File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1999/postcolonial.9904, message 42


Date: Sat, 03 Apr 1999 14:52:50 -0400 (EDT)
From: Tim Watson <watsontp-AT-alpha.montclair.edu>
Subject: Re: Kosovo, Bombs and Imperialism


I have been following the debate on the list about the war in the Balkans
with much interest.  I'm particularly interested -- although perhaps not
surprised -- to see the old theory/real world split rear its head again.
Watching heartbreaking pictures of refugees in Macedonia last night --
while US and Britain bomb empty buildings in the middle of Belgrade -- I
too think "what is to be done?", rather than "what is to be thought?",
even as I know better than to make that distinction in the first place.
However, from my place as teacher, I think doing "theory" might be
precisely the best thing I can do.  My literary theory classroom this week
was given over to such activities as: deconstructing the term "Tomahawk
cruise missile", a phrase repeated so often that nobody had stopped to
think about the implications, and contradictions, of appropriating the
sign of an earlier opponent's "savagery" (which is itself the sign of an
earlier projection -- in the discourse of "scalping" especially).  Of
course, this discussion did nothing to prevent Tomahawk cruise missile
strikes in Belgrade on Friday night; but it did make my students *think*.
I pointed out that the way the news anchors suddenly speak of a national
"we" as soon as war breaks out was a perfect example of the ways in which
ideology constructs us as subjects through the deployment of "common
sense" -- the repressive and ideological state apparatuses coinciding.  I
told them that since 1991 the Pentagon has justified its budget by
claiming the need to be prepared to fight two wars simultaneously, and
that now "we" are doing just that (southern Iraq bombed again on Thursday)
-- this will help to further justify the $110 billion increase in US
defense spending over the next 5 years.  All this teaching does not stop
me feeling helpless -- but I do not think that it's a futile endeavour.
Perhaps some of my students will turn up at our campus teachin/protest on
Tuesday; perhaps some of them will refuse to be drafted when the time
comes ... sorry, all those Vietnam comparisons going to my head.

It seems ironic that the discussion of Spivak's "the postcolonial
intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss" should segue so
rapidly into a collective sense on the list of powerlessness and loss over
the Balkan war, no?

Seems to me also that this conflict creates particular difficulties for
postcolonial critics.  Ella Shohat says that postcolonial studies is
actually post-anticolonial nationalism (after the independence struggle,
the disillusion with the failures of the postcolonial state).  But we
still have to acknowledge our debt to that initial anticolonial struggle,
in its specifically nationalist phase.  So how do we respond to Serbian
historiography rooted in anticolonial nationalism -- against the Ottoman
Empire, and in more modern times the Austro-Hungarian empire?  Easy -- we
dismiss it as atavistic -- the (first) Battle of Kosovo was in the 14th
century, after all.  But if we have become sophisticated in our
theoretical understanding of nationalism in general -- that it is
predicated on a series of exclusions, for instance -- how do we
distinguish Serbian nationalism from the "good" national liberation
struggles we have canonized (and now have the luxury of critiquing)?  The
current ambivalence about the KLA ought to make us think.  (This is
connected to Lawrence Phillips's point about the rhetoric of "good" or
"just" war in this case.)  And to add to our confusion, postcolonial
studies has not yet been able to figure out its relationship to the US as
an imperial and neo-imperial power.

Of course, I understand why some reading this might respond "more theory
b.s. -- people are dying!".  I have that impulse too.  But this is an
email discussion list: what else do we do here other than write, think,
and theorize?  (And we pass on information: the director of B92 radio in
Belgrade has been ousted by the Serbian govt -- http://www.b92.net -- and
while I'm suspicious of "civil society" opposition movements that become
the darling of Western media -- remember Lech Walesa? -- this seems to be
a sign that anti-Milosevic opposition in Yugoslavia will be crushed, or,
as has already happened, join the government's position against the bigger
threat of NATO.)  I'm sure many of us are responding to the war in many
other ways in other forums.  Clinton said the other night that he had been
"brushing up on the history of that region" -- you could almost hear him
add "down there" (Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Cuba), or "over there"(Vietnam,
Iraq).  Right -- so that the US govt could make sure that we don't learn
that same history, b/c "Milosevic = Hitler" and "domino theory" and
"Archduke Ferdinand's assassination in Sarajevo" all sound easier than
searching for more complicated stories.  Damn, if intellectual labour has
any point these days, we ought to be able to take the time to pass on some
of those other stories -- for example, the last issue of Covert Action
Quarterly (#66) has stories on NATO expansion; Tomahawk cruise missiles;
and the Croatian expulsion of 500,000 Serbs from the Krajina region in
1995.

This post is too long ...

Tim Watson   




     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005