What in the hell …

Notes on this article “Rethinking the Historical Genealogy of Orientalism” by Burke and Prochaska, in History and Anthropology, Volume 18 Issue 2 2007. These are for a thing I’m working on. The notes are critical and don’t at all make clear that I actually think it’s a great and very useful article.

Burke and Prochaska praise Edward Said’s Orientalism for initiating a sea-change in the understanding of colonialism. At the same time, they suggest that the turn Said inaugurated “entailed some significant intellectual losses” alongside its positive components. (138.)

The authors write that “the critique of colonial representations often appeared abstract and disengaged with both its own history as well as the specific colonial histories which it sought to explain.” Against this, the authors call for “colonial representations” and their study “to be adequately historicized.” (136.) As a contribution to this historicizing move, the authors seek to place Said’s work in an intellectual and political context, in order to ascertain “the state of the critique of colonial forms of knowledge prior” to and largely displaced by Said. (137.)

The authors count a lessened place for Marxist scholarship as one of the losses in the wake of Said. In contrast to Said’s Foucaultian work, the Marxist work which is displaced “was more complex and historically engaged.” (138.) By this they appear to mean at least in part that the Marxist work was more engaged in its own present. By contrast they criticize Said for failing to engage with Fanon and others engaged in political and intellectual debates bound up with Algerian independence. Said and those influenced by Said “failed to consider the contexts in which the arose,” thus forgetting “their own history (…) rooted in the anti-imperialist struggles of the past century.” (139.) Global anti-imperialism, as both intellectual and political currents, laid the groundwork for Said’s reception

Earlier critics of colonialism understood it as “linked to capitalism” and racism. They did not, however, criticize “colonialism as a discursive system” or criticize “colonial forms of knowledge.” (140.) These areas are precisely where anti-colonial critics applied themselves in the wake of Said.

Burke and Prochaska criticize this earlier Marxist work and history generally for holding to “the nation as the appropriate frame for analysis and fetishiz[ing] written sources (…) attitudes [which] tended to limit the impact of radical critiques that crossed national boundaries.” (141.)

Burke and Prochaska state that “the critique of imperialism was poorly developed” before the social movements of the 1960s, at least in the U.S. They claim to see a “radicalization of politics and thought” in this era. (140.) While there is an element of truth here, the authors overemphasize their claim, committing an error akin to Said’s failure to pay attention to Fanon. The authors treat the 1960s as overly discrete from prior generations. This flies in the face of the trend among U.S. historians toward seeing the movements of the 1960s as rooted in a longer tradition of freedom struggles and radical ideas. As part of this, their treatment of the U.S. and Britain overly emphasizes “academic Marxism,” paying too little attention to conversation which occurred outside or across the borders of universities, analogous to the Algerian intellectuals they cite. In so doing, the authors leave out a long history of opposition to imperialism by (often Marxist) intellectuals of African descent around the world [cite Kelley on black internationalism], as well as feminist debates about gender, capitalism and imperialism in the 1960s. These omissions are particularly unfortunate in that the authors imply a link between “post-Marxist cultural space of contestation” opened by Said and “intellectual links between feminists and peoples of colour.” (145.) This claim is no doubt true, but it reads differently when paired with an awareness of other longstanding ties between anti-imperialists, Marxists, feminists, and peoples of color (terms which should be treated neither as necessarily identical nor as necessarily discrete).

Over emphasis on academic critics in a limited range of disciplines may also explain the rather strange assertion that “anti-imperialist Marxists” lacked “philosophically grounded critique,” a claim that seems quite odd when juxtaposed with, for instance, C.L.R. James’ engagement with Hegel, E.P. Thompson’s reading of Althusser, or Herbert Marcuse’s writings on Freud. (141.) Various Marxists have made many mistakes and much of the Marxist tradition may well prove not worth recovering or retaining, but the deficiencies of the tradition are not generally attributable to a lack of philosophy. If philosophical reflection within world history is needed (something the authors state but do not argue), the history Marxist philosophy may well be a resource to draw upon.

Burke and Prochaska are also strangely silent about French Marxism. They do not discuss the French Communist Party or Louis Althusser, arguably the most famous theorist associated with that Party. This would have been relevant to the attention they pay to structuralist and post-structuralist thought in “philosophical contestation of Cartesian rationalism.” Discussion of Althusser would have also been relevant to a discussion of French Maoism, the role of Althusserians within that current, and their relationship with intellectuals such as Sartre and Foucault.

I believe Burke and Prochaska are largely right that the academic Marxists they treat and academic Marxism over all in the 1960s and 1970s had serious limitations. These limitations as well as a sober assessment of that work would be better served by the sort of treatment they apply to Said, which is to say, historicizing it. The authors refer to the “relative academic isolation” of the Marxism they address, by which they mean its isolation from other academic debates. They do not, however, adequately discuss the degree to which academic Marxists were and were not engaged with anti-imperialist intellectual and political movements outside the academy. (146.) Such a treatment might enrich the project they call for, “not better theory but a deeper historicization,” which would move “us away from high theory and toward a more fine-grained, historically situated understanding.” (147, 148.)

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Second bit that I need to integrate with the above, this bit about a piece by Chakrabarty.

In his article “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography” Dipesh Chakrabarty presents the ideas that came out of the Subaltern Studies group around Ranajit Guha. Chakrabarty charts the trajectory of the Subaltern Studies group moved from criticisms of nationalism and nationalist historiography toward more theoretical concerns including “the critique of the very idea of the subject itself” and questioning the “epistemological grounds” of “even the very possibility of constructing a totalizing national history in narrating the politics of subaltern lives.” (24, 25.) The Subaltern Studies scholars aimed to avoid the mistakes of both colonialist and nationalist historiography of India, the latter often from a Marxist perspective. Their relationship to nationalist historiography is particularly interesting. Among other things, their work might be called a left-wing criticism of a left perspective, focusing as it does on the ways in which ostensibly left leaning national liberation movements oppressed peasants and workers and ostensibly left leaning nationalist historians did not address these dynamics.
Chakrabarty takes great pains in his essay to refute a remark by Arif Dirlik that the Subaltern Studies group was merely the application of insights developed by English Marxists. (10.) Given the preoccupations and positions of the Subaltern Studies group, it is no surprise that Chakrabarty would reject this view. Chakrabarty’s defense of the Subaltern Studies group against the charge of being derivative is marred by two factors. First, he mixes his claim to the originality of Subaltern Studies from the beginning with a defense of the group’s turn toward theory.
Chakrabarty’s essay subtly shifts from saying Subaltern Studies was not a derivative of English Marxism to distancing Subaltern Studies from Marxism altogether. This is particularly unconvincing because of his essay’s second problem, which is that he presents a rather one-dimensional portrait Marxism and Marxists, primarily the nationalist position taken by some Indian Marxist historians and the Leninist inflected Marxism of Eric Hobsbawn. This is unfortunate not because the names Marx and Marxism are inherently worthy of respect, but because Chakrabarty ends up arguing for distance between thinkers who might be more productively considered in their proximity.
The criticisms which emerged from Subaltern Studies are quite important, such as the point that “[t]here was, in fact, no unitary ‘nation’,” a key part of the “critical stance toward official or statist nationalism and its attendant historiography” which characterized the Subaltern Studies group. (22.) Consider this quote from Howard Zinn: “we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest.” (10.) Zinn is a Marxist historian, expressing a very similar sentiment to that described by Chakrabarty. Given the importance of this point, Chakrabarty’s emphasis on distance rather than proximity or resonance is particularly unfortunate.
A recognition of proximity might undermine the status of the group’s theoretical turn. If similar insights can be reached by others who took different routes – in Zinn’s case this route involved no major departure from Marxism – then the relationship between the group’s critical impulses and its more recent work becomes less clear. That is, the turn to theory by many people affiliated with Subaltern Studies may be only one among a variety of possible valid responses to the concerns and early work of the project.