Elleke Boehmer
Chinua Achebe: An Obituary
16th November 1930–21st March 2013

…

…

…

…

…

..

..

If it is true that legends never die, only grow and transmogrify, then the death of the African literary giant Chinua Achebe on 21st March this year, at the age of 82, will do nothing to dim his already assured status as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. This Thursday, 23rd May, he will be buried in his home town of Ogidi in Anambra state, Nigeria, after a week of funeral rites in both the national and the state capitals, as well as at Nsukka University, where he worked as an academic in the early 1970s. The ceremonies will aim to extol his ‘impact’ on world letters (as journalist Levinus Nwabughiogu writes in Vanguard).

Since the publication of Achebe’s classic, Things Fall Apart in 1958, several generations of African writers have defined their voices through a process of interacting with his characteristic mixed Igbo-and-English inflections. His influential perspectives on such key African, yet also global themes such as the interaction of modern life with tradition and myth, as well as the colonial incursion and the struggle for national freedom, have marked the work of the many who have written in his wake, both in Nigeria and more broadly. As Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, one of his literary daughters, aptly put it, Achebe ‘gave permission’. The British-Nigerian writer Ben Okri relatedly wrote in 1990 that Achebe allowed all of humankind to dream more richly.

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), the tragic tale of Okonkwo the yam-farmer whose intransigence fatally comes up against missionary infiltration in Igboland, remains the best-selling African novel of all time with 10 million copies sold in 50 languages. Yet Achebe also published four other important novels, including No Longer At Ease (1960), about a Nigerian civil servant ‘been-to’ (English-educated and full of colonial airs and graces), the finely wrought The Arrow of God (1964, many readers’ personal favourite), and a withering satire of neo-colonialism, A Man of the People (1966). The Booker-shortlisted Anthills of the Savannah (1987) again looked at the woes and self-division of Africa’s neo-colonial elites.

Achebe also published literary essays, poetry, short stories and acidic polemic (including the eye-opening 1984 excoriation of post-independence corruption, The Trouble with Nigeria). For nearly twenty years following his harrowing involvement in the Biafran or Nigerian Civil War (1967-70), in which he supported Igbo secession and lost beloved friends and family, he produced no fiction, preferring the more direct and immediate channel of shorter forms like the essay. Achebe’s long-awaited personal history of the Biafran War, There was a Country—which was published only last year—raised considerable controversy in Nigeria for its still markedly Igbo nationalist point of view. Achebe won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Beware, Soul-Brother, also entitled Christmas in Biafra (1971). In 2007 he was the winner of the Man Booker International prize recognizing a life-time’s literary achievements. Since a car accident in 1990 that left him wheelchair-bound, he held professorships at Bard College and Brown University in the US.

Though often called the father of African literature, Achebe was not strictly speaking that (given the anglo- and francophone African novelists active in the 1920s). However, as Lyn Innes has written, he can be credited with the foundation of modern imaginative literature from the continent in the post-war period. Not only was he a practitioner; he was also the editor of the influential African Writers Series for nearly a decade. In English departments across the Anglo-American world he became well-known—not to say notorious—for his talking back to institutional racism and the biases of the English literature canon, most prominently in an essay that attacked Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for its representation of Africans. Ironically, given his receptive attitude towards the English language as at once a colonial language whilst also an African lingua franca, he became regarded as the combative black African voice, especially after the 1988 inclusion of the essay in the Norton Anthology. In fact, his views were always a great deal more ameliorative, nuanced and conciliatory, as is clear from his debates about English as a medium of African expression with more radical writers like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

Yet it is not only for his foundational position, nor for his willingness to speak truth to power and indict the western world for its unquestioning racial biases, that Achebe deserves his readers’ undying respect. Achebe’s reputation as a truly great world writer rests centrally on his staggering success in wresting Africa into non-African frameworks of cognition through the medium of the novel form, whilst, importantly, without ever compromising or substantially changing the novels’ structures of mythic and cultural reference. As I write these sentences newspaper reports once again observe that the world’s image of Africa is almost terminally negative. Achebe, by contrast, let us know that Africa—the many countries and communities that make it up—is a vast cultural universe unto itself, coherent, involving, richly textured, the same as any other complex cultural universe. The philosopher Achille Mbembe warns us that when we write of Africa we should always remember that this must not become merely a pretext to write of Europe. Achebe’s great achievement has been always to write of Africa as the core and also the whole of the world.

Elleke Boehmer is a novelist and Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford.

Chinua Achebe, author of the ground-breaking Things Fall Apart amongst numerous other novels, poems and works of literary criticism, is widely recognised as the Founding Father of African Literature. He is pictured here with Nelson Mandela, who has famously described Achebe as “the writer in whose company the prison walls came down”, and who “brought Africa to the rest of the world.” Achebe’s contribution to both literary and academic fields, as well as his broader social and political contribution to his home-country of Nigeria, the African continent and beyond, was prolific and invaluable. He died on 21st March of this year in the US, where he held a professorship at Brown University. His funeral will take place in Nigeria this Thursday, 23rd May 2013.

To mark the death of this literary great, ORbits is this week running a special “Chinua Achebe Week”. Each day ORbits will publish an article about or relating to Chinua Achebe and his broader literary, historical and political context, including an obituary written exclusively for ORbits by Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, to follow tomorrow.

This week’s articles take Britain as their focus. As spring finally brings out the blossom here in the UK, the political landscape, as evidenced by these articles, remains bleak and dreary.

1. “Everybody Out“, The Economist: Urban Housing: Race or Class.

2. “Balls warns of “despair” over welfare cuts after bedroom tax suicide“, The Corporation: “There is no doubt this policy is driving people to the edge of despair in their many thousands across the country.”

3. “The Coalition’s Serial Abuse of Statistics”, The New Statesman: Ian Duncan Smith’s manipulates data to label 8000 people scroungers.

4. ““Labour voters increasingly turning against the poor, study says”“, The Guardian: The British public somehow slip ever further to the right as class distinction and alienation intensify.

5. “23 Sultry MP Moments”, Buzzfeed: If you can’t beat the politicians, you may as well laugh at them.

If you would like to suggest a link, please email dominic.davies@st-annes.ox.ac.uk

St Anne’s Equalities Forum
Minority Groups: Rivals or Allies?
Mary Olgilvie Lecture Theatre, St Anne’s College
10th May 2013

…

…

…

…

..

..

Last Friday a small group collected in the Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre at St Anne’s College, Oxford. They formed an interested audience prepared to give up a couple of hours of their Friday evening to attend an event ran by the St Anne’s Equalities Forum. As the audience participation throughout the event revealed, for many their commitment and interest extended beyond this one evening’s engagement into various other outlets and forums for campaigning, volunteering, and generally initiating social change. Though this provided fertile ground for some productive discussion, one of the event’s major concerns—raised throughout the evening by an audience member—was that everyone in the room was ‘preaching to the converted’. That seems an ugly phrase, and it might be better termed, here at least, as ‘informing those already socially and politically aware of the issues at stake.’

Nevertheless, there was a huge amount of information to be absorbed from such an incredible panel, even for those who work on these issues on a daily basis. It is only a shame that there weren’t more present to hear some of the inspiring accounts and meet some of the astonishing speakers, all of whom have dedicated their lives to campaigning for the rights of minority groups. Their firsthand experience of the different forms of oppression—sometimes subtle and sometimes overt, sometimes obvious and sometimes complex and unpredictable—suffered by minority groups across the United Kingdom quickly dispelled any illusions that Britain is, as some (though, in recent years, surely not that many) may believe, an ‘equal’ society. Chaired by Rosemary Radcliffe, CBE, a St Anne’s alumni and PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Chief Economist in Europe before her retirement in 2001, the panel spoke both to questions submitted before the event and to live audience responses and queries, covering various inequalities that still permeate almost every sector of society.

The ambiguous question that the event initially posed—”Minority Groups: Rivals or Allies?”—seemed to be asking whether or not minority groups were rivals or allies with each other. The intersections between comments made by the panel members, comprised of speakers working with a whole range of different minority groups, quickly answered this question. Peter Purton, the Trade Union Council policy officer for disability and LGBTQ rights, answers it simply by giving his job title. Denise Milani, the current Director, Diversity and Citizen Focus Directorate at the Metropolitan Police Service, was the first African-Caribbean and non-uniformed female member of staff to complete the Strategic Command Course (the highest Police Officer Development course in the country) in 2006, also embodying these intersections between minority groupings. She told touching stories about her children, a disabled daughter and black son, who have managed to thrive despite the statistical odds against them as minorities. Perhaps the intimate nature of the event, with the discussion taking place between a fairly small group, added weight to these accounts. But I’m inclined to think that such an informed and aware group of speakers know what they want to say—what, in fact, they need to say—and are prepared to offer their insights to any who will listen.

Peter Quinn, the Head of Oxford University’s Disability Advisory Service, Fiona McClement, the Equality and Diversity Adviser at University College London, and Suzanne Holsomback, the outgoing Vice President (Women) at OUSU, completed the panel. Each offered a unique insight into the formations, intersections, and persecutions of minority groups on varying social, national and international levels. Though the event ran over, a day-long conference would not have been long enough for the debate to exhaust itself. Indeed, one of the points that surfaced during the session was that these issues will always be debated, and necessarily so. Society as a whole, if one can conceptualize such a thing, will tend to maliciously discriminate against, or sometimes just thoughtlessly overlook, the various minority groups moving within its structures. As educated and informed citizens, it is surely a responsibility to share knowledge, to spread insights, and to initiate small social changes on a daily basis. These combine, as the panel themselves proved, into broader social movements with positive effects and impacts for so many of the minority groups of which our society is comprised.

It is, however, hard not to come away from such an event a little frustrated, with a healthy dose of disillusionment sticking in one’s stomach. Initiating social change might be one thing, but given the proliferation of discriminatory headlines in the media and the range of stigmas and stereotypes that pervade popular culture and society, the question that the event initially posed seems to be thrown into a different light. Minority groups may not be rivals with each other, but are they seen as rivals with mainstream society, by that society’s members? Some of the horrific statistics quoted by the speakers might suggest that this is indeed the case. But when we look at the grass roots experiences brought to the table by this panel, the gap between representation and reality manifests itself. Minority groups are almost always people who have contributed, or are willing to contribute, to that society in a way that only allies would, so long as the structures are in place to give them the opportunity to do so. Though much of the discussion revolved around the negative statistics and forms of oppression suffered by minority groups, the positive is embodied in the work and lives of the people in that room. Next time an event such as this takes place, we can only hope there are more of them in there.

Dominic Davies is reading for a D.Phil. in English literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Daniel Mihailescu’s photograph shows a man stretching a 750kg European Union flag before the parliament buildings in Bucharest, Romania, to mark Europe Day (5 May for the Council of Europe, 9 May for the European Union). Though it may have gone unnoticed in the UK, ironically overshadowed by debates surrounding Britain’s EU membership, Europe Day is widely observed in Eastern Europe as well as in EU candidate countries such as Turkey. The flag is an important symbol of European solidarity.

Transnational and Global History Group
Global Knowledge Workshop
Ertegun House
10th May 2013

…

…

…

…

..

..

The Global Knowledge Workshop, held at Ertegun House last Friday, was part of a two-day event organised by the Transnational and Global History Group. After kicking off with a rigorous panel discussion with the likes of Chris Bayly, John Darwin, Cassandra Pybus and Richard Drayton on the Thursday afternoon, the workshop was designed to facilitate further conversation about the movement of knowledge in its various forms across national boundaries.

Professor Chris Bayly’s opening remarks set the tone for the day. While talking specifically of colonial India, Professor Bayly nevertheless situated his examples in the broader context of knowledge circulation. He drew attention to a burgeoning body of scholarship on the constitution of disciplines in the colonial world, the rise of the newspaper, the imposition of new education systems, and the development of race discourse theory, among a whole range of new research. More importantly, he drew the audience’s attention to the importance of thinking not only about how knowledge moves, but also the methods and practices that aid or resist this process. What is at stake is not just the question, how does knowledge globalise, but rather a more urgent, basic counter-part: does knowledge globalise at all?

The 23 workshop papers (given by graduate students and early career researchers) covered an ambitious and impressive range of geographical and historical situations, ranging from nineteenth-century Mexico and eighteenth-century China to late-colonial India and post-independence Africa. Nevertheless, the papers came together in surprising ways to explore several similar strands, themes and ideas. A common preoccupation that emerged was a concern with the material objects of transmission—books, newspapers, archival records, college and training centre newsletters, maritime notebooks, official letters and scandal broadsheets were just a few that were mentioned during the day. This led to a fruitful set of discussions regarding the position of the archive in historical research, and specifically what bearing it has on the reality of historical events: what does an archive reveal? Can it trick us? Can we always believe what they reveal? And can we intuit what they do not reveal?

So while the objects of knowledge seem to take these very tangible forms, as monstrous piles of paper threatening to burst out of their storage containers, they can nevertheless remain slippery and elusive, constantly thwarting the scholar’s search for information—sometimes, simply though perhaps unexpectedly, by presenting the researcher with just too much information. This takes us back to a central point that Professor Bayly made in his opening remarks: while, for example, colonial administration was single-mindedly geared towards the collection of data, more often than not, the uses of this data remained uncertain.

The conference also made apparent that behind the collection of information was also a lurking fear of this material falling into the wrong hands. Several papers throughout the day examined the measures taken by states to prevent its subjects from hearing of its activities and, even more interestingly, learning stories about other subjects in other parts of the colonial world. The infectious nature of these circulating and constantly-evolving stories was a concern in places and times as disparate as eighteenth-century China and late-nineteenth-century Algeria. The movement of knowledge between empires also received much critical attention. The concluding panel of the day drew attention to Spain’s status as an imperial power in the eyes of the British, the interaction of US and British colonialist tendencies, and French-Algeria’s perceptions of surrounding African colonies.

In the shadow of knowledge’s transnational journeys are, of course, the processes by which these journeys are made. What obstacles and difficulties are encountered on its way? Several of the day’s papers looked at the interaction between the imposition of alien knowledge systems and indigenous practices of knowledge assimilation, whether it be specific contexts such as the colonial Indian subject’s need to reorient himself to a codified system of place and address necessitated by the arrival of the postal system in the nineteenth-century, or broader questions such as the interaction of Islam and the West.

Both serving to remind all the participants that knowledge inevitably comes hand in hand with ignorance, whilst demonstrating the necessity and effectiveness of interdisciplinary and comparative frameworks, this excellent workshop was food for thought, organized by a dynamic and student-run group who are sure to provide interesting events in future. You can visit their website for information on forthcoming seminars and to join their mailing list here.

Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is reading for a DPhil in English at Wolfson College, Oxford.

Saikat Majumdar
Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire
Columbia University Press, 2013
£27.50
248 pages
ISBN 978-0231156943

…

…

…

…

..

When a reviewer turns to a book with the term “banality” in the title, the possibility of numerous quips and puns on the “banal” and “boredom-inducing” quality of the text inevitably springs to mind. It is with great regret, however, that I, lover of puns that I may be, shall have to endeavour to restrain myself from such jokes. For though the title of Saikat Majumdar’s first academic monograph includes the word “banality”, this appears alongside a whole cast of strikingly broad terms: “Prose”, “World”, “Modernism”, and “Empire”—we might start to consider that this monograph can’t actually be long enough. The book is some 200 pages, but a bibliography of the material that has been written on these subjects since just the turn of the 21st century would not fit between the covers. To write across, suture together, and traverse all these huge topics would require the development of a complex theoretical paradigm that conceptualises an historical framework for a very long 20th century. And of course Saikat Majumdar, Associate Professor at Stanford University, has attempted exactly this.

No small feat then. The component parts of the book’s title are in fact taken from just two quotations: that opening confident and somewhat totalising phrase, “Prose of the World”, is sourced only once throughout the text and is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a quotation of Hegel. The reader of this review should be warned that if they think a text heavily inflected with Hegel is going to  attempt to configure the broad motions of history into a convenient yet intricately theorised narrative, then, well, they would be right. This globe-encompassing theory is developed in the book-end chapters that serve as introduction and epilogue and that speak generally and confidently as only an Associate Professor at Stanford might. The geographical breadth of the argument (the “world”) is matched only by the historical weight that Majumdar ascribes to his argument. Though there has been much critical work in recent years that has traced the subversive impact of modernist literature on the discursive constructs of “Empire”, Majumdar pushes this further, extending it to a critique of Enlightenment thought more broadly. Though this conceptualisation is far from original (it has been present in critical discourse at least since Jean-François Lyotard coined the term “Enlightenment Grand Narratives” in 1979, if not before), no one has before argued that literary texts perform these subversive motions through a “narrative aesthetic of the banal”.

The central argument Majumdar develops is basically this: colonial and postcolonial history is littered with extremely important and often violent events—from genocides to wars of independence to the rise of various nationalisms—that quite rightly often become subject matter for (post)colonial anglophone literatures (one of the few limits Majumdar places on his analysis is to restrict it to the English-speaking world, as formed by the British Empire). These “dramatic” (Majumdar’s word) events are often invoked in postcolonial literature as part of a project of anti-colonialism and de-colonisation, depending on where the texts fit into the historical progress of the struggle. However, in direct contrast to these dramatic episodes is the ongoing banality of life on the colonial periphery. Indeed, the contrast becomes a complex dialectic. This is not only recorded in much of this body of literature, but finds formal articulation in a specifically “banal” narrative aesthetic that Majumdar argues becomes intensely subversive of the dominant power structures and historical narratives in each historic-geographic moment. The “Prose of the World” is, for Majumdar, writing that gives priority to all those in-betweens, those non-events, the spatio-temporal arenas that form the unarticulated backdrop to the movements of upheaval and political contestation in the global history of the 20th century.

This was unfortunately not made clear to me until I’d finished the epilogue, and though retrospectively I now understand that this was being gestured towards throughout the text, the introduction and intervening chapters didn’t serve to drive it home. Though from the title we might have expected the Fredric Jameson of the “Modernism and Imperialism” essay to emerge, it is in fact Jameson’s more controversial article, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, that serves as a critical foothold for Majumdar’s argument. Majumdar at first constructs a binary between dramatic and banal, locating the political impetus of the former within the concept of the National Allegory as theorised by Jameson in that much-contested essay. He then demonstrates how such a binary, based inherently on a deeper opposition of political and apolitical, is in fact misconstrued and false. The “banal” narratives that Majumdar identifies are just as political as those more obvious allegories of anti-colonialism and nationalism: they often serve as a reflexive critique of those postcolonial narratives by disaggregating postcolonial populations into varying sub-groups such as the local, gender, class, and so on. This configures, for Majumdar, a political movement that subverts the grander allegorical narratives.

The significance of this is that in order to draw forth such a theorisation, it is necessary to generate the beginnings of a critique of early postcolonial novels, such as Midnight’s Children—indeed, Salman Rushdie  bears the brunt of Majumdar’s chapter on Amit Chaudhuri, though the argument operates mostly through positive rather than negative critique. Much of Majumdar’s argument is implied rather than conveyed through direct attacks, but it is well done and refreshing. Within Majumdar’s project is the poignant implication that—because many of the anti-colonial movements are now a half-century in the past—we can begin to recover all those other narratives, produced from the more banal locations and gaps in the spatio-temporal paradigm that postcolonialism takes as its field of inquiry, and re-configure them as playing an equally central, political role in the evolution of various post-independent nation-states in the second half of the 20th century. Majumdar seizes the historical moment for this articulation wisely and makes it with a care and sensitivity that should be admired and adopted by other postcolonial critics.

Nonetheless, there are some difficulties with Majumdar’s monograph, rooted perhaps in the book’s subtitle, Modernism and the Banality of Empire. The term “banality” is, as an opening epigraphic quotation informs us, taken from Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid. And yet, Kincaid’s work features nowhere else in the text, aside from a brief mention of the cited quotation in the introduction. Virginia Woolf too is deployed in this way, her own critical work drawn on throughout the introduction but with no attention paid to her literary role in this process. Majumdar acknowledges this oversight, claiming that his concern is with the movement between colonial periphery and imperial metropole and that therefore Woolf does not fall within his “literary archive”. But such an acknowledgement overlooks Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), and a reading of this relatively neglected text would have been appreciated by this reviewer at least. It should be pointed out in fact that despite Majumdar’s grand theorising, there are one or two notes regarding the limitations of his argument’s applicability, comments we then swiftly lose sight of when Hegel returns to the conversation. Majumdar could simultaneously cast his critical net wider, bringing in not only Virginia Woolf but also Leonard’s The Village in the Jungle—and perhaps Joseph Conrad, another eerily absent figure—while honing his theoretical configurations and engaging with a little more historical and geographical specificity.

The work primarily focuses, then, on four authors, two “colonial” and two “postcolonial”, in the technical or temporal sense. James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield receive a chapter each in the first half of the book, and Zoë Wicomb and Amit Chuadhuri in the second half. Rather unsurprisingly, Majumdar struggles to write across such contrasting and disparate geographical and historical locations: colonial Ireland and New Zealand, apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, and postcolonial India. Though Majumdar impressively tackles each author’s œuvre—encompassing everything from Ulysses to the manuscript of Stephen Hero in his analysis of Joyce, and including Chaudhuri’s work as a literary critic as well as his novels—there is very little comparative work, leaving the actual application of the broader theories negotiated in the introduction and epilogue somewhat problematically untransferable across the spatio-temporal locations of each author. Majumdar’s clear enthusiasm for Joyce is an exception to this rule: the buoyancy of his narrative in the chapter on Joyce is noticeable when contrasted with the others, and Joyce is the only author to recur with any sort of regularity throughout the remainder of the book. Aside from this, the author-based chapters hang like individual essays somewhat isolated from one another, raising doubts as to whether Majumdar can in fact theorise such a general and broad topic as “Prose of the World”.

Majumdar does offer a generalised key to each of these authors, located very explicitly in his concept of the “banal”, a word that recurs in each of his analyses. However, banality becomes rather too broad and un-falsifiable for what is otherwise an impressively rigorous academic study. We are presented with banal objects, banal time, banal space—almost anything in fact that suits Majumdar’s reading and that can be configured, very roughly and a little arbitrarily, as banal. In a work of such sharp technical theorisation, this fluid and unspecific term is unsatisfying. It feels like Majumdar has attempted to marry two clearly inter-related but nevertheless distinct literary interests: modernism, in the form of Joyce and Mansfield (but especially Joyce) and postcolonialism. These two have a long heritage of intersection in critical debates over the past few decades, but the pertinence of Majumdar’s argument is not quite grounded in the modernist canon on which he draws. This is not to say that such a grounding would not be possible—and indeed, Majumdar opens various lines of inquiry that might be pursued to solidify this process in various and more convincing ways. But from a literary critic of such skill, with such a breadth of knowledge and refreshingly conscious socio-political engagement, I would expect a slightly tighter methodological and thematic approach. Puns aside—and do excuse a moment of self-indulgence—the only banal aspect of Prose of the World is the concept of ”banality” itself.

Dominic Davies is reading for a D.Phil. in English literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

David Armitage
Foundations of Modern International Thought
Cambridge University Press, 2012
£17.99
311 pages
ISBN 978-0521001694

…

…

…

…

..

In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1929, the Progressive historian and educationalist James Harvey Robinson recounted a story from the British writer Thomas Burke. “Now and then [during his childhood] he had a revelation,” said Robinson. “He would soon realize, however, that this new flash of insight was after all nothing more than what he had always known all along—no more, indeed, than everyone had always known. This curious experience comes to all thoughtful persons.” It certainly happens to historians. Two pages later Robinson declared: “national history seems to us more provincial than it formerly did.” What was needed, he said, quoting another transatlantic author, H. G. Wells, was a history oriented to “the common adventure of mankind”.

The territory David Armitage maps in his new essay collection could be called the common intellectual adventure of mankind. Intellectual historians have been notably slow to recalibrate their vision to encompass this commonality. Economic, political, and military historians took the same turn long ago, prompted by the flash of clarity that world war and economic crisis gave to international interconnectedness. Fernand Braudel and his fellow Annalistes deserve as much credit as H.G. Wells for grasping this reality; postcolonial Marxists like C.L.R. James and historical sociologists like Immanuel Wallerstein continued to uncover the global nature of modern historical experience long before globalisation was a conceptual commonplace.

When it comes to the history of ideas though, it would be fair to say the map is very partial and the exploration at a very early stage. “At the end of the twentieth century,” Armitage writes, “research on the international dimensions of intellectual history was mostly fragmentary and remained marginal to the broader historical discipline.” If not for the progress made by other branches of history, the task might seem impossibly ambitious. How could we comprehend the play of influence and intersection in human thought across the unbounded globe? Armitage’s central gesture is to begin with the history of how the international itself has been understood and theorised. By historicising international thought, we might start to internationalise the history of thought itself.

In order to pursue this gesture, Armitage calls on some familiar figures, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and a particularly familiar problem in the history of political thought, the state of nature. There’s no doubt that Hobbes at least is treated by modern international relations theory as one of the canonical “founding fathers” of the field. But how he got there is a “problem [...] for historians, political theorists and international relations theorists alike”, considering how little he explicitly said about the relations between nations and how little he was understood as an international thinker in his own time and in succeeding centuries. The birth of Hobbes as an international theorist could be taken to constitute the birth of international relations as a discipline. Thus Armitage can return to the Hobbes of the 17th century for the foundations of that yet-to-be-realised endeavour.

Hobbes, Locke, and their fellow early modern political theorists imagined the state of nature–that is, a condition of human life without government or social structure–in order to approach the concepts of human nature and natural law. What were men like without the supposedly artificial intrusion of authority? No such condition, of course, was available to be closely observed by these writers or their readers. But take the international realm in which sovereign empires coexist and clash and you have a surprisingly close (though always imperfect) analogy. Hobbes’s ingenious move was to use the international world to talk about individuals and their relationship to society. Armitage traces the way scholars of international relations reversed the direction of that insight, generating an implicit theory of international relations.

Locke’s case is different: for all his continuing influence on political theory, he has no theoretical avatar in contemporary international debate. The complaint of an  “imbalance [...] between the study of political theory and that of international theory” is central to this volume: “at least one major task for the history of international thought is to correct that imbalance by finally giving due attention to reflection on international affairs by past thinkers like Locke.” So Armitage’s approach here is to perform the excavation himself, using knowledge of Locke’s active involvement in international–and especially imperial–affairs to recreate him as an international thinker. The result aligns Armitage with forceful critics of Locke, like Domenico Losurdo, who put his defence of slavery and colonial expansion centre stage, exposing “the complicity of Lockean liberalism with English colonialism.”

Neither Losurdo nor Armitage was the first to make this connection, of course. One of the earliest critics of Locke on slavery was also the inventor of the word “international”:  Jeremy Bentham. Armitage’s essay on Bentham marks a return from the attempt to historicise international thought to the larger project of “the globalisation of the history of political thought”. As in the case of Hobbes, his focus here is on reception rather than original context or intent. It is Bentham’s global popularity that makes him interesting to Armitage. “His reputation lies at the circumference; and the lights of his understanding are reflected, with increasing lustre, on the other side of the globe,” wrote the essayist William Hazlitt in 1825. Bentham himself, whose preserved body still resides on display at University College London, had ambitions equal to the scale of Armitage’s project: “The Globe is the field of Dominion to which the author aspires” he wrote in 1786.

By collecting these essays in one volume, Armitage lays his own claim to the globe as a field of knowledge, if not domination. But his vision is more prospective than panoptic. Each essay here approaches its subject from a different angle–including each of the three on Locke–and more importantly, each offers a different way of formulating and questioning the concept of international thought. That history is ultimately international is no new insight; the challenge is to incorporate it into historical practice. If H. G. Wells’s modernist story of “the common adventure of mankind” was a totalising one, suspicious of the multiplicity and chaos of human experience, Armitage has set out here to suggest a fully postmodern pattern of exploration: a vision as fractured and kaleidoscopic, as persistently resistant to categorisation and control, as the global experience itself.

Tom Cutterham is reading for a D.Phil. in History at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Sianne Ngai
Our Aesthetic Categories
Harvard University Press, 2012
£29.95
344 pages
ISBN 978-0674046580

…

…

…

…

..

For a long time now aesthetics has meant Beauty. This has held true even for “minor” categories, for which worth is determined by their remove from this dominating aesthetic. What do we gain by moving away from this Kantian model and opting instead for a repertoire of “weak”, quotidian judgements? This is the underlying question in Sianne Ngai’s latest book, in which she rescues three “minor” aesthetic categories from that proscriptive label in order to show how their inextricability from systems of labour, consumption, and circulation makes them the new standards of taste in late capitalist culture.

For her there are three main categories that best exemplify the postmodern aesthetic experience. The “cute” object evokes a disparity of power [power struggle] between helplessness and aggression, reflective of the consumer’s attitude towards the commodity. The “interesting” is an aesthetic of “serial, comparative individualization” bound up in the idea of difference without affect, which in turn invites circulation. Finally, the “zany” (an odd choice to complete the trifecta given that the term has all but fallen out of use, as Ngai herself admits) which evokes the idea of a figure so flexible and vigorous in their labour, and constantly performing a wide variety of disparate roles, that the Fordist/Taylorist worker is replaced by “a succession of transient actions”.

Yet such a summation hardly encompasses how far Ngai goes to demonstrate that these categories, which are far from untreated in the field of aesthetics, are integral to a revised understanding of a critical discourse on aesthetics that spans two centuries. Though its title risks making it sound like a book of pop criticism, whose “categories” were chosen for their popularity rather than their ability to speak to the contemporary study of aesthetics, this work aims to reform the field  by showing how “the interesting, the cute, and the zany can in fact shed light on some of this [Kantian] theory’s defining problems more vividly, making explicit what the older and more prestigious categories leave implicit or even structurally obfuscate.”

Ngai eschews the notion that these categories are “minor”, not because it would deny their effectuality or importance within the field of aesthetics, but because she finds it reductive and problematic to treat these categories as “lower” variations of Kantian Beauty:

the very idea of a finite, historically delimited, highly variegated repertoire of aesthetic categories […] ends up being strangely marginal to the canon of modern philosophical thought even as the problem of aesthetic variety and pluralism lies at the very inception of philosophical aesthetics as a discourse.

Far from treating these categories as critics before her have treated kitsch (Adorno) and camp (Sontag), by setting them in opposition to high art, Ngai concludes instead that the “specific social transformations and/or aesthetic problems to which [the cute, the interesting, and the zany] intimately speak […] are ones that significantly affect the making, dissemination, and reception of all culture.” What makes these categories “ours” is that they are so near to our everyday lives. Within the “hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven” conditions of late capitalism, these easily overlooked judgements become the new exemplary vessels of aesthetic experience through not only their sheer prevalence, but their inextricable economic insinuations.

It makes sense that in talking about the quotidian and the postmodern Ngai would expand beyond discussions of art—part of her concluding argument is that aesthetic experience has exponentially expanded to encompass literally everything—and it is true that she does not shy away from pulling up commercial artefacts like Hello Kitty and the Jim Carrey film The Cable Guy from her vast reserve of cultural evidence if it serves her purposes. However, Ngai seems more interested in postmodern art in which these three categories are consciously applied, which has the salubrious effect of elucidating them as aesthetics rather than as adjectives that happen to convey aesthetic judgements. She also possesses a capacious knowledge of theory as well as culture. She embeds her readings of material such as the photo series of Ed Ruscha, the works of Yoshimoto Nara and Takashi Murakami, and the books of performance artist Karen Finley in provocative discussions of Shlegel’s delineations of “interessante” literature and Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. There is a shocking concentration of critical citations in this work. Ngai would hazard seeming arbitrary in her cultural (and even critical) choices were it not for the virtuosity with which she puts her materials in conversation with one another.

The one area where Ngai does not really break new ground is in the postmodern itself. Her assumptions about late capitalism sound almost identical to Fredric Jameson’s—the commoditisation of everything, information saturation, network systems, etc—and it is more than a little disconcerting to think that our conceptualisation of postmodernism has not changed much since the 1990s. Ngai, in fact, does not pause to explain her “postmodern” to us, and instead relies on the canonized definition. It might be asking too much to wish that Ngai had used her three categories to tell us things about late capitalism that were a little more surprising than the now-stale thesis that the world is hypercommodified. Or, given the current cultural debate surrounding the ironic (which, while perhaps not an overt aesthetic category, seems at least to bear the same status as the interesting), it may have been revealing to see how Ngai would account for this category.

But Ngai does come to a conclusion about the current state of critical aesthetics and states in the last paragraph of the book that in our historical moment there is a need to revive the study of aesthetics as a mode of countering the postmodern omnipresence of aesthetic experiences:

By paying closer attention to the aesthetic categories that speak to the most significant objects and socially binding activities of late capitalist life […] one can at least make a start at closing the gulf between aesthetic theory and practice that began to open in the twentieth century

Criticism, says Ngai, needs to address this new omnipresence; but the antithetical structure of art and kitsch risks obstructing any conduit to this realization, and even more to its treatment. Rather than maintaining these dipoles and situating her categories somewhere in the middle, Ngai asks us to conceive of an aesthetics that, like late capitalism, “has come to saturate virtually every nook and cranny of the world that postmodern subjects inhabit.”

Ngai is not necessarily calling for the re-politicisation of art; rather, she says that if we approach the cute, the interesting, and the zany in the same ways as we approach Beauty, then we revitalise the stagnant arguments within the study of aesthetics. At the very least, this book makes us conscious of the minute aesthetic judgements that we perform on a daily basis—beyond just “our” three categories—and changes how we think about aesthetic experience itself; at the very most, it makes a case for altering the field.

Kirsten Lew read for an M.St. in English and American Studies at Linacre College, Oxford. She is currently in the PhD program at UCLA.

Geoff Dyer
Zona
Canongate, 2013
£9.99
240 pages
ISBN 978-0857861672

…

.

..

Ingmar Bergman, a serious admirer of Andrei Tarkovsky, describes his discovery of the Russian filmmaker in terms that evoke the mysterious journey of Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979):

My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle.

Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease.

Travelling to a room—in both the real and metaphorical senses—is the plot of Stalker. Though 163 minutes long, the film’s action is easily summarised: a balding man known simply as Stalker guides two characters, Writer and Professor, through a portentous Chernobyl-esque wasteland called the Zone. The innermost region of the Zone contains the Room, where anyone can have their deepest wishes fulfilled. Blending slow-moving camera pans and criticism of Writer and Professor in equal parts, plot is seldom the focus of Tarkovsky’s art house/sci-fi film. Professor’s flaw is his commitment to scientism; in his pursuit of empirical understanding, he seeks to reduce the irreducible. As for Writer, he’s fit only to march forward, unheeding of warnings, all the while grumbling about something or another. In a fit of exasperation after Stalker’s return from the Zone, he squirms on the floor:

Calling themselves intellectuals those writers and scientists. They don’t believe in anything [...] They’ve got empty eyes!

While Stalker goes to great lengths to distance himself from Professor and Writer, one can’t help but see a bit of Geoff Dyer in Writer. For both, to process anything is to digest and communicate it. Dyer has published broadly on subjects ranging from the history of jazz to D. H. Lawrence, and reading him always feels a bit like having a one-sided conversation with a clever friend. In his recent ode to Tarkovsky, Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room, Dyer revels in monologue, quoting Milan Kundera, alluding to Heidegger, and reminiscing about Oxford movie theatres. This is all characteristic Dyer. As he admits in a preface to his essay collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011), his body of work offers “proof of just how thoroughly my career had avoided any focus, specialization, or continuity except that dictated by my desire to write about whatever I happened to be interested in at any given moment.” This calls to mind another scene from Stalker: Writer, nearly asleep, regales a reclining Stalker with long-winded reflections, even as Stalker has already drifted into a technicolor dreamland. Thoughts of his audience’s attention span do not bother Writer. But Tarkovsky himself has little in common with Writer or with Dyer. Indeed what is most striking about Zona—and perhaps its largest weakness—is just how un-Tarkovskyan it feels. Tarkovsky, known for his slow-moving and deliberative style, is ill-suited to Dyer’s quick neuroticism.

Tarkovsky’s films are weighty, due in part to the context in which Tarkovsky rose to prominence. His first full-length feature, Ivan’s Childhood (1962), benefitted from the thaw in cultural politics in the USSR after Stalin’s death in 1953. Foreign films were beginning to be imported, and up-and-coming filmmakers were encouraged to enter the international festival circuit. Tarkovsky’s well-timed debut met with great success in the West, in part because of his insights into Soviet travails during World War II. A full 17 years and several films later, Tarkovsky’s Stalker again captured the creative and spiritual yearnings of the intelligentsia. The weightiness of Tarkovksy’s films also come from the director’s expectations of the film-goer. Audience members are expected to engage seriously, almost solemnly, with his films. This is part of the profound possibility of cinema. Dyer often brings light to Tarkovsky’s poetic heaviness but sometimes at the expense of Tarkovsky’s aim to, as Kierkegaard puts it, “express the sublime in the pedestrian”.

If Stalker is about the plight of man, Dyer’s book focuses mostly on Dyer. Taking as its name the Russian for “zone”, it is a scene-by-scene recounting of Stalker, though it is far from pure plot summary. We learn more about Dyer than we ever cared to: his trips, to Burning Man and on LSD, alongside his views of other films (Godard’s Breathless (1960) is “unwatchable”; Buñel’s Belle du Jour (1967) “sucked”). Dyer’s works are typically associative and filled with allusions to books to read, films to see, places to visit. A critic once described him as a high-brow live-blogger. When Dyer sees an actor drink in a film, he wants a drink too.  He’s never seen The Wizard of Oz, and he’s not planning on it. It’s beneath him to read Hanif Kureishi.

Sharp, digressive, and irreverent, Dyer litters Zona with footnotes. At his best, he makes pithy reflections on details of the film, relating them to his experience and by extension to our own. Take for instance his reflection on William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience and Stalker’s faith:

William James writes of people’s willingness to stake everything on the chance of salvation. Chance makes the difference, says James, between ‘a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.’ Again the impossible paradox of Stalker’s relationship to the Zone makes itself felt. The keynote of his life is hope, but the Zone will let through only those who have lost all hope. Stalkers, we learn later, are forbidden entry to the Room. Forbidden, perhaps, by virtue of their belief—their hope—in it.

At his worst, Dyer is haphazard and clumsy: a footnote about his wife’s resemblance to Natascha McElhone, star of Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), rambles on for well over a thousand words. Elsewhere, he goes on for half a page about “back-of-the-head stuff” in an aside about Stalker’s baldness. He then adds that this might be relevant to Einstein and that whole “space-time thing”.

There are moments when Zona is both entertaining and informative, but for the rest for the time Tarkovosky’s admonition in Sculpting in Time (1986) haunts Dyer’s project: “Clearly the hardest thing for the working artist is to create his own conception and follow it, unafraid of the strictures it imposes, however rigid these may be. It is far easier to be eclectic.” Dyer is left finally in a difficult place. On the one hand, he needs his sprawling footnotes and running commentary to make Zona more than just a summary of a minimalist film. On the other hand, when Dyer moves beyond a synopsis of Tarkovsky’s film (a form which in itself seems to rob Tarkovsky of his brilliance and distinctiveness), Dyer’s style loses what it is that draws people to Tarkovsky—deliberate pacing and otherworldliness. To be fair, reading Dyer is not without merits (not least for compiling a cultural to-do list), but Zona is better suited for lovers of Dyer than of Tarkovsky. The book’s promise to helping us realise our deepest wishes is left frustrated, and fans of Tarkovsky are likely be so too.

Shivani Radhakrishnan is reading for a B.Phil. in Philosophy at Linacre College, Oxford.