The seminal event of Chandra's 45 years, by contrast, has been the transformation, beginning in the early 1990s, of India's sleepy socialist economy into a dynamic engine of internationalization and growth.
"We're living through this precarious time when great changes are happening," Chandra says. The India he grew up in felt like "a little bubble at a far distance from the rest of the world." But in the India his 7-year-old nephew has inherited, "the West as a presence is completely available every day -- and his expectations of his place in the world are very changed."
This new India is a place where the middle class is growing in size and confidence. It's also a place, as Chandra points out, where there's still "this huge mass of people who have nothing" but who can now see what they lack.
And it's a place, according to Lehigh University professor Amardeep Singh, where "the stories people want to tell" aren't so much about colonialism anymore.
Singh teaches courses with titles such as "Post-Colonial Literature in English," using texts from regions as diverse as Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean. He notes that Chandra's first novel was replete with colonial themes, but he sees "Sacred Games" as something quite different.
"I would use the phrase 'novel of globalization,' " Singh says. In "Sacred Games," he points out, the English language Chandra's upwardly mobile gangster struggles to learn is associated less with India's former colonizers than with the broader international economy that dictates its use.
Not surprisingly, the notion of a globalized Indian literature has sparked a backlash. Indian authors writing in English, especially those living overseas, have been charged by some critics with distorting Indian reality to cater to Western audiences. Chandra took some hits on this front himself, even before "Sacred Games," and was irritated enough to lash back in a Boston Review essay titled "The Cult of Authenticity."
His advice to any writer similarly attacked: "Do what it takes to get the job done. Use whatever you need. Swagger confidently through all the world, because it all belongs to you."
In the Washington Post: Vikram Chandra, and a little from me
I'm quoted in an article in this past Monday's Washington Post, on Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games:
Masud Khan, a Psychoanalyst in Turmoil
Amy Bloom has a review of a new book about an Indian psychoanalyst named Masud Khan in this weekend's New York Times. Khan was born in Lahore in 1922, and moved to England to study at Oxford around 1944. He ended up having a successful career as a psychoanalyst, publishing several well-regarded books, and training extensively with the famous British psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott. But Khan also seems to have been seriously mentally unbalanced -- among other things, he was an alcoholic, slept with several of his patients, and seems also to have become rather anti-Semitic in his old age (which is especially strange, considering his choice of profession). Bloom wants Linda Hopkins's new biography of Khan to directly criticize him for these failings, and she faults Hopkins for failing to do so:
Bloom certainly has a point when she insists that a person who was so abusive ought to be held to account -- but I gather that Hopkins's approach is to consider Khan himself as a patient, and as such, she wants to consider all the different aspects of his life symptomatically, which means one witholds judgment. Since it's impossible to decide where to stand simply from reading the review (and I haven't had a chance to read the book itself yet), I poked around and found some interesting articles relating to Masud Khan online. Masud Khan may well be the worst psychoanalyst ever, but perhaps that is itself kind of interesting. For those who are critical of psychoanalysis as a technique (i.e., as "pseudo-science"), there's ample material here; even Winnicott comes off badly. But ironically, Khan is equally intriguing for those who like psychoanalysis -- as he constitutes a particularly rich case study.
* * *
The best place to go online is the long article by Robert S. Boynton in the Boston Review on Khan's relationship with one of his male patients, Wynne Godley. (Yes, this is that Robert Boynton, but hear him out.) In 2001, Godley published a personal account of his bizarre experience being "treated" by Khan in the London Review of Books, and Boynton's article follows up on that revelation with a lunch interview with Godley as well as interviews with a number of others involved with British psychoanalysis. Boynton's account deepens the picture of Khan as a mess, but it also suggests that his influence on the field as a whole has not been a small one. One of the people who trained with him, Adam Phillips, is now a major voice -- someone whose books I find interesting if not always compelling:
The Boynton piece also has a great anecdote about a crazy dinner party with Masud Khan and Frank Kermode, as well as a rather priceless anecdote about Masud Khan and Jacques Lacan:
* * *
One of the things Bloom's review in the Times doesn't highlight is the question of Khan's South Asian background. Was it a factor in the rather spectacular mess Khan made of his personal life as well as his career (and often the two at once)? In the new biography, Linda Hopkins has taken a look at Khan's extensive unpublished notebooks, and seems to have come up with some revealing stories. Some long quotes from those notebooks are in an article she published in American Imago in 2004. Since the article is behind Project Muse (institutional subscribers can go here), I'll quote at length from some of the passages I thought were interesting:
You definitely get a sense of Khan's strangeness here -- but also an acute sense of the culture clash he experienced coming to an England decimated by war. He himself was from a very wealthy background. His father, Rajah Khan, was a powerful land-owner in Punjab. His mother, interestingly, was a dancing girl, who was seventeen when she became Rajah Khan's fourth wife. Clearly, there is a lot to work with if the goal is to psychoanalyze Masud Khan's strange life. (On the other hand, if he was really bipolar, as Hopkins apparently argues in the new book, the familial story is arguably irrelevant -- the best treatment is not Winicottian psychoanalysis but medication.)
* * *
It's perhaps not surprising that Khan originally came to Oxford to study literature, only to end up in psychoanalysis. In some sense the two are allied pursuits -- both literary criticism and psychoanalysis are driven by the analysis of character. Psychoanalysis attempts to define itself, with arguable success, as a "science," and literary criticism has always been closer to "art," but the guild-like structure of the two disciplines is remarkably similar.
Along those lines, here is another quote from Hopkins's 2004 article on Khan:
Here is a guy who, at age 23, saw the same version of King Lear (with Lawrence Olivier in it) twenty-seven times in a single month! How fascinating; how strange. Hopkins suggests the obsession had to do with Khan's own status in his father's household: though he was his mother's second son, and had half-brothers who were already middle-aged when he was born, his father decided, Lear-like, to bequeath everything to him. And as with the play, being selected as a favorite turned out not to be a good thing at all.
Hopkins, in her non-judgmental way, writes of this analysand only that it is “easy to assume she must be in denial about the harm done to her by Khan, but it is perhaps more honest to grope with the possibility that there may be some validity to her subjective experience.” It seems to me that it is not only his patients but his admirers, including his biographer, who may be struggling with some denial about the harm done by an alcoholic married analyst who initiated sex with female patients, encouraged affairs between patients, threatened patients who terminated treatment and abandoned those who did not meet his own emotional needs. (link)
Bloom certainly has a point when she insists that a person who was so abusive ought to be held to account -- but I gather that Hopkins's approach is to consider Khan himself as a patient, and as such, she wants to consider all the different aspects of his life symptomatically, which means one witholds judgment. Since it's impossible to decide where to stand simply from reading the review (and I haven't had a chance to read the book itself yet), I poked around and found some interesting articles relating to Masud Khan online. Masud Khan may well be the worst psychoanalyst ever, but perhaps that is itself kind of interesting. For those who are critical of psychoanalysis as a technique (i.e., as "pseudo-science"), there's ample material here; even Winnicott comes off badly. But ironically, Khan is equally intriguing for those who like psychoanalysis -- as he constitutes a particularly rich case study.
* * *
The best place to go online is the long article by Robert S. Boynton in the Boston Review on Khan's relationship with one of his male patients, Wynne Godley. (Yes, this is that Robert Boynton, but hear him out.) In 2001, Godley published a personal account of his bizarre experience being "treated" by Khan in the London Review of Books, and Boynton's article follows up on that revelation with a lunch interview with Godley as well as interviews with a number of others involved with British psychoanalysis. Boynton's account deepens the picture of Khan as a mess, but it also suggests that his influence on the field as a whole has not been a small one. One of the people who trained with him, Adam Phillips, is now a major voice -- someone whose books I find interesting if not always compelling:
I was stunned when I read Godley’s piece. Although skeptical about the scientific basis for and efficacy of psychoanalysis, I had always thought of the Winnicottian tradition that produced Khan as defined by its gentleness and empathy—much like Winnicott himself. Khan was especially popular among literary and creative people; he analyzed Christopher Bollas and Adam Phillips, analysts and prolific writers whose work explores what Phillips has called the “post-Freudian Freud,” or the “wild Freud” who champions creativity and the fully lived life over the stern “Enlightenment Freud” who prescribes rigorous interpretation and self-knowledge. I had previously written about Phillips, who, as one who was analyzed by Khan, and had authored an excellent monograph on Winnicott, clearly perceived himself as carrying on their tradition. “From Winnicott to Khan, to Bollas to Phillips, the move is toward finding and enlarging the self,” writes Linda Hopkins, a psychoanalyst who is writing Blessings and Humiliations, the first full-length biography of Khan. “The aim of the ‘new’ analysis is to help a person to feel alive, to be open to change, not to be cured of an illness. The analyst seeks to deepen and enlarge the scope of experience. It is better to be alive, real and ‘mad’ than to be living from a false self.” (link)
The Boynton piece also has a great anecdote about a crazy dinner party with Masud Khan and Frank Kermode, as well as a rather priceless anecdote about Masud Khan and Jacques Lacan:
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Khan’s behavior was that it usually went unchallenged. One reason, suggests Kermode, was Khan’s intelligence. He recalls a standing-room-only lecture by Lacan at London’s Institute Français in the mid-1960s, when the French analyst was at the height of his fame. “It was boring and went on for three hours. Finally, Masud strode up to the stage and interrupted him saying, ‘No, you’re explaining this incorrectly.’” Khan then proceeded to offer his own version of Lacanian theory while Lacan beamed with admiration. “He was obviously quite fond of Masud,” Kermode tells me. (link)
* * *
One of the things Bloom's review in the Times doesn't highlight is the question of Khan's South Asian background. Was it a factor in the rather spectacular mess Khan made of his personal life as well as his career (and often the two at once)? In the new biography, Linda Hopkins has taken a look at Khan's extensive unpublished notebooks, and seems to have come up with some revealing stories. Some long quotes from those notebooks are in an article she published in American Imago in 2004. Since the article is behind Project Muse (institutional subscribers can go here), I'll quote at length from some of the passages I thought were interesting:
I arrived at Bowlby's office, immaculately dressed. Was surprised to see how shabbily everyone was dressed. I had no idea what the war years had done to the English. I had read about the war, and my brothers had fought in it, but I had no image of what it had done to people.
I was told to go up a poky little staircase and sat in a dingy room. I was punctual, Bowlby was late. Some twenty minutes later a middle-aged, red-faced, pug-nosed man wearing a crumpled tweed suit, stained tie and a home-washed shirt poorly ironed, introduced himself as Dr. Bowlby. He rather embarrassedly told me he was busy and could I wait till l2 o'clock and then he would see me. I asked for some book to read meantime as there was nothing but newspapers in the room. He showed surprise at this request but acquiesced.
He arrived around l2:30 and I was peeved by now. He invited me to lunch. We walked out and he collected a drab and dirty raincoat en route. "We will make a dash for the restaurant, it is only round the corner," Bowlby explained. It was drizzling so I said, "Why not use my car?" "You have a car, already?" "No Sir, I have hired one." "You have a license?" "No Sir, I never drive myself." He refused my chauffeur-driven Rolls and we walked our distance. I had by this time a distinct feeling that Dr. Bowlby thought he had a lunatic on his hands.
We got into the restaurant and it was crowded. We squeezed in and sat in a corner at a table for two. A typed menu was presented where the choice was between mushroom omelette and roast duck. Bowlby asked me what I would have and I replied: "You choose, Sir. I am your guest."
The food that arrived was simply awful. I ate a few mouthfuls politely. Alongside Bowlby made the most inane sort of conversation. Quite irrelevant and meaningless, punctuated by huge and heavy silences. When coffee was served, he asked me whether I had any references because I had sent one and it was customary to have two references. I didn't quite understand and Bowlby explained ponderously that he needed the names of two persons whom he could write to and ask about me. I thought for a while and said the two people who would perhaps serve his purposes best were Field Marshal Lord Wavell, Governor General of India, and Sir Bertrand Glancy, Governor of Punjab. Bowlby shuffled awkwardly and asked: "Do they know you personally?" [End Page 485] "Yes Sir, very well indeed, and they also know the family well." There was a most uncanny atmosphere following this little conversation. (cited in Linda Hopkins, "How Masud Khan Fell Into Psycho-Analysis")
You definitely get a sense of Khan's strangeness here -- but also an acute sense of the culture clash he experienced coming to an England decimated by war. He himself was from a very wealthy background. His father, Rajah Khan, was a powerful land-owner in Punjab. His mother, interestingly, was a dancing girl, who was seventeen when she became Rajah Khan's fourth wife. Clearly, there is a lot to work with if the goal is to psychoanalyze Masud Khan's strange life. (On the other hand, if he was really bipolar, as Hopkins apparently argues in the new book, the familial story is arguably irrelevant -- the best treatment is not Winicottian psychoanalysis but medication.)
* * *
It's perhaps not surprising that Khan originally came to Oxford to study literature, only to end up in psychoanalysis. In some sense the two are allied pursuits -- both literary criticism and psychoanalysis are driven by the analysis of character. Psychoanalysis attempts to define itself, with arguable success, as a "science," and literary criticism has always been closer to "art," but the guild-like structure of the two disciplines is remarkably similar.
Along those lines, here is another quote from Hopkins's 2004 article on Khan:
Next day when I arrived at Dr. Payne's I felt both confident and relaxed. She asked me about my education and I told her I had a B.A.(Hons.) degree in Political Science and an M.A. in English Literature. She then enquired about my plans and my answer was: my family wants me to go to Oxford and do Modern Greats and after that study for Barrister-at-Law and return home and be a politician. I told her that I had no intention of going back home to become a politician as we, the Feudalists, had had our day and what was to follow was corruption, demagogy and chaos. I was looking for a profession which would enable me to earn my living anywhere in the world. I would like to go to Oxford, as I was registered there, and do Law, perhaps International Law. But first of all I would like to have a good analysis. She asked me what I meant by "a good analysis." I said I didn't quite know. She then asked me what sort of an analyst I had in mind. I told her he or she must be English, well-bred, sensitive, kind, very patient and firm and well-read in literature. She was amused. She had, she said, given my situation a lot of thought and her suggestion was I should go to Miss Ella Sharpe for analysis. That Miss Sharpe was one of their best, most sensitive and experienced training analysts. She had talked to Miss Sharpe personally last night and Miss Sharpe was willing to take me on.
She then produced a form and said, "I think you should apply to the Institute for training. I cannot promise they will accept you. You are very young. Anyhow, I shall strongly recommend you." . . . There was a happy, kind, benevolent, protective look on her face when we shook hands to part and I had not felt so safe and cared-for since my father's death.
When I reached my room I wanted to celebrate but I knew no one. Then I felt very dismal suddenly. Got up, washed, changed and went and saw King Lear again. I was to see it for twenty-seven consecutive evenings that month.
Here is a guy who, at age 23, saw the same version of King Lear (with Lawrence Olivier in it) twenty-seven times in a single month! How fascinating; how strange. Hopkins suggests the obsession had to do with Khan's own status in his father's household: though he was his mother's second son, and had half-brothers who were already middle-aged when he was born, his father decided, Lear-like, to bequeath everything to him. And as with the play, being selected as a favorite turned out not to be a good thing at all.
"Sacred Games": Two Reviewers Who Haven't Finished the Book
There seems to be something about Vikram Chandra's heavily-hyped, 900 page Bombay gangster novel, Sacred Games, that has led reviewers to publish evaluations before they've finished reading the book.
I can forgive Sven Birkerts for his essay in the Boston Globe. He writes about the publishing industry's hype machine, and how a million dollar advance and a $300,000 publicity campaign are actually pretty discouraging for a serious reader. The essay is well-written, and the paragraph Birkerts devotes to the novel itself redeems the thing:
But I was bothered by the Malcolm Jones "review" in the online Newsweek/MSNBC, where he essentially says he can't be bothered because he's too lazy (and yes, he even uses the word "lazy"). He makes the rather original claim that committing so many hours to a long book can actually dampen one's objectivity:
He might have a point here about the way in which your own investment of time can act as a kind of bribe -- though I find the implications of this kind of thinking rather distressing. Reading a work of literary fiction is not really like having a lobbyist pay for a golf trip to Scotland, is it? Jones then comes dangerously close to admitting he'd rather be watching TV:
There are lots of problems here. For one thing, I've never finished a very long book that I didn't in some way like, and I can't imagine there are many readers out there who would do so. Secondly, reading a long novel is a qualitatively different kind of experience than watching a film, and thinking of them as interchangeable experiences doesn't speak well of Jones (I hope he soon gets assigned to an easier beat). The dangers of disappointment may still be real, but the kind of imaginative pleasures and discoveries possible make the risk worth it for most readers.
I can forgive Sven Birkerts for his essay in the Boston Globe. He writes about the publishing industry's hype machine, and how a million dollar advance and a $300,000 publicity campaign are actually pretty discouraging for a serious reader. The essay is well-written, and the paragraph Birkerts devotes to the novel itself redeems the thing:
I've been reading every day, not quite finished, so the one-man jury on ultimate greatness is still out, but I can say that "Sacred Games" is moving right along. It's working. Page after page it plucks me from the here and now, from the world governed by marketing mentalities, ruled by tasks and anxieties. I really am for long stretches in some phantasmagoric, confusing, reeking, corrupt, overheated, overpopulated elsewhere, a Mumbai of the mind, with characters who surprise me with their look and sound, their twists of behavior. How strange. It's as if I've needed to go through this peculiar re-immersion to get to my turnaround, to remember -- again -- why I got into this game in the first place. It was out of love. (link)
But I was bothered by the Malcolm Jones "review" in the online Newsweek/MSNBC, where he essentially says he can't be bothered because he's too lazy (and yes, he even uses the word "lazy"). He makes the rather original claim that committing so many hours to a long book can actually dampen one's objectivity:
Book reviewers, if they’re being paid and if they’re being the least bit fair, finish the books they review. But this creates a strange, maybe unnatural, situation: the very people paid to be objective about a book are also duty bound to finish it, and believe it or not, this warps a lot of peoples’ judgment. Let’s say you read a 900-page novel and you don’t absolutely hate it. You even sort of like it. Are you going to say that? Apparently not, judging by most reviews I read. Most reviewers get invested in the books they review, one way or the other. So the books are either panned outright or praised. The praise isn’t necessarily over the top, but it is praise. The reviewer has an investment now. He or she has spent a lot of time reading this book. Can’t just say, oh, it was OK. So you wind up with positive reviews that lack something—heart, maybe? (">link)
He might have a point here about the way in which your own investment of time can act as a kind of bribe -- though I find the implications of this kind of thinking rather distressing. Reading a work of literary fiction is not really like having a lobbyist pay for a golf trip to Scotland, is it? Jones then comes dangerously close to admitting he'd rather be watching TV:
My time is precious. Your time is, too. Who has enough time in the day to do all that we want? When I go home after work, it’s triage every night. I can listen to music. Or I can play music. Or I can answer letters or write. Or I can read a book. Or watch TV. Or watch a DVD on TV. Or go out to a concert or a movie. And those would be the nights that I don’t have to clean up the kitchen, do the laundry or help with homework.
When I realized that I get paid to read and that I still don’t have time to read everything I want—in fact, it’s hard to just barely keep up—that was when I realized how up against it everyone else is. Almost no one has time to read indiscriminately for pleasure these days. You have to pick and choose and then pick and choose again, and if you choose wrong, well, there are few things more aggravating than getting well into a book and discovering that you don’t like it after all. You’ve wasted your time. Your money. And unlike a bad movie, where you brush the popcorn off your lap and forget the whole thing by the time you hit the street, a bad book just sits there on the shelf, reminding you daily what a miserable experience you had. It’s a wonder that anyone reads anything any more. (link)
There are lots of problems here. For one thing, I've never finished a very long book that I didn't in some way like, and I can't imagine there are many readers out there who would do so. Secondly, reading a long novel is a qualitatively different kind of experience than watching a film, and thinking of them as interchangeable experiences doesn't speak well of Jones (I hope he soon gets assigned to an easier beat). The dangers of disappointment may still be real, but the kind of imaginative pleasures and discoveries possible make the risk worth it for most readers.
Anthems of Resistance: Progressive Urdu Poetry
[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]
Vijay Prashad has a nice review of a new collection of Urdu poetry up at this month's issue of Himal Southasian. The book is called Anthems of Resistance, and it's edited by Ali Husain Mir and Raza Mir, two brothers from Hyderabad who now teach at universities in the U.S. (While it's not for sale in the U.S. yet, this Indian book-seller will send it to you for $7.00 USD + postage.)
Prashad's opening by itself raises some interesting questions (and memories):
This is an interesting analysis of the appeal of Ghazals and the musical Mehfil culture of to many non-Muslims. Of course, the cinematic culture (i.e., the tawaif, or courtesan film) he's referring to is now long dead, as the writers who wrote the songs and scripts of Bollywood's early Urdu films are now gone (Kaifi Azmi died in 2002). Recent films like Fanaa have temporarily revived popular interest in Shayari (the recitation of poetic couplets), but in my view it's more a gimmick than anything else. (I frankly don't know what to make of Aishwarya Rai's remake of Umrao Jaan.)
The rest of Prashad's review is about the poets themselves -- the writers of the Progressive Writers' Association -- who wrote as much about politics as they did about love. (I wrote about another PWA writer, Ismat Chughtai, here. Also, see Saadat Hasan Manto, who was not a member of the PWA as far as I know, though he did have certain things in common with them)
As their name implies, the PWA writers leaned left politically -- and not just a little left! And while the communist slant of some of this writing may not be appealing to many readers, the radical stance they took gave these writers the freedom (and will) to openly criticize the failings of the post-independence governments of India and Pakistan. Here's Sahir Ludhianvi:
And just to be clear, Anthems of Resistance also contains selections from poets critical of Pakistan's various failings. (Prashad quotes from the feminist poet Kishwar Naheed, who criticizes the Islamization initiatives of Zia-ul-Haq)
* * *
Incidentally, while Googling the word "Tawaif" for this post, I came across this review of a documentary film on "Gurias, Gossip, and Globalization," which may be of interest to readers curious about Indo-Islamic courtesan culture.
Vijay Prashad has a nice review of a new collection of Urdu poetry up at this month's issue of Himal Southasian. The book is called Anthems of Resistance, and it's edited by Ali Husain Mir and Raza Mir, two brothers from Hyderabad who now teach at universities in the U.S. (While it's not for sale in the U.S. yet, this Indian book-seller will send it to you for $7.00 USD + postage.)
Prashad's opening by itself raises some interesting questions (and memories):
In 1981, the cinema theatre near my home in Calcutta became a mehfil-e-mushaira. At the end of each show, majnoohs walked out of the darkness humming tunes and reciting ghazals. Muzaffar Ali’s Umrao Jaan allowed non-Urdu speakers to revel in the richness of Urdu culture, which most of us non-Muslims saw as exotic and attractive, yet distant. (Muslim culture would be further rendered exotic in 1982 in two films, Nikaah and Deedar-e-yaar.) These are all films of decline, where a supposedly homogenous Muslim culture is rife with problems – some easy to overcome (divorce rates), and others intractable (the demise of the kotha culture). The elegance of the language thrilled many urbane Indians, who enjoyed the patois but felt uncomfortable with the working-class and rural sections that actually spoke it. (link)
This is an interesting analysis of the appeal of Ghazals and the musical Mehfil culture of to many non-Muslims. Of course, the cinematic culture (i.e., the tawaif, or courtesan film) he's referring to is now long dead, as the writers who wrote the songs and scripts of Bollywood's early Urdu films are now gone (Kaifi Azmi died in 2002). Recent films like Fanaa have temporarily revived popular interest in Shayari (the recitation of poetic couplets), but in my view it's more a gimmick than anything else. (I frankly don't know what to make of Aishwarya Rai's remake of Umrao Jaan.)
The rest of Prashad's review is about the poets themselves -- the writers of the Progressive Writers' Association -- who wrote as much about politics as they did about love. (I wrote about another PWA writer, Ismat Chughtai, here. Also, see Saadat Hasan Manto, who was not a member of the PWA as far as I know, though he did have certain things in common with them)
As their name implies, the PWA writers leaned left politically -- and not just a little left! And while the communist slant of some of this writing may not be appealing to many readers, the radical stance they took gave these writers the freedom (and will) to openly criticize the failings of the post-independence governments of India and Pakistan. Here's Sahir Ludhianvi:
Zara mulk ke rahbaron ko bulaao
Ye kooche, ye galiyaan, ye manzar dikhaao
Jinhen naaz hai Hind par unko laao
Jinhen naaz hai Hind par voh kahaan hai?
Go, fetch the leaders of the nation
Show them these streets, these lanes, these sights
Summon them, those who are proud of India
Those who are proud of India, where are they?(link)
And just to be clear, Anthems of Resistance also contains selections from poets critical of Pakistan's various failings. (Prashad quotes from the feminist poet Kishwar Naheed, who criticizes the Islamization initiatives of Zia-ul-Haq)
* * *
Incidentally, while Googling the word "Tawaif" for this post, I came across this review of a documentary film on "Gurias, Gossip, and Globalization," which may be of interest to readers curious about Indo-Islamic courtesan culture.
An Afternoon With Yahya
[Cross-posted]
The middle of an academic's long winter break is the perfect time to be saddled with irritating errands. In this case, I had been commissioned to stay home on a Friday afternoon so a SatTV (fake name) technician could fix the problems we've been having with our Hindi-language channels.
SatTV is essentially a hive of incompetent technicians. A previous technician had come a month earlier. He spent five minutes looking around, cursed the installation guy that had preceded him, and declared there was nothing he could do. Though Yahya too would also accomplish nothing in the three hours he spent in my house, he was at least more interesting to talk to.
When he told me his name, I said, "oh, like the famous Pakistani general" (fortunately, I did not say "dictator"). He was impressed, it seemed, by my knowledge of history, and it started us on a good footing. He said he was from Sialkot, and industrial town in a Punjabi speaking area. Yahya himself was Punjabi, though to my relief he seemed perfectly happy to speak in English -- his English was confident and effective, though lacking in the grammatical niceties that come with years of English-medium schooling. To begin with, he came to the U.S. fifteen years ago, to work as a chef. Yes, a chef: he said he had studied at a culinary institute in Lahore, and then worked as an executive chef at a "five star hotel" there before coming to Philadelphia with his wife.
He said he steadily worked his way up to executive chef at some posh French and Italian restaurants in Philly itself -- I knew their names -- at which point I started to wonder whether he might not be pulling my leg. I tried drawing him out a little about his approach to cooking, and he said just enough to convince me that he wasn't entirely BSing me, but not enough for me to quite believe that he'd really been the head chef at the places he named. Eventually, he tried to open his own restaurant -- an Italian place, of all things -- but it failed ("why you got a Pakistani chef for Italian food? It don't make no sense"). He kept on laying it on: he talked about real estate investments he'd made, and described a pattern of heavy borrowing that struck me as ingenious, and perhaps a bit nuts. It was the opposite of everyone I knew from my parents' generation: instead of saving every penny, Yahya had put himself up to his ears in debt in order to make things happen financially. It sounded like he'd succeeded, though there was always the nagging question: if he's done so well with real estate, why is he here, fixing my Satellite TV?
Yahya said that since he'd left he hadn't ever gone back to Pakistan, which seemed sad, though it also made a certain kind of sense given the kinds of jobs he's had (very little paid leave). He said he's just been too busy with work, and things in Pakistan are messy. And anyway, his kids (teenagers) have absolutely no interest in going to go sit in his family's house in Sialkot for a month or two. I tried to convince him that he should take them anyways, but perhaps with a difference: take them to Pakistan as tourists, and travel to the country's most interesting places. As we talked about other ways people might stay connected to home (movies, literature, current events), I increasingly got the sense that for Yahya and his family, Pakistan is essentially in the past; the links have been allowed to wither. It made me wonder about his kids -- how could they really understand their parents without seeing where they came from?
In the end the various tests he'd been running to make our Hindi channels work properly on both TVs failed. He shrugged, and apologetically noted that, while the main satellite (standard US programming) gives a very good signal, SatTV's international channels come from a recently-acquired satellite whose signal is often a little dicey. It struck me as a good metaphor: home is a signal you can't always get. If it comes in, great, but if not, what can you do, really?
The middle of an academic's long winter break is the perfect time to be saddled with irritating errands. In this case, I had been commissioned to stay home on a Friday afternoon so a SatTV (fake name) technician could fix the problems we've been having with our Hindi-language channels.
SatTV is essentially a hive of incompetent technicians. A previous technician had come a month earlier. He spent five minutes looking around, cursed the installation guy that had preceded him, and declared there was nothing he could do. Though Yahya too would also accomplish nothing in the three hours he spent in my house, he was at least more interesting to talk to.
When he told me his name, I said, "oh, like the famous Pakistani general" (fortunately, I did not say "dictator"). He was impressed, it seemed, by my knowledge of history, and it started us on a good footing. He said he was from Sialkot, and industrial town in a Punjabi speaking area. Yahya himself was Punjabi, though to my relief he seemed perfectly happy to speak in English -- his English was confident and effective, though lacking in the grammatical niceties that come with years of English-medium schooling. To begin with, he came to the U.S. fifteen years ago, to work as a chef. Yes, a chef: he said he had studied at a culinary institute in Lahore, and then worked as an executive chef at a "five star hotel" there before coming to Philadelphia with his wife.
He said he steadily worked his way up to executive chef at some posh French and Italian restaurants in Philly itself -- I knew their names -- at which point I started to wonder whether he might not be pulling my leg. I tried drawing him out a little about his approach to cooking, and he said just enough to convince me that he wasn't entirely BSing me, but not enough for me to quite believe that he'd really been the head chef at the places he named. Eventually, he tried to open his own restaurant -- an Italian place, of all things -- but it failed ("why you got a Pakistani chef for Italian food? It don't make no sense"). He kept on laying it on: he talked about real estate investments he'd made, and described a pattern of heavy borrowing that struck me as ingenious, and perhaps a bit nuts. It was the opposite of everyone I knew from my parents' generation: instead of saving every penny, Yahya had put himself up to his ears in debt in order to make things happen financially. It sounded like he'd succeeded, though there was always the nagging question: if he's done so well with real estate, why is he here, fixing my Satellite TV?
Yahya said that since he'd left he hadn't ever gone back to Pakistan, which seemed sad, though it also made a certain kind of sense given the kinds of jobs he's had (very little paid leave). He said he's just been too busy with work, and things in Pakistan are messy. And anyway, his kids (teenagers) have absolutely no interest in going to go sit in his family's house in Sialkot for a month or two. I tried to convince him that he should take them anyways, but perhaps with a difference: take them to Pakistan as tourists, and travel to the country's most interesting places. As we talked about other ways people might stay connected to home (movies, literature, current events), I increasingly got the sense that for Yahya and his family, Pakistan is essentially in the past; the links have been allowed to wither. It made me wonder about his kids -- how could they really understand their parents without seeing where they came from?
In the end the various tests he'd been running to make our Hindi channels work properly on both TVs failed. He shrugged, and apologetically noted that, while the main satellite (standard US programming) gives a very good signal, SatTV's international channels come from a recently-acquired satellite whose signal is often a little dicey. It struck me as a good metaphor: home is a signal you can't always get. If it comes in, great, but if not, what can you do, really?
Vikram Chandra Media Onslaught
It was about a year ago that I did a short post on the Indian media's hyped approach to Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games.
Now the book has finally been released in the U.S., and the hype seems to have only grown.
New York Times review
New York Times profile
NPR
Pankaj Mishra's excellent review in the New Yorker
My mother-in-law actually brought Sacred Games for me from India a few months ago, but I let it languish. This week, prompted by a reporter's phone call, I finally picked it up. After 200 pages, I'm finding myself really drawn into the story; it's well-written, at the level of both paragraphs and chapters, and nicely structured.
Now the book has finally been released in the U.S., and the hype seems to have only grown.
New York Times review
New York Times profile
NPR
Pankaj Mishra's excellent review in the New Yorker
My mother-in-law actually brought Sacred Games for me from India a few months ago, but I let it languish. This week, prompted by a reporter's phone call, I finally picked it up. After 200 pages, I'm finding myself really drawn into the story; it's well-written, at the level of both paragraphs and chapters, and nicely structured.
Bangladesh on the Brink
It looks like Bangladesh is at a critical point politically right now. The interim President, Iajuddin Ahmed, recently declared a state of emergency, and then abruptly resigned as interim leader.
The central issue seems to be the accuracy of the country's voter rolls, which has on it the names of 13 million people who shouldn't be there -- out of a total population of 150 million. The voter rolls also exclude most minority voters, though that doesn't appear to be as big a problem politically for either party. The best summary of what is happening is probably Naeem's at Drishtipat:
The two main political parties in Bangladesh are the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which leans Islamist, and the Awami League (AL), which has been historically more secular/left (though recently they have been making overtures to some Islamist parties). The BNP is currently dominant, but the AL has been putting pressure on them to run the upcoming elections fairly, and had been threatening a boycott unless the voter rolls are corrected. Drishtipat's Naeem and others have suggested that the inability of the two parties to negotiate a way to manage elections might well lead the military to take matters into their own hands in the next couple of weeks. That isn't a good thing, but clearly things can't continue much longer as they are.
About 40 people have died thus far in the violence that has accompanied the current political standoff. I'm crossing my fingers that, however, this is resolved, that number doesn't go any higher. Do readers have suggestions for readings that might shed more light on what is happening in Dhaka right now? I'm especially curious to see 'on the ground' blog reports of what is happening, if there are any.
The central issue seems to be the accuracy of the country's voter rolls, which has on it the names of 13 million people who shouldn't be there -- out of a total population of 150 million. The voter rolls also exclude most minority voters, though that doesn't appear to be as big a problem politically for either party. The best summary of what is happening is probably Naeem's at Drishtipat:
The controversy around Jan 22 elections center around few things:
i) Voter List: Subject of raging court battles for last 2 years. BNP defied a court order to update existing voter list (created by AL in 2000), and instead created a brand new voter list. An NDI survey found 13 million extra names on the Voters List. Minority voters (esp, Hindu+CHT Pahari voters) are of course wholesale missing from this list–– par for the course. The total voter count was 93 million, a mathematical impossibility from 2001 census. In face of mounting domestic/international pressure EC finally agreed to correct the voters list, but the work was incomplete when opposition boycott began.
ii) CTG (Caretaker Government): This was a system instituted after the 1996 vote-fraud marred elections, whereby, 3 months before each election the gov’t steps down, and a CTG takes over to conduct “fair”elections. This worked in 1996 and 2001, but by 2006, surprise surprise, the CTG itself has become super-controversial. The AL alleges it is now full of BNP partisans. After a long campaign to remove a partisan candidate, the chess move was placed by Iajuddin who took over as head of CTG bypassing the normal process. Since taking power Iajuddin proved to be a horrorshow autocrat. He repeatedly bypassed and ignored his advisors in taking decisions about voter list, election date and army deployment. A month ago, 4 of his advisors quit in protest. (link)
The two main political parties in Bangladesh are the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which leans Islamist, and the Awami League (AL), which has been historically more secular/left (though recently they have been making overtures to some Islamist parties). The BNP is currently dominant, but the AL has been putting pressure on them to run the upcoming elections fairly, and had been threatening a boycott unless the voter rolls are corrected. Drishtipat's Naeem and others have suggested that the inability of the two parties to negotiate a way to manage elections might well lead the military to take matters into their own hands in the next couple of weeks. That isn't a good thing, but clearly things can't continue much longer as they are.
About 40 people have died thus far in the violence that has accompanied the current political standoff. I'm crossing my fingers that, however, this is resolved, that number doesn't go any higher. Do readers have suggestions for readings that might shed more light on what is happening in Dhaka right now? I'm especially curious to see 'on the ground' blog reports of what is happening, if there are any.
Richard Posner on Plagiarism; the Case of Yambo Ouloguem
Via the Literary Saloon, I learn that Richard Posner has a new book on plagiarism out, called The Little Book of Plagiarism. There are already some reviews, including the Louisville Courier-Journal (which includes an interesting tidbit: the University of Oregon has been accused of plagiarizing its plagiarism policy from Stanford University). The Times review, by Charles McGrath, is more thorough, partly because McGrath is also reviewing a scholarly book by Tilar Mazzeo, called Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period.
When McGrath gets into Mazzeo's understanding of plagiarism at the end of the 18th century, things start to get interesting:
In short, in the early 19th century a certain amount of borrowing was taken for granted and even allowed, as long as it was well-concealed and accompanied by fresh insights and work -- "value-added." And today, while both the law concerning plagiarism and the ethos of originality are quite different (today plagiarism is generally seen as shameful), some of the same thinking is still used, especially when there are gray areas (as in the McEwan case).
* * *
Speaking of gray areas, there are a number of them in the case of a famous plagiarist from the 1960s that I only recently learned about, the Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem.
Here's the back-story, as provided by Richard Serrano (author of a recent book called Against the Postcolonial):
After the English edition was published in 1971, an anonymous article appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, noting that certain passages in Bound to Violence appeared to plagiarize Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield. The TLS writer even noted the irony that the novel's heralded African "authenticity" was at least partly derived from the text of a British travel writer:
And shortly thereafter, it was discovered that Ouloguem had borrowed -- even more heavily -- from a French novel by Andre Schwartz-Bart, Le Dernier des justes (1959), which had, also ironically, won the same literary prize -- the Prix Renaudot. And in a manner characterisitc of plagiarism, once discovered, it seemed to spread: "citations" were soon found to half a dozen other writers, listed by Serrano as "Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, Pascal, Godard, and in the English translation, T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson."
Graham Greene filed suit, and Bound to Violence was banned in France. Ouloguem himself went back to Mali shortly after all this transpired, gave up fiction, and took up Islam. (The critic Christopher Wise visited him there in the mid-1990s, and discovered him to be somewhat disturbed; he was spouting various conspiracy theories, and refused to directly address the controvery over his work)
But here's the thing: shortly after all of this broke, Ouologuem himself claimed that the passages he took from other writers were in quotations in his original manuscript, and that those quotations were omitted by his publisher. As Christopher Wise notes, the publisher has never specifically denied this -- but it's also clear that the original manuscript of Le Devoir de violence has never been made public, which would allow Ouologuem's claim to be definitively supported. (The status of the manuscript isn't discussed in the Ouologuem scholarship I've read.)
Once one starts looking closely at some of the specific instances of plagiarism in the text, especially from the Andre Schwartz-Bart, it begins to be clear that Ouologuem wasn't just randomly grabbing nice passages for his own use -- Schwartz-Bart's book is about the experience of European Jewry from the medieval period up through the Holocaust, and many of the passages that Ouologuem appropriates are in fact tied (in Ouologuem's redployment of them) to the advent of the early (pre-European) Arab slave trade in Mali, an event that Ouologuem views as catastrophic (Holocaust-esque). Moreover, postcolonial critics like Christopher Miller and Kwame Anthony Appiah have argued that Ouologuem's other borrowings are equally strategic -- that is to say, they are used ironically, to send up European misrepresentations of Africa. As Miller puts it, "this is a novel so highly refined and perverse in its manner of lifting titles, phrases, and passages from other texts that it makes the binary system of quotation and firect narration irrelevant" (cited in Serrano, 18). And Appiah, in his defense of Ouologuem, sees Bound to Violence as specifically a rejection of the first generation of modern African novels:
Ouloguem's novel is harshly critical of African nationalism, and in fact, reserves its greatest hostility for the violence Africans committed against other Africans (though the Europeans don't get off scot-free; there is a brilliant parody of western anthropology in chapter four, which you can read online). For Appiah, this ideological critique mirrors the novel's formal disintegration -- the story is convoluted, and must be, as a refutation of the false clarity in the first generation of African novels. And this argument might even be extended to explain Ouologuem's gratuitous borrowings; plagiarism may be a way of showing contempt for the entire ethos of European/colonial writing.
Well, maybe. Though Wise, Appiah, and others are firmly committed to defending Ouologuem (while Serrano remains a bit hostile), it might be that the most intelligent position on Ouologuem would neither aim to exonerate him nor convict him all over again. There is clearly a commentary on the ideas of authorship and authenticity at play in many of the specific instances of plagiarism in his text. But there are also problems of intellectual property that have to be contended with; a decision has to be made about whether strategic or polemical borrowings such as the kind Ouologuem makes can be rendered acceptable (and one notes that the reasons given for those borrowings are adduced by critics, not by Ouologuem himself, though they are consistent with the idea that Ouologuem intended for the borrowed passages to have quotes around them). What one might study (or teach) is not just the book, but the controversy the book has generated -- Ouolgouem, and the "Ouoluguem Affair," if you will. In this light, Ouologuem, I believe, is in the plagiarism gray area after all.
* * *
Incidentally, another excerpt from Ouloguem's novel is here, and there's a 1971 interview here. Also see an article in TNR that covers much of this same ground, as well as the Yambo Ouologuem Forum, a weblog started by Ouologuem's daughter, Awa.
When McGrath gets into Mazzeo's understanding of plagiarism at the end of the 18th century, things start to get interesting:
In style and methodology, Ms. Mazzeo’s new book is an academic wheezer, a retooled dissertation perhaps, but it’s also smart and insightful, and points out that 18th-century writers took a certain amount of borrowing for granted. What mattered was whether you were sneaky about it and, even more important, whether you improved upon what you took, by weaving it seamlessly into your own text and adding some new context or insight.
Interestingly, the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally recently defended Mr. McEwan in just this way, writing, “Fiction depends on a certain value-added quality created on top of the raw material, and that McEwan has added value beyond the original will, I believe, be richly demonstrated.” In the case of “Atonement,” the principle seems inarguable, but it’s also a slippery slope. You could argue that Kaavya Viswanathan improved upon the raw material of the Megan McCafferty novel she relied on so liberally, and yet no one is rushing to her defense. (link)
In short, in the early 19th century a certain amount of borrowing was taken for granted and even allowed, as long as it was well-concealed and accompanied by fresh insights and work -- "value-added." And today, while both the law concerning plagiarism and the ethos of originality are quite different (today plagiarism is generally seen as shameful), some of the same thinking is still used, especially when there are gray areas (as in the McEwan case).
* * *
Speaking of gray areas, there are a number of them in the case of a famous plagiarist from the 1960s that I only recently learned about, the Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem.
Here's the back-story, as provided by Richard Serrano (author of a recent book called Against the Postcolonial):
In 1968 the Malian Yambo Ouloguem's novel Le Devoir de violence [English: Bound to Violence] was published by Editions du Seuil to widespread critical acclaim, culminating in the Prix Renaudot the same year. Reviewers and literary critics in the West praised the novel's "authenticity," some hailing it as the first authentic African novel ever written (as it was described on the back cover of the American edition). Matthiew Gallez, writing for Le Monde, called it the first African novel "digne de ce nom" [worthy of this name].
After the English edition was published in 1971, an anonymous article appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, noting that certain passages in Bound to Violence appeared to plagiarize Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield. The TLS writer even noted the irony that the novel's heralded African "authenticity" was at least partly derived from the text of a British travel writer:
Yambo Ouloguem said on television that he 'wrote this book in French but followed the traditional African rhythms and the spirit of the African past.' It presumably says something for Graham Greene that, even before he went to a continent that later much concerned him he was capable of effortlessly conveying its traditional rhythms. (cited in Serrano)
And shortly thereafter, it was discovered that Ouloguem had borrowed -- even more heavily -- from a French novel by Andre Schwartz-Bart, Le Dernier des justes (1959), which had, also ironically, won the same literary prize -- the Prix Renaudot. And in a manner characterisitc of plagiarism, once discovered, it seemed to spread: "citations" were soon found to half a dozen other writers, listed by Serrano as "Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, Pascal, Godard, and in the English translation, T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson."
Graham Greene filed suit, and Bound to Violence was banned in France. Ouloguem himself went back to Mali shortly after all this transpired, gave up fiction, and took up Islam. (The critic Christopher Wise visited him there in the mid-1990s, and discovered him to be somewhat disturbed; he was spouting various conspiracy theories, and refused to directly address the controvery over his work)
But here's the thing: shortly after all of this broke, Ouologuem himself claimed that the passages he took from other writers were in quotations in his original manuscript, and that those quotations were omitted by his publisher. As Christopher Wise notes, the publisher has never specifically denied this -- but it's also clear that the original manuscript of Le Devoir de violence has never been made public, which would allow Ouologuem's claim to be definitively supported. (The status of the manuscript isn't discussed in the Ouologuem scholarship I've read.)
Once one starts looking closely at some of the specific instances of plagiarism in the text, especially from the Andre Schwartz-Bart, it begins to be clear that Ouologuem wasn't just randomly grabbing nice passages for his own use -- Schwartz-Bart's book is about the experience of European Jewry from the medieval period up through the Holocaust, and many of the passages that Ouologuem appropriates are in fact tied (in Ouologuem's redployment of them) to the advent of the early (pre-European) Arab slave trade in Mali, an event that Ouologuem views as catastrophic (Holocaust-esque). Moreover, postcolonial critics like Christopher Miller and Kwame Anthony Appiah have argued that Ouologuem's other borrowings are equally strategic -- that is to say, they are used ironically, to send up European misrepresentations of Africa. As Miller puts it, "this is a novel so highly refined and perverse in its manner of lifting titles, phrases, and passages from other texts that it makes the binary system of quotation and firect narration irrelevant" (cited in Serrano, 18). And Appiah, in his defense of Ouologuem, sees Bound to Violence as specifically a rejection of the first generation of modern African novels:
[T]he first generation of modern African novels -- the generation of Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Laye's L'Enfant noir--were written in the context of notions of politics and culture dominant in the French and British university and publishing worlds in the fifties and sixties. This does not mean that they were like novels written in Western Europe at that time: for part of what was held to be obvious both by these writers and by the high culture of Europe of the day was that new literatures in new nations should be anticolonial and nationalist. These early novels seem to belong to the world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary nationalism; they are theorized as the imaginative recreation of a common cultural past that is crafted into a shared tradition by the writer. . . . The novels of this first stage are thus realist legitimations of nationalism: they authorize a 'return to traditions' while at the same time recognizing the demands of a Weberian rationalized modernity. (cited in Serrano, 23)
Ouloguem's novel is harshly critical of African nationalism, and in fact, reserves its greatest hostility for the violence Africans committed against other Africans (though the Europeans don't get off scot-free; there is a brilliant parody of western anthropology in chapter four, which you can read online). For Appiah, this ideological critique mirrors the novel's formal disintegration -- the story is convoluted, and must be, as a refutation of the false clarity in the first generation of African novels. And this argument might even be extended to explain Ouologuem's gratuitous borrowings; plagiarism may be a way of showing contempt for the entire ethos of European/colonial writing.
Well, maybe. Though Wise, Appiah, and others are firmly committed to defending Ouologuem (while Serrano remains a bit hostile), it might be that the most intelligent position on Ouologuem would neither aim to exonerate him nor convict him all over again. There is clearly a commentary on the ideas of authorship and authenticity at play in many of the specific instances of plagiarism in his text. But there are also problems of intellectual property that have to be contended with; a decision has to be made about whether strategic or polemical borrowings such as the kind Ouologuem makes can be rendered acceptable (and one notes that the reasons given for those borrowings are adduced by critics, not by Ouologuem himself, though they are consistent with the idea that Ouologuem intended for the borrowed passages to have quotes around them). What one might study (or teach) is not just the book, but the controversy the book has generated -- Ouolgouem, and the "Ouoluguem Affair," if you will. In this light, Ouologuem, I believe, is in the plagiarism gray area after all.
* * *
Incidentally, another excerpt from Ouloguem's novel is here, and there's a 1971 interview here. Also see an article in TNR that covers much of this same ground, as well as the Yambo Ouologuem Forum, a weblog started by Ouologuem's daughter, Awa.
More "Literary Secularism" stuff
I've posted a little about my book at The Valve.
(And that should be the last bit of self-promotion for now...)
(And that should be the last bit of self-promotion for now...)
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.
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