Politics of difference: Reflections on dalit and African American struggles

Economic and Political Weekly

Volumn 45, Issue 19, 2010, Pages 62-69

  Pandey, Gyanendra ^a  

^a EMORY UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 77953341559     PISSN: 00129976     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. Gyanendra Pandey ed. Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories: Investigations from India and the USA (London: Routledge), 2010.
2. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, passim;
3. Sander L Gilman, Difference and Pathology (Cornell 1985), 35;
4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (ed.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana 1988);
5. and idem, In Other Worlds. Essays in Cultural Politics, New York, 1988, passim.
6. Robin D G Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class, New York 1996, 6, for Kelley and Painter quotes;
7. Jacqueline Jones, Labour of Love, Labour of Sorrow. Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present, (New York, 1986), 330.
8. Elizabeth Gross, "Derrida, Irigaray, and Deconstruction", Intervention: Revolutionary Marxist Journal, Vol 20, 1986, 72.
9. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, (Berkeley 1984), 2007, 122;
10. see also 112 and passim.
11. Joan W Scott, "Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference", Feminist Studies, 14, 1, 1988, passim.
12. Numerous scholars have written on this theme. Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony. The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture, (Princeton 2007), provides an important elaboration, focused on the question of Muslims in South Asia;
13. see p 51 and passim.
14. This is not to deny the critical differences between the history of the Jews - a consistently tiny minority in Europe, perceived as racially other, as killers of Jesus, as the only religious minority until the post-Reformation era, a people without a state until the formation of modern Israel - and that of Muslims, a very substantial population that controlled large territories and has had state power in many places from the inception of Islam until today. In that respect, the parallel between Jews and homosexuals may be somewhat more tenable - with their similar histories of being small minorities that are persecuted in Christian Europe (the experience elsewhere was perhaps more mixed) until late modernity, culminating in the Nazi Holocaust. My point, however, is about metaphor: of a minority that never quite fits, and is seen as dangerous to the nation/state - hence, the Jewish Question in 19th century Europe, and the "problem" of Islam today.
15. What, too, if the paradigm case of world historical development is taken to be not Europe (which has clearly assumed this place from the time of Hegel and Marx, if not earlier), but north and south America, or south Asia? In the 19th century, according to Marx, England (then perhaps Germany, then perhaps Russia) showed to the world the face of the future. In the 20th and 21st centuries, one might say it is the US, and China and India, Bolivia and Ecuador. Better still, one might recognise that there is no one face to world history, but many masks, donned in various ways at various times to produce the illusion of one world, with its natural ordering of dominance and subordination, male and female, ethnicity versus ethnicity, and so on.
16. Mufti, Enlightenment, p 209.
17. Ibid, p 11.
18. Ibid, p 13.
19. See, for example, Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches (hereafter BAWS), IX, 181, 190;
20. XVII, Pt 3, 418;
21. and Vol I, 368;
22. Eleanor Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit. Essays on the Ambedkar Movement (Delhi, 1996), 97;
23. Sekhar Bandyhopadhyay, "Transfer of Power and the Crisis of Dalit Politics in India, 1945-47", Modern Asian Studies, 34, 4, 2000, 903, 906.
24. BAWS, IX, 68.
25. BAWS, XIV, 270-271 and 1162.
26. Eleanor Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit. Essays on the Ambedkar Movement, Delhi, 1996, 206.
27. "India and the Prerequisites of Communism", p 8 of Ambedkar, Collected Works, cd (compiled by Anand Teltumble).
28. "Revolution and Counter-revolution in Ancient India", p 32 of Pt II of Teltumble, cd.
29. "What Is Saddhamma?", BAWS, XI, 302;
30. and "Revolution and Counterrevolution in Ancient India", p 57 of Pt II of Teltumble, cd.
31. B R Ambedkar, The Untouchables. Who They Were and Why They Became Untouchables (1948; Shravasti, 1977), 204.
32. Christopher Queen, "Ambedkar, Modernity, and the Hermeneutics of Buddhist Liberation" in A K Narain and D C Ahir, (ed.), Ambedkar, Buddhism and Social Change (Delhi 1994), 100.
33. Ambedkar argued that communists too could learn from the Buddha how to bring about the "Bloodless Revolution" and "Remove the Ills of Humanity". "Communism of the Russian type aims to bring about (change) by a bloody revolution. The Buddhist Communism brings it about by a bloodless revolution;" BAWS, 17, III, 515, 517, 493.
34. See also Martin Fuchs, "A Religion for Civil Society? Ambedkar's Buddhism, the Dalit Issue and the Imagination of Emergent Possibilities" in Vasudha Dalmia et al (ed.), Charisma and Canon: Essays on the Religious History of the Indian Subcontinent (Delhi 2001), 250-73.
35. E g, studies by Eleanor Zelliot, Adele Fiske and Surendra Jondhale, cited in John C B Webster, Religion and Dalit Liberation: An Examination of Perspectives, Delhi, 1999, 84 and 88.
36. Cited in Eleanor Zelliot, "New Voices of the Buddhists of India" in Narain and Ahir (ed.), Ambedkar, Buddhism and Social Change, 196.
37. See also the poems by Daya Pawar and Namdeo Dhasal, and Zelliot's commentary on them, on p 203.
38. Urmila Pawar, Aaydaan (Granthali, Mumbai, 2003), 90-93
39. "I Have Relied on Maya Pandit's Translation of these Passages in Sharmila Rege", Writing Caste/Writing Gender (Delhi 2006), 285-88
40. with minor additions and emendations in the light of the original Marathi.
41. Baby Kamble, The Prisons We Broke (Chennai: Orient Longman), 2008, 122.
42. WEB DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, New York, 1969, 45.
43. Hooks, Ain'tI a Woman, Boston, MA, 1981, 122.
44. Jones, Labour of Love, 9.
45. Cf, Pauli Murray, cited in hooks, Ain't I a Woman, 147.
46. Jones, Labour of Love, 316.
47. hooks, Ain'tla Woman, 159.
48. Lorde, Sister Outsider, 112;
49. Bethel cited in hooks, Ain'tla Woman, 152.
50. hooks notes that the common comparison of "women" and "blacks" in white feminist critiques of American history serves to exclude black women from consideration. Even feminists like Helen Hacker and Catherine Stimpson use "women" to refer to white women and "black" to refer to black men, she argues, and others ("including even some black people") make the same assumption;
51. ibid, 140.
52. Sister Outsider, 144.
53. Hine Sight. Black Women and the Reconstruction of American History (Brooklyn: New York), 1994, xxiii.
54. Hine Sight, 41.
55. "The Fourth Theme Has Been Problematic", writes Hine somewhat problematically;
56. ibid, 51.
57. Ibid, 38, 51, 52.
58. Italy and Germany ad been unified; Japanese nationalism was in the ascendant; a regime of Poor Laws (to protect all the nation's people) was well established in Britain and elsewhere; and even as European (and American) imperialism extended its sway in Africa and Asia, the idea of the self-determination of nations was gaining ground.
59. Souls, 52.
60. D G Tendulkar, Mahatma: Life of M K Gandhi, Vol 4, New Delhi, 1960, 41.
61. BAWS, 404.
62. Ibid, 404-05.
63. Souls, 102-3 (emphasis added).
64. See, e g, Doris Sommer, "Resisting the Heat. Menchu, Morrison, and Incompetent Readers" in Amy Kaplan and Donald E Pease (ed.), Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham 1993), 407-32.
65. My colleague V Narayana Rao has spoken of the culture - rituals, beliefs, practices - that traditional "communities" in India, dalits and lower castes as well as upper castes, have had to leave behind in order to become part of the modern society and state, and stressed the need to write about the rich diversity of these cultures; personal communications, and unpublished paper. I am suggesting, however, that these practices and traditions are not given from the past: they are produced from contested and changing elements in a visibly contested political terrain.
66. One might note the political claim that inheres in the very act of naming a political assemblage as "dalit", "black", "African American", adivasi, aboriginal, First Nation, "gay", "lesbian" (not to mention LGBTQ), and for that matter even "women".
67. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds, pp 197-221;
68. idem "In a Word: Interview" in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York 1993);
69. Danius, Sara and Stefan Jonsson, "An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak" in Boundary 2, 1993:3.
70. Baby Kamble, The Prisons We Broke, 122.