Some Notes toward Queering the Humanities in the University
Brinda Bose Has the increasing visibility of the movement against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (that criminalises homosexual behaviour) in recent years brought any significant change to gendered spaces in Indian universities? Is ‘gender’ as an established theoretical tool for reading the humanities – and literature in particular – being ‘queered’ in the classroom and outside it on campuses now? Gender studies have been traditionally seen as analogous to women’s studies, read through feminist tracts and critiques that identified women’s positions as marginalized and disempowered, and women’s politics as collusive or resistant. Queer studies has given this somewhat-tired paradigm a new lease of life in the classroom, perhaps its own shot-in-the-arm coming from fresh turns in contemporary sexuality politics in the country. We now seem to be witnessing a parallel movement in university spaces like corridors, plazas and gardens in which the politics of reading literary texts through radical queer frameworks, for example, is being extended to assertions of non-normative sexual choices and a spreading support for queerness – and queer thinking – on campuses. This is not to say that homophobia, and a conservative heteronormativity – in response to texts as well as lifestyles – is not still visible and disruptive, but is it possible to mark, analyze and interrogate an identifiable turn towards queering the gendered space in/through the humanities in the Indian university? A few weeks ago, a young woman came up to me on the metro, checked that I was who she thought I was, and identified herself as an MPhil student of sociology for whom ‘Phobic Erotic was a Bible’ when she first began to do research on lesbian lives, and that she now could ‘not wait for the Gender Conference to begin’ (referring to the recently-concluded conference on gender, sexualities and multiple modernities that we organised at Delhi University). So what, I wondered as I stepped off the train, has been happening in the Humanities and Social Science disciplines on university campuses since I put together The Phobic and the Erotic in 2007, an anthology of writings by feminist and queer activists and scholars? The intention of the anthology was to take stock of both activism and academics around sexualities in contemporary India, and to identify ways in which feminist and queer intellectual interventions had both interrogated and extended those politics and the thinking around it. Contributors to the volume included some of the foremost feminist and queer activists and thinkers in the field, and what emerged from the volume – and the subsequent reception to it – was the sense that while it was indeed time to critique both the activist and intellectual movements and analyze their limitations, the core necessity for feminist theorizing was far from dead. While feminisms have been challenged and transformed, and ‘woman’ as a category entirely destabilized and continually reconstituted, feminist theory as a tool of critical inquiry has remained essential to intellectual interrogations of how we materially inhabit multiple spaces. Queer interventions in feminist thinking had then given it new directions by fruitfully complicating the scenario and throwing up new and old spanners in the works. I currently teach an MA course in Literature and Gender, and last semester offered an MPhil course on Sexualities and Visual Cultures in Contemporary India. The MPhil is a more advanced discussion class in which students are aware of originary debates in the field and can push the arguments in certain directions through the texts they consider and the critical readings they access. It has been the MA class which has been far more revelatory in a sense: the students are intellectually and otherwise younger and fresh from undergraduate degrees in which feminist criticism seems to start always by looking at how a woman has little or no ‘agency’ in her social structure and is dependent on, and oppressed by, a male figure. While this is not an entirely useless entry point into reading gender in the classroom, it has its obvious limitations. Starting at the undergraduate level, we try to complicate this scenario and offer ways of approaching texts that look at how men and women are gendered, constructed and performed, and how their desires, frustrations and negotiations of categories of male/female are fluid and overlapping. Students travel the range of heteronormative/homosocial/homoerotic/homosexual desire, and are able to make distinctions between different registers of desiring – not merely in terms of sexual difference, but in the ways which point toward collapsing binaries of difference into other more complex patterns of gendered and sexual interactions. What I wanted to think about, then, is whether the climate-change that has been brought about by political, cultural and social developments in India since the movement around Section 377 intensified and captured the public imagination, has made possible a completely different set of negotiations and discussions both in and outside the classroom. For the first time in almost a decade and a half that I have spent at Delhi University – first in an undergraduate college and now at the postgraduate department – it seems to me that the intellectual is slowly also approaching and approximating the personal and the political, and this is not merely to do with whether one is gay and can ‘come out’ now, though that is a vital question too. What I am trying to work out is whether a connection can be made between developments in the immediate world around us as they impact on us – and on our students in particular – and emergent trends one can see on the university campus over the past few years. There are a couple of instances I would like to point to as markers of a changing campus in contexts of gender, though this is not at all to say that any of the problems of sexual harassment, crassness and insensitivity, rights violations and stereotyping have been resolved. In fact, with a campus increasingly open to new ideas and expressions, new problems – both of radical posturing and
Re-reading Marquez’s Memoir
Manash Bhattacharjee Many writers and critics have complained about the term “magic realism” used to describe much of Latin American writing by the world publishing market. It was the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier who put a more apt phrase for the kind of Latin American fiction that was forcibly translated as magic realist. He called such works of fiction: marvelous real (“lo real marvilloso”). Europe is infamous for creating binaries after the Enlightenment experience wherein “magical” was opposed to “real” the way “irrational” was opposed to “reason”. So “magic realism” served as an oxymoronic fusion where the two binaries were retained to serve the double tension between the West’s own self-conscious distinction: between a magic deemed to be medieval and realism deemed to be modern within its own history, as well as between “other” cultures which are supposedly still in the grips of “magic” but – and it’s impossible not to be polemical here – in contact with the modern European form of fiction, also attains the claims of realism. In contrast, the term “marvelous real” simply conjures up an image of a fictional world where the word “marvelous” does not suggest something other than the real, but holds the marvelous as an attribute of the ordinary aspects of real life itself. Carpentier distinguished his idea of “lo real marvilloso” by contrasting it with the most vibrant literary movement in Europe during his time, surrealism: “In the first place, the sensation of the marvelous presupposes a faith. Those who do not believe in saints cannot be cured by the miracles of saints… Thus the idea of the marvelous invoked in the context of disbelief – which is what the surrealists did for so many years – was never anything but a literary trick”. Surrealism was a violent escape from the traps of Christian values and bourgeois life. It was a fusion of Marx and Rimbaud: a radical aesthetics aiming to liberate society by re-inventing love. In their search for a new future, the surrealists aimed to destroy conventional notions of both (Christian) morality and (bourgeois) reality by embracing the psychic/irrational depths of language. It led them to search and recover the resonances of pre-moral/primordial/pagan origins. Some of the primordial/pagan influences were however marketed into the imagination through a colonial route from non-European cultures. The surrealist movement can also be read as an attempt to counter the various factors which produced in modern Europe what Weber called “disenchantment”, in the wake of capitalism and the Protestant ethic. Against this rationalization of life and faith, the surrealists introduced an aesthetic of re-enchantment. But, as Carpentier right pointed out, instead of welcoming faith, the surrealists took a critical look at faith, influenced by secular/Marxist traditions. Figures like Salvador Dali were however more ideologically ambiguous than leftist surrealists. Carpentier’s criticism however, taking the example of Dali’s paintings, is that surrealism’s attempt was “the fabrication of the marvellous”. It is a criticism regarding the codification and manufacturing by Dali and other surrealists of a marvellous reality which wasn’t palpable in modern Europe as opposed to the raw translation by Latin Americans like Marquez of the marvellous which was tangibly experienced in their culture. Though this view holds water, it is important to qualify this crucial distinction. In the case of Latin American fiction, the marvellous was pretty much an easily obtainable material, from which a mise-en-scène could then be created. In surrealism, one could detect the structural influence of the Freudian revolution, with imageries of dream-states and the techniques of deciphering and interpreting them having a huge impact not only on Dali’s paintings, but also on Andre Breton’s concept of “automatic writing”. Carpentier argued how in Latin America, “the marvellous was around every corner”, whereas in Paris “one had to milk reality with great effort in order to extract the marvellous”. Carpentier seems to separate (artistic) labour and magic. He didn’t suspect the possibility that only labour can offer the radical means left in a culture besieged by the power discourses of religious beliefs and bourgeois rationality, to extract, however painfully, remnants of the lost and the buried forces (imageries) of culture. The surrealist enterprise of labour however suffers from a sociologically, if not existentially, alienated productivity. This alienation can be grasped if one bears in mind that while the post-colonial Latin Americans kept alive their ties with the popular, the surrealists experimented within the artificial confines of an elite environment. The difference also lies in the condition (or situation) which the surrealists faced, where the exceptional had to be produced against the everyday. The surrealists, being revolutionary atheists fighting Christian dogmas, also found it difficult to say what Gabriel Garcia Marquez, despite being a communist, could suggest from a popular register of culture: “If you don’t believe in god, at least be superstitious”. This difference endorses Carpentier’s attempt to see the Latin American literary-scape vis-à-vis Europe through a prism of radical otherness and elsewhere-ness. Latin American fiction, like any genuine fiction from the non-West, holds up a different version and vision of the world and of life. Even though the modern form of the novel began in Europe, with Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Milan Kundera’s assertion of the novel being “Europe’s creation” is merely an assertion about the creation of a form which has been re-created differently elsewhere. Writers from other cultures, faced with a Europeanizing modernity forced through their colonial histories, have tried to fuse the novel form with its older forms of story telling. The imaginations of fiction in such countries were, in a way, a paradoxical experience of appropriation and resistance. The fact that Marquez could achieve this specific task of fusing the Western form of the novel with his Columbian roots of storytelling is just a case in point. But writers from different cultures have not been necessarily busy in mimicking Europe. They also parodied their own world. As much as Europe was part of their colonized history, in effect, sometimes Europe itself got parodied. Marquez was of course busy
The Rienzi Effect
Hans Rudolf Vaget Joachim Köhler, in his Wagners Hitler: Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker, goes so far as to suggest that the German dictator was “merely” the executioner of Wagner’s ideas. Köhler argues that Hitler’s entire political program was essentially an attempt to turn the mythologically coded world of Wagnerian opera into a social and political reality. “The achievement of the Wagnerian world of the ‘work of art of the future’.” In everything he did, Hitler acted as the “agent” of the Bayreuth Circle, accomplishing the task originally set by that great prophet of the Third Reich and of the Holocaust: Richard Wagner. Recently, Frederic Spotts, the author of a fine history of the Bayreuth Festival, took up the whole vexed matter and re-examined Hitler’s multifarious meddling with the arts – primarily architecture and music. In a thought-provoking and useful new study, boldly entitled Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, Spotts laudably ignores those endless speculations about psychic and sexual abnormalities – the most eagerly pursued red herrings in Hitler studies – and proposes instead that the Führer’s social, racial, and geopolitical agenda was ancillary and subordinate to the realization of what was fundamentally an aesthetic project, namely, to create “the greatest culture state since ancient times, or perhaps of all time.” What was the role of aesthetic experience in general and of Wagnerian opera in particular in the identity formation of Adolf Hitler? For the conscientious historian, however, the task is not to construct “Wagner’s Hitler”, despite that clever titular reversal, but rather to reconstruct Hitler’s Wagner. This is a far more difficult matter. Some of the difficulties were duly noted by Joachim Fest in his 1973 biography. Striking as the affinities between Hitler and Wagner may at first sight appear – the outsider’s resentment against the bourgeoisie; the bohemian affect of an artistic existence; the basically non-political relationship to the world; the uncertainty about their ancestry; the morbid hatred of Jews – none can be simply attributed to the so-called influence of a widely idolized cultural figure. Much of what we find in young Hitler represents a constellation of phenomena perfectly typical of the era in which he grew up. The most characteristic elements of his Weltanschauung – nationalism, Darwinism, anti-Semitism – were in the air in Vienna at the time, which he could not help but breathe. Still, in Fest’s view, the Meister emerges both as the young man’s ideological mentor and as Hitler’s great exemplar. Fest’s own assessment of the matter, though, is not free from contradiction. On the one hand he argues correctly that no direct succession from Wagner to Hitler can be established; on the other, he identifies Wagner as the Führer’s decisive teacher. He disputes the claim that Hitler’s murderous anti-Semitism can and must be traced back to Wagner: the Führer’s racial anti-Semitism was uncompromising, he argues, whereas Wagner’s hostility towards Jews was selective and inconsistent. Saul Friedländer, who noted (at the Schloss Elmau Symposium of 1999 on Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich) that Hitler, in all his speechmaking, never once invoked Wagner’s well-known hostility towards das Judentum. Why not? He could easily have argued that if the great Richard Wagner called for the elimination of Jews from German culture, then how could our current anti-Jewish laws and policies be wrong? We are simply carrying out what Wagner intended. But Hitler never said anything of the sort. Friedländer offers two explanations. First, perhaps Hitler considered Wagner’s position insufficiently radical since both Das Judentum in der Musik and Parsifal leave open the possibility that Jews can find redemption by shedding their Jewish identity, as Ludwig Börne had done, and as the figure of Kundry implies. Second, perhaps the Führer’s very adulation of Wagner simply “did not allow for any disclaimers or any ambiguity”, so as not to call into question the lofty standing of Richard Wagner as one of the patron saints of the Third Reich. Third, if we may add a reason of our own, perhaps Hitler was astute enough to realize that mining Wagner for proto-Nazi ideas, and exploiting Wagner for crude propaganda, might have diminished his standing as the supreme example of the creator of an art that was thoroughly German, heroic, sublime, and highly auratic. A non political cult could be more effective than any propagandist exploitation. This, then, throws into relief the crucial methodological problem and underlines the need for a new way of looking at the entire Hitler-Wagner complex. The crux of the matter, it seems to me, lies in the fixation of historians on the notion of influence. We can no longer use this term as trustingly as Viereck, Fest, Köhler, and a host of others have done. In reception theory, “influence” has given way to notions of reception and appropriation, denoting a more complex and indirect mode of intellectual transfer, and shifting attention from the source to the recipient. Thus, what may look to the untrained eye like a direct line from Wagner to Hitler could in fact be an optical illusion – the result of multiple refractions. For what we call influence accrues from an entire constellation of factors involving language, media, cultural practices of remembering, and the various ways in which these factors interact within a sharply defined historical space. As in all cases of intellectual precursorship, the basic tenet of reception theory fully applies to the case of Hitler and Wagner: a tradition does not perpetuate itself; rather, it is appropriated and adapted to the needs of the recipient and, in the process, bent and deformed. As with “influence”, then, the very notion of mentor seems incongruous with Hitler’s study habits, which were those of an autodidact and dilettante. Furthermore, from what we know about young Hitler, the experience of Lohengrin and of Rienzi preceded his reading of Wagner’s prose tracts. And that adolescent aesthetic experience – more irrational and thus more idiosyncratically formative than the traditional master-disciple relationship – was by no means solitary or unique: Hitler shared it with
A Moment of Revelation
Prasanta Chakravarty (A Report on ‘The Everyday Life of a Discipline’- a colloquium on contemporary English Studies that took place on February 4, 2011, at the Department of English, University of Delhi) Unlike the social sciences, humanities in India at least, have been less systematic and meticulous about introspection. This is slightly odd owing to the fact that the onslaughts on humanitities, from both outside and from within its own quarters, have been quite relentless and ballistic of late. Besides, it is a good idea to take stock of things from time to time as disciplines morph and change gear. So, when I was asked to be part of a group of practitioners of humanities who were at the forefront of the last bit of stock-taking that took place during the late nineteen-eighties, I was curious to know how they see their own transition at this point of time and also get a sense about their assessment of English studies now, apart from my own contribution to the current debates. Alok Rai, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and Gauri Viswanathan are literary critics and scholars who in their own ways, along with many other fellow scholars, actually helped make a strong case for various changes in the way disciplines and departments of literature function. Chief among them were vital questions on the politics of canon-formation, the role of language in literature, issues of vernacular articulations and translation, forms of colonialism—including homebred ones, identifying markers of gender and identity politics and so on. In 2011, many of these issues are quite relevant and yet doing literature today also means dealing with fresh challenges and innovations. For one, we now inhabit a much more fractured global world with more surreptitious forms of literary activities and attacks on it. The deeply invested local author is as much rooted in his own milieu as in other networks that mediate continuously with his own output and imagination. A dynamic scholarly document no longer resemble a linear narrative. There is a challenging task to identify and tackle this whole new field called digital humanities where literature intersects with documentation, visual media and other interactive literary production. There are issues of power equations involved with such innovations and yet these areas and paratactic associations could be explored effectively and critically. There is now a tremendous investment in areas like textual and print studies, new aesthetic formalisms, detecting renewed ideals of empire formation in texts, studying subjective spaces (from diaries to autobiographies to blogs), invoking sacred spaces or looking for legal implications in literature and reconfiguring the political in literary utterances—say, looking closely at the way political poetry (a genre often not recognized adequately by postcolonial criticism) has been able to galvanize people in Middle East or parts of South America, of late. These concerns are not necessarily new to literary studies, but the times demand a fresh historicization from the practitioners. So, it was interesting when Alok Rai started the proceedings with a mea culpa: that he feels like Hardy’s Jude—a hapless prisoner, in this case, implicated in the trajectory of literary criticism the way it has played out. What combination of sweetness and light led him to think that the outside is free and vigorous and the academe is not so—he asked himself. Even as he acknowledged the valuable works of the literary critics (on forgotten scandals and caste autobiographies) in the past three decades or so in cahoots with, what he marked as the cruising gangs of philosophers and social scientists, he came down heavily on the fake benignity (ah! English is so oppressed by Shelley) of such high moral endeavours. To study literature has become surrogating on a certain idea of reality, to gain a purchase on how one can affect the proceedings around oneself, even if that is through exploring tributaries of power or micro-studies of texts and textualities. Scholarship has become a matter of conviction rather than appreciation: ethically bankrupt, overtly politicized and thoroughly without joy. The world itself has become a text and the idea of representation is eroded. No appreciation for the subtleties of speech or rhetoric there. This Rai feels to be a kind of textual-political imperialism. The price to pay then is a gradual erosion of appreciating a certain cognitive purchase that the ‘word’ provides. This expanding world of textual imperialism on the word, that forces us to forget the joys of discovering the turn of the phrase or the craft of lucid composition, is now being gutted down by the grim managerial class. The accounting protocols of footloose capitalism, which is not even deliberately cruel, is completely oblivious to the loss of this shared world. He invoked the multifarious life-world of Milan Kundera and John Keats’ idea of negative capability—the ability to dwell in uncertainties, mysteries and half-knowledge that literature provides us—in order to appreciate the role of literature in a world away from the capitalists and their vulgar opponents. Rai is essentially asking for two things: by means of getting back into the specificity of the word, he seeks to reconnect literature with a communitas of connoisseurs. There is a certain repossessing of an enshrined certainty of the experiential or the aesthetic in this act. But since he is at the same time arguing against the righteous certainty of literary activism, he also celebrates the complexity of the life-world that revels in its uncertainty of the fantasy, away from verisimilitude or truth hunting. There is a lament for the world that we have lost and a clarion call to restore a certain complexity within that very world, by capturing the nuances of literary hermeneutics. Rai’s project is philological, a historicization of the text after theory! Rajeswari Sunder Rajan does not see humanities to be in a mode of crisis at this point. The crisis she finds in rather two concomitant developments: in the ideas that claim a of clash of civilizations even in the literary world and a rampant provincialism in literary-critical activities on the other hand.