Intimate Enemy Research Articles

Epistemologies of Domination: Colonial Encounters, Heterology, and Postcolonial Pedagogy

Abstract This article theorizes and establishes some of the outlines of an epistemology of domination. An epistemology of domination interpellates the question of “how/what does the oppressor know about the oppressed?” Drawing on several studies of cultural encounters such as Ibrahim Abu-Lughod's The Arab Rediscovery of Europe, Ashis Nandy's The Intimate Enemy, and Zeynep Çelik's Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient, the discussion explores epistemic tropes around colonial encounters: the power and politics of representation; the burden of belatedness/the denial of coevalness; the over-emphasizing of Western agency. Wlad Godzich states that “Western Thought has always thematized the other as a threat to be reduced, as a potential same-to-be, a yet-not-same.” My discussion here accepts this premise but only partially, and asks the question: does domination always entail the projection of alterity as a threat, or is there a wider spectrum of epistemic projections? How does the other encounter and experience the Western self, and does such encounter modify hegemonic epistemological paradigms? Following Michel de Certeau's assertion that “what is near masks a foreignness,” I seek to complicate the relation between selfhood and otherness in the colonial encounter, and its entanglements with colonial violence. What pedagogical moments emerge from such encounters? And how do such pedagogical moments structure postcolonial epistemologies?

Exploring the Complexities of Postcolonialism and the Dynamics of Power Relations through the Critical Analysis of Ashis Nandy's The Intimate Enemy: A Study on the Resistance, Identity, and Hybridity of Postcolonial Thought

Ashis Nandy focuses on colonialism and its effects in her book The Intimate Enemy. He mentions colonisation of both the body and the intellect. Nandy questions accepted notions of colonialism and emphasises the significance of hybridity in postcolonial thought. The book does a good job of explaining the reasons behind the British Raj's protracted rule as well as the mutual effects of coloniser and colonised. Nandy asserts that there is no unbalanced connection between colonisers and colonised people. He objects to the idea that colonisers are always "victorious" and colonised people are always "victims". The Intimate Enemy is primarily a study of the epistemic structure and intellectual capacities that continue colonialism's legacy in India under British control. According to Nandy, eradicating colonialism requires starting right there in people's minds. The downtrodden of the globe are one, and those who torture others are also complicit in this practise. In this essay, I want to concentrate on how Nandy reinterprets the idea of postcolonialism to open new vistas of thinking that lead to universalism, humanism, and self-realization. He does this by attempting to undermine the theory of the connection between colonisers and colonised.

The Hera of Zeus. Intimate Enemy, Ultimate Spouse by Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge and Gabrielle Pironti

Reviewed by: The Hera of Zeus. Intimate Enemy, Ultimate Spouse by Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge and Gabrielle Pironti Roy Van Wijk The Hera of Zeus. Intimate Enemy, Ultimate Spouse. By Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge and Gabrielle Pironti. Trans. by Raymond Geuss. Cambridge, UK; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. 348. Hardback, $120.00. ISBN: 9781108888479. This book is an English translation of the 2016 French original L'Hera de Zeus: Ennemie Intime, Epouse Definitive. It is the first product of a new CUP series dedicated to translating key works in other languages into English. If this is the standard adhered to, the series will be a great addition to Classical scholarship. This is an essential book for anyone interested in researching and understanding (if partially) the multifaceted nature of Greek polytheism. Rather than providing a general overview or deciphering the teleological development of Hera, the authors stress her versatile character. At the same time, they successfully incorporate the many local characteristics of her cult. They avoid the [End Page 376] straight jacket of a "uniform" goddess approach, yet demonstrate how her essential characteristics, such as maintaining sovereignty and organizing the hierarchy of the (divine) household or marriage, emerge at the cult sites from Sybaris to Samos. In the process, they traverse numerous mythological stories to argue that Hera cannot be captured by the monolithic "jealous wife" trope widespread among scholars. In fact, she is the rightful, powerful counterbalance to Zeus in her own right. She does not just exist as Zeus' foil. She is a divine queen atop the pecking order of Olympus by her own right. The first chapter sets out the premise of her role in the divine order. Contrary to earlier scholarship that saw Hera as the remnant of a matriarchal society or the final development of a primordial vegetation goddess descended from the Mycenaean period, the authors show that Hera took on many roles. Besides being the daughter of Kronos and thus divine royalty on her own account, she plays the role of spouse. As Zeus' sister, she is on equal terms with him. As his lover, she is unsurpassed in beauty in Zeus' eyes – despite his misgivings – and his desire for her stands on a different level. It is that attraction she uses to negotiate with him. She is the guardian of marriage and safeguarded childbirth, especially the legitimacy of children, as evidenced by her behaviour vis-à-vis Dionysos and Herakles, who need to earn their right to Olympus. It is her close acquaintance with her brother that makes her his most dangerous enemy and equal: she knows exactly what triggers him and how to outsmart the thundering god, as evidenced in the story of Herakles and Eurystheus' birth. The second, much bigger chapter, traces Hera in her various cult guises across the Greek world. The cults in question are that of Stymphalos, Plataia, Argos, Samos and Olympia. The chapter ends with an overview and analysis of her roles. Despite the local differences, in each cult it is clear that she acts in her capacity as Queen of the Gods and Olympus. Her role as the consort of Zeus is everywhere engrained in the cultic roots across Greece in various shapes and sizes. In Plataia she protects and solidifies unions and marriages; at Samos she takes on the form of Zeus' young bride that inspired such desires in him. These roles are not mutually exclusive. She can perform various duties within these cults. What their geographic dissemination and local idiosyncrasies show, however, is that despite epichoric differences, the goddess is always venerated in her role as the Hera of Zeus, an equal partner that rightly deserves worship. These investigations of cult are not just worthwhile because of the breadth of their analysis and scholarship; [End Page 377] they also provide a Sitz im Leben for understanding how Greek worshippers themselves saw Hera in all her roles and attributes. The third and final chapter traces one of Hera's most lasting legacies: that of her cholos. This archaic, Homeric term for anger was always misused by previous scholarship. Rather than analyze the context of Hera's wrath more closely...

Palestine +100: Stories from a century after the Nakba Edited by BasmaGhalayini. Manchester, U.K: Comma Press, 2019.

Palestine +100: Stories from a century after the Nakba Edited by BasmaGhalayini. Manchester, U.K: Comma Press, 2019.

The Change Which Remains the Same

In his celebrated study of colonisation, The Intimate Enemy, Ashis Nandy observes of Indian responses to British colonisation: ‘The pressure to be the obverse of the West distorts the traditional priorities in the Indian’s total view of the…universe…It in fact binds him (sic) even more irrevocably to the West.’ This problem stems, he adds, from a tendency by both coloniser and anti-colonial thinker to ‘absolutise the relative difference between cultures’. This article will argue that Nandy’s observation is an essential element in a South African response to colonisation which does not repeat colonialism’s assumptions in the name of replacing them. In particular, it argues against an essentialism in which a reified ‘Western culture’ is replaced by an equally reified ‘African culture’ which is just as constraining and just as likely to be used as a rationale for domination as the colonial ideology it purports to reject. It will further argue that we avoid the trap of which Nandy warns if we define intellectual colonisation as an ideology which seeks to suppress or eliminate modes of thought which do not conform to a dominant set of values and its antidote, decolonisation, as the removal of this constraint, not as its replacement by new constraints. This decolonisation does not seek to abolish ‘Western culture’ but to integrate it into a world view in which it takes its place alongside African, Asian, and Latin American cultures. It therefore recognises the syncretic nature of all cultures and views of the world and seeks to enhance, rather than obstruct, conversations between them.

Parasite-host ecology: the limited impacts of an intimate enemy on host microbiomes

BackgroundImpacts of biotic stressors, such as consumers, on coral microbiomes have gained attention as corals decline worldwide. Corallivore feeding can alter coral microbiomes in ways that contribute to dysbiosis, but feeding strategies are diverse – complicating generalizations about the nature of consumer impacts on coral microbiomes.ResultsIn field experiments, feeding by Coralliophila violacea, a parasitic snail that suppresses coral growth, altered the microbiome of its host, Porites cylindrica, but these impacts were spatially constrained. Alterations in microbial community composition and variability were largely restricted to snail feeding scars; basal or distal areas ~ 1.5 cm or 6–8 cm away, respectively, were largely unaltered. Feeding scars were enriched in taxa common to stressed corals (e.g. Flavobacteriaceae, Rhodobacteraceae) and depauperate in putative beneficial symbionts (e.g. Endozoicomonadaceae) compared to locations that lacked feeding.ConclusionsPrevious studies that assessed consumer impacts on coral microbiomes suggested that feeding disrupts microbial communities, potentially leading to dysbiosis, but those studies involved mobile corallivores that move across and among numerous individual hosts. Sedentary parasites like C. violacea that spend long intervals with individual hosts and are dependent on hosts for food and shelter may minimize damage to host microbiomes to assure continued host health and thus exploitation. More mobile consumers that forage across numerous hosts should not experience these constraints. Thus, stability or disruption of microbiomes on attacked corals may vary based on the foraging strategy of coral consumers.

A Critique of The Civilising Rationale: Strategies for producing marginalisation

The radical distinction between civilization and barbarism used in the discourse of the national states of Chile and Argentina during the second half of the XIX century, not only was used to justify the genocidal military intervention of the territories inhabited by the mapuche indigenous from the south of both countries; but also inaugurated a conflictive relationship that remains to the present. The main objective of the paper is to identify the scope of the “civilization project” initiated during the second part of the 19th century and expressed during the 20th and 21st centuries through different and broad forms of marginalization, both ethnic and -by extension- immigrant, thecriminal and LGBT+ groups; in such a way that it is a historical, systematic and institutionalized process of producing marginalities, which considers various production strategies of the intimate enemy, especially from the cultural industry available in each time. The results show how “marginal/marginalized” is produced and reproduced, through policies of death, dispossession, inclusion/exclusion, in a constant relationship from moral, criminal and neoliberal rationalities.

The self under domination: a dialogue between Nandy’s The intimate enemy and Dangarembga’s Nervous conditions

ABSTRACTThis article analyses two different endeavours to understand the effects of domination on the self as well as the tortuous ways by which emancipation is sought. One example is taken from Ashis Nandy’s work The Intimate Enemy (1983), the other from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions (1988). It is argued that domination deeply scars the human psyche so that the successful pursuit of the political emancipation of oppressed individuals and collectives depends on how the abhorred reality of oppression is dealt with, not only externally but – mainly – internally. In this vein, political emancipation consists of a politics of identification in that it must address both collective action towards freedom and an inner reconstruction of a vilified and downgraded self.

Kidnapping and a 'Confirmed Sodomite': An Intimate Enemy on the Northwest Frontier of India, 1915-1925.

Kidnapping and a 'Confirmed Sodomite': An Intimate Enemy on the Northwest Frontier of India, 1915-1925.

Fictional Attachments and Literary Weavings in the Anthropocene

Literary studies can find inspiration in Bruno Latour’s 2013 book An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence insofar as it helps them map and locate where and how they can contribute to the debates that will shape our necessary turning away from the suicidal path of capitalist ecocide. In return, AIME can find in literary studies a field of research that will help it overcome its current attention deficit toward the issues of media agency. Along the way, we will discover that the humanities may indeed be the most dangerous and reactionary of all disciplines, unknowingly siding with our most intimate enemy in the anthropocenic war (“the humans”). The time has come to evolve from the Humanities to the Medianities!

‘Our heroes were always androgynous’: An Interview with Ashis Nandy

In The Intimate Enemy 1 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). you discuss a form of colonisation which ‘releases force...

International Law as Intimate Enemy

The metaphor intimate enemy best captures the changing nature of international law vis-a-vis nations. Intimate enemy is a useful heuristic device that could be deployed to capture legal concepts of indeterminacy, dialectics, and reformulation within international law. In order to prove this thesis, this Article discusses international humanitarian law, international economic law, and international criminal law. More precisely, this Article will take up “war on terror,” laws of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs), and the law of regional unions such as the European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU) to explicate the claims made. Across the board, this Article claims that an intimate animosity is on display.This Article invites scholars and researchers of international law to use intimate enemy as a new hermeneutics to unpack the real relationship of countries and international law.

Biopolitics and Political Space

Biopolitics and Political Space

Travel for ordinary comforts

The article focuses on the co-constitution of political subjectivities, political regimes and global political economy by exploring experiences of international travel by ordinary Yugoslav citizens. Political non-players (Ashis Nandy (1998) The intimate enemy: loss and recovery of self under colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press)) and their everyday practices are key protagonists in the narrative of border crossings, migrations, translocations and regime sustenance. Taking a cue from Peter Taylor's (Modernities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)) analysis of ‘ordinary modernity’, the article examines the ways in which foreign travel helped create ‘ordinary comfort’ for ‘ordinary citizens’ in the Yugoslav communist experiment. The temporal focus is on the 1970s—time of grave economic crisis in Western Europe and the United States—and, thanks to petro-dollar debt, the time of unprecedented prosperity and largesse in Yugoslavia. By looking at the variety of ways ordinary Yugoslavs travelled abroad and the representations of ‘abroad’ at home, the article explores the ways in which inostranstvo (the foreign world, the international) and its imaginary came to the rescue of the national, and how the liberty of travel (always contrasted to the ‘prison’ of other communist countries) obfuscated political and economic problems within.

International Law as Intimate Enemy

International Law as Intimate Enemy

Episodisches Schreiben und ›Werkgedächtnis‹ bei Jean Paul. Mit einem Seitenblick auf Goethe

This article endeavors to bridge the gap between ›material‹ text philology, interested in manuscripts, and empirical writing research. Since terminology suitable for describing writing processes (in contrast to the description of the genesis of texts) is missing altogether in the current state of the art, the author aims at an empirically ›informed‹, but philologically embedded model of writing. This model in turn is implemented in order to delineate writing strategies Jean Paul could plausibly have utilized for his literary production. In this context the autograph of the third preface to the novel Hesperus is presented here for the first time. That argument is framed by general remarks on the ›going science‹-program in the philologies (first section) and on Jean Paul's intimate enemy in Weimar, who nevertheless serves as a paradigm for writing authorship (final section).

International Law as an Intimate Enemy

International Law as an Intimate Enemy

Aubrey Williams

Leon Wainwright is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan University, Visiting Scholar at the Yale Centre for British Art and on the editorial board of the jour...

The Volatility of the ‘Other’: Identity Formation and Social Interaction in Diasporic Environments

The construction of an ‘other’ and the confrontation with this intimate enemy lies at the heart of identity politics. In diasporic environments, these constructions of the ‘other’ have two major attributes: their multiplicity and their volatility. Ethnic entrepreneurs have a wide range of options to propose an ‘enemy’ to their audience, hence their multiplicity. At the same time, social and political evolutions in the migrants’ country of residence or in their home state make such politics of otherness highly contingent. The study of ethnic relations in diasporic environments is thus a difficult task and very little empirical material is presently available on this critical issue. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap, through an exploration of patterns of conflict and cooperation amongst South Asian residents of Southall, in West London.

Scott Straus and Robert Lyons. Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide. New York: Zone Books, 2006. 185 pp. Illustrations. Map. Glossary. $37.95. Cloth. - Louise Mushikiwabo and Jack Kramer. Rwanda Means the Universe: A Native's Memoir of Blood and Bloodlines. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006. 384 pp. Map. Photographs. Glossary. Index. $26.95. Cloth.

Scott Straus and Robert Lyons. Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide. New York: Zone Books, 2006. 185 pp. Illustrations. Map. Glossary. $37.95. Cloth. Louise Mushikiwabo and Jack Kramer. Rwanda Means the Universe: A Native's Memoir of Blood and Bloodlines. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006. 384 pp. Map. Photographs. Glossary. Index. $26.95. Cloth. The 1994 Rwandan genocide is among the rare African tragedies that have managed to capture the imagination of the international community. While wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, and Somalia have barely registered in the international consciousness, interest in Rwanda has spawned a cottage industry of publications, making available a much broader spectrum of academic analysis, personal narrative, and heroic mythology than generally is available about events in Africa. The two books reviewed here represent unconventional approaches to the Rwandan genocide that seek to put a human face on the tragedy, and they demonstrate both the benefits and risks of the willingness to publish so comprehensively about Rwanda. Robert Lyons and Scott Straus's innovative Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide combines stark black-and-white photographs of Rwandan people with a collection of interviews with confessed participants in Rwanda's 1994 genocide to create a striking portrayal of the nature of extreme violence. While so much of the popular depiction of Rwanda's genocide treats the violence as incomprehensible madness, reinforcing racist stereotypes of Africans as fundamentally savage, Lyons and Straus's work goes a long way to humanizing the conflict. The Hutu men interviewed here are not evil madmen involved in a diabolical plot against their Tutsi neighbors. Instead, they are, as Straus writes in his brief but useful introduction to the text, ordinary husbands, fathers, sons, and boyfriends; they [are] farmers, fishermen, teachers, and market salesmen.... The testimonies in this book reflect the ordinary, unremarkable nature of most of Rwanda's genocide (24). While most of the scholarly work on the Rwandan genocide seeks to explain the national organization of the violence, these interviews help explain the individual motivations of perpetrators. Those interested in a more scholarly analysis of the perpetrator motivations can consult Straus's The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006). Intimate Enemy is valuable for allowing Rwandans to speak for themselves, leaving readers to make their own sense of the violence. The testimonies indicate that while a few participants seem to have been motivated by hatred of the Tutsi, most were in fact driven to kill by a complex combination of fear, obedience, intimidation, and opportunism. Togedier, the testimonies challenge the popular image of the genocide as a spontaneous popular uprising against a hated minority. Instead, they clearly demonstrate the official nature of the violence, referring repeatedly to the intervention of national figures and the active organization of the killing by local authorities. While Straus interviews exclusively genocide perpetrators, Lyons's photographs include both genocide perpetrators and survivors. The majority of Lyons's photographs are portraits, headshots of Rwandans from the neck up, many of them staring directly into the camera. Like those interviewed by Straus, the Rwandans portrayed by Lyons are people, looking sad, defiant, proud, or humble. What is remarkable about the portraits-and this is undoubtedly Lyons's point-is that one cannot tell without looking at the photo key in the back of the book who is Hutu and who is Tutsi, who is a genocidaire and who is a survivor. Together the interviews and photographs present a deeply affecting portrait of the nature of violence and of the oft-overlooked humanity of both victims and perpetrators. …