Timothy A Brennan

The National Longing for Form

Until the appearance of Midnight’s Children in 1980, India’s literary agents in the West were, for the most part, obscure intellectual tourists or Indian academics writing in the yellowed volumes of Delhi publishing houses. Srinivasa Iyengar has noted, for example, that at the very moment that Commonwealth fiction was finally getting attention, Indo-English literature — despite its comparative quality and volume — had no following comparable to that of Africa and the Caribbean. In the United States and in Britain, the social conflicts making news in those regions were enough to make their literatures a going issue, whereas India and the Raj (much less the Independence struggle itself) were already an old story.

Salman Rushdie and the Third World : myths of the nation

The dialectic between national literary production and the rise of a group of writers with cosmopolitan sympathies is the aim of this book, concentrating on Rushdies novels and journalism. It comments on the narrowness with which British literary tradition has been conceived and broadens its scope to include the new writing emerging from Britains black communities.

The Empire’s New Clothes

337 1. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari, ed. Buttigieg, 5 vols. (New York, 1992– ), 1:211. I would like to give special thanks to Keya Ganguly for her help on this essay. Tom Mitchell and Silvia Lopez gave me helpful advice at key moments. Although there are obvious disagreements between us, I would also like to thank Michael Hardt for being part of an MLA panel I organized in 2000 where some of these ideas were first presented. The Empire’s New Clothes

From development to globalization: Postcolonial studies and globalization theory

Neither “globalization theory” nor “postcolonial studies” are terms that easily reveal their meanings. The areas of knowledge to which they refer are not what they seem, and a great deal of confusion surrounds their uses. Readers would be forgiven for thinking that “globalization theory” denoted an emergent body of writing called forth by inexorable recent developments in technology and communications, as well as radical shifts in the world economy and in geopolitics, all of them presaging the rise of a truly global culture - the obliteration of state sovereignty in a world marked by fluidity and border-crossing. In turn, these readers might suppose that “postcolonial studies” referred to an inaugural critique of Eurocentrism prompted by a new diasporic wave of intellectuals from the former colonies resident in metropolitan centers who - informed by postwar theories of language and representation - began in the late 1970s to cast older versions of “Western Man” in doubt in an act of writing back to Empire. Actually, neither is the case. One has to begin by distinguishing between the study of global issues or colonial pasts per se and the fairly recent creation of schools of thought that retrospectively appropriate the more general cases fleetingly echoed in their names. When invoked in European or North American universities since the beginning of the 1990s, globalization theory and postcolonial studies turn out to be very specialized discursive formations passing for older and more varied types of enquiry. This slippage between connotation and code is one of the first things to understand about the conjunction of the two terms.

The Cuts of Language: The East/West of North/South

The oddity of the locution East/West is that it refers both to the Cold War and to an imperial divide of race and civilizational conquest. If translation is an East/West problem in the latter sense, it is also embedded in the ideological divide of communism and capitalism. To say, for example, that “East is East and West is West” is to assume the sort of noncommunication among human types that has a long tradition in the work of Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, and other novelists of empire. By contrast, seeing communication as a problem of substance is not typically granted to the “East/West conflict,” a phrase belonging to a war that was popularly thought to be ideological alone. In that particular sense, “East/West” has always been thought of as a mere struggle over programmatic spoils. And yet, just as much as the imperial divide, the Cold War divide involved differences in aesthetic taste and social value—in intellectual excitement and moral intention—not just differences in the more regulatory contests of administration, hierarchy, and sovereignty over land. An imaginative geography, in other words, governs the cultural differences related to civilizational contests and national or ethnic divisions (the East/West as Kipling understood it), as well as the world political contests of the Cold War, as perhaps Nikita Khrushchev or later Ronald Reagan rendered them. Soviet and Euro-American cultures of position are today overlaid upon more well known imaginative geographies that were first developed in eighteenthand nineteenth-

World Music Does Not Exist

It takes an era of world culture for world music to exist despite my title as an idea in the mind of journalists, critics, and the buyers of records.It is real if only because it is talked about as though it were real.When so much of the world seems immediately accessible without our ever having to leave home, and our experience of things is really an experience of the representations of things, the idea of world music is arguably as important, and as real, as a world music that really existed. Through television at any rate, we appear to have access to a bewildering array of music from around the world.In Germany, where I lived in 1997 and 1998, one could find on MTV or the Viva channel both rock and rap and shades of pop from France, Italy, Britain and the United States, all available without ever having to buy a record.A visit to a theatre brings one into contact with movie soundtracks of an even more varied and more truly global scope.In that kind of venue most audiences, even without looking for them, will hear South African township music, Latin salsa, West African rock, Hindi pop, Moroccan chaabi, Brazilian samba, Colombian cumbia, and Algerian rai musics that over time actually become familiar, although the film-goers will not know the names of the styles or where they originated or anything about how they signify in other locales.In stores, metropolitan listeners find a whole section of shelves with CDs grouped alphabetically by country in a bin labeled “world music.” And there, in the altogether normal place

Joining the party

Postcolonial studies has always been deeply divided politically. These divisions signal sharply opposed, not just different, relationships to theory and history. Moreover, what we find within its purview are not two schools of thought neatly partitioned (as perhaps the above suggests) but multiple ones crisscrossed by particular combinations of methodological differences, epistemological points of departure, regional foci, and political allegiances. Despite some efforts to conjure the ghost into being, then, there is no such thing as ‘postcolonialism’, the unitary formation that a few critics have tried to depict in arguing for a unique and coherent philosophical and political outlook. There are instead unstable alliances with clashing objectives, sharing only their resistance to empire and a commitment to tell a more inclusive, more truly global, story. This is the setting for The Postcolonial Gramsci, which, among other things, exemplifies a remarkable change of atmosphere over the last decade. Although the field was always marked by a radical rhetoric delinked from practical political movements, that rhetoric has evolved. Anyone who has followed the field closely over the years will have noticed a significant redirection of its efforts*where the focus of the 1980s and 1990s on texts, discourse, identity, migrancy and subjectivity has since given way to an engaged, activist language of political movements and positions. Significantly, this verbal shift from self to world is rarely talked about even as critics find themselves borrowing heavily from the traditions of a postcolonial tendency that only yesterday was ignored or disparaged by many of the major journals, institutes and conferences. During the heyday of discourse studies, this loose, let us call it ‘materialist’, orientation was regarded as unfashionably preoccupied with such things as the social contradictions of postcolonial experience, US and NATO foreign policy, contemporary indigenous movements struggling for land and autonomy, and globalization seen as the aggressive financial projects of international capital. This approach had always paid more attention to the anti-imperialist traditions that predated postcolonial studies, for example, early twentiethcentury research on the impact of global capitalist expansion, anti-colonial military campaigns launched by minority intellectuals from the metropolitan centres, early-century economic theorizations of the system known (for the first time) as ‘imperialism’ itself, and dependency and world systems theory. Postcolonial Studies, 2013, Vol. 16, No. 1, 68 78

Labor and the Logic of Abstraction: An Interview

Since its publication in 1993, Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination has inspired a host of praising assessments from various corners of the critical social sciences. He argues that the “social domination” referred to in the title is generated by labor itself, not only market mechanisms and private property. With some similarities to the Krisis school in Germany (and the work of Robert Kurz and Norbert Trenkle), it is industrial labor that is seen as the barrier to human emancipation rather than as the key to its overcoming. While !nding, to this degree, a convergence between the goals of capitalism and the older state socialisms, Postone is not content with rejecting earlier systems. One of the more bracing aspects of his book is the attempt to found a new critical social theory. It is in that spirit that the following interview was conducted on May 16, 2008.

Critical ResponseIIThe Magician’s Wand:A Rejoinder to Hardt and Negri

Describing the malaise of English national culture in the 1930s, Perry Anderson wrote of F. R. Leavis that his criticism rested on a very particular, even peculiar epistemology: “When challenged for the rationale of his critical statements, Leavis always replied that they did not properly speaking have an affirmative but an interrogative form. The latent form of all literary criticism was: ‘This is so, is it not?’” Hardt and Negri are of course not engaged in literary criticism (at least if one were to go by their claims and the predicaments their book purports to analyze). But they seem to share a similar epistemological conviction, willing their readers to accept their assertions—“This is so, is it not?” Their version of the interrogative statement comes with its own foreclosures. Strikingly enough, it also comeswith an unwillingness to take responsibility for the self-styled “new ends” to which Empire supposedly contributes. Readers will not have forgotten the rhetorical gambit of the book in which the authors were not shy about comparing themselves toMarx or declaring their intention of supplying what Foucault “fail[ed] to grasp.” Yet now in their response they aver that their revisionary reading of such large-scale propositions as global capitalism’s “system of command” represents only amodest proposal, inviting its readers todisagreewith itspremises—which, because they are “conceptual,” are not based on “empirical analysis, statistics, or thick description” (p. 369). Presumably relegated to the status of bogus proof-mongering, neither method nor supporting evi-

The case against irony

Taken to be the essential feature of all literature, irony is actually quite problematic. Inseparable from the invention of the West by way of the Oriental society of Greece (above all, in Plato), irony enters the modern literary scene at the confluence of forms of labour, vestigial notions of medieval craft, an ethics of dissimulation, and an attack on dialectical thought. Indeed, there is a largely neglected tradition of hostility towards irony within dialectical thought, which leads to an aesthetic outlook on the world that, for a variety of historical reasons, has been most prominent in the global periphery. Irony is understood here as much more than a literary figure — as being, rather, a “standpoint” or position. It is impossible to decouple our largely uncritical reception of irony from the triumph of literary modernism, and so any attempt (as in this article) to question forms of “peripheral modernism” requires a critical revision of our welcome to irony itself, which is not essential to literature, and has in fact colonized it.