Author’s Roundtable: Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
Guest Writer: Zachary Poppel

Thursday, October 18, 2012

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[On October 15, 2012 the Unit for Criticism held the Fall 2012 Author’s Roundtable . The Unit hosted Samuel Moyn to discuss his book The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Below is one of three responses that were delivered on Monday, by Zachary Poppel, a graduate student affiliate in History.]

Response 1
Zachary Poppel (History)

My brief comments focus on the middle and end of Moyn's book, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History and I hope to suggest some connections and questions.


The middle chapter of The Last Utopia is about decolonization, collective liberation, and to quote the title of chapter 3, "Why Anticolonialism Wasn't a Human Rights Movement." For now I'll just say my question for Moyn is rather simple: does he think history can repeat itself? As the title suggests the key claims of this chapter are that decolonization was a period that saw the "globalizing" of claims to nationalist liberation, not a globalizing of individual liberation (86). In this story human rights come after anti-colonial struggles —in Moyn's words, "human rights experienced [their] triumph as a widespread moral vernacular after decolonization not during it" (117). Furthermore, the chapter turns on the idea that in the wake of decolonization and national liberation, the idiom of human rights displaced rather than fulfilled anti-colonial promises (116). Collective liberation went into crisis around the globe, and in doing so set the stage for human rights (87). It's also suggested that decolonization and anti-colonial nationalism were periods, rigidly bounded in time, rather than processes that could very likely, or could already, be happening again. If we push back a bit against this periodization, as I think we should, and against the book's suggestion that empire and some forms of racialized oppression ended in the 1970s, we might see the current uneven horizon of humanity against empire that today is both retro and original (118; 217). Briefly, I will discuss the middle of The Last Utopia, and do so in light of what Moyn offers us at the end of the book regarding the approaching choice between two different futures for human rights.


Dates of Decolonization World Map
My reading of this middle chapter, and of the book overall, boils down to a set of questions about what the futures of anti-colonialism, of collectivity, and of decolonization might look like from Moyn's perspective. I suspect he may have some ideas about how another round of decolonization, or another attempt to rattle popular conceptions of state sovereignty, might do to reveal a lean and mean, bureaucratic-proof, properly historicized relationship with human rights. Indeed it's the choice that Moyn describes at the conclusion of The Last Utopia making urgent the query about the future of anti-colonialism and anti-neocolonialism. The coming choice described at the end of the book is between a future where human rights is either a method for a more successful restraint of potentially violent global affairs, or a future where human rights is expanded artificially to displace or neutralize necessary political struggles. This is defined as a choice between on the one hand a "minimalist" human rights--conscious of its contingency, resistant to liberalization--and on the other hand a "maximalist" human rights--addicted to its teleology, run by a professional class that prescribe, rather than just edit, blueprints for political life and political solutions (219).

Though he offers many qualifications, Moyn thinks a minimalist human rights is more fair. He writes that the minimalist choice can more "honestly confront its lack of answers and acknowledge that it must make room for the contest of genuinely political visions for the future" (226). For Moyn then, human rights emerged because the idea was not "genuinely political"; it was, as he says, "born in anti-politics" and it "survived [through] neutrality" (213). And those conditions do not justify the maximizing, the scaling up of human rights to the level of the "genuinely political," a level reserved for unrealized or heretofore uncharted modes of liberation.

I conclude with my larger question, how would this minimalist version of human rights engage another round of decolonization and collective liberation? How does another round of fighting for concessions and fair jurisdiction change the core language of human rights? Since the 1970s is a crucial part of this core, my last silly question is whether or not Moyn is expecting a reenacting of the 1970s any time soon?
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Author's Roundtable 3: Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital

Thursday, November 19, 2009

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On Monday, November 16, the Unit for Criticism held the last of its Fall 2009 Author’s Roundtables on the first day of a historic strike for the University of Illinois and beyond. When we asked various student and faculty affiliates if they thought we should cancel the event, one student, John Claborn, replied that he thought that “the project of critical theory should continue unabated in the face of a work-action against the corporatized University” since such actions “are indebted to the spaces of critique opened up by groups” like the Unit. We wish to reply that the debt is, to say the least, a mutual one. We congratulate and thank the Graduate Employee Organization for their stirring example of courage, fortitude, principle, and pertinacity. In the months and years ahead, as the University of Illinois rebuilds its leadership, we hope that the GEO’s exemplary commitment to the core needs of teaching and research will serve as a model and inspiration.

In the focus of Monday’s roundtable, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Duke, 2009), Ritu Birla, associate professor of history at the University of Toronto in Canada, charts a new history of market society and the modern subject in India through the study of colonial governmentalities. The book describes how the standardization of the Indian economy—a transition from vernacular capitalisms to “the ideal of Indian Economic Man”—took the form of a “translation across hegemonies,” indigenous as well as colonial. Central to this process, was the growing distinction between a privatized and Orientalized realm of culture, on the one hand, and, on the other, the supposedly neutral and impersonal public realm of the modern market. Neither a celebration of “native” capitalist voices, nor a description merely of capitalist-imperial structures, Birla’s study shows us a different way of thinking through the history of globalization—an account in which the institution of the market actually creates the Indian capitalist through a process that sees colonial subjects negotiating, contesting and appropriating the new technologies of rule.

The Unit for Criticism invited three responses to the book (from Matt Hart in English, Zsuzsa Gille in Sociology, and James Warren in History) all of which we are pleased to published below. We are also pleased to feature a post from Guest Writer,Okla Elliott, a graduate student in Comparative Literature. And here is the rest of it. Read more

Author's Roundtable 3: Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital
Guest Writer: Okla Elliott

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Written by Okla Elliott (Comparative and World Literature)

The Graduate Employee Organization strike so filled the air Monday night that the event began with an update from a representative, Michael Verderame, from the English department. Two of the panelists addressed the issue—Zsuzsa Gille dedicating her comments to the GEO’s efforts and Matt Hart beginning with an inspiring description of graduate students’ labor and intellectual value. Proof that their words were more than mere lip service, one of the panelists, Jamie Warren, was a graduate student in History.

Lauren Goodlad, who also mentioned the strike in her introductory comments, acknowledged the challenges we face here at UIUC (and elsewhere in the country), as she pointed out that intellectual exchanges like Monday’s author’s roundtable continue to bring joy to academic life. I will go one step further and say that it is evenings like this for which we are ultimately fighting, and they’re the reason graduate students are already willing to live at near-poverty levels just to be here. As we celebrate the apparent success of the GEO strike, I find myself hoping that the University of Illinois and others like it continue to be the locus of a kind of wealth which exceeds mere material comfort.

Ritu Birla’s Stages of Capital is as much a legal history as a theoretical analysis, a project in post-colonial studies as well as an investigation into economics. Perhaps the most fascinating feature of this wide-ranging book is Birla’s conceptualization of history and jurisprudence as translation. This is an especially apt tactic when one remembers that translators can do more than get the particular words wrong; one can also misunderstand underlying facts.

Birla’s insights into the economics of kinship as recoded by colonial law are among the strongest aspects of the book. The notion of kinship as it played out in pre-colonial Indian economic practice allowed for an extended family that also served as a business network crossing city, state, and (at times) national borders. The colonial translation of this “family business,” however, limited the family economic unit to the more western notion of an estate or residence, shrinking the business network to a single household. And so, getting the cultural facts on the ground wrong, the British translated the Indian family business network into a law that was then applied to the conduct of Indian society, thus changing the facts on the ground (though Birla also explains the back and forth reverberation between the two).

As she recapitulated the main arguments from her book, Birla reinterpreted Ferdinand Tönnies’ well known thesis about the nineteenth-century shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. She pointed to the specific laws that translated the Western distinction between public and private into a distinction between British-style market capitalism and the “culture” of Indian economic practices. On her view the imposition of the market governmentality and the consequent impact on and response from India’s vernancular capitalists created what we now think of as Gemeinschaft.

One of the joys of the book, for me anyway, is the wealth of specific examples from legal and economic history. Birla offers a nearly perfect balance of archival data, explanations of said data (for readers who aren’t specialists in Indian legal history), and theorizing about how these data came to cause the historical and cultural events they have.

And, finally, I’d like to call attention to a term Birla coins that I hope will find its way into Latin American Studies, African Studies, and other area studies related to post-colonialism: “vernacular capitalist.” The term nicely evokes a palimpsest of the language, culture, and commercial practices of a region. It names, and therefore brings into being, a variation on several pre-existing concepts in a way that I find immensely productive.
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Author's Roundtable 3: Response from Matt Hart

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Vernacular Capitalists: A Response to Ritu Birla

Written by Matt Hart (English)

Author’s Note: The day after I delivered these remarks, the Graduate Employees Organization, IFT/AFT Local 6300, AFL-CIO (GEO), suspended strike action pending ratification of a new contract with the University of Illinois. In a major victory for academic labor, the GEO won concessions on all four of its key issues: salary increases for the poorest paid, maternity/paternity benefits, restoration of the union’s right to bargain in the event of material changes to working conditions, and protection of tuition waivers. Although this victory makes my introductory comments less newsworthy, it only magnifies the sentiments behind them.

Ritu Birla is the author of a remarkably absorbing book. But before I begin responding to it, I can’t resist the chance to comment upon the GEO strike. In my time at Illinois, I’ve worked with some pretty terrific graduate students and, as I’ve moved from teaching small seminars to large lectures with TA support, I’ve learned that our students’ intellectual gifts are matched by the professionalism, dedication, and love that they bring to their teaching. It seems to me that the GEO has done a terrific job at the bargaining table, fighting back several of the University’s most regressive proposals and winning meaningful salary raises in very difficult budgetary circumstances. As you’ve heard, their remaining battle is over graduate tuition waivers or, as I like to call it, advanced humanistic study as we know it. Most of us in the Unit don’t work in grant-rich disciplines. Without guaranteed tuition waivers, we not only give up on the goal of educational equality: we will find it impossible to build sustained excellence in our graduate programs. It seems that the administration is determined to create an à la carte policy on graduate tuition, where certain departments can access new revenue streams that boost their bottom line even as they further restrict educational access to the privileged. This policy will put new pressures on department heads and on our beleaguered systems of faculty governance, which often lack the power to resist the Board of Trustees, even when they have the will. So when I say that the GEO’s struggle for guaranteed tuition is the faculty’s struggle, too, I don’t only mean that we share a common set of principles; I mean that the GEO represents the most determined, the most effective, and the most democratic means of resisting the next step in the corporatization of our University. I spent this morning chanting, “Who are we? GEO!” This is no empty slogan: as faculty, we have no better advocate than our students.

OK. Time to get back on topic.

As you heard from Lauren, I’m neither a legal historian nor a scholar of late colonial India. When it comes to Stages of Capital, then, whatever expertise I possess lies in the work I’ve done on the vernacular. As a critic of modern and contemporary literature, I’m most interested in the vernacular as a linguistic phenomenon—that is, as dialect, nation-language, or some other written or verbal sign of indigeneity, ethno-national identity, or deviance from a presumed norm. But as any student of vernacular literatures soon learns, it’s impossible to treat the vernacular as a narrowly linguistic phenomenon. In the first place, as I’ve explored through my concept of the “synthetic vernacular,” the very fact of translating the vernacular into print opens it up to all sorts of transformations and adulterations. More importantly, the vernacular is not simply a mode of writing or speech; it is a discourse in the broadest sense, not just a language but, as Grant Farred argues in his work on black vernacular intellectuals, a language of power.1 Moreover, as such a language of power, the vernacular is not easily assimilated to a simple discourse of subalterneity; rather, because it represents the way in which the indigenous becomes expressible as such, it is an ideologically over-determined discourse that can be co-opted by sovereign power even as it can be mobilized in resistance to it. Thus, when Farred insists that the vernacular has a basically populist caste, we ought to remind ourselves, using Ernesto Laclau as a guide and Sarah Palin as an example, that populism is the emptiest of signifiers.2 And when we narrow the topic to the politics of language, we ought to remember the work done by the Africanist Moreadewun Adejunmobi, whose studies of English education in the context of the Nigerian anti-colonial struggle describe the phenomenon she calls “major discourses of the vernacular”—as when the colonial government in Lagos made indigenous language education a priority, at the same time as anti-colonial activists opted for what they saw as the universality and modernity of English.3

The social polyvalence of the vernacular is palpable in Professor Birla’s book. As you have heard, she focuses on how Indian vernacular capitalists—whom she calls “insiders in the colonial economy but outsiders to modern market ethics”—worked to “legitimize themselves as modern subjects” (3). In a fascinating series of chapters about the uneven development of Indian market governance, Professor Birla shows how institutions such as the Hindu Undivided Family or HUF, which confound Eurocentric distinctions between “kinship as a symbolic logic and commerce as a material one” (16), became the object of profound disagreement, between Indians and the British, to be sure, but also between reformers and traditionalists within Marwari society. In her chapter on gender and the making of capitalist subjects, for instance, she describes how the HUF was not only a problem for the British, who shed real tears about corporate partnerships, liability, and loss and, one suspects, crocodile tears about the morality of child marriage. Rather, as “a private system for the regulation of females, sanctioned by ancient authority,” the HUF was seen by Marwari reformers as a signal contribution “to public welfare,” while for the orthodox it “constituted the foundation of an alternative Hindu public” (222). In debates like these, Professor Birla writes, “idioms of gemeinschaft” ought to be seen as “effects of a politics of gesellschaft” (201). If there’s one thing, then, that this non-specialist reader takes away from Stages of Capital, it’s Ritu Birla’s explanation of the way “colonial authorities regulated vernacular capitalism […] by coding it as a rarefied cultural formation,” while vernacular capitalists themselves first challenged and then redeployed the very categories of culture through which they were subjectivized as Indian Economic Man (5).

Now I’ve written enough reviews to know that the easiest way to criticize someone’s scholarship is to look for sins of omission, with the corollary that the subject most often left out is (who would’ve thunk it?) the one you’ve just published upon, with the implication that the author would never have sinned had she only consulted you first. But if this reflects poorly upon the academic propensity for narcissism, it’s nevertheless defensible as a function of scholarly expertise: for we all see through a glass, narrowly. I’ve already noted my deep appreciation for the way Professor Birla adds to our understanding of the vernacular as a cultural, legal, social, and economic discourse. I hope it’s not churlish, then, to wish that she’d made her theorization of the nature and limits of this discourse somewhat more explicit. As I read Stages of Capital, I started an ad hoc list of rough synonyms for vernacular. In no particular order, I came up with the following: indigenous, gemeinschaft, pre-modern gemeinschaft, customary, convention, long-held convention, community, kinship, tradition, social customs based on religious laws, personal law, and the nexus: family, clan, caste, and ethnic/communal identity (218). Now my complaint isn’t that Professor Birla conflates these terms; on the contrary, concepts like kinship and personal law are handled with great particularity. But when such social and historical precision combines with great cultural and semantic diversity, it becomes hard to define the modifier in vernacular capitalist without reducing it to a lowest-common-denominator label like indigenous—and that, as we’ve already seen, is only the beginning of the discussion.

In the end, this seems like a fair price to pay. My objection only stands because Professor Birla has assembled such a rich historical archive, replete with examples and ambiguities, as when she writes about her focus on the unstable distinction “between law as a logic, and law as a nomos or the conventions of localized practice” (236). Stages of Capital is a compelling work of history centered on Indian market governance. If this literary critic leaves it wanting more, then that only points towards the interdisciplinary work still waiting to be done on the discourse of the vernacular. I only hope that Professor Birla is already writing her next contribution to the field.

1Grant Farred, What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Minneapolis: U. Minnesota P., 2003).
2Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005).
3Moradewun Adejunmobi, Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa (Clevedon UK, Tonawanda NY, and North York, Ontario: Multilingual Matters, 2004).

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Author's Roundtable I: Darieck Scott, 9/28

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

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On Monday, 9/28 the Unit for Criticism held the first of three Fall 2009 Author's Roundtables featuring Darieck Scott, Assistant Professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, discussing his forthcoming book Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. Illinois respondents for this event were Marc D. Perry (Anthropology and African American Studies,) Richard T. Rodriguez (English & Latino/Latina Studies), and Emily Skidmore(History). We are pleased to post on Kritik a guest blog on the event by Dan Tracy (English) as well as the full responses for Rodriguez and Skidmore.

In the above photo, Darieck Scott and Marc Perry speak to one another. Read more

Author's Roundtable I: Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection
Guest Writer: Dan Tracy

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The extent to which the abject might be recuperated for some kind of political potential has been an occasional focus of queer studies; Darieck Scott’s forthcoming book specifies that question, and raises its stakes considerably, by asking it of “black abjection,” or the history of debasement under slavery and Jim Crow. Scott argues that two responses have dominated black literary and critical focus on this topic. The first, typified by the work of Frantz Fanon and the writers of the Black Arts movement, demands a recuperation and celebration of abjected blackness before an ultimate turn away from it. For Fanon, especially, “blackness is constituted by a history of abjection, and is itself a form of abjection” (Scott 6). The second response comes from late 20th-century neo-slave narratives, texts that try more deeply to historicize slavery in order to question the idea of an abject history. In these narratives, slaves engage in forms of resistance that complicate our sense of the power relations evoked in narratives of abjection.

Both of these solutions attempt to overcome abjection, or, in the case of the neo-slave narratives, to refute its sufficiency as historical description. Scott, by contrast, in introducing his book on Monday evening, provoked us by asking whether retaining abjection might be the more politically effective move. Although he finds neo-slave narratives compelling, he notes that the black abject continues to hold a powerful grip on the contemporary imagination despite its historical deficits. Reading (often against the grain) Fanon, James Weldon Johnson, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, and Samuel Delany, Scott suggests that a strain of latent power (and, in Delany, explicit erotic pleasure) undergirds the figuring of black abjection. If one is racialized through abjection, he suggested, then this racialization “offers capabilities, not just debilities.”

In Fanon’s corpus, Scott emphasizes, the metaphor of “tensed muscles” repeats to figure the moment of abjection, signaling this latent power for political response. Moments of male-on-male rape from Baraka and Morrison signal the pitfalls of the Black Arts and neo-slave narrative responses to black abjection but also suggest abjection’s potential. The danger Scott locates is the shared imperative of both projects to celebrate a black male subject who embodies normative masculinity: a subject both homophobic and misogynistic. Yet these moments of rape also figure a loss of sexual subjectivity that could allow for the development of a different kind of male subject. Here, Scott acknowledges his debts to Hortense J. Spillers’s feminist argument that the devastation caused to gender roles among black slaves by the middle passage was an opportunity, carrying the potential for longer-lasting changes to gender norms. Likewise, he argues that the moment of black abjection opens up a range of potential responses that need not be limited to a revivified patriarchal masculinity. The final chapter of his book, on Samuel Delany’s literary pornographic novel The Mad Man, argues that its turn to a fantasy of black abjection creates another possibility: pleasure, through the resignification of racist violence in erotic contexts that the black protagonist (who searches out white sexual partners who will humiliate him) finds surprisingly liberating.

Much of the discussion in response to Scott’s work centered on the potential political and methodological problems it raises. Richard T. Rodriguez suggested the importance of Scott’s work in rethinking the usual disempowered take that figures the sexual bottom as both emasculated and feminized. Particularly in the context of the chapter on Delany, Marc D. Perry, in his response, asked if this recuperation of the abject risked fetishizing violence. He also wondered if a writer like Fanon, often critiqued as masculinist, could be incorporated into this project without reproducing his problematic relationship to gender. Emily Skidmore, in turn, wondered if calling the male-on-male rape in Morrison’s Beloved “homosexual” might flatten out the history of sexuality. She also called attention to the diversity of Scott’s archive, asking whether the abjection he discusses is specific to African-American experience or indicative of African diaspora more broadly.

Two of Scott’s responses struck me as especially suggestive of his project’s emphasis and aims. First, he clarified that he was not offering the recovery of abjection as the only—or even the best—resource for a political response to racial inequality. Instead, he draws attention to it precisely because most anti-racist work misses it entirely. Second, Scott at one moment rather boldly defended the possible distortions of the history of abjection in any contemporary political or literary recovery (especially, in this case, Delany’s novel), arguing that while it is a position of privilege that allows us to transform that history rather than live it, we are also inheritors of that history and how it is imagined. Thus, he suggests, we are entitled to use that history of abjection in any way that will help to mitigate its legacy of psychological and social hurt.
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Author's Roundtable I: Roberto Dainotto replies

Friday, September 19, 2008

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Written by Roberto Dainotto, Department of Romance Studies, Duke University

In a note on “Methodological Questions” penned in his Prison Notebooks around 1933, Antonio Gramsci wrote: “If one wants to study the conception of a world-view that has not been exposed systematically… (and whose essential coherence is to be found not in a single essay or in a series of essays, but in the entire development of [a body of] intellectual work in which the elements of such view of the world are implicit), we need to do careful, preliminarily philological work…”

Philology may well have been, in Gramsci’s time as in our own, “the least sexy” of disciplines and methods of inquiry, as Edward Said reminded us only a few years ago in his “Return to Philology.” Yet, what philology helped Gramsci to do, and can still help us in doing, is to “better understand the concept a word means to express: the concept can be brought back to the historically determined cultural world that conceived it. Similarly, it can be useful specifically to determine the limit of the word, thus avoiding the almost mechanical reification of that word” into truth statements.

Europe (in Theory) begins with a set philological hypotheses: that the word “Europe” alludes, more than to a specific geographical fact (which is notoriously difficult to define: is Turkey Europe? And what about Russia?), to certain “conceptions of the world” which are “historically determined”; that these “conceptions of the world” are immanent to certain historical situations, and therefore change when the situation changes even if the word remains the same; and that all of these “conceptions of the world” determine specific “limits” to what the word, in each different historical setting, signifies.

Through this set of philological hypotheses, I looked at the origin of “Europe”: the word, once relegated to mythology, emerges “as a moral and political concept” (Chabod) in the context of the Persian Wars. It is in that context that “Europe,” whose geographical extension is limited to the Greek city-states around the Mediterranean, starts meaning nothing else than the antithesis of Asia. Aristotle’s Politics, for instance: “The nations in cold regions, particularly in Europe, are full of [courage]... which is why they continue to be comparatively free... . By contrast, those in Asia... lack [courage]; which is why they continue to be ruled and enslaved.” “Us,” not surprisingly, is defined by an opposition to “them.”

Yet, what for me was more interesting than this original conception of Europe, was a shift in what Europe started to mean in the Eighteenth Century. Not only the territory of what “Europe” supposed to cover had extended far beyond the Greek city-states. What was more curious was the antithetical principle to Europe (Asia as non-Europe) had been, so to speak, internalized. It is not that an opposition of Europe to Asia was ceasing to exist. Rather, this opposition was being supplemented by a new—modern—one. In Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Law, in fact, the essence of Europe—its progress from a state of nature to the modernity of social laws—relied on antithesis that was internal to Europe itself—on its south, a sort of pathological, backward non-European Europe; a Europe (in theory), that is to say

It is not surprising that the cowardice of the people of hot climates has almost constantly rendered them slaves, and that the courage of the people of cold climates has kept them free…

You will find, in the climates of the north, peoples who have few vices, many virtues, and much sincerity and candor. As you move toward the countries of the south, you will believe you have moved away from morality itself…

What “conception of a world-view,” what “historically determined” concept was being re-articulated in such shift and re-orientation of what “Europe” was starting to signify? Certainly, the fact that Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Law was written at the heyday of a controversy between ancient and moderns was likely to mean that “Europe” expressed now a faith in progress and modernity of which the ancient and classical south could only be an “origin”—an imperfect beginning, that is, impervious to the magnificent progress of history, and closer still to a state of nature—a club Mediterranée, indeed. And the fact that the Spirit of the Law was written at the moment in which capitalist and mercantile classes were already waiting to displace the old aristocracy, was likely to hint at a new conception of economic and political power—a power no longer dependent on feudal and territorial accumulation, but on the exploitation of natural resources (the plentiful south), and on the exploitation of labor (a labor whose ethics, before being Protestant, was already antithesis of the “lazy” south).


The larger, and most problematic theoretical shift (by “theory” I mean, again, a “conception of a world-view”) engendered by the internalization of the (Asiatic) Other into the (European) South, however, remains one: the shifting signification of Europe points to a reform of classical dialectics (Aristotle’s) into a modern dialectics that, starting from Montesquieu, finds its systematic theorization in Hegel. This is a dialectics of the same. The Other, in this dialectics, is no longer something external to the self, but, at best, a previous developmental stage in the progressive unfolding of the self towards the end of history. In this dialectical shift lies, in my opinion, the pernicious essence of what we often refer to as “Eurocentrism.” Eurocentrism, in this reading, is not the alleged centrality of Europe, but its totalizing spread. Non-Europe, to put it differently, is no longer the “other” of Europe, but a stage of Europe itself yet to be Europeanized—or modernized, or democratized, or rendered free, and so on. Read more

Author's Roundtable I: Roberto Dainotto's Europe (in Theory)

Guest Writers Curbelo and Serrano

Thursday, September 18, 2008

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Written by Katia Curbelo (ICR/Cultural Studies/Italian and Spanish) and Amauri Serrano (Italian/MSLIS)

In Europe (in Theory), Roberto Dainotto traces theorizations of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, singling out the surfacing structures and paradigms that have shaped current ideas of Europe and its cultural identity. He does so by attempting to provide a “genealogy of Eurocentrism.” He argues that modern theories of Europe cannot be explained by the antithesis between Europe and Asia; rather Eurocentrism begins with a modern theory of identity, specifically identity as dialectics of the same, which according to Dainotto begins with Montesquieu and finds its final nineteenth-century form in Hegel’s Europe as the “end of history.” Therefore modern European cultural identity begins when Southern Europe becomes the internal Other. He cites the writings of the philosophes and even Rousseau to illustrate how the south was seen as a “distant fantasy of primitivism – nature; past – against which modern and northern Europe, with nostalgia and pride could theorize itself.” Dainotto further utilizes the noncanonical writings of Juan Andrés, a literary historian, and Michele Amari, an Orientalist, to describe the Other Europe, a Europe theorized for and from the south. Both Andrés and Amari see the Orient as an integral part of European history and identity, and the analysis of such sources challenges current and past depictions of southern Europe.

Professor Dainotto presented his book at the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory’s roundtable discussion last Monday night by outlining his motivations for writing the book. He described the book as an end product of multiple anxieties: being called ‘PIGS’ (Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain), becoming European as well as a teaching and researching in a humanities under seige. The book itself, according to Dainotto, is a justification of the humanities; however it is not meant to propose a clash of the disciplines. Rather its purpose is to show how different mythologies, in the case of Europe (in Theory) – a philological approach – are all part of a larger whole. The constant questioning of the humanities led Dainotto to question another area of personal identity: his (trans)formation into a European citizen, not only an Italian. It is here that he looks at his Europeaness from his point of origin – that of a southern Italian. As he explains, he starts where everyone else ends – in Southern Europe. Europe divides itself from the external Other (Asia) because it has the Other contained in itself (South). In Dainotto's words: " [There was a] latitudinal shift: it's not East and West anymore, but North and South. A shift that reconceptualizes Europe […] a shift that is not finding its other in Asia, but looking for its Orient in its South".
During the discussion several interesting comments and questions were made that were briefly addressed but would be worth discussing further.

How can we produce a new vocabulary to speak about what 'Europe' and 'Europeaness' should 'look like', if we were to take the Other out of the idea of 'the Southern Other'? What other terminology would we use to refer to 'the South'? Can we apply concepts drawn from postcolonial studies? What about migration—or the 'networks of migration', to cite directly from the roundtable—that are present in the EU? The continuous monitoring of the European Union over certain 'borders'? Who gets to pass, who gets to stay behind?

What terminology (i.e. in Italian as 'ex-comunitari') would mark those countries geographically seen as Southern? How would Europe define itself if the internal Other, just like its external Other, became nonexistent and/or could not be racialized anymore? Can we think of an Arabo-Islamic approach to speaking about the beginning of Europeanness?

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Author's Roundtable I: Roberto Dainotto's Europe (in Theory)

posted under , , by Unit for Criticism
Written by Lauren Goodlad, Interim Director, Unit for Criticism

On Monday September 15th the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory held the first of three Author's Roundtables: a discussion by Roberto Dainotto, professor of Romance Studies at Duke University, of his recent book Europe (in Theory) (Duke UP, 2007). The event also featured three respondents: Elena Delgado (Spanish), Manuel Rota (Italian), and Carl Lehnen (English).

Dainotto begins his book by situating himself as a Southerner—an Italian—addressing the moment of European Union. In offering up the genealogical backstory of this European apotheosis the book does not simply transpose the logic of Orientalism to a latitudinal axis; it also tells a complicated story about internal otherness within Europe, describing the various ways in which Southernness—both like and unlike Orientalism—becomes aligned with historicity and particularity in a Eurocentric imaginary dominated by, but also unsatisfied with, its prevailing Northern polarity.

We have invited two guest bloggers—Katia Curbelo (ICR/Cultural Studies/Italian and Spanish) and Amauri Serrano (Italian, MSLI) to write on the roundtable and have also posted the responses by Manuel Rota and Carl Lehnen as well as a final reply from Roberto Dainotto. Read more

Author's Roundtable I: Roberto Dainotto's Europe (in Theory)

Response: Work Makes You Free

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Written by Emanuel Rota, Italian

In his latest book, Roberto Dainotto argues that, with the rise of modernity, European identity, hegemonized by French authors, acquires a Northern/Southern opposition, next to the traditional Orient/Occident opposition. Inspired by Gramsci, Dainotto uses his sharp philological tools to identify the emergence of such a tradition, convincingly showing that this new narrative, and a few counternarratives, take shape in the French Enlightenment and become part of the ideological debate of the 19th century. Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws and its theory of climates were, in Dainotto’s convincing account, the original formulation of this new Northern disdain for the South of Europe. In my response, thinking with professor Dainotto’s excellent book, I argue that labor and the new work discipline required by the emerging capitalist production constitute one of the central subtexts of this North/South opposition.


Montesquieu's elaborate theory of climate is a logical necessity of his philosophical construction. He believed in natural laws, monogenesis, and on an idea of Europe based on the notion of the Ius Publicum Europaeum. These three elements could on ly work together thanks to his theory of climate. Monogenesis, which Montesquieu inherited from the biblical tradition, asserts that human nature is one and the same everywhere. Natural laws were supposed to be laws that stemmed directly from nature and existed in an extra-juridical space, independent from the sovereign's will and as natural as the laws of physics. The Ius Publicum Europaeum was the specific form that natural laws had acquired in the European territory and that governed the inter-European international relations despite the absence of a European sovereign. Why, if human beings were the same everywhere and natural laws came from nature, was the Ius Publicum Europaeum European and not worldwide? Montesquieu's answer was that human nature did not change, but natural climates did, hence climates were responsible for the differences.


This weak argumentation, which would be attacked, within the borders of liberal ideology, by racists--human nature change--and by legal positivism--might makes right--serves the ideological purpose of limiting the power of the sovereign without putting the existence of the state at risk. Laws are natural; they exist above the king, who becomes a despot if he wants an absolute power, and also above the multitude, who becomes an unruly mob and gives birth to ochlocratic governments if it does not respect natural laws (including private property, of course).

Thus, Montesquieu’s book always serves two purposes: challenge absolutism while keeping a watchful eye on the multitudes and its desire for democracy. With this in mind, we can try to interpret the emergence of a Southern narrative as brilliantly highlighted by Dainotto. The Occident/Orient binary opposition perfectly serves the purpose of attacking absolutism as Oriental despotism, but what about the North/South distinction?

Let’s hear from the French Enlightenment. Here is Montesquieu (most relevant parts in Bold, a summary of the points at the end of the quotes):

In Europe there is a kind of balance between the southern and northern nations. The first have every convenience of life, and few of its wants: the last have many wants, and few conveniences. To one nature has given much, and they demand little from nature; to the other she has given but little, and they demand a great deal. The equilibrium is maintained by the laziness of the southern nations, and by the industry and activity which she has given to those in the north. The latter are obliged to undergo much labour, without which they would want everything, and degenerate into barbarians. This has naturalized slavery to the people of the south: as they can easily dispense with riches, they can more easily dispense with liberty. But the people of the north have need of liberty, for this can best procure them the means of satisfying all those wants which they have received from nature. The people of the north, then, are in a forced state, if they are not either free or barbarians. Almost all the people of the south are, in some measure, in a state of violence, if they are not slaves.
Here is Voltaire:

The Oriental climate, nearer to the South, obtains everything from nature; while we, in our northern West, we owe everything to time, to commerce and to a belated industry.
And here is Rousseau’s Social Contract:

Luxury in clothes shows similar differences. In climates in which the changes of season are prompt and violent, men have better and simpler clothes; where they clothe themselves only for adornment, what is striking is more thought of than what is useful; clothes themselves are then a luxury. At Naples, you may see daily walking in the Pausilippeum men in gold-embroidered upper garments and nothing else. It is the same with buildings; magnificence is the sole consideration where there is nothing to fear from the air. In Paris and London, you desire to be lodged warmly and comfortably; in Madrid, you have superb salons, but
not a window that closes, and you go to bed in a mere hole... To all these points may be added another, which at once depends on and strengthens them. Hot countries need inhabitants less than cold countries, and can support more of them. There is thus a double surplus, which is all to the advantage of despotism.
If you did not have the patience to read the quotes, here is what they all say: Northern people have to work because nature does not give much; Southern people don’t have to work because nature is generous there. Only necessity makes people work, whereas abundance makes them lazy. Lazy people are prone to despotism, hard working people, instead, are good for the rule of laws. Abundance leads to despotism, scarcity of resources leads to good citizens.

Really? Were people in Southern Europe, not just the aristocrats, everybody, so rich that they did not have to work? Fortunately, what the French philosophes managed to obscure with their elaborate constructions, is readily revealed by English sources: (don’t skip this one):

The industry of the people was considered extraordinary, their peculiarity of life remarkable. They lived like the inhabitants of Spain, or after the custom of the Orientals. Three or four o'clock in the morning found them at work. At noon they rested; many enjoyed their siesta; others spent their time in the workshops eating and drinking, these places being often turned into taprooms and the apprentices into pot boys; others again enjoyed themselves at marbles or in the skittle alley. Three or four hours were thus devoted to play; and then came work again till eight or nine, and sometimes ten, the whole year through.

Birmingham Journal, 26 Sept. I855, “Hints for a History of Birmingham”
The Birmingham Journal uses 18th century sources to describe the life of the Birmingham workers who, thanks to the abundance created by their successful work, have the freedom to organize their time according to their desire: they work and they play, they take siestas, like the inhabitants of Spain, or after the custom of the Orientals. Abundance creates a non European space.

Here is another, even more revealing quotation: (Hutton, An History of Birmingham (I78I), p. 69)

The men... [are] regulated by the expense of their families, and their necessities; it is very well known that they will not go further than necessity prompts them, many of them.


As economic historians have pointed out, workers, in the early stage of the capitalist reorganization of production, refused to work more than they needed to support their standard of life. They preferred lower pays and more leisure time than higher pay and no free time. Montesquieu and the other philosophes provided a philosophical justification for the predatory instincts of the early capitalist owners: abundance will make you lazy and slaves: work all day long to earn the bare necessity and you will be free. The European South, with its preindustrial life style had to be racialized and moralized so that the Northern European workers could be threatened with the early stage of a racial division of Europe: overexploit the workers because necessity is Northern Europe, whereas abundance is the degenerate South. Learn this work discipline because exploitation and work will make you free. From the early stages of the original accumulation of power and capital, one can almost imagine a world where in all the factories of Europe one cold write: Work Makes You Free. Read more

Author’s Roundtable I

Response: On the Use and Abuse of History

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Written by Carl Lehnen, English

One of the primary goals of postcolonial studies has been to deconstruct articulations of cultural difference that depend on binaries like East and West, primitive and modern, colonizer and colonized. Such scholarship has shown that Europe does not exist in splendid isolation, but in complex networks of migration, imperialism, and capital. Yet, insofar as postcolonial studies has tended to put Europe’s internal divisions in brackets, it risks leaving unrealized its insight that “Europe” is as much a rhetorical invention as “Africa.” As such, Professor Dainotto’s genealogy of the idea of Europe offers an excellent opportunity to rethink how such articulations of cultural difference operate both inside and outside of Europe. What’s important here is not just the assertion that Europe had internal as well as external others, thus giving us a bigger pool of “others” to apply our critical tools to, but that this genealogy questions the Europeanness of Europe, or the identity on which such a logic of othering depends. In shifting our attention from an inter-continental distinction between East and West to an intra-continental distinction between North and South, I think this book raises a number of important questions for how we think about culture, geography, and history, and in the remainder of my response I’ll try to sketch out just a few of them.

First, if the European south takes the place of the Asiatic east in the dialectic of European self-definition, then what’s at stake in this substitution? In other words, does making the negative term internal to Europe just change one of the terms of the dialectic, or does it change the way the dialectic itself works? In some ways, Greece or Italy could be quite convenient analogues to the Islamic world. Both are the sites of civilizations that, so the theory goes, gained the benefits of civilization quite early because of their hospitable climates, but were then unable to develop any further. On the other hand, whatever the attempts of writers like Montesquieu and Staël to define the origin of modern Europe as Franco-German rather than Greco-Roman, it simply wasn’t possible (or perhaps even desirable) to exclude the south from a history of Europe in the same way that it was to exclude Africa and Asia.

Which brings me to a related concern about method and terminology. Given the widely recognized cultural heritage of places like Greece and Italy, and given the southern “periphery’s” proximity to the northern “center,” does it even make sense to call the south an “other,” or do we need some new vocabulary to discuss its position? I would argue, as I think Europe (in Theory) also implies, that we do need such a vocabulary, and that the language of othering is not just tired but also inadequate to describing many articulations of cultural difference. The essential question here seems to be, how are cultures narrated in history and mapped onto space? In the story that this book tells, it turns out that “Europe” doesn’t just come into being through some primal encounter of self-definition and negation, but through an ongoing process of self-narrating and self-mapping. Europe and its others aren’t just like or unlike, but temporally and spatially situated: young or old, developing or decadent, near or far, here or there.

A third question that this attention to space and time raises for me is how we might extend Europe’s insights in order to make sense of writers who not only position the south as under-developed, static, or decadent, but who also seem to find this underdevelopment attractive. That is, instead of getting caught in an unfruitful opposition between “othering” and “identification,” perhaps the language of past and present selves can give us a better way of explaining this variant of romantic primitivism. Of course, Europe gives ample attention to those like Juan Andrés and Michele Amari who challenge Montesquieu’s narrative of historical development, but these writers seem less interested in questioning the desirability of modernity than they are in redefining the south’s relationship to it. What, then, about writers like Staël or Byron who more or less accept Montesquieu’s version of a modern north and a pre-modern south, but for whom this denial of coevalness does not necessarily constitute a denial of the possibility of dialogue?

Finally, I can’t help but think about the historical aporia with which the book ends. Amari, hoping to rescue Sicily from northern denigration through an Arabocentric approach, finds that the real Sicily remains as much an obscurity in the Islamic archive as in the European. Given this failure, should we take a moment to reflect on our own methodologies? If, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, historicism “posit[s] historical time as a measure of cultural distance,” then can its contradictions and exclusions be remedied through more historicism? What does the framework of history reveal, and what are its limits?
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