Athens in the Age of Socrates

Athens in the Age of Socrates

par | Déc 2, 2016 | The school of history

Athens in the Age of Socrates

HOEL

The school of history
Philosophie
Rhétorique
Sophistique
Histoire 


Among ancient empires bordering the Mediterranean, the Athenian empire was impressive neither for its size nor for its durability. But as the creation of a democratic state it was unique. […]


Over the course of the Athenian experience with empire, the use of writing to hone the skills of debate and to express the principles that made arguments memorable gave rise to new habits of discourse and standards of judgment. These habits in turn provided the foundations of rhetoric, political philosophy, constitutional law, and history. […]


The Athenians were well aware that their city was the home of this literary revolution. Athens was the “school of Hellas,” as Thucydides reports the famous claim of Pericles.


Mark H. Munn


« Parmi les anciens empires riverains de la Méditerranée, l’empire athénien ne fut impressionnant ni par sa taille, ni par sa durée. Mais comme la création d’un Etat démocratique, il fut unique. […]


Au cours de l’expérience athénienne avec l’empire, l’utilisation de l’écriture pour améliorer l’habileté dans les débats et énoncer les principes qui rendirent les arguments mémorables donna naissance à de nouvelles habitudes de discours et normes de jugement. Ces habitudes fournirent à leur tour les fondements de la rhétorique, de la philosophie politique, du droit constitutionnel et de l’histoire. […]


Les Athéniens étaient bien conscients que leur cité était le siège de cette révolution littéraire. Athènes était l’ « l’école de la Grèce », selon la fameuse déclaration de Périclès rapportée par Thucydide. »

			

			

				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				
Scuola di Atene (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, 1509–1511)

			

				
				
				
				
				


                … Athens, in the final decades of its domination of an Aegean empire, was the central focus of tracts of rhetorical polemic, of reflective drama, of philosophical criticism, and of historical analysis out of which emerged the intellectual tools by which human achievements then and ever afterward have been more keenly judged and compared.



			

				
				
				
				
				
In less than a century (between 478 and 404 b.c.e.) Athens gained and lost an empire. Among ancient empires bordering the Mediterranean, the Athenian empire was impressive neither for its size nor for its durability. But as the creation of a democratic state it was unique. No dynasty or ruling oligarchy controlled the instruments of power at Athens. Political, judicial, and military power were directed by means of public debates in which skilled speakers tried to sway the majority against their rivals’ efforts to do the same. Because power was publicly constructed, contestants for political influence at Athens developed the means to appeal to wide audiences, and to guide popular approval or condemnation not so much according to narrow, sectional interests, but by casting their arguments in terms of transcendent principles. Over the course of the Athenian experience with empire, the use of writing to hone the skills of debate and to express the principles that made arguments memorable gave rise to new habits of discourse and standards of judgment. These habits in turn provided the foundations of rhetoric, political philosophy, constitutional law, and history.


Writing had long been employed among the Greeks, especially as an aide-mémoire for poetry and to give voice to monuments, but in the course of the fifth century it became increasingly the medium for other forms of expression, particularly in prose. Athenian democracy encouraged habits of literacy, both for the creation of public records and memorials and in the personal use of writing as one of the tools to sharpen and amplify rhetoric. The consequences of this trend were various and profound. Poetry at Athens was enriched by the absorption of rhetorical and eulogistic style and content. In this period the public conscience was both entertained and at the same time informed about underlying meanings and ironies within contemporary events through the allegories of tragedy and the farces of comedy, all created and preserved in writing. The enrichment of literary description and rhetorical argument achieved by writers versed in a growing literary heritage enabled critical history to be written, first by Herodotus and then by Thucydides. And many of the same motives that sharpened rhetoric and critical history stimulated the reflective and analytical skills of political philosophy, best known in the person of Socrates and represented in the writings of Plato.


A surprising amount of the foregoing is represented in the literary products specifically of the generation that saw the Athenian empire come to an end, in 404, as the final outcome of the Peloponnesian War. Aristophanes was of that generation, and although Sophocles and Euripides both died in 406 and did not live to see the defeat of Athens by Sparta, they did experience and respond to the convulsions that preceded the final fall. Within that period the Histories of Herodotus were written, and Thucydides, although he was writing after the fall of Athens in 404, began to gather material for his account when the war with Sparta began in 431. Pericles, who died in 429, left no written speeches of his own, nor did any of his contemporaries. But within the following generation, Gorgias, Antiphon, Thrasymachus, and other sophists circulated treatises displaying their rhetorical skills. Increasingly, texts of actual speeches were collected and studied, and by 400 a great number of contemporary speeches were in circulation. Plato was born and educated in these final decades of the fifth century, in the most influential period of his mentor, Socrates. Although Plato’s works belong to the generation after the Peloponnesian War, the event that inspired Plato to write was the trial and execution of Socrates in 399. The same year marked the publication on stone of a substantial body of the laws of Athens. The compilation of these laws, beginning in 411, resulted in the creation of the first known centralized state archive and marked the beginnings of research into constitutional history.


It is not a mere quirk of fortune that such a literate legacy should survive from the last three decades of the fifth century, and not, to any comparable degree, from earlier decades. The habits of reading and the applications of writing burgeoned specifically in the late fifth century, and testimony to the phenomenon is evident in the immediately following generations. Within the fourth century, written works of rhetoric and history, and studies of poetry, laws and institutions, and political philosophy proliferated. All such works referred directly to literary predecessors or implicitly reveal the influence of earlier works. The wide-ranging writings of Aristotle exemplify the tendencies of fourth-century authors to thrive on the works of their predecessors. Yet amidst all this attention to works of the past, as the citations by Aristotle attest, the vast bulk of the literary heritage available to fourth-century authors is traceable to works no earlier than the last third of the fifth century.


The Athenians were well aware that their city was the home of this literary revolution. Athens was the “school of Hellas,” as Thucydides reports the famous claim of Pericles. There is an apparent danger of circularity in accepting this testimony, since Athenian rhetoric naturally praised Athens. But such praise is neither the sole nor even the chief support for this judgment. Much of the political commentary of late-fifth and fourth-century Greece was openly critical of Athenian policies and institutions. Yet it confirms that Athens, in the final decades of its domination of an Aegean empire, was the central focus of tracts of rhetorical polemic, of reflective drama, of philosophical criticism, and of historical analysis out of which emerged the intellectual tools by which human achievements then and ever afterward have been more keenly judged and compared.


What were the conditions that brought standards of criticism and debate to so high a pitch? Part of this inquiry must seek to establish the objects of criticism and debate at Athens, and part must seek to establish when debate at Athens reached such a threshold of intensity that it yielded a lasting record in writing. Put in these terms, an investigation into the conditions that placed Athens at the center of an intellectual and literary revolution must become a historical investigation of the time in which this revolution took place, and particularly of the intersection between political and intellectual culture at that time.


[…]


Our investigation thus comes to focus on the period that Thucydides chose to write about, the Peloponnesian War. It is even possible that our interest in identifying the origins of critical historical analysis has much in common with Thucydides’ motives for writing history. Having lived through this period of ever-intensifying crises, Thucydides was surely responding to the challenge of explaining the destruction of the Athenian empire. But his history never reached that point. Having set out to narrate “the war” that began in 431 and that lasted, as Thucydides notes in 5.26, for twenty-seven years until the surrender of Athens, his work ends abruptly in the midst of its twenty-first year (411/10). Thucydides’ narrative was later continued by others, so we are able to follow the events that Thucydides had in view when he wrote. But the incompleteness of his work is problematic for present purposes, because we lose contact with Thucydides’ intellectual project as it approaches the very time in which it was formed.


Before the abrupt termination of his narrative, Thucydides reveals some of his judgments in view of the outcome of the war. His views are always nuanced, and they likely would have become even more so had he gone on to narrate a further six or seven years of the career of the Athenian empire. But without his judgments on the events accompanying the final defeat of Athens we are hard put to evaluate his meaning in the several passages where he fully contextualizes events but goes on to affirm superlative instances like, “[These were] certainly the best men…who perished in this war,” (3.98.4); “a disaster more complete than any…” (7.29.5); “…a man who, of all the Hellenes in my time, least deserved to come to so miserable an end” (7.86.5); “…the greatest action that we know of in Hellenic history” (7.87.5); and “…a better government than ever before, at least in my time” (8.97.2). We simply do not know how Thucydides would have dealt with the ecstatic highs and bewildering lows that lay in store for the Athenians and their foes in the final six years of the war, or in the civil war at Athens that followed.


Thus as we approach the climax of the story of the greatness of Athens and her fall, we lose the perspective of the man who drew our attention to the subject.


Mark H. Munn – The School of History. Athens in the Age of Socrates



			

			

				
				
				
				
			

				
				
			

				
				
				
				
				
				
				

				

				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				

				
			

				
				
				
				
				

				
			

				
				
				
				
				

				
			

			

				
				
				
				
			

				
				
			


				
					

			
					


											
								Itineraries of Dalits and subalterns							
					
															
Itineraries of Dalits and subalterns

					
					
 par  | Déc 1, 2016 | Subaltern Studies

				
				
				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				

					

					

						
						
Itineraries of Dalits and subalterns

						
						

						
					

				

					
				

				

				

					
					
					
				

			

				
				
			

				
				
				
				
				
				
				

				

				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				

					
					

						
HOEL

						
					

				

			

				SUBALTERN STUDIES
			

				Gramsci
			

				Ambedkar
			

				subalternité
			

				Dalits
			

				
				
				
				
				
			

				
				
				
				
				


Gramsci and Ambedkar were contemporaries – both born in 1891 – and although operating in very different environments, the similarities of their strategies and political philosophy to empower subalterns / Dalits are indeed striking. Their activity as leaders, always combined with solid theoretical reflection, springs out of their own and others’ lived experience of subalternity. Both found inspiration in Marxism, both were critical of religion, but considered religion culturally and politically relevant; both assessed the presence of subalterns through social, cultural and historical critical analysis, and sought to negotiate a rightful place within the state, society and history / historiography for these ‘excluded’ individuals. For both of them, the solution would come from the effort of the subalterns themselves, as active protagonists of their own destiny, to achieve ‘consciousness’, and ‘collective will’ aided by the role of leaders / intellectuals.


Cosimo Zene


« Gramsci et Ambedkar furent contemporains – tous deux nés en 1891 – et bien qu’opérant dans des environnements très différents, les similitudes de leurs stratégies et de leur philosophie politique pour donner du pouvoir aux subalternes / Dalits sont en effet frappantes. Leur activité comme leaders, toujours combinée à une solide réflexion théorique, découle de leur propre expérience vécue de la subalternité et de celle des autres. Tous deux trouvèrent de l’inspiration dans le marxisme, tous deux étaient critiques de la religion, mais considéraient la religion culturellement et politiquement pertinente ; tous deux appréhendèrent la présence des subalternes à travers une analyse critique sociale, culturelle et historique, et cherchèrent à négocier une juste place au sein de l’Etat, de la société et de l’histoire / historiographie pour ces individus ‘exclus’. Pour tous deux, la solution viendrait de l’effort des subalternes eux-mêmes, en tant que protagonistes actifs de leur propre destin, pour parvenir à la ‘conscience’ et à la ‘volonté collective’, aidés par le rôle des dirigeants / intellectuels. »

			

			

				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				
Femme dalit de Bombay, Inde (1942) (oldindianphotos.in)

			

				
				
				
				
				
              … the Gramscian concept of ‘subalternity’, as a holistic approach involving a socio-cultural critique of subalternity, clearly points towards the ‘ex-Untouchables’ as the epitome of the ‘subaltern’, and more precisely towards the movement/journey of the Dalits from self-pity to self-consciousness…

			

				
				
				
				
				
The present volume offers a collection of fourteen essays revolving around the political philosophies of Antonio Gramsci and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and their theoretical and practical commitment in favour of subalterns and Dalits. Following a preliminary exchange among colleagues, most of the authors of these chapters met in London in December 2010 to discuss the papers which are now here collected. Our initial question, ‘Why should we discuss jointly Gramsci and Ambedkar, on subalternity?’ provided an opening, basic frame of reference soon to be enriched by more specific and probing questions. Initially it seemed clear to us that if a Gramscian methodology of ‘integral history’ were to be applied to the study of ‘subalternity’ in South Asia, then Ambedkar and Dalits were to play a relevant role on various accounts:


1.  the historical and political dimensions of subalternity, and the function of leaders/intellectuals were significant to both Gramsci and Ambedkar;


2.  the position of Untouchables/Dalits in South Asian societies largely reflects the historical, social and cultural characteristics of subalterns as described by Gramsci, including different levels/degrees of subalternity (Q25);


3.  Ambedkar’s reading of the ‘History and Experience of Untouchability’ provided a clear example of ‘traces’ left in history by subalterns and considered of paramount relevance for the Gramscian ‘integral historian’;


4.  we felt that the influence of Gramsci’s thought in South Asia, though inspiring to the Subaltern Studies project, had not reached its full potential, precisely because it lacked the contribution of a substantial local reflection, such as the one provided by Ambedkar and other Dalit leaders, as the best expression of mediated self-reflexive thinking on subalternity;


5.  both Gramsci and Ambedkar, being contemporaries, developed their political thought in similar international, critical circumstances – the interwar period – and they took into account a wider scenario (the development of international law and democracy) in the solutions they put forward;


6.  they both sought a holistic response to subalternity and Untouchability, involving a combination of theoretical reflection and practical, political commitment;


7.  the solution of the crisis experienced within the formulation of ‘international concepts’ – equality, citizenship, legitimacy, democracy, the law, etc. – cannot be reached, according to them, without taking into account the presence of subalterns/Dalits at the centre of this crisis, since their exclusion reveals the essential character of the crisis itself;


8.  for both Ambedkar and Gramsci, religion is a crucial dimension of politics, and a decisive factor for the self-emancipation of the subalterns. Moreover, compared to the progressive thought of their time, both Marxist and liberal, the ‘national’ dimension plays a vital role and one not in opposition to the universalistic perspective of the ‘liberation’ of subalterns.


My own research among ex-Untouchables in Bengal and Bangladesh during the late 1980s motivated me to re-read Gramsci and, tentatively, I sought to apply his thought to this milieu (Zene 2002, 2007). While I found inspiration in the experiment of the Subaltern Studies Collective, I remained critical of it for ‘domesticating Gramsci’s revolutionary thought’ (Ahmad 1993: 46), and for failing to deal with ‘deep-rooted subalternity’, thus not engaging more directly with Untouchability and the caste-class problem. This inability to see ‘caste’ (or gender) by Subaltern Studies still remains unanswered, and one very simple reason might be the unattended dialogue with other disciplines and areas dealing with history-in-the-making and everyday life, in which many traces of subalternity, often hidden in revealing metaphors, can be found. In my view, the Gramscian concept of ‘subalternity’, as a holistic approach involving a socio-cultural critique of subalternity, clearly points towards the ‘ex-Untouchables’ as the epitome of the ‘subaltern’, and more precisely towards the movement/journey of the Dalits from self-pity to self-consciousness, most forcefully expressed in the experience of Dalit women (Rao 2003; Rege 2003, 2006; Narayan 2006). In the concluding remarks to a recent article (Zene 2011:102), while discussing the process from the awareness of oppression towards the mobilization of Dalit consciousness, I refer to the Dalit historic leaders as instrumental in this development. In particular, I underline there the vigilant role of Ambedkar as inspiring organizer, while prompting the Dalits to publically burn the Laws of Manu (1927), and to defy the injunction not to enter Hindu temples (1930), thus challenging an age-long tradition concerning the religious and human discrimination of the Dalits from the rest of the community. Even at that very early stage of not solely religious but ‘civil disobedience’, Ambedkar had clear in his mind that the road to liberation and salvation (mukti) – political, social, legal, constitutional, religious and economic – was to be a long and painful journey ahead.


All these elements joined together: my direct involvement with Dalits in South Asia, the influence I received from Gramsci and a closer approach to Ambedkar’s thought, prompted me not only to approach both Gramsci and Ambedkar in conjunction, but also to involve other colleagues to reflect together upon their political philosophy and lived experience of subalternity and Dalithood. With this in mind, I invited them to gather together and to share their ideas and findings, thus promoting a common debate among experts, both Gramscian and South Asianists, coming from a variety of disciplinary fields including history, philosophy, anthropology, feminist and cultural studies, politics and development studies, philology and literary criticism. […]


Although the finalising of every book seems to signal the end of a journey, at times this feeling has the potential to spark the beginning of new itineraries, and of this here I feel optimistic. Taking the cue from Pasolini’s poetry in Gramsci’s Ashes, I like to believe that different itineraries are destined to meet and that even the most desperate of experiences can emit a hopeful ray of light:


Poor as the poor, I cling

like them to humiliating hopes

like them, I fight each day

to stay alive . . .

But just as I own history,

history owns me; it enlightens me . . . 


[…]


Gramsci and Ambedkar were contemporaries – both born in 1891 – and although operating in very different environments, the similarities of their strategies and political philosophy to empower subalterns/Dalits are indeed striking. Their activity as leaders, always combined with solid theoretical reflection, springs out of their own and others’ lived experience of subalternity. Both found inspiration in Marxism, both were critical of religion, but considered religion culturally and politically relevant; both assessed the presence of subalterns through social, cultural and historical critical analysis, and sought to negotiate a rightful place within the state, society and history/historiography for these ‘excluded’ individuals. For both of them, the solution would come from the effort of the subalterns themselves, as active protagonists of their own destiny, to achieve ‘consciousness’, and ‘collective will’ aided by the role of leaders/ intellectuals. Their ‘holistic’ approach – which is a global critique to culture and to the structures of subalternity – enlightens the present-day ‘Dalit Question’ as a challenge posited not simply to Dalits and concerned scholars, but to societies/states and to the international community.


Cosimo Zene – The Political Philosophies of Antonio Gramsci and B. R. Ambedkar. Itineraries of Dalits and Subalterns


Cosimo Zene



			

			

				
				
				
				
			

				
				
			

				
				
				
				
				
				
				

				

				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				

				
			

			

				
				
				
				
			

				
				
			


				
					

			
					


											
								On the Margins of Modernism							
					
															
On the Margins of Modernism

					
					
 par  | Nov 28, 2016 | On the Margins

				
				
				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				

					

					

						
						
On the Margins of Modernism

						
						

						
					

				

					
				

				

				

					
					
					
				

			

				
				
			

				
				
				
				
				
				
				

				

				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				

					
					

						
HOEL

						
					

				

			

				ON THE MARGINS
			

				Périphérie
			

				littérature mineure
			

				Centre
			

				Canon
			

				
				
				
				
				
			

				
				
				
				
				


After Modernism is canonized, however, by the post-war settlement and its accompanying, complicit academic endorsements, there is then the presumption that since Modernism is here in this specific phase or period, there is nothing beyond it.


Raymond Williams


« Cependant, après que le Modernisme soit canonisé par l’accommodement de l’après-guerre et les appuis académiques complices qui l’accompagnaient, il y a alors la présomption que, puisque le Modernisme est ici dans cette phase ou période spécifique, il n’y a rien hors de lui. »

			

				
				
				
				
				


… historical and theoretical discourse on literature is always tacitly based on what I call a “selective modeling” of literary production, a modeling that both constitutes and serves its own cultural prototypes. But the selective processes, their tendentiousness and utility, should be opened up for analysis and not simply accepted as inevitable, built-in blinders. […]


Writers the world over have self-consciously participated in—not simply been influenced by—the great international experiment with the -isms of modernism. But, ironically, Arabic, Hebrew, Senegalese, Japanese, and Yiddish literatures (among many others) have been excluded from recent theories of minor writing by the theoretical premises of the very same recovery project that should have made their voices audible. […]


All too often the selective modeling of minor literature—as of “international modernism”—on a Euro-American geopolitics and linguistics effectively leaves all that is not English, French, or German (or “deterritorialized” versions thereof) outside our purview.


Chana Kronfeld


« … le discours historique et théorique sur la littérature est toujours tacitement basé sur ce que j’appelle une « modélisation sélective » de la production littéraire, une modélisation qui à la fois constitue et sert ses propres prototypes culturels. Mais les processus sélectifs, leur caractère tendancieux et leur utilité, doivent être ouverts à l’analyse et pas simplement considérés comme d’inévitables œillères intégrées. […]


Des écrivains de monde entier ont consciemment participé  à — pas simplement été influencés par — la grande expérience internationale avec les -ismes du modernisme. Mais, de manière ironique, les littératures arabe, hébraïque, sénégalaise, japonaise et yiddish (parmi beaucoup d’autres) ont été exclues des théories récentes sur l’écriture mineure par les prémisses théoriques du projet de rétablissement lui-même qui aurait dû rendre leurs voix audibles. […]


Beaucoup trop souvent, la modélisation sélective de la littérature mineure — comme du « modernisme international » — sur une géopolitique et une linguistique euro-américaines laisse de fait tout ce qui n’est pas anglais, français, ou allemand (ou qui en soit une version « déterritorialisée ») en dehors de notre champ. »

			

			

				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				
 Statue du poète mongol Borjgin Dashdorjiin Natsagdorj (1906-1937)

			

				
				
				
				
				


                                             Through the multiple, broken prisms of the minor, the mystified notion of a unified canonical modernism is exploded, subjecting the very language of center and periphery itself to a critique that exposes its own historicity.

			

				
				
				
				
				


(First Century Jerusalem. A crowd of followers congregates outside the hovel where Brian, an anachronistic, parodic double for Christ, lives with his mother. The chanting mob arouses Brian from his first night with his lover, Judith, who is the sole female member of the Peoples’ Front of Judea, an ineffectual splinter group fighting against the Roman occupation. Reluctantly, Brian opens the window and tries to get the noisy crowd to disperse.)


Crowd: A blessing! A blessing!
 (more pandemonium)
 Brian: No, please. Please. Please listen.
 (they quieten)
 I’ve got one or two things to say.
  Crowd: Tell us. Tell us both of them!!
  Brian: Look … You’ve got it all wrong.
 You don’t need to follow me.
 You don’t need to follow anybody.
 You’ve got to think for yourselves.
 You’re all individuals. 
  Crowd: Yes, we’re all individuals. 
  Brian: You’re all different. 
  Crowd: Yes, we are all different. 
  Dennis: I’m not. 
  Crowd: Sssshhh!
 —Monty Python, The Life of Brian




The 1979 movie The Life of Brian offers itself, in Monty Python’s irreverent parodic logic, as parable and prelude for this study on the margins of modernism. Difference iterated and echoed in unison (“Yes, we are all different”) is difference erased, a gesture that can be met only with resistance, with a refusal to be different in the manner prescribed by the consensus (“I’m not”). From its collective vantage point outside Brian’s door, the crowd embraces otherness as a force that consolidates a majority. In the process, they turn Brian, that antiheroic mock-Christ, into a figure of absolute yet vacuous authority. But it is Dennis, the little bearded man in the left-hand corner of the frame on whom I wish to turn the spotlight in this study, the one who mumbles “I’m not” and is silenced by the crowd, never to be heard from again.


What does it mean to be that writer, that reader on the margins of international modernism, in the corner of the picture yet part of it, when the crowd at the center clusters around a homogenized, privileged construction of difference? What does it mean for the visibility or audibility of that writer, that reader, when the center, in the process of championing difference, denies both that writer’s modernism and his or her minor status? Finally, what does it mean for the field if the very theoretical models that aim to uncover “the damage inflicted on minority cultures” structurally, institutionally participate in replicating it (JanMohamed and Lloyd, 1990:9)?


Modernism is famous for its affinity for the marginal, the exile, the “other.” Yet the representative examples of this marginality typically are those writers who have become the most canonical high modernists. Their “narrative of unsettlement, homelessness, solitude and impoverished independence” (Williams, 1989:34) may indeed have been cast in minor, discordant tones, but those tones were composed in the major key of the most commonly read European languages: English, French, German. While they sometimes acknowledge the multicultural, international nature of the movement, handbooks as well as theoretical debates on modernism and minor writing consistently focus on -isms and writers that are well within this major linguistic and geopolitical key. Consequently, even hugely influential trends within European modernism itself are sometimes made to sound like a casual codetta: Scandinavian modernism, by many accounts the overture to all later trends; or the two very different variations on futurism, the Italian and the Russian; or the still resonant din of Rumanian dada (described by most critics as French). These modernisms usually get the cursory nod, while the focus of discussion remains on the canonically privileged modalities of difference in Kafka and Pound, Proust and Joyce.


Very few of the discussions of international modernism available in English or French or German include Russian acmeism or Russian imaginism, although important poets who see themselves as affiliated with these trends can be found not only in Russia but also all the way over in the Palestine of the 1920s and 1930s. We love to read the acmeists Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, even the imaginist Sergey Yesenin, in translation, but this doesn’t make our view of international modernism more inclusive. This is perhaps only natural, since historical and theoretical discourse on literature is always tacitly based on what I call a “selective modeling” of literary production, a modeling that both constitutes and serves its own cultural prototypes. But the selective processes, their tendentiousness and utility, should be opened up for analysis and not simply accepted as inevitable, built-in blinders.


Raymond Williams exposes the link between consolidating a Euro-American modernist canon from what was once a marginal literary trend and erasing unprivileged formations of marginality. His words resonate with special poignancy because they may have been among his last. These are his notes for the first chapter of an unfinished book, brilliantly edited and introduced by Tony Pinkney in the posthumous volume The Politics of Modernism:


After Modernism is canonized, however, by the post-war settlement and its accompanying, complicit academic endorsements, there is then the presumption that since Modernism is here in this specific phase or period, there is nothing beyond it. The [once] marginal or rejected artists become classics of organized teaching and of travelling exhibitions in the great galleries of the metropolitan cities. ‘Modernism’ is confined to this highly selective field and denied to everything else in an act of pure ideology, whose first, unconscious irony is that, absurdly, it stops history dead.


… [W]e must search out and counterpose an alternative tradition taken from the neglected works left in the wide margins of the century. (Williams, 1989:34–35)


Searching out and counterposing such alternative traditions on the margins of modernism is, indeed, my primary project in this book. Many minor modernisms remain “in the wide margins of this century,” excluded from standard accounts of this international movement simply because they lie outside the official borders of the unarticulated yet powerful cartographic paradigm: international modernism = Europe + United States. Let me offer just one example. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane’s excellent critical anthology Modernism 1890–1930 ([1976] 1981) is much more sensitive than most traditional treatments of modernism to the movement’s diversity and heterogeneity. It nevertheless adheres implicitly to the cartographic formula, never straying beyond the boundaries of Europe and the United States. Not coincidentally, this same anthology also systematically marginalizes the crucial role women writers and editors played in the dynamics of international modernism, minimizing even the contribution of those women who were active within the Euro-American frame.


How to search out and counterpose an alternative tradition and alternative theory of marginal modernisms without universalizing them out of existence? How to account, within a theoretically rigorous model, both for the women and minorities traditionally marginalized within the Euro-American canon and for the diverse groups and individual female and male writers outside the cartographic and linguistic mainstream? Writers the world over have self-consciously participated in—not simply been influenced by—the great international experiment with the -isms of modernism. But, ironically, Arabic, Hebrew, Senegalese, Japanese, and Yiddish literatures (among many others) have been excluded from recent theories of minor writing by the theoretical premises of the very same recovery project that should have made their voices audible.


Nevertheless, current theories of the minor have had an important effect in a number of ways. They have refocused attention on the decentering, deterritorializing, indeed the revolutionary and innovative force of minor writing. At the same time they have also underscored the potential appropriation of the minor by the major canonical system; and they have pointed out ways in which a minor literature can replicate exclusionary practices in its attempt to model itself after the hegemonic literary canon. Recent discussions have also helped reinscribe the association between minor and modernist, charging the old alliance between the two concepts with a new political urgency. All these perspectives have proven exceedingly helpful to me in exploring the history and theory of marginal modernisms.


Yet coming as I do from the perspective of two literatures, Hebrew and Yiddish, whose (different) modernisms and modes of minor writing do not fit into the postcolonial models now in vogue, I am troubled by what I see as the exclusionary effect of current definitions of the minor. All too often the selective modeling of minor literature—as of “international modernism”—on a Euro-American geopolitics and linguistics effectively leaves all that is not English, French, or German (or “deterritorialized” versions thereof) outside our purview. This exclusion is not merely a result of some bad choice of examples but is logically entailed by the explicitly articulated principles of the most detailed theories of minor writing available to date. Only if we construct the major through the minor, not—as current wisdom has it—the minor through the major, can we begin to discern the regionalism, contextual diversity, and interdependence of even the most highly canonical forms of modernism. Theories of modernism that are modeled on belated, decentered, or linguistically minor practices may provide some insight into the processes that have become automatized or rendered imperceptible in the canonical center. Through the multiple, broken prisms of the minor, the mystified notion of a unified canonical modernism is exploded, subjecting the very language of center and periphery itself to a critique that exposes its own historicity.


 Chana Kronfeld – On the Margins of Modernism. Decentering Literary Dynamics


Chana Kronfeld

			

			

				
				
				
				
			

				
				
			

				
				
				
				
				
				
				

				

				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				

				
			

			

				
				
				
				
			

				
				
			

				
				
				
				
				
				
				

				

				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				


REVIEW :


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“Chana Kronfeld’s greatest contribution is her clear overview of contemporary theorists in Israel, whose work has reached only a limited audience in North America. Hebrew and Yiddish critics such as the late Dov Sadan and Dan Pagis, or the alive and well Ziva Ben-Porat and Hannan Hever, have remained relatively unknown here, although their work has figured prominently in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Kronfeld remedies this neglect, which may be attributable to the language barrier and geographic isolation, by surveying some prominent Israeli critics’ essays and by showing how their theories may deepen our understanding of Hebrew modernism.


Chana Kronfeld has contributed immeasurably to the study of Judaic literature. In addition to carrying out her original research as associate professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, she has trained a dozen of the most competent and interesting younger scholars of Hebrew and Yiddish writing. Her intellectual roots are planted in Ramat Aviv, at Tel Aviv University, where she studied with leading proponents of Israeli literary theory. Having moved permanently to the United States, however, she has guided the coming generation of Hebrew critics into academia as an avant-garde whose articles and books counterbalance an earlier brand of thematic scholarship. Kronfeld’s own long-awaited book helps set the agenda for contemporary critics of twentieth-century Hebrew poetry.”


Ken Frieden – Syracuse University

			

			

				
				
				
				
			

				
				
			


				
					

			
					


											
								Rethinking Postcolonialism							
					
															
Rethinking Postcolonialism

					
					
 par  | Nov 28, 2016 | Postcolonial Studies

				
				
				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				

					

					

						
						
RETHINKING POSTCOLONIALISM

						
						

						
					

				

					
				

				

				

					
					
					
				

			

				
				
			

				
				
				
				
				
				
				

				

				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				

					
					

						
HOEL

						
					

				

			

				Postcolonial Studies
			

				orientalisme
			

				discours colonial
			

				suprématisme
			

				idéologie
			

				
				
				
				
				
			

				
				
				
				
				


When Greece became a Roman protectorate the Romans imitated the Greeks. They adopted their strategies of expansion, arts, gods, rituals and even dress […]. Likewise, in the nineteenth century both Britain and France displayed continuities with the classical powers, adopting their ideas and instigating their methods of conquest and rule.


Amar Acheraïou


« Quand la Grèce devint un protectorat romain, les Romains imitèrent les Grecs. Ils adoptèrent leurs stratégies d’expansion, arts, dieux, rituels et même vêtements […]. De même, au dix-neuvième siècle, la Grande-Bretagne et la France ont, l’une et l’autre, montré des continuités avec les puissances classiques, adoptant leurs idées et instigant leurs méthodes de conquête et de domination. »

			

			

				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				
Virgile lisant l’Énéide à Auguste et Octavia (Jean-Joseph Taillasson, 1787)

			

				
				
				
				
				


              Colonialism is an immemorial phenomenon. All through history it has taken various forms and has been highly parasitic.

			

				
				
				
				
				
Following Edward Said’s pioneering Orientalism (1978), a substantial body of scholarship was produced in the field of postcolonial studies. Like the influential Orientalism, most of the works in this area of research centre on nineteenth-century imperialism, with little or no reference to former ideological formations to assess modern colonial ideology. While they remain on the whole heavily indebted to Said’s insights, these studies tend to move from Orientalism’s sweeping, often monolithic representations of colonialism to stress the heterogeneity and ambivalence of imperial discourse and rule. Elleke Boehmer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995), Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler in Tensions of Empire (1997), and Antoinette Burton in At the Heart of the Empire (1998), to name a few, insist on the interactions and interpenetrations of colonial cultures. […]


Rethinking Postcolonialism analyses colonialist discourses in modern literary and non-literary texts and explores key philosophical concepts informing colonialism. It is divided into two main areas: first, a discussion of the ways in which classical writings influenced colonialist discourse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; second, an examination of the relationship between modernist literature and empire. In each section I investigate the ways colonial discourses construct, or produce, the colonised by adopting an array of strategies that draw inspiration from immediate as well as remote sources. In studying imperial intellectual history in the context of classical discourses and literatures, I offer a challenge to the conventional categories of analysis in the field of postcolonial studies, which tend to study colonialism as a synchronic phenomenon and mere product of modernity.


Colonialism is an immemorial phenomenon. All through history it has taken various forms and has been highly parasitic. When Egypt came under Greek domination in 146 BC, the Greeks incorporated into their culture the Egyptian religions, myths and arts. When Greece became a Roman protectorate the Romans imitated the Greeks. They adopted their strategies of expansion, arts, gods, rituals and even dress, establishing continuities between the Hellenic and Latin worlds (Bernal 1987; Pagden 2001; Isaac 2004). Similarly, in America the Mayans inspired the succeeding Toltec and Aztec empires which adopted their arts, legends and religions. The Aztecs were in turn influenced by the Toltecs. They regarded them as ideal fighters and their arts were highly valued. The Inca Empire was also built on the achievements of former civilisations, embracing the Aztec and Toltec legends and religions which they fused into their own culture to build a centralised state (Davies 1987). In the sixteenth century the Spaniards, who vanquished the Incas and Aztecs, took after the ancient European empires which they viewed as models (Ramírez 1996; Mabry 2002). The Ottoman empire, too, imitated the Greeks and Romans. Sovereigns such as Mehmet Fatih (1451–81) and Suleiman Kanuni (1520–66) posed as continuers of the empires established in the Mediterranean by Alexander the Great and furthered by the Romans. Likewise, in the nineteenth century both Britain and France displayed continuities with the classical powers, adopting their ideas and instigating their methods of conquest and rule.


From the ancient to modern times colonialism has thus been a synergetic phenomenon. Colonial powers drew on their predecessors to achieve their imperial motives and consolidate their domination. The British and French empires imitated the Greek and Roman empires. They incorporated tropes, modes of representation and myths of supremacy. The classical writers who backed them were revered by modern writers and colonial ideologues. Their themes and thoughts were assiduously rehearsed and the image of ancient Greece and Rome was reinvested and idealised by eighteenth and nineteenth-century Western writers and scholars, particularly the British and French.


Rethinking Postcolonialism probes the interconnections between ancient and new imperialism. It examines modern colonial British and French literatures in the light of ancient Greek and Latin texts. It focuses on the Colonial Idea and attempts to chart the impact of classical thought on modern colonial cultures. In the main, I intend through the exploration of colonial historiography to trace the ways in which the classical models were re-inscribed and re-imagined, in an idealised form, in European metropolitan cultures in the period of imperial expansion. The aim in teasing out the conceptual and ideological links between ancient and modern colonialism is to place the discussion of empire in a wider historical and ideological arena. This necessary contextualisation serves to demonstrate how far modern colonial ideology forms an historical, ideological and narcissistic continuum whereby new theories of domination build upon ancient myths of grandeur and supremacy.


By focusing on colonialism’s diachronicity and multi-faceted nature of imperialist ideology, I primarily seek to resituate colonialist discourse’s historical and ideological denseness which is often neglected in postcolonial studies. My assumption is that the scholars’ study of colonialism from a strictly synchronic dimension provides only a partial insight into imperial ideology. To get a fuller picture of this ideology requires re-examining it in connection with the former narratives of domination, notably the classical ideological formations from which it drew inspiration. The recovery of this neglected trans-epochal dialogue should help us grasp the multi-dimensional, palimpsestic (that is stratified and cumulative) character of modern colonialist discourse. This genetic approach, which sets the ancient and the modern in a productive dynamics, intends to shed light on these conceptual and ideological ramifications. It aims to uncover the legacy of the classical assumptions of linguistic, cultural and racial supremacy on modern writers and colonial ideologues. Such a historicisation, which invites consideration of the archaeological structure of imperialist discourse, is a prerequisite to mapping out the complex ideological network that shaped modern colonial representations. It enables us to trace the interface between colonial metropolitan ideological formations and classical imperial production of stories of power and supremacy.


Amar Acheraïou – Rethinking Postcolonialism. Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers


Amar Acheraïou

			

			

				
				
				
				
			

				
				
			

				
				
				
				
				
				
				

				

				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				


REVIEW :


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“Acheraïou’s rethought colonialism is more a personal interpretation of a human tendency to dominate members of their own species than a conventional postcolonial theory of literature, oral production, art, and culture, because Acheraïou prefers to see colonialism as “an immemorial phenomenon” (3), as distinguished from the time-specific phenomenon of various hegemonic European empires in the New World over the past five hundred years. Thus, in the arc of his discussion he addresses how classical writings have influenced colonial discourse over the last two centuries and how constructs of modernism and empire are interrelated. […]


His theory of postcolonialism is ideologically expansive and culturally inclusive, historically bold, and reminiscent of empire in that he reminds readers that colonialism has never ended and may be a universal system without an end boundary. Much of his discussion pertains to imperial ideologies, attitudes, and practices as informing specific works of literature and as evident textually. His commentary on the texts is insightful and engaging in its didactic energy. […]


Acheraïou problematizes “rethinking postcolonialism” by aligning it with how colonizers conceptualized colonialism. In his conclusion as throughout the book he stresses “the intricate connections between ‘new’ and ancient imperialism” (214), he notes that “ideological inconsistencies … can also be easily discerned in the works of those criticising empire, such as Conrad, Forster, Woolf, Green, Gide and Camus” (217), and he cautions that “failing to acknowledge that imperialism was for the majority of the natives an odyssey of dispossession, humiliation and alienation may be just as mystifying as reducing the colonial encounters to smooth, balanced transactions” (219).”


Paul Matthew St Pierre – Some Self-Reflections on Colonialism and Postcolonialism (English Studies in Canada)

			

			

				
				
				
				
			

				
				
			


				
					

			
					


											
								Postcolonialism, Sociology, and the Politics of Knowledge Production							
					
															
Postcolonialism, Sociology, and the Politics of Knowledge Production

					
					
 par  | Nov 27, 2016 | Rethinking Modernity

				
				
				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				

					

					

						
						
POSTCOLONIALISM, SOCIOLOGY, AND THE POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION

						
						

						
					

				

					
				

				

				

					
					
					
				

			

				
				
			

				
				
				
				
				
				
				

				

				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				

					
					

						
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				RETHINKING MODERNITY
			

				Modernité
			

				Universalisme
			

				Ethnocentrisme
			

				
				
				
				
				
			

				
				
				
				
				


Our identification of ‘modern’ society rests on a conception of what it means to be modern – whether the modern is understood in terms of social structures or of discourses – and it is from the Western experience that these definitions are drawn.


Gurminder K Bhambra


« Notre identification de la société ‘moderne’ repose sur une conception de ce que signifie être moderne – que le moderne soit compris en termes de structures sociales ou de discours – et c’est à partir de l’expérience occidentale que ces définitions sont tirées. »

			

			

				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				


                                                                   ‘Modernity’ is the dominant frame for social and political thought, not just in the West, but across the world.

			

				
				
				
				
				
‘Modernity’ is the dominant frame for social and political thought, not just in the West, but across the world. The repercussions of the French Revolution and the processes of industrialization stimulated debates about the emergence of a modern world and this world was held to require a distinctively modern form of explanation. I shall argue that this rests on two fundamental assumptions: rupture and difference – a temporal rupture that distinguishes a traditional, agrarian past from the modern, industrial present; and a fundamental difference that distinguishes Europe from the rest of the world. These paradigmatic assumptions frame both the standard methodological problems posed by social inquiry and the explanations posited in resolving them. In this book, I call into question the socio-historic evidence for ideas of rupture and difference, and examine how the construction of this evidence itself has led to the development of particular forms of theoretical understandings. Most importantly, the equating of modernity with Europe reinforces a fundamental assumption of much intellectual thought today: that particular structures, emerging first in the West, would become universal.


Some will assert that such claims are no longer novel. The ideas of temporal and spatial disjuncture on which dominant ideas of modernity rest have seemingly been challenged by many postmodern and postcolonial theorists and yet, while there is increasing hesitancy in equating westernization with progress, it is my contention that the West is still seen as the leader or ‘signifier’ of change. For example, many theorists locate the postmodern turn itself in the advanced capitalist countries of the West and many postcolonial scholars alike continue to use Europe as a reference point, albeit a negative one. I shall argue that there is a need to reconsider the conceptual framework of modernity from a wider spatial and historical context, one which regards the very concept of modernity itself as problematic.


By addressing the relationship between modernity, postcolonial theory, and Eurocentrism, I challenge the continued privileging of the West as the ‘maker’ of universal history and seek to develop alternatives from which to begin to deal with the questions that arise once we reject this categorization. This is done in the belief that the ways in which we understand the past are crucial to our understandings of ourselves and the world in which we live today and that if our understandings of the past are inadequate it follows that our grasp of the present will also be inadequate. Although I address dominant conceptions of modernity from the perspective of postcolonial theory, I shall also criticize postcolonial theory itself, arguing that it frequently simply inverts the dualism inherent to the dominant conceptions and, in that way, preserves the very intellectual structure that is being challenged.


Modernity, broadly conceived, refers to the social, cultural, political, and economic changes that took place in Western Europe from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. Regardless of the different interpretations put forward by theorists of modernity – as to its nature, the timing of its emergence, and its continued character today – ideas of rupture and difference, I contend, underpin all theories of modernity. This is high-lighted in the work of the French and Scottish writers of the eighteenth century – such as Montesquieu, Ferguson, and Smith – who are largely seen as precursors of the sociological approach as well as in the work of the primary theorists of classical sociology – Durkheim, Weber, and Marx – who all express, in differing ways, the challenges faced by modern European society, a society that they see as distinguished from earlier agrarian societies and as unique within the contemporary world order.


More recent social theorists on modernity, from a variety of traditions, also see it as both distinctive and European in its origins. […]


Across a range of theoretical positions, then, modernity can be seen as resting on a basic distinction between the social formations of ‘the West’ and ‘traditional’ or ‘pre-modern’ societies. […]


Our identification of ‘modern’ society rests on a conception of what it means to be modern – whether the modern is understood in terms of social structures or of discourses – and it is from the Western experience that these definitions are drawn. […]


As I shall demonstrate, the Western experience has been taken both as the basis for the construction of the concept of modernity and, at the same time, that concept is argued to have a validity that transcends the Western experience. Following Mohanty, I would like to draw attention to the ways in which authors codify others as non-Western and hence themselves as implicitly Western without ever really stating what being Western entails (1991: 51), or, for that matter, what being European entails.


Gurminder K Bhambra –  Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination


Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (1991) ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’ in C. T. Mohanty, A. Russo and L. Torres (eds) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism


Gurminder K Bhambra

			

			

				
				
				
				
			

				
				
			

				
				
				
				
				
				
				

				

				
				
				
				
				

				
				
				
				
				


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“From the perspective of postcolonial theory, the book takes issue with the ‘facts’ of European modernity and the scholarly understanding of the European ‘ownership’ of modernity as an originary project. Bhambra recognizes that ubiquitous within social scientific inquiry is the continual privileging of Europe and the West as the sole ‘maker’ of modernity. In her words, “the story is never about the peasant” (25). […]


In chapter 1 Bhambra briefly discusses the politics of knowledge production, and, importantly, acknowledging colonialism as part of the scene of dominant social scientific inquiry. For Bhambra, the colonial encounter, which involved conquest, domination, and enslavement of peoples and forms of life, is “constitutive of the very disciplines that express or seek to understand modernity” (16). With theoretical poise, Bhambra posits that colonialism was intrinsic to the contemporary scene in which dominant forms of inquiry were found and yet the colonial encounter is rendered unseen. Hence it remains, for Bhambra, imperative to deconstruct these forms of inquiry that elaborated universal criteria on the basis of marginalizing and silencing other experiences and voices. Borrowing from historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam (1997), Bhambra proposes the concept of ‘connected histories’ as a viable approach to deconstructing dominant narratives at the same time rendering visible the constituted ‘other.’”


Gregory Lee Cuellar : Postcolonial Networks