Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 06:53:57 -0400 (EDT)
From: Imre Szeman <szeman-AT-mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca>
Subject: Re: national subjects/poco epistemologies


B
ruce King makes a number of points in his last post, almost none of which
have any relation to one another, and few of which are worth responding
to. At a time like this, when millions of basically decent people are
caught up in a militaristic fervor that is bound to come back to haunt
them in one form or another, allowances must be made for all kinds of
mis-directed emotion. Nonetheless, his portrait of postcolonial studies is
little more than a caricature; his screed against three decades of
"tenured radicals" evokes the worse rhetoric of the (so-called) culture
wars (maybe he means the legion of Ivy League "radicals" that have filled
the airwaves calling for war and destruction since the first day of the
WTC tragedy); and the overall implication of his post seems to be that any
attempt to draw attention to the foreign policy hypocrisies of the United
States, especially as these relate to the postcolonial world, implies an
acceptance of the tyrannies and attrocities that are features of daily
life around the globe.

One doesn't have to be a tenured radical to see that the foreign policies
of the United States are not driven by its desire to perpetuate and defend
those genuinely enlightened concepts that have been trotted out over the
past four days -- "democracy," "freedom," "justice," "human rights," and
so. In general, what shapes the U.S. interaction with the rest of the
world is the pursuit of its own interests (political, financial, etc.) at
any cost to others. We know that nobody needs another list of one and a
half centuries of U.S. sponsored assassinations, foreign coups, and
military invasion -- and perhaps most importantly, the economic violence
inflicted by the U.S. and entities of which it is a member. But it may be
helpful to remember, just as a current example, that the IMF's policy of
currency devaluation has destroyed agricultural production in poor
countries around the world, leaving these countries increasingly dependent
on U.S. imports, which they try to pay for with the minimal foreign
currency that they can generate given the evisceration of their
agricultural sector. And so on.

We think that it is important to point to the nature of U.S. involvement
in the world at this time, not to declare "sympathy" for terrorists (whose
aims have nothing to do with alleviating the misery from which they draw
their strength), but to offer some context to the events of the past week.
We take this to be one of the central tasks of intellectuals -- radical,
tenured or otherwise. There was a great deal of talk of the shattering of
American "innocence" this week, something which might better be described
as awaking from a dream into the history of which we have always been a
part. The U.S. is the most powerful nation on the Earth, one whose
involvement (or lack thereof, in places like Rwanda, Bosnia, etc. -- as we
said, policy is dictated by convenience) in the world has an enormous
impact. There is no excuse for Americans not to be aware of what
successive governments have done in their name, under the banner of
democracy and freedom. It may be that to some extent U.S. citizens have
acquiesced knowingly in these actions, since the unflagging defense of
U.S. political and economic interests has helped secure the economic
prosperity that the United States enjoys. But U.S. citizens are also
interested, above all else, in seeing justice done in the world.  The aim
of those involved in this list and with postcolonial studies (as we
understand it), as both researchers and pedagogues, is to unfold the full
complexity of the issues
that have to be dealt with in the contemporary world, including the
historical development of these issues. In trying to comprehend the events
that have unfolded this week, it seems more useful to try to articulate
fully the complexity of contemporary geopolitics, to do so in a manner
that legitimates neither terrorism nor state-sponsored violence, and to
refuse to discuss U.S. actions and policies by resorting to the mystical
and irrational concepts of "evil," "madmen," and primordial
racial/cultural/national characteristics.

Discussions of the involvment of the United States in backing dictators
and tyrants doesn't mean that one stops critically examining the actions
of these leaders or simply lays blame at the feet of the U.S. and/or
capitalism. But it certainly makes little sense to do the opposite. One of
us had the opportunity to take an undergraduate political science course
on Latin America that made not a single reference to U.S. involvement or
policy in the region. There were academic books assigned to the course
that had no reference to the C.I.A. in the index. The causes for regime
stabilization that the professor came up with were curious at best (the
breakdown of the judiaciary in Chile in 1973, for instance, leading to the
end of the Allende regime. No talk of soccer stadiums at all!). We don't
want our students to be educated in this same way. While it won't help
them at all to say that "capitalism" caused X to happen, we think that a
full account of not only U.S. action, but of the cultural, political and
economic challenges faced by peoples and countries emerging out of
colonial situations is essential. Isn't this what postcolonial studies is
uniquely able to do?

Imre Szeman, McMaster University
Nicholas Brown, U of Illinois-Chicago





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