MISREPRESENTING INDIA — ACHMED ABDULLAH (1922)

Etonian, “Broadway Afghan,” “British intelligence officer,” writer of Oriental tales and other pulp, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, or simply “a Turk,” it’s hard to know who exactly Achmed Abduallah was. Born—they say—in Yalta in 1881 as Nadir Khan-Romanoffski, Abduallah was a naturalized British citizen, who after studying in the finest schools of Britain and France and a career in the British army, made his way to the United States where he became a professional writer.

Below, a review of the New Cambridge History of India by Abdullah in The Nation from 1922. “Post-Orientalist” avant la lettre, Abdullah’s stinging criticism of the Cambridge volume and its forms of knowledge prefigures the critiques of colonial historiography and epistemology— and the “Aryan theory” in particular—scholars would make many decades later. Indeed, Abdullah’s evaluation of the West is akin to those made by other prescient “Easternists” of the early twentieth century.

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New Cambridge History of India. Vol. 1—Ancient India. Edited by E.J. Rapson. Macmillan Company. $7.

There exists a type of academic mind which soaks itself in facts as a sponge drinks water. Press the sponge, and the water squirts out, a little more muddy, a little more stale. Press the academic mind, and we have for instance the first volume of the “New Cambridge History of India,” dealing with ancient India from the pre-Vedic twilight to the end of the Pahlava suzerainty. If you look for data and facts—and facts, without correct interpretation, are often synonymous with lies—neatly marshaled and labeled, you will find them here, every last one of them, excellently printed, superbly indexed, soberly bound in chaste bottle-green. You will be able to look up these data and facts as you would a proper undertaker's name and number in the Telephone Red Book. Both books are valuable for the “trade.”

This History of India is as platitudinously impressive as a Methodist bishop. It reaches that apex of good breeding: a complete vacuity of soul. It is filled to the brim with the common-school logic in which all the truths stand one behind the other, holding each others’ trails. It is studded with great and shining jewels of Chautauqua Kultur. It is as inspiring as the rule-of-three, a little less so than a problem in abstract dynamics. No miracle of Indian achievement—achievement in the days when the Anglo-Saxons painted their bodies blue and confessed to a penchant for human flesh, cooked plain—can stand up before its withering patronage, unless in some way, more often back to Arya influence. The influence may be that of early Arya infiltration in Vedic days or that of the latter-day Arya invasion under Alexander the Great, that alcoholic and vainglorious Greek highwayman, the direct spiritual ancestor of all the latter-day European philanthropists who believe in carrying the White Man’s Burden as a hundred per cent profit on the investment, with assurance of having heaven thrown in as a stock bonus. There is nothing its writers, a dozen of them under the supervision and guidance of Professor E.J. Rapson, M.A., have not read, reread, examined, indexed, and cross-indexed, from Lüders and Wackernagel to Oxford-Muller, from Crooke to Winternitz, from Elphinstone to Ramprasad Chandi, from the Rig-Veda to the driest reports of the Honorable John Company. It follows safely, if not sanely, in the footsteps of a half hundred similar Indian histories and cyclopedias.

It may be lèse-majesté to speak unfavorable of anything conceived at Cambridge, Oxford, or Harvard. I realize perfectly that I should be investigated by the American Legion, the Ku Klux Klan, the Ellis Island authorities, the Attorney General’s office, the Near East Relief field agents, and the Brooklyn Board of Fire Underwriters. Still to me the very title of the book sounds too respectable, too well bred. Dealing with ancient India, with one of the most glorious pieces of Asian civilization, it is too Anglo-Saxon. It is not so deliberately, but instinctively, which is the more naive, therefore the more dangerous, form of prejudice. It looks at the great peninsula through blue spectacles. These spectacles are eminently well-fitted, eminently practical. But they focus wrong when used to look beyond Boston, Regent Street, and the pleasant Downs of Sussex-by-the-Sea. The psychology of the writers remind me of ancient Begari proverb: “God made wisdom of three parts and a half, of which the half went to the world, the rest to one man.” And, where the book makes reference to the Vedas, I might quote another Behari proverb: “Little was written by the poet Tulsidas, but a great deal was added by the commentators.”

More by inference than by direct statement the book, here and there, makes once more of the Arya a wonderful demi-god and a noble and high-minded conqueror. And may I, in this connection, remind Professor Rapson that the Sanskrit word for war means literally a “desire for more cows”? I never realized that the desire for more cows could be interpreted as high-minded nobility.

Again, by inference, the book tries to prove that these “more-cows-desiring” Aryas (and how history does repeat itself! Consider the Occident’s recent and less recent cow-desiring Oriental policy) were the Lord's own anointed, the original vessel of everything fine south of the Himalayas, that, while they put the brand of their hegemony upon the aborigines, they “civilized” them, straightened them out spiritually, financially, and sartorially, and left a lasting impression upon them for all time to come.

Now, what is the truth of this? Is it not a fact that the very Vedas, those chronicles of ancient and lying Arya conceit, speak of intermarriages between the invaders and the original lords of the soil of India? The caste system was not a bright invention to put a stamp of inferiority on the conquered aborigines, but it is the outcome of a low, evolutionary process, helped by the machinations of Brahmin priests who wished to preserve the profits arising from their sacerdotal profession within a restricted circle of families, and who increased their ranks and influence by drawing recruits from the priests of the aboriginal tribes, although the latter worshiped a different brand of idols from those of the invaders. Is it not, furthermore, a fact that the Aryas were absorbed as completely by the “inferior” races whom they conquered as the Normans were by the Saxons, the Saxons and Normans in Ireland by the Celts, and the Mongols of the Horde and later on the Machus by the Chinese?

Yet the book is labeled “New.” It is not. It is a mere rehashing and redigesting of old fallacies and prejudices. A new history of India would, basing itself on facts, interpret these facts truthfully and fairly, without racial or “civilizational” prejudice swinging one way or the other. To choose an example, it is useless to state, as does the Cambridge Volume, that to the Greek the beauty and intellect of man was everything, that the apotheosis of this beauty and this intellect remained the keynote of Hellenic civilization even in the Orient, and that these ideals awakened no response in the Indian mind. Now, why should these Hellenic ideals awaken a response? Will it ever dawn on the Arya mind, of Cambridge and elsewhere, that its standards are not necessarily the standards for all the world? To me, for instance, and to a great many other Oriental artists and scholars, Hellenic civilization, Hellenic art, is the apex of soulless, fleshed stupidity; to us the Venus of Milo is a rather ugly and vulgar mass of female meat without brains¹, without beauty of any sort; to us the Apollo Belvedere seems like a highly-glossed and brainless Regent Street shop-walker; to us there is more beauty and more intellect in a pair of Fo dogs of the Kang-he dynasty and in a sang-de-boeuf vase of the Yung Ching period. It is all a viewpoint; and history should not be a viewpoint, but a truthful interpretation of a variety of viewpoints.

The Cambridge History in its account of India in Arya and pre-Arya days bases itself largely on Arya monuments and Arya chronicles. Would it be fair to write a history of the Roman Catholic Church in America by basing it on the reports and pamphlets of the A.P.A., a history of Charles Parnell by basing it on the contemporary files of the London Times, or a history of the I.W.W. by basing it on the recent comic articles in the Boston Transcript? The Vedas were biased, quite naturally. The Vedas call the earlier Indian tribes dasyus, which is the Sanskrit for enemies. They abound in scurrilous epithets for the aborigines, calling them “disturbers of sacrifices,” “gross feeders on mean,” “raw-flesh eaters,” “lawless,” “godless,” and “without rites.”

Yet, later on, when praising the prowess of their own race, they make much of the pluck and shrewdness and warlike achievement of those aborigines, speaking of their “seven castles” and “ninety forts.” The Vedas are filled with stark racial prejudice and conceit. So is the “New Cambridge History of India.”

Achmed Abdullah, “Misrepresenting India,” The Nation (November 15, 1922). For a cogent and thorough scholarly treatment of this same question, see: Romila Thapar, “The Theory of Aryan Race and India: History and Politics,” Social Scientist v. 24 n. 1/3  (1996)

¹Like other men of his time, even in the most lucid moments of anti-colonial critique, a latent misogyny loudly announces itself.   

TELEGRAM FROM GRADUATES OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES IN IRAQ TO W. E. B. DU BOIS

The Arab itineraries of W.E.B. Du Bois’s wife Shirley Graham Du Bois and his step-son David Graham Du Bois are well known. Shirley’s writings on Arab politics in The Black Scholar and elsewhere have recently received extended scholarly attention in Vaughn Rasberry’s Race and the Totalitarian Century (2016). And David’s long career in the Middle East was fictionalized in his 1975 novel of Black American expatriates in Cairo ... And Bid Him Sing.  

But the contours of W.E.B. Du Bois’ own career in the Middle East are less known, though his curious entanglements with Israel and Zionism have recently been explicated in Alex Lubin’s Geographies of Liberation (2014). Du Bois's  wide and deep learning in the machinations of imperialism globally meant that the tribulations of the region were certainly known to him. Indeed, in a brilliant book which Gerald Horne approvingly calls a “militant tract” and Foreign Affairs disparagingly reviewed as “little more than an anti-imperialist—especially an anti-British—tract,” Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945), Du Bois observed that the “situation in the Middle East—the oil of Iran, the subjugation of Syria, the unrest among the Arabs—is a serious threat to the possibility of maintaining peace after this war.” The elder Du Bois’ international connections and internationalist commitments were exceptional, so further research into his reception in the Arab world is necessary.

Below, a message from some Iraqis to Du Bois. Who exactly the authors were is not known. Nor do we know how they learned of Du Bois or why they sent him this telegram (perhaps they sent similar messages to other prominent Americans). 1958, the year of this message, was also the year Du Bois regained his U.S. passport eight years after it had been confiscated by the government.

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Dear Mr Boise [sic] on behalf of American universities in Iraq we appeal to you in the most urgent manner to stop United States aggression in our sister Arab state Lebanon the aggression against our sister state Jordan and the aggression being contemplated against our own beloved country. It is not possible for us to see how the United States with complete disregard the principles of the United Nations and without paying any heed to the report of the United Nations commission in Lebanon can give itself the right to land troops in Lebanon which is according to the report of the UN commission torn by civil war the United States position on the revolution in Iraq is equally deplorable. It is well known that the previous royalist regime was a police state intensely hated by the people of Iraq who staged several unsuccessful revolutions to overthrow it in 1941 1948 several unsuccessful revolutions to overthrow it in 1948, 1948, 1952 and 1956 we should not have to remind you that the right to revolution is an inherent right of the people of any country and that the United States of America was founded by such a method. Our young republic which came into being a few days ago enjoys the support of the overwhelming majority of our people whose slogan on the day of the revolution then arouse the ire of Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge and be used as a pretext for intervention in Lebanon and possible intervention in Iraq? Such western intervention in Iraq as is being prepared will not deceive world public opinion no matter under what pretext it is carried out, even though it may deceive the American people thanks to the lies and distortions of the monopoly press if such aggression be unleashed against us we will meet it with with all the forces at our disposal including the support of the Asian African and socialist countries and the sympathy of decent people all over the world should this lead to an atomic war which may well be the case it will indeed be tragic. But the responsibility will clearly and entirely rest upon the shoulders of the United States we sincerely hope that common sense and simple human decency will prevail and will curb the hotheads in Washington who seem to be insistent on drawing the world into the abyss and that world peace and our freedom will be saved.

Telegram from graduates of American universities in Iraq to W. E. B. Du Bois, July 19, 1958. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. The text has been slightly edited for clarity.

"JUST THOUGHT I'D POINT OUT THE SIMILARITY BETWEEN THE CHEYENNES AND THE PALESTINIANS."

Page from: Etal Adnan, The Arab Apocalypse (Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 1989) 

“We Rejoiced that Carson and Godey had been able to give so useful a lesson to these American Arabs who lie in wait to murder and plunder the innocent traveler,” wrote John C. Fremont, “the conqueror of California” of the indigenous people who got in his way. Fremont’s expeditions in the 1840s, commanding role in the Mexican-American war, and governorship over the territory of Arizona, made him a central figure in the building of the United States’s continental empire in the nineteenth century.

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… the famous Cherokee Catherine Brown, “the lovely convert from heathenism” celebrated by the American Board becuase she repudiated her native Indian culture but also because she vindicated missionary labor in the face of white American racism, donated her earrings for the mission to Palestine. Far from reflecting failure or underscoring a history of American intolerance, the domestic errand to the wilderness was made to bless explicitly a much bolder errand to the world. (Ussama Makdisi, 2008)  

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“I write these lines as the horrific waste and potential violence of today's gulf crisis focus all efforts on war and confrontation. Is it too much to connect the stark political and military polarization with the cultural abyss that exists between Arabs and the West?” Edward Said wrote these words in the September 17th, 1990 issue of The Nation. Four months later, on January 17th, 1991, the United States and its ancillaries began a bombing campaign that would last more than a month and kill many thousands of Iraqis. Operation Desert Storm, as that much media theorized exercise in mass murder was dubbed, did not inaugurate American violence in the Middle East. Nor did it end it.

Said wrote the above words in his essay “Embargoed Literature.” There, Said criticized the dearth of English translations of Arabic texts. Arabic, a publisher told Said, “is a controversial language.” American translator and critic Robyn Creswell has recently noted an ironic reversal in Arabic’s American fortunes:  

Arabic literature is no longer embargoed—9/11 effectively lifted those sanctions—but the language remains controversial. In the media and the popular sphere it is reduced to the lexicon of sectarianism (Sunni, Shia, Alawi), religiously inspired violence (jihad, shahid [martyr]), and female subjugation (niqab, hijab). Complex traditions like the sharia are cartoonishly misrepresented, and the region is generally made to serve, as it often has, as the mirror image of our idealized self.

Arabic indeed remains controversial, but Arabs themselves more so. Translations of Arabic literature flourish, while a people is embargoed. But Arabs and Palestinians are not the only—or the people most often—murdered by American Imperialism. And they certainly weren’t the first.

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As ethnographers, we must take the interruption of settler capitalism enacted by #NoDAPL seriously. Oceti Sakowin are not engaged in some transitory, passing moment. Neither are the people I work with at Unist’ot’en camp, where Wet’suwet’en peoples have been living on the land and stymieing pipeline construction for over seven years. Nothing was or is fleeting about Oka, Wounded Knee, Alcatraz, Gustafson Lake, Elsipogtog, the Peace River Valley, Oak Flat, Klabona, Lelu Island, Mauna Kea, or Muskrat Falls. While these movements may appear to be interruptions of the normal progression of relations between settler states and Indigenous peoples, they are in fact continuations of hundreds of years of Indigenous resilience and resistance. What other structures of industrial expansion, of academic capital, and of knowledge production need interruption in order to remake our relations beyond extraction? I will leave this question to you. In the meantime, see you on the front lines. (Anne Spice, 2016)

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After Said’s essay was published, David Seals wrote to The Nation from Rapid City, S.D.:

As a “Native Indian” inside the illegal borders of the United States, I would like to thank you for your fair and excellent coverage of the similar racism practiced in this country toward those other brown and red people of Mesopotamia. Christopher Hitchens's “Minority Report” and Edward W. Said’s “Embargoed Literature” could easily have transposed Sioux Indians for Arabs.

I am an “Indian” writer in America, and I have had the same trouble getting my novels published as has Hanan al-Shaykh. After many eyars, and a bad Hollywood movie, my novel the Powwow Highway was very reluctantly brought out by the same Penguin Said praises for Publishing Gamal al-Ghitani and Adonis. That same Penguin then ignored the book and refused to publish another they had contracted for, saying, in the words of New American Library executive editor Michaela Hamilton, “it needs to be more accessible to white Americans.”

I realize this issue includes the usual marketplace censorship of commercially questionable literature, but it also involves the sheer hostility of Americans toward the slayers of Custer and pioneers. We are a constant reminder that the American heart is buried forever at Wounded Knee. Just thought I’d point out the similarity between the Cheyennes and the Palestinians.

Said responded to the letter: “David Seal’s experience with Penguin is, I agree, very discouraging. It should be said that even though Penguin did publish Ghitani and Adonis, it didn’t do anything to promote or advertise the books, so they just disappeared. Seals also has a point about white Americans not being able to deal with 'Native Indians': It’s a common characteristic of all settler/colonial societies.”

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In 1989, Robert Warrior, then a student at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, wrote:  

Is there a god, a spirit, who will hear us and stand with us in the Amazon, Osage County, and Wounded Knee? Is there a god, a spirit, able to move among the pain and anger of Nablus, Gaza, and Soweto? Perhaps. But we, the wretched of the earth, may be well advised this time not to listen to outsiders with their promises of liberation and deliverance. We will perhaps do better to look elsewhere for our vision of justice, peace, and political sanity—a vision through which we escape not only our oppressors, but our oppression as well. Maybe, for once, we will just have to listen to ourselves, leaving the gods of this continent’s real strangers to do battle among themselves.  

OF FASCISM AND CALIFORNIA (CAREY MCWILLIAMS, 1939)

Along the highway in Merced Country, California. (December 17, 2016)

An efficient espionage system is maintained by the Associated Farmers. In 1935, I inspected the “confidential” files of the organization in San Francisco. At that time, they had a card-index file on “dangerous radicals” containing approximately one thousand names, alphabetically arranged with front- and side-view photographs of each individual including notations of arrests, strike activities, affiliations and so forth. Each reference contained a number which referred to a corresponding identification record in the archives of the State Bureau of Criminal Identification. Set of this file have been distributed to over  hundred peace officers in the State and lists have been sent to members of the association. Local offices in the State and lists have been sent to members of the association. Local offices or branches of the Associated Farmer maintain elaborate records of a similar nature, including a “check-up” system whereby workers with a reputation for independence may be readily identified and rousted out of the locality. The State Bureau of Criminal Identification had its private investigators sleuthing for the Tagus Ranch in the San Joaquin Valley and it employed, at one time or another, the various stool pigeons upon whose testimony the Sacramento criminal-syndicalism prosecution was based.

In addition to its espionage activities, the Associated Farmers maintain a carefully organized propaganda department. Regular bulletins, heavily larded with “anti-Communist” information, are sent to the member; special articles are reprinted and distributed throughout the State; and a steady flow of statements and releases are supplied to the press. In recent years, the association has begun to dabble in a more ambitious type of propaganda. One of its spokesmen, Mr. John Phillips, a State Senator, recently visited Europe. Upon his return, Mr. Phillips published a series of articles in the California Cultivator (February 1 and 15, 1936), on his travels. One article was devoted to Mr. Philips’ impressions of the Nazis (he was in Nuremberg when the party was in session). Mr. Philips particularly noticed the new type of German citizenship—the Reichsburger—under which “you simply say that anybody who agrees with you is a citizen of the first class, and anybody who does not agree with you is a non-voting citizen.” His admiration for Hitler is boundless: “I would like to tell you how the personality of Hitler impressed me and how I feel that he has a greater personal appeal, a greater personal influence on his people than many of the nations realize.” “Hitler,” he said in a speech on January 18, 1938, “has done more for democracy than any man before him.” Some years ago,  Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor, Issued a statement repudiating a circular which the Associated Farmers had distributed in which they had attempted to out, by reference to a faked marriage license, that she was  Jewess. Throughout California in 1936 and 1937, the Associate Farmers sponsored and organized meetings for the Reverend Martin Luther Thomas, of Los Angeles, who heads a “Christian American Crusade,” and who is a notorious anti-Semite and Red-baiter. As a result of Mr. Thomas’ harangues, the authorities in Riverside County employed a special detective, at a salary of $1,800 a year, to spy on the public schools. Mr. Phillips, who is frequently teamed with the Rev. Mr. Thomas at anti-Communist meeting sponsored by the Associated Farmers, was, for a time, holding a county office in Riverside County, designated as “labor coordinator.” More recently the Associated Farmers have sponsored Samuel J. Hume, of the California Crusaders, who has spoken throughout the State inveighing against labor organization.

Shortly after its formation, the Associated Farmers launched a campaign, in the rural counties for the enactment of the anti-picketing and so-called “emergency-disaster” ordinances. Anti-Picketing ordinances have, as a consequence, been enacted in practically every rural county. The alleged justification for the “emergency-disaster” ordinances, which provide for a mobilization of all the community in case of a “major disaster,” was the earthquake which occurred in Southern California in March, 1933. Today practically every county in the State, and most of the cities and towns, have such ordinances in effect. There is nothing in the wording of most of these ordinances to prevent their use in case of a “strike,” which in the eyes of the farmers during harvest is certainly a “major disaster.” The ordinances provides, in elaborate detail, for the formation of a kind of “crisis,” or extra-legal governmental machinery, which is to come into existence, with broad powers, upon the declaration by the appropriate executive officer in the community that a state of emergency exists. The purpose back of the campaign for the enactment of these ordinances has been clearly indicated. For example, on December 18, 1936, the county counsel in Los Angeles was instructed to draft legislation which “would permit counties to spend funds for erecting concentration camps for us during major disasters.” Thus the governmental apparatus for a kind of constitutional Fascism actually exists in California today.

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On September 20, 1935, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration ordered the liquidation of the Federal Transient Service, which had, at one time, provided relief for 38,815 transients in California: 13.5 per cent of all transients in the country. With the abrupt discontinuance of Federal assistance, the local authorities became wildly hysterical. The methods by which they have ever since attempted to cope with the problem have been, to say the least, curious. The first step in this direction was the creation of the Los Angeles Committee on Indigent Alien Transients, headed by James E. Davis, Chief of Police. In flat disregard of constitutional provisions, this power-drunk functionary of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce proceeded to establish some sixteen border patrols staffed by the Los Angeles City Police, the patrols being located in counties hundred of miles removed from Los Angeles. Throughout November and December, 1935, and January, March and April, 1936, some 125 policemen stationed at these various points of entry stopped all cars that looked as though they might contain “unemployables” and turned them back. When a court action was brought in the United States District Court by the American Civil Liberties Union, to test the constitutionality of this procedure, the Chief of Police detailed the head of his celebrated “Intelligence Squad” to “work over” the plaintiff in whose name the action had been commenced. Not only was the plaintiff himself intimidated, but his wife and child were threatened and browbeaten by police officers (one of whom has since been convicted in Los Angeles of attempted murder); and, ultimately, the plaintiff was “induced” to drop the action. The patrol unquestionably checked the influx of refugees, but the effect of the blockade was to “back up” the refugees and temporarily delay their entry into California. Repercussions of the blockade were felt as far East as El Paso.

Excerpts from: Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field (1939)

#NOBAN — C.L.R. JAMES, 1953

C.L.R. James Papers; Box 24 Folder 33; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

The Department of Justice and its policies, not the aliens, are the chief source of the demoralizing regime on Ellis Island. It cannot even organize and give some sense of direction to its own American security officers. Its misunderstanding of the aliens themselves is absolute.

The whole of the world is represented on Ellis Island. Many sailors, but not only sailors; Germans, Italians, Latvians, Swedes, Filipinos, Malays, Chinese, Hindus, Pakistanis, West Indians, Englishmen, Australians, Danes, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Canadians, representatives of every Latin-American country. As I write each word, I see someone whom I knew. To the administration on Ellis Island and I presume, at 70 Columbus Avenue, these are just a body of isolated individuals who are in reality seeking charity, or a home in the United States which is a better place to live in than their backward or poverty stricken countries. Of all the blunders I encountered on Ellis Island this is undoubtedly the most colossal.

These men, taken as a whole, know the contemporary world and know it better than many world-famous foreign correspondents. They discuss among themselves their attitudes to the United States, their attitudes to World War III, to Russia, to totalitarianism, to democracy, to national independence. I have never heard or read in any newspaper such coldly realistic discussion as to the possibilities of war, and weighing of which side offered the greater advantages. They pass to one another political articles in the popular press, and they discuss and fill in from personal knowledge. With a devastating simplicity they sum up regimes. I have heard a man say in five minutes all that needed to be said about one of the most controversial regimes in the world today. He ended, “I know. I have lived and worked there.” Their consistently recurring view of the United States is worth recording. “America is all right if you have money.”

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Indo-China, the Malay States, Pakistan, Franco Spain, Yugoslavia, Europe yesterday, today and tomorrow, Asia today, Germany, East and West, I picked up, sometimes at second-hand, sometimes confused, sometimes contradictory but always authentic views. There was a Scandinavian who had traveled all over the world, spoke many languages and knew Europe and Europeans to his fingertips. I spent some days in his company. He spent his time alternately declaring with great emphasis that he didn’t care about anything any more, not a damn thing—it was too much for him—he was tired of it. And then he would immediately launch into such descriptions, reminiscences, analyses and forecasts of the European situation as I had never heard before. He wanted to, but he could not leave it alone.

This is my final impression. The meanest mariners, renegades and castaways of Melville’s day were objectively a new world. But they knew nothing. The symbolic mariners and renegades of Melville's book were isolatoes, federated by one keel, but only because they had been assembled by penetrating genius. These were federated by nothing. But they were looking for federation. I have heard a boy, a young oriental, say that he would fight in the war on either side—it didn’t matter to him. What he wanted was a good peace, no half-peace. This peace, however, he added almost as an afterthought, should include complete independence for his own little country.

This then is the crowning irony of the little cross-section of the whole world that is Ellis Island. That while the United States Department of Justice is grimly pursuing a venomous anti-alien policy, and in the course of so doing disrupting and demoralizing its own employees desperately trying to live up to their principles, the despised aliens, however fiercely nationalistic, are profoundly conscious of themselves as citizens of the world.

— C.L.R. James, “A Natural but Necessary Conclusion,” in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953)

BARBARA HARLOW (1948-2017), COMRADE-IN-ARMS

We’ve just lost Barbara Harlow. Born in that infamous year of 1948 in Cleveland, Ohio, Harlow was a professor at UT Austin since 1985. Before that she taught at the American University of Cairo (after her departure, and as a testament to her internationalism, Harlow was a founder of and frequent contributor to AUC's Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics). Harlow was a model scholar whose political commitment cannot be understated. Her translations and serious engagement with Arabic fiction and nonfiction—in particular the work of Ghassan Kanafani—remains critical. And her comparative prowess was unmatched. She moved between the literatures and histories of the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Latin America perennially and seemingly effortlessly. Her writing and editing at scholarly publications committed to critique and radical politics, like Middle East Report and Race & Class, means she wrote—besides her erudite books—many political interventions and a truly dizzying number of review essays. Indeed, Harlow’s reviewing practice exemplified what one of her most frequent interlocutors, Antonio Gramsci, prescribed:

Individually nobody can follow all the literature published on a group of topics or even on a single topic. . . . Just as those in power have a secretariat or a press office which keeps them informed daily or from time to time about everything published they need to know about, so a similar service will be provided for its public by a periodical. . . . Reviews should not be casual and occasional, but systematic; and they also need to be accompanied by retrospective “surveys” that “sum up” the most essential topics.

Harlow’s review essays were clear, generous, and instructive. Her books, Resistance Literature (1987), Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (1992), and After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing (1996) must be read and re-read. Written at a time when discussions of Palestinian literature were far rarer than they are now, Harlow placed the writings of Palestinians–not just their novels, but their poetry, memoirs, and political tracts—into a global conversation they were often excluded from.

Harlow’s critical method is instructive. In the preface to her book Barred, from which I excerpt at length below, she wrote:

In terms of discipline, this project derives from the traditions of literary criticism and from current schools of cultural theory. Political detention, however, engages a redefinition of the scholarly practices implied in the terms “discipline,” and it is such a redefinition, whed through the different but linked institutional imperatives of the academy and the prison, that I have attempted to encounter here… This procedure is a calculated and not disinterested one. The major figures in the book, its cast of characters as it were, are the prisoners, male and female, their associates, and the specific organizations, struggles, and movements in which they have participated and for which they have been detained. Their writing, the subject of this book, is not just “raw material,” but is itself an articulation of a critical perspective, one that I have attempted both to deploy and to demonstrate.     

In her obituary for Edward Said in 2003, Harlow noted the solidarity displayed in Said’s own obituaries for his friends Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. She quoted Ahmad who said that “we are in a much worse time than the Cold War.” “Dark times they were,” Harlow concluded, “Scoundrel times they are. But the comrades remained—must remain—in arms.”  Harlow’s solidarity with the Palestinian people, her commitment to the incarcerated, to the wretched of the earth from Ireland to South Africa to El Salvador, was deep and unwavering. Now, perhaps more than ever, Harlow must be remembered and her example followed.   

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Prison education, unlike much university instruction as professed in the Western academy, functions to undermine the very walls and premises that contain it. It raises the question of the extent to which an academic discourse functions to perpetuate disciplinary structures erected to maintain order and punish transgressions; it asks why scholarship so often “bantustanizes” the sociopolitical realities of the areas whose cultural production it appropriates. Programs in various ethnic and area studies and women’s studies, for example, which appeared in United States universities following the campus activism and political agitation in the 1960s, as Rosaura Sanchez points out, “not out of a state interest in a body of knowledge but out of interest in ensuring campus order and security.” The work of political prisoners, men and women, and even children, on a discursive level no less than in the political arena, presents a powerful challenge to such disciplining.

Area Studies programs and departments of national literatures have extracurricular analogues in the state bureaucracy that closes its internal borders as readily as it allow for a calculated permeability of external boundaries. On 29 October 1986, for example, the United States bureau of Prisons opened a multimillion dollar maximum security prison for women in Lexington, Kentucky. Designed to house sixteen inmates, for over a year the facility contained only two detainees, Alejandrina Torres, a Puerto Rican nationalists, and Susan Rosenberg, a revolutionary political activist from New York City, both confined under extremely brutal conditions criticize publicly by Amnesty International as constituting “cruel and unusual punishment.” Less than a year later, death squads from El Salvador extended their sphere of activity into the united States, when three Central American women were abducted from the streets of Los Angeles, tortured, and then returned to the streets badly beaten, as a “message” to their supporters. The lexington “high security unit” has since been closed by court order, in part in response to pressures such as Amnesty protest. The closure has been appealed by the United States government. Torres, convicted of seditious conspiracy, was transferred to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego. In the meantime, Susan Rosenberg with five codefendants is awaiting trial in Washington, D.C., on charges of conspiracy associated with a series of bombings in the capital in 1983 following the United States invasion of Grenada. The “resistance conspiracy trial” and its attempt to criminalize political activism in the United States will, according to Susie Day, “probably unearth in the Left profound questions about the nature of justice and criminality in our society.” The ultimate intended effect of such “messages,” however, whether from the United States government or form Salvadoran death squads, is to disenfranchise the political for the sake of the national patriotic, and reassert the dominant boundaries.

Most analyses of the modern prison system, even those that are critical, such as Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1979) and Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini’s The Prison and the Factory (1981), remain outside the walls of the prison and its officials. Foucault, for example, following his historical narrative of the transformation of the public spectacle of punishment into coercive and secretive model of the “power to punish,” discerns two images of discipline in the modern penal system:

At one extreme, the discipline blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come.

Massimo and Pavarini, in turn, locate the practices associated with such “images” in the rise of the bourgeois industrial state and thus assimilate the architecture, both political and ideological, of the modern prison to that of the factory. According to the two Italian researchers, the “penitentiary invention” is that of the

“prison as machine” capable of transforming, after close observation of the deviant phenomenon, … the violent, troublesome and impulsive criminal (real subject) into an inmate (ideal subject), into a disciplined subject, into a mechanical subject … [and assisting the] production of proletarians by the enforced training of prisoners in factory discipline.

Even such critiques of the prison system, however, too often can be subjected to the consent of that same prison system and its apparent insistence on a language of authority and objective responsibility that requires a complete compromise from the would-be researcher and attempts to usurp his/her own project. Thus, R. Theodore Davidson, who investigated social formations and networks among Chicano prisoner in San Quentin in the 1960s, introduced his study with an explanation of his own situation within the system: “Prison administrators realized the delicate nature of the information I would probably encounter if I were to accomplish my task, so it was agreed that I would not have to reveal any confidential information to the staff. The only exception would have been if I had learned that someone was going to be physically harmed or that the prisoners were going to destroy the prison in some manner.” This “only exception,” however, is twofold, and the requirements of the prison administration and the unitary language serve only to conceal concern for the stability of the prison itself (“destroy the prison in some manner”) under and ostensibly humanitarian sensitivity for the safety and well-being of the anonymous prisoners (“someone was going to be physically harmed”). The testimonies of prisoner betray another analysis, that of an engaged and partisan counterhegemonic cultural production.  

Excerpt from, Barbara Harlow, Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1992)