental endeavor for today’s critic is to concern herself with the “things” of thing theory, the thingly agency of Bill Brown and other new materialists brought to bear, all the things we don’t talk about when we talk about imperialism, colonial discourse, subjectivity, and postcoloniality brought to bear. Taking the assessments outlined as jumping off points—the meta-theorizations of Callinicos, Cleary, Murthy, Rao, Cheta, Lloyd, and Taylor—needed is a methodology that brings old and new materialisms to bear on Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, Memmi’s philosophy of The Colonizer and the Colonized, or the discourse theory of Culture and Imperialism. This means putting the question of how is this about capital, or, how is this about more than language or ideation or culture next any idea understood to prevail in this world of thought and research. Where and when or how does the money question enter Bhabha’s theorizations of liminality, hybridity, ambivalence, and unhomeliness or the historical fragment of Subaltern Studies or of Walter Benjamin? Edward Said was concerned with the history of empire from the perspective of how it suppressed and subjugated, by what means it consolidated and reconsolidated itself, by what violent discourses it terrorized native peoples, but not by what acts of physical violence it did these things, not by what acts of economic violence. When Said taught us about the world according to modern European imperialism, that is, about the dependency of the empire, for its sense of its own integrity, on the fantabulous brown native figure it appears to have invented from out of the addled imagination of a de Quinceyan opium eater, he was teaching us a lesson about economics. For that same dependency is matched in the fiscal realm, and the fiscal part is the underlying and also the causal part. We simply have yet to articulate that part of what we were to learn from Said. Building on and not rejecting those critical foundations, we envision a criticism that takes account of empire any- or everywhere it occurred—across and between the familiar oppositional macro borders—accounting for a fuller picture of imperialism, in itself and in its phoretic relationality. That must necessitate foregoing the binary geopolitical lenses—North/South, East/West, the Atlantic and not the Pacific or the Mediterranean or the Irish seas—in favor of a tedious assessment, to play on Tharoor and Bill Brown, of what empire did and what were its things. Rather than carve out vast territorial quadrants to explain vastly complex historicities, it may be more precise and more efficacious to leave aside these (probably) masculinist structures—largely the inheritance of colonial discourse—in favor of a (probably) feminist and decidedly materialist method that plots the things24 empire did at whatever nautical points it did them. The concern, developed as Said’s descendant and not his antagonist, is what empire did as a global, multipart infrastructure religiously and symbiotically conjoined to capital. In the spirit of Tharoor’s subtitle—“What the British Did to India”—what happens when we remove Said’s hemispherical structure but retain his critical insights in our line of vision? Discerning the knowledge

28  Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem of this epistemological vista requires finding “new ways of connecting worlds, new directions for comparison that unmake or even forget to mention the West and the East” (Workman 2016, 171). What do we learn, what new knowledges constellate after setting aside the binary frameworks to look at empire through geographically chaotic, everywhere-anywhere, through-lines? What is unearthed in the attempt to deconstruct the cartographic imperative, the map and mapping that lead to meta-paradigms like Orientalism, Atlantic studies, or the South/North binary? What happens to what we know about empire if capital is seen as colonial discourse—or, if preferred, understood as a founding premise and Derridean “center” legitimating the praxis and underwriting its material life, underwriting its agency, as with the Queen licensing “the Company” on behalf of the “Government” and in the fell swoop of a signature on a page—“Government and Company of Merchants of London Trading with the East Indies,” “Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay”—marrying the state to the corporation? We can think of empire if we like as an empire of paper—without having previously determined its limits or lines, its themes or things, its borders—and let the paper of empire speak, all the “deeds, speeches, jail journals, and polemics” of empire (Cleary 2007a, 21), the stockpiled words printed and penned inaugurating the siphoning of moonstones, the papered signatures sanctioning the colonization of trade in not just gems but textiles and animal furs, peppercorns, and salt, opiates and human persons, the however-so-many ships manifests and the assets registries listing thousands of names—all wrong names—of the persons transported into enslavement in the name of imperial greed. We think of the enslaving itself and all the war and weaponry papered and making it possible, the forging of colonial pedagogies, of textbooks and dictée papers, the utilization of religious orthodoxy in the dissemination of the epistles, objects, and props of empire, the royal orders turning massive natural disasters—the Irish famine—into strategies of political convenience, the betrayals of papered signed treaties, the orders to cut native children’s hair signed and stamp-sealed, the oral accounts of junior officers justifying their pay by listing out the names of those lynched or kidnapped, that day, that week. Said’s own teacher Michel Foucault believed that political theory “attends too much to institutions, and too little to practices,” yes, practices and papers (Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 1991, 4). Here, we make that claim with him in a postcolonial frame but we revise the binary to suggest that the metaphysic has been slanted too far in the direction of subjectivizations under empire—how discourse impacted native peoples, colonizing peoples, and the relations of one to the other, obviously not unimportant—rather than on the things of empire, its micro, corporeal historicities and thinglinesses. Part of what a new materialism in postcolonial theory would mean is that, in so committing, we are brought necessarily to a new historicism, as only one example, but a revised new-materialist-new-historicism. Empire isn’t anything or everything, of course, and we do not advocate a watering down of historical specificity or losing the precision critical to any scholarly undertaking. But it is more and more multiple than much research would imply. How, finally, will critics produce this new postcolonial criticism in dialogue and

Introduction—empire’s license  29 not competition with the analytics that have defined the field? In fact, decolonial scholars have been producing versions of that for some time. This body of research frequently assumes the continuation suggested between early modern imperial pursuits and the contemporary system of global capital (Quijano 1971)— the first corporation to have been bailed out being the EIC itself—and some are already judiciously engaging the tethering of empire-and-capital, the historical “phoresy” theorized here (Castro-Gómez 2007). The decolonial articulation appears however to set itself apart from postcolonial studies rather than being positioned as advancement or transformation. A similar distancing we have seen before, in the move from second-to third-wave feminism, for example, or from post-structuralism to the new materialism—the latter risings represented as not merely distinct but as antithetical or mutually exclusive. Such gestures can be necessary but might also be immiserating in terms of the production of knowledge. If the aim is ultimately to challenge empire or to, in decolonial theorist Castro-Gomez’s words to “decolonialize postcolonialism,” as activist–scholars concerned with goading more just futurities—and with the forces against social justice more robust than ever—my sense is that we are stronger in numbers, stronger in scholarly solidarities that are politically useful. This might be especially true in fields like feminist theory or postcolonial studies where the issues regard equality, dignity, disenfranchisement. We certainly must decolonialize postcolonial studies, and this is one way of viewing the very purpose of the present volume. But, thinking about this in a feminist frame and with inspiration of decolonial feminist Lugones’ inspiring work, it may be more productive to amplify postcolonial studies through bridged rather than partitioned articulations, augmenting rather than splintering the infrastructural foothold the field has from which to confront practices expressive of coloniality and imperialism.25 This field, far from “dead” as Dipesh Chakrabarty submits in the Foreword to this book, is finding a(nother) language or simply more and other words to express its unavoidable failings, its new intersectionalities, and the interdisciplinarities that will be unavoidably tentacled, messy, heterogeneous. Chakrabarty quotes Michael Ryan in the Foreword: “the left needs diverse unity,” and Matthew Watson said: “postcolonial theory will survive not because of its unity but because of its disunity” (2013, 230). I close these reflections by suggesting three specific futures for postcolonial studies: 1) its active, committed sustainment and growth; 2) committed deployments of intersectional and interdisciplinary praxes that build on existing work and introduce new logics through expansion of those links; and, 3) a no-longer throttled but full-throated focus on capital in a criticism that takes as starting ground the historical phoretic relation outlined and that works in the intellectual space between economics and culture and—goaded by the complexities of the real-world data collected or the novel or historical artifact representing it—turns the bridge into an analytic stopping place. The aim is to open spaces through which to inspire a full flowering of possible futurities. Rather than delimit, simplify, or homogenize, the point is to push back on circumscription and augment the research based on an array of interdisciplinarities, territories, histories, and subjects of study.

30  Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem This means pursuing lenses for considering the borders imposed under empire as forms of violence, as carceral structures, and as manufacturers of impoverishment; for illustrating the colonial appropriation of native resources, trade, and revenue; and for sussing the existence of uncollected reparations and for galvanizing social and academic movements to achieve an international economic equilibration. These are the intense challenges of reinventing postcolonial criticism as an ingenuously materialist undertaking. The idea underpinning this scholarly volume is to suggest that we, as a loose research (field) collective, open space for multiple advanced articulations that are more broad-ranging and accommodative. Taylor (2018b) asks, “What gets left out when we assimilate the history of the plantation to the history of capitalism? What happens when the history of the plantation only becomes narratable through the history of capitalism?” (552). This points to the specter of a challenge to the homological analytic outlined in this volume, a critique one might lodge: What gets left out, what happens, when the history of empire only becomes narratable through the history of capitalism? Or, vice versa? That is a risk of the schema urged here. I hope those questions will be asked, those critiques and rejoinders expounded. To ask them, to build that, we must develop the missing scholarship recognizing and justifying the legitimacy of the hinge, that understands colonialism-and-capitalism as historically symbiotic and fully discovers that knowledge. Let us continue that development, look squarely at modernity’s normalization of criminality, the thievery sanctioned by empire’s license, unpack and know it, and develop the logical conclusion of such study, the international economic equilibration that thus materializes as historical imperative. We are called to a more committed criticism that dredges and tenders a fuller epistemology of imperial history and, in the same articulation, a more precise grasp of the economic vicissitudes of the contemporary world. That critical fusion is the future of postcolonial studies. Let us continue Said and Spivak’s legacies of performatively engaging the anxious, nervous, necessary and urgent de-silencings—unsilencing empires’ cruelties and the contemporary legacies of those cruelties—by undertaking the scholarly activism that would answer the provocative questions Toni Morrison (2001) put before us some years ago. From her talk, “How Can Values Be Taught in the University?”: What are we personally willing to sacrifice, give up for the ‘public good’? What gestures of reparation are we personally willing to make? What risky, unfashionable research are we willing to undertake?

Notes 1 To imagine a space containing the entirety of the “loot” pilfered from India by the British Empire is an almost unfathomable imagining. But that would also index the vastness of the thievings and the production of today’s economical unevenness. One historian’s efforts to bolster such awareness:

Introduction—empire’s license  31   www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-14/art-tour-guide-galleries-museums-racismcolonialism-exclusion/12241850?fbclid=IwAR1xJjq_IB4j6t_eyB5XNYulWlmNk 1K4Mzv7errISRTQ5b-3v7SqzstEBAo 2 As discussed in the Preface to this volume. 3 This figure is important to the novel and discussed again later in this chapter. 4 Histories of such ancient pilferings were used in British colonial discourse as a means to consolidate their own imperialist pilfering designs. Romila Thapar discusses the debate—occurring in 1843, five years before Collins’ tale is set—in the House of Commons over returning gates stolen from a Hindu temple at Somanatha in 1026 by Moghul ruler Mahmud of Ghazni. This event becomes a focal matter in the House because in the previous year “Lord Ellenborough issued his famous 'Proclamation of the Gates' in which he ordered the British army in Afghanistan to return via Ghazni and bring back to India the sandalwood gates from the tomb of Mahmud” (Thapar). Cast as a “Hindu trauma,” obviously playing on Hindu sentiments, it was one discursive piece in a vast divide and conquer strategy. And it is to that that Collins is responding critically: in his own (anti-colonial) discourse representing empire, the item in question was stolen by the British Empire and it is that theft which closely ­followed, scrutinized, and in the end repaired. (A facsimile of Thapar’s important article can be found here: www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_ thapar_somnath.html) 5 I find three explicitly postcolonial readings of the novel, one as far back as 1993: Amna Matar Al-Neyadi, “Depicting the Orient in Wilkie Collins’ the Moonstone,” International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature 4, no. 6 (2015): 181–89; Melissa Free, “ ‘Dirty Linen’: Legacies of Empire in Wilkie Collins’s the Moonstone,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48, no. 4 (2006): 340–71; and, Ashish Roy, “The Fabulous Imperialist Semiotic of Wilkie Collins’s ‘The Moonstone,’ ” New Literary History 24, no. 3 (1993): 657–81. There is one other that might reasonably be viewed as belonging to the field as it focuses on the Jennings as a Romany figure: Nicholas Saul, “Half a Gypsy: The Case of Ezra Jennings in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868),” in The Role of the Romanies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004). 6 My close reading of Collins’ novel in the first part of this chapter was my best attempt at attempting that kind of coinage; whether or not I was successful is for my reader to judge. 7 See like arguments made by Watson and Wilder (2018) and by Pollard, McEwan, and Hughes (2012). 8 See the final section of this chapter where I outline some of these advances. 9 The source of this phrase is Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack-room Ballads (1892): “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” 10 This excellent question could be usefully taken up, for example, from the perspective of other postcolonial sites, Ireland springs immediately to mind as well as the Soviet bloc and lesser studied locations such as Tunisia or Cyprus as well as Palestine certainly. Also see, in this volume, Chapter One by Vikram Visana which, though not articulated as such, stands as an incisive rejoinder to the argument Chibber makes in his 2013 polemic. 11 That is the subject of Part III of this chapter. 12 Some of the most important ones, in chronological order, include Ahmad’s groundbreaking In Theory (1992), Dirlik’s book After the Revolution and his widely cited article “The Postcolonial Aura” (1994), Juan Jr.’s Beyond Postcolonial Theory (1997), and Parry’s Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (2004). There are others but these publications are standouts all coming before Chibber and which delineate a history, nearly from the beginning, of this self-critique. 13 See Ngũgĩ 1986.

32  Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem 14 See Hiddleston 2010 for an interesting take on this question in the context of theory at large; I think there is a very real application of her ideas to work in the field of postcolonial studies, one that, unlike many fields engaged with critical theory, is a specifically political field of study, as I note. 15 This refers to the idea as articulated in Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 278–94. 16 Of course Spivak got tenure, as we well know, but scholars of the time, and in the time since, experience real concern in this regard. As we know, black and brown scholars, immigrant scholars, in the United States are statistically denied tenure more frequently than their white counterparts; a large part of that problem stems from institutional racism more broadly, however it may also be an effect in some cases of the nature of their research and how it is regarded by senior faculty at those teaching institutions. 17 For a quite different take on the question, see the 2012 issue of New Literary History, ed. Shohat and Stam (Vol. 43, Issue 2, Spring 2012) and which is referenced elsewhere in this chapter. 18 Refers to Heidegger’s essay (1993) “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” one widely turned to as a critical source for postcolonial theorists. 19 The work of Indian economist Utsa Patnaik, cited in this chapter, represents a welcome respite from this particular silence. She discusses some of her work, specifically the matter of how to equilibrate wealth internationally today, in a recent interview: www. livemint.com/Companies/HNZA71LNVNNVXQ1eaIKu6M/British-Raj-siphonedout-45-trillion-from-India-Utsa-Patna.html 20 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 102–22. 21 Of course there are numerous rewrites, re-visionings of Orientalism but the point here is that few of those regard the intervention urged here. 22 Chief among those interventions being by Dipesh Chakrabarty, a contributor to this volume, his 2018 monograph, The Crises of Civilization (Oxford). 23 To be clear, I do not mean to suggest that none of this type of research is being done; I offer these as exemplary ideas in a new framework for thinking about the postcolonial methodology. 24 I refer to the work of Bill Brown, thing theory and the new materialism more broadly, an important part of what’s missing methodologically from the field. 25 An aligned development was seen in the development from second to third wave feminism, whereby third wave post-feminists swiftly and roundly characterized second wave theory as antithetical both to their own work as to “true” feminism full stop. The response from the third to the second wave was overwhelmingly antagonistic for some time and yet some of our most vital and indeed indispensable thinking—in gender studies, in women’s studies—occurred in and as the second wave. As we transition from one era of thought to the next, we must learn to stop throwing the baby of the earlier era out with the bathwaters of the next.

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2 Decolonizing capital Indian political economy in the shadow of empire Vikram Visana

Introduction In recent years, Indian intellectual history has come into its own, with numerous path-breaking studies of indigenous liberalism, anti-colonial revolutionaries, religious revivalism, and nationalists flying off the printing presses (Sartori 2008; Majeed 2009; Manjapra 2010; Kapila 2011; Collins 2011; Devji 2012; Vajpeyi 2012; Devji 2013). Overwhelmingly, these studies have been preoccupied with the spheres of political, religious, and social thought in which considerations of economics and commercial society have piggybacked on broader agendas or have only formed one component of a much more expansive web of ideas. C.A. Bayly and Andrew Sartori’s work on Indian liberalism are two notable exceptions which both show—admittedly from two very different methodological perspectives— how political economy was often at the heart of Indian liberals’ conceptual ­claimmaking (Bayly 2012; Sartori 2014). Crucially, the discovery of the economic dimension of colonial liberalism by Indian critics of empire served to rematerialize the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in terms of metropolitan capital and exploitation. In so doing, economics fundamentally informed the political imagination of Indian critics of empire. As this might suggest, the debates between various Indian thinkers on capitalism ought to be an essential part of understanding the country’s modern history and postcolonial trajectory. There have been some illuminating studies; for instance Zachariah’s impressive work on the architects of the Nehruvian planned economy between 1930 and 1950. However, this work occasionally falls prey to its limited chronological framing. The author labels the era’s key thinkers as “developmentalists” inspired by Western and socialist models of state-led industrialization, which seek to impose order on otherwise disparate indigenous ideas of a nineteenth-century provenance, such as “co-operative farming,” “village uplift,” and “social reform” (Zachariah 2005). Marxist scholars of the mid-twentieth century similarly subsumed the nuanced and conflicting attitudes of individual thinkers into a Polanyi-esque account in which collective effort was geared toward socially embedding the market and sanitizing it of its most exploitative and colonialist characteristics. This was dubbed “economic nationalism” even though the sovereign nation-state was not the ultimate goal for many of those involved in

40  Vikram Visana this project (Chandra 1966). Contemporary riffs on this Marxian theme have also suggested that collectively Indian economic thinkers were clamoring for tariffs on British-manufactured commodities as a means of demarcating a national economic space and politically inscribing the nation out of the heteronomy of colonial capitalism (Goswami 2004). These approaches gloss over the fact that Indian economic thinkers of the nineteenth century had developed sophisticated yet differing critiques of colonial capitalism that were directed outward toward the colonial state but which were also introspective about the social and institutional specificities of Indian culture and society. Indeed, Indian thinkers were animated by two parallel realizations: first, they recognized colonial capitalism’s inability to transform South Asia’s ostensibly “feudal” social relations even as the plantation economy and metropolitan commerce introduced market incentives into the subcontinent (Chakrabarty 1989). As Dipesh Chakrabarty observed, there is a need to “provincialize Europe” by accepting the indispensability of Western ideas and concepts but also by recognizing that Indian thinkers had to innovate concepts in order for their ideologies to have local purchase (Chakrabarty 2000). Second, after the 1857 “Mutiny,” the Government of India passed a raft of commercial legislation quarantining the traditional rural economy—constituted by the commerce within the extended k­ inship relations of the Hindu Undivided Family—from the ­disruptive forces of the urban sphere of European commerce in which individuals were the primary commercial agent (Birla 2009). Indian thinkers, each with their own distinct views, were incubated within this complex and contested capitalist ecology. Unsurprisingly, disagreement often ensued. The nineteenth-century debate around competing capitalist visions of an idealized and legitimate Indian political economy would inform the country’s postcolonial policy-making. The discourse of “development” was indigenized within an indigenous liberal, rather than derivative and socialist understanding of economic planning (Bayly 2015). Drawing on a range of economic theorists from western India, what I show in this chapter is how various strands of Indian economic thinking reconceptualized the concept of capital. Section one, of this chapter, demonstrates how these differing perspectives were united by a common regional and cultural context which, out of the otherwise booming commerce of globally circulating ideas, allowed economic thinking to have greater purchase as the primary metric through which to understand and evaluate colonial exploitation. The following sections of the chapter, however, reveal how individuals deployed this economic register in varied ways. Section two analyzes the ideas of two of India’s most prominent Parsi (Zoroastrian emigres from Persia) intellectuals and reformers, Dadabhai Naoroji and Dinshaw Wacha. In their account, Indianization of the colonial state is the order of the day since the European bureaucracy is underpinned by a plethora of forms of economic mediation (the bureaucratic state and revenue demand, Western banking, currency controls etc.) that appropriate value and render Indian capitalism unproductive. Section three foregrounds Hindu reformers like Mahadev Govind Ranade and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, for whom the rusticated rural economy could be revived through state-sponsorship of new cooperative commercial

Decolonizing capital  41 institutions. Section four interrogates the protectionist policies of Krishnath Trimbak Telang, who located many of the deficiencies of capital in Indian society itself. For him, the colonial state did not need wholesale reform but needed mobilizing as a neutral sequencer of social change through adopting protectionist policies. Lastly, section five examines the ideas of Dhananjay Ramchandra Gadgil and his influence into the twentieth century. Gadgil was a systematizer of the economic thinking of the previous century. However, the remaining tensions between some of the ideas of economic reorganization and state planning he promoted belied an architectonic synthesis. The conclusion takes a step back from these individuals to show how these economic critiques of colonial capitalism produced a debate around the fundamentals of South Asian capitalism and its direction in the future. Indian political economy was not neatly encapsulated by the consensus of “Western” ’ development; rather, its indigenously conceived and contested conceptual framework have animated a partisan party politics in postcolonial India.

The lifeworld of western India All of the major thinkers discussed in this chapter were natives of the modern-day Indian state of Maharashtra—stretching from the western Indian Ocean littoral to the central Deccan Plateau (formerly part of the Bombay Presidency province). Specifically, in western Maharashtra the cosmopolitan and economically dynamic city of Bombay was the primary incubator of the economic thought of Naoroji, Wacha, Telang, Ranade, Gokhale, and Gadgil. Even though individuals like Gokhale and Gadgil had their ancestral hometowns in the more conservative and culturally homogeneous Maharashtrian hinterland, Bombay was the locus of their young education, early professional activities, and their first taste of local politics. Bombay’s social and intellectual environment over the centuries developed as a result of its political, civil, and economic particularities as a coastal entrepôt and center of commerce. Under Portuguese and British sovereignties from the sixteenth century onwards, Bombay maintained its unique character largely due to Indian Ocean trade and opium exports to China. The inheritance of Portuguese and British corporate institutions and early law courts meant that a system of civil and commercial law coexisted alongside the panchayats (community courts) of India’s various caste and religious groups. This created a context in which debates about political, social, and economic jurisdiction developed a secular and pragmatic tone (Bayly 2012). In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the city nurtured several indigenous mercantile communities, many of whom had migrated from Gujarat. These enterprising groups: Parsis, Hindu banking castes, Jains, Jews, and Khoja Ismaili Muslims grew prosperous underwriting British trade into the Indian interior (Edwardes 1909). The so-called shroffs (indigenous moneylenders) were more united by class interests and collaboration than by religious community or kinship groups (Chandavarkar 2009). This was an essential component of Indian commercial solvency. By the mid-nineteenth century, Europeans enjoyed better and easier access to capital markets, forcing Indians to

42  Vikram Visana diversify by inter-investing between mills and managing agencies owned by different commercial families. When these enterprises found themselves with excess cash during boom years, they often reinvested it with shroffs from a different community, who were in turn given a share in the business for short-term deposits on the mills. This interdependence guaranteed a steady flow of funds for investment in fixed capital (Chandavarkar 1998). Urban cosmopolitanism and commercial prosperity eventually translated into philanthropic largesse. This was born out of the shroffs’ desire to acquire social capital with their British governors—for whom ideas of middle-class respectability and public-minded philanthropy went hand in glove. The Parsis were by far the most generous, but Hindu and Muslim magnates also contributed to new schools, hospitals, public drinking fountains, literary associations, and the establishing of a vernacular press (Masselos 1974; Palsetia 2001). This amounted to a sustained attempt to create a broadly liberal Indian civil society and public sphere, promoting the civic responsibility, morality, and tolerance essential to the maintenance of Bombay’s multicultural sociability (Kidambi 2007). The foundation of the Bombay Association in 1852 consummated the rise of the collective political consciousness of the city’s Western-educated professionals who were also attentive to the commercial needs of their respective communities. The association petitioned the British government for redress on issues of taxation, municipal representation, social service through public works, and the proper relationship between the governors and the governed (Dobbin 1972). The eventual creation of the municipal corporation in 1861 and the election of Indian representatives by middle-class ratepayers drew university-educated figures like Naoroji, Wacha, and Telang more and more into public life to represent sharp-elbowed ratepayers. Equally, they brought their own liberal ideas to wider attention by debating them in the new public forum (Masselos 2011). Indian representatives and their wealthy constituents in the municipal corporation became increasingly critical of Arthur Crawford, the Municipal Commissioner and his profligacy and alleged corruption during the 1860s. Consequently, various theories of local government, combined with notions of effective economic management, were debated and re-debated ad infinitum. The significance of this, however, was that the preoccupation with economic issues in the institutional space created by the burgeoning civil society and reformed local government, signaled the philosophical discovery of the colonial state as the subject of indigenous politics. Given the events that were to follow, this was a crucial psychological and intellectual development. In 1864–1865, the city of Bombay fell victim to a sudden and calamitous financial crisis that bankrupted many of the wealthy trading families and shroffs who had patronized the city’s philanthropic endeavors, associational culture, and ultimately its civil society. This episode was not confined to the economic realm but had a lasting impact on the psychology and community confidence of Bombay’s mercantile communities. As a contributor to the Bombay Gazette commented: [T]he whole community . . . is in a most unhealthy state, that the flush of fever is mistaken for a sign of health; and though disease may be arrested, it

Decolonizing capital  43 will too probably run its course, working its own cure at last only by some exhaustive process. (Bombay Gazette, Jan. 7, 1865) Indian capital had been presented with an opportunity during the American Civil War to invest massively in the export of raw cotton. Between 1860 and 1864 cotton trading in Bombay climaxed due to high demand for Indian cotton in the wake of the American conflagration. Inflated prices and payment in bullion meant that by the early 1860s a wave of speculative investment washed over the city (Chandavarkar 2002). A precarious property bubble developed as investments in land and property soared. Risky projects for land reclamation proliferated, the largest being the government-sponsored Back Bay scheme. Wacha would later describe “the fashion among the prominent financiers of the day that the most influential bank should have at its elbow an equally influential financial and that as corollary or appendix to both, there should be a powerful reclamation company” (Wacha 1910, 35). With the Confederacy’s defeat, cotton prices plummeted and Indian financial institutions and enterprises defaulted, sending the local economy into a liquidity crisis. Bombay would bounce back as investors increasingly put their money in cotton mills in addition to the export of raw cotton. Nevertheless, the crisis’ psychological impact should not be underestimated. The fortunes of many of the great mercantile houses never recovered. Families that had long been associated with philanthropy in the city were no longer in a position to fund the infrastructure projects, educational and healthcare schemes that had brought them renown among the British and their own community alike. Even by the early twentieth century, Wacha reminisced about the great broker families of the 1850s, wistfully recalling that “alas, one can never forget those great merchants and public-spirited citizens of the epoch-making fifties” (Wacha 1920, 626–27). Meanwhile, just as Bombay was getting to grips with the effects of the economic crisis, cycles of drought and famine struck western and central India from 1866 to 1870, killing an estimated three million people. Commercially, the price of food grains slumped until 1875 and the cotton trade was impacted again with a similar collapse in value. Concomitantly, the government was due to review the land and revenue settlements in 1867–1868, which it duly did in the succeeding years by upgrading the revenue demand (Masselos 1974). Bombay’s mercantile elites were also exposed to the aftermath of the famine. While they may not have starved, those many shroffs and traders with profits invested in agricultural land and who could not service their debts, saw their properties in Maharashtra and Gujarat taken as collateral by economic rivals (Karaka 1884). These dual shocks and their lingering psychological impact fundamentally shifted the focus of local Indian thinkers. What began as a political and economic critique on behalf of local ratepayers developed an all-India flavor. What is more, poverty was politicized for the first time as the prime metric of a failed state. This moved the debate beyond the official attribution to overpopulation, fecklessness, economic irrationality, or other orientalist tropes. While the material basis for Bombay’s nascent

44  Vikram Visana civil society had been delivered a harsh blow, its organs were alive and well and now turned their attention to a new economic critique. One newspaper editor from Bombay railed at his fellow ratepayers at a meeting in 1872 that: Poverty is no offence (Applause) . . . I am proud to say, that I belong to the poor—I mean to the masses, the great mass of men who constitute the nation, the commons in whose hands are vested all the powers of the purse and the provisions of the ways and means in civilized countries. (Bombay Gazette, Nov. 7, 1872) This shift in tone was representative of the turn to a new way of thinking about society and politics: through the lens of political economy (Visana 2015).

The Parsi political economy of Dadabhai Naoroji and Dinshaw Wacha Dadabhai Naoroji (b. 1825) was a member of the Bombay Association, the city’s municipal council, and the first Indian professor at Elphinstone College—a British founded university intended to impart liberal education to a small band of elite Indian professionals and administrators. Having also been one of the first Indians to establish an import–export firm in the United Kingdom, Naoroji was intimately embedded in Bombay’s trading economy. As this might suggest, Naoroji’s academic (he was a professor of mathematics) and commercial competencies along with his prominent position in Bombay politics meant that he was especially well suited to making sense of the economic and agrarian crisis and subsequently popularizing his critique by acting as a key node between Indian professionals, captains of industry, and British officials within his extensive social network. Naoroji’s initial response to the crisis, along with his colleague Nowrozi Furdoonji, was to organize a rural fact-finding mission to the famine-afflicted districts of Gujarat and the Deccan. Using a sophisticated questionnaire for individual peasant farmers, both men sought to ascertain the relationship between the lived experience of famine and colonial policy (Bayly 2012). The advantage of this method was that it enquired after the economic conditions of individuals— rather than ethnographic groups like the colonial state’s statistics—in order to paint an accurate picture of the Indian as an economic agent and his potential for greater production. One question entered into the costs of production and the size of the resultant surplus: “Does the assessment generally leave a surplus to the cultivator or occupier, after satisfying the demands of the Government and paying the costs and charges of cultivation?” Others asked about instances of physical coercion by officials and the role of moneylenders (Native Opinion, Feb. 16, 1973). The unique perspective that emerged from these investigations, as Naoroji would subsequently report to the 1873 Committee on East India Finance, was that the land revenue/rent as collected by the colonial state was not a “surplus rent” that merely skimmed off the unearned increment of the

Decolonizing capital  45 cultivator–proprietor. On the contrary, Naoroji “consider[ed] the whole of the land revenue to be paid by the cultivator” (Third Report of the Select Committee on East India Finance, 11 July 1873). In what would later be dubbed his “drain theory” of colonial exploitation, Naoroji also stressed that the capital stocks of British banks financing the export of Indian produce to the United Kingdom obtained their credit from the colonial state’s revenues. If, therefore, the whole of the state’s revenues came from the cultivator, not only was the Indian farmer never properly remunerated for his creation of value in the first place, but his own labor was used against him to finance the process of exploitation so that no capital investment was required in India. It was the colonial system that stripped Indian labor of its innate productive agency, relegating workers to passive “helots” who extracted raw produce for British industry without creating value, like “hewers of wood and drawers of water” (Naoroji 1887, 112–36). Dadabhai opined that this rusticating colonial mediation in the economy is what lay at the heart of the Indian’s failure to create property and through it subsequently sustain the social contracts of modern society. What Naoroji was conceptualizing was an Indian labor theory of value. While this was a simulacrum of John Locke’s analogous theory, it was devised independently of the latter and lacked Locke’s providentialism. For Naoroji, the contrast with the male British laborer, who often owned his tools, workshop, and land, and who by 1867 was politically enfranchised, could not be starker (Naoroji 1887, 112–36). By extension, the inability to accumulate property, like that small minority of Bombay shroffs and traders had done in the roaring 1840s and 1850s, meant that a national civil society of liberal civic associations defined by public sociability could not be realized in India. This “discovery” by Naoroji and his colleagues led to a shift in how they understood the colonial state and its interaction with the Indian economy. Many educated Indians believed that Britain was an avatar of capitalist civilization promising the transformation of a society based on the status of caste and kinship into one of individuals and contract. However, Naoroji demonstrated that the colonial state’s track record clearly meant that it needed a new direction that was actually generative of the sort of commercial contractualism that Naoroji imagined in his labor theory of value. As the rest of the chapter demonstrates, this preoccupation with the material foundations of modern liberal civilization and the varying capacities of Indians to retain the value they produced led to a uniquely Indian perspective on capitalism. This Indian perspective set capitalism apart from the “Western” perspective which regarded market relations as an autonomous realm and the ideal liberal state as merely a “night watchmen.” Indeed, in western India, capitalism proper could only be realized from the bastardization of colonialism by harnessing the concentrated resources of the modern state. In Locke’s “Western” theory of the social contract, property relations arise in the state of nature and scale-up and are guaranteed in the end by the modern legal state. In western Indian thinking, albeit to varying degrees, imagining the creation of a civil society based around a

46  Vikram Visana labor/property-based social contract began with the political and the available resources of the state. This was summed up neatly by Naoroji when he maintained that “every political question is a labour question” (“labour questions,” Naoroji Papers, undated). Naoroji’s more well-known solution to the problem of colonial mediation in the economy was to Indianize the colonial bureaucracy in such a way that civil service salaries and pensions would remain within the country. In so doing, he believed that he could cultivate an Indian technocracy of professional entrepreneurs like himself who might use their new capital to invest in the productive capacities of the economy. (Visana 2016). However, Naoroji and his political lieutenant in Bombay, Dinshaw Wacha (b. 1844) also turned their attention to another major plank of the colonial economy: India’s currency. Wacha was the managing agent of the sizeable Morarji Gokaldas and Sholapur textile mills and on the managing committee of the Bombay Millowners’ Association as well as serving in the Bombay Municipal Corporation (Chandra 1966). Unsurprisingly, he shared Naoroji’s proclivity for conceptually combining political and economic questions. In 1893 the Government of India opted to close its mints to free coinage in silver in order to halt the decline in the value of the rupee relative to the British pound. This measure was deemed necessary to ensure that the government in Calcutta could continue to service its debt at an affordable rate. Dadabhai demanded a return to the free coinage of silver because all existing economic contracts including those pertaining to the state’s revenue demand had been “contracted on a silver basis.” Dadabhai opined that since the economic monopoly of India was largely paid for in produce, a change in the value of gold or silver, would not change the fact that an absolute quantity of produce would have to be exported to cover, for instance, a £20 million debt in Britain. Only if the price of the commodity itself increased would the level of drain on the Indian taxpayer reduce. In fact, in increasing the value of the rupee through monetary stringency, the salaries of colonial officials and money owed to domestic creditors would be artificially inflated to the detriment of the “poorer classes . . . and the rayats [peasants].” The fabrication of a “false rupee” was thus an “illegal, dishonourable and despotic act” (Naoroji 1985, 315). For Naoroji, this was simply another instance of colonial mediation in which fiat money benefited only a “few wealthy men who hold permanent promissory notes of other bonds” because the fixed value of the “false rupee” now gave them “more than they lent.” Inevitably, this policy pandered to the “British capitalists, bankers, merchants etc.” that Naoroji believed were responsible for the theft of all value from the Indian economy to the detriment of the productive capacity of Indian industry (“Naoroji to the Currency Committee,” Naoroji Papers 1899): That precious policy of artificially increasing exchange and creating a scarcity of Rupees have brought about their own Nemesis. How it will end we cannot say. Money for ordinary business purposes is not to be had anywhere. The banks refuse to advance even at 15% on Government securities! In the open market rates rule as high as 24 and 30. Owing to China market being

Decolonizing capital  47 depressed our mill industry is greatly depressed. Heavy stocks are accumulating and dealers have no money to pay for and remove them. Produce is lying at our bunders. As it could not be financed, it cannot be removed and exported! (Patwardan 1977) Moreover, Wacha also noted that even if the government’s intention in the long term was to stabilize international trade by currency controls, this was overwhelmingly for the benefit of European capital. Indian business, he noted, was far more involved in the domain of internal trade. Therefore, to break the back of the cultivator through fiat money was yet another way of sapping his productivity (Wacha 1898, 11). This was a violation of the implicit contract between the taxpayer and the government (Naoroji to William Wedderburn, Naoroji Papers, July 30, 1898). The frequency with which European capital, in cahoots with state institutions, would violate implicit commercial contracts was a recurring theme in Naoroji and Wacha’s critique. In the mid-1860s during a process of commercial litigation, Naoroji’s firm was held liable for non-payment on bills of exchange for imports into London when the responsible party was a firm in Bombay that had contracted the exchange separately with a European firm and had no organizational connection to Naoroji & Co. Dadabhai’s lawyers claimed that no contract of mutual credit had been entered into, but the court concluded that such a contract existed implicitly when “merchants mutually have dealings together, and each gives credit to the other,” and when a bankruptcy takes place the calculations of those credits would inevitably end in a debt that should be repaid. What shaped Naoroji’s conception of the fairness of a trade was the court’s conclusion that it was “clear that in order to constitute a mutual credit, it is not necessary that there should be credits connected with and dependent on one another” (Law journal reports for the year 1868, vol 37 1868, 221–25). That is to say, profits from one equitably contracted transaction could be used to cover the debts of entirely separate transactions on the whim of the mediating European bank and in so doing they absconded with Indian capital they had no part in producing. Ultimately, Naoroji’s vision for the future was a system of unmediated economic contracts generated by wealth-producing individuals creating a global civil society; or, as he termed it, an “imperial firm” (Naoroji 1887, 307). The next section discusses how indigenous thinkers who were, like Naoroji, committed to building the material basis of Indian civil society inherited his critique of “unproductive” and rusticating financial mediation in the Indian economy. While they recognized that the policies of the colonial state were the predominant problem, they also devised new economic policies and institutions that could harness state power in more productive ways. Rather than directing capital out of India, the country’s economic thinkers sought to use the state in novel ways to direct capital into more fruitful avenues. Crucially, these Indian conceptual innovators continued to regard themselves as faithful to the universal “truths” of liberal capitalism.

48  Vikram Visana

Pune’s political economy: M.G. Ranade and G.K. Gokhale Mahadev Govind Ranade (b. 1842) was another student of the liberal Elphinstone College and later attended Bombay University—becoming a lawyer and a judge in Pune, Maharashtra. Ranade founded several social and religious reform associations in Pune concerned with the modernization of Hindu traditions. He was very much inspired by Naoroji’s earlier forays into economic thought and the general need to industrialize India in order to promote an Indian civil society (Ranade 1906). Mahadev was also instrumental in the establishment in Pune of the Cotton and Silk Spinning and Weaving Factory, Metal Manufacturing Factory, Poona Dyeing Company, and Ready Paper Mill (Chandra 1966). However, centered on Pune, a more conservative and less cosmopolitan city situated inland from Bombay, Ranade’s commentary on economic reform would take greater cognizance of the “ancient bondage of Feudalism and Status” in rural India and the difficulty of facilitating the transformation to individual contract (Ranade 1906, 70). He noted that in the countryside, the “economical man” who formed the ideal type of the economic theories of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Nassau Senior, and Thomas Malthus, was largely absent. While economic self-interest was an Indian impulse, the collective needs of caste, kinship, and family often eclipsed such interests. What British officials needed to grasp, Ranade thought, was that while the laws of production were universal the laws of distribution were “partly of human institution” (Ranade 1906, 7). Consequently, it was not only that the British absconded with much of India’s capital but also that “hoards of unused” capital lay unproductive in both the European banks and the Indian countryside. In the latter the “petit culture” of small yeoman farmsteads could not possibly kickstart a capitalist transition en par with the agricultural revolution of post-enclosure Britain (Ranade 1906, 3–4). Mahadev had less faith than Naoroji, however, in the ability of indigenous capitalists to solve this problem if the colonial state’s exploitative practices stopped. Ranade claimed that the concentration of capital and expertise in the hands of the British bourgeoisie was so total that they did not even need the institutional buttressing they received from the colonial state. Indian capitalists were a poor imitation since Indian capital was so diffuse between rural and urban centers. The remedying of this was of paramount importance—not just for industrialism’s sake—but because “any measures which tend to rescue this business from its present chaos, and restore certainty and honesty in it, are sure to put new life and energy into the body politic” (Ranade 1906, 65). For Ranade, as for Naoroji, the concentrated resources of the colonial state became the subject of India’s liberal political economy. As he observed, it was a fait accompli that the government already owned the mines, lands, and forests as well as being the largest single consumer of goods in the country. To not make use of this unique institutional fact would be short-sighted (Ranade 1906, 192). Paraphrasing Sismondi and emulating Friedrich List of the German Historical School, Ranade wished the state to be a better “co-ordinating power” between labor and capital so as to improve rural credit without resorting to the usurious mediation of European or indigenous moneylenders (Ranade 1906, 19). The government could

Decolonizing capital  49 be cajoled into adopting something like the Dutch “Java culture system” whereby European private enterprise made cash payments for crops with money loaned by the government but also “with the Government as the sole customer.” This had the double advantage of using government loans as a way of paying the farmer a guaranteed wage from which he might pay the revenue demand. Moreover, the fixing of prices would ensure long-term stability and that the laborer would get more than if he was at the mercy of the market. Equally, whether the owner was European or Indian, he would benefit by having his profit margin and stability of production guaranteed. Ranade used the example of the European Iron, Steel and Chrome Company, founded in 1833 and its subsequent closure in 1861, as an instance of how market irregularities and an instability of supply had crippled an Indian business whose products were said to be of better quality than those of counterparts based in the West. Ranade’s culture system would obviate the necessity of borrowing and thereby remove one level of mediation in the economy. Ranade’s idealized state was “the largest Consumer, and the largest Capitalist and Manufacturer in the Country” and therefore industrialization did not demand the Indianization of the bureaucracy or the abolition of the colonial state so long as it could be pressured into intervening in the economy (Ranade 1906, 192). Gopal Krishna Gokhale (b. 1866) considered himself a “humble pupil” of Ranade in Pune, inheriting and developing the latter’s doctrine of state-led liberalization of the Indian economy (Gokhale to G.V. Joshi, Gokhale Papers, undated). Like his mentor, and Naoroji before him, Gokhale had a rude awakening about the colonial state in India. In a conversation with a British bureaucrat, he asked why the colonial state could intervene and mediate arbitrarily in Indian social and economic matters in a way that was unthinkable in the United Kingdom. Gokhale retorted that Britons believed that they had no individual interests or personal attachments to consider in India and could, therefore, intervene with decisiveness and impartiality (Gokhale 1916, 1045). There was no reason why this intrusive state could not be lobbied to intervene more productively. Indeed, Gokhale believed that in the non-European world it was inevitable that competition from the industrialized West would undermine and ultimately destroy rural communities and their traditional modes of production. It was the reality of colonial capitalism that had transformed the role of the state in the Global South—thus it became the “duty of the State” to act as a social engineer (Gokhale 1908, 162). In this Jesuitical spirit, Gokhale urged the state to reestablish and modernize the Mughal era policy of extending public tagai loans at nominal interest to mortgagees who were on the verge of default. State scholarships were recommended for young Indians to travel to the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan to get an industrial and agricultural education. This principle was also extended to statesponsored sanitation, education, and state-run rural credit cooperatives (Gokhale 1908, 356–57). Gokhale viewed the rural question, like Ranade, through the more conservative lens of the Pune context. Caste was an unavoidable obstacle to the rise of contract. Gokhale observed that the lot of Indian traders suffering under the racist pass system of the South African government was akin to that of lower caste groups in

50  Vikram Visana India. Treated as ethnographic cohorts rather than individual actors by the law and by habit, it was unsurprising that their latent economic potential was not realized (Gokhale 1903). The credit cooperatives were intended to do away with mediating moneylenders and, in a Naorojian sense, allow peasant producers to contract with the state and their customers directly and on fair terms as individuals. The net result would be to inculcate those characteristics of individual liberal citizenship and civic association: “prudence, thrift and self-reliance” (Gokhale 1916, 329–30). As early as 1909, John Maynard Keynes wrote to Gokhale agreeing with his policy for using Indian budget surpluses to invest in such public services (J.M. Keynes to Gokhale, Gokhale Papers, Mar. 31, 1909). However, for Gokhale, as for the other economists discussed earlier, this was not an issue of demand-side economics as Keynes’ General Theory would later popularize. Rather, conceived in India’s unique economic circumstances these measures were not conceived as interference in a market economy at all and, counterintuitively, were aimed at an expansion of supply. After all, it was the unfair terms of colonial trade which had resulted in India’s “resourcelessness”—as a corrective to this, the colonial state was merely serving as deus ex machina in the process of liberal capital accumulation (Gokhale 1916, 111).

The Urban Bias of K.T. Telang Kashinath Trimbak Telang (b. 1850) was another native of the city of Bombay, a graduate of the Elphinstone College, and a sufficiently impressive jurist to be elevated to the bench of the Bombay High Court. A founding member of the Bombay Presidency Association (successor to the Bombay Association) and the Indian National Congress, he was also deeply involved in the local political economy of the city. Telang drew heavily on Dadabhai Naoroji’s earlier work on the poverty of India but would end up taking it in a direction that focused much more narrowly on urban industrialism. Telang was convinced that the experience of famine demonstrated that India had to move decisively in the field of modern manufacturing (Journal of the East India Association, Vol. X, 1877; Telang 1916). Drawing on John Stuart Mill’s dictum that “a country will seldom have a productive agriculture, unless it had a large town population” or a foreign urban population to export to, Telang suggested that the policies of the colonial state and the expense of internal communication render export an insufficiently profitable option for the Indian farmer. Moreover, quoting Mill again, the “unaspiring spirit” of traditional cultivators is such that they themselves will not become major “consumers of town produce.” Telang concluded: “so far, it appears to me, that the argument points to the establishment of various manufacturing centres, so to say, in our rural districts.” This direct contact, he hoped, would “extend wants and desires” amongst traditional populations, encouraging them to develop the individualist bonds of civic association through economic contract that ostensibly characterized Bombay (Telang 1916, 166–67; Mill 1965, 300). But how was this to be achieved? Telang’s silver bullet was the counterintuitive idea of encouraging state protectionism as a promoter of sound free-market relations. For Telang, Indian

Decolonizing capital  51 protectionism was of a different magnitude entirely, so much so “that it [was] impossible to exaggerate the importance of having correct views upon it.” Telang opined that India’s distorted capitalism was only partly due to the mediation of the colonial state. Telang’s urban bias partly placed the onus on rural Indian capital for being inefficient and since “there is so little knowledge both of the real resources of the country, and of the proper mode of developing those resources,” protectionism was a means by which the state could coax capital from the clutches of customary agricultural commerce into the sphere of modern urban “enterprise” (Telang 1916, 116–17). So far indigenous industries were concentrated in a handful of locations like Ahmedabad and Bombay. This Telang attributed to historical luck rather than the efficient allocation of capital. He noted that Gujarat’s mercantile castes had a long history of success in trading across the Arabian Gulf. Petitioning the British with sound arguments would unshackle the state and channel capital more rationally, allowing factories and mills to spread into the cotton districts of Maharashtra and Gujarat (Telang 1916, 97). Thus, the political became the primary sphere of action for Telang expressly because of his belief that in the public sphere rational argument could efface custom while public opinion could pressure that state into wiser policy decisions (Jayal 2013). In a revealing statement, Telang demonstrated just how enchanted western Indian liberal thinkers had become with the idea of capital as the key agent of civil sociability and modernization. In a debate with his colleagues about whether social reform should precede political/economic reform, Telang came down decisively on the side of the latter, whilst figures like Ranade and Gokhale preferred to dabble in both. The reason Telang gave was that capital unleashed could do all the work of social reform unaided. What his colleagues called agricultural capital in the countryside was “not in fact capital strictly speaking” since it did not facilitate the metamorphosis from status to contract (Telang 1916, 160). It was “altogether unemployed in any production” and needed to be channeled to urban centers since “an agricultural people cannot be a highly civilized people” (Telang 1916, 160).

The apotheosis of Indian capital in the thought of D.R. Gadgil Dhananjay Ramchandra Gadgil (b. 1901) is the last of the Maharashtrian conceptualizers of Indian capital to be discussed here. Having read Economics at the University of Cambridge, Gadgil returned to India to found the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in Pune in 1930. In 1967, he was invited to join the Planning Commission of India as its vice chairman (Dandekar 1971). Gadgil drew insights from all of the economic thinkers discussed earlier, invoking various aspects of their thinking (Naoroji’s strictly materialist perspective and Gokhale’s desire for disciplined and prudent citizens) when putting forward his own vision for state-led economic development in India (Bayly 2015). However, Gadgil also echoed Telang and Ranade when critiquing the inefficiencies of capital allocation generated by incorrect policy choices of the Nehruvian state.

52  Vikram Visana Like Ranade and Gokhale, Gadgil saw the possibility of an integrative society emerging out of the historically autonomous and self-contained Indian village. However, reminiscent of Telang, Gadgil accepted that the landholdings of the Indian peasant were too small and too equally distributed amongst endogamous kinship groups to allow for capital accumulation (Gadgil 2011, 4). Equally however Gadgil did not place as much faith as Telang in the capacity of India’s industrial centers to “develop” the country. Indian cities were largely atomistic and lacked the “civic spirit” that Gadgil believed Europeans had inherited from the Greek polis and medieval market towns (Gadgil 2011, 356–57). Moreover, he noted that urbanization in India had not resulted from the expansion of manufacturing, trade, and its concomitant cosmopolitan sociability but from the necessities of famine and the exodus of a landless labor class from the countryside (Gadgil 1942, 148). Using the example of America, Gadgil observed that immigrants merely had to acquire the civic spirit in order to integrate. Crucially, Gadgil’s bone of contention was that the Nehruvian state—with its quotas, capital investment in heavy industry, and provision of services—functioned much like the colonial state. It placed the urban sphere under the supervision of a class of technocrats who made no effort to integrate economic and social planning but merely arbitrated between groups (Gadgil 2011, 357). To compound the issue, colonial rule had already begun to disrupt the autonomy of the Indian village, especially with the expansion of the railways and introduction of market incentives without industrialization (Gadgil 1942, 137). The concentration of economic power by a small class of capitalists in cahoots with the Congress Party (who effectively governed without a national rival party well into the 1970s), imitated the colonial state condemned by Naoroji and his coevals. These parasitic mediators filled their pockets with Indian capital— rendering it unproductive. By the 1940s this was already being dubbed “­ corruption.” Social cohesion through economic transformation would only be realized when this “concentration” of capital was “broken down” (Gadgil 2011, 70). Genuinely cooperative processes of economic exchange were the only sure way to move India away from an “unsocial” colonial style marketization. Here, Gadgil echoed Ranade and Gokhale’s anti-colonial critique and preference for unmediated rural cooperatives that dispensed with middlemen and unified production and distribution in a way that the state’s planning policy did not. Further developing an observation by Ranade, Gadgil insisted that a system of cost–price controls was essential to mitigate speculation, allowing Indians to focus exclusively on production (Gadgil 2011, 293–94). This was the ultimate solution to the colonial and Nehruvian state’s extractive monopoly on capital. After a reformed state had sequenced capitalism properly, Gadgil envisioned it eventually withering away— ushering the “Co-operative Commonwealth into existence” (Gadgil 2011, 302).

Conclusion That Gadgil’s conception of a “co-operative commonwealth” for postcolonial India resembled Naoroji’s ideas of an “imperial firm” is telling. In both of these

Decolonizing capital  53 visions of a perfected capitalist order, production and distribution were to be integrated with one another, thereby generating unmediated social contracts between individuals. The result would be an Indian and a global civil society shorn of its need for capital to be managed by a parasitic colonial state and also emancipated from the precarious patronage of a small capitalist class. While the architects of India’s postcolonial political and economic settlement were certainly conversant in the macroeconomic and developmentalist debates of the 1930s onwards, this chapter has provided a rejoinder which shows that this engagement was not derivative but was born exclusively of an early twentiethcentury zeitgeist. Rather, new ideas about the proper use and mobilization of capital had a much longer genealogy reaching back into the nineteenth century. The liberal contestations and reinventions of this era, which took place in a period of economic, social, and political upheaval in the shadow of empire, were projected deep into the twentieth century. Ultimately, the critique of the colonial state and its economic practices, and the Indian political economy it spawned, would also find an outlet in holding the leviathan of the Nehruvian “license Raj” to account. Although there is insufficient space to discuss it in this chapter, a local perspective on Indian capitalism continues to influence the country’s gradual liberalization. In the 1960s, the rise of the Swatantra Party as the only national opposition to the state-planning re-inscribed colonial era arguments with new life. The party’s most senior figure, Chakravarty Rajagopalachari castigated the ruling party’s politics of patronage, clientelism, and subsequent monopoly on capital. Rajagopalachari insisted that this merely created new classes of economic parasites wedded to the state, forming new group interests which could not be reconciled with the wider Indian society. Indeed, far from forming mutually dependent social contracts, these new economic groups could only imagine their success via the defeat of a rival interest group (Rajagopalachari 1961). Another founder member of this party, Minoo Masani, was formerly an ardent socialist in the Indian National Congress, only to become disillusioned by the state’s encroachment on civil society. Masani concluded that the “field of trade” was impeded by intervening variables that prevented the freedom of contract of the “producer and consumer” (Masani 1966). The net result of over-mediation by disinterested forces was the rustication of the socially generative powers of capital. The Swatantra Party’s allegation of the “serfdom of the governed” in the 1960s could have substituted for Naoroji’s “British helotry” a century earlier (Statement of Principles of the Swatantra Party 1959; Masani 1939, 419).

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3 Criminal cities Economics and empire in Belfast and Johannesburg Molly Slavin

Robert McLiam Wilson’s 1996 novel Eureka Street is often held up as a quintessential novel of the Troubles, the violent conflict in Northern Ireland that consumed the region from 1968 to 1998. Alternately narrated by best friends Jake Jackson, a Catholic, and Chuckie Lurgan, a Protestant, Eureka Street follows the two men around Belfast in the early 1990s. Though the two young men often engage tangentially with the Troubles—Jake is constantly ready to argue about any political points, and Chuckie uses the violence to turn a profit by developing an entrepreneurial scheme revolving around the selling of dildos—the most concrete example of the type of violence associated with the civil unrest occurs with a break from either Jake or Chuckie’s narration. About halfway through the novel, the narration moves to an omniscient point of view to depict an explosion in a sandwich shop in the Belfast city center. After the violence, Wilson’s third-person narrator seems to lack a sense of its root causes. “For the men who planted the bomb knew it wasn’t their fault,” the narrator muses cynically. It was the fault of their enemies, the oppressors who would not do what they wanted them to do. They had reasonably asked to have their own way. They had not succeeded. They had then threatened to do violent things if they did not get their way. (Wilson 1996, 228) The impersonality of this summation of an extraordinarily complex historical reality continues as Wilson (1996) writes, “When this had not succeeded, they were forced to proceed with extreme reluctance to do those violent things. Obviously it was not their fault” (228). In answer to the question, “What had happened?” the narrator answers, “A simple event. The traffic of history and politics had bottlenecked” (1996, 231). It is inexplicable, the narrator says. It is just a confluence of incomprehensible people carrying out incomprehensible violence tied up in their incomprehensible demands. This is a universal story about why violence is bad and murder is to be condemned. It is a simple event, nothing to do with imperialism or economics or any other social forces. In the telling, Wilson’s narrator denies and forgets the knotted histories that have led his characters to this

58  Molly Slavin point in this city in favor of an easily digestible narrative about violent people doing violent things. A similar gesture occurs in Ivan Vladislavić’s The Restless Supermarket (2001), which is set in Johannesburg, South Africa, right at the transition point as de jure apartheid is coming to an end in the early 1990s. The novel’s protagonist and narrator, the uptight retired white proofreader Aubrey Tearle, is walking the streets late at night with Shirlaine, a young African woman. Tearle is quite racist and misogynist; he finds the “concepts of transition and change” to be “abhorrent and threatening” (Charos 2008, 23), fears and anxieties he articulates through his constant insistence on “proper” grammar and spelling. As he and Shirlaine meander the streets, he explains to her, “Spelling a word one way ensures we all know we’re talking about the same thing. Once you’re free to spell a word any way you like, chaos comes marching in” (Vladislavić 2001, 284). In response to Shirlaine’s skeptical, “Aren’t there more important things to worry about than commas and full stops?” he responds, “Absolutely! The decline in standards of proofreading is linked directly to the decline in standards everywhere else. Because nowhere is the maintenance of standards more important than in proofreading. Indeed, that’s all it is” (Vladislavić 2001, 285). Tearle, in this scene, expresses a view of Johannesburg not terribly different from the blanket statement Wilson’s narrator expresses about Belfast: Tearle wants Johannesburg to be a smooth, easily comprehended (by him) space, where everyone adheres to his idea of what is correct and preferable in the interest of avoiding what he terms “chaos.” The Eureka Street narrator, similarly, wants Belfast to be a place where difference is smoothed over and where we don’t have to think about the root causes of violence. Both scenes present images of contemporary cities that wish to iron out history and politics and economics and all the other messy bits in favor of harmonic, top–down visions of shiny, even narratives that are free of the wrinkles and unevenness that are part of any serious reckoning with the reality on the ground. These utopic universalisms run up against the reality of life in both Belfast and Johannesburg, as well as most other cities worldwide. Instead of a smooth “all stories are love stories” (Wilson 1996, 1), it is more accurate to make the argument that all stories are crime stories, with all the attendant inequality, economic disparity, violence, and need for reparations to reckon with the past that entails. Because both Belfast and Johannesburg are products of the British Empire, as well as the capitalist development that entails/ed, one way to come to terms with the jaggedness of the narratives of both cities is to be attentive to the inequalities that capitalism creates, sustains, and fosters and to think about these inequalities in light of the crimes depicted in each city’s literature. As the Warwick Research Collective claims, “capitalist development does not smooth away but rather produces unevenness, systematically and as a matter of course” (2015, 12). Understanding the literary and material world—specifically, the postcolonial cities of Belfast and Johannesburg—as uneven opens up new ways to investigate how literature is produced in, reflects, and shapes a capitalist world-system born of colonially and imperially generated inequalities, and how this literary world might be understood through a reading lens attentive to the nexus of cities, capitalism, colonialism, and

Criminal cities  59 crime. The term “criminal cities” takes into account economics, empire, and the presence of crime to present multifaceted views of the economic genealogies and various historical factors that have shaped these literary cities, paying particular attention to materialism and its relationships to literature. The Warwick Research Collective (WReC), comprised, fittingly enough, of researchers from the University of Warwick, conducts interdisciplinary and collaborative research on world literature and the materialist dimensions thereof. WReC has recently expanded the theory of “combined and uneven development,” which they trace from its beginnings with Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin to the later theorizations of Leon Trotsky, Fredric Jameson, and Franco Moretti. WReC’s recent work, which they articulate as describing “a situation in which capitalist forms and relations exist alongside ‘archaic forms of economic life’ and pre-existing social and class relations” (2015, 11), has been very useful in helping me to formulate the idea of the “criminal city.” WReC argues that though “combined and uneven development” has been underutilized in the humanities, it can be applied to the study of literature as a way to understand legacies of colonialism and its capitalist mission. “We understand capitalism to be the substrate of world-literature,” they note, “and we understand modernity to constitute world-literature’s subject and form” (2015, 15). They further elaborate: If we follow [Immanuel] Wallerstein and others in speaking of the instantiation of capitalism as a world-system around 1500, it nevertheless seems clear that it is only in the “long” nineteenth century, and then as the direct result of British and European colonialism, that we can speak both of the capitalisation of the world and the full worlding of capital. (2015, 15) Though WReC is mostly invested in thinking about systems of world-literature, I will hone in on their contentions that the unevenness we see in contemporary narratives about the city, especially cities created by colonialism, can be understood through the lens of uneven capitalist development, brought about by empire, and how colonial capital has continued to shape these cities since the days of formal imperialism. In this chapter, I will use WReC’s formulations of “combined and uneven development” to propose the idea of the “criminal city,” or a postcolonial city that is understood through the interlocking nexus of capitalism, colonialism, and crime. These three formations disrupt utopic visions of the city, complicating narratives like “all stories are love stories.” Belfast and Johannesburg work exceptionally well for this idea of the “criminal city”; each urban space carries a specific charge when it comes to crime and capitalism, each was affected in deep ways by the violence of capital, and each occupied an important role in the formation and postlife of the British Empire. Belfast’s rise as a city occurred after the British plantation of what we would today call Northern Ireland, when the British Empire encouraged the migration and settlement of English and Scottish Protestants into the heavily Gaelic and

60  Molly Slavin Catholic northeast of Ireland. Tensions promulgated by the original plantation of the land were exacerbated in the urban space of Belfast, as Protestants were favored in the industrial labor market and Catholics largely left out. With the partition of Ireland into the Republic and the North in 1921, Belfast was made the capital of Northern Ireland. Partition also established a Parliament at Stormont, “a Protestant Parliament for Protestant people,” in the potentially apocryphal words of Lord Craigavon, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. In this “Protestant state,” capitalism was wielded as a tool for privileging Protestants and leaving Catholics at an economic disadvantage. The capitalist inequality, combined with the ways “colonial discourse came to be enunciated and reified” (Fadem 2015, 17), made for a potent mix of capitalism and colonialism in Northern Ireland. Even after southern Ireland gained its independence from Britain, first via Home Rule and later by full severance from the rapidly shrinking British Empire, the North and Belfast remained part of the United Kingdom. The colonial roots of such a political arrangement manifested themselves in the violence of the Troubles, which raged in varying forms of intensity from the 1920s up to 1998 (with the periods of most protracted violence beginning in the 1960s), formally ending with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. Though the Good Friday Agreement is far from perfect, its democratic nature (it was voted on through a series of referendums) and its power-sharing and devolution models have allowed for an overwhelming amount of “buy-in” from the population of Northern Ireland, leading to a sharp decrease in paramilitary and extralegal, as well as police and British, violence. Though there have been sporadic flare-ups since 1998, the Good Friday Agreement is typically taken to be the “formal” end of the Troubles, leading to investments of European Union money in the country and the rebranding of Belfast into a capitalist-friendly tax haven. The Agreement’s “neoliberal agenda” (Heidemann 2016, 7) has gone a long way toward a cosmetic erasing of the Troubles’ past and a papering over of Belfast’s history in the interest of putting forth a gentrified and sanitized version of the city. However, Northern Ireland has recently made a name for itself on the literary scene with a spate of crime fiction writers. William Meier and Ian Campbell Ross note that “the subject of crime in Ireland since 1921 also reveals ways in which twentieth-century Irish crime continues to be marked by its colonial past” (2014, 15). This “Emerald Noir,” as the genre is called, engages strongly with what contemporary depictions of crime and capitalism have to say about the region’s history with imperialism. Post-apartheid Johannesburg bears some structural similarities to postAgreement Belfast, particularly in ways capitalism is used to divide populations. Johannesburg is the largest city in a country that has seen Portuguese, Dutch, and British imperial influence and, until the late twentieth century, operated under a system of strict racial segregation known as apartheid. Though not formally instituted until 1948, apartheid built upon systems of racial segregation initially put into place by both British and Dutch imperial rule. Apartheid’s intensities and formal codifications into strict law were a post-imperial innovation, but apartheid can be seen as an imperial legacy in that its general purpose was to solidify the hold white Europeans enjoyed over indigenous black Africans and the mixed colored

Criminal cities  61 population once the formal protections of European imperial rule had left the country. Moreover, because “land had been a critical factor in the colonial encounter” (Welsh 2009, 30) and apartheid focused heavily on controlling access to land and space, “apartheid can surely be grasped as a deliberated and anachronistic perpetuation or reinvention of the spatial and epistemological distortions of imperialism within one country’s borders” (Barnard 2007, 7). Apartheid, simultaneously a system of domestic imperialism and a hangover from imperial rule, was also tied up with discourses of criminality from early on, both in the sense that the system was a crime, a violation against any basic understanding of human rights, and in that it instituted a wide and far-ranging criminal code in the strict legalistic sense. Because of apartheid’s many rules and regulations regarding what people could or could not do based on skin color, it was virtually impossible to keep abreast of the many ways one could violate apartheid law and thus be classified as a criminal. Because the outright, explicitly racist attitudes that were acceptable in the apartheid era are now discouraged, the divisions and exclusions of contemporary South African cities are based less on explicit racial categorizations than on crime and economics, which are often coded implicitly racially (Martin Murray refers to this as “racially inscribed capitalism” [1994, 2]). Due to the massive demographic changes that took place in Johannesburg in the 1990s—from white flight into the suburbs to the increase in migrants from other parts of Africa—crime and security and the languages surrounding these concepts became a socially acceptable way to process the end of apartheid and the rise of the “new South Africa.” Lindsay Bremner notes that Johannesburg has become more and more neoliberal in the post-apartheid era, and that “into this situation, a new discourse and set of practices have emerged—those of crime” (1998, 53). Apartheid is now in many ways reinscribed into urban spaces not due to law, but due to white anxieties surrounding race, crime, and economics. Jean and John L. Comaroff (2016) have argued that crime in the twenty-first century “has become the metaphysical optic by means of which people across the planet understand and act upon their worlds” (8, italics original). Understanding and processing crime and its economic connections collectively, through discourses like the novel, provides a framework for thinking through the social ramifications and contemporary relevance of large historical processes like capitalism and empire. In the sections that follow, I will read the “criminal cities” of Belfast and Johannesburg through two twenty-first century texts that engage with crime, colonialism, and capitalism: Stuart Neville’s 2010 Belfast-based The Twelve (published as The Ghosts of Belfast in the United States) and Lauren Beukes’s 2010 Zoo City, set in the Johannesburg neighborhood of Hillbrow, in order to think through how these cities have been shaped by the violence of capital and colonial structures of economic disparity.

“Times change, even if people don’t”: Stuart Neville’s The Twelve Gerry Fegan, protagonist of Stuart Neville’s 2010 thriller The Twelve, is a former IRA man recently released back onto the streets of Belfast after serving time in

62  Molly Slavin the Maze prison for the murder of twelve individuals, carried out at the behest of various IRA commanders. He is haunted by the ghosts of those he has killed, ranging from British soldiers to Protestant paramilitaries to police to civilians. The twelve ghosts follow Fegan around, demanding Hamlet-esque retribution in the form of killing those who ordered or otherwise orchestrated their murders. Fegan becomes convinced that the only way to rid himself of these ghosts is to enact justice in the way his victims are asking, and so he takes off on an avenging tour of Belfast, murdering those—politicians, lawyers, and others—who had ordered the murders of the original twelve. The revenge Fegan engages in on behalf of his victims highlights how genealogies of empire and capitalism, including systems and structures of economic disparity, have mapped the contemporary city of Belfast and points to the gaps and unevenness that exist in the self-satisfied neoliberal narrative that local elites often push. As Fegan carries out his crimes, we encounter former IRA paramilitaries who, in a post-Agreement era, have turned into capitalist investors wrangling London money earmarked for development and tourist attraction schemes. Fegan’s first present-day victim, the IRA-man-turned-developer/politician Michael McKenna offers the observation before Fegan kills him: “The Brits are throwing so much money at this that I almost feel bad taking it off them. Almost” (2010, 8), indicating how money from London, intended as lukewarm reparations for the Troubles, instead has merged with the leftovers of the Troubles-era purveyors of violent crime. The ghosts who haunt Fegan and who he must destroy, then, act as spectral reminders of colonialism and the Troubles—entities once thought dead that are back in less tangible, more ethereal, shiftier form, constantly present and reminiscent of the physical violence of the late twentieth century, even as the economic structures of the city have changed. Aaron Kelly has written of the Northern Irish thriller, “the putatively ungraspable and penumbral conspiracy, which ultimately foreshadows and obsessively stalks these texts is none other than the seemingly vast inscrutable logic of the global conspiracy of global capitalism itself” (2005, 164). This emphasis on the “global conspiracy of global capitalism” can also be seen in the work of Joe Cleary, who has written that in some newer thrillers “the North is now to be redeemed not by the British security forces but by the energies and excitements of global capital” (2002, 141)—for Cleary, it is no longer British security forces controlling the North, but the violence of global capitalism. The effects of these investments of global capital in the contemporary novels of Belfast, The Twelve included, are threefold. First, they are a form of neocolonialism, a capitalist way for the British to keep exerting control over the city and its technically devolved governance under a patina of reparations for past violence; second, the cash flow has constituted a city that is unrecognizable to Gerry Fegan but normalized for most of its inhabitants; and, last, the neoliberal capital investments made in Belfast—in the form of money earmarked for tourist attractions, or community arts schemes, or street mural cleaning plans—are universalizing gestures, in that they erase the specificities of Belfast’s history and specific struggles in an effort to present a face of a “normal” city, a place where people would like to visit

Criminal cities  63 and live and work and play, seemingly free of the violence colonial economics has engendered. By placing Gerry Fegan at the center of The Twelve, Neville allows his readers to occupy both the colonial Belfast of old and the contemporary neoliberal Belfast with the shining new face: we get, in WReC’s words, new “capitalist forms and relations” existing “alongside . . . pre-existing social and class relations” (2015, 11). We see how Fegan’s past and current crimes expose the colonial rifts that underlay his original murders, as well as the continuing ­imperialism and neocolonialism—in the form of foreign capital investment—that persist in structuring his criminal city. Though the degree and intensity of the neoliberal and capitalist imperialism depicted in The Twelve is new, Belfast has long been a site of imperial investment and globalizing currents. Kelly points out that: Belfast’s street names . . . actually bespeak the return of the repressed of precisely such new languages produced by the globalization of capital, for, more often than not, they signify the outpost of empire, networks of world economy, a global experience of violence and disruption. (2005, 107) And, giving truth to this observation, Fegan lives at what is still called Calcutta Street. Gerald Dawe points out that the past of the city, specifically with regards to industrialization and globalization of capital, “is inextricably linked with the British imperial project” (2003, 203), and Tom Paulin echoes him, saying that “deep in the city’s culture memory is the experience of the linen trade” (2003, 239), with its imperial and global associations. But foreign and imperial investment has taken of with in a new intensity in the postcolonial city; economics are held to be the panacea, the accompanying fundamentalist narrative the idea “only capitalism can fix it.” However, what is thought to smooth out all violence in the criminal city—capital—actually produces further unevenness as it is inattentive to root colonial causes of crime. What might seem all well and good on the surface conceals deeper histories that are unearthed through a reading attentive to what economic and colonial capital has wrought. Brendan Murtagh and Karen Keaveney (2006) argue that Belfast, in the postGood Friday Agreement era, is gentrifying at a rate similar to post-apartheid South Africa. Though sharp divisions in Belfast exist as they did in the Troubles era, the logic that brings the city to this point is different: “The pattern of private-sector investment and the differentiation of economic centres specialising in exclusive shopping, high-priced accommodation and new arenas of entertainment have further polarised the city” (198). We see such gentrification in The Twelve, shortly after Fegan has been released from police custody for the shooting of Michael McKenna (charges are ultimately dropped), and he is being driven home by his “human rights” lawyer, another former IRA man named Patsy Toner who has, like McKenna, reinvented himself for an era of “peace.” They drive along the Lisburn Road, and “designer boutiques, restaurants and wine bars passed on either side. Students and young professionals crossed at the lights. They think the city

64  Molly Slavin belongs to them now, Fegan thought” (2010, 36). He sees a young woman cross the street, and Fegan “wondered if she was even born when they scraped the body parts off the streets with shovels” (2010, 36). Fegan, not part of this twenty-firstcentury scene, is “angered at his own bitterness. The quiet after weeks of clamour disoriented him . . . he found the clarity disorienting” (2010, 36). Released into a city he does not recognize, Fegan still lives in a space the young professionals cannot see, a place where “the eleven [remaining ghosts] were there somewhere, just beyond his vision, waiting” (2010, 36), where he finds the lack of Troubles violence “disorienting,” rather than calming or soothing. Fegan’s unease at the sleek Belfast of wine bars is not just the disquiet of a man so recently incarcerated attempting to find his way back into modern urban life; it is a gesture to the reader that something still snakes under the surface of the city that is invisible to those who live in a gentrified Belfast and think the city belongs to them. As WReC points out, understanding this new Belfast through the lens of combined and uneven development helps combat the “political mantra that ‘globalisation’ is a tide lifting all boats” (2015, 22)—though Fegan’s city has ostensibly been globalized and neoliberalized in the time he has been away, this supposed panacea has done very little for him and for other people this narrative attempts to confine to the dustbin of history. The structures and systems of economic disparity remain to be mined by those who may exacerbate the problems of violence and crime. Patsy Toner and Fegan meet with Vincie Caffola, who ordered the execution of two of Fegan’s remaining ghosts (Protestant paramilitaries) outside the old Celtic Supporters Club in west Belfast, where “tricolours and footballs decorated the sign above the entrance, but the paint flaked away to expose rotting wood” (Neville 2010, 36). The republican/Catholic stronghold of west Belfast has been forgotten in the eager rush to redevelop the city with foreign investment capital, leaving the remnants of the IRA, like Vincie Caffola, to lurk in buildings of rotting wood. Unlike McKenna and Toner, Caffola has not reinvented himself for the Good Friday Agreement: he tells Fegan, “I don’t like what’s going on. Supporting the peelers, sitting at Stormont, all that” (2010, 39). Caffola’s unreconstructed republican mindset, at odds with the entry of Sinn Fein into the political process, gives readers a glimpse into the world that capital was supposed to sweep away, the world of colonial violence that was meant to be transmuted into neocolonial investment as a form of reparations. Caffola is of the staunch belief that the conflict in Northern Ireland will “never be over . . . not til the Brits get out” (Neville 2010, 38). Caffola is still firmly embedded in the viewpoint that sees Belfast as a straightforward “colonial crisis” (Deane 1990, 6); he approaches the world through a stark Irish vs. British lens. But he lives in a rapidly changing city, which even he acknowledges and is not pleased about: referring to a recent immigration boom, he tells Fegan in a particularly unsavory moment, “I swear to God, this place is getting so full of foreigners it won’t be worth getting the Brits out” (2010, 39). Caffola’s section of Belfast, however, has seen no benefit from foreign investment or immigration: he is locked into an older dichotomous imperial framework where the Brits aren’t there to invest, they are there to occupy and kill, which comes to a head shortly

Criminal cities  65 before his death, when he and Fegan together participate in a riot, shortly after Michael McKenna’s funeral. Sabine Wichert has written of Northern Ireland and Belfast that “mobs, demonstrations, and paramilitaries can be seen as not so much extra-parliamentary but as functioning in place of proper democratic representation and access to power” (1991, 179). Caffola’s west Belfast—rundown, decaying, haunted by the ghosts of the Troubles—bears no resemblance to the gentrifying city center that has been the major beneficiary of the peace process, and so a way to react to the new neoliberal order is via the demonstration turned riot, as a way to remind the world west Belfast is still here. This particular riot doesn’t seem to have been politically motivated, but rather just a way to bring up old Troubles logics without the underlying political context—Patsy Toner tells Caffola and Fegan it began because kids “started chucking stuff” (Neville 2010, 84)—but Caffola is still delighted by the opportunity to engage in old-fashioned violence with the police. “Jesus,” he grins, “we haven’t had a proper ruck in ages. I wonder if we can get some petrol bombs rustled up quick” (2010, 84). This disturbance and associated violence, like Fegan’s murders, is a crime redolent with the colonial legacies and economic genealogies still embedded in the city but not entirely of those legacies and genealogies. Though the actual riot is a bit disappointing—“It’s not the Eighties any more,” Caffola says, “Fuck, it’s not even the Nineties. A few stitches, that’ll be the height of it” (2010, 90)—it provides the necessary cover for Fegan to get Caffola away from the crowd and kill him for the revenge the ghosts seek. But Caffola’s short time on the streets of The Twelve serves an important purpose. The text highlights an area of Belfast left behind by capitalist investment and allows us to see how the neocolonial twenty-first-century city and the colonial city of the Troubles can coexist. As Adrian McKinty and Neville write in the introduction to Belfast Noir, British governments increased their Troubles-era colonial hold on Belfast “in reaction to IRA bombings and shootings” (2014, 15); moreover, despite ­Britain’s post-Agreement neoliberal endeavors in one of its last remaining colonies, “working-class areas [of the city] have seen little improvement” (2014, 18). Focusing on the city center for investment and encouraging the ensuing gentrification blatantly ignores the people and areas who were most deeply involved in the Troubles—the working-class areas of west Belfast, for the purposes of The Twelve—and reinscribes old imperial logics and urban patterns without any real attempt at reparation for the violence of colonial capital. The imperially influenced violence of anti-police riots may not carry the same charge it did at the height of the Troubles in the 1980s and 1990s, but there is still a very deep frustration in those areas at the subtler neocolonialisms of redevelopment, gentrification, and lack of structural attention paid to the areas which were the most in the weeds of the Troubles. Though “Belfast was a different place now” and “metallic signs of prosperity towered over every corner of Belfast,” [t]he city’s invisible borders remained the same . . . The same lowlifes still fed off the misery they created, deepening the divisions wherever they could.

66  Molly Slavin The same hatreds still bubbled under the surface. But the city had grown fat, learning to mask its scars when necessary and show them when advantageous. (Neville 2010, 129) This strategic showing and masking of scars, this unevenness, mirrors Fegan’s ghosts; they pop up when Fegan has to confront his past physical crimes and subside as he observes what his city has become. The riot is an example of colonial legacies erupting through a capitalist coverup of imperial scars. At the same time, more generally, the influx of peace process money has led to a flattening of the specifics of Belfast’s history and what imperialism and later, Good Friday Agreement-inspired neoliberalism, has meant and done to this urban space, creating a new branch in this long economic genealogy. Michael McKenna’s wake, for instance, is not held in his big house in the suburbs, because this doesn’t “sit well with the party’s socialist manifesto” (Neville 2010, 63)—they hold the wake, instead, at his mother’s house just off the Falls Road in west Belfast. Though this part of the city has not received much direct peace process funding, it has received some spillover from young people who can no longer afford to live in the gentrified city center: Fegan observes that “many of the street’s newer residents would eye this gathering with apprehension,” for “the property boom had driven the young middle classes into parts of the city they’d never contemplated before” (2010, 64). Of course, the papering over of west Belfast’s past isn’t altogether a bad thing—the breakup of the IRA community isn’t necessarily something to mourn, and the presence of money has led to lots of opportunities for the city that hadn’t existed in the Troubles era—but the Falls Road moving from its position as a republican stronghold and a home for unreconstructed republican nationalists like Vincie Caffola to a site instead for young professionals buying starter homes erases something, does away with the particularities of colonial history and ushers in a new framework of globalized capitalism that makes it possible to forget about local specificities and move instead toward Belfast as just another site for globalized capital. As noted, Fegan no longer believes his crimes had any political meaning; just as his crimes are universalized in the twenty-first century, so is the narrative of Belfast the city. To further illustrate this point, Edward Hargreaves MP, Minister of State for Northern Ireland, says when told of the murders, “So, it’s not political. Let’s try and keep it that way, shall we?” (Neville 2010, 50). By killing all the people who ordered his Troubles murders to, in turn, rid himself of the ghosts that remind him of his Troubles and colonial past, Fegan is attempting to participate in that erasure of community memory. To be clear, I do not wish to sound nostalgic for the times “when they scraped the body parts off the streets with shovels” (Neville 2010, 36) or to make the provocative argument that Belfast was better off in the era of the ungentrified Troubles; however, Fegan’s actions in ridding himself of anyone who reminds him of the Troubles participates in globalized capital’s project of minimizing the effects of Belfast’s imperial and colonial violence in favor of projecting the image of a city that has safely shuttered its past, closed the book on its past economic disparities, and

Criminal cities  67 achieved closure to become just like any other city. Now, Belfast is a city like any other, places of finance and commerce and business, where the colonial violence of the past is elided for the benefit of a new triumphalist narrative and where the troubling parts of the city are simply gentrified and evened out. The Twelve demonstrates capitalism and neocolonialism’s desire to gloss over, forget, push aside, and universalize the uneven and inconvenient specificities of local spaces and criminal cities, even as capital continues to produce uneven criminal cities like that of Belfast itself, as well as Johannesburg.

“No offense to the animalled”: Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City Lauren Beukes’s 2010 novel Zoo City is a futuristic, science fiction text set in a ­dystopic Johannesburg. WReC notes, “Johannesburg’s position as the ‘pre-eminent global city’ of Africa, the paradigmatic ‘Afropolis,’ crystallises certain trends within what we are calling the aesthetics of uneven development” (2015, 144). Though Beukes’s Johannesburg is speculative, elements of the real and uneven history of Johannesburg have been carried through into the speculative city of Beukes’s novel—for instance, apartheid seems to have happened in the history of Zoo City, and the titular “Zoo City” is the real-life Johannesburg neighborhood of Hillbrow. But, given the genre, many elements of the world of Zoo City are fantastic; some residents of the city, known as “zoos” or, more derogatorily, “apos,” the novel’s narrator Zinzi December included, are constantly accompanied by animal familiars (Zinzi’s familiar, for example, is a sloth). Though various theories abound as to why these “zoos” have come to be, the one constant variable common to all zoos is that they are all formerly incarcerated persons, or as Zinzi wryly puts it “criminals. Murderers, rapists, junkies. Scum of the earth” (Beukes 2010, 15). Because of her criminal history, Zinzi is forced to make her living on the black market, by finding lost things for clients and by taking part in the ultimate capitalized neoliberal venture, Internet scams. But besides the commonality of a criminal history, neither the scientific community nor the world at large has managed to figure out how or why the zoos have these familiars, and zoos face significant social, economic, and political discrimination in their day-to-day lives. Residents of Johannesburg use “Zoo City” to refer to the part of the city where the zoos are effectively forced to live. Zoo City is what was previously referred to as Hillbrow, an inner-city suburb that, in both our history and the history of the novel, was viewed as glamorous and cosmopolitan in the apartheid era, and that fell into hard times with the end of apartheid and subsequent white flight to the suburbs. By designating Hillbrow as the area where the zoos, people with criminal histories, must live, Beukes draws a connection between apartheid and criminality; in the “real” history of Johannesburg, post-apartheid Hillbrow is often stereotyped as being dirty, dangerous, and full of Others, due to its post-apartheid demographic makeup; the same is true of the speculative Zoo City and its criminal zoos. Neville Hoad writes of the neighborhood that while it “continues to enjoy a lively street life,” this is “coupled with a high crime rate, and [the neighborhood] is considered a no-go zone for respectable white people and tourists” (2007, 113)

68  Molly Slavin (note the pairing of the ostensibly colorblind, behaviorally influenced language of “respectable” with the color-conscious use of “white people”). In both our Hillbrow and in the world of Zoo City, the neighborhood is a site of post-apartheid segregation, with the new divisions based on a neoliberal, capitalized language of crime rather than the older systems and structures of economic and racial disparity; Lisa Propst writes of the novel, “Unable to escape the visible stigma of criminality, this animalled become the new underclass” (2016, 4). For an example of the continuities between the eras of apartheid and post-apartheid in the novel, consider how much of the language in post-apartheid Zoo City remains the same as in the apartheid era. For instance, when Zinzi is meeting with one client, the old woman snaps, “If you would be so kind as to let me finish? . . . I hid in the bathroom and took all my jewellery off because I know how you people—criminals that is,” she added hurriedly, “No offense to the animalled” (2010, 8). We see a slippage here between the racist, apartheid-era language of “you people” to the quick clarification that she means “criminals,” and of course, not the animalled. Though the deep structures have not changed, in a post-apartheid and neoliberal era, Zinzi’s client must clarify that she is not racist in the sense of judging the physical characteristics of the animalled, but that she is simply prejudiced against “criminals,” making Zoo City a particularly interesting test case for seeing how economic and colonial capitalism has morphed and what it has entailed since the days of apartheid. Zinzi, in recounting her time in prison, remembers “they call prisoners clients these days,” though, “clients” still get served slop and pap, still have to sleep fifty-seven to a room designed for twenty, still have to exercise in a grim concrete yard with the outside world taunting, only a mesh fence and a gun turret away. (Beukes 2010, 60) Once that outside world becomes a reality, “clients” get kicked out “with zero support except for an overloaded parole system that can’t keep track of who you are, let alone what you’re supposed to be doing” (2010, 60). With this lack of any kind of support system, Zinzi notes: It was inevitable that I’d end up in Zoo City. Although I didn’t realise that until after the fifth rental agency had sneered over their clipboards at Sloth and told me they didn’t have anything available in the suburbs—had I tried Hillbrow? (2010, 60–61) Surface-level jargon aside—clients instead of prisoners, etc.—the deeper effects of the violence of advanced capitalism are evident from this passage; in WReC’s words, “this unevenness at the level of economics is coded into the fabric of built space in South Africa” (2015, 148). For instance, Zinzi’s incarceration and subsequent labeling as a criminal once she is released reminds the reader strongly

Criminal cities  69 of Michelle Alexander’s argument about the American criminal justice system in The New Jim Crow (2010): that individuals belonging to discriminated-against classes of people are branded as criminals in a neoliberal age to keep the prisonindustrial complex humming. Once released, without state supports (Zinzi, like many others formerly incarcerated, is estranged from her family and cannot rely on them), people with criminal histories have nowhere to go, no one to rely on. Without laws or safety nets in place to mandate some sort of reintegration into society, or robust housing assistance, or any formal kind of reparations, all the people with criminal histories, the “zoos,” are forced together into Hillbrow. This may no longer be due to the official policies of the apartheid regime—actual laws mandating who may live where have been repealed—but the logic of the market, combined with individual prejudice and bigotry, mandates that there is nothing available in desirable areas and that the zoos must live in Hillbrow/Zoo City, the place of last resort. This capitalized, segregated, and individualistic environment Zinzi and her sloth are effectively forced to navigate provides the motor for the novel’s main action. Her skill at finding things is established very early as she manages to find an old woman’s (Mrs Luditsky) ring. She is on her way to return the ring when she gets word that Mrs Luditsky has been murdered. The two individuals who give her this information outside Mrs Luditsky’s apartment, a man with a Maltese poodle familiar (whom Zinzi refers to as “Maltese”) and a woman with a marabou stork (“Marabou”), seemingly innocently engage Zinzi in conversation and, hearing what she does for a living, tell her that they run a “procurement” business and hire her to find a missing person, the pop star Songweza, who is managed by a reclusive music producer named Odi Huron. Though Zinzi despises finding lost persons, the death of the old woman and her subsequent loss of that paycheck, combined with her segregation from legal markets, means that she is left with no other choice than to accept the job, demonstrating once again the power colonialist capitalism holds over the day-to-day lives of people in the criminal city. Zinzi’s Johannesburg is built on crime: colonial legacies have made it so that the economic and social structure and functioning of the city builds upon past economic genealogies in order to continue apartheid-esque codes of segregation and urban organization, with the criminal now occupying the space formerly designated for Africans in Zoo City’s “inegalitarian division of basic services eerily reminiscent of apartheid’s race-based system” (Eatough 2015, 709). But Beukes positions Zinzi in a way so that she at first assists in propping the system up, but then navigates the system to bring to light subsumed ideologies and places the reader in the position of detective to figure out the base, underlying structure of a society, where the bones of colonial legacies are still visible for those who know where to look. Zinzi begins looking into Songweza’s case by pretending she is an investigative journalist for a popular music magazine in order to gain access to those in the upper echelons of the entertainment and music industries. This positioning allows her to delve into areas where a criminal zoo would typically not be allowed, and as she falls deeper and deeper into her investigation, Zinzi begins to realize that the disappearance of Songweza closely mirrors the cases of other missing people in recent

70  Molly Slavin years; when she discovers all those people (except for Songweza) were animalled, she begins to become convinced that the prior murders in the pattern were committed to kill the familiars, not the human zoos they were attached to. She realizes that the familiars have been killed to make muti, or a potent kind of medicine to treat diseases like HIV/AIDS that are thought to be uncurable. The familiar muti murders in Zoo City have a real-life parallel in contemporary South Africa, in that a racialized moral panic not unlike the one kicked up around the prevalence of crime has sprung up around supposed muti murders of humans. Zinzi notes that “someone’s always buying in this city. Sex. Drugs. Magic” (Beukes 2010, 301). By tying the fictional muti murders of familiars to the rare-but-it-happens phenomenon of muti murders of real-life humans, Beukes further solidifies the link between the speculative future of Zoo City and the real Johannesburg: no one misses zoos, as Zinzi points out (2010, 301), and no one misses the Africans killed for muti either. Capital and crime have taken over where apartheid left off to continue the uneven categories and structures set in place by apartheid’s racial codes, showing how economics can create a new criminal city in the place of formal imperialism. Though she doesn’t articulate it in quite these terms, Zinzi works out the connections between apartheid, imperialism, and crime when she arrives at Odi’s mansion to accuse Marabou and Maltese of keeping Songweza and her twin, S’bu, hostage for a purpose that remains murky, but that Zinzi knows has something to do with the muti murders. Maltese tells her frankly that he and Marabou have killed two “unlucky street kids who match the general physical description” (2010, 322) of Songweza and S’bu and framed Zinzi for their murders. He explains, over her protestation, “No one’s going to believe this”: Won’t they? A psychotic junkie zoo bitch who killed her brother? Who was so celebrity-obsessed she pretended to be from a bigshot music magazine so she could get closer to the twins? Whose fingerprints were all over poor Mrs Luditsky’s apartment, who took her little china cat home with her as some kind of trophy? Are you kidding me? (2010, 322) Songweza’s disappearance was planned by the Maltese and the Marabou; they framed Zinzi from the beginning, killing Mrs Luditsky to snare Zinzi into the criminal structure. Though Songweza and S’bu are not zoos, the murders of the “street kids who match the general physical description” have been plotted to make the pop stars’ impending murders look as though they fit the pattern of muti murders. The purpose of murdering the twins at all is revealed when we learn that Odi Huron is a zoo and hiding this from the public; he is “sick to death” of his familiar, a crocodile, and believes that murdering zoos for their familiars, followed by killing one of the twins, will allow him to transfer his familiar to the remaining twin and rid himself of the stigma of being a zoo. Then, by murdering the twin who he has forced to take his crocodile, he will kill the crocodile and “chop you up for muti” because, as Zinzi explains to the animal, “Monster like you? You’re probably worth a fortune” (2010, 340).

Criminal cities  71 This complicated plotline is legible in the context of a Johannesburg shaped by neoliberal capitalism, imperialism, and apartheid. The crimes are thick: the discrimination against zoos that both would make Zinzi a believable suspect for a series of murders and that forced her to work in illegal activities to begin with is a start, but so is the criminal city that pushed her out of jail onto the streets with nothing resembling state supports, nudging her into a life of constant evasion of the law. Deep patterns and economic genealogies shape the world she is operating within; the undying quest for profit above all else that would make these serial murders possible, the segregation brought about first by apartheid and then by the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege encouraged by capitalism that drives crimes like these murders forward by providing convenient cover stories. Beukes uses a speculative future with many parallels to our own world to demonstrate that anxieties over crime have taken over contemporary Johannesburg in the eroding of the formal codes of apartheid. Zoo City and The Twelve end in much the same way: with both protagonists escaping their respective criminal cities and all the baggage they carry. Zinzi decides to go on a road trip through the African continent, from Johannesburg to Kigali, where she plans to meet up with her boyfriend, Benoît’s, Congolese family and present them with immigration and asylum papers for South Africa. This panAfrican gesture, taking in as it does many urban spaces scarred by colonialism and its attendant economic violences (she notes that, on the trip, she will go from “Johannesburg to Harare to Lusaka to Mbeye to Dar es Salaam to Nairobi to Jinja to southern Uganda to Kigali” [Beukes 2010, 348]), is a form of demonstrating the artificiality of city and national borders, when economic and colonial capital has shaped all these places via similar economic genealogies. Zinzi’s trip seems to speak of what economic and colonial capital have produced: in WReC’s words, “the capitalisation of the world and the full worlding of capital” (2015, 15), in that she will start, travel through, and end up in criminal cities with different but strongly related systems and structures of economic disparity. Though it seems as though Zinzi plans to return to her city, once she has Benoît’s family in tow and the flurry around her case has calmed down, Gerry Fegan leaves Belfast noting, “Men like him no longer belonged here,” and firmly tells his love interest, “I can’t come back. Ever” (Neville 2010, 463). (He does, however, come back to Belfast in the five sequels that make up the complete Belfast Novels series.) Because both Zinzi and Gerry Fegan will return to their largely unchanged cities, still marked by crime and capitalism and colonialism, it would seem that it is time to insert another entry into the genealogy of the theory of “combined and uneven development”: the importance and urgency of the unevenness of the criminal city.

Bibliography Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Barnard, Rita. 2007. Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

72  Molly Slavin Beukes, Lauren. 2010. Zoo City. Nottingham: Angry Robot. Bremner, Lindsay. 1998. “Crime and the Emerging Landscape of Post-Apartheid Johannesburg.” In Blank ____: Architecture, Apartheid, and After, edited by Hilton Judin and Ivan Vladislavić, 48–63. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. Charos, Caitlin. 2008. “ ‘The End of an Error’: Transition and ‘Post-apartheid Play’ in Ivan Vladislavić’s The Restless Supermarket.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 9 (1) (January): 23–38. Cleary, Joe. 2002. Literature, Partition, and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel, and Palestine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Comaroff, Jean, and L. John. 2016. The Truth About Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dawe, Gerald. 2003. “The Revenges of the Heart: Belfast and the Poetics of Space.” In The Cities of Belfast, edited by Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly, 199–210. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Deane, Seamus. 1990. “Introduction.” In Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, edited by Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said, 3–19. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eatough, Matthew. 2015. “Planning the Future: Scenario Planning, Infrastructural Time, and South African Fiction.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 61 (4) (Winter): 690–714. Fadem, Maureen Ruprecht. 2015. The Literature of Northern Ireland: Spectral Borderlands. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Heidemann, Birte. 2016. Post-Agreement Northern Irish Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hoad, Neville. 2007. African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kelly, Aaron. 2005. The Thriller and Northern Ireland Since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror. London: Routledge. McKinty, Adrian, and Stuart Neville. 2014. “Introduction: The Noirest City on Earth.” In Belfast Noir, edited by Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville, 13–22. Brooklyn: Akashic Books. Meier, William, and Ian Campbell Ross. 2014. “Editors’ Introduction: Irish Crime Since 1921.” Eire-Ireland 49 (1 & 2) (Spring/Summer): 7–21. Murray, Martin. 1994. Revolution Deferred: The Painful Birth of Post-Apartheid South Africa. London and New York: Verso. Murtagh, Brendan, and Karen Keaveney. 2006. “Policy and Conflict Transformation in the Ethnocratic City.” Space and Polity 10 (2): 187–202. Neville, Stuart. 2010. The Twelve. London: Vintage. Paulin, Tom. 2003. “The Vernacular City.” In The Cities of Belfast, edited by Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly, 233–42. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Propst, Lisa. 2016. “Information Glut and Conspicuous Silence in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 11 (November): 1–11. Vladislavić, Ivan. 2001. The Restless Supermarket. London: And Other Stories. Warwick Research Collective. 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Welsh, David. 2009. The Rise and Fall of Apartheid. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Wichert, Sabine. 1991. Northern Ireland Since 1945. London: Longman. Wilson, Robert McLiam. 1996. Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other. New York: Arcade Publishing.

4 Interrogating legal world-making through genre Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book and colonial reparations Honni van Rijswijk Introduction: the significance of the traumatised indigenous to the Australian colonial imaginary In this chapter, I provide a reading of Alexis Wright’s exemplary novel The Swan Book (2013), which is focalized through the figure of a traumatized indigenous girl who has been sexually assaulted by members of her own community. I read Wright’s novel to offer a radical rethinking of legal and political categories of personal injury, reparations, sovereignty and law. Essentially, I argue, the novel reframes sexual violence as an issue of sovereignty, without taking away from the understanding of sexual violence as an intersectional harm. Indeed, my reading suggests, sexual violence understood in the colonial context should be extended intersectionally, beyond the framework of “harm to the person” that dominates legal and cultural domains—instead, personal injury should be conceptually revised to include damage to sovereignty, while holding the standard of justice to that experienced by the indigenous subject. Historically, in Australia, the claim for reparations connected with colonialism, articulated as harms suffered by the Stolen Generations, has not been successful. Similarly, the claims of Stolen Generations survivors have mostly failed at common law. The economic, material consequences of the failure of the federal reparations scheme and the failure of claims at common law are gendered. This chapter parses the logic of the legal and political imaginaries behind these failures and looks for alternatives. Sexual violence—and “personal harm” more widely—is not epiphenomenal. Ultimately, the disproportionately high rate of sexual violence against indigenous women and children in Australia is the direct effect of gendered, colonial violence. Although it is reported that finding reliable data on the nature and extent of sexual violence against indigenous Australians is difficult, it is estimated that Indigenous women are twelve times more likely to be the victims or survivors of assault than non-indigenous women (McCalman, Bridge, Whiteside, Bainbridge, Tsey, and Jorgen (1). Sexual violence needs to be understood in two key ways: (1) alongside other continuing colonial injuries; and (2) alongside the state’s refusal to acknowledge indigenous sovereignty, which means reframing what is meant by “sexual violence” from an isolated, individual experience of harm and subjection to one that foregrounds the sovereignty of indigenous women, whose laws have

74  Honni van Rijswijk survived despite the injuries of the colonial past and present. We need a radical rethinking of legal and political categories of injury, reparation, sovereignty, and law. The Swan Book tells the story of Oblivion Ethylene, nicknamed Oblivia. She lives in the Northern Territory within “the world’s most unknown detention camp” (Wright, 40). Oblivia is deliberately mute, refusing to speak since she was gang-raped by members of her own community. Her ongoing trauma is figured as a vicious “cut snake virus” that has invaded her mind and which she can neither fight nor eliminate (1). She is trying to “regain sovereignty over [her] own brain” (4) and the plot of the novel is based on her “quest” to regain this sovereignty (4). Wright thereby puts the female child at the center of political and legal claims, radically challenging state law’s frameworks of both personal injury and indigenous sovereignty. This focus on representation and its connection to power/ authority opens up the possibility of an intervention into the understanding of reparations, in particular to extend the claim for reparations beyond personal injury. Legal and cultural stories reinforce each other: in the public sphere, the suffering of indigenous survivors of the Stolen Generations has been seen as regrettable and met with sympathy (Kennedy 2011, 128) but has also been characterized as “personal” and exceptional. Further, and most important, in both cultural and legal domains, indigenous suffering is not connected to questions of sovereignty or legal claim—as will be discussed in more detail in the following pages. Questions of indigenous sovereignty have tended to be kept separate from the adjudication of colonial and contemporary harms in political and legal discourses. But the refusal of the colonial state to recognize indigenous law and sovereignty is key to all aspects of indigenous harms, including harms that have been ascribed as individual or personal. Lack of sovereignty manifests in real ways as injury and illness. For example, the state’s violence adjudications in the ongoing Northern Intervention involves the exclusion of indigenous sovereignty, as will be discussed later in the chapter. This is a point that is often lost, as sovereignty is more commonly thought of as an issue associated with land claims, rather than of personal harm, and the effects of this artificial division are gendered. As such, the exclusion of sovereignty as an issue to be accounted for in sexual violence forms part of the problematic gendering of indigenous sovereignty. It has been recognized that in the context of land claims, law clearly refuses to allow a plurality of authorities—of laws, sovereignties, or communities. Stewart Motha locates this refusal in Mabo, in which, he says, “a singular, unassailable (non-justiciable) sovereign ‘event’ is proposed as the foundation of Australian law and society” (2005, 108). Law’s insistence on a single, normative system—that of the white state— has ensured that indigenous authority became coded as not-law within the legal domain. In a sense, the subject matter of the adjudication is less important than the genre within which it takes place, as it is this genre that excludes the power of indigenous law. The issue of sovereignty has been foregrounded in Native Title cases at common law, but it is equally at the heart of issues of harm—Stolen Generations, sexual violence—although this is a much more subtle point that needs to be brought out, in part because of its gendered nature. In all these domains,

Interrogating legal world-making  75 the power of indigenous authorities to challenge law’s practices and genres is obscured in the legal domain. We need new ways of situating state law and also need to thematize law’s relation to indigenous authority in cases where Western law is asserting adjudications over violence and harm. In this paper, I consider the genealogy of harm from the Stolen Generations through the Northern Territory Intervention, in the context of a failed national reparations scheme and what that signifies. State law’s failure to properly encounter indigenous sovereignties and laws is clearly seen in its adjudication of harms caused to survivors of the Stolen Generations. State legal responses to indigenous child removal include the transitional justice process Bringing Them Home (HREOC 1997) and a handful of common law cases (with only one of these being successful). These legal and political processes have meant that the dominant legal and political frameworks within which colonization is understood occur within the genres of personal suffering and redemption, rather than within the genres of legal right and entitlement to reparations. Through these processes, the sentimental figure of the indigenous child has also been instrumentalized as part of wider state and cultural myths. Moreover, these legal failures not only fail to compensate survivors for past and present harms—the very adjudication of these harms acts to constitute indigenous communities as traumatized survivors under state law, rather than as sovereign communities with their own authorities and laws.

Political responses to the stolen generations: public feeling and popular justice The colonial treatment of indigenous injury needs to be understood within the recent reckoning of harms caused by the state and other institutions to survivors of the Stolen Generations. Between 1995 and 1997, an Australian federal government agency, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), conducted an inquiry into the forcible removable of Aboriginal children from their parents—widespread practices that had been carried out by both state and private organizations under the auspices of state and federal legislative regimes. HREOC’s final report, Bringing Them Home, published in 1997, found that from approximately 1910 to 1970, between one and three of every ten indigenous children had been forcibly removed from their families, and that this had led to ongoing physical and psychological harms (HREOC 1997, 308 onwards). Sexual violence was noted as one of the many harms caused to survivors: in the course of its inquiry, the HREOC heard evidence from a number of witnesses who reported sexual abuse (HREOC 1997, 140–44). In Bringing Them Home, HREOC stated that “children in every placement were vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation” (140); despite not being directly asked about experiences of sexual abuse during the extensive interviews, out of sensitivity to interviewees’ experiences, approximately 30 percent of girls volunteered that they had experienced sexual abuse in foster families and 11 percent volunteered that they had experienced sexual abuse in institutions (141).

76  Honni van Rijswijk There was very little impact on the state, economic or legally, following the Report. No criminal proceedings arose out of the findings of Bringing Them Home. Further, the wide range of people who were responsible for the policies of child removal and who were involved in child removals—still-living public servants, legislators, politicians, police officers, heads of institutions, and government ministers—were not included in the process of acquiring the testimonies that formed a large part of the inquiry or of the subsequent Report. Raimond Gaita argues that those authorities and their agents would have been guilty of genocide and should have faced trials: “How can one say that genocide had been committed, yet only ask for an apology and compensation? How can you think genocide always to be a serious crime, yet find it unthinkable to call for criminal proceedings?” (44). Gaita also states that in Australia, such trials were “literally unthinkable, and that they are so . . . is the most persuasive evidence that the significance of the crimes against the Aborigines has not been fully appreciated” (45). Bringing Them Home concluded that the forcible removal of indigenous children constituted cultural genocide under the United Nations Genocide Convention 1948 (ratified by Australia in 1949) and customary international law (HREOC 1997, 308–09). It recommended the use of the United Nations’ van Boven Principles for Victims of Gross Violations of Human Rights, including a full range of reparation measures, such as restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of not-repetition (HREOC 1997, 308–09). Bringing Them Home also recommended that a reparations scheme be adopted to deal with compensation arising from harms suffered by the Stolen Generations, and that there be a national apology (HREOC 1997, 308–09). Bringing Them Home thereby did important work in documenting “the everydayness and bureaucratization of genocide and of massive human rights violations in the liberal democratic state” (Orford 2006, 851–83). In tracing the past “laws, practices and policies” that produced the Stolen Generations (HREOC 1997, 3), it made a significant intervention into the silence of both the legal domain and the public sphere of that time. But despite these important recommendations—despite its important political and legal claims—no federal reparations scheme has been put in place. It is so important that this still be done, to compensate survivors for the racist removal policies of the past and also for the injuries of sexual, emotional, and physical violence documented in Bringing Them Home. Bringing Them Home is a didactic text—one of its main purposes was to educate the mainstream public regarding the experiences of the Stolen Generations and the responsibilities that arose through this suffering. It was clearly aimed at eliciting empathic responses from the public in ways that were compatible with a broader narrative of healing and reconciliation. Rosanne Kennedy compares this public response to what Lauren Berlant has written about in the context of the United States, as “a popular belief in national sentimentality, a rhetoric of promise that a nation can be built across fields of social difference through channels of affective identification and empathy” (Kennedy 2011, 69 citing Berlant 2000, 128). The main political response to Australia’s Stolen Generations was the National Apology in 2008 (Commonwealth of Australia 1997, 308–09), which

Interrogating legal world-making  77 framed one of the major tools of colonization, the removal of indigenous children from their families, as a personal injury suffered by children and their families, so that the primary way in which the Stolen Generations are encountered in the Australian public sphere is through an affective mode of engagement. The Prime Minister at the time of Bringing Them Home, John Howard, refused to apologize to the Stolen Generations, on the basis that “Australians of this generation should not be required to accept guilt and blame for past actions and policies over which they had no control” (Howard 2000, 90). Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s later “Apology to Australia’s Indigenous People,” on February 13, 2008, was a momentous event in the national Australia imaginary—an event that aimed to promote healing and reconciliation. But this very emphasis on “reconciliation” promoted the public’s affective, sentimental engagement with the Stolen Generations, at the expense of raising the public’s awareness of political and legal right and remedies. In defiance of the recommendations of Bringing Them Home, today there is still no federal reparations scheme. The legal and cultural stories reinforce each other: indigenous suffering is regrettable and met with sympathy, but is also characterized as “personal” and aberrant in the wider teleology of colonial time. Further, and most important, in both cultural and legal domains, indigenous suffering is not connected to questions of sovereignty or legal claim. Indigenous suffering registers in the mode of affect—specifically, the affect of sentimentality—in the imaginary of the present harms of the Northern Territory Intervention and the past harms of the Stolen Generations. Indigenous harms are framed in what Rosanne Kennedy terms “scenes of suffering” rather than as “scenes of injustice” (Kennedy 2011, 270) thereby foreclosing legal and political interventions: “the victim’s grief is now disconnected from their sense of grievance” (Meister 2011, 70). The wider work of the state in reconciliation—which includes quasi-judicial processes—is aimed at ending violence, rather than providing forms for the struggle toward justice. In Australia, the reconciliation narrative has the effect of aligning nonindigenous beneficiaries with the figure of the bystander, rather than that of the perpetrator, thereby disguising the complicity of non-Indigenous subjects in state acts that have caused (and continue to cause) suffering.1

State law’s response to the stolen generations: best intentions and the failure to acknowledge indigenous sovereignty Following the failure of reparations, individual claims were brought in the common law. There have only been a handful of cases responding to the harms suffered by members of the Stolen Generations; and only one of these claims, decided as late as 2010, was successful.2 In these cases, harms are framed as personal, and as disconnected from wider state policies of assimilation, despite the facts that the removal of children also meant the forceful removal of communities from their land and the targeting of indigenous language and culture.3 The cases directly run up against questions of legal authority and indigenous sovereignty, but in each case—even in the successful claim—reject engaging with these questions, instead

78  Honni van Rijswijk subordinating the key question of sovereignty to a framework of personal injury and state intentionality. In the early case of Kruger v Commonwealth (“Kruger”),4 indigenous claimants argued the constitutional invalidity of the Aboriginals Ordinance 1918 (NT), which purported to give the Chief Protector entitlements to “undertake the care, custody, or control of any Indigenous or half-caste, if, in his opinion it is necessary or desirable in the interests of the Indigenous or halfcaste.”5 The claim failed, and the court rejected the claim that the Ordinance was enacted for the purposes of genocide.6 Although the court took judicial notice of the existence of a general policy of child removal,7 these observations had no legal effect. In the later case of Cubillo v Commonwealth,8 Justice O’Loughlin held that there was insufficient evidence of a policy or practice of indiscriminate removal,9 that there was no genocidal intent in either the legislation or its implementation by the Director of Native Affairs and others,10 and further, he emphasized that the state officials who removed the children from their communities were doing so “in the best interests” of the children.11 In the only successful case, Trevorrow, the court did acknowledge a state policy of child removal,12 but that this wasn’t relevant to the legal claim.13 So there is no legal case in which a judicial finding regarding general policies of child removal has had legal effect. Further, the insistence of the courts in emphasizing state actions as benign, or as exceptional, disguises the extent of the significance of colonial policies of assimilation to the sovereignty, legal integrity, and landed rights of individuals (van Rijswijk and Anthony, 2012). The Western Australian Supreme Court recently denied a claim for compensation in Collard v The State of Western Australia [No 4] (2013). In February 2001, Valerie Linow, a survivor of the Stolen Generations and of sexual assault, tried to claim for her injuries through the New South Wales Victims Compensation Tribunal. Valerie was unsuccessful initially, but successful on appeal, and her journey through the system is significant for the ways in which the state interpreted the intersection between her harms. The facts were as follows: Valerie Linow was taken from her mother at the age of two and placed in the Bombaderry Children’s home. In 1958, at age 16 she was placed by the Aborigines Welfare Board with a family of four children as a domestic worker. During her six months in this placement she was sexually assaulted and thrashed with barbed wire “by a white man who ran the station” and who was a member of the household in which she now lived. The applicant ran away from the house and informed the authorities of the assaults. The police investigated the allegations but found insufficient evidence to pursue the matter. The matron of Cootamundra Girls Home, where she was residing prior to the placement and to where she returned after the assaults, wrote to the Welfare Board saying she had not made Linow return to the placement “for fear” that her allegations were true. (Forster 2002, 185–86) Valerie Linow lodged an application in the NSW Victims Compensation Tribunal in February 2001 for sexual assaults that occurred between May and October 1958.

Interrogating legal world-making  79 These were outside the two-year limitation period under s26(1) of the relevant legislation, but leave was granted for the matter to be determined by the Tribunal. However, on February 15, 2002, her application for compensation was dismissed by the Tribunal (Cunneen and Grix 2003, 306). The reasoning given was extraordinary: while the Assessor accepted that Ms Linow had been sexually assaulted, the Assessor was not satisfied that her injuries were caused by the assaults, due to the fact that she had suffered previous harm as a result of being removed from her parents as a member of the Stolen Generations (Cuneen and Grix 2003, 307). Alexis Goodstone, Ms Linow’s solicitor, expressed the Assessor’s opinion as follows: “the claim failed because the effects of the removal from her family had caused such extreme psychological harm that the subsequent sexual assaults did not, in the view of the Assessor, cause Mrs Linow harm” (Goodstone 2003, 1). The Assessor’s determination was appealed and set aside in August 2002 (Cuneen and Grix 2003, 307).

Contemporary mobilization of the figure of the indigenous child It is imperative that we keep in mind the recent history of state instrumentalization of sexual harm against indigenous subjects and how the state continues to use narratives of harm to justify violent assaults on indigenous sovereignty, particularly the recent Northern Territory Intervention in 2007 (“the Intervention”) and its subsequent updating through the Stronger Futures legislation in 2012.14 Given the legal and political overdetermination of the figure of the raped indigenous child/woman, it is difficult for indigenous women to disclose violence to the state, without that disclosure inviting further state violence. The interconnectedness of this colonial violence needs to be read as part of #MeToo. The occasion for the Intervention was the publication of the Little Children are Sacred Report (2007) (“The Report”), following an Inquiry into child sexual abuse, commissioned by the Territory’s Inquiries Act. The Report found that child sexual abuse was “an issue of urgent national significance”(Wild and Anderson 2007, 22). Harm to indigenous children is an extremely serious issue, but the government did not take up the recommendations of the Report in good faith; rather, it responded by instrumentalizing the Report to justify violent interventions into indigenous communities. This story underpinned ongoing state violence, while simultaneously disguising the role of state violence in producing these harms. While the first recommendation of the initial Board of Inquiry that was examining the harms against children was to emphasize “the critical importance of governments committing to genuine consultation with Indigenous people in designing initiatives for Indigenous communities” (21), this was not an ethic that was carried through to the subsequent legislation. The Report documented the role of structural racism—poverty, poor health, and poor employment opportunities—in producing violence and included recommendations that the state should support indigenous communities through community consultation, family support services, education, employment, and housing (4–24). But the

80  Honni van Rijswijk state legislation and the surrounding public statements that supported the Intervention ignored the roles of state resourcing and colonization in causing harm: rather, they explained harm against children as an effect of aberrant community and family structures that required urgent state intervention. State law’s reading of these harms excluded the complex effects of continuing colonization and the intergenerational effects of past traumas caused by the state, which have been documented in detail across the Stolen Generations legal cases, and in the Bringing Them Home Report, detailed in the following pages. Although the language of the Intervention legislation refers to indigenous welfare and well-being (for example, the aim of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act provided in s5 is “to improve the well-being of certain communities in the Northern Territory”), the legislation was a violent assault on indigenous sovereignty. The Northern Territory Intervention laws permitted the seizure of local community land leases by the federal liberal government, the deployment of the army into Northern Territory communities, the use of extra police powers, and the quarantining of welfare benefits.15 These particular narratives of the harm are central to upholding state laws and policies that continue to undermine indigenous authority. There is a clear connection between the Aborigines Protection Acts of the past (which fueled the state violence behind the Stolen Generations) and the current policies of the Intervention, both of which are based on narratives of harm-prevention. As Irene Watson argues, both past and present violence against indigenous people have been read as “beneficial,” as acts of “saving [Indigenous people] from themselves” (45). A narrative of harm-prevention has been used to justify a legislative response that provides for, simultaneously, both the withdrawal of state services to indigenous communities that nonindigenous Australians take for granted and the introduction of techniques of colonial-type governance. Jon Altman’s detailed analysis of the Intervention, in which he reviews the government’s own analysis and results, concludes that there has been an increase in violence, malnutrition, and truancy in particular communities following the Intervention (79). Claiming a role merely in the adjudication of harms taking place in indigenous communities, the state asserts its jurisdiction and thereby inflicts harms on those communities, and in doing so, disguises its own violence. The “abused Indigenous child” becomes a dangerous figure in law’s imaginary, a key trope through which the scope of “legitimate” violence by the state becomes overly broad and a figure that also limits the subsequent adjudication of acts of the state—for example, supporting reasoning such as that of the court in Kruger, which found that state acts carried out under the Aboriginals Ordinance 1918 (NT) were not genocidal because they were carried out with good intentions, in the “best interests” of indigenous people.16 These problems concern law’s categories and logics, but they also concern law’s practices of representation—the genres, figures, and narratives that constitute and are legible to law. The enduring colonial story in Australia is that the state has a unique role in adjudicating harms suffered by indigenous communities in ways that are different from law’s adjudication of the harms of nonindigenous communities.

Interrogating legal world-making  81

Genres that intervene in the dominant colonial imaginary: the relation of representation to indigenous authority The significance of practices of representation to the question of sovereignty has many layers, and an important component is the ways in which not only the courts, but the public are vested authority in their witnessing of, and implicit participation in, legal and political processes. Recently, there has been increasing critical interest in the potential of the interdisciplinary work of law and the humanities to address legal and political questions.17 The most innovative critical move here has been a turn to methods that think of critique “as a problem of genre” (Motha and van Marle 2013, 18), where genre is understood not merely as an aesthetic device but as a structure that constitutes and reveals worlds. In the reading that follows, I am interested in the unique potential of the engagement of genre to address an urgent area of Australian law and politics—the significance and role of indigenous authority in the context of postcolonial legal and political domains that continue to refuse encounters with indigenous sovereignties and laws. In this context, how do we undertake the important ethical and political work of properly marking the absences and elisions of law? How do we create spaces in which to undertake the important work of encounter, with or without state recognition? Motha and Van Marle note that the liminal space of critique at the intersection of law, aesthetics, and politics provides a domain in which to develop critique through literary forms and to develop the role of the imaginary in responding to legal and political problems (Motha and van Marle 2013, 17). They distinguish their version of liminality from one that characterizes it merely as a midpoint, marking the degree to which one mode shares commonality with another (Genres of Critique 35). Instead, they “regard liminality as occupying the space and time of traversal and the impetus to hold that transformative zone open” (Genres of Critique 25). This form of liminality is not about transcendence, but about ambivalence and uncertainty; not about abstraction, but about historically grounded specificity (van Marle 128). Both legal and cultural apparatuses of the contemporary colonial state make implied normative claims for nonjusticiable white sovereignty at the same time that they purport to adjudicate harm to indigenous people. Not only are indigenous sovereignties rendered invisible, but the fact that indigenous sovereignty is being subordinated is itself disguised. This essay focuses on practices of representation as being central to responding to these questions—and on representation as being central to the interpretation of authority. It examines how literature provides a domain from which to analyze, critique, and challenge these practices. Engaging exemplary countertexts in this critical mode provides a way to challenge law’s forms and logics, creating spaces that are neither purely legal nor purely critical, but which get to the underlying imaginaries that support all these domains. These “liminal spaces” (van Marle, 128) are particularly important in Australia, where state law provides no space for encounters between indigenous and nonindigenous authorities and legalities.

82  Honni van Rijswijk Absences in the law—where we should otherwise expect law’s recognition of, and engagement with, indigenous authority—are significant to the adjudications of claims involving both land and people. These absences in land claims have been given some critical attention, but much less critical attention has been given to the ways in which sovereignty is displaced in law’s adjudication of harm claims. It has been recognized that in the context of land claims, law clearly refuses to allow a plurality of authorities—of laws, sovereignties, or communities. Stewart Motha locates this refusal in Mabo, in which, he says, “a singular, unassailable (non-justiciable) sovereign ‘event’ is proposed as the foundation of Australian law and society” ((Motha 2005, 108). Law’s reading of this foundational point in time marks a bright line of authoritative exclusion that was continued in subsequent Native Title cases. Law’s insistence on a single, normative system—that of the white state—has ensured that indigenous authority became coded as not-law within the legal domain. State law’s assertions of jurisdiction and right to judgment have a significant formal component. State law structures and adjudicates the social, economic, and political conditions of indigenous communities, and in doing so, law asserts an exclusive claim to truths that it alone can resolve. Through an insistence on singular doctrine and singular authority, we can think of law’s representational practice as taking place within what I term the genre of aggressive realism, a genre that implicitly excludes other genres and representational practices through its adjudications of subject matter. In a sense, the subject matter of the adjudication is less important than the genre within which it takes place, as it is this genre that excludes the power of indigenous law. In the Australian context, as we have seen here, the courts have insisted on a singular authority, represented through specific practices that are presented as universal and normative. Although created through the particular history of colonization—a legal system that has been present on Australian territory for just over two hundred years, and which exists alongside continuing indigenous laws—this historical contingency is exempt from the legal recording of time and space. The literary domain provides a space in which to engage with the time and space of Australia’s past and present outside these national frameworks—to refuse to accept the terms of dominant legal, political, and social imaginaries in representing and adjudicating events. The first thing that literature can do is to provide a domain in which to thematically represent indigenous sovereignties and laws and to imagine what encounters with the white state might look like: to begin to articulate the ethical and juridical responsibilities that arise between these authorities; to represent the possibility of transforming social and legal conditions; and, especially, to rewrite state legal responsibility from this ethic of encounter. The second intervention that an engagement between law and literature can provide—uniquely, compared to other interdisciplinary projects—is an interrogation of the practices of representation of law, and the ways in formal aspects of law, such as genre, make implied claims to authority. The liminal space can insist not only on a plurality of worlds, but can interrogate the methods through which authority is constituted—those

Interrogating legal world-making  83 practices of representation that allow the exclusion of worlds beyond those of the state. In this approach to genre, we see a recent convergence between critical legal scholarship and critical literary scholarship. Literary scholars including WaiChee Dimock and Villishani Cooppan argue for the efficacy of genre as a mode to challenge the form of the nation-state, as well as the teleological time of modernity. Cooppan emphasizes that genre is not merely a reflection of historical or political structures such as capitalism and imperialism, but rather, that genre’s “modalities” can be thought of as the very forms through which capitalism and imperialism are produced (Cooppan 2009, 39)—and here, we should include law’s genre of aggressive realism and its production of the conditions of continuing colonization. Law’s aggressive realism not only asserts a unique role in adjudicating and creating social conditions, it also insists on a linear, national time in which there is a distinct break between the present and the past. This is evidenced by law’s inability to bring the state and other parties to account for the injuries of the Stolen Generations. It is also evidenced by the bright line drawn in Native Title cases regarding the rights of indigenous people to their land: in the words of Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh, “[w]hat was ‘law . . . is now ‘custom’ ” (12). The power of indigenous authorities to challenge law’s practices and genres is obscured in the legal domain. We therefore need new ways of situating state law, and also need to thematize law’s relation to indigenous authority. Dimock observes that the nation form is not necessarily the “sole determinant” or reference point of human conduct and nor is national time—especially as most of the world’s population has organized meaning according to frameworks outside the nation or which subtend the national form. One way to reorient the power of the state, she argues, is to change the scale of analysis. Dimock asks: [O]n what map should we break down this massive corpus into meaningbearing contexts or units of analysis: the map of a locality, the map of the nation-state, or a map still larger—continental, hemispheric, even planetary in scope? (Dimock 2006, 488) This work is being done by literary critics and legal scholars, and it is also being done by creative writers. By way of exploring the potential of these insights regarding representation and genre to the question of legal authority, I provide a reading of The Swan Book (2013) here, starting with the significance of indigenous authority in Wright’s earlier novel Carpentaria (2006). These novels speak to questions of sovereignty in the context of contemporary land rights and community life (Carpentaria) and to contemporary law’s adjudication of communities through the Northern Territory Intervention, via the figure of the indigenous child (The Swan Book). This reading of Wright’s work provides a way of thinking through elements of authority—not only authority’s juridical and political aspects, but as those manifest in different forms of cultural representation.

84  Honni van Rijswijk

Encounters of authority in the literary domain In The Swan Book (2013), Wright uses the figure of the traumatized girl to rewrite the Australian colonial imaginary, with a focus on how this imaginary treats harm to the indigenous child. Wright developed practices of foregrounding authority, and its relation to representation are further developed in her earlier novel, Carpentaria. Carpentaria is set in the Gulf of Carpentaria, in a small town called Desperance. Desperance has a violent colonial history, which continues into the present. The novel focuses on the politics of land claims in the context of contemporary town life, but it also weaves through the role of personal harm to questions of power. The mayor, Stan Bruiser, has been voted the “citizen of the year . . . for ten straight years” (34) despite it being commonly known that he is a brutal man who rapes indigenous women. Truthful, the town’s policeman, is also a sexual predator. But this is how power works in the town, and the indigenous inhabitants know that there is no proper recourse to state law. Literary scholars have noted the significance of Carpentaria in developing a literary imagination beyond and outside the nation form18 and, in particular, the significance of readings of land to this intervention. Laura Joseph reads the emphasis on region in Carpentaria as a technique to move beyond the nation-state, “doubling” the world of the national imaginary with that of the colonial “underworld” and making possible new readings of power and history that are produced through colonial specificities—making possible, too, a futurity based on particular materialities, instead of national myths (Joseph (2000), Joseph (2009)).19 It is important to think through the consequences of this reimagining for questions of law, sovereignty, and responsibility—questions that challenge the authority of the common law and state at their core. State law is not the only authority acting on Australian territory, and Carpentaria refuses both the time and geography of the nation-state and its laws. Instead, the law of the state is shown to operate alongside indigenous authorities that ultimately challenge and subjugate the authority of state law. The law of the Waanyi people and the Waanyi land inheres in the figure of a serpent, whose covenant “permeates everything” (Carpentaria 11). Carpentaria ends with a violent uprising of this law and this land, which together call up an apocalyptic weather event that destroys the white settlement and brings about the reemergence of the Waanyi nation’s Dreaming (519). In contrast to the common law’s reading of authority, in Carpentaria it is not indigenous sovereignty but the white state that is revealed to have been exceptional, historically contingent and which is, finally, extinguished. The subjugation of state law to indigenous law is a powerful reversal of the treatment of authority in state law’s Native Title cases, in which a foundational event ends indigenous sovereignties and sets in place the recognition of a sole normative system. This is a significant reversal, too, of the common law’s reading of the land as a passive object of law’s categories of title. It also marks a significant intervention into the absences of the Stolen Generations cases, where the harms of child removal are divorced from the harms of sovereign violation.

Interrogating legal world-making  85 As in Carpentaria, Wright’s novel The Swan Book foregrounds the role of representation in assertions of jurisdiction over the “truth.” State law is only one authority operating on state territory. The novel depicts an Australian landscape seventy years into the future, which is still subject to a violent application of state law—the Northern Territory Intervention’s policies have been heightened. The novel focuses on the story of an Australian indigenous girl, Oblivion Ethylene, nicknamed Oblivia. She lives in the Northern Territory within “the world’s most unknown detention camp” (40). Oblivia is deliberately mute, refusing to speak since she was gang-raped by members of her own community. She is trying to “regain sovereignty over [her] own brain” (4) and the plot of the novel is based on her “quest” to regain this sovereignty (4). Wright thereby puts the female child at the center of political and legal claims that radically challenge state law’s frameworks of personal injury and indigenous sovereignty. It is striking that Oblivia’s trauma is reframed as a question of “sovereignty”— harm as a question of authority. Oblivia evokes the long history of violence that has been committed against women, and against colonized and racialized groups, which is both encapsulated by the figure of the raped child and which is also perpetrated through it—the myth of protection, from antiquity to the Northern Territory Intervention, which has called forth state and familial violence aimed at women, children, and colonized others. It is not that Oblivia’s suffering is less important than these other harms, but that all these harms must be described if Oblivia’s rape is to be properly represented and not merely instrumentalized in an assertion of state authority: “like any other long-standing conflict around the world, one act of violation becomes a story of another” (20). The standpoint from which justice should be viewed in Oblivia’s—and this point of view includes harm to sovereignty and land. The harm of rape is contextualized within the wider context of state violence. Oblivia evokes the key figure of the Intervention legislation, that of the abused or neglected indigenous child. Given the legal and political overdetermination of the figure of the raped child/woman, and in particular the Australian archive of the raped indigenous child (as documented in Bringing Them Home and in the Stolen Generation cases considered earlier) it is impossible for Oblivia to tell the story of her rape without it being read as a narrative of community or familial dysfunction, one that would invite further state violence. So Oblivia’s rape is never represented as a scene; Oblivia’s story does not fall within the genre of trauma or healing narrative. Rather, The Swan Book narrates interconnecting political and legal harms in order to properly explain Oblivia’s suffering. The Swan Book’s argument is that legal harms cannot be separated from stories of rape: the rape of women and children is connected to state practices of incarceration and punishment, to poverty, abuse of the rule of law, and to Australia’s history of forced assimilation. The novel’s reframing of Oblivia’s rape takes place in the context of law’s archive being recontextualized and reoriented not only through narrative but also through the mode of its representation, law’s genre. Wright makes visible the contingency of law’s claim to a national space and time and to an exclusive jurisdiction over Australian territory and subjects. More specifically, the novel highlights

86  Honni van Rijswijk the contingency of the jurisdiction that state law asserts over indigenous subjects through case law regarding Native Title and the Stolen Generations and through legislation such as the Northern Territory Intervention. State law is represented as merely one of many intersecting authorities operating on Australian territory. In The Swan Book, as in Carpentaria, land has agency and authority. The swans move around the country, “following stories for country that had been always known to them” because “Swans had Law too,” and they have their own “Law scriptures” (86). The tree that is Oblivia’s refuge is “a sacred tree where all the stories of the swamp were stored like doctrines of Law left by the spiritual ancestors” (36). The landscape is permeated by “law spirits” who “scrutinize” the country (40). This thick description of intersecting authorities and laws produces a representation of Australian territory that exceeds national frameworks, and that is both plural and post-national.

Intervening into colonial time and space At the end of Carpentaria, the apocalypse enacted by the land and its law washes away colonial violence and the contingent sovereignty of the white state, bringing about the resurgence of indigenous authority. The ending of The Swan Book is a lot more pessimistic. Here, everything seems lost. Oblivia moves back to the swamp where she originated, holding the broken body of a last, remaining swan, and the novel ends with her haunting: There is a really big story of that ghost place: a really deadly love story about a girl who has a virus lover living in some lolly pink prairie house in her brain . . . You see swans sometimes, but not around this place. . . . Swans might come back. Who knows what madness will be calling them in the end? (334) Ann Orford contends that transitional justice processes such as Bringing Them Home are “centrally concerned with temporality” and how this temporality relates to questions of responsibility [emphasis added] (880) and that Bringing Them Home produces a narrative of closure, a view of “a unified past and a shared future within the liberal democratic nation-state” (881). The removal of indigenous children ends in reconciliation, with both suffering and responsibility being located in the past, state time preluding a continuing time of responsibility, as well as a mode of encounter with indigenous authority regarding these harms. In The Swan Book, no final authority judges or resolves the extensive suffering represented in the novel. This failure to resolve harms is a refusal, too, of the time of the state. The novel marks an unhopeful futurity that acts to “resist the mourning time of ‘moving on’ ” (Cooppan 2009, 63) doing the work of refusing state imaginaries. Alternative frameworks to those of the nation-state include Dimock’s “deep time” (2006) and Laura Doyle’s “inter-imperiality” (2012, 672). Wright’s novels represent time as extending beyond colonization and colonialism’s laws—revealing

Interrogating legal world-making  87 this historical period to be relatively short and exceptional in the larger picture of Australian temporalities. The Swan Book figures a future in which people need to think through the ethics and politics of a situation of continuing harm, a situation that cannot be immediately resolved, rejecting the teleological time of law, as well as national temporalities of reconciliation and transitional justice, which insist on resolution and a firm break with the past. Wright’s novels offer, in addition to thematic answers to questions of justice, a method of examining the forms, devices, and habits through which those truths are represented, in both legal and cultural contexts. Moving the framework of authority beyond that of state law weakens law’s violent jurisdictions and loosens the hold of the genre of aggressive realism that goes to the heart of law’s authority. Law’s assertion to singular jurisdiction is undone when it is put in its proper place, alongside indigenous laws, genres, narratives, and figures. In the liminal space of law and literature, legal worlds can be diagnosed and described differently; we are provided an opportunity to chip away at the singularity of law’s authority and to begin the significant task of delineating responsibility in ways that acknowledge and encounter the multiple authorities that operate in Australian times and places—in spite of, within and outside the colonial genres of law. The economic, material consequences of these legal and cultural imaginaries follow the failure of the federal reparations schemes and the failure of individual plaintiffs’ claims at common law. While the marks of state violence against indigenous sovereignty are more apparent in Native Title claims, the stakes of indigenous sovereignty are more subtle in historical and contemporary harm claims. This chapter has been at pains to bring out why it is so important to make the state pay for its continuing violence against indigenous communities: for the state’s continuing habit of instrumentalizing indigenous suffering, which is a sovereign harm as well as a “personal” one. Reimagining injury as an issue of sovereignty bolsters demands within legal and political registers, which in turn has economic effects for the state—and goes toward undoing the gendered sidelining of indigenous “personal” harms.

Notes 1 For the role of the sentimental or melodramatic genre in producing the roles of bystander and witness, see Meister (2011, 25). 2 The Federal Court denied claims for compensation in Kruger v Commonwealth (1997) 190 CLR 1 and in Cubillo v The Commonwealth (2000) 103 FCR 1 and Cubillo v The Commonwealth [No 2] (2001) 112 FCR 1 (“Cubillo”). South Australia v LampardTrevorrow (2010) 106 SASR 331 (“Lampard-Trevorrow”), where the court dismissed the State’s appeal against the decision of Gray J in Trevorrow v South Australia [No 5] (2007) 98 SASR 136 (“Trevorrow”), has been the only successful Stolen Generations case. See Van Rijswijk and Anthony (2010). The Western Australian Supreme Court recently denied a claim for compensation in Collard v The State of Western Australia [No 4] (2013) WASC 455. 3 These cases have been given significant scholarly attention in a number of contexts. See, for example, Genovese (2011); and O’Connor (2001). See also Cuneen and Grix

88  Honni van Rijswijk (2003); Buti (2008); Hocking and Stephenson (2008); van Krieken (2001); Luker (2005); and van Rijswijk and Anthony (2010). 4 (1997) 190 CLR 1. 5 Aboriginals Ordinance 1918 (NT), s 6(1). 6 Kruger v The Commonwealth 70–1 (Dawson J), 88 (Toohey J), 107 (Gaudron J), 144 (McHugh J), 159 (Gummow J). 7 Kruger, 40. 8 (2000) 103 FCR 1. A number of aspects in the trial case favorable to the applicants were reversed on appeal, but all adverse findings were affirmed: Cubillo v Commonwealth (2001) 112 FCR 455 (“Cubillo (Appeal)”). 9 Ibid 103–8 [301]—[321]; 358 [1159]—[1160]. 10 Ibid 483 [1561]. 11 Cubillo, para [1560]. 12 Trevorrow, at 239, referring to the judicial recognition in Kruger, at 40. 13 Ibid 239 [431]. 14 Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007 (Cth) No. 129 (NTNERA); Family   Community Services, Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (Northern Territory   National Emergency Response and Other Measures) Act 2007 (Cth) No. 128; Social Security and   Other Legislation Amendment (Welfare Payment Reform) Act 2007 (Cth) No. 130; Families,   Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (NorthernTerritory   National Emergency Response and Other Measures) Act 2007 (Cth) No. 128; Appropriation (Northern   Territory National Emergency Response) Act (No. 1) 2007 (Cth) No. 126 and Appropriation (Northern   Territory National Emergency Response) Act (No. 2) 2007 (Cth) No. 127. When the Northern Territory   Intervention came to the end of its five-year period in July 2012, it was immediately replaced by the   Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Act 2012 (Cth) (No. 100) and related laws: Stronger   Futures in the Northern Territory Act 2013 (Cth) (No. 184); Social Security Legislation Amendment   Act 2012 (Cth) (No 102). These laws will operate for aten-year period: Stronger Futures s 118.   Stronger Futures is broken up into a number of Parts that administer aspects of the lives of indigenous citizens in the Northern Territory. “Tackling alcohol abuse” (Part 2) is aimed at “reducing alcohol-related harm to those Indigenous people;” “Land reform” ’ (Part 3), is “aimed at facilitating the granting of rights and interests, and promoting economic development;” “Food security” (Part 4) and some miscellaneous matters (Part 5) are also covered. The legislation includes income management schemes and provisions for the suspension of parents’ welfare payments if children’s attendance rate at school is considered unacceptable (Social Security Legislation Amendment Act 2012 (Cth) (No 102) Sch 2.). I use the term “Stronger Futures” to refer to this regime. 15 Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007 (Cth) No. 129 (NTNERA); Family, Community Services, Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (Northern Territory National Emergency Response and Other Measures) Act 2007 (Cth) No. 128; Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Welfare Payment

Interrogating legal world-making  89 Reform) Act 2007 (Cth) No. 130; Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (NorthernTerritory National Emergency Response and Other Measures) Act 2007 (Cth) No. 128; Appropriation (Northern Territory National Emergency Response) Act (No. 1) 2007 (Cth) No. 126 and Appropriation (Northern Territory National Emergency Response) Act (No. 2) 2007 (Cth) No. 127. 16 See Part 2 of this article. 17 See, for example, the work of Mark Antaki, Stephen Best, Guyora Binder, Saidiya Hartman, Desmond Manderson, Stuart Motha and Karin van Marle. This work emphasizes the role of the imaginary in the legal domain and the role of form in producing legal reasoning: “the process by which we represent our society’s will and welfare in the medium of law is an imaginative and expressive one . . . informed by aesthetic judgment as well as instrumental reason” (Binder 2000, 105). 18 Devlin-Glass (2008) examines the ways in which Carpentaria's literary engage with Western epistemologies and metaphysics. Brewster argues that the novel defamiliarizes whiteness, making whiteness an “object of critique” (2010). Ravenscroft argues that Carpentaria reorients the norm of whiteness, positioning indigenous subjectivities as the normative centre (2010). 19 For a reading of Wright’s concept of land as a challenge to capitalist logics, see Gleeson-White (2013).

Bibliography Berlant, L. 2000. “The Subject of True Feeling: Privacy, Pain and Politics.” In Cultural Studies and Political Theory, edited by Jodi Dean. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Binder, Guyora. 2000. “Aesthetic Judgment and Legal Justification.” In Studies in Law, Politics and Society. Special Issue: Law and Literature Reconsidered, edited by. Austin Sarat. Vol. 43, 79–112. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Brewster, Anne. 2010. “Indigenous Sovereignty and the Crisis of Whiteness in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.” Australian Literary Studies 25 (4): 85–100. ———. 2008. “The Stolen Generations Litigation Revisited.” Melbourne University Law Review 32 (2): 382–421. Cooppan, Valashini. 2009. Worlds Within. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cuneen, Chris and Julia Grix. 2003. “The Stolen Generations and Individual Criminal Victimisation: Valerie Linow and the New South Wales Victims Compensation Tribunal.” Current Issues in Criminal Justice 14 (3): 306–9. Devlin-Glass, Francis. 2008. “A Politics of the Dreamtime: Destructive and Regenerative Rainbows in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.” Australian Literary Studies 23 (4): 392–407. Dimock, Wai-Chee. 2006. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Doyle, Laura. 2012. “Modernist Studies and Inter-Imperiality in the Long Duree.” In The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, edited by Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough, 669–96. New York: Oxford University Press. Forster, Christine. 2002. “The Stolen Generation and the Victims Compensation Tribunal: The ‘Writing In’ of Aboriginality to ‘Write Out’ a Right to Compensatory Redress for Sexual Assault.” University of the New South Wales Law Journal 25 (1): 185–93. Genovese, Ann. 2011. “Metaphor of Redemption, Myths of State: Historical Accountability in Luhrmann’s Australia and Trevorrow v South Australia.” Griffith Law Review 20: 67–90.

90  Honni van Rijswijk Gleeson-White, Jane. 2013. “Capitalism Versus the Agency of Place: An Ecocritical Reading of That Deadman Dance and Carpentaria.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Special Issue: The Colonies: Australia and New Zealand 13 (2): 1–12. Goodstone, Alexis. 2003. “Stolen Generations Victory.” Indigenous Law Bulletin 5 (22): 10. Hocking, Barbara Ann, and Margaret Stephenson. 2008. “Why the Persistent Absence of a Foundational Principle? Indigenous Australians, Proprietary and Family Reparations.” In Reparations for Indigenous Peoples: International and Comparative Perspectives, edited by Federico Lenzerini, 477–522. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howard, John. 2000. “Practical Reconciliation.” In Reconciliation: Essays on Australian Reconciliation, edited by M. Grattan. Melbourne: Black Inc. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. 1997. Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander Children From Their Families. Sydney: Commonwealth of Australia. Joseph, Laura. 2009. “Dreaming Phantoms and Golems: Elements of The Place Beyond Nation in Carpentaria and Dreamhunter.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature; Australian literature in a Global World: 1–10. Eds. Antonio Jose Simoes Da Silva and Wench Ommunsden. ———. 2000. “Opening the Gates of Hell: Regional Emergences in Carpentaria and Dreamhunter.” Southerly 69 (2): 66–80. Kennedy Rosanne. 2011. “An Australian Archive of Feelings.” Australian Feminist Studies 26 (69): 257. Luker, Trish. 2005. “Postcolonising Amnesia in the Discourse of Reconciliation: The Void in the Law’s Response to the Stolen Generations.” Australian Feminist Law Journal 22 (1): 67–88. Meister, Robert. 2011. After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights. New York: Columbia University Press. Motha, Stewart. 2005. “The Failure of ‘Postcolonial’ Sovereignty in Australia.” Australian Feminist Law Journal 22: 107–25. Motha, Stewart, and Karin van Marle. 2013. “Introduction”. In Genres of Critique, edited by Karin Van Marle and Stewart Motha, 15–28. Stellenbosch: Sun Press. O’Connor, Pam. 2001. “History on Trial: Cubillo and Gunner v The Commonwealth of Australia.” Alternative Law Journal 26: 27–31. Orford, Anne. 2006. “Commissioning the Truth.” Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 15: 851–83. Ravenscroft, Alison. 2010. “Dreaming of Others: Carpentaria and its Critics.” Cultural Studies Review 16 (2): 194–224. van Krieken, Robert. 2001. “Is Assimilation Justiciable? Lorna Cubillo and Peter Gunner v Commonwealth”. Sydney Law Review 23 (2): 239–60. van Rijswijk, Honni, and Thalia Anthony. 2012. “Can the Common Law Adjudicate Historical Suffering? Evaluating South Australia v Lampard-Trevorrow (2010).” Melbourne University Law Review 36 (2): 618–55. Wild, Rex, and Patricia Anderson. 2007. Little Children are Sacred: Report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Indigenous Children from Child Sexual Abuse. Darwin: Northern Territory Government. Wright, Alexis. 2013. The Swan Book. Artarmon: Giramondo. ———. 2006. Carpentaria. Artarmon: Giramondo.

Interrogating legal world-making  91 Cases Collard v The State of Western Australia [No 4] (2013) WASC 455. Cubillo v The Commonwealth (2000) 103 FCR 1. Cubillo v The Commonwealth [No 2] (2001) 112 FCR 1. Kruger v Commonwealth (1997) 190 CLR 1. Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1. South Australia v Lampard-Trevorrow (2010) 106 SASR 331. Trevorrow v South Australia [No 5] (2007) 98 SASR 136. Yorta Yorta Indigenous Community v The State of Victoria (2002) HCA 58.

Legislation Appropriation (Northern Territory National Emergency Response) Act (No. 1) 2007 (Cth) No. 126. Appropriation (Northern Territory National Emergency Response) Act (No. 2) 2007 (Cth) No. 127. Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (Northern Territory National Emergency Response and Other Measures) Act 2007 (Cth) No. 128. Family Community Services, Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (Northern Territory National Emergency Response and Other Measures) Act 2007 (Cth) No. 128. Northern Territory National Emergency Respone Act 2007 (Cth) No. 129. Social Security Legislation Amendment Act 2012 (Cth) (No 102). Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Welfare Payment Reform) Act 2007 (Cth) No. 130. Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Act 2012 (Cth) (No. 100). Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Act 2013 (Cth) (No. 184).

5 Trading in women’s “troubles” Fertility control and postcolonial exchanges in Irish history Cara Delay

The dozens of Irish women who have traveled to mainland Britain every day in the twenty-first century for safe and legal abortions represent the continued links between the Republic of Ireland and its former colonizer. Cross-border abortion travel since 1967, when the Abortion Act came into effect in most of the United Kingdom (UK),1 allows Irish society to safeguard the falsehoods of its allegedly sexually pure national culture (Inglis 2005) while exporting abortion and other sexual “vices” to Britain (Fletcher 2001). The experiences of Irish women going to Britain demonstrate the importance of travel, exchanges, and material networks within the Irish postcolonial context even as they remind us that women’s bodies often reside at the nexus of such interactions. These are not the only exchanges to discuss when examining abortion in Irish history, however. After independence but well before the 1967 Abortion Act, Irish women, and sometimes their partners, friends, or family members, traveled to and from Belfast, London, and other parts of the United Kingdom to access abortion networks (Delay 2019). Meanwhile, migrants from the British Empire and Commonwealth moved in and out of Ireland, becoming part of systems involving fertility control. A few were backstreet abortionists, while others had or attempted abortions on Irish soil (Delay and Liger 2020). Bodies crossed national borders, but so too did things, including contraceptives, abortifacient pills, medical supplies, and advertisements for birth control and emmenagogues. Also traded were expertise and information: knowledge of abortion methods and information about abortion markets. This chapter explores the networks associated with fertility control, and particularly abortion, in post-independence Ireland,2 from 1922 to 1967, by examining the movement of both material goods and bodies between Ireland, parts of the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland), and other areas of the British Empire or Commonwealth. Through an analysis of criminal abortion trial cases, newspapers, advertisements, and pamphlets, this research demonstrates that even after independence, attempts to control fertility incorporated Irish abortionists and abortion-seekers into webs of mobility, communication, and economic exchange with Britain and the British imperial world. This chapter considers these realities within the context of postcolonialism, exploring, in the words of Jane Pollard (2011), “the material ways in which colonial power relations persist” and

Trading in women’s “troubles”  93 are complicated (5). It sheds light not only on economic exchanges but also on postcolonial geographies and the realities of women’s reproductive lives.

Post-independence economic and moral landscapes After the upheaval of the 1910s and 1920s, the independent Irish Free State set on a new economic course. Political autonomy and partition were accompanied by attempts to detach Ireland’s economy from that of its former colonizer. In Ireland, this resulted in not only a focus on small farming rather than industrial production but also economic protectionism “as a means of disengaging from the dominant neo-colonial economy of Britain.” This campaign to isolate the new Ireland economically, which Gerard McCann (2011) calls an “aggressively” “anti-colonial engagement,” was not successful. Not only did it lead to economic crisis for Ireland, it also failed to achieve its separatist goals (88–90). As many scholars have argued, the notion of twentieth-century Ireland as peripheral in Europe, insulated from Britain and the continent, is more construction than reality. The proximity of Ireland to Britain and the presence of part of the United Kingdom on the island itself hampered attempts to isolate the economies of the Free State and later Éire and the Republic. The Irish and British economic systems remained intertwined; even by the 1950s, at least 90 percent of Irish exports continued to go to the United Kingdom (Cronin 2002, 56; McCann 2011). Furthermore, attempts at economic seclusion, which focused on the regulation of goods, could not control the movement of bodies across Irish and British borders. Continued endemic levels of emigration linked Ireland with its diaspora and the British colonial world in ways that, as Enda Delaney argues, are still understudied. Delaney (2011) and others have advocated for a more global and transnational approach to modern Irish history through, in Delaney’s words, “transnational analysis that investigates particular topics or themes across national boundaries” (600–01; see also Crosbie 2011). Rarely considered within these transnational explorations, however, is sexuality. Indeed, the dominant narrative of Irish history positions post-independence Ireland as uniquely prudish and sexually exceptional compared to the rest of Britain and Western Europe, but the movement across borders of people and things related to fertility control challenges this notion. Irish state and Church authorities in the 1920s and 1930s sought to create a sexually chaste nation by isolating Ireland morally as well as economically. Through not only the restriction of goods but also censorship, they tackled the moral and the economic concurrently (Laird 2015, 392). After independence, fears that in Ireland a “culture of moral decadence in which sexual promiscuity, illegitimacy, and sexual crime were held to be proliferating” (Pašeta 2003, 198) heightened economic tensions, and the nascent state soon combined forces with a powerful Catholic Church to combat these alleged vices and to protect Ireland from external threats including perceived English social liberalism. As historian Anthony Keating (2012) observes, in the Free State, sexual vices were “portrayed as an aberration inflicted on the Irish nation by the twin evils of colonisation and an alien decadent modernity” (140). New state officials set about implementing conservative legislation and policies designed to

94  Cara Delay safeguard the “traditional” family and Catholic worldviews and protect Ireland from corrupt English influence. Central to these emerging postcolonial identities were Irish women’s roles and particularly their reproductive bodies (Fischer 2016). Promoting women’s fertility within marriage only and enforcing celibacy for non-married women emerged as fundamental concerns. A persistent discourse encouraged Irish women to remain pure until marriage and, after that, to focus their attentions on bearing children for the nation. And many did the latter: by the 1930s, married Irish women had the highest fertility rates in Europe. The overall population was declining, however, as a result of low marriage rates and the mass emigration of young people. Because, as historian Mary Daly (2006) notes, “large families were regarded as a key feature of Irish society,” concern about the population decrease caused worry amongst Free State political and religious authorities (572–73). The threats of birth control and abortion emerged as particularly harmful within these contexts. A campaign to crack down on exposure to sexual immorality, focusing on censorship, took root in the 1920s. From 1923 to 1926, legislation that allowed the government to censor offensive films and radio was passed (Ó Drisceoil 1996, 2). After the Committee of Evil Literature was tasked with investigating other ­censorship possibilities, a 1927 report of one of its subcommittees, headed by the Catholic Society of St. Vincent de Paul, recommended that the following be outlawed: (1) advertisements of any article or drug to prevent conception; (2) advertisements of literature for the propagation of race suicide; (3) advertisements of “Female Pills” or other drugs for menstrual suppression except in bona fide medical journals circulated to the medical profession only. (NOTE—These are only camouflaged abortefacients) [sic]. (Report of Sub-Committee on Evil Literature 1926) The committee named certain British women’s publications, including Girl’s Companion, Home Companion, Woman’s Weekly, Woman’s World, Eve’s Own Stories, Woman’s Life, and Betty’s Paper, as rife with such advertisements, ones that, if read by Ireland’s women and girls, had the potential to corrupt their natural reproductive instincts and thereby threaten the “race” and nation (Report of SubCommittee on Evil Literature 1926). These efforts at sequestering Ireland from a more permissive print culture brought about the Censorship of Publications Act (1929), which banned the dissemination in Ireland of all print information relating to contraception and abortion (Oireachtas 1928). Consequently, from 1930 to 1945, 12 percent of those books banned in Ireland were targeted because they mentioned fertility control, and the state did its best to confiscate print materials related to contraception and abortion (Luddy 2017). As Pašeta (2003) writes, the “work of the Censorship Board was aided by Customs, Catholic vigilance groups and eagle-eyed members of the public who collected examples of printed matter which the Board might deem worthy of proscription” (214). Several years later, the Criminal Law

Trading in women’s “troubles”  95 Amendment Act (1935) outlawed the sale and trade of contraceptives themselves (Pašeta 2003, 214). Abortion, meanwhile, remained illegal under sections 58 and 59 of Britain’s 1861 Offenses Against the Person Act. The idea of otherness or foreignness was particularly evident in the Irish state’s attempts to regulate women’s fertility, reflecting, as Diarmaid Ferriter (2009) writes, a “notion of foreign contamination” that “was one of the greatest myths punctuating discussions about sex during this period” (258). Fears of foreignness strongly resonated in the decades after part of the island gained independence yet struggled to assert a separate social and cultural identity amidst continued emigration and persistent economic ties with Britain, the United States, and Europe. While Irish state leaders declared the use of contraceptives and products such as abortifacients to be “alien to the ‘true’ Irish” and instead reflective of “foreign [mainly English] contamination” (Keating 2012, 136), women’s consumption of both emmenagogues and their corresponding advertisements demonstrates how much Ireland remained laced into larger British economic and cultural networks. As Ruth Fletcher (2001) posits, “Ireland provides a nice example of the postcolonial breakdown in binary relationships between colonizer and colonized as the relationships between and among Southern Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Britain demand constant renegotiation” (571–72). Indeed, although a statistical analysis of fertility control is hardly feasible, we know that many women and men in the new Ireland did their best to ignore the new laws and, instead, sought to access contraception and abortion through whatever means possible. As Sandra McAvoy (2012) observes, it is impossible to gauge contraceptive use in Ireland before or after the 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act prohibited it (189). Cliona Rattigan (2012) claims that in the first half of the twentieth century, contraception use was rare and ignorance about it rampant (146). Still, some evidence suggests that Irish men and women sought contraceptives from the North and from the British mainland. In a 1940s abortion criminal case in Dublin, the husband of the woman who allegedly secured a backstreet abortion told the court that the couple had tried to prevent pregnancy via contraception. “I have taken contracepted [sic] precautions,” he claimed, continuing: I generally got the contraceptives myself in the North of Ireland. I remember buying them a couple of times from northern students in the college. I always used contraceptives except in the safe period immediately before & immediately after menstruations. I was lectured on that during my course on zoology. (JB case 1945) For this couple, crossing the border to access fertility control was something they discussed and planned for.

Material exchanges In the first few decades of independence, Irish people also violated censorship laws, persistently attempting to import banned print materials, primarily from

96  Cara Delay Northern Ireland and mainland Britain. Indeed, in the 1930s, the Department of Justice in Ireland seized dozens of pamphlets and advertisements featuring birth control and abortifacients that were originally published in Britain. The government was assisted here by the Catholic Church. In 1931, the executive secretary of the Catholic Truth Society wrote to the Minister of Justice explaining that a recent edition of the London-based Sunday Times (December 6, 1931) contained an editorial expressing overt support for family limitation. Soon, the government confiscated several publications—periodicals as well as pamphlets advertising sheaths, pessaries, sponges, and enema syringes produced by English companies (Pamphlets on Dangerous Drugs). Pamphlets seized in the 1930s that were produced by English company Hygienic Stores featured numerous advertisements for emmenagogues or “female pills” including the well-known Dr. Patterson’s. These pills, used for menstrual regulation and to induce miscarriage, were ubiquitous throughout Britain and Ireland. They remained enormously popular with women and enormously profitable for their makers in the first half of the twentieth century. Advertisements for emmenagogues and abortifacients appeared not only in Britain and Northern Ireland but also across the Free State and later Éire and the Republic (Delay 2018, 9–10). Produced in London, Widow Welch’s pills were advertised in Irish newspapers (see Figure 5.1), including the Sunday Independent, Kerry Evening Post, and Drogheda Argus and Leinster Journal in the early twentieth century, as well as across the United Kingdom, including in newspapers from Cornwall, Sussex, Devon, and Kent; and Aberdeenshire, Stirlingshire, and Kincardineshire, Scotland. These pills made their way across parts of the empire and former empire; newspapers in Australia and New Zealand featured advertisements for the popular emmenagogues in the 1930s and 1940s.

Figure 5.1 Advertisement for Widow Welch’s pills in Ireland’s Drogheda Argus and ­Leinster Journal, July 14, 1934

Trading in women’s “troubles”  97

Figure 5.2  Advertisement for Widow Welch’s pills in Northern Advocate, New Zealand, January 8, 1931

98  Cara Delay Communication networks between Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the rest of the empire and former empire thus were well established, and many Irish women and men were able to not only see advertisements and pamphlets featuring fertility control methods but also to obtain actual abortion potions and pills via the transnational post. A 1937 pamphlet produced by Mr and Mrs Wood of Leeds, who sold a special “treatment” for “female irregularities,” claimed that their medicine was “sent out under cover, in plain wood box, free from observation.” These concerns for secrecy and privacy served the company well, facilitating business with Ireland. One testimony published on the Woods’ pamphlet was from “A.L.” of Kildare, Ireland, who wrote of her success with the potion: “Please send me bottle of your Special Mixture and Pills. I enclose P.O. 15/6. Last I had [I] proved alright within the week” (Leaflets sent out by abortifacient manufacturers, 1930s). In 1939, a Belfast man, GH, was charged in the courts with supplying “a noxious thing called Dr. Raspails Female Pills, . . . knowing the same was intended to be unlawfully used with intent to procure the miscarriage of a woman.” He sent the pills to the woman via the post within Northern Ireland (from Belfast to Aughnacloy), but in court, he testified that when he had a difficult time purchasing them in Belfast, his chemist sent away to Scotland for them (case of AG, Belfast 1939). Examples of advertisements and abortifacients moving across Britain and Ireland encourage us to think about the development of a colonial and postcolonial medical marketplace not only between Britain and distant parts of the empire, a topic that has been researched recently (Bhattacharya 2016), but also closer to home. Ireland’s place within these networks remains under-examined. Furthermore, while explorations in British imperial medicine have become popular, most privilege the ways that medicine was an “extension of British power” (Rankin 2015, 5), used to create and uphold imperial economic, cultural, and racial systems. As the work of Rankin (2015) and Hall (2002) has suggested, however, “the evidence for cultural sharing, melding, and interaction is too strong” (93; see also Hall 2002). Across Britain and Ireland in the twentieth century, abortion pills were clear evidence of this cultural sharing. Furthermore, marketing, advertising, and sales practices were similar across both the islands and indeed throughout the empire or Commonwealth. In early twentieth-century colonial India, as Nandini Bhattacharya (2016) argues, the sale of drugs imported from not only Britain but also other parts of Europe and the United States testified to global trade and advertising networks. Focusing on Ireland and India, Barry Crosbie (2011) writes that the “very different communities of the Empire” were woven “into systems of contact, collaboration and conflict long before the development of modern communications technology and the so-called contemporary ‘age of globalization’ ” (2). Ireland, far from being isolated, was an important link in these economic and cultural networks. When Dublin-area tailor MR faced abortion-related charges in 1931, the story that came out in court detailed MR’s attempts to procure abortion pills. MR reportedly told a friend that when his girlfriend B became pregnant, “he was in a position to get drugs or pills or something from London.” This was what MR then did, remarking later to his confidant that “he had two sons doctors in London and the medicine had been sent by them; and that he, himself, had given

Trading in women’s “troubles”  99 medicine to the girl.” The pills did not work, however, so MR then considered sending B herself away, telling his friend that all would be okay if he could only “get her away to London” (MR case 1931). In this example, MR’s links with London allowed him to easily obtain abortifacient pills. When they failed, however, he again attempted to utilize his British networks, this time to send his girlfriend across the sea. Whether he intended for her to give birth there or attempt to procure an abortion in England is unclear. In a 1939 murder case, a Cork woman died after consuming abortifacients; her lover and a nurse were charged in her death. When the woman, BK, fell pregnant, she sought an abortion. Her lover, JD, frequently traveled back and forth between Ireland and Britain; he promised to “send her something” from Britain to Ireland to help her out. Indeed, JD had been convicted on abortion charges (“supplying drugs with intent to procure an abortion”) in Liverpool about three years earlier. In that 1936 case, JD allegedly sent abortifacient pills via the post from Ireland to the UK (JD case 1939). The abortifacient trade thus flourished in the 1930s despite the Free State’s new legislation and attempts at economic and moral isolation. We also could place the exchange of fertility control methods within a larger context of the trade in information across Britain, Ireland, and other parts of the British colonial world. As Angus McLaren (1977) has shown, word-of-mouth transmission seems to have been responsible for the increasing popularity across Britain of using lead diachylon as an abortifacient in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (391–92). Knowledge of this method, rumored to have American origins, also made its way to Belfast by the early twentieth century. In one abortion criminal case, a Northern Irish woman found out about lead diachylon from another local woman who allegedly learned about it “in America” (Case of EM, Belfast 1943). We must, therefore, recognize the possibility that informal, verbal transmissions of fertility control methods made their way across the islands even as advertisements and abortifacients were doing the same. While the trade in emmenagogues and knowledge of them was robust, it is more difficult to discern how much abortion instruments moved across the borders of Britain and Ireland. Although apparently not common, such exchanges did occur. One 1947 criminal case linked London, Dublin, and Belfast in an exchange of abortion utensils and techniques. After WH was charged with an abortion-related offence in Belfast in 1947, the man admitted that he had helped to smuggle medical instruments from London to Dublin in order to assist a friend with a pregnancy termination. WH, who was from Northern Ireland, worked with another woman based in Éire to bring “one pair plaster shears, one curette, one pair forceps, one speculum and one piece of plated wire” to Dublin and then to Belfast. In court, WH, when presented with the instruments, admitted: They and the satchel with them are my property . . . My reason for having these instruments was due to the fact that I had been a medical student for about 8 years prior to joining the British Army in which I served for 4 years and 8 months during the late war. (Case of MM, Belfast 1947)

100  Cara Delay WH’s partner in this crime, a Dublin-based widow, knew a friend of the woman in need of an abortion and enlisted WH’s help. Once WH brought the instruments from London to Dublin, the widow, MG, asked another acquaintance, Margaret, to smuggle the instruments to Belfast. Margaret, in her own words, expressed later in court, [c]oncealed the instruments in my underwear . . . Shortly after I got off the Dublin train at Belfast I was detailed by a policeman and brought to Musgrave Street barracks. I have no idea what these instruments were to be used for nor do I know who they were for. The man did not offer any money to me to cover the cost of my fare or trouble for collecting the parcel and bringing it to Belfast. My reason for concealing the instruments was so that they would not be found by a Customs Official. (Case of MM, Belfast 1947) This woman’s claims of ignorance are hard to take at face value given her admitted attempts to conceal the instruments, but such avowals were not uncommon in court cases. The instruments’ voyage from London to Belfast via Dublin rather than directly from England to Northern Ireland is fascinating if unclear in terms of purpose. Also unknown is how and why Margaret was met by the police as soon as she got off the train in Belfast, but clearly the police had been clued into her smuggling attempts. Still, for every Margaret who was caught, there likely was another whose efforts were successful and thus undetected. The reality, of course, is that the vast majority of transnational material exchanges relating to fertility control escaped documentation in the historical record; therefore, a complete picture remains obscure.

Bodily exchanges Ronit Lentin (2005) places the stories of recent Black women migrants in Ireland at “a crossroads between Ireland’s globalized economy and a new migratory movement” (1). She does so, however, within the context of a “twenty-first century global Ireland” which, she posits, has brought about a new and unprecedented mobility, especially in terms of women migrants. While Lentin’s analysis is compelling, Ireland’s complex colonial and postcolonial history, and specifically women’s migrations to and from Ireland within that history, offers an important historical precedent and context for what she presents as a more recent phenomenon (Magee and Thompson 2010, Introduction). A myriad of examples testifies to the prominent movement of bodies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across Ireland, England, and other parts of the empire or former empire. Worthy of mention are Irish women’s and men’s active participation in missionary work as priests and nuns or in medical care as doctors and nurses, the massive emigration of women and men from Ireland to other parts of Britain or the imperial world, and a less studied migration: that of people from the empire or Commonwealth to

Trading in women’s “troubles”  101 Ireland. These migrations facilitated the trade of abortion-related material culture discussed earlier and added bodies to the exchange equation. Women acted as central agents in these migrations and particularly as emigrants. In the first half of the twentieth century, unmarried Irish women left their homeland by the thousands, traveling to England, the United States, Australia, and other parts of the former empire. Most left behind rural backgrounds for life in cities across the seas. As historians including Jennifer Redmond (2008) and Louise Ryan (2001) have shown, female emigrants at the time, especially those who were exposed to the sophistications of urban life abroad, were thought to “pose a serious threat to the continuity of ‘the race’ and the nation” (Ryan 2001, 271). These women disturbed and, some feared, perhaps even deliberately rejected, the culture of domesticity and fecundity that, to survive, depended on Irish women remaining in Ireland, marrying, and reproducing. Other Irish women migrated to Britain, sometimes temporarily and sometimes not, for more scandalous and secretive reasons. Unmarried pregnant women left Ireland to give birth abroad and thus protect their families and homeland from scandal (Garrett 2000, 337). Some sought abortion services in England. Irish women, who were attempting to manage their fertility, then, engaged in important yet understudied exchanges with the former colonizer. Although the 1967 Abortion Act gave rise to what is known as the “abortion trail”—the reality that thousands of Irish women sought abortion in mainland Britain each year—these voyages began well before the 1960s. When unmarried SD of Dublin became pregnant in 1950, she first tried to induce miscarriage via hot baths and gin. When those methods failed, she traveled to London for a surgical abortion. In this case, SD’s lover, HM, was originally from England. A migrant to Dublin, he owned property in Belfast. When SD got in “trouble,” HM arranged for her to travel to England to terminate her pregnancy (SD case 1950). Around the same time, another British subject (this time from Scotland) also living in Dublin traveled with his pregnant girlfriend to London so she could receive an abortion (MM case 1949). A rare County Galway case from 1950 attests that the possibility of travel to Britain was not limited to women and girls in the east or the north. When sixteenyear-old M became pregnant, she allegedly tried “salts and baths” to induce abortion; when unsuccessful, she told her lover “that her Mother and brother Paddy were going to England soon, and would she be able to go over with them?” The lover, Martin, then set out to help M get her passport so that she could travel. In this case, whether the couple intended to seek abortion in England or remain there until the child was born is unclear, but M’s clear desire to terminate the pregnancy while in Ireland suggests the former (MM case 1950). These abortion voyages, particularly in the Irish context, complicated concepts of motherhood, domesticity, and national identity. In the first half of the twentieth century, Irish women’s politicized roles as mothers relied on their fixity in the domestic sphere—on their lack of mobility. As I and others have argued elsewhere, when thousands of women traveled for abortion care across the twentieth

102  Cara Delay century, they not only seemed to reject or refuse motherhood, they also complicated notions of Irishness itself (Delay 2019). That Irish women did this while simultaneously utilizing the abortion services and networks of the former colonizer may have heightened the scandal and anxiety surrounding such cases. Imperial exchanges appear in other ways in Irish abortion criminal cases. Several Belfast cases from the 1940s, for example, unsurprisingly featured women who were left to deal with their unwanted pregnancies alone as their male partners were fighting in the war. Some of these men had been dispatched to far-away parts of the empire. A 1942 example saw the husband of EM away as “a soldier at present in Africa” (Case of EM, Belfast 1943). The husband of HR, who famously died of a botched abortion at the hands of Mamie Cadden in 1956, was serving abroad in Nigeria (MC case 1956). Ireland’s links with other parts of the empire were complex, however, involving not only Irish male travelers but also immigrants to Ireland from other British colonies or former colonies. Migrants from Britain’s former empire traveled to Ireland for a variety of reasons, and some needed abortions after they arrived. Twenty-two-year-old IA, who died in Dublin in 1965 after a backstreet abortion, came to Ireland from Nigeria to study commerce at University College Dublin (Irish Times June 22, 1965). When she found herself pregnant, she went to her boyfriend’s apartment in Rathmines. There, the two attempted to abort IA with a syringe; IA, however, became ill and died of a pulmonary edema. Her boyfriend, also an immigrant student, was put on trial for murder (Irish Press November 6, 1965). This abortion case, although rare in that it occurred in the late 1960s, followed a pattern of immigrants seeking fertility control, and immigrants charged with abortion offences, in post-independence Ireland. Significantly, from the 1920s to the 1960s, men from Scotland, England, India, and Nigeria were put on trial for abortion offences, testifying to Ireland’s history of immigration as well as emigration in the twentieth century. In addition, a surprisingly high percentage of Jewish immigrants were accused of abortion-related offenses in Dublin (Delay and Liger 2020). One of those accused, the Indian RM, not only specialized in abortion but also more exotic practices such as palm-reading and phrenology. In court, he was described as having a range of foreign-sounding names (RM case 1929). Newspaper descriptions of a 1944 trial involving a British defendant, DB, also reflected anxieties about foreignness. In this case, however, DB’s Britishness paled in comparison to the fact that his two alleged accomplices were Nigerian immigrants. The Nigerian men were medical students, and they were accused of giving an abortion to an Irish woman, who was DB’s lover, in their own apartment. In court, the prosecution revealed that DB was the main instigator of the abortion, giving his lover, KM, the money for it. KM asked the Nigerian students, with whom she was friendly, for help. The Irish Times headline describing the case on June 7 underscored the “Coloured Medical Students’ Defence.” Three days later, the headline summarizing the verdict in the trial read, “Two Coloured Medical Students Convicted” (Irish Times June 7 and June 10, 1944). In an era when the fear of “race suicide” was mentioned in abortion cases, the abortion-related crimes of

Trading in women’s “troubles”  103 men perceived as non-Irish or “other” against Irish women and babies appeared as particularly grievous (Delay and Liger 2020). Most scholarship on race and racism in Ireland focuses on recent immigration trends within the context of the creation of an allegedly newly multicultural Ireland in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There was racial, ethnic, and religious diversity in Ireland well before that, however, with people moving across the British Empire and former empire throughout the twentieth century. Indeed, the myth of Ireland’s racially and ethnically homogenous past has been exposed by sociologist Bryan Fanning (2002), who argues that late twentiethcentury discussions of a “new” racism in Ireland caused by recent immigrants serve to obscure Ireland’s multicultural—and racist—past. Twentieth-century immigrants to Ireland had sexual lives, and some sought to manage fertility. Their actions and connections remind us that Ireland was not economically isolated, nor was it sexually or culturally unique in some ways.

Conclusion Throughout post-independence Ireland, women and men attempted to manage fertility by availing themselves of, and contributing to, economic, social, material, and travel networks that traversed the British Isles and beyond. They moved their bodies across national spaces to access abortion even as they bought and sold abortion pills and contraceptives, primarily from mainland Britain. Abortion attempts that ended up in Irish courts provide intriguing glimpses into the cross-border networks that persisted into the twentieth century. They shed light on the ways that Ireland remained part and parcel of postcolonial networks that had mainland Britain at their center but also involved a vast web of places and peoples. As we continue to explore colonialism and postcolonialism in the Irish context, women’s lives, sexuality, and fertility control can provide new perspectives that allow us to move beyond the myths of Irish isolation and exceptionalism.

Notes 1 The 1967 Abortion Act, effective in England, Scotland, and Wales decriminalized abortion in most circumstances, placing it under the direction of physicians. www.legislation. gov.uk/ukpga/1967/87/section/1 Prior to that, abortion was prohibited under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act. Significantly, the 1967 Act did not apply to Northern Ireland, where abortion remained illegal until 2019. The Republic of Ireland was governed by the Offences Against the Person Act until 1983, when the Eighth Amendment to the constitution came into effect. On May 25, 2018, the Irish people in the Republic voted to remove the Eighth Amendment and introduce legislation allowing for abortion in some circumstances in Ireland. 2 Before 1921, the entire island of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom and was ruled directly by Britain. In 1921, the island was partitioned. Six counties in the north of Ireland (part of the traditional province of Ulster) remained part of the United Kingdom; the rest of the twenty-six counties on the island were granted limited independence, becoming the Irish Free State. This independent state was known as Éire from 1937 until 1948, when it became the Republic of Ireland.

104  Cara Delay

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6 Contemporary plantation narratives and the postcolonial memory of capitalism1 Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska What we are looking for in the past, writes Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism, is “whether the past really is past . . . or whether it continues, albeit in ­different forms” (1993, 3). Neo-slave narratives—“contemporary novels that assume the form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first-person voice of the antebellum slave narrative” (Rushdy 1999, 3)—perfectly embody Edward Said’s claim. By definition, neo-slave narratives are intimately connected with the history of the African slavery and the historical experience of the African transatlantic diaspora (Gilroy 1993, 15). However, the new wave of neo-slave fiction opens a new chapter in the history of the genre. Through the example of Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women (2009), Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010), and David Dabydeen’s Johnson’s Dictionary (2013), this chapter argues that the novels in question not only respond to the tradition of slave narratives but also aspire to being seen as allegorical comments on the global (post)colonial capitalism—a socio-economic system which has its origins in the historical colonial capitalism and which is a shared experience of the majority of the people worldwide. In the three novels under discussion, the authors conjure up the image of a West Indian sugar plantation, revisit its socio-economic structures in great historical detail, as well as analyse complex power plays between various social groups living on the plantation. They invite the readers to notice parallels between the historical and contemporary experience of global capitalism, opening a critical debate on the relationship between the contemporary postcolonial literatures and the economy. The West Indian colonial plantations were the powerhouses of the empire. Established mostly as farming entities, they grew to become “small region[s] or domain[s]” with their own idiosyncratic culture and justice system (Higman 2011, 99); they were fueled by international capital and they were part of the global trade network (Heuman 2014, 18). The plantations were specifically designed for a mass production of sugar and they changed the West Indies into agricultural monocultures economically dependent on the European metropolis. They also necessitated the creation of a particular social structure, comprising overseers, accountants, slave traders, and plantation owners (Higman 2011, 98). Their aim, broadly, was to move the plantations’ goods across the globe and rule over a large disciplined workforce consisting predominantly of the African slaves. The most privileged group of the planters usually did not live on the islands. Known as

108  Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska the absentees, they gained the highest profits from sugar and exerted great influence on the European political scene (Higman 2011, 105). The representatives of the local plantation elite known as Creoles—people of mixed European and nonEuropean ancestry—were looked down on by the elites of Europe, who accused them of impure blood, bad temper, insatiable sexual appetite, and barbarous conduct (Stoddard 1914, 19). The everyday life of the plantation was organized by lower class Europeans who, “[g]eneraly economically insecure,” “often formed part of the most racist elements among the whites” (Heuman 2014, 58). However, the idea of the plantation as a separate socio-economic and cultural entity prevalent in the Caribbean islands was by no means confined to the region. Plantations were established in Ireland and North America as well as—though with some regional and cultural differences—in Poland or Russia (Linklater 2014, 65). Therefore, plantations were socio-economic institutions established on a truly global scale and, as such, they still are part of many a private and national history. The authors of the novels presented in this chapter fully embrace the potential of a colonial plantation as a universal symbol of global capitalism—the system which proves surprisingly difficult to define precisely and unambiguously. Jürgen Kocka writes that the term capitalism describing a particular socio-political order was popularized in the nineteenth century by the intellectuals who compared it unfavorably with socialism; thus, it was used as much to describe a particular economic system based on the idea that private capital facilitates economic and social progress as to present their subjective vision of the system and values associated with it—class society, elitism, or greed (Kocka 2016, 3). Hence, it is important to stress that Marlon James, Andrea Levy, and David Dabydeen do not impose any predefined vision of global capitalism on their protagonists, but build up the image of the system through the prism of their protagonist’s private experience, emphasizing its relatable and universal dimension. The novels do not put forward any macro-scale analyses of global capitalism per se, but they do inscribe themselves into a current debate on the condition of global capitalism in the twenty-first century, where humanity’s wealth, economic dispossession, and social inequality grow all at the same time (Dorling 2015, 3; Bergman 2018, 17). Moreover, the three novels are a great example of why, as Melissa Kennedy argues, postcolonial historical fiction “ought to be part of contemporary critiques of capitalism.” As she says, postcolonial historical novels are not only “valuable source[s] of insider perspectives” on the workings and history of global capitalism written by those whose “economic histories, are rarely or barely registered” (Kennedy 2017, 22); they are also the “reminders of forgotten pasts,” challenging the short-sightedness displayed by many politicians and economists, who lack historical sensitivity and essential insight into the historical mechanisms of the system they analyze (Kennedy 2017, 36). The Book of Night Women by Marlon James is an ambitious example of a postcolonial historical novel imparting such a universal meaning through relatable, individual (hi)stories inscribed into a broad framework of the global system. It depicts the historical reality of the Jamaican plantations in the second half of the eighteenth century, accounting for the lives of those once entangled in the colonial

Cotemporary plantation narratives  109 capitalism at the peak of the demand for sugar. The estate described by James is Montpelier, “so huge that you could tell you’re there as soon as the wind start blowing to the east” (James 2009, 4). Montpelier’s inhabitants come from different corners of the globe, they represent many social groups and trades; yet, they inhabit the same space and their fates are linked within the broader scheme of the empire’s economy. They are oftentimes defined, or define themselves, through the prism of the social role they play within the Montpelier estate. Even though the readers know immediately that the sole purpose of the Montpelier’s existence is generating capital returns for the European planters, the protagonists seem not to be fully aware of this fact. They go about their daily business, playing their roles as domestic slaves, overseers, or colonial masters. What they all effectively do, however, is keep order among the field slaves on whose work they rely for profit. Though “[e]verybody know ‘bout the life of a field nigger” (2009, 12), James writes, the field-workers seem invisible to the eyes of the Europeans and more favorably placed slaves, as if existing outside the usual social structures. They are described as a nameless mass—“one, two, three hundred foot hitting the ground and rumbling like slow thunder . . . tired, crying, limping and bleeding,” some “com[ing] back in a sack” (12). It is worth reminding oneself that Jamaica was one of the places with the greatest discrepancy between the European and the African populations; in 1750, the enslaved population “[made] up 90 per cent of the total and whites 9 per cent” (Higman 2005, 2). This is why those who look at them every day, even if they pretend not to see them, are terrified by their numbers and strength. One may therefore argue that the protagonists of the novel live under the spell of ideology understood here as “an ‘illusion’ ” that “structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel” (Žižek 2008, 45). The field slaves are the impossible kernel of this system; like Dickens’s workers from Hard Times who were “generically called ‘the Hands’ ” and who “would have found more favour with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands” (Dickens 2008 [1854], 45), they remind the Europeans about the immoral price of sugar and the domestic slaves about their own position within the system as “mere production units”—human machines— employed “to maximize effectiveness at any cost” (Sedláček 2011, 21). The Book of Night Women, hence, shows that the mechanisms of early capitalism work analogously in different areas but also that they are by no means limited to dehumanizing a particular group chosen to do the most strenuous work. On the contrary, they comprise a whole system of dependencies based on economic privileges and injustices and, for lack of a better term, on a commodification of illusions and dreams. While Montpelier’s field slaves are impossible converts, some of their fellow slaves, as well as poor Europeans, still see in colonial capitalism a chance for a better life. Therefore, the most intriguing aspect of The Book of Night Women is the fact that Marlon James centers on the mindsets of the characters placed somewhere in the middle of the plantation social scale—domestic slaves, mulattos, and impoverished Europeans, who see themselves as minor beneficiaries of the system that thrives on exploitation and ideological illusion.

110  Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska Such a narrative focus exposes one of the greatest paradoxes of global capitalism, namely its power to accommodate one’s desires for advancement, but only within the limits that do not threaten the already established socio-economic hierarchy, with real money and power being accumulated in the hands of a small group on the top (Dorling 2015, 6). Any ideological illusion, however, works for as long as “we do not feel any opposition between it and reality” (Žižek 2008, 45). Soon enough James’s protagonists start noticing inconsistencies within the system and recognize their own paradoxical positioning within its realms. One such character in the novel is Lilith, our main protagonist, who is a mulatto with green eyes “that seem robbed from white lady” (James 2009, 4). Lilith is an illegitimate daughter of Jack Wilkins, a Scottish overseer and a field slave. As a child, Lilith is oblivious to her position within the system but, with time, it dawns on her that she was granted a privilege of living in a separate household with two step-parents to take care of her. “In this place two things matter more than most, how dark a nigger you be and where the white man choose to put you” (33), and Lilith’s position is a result of her mixed blood. In this barbarous world, Lilith may be described as privileged and she even starts “[t]hink[ing] she be some nigger queen” (18); even when she commits a serious crime, namely kills “a Johnny-jumper” who tried to rape her—a slave responsible for supervising other field slaves—Lilith is surrounded by a protective web ensured by other mulatto women—her half-sisters—and especially by Homer, the main kitchen maid. Homer utilizes her own position and smuggles Lilith to the great house where she teaches her to read, preaching that “[e]very time you open [the book] you get free” (57), and facilitates her becoming a domestic slave. Jamaican plantation society, then, is a “society where social categories are defined by race, family background, and ethnicity” and where people have a “limited choice over identity” (Akerlof and Kranton 2010, 23). The African slaves could either work the field or become domestic slaves who, though “isolated from the slave community and from kin” (Heuman 2014, 36), were offered decent material conditions. In consequence, “domestic slaves could be fiercely loyal to their masters, even when the slave owners were under attack by other enslaved people” (Heuman 2014, 36). Homer herself, though she practically runs her masters’ house, knows well that under colonialism there is no real freedom for the African slaves. Together with other like-minded women, she is preparing a revolution against the whites, hoping that Lilith may one day join them. Lilith’s primary ambition, however, is not to overrule the system, but to do well within it; Lilith desperately clings to the idea that she is “[her] mistress favourite” (71), even though the other women mock her: “You think you and white woman goin’ be friend? You think she goin’ make tea and cucumber sandwich and invite you to sit?” (72). Lilith proves stubborn, knowing that the mistress’s favor guarantees that “[she] not going back to the field” (75). In the future, she hopes to win a white man who could “save her from the Johnny-jumpers and put her above other negro-womens” (81). Thus, Lilith misreads Homer’s disillusionment with the system as jealousy of her possible success: “Homer don’t want to see anybody rise up from they station in negro life” (101). Nonetheless, the moment Lilith reaches her goal, and becomes

Cotemporary plantation narratives  111 a servant during a festive dinner party, is also the moment when her dreams are crushed. It is then that she breaks a dish and causes an outburst of anger from her British Master, Humphrey Wilson, who beats her almost to death in front of all his guests (136). She is whipped and sent to a different estate, Coulibre, which is governed by even more severe rules than Montpelier. There, Lilith witnesses grueling instances of violence against the African slaves and comes back to Montpelier only after the fire devours Coulibre—an act of revenge Lilith later admits to have caused herself. One could expect that now Lilith will be ready to join Homer in her revolutionary designs, but at this point in the novel she starts growing attached to yet another complex character, Robert Quinn, an Irishman and an old friend of Master Humphrey. Quinn arrives in Jamaica with Humphrey as his friend and trusted overseer, only to realize that in the colonies his social position is closer to the African slave than to his British employer. In the British collective consciousness, the Irish served as colonial others long before the African slaves. The overseas expansion of the empire placed the Irish in a morally difficult position. The same empire that denied their independence offered them a chance of social advancement outside Europe: “the Irish were at once the colonizers—brutal overseers, capable of extraordinary cruelty, and the colonized—indentured servants and slave sympathisers, perhaps ready to join with enslaved Africans to foment rebellion” (Kroeg 2010, 110). Robert Quinn is one of such borderline Irish characters who, on the one hand, serves Master Humphrey but, on the other hand, sympathizes with the slaves. As an overseer, Quinn tries to plead with Humphrey to improve the slaves’ material conditions (46) and accuses Humphrey of inflicting excessive whipping that he then refuses to watch (94). Quinn also “eat[s] in the kitchen with Homer,” which “everybody but he find that mighty uncanny (100).” Moreover, once he gets a chance to share his views on the developments in Saint-Domingue,2 he is by no means as condescending as Humphrey (140). Thus he earns himself a label of “the nigger lover” (198), which gets him excluded from the category of the civilized men. “One is either British or brutish, as far as I can see” (140), Humphrey says at one point. Even slave-drivers feel offended by an Irish-man leading their lot; as one of them says, he would “[s]ooner take Jesus for a sodomite than take me orders from a potato eater” (44). Quinn is by no means oblivious to such remarks; “[i]n these colonies Irishmen are held in even lesser esteem than negroes,” he tells Lilith, “[a]t least a slave has some value to the master. An Irishman has none. They hate the lot of us, you know. They say, Aye, what’s an Irishman? A nigger turned inside out” (299). Hence, Quinn understands the slaves much better than the British and he is able to see through the strategies they employ to please him. He knows that their lies do not stem from their natural, inborn tendencies, but from their fear of crossing him. He also shows kindness to the slaves, and especially to Lilith, whom he eventually chooses as his woman and moves to his house. Lilith remembers “trying to hold on to hating Robert Quinn” but “[t]hings like these was making Lilith forget that white man be a monster” (280). Unlike her younger self, Lilith no longer dreams about a relationship with a white man; “[it] is a diabolical thing when a white

112  Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska man show kindness” (283), she notes, “because a nigger know that sooner or later something of someone is goin’ remind her that she black” (370). Even within the privacy of their home, Lilith is reluctant to call Robert by his Christian name: “she can hate a massa, A Massa Quinn or even a Massa Robert. But she can’t hate Robert” (317). Lilith knows that in Jamaica there is no space for her and Robert to have a legal relationship as, even though they both serve the British, they are not considered equals. She also knows that emotional closeness to a European man could prevent her from taking a decisive stance against the system that is the source of her miseries. Needless to say, this is exactly what happens. Lilith does not betray Homer’s plans to the Europeans but, when Homer’s revolution finally comes, she does not join the slaves either. On the spur of the moment, she saves her senile biological father, Jack Wilkins, from the fire, as if atoning for her sins at Coulibre (407). In a touching scene, Lilith drags the old man from his burning house and “think[s] of her own burnin’ home, the home that she made with Robert Quinn” (407), only to learn that “Quinn die[d] trying to save the estate, an estate that was not even his” (412). It seems that both Lilith and Quinn ultimately fulfill their roles of a domestic slave and a loyal overseer, though not out of loyalty toward the empire. As many of us would be, they are driven by the fear of losing what little they gained by using the modest opportunities that were offered to them. It is vital to realize, however, that the limits of their dreams were predefined by the rigid structures of the plantation economy. Though many Europeans saw the West Indies as synonymous with social success, the plantations were not designed to promote social advancement for all classes, but to generate profit for the elites. In the process, they created a demand for the African slaves and “surplus” Europeans (Bauman 2007, 32) and served as a buffer that ensured the global success of capitalism. “If the excess of population . . . can be routinely removed and transported beyond the boundaries of the enclosure,” those who stay, “even if they are momentarily redundant,” may hope for reintroduction into the system (Bauman 2007, 33). In other words, the West Indies made a relocation of a surplus European population possible, allowing the people at home to feel more economically secure. Only if such a removal were impossible, would they realize that the condition of being surplus is an inherent part of the capitalist economy. The Book of Night Women does not depict this moment in time; it ends with the collapse of Homer’s plan and an employment of a new attorney who procures new slaves. Such a decision, however, “was folly, since the interest in the West Indies was fading and slavery might soon over” (James 2009, 422); the novel, then, ends with the prophecy of the impending changes in the colonies, which will be dictated by the changes on the global market. A similar sense of capitalism’s pervasiveness permeates Andrea Levy’s novel, The Long Song, which spans across the nineteenth century and which may be read as a satire on (post)colonial capitalism. Levy depicts the times when the West Indian plantations came under severe attack in the metropolis; the disagreements were caused not only by the very institution of slavery but also by monopolies and sugar preferences that brought about political quarrels among the merchants, the planters, and the politicians (Williams 1944, 136). The novel captures the moment

Cotemporary plantation narratives  113 when the slaves and their masters decode the economic dependencies resultant from the plantation economy and realize that they reach far beyond slavery. The plantation depicted in the novel is Amity and it is run by the planter named John Howarth, his sister, Mrs Caroline Mortimer, and their Scottish overseer, Tam Dewar, later to be replaced by Robert Goodwin. The organization of the plantation labor is analogous to Montpelier, with a basic division into field and domestic slaves as well as many gray areas occupied by mulattos, manumitted slaves, and poor Europeans. The main narrator of the novel is a mulatto and a former slave, July, who, similarly to Lilith, happens to be a daughter of an overseer and a field slave and an example of social progress; as a child, she was chosen by Caroline Mortimer to be her personal slave and thus started living in the great house. The relationship between the two women well reflects the complexity of the slave– master relations. Caroline relies on July as her sole companion. She keeps July close at all times, even during inspections of the field slaves, but she also inflicts persistent acts of violence on the girl. She stabs her hands with needles, slaps her (64), and lies to her that her mother has been sold away (67). “You are mine now,” (67) she keeps repeating, being at the same time genuinely frightened that, one day, July may leave. July resents Caroline, but appreciates the place she offers her: “in the great house she will at least feel to be a white man’s child,” (48) July thinks. Other domestic slaves are jealous, pointing out that “a filthy nigger child—used only to working in the fields—[changed] into the missus’s favoured lady’s maid” (58). Thus, the great house is an allegory of pre-abolition Jamaica, run by weak masters who start losing interest in sugar and focus on consuming wealth. It becomes a space of subversion where old colonial capitalism starts adapting to the changing world. Andrea Levy draws many a parallel between the historical conditioning of Jamaica and the world of today. The planters, for example, are defined by their insatiable appetite, which may be read as a satire on consumerism. One of such comments applies to Caroline who: [w]anted to try everything—oh yes—everything. . . . Bring on the duck, guinea birds and jack fish, for Mrs Caroline Mortimer was eager to nibble upon their bones. Even breadfruit that was destined for the slaves’ table. “Why should I not try it too?” she asked her brother, who replied sternly that several of his slaves had been whipped for eating dirt—did she propose to try that delicacy also? (29) Caroline is not alone in her desires. “Perhaps, reader, you are familiar with the West Indian planters and their famed appetites,” the narrator comments ironically, “then you will also know that the flesh of many a poor creature needed to be sacrificed to satisfy their greedy-guts” (73). Therefore, it is symbolic that the greatest political breakthrough in the novel, namely the outbreak of the Baptist War3, coincides with a festive dinner organized by Caroline. July remembers the day through Caroline’s fussing about the food and pretending that she can afford

114  Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska it. Her slaves, however, are no longer easily fooled, and Godfrey, the one responsible for running Caroline’s stock, informs his mistress bluntly that she is poor: “[i]t is not that things are expensive, it is just that you cannot afford them” (78). Godfrey understands that poverty is not so much defined by money as by social exclusion: “people are poor because they cannot afford to take part in the norms of society and these norms only become unaffordable because the better-off have been allowed to become even [more] better-off” (Dorling 2015, 30). Caroline, then, does not see herself as poor until she reads the disregard in her guests’ faces; such details as a bedsheet instead of a tablecloth (82) or a cheap “group of negro fiddlers” whose clatter is “unrecognisable as a tune” (86) do not fail to grasp their attention. When dinner is interrupted by the uprising, Caroline welcomes it with relief, worrying only about “Elizabeth Wyndham [who] will soon testify to everyone [that] a soiled bed sheet [was] . . . on my table through this whole beastly dinner” (100). At the same time, “the loudest thing your storyteller [July] could hear was Miss Hannah gnawing upon the missus’s discarded ham bone” (100). Such an excessive attachment to consumption and keeping up appearances permeates the slave world too. The slaves compete among themselves as to whose master is richer, seeing that their own worth is defined by the wallets of their owners. Once a slave named Clara tells July that her “massa have no money for white muslin for [her]” and that “what [July’s] missus be wearing is bad” (93). “Me massa have plenty money” (93), July replies, trying to defend her own position. A similar awareness of their mutual entanglement in the market economy is noted by Nimrod, a free black man, who tries to teach Godfrey how to survive in capitalism. “Nimrod thought Godfrey a fool. For here was a light-skinned man with opportunity as abundant as pods on a tamarind tree to relieve his situation” (113); Nimrod scolds Godfrey for not embracing the chances capitalism offers. Then he explains that the route Godfrey embarked on, namely stealing from his mistress for his own use, makes no sense: [A] slave cannot steal from his master . . . [as] whatever is your massa’s, belong to you. When you take property from your massa, for your own use, him loses nothing. For you be his property too. All is just transferring. (113) Godfrey remains oblivious to Nimrod’s teachings, thinking him a “fool [who] has worked so slowly for his freedom that some nigger with fire and machete does have to complete his task” (113). However, the course of history proves that Nimrod is right as the abolition crafted by the European government does not bring the revolutionary changes expected by Godfrey. Due to two hundred years of exploitative economy, the colonies were economically addicted to the metropolis. They had no industry and no export goods but for those already monopolized by Britain. In the nineteenth century, Jamaica was a leading sugar exporter in the region “committing more than 80 per cent of its product to international commerce” (Higman 2005, 1), which de facto meant British international commerce. The goods produced by the colonies “had to be sold to the mother country, and

Cotemporary plantation narratives  115 their imports could only come from the same source” (Linklater 2014, 236). After the abolition, there was no other choice but to still abide by the empire’s rules; as one of the planters quoted in the novel ironically says: “[t]hey believe it is only we planters standing in the way of them and some heaven on earth, once they are free” (88), as they know little of the international economic relationships that define their lives; so when “[c]olonial slavery die[s] July 31, 1838, aged 276 years” (182), it is followed by “dark days” (191). Even though technically free, the slaves are “bound to the missus to work for six years without pay” (202), but they “refused to work no more than the forty hours a week” (202). It is not enough to collect the sugarcane, “[y]et Caroline Mortimer was required to take care for those negroes in the same way—with lodging and food and clothing” (203), which she sees as an injustice. When she employs a new overseer, Robert Goodwin, his primary task is to convince the former slaves to work more for Caroline. Initially, he aims to “restore their best feelings to [her] by telling them how fairly [she] intend[s] to treat them now that they are free” (215). When this strategy fails, Goodwin gives the former slaves a true lesson in British capitalist economy; namely, he cites the sacrosanct rule of private property and capital investment, which needs to return profit (Linklater 2014, 58). “The difference between peasant Europe and capitalist Britain was not one of production but of ownership” (2014, 126), Linklater explains. The English consolidated land and regulated land-ownership long before continental Europe and therefore Shakespeare could conceive of land as private capital passing undivided to one’s heir—a thought impossible to fathom in the countries where communal land ownership was still strong (Linklater 2014, 127). The British transported the rules to the colonies and there too property rights did not exist without formal ownership of the land. “The houses that you live in and the grounds that you work, do not belong to you. They are the property of your mistress” (221), Goodwin says, “[n]o matter how long you have lived within a house . . . [or] how much effort you have extended to fix up that dwelling . . . these still belong entirely to you mistress” (221). Then he adds a promise that “[t]he industrious and well disposed of you, will do well” (221) and “[t]he idle, disorderly, indolent and dissolute, will neither thrive nor remain” (221), blaming their possible lack of economic success on personal failures. The tenants refuse to take Goodwin’s words seriously and they continue to “[work] their old provision grounds and gardens . . . so there might be food enough to eat” (303). They do not realize, however, that once they are free individuals the product of their labor, if produced on Caroline’s grounds, does not belong to them—the truth Nimrod conveyed to Godfrey earlier in the novel. Goodwin demands compensation to prevent further losses on capital, namely he raises rents to “a full week’s wage . . . for every acre of land worked” (303). “I have taken this measure of increasing the rents upon your provision grounds for your own good” (310), he explains, as “all freemen in England—yes, white men—work for wages. It is the way of the world” (311). Thus, Goodwin makes them realize that, in capitalism, it is not so much the color of your skin as your material status that defines your place on the social ladder. As one of the slaves notes, “[s]lavery has just returned to Amity” (311), and though the man is not

116  Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska right, he nonetheless recognizes that economic dispossession works in a similar way to political slavery. Putting it differently, if capital guarantees one’s rights, then those who do not own anything are at the mercy of those who do, which Goodwin skillfully uses once he decides to evict his non-paying tenants (324). The following scene is one of the most touching in the novel: Let us find the negroes who once resided and worked upon the plantation named Amity. We must ride a good way to follow the path they journeyed when they abandoned the place. The trail they travelled—carrying their salvaged mattresses, chairs, clay pots, tin pans—has been worn down over many years by hundreds of bare black feet just like their own. It was walked by negroes who wished to be undisturbed by white men. It was run down by excited slaved chasing wild boar. It was fled down by runaways and his along by the needful. But the negroes of Amity escaped by it with flapping chickens hung over their shoulders; with bleating goats tethered together in a line. (336) The description is timeless and eerily familiar; it may remind us about the refugees knocking on Europe’s door or of the dispossessed Americans who lost their homes as a result of the 2008 crisis, while the governments and financial institutions remained unaccountable (Dodd 2014, 3). Tellingly enough, Robert Goodwin and Caroline Mortimer, now his wife, leave Jamaica when the things start getting really difficult, but other planters do not give up so easily. They start seeking new ways of securing their workforce and turn toward the East Indies. “The planters of the parish were planning—an idea which would end all of their problems with those indolent, feckless, troublesome negroes and return their plantations once more to profit”; the name of this solution is “coolies” (341).4 The end of African servitude marks the beginning of another and then, as one may suspect, history will keep repeating itself for as long as the mechanisms of exploitation remain unchallenged. Such an ending constitutes a good transition to David Dabydeen’s Johnson’s Dictionary, which is the most allegorical of the novels presented in the chapter. In his depiction of the eighteenth-century Demerara—today’s Guyana—Dabydeen openly draws from religious symbolism, revealing the moral costs of the capitalist economy. The novel itself comprises three parts, which may be read as separate stories; the protagonists migrate between the parts, and the plot is supplemented by images, mostly by Hogarth, who is famous for his depictions of the moral corruption and poverty of the eighteenth-century London. The novel, then, may be seen as an extension of Hogarth’s own critique of rampant capitalism analyzed by Dabydeen in his own Hogarth’s Blacks (1987). Interestingly enough, unlike James and Levy, Dabydeen finds some of his most intriguing protagonists among the field slaves who are in the process of preparing themselves for freedom. Contrary to The Long Song, they discover that the fate of the poor English differs little from the fate of the slaves long before abolition, and they want to do everything they can to prosper in this new reality. Dabydeen’s field slaves are “[p]ractical

Cotemporary plantation narratives  117 people” and they know that in the white man’s world “money [is] sovereign, the sole measurement of value” (Dabydeen 2013, 87). The English, in turn, “[are] worse than cannibals” (89). “A select group fattened on the labour of the rest of their tribe, reducing hundreds of thousands to beggary and bone;” the rest, free only in name, “sold their children into brothels” and “died each day from diseases” (89). The image of England that emerges from such descriptions is exaggerated, though it could be relatable to many an impoverished Londoner. It well reflects the fears of the most vulnerable group within colonial capitalism that would pay most dearly for the oncoming transformations. Consequently, the slaves readily embrace the lessons in the theory and practice of capitalism provided by a literate slave named Madboy. Madboy teaches them “how to value themselves” (130) and they listen to him as if he was a prophet; they even “double-capitalised Madboy, not in terms of money but, more radically, in language” and added “an extra letter to make his name” (133)—MMadboy. MMadboy simply calculates the market value of the slave, “[s]ubtract[s] the cost of food, clothing and medicines” and concludes that “seventeen thousand nine hundred or so [is] left” (130). This means “that slaves made on average three hundred and twenty pounds each for Mr Basnett [the planter]” (130) and immediately they start taking pride in their monetary value: “[t]hose who were on the cusp of retirement . . . resolved to speed up their decline . . . so as not to lessen the collective worth of their fellows,” while “[o]thers grinned in delight for they were young and useful for years to come,” resolving to “work even harder, to justify themselves” (131). In other words, they fall to the charm of the market economy and the rhetoric of being useful as sole measurements of their value as human beings. They even see themselves entitled to “compensation for being made redundant” since “a free man [is] worthless” (131). From anticipating freedom, they go to being afraid of any rapid change in the market, which they now call sudden: “One minute they rich-rich, next minute they minus nothing: is sudden that afflict them” (139; italics in the original). Tellingly enough, they start embodying the fears of all the contemporary people who live dependent on the global market—a mysterious, invisible being, which they do not understand and cannot control. Therefore, when there appears an ambitious reformer who wants to rapidly implement Adam Smith’s ideas into the colony, he finds his most determined opponent in a domestic slave named Francis—one of those who progressed within the system and who looks at the impending changes with horror. The reformer’s name is Theodore and he is an accountant from Eastern Europe. “[A] scion of privilege, a relative of the Czar no less, his family owning several estates in Russia and Poland” (118), “drawn to the colony by a powerful and improbable vision” (119), namely freeing the African slaves from bondage. Theodore, who is of Jewish origins, recognizes in the African slave himself, namely a persecuted other of Europe, and his devotion to Adam Smith comes from a religious epiphany he had while contemplating investing money in “the African trade” (195). Then Theodore saw the Virgin Mary being crucified by the African slaves, who shouted at her “ ‘Jew’, ‘Jew’, ‘Jew’ ” (195). He read it as sign that

118  Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska he should liberate his fellow human beings from slavery and then “[left] Poland . . . to pursue a new calling” (195). “[I]t was as if God had given me a new name and promise of another reputation” (195), Theodore says, and he transforms into “a new Christ who will emancipate all” (195), as Francis ironically comments. From then on, Theodore starts treating the economy not as a means of satisfying his own greed, but as a means of earning salvation. He is “working the hours of a slave, locked away in the counting house, refusing to be served cooked food” (119) only to emerge after some time with a new plan—he starts restoring breaks and free Sundays as well as puts forward a proposal of paying the slaves “in hard currency . . . a sliver of percentage of revenue but something all the same” (142). He even makes “plans to open up a shop to be run by the slaves themselves, with all the profits given to them” (142). When asked where he takes his ideas from, he invariably cites Adam Smith, preaching his ideas to the planters (143). Paradoxically, the planters prove eager to embrace Smith’s theories, though they do so superficially. As many before and after, they interpret his ideas merely as an absolution from greed, not acknowledging the aspect of sharing wealth; they “all agreed with [Theodore]. The more they spent on themselves, the more it benefited the lesser breeds” (143); “[a] coach, for instance, employed a host of hands in its construction—carpenters, craftsmen, ironsmiths, painters and varnishes” (143). Francis, however, remains skeptical and he notes that “Theodore’s Adam Smith was named after a sinner from a past so distant-dark that even MMadboy would be unable to count the years” (146; italics in the original). Thus, Francis ascribes his personal conflict with Theodore a religious dimension. He employs the ageless stereotype of impure Jewish blood to breed resentment in Theodore’s employer (170) and warns him that Theodore’s overall plan is to give the slaves an advantage on the market (170). In so doing, Francis fights to defend the system that made him a slave and thus mirrors the behavior of his masters, merely protecting his own interest and not actually contributing to the well-being of his people. “I was not free in Law but in fact, Lady Elizabeth’s household mine to command . . . my sovereign property” (171), Francis says, referring, as Robert Goodwin did, to the sacred power that comes with property. “I would be as worthless as a deflowered maiden if every Negro was set free” (171), he says. Then he lets himself be carried away by his hatred and devises a plan to kill Theodore. He is stopped by a respected sorceress, Miriam, who assures Francis that Theodore will not succeed and that the African slaves will be left on their own once again. Then she offers Francis his own chance at selftransformation, from a worshipper of greed to the prophet preparing his people for the dawn of the new world—a chance which Francis embraces. The passages are illustrated by an image of The Virgin and Child with a Monkey by Albrecht Dürer, where Mary, the mother of Jesus, is accompanied by a chained monkey. The monkey symbolizes “greed, lust and selfishness” and the chains bring to mind “the prison of worldly passions” that is human nature (Sorenson 2009, 95). Dabydeen suggests here that capitalism—or any man-made system for that matter—is not an anonymous entity which lives its own life independently of the people who run it; instead, its shape and condition depend on us and our ability to resist the inherent

Cotemporary plantation narratives  119 flaws of the human nature such as the sin of greed. Capitalism has its saints—like Theodore—and devils—like evil planters, but, in practice, it relies on average sinners—middle-class individuals who accept its rules, wishing to progress in life, but who rarely display ambitions to redefine the system at its core. Thus, Dabydeen challenges his readers to notice that they too are part of the system, suggesting that the economy, religion, and morality are intricately interwoven. Some seek in them the means to achieve the moral justification of greed, others redemption from their sins, but undoubtedly one teaches us about the other. Judaism, for example, gave us the idea of linear history and the necessity of progress and material gain—the values which, with time, have been embraced by Christianity (Sedláček 2011, 84), and especially by Protestantism, which provided the foundations for British imperialism (Said 1993, 167). In his piece “Capitalism as Religion” Walter Benjamin goes even further and claims that capitalism is religion. Benjamin argues that capitalism operates analogously to a religious movement, that is to say, “capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers” (1996, 299). Capitalism gives transcendent meaning to the structures it creates and these structures, in turn, only have this transcendent meaning within the realms of capitalism. Though capitalism does not require the acceptance of a dogma, its practices, for example the exchange of goods on the market, for some have a religious-like significance and they create groups of cultic followers. According to Benjamin, capitalism is also permanent and, much like Christianity with its idea of sin, it “makes guilt pervasive;” namely, it propagates the sense of guilt from which there is no absolute atonement (Benjamin 1996, 299). It is important to note that Benjamin plays here on “ ‘the demonic ambiguity of the word Schuld’— which in German means, at the same time, ‘debt’ and ‘guilt’ ” (Löwy 2009, 65). This adds an even more contemporary dimension to Benjamin’s original thought; as David Graeber argues, it is the idea of debt that made the system of global capitalism pervasive and enduring, enabling it to go beyond the physical limitations of money and finite resources of the global economy. The advent of easily available debt, credit cards, and other types of loans truly changed the system into a self-perpetuating mechanism driven by the lack of the actual expectation of us ever fully settling our debts (Graeber 2014, 13). In a way, then, Dabydeen makes us realize that we are all sinners in the eyes of the system. In conclusion, all three novels presented in the chapter allude to the form of a historical slave narrative, and to the tradition of neo-slave fiction, but in their scope and focus they transgress the limitations of the genre. Namely, they do reclaim the lives of the African slaves from the abyss of history, but, first and foremost, they reveal the universal mechanisms of the plantation economy, depicting the intricate dynamics of power between various groups trapped within the same system. This, in turn, serves as a narrative vehicle for commenting on social and cultural complexities of today’s global capitalism, which makes it appropriate to call the novels plantation narratives, or the narratives about plantations, rather than neo-slave narratives per se. The protagonists of The Book of Night Women, The Long Song, and The Johnson’s Dictionary are of various nationalities and

120  Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska ethnicities, but their provenance is secondary to the group they represent within the plantation economy—overseers, economic immigrants, Creole land-owners, domestic and field slaves, freemen etc. Thus, the novels convey a second— allegorical (moral) message as they build parallels between the particular character’s experience of the plantation economy and the place their contemporary counterparts occupy within the broad schemes of global capitalism. In so doing, they reveal the injustices inherent in the system and make us aware that the problems we face today are rooted in a complex and long history of global capitalism.

Notes 1 Research presented in the chapter is supported by National Science Centre, Poland— research grant number UMO-2018/31/D/HS2/00031. 2 They talk about the Haitian Revolution which led to the proclamation of an independent Haiti in 1804 (Heuman 2014, 62). One of the largely forgotten aspects of the struggle is the involvement of Polish soldiers, who had joined Napoleon hoping to fight for Polish independence, but were sent to fight Haitian slaves instead. Much like the fictitious Robert Quinn, the Poles sympathized with the slaves and some of them settled in Haiti; their descendants still live there (Orizio 2000, 124–79). 3 The Baptist War or Christmas Rebellion (1831), was a slave mutiny led by a Baptist preacher, Sam Sharpe. It remains a highly symbolic event on the map of the Jamaican struggles for freedom (Higman 2011, 185). 4 For more on the history of indenture see: India in the Caribbean (1987) edited by David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo.

Bibliography Akerlof, George A., and Rachel E. Kranton. 2010. Identity Economics: How our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2007. Liquid Times: Living in the Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1996. “Capitalism as Religion.” In Walter Benjamin Selected Writings. Volume I. 1913–1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 288–91. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bergman, Rutger. 2018. Utopia for Realists and How We Can Get There. London: Bloomsbury. Dabydeen, David. 2013. Johnson’s Dictionary. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. ———. 1987. Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art. Georgia: University of Georgia Press. Dabydeen, David, and Brinsley Samaroo, eds. 1987. India in the Caribbean. Hertfors: Hansib Printing Limited. Dickens, Charles. 2008 [1854]. Hard Times. Oxford: Oxford Classics. Dodd, Nigel. 2014. The Social Life of Money. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dorling, Danny. 2015. Injustice: Why Social Inequality Still Persists. Chicago: Policy Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Graeber, David. 2014. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. London: Melville House. Heuman, Gad. 2014. The Caribbean: A Brief History. London: Bloomsbury.

Cotemporary plantation narratives  121 Higman, Barbara. 2011. A Concise History of the Caribbean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. Plantation Jamaica, 1750-1850. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. James, Marlon. 2009. The Book of Night Women. New York: Riverhead Books. Kennedy, Melissa. 2017. Narratives of Inequality: Postcolonial Literary Economics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kocka, Jürgen. 2016. Capitalism: A Short History. Translated by Jeremiah Riemer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kroeg, Susan. 2010. “The Transmigrated Soul of Some West Indian Planter: Absenteeism, Slavery, and the Irish National Tale.” In The Irish in The Atlantic World, edited by David T. Gleeson, 109–28. Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press. Levy, Andrea. 2010. The Long Song. London: Headline Publishing. Linklater, Andro. 2014. Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership. London: Bloomsbury. Löwy, Michael. 2009. “Capitalism as Religion: Walter Benjamin and Max Weber.” Historical Materialism 17: 60–73. Orizio, Riccardo. 2000. Lost White Tribes. Translated by Avril Bardoni. New York: The Free Press. Rushdy, Ashraf A. H. 1999. Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. Sedláček, Tomáš. 2011. Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sorenson, John. 2009. Ape. London: Reaktion Books. Stoddard, Thomas Lothrop. 1914. The French Revolution in San Domingo. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Williams, Eric. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Žižek, Slavoy. 2008. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.

7 Waste lands and preserves Olive Schreiner’s ecological allegories and colonial Zimbabwe Deborah Shapple Spillman

When proposing to Cape Colony’s commercially motivated 1890s readers how to manage part of recently annexed Mashonaland, novelist Olive Schreiner speculated how a lion—then shot by local farmers as a species of “vermin” (MacKenzie 1988, 24)—might someday “equal in worth a handful of Kimberly diamonds or a claim at Johannesburg” (Schreiner 1891, 397). She moreover suggested how future “Nimrods may be found who would gladly expend much of their superfluous wealth in paying for attaining to the blissful consciousness of having destroyed the life of a creature whose kind only a few score exist in the world” (Schreiner 1891, 397). Schreiner invokes this Biblical figure for ironically referencing “great or skillful hunter[s]” of the future (“Nimrod,” OED),1 who in the enduring tradition of “the Hunt” imagine themselves engaging with animals in honorable combat (MacKenzie 1987, 50). While such hunters continue to make headlines today, what lends her remark even greater prescience is its allusion to competing interests in two of southern Africa’s most valued natural resources: minerals and megafauna. As Tumai Murombo observes more broadly of this conflict between development and conservation in Zimbabwe and South Africa, “often [mineral] deposits lie on or beneath equally (if not more) treasured resources such as water, biodiversity, and protected areas where flora and fauna thrive” (Murombo 2013, 36). Conflicting rights of access further complicate this struggle in tensions between government regulations and local common laws as well as between large-scale and small-scale economic ventures. By engaging questions of value, preservation, and waste, Schreiner develops an ecological vision in her 1890s writing that reflects tensions between colonial and precolonial practices continuing to inform debates over land use in Zimbabwe today. ******** Schreiner’s ecological vision of the early 1890s descended in part from nineteenth-century European models of preservation that emphasized efficiency and exclusivity. Her proposal to establish a southern African zoological garden in a less populated region moreover depended on familiar colonial discourses of waste as well as the institutions that helped to articulate and enforce them. A similar model of preservation underwrote emerging colonial legislation devoted to

Waste lands and preserves  123 resource conservation, which tended to place humans at odds with nature while simultaneously privileging white colonial hunters’ and farmers’ rights of access. Colonial land and resource legislation of the late 1800s systematically supplanted indigenous authorities and local ecologies while artificially introducing labor shortages for white farmers as well as land and resource shortages for black laborers. Whereas Schreiner famously criticized English imperial encroachment on southern Africa throughout her career, her political and ecological views would not fully intertwine until later that decade. In “Our Waste Land in Mashonaland,” first published in the Cape Times, Schreiner suggests establishing “a vast preserve” to act as “the World’s Zoological Garden” on lands subsequently known as Southern Rhodesia (Schreiner 1891, 395, 398), now Zimbabwe, that had recently been acquired by mining magnate Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa Company (BSAC). Gained through a series of notorious concessions, intimidations, and outmaneuverings between Rhodes’s Company and the Ndebele king, Lobengula, this new territory was referred to euphemistically as “the northeast extension” or even “the promised land.”2 Appealing to a colonial audience motivated by the particular promise of mineral wealth and material gain, Schreiner focuses her rhetorical efforts in her 1891 essay on challenging her readers’ perceptions of value. While many of her contemporaries recognized the value of preserving for posterity “scattered fragments of antiquity,” as evidenced in contemporary expeditions in search of the Great Zimbabwe popularized in Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), few of them invested in “materials far more priceless and irrevocable” found only in southern Africa and rapidly approaching extinction (Schreiner 1891, 393). Her colonial readers, Schreiner knew, had grown accustomed to positioning themselves against, rather than amidst, their natural surroundings: (Curious as such an idea now appears, in a country, where for years our struggle has been to obtain an initial control over the animal and vegetable productions of Nature, and where all artificial productions are naturally valued at something above their real worth) it is possible that the mere animals themselves might, in the course of sixty or eighty years, prove as lucrative a source of wealth to the scientific body to which they belonged as if the original capital had been invested in gold mines or corn fields. (Schreiner 1891, 397) While highlighting the significance of even the smallest animal, which might serve as an evolutionary link by representing “a form intermediate between . . . orders” (Schreiner 1891, 394), Schreiner attempts to entice her readers with the lure of foreign capital from “scientific men and practical travellers” in “Europe and America” (Schreiner 1891, 396). Doubting whether enterprising colonists saw the practicality of investing in such delayed returns, Schreiner emphasizes the local animals’ international value to science for “which a thousand years are but as one day” (Schreiner 1891, 397).

124  Deborah Shapple Spillman Schreiner’s comparison between her proposed preserve and a zoological garden nevertheless reveals the extent to which she draws on nineteenth-century European models of preservation. The first recorded English usage of the word “preserve” to denote land “set apart for the protection of wildlife” in fact dates from the early nineteenth century; a couple of decades later, the word additionally came to mean an “exclusive domain of a particular person or group” (“preserve,” OED). In the preserve Schreiner outlines, “the rifle” would be “almost unknown” (Schreiner 1891, 395). Moreover, she envisions a protected territory offering sanctuary not only to southern African wildlife but also to a diversity of endangered animals from all over the world capable of living in a tropical or subtropical environment. Whereas an exotic animal in a European zoo often appeared a depressed and defeated creature, she suggests, native and non-native species might all thrive in a more temperate natural environment bounded only where necessary by a wall costing less than the amount of coal used to heat zoo animals’ cells (Schreiner 1891, 396–97). The model of the zoo nevertheless inspires somewhat of a Noah’s Ark approach to conservation, as Schreiner admittedly does not express emerging ecological concerns about the potential dangers of introducing invasive species.3 Exclusivity moreover characterized emerging colonial models of preservation entering into 1880s Cape Colony legislation, which increasingly privileged affluent white landowners and hunters over disenfranchised pastoralists and hunter-gatherers. Schreiner’s preserve similarly implies exclusion, as it depended on the neighboring “existence of a strong, civilized government . . . to guarantee its retention for the desired purpose”—presumably by restricting access and criminalizing unauthorized use (Schreiner 1891, 396). The introduction of colonial legislation promoting game preservation in Mashonaland began with the 1889 Charter of Incorporation approved by Parliament and granted to the British South Africa Company by the Queen of England. In addition to endowing the Company with the power to introduce ordinances and to build a police force to “preserve peace and order,” the Charter also reflected emerging colonial interests in preservation. “For the preservation of elephants and other game,” this charter offered the Company the right to introduce “regulations and . . . impose such licence duties on the killing or taking of elephants and other game as they may see fit”—provided these actions did not interfere with the hunting rights of local chiefs or tribes during hunting seasons as determined by the Company (Charter, Articles 10 & 21). With the Proclamation of the High Commissioner of 1891, Cape game legislation like the 1886 Act for the Preservation of Game was extended to Mashonaland; moreover, BSAC introduced new regulations over the next few years. According to John MacKenzie, these regulations increasingly turned hunting into a sport for the white elite: “Through these laws Africans were entirely excluded from hunting. Licences were set at a price well beyond their reach. Rights were given to landowners which placed them in an exceptionally powerful position over game on their land” (MacKenzie 1987, 56). Wealthy white landowners hunting on thousands of their sparsely inhabited acres would no doubt find game more plentiful than in more densely inhabited, less fertile native reserves. When African hunters pursued game across newly

Waste lands and preserves  125 established borders and onto the territory of private landowners, moreover, they could be charged with poaching. The British South Africa Company first introduced native reserves, or communal areas, to colonial Zimbabwe in 1894, which formalized the ongoing process of land and resource alienation. A newly organized Land Commission divided the lands between European settlers and Africans; when the poorly irrigated Gwaii and Shangani reserves for Ndebele first opened in 1895, this territory represented only two percent of the country (Goodwin 2013, 164).4 Similar reserves were subsequently established for the Shona, who were forcibly relocated from Beatrice, Mazowe, and Harare to less fertile areas like Mhondoro, Murehwa, and Seke. While Africans technically possessed the right to purchase land outside of the reserves, colonial farmers generally avoided selling to them (Goodwin 2013, 14). Given the poor quality of the lands reserved as communal areas, moreover, Rhodes encouraged Africans to live and work on European lands (Goodwin 2013, 164; Stigger 1980, 22). Settlers thereby attempted to resolve artificially constructed labor shortages on their now vast lands through the introduction of artificially induced land and resource shortages for Africans. A hut tax further enforced the availability of African labor, since failure to pay taxes could result in the confiscation of cattle and other property. Such rigorous acquisition and division of land could only follow the defeat of Lobengula in the First Matabele War of 1893–1994, after which the Ndebele king died of smallpox. Several notorious concessions led up to the consolidation of the British South Africa Company’s control over the lands and its people that precipitated the First Matabele War. The Rudd Concession drawn up between King Lobengula and Charles Dunell Rudd as well as his fellow representatives of BSAC in 1888 established the primary conditions through which the Company first obtained its Charter. In this broadly defined concession, Lobengula granted BSAC: [T]he complete and exclusive charge over all metals and minerals situated and contained in [his] kingdoms, principalities, and dominions, together with full power to do all things that they may deem necessary to win and procure the same, and to hold, collect, and enjoy the profits and revenues, if any, derivable from the said metals and minerals. (Concession) This concession granted mining rights, not the right to occupy and settle the land. According to the missionary witness and translator Charles Helm, moreover, verbal assurances not included in the document promised Lobengula “[t]hat they would not bring more than 10 white men to work in his country, that they would not dig anywhere near towns, etc., and that they” would obey Lobengula’s laws (qtd. in Keppel-Jones 1983, 77). Only later did Lobengula realize the treachery of this agreement, as illuminated in the words of his Mfengu confidant William Mzisi who was more familiar with the practice of colonial, large-scale mining: “You say you do not want any land, how can you

126  Deborah Shapple Spillman dig for gold without it, is it not in the land? And by digging into the land is not that taking it . . . ?” (qtd. in Keppel-Jones 1983, 86–87). BSAC acquired greater control over Mashonaland after secretly purchasing another concession drawn up between Lobengula and German businessman Eduard Lippert, which granted the latter “the right to lay out, grant, and lease farms and townships on behalf of the king” for a century in the territories for which BSAC previously only possessed mining rights (Keppel-Jones 1983, 231). Lobengula only learned of this deal the following year, after settlement in Mashonaland under BSAC was well underway. This concession enabled Rhodes to grant the lands promised to those hundreds of colonists who helped him march into Mashonaland in 1890 to begin mining.5 Schreiner imagines building her proposed colonial preserve in the low-lying districts of Mashonaland: a part of the newly annexed territory she deemed “sparsely inhabited by natives” that would “lie waste” (Schreiner 1891, 396, 398), until the more fertile, nearby plateau was “fully peopled and cultivated” (Schreiner 1891, 398). Throughout the nineteenth century, the term “waste” was synonymous with “waste land” or “wilderness” (“waste,” OED). “Waste” referred to “uncultivated country” or lands “not used for any purpose”; in the legal sense, it could denote lands “lying common” and “not in any man’s occupation” (“waste,” OED). The internationally renowned British big game hunter Frederick Selous, after whom Haggard modeled his popular hero Allan Quartermain, provides a similar account of the territory when describing Mashonaland and particularly its high plateau as “an almost uninhabited wilderness” (Selous 1893, 345). Although peppered with intermittent accounts of hunting, the primary focus of Selous’s 1889 expedition to Mashonaland as narrated in Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa (1893) was to determine prior to Rhodes’s bid for a Charter the suitability of the region for mining and agriculture and to discern the extent to which the Portuguese had established occupation of the interior. Selous nevertheless qualifies his use of the term wilderness when suggesting that “a large native population” likely inhabited the plateau and its environs until as recently as mid-century, when these populations scattered under Zulu invasions (Selous 1893, 345). Without these prior invasions, he frankly consents, “there would be no room for European immigration today” (Selous 1893, 345–46). While Selous’s use of the phrase “wilderness” works to legitimate British colonial occupation of the plateau, Schreiner’s reference to the territory’s low-lying “waste land” makes similar claims for establishing a preserve. The suggestion that these “waste” lands may lie “common,” however, raises concerns over the land’s continued habitation and use, no matter how “sparsely” represented. In the context of Schreiner’s value-oriented argument, to “lie waste” may also suggest a form of “squandering” through perceived lack of efficient use rather than through over expenditure (“waste,” OED). While Schreiner may certainly have been less profit-driven than Selous or Rhodes, her adoption of the term “waste” reflects the values of European colonists and British capitalists then staking a claim in the region. Apparent lack of efficient development or consistent

Waste lands and preserves  127 occupation, for example, formed the basis of Selous’s argument against Portuguese claims to Mashonaland: [U]nder Portuguese administration, in two hundred years’ time the natural resources of the Mashuna country would remain in the same undeveloped condition as they are at the present day. . . . More than this I cannot say in condemnation of [indirect] Portuguese rule. (Selous 1893, 323–24) The British South Africa Company employed a similar argument when later repossessing colonists’ farms in Mashonaland, whose owners failed “to occupy the land in a manner beneficial to the BSACo.”6 As historian Admire Mseba explains, “The BSAC administration hoped that permanent settlement would raise both the value of the land and the price of the Company’s shares on the London Stock Exchange” (Mseba 2016, 668). Although perceiving their lands as freeholds, landowners working properties granted to them by BSAC sometimes found themselves more like tenant farmers subject to writs of waste. “Waste,” observes historian Timothy Cooper, is in fact “one of the most important categories of capitalist modernity” in that it enables imperialists to rationalize “the technological transformation of existing ecologies into sources of capitalist profit” (Cooper 2011, 21); this problem is especially pronounced in British colonial perceptions of African land use, tenure, and ecology. Before Rhodes’s military force known as the Pioneer Column marched into Mashonaland in 1890 and enabled the settlers who followed to introduce the more aggressive value extraction techniques of large-scale mining and agriculture, the lands between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers were inhabited largely by the Shona in the north and the Ndebele (formerly, Matabele) in the south. Local African chiefs and their kraals paid tribute to King Lobengula of Matabeleland in exchange for land and protection. Lobengula nevertheless controlled access to both Matabeleland and Mashonaland by permitting only select colonial traders, explorers, and hunters to enter in exchange for gifts and payment. Lobengula also carefully controlled the lands available to white hunters in order to prevent competition with Ndebele hunters (MacKenzie 1987, 42). As James C. Murombedzi of the UN Economic Commission for Africa further notes, Lobengula’s father King Mzilikazi had established a game reserve in Matabeleland as well as a permit system controlling access to his lands in order to curb the growing destruction of necessary wildlife brought about by European hunters (Murombedzi 2003, 1). Gifts and a certain percentage of the hunter’s spoils were required in exchange for limited hunting rights. Unlike the European model of the preserve, which placed humans more strongly at odds with animals and livestock at odds with game, Mzilikazi’s and Lobengula’s models of conservation were more in keeping with small-scale practices of consumption that allowed for controlled human use while defending against sudden shortage. In general, pre-colonial conservation practices focused on preventative measures that would help to manage crises resulting from natural disasters rather than on resistance to the cumulative effects of large-scale human

128  Deborah Shapple Spillman extractive practices (Murombedzi 2003, 3).7 When these small-scale practices were disrupted by larger-scale colonial legislation and practices of extraction— whether the extraction of minerals, agricultural goods, or wildlife—local communities no longer possessed the necessary reserves for disaster management, whether natural or humanly made.8 The British South Africa Company’s annexation of Mashonaland and later Matabeleland therefore faced ecological as well as political resistance. Rhodes and his associates were well aware of Lobengula’s conservation laws, even if they did not fully appreciate their value. Selous, who served as the Pioneer Column’s guide along a new route into Mashonaland despite repeated objections from Lobengula, had in previous decades regularly obtained permission from the Ndebele king for hunting on his lands. Lobengula could also specify the lands open for hunting, as Selous recounts on a particular occasion: “[H]e would not let us go to the Mashuna country, but told us that we must hunt to the westward of the river Gwai” (Selous 1881, 55). In keeping with the infamous Rudd Concession of 1888, Rhodes agreed to pay Lobengula a monthly fee, one thousand Martini-Henry rifles with one hundred thousand cartridges and an armed steamboat for defending the Zambesi (Concession). The subsequent history of this concession is well known, with BSAC obtaining a Royal Charter, secretly purchasing land rights to Mashonaland, and eventually taking over Matabeleland by force. Perhaps, less well known are the Shona’s conservation practices that social anthropologist Munyaradzi Mawere outlines as a series of local customary laws: “zvierwa/zviera (taboos), unhu (ubuntu), ngano (folktales), mitupo (totemism) and conception of natural resources as common property” (Mawere 2013, 6). Ubuntu, in particular, referred to an underlying philosophy of unity between “the living, the living-dead and the unborn” (Mawere 2013, 12). This philosophy, Mawere explains, fostered ecological awareness in that it “encourage[d] sustainable use, respect of all beings (human and nonhuman) and ‘good’ relations of man with his natural environment” (Mawere 2013, 12). Such philosophies undoubtedly did not register as strongly with colonial capitalists and their campaign against perceived forms of waste. Even white southern Africans like Schreiner who regularly criticized the effects of large-scale extraction capitalism and the greed of foreign investors turned to models of conservation that privileged the non-human environment over the interests and claims of black southern Africans. While a few of her other essays from this decade considered the increasing disparity between black and white southern Africans’ access to land and resources, she also tended to naturalize the developing social demographics reflecting white uses of black labor by comparing them to “the varying strata of confused geological formations” (Thoughts 51). As I will suggest in the next section, Schreiner’s fiction, and particularly her allegories, nevertheless provided her with a space for beginning to address such relations and the importance of local, collective resistance. ******** Given the pervasiveness of local political and ecological resistance to colonial capitalist expansion, it is not surprising that prominent African perspectives on

Waste lands and preserves  129 the political struggle adopted recognizably ecological terms. The Ndebele spiritual leader, the Mlimo, who helped inspire widespread resistance, attributed the region’s drought and disease to European colonists. While the Mlimo’s visions of European bullets turning into water may not have materialized during battle, his concerns over droughts in deforested and depleted lands, the spread of rinderpest via colonial cattle, and the disruption of small-scale conservation practices that previously enabled local communities to weather such environmental crises were not unfounded.9 Schreiner’s views of waste and preservation begin to account more for such pre-colonial perspectives in her later 1890s allegories, in which she exposes the tensions between Christianity and colonialism while promoting more socially and ecologically sustainable systems of belief. Schreiner’s vision of Mashonaland in her later novella Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), written in response to Rhodes’s violent suppression of the Ndebele and Shona resistance during the Second Matabele War (1896–97), resembles more of a waste land in the Biblical sense. This Mashonaland is “a devastated region” depleted by war, arson, and drought (“waste,” OED), during what is also known in Shona as the First Chimurenga (“revolutionary struggle”) or in postcolonial Zimbabwe as the First War of Independence. No longer perceivable as a wilderness awaiting cultivation, this waste land too clearly displays signs of devastated lives: burned settlements, spoiled granaries, and trampled plantings (Schreiner 1897, 2–3). As colonial and British soldiers like the titular Peter Halket pick their way through this landscape, they encounter “no sign of [current] human habitation” (Schreiner 1897, 2); even the animals have fled the decimated region, and the soldiers can no longer hunt for sustenance or trade as in the early days of occupation. Ironically, the soldiers have been reduced to cooking mealies: a local dietary staple they previously destroyed along with the villages and their inhabitants. Peter Halket first appears in Schreiner’s novella staring into a makeshift campfire amid a wasted land, separated for the night from his troop, and surrounded by “an impenetrable darkness” with “not a star . . . visible in the black curve over his head” (Schreiner 1897, 1). If the seemingly infinite depths of a starry, moonlit night reminded Victorians of the expansive possibilities of the human soul, as they famously did for Matthew Arnold in “A Summer Night” (Arnold [1852] 2004), for Halket these spiritual possibilities appear dimly foreclosed. Halket, like many of the military volunteers in the British South Africa Company’s employ, had come to southern Africa from England for the material concern of making money: He considered his business prospects. When he had served his time as volunteer he would have a large piece of land given him, and the Mashonas and Matabeles would have all their land taken away from them in time, and the Chartered Company would pass a law that they had to work for the white men; and he, Peter Halket, would make them work for him. (Schreiner 1897, 9–10) As this glimpse into Halket’s unfiltered thoughts reveals, no moral pretence need be enlisted on this march into Mashonaland. However, Halket’s material

130  Deborah Shapple Spillman motivations transform overnight with the arrival of a stranger. Written in the manner of William Stead’s If Christ Came to Chicago (1894), Schreiner’s novella stages a nighttime encounter between Halket and a kindly, longhaired man in outmoded robes with recognizable stigmata whom Halket humorously fails to recognize. Typically considered a form of religious allegory, this nighttime visitation in the novella could just as easily be interpreted as a dream that succeeds the increasing disorder of Halket’s drowsy thoughts and that provides a glimpse into one colonial soldier’s conflicted unconscious. Surrounded by an “impenetrable darkness” and lulled into a dreamlike state, both of which Conrad would reproduce in his own novella two years later, Schreiner’s colonist turns that night to God within himself rather than to the idea of himself as a god among the colonized. This scene begins with Halket sitting atop a hill-like kopje—a distinctly southern African geological formation that figures as the site of existential reflection and suppressed histories in Schreiner’s writings.10 Halket’s thoughts gradually transform from “connected chains” to “a chain of disconnected pictures, painting themselves in irrelevant order on his brain” (Schreiner 1897, 6, 14). Eventually, “there was no picture left on his brain . . . , but simply an impress of the blazing logs before him” (Schreiner 1897, 16). Among the disconnected pictures that register impressions on Halket’s increasingly fragmented and dreamlike preconscious, and that lead up to an unmediated impression of the fire immediately preceding the visitor’s arrival, are the confusedly intermingled memories of his English home and the homes he recently helped to destroy. If England were invaded by a foreign power, the kindly stranger subsequently asks Halket, wouldn’t they, too, fight to defend themselves? Destruction in the colonies thereby appears to reverberate on a more global scale when Halket’s pastoral reveries of his English past are crosscut with scenes of genocide in Africa. The first of these visions places in contrast the availability of natural resources in Mashonaland and in England: Now, as he looked into the crackling blaze, it seemed to be one of the fires they had made to burn the natives’ grain by, and they were throwing in all they could not carry away: then, he seemed to see his mother’s fat ducks waddling down the little path with the green grass on each side. (Schreiner 1897, 14–15) The well-fed ducks used only for eggs and feathers before dying of old age contrast the wasted grains taken from people provisioned worse than English fowl or livestock. Destroying resources was also a common retaliatory colonial practice: even the generally more temperate Selous, admired by Schreiner’s fictional colonists as “a man” (Schreiner 1897, 99), destroyed the trading supplies he could not carry rather than leave them with an African chief whose escalating costs for carriers he had rejected (Selous 1893, 284). Halket further imagines: Then again he was working a maxim gun, but it seemed to him it was more like the reaping machine he used to work in England, and that what was going

Waste lands and preserves  131 down before it was not yellow corn, but black men’s heads; and he thought when he looked back they lay behind him in rows, like the corn in sheaves. (Schreiner 1897, 15) Not only do such visions suggest that Halket’s memories of himself at home and with his mother have been tainted by the man he has become as well as the Shona and Ndebele women he has abused, but they also reveal how the lands to which he looks forward as payment for his military service under Rhodes will be reaped at the expense of African lives. Like the “plague-clouds” John Ruskin descried in the skies over England in the final turbulent decades of the nineteenth century, the intermingled landscapes of Halket’s vision thereby suggest the far-reaching impact of moral and environmental degradation: Blanched Sun,—blighted grass,—blinded man. . . . [E]very man doing as much injustice to his brother as it is in his power to do. Of states in such moral gloom every seer of old predicted the physical gloom, saying, “The light shall be darkened in the heavens thereof, and the stars shall withdraw their shining.” (Ruskin [1884] 2009, 30) Schreiner’s novella begins on such a darkened night that Ruskin, echoing the prophetic words of Isaiah 13:10, describes. While this darkness signals how colonists “have blasphemed the name of God” through their actions in Mashonaland ostensibly on behalf of Christian England (Ruskin [1884] 2009, 30), Halket does not remain condemned to a lightless sky of his moral manufacture. Rather, he learns to embrace something of Ruskin’s stubborn optimism: “Whether you can affect the signs of the sky or not, you can the signs of the times” (Ruskin [1884] 2009, 30). The stranger suggests to Halket a range of actions the soldier might take in order to take a moral stand in Mashonaland more in keeping with the early instruction of his English mother. Although Halket could not save the wasted lands and lives he helped to destroy, he might save future lives by changing himself and inspiring change in others.11 In a colonial reworking of Christ’s “Sermon on the Mount” staged atop an African kopje, Halket learns what it means to be a Christian “in this world” rather than in anticipation of—or, in terms more suitable to Halket’s character, in speculation of—a world beyond (Schreiner 1897, 47). Learning to value “treasures in heaven” over “treasures upon earth” is nevertheless one of the central lessons of Christ’s sermon in the Book of Matthew (Matthew 6: 20, 19 [King James Version]), which adopts natural analogies when making a case against material accumulation: Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. . . . Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: . . . if God so clothe the grass of the field . . . shall he not much more clothe you. (Matthew 6: 26, 28, 30 [KJV])

132  Deborah Shapple Spillman While these lines may have resembled nineteenth-century providential views of nature as a self-balancing system not in need of human protection, the lesson emphasized here against accumulation and greed is that if God takes care of such ostensibly lowly creatures as birds and grass then why not humans “much more.” Christians, moreover, might learn something of their benevolent maker by looking to his works in nature, as suggested by William Paley in Natural Theology (1802). Schreiner, the daughter of a colonial missionary, nevertheless took issue with such hierarchies underwriting Christianity, which the twentieth-century environmentalist Lynn White Jr considers “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen” that has helped to lay the groundwork for current environmental problems (White 1967, 1205). In an 1892 letter to John T. Lloyd, Schreiner expresses her preference for Buddhism’s acknowledgment of a “larger unity” between plants, animals, and humans: Nothing tortured me so in Christian teaching as the scorn for the animal world, and the hatred of matter. But if we knew really what the beautiful soul of Jesus thought and felt, we should find it loved wider and deeper than its followers left us any record of. (Schreiner [1892] 1987, 214) Christianity’s emphasis on laying up “treasures in heaven,” Schreiner cautions, might too simply be reduced to Halket’s nominal emphasis on believing in God, going to church, and reading the Bible while disregarding the sacredness of the material world and its inhabitants (Schreiner 1897, 46–47). Schreiner’s fictional Christ recreated in her 1897 novella instead loves “wider and deeper” than the teachings of colonial Christianity by representing a more ecologically conscious morality that combines Darwin’s theory of descent interconnecting all species with an emerging perception of the environment as a vast interdependent network: “He who has crushed a nation,” Halket’s visitor asserts, “sins no more than he who rejoices in the death throe of the meanest creature. The stagnant pool is not less poisonous drop for drop than the mighty swamp, though its reach be smaller” (Schreiner 1897, 91). From a Darwinian perspective, the meanest creature might be a microorganism living in a swamp; from an imperial capitalist’s social Darwinist perspective, it might mean a member of a colonized race. Schreiner attempts to underscore the idea that every life possesses value, while also suggesting, in keeping with the logic of Matthew, that celebrating another’s death is little to no better than causing it. Although wetlands in this typically nineteenth-century vision figure as the site of disease rather than as a source of life, this ecological vision of interdependency forms the basis of Schreiner’s indictment not only of Rhodes and his fellow capitalists but also, to a certain extent, of the Christian missionaries who accompanied him on his march into Mashonaland. In addition to promising the Shona protection while occupying Mashonaland, the British South Africa Company made the familiar colonial nod toward

Waste lands and preserves  133 promoting Christian moral and religious instruction. Along with Rhodes’s Company in 1890 came two priests from the former Zambezi Mission, which they had reluctantly left several years previously. “When the mission was temporarily abandoned in 1887,” Anthony J. Chennells explains, “all that the Jesuits had to show for ten years’ labour and many deaths were” several fallen stations “and the hardly thriving mission at Empandeni” (Chennells 1980, 195). That the missionaries would succeed on their new attempt—so much so that Zimbabwe today is more Christian than England or the United States—suggests how “no modern Christian mission has succeeded unless the commerce or administration of some Western power had profoundly affected the people” enough to lure them away from the guidance of their political, philosophical, and religious leaders (Chennells 1980, 195). In brief, the Company’s challenge to the authority of King Lobengula as well as to local religious leaders, partly through the introduction of new hardships, helped early Jesuit missionaries introduce new beliefs. With the waning of indigenous belief systems, related ecological practices weakened as well (Murombedzi 2003, 3). Schreiner’s (1897) novella highlights the disparity between Christianity and colonialism in Mashonaland when the kindly stranger expresses shock upon learning that Halket considers himself and Rhodes’s Company “Christian” (Schreiner 1897, 46). An earlier exchange between the two characters ironically underscores this disjunction: “In the employ of the Chartered Company, I suppose?” said Peter, looking into the fire he had made. “No,” said the stranger; “I have nothing to do with the Chartered Company.” (22) This is perhaps more than early missionaries to Zimbabwe could proclaim, regardless of the genuineness of their intentions. As George Wyndham Hamilton Knight-Bruce, first Anglican Bishop of Mashonaland, sadly reflected, members of his diocese were often too busy with Sunday gold prospecting to attend church regularly (Knight-Bruce 1892, 39). Schreiner’s 1890s allegories in general target the conflict between colonialism and Christianity in British southern Africa, where the annexation of resources often effected their destruction and where the project of preserving souls accompanied the subjugation of indigenous labor under new models of land ownership and taxation. When Halket later attempts to apply his newfound, ecologically informed morality and dies attempting to free a single African prisoner held by colonial troops, one of his fellow English soldiers, reading the signs of the times rather than the signs of a natural theology he has come to abandon, hopelessly declares: “There is no God in Mashonaland” (Schreiner 1897, 132). It is difficult to see evidence of a God in nature, Schreiner suggests, in the midst of an ecological and moral waste land. While it may be helpful to view Schreiner’s sermon on the kopje in relation to its Biblical pretext from the Book of Matthew, the meaning of Schreiner’s

134  Deborah Shapple Spillman 1890s allegories typically lay closer to the surface at the level of concrete images and often familiar southern African topographies. Published the year before her essay on Mashonaland, Schreiner’s allegorical collection entitled Dreams (1890) reflects her emerging concerns about the production of colonial waste. The allegory “The Sunlight Lay Across my Bed,” in particular, stages its dream scenes in recognizably southern terrains traversed by a dreamer traveling through Heaven and Hell. Hell in this allegory initially appears productive, with fertile trees and green turf edging a clear blue lake; however, all is not as it seems. Women poison the fruit they pick to discourage others from eating it and thereby spoil it for all. Meanwhile, in marble pillared banquet halls, revelers appealing to God nearly drown themselves in wine, while, on the other side of a curtain, some of the people working the wine press tumble in and become wine. This perversion of the Eucharist allegorizes capitalism as blood becomes wine through the sacrifice of human labor in support of godless, cannibalistic consumers who pray for more while preying on others. The more the Dreamer wanders through Hell, the more the scene becomes a ruinous desert—a veritable waste land. Heaven, by contrast, figures in this allegory as a towering mountain brilliantly charged by sunlight, Victorians’ hope for a sustainable alternative to coal;12 flowers blooming on rocks, trees blossoming, and water flowing complete the scene. Humans also radiate light and serve as individual sources of energy, causing plants to grow and small gardens to thrive without the need for ploughs. Higher up the mountain, the Dreamer sees men working with picks and observes how “some laboured in companies, but most laboured singly” (Schreiner 1890, 117). Rather than digging for gold or diamonds far beneath the earth, these miners work far above to unearth small glowing stones: tiny, brilliant repositories of the sun’s energy that seemingly produce light without combustion or emissions. Unlike claimholders who flocked to southern African mines in search of making their fortunes, moreover, “No man kept the stone he found”; instead, they place the stones in a large glowing crown for all to admire. Small-scale agriculture and mining thereby figure obliquely in “The Sunlight Lay Across my Bed,” as Schreiner juxtaposes visions of waste with ideally more sustainable uses of land unmotivated by large-scale, industrialized commodity production. As Mark Sanders has argued, Schreiner’s allegories disrupt old symbols— using them while not using them, invoking them only to expose their insufficiency in the present—while attempting to envision a more favorable future (Sanders 1998, 316). The temporality of these allegories invites readers to look forward rather than to look to the authority of the past, and for this reason many of Schreiner’s shorter allegories take on the language of prophecy. Given the vexed relationship between colonialism and Christianity, Schreiner’s allegories invoke Biblical pretexts without authorizing them while converting their symbols into signs of colonial difference. The blood of human sacrifice in “The Sunlight Lay Across My Bed” contaminates rather than purifies, damns rather than redeems, and wastes rather than saves. At the end of Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, the sacrificial blood of Halket and the man he presumably fails to save stain the already bloodied soil. Both of these allegorical works encourage the pursuit of

Waste lands and preserves  135 surface-level meanings disclosed through mutable signs rather than the excavation of meanings embedded within symbols or emblems. Presenting a “surface aesthetic” at odds with capitalist extraction, similar to that which Elizabeth Miller identifies in William Morris’s 1890s eco-socialist writings (Miller 2015, 402), Schreiner’s allegories offer an aesthetic and ecological contrast to Rhodes’s geopolitical enterprise. Equally prophetic, perhaps, was Schreiner’s allegorical lament over the longterm effects of the First Chimurenga. While she attempts to comfort herself with the idea that colonial injustices would one day necessarily be condemned, she worries about the bloody legacy of the violence she and her contemporaries witnessed: It doesn’t ever help me at all to think that in fifty years’ time all this injustice will be terribly paid for in white man’s blood. Why should poor innocent folk still unborn pay for the evil deeds of men living now? “Though the mills of God grind slowly yet they grind exceedingly small”—yes, but they grind so slowly that the men who put the poisoned corn in at the top, are not the men who get the poisoned flour out at the other end and die of eating it! (Schreiner [1896] 1987, 287) Reflecting on the cyclical nature of violence, and how the white colonists most to blame would pass responsibility on to their descendants, Schreiner basically predicts the beginning of the Second Chimurenga or Zimbabwe Liberation War seventy years later (1966–79). Again, she expresses her concern for future generations with an environmentally charged analogy that builds on the words of Henry Longfellow to depict the effects of slowly developing violence: the poisoning of resources that a future generation would consume. Again, the value of Schreiner’s allegorical thought, with some adjustments, lies closer to the surface if we consider the long-term effects not only of colonial war but also of extraction capitalism on necessary resources like the land and water that black Zimbabweans have inherited since the 1890s. Such forms of “slow violence,” as Rob Nixon terms them, derive from “the temporal distance between shortlived actions and long-lived consequence” perceived only diffusely over time (Nixon 2011, 41). Given the global outsourcing of production as well as waste disposal that removes both activities from primary sites of consumption in the northern and western hemispheres, spatial distance further helps to obscure acts of slow violence by rendering them less palpable to consumers. Indeed, “capitalism’s innate tendency to abstract in order to extract” thrives upon the distancing effects of outsourcing (Nixon 2011, 41). Schreiner’s 1890s allegories, with their emphasis on the comparative immediacy of surface-level meanings rather than on symbolic depth or abstractions, imaginatively attempts to bridge such distance. While “The Sunlight Lay Across My Bed” highlights the mystification of social relations between local producers and consumers, whose sites of activity are separated merely by a curtain, “Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland” reveals

136  Deborah Shapple Spillman the interconnectivity between social relations in the colonies and those in imperial England. ******** Perhaps only through the slow churning mills of delayed justice that Schreiner references could the colonial concept of waste as unrealized utility resurface when Zimbabwe’s postcolonial government under then President Robert Mugabe introduced Fast Track Land Reform, which allowed for the reallocation of white-owned commercial farmlands in part because large tracts lay uncultivated and—therefore—wasted. Under this controversial program introduced in 2001, the government appropriated, sometimes by force, several thousand farms totaling over seventeen million acres while redistributing these lands among landless black Zimbabweans. The economic and political repercussions of this reform still impact Zimbabwe today while simultaneously revealing the extent to which postcolonial Zimbabwe continues to struggle with its colonial legacy at the legislative level. The introduction of Fast Track Land Reform represented a long-awaited step toward decolonizing the unequal distribution of land in Zimbabwe, which twenty years of voluntary land redistribution under the Lancaster House Agreement had not sufficiently addressed; however, the reform also introduced uncertain land tenure for blacks and whites as well as a disincentive for potential overseas investors. Small-scale black farmers occupied lands owned by and subject to the goodwill of the state, and the remaining white farmers possessed five-year leases. The concern over wasted utility nevertheless also fueled criticisms of Mugabe’s plan, since fertile lands disproportionately held by members of the government elite often remained untended and beginning small-scale farmers often did not possess the capital or the machinery to render their farms sufficiently productive. After the reform, Zimbabwe went from leading southern Africa in agricultural exports to importing much of their food and suffering from famine. Zimbabwe’s current president Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa hoped to rehabilitate Zimbabwe’s agricultural industry by making available ninety-nine-year leases to both black and white investors, although foreign investors have remained wary. Equitable distribution of resources, inflation, and food security meanwhile remain particular challenges in Zimbabwe—especially for the urban and rural poor. Postcolonial attempts at indigenizing the mining industry in Zimbabwe posed similar challenges. Mugabe’s 2008 Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act requiring that fifty-one percent of all foreign companies with substantial assets be owned by Zimbabweans similarly checked foreign investors and development, and President Mnangagwa has since reversed this legislation as well. As Tumai Murombo nevertheless observes, current mining laws in Zimbabwe regardless of this Act descend from “colonial models hell-bent on efficient extraction” and “local proxies and elites [have largely] stepped into the shoes of the colonial powers and multinational companies” without altering these inherited models (Murombo 2013, 39). Such models typically privilege the large-scale mining

Waste lands and preserves  137 ventures of the state and multinational corporations at the expense of local smallscale mining, and accounts of human rights violations in areas like the Marange Diamond Fields further link postcolonial to colonial practices. In keeping with this colonial legacy, moreover, “the Roman-Dutch law of property continues to govern land ownership and transfer,” including the law that “landowner[s] own . . . the mineral resources beneath [their] land” (Murombo 2013, 40). In the country’s communal areas governed by customary law and overseen by traditional leaders, individuals, by contrast, do not own the land but rather possess the right to use it (Murombo 2013, 40). This greater uncertainty of land tenure in the communal areas makes residents more at risk of being forcibly relocated when minerals are discovered and large-scale mining on their land begins, as was the case in the Marange district. Such legislative conflicts between colonial and customary laws appear as early as the 1889 Charter, in which “the customs and laws of the class or tribe or nation” in question must be respected while nevertheless remaining “subject to any British laws which may be in force” (Charter, Article 14). As Murombo reflects, “The convergence of legal systems saw the dislocation of local indigenous communities’ entitlements to land and mineral rights—an issue never fully resolved in the independent state” (Murombo 2013, 40).13 The environmental effects of these large-scale extractive industries also form part of postcolonial Zimbabwe’s troubled colonial legacy, although such forms of slow violence may not yield the same type of spectacular headlines capable of gaining international recognition. As Murombo argues, companies based on colonial models and “conceived to maximise profits for shareholders” need to adopt a broader conception of their stakeholders: one that encompasses the people and “the environment broadly defined” in which production takes place (Murombo 2013, 36). Such an expanded model of the company would provide local jobs and investment opportunities while developing local infrastructure by building roads, hospitals, and schools (Hilson 2002). Practicing greener industrial techniques that help preserve land, water, and biodiversity also form an important part of this model (Murombo 2013, 38). Preservation practices, nevertheless, need to account for the fact that “any policy that requires land” in Zimbabwe raises political concerns (Duffy 2000, 174). Preservation practices based on colonial models of exclusion, Rosaleen Duffy argues, are not environmentally and politically sustainable because they do “not have any legitimacy for local people,” many of whom depend on the land for subsistence (Duffy 2000, 174). Duffy explains how Zimbabwe’s conservation ideology that emphasizes sustainable utilization conflicts with the values of Western environmental NGOs (non-governmental organizations), some of which have been accused of practicing eco-imperialism toward developing countries. Under the model of sustainable utilization in Zimbabwe: [W]ildlife is considered to be a natural resource, alongside other environmental goods, such as forests, minerals and water, which are all to be utilised to further development. This is an explicit statement of an environmental ideology that places the satisfaction of basic human needs above the rights

138  Deborah Shapple Spillman of animals, and so Zimbabwe’s wildlife policy is at odds with environmental ideologies that are based on animal rights or animal liberation. (Duffy 2000, 174) While all countries could benefit materially by working to maintain biodiversity and limit pollution, whether one views animals as commodities may represent more of an ontological question open to debate as well as charges of eco-imperialism. Controlling commercial poaching fueled by “criminal syndicates, armies and wealthy dealers in Europe and Asia” while allowing for limited access by local hunters nevertheless seems in order, while also making the safari and wildlife industry more profitable for a broader range of local residents (Duffy 2000, 176). Like Zimbabwe’s agricultural and mining industries, wildlife conservation needs to attend to the broader needs of the human and nonhuman environment. While Schreiner could not have foreseen all of the debates over land usage troubling postcolonial Zimbabwe today, her critique of colonial capitalism’s largescale extractive practices under Rhodes argued for the rights of local communities over multinational companies and foreign shareholders. She also realized that the problem of how to manage multiuse and multiethnic territories extended well beyond the man who embodied this issue for her. As Schreiner wrote to John Merriman, the year she published Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, “We fight Rhodes because he means so much of oppression, injustice, and moral degradation to South Africa” (Schreiner [1897] 1987, 308). If Rhodes were to suddenly die, she nevertheless considers, “there still remains the terrible fact that something in our society has formed the matrix which has fed, nourished, and built up such a man! (Schreiner [1897] 1987, 308). This lingering matrix she identifies as the domestic development of a capitalism driven by a few members of the local elite on behalf of themselves and overseas shareholders. While Schreiner’s views on conservation may have derived from colonial and European models, she nevertheless acknowledged the significance of finding a place for smaller-scale forms of industry and larger-scale forms of environmental responsibility.

Notes 1 More contemporary uses of the word to mean “idiot” apparently did not enter into American slang until the 1930s (“Nimrod,” OED). 2 See 9 October 1892 letter to Will Schreiner in Schreiner [1892] 1987, 211 and Selous 1893, 363, respectively. 3 One of the earliest references to “invasive species” can be found in Brandis 1891, 339. 4 Communal areas increased in size to 20 percent of the country by 1902 and 42 percent by 1980 (Goodwin 2013, 165). 5 Rhodes promised the volunteer members of his Pioneer Column three thousand acres of land and fifteen mining claims in the new territory. 6 National Archives of Zimbabwe DT 1/6/1, Surveyor General, 2 June 1898 quoted in Mseba 2016, 668. 7 Murombedzi, for example, explains at length: “Given that population densities were generally low compared to resources, and also that resource exploitation was designed to fulfil immediate consumption needs and only limited exchange values,

Waste lands and preserves  139 natural resources were not commoditized in the pre-colonial era. Consequently, early conservation ideals were developed to deal with crisis situations arising out of natural disasters, rather than from the extractive activities of humans” (Murombedzi 2003, 3). 8 See, for example, Davis 2001. 9 The first Colonial Botanists at the Cape, Ludwig Pappe and his successor John Croumbie Brown, warned about the link between deforestation, drought, and famine beginning in the 1850s. As Grove suggests, their broader concern for land and biodiversity more closely resembles “contemporary conservation ideologies which identify with the basic needs of peasant populations” (Grove 1987, 36). 10 See, for example, Anthony 1999. 11 While Schreiner remained proud of this ill-received novella throughout her lifetime, it unfortunately never inspired the immediate political changes she had hoped. 12 On Victorians’ interest in solar energy, see MacDuffie 2014 (especially pages 18–86). 13 In fact, “The notion of ‘ownership’ under customary law has been erased from legal history and in its place substituted with individual title” (Murombo 2013, 47).

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140  Deborah Shapple Spillman MacKenzie, John M. 1988. The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 1987. “Chivalry, Social Darwinism and Ritualised Killing: The Hunting Ethos in Central Africa Up to 1914.” In Conservation in Africa: People, Policies and Practice, edited by David Anderson and Richard Grove. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mawere, Munyaradzi. 2013. “Traditional Environment Conservation Strategies in Precolonial Africa: Lessons for Zimbabwe to Forget or to Carry Forward into the Future?” Afro Asian Journal of Social Sciences 4 (1): 1–23. Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. 2015. “William Morris, Extraction Capitalism and the Aesthetics of Surface.” Victorian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Social, Political, and Cultural Studies 57 (3) (Spring): 395–404. Mseba, Admire. 2016. “Law, Expertise, and Settler Conflicts over Land in Early Colonial Zimbabwe.” Environment and Planning A 48 (4): 665–80. Murombedzi, James C. 2003. “Pre-colonial and Colonial Conservation Practices in Southern Africa and Their Legacy Today.” https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download? doi=10.1.1.579.3550&rep=rep1&type=pdf Murombo, Tumai. 2013. “Regulating Mining in South Africa and Zimbabwe: Communities, the Environment and Perpetual Exploitation.” Law, Environment, and Development Journal 9 (1): 33–49. “Nimrod, n., 2”. OED Online. May 2018. Oxford University Press. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Paley, William. 1802. Natural Theology; Or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. London: R. Faulder. “preserve, n., 4”. OED Online. May 2018. Oxford University Press. Rudd Concession. 1888. Bulawayo, 30 October. Ruskin, John. 2009. “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.” [1884] In The Works of John Ruskin, edited by Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. Vol. 34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sanders, Mark. 1998. “Complicities: On the Intellectual.” Dissertation. Columbia. Schreiner, Olive. 1897. Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland. Boston: Roberts Brothers. ———. 1891 [1923]. “Our Waste Land in Mashonaland.” In Thoughts on South Africa, 393–98. London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd. ———. 1890. Dreams. New York: Caldwell. ———. 1987. Letters. Edited by Richard Rive. Cape Town: David Philip. Selous, Frederick Courteney. 1893. Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa. London: Rowland Ward & Co. ———. 1881. A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa. London: Richard Bentley & Son. Stead, William T. 1894. If Christ Came to Chicago: A Plea for the Union of All Who Love in the Service of All Who Suffer. Chicago: Laird and Lee. Stigger, P. 1980. “The Land Commission of 1984 and the Land.” In Local Series—Historical Association of Zimbabwe. Vol. 36. Salisbury: Historical Association of Zimbabwe. “waste, n., I” OED Online. May 2018. Oxford University Press. White, Lynn Jr. 1967. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science 155 (3767) (10 March): 1203–7.

8 Unearthing land and labor disputes in Tunisia An uneven and combined development approach to tribal/ management councils1 Matt Gordner Introduction Four months following the January 14, 2011 ouster of long-standing dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, tribal clashes were reported in the mining town of Metlaoui in central Tunisia. Eleven people were killed and over one hundred were injured as “rumours circulated that only certain tribes would be offered jobs at the nearby Gafsa phosphate complex” (“Eleven killed in tribal clashes,” 2011). “Tribal tensions have flared in Metlaoui,” Aljazeera reported, “which is reeling from high unemployment.” The Tunisian government was forced to declare a state of emergency in Douz on May 9, 2014 after more than fifty people were injured in a land dispute over rival claims to ownership of a site where an oil company was set to prospect for a potentially lucrative project (“State of emergency,” 2015). And in June 2017, seventy-eight people were hospitalized in the governorate of Kebili when “[d]ifferences over land disputes between the two tribes, dating all the way back to independence from France in 1956, degenerated into violence.” “Six years since a revolution that toppled long-time dictator, Ben Ali,” the report continued, “Tunisia has not been able to resolve issues of security, poverty, unemployment and corruption that sparked the uprising” (“Tribal row,” 2017). If tribal politics are evident in these areas of Tunisia today, it is because, despite the best efforts of successive post-independence governments, kinship has remained an enduring feature in the social fabric of Tunisian politics and society. This is especially true for the communities of the Tunisian hinterlands, where upon their migration to North Africa in the twelfth century, and until the colonial period of the twentieth century, nomadic and seminomadic Arab tribes maintained relative autonomy from the central authorities that periodically sought to directly rule them. Beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and continuing into the post-independence period, a variety of political projects— state-building efforts, capitalist penetration, colonial policies, developmental planning, and authoritarian governance, among others—forced significant and irreversible changes upon the everyday lives of tribal communities. Perhaps chief among them, the Tunisian national project sought to erase tribalism and kinship altogether (Anderson 1986; Charrad 2001, 2011; Charrad and Jaster 2015; Charrad and Reith 2019). To date, land and labor disputes within and between the

142  Matt Gordner communities of the hinterlands, private and public corporations, and the central government remain inextricably bound to tribal politics, tribal identity, and tribal modes of “foreign relations” (van der Pijl 2007). In the south and central regions of Tunisia, an important means used to achieve many of these ends was the adoption and alteration of the tribal myaad system. Traditionally an informal institution for conflict resolution and resource allocation, the myaad was perfectly suited to provide the French and later the postindependence governments with a veneer of local legitimacy through which to control both land and people. Co-opted and formalized as a legal entity under French colonial policy, these tribal/management councils (T/MCs) ensured the compliance of local communities in the service of successive central authorities by endowing them with ostensible control over vast areas of collective, tribal lands through local “representatives” of each of the major clans. Though the T/ MC representatives were nominally “elected,” in practice, they were more often vetted, approved, and sometimes even directly selected, by the central authorities. Initially, the T/MC was used as a mechanism for sedentarization and securitization under French colonial rule (1881–1956) in areas where tribes were historically powerful and posed a threat to colon interests. However, the Bourguiba (1956–87), Ben Ali (1987–2011), and post-“Arab Spring” (2011–) governments increasingly used the T/MCs for their own designs, most significantly to privatize plots previously designated as “collective” tribal land in what today amounts to forms of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003) and extractivism (Hamouchene 2019). The purpose of this chapter is to present the role of T/MCs in the social transformation of the people and communities of the south and central regions of Tunisia from the Ottoman period to the present. My aim is to demonstrate the tensions that existed between a traditional informal institution that maintained the cohesiveness of the tribal social formation and successive efforts to co-opt and undermine it. This is not to say that the adoption and transition of the T/MC across regimes was a fluid process, however. And nor is it to suggest that the communities most affected by these policies accepted them passively. To be sure, direct and indirect resistance to these multiple forms of domination are evident throughout these periods and continue to date. The T/MC remains a system fraught with complications, tensions, and multiple and varied forms of opposition no less under the current phase of democratic “transition”2 than under colonial and authoritarian rule. What has changed, however, is that conflicts that played out as skirmishes between extended families and clans, and administrative districts under previous regimes, were seldom discussed publicly, let alone addressed politically, for fear of violent reprisal or de-clientalization by the authorities. The post-uprising period affords a greater measure of freedoms of speech and assembly for all Tunisians, and it thereby also provides observers with the opportunity to gain important insights into the different ways that local communities have interacted with the T/ MCs, their local representatives, the private and public corporations that operate through them to exploit Tunisian lands and resources and the central governments that have attempted to oversee and manage all of these processes and interactions.

Unearthing land and labor disputes  143 Thus, while contributing to legal and administrative studies on the establishment and evolution of T/MCs, I also aim to analyze the political and sociological place that the T/MCs occupy within the genealogies and histories of the peoples of Tunisia’s hinterlands. T/MCs are little discussed in Anglophone literature on Tunisian political economy. Prevailing Francophone and Arabic sources provide helpful overviews of the T/MCs as facets of colonial and capitalist penetration, but few studies demonstrate the impact of T/MCs from a postcolonial perspective that analyzes their impact on social transformation. Analyzing T/MCs through the framework of uneven and combined development (UCD) permits the present study to examine them as a unique series of socio-political combinations of local and extra-local historical developments over successive regimes. To develop, that is, the awareness that narratives often overlook the local dimension in favor of sweeping Eurocentric accounts, I examine the varied combinations and effects of the T/MCs on local communities alongside but distinct from narratives of colonial domination and capital accumulation. Along with UCD, I invoke Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to “provincialize Europe” through the distinction that he draws between what he calls History 1 and History 2. Chakrabarty’s influential work Provincializing Europe provides a theoretical frame for eschewing the “historicist” tendencies to analyze late development societies solely through the prism of capitalist and/or colonial penetration, domination, and influence (History 1) by writing local narratives in a way that demonstrates how people and communities’ everyday lives operate alongside yet distinct from the penetrating logic of global capital (History 2). The amalgam of these two frameworks admits to local forms of agency that exist both beside and within the socio-economic structures that French colonialism and subsequent regimes imposed while paying due attention to the transition of the T/MCs across French colonial and the no-less-violent Tunisian structures of authoritarian governance that are complicit with neocolonial practices of accumulation by dispossession and extractivism. Following Chakrabarty, and drawing on Chris Taylor’s important work “The Plantation Road to Socialism” as another guidepost, I present the T/MCs simultaneously as impositions of colonial and capitalist projects while also paying heed to the particularity of local narratives, agency, and sites of domination and resistance to them from the colonial period through the present. I call this, building on Chakrabarty’s work, “History 3.”3

Uneven and combined development vs. “provincializing Europe” While Marx never ruled out the possibility that “backward” countries like Russia could achieve permanent revolution, neither he nor his early followers of the Second International believed that it was possible without the Russian state first attaining significant social and technical advances. Without reaching late stages of capitalist development, they believed, the Russian state would be bound to a series of bourgeois revolutions. Trotsky proposed that in borrowing technologies and ideas from “advanced” states in the later stages of the capitalist epoch,

144  Matt Gordner “backward” states confronted a problem of underdevelopment as a result of both “too much and too little capitalism” (De Smet 2016, 116), or what Trotsky (2008) called “uneven and combined development.” Trotsky’s conception of uneven and combined development was formed alongside the challenge he perceived, endemic to late-developing capitalist states, of nations having to confront the influence of modern, industrial capitalism from outside while maintaining relatively traditional agrarian practices and social formations within. While efforts by foreign capital and domestic elites to modernize the state were underway, Russia’s national economy was nonetheless premised on traditional agrarian practices, beholden to a traditional feudal structure, and controlled by a traditional pre-capitalist elite. Trotsky rightly perceived that the Tsarist state and foreign interests pursued an aggressive policy of industrialization alongside a relatively static agrarian sector. Furthermore, rather than funneling capital accumulation back into industry, it was devoted to real estate, usury, and banking (Sennett 2014, 11–13). Subsistence farming remained intact, hampering the potential for economic growth and industrial development. Incapable of positioning itself as chief financier, the Tsarist state instead became capitalism’s chief promoter, attracting ever-larger foreign investments and channeling the surplus into military and developmental projects. While this siphoning effect was often inimical to the interests of the domestic and foreign bourgeoisie, the class structure in Russia was such that their demands posed no significant threat to the state. Rapid industrialization created a large proletariat from a plentiful base of subsistence peasants, many of whom remained bound to the land if not by law, then by custom. The bourgeoisie, though supported by their foreign counterparts, remained demographically insignificant and thence politically ineffectual. The class responsible for struggling for liberal democracy in France and Britain—the bourgeoisie—was therefore mostly absent in the Russian case (Moore 1966). Thus, when the Russian Revolution materialized, it was not an instance of Marxist prediction, but rather one of exception. The uneven pattern of development between “advanced” Western European powers in contrast with Russia’s “backwardness” and the unevenness within the Russian state of industrialization alongside traditional agrarian structures and feudal relations compelled the Russian state and segments of the Russian society to advance through the “whip of external necessity.” This compulsion to advance through uneven patterns of development produced unique combined social effects. It also posed a great potential to “leap forward” through stages of development, thus presenting a “privilege of backwardness.”4 This “privilege” permitted the Russian state to take strides industrially, not to mention ideologically. Industrialists looked afar to advance their understandings and capabilities in trade, technology, and manufacturing, while laborers and peasants gleaned directly from earlier experiences of (the philosophies and practices of) prior revolutions (Sennett 2014, 14–18). Unevenness, as per Trotsky’s original formulation, is therefore a fundamental axiom of historical development, applying to spatiotemporal development across the globe as well as within states and substate units. The interaction of these differently developing social systems produces multiple, layered, and intrinsically

Unearthing land and labor disputes  145 unique patterns: “Development is . . . ineluctably multilinear, polycentric, and co-constitutive by virtue of its very interconnectedness” (Anievas 2014, 43). Combination, itself the result of clashing uneven patterns of development, “refers to the ways in which the internal relations of any given society are determined by their interactive relations with other developmentally differentiated societies” (Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015, 45). However, making perfect replicas of technological development or implanting “pure” ideological programs are well-nigh impossible, rendering leapfrogging a risky venture. For one, in the traditional formulation, insofar as a relationship of domination exists, “advanced” societies do not simply permit “backward” ones to enter into full competition. Two, the native bourgeoisie is often trapped between the desire to industrialize and reform the agrarian structure, on the one hand and the impetus to maintain the status quo that advantages their position, on the other. And three, on a practical level, marginalized communities most affected by these “combinations” often lack the kind of central leadership necessary for revolutionary or reformative action the kind of which leads to purposive, meaningful, and effective change (Van der Linden, 2007). Trotsky’s original formulation has undergone myriad changes many of which have precipitated important debates about the “uses and misuses” of UCD (Allinson and Anievas 2009; Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008; Rosenberg 2016; Post 2018). UCD lends itself not only as a cure for methodological nationalism, but also for “civilizational internalism”: the writing of Eurocentric social science (Rosenberg 2013). Indeed, the history of the T/MC begins with the myaad as an indigenous informal institution. French colonialism is integral to the equation of UCD, but we must also evaluate the legacy of this institution as it transitioned across the post-independence period, befitting the purposes of the Bourguiba and Ben Ali authoritarian regimes, as well as those of the post-uprising “transition” to democracy. Furthermore, we must consider the ways in which colonialism complicates the original Trotskyist formulation and the typical applications of UCD in use today, including the many innovations therefrom. Lastly, our inquiry includes the introduction of capitalism in Tunisia not only through colonial domination but also in its indigenous form. The following analysis thus demonstrates the combined effects of differential development patterns within societal interactions premised on the path-dependent impact of the colonial co-optation and formalization of an indigenous informal institution—the myaad. The contradictions inherent within the productive forces of colonial capitalism—namely, the development of a market in Tunisia as the locus of France’s economic surplus (Mahjoub 1982)—present the T/MCs as a variation on the classical equation of UCD. If, in the “typical” case of UCD, the agent of combination is the late developing state (or society) that “borrows” the progressive elements of an “advanced” society, the case of Tunisian T/MCs demonstrates the inverse: how an “advanced” society borrowed first from the social formation of a “backward” one, only to be copied by later regimes. It is only under the postindependence governments from Bourguiba to today that the “leapfrogging” of the “innovation” of the T/MCs may be studied as a “typical” manifestation of

146  Matt Gordner UCD: namely, a late developing society (Tunisia) borrowing from an advanced one (France) in order to spur development. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2008) represents a clarion call in development and postcolonial studies for confronting and transcending the Eurocentric and colonialist histories of late developing states and societies. Chakarabarty’s invocation to adopt a decentered and decentering methodology in writing modern history poses a challenge to mainstream scholarship insofar as the latter often unreflectively reproduces the “logic of capital” within historical narratives by using capitalism and colonialism as an inflection point to writing local histories, thus presuming a transition from a pre-capitalist mode of production toward one that is fully, uniformly, and evenly integrated into global capitalism. Chakrabarty takes issue with scholarship that presupposes European history and politics as the backdrop against which we discuss concepts of political modernity such as “citizen” or “democracy.” Theorists of postcolonialism and Subaltern Studies identify this phenomenon as “historicism,” defined by Chakrabarty (2008) as: “a mode of thinking about history in which one assumed that any object under investigation retained a unity of conception throughout its existence and attained full expression through a process of development in secular, historical time” (xiv). While drawing upon the Marxist tradition, Chakrabarty (2008) critiques Marx’s brand of historicism in his treatment of the “local,” or “the idea that any sense of the “local” is a surface phenomenon of social life; that is, in the ultimate analysis, some kind of effect of capital.” (xvi) He labels this kind of “universalist thinking”—“a past posited by capital itself”—as History 1 (63). History 2 acts as a form of resistance to History 1 in that it “sees the undertow of singular and unique histories” and is “always arresting the thrust of such universal histories and producing the concrete as a combination of the logic of History 1 and the heterotemporal horizons of innumerable History 2s” (xvii). History 2s are separate, though not distinct, from History 1 in that History 2 acknowledges the place and prominence of History 1 while operating alongside it in its multiple and unique local forms. History 2s act as resistance to History 1 precisely because History 2s “do not belong to the ‘life process’ of capital.” Rather, they are “partly embodied in the person’s bodily habits, in unselfconscious collective practices, in his or her reflexes about what it means to relate to objects in the world as a human being and together with other human beings in his given environment” (66). History 2s do not constitute a dialectical Other of the necessary logic of History 1. To think thus would be to subsume History 2 to History 1. History 2 is better thought of as a category charged with the function of constantly interrupting the totalizing thrusts of History 1. (65–66) The task at hand, then, is to write a history and political economy of the T/MCs in a manner that is cognizant of the interplay between local History 2s as they act alongside History 1. Though hailing from the myaad, the formalization of the T/MC is a process of institutionalization borne of colonialism and capitalist

Unearthing land and labor disputes  147 penetration, and as such it acts as a bundle of rules and regulations (policies) carried out through the domination of central authorities. While the desired effect was a uniform process of sedentarization, capital accumulation (by dispossession), and resource extractivism (History 1), the result was oftentimes the resurgence of tribal and kinship structures (History 2s). Indeed, the enduring forms of local identity and agency have resisted forms of extra-local domination for centuries, be they Ottoman, French, or post-independence regimes. And while Provincializing Europe represents a corrective to the “historicism” of History 1 through its (re)presentation of History 2s, students of postcolonial and Subaltern Studies may find themselves mired in a quagmire over how one might meaningfully map History 2s and History 1s simultaneously without interpolating or subsuming the latter into the former. Such a project cannot simply imbricate one narrative over the other, and nor do they (as Chakrabarty makes clear) dovetail in even, uniform, or consistent fashions. Furthermore, Chakrabarty’s call is to write History 2s from local bases of knowledge, and experience is more easily carried out than it is for students of others’ histories and cultures. What are the implications of writing History 2s alongside accounts that invoke History 1s? How do (and can) nonindigenous scholars of Subaltern Studies do justice to both simultaneously? Acknowledging the enduring legacies and lasting institutional and ideational influences of colonialism as well as the predominating effects of capitalism on the social transformation of non-Western societies while also highlighting the local, particular, and unique narratives in the same work appears as a difficult and perhaps insurmountable task. How do we pay due attention to local, unique histories, agents, and sites of domination and resistance that are not directly attributable to inner workings and logics of colonialism and global capital—especially when the subject matter is so little developed in the historical record? While a resolution to these problematics of writing postcolonial history may not readily appear in a neatly presented methodology or formula, Chris Taylor’s (2018) work is exemplary as a “History 3” of plantation slavery (though he does not name it as such) by exploring the works of social-ist Jamaican activist Robert Wedderburn, as well as examining the “socialistic” form of organization proposed by the post-emancipated St. Ann pamphleteers in an 1865 appeal for assistance to Queen Victoria. Taylor’s critique of the writing of History 1 (again, this is Chakrabarty’s term) is that both scholars on the Left and the Right have approached the plantation from within a Eurocentric understanding of the capitalist labor process. However, Taylor (2018) writes: [F]rom a Marxist perspective, capitalism is not simply a labor process . . . Rather, capitalism is characterized by a process of value-creation that occurs at once alongside and through observable and empirical processes of human laboring within the total capitalist production process. (552) And while slave plantations were capitalist in their market dependency, the total subsumption of plantation labor into capital was “unsuccessful” to the extent

148  Matt Gordner that “the plantation maintained a relation of immanent exteriority to the globalizing logic of capitalist value” (553). Facing dire circumstances, the pamphleteers of St. Ann requested from the Queen the provision of economic assistance. Their proposal was couched in liberal, market-friendly terms and resembled the plantation model save for the fact that the land owned by the company would be collectively owned and, presumably, collectively operated in a manner resembling an indigenous form of socialism. Their program thus “sutures elements of peasant economy to the institutional form of the plantation and, in so doing,” Taylor continues, “shows these smallholders working toward a vernacular socialist solution to political and economic oppression on the basis of the plantation form” (558). While making no mention of socialism, the organizational form that the emancipated laborers proposed was akin to what Wedderburn had previously envisaged as a road from plantation slavery to one of plantation socialism. The only major difference is that Wedderburn explicitly invoked socialism as a model. In Wedderburn’s model, the plantation’s provision grounds provided an independent mode of production to one of collective, self-rule (Taylor 2018, 560). Upon using the surplus of goods farmed on the provision grounds as a basis for independent income garnered at the Sunday market, slave laborers could purchase land upon emancipation on which they could found a collective. Both the pamphleteers and Wedderburn thus resisted capitalist logic and the institutions normally beholden to it while at the same time working within and alongside it. “Where Wedderburn looks forward, anticipating the founding of an agrarian socialist commonwealth as the plantation’s negation, these petitioners looked backward to the plantation, reconstituting it as an institutional figure for collective self-management and independence from the market” (Taylor 2018, 561). Taylor (2018) expertly shows how, in their appeals to an inward, collectivist logic, the plantation workers find room to maneuver in the spaces where capital is not all-penetrating, thereby showing us “[w]hat gets left out when we assimilate the history of the plantation to the history of capitalism” (552). With respect to “provincializing” Europe, Taylor’s work carries out a “History 3” in adeptly navigating a narrative that combines History 1 and History 2s onto the same page. With an eye to the present analysis, two modes of thought bear fruit: for one, an examination of Tunisia that maintains a teleological reading of historical development following a “typical” trajectory of (late) development overlooks the durability of non-capitalist modes and values—most significantly the tribal identity, tribal politics, and pre-capitalist relations of production that survived, in many ways paradoxically, a variety of forms of capitalisms as well as attempts to impose Tunisian nationalism, or Tunisianité, through the myaadcum-T/MC system. And two, such a reading of Tunisian history—especially in the post-uprising democratic “transition” underway today—must attend to the social relations and tensions that exist between T/MCs, local communities, private corporations, and the central government either as “legacies of authoritarianism” that prevail through the current political transformation or as the realization of a democratic ethos that is at the forefront of collective action

Unearthing land and labor disputes  149 despite a national, substantive form of democracy that has, largely, not taken root. It would be impossible, then, to write a history of the T/MCs that was not “borne” of French colonialism or capitalist penetration in their current form, not to mention the overriding prerogatives of liberal and neoliberal policies. The task thus becomes one of writing a “History 3” that admits to the place of capitalisms while also demonstrating the everyday politics (Bayat 2013) that exist alongside while resisting international, national, and local forms of domination that manifest through the T/MCs and their impetuses to privatize collective, tribal lands.

Upending the formula: T/MCs as a variation on UCD The tribal mode of foreign relations arises from the contradiction between “community” as a “unit of social cohesion” and its “submersion in nature” (van der Pijl 2007, 17). This contradiction, as the consolidation of ethnogenesis (ibid.), operates according to patrilineal tribal relations designed to maintain strong asabiyya, or “unifying structural cohesion” (Charrad 2001, 23). Those with the strongest asabiyya were those “best capable of resisting control by other groups, including central authority, and sometimes to displace central authority altogether” (ibid.). Examining kinship as a resource (ibid., 70) permits us to examine tribes as “relations of production” insofar as lineages are engaged in the collective production of goods, services, and protection (ibid., 74). At the dawn of the twentieth century, Tunisian tribes were increasingly confronted with challenges to their modes of foreign relations by the dominance of the capitalist mode of production. The grafting of the tribal mode with Ottoman tributary relations,5 colonialism, nationalism, authoritarian denizenship, and democratic citizenship occurred as local, traditional forms of power and authority gave way to bureaucratic centralization, state- and nation-building. The transition to capitalism through primitive accumulation (the exploitation of wage labor) and the privatization of the means of production predates French colonialism in an indigenous Tunisian form. The T/MCs were appropriated or “captured” and used by successive regimes each to their own ends, resulting in a variant on accumulation by dispossession in the neoliberal period which might more aptly be termed “possession-for-accumulation-by-dispossession” insofar as sedentarization and private land tenure were forced upon the tribes as a strategy for marketization and extractivism. As we saw in the previous section, uneven development is a historical and inherent facet of social life that exists in and between states and societies in multitudinous unique forms. Rolf (2015) outlines a helpful schema for the application of UCD that is applied as follows: (1) Begin by examining global unevenness at multiple scales; (2) Explore how a late developing social formation inserts itself into a new pattern of global capital accumulation, combining its development with the most advanced capitalist states;

150  Matt Gordner (3) Explore the uneven impact of this combination within the late developing social formation itself; (4) Consider how this unevenness produces unique social tensions that become reflected in state form and strategy. (137) The social tensions that arise in the post-uprising period are struggles against the exploitation of the region’s natural resources, hiring and labor practices, and struggles over land ownership—all directly controlled, and therefore in conflict with, the Tunisian central government. The tribal mode has given way, over generations of foreign and national domination, to the individualization and localization of identities. Hence, Charrad (2001) refers not to kinship per se, but to “local solidarities.” As tribes and clans overlapped through internal migration, loyalties rested primarily with geographical distinctions, though one’s clan and tribe remain ever-present in the background. A. T/MCs: beylic period and the Tunisian Eyalet (1574–1881) Historical unevenness between the “coast” and “interior,” or the “Two Tunisias,” remains an omnipresent feature of Tunisian society and development (Ayeb 2011).6 The coastal cities, running from Tunis to Sfax, are nodes of economic centers, each with its own centripetal force of development and trade. They stand in contrast to the towns and communities of the interior which always maintained more traditional and conservative forms of economic and social life. As a peripheral Ottoman province, uneven development also existed between Tunisia and the central Ottoman authorities. The Tunisian Bey was aware of the relatively more developed states and societies that began to encroach upon and later colonize Tunisian commerce and trade as early as the eighteenth century—most notably the British, Italians, and the French. In an effort to stave off colonial penetration, successive beys undertook campaigns of “defensive modernization;” the “whip of external necessity” compelling the Tunisian state to raise a professional army, build an even stronger central administration, and extend its reaches into the countryside to raise taxes. The result was a failed attempt at maintaining either autonomy from the Ottomans or independence from the French. The development of European capitalism and the continent’s eventual ascent over the Ottoman Empire resulted from the European “privilege of backwardness” over the relatively more advanced Ottomans. Ottoman internationalization of merchant trade and their military entanglements with the Hapsberg Empire provided the “buffer” that Europe needed to transfer from feudal to capitalist modes of production (Anievas and Nişancıoğlu 2015, 120).7 Upon overtaking the Ottomans developmentally, the French nonetheless drew upon the myaad as a “backward” social formation in order to quell tribal opposition and impose colonial capitalism. Post-independence regimes co-opted the French “innovation,” thus upending the classical formulation of UCD.8 Precisely when and how Tunisia became

Unearthing land and labor disputes  151 subordinate to foreign influence and capital is a matter of historical debate, but consensus exists that it occurred somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century.9 To safeguard his rule, Ahmad Bey was forced into a dangerous game of diplomacy, modernizing armed forces complimented by an aggressive program of industrialization based on the European model. The reign of his successors, Muhammad Bey (1855–59) and Muhammad al-Sadiq (1859–82), were no less fraught. An 1857 Fundamental Pact, an 1861 Constitution (the first in the Arab world), an 1863 Anglo-Tunisian convention, and a series of odious loans reflect both the beys’ desire to appease the Europeans while attempting to maintain control. To pay back his loans, al-Sadiq levied heavy taxes on the peasantry and merchant classes through the doubling of the poll (mejba) tax, leading to an 1864 revolt. Under mounting pressure, the bey was compelled to establish a financial commission to restructure Tunisian debts in 1869. With a nonexistent manufacturing industry, hit hard by natural disasters impacting Tunisia’s agricultural industry, and incapable of resolving its financial obligations, the French used a tribal skirmish on the Algerian–Tunisian border as a pretense to colonize Tunisia in 1881—with prior approval from the Germans and British. Until French occupation, the central government recognized tribal “rights” to collective “arch” lands alongside publicly or privately owned “habous” lands, and private lands, or “melk” (Ben Othman 2014, 6). The tribes at this time, nomadic for significant portions of the year, were dependent mostly on their livestock and seldom adhered to the notion of private land, let alone private titles. For these tribes, lands were the property of the community, and territories shifted in a complex fashion according to the strength and numbers of those who could defend them. The allocations of resources and the adjudication of conflicts were the purview of the myaad—elders representing the different clans and extended families (douars) (Ben Saad 2011, 74). This structure reflected the ultimate patriarchal authority of the tribes and was, by extension, the expression of its collective will. Voting and power within the council followed the size and strength of each clan within the tribe. Councils were also convened between tribes and extended families (Ben Saad et al. 2010, 29). The myaad ensured relative equality within each tribe,10 but the incursion of the Ottoman and imperial powers exacerbated the historical balance both within and between seminomads (badawi) and with neighbouring peasant communities (hadar) (Anderson 1986, 42). For example, makhzen tribes—those working with the central administration— often levied taxes from their members and subordinate tribes and, in return, received tax exemptions. Yet as the Ottoman administration sent its officials deeper into the Sahara, tribal leaders were accorded positions as members of the administration, and they were accorded land, as well. The development of patron–client relations privileged the clients and rendered the former the decisive powerholders of opportunities for the upward mobility of the latter. The result was the creation of rural notables—a rural elite—beholden to the state (Anderson 1986, 27–29, 60–62).

152  Matt Gordner B. The French protectorate (1881–1956) The French built upon existing Tunisian institutions rather than dismantling them (Hermassi 1972; Anderson 1986; Charrad and Jaster 2015). They “grafted features of the French bureaucracy onto the existing Tunisian administration” in order to “increase efficiency and enhance their control over the Tunisian population” (Charrad and Jaster 2015, 79). Yet, “finding too much dispersion of authority in the administration of regions, they reduced the number of qaids . . . as a measure towards bureaucratic centralization” (ibid.). In October of 1884 “civil controllers” were placed in charge of all thirteen districts, and a circulaire of July 22, 1887 permitted the controllers to give orders to the qaids directly. In those regions where the qiyadas coincided with tribal populations, the borders were redrawn “based on rationalized, geographic principles, splintering the power of local elites.” (ibid., 79). In response, tribes consolidated their holdings through the local myaad councils who expedited the partitioning of pastural and water resources. Under French occupation, swaths of the hinterlands were declared military zones (Nasr and Bouhaouach 1997, 152). As demand for land increased, the colonial authority ramped up its efforts to mark more land available through Islamic laws and local institutions. The year 1892 heralded the entry of “official colonization.” The French government established a fund in 1897 that declared hundreds of thousands of hectares of collective lands mawat—“dead lands,” by decree (Ben Mraad et al. 2010, 33). A nation-wide project of administering boundaries tout court recognized the right of individual enjoyment (Nasr and Bouhaouach 1997, 152), but effectively denied the fact of collective ownership. Ill-received by local populations, the move resulted in violence toward French colons, threatening peace across the region (ibid.). In 1906, the French reconsidered and recognized the tribes’ ownership to collective lands. Twenty-two thousand hectares of agricultural collective lands were thus (re)attributed to local tribes (Service des affaires indigènes 1931, 40). Failing previous efforts, the French capitalized upon the myaad, formalizing it through the “legal personality” of “conseil de notables” in 1918, followed by the 1935 creation of the “conseil de gestion”—heretofore T/MC (Nasr and Bouhaouach 1997, 152). While offered as an ostensible compromise, it was more of a ownership. The state encouraged land privatization through “al-ihya,” “restoration and livening”—whereby candidates were eligible to own a plot of land so long as they revived it within six years and created value through agricultural output (Nasr and Bouhaouach 1997). A massive project of well-building was used as a mechanism to finalize sedentarization (Yazidi 2005, 55–58). In this way, the French asserted dominance without resorting to hostility while also gaining the allegiance of tribes who, foreseeing the inevitable, forged peaceable clientelist relations with them, thus reproducing a rural nobility now allied to the state and occupying forces (Anderson 1986, 54–44). Kinship thus gave way to clientelism. “Before the population growth of the 20th century,” Valensi wrote, “there was no rural proletariat to speak of in the Maghrib,

Unearthing land and labor disputes  153 where small land-owners and small family farms predominated” (Valensi 1977, 30). Whereas, in pre-protectorate Tunisia, only immigrants or peasants separated from their families worked as sharecroppers (khammasat); that relationship changed with colonialism. The ranks of the khammasat swelled as Tunisian farmers were given unusable land by the government and eventually became landless, forced to roam for work. Poverty and internal migration led to the destruction of the rural, traditional economy. French colons and Tunisian large landowners alike hired wage laborers for industry and farming, while the tribes, now sedentary, resorted to the traditional khammas arrangement, charting a path to the proletarianization of workers from neighboring areas without yet being cognizant of the “advantages” of wage labor. Mining developed rapidly. Lead-ore was exported almost immediately. Phosphate was exploited commercially in 1899, with iron-ore following suit in 1908. Modernization thus led to increased proletarianization, but also urbanization, and eventually, the eradication of the khammasat altogether; two-thirds, by some estimates, by 1914 (Bennoune 1979, 92). C. The period(s) of “independence” (1956–1987–2011) The failure of the French colonial apparatus to meet the demands for local control precipitated the fight for independence (Anderson 1986, 33). Yet, in limiting the tribes’ freedom of movement, the French authorities isolated many tribes from participating in nationalist political campaigns, unions, and the wider independence movement. Upon gaining independence in 1956, Bourguiba consolidated political power over his rivals and established a new administrative elite from his most loyal supporters. He ended the influence of Islamic law over the country’s agrarian policies, starting with public habous. In addition to supporting the old Tunisian bourgeoisie (who, backing his rival, Ben Youssef, were a base of political opposition to Bourguiba’s rule), habous hindered the country’s economic progress. In 1957, one and a half million hectares of habous lands were either leased, distributed, or put directly under state control (Anderson 1986, 232; Nasr and Bouhaouach 1997, 153). A 1959 law simplified the conditions for al-ihya and marked the official transition of the right of enjoyment of over half of the collective lands—one and a half million hectares—to potential private ownership, while delimiting the other half for grazing, shepherding, and husbandry (Gharbi 1998, 85; Nasr and Bouhaouach 1997, 153). In the years following independence, Bourguiba discredited the Ben Youssefist tribal leaders with accusations of collaboration with the French, sacking them, and eventually replacing the position of shaykh with amda (mayor) in 1979, while towns loyal to the Bourguiba regime were promoted in state support and status. Administrative districts were redrawn, many more now inconsonant with the previously agreed-upon tribal boundaries (Charrad and Reith 2019). Bourguiba promulgated a Code of Personal Status five months after the proclamation of independence that, while popularly conceived as a progressive step for women’s rights, “dropped the vision of the family as an extended kinship group

154  Matt Gordner built on strong ties crisscrossing a community of male representatives” and instead instituted a “vision of a conjugal unit in which ties between spouses and between parents and children occupy a prominent place” (Charrad 2001, 218). It thus “emancipated” men from kinship ties, too (ibid. 219). Bureaucratization and party loyalty, while promoting impersonal political relations generally, often had the opposite effect in the countryside: the intensification of factionalisms and the resurgence of kinship. With the exodus of French ex-patriots in 1960, Bourguiba sought to nationalize all French agricultural lands through a socialist/corporatist experiment in 1964. Throughout the 1960s, the pace of attribution of collective tenures to private titles slowed considerably. In some cases, locals torched their plots to prevent government seizure. Bourguiba’s quasi-socialist experiment ended with abysmal failure in 1969, and under encouragement from the United States and World Bank, the state liberalized the economy. Privatization occurred in two phases: the first, from 1969 to 1980, in which the state “directed” the capitalist turn and remained the “first actor and unique planner,” and the second, from 1980 onward, characterized by increasing state disengagement and the imposition of neoliberal policies (Ayeb and Bush 2019, 108). The year 1971 brought forth a new process of land attribution, and in 1974, the minister of agriculture committed to limiting state lands to 330 thousand hectares to “reactivate the land market and reinforce the private sector of medium and big farmers” (ibid., 109). A 1979 decree accelerating the means by which individuals could transition private title of formerly collective lands to titre bleu—the designation that renders owners eligible to leverage private property into agricultural loans from banks. Tribes and extended families claimed the most fecund lands for themselves through the unlawful construction of settlements. A 1988 law thus decentralized the process of attribution and conflict resolution through local tutorship and regional tutorship councils. New laws removed barriers to private appropriation by nonmembers of local communities, and the state opened protected areas to commodification by agribusiness through the export sector (ibid., 109). Ben Ali waged a “medical coup” against Bourguiba in 1987. Though inaugurating his regime with overtures toward political liberalization, the surveillance state developed under his reign was long-standing and brutal (Hibou 2011). The effect of his authoritarian and neoliberal policies was the re-traditionalization of local politics, as peasants turned away from formal political participation and relied more heavily on kinship ties and clientelism to make ends meet (King 2003). By the late 1980s and 1990s, T/MCs reflected the characteristics of Ben Ali’s personalist rule with deepening forms of corruption and heavy-handedness. Members were chosen directly from the political class or by the President himself and were persuaded to rent collective, tribal land to private Tunisian and international interests for pittances (Ben Othman 2014, 9). Successive laws meant to expedite privatization not only complicated the attribution process, but they confused T/ MC members, many of whom had no formal education or practice with legal– administrative matters. By 1997, only two hundred thousand out of one and a half

Unearthing land and labor disputes  155 million hectares of agricultural collective lands were duly attributed. Stated goals of privatization failed, while rangelands were ignored and fell into disuse. With the ousting of Ben Ali in 2010–2011, pressure mounted against postuprising governments to comply with further neoliberal reforms. At the same time, the opening of civil society led to the emergence of a new class of techsavvy, youth elites who, emboldened by freedoms of association and speech, led social movements seeking the fulfillment of the aims and goals of the revolution: work, freedom, and national dignity (Gordner 2016). The surge of civil society activism in the post-uprising period is characterized by struggles for transitional justice, protests against the continuation of neoliberal policies, government transparency, and accountability (Gordner 2019). In 2015, parliament reexamined land reforms. T/MCs were given five years to complete their work in adjudicating disputes and allocating land to applicants. Failure to uphold the new law will lead to the transfer of pending cases to the regional tutorship council. In extreme cases, the state, in the form of the governor, will be given sole authority to cease and appropriate all lands—whether those in dispute or those remaining. By 2021, therefore, any collective land not allocated by the T/MCs will become the ostensible purview of the state—a move that denies local communities their centuries’ old rights to self-govern collective, tribal lands. It will also allow international corporations greater opportunities for resource extraction, whether gas, oil, mineral, or agricultural. The law effectively spells the death knell of the T/MCs and with them, the last vestige of the tribal institutional formation regulating, in any sense, the tribal mode of foreign relations. It is unlikely that the government, historically dilatory and neglectful of the interior regions, will institute these policies in a timely fashion. Nevertheless, the legal and administrative avenues for government appropriation exist.

A “History 3” of the Nefzaoua11 The Nefzaoua is a region covering roughly the governorate of Kebili, with the city of Kebili as its capital. For centuries, the population of the Nefzaoua consisted of both sedentary and seminomadic peoples. Traditionally, many of the tribes would take their herds into the desert at the beginning of spring, only to return in the summer to settle around wells, oases, or on the edge of small villages. The relationship between settled agriculturalists and seminomadic peoples differed across the region, but barter existed between them, often as a function of protection given by the latter to the former (Clarke 1959, 98). Throughout Ottoman rule the Nefzaoua was favorable as “a refuge for rebels or for authorities in difficulty” (Pellat, “Nafzawa”) and was infamous as a stronghold of anti-colonial struggle (Clancy-Smith 1994). Thus, though the oases provided abundant potential for colonial resource extraction, the French declared the Nefzaoua a military zone during the early periods of French occupation. When, in 1885, Lieutenant Francoius de Bechelvel established the Department of Indigenous Affairs in Kebili, he appointed Belgacem Ben Mohamed Ben Khalifa—nephew of Ali Ben Khalifa (the leader of the resistance against French

156  Matt Gordner colonialism) as amel/amin, or local district head, in order to legitimize his efforts at sedentism. Bechevel created villages and wells for many of the tribes, delimited pastural lands, and restricted residents’ mobility through travel permits. The policy of digging wells and encouraging farming was continued in 1909 by Colonel Pujat. By 1930, three hundred hectares were revived and attributed to around twelve hundred residents of Douz, Golaa, Souk El-Bayez, Tombar, Basma, and Jemna, among others. At that time, over thirty thousand residents lived in the area, compared to around sixteen thousand nomads. Seventy-eight wells were counted throughout the Nefzaoua by 1947, with settlement and oases expanding apace. In 1862, there were 323 thousand palm trees in the area, compared to 765 thousand in 1955 and as many as one million in 1967 (Pellat, “Nafzawa”). Population increase was duly impressive, from eighteen thousand in 1881 to 31,806 in 1926. On the eve of independence, the number of residents in the Nefzaoua doubled to around sixty-five thousand (Sghaeir 1995, 210). Some tribes adapted to French rule and succeeded, while others fell in status. The Ouled Yacoub tribe was historically powerful with a sphere of influence that surpassed the Nefzaoua. As a sort of military aristocracy, their resources were derived from collecting tribute from less powerful tribes and clans. With the arrival of the French in 1883, one camp allied with them, while the other resisted. Eventually, the whole tribe benefited from the extension of the date plantations. Their eventual embrace of capitalism and adoption of merchant activity in Kebili, Nega, and other villages helped them to retain their pride of place. The Marazig were considered the religious aristocracy of the region, claiming lineage to the holy saint “Sidi Marzoug.” Mainly pastoralists, they organized caravan routes for trade. In times of drought, to accommodate for the loss of their cattle, the Marazig demanded tribute from local sedentary populations, citing their religious authority and heritage. As date plantations expanded under the French, the tribe lost most of its economic and non-pastoral possessions with the decline of local artisanal production. The droughts of 1936–1937, 1940–1941, and 1947–1948 destroyed much of their livestock. As a result, they applied for ownership of agricultural land through the “conseil de notables” in 1918. They were at a disadvantage when compared to Ouled Yacoub, however, who was better positioned to gain approval for lands due to their alliance with the French. The Office of Indigenous Affairs described the balance as “delicate and extremely complex. It is important not to collide with [their] customs and susceptibilities” (Service des affaires Indigènes 1931, 40). By the 1960s, remarkable changes were underway. As Sarel-Sternberg (1963) recounted, since the protectorate favored the sedentary, nomadic groups who were willing to make a compromise (or submit) were rewarded (130). The Ouled Yacoub thus obtained half of the new lots created in the Kebili region at the time. The Marazigs were allocated lots in the oasis of Douz. The Adhara were settled with a village in their name, as were the Sabria. Only the Ghrib, many of whom already owned small plots of palm groves, were denied initial French-built irrigation. Almost all the Ouled Yacoub and the majority of the Marazig hired khammes to develop their plots. Some of the Sabria followed as well. The khammes of the Ouled Yacoub were hired externally, while

Unearthing land and labor disputes  157 the Marazig hired within and without. Because the Adhara usually exploited their lands themselves, they recruited khammes from within their own tribe. While “khammes” derives from the fact that workers usually took “one-fifth” of the harvest in exchange for their labor (the landowner would provide the land, draft, animals, water, and seed), the khammes of Douz received only one-tenth of the production of the deglet nour variety of dates, one-eighth to one-seventh of the alig variety, and one-fifth of the common variety, as well as one-third of fruits and vegetables, in addition to an annual premium amounting to between 4 and 6 dinars, and a sheep for the feast of Aid. In order to make ends meet, many khammes cultivated dates and vegetables for others apart from their usual work (Sarel-Sternberg 1963, 130). Khammes workers were, in general, often indebted to larger landowners, so when land became available for purchase, they were unable to procure plots of their own. Mechanized agriculture meant, therefore, that when the khammes were no longer needed, they were both landless and unemployed (Alexander 2016, 21). Sarel-Sternberg (1963) observed that, in the first year of independence, tribal patriarchal relations resembled a mixture of “serfdom, capitalism, and dirigisme,” though the “mentality of the new owners, while adapting to the situation, remains nomadic,” he continued, “if only for their contempt for direct ownership over working the land” (130). According to Hamzaoui’s 1979 study, however, the khammessat continued to represent a form of pre-capitalist relations well after the cooperative movement and its failure. Unlike the miners and STIL (Société Tunisienne de l’Industrie Laitière) workers, whose wage labor prompted forms of class consciousness, the khammes was embedded in the social fabric of Tunisian society. Their quasiindentured servitude continued for generations without demands for “rights” in the modern sense (Hamzaoui 1979). Interviews with small landowners throughout the Nefzaoua indicate that the khammessat no longer exists today. Rather, in the Nefzaoua, men from Gabes are trucked in to cultivate and work date plantations, with local women working as “pickers” on the plantation floor. Men are paid around 30 dinars (roughly $10 USD) per day; women, around two-thirds of that. As we have seen, the cooperative movement boded poorly for tribal populations. While in some places, the Tunisian government was able to convince communities of the interior to adopt cooperative policies, in others, like Faouar, the tribal leadership refused, leading the central authorities to balk. The cooperative period followed from an equally difficult time after independence, where between 1956 and 1964, the rivalry between Bourguiba and Ben Youssef played out in the countryside. As a formal T/MC member in Golaa recalled: “If people found [some]where to eat, they did.” At the time, each clan in Golaa lived on its own parcel, with six to ten palm trees to generate a livelihood. Only after Bourguiba consolidated his power did they begin to assert land claims. The 1970s and 1980s brought about rapid social changes. Bourguiba’s Personal Status Code began to diffuse throughout the countryside, and opportunities for an extended education were granted to girls many of whom showed significant promise. A prominent elder in Douz lamented that, especially after the 2011 uprising, young women often leave home without a male escort. Youth consort across

158  Matt Gordner gender and tribal lines freely and frequently. Increasingly, certain restaurants and cafes became known as spaces for intermixing. Date commerce liberalized in 1974, and international oil and gas companies were more and more approved to speculate. By the post-uprising period, Tunisia became the fourth largest date producer in the world by volume (behind Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq) and the largest producer worldwide by the quantity of dates exported. The Nefzaoua became the largest date producing region in Tunisia, accounting for 37 percent of all palm trees and 50 percent of all deglet nour (Iwasaki and Kashiwagi 2015). The relationships between T/MCs and local communities in the post-uprising period differ markedly according to each community. In Jemna, the occupation of the STIL plantation upon Ben Ali’s ouster led to a peaceful sit-in, the dissolution of their T/MC, and the organization of a date cooperative that now redistributes millions of dinars back into the local community. In Zaafrane, local T/ MC members were allegedly jailed on allegations of corruption. In Kebili and Faouar, T/MC members refuse to step down altogether, while in Douz elders were voted out and a new generation of younger members voted in. Thus, legacies of Tunisia’s authoritarian past remain in some areas, while in others the democratic ethos brings prosperity and new hope for change. The authoritarian practices and extractivist policies of the Bourguiba and Ben Ali eras manifested across the Nefzaoua in 2015–2017 as local protests demanded to know “Where is the Oil?” (Weinou el-Petrol?) (Gordner 2017, 2019). Following a number of protest cycles resulting in civil disobedience, arrests, and military interventions, the government and the collectivity of protesters from districts across the Nefzaoua finally came to an agreement over corporate social responsibility, hiring practices, and economic investment for local communities on a district-by-district basis. Those agreements remain unfulfilled.

Conclusion Ultimately, the T/MCs survived across each regime because they were useful as mechanisms of controlling both land and people. Yet, once they retained legitimacy as representative institutions—whether corrupt or not—dismantling them posed a greater liability to each regime than their maintenance. For, the inhabitants of Tunisia’s interior regions, affected and afflicted as they were by all of these vicissitudes, never succumbed to the eradication of kinship ties. Repeated attempts through bureaucratization, the Personal Status Code, and privatization of tribal lands led, to the contrary, to revivals of kinship and re-traditionalizations of social life. Given that administrative borders remain inconsonant with agreedupon tribal boundaries, violence between local communities persists. International companies, through the central government, distribute oil and gas rents according to the administrative, not the tribal, boundaries. Thus, kinship structures became grafted onto these fixed geographical and administrative divisions. Conflicts play out between members of different “local solidarities” (Charrad 2001). Whether T/MCs will be abolished under the new 2016 law, and with them,

Unearthing land and labor disputes  159 the last institutional vestige of the tribal mode, “(re)captured” by “the people” through this the new democratic ethos, or sustained as “legacies of authoritarianism” will be determined by local and national struggles over “work, freedom, and national dignity.”

Notes 1 The author would like to thank Maureen Fadem for her unending support in completing this chapter. A number of research assistants were also indispensable, including Sara Snoussi, Mokhtar Eljilani, Wael Gara, Noura Zaouali, Amine Ghorbel, Imene Debbeche, and Mouna Gana. Finally, research for this chapter was supported by an American Political Science Association (APSA) Middle East and North Africa Civil Society Fellowship, a series of Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) and MITACS grants, as well as the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Scholarship. 2 In 2010–11, a fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated in an act of protest against perceived government corruption and injustice, thus setting in motion a series of local protests in the Tunisian interior that diffused toward the capital, culminating in a national uprising. Analysts often refer to this contentious episode as the “Jasmine Revolution,” and the region-wide series of uprisings as the “Arab Spring.” Tunisia remains the only country among the many national uprisings that have held successive free and fair elections. 3 I would like to thank Maureen Fedam for this invaluable insight and for suggesting Chris Taylor’s work in compliment to Chakrabary. 4 It should be noted here that these terms are not meant to convey a directionality or teleology, but rather represent “imbalances” and “asymmetries” (Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015, 56). 5 Following Jairus Banaji, NR define the “tributary” mode of production as “as constituted along two class-relational axes: first, the vertical opposition of a ruling, taxcollecting class in a contradictory relationship with a class of peasants exploited for the appropriation of productive surpluses; and second, the horizontal differentiation between a ‘landed nobility’ and ‘patrimonial authority’ within the tax-collecting class, in which the state controlled the nobility as well as the means of production.” P. 99. 6 This moniker is geographically inaccurate. While the economic centers along “the coast” run from Tunis to Sfax, there are cities in the north-west that, though considering themselves the “interior,” are, in fact, also situated along the coast of the Mediterranean. 7 This explanation bespeaks “multiple capitalisms” and is, incidentally, another reply to the clarion call to “provincialize Europe.” 8 See Rolf’s schema. Once more, the case of Tunisia’s T/MCs demonstrate the method by which an “advanced” society (French) borrowed from and innovated a “backward” (tribal myaad) social formation. Only with the co-optation of the French innovation by post-independence regimes does the classical schema of UCD then adhere. 9 Dating back to the eighteenth century (Lafi 2017), the 1830s and 1840s ushered in an age of Tunisian capitalism, when an indigenous form of industrialization existed, however ephemerally (Mahjoub 1982). Valenci’s (1969) study of the chechia (wool cap) industry demonstrates the extent to which long-term investment and a profound division of labor was evident in Tunis prior to the arrival of European industrialization (42). Bennoune (1979) suggests that Tunisia enjoyed favorable terms of trade until 1814 (85). Hammami (2020) argues that the mid-nineteenth century represents a critical juncture wherein the “privateering-trade-slavery complex” so integral to the Tunisian economy was dismantled (78–81). The Tunisian elite were forced to replace their prior mode of accumulation, but they were ultimately outmaneuvered in the process

160  Matt Gordner by French colonial (and later crony) capitalists. Mahjoub (1973) dates a “rupture” in social antagonisms to 1820–30, with underdevelopment beginning during the following decade. Perkins (2014) notes that “[d]uring the reign of Ahmad Bey (1837–55) European persons, commodities, and ideologies flooded into Tunisia in greater numbers and with greater intensity than ever before” (17). 10 An 1873 survey of 402 tribes found that 77 percent of families owned less than twentyfive acres of arable land, with 21 percent owning between twenty-five and hundred acres (Valensi 1977, 29). While this statistic reflects a relatively modest gap, the tribal dynamic changed drastically as the central authorities extended their reaches into tribal lands. Raising taxes in the interior required a modernized, professional army, and by necessity, an expansive administration and bureaucratic state apparatus. 11 Unless otherwise noted, the following section is informed by personal interviews between the author and local community members, T/MC officials, NGOs and activists in Kebili, Douz, Jemna, Golaa, Zaafrane, and Faouar from 2017–20.

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9 Derailing the rail Indian–Kenyan solidarity in contemporary Anglophone fiction Meghan Gorman-DaRif

Introduction The Railway Project in Kenya, launched by the British in 1895, had as its immediate aims “to extend a line deep into the unmapped heartland of eastern Africa, to make it pay for itself through exports and by attracting settlers, and to safeguard an important source of the Nile” (Miller and Yaeger 1984, 12). Yet its impact extended far beyond the original economic and trade goals as the struggle for labor structured relations between the white settler, Asian, and African communities. A critical long-ranging consequence of this history includes the fact that when the British ran up against resistance in recruiting sufficient wage laborers in Kenya to build the railway, they recruited some forty thousand Indian indentured laborers to fill the gap, making the railway project a primary site around which ethnic and racial divisions were constructed and naturalized. In establishing Indians as a racial group positioned between the English and the Africans, the British encouraged the emergence of Indians as the petty-bourgeoisie, with economic advantages over Africans. The resultant differences in material wealth and opportunities led to tensions between the two groups that would have profound effects on their relations into the independence era. This chapter analyzes contemporary literature about the construction of the railway that is attentive to the Asian community in Kenya in order to examine the ways authors are returning to this foundational colonial project to think through the impacts and afterlives of the economics of empire in the postcolonial era. I suggest that the novels under consideration importantly expose and rewrite overlooked histories, around both sanitized versions of the colonial construction of the railway and around the positionality of the Asian community in Kenya. In their narrative capacity to link the past and present, and explore alternative histories, they provide an important supplement to historiography on the railway and contemporary debates on ethnic tension and political violence in Kenya. While contemporary Kenyan writing has focused extensively on colonial histories and anti-colonial resistance, particularly in relation to the 1952–1960 Mau Mau Uprising, the selected contemporary novels stand out in their focus on the Indian community in Kenya, which, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has noted, has remained largely marginal and invisible. Sana Aiyar has argued, for example

Derailing the rail  165 that, “[a]n overwhelming emphasis on singular territoriality and racially bounded scholarship on Kenya has resulted in the historiographical marginality of Indians, who are assumed to be historically insignificant” (1). Such historiographical approaches, she claims, imply the relationship between Indians and Africans was “apolitical and unchanging” rather than considering “the simultaneous coexistence of solidarity and friction in constituting this relationship” (13). While such elisions are rife within historiography, Aiyar notes fiction’s capacity to represent the interwoven, complex, and intimate connections between the two communities, and she highlights Vassanji’s novel, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, as a key example (203–04). However, while there are indeed notable exceptions in literary texts that intervene in dominant discourse that overlooks Indians in Kenya, the rule has been a lack of representation. As Gaurav Desai argues in Commerce with the Universe (2013), with a few exceptions, “India and Indians have not received much representation space in the canon of colonial and postcolonial black African literature. When (s)he appears, the Indian is inevitably cast as what E.M. Forster would call a “flat character”” (3). This chapter takes up a study of Vassanji’s novel alongside Peter Kimani’s more recent The Dance of the Jakaranda (2017) to explore their engagement with the Indian community in Kenya, and particularly how this engagement shifts after the 2007 post-election violence. Kimani’s novel, for example, viewed in this light, excavates elided histories that center on the railway as a site for British divide-and-rule tactics and Indian–Kenyan solidarity against colonialist and capitalist exploitation. In its focus on solidarities across race, the novel defamiliarizes notions of ethnic tension in Kenya, highlighting the colonial roots of these divisions, and representing a long history of collective resistance. I argue that while Vassanji uses the railway as a metaphor for the in-betweenness of the Asian community in Kenya in a manner that reinscribes racial, class, and ethnic difference, Kimani makes the railway a metaphor for the possibilities of collective resistance to colonial and postcolonial capitalist exploitation. I begin the chapter with an overview of recent historical analyses of the construction of the railway, drawing out the ways historians have moved away from theories of modernization to attend to the material specificities of colonial projects like the railway. I connect these histories with recent studies of the colonial roots of ethnic tension in contemporary Kenya, highlighting analyses of colonial regimes of citizenship based on race and ethnicity that critics connect with the geographies of violence in independent Kenya, including the 2007 post-election violence.1 The second section of the chapter turns to fictional representations of the railway and the relationships between Asian and African communities in Kenya before the outbreak of communal violence in 2007, through an analysis of the content and critical response to M.G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2004). I read Vassanji’s novel in some ways as reinscribing racial difference in its depiction of relationships between Indians and Africans in Kenya due to its focus on the transitional moment of independence and the practice of expulsion of the Asian community from Eastern Africa. The final section of the chapter engages with Peter Kimani’s The Dance of the Jakaranda (2017), analyzing the

166  Meghan Gorman-DaRif shift in engagement with the Indian community in Kenya. While Vassanji’s novel establishes the railway as both an originary source of colonial capitalist exploitation and land dispossession, and as the tie that binds the Indian indentured laborers and their descendants to the land, I read Kimani’s novel as going beyond the metaphor of Vassanji, in his representation of the railway as ushering in a clear and determined process of racial balkanization by the British in its construction through their use of divide-and-rule tactics. This constructed division is belied in the text by a focus on the ways in which the literal railroad is the product of the collective efforts of white, brown, and black hands, and the ways the figurative underground railroad of resistance, including that of the fictionalized Mau Mau Uprising in the text, succeeds only through connections and solidarities between the African and Indian communities. Through his representations of collective resistance and its impacts, Kimani excavates solidarity as the true history of the Kenyan people—locating the drivers of racial and class tension squarely in the realm of elite colonial and postcolonial leadership. I argue that Kimani’s novel presents an alternative imaginary of collectivity, which contradicts both earlier literary and historiographical depictions of Indians in Kenya, making an important and timely intervention into imagining the African collective in the aftermath of the 2007 post-election violence. His project, which aligns with the aims of the Kenya Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission, established after the postelection violence in Kenya, is to recover the silenced histories in Kenya’s past, and further, I argue, provides an alternative account of the period leading up to independence, filling a gap in representations in its focus on non-elite cross-ethnic solidarities and creating a new, more expansive vision of both the national project and what he calls the African collective.

The construction of the railway: naturalizing ethnic and racial divisions in colonial Kenya The railway emerges in historical analysis as the foundational site around which the British negotiated and began to construct the racial and ethnic divisions that would structure the future colonial state. As a result of the manner that the British recruited, coerced, maintained, and divided labor during the railway’s construction, not only was the railway successfully completed, but so too, were particularized regimes of citizenship based on race and ethnicity that historians are now explicitly connecting to the ethnic tensions that culminated in the communal violence of 2007. Thus, returning to this history is an important starting point in understanding contemporary Kenya but especially, to see how writers return to and revise this period in history before and after the post-election violence. Historians have long been making the argument that the railway is a critical site to study in order to understand the construction of racial and ethnic divisions in colonial Kenya. Pushing beyond assumptions arising from theories of development, historians have instead drawn attention to the social and political effects of the railway project that extend beyond the straightforward aims of capitalist development and modernization. Bruce Berman (1990), for example, defines the nature

Derailing the rail  167 of the colonial state in Kenya as semiautonomous, arguing that it was neither the pure instrument of capital nor a wholly autonomous agent. This intervention into understandings of colonial power responds to his perception that “[i]nstead of being analysed as an historical process, African development is characterized as a self-reproducing system imposed to serve the needs of metropolitan capital” (6). Rather than accepting theories of modernization and development that view colonial power as predetermined by capital, Berman is attentive instead to “the complexity, ambiguity, and idiosyncrasy of the history of a single colony” (11). Eunice Sahle (2015) takes this argument even further, analyzing the British imperial project in Kenya through a Fanonian lens and arguing that: [c]ontrary to the modernization view of imperial projects in Africa as civilizing and generating the necessary conditions for the continent to make the transition to capitalist modernity, the colonial state’s efforts to produce and organize local geographies instead generated injustices. She argues that in Kenya, the spatial strategies of colonial rule produced a regime of citizenship based on ethnicity and race while simultaneously organizing economic space through accumulation by dispossession, both of which influence and produce what she calls “geographies of violence” in contemporary Kenya. As the foundational colonial project in Kenya, the railway emerges in historical writing as the site through which the structures of the future colonial (and independent) state were developed and negotiated and importantly returned to after 2007 to make sense of contemporary ethnic tensions. Samuel Ruchman (2017) is explicit in the railway’s foundational role, which he views as “the colonial state’s progenitor,” arguing that, rather than the colonialism of the settler state, it was during the construction of the railway, “with its own purported imperatives and labor demands, that British officials struggled with Africans and Indians, shaping and normalizing modes of exploitation that would remain at the foundation of lived experiences under colonial rule.” Miller and Yaeger (1984) similarly assert that the railway “played a key role in creating the demographic, political, and socioeconomic configurations of modern Kenya,” and that despite its original aims, “[t]he ultimate consequences of the [railway] were much more profound and far-reaching” (12). Specifically, the colonial structures that emerge during the construction of the railway that have such significant impact on the formation of the future colonial state and beyond, came about largely in response to the difficulty in recruiting and retaining African labor. This difficulty arose from the clash between the British wage labor model and cultural practices of African communities away from the coast. Unlike other places in Africa, which had greater and longer contact with European culture and commercialism, “in the central highlands of East Africa, the indigenous communities were largely untouched by Europeanizing influences” (Tignor 1976, 3), including a wage labor market. British responses to the labor shortage during the construction of the railway have two significant consequences. The first was the decision to import Asian indentured labor for the construction of the railway, which had profound effects on

168  Meghan Gorman-DaRif race relations within the colony, and the second was “the manipulation of African labor pools—through taxes, punitive violence, diminished land reserves, and a multitude of other mechanisms—that would structure the experiences of colonial subjects in the decades to come” (Ruchman 2017). Each of these responses variously altered regimes of citizenship based on race and ethnicity that would have long-ranging effects in Kenya. The division of labor on the railway project placed Indian indentured workers above their African counterparts, establishing a rigid hierarchy between the races. In addition to their reliance on Indian labor for the construction of the railway, Sana Aiyar notes that the British “encouraged the settlement of Indians in the new protectorate, using Indian business expertise to create a monetary colonial economy . . . considering Indians subimperialist agents of civilization in the region” (2015, 8). Envisioning the Indian traders as central to the colonial project of economic and cultural modernization, colonial officials considered them “indispensable to the colonial economy as agents of civilizational progress who would stimulate demand for consumer goods among Africans” (31). Inevitably this caused tensions between the African and Asian communities as Indian traders became, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o notes, “a most visible part of the affluent middle class. In such a case the line between racial and class resentment is thin” (2012). The situating of the Asian community in a manner meant to manipulate and articulate African populations into the colonial capitalist economic system as well as to divide along racial lines is linked by Berman to the simultaneous practice of colonial officials of establishing chiefs for the recruitment of labor, which created hierarchies that privileged collaborators and created tensions within and between various Kenyan communities. In addition to the establishment of chiefs to coerce local labor, the British also imposed various policies including the pass system and hut taxes designed to increase wage labor populations. As Samuel Ruchman argues, the railway thus “regularized” and “vindicated the explicit dehumanization of non-European others” in Kenya, and that around its construction, “the colonial state sought to [physically] control African and Indian bodies and the spaces they occupied to maximize economic exploitation and attain political objectives . . . all within a racial hierarchy.” It is precisely such racial hierarchies, which emerge from colonial strategies of control that Eunice Sahle claims “have influenced the emergence of geographies of violence in Kenya in the era of democracy” (2015). She persuasively argues even after independence, because the state was de-racialized but did not fundamentally change in structure and strategies, that: [t]his naturalization of a differentiated regime of citizenship that emerged out of colonial political, historical, and spatial strategies was a core factor in the emergence of foreigner/outsider/other, up country, non-indigenous discourses that characterized Kenya in the period leading to the 2007–2008 political violence. Yet, despite such discourses traced by Sahle, before the outbreak of ethnic violence after the 2007 election in Kenya, there was a general sense that Kenya had

Derailing the rail  169 escaped some of the ethnic and communal tensions associated with other African countries. The violence of 2007 was devastating to Kenyans who didn’t think such violence in their own country was possible and precipitated a return to h­ istory in order to make sense of the roots and causes of such divisions. The Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission, established in the wake of the 2007 post-election violence, for example finds that: The violence, bloodshed and destruction of the [post-election violence] shocked Kenyans into the realization that their nation, long considered an island of peace and tranquility, remained deeply divided since independence from British colonial rule in December 1963. (2013; vol. I, vi) The Commission thus joins Sahle in analyzing the post-election violence as stemming from ethnic tensions generated during the colonial era which persist after independence, and thereby takes up the call, echoed by a wide range of ­postcolonial thinkers, to critically examine this history and its afterlives in the postcolonial state. This reexamination of colonial history, and particularly the history of the railway and its structuring of relationships between Indian and African laborers, as well as Indian and African citizens more broadly, is also taken up by writers in contemporary fiction from Kenya. Specifically, there is a marked shift in the way writers engage with the railway and its impacts on the relationship between the Asian and African communities in Kenya. As I argue in the following analyses of recent fiction on the construction of the railway, while before the post-election violence racial differences remain, and are reinscribed in fiction, the post-election violence has profound effects in the ways authors try to reimagine and rewrite history in ways that aim to expose the constructedness of ethnic and racial tensions and also to intentionally excavate alternative histories of solidarity.

“In-between”: the railway as metaphor for the Asian community in Kenya Fictional attention to the construction of the railway and its impacts on Asian and African communities before 2007, while closely aware of the construction of racial divisions and the intersections between colonial and capitalist exploitation on the railway project, in some ways can be read as reinscribing racial differences. That is, the focus of the authors seems more fixed on elucidating the problems as opposed to imagining alternative relations and solidarities. I analyze M.G. Vassanji’s 2004 novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lall as engaging in precisely this dualism. While the novel effectively establishes intimacies between the Asian and Kenyan communities, as noted by critics, it falls short of reimagining the relationship between the two communities in its repetition and reconstruction of imperialist perceptions of the African community through the eyes of its Asian protagonist. The In-Between World of Vikram Lall centers on

170  Meghan Gorman-DaRif the eponymous character who has fled the country after topping a corruption list in post-independence Kenya. While much of the novel centers on Vikram’s adult life after independence, large sections of the novel, told in flashback, explore the history of Vikram’s family, including his grandfather’s recruitment and labor on the railway. Through its engagement with this long swath of history, the novel importantly foregrounds the Asian community in Kenya, yet it maintains a clear division between racial groups, in a manner I read as affirming rather than subverting the very distinctions the British aimed to establish by dividing labor during the railway’s construction. What the novel does successfully has been cogently articulated by Peter Simatei (2011) who focuses on the representation of the railway as both an originary source of colonial capitalist exploitation and land dispossession and as the tie that binds Indian indentured laborers and their descendants to the land. He suggests, for example, that: In postcolonial Kenya, the railway would achieve a variety of symbols and significance: it would stand as a symbol of colonial conquest and exploitation, of Kenya’s entry into modernity, of Indian affiliation to the land, of their role in ushering in Kenya into this modernity. In a sense, this fluid symbolic status of the railway mirrors the ambivalent relationship of East African Asian experiences to Kenya’s nationalist histories. Indeed, Vikram describes the railroad in precisely this joint fashion—connecting it to the imperial designs of the British and as the source of Indian connection to and even ownership over the land: [T]he railway running from Mombasa to Kampala, proud “Permanent Way” of the British and “Gateway to the African Jewel,” was our claim to the land. Mile upon mile, rail next to thirty-foot rail, fishplate to follow fishplate, it had been laid by my grandfather and his fellow Punjabi labourers. (Vassanji 2004, 16) This passage echoes the intentions of the railway in the words of the British, as its “Permanent Way” and “Gateway to the African Jewel.” Later in the passage such imperialist views of Africa are reiterated in the narrator’s reflection on his grandfather’s group of Indian laborers, who were “recruited from an assortment of towns in northwest India and brought to this alien, beautiful, and wild country at the dawn of the twentieth century” (16). Here Africa is exoticized and its development framed in the discourse of modernization, as the railway is built at the “dawn” of the new century by Indian laborers who build the line “strenuously and persistently six hundred miles from the Swahili coast . . . before bringing it to descend gently and finally to the great lake Victoria-Nyanza that was the heart of what became beloved Africa” (17). By highlighting the connection between British aims and an Indian sense of pride in ushering in this modernizing force that connects them to Kenya, Vassanji’s

Derailing the rail  171 text mirrors Aiyar’s articulation of the subimperial claims of Indians to African land and their pride in participating in the modernizing project of the railway, making this new country “belong” to them and vice versa, not dissimilarly to the way colonial settlers might have viewed their contributions to Kenya. In her history of the importation of labor from India to build the railway, Aiyar highlights the expectation of colonial officials that Indian laborers, merchants, and agriculturalists would be “central to the modernizing mission of the British in Kenya” (2015, 31), a belief that helped to create a three-tiered racial hierarchy which advantaged Indians over Africans under colonial rule. Aiyar suggests that during this time, leading Indian merchants and politicians positioned themselves as “subimperialist colonizers, asserting their rights as imperial citizens to gain parity with European settlers in political representation and land ownership” (12). Connecting their negotiation of identity in Kenya to Gandhi’s claims of imperial citizenship, Aiyar also notes the ways in which Indians in Kenya mobilized concepts of Indian modernity and civilization as opposed to African savagery. In this way, she explains, “the diasporic construction of ‘Indianness’ not only evoked a spatial and civilizational difference between Indians and Africans but also conflated race with civilization” (68). These conceptions of Indian imperial citizenship, both in subimperialist roles and in the distinction drawn between Indian modernity and civilization as opposed to “African savagery” emerge throughout Vassanji’s novel and temper the intimacies the text draws between the African and Asian communities, thus reinscribing rather than revising racial differences. First, the novel in some way flattens the economic positionality of the Asian community in the novel by combining the laborers and mercantilists within the same family, as Vikram’s grandfather is brought to Africa to construct the railway and his mother and father run the store in the village. Second, along with Vikram’s family’s history of work on the railway cited earlier, the symbolic value of the railway for the Indian community extends beyond its original construction when Vikram himself is made an auditor and inspector of the line after independence. In his new role, he fulfills his childhood dream of “speeding on a railway engine from lake to coast, crossing the country back and forth, head and shoulders leaning out proudly to appraise the world flying past before me” (Vassanji 2004, 239). Along with his role as appraiser, Vikram’s representation of what the rail provides him is also telling: [T]he country was mine to explore, on this mysterious metal highway stretching from the coast into the interior, its iron rails reaching to diverse, far-flung and strange places; stories clung to it and ghosts still haunted its path. It could well have been called the Thousand and More Miles of Fantastic Lives and Ghost Stories. (240) Not only does his position on the railway echo narratives of ownership, but the railway itself, and the movement between stations becomes a metaphor for Vikram’s experience of his position as an Indian in Kenya: “[i]n that intermediate

172  Meghan Gorman-DaRif state, between place and place, one life and another life, perhaps there was also a kinship with my own inner nature” (243). Along with the metaphorical significance of the railway, the text’s narration emphasizes the distinction drawn between the Indian and African communities at the moment of the railway’s construction and then later in the vexed moment of independence. In the section detailing the grandfather’s work on the railway, this distinction is drawn through the juxtaposition of the hard work of Indian railway laborers in ushering Kenya into modernity and instances of “African savagery” through violence against the Asian community. In the section focused on the original construction of the railway, the narrator reflects: [O]ur people had sweated on it, had died on it: they had been carried away in their weary sleep or even wide awake by man-eating lions of magical ferocity and cunning, crushed under avalanches of blasted rock, speared and macheted as proxies of the whites by angry Kamba, Kikuyu, and Nandi warriors. (16–17) The division between the communities is clearly established in the use of “our” to define the Asian laborers in contrast with the “angry” African warriors. Additionally, the focus on primitive weapons such as spears and machetes reiterates colonialist narratives of African atavism and ranges the Asian laborers as clearly separated from such uncivilized violence. The implicit inability of Africans to distinguish between colonial oppressors and Indian laborers, who become “proxies of the whites” in the previous quotation, takes on new but related relevance later in the novel in Vikram’s articulation of his own frustrated feelings of betrayal at the moment of independence. Here I was, a young Asian graduate in an African country, with neither the prestige of whiteness or Europeanness behind me, nor the influence and members of a local tribe to back me, but carrying instead the stigma from a generalized recent memory of an exclusive race of brown “Shylocks” who had collaborated with the colonizers. What could I hope to achieve in public service? Black chauvinism and reverse racism were the order of the day against Asians. (238–9) For Vikram, the problem is the binary and his positionality “in-between” white and black in terms of belonging but also in terms of power where race and class intersect. After independence and as corrupt African officials take over from their colonial predecessors, Lall is cast as once again taking up the mantle of the middleman—a privileged position between the elite and corrupt politicians making money off of foreign investment rather than directing funding the people, who continue to struggle under this new form of expropriative capitalism. As Simatei notes, after independence, Vikram, like his parents and grandparents before him, is cast as a “middle [man], but this time of the corrupt African elite

Derailing the rail  173 and foreign businessman” and that this privilege, “like the colonial privilege his parents enjoyed . . . is founded on a shaky alliance. Used then dumped by the political elite, he flees to Canada as if to re-enact the earlier exodus by his father’s generation” (2011). Simatei’s reading of the novel is recuperative in its analysis of such representations of the Asian community, and he concludes by suggesting that, “the novel often annexes the nationalist discourse and subjects it to its polyphonic structure, and when this occurs, the novel’s latent hybridity decenters homogenous nationalist visions.” In Simatei’s view, the novel represents “heterogenous social formations within the nation-space and amplifies such formations as structures within which emancipatory politics can be organized.” While I follow Simatei’s argument that posits the significance of decentering “homogenous nationalist visions,” I do not espouse his final conclusion about the emancipatory potential of Vassanji’s text, when read after the 2007 post-election violence. While Vassanji’s novel importantly focuses on the intimacy between Indian and Kenyan communities highlighted by Aiyar and Kenya’s “heterogenous social formations” as noted by Simatei, it can also be read as reinscribing racial difference in its consistent representation of the “in-betweenness” and ambiguity of the Asian community in Kenya, particularly when read side by side with Peter Kimani’s novel The Dance of the Jakaranda (2017). This can be explained in part due to the separation in their publication dates, where Vassanji is engaging with an exploration of the Indian community in Kenya during the transitional period of independence in a context of the expulsion of and biases against the South Asian community during this time, in Kenya and also famously in Amin’s Uganda.2 Indeed, Gaurav Desai has argued for the centrality of M.G. Vassanji’s writing in the East African Asian literary tradition, claiming that The Gunny Sack “occupies a similar inaugural role . . . that Simon Gikandi has argued for Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in the tradition of African fiction as a whole” (2013, 15). The significance of Vassanji’s writing, Desai suggests, [i]s not only the weight and substance that he gives to a cross-generational ethnic history, it is also his insistence that ethnic identities matter, that they must be recognized and engaged with before they can be set aside for the sake of larger, cross-ethnic national imaginaries. (173) This argument can be directly aligned with the work of The In-Between Life of Vikram Lall, which, focusing as it does on the transitional moment of independence, seeks to recognize and engage with the challenges faced by Asian citizens of Kenya at that time when policies began to turn against them and in light of the contemporaneous expulsion of Asians by Amin in Uganda. In short, the emphasis on ethnic and racial difference that emerges in Vassanji has many positive readings, overall, his writing makes important interventions in, possibly even creating a particular literary canon within East African fiction. However, while during the early 2000s, when Vassanji wrote this novel, a focus on differences may have had productive ends, there is a marked shift in Kimani’s novel relating to

174  Meghan Gorman-DaRif representations of the relationship between the Asian and African communities, which covers a similar period quite differently after the violence of 2007. While Vassanji deploys the railroad as a metaphor for the in-betweenness of the Asian community in Kenya in a way that made an important intervention to the particularity of the postcolonial moment after independence, Kimani makes the railway a metaphor for the possibilities of collective resistance to colonial and postcolonial capitalist exploitation in response to the specificity of the postelection violence and the necessity of recuperating a multiethnic Kenyan identity in its aftermath. In its emphasis on solidarity across racial and ethnic boundaries, Kimani’s novel is a timely intervention into reimagining the African collective in the aftermath of 2007.

“The product of collective efforts”: The railway as metaphor of interracial solidarity in resistance Kimani has explicitly stated the impact of the post-election violence on the writing of the novel, which he began in 2007 but “didn’t touch . . . for four years as he struggled with the weighty question of what was making Kenyans turn on their neighbors” (Grubel 2017). His representation of the history of the railway’s construction then, must be read through the lens of the post-election violence and the imperative emerging in its wake to examine the constructedness of ethnic and racial difference, particularly at such a foundational moment of colonial history, which historians have been more and more explicit in connecting to contemporary divisions and violence. In explaining his engagement with the railway project, Kimani argues it is “a metaphor of the segregated society that the colonialists build in Kenya. In a certain sense, the railroad presages racial segregation as official policy in the colony” (Magaziner 2017). His novel is attentive to the long arc of Kenyan history since colonialism, with sections of the narrative shuttling between the building of the railroad by the British in 1895–1901 and the period leading to independence in 1963. It explores the dynamics of race, identity, and imperial exploitation through the connections between its characters, including Edward McDonald, the British railway superintendent who oversees the work of the railroad and stays on in the Rift Valley after independence, Babu Salim, one of the thirty thousand indentured Indian workers engaged in the construction of the railway, and Nyundo, an African drummer who mobilizes the workers and later joins the resistance against the British. Kimani has stated that the novel is centered on race relations and the impacts of imperialism on the “African collective” which “the novel seeks to confirm” (Carrol 2017), and his book is a prescient exploration of issues of identity and belonging, marking a new interest in examining the non-African communities of Kenya. Kimani states that some Indians were “complicit in the establishment of the Kenya colony, and enjoyed more privileges in colonial Kenya. Yet others fought to end British colonization of Kenya. It is the latter group that my book seeks to acknowledge” (Magaziner 2017). In its focus on solidarities across race, I argue the novel defamiliarizes notions of ethnic

Derailing the rail  175 tension in Africa, highlighting the colonial roots of these divisions, and representing alternative versions of collective resistance. The book insists on exposing the connection between colonial capitalist exploitation and divide-and-rule practices for labor extraction in the construction of the railway. The actions of McDonald routinely emphasize the creation of regimes of citizenship based on ethnicity and race that Eunice Sahle claims are the outcome of colonial spatial strategies. Originally, these strategies are focused on labor extraction, laid out in a letter from McDonald’s predecessor, who variously suggests taxation, the appointment of chiefs, the killing of livestock, and who reminds both McDonald and the reader that, “when all else fails, violence is still a viable option. There is no better medicine to native obstinacy than a good beating” (128). After an early moment of resistance from the railway laborers, McDonald is described as having [p]icked up many useful lessons . . . the most crucial being that brute force was the only language that the locals and newly arrived Indians understood. And to ensure the locals and Indians did not join hands, McDonald formulated what he called a “divide and rule policy.” (128) The novel comes back to this again and again, highlighting the conscious and consistent manner in which McDonald’s character is “actively balkanizing [African and Indian laborers] along racial lines” (186). Yet while the intention of the British colonialists through the figure of McDonald is clear, Kimani offers alternatives throughout the text, pushing back on teleological understandings of history. Even as the text lingers on McDonald’s divide-and-rule practices, it simultaneously gestures toward the fundamental connection between laborers from different ethnic and racial communities, opening up the possibility of alternative versions of relationality between the workers: “[t]he different racial groups, Master had written in one of his dispatches to London, remained separate like the rail tracks. Yet the rail was a product of their collective efforts—of black and brown and white hands” (9). The book combines this attention to alternative connections with an emphasis on the radicalization of British violence in response to resistance, rather than representing the completion of the railway as the only possible outcome. At a key moment of unified resistance in the text, nine villages join together to address the threat of the railway construction. The kaya elder addresses the crowd, announcing, “We have gathered here because we know there is strength in unity, and two heads are better than one. A hundred heads are better than ten. We are here because our collective future is under threat” (146). The emphasis on the collective is further developed in this moment of resistance when Nyundo, a worker on the railway, inspired by the strength of the kaya elders in mobilizing the community decides to switch sides, and declares, “He would work for the kaya elders and the community,” as well as the implied reasons for his choice, as the text reads, “some whispered he had been emboldened by the Indian workers’

176  Meghan Gorman-DaRif act of defiance against McDonald at Fort Jesus, and now the kaya showdown in which the elders had carried the day” (155). This scene then, establishes the possibility of an African collective that transcends ethnic and racial divisions in its inclusion of a wide variety of villages, African railway workers, and instances of Indian resistance to the British imperial project. Both by highlighting the potential of unified resistance against colonial projects and simultaneously drawing attention to the radicalization of colonial violence to control the laboring populations, the novel unsettles teleological assumptions about the railway’s ultimate success. Immediately after the earlier-mentioned moment of solidarity and resistance, McDonald makes the decision to ring the kaya with dynamite and blow up a large part of the community, emphasizing the willingness of the British to complete the railway project and by any means. McDonald’s act of violence against the community stems from his belief that “[w]hat the natives needed is what his trainers at Sandhurst called a short, sharp shock.” (156). This action is represented in the text as clearly a terrorist act: “[f]rom his soldierly experience, McDonald knew the destruction of a place of worship was considered an act of terror—which was prohibited in conventional warfare—but nothing about the locals was conventional” (179). Though state terror succeeds in this instance, it is important that Kimani also narrates the preceding moment of collective resistance, highlighting the extremity of violence that was required from the British in order to overwhelm the resolve of the community. Even the success of the action is left open to revision as the scene ends with the note, “[w]hat was most evidence was the deafening silence from the community, its fighting spirit momentarily crushed” (157), which emphasizes the discrete nature of the success and the possibility of further resistance and fighting spirit. The book consistently excavates elided histories and ignored moments of resistance. Immediately following a letter from a colonial administrator that outlines the success of “divide-and-rule and other forms of unconventional warfare” (174) is the note by the narrator that: [W]hat Captain John Adams omitted in his report was the fact that Chief Lonana’s band of warriors, spurred on by the strong medicine of Kioni—the seer who had warned about invading white butterflies long before the onset of the British—halted the railway reconnaissance for one whole year as they defended their land. (176) The inclusion of these revisions to colonial narratives in the text resists and unravels the success of the railway project, emphasizing alternative moments of effective communal resistance. In a similar metafictional moment, almost an aside, the narrator counsels the reader: The writing on the wall of the British Museum, dripping with bronze arrogance in that hallowed space where the supreme truth is supposed to reside, proclaims: IT IS NOT UNCOMMON FOR A COUNTRY TO CREATE

Derailing the rail  177 A RAILWAY, BUT THIS LINE ACTUALLY CREATED A COUNTRY. This was probably true; what the statement concealed, however, were the obstacles that nearly derailed the rail, and those men who nearly brought the construction to a halt. Those are the stories that never made it into the museums, like the story of Nyundo, who initially harkened the call of the British, but changed sides after the destruction of the kaya. Then there is Babu. (201) The overall message here is the necessity of counterbalancing what is recorded as history, in this case, colonial narratives invested in erasing and concealing “the obstacles that nearly derailed the rail.” Additionally, and importantly, this resistance again is directly connected to Babu, the avatar of the Indian community working in solidarity with African anti-colonial agents. Babu emerges in the text as a character who struggles with his identity but ultimately puts aside questions of racial difference in order to make the ethical choice to join the resistance. His moment of choice occurs when he leaves the railway and travels by foot across the country, seeing for the first time the big picture of the colonial project and connecting what is happening in Kenya to what happened under colonialism in India: Babu had a sudden revelation. He had seen similar enterprises in Punjab— what was pending here was the means to ship away what the land could produce. That’s where he and the others came in—they were to lay the rail to transport the crops to the coast. This was the turning point in Babu’s life . . . It was in that walk through the bush that Babu made a silent vow to do something. What, exactly, he did not know. He just knew he had to do something about the white domination taking root before his very eyes. (233) What Babu does, is join the anti-colonial resistance movement, which becomes an alternative railroad in the text. Nyundo explains, “Our organized resistance went underground. Unlike yours, our railroad was not built using iron; it was laid in the hearts of people who were guided by a desire to do what’s right.” Babu’s choice is thus explicitly framed as moral, and Nyundo’s use of “our” in this passage directly connects the Indian community with African anti-colonial resistance, when he names Babu as a key figure in the resistance movement, “His code name in the forest was Guka. Patriot of the highest order. And when the history of this country is written, a chapter will be devoted to him” (286). Through his excavation not only of the existence but the efficacy of solidarity in resistance across race, Kimani rewrites not only colonial history, but later histories of anti-colonial resistance that emerge and are rewritten after independence. Toward the end of the novel, Kimani emphasizes the invisibility of Babu in the history of newly independent Kenya. Gathenji, a local in Nakuru, where McDonald and Babu have both settled after the completion of the railway, says to Babu, “You know, now that we are about to celebrate our independence, you stand tall

178  Meghan Gorman-DaRif as one of our fathers of the nation.” “Not so loud,” Babu cautioned. “Some don’t think of fatherhood as a shared responsibility” (31). Importantly, these conceptions of fatherhood and the possibility of shared responsibility reference not only colonial history, but also the revised history of independent Kenya and the political revision of the history of the Mau Mau Uprising. At independence, Babu’s role in the anti-colonial movement will again be invisibilized as “Africa for Africans” becomes the refrain of the de-racialized, but otherwise similarly structured postcolonial state. As Vijay Prasad suggests in his analysis of the third world project, the aspirational unity that emerged in anti-colonial struggles was swiftly undone by the political elite who recognized once in power that, “the unity that had been preserved at all costs became a liability” (2007, xvii). By ending the novel at the moment of independence and as histories are merely differently elided compared to the colonial past, Kimani draws attention to how dominant discourses work to erase cross-racial and cross-ethnic unity through both eras of Kenya’s history. “Not being visible is not the same as not being there” (21), Babu tells fellow Indian workers, and Kimani is intent in the closing of the novel at reiterating the stories that are forgotten. In the final page of the novel, Nakuru is described as “the cradle of mankind, the point of dispersal for all humanity, irrespective of race, color, or creed” (342), and the narrator, as in the rest of the novel, reminds the reader of those people and events that have been forgotten in postcolonial history, “the man who Nakuru forgot is Babu . . . Babu’s memorable assertion upon watching the construction of the original Jakaranda in 1901—that not being seen is not the same as not being there—remains a succinct truth” (341). Adding to this, the novel ends by gesturing to the histories that even its own pages have not managed to resuscitate: Interestingly, no one remembers the women behind the pioneers, or their children. Just as no one remembers that the train, gliding along twice every week, rocking slowly, gently smoothly, penetrating the beautiful countryside before squeaking its horn in joyful ejaculation, made a forcible entry into their land, raping and tearing it viciously, once upon a time. (342) Tying the Indian community with gender and the elided material history of the railway, the novel ends with an imperative to remember.

Conclusion The post-election violence of 2007 shifted Kenyan authors’ perceptions of their responsibility as writers in its aftermath. In the opening editorial to Kenyan literary journal Kwani? 5 (2008), which centers on narratives related to the violence of 2007, Billy Kahora writes, “it is our hope that, taken together, these testimonials articulate an essential quality all countries have to accept before they can work as a nation: unity” (Vol. 1, 22). In the editorial opening the second volume, Kahora enjoins his fellow writers to reject the “amnesiac collusion” of Kenyan public life

Derailing the rail  179 (vol. 2, 9). Binyavinga Wainana similarly casts the role of the writer as resistant and necessarily centered on facing the contemporary reality of Kenya: It is being suggested everywhere that the Post Election madness was a sort of anomaly, let us go back to where we were and it will be alright. As writers, we have said no to this: we have to look at what happened in the full-face. (vol. 2, 17) In my reading of Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, I have suggested that representations of the Asian community in Kenya remain centered on racial difference in a way that can be seen to reinscribe rather than decenter dominant nationalist narratives, even as the novel importantly brings Asian characters to the fore. It is in Kimani’s Dance of the Jakaranda that I see the imperatives of Kahora and Wainana emerge as the novel shifts from racial difference to interracial solidarity, the oft-neglected element of the history of Indians in Kenya (Aiyar 2015, 3) and faces the realities of the colonial past and its afterlives on geographies of violence in contemporary Kenya (Sahle 2015) in the “full-face.” In his focus on interracial solidarity, Kimani not only takes up the call for revised histories of Kenya and consideration of the constructedness of racial divisions, but additionally, by centering the narrative on the Asian community in the colonial past, he defamiliarizes contemporary ethnic tension while making an appeal to solidarity and unity across Kenyan communities. Through his representations of collective resistance and its impacts, Kimani excavates solidarity as the true history of the Kenyan people—locating the drivers of racial and class tension squarely in the realm of elite colonial and postcolonial leadership and providing an important intervention into recent narratives that focus on ethnic tensions as opposed to the material histories of land dispossession or cross-community solidarity in resistance.

Notes 1 As Daniel Branch explains in Kenya: Between Hope and Despair (2011), violence emerged after the 2007 contested election at first based on delays of results and irregularities within the election more broadly, but eventually moving into planned attacks on homes and communities perceived to have supported “the other side,” followed by counter-attacks, which ultimately left more than thousand Kenyans dead, and innumerable others raped, displaced, and traumatized. Branch suggests that despite long histories of land dispossession, “in the heat of the moment, of all these different factors, it was ethnicity that was seized up on by many Kenyans in an attempt to understand events” (275). 2 Sana Aiyar highlights the fear of the impact of independence on the part of the Asian community in Kenya and cites as a consequence “The exodus of approximately 33,000 Indians who emigrated from Kenya to Britain between September 1967 and February 1968 after the passing of two legislative bills aimed at circumscribing Indian economic activity” (263), though she notes “Kenyatta’s policies were less extreme than either those witnessed in Zanzibar during this time” and also “quite different from the expulsion of Indians from Uganda under Idi Amin just two years later” (271).

180  Meghan Gorman-DaRif

Bibliography Aiyar, Sana. 2015. Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Berman, Bruce. 1990. Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination. London: James Currey. Branch, Daniel. 2011. Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, 1963–2011. New Haven: Yale Univerity Press. Carroll, Tobias. 2017. “Nations, Railroads, and History: Peter Kimani on Writing ‘Dance of the Jakaranda.’ ” Volume 1 Brooklyn, July 6. Desai, Gaurav. 2013. Commerce With the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press. Grubel, Alix. 2017. “A Chat with Peter Kimani, Author of Dance of the Jakaranda.” Kenya Buzz, March 16. Kahora, Billy, ed. 2008. Hung’arisha Haswa! Kwani? 5. Vol. 1. Nairobi: Kwani Trust. Kimani, Peter. 2017. Dance of the Jakaranda. New York: Akashic Books. Magaziner, Dan. 2017. “The Work of Historical Fiction.” Africa is a Country, April 12, 2017. Miller, Norman, and Rodger Yeager. 1984. Kenya: The Quest for Prosperity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Prashad, Vijay. 2007. The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. New York: The New Press. Ruchman, Samuel G. 2017. “Colonial Construction: Labor Practices and Precedents Along the Uganda Railway, 1893–1903.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 50 (2): 251–73. Sahle, Eunice N. 2015. “Fanon and Geographies of Political Violence in the Context of Democracy in Kenya.” The Black Scholar 42 (3–4): 45–57. Simatei, Peter. 2011. “Diasporic Memories and National Histories in East African Asian Writing.” Research in African Literatures 42 (3): 56–67. Thiong'o, Ngũgĩ wa. 2012. “What Is Asia to Me? Looking East from Africa.” World Literature Today 86 (4): 14–18. Tignor, Robert L. 1976. The Colonial Transformation of Kenya: The Kamba, Kikuyu and Maasai from 1900 to 1939. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission. 2013. The Final Report of the Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission of Kenya. Vol. I. Vassanji, M. G. 2004. The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. New York: Vintage Books. Word Count: 8432.

10 Coloniality, knowledge production, and racialized socio-economic inequality in South Africa Savo Heleta If we have a mere change of face of those in governing positions what is likely to happen is that black people will continue to be poor, and you will see a few blacks filtering through into the so-called bourgeoisie. Our society will be run almost as of yesterday. So for meaningful change to appear there needs to be an attempt at reorganizing the whole economic pattern and economic policies within this particular country. Steve Biko (1978, 169)

In the 1970s, in the heyday of apartheid, Steve Biko, anti-apartheid activist and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement who was murdered by the apartheid regime in 1977, predicted that South Africa might in the future see changes that would not improve the socio-economic conditions for the majority of the long-suffering black population (1978, 169). To a large extent, this is what happened in post-apartheid South Africa. The political change that ended apartheid in 1994 brought to power the African National Congress (ANC), led by Nelson Mandela. However, this did not result in economic transformation and redistribution of resources and wealth aimed at redress after centuries of colonial and apartheid racist oppression (Farkash 2015, 12). In South Africa, the colonial conquest, establishment of a settler colony, and exploitation of the black majority through racial oppression, white supremacy, and capitalist accumulation before 1994, and the maintenance of the oppressive status quo via the neoliberal economic model after the end of apartheid, have created one of the most unequal societies in the world. Today, nearly half of South Africa’s population lives in chronic poverty; if the transient poor and the vulnerable who face the risk of slipping into poverty at any time are added to this figure, about 75 percent of South Africans, majority of whom are black, either live in or are constantly threatened with poverty (World Bank 2018, xviii). The high levels of poverty and inequality are an enduring legacy of colonialism and apartheid racism; the majority of black people is still poor while the economy is largely in the hands of the whites, as it was the case during the colonial and apartheid days (Clark 2014, 93–94; Gibson 2017, 581; World Bank 2018, xxii).

182  Savo Heleta The economic structures of power and control, rooted in the past racialized capitalist system, persist even after the formal end of apartheid (Terreblanche 2002, 20; Mabasa 2017, 99). The end of apartheid was in many ways “a performative episode within a prescriptive continuous historical structure of coloniality” (Ndlovu 2018, 97). Coloniality here refers to the structures of power and influence that survive the formal end of colonialism or the end of the formalized apartheid system in the case of South Africa in the 1990s. While the political regime has changed and the country has since 1994 been a democracy, the capitalist and neoliberal organization of the economy remain intact. The capital, neoliberal economic system and the market forces did not support the post-1994 rhetoric of equality and redress; rather, the racially exploitative trajectory of the South African economy continues unabetted (Clark 2014, 106). The country remains torn apart by the “disparities born of the structural injustices of capitalism, themselves entrenched by a legal system of racism, which over a long period of white minority domination guaranteed white privileges” (Magubane 2001, 31). Former South African President, Thabo Mbeki (1998, 68), describes post-apartheid South Africa as “two worlds in one country”: South Africa is a country of two nations. One of these nations is white, relatively prosperous, regardless of gender or geographic dispersal. It has ready access to a developed economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure . . . The second and larger nation of South Africa is black and poor . . . This nation lives under conditions of a grossly underdeveloped economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure. Colonial and apartheid education and knowledge were key in the process of subjugation, racist oppression, and economic exploitation in the past. Despite the end of apartheid in 1994, Eurocentric knowledge, rooted in colonial and apartheid education, remains the norm, displacing all other knowledges, epistemologies, and schools of thought at the country’s universities and in the society as a whole. Coloniality and Eurocentric domination have contributed to the maintenance of structural imbalances and deeply embedded inequalities. This has been deliberate, ideological and by design, aimed at the maintenance of white and capitalist domination in the economy. The lack of fundamental transformation and decolonization at South African universities, and in particular in the way economics is taught, is one of the reasons the socio-economic change in the country has been painfully slow. The struggle to dismantle coloniality is an existential struggle for the majority of South Africa’s population. For this to happen, understanding the country’s history of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation, working hand-in-hand to enrich the white minority at the expense of the black majority, is paramount. It is also crucial to understand the racialized roots of South Africa’s knowledge production at the institutions of higher learning and how this links to the ongoing racialized and deep-rooted socio-economic inequality and poverty. Here, teaching of economics ought to fundamentally change and focus on critical interrogation

Coloniality and socio-economic inequality  183 of country’s economic history and racist exploitation on one side and the exploration of alternatives to the capital accumulation and neoliberal economics, on the other side. The first part of the chapter will focus on the history of colonial conquest, land theft, white supremacy, apartheid oppression, capitalist exploitation, and inequality. The following section will discuss the end of the apartheid and the political changes that did not result in the economic transformation. This section will also show that, to a large extent, after 1994, South Africa has replaced the racist apartheid system with coloniality. The next section will illustrate how knowledge and education were used during colonial and apartheid days for domination and dehumanization of the black majority. Despite the political changes in 1994, the hegemonic colonial and apartheid-era knowledge continues to shape the ways of knowing and understanding of social, political, economic, and other relations in South Africa. The last section will show how this plays out in the field of economics and how the dominance of neoclassical and conservative teaching of economics is undermining the prospects for real socio-economic changes. The chapter will end with a call for dismantling of the Eurocentric hegemonic canon and decolonization of knowledge in order to come up with alternatives to the oppressive status quo.

Colonialism, apartheid, and capitalist exploitation In order to understand the current state of economic and social affairs in South Africa, it is crucial to briefly discuss the history of colonial conquest, land theft, white supremacy, apartheid oppression, capitalist exploitation, and inequality. The Dutch East India Company set up a stronghold in the Cape Peninsula, in the southernmost tip of Africa, in 1652. The purpose of the outpost in the Cape was the creation of a half-way stop for the European colonizers on the route to India. Over time, the small stronghold expanded and attracted European settlers, whose quest for land and resources led to conflicts with black people who lived in the area (Gottschalk 1971, 9–10; Magubane 2001, 5). The discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886 led to the complete takeover of the territory of what is today South Africa by the British colonizers. The establishment of a settler colony led to the theft and expropriation of land previously in the hands of black people for the benefit of the white conquerors (Dladla 2018, 438) and “the capital hungry colonial project” (Farkash 2015, 14). In 1910, white settlers created the Union of South Africa, institutionalizing white political domination and a racial capitalist economic system (Terreblanche 2015, 38). In 1948, the Afrikaner National Party came to power and established the apartheid system, entrenching institutionalized racial segregation and white supremacist exploitation and oppression. The apartheid regime created a “vast legal superstructure to enforce separation” along the racial lines (Waldmeir 1998, 10) and formally took away black people’s political and economic rights. It is important to highlight, however, that while apartheid entrenched white supremacy and racist oppression, the roots of segregation and the white supremacist project were

184  Savo Heleta in the British colonial policies (Gqola 2001, 96; Acemoglu and Robinson 2013, 265; More 2017, 131). Magubane (2001, 3) defines white supremacy and racism as the expressions and measures employed by the European colonizers in the process of conquering, colonizing, and exploiting the colonized peoples. In South Africa, racist expressions and measures included the conquest, land theft, slavery, dehumanization, exploitation, brutal oppression, and denial of basic rights and citizenship to the black majority, to mention a few. While colonialism and apartheid in South Africa differed in many aspects, their ultimate goals were the same: maintenance of the hegemonic white power, exploitation of the country for the benefit of the whites, and oppression of the black majority (Subreenduth, 2006, 618). Terreblanche (2002, 128) points out that one of the main aspects of apartheid was a systemic exploitation of black people through racial capitalism. For More (2017, 130–31), apartheid was a “colonialist, capitalist, religious and racial ideology designed to ensure the domination and subjugation” of the black majority by the white settlers. Apartheid was “colonialism of a special type,” which saw the country evolve from a colonial possession into an independent settler colony where the black majority was oppressed by the white settler minority (African National Congress 1997). Mamdani (1996, 8) adds that apartheid was nothing more than a “generic form of the colonial” system of exploitation and subjugation. Rodney (2012: 7) sees capitalism as a concentration of the ownership of the means of production among the few, coupled with the unequal distribution of the products of labor. In South Africa, the ownership of the economy and the means of production were concentrated among the white minority, with the black majority being exploited as cheap labor. The “racialized capitalist political economy” of colonial and apartheid regimes distributed resources and economic benefits based on the racist notion of white supremacy (Mabasa 2017, 96). This way, the racist regimes, through their policies and in collaboration with the capitalist private sector at home and abroad, helped the white minority develop, prosper, and accumulate wealth at the expense of the black majority. From the perspective of the colonizers, apartheid architects and their followers, black people in South Africa were not considered as human beings (Gordon 2015, 22) but as “things” that could be exploited for the economic benefit of the whites (ibid., 69). This, in the eyes of the white settlers, justified conquest and land grab and centuries of racist oppression and exploitation. Through the use of brutal violence and fearmongering, whites created for themselves a “special position of privilege” (Biko 1978, 80). As Johnstone (1970, 132) points out, the social and economic structure of white supremacy was maintained through racist oppression and discrimination: The core of these measures consists of those which most basically restrict the access of Africans to the means and possession of economic power, namely the denial of labor organization and education to Africans, and the unequal distribution of income which reflects and further consolidates this distribution of power.

Coloniality and socio-economic inequality  185 The colonial land theft and legislation—enacted through the Land Act of 1913— that took the majority of land in South Africa from black people were the “foundation for white colonial and capitalist rule . . . as without the total control and dominance of the land, white industry would fail to expand and flourish” (Farkash 2015, 14). The white ownership of 87 percent of the land in South Africa led to the “patterns of control and inequality” that would last for centuries (Gottschalk 1971, 19). The land theft cramped the black majority, which made up about 80 percent of the country’s population, in the small section of the territory known as homelands or Bantustans. Homelands were “a patchwork of ethnic states covering only 13 percent of the landmass” (Waldmeir 1998, 11). As an outcome of deliberate apartheid policies, homelands would remain poor and underdeveloped in order to maintain the source of cheap African labor to be employed in white capital’s industries (Mamdani 1996, 6; Rodney 2012, 233; Acemoglu and Robinson 2013, 267). The mining, farming, and other emerging white industries recruited desperate people from the homelands to work in “white” South Africa and “administer to the needs of the white man” (Waldmeir 1998, 161). There, they were placed in townships, which were squalid, crowded, and underdeveloped areas built on the outskirts of cities and towns and out of sight of the whites (ibid., 15). Dispossessed, landless, and without basic rights, black South Africans were reduced “into helots and servants of the white minority, whether English or Afrikaners” (Magubane 2001, 24). For centuries, black people were exploited, repressed, and “excluded from ownership and entrepreneurial participation in the politico-economic system” established to maintain white supremacy and the rule of the white minority (Terreblanche 2015, 38). A report by the World Bank (2018, 20) on the persistence of poverty and inequality in South Africa highlights that: The race-based exclusionary policies of apartheid prevented most of South Africa’s population from participating in meaningful economic activities and accessing basic public services. This resulted in unequal distribution of resources, which led to high levels of poverty among marginalized groups. Johnstone (1970, 126) argues that one of the main goals of apartheid was to “maximize economic development both for the sake of white prosperity and for the material protection of white supremacy.” Race “was the determining factor in what one got, how one lived and how long one would live” (More 2017, 32). Political repression during apartheid was “closely linked to economic exploitation. . . [and] the social position that individuals occupied in life was defined by writ in racial terms” (African National Congress 1997). Consequently, the prosperity and power of white settler minority was solely based on the systematic oppression and exploitation of black people (Johnstone 1970, 136; Terreblanche 2002, 5). Racist ideology and policies were used by both the colonial and apartheid state for reproduction of capitalist mode of production (Wolpe 1972, 429). Racism was the “operative instrument” in the systemic exploitation of cheap black labor for the benefit of the capital and the white settler minority (Magubane 2001, 24).

186  Savo Heleta The dominance of capitalism in South Africa emerged initially through the British imperialism and then further developed through the “internal capitalist development” driven by the white business interests within the country during apartheid (Wolpe 1972, 431). Apartheid system, in particular, was a mechanism for the maintenance of a “high rate of capitalist exploitation through a system which guarantees a cheap and controlled labor force” (ibid., 433). The exploitation of black labor by the white capitalists allowed mining and other industries to grow exponentially and earn enormous profits for the white minority. As Farkash (2015, 15) points out, “by paying Africans scant wages and extracting as much labor and energy from them as possible, various mining companies and conglomerates . . . were able to extract unprecedented super profits.” The capitalists in South Africa benefited from the colonial and apartheid laws that subjected black majority “to some of the most draconian and tyrannical labor controls ever developed in modern history” (Johnstone 1970, 136). While the capitalists from time to time voiced their opposition to the restrictions of labor mobility, they never went as far as openly challenging the racist and exploitative system (Waldmeir 1998, 29). Lemon (2004, 62) adds that, even though some of the apartheid regime’s policies did not necessarily support the capitalist accumulation and profit-making, the “aims of apartheid were consistent with those of capitalism.” In fact, the capital was never against the apartheid system and exploitation of black people; the only issues were the policies which directly clashed with profitmaking and capital accumulation. Johnstone (1970, 136) argues that capitalists, rather than being undermined and limited by labor controls, profited from cheap black labor who had no rights and was not allowed to organize. According to the African National Congress (1997), there existed a “symbiotic link” between racist oppression and capitalism in South Africa, with the sole purpose to exploit black people for the benefit of the white supremacist project. The fact that the economic disparities between capitalists and white workers did not lead to collaboration between white and black labor represented one of the core structures of white supremacy in apartheid South Africa. While to some extent exploited by the capitalist system, white labor was still enormously privileged and earned far more when compared to the black labor (Gottschalk 1971, 7–8; Terreblanche 2002, 13; Rodney 2012, 152; More 2017, 239–40). Black workers were deliberately prevented by the apartheid legislation from competing with whites over high-skill jobs in order for white workers to enjoy higher wages and not have to worry about competition (Acemoglu and Robinson 2013, 269). In 1911, for example, white workers earned on average 11.5 times more than black workers; this increased to 14.5 times in 1951 and 17.5 times in 1966. In 1969, the average per capita income for black people was 8 percent of that of the whites (Johnstone 1970, 135). Terreblanche (2015, 38) adds that between 1910 and 1980, the per capita income of black people was never more than 10 percent of the per capita income of the whites. What united the white working class, capitalists, and the ruling elites was their racism, the belief in white supremacy, and the goal to maintain the rule of white settler minority over the black majority (Johnstone 1970, 130). Finally, the

Coloniality and socio-economic inequality  187 relations between capitalists, apartheid government, its policies, and ‘the core structure of white supremacy’ were of collaborative nature; if there were issues between them, these were mainly about the distribution of benefits (Johnstone 1970, 139). Most importantly, while the English and Afrikaner settlers had a difficult history in the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century they established a form of a truce in order not to “allow their quarrels to disrupt the racial order of white supremacy” (Magubane 2001, 26) and to maintain capital accumulation at the expense of the black majority.

End of apartheid and the beginning of coloniality Coloniality is the continuation of domination by “colonial cultures and structures in the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system” long after formal colonialism has ended (Grosfoguel 2007, 219). After the formal end of the colonial rule, structural “capture” remained in many former colonies, fueling underdevelopment, poverty, inequality, and many other societal ills. This ensured that the previously colonized peoples “had freed themselves on one level but . . . remained victims of their past on another” (Said 1989, 207). Grosfoguel (2007, 219) adds that “one of the most powerful myths of the twentieth century was the notion that the elimination of colonial administrations amounted to the decolonization of the world.” In the same vain, the end of the apartheid rule did not amount to decolonization and true liberation of South Africa and its people, as the structural inequalities rooted in colonial and apartheid racism, oppression, and exploitation remained deeply entrenched in the country. During apartheid, the South African economy was an exploitative racial capitalist market economy (Terreblanche 2002, 80), “with constraints and policy parameters determined by whites and for whites” (Lowenberg 2014, 148). Despite the end of apartheid and the political change that the country has seen since 1994, the economy continues to be determined by the capital, mainly in the hands of the whites, as well as the needs and interests of foreign investors. As Farkash (2015, 13) points out: The socioeconomic system that remains in place in South Africa can be characterized as a form of neo-colonialism, where economic and social power remains in the hands of white capitalists and the white minority population under the guise of black political control. Lemon (2004, 64) writes that the South African capitalists “had long accepted many imperfections, from their standpoint, in the economic micro-environment of apartheid, mitigating their effects through accommodative relationships” with the apartheid governments. However, when the external influences and international sanctions in the 1980s changed the macro-environment and negatively impacted the profits of the capitalists, they decided to engage with the antiapartheid movements and promote talks that would ultimately end the white minority rule. In turn, the 1994 settlement would greatly benefit the white capital,

188  Savo Heleta which continues to make large profits; in most cases, the capitalist elites have seen accumulation and profits increase more than ever before due to South Africa’s opening to the world. The timing and nature of the negotiated settlement that ended apartheid had a major influence on the post-apartheid economic policy. In particular, the most profound shift took place within the African National Congress, which switched from the Leftist and socialist ideology and policy formulation to the neoliberal policy framework (Boughey 2007, 10; Baatjes, Spreen, and Vally 2012, 140). A number of factors forced the post-apartheid government of South Africa to adopt the neoliberal economic model. The first factor was the end of the Cold War and collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. The ANC, historically linked to the Communist bloc, lost its major international ally and a possible alternative socialist economic model. The second factor was the resistance by the powerful white business community in the country to any talk of nationalization and state control of the economy. The third factor was the pressure and influence from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and their Western backers. This pressure started in the early 1990s during the negotiations to end apartheid, when the top ANC officials were flown to Washington, DC to be “taught” lessons about economics and globalization. The ANC needed loans and support from the international financial institutions in order to deal with the fiscal crisis, kick-start the economy, and repay huge debt left behind by the apartheid regime (Waldmeir 1998, 238–40; Habib, Pillay, and Desai 1998, 104; Terreblanche 2002, 98–100). Ultimately, the ANC was unable to escape the “new imperialism” led by the United States and the promotion of neoliberal economics and capitalism (O’Connor 2010, 698). After 1994, the ANC government began implementing macroeconomic policies influenced by the neoliberal thinking and advice from the international financial institutions, which allowed little room for genuine transformation of the economy and society (Habib, Pillay, and Desai 1998, 109; Terreblanche 2002, 18; Lemon 2004, 65). What was once a promise and commitment to economic egalitarianism and developmentalist economic policy in the process of redress, reconstruction, and development of a deeply unequal society changed into a market-driven approach to economic transformation (Habib, Pillay, and Desai 1998, 105). For more than two decades since the end of apartheid, South Africa’s neoliberal and market-driven economic project has never subsided. Instead, it continues to aggressively promote “corporatization, marketization and privatization in both the economic and social spheres” (Baatjes, Spreen, and Vally 2012, 144). Contrary to the hopes and dreams of those who fought to end apartheid and usher in South Africa freedom, democracy, and equality, the post-apartheid reality is that of “black poverty and exclusion alongside white wealth, legitimized by a black presence in government” (Mngxitama, Alexander, and Gibson 2008, 4). The enormous economic costs that apartheid inflicted on black South Africans were never considered and the redress or reparations were never provided to black people who suffered under the ruthless racist regimes for centuries (Msimang 2017). In the post-apartheid period, the material outcomes and legacies of colonialism

Coloniality and socio-economic inequality  189 and apartheid continue to shape the socio-economic realities (Mngxitama, Alexander, and Gibson 2008, 2). The majority of the land, acquired by the whites through colonial conquest and theft, remains in the hands of the white minority. In the same way, the wealth, acquired through the brutal exploitation of black people for centuries, remains in the hands of the whites. Mabasa (2017, 97) argues that what exists in South Africa today is neoapartheid capitalism. This refers to the “reproduction of apartheid economic ­relations with two key alterations: the co-option of an aspirant black bourgeoisie and South Africa’s accelerated integration into a neo-colonial global political economy.” Following the negotiated settlement that ended apartheid, the white capital shared a small portion of its wealth with the new black elites, whom Mbeki (2009, 61) calls “black crony capitalists made up of ANC politicians;” in the process, the white capital’s co-opted partners would have a vested interest in continuing with the entrenched economic system and even open the doors to further wealth accumulation after 1994. The new black elites were interested in socioeconomic transformation that brought them benefits but were not prepared—and/ or ­interested—to dismantle the oppressive status quo and transform “the very structures of accumulation, production and redistribution created by colonialism and apartheid” (Mngxitama, Alexander, and Gibson 2008, 16). Msimang (2017) writes that the new dispensation, despite all the rhetoric and promises, has completely “failed to address the hopelessly unjust economic and social order they inherited while enriching themselves.” Thus, the structural barriers and inequalities continue to negatively affect the previously and currently disadvantaged black population. The existing economic model has not been able to grow the economy or deal with poverty, inequality, and unemployment. In 2018, 27.2 percent of South Africans were unemployed. If discouraged work seekers are included, then the expanded unemployment rate was 37.2 percent in 2018 or 9.6 million people. When it comes to the population groups, the majority of unemployed are black and colored South Africans (Statistics South Africa 2018). Even having a job is not a way out of poverty; over 50 percent of employed people live below the poverty line (Gibson 2017, 581). A large section of the population—a staggering 17.7 million people out of the population of about fifty-five million—depends on government’s social grants for their most basic needs and survival (South African Social Security Agency 2018). All the while, local and international corporates are making significant profits in the country.

Knowledge, dehumanization, and domination Colonialism involved the invasion and takeover of foreign lands, slavery, unthinkable brutality, subjugation of indigenous peoples, dispossession, and economic exploitation through authoritarian and ruthless rule. Colonialism was also an intellectual project that included the use of knowledge and education to dehumanize colonized populations, diminish their knowledges, cultures, and humanity and maintain structural domination during and long after the colonial rule. Kelley

190  Savo Heleta (2000, 27) points out that “colonial domination required a whole way of thinking, a discourse in which everything that is advanced, good and civilized is defined and measured in European terms.” Colonialism, white supremacy and racism are not only about conquest, land theft, exploitation, and oppression; they also include the negation of the knowledge and ideas of the colonized, racially subjugated, and oppressed (Magubane 2001, 4). Since the colonial times, education in South Africa was used to subjugate the black majority and propagate Eurocentrism and white domination. Kamola (2016, 43) writes that since their inception, South Africa’s institutions of higher learning have played a key role in maintaining racist oppression, exclusion, and dehumanization of black people. During apartheid, in particular, black people’s prospects were severely limited due to the educational discrimination. The educational content for black students was controlled and determined by the apartheid government, which used education to condition black people into acceptance of an inferior and subordinate position in the society and economy (Johnstone 1970, 134; Biko 1978, 30; Magubane 2001, 29; Acemoglu and Robinson 2013, 269). Through educational propaganda and lies, colonial and apartheid authorities “distorted, disfigured and destroyed” the history and consciousness of black people and painted a picture of Africans as barbarians and Africa as a “dark continent” (Biko 1978, 31). Magubane (2001, 4) writes that racism “produces forms of knowledge which are of great utility in justifying the degradation of the exploited. It serves to define the superior whilst at the same time serving to regulate the inferior and putting them in their proverbial place.” The historical perspectives of the “indigenous, conquered people” of South Africa “have been silenced and ignored” for centuries by the white supremacist regimes, white writers, and academia (Dladla 2018, 436). This is not only true about pre-1994 South Africa or about the study of history; it is also a reflection of how the dominant Eurocentric knowledge in post-apartheid South Africa—including the study of economics—continues to be used as an all-powerful tool for the maintenance of white domination and racial inequality. As Gordon (2015, 91) points out, “a society premised on colonialism, whose normative social field is a racist one, closes off the future for the colonized and designated racially inferior subjects.” Despite the end of apartheid, the future remains closed off for the majority of black people in South Africa. Apart from the structural barriers to change and equality, rooted in colonialism and apartheid, the hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge system is one of the key barriers to progress. Despite the end of apartheid, education offered at South African universities remains “largely Eurocentric, rooted in the colonial and apartheid dispossession, looting and humiliation of Africa and its people” (Heleta 2016, 3). While all universities have been formally “de-racialized” since 1994, the historically white universities continue to be “institutionally white and alien places” (Gibson 2017, 585) for black students, staff, and academics. This should not come as a surprise as South Africa continues to grapple with coloniality. In many former colonies, and particularly in the settler colonies such as South Africa, coloniality

Coloniality and socio-economic inequality  191 remains “deeply embedded in everyday relations” (Dei 2006, 15). Coloniality “refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations” (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 243). Maldonado-Torres (ibid.) adds that coloniality is maintained through education, [i]n the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and everyday. In a country with deep-rooted history of colonial exploitation and oppression, maintenance of coloniality through epistemic and other forms of oppression, othering, and violence is aimed at hindering and deterring the future of the black majority (Gordon 2015, 91). Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013, 11) highlights that in South Africa, coloniality has been normalized as the way the world is. The country’s public universities have played a key role in this, remaining the “sites of reproduction of coloniality.” They are the spaces where black students are “trained to assimilate” to whiteness (Fikeni 2016) in order to fit in and function in the postapartheid “Rainbow Nation”—a term, perhaps even an ideology, invented in the transitional period in the late 1990s that is supposed to portray a unified nation where everyone is equal. Mabasa (2017, 96) and Gqola (2001, 98) stress that this ideology ignores the deep-rooted structural, socio-economic racial inequalities, thus reproducing and maintaining the oppressive status quo and the racialized capitalist system. Rainbowism “reinforces the illusion of pervasive equality and negates the need for equity endeavors to rectify the effects of the interlocking systems of apartheid, patriarchy and capitalism” (Gqola 2001, 103). When the Rainbowist mask is removed, the injustices of “neocolonialism, racial capitalism and apartheid-era economic dominance” can be found hiding “confidently underneath” (Farkash 2015, 18). In the “Rainbow Nation,” universities are “involved in the subjectification and disciplining of black bodies according to colonial ideals” and assimilating them into the “mainstream” social order that in many ways resembles the pre-1994 social and economic order and hegemony (Fikeni 2016). The curriculum at South African universities continues to favor and reproduce Eurocentric knowledge and worldviews while other knowledges and worldviews are ignored, sidelined, and/or devalued. The dominant Eurocentric knowledge, theories, and assumptions about Africa and its socio-economic and political contexts and experiences are in most cases inept, irrelevant and unsuited to the realities on the African continent (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999, 49; NdlovuGatsheni 2013, 11; Heleta 2018, 54). Yet, they persist and are seen as superior by South Africa’s white-dominated academia to the opinions, ideas, assumptions, and knowledges coming from the African continent itself or comparable settings in the Global South.

192  Savo Heleta

Decolonizing economics The role of education in the former colonies such as South Africa has been, and largely continues to be, to produce graduates ready to “service the capitalist system and subscribe to its values” (Rodney 2012, 26). Since 1994, the South African academia has largely neglected to critically reflect on the country’s history of racist oppression and the racialized roots of wealth, socio-economic inequality, and poverty. Academia has also failed to reflect on its own role in the maintenance of white supremacy, whiteness, domination, dehumanization, and past and present injustices and inequalities (Heleta 2018, 55). This way, academia keeps “reproducing and not questioning dominant mechanisms designed to produce power asymmetries” (Macedo 1993, 186) along the racial lines. The hegemonic colonial and apartheid-era knowledge, which continues to shape the ways of knowing and understanding of social, political, economic, and other relations, continues to construct the everyday realities in South Africa. The higher education system, “previously a vital cog in the reproduction of racial capitalism . . . continues to entrench inequality by embracing a neoliberal, market-oriented ideology” (Baatjes, Spreen, and Vally 2012, 139). This is particularly evident in the way economics is taught at South African universities. Students continue to be taught economics through the neoclassical lens. There is hardly any questioning of the dominant economic system(s) or critical interrogation of the history of inequality in the country, the African continent, and the world (Chelwa 2016; Ramburuth-Hurt 2019). The relevance of the economic models, curriculum, and materials to the socio-economic realities and challenges in South Africa and Africa are rarely considered. In most cases, South African academics use neoclassical and conservative economics textbooks written by American authors that do not discuss South Africa in particular and present examples and case studies almost exclusively from the Western world (Muller 2017, 90). According to the Eurocentric hegemonic view prevalent in South African academia, only white Westerners can theorize and produce relevant and “universal” knowledge; others have no ability to do so and are supposed to follow the enlightened white saviors. In many undergraduate economics programs at South African universities, students are not exposed to writings and ideas of African economists, nor are they taught about the economic history of the country and the African continent. The economic models and case studies that the students learn about in most cases do not apply to the South African realities, needs, and prospects (­Ramburuth-Hurt 2019). Muller (2017, 90) argues that economics students at South African universities are “indoctrinated” with the neoliberal, free-market and conservative ideas and notions about economic and societal functioning, development, and progress. The unevolved and untransformed economics curriculum continues to propagate decades-old, and in some cases even centuries-old, ideas and dogmas, as if massive structural changes have not taken place in South Africa, on the African continent, and in the world in the past decades (Lagardien 2014; Chelwa 2016).

Coloniality and socio-economic inequality  193 Lagardien (2014) writes that continuation of the same old teaching of economic orthodoxy that does not question, let alone challenge the dominant paradigms and status quo, is doing disservice to the students and sabotaging their and country’s future. The “irrelevant knowledge” plays a key role in disempowering and alienating the students rather than empowering them to make a positive difference in the society (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013, 11). Fixing “structural ailments, the result of an extractive and capital-intensive accumulation path with deep roots in the historical evolution of the local economy” (Osborne and Smith 2019) and the centuries of racist exploitation of the black population requires new ideas about economics and development rather than the business-as-usual. As RamburuthHurt (2019) points out, “we need to rethink what is taught, the way that economics is taught, and who teaches it. We need to consider carefully who the current capitalist-centred neoclassical economics serves.” Dei (2006, 3) writes that knowledge must be “located in the particular social contexts from which it emerges. Such location shapes the ways of knowing and understanding the social and political relations at play in constructing social realities.” Instead of blindly and uncritically following Western ideas, theories, norms, approaches, and dogmas, through decolonization and fundamental transformation the academia needs to evolve and become a space where South Africans can theorize their own reality while striking a balance between the local, regional, continental, and global issues, challenges, and possibilities (Mamdani 2018). Ramburuth-Hurt (2019) thinks that the “relevance and local application of the economic models and economic principles is integral to decolonizing economics.” Lagardien (2014) adds that teaching of economics needs to be situated in the economy that is being studied as well as the society where the economy is located. This way, economics would be grounded in reality. In South Africa, this would entail studying the economic history of the country in a much more detailed way than this chapter has done in order to understand the roots of wealth, capital accumulation, inequality, and poverty. Only then would the students—the future economists and policy-makers—be able to truly understand why things are the way they are and begin to contemplate possible change, redress, and transformation.

Conclusion Kamola (2016, 57) points out that even though most universities in South Africa “imagine themselves as ‘global,’ settler colonialism and racial apartheid—and acts of resistance to them—continue to shape higher education” in the country. In particular, the student resistance to coloniality has come to the fore since 2015. The fact that the students had to mobilize and campaign for decolonization of their institutions and the curriculum rooted in colonial and apartheid oppression and dispossession, and not the university leaders, academics, and administrators, tells a lot about the state of higher education in post-apartheid South Africa. This is a prime example of the continued maintenance of Eurocentrism and the hegemonic status quo when it comes to the knowledge, teaching, learning, and research at the country’s universities (Heleta 2018, 47–48). However, this has also been a

194  Savo Heleta catalyst for critical debates and intellectual work and has placed decolonization of knowledge at the forefront in the higher education space. As Biko (1978, 169) highlighted in the 1970s, in order to bring about socioeconomic redress after centuries of racist oppression and capitalist exploitation, the whole economic model in the country must be reorganized. The anti-black capitalism that has existed for centuries in South Africa could not be reformed to serve the interests of the oppressed and impoverished majority (Mngxitama, Alexander, and Gibson 2008, 4). The only way for the socio-economic realities to fundamentally change would be through a different economic and developmental model that focuses on redress, reconstruction, and justice. This, as this chapter has shown, has never happened. More than two decades after the end of apartheid, the economic and developmental concepts, models, and ideas that fall outside the capitalist and neoliberal hegemonic “boxes” are seldom allowed to be part of the curriculum and classroom discussions at South African universities. Unsurprisingly, new ideas about economics and development, and how to tackle massive levels of poverty and inequality in a society that was for centuries run by colonial settlers and white supremacists, are not emerging. Operating in an unjust, interconnected, and globalized world requires critical understanding of capitalism, neoliberalism, and neoclassical economics. However, these—and the knowledge about economics and development produced in the Global North—cannot remain dominant and universally relevant in South Africa and elsewhere in the Global South. While neoclassical economics needs to remain in the curriculum, a decolonized curriculum must also include critiques of dominant economic theories and approaches as well as the critical interrogation of all other past and present economic theories and approaches from around the world. This is not to say that pluralistic study of economics would change the current approach to economic development in South Africa; this requires political will from the ruling elites to dismantle coloniality and bring about fundamental change. However, the presence of new and diverse research, ideas, concepts, and models could potentially influence policy-makers to adjust or change models and policies that are not working for the majority of the population. As Bruff and Tansel (2019, 238) write, “by becoming more attuned to how inequalities of power are produced and reproduced” in capitalist and neoliberal societies, we might be able to figure out alternatives and possibilities.

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11 Devalued knowledge Colonized post-socialism Juho Korhonen

Introduction While post-socialist states are often not considered postcolonial, this chapter explores the coloniality of especially peripheral states of the former Second World. Discussing the relation of post-socialism and postcolonialism, I shed light on the tension between the hegemony of the communist state, as Soviet political colonization and as these states’ foundational knowledge, and the hegemony of the free market as the post-socialist “emancipatory” project. This entangled relationship is considered here both historically and from the viewpoint of presentday history politics, that is present-day interpretations of the past and their relation to future possibilities. Historically, the creation of the anti-imperial Soviet alternative served to ­consolidate Bolshevik rule, but also to create new nation-states as Marxism– Leninism turned national self-determination into a colonizing instrument that coupled economic development with socialist statehood. At the same time, ­ reversely, the West proclaimed political developmentalism’s union with capitalist statehood. Sovereignty as independent nation-states was originally reserved to European peoples deemed civilized enough, while the same logic served to justify mandates rule and continued colonialism elsewhere. Woodrow Wilson, for example, initially compared the Finns to the Hottentots and at the Versailles peace conference denied independent nation-statehood from the Grand Duchy of Finland, but changed his mind once Wall Street found commercial interest in Finnish exports. The fall of the Soviet Union, however, delegitimized this foundation—especially in peripheral states of the former Second World, created as part and parcel of the Soviet project—and was followed by a supposedly managed transition to free markets and liberal democracy built around social science prescriptions called “transitology,” reminiscent of the Wilsonian thinking almost a century earlier in its emphasis on successful political reforms “guaranteeing” economic embeddedness with the West. Thus, the influx of Western experts and knowledge into the former Soviet-led sphere was meant to replace “obsolete” local forms of knowledge production and state-making and pave the way to democratization and capitalism. As representatives of the future, meaning in this case the developmental path emulating an idealized and universalized past of the West, holders of

Devalued knowledge  199 this knowledge delegitimized the agency of socialist knowledge across the spectrum from political rule and oppression to resistance and civil organizing that had attuned itself to and developed with the making of these states. This second colonial encounter devalued socialist statehood and knowledge— the foundational myth of which had been resistance to that capitalist project—and decoupled it from economic development. It dismantled former forms of managing contentions in order to “right the wrongs” of the seventy-year Soviet mistake. As a consequence, “transition” policies of privatization and shock therapy turned into irreversible plundering of wealth as, to borrow Nancy Fraser’s terms (1995), former Soviet politics of redistribution were delegitimized by (false) politics of recognition. The states system continues to legitimate the unequal flow of capital, resources, and knowledge both globally and within the newly independent post-socialist states. Yet, the blame for economic failure now rests squarely in each individual state and society’s political capacity to modernize and adapt to market liberalism by emulating Western knowledge. In this historical regard post-socialism diverges from postcolonialism. Post-socialism did not challenge and critique the global core, but emulated it and shifted from the so-called Second World to the “deep periphery” (Tlostanova 2018), a direction of movement that may explain postcolonial scholars’ lack of interest in engaging post-socialism. The intertwining of two colonialities is a specific tension of post-socialist postcolonialism, where an economic colonialism overlaps with the initial foundation of these states as Soviet political colonization. Parallels and comparisons of post-socialism with postcolonialism can however, for this very reason, improve our analyses of modernity and of capitalism.

Post-socialism and postcolonialism In an effort to move our understanding of post-socialism beyond typologies and taxonomies of divergence from an imagined “ground zero” following 1989/1991 many scholars have recently argued for a global perspective on post-socialism (Dzenovska 2013; Gagyi 2016; Kideckel 2009; Silova et al. 2017; Tulbure 2009) or more forcefully for the globality of the post-socialist condition itself (Gille 2010; Korhonen 2016, 2017; Tlostanova 2012). These scholars employ relational perspectives of different types, from delinking to commonalities, inter-imperiality, and co-constitutive histories in order to also move beyond the somewhat tedious and repetitive debates about the possible compatibility or incompatibility of a pure post-socialist with postcolonial comparison (see for example Chari and Verdery 2009; Hladik 2011; Imre 2014; Kołodziejczyk and Şandru 2012; Lazarus 2012; Owczarzak 2009), a binary which is now rather seen to stem from and reinforce Western modernity and capitalism itself through the discrepant differences in the co-constitutive role that capitalism had in the creation and history of these two perspectives separately. This separation emerges to obscure capitalism’s role when we attempt a purely objective theoretical comparison of post-socialism and postcolonialism. Thus, overcoming the post-socialist/postcolonial divide

200  Juho Korhonen promises a sharper analysis of capitalism itself. As Nancy Fraser reminds us, dichotomies obscure, decouple, and, most importantly for post-socialism, devalue (see for example Fraser 1995, 1997; Young 1997). From the post-socialist perspective, “an ignorance about the Soviet reality and its propagandistic false self-representation is one of the reasons for the reluctance of postcolonial scholars to venture into this area and compare their situation with that of the socialist and postsocialist subjects” (Tlostanova 2018, 11). Considering Madina Tlostanova’s observation, I hope to unpack the post-socialist and postcolonial comparison, especially concerning the common dichotomous referencing of the two conditions separately via their position with the West. More precisely, I suggest that the historical imperiality of the former Second World itself should replace the narrative of its disappearance and could better resonate with a postcolonial position. What the post-socialist positionality is in dire need of, and could gain from postcolonial studies this way, is the emphasis on, and a deeper analysis of, knowledge hierarchies. But to achieve the latter, such a postcolonial analysis of post-socialism needs to be complemented and to an extent complicated with a more nuanced understanding of post-socialism’s historically overlapping imperialities and their entangled relation in present-day post-socialist history politics. For example I will discuss in more detail in the following sections the layered history politics of post-socialism in relation to the period of Soviet rule and the pre-Soviet era. The importance and role of these imagined historical cutoff points and comparisons for present-day politics reveals continuous imperial differences, not unlike those evidenced in the entanglements of colonial and national histories. In general, there exists several entry points through which we can start to make these connections between post-socialism and postcolonialism. Indeed, uncertain citizenship, contested histories, and distorted economies shape both post-socialist and postcolonial states (Kideckel 2009), and historically they share a contextual origin in the aftermath of World War I and the policies commonly described to Wilson and Lenin. This chapter then joins Madina Tlostanova in suggesting that the: [r]oots of the possible dialogues [between post-socialism and post-colonialism] or the reasons for their lack lie in the intersection of the earlier historical layers, marked by the imperial rivalry and therefore by the imperial difference in its multiple and complex manifestations. (Tlostanova 2018, 6–7) This contrasts starkly with how many, for example Kołodziejczyk and Şandru, argue that “losing the anti-imperialist, liberating moment of eastern European transformation from its horizon, postcolonial studies contributed to the conceptual co-option of the region to the Eurocentric model of western modernity” (2012, 114). To begin with, the idea of a liberating moment has little empirical support and indeed rather harkens back to the transitological concepts of a full reset, an end of history. Indeed, as historian Ronald Grigor Suny, for example, has argued, the promised emancipatory moment was rather Gorbachev’s attempts at constructing

Devalued knowledge  201 a so-called third way (Suny 2014). Moreover, peeling back the layers of history politics even further, that supposedly liberating moment mobilized entangled economic imperialities and “obliterated the democratic forces of the sixties in deindustrialization and enormous inequalities” (Derluguian 2014, 1). Attempts at a democratic third way were first denied by Soviet imperial politics and soon after, following the fall of the Soviet Union, similar attempts were denied by Western imperialist economics. Discussions of a third way and the preservation of some Soviet politics of redistribution were denied in favor of shock therapy and an irreproachable incommensurability between the two systems, a rhetoric closely reminiscent of pre-World War I Western colonialism (see for example Gowda 2013). As one economist for example put it, arguing against any third way approaches, “you don’t try to cross a chasm in two jumps” (Sachs 1991). Perhaps, the most destructive of such economic temporalities was the erasure of the historical connection of the present with previous struggles against imperiality and oppression in the post-socialist sphere. Despite this, Kołodziejczyk and Şandru go on to argue in favor of the inclusion of the post-socialist experience in postcolonial studies and for “the advantage of thinking the two posts together,” despite “multi-tiered disjunction” between the two (2012, 114–15). My argument is less theoretically formal and begins from historical relationality rather than being made despite the lack of it. I suggest that the multi-tiered disjunction Kołodziejczyk and Şandru bemoan is, in fact, part of a joint entanglement. I make no disciplinary or metalevel claims as to which theories and paradigms should be joined together or not, or if we should think between the posts or think of them together. Rather, the relation of postcolonialism and post-socialism can historically and analytically inform each other, to increase separately the autonomy of each against Eurocentrism. I argue that there is something meaningful to be observed in the very conjunctures and disjunctures, resonances, and dissonances of post-socialism with postcolonialism themselves, especially a devalued knowledge; a disjuncture based on postcolonial studies’ focus on critiquing Western knowledge structures versus post-socialism’s incapacity (thereby also reluctance) to do so. Here, reflexivity on historical dependencies’ interactions is my central strategy. Considering postcolonial studies’ penchant for the colonial legacies of power and the extensions of the economics of empire to other spheres of life, it is odd that it has not incorporated similar extensions to its canon from the vantage point of a post-Cold War, globalized post-socialism. Postcolonial analyses of power have remained curiously silent about the coloniality of post-socialism and rather adopted or assumed correct the narrative of the loss and disappearance of the Soviet Empire, thus buying into the very idea of a deviation or failed experiment in the manner of the West’s and so-called transition culture’s (see Kennedy 2002) retrospective portrayal of its post-World War I accomplice. This bundling of imperialisms has the analytical purchase of highlighting the role of imperiality across modernity and capitalism. But furthermore, “postsocialism could be used to ground comparative studies of historical routes out of empire” as Tulbure suggests citing Katherine Verdery (2002, quoted in Tulbure 2009, 7); and, historical

202  Juho Korhonen routes into novel imperial interactions, I add. It took over eighty years for serious analyses of German colonialism, despite its abrupt end, as constitutive of global imperial history to resurface. And the strongest impact of that analysis has been felt in the realm of our modes of analyzing and theorizing modernity (see for example Bhambra 2016). Let us not wait so long with the Soviet Empire despite its similarly abrupt and spectacular disappearance in 1989/91 with that of the German colonial empire after World War I.

Layers and dichotomies The postcolonialism of post-socialism is layered in several ways. Historically the key layers that interact, overlap, but also at times exclude (or parallel) each other, are the various legacies of the making of these imperialisms after World War I and their history politics, especially in the form of dependencies of interaction. For example both economies of development found their legitimating temporality and ahistorical universality in liberation against non-national old imperialism, but in antithetical opposition to each other. Geographically, postcolonialism of postsocialism has found its affinities more naturally with peripheries of the former Second World, the states whose foundation was built upon Soviet state-making or socialist national liberation movements from Central Asia to the Caucasus, to Tanzania. But, the conjuncture of postcolonialism and post-socialism in the Russian Far East, Ukraine, or Buddhist Kalmykia is equally present, even if in different configurations. From a postcolonial perspective one should also consider with curiosity the Orientalisms of many post-socialist countries and the Russian and Soviet Empires working beneath the later “delocalized colonial situation” and in interaction (Tlostanova 2017, vii) forming “a strange picture of the poorly communicating remnants of the two grand modernity projects—the Western (European) liberal/ neoliberal one and the Socialist failed modernity replaced today with various nation-state projects” (ibid.), thus constructing an effective false dichotomy not unlike those characteristic of Eurocentrism, such as between independent and uncivilized, to return to the previous example of Wilson’s projection of the Finns. To begin dismantling the dichotomy concerning post-socialism, I have previously argued (Korhonen 2016, 2017) that post-socialism in its very divergence is in fact a global condition, distancing myself from localized approaches to post-socialism centered on one region (often eastern Europe). In this sense, we can again refer back to analyses of German coloniality as part of a global condition that has, for example, revealed and uncovered much more about localized approaches to Atlantic coloniality (see for example Zimmerman 2010). In this chapter I extend this argument to argue that the conjuncture of postcolonialism and post-socialism is equally present in the global post-socialist world, even if equally divergent. In literary and cultural studies, a niche subfield that considers this conjuncture has been carved out, most prolifically by Madina Tlostanova, but in the social sciences a serious engagement of post-socialism’s intersections with postcolonialism within global coloniality is almost non-existent (but see Manuela

Devalued knowledge  203 Boatca 2015). When post-socialism has been compared with postcolonialism, it has often been under the umbrella of world-systems analysis or another analytical perspective that in its own self-reflexivity rejects postcolonialism’s claims to particular knowledge production or to a more critical historiographical perspective. Such over-encompassing perspectives thus often overlook or dilute the most fruitful aspects of the comparison. In the other end of the spectrum of global comparisons Neil Lazarus goes as far as to argue that post-socialism is the “strict inverse” of postcolonial “third worldism,” as post-socialism seeks to emphasize its postcoloniality while positing itself as European, contrary to provincializing Europe (Lazarus 2012, 126). Let us consider these post-socialist and postcolonial resonances and dissonances as the first step in moving toward a relationally historicized perspective of these differences, a perspective that tries to reach back to the imperial origins of the differences. Anthropologist Hana Cervinkova suggests a similar move “in the dismantling of the historically generated and geographically bounded divisions that have determined [these two] scholarly approaches to analyzing people’s experience in different parts of the globe” (Cervinkova 2012, 155). Cervinkova, however, insists on the limitations of post-socialism as an analytical tool developed by Western scholars, thereby ineffective in challenging global capitalism. But I suggest that this is in line with post-socialism’s imperiality as an analytical tool on the one hand and as a postcolonial condition on the other hand, and thereby this limitation can, in fact, reversely be used to analyze global coloniality and the genealogy of post-socialism’s colonial encounter. If we take the assumed middleman of the former First World out of the comparison, then Cervinkova’s assumption loses its normative knowledge hierarchization and becomes rather a critique of the Western scholarly standpoint, as we might see with the following examples.

Resonances and dissonances—class, race, nation, and knowledge “The universal class parameter in the State Socialist discourse was used as a common denominator absorbing race. Race then was translated into the language of class. Whereas in the Western liberal capitalist modernity with its darker colonial side race has remained the central factor into which the class distinctions were often translated in the proportion which was the opposite to the Soviet recipe.” (Tlostanova 2018, 8)

Let us take, for example, race and racism’s imperial difference as Tlostanova describes it. Race, especially as Western imperial knowledge politics, is foundational to postcolonial studies’ critique of knowledge hierarchies. But, race was not present in state socialist social sciences, rather politicized human taxonomies were constructed via critiques of the capitalist system. While capitalist modernism emphasized the racial difference in core metropoles, its developmentalist variant

204  Juho Korhonen distanced global racism from Wilsonian national self-determination’s economic imperialism (see for example Du Bois 2007). For this very reason, for Soviet imperialism class took precedence over race, and nationality absorbed it, whereas the reverse was true in Western imperialism; racism justified the class differences that also constructed nationalities. But, in their imperiality these logics are comparable. Ron Suny provides a simplified example. A young woman born in Stockholm of parents who speak Swedish and identify themselves and her as Swedish, educated in Sweden, is more likely to identify as Swedish than as American, until, years later, she marries an American, migrates to Ann Arbor, and raises children born and educated in the United States.” . . . “But a woman born in Tbilisi during Soviet times, of parents who speak Georgian and identify themselves and her as Georgian will be more likely to identify as Georgian even after she marries a Russian, moves to Russia, and raises children born and educated in Russia. Her ethnic identity as Georgian remains fixed on her internal Soviet passport, and in a multinational state in which ethnicity is almost universally conceived (and enforced) as a primordial—indeed biologically determined—essence, national identity provided both opportunities for social mobility (within the Georgian republic in this case) or serious disadvantages. (Suny 2001, 7). Then, if we accept the globality of post-socialism in its relationality, specifically its co-constitutiveness, and the simultaneously necessary historical agency, or lack thereof, created and reproduced by post-socialism’s projected exceptionality, these dissonances transform from questions and problems into analytical categories and explanandum, and reveal the postcolonialism of post-socialism. This “shifts analytic attention from the socialist past and the transformations after socialism’s collapse to the ideological constructs and knowledge practices emerging under socialism but continuing to structure our contemporary worldviews and academic practices,” as anthropologist Tulbure writes of the globality of postsocialism (2009, 2). The Western notion of a particular post-socialist analytic category is imperially entangled itself. The question then becomes not one of compatibility of theories and empirics, but one of, as Don Kalb puts it, “theory from the east” (Kalb 2015). In other words, it is a matter of the relational contributions of post-socialism to postcolonialism. Because, as David Chioni Moore has shown, historically there is no doubt that the post-social is postcolonial (2006). The construction of racial categories and analyses in post-socialism is not, in fact, different from the West, but shares a mutually constituted past that occludes the imperiality of present knowledge production. Similarly, to reach beyond the common critique of the dichotomous selfunderstanding of postcolonial studies, of a “third wordlist” optic, as Neil Lazarus calls it (2012, 120), as well as the critique leveled against post-socialism’s own nationalism, arrogance, and racism, one should not “overcome” a Eurocentric approach. We should rather take Eurocentrism as a historical relation to both.

Devalued knowledge  205 Following Manuela Boatca’s and others’ lead, I suggest we should replace the notion of a single Europe producing multiple modernities by that of multiple Europes with different and unequal roles in shaping the hegemonic definition of modernity (2013). With this approach post-socialism becomes an invaluable case for better understanding present-day coloniality; “parallel to the construction of the colonial difference overseas, we thus witness the emergence of a double imperial difference in Europe,” where “the blindness to the (neo)colonial logic prevalent in these areas’ [post-socialist Eastern Europe’s] political and identity discourses rather makes them accomplices of the colonial project of power underlying the emergence of modernity” (Boatca et al. 2013, 5). In a nutshell, simply provincializing Europe and thus rejecting its different relations with post-socialism, from the perspective of postcolonial studies, would detrimentally prevent us from analyzing colonial and imperial legacies beyond a blind direct challenge to their effects today. Rather, postcolonialism can help adjudicate the unequal and unproductive dynamics between postsocialism and modernity and help break one of the strongest aspects of coloniality in post-socialist countries, the devaluation of knowledge (see Korhonen 2016; Silova et al. 2017) and the consequent blindness to neocolonial logic. If this is accepted, then the post-socialist experience can help postcolonial studies advance their position and claims within Eurocentric social sciences as suggested also by Julian Go (2016). Resonant with but slightly different from Walter Mignolo’s delinking, this is a way of overcoming the “Western agonistic principle of making theories and practices compete for dominance” (Tlostanova et al. 2016, 225, quoted in Silova et al. 2017, 76). It is perhaps more a process of reassociation than delinking. I suggest that the force, simplicity, and mutual support that this reassociational approach brings, gives it a qualitatively different strength compared to purely comparative viewpoints that are more commonly suggested in bringing together post-socialism and postcolonialism, though have their own undeniable strengths. A reassociation moves relationality and co-constitutiveness from the position of an approach and a perspective more poignantly toward their place in the nativity of the object of analysis, especially when understood as the inextricable interactions and dependencies of various imperial differences and their continued legacies with each other. Dzenovska (2013) adopts a somewhat similar approach in her study of Latvia’s past as a colonizer in the seventeenth century and its present-day attempts at mobilizing that colonial past to join the Western world. She critiques Harry Merritt’s (2010) explicitly Western perspective on the research question as well as Merritt’s reification of Latvia as a singular comparative case where a Soviet past complicates, or polarizes, its history politics. Dzenovska rather proposes to adopt a relational perspective situated globally within coloniality. While I share Dzenovska’s motivation to shift the post-socialist “case” from an object of inquiry to an analytical dynamic, nevertheless my approach is situated between these two opposites of Dzenovska and Merritt in exploring post-socialism’s relation and interaction with coloniality. Rather than engaging what Merritt and Dzenovska term bipolar coloniality, a reassociation tackles more critically, as

206  Juho Korhonen a colonial condition, what many have termed the double polarization of postsocialism from a postcolonial perspective instead of using that polarization, that post-socialist coloniality, as an explanatory category. In other words, where Merritt investigates how Latvia’s Soviet past shapes its history politics and thereby self-understanding, and Dzenovska wants to interpret this as part and parcel of a European modernity that “is constituted through colonial power relations and the associated epistemologies” (2013, 396), I hope to grasp the interaction between the two perspectives that reproduces reifications of post-socialism. Both can be true at once and in their supposed incommensurability reveal an existing ­imperial difference entangled in the erasure of the Soviet past and the assumption of new independence as Western nation-states. Reaching out to seventeenthcentury colonial ambitions to present oneself as European today is not in itself a ­modernizationist or Eurocentric position. This strategy, if not its Latvian context, is a singular case as Merritt suggests, though situated within global coloniality as Dzenovska argues. In sociology, on the other hand, the calls for a postcolonial turn are linked to an analytical bifurcation of Europe versus the others. Connected histories have been suggested as a remedy that examines the relations, not essences, of what led to this original bifurcation. Manali Desai, however, points out the problems of power relations inherent in this approach, especially regarding treatments and understanding of the nation and of nationalism: “a reinvigorated postcolonial sociology that attends to this troubled history of the nation is better placed to offer a critical perspective on the contemporary crisis moment that manifests differently across the globe” (Desai 2018). In other words, the problems of a nationstate optic need not be overcome through a focus on historical connections, but can be addressed by considering those problems and the power relations, that are inherent equally in dismissing or abiding by that troubled history, as connected histories themselves and as part of the analysis of imperiality. Then, the history of the socialist alternative and its role as the co-constitutive founder and maker of nationalism in its post-World War I form offers an important perspective to this troubled history. Indeed, how could we justify calls for theory from the South or for a serious integration of sociology and postcolonial studies (see for example Go 2016) based on their constitutive contributions to modernity, if we remain silent about the former Second World? This post-colonial suggestion of an analytical bifurcation is only justifiable in a post-1989/1991 world that has swallowed wholesale the West’s own narrative of the making and unmaking of the Second World. Post-socialism therefore offers a required contribution to understanding this troubled history. The post-socialist experience helps avoid problems of connected histories understood purely in the dichotomous terms of the West and rest, much like the analysis of other imperial configurations has shed new light on the Atlantic empires before the post-World War I era of national liberation. The post-socialist predicament and its inherently contradictory standpoint offers a way to avoid the problem that Desai articulates concerning a postcolonial turn; “reproducing rather than querying the forms of power that embody the very bifurcation itself” (Desai 2018).

Devalued knowledge  207 The crucial point for recovering and manifesting this post-socialist position is made poignantly by Tlostanova: What is important in all of these and many other reflections on the postsocialist condition, is that in contrast with most postcolonial countries which have not interrupted their successive movement along the progressivist trajectory, the postsocialist people were asked to forget about our version of modernity and start from scratch in a paradigm of a different Western and neoliberal modernity. (Tlostanova 2017, 6) This is historically the specific post-socialist condition, which can be queried productively if reflected upon through the paradigm that was “forgotten,” the acknowledgment of the co-constitutiveness, not exceptionality, of the socialist alternative in relation to the West. This is where the alternative tension offered by the post-socialist condition arises from, as Tlostanova puts it, despite the fact of being asked to “start from scratch,” they “were not really in the position of a tabula rasa” (ibid.). Historically, the Soviet collapse, what Tlostanova calls the void, was similar with, though on a scale more drastic than, for example, the collapse of German colonialism and the German Empire, which led to an appropriation of German imperial differences by global coloniality, yet portrayed at the time as a disappearance of obsolete rule. At the same time, the Russian Revolution developed new forms in response and reaction to continuities and legacies of the Russian Empire as part of the same global coloniality. Recent efforts at incorporating German colonialism (Conrad 2013; Naranch and Eley 2014) into our narrative of modernity and Western imperialism give us clues as to how to connect with the Soviet empire as well. These studies have, for example, shown the generalizability of relational interactions between socialist politics, nationalist imagination, and colonial politics, thus questioning otherwise self-contained or essentialized narratives of each in the Western cases. This has highlighted the entangled nature of developments such as metropolitan working-class politics with global coloniality against modernizationist narratives. Post-socialism can help highlight similar historical entanglements in present-day imperiality. Indeed, many of the problems facing post-socialist states resemble the semiperipheral problems faced by them in pre-communist times (Derluguian 2005, 79). To understand the origins of the imperiality of this relation, let us consider how two different national self-determinations were formulated in the aftermath of World War I as continuities of empire and, very briefly, the situation of imperial difference before their formulation. Recognizing the shared imperial origins of these two systems and their parallels can help fight the Eurocentric portrayal of post-socialist history as yet another exception, deviation, and singularity. Thereby, in Tlostanova’s words, we must go deeper than the “history of the state socialist system” itself (2018, 6). By understanding these imperial parallels and connected histories of troubled national histories, we may dispel the stigma of post-socialism

208  Juho Korhonen as a failed alternative to capitalism and discover its imperial difference and begin to understand the limitations this Western reification has imposed on socialism’s engagement with colonialism.

Imperial origins of post-socialism Definitions and practices of sovereignty and self-determination shifted dramatically in the conjuncture of the imperial revolutions and world politics during and after the Great War (see for example Gerasimov 2017); particularly with the competing visions of national self-determination of Lenin and Wilson. In the Grand Duchy of Finland of the Russian Empire, for example, socialist and conservative actors articulated a desire for self-determination and nationalism specifically within an inter-imperial context, while so-called socialist colonial policies of the German SPD before 1914 and the anti-socialist campaigning that triggered the formulation of these policies connected subaltern voices across empire, despite the nation and beyond the nation. These connections and contexts for interactions of socialism, colonialism, and nationalism reflect the possibilities before the imperial encounter with Wilson and Lenin’s policies of national self-­determination. The problem of self-determination’s challenge to empires was solved by nationstate independence in a peculiar compromise that signified a reorganization of world imperial order; domination was reconciled by confining democracy on the one hand and socialism on the other hand to the national state. Within these shifts in understandings of sovereignty in the context of former Central and East European empires, inter-imperial contestations and new definitions of inter-imperial world order were determinant, ultimately trumping the projects of local actors: “The Soviet experiment was positioned as a liberation and particularly for the former colonies of the demonized Czarist empire” (Tlostanova 2018, 12). Let us take as an example the Finno-Soviet treaty of 1918. It was the first treaty between two socialist governments and is significant in this inter-imperial respect; reflecting the development of the new policy that Lenin sought to build. While it sought to clarify borders, and regulate policies regarding independence, its ideological dimensions were more significant. Bolsheviks wanted to redefine international relations. The treaty is an example of the process of trying to define what it could mean to be independent in a way that would challenge former imperial imaginations. In this treaty, socialist politics and organization still transcended state boundaries. However, its failure showed the Bolsheviks that socialist states could not challenge capitalist states in this fashion within and against the existing imperial order. Following the failure of the Finnish revolution, and thereby the creation of a hostile capitalist state right next to Petrograd/Leningrad, a state that sent war expeditions to the Soviet Union following 1918 and restricted democratic participation of the Left, Soviet tactics shifted toward creating a closed-off, alternative international space, not in competition with, but parallel to imperial differences. Important for future treaties and the colonial legacy of post-socialism, with this trajectory sovereignty would not be supported by socialism, but socialism by sovereignty in nations that were economically mature. What it meant to

Devalued knowledge  209 have reached a required level of economic relations remained a political and ideological instrument. The path to socialism in one country was paved. Thereafter, the disappearance of socialism did little to dismantle the imperiality of power that supported Soviet sovereignty. This parallelism infused global nation-state coloniality with a legitimating challenge and flattened democratic resistance to it by funneling it into a one-way national liberation pipeline that could not challenge colonial relations beyond the confines of this imperially defined nationstate sovereignty. It could not, for example, reach out to international relations of economic and knowledge hierarchies. The parallel redefinition of sovereignty and self-determination was offered by Wilson with his fourteen points, where a politically mature nation’s independence supports democracy, but what politically mature meant remained a political and ideological instrument. At the Versailles Peace conference Wilson, to use the same example, refused to recognize Finland’s independence. Wilson had compared Finnish political maturity with that of the Hottentots and the Iroquois (Ruotsila 2005). Only after attempts to restore a White Russia had failed, and Finland began offering commercial products at exceedingly low prices, and with the help of private Finnish contacts with Wall Street (who in turn influenced the Wilson administration), were Finns able to change Western perceptions about Finland’s capacity for capitalist democracy (Kuisma 2010). This reflects Wilsonian selfdetermination’s foundational logic of maintaining racial and economic imperial difference through a specific conceptualization of democratic development. This narrative of the Grand Duchy of Finland at the intersection of the interimperial and intra-imperial fields challenges retrospective narratives of a search for national sovereignty and wars of independence. It instead emphasizes the forced marriage of national independence, self-determination, and democratic and socialist statehood as co-opting, not resisting imperial political economy—a foundational context for postcolonial studies too—especially through the different agendas of Lenin and Wilson, and despite the wishes of the local actors. It alerts us to the fact that instead of the diffusion of democracy or socialism after the Great War, democracy and socialism came to be connected with nation-states through imperial bids for power, much transformed from the pre-1918 ideas of democratization and socialism as described briefly here with the example of the German social democrats’ relation to colonialism. This narrative can also inform our thinking of how retrospective narratives of post-socialist transition have constructed relationships between democracy, socialism, and nationalism in post-socialist contexts; socialist governance being articulated as a “long route to capitalism,” as Kennedy demonstrates in his work on transition cultures (2002). In the case of the Grand Duchy of Finland under the Russian Empire and post-socialist states under the Soviet Empire, this narrative of a long route to nation-statehood under backward empires must be challenged in favor of demonstrating the complex struggles and redefinitions of sovereignty and self-determination under empire, within inter-imperial interactions. The idea of emancipatory national independence was an imperial invention and continued to be so, as post-socialist states were appropriated by one such paradigm after the collapse of another following

210  Juho Korhonen 1989/1991. This reappropriation was entangled with the original imperial invention of both socialist and capitalist nation-statehood in two ways. First, in terms of history politics, the founding co-constitutive interdependence of the two models now erased possibilities of imagining alternative futures against the remaining model. Second, the projection of the remaining model as the only possible nationstate future erased the historical experiences and accrued knowledge of struggles against the Soviet alternative. It had been, after all, a historical model of socialist state formation, of future building, against an interdependent, parallel historical interpretation. Let us compare this further to pre-World War I imperial differences, specifically Germany. Through articulating connections between different imperial and colonial relations, the German social democrats had made the argument that failures in colonial affairs were a result of German imperialism in general, pertinent to the metropole as part of the empire. They formulated a connection between subaltern voices in the metropole with subaltern voices in the periphery and aimed to democratize the empire, instead of preparing for a worker’s revolution in Europe. They made the opposite case from Wilson and Lenin’s, in that the historical model of development they projected could not be separated from empire and imperial relations, even with nationally defined sovereignty. This expanded especially after the SPD’s electoral setback in the so-called Hottentot elections in 1907 into a socialist colonial policy (see for example Hyrkkänen 1986), an unimaginable project after World War I. The interests of the colonized, and the dominated workers in the metropole could be articulated together by the social democrats, though not as equal, just as they were portrayed together, as detrimental, by the socialists’ opponents. Imperial differences along lines of national sovereign liberation broke this connection (Korhonen 2018). Thus, the relationship between socialism, democracy, and empire, and intraimperial challenges to imperial relations, transformed in the aftermath of the Great War, as imperial elites responded to the double challenge of democratization and socialism by dividing such challengers through “fixing” imperial connections and links with the policy of national self-determination; hence isolating the peripheries from the metropole and stabilizing global imperialism around interdependent nationally confined sovereignties. The idea of national self-determination “fixed” the two problems of socialism and democratization by turning empires into nation-states holding indirect power over the rest of the world, justified through the very same developmental models that were promising liberation from one another. The origins of this “fix” are visible in Wilson’s idea to reserve national self-determination for specific Western countries, thus the trouble with Finnish independence, to justify colonial rule elsewhere. Therefore, it was not supposed to originally matter how the rest of the world would organize itself as the imperial difference would follow the lines of capitalist democracy. But Bolsheviks, in a similar fashion, used national self-determination to detach economic capital from imperial opposition, thus giving anti-colonial nationalism increased force as a competing potentiality, though equally forged to contain anti-imperial challenges. This new relationship of empire and nationalism allowed for the continuity of

Devalued knowledge  211 Western empires with a nation-state core and economic peripheries. Remember for example the recognition of Finnish independence once commercial interest was identified. And, it allowed for the continuity of the Soviet in place of the Russian Empire with an economic core and nation-state peripheries. Remember, for example, that the Russian core of the empire was the only one without its own statehood and it was claims for that statehood that ultimately led to the collapse of the empire. Thus, national self-determination policies in a sense depoliticized empire by over-politicizing the national. In this sense, the new arrangement facilitated the continuity of empires, as the transformation from the League of Nations’ crude mandates system and Soviet colonization of Russian empire’s peripheries to more sophisticated post-World War II global relations—the United Nations, NATO, and the Warsaw Pact—and the apex of national liberation movements demonstrates. In the Soviet case this meant that the central state would guarantee a plurality of nations’ self-determinations, except its own. This created an imperial difference of sovereignty without the need for local legitimacy; the political distancing of the Bolsheviks from the Russian Empire’s metropolitan sovereignty was fundamental for Soviet nationalities policy. Imperial hierarchies then became international, rather than intra-empire, lending legitimacy to ideas of nation-state sovereignty and also retrospectively interpreting the formation of nation-states as a logical and natural culmination of the development of anti-imperial nationalisms, constructing a false dichotomy between nation and empire (Korhonen 2018). From this perspective the modern nation-state, in its two different iterations (Western and Soviet) emerges from attempts to deal with ambiguities of imperial governance and to introduce control and difference. Nationalism itself was not and does not become anti-imperial, but coloniality adjusts to national difference through the legitimating pressure of the competing logics of Western and Soviet liberation. The dimensions of political and anti-imperial struggle become confined and attached to a predetermined national framework that is itself detached from the economic relations of Western and political relations of Soviet imperiality. And once the Soviet empire, but not the nations, collapsed, Western economic imperialism moves in, but not the accrued capacities of the modern bourgeois nation-state. Postcolonial states had traded the position to directly resist economic imperialism to a quantum of national political autonomy as independent nationstates, which emerges as the foundational crux of postcolonial criticism’s attack on Eurocentrism’s connectedness with global capitalism. Whereas, the socialist states had lost political and democratic leverage and gained guaranteed minimal economic redistribution and elite national economic bargaining power. In this configuration statehood meant international economic sovereignty, in contrast to the Western model of international political sovereignty, yet not capacity. When Nancy Fraser talks of politics of redistribution turning into politics of recognition in the post-socialist age, she purely focuses on the Western model of national socio-economic redistribution and overlooks the transformations of Soviet international socio-economic redistribution versus national cultural recognition. Post1989/1991 this Soviet model, including the accompanying accrued knowledge of

212  Juho Korhonen its inhabitants in navigating, surviving, and resisting that specific type of imperialism, was colonized by Western imperial actors, themselves adapting to a transformation (which is what Fraser talks about) from Western imperialism’s Wilsonian configuration of national politics against the socialist alternative and, according to its own historical imagination, against old imperialism. Now, without the socialist alternative, Western national politics lose their opponent for the future and turn on the past and the Wilsonian configuration itself loses its founding anti-imperial historical imagination and begins to look like a continuation of old imperialism. In this situation, the knowledge of anti-imperial resistance against the Soviet model becomes doubly devalued; it is cast as unsuccessful and furthermore as antiquated, as concerning a realm of politics that had become obsolete. From this perspective, it is almost logical that Latvians would connect their state-building project with seventeenth-century colonialism and position themselves, even when verging on the absurd, on the “wrong side of history,” yet a history that is recognized and exists. This is not unlike the situation in the Grand Duchy of Finland following Allied recognition of independence in 1919. Then, previous politics aiming at non-sovereign autonomy as part of the Russian, then Soviet or German imperial configurations quickly became obsolete and actively forgotten, and a new historical interpretation of Finnish state formation was crafted. One, that reached back over a hundred years beyond the period of Russian imperialism, much like the Latvian attempt to skip the Soviet period in their memories of statehood. This reveals a coloniality based on the active erasure of its own history and especially of historical struggles against it. This is not unlike the triumph of nationalist historiography and history politics after World War II that postcolonial studies is familiar with. One exemplary case of it being British involvement in the making of independent India. And despite long efforts, we have not yet properly connected the analysis of imperiality with nation-state independence. The condition of post-socialism falls upon that same continuum. But, depending on how we analyze it as part of that whole, it can serve both to distract and dilute or to reinforce and deepen our understanding of imperiality.

Imperial economics of post-socialism—devalued knowledge “it should have been possible to museumize and shelve the Socialist experience. However, it has not happened because the thin ideological film hides unreflected upon imperial and colonial complexes and persistent re-emerging power asymmetries, which correlate with pre-Socialist memory and mythology, with Socialist discourses which have always had their darker colonial side, and with today’s situation of global colonialism from which no one is exempt.” (Tlostanova 2017, 5)

Indeed, the so-called Russian Revolution was an imperial and transnational revolution, that has only later been interpreted as the start of an exceptional temporality and trajectory, different from the societal time of the West. In reality, the imperial

Devalued knowledge  213 revolutions of the early twentieth century in the Russian Empire were failed democratic revolutions replaced with a direct lineage and continuity with the wider colonial and imperial world. In response to the Russian, Ottoman, Austro–Hungarian, Chinese, and German imperial revolutions and reformations Western powers, who isolated these events to their overseas peripheries and metropolitan cores respectively, and to maintain a relative status quo, began to alter their own societal timelines between the periphery and core, most commonly known as developmentalism. They had to adopt and appropriate the articulations of democratization, social reform, and self-determination. The United States was best equipped to do so by portraying itself as a monolithic gigantic (racialized) nation-state. While the Soviet Union appropriated and adopted socialism resting on sovereignty as an emancipation from continued economic imperialism, and later as economic support for political resilience against the West’s model of continued economic dependency under political independence. Western empires maintained capitalist strings to political freedom, whereas the Soviets created political strings to freedom from capitalism. How the current post-socialist predicament differs from pre-World War I imperialism is the intertwining of its present-day coloniality, even in grotesque forms of chauvinistic nationalism or absurd history politics, with the erasure of its imperial experience as part of the global colonial matrix of power, as Tlostanova too suggests: “History has resumed its course since then but the position of the ex-socialist world in this process has remained precarious and under-conceptualized—for various reasons—both in the West and the ex-socialist world itself.” (Tlostanova 2017, 3). Unlike earlier imperial logics, this tension has led to a myriad and divergent logics and trajectories of coping, each equally unable to anchor themselves to historical contexts on the ground, a shared divergence (Korhonen 2016). Thereby, a self-reflective and analytical “museumization and shelving” of the socialist experiment, as Tlostanova writes, as a separate but constitutive object of local pasts vis-à-vis present problems has not been possible. A simplified but concrete example from the National museum of Kyrgyzstan is presented here. In this regard, historical sociologist Georgi Derluguian has shown that much more than the economic relations and capacities in the many post-Soviet republics and sub-republics, the configuration of political dependence with knowledge production and social capital was decisive in conditioning divergent trajectories as Western economic modernity began to overlap with Soviet colonial legacies, thus showing the interaction, not disappearance, of Soviet coloniality with postcolonialism (Derluguian 2005). “What has been required from us—the inhabitants of the collapsed once-utopian and later dystopian Socialist world—was divided into two quite familiar options—Orientalist annihilation or progressivist appropriation.” (Tlostanova 2017, 3). Responses to this new coloniality were in fact formulated in interaction with former legacies and neither of the options outlined by Tlostanova was desirable or feasible, but represented the dynamic and tension of overlapping imperialities. Overall then, the so-called promise of democracy was indeed the promise of Western-type national self-determination where democratic processes and politics

214  Juho Korhonen of redistribution are confined to the national states, themselves dependent on nonnational economic relations. The supposed emancipatory moment of the fall of the Soviet Union was merely an emancipation from imperial politics of redistribution built upon non-national political relations legitimized by imperial politics of recognition. No actual unit, space, or locality of emancipation ever existed or was recognizable by those emancipated. This sheds a different light on Nancy Fraser’s argument from 1995 of the politics of redistribution turning into politics of recognition, where “cultural recognition displaces socioeconomic redistribution” as the “paradigmatic form of political conflict” (Fraser 1995, 68). Fraser calls this politics of a post-socialist age, but of course does not address post-socialism as such. How would Fraser’s argument look like from the perspective of global postcolonial postsocialism? One way to begin answering this question and reappraisal is by better recognizing and analyzing the coloniality embedded in post-socialism’s own failure to reflect upon, identify, and rally in opposition to its colonial position. From the perspective of Soviet imperialism, cultural recognition had always displaced socioeconomic redistribution, as the latter, especially in the form of state relations, was premised on the former. But knowledge regarding struggles within and against such imperial politics has been devalued. This has led to complex and often paradoxical interactions, especially between the new dependencies of state relations and cultural politics, as described by Fraser, and the legacies of post-socialist state–society relations stripped of their historical logic and the capacities they had fostered. For example the so-called Armenian revolution of 2018 began with a consensus in public opinion of internal colonization connected to Soviet legacies, as my interlocutors there in June 2018 described in different words. It was a promising first step of political reflexivity motivating action and identifying a locally shared mode of resistance, even though they did stop short of recognizing the wider interimperiality of the predicament. But, soon enough the tension of the postcoloniality of post-socialism emerged in response; a step in the right direction was confined by the interaction of post-socialist legacies with post-1989/1991 coloniality. Hardly can we speak today of any post-Soviet community of sense apart from the shrinking linguistic sphere and a not very productive negative identity connected with the feeling of the looming end and one’s exclusion from world history and modernity. (Tlostanova 2017, 120) Following Tlostanova’s provocative summary of the post-socialist condition, what the colonial encounter of post-socialism presents itself as is a colonial reencounter where free markets “emancipated” post-socialist societies from political oppression, while remaining confined to national states where politics of imperial redistribution defines sovereignty as the foundational legacy of the Soviet Empire. Attempts to politicize redistribution in the wake of the transition have failed while the only successful forms of political movements focus on nondemocratic regime change. Following the Soviet legacy of international sovereignty founded on redistribution, civil society can influence leadership change,

Devalued knowledge  215 while political change is confounded by the states’ adaptation to global markets. A quote from my interlocutor about the Armenian revolution and its pasts and futures summarizes the conjuncture in which post-socialist politics of the present are in this vein historically (de)located: “Nationalists, especially, are still Homo Sovieticus. Those nationalists always take everything to the moral extreme. They should be educated that the self is prior to everything and everything else is socially constructed.” A sense of anti-nationalism as the precariousness of postsocialist statehood intertwines with a capitalist ethos of individuality to prevent solidarity within the existing political framework and against the impositions that its connections to global economy bring about. The individual channels the spirit of post-socialist potentiality, while the nation-state, that ironically is that potentiality’s truest representation in today’s global order, is seen to intervene as a remnant of socialist imperialism. Or, in less subjective terms, considering that “capital as a social relation depends on the power of the state to define, shape, and be part of a regime of accumulation” (Gill 2003, 96), this power of the socialist states disintegrated in 1989/1991 while national polities continued to be politically imperial. Gill elaborates on this interaction by quoting the World Bank Development Report from 1997: “ ‘locking in’ the rights of capital and thereby ‘locking out’ democratic control over key aspects of the political” coercively contained “the contradictions between capital accumulation and social reproduction” (Gill 2003, 196). Ultimately then, postcolonialism allows us to detect the agonistics of postsocialism, too often overlooked and rather described in the extremes as either a void or as a menagerie of irrationalities arising from an incompatibility of post-socialism and modernity. But just like the earlier quote from an Armenian interlocutor shows, this is not an analytically observable dissonance, but rather a post-socialist observation in itself; part and parcel of the post-socialist condition and as such as much a resonance of post-socialism’s colonial configuration. Similarly, post-socialism helps us identify the role of a false potentiality in postcolonialism, beyond identifying mere agonistics imposed by modernity’s never-ending, always rigged competition. In Dzenovska’s prescient words, post-socialism enables a detailed analysis of the material and discursive practices which reinvent and reproduce global coloniality of power (Dzenovska 2013, 410). It does so almost as if on the side of the real conflict between the colonized and the colonizer. Moreover, together then we can better triangulate Western modernity itself without having to rely on analytics that can simply be denied, refused, or overlooked without a wider engagement with their origins, such as the approach of peripheralizing the West. As Madina Tlostanova eloquently argues: “Such ‘deep coalitions’ to counter modernity/coloniality can liberate us from endless appealing to someone else’s ideals, free us from the double consciousness of those who cannot belong and will never belong” (Tlostanova 2018, 29).

Intertwined imperial logics As the Western model of national self-determination rolled in with the accompanying structures of knowledge dependent on it, this wholesale devalued the

216  Juho Korhonen knowledge structures of socialist states, even more so than their economic dependencies, which had relied on relative sovereignty from global capitalism. In post-socialist countries knowledge production and producers have “remained essentially state functionaries” (Tlostanova 2006, 643) while simultaneously their function has disappeared together with those states’ founding histories. I want to point out this condition’s overlap with how, following Tlostanova further, the new statehoods and “the new global market are finding more effective strategies of silencing or making inaccessible the views of an intellectual who refuses to serve them. For Russia [and its post-socialist others] this problem has deep historical roots” (Tlostanova 2006, 638). And, unlike Western scholars of the transition argued, that the Soviet system had a lack of responsiveness and social capital and had rather been inclusive by force (see for example Åberg and Sandberg 2003, 99–101), Derluguian has shown that varieties of social capital crucially determined post-socialist trajectories and were the key determinants of social development (Derluguian 2005). Take Kyrgyzstan, where during my visit to the national museum I noticed the founding document of the country, signed by Lenin and others, covered by a newspaper clipping of a picture of a recent miss Kyrgyzstan beauty queen hastily scotchtaped on top of the original vitrine, descriptive of the several agonistic attempts to replace Soviet national symbolism with something new in place of the removed statues of Lenin. In Bishkek’s central square this literally meant at first a statue of lady Liberty, soon replaced by another of the national mythological hero Manas, but neither could legitimize and unite politics, ideas, and institutions on a shared historical foundation. Or, take the fervor for the European Union, one would want to use the oxymoron “EU-nationalism,” in Georgia, where more flags, affection, joy, and dance for the EU than anywhere in the Union itself ever could be witnessed. Or consider anywhere the ten, even twenty-five fold difference in salaries paid to professors at Western, and in some cases Russian or Turkish supported universities that mushroomed in the 1990s and early 2000s versus the local flagship state universities. Not to mention the imported curricula and focus on “practical” subjects such as business and law. These are some simple examples of the many demonstrating the colonization of post-Soviet knowledge, as Tlostanova puts it, by asking “can the post-soviet think?” (2015). Polish professor Edmund Mokrzycki describes this devaluation of knowledge in the post-socialist sphere: “The ideological landscape is not only changing rapidly; it seems to have lost all recognizable landmarks” (Mokrzycki 1994, 82). As mentioned earlier, this constructed incommensurability between imperial knowledge of the system and capital in the system with colonized knowledge is reminiscent of pre-World War I colonialism, which was challenged by Wilsonian and Leninist national self-determination formalizing the differences between the constructed dichotomies of knowledge. One of the most profound legacies of this challenge, besides the global system of supposedly equally sovereign nation-states, is postcolonial scholarship itself. But, in the post-socialist sphere both forms of the challenge have been incapacitated. Or, as French sociologist Alain Touraine points out, only a society historicized prevalently enough is able

Devalued knowledge  217 to define its own normative guidelines, rather than having them passed by entities transcending that society (Touraine 1981, 13–17), confining the use of political capital to mere regime change when the knowledge supporting such capital is subject to Western modernity. When, on the contrary, the ability to transform possibilities and challenge the status quo, forms of Utopian thought in other words, would be essential for social and cultural transformation (Touraine 1981, 18–20). Then, just as economic imperialism in the traditional sense of post-World War I Western colonialism restricts the post-socialist states’ room for maneuver and mobilization of social capital, similarly the knowledge production challenging and navigating local forms of domination was delegitimized and devalued. The impossibility and paradoxes of post-socialist Left politics such as the near-fascist trajectories of former communist parties, the dismissal of Marxist social sciences, and the complete domination of Western educational degrees are some of the clearest examples of this. Examples that should find interesting resonances and equally interesting and fruitful dissonance with postcolonial analyses. Those states successful in avoiding this predicament have done so on the terms of the West. What postcolonial scholars most obviously can learn from this post-socialist predicament is a deeper analysis of the often-praised critical role of local(ized) knowledge and its relation with criticism of the West. In simplest terms, is critique the same as competition, and what is the goal of critique? What are the trajectories of imperial transformation and what is the goal and location of emancipation? These fundamental questions remain unanswerable, if not even unapproachable, in post-socialist states. Whereas, in postcolonial states their location can still be tracked to the national state, even in terms of minority rights, as long as we buy into the Western conception of national liberation as anti-imperial. This condition and its difference with postcolonialism, in itself, provides a key analytical perspective on modernity and capitalism. We should then observe how the imperiality of the post-socialist condition manifests in Western economic relations as the legitimizing and justifying force for the delegitimization of Soviet political imperialism that supported and hegemonized knowledge production. Why would a failed “evil,” a proof of the superiority of the West, be so swept aside? Indeed, this was not a disappearance of one imperial model and its replacement with another, but an overlapping of the fields. This overlap, or interaction of two imperial logics, is often misrecognized through the dichotomies of internal/external effects or global/national demands, like in the case of Agnes Gagyi’s description of the internalization of external penetration in Hungarian politics (2016). But, when viewed from the historical perspective of the divergent economics and politics of empire in their post-World War I iterations, we see the coming together of two formerly parallel logics and a situation that largely reminds us of the era of late high imperialism; once more the ineffectiveness of the peripheral polities in the world market is joined together with their incapacity to independent knowledge production. Once more we can ask, can the native, in this case, the post-Soviet think. It is the question that postcolonial studies, due to their own positionality built around making that very claim vis-à-vis the imperial, that is stating “yes, we can think,” refuse to ask of the post-socialist.

218  Juho Korhonen Without recognizing this imperial overlap, we may falsely analyze the emulation of the capitalist core in the post-socialist proclamation of continued superiority over the former Third World as nostalgic potentiality, or as the bitter remains of the system, rather than as an adaptation to transition culture and the politics of developmentalism in the post-socialist context. Similarly, we may falsely recognize postcolonial studies as competition over moralities, as Dzenovska does in the case of Latvian and Polish neocolonists, rather than as the agonistics of knowledge (remember Ron Suny’s example of the Swede and the Georgian). Then, just as the fall of the Soviet Union was not the fleeting possibility of emancipation that the West simply failed to deliver to the East, especially in contrast to how Gorbachev’s reforms were an attempt at that emancipation, similarly the “primordial nationalisms,” as an example of supposed post-socialist irrationalities emerging after 1989/1991, were not a consolidation of post-socialist mentalities once the thin veneer of Soviet oppression had been removed. Rather, they were attempts at clinging onto something at a moment when “the future seemed both wide open and frighteningly impossible,” when there was an “expanded space for intellectual experimentation, [but] imagining what this might entail was difficult” (Amsler 2007, ix), whereas perestroika in the 1980s had given the national intelligentsias “unthinkable opportunities to assume the moral and political leadership of the nation” (Derluguian and Hovhannisyan 2018, 454). The 1980s were an opening of resistance and opposition against known and existing imperial relations, but the post-collapse was a time of intertwining imperial relations and legacies without identifiable, legible, or reachable structures from the viewpoint of former socialist nation-states. As Ron Suny describes the period and the difference between those two forms of knowledge structures: “two fundamentally different languages of analysis met in a moment of mutual incomprehension” (Suny 2001, 4). What is crucial for genealogies of capital in post-socialist globality is how they interacted, because in the dichotomies of thinking about postsocialism “anything that falls in between or beyond this simple scheme and is critical to both models lies in the zone of risk” (Tlostanova 2006, 645). Indeed, if socialist national self-determination was premised on a struggle against economic dependency, what should we expect of it, when its political means are denied and economic support transformed to competition? Likely the answer is a sense of agonistics combined with ever-promised unattainable potentiality (see Korhonen 2017 for their interaction, or the “agonistics of potentiality”).

In conclusion Eruptions of nationalism or of politics of recognition following the fall of the Soviet Union are now gone. Progressively, from the Kyrgzyz uprisings of 2005 and 2010 to the bloodless “revolution” in Armenia in April 2018, politics is confined to regimes that accept nationalism as the only mold for politics, instead of contesting it. This is comparable to “home rule” or indirect colonialism, where the most to be excepted is regime change and a reshuffle of patronage styles and networks. Delegitimizing the political oppression of the Soviet Union and the

Devalued knowledge  219 knowledge production that had developed under it guarantees social reproduction without consideration for the multiple struggles of people to insure their economic existence under political oppression. Through the reifying optics of the West, equating civil society with political mobilization, the history of oppositional struggles under socialism is brushed aside as political and societal stagnation and as some sort of natural and primordial responses to the economics of need and the politics of a Soviet empire, antithetical to modernity. But, free-market capitalism asserts that the independence following 1989/1991 is what socialist peoples wanted, freedom to choose one’s own patronage, a near tabula rasa return to the original logic of Wilsonian self-determination and liberation from imperial political oppression, thereby forgetting that any progressivist victories that free market democracies themselves could claim since their inception were purely the making of critical and oppositional forces within their own structures (often connected to the existence of the Soviet Alternative). And with this simple move—in which an idealized version of Western sovereignty delegitimized specifically the experiential and grounded knowledges of Soviet imperial subjects—the critical thought and oppositional frames of Eurocentric knowledge and its others was denied of the post-socialist space as supposedly obsolete knowledge, especially for navigating economic relations under political oppression developed under socialism. In sum, what the devaluation of post-socialist national knowledge as the dissolution of the former relation of political empire with national self-determination reveals of new imperialist economics in the post-Soviet world is an agonistics of potentiality reminiscent of politics of the pre-Cold war era. Exactly like with Bolshevik claims for legitimacy (Lenin 1916) or those of the British taking over German East Africa after World War I (Joelson 1920), so too in the post-socialist sphere the narrative and legitimization: [w]as that these nations existed prior to the imperial conquest by the Bolsheviks, that they had been suppressed and denied their national expression during the long dark years of Soviet rule, and that they represented a population yearning for freedom, democracy, and capitalism. Left out of this narrative were the powerful effects on nation-making, rather than nation-destroying, of Soviet policies. (Suny 2001, 13)

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12 Hong Kong and the Sinocentric afterlife of an Anglophone postcolonial discourse Michael O’Sullivan

The current political crisis in Hong Kong has unleashed a wide range of political narratives as academics scramble to chart not only how the dramatic shift to violence on both sides emerged but also how events will play out in the wake of the new national security law. The roots of the crisis—a series of events that many on the ground described as “the revolution of our times” (a phrase now “criminalized” by the national security law)—call for an examination of the revolutionary subject, decolonization, recolonization, and subjugation, the nature of totalitarianism and its ownership of the media, theories of assembly, and class politics. However, this paper will focus on how postcolonial theory has been applied to Hong Kong, and how state capitalism and Western capitalism have very often exploited the notion of Hong Kong as “Pearl of the Orient” and of Hong Kong people to the extent that postcolonial theory never seems able to deal with the realpolitik of Hong Kong. As Mirana May Szeto writes in 2006 after another less violent period of protest: What postcolonial studies has done about Hong Kong does not seem to be adequate to its ideas of postcoloniality. The problem is that, even though postcolonial theory quite successfully criticizes structuralist and systematic inequalities, nonetheless these still exist today in realms quite untouched by postcolonial studies, economically, socio-politically and even culturally. What we need from postcolonial theory is not simply a politics of racial, sexual and class identity that is useful only in subverting cultural hegemonies ad infinitum. We also need an effective engagement with the quotidian effects of colonial legacies affecting the vast majority of people in and beyond the cultural realm. (254) This is a result of the different cultural contexts in which postcolonial theory is asked to play a role. Hong Kong is neither Ireland nor Algeria. The nature of the cultural hegemonies at play is therefore very different in Hong Kong. Since postcolonial theory, according to Szeto’s view, is chiefly concerned with subverting cultural hegemonies and with the relation between a people, its culture, and its modes of representation of racial, sexual, and class identities, it can often fail

224  Michael O’Sullivan to account for the effects of economic and political shifts that play out in tandem with these cultural changes. Due to the unique nature of its colonial history, culture has also often been bound up more integrally with the economic in Hong Kong than it has in other regions. I will discuss this later in the chapter. Hong Kong has had its fair share of “postcolonialities” just as its inhabitants speak a variety of world Englishes and trace family roots to a diverse spectrum of modernisms; the postcolonial in Hong Kong must deal with southbound colonialism, northbound colonialism, British colonialism, Chinese recolonialism, postcolonialism as “model for China” (Law 2000, 207). There are also other expressions of postcolonial identity that have emerged in recent years in work on Hong Kong: hybridity, liminality, spectrality, “writing the self” (Chu 2018, 1092), “writing beyond history” (1094), “colonial pathology” (Szeto 2006, 267), “in-­ betweenness” (Chu 2018, 1088), Rey Chow’s (1993) “third space,” and Abbas’s (1997) “politics of disappearance.” Each one has recently been challenged from a range of perspectives, perhaps the most effective being Shu Mei Shih’s (2013) Sinophone reading that places Hong Kong as a central hub in the field of Sinophone studies, a field of studies related to the study of Chinese culture (both diasporic and otherwise) that understands itself against the dominating political system of the CCP and its cultural influences. Sinophone studies works through cultures of Sinitic-language communities situated at “the margins of China and Chineseness” (Shih 2013, 33) to challenge older versions of China and Chineseness and a racialized concept of “the Chinese”: [F]or China and the Han Chinese, the racialized concept of “the Chinese” correlates at least with three different purposes: the unified nation’s resistance against imperialism and semicolonialism in the early twentieth century; a practice of self-examination that internalized Western categories of the self; and, finally and most importantly, the suppression of ethnic minorities for their claims on and contributions to the nation in addition to the sovereignty claims of some of these groups. (31–2) The Sinophone articulation then works against the dominance of China-centrism and the “gradual process of Mainlandization” (Wong 2018, 1103) to reimagine the postcolonial dimension from a perspective that also pays due respect to the rich cultural roots of the unique Cantonese Sinitic-language community and culture that has always formed the majority in Hong Kong. Despite the claims by Abbas and others that Hong Kong is an anomalous postcolonial state that achieved postcoloniality before decolonization, these terms as applied to Hong Kong often neglect the waves of migration into Hong Kong from China, as well as the steady streams of mercantile and tourist flows in the other direction. These have resulted in a unique cross-fertilization of cross-border Sinophone communities that are the result of what might be described as micro-decolonial and re-colonial currents that mutually determine these border communities. These have evolved alongside the more frequently theorized Anglophone postcolonial narratives that have also shaped Hong Kong.

Hong Kong and the Sinocentric afterlife  225 Shih goes so far as to argue, for Law Wing-sang (2000), that the “notions of marginality and in-betweenness and all the criticisms they have received” in the Hong Kong context are, perhaps, only “dispersion variants of the same Western postcolonial academic discourse . . . the differences among them are only matters of emphasis locatable within the same continuum, regardless of their indeterminate and floating nature.” For Law, Shih is also “doubtful whether there would still be such a heated debate turning on discourses and representations of Hong Kong if there were not a 1997 D-day [and also a 2047 D-day] and postcolonial languages” (221). This temporal dimension is possibly unique to Hong Kong. Whereas the postcolonial leads to dreams of nationhood in most other colonies, in Hong Kong any dreaming was prematurely cut short and labeled illegal by the Basic Law and the “one country, two systems” model; China effectively gave Hong Kong fifty years to transform itself into a version of the Mainland, an impossible task, not least since the rules and dictates of the CCP have consistently shifted over the last two decades. Yiu-Wai Chu (2018) gives a good summary of many of the key economic arguments made both by the leading postcolonial scholars and other scholars on Hong Kong. He notes how the political and economic shifts that have taken place mean that Hong Kong has lost its “in-between” status. In possibly taking up Szeto’s point on how the postcolonial argument has overlooked the “quotidian” and daily struggles of people in Hong Kong, Chu focuses on how Hong Kong’s “in-betweenness” has been reconfigured since 1997 largely due to the different economic arguments that have appeared in recent postcolonial readings of Hong Kong. He notes how the economist Niall Ferguson and political thinker Pankaj Mishra have clashed over the relative merits of “concepts developed in the West” for Hong Kong. Chu also notes how Chakrabarty’s (2000) concepts of History 1 and History 2, where the former refers to Europe as the “sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories” and the latter to how other non-western histories become “variations on a master narrative that could be called the ‘history of Europe’ ” (1090) can be overcome in the Hong Kong context by focusing, as he claims Chibber does, on “capital’s universalization.” However, once again Chibber is faulted for failing “to recognize any legitimacy in the people he criticized” (1091). As we recall, Chibber (2013) slights postcolonial criticism and particularly Subaltern Studies for failing to answer the question it raises, namely “how the entry of capitalism into the colonial world affected the evolution of its cultural and political institutions” (25). He argues that subaltern critics presume that “Marxist and liberal theories attain validity only in settings with a secure bourgeois culture” (29). Chibber’s problem with Subaltern Studies arises from its inability (and one must recall that he is principally referring to three writers on Indian postcolonial theory—Guha, Chakrabarty, and Chaterjee) to define correctly the universalizing nature of capital. He argues that what is “universalized under the rule of capital is not the drive for a consensual and encompassing political order, but rather the compulsions of market dependence” (125). However, while Chibber’s readings give detailed analyses of how these critics are incorrect in suggesting that such concepts as liberalism, feudalism, the bourgeoisie, and capital itself have very different meanings in the colonial context of India, he clearly regards the emergence

226  Michael O’Sullivan of these notions within different European contexts (chiefly Britain and France) as the template against which all uses of the terms must be gauged. In other words, in aiming to do the complete opposite, his analysis only appears to validate the spirit—if not the content—of the subaltern argument, namely, that a Eurocentric vision of history and capitalism is used as a lens through which the different Asian societies are read. Chibber’s debunking of much postcolonial theory is also Indiacentric with little or nothing on the Sinophone world; Chibber’s focus is almost exclusively India and there is also a surprising lack of detail on how capitalism in the colonial context affected what Szeto calls the “quotidian,” or the daily lives, of peoples in these colonies. In other words, recent works such as Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire (2017) offer far more detail on the precise nature of the economics of colonialism in the Indian context. In the second half of this chapter, I will look at the specific nature of capital in the Hong Kong context in order to suggest that the reading of economics for the postcolonial critic must not only work in one direction—as Chibber’s appears to do—whereby Europe is regarded as providing the source code for a range of economic and cultural terms that Chibber believes have been misread in the Asian context by Subaltern Studies. Recent critics reveal how the nature of capitalism as practiced in the Hong Kong context would influence the future practice of capitalism around the globe. Hong Kong works such as Land and the Ruling Class in Hong Kong by Alice Poon (2011) also reveal the distinct nature of capitalism in the Hong Kong context. Poon describes the current state of the economic order in Hong Kong, an order that flourished in the colonial era and that has been left to trundle on regardless of the fact that Hong Kong now has poverty rates rarely seen in the developed world and is a city that one commentator describes as the most unequal in the developed world1: Hong Kong people would like to live in a liberal democratic society free of bureaucratic controls. They want to have the ability to create self-employed businesses to challenge the conglomerates that have built their strength on the monopoly control of natural resources. They yearn for an end to poverty and the development of an equitable social system that enhances self-esteem. Yet in the present set of circumstances, where monopolization of land and other key economic sectors by deeply rooted and powerful conglomerates has become an irreversible trend, those ideals will never stand a chance of turning into reality. Hong Kong communities may sometimes appear dangerously oblivious of the morbid side of economic concentration, which has chiefly arisen from, or at least related to, conglomerates’ parasitical monopoly of land, made possible by a socially unjust land system. (77–78) How much of this is down to colonial structures or to indigenous land practices is unclear since Hong Kong residents were never wholly left to manage their own affairs. The roots of this land system lie in the colonial order but they are also fed by cross-border business practices that worked in tandem with the hegemonic colonial order. In a sense, as we will see later in discussing how the economic system

Hong Kong and the Sinocentric afterlife  227 worked for colonial Hong Kong, one can argue that the global economic practices established by the British in Hong Kong, practices that would later influence the practice of multinational corporations, were enabling of cross-border laundering operations that mirrored on a local level the global economic practices that made Hong Kong a famous international finance hub and tax haven. Chibber’s onesize-fits all universalizing capitalism is then challenged by the recent emergence of Sinophone studies that has, at the very least, made us aware of the need to unpack such universalizing tendencies. Stephen Chu (2018) ultimately looks to the notion of “self-writing” that must haunt the “complicity between ‘nation’ and ‘capital’ ” (1092) so that Hong Kong must “free itself from both nationalism and capitalism.” Chu suggests, once again echoing Szeto, that this might be done in the Hong Kong context by turning from “universal capital to local particularities” (1093). However, in making this move Chu returns to some of the old Hong Kong clichés arguing that Hong Kong’s “self-writing” should speak “in the third space about what Hong Kong cannot say” (1097). Chu is right to conclude his summary with the suggestion that this must incorporate a return to history that reimagines postcolonialities—in the words of Harootunian—in the context of the relationship between “the experience of everydayness and the relentless regime of the commodity form” (1098). This marks the conclusion of his essay and yet it must become, as recent events make dramatically clear, our starting point. Recent events, rooted in decades of inequality and low social mobility are also borne of the sense of being forgotten and left behind. Successive Chief Executives have viewed the economic and political situation in Hong Kong as a “numbers game” that provides justification for why universal suffrage can never be granted or as evidence that the vast majority of Hong Kongers are simply worthless because they are not even “stakeholders.” The glaring absence of any attempt to bridge the schism in scholarship on politics and culture between this postcolonial high theory and efforts to connect it with the real lived lives of this deeply unequal city is mirrored by how out of touch successive CEs appear in relation to the needs and beliefs of Hong Kong people. With this in mind, I now try to bring the postcolonial argument into closer contact with some recent economic theories. Stephen Chan (2015) has recently sought to describe the “on the ground” sentiment of Hong Kong people, the very people so often overlooked by these postcolonial theories. In doing so, he outlines what have come to be known as “Hong Kong Core Values.” The educational context very often draws from these values. For example, for students who joined the recent Extradition Bill class boycotts, the description of the values they hold dear echo many European liberal values that have long become almost political clichés. The students’ Extradition Bill posters began by stating how “All men are created equal. Everyone shall enjoy our rights to Liberty, Freedom from Fear, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Chan describes in more detail what these Hong Kong “core values” are: [A]t the root of the matter is a set of “core values”, ranging from liberty, fairness, justice, rule of law, meritocracy, free (?) competition, human rights, integrity and dignity, to those embedded in the basic social formation and

228  Michael O’Sullivan cultural practices they support. More often than not, while the HKSAR attempts to put the spectrum of mainstream “liberal” practices on an operational platform, the level playing field in place keeps losing its ground, one that has been viale and essential to the foundation of the embedded values and “lifestyle” people adhere to in this unique haven on the Chinese mainland. (328) The unique local flavor of the particularities that speak for the coming together of the economic and the postcolonial in the Hong Kong context are then described in a way that displays a clear devotion to values long associated with European social theories such as Rousseau’s social contract. However, while such liberal values might have been credited with influencing later moves to accommodate aspects of the social welfare state in France, the UK, Germany, and Ireland, in Hong Kong any such devotion to such values has had to live alongside an equally strong belief in extreme meritocracy where there is little or no social safety net and where inequality is endemic and accepted. This seeming incongruence between theory and practice in terms of social values may then also explain why the reimagining of Western postcolonial notions for the Hong Kong context has often produced something of a mismatch between the theoretical description of the region in postcolonial studies and the reality of life lived therein. This brings us back to culture; culture and its theorization are of course imagined differently in this hub of the Sinophone. The relationship between the political and language itself is conceived differently in different cultures especially when there are different writing systems. Jacques Rancière (2005) has recently given us a new description for how to understand this relationship between language and politics. He sees language, literary articulations, and the “power of words” as diverting “man” from “his ‘natural’ purpose” (39). Political subjectification is, then, not formed or achieved by way of “imaginary identification”—we think here of Anderson’s (1991) oftcited “imagined communities”—but by way of “ ‘literary’ disincorporation” (40). The circulation of actual “literary locutions” takes hold of bodies and “divert[s] them from their end or purpose insofar as they are not bodies in the sense of organisms, but quasi-bodies, blocks of speech circulating without a legitimate father to accompany them toward their authorised addressee.” However, Rancière also describes how these blocks of speech do not form “collective bodies” but instead “lines of fracture and disincorporation into imaginary collective bodies” (39). This seems to describe well how postcolonial theory is often fractured when applied to the economics of Hong Kong. Of course, the various language communities in Hong Kong must also experience the political ramifications of these “lines of fracture and disincorporation” not only at the level of the sign but also at the disjuncture between sign system and character system. Rancière’s reading also suggests that language must be controlled since it can be responsible for the fracturing of collective imagined bodies and the diverting of individual bodies from ends and “natural” purpose. However, the political control of language has its own unique political and historical dimensions in Hong Kong that also are consistently revealing of aporias in any inherited Euro-centric approach to language.

Hong Kong and the Sinocentric afterlife  229 It may well be the case that the different sign systems employed in the Sinophone sphere introduce such disincorporations into any language of politics inherited from the “west.” Hong Kong is unique in its deconstruction of the narratives of colonialism and postcolonialism. Unlike other former colonies the British Empire finally relinquished in the twentieth century such as Ireland and India, Hong Kong could prepare relatively peacefully over a twenty-year period for its Handover. It also was the last colony of the British Empire to be given up in the twentieth century. It was a common experience in the 1980s and 1990s for a white man schooled in elite universities in Britain to stand at the top of lecture theatres in elite colonial universities in Hong Kong, offering classes in postcolonial literature and theory while the British Empire still colonized the region. So, for example, texts such as The Empire Writes Back were taught in Hong Kong’s lecture theatres while Hong Kong was being colonized and one of the editors of the book would go on to become Chair Professor of Hong Kong’s flagship Department of English at the University of Hong Kong shortly after the empire had handed back the leased colony to its new “colonial” master. Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture was also on many reading lists in courses on postcolonial literature in colonial Hong Kong. Ethnically, Chinese students were taken through its impossible prose very often by white postcolonial critics in positions that were a direct result of colonial powers that had situated English and departments of English as core subjects and “centres” for “radiating” British influence. So, when Bhabha (2004) reminds us that, Postcoloniality, for its part, is a salutary reminder of the persistent “neocolonial” relations within the “new” world order and the multinational division of labour. Such a perspective enables the authentication of histories of ­exploitation and the evolution of strategies of resistance. (6) it was in a sense deconstructed by the teaching event in these halls. Any “neocolonial” relations were subsumed under fears of recolonization from the motherland and this fear unleashed a postcolonial nostalgia for which the extension and preservation of informal imperialist practices themselves became the “strategies of resistance” to this recolonization. In those years, where colonial identity ran into a complicated nexus of neo-/de-/re-colonizing forces, it was very often white postcolonial critics from Britain or other former British colonies who came to preach the good news of postcolonialism, knowing that the elitism that colonialism had instituted still had cachet in Hong Kong. A strange interstitial space, maybe not even a third space, sprang up then in the 1980s and 1990s in these lecture halls between the respectful, diligent silence of the colonized, ethnically Chinese students and the white colonizer’s language of postcolonial theory that was institutionalized and validated by the colonial university as “imperial asset.” The University in such contexts becomes not only a publicly funded institution perpetuating colonial-style education in the language of the oppressor but also a

230  Michael O’Sullivan resource enabling colonized subjects to learn about the multitude of ways colonialism oppresses and subjugates them in real time. The institutional reality of the locus of the teaching event works in opposition to whatever message the class delivers. Spivak’s (1988) subaltern couldn’t speak in those classes and lectures, even if she was an expert in the different aspects of Spivakian subalternity, precisely because the scores for participation and assessment were administered by the same colonial logic that the text she had learned by heart deconstructed. Therefore, when Spivak writes in 1985 that: It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. These two obvious “facts” continue to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. This itself attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms. (243) This overlooks the fact that this culture of not “remembering,” of teaching texts without acknowledging their provenance and role in building myths of empire at home, was also in evidence and perpetuated by the colonized and decolonized Chinese education administrators and consumers themselves in the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond. The students were told time and time again by Western and nonwestern academics, sometimes British white academics, that such literatures— both nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature—helped the empire’s mission of expansion, but it was all overseen institutionally by that same empire. In other words, it made no difference to the teaching event; the trauma of the event, of those classes of the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond, would only truthfully be tackled later by the local lecturers and academics themselves. They eventually had to self-reflect on how this self-critical performance was played out on stage by the empire in their classes (a performance offered so that the imperial machine could feel more assured of its magnanimity in being so sensitive and self-aware) only further delayed their entry onto the world of academia as professional academics who could not only “write back” as “Empire” but “write for” their own academic jobs teaching postcolonial literature and other literatures to their compatriots in their new special autonomous region. And it was not only the teaching of British literature but the whole educational environment and structure that failed to be wholly cognizant of the repercussions of its imperialist flavor even after colonialism had officially ended. The canons and curricula of British literature would continue to be regarded as the “foundation,” the “capstone,” the “selling point” of many departments of English in the former colonies for decades to come. There are two important features of postcolonial theory that become apparent when its Anglo-centric afterlife confronts Sinocentric recolonization, and practices that had appeared normal are referred to as transplants from Western

Hong Kong and the Sinocentric afterlife  231 contexts. First, such postcolonial theory acts very much like a branch of the critical theory that Amy Allen (2017) has critiqued in her book The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Such theory fails in itself to be decolonized, for Allen, because it “remains committed to an imperialist metanarrative” (4). However, more importantly, for Allen, such theory is “stunningly silent on racist theory” (1). In fact, I would go further, in suggesting that postcolonial theory acts in such events both as an extension of the informal imperialist elements that perpetuate such tendencies as class inequalities while also enabling a Chinese community that has risen out of colonialism to regard itself as almost racially transformed by the experience. Touched and nurtured by the hand of Western postcolonialism, the postcolonial community can now act as if its people have almost been transformed into a different race to the Chinese relatives across the border in the recolonizing motherland who never had the good fortune to attend this postcolonial finishing school. The problem with this situation is that, once such informal imperialist practices are normalized in academic administration by the universities beyond their natural life—institutions well known for their adherence to traditions—, once the power dynamics they excuse and validate proceed unproblematically in the shift from colonialism to Chinese re-colonialism, it becomes difficult for an institution to self-reflect on how it might be extending the informal practices of colonialism. And these markers of the colonial order and structure are still everywhere in the language of administration in Hong Kong academia: we still speak daily of the Vice-Chancellor, the Senate, the Executive Committee. If a university can’t acknowledge the deep ramifications for its citizens of enacting and validating informal imperialist practices when colonialism has ended, many other political oversights in regard to self-reflection, self-engagement, and reflective practice are likely to ensue and get passed on by the deeply bureaucratic Hong Kong educational structures. This is one of the reasons Hong Kong educational authorities still follow the British educational model so closely. Hong Kong is the only region on earth, apart from the UK, to review all its academic staff and all its elitist universities according to the UK-designed RAE (soon to be REF) academic review systems. It is difficult not to see this as a colonial throwback. And this reluctance to give up colonial administrative practices should not be so surprising given that India also integrated informal imperialist practices into education and administration long after independence; Pankaj Mishra (2013) argues that “British-style schools, colleges and universities in India”—often run by Christian missionaries—were “churning out faux-Englishmen of the kind [Lord] Macaulay had hoped for.”2 This postcolonial nostalgia that acted as a bulwark against the realities of Chinese recolonization also had to work through the preservation of its English language proficiency; Indian scholars recognize that English became dominant in education in India through the “effort of individuals and institutions to establish their ‘cultural capital’ ” (Mukherjee 2017, 3). For Alok Mukherjee (2017), the “popular view that English was a colonial imposition . . . resulting from the influence of the theories of nationalism, Orientalism and postcolonialism on the study and understanding of the colonial era, is one-dimensional” (9).

232  Michael O’Sullivan However, whereas the last days of colonialism in India were filled with bloodshed and famine with “an estimated 3.5 million Bengalis” (Baker 2018, 260) dying in the Bengal famine of 1943, Hong Kong had a relatively peaceful send off for its “last Englishmen.” And whereas Britain left India with a debt of over eight hundred million pounds, a debt that, in Deborah Baker’s narrative history of the last decades of colonial rule in India, may have led to the Crown acknowledging that “England owed something of its survival to India” (261), Hong Kong’s finances were so integrated with that of England and so few official records were kept that Hong Kong never really considered that the empire might have owed it something. It all meant that whereas India was quick to show its disillusionment toward all things English, Hong Kong has had a more delayed reaction to the decline of English influence. Baker writes of India after independence: Yet though the English were finally leaving, they left their language behind. There was now an edge of restraint to the Bengali love for English letters, never again would English words and English writers be taken at face value. Bengalis would make the most of their independence. Stories would be told and histories written to unmask the lies, expose the trifling and breathtaking betrayals suffered at the hands of this language and those who ruled with it. (285) To think that British colonialism acted any differently in Hong Kong would be foolhardy and yet Hong Kong society has not yet concocted the stories or histories to unmask these lies or unearth the breathtaking betrayals, most likely because some imaginary narrative is needed to act as a stopgap against the encroaching realization that Chinese reintegration is almost complete. That many in Hong Kong still believe in the authenticity of British claims about preserving democracy in Hong Kong according to the “one country, two systems” model when the British themselves never gave its Chinese subjects a vote for Governor during its long reign, might only speak for the importance of imaginary narratives for the Hong Kong community. However, it is also important to look at the economics of education in this former colony of the British Empire, something that fed directly into the nature of the postcolonial as it was lived and taught in Hong Kong. The empire’s view of university education in Hong Kong went hand in hand with its overall view of Hong Kong and its people. Hong Kong’s identity, its very legal existence, was always the result of economic treaties and agreements. The land comprising Hong Kong was, unlike the land of Ireland and India, rented and leased. In other words, Hong Kong emerged from commercial agreements and commercial agreements have been the ground of its self-identity and philosophy; is it any wonder then that Hong Kong’s economy is still reliant on leases and rents with Hong Kong officially now the most expensive place on earth to buy property? Legally timebound conventions and treaties have always determined Hong Kong’s emergence, existence, and evolution. Hong Kong has a lease-and-rent identity. The Treaty of Beijing of 1860 ended the lease of Kowloon and ceded the land south of Boundary

Hong Kong and the Sinocentric afterlife  233 Street in perpetuity to the United Kingdom. The Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory of 1898 leased the territories north of Boundary Street and south of the Sham Chun River with the surrounding islands to the United Kingdom for ninety-nine years rent-free. In the lease-and-rent mentality Hong Kong grew and had its being. Meanwhile, the British also employed Hong Kong as a low-tax haven for its banking industry. The importance of Hong Kong for banking and offshore economics is well-documented. To sum up the economic importance of Hong Kong and to understand why for local people pride in Hong Kong’s economic and business prowess trumps all else we only need to look at the statistics for this tiny region with its relatively small population: Between 1980 and 1990, Hong Kong banks’ assets increased from US$38 billion to US$464 billion (from 2 per cent to almost 7 per cent of the world total) by which time Hong Kong ranked fourth in the world, trailing only the UK, USA and Japan. By 1990 Hong Kong was host to 138 licensed foreign banks, compared with 30 in 1965. In terms of the number of foreign banking offices, Hong Kong ranked second only to London with a total of 357 in 1995. (Schenk 2001, 3) Hong Kong was experiencing growth rates of 16 percent as recently as 1969, rates that China could not even manage during its economic resurgence of recent years. However, Hong Kong was a unique economic zone for other reasons too; it kept very few records and statistics. Catherine R. Schenk (2001) writes that: [T]he reluctance of the government to intervene in the economy extended to an unwillingness to collect statistics unless strictly necessary for business or welfare purposes. For this reason, for example, no official balance of payments or national income accounts are available before 1961. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) began to be calculated only from the early 1970s. (7) Indeed, the tax haven economy was very often a testing ground for new forms of neoliberalism. As Vanessa Ogle (2017) argues, in writing of what she calls “Archipelago Capitalism,” one important “economic function that tax havens additionally came to fulfil was offshore finance. They thus allowed certain aspects of neoliberalism to thrive before it came fully to the fore with the end of the Bretton Woods system” (1446). The international offshore business that began under British colonialism at the end of the nineteenth century through such companies as De Beers in South Africa and Egyptian Delta Land and Investment Co. Ltd, where companies were registered in London but had their headquarters and board meetings in the colonies, would be developed and finessed in Hong Kong in the twentieth century. Ogle reminds us that “the common denominators that bound together the entire offshore world in the preceding decades—low taxation and deregulation—were thus later part of the neoliberal free-market capitalist agenda” (1434). Ogle goes so far as to suggest that the offshore economy ultimately

234  Michael O’Sullivan produced the Euromarket which, for Niall Ferguson led to the European Union, and that without the offshore market and the Euromarket the rise of the American multinational corporation after World War II would have been impossible. This is a very different reading of capitalism and of the economics of subaltern politics under the colonialism of empire than the one Chibber would have us believe Subaltern Studies puts forward. Chibber (2013) argues that Subaltern Studies and hence much postcolonial theory on Asia pits Eastern pre-modernism and its lack of a proper bourgeoisie against Eurocentric modernity and capitalism. For Subaltern Studies and hence for much of the postcolonial theory built around Asia “this basic congruence between West and East” is denied. Chibber argues that it is this claim that is the basis for their conclusion that “Western theories cannot be grafted onto Eastern realities” (17). One feels that Chibber’s critique of postcolonial theory and of Subaltern Studies overlooks some of the subtlety of the descriptions of East and West important to political works exploring the origins of anti-westernism. For example, in his 2007 book The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia, a book republished in 2019 by Columbia University Press, Cemil Aydin argues that “Anti-Western visions of world order were born of” a “non-Western idea of a universal West around the 1870s.” Aydin (2007 [2019]) writes that “the contradictions of the civilizing mission ideology” of the West “and the crisis in the legitimacy” of this imperial world order created “alternative visions of nonwestern thought” that sought “to criticize the imperialist West for violating its own proclaimed standards of civilization” (177). This implies, for Aydin, that the idea of “the West” was in part a non-western construct. Ogle’s non-Marxist reading of economics and global capitalism is much more open to flows between the East and the West, to the extent that Hong Kong and other Asian colonies were used as testing grounds for economic practices that would later be perfected in Europe and the United States. In other words, the offshore economy, which the British were chiefly responsible for and in which Hong Kong played a significant role, was very much a testing ground for the neoliberal market forces that would go on to shape university policy since the 1970s and 1980s. London, as the center of the British Empire had always been the center for offshore banking and for the later shell company explosion. Ogle (2017) describes how this offshore and subsequently shell system worked through London, the center of the empire: Beginning in 1969, the U.S. Federal Reserve allowed U.S. banks to set up shell branches in havens such as the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands . . . By the early 1970s, roughly one hundred such shell branches existed in the Caribbean. Normally these locations were not even staffed by bank personnel; rather, the responsibility of running the shell was contracted out to local trust companies, which were often themselves owned by major international banks. Most of the business showing up on the books of tax haven shell branches was done not locally but in London. American bank branches in London then channeled funds to the Caribbean shell, and “by crediting the transactions to their Caribbean shells, the banks avoid having to pay withholding tax on a substantial part of the business they create in London.”

Hong Kong and the Sinocentric afterlife  235 No taxes accrued until profits were repatriated to the U.S. head office, “a step that can be postponed almost indefinitely.” (1451) Archipelago capitalism, therefore, is a kind of capitalism that was perfected and finessed in Hong Kong, as a form of capitalism that the empire tried out first in the colonies. As Ogle concludes, the “non-Western world indeed served as a laboratory for certain facets of modernity—for freemarket capitalism.” It was the offshore world, for which Hong Kong played an important role for two masters, Britain and China, that “created a testing ground and escape valve for certain elements of free-market capitalism beginning in the 1950s and 1960s that would later move to Europe and North America” (1456). This point is also taken up by Amy Allen (2017) who writes that the “material and ideological aspects of Europe’s dependence on its colonies were deeply intertwined” (18). Allen’s argument is that it is precisely a “backward-looking” notion of progress put forward by European modernity—something Bruno Latour also takes up—and its “norms or institutions” that overlooks “the role that Europe’s material and ideological relation to its colonies played in shaping European modernity as a racialized construct” (19). This blindspot, Allen argues, “continues to serve the ideological function of rationalizing and legitimizing contemporary forms of informal imperialism, neo-colonialism, and racism” (19). This point is of course well known in the Asian humanities where critics and philosophers have long sought to elucidate its influence. However, any such blind spot in the Hong Kong context has also served to lead to forms of discrimination against mainland Chinese that often assume all the characteristics of racism what became apparent in the recent protests against the influx of mainland parallel traders into Hong Kong. The point should not then be to return only to Adorno, Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School, as Allen suggests, in accounting for how this “informal imperialism” persisted but to look closely too at the structures and institutions of knowledge exchange in universities in the former colonies that continued to peddle administratively and academically the real-time effects of this “informal imperialism;” the shelf life of imperialism is long and even what may appear as informal is quickly formalized for reproducibility by the efficient bureaucratic machines of Hong Kong, institutions still organized around colonial models. In returning then to the economics of education in Hong Kong, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to claim that the kinds of discourses surrounding the establishment of the University of Hong Kong in the early part of the twentieth century were also a kind of model for discussions on the economic viability of universities internationally. The dominant economic perspectives on universities that perhaps became most pronounced since the 1980s and that fed into the “crisis of the humanities” discourse can be regarded as one clear academic result of this shifting economic order of neoliberalism, offshore banking, and shell companies, an economic shift regions such as Hong Kong allowed for. The economic mindset, which for some has led to the era of the “econocracy” in recent decades, was enabled by global economic trends that colonial regions such as Hong Kong allowed

236  Michael O’Sullivan for. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hong Kong had no home-grown university traditions to adhere to. Its universities arrived front and center into an economic nexus where the only justification for any new academic establishment was its economic justification. Therefore, from the very beginning in Hong Kong there had to be a viable economic plan and justification for a university if it was to receive financial support from donors in such a hive of business. The fact that Hong Kong would then, in some research papers (Hazelkorn 2010, 26), become the region with the most top-ranked universities by the beginning of the twentieth century was surely a sign that its staunchly utilitarian and rigidly economic perspective on education was what the global ranking bodies required for the new era of knowledge factories. The kinds of discussions the Vice-Chancellor and Governors conducted around the establishment of the University of Hong Kong, discussions that hinged on the institution’s economic justification, would only later become acceptable as explicit justifications for new universities in more established university regions. In this regard, it is interesting to contrast the different arguments made on behalf of universities established in Ireland and Hong Kong two former colonies of the British Empire during the period of colonization. While John Henry Newman could devise a whole new Catholic educational philosophy in laying out his vision for the Catholic University in Dublin in 1851 (what would later become University College Dublin), the founding of University of Hong Kong at the beginning of the twentieth century would always be based on its status as an “imperial asset.” It is fair to say that the British Empire always saw the establishment of a university in Hong Kong chiefly in terms of its economic value to the empire. The University of Hong Kong was itself described as an “imperial asset” by the colonial powers from the very beginning in the 1920s. One of the first publications devoted solely to the first university in Hong Kong, the University of Hong, reprinted from the Annual Report for 1928 of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce is entitled, “Hong Kong University as an Imperial Asset” [This of course builds on the British colonial mindset in terms of China that is also evident in the letter of Robert Hart to John Pope Hennessy, the then Governor of Hong Kong, in 1881]. The Chamber of Commerce document discusses how “friendly intercourse between China and Great Britain might be promoted” and how “correspondence of considerable interest has taken place with Glasgow and London” on this point. The correspondence details how “contact between the two countries in the educational field” could promote such friendly intercourse. W.W. Harvell, the then Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong, wrote a piece on the possible collaboration entitled “Hong Kong as an imperial asset.” Harvell notes that Great Britain has “lost an opportunity in not making Chinese students more welcome to its Universities.” It is interesting in today’s climate to hear him describe in 1928 how Chinese students had flocked to American universities only to return to China “generally scornful of British ideas, if not hostile to everything British” (3). Harvell continues by saying that the “best thing” for “British influence in China” would be “a steady stream of the best of Chinese youth to this University, whence the best students might pass on to special courses of advanced

Hong Kong and the Sinocentric afterlife  237 study in Universities in Great Britain.” However, he says an “indispensable preliminary to this development is the recognition of this University as an imperial asset” (4). The intention of promoting British influence was, of course, always integral to the University. Harvell describes how the founder of the University Sir Frederick Lugard “clearly intended the University to be a seat of higher learning for the Chinese generally and a centre from which British influence could radiate” (5). This was of course an ideal that was central to critics and educationalists in the United Kingdom as well. F.R. Leavis wanted the English School to be the “centre” of English culture wherever it was established and the British Board of Education’s Newboldt Report of 1921 entitled the Teaching of English in England privileges the capacity of English as a discipline that takes precedence over all other branches of learning (150) for building “national pride” and for also unifying class divisions, sadly an aspect of third-level education that never received much attention in Hong Kong’s harshly meritocratic system (150). Obviously, the racial differences between the English and the Chinese in Hong Kong were understood as running far deeper than class, but the universities abroad built on the British model, universities such as the University of Hong Kong, long maintained an interest in radiating British influence. The School of English at HKU is still a flagship school today and it has long moved beyond any mission to radiate such influence. However, it perhaps does sustain a practice that is often common in English Schools in former colonies of the British Empire, namely a reluctance to hire PhD graduates in English from departments and schools in its own region. Today the School of English has approximately twenty-five professorial staff; only a couple of them were born and raised in Hong Kong, and none of them studied for the PhD in Hong Kong. Other universities in Hong Kong do not fare much better in this regard. Harvell responds directly to anybody who might question the merit of a university in Hong Kong by responding to the imagined response of the “practical man”: “But all this,” I hear the practical man retaliate, “is rhetoric, the sort of stuff which a Vice Chancellor with nothing of practical utility to propose serves up on an occasion like this. We are a commercial community and Hong Kong is a place for trade, not for taradiddles about culture or the maintenance of British prestige in China by increasing the output of Hong Kong University graduates. Show us your university is going to enhance the prosperity of Hong Kong; show us the standard of value in virtue of which the University claims ever increasing financial support.” (11) The “practical man” may not have moved on much from Harvell’s day. Harvell refers to the work of John Ruskin as an example of how to move beyond the economic argument: [T]o John Ruskin it was an intuition that prosperity was not to be measured in terms of money and that unmitigated competition was not the road to

238  Michael O’Sullivan happiness. That intuition seemed to his contemporaries the most extravagant of assertions, running counter as it did to every approved and well-argued dogma of that industrial Age. But in that intuition lay the seeds of the Social Revolution through which we are now passing and in social and industrial matters we are still stumbling after Ruskin. (12) These are arguments about the justification of funding universities that are as relevant to today as ever before as we live through a highly competitive age, one Lana Guinier (2015) describes as testocratic and where competition for places at elite schools from both United States and Chinese students has never been higher. In this chapter, I have sought to read Hong Kong through some of the recent postcolonial theory it has sparked while also being cognizant of its unique economic history. Hong Kong is at a violent juncture in its evolution away from one form of colonialism and toward what many describe as a future of greater Mainlandization while also being postcolonial. In many ways, it is a region that tests the limits of postcolonial theory and its various figures for defining the effects of colonial power on the subject. However, because Hong Kong refuses to be tied down by postcolonial theory of any kind, it is now taking the struggle for its future to the streets and nobody knows where this is heading either in theory or in reality. In concluding, I wish to turn to the shadow of violence that hangs over postcolonial Hong Kong today. Franz Fanon (1978) reminds us that the “colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence” (68) and his readings of the various African colonialisms can in some ways be applied to Hong Kong. Such violence not only references the physical violence on the streets but also what Derrida has called “the violence of the sign.” The story of colonialism’s role in subjecting the Cantonese Sinitic-language community of Hong Kong to the violence of English has only partially been told. Today, re-colonialist Mainlandization suppresses this language community, its history, and its narratives in a wholly new way. Institutional censorship, the inaccessibility and lack of maintenance of archives,3 and the government rewriting of history4 means the postcolonial narratives of Hong Kong may not be told. The postcolonial is different in Hong Kong because it will not get written like it has been written elsewhere; there will be no schools of Subaltern Studies or postcolonialism in universities fifty or sixty years after British colonialism as there were in India and Ireland. The CCP government dictates also lead to many publishers self-censoring and outlawing comparisons of Hong Kong with other former colonies. This author’s chapter on a “shared legacy” between Ireland and Hong Kong was pulled from a collection for fear it would “bring down” a “Beijing publishing house.” As Hong Kong writer, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho asks “Can We Say Hong Kong?”5 However, perhaps the key violence of the postcolonial in Hong Kong is the violence done to the Anglophone postcolonial discourse itself. Hong Kong is possibly the only English-speaking former colony of the British Empire where a large section of the former colonized community look back on the days of British colonialism with nostalgia. The protesters who “stormed the LegCo” in Hong

Hong Kong and the Sinocentric afterlife  239 Kong in July 2019 in the Extradition Bill protests hoisted high the Union Jack. This would have been unthinkable twenty years after colonialism in the parliaments of Dublin or Delhi. If the Anglophone postcolonial is then, as a recent book writes, a theory relevant to anyone “joined by the common political and ethical commitment to challenging and questioning the practices and consequences of domination and subordination” (McLeod 2007, 6), it would seem that the majority of Hong Kongers have no desire to engage in such a challenge. Hong Kong’s chief issue is with its recolonization by the PRC. Therefore, the complex nature of Hong Kong’s “postcolonialities” requires a careful disentangling of the underlying structures of the different calls to de- and re-colonialize Hong Kong. Each strand calls on different readings of discourses with long and respected traditions, whether it be Sinocentric, Sinophone, or Anglophone. As Yiu-Wai Chu writes, in reference to Koon-Chung Chan’s notion of “Hong Kong as Method,” Hong Kong is often regarded as a figure for such hybridization, but this should not lead to any emphasis on method over content and context (2018, 1094). The Hong Kong postcolonial does not challenge any presumed domination and subordination from any one clearly demarcated Anglophone postcolonial discourse but instead reveals the fractures, fissures, and aporias opened up when different accounts of the colonial come into contact and when self-determination is ruled illegal or impossible. The Hong Kong postcolonial may then highlight the limitations in Sinophone contexts of postcolonialism as a chiefly Anglophone discourse whose raison d’être is typically to speak for how multilingual colonial subjects were colonized by a chiefly monolingual colonizer. The Hong Kong postcolonial focuses our attention on a site of cross-cultural inquiry where the Sinophone, the Sinocentric, and the Anglophone are engaged in a violent political and cultural battle for the hearts and minds of its subjects.

Notes 1 Lubin Gus, “This City Has By Far the Most Inequality in the Developed World,” Business Insider, June 26 2012, www.businessinsider.com/inequality-in-hong-kong-2012-6. 2 Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (London: Picador, 2013), 35. 3 Robert Bickers, “History in the Faking,” South China Morning Post, Wednesday, May 3 2017. Bickers argues that Chinese nationalism has become a much more influential political discourse ever since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 and he advises: “Let’s think properly about what that history was across the twentieth-century. And that’s difficult to do because over the past five, six, seven years the archives have shut down in China.” 4 Alvin Lum, “Government Rewrites History of Hong Kong’s 1997 Handover, One Inconvenient Phrase at a Time,” South China Morning Post, May 1 2018. The Hong Kong government’s Protocol Division removed the phrase “handover of sovereignty” from its website in 2018. This was following an earlier circular from the Government Administration Wing, which oversees the Protocol Division, entitled— Correct Use of Terminology — addressed to all civil servants, so as to “ensure the [use of certain expressions] are correct in both verbal and written correspondence.” One of the reminders related to the description of the handover, saying officials should use “return to China/the Motherland” or “resume the exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong.” 5 https://theoffingmag.com/enumerate/can-say-hong-kong/

240  Michael O’Sullivan

Bibliography Abbas, Ackbar. 1997. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press and University of Minnesota Press. Allen, Amy. 2017. The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Aydin, Cemil. 2007 [2019]. The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought. Reprint, New York: Columbia University Press. Baker, Deborah. 2018. The Last Englishmen; Love, War, and the End of Empire. New York: GrayWolf Press. Bhabha, Homi. 2004. The Locations of Culture. London: Routledge. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chan, Stephen. 2015. “Delay no More: Struggles to Re-Imagine Hong Kong (for the next 30 years).” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 16 (3): 327–47. Chibber, Vivek. 2013. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso. Chow, Rey. 1993. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Chu, Yiu-Wai. 2018. “Betwixt and Between: Hong Kong Studies Reconsidered.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 20 (8): 1085–100. Fanon, Frantz. 1978. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin Books. Guinier, Lani. 2015. The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America. Boston: Beacon Press. Hazelkorn, Ellen. 2010. Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education: The Battle for World-Class Excellence. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce. 1928. Hong Kong University as an Imperial Asset. Hongkong: Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, 1928.[Chinese University of Hong Kong Library, Special Collections]. Law, Wing-sang. 2000. “Northbound Colonialism: A Politics of Post-PC Hong Kong.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 8 (1): 201–33. Lubin, Gus. 2012. “This City Has By Far the Most Inequality in the Developed World.” Business Insider, June 26, 2012. www.businessinsider.com/inequality-in-hong-kong-2012-6. McLeod, John. 2007. “Introduction.” In The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, edited by J. McLeod. London: Routledge. Mishra, Pankaj. 2013. From the Ruins of Empire The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia. London: Picador. Mukherjee, Alok. 2017. “Early English Textbooks and Language Policies of India.” In Language Policy and Education in India, edited by M. Sridhar and Sunita Mishra. New York: Routledge. Ogle, Vanessa. 2017. “Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1950s—1970s.” The American Historical Review 122 (5): 1431–58. Poon, Alice. 2011. Land and the Ruling Class in Hong Kong. 2nd ed. Honolulu: Enrich Professional Publishing (S) Private, Limited. Rancière, Jacques. 2005. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum. Schenk, Catherine R. 2001. Hong Kong As an International Financial Centre: Emergence and Development, 1945–1965. London: Routledge.

Hong Kong and the Sinocentric afterlife  241 Shih, Shu-Mei. 2013. “Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production.” In Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader, edited by Shu-Mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards, 25–42. New York: Columbia University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 1985. “Three Women’s Texts And A Critique Of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1): 243–61. doi:10.1086/448328. Sridhar, M., and Sunita Mishra, eds. 2017. Language Policy and Education in India. New York: Routledge. Szeto, Mirana May. 2006. “Identity Politics and Its Discontents: Contesting Cultural Imaginaries in Contemporary Hong Kong.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 8 (2): 253–75. Tharoor, Shashi. 2017. Inglorious Empire. London: Hurst. Wong, Alvin K. 2018. “Including China? Postcolonial Hong Kong, Sinophone Studies, and the Gendred Geopolitics of China-Centrism.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 20 (8): 1101–20. Wong, W. 2015. “Discrimination against the Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong’s Defense of Local Identity.” In China’s new 21st Century Realities: Social Equity in a Time of Change, 23–37. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/hkbu_staff_publication/3694/.

Index

Abbas, Ackbar 224 Aboriginals Ordinance 1918 (NT) 78, 80 Aborigines, crimes against 75 – 6; see also colonial imaginary; indigenous peoples; Stolen Generations; Swan Book, The Aborigines Protection Acts 80 abortifacients 95 – 6, 98 – 9 Abortion Act of 1967 (England, Scotland, Wales) 101, 103n1 abortion (Ireland) 92; backstreet 92, 95, 102; criminal cases and charges 94 – 5, 99, 102; pills 98 – 9 Achebe, Chinua 173 Adams, John (Captain) 176 Adhara, the 156 – 7 affect 78; nostalgia 18; sentimentality 76 – 7 Africa and Africans 11, 131; anti-colonial 177; colonial 20, 175, 238; continent 71; diaspora 107; distorted views of 190 – 1; English encroachment on 123; genocide in (literary representations of) 130; imperial projects in 167; Indians in 165 – 72; indigenous 60; mineral and megafauna of 122; servitude and enslavement of 107, 109 – 12, 116 – 19; southern 134, 136; see also apartheid; British South Africa Company; Johannesburg; Kenya; North Africa 141; poverty; South Africa; Zimbabwe “Africa for Africans” 178 African Asian literary tradition 173 African collective 174, 176 Afrikaner 185, 187; National Party 183 Afropolis 67 Ahmad, Aijaz 31n12 Ahmad Bey see Bey, Ahmad Ahmedabad 51 Aiyar, Sana 164 – 5, 168, 171, 173 Alexander, Michelle 69 Algeria 223

Algeria-Tunisian border 151 allegory 3, 6 – 7, 113; of Heaven and Hell 134; religious 130 Allen, Amy 231, 235 al-Sadiq, Muhammad 151 alterity xxxiii Altman, Jon 80 amel/amin 156 Amin, Idi 173, 179n2 Anderson, Benedict 228 Anzaldúa, Gloria 20 apartheid 58, 61, 67 – 71, 181 – 94; end of 182, 190; post- 60, 63, 181; see also Biko, Steve Arabia Gulf 51 Arab Spring 142, 159n2 Archipelago capitalism 233, 235 Armenia 11 Armenian revolution of 2018 214 – 15, 218 Arnold, Matthew 129 assimilation 8; forced 85; of history xx, 30, 148; state policies 77 – 8; to whiteness 191 Atlantic: coloniality 202; empires 206; paradigm 12 Atlantic studies 28 Austen, Jane 17 Australia 73 – 87; see also colonial imaginary; Northern Territory Australians 77; indigenous 73; nonindigenous 80; see also Aborigines authoritarianism 189; Tunisia 141 – 3; of Ben Ali 145, 149, 159 authority: central 149; colonial 152; emancipation from xx; indigenous 75, 80 – 3; legal 77, 83, 87; of the King 133; in literary domain 84 – 6; of the past 134; patriarchal 151; patrimonial 159n5; religious 156; and representation 74; state 85 – 7, 155 Aydin, Cemil 234

Index  243 Bahamas 234 Baker, Deborah 232 Baker, Ella ix Bantustans 185 Barnard College xxv Bartolovich, Crystal 16 Bayly, C.A. 39 Bechelvel, Francoius de 155 – 6 Beijing, Treaty of 232 Belfast, Ireland 57 – 67, 71, 92, 98 – 102; Gaelic 59; Protestant 60 Benjamin, Walter 27, 119, 235 Ben Ali 145 Bengal 10, 232 Bengal famine 232 Ben Khalif, Ali 155 Ben Khalifa, Belgacem Ben Mohamed 155 Bennett, Jane xxiii Bennoune, Mahfoud 159n9 Ben Youssef 153, 157 Berlant, Lauren 76 Berlin Wall xxi, 11 Berman, Bruce 166 – 7 Beukes, Lauren: Zoo City xxxv, 67 – 71 Bey, Ahmad 151, 160n9 Bey, Muhammad 151 Bhabha, Homi xxx, xxxii, 24 – 5, 27; Location of Culture 229; “Signs Taken for Wonders” 25 Biko, Steven 181, 194 binary(ies) 12, 95; of the colonial 8, 16, 19; Europe and other iv; North/South 27 – 8; waste and preservation xxxvii; post-socialist and postcolonial 199; white and black 172; see also colonizer and colonized binary structures xxii, xxx, 28 birth control 92, 94, 96, 99 Board of Education (Britain) 237 Boatca, Manuela 205 bodies: African 168; Black 191; disciplining of 191; economic exploitation of 168; habits of 146; Indian 168; language and 228; movement of 100; reproductive female 92 – 4, 100 – 3; see also hands, black and brown; migration body parts 64, 66 body politic 48 Bolsheviks 198, 208, 210 – 11, 219 Bombay, India 41 – 8, 50 – 1 Bombay Association 42, 50 Bombay Presidency province 41 Bombay University 48

borders: administrative 158; abortion instruments crossing 99; bodies crossing 92 – 3; city 65, 71; of empire 28, 30; hunters crossing 125; imperialism within 61; invisible 65; macro 27; national 71, 92; redrawn 152; treaty clarification of 208 Bouazizi, Mohamed 159n2 Bourguiba 145, 153 – 4, Bourguiba Personal Status Code 157 – 8 Branch, Daniel 179n1 Bremner, Lindsay 61 Bringing Them Home Report 75 – 6, 80 British Empire xxv, 3, 10, 23, 115; Belfast as product of 58 – 9, 65; English schools, establishment of 236 – 8, 231; Irish independence from 60; Johannesburg as product of 58; London as center of 234; migrants from 92; nostalgia for 238; and Protestantism 119; see also East India Company British Empire and Africa: East Africa 219; eastern 164 – 79; South Africa 183 – 184, 186; southern Africa 123 – 37 British Empire and Hong Kong 224, 227, 229, 232 – 234; British universities in 236 – 7 British Empire and India 4 – 6, 12 – 13, 24, 229; and British banks 45; British educational models in 231; corporate institutions 41; Elphinstone College 44, 48, 50; capital pilfered by 30n1, 48; shroffs’ relationship to 41 – 42; Telang’s petitioning of 51; Tharoor on 27; trade 41 British Empire and Ireland 58 – 65, 111 – 12, 229; British universities in 236 – 7; and fertility control 92 – 95, 98 – 99, 101 – 103 British Empire and Jamaica 111 – 12 “British helotry” 53 British literature 18, 230 British South Africa Company (BSAC) 123 – 5; Mashonaland, annexation of 122, 126 – 8, 132; Matabeleland, annexation of 128; Royal Charter 128 Bretton Woods 233 Brexit xxvi, xxix bricolage 25 Brown, Bill xxiii, 27 Brown, John Croumbie 139n9 Brown, Joseph xxvi Brown, Nicholas xxvi Brown University xxvi – xxvii Bruff, Ian 194 Butler, Judith xxvii, 25

244 Index Calcutta 10 Calcutta Street, Belfast 63 Callinocos, Alex 22 – 3 canon: hegemonic 183; literary 26, 165, 173, 230; in postcolonial studies 14, 201 capital: appropriated 1 – 30; as colonial discourse 28; and colonial power 167; and crime 70; cultural 231; decolonizing 39 – 53; foreign 123, 151; framework of xxxi; Eurocentrism of 226; European 47; genealogies of 218; globalization of 63, 66; Indian 41, 43, 47 – 8, 51; indigenous 48; investment 64 – 5; imperialist 10; liberal 50; logic of 146, 148; and ‘nation’ 227; political 217; and rights 116; social 42, 216 – 17; universalizing of 225; white (racial) 185; worlding of 58; see also empire and capital capital accumulation 50, 52, 143, 181 – 3; via dispossession 147 capital, history of xvii – xxiii, 14; new history of xxx, 20 capital investment 115, 123; in India 45 – 6 capitalism 12 – 16, 18, 22 – 4, 118; allegories of 134; in Belfast 59 – 63, 66; in Belfast of The Twelve 66 – 7; British 115; and capitalisation 59; colonial 40 – 1, 49, 68 – 9, 109 – 10, 117, 145, 150; and colonialism 6, 58 – 60; conditionality of 118; contemporary 13; crisis of 12; crony 160n9, 189; and democratization 198, 209; economic system of 168; and empire 22, 62; European 150; expropriative 172; failed alternative to 208; in Finland 209; free-market 219, 233, 235; history/historical unfolding of 14, 30; in Hong Kong 223, 225 – 7, 231 – 5; and imperialism 83; imperialist 23; in India 45, 47, 51 – 3; industrial 144; in Johannesburg 60 – 1; in Johannesburg of Zoo City 68 – 9, 71; and modernity 217; and nation statehood 210; and neocolonialism 67; neoliberal 71; in North Ireland 62; pervasiveness of 112; political-economic logic of 26; postcolonial 112; and postcolonial historical fiction 108; postcolonial memory of 107 – 20; and Protestantism 60; racial 184; racially inscribed 61; as religion 119; in South Africa 186 – 94; and the Soviet Union 213, 215, 219; as term 108; in Tunisia 145 – 59; Western 223; and Western modernity 199 – 201,

203; and world literature 59; as world system 58 – 9; see also Archipelago capitalism; global capitalism capitalism and colonialism 6, 30, 146, 165; and apartheid 183 – 7; exploitation 169 – 70; in India 45; in Northern Ireland 60 capitalism and imperialism ix, xxvii, xxx, 22, 24; and apartheid 71; and crime 60; genre as a reflection of 83 capitalism, colonialism, crime 58 – 61 capitalist 48; British 126; colonial 128; indigenous 48; Ranade state as 49; Rhodes as 132 capitalist class 53 capitalist democracy 209 – 210 capitalist development xxxv capitalist extraction 135 – 8 capitalist exploitation 170, 174 – 5 capitalist imperialism see imperialism capitalist modernity 127, 167 capitalist penetration 141, 143, 149 capitalist system 182 capitalist turn 154 Capitalocene xxiii Caribbean 108, 234 Carroll, Clare 11 caste 41, 45, 48 – 51; half- 78 caste reconsolidation 9 Catholic Church 92, 96 Catholicism: in Ireland 60, 64, 93 – 4; worldview of 94; see also Christianity; Protestantism Catholic Truth Society 96 Catholic University, Dublin 236 Cayman Islands 234 Cervinkova, Hana 203 Césaire, Aimé xxxiii, 13, 17, 24; Discourse on Colonialism 27 Chakrabarty, Dipesh xvii – xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxvii, 24, 225; on colonial capitalism 40; on postcolonial studies 29; Provincializing Europe 40, 143, 146 – 7; see also History 1; History 2 Chan, Koon-Chung 239 Chan, Stephen 227 Charrad, Mounira 150 charter, charterings 126; imperial 12 Charter of Incorporation (1889) (British South Africa Company) 124 – 6, 128 – 9, 133, 137 Chaucer, Geoffrey 18 Chennells, Anthony J. 133 Cheta, Omar Youssef xxvii, 25, 27

Index  245 Chibber, Vivek xviii, xxxii, 18 – 19, 24; Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital xxxiv, 15; and Subaltern Studies 16; on universalizing capitalism 225 – 7 China xxvi, xxxiv; British prestige in 237;and Hong Kong 224 – 5, 230 – 5; mainland 228, 235; markets 46; nationalism 239n3; opium trade 3, 41; Pearl River Delta Region xxvii Chinese Communist Party (CCP) xxxviii, 224 – 5, 238 Chineseness 224 Chinese revolution 213 Chow, Rey 224 Christianity 119; in England 131 – 2; and colonialism 129, 134, 231; hegemony 18; schools 231; in Zimbabwe 133 Chu, Stephen 227 Chu, Yiu-Wai 225, 239 citizenship: colonial regimes of 165 – 8, 175; democratic 149; denial of 184; imperial 171; uncertain 200 Cleary, Joe xxxii, 10 – 11, 14, 19, 22 – 23; global conspiracy of global capitalism 62; metatheorizations of 27 coal 124, 134 Coates, Ta-Nehisi xxx Cohen, Gerry xix Collard v The State of Western Australia 78, 87n2 Collins, Wilkie xxxiii; Moonstone, The xxxv, 1 – 24 colonial discourse 31n4; reification of 60 colonial epistemology see epistemology colonial history xxvii, xxxv, 66; in Carpenteria 84; conquest 183; India 1; Hong Kong 224; Ireland 92, 100; Kenya 178 – 9; South Africa 192; Tunisia 145 colonial imaginary: Australia xxxvi, 73 – 5, 77, 84; genres that intervene in 81 – 3 colonialism: and apartheid 183 – 4, 187 – 91; in Africa 71, 167, 174; in Australia 73; British 233; Christianity and 129, 133 – 4; economic 199; economics of 226; in Egypt 233; of empire 234; French 143, 145, 149; German 202, 207; ghosts as reminders of 62; grand narratives of 16; and Hong Kong 229, 238; and imperialism 5; in India 177, 226, 232; indirect 218; laws 86; legacies of 147, 181, 187; and nationalism 8; nostalgia for xxvii; post-World

War I 217; pre-World War I 216; re-colonialism 231; slavery and 110; and socialism 208 – 9; in South Africa 233; in Tunisia 153, 156; as war 20; and white supremacy 190; see also capitalism and colonialism; capitalism, colonialism, crime; decolonization; neocolonialism; postcolonialism; Postcolonial Studies; settler colonialism coloniality 182, 187 – 89, 191; double xxxviii colonial territories see territories colonial theft see theft colonizer xxviii; British 183; European 183 – 4; historical 24; Latvia as 205; subimperialist 171; white 229 colonizer and colonized xxxv, 8, 39, 172, 215; Britain and Ireland 92 – 3, 95, 101, 111 Colonizer and Colonized (Memmi) 27 Comaroff, Jean and L. John 61 Congress Party (India) 52 Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory of 1898 232 Cooper, Timothy xxxvi, 127 co-operative commonwealth 52 co-operative farming 39 cooperative movement (Tunisia) 157 cooperatives xxxi, 52; commercial 40 – 1; credit 49 – 50; date 158 Cooppan, Vilashini 83 Cotton and Silk Spinning and Weaving Factory, Pune 48 cotton districts, Maharashtra and Gujarat 51 cotton trade 43; see also plantations Craigavon (Lord) 60 Creoles 108, 120 Croce, Benedetto xviii – xix Crosbie, Barry 98 Cubillo v Commonwealth 78 Cyprus 11, 31n10 Dabydeen, David 108, 118 – 19; Hogarth’s Blacks 116; Johnson’s Dictionary xxxvi, 107, 116, 119 Dalrymple, William 1 – 2, 10 Daly, Mary 94 Dar es Salaam 71 Davis, Lance xxxi Dawe, Gerald 63 Deane, Seamus 13 De Beers 233 decolonial theory xxx, 29

246 Index decolonization: of capital 39 – 53; of education 230; of economics 192 – 3; of Hong Kong xxvi, 223 – 4, 230; of Ireland xxxix; of knowledge xxxvii, 183, 194; of postcolonialism 29; of postcolonial theory 231; of Zimbabwe 136; of the world 187 deconstruction xvi, xx – xxi; of cartographic imperative 28; of colonial narratives 229; of empire 8; Marxist 16; and new materialism xxxiii Dei, George J. 193 Delaney, Enda 93 Delhi, India 239 Delay, Cara Margo 92 – 106 Derluguian, Georgi 213, 216 Derrida, Jacques xx – xxi, 28, 238 Desai, Gaurav 165, 173 Desai, Manali 206 Desmond, Matthew xxxix note 8 Devlin-Glass, Francis 89n18 Dhawan, Nikita 16 Dickens, Charles 109 Dimock, Wai-Chee 83, 86 Doyle, Laura 86 Drogheda Argus 105 Dublin, Ireland: abortion criminal cases 95, 98 – 102; Catholic University 236; parliament 239; Trinity College 21; University College 102 Duffy, Rosaleen 137 Dürer, Albrecht 118 Dzenovska, Dace 205 – 6, 215, 218 Eagleton, Terry xx, 13; Sweet Violence xxxiii – xxxiv East India Company (EIC) xxv – xxvii, 1 – 2, 29 eco-criticism xxix, 26 eco-imperialism 137 – 8 ecological allegory 122 – 38 ecology 127; capitalist 40; local 123 – 4 economic disparity 62, 64 economic dispossession 116 economic history 13; of imperialist capital xxvii; of Yale xxvi; see also trade economic imperialism see imperialism economic nationalism 40 Economics (disciplinary field) 14, 51, 183; teaching of 182, 192; study of 190 economics 27; of colonialism 226; and culture 29; decolonizing 192 – 3; demand-side 50; of education 232;

and empire 15, 57 – 71, 164, 201; and globalization 188; of Hong Kong 228; imperial/ist 201, 212 – 15; and Indian critics of empire 39; of need 219; neoclassical 192 – 4; offshore 233; and society 39; Western imperialist 201 economic violence 17, 58, 71; and economic justice 20 – 30 education and empire: British education models in Hong Kong xxxviii, 229 – 37; British educational models in India 44, 231; dehumanization enacted via 189; and Eurocentrism xxxvii, 183, 190; and Hong Kong Core Values 227; Indian students in the United Kingdom 49; racist systems of xxxvii; in South Africa (colonized) 183 – 4, 189 – 94; Western 217; see also Brown University; Elphinstone College; Harvard University; Yale University Éire 93, 96, 99, 103n2 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 20 Elphinstone College 44, 48, 50 Elster, Jon xix emancipation xx; from economic imperialism 213; from imperial politics 214, 217 – 18; post-xxxi–xxxii; from slavery 148 emigration (from Ireland) 93 – 4, 100, 102 emmenagogues 92, 95 – 6, 99 empire 206 – 11, 232, 234; abortifacients circulating through 96, 98; bodies, movement of 100 – 3; and capital 1 – 30; and capitalism 22, 29 – 30, 61 – 2; colonialism of 234 – 5; and colonial plantations 107, 109, 111 – 12, 15; critiques of 17 – 18, 26; expansion mission of 230; history of 27, 30; and Indian political economy 39 – 53; modern 10 – 11, 21; politics of 217; resistance to 23; shadow of 39, 53; as structural theft 1 – 30; under-theorization of 21; Western 213; see also Atlantic: empires; British Empire; economics; education and empire; German Empire; Hapsburg Empire; Moghul Empire; Ottoman Empire; Russian Empire; Soviet empire Empire Studies 14 – 15 Empire Writes Back The (Ashcroft) 11 epistemic oppression 191 epistemological blindness 14

Index  247 epistemology(ies) xxxiv; Eurocentric 182; postcolonial 26, 28; of wealth xxviii; Western 89n18 Eucharist 134 Eurocentrism 16, 143, 190 – 3; and Africa, distorted views of 191 – 3; and capitalist labor 147; as colonial norm 182 – 3; education as instrument of 190; and global capitalism 211; and history 207, 226; in knowledge 219; in social science 145, 205; and western modernity 200 – 2, 204 – 7, 234 Euromarket 234 European Union 60, 216, 234 exile, theory of 26 Fadem, Maureen E. Ruprecht 1 – 38 famine: 43 – 4, 50, 52; Irish 28; Zimbabwe 136 Fanon, Frantz 13, 17 – 18, 24 – 5, 167, 238; Black Skin, White Masks 25 – 6 Fanning, Bryan 103 Faouar 157 – 8, 160n11 Farkas, Andrew T. 186 – 7 farmland 136; see also plantations farmers: black 136; in India 44 – 5; private sector 154; small-scale 136; tenant 127; white 123, 136; in Zimbabwe 122 – 3, 125, 127, 136 Fast Track Land Reform 136 Faust, Drew Gilpin xxvi Ferguson, Niall 225, 234 Ferriter, Diarmaid 95 fertility (human female) 92 – 5, 99 – 103 Finland, Grand Duchy of (Russian Empire) 198 – 9, 208, 212 Finno-Soviet Treaty of 1918 208 First Chimurenga (“revolutionary struggle”) 129, 135 First War of Independence (Zimbabwe) 129 Fletcher, Ruth 95 Foner, Eric xxv, xxvii Forster, Christine 78 Foucault, Michel xvii, xxi, xxviii; on political theory 28; power, techniques of xxvii France 226; liberal democracy in 144; social welfare state 228; and Tunisia 145 – 6; Tunisian independence from 141 Frankfurt School 22 – 3, 235 Fraser, Nancy 199 – 200, 211 – 12, 214 Frątczak-Dąbrowska, Marta 107 – 21

freeholds 127 Free State see Irish Free State 93 – 4, 96 free trade xxxi Furdoonji, Nowrozi 44 Gadgil, Dhananjay Ramchandra 41, 51 – 2 Gagyi, Agnes 217 gender xxxiv; and genealogies of capital xviii; in imperial contexts xxxv; and the law 73 – 4; and the new materialism xxviii; and the railway 178; in South Africa 182; and tribal lines 158 gendered violence 73 gendering 24; of indigenous sovereignty 74, 87 gender politics 6 gender studies 32n25 German Empire 207, 219 German Historical School 48 Germany 49, 228; colonialism 202, 207 – 10; in East Africa 219; imperial revolution 213; and Tunisia 151 Gikandi, Simon 173 Gill, Stephen 215 global(ized) capitalism 66, 146, 203, 211, 216; colonial plantation as symbol of 108; economics and 234; global conspiracy of 62; history of 120; pervasiveness of 119; (post)colonial 107; system 23 Global North 194 global power, balance of 24 Global South 12, 15, 49, 194 Gokhale, Gopal Krishna 40 – 1, 49 – 52 Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics 51 Gómez-Barris, Macarena xxx Goodstone, Alexis 79 Goodwin, Robert 113, 115 – 16, 118 Gorbachev, Mikhail 218 Gordner, Matt 141 – 63 Gordon, Lewis R. 190 Gorman-DaRif, Meghan 164 – 80 Gqola, Phumia 191 Graeber, David 119 Graham, Colin 11, 13, 16 Grosfoguel, Ramón 187 Grove, Richard 139n9 Guinier, Lani 238 Gujarat 41, 43 – 4, 51 Gupta, Akhil xxx Guyana xxxiv, 116

248 Index Haggard, Rider 123, 126 Haitian Revolution 120n2 Hall, Catherine 98 Hall, Stuart xix Hammami, Mohamed-Dhia 159n9 Hamzaoui, Salah 157 hands, black and brown 166, 175 Hapsburg Empire 150 Hardt, Michael xxi – xxii Harootunian, Harry 227 Hart, Robert 236 Harvard University xxvi – xxvii Harvell, W.W. 236 – 7 Hawkes, Terrence xx Hebdige, Dick xix Hegel, G.W.F. xviii, xxi, 24 Heaven and Hell 134 Heidegger, Martin 21, 32n18 Heleta, Savo 181 – 97 Helm, Charles 125 Hennessy, John Pope 236 Hindu 2, 5; banking castes 41 – 2; pilgrimage 8 – 9; traditions 48 Hindu Undivided Family 40 historicism 17, 28, 146 – 7 History 1 24, 146 – 7, 225 History 2 146 – 7, 225 History 3 147, 155 – 8 history politics 201, 210 Hoad, Neville 67 – 8 Homelands (South Africa) 185 Hong Kong 223 – 39; and opium wars 3; and postcolonial studies 11, 223; see also hybridity Hong Kong Territory, Convention for the Extension of 232 Hong Kong Core Values 227 Ho, Tammy Lai-Ming 238 Howard, John 77 Hudson’s Bay 28 human rights 61, 227; violations 76, 137 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) 75 hybridity 15 – 16, 27, 173; of Hong Kong 224, 239 identity 16; African (Jamaican) 110; Eastern European 205; Georgian 204; Kenyan 171, 174; postcolonial 21, 223 – 4, 229; national (Irish) 95, 101; tribal 142, 147 – 8 imperial citizenship see citizenship imperialism 1 – 7, 9 – 20, 22 – 30; and Africa 167 – 70; apartheid as 61; British 60, 92, 98, 100, 119, 123; capitalist 63; Dutch 60; economic 213; epistemic fracture

and distortions of 18, 61; and Eureka Street (Wilson) 57 – 8; in Tunisia 151; in Twelve, The 63 – 6; and waste 127; in Zoo City 70 – 1; see also capitalism and imperialism; eco-imperialism imperialist capital see capital “imperial firm” 47, 52 imperial history 30 imperialist ideology 13 India 1 – 8, 13, 39–; industrialization 24; “loot” from 30n1; Parsi 44 – 48; Pune 49 – 50; western 41 – 44; see also British Empire and India; East India Company; see also Bombay Indian-Kenyan solidarity 164 – 179 Indian Ocean trade 41 Indigenous Affairs, Department of (Tunisia) 155 – 6 indigenous communities 137, 167 indigenous peoples: Australia 73 – 87: children 79 – 81, 84 – 6; black Africans 69; subjugation of 189 – 90; thinkers 47 indigenous politics 39 – 42 indigenous sovereignty, gendering of 74 Inquiries Act 79 inter-imperiality 86 Intervention, the see Northern Territory Intervention Iraq xxi, 158 Ireland: Catholic 60; as colonizer and colonized 92 – 3, 95, 101, 111; Good Friday Agreement 60; Northern 59 – 60, 95; Partition 60, 93, 103n2; Protestants 59 – 60, 62, 64; Southern 95; see also abortion; Belfast; Dublin; Troubles, the Irish Free State 93 – 4, 96, 99; Éire 93, 96, 99, 103n2 Islam 152 – 3; see also Muslims Jain 42 Jamaica 108 – 16 James, Marlon: Book of Night Women 107 – 10, 112, 116 Jameson, Fredric 59 Jasmine Revolution 159n2 Jewish people 41, 117 – 18; immigrants 102; see also Judaism Johannesburg, South Africa 57 – 61, 67, 69 – 71, 122; see also Vladislavić, Ivan Johnstone, Frederick A. 184 – 6 Joseph, Laura 84 Judaism 119 Kahora, Billy 178 – 9 Kalb, Don 204

Index  249 Kamola, Isaac 190, 193 Kant, Immanuel xxii, 24 Karuka, Manu xxx Keating, Anthony 93 Keaveney, Karen 63 Kebili, governorate of 141, 155 – 6, 158, 160n11 Kelly, Aaron 62 – 3 Kelly, Robin D. 189 – 90 Kennedy, Michael 209 Kennedy, Rosanne 76 – 7 Kenya 164 – 74, 177 – 79; Railway Project 164 – 72, 74 – 9 Kenyatta 179n2 Keynes, John Maynard 50 khammas, khammassat 153 khammes 156 – 7 Kiberd, Declan xxxii Kigali 71 Kimani, Peter: Dance of the Jakaranda xxxvii, 165 – 6, 173 – 9 kinship 41, 45; and clientelism 152; endogamous 52; versus economic selfinterest 48; Hindu 40; as a resource 149; structures 147; of thievery 10; in Tunisia 141, 147, 149 – 50, 152 – 4, 158 Knight-Bruce, George Wyndham Hamilton 133 Kocka, Jürgen 108 Kołodziejczyk and Şandru 199 – 201 Korhonen, Juho 198 – 222 Kowloon 232 Kruger v Commonwealth (“Kruger”) 78 Kyrgyzstan 213, 216 Lacan, Jacques xvii, xxi Lagardien, Ismail 193 Land Act of 1913 (South Africa) 185 land theft see theft Latvia 205 – 6, 212, 218 Law, Wing-sang 225 Lazarus, Neil xix, 16, 203 – 4 Leavis, F.R. 237 Lemon, Anthony 186 – 7 Lenin, Vladimir 59, 200, 208 – 10, 216 Lentin, Ronit 100 Levy, Andrea: Long Song, The 107 – 8, 112 – 13, 116 liminality 34, 27, 81 – 82, 87, 224 Linow, Valerie 78 – 9 Lippert, Eduard 126 List, Friedrich 48 Little Children are Sacred Report 79 Lloyd, David 8, 23 – 4, 27 Lloyd, John T. 132

Lobengula (king) 123, 125 – 8, 133 loot and looting 1 – 2, 4, 12, 30n1, 190; see also theft Lugard, Frederick (Sir) 237 Lugones, María 29 Lyotard, Jean-François xxi – xxii Mabasa, Khwezi 189, 191 Mabo v Queensland 74, 82 MacKenzie, John 124 Maghrib 152 Magubane, Ben 184 Maharashtra 41, 42, 51 Mahjoub, Ali 160 Malm, Andreas xxiii Malthus, Thomas 48 Mamdani, Mahmood 184 Mao (chairman) xix, xxi Marazig 156 Marxism xix – xxiii, 15 – 16, 19, 22, 24 – 5 Marxism-Leninism 198 Marx, Karl xxi, 59 Masani, Minoo 53 Mashonaland 122 – 38; game legislation 124; see also British South Africa Company (BSAC); Schreiner, Olive mass incarceration 25 Matabele 127; First Matabele War 125; Second Matabele War 129 Matabeleland 127 – 8 materialism(s) 22; historical 28, 59; and literature 59; Marxist xxiii, 24; methodological 22; new xxix – xxxiii, 19, 24 – 9 Mawere, Munyaradzi 128 Mbeki, Moeletsi, 189 Mbeki, Thabo 182 McAvoy, Sandra 95 McCann, Gerard 93 McDonald, Edward (fictional character) 174 – 7 McEwan, Cheryl xxxi McKenna, Michael 62 – 6 McKinty, Adrian 65 McLaren, Angus 99 McVeigh, Shaun 83 Meier, William 60 mejba 151 Memmi, Albert 17, 27 Merritt, Harry 205 – 6 meta-analysis xxvi meta-critique: of political power xxvii; postcolonial xxxii, 14; of postcolonial realisms 11 metalevels 201

250 Index metaphor: of death xvii; of in-betweenness (racial) 165, 169 – 74; of literary production xxix; of railway for race and interraciality in Kenya 166, 169 – 78 meta-theory 28 Mignolo, Walter 205 migration and immigration 126; into Hong Kong 224; Ireland 59, 64, 100 – 2; from/ inside Tunisia 141, 150, 153 Miller, Elizabeth 135 Miller, Norman 167 Mill, John Stuart 50 Millowner’s Association (Bombay) 46 mills 51; textile 46 – 7 Mishra, Pankaj 225, 231 missionaries 100, 125, 132 – 3, 231 Mlimo, the 129 Mnangagwa, Emmerson Dambudzo 136 Moghul Empire 4 Mokrzycki, Edmund 216 Moore, David Chioni 204 Moore, Jason xxiii More, Mabogo P. 184 Moretti, Franco 59 Morrison, Toni 18, 30; Beloved xxxix, 6 Morris, William 135 Motha, Stewart 74, 81 – 2; Mabo v Queensland 74, 82 Mseba, Admire 127 Msimang, Sisonke 189 Mugabe, Robert 136 Muhammad al-Sadiq see al-Sadiq, Muhammad Muhammad Bey see Bey, Muhammad Mukherjee, Alok 231 Murombedzi, James C. 127 Murombo, Tumai 122, 136 – 7, 138n7 Murray, Martin 61 Murtagh, Brendan 63 Murthy, Viren 22, 27 Muslims 41 – 2 myaad system 142, 145 – 6, 148, 150 – 152, 159 Mzilikazi (king) 127 Mzisi, William 125 Nairobi 71 National Apology (Australia) 76 – 7 nation-space 173 Naoroji, Dadabhai 41 – 2, 44 – 53 Ndebele 123, 125, 127 – 9, 131; see also Matabele Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. 191

neocolonialism xxxix; gentrification as a form of 65; and imperialism 63, 235; urban erasures of 67 Neville, Stuart : Twelve, The xxxv, 61, 63 – 7 Newboldt Report of 1921 (Britain) 237 Newman, John Henry 236 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o see Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa Nimrod (free Black man) 114 – 15 Nimrod (slang) 122, 138n1 Nixon, Rob 135 Norris, Christopher xx – xxii Northern Ireland see Ireland Northern Territory (Australia) 74 – 5, 80 Northern Territory Intervention 77, 79, 84 – 6 Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 80 Offences Against the Person Act (Britain) 95, 103n1 Ogle, Vanessa 233 – 5 opium and opium trade 3, 27, 41 Orientalism see Said, Edward Orientalism(s) 12, 15, 202, 231; annihilation 213; as meta-paradigm 28; theories of xxxiii; tropes 43 Orford, Anne 86 O’Sullivan, Michael 223 – 41 Ouled Yacoub 156 Paley, William 132 panchayat 41 Pappe, Ludwig 139n9 Parsi 40 – 2; political economy 44 – 7 Partition see Ireland partitioning, disciplinary 21, 29 Pašeta, Senia 94 Patnaik, Utsa 32 Patwardan, R. 47 Paulin, Tom 63 peasant 46, 50, 52; Europe 115; subsistence 144; taxes 151 peasant economy 148 Perkins, Kenneth 160n9 phoresy xxxv, 9 – 20, 29 Pioneer Column 127 piracy xxx plantation 107 – 20; American cotton/ slave xxxix note 8; “against capitalism” xxxii; and capitalism 30; as “crucible of capitalism” xxxi; in Ireland 59 – 60;

Index  251 poststructural 25; slavery 147 – 8; Tunisia date 156 – 7; West Indian sugar/ slave 107 – 15 planation economy: South Asia 40; West India 112 plantation labor 147 “Plantation Road to Socialism” (Taylor) 143 plantation socialism 148 Pizan, Christine de 18 Poe, Edgar Allan 9 Poland 108, 117 – 18; neocolonialism 218 Policante, Amedeo xxx Pollard, Jane xxxi Poona Dyeing Company 48 Poon, Alice 226 Portuguese 24, 41, 60, 126 – 7 postcolonial history xxi postcolonial identity see identity postcolonial literary criticism 10, 17 postcolonial methods 12 postcolonial reparations see reparations Postcolonial Studies xxv – xxxviii, 218; and capital, history of xvii – xxiii, 14; and capitalism, crisis of 12; Chakrabarty’s influence on 146 – 7; “Chibber debate” in 19; and economic violence 20 – 30; empire in xxvi; faculty 12; as feminist undertaking 20; future of 22; history of xxxiv; and nationalist historiography 212; as nervous condition 17 – 18; and postcolonial realisms 11; and postsocialism 200 – 7, 209; scholarship 11 postcolonial theory 11, 15 – 16, 22, 26; canonical xxiii; decolonization of 231; see also Subaltern Studies; poststructuralism postcolonial thought 12 – 13 postcolonialism 25; decolonizing 29; and fertility control 92, 103; and Hong Kong 224, 226, 229, 239; and post-socialism 198 – 205, 215; theories of 146; Western 231; see also historicism post-socialism: imperial economics of 212 – 15; positionality 200 – 7, 209 post-poststructuralism 24 poststructuralism xvii, xxii; antiessentialist 15; perspectives 14; of postcolonial theory 22, 26 poststructuralist theory xxvii, 16 poverty 24, 26; and coloniality 187; in Hong Kong 226; in India 43 – 4, 50; in London 116; in Long Song 114; social

psychologies of; in South Africa 181 – 2, 185, 188 – 9, 192 – 4; and structural racism 79; in Swan Book 85; in Tunisia 141, 153 precarity xxvii–xxviv, 24, 26 preserves (land) 122 – 39 prison industrial complex 25, 69 Propst, Lisa 68 Protestantism 119; in Ireland 57, 59 – 60, 62, 64 Pune, India 48 – 51 Rainbow Nation 191 Rajagopalachari, Chakravarty 53 Ramburuth-Hurt, Kamal 193 Ranade, Mahadev Govind 40 – 1, 48 – 9, 51 – 2 Rancière, Jacques 228 Rao, Rahul 15, 25, 27 Rattigan, Cliona 95 Ravenscroft, Alison 89n18 Redmond, Jennifer 101 reparations xxvi, 58; Coate’s work on xxx; colonial 73 – 87, 188; discourse of 26; imperial 7; in Moonstone, The 4, 7 – 9, 12 – 13; postcolonial 4, 8, 12; in Twelve, The 62, 64 – 5; for Troubles, the 62, 65; uncollected 30; in Zoo City 69 reparation measures 76 reparation scheme, failed 75, 77, 87 reparations, renegotiation, and redress xxvi Report, the see Little Children are Sacred Report; Bringing Them Home Report revisionism xxvi, xxix, 16; Gupta xxx; Watson and Wilder 12 Rhodes, Cecil 123, 125 – 33, 135, 138 Rhodesia 123 Ricardo, David 48 Rijswijk, Honni van 73 – 91 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 6 Rodney, Walter 184 Rolf, Steve 149 Rosdolsky, Roman xix Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 228 Rubin, I.I. xix Ruchman, Samuel 167 – 8 Rudd, Charles Dunell 125 Rudd Concession 125, 128 Rudd, Kevin 77 Ruskin, John 131, 237 – 8 Russian Empire 202, 208 – 9, 211, 213; see also Finland, Grand Duchy of; Soviet Empire

252 Index Russian Revolution 207 Russian state 143 – 4 Ryan, Louise 101 Ryan, Michael xix – xx, 29 Sahle, Eunice 167 – 9, 175 Said, Edward iv, xx, xxxiii, 13, 23 – 5, 27 – 8, 30; Culture and Imperialism 107; discourse theory of 23; Orientalism xix, 17 – 18, 25 – 6 Samaddar, Ranabir 19 Sanders, Mark 134 Sarel-Sternberg, Benno 156 Sartre, Jean Paul 17 Schenk, Catherine R. 233 Schuld 119 Schreiner, Olive 122 – 39; Dreams 134; “Our Waste Land in Mashonaland” 123 – 9, 134; “Sunlight Lay Across My Bed” 134 – 5; Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland 129 – 36, 138 Second Matabele War (1896–97) 129 Selous, Frederick Courteney 126 – 8, 130 Semmel, Bernard xxxi, 37 Senior, Nassau 48 settler colonialism xxxi, 125, 127; in Kenya 164, 167, 171; in South Africa 181, 183 – 7, 190, 193 – 4 sexual violence 73 – 4 shell companies 234 – 5 Shelley, Mary 6 – 7 Shih, Shu-Mei 224 – 5 Shona 125, 127 – 9, 131 – 2 shroff 41 Simatei, Peter 170, 172 – 3 Sinha Subir 13, 16, 19, 21 slave narratives 107, 109 – 20 slave trade 28, 117, 159n9; and Ivy League institutions xxvi slavery 20, 28; and imperial colonization xxv, 184, 189; as “looted” labor 12; modern chattel 21; plantation 147 – 8 Slavin, Molly 57 – 72 Smith, Adam 48 social Darwinism 132 Société Tunisienne de l’Industrie Laitière (STIL) 157 South Africa 49, 181 – 96; see also apartheid; British South Africa Company (BSAC); education and empire; Johannesburg South Australia v Lampard-Trevorrow 87n1

South/North binary 28 Soviet Alternative 219 Soviet Empire xxxviii, 202, 206, 209 – 11, 214, 217; politics of 219 Soviet Union 200 – 19 collapse xxi, 11, 198, 207, 214, 218; redistribution, politics of 199; see also Bolsheviks; Lenin, Vladimir space and time see colonial space and time 81 – 2, 86 – 7 space (abstract) 8; academic 193; of assimilation 191; economic 40, 167; of emancipation 214; higher education 194; institutional 42; intersected 20; intellectual 29, 218; liminal 81 – 2, 85, 87; for new knowledge 23; open 29 – 30; post-socialist 219; of resistance 128; of subversion 113; “third” 224 space (physical): African and Indian bodies in 168; apartheid and 61, 69; built (South Africa) 68; cafes 158; land and 61; local 67; national 103; urban xxxv, 59 – 60, 66, 71; see also borders; nationspace; plantation; territories Spillman, Deborah Shapple Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty xix – xx, xxviii, xxxiii, 30; “Can the Subaltern Speak” 25 – 6, 230; on Frankenstein 6; tenuring of 32n16; “Three Women’s Texts” 17 – 18 statehood: nation- 209 – 10; new 216; postsocialist 215; Russia’s claims to 211; socialist 198 – 9, 209 Stead, William 130 Stolen Generations (Australia) 73 – 80, 83 – 6, 87n2 stolen see theft subaltern 25; mute 26; Spivakian 230; voices 208, 210 Subaltern Studies 13, 15 – 16, 23, 27; Chibber’s critique 225 – 6, 234; and historicism 146 – 7; in Hong Kong 238 sugar export 114 sugar plantation see plantation Suny, Ronald Grigor 200, 218 Swan Book, The see Wright, Alexis Szeto, Mirana May 223 – 7 Telang, Kashinath Trimbak 41 – 2, 50 – 2 Terreblanche, Sampie 184 territorial histories 11 territoriality 165

Index  253 territories 14, 27, 29; Australian 82, 84; colonial xxx; colonized 23; homelands/ Bantustands 185; multiethnic 138; postcolonial 17; preserve 123 – 6; “promised land” 123; South Africa as 183; Tunisian 151; zoo 124; see also Mashonaland; Northern Territory Thaler, Richard xxix Thapar, Romila 31n4 Tharoor, Sashi xxx, xxxii, 24, 27; Inglorious Empire 226 Tharu, Susie 16 theft xxv; of antiquities 31n4; capital and 13, 20; of capital 14; colonization as 9, 23, 46, 183; imperial xxxix; land 183 – 5, 189 – 90; in Moonstone, The 4 – 5; property 7, 20; of Third World 23; trade as 2; wage 20 Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa 17, 164, 168 Tlostanova, Madina 200, 202 – 3, 207, 212 – 16 T/MC see tribal/management councils Touraine, Alan 216 trade xxxiv; of abortifacients 99, 101; “African” 117; of bodies and goods xxxvi; British 41; of contraceptives 95; cotton 43; colonial appropriations of 30; and the colonial state 21; and empire xxxv; of expertise and information 92; “field of” 53; global 98, 107; and imperialist capital 10; law and licensing of 28; linen 63; in Moonstone, The (Collins) 1 – 3; piracy and xxx; as theft 2, 12; Tunisian commerce and 150; unfair terms of 50; see also British Empire; free trade; opium and opium trade; slave trade trade routes xxvii, 12 traders: colonial (white) 127, 129; in Hong Kong 235; Indian 45, 47, 49, 168 Trevorrow v South Australia 78, 87n2 tribal/management councils 142 – 3, 145 – 6, 148 – 58 Trotsky, Leon 59, 143 – 5 Troubles, the (Ireland) 57; Good Friday Agreement 60; in Twelve, The (Neville) 62 – 6 Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission (Kenya) 166, 169 Tulbure, Narcis 201, 204 Tunisia 11, 31n10, 141 – 59; as French protectorate 152 – 3; independence (1956–1987–2011) 152 – 5; Nefzaoua 155 – 8 Twain, Mark 21

UCD see uneven and combined development (UCD) uneven and combined development (UCD) 143, 145 – 6, 149 – 52, 159 Uganda 71, 173, 179n2 unhomeliness 27 United Nations Genocide Convention (1948) 76 United Nations: van Boven Principles for Victims of Gross Violations of Human Rights 76 Valensi, Lucette 152 Varma, Rashmi 13, 16, 19, 21 Vassanji, M: Gunny Sack, The 173; In-Between Life of Vikram Lall 165 – 6, 169 – 71, 173 – 4, 179 Verdery, Katherine 201 Versailles treaty 198 Victims Compensation Tribunal (New South Wales) 78 – 9 Victorian novel 1 – 2, 5 – 6, 10, 26 Victoria-Nyanza (lake) 170 Victoria (queen) 147 Visana, Vikram 31n10, 39 – 56 Vladislavić, Ivan 58 Wacha, Dinshaw 40 – 4, 46 – 7 Wainana, Binyavinga 179 Wallerstein, Immanuel 59 Walpole, Horace 10 Warwick Research Collective (WReC) xxxi, xxxv, 58 – 9 waste 126 – 9; and capitalist modernity 127; colonial concept of 128, 134, 136; definition 126; moral 133; writs of 127 waste disposal 135 waste lands 122 – 38; Biblical sense of 129 wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ see Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa Watson, Irene 80 Watson, Jini xxxi, 12 Watson, Matthew 29 Wedderburn, Robert 147 white flight 61, 67 White, Lynn, Jr. 132 whiteness 89n18 white-owned 136 white people 68, 108 – 17, 123 – 5, 127; academics 230; men 129, 135, 229; settlers 164 White Russia 209 white supremacy 181 – 94

254 Index white sovereignty 78 white state 74, 82, 86 Wichert, Sabine 65 Wilder, Gary xxxi, 12 wilderness 126, 129 wildlife 124, 127 – 8, 138 Wilson, Robert McLiam 57 Wilson, Woodrow 198, 200, 202, 208 – 10 Wilsonian: imperialism 212; national self-determination 204, 219; “transitology” 198 Wood, Ellen Meiksins 16 Wood, Mr and Mrs (of Leeds) 98 Workman, Travis 15 – 16, 19, 22 World Bank Development Report (1997) 215 World War I 200 – 3, 206 – 8; post- 200, 212, 217; pre- 201, 210, 216 World War II 211 – 12

world systems theory 10 Wright, Alexis: Carpentaria 83 – 6; Swan Book, The 73 – 87 Xi Jinping 239n3 Yale, Elihu xxv, 3, 12 Yale University xxv – xxvii Young, Robert xxvii Zachariah, Benjamin 39 Zambesi Concession 128 Zambesi Mission 133 Zambezi River 127 Zimbabwe 122 – 38; agricultural and mining industry 138; Christianity in 133; colonial 125; postcolonial 129, 136 – 8 Zimbabwe Liberation War 135 Žižek, Slavoy xxxii