CONTENTS
East West Affairs | Volume 2 Number 1 | January-March 2014
Editorial
5. Postnormal Governance | Jordi Serra
Commentaries
13. Iran’s “Charm Offensive” | Stephenie Wright 21. A Very African Homosexuality | Zain Sardar 29. Malaysian Shadow Play | Merryl Wyn davieS
Papers
35. Come together...for what? Creativity and Leadership in Postnormal Times | alfonSo Montuori and gabrielle donnelly 53. The Story of a Phenomenon: Vivekananda in Nirvana Land | vinay lal 69. The Pedagogical Subject of Neoliberal Development | alvin Cheng -h in liM 93. Science Fiction Futures and the Extended Present of 3D Printers | JoShua pryor 109. Muslim Superheroes | gino Zarrinfar 123. The Joys of Being Third Class | Shiv viSanathan
Review
165. How the East was Won | Shanon Shah
Report
165. Looking in All Directions | John a. S Weeney
East-West Affairs 1 East West Affairs a Quarterly journal of north-South relations in postnormal times
EDITOrS Ziauddin Sardar, Centre for policy and futures Studies, east-West university, Chicago, uSa Jerome r. ravetz, research Methods Consultancy, oxford, england
DEPuTy EDITOrS Zain Sardar, birkbeck College, university of london, england Gordon Blaine Steffey, department of religious Studies, randolph College, lynchburg, uSa John A. Sweeney, department of political Science, university of hawaii at Manoa, honolulu, uSa
MANAGING EDITOr Zafar A. Malik, dean for development and university relations, east-West university, Chicago, uSa
DEPuTy MANAGING EDITOr Joel Inwood, development and university relations, east-West university, Chicago, uSa
ADVISOry BOArD Tahir Abbas, department of Sociology, faculty of arts and Science, fatih university, istanbul, turkey Mert Bilgin, department of political Science and international relations, bahcesehir university, istanbul, turkey yi-zhuang Chen, department of philosophy, faculty of public administration, Central-South university, Changsha, China Gabrielle Donnelly, Writer, Wolfville, nova Scotia, Canada Deshang Fan, vice director & general Secretary, the Center for global governance Studies postdoctoral Committee office, peking university, China rathana Peou Van Den Heuvel, bangladesh university of liberal arts, dhaka, bangladesh Sohail Inayatullah, Queensland university of technology, brisbane, australia George Gheverghese Joseph, university of Singapore, Singapore Maorong Jiang, director, asian World Center, Creighton university, omaha, uSa Farida Khan, department of economics, university of Wisconsin-parkside, uSa Wasiullah Khan, Chancellor, east-West university, Chicago, uSa Vinay Lal, department of history, university of California, los angeles, uSa Alvin Lim, department of international and Comparative politics, american university of nigeria, yola, nigeria Iftikhar Malik, department of history, bath Spa university, england rana Mitter, department of Modern Chinese history and politics, university of oxford, england Alfonso Montuori, California institute of integral Studies, San francisco, uSa Sami raza, department of political Science, university of peshawar, pakistan Pedro Sotolongo, Cuban national Writers association (uneaC), havana, Cuba Joost Vervoort, environmental Change institute, university of oxford, oxford, england Shiv Visvanathan , School for government and public policy, o. p. Jindal global university, Sonepat, india
2 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 CONNNECTIOONFSo rY tOOUhe WILL MAKE
Master of Arts in East--West Studiies
Creighton University Located in Omaha, Neb., Creighton University is rankeed NUMBER ONE inn Master’s degree grranting universities in the Midwest’ by US News & WorldWorld Repoortt. CCreighti hton is nationalllly recognizedi d for providingidi a challenging and balanced experience focused on edducating the whole person academically, socially and spiritually.
The Program The Master of Arts in East-West Studies is a two-year program designed to provide a strong cross-cultural fframeworkk ththroughh inti terdidisciplinari li y applicationli ti andd international collaboration. The program combines courses taken at Creighton University in Omaha with iinternational experience gained at our partner institutions in Asia.
The program prepares students to assume global leaddership positions in these four areas: • Comparative Eastern and Western Arts, Philosophhy and Literature • Comparative Eastern and Western Business Admiinistration • Comparative Eastern and Western Energy TechnolTechnoology • Comparative Eastern and Western Way of Negotiaation and Dispute Resolution
Start planning yyourour future today For more information on the East-West Studies program pleasse contact us at 402.280.2856 or by e-mail at [email protected] ews.creighton.edu
For the greater East West Affairs a Quarterly journal of north-South relations in postnormal times
East West Affairs (eWa) is a multidisciplinary journal devoted to that examining the relationship between east and West in a rapidly changing world, where power is shifting from West to east, uncertainty and complexity are the norms – what is generally being described as 'postnormal times'. eWa provides opportunities for publication of scholarly articles, which may represent divergent ideas and opinions, on international, political, economic, social and cultural issues from the perspective of shifting power balance from West to east. the Journal also publishes essays and commentaries on policy and research relevant to the global South. it seeks to promote understanding of east-West relations and appreciation of non-western concerns and issues. articles and commentaries are peer reviewed.
Contributions are normally received with the understanding that their content is unpublished material and is not being submitted for publication elsewhere. translated material which has not previously been published in english will also be considered. the editors do not necessarily agree with the views expressed in the pages of eWa.
iSSn 2330-2844
published by east-West university 816 S Michigan avenue, Chicago, il 60605
East-West Affairs issue 5 is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-nonCommercial-Sharealike 4.0 international license. based on a work at http://eastwestaffairs.org. permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://eastwestaffairs.org.
-- Cover iMage : Zafar Malik , detail , grid 2, aCryliC on Wood .
4 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 EDITORIAL Postnormal Governance
governments act as if nothing has changed and it’s business as usual. but as events in the ukraine, egypt, and Spain demonstrated, we are entering the uncharted territory of postnormal times, which require a new approach to governance and international relations
Jordi Serra
IN THEIr CLASSIC PAPEr , “S CIENCE FOr THE POSTNOrMAL AGE ,” S ILVIO funtowicz and Jerome ravetz formulated the principles of postnormal science as a new type of science “where facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent” (funtowicz and ravetz, 1993). later on, Ziauddin Sardar elaborated on the concept and coined the notion of “postnormal times” where chaos, complexity, and contradictions were becoming the norm and uncertainty was the dominant theme (Sardar, 2010). even a casual glance at recent world events reveals how politics and governance is rapidly going postnormal. before we examine recent developments, we should say a few words about the category itself. the selection of the label is quite relevant here. “postnormal” connects two pertinent notions: it indicates that what we are experiencing is not normal or, at least, what we could expect as normal. the conventions by which we have lived over the past decades are increasing becoming irrelevant. but the term also signifies that what we are experiencing is not exactly abnormal. rather, what is happening is that we are transcending the usual meaning of normalcy and entering an uncharted territory, which is the domain of the “postnormal.” but in what sense are
East-West Affairs 5 we surpassing normality? the short answer would be in the modern-industrial sense. Modernity appeared as the answer for a new kind of power that needed a new legitimate source that would break up with medieval traditions and structures. hence, it witnessed the emergence of a new leader, Machiavelli’s The Prince , who ruled over a new concept, the state or more specifically, “the nation-state.” Science served as a useful tool to cut the remaining allegiances to the old feudal system and to provide new foundations for the new structure. Science and (colonial) politics combined to produce the industrial revolution with an accent on modernity that became the main criterion for regulating our life. Modernity, the industrial worldview and science had a symbiotic relationship as all three advocated standardization, imposing some sort of statistical average as the reference for normalcy. there were standard rules that applied to everyone and served all and solved all our problems. these standards were conventionally seen as “universal”; and western civilization, with its hallmark features of “democracy” and “human rights,” was projected as the future of all cultures and societies. but these assumptions of an assumed monolithic world, with a single source of power—western culture, led by the united States and europe— are no longer valid in a multipolar, multicultural world. even the science it is based on turns out to be not as objective and neutral as we liked to think. What funtowicz and ravetz postulated in their seminal work is that we need to go beyond the normal emphasis of science that focuses on results or products to include procedures, purposes, and persons in our analysis. that is, the value of scientific research cannot rely solely in its conclusions but also in the choice of the method, the objective pursued, and the politics and worldview of the people in charge. in other words, science ceases to be an absolute and becomes contextual—just like most human endeavors.
What applies to science also applies to governance and society. the conventional modes of governance are becoming dangerously obsolete; society is in a state of total confusion. as Sardar puts it, we are going through a period “when little out there can be trusted or gives us confidence”; “we live in an in-between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have yet to be born, and very few things seem to make sense” (Sardar, 2010, p435). the zeitgeist of the moment is a mix between uncertainty and anxiety provoked by our inability to understand what is happening. reality seems to be more complex than ever (or maybe it is just
6 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 that we are forced to acknowledge this complexity for the first time), while political developments emerge and proliferate at such a pace that we barely cope with them. We constantly find ourselves in a state of baffling chaos and contradictions.
Consider, for example, the situation in ukraine where the threat of war is growing. it all began with demonstrations against the government in kiev. president viktor yanukovych’s government was indeed corrupt, but it was democratically elected. his main crime, however, was not that he was corrupt but that he wished to align ukraine with russia. from the western perspective, it was good for him to join nato but bad to go into alliance with russia. Soon armed protestors in kiev took over government buildings and demanded a change of government and constitution. politicians from the united States and europe stood side by side with the demonstrators, including the leaders of the far-right Svoboda party, to declare their support. When the parliament voted to oust the president, the political order in ukraine was turned upside down in a single day. president yanukovych fled to russia, and the equally corrupt former prime Minister, yulia tymoshenko, was wheeled out from jail to address the demonstrators. a decade or so ago, that probably would have been the end of the affair. Western powers would have established a government of their choosing in ukraine, just as they had done during the twentieth century in numerous other places, from iran, where the united States overthrew democracy to install the Shah in 1963, to Chile, where the democratically elected Marxist government was ousted in 1973. but in a multipolar postnormal world, things are not as straightforward as they use to be: the generalized acceptance of the conventional distribution of power and the hierarchy of interests are not valid. a re-emergent russia flexed its muscles and moved swiftly by taking over Crimea. the speed with which Crimea was seized was as astonishing as the speed with which the government in kiev was brought down. apart from issuing threats of sanctions, and actually imposing a few, western powers seem impotent. not because, as it is widely assumed, the will is not there, but because the means has evaporated. the reality that power has genuinely shifted is hard to comprehend let alone to face. notice the complexity of, and the resulting contradictions, in the ukraine affair. it is not just the interests of two competing powers that are at stake;
East-West Affairs 7 ukraine has 120 different minorities, each with its own reasonable and unreasonable demands. there are the democratic aspirations of large communities such as the ukrainians, ukrainians russians, the russians of eastern ukraine, and the Muslim tartars in Crimea who have historic reasons to hate russia; the undemocratic goals of nationalists and far-rights groups of both ukrainian and russian colors; the helplessness of the western backed regime in kiev; the militancy of the nostalgic pro-russian communities in the industrial east; the threat of a civil war; and the peril of a global conflict that should concern us all. the contradictions are glaring. Western interests are paramount, but russian interests are irrelevant. the democratically elected president of ukraine was replaced by an entirely unconstitutional and undemocratic takeover. the democratic demands of the mob in kiev are legitimate, but the democratic demands of the mob in Crimea, where a referendum was held, are “illegal.” our fascists, who are an integral part of the new government in kiev and where they control a number of ministries, are benign; their fascists are racist brutes. this sort of rhetoric, and the policies based on them, are now dangerously obsolete. if you light a touch paper in the postnormal world, you are as likely to burn yourself as much as your intended target. this is well illustrated in the case of egypt, where another democratically elected government was overthrown by military-backed demonstrations. the government of president Muhammad Morsi was not corrupt, but he was an autocrat and exclusivist. the egyptian Constitution he introduced made the Sharia (conventional islamic law) supreme and declared egypt to be a Sunni state to the exclusion of Shia, Sufis, ismailis, and other varieties of Muslims, not to say Christians, secularists, atheists, and others. as Sardar notes, once you bring the Sharia into play, a diverse society like egypt can hardly remain united: “given that Sharia means different things to different people, even amongst Muslims let alone non-Muslims, this is a recipe for inviting dissent, inevitable disaster, and a clear attempt at suppressing diversity and plurality” (Sardar, 2013). So the demonstrations against the Morsi government were based on genuine grievances. Many secularists involved in anti-Morsi demonstrations wanted a genuinely pluralistic democracy, an acknowledgement of diversity, and genuine freedom of thought and action. but what they actually got was something altogether different. as the arab Spring itself demonstrates, positive feedback rapidly turns initially peaceful demonstrations into a chaotic phenomenon, which can either lead to
8 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 collapse or total transformation. the anti-Morsi demonstrations led to collapse. the omnipotent egyptian military took advantage of the chaos, and the gullible secularists played into their hands. the end product: a legitimate, democratically elected government, albeit an autocratic one, was replaced by military rule. a “coup” was not a coup. an entire segment of the population—supporters of the Muslim brotherhood—were declared “terrorists.” Mass death sentences were handed out. far from nudging egypt towards more democracy, the secularists succeeded in turning into a nightmarish police state, ever on the verge of civil war. lest you think that the postnormal condition applies only to far off places like egypt and ukraine, let me give another example from my own country, Spain. after a golden period in the real estate business, which turned Spain into some sort of “economic miracle,” the subsequent burst of the housing bubble come as a chaotic implosion. although Spain was not formally rescued like greece, portugal, or ireland, it had to ask for european union funding to sanitize its banking system. and, as expected, in return the eu was granted a high degree of control over Spain’s economy. to comply with european directives, Spain has had to endure severe budget cuts and some structural reforms that, basically, have resulted in a drastic reduction of the Spanish welfare system. all in all, unemployment rate in Spain has escalated over 25% since 2012 (it peaked at 27.2% in the first quarter of 2013) producing no less than 5 million unemployed people during this period. Moreover, the Spanish sovereign debt has reached 99.5% of the country’s gdp, and the payment of the debt interest rates now constitutes a major segment of its national budget, bigger than the one devoted to unemployment. but if the economic landscape is dire, then political situation is grim. the current conservative government is as mired in corruption scandals as the old and new ones in the ukraine. in the eyes of most the population, it is as self-interested and interested only in making profit at the expense of the society—not unlike the autocratic rulers elsewhere! it won the last elections with the promise that it would overcome the crisis and get the country back on the track to growth. but after the two years in government, the truth has dawned: managing a national economy in postnormal times is a complex affair. in fact, the conservative government has ended up doing just the opposite of what it said it would do: far from reducing taxes, they had to increase taxes; far from decreasing unemployment, they have seen it rise sharply. but the economy
East-West Affairs 9 is not its main challenge. that comes from Catalonia. for various reasons, ranging from economic to cultural and identity issues, Catalonia wants to secede from Spain and become an independent state. as polls have consistently shown, the independent movement has mass support from the Catalan society. truly, it is not the best of times to govern Spain.
So what has the Spanish Conservative government done to tackle these issues? it has chosen to turn its back from the future and hearken back to history. first, it granted the Catholic Church an authoritative position, not unlike the Constitution of ex-president Morsi, on several social issues. the abortion law was reformed to accommodate the position of the Church (something that should not come as a surprise as the Justice Minister is a member of the Opus Dei ). the Catholic religion was reinstalled as a compulsory subject in school curricula. in return, the Catholic hierarchy has positioned itself against the secessionist Catalan movement labeling it as “immoral.” thus, seeking sovereignty becomes both a religious and a moral issue! but the most bizarre action was the bestowing of the golden medal of police merit to the virgin Mary by the interior Minister. to be more precise, it has been given to the virgin Mary of the very Sacred love ( Virgen María del Santísimo Amor ) because “she shares the values of dedication, wakefulness, solidarity and sacrifice that Spanish police uphold”—clearly the virgin goes regularly on patrol with policemen. the government has also claimed that Saint teresa would help Spain in these times of hardship. given that the economic and political situation in Spain is too complex and full of contradictions, where viable policies are difficult to perceive let alone to formulate, the government has turned to Saints and religious dogma for help!
Second, it truncated, or simply abolished, many democratic rights. the right to demonstrate, for example, has been curtailed. the strategy is to turn some public actions, like street rallies and demonstration, into administrative misdemeanors. So they are taken out of the jurisdictions of the courts and placed in the hands of bureaucrats and administrators. thus, some legal guaranties, such as habeas corpus or the compulsory presence of an attorney, are wiped out. all of which makes it easier to charge the promoters or supporters of public demonstrations. third, it aligned itself with free-booting capitalists. the most poignant example is provided by its opposition to reform the mortgage regulation.
10 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 Currently, Spanish mortgages are not really mortgages; they are personal credits with real (meaning housing) guaranties. unlike other places where the lack of payment implies the loss of the property and the end of credit, in Spain the loss of the property only entails the end of credit if the selling value covers the total amount of the credit; otherwise the former owner will still owe the remaining part. as property values have dropped considerably, many people have lost their homes. it is estimated that more than 370,000 people have been evicted since 2008. the real tragedy is that a most of these people are unemployed and still owe a lot of money to the banks. these are the same banks that received €41,000 million from the european rescue package, in addition to enormous public funds, to cover their losses! these policies, if one can call them as such, are a recipe for disaster in postnormal times when a tiny perturbation in the system—a demonstration against economic injustice, or a rally in Catalonia for independence, or a boycott of schools where philosophy and music have been removed from the curricula and Catholic dogma has been made compulsory for all—could have big unintended chaotic consequences. as we see on youtube, just such sparks produced serious perturbations in turkey and venezuela, as well as egypt and ukraine. and, of course, it is not just Spain but also other western countries that are facing similar problems. the housing bubble in britain is bound to lead to a catastrophe; and the united kingdom may not be all that united and not much of a kingdom if Scotland gains independence. despite all the checks and balances, or because of them, governance in the united States is paralyzed. We have already witnessed the shutdown of the uS federal government in october 2013. it seems to me that governments still act on the basis of the normal assumption that their actions would cause exactly the effect they intend to achieve. policies are made on the conventional direct linear cause and affect basis: action on a will trigger the desired result on b. but in postnormal times, there is seldom a direct cause and effect relationship. nowadays, phenomena are the result of complex networks of causality in which many causal factors are intermingled; in such cases, action on just one element is not only futile but often also quite dangerous. action on a triggers myriads of reactions in b, C, d, and all the way to Z; and many of these reactions can acquire chaotic proportions at lightning speed. policy has to take a quantum leap to be meaningful in postnormal times.
East-West Affairs 11 to be honest, we do not really know how to shape viable policies for postnormal times. but there are three basic principles that can guide us. first, we need to acknowledge that no one is in control, at least not in a democratic society. the bottom line is that those who think that only governments can deliver, cause, or achieve whatever needs to be done, are deluding themselves. indeed, the scope of any government intervention has been progressively eroded, so it is always incomplete, much less than most policy makers assume. More and more aspects of governance fall out of the executive competence or capacity; in some cases, it takes the collaboration of several administrations to attain the desired goal, which often involves interventions of a host of different social agents. So, by definition, policy making must consider and involve a host of different perspectives and competing, even contradictory, interests. in international relations, “our interests” are not served by focusing on what “we desire”; our goals will be contested, just as we would contest “their goals”; and only through a process of contested negotiations a positive outcome can be realized. in postnormal science discourse, the contested negotiations take place within what is called an “extended peer community.” apart from scientists and academics, it includes a variety of other social actors, from environmentalists, critics, skeptics, writers, to housewives and shift workers. in fact, everyone who is affected by the products of science joins in and participates in the discussion and assessment of any given work. the notion of the extended peer community must now apply to all issues of governance as well as to social issues at large. elsewhere, i have shown how this idea could be used in intelligence communities (Serra, 2012). it is equally valid and important for political, administrative, cultural, and corporate institutions. of course, it requires that we enlarge our conception of participation. Most executives are wary of participation; they feel that participation processes are too much of an annoyance and that there is little to be gained from them apart from a certain degree of legitimization. therefore, the impulse of most administrations is to tame and restrict participations within a limited number of channels. for the purposes of postnormal governance, participation should be enriched and diversified, not only granting access to the widest variety of actors but also establishing many different ways and procedures to shape policy. technically, this is not a problem; the main obstacle would be adherence to the modern ideal of control that is totally counterproductive for postnormal times.
12 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 Second, we need to appreciate that in a complex environment the guiding mechanism must itself be complex—this is known as ashby’s law of requisite variety. in other words, plurality and diversity have to be at the heart of governance and have to be reflected in all state institutions for democracies to endure. When this does not happen, even the most successful states face serious chaotic obstacles. third, a policy worthy of the name must consider the impact of positive feedback loops. how are we going to cope with the myriad unintended consequences? how are we going to negotiate chaotic upheavals? While we cannot predict the outcome of a policy, we ought to have some awareness of its potential consequences. the answer to postnormal challenges is not to hearken back to some perceived normal (or pre-normal) responses—as demonstrated so well by the situation in the ukraine, the fall of president Morsi and the rise of military dictatorship in egypt, and the inane religious sentiments of the conservative government in Spain. it is to understand and embrace the dynamics of postnormal times and act accordingly. We have lost our capacity to control and steer change. We could mourn that loss. or make the most of the postnormal condition.
REFERENCES
S. funtowicz and J. r. ravetz, “Science for the postnormal age,” Futures , 25 (1993), 739–755. a. S. gard-Murray and y. bar-yam, “Complexity and the limits of revolution: What will happen to the arab Spring?,” arXiv:1212.3041, 11 december 2012.
Z. Sardar, “Welcome to postnormal times,” Futures , 42 (2010), 435–444.
Z. Sardar, “the future of the arab Spring in postnormal times,” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences , 30 (2013), 125–136.
J. Serra, “los retos de la inteligencia en un mundo posnormal,” in Cultura de inteligencia: un elemento para la reflexión y la colaboración internacional , edited by f. velasco and r. arcos (Madrid: plaza y valdes, 2012), 143–156.
East-West Affairs 13 East-West Perspectives Perspectives is a series of free lectures open to the public, featuring notable academics, artists and achievers addressing the University and surrounding community.
October, November, January, February and March: Third Tuesday of the Month @ 5:30 PM
April and May: Third Wednesday of the Month @ 5:30 PM
The program consists of a reception with light refreshments at 5:30 p.m, followed by a 30-45 minute talk at 6:00 p.m. at the
Riaz H. Waraich Auditorium (4th floor) Student Life Center East-West University 829 South Michigan Ave | Chicago | IL 60605
For more information, contact: Joel Inwood Email: [email protected] Phone:312.939.0111 ext. 1820 www.eastwest.edu
14 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 COMMENTARY Iran’s “Charm Offensive”
Words matter. and the words used to describe the islamic republic’s effort at reconciliation are not only offensive but also an obstruction to peace. for an enduring and mutually beneficial solution to iran’s nuclear issue, we need better descriptions of its foreign policy
Stephenie Wright
WHEN A BAPTIST MINISTEr IN SOuTHErN GEOrGIA rECENTLy PrOPOSED TO uSE church funds to hire a “stripper,” he stumbled less than willingly on the truth of an old cliché. language matters; in some cases, it matters a lot. it matters, for instance, when it fails to convey the distinction between an erotic dancer and an electrical tool, and when, as a result, it engenders confusion and outrage instead of meaningful dialogue and engagement. it is not difficult to concede the preacher’s point that word choice is important. like him, however, we remain often too complacent in our attention to matters of language. yet the process through which words are incorporated into or excluded from discourse is a profoundly political one, and for this reason, words themselves deserve far closer analysis than most of us are in the habit of doing. through words, we can catch a glimpse the oft-obscured expectations that authors have of their readers. and there are moments where these expectations prove so well-founded that what might have been dismissed as mere carelessness in language is transformed into a habit of speaking that encapsulates, in a few brief words, an entire way of thinking. the term currently favored by the media to describe the turn in iranian
East-West Affairs 15 foreign policy under the recently elected president hassan rouhani provides a fascinating example of such a “tip-of-the-iceberg” phenomenon. it is well worth asking why “iran’s Charm offensive” has featured as the headline of choice across a broad sweep of reputable and not-so-reputable newspapers in their coverage of rouhani’s diplomacy, and particularly, his landmark negotiations with the united States. it is a title that invites the question: offensive to whom ? the lack of the qualifying quotation marks that, for clarity’s sake, ought to encircle iran’s “Charm offensive” is a telling lack, however. a telling lack, because it speaks of an absence of irony, sarcasm, or even the distinction that it generally becomes journalists to observe: the distinction between fact and interpretation, between substance and spin. a telling lack, because it suggests that any member of the reading public from london to doha to dallas should know not only just what a “charm offensive” is , but that it is reasonable to assume that iran would be pursuing one. is this so intuitive, though? and if so, why? given the relative obscurity of the term itself, we might assume that there is some conceptual connective tissue that links “iran” and “charm offensive” in the public imagination—or at least, that the media believes that there is. the notion of the “charm offensive,” in other words, acquires salience through its evocative relationship with the arguably more available concept of “iran.” tying the two terms together, the press seems to believe, will be sufficient to convey the contents of the relevant article in a manner that appears reasonably objective. the use of “charm offensive” to describe iran’s approach to nuclear negotiations is clearly far from neutral, however. indeed, it presupposes and evokes a whole set of assumptions about the character of the iranian regime and the possibility of negotiating with it. the interesting question is not why the press would opt for this potentially—dare i say— offensive caption, but why they think it will hit home for their targeted readership. as it turns out, the media has several good reasons to trust in the efficacy of their semantic strategy. the most important (if least surprising) of these is the fact that this recent sobriquet captures virtually every aspect of a cultivated stereotype of iranian foreign policy that pervades Western political and popular discourse. the “charm offensive” exemplifies all of the dangerous duplicity that the islamic republic has so often embodied—particularly during its more reconciliatory moments. the charm offensive attacks by seduction: it is militant, yet disarming. it is a calculated campaign in which
16 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 deception is the only means of victory, and vigilance is the only means of defense. above all, it is a foreign policy posture of exigency and desperation. the need to charm is born out of the reality of rejection, and the scale of the offensive is proportionate to the isolation that needs to be overcome. as a foreign policy posture, the “charm offensive” perfectly complements an entrenched perception of the islamic republic as a fundamentalist regime that is beyond reason without being above compromise and pragmatism. the recirculation of the “rogue state” narrative has helped to feed into the portrayal of iran as a state whose apparent flexibility must be seen as merely the mask of its essential and unchanging identity. no matter how “moderate” the face of iran, its underlying character is fundamentally and inalterably extreme. if this logic seems oddly familiar, this should not be surprising. not only because it resonates with prevailing conceptions of the islamic republic in the West (and some parts of the Middle east), but because it reproduces almost exactly the arguments represented in the concept of taqiyya . in the islamic context, taqiyya is a juristic doctrine exclusive to the Shi’a sect, and it denotes a legal dispensation that allows Muslims to conceal their religion or commit certain illegal acts if they are at risk of significant persecution. in Western popular usage, however, the term taqiyya has come to have the unfortunately circular meaning of: “islam endorses lying, so what Muslims say can never be trusted.” a more sinister definition, to be found mostly among ultra-conservatives and rogue bloggers, states that taqiyya is the doctrine that permits lying in order to further the spread of islam. associated with this second sense of the term is a host of anxieties expressed by phrases like “creeping shari’a ” and “global jihad.” the linking of taqiyya and terrorism in the West, ironically, has meant that the former has been most widely invoked in reference to Sunni extremists. When applied to iran, on the other hand, taqiyya has come to mean not only a personal religious obligation but the political doctrine (as one blogger puts it) of “smiling to your face while stabbing you in the back” (Sixth Column, 2005). Taqiyya , in other words, is the charm offensive that islam commands: political deception as religious obligation. Spurious as it is, this usage of taqiyya has been largely sidelined in print media until relatively recently. it has flourished, for the most part, on the fringes of the far-right in blogs and on personal websites. here, as well as where it has occasionally been invoked in the mainstream media, taqiyya serves precisely the same function as the charm offensive, although it relies
East-West Affairs 17 more heavily on religious than national stereotypes. both concepts, however, aim at the complete destruction of iran’s political credibility in order to obstruct its attempts at negotiation and international reconciliation. the assumption that iran is only honest when it cries “down with the Zionists” or “death to america” has the unhappy consequence of being impossible for iran to disprove. Moreover, negotiating successfully with iran while maintaining the conviction that “the iranian claim that their nuclear programmed is only for peaceful purposes is a prime example of taqiyya ” seems a rather dismal prospect (Campbell, 2006). embedded in the rhetoric of terms like “charm offensive” and taqiyya is a consistent and tenacious message: appearances are not to be trusted. a single example taken from the recent press coverage enables us to see just how plainly this logic plays out in language and argument. on 19 September 2013, just a few days before the iranian president’s groundbreaking visit to the united States, the Washington Post published an article that referred, with careful imprecision, to the “barrage” of friendly gestures launched by president rouhani. this amiable attack, reported the Post , was accompanied by the “tantalizing prospect of a face-to-face meeting”—a prospect of which the reader is subtly reminded to be wary. the article comments approvingly on the skeptical reaction of uS officials, who have been “careful not to embrace rouhani without reservations”—an appropriate response, the article implies, because iran has not yet proved the sincerity of its “stated desire to improve relations with the international community” by taking “concrete steps.” the article lingers on the lack of specificity in iran’s proposals, and it suggests that the islamic republic is unaware of the kinds of concessions required to achieve its goal of sanctions relief. Citing gary Samore, a former advisor to the obama administration, the article states: “Charm alone is insufficient to achieve the kind of sanctions relief they’re looking for. So far i haven’t seen the iranians indicating a willingness to take the dramatic steps necessary to lift the biggest sanctions” (gearan and rezaian, 2013).
What is attributed here to “iranian unwillingness” might be equally ascribed to american obstinacy—particularly if we consider that what is “necessary” to lift sanctions is defined by the entities that enforce them, including and most notably the united States. part of why america has not been viewed in this light is that within the operative logic of the “charm offensive” is already contained the assumption of deceit and insincerity, of which iran’s
18 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 “unwillingness” is mere proof. the ironic implication is that the only way for tehran to dispel Washington’s suspicion toward it is by conceding to do whatever Washington itself perceives as “necessary.” iran cannot prove itself sufficiently “rational” for negotiations, in other words, unless it agrees unconditionally to demands that have been formulated under the assumption that iran is inherently “irrational.” What Washington sees as “necessary” for the resolution of the iranian nuclear issue—and, conversely, what it is willing to admit as permissible in terms of concessions—is colored by a long-standing assumption that iran is an “irrational” state actor that cannot be dealt with within the established framework of international diplomacy. the terms that Washington has insisted upon correspond with the perception of iran as a “rogue state” unable to be trusted and disingenuous in its negotiations. the result is that iran, to prove itself a rational state actor, must agree to conditions that are more exacting and less flexible than those that would be demanded of a rational state actor. iran, in other words, must give up much more of its nuclear ambitions than would be asked of france, russia, or pakistan, if it is to be counted among the rational nations of the world. the interim agreement between iran and the p5+1 (the united States, france, britain, russia, China, and germany) announced in november 2013 provided grounds for tentative optimism that the international community was moving toward a more pragmatic and less polemical approach to iran. taking effect on 20 January 2014, the deal imposed clear limits on iran’s nuclear program whilst allowing the country to continue enriching uranium up to 3.5%, a level adequate for civil but not military purposes. through this agreement, the uS government implicitly (though not explicitly) recognized iran’s right to nuclear enrichment, an issue that has long been at the center of the impasse. Whether these signs are in fact reflective of a wider shift will become clearer in the course of the coming months, as negotiations for a more permanent solution to the nuclear issue move forward. Characterizing iran’s efforts toward international reconciliation as a “charm offensive” during this critical time in the negotiation process can only damage its prospects for success, since the term itself evokes many of the assumptions and stereotypes that contributed to iran’s ostracization in the first place. it is precisely because of this fact, however, that the term has been so enthusiastically adopted by those who stand opposed to the negotiations, and who have no desire to see them succeed. understanding the internal logic of
East-West Affairs 19 the “charm offensive” and its relation with a broader set of assumptions about iran, we should not be too surprised that some of the earliest dismissals of rouhani’s diplomacy as a “charm offensive” come from the conservative israeli press. While the linking of rouhani with the “charm offensive” can be traced as far back as his election, the term came into its own in September 2013, as the israeli leadership prepared to respond to what they feared would be rouhani’s international success. on 8 September, international relations Minister yuval Steinitz set the line for the israeli government’s response by predicting the launch of an iranian offensive. he cautioned against taking rouhani’s apparent moderation at face value, arguing that iran would go to any lengths to fool the West into trusting it (lappin, 2013). With rouhani’s address at the united nations on 24 September, Steinitz’s prophecy gained, for some, a degree of credibility. Just four days later, israeli prime Minister netanyahu flew to the united States to warn Washington not to buy into iran’s “charm offensive,” which he insisted was a mere ruse aimed at achieving relief from Western sanctions. by 1 october, the “charm offensive” was splattered across the headlines of countless english-speaking newspapers of all political leanings and agendas. netanyahu’s counter-charm-offensive, it goes without saying, convinced almost no one who did not already agree with him on the matter of iran’s true political intentions. Many of the journalists who quoted his reference to the iranian “charm offensive” did so only in order to criticize it as fear-mongering and sensationalism. in a sense, however, this is beside the point. netanyahu’s american visit may have failed to produce many new converts to his cause, but it succeeded in shifting the debate from iranian actions to iranian intentions within the media as a whole. Casting dispersions on iranian sincerity is nothing new in the West, of course. yet while the conservative press continued to hammer home the point that iran cannot be trusted, netanyahu’s public denunciation of the “charm offensive” drew the liberal media into the fray by directing its energies to defending the possibility, or even the necessity, of trusting iran. the “charm offensive” has therefore encouraged those who disagree with its arguments to engage with its claims. the incorporation of the “charm offensive” into the journalistic mainstream had the immediate effect of sidelining some of the more pragmatic approaches to the subject, while bringing the polemical issue of iran’s trustworthiness to the fore. While we have become accustomed to this kind of tone in any discussion of iranian negotiations, it is worth reminding
20 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 ourselves of how strange it would sound if applied to virtually any other nation. in almost any other context, the idea that what a foreign leadership says publicly does not always reflect its actual ambitions is not terribly shocking—indeed, it is taken for granted. political analysis and speculation generally proceeds from the basic facts of political interest, not rhetoric. the fact that public statements rarely capture the true motivations of state powers is accepted as a matter of course, because the disconnect is ultimately unimportant. that states conclude agreements for deeper and less noble reasons than what they pretend is perfectly acceptable, because the agreements are still made, and noble ends are often unattainable without pragmatism. political trust, for the most part, is not built on the extent to which rhetoric resonates with reality, but on reality itself: namely, the reality of common interests. it is well to remain mindful of this fact every time the question of iran’s trustworthiness rears its head, in whatever shape or form. rather than causing us to doubt the sincerity of iran’s intentions, the emphasis on iran’s untrustworthiness should remind us of just how much we have come to accept the notion of iran’s essential difference. in reality, though, iran can most likely be trusted for the exact same reason that we trust any other state entity. Crippled by economic sanctions and confronted by a crisis of political legitimacy, as exemplified in the 2009 green revolution, iran has a number of powerful practical reasons to seek a genuine and long- lasting resolution of the nuclear issue, which has been at the crux of the nation’s international and domestic problems.
Since the beginning of rouhani’s negotiations with the p5+1, the concept of a “charm offensive” has developed into a powerful tool to discredit the iranian regime and obstruct its path to international reconciliation. While netanyahu’s invective was met with skepticism among large segments of the press and the public, it has nevertheless played a role in diverting attention away from what matters most about the iranian nuclear negotiations. the election of a moderate candidate in iran, following the re-election of president obama in 2012, has created a rare window of opportunity for a resolution of the nuclear issue—even a unique one. for arguably the first time since 1979, both the iranian and american leadership have shown a pragmatic willingness to engage in careful dialogue and meaningful negotiations, without resorting to threats or ultimata. the concept of an iranian “charm offensive,” and all that is associated with it, is a damaging one for pragmatism since it implies that any reconciliatory gesture made by iran is ultimately
East-West Affairs 21 misleading. it is worth noting that the earliest use of the term itself dates from 1956, in reference to another foe and a different reconciliation. the quote was by general alfred gruenther, who warned then that the “launching of the russian charm offensive” created a “danger of the democracies relaxing their vigilance” ( Ocala Star Banner , 1956). if the target has changed, the language has not. iran, as the Soviet union in gruenther’s time, has long held the undesirable reputation of being america’s foremost political foe, and the islamic republic has been subjected to just as much propaganda and polemics as communism during the Cold War. the iranian threat, like the Soviet one before it, has been seen as especially dangerous because of two factors. the first is the international influence that it is imagined to exercise (the bush administration’s linking of iran with the 9/11 attacks is reminiscent in many ways of previous failures to recognize the extent of hostilities within the communist world). the second, and most crucial, is the state’s status as an existing (or potential) nuclear power. these comparisons, however, are more imagined than real. the islamic republic is not, and has never been, a world power on the scale of the Soviet union. its international influence as an islamic power has been largely contained by sectarian and ethnic factors and has expanded in recent times due mostly to uS foreign policy failures in iraq and afghanistan. the iranian people and many of its leaders have welcomed the possibility of reconciliation, and the state has good cause to do so as well. We should not allow this possibility to be thwarted by the kind of tired rhetoric embodied in the concept of the “charm offensive.” it is a term of convenience used for polemical purposes, not a useful descriptor for real political behaviors. it has even been used to discredit american presidents who have pursued controversial rapprochements. even in the liberal press, the term has come to be used uncritically, as if it were a technical phrase rather than a loaded concept. this is a worrying sign, and one that risks giving legitimacy to the very ideology that liberal journalists presumably want to discredit. if an enduring and mutually beneficial solution to the iranian nuclear issue is really what we seek, we should look for better ways of describing the efforts that are made toward it. and if it is not, the offence clearly does not lie with iran.
22 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 REFERENCES a. Campbell, “iran’s nuclear deception: Taqiyya and Kitman (part i),” National Observer , 67 (2006), 8–25. a. gearan and J. rezaian, “iran’s hassan rouhani prepares for his debut trip to the united nations,” Washington Post , 19 September 2013. y. lappin, “Steinitz: iran's rouhani plotting deceptive charm offensive,” Jerusalem Post , 8 September 2013.
Ocala Star Banner , “gruenther says next five years critical,” Ocala Star Banner , 19 September 1956.
Sixth Column (2005), “Smile to your face while stabbing you in the back,” accessed 15 January 2014, http://sixthcolumn.blogspot.com/2005/04/smile-to-your-face-while-stabbing-you.html.
1 The Jerusalem Post is exemplary; Haaretz , on the other hand, has published some articles which have been critical of netanyahu’s approach and sensitive to the nuance and complexity of the iranian situation. See barak ravid, “iranian fM's new Charm offensive - on Skeptical domestic audience,” Haaretz , 14 october 2013.
2 See, e.g., Carol J. Williams, “netanyahu Warns of iran ‘Charm offensive,’ deceit on nuclear arms,” Los Angeles Times , 1 october 2013; louis Charbonneau and dan Williams, “netanyahu at u.n.: don't trust rouhani, iran's overtures a ruse,” Reuters , 1 october 2013; Steve inskeep, “netanyahu's push: Countering iranian leader's charm offensive,” NPR , 4 october 2013; edith M. lederer, “netanyahu: iran's charm offensive is ruse to get rid of sanctions,” Huffington Post , 1 october 2013.
3 See James norton, “the israeli case against the iranian charm offensive,” Christian Science Monitor , 1 october 2013; Somini Sengupta and rick gladstone, “netanyahu excoriates iran’s leader and his ‘charm offensive,’” New York Times , 2 october 2013.
East-West Affairs 23 The South Loop Historical Society (SLHS ), is an East-West University initiative.
It is dedicated to providing a platform for research, publication and promotion of the significant history of the South Loop neighborhood in Chicago.
For more information, please visit: www.southloophistoricalsociety.org A Very African Homosexuality
the rise of homophobia in africa has complex causes and roots. Colonial history and legislation, the human rights discourse, foreign aid policies tied to security, american Christian right, and african leaders determined to keep their hold on power have all contributed. but traditional african cultures had no problem with homosexuality
Zain Sardar
ON 20 D ECEMBEr 2013, u GANDA ’S ANTI -H OMOSExuALITy BILL WAS SIGNED INTO law. the passing of the bill provided another opportunity for the West to deride the rise of homophobic sentiments in africa. the scale of homophobia in the continent is indeed extensive: a recent report by amnesty international states that homosexuality is now illegal in 38 out of 54 countries in africa (amnesty international, 2014). the lgbt community is casted as incorrigible rogues—the “enemy within.” african leaders have been competing with each other to denounce homosexuality in harshest terms. in his election speech, robert Mugabe, everyone’s favorite ravening rapscallion, pontificated on the normativity of heterosexual relations through recourse to adam and eve. the uganda ex-priest Simon lakodo suggested homosexual men “will destroy health because their backsides will not hold.” the response of the international community centered on criticizing the fears that have been stoked up and violence meted out on the african lgbt community. this is articulated, somewhat predictably, on the defense of universal human rights. in many ways, this has played into the rhetoric of african politicians which espouse homosexuality as alien to african culture. the edifice of divisive battle is thus erected: a bifurcation between those
East-West Affairs 25 who would use cultural relativism as a discursive panacea to legitimize effective oppression and those who allegedly uphold universal human rights across the world, regardless of postcolonial sensitivities. the passage of the ugandan bill can be taken as an effective microcosm of how homophobia in africa has proven to be a rather acute political tool in shoring up the power of the african ruling classes. as journalist david Smith, writing for The Guardian , explains: “promoters of the bill in uganda, which gained independence from britain in 1962, appealed to populist notions of culture that frame homosexuality as ‘un-african,’ alien behavior foisted on the continent by Western imperialists. Seen through this prism, a strike against gay and lesbian people is a strike against colonialism and in favor of african nationalism and self-worth.” the discourse of Mugabe, the ugandan president yoweri Museveni, and african leaders in nigeria, kenya, and other states, can be seen as a virulent strain of anti-colonialism: it projects a threatening outside to defend and preserve the nation-state. the lgbt communities have thus become the new outsiders, or scapegoats, within the african nation-state. homosexuality is projected as a colonial project and an imperial import; and those opposed to the human rights agenda of gay communities are seen as heroes laying claim to pre-colonial cultural values. however, the human rights agenda has itself become a problem in africa. in many cases, it continues to legitimize the pernicious rationality of imperialism, which refuses to die and continues to live on within some of the structures of international law. non-western and postcolonial writers have been questioning the “universal” basis of the declaration of “human rights” for decades. for example, raimundo panikkar (1989), rajni kathari (1989), Chandra Muzaffar (1995) and Smitu kothari and harsh Sethi (1989) argue that human rights are a western construction and that the West has no right to impose them on all of humanity. indeed, no culture, tradition, ideology, or religion has a right to speak on behalf of humankind or impose its notion of what it means to be human on others. even if we accept that human rights as currently constructed are universal, their imposition on other cultures, by force or by tying it with foreign aid or security issues, amounts to the continuation of the colonial belief that the perceptions of the western culture (about god, Church, empire, Civilization, reason,
26 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 Science, progress, Modernity) inherently contain universal values authorizing it to spread them all over the planet. for many critics of human rights, who far from rejecting them want to expand and reformulate them, the problem is philosophical as well as cultural. “the universal declaration of human rights,” writes Ziauddin Sardar, assumes a universal human nature common to all peoples. it further assumes that this human nature is knowable and that it is known by a universal organ of knowledge—namely, human reason. Moreover, it posits that this human nature is essentially different from the rest of creation: other forms of life are inferior to humans and have no human rights, and living beings superior to humans are not likely to exist. thus, humankind is the master of all creation, of itself and the universe: it is not only the supreme legislator on earth but also source of all moral principles. …the declaration presupposes a social order based on liberal democracy where the society is simply a collection of ‘free’ individuals. again, the individual is seen as absolute, irreducible, separate and ontologically prior to society. but more than that: it assumes that the individual is the whole person. Self- interest and desire for absolute autonomy is all there is to a person: the links between history and community, environment and nature, cosmos and the universe, do not exist. but the person and the individual are not the same thing. the individual is simply an abstraction, a truncated and selected version of the person for the sake of practical convenience. a person incorporates his/her parents, children, extended family, ancestors, community, friends, enemies, ideas, emotions, self-image, perceptions, visions, self-identity. violence inflicted on a person equally damages the whole community not to mention the perpetuator of the violence. thus in the perspective of the whole person, rights cannot be individualized. the insistence of many non-western cultures and religious traditions, on consensus instead of majority opinion, is based on the corporate and collective nature of human rights…they see the notion of the human being presented in the declaration as a rather defective reading of what constitutes a human being: are human simply packages of material and psychological needs, wrapped in an atomized microcosm? is this all there is to be human? (Sardar, 1996a) the relationship between human rights and universality of western values is summed up by the form british prime Minister tony blair’s statement
East-West Affairs 27 that “the best defense of our security lies in the spread of our values. but we cannot advance these values except within a framework that recognizes their universality.” the international lawyer Sadhiya pahuja is amongst many legal theorists who have identified those institutions of international law which spreads the universality of western values—particularly when it comes to economic development, which is based solely on Western models—something which nowadays goes undisputed much of the time. the iMf and World bank have acquired legitimate powers to intervene in the economic affairs of developing countries, mostly to disastrous ends. these institutions cover their backs with the argument that economic development is vital to the progress of the rule of law, respect for human rights, and good governance. if one were to leave african countries to themselves economic stagnation and decline would follow, leading to the lack of implementation of the rule of law, the lack of strong legal institutions, and no doubt would come back and haunt the West as a security concern. tony blair’s african governance initiative (agi) underscores this point—only Western development models seem to ensure good governance and fortifiable legal institutions. the african discourse on homosexuality is thus not just about homosexuality; it is intrinsically tied up with human rights, economic development, foreign aid, as well as colonial history. a host of ngos and civil society organizations have parasitically attached themselves to african nations to disseminate Western values. of course, many are doing invaluable work, some can be seen to be promoting noble causes, but overall the net effect is that these organizations drain the energy and meager resources from the struggles waged by social movements within african nations. this has been well documented by Michael neocosmos, who has observed in South africa that the “programmable discourse” of civil society organizations and ngos has resulted in the de-politicization of people involved in social movements. people have been nefariously reduced to an inane and passive victimhood which asks for the implementation of some nebulous program (neocosmos, 2011). the african people have thus fallen from the heights of active politicization which characterized the national liberation movements against colonialism in the 1960s to passive preys. the Western recourse to the language of universality is thus both counterproductive and dangerous. it is hardly surprising that the people in
28 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 african nations which have criminalized homosexuality do not trust the West’s prescriptions, and that the language of reclaiming african culture has hit home. When the hypocrisy of human rights discourse is on open display in many western countries, and the rotten nature of so called judicial universality is so evident, it is very easy to take refuge in the so-called particularisms of one’s own culture. the great irony of the rise of homophobia in africa is that to some extent it has been imported from the united States. the evangelical Christian right, with its homophobic agenda, has exported the vitriol that fuelled the uS cultural wars to africa where it has found fertile ground. one particular preacher who has become a celebrity is Scott lively. his extreme views on homosexuality have found a lively audience in uganda. lively equates gay people with monsters and nazis. he has taken part in conferences, spoken in the uganda parliament, and is widely taken and accepted in africa as a leading international authority on the issue. indeed, his views had a significant influence on the anti-homosexuality bill in uganda. to back up his rhetoric, the uS Christian right has poured millions of dollars into funding the training of local ugandan pastors, and teaching them to “adopt and mirror” the language which so epitomizes the culture wars in the united States. the intervention of the uS Christian right mirrors the rhetoric and fundamentalism of the first Christian missionaries to arrive in the continent. by acting on their council, the african leaders claim to be reclaiming their original african stance on homosexuality. but in fact what they are actually re-appropriating is the colonial mentality imposed on african culture by Western imperialism. the “original” african perspective on homosexuality is radically different. there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that homosexuality was not just tolerated but widely accepted in african cultures—long before the arrival of the Christian missionaries. Men who do not conform to gender norms have been accepted in Zulu, hausa, and yoruba societies. there was a long tradition of homosexuality amongst the biganda monarchy in uganda, and individuals with non-normative sexual and gender orientations were respected amongst the Shona tribe. Marriages between women are documented in over 40 ethnic groups in the Continent. diversity of sexual practices are thus a deeply engrained part of african society and history,
East-West Affairs 29 although it is important to point out that modern lgbt identities are relatively new to africa (as well as the West). Michael Munisma suggests that the absence of a word for homosexuality in some african languages was “in itself proof that gay people were never considered as existing outside of the norm in such traditional african societies.” the process of “othering” and separating homosexual practices from what is now considered normative practices is a true remnant of colonialism. it is this remnant of colonialism which has now been re-appropriated into the discourse of the african governing elites. While homophobia per se did not exist pre-colonialism in any extensive way, imperialism brought in its wake an extensive legal framework in which homosexuality was criminalized and expressly forbidden. the twin powers of the imperialist, state and the church, according to basil ndjio (quoted in amnesty’s report), extended its dominion over its colonial subjects through its anti-sodomy laws. these laws were overtly a form of social control. the perception was thus circulated that same-sex relations were an expression of “cultural primitivism”—an outmoded deviancy which needed to be superseded by what was posited as “so-called modern sexuality; that is, exclusive heterosexuality.” a new normativity was born; one in which the midwife was explicitly Western. in the african countries colonialized by europe, penal codes were imposed, and their legacy still exists within sub-Saharan africa. South africa, where the netherlands imposed dutch laws in the seventeenth century, provides a good illustration. the anti-sodomy laws that were enacted were kept on by the subsequent british imperial administration. While South africa is one of the leading african countries in the implementation of human rights, the government has come under severe criticism for it inability to effectively protect lgbt people from violent attack. in uganda, prior to the passing of the 2013 anti-homosexuality act, research was commissioned by the government investigating homosexuality in the country. the resulting report itself stated that homosexuality pre-dated “the coming of the White man.” it downplayed the widespread belief propagated by the governmental elite that homosexuality was something people chose. Moreover, it implicitly rejected the notion that homosexuals were intent on converting others to their sexuality. despite some of these “findings” outlined in the report, president Museveni ploughed on with his bill, eager to soak up
30 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 acclaim from the population which he thought would accompany the passing of the act. a very similar law, with (almost) exactly the same wording, would also find its way through the legislative processes of nigeria. these anti- homosexuality legislations are manna to the more zealous Muslim and Christian communities in parts of sub-Saharan africa: it is one thing on which warring factions have united. and it is a main reason why african political leaders and elites see anti-lgbt laws as having high populous value in uniting people to the ends of the government apparatus. the laws themselves are labeled by some Western commentators as typical of a “populism” and “nationalism” emanating from the african continent. however, while some may regard populist nationalism as the last refuge of scoundrels, we need to emphasize that the type of nationalism we see in africa today is the outcome of a historical sequence. a nationalism based on divisions, exclusivity, and scapegoating is now in the ascendant. but this nationalism is itself a western import; a product of the breakdown of an edifying pre-independence historical moment for many post-colonial african countries. it is not the “nationalism” of the national liberation movements which projected an inclusive and emancipatory conception of the people as a political force. the decline of national liberation movements from roughly the 1960s to the 1980s is seen by many as a failure of nationalism. but it should be viewed, as Michael neocosmos puts it, as “the saturation of pure politics, of national liberation and their gradual exhaustion as pure politics, as pure political affirmation.” neocosmos, following franz fanon, sees in the national liberation movements, which existed momentarily, as a popular conception of the nation. in this framework, the nation is the people as a political force that constructs itself through its struggle and resistance. in other words, in the political struggles of the people to liberate themselves from colonial domination, they produce themselves in the form of a collective political entity: the nation. the underlying value of neocosmos’ theory is the importance of agency: the nation here is not “reflective of social entities such as indigeneity, ethnicity or race” but is a political formation with liberating potential. the collective agency of the people resisting structures of colonial oppression is also what manages to keep this notion of the nation an open and inclusive one. What matters most is exercising agency in resisting
East-West Affairs 31 oppression and in charting paths towards liberation. it is this practice which effectively constructs the nation in its collective identity. the nation, as fanon would have it, is this fidelity to an emancipatory situation— such as he saw in the algerian struggle against french colonialism. it constituted a politics of affirmation: the people affirm themselves as supremely political in nature in contrast to the politically passive victims who define the african subject in the eyes of ngos and global civil society organizations.
What has really changed, in neocosmos’ estimation, is that in a bid to consolidate their hold over power african elites have accepted wholesale the notion of the nation-state, a fundamentally Western epistemology. there were also pressures from above to do exactly that: the un does not recognize countries which do not succumb to the nation-state form, the iMf and the World bank do not deal with actors that are not states, international law does not recognize the human rights of groups or communities. While national liberation movements were made up of the alliance of the people— that is, “the nation”—that helped to ward off any formulation of the centralized nation state run by elites, both international institutions and african dictators worked to undermine the idea. it is the wholesale adoption of the nation-state form by post-independent african leaders that has changed the face of african nationalism. the nation- state model not only dissipated the political formation generated by the independence movement, it also enabled african elites to capture the newly independent states. they did this simply by turning nationalism inward, grounding it in exclusion, ethnicity, and a romantic notion of indigeneity. this exclusive form of nationalism proved an efficient way of dividing and ruling, and it ensured african elites held a monopoly over positions of power. the culmination of this process was to produce a déclassé, people or communities of lower social position, on which violence could be legitimized. the logic of this process dictates that a new group of people have to be continuously identified and made to feel the weight of exclusion in order to feed the regressive form of nationalism on which the governing elites dependent for their power. robert Mugabe is the archetypical example of a former leader against colonialism who has made the transition from resistance fighter to permanent dictator and who has used exclusivist nationalism to perpetuate his hold on power.
32 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 ironically, nationalism itself is not the problem. While many Western commentators decry african nationalism as a nefarious form of politics as it merely covers up the fact that nationalism is a construction which is always open to contestation. the utopian energies which defined the national liberation movements of the 1960–1980s, threw up an alternative idea of the nation which can be, and ought to be, embraced once more in the current context. the benefit of this progressive nationalism is that it is at once particular, rooted in the resistance of a specific place, and universal in that it aspires to emancipation of humanity from all kinds of oppressive national and transnational structures. the homophobia gaining ground in africa thus has complex causes and roots. it has historical and colonial dimensions; it is a reaction to the western rhetoric of universal human rights, a response to western economic imperialism and foreign intervention, and a product of new forms of virulent nationalism anchored on the imported notion of nation-states. it has been overtly promoted by the american Christian right and unconsciously enhanced by ngos and civic rights organizations working on Western agendas. it has been embraced by african leaders, who have re-absorbed the mentality of colonialism as an instrument of social control and to maintain power. the uganda anti-homosexuality bill, and similar legislation in other african countries, is little more than an updating of the colonial anti-sodomy penal codes with a few additions—such as forbidding casual and suggestive “touching” between persons of the same sex in public. but homosexuality itself has never really been a problem in traditional african societies.
What the rise of homophobia in africa actually demonstrates is that the “mentality” of the colonial era—something which the african people tried so hard to fight and discard—as well as its language and discourse, has well and truly been revived to augment the power of african elites. Many of the african leaders now in power have held continuous power since independence. their legitimacy has crumbled. once upon a time, african leaders used the rhetoric of anti-colonialism to unite their people against Western imperialism. now they use divisive colonial discourse to divide and maintain power over their people and to stop them from organizing as an effective political force against life-long dictators.
East-West Affairs 33 REFERENCES amnesty international (2014), “Making love a Crime: Criminalization of Same Sex Conduct in Sub-Saharan africa,” accessed June 2014, http://www.amnestyusa.org/sites/default/files/making_love_a_crime_- _africa_lgbti_report_emb_6.24.13_0.pdf. k. kaoma, “how anti-gay Christians evangelize hate abroad,” LA Times , 23 March 2014. r. kathari, “human rights: a movement in search of a theory,” in Rethinking Human Rights , edited by S. kothari and h. Sethi (new york: new horizon press, 1989).
S. kothari and h. Sethi (eds.), Rethinking Human Rights (new york, new horizon press, 1989).
M. Munisma, “it is homophobia, not homosexuality that is alien to traditional african culture,” The Guardian , 14 february 2014.
C. Muzaffar, Rethinking Human Rights (penang: Just World trust, 1995).
M. neocosmos, “transition, human rights and violence: rethinking a liberal political relationship with the african neo-colony,” Interface , 3 (2011), 359–399.
M. neocosmos, “the nation and its politics: fanon, emancipatory nationalism and political sequences,” accessed June 2012, http://www.churchland.org.za/wp- content/uploads/2012/11/neocosmos-the-nation-and-its-politics.pdf.
S. pahuja, Decolonizing International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge university press, 2011). r. panikkar, “is human rights a Western concept?” Breakthrough , 10 (Winter/Spring 1989).
Z. Sardar, “Some thoughts on an alternative to the imperium of human rights,” in Human Wrongs: Reflections on Western Global Dominance and its Impact Upon Human Rights (penang: Just World trust, 1996).
Z. Sardar, “the future of democracy and human rights: an overview,” Futures , 28 (1996a), 839–859. d. Smith, “Why africa is the most homophobic continent,” The Guardian , 23 february 2014.
34 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 Malaysian Shadow Play
its “déjà vu all over again” in the long-running saga of political persecution of the opposition leader, anwar ibrahim
Merryl Wyn davieS
WAyANG KuLIT , THE TrADITIONAL MALAy ArT OF SHADOW PuPPET THEATEr , IS A favorite analogy among analysts of Malaysian politics. Metaphors drawn from the myths and legends of Malay culture often mingle with references to movie themes to explain that not all is necessarily as it seems in a country conventionally described as a bastion of calm stability and easy going moderation. in a wayang performance, old familiar stories are enacted by brightly colored puppets that are seen only as shadows reflected on fire-lit screens. like moths, the audience is entranced by the movement and the haunting music of the gamelan players, while the dalang, the master of ceremonies, tells a story that is a rich mix of risqué, ribaldry, and wit where the high moral sentence of the myth encrusted drama is recast as a biting comment on the faults and foibles of contemporary local events. not a bad metaphor to set the scene for the last seventeen years during which the Malaysian political stage has centered on court cases known as “Sodomy i” and “Sodomy ii.” What has been played out in these courtroom dramas owes little to the hollywood tradition of a movie and its sequel, more a case of what is termed “déjà vu all over again.” the charges embroiling the leader of the opposition, anwar ibrahim, interconnect all the complexity and contradictions of Malaysian politics and society. Malaysia is entirely
East-West Affairs 35 postnormal in its perennial ability to simultaneously generate and coexist in states of stasis and change. this strange ability is always threatening to return the nation to the initial conditions of its past and to propel it to the potential of its possible bright future. hope and exasperation are close companions in Malaysia. its concerns mirror the agenda made familiar by the arab Spring—long standing one party rule, corruption, demands for greater democracy with free and fair elections, good governance, freedom of speech and the press, an independent judiciary, and an end to arbitrary abuses of human rights. it is easy not to notice that Malaysia’s engagement with and experience of these matters, the sudden upsurge of activism and harsh backlash of power, predates and prefigures much that is happening elsewhere.
Malaysia is a rapidly developing economy, an urbanizing society that generates vast riches. it has an enviable portfolio of natural resources—oil and gas, tin, palm oil, rubber, timber, and fertile agriculture that can grow just about anything. it is a multi-ethnic multi-religious country where the official state religion is islam. Just about any religion, sect, or ideology one could care to name has its adherents in Malaysia, from the moderate mainstream to all manner of radical fringes. With such a diverse canvas, it is little wonder that the country can seem to be all things to all observers according to the way the fire light catches and casts its shadows.
When the events currently known as “Sodomy i” first began back in 1997, Ziauddin Sardar described the problem as essentially a traditional Malay succession drama in a country where allegiance to a leader was not only essential but a paramount value. in his The Consumption of Kuala Lumpur (Sardar, 2000), he rather offhandedly noted that in bygone eras such struggles could last for decades, a generation even, with the same players vying for the prize of power. i doubt he expected to be such a prescient forecaster in these times of ever increasing 24/7 communication when public attention narrows to expect the quick paced action of ever changing scenes with new policies and personalities. and how can one describe a popular mobilization for democratic change as a succession drama personified by a small cast of characters? Surely history as the doings of the great that shape the lives of the multitude has become passé, displaced by interpreting events from the perspective of the doings of every person. and yet it is so in Malaysia, that it
36 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 is a country that is West, looks east, vaunts asian values, insists on the exclusive dominance of a puritanical and a would be fundamentalist islam that is moderate and tolerant, yet where Malay Muslims effortlessly turn to older magical traditions as circumstances warrant. as a nation that seeks to position itself as a leader of developing emergent nations, it has a rhetorical tradition of denouncing the West and its interventionist interference along with denouncing western decadence and rampant inequalities, while it fosters its own elite born of a corrupt politics and economy, who share lifestyles of the rich and famous plucked direct from beverley hills. it is in its contradictions that Malaysia is to be understood.
So who are the characters, how has the drama unfolded, and can any denouement be discerned? it is increasingly clear that the central character is not anwar ibrahim, the opposition leader, the contender and champion of reformasi (the reform agenda), but it is his nemesis the old Man, tun Mahathir Mohammad who purportedly retired from politics in 2003 after 22 years as prime Minister. Mahathir has proven himself to be a master manipulator and a persevering puppeteer who, a decade after his retirement, publically speculates about the possibility of returning to the helm of government. no one is entirely sure what to make of this; nobody regards this as a joke. Most certainly Mahathir is continuing his political career precisely where it began. he gives aid and comfort to perkasa—an overtly racist Malay supremacist organization that was founded in the aftermath of the 2008 election. perkasa takes a defiant stance on anything and everything it perceives as an infringement on Malay rights. the most recent offence to Malay sensibilities was the use of the arabic term allah in non-Muslim scriptures, which is now banned by law in Malaysia.
Mahathir came to prominence with his book The Malay Dilemma (1970), which was published in the wake of the traumatic race riots that rocked Malaysia in 1969. it advocated affirmative action on behalf of the Malay majority who were defined as bumiputeras (literally sons of the soil), the indigenous people of the nation. the Malay dominance of government after independence from britain, he argued, had failed to deliver educational and economic uplift to the Malays who continued to be marginalized in their own land by the economic dominance of the Chinese, which is the second largest ethnic group.
East-West Affairs 37 in his career as prime Minister, Mahathir married affirmative action to his other great vision of achieving a fully developed status for the Malaysian economy and society by 2020. the combination of guaranteed economic hand outs and distribution of shares and licenses to Malays operated alongside deregulation and privatization of major corporations. it produced a distinctive form of crony capitalism and kept government at the heart of business. Wealth was indeed created, especially among a coterie of favored clients close to Mahathir, whether this represented a genuine productive allocation of investment is highly dubious. economic advancement was also to be demonstrated by Mahathir’s pet mega projects, such as the petronas twin towers, putrajaya (the new national capitol), Cyberjaya (the hi-tech hub), and the Sepang formula one motor racing track. then came the asian financial crisis of 1997 and Mahathir’s big dreams looked imperiled. addressing the problems brought Mahathir into direct collision with his then deputy prime Minister and finance Minister anwar ibrahim. anwar was a very different kind of politician from Mahathir. in simplistic terms, Mahathir was the personification of natural authoritarianism, while anwar was a charismatic natural democrat. Where Mahathir saw Malayness as beset by threats and haunted by nightmare fears, anwar was at ease with his Malay identity. anwar could entrance the Malay masses with his fluent facility and sophisticated elegant usage of their language, which is a major issue in the culture wars of modern Malaysia. equally, anwar was at ease with his Muslimness, being a prominent national and international advocate of a contemporary interpretation of islam that reveals its relevance to social, political, economic, as well as intellectual issues. he came to prominence as a student leader through his involvement with abiM, the Malaysian islamic youth Movement. he was imprisoned under the draconian internal Security act from 1974 to 1976 for organizing anti-poverty demonstrations. in 1983, Mahathir brought anwar into the united Malays national organisation fold. the uMno has been the dominant party in barisan nasional, the national coalition government comprising communal based parties that has held power since independence in 1957. anwar rose quickly through the ranks to become a vice president of uMno and deputy prime Minister while holding cabinet posts as Minister of education and then finance. he seemed hallmarked to be Mahathir’s chosen successor. in a
38 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 political system increasingly dominated by placemen, anwar was active, able, and efficient, a popular and effective campaigner, and an urbane communicator at home and abroad. he championed an agenda of social justice, social responsibility, and accountability, which he preached relentlessly to the complacent masters of the Malaysian economy. in politics and business, anwar was seen as a clean pair of hands, unencumbered by a coterie of cronies, not least since those he enabled to advance soon gravitated to the potentially more lucrative largesse to be obtained in the orbit of the Master, Mahathir, and not the heir apparent, anwar. Where Mahathir’s vision never moved beyond the perspectives of the Malay dilemma, anwar took a positive open approach to multi-racial multi- culturalism, writing of Malaysia as the home of a new kind of convivencia of peoples and religions mutually benefiting from co-existing together. the differences between Mahathir and anwar begin as style, and their vision of Malaysia became obvious in substantive differences of policy. in the asian financial crisis, Mahathir polished his radical credentials, appearing as critic of western hegemony, instituting strict capital controls, and fulminating against george Soros and the plague of currency speculation, while rejecting interference from the iMf. anwar demurred and looked more biddable to foreign interests and was not aghast at the thought of the economic moral hazard of doing the work of “creative destruction” if it thinned the ranks and curbed the activities of the crony capitalists. in the end, it did come down to simple personal issues. anwar refused to use public funds to refinance the enormous business losses suffered by Mahathir’s sons. the second son, Mokhzani, according to Forbes magazine, was at the time “crashing and burning,” forced to relinquish all his stakes “his debt mounted to more than $100 million” (Jetley, 2014). this was real crisis and meant anwar had to go. Mokhzani, according to Forbes , needed to “learn a lesson.” it was indeed well learned. for in 2013, he entered the ranks of the billionaires, listed by the magazine as the 15th richest Malaysian with a fortune of $1.2 billion. his interests are in oil and gas services as well as the Sepang formula one race track, where no doubt he can enjoy driving his bugatti veyron, the most expensive car in the world costing a cool $1.5 million. the summary dismissal of anwar in September of 1998 sent shock waves through Malaysia. Mahathir had form in ditching deputy prime Ministers,
East-West Affairs 39 having adroitly maneuvered the removal of an earlier incumbent, Musa hitam, in 1987. that had been ruthless power politics within the confines of uMno, grist to the inveterate gossip that animates the daily visit to the tea stalls but not directly a matter for ordinary folk. the response to anwar’s sacking was, as everyone kept saying, “unprecedented,” as if people were surprised at themselves. in quiescent and conformist Malaysia, where any gathering needs official permission, crowds thronged nightly at anwar’s home for ad hoc political rallies that clogged the surrounding streets. the crowds were diverse and formed themselves into a sort of protective 24 hour watch patrol of visitors in the improvised tent ramparts that sprung up around his home. it was evident that anwar would not go quietly. it appeared that significant sections of the Malaysian public would not accept this dismissal quietly either. a campaign of personal attacks on anwar’s character was already in existence. it had been launched with the publication of a book, 50 Reasons Why Anwar Should Not Be Prime Minister , designed to forewarn the uMno general assembly and forestall anwar’s expected challenge to Mahathir. the book was joined by letters and cassette tapes purporting to prove anwar’s libertine ways. as these failed to dent popular support Sodomy i went into action. it was a quantum leap in scale, utilizing the institutions of the state, the police, and the courts, to be rid of this turbulent politician by ruining his personal standing and integrity with the socially conservative Malay electorate. first, anwar’s adoptive brother was picked up. then his speech writer dr. Munawar ahmad anees was taken from his home and held incommunicado for a week by the Special branch before both were produced in court to admit to being sodomized by anwar. Sodomy is illegal in Malaysia where it constitutes an “act against the order of nature” by both parties irrespective of consent. it is punishable by up to 20 years of imprisonment and whipping. both witnesses later retracted their confessions stating they had been coerced, but both had already been sentenced and were serving time in prison. days later anwar was arrested. When he arrived in court, anwar had a black eye, the product of a beating administered personally by the inspector general of police, who later acknowledged the beating. the black eye became the symbol of the reformasi movement anwar had speedily brought together. anwar was brought to trial in 1998 in what was acknowledged by human rights groups to be a farcical politically motivated show trial. he was
40 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 sentenced to nine years in prison. reformasi coalesced into parti keadilan, (Justice party) with anwar’s wife Wan azizah Wan ismail at it head. Wan azizah, an eye surgeon and mother of six, soon showed that she was the mistress of the sound bite. She was a personable and effective figurehead for a new departure in Malaysian politics. the political landscape was shifting. the new party was overtly and determinedly noncommunal. it attracted members from all races and sectors of society. in all the surprise occasioned by the “unprecedented” activity it seemed many Malaysians had acquired a new confidence in the possibility of politics, the idea that things could change, that a new vision of the future could be brought into being. in the 1999 general election, the enthusiasm and hope of a newly politicized electorate met the entrenched structures of uMno control. keadilan had brought together a hastily assembled alternative to the ruling barisan nasional coalition. keadilan joined with the old established opposition parties, the dap and paS. dap is a determinedly secular party with a strong platform of social justice. paS is the islamic party operating throughout Malaysia but dominant in its heartlands of the east coast states of Malaysia. its platform is a rigorous social conservatism supporting the introduction of Sharia law and hudud punishments. this coalition of essential electoral convenience did not long survive the election. after 57 years in power, uMno is the ultimate political machine. it has a way of doing politics. elections are expensive undertakings involving largesse lavished on the populace from feeding them well at political rallies, to handing out gifts and goodies, as well as manipulating the levers of power to bring pet projects to local communities at just the right time. it is a policy that has served uMno well, most especially in rural areas where older Malay voters are predominantly found. the communal basis of politics is also ingrained in geographic spatial distinction between communities. predicting who voted for whom in each locality was less than rocket science or heavy duty psephology. the gerrymandering of constituency boundaries to ensure success is the logical consequence. and the Malaysian mainstream media, newspapers, radio, and television are either state owned or owned by clients of uMno. there is no culture of open political debate in the Malaysian media. the media exist to publish the party line. and, of course, the electoral Commission which regulates and oversees elections is another institution close to government. electoral rolls and ballot boxes have all been emended lost and found as and when circumstances demand.
East-West Affairs 41 despite all this, the fledgling opposition riding the tide of popular displeasure got 43.5% of the officially declared popular vote, winning 45 seats. the government in return for its 56.5% of the vote gained 76% of the seats in parliament. the two-thirds majority in parliament that is the lodestone of uMno politics and Mahathir’s obsession was secure. this majority is necessary to make constitutional amendments and the constitution is seen as the bulwark of Malay rights, the position of islam and the royal prerogatives. all the hopes and activism that had been mobilized seemed to have been converted into a manageable challenge. Complaints about ballot fraud, the suspicious number of government ministers who won their seats with identical majorities could be dismissed and most certainly would not trouble the electoral Commission. the business of politics, it seemed, could return to normal. the unprecedented, however, did not evaporate in electoral exasperation and despondency. it was not just the alignment of political forces that had shifted. a whole new array of social media outlets were becoming widely available as platforms for news, debate, and critical comment. Malaysia not only produced computer chips and electronic goods, but its population were adept and also using these products. the older generation, used to accepting the dictum of leaders, was increasingly being displaced by a younger generation that was better educated, often educated overseas, and ready to grasp the opportunity to ask questions, to question authority and the status quo and express their opinions as never before. Where the outlet for exasperation had always been the sharp wits gathered at tea stalls churning the rumor mill and imbibing healthy infusions of scurrilous gossip, posting one’s criticisms and reading what was published on the internet changed perceptions. the many who were discontent with the status quo and with the authoritarian Malaysian way were being dissected and found lamentable. public debate also drew strength from the existence of a plethora of organizations of civil society—non- governmental organizations that existed beyond the ambit of party political organization and that were involved with a wide variety of special interests and concerns. the possibilities for conscientizing the temper of discontent were many and actively pursued. the tectonic plates of Malaysian consciousness were on the move.
With anwar in prison and with the worst impacts of the financial crisis weathered in 2003, Mahathir decided it was time to retire. he hand-picked
42 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 as his successor abdullah ahmed badawi, popularly known as “pak lah.” a scion of a well-known and highly respected religious family, badawi was no firebrand. he was a quiet spoken middle of the road man, a poet whose principle public appeal was as a clean pair of hands not embroiled in either political machinations or questionable business dealings. it was perhaps a collective sigh of relief that the Mahathir years were over that delivered pak lah his landslide victory in the elections of 2004. garnering nearly 64% of the popular vote, badawi gained 90% of the seats in parliament. the opposition slumped to 21 seats on 36% of the vote. keadilan won just one seat. if getting rid of uMno was too tall an order then maybe the calculation was that a different kind of uMno might emerge under the guidance of a very different kind of leader. the simple presumption was that with the presidency of uMno, which went along with the office of prime Minister, came automatic dominance of all the levers of power which created the possibility to alter the dispensation Mahathir had constructed. it is a presumption which has proved to be naïve. at first, the omens seemed positive. badawi talked moderation and amendment from religion to economics. he pledged to tackle corruption and to end patronage and misuse of power, while streamlining government. also, in 2004, anwar’s conviction in the sodomy trial was overturned by the appeal Court. he was released from prison. it was clear that anwar would immediately begin strategizing the future of opposition politics. for badawi, things did not continue as they began. his son-in-law, khairy Jamaluddin, began a rapid rise to prominence becoming notorious for his rapacious appetite for business dealings. nepotism, corruption, and misuse of power made it seem just like old times. and the structure of crony capitalism Mahathir had nurtured now seemed hard wired into the economy. its effect was to increase disparities of wealth. the rich were getting richer, while the incomes and options of the rest of the population stalled. the rise in fuel prices and inflation were squeezing living standards. the big ticket items planned by Mahathir were still on the government agenda. and Mahathir was ever ready and available to pontificate on any issue of the day. the hemorrhage of Malay votes, far from generating the moderation badawi had promised, was pushing uMno to become more raucous in its anti-Chinese rhetoric. the renewal of the challenge from the opposition which anwar was molding into a more coherent agenda of agreed principles had the capacity to reach into all communities. inevitably,
East-West Affairs 43 it ended badly. in the 2008 election, the split of the popular vote was government 50% to the opposition’s 46%. badawi therefore garnered 63% of parliamentary seats—the government fell short of the two thirds majority for the first time in Malay history. khairy Jamaluddin was among the victorious uMno candidates—eventually. after the first count, his opponent was declared a narrow winner by around 140 votes. after a recount, the election Commission records khairy as the victor by some 5000 votes. Worse still the barisan coalition was wiped out in penang, badawi’s home state, as well as a loss of control of Selangor, the most urbanized and developed state in the country where the capitol and kuala lumpur are situated. it was in the wake of the 2008 election that perkasa was formed and Mahathir weighed in supporting its overtly racist approach to the Malaysian future. it is clear that badawi had become a broken reed, ineffectual in directing his party and government, increasingly harried by the displeasure of Mahathir who even threatened to quit uMno. the opposition, on the other hand, was gaining strength. So something had to be done. in June of 2008, an “aide” went to a police station alleging that he had been sodomized by anwar. thus began Sodomy ii, which was as ridiculous and garbled a proceeding as Sodomy i. it was denounced by anwar as blatantly politically motivated, a view shared by human rights groups and politicians from various countries. the court case became a protracted business which consumed anwar’s energies and distracted his focus on marshalling political opposition. anwar faced trials in 2010 and 2011 before being acquitted in January of 2012. the prime task for keadilan was to reach out to the rural Malay population that is the backbone of uMno support. this socially and religiously conservative group is exactly the voters who would be most horrified by the salacious charges brought against anwar. obstacles were places on anwar’s movement to curtail his ability to make direct appeals to rural voters. in 2009 pak lah retired. his successor, again chosen by Mahathir, was najib tun razak, the son of Malaysia’s second prime Minister and nephew of its third prime Minister. najib had previously served Mahathir as defense Minister where he and his ostentatiously wealthy wife had earned unenviable reputations for corruption. french courts are investigating the payment of bribes to secure the Malaysian purchase of a french submarine. najib entered the office making the usual pledges to stamp out corruption, poverty, and
44 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 cronyism. he clearly appreciated the need to engage and subvert the agenda which was attracting voters to the opposition. his main proposal was to modulate the new economic policy that had been the mainstay of government policy for decades. najib’s new economic Model would continue to offer affirmative action, but it would switch from being race based to needs based. he proposed opening the economy to market pricing weaning Malaysia off subsidies on essential goods such as electricity, petrol, and sugar, even though this would inevitably mean price rises. he pledged to conduct a comprehensive review of the laws allowing indefinite detention without trial, released 13 people held under the internal Security act, and removed the ban on two opposition newspapers. Clearly najib wanted to be seen as more liberal and libertarian in his approach than his predecessors. najib’s test came in the elections of 2013. the opposition had high hopes of succeeding at last in wresting power from the barisan. in a shadow play, the concept of a lack of clarity is always manifest—one looks through and at things darkly. So it must be for the Malaysia electorate. in this last 2013 election, 85% of the electors turned out to cast their vote. the government garnered 133 seats in parliament from a 46.53 share of the popular vote— its lowest ever tally. the opposition polled 53.47 of the popular vote and won 89 parliamentary seats. it has often been argued that using a ballot box is not the be all and end all of democracy, an election is no proof positive that genuine democratic choice is available to and has been deliberately chosen by the people. Malaysia is a case in point. Clearly in some respects it is an object lesson. Certainly it is a most effectively gerrymandered nation. on election night, a more comprehensive picture of utter dejection than one seen on anwar’s face during his post-election press conference would be hard to imagine. the democratic challenge goes—and so too do the twist and turns of déjà vu all over again. the recent history of Malaysia has been the interconnection of hope and exasperation, the linking of stasis and change. a small cast of characters have contended on the shadowy stage. following the debacle of the Mh370 disaster on top of his appalling election showing, najib is another broken reed clearly in the crosshairs of the enduring old Man Mahathir who stands ready to rescue the nation from its future possibilities by familiar stasis. the quality of governance is a constant theme of the opposition. the ranks of uMno look increasingly threadbare of talent. najib has rapidly backpedaled
East-West Affairs 45 on the promises of change he confidently made on taking office, tacking ever closer to Mahathir’s favored remedies. and the travails of anwar continue. his acquittal for Sodomy ii, would you believe, has been overturned, and he has been sentenced to five years in prison—his third major incarceration. We leave the shadow play by the same door we came in. how much is change, how much are things just as they were? Malaysia may just be a country where, for some time to come, it is impossible to tell the difference between one state of existence and another. is that postnormal?
REFERENCES
C. allers, Anwar Ibrahim: Evolution of a Muslim Democrat (Singapore: Monsoon books, 2014). n. Jetley, “Sapurakencana gushes profits for billionaire Shahril Shamsuddin,” Forbes , 3 March 2014.
M. Muhammad, The Malay Dilemma (kuala lumpur, Malaysia: pandok publications, 1970).
Z. Sardar, The Consumption of Kuala Lumpur (london, uk: reaktion books, 2000).
46 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 PAPERS Come together...for what? Creativity and Leadership in Postnormal Times
in the age of accelerating change, complexity, and chaos, we urgently need new ideas and radical way of thinking that go to the roots of our assumptions and issues
alfonSo Montuori and gabrielle donnelly
INTrODuCTION the world is in the throes of a great transformation (Macy and Johnstone, 2012; Morin and kern, 1999; ogilvy, 1989; Slater, 2008). the complexity, pluralism, and uncertainty of life appear overwhelming. from beijing to rio, from Cairo to los angeles, the rate of change is not letting up. indeed, it seems like the rate at which we take radical change and radical changes for granted is also accelerating. a recent cartoon showing the evolutionary development of humans has our latest installment losing the erect posture in favor of the now familiar hunched over position of individuals checking their smart phones. We should keep in mind that smart phone technology is less than 10 years old: the first iphone came out in 2007, but in 2014 it seems almost inconceivable for a considerable majority of people to live without one. nevertheless, the changes brought about by the new technology and the relatively seamlessness with which it has been accepted hide the fact that we are talking about very, very new phenomena, and are potentially blind to the implications of our new hunchbacked posture.
Ziauddin Sardar argues that we are in postnormal times, “an inbetween period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have not yet emerged, and
East-West Affairs 47 nothing really makes sense” (p435). the new technology, makes it increasingly possible to follow our every move through the internet, CCtv, satellites, and other means. the dramatic news about climate change, terrorism, the abuses of power, and rampant inequality, coupled with our seeming inability to make sense of them, means the future Shock discussed by alvin toffler (toffler, 1984) several decades ago, is upon us. toffler’s Future Shock was a play on the term Culture Shock: the future is as disorienting and shocking as being in a foreign country, where the most taken for granted things are done differently, disorientingly weirdly, in a way that is just not… normal, and the world truly doesn’t seem to make sense. the sociologist Zygmunt bauman writes that modernity has gone from being “solid” to “liquid”: everything is fluid and changing; there is no predictability, no certainty, no stability, and human beings have to become flexible, adaptable, capable of working under conditions of great uncertainty (bauman, 2005, 2007, 2008). the uS army describes the present world with the acronym vuCa: volatile, uncertain, Complex, ambiguous. in the business world, the acronym fud is used to describe a condition of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (Winograd and hais, 2011). in this complex, fluid, uncertain interregnum , Sardar argues that creativity and imagination are essential to address the “complexity, contradictions and chaos” of postnormal times:
imagination is the main tool, indeed we would suggest the only tool, which takes us from simple reasoned analysis to higher synthesis. While imagination is intangible, it creates and shapes our reality; while a mental tool, it affects our behavior and expectations. We will have to imagine our way out of the postnormal times. the kind of futures we imagine beyond postnormal times would depend on the quality of our imagination. given that our imagination is embedded and limited to our own culture, we will have to unleash a broad spectrum of imaginations from the rich diversity of human cultures and multiple ways of imagining alternatives to conventional, orthodox ways of being and doing. (p435) for Sardar, imagination, and its broader umbrella, creativity, are essential “to imagine our way out of the postnormal times.” as the old ways of thinking and doing are failing, creativity is as a vital resource to envision and develop alternatives, whether technological, economic, or social. Creativity has gone from being a fascinating, marginal, odd and inexplicable phenomenon to
48 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 becoming the engine of social change and transformation. it has become central in the transition from an industrial-Machine worldview to a new world, as yet unarticulated. but creativity itself is changing dramatically. Whereas 20 years ago the lone genius was still the iconic model of creativity, today creativity is viewed increasingly as a relational, collaborative everyday/everyone/everywhere process that is not limited to the arts and sciences and the “big idea.” the change in creativity is both driven by, and in turn itself drives, social trends, and social change. two key aspects of the old worldview are what we’ll call the “hobbesian Machines.” this is a combination of the newtonian/Cartesian Machine, Clockwork, industrial view of the world (Capra, 1984; russell, 1983; Scott, 1997; toulmin, 1992), with an assumption that the world is fundamentally shaped by a hierarchy of ruthless competition and a mentality of us against them, hobbes’s “homo homini lupus” (men are as wolves to each other) (eisler, 1987; Montuori, 1989; rifkin, 2009; Slater, 1991, 2008). this combines to make what Slater calls a “Control Culture,” and eisler has called a dominator culture (eisler, 1987; Slater, 2008). an alternative to this view is that the universe is fundamentally a creative process (Ceruti, 2008; davies, 1989; kaufman, 2004; peat, 2000, 2002; Swimme and tucker, 2011), and that human beings can —although are by no means determined to—develop collaborative or “partnership,” win-win relations. edgar Morin has argued that what is needed now is a thought that is radical , by which he means a thought that goes to the roots of our assumptions and issues, and a thought that connects and distinguishes rather than one that separates and fragments (Morin and kern, 1999). in transitional time such as ours, we believe that it is necessary to follow his advice, and step back and look at the big picture, to situate ourselves in space and time. We need to be able to understand the forces that shaped our old worldview, and how it informed our choices. We need to understand where we have come from, and how we have been shaped by our times, in order to move toward a different future. in this paper, we trace the evolution of creativity and leadership, and we explore how and why they have changed in the emerging networked society. We describe these changes, and then we conclude with a brief discussion of how creativity and leadership might address some of the more problematic aspects of recent developments.
East-West Affairs 49 Historical roots in the West, the concept of creativity as we know it today emerged in the 15th century during the renaissance, (tonelli, 1973). it coincided with the birth of humanism and individualism (Wittkower, 1973), and a reaction against theocracy. it blossomed with the genius myth of romanticism in the late 18th century (goehr, 1992). until the 1980s, research on creativity in the West was situated mostly in the discipline of psychology. it focused primarily on what were known as the three ps: person, process, and product (runco, 2007). in the romantic mythology underlying this atomistic, individualistic view, the creative person was mostly a lone, often eccentric, genius (Montuori and purser, 1995). the unit of analysis was almost exclusively the exceptional or “eminent” individual (glaveanu, 2010). the “how” of creativity occurred exclusively “inside” this individual, the creative person. the classic image of the creative process was of a light bulb going on over the creator’s head during the “eureka” moment. the creative process was viewed as a solitary one, at first with mystical or divine sources, and then increasingly associated with unusual mental states and psychopathology (andreasen, 2006). the “what” or creative product was associated with “big bang,” earthshaking insights and products (a. Montuori and r. purser, 1999; runco, 2004, 2007). the “where” of creativity was confined to specific domains, almost entirely in the arts and sciences. We can see this in the great traditional exemplars of creativity, almost entirely male and almost entirely made up of artists and scientists such as van gogh, einstein, Mozart, and feynman (barron et al., 1997).
The Changing Face of Creativity and Leadership at the beginning of the 21st century the way we understand, practice, and express our creativity is changing. these new developments are in turn influencing how society is changing (Montuori and donnelly, 2013). Creativity leads to change, and change leads to creativity. three main trends involve (a) viewing creativity as a more networked, collaborative process, (b) as an everyday, everywhere, everyone process, rather than something confined to exceptional geniuses (Montuori, 2011a, 2013), and the articulation of creativity as a form of leadership and leadership as a form of creativity (burns, 2004; Csikszentmihalyi, 2004; gardner, 1995; hooker and Csikszentmihalyi, 2003; Montuori, 2010; Simonton, 1984; Sternberg, 2007).
50 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 not surprisingly, the discourse and practices of leadership in postnormal times are changing too. two of the most important social movements of the last few years, the arab Spring and the occupy movement did not have a heroic, “great Man” leader, or even a media-genic individual representative (Castells, 2012; Montuori, 2013). Modern conceptions of leadership and creativity trace their roots to the same theoretical assumptions and research approaches. We briefly trace their history and then point to different ways in which they are changing at the beginning of the 21st century. new assumptions and theoretical frameworks, as well as specific practices of leadership and creativity, can inform one another and reflect a more distributed, relational view. leadership and creativity are shifting from a heroic, great Man view to a more relational, distributed, everyone/everywhere/everyday process. of particular relevance in postnormal times is the emerging view of leadership as a creative process, and creativity as a leadership process. leadership can be a form of self- creation in the context of social responsibility and the development of possibilities and alternatives in the world: if creative ideas and processes can change the world, where and how do we want to ourselves and others? how do we channel our creativity? Creativity is increasingly being applied to social problems in movements focusing on Social innovation, Social entrepreneurship, and Social labs, defined broadly as the generation and implementation of new ideas about social relationships and social organization (hassan, 2014; howaldt et al., 2010). turning possibilities into realities requires that creators also become leaders. leadership needs to account for and be responsible for the direction and application of human creativity, and creativity needs to infuse leadership with new possibilities and opportunities to move beyond postnormal times. the interrelated duo of creativity and leadership can begin address the problems of the old world and can develop and guide us toward alternative, more humane, more just, and more conscious times.
Historical and Conceptual Origins of Creativity and Leadership Modern conceptions of creativity and leadership in the West can be traced to the romantic hero, the “lone genius” myth (Montuori and purser, 1995) and its “great Man” image (northouse, 2004). until the second half of the 20th century, the study of leadership was largely about individual leaders, and the study of creativity the study of creative persons (Montuori, 2011b; runco, 2007; Western, 2008). the focus was on what made particular individuals exceptional, and hence a focus in both fields on traits, personality, and
East-West Affairs 51 cognitive dimensions (northouse, 2004; pope, 2005; Western, 2008). informed by such classic dualisms of Modernity as creativity/conformity, genius/masses (and of course, genius/madness), as well as leader/follower, this approach has been “exceptionalist”: leaders and creators were assumed to be exceptional persons with unusual gifts in a limited number of areas such as politics, business, the arts and sciences, or the military. a historical review of individuals considered great creators and leaders in the West shows a preponderance of white men while people of other ethnic and racial identities, as well as women in general, are notably absent (bordas, 2007; Chin et al., 2007). it is only recently that the discourse has begun to integrate women, while the number of possible examples is increasing exponentially, and Mohandas gandhi, Martin luther king Jr., nelson Mandela, and Malcolm X have become the icons of non-western, non-white leadership.
20th century developments a number of intellectual developments in the 20th century have led to a thorough questioning and critique of the dominant atomistic views of leadership and creativity:
• Social constructionists have argued that what we call “creative” or who we call a “leader” is the result of a judgment, and creativity and leadership are therefore socially constructed: there is no “essence” of leader, there is a social judgment that labels people leaders and behaviors as “leaderly.” the relationship between self and society must be viewed more relationally, and essentialist perspectives on the self (“a born leader,” “you’ve either got it or you haven’t”) are critiqued (g. t. fairhurst and d. grant, 2010; gergen, 1994, 2000; k. J. gergen, 2009; kasof, 1985; Mockros and Csikszentmhalyi, 1999; Sampson, 2008).
• the intellectual movement loosely known as postmodernism has critiqued the notion of the individual, essentialism, the “subject” and the “author,” as well as demonstrated the commercial and political interests embedded in the discourse of creativity and leadership (barthes, 1977; boje, gephart, and Joseph, 1996; g.t. fairhurst and d. grant, 2010; foucault and rabinow, 1984; grint and Jackson, 2010; hare-Mustin and Marecek, 1988; kearney, 1988; Montuori and purser, 1995; Stigliano, 1999).
• Systems and complexity approaches have stressed the importance of an
52 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 open systems perspective—specifically, the interactions between individual and society—and the role of context. they have highlighted the “self- organization” of natural and social phenomena, with a bottom-up, distributed rather than top-down approach, and thus the significance of recursive, mutually causal interactions, with implications for both creativity and leadership (borgo, 2006; brafman and beckstron, 2008; Contractor, 1999; Johnson, 2001; luhmann, 2013; Montuori, 2011c; Morin, 2008; Wheatley, 2006).
• the emerging networked Society (with the rise of social media, the internet, and relatively cheap global transportation) has led to an increased awareness of the role of interactions, networks, and collaborative processes, leading to greater openness to more relational, networked understandings of agency and the unit of analysis (W. t. anderson, 2001; barabasi, 2003; brafman and beckstron, 2008; Castells, 2000; Christakis and fowler, 2009; leadbeater, 2009; nielsen, 2012; taylor, 2003). this is particularly evident in the so-called “Millennial” generation (pachucki, lena, and tepper, 2010; pew, 2007; Winograd and hais, 2011). the atomistic, individualistic, “great Man” views of creativity and leadership were already problematic: it is becoming clear that both creativity and leadership were much more networked and collaborative than was originally assumed, not least because the exclusive focus on individuals did not account for the role and importance of interactions, social contexts, organizational structures, political interests, the dynamics of race class and gender, and a variety of other factors (Montuori and purser, 1995). the emerging practice and acceptance of collaborative creativity and leadership (Montuori, 2011a; Sawyer and deZutter, 2009) coincides with the rise of the Millennials, a new generation that came of age in the year 2000 and that is considerably larger even than the baby boomers, the needs of industry for collaborative creativity in r&d, and with the larger number of women, as well as more people from diverse ethnic and racial identities being able to participate in, and recognized in, creative and leadership roles (eisler and Montuori, 2007; Winograd and hais, 2011).
Transforming Creativity recent scholarship has led to new ways of conceptualizing self, society, production, art, science, and creativity, stressing the social construction of a
East-West Affairs 53 self embedded in relationships, situated in a cultural and political context (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999; k. gergen, 2009; kearney, 1988, 1999; pope, 2005; rosenau, 1992; Sardar, 1999; Stigliano, 1999). in the arts and entertainments, we see this in a shift to what has been called a participatory culture , which involves a blurring of boundaries between “artist” and audience (Jenkins, 2008). the seemingly trivial example of karaoke provides a glimmer of how entertainment now involves greater and more active audience participation. it’s not a passive audience listening to music. audience members are also the performers. Wikipedia is another example of the admittedly controversial “wisdom of crowds,” with participatory entries and editing processes. video games have users design their own series of levels. in r&d, end-user participation in the design process is increasingly becoming the norm. according to Jenkins, participatory culture reflects a shift from individual expression to greater community involvement, toward emergent, bottom-up, and even grassroots processes and away from the traditional reliance on a top-down approach. research on the psychology of creativity now includes a strong emerging focus on everyday creativity rather than exclusively on “eminent creatives” and major contributions. it is by no means limited to the arts and sciences (richards, 2007; runco and richards, 1997). the notion of everyday creativity suggests creativity can occur in everyday life, in less traditionally exalted domains, and does not have to take the form of a major work of art or scientific discovery. this opens up the possibility of the recognition of creativity as a phenomenon that can permeate every dimension of life. the Where of creativity is now potentially everywhere . there is also an increasing recognition of group and collaborative creativity. this can be found in new research on innovation, group creativity, jazz, and an increasing appreciation of “the wisdom of crowds,” the creative potential of “open innovation,” where difficult problems are shared with the public and useful answers emerge (barron, 1999; borgo, 2006; leadbeter, 2009; Montuori, 2003; Montuori and purser, 1995; a. Montuori and r. e. purser, 1999; paulus and nijstad, 2003; Schrage, 1999; Surowiecki, 2005). generational trends are becoming increasingly obvious and influential. research conducted in 2010 showed millennial college students associated creativity with everyday activities and social interactions (pachucki et al., 2010). Whereas for baby boomers creativity is associated with “eminent
54 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 creatives” such as einstein, van gogh, or individual popular artists, in today’s “participatory” culture (Jenkins, 2008, 2009) the focus is not so much “eminent creatives,” but on participatory, relational processes with peers and family, where “making is connecting” (gauntlett, 2013).
What might appear as great participation also arguably lends itself to great manipulation and exploitation. as douglas rushkoff points out in his frontline documentary Generation Like , the movie Hunger Games has a website with a competition for the best, most committed fan. What this means is essentially that the fans are now using social media to promote the movie, and the reward of promoting the movie through social media is being “#1 fan,” and potentially a mention by one of the movie’s stars. this way the movie gets constant grassroots promotion, and the fans gain in social status by being “retweeted” or responded to by the stars of the movie, which increases the fan’s peer group social status and the number of “likes” they get in social media. there has been a considerable shift toward a much more interactive, participative relationship between audience and the “content providers.” it’s obvious that business interests have learnt how to leverage this for their own interest. but while this is perhaps the most obvious expression of this transition, it is by no means this only one.
Many of the most interesting innovations in the social sphere over the last 20 years or so have been about networking, participation, and grassroots efforts. these innovations are connected to the emergence of the internet, social media, the rise of a networked society, the changing role of women, the values of the Millennial generation. an assortment of examples of more participatory, grassroots creativity include (and this is limited to mostly uS/uk examples): youtube, etsy, facebook, Wikipedia, WebMed, lord of Warcraft, farmers’ markets, artisanal foods, and the Slow food movement, MySpace, blogs, vlogs, twitter, flash mobs, Britain’s Got Talent, independent music labels and movies, garageband, diy culture including diy education (kamenetz, 2010), yelp, tripadvisor, Craigslist, Dancing with the Stars , American Idol , and all sorts of “reality television.” the phenomenon of “crowdsourcing” to solicit funds via social media has also opened up new avenues of funding for entrepreneurial activities. the emerging Makers movement is another sign (C. anderson, 2012), as is toffler’s related concept of “prosumer” which brings together the terms producer and consumer to illustrate how the traditional opposition between the two roles is becoming blurred (toffler and toffler, 2006).
East-West Affairs 55 this new grassroots participation is not unproblematic, as the Hunger Games example illustrates. Critics have also argued that there is a move toward amateurism: it’s not clear that the fact that art and travel critics are replaced by blogs with reviews and the comments of trip-advisor users is necessarily an improvement, and newspaper and magazine critics are losing their jobs. any semblance of standards and high culture, any valuing of expertise and craft is being replaced by vulgar, amateurish know-nothings, in this view (Carr, 2010; keen, 2008). the alleged democratizing process can also be a flattening where traditional standards of excellence and values are all but lost. the threat of manipulation by governments and big business is ever present, and grassroots, networked groups can also include terrorists and hate groups (rushkoff, 2010, 2011).
Questions are now being raised as to whether what we are calling “everyone, everyday, everywhere” creativity will lead to a growing narcissism (and an obsession for one’s 15 minutes of fame) a consumerist self-absorption, and a flattening of all values that will make the “Me generation” seem positively altruistic (“Must keep up with the latest, even if it’s only the new operating system without which none of my apps will work”), or whether it can be channeled toward worthy human aspirations. at this point, the jury is out, with wildly different prognostications (Carr, 2010; greenberg and Weber, 2008; twenge and Campbell, 2010). the question now is not so much whether we are creative, but what are going to do with our creativity? Where and how are we going to channel it? reinventing Leadership let’s step back now and look at leadership more closely. leadership is an established area of academic study, with departments and degrees. the literature on the topic is extensive, confusing and often contradictory indeed kellerman has written about of the end of leadership (kellerman, 2012; Maccoby, 2001; rost, 1993). as we can see, its conceptual roots parallel those of creativity research: the study of exceptional individuals. already in 1985 bennis and nanus (bennis and nanus, 1985) wrote that literally thousands of empirical investigations of leaders have been conducted in the last seventy-five years alone, but no clear and unequivocal understanding exists as to what distinguishes leaders from nonleaders, and perhaps more important, what distinguishes effective leaders from ineffective leaders. (p4)
56 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 not very much has changed in the last 25 years (Western, 2008). in the same year, a critique of leadership emerged that questioned the “romance” of the heroic leader (bligh, kohles, and pillai, 2011): it appears that as observers of and participants in organizations, we may have developed highly romanticized, heroic views of leadership—what leaders do, what they are able to accomplish, and the general effects they have on our lives. one of the principal elements in this romanticized conception is the view that leadership is a central organizational process and the premier force in the scheme of organizational events and activities. it amounts to what might be considered a faith in the potential if not actual efficacy of those individuals who occupy elite positions of formal organizational authority (p79). this critique of the heroic great Man coincided with a shift out of one era and into a new era (Montuori, 1989; Montuori and Conti, 1993; Morin and kern, 1999; Sardar, 2010; Slater, 2008). in this transitional, postnormal period, we see the demise of one guiding model of leadership and the birth of new forms of leadership (Wren, 2007). for our purposes, we begin our discussion of leadership very simply, by asking, who can be a leader? a brief review of the history of the world’s great leaders shows that widely recognized, celebrated, as well as despised leaders, have been overwhelmingly male representatives of the dominant culture, embodying characteristics that can be summarized (but are of course not limited to) the “heroic” model. it is becoming increasingly apparent that leaders are now emerging from traditionally underrepresented groups, such as women and minorities. uS president obama is perhaps the most dramatic case in point. in the global “social imaginary,” there is now an african- american president of the united States. this does not mean that leadership opportunities have opened up for one and all, but it does signal the beginning of a shift toward greater openness toward traditionally under-represented groups in leadership roles. the shift in the “who” of leadership extends in other areas: it is not confined to the position of arguably the most powerful man in the world. as an example, the Goldman Environmental Prize is handed out every year in San francisco to individuals described as “grassroots environmentalists” from all over the world who have made a considerable and often courageous
East-West Affairs 57 contribution to protecting the environment. the winners are not individuals who strike one as “heroic leaders” in the dramatic mold of a general patton. they are not great warlike leaders, orchestrating armies of soldiers or engineering corporate takeovers. they are ordinary men and women who prove they are also quite extra -ordinary when circumstances require.
While not traditional in how they view and present themselves these individuals are heroic in the sense that they regularly take on multinationals or governments or both, often at great personal risk. they are involved in struggles against deforestation, privatization of water supplies and other projects that affect the well-being of their communities or involve the destruction of nature. one of these leaders and goldman prize recipients, ken Saro-Wiwa of nigeria, was hanged by a corrupt government on trumped up charges because his work put multi-million dollar deals at risk. the goldman prize winners are not individuals who had ambitions to be Ceos, generals, or elected officials. they did not see themselves in the traditional mold as “leaders of men.” they simply responded passionately and thoughtfully to what they perceived to be an injustice. they felt they had to do something beyond their own personal survival and well-being. they almost fell into being leaders because they felt they had to develop a coalition of people to fight injustice. the message is clear. the “who” of leadership has changed: if leadership is about making a contribution to the global transition, making a contribution by taking the initiative, then the field is wide open. and as members of traditionally underrepresented groups become leaders, we can safely say that the concept of leadership will be irrigated by new streams of values, creativity, and cultures, new perspectives and potentials. eventually it should not be the case that now underrepresented groups may also join the existing leadership club and play the game. the very definition of leadership, the rules of game themselves, will be changed, and they are already changing. the “who” of leadership also ties in directly with a central postmodern concern: self-creation (McCracken, 2008). the assumption is not that leadership is a fixed characteristic one either has or doesn’t have. in an era of transition, there are few certainties and great opportunities for creativity. We are not bound by fixed roles or destinies. it is possible to create oneself as a person, and as a leader. the new leadership does not assume one has to be a
58 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 leader all the time. leadership is also increasingly viewed as heterarchical, based on aptitude for a particular context, task, and situation.
Creativity researchers differentiate between big “C” creativity and little “c” creativity—eminent and everyday creativity (runco, 2007). it seems that the notion of big “l” leadership and little “l” leadership might offer a starting point to differentiate between, say, the president of the united States, whose role is formal and fixed and viewed as a central symbol of leadership for an entire country, and the everyday “leaderly” activities of individuals engaged in social change movements, organizations, or daily activities who may step in and out of leadership activities in a more heterarchical mode.
Tribes and Factories a significant and underlying tension in the study of both leadership and creativity lies in two opposing perspectives with two different and opposing units of analysis. in the philosophy of social science, these perspectives are known as atomism and holism (fay, 1996). in the study of leadership, atomism is articulated by Carlyle with the great man theory, focusing on the individual (at the exclusion of social factors) and holism is articulated by tolstoy, with the forces of history and society, the individual simply a representative of these forces (Wren, 1995). in creativity, these opposing perspectives are represented in the dominant research discipline, psychology, focused on the creative person, and the related sociological perspective, focused on the role of social factors and the overall zeitgeist, with both of these perspectives viewing the other’s focus as epiphenomenal (Simonton, 1999). ogilvy has addressed this issue repeatedly and convincingly in his articulation of a radically pluralist social philosophy of Some (ogilvy, 1977, 2002). his argument, too complex to summarize here with anything but a sketch, involves taking both individualism and collectivism to their dialectical extremes and showing the extent to which both are human-made distinctions that arise in opposition to each other and therefore do not recognize the extent to which on the one hand, individuals exist in and because of a social context, and collectivities exist as collections of more or less organized individuals. the social philosophy of Some proposes a radical intrapsychic, interpersonal, and social pluralism that is not bound by fixed disjunctive separation, with a logic of either/or, but it is a more fluid, complex process that recognizes the ongoing interconnectedness and interdependence of these terms, and their expression in human thought and action.
East-West Affairs 59 Seth godin’s popular Tribes provides us with two useful images that can orient us to the emerging understanding of leadership (godin, 2009). his argument is that we are moving out of the age of the factory and are now in an age of tribes. “a tribe,” he writes, “is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea” (p1). the term tribe might strike one as amorphous, as “pre-modern” as the word “factory” seems quintessentially “modern.” the crucial difference now is in the word “connected.” the new social media have connected individuals all across the globe. Whereas in pre-modern times a tribe was a local phenomenon strongly defined by physical proximity, it is now possible to be part of a planetary tribe—whether fans of some obscure indie band, coming together to support earthquake victims in abruzzo, or, in the shadow side of this phenomenon, organizations like al-Qaida and the aryan brotherhood. tribes can emerge and disappear: the search for Malaysian Mh370 has involved a “tribe” of individuals scanning regularly updated images of the pacific ocean on their computers for traces of wreckage. the operations of Wikipedia can be said to be performed by a tribe devoted to writing, assessing, and correcting entries. and tribes are not only the most important new form of social organization and social change, they also drastically change the who, what, where, and how of leadership. for our purposes, we might think of tribes as a pointer toward ogilvy’s pluralist philosophy of Some. factories are large, hierarchical, unwieldy, inflexible, and generally not prone to innovation. in a factory, leadership is confined to a few. Command and control are the central features of leadership in factories. factories are like armies. the uS army defeated the iraqi army in a matter of days, but that was hardly “Mission accomplished.” the awkward fact, of course, was that iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. it is far from clear what exactly the accomplished “mission” was, and there was much “mission creep” in attempts to reframe, justify, and rationalize an invasion that reflected a mindset rooted in a different age. the assumption was that a nation is attacked, which is an act of war, and this can only be done by another nation. this requires retaliation against that nation. there is a logic and a clarity and a simplicity here. in postnormal times, a distributed network of terrorists living all over the world cannot be defeated by an army in a head-on battlefield confrontation. it is not a hostile nation in the traditional sense. the 7/7 bombers in london lived in england, and the 9/11 bombers lived in the uS. they were “a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.”
60 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 tribes are networked, flexible, and heterarchical, allowing leadership to emerge in a plurality of sources (ogilvy, 1989; taylor, 2003). in fact, if in the Modern factory world there was a focus on one leader for each system and subsystem, in the world of tribes, everybody can be a leader, and that is godin’s point. the democratization of leadership is becoming an increasingly mainstream perspective. nye sums up the new view (nye, 2008): almost anyone can become a leader. leadership can be learned. it depends on nurture as well as nature. leadership can exist at any level, with or without formal authority. Most people are both leaders and followers. they “lead from the middle.” (p147) this is a far cry from the heroic, “great man” leadership picture, the captain of industry, Jack Welch, general patton, napoleon, and the classic figures associated with leadership, or even the rather nerdier but no less commanding figures of bill gates and Steve Jobs, with their devoted followers. What seems clear though, is the shift in both leadership and creativity from a great Man model to “everyday, everywhere, everyone,” with a new emphasis on the role of followers and even “leaderless” organizations (brafman and beckstrom, 2006; Meindl, 1995; riggio, Chaleff, and lipman-blumen, 2008). More distributed models of leadership, drawing, as is the case in creativity research, from a variety of sources including complexity and chaos theories and the recent study of swarms, are beginning to provide alternative models that recognize the centrality of collaborative creativity (rolling, 2013).
Concluding reflections We live in postnormal times. an old world is dying, and a new one has yet to emerge. Creativity and imagination are necessary to envision the new world, to invent and articulate alternatives to the old world. Creativity is leading us into this new world—it is the way we conceive of alternatives. this means that creativity, at this particular point in time, requires more responsibility than ever before. Creators are leaders. We have seen how new trends suggest that creativity is now becoming more relational, and more focused on everyday, everyone, everywhere phenomena. this makes sense: alternatives are being articulated and developed collaboratively by tribes, by “some” people all over the world, in every aspect of their lives. generative, participatory processes are becoming increasingly popular. people are learning to work together, across differences, to develop creative solutions to old problems. very often,
East-West Affairs 61 these problems were themselves once solutions, but the solutions have become the problem. the new creativity and leadership are different from the old in a number of ways, as we have suggested. but these changes, while in and of themselves interesting and suggestive, are not enough. if we are to move through these postnormal times toward a new world, we need to be aware of the roots, branches and fruits of the “old world” and present alternatives to them.
We conclude with a brief sketch of some of the larger issues. a postnormal era is the result of the exhaustion of the “old paradigm” or of the worldview of Modernity. this exhaustion is visible in a number of areas. as we pointed out earlier, we can see that many of the solutions offered by Modernity, mostly having to do with controlling the natural environment, have now themselves become the problem. as ogilvy suggested, the “alien environment” we must now confront is not, as it once was, the natural environment, but rather technology and politics (ogilvy, 1977). What we need to confront is not “out there” so much as our own creations and our own ways of thinking, feeling, and being, institutionalized and made “real.” the shift to this emerging worldview will very much depend, as Sardar stresses, on creativity and imagination, and specifically how what were perceived to be zero-sum relations in the old worldview can be turned into win-win relations. how conflict and difference can, in other words, be mediated, leveraged, and perhaps even transcended by creativity. fostering and drawing on creativity everywhere, everyday, from everyone, will not be an easy or fast process, but this kind of networked, “open source” creativity seems essential to go beyond the limitations of “hobbes and the Machine.” given the urgency of global problems, the task seems daunting, at best. but we are suggesting that the new, global networked creativity, channeled into collective problem-solving and the generation of alternatives, can also provide us with remarkable potentials and opportunities that were unimaginable a mere 20 years ago (Montuori, 2013; Montuori and purser, 1996). life may never be “normal” again, but if that is a result of losing the shackles of “hobbes and the Machine,” we may actually have something to look forward to.
62 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 REFERENCES
C. anderson, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution (new york: random house, 2012).
W. t. anderson, All Connected Now. Life in the First Global Civilization (boulder, Co: Westview press, 2001). n. C. andreasen, The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius (new york: plume, 2006). a. barabasi, Linked. How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means For Business, Science, and Everyday Life (new york: plume, 2003). f. barron, “all creation is a collaboration,” in Social Creativity , edited by a. Montuori and r. purser (Cresskill, nJ: hampton, 1999), vol. 1, pp. 49–60. f. barron, a. Montuori, and a. barron (eds.), Creators on Creating. Awakening and Cultivating the Imaginative Mind (new york: tarcher/putnam, 1997). r. barthes, Image-Music-Text (london, uk: fontana, 1977).
Z. bauman, Liquid Life (london, uk: polity press, 2005).
Z. bauman, Liquid Times. Living in an Age of Uncertainty (london, uk: polity press, 2007).
Z. bauman, The Art of Life (london, uk: polity press, 2008).
W. bennis, and b. nanus, Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge (new york: harper, 1985).
M. C. bligh, J. C. kohles, and r. pillai, “romancing leadership: past, present, and future,” The Leadership Quarterly 22 (2011) 1058–1077. d. boje, d. gephart, and t. Joseph (eds.), Postmodernism and Organization Theory (newbury park, Ca: Sage, 1996).
J. bordas, Salsa, Soul, and Spirit: Leadership for a Multicultural Age (San francisco, Ca: berrett-koehler, 2007). d. borgo, Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (london, uk: Continuum, 2006). o. brafman, and r. a. beckstrom, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (new york: penguin, 2006). o. brafman, and r. a. beckstron, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (new york: portfolio trade, 2008).
J. M. burns, Transforming Leadership: The Pursuit of Happiness (new york: grove, 2004).
East-West Affairs 63 f. Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture (new york: bantam, 1984). n. Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (new york: W. W. norton, 2010).
M. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society , vol. 1, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (new york: Wiley-blackwell, 2000).
M. Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope. Social Movements in the Internet Age (Malden, Ma: polity press, 2012).
M. Ceruti, Evolution Without Foundations (Cresskill, nJ: hampton press, 2008).
J. l. Chin, b. lott, J. k. rice, and J. Sanchez-hucles (eds.), Women and Leadership. Transforming Visions and Diverse Voices (Malden, Ma: blackwell publishing, 2007). n. a. Christakis and J. h. fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives , 1st ed. (new york: little, brown and Co, 2009). n. S. Contractor, “Self-organizing systems research in the social sciences: reconciling the metaphors and the models,” Management Communication Quarterly 13(1999) 154–166.
M. Csikszentmihalyi, “a systems perspective on creativity,” in Handbook of creativity , edited by r. Sternberg (Cambridge: Cambridge university press, 1999), pp. 313–335.
M. Csikszentmihalyi, Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning (new york: penguin, 2004). p. davies, The Cosmic Blueprint. New Discoveries in Nature's Creative Ability to Order the Universe (new york: Simon and Schuster, 1989). r. eisler, The Chalice and the Blade (San francisco, Ca: harper Collins, 1987). r. eisler, and a. Montuori,”Creativity, society, and the hidden subtext of gender: a new contextualized approach,” World Futures. The Journal General Evolution 63(2007) 479–499. g. t. fairhurst and d. grant, “the social construction of leadership: a sailing guide,” Management Communication Quarterly 24(2010) 171–210. g. t. fairhurst and d. grant, “the social construction of leadership: a sailing guide,” Management Communication Quarterly 24(2010), 171–210. b. fay, Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science. A Multicultural Approach (new york: blackwell publishers, 1996).
M. foucault, and p. rabinow, The Foucault Reader, 1st ed. (new york: pantheon books, 1984).
64 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 h. gardner, Leading Minds (new york: basic books, 1995). d. gauntlett, Making is Connecting (new york: John Wiley and Sons, 2013). k. gergen, Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community (new york: oxford university press, 2009). k. J. gergen, Realities and Relationships, Soundings in Social Construction (Cambridge, Ma: harvard university press, 1994). k. J. gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Indentity in Contemporary Life (new york: basic books, 2000). k. J. gergen, An Invitation to Social Construction (thousand oaks, Ca: Sage, 2009). v. p. glaveanu, “paradigms in the study of creativity: introducing the perspective of cultural psychology,” New Ideas in Psychology 28 (2010) 79–93.
S. godin, Tribes. We Need You to Lead Us (new york: portfolio, 2009). l. goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (new york: oxford university press, 1992). e. greenberg, and k. Weber, Generation We: How Millennial Youth are Taking Over America and Changing our World Forever (emeryville: pachatusan, 2008). k. grint, and b. Jackson, “toward ‘socially constructive’ social constructions of leadership,” Management Communication Quarterly 24(2010) 348–355. r. t. hare-Mustin and J. Marecek, “the meaning of difference: gender theory, postmodernism, and psychology,” American Psychologist 43 (1988), 455–464.
Z. hassan, The Social Labs: A New Approach to Solving Our Most Complex Challenges (San francisco, Ca: berrett-koehler, 2014).
C. hooker and M. Csikszentmihalyi, “flow, creativity, and shared leadership,” in Shared Leadership: Reframing the Hows and Whys of Leadership , edited by C. l. pearce and J. a. Conger (thousand oaks, Ca: Sage, 2003), pp. 217–234.
J. howaldt, M. Schwarz, k. henning, and f. hees, Social innovation: Concepts, research fields and international trends (iMa/ZlW, 2010) h. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (new york: nyu press, 2008). h. Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (boston, Ma: the Mit press, 2009).
East-West Affairs 65 S. Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (new york: Scribner, 2001). a. kamenetz, DIY U : Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education (White river Junction, vt: Chelsea green publishing, 2010).
J. kasof, “explaining creativity: the attributional perspective,” Creativity Research Journal , 8(1985), 311–366. g. d. kaufman, In the Beginning...Creativity (Minneapolis, Mn: augsburg fortress publishers, 2004). r. kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Towards a Postmodern Culture (Minneapolis, Mn: university of Minnesota press, 1988). r. kearney, “the narrative imagination,” in Social Creativity , edited by a. Montuori and r. purser (Cresskill, nJ: hampton press, 1999), vol. 1, pp. 61–79. a. keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today's User-Generated Media are Destroying our Economy, our Culture, and our Values (new york: Crown, 2008). b. kellerman, The End of Leadership (new york: harper Collins, 2012).
C. leadbeater, We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production , 2nd ed. (london, uk: profile books, 2009). niklas luhmann, Introduction to Systems Theory (Cambridge, uk: polity, 2013).
M. Maccoby, “Making sense of the leadership literature,” Research-Technology Management 44(2001), 58–60.
J. Macy and C. Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess Without Going Crazy (novato, Ca: new World library, 2012). g. McCracken, Transformations: Indentity Construction in Contemporary Culture (bloomington, in: indiana university press, 2008).
J. r. Meindl, “the romance of leadership as a follower-centric theory: a social constructionist approach,” The Leadership Quarterly 6(1995) 329–341.
C. a. Mockros and M. Csikszentmhalyi, “the social construction of creative lives,” in Social Creativity , edited a. Montuori and r. purser (Cresskill, nJ: hampton press, 1999), vol. 1, pp. 175–218. a. Montuori, Evolutionary Competence: Creating the Future (amsterdam: gieben, 1989).
66 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 a. Montuori, “the complexity of improvisation and the improvisation of complexity. Social science, art, and creativity,” Human Relations 56(2003), 237–255. a. Montuori, “transformative leadership for the 21st century. reflections on the design of a graduate leadership curriculum,” ReVision 30(2010) 4–14. a. Montuori, “beyond postnormal times: the future of creativity and the creativity of the future,” Futures: The Journal of Policy, Planning and Future Studies 43(2011a), 221–227. a. Montuori, “Social psychology,” in The Encyclopedia of Creativity , edited by M. runco and S. pritzker (amsterdam: elsevier, 2011b). a. Montuori, “Systems approach,” in The Encyclopedia of Creativity , edited by M. runco and S. pritzker (San diego, Ca: academic press, 2011c), vol. 2, pp. 414–421. a. Montuori, “Creativity and the arab Spring,” East-West Affairs 1(2013). a. Montuori and i. Conti, From Power to Partnership. Creating the Future of Love, Work, and Community (San francisco, Ca: harper, 1993). a. Montuori and g. donnelly, “Creativity at the opening of the 21st century,” Creative Nursing: A Journal of Values, Issues, Experience and Collaboration 19(2013) 58–63. a. Montuori and r. purser, “deconstructing the lone genius myth: towards a contextual view of creativity,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 35(1995) 69–112. a. Montuori and r. purser, “ecological futures: Systems theory, postmodernism, and participative learning in an age of uncertainty,” in Postmodernism and Organization Theory , edited by d. boje, d. gephart, and t. Joseph (newbury park: Sage, 1996), pp. 181–201. a. Montuori and r. purser (eds.), Social Creativity (Cresskill, nJ: hampton press, 1999), vol. 1. a. Montuori and r. e. purser (eds.), Social Creativity (Cresskill, nJ: hampton press, 1999), vol. 1. e. Morin, On Complexity (Cresskill, nJ: hampton press, 2008). e. Morin and b. kern, Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium (Cresskill, nJ: hampton press, 1999).
M. nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science (princeton: princeton university press, 2012). p. g. northouse, Leadership. Theory and Practice (thousand oaks, Ca: Sage, 2004).
J. S. nye, The Powers to Lead (new york: oxford university press, 2008).
East-West Affairs 67 J. ogilvy, Many Dimensional Man (new york: harper, 1977).
J. ogilvy, “this postmodern business,” The Deeper News 1(1989) 3–23. J. ogilvy, Creating Better Futures (new york: oxford university press, 2002).
M. a. pachucki, J. C. lena, and S. J. tepper, “Creativity narratives among college students: Sociability and everyday creativity,” Sociological Quarterly 51 (2010), 122–149. p. b. paulus and b. a. nijstad (eds.), Group Creativity: Innovation Through Collaboration (new york: oxford university press, 2003). f. d. peat, Blackwinged Night. Creativity in Nature and Mind (Cambridge, Ma: perseus/helix books, 2000). f. d. peat, From Certainty to Uncertainty. The Story of Science and Ideas in the 20th Century (Washington, d.C.: Joseph henry press, 2002). pew research Center, “Millennials. a portrait of a generation. Confident. Connected. open to Change,” (pew research Center, 2007). r. pope, Creativity. Theory, History, Practice (new york: routledge, 2005). r. richards (ed.), Everyday Creativity and New Views of Human Nature: Psychological, Social, and Spiritual Perspectives (new york: american psychological association press, 2007).
J. rifkin, The Empathic Civilization. The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (new york: tarcher/penguin, 2009). r. e. riggio, i. Chaleff, and J. lipman-blumen, The Art of Followership: How Great Followers Create Great Leaders and Organizations (new york: John Wiley and Sons, 2008), vol. 146.
J. h. rolling, Swarm Intelligence: What Nature Teaches us About Shaping Creative Leadership (new york: Macmillan, 2013). p. M. rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences. Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (princeton, nJ: princeton university press, 1992).
J. C. rost, Leadership for the Twenty-First Century (Westport, Ct: praeger, 1993).
M. runco, “Creativity,” Annual Review of Psychology 55(2004) 657–687.
M. runco, Creativity. Theories and Themes: Research, Development, and Practice (amsterdam: elsevier, 2007).
M. runco and r. richards (eds.), Eminent Creativity, Everyday Creativity, and Health (Westport, Ct: ablex/greenwood, 1997).
68 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 d. rushkoff, Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age (new york: or books, 2010).
d. rushkoff, life inc. How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take It Back (new york: random house, 2011). d. W. russell, The Religion of the Machine Age (london, uk: routledge and kegan paul, 1983). e. e. Sampson, Celebrating the Other: A Dialogic Account of Human Nature (Chagrin falls: taos institute publications, 2008).
Z. Sardar, Postmodernism and the Other (london: pluto press, 1999).
Z. Sardar, “Welcome to postnormal times,” Futures 42(2010), 435–444. k. Sawyer and S. deZutter, “distributed creativity: how collective creations emerge from collaboration,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 3(2009), 81.
M. Schrage, Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate (new york: harvard business School press, 1999). a. Scott, “Modernity's machine metaphor,” British Journal of Sociology (1997) 561–575. d. k. Simonton, Genius, Creativity, and Leadership: Historiometric Inquiries (Cambridge: harvard university press, 1984). d. k. Simonton, “the creative society: genius vis-a-vis the Zeitgeist,” in Social Creativity , edited by a. Montuori and r. purser (Cresskill, nJ: hampton press, 1999), vol. 1, pp. 237–264. p. Slater, A Dream Deferred. America's Discontent and the Search for a Democratic Ideal (boston: beacon, 1991). p. Slater, The chrysalis Effect (brighton and portland: Sussex academic, 2008). r. J. Sternberg, “a systems model of leadership: WiCS,” American Psychologist 62(2007), 34. t. Stigliano, “Creativity, romanticism, and the rise of consumerism,” in Social Creativity, edited by a. Montuori and r. purser (Cresskill, nJ: hampton press, 1999), vol. 1.
J. Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (new york: anchor, 2005). b. Swimme and M. e. tucker, Journey of the Universe (new haven, Ct: yale university press, 2011).
M. taylor, The Moment of Complexity. Emerging Network Culture (Chicago, il: university of Chicago press, 2003).
East-West Affairs 69 a. toffler, Future Shock (new york: bantam, 1984). a. toffler and h. toffler, Revolutionary Wealth (new york: knopf, 2006). g. tonelli, “genius from the renaissance to 1770, in Dictionary of the History of Ideas , edited by p. p. Wiener (new york: Scribner, 1973), pp. 293–297.
S. toulmin, Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago, il: university of Chicago press, 1992).
J. M. twenge and W. k. Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in an Age of Entitlement (new york: free press, 2010).
S. Western, Leadership. A Critical Text (thousand oaks, Ca: Sage, 2008).
M. Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science (San francisco, Ca: berrett-koehler, 2006).
M. Winograd and M. d. hais, Millennial Momentum: How a Generation is Remaking America (new brunswick, nJ: rutgers university press, 2011). r. Wittkower, “genius: individualism in art and artists,”in Dictionary of the History of Ideas , edited by p. p. Wiener (new york: Scribner, 1973), pp. 297–312.
J. t. Wren, Inventing Leadership. The Challenge of Democracy (northampton, Ma: edward elgar, 2007).
J. t. Wren (ed.), The Leaders' Companion: Insights on Leadership Through the Ages (new york: free press, 1995).
70 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 The Story of a Phenomenon: Vivekananda in Nirvana Land
the man who introduced hinduism in the united States was proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance
vinay lal
I: Indian Spirituality in the West and Vivekananda’s Acolytes
SWAMI VIVEKANANDA (1863–1902), LONG LIONIZED AS THE INDIAN MONK WHO brought hinduism to the doorsteps of the West, has lately been enjoying a fresh spurt of adulation as his 150th birth anniversary celebrations draw to a close. the attention lavished upon vivekananda in india and among diasporic indian communities has made all too clear the indelible place of his american sojourns in giving shape to the mythographies that have developed around his life, tragically cut short by illness. What might vivekananda have been had he not commenced the first of his three speeches at the World parliament of religions in 1893 with those five words, “brothers and Sisters of america,” which are said to have won him a standing ovation at that unusual gathering and, 120 years later, still earn him the approbation of those who view him as the greatest emissary of hinduism to the West? Just what aspects of vivekananda’s legacy have endured in the united States, and to what effect?
Much ink has been spilled on the convocation that is known as the World parliament of religions, certainly the first gathering of its kind when representatives of what were deemed, at least by the parliament’s organizers,
East-West Affairs 71 as the ten great world religions met to reflect both on the diversity and unity encompassed by “religion.” in india, at least, the parliament is chiefly remembered for the speech that launched vivekananda on to the world stage, but in the united States, it occupies a yet more significant place, though seldom recognized, in the intellectual history of the country. the notion of “religious pluralism,” which in principle serves as the bedrock of american civic culture, was given its first substantive hearing at the World parliament in 1893; similarly, the academic (and, to some extent, popular) study of comparative religion may, in some respects, be viewed as having originated in the immediate aftermath of the World parliament. as the historian of religion, Joseph kitagawa, has remarked, “in the mind of many americans, comparative religion and the cause of the World parliament of religions became inseparably related” (kitagawa, 1987, p5–6). diana eck, a well-known scholar of hinduism, is likewise of the opinion that “the study of world religions as an academic field today can be traced through numerous threads that lead back to the parliament” (Masuzawa, 2005, p271).
What is indubitably certain is that when vivekananda first arrived in the united States, very little, and almost nothing that may be described as substantive, was known of vedanta, hinduism, or, more broadly conceived, indian religions. american periodicals, such as the Christian Disciple and the Theological Review (1813–1823) and the North American Review , which commenced publication in 1815, had begun to carry occasional articles on hindu customs and mores, and especially “hindu idolatry,” but such pieces were invariably informed by an orientalist outlook. the understanding of hinduism, if one can even call it that, was mediated, on the one hand, by Charles grant’s highly influential A Poem on the Restoration of Learning in the East (1805) and, on the other hand, by the interest shown in the life and work of rammohun roy. the american transcendentalists, ralph Waldo emerson and henry david thoreau in particular, had more than dabbled in some of the sacred books of the hindus. the young emerson, not yet out of his teens, had made bold to interpret “hindu theology” in a lengthy poem, now known only to scholars, called Indian Superstition (1821). emerson’s paltry knowledge of hinduism may be surmised from his invocation of “the stern bramin armed with plagues divine” (l. 71), or of devotees engaged “in wild worship to mysterious powers” (l. 47). in time, emerson would gravitate toward a considerably more complex, indeed sympathetic, view of hinduism—as is suggested, for instance, by his poem “brahma,” where the impress of the
72 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 teachings of the bhagavad gita is clearly suggested. his younger (and some would say eccentric) contemporary, thoreau, entered into a wider engagement with indian texts and took copious notes from the Gita , the Upanishads , the Vishnu Purana , and the Manusmriti . “in the morning,” thoreau wrote of his experiences at Walden pond, “i bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the bhagvat geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and i doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions” (thoreau, 1970, p418). the tuesday chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is given over to dense quotations from thoreau’s favorite hindu writings. thoreau was also doubtless the first person in the united States to describe himself as a yogi. yet, for all his mental peregrinations, he never travelled outside the united States; indeed, he confined himself to new england. thoreau was far from having ever seen an indian, let alone a hindu yogi; and many indians, justifiably enthused by his gushing admiration for the gita and puranic lore, have all but overlooked his remark that “no hindoo tyranny prevailed at the framing of the world, but we are freemen of the universe, and not sentenced to any caste” (thoreau, 1873, p158). there is nothing to suggest that, in the aftermath of emerson and thoreau’s reasonably sustained engagement with indian philosophy, interest in the vedas, upanishads, the gita, or hindu myths was kindled among americans (lal, 1982). to be sure, Sanskrit had made some inroads, howsoever slight, into the curriculum at a few of the principal american institutions of higher education. edward elbridge Salisbury was installed as professor of Sanskrit and arabic at yale university in 1841, and Salisbury would also go on to play a pivotal role in giving shape to the american oriental Society, founded in 1842 as the first learned organization of its kind in the united States. yale would subsequently become home to William dwight Whitney (1827–1894), author of a widely used Sanskrit grammar (1879) and translator of the Atharva Veda . by the late 1880s, Sanskrit was being taught at more than half a dozen american universities, among them Johns hopkins, harvard, Columbia, and yale. one might, with due diligence, summon a few other similar nuggets of american interest in india and especially in hinduism; but, viewed in totality, one is inescapably drawn to the conclusion that when vivekananda arrived in Chicago as one of a handful of people charged with representing hinduism to the american public and the
East-West Affairs 73 wider world, hinduism remained an utter novelty to americans. Certainly there would have been no one, whether among the public or even in the academy, to contest his readings of hinduism or of indian society more generally. it is the World parliament of religions, then, which first brought americans face to face with a living emissary of “hinduism,” a circumstance wrought with ironies. the parliament was itself one of various congresses convened in 1893 to celebrate the quatrocentennary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the americas. as Columbus set landfall in the americas, he imagined he had reached india. We need not be detained here by a consideration of the far- reaching consequences of that mistake—none as calamitous as the genocide of native americans—except to suggest that, in a manner of speaking, vivekananda arrived in the united States in the wake of that mistake. if what has come to be celebrated as the inclusiveness of american society was predicated on an exclusiveness that called for nothing less than the nearly wholesale extermination of the peoples of the americas and the subsequent enslavement of africans, the World’s Columbian exposition would echo that worldview. the parliament billed itself as the world’s largest gathering of the representatives of religions from the world, and so eminent a scholar as Max Muller, one of the pioneers of the comparative study of religion, if not its foremost instigator, signified his approbation of the enterprise with the observation that the parliament “stands unique, stands unprecedented in the whole history of the world” (Muller, 1901, p331). yet, american indian religions were excluded, on the supposition that native americans, though not without culture, could not be viewed as possessing something that might be called “religion”; likewise, insofar as africans (and african americans) received any representation, it was only to the extent that they were members of some Christian denomination. ten faiths were conceived by the organizers as the world’s great religions and invited to send their representatives; alongside the three abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and islam— and Zoroastrianism were six religions originating in South asia and the far east: taoism, Confucianism, Shintoism, hinduism, buddhism, and Jainism. Some Christian leaders objected to the parliament on the grounds that it furnished parity to all faiths and thus undermined Christianity, “the one religion” as described by the archbishop of Canterbury. “i do not understand,” the archbishop wrote in a letter to the organizers, “how that religion can be regarded as a member of a parliament of religions without assuming the equality of the other intended members and the parity of their positions and
74 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 claims” (barrows, 1893, p20,22). With respect to the parliament’s proceedings, the greater preponderance of the papers dwelled on Christianity—152 out of 194, to be precise. virchand gandhi appeared as the sole spokesperson for Jainism; today his statue stands outside the Jain temple in Chicago, an emblem of a community’s gratefulness for having brought visibility to a faith which had historically been confined to india. it is on September 11, now a day of infamy in america, that James Cardinal gibbons opened the parliament by leading the delegates in the lord’s prayer. at the parliament, only two representatives spoke up on behalf of islam—in retrospect, that appears as a premonition of the fact that islam and Christianity have an extraordinary amount of terrain to cover if they are going to engage in a genuine inter-faith dialogue. for the worldwide indian diaspora, September 11 augurs other possibilities. More than a decade after vivekananda delivered his rousing address, across the world in Johannesburg, gandhi gathered together with friends, associates, and “delegates from various places in the transvaal” on the evening of September 11, 1906, to consider how best South african indians could resist the injustices imposed on them. Such was, in gandhi’s own words, “the advent of satyagraha,” the term he coined to signal not only the birth of a new movement of nonviolent resistance but an entire worldview (gandhi, 1972, p95–105). but that is another story: back in Chicago, on the afternoon of September 11, 1893, vivekananda mounted the stage and hinduism was, in the received view, itself propelled on the world stage. vivekananda had shared the dais alongside other “representatives” of hinduism: among others, there were Siddhu ram, “an appeal writer” from “Mooltan, punjab”; the reverend b. b. nagarkar, a minister of the “brahmo- Somaj” of bombay; professor g. n. Chakravarti; Jinda ram, president of the temperance Society, Muzzafargarh; and the reverend p. C. Mozoomdar, Minister and leader of the “brahmo-Somaj” of Calcutta. those other names are now lost to history—whatever they may have said, they appear to have been swept aside by vivekananda. and, yet, virchand gandhi, speaking on behalf of Jainism, provided a different perspective: not only vivekananda, but all the indian delegates, virchand gandhi wrote, were a great draw, and “at least a third and sometimes two-thirds of the great audience . . . would make a rush for the exits when a fine orator from india had closed his speech.” by all accounts, and these are not only narratives that have come down to us from his acolytes and other advocates of hindu nationalism, vivekananda had
East-West Affairs 75 an electrifying impact on his audience. “Sisters and brothers of america,” vivekananda proceeded to say—and with this he brought his audience of 7,000 to its feet. the presbyterian minister, rev. John henry barrows, in whose charge the organization of the parliament had been placed, wrote in his official two- volume history of the parliament that vivekananda’s initial words were followed by “a peal of applause that lasted for several minutes” (barrows, 1893, p101); by his own testimony, vivekananda was the most popular speaker at the parliament. once the din of the applause had subsided, vivekananda thanked the people present “in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world,” “in the name of the mother of religions,” and “in the name of millions and millions of hindu people of all classes and sects.” vivekananda declared himself proud “to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration but we accept all religions as true. i am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth.” vivekananda would drive home what he viewed as the essentially ecumenical character of the indian, and particularly hindu, religious sensibility by reminding his audience of a hymn which he remembered repeating in childhood, “as the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, o lord, the different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to thee” (vivekananda, 1989, vol 1, p3–4). in vivekananda’s opening address, the first of many he was to deliver at the parliament, are already present some, though by no means all of, the characteristic features of the interpretive strategies that he was to deploy to great effect in his public performances in the West. there is no disputing the fact that india had given shelter to the “remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation,” just as it had accorded hospitality to the Jews being hounded in much of the rest of the world. his immediate audience may not have known all this, but in this respect at least vivekananda was indisputably on firm ground. however, there is already a tacit claim, one which would receive fuller expression once vivekananda went on the lecture circuit in the united States, about the superiority of hinduism over other religions. he describes hinduism as “a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance,” but at once appears to be suggesting that this may not be true of other religions. When he adds, “We believe not only in universal toleration but we accept all religions as true,” there is far more than a hint
76 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 that hinduism occupies a unique place in the pantheon on account of the fact that it accepts all religions as true. “We,” the adherents of hinduism, practice “universal toleration”; but what of the adherents of other religions? addressing his audience briefly on September 20, vivekananda advised Christians that they “must always be ready for good criticism”: having arrived in india in large numbers “to save the soul of the heathens,” they were yet to understand that “the crying evil in the east is not religion—they have religion enough—but it is bread that the suffering millions of burning india cry out for with parched throats” (vivekananda, 1989, vol 1, p20). it has been argued that as much as his teachings, it was the vast impress of his personality that turned vivekananda into a sensation. The Chicago Inter Ocean reported that “great crowds of people, the most of whom were women,” would arrive an hour before the afternoon session was to commence, “for it had been announced that Swami vivekananda, the popular hindu Monk, who looks so much like McCullough’s othello, was to speak.” The Boston Evening Transcript was similarly candid in its assessment that “the four thousand fanning people in the hall of Columbus” were prepared to sit through an hour or two of other speeches with a smiling countenance, “to listen to vivekananda for fifteen minutes.” harriet Monroe, a well-known figure in literary circles, was struck by his voice, characterizing it “as rich as a bronze bell” (Syman, 2010, p43–46). vivekananda had arrived in the united States with some hope of procuring funds with which he could carry out his mission in india; in america, on the other hand, he appeared to some as a good business proposition, the proverbial wise man from the mystical orient with immense charm, poise, good looks, and a command over english. no sooner was the parliament over that vivekananda was signed up on the american lecture circuit, already a sign of the aura of celebrity that surrounded him.
II: Vivekananda among American Intellectuals and Diasporic Hindus it would be four years before vivekananda, who had found the West rather hospitable, found his way back to india. it is said that he received more than a rousing reception in indian cities, and years later henry Miller, whose gargantuan appetite for sex—or at least for some of the most candid writing on copulation on his side of the atlantic—went alongside a deep admiration for ramakrishna and vivekananda, recalled romain rolland’s description of “vivekananda’s triumphal return to india from america. no monarch ever
East-West Affairs 77 received such a reception at the hands of his countrymen: it stands unique in the annals of history. and what had he done, vivekananda, to merit such a welcome? he had made india known to america; he had spread the light. and in so doing he had opened the eyes of his countrymen to their own weaknesses. all india greeted him with open arms, saluting him as a saint and savior, which he was. it was the moment when india stood nearer to being unified than at any time in her long history” (Miller, 1970, p68–69). how much Miller knew of vivekananda’s life, or his apotheosis into an icon of young and insurgent india, is not absolutely clear from this assessment that is oddly extravagant yet prescient, but like many others, he held him up as resounding critic of the material life and of the air-conditioned nightmare that america had become.
What were fact and fiction in vivekananda’s life had, it appears, become indistinguishable, and that too in his lifetime. one of the stories most frequently recounted about him, no doubt both to convey a sense of his intellectual prowess as well as his unyielding commitment to the idea of service, is that in the aftermath of the World parliament, he was offered a Chaired professorship in eastern philosophy at harvard university, but that vivekananda, citing his life as an itinerant philosopher-beggar and his mission of service to the poor of india to which he was committed, politely but firmly declined from embracing any such encumbrance. it is not known if harvard maintains any record of such an offer to vivekananda, nor has anyone been able to furnish an iota of evidence in support of this claim (Chattopadhyaya, 1993, p89); but, like much else that is told of him, this story requires no corroboration from the standpoint of those who view him as a spiritual and intellectual luminary. it may even be that the quest for “the truth” is not altogether germane: vivekananda had doubtless acquired a considerable following, though henry Miller put the matter much more dramatically in recalling “the stir” that he created “when he spoke before the parliament of religions in Chicago back in the early nineties”: “the story of the pilgrimage of this man who electrified the american people reads like a legend. at first unrecognized, rejected, reduced to starvation and forced to beg in the streets, he was finally hailed as the greatest spiritual leader of our time. offers of all kinds were showered upon him; the rich took him in and tried to make a monkey of him. in detroit, after six weeks of it, he rebelled. all contracts were cancelled and from that time on he went alone from town to town at the invitation of such or such a society” (Miller, 1970, p47).
78 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 there are histories of american intellectual and cultural enterprises that are now inextricably intertwined with the name of vivekananda. the role played by two new england women, Sarah farmer and Sara Chapman bull, in creating a spiritual retreat, green acre, where vivekananda discoursed frequently on indian philosophy and conducted a class on raja yoga over several months is but one of many illustrations of his ability to command a following among some influential and certainly well-placed sectors of american society (atmaprana, 1995; Syman, 2010). at what came to be known as the Cambridge Conferences, held in december 1894 in the vicinity of harvard at the instigation of Sara bull, vivekananda starred as the main speaker. the guests in attendance at his lectures included Charles lanman, professor of Sanskrit and editor of the harvard oriental Series; ernest fenellosa, one of the world’s leading authorities on Japanese art; and the philosopher William James. Much transpired between James and vivekananda at a dinner party with Sarah bernhardt, whose production of a play dramatizing the attempted seduction of the buddha by the courtesan ambapali—later to become one of the enlightened one’s most famous disciples—had just been staged (hill, 2005). James evidently was greatly impressed by vivekananda’s grasp of interpersonal psychology and would go on to quote copiously from vivekananda’s writings in his highly influential 1902 book, The Varieties of Religious Experience (frederick, 2012). vivekananda established the vedanta Society of new york in 1894, and another branch in San francisco in 1900 on his second visit to the united States. he passed away in 1902: perhaps some might have seen in his death on July 4, which marks the anniversary of the declaration of american independence, a portent of the fact that the american conception of freedom had yet to ripen into something more profoundly spiritual. the institutionalization of vedanta in america was well on its way within a few years after his death. by 1929, there were vedanta Centers in boston, Chicago, pittsburgh, portland, and providence, and three in the los angeles area alone—pasadena, hollywood, and la Crescenta. the most arresting chapter of the growth of vedanta in the united States—a narrative that calls attention to its enticements to Western intellectuals, especially in the aftermath of World War i, which had taken an extraordinarily large toll of young men and brought home to millions of europeans the devastatingly frightening idea of a “total war”—would be written in Southern California, where the young monk, Swami prabhavananda, who had been sent to hollywood by the
East-West Affairs 79 ramakrishna order in 1929, eventually gathered a renowned group of british writers and intellectuals around him, including aldous huxley, Christopher isherwood, and gerald heard. prabhavananda and isherwood together produced translations of a number of key hindu philosophical texts—the bhagavad gita, Shankara’s Vivekachudamani , and the yoga aphorisms of patanjali—and so played a critical role in popularizing indian philosophy. We might say that hollywood’s interest in “eastern spirituality” was kindled by isherwood, whose connections with film, art, and literary circles were prolific.
Many more instances could be summoned of the impact of vivekananda, and equally of his teacher ramakrishna, on american and european writers and intellectuals, perhaps none as remarkable as the case of the elusive J. d. Salinger. a recent tome on Salinger, whose Catcher in the Rye has sold 65 million copies and is a rite of passage for american high school students, segments the writer’s life into four parts corresponding exactly to the four stages enumerated in hindu texts: brahmacharya (apprenticeship), garhasthya (householder duties), vanaprasthya (Withdrawal from Society), and Sannyasa (renunciation of the World). While reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna in 1952, Salinger experienced a “transformation” that led to a profound and complete change in his life; he accepted Swami nikhilananda, the head of the ramakrishna- vivekananda Center in new york, as his spiritual teacher and for the last six decades of his life endeavored to follow his teachings (Shields and Salerno, 2013, pvii–ix, 396–407). his biographers, after describing how vivekananda brought vedanta to america, state that Salinger’s “commitment to vedanta was, by far, the most serious and long-lasting commitment of his life”; but their understandable equivocation about how Salinger’s interest in vedanta is to be interpreted may be gleaned from their observation that “World War ii destroyed the man but made him a great artist. religion provided the comfort he needed as a man but killed his art” (Shields and Salerno, 2013, p407, xv). there is but no question that memories of vivekananda linger in the american imagination. a victorian home in South pasadena, where vivekananda stayed for six weeks in 1900, is now under the care of the vedanta Society of Southern California. the trabuco College of prayer, established by gerald heard in 1941 as a quiet retreat for meditation amidst 300 acres of land in the hills of Santa ana to the south of los angeles, was turned over to the vedanta Society in 1949 and rededicated as the ramakrishna Monastery. two years later, a statue of vivekananda, modeled
80 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 after one that had been installed at the ramakrishna-vivekananda Center in new york, would be installed at the trabuco Canyon monastery. Significantly, the dedication ceremony took place on July 4: thus an attempt would be made, one which is to be witnessed repeatedly in the ground-breaking ceremonies that have accompanied the inauguration of new sites for hindu temples in the united States, to synchronize the notion of political freedom prevailing in the uS with the idea of spiritual freedom (lal, 2008, p70–75), an idea that many educated middle-class hindus believe reached its apogee in indian civilization. however much america, in this view, may represent the culmination of the idea of freedom of expression and the material freedoms that have to define modern life, vivekananda, the emissary of an ancient civilization that has long grappled with the notion of spiritual emancipation, was needed in the West to fulfill the very idea of freedom itself. the more recent history of the appropriation of vivekananda by indian organizations in the united States echoes as well the hugely iconic status that vivekananda came to acquire as a preeminent figure of the notion of a resurgent india. it is no surprise that he is the patron saint of the hindu Student Council (hSC), which rather modestly describes itself as “an international youth forum providing opportunities to learn about hindu heritage, spirituality and culture.” the hSC is, of course, the youth division of the vishwa hindu parishad, an evangelical-style organization that does the intellectual and cultural work of hinduism, and it has been especially active on american campuses, serving the needs of what are sometimes called “heritage students,” or second- and even third-generation indian americans, who are keen to learn about hinduism, ancient india, the modernity of hinduism, and the affronts to hindus in countries where they are a minority. the organizational strengths of the hSC can reasonably be surmised from the fact that in 1993, on the centenary of vivekananda’s address to the World parliament of religions, it held a “vision 2000 global youth Conference” attended by 2000 hindu students from the united States, india, and nearly 20 other foreign countries (lal, 2008, p87–89). vivekananda is the one figure from the relatively recent indian past who is most admired in hSC circles as someone who not only spoke for the youth of india but unabashedly suggested that india was positioned to achieve conquest over the world with its rich spiritual inheritance. it is vivekananda who, from the standpoint of the vishwa hindu parishad and the hindu Students Council, successfully transformed hinduism from an inward-looking faith to the global religion that it had once
East-West Affairs 81 aspired to be as it spread through thailand, Java, bali, and indochina. the hindu Student Council’s “global dharma Conference,” held at edison, new Jersey, in 2003, was thus not only a tribute to vivekananda’s conception of hinduism as a global religion but an affirmation of hinduism’s capacity to organize its devotees and take its place alongside other world religions. one can speak in a similar vein of the activities of the hindu american foundation, an organization of recent vintage that draws its key members from the ranks of young indian american professionals who profess both to ensure that multicultural america is not wholly ignorant about the world’s oldest faith and to safeguard it from libelous attacks by unpatriotic indians and ill-informed americans. the guidelines for its 5th annual next generation essay Competition, held in august 2013, describe with undisguised pride vivekananda’s participation in the World parliament while inviting students to reflect on his teachings: “in a mere five word greeting of ‘brothers and sisters of america,’ he relayed hinduism’s ancient teaching of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam [the whole world is one single family], inspiring so many in the audience and countless other americans to live up to the dharmic understanding of pluralism and mutual respect. his teachings, like hinduism, continue to stand the test of time and serve as an inspiration to hindus and non-hindus alike.” this veneer of goodwill, mutual respect, and an anodyne form of cultural pluralism disguises the hindu american foundation’s consistent attempts to vilify and proselytize aggressively against organizations which have been critical of diasporic hindus in the united States who have championed hindu nationalism and often given their material or moral support to hindu militants (hindu american foundation, 2013).
“this is the story of a phenomenon.” thus, Christopher isherwood commenced his elegant even mesmerizing biography, Ramakrishna and His Disciples . isherwood tells a great many stories—and tempts me to conclude with one of the many stories, largely apocryphal, that have now become part of the legend that has grown up around vivekananda and his legacy in the united States. in the 1980s, as a graduate student at the university of Chicago with a certain attraction to Sri ramakrishna, i became a frequent visitor to the vivekananda Center in hyde park. in time i came to find out that, under the leadership of Swami bhasyananda, land was acquired in 1968 in the township of ganges, Michigan, and the vivekananda Monastery and retreat was duly established in the midst of a wonderfully bucolic setting. upon
82 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 inquiring how ganges had acquired its name, i was told by the residents of the Monastery that the town was founded by an early follower of vivekananda; others mentioned to me that the disciple in question was the governor of Michigan, and that in honor of the indian swami he conferred indian names on two towns, the other being nirvana. at that time i ceased my probe into this matter, inclined to accept the view that the story was worthy to be told to others, whatever its veracity. in recent years, as vivekananda’s place in the diasporic imaginary has grown tremendously, i thought it worthwhile to investigate this story further and found not a scrap of evidence to corroborate the view held by members of the vivekananda Monastery. thus, Walter romig, in his encyclopedic Michigan Place Names , states that ganges was settled in 1838, and so “named by dr. Joseph Coates, a member of the legislature from otsego, after the holy river of india, for reasons unknown”; of nirvana, he says that it is “buddhist for highest heaven,” and acquired its name from the great admiration that darwin knight, the town’s first postmaster, bore for “oriental religions.” but will this matter at all to vivekananda’s followers and disciples in america and around the world? Should it matter at all? What could be more fun, after all, than to arrive in nirvana, and then drop a few postcards to friends and family members announcing one’s arrival in (vivekananda’s) nirvana?
REFERENCES p. atmaprana (ed.), Western Women in the Footsteps of Swami Vivekananda (new delhi: ramakrishna Sarada Mission, 1995).
J. h. barrows, The World’s Parliament of Religions , 2 vols. (Chicago, il: the parliament publishing library, 1893). r. Chattopadhyaya, Swami Vivekananda in the West (houston, tX, published by the author, 1993). r. emerson, Indian Superstition , edited by kenneth Walter Cameron (hanover, nh: the friends of the dartmouth library, 1954).
M. k. gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa , translated by valji govindji desai (ahmedabad: navajivan publishing house, 1972). hindu american foundation, The Coalition Against Genocide: A Nexus of Hinduphobia Unveiled (Washington, dC: hindu american foundation, 2013).
East-West Affairs 83 a. W. hill, “the Swami and the Savant,” accessed 2 april 2014, http://redroom.com/member/a-w-hill/writing/the-swami-and-the-savant.
C. isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (new york: Simon and Schuster, 1965).
S. k. kapoor, Cultural Contact and Fusion: Swami Vivekananda in the West , 1893-96 (Jalandhar, punjab: abS publications, 1987).
J. M. kitagawa, “the history of religions in america,” in The History of Religions: Understanding Human Experience (atlanta, ga: Scholars press, 1987), 3–26. v. lal, “emerson and india,” Ma thesis, humanities Center, the Johns hopkins university (1982). v. lal, The Other Indians: A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America (new delhi: harperCollins, 2008). t. Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, il: university of Chicago press, 2005). h. Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (new york: new directions, 1970). f. M. Muller, “the parliament of religions at Chicago (1894),” in Last Essays (london, uk: longmans, green and Company, 1901).
W. romig, Michigan Place Names: The History of the Founding and Naming of More Than Five Thousand Past and Present Michigan Communities (grosse pointe, Mi: Walter romig, n.d.). r. h. Seager, The World’s Parliament of Religions: The East/West Encounter, Chicago, 1893 (bloomington, in: indiana university press, 2009). d. Shields, and S. Salerno, Salinger (new york: Simon and Schuster, 2013). n. p. Sil, “Swami vivekananda in the West: the legend reinterpreted,” South Asia , 18, no. 1 (June 1995).
Stefanie Syman, The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America (new york: farrar, Straus and giroux, 2010). h. d. thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (boston, Ma: James r. osgood and Company, 1873). h. d. thoreau, The Annotated Walden , edited by philip van doren Stern (new york: Clarkson n. potter, 1970).
S. vivekananda, The Collected Works of Swami Vivekananda , Mayavati Memorial edition, 8 vols (Calcutta, india: advaita ashram, 1989).
84 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 The Pedagogical Subject of Neoliberal Development
Structural adjustment has destroyed the indigenous industries of sub-Saharan africa and diverted the region’s natural and human resources into the economic development of the north
alvin Cheng -h in liM
IN FALL 2012 AND SPrING 2013, I COOrDINATED THE FrESHMAN SEMINAr PrOGrAM for the american university of nigeria. as the seminar aimed at introducing our student participants to the challenges of development in nigeria and West africa, i had to consider the pedagogical subject of neoliberal development. this was especially so since this seminar had to comport with aun’s vision of becoming “the development university for africa,” and in particular, “a great center of learning and research for nigeria and West africa, and a catalyst for development in the entire area” (american university of nigeria, 2011, p2–3). aun qua development university envisions itself as being deeply engaged with the surrounding community, with this practical engagement proceeding on a double movement, with the faculty on one hand “connecting and applying their theoretical knowledge with the aim of solving social and economic problems,” and the students on the other being guided by the faculty to “understand and solve problems” for the development of the community (p7). hence, before i could develop the curriculum for the freshman Seminar, i first had to understand the development challenges faced by the community. as i soon discovered, these challenges emerged from nigeria’s neoliberal transformation of the 1980s.
East-West Affairs 85 Structural Adjustment peck (2013) notes that neoliberalism is an “unloved, rascal concept” (p133), as the multiple and varied histories of neoliberalization across the developing world renders it erroneous to compare neoliberalism against a single measure of “absolute market rule” (p140). in the case of nigeria and other african states, the path of neoliberalization is clear, with the imposition of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s by the World bank and the international Monetary fund (iMf). by the end of that decade, sub-Saharan african states were laboring under the conditionalities imposed by 84 structural adjustment loans (harrison 2005, p1308). through structural adjustment, the affected governments adopted a regime of market reforms that shrunk the public and expanded the private sector, opened markets to free trade, and encouraged export-oriented industrialization (kraus 2002, p428). the World bank and iMf soon became “the paymasters and auditors of development policy making” in the affected states (harrison, 2005, p1308). ideologically, these international financial institutions and the Western donor states envisioned the private rather than the public sector as the legitimate “engine of growth,” and deployed structural adjustment to implement this ideology across sub- Saharan africa (kraus, 2002, p395–397). this deployment of structural adjustment has been very effective, with neoliberalism supplanting “statism and socialism as the dominant strategy among politicians and intellectuals in africa more thoroughly than one would have imagined in 1980” (p428). Structural adjustment also opened the affected markets to free competition from multinational corporations, devastating local entrepreneurs. for example, the nigerian government was forced by its structural adjustment program to repeal “indigenisation decrees that had reserved whole economic sectors to local businesses or the state” (p430). in addition, haque (1999) notes that neoliberal ideology has a narrow focus on economic growth, ignoring other concerns, including economic justice and environmental sustainability (p209). this has had deleterious effects on the environment, and impeded progress toward sustainable development:
in effect, such neo-liberal policies are likely to expand industrialization (causing environmental pollution); globalize consumerism (encouraging consumption of environmentally hazardous products); multiply the emission of Co2 and CfCs (worsening the greenhouse effect and ozone layer depletion); overexploit natural resources (depleting nonrenewable resources); increase the number of urban poor and rural landless (forcing
86 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 them to build more slums and clear more forests); and, thus, threaten the realization of sustainable development objectives (haque, 1999, p199). not only has structural adjustment negatively impacted economic development in sub-Saharan africa through the destruction of indigenous industries, it has also had the neocolonial effect of feeding the region’s “natural and human resources” into the economic development of the north, which as geo-Jaja and Mangum (2003) succinctly observe, is “not to african advantage” (p296). the effects of structural adjustment on ordinary africans, including mass job losses of those formerly employed in the public sector, as well as the weakening of purchasing power through currency devaluations and the removal of state subsidies, have also impacted the intellectual and middle classes, for whom neoliberalization “appeared as the final assault on the historical foundations of their embourgeoisification in the colonial and postcolonial eras” (eyoh, 1998, p285). this devastating assault on the peoples’ standard of living generated a cycle of resistance and repression:
Most african intellectuals believe that structural adjustment programs were recipes for intensification of economic dependence and socioeconomic inequalities. these programs were profoundly undemocratic in both sentiment and practice because their design and implementation ruled out domestic political debate over the direction of economic policy. While ruling elites escaped the sacrifices structural adjustment programs called for, popular resistance to these programs provoked more state repression. (p286) as eyoh (1998) observes, this resistance had two targets, opposing “both authoritarian rule and the authority of neoliberal orthodoxy” (p286). in the case of nigeria, the state violence that defended the economic violence of neoliberalism was most intense under military dictatorship. Since independence, the nigerian military has ruled for over a quarter of a century, a period in which “violence became a quotidian experience” (Smith, 2004, p436). this violence served to undergird the inequality that emerged under neoliberalism, an inequality which was intensified by “the rapid and massive accumulation of wealth by the military and their civilian collaborators,” thanks to their capture of the neoliberalizing processes of privatization and trade liberalization (Smith, 2001, p816–819). ordinary nigerians soon came to despise the routine extraction of bribes that took place at police checkpoints and quickly grew to regard them as representative of the general extractive
East-West Affairs 87 violence of the corrupt entanglement between structural adjustment and military rule (Smith, 2004, p436).
More generally, neoliberalism represents the latest stage in modernization’s disruption of the traditional economy. as polanyi (1957) observes of the pre- capitalist political economy:
as long as social organization runs in its ruts, no individual economic motives need come into play; no shirking of personal effort need be feared; division of labor will automatically be ensured; economic obligations will be duly discharged; and, above all, the material means for an exuberant display of abundance at all public festivals will be provided. in such a community the idea of profit is barred; higgling and haggling is decried; giving freely is acclaimed as a virtue; the supposed propensity to barter, truck, and exchange does not appear. the economic system is, in effect, a mere function of social organization. (p49) the neoliberal society, in contrast, consists of atomistic individuals. harrison (2005) argues that the neoliberal optic views africans as possessing “a utilitarian individuality,” with the neoliberal african society hence representing a “collective endeavour to improve utility” (p1313). this neoliberal conception of the utilitarian african society is ignorant of the specific particularities of actual african societies (p1314), which, as we shall see, offer spaces for resistance. actual african markets “are pluralised, culturally embedded and structured in ways” that make them substantially different from the idealized rational markets of neoliberal ideology (p1315–1316).
When structural adjustment was imposed on sub-Saharan africa, the consequences were refracted through networks of traditional patron-client relationships, giving rise to an intensification of corruption. While traditional african kinship societies were characterized by inequality, this inequality was continually calibrated through the redistributive mechanism provided by patron-client relationships, such that the rich and powerful “were forever fulfilling obligations to their followers and redistributing their wealth to buy prestige” (Smith, 2001, p820). in such patronage networks, the reputation that a rich and powerful person enjoys from being a “big man” arises precisely from his capacity and willingness to be a “big patron” (Smith, 2001, p820). Conversely, the poor and powerless assume the submissive role of clients to
88 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 patrons “who may be able to help out with employment, cash for medical and other crises, places at school or university, or just about anything else for which influence might be required” (pierce, 2006, p891). indeed, patronage serves as a key bond between rich and poor in traditional kinship societies:
When a relatively wealthy man has his car stolen in town, his rural kinfolk and other people in his sphere of influence feel genuine sympathy. in addition to affective sentiments motivating their sympathy, they often have more instrumental reasons to be concerned about his welfare. (Smith, 2004, p434) the arrival of neoliberalism disrupted this redistributive mechanism offered by patronage, for the new political and economic elites in the neoliberal economy regard themselves as unbound from their traditional obligations of kinship and patronage, leaving the poor and powerless less able to appeal for favors from them (Smith, 2001, p820). this unease over neoliberalism’s disruption of the traditional mechanisms of wealth redistribution can be observed in popular rumors of the occult misdeeds of the neoliberal nouveau riche. Smith (2001) recounts one such tale:
a young man in a neighboring village was said to have died in his uncle's house. he died vomiting money. the uncle, people said, had hired a juju man (a sorcerer or witchdoctor) to help him get rich. the juju man instructed the uncle to give one of his family members a special medicine. if a family member ingested the medicine and the man observed the prescribed rituals, he would become rich, the juju man promised. the man picked a nephew who lived with him and locked the boy in a room, feeding him food that included the juju man's medicine. the man was not told that his nephew would die or exactly how he would become rich. the man was horrified when his nephew died, and he realized he could do nothing to stop the corpse from vomiting money. (p818)
Such fears of profit-oriented occult violence have the capacity to generate violence, as Smith (2001) documents in his reconstruction of the 1996 owerri riots, in which the angry mob attacked the neoliberal elite for their alleged use of “satanic rituals” to accumulate wealth, as well as their local collaborators, “the police, politicians, and religious leaders who were believed to have encouraged, protected, legitimized, and consorted with these
East-West Affairs 89 evildoers” (p804). as dean (2002) argues of the american revolution, the production of conspiracy theories can facilitate the emergence of a counter- public sharing the same set of grievances:
encoded through the dynamic of publicity and secrecy, the grievances relied on a knowledge of the excesses of power, a knowledge that made links among seemingly disparate and not strictly factual events. (p57) in the aftermath of the owerri riots, similar rumors of the occult violence of the neoliberal elite “circulated widely in the press and in popular discourse,” reflecting both the general “discontent over inequality” as well as the empowering sense that, just like the owerri rioters, the common people are capable of violently resisting the new political economy (Smith, 2001, p804). the emergence of everyday vigilantism in nigeria, vividly dramatized in Cole (2013), manifested public frustration over the “greater inequality and injustice” that arose from structural adjustment (Smith, 2004, p430). however, such vigilante violence only “obscured the role of politicians and the state in perpetuating the conditions that produced crime, insecurity, and inequality” (p431).
Development comes to the Koma Hills to see for myself the impact of neoliberal development on a local community, i organized a faculty visit to the famously underdeveloped koma hills, located at the atlantika mountains on the nigerian border with Cameroon. this borderland is a hub of legal and illegal transborder trade, with large container trucks continually transporting consumer goods from nigeria’s markets into Cameroon. Meagher (2003) reminds us that the economic disruption of structural adjustment has increased smuggling and illegal trade:
throughout West africa, the effects of devaluation, inflation and declining real incomes has produced an intensifying contradiction between the rising cost of goods and declining effective demand. this has encouraged, among other things, an increasing evasion by traders of duties, tariffs and taxes. even in entrepôt economies, which had officially encouraged transborder flows since the 1970s, structural adjustment has triggered a massive shift into unofficial trading circuits in an attempt by traders to evade even the low level of duties and taxes imposed within these states. (p61)
90 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 With structural adjustment having generated unemployment through the retreat of the public sector, and with the private sector having failed to generate sufficient jobs to employ the unemployed and immiserated masses, smuggling and illegal trade offer income-generating opportunities (Meagher, 2003, p61). Some of the private taxi drivers i met since coming to aun began their careers working as truck drivers transporting goods across the bush roads and broken highways from yola in nigeria’s adamawa State across the border into garoua in Cameroon’s adamawa region. indeed, nigerian and Cameroonian officials on both sides of the border, whose incomes had been adversely affected by structural adjustment, have become involved with the illegal transborder trade as well. ironically, the loss of purchasing power has increased the demand across the border for nigerian goods, thanks to “the massive devaluation of the naira” (p61):
transborder flows of manufactured and subsidised goods from nigeria have also increased dramatically under adjustment, in the face of a rapidly devaluing naira accompanied by increased demand for cheaper goods throughout West africa. Subsidised nigerian petrol, which accounted for only 10–20 per cent of niger’s fuel needs in the early 1980s, was, by the early 1990s estimated to account for 50 per cent of niger’s and nearly two-thirds of Cameroun’s fuel consumption. nigerian-made building materials, spare parts, textiles, soap, pomade, and pharmaceuticals have enjoyed a similar boom in transborder distribution. (p62)
While the illegal transborder trade has offered opportunities for employment and rent extraction, agriculture has suffered, as the import of cheaper agricultural products has adversely affected local farmers by “undercutting prices and eroding demand” (p70). With the bustling transborder traffic between Cameroon and nigeria only an hour away by road, i wondered how the people of the koma hills had handled the encroachment of neoliberalism. as it turned out, Christianity had arrived first. instead of the men and women famously clad in leaves and animal skins, the koma people who greeted us were mission school students neatly dressed in donated Western clothes. the missionaries explained to us that they were from a southern nigerian dominionist church who had heeded their religious call to bring their “radical evangelism” to the koma hills (Momolosho, n.d., p7). as pastor kay Momolosho (n.d.) explained in his church publication Koma Lens Talk , before
East-West Affairs 91 the church arrived, the koma people “were in gross darkness; poverty ravaged their land like locusts”:
they were all naked; concealing their nudity with fresh leaves ( denge ) for the women and animal skin ( bante ) for the men. (p6)
Several pages of Koma Lens Talk consist of before-and-after photographs of koma women attired in their traditional denge and then in their donated Western attire. indeed, pastor Momolosho views life in the koma hills in terms of before-and-after the arrival of the dominionist mission:
death and diseases were their kinsmen; while life begins at forty for the man in the outside world, theirs expires at forty – any extra is considered “unusual.” nobody in the land was enlightened. all of them were in complete darkness. (6) the dominionist missionaries were proud of the development they had brought to the koma hills, including the construction of boreholes and wells which prevented the spread of river blindness and other water-borne diseases (Momolosho, n.d., p28); as well as a boarding school for the local children (p17), all the better to “teach them god’s ordinance via their ability to read and write” (p7). Similarly, the provision by the mission of primary health care served to “elongate their short life span in preparation for the gospel” (p7).
While pastor Momolosho and his missionaries had evangelical intentions in mind for their mission to the koma hills, their ministry can be read as part of the greater assemblage of governmentality that has extended the regulative power of government into the koma hills. government, in this foucauldian sense, refers to the mode of power that allows the population to be “modified, altered, and managed through policy interventions that aim to increase the state’s economic resources and forces”:
it is important to distinguish government, a terminal form of power, from governmentality, the heterogeneous assemblage of institutions, technologies, calculations, and tactics that are the conditions enabling the exercise of government. as we shall see, this distinction is crucial because it implies that even non-state actors and entities such as ngos and civil society rely on and are part of the web of governmentality. (Cheah, 2006, p200–201)
92 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 indeed, by transforming the hitherto illiterate children of the koma hills into literate students, the dominionist mission has helped “increase the state’s economic resources and forces” by enlarging the regional population of economically productive citizens. it should also be recognized that, despite their repressing and supplanting the traditional culture of the koma people, the dominionist mission served the biopolitical function of transforming human life into a productive economic resource (Cheah, 2006, p200). to understand this, we have to turn to foucault’s gloss on neoliberalism. as foucault (2008) reminds us, neoliberalism’s theory of human capital posits homo œconomicus as “an entrepreneur of himself,” such that the neoliberal economic agent is “for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings” (p226). this comports with our earlier observations of atomistic individualism supplanting traditional group affiliations under neoliberalization. as lawuyi (1993) notes of neoliberalism’s transformation of nigeria’s traditional social order,
Within the economic time least encouragement is given to kinship relations. indeed, in the nigerian society, the family is increasingly informal as the development of individualistic entrepreneurship breaks kinship ties. as advances are then made in trade and industry, the bond between kinship affiliation and the new system of thought and order makes itself felt in the spirit of individualism: the need for setting the self-identity aside from that of the collective through ambitions for wealth and status. the economic time is for prudence. (p104)
Homo œconomicus , being his own capital, hence is responsible for nurturing his human capital, which foucault (2008) explains is an “ability-machine” which “will be remunerated by income.” apart from educational investments like schooling, a key element of human capital is mobility (p229–230). Such mobility would be essential for the newly educated children of the koma hills, as they will eventually have to migrate to where jobs are to be found. Such migration counts as an investment, for the expenses incurred in the move will be remunerated with the income paid by the employer for the human capital possessed by the migrant (p230). hence, by transforming the illiterate children of the koma hills into literate students and future productive members of nigeria’s neoliberal economy, the dominionist mission has made a strong contribution to “the cultivation of human capital,” reflecting not just the mission’s role in governmentality, but also its exercise of biopower (Cheah,
East-West Affairs 93 2006, p199). as foucault (1978) notes, biopower emerged when “the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (p138). Such cultivation of life includes educational investments like schooling which enhance the abilities-machines of the students. an important element of biopolitical schooling consists of the disciplining of the body for economic productivity: “the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls” (p139). the polite manners and docility of the mission’s students that we observed on our visit reflect the thorough religious discipline they must undergo every day at the boarding school, which will enable them to find employment when they eventually enter the workforce. Such discipline makes them ready for employment in the broader capitalist economy, which requires “the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes” (p141). apart from educational investments, the assemblage of governmentality that seeks to produce and reproduce an economically viable population of homines œconomici involves agencies whose policies “shape the population by affecting birthrates, health, and the distribution of the population” (Cheah, 2006, p201). i realized that this would offer a space for the student participants of the freshman Seminar to learn about and contribute to development, as they could, through their involvement with aun’s community development projects, positively affect the biopower that shaped the local community. aun’s vision of itself includes an important role for community service. in its strategic plan, aun views the student body as being “transformed for service and leadership to lead africa and the world in what will be surely the challenging years ahead.” indeed, the students are expected to create and to lead their own spaces for service, for aun expects that “every graduate will internalize the basics of innovation and entrepreneurship” (american university of nigeria, 2011, p5). the community development projects that i envisioned these students engaging in would hence not only bring them face- to-face with the local population which was struggling to survive under the neoliberal politico-economic regime, but would also provide them the practical space to offer their own solutions for these problems. i hoped that this engagement with the community would prevent them from falling into what power (2010) describes as “market cynicism,” the neoliberal condition where the bachelor’s degree is “increasingly understood as the product
94 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 purchased for a certain amount of money and a certain quantity of time served,” and students “think of themselves in purely economic terms” (para. 5). as it turned out, we managed to avoid this. When i finally coordinated the freshman Seminar in the fall 2012 and spring 2013 semesters, our freshman participants were required to serve a minimum of ten hours with our community development projects, which ranged from “counselling drug addicted youth in the local yola-Jimeta area, providing literacy and employability skills training to residents at a local women’s shelter, tutoring children at poor neighborhood schools, and providing information technology (it) training to local youth, among others” (lim, 2013, p105). the affective success of these projects could be seen in the voluntary participation of the freshmen in these projects beyond the mandated ten hours, with some students continuing to participate even after they had completed the freshman Seminar. these suggest that community service can be deployed by local communities as a key pedagogical resource to confront the challenges of neoliberal development.
REFERENCES american university of nigeria, The American University of Nigeria (AUN) Strategic Plan 2011– 2016 (yola, nigeria: american university of nigeria, 2011). pheng Cheah, i nhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge, Ma: harvard university press, 2006). teju Cole, “everyday is for the thief: an excerpt,” in African Cities Reader II: Mobilities and Fixtures , edited by ntone edjabe and edgar pieterse (vlaeberg, South africa: Chimurenga and the african Centre for Cities, 2013) 150–155.
Jodi dean, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (ithaca, ny: Cornell university press, 2002). dickson eyoh, “african perspectives on democracy and the dilemmas of postcolonial intellectuals,” Africa Today 45 (1998) 281–306.
Michel foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction , translated by robert hurley (new york: pantheon books, 1978).
Michel foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978–1979 , translated by graham burchell (new york: picador, 2008).
East-West Affairs 95 Macleans a. geo-Jaja and garth Mangum, “economic adjustment, education and human resource development in africa: the case of nigeria,” International Review of Education 49 (2003) 293–318.
M. Shamsul haque, “the fate of sustainable development under neo-liberal regimes in developing countries,” International Political Science Review 20 (1999) 197–218. graham harrison, “economic faith, social project and a misreading of african society: the travails of neoliberalism in africa,” Third World Quarterly 26 (2005) 1303–1320.
Jon kraus, “Capital, power and business associations in the african political economy: a tale of two countries, ghana and nigeria,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 40 (2002) 395– 436. olatunde b. lawuyi, “time, identity, and nigerian business ethos. reflections from bush-taxi and banking,” Anthropos 88 (1993) 99–107. alvin C. h. lim, “lines of flight: the new ph.d. as migrant,” Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 22 (2013) 98–108. kate Meagher, “a back door to globalisation? Structural adjustment, globalisation & transborder trade in West africa,” Review of African Political Economy 30 (2003) 57–75. kay Momolosho, Koma Lens Talk, Vol. 1 (Mani koma hills, nigeria: the king’s Call at koma hills publication, n.d.).
Jamie peck, “explaining (with) neoliberalism,” Territory, Politics, Governance 1 (2013) 132–157.
Steven pierce, “looking like a state: Colonialism and the discourse of corruption in northern nigeria,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (2006) 887–914. karl polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (boston, Ma: beacon press, 1957). nina power, “axiomatic equality: rancière and the politics of contemporary education.” Eurozine . accessed 24 January 2014. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-07-01-power- en.html daniel J. Smith, “ritual killing, 419, and fast wealth: inequality and the popular imagination in southeastern nigeria,” American Ethnologist 28 (2001) 803–826. daniel J. Smith, “the bakassi boys: vigilantism, violence, and political imagination in nigeria.” Cultural Anthropology 19 (2004) 429–455.
96 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 Science Fiction Futures and the Extended Present of 3D Printers
3d printing technology is a double-edged sword. it has the potential to remove the limits of scarcity as well as the potential to create new ways of reinforcing scarcity. that’s what science fiction writers are telling us
JoShua pryor
FuTurES ALrEADy ExIST IN THE IMAGES , HOPES , AND DrEAMS OF SOCIETIES . O FTEN , these images are constructed into works of film and literature that create a window into worlds of possibilities. by creating future worlds based upon extrapolations of current trends and human imagination, science fiction holds the promise of envisioning whole worlds that are realistic and organic. basically, as ray bradbury has said, “science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together” (Quoted in tompkins 1977, p9). thus, science fiction provides us with a means to critically analyze and understand the forces and currents confounding and propelling possible futures. a useful perspective on science fiction focuses on the images produced by science. Science produces images and representations, each of which filter through the social imagination and create ideas that grow beyond their original scientific explanations (klein, 2000). images in this sense refer to realities produced by science, such as the image of Jupiter and its orbiting moons, or the human genome. these images then inspire representations, abstractions, such as the general vision of a center orbited by a body, facilitating the further creation of additional images as in the bohr model of
East-West Affairs 97 the atom. rarely does science itself address the images it facilitates, unless those images can be used in service of generating new theories and results. one could argue, then, that the images produced by science are frequently abandoned and left unanalyzed. this is where science fiction comes in: the images of science left in the wild become raw material for science fiction; for “the imaginative exploration of scientific possibility,” to use the words of Jack Williamson (quoted in tompkins, 1977, p10). Science fiction takes scientific images and representations, combined with human imagination, to create living, breathing worlds, anticipating possible consequences of science that few other fields are prepared to entertain. as the pace of change in technology and culture accelerates, science fiction is often used to explain recent advances. When dolly the sheep was cloned in 1997, frequent connections were made between modern science and science fiction (hamilton, 2003). Science fiction acted as a bridge to facilitate the social understanding of advances in technology, even if science fiction aggrandized or hyperbolized actual scientific possibilities. Scientific ideas and representations are distributed through the social imagination by science fiction, consequently making science fiction a useful tool to explain recent technological advances. the gap between literature, especially science fiction, and science is not very wide (Swirski, 2000). for example, donald palumbo argues that the central tenets of chaos theory are buried in isaac asimov’s Foundation trilogy and frank herbert’s Dune series, years before chaos theory was clearly laid out in science (palumbo, 2002). images and ideas originally envisioned by science, and further forecasted by science fiction, have led to what veronica hollinger has described as a “science fiction present” (hollinger, 2006), or what Ziauddin Sardar calls “the extended present” (Sardar, 2013). technological change appears to be occurring so quickly that human society lives in a constant future/present, where future visions clearly affect present realities and the divide between the two becomes increasingly murky—the postnormal condition. thus, science fiction is a useful tool to explore the immediate future, or the extended present, of a new or emerging technology. 3d printers provide us with a good case study. While the digital revolution provided an opportunity for the wholesale evolution in the availability and distribution of information and ideas, 3d printing creates a similar potential in the manufacture of physical objects. from kidneys and drugs (Sanderson 2012) to guns (titlow 2012) and food (fox
98 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 2012), as well as simple toys, 3d printing has the potential to completely reshape the economic landscape of our society. Currently, the consumer market is dominated by 3d printers that cost up to $2000 and that can produce anything made out of basic plastics in as large an area as one cubic foot. More expensive industrial 3d printers, costing over $10,000, can create objects out of steel, and flesh composites for human organs. While the potential is enormous, the process is relatively simple. after acquiring a digital file outlining the structure of the object, the machine creates the final product layer by layer. as the technology evolves, the ability of people to create, in their own homes, many things from clothes to musical instruments becomes a reality. While the technology has been rapidly evolving since the 1980s, its future impact is increasingly up for debate. as a constantly changing technology, 3d printing is ripe for analysis with the assistance of science fiction. an early exploration of the impact of 3d printing was provided by ralph Williams in his short story, “business as usual, during alterations” (1958). the story begins with a discussion between aliens. Seeking to test humanity, they deliver a duplicating device, which can make copies of anything placed within. deposited near city halls throughout the world, each device is labeled with the following, frequently ignored note: “Warning! a push of the button grants your heart’s desire. it is also a chip at the foundations of human society. a few billion such chips will bring it crashing down. the choice is yours.” the potential meaning is double edged: does using the duplicator itself cause society to collapse, as some sort of doomsday machine, or is the act of copying itself, and hence the end of scarcity, the true threat? initially chaos ensues. the machines eventually become ubiquitous and uninteresting. originally selling for $20, by the end of the day people trying to sell the duplicators could not even give them away. as money can be copied, the economy goes from a currency based system to credit, a system of ious. businesses that previously sold physical objects that were produced in factories transform into “showrooms,” delinking physical production and commerce. the final purpose of the economy is clearly stated by a business owner:
in the past, we’ve sold standardization because it was a scarce commodity. now, the shoe is on the other foot, we’ll sell diversity. instead of offering the customers a choice of g.e. or Westinghouse refrigerators, we’ll offer a choice of any refrigerator built, anywhere… (Williams, 1958, p29)
East-West Affairs 99 diversification and customization geared towards specific individual needs, rather than mass marketing, become the primary pursuit in economic activities. to ensure opportunities for profit and the maintenance of scarcity, copyright is used to ensure that any copy of any product made with the duplicators would still lead to the payment of a royalty to the original producer. the consequent economic impact is a loss of employment in simple jobs such as “button pushers,” who do not create added value toward the creation of new products. rather, planners and designers, “makers,” become the driving engines of the economy. the final moral of the story is that human adaptability is able to overcome the anarchic potential of 3d printing, “ingesting” the new technology to reproduce classical Western economic concepts of scarcity. there are massive changes to the economy, to be sure, but ultimately the core of 3d printers in this instance would not lead to a wholesale re-creation of society. an alternative take on the impact of 3d printer type technology is in provided by george o. Smith’s The Complete Venus Equilateral (1976), which is a compilation of stories originally written between 1942 and 1947. the venus equilateral is a space station that relays messages around the galaxy, and it is the setting of numerous stories. the future portrayed is a continuation of the modern world: capitalism, competition, and corporate intrigue. however, the foundations of the economy are disrupted with the development of a matter transmitter/duplicator. While the inner operations of the matter duplicator are not made entirely clear, each machine runs on batteries, which can be copied and reused. the duplicator, unfortunately, can only make a copy of anything placed within a box. Copying watches, jewelry, raw materials, money, and absolutely anything, the matter duplicator creates total chaos as currency becomes worthless. the economy based on scarcity becomes eradicated, and instead people become entrenched in a system of barter and trade. people too poor to acquire matter duplicators must find their own ways to make ends meet, whereas those with access are able to make copies of anything in their possession. While matter duplicators are rare, there is panic and violence, but as they become more available, people settle down. as the impact of the duplicator spreads throughout the galaxy, keg Johnson, a manager of the venus equilateral, asks don Channing, the developer of the duplicator, to search for materials the duplicator cannot copy. in the meantime, the economy focuses on services; security, entertainment, and
100 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 other similar activities. production as a job position slowly disappears. eventually, the scientists at the venus equilateral develop a new material called “identium.” if placed within a matter duplicator, a large explosion occurs, destroying the duplicator. this uncopyable material creates a universal currency that re-institutes material and acts as a medium of exchange. identium is mass produced by governments, creating coins, paper currency, contracts, and other mediums of exchange that require scarcity. don Channing argues this is a harbinger of the four-hour work week; people working just enough to stretch the creative juices and yet still have currency to acquire additional things they want:
Why do men work? Men often work because they must work in order to live…and so when people all are well clad, well housed, and well fed, there arises an almost universal ambition to become clever, to produce things that have not been duplicated by the machine. for, in a culture in which fifty thousand copies of leonardo da vinci’s Last Supper hang in theaters, churches, schools, and living rooms, he who possesses a handmade chromo painted by his own hand owns a true Unique , to which he can point with pride. So once the flurry was over and the tumult gone, men took a deep breath- and went back to work. (Smith, 1976, p347) the original creation of the duplicator caused a collapse in the economy, through stress, panic and disarray. a non-duplicatable material was eventually invented, allowing familiar scarcity based economics to become dominant again. but identium, the new currency, could not be acquired through the buying and selling of normal things, such as basic food and clothing and the like. rather, “unique shops, that deal in nothing but items which they can certify as never having been duplicated,” become the primary reason for currency. Currency becomes a means to acquire pride, pride in the unique things people create, and have acquired. a continued growth future, yet carrying the potential for transformative change, is found in neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (1995). using nanotechnology as the scientific foundation, humanity has created matter decompilers, which use access to the “feed” to create all of society’s needs. the feed represents centralized, and controlled access to nanobots that are able to create material desires. When things are created using the feed, information is sent back to the center such that everything produced
East-West Affairs 101 is recorded and registered. the economy is “post-scarcity,” in the sense that society is not limited by available physical materials, and there are public matter decompilers to allow even the poor to have access to basic food and materials. however, anything created by a matter decompiler and based on someone else’s intellectual property requires payment. this copyright system creates artificial scarcity and is made possible due to the complicated nature of nanobots; they are not easy to produce, requiring a large centralized infrastructure that is easily controlled by government. but the government’s control of the “feed” faces resistance both from hidden, pirate “feed” sources, as well as the not yet finished “seed.” pirate “feed sources” allow for copyright-free reproduction, and they are involved in a constant cat and mouse game with the authorities. the “seed,” represents an emerging technology that only requires people to plant a technological device in the ground, which then results in the production of whatever material good that seed was designed to create. the “seed” is a resistance technology, pitted against the hierarchical control of the “feed,” with its peer-to-peer possibilities. one of the story’s protagonists, professor hackworth, was tricked by the criminal mastermind dr. X into developing the “seed.” once hackworth realizes he has been tricked, he hands dr. X to the authorities. hackworth argues, articulating the dominant ideology of the day, that the “seed” is extremely dangerous. Without centralized control, matter compilers could be used to create nuclear weapons, small arms, and generally spread political and social disruption through violence. in response, dr. X explains how the “feed” led to social chaos in his society as matter compilers gutted old social relationships between producers and consumers, and he wanted to develop the seed as a means to revoke dependence on Western “feed” supply lines. the dominant, victorian style society of The Diamond Age , with its centralized “feed,” clearly reflects the continuation of modern society. even with the availability of nanotechnology and the creation of a possible post-scarcity environment, copyright policies are used to enforce artificial scarcity, creating massive inequality between the elites and everyone else. however, the discussion of the “seed” portends a nanotech peer-to-peer production revolution that could sidestep the dominant command and control economy: a transformative future. these three stories off two potential futures for 3d printing. first, after a period of slight turmoil caused by the introduction of 3d printers, scarcity-
102 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 based economics is able to maintain its grip on society, either through centralized control of nano-feeds, or through the creation of currencies that are non-reproducible. Currencies exist as means of exchanging wealth, composed of elements that are not reproducible by 3d printers. Second, the reinforcement of economic scarcity leads to inequalities between sellers and consumers, and likely political inequalities from those who have the means to participate and those without the financial capabilities to do so. because of copyright, owners of ideas have access to material goods, whereas those without access become marginalized. the lack of economic might also leads to unequal access to the political system. the 3d printer future is one of hierarchical elite control and continued stratification within society. apart from presenting business-as-usual images, 3d printers are also portrayed negatively in science fiction. in damon knight’s A for Anything (1990), 3d printers, identified as “gizmos,” become the catalyst for a global war that ultimately ends in a hierarchical oligarchy of elite control, a dystopia collapse scenario. unlike many other duplicator stories, the duplicators in A for Anything are powerful enough to reproduce anything placed within them, including people. the human replicating powers of these duplicators can be compared to the reproduction of robots—assuming the robots are capable of at least menial tasks. throughout the novel, the author provides reasons why easy duplication of material wants must inherently lead to a slave society. the first argument, put forth by krasnow, a violent antagonist seizing the initiative in the early days of the duplicator, is that with the easy reproduction of physical goods, the only form of value is a slave. he argues that nobody would be willing to work anymore without the use of force, because nothing would be of value as payment. this leads to a dichotomy: slave vs. slaveholder. as a result of this perception, krasnow, begins placing explosives on as many “slaves” as he can find, turning them into cogs in his personal empire. the use of duplicators to create weapons, along with an explosion of people who think like krasnow, leads to a five year war that concludes in the “inevitable” final state of humanity: elite controlled slavery. an alternative explanation for the requirement of a slave state due to gizmos is put forward by academics discussing politics at the end of a school day. gizmos are a profound gift, they can do anything from generate power to
East-West Affairs 103 produce tables, chairs, or cars. this means of production creates a new opportunity for leisure. yet, leisure leads to the demand for services, such as the cleaning of beds or providing massages. the gizmo, unable to provide these services, and the inability of people to “pay” for these services in a typical capitalist fashion, leads to a compulsive labor system; to satisfy the desires of social elites, a new class of servant/slaves are required. in order to reinforce the continuation of the elite, access to gismos is tightly controlled. gismos could be used to generate the weapons required for a successful revolt. also, if everyone had access to a gismo, there would never be a food shortage. With no food shortage, populations would explode, and as the population increased, the potential for more conflict in the future becomes increasingly likely. as it was, the 5 year war killed 7/8s of the human population. lack of access to gismos and a regulated population are all tools the elite use to maintain control. discontent between slave and slaveholder ultimately leads to a revolt, where slaves briefly gain control of the capitol city. however, a massive counter attack leads to a re-establishment of the oligarchy. this, combined with the revelation that the gismo was the last technological advancement developed by humanity, concludes a story identifying how 3d printing can lead to a period of stasis.
A for Anything is grounded in a hobbesian mindset, where individuals in a position of power distrust others to such an extent that the only world they can perceive is one dominated by violence. 3d printers instigate a global revolution and promote slavery, which is a truly nightmarish scenario. in Murray leinster’s The Duplicators (1964), 3d printing leads to the removal of humanity’s desire to “get things done” and, thus, the total collapse of society. a long lost planet far from earth called Sord three is the home of some humans and the alien race uffts. Machines exist to duplicate material necessities, and humans do no work. in exchange for beer, uffts do whatever other work is needed, which is not much. link, the protagonist of the story, quickly realizes the state of “decay” of Sord three: little work and no significant commerce. if the duplicators were allowed to spread to other planets, and all could be reproduced by the duplicators, the rest of the universe would collapse:
if there can be a device which performs every sort of work a world wants
104 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 done, then those who first have that instrument are rich beyond the dreams of anything but pride. but pride will make riches a drug upon the market. Men will no longer work, because there is no need for their work. Men will starve because there is no longer any need to provide them with food. there will be no way to earn necessities. one can only take them. and presently nobody will attempt to provide them to be taken. (leinster, 1964, p66–67)
a business man could begin with the luxury trade and undersell all other supplies, dispensing duplicated luxury items. then he could undersell any manufacturer of any other line of goods. he could undersell normally grown foodstuffs. any supplier of meat products. any supplier of anything else men needed or desired. all factories would become unprofitable. they’d close. all working men would become unemployed. all wages would cease to move except into a duplicater-owner’s pockets. and then there would be disaster, calamity, collapse, destruction, and hell to pay generally. (leinster, 1964, p73–74) the duplicators were originally created on a planet called Suheil two. the ancestors of the humans on Sord three eventually fled in order to escape economic wars. however, some were left on Suheil two, and the consequences were ugly. Wars raged as people fought over ownership of the remaining duplicators, people fighting to possess them, and others fighting to take the duplicators away. eventually, the duplicators were destroyed by people unable to defend them anymore. once the duplicators were destroyed, society fought over scraps, until everything had to be rebooted from scratch
While the duplicators caused an economic war on the home planet of Suheil two, a different, though in link’s eyes equally terrible, result occurs on Sord three. With the duplicators creating all of society’s needs, people stopped learning. engineering, science, most of human knowledge were all lost, including the knowledge of how to provide the duplicators with the primary resources needed to operate perfectly. as the duplicators ran out of raw materials (which could not be produced by duplicators), duplicated products slowly degenerate in quality. Without the knowledge to find new sources of raw materials, society slowly slides into extinction. duplicators are more curse than blessing. either people fight over control of
East-West Affairs 105 them, as on Suheil two, or once in their possession, people become lazy, useless, and over time cease to pursue knowledge and forget all useful information. The Duplicators does not propose duplicating more duplicators in order to appease those who are violent; rather, it suggests that control of the existing duplicators and ensuring others do not get them that promotes violence. leinster argues for a core of human behavior built upon coercion and control, rather than cooperation; people are not able to share the wealth that comes with the duplicators. further, these particular duplicators rely on raw materials that require constant resupply and cannot be duplicated. if one were to make a steel knife, one would need a knife, as well as some raw steel in order to recreate the knife. for leinster, duplicators—or, indeed 3d printers—are more trouble than they are worth, as they unlock the ugliest human traits, and humanity is better off without them. in contrast, Cory doctorow’s “Makers” (2009) suggests the creative potential of 3d printers; a creativity that can help facilitate an alternative economic system in response to a stagnating society. Set in the ashes of the dot.com collapse of the late 2000s, “Makers” explores the world of the “new Work” economy. recognizing that large monolithic companies with a single organizational bureaucratic structure are on the decline, an investor named Mr. kettlewell purchases the remnants of kodak and duracell, forming a new company called kodacell. arguing that the days of general Motors and general electric are over, kettlewell explains his future economic plan as generating money through financing “a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.” explaining the business plan in greater detail, kettlewell argues:
our company isn’t a project that we pull together on, it’s a network of like- minded, cooperating autonomous teams, all of which are empowered to do whatever they want, provided that it returns something to our coffers… . the company isn’t a company anymore: this company is a network, an approach, a sensibility. (doctorow, 2009, p5)
With the freedom provided by kodacell, a duo of Maker’s inventors with a desire for creative enterprise begin to funnel their time into the development of 3-d printers on a massive scale. this develops into a localized production system. at least 20% of america is employed in the “new Work” economy, either inventing new products and producing them with 3d printers, or
106 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 providing support services for the inventors. the “new Work” economy becomes so successful that eventually Walmart goes out of business, representing the death of economic middle men. in the face of economic collapse, 3d printers, and the individual entrepreneurship and potential they embody, becomes a disciplinary method to find a way forward after the almost armageddon-like consequences of the 2008 stock market crash. doctorow illustrates one potential impact of 3d printers on the local economy. in “Makers,” the impact of the 3d printer on globalization and interconnectivity is a resurgence and a return to localized, home-based economies. rather than a global focus of international economics, production is more locally centered. by identifying a path for individuals to direct their energies in the pursuit of creative production, 3d printers are insinuated as reducing inequality. of course, the stories presented here do not explore all possible and potential futures of 3d printing. but they do highlight the social and economic implications of 3d printer technology; and suggest its potential effects on society. 3d printers, according to these stories, allow for localized production, self-reliance, and the immediate acquisition of material goods. they can also cause, alternatively, economic disruption, social chaos, and lead to a society of subservient slaves. on the more pragmatic side, if 3d printers become widespread, then people invested in scarcity based economic systems will attempt to create objects that cannot be copied, either through digital rights management, or by finding materials that simply cannot be copied.
3d printing represents a unique challenge to the future of human economic systems. by creating the potential to remove the limits of scarcity, and yet concurrently providing a new control point for scarcity to be reinforced, 3d printers present us with a double-edged future. Science fiction provides a space where these possible relationships and connections can be uniquely explored, clarifying relationships that may initially be obscure. While science fiction helps anticipate potential impacts of emerging issues, the impact of these issues ultimately depends on how they become integrated in constantly evolving social systems.
REFERENCES
Cory doctorow, “Makers,” accessed June 2014, http://craphound.com/makers/Cory_doctorow_-_Makers_a4.pdf.
East-West Affairs 107 Zoe fox, “3d printed meats may soon be on the menu,” Mashable.com , 15 august 2012. accessed 4 august 2013, http://mashable.com/2012/08/15/3d-printed-meats-may-soon-be- on-the-menu/.
Sheryl hamilton, “traces of the future: biotechnology, Science fiction, and the Media,” Science Fiction Studies 30, no. 2 (2003) 267–282. veronica hollinger, “Stories about the future: from patterns of expectation to pattern recognition,” Science Fiction Studies 33, no. 3 (2006) 452–472. gerard klein, “from the images of science to science fiction,” in Learning From Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia, edited by patrick parrinder (durham, nC: duke university press, 2000) damon knight, A For Anything (new york: Zenith books, 1959); reprinted tor books, 1990.
Murray leinster, The Duplicators (new york: ace books, 1964). donald e. palumbo, Chaos Theory, Asimov’s Foundations and Robots, and Herbert’s Dune: The Fractal Aesthetic of Epic Science Fiction (Connecticut: praeger, 2002). katharine Sanderson, “3d printing: the desktop drugstore,” BBC Online , 26 September 2012, accessed 4 august 2013, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120926-desktop-drugstores.
Ziauddin Sardar, Future: All that Matters (london, uk: hodder educational, 2013) george o. Smith, The Complete Venus Equilateral (new york: ballantine books, 1976). neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (new york: bantam books, 1995). peter Swirski, Between Literature and Science (Montreal: Mcgill-Queen’s university press, 2000)
John paul titlow, “how 3d printing is inflaming the gun control debate,” ReadWriteWeb , 29 august 2012, accessed 4 august 2013, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how-3d- printing-is-inflaming-the-gun-control-debate.php. robert tompkins (ed.), Future Scapes: Explorations in Fact and Science Fiction (london, uk: Methuen publications, 1977) ralph Williams, “business as usual during alterations,” Astounding Science Fiction July (1958); pdf at http://www.teacheconomicfreedom.org/files/business-as-usual-during- alterations.pdf.
108 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 Muslim Superheroes
a new breed of characters is changing the landscape of comics
gino Zarrinfar
Comics play an important part in shaping our culture. they excavate our memories, real and imagined, and create new ones. Comics created networks before networks became the norm in postnormal times: we are required to make connections between words and images, between panels which follow a sequence, and in networks across each page—right to the end of the story. like Spiderman, the network within a comic, and the network of comics, capture our cultural imagination in a web. Superman and Captain America have instilled the american dream in a generation of americans—as well as global citizens. guy fawkes has been incarnated through V for Vendetta ; his mask is now a global icon adopted by occupy, hackers anonymous, and other protest groups. Judge Dredd provides us with an image of the ultimate nightmare of law-enforcement in a fascist future.
Conventionally, superheroes of american comics have been hardy americans. think of Batman , Superman , Spiderman , Captain America , Iron Man , and Thor . their antagonists—Joker, green goblin, Magenta, doctor doom—came from the same background. occasionally, one would come across a non-western villain. not surprisingly, these characters are painted in all the colors of orientalism.
East-West Affairs 109 in neil gaiman’s cult comic Sandman #50:Ramadan , for example, we come across harun al-raschid:
know then that this is a tale of baghdad, the heavenly city, the jewel of arabia; and that this was in the time of harun al-raschid, king of kings, prince of the faithful. there was no court that was like harun al-raschid. he had gathered to him all manner of great men from all corners of the world. there were sages and wise men, and alchemists, geographers and geomancers, mathematicians and astronomers, translators and archivists, jurists, grammarians, cadis and scribes. in his court were the greatest teacher of the hebrews who were the first of the three people’s of the book...and the greatest monks of the pale Christians (a dirty folk who will not bathe and who venerate the dried dung of their leader whom they call pope)…and, as you must realize, he had with him the greatest scholars of the Quran, the world of allah, as revealed to his prophet Muhammad, one hundred and eighty years before. thus his palace was the palace of wisdom. (gaiman, 1993) aaron the upright, as his name is translated for the west, ruled over a grand flourishing of science, art, and culture. his capital, baghdad, is the focus of the story. in the comic, baghdad is shown as “wonder.” in various panels, one sees monsters, flying carpets, and numerous mystical undertakings in the city amidst a backdrop of golden Mosques and brightly colored denizens. the Sandman’s series main character is dream, or the lord of dreams, who is basically the anthropomorphic personification of dreams. the plot is moved forward by al-rashid’s obsession with the wonder of baghdad. he cannot draw his eyes away from his sparkling city, pondering that “all things pass.” after descending a secret crypt that hides a ball holding jinn, the caliph demands that the Sandman appear before him or he will unleash the imprisoned jinn into the world. When he appears, harun offers the Sandman a drink and is rebuked for it as he reminds him it is ramadan. he walks to the balcony and opens a box holding a flying carpet. the Sandman and the caliph then board the carpet for an aerial tour of baghdad, which is truly shown to be a city of magic and mysticism. they descend to the marketplace, where a half human half cat slave girl is being auctioned. harun strikes a deal with the Sandman. he “sells” him the city so long as it lasts forever and remains in the stories and dreams of man as the wondrous place they just finished surveying. the Sandman agrees and the city is shrunk into a bottle
110 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 just as al-rashid awakens in a less grand version of baghdad. the domes on the mosques no longer sparkle and the city is noticeable less “grand.” he is found lying on the same carpet he flew on with the Sandman by his guards and notices the king of dreams holding a city in a bottle. he asks if it is for sale, to which the Sandman replies it was but is no longer. the piece then flashes forward to 1990s baghdad where one is confronted with the image of a young boy walking through bombed out buildings. the dervish, who was telling the boy this story all along, tells the boy to go home as he no longer has anything to pay the dervish with to continue his story.
Sandman’s images of baghdad are not incidental. orientalists, as nevi Soguk notes, “have largely written islamic histories around such imagery supplemental to Western histories, thus casting islam and Muslims apart from or outside of the West civilizationally” (Soguk, 2010, p30). the characterization of the caliph too strongly resonates with this supplemental imagery. instead of showing harun al-rashid as a king during a cultural renaissance, he is shown as a distinctly foreign and somewhat pointy faced despot. in numerous panels, the caliph’s illustration is that of a shadowy figure, with nothing but his devious smile and shifty almond shaped eyes illuminated. this same invocation of “dark features” to show islamic rulers as a “foreign” and distinct “other,” far removed from european counterparts, can also be seen in ridley Scott’s 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven . one of the main characters, Saladin, revered as one of the most famous, sophisticated Muslim leaders and tacticians, is characterized as a simple and simplistic desert nomad, garbed in black and often seated comfortably in his tent during battle. this is a stark contrast to the crusaders, often shown facing insurmountable odds dressed in armor and fighting at the front of the battles. Such characterizations reduce Muslim heroes to mere footnotes in history. instead of giving them the recognition they deserve as rulers who presided over a rich, flourishing culture, they are portrayed as profoundly “alien” when contrasted with their western counterparts. in Sandman , harun al-rashid is reduced to a mystical king more interested in otherworldly beings than the world itself. this imaginary view, as Muhammad arkoun has argued, hitches together the entire political, social, economic, and cultural shortcomings of Muslim societies to islam “with a capital i” (arkoun, 1994). this feat is accomplished by ending the story with images of a bombed out baghdad with a young boy in tatters listening to a beggar. the final image links the islamic society of the “golden age of islam,” with the baghdad of Saddam
East-West Affairs 111 hussein’s administration, which was about to face the wrath of the uS war machine. the bombed out baghdad in the comic had yet to be realized!
Harun al-Rashid but things are changing in the world of comics. or, we can say, the normal is being replaced with the postnormal. Muslim superheroes have now fought their way into the comic universe. there is dust, the first Muslim (and afghan) super-heroine, featured in mainstream comics as a member of the X-Men . her super power allows her to become a living element of the desert in the form of a sandstorm. interestingly, she wears a niqab and a form-fitting abaya which the other X-Men often mistakenly call a burqa . While dust’s is presented from a western perspective, there are other Muslim super heroes created and written by Muslim authors. Air , a product of the fertile imagination of the american Muslim convert g. Willow Wilson, features a flight attendant named blythe who becomes involved in a conspiracy to “pacify air travel” for the “West” and to ensure the continuation of the airline industry. the story revolves around Zayn, a young pakistani man who is framed as a terrorist yet no one knows who he really is except that he is “dangerous.” a memorable part of Air is when blythe is trapped in Zayn’s body and relives his childhood, allowing the reader to experience an interesting encounter between the mind of a young western woman and the body and experiences of a so-called Muslim extremist. then we have The 99 . the story revolves around a group of strangers who come together (like the television series Heroes ) that find themselves with one of the 99 noor stones, giving them powers related to the nature of each specific stone. each member
112 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 of the 99 comes to exemplify one of the 99 attributes of allah. but The 99 is not religious and none of the 99 have their religion explicitly stated. instead, the comic attempts to use these characters as a vehicle of expression to show how islamic concepts surrounding the nature of allah can be universal. the images and characterization in these comics contrasts sharply with those written by Western writers; they are more cosmopolitan and open minded.
Dust dust, whose real name is Sooraya Qadir, is a Sunni Muslim afghan member of the X-Men team. She is the first member of the team to openly express her faith, donning traditional islamic garb for women. her story begins when her super powers are inadvertently turned on when a slave trader attempts to remove her niqab . her power enables her to control sand to such an extent that she can use it to defend herself and even reduce her from to a cloud of sand. She soon becomes a valued member of the X-Men, but she has trouble fitting in with the others due in no small part to her religious beliefs. one member of the team often questions her choice to wear the abaya raising issues of women’s rights. another often challenges her loyalty to islam, wondering how she can place her faith ahead of all other things in her life. how dust is portrayed and handled in X-Men stories provides invaluable insight into the way the comics’ aesthetic treats islamic femininity and Muslim
East-West Affairs 113 societies. the first things one notices when seeing dust illustrated in a panel is her traditional islamic clothing. this seems to be integral to her identity as a Muslim woman; after all, the niqab plays a central part in the plot of her origin story, the story where her powers first manifest. thus, it was her defense of her garb that led to her “empowerment.” the point is that traditional islamic clothing is seen as central to the West’s view of Muslim women. the function of the veil here is not to make dust invisible but to make her more visible and tie her character specifically to a particular view of islam. the authors are attempting to show how her “islamicness” entails the wearing of the niqab . in addition, dust is often shown arguing with the leader of her particular team of the X-Men about her niqab and how it is perceived as an affront to women’s rights. this paints the veil in the light of a “harmful cultural practice,” even leading to disunity amongst her team mates. beyond her clothing, dust’s power has interesting resonances as well. her mutant power enables her to manipulate sand. this manipulation allows her to create sandstorms, harden her skin into silica, and actually become a sandstorm. her power seems to connect islam with the desert in a compelling way, creating a cultural “meme,” which establishes the sand and desert as essential elements of an islamic identity. So all Muslims are projected as the denizens of the desert, where we know there is nothing but aridity. the social and cultural differences of Muslims across the world, from Morocco to egypt, iran and pakistan, Malaysia and indonesia, nigeria and Senegal, China and britain, are eradicated. islam and Muslim identity becomes a monolith. at the very least, the authors of dust are devoted to a type of islam that reduces it geographically to one part of the world. another departure from reality is the way the illustrators portray the abaya on dust. Many illustrations show it as form fitting, allowing one to see “curves.” this is not new to comics as many of the female characters have their bodies exemplified. but the abaya is specifically not meant to be worn tight. Wearing it tightly seems to defeat the intended purpose, which is to hide the curves of the body. While i do like the character wearing traditional islamic clothing, this artistic liberty is rooted in ethnocentrism: the artist is projecting how he thinks women’s clothes should fit, regardless of the cultural ramifications of them being worn loosely. dust would have been a bit more rounded, not to say interesting, if she was illustrated with a modicum of cultural sensitivity.
114 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 Zayn could not be more different than dust. g. Willow Wilson’s series Air first appeared in 2008 before it was abruptly cancelled. perhaps it was just too subversive for american tastes. the story draws on Wilson’s journalism and is also based on a particular incident during which she was grilled at amsterdam airport for having too many visas in her passport. blythe, a flight attendant on Clearfleet airlines, is invited to join the etesian front, an ostensibly anti-terrorist organization. but she is tricked and ends us transporting plans for a terrorist attack. When she discovers the plot of etesian front, she is kidnapped, along with a man called Zayn al-harrani, and is taken to the plane that is the hijack target. Zayn and blythe manage to escape; and later Zayn helps blythe understand her “hyperpract” ability, her power to move into different dimensions of reality. this ability allows her to transport herself anywhere with the aid of certain artifacts, which is why the etesian front also seeks to control her. as Zayn attempts to convince her to help him fight the etesian front, they become intimate. blythe then has a strange experience where she inhabits Zayn’s body, relives his life, learns his history, and sees what led him to seek her out in the first place. Wilson offers a “world to world” comparison for the characters, which is intensely ontological. blythe is able to see the “ways of being,” to borrow the heidegger term, of a Muslim man—whether at home with his family or as a child or in the madrasa. this leads her to appreciate how he became who he is and to understand his motivations. a compelling element of Zayn’s story is the characterization of his family life. one is confronted with deeply “normal” parents. even though Zayn comes from an “ancient” (as his father put it) family and they may dress differently, they want for their son what all parents want: a good education, which they perceive as being in america.
Zayn
East-West Affairs 115 Zayn presents us with a sharp contrast to the characterization of harun al- rashid, which explained little of his world view or motivations and instead simply placed him in the context of another character’s story. While harun al-rashid is often portrayed “in shadows” with distinctly pointed features, Zayn looks like a normal person. his features are not shadowy, yet one can tell he is not from the united States. his face is often lit up, that is to say it does not have shadows or darkness cast upon it. he is also intimate with western women while offering his five daily prayers. at school, he is first ostracized but later accepted as his soccer skill endears him to his teammates. While one illustration endears us to the character and enables us to identify with him, the other denotes a foreign otherness that is in no way linked to the West. harun al-rashid appears as a classical orientalist villain—up there with fu Man Chu, Crimson emperor, and other foes that lurk the dark alleyways of western consciousness. Zayn emerges as a cosmopolitan Muslim youth, well-educated and faithful to allah.
The 99 , “the world’s first superheroes based on islamic culture and society” as they are described, is published by Muslim publishers based in kuwait. the comics, and their creator, naif al-Mutawa, have even received a recommendation from president barack obama. in his april 2010 presidential Summit on entrepreneurship, obama commended The 99 for capturing “the imagination of so many young people with superheroes who embody the teachings and tolerance of islam.” the story focuses on a group of people who are imbued with special powers by coming into contact with the noor (literally meaning light) stones. each stone gives the person who comes into contact with it a power that is related to one of the 99 “names” of allah. for example, a Saudi youth named Jabbar
116 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 The 99 becomes dubbed the powerful when he learns he can increase his mass exponentially and sometimes uncontrollably. the other members of the team are from all over the world and exemplify a number of ideals central to all cultures as reflected in their names: Widad the loving, Jami the assembler, Musawwira the organizer, darr the afflicter, hadya the guide, noora the light, fattah the opener, bari the healer, Sami the listener, Mumita the destroyer, et al. these people are brought together by a uneSCo official named dr. ramzi razem. he is an expert on the noor stones and is determined to convince each noor stone’s guardian to join his team and help save the world. the assemblage is compelling, but there are no religious overtones to any of the characters besides their names and the fact that they hail from Muslim countries. unlike dust who vocalizes her beliefs and often appears to preach, the 99 have no problems with their faith. on the contrary, the authors are careful not to mention anyone’s religious leanings; rather, they concentrate on bringing out the universal values of islam without actually labeling them as such. So the 99 emerge just like other superheroes and super heroines interested in saving lives and generally doing good irrespective of their religious background. (imagine Superman going through some religious angst!) the members of the 99 team are also drawn in a way similar to other superhero comics. their over-exaggerated musculatures combined with their colorful and often futuristic costumes allow one to see that heroism is not something exclusive to one culture or another. Superheroes can come from any and every background. this point was further driven home when the 99 recently teamed up with their american counterparts, the Justice league of
East-West Affairs 117 america. this is an important moment for comics as the first superhero team created by a Muslim writer is going to work together with some of the iconic characters that have defined the genre. these characters include the mainstays of comic culture like Batman and Superman . hopefully, this will bring the 99 into the mainstream, as they are a groundbreaking title worthy of further study. they illustrate that the values and beliefs of east and West are not all that different; and hopefully they will lead people to see how different cultures of the planet are an integral part of each other.
Comics challenge the conventional ways of presenting information and telling stories in terms of structure and format. they reflect the prevailing social norms—the zeitgeist. but as society itself changes, comics have to change too. the comic fans of the 1980s and 1990s, the decades which created and shaped comics as we know them today, have grown up. their concerns and values have changed. the young of today, the potential comic readers, live in a different world where diversity is valued and globalization is the norm. the emergence of Muslim superheroes illustrates how comics are attempting to capture the spirit of postnormal age and trying to persuade us to reconsider how we view the world.
REFERENCES
Muhammad arkoun, Rethinking Islam: Common Questions, Uncommon Answers (oxford, uk: Westview press, 1994). neil gaiman, Sandman #50 (new york: dC Comics, 1993). grant Morrison, New X-Men #1 (new york: Marvel Comics, 2002). grant Morrison, New X-Men #146 (new york: Marvel Comics, 2003). naif al-Mutawa, The 99: Origins (kuwait: teshkeel press, 2008). barack obama, Speech to the presidential Summit on entrepreneurship, accessed June 2010, http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/presidential-summit-entrepreneurship. nevzat Soguk, Globalization and Islamism: Beyond Fundamentalism (Maryland: rowman and littlefield publishers, inc., 2010). g. Willow Wilson, Air #1 (new york: vertigo Comics, 2008).
118 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 The Joys of Being Third Class
the beauty, diversity, and richness of all indian life could be found in the “third-class” compartment. but third class is not mediocre or the same as “third World”
Shiv viSvanathan
india today is an aspirational society where one breathes desire and dreams mobility. the new generation feels that utopia can be an immediate affair, even if it is magical and momentary. any mall, they claim, is a bit of utopia, a surreal exhibit of possible futures to be surveyed with care. today, desire nibbles at everybody and dreams of the erotic and feels that the exotic is a mundane experience that every tourist enjoys. even poverty is exoticized as tourism. Such a world cannot dream of life in socialist india. our theories of market and efficiency are such that one loses a celebration of the mediocre, the defeated, and the marginal. We suddenly feel that poverty can be objectivized, but the mediocre, we feel, are a stain we cannot rub away. the mediocre and the pedestrian dull our futures. ever since liberalization, we have removed the category called “third class” from our railways and our lives. as an upwardly mobile nation, we want to travel first class, and as a truly global country, we want our institutions to be world class. our presidents and vice chancellors are upset when they realize that none of our institutions are world class. it is odd how the world class becomes a floating signifier, as class in its Marxist specificity is exorcized. our obsession with quality makes us intolerant of mediocrity. the strange thing about our socialism was that it was tolerant of the ordinary. in fact, bureaucratically, socialism was the world of third class.
East-West Affairs 119 one could argue that an anthropology of indian socialism begins with the lived world of the third class. think of the third class and one thinks immediately of a railway compartment. the railways is not just a metaphor for the state, but it is a graphic representation of socialism. the railways system mimics society in being a three tier system. at one end, you have all the trappings of privilege in the first-class compartment. it is exclusive, official, and reserved, mimicking the domain of club. luxury is an ambience of cushions, the perpetual presence of batmen, and a strata that exists to serve you. Just below is the second-class compartment. it is less conspicuous and more austere. all it can offer is a bit of cleanliness, which one clings to as a privilege. this world is Spartan but predictable and orderly. it still clings to the formal world of entitlements. one has to book tickets for first and second class. it is the world of formal india, an official regime we call Sarkar . third class is different. in fact, it is beyond classification. it is a residual world, above bare life but below privilege. third class is the compost heap of the defeated, the anonymous, and the mediocre. it is the only true class that socialism invented and as a wag complained, “the only thing it lacks genuinely is class.” a third-class compartment is a socialist world in microcosm. it is darwinian but orderly. the body, physically present, is the only claim to right. people sit huddled together like sardines in a tin, smelling in a variety of ways. one has to fight for entry. to pompously claim a booking or reservation is to misunderstand the world of the third class. Social contracts and great orders of legality and its accompanying domains of privilege and pomposity begin with the middle class. law and order is a middle-class idea. the third class blends a state of nature and a state of society. like a state of nature in a hobbesian sense, it can be poor, short, and brutish but not solitary. one has to push one’s way in. alacrity, brute force, timing are crucial for entry. one grabs the first seat one sees and clings to it, colonizing every bit of space, piling luggage around it like a fortress. oddly, no one except beggars travelled light. a family travels like a horde of refugees with an iron trunk which needed a chain in the night, a hold-all, a huge tiffin box, a surai for water. one carried everything one needed, for every contingency. the first moments of a third-class train were tense. it was a world of strangers
120 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 contending for limited space. Competition made one rude. Silence followed struggle as one settled down and gradually the rituals of conviviality begin. third class was a way of being at home in the world. Conversation was a way of mapping the world. introductions flowed into genealogies, encompassing entire neighborhoods. food shared became an order of conviviality and companionship. Space, which seems so scarce, stretches as one adjusts for each other. Conversation, food, and companionship convert anarchy into society, however temporary. Malthus is banished as hospitality takes over. there is joy in little. Children eavesdrop into the world of adults. newspapers, space, water are all shared. one realizes the card game is almost a sacrament. Sustainability is invented out of so little that surplus seems unnecessary. an occasional scuffle marks the rituals of new entry. government is an alien entity, and the ticket collector is greeted with trepidation. in india, tyranny always carried the badge of a lower level clerk. Corruption kept them at bay and bought one temporary citizenship. it is an odd world where taxes are what one pays for entitlements but bribes are what one pays for the right to be a citizen. third class was a new commons, a style of life linking livelihoods that had to cope. third class was the art of stretching money till the end of the month. it was making or coping on little. it was sharing a samosa between two people, a half-cup of chai because a full cup was almost conspicuous consumption. third class was all the little arts of survival, sharing, hospitality, reciprocity, adjustment, and tolerance. it was the world of hand-me-downs passed on like a legacy. it was shopping in a Sunday market, coming home with a classic in tattered covers. it was a sustainable society before the world and the word were invented. it was middle-class aesthetic in a less endowed economy. the tattered copy substituted for the original, but it was not a lesser magic. as a child and as a student, i loved the word “third class.” i always felt while travelling in trains that first class was distant, second class was prim, but the dabba called third class was a joy, a celebration of its own—a place where joy blooms even in discomfort. third class was an invitation to adventure, a promise of surprise and hospitality, a claim that those who had less had more to give and more to share. a third-class compartment conveyed a sense of surplus, a belief that its space, no matter how dense or Malthusian, was ready to absorb a few more. When the government introduced the category “third-class sleeper,” i felt as
East-West Affairs 121 if a new category of luxury had been invented in our socialist land. as a child, i swore i would write an autobiography as my memoirs of a third-class life. third Class was a mediocre world, but it was not populated by mediocres. intelligent people spent mediocre lives because of lack of opportunity. there was boredom at the bottom of the pyramid. it became a fine art, where one talked of books one could not afford. i have heard more levi Strauss and althusser in the dhabas of Calcutta, now known as kolkata, than at berkeley. one listened to the gossip of distant ideas, shared little morsels. each city had its theaters of waiting: wayside trees, cafes, or places where one walked or talked of a world going by. Calcutta was the capital of waiting. history almost bypassed it as jobs, industries, and talent slowly migrated to other cities. the history of Calcutta is not the history of waiting for a revolution but for a millennium that never came. Waiting created imaginaries that never arrived. as dreams grew, the world shrank and mediocrity became more painful. yet what made waiting painful was its mirror inversion. third class had its double in the world of the vip. the vip is an artificial category of arbitrary statuses, where a group of people claim extra privilege which has no basis on right. this allows them free access to its spaces. they do not have to wait. a vip never waits, but the world waits on a vip. it is an officially sanctioned nepotism. every corrupt socialism had its false aristocracy of vips who were parasitic to the system. Minor officers, among them functionaries with official statuses demanded attention, space, and hospitality which no feudal lord could dream of. all it needed was a red light in the car to make him a dignitary signaling a cornucopia of demands. the vip conveyed to many the red light delight of power and privilege. in a way, the third-class compartment is representative of our world. it is every indian city in the miniature. it is not the bare life of survival but the creamy layer above it. being content, but never having surplus. third class had everything colonial about it. rank, status, hierarchy, the sense of life as a perpetual exam, where a pass mark gave you access but never surplus. it had a bareness to it. there was a sense of the impoverished. it was a world where success came in pipettes. Success was always other people’s success. to be third class was to be deeply voyeuristic. between voyeurism and waiting, one killed time, the only surplus of a third-class society. Waiting was the only civics of socialism. one waited at ration card shops for sugar and kerosene. one
122 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 waited for vips listening to endless speeches. one waited for buses and trains. Without the art of waiting, no regime could survive. Waiting transcended hope as it became an end in itself. Waiting was a bit like buttermilk or coffee which mothers thinned to make it go a longer way. Waiting was the initiation ritual of a third-class world.
Waiting was a strange kind of time. it had no purpose. one did not wait for something specific. it was not an act of deferred gratification. Waiting was a kind of lived time. it was not boredom. Waiting was full of rituals. one watched from windows. one sat on pavements waiting for something to happen; a scandal, an accident, a morsel of gossip. While waiting, one recounted events from the past. Waiting was stretching time. it was the perpetual pregnancy of expectation. time, which flowed like eternity, had to be punctuated with events. Waiting could be a fine art but only in a society which understood the poetry and poverty of “time pass.” time pass was not killing time but living through time. one waited for results, relatives, and employment. one waited for the next move as one endlessly replayed the last one. repetition and redundancy made waiting sufferable. each event that happened was replayed like an epic, viewed from every angle, recited repeatedly, till every hint of narrative juice could be extracted from it. Waiting was the act of “being” under socialism. the third-class waited. that is all that happened. Waiting was not nostalgia. nostalgia contained events preserved like a spiced pickle. Waiting was hoping that something happened. one spent most of childhood waiting. between dream time and waiting, life went on. Socialism without time passing would have been insufferable. life in socialism was split into two. history was public like nehru, the great dams, and bombay talkies. but ordinary life was anonymous, almost eventless, almost history-less. everyday followed another day; everydayness had no history, all it had was a dull calendar. like bureaucracies everywhere, it ran on exams and occasional promotions. there was no tv to challenge the everyday, just movies which were recited long after their shelf life was over. We hoped for little things and little miracles happened occasionally. the third class suffered from history but was outside history. third class was full of little cultures. it had a folklore of its own, a folklore of waiting where time was everyday time, normal but more surreal than the surreal. it had gossip but no storyteller. Waiting was our history, but there was no history of waiting. Memory was the little things of domestic and city life. a little dish. a relative’s
East-West Affairs 123 visit. a quarrel in the street. a test match heard on radio. only football was third class. our enthusiasm made up for our talent. yet i could never watch football after the first world cup. our football was mediocre. it was actually only a feud between teams like east bengal and Mohun bagan. it was the rivalry rather than the game that kept us alive. yet mediocrity desperately needs drama and scandal. even scandal was third rate. it was someone eloping and returning defeated to die again with each chronicle of gossip. We often talked like report cards, celebrating each other’s performance. a little promotion was like climbing everest. little failures kept as alert and alive. We need to have a different kind of time to write the eventless history of Socialism. third class was the commons of socialism where we shared these eventless histories. While life moved in inches, production moved up and down a few thousand tonnes a day. it was as if even domesticity was a dull public sector enterprise. the Doordarshan television station covered history, and gossip covered us. both nation and domestic life were in deep freeze. liberalization opened us to history. i wanted to make a list of third-class cities. kolkata, both real and imaginary, topped it all. kolkata was excess—the city of the defeated struggling for survival. at a time when the word “development” had blue chip quality, kolkata was gloriously third class, a third-class world that Marx, Mother teresa, naxalites, poets, and revolutionaries embraced. kolkata was my favorite third-class city where nothing worked and everything was workable. it was a perpetual compost heap of the defeated, dumped, damned—all living out the last juices of hope. ideas had a major role in the third-class society. this was a strange world of clerks in bureaucracies, in laboratories in the academe. people too poor to study further, men for whom a phd was an unimaginable luxury. this generation was 10–5 clerks but 24/7 radicals and intellectuals who experienced every school of hermeneutics over tea. tea was the source of intellectual life. there were high priests in this crowd, first class firsts who could not study further, who lived out a text in all its variants. a quote was something scared, and what sustained this world was the adda —a perpetual conversation of ideas. there was poverty, but there was never a poverty of ideas. in fact, ideas were the only ideology of this generation. the pantheon was hegel, Marx, levi Strauss, trotsky, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth. in fact, one had to show familiarity to join the commons. in fact, these addas were oral. little was written, but hours
124 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 were spent on the seduction of one idea. life blossomed in such scarcity. the adda was the intellectual commons where the oral tradition created a system of sharing which overcame the paucity of the book. Memory, hermeneutics, and rhetoric provided the richness of life. orality overwhelmed textuality with its generosity of interpretations. third class was my naïve idea of indian democracy. democracy to me was a theory of hospitality, of sharing, of adjusting, and of acknowledging presence and not worrying about rights. rights screamed the worlds of contract and property, but democracy was sharing, give and take, adjustment, and the ability to improvise with little and to allow for discomfort so the perpetual miracle of one more person could be accommodated in this elastic commons. third class emerges when people have little; it evokes a different notion of everydayness. today the label “third class” sounds like a death sentence, a denial of possibilities. in my childhood, third class was an ecology of tolerance, a sense that most people did not have enough and yet life was worth living. third class was a way of life. it was secondary. it was definitely not affluent. but something about the struggle and joy of people made sure it was not second rate. Materially, there was not much. hope provided color to the drabness and an occasional success story provided a shared fraternity for all those who failed to make it. third class was a cosmopolitan world where failures told stories of unbelievable success. third class was the domain of storytelling, an Arabian Nights world where every struggle, every exam, every battle to keep your neck above the water acquired a heroic quality. democracy in india has to be third class. democracy is not only about rights, but it is about the virtues of sharing, adjusting, coping—the various art forms of a third-class society. in such a democracy, one had little, but little was large enough to go a long way. it is this sense of democracy as a commons that india has lost. i will tell you what destroyed the everydayness of the third class. it was not the stratification system which thought whites and babus were first class. those worlds did not bother us except for the gossip and occasional scandal we relished. it was the economists and development experts who coined the term “third World.” as a student, i resented the idea of the third World. it was a cage which created a museum of my world and its limits. it took the fun out of the
East-West Affairs 125 word “third class.” now third class was mediocre, backward, and underdeveloped. it was subject to analysis. We could not be it, because we had to be developed. third World took contentment out of the world of the third class. it created a new social realism where our world was drab, colorless, and mediocre. the romance drained out of the term. it was a tragedy that few recognized or analyzed. the death of the third class had no storytellers.
What was a continent and a way of life now became a pejorative term, an object of contempt. nostalgia summons me, but i know i cannot return to my third-class world anymore. it has lost its cultural power, desiccated by the puritans of success. oddly, socialism, despite itself, created the last great commons, the third class. it is a lost world. as one of its munshis , its secretary and chronicler, all i can do is mourn it and miss it.
126 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 REVIEW How the East was won
asian public intellectuals responded creatively to colonialism and fashioned a new understanding of asia
Shanon Shah
Mishra, p. (2012). From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (allen lane, london, uk) how could the victorian era have been seen in the West as heralding progress, yet be experienced in asia as a period of catastrophe? for one, just when Western europe was undergoing scientific and technological progress, european colonial powers were tearing down various civilizations in asia for territorial expansion, political domination, and economic gain. in From the Ruins of Empire , pankaj Mishra explores how a group of asian thinkers were enraged by these developments and mounted growing intellectual and political challenges to free asian societies from Western domination. these men revised their positions repeatedly and drastically through their travels in asia and beyond, where they encountered other intellectuals and activists. their disparate and inchoate ideas were considered controversial, and they were mostly marginalized during their lifetimes. their intellectual legacies gained posthumous momentum, however, among the next generation of anti-colonial actors, inspiring them to wrest national independence from the european empires. Mishra focuses
East-West Affairs 127 on the journeys of two men in particular—the Muslim scholar-activist Jamal al-din al-afghani (1838–1897) and liang Qichao (1873–1929), “perhaps China’s foremost modern intellectual.” after sketching their surrounding social and political contexts, Mishra traces how their ideas influenced subsequent “mass nationalist and liberation movements and ambitious state-building programmes across asia.” in a sense, al-afghani, liang, and the movements they inspired were trying to solve two paradoxes. first, how could rich and powerful eastern traditions such as the islamic and Chinese civilizations succumb so soundly to political, economic, and cultural domination by Western powers? Second, how could the Western enlightenment be capable of advancing thinking that prized individual liberty and yet justify systematic oppression of non-Western peoples? Mishra shows how the exposure of these asian intellectuals to Western modernity introduced a specific dialectic—they valued Western knowledge and scholarship, but resented the West’s subtle and not-so-subtle encroachments into the east.
Mishra’s argument is grand, persuasive, and eloquently expressed. he shows how the colonial encounter produced great epistemological transformations which eventually led to equally seismic social and political shifts. the book opens with an account of one such seminal moment—Japan’s defeat of russia in the battle of tsushima in 1905. Mishra shows how this spectacular defeat of a european power by a non-european country reverberated around the world, striking fear in imperialists such as lord Curzon, the british empire’s viceroy to india, and igniting hope in anti-colonial actors such as Mohandas gandhi and Mustafa kemal ataturk. the battle of tsushima, however, did not produce anti-colonial movements—rather, it was a powerful catalyst of intellectual and political trends which were already moving throughout asia.
Mishra weaves a compelling story about the mutual affinities between the birth of pan-islamic revivalism, Chinese revolutionary movements, and other anti- colonial currents in early 20th century asia. though they utilized different sources of wisdom, Mishra suggests they shared a common anxiety about Western dominance and a mutual desire to synthesize Western and eastern thought to fight for independence and self-autonomy. in short, he sketches how anti-colonial and postcolonial expressions of modernity were constructed in asia. through his use of a dazzling array of textual sources—including the historical, sociological, anthropological, journalistic, and biographical—we glimpse the kinds of thought structures european colonialism disrupted, what it enabled, and
128 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 what continuities remain between the past and the present. the book is unapologetically a corrective—it reframes the story of modern political thought, retelling it from the perspective of the colonized. this exhaustive reframing is especially rewarding when Mishra re-contextualizes the big events—for example, the indian Mutiny of 1857, the boxer rising of 1900, and the first World War. the indian Mutiny, for instance, might have been perceived by the british as a sudden eruption, but Mishra asserts it was foreshadowed by smaller rebellions in northwest india during the early 19th century. inspired by the Wahhabi strand of islam gaining ground in the arabian peninsula, these Muslim-led rebellions were directed at what native Muslims and hindus saw as britain’s “deliberate assault on indigenous ways of life.” the british managed to quell them, but they were unprepared for the sheer scale and ferocity of the 1857 uprising. hindu and Muslim mutineers were merciless—they did not even spare british women and children. back in britain, public opinion turned hawkish, and even Charles dickens supported british vengeance—in response, the british “left a trail of destruction across north india, bayoneting and burning their way through villages and towns” (p. 38). this stunned native indians, who were hitherto unaware of the extent of britain’s organized capacity to kill. in particular, the bitter aftermath of the Mutiny would incite the lifelong political instruction of al-afghani. al-afghani travelled throughout his life—to afghanistan, ottoman turkey, iran, and egypt—trying to mobilize pan-islamic opposition to european colonialism. his rhetoric was angry and violent, provoked partly by britain’s systematic undermining of Muslim society and culture in post-Mutiny india. yet, this violent rhetoric also sat alongside al-afghani’s exhortation for Muslims to shed traditionalist interpretations in favor of modern readings of the Qur’an. he rejected the Shiite-Sunni schism in islam, stressed the essential unity of the monotheistic religions (underlining that what he opposed about the West was not Christianity but imperialism), and insisted on constitutional reforms in Muslim lands. this made him unpopular not just with the colonial powers, but also with despotic Muslim rulers. he died in obscurity in 1897—having been stricken by cancer while in political exile—but in the coming decades his ideas would inspire anti-colonial movements throughout the Muslim world.
Mishra frames the events of China’s boxer rising along similar lines. as spontaneous as the indian Mutiny, it similarly attracted a motley crowd revolting against foreigners, especially missionaries, who were perceived as “undermining
East-West Affairs 129 and insulting Chinese beliefs and practices.” in response, troops from several countries, including Japan, “marched to beijing to relieve the siege and loot the city.” these retaliations were tinged with racist attitudes, such as when the german kaiser exhorted his soldiers to ensure that “no Chinaman will ever again dare to even squint at a german!” humiliated, the Chinese palace was forced to sign an agreement with the West that imposed an indemnity almost twice the size of the government’s annual revenues and opened the door to increased foreign military presence. Just as the indian Mutiny was to shift al-afghani’s thinking decisively, the boxer rising provoked liang—already a critic of the status quo—to become even more critical of Western imperialism and China’s responses. like al-afghani, liang constantly revisited his thinking based on his numerous encounters in his travels. for instance, during his time in the united States in the early 20th century, liang quickly became disillusioned with the notion of democracy, as he learned of the united States’ encroachment into panama, the continued lynching of african americans, and racism against Chinese immigrants. unlike al-afghani, however, liang’s ideas did not directly influence the different social movements that came after him. Mishra suggests, however, that liang’s criticisms of his Chinese intellectual peers were often prescient. for instance, liang argued early on that China’s social and political context was not identical to the West’s which made socialism necessary there. Mishra juxtaposes liang’s critique against Mao Zedong’s “textbook Marxism” which eventually “unleashed one disaster after another on his people.”
Mishra structures his argument such that these insights build systematically upon each other. they come together especially meaningfully when he discusses the first World War and its aftermath, detailing in particular the emergence of the united States as a major power and potential anti-colonial ally. according to Mishra, president Woodrow Wilson’s pro-democracy rhetoric on behalf of the allies inspired hope among various actors, including “moderate indian nationalists” who fought for the british in exchange for a vague promise of self- rule. Similarly, invoking the ideals of “liberty, equality and fraternity,” the french in vietnam “rounded up some 100,000 peasants and artisans” to fight in french battlefields in exchange for promises of autonomy. in the aftermath of the war, however, european colonialists went back to business—the british attempted to squash pro-independence movements in egypt and india, while the french reoccupied indochina and eventually went to
130 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 war with pro-independence guerrillas. despite his earlier commitment to democracy, Wilson sided with his european allies—a move that disillusioned and pushed many anti-colonial movements toward Communism instead.
Mishra’s use of textual evidence is meticulous, but it never drowns his main argument. al-afghani and liang are the main protagonists in this story, but we never lose sight of how their legacies eventually influenced other major players— including gandhi, kemal, Mao, Jawaharlal nehru, rabindranath tagore, and Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim brotherhood leader who was imprisoned, tortured, and eventually killed by gamal abdel nasser’s regime. Mishra reminds us that these anti-colonial movements, while successful, created national “birthing traumas” leading to postcolonial state-building projects marked by “cruel disappointments, mixed successes, tragic setbacks and vicious conflicts.” furthermore, as emerging powers such as india and China try to claim their place alongside the West, they appear doomed to repeat the West’s mistakes—widening social and economic disparities, suppression of dissent, and environmental degradation. there is much to commend in this ambitious work, largely in that it succeeds in giving a broad view of how asian public intellectuals responded to colonialism and fashioned new self-understandings of being asian. nevertheless, there are significant and relevant questions which it does not broach or only skirts around—changes in gender relations, relevant anti-colonial critiques within the West, and the role of religion in social change.
Mishra did not set out to tell a story about gender relations in the ruins of empire and the remaking of asia—that much is true. also, he is interested in the people whose opinions gained actual influence over time—of course, these individuals were invariably men. but to excuse Mishra’s omission of gender analysis just because that is how things were would be disingenuous, precisely because this is a book about unearthing buried accounts of history. this is especially so because, as Mishra points out, someone like al-afghani emphatically advocated women’s rights. Surely his thoughts about gender were just as influenced by his social and political context as his other ideas? this would have especially been the case in egypt, where al-afghani most clearly articulated his thoughts about gender, since this was one territory where regulations of gender were central to the colonial project. in fact, al-afghani was in egypt when britain’s top colonial administrator there was lord Cromer, who was convinced that Muslims were inferior to europeans, especially in their treatment of women.
East-West Affairs 131 Cromer believed that Christianity gave women respect, while islam only degraded them through the practices of veiling and segregation. he pursued contradictory policies to change egyptian society, which cumulatively ended up being even more detrimental to egyptian women. for example, as much as he wanted to “liberate” Muslim women from the veil, he also discouraged the training of women doctors and raised school fees such that girls and boys were severely held back in their education. but it was Cromer’s role within britain that shows the core of his hypocrisy at work—he was the founding member and sometime president of the Men’s league for opposing Women’s Suffrage (ahmed, 1992, pp. 152–153).
Cromer’s logic seems to have been that feminism on the home front was a threat, but in the colonies, it was a useful weapon to subjugate the unwashed natives. this exemplifies the double standard of what social scientist leila ahmed (1992, p. 152) calls “colonial feminism,” described by gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as “white men saving brown women from brown men” (abu-lughod, 2002, p. 784). in other words, colonialists often used women’s bodies to justify colonialism, and colonized men and women had to rethink gender as part of their advocacy of anti-colonial alternatives. these dynamics persist, for example, in uS first lady laura bush’s mission to “save” Muslim women in support of her husband’s invasion of afghanistan in 2001. this is what makes Mishra’s lack of gender analysis all the more conspicuous— women and men were active shapers of anti-colonial (and colonial) politics and intellectual currents. We cannot afford to omit women’s contributions and experiences when we reframe the story of colonialism. this does not mean that Mishra’s analysis would have been fine if he had simply added “woman” and stirred. the point is that men like liang and al-afghani interacted with and were probably influenced by other men and women, in contexts where gender was core to colonial and anti-colonial contestations of modernity. gender is not a separate or subsidiary aspect of an analysis of colonial history—gender relations were disrupted, redefined, and reconstructed in the colonial encounter, and were integral to the formation of anti-colonial movements. it is also important to recognize and remember that critical perspectives of colonialism existed in the West, too. again, Mishra did not set out to write about anti-colonial critiques in the West, so he cannot be faulted for focusing on anti- colonial thought in asia. nevertheless, it is important to remember that even though a social reformer like dickens advocated punishing the indian mutineers,
132 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 other social reformers, such as the Christian Socialist f.d. Maurice, sought reconciliation and understanding. this was remarkable, given that the majority of the british establishment—especially the Church of england—used the indian Mutiny to justify further subjugation of the native population (Sugirtharajah, 2005, pp. 80–81). in fact, Maurice was considered a threat to the established Church and, in 1853, was deprived of his professorship at king’s College london on accusations of promoting unsound theology. this is where it would be interesting to compare men like Maurice and al- afghani—both were inspired by, but critical of, their own religious traditions, and both were passionate about social justice. both engaged with influential institutions to disseminate their ideas, and their contributions were often marginalized during their lifetimes but were rediscovered and appreciated posthumously. perhaps then, besides a story of “east” and the “West” reacting against each other, there is also one about the historical conditions in the “east” and “West” that inspired prophetic voices such as Maurice’s and al-afghani’s. as with the story of gender, this also holds deep significance today—voices challenging unequal power relations continue to be disempowered, suppressed, or labeled treasonous in the “east” and “West.” in this light, Maurice and al-afghani are also interesting case studies of how religion not only plays a role in social change, but how it itself is transformed by actors seeking social change. they demonstrate how “Christianity” and “islam” are constantly contested and redefined, and how religion can be a resource for the powerful to justify oppression and for the powerless to organize protest and rebellion. for the most part, Mishra’s account allows us to notice these nuances— for example, when he discusses al-afghani’s changing views of islam or liang’s of Confucianism. however, Mishra’s analysis suffers when he addresses contemporary events, using ambiguous, totalizing concepts like “global islam” and likening islam simplistically to a “gigantic powder keg, likely to blow up any time.” these criticisms aside, this is an important, critical, and deeply informed work. it gives us tools to see the world in new ways, from the vantage point of those whose histories have consistently been erased or distorted. the question now is how much traction could a book like this gain in the “east” or “West”? are easterners and Westerners truly interested in learning about the other? are we even interested in learning about ourselves? Mishra admits—humbly and admirably—that in writing this book, he was appalled by a growing knowledge
East-West Affairs 133 of how little he really knew, and this is what drove his research. Within his resulting work, then, are the seeds of a solution—truth-telling projects are important, if only for us to educate ourselves about how little we actually know about ourselves and each other. Mishra’s confession reminds me of something the nigerian writer Chimamanda ngozi adichie (2009, p. 2) said of her novel Half of a Yellow Sun , about the biafran War:
i wrote this novel because i wanted to write about love and war, because i grew up in the shadow of biafra, because i lost both grandfathers in the nigeria-biafra war, because i wanted to engage with my history in order to make sense of my present, because many of the issues that led to the war remain unresolved in nigeria today, because my father has tears in his eyes when he speaks of losing his father, because my mother still cannot speak at length about losing her father in a refugee camp, because the brutal bequests of colonialism make me angry, because the thought of the egos and indifference of men leading to the unnecessary deaths of men and women and children enrages me, because i don’t ever want to forget. adichie’s impassioned plea for the telling of forgotten or painful histories applies as much to nigeria as it does to the numerous asian countries Mishra explores. yet, Mishra is less personal and more pessimistic than adichie when he suggests that “the universal triumph of Western modernity…turns the revenge of the east into something darkly ambiguous, and all its victories truly pyrrhic.” that is certainly one way to look at it. fortunately, for most of this powerful book, Mishra gives us the tools to learn about the present from the past so that we can perhaps contemplate an improved future together.
REFERENCES l. abu-lughod, “do Muslim women really need saving? anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others,” American Anthropologist , 104 (2002), 783–790.
C. n. adichie, “the Stories of africa: a Q&a with Chimamanda ngozi adichie,” in Half of a Yellow Sun (london, uk: fourth estate, 2009). l. ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (new haven, Ct: yale university press, 1992). r. S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible and Empire: Postcolonial Explorations (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge university press, 2005).
134 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 REPORT Looking in All Directions
a self-organizing gathering at east-West university produced some insightful results
John a. S Weeney
TWO VOICES ArE NOT ENOuGH . T HIS SIMPLE PrEMISE PrOVIDED THE FrAMEWOrK for the first annual Center for postnormal policy and futures Studies (CppfS) polylogue. a “polylogue” emphasizes the fact that more than two (dialogue) voices, perspectives, positions, and generations are involved, and, perhaps most importantly, that we need to learn and engage and listen with different voices. the three-day gathering, held on 23-25 May 2014, brought academics, foresight practitioners, student researchers, and higher education professionals to east-West university in Chicago, illinois, u.S.a. to explore the dynamics of life in postnormal times (pnt). the theme for the Center’s inaugural gathering was “east-West/north/South: looking in all directions.” in organizing the event as a polylogue rather than as a conference or symposium, CppfS set out to craft spontaneous, yet critical, spaces of exchange between the two-dozen participants. Commencing on friday evening with an opening provocation by alfonso Montuori of California institute of integral Studies, San francisco, entitled “Creativity in postnormal times,” the polylogue was built around three broad areas of inquiry: “What is the West?,” “Where is the east?,” and “how is the north/South divide?” instead of asking participants to prepare a research paper or formal
East-West Affairs 135 presentation, all of the attendees were requested only to provide a preference for one of Saturday’s three two-hour sessions, which was chaired by a fellow participant just before the start of each panel. panelists were chosen at random and given only ten minutes to respond to the question before the chair fielded responses and questions. a final session on Sunday morning organically emerged around the query: What’s next? as this initial gathering concentrated on tropes central to East-West Affairs: A Quarterly Journal of North-South Relations in Postnormal Times , the polylogue included many members of the journal’s editorial Staff and advisory board.
Montuori’s opening talk built and expanded upon the insights of his 2011 article, “beyond postnormal times: the future of creativity and the creativity of the future,” which outlines the concept of postnormal Creativity (futures 43, 221– 227 March 2011). Creativity is the most important ingredient for coping with pnt, Montuori argued. but creativity is being transformed in the West from the individualistic and atomistic view of a troubled genius working against odds, as championed by modernity, toward a more contextual, collaborative, and complex approach. Montuori challenged the participants to reflect on the substantial changes in collaborative creativity fostered by and through new and social media, as well as the shift towards artisanal and craft-driven approaches to production and consumption. the centrality of creativity must go beyond the mythology of genius and inspiration to inform philosophy, ethics, education, and action to shape desirable futures, he declared. the session on “What is the West” began with lindsea k. Wilbur, a student researcher. growing up in hawaii, she said, affected her perspective on “the West.” “in hawaii, one has to go east to get to the West,” Wilbur observed. using an auto-ethnographic point of entry for exploring Western archetypes—the fearless cowboy (her father), the adventurous astronaut (herself), and the people underground (friends in paris), Wilbur commented, “the West is not an entity; its divisions make it what it is.” for Wilbur, the West is friction; it is what drives exploration, which brings both challenges and opportunities. She ended her remarks with a musical performance that embodied her reflections.
Jim dator, director of hawaii research Center for futures Studies, university of hawaii at Manoa, opened his comments with an incitement: “the West is dead!” “the West was a brief episode that occurred at a certain time,” dator opined. invoking his own personal experience, which was shaped by many years living
136 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 in hawaii and abroad, dator also noted how his time in the islands dramatically shaped his perspective on the West. for dator, the West came to an end in 1914 with the start of World War i, which reshaped the global geopolitical context. dator went on to ask, “Why did the West cause so much trouble?” Contending that the West remains woefully attached to destructive notions of continued economic growth, dator argued that alternatives will likely be found in the margins, although he stated that “no new visions” for the future seem to be emerging. acknowledging that something will come after postnormal times, dator ended his remarks with the nonplussed query, “What’s next?” in contrast to dator’s definitive declarations, Jordi Serra del pino answered the session’s query with the self-reflective confession: “What is the West? i don’t know...whatever it is...i’m in it!” Serra del pino, from autonomous university of barcelona, Spain, took this intimation further in noting how one doesn’t have to “worry” about the world as a Westerner. “one can just be,” he stressed. observing how the West is not a place but rather a worldview and a set of values, Serra del pino argued that the West is trying to mutate, although the content and form of this mutation remains, as yet, uncertain. vinay lal, professor of history at uCla, began answering the session’s interrogation by discussing his work with Multiversity, which is a global confederation of academics and professors seeking to decolonize higher education by “getting the West off everyone’s back,” as lal put it. noting how the West has colonized the world’s imagination, lal spoke about the ways in which the very categories of knowledge used throughout education around the world have been Westernized. “When one does comparative studies, one arc is already predetermined. your history and the Western categories become part of the common sense of a culture,” noted lal. however, this process first required a “self-colonization,” which is to say that the West had to silence the marginalized within itself. there were a number of responses to the panelists’ opening comments, and much of the discussion revolved around whether or not the West was indeed “dead,” which dator said “was something we need to decide before we leave here.” Scott Jordan, a post-graduate student from Creighton university, invoked the metaphor of a virus, which does not fit traditional categories of life and requires a host to subsist. Ziauddin Sardar, director of CppfS, compared the West to Schrödinger’s Cat, which is simultaneously dead and alive. “a dead body can
East-West Affairs 137 spread enough decay and disease to infect an entire system,” reflected Sardar.
“Where is the east” session was opened by Merryl Wyn davies, Co-director of the Muslim institute in london. She began with a reflection on her status as a “convert”; she had converted to islam some 34 years ago. for davies, “islam is east, and the east is not here.” She noted how conversion is a process of reimagining the world. agreeing with lal, davies observed how Western constructs continue to impact the east, although it continually defies the categories imposed upon it and remains recessively beyond our comprehension. She concluded, “the east is where we know nothing.” amrita ghosh, who teaches at Seton hall university, distinguished between the “real and imagined” east. in the 19th century, the east was east asia, but in the post-9/11 world, the Middle east has become the east, which speaks to the ways in which the exotic east has become a contested terrain of ongoing securitization, although there is overlap between the two. “the consumable and marketable east remains,” noted ghosh. there is a bleeding between South and east asia that has much to do with global development models. for ghosh, much of the east can be found within the “post- Slumdog Millionaire World,” which speaks to the ways in which the success of the film opened up new spaces of inquiry and experience for those within and outside of the east. kipling’s famous dictum, OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat was brought into play by Sabita Manian of lynchburg university. “the twain has met,” she declared. as with lal and davies, Manian observed how the “east remains in the West,” which affirms the power of conceptual and concrete models imposed upon the east from outside as well as within. She drew attention to the ways in which the east “emulates” the West and challenged participants to work out how to think through inequality, social justice, and environmental challenges in the east. as with Serra del pino, Scott Jordan offered a reflective confession, “i am fully Western.” for Jordan, the east remains a space of exploration— something ineffably Other . “the east is outside of you,” Jordan noted. responses to this session centered on examining the ways in which representations of the east have varied over time and how these imaginings have shaped conditions around and within the east. for farida khan, who
138 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 teaches at university of Wisconsin-parkside, the east continues to be “where the Sacred is.” “the east is a career,” observed lal. “the only place where you find the east is Japan. it was never colonized,” dator reflected. noting the cyclic nature with which the West engages the east, davies remarked, “the east gets discovered, erased, and rediscovered over and again.” offering three points of entry for examining the north/South divide, and answering the question “how is the north/South divide?,” alvin lim outlined the global flows of bodies and capital integral to the rise of Singapore, the politically fragile transnational supply chains of Southeast asia (specifically Cambodia and vietnam), and the dynamics of academic and terrorist globalization found within nigeria, which is where lim has taught for the past three years. for lim, these three interconnected phenomena speak to the diverse ways in which the north/South divide persists. Whether one looks at the rising “xenophobia” in Singapore or “nationalist riots in vietnam” or the rise of groups like “boko haram in nigeria,” the north/South divide remains at the heart of these phenomena, noted lim. reflecting on the recent and highly publicized abduction of schoolgirls in nigeria by boko haram, lim commented how they will likely be used “as an excuse for the expansion of the uS security apparatus.” gabrielle donnelly, a postgraduate student at California institute of integral Studies, began her comments by talking about her estrangement from previous work in development, specifically her disillusion with the “development industry.” as she works in nova Scotia with indigenous communities seeking to foster sustainable models of development, donnelly called into question the traditional, which is also to say colonial, models of the past. “development is something the north does to the South,” donnelly noted. the hierarchy of the divide, donnelly observed, presumes a certain model of development. “humans do not require exponential growth,” exclaimed donnelly. for brad bullock, professor of Sociology at randolph College, lynchburg, the north/South divide is “doing quite well, thank you!” Calling into question the metanarrative of perpetual economic growth, bullock problematized the false promise inherent in the assumption “all of the South trying to be the north.” affirming how the capitalist system has engendered a globalization of desire, bullock observed how this differs from the values of “tribal people.” “the global capitalist system fosters a particular kind of exploitation, and the Sacred has become profane,” reflected bullock.
East-West Affairs 139 the themes introduced by bullock were picked up by anil lal of roosevelt university. the “mantra of development” is the central problematic of our historical moment, he declared. lal demonstrated how submitting this dynamic to an ethical critique is woefully insufficient as the global South has needs and wants that it will meet on its own terms. this has led to a resurgence in nationalism in india as evidenced with the recent landslide victory of the bJp party in the indian elections. providing an anecdotal example of this turn, lal noted, “ayn rand is a best-selling author in india.” after a full day of spirited debate and inquiry, responses to this panel quickly turned from critique into creation. John a. Sweeney, deputy director of CppfS, suggested that metanarratives are a mere reflection of the structures and systems underlying them, which is to say that our values are often in stark contradiction to our behaviors and the structures supporting them. agreeing with Sweeney’s postulate, alun rhydderch, who co-manages the oxford-based School of international futures, observed: “the system is fundamentally broken.” Serra del pino remarked how capitalism does one thing very well: “externalize costs.” these responses commenced post-session discussions on what types of structures might be needed to transcend postnormal times, which led to the decision to frame Sunday’s session around dator’s prescient query. reorganized as a workshop aimed at generating productive responses to the challenges and issues raised the day before, Sunday’s session was split into three parts: (1) causes/assumptions, (2) actions/outputs, and (3) takeaways/commitments. the first part challenged participants to work through the causes/assumptions of “What’s next?” as a critical first step in articulating the dynamics of life in postnormal times. the second part asked participants to consider what actions/outputs, specifically values, behaviors, and structures, might be needed to respond to the challenges and opportunities raised in the first part. for the first and second parts of this session, participants were split into three groups. groups were “cross- pollinated” for the second part of this session in order to stimulate creative actions/outputs for all of the listed causes/assumptions. the Center plans to further research and expand the work done during the last session. Some of its fruits will appear in the pages of East-West Affairs in the near future.
140 JANUARY -MARCH 2014 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE
Merryl Wyn Davies is co-director of the Muslim institute, london, and author of Introducing Anthropology , amongst other books.
Jordi Serra is an independent futurist and consultant based in barcelona, Spain
Vinay Lal is associate professor of history at uCla. he writes widely on the history and culture of colonial and modern india, popular and public culture in india, historiography, the politics of world history, the indian diaspora, global politics, contemporary american politics, the life and thought of Mohandas gandhi, hinduism, and the politics of knowledge systems.
Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim is an assistant professor of international and Comparative politics at the american university of nigeria. he received his ph.d. in political Science from the university of hawaii at Manoa. his book Cambodia and the Politics of Aesthetics is published by routledge.
Alfonso Montuori is principal of evolutionary Strategies, and professor in the transformative inquiry department at California institute of integral Studies. San francisco, California.
Gabrielle Donnelly is a phd Candidate at the California institute of integral Studies, San francisco, California
Joshua Pryor teaches in the government department at California State university, Sacramento. California.
Zain Sardar is pursuing his doctorate in philosophy at birkbeck College, university of london, england.
Shanon Shah , a theologian, is a well-known Malaysian musician and writer.
John A. Sweeney is deputy director of Center for postnormal policy and future Studies, east- West university, Chicago.
Shiv Visvanathan is currently professor at o p Jindal global university, Sonepat. he is author of Organizing for Science, A Carnival for Science and has co-edited Foulplay: Chronicles of Corruption .
Stephanie Wright is an australian writer specializing on identity, history, and discourse in islam and the Middle east.
Gino Zarrinfar teaches in the department of political Science, university of hawaii at Manoa.
East-West Affairs 141