Because props are important. As are props (though of course, they are never just props!).
Postcolonial/Global literature and film, Modernism, African American literature, and the Digital Humanities.
Secularism and Reverse-Engineering
[Cross-posted from Sepia Mutiny; tied to the release of my book]
The debates about secularism we’ve had over the months I’ve been on Sepia Mutiny have sometimes gotten stuck due to differences in terminology. People have different ideas of what “secularism” means, and not simply because one party is “right” and the others are “wrong.”
In fact, there is some slipperiness in the way many people use the term on a day-to-day basis. Some people think of secularism as a cultural attribute, indicating the opposite of religiosity. A society where people are not very religious might be termed secular, and under this terminology, Europe would be very “secular,” while the U.S. would be less so, even if (and Razib has often pointed this out) there is actually more religion taught in public schools in most northern European countries than is allowed in the U.S. system. India is a society that is also very non-secular by this definition, partly because the overwhelming majority of its citizens would identify themselves as belonging to one or another religious community. Moroever, one of the unique features of life in the Indian subcontinent is the fact that a person’s religious identity is often publicly visible to others –- it’s built into one’s name, as well as various kinds of bodily markings and religiously-coded attire. A Bindi might mark a woman as a Hindu; a turban and beard might mark a man as a Sikh; and any number of identifying marks are possible for Muslims. (Christians and Buddhists, interestingly, are less visibly marked.)
The problem with the cultural definition of secularism is that it seems very difficult to think of changing anything. If the people in a given society are seen as religious, one could claim that there’s no need for a legal or political system that requires separation of church and state. Nor need there be any particular incentive to reform aspects of a traditional culture that are incompatible with the idea of civil rights. Also out the window are specific protections for religious minorities, as well as vigilance about protecting individuals (as in, women) from religious coercion. If a woman (or even, as is often the case, a girl) is being pressured by her family to accept a marriage she doesn’t want, under the culturalist definition of secularism there isn’t really justification to help her: that’s simply the culture, one could say.
A better way of defining secularism is more strictly political: for me, "secularist" refers to a political system where the government derives its authority without reference to any religious institutions (as a shorthand, we can call this "separation of church and state"). Under this definition, you can disentangle ideas of "modernity" and "democracy" from "secularity" -– very modernized and even democratic nations might choose not to follow the path of secularism, and very secular nations might end up as non-democracies. As many people have pointed out over the years, Iran has elements of a democratic system of government, but that government has to be legitimated by the "Supreme Leader" who is always a religious cleric. It is procedurally "democratic" (there are regular elections) without being "secular."
Similarly, it’s equally possible to have coercive state secularism where democracy and civil rights are absent. Turkey is certainly more free now than it was, say, 30 years ago -– when the automatic imprisonment of both Communists and Islamists was a regular fact of life. But even now -– with a nominally Islamist party running the government -– there are questions about how democratic the country is, as writers continue to get in hot water with the government over things they write.
In the political definition, some of the positive value of secularism is lost, and the concept becomes a bit more technical. And admittedly, secularism is not always used in the most intelligent way even by secularists. It can also be pushed too far -– and actually work against the interest of individual rights. Turkey has sometimes gone in this direction, as has (arguably) France, with the recent Hijab ban.
But such excessive applications are relatively rare. On balance, political secularism in most nations seems to be a good thing –- especially when those nations are pluri-religious (most are, these days), have serious internal sectarian divides (Iraq, Afghanistan), or other major cultural differences (as in, between urban and culturally secular people and rural societies that are more religious). Secularism as a political term, in short, need not be understood as "opposed" to religion.
And political secularism can be a good thing even if the term ("secularism") itself may be foreign to a given society, and even though the term has a "Christian" genealogy (in the sense that the word "secular" comes from the Latin "saeculum," and came into European languages through Christian theology). But the idea that "secularism" is an extension of colonialism -– an imposition of the west -– doesn’t really hold water, and I disagree with people who have used that argument (such as Ashis Nandy; see this post from the early days of my blog).
Secularism is a legible concept pretty much everywhere -– it’s been successfully translated to multiple cultural frameworks, and most societies are capable of adapting and incorporating political ideas like this one without any trouble. (Another term that has high translatability might be "democracy.") Secularism can be "reverse engineered" to be compatible with, say, predominantly Hindu societies like India and Nepal, or predominantly Muslim societies in the Middle East, North Africa, or Southeast Asia. Even if there aren’t strong philosophical or historical justifications for doing this, there are, in nearly every case, very good pragmatic ones. That is to say, it is quite clear that many countries would fall into civil war if political secularism were abandoned. And secondly, the civil rights of dissenters, atheists, and members of small religious minorities would likely be trampled without some protection from the state.
In an essay called “Modes of Secularism” (in Rajeev Bhargava’s collection, Secularism and its Critics), the philosopher Charles Taylor has worked out a way of thinking about how what I am calling the reverse engineering of secularism might work. Taylor uses the term “overlapping consensus,” coined by John Rawls, to describe how different groups can agree upon a common political framework (secularism) even if they might do so from dramatically different points of view:
In the U.S. context, overlapping consensus is what allowed dissenting Protestants (who were extremely religious, but also extremely individualistic) and Deist/humanist types like Thomas Jefferson to agree on a governing framework. The Protestant dissenters of Virginia didn’t want to have to say an oath or pay a tax that would benefit an established (Anglican) church, and Jefferson had the strong conviction that religion and politics should be kept separate. The two parties agreed on a system of government (in Virginia) that incorporated their quite different beliefs, even if they came to that agreement for different reasons.
With large numbers of immigrants who adhere to non-western faiths now in the U.S., it’s also become acutely clear that overlapping consensus can allow, say, a conservative Muslim immigrant (someone who trusts the Quran more than Thomas Jefferson or John Locke) to agree on a common governing principle with a secularist like Andrew Sullivan, even if they disagree on how to adjudicate specific issues, and even if they don’t even base their understanding of secularism on the same philosophical principles. Secularism, according to people like Taylor, is a political system that can work just fine without its philosophical foundation.
(A bit more on the idea of overlapping consensus can be found here)
In India, the story is a bit different. But it’s undeniably the case that the Indian constitution was written with a clear awareness that a country with significant populations of people belonging to eight different religions (Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism), as well as serious caste issues, had to have an expedient way of keeping the society together. The principle of secularism wasn’t named originally, though it was clearly indicated in Articles 15-18 of the Indian constitution (in a subsequent emendation of the preamble to the constitution, the word "secular" was in fact added). There are other unique features of the Indian system (and yes, flaws), and I’ve addressed some of them here.
The debates about secularism we’ve had over the months I’ve been on Sepia Mutiny have sometimes gotten stuck due to differences in terminology. People have different ideas of what “secularism” means, and not simply because one party is “right” and the others are “wrong.”
In fact, there is some slipperiness in the way many people use the term on a day-to-day basis. Some people think of secularism as a cultural attribute, indicating the opposite of religiosity. A society where people are not very religious might be termed secular, and under this terminology, Europe would be very “secular,” while the U.S. would be less so, even if (and Razib has often pointed this out) there is actually more religion taught in public schools in most northern European countries than is allowed in the U.S. system. India is a society that is also very non-secular by this definition, partly because the overwhelming majority of its citizens would identify themselves as belonging to one or another religious community. Moroever, one of the unique features of life in the Indian subcontinent is the fact that a person’s religious identity is often publicly visible to others –- it’s built into one’s name, as well as various kinds of bodily markings and religiously-coded attire. A Bindi might mark a woman as a Hindu; a turban and beard might mark a man as a Sikh; and any number of identifying marks are possible for Muslims. (Christians and Buddhists, interestingly, are less visibly marked.)
The problem with the cultural definition of secularism is that it seems very difficult to think of changing anything. If the people in a given society are seen as religious, one could claim that there’s no need for a legal or political system that requires separation of church and state. Nor need there be any particular incentive to reform aspects of a traditional culture that are incompatible with the idea of civil rights. Also out the window are specific protections for religious minorities, as well as vigilance about protecting individuals (as in, women) from religious coercion. If a woman (or even, as is often the case, a girl) is being pressured by her family to accept a marriage she doesn’t want, under the culturalist definition of secularism there isn’t really justification to help her: that’s simply the culture, one could say.
A better way of defining secularism is more strictly political: for me, "secularist" refers to a political system where the government derives its authority without reference to any religious institutions (as a shorthand, we can call this "separation of church and state"). Under this definition, you can disentangle ideas of "modernity" and "democracy" from "secularity" -– very modernized and even democratic nations might choose not to follow the path of secularism, and very secular nations might end up as non-democracies. As many people have pointed out over the years, Iran has elements of a democratic system of government, but that government has to be legitimated by the "Supreme Leader" who is always a religious cleric. It is procedurally "democratic" (there are regular elections) without being "secular."
Similarly, it’s equally possible to have coercive state secularism where democracy and civil rights are absent. Turkey is certainly more free now than it was, say, 30 years ago -– when the automatic imprisonment of both Communists and Islamists was a regular fact of life. But even now -– with a nominally Islamist party running the government -– there are questions about how democratic the country is, as writers continue to get in hot water with the government over things they write.
In the political definition, some of the positive value of secularism is lost, and the concept becomes a bit more technical. And admittedly, secularism is not always used in the most intelligent way even by secularists. It can also be pushed too far -– and actually work against the interest of individual rights. Turkey has sometimes gone in this direction, as has (arguably) France, with the recent Hijab ban.
But such excessive applications are relatively rare. On balance, political secularism in most nations seems to be a good thing –- especially when those nations are pluri-religious (most are, these days), have serious internal sectarian divides (Iraq, Afghanistan), or other major cultural differences (as in, between urban and culturally secular people and rural societies that are more religious). Secularism as a political term, in short, need not be understood as "opposed" to religion.
And political secularism can be a good thing even if the term ("secularism") itself may be foreign to a given society, and even though the term has a "Christian" genealogy (in the sense that the word "secular" comes from the Latin "saeculum," and came into European languages through Christian theology). But the idea that "secularism" is an extension of colonialism -– an imposition of the west -– doesn’t really hold water, and I disagree with people who have used that argument (such as Ashis Nandy; see this post from the early days of my blog).
Secularism is a legible concept pretty much everywhere -– it’s been successfully translated to multiple cultural frameworks, and most societies are capable of adapting and incorporating political ideas like this one without any trouble. (Another term that has high translatability might be "democracy.") Secularism can be "reverse engineered" to be compatible with, say, predominantly Hindu societies like India and Nepal, or predominantly Muslim societies in the Middle East, North Africa, or Southeast Asia. Even if there aren’t strong philosophical or historical justifications for doing this, there are, in nearly every case, very good pragmatic ones. That is to say, it is quite clear that many countries would fall into civil war if political secularism were abandoned. And secondly, the civil rights of dissenters, atheists, and members of small religious minorities would likely be trampled without some protection from the state.
In an essay called “Modes of Secularism” (in Rajeev Bhargava’s collection, Secularism and its Critics), the philosopher Charles Taylor has worked out a way of thinking about how what I am calling the reverse engineering of secularism might work. Taylor uses the term “overlapping consensus,” coined by John Rawls, to describe how different groups can agree upon a common political framework (secularism) even if they might do so from dramatically different points of view:
I want to use this term [overlapping consensus], even while I have some difficulties with its detailed working out in Rawls' theory. I will come to these below. For the moment, I just want to describe this approach in general terms. The problem with the historical common ground approach is that it assumes that everyone shares some religious grounds for the norms regulating the public sphere, even if these are rather general: non-denominational Christianity, or only Biblical theism, or perhaps only some mode of post-Enlightenment Deism. But even this latter is asking too much of today's diversified societies. The only thing we can hope to share is a purely political ethic, not its embedding in some religious view. But its problem is that it too demands not only the sharing of the ethic but also of its foundation--in this case, one supposedly independent of religion.
The property of the overlapping consensus view is just that it lifts the requirement of a commonly held foundation. It aims only at universal acceptance of certain political principles (this is hard enough to attain). But it recognizes from the outset that there cannot be a universally agreed basis for these, independent or religious. (Charles Taylor)
In the U.S. context, overlapping consensus is what allowed dissenting Protestants (who were extremely religious, but also extremely individualistic) and Deist/humanist types like Thomas Jefferson to agree on a governing framework. The Protestant dissenters of Virginia didn’t want to have to say an oath or pay a tax that would benefit an established (Anglican) church, and Jefferson had the strong conviction that religion and politics should be kept separate. The two parties agreed on a system of government (in Virginia) that incorporated their quite different beliefs, even if they came to that agreement for different reasons.
With large numbers of immigrants who adhere to non-western faiths now in the U.S., it’s also become acutely clear that overlapping consensus can allow, say, a conservative Muslim immigrant (someone who trusts the Quran more than Thomas Jefferson or John Locke) to agree on a common governing principle with a secularist like Andrew Sullivan, even if they disagree on how to adjudicate specific issues, and even if they don’t even base their understanding of secularism on the same philosophical principles. Secularism, according to people like Taylor, is a political system that can work just fine without its philosophical foundation.
(A bit more on the idea of overlapping consensus can be found here)
In India, the story is a bit different. But it’s undeniably the case that the Indian constitution was written with a clear awareness that a country with significant populations of people belonging to eight different religions (Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism), as well as serious caste issues, had to have an expedient way of keeping the society together. The principle of secularism wasn’t named originally, though it was clearly indicated in Articles 15-18 of the Indian constitution (in a subsequent emendation of the preamble to the constitution, the word "secular" was in fact added). There are other unique features of the Indian system (and yes, flaws), and I’ve addressed some of them here.
2006 in South Asia-oriented Books
Red Snapper wrote me and suggested a post reviewing the books of 2006. This is of course somewhat difficult to do, because unlike some readers I tend to spend most of my time reading books written years and years and years ago -- and I often let new works of fiction simmer into paperback before venturing to sit down with them. In this case, I haven't actually read several of the books on the list below, and the list is as much a "to read" as it is a "best of."
Secondly, the ordering isn't especially significant. The list is more about the group as a whole than it is about putting X above Y or Y above Z. As I mentioned, I haven't read some of the titles, and anyway ranking books isn't usually a very intelligent exercise, especially when you're talking about different genres of writing.
Third, I'm curious to know what was on your list in 2006. What am I leaving out?
* * *
1. Kaavya. It was undoubtedly a lively year for South Asian literature of the diasporic variety, though not always for the right reasons. "Kaavya Viswanathan" quickly became the name on everyone's lips (including Sepia Mutiny's bloggers and commenters) for about three weeks in April and May, but in contrast to other desi writers it wasn't for her exotic choice of subject matter. Kaavya's plagiarism scandal was the biggest of the year (and 2006 was also the year James Frey caused Oprah to go ballistic, and Dan Brown got dubiously acquitted, so this isn't a small accomplishment).
2. Kiran Desai also won the Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss. (Manish's review; Siddhartha's post). This is great news for the general reputation of South Asian writers, though it isn't clear to me that the book has had very much buzz in its commercial life. Still, I'm long overdue to pick it up.
3. Sudhir Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor has made a big impact, all the more so because Venkatesh doesn't come from a background remotely similar to the people he studies. Interestingly, though this book has little to do with South Asia, Venkatesh's Indian background probably did help him get his research done, because it marked him as belonging to a group in between the African-Americans he was studying and the wealthier white America beyond the south side of Chicago.
4. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. It's too bad this book didn't come out even earlier, but it's apparently one of the most scathing accounts of the botched American reconstruction effort in Iraq to have yet appeared. As with Sudhir Venkatesh in a poor black neighborhood, journalists like Chandrasekaran and, to an even greater extent, Time Magazine's Bobby Ghosh, benefit from being South Asian. Since they register to others as belonging an indeterminate racial background, desi journalists can pass for Iraqis and go where their white or black peers can't.
5. Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games. This book isn't even out in the U.S. yet, but it's already getting some U.S. reviews, the most widely circulated of which was Sven Birkerts' review-that-isn't-one.
6. Lads. Earlier in the year there was a fair bit of hype about books like Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal's Tourism and Gautam Malkani's Londonstani (see Manish's post). Now, not so much. It probably didn't help that Dhaliwal's book was nominated for a Bad Sex Award. But Gautam Malkani wrote an important column on the real vibrancy of Asian life in Britain this past August. I haven't read either of these, though of the two I'm more likely to pick up Londonstani.
7. Lads who Like Lads Should Be Allowed To Like Them, Legally. In 2006, Vikram Seth made headlines by prominently participating in the movement to repeal India's Section 377. Seth's magnificent memoir of his uncle and aunt's relationship, Two Lives, doesn't foreground homosexuality, but it is a loving consideration of another kind of coupling often considered taboo. Two Lives actually came out in November 2005, but the paperback was released in June 2006.
8-11. The heavy duty. Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence, Amitav Ghosh's Incendiary Circumstances, and Pankaj Mishra's Temptations of the West. Serious books of essays meditating on very serious issues. All three of these books struck me as important. Of the three, Mishra's book reflects the greatest effort in terms of actual footwork. And even if you're unhappy about Mishra's reporting on the massacre at Chittisinghpura, (Kashmir), you should still read this for the excellent chapters on Pakistan (which, Mishra shows, is a mess), Tibet, and Afghanistan.
12. Upamanyu finally makes it. Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August was finally released in the U.S. in 2006, almost 18 years after it originally appeared in India. In one sense it doesn't matter that much, since most people who are interested in Indian literature had already found a copy somewhere. But in another sense it absolutely does matter: if it's in print in the U.S., it's a lot easier for people like me to assign it in our classes (which I did for the first time, this fall)
13. Marina Budhos, Ask Me No Questions. Marina Budhos's book is a sophisticated dystopian vision that belongs somewhere between the juvenile fiction shelves and the adult shelves. I was impressed by Budhos's writing when I saw her read at the SAWCC conference, and I enjoyed the book itself.
14. Eqbal Ahmad's collected writings. Eqbal Ahmad was a legendary leftist radical from the 1960s whose political beliefs were not at all doctrinaire. Amitava Kumar published a very smart review of the new collection of his essays in the Nation back in November.
Secondly, the ordering isn't especially significant. The list is more about the group as a whole than it is about putting X above Y or Y above Z. As I mentioned, I haven't read some of the titles, and anyway ranking books isn't usually a very intelligent exercise, especially when you're talking about different genres of writing.
Third, I'm curious to know what was on your list in 2006. What am I leaving out?
* * *
1. Kaavya. It was undoubtedly a lively year for South Asian literature of the diasporic variety, though not always for the right reasons. "Kaavya Viswanathan" quickly became the name on everyone's lips (including Sepia Mutiny's bloggers and commenters) for about three weeks in April and May, but in contrast to other desi writers it wasn't for her exotic choice of subject matter. Kaavya's plagiarism scandal was the biggest of the year (and 2006 was also the year James Frey caused Oprah to go ballistic, and Dan Brown got dubiously acquitted, so this isn't a small accomplishment).
2. Kiran Desai also won the Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss. (Manish's review; Siddhartha's post). This is great news for the general reputation of South Asian writers, though it isn't clear to me that the book has had very much buzz in its commercial life. Still, I'm long overdue to pick it up.
3. Sudhir Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor has made a big impact, all the more so because Venkatesh doesn't come from a background remotely similar to the people he studies. Interestingly, though this book has little to do with South Asia, Venkatesh's Indian background probably did help him get his research done, because it marked him as belonging to a group in between the African-Americans he was studying and the wealthier white America beyond the south side of Chicago.
4. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. It's too bad this book didn't come out even earlier, but it's apparently one of the most scathing accounts of the botched American reconstruction effort in Iraq to have yet appeared. As with Sudhir Venkatesh in a poor black neighborhood, journalists like Chandrasekaran and, to an even greater extent, Time Magazine's Bobby Ghosh, benefit from being South Asian. Since they register to others as belonging an indeterminate racial background, desi journalists can pass for Iraqis and go where their white or black peers can't.
5. Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games. This book isn't even out in the U.S. yet, but it's already getting some U.S. reviews, the most widely circulated of which was Sven Birkerts' review-that-isn't-one.
6. Lads. Earlier in the year there was a fair bit of hype about books like Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal's Tourism and Gautam Malkani's Londonstani (see Manish's post). Now, not so much. It probably didn't help that Dhaliwal's book was nominated for a Bad Sex Award. But Gautam Malkani wrote an important column on the real vibrancy of Asian life in Britain this past August. I haven't read either of these, though of the two I'm more likely to pick up Londonstani.
7. Lads who Like Lads Should Be Allowed To Like Them, Legally. In 2006, Vikram Seth made headlines by prominently participating in the movement to repeal India's Section 377. Seth's magnificent memoir of his uncle and aunt's relationship, Two Lives, doesn't foreground homosexuality, but it is a loving consideration of another kind of coupling often considered taboo. Two Lives actually came out in November 2005, but the paperback was released in June 2006.
8-11. The heavy duty. Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence, Amitav Ghosh's Incendiary Circumstances, and Pankaj Mishra's Temptations of the West. Serious books of essays meditating on very serious issues. All three of these books struck me as important. Of the three, Mishra's book reflects the greatest effort in terms of actual footwork. And even if you're unhappy about Mishra's reporting on the massacre at Chittisinghpura, (Kashmir), you should still read this for the excellent chapters on Pakistan (which, Mishra shows, is a mess), Tibet, and Afghanistan.
12. Upamanyu finally makes it. Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August was finally released in the U.S. in 2006, almost 18 years after it originally appeared in India. In one sense it doesn't matter that much, since most people who are interested in Indian literature had already found a copy somewhere. But in another sense it absolutely does matter: if it's in print in the U.S., it's a lot easier for people like me to assign it in our classes (which I did for the first time, this fall)
13. Marina Budhos, Ask Me No Questions. Marina Budhos's book is a sophisticated dystopian vision that belongs somewhere between the juvenile fiction shelves and the adult shelves. I was impressed by Budhos's writing when I saw her read at the SAWCC conference, and I enjoyed the book itself.
14. Eqbal Ahmad's collected writings. Eqbal Ahmad was a legendary leftist radical from the 1960s whose political beliefs were not at all doctrinaire. Amitava Kumar published a very smart review of the new collection of his essays in the Nation back in November.
Possible Side Effects of the MLA's Move to January
According to Inside Higher Ed, the Delegate Assembly has voted to change the date of the MLA, from the last week of December to the first week of January. The change in schedule will not take effect until around 2010.
Obviously this will mean some general logistical changes. Plane fare might be a little cheaper, for instance. And affiliate groups, many of which hold parallel conferences alongside MLA, will have to think creatively to work out scheduling. Inside Higher Ed doesn't give specifics, but as I understand it the dates are not going to be as fixed as they currently are; instead, the conference will be tethered to the first Thursday after January 1.
But we can expect some more 'attitudinal' changes too. Allow me to speculate:
1. Take California. First of all, schools on the quarter system often start on January 2 or 3, and people from those schools are quite possibly not going to be able to come to MLA for the full four days -- or at all. Many quarter system schools are located on the west coast, though there are alsp schools elsewhere in the country that also use it (the University of Chicago, for instance). Since folks especially on the west coast (though not those from the semesterly Berkeley) may skip the MLA as a result of the change, the cultural tone of the conference might become even more east coast/upper midwest than it already is. Then again, since so many people who teach at those places are from the east coast originally, it may not really make much of a difference in terms of 'culture' if MLA were to lose them. In fact, I suspect the real change might be that the regional MLA for the Pacific schools (PAMLA) might become more important, especially for job interviews.
Alternatively, we might see a pattern of California, Oregon, and Washington people coming in just for a day -- to give a talk, or do some interviews -- and then heading back.
2. Mood change. Second, the general mood of the conference is likely to change. The end of December means the fall term is still very much in one's mind: grading, various performance questions ("did I get enough writing done this year?") -- not to mention the often emotionally-disorienting holiday season. Though by December those of us teaching 14 week semesters are somewhat exhausted, the currently looming MLA forces you to turn it around and be brilliant (or at least, "brilliant") and energetically professional for a couple of days, even if you would strongly prefer to be on a beach somewhere warm, or at the very least locked up at home with Season 2 of some mindless TV show. Instead of the end-of-the-year, apocalyptic, resentful, but still somehow festive feel of the current MLA, a January MLA is likely to be more calmly proleptic -- stoic lit crit "resolutions" for a new year, rather than excessive theoretical manifestoes of frustration directed at what has already passed.
3. Quality. Since people interviewing and giving talks at MLA currently tend to prepare for them in a rush in the last two weeks of December, it's marginally possible that the quality of both job interviews and the papers presented at the conference will improve with an extra week.
4. Happy comparatists. Since the scholars who work on literature from other parts of the world -- from Italy to India -- are going to find it easier to travel to those places now (most people will have two full weeks off in December), participants in panels related to those literatures are likely to have a recent physical memory of visiting those places when they come to the conference. Comparatists will have that happy, "I was just speaking French with people in Paris, yesterday!" look on their faces. On the other hand, people traveling just before MLA might end up spending their entire time abroad worrying about job interviews and paper(s) needing to be written. All in all, however, I think the change will be a beneficial one.
5. No More "Kooky MLA" pieces in the Times. I think the change to January is also probably going to be the death-knell of the much-lamented "Wacky, Sex-Obsessed English Professors Are In Town This Week, and Their Papers Have Scandalous Titles That Will Amuse You" article that local newspapers often carry. While the end of December is a dead news week, the first week of January tends to be more lively. Most people -- except for academics -- are already back at the office, and editors will have bigger stories to assign. The MLA might come to seem more like other academic conventions. Which is to say, not particularly newsworthy.
Then again, the tradition of such articles might already be ending. This year, the only Philadelphia Inquirer coverage I could find was a rather non-sensationalist piece called "Poetry, Creative Writing are Hot," which focused on the modest uptick in the number of jobs listed this year. Susan Snyder did, however, sneak a little jab about paper titles into the piece: "Organizers have identified poetry as a major theme this year, but the convention, as usual, also offers talks on offbeat topics such as 'Evil' and 'Sexual Norms in Trastamaran Spain.'" But that's hardly a pinprick.
Obviously this will mean some general logistical changes. Plane fare might be a little cheaper, for instance. And affiliate groups, many of which hold parallel conferences alongside MLA, will have to think creatively to work out scheduling. Inside Higher Ed doesn't give specifics, but as I understand it the dates are not going to be as fixed as they currently are; instead, the conference will be tethered to the first Thursday after January 1.
But we can expect some more 'attitudinal' changes too. Allow me to speculate:
1. Take California. First of all, schools on the quarter system often start on January 2 or 3, and people from those schools are quite possibly not going to be able to come to MLA for the full four days -- or at all. Many quarter system schools are located on the west coast, though there are alsp schools elsewhere in the country that also use it (the University of Chicago, for instance). Since folks especially on the west coast (though not those from the semesterly Berkeley) may skip the MLA as a result of the change, the cultural tone of the conference might become even more east coast/upper midwest than it already is. Then again, since so many people who teach at those places are from the east coast originally, it may not really make much of a difference in terms of 'culture' if MLA were to lose them. In fact, I suspect the real change might be that the regional MLA for the Pacific schools (PAMLA) might become more important, especially for job interviews.
Alternatively, we might see a pattern of California, Oregon, and Washington people coming in just for a day -- to give a talk, or do some interviews -- and then heading back.
2. Mood change. Second, the general mood of the conference is likely to change. The end of December means the fall term is still very much in one's mind: grading, various performance questions ("did I get enough writing done this year?") -- not to mention the often emotionally-disorienting holiday season. Though by December those of us teaching 14 week semesters are somewhat exhausted, the currently looming MLA forces you to turn it around and be brilliant (or at least, "brilliant") and energetically professional for a couple of days, even if you would strongly prefer to be on a beach somewhere warm, or at the very least locked up at home with Season 2 of some mindless TV show. Instead of the end-of-the-year, apocalyptic, resentful, but still somehow festive feel of the current MLA, a January MLA is likely to be more calmly proleptic -- stoic lit crit "resolutions" for a new year, rather than excessive theoretical manifestoes of frustration directed at what has already passed.
3. Quality. Since people interviewing and giving talks at MLA currently tend to prepare for them in a rush in the last two weeks of December, it's marginally possible that the quality of both job interviews and the papers presented at the conference will improve with an extra week.
4. Happy comparatists. Since the scholars who work on literature from other parts of the world -- from Italy to India -- are going to find it easier to travel to those places now (most people will have two full weeks off in December), participants in panels related to those literatures are likely to have a recent physical memory of visiting those places when they come to the conference. Comparatists will have that happy, "I was just speaking French with people in Paris, yesterday!" look on their faces. On the other hand, people traveling just before MLA might end up spending their entire time abroad worrying about job interviews and paper(s) needing to be written. All in all, however, I think the change will be a beneficial one.
5. No More "Kooky MLA" pieces in the Times. I think the change to January is also probably going to be the death-knell of the much-lamented "Wacky, Sex-Obsessed English Professors Are In Town This Week, and Their Papers Have Scandalous Titles That Will Amuse You" article that local newspapers often carry. While the end of December is a dead news week, the first week of January tends to be more lively. Most people -- except for academics -- are already back at the office, and editors will have bigger stories to assign. The MLA might come to seem more like other academic conventions. Which is to say, not particularly newsworthy.
Then again, the tradition of such articles might already be ending. This year, the only Philadelphia Inquirer coverage I could find was a rather non-sensationalist piece called "Poetry, Creative Writing are Hot," which focused on the modest uptick in the number of jobs listed this year. Susan Snyder did, however, sneak a little jab about paper titles into the piece: "Organizers have identified poetry as a major theme this year, but the convention, as usual, also offers talks on offbeat topics such as 'Evil' and 'Sexual Norms in Trastamaran Spain.'" But that's hardly a pinprick.
Notes on MLA and SALA: Indo-Africa, Blogging, Arab Lit, Ngugi, etc.
The week started out for me at SALA (South Asian Literary Association), some of which I missed as I was staying home to write a paper for the MLA later in the week.
* * *
The highlight of the part of the SALA conference I was able to attend was Gaurav Desai's solid keynote. Unlike many keynote addresses, which tend to be wide-ranging and thin, Gaurav's talk was closely focused on just one topic: the literary history of South Asians in East Africa. I won't say much here about Gaurav's actual thesis -- look for his upcoming book, which is entirely dedicated to the Indo-Africans -- and stick to just mentioning some of the names he mentioned. While Gaurav did make brief reference to some famous Indian Ugandan exiles, like M.G. Vassanji, most of his talk was focused on lesser-known figures. He also gave some helpful bibliographic leads for others interested in the topic (he mentioned, for instance, Robert Gregory's 1972 history of "India and East Africa," as well as Cynthia Salvadori's We Came in Dhows, which is actually quoted on some Sikh websites for the background on East African Sikhs)
While commentators like Shiva Naipaul (Sir Vidia's brother) focused earlier on the distance of the Asian community from black Africans before the traumatic exodus of the early 1970s, Desai argues that there were some members of the Asian community -- especially artists, playwrights, and poets -- who were trying to envision a sense of shared culture with black Africa.
One name that came up a lot in this regard in Desai's talk was Rajat Neogy, a Ugandan of Indian descent who started a famous African magazine called Transition. Neogy's magazine was a freethinking forum for many of the major postcolonial intellectuals in the 1960s and 70s (some of them are named at Wikipedia, while others are named at the Transition website). The magazine went defunct in 1976, when Neogy was arrested by Idi Amin's henchmen, but it was revived in 1990 by Henry Louis Gates (among the early contributors to the magazine).
Another name mentioned by Desai was Peter Nazareth, a writer of Goan and Malaysian ancestry, who actually worked briefly in the Idi Amin regime before getting out in 1973. He wrote a novel about Amin, called The General is Up, that sounds pretty interesting. According to the Wikipedia entry on him, Nazareth now teaches at the University of Iowa!
Finally, Desai mentioned a writer named Yusuf Dawood, who has also written about the mass exodus of Indians from Uganda in a novel called Return to Paradise.
Has anyone read either Yusuf Dawood or Peter Nazareth?
* * *
At MLA itself I had some professional obligations to attend to, so I missed several panels I would have liked to be at. For instance, I heard that the panel with Richard Serrano, Francoise Lionnet, Simon Gikandi, and Ali Behdad was quite controversial. Richard Serrano has written a book called Against the Postcolonial, where he argues that the narrative of decolonization that dominates in postcolonial studies doesn't really fit the French/Francophone model (see the description here).
The problem at this particular panel, apparently, was that the MLA decided to match up Serrano with the very individuals whose work he criticizes in his book! Normally that should make for a lively discussion, but from the report I heard of the panel the tone of the conversation less than amicable.
* * *
I myself gave a talk on blogging, authorship, and the public sphere at a panel with Michael Berube and Rita Felski on Thursday. It seemed to go ok -- my argument was that the blogging era has, contrary to the predictions of literary theory and despite the dire predictions of digi-skeptics like John Updike, enlarged the cultural power of the "author-function" in some ways. One of the key attributes of that expansion is blog-world's revival of the diary form, in which the figure of the author is always central. I might describe the argument in greater detail in a subsequent post, so stay tuned. For now, let me just say that I was able to work in Samuel Pepys, Susan Sontag, Kaavya Viswanathan (including a New York Times article that mentions Abhi's first post on the subject at Sepia Mutiny), PlagiarismToday, Lionel Trilling, and Jurgen Habermas.
Because I was sitting between two very well-known people, the panel was given a good time-slot, located in a "ballroom," and nearly all the seats (to my eye) were full. Somewhere between 100 and 200 people? (If any of you reading this right now were in attendance, I would welcome any feedback or criticism on the talk)
* * *
On Friday I went to an engaging panel on contemporary Arabic "War Narratives." I didn't expect that blogging would be a topic from the paper titles, but one of the panelists, Carol Fadda-Corney, in light of the war in Lebanon this past summer, decided she needed to change her paper from her original topic. Fadda-Corney talked about the way in which Lebanese bloggers, many of whom are archived now at Electronic Lebanon, created a sense of immediacy and widespread awareness of the situation "on the ground" in Beirut during the Israeli siege of the city through their posts. Fadda-Corney contrasted blogs to literary representations of war, which especially in the Arabic context tend to be somewhat lyrical and abstract (Fadda-Corney didn't mention it, but one thinks of Hanan al-Shaykh's Beirut Blues as suffering from a serious case of "abstractitis").
War blogs give a sense of war that is immediate and raw -- and there can be great power in that, even if not everything that is written on a blog under such circumstances remains meaningful in the long run. Fadda-Corney quoted extensively from "Salti Dispatches from Lebanon", a blog that actually evidenced a serious literary sensibility.
Another good paper on the same panel was by Nouri Gana, from the University of Michigan. Gana talked about the anxiety over aestheticizing war as expressed by some very famous Arab poets, Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis. Every time I hear a translation of one of these poets' work, I find myself wishing I knew Arabic. Here's a few lines of a 1971 poem by Adonis quoted at Wikipedia (this was not in Nouri Gana's talk):
* * *
I was thrilled to see Ngugi w'a Thiong'o read from his new novel, The Wizard of the Crow on Friday evening. Parody is one of the best weapons with which to battle the sickening corruption of postcolonial dictatorships, and Ngugi wields it with ferocity and charm. I'm looking forward to getting the book.
* * *
I didn't get to do quite as much socializing as I have at previous MLAs, mainly because it was in Philly and I was staying home (=come home on SEPTA & have dinner at a normal hour) rather than at a hotel (=hang out w/grad school buddies until late). But I did get to see many old friends at the Duke party, have coffee with Scott McLemee, and chill with the Valve crew (including of course John Holbo and Scott Eric Kaufmann) at SoleFood Thursday night. There I also had the privilege of meeting the famous BitchPhD in person, though I had to miss her talk at the "other" bloggers' panel. I also met a blogger I hadn't heard of earlier, Amanda of Household Opera (she has a nice recap of her MLA experience here), and Chuck Tryon, a blogger I have known (virtually) for a long time. Nice to meet all of you.
[Update: At least one person has blogged about the "other" bloggers' panel already: "Not of General Interest"]
* * *
And that's about all from my end -- busy week!
* * *
The highlight of the part of the SALA conference I was able to attend was Gaurav Desai's solid keynote. Unlike many keynote addresses, which tend to be wide-ranging and thin, Gaurav's talk was closely focused on just one topic: the literary history of South Asians in East Africa. I won't say much here about Gaurav's actual thesis -- look for his upcoming book, which is entirely dedicated to the Indo-Africans -- and stick to just mentioning some of the names he mentioned. While Gaurav did make brief reference to some famous Indian Ugandan exiles, like M.G. Vassanji, most of his talk was focused on lesser-known figures. He also gave some helpful bibliographic leads for others interested in the topic (he mentioned, for instance, Robert Gregory's 1972 history of "India and East Africa," as well as Cynthia Salvadori's We Came in Dhows, which is actually quoted on some Sikh websites for the background on East African Sikhs)
While commentators like Shiva Naipaul (Sir Vidia's brother) focused earlier on the distance of the Asian community from black Africans before the traumatic exodus of the early 1970s, Desai argues that there were some members of the Asian community -- especially artists, playwrights, and poets -- who were trying to envision a sense of shared culture with black Africa.
One name that came up a lot in this regard in Desai's talk was Rajat Neogy, a Ugandan of Indian descent who started a famous African magazine called Transition. Neogy's magazine was a freethinking forum for many of the major postcolonial intellectuals in the 1960s and 70s (some of them are named at Wikipedia, while others are named at the Transition website). The magazine went defunct in 1976, when Neogy was arrested by Idi Amin's henchmen, but it was revived in 1990 by Henry Louis Gates (among the early contributors to the magazine).
Another name mentioned by Desai was Peter Nazareth, a writer of Goan and Malaysian ancestry, who actually worked briefly in the Idi Amin regime before getting out in 1973. He wrote a novel about Amin, called The General is Up, that sounds pretty interesting. According to the Wikipedia entry on him, Nazareth now teaches at the University of Iowa!
Finally, Desai mentioned a writer named Yusuf Dawood, who has also written about the mass exodus of Indians from Uganda in a novel called Return to Paradise.
Has anyone read either Yusuf Dawood or Peter Nazareth?
* * *
At MLA itself I had some professional obligations to attend to, so I missed several panels I would have liked to be at. For instance, I heard that the panel with Richard Serrano, Francoise Lionnet, Simon Gikandi, and Ali Behdad was quite controversial. Richard Serrano has written a book called Against the Postcolonial, where he argues that the narrative of decolonization that dominates in postcolonial studies doesn't really fit the French/Francophone model (see the description here).
The problem at this particular panel, apparently, was that the MLA decided to match up Serrano with the very individuals whose work he criticizes in his book! Normally that should make for a lively discussion, but from the report I heard of the panel the tone of the conversation less than amicable.
* * *
I myself gave a talk on blogging, authorship, and the public sphere at a panel with Michael Berube and Rita Felski on Thursday. It seemed to go ok -- my argument was that the blogging era has, contrary to the predictions of literary theory and despite the dire predictions of digi-skeptics like John Updike, enlarged the cultural power of the "author-function" in some ways. One of the key attributes of that expansion is blog-world's revival of the diary form, in which the figure of the author is always central. I might describe the argument in greater detail in a subsequent post, so stay tuned. For now, let me just say that I was able to work in Samuel Pepys, Susan Sontag, Kaavya Viswanathan (including a New York Times article that mentions Abhi's first post on the subject at Sepia Mutiny), PlagiarismToday, Lionel Trilling, and Jurgen Habermas.
Because I was sitting between two very well-known people, the panel was given a good time-slot, located in a "ballroom," and nearly all the seats (to my eye) were full. Somewhere between 100 and 200 people? (If any of you reading this right now were in attendance, I would welcome any feedback or criticism on the talk)
* * *
On Friday I went to an engaging panel on contemporary Arabic "War Narratives." I didn't expect that blogging would be a topic from the paper titles, but one of the panelists, Carol Fadda-Corney, in light of the war in Lebanon this past summer, decided she needed to change her paper from her original topic. Fadda-Corney talked about the way in which Lebanese bloggers, many of whom are archived now at Electronic Lebanon, created a sense of immediacy and widespread awareness of the situation "on the ground" in Beirut during the Israeli siege of the city through their posts. Fadda-Corney contrasted blogs to literary representations of war, which especially in the Arabic context tend to be somewhat lyrical and abstract (Fadda-Corney didn't mention it, but one thinks of Hanan al-Shaykh's Beirut Blues as suffering from a serious case of "abstractitis").
War blogs give a sense of war that is immediate and raw -- and there can be great power in that, even if not everything that is written on a blog under such circumstances remains meaningful in the long run. Fadda-Corney quoted extensively from "Salti Dispatches from Lebanon", a blog that actually evidenced a serious literary sensibility.
Another good paper on the same panel was by Nouri Gana, from the University of Michigan. Gana talked about the anxiety over aestheticizing war as expressed by some very famous Arab poets, Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis. Every time I hear a translation of one of these poets' work, I find myself wishing I knew Arabic. Here's a few lines of a 1971 poem by Adonis quoted at Wikipedia (this was not in Nouri Gana's talk):
Picture the earth as a pear
or breast.
Between such fruits and death
survives an engineering trick:
New York,
Call it a city on four legs
heading for murder
while the drowned already moan
in the distance.
New York is a woman
holding, according to history,
a rag called liberty with one hand
and strangling the earth with the other. (link)
* * *
I was thrilled to see Ngugi w'a Thiong'o read from his new novel, The Wizard of the Crow on Friday evening. Parody is one of the best weapons with which to battle the sickening corruption of postcolonial dictatorships, and Ngugi wields it with ferocity and charm. I'm looking forward to getting the book.
* * *
I didn't get to do quite as much socializing as I have at previous MLAs, mainly because it was in Philly and I was staying home (=come home on SEPTA & have dinner at a normal hour) rather than at a hotel (=hang out w/grad school buddies until late). But I did get to see many old friends at the Duke party, have coffee with Scott McLemee, and chill with the Valve crew (including of course John Holbo and Scott Eric Kaufmann) at SoleFood Thursday night. There I also had the privilege of meeting the famous BitchPhD in person, though I had to miss her talk at the "other" bloggers' panel. I also met a blogger I hadn't heard of earlier, Amanda of Household Opera (she has a nice recap of her MLA experience here), and Chuck Tryon, a blogger I have known (virtually) for a long time. Nice to meet all of you.
[Update: At least one person has blogged about the "other" bloggers' panel already: "Not of General Interest"]
* * *
And that's about all from my end -- busy week!
Book Announcement: "Literary Secularism"
A few readers may have noticed that I added a link on the side bar to "my book, Literary Secularism" a few days ago. It's true -- my book is out, albeit only in England, and only in hardcover.
"Literary Secularism" was originally my dissertation, though I rewrote the whole thing beginning in earnest in the spring of 2004. I added some new material (chapters on secularism in Indian feminism, V.S. Naipaul, and the crisis of secularism in the post 9/11 world). And I tried to make the writing more generally readable and less densely theoretical on the whole (it's still a bit dense at some points).
I also completely rethought my thesis: earlier, I had conceived of something called "post-secularism," which I was thinking of as a historical phenomenon in parallel with "postmodernism" and "post-colonialism." But I found a lot of resistance to that term -- which sounds like it's suggesting that secularism is dead -- and I eventually dropped it. As I read philosophers and theorists like Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, and Jose Casanova, I realized two things: 1) I actually deeply believe that "secularism" as a political principle can be applied universally in the modern era of nation-states, and 2) there's something particularly literary about the way in which modern novelists deal with secularism and secularization in their works. The novel itself, in other words, is a unique mode of arguing for secularity. The latter theme, I felt, hadn't really been addressed by critics outside of a Eurocentric perspective -- so that is what I tried to do.
Now, there are many, many qualifications that could be introduced with reference to the first point (secularism as a universal concept, if not a universal practice). There are, for one thing, different secularisms -- India's is different from Great Britain's, just as the British system remains significantly different from the American one. Secularism need not mean strict "separation of church and state," but it does require some measure of institutional (procedural) separation between government from religion, as well as clear protections for religious minorities, women, dissenters, and atheists.
This is not really the time to work through all of the definitional issues on secularism. I do deal with some of the terminological questions in my first chapter, but in fact much of the material on political theory ended up getting stripped from the final version of the book.
In support of "Literary Secularism," I will be doing a series of blog posts in the spring, introducing fresh material not in the book, which will open out some of those issues. You'll find them here, as well as on the new "Literary Secularism" blog I've created especially for this purpose.
In the meanwhile, if you are an academic, I would be much obliged if you could ask your college or university library to order "Literary Secularism" from Cambridge Scholars Press.
"Literary Secularism" was originally my dissertation, though I rewrote the whole thing beginning in earnest in the spring of 2004. I added some new material (chapters on secularism in Indian feminism, V.S. Naipaul, and the crisis of secularism in the post 9/11 world). And I tried to make the writing more generally readable and less densely theoretical on the whole (it's still a bit dense at some points).
I also completely rethought my thesis: earlier, I had conceived of something called "post-secularism," which I was thinking of as a historical phenomenon in parallel with "postmodernism" and "post-colonialism." But I found a lot of resistance to that term -- which sounds like it's suggesting that secularism is dead -- and I eventually dropped it. As I read philosophers and theorists like Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, and Jose Casanova, I realized two things: 1) I actually deeply believe that "secularism" as a political principle can be applied universally in the modern era of nation-states, and 2) there's something particularly literary about the way in which modern novelists deal with secularism and secularization in their works. The novel itself, in other words, is a unique mode of arguing for secularity. The latter theme, I felt, hadn't really been addressed by critics outside of a Eurocentric perspective -- so that is what I tried to do.
Now, there are many, many qualifications that could be introduced with reference to the first point (secularism as a universal concept, if not a universal practice). There are, for one thing, different secularisms -- India's is different from Great Britain's, just as the British system remains significantly different from the American one. Secularism need not mean strict "separation of church and state," but it does require some measure of institutional (procedural) separation between government from religion, as well as clear protections for religious minorities, women, dissenters, and atheists.
This is not really the time to work through all of the definitional issues on secularism. I do deal with some of the terminological questions in my first chapter, but in fact much of the material on political theory ended up getting stripped from the final version of the book.
In support of "Literary Secularism," I will be doing a series of blog posts in the spring, introducing fresh material not in the book, which will open out some of those issues. You'll find them here, as well as on the new "Literary Secularism" blog I've created especially for this purpose.
In the meanwhile, if you are an academic, I would be much obliged if you could ask your college or university library to order "Literary Secularism" from Cambridge Scholars Press.
The Myth of Martial Races
Though I've always been proud of the Sikh tradition in military service -- particularly in the First and Second World Wars -- the fact that the British Raj designated certain ethno-religious groups as martial races makes me uneasy. And recently I've been reading a book on the Gurkha regiments, (Byron Farwell's The Gurkhas), and after working through a number of chapters I'm ready to throw out the designation entirely.
For those who are unfamiliar, the Gurkhas (or Gorkhas) come from a region of Nepal west of Kathmandu, and have been actively recruited by the British for service as mercenaries since 1815. It so happened that the British discovered the Gurkhas' military aptitude after defeating them in a series of particularly tough battles -- just as they did with the Sikhs, the Marathas, and indeed, the Zulus (all of whom would be designated "martial races"; see the full list here). Often, troops from one recently conquered region would be instrumental in defeating the next group (the Gurkhas were deployed in the Anglo-Sikh Wars, for instance).
As a side-note, though most Gurkha regiments joined the Indian army at independence, the British did retain a small number of Gurkhas for the British Army after 1947 -- and they still actively recruit them today (on a fully voluntary basis, of course). Gurkhas were deployed in the Falklands' War, in Kosovo, and are now in Afghanistan. Retired Gurkhas are also probably going to be deployed to monitor the fragile peace agreement between the Maoists and the new government of Nepal. Joining the Gurkha regiments in the British Army is considered desirable, but it's a tough gig to get: one of the physical tests in order to be accepted involves running uphill for 40 minutes with a 70 pound bag of stones strapped to your back!
The author of the book on the Gurkhas is mainly a military historian, not an anthropologist, so it's probably too much to expect to ask him to deconstruct the idea of "martial races." But it's extremely frustrating that in episode after episode Farwell seems to reiterate a few straightforward stereotypes as explaining the Gurkhas' effectiveness in battle on behalf of the British: they are simple peasants, they are hardened by life in a mountainous region, and they have a strong sense of cultural identity. The same could be said of many other ethnic groups, most of whom were not designated "martial races." So why the Gurkhas?
It seems hard to escape the conclusion that "martial race" is a convenient term created by the British to continue military recruiting patterns favorable to the progress of imperial expansionism.
The authors of the Wikipedia entry on "martial races" have stated the problems with the term quite well:
The damning parallel between the groups that were loyal during the Mutiny and those who would be designated as "Martial Races" later seems hard to escape. Though I generally try and avoid paranoid speculation, the idea of "divide and rule" also seems to be relevant here: by keeping the various ethnic regiments of the Indian army divided along linguistic or ethnic lines, they prevented them from congealing along racial (as in, brown vs. white) ones.
For better or worse, groups once designated by the British as "martial races" still tend to carry that badge with pride. But it's a dubious source of honor, and also an extremely dubious way of asserting one's manhood & masculinity. (How much violence against women has been perpetrated in the service of the myth of Jat or Pathan/Pashtun martial masculinity?) I think it would be better if we just threw out all those old myths, spattered as they are with the blood of wars of subjugation.
For those who are unfamiliar, the Gurkhas (or Gorkhas) come from a region of Nepal west of Kathmandu, and have been actively recruited by the British for service as mercenaries since 1815. It so happened that the British discovered the Gurkhas' military aptitude after defeating them in a series of particularly tough battles -- just as they did with the Sikhs, the Marathas, and indeed, the Zulus (all of whom would be designated "martial races"; see the full list here). Often, troops from one recently conquered region would be instrumental in defeating the next group (the Gurkhas were deployed in the Anglo-Sikh Wars, for instance).
As a side-note, though most Gurkha regiments joined the Indian army at independence, the British did retain a small number of Gurkhas for the British Army after 1947 -- and they still actively recruit them today (on a fully voluntary basis, of course). Gurkhas were deployed in the Falklands' War, in Kosovo, and are now in Afghanistan. Retired Gurkhas are also probably going to be deployed to monitor the fragile peace agreement between the Maoists and the new government of Nepal. Joining the Gurkha regiments in the British Army is considered desirable, but it's a tough gig to get: one of the physical tests in order to be accepted involves running uphill for 40 minutes with a 70 pound bag of stones strapped to your back!
The author of the book on the Gurkhas is mainly a military historian, not an anthropologist, so it's probably too much to expect to ask him to deconstruct the idea of "martial races." But it's extremely frustrating that in episode after episode Farwell seems to reiterate a few straightforward stereotypes as explaining the Gurkhas' effectiveness in battle on behalf of the British: they are simple peasants, they are hardened by life in a mountainous region, and they have a strong sense of cultural identity. The same could be said of many other ethnic groups, most of whom were not designated "martial races." So why the Gurkhas?
It seems hard to escape the conclusion that "martial race" is a convenient term created by the British to continue military recruiting patterns favorable to the progress of imperial expansionism.
The authors of the Wikipedia entry on "martial races" have stated the problems with the term quite well:
Martial Race was a designation created by officials of British India. The British officials described these races as naturally warlike and aggressive in battle, and to possess qualities like courage, loyalty, self sufficiency, physical strength, resilience, orderliness, hard working, fighting tenacity and Military tactics. The British recruited heavily from these Martial Races for service in the colonial army. This doctrine of martial races postulated that the ability and desire of the soldier was inherited and that most Indians, with the exception of the specified castes, did not have the requisite genes that would make them warriors. Critics of this theory state that the Indian rebellion of 1857 may have played a role in reinforcing the British belief in Martial races. During this event some Indian troops (known as "Sepoys"), particularly in Bengal, mutinied, but the "loyal" Sikhs, Punjabis, Dogras, Gurkas, Garhwalis and Pakhtuns (Pathans) did not join the mutiny and fought on the side of the British Army. From then on, this theory was used to the hilt to accelerate recruitment from among these races, whilst discouraging enlistment of "disloyal" Bengalis and high-caste Hindus who had sided with the rebel army during the war.
The geography and culture of these martial races had common marks, such as hilly and mountainous terrain, a basis as hunting or agricultural societies, and a history of conflict, whether internally or with external groups. A case in point are the Gurkhas, who challenged British imperial expansion and gained the respect of their enemies for their fighting prowess and tenacity, thus earning them their reputation and their continued employment in the British Army. Some authors like Heather Streets rebuff this Martial Races Ideology stating that the military authorities puffed up the images of the martial soldiers by writing regimental histories, and by extolling the kilted Scots, kukri-wielding Gurkhas and turbaned Sikhs in numerous paintings. The Martial Race theory has also been described as a clever British effort to divide and rule the people of India for their own political ends." (link)
The damning parallel between the groups that were loyal during the Mutiny and those who would be designated as "Martial Races" later seems hard to escape. Though I generally try and avoid paranoid speculation, the idea of "divide and rule" also seems to be relevant here: by keeping the various ethnic regiments of the Indian army divided along linguistic or ethnic lines, they prevented them from congealing along racial (as in, brown vs. white) ones.
For better or worse, groups once designated by the British as "martial races" still tend to carry that badge with pride. But it's a dubious source of honor, and also an extremely dubious way of asserting one's manhood & masculinity. (How much violence against women has been perpetrated in the service of the myth of Jat or Pathan/Pashtun martial masculinity?) I think it would be better if we just threw out all those old myths, spattered as they are with the blood of wars of subjugation.
A Minor Quibble (Wyatt Mason on Narayan)
I first read this Wyatt Mason piece on R.K. Narayan more than a week ago, and I didn't really have anything to say about it initially. On the whole, it's a very helpful review essay -- a nice balance of interesting quotes from different Narayan novels, as well as biographical and contextual information. The anecdote about Graham Greene is especially interesting -- Narayan's experience fits the pattern experienced by several other colonial writers from before independence: they all needed patronage from established British writers. Tagore would never have gone as far as he did without Yeats's enthusiastic support, and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable would likely not have been as influential without E.M. Forster's preface.
Hopefully, Mason's essay might encourage people to go out and discover Narayan all over again, especially now that several of his major novels have been reissued with new prefaces by contemporary writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Pankaj Mishra.
But after a reader (thanks, Madhu) prompted me on Mason's essay, it occurred to me that there is one small troubling bit, which might not be so small, depending on how we read it. It's the very last paragraph of the essay:
The point about the non-development of Narayan's characters sounds right to me. But the part I find fishy is Mason's interpretation of Narayan's obsession with fate as the expression of an "Eastern existential perspective." In fact, Narayan's own personal experience of the loss of his young wife -- whom he had married against his family's wishes and against the advice of a Hindu astrologer -- might be the real culprit for his view on the impossibility of changing one's destiny. It is "Eastern" and it is "existential," but when Mason calls it "Eastern existential," he generalizes (to the cultural level) an attribute of Narayan's writing that he has already explained as a result of personal experience. Are there any Indian writers besides Narayan who share his approach to character and fate? If not, it might be more accurate to simply describe the particular comic sense of immobility as "Narayanesque."
As I said, it might just be a quibble. I still much prefer this essay to most other general accounts of Narayan I've seen, including especially Naipaul's.
Hopefully, Mason's essay might encourage people to go out and discover Narayan all over again, especially now that several of his major novels have been reissued with new prefaces by contemporary writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Pankaj Mishra.
But after a reader (thanks, Madhu) prompted me on Mason's essay, it occurred to me that there is one small troubling bit, which might not be so small, depending on how we read it. It's the very last paragraph of the essay:
It is through this idea—that a self is not a private entity but a fixed, public one—that Narayan’s novels break most meaningfully with those of the West and establish their own tradition. Their significance derives less from the mere fact of being some of the first important Indian fiction in English than from being the first English writing to infuse the novel with an Eastern existential perspective. Though crammed with incident, Narayan’s novels do not—indeed, cannot—chart a progression toward the formation of character. His characters, “strangled by the contour of their land,” are doubly circumscribed: by their nation’s political fate and by the inexorable fate of Hindu cosmology. In Narayan’s world, no less than in his lived life, we do not become; rather, we become aware of that which, for good or ill, we cannot help being. Through the novel, a form long used to show how things change, Narayan mapped the movements of unchanging things. (link)
The point about the non-development of Narayan's characters sounds right to me. But the part I find fishy is Mason's interpretation of Narayan's obsession with fate as the expression of an "Eastern existential perspective." In fact, Narayan's own personal experience of the loss of his young wife -- whom he had married against his family's wishes and against the advice of a Hindu astrologer -- might be the real culprit for his view on the impossibility of changing one's destiny. It is "Eastern" and it is "existential," but when Mason calls it "Eastern existential," he generalizes (to the cultural level) an attribute of Narayan's writing that he has already explained as a result of personal experience. Are there any Indian writers besides Narayan who share his approach to character and fate? If not, it might be more accurate to simply describe the particular comic sense of immobility as "Narayanesque."
As I said, it might just be a quibble. I still much prefer this essay to most other general accounts of Narayan I've seen, including especially Naipaul's.
Absolute Borders: Partition, Pluralism, and Indian Nationalism
Via Desipundit, I caught a link to a post by Qalandar on a recent article in the Calcutta Telegraph by Mukul Kesavan.
For those who don't know, Mukul Kesavan is a pretty accomplished writer -- the author of Looking Through Glass, and an interesting little monograph that came out a few years ago, called Secular Common-Sense.
His latest column is about the lingering consequences of the experience of Partition on the thinking of the Indian government regarding its borders. Kesavan is pointing to a kind of paradox in the constitution of the Indian state -- it was founded on a principle of pluralism across religious, linguistic, ethnic, and caste differences. But once it was defined as such and those borders were consecrated, if you will, in blood during the Partition, the possibility of allowing one or another territory to secede on the basis of ethnic or religious difference became an impossibility. If you do that, the whole justification for holding the rest of the country together could potentially collapse.
Qalandar raises some questions about the rhetorical stance taken by Kesavan in his piece, and Mukul Kesavan himself actually shows up in the comments to clarify some things. In fact, it's in the comments to the post that he gives what might be the clearest account of his position:
It's an interesting thesis -- one could argue that it might not hold in the case of India's claims to the Kashmir valley (too much strategic and symbolic value to ever think of letting go). But the northeastern provinces seem much more marginal. And just to reiterate in case anyone misses it: Kesavan isn't saying that India should just let go of any territory (indeed, he comes out pretty clearly as saying it shouldn't). Rather, Kesavan is trying to explain why India has held on -- and will continue to hold on -- so tenaciously.
There's more to it, but I think I'll leave it to readers to explore some of the other interesting points made in this discussion, by Qalandar, Mukul Kesavan, and Nitin Pai.
For those who don't know, Mukul Kesavan is a pretty accomplished writer -- the author of Looking Through Glass, and an interesting little monograph that came out a few years ago, called Secular Common-Sense.
His latest column is about the lingering consequences of the experience of Partition on the thinking of the Indian government regarding its borders. Kesavan is pointing to a kind of paradox in the constitution of the Indian state -- it was founded on a principle of pluralism across religious, linguistic, ethnic, and caste differences. But once it was defined as such and those borders were consecrated, if you will, in blood during the Partition, the possibility of allowing one or another territory to secede on the basis of ethnic or religious difference became an impossibility. If you do that, the whole justification for holding the rest of the country together could potentially collapse.
Qalandar raises some questions about the rhetorical stance taken by Kesavan in his piece, and Mukul Kesavan himself actually shows up in the comments to clarify some things. In fact, it's in the comments to the post that he gives what might be the clearest account of his position:
Pakistan claims Kashmir because as a Muslim state carved out of British India it thinks it has a right to Kashmir as a Muslim majority province. Israel, as a Jewish state, wants to annex large settler blocs of Jews on the West Bank to Israel and in return would be happy to give away bits of Israel that have concentrations of Arabs. Other nations dispute or defend territory on the ground of language. Indian nationalism refused the temptation of a single collective identity; as a result, the republic it created had no way of discriminating between borders that were negotiable and those that were written in stone. Not only were its borders were colonial and therefore arbitrary, being an ideologically pluralist state it couldn't claim or trade away disputed borderlands going by the nature of the populations settled there. So it decided that every inch of its border was sacred and what it had, it held. (link)
It's an interesting thesis -- one could argue that it might not hold in the case of India's claims to the Kashmir valley (too much strategic and symbolic value to ever think of letting go). But the northeastern provinces seem much more marginal. And just to reiterate in case anyone misses it: Kesavan isn't saying that India should just let go of any territory (indeed, he comes out pretty clearly as saying it shouldn't). Rather, Kesavan is trying to explain why India has held on -- and will continue to hold on -- so tenaciously.
There's more to it, but I think I'll leave it to readers to explore some of the other interesting points made in this discussion, by Qalandar, Mukul Kesavan, and Nitin Pai.
The Ferberizers vs. the Bleeding Hearts
We're more bleeding hearts than Ferberizers, though apparently both methods of getting babies to sleep are equally effective, as long as they're used consistently.
Hm, these "teach me how to get my baby to sleep classes" sound great, though I'm not sure we would actually ever go.
Meanwhile, I'm interested to know there is a whole sub-field of medicine devoted just to sleep -- sleep medicine.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the easiest option is preventing sleep problems in the first place, through simple parent education, whether one-on-one training, group classes or booklets. Such programs typically encourage parents to have a peaceful, consistent evening routine in which children are placed in bed “drowsy but awake” to help them develop independent sleep skills. Three well-designed randomized trials have found that the babies of parents who had such training slept significantly better than those whose parents did not. (link)
Hm, these "teach me how to get my baby to sleep classes" sound great, though I'm not sure we would actually ever go.
Meanwhile, I'm interested to know there is a whole sub-field of medicine devoted just to sleep -- sleep medicine.
Spam, Like Sin, Is Constantly Renewed (and "Digital Maoism")
The best thing I've read today is this blog post at Short Schrift:
Brilliant!
I found it accidentally while surfing for bootleg blog posts of the latest Stanley Fish column (on "career-ending gaffes"). Fish's column (found it) turns out to be not too terribly exciting, but along the way I found this blog post on the changing status of Authorship at Snarkmarket, which links to this article in Forbes on the future of the book in the age of network technology and digitization. According to Ben Vershbow, we are headed for an era of "network books," collective, Wikified editing, and "crowdsource" annotations. But it isn't necessarily going to be an era where authorship is entirely abolished. Arguably, authors are going to be more important than ever as information gets more and more confusing -- but as navigators rather than as "originators."
It's a step short of "Digital Maoism," a concept which was defined here and discussed in this New York Times article.
"All messages marked spam have been deleted forever."
There's something about the balance and weight of it, that just feels right. Not just techno-speak. It tells the truth.
On the other hand, it's unexpectedly funny. The purported finality is absurd. If your email account is anything like mine, you're going to have to delete all messages marked spam "forever" in about five minutes. (And indeed, I've got more spam in my box since I began typing.) You could take the "forever" not as literal truth (that deleted spam messages are unrecoverable -- is this true? Where do they go?) but as ironic commentary on our deepest desires - that is, our deepest email desires - that we be done, once and for all, with messages we will not read, that we no longer wish to receive. We want spam to be deleted forever -- like a theological salvation, we want to be delivered from spam -- yet spam, like sin, is constantly renewed, something from which we find only momentary relief, if any at all. (link)
Brilliant!
I found it accidentally while surfing for bootleg blog posts of the latest Stanley Fish column (on "career-ending gaffes"). Fish's column (found it) turns out to be not too terribly exciting, but along the way I found this blog post on the changing status of Authorship at Snarkmarket, which links to this article in Forbes on the future of the book in the age of network technology and digitization. According to Ben Vershbow, we are headed for an era of "network books," collective, Wikified editing, and "crowdsource" annotations. But it isn't necessarily going to be an era where authorship is entirely abolished. Arguably, authors are going to be more important than ever as information gets more and more confusing -- but as navigators rather than as "originators."
It's a step short of "Digital Maoism," a concept which was defined here and discussed in this New York Times article.
Hopes for Peace in Nepal
Since the big changes occurred in Nepal this past summer, the longstanding conflict there between Maoist insurgents and the government has ceased, as a "Comprehensive Peace Agreement" (CPA) has been signed. The Maoists have agreed to lay down arms and stay in camps where they will be monitored by international observers. The system they've come up to ensure both parties abide by the agreement seems a little far-fetched, but perhaps workable:
This seems like an awfully fragile system. Though Nepal's 10 year old conflict is a little different from civil conflicts in other parts of the world -- as I understand it, it's not rooted in ethnic differences, so it may be easier to heal -- it seems hard to imagine this method working for very long. Will the symbolic deposition of the King and the advent of a permanent democratic government be enough of a change to bring the country back together after 10 years of civil war?
In the short run, ironically, the Maoists have lots of new recruits hanging around at the new camps. But it's unclear whether the new kids are there because they support the ideology, or because they hope the newly legitimized Maoists might have work for them:
Meanwhile, many Royalists loyal to King Gyanendra have begun buying property in places like India and Singapore. A major garment factory in Kathmandu has shut down for reasons that seem linked to the changes. And there have even been some protests against the Maoists in the Kathmandu Valley, who seem more powerful than ever at this point.
Under a novel agreement with the government and the United Nations, they are to deposit their weapons in padlocked containers at each of the cantonments like this one. They will hold the keys, but their gun closets will be closely watched. Floodlights will shine each night. Surveillance cameras and burglar alarms will be installed.
For the sake of at least symbolic reciprocity, the Nepalese Army has promised to keep an equal number of its soldiers in their barracks.
An initial team of 35 United Nations monitors is expected to trickle in by the end of the year to oversee the Maoist and the army barracks alike, followed by an assessment team to determine the final size of the United Nations mission. (link)
This seems like an awfully fragile system. Though Nepal's 10 year old conflict is a little different from civil conflicts in other parts of the world -- as I understand it, it's not rooted in ethnic differences, so it may be easier to heal -- it seems hard to imagine this method working for very long. Will the symbolic deposition of the King and the advent of a permanent democratic government be enough of a change to bring the country back together after 10 years of civil war?
In the short run, ironically, the Maoists have lots of new recruits hanging around at the new camps. But it's unclear whether the new kids are there because they support the ideology, or because they hope the newly legitimized Maoists might have work for them:
Up the road in the village, among the old men sitting and soaking in the last of the day’s sun, the question of new recruits inspired churlish laughter. Of course these are new recruits, they said, and you can easily tell them from the old-timers. The new ones know nothing, one old man said. The new ones cannot tell the difference between where to defecate and where to bathe, another said. That inspired howls of laughter.
The troops who have gathered here for now rely on the hospitality of the local people. The old man, Ananda Gyawali, introduced one 19-year-old, Krishna Acharya, as a distant relative. The young man is illiterate and came a couple of weeks ago from a village far away to throw his lot in with the Maoists. He claimed to have joined the rebels a year ago.
The boy came only because he thought the Maoists would give him a job, he said, adding, “Poverty is to blame for this.” (link)
Meanwhile, many Royalists loyal to King Gyanendra have begun buying property in places like India and Singapore. A major garment factory in Kathmandu has shut down for reasons that seem linked to the changes. And there have even been some protests against the Maoists in the Kathmandu Valley, who seem more powerful than ever at this point.
Pamuk's Nobel Lecture: Shades of Naipaul
A translation of Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Prize lecture has been posted at the Nobelprize.org website -- and it's pretty good. If you're one of the (many) people out there who's a bit skeptical about Pamuk, or haven't had a chance to read his stuff, the speech might be an encouragement.
The speech actually reminds me a lot of Naipaul in some places -- especially as Pamuk talks about his youthful anxiety about being from what was seen as a marginal, provincial place for a writer. There are also shades of Naipaul in Pamuk's way of meditating on his father's interest in literature and writing. Like Naipaul, Pamuk's father had literary pretentions, and indeed, the frame for the speech is Pamuk's consideration of the briefcase in which his father kept his notebooks.
Near the beginning of the speech, there is a kind of writers' manifesto, which has a nice rhythm to it in Maureen Freely's translation:
There is also a passage where Pamuk expresses concerns quite similar to those dealt with by postcolonial writers in the Anglophone tradition. Turkey can't be thought of as "postcolonial," but in the following paragraph Pamuk describes anxieties that many "poco" writers -- Naipaul probably chief among them -- have also expressed:
As they say, read the whole thing.
The speech actually reminds me a lot of Naipaul in some places -- especially as Pamuk talks about his youthful anxiety about being from what was seen as a marginal, provincial place for a writer. There are also shades of Naipaul in Pamuk's way of meditating on his father's interest in literature and writing. Like Naipaul, Pamuk's father had literary pretentions, and indeed, the frame for the speech is Pamuk's consideration of the briefcase in which his father kept his notebooks.
Near the beginning of the speech, there is a kind of writers' manifesto, which has a nice rhythm to it in Maureen Freely's translation:
A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man – or this woman – may use a typewriter, profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I have done for 30 years. As he writes, he can drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time he may rise from his table to look out through the window at the children playing in the street, and, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or he can gaze out at a black wall. He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.
There is also a passage where Pamuk expresses concerns quite similar to those dealt with by postcolonial writers in the Anglophone tradition. Turkey can't be thought of as "postcolonial," but in the following paragraph Pamuk describes anxieties that many "poco" writers -- Naipaul probably chief among them -- have also expressed:
As for my place in the world – in life, as in literature, my basic feeling was that I was 'not in the centre'. In the centre of the world, there was a life richer and more exciting than our own, and with all of Istanbul, all of Turkey, I was outside it. Today I think that I share this feeling with most people in the world. In the same way, there was a world literature, and its centre, too, was very far away from me. Actually what I had in mind was Western, not world literature, and we Turks were outside it. My father's library was evidence of this. At one end, there were Istanbul's books – our literature, our local world, in all its beloved detail – and at the other end were the books from this other, Western, world, to which our own bore no resemblance, to which our lack of resemblance gave us both pain and hope. To write, to read, was like leaving one world to find consolation in the other world's otherness, the strange and the wondrous. I felt that my father had read novels to escape his life and flee to the West – just as I would do later. Or it seemed to me that books in those days were things we picked up to escape our own culture, which we found so lacking. It wasn't just by reading that we left our Istanbul lives to travel West – it was by writing, too. To fill those notebooks of his, my father had gone to Paris, shut himself up in his room, and then brought his writings back to Turkey. As I gazed at my father's suitcase, it seemed to me that this was what was causing me disquiet. After working in a room for 25 years to survive as a writer in Turkey, it galled me to see my father hide his deep thoughts inside this suitcase, to act as if writing was work that had to be done in secret, far from the eyes of society, the state, the people. Perhaps this was the main reason why I felt angry at my father for not taking literature as seriously as I did.
As they say, read the whole thing.
Nabokov: Butterflies, Darwin, Mimesis
From Nabokov's Speak, Memory:
"The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things. Consider the imitation of oozing poison by bubblelike macules on a wing (complete with pseudo-refraction) or by glossy yellow knobs on a chrysalis ("Don't eat me--I have already been squashed, sampled and rejected"). Consider the tricks of an acrobatic caterpillar (of the Lobster Moth) which in infancy looks like bird's dung, but after molting develops scrabbly hymenopteroid appendages and baroque characteristics, allowing the extraordinary fellow to play two parts at once (like the actor in Oriental shows who becomes a pair of intertwisted wrestlers): that of a writhing larva and that of a big ant seemingly harrowing it. When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp in shape and color, it also walks and moves its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike manner. When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. "Natural Selection," in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of "the struggle for life" when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator's power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception."
My students, I was happy to see, were a little shocked that someone with Nabokov's way of seeing things would say something that might even remotely be construed as Intelligent Design-ish. And indeed, Darwinian natural selection, as I understand it, does have a fine explanation for the "miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior": any mutant variety that doesn't exhibit a perfect imitation is going to get eaten. And if you have enough random-pattern butterflies getting eaten over time, eventually a strain that has a slightly better design is going to come around and not get eaten.
I tried to deflect the conversation onto his real substantive point here, which is that for Nabokov art requires a kind of heroic, almost obsessive attention to mimesis. You put way more effort into representing the world in your art than your predator (or reader) is likely to ever notice. The art comes from the excess, which is, like the butterfly that looks like a leaf with "grub-bored holes," also always in some sense deceptive ("an intricate enchantment and deception"). If art is both mimetic and deceptive, perhaps Nabokov is trying to say that mimesis itself is always deceptive. You make a butterfly that looks amazingly like a leaf, but you don't attempt to clone the genetic structure of the leaf itself. Indeed, in some sense you don't care about the leaf per se (i.e., reality) at all.
Munnabhai beats the rap, mostly
Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt (star of the Munnabhai movies) has been acquitted on the terrorism charge that's been on his head since 1993. The judge did find him guilty of illegal possession of arms, but it appears that charge is much less of a concern: though he may still do years of prison time, according to the New York Times, Dutt's family and friends are celebrating.
Some background on the case is available at Wikipedia:
Admittedly, the Wikipedia article is a bit slanted towards Dutt here, as it presumes that Dutt's purpose in buying a weapon was self-defense. But the problem with this interpretation is Dutt's supplier, Abu Salem, a notorious terrorist seen as one of the key organizers of the terrible 1993 blasts in Bombay. While it's fair to imagine that a half-Muslim actor might want protection following some nasty communal riots (December 1992-January 1993), it's also fair to speculate that he knew Abu Salem was up to something unsavory by the spring of 2003. Even if Sanjay Dutt wasn't actively involved in the bombings that took place in March of 1993, isn't it possible he knew something about the plans given his association with Abu Salem?
I guess I lean towards Dutt a bit in this case. While I do find Abu Salem's involvement disturbing, it's hard to imagine that Dutt would have been actively involved in terrorism given his famous parents and his status as an actor. That said, if this were the U.S., and Sanjay Dutt had bought an AK-56 rifle from, say, Mohammed Atta, he would probably be permanently locked up in Guantanamo Bay. (Sometimes, the Indian legal system seems more rational than the current American one.)
Dutt served 18 months in jail immediately following his arrest, but within a few years was back and more popular than ever in Bollywood. The 2000s have been the peak of his career, with the two superhit Munnabhai movies. As I recall from the comments to one of my earlier posts on Lage Rago Munnabhai, some people at least have been aware of the irony of an actor in a movie about "Gandhi-giri" being found guilty of possessing an assault rifle. Well, at least he has one thing in common with the Mahatma -- they both did lots of jail time.
Some background on the case is available at Wikipedia:
Mumbai was engulfed in riots as the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid complex in Ayodhya in December 1992. The resulting riots claimed hundreds of lives and it is during this time that Sanjay Dutt claims to have asked his under world friends to provide him with a fire arm for protection. He however had not conveyed to police any threats to his life.
As per the CBI case filed in a TADA court Abu Salem and his men went to Dutt's house on January 16, 1993 and gave him three AK-56 rifles, 25 hand grenades, one 9 mm pistol and cartridges. He returned two AK-56 rifles, hand grenades and cartridges to Hanif Kadawala and Samir Hingora but kept one AK-56 rifle with himself. (link)
Admittedly, the Wikipedia article is a bit slanted towards Dutt here, as it presumes that Dutt's purpose in buying a weapon was self-defense. But the problem with this interpretation is Dutt's supplier, Abu Salem, a notorious terrorist seen as one of the key organizers of the terrible 1993 blasts in Bombay. While it's fair to imagine that a half-Muslim actor might want protection following some nasty communal riots (December 1992-January 1993), it's also fair to speculate that he knew Abu Salem was up to something unsavory by the spring of 2003. Even if Sanjay Dutt wasn't actively involved in the bombings that took place in March of 1993, isn't it possible he knew something about the plans given his association with Abu Salem?
I guess I lean towards Dutt a bit in this case. While I do find Abu Salem's involvement disturbing, it's hard to imagine that Dutt would have been actively involved in terrorism given his famous parents and his status as an actor. That said, if this were the U.S., and Sanjay Dutt had bought an AK-56 rifle from, say, Mohammed Atta, he would probably be permanently locked up in Guantanamo Bay. (Sometimes, the Indian legal system seems more rational than the current American one.)
Dutt served 18 months in jail immediately following his arrest, but within a few years was back and more popular than ever in Bollywood. The 2000s have been the peak of his career, with the two superhit Munnabhai movies. As I recall from the comments to one of my earlier posts on Lage Rago Munnabhai, some people at least have been aware of the irony of an actor in a movie about "Gandhi-giri" being found guilty of possessing an assault rifle. Well, at least he has one thing in common with the Mahatma -- they both did lots of jail time.
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