Albert Memmi Research Articles

Anthologies, Ontologies, and Hauntologies: Resurrecting Léon-Gontran Damas

Anthologies, Ontologies, and HauntologiesResurrecting Léon-Gontran Damas Kathleen Gyssels (bio) In his excellent and most welcome collection of essays, The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966,1 David Murphy illustrates the vibrant art scene in the young republic with a thorough overview of a range of Senegalese authors and artists. And yet, someone is missing: Leon Gontran-Damas, the Martinican-born, French Guyanese cofounder of the Négritude movement, who put together several collections that included works by Senegelase authors. In fact, it was Damas who provided his friend, Négritude cofounder and Senegalese president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, a first copy of what would be his second wide-ranging anthology of African voices in five languages, Nouvelle somme de poésie du monde noir/A New Survey of Poetry from the Negro World. The potency of this largely forgotten and unacknowledged anthology is revealed when compared with other examples of the genre. What do Nancy Cunard, Blaise Cendrars,2 André Gide, Albert Memmi, L.S. Senghor, Albert Helman, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Edouard Glissant have in common? Published anthologies form a genre that Paul Lauter convincingly argues we should take seriously, since knowledge of most works of "ethnic literature" has remained within classroom walls for too long.3 Anthologies were, and are still today, valued for their didactic function, as well as serving as inventories of new fields and schools of writing. They are essential to the creation of a specific corpus that needs to be presented as a subsystem, one that seeks legitimacy through editorial strategies. Many intellectuals, black and white, Anglo and Francophone, have served as intermediaries between artists and their potential audiences with respect to black literature and postcolonial literature (the Maghreb, for instance, with Memmi's 1969 Anthology of French Writers from the Maghreb). Many of these thinkers—themselves poets and [End Page 2] writers—have promoted literature from the African continent and the black Atlantic world; that is, the African diaspora in the Americas and Europe. In fact, it is hard to imagine how literary schools such as the Harlem Renaissance could have existed without its prominent members publishing collections of their colleagues' writings. Alain Locke and Langston Hughes created literary journals and literary anthologies—Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro (1925) and The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), respectively—inviting the American public to discover black literature, sociology, ethnology, and history. Poets and scholars found ways to raise the visibility of a tradition of (oral) literature and arts hitherto marginalized. In 1934, the extravagant Nancy Cunard, an obsessive white collector as fascinated as Blaise Cendrars with "primitive art," published Negro: An Anthology. Poems and illustrated articles on Africa, the Caribbean, black America, and the black arts rubbed shoulders with work by nonblack artists.4 Anthologies aiming to act as vocal countermovements and boost recognition debated the then-hot issues of racism, inequality, and colonization. Hughes was clearly one of the most inspiring writers, influencing contemporary and younger authors alike, including Damas. Such anthologies were important, as they raised the prestige of established intellectuals while offering the audience an overview of what, in their estimation, were important examples of a certain literary school or movement. Cunard5 befriended key figures of the Harlem Renaissance as well as its French "offspring," the Négritude movement. She paid tribute to both the Anglo-American movement and the cofounders of the French movement, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, who came to her attention following the publication of Césaire's Notebook of a Return to my Native Land.6 In 1948, Senghor published the first important anthology of black writing in French, covering the French Antilles, Haiti, Madagascar and Senegal, which included the poet, David Diop (1927–1980), born to French-speaking African parents in Bordeaux. Released by the prestigious Presses Universitaires de France and introduced by Sartre's thirty-three-page critical essay "Orphée noir," the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française was hugely successful and has since undergone several reprints. Edouard Glissant, leading figure of the next generation of black French writers and founder of...

Dissident Writings of Arab Women: Voices against Violence

Dissident Writings of Arab Women: Voices against Violence

Erratum to: Shut-Up and Listen: Implications and Possibilities of Albert Memmi’s Characteristics of Colonization Upon the “Natural World”

This paper begins by exploring the anti-colonial work of Tunisian scholar Albert Memmi in his classic book The Colonizer and the Colonized and determining whether the characteristics of colonization that he names can be successfully applied to the current relationship between modern humans and the “natural world”. After considering what we found to be the five key characteristics: manufacturing the colonial, alienation and unknowability, violence, psychological strategies (bad faith), and language, history, and metaphor we draw clear parallels, through selected examples, to the exploitative relationships enacted in many realms of the modern human/nature relationship. In so doing the paper posits that the beings that comprise the “natural world” are colonized. It then continues from that position to explore the possibility of cultivating practices of listening to the voices of these colonized others to inform anti-colonial ecopedagogy as allies. We employ the term “shut-up” as an anti-colonial gesture to remind ourselves as much as others of the importance of first listening to the colonized other before engaging in “post-colonial” theorizing about prospective relationships or liberatory solutions “for” them. Given the fast-paced and cacophonic urban life many humans increasingly inhabit, and the disciplined and reiterative practice(s) required to learn to listen to other voices, we suggest caution and care when importing postcolonial theory into “environmental” contexts and seek to instigate further discussion as to how we might enact solidarity with other beings as anti-colonial allies in education. To this end, we conclude the paper with some educational implications based on research at a place-based school and focus on the role history, language and metaphor play in manufacturing a colonial relationship, but also provide a potential means for changing relationships with the diverse beings with whom we share the planet.

Reggae as Subaltern Knowledge: Representations of Christopher Columbus as a Construction of Alternative Historical Memory

In this article, I examine how identity is not being “rediscovered” in reggae music, but rather produced through a re-telling of history that blends trauma and witnessing. Albert Memmi underscores the importance of re-telling history in The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) when he rightly declares that the greatest consequence of colonialism was the exclusion of the colonized from both history and their community (151). Representations of Christopher Columbus, largely through first-person testimony, illustrate a metonym for how reggae music can be useful for the diffusion and endurance of a counter-discursive epistemology to undermine Western knowledge and culture as hegemonic. These musicians re-write themselves into history and forge a community by raising doubts over the problematic encounter between Columbus and indigenous peoples, an encounter often perceived as one of the fundamental moments for the development of modern American civilization. Such a project is not unique to Jamaica. According to Kenyan postcolonial theorist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, “most national liberation movements start by rejecting the culture of the colonizer, by repudiating the religion of the oppressing nation and class and the entire education system of the colonizer” (27). Although not a liberation movement in and of itself, reggae and Rastafari have sought to revise history since for these musicians, the “truth” surrounding the encounter has been one-sided and misrepresented. Indeed, in Reggae Wisdom (2001), Anand Prahlad discusses how reggae musicians take on the role of teacher in order to “focus on specific areas of history and culture that have been distorted by the texts found in colonial school systems or in other forms of hegemonic propaganda” (33). Reggae musicians, in an act of counter-discursive difference, reduce Columbus, viewed as heroic in the Western world (the United States still celebrates Columbus Day as an official holiday), to a liar, thief, slaver, and pedophile. Central to the alternative epistemology in reggae is the revision of Western historical figures often credited with Western expansion to present him as a villain of the Antilles.

Shut-Up and Listen: Implications and Possibilities of Albert Memmi’s Characteristics of Colonization Upon the “Natural World”

Shut-Up and Listen: Implications and Possibilities of Albert Memmi’s Characteristics of Colonization Upon the “Natural World”

Nouvelle lecture de La Statue de sel d’Albert Memmi

The author aims to present writer and sociologist Albert Memmi’s understanding of World War II and the way that Memmi expressed this understanding in his important novel, The Pillar of Salt. The book was published in 1953 at a time when most Jews still lived in Tunisia and the memory of the war was still very fresh.

Simone Schwarz-Bart et l’écriture de la violence (post)coloniale dans le roman Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle

Abstract This text is dedicated to studying the fictionalization of traumas of (post)colonialism in the novel Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle by the Guadeloupean writer Simone Schwarz-Bart. Published in 1972, the book is built on the premise of novel writing as a therapeutic expression of trauma to be overcome. This implies bringing out the pain of slavery and of a miserable life in the sugar cane plantations through the resistance saga of four generations of valiant women. From a bottom-up perspective of history (Jim Sharpe) and the possibility of the subaltern’s testimony (Gayatri Spivak), emphasis is placed on the oppressed colonized (Frantz Fanon) as main characters, who break the silence for a long time imposed by their masters (Albert Memmi) in order to tell their story.

Por uma outra mise-en-scène: polifonia e afetividade no filme Welcome

Traditionally known as a country of respect for human rights and political asylum in recent years France received notoriety by intolerance and expulsion of immigrants. Many of these situations are present in Welcome (Philippe Lioret, 2009) and provoked an intense social and political debate over immigration. The media visibility of different issues about the subject – which was possible because of the movie – ended with the expiration of the crime of solidarity, a law which punished french citizens who helped undocumented immigrants. To understand the presented situations by the movie, we use the studies of Zygmunt Bauman (1999, 2005, 2007 and 2009), contextualizing the movie and its production. Then, we discuss the imagetical construction process based on the concepts of Orientalism by Edward Said (2007), and Eurocentrism by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (2006), and France’s specificities about racism, using the work of Albert Memmi (1993) and Michel Wieviorka (1998). The presence of the immigrant in Welcome was identified with polyphonic qualities, according to Mikhail Bakhtin’s perspective of polyphony. From the study of Luis Nogueira’s cinematographic specificities and the concepts of image, affection and visage by Gilles Deleuze (1985, 1995) we understand that the use of close ups aimed to produce an individualization of the immigrant and an affection for him. This way, we believe that Welcome cooperates in the sense of rising new possibilities of the immigrant’s fiction image, as well as about other minorities.

‘The Coloniser who Refuses’: Co-Resistance and the Paradoxical Reality of Israeli Solidarity Activists

In the period following the Second Intifada, many Israeli and Palestinian peace activists began to despair of traditional coexistence efforts, turning instead to joint nonviolent political activism against Israeli policies. This mode of joint work came to be known as ‘co-resistance’. It would be fair to wonder if such activism might foster joint Israeli–Palestinian efforts towards a shared society, possibly a one-state solution. However, somewhat counter-intuitively, solidarity can sometimes reinforce separation between the two parties in question. This article uses the Solidarity Movement as case study to explore the political role of Israeli co-resistance activists. Using ethnographic methods and drawing upon Albert Memmi's theory of the ‘coloniser who refuses’, this article illustrates how co-resistance can serve to reinforce and advance separation between Israelis and Palestinians into two distinct national communities.

The Tension of the Social Relations between the Colonizer and the Colonized in Forster’s a Passage to India

Colonialism is a practice of dominion which involves the subjugation of one people to another. The British colonized India and left an impact on many different levels of life and culture. E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, referring to colonialism, explores the relationship between the colonized, an Indian doctor, and the colonizer, a British schoolmaster. This paper aims to explore Albert Memmi’s concepts of colonialism as presented in his The Colonizer and the Colonized (1974) and examine Forster’s characters according to these views. One basic issue is the cultural misunderstanding between the colonizer and the colonized. Different types of characters in the novel embody a number of Memmi’s ideas. The colonizer is characterized by profit, privilege and usurpation. Lack of communication comes at the core of the relationships seen in the social context between the English and the Indian, since colonial India suffers from mistrust and racial hatred. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n10p27

Albert Memmi: retrato de un extranjero. Crisis de identidad y creación literaria

En 1953, Albert Memmi publie son premier roman autobiographique, intitulé La statue de sel. Issu d’une famille juive, Memmi passe son enfance en Tunisie, pays à majorité musulmane qui, à l’époque, était sous protectorat français. Cette situation particulière provoque chez l’écrivain une profonde crise d’identité. À 35 ans, Memmi se rend compte que seule la littérature peut l’aider à comprendre sa place dans le monde. Dans cet article, nous allons analyser le sentiment d’étrangeté avec lequel grandit l’auteur tunisien. Pour ce faire, nous allons considérer les oeuvres La statue de sel et le Portrait du colonisé, essai publié en 1957 comme complément théorique du roman.

The Postcolonial World and the Recourse to Myth: a critique of Albert Memmi’s Decolonization and the Decolonized

The seminal postcolonial thinker Albert Memmi’s reactionary turn with the publishing of Decolonization and the Decolonized provides an excellent opportunity to properly contextualise the conditions of the Third World. In this article, emphasis is laid on the necessity of linking the postcolonial world’s dire condition to the role of Western powers and economic processes of globalisation. Memmi’s primary shortcoming is his failure to examine these connections with any nuance, and instead choosing to blame the Third World’s condition on corrupt leaders and governments. Consequently, a focused critique of his work can serve as a valuable foundation for a broader critique of the general patterns of capitalism and its global effects. By examining the inconsistencies and obfuscations of this work in detail, both Memmi and the ideas he professes can be appropriately confronted.

Writing the memoir of self-erasure: A practice-led exploration of constructing and deconstructing the coloniser-who-refuses

Writing memoir entails more than researching, recording and constructing a past ‘self’. The act of writing forces a set of critical strategies similar to that of writing a fictional work: there is a problem to be solved, narrative choices tobe made, a theory to be tested. The idea of how the past is accessed, reconstructed, researched and re-experienced is also problematic. My recent memoir, Soldier Blue (2008) poses the usual autobiographical problem – ‘Who am I?’ – but further attempts to interrogate and analyse how this ‘I’ isconstructed, and uses narrative strategies such as the conflation of characters and events, a framing device/ use of an outside narrator, and the constant destabilisation of the idea of a retrievable past in order to solve this problem. The protagonist of Soldier Blue has been created by his society (1960s and 1970s Rhodesia) as a colonial ‘white male’ with a particular propagandised national identity and agenda. In this paper, I explain the narrative methods used to help me deconstruct this ‘self’ and trace the paths that lead him out of this labyrinth to become Albert Memmi’s ‘coloniser who refuses’ (Memmi 1990: 106). Further, I discuss how in making certain narrative choices in writing this memoir, the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction are blurred, and that in order to create a cohesive narrative, fictional techniques are used that apparently sacrifice historical and factual integrity for the achievement of other aims – that of achieving the emotional truth of the memory/event … and that of liberating the ‘I’ or ‘self’ from the confines of gender/race/class.

Assimilation, Hospitality, and the Politics of Identity in Albert Memmi

Et tous ces problemes d'identite, comme on dit si betement aujourd'hui. --Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l'autre In essays, novels, and poems Albert Memmi describes a world where boundaries are disappearing, assimilation is an incontrovertible fact, and hospitality is the question of the moment. More ambitiously, his work describes an endgame where the very notion of identity as a central organizing structure must be devalorized to make coexistence possible. Without dismissing the veritable appeal strong centers of consciousness enjoy in our culture, his work destabilizes singularity and demystifies the drama of personal history. Unquestionably, Memmi's work acknowledges that the personal dimension, that identity, that the sense of belonging to families of individuals, count in the lives of communities. However, his work allows us to contemplate what communities gain when they take the spotlight off of identity. Identities are built around perceived opposition and difference. Memmi's work problematizes the notion of a fixed identity and maps out a relational model to dethrone the self, to decenter it and neutralize it, as it were. I will argue here that both his polemic and novelistic works advance the notion that non-oppositional structures constitute the best terrain for promoting coexistence, mutuality, and nonviolent exchange, all of which comprise the principal focus of his work. Admittedly, there is a difference between what Memmi describes as social reality and what he imagines to be the best solutions for societies. His work focuses on both how things are and what is desirable. He acknowledges this in La Liberation du Juif: Ainsi tous mes textes sur les hommes domines, colonises, juifs, noirs, sont essentiellement des descriptions, dont le merite a mes yeux reside surtout dans leur fidelite aux modeles, et dans leur coherence, qui revele les mecanismes de L'oppression. Les solutions a ces differents malheurs, que je finis certes par suggerer, viennent toujours en plus; comme des chapitres supplementaires, necessaires pour moi il est vrai, mais que l'on peut refuser, me semble-t-il, sans que cela contre-dise a l'inventaire lui-meme.(1) Memmi's novelistic and autobiographical works push further and more productively than his essays in exposing the problems and unfortunate consequences of hardened identity. He writes tellingly in Ce que je crois: Je sais depuis longtemps que l'identite n'est jamais identique, ni dans le temps ni dans l'espace, ni chez un individu ni dans un groupe, que toute cette affaire est largement imaginaire. ... Allons, personne n'est jamais sur de ses racines, personne ni moi. (2) Roots are tangled and there is nothing we can do about it. We have no choice but to invent ways to deal with the fact of our multiple attachments. Assimilation and the notion of hospitality run through Memmi's work and challenge us to rethink society's fascination with identity. In his work, assimilation is both a plea and a fact. It is a plea to communities and individuals to recognize that assimilation is a fundamental fact of modern societies and that it is desirable. Memmi, like Jacques Derrida and Edmond Jabes, envisages hospitality as the moment when identities are set aside--if not nullified--in the encounter between host and guest. Memmi's work encourages us to recognize, as Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips advance in Intimacies, that there are other satisfactions than the satisfactions of personal history. (3) There are other and more salutary ways to be present to another person than through personal histories. Personal histories, they argue, are histories of difference, opposition, and violence. Memmi's essays and most strikingly his novels dramatize the misery that ensues when personal history overwhelms the fabric of everyday life. Novels like La Statue de sel, Agar, and Le Scorpion, suggest that nothing is more tediously commonplace than the fact of being born a Jew, a Tunisian, or a Frenchman, for example. …

Colonizing intersectionality: replicating racial hierarchy in feminist academic arguments

In this article I use tools of critical and poststructural discourse analysis to examine a particular rhetorical frame adopted by some European social scientists and philosophers dealing with the feminist concept of intersectionality. These scholars must negotiate a complex discursive terrain framed by what David Theo Goldberg calls ‘racial Europeanization,’ a metadiscursive regime that denies the continuing existence of European race and racisms. The result is to suppress the availability of conceptual tools that will allow people to recognize, analyze, and debate what might count as structural racisms and how racial differences can be negotiated effectively. Acceding to this suppression restricts the tools available when critics must engage with racial arguments in criticizing US intersectionality. I examine here three cases in which critics fail to give due attention to the imbrication of race, nation, and power in their arguments, the women they target, and the forms of intersectionality they wish to critique. The critics utilize structures of argument that evoke histories of racial hierarchy and colonialism, treating the intersectionality of US women of color as a site to colonize and control. They deploy rhetorics that map closely to structures of thinking described by Albert Memmi in his description of colonial racism. I demonstrate how the critiques of intersectionality frame US feminist scholars of color and their constituencies by ‘depersonalizing’ and ‘collectivizing’ them through what Memmi calls ‘the mark of the plural,’ through binary and hierarchical rhetorics, and through ‘fixing’ the nature of the black feminists who introduced the concept of intersectionality as a theoretical tool. The unacknowledged expressions of racial privilege that characterize these critiques demonstrate that feminists need to transform the terms of reading and writing to take responsibility for the ways feminist discourses function as technologies of power.

Memmi and Béji: Decolonization and the place of the ‘human’ within ‘humanism’

Since the 1950s and the period of decolonization, intellectuals in the francophone world have addressed the legacy of humanism. Frantz Fanon, amongst others, wrote on the possibilities of a new humanism and of ‘new man’ in a decolonized world. This humanism to be constructed, this humanism to come, was faced with the difficulty of how to negotiate the legacy of the European tradition of humanism and the conceptually constructed tension between particularizing experiences deemed proper to cultures outside of Europe and a notion of the universal, which, while an abstraction, was also characteristically French. In examining works by two Tunisian intellectuals – Albert Memmi and Hélé Béji – this article analyses what they try to do with the term ‘humanism’. It is clear that both intellectuals advocate a better world and an end to human suffering, but their principal weapon– humanism – lacks sharpness and the kind of political edge (dialectical) that characterized Fanon’s notion of ‘new humanism’.

Rethinking “Jews” and “Arabs” through Palestine: Transcolonial perspectives on Maghrebi literature

ABSTRACT In this essay I investigate an unexplored transcolonial relation: that tying North African writers to Palestine. Examining three sets of texts from the 1950s to the mid-1980s, I argue that, in different ways, Albert Memmi, Edmond El Maleh, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Jacques Hassoun reconsidered the legacies of French colonial divide-and-rule tactics in the Maghreb—in particular those opposing Jews and Arabs—through the lens of Palestine. Whereas in the 1950s Memmi famously analyzed the colonial hierarchies of his native Tunisia, he later endorsed the opposition between Jews and Arabs, giving credence to these categories and proclaiming the impossibility of the “Arab Jew.” To the contrary, the Moroccan Jewish writer El Maleh faulted French minority politics, Zionist discourse, and Israeli colonialism with the destruction of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Maghreb and beyond, disidentifying with Israel and allying with Palestine in an attempt to restore the link between Jews and Arabs. Finally, Khatibi, a Muslim Moroccan, and Hassoun, a Jewish Egyptian, sought to deconstruct this opposition through philosophical exchanges on the Abrahamic. These diverse examples invite us to reconsider national and postcolonial perspectives on Maghrebi literature in light of transnational relations connecting the Maghreb to Palestine.

Albert Memmi and Audre Lorde: Gender, Race, and the Rhetorical Uses of Anger

Feminists, like members of other oppressed groups, are likely to embrace many aspects of Albert Memmi’s profound analysis of domination and oppression. Even though feminists can find common cause with Memmi in many respects, nevertheless they are likely to find themselves at odds with what Memmi says and does not say about women.

Writing as Penance: National Guilt and J. M. Coetzee

Writing as Penance:National Guilt and J. M. Coetzee Forrest G. Robinson (bio) In company with samuel clemens and gunter Grass—writers I have discussed comparatively in an earlier essay (Robinson)—South African novelist and Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee has wrestled in his writing with a sense of anguished moral entanglement in his country's crimes against humanity. In their very different ways, all three writers answer potently competing impulses to confess and to conceal their accusing self-knowledge. Clemens is the least conscious in his literary negotiations with conscience. Repressed memories of slavery surface unsummoned in his writing, where they give rise to bad faith evasions or baffled retreats into silence. Grass, by contrast, has been shrewdly knowing in his fictional dissections of national guilt in post-Holocaust Germany, but failed until very recently to disclose the damaging truth of his own involvement in the moral debacle. In a very real sense, I believe, we owe the gift of his insights into national guilt to his own half-century of public denial. Coetzee's writing is similarly torn on the topic of apartheid, but in ways so various and seemingly contradictory as to suggest a desire on his part to invite and at the same time to frustrate critical scrutiny. Over the course of a long career, his attention has been less focused on the actual horrors of modern South African history than on the moral challenges faced by white people entangled in them. The need to intimate the worst of himself in several of his novels may appear to be a kind of grudging penance for feelings of moral complicity endured—and resented—as the unjust accidents of historical circumstance. As Sam Durrant has argued in a rather different critical framework, Coetzee's "novels seem to replay the agony of his implication in apartheid" even as they "are modes of protesting this affiliation" (19). [End Page 1] Yet Coetzee's attention to historical guilt is seldom direct. Rather, the topic is most often broached obliquely, as a consideration submerged in or apparently secondary to a diverse array of more open agendas—literary theory, autobiography, the problem of confession, and anti-Americanism prominent among them. Indeed, it is testimony to the simultaneous urgency and moral delicacy of the issue of historical guilt that it is so widely and yet so guardedly at large in Coetzee's work. His approach to the subject is characteristically ambiguous, at once a revelation and a concealment, an elusive crossing of signals that seems to express both his compulsion to show himself and an answering resistance to compromising disclosure. In a double movement clearly akin to the dynamics of bad faith, his work may be said to resist its own drive toward confession. Viewed in this way, Coetzee's novels may appear to be the work of a "colonizer who refuses" to endorse or support colonialism, but who is nonetheless, in Albert Memmi's characterization, deprived of moral tranquility because he "suspects, even if he is in no way guilty as an individual, that he shares a collective responsibility by the fact of membership in a national oppressor group." A white South African of Afrikaner descent, educated among Afrikaners and fluent in Afrikaans, but opposed as an adult to the inhuman apartheid regime created and enforced by his kin, Coetzee may appear to be a "benevolent colonizer" who, by Memmi's reckoning, "can never attain the good, for his choice is not between good and evil, but between evil and uneasiness" (39, 43). The novelist's predicament, as Stephen Watson has persuasively argued, registers clearly in the "dominant moral impulse at work" in his early fiction: the "insatiable hunger of all his protagonists" to escape the "shackles of their historical position" as colonizers (23). "I never wished to be drawn into this," complains the magistrate, a horrified witness to state torture in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). But he is also an agent of the state, and therefore complicit in its crimes. Little wonder that he wants "to live outside the history that Empire imposes on its subjects," and wonders how such a wish can be a "cause for shame" (8, 154). In...

De-Imperializing Cultural Studies: “Asian Studies in Asia”

De-Imperializing Cultural Studies: Studies in as Method: Toward Deimperialization by Kuan-Hsing Chen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 321 pp. $89.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback.Edward Said's claim that Oriental grew out of eighteenth and nineteenth century European imperialism is a controversial but well-known argument. His thesis is resonant in context of Asian studies in United States, which developed in part as a postwar initiative to better understand perceived outside threats emerging during Cold War. It is no surprise that critics have characterized Asian studies, and area studies in general, as agents of state and conduits for neoimperialism. Kuan-Hsing Chen's as Method: Toward Deimperialization responds to this critique in unexpected way. Far from being a helpless neoimperialist enterprise, Chen presents Asian studies as key to radical social progress, if only Asian studies be moved to Asia, to speak. Studies in (2), together with cultural studies as a whole, could be driving force for a global de-imperialization movement.Asia as Method provocatively challenges assumptions and practices in postcolonial studies, cultural studies, globalization studies, and Asian studies. Whether through a type of unquestioning fixation or obsessive critique, these fields have been guilty of focusing too much on the West, leading to a politics of resentment (2) that perpetuate existing power structures. Chen's toward as a gesture to multiply objects of identification and to construct alternative frames of reference is compelling. The question that this approach raises is whether his Asia-based paradigm and its geopolitical assumptions truly transcend West and Rest binary that he effectively criticizes.Chen believes that studies in can deconstruct and disarticulate colonialist and imperialist cultural imaginaries that are still actively shaping our present reality. The turn to (2) is quite literal for Chen when applied to field of Asian studies. He argues that field has primarily been shaped outside of Asia, mainly in United States and Europe, and that first step toward recuperating it would be to extract it from West. The reorientation of Asian studies to Asia, in which becomes an imaginary anchoring point that can allow societies in to become one another's reference points, would help detach Asia as method from imperialist imperatives that historically have shaped it so that understanding of self can be transformed, and subjectivity rebuilt (xv).Chen highlights current state of decolonization in by analyzing discourses of Southeast in 1990s' Taiwan. Specifically, chapter 1 examines a 1994 special issue of daily literary supplement in Times to show how natural, scientific, historical, and literary resources provided theoretical and validation for Taiwan's policy of advance: state-led aggressive capital expansion into Southeast Asia. Since Taiwanese capital was already in Southeast long before 1994, Chen argues that policy was ideological maneuvering, result of political anxiety brought about by stronger economic ties with China (19). Taiwan's policy of southward advance reflects surge of Taiwanese nativism, which itself was a reproduction of imperialist cultural imaginary constructed during colonial era, and subimperial desire, a lower-level empire's desire to resemble higher-level empire on which it is dependent (18). Chen believes that case of Taiwan falls into the postcolonial trajectory (63) in Third World, a pattern in which decolonization is followed by recolonization or neocolonization. This pattern repeatedly reproduces itself, according to Chen, because of a dearth of critical reflection on decolonization.Chapter 2 follows emergence of psychoanalytic articulations of decolonization by examining writings of Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Ashis Nandy. …