Race, amnesia, and the education of international relations

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Volumn 26, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 401-424

  Krishna, Sankaran ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII   (United States)

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EID: 23044528688     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540102600403     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. I deliberately choose the term IR discourse, rather than IR theory, IR literature, or just IR. The use of discourse is intended to inflect theory, discipline, or any social narrative with considerations of power. As Walter Mignolo explicates in his choice of colonial discourse over colonial literature in his work on the Renaissance, "[d]iscourse used in this sense has an enormous advantage over the notion of literature when the corpus at stake is colonial. While colonial literature has been construed as an aesthetic system dependent on the Renaissance concepts of poetry, colonial discourse places colonial discursive production in a context of conflictive interactions, of appropriations and resistances, of power and domination": Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 7; all emphases are in the original.
2. For reasons of space, I can do no better than offer this brief description of the intimacy between abstraction and issues of power. My understanding of Heidegger in this regard relies heavily on two recent works: Rudiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998),
3. and Michael Dillon, Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought (New York: Routledge, 1996).
4. For more on Foucault on abstraction and interpretation, see his essays "Truth and Power" and "Two Lectures," in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 78-108, 109-133.
5. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). Page-number references are given in the text.
6. Frantz Fanon's description of this originary alienation at the heart of the modern interstate system advises us to not forget Europe's crimes, of which the most horrible was committed in the heart of man and consisted of the pathological tearing apart of his functions and the crumbling away of his unity. And in the framework of the collectivity there were the differentiations, the stratification, and the bloodthirsty tensions fed by classes; and finally on the immense scale of humanity, there were racial hatreds, slavery, exploitation, and above all the bloodless genocide which consisted in the setting aside of fifteen thousand millions of men. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 315.
7. For more on the enablements of such a conjoined reading of modern history and its refusal to either drop anchor in nativism or forgo the invaluable legacy of "European" ideas such as freedom and democracy, see also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000).
8. This particular list is cribbed from V. G. Kiernan, Poets, Politics, and the People, ed. Harvey J. Kaye (London: Verso, 1989), p. 134.
9. See J. David Singer, ed., The Correlates of War, vols. 1 and 2 (New York: Free Press, 1979);
10. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981);
11. and Rudolph J. Rummel, Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Non-Violence (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Press, 1997).
12. Bernard Nietschmann, "The Third World War," Cultural Survival Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1987): 1, 7.
13. Quoted in Michael Shapiro, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 176-177.
14. This is why, following the subaltern studies historian Ranajit Guha, I have called the discipline of international relations a "prose of counter-insurgency": See my Postcolonial Insecurities: India, Sri Lanka, and the Question of Nationhood (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
15. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1981).
16. This last definition of a strategy of containment is from one of Jameson's best interlocutors, William Dowling, in his Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the Political Unconscious (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1984), p. 54.
17. Jameson, note 10, p. 213.
18. In this context of abstraction, I really cannot do better than quote, once again, Dowling, who elucidates how the process works in the context of economics: Classical and neoclassical economics function as strategies of containment . . . not simply through their premature closure (closing off inquiry before it can lead to ultimate questions about history and society) or even through their repression of history (repressing the sense in which the market economy described in their texts could not exist without exploitation and oppression), but through the way they accomplish this closure and repression, treating the workings of an emergent capitalism as eternal and objective economic laws. Dowling, note 11, p. 79. Without using the term strategy of containment, but with a brilliant deployment of the notion of taboo, Rick Ashley inaugurated this line of argument within IR by his analysis of the way "economism" works within and as the discipline. See Ashley, "Three Modes of Economism," International Studies Quarterly 27 (1983), pp. 463-496;
19. and "The Poverty of Neorealism," International Organization 38 (1984), pp. 225-286.
20. From Paul Gilroy's interview with Toni Morrison, published as "Living Memory: Meeting Toni Morrison," in Paul Gilroy, Small Acts (London: Serpent's Tail, 1993).
21. Quote reproduced from Gilroy, Black Atlantic (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993), p. 221. As in the works of Gandhi and those of Ashis Nandy, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon, there is a keen appreciation here of the fact that victory is often more catastrophic for the culture and civilization of the victor than it is for that of the vanquished. The defeated civilizations, at one level unencumbered by the need to continually reinvent themselves along a hypermasculine will to dominate the world, may be better able to preserve those values and principles that are, in the longer run, more conducive to the survival of the species and the planet.
22. James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford, Eng.: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 16.
23. Siba Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
24. Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law Ibid., p. 58. In any case, in his text War and Peace, Grotius had already argued that slavery was legally acceptable.
25. Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law Ibid., pp. 43-44, 63.
26. Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law Ibid., p. 61.
27. Self-contained stories of the West are, obviously, hardly unique to IR discourse, but the dominant modus operandi of knowledge production in modern times. In a brilliant recent article, Susan Buck-Morss examines the paradox of the coeval and related emergence of Enlightenment ideals of human emancipation alongside that of global slavery, the extraordinarily important role played by the Haitian revolution in the ideals of the French Revolution and enlightenment, in Hegel's and many another Western thinkers' meditations on slavery, and of the importance of disciplinary boundaries in perpetuating the myopia that regards these events as disconnected and disparate. See Susan Buck-Morss, "Hegel and Haiti," Critical Inquiry (summer 2000), pp. 821-865.
28. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense," in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954), pp. 46-47.
29. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996).
30. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
31. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1976).
32. Mignolo, note 10.
33. Besides the second half of Mignolo's The Darker Side of the Renaissance,
34. see also Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
35. Mignolo, note 1, p. 42.
36. Ibid., p. 46.
37. Important among these would be Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The 'Manly' Englishman and the 'Effeminate Bengali' in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995);
38. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Sexuality, and Gender in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995);
39. Dipesh Chakrabarty, note 5; Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1983);
40. Edward Said, note 3; and Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia UP, 1989).
41. Viswanathan, n. 29, p. 168.
42. In Mill's History the specific, but, more relevantly, the strange and the unfamiliar, are at the epistemological mercy of a rationality that is vouched for in advance of "viewing" and certainly experiencing the strange and the unfamiliar. The project of the empire is inscribed in the judgments of that way of 'doing' history, which relentlessly attempts to align or educate the regnant forms of the unfamiliar with its own expectations. Liberal imperialism is impossible without this epistemological commitment - which by the nineteenth century supports both progressivism and paternalism - that is, the main theoretical justifications - of the empire. Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 18.
43. Eric Stokes, English Utilitarians in India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), as quoted in Mehta, note 31, p. xii. Mehta's is a worthy successor to Stokes's classic work and is an exemplar in political theory of what, following Said, I have called a contrapuntal approach to understanding international relations. This is also an indirect way of saying that the following paragraphs owe much to his deeply insightful work.
44. For a superb explication of the differing ethos of governance that animated these presidencies in comparison with Cornwallis's Bengal, see Stokes, note 32. The other classic occasioned by the debate on the Permanent Settlement is, of course, Ranajit Guha's A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1996; first published 1963).
45. Mehta, note 31, p. 20.
46. Ibid., p. 33.
47. Ibid., p. 21.
48. Ibid., p. 41.
49. It is also important to register the limits to Burke's critique of empire. His attitude to empire was a difference of degree, not of kind, to that of the liberals. A flaming anti-imperialist he was not by any means. His overwhelming concern at all times is not the fate of the Indian but rather of what the rapacious colonialists would do to democracy in England on their physical or ideational return to the homeland.