Against Privilege Theory

This recent intervention from U.S. socialists in the Occupy movement has set me reflecting on the term ‘privilege’, and its growth as a analytical tool – and accompanying rhetorical strategy – in social movements.

I’ve little patience with contemporary leftist critiques of so-called identity politics, whatever previous value that struggle may once have had. They seem now, for the most part, to be dedicated to trying to get other people to quieten down about their identity, all in the name of a (largely mythical) ‘central’ class concern. This isn’t just bad politics. It’s also bad class politics. A left which isn’t – like the working class itself – attuned to, and welcoming of, the varieties of human sexuality and gender identity, and actively anti-racist, is hardly worth the name or the bother. And, besides, it’s not like the oppressed choose what questions of identity they’ll be confronted with. The trans person who has no appropriate box to tick when they're asked about sex on census day, or who is assigned a prison cell in a jail for people other than the gender they identify with, didn’t ask to be placed in that situation.

Conversations about, and struggles over, identity, are essential to politics. Gary Younge is wise about this, as so much else, and stresses, in his Who Are We?, that “identities are a great place to start.” The pains they impose upon us (in the case of compulsory heterosexuality, say) or the sense of liberation they can bring (as with the superb slogan Black is Beautiful from the 1960s) can both spur further action, and demand reflection. That process, for those not amongst the oppressed group, isn’t always comfortable, but it’s an essential starting move. That confrontation – in which a sincere belief in one’s involvement in a particular cause comes up against the realities of implication in a wider ideological system – seems to be the moment from which privilege theory takes its energy. The exciting work of Eclipse Rising, the Zainichi activists on the West Coast of the United States, or the publishing collective Mellow Yellow in this country, are just two examples of the kind of direction that struggle can take.

It’s here that my discomfort sets in. For starters, the language here – whatever gestures are made in the direction of wider structures of power – relentlessly psychologizes what needs to be understood in systemic terms. That oppression exists is so obvious that it shouldn’t need mentioning, nor should it be put into rhetorical competition with other injustices. (Here I agree with Richard Seymour at Lenin’s Tomb: “those who attack multiculturalism in the name of class instantly forfeit their probity on both subjects.”) Contemporary capitalism is riven with barbarousness, racist inequalities, murderous injustice, sexist bigotry and petty, vindictive meanness.

But to whom does any of this accrue ‘privilege’? The language of rights we’ve inherited from the great bourgeois revolutions, whatever its other problems, still seems preferable at the level of immediate slogans and rhetorical demands: to walk the streets unmolested ought to be a simple – and essential - democratic right, not a privilege granted, like access to a licensed premises, to the lucky by the powerful.

More worrying, talk of privilege in this sense suggests an investment in, and a benefit from, the existing state of affairs for those not in oppressed groups (I mean, for most of these examples, straight-identifying white male workers) that I don’t think the history of previous liberation movements bears out.

The Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970s, for instance, has been of enormous benefit to straight men. This wasn’t, quite properly, the aim of that movement, but its by-products have been a boon for us all. A more open culture around sexual experience and sexual expression; programmes for male health unthinkable before the activism and stridency of the gay rights’ movement; a greater sense of the complexities of identity and desire: all this has resulted in markedly better lives for heterosexual men. It took Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation to attack and critique the association of male sexuality with dominance and aggression- are straight men worse off for this? On a more practical, and needlessly tragic, level, homophobic anxieties around examining parts of the body play an important part in keeping deaths from prostate cancer so high, while the quite different attitudes to contraception between openly gay men and heterosexual-identifying men who have sex with other men point to the universal potential good of Gay Liberation.

Check Your Privilege

Talk of checking privilege captures little of this complexity, whatever the individual merits of the suggestions involved, and, what’s worse, produces a sense of the experience of liberation as one of threat, loss, and morally-driven reformation. Its language here, ironically, mirrors that of the mainstream, in which feminism has ‘emasculated’ men, produced a crisis of masculinity and so on. Challenges to oppression involve all sorts of uncomfortable and difficult confrontations, to be sure. Whether these are what drive that process is another matter.

Intersectionality is the term some types of feminism use to grasp some of this, but the spatial imagery this deploys – in which privileges pile up on one another like the layers of a pancake brunch – doesn’t seem to fit the dynamics of liberation movements past. (I’m writing about past struggles because, like the rest of my generation, my political formation was in the backlash and devastation of these movements).

Autralia’s Builders’ Labourers Federation in the 1970s seems, at first glance, like a picture of privilege: overwhelmingly male, part of a boisterously heterosexist culture, from a ‘traditional’ blue-collar industry. The BLF’s response as political radicals turned it into a fighting union, though, points in a different direction. For starters, the BLF built amongst immigrants and non-Anglo groups, recognizing the need to draw new migrants into union struggles.

More strikingly, from the height of their industrial power in the 1970s, the BLF took part in an outstanding campaign in support of gay and lesbian rights. They imposed a “black ban” on work at Macquarie University when it tried to kick out a gay student from his hall of residence. (Savour the contemporary headlines here). Strike action forced the reinstatement of a student to teachers’ training who had been expelled for writing a lesbian poem. For organized workers, power doesn’t corrupt, it inspires. (Traditions from the BLF live on: in 2005 a  gay comrade and friend of mine threatened with arrest at Deakin University managed to keep up political activity when construction workers on site stopped work to defend his freedomof speech).

The BLF matters as an example because it disproves both the mythology of the right-wing anti-identity politics stance at the same time as it shows how union organization against oppression might operate. This was a group of ‘traditional’ workers for whom social questions and ‘labour’ questions were inseparable, and their industrial and political strength rose and fell as they fought on both fronts.

None of this should suggest an illusory picture of the trade union movement as free of prejudice, of course. But the strategic dilemmas we face demand an older language of ideology and false consciousness, whatever the difficulties in that term, instead of hierarchies of privilege.  The problem here is strategic stupidity, not privilege. Japan’s major unions have been happy to rest on their privileged position as organisers of the permanent and full-time for many years now. The crisis gathers, though, as casualised and impermanent younger workers have been kept from the movement. That problem, if not addressed with solidarity and organization, will break the permanent workers’ groupings, not maintain them.

Again, who can speak as Other?

One of the productive irritants of privilege theory, though, leftist practice has no right to ignore: where are the voices of the oppressed? A contemporary socialism which isn’t spoken through the language and ideas of women as well as men, queers as well as straights, migrants as well as ‘local’ workers, is of no interest to me. Insisting on agency  is vital here, and warns against revivals of the White Man’s Burden elsewhere; it also reminds us of what’s missing in so much public life.

The question, for me, isn’t one so much of appropriation as appropriation for what end? I’m involved in the movement for abortion rights, for instance; it seems clear that this movement needs both to be led by women and to have the active involvement of men. There’s no contradiction there, and the choice isn’t between marginalizing others and choosing to keep silence in the face of what’s framed as privilege. There are relationships between leadership, involvement, active listening and respectful debate that need explored: privilege theory threatens to close those off instead of developing them.

This blog itself, I’m aware, exists just that side of Orientalism, and leaves me open to not-wholly-unjustified charges of appropriation. I started writing here to try and get into critical habits that might undo three divisions that seemed to be conceptually crippling, and politically harmful: that between the still-dominant Anglocentric orientation of my disciplinary location and the multiculture it inhabits; that between ‘theoretical’ work hidden behind paywalls and peer review and the direct, conversational address of blogging; and that between my training and institutional work as a literary critic and my political commitments and activity.

The risk of appropriation remains, naturally: these aren’t my stories, I’m not of this community, I’m not walking this path. The challenge of literature, and the value of literary studies, is that it offers an imaginative space in which to try and inhabit identities that aren’t our own, and situations we’re not able to share. That work can be productive when its memory plays out in more practical political situations.

Literary experience stresses peculiarity here, the complexity of subjectivity and individual involvement in larger history. The ending to Jean Rhys’ “Let Them Call it Jazz” sticks in my mind as the best example of this:

I read the letter and I could cry. For after all, that song was all I had. I don’t belong nowhere really, and I haven’t money to buy my way to belonging. I don’t want to either.

But when that girl sing, she sing to me and she sing for me. I was there because I was meant to be there. It was meant I should hear it – this I know.

Now I’ve let them play it wrong, and it will go from me like all the other songs – like everything. Nothing left for me at all.

But then I tell myself all this is foolishness. Even if they played it on trumpets, even if they played it just right, like I wanted – no walls would fall so soon. ‘Let them call it jazz’ I think, and let them play it wrong. That won’t make no difference to the song I heard.

I buy myself a dusty pink dress with the money.

The other possibility this raises, with its line about the song being sung for the narrator, is that of standpoint theory, the sense, following Lukacs, that in fact there’s a privilege or the chance to epistemological and political insight to particular marginalized positions, the chance from some locations better to see the system whole.

Where to go from there is a whole other discussion, and one I can’t pursue here. The second half of Gary Younge’s quotation suggests one direction:

even before the recession, for a younger generation capitalism had already become a system worth critiquing. People have never been so savvy about neoliberalism and the need for transformative politics.

So on the one hand we have never been so aware of international capitalism, but we've never been less well organised as a force - we are too dispersed. 

And that's the challenge we face. Identities are a great place to start - they're about how we got here, what makes people want to be part of a certain politics. But it's a terrible place to finish. If you end with identity, you end in fundamentalism or self-indulgence.

So our task is to find a way to mobilise identity for good. Identity is like fire. We wouldn't want to do without fire, but it can be dangerous. To deny difference doesn't mean that difference doesn't exist. It just means that you can't see it.

James Baldwin expressed this in a different way in a line I’ve always loved. Asked if he thought being poor, black and gay had disadvantaged him as a writer, Baldwin replied, no, he felt he’d hit the jackpot. It’s another privilege again.

Sources

My knowledge of the BLF campaigns within the social movements comes from Liz Ross, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win (Vulgar Press, 2004), and Meredith and Verity Burgmann, Green Bans, Red Union (UNSW Press, 1998). Both are wonderful histories.

Counter-song to 'The Friendliness of the World'

Where is the literature of work? There are all sorts of theoretical issues and problems clustered around this question, to be sure, and labour’s harder, possibly, to draw out in narrative form in an era when – as Jameson has it - “representation is not conceived as a dilemma but as an impossibility”, but, all the same, the fact the question is asked so infrequently ought to give us pause.

There’s something grotesque in the claim that literature about work is boring, too. It’s one of those claims that seems, usefully, to be an aestheticism and willing impractical; I’m starting to suspect, though, that it involves a more knowing complacency, and comfort with the existing order, than usually needs acknowledged. A future historian could read many volumes of contemporary literature without realizing that there had never been a bosses’ offensive through the 1980s and 1990s.

What is the alternative? Part of my day job involves trying to keep up to date with contemporary literature, and so I can say this with confidence: there are few things more boring than ‘literary’ novels about middle-class people getting divorced, or having affairs, or experiencing revelations whilst travelling.  And yet these trash works, readers – the sub-genre Iain Banks calls the ‘Hamstead novel’ – are the works that manage to intimidate and brow-beat many any un-‘literary’ reader, and to dominate much of the reviews pages of the ‘quality’ press.

Perhaps the representational problems of contemporary capitalism aren’t all so very different from its earlier forms, and what we’re facing is instead a problem of strategy and outlook amongst writers. The details emerging in the last months about conditions onboard fishing ships in the Southern Ocean cry out for a Shelley or a Marge Piercy to record the disgust and indignation we all should be feeling. Workers have been kept in virtual slavery, subjected to violence, abuse, and sexual assault. They’ve had their wages denied, and have been sent into dangerous seas in what look (from reports and from my memory of seeing these ships in Dunedin) like rusted and decrepit wrecks. The entire situation is a scandal.

The desperation and horrors the international crews of these ships – the Oyang 77 and all the rest – face remind us too, though, of how a literature of work – by which I might as well make clear I also mean a means of communication for workers – may be reforged. It’s no accident that watersiders’ and seamens’ unions have been historical sources of militancy, clarity and courage: if the ruthlessness of shipping company bosses forced conditions in the industry to ghastly lows, long periods and sea together – and the spread of ideas, publications, and magazines from country to country – produced intense cultures of solidarity and class consciousness. Ships were, for many generations, the universities of the working-class movements.

*

In 2008 the Japanese book world was surprised by the sudden revival of a long-lost classic. Kobayashi Takiji’s Kani Kosen (The Crab Cannery Boat), first published in 1929, sold around 380 000 copies in the first part of 2008; its publishers would usually be happy with a run of 5 000 or so. A manga version came out that same year, and a film adaptation followed. Kobayashi’s novel – the story of deprivation, abuse and, eventually, resistance, on a fishing boat – has, for most of its life, been read as a piece of literary history, a classic of leftist ‘proletarian’ literature. Kobayashi’s new readers, though, were Japan’s ‘new poor’, casualised, underemployed and precarious workers in their 20s and 30s for whom the novel’s representations of workplace humiliation, sexual harassment and assault, isolation and drudgery had immediate, and contemporary, relevance.

Kobayashi’s surprise revival wasn’t altogether surprising; as Norma Field has pointed out, a number of figures in publishing and Kobayashi scholarship had been working for many years to make his rediscovery possible. But his new audience – and the new readings of his work they enable – is exciting nonetheless: the latest Kobayashi ‘wave’ has produced, as well as manga and film adaptations, a play and other creative interpretations.

Kani Kosen’s twenty-first century life demonstrates, for me at least, that the audience for literature about work is undiminished. The decline of interest in workers’ literature and literature of work (not always the same thing, to be sure) is more to do with the political struggle within literary criticism than it is to do with any real changes in society or the social struggle. Being a socialist working in literary studies has been, for many years, a lonely job of work; I’ve a feeling from the ‘year of the protestor’ last year that it may become less so soon.

Reading accounts from the Oyang 77 and others, it was Kobayashi’s work that came into my mind. His realism was dedicated to documenting these outrages, and his account of life on a fishing ship gives me more of a sense of this experience than anything I’ve read since.

Kobayashi’s is an openly propagandistic work. He aims to expose the conditions in the shipping industry, and is quite obviously moved to write by a righteous anger. Literature, motivated by this anger, isn’t solely a tool for organizing, but it has its role to play:

"Capitalism, intending that labour remain unorganized, has ironically created a situation where it has caused it (almost spontaneously) to organise. I have attempted in this work to show how inexorably capitalism infiltrates the new territories and colonies to carry out a primitive exploitation and, with the backing of the powers that be and the armed forces as guards, watchmen and bullies, carries out a never-ending series of brutalities."

What then of Kani Kosen’s literary qualities? The mainstream of criticism follows much the same predictable path here as it has elsewhere: Kobayashi’s isn’t a Hampstead novel. Roy Starrs in Modernism and Japanese Culture remarks rather sniffily on the “pedestrian quality” of most proletarian literature, but this is to miss the point of Kobayashi’s formal radicalism and aesthetic aims. Kani Kosen is written in a ‘flat’, broken, ‘objective’ style, recording – like Isherwood’s line ‘I am a camera’ – as if without narrator or narrative presence, drawing the reader into the thisness of that particular social situation.

The horrors this book records are horrific precisely because they’re normal, everyday events. A violent beating onboard; rape as a sanctioned form of punishment; dirt; poverty; danger: the crisis, Kani Kosen’s organization implies, is precisely that none of this is taken as evidence of a crisis.

Does ‘poetry make nothing happen’? The authorities in the early years of the Showa Era didn’t think so. Kobayashi was arrested repeatedly, held for his involvement with the Communist Party and the Proletarian Writers’ Guild of Japan and, on 20^th February 1933, he died as a result of torture and beatings he’d received in police custody. Having lost his job over his publications – “The Absentee Landlord” is a classic alongside Kani Kosen – he was eventually to lose his life. He was the same age I am now when he died.

There have in fact been two Kani Kosen revivals. A 1953 film version linked the narrative to the post-war revival of union militancy in Japan, and matched by repression from the US occupying forces and newly reorganized Japanese capitalist class. This latest revival catches Japanese capitalism at a different stage in its history, and draws – inevitably, given the decomposition of the union movement and the loss of traditions of revolt – more on the details of suffering and victimization than the last time around. This new Kobayashi may further inspire anger, though, and, with it, action.

*

One last detail to link Kani Kosen and our current situation imaginatively. Much has been made of the nationality of the sailors on board the Korean-owned ships, and of the divisions between the foreign-owned vessels, the waters they work in, and the homelands of the crew.

It’s obvious there are tactics to divide and rule at work and that, at times, these have been successful. But this bosses’ strategy is a high-risk one, too; creating an internationalized workforce, they may find themselves with a newly organized, and unanticipated, opposition.

Kobayashi wrote Kani Kosen for internationalist purposes. He wrote in Japanese and for a Japanese market, but he never saw himself as a ‘Japanese’ writer – the label ‘proletarian literature’ is as much a utopian point of identification as it is a sociological-literary sign. Writing against racist and colonialist pieces on Korea and Koreas, Kobayashi insisted:

"The proletariat cries out that they are utterly opposed to imperialist wars, but I wonder how many workers in Japan really understand why they must protest. Nevertheless, they must be made to understand. This is a matter of utmost urgency."

This legacy revives, too. Norma Field reports that Kobayashi’s recent Korean translator and publisher - Yi Kwi-wðn and publisher Yi Sang-kyðng – travelled to speak at his birthplace in Akita in 2008. A more recent translation has appeared in Korean. On these affinities, Field observes:

Yi KwÄ«-wðn recounted how, as he translated the works of Marx or Lenin from Japanese translations in the course of underground activities in Pusan, he began to yearn for works of literature.  Encountering Takiji's works for the first time, and feeling a strong affinity for the portrayal of state violence (in "March 15, 1928") and underground struggle ("The Life of a Party Member") as well as the narrative of theCannery Ship, he translated the three, and his friend published them under the title of The Cannery Ship as soon as the Chun Doo-hwan regime came to an end.

Why did Yi Kwi-wðn feel the need for works of literature? Why, for that matter, did Takiji and his comrades feel the need to produce literature during their busy, danger-ridden pursuit of social transformation? And how important is the fact of its being a work of literature to the revival of the Cannery Ship?  We know that the title has provided an invaluable metaphor enabling people to grasp their current condition, but what about the work as a whole?

It remains to be seen if, and how, in these strange and familiar times, the experience of novelistic ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking will serve people seeking to redefine their world: from a collection of atomized consumers to a collectivity of citizens who, by forging solidarity around the necessity of work, have once gain begun to dream of a society dedicated to the flourishing of all.

The literature of work never disappeared, and it was never forgotten. We’ve faced, rather, modes of reading – and practices of criticism – that have operated as a kind of anti-memory, erasing these dissident, radical, internationalist traditions of proletarian literature.

The news from the Southern Ocean convinces me, though, that this is a tradition ready to be revived.

Sources

Norma Field’s essay in Japan Focus is excellent. Read it here, if you missed the links above. Thanks to Shomi Yoon, who first introduced me to Kobayashi, and who wrote on him here. Neojaponisme have a very good introductory piece on Kani Kosen - and a translation of chapter one - here.

Roy Starrs’ quote I take from his Modernism and Japanese Culture (Palgrave 2011), an otherwise very valuable book.

I was prompted to write this in part from the work I’ve been doing to support the Maritime Union of NewZealand in their current struggle at Ports of Auckland. If you’re reading from New Zealand, look up Save Our Port.

The Postcolonial Unconscious

There is so much good to write about The Postcolonial Unconscious that it is hard to know where to begin. Neil Lazarus’ book comes like answered prayers; it’s the kind of text I have been hoping to see appear for many years now, and yet never quite believed I’d be able to read. A full-blown assault on the complacency and political and moral exhaustion of so much of what passes for ‘postcolonial criticism’ in the academy today, Lazarus’ is a very important – and thought-provoking – intervention into anti-Eurocentric literary studies. Geopolitical shifts have made possible what Lazarus calls the “reconstructive thrust” of his work.

He aims to recreate a counter-canon, re-examining important political interventions from moments past – Fanon most significantly – in order to set out a politically engaged criticism useful for today. “Developments in the first decade of the new century – above all the US-led and –sponsored invasion of Iraq and the sorry misadventure in Afghanistan – have exposed the contradictions of this established postcolonialist understanding to stark and unforgiving light. For, conjoining violence and military conquest with expropriation, pillage, and undisguised grabbing for resources, these developments have demonstrably rejoined the twenty-first century to a long and as yet unbroken history, wrongly supposed by postcolonial theory to have come to a close circa 1975. This is the history of capitalist imperialism.” (15) The individualist and arresting obsessions of a textualist postcolonialism – and its hostility to third-world nationalisms – have, Lazarus argues, become fetters from an era of defeats unsuited to the challenges confronting us.

 If Lazarus calls for a newly political criticism, though, it is one that appears in a guise some might find unexpected. Part of his impatience with current postcolonialism is to do with its heavy-handedness, its ponderous insistence on a few set-piece confrontations. “One the one hand, so many works that ought – by the most orthodox criteria, such as representativeness or literary value – to have been taken into consideration, have been ignored entirely; on the other hand, the relatively few works that have been taken into consideration have often, and characteristically, been read in the most leadenly reductive of ways.” (22) Instead of yet another boring article on Otherness, or on how text X or Y at once critiques and endorses imperialism, or on the perils of representation, Lazarus challenges us to read across writing from the oppressed world, and to approach these texts with eyes and ears alert to the complexities of issues they might confront, and strategies they might use. Enough reading novels as theses! Lazarus’ book made me think of all the articles I’ve read that announce a particular novel “argues” a set case, and to shudder at the time wasted. The quickest path to a politicised criticism, then, might again be through the garden of Formalism.

The canon? Yes, please!

The evident joy Lazarus takes in the texts he studies, and his fearless use of the terms of literary value, is another of The Postcolonial Unconscious’ virtues. His argument here proves itself in delivery, as the piling of example upon example, and close reading on close reading, is essential to establish two, interconnected, points. Firstly, against Fredric Jameson, Lazarus locates in literary writing all across the oppressed world evidence that there is a “modernist writing after the canonisation of modernism”, a writing “that resists the accommodation of what has been canonised as modernism and that does what at least some modernist work has done from the outset: namely, says ‘no’; refuses integration, resolution, consolation, comfort; protests and criticises.” (31)

As well as following in the tracks of this critical modernism of ‘disconsolation’, Lazarus insists that we at least consider – in front of the body of actual texts – the fate of realism as it has developed in the literary field. “Inasmuch as the dominant aesthetic dispositions in postcolonial literary studies have from the outset reflected those in post-structuralist theory generally, the categorical disparagement of realism in the latter field has tended to receive a dutiful – if wholly unjustified and unjustifiable – echo in the former.” (82) ‘Postcolonial’ theory, Lazarus illustrates, has been sneeringly dismiss of realism for all manner of poorly articulated reasons while, at the same time, critical and anti-colonial literary production in the postcolonial world has led to a revival and re-imagining of realism.

Who can speak as Other?

One sign of postcolonial theory’s political decay is the ascendency of J.M. Coetzee. Coetzee – and the insistence on ‘ethics’ against ‘politics’ that goes along with so many discussions of his work – is, in many a primer and textbook, set up as something of a postcolonial exemplary, a writer whose abiding concerns – with the relationship between representation and power, with speech and silence, with narrative and colonialism – are seen as more serious, and more self-reflexively aware of the writer’s own implication in power, than earlier, bad realists. Express a preference for Nadine Gordimer or Andre Brink over Coetzee and, in many an academic circle, you condemn yourself as hopelessly passé. What’s missed in this thinking, though, are some of the implications of Coetzee’s own development: towards ever shorter, sparser, emptier novels, in which an ever-more scrupulous meanness pulls away from the possibilities of any sort of ethical engagement, let alone a more collective political intervention or appeal for justice.

Lazarus has a more positive view of Coetzee than me, but insists on a very salutary suspicion towards self-denying ordinances around ‘speaking for the Other.’ He traces the – very real – dilemmas of speaking of, for, and about others as they appear in concrete political-literary situations, arguing that “we do not have to choose between attention to truth – as propositional correspondence with reality – and attention to rhetoric – as the discursive shaping and mobilisation of ideas, including about what is true.” (125) A sensitivity towards issues of appropriation should be accompanied by a sense of urgency that certain matters are brought up, discussed, known more widely. The question is not so much is this appropriation, as appropriation for what, of whom, for what end?

Most controversially, Lazarus links this to his defence of Fredric Jameson’s reading of ‘Third World literature’ as ‘national allegory.’ Jameson’s argument – deeply unpopular in postcolonial orthodoxy, and accused of all manner of reductionisms and Eurocentrisms – has, Lazarus contends, been misread by most of his critics. Locating Jameson’s claims within their context – as an appeal, and as part of a public lecture in the United States – Lazarus argues that they are an intervention in pedagogy and curriculum, a recognition of the unread status of most ‘Third World’ texts in ‘the West’. When Jameson talks about how these texts appear to ‘us’ (i.e. the reader in the oppressor or ‘developed’ world), he is not, contra Aijaz Ahmad, acting to exclude ‘Third World’ leftists from the discussion but, rather, recognising the need to fight to change and expand the English-language literature curriculum for anti-imperialist ends.

This section of the book was particularly interesting for me because, in miniature, I saw the situation Lazarus describes play out in my own classroom. Having set Jameson’s essay as a reading in my Postcolonial Literature paper, almost all my best students wrote responses to him castigating him – usually along the empiricist line that he couldn’t have read every ‘Third World’ text – for reductiveness, narrow-mindedness, Eurocentrism, etc. These same students, though, were later less severe on texts making blanket points on particular ‘cultures’, indicating that the hostility Jameson produced had a quite specific energy.

While postcolonial criticism has spent decades repeating much the same lines about ‘speaking as Other’ and the violence of representation, the percentage of literature in translation consumed in English-speaking countries has fallen. The plea Jameson made twenty-five years ago – that we take the political and critical tasks involved in constructing a non-Eurocentric literary criticism seriously – is as relevant as ever in a social formation where many leftist Anglophone readers will be unaware of Mulk Raj Anand, Bei Dao, Aime Cesaire, Mahmoud Darwish, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Nuruddin Farah or Elias Khoury.

 How reductive, and how self-sustaining, most postcolonial literature curriculums remain!

For national allegory

Lazarus’ defence of Jameson reminds me of the provocative power of that 1986 essay too. So much of the individualist focus of postcolonialist criticism, ironically, downplays the national question itself, and, as Lazarus shows, Homi Bhabha, Spivak and others have performed feats of distortion to transform revolutionary nationalist thinkers like Fanon into poststructuralists avant la letter, suspicious of and hostile to nationalisms of oppressor and oppressed equally. (The use of the term ‘colonial encounter’ is symptomatic here, as if the wider forces of imperialism are secondary to interpersonal relations.) Talk of national allegory reminds us that, for many parts of the world, the project of national liberation remains an urgent and pressing one, and that nationalist energies – as the ongoing controversy around Rosa Luxemburg for socialists illustrates – are a complex and far from simple thing. In this setting, Jameson’s suggestion that we read texts as ‘national allegories’ forces the ‘Western’ reader into rather more complexity than less.

Take four examples, all bestselling, from Korean literature in the last twenty years. Hwang Sok-Yong’s The Guest examines the damage the ‘guests’ – Christianity and Stalinist Marxism – have done to Korean society, and plays out a family story as a national history. Kim Young-Ha’s Your Republic is Calling You treats the issue of national division explicitly, making a DPRK agent in deep cover its protagonist. Park Wan-Suh’s Who Ate Up All the Shinga? (1992) makes only fleeting reference to the war, and yet many Korean readers locate significance in all sorts of details – starting with the mysterious shinga in the title – that give its nostalgia and memory work a significance beyond a personal story.

What, even, if Yang Gui-Ja’s Contradictions (1998) can be read as national allegory? Contradictions' heroine An Jin-Jin attempts to choose between lovers, and is torn also between her own mother and her aunt, her mother’s identical twin. The lovers suggest different lives; the mother and aunt, although ‘identical’, couldn’t be more different figures. Don’t these doublings and choosings – these contradictions – have a different symbolic and metaphorical resonance in a country divided and at war than they would in a country undamaged by imperialism? The question seems sensible at least to pose.

 Kim Yun-Sok, writing in 1995, argued of the colonial period that

  When Korea lost its sovereignty as a result of its annexation by Japan, the formidable task of assuring the return of this sovereignty fell to literature alone. In a sense, this mission was its point of departure.

Historians will challenge that “alone”, no doubt; there was a rather busy resistance movement. But that this task could be formidable, and desirable, and, in many countries – Palestine most obviously – urgent, passes by contemporary postcolonial criticism.

Neil Lazarus’ book, in restoring the products, both historical and contemporary, of revolutionary nationalism to both serious critical attention, and to properly literary evaluation, performs a very valuable task. I’m enormously grateful to him for it.

Sources

 Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

 Park Wan-Suh, Who Ate Up All the Shinga? has been translated by Yu Young-Nan and Stephen J Epstein; Yang Gui Ja, Contradictions, by Stephen J Epstein and Kim Mi-Young; Kim Young-Ha, Your Republic is Calling You, by Chi-Young Kim.

Kim Yun-Sok’s comment I’ve taken from Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, p. 191.

 I first found out about Lazarus’ book from Gary Pearce, whose PhD thesis on Irish modernism is also one of Lazarus' citations.

The Boy Who's a Girl

Nitori Shuichi is a 5th grader, a boy who wants to be a girl, although he may not altogether realise that. Takatsuki Yoshino, his friend, is a girl who wants to be a boy. Volume One of Shimura Takako’s manga Wandering Son covers the months leading up to their graduation, and traces with an astonishing beauty the difficulties and excitement of both desires.

The sex/gender distinction is an easy enough one to work with and, whatever later revisions and challenges it may have needed, it still performs useful political work. Our desires and identities – and the not always simple connections between those two – work themselves out in the play between the two terms, as physical bodies and selves are shaped by and shape their cultural context and social construction. So far, so orthodox. There’s a certain frisson in the stretching and bending of these expectations and in the flouting of gendered roles (this is the debased account of Judith Butler current in some circles) and, it is sometimes claimed, these performances do their bit to undo gender binaries and their attendant oppressions. That all-too-easy leap from the personal to the political not only bypasses some difficult problems (to do with social structures of oppression, women and exploitation and so on); it also erases a whole raft of experiences that involve an intensely lived relation to the sex/gender divide, ones that don’t wish them severed. Feeling other to the body one is born with – and having to negotiate that otherness in a society happy to ridicule and damage you for this feeling – is a situation not well served by a lot of the language and theorising of gender.





Shimura’s manga chronicles of LGBT experience have been known from many years in Japan ; what makes Wandering Son so interesting, and so useful, as a representation of ‘this world’ and ‘this path’ is the way it focuses, in this early volume, on that time just on the cusp of puberty (a first period plays an important role in the story), when bodily identity and selfhood need not be associated so quickly with questions of sexuality itself. Wandering Son is a beautiful, delicate and careful tale of sex much more than sexuality – what does it mean to be a boy? And, following that, what might it mean to be a girl?




The most gorgeous, and moving, pages, are, for me, those in which Shimura hesitates over a significant object of identity – a hair tie, an old school uniform, a dress or a sailor suit – and uses the image’s isolation and stillness to prompt our reflection and sympathy with the characters as they invest these objects with identifying powers. Pages of ‘rush’ – people hurrying to school, a knock at the door, train rides – give over to single images or a character’s face. Scott McCloud calls that space between panels – ‘the gutter’ – the area that “plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics,” and this is the sense in which I read Wandering Son’s gutters. It’s a manga of transitions, of never-wholly-realised identities, and so the space between the image of a hair band and an image of a face points to the gaps between the bodies characters live with – alongside their often unwelcome transformations – and the bodies they feel as selves.




The difficulty of these boundaries, and the slipperiness of identity, plays out at the level of style, too. Shimura’s characters are very hard to tell apart (something she, half-jokingly, apologises for at the manga’s end), and her drawings make powerful use of simple contrasts, seemingly unfinished sketches and minimal detail to evoke something of the flux and incompleteness in Nitori and Takatsuki’s sense of self and relations. Her exploitation of Japanese’s ambiguities around personal address and gender adds another complexity still; pronouns having such specific contexts and uses in Japanese (私、オレ and ぼくall translating as “I” and yet in themselves gender- and socially-specific) and proper names appearing in place of ‘you’ in ways that make the English speakers norms for gender identification almost unworkable. Matt Thorn’s translation – and his intriguing Translator’s Note – make good use of this material by transporting it into the English and not trying to hide the problems it poses for his work. Shimura wrote another manga called ぼくは、おんなのこ, a title (and, behind it, a subculture) playing with similar gendered language.




Cultural translation is an altogether more vexing problem, though, and Wandering Son reminds us why the terms gay, lesbian and transgender may not be at all appropriate for discussions of Japanese identities. Mark McLelland has pointed out some of the ways in which the too-hasty translation of specific life experiences can cause us to misunderstand the richness of those lives; I’ve written on his work before. Wandering Son makes great use of Takarazuka – the all-female performance troupe – to allow the characters’ cross-dressing to develop in a social context (the classroom) and also as part of a relationship, as friendships help develop insights into self, clothing, and identity. Takarazuka is, though, notoriously hard to place using Western labels for sexuality. I won’t give too much of the story away here, except to say that a school performance of ‘The Rose of Versailles’ sets much of the anxiety – and excitement – in motion.



There’s plenty of the suffering of LGBT life in Wandering Son, too, of course; homophobic bullying and violence, hostility to ‘perverts’, scenes evoking aching loneliness. My dominant memories from the manga, though, transform these into a narrative that’s much more than a realist account of lives neglected in most representations, although goodness knows we need more of those. Rather, Wandering Son’s beauty, the studied quality and balance of each image, seem to bring something of a utopian sense to this alienation and confusion. There’s a sense of expectation and thrill to the discoveries here, to the moment spent looking in a mirror when wearing a dress or sporting a headband, and a sense of anticipation. That’s a rare enough quality in any serious treatment of ‘other’ sexuality, and it's an exciting, and inspirational, one.



Wandering Son has recently been made into an anime, and Fantagraphics Books have brought out Volume Two as well. So look out for Shimura Takako.

Sources

You can buy a copy of Wandering Son here. The pictures I've used here are from the anime, not from the manga.

Jennifer Robertson’s “The Politics of Androgyny in Japan: Sexuality and Subversion in Theatre and Beyond” you can read here (pdf)

Scott McCloud’s three-volume series Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000) and Making Comics (2006) is very useful.

On Tyrants Only We'll Make War

I was last in Seoul during the insufferable summer of 2008, attending All Together’s Marxism conference as the Candlelight Movement shook Korean society.




Seoul’s a gloriously chaotic city, beautiful in its shambolic liveliness and, after months in the buttoned-down decorum of Tokyo, its energy and sense of fun were infectious. I have family who are Zainichi Korean and, over the years, getting closer to them has led me to get more and more fascinated and involved with Korean culture: Seoul was a sensory overload. Fundamentalist Christians shuffle up to you on the underground and whisper “embrace Jesus”; before you’ve had a chance to decide whether you will or not they’ve wandered off. Station platforms are crowded with women selling piles of everything from deliciously enticing pickles to perfectly priced socks. In summer months after business hours shopkeepers set up gas cookers outside their stores, and relax by barbequing snacks and drinking a few shots of shochu before heading home. For non-alcoholic treats you can stop at most street corners and buy peaches blended with ice and sugar. Koreans, too, for a puritanical and gauchely awkward New Zealander like me, seem emotionally liberated: after dark the pubs were full of salary men singing together and wandering around arm-in-arm. The summer felt celebratory.




That demotic, free-spirited city life wasn’t everything, though. Travelling by tube, I was struck by the straight backs of all the men, a reminder of the bullying and violence meted out as part of compulsory military training. Soldiers in uniform are a normal, and visible, part of city life. The city was a site of struggle: wherever we went we’d see the banners and placards of the Candlelight Girl, the movement’s symbol, and often stopped to spend time with little clusters of protestors camping out.

More sinister signs were to come. On the morning of Liberation Day – the day of light, celebrating when the Japanese were defeated – I left our guest house to buy some breakfast, and saw that the streets were crowded with riot police. The state had decided to crush the movement.




South Korea is, in the Western press most of the time, held up as an example of democracy. What we saw could, at the very best, be described as illiberal democracy. Our comrades in All Together base their analysis on the ‘state capitalist’ theories of Tony Cliff, and offer no support for the regime in Pyongyang. That hasn’t stopped many in their ranks being jailed for thought crimes, charged and imprisoned for translating works like Alex Callinicos’ Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx. All Together played a leading, and positive, role in supporting and shaping the Candlelight Movement and, for that reason, their conference was targeted. The university in which it was hosted had, at the very last moment, cut off the power supplies – for three days in mid-July heat we struggled through humidity with hastily-assembled generators keeping minimal heating and air conditioning at work. All Together members, who had sought shelter in a Buddhist temple following brutal police repression, were wanted figures, and, to get to the conference you had to walk past a phalanx of riot police, decked out in full battle regalia. The Saturday of the conference there was a major demonstration scheduled. We’d planned to attend but, early in the evening, conference organisers took us aside; they didn’t want us to go, C explained, because they couldn’t protect us or expect us to take care of ourselves in strange streets, and expected the violence to be sudden and intense. That night we spent, somewhat guiltily, in a local restaurant, checking our phones between courses to see how the cat-and-mouse chases of protestors and police progressed. The next morning we saw many delegates with stitches, and some still bleeding. O, our interpreter, had bruises all the way up his arm.




I’m not a physically confident person, and these details intimidated me. What sticks in my memory, though, is the joyousness of the event, the bubbling energy of the movement pointing in a different direction for Korea’s future. There were children from the crèche running about between sessions; the walls were decorated with union banners and campaign posters; the youth and energy of the crowd gave a clear sense of the forces welling up in the protest and social movements. And there was plenty of laughter. Most of the jokes got lost in translation, but some made their way through. Guest speaker Jonathan Neale, a movement veteran, a bear-like and warmly expansive American socialist, gave a talk on alienation: “I carry mine around with me as a reminder!” he explained, slapping against his belly. Jonathan’s been to many international conferences, and he can explain complex ideas in short, simple sentences – the meeting came alive.




All Together have dedicated a great deal of intellectual and political energy to analysing the origins and dynamics of capitalism in Korea, north and south. They’ve got a clear line for how to get the peninsula nuclear free: let’s start by ending the US occupation. They put their trust in workers on both sides of the border, and have never had any illusions in the regime beyond the 38th. A younger generation, impatient with the Cold War rhetoric of their elders, are less caught up in the demonology of the GNP, and the social movements in the South have freed themselves from poisonous legacies of earlier eras. At the conference, though, I was struck by how many people at question time still wanted to explore the situation in the North, and from the view of the North. After a solid diet of Western liberal accounts of Korea, it’s easy to forget that this is a nation dismembered and still at war, and one with a proud history of resistance to foreign occupation. What may seem bizarre and unpredictable from Washington or Wellington still feels dangerous from Seoul, but motives come into a much clearer view.




I left Seoul feeling happy, and having made many new friends and contacts. The Candlelight Movement looked like it would develop.

A year later, I found out my friend O had been jailed, arrested for distributing leaflets in a public place. There’s a chill over those summer memories now.

*

I’ve never been to Pyongyang, although friends have. A contingent from KEY – the organisation of united Korean youth in Japan – went a few years ago, searching out family members they’d never had the chance to meet until then. Those Zainichi in Japan who have refused to rescind their “North Korean” papers have made a very bold choice, and one that’s hard for many of us fully to understand. They’ve taken upon themselves many inconveniences – and have ruled out all sorts of travel, educational and employment opportunities – for the sake of a principle, and a principle around which they’ve few chances to organise. The statement in refusing Japanese or South Korean citizenship involves insisting on certain historical realities, reminding the world about colonialism, drawing attention to the justice they and their ancestors have been denied. It’s an extraordinary gesture, and one I’m glad I’ve never been forced to see if I’d have the courage to emulate.




My friend K went to Pyongyang, then, to seek out family, and to see the land she’s attached to without having been born there or even, to that point, having visited. What she saw won’t surprise, but should still upset; US-driven sanctions have led to widespread hunger. The regime’s autocratic rule prevented any real communication. The constant mobilisation for war (by no means wholly unjustified) lent the city a sinister, fearful air. It was a lonely, and difficult, trip.

Most of the “North Koreans” in Japan, though, aren’t from the north at all – their relatives are, in the main, from southern regions, and, after the war, took on northern identities for reasons of nationalism and political solidarity. In a country as regionally specific as Korea, the north really is another country.

The ruling classes of both Koreas have played shameful and grubby roles in manipulating the lives of Zainichi Koreans over these last decades. The DPRK, with the connivance of Japan’s rulers and of the International Red Cross, set up mass emigration programmes for Zainichi that resulted in many semi-forced removals from Japan. Who knows how many of those people were subsequently jailed or killed in the north. It was from Tokyo that agents of the Park dictatorship kidnapped Kim Dae-Jung in 1973, taking him to what came very close to death. Thousands of people in Korea, China and Japan are separated from family members and lovers due to the borders and ambitions of imperialism.

The Korean Peninsula is the site of an ongoing, and massive, human tragedy.

*

I don’t shed any tears for Kim Jong-Il. Another ruler falls in the year of revolts. Like my friends in All Together, my hopes are for a Korea united from below, by mass democratic movements of workers in both countries.

I come close to shedding tears, though, at the coverage his death has received: tears of frustration and anger. The idiocy of the mainstream media and the commentary of the so-called experts and hawkish IR figures, all concerned with Kim’s idiosyncrasies and alleged habits, don’t surprise me. More dispiriting, though, has been the memes spreading through Facebook and Twitter from friends and people who should know better. You’ll know these – Kim looking at things, jokes about Dear Leaders, Kim in Team America singing “I’m so rornery”. (The hilarity! Asians confuse their l and their r!).

Anger or contempt for a dictator I welcome, but this ridicule is dangerous. The racism mobilising it all should be too obvious to deserve mention: we have here another figure of the Asian as buffoon, as a comical figure playing out their foolishness on a European world stage their ambitions are unable to match. That this hinders thought hardly needs argued; that it effaces History, again, is worth pondering. The politics of the peninsula are frequently strange, but they’re strange for a reason, and those reasons are to do with war, invasion, occupation, starvation, and the constant threat of further US intervention. Smug liberal gloating over Kim the clown, Kim the cartoon character, reinforces all the colonialist piety that makes Western readers and thinkers, even the most well meaning, ill equipped to handle the charge and challenge of Korean material.




What images we receive, and what narrativising impulse is brought to bear upon them, matters here too: this Kim Jong-Il isn’t the one we’re trained to view, although the details of clothing here suggest points in common with Japanese life both the DPRK leadership and the Japanese would be at pains to deny.

Kim’s death opens an interesting, and, perhaps, exciting time in Korean history. He was a leader who – on his own terms – was very successful. What comes next will matter for the region, and the world. Chinese and US powers will be closely involved.

Who knows what will happen following Kim’s death. I don’t pretend to have any particular expertise. A cursory reading of US foreign policy intellectuals’ work, though, shows us that strategies have been debated for some years now, and none of them are strategies for peace. The Korean War is a tragedy, not material for the one-liners of the well-adjusted news junky.

*

A more personal note to end with. Paul Gilroy, in his “Multiculture in Times of War” (PDF), argues that the true fruits of anti-racist activity present themselves in a certain metropolitan ‘conviviality’, when racial differences ‘appear ordinary and banal, even boring.’ When different languages and foods and ways of living coexist so often, and so frequently, that they don’t need remarked upon we’ve moved some way, Gilroy suggests, to a better society. Not the racist white myth of assimilation, but not the enforced separation of multiculturalism either. Conviviality suggests the freedom –and political space – to be in one’s own being amongst others, to have the realisation, as Raymond Williams put it many years ago, that ‘culture is ordinary’. If everyone’s parents have ‘accents’, to take the example of primary schools near me, none of them stand out so much, and, equally, all of them are valued.




I’d like to imagine, then, a convivial world where a child growing up with Zainichi heritage can feel comfortable wherever they end up, be that Wellington, Tokyo or Seoul, and where the question of identity, so fraught and important for our struggles now, may seem to them boring, irrelevant, or overworked. The issue of belonging becomes particular acute when others try to deny you that right; left free to explore its implications alone, more complex relations may emerge.

That sort of world can’t be produced from the wilful misunderstanding and caricaturing that leaves so many so comfortable with racist depictions of Kim. It can’t be produced in a region still defined by permanent war, either, as the US mobilises Japanese and Korean nationalisms for reactionary ends of its own. It will take the reconstruction of a particular internationalist culture, one I’ve found, centrally, in the workers’ movement, the unions, and the banner of socialism. It needs, in other words, a conscious internationalism.

So, once more, it’s neither Pyongyang nor Seoul, but international socialism.

A Note

This post draws on others’ stories, and on situations that still present some real political risk. I’ve changed all the names of those involved; the letters I’ve used don’t correspond to real names.

I don’t mean to get into the Stevie Wonder habit here too often, and am sorry if those last paragraphs seem manipulative, or inappropriately personal. I don’t mean them to be, but the conjuncture of events makes it hard not to write about them together.

The young Kim photo is from the Hankyoreh website; I found it via @melnik0v's twitter feed.