How the West Was Not One

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

posted under , by Unit for Criticism
Written by Jodi Byrd, American Indian Studies, English

After thirty years of existing within the academy, American Indian Studies is still not quite yet at critical mass, but headed in that direction. Often, the field is perceived by those within and without its purview as a project of recovery, culture, identity, polemic—let's be honest—and as a kind of anti-intellectual, essentialist project of victimry. American Indian Studies, however, has been steadily establishing methodological and theoretical tools with which to engage the multi-directionality of a discipline that

1) intervenes within the colonial institutions and disciplines of academia;

2) bears accountability to indigenous communities and indigenous philosophical traditions, and;

3) spans transoceanically and transhemispherically to address the international diplomacies of "indigenous peoples" in the wake of globalization.

Such epistemological tools, developed by scholars such as Vine Deloria, Jr., Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Taiaiake Alfred, Noenoe Silva, Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, and Dale Turner to name just a few, offer the radical notion that what we might term "indigenous critical theory" provides valid critiques of imperialism and colonialism at the same time that such work might, finally, move us toward restorative justice.

In thinking about this post for Kritik and offering up indigenous critical theory for a dialogue with those scholars committed to critical theory but perhaps unfamiliar with "indigeneity" as a category of critical analysis, I wanted to provide at least a couple of provisional thoughts as well as foundations. "Indigenous," like "aboriginal," "Indian," "native," "First Nations," "Native American," and any other monolithic namings within colonial languages is highly contested and contestable. Jeff Corntassel and Taiaiake Alfred provide a preliminary definition in their essay, "Being Indigenous," (which can be found here) that is a useful starting point:

Indigenousness is an identity constructed, shaped, and lived in the politicized context of contemporary colonialism. The communities, clans, nations and tribes we call Indigenous peoples are just that: Indigenous to the lands they inhabit, in contrast to and in contention with the colonial societies and states that have spread out from Europe and other centres of empire. It is this oppositional, place-based existence, along with the consciousness of being in struggle against the dispossessing and demeaning fact of colonization by foreign peoples, that fundamentally distinguishes Indigenous peoples from other peoples of the world.


Indigenous critical theory, then, emerges as a contentious, oppositional discourse that confronts imperialism and colonialism. It also necessitates certain Manichean allegories of foreign/native and colonizer/colonized within reclamations of "place-based existence." As it has emerged thus far, indigenous critical theory centers itself within indigenous epistemologies and the specificities of the communities and cultures from which it emerges and then looks outward to engage European philosophical, legal, and cultural traditions. Steeped in anticolonial consciousness that deconstructs and confronts the colonial logics of settler states carved out of and on top of ancestral lands, indigenous critical theory seeks to offer a transformative accountability dependent upon radical alterity and recognition.

In other words and among other things, indigenous critical theory provides a diagnostic way of reading and interpreting the colonial logics that underpin cultural, intellectual, and political discourses. And it asks that settler, native, and arrivant each acknowledge their own position within empire and then reconceptualize space and history to make visible that which settler colonialism has sought to obscure. Within in the continental United States, it means imagining an entirely different map and understanding of territory and space constituted by over 500 different native nations, each with their own borders and boundaries, that transgress what has been naturalized as 48 states and contiguous territory. Of course, indigenous critical theory is more than this, but it's a starting point to draw attention to entire histories, peoples, and philosophical traditions that inhabit and inform how land, space, and narratives are perceived.

From there, indigenous critical theory offers alternative questions and concerns. For instance, here we might return to Michael's posts "Against the West" and "All About the West" and the discussions that emerged around the geologeme, "the West," and its prevalence within American "mainstream" journalism, politics, and critical theories. This continued use of "the West" and "western," at least in the U.S. context, could additionally be read as something of a trace, a différance that is tied to the frontier narratives and consolidations of U.S. imperialism in relation to American Indians. Evocations of "the West" speak to colonial discourses that consolidate through repetitions and provide an imperial subjectivity steeped in "cowboys" and "Indians" and as the work of Richard Slotkin, Patricia Limerick, Richard Drinnon, and even Susan Faludi have shown, frontier narratives and cowboy diplomacies continue to undergird a United States that seeks to turn all those against it into "Indians." All this speaks to an interesting discursive turn and gestures towards deeper problematics inherent within debates that orient the world either through West/East or North/South logics. What happens to indigenous peoples in these paradigms if they exist somewhere in the third-space solidus between and among?

And this, perhaps, is enough for a preliminary post on "indigenous critical theory” and how it has begun to emerge out of American Indian and Indigenous Studies. Here at Illinois, the American Indian Studies Program has been hosting a lecture series over the course of the 2007-2008 academic year entitled, "Indigeneity as a Category of Critical Analysis" and those lectures are archived and viewable online for those interested in more. The series culminates May 1-2, 2008 when American Indian Studies and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory will be hosting "Decolonizations: Subaltern Studies and Indigenous Critical Theory" to open up further dialogue around the intersections between postcolonial studies and indigenous studies.

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All About The West

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

posted under , , , , by Unit for Criticism
Written by Michael Rothberg, Director of the Unit for Criticism

My primary hope for Kritik has been that it would provoke a new forum for discussion among people in and beyond Illinois about the important theoretical, political, and cultural issues that we face. With that goal in mind, I’m very pleased about the thoughtful and substantive responses we received after my last post on the persistence of a discourse of “the West” among critical intellectuals. I’d like to try to continue the discussion by engaging with those remarks from the comments section. (Incidentally, the easiest way for those of you who, like me, are not registered with Blogger to contribute comments is to click on the button that says “Name/URL” and simply enter your own name before writing up your comment.)

The starting point for my piece “Against the West?” was the observation that a discourse of “the West” is ubiquitous despite decades of poststructuralist-fueled skepticism about such abstractions and despite a marked tendency toward localism and particularism in many fields in the humanities and social sciences. There seems to be agreement among the respondents that a discourse of “the West” is widespread—at least in certain contexts. As Keguro writes, the notion of the West “is everywhere,” especially in contemporary “mainstream” journalism. Although coming at things from a different angle, Emanuel seems to second this point about the mainstream; he writes that “the use of the ‘west’ under critique in Michael's post is the one prevalent in American newspapers and tv news, perhaps a reflection of American political theory . . . rather than a persistent philosophical term.” As Emanuel also points out, however, the “West” in Derrida’s “Western metaphysics” (one of the examples I gave last time) is really the “Occident”—as in, “la métaphysique occidentale”—a term with a different etymology, genealogy, and contemporary significance. Emanuel’s comment is an important reminder that the discourse under discussion here works differently in non-English-language contexts—though my hunch is that “l’Occident,” “das Abendland,” and other linguistic variants play similar roles to “the West” in Europe today despite their different genealogies. Observers of other “Western” contexts should feel free to check in on this.

I agree with Keguro and Manuel that “the West” pervades, among other things, the language of the US media. I don’t think, however, that this is simply a media discourse; rather, it is also omnipresent among English-language critical thinkers and theorists. As I mentioned in my original post, it is particularly that persistence that troubles me. For me, at least, the question remains how to address that omnipresence. Like Keguro, I also think it’s urgent that we figure this out—but I don’t take it for granted that the wide circulation of a popular discourse requires that we remain within its terms. Perhaps, as Bruce joins Keguro in implying, and as Derrida dedicated many words to demonstrating, it isn’t so easy to get away from “the West” after all. I’d admit that, but still urge us to think twice before repeating the terms of mainstream discourses. Indeed, here I think Derrida can be methodologically helpful in prompting us to try to pry the discourse free from its dominant terms, while also remaining aware of our inevitable complicity in dominant structures. To clarify: I’m not against all generalizations, but I’m still not convinced that the East/West binary provides our best purchase on the urgent matters that we confront—even if those matters appear dressed up in that geo-ideological guise.

What are other possibilities for mapping the contemporary or historical terrain? Both Martha and Sharif bring up an alternative figure of the contemporary critical imagination; the North/South divide. Martha is right that in the post-Cold War world, this way of dividing the globe has started to appear alongside the more familiar Occident/Orient coding. As Martha guesses, I’m ambivalent about this turn. Let me register a couple of observations about this matter. First, it seems to me that the North/South opposition appears almost uniquely in the discourse of what I’d still like to call the Left—while West/East is strikingly promiscuous in terms of political orientation. (The relevance of “orientation” to this discussion reminds me of the important work of Sara Ahmed, the University of London theorist and author of Queer Phenomenology with whom we were lucky enough to have a seminar last week.) To me, the political clarity of North/South is a plus—that is, it has a polemical bite that is less ambiguous than West/East. Why? Because—and this is the second point—North/South describes material inequities first and foremost rather than inevitably invoking cultural and religious differences. (I suspect there will be some disagreement about this last point from those working on “the South,” but I would maintain at least tentatively that North/South is relatively less overdetermined by pernicious discourses of cultural difference and more “oriented” toward the uneven, capitalist world-system.)

Nevertheless, I’d say once again that even this revised geo-imaginary starts to break down once we consider Sharif’s pertinent point that “immigration and displacement” have created an undeniable “proximity” of the West and non-West as of the North and South. It is key that we emphasize, as Sharif does, that displacement joins migration in fostering this proximity, since that former term better captures both the ever-powerful legacies of slavery and the ongoing colonization of indigenous peoples than does the also-crucial focus on migration (in the US as in many other places). (I also like Sharif’s citation of Bhabha’s “yes-but” logic—I do feel close to that way of thinking, even as I’d want to submit Bhabha’s own thought to such a dialectical critique!)

Here we may seem to be heading back to the very problem that stimulated this line of thought for me in the first place: Matti Bunzl’s critique of anthropologists’ propensity toward “Borgesian maps” and over-particularization. In short, I agree with Matti that we need maps and that maps require generalization, abstraction, and even a degree of reification. Such a requirement entails that the vision of proximity, overlap, and non-segregation that Sharif points us toward still has to be mappable. To pick up on Joe’s comments, and shift from a spatial metaphor toward a simultaneously spatial and temporal one, I’d say that we need narrativity even if we remain skeptical towards meta- or grand-narrativity. Joe asks us to consider that, despite our “incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, xxiv), we may still rely on their negative example to ground our own alternatives, and he asks what our theories would look like if we broke from these metanarratives. I think this is exactly the right question and provides a description of the difficult but necessary task that I’m proposing we consider. The problem with the “meta-“ or “grand” narrative is not its narrativity—the way it helps give spatio-temporal order to our thought (something I don’t think we can do without)—but with the “supplement” that the prefix or qualifier (meta-, grand) supplies. The West (and also the Occident) is a grand narrative that seeks to orient all stories around a single axis—it is “heliocentric,” to use one of Derrida’s terms from “White Mythologies,” a text brought to mind by Bruce’s and Emanuel’s comments.

At the opposite pole from metanarratives would be something we might call “stories,” by which I mean the kind of small scale, local tale recommended by Lila Abu-Lughod: “what life is like for one old Bedouin matriarch” (qtd. in Bunzl 5). But stories are still written in the shadows of the master narratives, it seems to me. Abu-Lughod’s recommendation, for instance, comes in response to the metanarrative of “culture” that she sees as grounding anthropology in its phase of complicity with colonialism. What I’m wondering is whether we can imagine maps and narratives that succumb neither to the hubris of the “meta-“ nor to the potentially reactionary domain of the local. (Why equate the local with the potentially reactionary? Just think of states’ rights discourse in the US.) Neither meta nor local, this would be—to respond to Bruce’s equation of “the West” with historicity itself—“another” historicity.

But here my discussion is getting more abstract than I’d want it to. So I’ll conclude by rephrasing what I still think are the key questions: Do we really lose anything by avoiding the geologeme, “the West”? If so, what? Does our focus on the West ultimately reference anything other than the self-referential discourse of the West itself? Are there other such terms in critical theory that we might want to learn to do without?
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Against the West?

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

posted under , , , by Unit for Criticism
Written by Michael Rothberg, Director of the Unit for Criticism

For some time I’ve been musing about a particular semantic, conceptual, and political matter: the persistent and frequently unreflexive use of the concept of “the West”—and the not-quite-as-frequent use of its correlate, “the non-West”—by cultural critics and theorists as well as just about everyone else. This usage is so omnipresent I don’t think it’s even necessary to cite an example—in recent reading I’ve encountered it in Derrida’s critique of “Western Metaphysics,” in Spivak’s critique of “Western intellectuals” in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” and in the sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s work on “cultural trauma and collective identity” in both “Western” and “non-Western” contexts. What is surprising about this persistence of “the West” as a category of critical analysis is that we all know better—precisely because we’ve spent the last three decades deconstructing just such abstractions, whether they be “the Orient,” “race,” or what have you. But of all these terms “the West” seems to have a special staying power. When it comes to the West, we’re all fetishists: We know very well the West doesn’t exit, but all the same…

What is “the West” and why would we want to evoke this highly ideological and Eurocentric concept? I mean this question quite seriously. I should say that I’m less concerned by the celebratory use of the concept—usually a conservative platitude about the superiority of “our” way of life—than I am by its deployment among critical, Left intellectuals who are generally “against the West.” Shouldn’t we be worried that we’re reproducing the very terms of conservative hegemony even as we attempt to deconstruct it? Not only is the referent of “the West” highly elusive, I would argue, but use of the concept ends up confirming the racialized framework it seeks to mark and displace. As Naoki Sakai puts it in his essay “The West—A Dialogic Prescription or a Proscription?,” “the West is [n]either a geographic territory with an affiliated population, [n]or a unified cultural and social formation. It remains always a putative unity; its unity is preordained regardless of its inherent fragmentation and dispersal. It is in fact a mythic unity” (Social Identities 11.3 (2005): 180). My argument here is not with all generalizations (as I will make clear in a moment), but with the usefulness of this particular one. I would guess that many critical intellectuals and activists see “the West” as a practical shorthand for real-world, unequal power relations. Such inequalities most certainly exist, but are they best described by the West/non-West binary? I believe we should resist using this particular set of generalizations and seek other terms, for, as Sakai continues, “the West-and-the-Rest distinction can never be free of the aura of racism” (191).

I see this phenomenon—excessive reliance on an ideological, geo-cultural shorthand I’m tempted to call a “geologeme”—as the flip side of a problem diagnosed by our colleague in the Unit for Criticism, Matti Bunzl. In an essay that was first given as a Unit colloquium in fall 2005, Bunzl provides a provocative critique of the “postmodern turn” in anthropology. Scheduled to be published this month (March 2008) in the journal American Anthropologist, Bunzl’s essay targets the hyperbolic particularism of contemporary anthropology—its refusal of all generalizations and its valorization instead of the local, the complex, and the heterogeneous. In a move that clearly distresses Bunzl, anthropologists have turned against the category that once defined their discipline: culture. In recent anthropology, “culture” stands accused of essentialism, over-abstraction, and reification of difference. In one of his most striking examples, Bunzl cites a well-known essay called “Writing against Culture” by the celebrated anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod. As Bunzl writes, citing Abu-Lughod, “When Abu-Lughod urged anthropologists to ‘write against culture,’ she suggested a particular specification of discourse, namely to replace ‘the term “Bedouin culture”’ with attention to ‘what life is like for one old Bedouin matriarch’” (Bunzl 5). Bunzl describes this turn toward hyper-specificity as an ironic resurgence of positivism in an otherwise thoroughly postmodern and postcolonial field, and he likens it to Borges’s famous story about cartographers who created “a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it” (Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” qtd. in Bunzl 5). Such a drive for exactitude, as evidenced by Abu-Lughod and as satirized by Borges, strikes Bunzl as intellectually and politically dubious. Borgesian cartography can neither supply useful knowledge nor orient political practice; it is precisely too particular, too . . . precise. In place of the particular, Bunzl ends with a call for a “middle ground” of generalization that he thinks will be epistemologically and politically more powerful than the refusal of culture he sees everywhere in his discipline.

I am not in a position to know how “precise” Bunzl’s cartography of contemporary anthropology is—surely it is going to provoke much controversy and it has already attracted a response from two of its targets, Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, which will accompany the publication of Bunzl’s essay in American Anthropologist. I do believe, however, that Bunzl has identified an important tendency that cuts across fields in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Such localism can be found just as readily in literary and interdisciplinary cultural studies as in anthropology, and I’m happy to join Bunzl in the call for a “strategic generalization.” (I’m less certain about another central aspect of Bunzl’s argument—his assertion that the turn toward complexity and the particular helps explain anthropology’s absence from the public sphere and public debate—but I’ll leave that issue aside for the moment.)

What Bunzl doesn’t say, however, is that the kind of positivist drive he finds among his colleagues pertains most dramatically to accounts of the “non-Western” world, while “the West” tends to retain its terminologically monolithic aura, even among many of the same scholars. There may well be good reasons for this differential. Imperialism, after all, did extensive “epistemic violence” (to use Spivak’s apt term) to much of the globe, and a good part of that violence came in the form of imposed categories of thought and naming that erased or wrote over local conditions. There is a need to reclaim that overwritten terrain—in discourse as well as in national political sovereignty. That need helps, at least in part, to explain the turn to the local that Bunzl laments, and suggests that it has been a necessary step within anthropology and cultural criticism.

But that context doesn’t necessarily explain the persistence of generalization on the other, “Western” side of the divide—or not, at least, to my satisfaction. For if imperialism is the problem that led to an asymmetrical overgeneralization on one side and particularistic nominalism on the other, why don’t we say as much? The “West” often seems to stand for just this—the imperialist powers. Before 1989 it also played a plausible metaphorical role in the geo-political opposition between the capitalist democracies and the Soviet bloc. But the problem is that it can just as easily stand for other, more dubious abstractions of the kind many of us have been committed to questioning—the “Judeo-Christian tradition” or the supposedly homogenous cultural and philosophical legacy that traces itself back to the Greeks. Or for Europe and America. Or Europe and America and Australia—in other words, for countries whose dominant political classes and (for the moment at least) majority populations identify their heritage in (some notion of) Europe. There are legitimate reasons for referring to these different entities in particular discursive or political contexts. But if they can be described more substantively than with the geologeme “the West,” why not do so?

Ultimately, that is my main terminological challenge to the purveyors of “the West.” If the term has any consistent meaning, such as imperialism or Christianity or whiteness or European-derived culture, why not just say so? And if the term doesn’t have such a meaning, why not put it to rest, once and for all? I’m curious to hear where people come down on this question; I’m open to persuasion that I’m going in the wrong direction. Read more

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