Against underdog metaphysics: Alvin Gouldner and the Marxist critique of post-theory

<i>Neil Lazarus</i> The Postcolonial Unconscious<i>The Postcolonial Unconscious</i>. Neil Lazarus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+299.

The Whole Field of Postcolonial Literature John Marx (bio) Keywords postcolonial literature, postcolonial studies, Marxist criticism, globalization and literature, Edward Said, Fredric Jameson The Postcolonial Unconscious. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Neil Lazarus describes a field of postcolonial literature that is both too big and too small. Too big, in that this "vast and hitherto unevenly and indifferently theorized corpus" contains too many works published in too many places and circulating in too many ways to be neatly summed up (35). The field is too small, however, in that few postcolonial works actually garner anything like meaningful scholarly attention. Saying he is "tempted to overstate the case," Lazarus declares "that there is in a strict sense only one author in the postcolonial literary canon. That author is Salman Rushdie, whose novels—especially Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses—are endlessly, not to say catechistically, cited in the critical literature" (22). The point remains even if one is inclined to supplement this canon with another likely suspect or two—J.M. Coetzee, say, or Arundhati Roy. Many literary fields combine sublime abundance with restrictive canonicity, which means the situation Lazarus describes is hardly unique. As it might for any other field, furthermore, Lazarus believes that in postcolonial studies shuttling between too big and too small has produced intellectual stasis. The field's band of privileged authors and works has become so stock as to breed boredom, if not outright contempt. At the same time, the idea that a much larger range of works might be included in the postcolonial canon can only appear as a threat to supporters of the curriculum's current composition. Given that postcolonial literary studies has historically embraced its reputation as a [End Page 389] scholarly insurgency, it is noteworthy to find Lazarus arguing that the field has transformed into yet another subdiscipline interested more than anything else in policing its own boundaries. The goal of The Postcolonial Unconscious is to figure out how and why this has happened and what to do about it. After his Introduction frames the project with a telling history of the field, Lazarus's two most substantial chapters tackle the prospects for revising scholarship's relationship to postcolonial literature. The remaining three chapters of The Postcolonial Unconscious consider how the field might revisit three major theorists: Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Fredric Jameson. When he distinguishes between postcolonial literature in all of its incipient variety and postcolonial studies in its increasingly narrow institutional form, Lazarus makes clear that he is not against institutionalization per se. To the contrary, what he would like is to build a postcolonial studies that is adequate to its literary objects. Adequacy is a key term in The Postcolonial Unconscious, and captures the ideal of a "vast, scattered, heterogeneous, but still, in principle, systematisable archive of literary works" (115). Adequacy will only be achieved, Lazarus supposes, by opposing "the ideological and epistemological assumptions that have tended to frame postcolonial studies" while avoiding the pitfall of replacing one programmatic set of assumptions with another (36). It also means specifying what a postcolonial studies informed not only by literary criticism but also by philosophy, art history, sociology, anthropology, and various area studies has to learn from such a diverse, but "systematisable" body of literary works. "There is a clear discrepancy or disjunction," Lazarus explains, "between what a very large amount of this literature has tended to show and what most postcolonialist critics have tended to register as significant. My proposal is that where the two forms of discourse (that is, '"postcolonial" literature' and 'postcolonial criticism') diverge, we would do well to think hard about the understandings in play in the former before moving to ratify those prevailing in the latter" (115). The task at hand, he argues, is figuring out the best method for discovering what literature can show scholars across the interdisciplinary range of postcolonial studies. Developing a cultural materialist perspective, Lazarus tests the limits of what postcolonial studies has been able to think about its foundational theoretical texts as well as its literary ones. The notion that postcolonial studies should have conceptual limits to test is not necessarily intuitive. Even though postcolonial in...

Although a wide range of activities constitute legal mobilisation, a long-standing area of neglect in this research tradition has concerned the role of collective or aggregative mechanisms such as class actions, particularly outside the American context. This essay situates class actions in the legal mobilisation research tradition, drawing on insights from the two comparator regimes of Canada and Sweden, and offers a critical exploratory account of their role in facilitating collective legal mobilisation. The first section establishes the theoretical foundations for incorporating class actions into the tradition, exploring the main approaches to conceptualising legal mobilisation and identifying ways in which this incorporation expands and contributes to conventional approaches. The second section undertakes a comparative analysis with a focus on key design points and legal opportunity structures that promote or hinder collective legal mobilisation. Finally, the third section explores new and future trajectories of research, with a focus on benefits of comparative sociology of law and a critical orientation towards the promises and perils of collective legal mobilisation.

In my reading, Gouldner's The Two Marxisms provides a brilliant series of metatheoretical reflections on marxian theory, illuminating discussions and criticisms of marxism through a close examination of its paradigmatic texts, and a useful analytical model which describes the basic features of the two conflicting and competing contemporary versions of marxism ("scientific" versus "critical") while reminding us that the "two marxisms" are really both part of the marxian project. Although his sociological critique emphasizes how and why marxism's contradictions and anomalies are suppressed and rationalized, his discussion indicates that marxism, far from being a closed system of finished and unshakeable orthodoxy, is open and demands further development to resolve the problems its own internal contradictions and history have bequeathed. That Gouldner's works offer innumerable contributions to the renewal and reconstruction of contemporary marxism is part of his indispensable value for contemporary social theory.

This article stages a confrontation between postcolonial theory and the decolonial option on the terrain of their respective engagements with Marxism. While prominent decolonial critics accuse postcolonial theory of relying too much on ‘Eurocentric’ theories, including Western Marxism, the article argues that this critique ignores what has been in fact a long-standing debate between postcolonial theory and its Marxist critics. Thus, the article questions this decolonial characterization and locates postcolonial theory itself in the crossfire of Marxist and decolonial critiques. First, it outlines the main objections that Marxist critics have formulated against postcolonial theory. Next, it discusses the decolonial critiques of postcolonial theory with an emphasis on the role played by Marxism in this confrontation. Finally, it proposes a ‘relinking’ between postcolonial theory and Marxism, understood not as a closure of the debate between these two theoretical formations but rather as an effort to hold that debate open. The article identifies the space of this open debate between postcolonial theory and its Marxist critics as a vantage point from which to articulate a critical response to the decolonial intervention.

The article is devoted to the theory of intelligentsia developed by Jan Wacław Machajski (1866–1926) and to the history of its transfer and reception in modern Western social theories. The main thesis of the article is that Machajski’s theory directly influenced the shaping of several Western social theories in the second half of the 20th century, such as the theories of the new class and the post-industrial society. The article includes a review of modern research literature devoted to Machajski, a brief biographical sketch, and an explication of the main thesis of his theory of intelligentsia. A history of the reception and the criticism of Machajski’s theory is analyzed in both the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, the result being that this theory was practically excluded from the Russian conceptual and theoretical context. In the article, the history of the transfer of this theory to the Western context in which Max Nomad played the decisive part is analyzed. As the result of this transfer, these ideas became known and acknowledged by a range of social theorists of the middle of the 20th century, for example, by Daniel Bell and Alvin Gouldner. In the concluding part of the work, it is shown that Machajski’s ideas that considered access to education and knowledge as a certain type of capital can be systematically recognized in later theories, in particular, in the theory of cultural capital by Pierre Bourdieu, and in the theory of society of singularities by Andreas Reckwitz.

Intended to capture the entangled history of Marxism, Alvin Gouldner’s two Marxisms also frame the intellectual biography of Erik Olin Wright. In the 1970s Wright’s Scientific and Critical Marxisms were joined, but later they came apart as each developed its own autonomous trajectory. Erik’s Scientific Marxism was the program of class analysis that first brought him international fame. Begun in graduate school, it tailed off in the last two decades of his life, when it played second fiddle to the Critical Marxism of the Real Utopias Project that Erik began in the early 1990s.

Political science scholarship argues that women's underrepresentation in American politics stems from a persistent shortage of female candidates. Women are less likely to run because they often perceive individual and structural obstacles that negatively impact their electoral interest. Such barriers remain intact, yet thousands of women have signaled their interest in running for office since the 2016 election by participating in candidate training programs (CTPs). Though running for office is not commonly defined as an activist activity, this article argues that theories of collective action and movement mobilization, rather than those focusing on the psychological aspects of candidate emergence, are better equipped to explain the recent increase of electoral interest. Using EMILY's List—an elite political entity that began as a grassroots social movement organization—as a case, this article integrates scholarship from sociology and political science to examine how feminist activist organizing can impact women's interest in running for public office. I first review the research on women's candidate emergence and CTPs before discussing the electoral movement strategies and the mobilizing impact of the media and collective action frames. The article reviews recent scholarship on the Women's March and the Resistance, then synthesizes the literature to examine EMILY's List and their electoral movement strategies leading up to the 2018 midterm elections. I conclude by suggesting avenues for future research that can bridge the relationship between movements and electoral politics and advance scholarly understanding of how, when, and why women run for office.

Exiles on Main Stream: Valuing the Popularity of Postcolonial Literature Chris Bongie (bio) Abstract This essay explores the problematic (lack of a) relation between postcolonial and cultural studies. It argues that the commitment to mass popular culture characteristic of so much work in cultural studies is one that is largely absent from postcolonial literary studies. If Jamaica Kincaid has nothing but contempt for the media star Roseanne (as related in the introductory pages of the essay), this hostility is not simply a sport of her querulous nature: counterintuitive as it might sound, her dismissive attitude exemplifies the “foundational bias” of postcolonial studies. The essay attempts to tease out this modernist bias against the “inauthentically popular” through several case studies, the first of which involves Tony Delsham, the most popular writer in the French Caribbean and yet one who is completely ignored by academic critics. The reason why this is so has much to do with the surreptitious elitism of postcolonial literary studies. In the second section, the essay introduces the concept of the “postcolonial middlebrow,” arguing that the consecration of a novelist like Maryse Condé has gone hand-in-glove with a dogged refusal on the part of her academic readers to engage in any discussion of the middlebrow qualities of her work—qualities that help account for her popular appeal. The essay concludes by asserting a paradoxical double imperative for the postcolonial (literary) critic that entails both a concerted turn to cultural studies and a self-conscious return to literary studies, a thorough assimilation of the former’s positive assumptions about the value of the popular and a cautious reassertion of the latter’s necessarily doubtful, and doubtfully necessary, claims about the value of the aesthetic.—cb Put me in a room with a great writer, I grovel. Put me in with Roseanne, I throw up. —Jamaica Kincaid1 When Tina Brown asked Roseanne Barr to serve as guest consultant for a special women’s issue of The New Yorker in 1995, Antiguan-American novelist Jamaica Kincaid made her negative feelings crystal clear. She trashed Brown’s protégé in the most emphatic of terms—as my epigraph demonstrates—and eventually severed her decades-long ties with The New Yorker, accusing Brown of transforming that once venerable journal into “a version of People magazine.” In the following pages, I argue that Kincaid’s hostile reaction represents something more than an individual fit of pique on the part of a notoriously irascible and opinionated writer; rather, her nausea at the thought of being forced to occupy the same physical and textual space as Roseanne has much to tell us about the vexed, and very under-theorized, relations between postcolonial cultural producers (be they creative writers or academic theorists) and what is still often condescendingly referred to as mass culture. Kincaid’s testy comments direct us toward the surprisingly uncharted territory in which postcolonial and cultural studies (don’t yet) meet. The one-sided confrontation between Kincaid and Roseanne can be read as emblematic of a failed dialogue between postcolonial and cultural studies. In Kincaid, we have a respected author of such postcolonial (or Afro-diasporic) “classics” as Annie John and In a Small Place, someone frequently lionized by critics as a writer who “speaks to and from the position of the other” (Ferguson 238). In Roseanne, we have a U.S. TV icon, someone who has also accumulated her fair share of academic plaudits from critics in disciplines such as women’s and cultural studies who have lauded “her subversive potential as a source of resistance and inspiration for feminist change” (Lee 96) or the way her show “potentially helps restore class visibility to the overwhelmingly middle-class world of television” (Bettie 142). While Roseanne may never have read Kincaid, the postcolonial author obviously feels that she has ingested enough of this media icon to pass definitive judgment on the degraded form of culture she represents: only those with “coarse and vulgar” taste, like Tina Brown, could possibly be drawn to such a nauseating figure as Roseanne.2 Revealingly, in voicing this negative evaluation of Roseanne, Kincaid seems compelled to preface it with the positive counterweight of groveling at the...

Victoria Cook, in Exploring Transnational Identities in Ondaatje's Anil's addresses issues of identity raised in the narrative of Michael Ondaatje's novel Anil's Ghost. Cook's paper is a close analysis of Ondaatje's novel, paying particular attention to the way in which Ondaatje examines identity as both a construct and a process. The approach used is one that draws on postcolonial theory and takes a perspective. Cook argues that Ondaatje's text moves beyond the concept of a postcolonial literature of resistance into an area that requires a theory of process rather than product. Transnationalism is shown here to be just such a theory, in that it captures something of this fluidity: the analysis is underpinned, therefore, by the application of transnational theory, as put forward by critics such as Paul Giles. Names and naming are the main themes addressed in the course of this argument, with regard to the way in which they impact on issues of identification. Finally, Cook explores in her paper issues of identity in Anil's Ghost, identity that traverses cultural and national boundaries and encompasses both central and marginal positions. Victoria Cook, Exploring Transnational Identities in Ondaatje's Anil’s Ghost page 2 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.3 (2004):

This book offers a sustained literary analysis of contemporary, multilingual and transnational Sephardic poetry. It proposes to re-examine the canonicity of Jewish literature by integrating the contribution of Sephardic Jews (Jews whose origins are traced to the Iberian Peninsula) and taking into account the multilingual complexity of Jewish writing. This book also observes the role of language and intertextual choice in the construction of identity. In a dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of “minor literatures,” this book argues that minor literatures can emerge from multilingual settings and conditions, and that minor languages have the power to challenge and re-inscribe major languages. It introduces and reads three little-known multilingual and multicultural Jewish poets who write from an oppositional or marginal position, using minor or threatened languages—Algerian Sadia Lévy, Israeli Margalit Matitiahu, and Argentine Juan Gelman. Writing in French and Hebrew, Hebrew and Ladino, and Spanish and Ladino, respectively, each of these different poets expresses a hybrid, composite Sephardic identity, through a strategic choice of competing languages and intertexts.Their work also calls into question established notions of ethnic, literary and linguistic identity. Centering on these poets, this book addresses the issue of competing narratives within Jewish cultural history, and focusing on intra-Jewish difference, it stresses the internal multiculturalism of the Jews. This book is a potential bridge between the debates on poetics, minor literatures and postcolonial studies, and the field of Jewish Studies.

My dissertation is a study and contextualization of the three ethnic autobiographies of Chicano public intellectual Richard Rodriguez, The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), Days of Obligation: An Argument with my Mexican Father (1992), and Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2003). Since the publication of Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez is identified as being against political programs like affirmative action or a “poster boy” for right-wing politics. I argue for a more critical approach to Rodriguez’s controversial role in Chicana/o and Latina/o literary and cultural studies. I explore the evolution of the author-protagonist, Richard, and highlight how his struggles are exemplary of postcolonial subjects negotiating their way through Americanization. Assimilation produces psychosexual discourses that I analyze as particular to a colonized subject’s identity that is ambivalently positioned as at once typically American yet always outside the definition of what it means to be “authentically American.” Building upon Octavio Paz’s “penetration paradigm” and expanding the implicit queer reading of la chingada and el rajado metaphors defined in Laberinto de la soledad (1950), my project articulates how the concepts of penetration, rejection, and ambivalence become strategies of resistance postcolonial subjects manipulate in pursuit of (in)authentic Americanism. Spanning the U.S.-Mexican border, Rodriguez narrates the location the deviant, brown subject assumes in historical and present narratives of nation formation. Rodriguez presents a colonized American subject who openly defends and explores various ambivalent processes of acculturation and assimilation. Instead of adhering to Paz’s notion of impervious national masculinity, Rodriguez narrates his experiences as prototypical of the life of a deviant and dark subject who acknowledges the benefits and losses of openly admitting to inhabiting ambivalent locations in culture. Recognizing the relationship nations and individuals have with their ambivalence regarding penetration and rejection becomes crucial because admission is read as submission in the epistemology of penetration that my project delineates. Through close reading the autobiographies of Rodriguez, I identity a subtext of desire; it is a desire for memory, for the creation of alternative narratives and alternative spaces for postcolonial American life and subjectivity.%%%%Includes abstract%%%%%%%%

Reviewed by: The Lomidine Files: The Untold Story of a Medical Disaster in Colonial Africa by Guillaume Lachenal Mari K. Webel Guillaume Lachenal. The Lomidine Files: The Untold Story of a Medical Disaster in Colonial Africa. Translated by Noémi Tousignant. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. 237 pp. Ill. $34.95 (978–1–4214–2323–4). Guillaume Lachenal’s engaging body of work has long been on the radar of global scholars of public health and medicine in Africa. It is, then, both a true pleasure for readers and vital addition to Anglophone literature in the field that we now have his monograph, The Lomidine Files, in Noémi Tousignant’s elegant translation from the original French. The Lomidine Files is an ambitious and incisive study of pentamidine (known in France as Lomidine), a drug that was used widely in the 1950s and 1960s against sleeping sickness, a fatal parasitic disease. The book examines several intertwined phenomena of the postwar era: French colonial mass medicine, international and intercolonial pharmaceutical research, and changing strategies to treat and prevent sleeping sickness. In biannual or yearly campaigns, roving teams injected pentamidine into the buttocks of African populations considered by colonial authorities to be at risk for infection; these campaigns ultimately constituted the “first international mass medicine program in Africa” (p. 54). Millions of doses were injected between 1944 and 1960, primarily in French colonial territories but in Belgian, British, and Portuguese colonies as well. But, as Lachenal demonstrates, drugs do not always work as they are supposed to, and in the troubles and “misfires” of Lomidine campaigns he identifies fundamental intellectual and epistemological tensions in late colonial medicine. For Lomidine injections also led to disaster: hundreds of cases of gas gangrene and scores of deaths, particularly in French Equatorial Africa. Lachenal’s core argument is thorough and damning, demonstrating what is widely intuitive but left largely unsaid: that colonial medicine was grounded not in holistic expertise or the best science of the day, but in mediocrity, stubbornness, hasty compromise, and, ultimately, a “constitutive amnesia” in self-evaluation (p. 178). Working with [End Page 719] the concepts of bêtise and “unreason” in tandem with extensive documentary and oral evidence, Lachenal shows that the ongoing use of Lomidine despite a series of deadly “accidents” undermined the very possibility of mass medicine. Further, the book exposes colonial officials’ dangerous, racialized calculus of collective benefit against individual risk. This is an important history to bring to light. Equally so is Lachenal’s nuanced and theoretically rigorous examination of how and why Lomidine’s purported powers captivated and convinced researchers, policy makers, and practitioners to support its ongoing use in the postwar era. This is an innovative and sophisticated study that rewards sustained engagement. Though it will appeal to a wide audience interested in medical controversy or public health ethics, it is also an excellent addition to undergraduate and graduate syllabi in public health, the histories of science and medicine, world history, African studies, and development studies. The book is grounded in rigorous transnational and comparative research, producing a varied and wide-ranging history on par with recent global histories of mobile medical goods and programs, while also fundamentally advancing the scholarship on international and intercolonial dynamics of sleeping sickness control in the post–World War II era. Lachenal’s engagement with historical, anthropological, and postcolonial theory has significant payoffs in a creative, energetic methodology and also makes the book a useful, current model for interdisciplinarity. Several chapters could stand alone as companions to extant histories of interwar science or postwar international health and development; the book’s exploration of “unreason” and eradication would be particularly trenchant alongside histories of midcentury malaria eradication efforts, for example. The inclusion of longer excerpts of key primary sources throughout is a bold move, offering readers an opportunity to grapple personally with the diverse sources that Lachenal’s impressive scholarship requires. Provocative and rich vignettes at each chapter’s end allow a mindful reader to invest and participate in the book’s interpretive work and narrative arc. Ultimately, Lachenal seeks to shake the “serene entrepreneurs” of modern global health, who are focused on “simple solutions” (p. 16) or “making numbers...

The twentieth anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act marked the end of an era of uncertain progress. Despite dramatic victories in constitutional litigation and the visibility of group-based struggles, civil rights strategies had limited success in initiating major economic and social change.' The limited progress has prompted a new sense of realism among groups who experience discrimination-a sense of how little the situation has changed even though overt prejudice may be less prevalent. The modest progress of the civil rights movement has not made "rights-focused" struggles unattractive, however; in fact, there is a proliferation of civil rights strategies

Rearticulating Violence