Monday, April 14, 2003

Where is the West? Some thoughts... Josh Micah Marshall, a public intellectual who I normally like a lot, has had two short posts recently that I have found interesting, both noting how odd it is that Iraqis belonging to the Ba'ath Party should own "Western" items like Britney Spears posters or receive email from a Yahoo! account.  Marshall writes: I've always been fascinated by the mix of alienness and similarity one finds in the leaders of countries like Iraq -- really across what we used to call the Third World. Some of this is just the story of globalization -- leaders and elites on the hand in death struggles with the global 'center' and on the other very much a part of it, invested in its culture, its modes of communication, its idioms. One sees examples of it in all the stories of raided palaces and homes of Saddam's top lieutenants. (So now we know that Tariq Aziz sometimes barked on TV about how the Iraqis would bury us in the sands of southern Iraq and then went back to his pad and popped Sleepless in Seattle into the VCR.) On the one hand, Uday Hussein was a hideously violent thug, born and bred into Saddam's Ba'athist police state, steeped in a virulent strain of Arab nationalism. On the other hand, he was using a free Yahoo! email account. I write "Western" in quotes above because I am fascinated by this concept and its seeming fluidity.  As someone who studies the interconnectedness of the "First" and "Third" Worlds throughout history, who looks at how each exists not independent of, but in relation to the other, I'm just not that surprised that Tariq Aziz should enjoy Norah Ephron schlock or that Uday Hussein might know how to websurf.  I am an academic trained in the interdisciplinary fields of colonial and postcolonial studies, a field of inquiry that followed in the footstepts of anticolonial thinkers like Aime Césaire and Frantz Fanon, who in Wretched of the Earth declared that "Europe is literally the creation of the Third World." Marshal writes that "Some of this is just the story of globalization," but to students of colonialism this story begins well before the advent of Nike sweat shops and MTV Internacional.  An example:  we hear much today about liberation and freedom, and, despite the newfound fondness for Freedom Fries in the United States, these are concepts defined politically in the modern era by the French Revolution's cries of Liberté, Egalité,  et Fraternité.  But even this most European of events covered in a typical modern European history survey course was also a profoundly colonial event.  The wealth of the maritime bourgeoise that became politically emboldened in the 18th century was not all created, after all, in the metropole.  The sugar that sweetened the cakes that Marie Antoinette famously suggested her subjects eat was produced not in Paris, but in the sugarcane fields of France's (and the world's) wealthiest colony, Haiti. Many (though not all) of those demanding liberté in the metropole were shocked, shocked that the slaves in that sugar-producing colony might demand the same for themselves.  The Haitian and French Revolutions were not discrete events -- they are both a part of one story, a story of world history that those who insist on speaking of strict barriers between the West and the Rest simply ignore.    These are interesting times for people who study colonialism and the postcolonial world.  The field of colonial studies developed in the 1980s and 90s in universities in both "First" and "Third" Worlds.  During that same time, as Edward Said notes, a revision of the Age of Empire emerged in the public sphere that sought to redefine the Age of Empire not as an age of dispossession or violence that Fanon criticized but rather as an age of ideals, of the promise of bringing Liberal progress to areas of the world not yet blessed with them. These days that revision seems almost complete, with people like Stanley Kurtz, who in an article in the influential Hoover Institution publication Policy Review, seeks to find salutary lessons from the "Democratic Imperialism" he says was practiced by India in the 19th Century.  The fact that the British stayed long and "taught" the Indians Liberal values, Kurtz suggests, is the reason India today is the rare functioning Third World Democracy.  (It seemed only recently that another conservative thinker who gets a lot of airtime these days, Fouad Ajami, suggested that perhaps the British hadn't stayed long enough.) At Emphasis Added, blogger Rob Salkowitz seems to see U.S. adventures in the Philippines, which after 1898 led to a bloody insurrection that cost about 200,000 Filipino lives, as a possible good example to follow because the archipelago today is, relative to its neighbors, "prosperous."  (I'll say more on this later in the week as I have to prepare a lecture for my class on Thursday about the Philippine insurrection) Suddenly empire is en vogue again -- whereas the U.S. built an empire in the twentieth century all the while denying that its actions were imperial, now people like Kurtz seek examples from the past to apply today in our world of pre-emptive strikes and Iraqi Liberation.  Like the turn of the century U.S., when "Our New Possessions" books talked about the need to learn from other empires (see previous post), today we have people scrambling for past examples of imperialism where the lessons are good, with "good" defined by how well the postcolonial country is doing today.   This sudden re-thinking of empire as not all that bad has a lot to do with how little impact the dialectical interpretation of colonial and metropolitan histories has had on present discussions of the role of the United States in the world.  You'll get Kurtz and Ajami, but you're not likely to see the likes of Edward Said on MSNBC.The writings of someone like Bernard Lewis, who insists on a binary opposition between Islam and the "West," are far more appealing than the work of scholars who suggest that a more appropriate way of thinking of these histories is as linked, informing one another.  If we see the modern era not as the progress of independent civilizations but rather as interacting with each other, creating each other, than we might not be as surprised to find out that Uday Hussein or, for that matter, Osama bin Laden's followers, might be adept at using the technology of the so-called "West."   The Edward Said piece linked to above is an extended review of Cathryn Hall's new study, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-67, a brilliant study in British history that charts the history of the metropole and its colonies not as independent of one another but as always mutually informing.I wish people like Catherine Hall would serve, alongside Lewis and Kurtz and the rest, as commentators today (in all honesty, I wish the would substitute for the likes of Bernard Lewis, but I'll settle for at least having them be a part of the dialogue).  We need to re-think world history if we are to truly understand how an invading force might be seen as both "liberatory" and "colonial" (no colonial power, after all, invaded under the mantle of Oppression -- they all claimed to be doing something good and, since the nineteenth century, something Liberal).   We might do well to re-think the history of the world as divided between the "West" and everything else.  It leads to dangerous arguments of absolute cultural differences, differences so essential that they can be resolved not through diplomacy or, for that matter, trade, but only through aggession.   Where, after all, is the West?   I do this exercise with my classes a lot -- I have students write for five minutes, completing a paragraph beginning with the sentence: "The West is..."  When they're done writing, I catalog people's responses on the board.  Sometimes people list countries, other times concepts such as modernity.  Sometimes the list includes technologies or progress, while lefty students might equate the West with oppression.  Everyone agrees that the West exists however -- when we list the countries, however, we start running into problems.  Is Japan a part of the West, I've asked.  "It is now" I've been answered -- it's a G-7 country.  Is Argentina a part of the West?  "It was before its problems with the IMF," I've been told.  Is the Haitian Revolution an event in "Western" history?  If not, why not?   For people not from the traditionally defined "West," being "authentic" is not often an existential concern -- Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire were both born in Martinique, an island in the Caribbean that has always been at the crossroads of the project of the West and its modernity.  Today Martinique is a highly technological, highly consumerist departement of the French nation-state.  I have a feeling that people there might not be as surprised that someone not "Western" might both harbor resentment towards the U.S. (or any other imperial master) while also enjoying the occasional lighthearted Hollywood romantic comedy.   10:30:27 PM    comment []