Malini Johar Schueller

DECOLONIZING GLOBAL THEORIES TODAY

Since the 1990s there has been an impetus to develop paradigms of theory that are global and energize us with possibilities for resistance. This essay argues that such theories confront us with a postcolonial unease because they are, like the tradition of colonial knowledge production, universalizing. The essay begins by briefly analysing the West-centered basis of the idea of inevitability in Hardt and Negris concept of empire and moves on to critiquing two universalizing concepts: Giorgio Agambens ‘bare life’ and Judith Butlers ‘vulnerability’. Turning from theory to practice, the essay points out the problems of Eurocentrism in even so ostensibly radical and global an organization as the World Social Forum. The essay demonstrates the need, particularly in the imperial moment today, for a vigilance against the global theoretical projects being generated at present.

Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism

Exceptional State analyzes the nexus of culture and contemporary manifestations of U.S. imperialism. The contributors, established and emerging cultural studies scholars, define culture broadly to include a range of media, literature, and political discourse. They do not posit September 11, 2001 as the beginning of U.S. belligerence and authoritarianism at home and abroad, but they do provide context for understanding U.S. responses to and uses of that event. Taken together, the essays stress both the continuities and discontinuities embodied in a present-day U.S. imperialism constituted through expressions of millennialism, exceptionalism, technological might, and visions of world dominance. The contributors address a range of topics, paying particular attention to the dynamics of gender and race. Their essays include a surprising reading of the ostensibly liberal movies Wag the Do g and Three Kings , an exploration of the rhetoric surrounding the plan to remake the military into a high-tech force less dependent on human bodies, a look at the significance of the popular Left Behind series of novels, and an interpretation of the Abu Ghraib prison photos. They scrutinize the national narrative created to justify the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the ways that women in those countries have responded to the invasions, the contradictions underlying calls for U.S. humanitarian interventions, and the role of Africa in the U.S. imperial imagination. The volume concludes on a hopeful note, with a look at an emerging anti-imperialist public sphere. Contributors . Omar Dahbour, Ashley Dawson, Cynthia Enloe, Melani McAlister, Christian Parenti, Donald E. Pease, John Carlos Rowe, Malini Johar Schueller, Harilaos Stecopoulos

Area studies and multicultural imperialism : The project of decolonizing knowledge

Malini Johar Schueller Security. Surveillance. Diversity. Balance. These have been the contradictory catchwords of the Right’s attacks on academia since 9/11. Couched in the language of nationalism and advocating a hyperscopic regime of control through state and civil apparatuses, different right-wing organizations professing commitment to fairness and diversity have sought to regulate the work of postcolonialist Middle East studies scholars. Thus Daniel Pipes’s Web site, Campus Watch, published dossiers of eight prominent professors of Middle East studies who demonstrated “bias” in their teaching and promoted anti-Americanism. The targeted eight were inundated with hate mail and death threats. Although Pipes removed the dossiers after vigorous criticism from faculty nationwide, he continued Campus Watch’s project “Monitoring Middle East Studies on Campus.” Each month, the Web site showcases a “Quote of the Month” that demonstrates the “terrorist” sympathies of a Middle East studies professor. The stated objective of Campus Watch is to redress the “intolerance of alternative views” within Middle East studies.1 In September 2003, members of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Select Education approved H.R. 3077, the International Studies in Higher Education Act, which authorized the creation of an advisory board, appointed by the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, to oversee the curricula of area studies centers that received funding from Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965. Curricula, it was stated, needed to better reflect the needs of national security.2 Expert testimony for the act came from its tireless promoter, Stanley Kurtz, fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution and editor of National Review. Alarmed at the purported anti-Americanism of postcolonial theory – influenced Middle East studies, Kurtz singled out the pernicious consequence of the writings of Edward Said and recommended federal oversight over these centers. His recommendations: balance and diversity. Such a blacklisting of professors and state surveillance of academics, in addition to the mushrooming of faculty-policing organizations such as Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), which boasts chapters in more than 130 institutions, demonstrate a victory of the Right’s attempt to

Negotiations of Benevolent (Colonial) Tutelage in Carlos Bulosan

US colonial education in the Philippines, begun as a means of pacification, was a complex mixture of military necessity and a biopolitical technology of colonial management through racialization and benevolent uplift. This essay examines the engagement of Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan with the project of colonial tutelage in two satiric stories, ‘My Mothers Boarders’ and ‘The Education of My Father’ and in his fictionalized autobiography, ‘America is in the Heart’. It demonstrates the historically specific ways in which Bulosan critiques the racialized assumptions of colonial education in which Filipinos were deemed primitive and, like Native Americans and African Americans, deemed fit only for industrial education. It also analyses the possibilities for decolonial thinking as articulated in America is in the Heart. At the same time, it suggests that Bulosans reverence for education and his use of the rhetoric of exceptional democracy, which replicates that of US imperialism, points to the difficulty of the colonial subject finding a language to critique the system of benevolent tutelage.

Unthinking Consumption and Arrested Melancholia in Bienvenido Santos’ “The Excursionists”

This essay uses the lens of racial melancholia to examine Filipino writer Bienvenido Santos’s representation of the complex relations between the colonial elite and the native through a literalizing of the hunger for colonial knowledge. In his short story “The Excursionists,” Santos positions the putative native elite subjects of U.S. tutelary colonialism as “arrested melancholics.” Their identities, dependent upon ingestion of colonial knowledge they can neither reject, nor fully incorporate, they dramatize the ambivalent process of attempting to reverse the effects of colonial injuries and tutelage. Santos demonstrates how hunger and consumption mediate hierarchical social relations and the problematic nature of appeals to colonial and neoliberal benevolence through the figure of the hungry native.

The Letters of Edith Wharton, and: Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters (review)

Edith Wharton is now recognized as an important American novelist of the twentieth century. Critical attention has been given not only to Whartons major works but also to minor works like Hudson River Bracketed and the unfinished novel The Buccaneers. Wharton has been seen as a writer portraying the entrapment and powerlessness of women and as a writer belonging to the tradition of great literature. Harold Blooms Introduction to a 1986 collection of critical essays on Wharton associates her with Hawthorne, Melville, Wallace Stevens, and Balzac. It is, therefore, an appropriate time for the first collection of Whartons letters to be made available. The Lewises have done an excellent research job in editing this volume. They have included four hundred letters from the nearly four thousand extant ones. The collection is broken down into seven chronological sections, each with its own introduction. Each letter is profusely annotated with biographical, historical, and literary references, and the volume is well illustrated. R. W. B. Lewis attempts to make a case for the literary merit of the letters but few will want to read the letters for that reason. The biographical figure that emerges from the letters, however, is fascinating. Critics interested in Whartons life will find a woman at once confident, firm, sensitive, and passionate. The most interesting letters are those to her editors and to her capricious lover W. Morton Fullerton. From the beginning Wharton was demanding of her editors. As early as 1899 we find her criticizing Scribners for doing an inadequate advertising job, and holding the editors responsible for the poor reviews of The Greater Inclination; shortly before her death she would reprimand Appleton publishers for their shoddy performance and demand release from her contract for The Buccaneers. The letters to her lover, Fullerton, an American journalist based in Paris, arc full of passion and emotion and seem far removed