Paradoxical Peace: a Scholar-Activist's Auto-Ethnography
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This article was downloaded by: [University of Miami] On: 03 July 2015, At: 10:16 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG Globalizations Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rglo20 Paradoxical Peace: A Scholar-activist's Auto- ethnography on Religious Pacifism and Anti- capitalism Ruth Halaj Reitana a Motion Pictures, M.F.A., University of Miami's School of Communication, Coral Gables, FL, USA Published online: 20 Nov 2014. Click for updates To cite this article: Ruth Halaj Reitan (2015) Paradoxical Peace: A Scholar-activist's Auto-ethnography on Religious Pacifism and Anti-capitalism, Globalizations, 12:1, 25-42, DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2014.971541 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2014.971541 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions Globalizations, 2015 Vol. 12, No. 1, 25–42, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2014.971541 Paradoxical Peace: A Scholar-activist’s Auto-ethnography on Religious Pacifism and Anti-capitalism RUTH HALAJ REITAN Motion Pictures, M.F.A., University of Miami’s School of Communication, Coral Gables, FL, USA ABSTRACT How can one subscribe to forms of ethico-religious pacifism and revolutionary communism or anarchism simultaneously, let alone conceive of their adherents as comprising the same transnational social movement? The author explores this conundrum via a playful probing of her own paradoxes related to violence and peace, dualism and non-dualistic thinking, and activist engagement along with more contemplative and quiet reflection. It experiments with expressive auto-ethnography in order to convey what living in and through these paradoxes feels like, and to access and convey other kinds of insights, (self) knowledge, and wisdom, unavailable or inadmissible by more orthodox forms of social science inquiry and writing. It embraces the postmodern relationship among authors, audiences, and texts and valorizes storytelling as deeply pedagogical, constitutive, meaningful, and meaning- making phenomena. The essay weaves together newspaper headlines, apocryphal diary entries, and dream poems into a methodological bricolage drawing from postmodern, poststructural and postcolonial scholars Deleuze and Guattari, Michael Shapiro, Anna Agathangelou, and Ruth Behar among others. Keywords: anti-war, anti-capitalism, auto-ethnography, poetics, social movements, pacifism Downloaded by [University of Miami] at 10:16 03 July 2015 The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory. Antonio Gramsci, trans. by Edward Said (1979, p. 25) Correspondence Address: Ruth Halaj Reitan, Motion Pictures, M.F.A., University of Miami’s School of Communication, Coral Gables, FL, USA. Email: [email protected] # 2014 Taylor & Francis 26 R. H. Reitan Here we have made use of everything [that] came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. ...To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied. Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari (1987,p.3) Preface ‘Be the change you seek in the world’, advised Gandhi. ‘No war but the class war’, admonished Marx. Both have inspired opposition to war, militarism, and imperialism across the world over the last century, including my own itinerant involvement. Yet their philosophies seem incongru- ent, even antagonistic: in a word, paradoxical. How can one subscribe to forms of ethico-religious pacifism and revolutionary communism simultaneously, let alone conceive of their adherents as comprising the same transnational social movement? The Jungian psychologist Carol Pearson (1991, p. 49) offers a clue: ‘The essence of the Self is paradox; ... [the] journey is a spiral, not linear.’ Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 3) in their introduction to the notion of the rhizome reflected, ‘The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.’ If this holds true for individuals, so much more for social collectivities: there is no coherent, let alone static, collective actor called the Peace Movement. Further, any (hi)story of such is not a teleological progression, but a spiraling dance among innumerable paradoxes. As scholar-activists, we are fraught with our own contradictions and caught up in the larger whirl of movement in which we act and thus help make. And in the process, we forge some sem- blance of self and society, ethics, and strategy. These ensembles are tendentious and tenuous, in that the individual, social, ethical, and strategic that we are creating (or coming into being; becoming) are both anti-essentialist and anti-hegemonic. In this essay I experiment with a particular kind of method—expressive auto-ethnography1— for three reasons: it provides a way of excavating and compiling this historical self-inventory that both Gramsci in Prison Notebooks and Said in Orientalism deemed necessary before embarking on critical and reflective scholarship. It further is a method that helps convey what living in and through paradox feels like. And it allows me to access and express other kinds of insights, (self) knowledge, and maybe even wisdom, derived from reflecting on paradox. All of these are largely unavailable or inadmissible via more orthodox forms of social science Downloaded by [University of Miami] at 10:16 03 July 2015 inquiry and writing. Here, I will simply say what this piece is not (and will refer readers desiring a methodological elaboration along with a ‘guide’ to how to read this piece to endnote 6): it is not an eponymous history of the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements.2 Nor is it a chronicle of the often heroic actors and practices of principled or strategic nonviolence.3 It is not a detailed account of radical left Christianity.4 Neither is it a study of the complex relationship between Marxian anti-imperialism and pacifism.5 It is something other.6 ∗∗∗ Circa 1980: The newspapers read: AFGHANISTAN: Soviet troops invade, causing the Non-Aligned Movement to fracture and the US Senate to halt ratification of the second Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT II). Paradoxical Peace 27 IRAN: Supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini overthrow Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; Mili- tants seize 66 hostages at the American embassy. IRAQ: Ongoing border disputes and heightened fears of a Shia insurrection fomented by Iran prompt Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to invade his neighbor, with covert support from the US. WASHINGTON, DC: Secret negotiations by President Jimmy Carter culminate in the Camp David Accords signed between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat. Carter and his friend Doug Coe, head of The Family and the National Prayer Breakfast, launch a world- wide call to prayer with Sadat and Begin (Sharlet, 2009, p. 24); the latter two are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Iranian revolution sparks the decade’s second petroleum crisis. Carter goes on national TV to put on a sweater and tell Americans to turn down their thermostats; he’s trounced by Ronald Reagan in the polls. The US House of Representatives’ Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence launches an investigation into anti-war and anti-nuclear groups, domestic and foreign, for suspected links to the Soviet-funded World Peace Council. CAIRO: Egypt is suspended from the Arab League; Sadat is assassinated. NEW YORK CITY: Dorothy Day, the Christian pacifist, anarcho-communist, and founder of the Catholic Worker movement, dies at 83. MIDDLETOWN, Penn.: Three Mile Island Nuclear Station’s core melts down, causing wide- spread fear and protests including some 200,000 in New York, and over 100,000 in the West German capital Bonn; ignites the ‘second wave’ of anti-nuclear protests across the world. WHITE EARTH, Minn.: American Indian Movement (AIM) activists found Anishinabe Akeeng to take back stolen and tax-forfeited reservation lands. Dear Diary: I don’t read newspapers. I’m 10. I read whatever teachers make me, plus the Bible. Especially Revelation, but really we jump around in Sunday school Downloaded by [University of Miami] at 10:16 03 July 2015 to try and cover the whole thing; and the National Enquirer, which keeps me up-to-date on where the arisen Elvis is and what he’s wearing. I’m pretty sure I’m going to hell for a pile of sins, especially for not being mindful: I just learned that if you pray ‘on automatic’ it don’t count; So I spend my nights sweaty, re-running lost years of ‘Our Fathers’.