Hi Joe and Ed,

Always a pleasure to meet up with you two.

By the way, I arrived home from Manchester to find the Shoot It! postcard of the Algerian swallow on my doormat. It had been mangled, creased, and distressed on its postal journey to me. All part of the poignant materiality involved in the transition from the digital virtuality of the iPhoneograph to the physicality of the postcard. While we’re on the subject of the haunting of the digital world by physical objects, I am attaching a Polaroid I made on my iPhone using the Polarize app. It was snapped yesterday at the moment we were trying to decide where exactly we might place Zinedine Zidane in the postcolonial world. Though we were freezing in Deansgate, our thoughts were in Marseilles.

All the very best,

John

Yesterday I re-read Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” [PDF hosted by AAAARG.ORG]. The first time I read it was when I was starting to think about what it means to be post-gender, but I have to say that this re-reading was so much richer and full of interesting stuff than that first reading could ever have been. My context has been strengthened and my own thinking has become more sophisticated, as well.

One of the things that means a lot more to me now is Haraway’s concept of the cyborg as a being who does not strive toward totality of theory, or ultimate all-encompassing explanation. Something I have struggled with has been this demand placed on me, especially as a public face of trans advocacy, to come up with some nugget or essence of what it is to be a transgender person. I guess there isn’t a kernel that some fundamental “trans-ness” can be boiled down to.

And maybe that is part of what resonates so strongly with me about this anti-imperialist critique of feminism. Unlike other critiques of feminism I have read, Haraway identifies a very particular characteristic of most feminisms (and most -isms, really), especially of the radical variety. Haraway writes

The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. In that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction.

And I think this gets at something very important about what it means to me to be a transgender person — many cis people tend to read into my self-identification an attempt to resolve the apparently irreconcilable contradiction between man/woman, whereas I think putting the weight of such a reconciliation on an individual is basically harmful and sort of, well, imperialistic. It is the use of a differently (and intentionally) gendered body to negotiate a certain gendered social reality that has come to be thought of as oppressive.

I suppose ultimately what excites me the most is the idea of an ideological system that is content with its incompleteness, that being a cyborg or being post-gender (post-human) is about a kind of becoming as opposed to a being. It seems to me that this is about shifting lines of definition, not just of oneself but also of one’s society and social categories, regulations, and expectations.

In attempting to formulate a cyborg politics, Haraway asks, “what kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective — and, ironically, socialist-feminist?” The rhetoric of both socialism and feminism don’t give room for incomplete, in-process identities. An in-process identity requires an affordance for what Haraway calls “polyvocality.” I think Haraway’s critique of Marxism and feminism is on point in ths way — and why feminist theorizing about transgender bodies and identities has a historical tendency to be screwed up. I don’t think that transgender selves or any semblance of totality.

On the contrary, I tend to think if there is anything at the core of trans-ness, it is a joyful expression of “permanently unclosed” identity if I’ve ever seen it. What feminist theorists get wrong about transgender selves and transgender bodies, then, is trying to squeeze a process (i.e., a temporal metaphor) into a spatial metaphor of categorization. I think this idea needs a little working out, especially since our understanding of time is spatially mediated, but the point is you cannot make a process or even a series of relations into a category because it is ongoing, open-ended, destabilized, and generative.

Trans people are the ultimate cyborgs. “Our” postmodern identities are predicated on an acceptance of the partiality of our perspectives and selves, even as a collective. I also think that in “our” constant contemplation and manipulation of language, “we” live Haraway’s “struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication.” She even goes so far as to say that this struggle is a subversion of “the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so [subverts] the structure and modes of production of Western identity.” (emphasis mine)

What I’ve learned in the past year or so is that the struggle for postcolonial identity, transgender identity, and a complex conception of multiple overlapping identities is a matter of struggling against exactly that structure. Complex multiple identities — at play in both the theorization of the postcolonial self and the transgender self — make it impossible to theorize about a totality of people. Who, after all, are the “transgender people” of this world? Who are really the “subaltern”? Who do we intentionally or accidentally exclude by naming these things?

Haraway’s critique of feminism translates directly in this way to (my) transgender critique of feminism. Re-reading this in light of everything that I have learned in the past two or three years was a total joy. I am sure I will be revisiting many of these ideas soon, hopefully a bit more rigorously. Thanks for playing!

Spivak

THE QUESTION OF SUBALTERNITY

A two-day seminar with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak at CENDEAC (Murcia, South Eastern Spain)  

1st and 2nd December // 5 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: The Question of Subalternity

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak will lead an intensive seminar at CENDEAC on the 1st and 2nd December 2009. It will be a unique opportunity to engage with Spivak’s thought, through a detailed analysis of some of her most influential texts. 

The seminar will discuss the history and usefulness of the elusive concept of the subaltern based on questions emerging from three texts by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak available in Spanish translation: “Can the subaltern speak?”, “Subaltern Studies: deconstructing historiography” and “Displacement and the Discourse of Woman”. The two sessions will be entitled: “The Subaltern: Use and Abuse” and “Women, Subalternity, and Strategic Essentialism”.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, is University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Toronto and London and Oberlin College. She has published, Of Grammatology (translation with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie, 1976); Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (1993); In Other Worlds (1987); Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993); A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999); Death of a Discipline(2003), Other Asias (2007). And the forthcoming An Aesthetic Education in an Age of Globalization. She has also translated from Bengali, Mahasweta Devi: Imaginary Maps (1994); Breast Stories (1997), Old Women (1999); Chotti Munda and His Arrow (2002) and Ramproshad Sen’s (eighteenth century Bengali mystic): Song for Kali (2000). The texts “Translation As Culture” (2005), “Translating into English” (2005), and “Rethinking Comparativism” (2009) reflect her concern for the task of the translator.  “Righting Wrongs” (2001), and “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching” (2004) give a sense of her dedication to supplementing vanguardism. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1983) has become a controversial classic.

Information and enrolment:

Attendance is free unless a certificate is required, in which case fees will be 30€ standard, 15€ for the unemployed, full-time students and OAPs, and free to Friends of CENDEAC. 

Language of the Seminar: English with simultaneous translation into Spanish. 

CENDEAC is accessible for wheelchair users and people with diminished mobility. Whenever possible, we will strive to provide on request a transcript of papers for users with impaired hearing. Auditorium Capacity: 140 people

For more information, including assistance with travel and accommodation, please visit our website: http://www.cendeac.net or contact yhernandez[at]cendeac.net

CENDEAC
Pabellón 5
Antiguo Cuartel de Artillería
C/ Madre Elisea Oliver Molina, s/n
30002-Murcia (España)
Tel.: +34 868 914 769
Fax: +34 868 914 149

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

To view a sample of my academic writing–also current and relevant–please see a sample of my graduate work: Violence as a Symptom of Postcolonial Diaspora and Irish American Life in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman’s Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath is described by the Publishers Weekly as “a gripping narrative of the 1942 battle for the Bataan peninsula in the Philippines,” by Kirkus Reviews as an “[a]ssiduous account of the Japanese conquest of the Philippines in World War II and the fate of the American garrison there,” and finally by Richard Pyle of the Associated Press as

A new account of the Bataan Death March, in which more than 70,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war were victims of appalling barbarism, a particularly grim episode of World War II following Japan’s invasion of the Philippines.

Tears in the Darkness is marketed as “an altogether new look at World War II that exposes the myths of war and shows the extent of suffering and loss on both sides.” Bryce Christensen writes in an advanced review:

Unlike historians who have spotlighted the titans—MacArthur and Wainwright, Yamashita and Homma—who matched strategies in the Philippines in 1942, the Normans focus on the ordinary soldiers who bore the brunt of the wartime savagery.

Tears in the Darkness, a The New York Times book review enthuses:

is authoritative history. Ten years in the making, it is based on hundreds of interviews with American, Filipino and Japanese combatants. But it is also a narrative achievement. The book seamlessly blends a wide-angle view with the stories of many individual participants.

But while there is no question to the integrity, “extremely detailed and thoroughly chilling treatment” of the historical facts presented in the rigorously researched book, there is also no reason for us to promptly accept the efforts to privilege the book as “popular history’s final say on the subject.”

In the new book, the Normans’ gaze is basically focused on the ordeals faced by the Americans involved in the Death March, particularly on the figure of Ben Steele. The Christian Science Monitor comments:

The book seamlessly blends the history of the war with the stories of people like Steele who lived through it. It could just as easily and appropriately have been titled “Ben Steele’s Story.”

Striving to give the other side of the conflict, the couple also presents previously untold accounts of some Japanese soldiers “who struggle to maintain their humanity while carrying out their superiors’ inhuman commands.”

But where are the Filipinos, the “collateral damages” of conflicting American and Japanese imperialist interests?

Victorious American colonizers stand over the bodies of fallen Filipinos. More than 1.4 million Filipinos died during the Philippine-American War.

The Great Depression that struck the advanced capitalist nations in the 1930s directly led to the Second World War of the next decade as these very same nations scrambled to redivide the world among them to escape the economic crisis. The fascist powers Germany, Italy, and Japan fought against the Allied imperialist nations (US, France, UK, etc.) for the acquisition of colonies and semi-colonies that will serve as new sources of cheap labor and natural resources and new dumping grounds for their surplus products.

The Philippines was thus dragged into the war by virtue of its being a US colony.

This deafening absence is no reason to dismiss the book outright, however. While it may not be “popular history’s final say on the subject,” the book still presents one more vantage point from which insights can be taken.

A Japanese force of 43,000 seasoned troops began the invasion of the Philippine islands eight hours after the Japanese fleet attacked the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The US preparations against the looming Japanese invasion of the Philippines, however, were at best haphazard. Falling back skirmish after skirmish, the American command finally gathered the remaining US troops and Filipino volunteers in Bataan and Corregidor in January 1942. Ninety nine days later, the Normans write, “more than 76,000 Americans and Filipinos under American command laid down their arms.”

The sick, starving, and bedraggled prisoners of war were rounded up by their Japanese captors and made to walk sixty-six miles to a railhead for the trip to prison camp, a baneful walk under a broiling sun that turned into one of most notorious treks in the annals of war, the Bataan Death March. […]

As the events of 1941‒1942 passed into the hands of historians, both the battle for Bataan and the death march became symbols, the former as a modern Thermopylae, a stirring last stand, and the latter as a crucible of courage, the courage to continue on a walk to the grave.

…but when the dross of propaganda and myth is skimmed from the surface of history, what’s left, in this case, is an example of the miscarried morality and Punic politics that underlie every appeal to arms—the bad leadership, the empty promises, the kind of cruelty that crushes men’s souls. (4-5)

"KILL EVERYONE OVER TEN," American Gen. Jacob Smith ordered his troops during the Philippine-American War.

And indeed, American and Filipino troops battling side by side (but with the latter as the leading man’s sidekick of course) and sharing the experience of brutality under the Fascist Japanese military occupiers sealed the image of America as the colonized people’s benevolent big brother.

The vicious violence of subjugation (half a million Filipinos killed during the Philippine-American War and so on) was erased from the Filipino people’s collective memory primarily by way of the US colonial administration’s introduction of a public educational apparatus that molded the Filipino people into docile and passive colonial subjects.

The bond formed between the American and Filipino troops during the Second World War only furthered this erasure. This amnesia and attendant “colonial mentality” survives up to the contemporary period of neocolonialism (the indirect control of foreign imperial powers over the Filipino people’s political, economic, and cultural life). ■

Musa W. Dube writes that the Jesus of the Gospel of John must be understood in the context of Roman colonialism and modern day imperialism:

Western academic biblical readings, therefore, tend to read the Johannine texts, and other books of the Bible, as if they only refer to ancient times and having nothing to do with our current world.  The reluctance to cross the borderline of the ancient setting and to assess how the biblical texts, together with such texts as Heart of Darkness and the Aeneid, inform contemporary structures and power of the world…is one way in which biblical studies are not only colonized, but become a colonizing body of knowledge.  Biblical studies vigilantly guards the boundaries, insisting on reading biblical texts without assessing or relating them to modern and contemporary world politics.  For the most part biblical texts are read in isolation from other secular works of literature.  Whether this is intended or not, this approach maintains and perpetuates the imperialistic power of the West over non-Western and non-Christian places, peoples and cultures.

…I therefore hold that the Johannine approach to exalting Jesus to divine status, above all Jewish figures and above all other cultural figures of the world, is a colonizing ideology that is not so different from the ideology of the Aeneid and Heart of Darkness.  More importantly, John’s colonizing ideology calls upon academic readers to go beyond just expounding and explaining the construction of John’s text.  Rather, readers are called upon to decolonize its ideology and to work on readings of liberating interdependence between Christians and Jews, One-Third World and Two-Thirds World, Western and Non-Western, Christian and Non-Christian cultures, women and men, etc. (Dube, 131-132)

Source

Dube, Musa W.  “Savior of the World but not of This World: A Post-Colonial Reading of Spatial Construction in John.”  In The Postcolonial Bible edited by R.S. Sugirtharajah, 118-135.  Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998.

I found myself sitting in the basement archives of Ottawa U which is under the medical services building at Somerset E. and King Edward, in an attempt to get to know the site better, and as a response to Gruenewald’s questions: Who was here? What happened here? What needs to be conserved? What needs to be created? There are binders to consult in the archives that list possible contents of boxes going back about a hundred years. Not many listings have the word “environment” in them. “ecology” is not listed. I chose one box for the archivist to find for me; it was marked “Environment 1990″. On opening it I came face to face with the first file “SICK BUILDING SYNDROME” in block letters, a 20 page report on how putting ourselves in plastic envelopes within concrete boxes in order to reduce energy consumption is not the road to healthy environmental relationships.

The second thing I came across was this lovely invitation to a tree planting ceremony called Arbor Genesis: “Through the simple act of planting one tree on Convocation day, the 1990-91 Teacher Education graduates begin the creation of a small park of flowering trees for all to enjoy, beside Lamoureux Hall. Please plan on attending this special occasion with your family and friends.” and then there’s a quote from Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees: “But the transformation took place so gradually that it became part of the pattern without causing any astonishment”

We’ve decided to make a large nest in the tree, which I believe is this little flowering crab, with the left over plant matter from our garden. I’m told that “nido” is nest in Italian, and also means nursery school.  I like this idea of “place”, a first place we all started from.

As far as I can tell, this is the only flowering tree that was planted. What was to be the arbor was planted with maple trees all at the same time at a later date.

The children’s garden is in the very early stages of growth and has an important presence near the education building. It is exciting to think about what will be cultivated and also the concept of it being a “post-colonial” garden. I really appreciate Barbara’s commitment to this project and her attention to the agricultural practices of first peoples. I am hopeful that a new generation of teachers will  be  attentive to issues of food security, and especially culturally-appropriate food. The post-colonial garden reminds me of an initiative in Toronto, the Afri-Can Food Basket, which was an important food security movement: http://www.africanfoodbasket.com/

One of the co-founders was a fellow student at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University and he inspired so many people with his commitment to the cultivation of, and access to, healthy and culturally-appropriate food. As I left Ottawa U. I walked past an elementary school near the campus and saw kids playing beside oak trees and small bushes. It was exciting to envision them in the process of cultivating food in the school yard. Undoubtedly they would bring important skills to such initiatives, in addition to learning new ones. I think that kids also bring an important element of wonder. Holding a seed, placing it deep in the earth and knowing that food will be cultivated is a realization that must elicit wonder!

The Hodenoshone Iroquois “Three Sisters”  companion plantings  opposite the wheatfield site did not fare well behind the construction fences and piled up with materials and equipment. Still, four ears of corn erupted and numerous green beans entwined the cornstalks. The squash leaves and vines were bountiful but constantly harassed and maltreated by street sweepers, infiltrated by lunch garbage from the construction workers and had the ends of vines regularly destroyed once they grew down to street level.

I feel quite bad about their neglect and abuse; they are alive and enliven the space with their unfurled stems and uncurled twisty bits.  In an ironic “twist”, the boxes which are growing food, are located outside of what will be a new cafeteria which will no doubt not be supplied with local produce.

Gilles Deleuze

DELEUZE & RACE

Jason Adams

While the relevance of Gilles Deleuze for a materialist feminism has been amply demonstrated in the last two decades or so, what this key philosopher of difference and desire can do for the theorization of race and racism has received surprisingly little attention. This is despite the explicit formulation of a materialist theory of race as instantiated in colonization, sensation, capitalism and culture, particularly in Deleuze’s collaborative work with Félix Guattari.

Part of the explanation of why there has been a relative silence on Deleuze within critical race and colonial studies is that the philosophical impetus for overcoming eugenics and nationalism have for decades been anchored in the conventional readings of Kant and Hegel, which Deleuze laboured to displace. Through the vocabularies of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and moral philosophy, even the more sophisticated theorizations of race today continue the neo-Kantian/neo-Hegelian programme of retrieving a cosmopolitan universality beneath the ostensibly inconsequential differences called race.

Opposing this idealism, Deleuze instead asks whether the conceptual basis for this program, however commendable, does not foreclose its political aims, particularly in its avoidance of the material relations it seeks to change. The representationalism and oversimplified dialectical frameworks guiding the dominant antiracist programme actively suppress an immanentist legacy which according to Deleuze is far better suited to grasping how power and desire differentiate bodies and populations: the legacies of Spinoza, Marx and Nietzsche; biology and archeology; Virginia Woolf and Jack Kerouac; cinema, architecture, and the fleshy paintings of Francis Bacon. It is symptomatic too, that Foucault’s influential notion of biopolitics, so close to Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on the state, is usually taken up without its explicit grounding in race, territory and capitalist exchange. Similarly, those (like Negri) that twist biopolitics into a mainly Marxian category, meanwhile, lose the Deleuzoguattarian emphasis on racial and sexual entanglement. It would seem then, that it is high time for a rigorous engagement with the many conceptual ties between Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, Deleuze and Guattari, and Deleuze-influenced feminism, to obtain a new materialist framework for studying racialization as well as the ontopolitics of becoming from which it emerges. While it will inevitably overlap in a few ways, this collection will differ from work done under the “postcolonial” rubric for a number of important reasons.

First, instead of the mental, cultural, therapeutic, or scientific representations of racial difference usually analyzed in postcolonial studies, it will seek to investigate racial difference “in itself”, as it persists as a biocultural, biopolitical force amid other forces. For Deleuze and Guattari, as for Nietzsche before them, race is far from inconsequential, though this does not mean it is set in stone.

Second, as Fanon knew, race is a global phenomenon, with Europe’s racism entirely entwined with settler societies and the continuing poverty in the peripheries. The effects of exploitation, slavery, displacement, war, migration, exoticism and miscegenation are too geographically diffuse and too contemporary to fit comfortably under the name “postcolonial”. Rather, we seek to illuminate the material divergences that phenotypical variation often involves, within any social, cultural or political locus.

Third, again like Nietzsche, but also Freud, Deleuze and Guattari reach into the deep recesses of civilization to expose an ancient and convoluted logic of racial discrimination preceding European colonialism by several millennia. Far from naturalizing racism, this nomadological and biophilosophical “geology of morals” shows that racial difference is predicated on fully contingent territorializations of power and desire, that can be disassembled and reassembled differently. That race is immanent to the materiality of the body then, does not mean that it is static any more than that it is simple: rather what it suggests is that its transformation is an always already incipient reality.

Possible themes:

CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS – Oedipus and racialization – fascist desire – civilization, savagery and barbarism – earth and its peoples – delirium and hallucination as racial – miscegenation

CAPITALISM – faciality – colonization and labor migration as racializing apparatuses of capture – urban segregation – environmental racism

POLITICS – hate speech and law as order-words – D&G, May ‘68 and the third world – Deleuze and Palestine – Guattari and Brazil – terrorist war machines and societies of control – Deleuzian feminism and race

SCIENCE – neuroscience and race – continuing legacies of racist science and the “Bell Curve” debate – kinship, rhizomatics and arboreality – animals, plants, minerals and racial difference – miscegenation – evolutionary biology and human phenotypical variation – vitalism and Nazism

ART – affects of race (sport, hiphop, heavy metal, disco…) – primitivism (Rimbaud, Michaux, Artaud, Tournier, Castaneda, etc.) – vision, cinema and race – music, resonance and bodies

PHILOSOPHY – geophilosophy: provincializing canonical philosophy – race and becoming – decolonizing Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Schelling… – the effect of criticisms of Deleuze (Badiou, Zizek, Hallward) on antiracism Chapters will be between 4000 and 7000 words long.

Arun Saldanha will write the introduction and a chapter called “Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of race”.

Jason Michael Adams will write the conclusion.

For more details on this project, contact Jason Adams at: adamsj@HAWAII.EDU

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

The Ockress: http://www.theockress.com

Original Image © Joseph McGonagle, 2009
Processing & Image Interpretation © John Perivolaris, 2009

Original Image © Joseph McGonagle, 2009
Processing & Image Interpretation © John Perivolaris, 2009

Original Image © Joseph McGonagle, 2009
Processing & Image Interpretation © John Perivolaris, 2009

Original Image © Joseph McGonagle, 2009
Processing & Image Interpretation © John Perivolaris, 2009

Original Image © Joseph McGonagle, 2009
Processing & Image Interpretation © John Perivolaris, 2009

Original Image © Joseph McGonagle, 2009
Processing & Image Interpretation © John Perivolaris, 2009

Jean-François Bayart, En finir avec les études postcoloniales, Le débat n° 154, Mars-avril 2009.

Soulignant la vogue récente des termes “postcolonial et post-colonialité”, l’auteur propose de les définir en suivant Akhil Gupta:

• Postcolonial pour désigner “ce qui vient chronologiquement après la colonisation”.
• Post-colonial pour “penser le postcolonial comme tout ce qui procède du fait colonial, sans distinction de temporalité”.

Plus globalement, on peut définir le post-colonial comme “une situation qui est celle de fait de tous les contemporains” c’est dans ce sens qu’en France, on s’est attaché à décrire un “héritage colonial” qui expliquerait la “fracture sociale” en postulant une continuité sous-jacente aux représentations et aux comportements depuis l’époque coloniale, jusqu’à aujourd’hui.

On peut dès lors parler pour ces auteurs de “l’universalisme prétendu” de la révolution et de la République et aller jusqu’à affirmer un lien avec l’Allemagne nazie et Vichy. Parallèlement, les enfants et petits enfants d’immigrés sont réduits à un statut d’”indigènes de la République”, dont la trajectoire sociale s’expliquerait par la situation de colonisés de leurs parents ou grands parents.

Ce courant de la recherche en France, dont l’importance médiatique est inversement proportionnelle au poids réel est inspiré par les “postcolonial studies” apparues dans les pays anglo-saxons dans les années 90. Parmi les inspirateurs de ce mouvement, mentionnés par l’auteur de l’article, je citerai l’immense Edward Said pour sa critique de l’orientalisme (c’est à dire du regard déformé que l’occident porte sur l’orient arabe à travers ses spécialistes de cette question).

Ce courant est étroitement lié à certains combats politiques en faveur de groupes opprimés (femmes, homosexuels, minorités ethniques, immigrés,…). Ce courant ne propose pas de théorie générale, les postcolonal studies sont très hétérogènes. L’auteur évoque “une rivière aux multiples affluents” qui s’empare des sujets les plus divers et pense qu’elles “existent surtout par l’accusation que leurs tenants profèrent contre les coupables qui ont le front de ne pas y adhérer…” “les prisons universitaires seront vite pleines ” ajoute-t-il.

“L’opinion se répand” poursuit-il” selon laquelle les universitaires français rejettent, quant à eux, cette approche par provincialisme, par conservatisme par refus de regarder en face le passé colonial de leur pays ou, pis, par compromission honteuse avec l’imaginaire racialiste qui serait constitutif de la République”.

J-F Bayart souligne combien cette école doit en fait à la french theory et aux auteurs anticolonialistes (comme Sartre ou Fanon). Il lui semble que l’ensemble des thèmes et critiques formulées se trouvait déjà dans les écrits des auteurs français ou francophones des années 50 et 60. De même le lien établit entre domination coloniale et domaine du genre se trouve déjà chez Foucault ou Bourdieu.

Le lien entre colonisation et totalitarisme était déjà au cœur de l’œuvre d’Hannah Arendt et Simone Weil pouvait écrire au lendemain de la seconde guerre mondiale que l’Hitlerisme “consiste dans l’application par l’Allemagne à l’Europe et plus généralement aux pays de race blanche, des méthodes de la conquête et de la domination coloniale”. Enfin la race “cette région sauvage de l’humanisme européen, sa bête” demeure sous-jacente à la représentation de l’Afrique” comme en témoigne le discours de N. Sarkozy à Dakar (26 juillet 2007).

“Dans ces conditions, ce n’est pas pêcher par excès de polémique ou de méchanceté que de voir aussi, dans la soudaine promotion des post-colonial studies et dans la stigmatisation de l’arriération française, des choses comme une stratégie de niche de la part de chercheurs en quête d’une part de marché académique”.

(à suivre…)