Third World? Which Third World? — Pierre Jalée (1963)

Revolution Africa, Latin America, Asia 1:7 (November 1963).

Although we may not agree with some of the author’s sweeping historical claims below, in a time of renewed academic interest in the history of the Third World and mainstream enthusiasm for its cognate “the Global South,'' strident critiques are useful as ever. Published in Jacques Vergès' great if short lived Parisian journal of tricontinental Marxism, Revolution Africa, Latin America, Asia Pierre Jalée’s 1963 essay below is characteristic of the moment and the magazine. Enthusiastic about Maoist China, deeply critical of Kruschev’s “revisionism,” and skeptical of Nehru’s non-alignment, Revolution published regular dispatches from those movements of national liberation still raging and acerbic criticism of imperialist thought and practice. Its editorial board would include Hamza Alavi, Hassan Diab (Samir Amin). Mohamed Babu, and Maulana Bhashani, as the historian Layli Uddin has noted. Siné drew many of the magazine’s brilliant cartoons. 

Despite being a prolific and widely published writer, very little has been written about Jalée himself. The pseudonym of Maurice Rue, a French communist closely involved with the nationalist movement in Morocco in the 1930s—and imprisoned for that activity—Jalée would go on to serve the independent Moroccan state’s finance ministry, before moving to France. His many books on the political economy of imperialism were published by Maspero and in English translations by the Monthly Review Press. Texts like The Pillage of the Third World, The Third World in World Economy, and How Capitalism Works, pepper the bibliographies of the 1960s and 70s. Pillage was among the 99 books removed from George Jackson’s prison cell after he was murdered in San Quentin. Jalée’s Moroccan career is detailed in a memoir, L'ancre dans l'avenir (Paris: Karthala, 1981). And the French conditions of his efforts are narrated in Christoph Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France, c. 1950–1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). But Jalée’s life and work deserves serious study.

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Third World? Which Third World? 

Although it first appeared only in 1956, the expression "Third World" has already had a brilliant career. Quickly entering the vocabulary of the economist and the journalist, it is known today even to the man on the street. Blossoming generously under the pens of capitalist technocrats and politicians, it nevertheless is not rare to find it also being used by Marxist theorists. The neo-colonialist and the neo-colonial use it. Even Frantz Fanon used it.

There is only a step to believing that this universality of use is explained by a clear, precise and indisputable meaning. However, let us not take that step until we have attempted to make an inventory of the term. 

For the French association which calls itself "Tiers Monde" (Third World), the problem is simple: there is an identity between the so-called countries of the "Third World" and the underdeveloped countries. But others have felt the need to try to be more precise. Jean Lacouture and Jean Baumier, in the preface to their book, Le Poids du Tiers Monde (Arthaud, Paris, 1962), try to explore the reality masked by these two familiar words. After referring to a kind of Third Estate or international Third Force, they suggest that the Third World might represent ex-colonial, underdeveloped countries, or, further yet, stand for the countries which refuse, if not socialism and capitalism, at least the socialist camp as well as the imperialist camp. The idea is put forward that the Third World might be made up of the nations which have benefited neither from the liberal capitalist and industrial revolution of the 19th century nor the socialist revolution of the 20th century and which seek their own form of revolution. Our two authors, after having been seduced by the definition "countries carrying out an inventory," finally decide on no single definition and leave the reader still unsatisfied.

The November 1962 issue of the French publication, Documents (La Revue des Deux Mondes, Paris), devoted to "Aid to the Third World," seems to go a bit further with less words, in so far as it denounces the confusion reigning about this "ready-made formula," a confusion which arises from the fact that the meaning of the term is essentially political, although it is usual to use it in an economic sense to designate all the underdeveloped countries.

To unmask a confused and even confusion-making term is already good but one should go further. For us — and although we have used this expression elsewhere — , we shall not wait to throw our pebble into the stream: there is no Third World. This expression is more than confused, it is a mystification.

Indeed, to call a group of countries without further definition the Third World is to say expressly that this group of countries belongs neither to the group of socialist countries nor to the group of capitalist countries. Objectively, such a group of countries does not exist, even if one wanted to make a faulty distinction between politics and economics.

The expression "Third World" can only have meaning by reference to the two other "worlds": the group of capitalist countries and the group of socialist countries or countries committed to socialism. It implies that the countries to which one applies the term belong to neither one nor the other, which is obviously false. But it is necessary to examine the question more closely.

A Third Force?

The expression "Third World," as has been said, dates from 1956. It could hardly be born or have much success before, because the Bandung Conference was held in 1955, and the equivocable nature of the expression depends upon the policy developed by the Afro-Asian countries after Bandung.

Indeed, the majority of these countries defined and claim to carry out an international policy which they qualify as "neutralist" or "non-aligned" or "non-committed," aimed at maintaining a certain independence in regard to the international policy of both of the two big blocs. Some persons even believed or let themselves be convinced that a third world force was coming into being.

But imperialism was sufficiently supple to tolerate youthful sins on the part of the newly independent countries, pardonable sins which consisted of affirming principles which in any case it would be difficult to oppose openly. The situation called for generous understanding of the countries obtaining their political emancipation. It was to let time and American aid do their work and to take action individually in concrete cases. The Congo was one of these, and it must be admitted that the non-committed countries did not cause many major worries for the imperialist camp on that occasion, the principal difficulty having arisen within the imperialist camp itself. In 1963, some twenty African States finally showed how docile they were by renouncing their demand that South Africa be expelled from the United Nations. They were left Portugal as a target, which embarrassed few persons, even in the West.

Hence, there is no third force either on a global scale or on that of various States. And this for the sole and sufficient reason that economics commands politics, and at present only two economic systems divide and dispute the world: capitalism and socialism. The so-called third ways are never more than a camouflage for the first, as Theodore Stibbe, in numbers 4 and 5 of the French review Partisans, and the Peking Review (in its issue of April 15, 1963—"Socialism and Nehru") effectively demonstrated in the case of India. The same is true for all the countries lumped together under the term "Third World," as well as for others. North Vietnam and Senegal are both underdeveloped countries; but the former belongs from every angle to the group of socialist countries, the second to the group of capitalist countries. There is no other problem, no other basic choice, and Jean Lacouture and Jean Baumier put forward an already exposed untruth knowingly a mystification, when they claim that "the debate between capitalism and socialism appears, from many aspects, to be outdated, at least in the Third World." Have they cited a single country that has escaped the dilemma?

The Storm Centres

But, no doubt we shall be asked, you are not going to place on the same footing, although classifying them in the same world, the United States, which has an annual per capita revenue of $2,400 and directs (not without difficulty) the politics of half the planet, and Morocco, whose national per capita revenue does not exceed $130? — Certainly, there can be no question of mixing together the great powers and the small, technically backward countries, the dominating and dominated economies. But the fact that imperialism has an essential internal contradiction between exploiting and exploited countries does not remove any of its unity. This unity is indeed the fruit of this contradiction, without which imperialism would not be imperialism. And the fact that the United States, Britain, France and several other countries exploit for the profit of their monopolist capital the economy of twenty countries of Africa and, in order to do this, guide or control the policy of those countries, not only does not remove the fact that both are basically part of imperialism, but creates that fact. On the other hand, although Morocco and Cuba have in common numerous characteristics that greatly distinguish them from the United States and France, it is nevertheless true that there is a primordial difference between them. One has maintained its ties with imperialism, the other has broken them. The former is politically and economically part of one group of coun- tries, the second part of another group. There is no third indeed, the most certain consequence of the expression "Third World" is to conceal that fact and confuse people. group. And, indeed, the most certain consequence of the expression “Third World” is to conceal that fact and confuse people. 

Every coin has two faces; let us recognize, nevertheless, that the fact of grouping together the underdeveloped countries dominated by imperialism under a special term, implies that they constitute a special zone within the imperialist camp. This is almost a preliminary hommage to an emancipation that is felt to be inevitable and relatively near. The "Third World," in its current use, means the underlings of imperialism. But these underlings are more or less aware of that and aspire with greater or lesser confusion to be that no longer. "Black Africa has had a bad start," some say, while others say it has not started off at all. In any case, it is the question of its departure, or new departure, that is in the air.

The countries given the misleading name of "Third World" are those at present where plots are multiplying against leaders committed to imperial- ism. Whether these plots are real or not, exaggerated or minimized, whether they do not often appear to have an immediate positive aspect, it is none the less true that plots in general do not flourish in the countries where the population is satisfied with its fate and the regime. They imply, if not popular support for the plots, at least a certain receptivity among the masses. Objectively, the gap does not cease to widen, despite all the "aid," between the economic level of the dominated underdeveloped countries and that of the countries that exploit them. And the weak national bourgeoisies in power in the former submit more and more to imperialism, sinking into nepotism and an insulting luxury amidst poverty. These countries in a state of ferment represent without a doubt the point of weakest resistance of the imperialist front. Some of them have already reached the stage of open struggle. And the Chinese Communists are right in seeing in them "the storm centres." "The various types of contradictions in the contemporary world are concentrated in the vast areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America; these are the most vulnerable areas under imperialist rule and the storm-centres of world revolution dealing direct blows to imperialism." (A Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, June 14, 1963.)

The Basic Choice

Hence there is no Third World, but there are storm centres. The revolutionary can ask himself under which conditions will these areas be that of the good storm.

The basic conditions were defined impeccably in a speech of April 13, 1963 by Le-Duan, secretary-general of the Lao-Dong Party of North Vietnam: "The immediate task of the peoples of these nations must be that of foiling and breaking imperialism's attempts at domination. For independent nations, this task is reduced to a choice between two roads: the non-capitalist road of development or the capitalist road of development." This is an absolute condemnation of any so-called third road. One does not compromise with imperialism, one does not limit it or temper it: one breaks with it or one submits. 

If this is the golden rule for the countries directly concerned, it is also the rule that guides the action of the socialist countries and the proletarians of the developed capitalist countries in regard to the emancipation of the underdeveloped countries. And it is difficult to explain why certain leaders of Western Communist parties are maintaining that States with different social structures (capitalist and socialist) can, through mutual cooperation, intervene jointly for the progress of the underdeveloped regions. This is to misunderstand the very essence of imperialism, and one can understand why the Peking People's Daily, in December 1962, spoke out against the principle of "joint intervention," recalling that "the policy of imperialism in regard to the underdeveloped countries... can only be a policy of colonialist pillage: it can never be a policy concerned with the progress of the underdeveloped countries." The organ of the Chinese Communist Party stressed that it was obvious that the socialist countries must aid the peoples of the underdeveloped countries, first to conquer independence, then to develop their national economy. "But," it added, "the socialist countries must not second the colonialist policy of the imperialists, still less intervene jointly at their side in the underdeveloped areas. Whoever acted in that fashion would betray proletarian internationalism and serve the interests of imperialism and colonialism."

Hence, the fundamental choice between the socialist road and the capitalist road, and non-collaboration with imperialism.

But a primordial question of strategy is raised for the socialist countries and the world revolutionary movement: that of the importance of the aid to be given to the peoples of the storm centres. The Leninist theory that the front of imperialism is not uniformly strong is well known, and the clashes occur at the weakest points, with the best chances of success for the anti-imperialist forces. If, therefore, the "underlings of imperialism" are also its point of least resistance, if in these countries the storm threatens here and already rages there, it is obvious that the principal effort of the world revolutionary movement must be made in these areas in order to open a wide breech in the enemy front, which may determine the outcome of

the struggle. 

Thus, the letter of June 14 of the Chinese Communist Party, after recalling that the national revolutionary movement of the areas of the storm centre and the socialist revolutionary movement in the world are the two great historical tendencies of our epoch, adds: "In a sense, therefore, the whole cause of the international proletarian revolution hinges on the outcome of the revolutionary struggles of the people of these areas, who constitute the overwhelming majority of the world's population." 

The terminology should be noted: "revolutionary struggle," "national revolutionary movement" of the peoples of the areas concerned. Lenin himself already warned against the emancipation movements of a non-revolutionary character which sought to disarm the workers before the bourgeoisie. He stressed the necessity of fighting against "reactionary and feudal elements," of "giving the peasant movement the most revolutionary character," of fighting "against the tendency to dress with the colours of communism the currents of bourgeois democratic liberation of the backward countries" and of supporting these currents only on condition that the elements of the future proletarian parties were "grouped and educated in the spirit of their particular tasks, tasks of struggle against the bourgeois democratic movements of their own nation"... etc. (On the National and Colonial Questions, June 1920). The Chinese Communist Party says the same thing in its letter of June 14, when it declares that the proletarian party of the oppressed peoples "supports progressive nationalism and opposes reactionary nationalism. It must always draw a clear line of demarcation between itself and bourgeois nationalism, to which it must never fall captive."

A Single Struggle in a Single World

If we have directed our attacks against the expression "Third World," it should be understood that it was not to begin a quarrel of linguists. To accept too easily the term, to introduce it in ordinary language, means to introduce insidiously the idea that the group of countries about which we have spoken constitute a particular entity, a world in themselves, in regards to which the theories and reasoning applied to the group of capitalist coun- tries and to the group of socialist countries as well as their relationship, should be revised, adapted, and more or less adulterated. Unconsciously, this is attacking the universality of Marxist doctrine and the unity of the revolutionary struggle on a world scale. The revolutionary struggles through- out the world only form a whole because the strategy of the international communist movement must start from the overall phenomenon, must study each country and its internal class forces, not as isolated entities, but rather by the specific weight that they have at various moments in the class

struggle, within a national and international proletariat. 

A single theory, a single struggle, in a single world, whose present division must not be made permanent, but overcome.

Pierre JALÉE.

Pierre Jalee, “Third World? Which Third World?” Revolution Africa, Latin America, Asia 1:7 (November 1963),  3-9.

Stuart Hall reviews George Lamming's Pleasures of Exile (1960)

Caliban in exile 

The Pleasure of Exile 

George Lamming (Michael Joseph, 21s). 

Mr. George Lamming is always just ahead. He is not only the most sensitive and dangerous of the West Indian novelists. He is also one of its most formidable and elusive intellects. 

No West Indian writer would put pen to paper to describe the discovery of his own “Negro-ness” (the French word, negritude, is better, but there is, significantly, no English equivalent) without first having to write his way round Lamming’s first novel, In The Castle Of My Skin. 

And now here he is with the book every other exile would have written first. It is a bloody frustrating experience. 

Mr. Lamming moves mostly indirections and allusions. These are sketches of exile, loosely composed in no chronological order, marked off by comments, some of which are deep and moving, some of which are a bit pretentious and innocent. The structure, if there is one, is provided by his developing awareness of the complex relationship between the colonial artist and the metropolitan culture: that is, the history of Lamming’s own sensibility. 

A more arbitrary—and less successful—framework is provided by his use of the figures of Prospero and Caliban from Shakespeare’s Tempest—a typical use of poetry to retell the story of colonial enslavement and liberation. 

Prospero sands for “England abroad”—not the England of wigs and plume-hatted Governors—but the whole process of cultural imperialism which has cut the West Indies off from a meaningful relationship with its African past. Caliban, the unspeakable monster who made a pass at the magician's daughter, the black outcast, is the West Indian writer. 

The power of Prospero over this slave is wielded, not by the tyranny of the colonial police, but by the terrible magic of the Gift of Language. Mr. Lamming is Caliban himself, come home at last from over the water, to break the wand. Caliban has the gift of tongues. When he recites, even the ICA quivers. The central chapter of the book is called, “Caliban Orders History.” It is an appropriately ominous note. 

But then, the solicitous social worker asks politely, what the hell is Mr. Lamming doing here at all? Why is the flower of Caribbean culture huddled in some frigid bed-sitter in London, W.11? In the first third of his book, with many twists and asides, Mr. Lamming sets out to answer that question. Caliban must capture the citadel of Prospero itself before he can be really free. 

Mr. Lamming is only working his way through what he hopes is the last twist of the dialectic: that terrible double relationship which makes the West Indian hate and love English culture in about equal portions. 

Behind him lies, not the sunny scenarios of the Caribbean travelogue, but a culture and society bearing upon its face the deep impression of Prospero’s long regime: a culture at once “liberated and Victorian, revering “the great masters of English poetry” and yet deeply philistine, profoundly proletarian in composition and yet rigidly middle-class in character—a “new nation” still as old as colonialism and slavery itself: free—yet still “in chains.” 

It is not until he stands in the ghastly amphitheatre of Paddington Station and asks himself the question. “Boy, what the hell you doin’ here any-at-all”? that the whole thing makes sense. “The West Indian writer hungers for nourishment from a soil which he (as an ordinary citizen) could not at present endure.” 

Mr. Lamming might be of the last generation of writers who have to do it this way: but that depends upon what sort of place “that acre of ground in the New World which keeps growing echoes in my head” turns out to be. 

The long rambling sections—scenes, sketches, bits of dialogue and reminiscence—are, properly speaking, the first literary commentary of its kind to be written by a West Indian. 

The ICA, the catacombs of the BBC’s Colonial Service, Notting Hill, David Pitts campaign in Hampstead, encounters with the English passim, are only a few of the incidents which provoke his asides. The approach here is sometimes too fragmentary, but almost all his comments illuminate one or other of the predicaments of the colonial sensibility in exile. 

The book turns, however, around a long and rather over-literary analysis of The Tempest and then, for two or three long chapters, gathers—not pace, of which there is too much—but depth. These are the chapters in which Lamming recounts the magnificent story of Toussaint L’Overture, the Haitian revolutionary, and via the book, Black Jacobins, engages the most formidable political intellect the West Indies had produced—C.L.R. James. 

These chapters lend a kind of oblique historical perspective to the book, and the absence of this elsewhere is a noticeable weakness. 

C.L.R. James and his protege, Eric Williams, are the political symbols of Lamming’s developing sensibility, and though, elsewhere, he handles the politics of post-colonial countries with a marked naivety, in the analysis of James’s development, and his account of Eric Williams’s “university in the square” in Trinidad, Lamming is on native ground. 

In the final section, Lamming describes his first visit to Africa. Here the poignancy and dilemma of permanent exile is complete. For Africa is, to him, a wonderful experience, and he is deeply bitten by the “freedom feeling” but he is a traveller in a foreign country. 

So that, with an appropriateness which Lamming himself can hardly yet see, the last chapter is the real beginning–himself and Sam Selvon, the first of the “last” emigrants arriving at Waterloo. 

Caliban in exile is a pretty resourceful bird. Mr. Lamming—who is not one to miss a final irony—calls the chapter “Journey to an Exception.” 

Stuart Hall 

Tribune (London), August 26, 1960, p. 11.

Law and Order — Edward Said

Rudy Giuliani by Amiri Baraka (via Howard Rambsy II)

During the past year, New York City has been racked by three major crises involving both the police department and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a very right-wing man of extreme as well as volubly expressed views that have frequently landed him in serious trouble with the people he was elected to serve. In the first instance, a Haitian black man, Abner Louima, was apprehended by policemen in Brooklyn, taken to the station for interrogation, and then badly beaten, sodomised with a bottle and subsequently hospitalised with several broken bones, including his jaw. At the criminal trial, the self-confessed police perpetrator of Louima's injuries, one Justin Volpe, was sentenced to thirty years, while his three accomplices were found guilty of obstruction of justice at a later civil trial. The second case was the shooting of an unarmed Guinean, Amadou Diallo, by white policemen who fired 41 bullets at him (of which 19 found their mark) because they said they thought he was armed. They were acquitted, to the whole city's astonishment. The third and in a sense the most inflammatory, thanks to Giuliani's support for the policemen involved, concerned the killing of an unarmed 21-year-old black, Patrick Dorisman, who was shot at his doorstep for no evident reason. Without justification, the mayor had Dorisman's police record -- the young man had been arrested and acquitted for assault and possession of marijuana -- released to the press, as if to justify the man's shooting, even though it was perfectly obvious that the white policemen who did the shooting could have had no prior knowledge of Dorisman's record.

The troubling theme in all three killings is not only that they involved blacks being shot by white policemen, but that Giuliani's sympathies seemed mostly to be for his officers rather than for their victims. In a racially divided society such as this, it is noteworthy that Giuliani's political reputation has been staked from the beginning of his tenure on the fact that New York's image had been that it was a violent, dangerous place (largely because it was known to contain a large non-white population of essentially poor people), an image which his administration has totally changed. It is certainly true that New York has now become one of the safest cities in the country: Giuliani has increased the police budget, he has put thousands more police on the streets and, most significantly, he has promoted harsh measures against the city's undesirables, i.e., the poor, minorities, the homeless, etc. As a result, it has been assumed that anyone not white and middle-class must fear for his or her safety, since the police have been encouraged to arrest or otherwise detain "suspicious" individuals with relative confidence that they will be rewarded rather than punished for their actions. Part of this strategy has been to put white policemen rather provocatively on the streets of Harlem, as if to say to the inhabitants of that section "here we are, whether you like it or not." The Diallo case in particular aroused the black community's ire; and the Dorisman killing, given Giuliani's egregious proclamations in support of the man's execution so to speak, fanned the flames of racial war.

Nor has New York been alone in the matter of police brutality. In Los Angeles, another huge city with a considerable minority population, policemen in the Ramparts area have drawn attention to their brutal methods, not only because of how violent they have been, but also because the media has revealed that in addition to its bullying the police has also engaged in drug-selling and extortion in the supposed discharge of law and order. The American jail system is therefore bursting with great numbers of unjustly persecuted blacks whose "crimes" are dubiously prosecuted by policemen who claim that they are acting on behalf of society to protect the majority from an already down-trodden and long-suffering minority.

Every government allows itself the prerogative of a monopoly on coercion, except that in the United States there is a constitutionally protected right for citizens to bear arms in their own defence. This is why the debate on possession of guns -- which is higher per capita than any place on earth -- is intense, and why also the lurid incidents in which schoolchildren kill each other are so terrifyingly frequent. For a country that preaches against violence and "terrorism" all over the world to be more violent than any other is deeply contradictory. And for elected officials like Giuliani to boast that they are eliminating crime by inciting the police to more, rather than less, violence is a terrible thing. The fact is that ever since the Nixon years the phrase "law and order" has acquired the status of a right-wing slogan. It first appeared during the Chicago Democratic Party convention in 1968, when the riots associated with Vietnam protest were brutally crushed by the Chicago police acting on the principle of law and order. Since that time dissent, debate and protest -- as in Seattle during the November 1999 riots against the World Trade Organisation -- have been opposed by the forces of law and order, as has agitation on behalf of integration, abortion rights, and anti-war protest. The idea is that whatever the government does carries with it the authority of rectitude, so that even abuses such as the killing of unarmed black men can be sanctimoniously ascribed to maintaining law and order.

In the American context, therefore, "law and order" has to do with an interpretation of law and order that favours the strong, the wealthy, the conservative currents in society, whether those happen to be in office or not. This is perfectly evident during debates while the presidential election campaign is in course: George Bush Jr is the law and order candidate, Al Gore is not. The notion is at bottom that the police is there to protect vested interests in the society and to make sure that social change occurs very slowly, if at all. This is why struggling minorities in particular associate the police with the blocking of their march towards equality and economic advancement.

In non-democratic societies such as those in much of the Third World, the police is also associated with the notion of law and order, except that law and order is a phrase implying the defence of the government, which would otherwise fall were it not for its battalions of policemen, republican guards, presidential security and so on. This is very much the case in the Arab world where as long as I can remember the police -- except for the lowly traffic policeman -- is immediately identified in the popular mind with interrogation, torture, unjust detention, surveillance, spying and cruelty. Think of the fear struck in one's mind as one faces a security official at the airport: this is no bureaucratic experience but rather a confrontation with the regime itself. It is highly significant that in most Arab countries the principal symbol of ruthless efficiency is not the tax collector or the legal system, but the security apparatus. Who has the most up-to-date cars, telephones, arms, and who is the best-dressed, the most spoiled and pampered? It is always the security teams whose main job is to guarantee the ruler's life, his regime and its interests, regardless of whether those happen to coincide with the interests of the population or not. There is no appeal for the average individual if he or she is picked up and taken to jail for "questioning." The whole idea imparted to citizens of so many of our "democratic" or "revolutionary" republics (and certainly of the monarchies) is that the police is there to strike fear in everyone in order to deter attempts against the regimes, rather than to protect the interests of a favoured segment of the population. But whereas in a democracy it is possible to change the administration and its methods through election, in our case we have no such option.

The result has been that terror has replaced the idea of law and order, terror that can be visited on the wayward or inattentive citizen. Armies, by the same token, are not necessarily there to fight against the enemy (despite the vast amounts spent on munitions, air forces, and heavy, mostly unusable artillery) but rather to confront the population should it entertain plans for democratic change, and of course to provide commission agents with handsome profits from arms sales. In the end, it is sadly the case that an objective alliance has grown to connect many non-Western security forces with those of the United States, where paradoxically the same distorted situation does not in fact obtain, and the police is subject to the law as well as citizens' review boards, elections, and so on.

The key to police brutality wherever it occurs is citizenship, the notion that all citizens of a society, including the police and security forces, are entitled to the same privileges and obligations subject to constant revision and re-interpretation. Political discourse in the Arab world has been so wrapped up in matters of security having to do with outside enemies (Israel, imperialism, etc.) that no attention has been given to the lamentable absence of real democratic processes inside our societies. Everything in those societies has suffered as a result, from education, to the legal system, to intellectual culture, to civil and political institutions. As every day goes by the situation worsens and for reasons that should make each of us profoundly ashamed the Arab world is the only part of the globe to appear as if it existed outside time and space in the ordinary sense. I said in an earlier article here, Godot will not come and it is no use waiting for a saviour. The problem of law and order, like all other problems, is one of our own making, and its only solution must be ours as well.

Edward Said, "Law and Order," Al-Ahram Weekly (6 – 12 April, 2000). Archived here.

Aijaz Ahmad (1941 – 2022)

A young Aijaz. 

Known better for his interventions in literary theory and his translations of Ghalib, in the late 1960s, Aijaz Ahmad was an instructor in (and, briefly, the director of) CUNY's storied and sometimes embattled SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) Program, alongside Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, June Jordan and other radicals.

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Boston: March 28th. After living in America for more than two years I came into this city for the first time, expecting the lethargy, the chaos, the narrow streets, and the sort of stringent despair, the old-fashioned endurance I have known in other old cities: Delhi, Lahore, Lucknow. But what I find is a confrontation of ages: the new building over the old, and not building so well: the whole city is torn up, ripped apart. In the shadow of an insurance tower which is the pride of new Boston and looms over the old like a monstrous dinosaur, the hotel is antiseptic, labyrinthine, packed with university professors who, over the next couple of days, will dissect and counter dissect Asia like a frog; it is made of plastic, neons and concrete; the air-conditioned, crowded, ventilated, sound-proofed halls are so clean I am quite sure no one can catch a virus there, or find real water to drink. The paper I am to read is part of what I am told are celebrations of Ghalib' s centenary within this huge conference. A ceremony within a larger, uninspired, career-oriented ceremony of scholarship. Professors clean-cut like boy scouts. 

 

I am apprehensive. Not so much about the fate of my own paper as about what these celebrations, to be stretched over the next year and a half, may portend for Urdu language and literature. In a macabre moment of doubt typical of a foreigner, I wonder: is the ghazal, like the haiku, also fated to be a favourite form of poetry among midwestern housewives? 

 

I marvel at the twenty minutes during which my voice manages to remain steady as I drone on about the art of translation, about Ghalib, about the hunger I found among American poets to

meet a fellow-creature like Ghalib. As I sink back into my chair with relative fatigue and a taste of ashes in my mouth, the professorial onslaught begins. Of all varieties: American, Indian, German, male and female. The observation which has enraged them so much is, to my mind, rather a simple one: “Poetry is meant, first, for the reader who cares for poetry; second, for the poet who practices the craft; and, only lastly, for the scholar.” Immediately a cry is raised: "The

scholars have to defend themselves.” 

 

No one talks about poetry, or Ghalib, or what poetry means to the age, what poetry means to other poets. They talk about credentials, about academic positions and foreign tours, about the intricacies of grammar. I stop listening, and think, instead, of the role of the contemporary university in our lives, of my students in New York who are risking their careers even at this moment in protesting against an educational system they find oppressive and obsolete, of Black students across America who are trying to deal with history, which is to say their own lives. I think in particular of a student, again Black, who told me that he thought ‘The Rainbow’ was a political novel because it taught him how to treat other human beings. Love, politics, or literature, it comes to the same thing: poetry happens wherever men suffer and posit their humanity against their suffering. Viet Nam, Harlem, the Delhi of 1857. LeRoi and Ghalib. You hold out your hand and you tell another person what you are going through: that is the final poem. Poem of reality, as Stevens might have said. And Paul Goodman: poets write poetry in

order to survive.

 

As the shrill tirade drones to an end, my mind is beginning to clear again and I return to Ghalib.

— Aijaz Ahmad (1969)

Empire as a Way of Life (C.L.R. James, 1933)

Some nineteenth-century governors of Trinidad, John or Arthur or some such.
All them served the British elsewhere in Africa or Asia before or after their West Indian careers. 

Into this community comes the Englishman to govern, fortified (sometimes) by university degrees; and of late years by a wide experience in dealing with primitive peoples in Africa. 

His antecedents have not been helpful. Bourgeois at home, he has found himself after a few weeks at sea suddenly exalted into membership of a ruling class. Empire to him and most of his type, formerly but a word, becomes on his advent to the colonies a phrase charged with responsibilities, but bearing in its train the most delightful privileges, beneficial to his material well-being and flattering to his pride. Being an Englishman and accustomed to think well of himself, in this new position he soon develops a powerful conviction of his own importance in the scheme of things and it does not take him long to convince himself not only that he can do his work well—which to do him justice, he quite often does— but that for many generations to come none but he and his type can ever hope to do the work they are doing. 

On his arrival in the West Indies he experiences a shock. Here is a thoroughly civilised community, wearing the same clothes that he does, speaking no other language but his own, with its best men as good as, and only too often, better than himself. What is the effect on the colonial Englishman when he recognises, as he has to recognise, the quality of those over whom he is placed in authority? Men have to justify themselves, and he falls heavily back on the “ability of the Anglo- Saxon to govern,” “the trusteeship of the mother country until such time” (always in the distant future) “as these colonies can stand by themselves,” etc., etc. He owes his place to a system, and the system thereby becomes sacred. Blackstone did not worship the corrupt pre- Reform constitution as the Colonial Office official worships the system of Crown Colony Government. 

“Patriotism,” says Johnson, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” It is the first resort of the colonial Englishman. How he leaps to attention at the first bars of “God Save the King”! Empire Day, King’s Birthday, days not so much neglected in England as ignored, give to his thirsty spirit an opportunity to sing the praises of the British Empire and of England, his own country, as its centre. Never does he seem to remember that the native place of the majority of those to whom he addresses his wearisome panegyrics is not England, but the colony in which they were born, in which they live, and in which they will in all probability die. 

This excessive and vocal patriotism in the colonial Englishman is but the natural smoke of intensified fires burning within. That snobbishness which is so marked a characteristic of the Englishman at home, in the colonies develops into a morbid desire for the respect and homage of those over whom he rules. Uneasily conscious of the moral insecurity of his position, he is further handicapped by finding himself an aristocrat without having been trained as one. His nose for what he considers derogatory to his dignity becomes keener than a bloodhound’s, which leads him into the most frightful solecisms.

In Grenada in 1931 there was a very orderly demonstration by all classes of the community against a decision of the Governor. One man who with his family had been invited to Government House for some social function took part in it. The Governor cancelled the invitation, but informed him that the cancellation did not apply to his wife and daughter who could come if they wanted to. 

It is not surprising that the famous English tolerance leaves him almost entirely. At home he was distinguished for the liberality and freedom of his views. Hampden, Chatham, Dunning and Fox, Magna Carta and Bill of Rights, these are the persons and things (however misconceived) which Englishmen, undemonstrative as they are, write and speak of with a subdued but conscious pride. It is no accident, the Whig tradition in English historical writing. But in the colonies any man who speaks for his country, any man who dares to question the authority of those who rule over him, any man who tries to do for his own people what Englishmen are so proud that other Englishmen have done for theirs, immediately becomes in the eyes of the colonial Englishman a dangerous person, a wild revolutionary, a man with no respect for law and order, a self-seeker actuated by the lowest motives, a reptile to be crushed at the first opportunity. What at home is the greatest virtue becomes in the colonies the greatest crime. 

The colonial Englishman it is fair to say retains some of the admirable characteristics which distinguish his race at home, but he is in a false position. Each succeeding year sees local men pressing him on every side, men whom he knows are under no illusions as to why he holds the places he does. Pressure reduces him to dodging and shifting. Thus it is that even of that honesty which is so well-recognised a characteristic of the English people,— but I shall let an Englishman speak: “It is difficult,” says Mr. Somervell, the historian, “for white races to preserve their moral standards in their dealings with races they regard as inferior.” Should Englishmen of fine sensibility stray into the Colonial Service they find themselves drawn inevitably into the circle of their colleagues and soon discover that for them to do otherwise than the Romans would be equivalent to joining a body of outsiders against their own. Thus it is that in the colonies, to quote an English official in the West Indies, “such large and intelligent classes of Englishmen come to have opinions so diff erent from those for which the nation has ever been renowned at home.”

C.L.R. James, The Case for West-Indian Self Government (London: Hogarth Press, 1932), 10-12. PDF.

Disaster Areas

            

Above Vietnam

            So area studies has been a disaster area in many ways. 

— Eqbal Ahmad, "Knowledge, Place, and Power: A Critique of Globalization,” in Ali Mirsepassi, Amrita Basu and Frederick Weaver eds. Localizing Knowledge Ìn a Globalizing World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003). 

"Bill Brown of Boston," West Africa, no. 1929, February 13, 1954, p. 125; no. 1930, February 20, 1954, p. 166. The anonymous "American Correspondent" of this biographical article notes that Dr. Brown lectured at Howard University. During the war he entered the State Department where he eventually succeeded Ralph Bunche as chief of the African Section of the Office of Strategic Affairs. He later headed the African Research Branch of the State Department. Brown left the Department of State in 1953 when the Ford Foundation offered him an appointment as consultant, involving a study trip to Europe and Africa. Upon his return from Africa, he accepted the post at Boston University. The Program at the start was entirely supported by Boston University, "but it is hoped that they will be supplemented by foundation grants." The Ford Foundation in November, 1954, made a substantial grant to the Program. One of the Program's faculty members is already engaged in a study of African students in the United States under the auspices of the Program and with partial financial support from the Twentieth Century Fund. American Sociological Review, XIX, 1954, p. 604. "The Anonymous Correspondent'' adds the following: "It is somewhat surprising to see in a sedate street in Boston, a pleasant New England (U. S. A.) town, an office housing an 'African Research and Studies Program'' Vaguely one feels that there can be little connection with far off Africa. But America is very conscious of her lack of knowledge of other continents. Her sudden emergence as the leading world power made her realize this and everywhere there are springing up groups concerned with areas very remote, both culturally and geographically, from America. So Boston University decided to establish an African Research and Study Program...." This "little connection with far off Africa" goes back, of course, a long way, to colonial times and the slave trade. This basis of New England colonial development has been amply documented. Less known, however, is the direct relationship of New England not only to the slave trade encompassing primarily West Africa, but also that of commercial relations with East Africa. To this day the dining room of the main hotel in Salem is called the "Zanzibar Room."

— Jerome S. Rauch, "Area Institute Programs and African Studies,” The Journal of Negro Education, 1955 p. 418-419, note 49. 

The late Jerome Rauch’s experiences during the 1950s illustrate the sort of troubles that befell anthropologists who critiqued disciplinary connections to the national security state. Rauch’s experiences are worth recounting, first, to acknowledge that there are many more victims of McCarthyism than could ever be established through a search of archives or record systems and, second, to stress how the fears of McCarthyism repressed the development of specific voices.

In the late 1940s Rauch began studying anthropology at Columbia University where he undertook fieldwork in the Mortlock Islands (aaanb 1947 1[2]:16). Rauch took graduate courses with Kardiner, Strong, Benedict,Wagley, Weltfish, and Steward. He was active in the Columbia chapter of the American Veterans Committee, the Henry Wallace campaign, and the campus Marxist Club (Julie Rauch to Price 7/7/01). Things went well for Rauch until 1955 when he published an essay in the Journal of Negro Education, titled ‘‘Area Institute Programs and African Studies.’’ This article developed a sophisticated, radical critique of the social sciences’ ties with governmental agencies. Rauch critically analyzed how increased funding for area study centers caused these centers to think in specific ways and to ask questions with applications to the military and diplomatic interests of the Cold War. With frankness and detail Rauch argued that relationships between funding patrons and client anthropologists ‘‘transformed academic research into applied science, and reconfigured social research into ideology’’ (Rauch to Price 2/22/01). Rauch observed that there was a ‘‘configuration of government and business interest[s]’’ that could be seen in the mixture of governmental policy agencies (e.g., State Department, Foreign Service Institute, etc.), intelligence agencies (e.g., Office of Intelligence Research, Office of Naval Intelligence, etc.), military (e.g., National War College, U.S. Air Force, etc.), private foundations (e.g.,Viking Fund, Rockefeller Foundation, etc.), and private industry (e.g., Standard Oil, etc.) directing research funding opportunities and research agendas for anthropology (Rauch 1955:415–16).

Rauch directly experienced negative consequences for his analysis of the ‘‘subordination of area research to government and business policy’’ (1955: 415). After publishing this critique, Rauch was given a Cold War cold shoulder by many in Columbia’s anthropology department. Decades later he recalled that after publishing his impolite study he was taken aside by ‘‘Julian Steward, [who] told me that I was unemployable, and trying to face reality, I enrolled in library school’’ (Rauch to Price 12/13/00). 

Rauch was not bitter about this unwanted career change. He lived a productive life outside of anthropology working with W. E. B. Du Bois on the Council on African American Affairs, researching the history of the Caribbean slave trade, assisting the Maryland Legislative Black Caucus, and working as an applications programmer at the Oncology Institute of Johns Hopkins Hospital (Rauch to Price 12/13/00). But the culling of Rauch from anthropology not only curtailed the development of his line of critical research, it limited the audience who would encounter his critique and it sent a message to other anthropologists that such frank analyses could detrimentally affect one’s career.

David H. Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham: Duke, 2004), 346-347.

… the Ford Foundation, in close consultation with the CIA, helped to shape postwar area studies and important collaborative research in modernization studies and comparative politics that were later mediated through well known Social Science Research Council projects (ones that were required reading when I was a graduate student in the late 1960s).  According to Christopher Simpson's study of declassified materials, however, this interweaving of foundations, universities, and state agencies (mainly in intelligence and the military) extended to the social sciences as a whole: "For years, government money .. . not always publicly acknowledged as such—made up more than 75 per cent of the annual budgets of institutions such as Paul Lazarsfeld's Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, Hadley Cantril's Institute for International Social Programs at Princeton, Ithiel de Sola Pool's CENIS [the Center for International Studies, earlier known as CIS] program at MIT, and others." Official sources in 1952 reported that "fully 96 per cent of all reported [government] funding for social sciences at that time was drawn from the U.S. military." My own work in postwar U.S. archives over the past two decades has taught me how many books central to the political science profession in the 1950s and 1960s emerged first as internal classified government studies. 

Bruce Cumings, “Boundary Displacement: Area studies and International Studies During and After the Cold War,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29 (1997), 15.

Above Iraq

Such a shifting in the focus of history can only be regarded as a long process. It would require an intensive effort for making available to the historian the type of historical information needed for these studies: literary sources, manuscripts and documents (many of them still buried in remote libraries), the study of folk traditions, physical objects, field studies, etc. It would also require the development of the necessary academic infrastructure in the countries concerned, for experience has shown that where the study of societies with living cultural traditions is concerned, the perception of its ethos and inter-connections requires a very long period of training for persons not born and reared within it. Even the development of “area studies” in many of the Western countries can play only a limited role in this process. For one, many of the area studies programmes in these countries have a heavy presentist bias, being dependent for their finances upon government and/or private foundations, and geared to fulfill certain political or business purposes. Secondly, within these countries, area studies are often considered peripheral to the study of history by the university departments. In consequence, they sometimes fail to attract the right type of student or researcher, thereby further strengthening the ethnocentric bias in history. To an extent area studies programmes have tended to perpetuate the notion that Afro-Asian countries are “patients” in the field of history, and that the history written by the historians of the area are somehow inferior, being tainted by the “nationalist” bias, whereas it is presumed that the writings of historians from metropolitan countries, i.e. the former colonising powers would be free from the “Imperialist” bias. This tendency to attempt to continue the colonial situation in the field of history in the name of the centre and the periphery is bound to have harmful repercussions.

Satish Chandra, "A Note On the Decentring of History and Apprehension By All People of Their History," Diogenes 20:77 (1972), 103.

The career entry barrier is first and foremost, language. If philologists no longer dominate area programs (then called ‘Oriental studies’, something also pioneered in the United States at the University of Chicago) as they once did, few Japanologists will pay attention to the work of someone who cannot read Japanese. If people in a large region of the world speak the same language—for example, Spanish in most of Latin America—then a Latin American studies programme will include everything south of the Rio Grande. If it is a region like Northeast or Southeast Asia, however, where there is no common language in the past century, ‘area’ will usually mean country. The field of Korean studies makes this generalization clearest: in spite of Korea’s two-millennium-long history of interaction with Japan and China, to be in ‘Korean studies’ is to study Korea and not China or Japan. (When I applied to a Northeast Asia committee for research funding to study the regional political economy, one Japanologist on the committee asked if I were ‘changing my field’.) To study China or Japan is to assume that one need know little or nothing about Korea: my experiences in this regard could easily fill a book, but we need only look at one book, Peter Duus’s Abacus and the Sword, to see the prefatory assumption that because he cannot read Korean, he must limit his study of Japanese imperialism in Korea to Japanese materials. The implicit assumption appears also to be that lack of Korean-language facility maims one in understanding the scholarship of Koreanists done in English, which is the only explanation I can come up with, of why Duus made so little use of the seminal studies of late-nineteenth century Korea by James B. Palais, Key-Hiuk Kim, Martina Deuchler, and others. That is, without climbing over the language barrier one ought not to venture into alien territory—however close (in every sense) it might be. 

Bruce Cumings, “Seeing Like an Area Specialist,” in John D. Kelly, Kurt Jacobsen, Marston H. Morgan, eds., Reconsidering American Power: Pax Americana and the Social Sciences (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020), 92-93.