Print Internationalism's Uneasy Adjacencies

Abstract

In 1908, traveling from Scotland to South Africa, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi began writing a fiery manifesto. As has been recounted ever since, he wrote with such feverish intensity that he switched to his left hand when his right grew tired. This transnational document, written by a figure who was both a British colonial subject and a member of the diaspora in South Africa, gathers in its sails a restless anticolonial and ambulatory energy that defiantly exceeds the boundedness of the Indian colony. Much as the ship attains a haunting freedom for Frederick Douglass in his autobiography, Gandhi's ship offers one evocative site of what Madhumita Lahiri calls “print internationalism,” a mode of transnational imagination that refuses the boundaries of either imperial might or national feeling. Instead, Gandhi's manifesto does something counterintuitive—it moves between the linguistic registers of Gujarati and English by refusing to translate its title Hind Swaraj for a Western audience, “creating an Indian version of Home Rule” and “declaring his politics nonequivalent to all existing agitations” (Lahiri 82). Tracking disparate, pivotal instances of “untranslatability,” Imperfect Solidarities collects what Nico Slate calls “missed opportunities” for theorizing transnational, anti-imperial solidarities.Lahiri's monograph ties together three figures from postcolonial and US history—Rabindranath Tagore, M. K. Gandhi, and W. E. B. Du Bois—in the network of the “global Anglophone” to reframe Benedict Anderson's famous theorization of print nationalism. If Anderson is interested in the newspaper and the novel as mass artifacts of the national, then Lahiri turns to journals and magazines that, despite their sometimes-meager subscriptions, self-consciously address international audiences. However, Lahiri acknowledges the vexed discursive terrain that all three writers traverse in their creation of new political solidarities, particularly Gandhi's writing on Black South Africans and Du Bois's representation of the high-caste Hindu princess in his novel Dark Princess (1928). The study “demonstrates how flawed connections across continents can, through the unpredictable medium of the global Anglophone, generate dramatic transformations in how we understand our world” (15). Lahiri's work expands mainly social science discourses into the terrain of literary thought by foregrounding the genre of print internationalism as the fundamental vehicle for the development of crucial political thinking. The writing of these three figures unspools a tangled web of rhetorical flourishes and comparisons that attempt to leverage the diverse analogies between race, caste, and nation. For Lahiri, neologisms like the “global Anglophone,” “people of color,” and “Brownies” all recast the work of philology in “seek[ing] linguistic origins” toward a language that is from the very beginning “beset with opportunism and impurity” (17). If philology can be understood as the ballast of colonial linguistic models, then the neologisms coined within the early twenty-first-century texts at hand, as well as contemporary borrowings, function to disrupt its work through “the romance of unpredictable possibilities” (17).Lahiri joins a growing list of scholars of history as well as literature who query elisions in political thought generated between India and the United States. In Un/common Cultures (2010), Kamala Visweswaran critiques twentieth-century anthropological and sociological discourses that create imperial epistemologies of common and uncommon cultures, having recourse to figures like Du Bois and B. R. Ambedkar, among others, to highlight an alternative formation of cultural collaboration by dissecting categories like race and caste. In Colored Cosmopolitanism (2012), Nico Slate attends to the intersecting stories of Gandhi and Du Bois. For Slate, the main dilemma of transnational evocations of race and caste is that the historical record is rife with mistranslations and deliberate reconfigurations for disparate ideological purposes. Meanwhile, J. Daniel Elam argues that anticolonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Gandhi, and Ambedkar began to fashion an impossible politics that imagined a world free of colonialism. Instead, they cultivated a studied form of the disavowal of mastery that challenged colonialism not just as imperial domain but as method. Lahiri's Imperfect Solidarities sits alongside these complex texts limning the space between utopian, exemplary, and impossible projects of envisioning the world. Lahiri places us methodologically within a burgeoning early to mid-twentieth-century print sphere that complicates strict delineations between the exemplary, the strategic, and the fanciful in a distinctly literary zone.Comprising three sprawling chapters, Imperfect Solidarities works its way from Tagore's Gitanjali (1910) onward, to Gandhi's Hind swaraj (1909) and finally Du Bois's Dark Princess, to understand each thinker's reliance on neologism and deliberate mistranslation. Lahiri tracks complex maneuvers that evade easy ethical categorization and unearths a much more difficult, and occasionally unpalatable, politics undergirding the world-historical vision of each figure. For example, Lahiri meditates on Gandhi's deliberate infantilization of Black South Africans in his attempt to render a spectrum of racial discrimination, an uncomfortable moment that moves Black South Africans from an initial “phobic” racial register to a metaphorical realignment as children who become “repositor[ies] of virtue” (a move that he would later replicate in the appellation of harijans or “children of God” for Dalits). Rather than evading Gandhi's overt racialization strategies, Lahiri highlights how his flawed rhetoric is deployed as a scalar vision of antiracist thinking against white supremacy. Unpacking another neologism, “people of color,” the author shows how Gandhi becomes deeply interested in “the suffering of Black people because their predicaments could be replicated on the bodies of others, including Indians” (96). Similarly, while scholars have been skeptical about Du Bois's use of caste in Dark Princess, particularly the representation of the Indian princess of the fictitious Bwodhpur as a high-born Brahmin woman, Lahiri both acknowledges and reframes the interpretive limits of such ambivalence by activating caste as global racial solidarity between India and the US through the figure of a mixed-race child as “the child of history” (119).In a striking turn that adds an entirely new, complex layer of interpretive density around gender and print internationalism, Lahiri showcases the role of three women who remain obscured from view behind the “three great men”—Sister Nivedita, Sonia Schlesin, and Jessie Redmon Fauset. The author highlights how all three women had a significant hand in furthering the print internationalism at play here, emphasizing that the grand political visions woven by these unabashedly male historical figures owe an unacknowledged debt of labor and gratitude to a buried, protofeminist sensibility: “the women of print internationalism” demonstrate “[their] rapidly changing status in the currents of early twentieth-century feminist movements [that] sometimes enabled their innovations across the boundaries of race and nation” (4). This is developed most powerfully in Lahiri's third chapter on Du Bois, where she examines the editorship of Jessie Redmon Fauset and the careful curation of a genre of mother-daughter readership that relies as much on orality as it does the print medium. In the closing moments of the chapter, Lahiri veers away from Du Bois to leave us with the close reading of an image of an ambiguously racialized young girl in The Crisis. The image shines through as a powerful emblem of print internationalism, asking us to reframe not only the historical failures of its illustrious figures but also to pay attention to the tireless feminist work that continued in spite of them.As might be expected of a nuanced account of print culture, Lahiri's methodology is rigorously archival; the best arguments in the text stem from moments of intense scrutiny of literary-historical material, whether the pages of Gitanjali or the various correspondences between Du Bois, Tagore, and Gandhi. However, even as Lahiri asserts the outsize debt to unacknowledged female intellectual labor, it is not entirely clear how this crucial insight develops a deeper understanding of imperfect commitments in the Anglosphere. Ania Loomba has argued that one must consider “the violence of Gandhi's non-violence” and places her critique precisely through the erasure of women in the development of satyagraha. For instance, Gandhi's “grotesque” advice to women in the face of sexual violence is to “cultivate courage” and that “[p]arents and husbands should instruct women in the art of becoming fearless” (qtd. in Loomba 26). While Lahiri is direct in her departure from “symptomatic reading” and her investment in “critical complicity” (Lahiri 13), a fuller appreciation of the urgent implications of painstaking archival work might have come from a closer engagement with such feminist scholarship (such implications are fully in evidence in Lahiri's engagement with race critique in her chapter on Gandhi).Most intriguingly, Lahiri dares to reframe the global Anglophone not as a market phenomenon but as a political evocation, one that bridges linguistic, national, and racial divides to imagine a new terrain of historical inquiry. It is a risky gambit to put this particular scholarly neologism on a continuum with historical neologisms—such as gitanjali, satyagraha, and Brownies—that Lahiri examines in print internationalism. Since the advent of the term “global Anglophone” in the mid-2000s, particularly after 9/11 and the 2008 global economic crash, the postcolonial has been weathering the charge of institutional decline. Debates around the term have now become commonplace—special issues and online forums have been litigating the fate of the field. For instance, Nasia Anam tracks how the term “entered into literary critical discourse foremost as a problematic substitute for established disciplinary terms like postcolonial and World Literature,” shaped by “the invisible hand of the academic job market.” In contrast, Yogita Goyal disputes the assumption of the global Anglophone's inevitable neoliberal ascent by emphasizing the continuing relevance of the postcolonial as a necessarily political category. Similarly, Sangeeta Ray refutes the salience of a “post-postcolonial” but by gesturing, like Anam, to the neoliberal market as creating the conditions for this new global frame. Given a continuing post-critical suspicion to the postcolonial, exemplified by Rita Felski in The Limits of Critique, one might hazard that an overlooked method war has been brewing between the postcolonial and the global Anglophone, signaled by the separation of MLA forums, even as both terms seem to be used interchangeably in both scholarship and job market ads. It is quietly, and perhaps hastily, assumed institutionally that the global Anglophone has entirely displaced the postcolonial in English literary studies.This is what makes Lahiri's reconfiguration of the “global Anglophone” an intriguing strategy. In asking us to consider the global Anglophone as one neologism among many in the spirit of Tagore's or Gandhi's linguistic maneuvers, Imperfect Solidarities productively evades why we must rehabilitate this particular scholarly neologism from its current association with the market. Tilting it toward a more political orientation, Lahiri acknowledges and relies on the importance of the postcolonial, paying attention to rejoinders by scholars like Goyal, Ray, and many others. Renovating the use of the “global Anglophone” in startling ways, Lahiri realigns debates around the term to return to the international commitments and anticolonial energies that animate theories of the postcolonial. In fact, Lahiri's archive covertly suggests that returning to the postcolonial (incidentally, also an anachronism for Lahiri's study) against the global Anglophone might draw a comprehensive through line between tenuous, pre-Independence solidarities. In the chapter on Gandhi, the author offers the powerful framework of “international comparativism,” which is not only furiously active in these pages but also renegotiates our understanding of the Anglophone in significant ways, particularly by calling attention to the constant, stubborn, and productively unsettling presence of South Asian languages like Bengali and Gujarati and global cultural contexts like Japanese woodcuts within repositories of English-language print writing.Yet Lahiri's cogent and timely analysis of print internationalism holds back from commenting on one towering figure of postcolonial history, B. R. Ambedkar. The omission is surprising because Ambedkar has been an important transnational interlocutor of figures such as John Dewey and Henri Bergson (Elam 54–59). Scholars like Visweswaran and Slate have also emphasized Ambedkar's proximity to African American thought, noting in particular his deployment of caste and slavery as commensurate optics of oppression, with Ambedkar inverting Lala Lajpat Rai's claim that caste was a greater mode of oppression than slavery (Visweswaran 156). Ambedkar also briefly corresponded with Du Bois in 1946 and was likely very familiar with his work (Visweswaran 154–55; Slate). I bring this up to note that, not unlike the primary figures of Imperfect Solidarities, Ambedkar was deeply interested in creating networks of solidarity that transcended the nation-state. Much like Du Bois, Ambedkar was committed to opening up the associative networks between caste and race by weaving analogies with the international register of slavery.In fact, one of Ambedkar's most frequently cited texts, The Annihilation of Caste, emerges in distinct opposition to print nationalism. When barred from addressing a conference by the Jat Pat Todak Mandal, Ambedkar famously self-published copies of the speech and distributed it as an act of protest. The speech ends with Ambedkar effectively declaring his exit from Hinduism and turn to Buddhism. Far from engaging this protest, Gandhi's main reaction was to fault Ambedkar for overpricing his pamphlet, a criticism that was meant to cannily undermine Ambedkar's ability to connect with India's majoritarian Hindu masses. Lahiri's analysis shows that Du Bois seemed to favor figures like Tagore and Gandhi over the lesser-known Ambedkar, despite the latter's reaching out to Du Bois in 1946 to discuss the resonances between caste and race. At the same time, Ambedkar's pamphlets do not quite correspond to Lahiri's tightly conceived framework of print internationalism and operate in a register that seems to move between national and international spaces. In other words, the omission of Ambedkar points to the historical record's inability to accommodate Ambedkar's polemic, especially as one of the fiercest critics of Gandhi. It demands that we simultaneously attend to the arguments of Dalit intellectuals like Mata Prasad and Gopal Guru that the experience of humiliation in England and South Africa by upper-caste Indian elites led to a form of national awakening. As Guru notes, it was only the disruption of their “feudal complacency” that “awakens them to their own subordination within this framework of power” (qtd. in Rawat and SatyanaRayana 3).Ambedkar's place in Anglophone studies is also of special note given that Ambedkar wrote copiously in English. The fact that Imperfect Solidarities makes no mention of Ambedkar is not to fault the author but to invite reflection on South Asian Anglophone literary scholarship's continued minoritization of caste within the framework of the national. Given that there is not even a passing reference to Ambedkar in Lahiri's book, we might read this not as an oversight but as a deliberate and silent counterargument that requires us to grapple with Ambedkar's defiance of the nation form not through print internationalism, as with Tagore or Gandhi, but by circulating within the nation as a critical force, what Sara Ahmed theorizes as the recalcitrant stance of the “willful subject” of politics. This is also exemplified by Akshya Saxena's Vernacular English, which devotes considerable time to language debates and the place of Dalit intellectuals in advocating for anti-casteism by repurposing English. The thinking and writing of Ambedkar, one of Gandhi's fiercest critics, loom like a large shadow over the implications of imperfect politics; it demands an interrogation of both thinkers's divergent world-historical visions. Lahiri's work opens up these contradictions as fertile ground for literary and political scholarship.Weighing such contradictions in a different but resonant context, Yogita Goyal finds that “[w]hile we tend to see African-American and colonial modernity as converging only in the era of Civil Rights and Black Power, Du Bois and Tagore both notably attempt to conceive of a non-imperialist universalism prior to Bandung” (“Transnational” 58). Lahiri's monograph not only returns us to these visions of universalism but goes one step further in asserting how the circulation of internationalist texts, literary objects that refute the primacy of the novel or the national newspaper, were pivotal in weaving together anti-imperialism, racial justice, nationalist critique, and an articulated urgent need for transnational solidarities. These insights did not always come to pass; some of them remain deeply flawed in their ideological deployment. Yet, Lahiri emphatically shows that these shortcomings, failures, and misprisions are the very stuff of political thought. The result is a complex study that is rich in implications for the future of global Anglophone scholarship, implications that will hopefully build on its reframing of caste as an international optic in furthering the work of focalizing racial solidarities.