Review: A Map to the Door of No Return

[Dionne Brand. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001.]

I'm not really used to reviewing books that are not straight-up nonfiction. These days it's mostly history and/or theory. And it's not because I don't like anything else, just because of circumstance. Brand, one of Canada's foremost authors, writes novels (I've read and very much enjoyed At the Full and Change of the Moon), political essays (I would recommend Bread Out of Stone, especially the essay on cultural appropriation), history (an important work of oral history of Black women who worked in Ontario between 1920 and 1950), and poetry (haven't read any myself but it is also widely acclaimed), and she has a long history of grassroots involvement in community/social movement organizing. A Map to the Door of No Return is a wonderful, political, nonlinear, and very literary memoir, and I'm not exactly sure what I can say about it.

I could talk about its relevance to my work. I figured this book would be one useful source for learning about that sizeable segment of the African-Canadian community that came to this country from various islands in the Caribbean, and it was -- not so much facts and details as a more general, qualitative sense, obviously through the very personal filter of one woman's experience and analysis. It provided me with a few quotes (beyond just the one I posted) that I may be able to use. As well, it grounds itself as coming from the African diaspora in the Americas more generally, as the title refers to a search for identity and history by those whose ancestors were forcibly ripped away from Africa and brought to the so-called New World, i.e. who passed through the "door of no return."

I could easily gush about the writing, of course. One of the down sides of my current reading agenda is that most of what I take in is by people who write books but not necessarily people who think of themselves primarily as writers, if you see what I mean, and it was lovely to spend a little time with the work of someone so passionate about words. As well, one of the interesting effects of putting large parts of yourself into writing is that you end up reading things differently. It has something to do with seeing the texts that you are reading and/or writing in different ways, holding their shape in your mind differently -- not necessarily better in any meaningful sense, since enjoying the reading should always be the point, but differently. And I can confidently say that whatever clumsy adaptation my own reading may have undergone in the last decade of endless wrestling with words is sufficient for me to be able to appreciate (and perhaps quietly envy) how exquisitely developed that sense must be in she who wrote this book.

But, as is fitting for this site, I think I really have more to say about the politics of the book. An important part of my political reading of this text came about because it entered in ways that I did not expect into recent conversations I have had, both literal conversations with other people and metaphorical conversations I have had with other texts.

I'm referring to this: In my review of John Holloway's Change The World Without Taking Power -- not one of my better reviews, but still an excellent book, both for its politics and its writing -- I focused quite a bit on the metaphor of "the scream", which Holloway uses as a starting point and a grounding for his book. On the one hand, I find it a powerful device to ensure that human experience and the very real destruction of human lives that is at the centre of how capital functions, are never lost from visibility, an outcome all too common in some parts of the Marxist tradition of which Holloway's work is a (non-traditional) part. At the same time, precisely because of its very visible utility in declaring and ensuring that attention to human experience would not be lost, I also read the explicit use of the scream as an indicator of where Holloway was coming from in terms of subject position, and where the text was intended to go. This is not necessarily problematic in and of itself, but should perhaps be taken as a marker to be aware of other ways in which where this book came from and where it intends to go might be shaping its politics, and therefore as a prompt to do what one should do anyway and keep one's eyes open.

In discussing this with a friend who asked me to clarify exactly what I was getting at, I drew the comparison to the writings of a number of radical women of colour writers/activists/theorists that I have encountered. Though this discussion happened before I read A Map to the Door of No Return, Brand was one of the examples I gave. Saying it like this runs the risk of presenting it in a more simplistic and essentialist way than I mean it, but the point that I was making with my contrast was that in the work of such writers, what might be called the sensibility of "the scream" is almost always present, yet without it being made such a big deal as in Holloway. This is often accompanied by a more natural feeling of balance and connection between moments of overt militancy and the everyday, and less of a shying away from moments of joy amidst horror as well.

As I said, pointing out this contrast was part of a larger discussion about why the device of "the scream" in Holloway made me slightly wary despite the fact that I found it compelling and useful. I raise it in this review because this contrast was on my mind as I was reading this book. For one thing, Map confirmed for me the contrast that I employed. Perhaps more important was the way that it focused my attention in a way different from usual on how different audiences would read this book.

In particular, I felt very aware of the fact that quite a lot of people, and in particular quite a lot of white Canadians, would read this book and somehow manage to blank out its politics, or at least keep the politics disconnected from themselves and at arms length and therefore functioning more as aesthetics than politics. This is not because Brand is particularly subtle about her politics. The grounding metaphor for the book, after all, (though not deployed with the functional intent of hounding theory along a path that avoids irrelevance, as Holloway's scream is used) is starkly political: that whoever or whatever or wherever the author's life so far has been, it cannot escape the shadow cast over it by the fact of ancestors stolen from Africa and enslaved. The book's politics are elegantly woven into the everydayness of the narrative even when they are at their most explicit, but Brand obviously has no time for the coy decorum, the willful segregation of self, with which the dominant culture in Canada teaches many of us socialized into privilege to bleach and avoid our politics under the banner of the appropriate. The realities of North America's ongoing white supremacy are everywhere in this book. Yet given the (artful) front-and-centreness of the book's politics, it has made me wonder about my sense (from my own years of honing my instincts about how audience X or audience Y will react to a given piece of writing) that many people I know would read the book primarily as a literary artifact rather than an indictment of five centuries of colonialism and white supremacy from which we derive unearned benefit.

I'm not quite sure what to conclude from this. I definitely do not mean to imply that Brand should have somehow written it differently so that white folk would find it harder to avoid reading it in relation to our own complicity. It is ridiculous to suggest that every writer who experiences a particular oppression should have to include the "101" level explanation of that reality in everything that they write. On the other hand, there have been several recent blow-ups in the progressive blogosphere in which mostly-white bloggers have engaged with the words of bloggers of colour in ways that demonstrate that they have no idea what is actually being said, and then most have shown resentment and an unwillingness to listen when this has been pointed out, so such basic differences in readings are very politically relevant. Perhaps the lesson here is that not only is there a political obligation for those of us on the oppressor end of relations of domination and subordination to read the words of those who oppression benefits us, but there is also a political obligation to invest energy in learning how to read those words.

The final way that it has occurred to me to respond to this book is to think a bit about my own history and the history of my ancestors. Particularly in some writings from the African diaspora and from indigenous nations in North America, an understandably crucial moment is the point of initial, irrevocable rupture from pre-contact indigeneity. I think there are all sorts of things to be said about that moment, including discussions of how it has happened in different ways for different people, and admonitions to avoid the colonial habit of dismissing as "savagery" or the liberal Othering of excessively romanticizing what existed before this moment. But it got me thinking about that moment in European history. I would need to learn a lot more to say anything even vaguely confident on the subject, but I have a few impressions. For example, I have the impression that in European history, the disruption of indigenous ways of knowing and being and doing was a much more gradual process than the instant of disruption that is the grounding for Brand's book or the somwhat more extended disruption faced by the indigenous nations of the Americas. How exactly did the indigenous ways of knowing and being and doing of the Picts and Celts that at one time inhabited the lands that I trace my ancestry to get disrupted? How has this affected the more recent (imperial) European and Euro-American ways of knowing and being and doing? There may be no convincing ways to answer these questions, rendering them more metaphysical than historical, and therefore potentially dangerous. But I can't help but think that the process was a gradual one stretching from the initial Roman conquest, on through the imposition of hierarchical Chistrianities (and I should emphasize that not all Christianities have had that characteristic), and up to the enclosure movements that marked the beginning of capitalism. But even as I describe it that way, it is hard to identify these transitions as ruptures in quite the same sense, because they mark changes within the context of conventionally understood Eurocentric history rather than forcible induction into those processes and narratives. Or something.

Anyway. In my concern that I might not have anything to say about this book, I think I have rambled on longer than I should have. Perhaps all I really needed to say was this: It's a good book. It's well written. It says interesting and challenging things about Canada and about the world. Read it.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Solidarity With the People of Oaxaca

First, the details of the Toronto solidarity action, and see below for some ways those of us who don't live in Toronto can show solidarity as well:

!!Emergency Picket in front of Consulate of Mexico in Toronto!!!
Friday November 3rd
12:00pm - 2pm
199 Bay Street, suite 4440

Next, even though I'm not exactly who it is addressing most directly, my thanks goes out to this post on Women of Colour Blog for a bit of a kick in the pants to get me to take a few minutes and actually apply some of the stated intent in the reasoning behind my blog name to the current situation in Oaxaca, Mexico. Hearing Ward Churchill speaking last night about the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas also primed me, I suppose.

Right now, my brain is not too far from mush because of dealing with a three year-old with serious dental issues that we became aware of late last week, that cannot be decisively dealt with for some time, and that are not always responsive to over-the-counter anti-pain meds, so I'm not going to try and come up with anything original to say about what's going on in Oaxaca myself -- I'm trying to finish a book review post that will hopefully make an appearance later tonight, but I make no promises. Instead, you can find some basic background here, some more detailed information in this post on the Autonomy & Solidarity site, and further info here, here, and here, and a Zapatista statement on the most recent events here.

And finally, from the A&S post, here is a template of a letter of protest written in Spanish and several addresses to which you can send it -- I don't speak Spanish, so I don't actually know the details of what it says, but I trust the source to be saying politically decent things:

[EDIT: After commenters pointed out that the Spanish of the letter needed some work, Brownfemipower took the trouble of finding someone to fix it up, and that someone was Fabulosa Mujer. Many thanks to both of you! The contents of the letter should now be good to go.]

Toronto, 28 de octubre 2006

Gobernador del Estado de Oaxaca,
Ulises Ruiz Ortiz:
Tel. (951) 5470116 y 5690241;
gobernador@oaxaca.gob.mx


Señor gobernador,

Por el presente queremos llamarle la atención de nuestras inquietudes referente a la crítica situación en cual los ciudadanos de Oaxaca se enfrentan en el momento. Al igual solicitar que usted y su Despacho tomen las medidas necesarias para poner a un fin a esta situación. Queremos expresarle que nuestros ojos no nos engañan de las ocurrencias y que nuestro corazón lucha a un lado con el pueblo.

Mayormente por eso el gobierno mexicano, tanto al nivel federal, estatal y Municipal, existe para serse responsable de los hechos que ocurrieron en el día 27 de octubre en la ciudad de Oaxaca. Creemos que la responsabilidad es de proteger a sus ciudadanos.

Denunciamos que en el día 27 de octubre de 2006 ocurrió lo siguiente:

-Al menos tres personas murieron de los disparos, incluyen a Will Bradley Roland un periodista de Indymedia estadounidense

- Mas de treinta heridos, incluyendo los compañeros siguientes,
Francisco Ángeles de 25 años, hijo de un maestro de Cuicatlan. Martín Olivera Ortíz, que fue herido en la pierna. Guillermo García de Zaachila, herido en la espalda. Enedino Cruz Sánchez de 25 años de edad que recibió disparo en la mano.

- Unas diez personas están detenidas.

- Un número indeterminado de personas están desaparecidas.

- La casa del Consejo Indígena Popular de Oaxaca-Ricardo Flores Magon en Santa-Lucia del Camino esta rodeada por hombres armados, amenazando a sus integrantes.

- grupos civiles están siendo renumerados para dispararle a la población civil en las calles. Su gabinete esta dejando esa situación crecer y implícitamente apoyando para justificar la intervención de las fuerzas policíaca en

la ciudad. Esto para impedir las actividades de las organizaciones y gente que están denunciando sus políticas ante-democráticas.

Por estas razones exigimos:

- La renuncia inmediata de Ulises Ruiz.

- La liberación de los presos políticos.

- El regreso inmediato de los desaparecidos

- Un proceso penal para traer justicia a los responsables de los hechos injustos.

- Que las autoridades mexicanas regresan a dialogar con la APPO para llegar a una solución pacifica en el conflicto.

- El fin inmediato de las agresiones que acosan la población Oaxaqueña.

Para obtener estas exigencias vamos a:

- Unirnos en campaña para informar las verdaderas implicaciónes del gobierno mexicano en la represión, los asesinatos, los heridos, las encarcelaciones ilegales y los afrontamientos que hubieron en contra la población civil oaxaqueña.

- Unirnos en campaña para informarles a todos los verdaderos intereses que tiene el gobernó a desinformar los medios internacionales dentro de esa situación.

- Promover una campaña contra el turismo en México.

- Llevar a corte penal a gente responsable cuando viajen a nuestros países.

Agradecemos ser informados por escrito de las medidas que Usted emprenda frente a estas solicitudes.

Cordialmente

YOUR NAME HERE

Ciudadano-(a canadiense) (or estadounidense)



**************************************************************************************
SEND LETTERS TO:

Lic. Vicente Fox Quesada
Presidente de los Estados Unidos de México
Residencia Oficial de "Los Pinos", Col. San Miguel Chapultepec, México, D.
F. Fax: (01152) 55-52-77-23-76 e-mail:
vicente.fox.quesada@presidencia.gob.mx,
radio@presidencia.gob.mx, webadmon@op.presidencia.gob.mx

Lic. Carlos Abascal Carranza
Secretario de Gobernación, Secretaria de Gobernación
Bucareli 99, 1er. piso, Col. Juárez, Delegación Cuauhtemoc, México D. F.,
C. P.06600, MÉXICO
Fax: (01152) 55-50-93-34-14 E-mail: segob@rtn.net.mx

Lic. Daniel Cabeza de Vaca
Procurador General de la Republica, Procuraduría General de la Republica
Reforma Cuauhtemoc esq. Violeta 75, Col. Guerrero, Delegación Cuauhtemoc
México D.F ., C.P. 06 500, MEXICO
Fax: (01152) 55-53-46-09-08 E-mail: ofproc@pgr.gob.mx

DR. JOSE LUIS SOBERANES
PRESIDENTE DE LA COMISION NACIONAL DE DERECHOS HUMANOS
FAX: (01155) 56-81-71-99 correo@cndh.gob.mx

Jaime Mario Pérez Jiménez, Comisión Estatal de Derechos Humanos de Oaxaca
quejas@cedhoax.org, Tel. (01152) 951-104-4306 o envie un mensaje
al:(01152) 951-51-2-90-20 clave 956, Fax: (01152)(951) 51-3-51-85, (01152)
951-51-3-51-91, (01152) 951-51-3-51-97, correo@cedhoax.org

Marcar copia al Consejo Indígena Popular de Oaxaca "Ricardo Flores Magón":
Calle Emilio Carranza # 210, Santa Lucia del Camino, Oaxaca, México.
E-mail: ciporfm@yahoo.com.mx

Red Oaxaqueña de Derechos Humanos: E-mail: rodhmx@prodigy.net.mx
Calle Crespo 524 Interior 4-E, Col. Centro, Oaxaca, Oaxaca, CP. 68000, MÉXICO

TORONTO CONTACTS:

General Cnsulate of Mexico in Toronto
Address:
Commerce Court West
199 Bay Street, suite 4440
Toronto, Ontario, M5L 1E9

Tel: (416) 368-2875

Fax: (416) 368-8342

Trade Commission of Mexico
Address:
1 Dundas St. West Suite 2110
P.O.Box 11
Toronto, Ontario M5G 1Z3
Canada

Tel: (416) 867-92-92

Fax: (416) 867-18-47

E-mail: cc-toronto@bancomext.gob.mx

Thanks!

Quote: Sexual Dissent

In representing our situation in public discourse, we need a less defensive, more politically self-assertive set of linguistic and conceptual tools to talk about sexual difference. ... We might begin to think about sexual difference, not in terms of naturalized identities, but as a form of dissent, understood not simply as speech, but as a constellation of noncomforming practices, expressions and beliefs. Here, again, I am drawing from the arena of religion. The right to religious dissent has been understood not solely as the right to belief, but as a right to practices expressive of those beliefs. Framing our differences in this way would be useful in several contexts. First, a notion of dissent would present our difference as oppositional, bringing into frame the illegitimacy of the social and political privilege accorded to heterosexuality. Second, this notion of dissent would join together our right to sexual conduct, both desire and expression, as well as our multiplicity of possible shifting identities, and our right to state a viewpoint and promote it, to express ourselves publically, political, and culturally. ...

Finally, the framework of "dissent" could help us think about a central paradox of sexual difference: it is both malleable -- historically, culturally and in many individual lives -- and yet highly resistant to coercive change. This paradox of malleability and resistance is built into the general understanding of how "dissent" works; people change their opinions and practices over time, yet will hold to them under torture. This is a paradox that neither notions of identity nor fluidity can quite capture.

-- Lisa Duggan

Franz Fanon and Scotland

This article (on Z-Net and originally from the Toronto Star) is a fascinating if overly brief examination of the contemporary relevance of anti-colonial theorist Franz Fanon. One important reason that I find this article interesting is because, in my experience of the little corner of the white left in Ontario that nurtured me early during my politicization process, I remember Fanon, to the extent that his name was mentioned at all, being dismissed (or, in other white left spaces, uncritically invoked) without much effort to really understand him or the context that produced him, much as I describe in this post the ways in which Macolm X was mobilized/demobilized in similar ways. In part of the white left, at least, a certain perceived relationship to violence (which the article I'm linking to today problematizes and complexifies in important ways for Fanon) got taken as sufficient reason to dismiss him completely, and to see him exclusively through the lens of his relevance to tactical debates among white leftists. One of the outcomes of both his dismissal and his valorization in different spaces was that his relevance beyond that one narrow debate was largely lost -- the ability of his powerful prose to create productive discomfort and therefore deeper political theory-and-pracitce among privileged citizens of a colonizing nation was somehow avoided.

But actually what really caught my attention sufficiently to lead me to post this is the following sentence about the country my mother grew up in and that I spent enough time in growing up that, thanks to mad cows, I'm currently not allowed to give blood in Canada: "Scotland's brutal orgies of 'booze and blades' among rival gangs of white youth recently led the United Nations to designate it the most violent country in the 'developed' world. It is also one of Europe's poorest countries: A quarter of Scotland's children live in poverty and are dependent on government assistance." And last I remember hearing, the constitutive level of official unemployment in Glasgow was something like 17% or 18%.

Which is perhaps not as significant to the white left in early 21st century Ontario as coming to a deeper understanding of Franz Fanon, but is still of personal interest to me.

Review: Reading Capital Politically

[Harry Cleaver. Reading Capital Politically. San Francisco: Anti/Theses and AK Press, 2000. Original edition published by University of Texas Press, 1979.]

Often the most important question that we can ask ourselves about texts that we encounter is, why should I care? Sometimes this reveals more about the book; other times, it tells us more about our own paths and politics.

Reading Capital Politically is a short, simple book with a deceptively narrow focus. The main body of the text is concerned with providing a close reading of the first three chapters of Volume 1 of Karl Marx's Capital that is politically useful in struggles. I have never read any Marx directly, except for quotes in works by other writers who identify as Marxists of one sort or another, so for me reading this material was not a challenge to existing understandings of Marx's concepts related to his analysis of value, but an introduction to them -- or, at least, an introduction to understanding them systematically and with rigour.

The shallowest answer to the question of why I might care about such a seemingly obscure and technical subject is that this book is a supplementary text for the sociology course that I am auditing at the moment. I already had experience with a couple of the supplementary texts, and decided that if I was going to invest the time to do the reading and thinking for this course (even though I am not actually doing the writing that those formally enrolled must do to receive credit) that I might as well make sure I emerge with a solid understanding of the concepts under discussion by reading a couple of the other supplementary texts beyond just the handful of pages that might occasionally appear in the list of assigned readings.

A deeper reason has to do with the placement of this text within the context of particular histories and intellectual traditions. Some of the pertinent history is presented in the relatively in-depth introductions to the book, both the introduction to the new edition and, more significantly, the original introduction. It provides a brief outline of the evolution of intellectual traditions that describe themselves as Marxist from the time of the Second International (pre-WWI) to the late 1970s. In particular, it describes how most of those traditions, even when they appear to be quite different from one another, understand Marx's work in ways that treat it as a description of capital that is oddly disconnected from the struggles of working people. Some of these theorists were very committed to struggle in practice and therefore often felt compelled to construct one or another "political" theory to lay beside or over top of Marx's "economic" theories, while others felt there was no need to struggle, out of the misguided idea that the supposed "science" of Marxism had shown that capitalism would collapse eventually from its own conradictions without any need for help from those who suffer at its hands. You can, in various ways, apply this observation to writers as diverse as Berenstein and the other theorists of the Second International, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci and the other figures within Western Marxism, the Frankfurt School and other Critical Theorists, and various approaches that academics have taken to turning Marx into a study of political economy rather than a critique of it.

On other hand, there are a number of diverse and small traditions -- all seen as dissident and heterodox by most Marxists -- which went out of their way to truly integrate the struggles of the working class (a concept understood in various ways by various contributors to these traditions) into ideas of social change not only at a practical level (like, say, Luxemburg) but also at a theoretical level. These ways of looking at the world include such diverse figures as C.L.R. James in the United States, E.P. Thompson in a different way in England, and the various theorists associated with the autonomia movement in Italy as well as the socialist feminist Wages for Housework campaign that existed in many countries in the early '70s.

I believe it was Cleaver that originated the English-language term "autonomist" as a way to group these various traditions together conceptually. Certainly, from what I understand, he has been one of the major proponents of these approaches in English for a long time, and this book is a critical contribution to figuring out how to use what he regards as some of the most important chapters in all of Marx's work to begin to see that work as a whole as an intervention in struggle that mattered because struggle was the only path to change. I'm not saying I am sure that I really understood all of the technical details of Cleaver's analysis of Marx's ideas about "value," but I am glad to have encountered the combination of the historical background and the conceptual underpinnings.

But the question still remains: why?

To understand that I need to reflect a bit on my previous encounters with various things to which the label "Marxist" has been applied. I am probably among the youngest generation of people whose political subjectivities began to be formed while the Soviet Union still existed. I was not politicized in any meaningful sense until a few years after, but I began to hear about and pay attention to the world at least a little bit as a pre-teen and teen in the '80s. I certainly didn't walk around my high school asking people "Are you or have you ever been..." kinds of questions, and I remember a few critical instances in those formative years that encouraged me to be open to views counter to the official hysterical rhetoric about big-C Communism that was prevelant during the Reagan years. Still, as I became politicized in the '90s, there were enough vestiges of the messaging that I had experienced in the media in the previous decade that I had much more openness to radical ideas that were critical of state as well as capital, and not a dismissal but a healthy skepticism of ideas/traditions associated with Marx.

As a newly politicized activist on a university campus who did not take any overtly political courses (since I was in a science program), my main encounter with explicitly self-identified Marxist ideas and practices came in the form of interacting with members of a particular Trotskyist formation that existed on campus for a few years. While I respected the organizing of some of the people who became affiliated with the group, I went to a few of their meetings and found the group, even at that point when I doubt I could've voiced a particularly sophisticated or convincing critique, to be intellectually sterile. One of their leading theorists from England spoke on campus and I remember thinking he was quite good, but it wasn't nearly enough to convince me to join the party.

A few years later, out in the community, I encountered members of a couple of other explicitly Marxist groupings who were trade unionists. I quite respected their lifelong commitment and their organizing skills, even while I didn't always agree with some of the places those skills took them or with some of their broader analyses of the world. Even up until just before we moved away from Hamilton, I quite happily organized with some of them in the anti-war movement, and would do so again if I was still living there. But I was never tempted to join either of those parties. As well, in those years I also encountered a couple of older white men and one younger one who did not, to my knowledge, belong to any party-like formation but who explicitly identified with Marxism and who are absolutely insufferable and very hard to work with, and they certainly didn't do much to win me over.

More generally, I was happy to read theorists from various Marxist traditions in a kind of random and haphazard way if the books happened across my path, and I was happy to learn useful ideas from these texts -- things like Gramsci's concept of hegemony (and later adaptations) and a few small samples of A. Sivanandan's writings on race and class and the odd bit or piece I've come across from Critical Theory were quite compelling for me, and some odds and ends from publications like the Socialist Register series and Marxist grouplet newspapers were of more intellectual interest than practical-to-me value. But a few core ideas that seemed unavoidable in anything that adopted the label of "Marxism" as more than a sylistic affectation (a la some postmodern writers) continued to make me ambivalent about the tradition as a whole -- things like the sense that history is completely deterministic and linear, the seeming disconnection from real people's real struggles (rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding), the seeming obsession with disputes between white guys who died decades ago, the lack of critique of oppressive hierarchy inherent in most party and state forms or satisfactory account of atrocities previously done supposedly in Marx's name, and the usually completely unsatisfying (and often openly contemptuous and oppressive) theorization of the relationship between narrowly defined class struggle and every other kind of struggle. Those are the concerns that come to mind, though I'm sure I could come up with more if I thought more about it.

The various traditions brought together under the label "autonomist Marxism", as well as related things like "open Marxism", seem to address at least some of the things that gave me reservations about Marxist approaches more generally. They put human beings and their experiences and struggles at the centre. They are focused on making their analyses practically useful in struggle. Some do seem to worship militancy in unhealthy ways but others recognize the importance of the everyday as well. They are not determinist. They have a role for human agency, individual and collective. They provide room for critique of both social democratic and Leninist party forms, and theoretical openness for other forms that are developed to meet today's needs. They theorize struggle very broadly, and explicitly value many different sorts of struggle and not just the activities of the industrial proletariat -- and they attempt to do that in a theoretically coherent manner that respects separate organizing and, for some at least, listening as a core political practice, though I remain to be convinced that this recognition and celebration of many fronts of struggle against many axes of oppression is necessarily completely consistent with my own take on things. Not all theorists in all of the parts of these traditions exhibit all of these things, and certainly not all are visible in this quite focued book by Cleaver, but one of the other encouraging factors that these traditions associated with autonomism display is a willingness to accept new data, creativity, new voices, new ways of thinking, as opposed to the feeling of dogmatic sterility I have gotten from many other self-described Marxisms.

All of this isn't to say that I now "am" this or that. I have become more open to some of these ideas, which I have had a modest interest in for years, and, yes, I will be interested in learning more about them, letting them settle, and seeing what eventually permeates into the core of how I think about things and changes me, and what gets expelled. Rather, I say all of this to try and explain (to myself and readers) why this book matters: because it is one part -- and a theoretically important one, I think -- of a relatively new-to-me family of approaches that help extract from the massive and variegated landscape of political thought after Marx some of what is insightful and powerful from thinkers that trace their intellectual origins through him while working hard to avoid what is politically distasteful or no longer relevant.


[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Quote: Colonial Excuses

Only the brazen can say, 'I was not here, I did not do this and feel that.' One hears that all the time in Canada; about what people feel they are and are not responsible for. People use these arguments as reasons for not doing what is right and just. It never occurs to them that they live on the cumulative hurt of others. They want to start the clock of social justice only when they arrived. But one is born into history, one isn't born into a void.

-- Dionne Brand

Barney Rage

These last few days I have been filled with a seething rage and a pulsating loathing by Barney the Dinosaur.

L, the pre-schooler who is my daily charge, has been a bit under the weather for the last couple of days -- nothing worrisome, not even completely activity-attenuating, but enough such that he feels like cuddling up on the couch and watching TV rather more than usual and such that I feel inclined to support this impulse. Our pre-schooler television roster largely draws upon the resources of the public library a few blocks away from us, as we don't have cable. L's approach to the consumption of televisual media is often to fixate on one particular show and then watch it repeatedly. Therefore, though I have only ever seen one episode of Barney, I have seen it a lot.

If you had asked me to predict my reaction to Barney before I had seen it I would have predicted negativity. However, at the time my familiarity with it was mostly via its echoes through the broader popular culture, and from that I would've expected the large purple dinosaur whose name graces the production as a whole to be the principal object of my scorn. This is not, in fact, the case. Barney himself has very little to recommend him, and like the rest of the show (and unlike classics like Sesame Street) there is absolutely nothing about how he is written to entertain adults. But he does not in and of himself prompt a visceral response from me. He is uninteresting but inoffensive.

Rather, my loathing and rage are directed at the overall feel of the show and, I am somewhat ashamed to say, at the real children (ages 8 to 12?) who comprise the majority of its cast. It has taken concentrated thought over a number of viewings of this single episode to truly pinpoint the reasons for this.

All television is fake. Dramatic productions are fake by definition; that's why we watch them. Reality shows are even more fake, though I think those who watch them must be able to engage in some sort of double-consciousness, suspension-of-disbelief thing to partially believe the name and thereby squeeze some extra scintillas of voyeuristic pleasure from what is, in my limited experience, mostly boring and a bit (or a lot) silly. Even TV news is largely fake, from the growing percentage of stories on local TV news programs that have actually been pre-produced by PR firms to the more elaborate fakery by omission, misdirection, and image on CNN. (Once or twice a week I'll spend the evening in a nearby pub, reading and writing as I sip on a pint. It often has CNN playing without sound on one of the four TVs behind the bar, and my gaze will sometimes settle there. It's an interesting exercise, I think, to consume such highly produced media with a component missing, so the overall impact the product has on even the most prepared mind is somewhat shortcircuited. Just watching the stream of images, without the voice of authority present to try and guide my reading of them, makes me wonder how on earth anyone can claim to believe that what CNN is selling has more than a vague connection to the real world. Even just the fact that the only time they show anyone who looks like the people I interact with in downtown Sudbury every day, it is painfully obvious from aesthetic cues that they are present as objects, as Other, not as legitimate subjectivities for grounding standpoints upon which news production might be based. And that's just one example.)

Barney's production values are not what one would call high. The writing is cheesey and unimaginative. The children who are the main "real person" presence are apalling and look like they are being menaced out of frame by a very scary man with a whip and a sign that says, "Smile like you mean it, damnit!" One little girl in particular looks like she's either preparing to bite one of her castmates or is trying her darndest not to let on that a live ferret is squirming inside the sleeve of her costume.

One of the results of low production values and awful performances is that they draw attention to the fakeness inherent in TV. This makes it harder to suspend disbelief and therefore to enjoy the show. This is certainly going on during my experiences of viewing Barney. Even if this was the extent of it, the show would not be fun for me to watch.

One could, of course, blame economy for the quality of the show -- why lay out more than the bare minimum to keep the franchise viable? Especially considering the age of the target audience. Someone in a more charitable mood than myself might also grant a little more leniency because of youthfulness.

I think there's more than that going on, though. I have no idea if it is an example of making a virtue of the supposed necessity of thrift or if it was grounded in explicitly stylistic reasons from the get-go, but I think there is an element of deliberateness about it. I think it is deliberate because I think they are using this blatant admission of fakery to create a deeper impression of genuineness. I think the mediocre sets and the ham-handed acting are meant to evoke notions of children engaged in imaginative play largely for themselves and of children putting on self-initiated performances at home for parents and grandparents and others who love them (something I never did as a kid but that my partner and her sister and cousins did reasonably often). Such productions, whether accidentally observed by or deliberately staged for the adult in question, are regarded positively not because of whatever skill is being displayed but because you love the performers. Even when you happen to encounter such performances by kids you don't know, like say when you are over at a buddy's place or something, the relationship to the performance is still mediated by the imagined love between principle audience and performers. This is exactly what Barney tries to tap into via its production choices. Mix together this genuineness-through-explicit-fakery with a veneer of supposed "good values" (as shaped by market pressures, of course) and you have a show that adults may not enjoy watching themselves but that many would approve of and even encourage their kids to watch because it performs a certain parental delusion of wholesome childhood.

I know people whom this would totally, totally work on.

What pushes my irritation to its greatest depths is that its genuineness-through-explicit-fakery is itself palpably fake, and in quite offensive ways. The forced smiles of the children that we are meant to read as amateur awkwardness overlaying genuine enthusiasm don't just hide kids who are tired from being on the set too long or wishing they could just hang out with their friends today -- it hides for some of them, I am sure, bitter jealousy that "that b____ got my solo!", and parental pressure so strong it gives tummy aches, and twisted unlikely dreams that if a couple of mouseketeers can do it well why can't I be the next superrich, widely desired, Britney-shaped cogs in the entertainment-industrial complex's machine? It hides, in other words, social relations in which the kids as real people are embedded that are not necessarily pleasant or liberatory spaces to be -- it hides the exploitation of these kids, it hides hides what is probably sometimes vicious competition, it hides dreams of spectacular success that is only possible because of ubiquitous denial of the dreams of others, pastes a smile and "family values" on it, and calls it wholesome.

Or the short exchange of dialogue between two of the girls where the clearly dominant girl forgets that the subordinate girl will be unable to enjoy a privilege that the rest of the kids will get to, followed by a quick apology and strategizing around making her feel better. The exact words of the first part of that exchange with only very subtle shifts in tone would make a great example of how little girls can be perfectly nasty to one another. But we are forced to smile and soldier on and forget that such things happen.

Or the fake genuineness as a whole excluding all of those aspects of real kids real experiences that we pretend to protect kids from by writing them out of child-focused media while doing nothing about the social bases of the actual, material experiences. This is hardly unique to Barney, but it is very much operative in that show.

Or carefully crafting the audience of parents and children that are watching the semi-imaginary circus that the main kids and dinosaurs are performing as the focus of the only episode I've seen, and crafting/choosing the shots of that audience, in ways that make it quite clear that a central mandate for this audience and its members is to perform diversity for the cameras. It's better than an all-white audience erasing racialized people completely, but, still, racialized bodies are present and shown not because of their intrinsic worth as people or as a sign of some sort of substantive engagement with difference infused with power, but rather they are used to allow white-dominated capitalist media to perform difference in completely unthreatening ways that doe not force any viewers to reflect, for example, on how the power-infused dynamics of actual geographical segregation in North America means it would be almost impossible for a circus to set up its tent in a random community on the continent and get that particular mix of faces.

In a way, the fake-genuineness-through-explicit-fakery via smiles and other things is so vile because it is an echo of dynamics at the heart of capitalism and nationalism -- the expectation that right thinking people, that people who deserve to be included, that people that matter, that people who have the privilege of not thinking about such things, will perform a manic, plastic enthusiasm that they think is a cover only for their own privileged alienation but in fact contributes to the spectacle that keeps us from seeing (or admitting that we are seeing) the man behind the screen and the horrific things he does. It is a wholesomeness that is built on determined denial, that conceals lies and suffering, that keeps us from seeing the violence of the dominant nation, of capital, of state relations. It is an example of capital seeking out every corner of realness, including the imaginative play of children and the smiles on their faces, and using it all to produce fakery, convince us it's genuine, and generate profit.

[Pauses to catch breath.]

Okay. Perhaps I'm going a little over the top. That has been known to happen. It may be happening now. Intense, repeated exposure to the same text is likely to have strange results, especially when it's a text you don't like. Maybe that's what's going on. Maybe the best solution is to wait for L's cold to disappear and make a point of turning off the box, going together down to the nearby stream, and throwing large stones into the water with vigour and abandon. That sounds real nice, actually, weather permitting.

[Pauses again.]

But, seriously, how on earth do people without blogs to vent on deal with this stuff?

Long Quote: Holloway

That which is oppressed and resists is not only a who but a what. It is not only particular groups of people who are oppressed (women, indigenous, peasants, factory workers, and so on), but also (and perhaps especially) particular aspects of the personality of all of us: our self-confidence, our sexuality, our playfulness, our creativity. The theoretical challenge is to be able to look at the person walking next to us in the street or sitting next to us in a bus and see the stifled volcano inside them. Living in capitalist society does not necessarily make us into an insubordinate, but it does inevitably mean that our exitence is torn by the antagonism between subordination and insubordination. Living in capitalism means that we are self-divided, not just that we stand on one side of the antagonism between the classes, but that the class antagonism tears each of us apart. We may not be rebellious, but inevitably rebellion exists within us, as stifled volcano, as projection towards a possible future, as the present existence of that which does Not Yet exist, as frustration, as neurosis, as repressed Pleasure Principle, as the non-identity which, in the face of repeated insistence of capital that we are workers, students, husbands, wives, Mexicans, Irish, French, says 'We are not, we are not, we are not, we are not what we are, and we are what we are not (or not yet).' That is surely what the Zapatistas mean when they say they are 'ordinary people, that is to say, rebels'; that is surely what they mean by dignity: the rebellion that is in all of us, the struggle of the humanity that we are. Dignity is an intensely lived struggle that fills the detail of our everyday lives. Often the struggle of dignity is non-subordinate rather than openly insubordinate, often it is seen as private rather than in any sense political or anti-capitalist. Yet the non-subordinate struggle for dignity is the material substratum of hope. That is the point of departure, politically and theoretically.

...

The invisibility of resistance is an ineradicable aspect of domination. Domination always implies not that resistance is overcome but that resistance (some of it at least) is underground, invisible. Oppression always implies the invisibility of the oppressed. For one group to become visible does not overcome the general problem of visibility. To the extent that the invisible becomes visible, to the extent that the stifled volcano becomes overt militancy, it is already confronted with its own limits, and the need to overcome them. To think of opposition to capitalism simply in terms of militancy is to see only the smoke rising from the volcano.

Dignity (anti-power) exists wherever humans live. Oppression implies the opposite, the struggle to live as humans. In all that we live every day, illness, the education system, sex, children, friendship, poverty, whatever, there is a struggle to do things with dignity, to do things right. Of course our ideas of what is right are permeated by power, but the permeation is contradictory; of course we are damaged subjectivities, but not destroyed. The struggle to do right, to live morally, is one that preoccupies most people much of the time. Of course, the morality is privatised, immoral morality which generally steers clear of such questions as private property and therefore the nature of relations between people, a morality which defines itself as 'do right to those who are clsoe to me and leave the rest of the world to sort itself out'...And yet: in the daily struggle to 'do right', there is a struggle to recognise and be recognised and not just to identify, to emancipate power-to and not just bow to power-over, an anger against that which dehumanises, a shared (if fragmented) resistance, a non-subordination at least.

-- John Holloway

Review: Stormy Weather

[Henry A. Giroux. Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2006.]

Anything which has the potential to intervene in the consciousnesses of human beings can be understood as an exercise in pedagogy -- not just what happens in classrooms, but also what happens down at the plant you work at and out on the street and in your bedroom and on television.

Media in particular is often quite deliberately a pedagogical intervention. This is true of all media, but often more overtly true of alternative, independent, progressive, and radical media of various sorts. Giroux, a well-known scholar of critical pedagogy, writes, "Changing consciousness is not the same as altering the institutional basis of oppression; at the same time, institiutional reform cannot take place without a change in consciousness capable of recognizing not only injustice but also the very possibility for reform -- and of reinventing the conditions and practices that make a more just future possible."

I believe that Stormy Weather is intended to be just such an intervention. I'm not sure how successful it is, unfortunately, but it is an interesting book nonentheless.

The focus of the book is Hurricane Katrina. It briefly describes the events surrounding the destruction of New Orleans by a combination of an extreme weather event and a particular pattern of social relations. More importantly, it puts these events in a social, political, and historical context. Part of what is interesting about this book as a pedagogical and political intervention is that it is very short and relatively easy to read, but it also is not shy about including ideas drawn from theory.

A central theoretical notion that is put to work in the book is the idea of "biopolitics". Giroux draws on various theorizations of this phenomenon elaborated by Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Giorgio Agamben. Despite Giroux's effort to avoid making the text too theoretically dense, I still remain somewhat fuzzy about exactly how "biopolitics" is as crucial or original an idea as he portrays it to be, but his very simplistic generalization that it is "an attempt to think through the convergence of life and politics" is helpful.

Using that framework, as well as relating the analysis to his background in critical pedagogy and the notion of public pedagogy as a way to foster social change, Giroux aims the book to

...offer a reading of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy that contradicts conventional accounts of the disaster, even those critical of the Bush administration. The events surrounding Katrina are about more than incompetence, lack of compassion, and ignorance; they are the consequences of a systemic, violent form of social engineering in which those populations in the United States marginalized by race and class are now considered disposable -- that is, simply collateral damage in the construction of a neoliberal order.

While much of the zingy detail provided about the hurricane itself and about the despicable functioning of state and productive relations in turning a disaster into a tragedy are things you will be familiar with if you read progressive media about Katrina at the time -- from the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency being told he was doing "a heck of a job" by Bush, to Bush's mother opining that the people who were shipped to Houston and warehoused in the Astrodome "were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them" -- the concise inclusion of all of that detail in one source is useful.

Beyond the use of ideas of biopolitics and pedagogy, I was particularly struck by his use of the notion of disposability. He argues that poor and working-class people of colour in the United States no longer serve just as a super-exploitable/exploited reserve army of the unemployed and, via white supremacy, a tool for dividing the working class and driving wages down. Rather, except for extreme situations (like about the first week after Katrina hit) they are pretty much entirely written out of the national narrative in the United States and to a significant degree their continued survival is considered to be irrelevant to the functioning of ruling regimes and both owning- and middle-class white Americans. Some would argue that this is nothing new and they would not be wrong, exactly, but he is convincing that there are shifts in what's going on here even if I am not quite able to articulate it. The shift is subtle but real, and it is vital in seeing the new directions in which ruling relations are evolving in the twenty-first century. Their analyses have many differences, but it made me think of Stan Goff's analysis of Katrina in terms of "exterminism" (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4).

At the same time, I'm not sure how well this book succeeds, at least if its aim is to combine concrete political engagement with accessible yet innovative intellectual work. I am particularly keen to learn from how it attempts to do these things, because it is a combination which interests me for my own future productive activities. For one thing, I think it could have used a sounder grounding in history. There were times when things were described as being new and different but it was not at all clear to me how new and different they actually were.

More importantly, its attempts to connect shifts in consciousness among readers to action by readers feel hazy and elusive. A few pages seemed to be addressed specifically to professionals who are part of educational relations, but most of the time the target audience seemed to be the elusive progressive "we" of U.S. political discourse, which is given a guided tour of events and political trends while flying above them followed by "shoulds" and advice that are absolutely true but sufficiently disconnected from actual subject positions that it is hard to connect to how you and I and we as actual people might operationalize them. In saying that, I'm not advocating that every political book be turned into a how-to guide to organizing a movement -- the shifts I would seek are harder to define than that, and I'm not sure I would have any confidence in my own ability to implement them if I was sitting down to the same writing project Giroux started with. And in any case, it's by no means impossible to read this book in a way that is relevant to action...it's just not easy.

[For a complete list of book reviews published on this site, click here.]

Ward Churchill Speaking in Sudbury

Internationally renowned indigenous scholar and activist Ward Churchill will be speaking in, of all places, little ol' Sudbury on October 30. Here are the details:

Monday, October 30th

1). 1:30 pm. Upper Fraser Auditorium, FA-056, Laurentian University.

2). 7pm. Canisius Hall, University of Sudbury.

Ward Churchill is a Keetoowah Band Cherokee, professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Colorado/Boulder, and member of the Colorado American Indian Movement. He is the author of more than 20 books including Marxism and Native Americans, Fantasies of the Master Race, Struggle for the Land, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, From A Native Son, Critical Issues in Native North America, The COINTELPRO Papers, Indians R Us?, Agents of Repression, Since Predator Came, Pacifism as Pathology, and A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas. Most recently two governors, four state legislators, several members of the University of Colorado Board of Regents, as well as the chancellor and a faculty committee have called for him to be fired because of his views on U.S. foreign policy.

Sponsored at Laurentian University by the Department of Native Studies; Native Human Services; Department of Sociology; Department of Geography; Department of Women’s Studies; Department of Political Science; Students General Association; Laurentian University Faculty Association; and in the community by the Sudbury Coalition Against Poverty.

If you want more details, email me and I can put you in touch with folks who can provide them.

Review: Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora

[Ronald W. Walters. Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora: An Analysis of Modern Afrocentric Political Movements. Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1993.]

A central question in all politics, albeit one that is seldom even recognized let alone effectively addressed in more privileged progressive (broadly defined) spaces, is who exactly are "we"? Who composes the collective subject pushing for change in a given instance, and how in practical terms is that collectivity constituted? What are the political implications of our answers to those questions? What might we wish to try and do differently?

Often in our semi-conscious dealings with the questions of "we", we forcibly include those who would not wish to be, and end up appropriating their credibility or erasing our own complicity. Or we disappear those who are different from "I" in some important respect but are genuinely and functionally part of "we", and thereby enforce homogeneity where it is not. Or we somehow slide from "we" as functional unity of those with like aspirations to an arbitrary border that is viciously policed. Or we privilege what is in our heads but ignore what is in (and socially focused on) our bodies. Or a million other things.

This book is one attempt to talk about one particular "we". It is not, I hasten to add, a "we" which encompasses me -- beyond the political advisability of developing understandings of "wes" that are actually "theys" to us, that we might better form broader politically functional "wes" with them, one of the interview participants in my main project identifies strongly as part of the "we" that is the subject of this book. Given that I know little of this "we" theorized in this way, I need to learn more to have a shot at adequately contextualizing his words.

Pan Africanism is a cultural orientation and a politics that is based on the overarching unity of African people. In various times and places its emphasis has sometimes been on what Walters calls "continental Pan Africanism" -- unity of the nations and states in Africa itself, particularly sub-Saharan Africa -- but at others it has been "racial Pan Africanism", a unity that encompasses the vast global diaspora of African-origin peoples.

The construction of a "we" so vast is a tricky business. Walters, who played a leadership role in the Pan Africanist movement in the U.S. at its crest and at the time of writing was a senior academic, rejects a romantic approach to this "we" and focuses, quite sensibly, on the material -- on how it has been, is, and can be actually constructed. His focus is on the diaspora, and for a variety of reasons, according to Walters, African America has a fairly central political space within the diaspora. He looks at the post-WWII history of Pan Africanism in the U.S., and then looks at a number of other contexts, usually using the U.S. situation as a referrant. In most cases he uses both a comparative method, to compare the political realities of African-origin people in the U.S. and the other setting of interest, and then what he describes as a Pan African method, which focuses on evidence of linkage between African communities and movements in the sites in question and on the political impact of those linkages.

The case studies are many and diverse. Unfortunately for my purposes, none explicitly focus on Canada, though there are mentions here and there. After a chapter looking only at the Pan Africanist movement in the U.S., Walters moves on to an examination of a modern "back to Africa" experiment by U.S. Pan Africanists who moved to Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana. Then there is a three chapter case study of the U.S. and the U.K., and another three chapter case study of the U.S. and South Africa. He finishes up with one chapter examinations of Brazil and the Caribbean, and a conclusion.

The lack of a Canadian case study did not make the book any less useful to me. For one thing, one of the bases of Pan African unity in the diaspora is that the experiences of African-origin people have broad similarities in all of the places they have migrated and/or been forcibly removed to. Liberal white Canadian fantasies notwithstanding, this racialized pattern of power relations with people constructed as white on top is no less true here than anywhere else. In any case, I was looking for general background, and this was a great source for it. As well, the person whose words I need to contextualize moved to Canada from Trinidad, initially to go to university, so I appreciated the chapter on the Caribbean in particular (even if I wish it had been in greater depth).

A question underlying this work is that of culture. In the main text, Walters proposes that along with similarity of experience in diverse settings in the diaspora, a further basis for Pan African unity is a common African cultural foundation, but he does little there to elaborate on this proposal. He does not downplay diversity in culture and the challenges it can create -- there is plenty of history of disunity between continental Africans and African Americans, for example -- but still perceives aspects of underlying unity or potential unity. At the request of a reviewer of a pre-publication draft of the book, he includes a postscript discussing culture and its connections to politics more fully. For me, at least, it was not full enough -- too many names I knew little about passing by too quickly, and too little space for such a crucial question. I think there were things with which I would differ in his analysis of culture and politics, but I don't think I entirely got it, so I'm not sure.

One thing that stood out for me in reading this was its placement firmly within disciplinary norms. Its content is radical, but its approach is quite traditional. This isn't really a problem, given what I hoped to get out of it, but I still noticed -- most of what I have been reading recently, other than some fairly conventional history, has either disregarded disciplinary conventions entirely or set out deliberately to challenge them. Some of the reification of abstract concepts in this book felt particularly odd to me, as well as certain turns of phrase that I suppose come from the scientistic pretensions of "political science", which just aren't necessary to convince me that its ideas deserve attention.

A final and probably more important lack in the book's analysis was that it examined complexity within the "we" of focus in certain respects but not in others. Perhaps the most obvious missing piece was a gender analysis -- I know that processes of colonialism and diaspora, as well as resistance in those contexts, are very much gendered, and that was not part of what the book talked about. I suspect sexual diversity would also warrant consideration, and perhaps other things as well.

There is one further component of this analysis that fits into larger areas of interest to me, and that I did not expect to find here: the seemingly inevitable conflict between state and non-state actors even when they are ostensibly on the same side. From the labour movement and the NDP in Bob Rae's Ontario to the social movements and the Worker's Party in Lula's Brazil to the seeds of tension between Chavez and the grassroots in Venezuela even as their alliance remains strong to the nature of the relationships between the state and non-state members of the Third International, I am becoming more and more convinced that this tension is not a matter of "betrayal" as some Trotskyists and others might have it, but an inevitable feature of entering the heart of state relations and subjecting one's self to the forces at work there, as many others have long argued. In this case, Walters talkw about the relations between the newly independent and often avowedly Pan Africanist states in Africa and community/movement representatives from the diaspora at conferences and the like. There were divisions among each on ideological grounds too, certainly, but the divisions bewteen these two groups were not trivial, and seem to lend credence to the thesis that the pernicious impact of state relations on radical politics is inevitable.

This book did not particularly excite me, but it did keep me interested and I learned a great deal from it. Beyond its utility for my work, it is one very useful contribution to an area about which white progressive and radicals and lefties in North America often know little but really should educate ourselves, in order to help mature our understanding of our own complicity in white supremacy, to help us work in solidarity with the "we" that is the heart of the book, and to broaden our understanding of the political question of "we" in general so that our own political practice might be made more effective.

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

First Snow!

Had our first snow fall of the year today. It's still too warm for any of it to stick around once it has fallen, of course, but it was actually snowing like it meant it at a few points, not just a few lonely flakes that got lost on their way to Hudson's Bay.

As always, I'm not exactly looking forward to what is to come, but I still get excited about the first snow. :)

Quote: Pan Africanism

Without self-determination, the natural predisposition of a colonized or oppressed people, it is impossible for people to realize their own human aspirations; otherwise, they must constantly assist in the realization of the dreams and projects of others. That is why any progressive struggle begins somewhere specific, with a particular group, but can be related to the struggles of other groups, especially if the patterns of subordination are similar and eminate from the same source.

Thus, the struggle for Pan African self-determination is a sine qua non to the possession of the necessary resources and disposition to enter into larger struggles for change and to rid the world of those forces that stand against the movement toward an enlightened living situation for humanity. Thus, while the cultural nationalism implied in the philosophy of Pan Africanism may be considered parochial or "narrowly" directed toward people of African descent, in fact, it is very broad, both because Africans are global people and because by helping themselves they position themselves to be of the greatest service to others. In fact, part of the task of demystifying the "progressive" pretentions of a political struggle is to admit that no struggle is largely altruistic, that all struggles are, in the first instance, local and particularistic in nature, and that whether they have wider significance depends not alone upon ideological declarations, but upon the character of the struggle -- whether or not those involved have the resources to utilize in that manner.

-- Ronald W. Walters

Urgent Action Required: Bolivian Activists Denied Entry to Canada

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that Sudbury is one of the stops in an upcoming tour of Canada by grassroots activists from Bolivia called the Bolivia Rising Tour. One of the sponsors of the Sudbury stop is a group that I am a part of, the Sudbury Coalition Against Poverty. We received an email from one of the key organizers of the tour, who is with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, that four of the activists are being denied entry into Canada, including one that is scheduled to come to Sudbury.

Here is what we received:

Please send a message asap to the Canadian embassy in Lima who have denied visitors visas to Canada for four of our Bolivian guests on the CUPW sponsored tour.

In an arrogant and embarrassing display the reason given is that these guests have more reason to stay in Canada than return home.

The four are:

Basilia Catari
Miguelina Villarroel
Ramón Escobar
Aydee Blanco

Tell them that these four are leaders of their communities who have generously spared valuable time to visit us. A great deal has been organized. Many here haven given there time and effort to set up events.

Please encourage the embassy to revverse their decision as soon as possible.

Send to:


re-lima.immigration@international.gc.ca

(Immigration)/Asistente del Jefe de Programa (Inmigración)
Immigration Section/Section d'immigration/Sección de inmigración
Canadian Embassy/Ambassade du Canada/Embajada de Canadá
Libertad # 130, Miraflores
Lima 18 Perú
Fax: (51-1) 242-2567


and fax to:

Ambassador G. Desrivieres, Canadian Ambassador to Perú
Fax: 011-511-242-4050

This is the sort of mobilization that blogs have the potential to be really useful for -- so please, if you are reading this in the few days after it is posted, take the time to send an email or a fax and let the embassy know that we want these people admitted!

Canadian Capital in Asia

Here is another great article from Vancouver-based writer and activist Harsha Walia, this one on the depredations by Canadian capital and the Canadian military in Asia.

She writes:

In the face of persistent political, economic, and so-called humanitarian interventions in the region, South Asian communities are raising their voices: women in the Narmada movement physically preventing the construction of dams, local panchayats (village councils) boycotting Coca Cola abuses and environmental devastation, protests rallies greeting Bush across the region, the Loktantra Andolan (Democracy Movement) against the tyrannical rule of King Gyanendra, 50,000 farmers rallying against the WTO in Mumbai, labour strikes and riots led by Bangladeshi garment workers, and women of the region charting their own course to fight against female infanticide, Huhood Ordiances, dowry deaths, and violence. Let us strengthen our end of this resistance by demanding an end to Canadian and other Western countries projects for the corporatization, militarization, and NGOization of the people of South Asia.

Review: Cyber-Marx

[Nick Dyer-Witheford. Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999.]

We who muck around creating words about other people's words sometimes like to pretend that causality proceeds in one direction when it really, often as not, flows in the other. We like to pretend that all the argumentation and analysis that we produce in reviewing a book or a movie is done from neutrality, step by step towards the verdict we finally deliver. In fact, much of the time, we get a vague feeling in our gut from a text and then have to build our castle of words and arguments to correspond to that feeling. There's nothing at all wrong with this, but it's good to be honest about it.

With this book, my vague gut feeling has pulled me in two quite different directions.

The first major pull came from the fact that much of its general thesis confirms what I already think. A few posts ago, an anonymous commenter was asking about my analysis of technology and social change. I had read perhaps only a dozen pages of this book at the time, and it's not an issue I'd thought about a whole lot recently -- at least not with technology as the entry point -- so I just spouted a few random things from my gut that all sort of said I believe the impact of technology is contestable and contested, and neither deterministically utopian nor deterministically grim. This book takes a few hundred pages and uses an autonomist Marxist frame to say much the same thing.

Texts which argue intellectually what you already instinctively believe can be a bit tricky because you may not be quite as engaged by the details of the argument and you may not read quite as critically, both of which were at least minimally active in my reading of this book. Nonetheless, it was definitely useful as analysis and not just comforting as affirmation. The early pat of the book looks at different ways technology's impact on social change has been theorized, particularly by the tradition captured in phrases like "postindustrialism" and "the information revolution", and by various strands of Marxist thought, arriving at the autonomist Marxist framework as the most useful. It goes on to describe some of the autonomist theory of composition, decomposition, and recomposition of the working class (a very broadly understood term in much autonomist Marxism, not just industrial workers). The idea is that in any given era, workers/people struggle in ways specific to the spaces available to them at that time. Capital then switches its approach to try and decompose the struggle, but if that decomposition succeeds, struggle emerges in different ways suitable to the opportunities of the new situation, forcing capital to shift again. The most recent phase involves changes in the functioning of capital that take advantage of high technology, and though struggle (in North America at least) may seem to be a sad shadow of the last crest in the late '60s and early '70s -- and remember he was writing in the late '90s -- there is evidence of exciting new strands of recomposition in the new technological environment. Dyer-Witheford then goes through a more detailed consideration of the impacts of technology has had, including a look at how postmodernist thought is both a response to and evasion of these changes in material conditions, and a final look at potentially productive agendas and avenues of struggle.

There is definitely material in there that was interesting and useful to me, though as this is a text I encountered in connection with the sociology course I'm auditing right now rather than my work it is not necessarily as immediately applicable as much of what I have read in the last couple of years. I quite appreciated the review of different analyses of technology, and I am still fairly new to autonomism but find some of its core ideas quite compelling so was glad to learn more. At the same time, I found myself kind of disengaged by the end of the book. I admit that it is only a tiny, odd, and sorry minority of us that are able to get very excited about theory (as usually understood), but I am one of that fractious band of travellers, and I just wasn't feeling it here.

That probably has to do with the other strand of my vague gut feeling while reading this book: it felt dated, in places quaint. Which was kind of disconcerting, to be honest. This book came out in 1999, so much of it was probably written during my early years of politicization -- in some ways, therefore, the time that produced this book also produced political me. And I don't feel that old! But when technology is your focus, at this end of history, seven years (perhaps more like nine or ten since the writing began?) is a long, long time. Even just in terms of the general environment of the (relatively privileged sections of the) left in North America, we are at least two ages removed from when this book came out -- one started in November 1999 with the Battle of Seattle and the next was ushered in on September 11, 2001. And just in terms of assumptions about things like what the internet is and can do, and the shorthand we use in talking about it, we are far from where we were then, and it shows. In terms of some of his projections about the role of technology in struggle, I would bet that they were more daring guesses when he made them than they seem to be now, simply because, at least in broad terms, there is increasing evidence that he is correct about a lot of things. But this has its frustrating side, too -- so much has emerged in terms of technology as both tool of control and tool of resistance since then, and it was psychically grating to know it wouldn't be talked about.

So. This is a useful book and there are important ideas in its "lit review" and its framework, but what would have been the cutting edge of its analysis at publication has been substantially dulled by time. If you are making a focused study of this area, definitely pick up this book, but I would bet there has been lots written since 1999 on technology from left perspectives, even if you specify that subset of left perspectives that emphasize the centrality of struggle.

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Bolivia Rising Tour Comes to Sudbury!

From the poster:

Bolivia Rising Tour: Canadian Tour of Bolivian Popular Movements

Tuesday October 17, The International Day of Solidarity with the People of Bolivia

What changes are going on in Bolivia today? What do social movements in Bolivia have to tell us? What role do indigenous people play? How can activists and social movements in the North best learn from and demonstrate solidarity with our sisters and brothers in Bolivia? Things are moving swiftly in South America. In Bolivia, the election of Evo Morales and the rise of social movement power are creating huge changes. Talk of nationalization and redistribution of wealth and power place the people of Bolivia at odds with the U.S. Empire.

With Alberto Camacho of the Sindicato de Correos ECOBOL from Cochabamba who has a political-union background of 35 years of struggle. He was a national leader of the Miners Union and a national executive member in the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB). He is presently a postal worker and organizer in the postal union. And Aydee Blanco Callejas of the Sindicato Mixto de Trabajadores Mineros Huanuni. Aydee is the first woman president of the union in 78 yeras of unions in the mine.

Two Talks

1) 2:30 pm. Room C-309 (in the Classroom Building) at Laurentian University
2) 7 pm. Fourth Floor Resource Area, St. Andrew's Place, 111 Larch Street.

(both locations wheelchair accessible)

Initial sponsors: Mine Mill/CAW Local 598; Native Studies Laurentian University; Labour Studies Laurentian University; Sudbury Coalition Against Poverty.

If you are local, please come to one or both talks!

Burqas, Complicity, and Fragmentation

So there has recently been a dust-up in the U.S. feminist blogosphere about the choice by a prominent white feminist blogger to use the imagery of a woman in a burqa as a supposedly humorous way to attempt to illustrate the sexism of certain conservative bloggers who are outraged at a different white feminist blogger having the nerve to have breasts while posing for a picture with a mass murderer of Iraqi children who shall remain nameless (but who also happens to be a former Democratic president of the United States). There's all kinds of backstory here, and I refuse to go into it or even link to it. What I am interested in is this post, which points out that the white feminists who posted the image "forgot something small but very important: they are feminists from and blogging within a colonizing nation. A colonizing nation that is in the process of bombing the holy hell out of the very women that they find so easy to make fun of," and the comments that follow from it.

First of all, I am not going to comment on the actual presenting issue. Brownfemipower does that far better than I could in her post and then repeatedly and with great patience in the comments section, and so do a number of other women, and in this post BFP reprises the issue and gives a nice, long list of authors that you can read if you still don't get what is being said. There is really no excuse for "not getitng it" at this point, and certainly no excuse for the refusal to listen, the refusal to engage seriously with patiently presented analysis, and the serious disrespect directed at BFP and those who supported her in comments by at least some of those who resented her naming of colonialism. Indeed, part of what really struck me about this instance was that the appropriation of this specific piece of imagery -- not just this kind of thing, but very specifically the use of the burqa in this way -- has been talked about and analyzed in lots of different spaces for years. And yet still the resistance is fierce when a woman of colour points out how oppressive that appropriation is.

One aspect that interests me and that I think I can legitimately comment on is what is revealed by the process of dialogue that happened in the comments section -- not its details, but its general shape -- and what I can learn from that about engaging in politics from positions of privilege within a colonizing nation, something that is integral to my everyday and so something I obviously have to think about a lot. Though this conflict is occurring in a feminist context, and that does give some aspects of it specificity, I think it is still possible to derive lessons from it that are more general. And I want to make clear that even though this does come from a feminist context, I am not intending my commentary as an attack on white feminist women, but rather trying to figure what I myself and white progressives and leftists in general (including feminist women and pro-feminist men) can learn in terms of our political practice from the hard intellectual and emotional labour that radical women of colour (and one white leftist woman) have already put in to this discussion via the post and the comment thread.

The conflict made me think of two words: complicity and fragmentation.

The relevance of the first of those words should be obvious, I think. A big part of the point that BFP was making was about how easy it is for white North American progressives, including white feminists, to ignore our existence "from and...within a colonizing nation". The subsequent discussion went on to illustrate this point quite nicely by example, and to reaffirm for me a point that is not new but persists in its importance: that liberals and leftists in North America, particularly those of us from privilege of various sorts, have almost no tradition of grounding our politics in our complicity. A few nooks and crannies aside, starting there is completely alien to us. Rather, we tend to ground them in some combination of our experiences of oppression and intellectual analyses that are untethered to our direct experience -- both of which are necessary, of course, but not at all sufficient.

The importance of grounding your politics in your complicity as well as everything else is not a new one. During her brief period of blogging, for example, it was a theme Darkdaughta wrote about more than once. But the sharpest, most insistent presentation of it that I have encountered is from the work of Sherene Razack, a legal scholar in Toronto. In her book Looking White People in the Eye, for example, she writes:

In proposing to begin with where women stand in relation to one another, two concepts are significant: complicity and the interlocking nature of systems of domination. In chapter 4 I noted that when we as feminists engage in 'saving' other women, what we fail to consider is how we are implicated in the subordination of other women. An attention to complicity has not strongly engaged in feminism because, for the most part, we continue to avoid any inquiry into domination and our role in it when we confront issues of difference and diversity. Instead, each of us feels most safe in these discussions anchored in our subordinated position by virtue of being of colour, disabled, economically exploited, colonized, a lesbian, or a woman. Identifying as part of a marginalized group allows each of us to avoid addressing our position within dominant groups and to maintain our innocence or belief in our non-involvement in the subordination of others. Knowing the difficultings involved in confronting our own role in systems of domination, we may find that being anchored on the margin is more preferable. Yet, if we remain anchored on the margin, the discourse with women subordinated to ourselves stops, and various moves of superiority, notably pity and cultural othering, prevail. We become unable to interrogate how multiple systems of oppression regulate our lives and unable to take effective collective action to change these systems.

Again, I want to emphasize that Razack frames it in the context of feminism because the book is largely an intervention into debates about feminist law reform, but I'm making the point more broadly -- the devices available to men, particularly privileged men, often differ somewhat from those available to feminist women in enacting this "race to innocence" (Razack again) but the same basic problem is nearly universal in North American liberal and left spaces.

Part of our resistence to grounding our theory-and-practice in our complicity is obvious: it's freakin' hard. I think it is made worse by our North American culture of individualism, which makes it tricky for us to differentiate between our unchosen place in oppressive complexes of social relations and our responsibility for the choices we make within that place, but even with that taken into account, it causes me a certain amount of psychological anguish to really hold in my head the brutal realities with which I am complicit in ways for which there is no simple individualistic escape. Razack herself talks elsewhere in the book about how difficult it is to really address this and to actually do the work of putting our complicity at the centre, and talks a little about some of her own struggles with it.

I think there is more to be said than that initial look at the understandable psychological inertia to seeing one's own complicity, however, and that's where the idea of fragmentation comes in. I guess fragmentation is on my mind because of recently reading and even more recently participating in discussions of John Holloway's book, Change the World Without Taking Power. I have written a review of it, but it isn't a review that necessarily does justice to how he talks about fragmentation, and I think I'm maybe going to be using it a bit differently than him in what I write here anyway. But that's why I'm thinking about it.

Anyway, I think that social fragmentation is part of what makes it difficult for those of us with privilege in North America to see our complicity, particularly colonial complicity. Holloway's argument is that one of the central characteristics of capitalist society is fetishism, which he adapts from Marx but uses in a much broader way. He argues that the social flow of human interrelationship by interconnected doing is broken and we come to see the world, in part because the world under capitalism kind of functions this way, as being all about relationships between things rather than relationships between people. We therefore see the "state" as a thing, for example, rather than as a complex of relationships among people. We see a corporation as a thing having independent, abstract existence, rather than as a form of relations among people. This permeates how we understand the world. Therefore when one of these "things" is doing something, even when that is really just a reified abstraction of a relationship in which we are a participant, it is easy for privileged progressives and leftists to distance ourselves from what is going on without even seeing that we are doing so. And not only are we participants, but because human beings are social and who we are comes to be in large part via social processes, who we are is created by our place in those oppressive relations -- but because we don't generally see what's happening as relations, we don't see how it relates to us.

This serves to keep us nice and insulated from our actual material place in the social relations that constitute the social world. It is very easy for privileged progressives and leftists in North America to see it as these abstracted nasty institutions doing nasty things to often quite abstractly understood people far away, rather than seeing our role in this complex of relationships, and the role of that complex of relationships in shaping who we are and our political discourse and practice and so on.

In the situation that sparked this, this made it easy for many of those who were critical of BFP's post to completely miss the point of what she was saying. Much of the defense of the offensive imagery depended, implicitly or explicitly, on constructing a "we" incorporating the women who made the image and those whose existence is invoked by the use of the image. But because actual social relations are so obscured, so fragmented both in practice and even more in our discourse, it was easy to construct this "we" based not on the actual material relationsihps from which a "we" might reasonably be constructed, but rather on abstraction. The "we" did see part of the material relationship, which has to do with gender oppression being very real both in North America and Afghanistan, but it made it easy to avoid seeing the fact that the social realities in which we as privileged progressive and leftists exist in North America, including middle-class white feminist women, are in part shaped by the fact that we benefit from and, willing or no, contribute to five centuries of booted white feet being placed firmly on brown necks. What does that mean for our politics? For our theory? For how we can theorize "we"? For what we should talk about on our blogs? Obviously I don't claim to have any magical answers, or perhaps any answers at all, but I think the first step is asking those questions.

(Btw, one of my most spectacular exhibitions of this blindness happened when I was in university. My first regular venue for publication was an op/ed column in the student paper at the university I went to. At one point, I had read a few interesting and insightful things about the accomplishments of progressive forces in the Indian state of Kerala. So I figured I would share some of that with readers as a way of trying to puncture the "there is no alternative" myth and the myth that resistance can never achieve anything. The people whose struggles I was so briefly and shallowly reporting the results of remained abstracted to me until I got a phone call from the president of the association of students on campus who trace their heritage to Kerala -- in the privilege that allowed me to simply avoid seeing that there were flesh-and-blood people attached to what I was saying, it hadn't even occurred to me that there were probably dozens of students on campus who traced their origins to that state, and whom I could've interviewed before I wrote. It turned out okay -- they seemed to like the article and they invited me to a dinner they were having -- but it was still a huge lesson. In retrospect, though I didn't explicitly construct it this way in the article, I too was building an abstracted "we", as in "we who are concerned about social justice", and imposing that with absolutely no conception of the ways in which my privilege was and is causally connected to their very need to struggle.)

The fragmentation is not just social, however, but also is a fragmentation of individual human beings. One of the ways in which some people tried to counter the fact that we are privileged citizens of a colonizing nation was to point out, well, the they oppose the war and so do most feminists, and that should be enough. Which completely misses the point, of course. I think being able to see this as a legitimate answer, however, is related to the ways in which self is fragmented, so that recognition of some level of complicity can be, in complete obliviousness, held "out there" in some peripheral circle of our politics, as something that perhaps informs their content and can be addressed by taking an abstract position against one war, but never has to be taken "in here", to the centre, so that it might inform the very shape of our politics.

It is also relevant to the fragmentation of self in a deeper way, too. One of the things that I have found most helpful from feminist thought -- particularly feminist thought grounded in multiple oppressions, but present in almost all feminist thought -- is an emphasis on overcoming such fragmentation, in treating human beings as exactly that: whole human beings. Yet this refusal to bring our complicity to the centre of our politics, of our daily thinkings-and-doings, is an experssion and a reinforcement of that fragmentation. When we deny it, avoid it, vanish it, we deny and avoid and vanish self, because it is part of how self was formed and selves like ours act to reproduce it every day. Bringing our complicity into the centre of our politics is not just an act of accountability for privilege, then, it is an also an act of resistance in the service of our own liberation -- it is a refusal to be fragmented and, by owning those aspects of self shaped by socializiation as one who benefits from structural domination of others, we can find ways to resist that domination from the position that we hold within those relationships, rather than repeatedly falling into blindness and guilt and active refusal to listen to things that draw attention to the parts of ourselves that we have hidden.

All of which is, as always, easier said than done. But I think that one way white progressives and leftists in North America can begin to shift our political traditions, our political practice, is by being mindful about foregrounding human beings in our analysis and resisting fetishization -- by being attentive to the very material social relations between "I" and whoever else we are talking about (and the discourse that has grown up around those relations) and by doing our best to resist the temptation to cooperate in our own fragmentation. And another way is by automatically asking, "How am I implicated in the phenomenon that I am talking about?" Because given the totalizing impact of capitalist social relations, particularly the way the most recent phase of neoliberal globalization is ensuring that fewer and fewer corners of geographical space and social life remain unpenetrated by them, odds are that you/we/I are complicit in some way, whatever the issue.

And of course, on a much more immediate level, listening and being respectful would be a good start too.