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=> Crafting the Imperial Imaginationby by Hamid Dabashi

Crafting the Imperial Imaginationby by Hamid Dabashi
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New Left Project
Crafting the Imperial Imaginationby
by Hamid Dabashi

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/crafting_the_imperial_imaginary





Hamid Dabashi is Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. The following interview focuses on themes from his new book, Brown Skins, White Masks (Pluto 2011) - which draws on the work of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said to develop a critique of the role of immigrant “comprador intellectuals” in facilitating contemporary imperialism.

Can you give us a brief synopsis of your main argument?

I think it should be left to my readers to find out for themselves what this book is about. Any act of writing is an act of successive and open-ended discovery, predicated on the initial impetus that places a person in front of a laptop. I have had multiple reasons and purposes in writing Brown Skin, White Masks and I should not privilege any one of them over the others, or in any other way prejudice my readers’ response to it. Obviously the ideological foregrounding of empire building, the changing modalities of racism, Islamophobia, the nature and function of comprador intellectuals and native informers, etc are among the issues that have driven me to write this book. The book that has resulted finds its arguments somewhere between Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and Edward Said’s Representations of Intellectuals (1994), updating one and rethinking the other. In short, I have sought to think through the racialized manufacturing of hegemony in the making of an empire, or engineering consent to it, while critically reconsidering the whole function of expatriate intellectuals in that process. At the end I find this notion of “exile” in fact quite flawed and unstable in part because that is precisely the site from which this cadre of comprador intellectuals are recruited. The book, I am sure, will have different resonances in North America and Western Europe than it will in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. So who takes what from this book and puts what spin on it is very instructive to me, as indeed is this very interview, for the sorts of questions you ask are the indices of a politics of reading from which a text finds the measures of its relevance.

From the title of your book it is very clear that you are explicitly drawing on Franz Fanon’s controversial seminal text Black Skin, White Masks (1952). How does your work relate to his original thesis?

I wonder what you mean by “controversial”—the book is not controversial to me or to the circle of my academic and political readings. Seminal yes, controversial no. For sure people who do not like Fanon or his dissecting of the racialized structure of colonial power do not like this book either. But that does not make his seminal book controversial. My book is a take on Fanon’s pioneering insights in Black Skin, White Masks in a different imperial context. Fanon wrote his book in the context of the French colonial domination of Algeria and the European domination in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in general. My book is written in the context of American attempt at the imperial domination of the globe, next to which the European Union, China, and Russia posit contending forces. In these contexts, I am particularly concerned with the function of expatriate, comprador intellectuals who have moved to North America and Western Europe and are acting as native informers in the manufacturing of a sort of useful knowledge that facilitates the imperial domination of the countries from which they have immigrated. The nature of this knowledge, as I explain in my Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (2009) is dispensable, as are these intellectuals. So my book works through Fanon’s text both historically and geographically, seeking a renewed theoretical angle on how imperial projects seek to manufacture consent. The other difference is the defiant disposition of my book vis-à-vis the mostly analytical diagnosis of Fanon. I think my book reveals a different contestatory disposition vis-à-vis the Empire. I am not out just to expose and explain. I am out to contest and defy.

It could be argued that in the wake of the popular uprisings in the Middle East in recent months your book’s argument is ever more relevant. What role do you envisage for the “native compradors” in the current climate of popular dissent in the Arab World?

I do not fetishize these “comprador intellectuals,” nor do I think their services are indispensible to all phases of imperialism. The sort of knowledge they produce is disposable, as they are dispensable. I am not particularly even interested in them or what they do. I simply wanted to see in what particular way they are serving the Empire, and by analyzing them I have been really interested in the modus operandi of any imperial project. Empires are not stable entities, and their ideological hegemony is always on very shaky grounds. They move, change, and alter the modalities of their operation. In one sense these recent uprisings you cite have discredited these “comprador intellectuals” more than ever. Some of them, however, have already started to come out to put their spin on these events in a manner that sustains the military and ideological power of the imperial imagining that uses their representation of Arab and Muslim cultures. But the recent role of the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy in facilitating the US and NATO invasion of Libya in order to procure an Israeli-friendly post-Gaddafi era is a clear indication that the way imperial domination works is not limited to or contingent on only one sort of consensus building. You might say that Bernard-Henri Lévy has sough to make native informers obsolete or has certainly outmanoeuvred them. Be that as it may, Tahrir Square is a game changer. It has exposed the fact that these native informers have been misinforming the empire. What I have done in my book is a theoretical foregrounding of the sorts of realities that inform these revolutions and are nowhere near the emotive or political parameters of these native informers. My book’s relevance as a result is both as a testimony to the factual cosmopolitanism of these societies that have been systematically distorted by these native mis-informers and than as an expose of the bankruptcy of the ideologies that have been used to rule them through both these expatriate intellectuals and the local tyrants of Ben Ali and Mubarak sort.

In the conclusion of your book you write about Barack Obama’s presidential election being replete with rhetoric about “post-racial” politics. Could you expand a little more on this subject, particularly in relation to Obama’s response to the ongoing fiscal crisis and international turmoil?

Colonialism is the abuse of labor by capital run geographically amuck. Abuse of labor by capital, again as I see it, is colour-blind and gender-neutral. In a given snap shot of it it might be, as it has been, masculinist and racist. But those are transitive and entirely incidental to the core logic of capitalism. I am interested in the colour codification of the relation of domination only to the degree that it helps us understand the particular ideological moment from which we are getting a snapshot. As I argue in my book, brown is now the new black, as Muslim is the new Jew—and thus Islamophobia the new vintage of classical European anti-Semitism. The rhetoric of “post-racial politics” appeals to a particular moment of African-American entry into the American middle class, more in aspiration of course than in reality. Poverty in the United States is still very much racially coded—and the fact that we now have an African American as our president does not mean that race no longer matters. In fact it can act as a camouflage concealing the racialized fact of poverty and destitution. The same is obviously true about women’s rights. The fact that Hillary Clinton almost became the first women president in the United States does not mean that women have attained their equal rights. Both women and racialized minorities still very much constitute the bulk of cheap labor in the United States. Obama’s responses to both fiscal crisis and democratic uprisings in Asia and Africa (what I believe you mean by “international turmoil”) has been pretty straightforward, deeply conservative and unimaginative, and scarce anything to do with his rousing rhetoric during his presidential campaign. In fact his speech justifying the US-led invasion of Libya in March 2011 was worse than Bush and Blair’s speeches justifying the US-led invasions of Iraq. In Obama’s case, he said specifically that the US acts militarily only when its “interests and values” coincide. Bush did not put it so bluntly. Compared to Obama’s naked imperialism, Bush’s now appears pretty circumspect and statesmanlike!

Edward Said developed the concept of “intellectual exile”, which refers to migrant intellectuals who no longer feel at home either in their homeland or their host society, and are thus pre-disposed to critique power from the vantage point of an outsider. However, in Brown Skin, White Masks you argue that intellectuals who have migrated to the North should not see themselves as exiles or “theoreticians of migrant hybridity” but must instead acknowledge their relative privilege and complicity in global power relations, and the responsibilities that come with such privilege. To what extent is your view at odds with Said’s?

I categorically dislike and distrust this useless, defeatist, and as I demonstrate in my book at times treacherous notion of “exilic intellectuals.” I have no patience for it. When 300 million human beings are roaming around the globe in search of a meagre living, away from their homeland and their loved ones, it is obscene for me to call myself “in exile.” But that is just the very basis of it. The sort of pathology I examine in cases like Ibn Warraq or Hirsi Ali, etc all come from these “exilic intellectuals” or “guns for hire” as I call them. What Edward Said, predicated on Adorno, was doing was self-theorizing himself as a force of militant defiance against the status quo and against power, precisely because he was not implicated in power relation to be one of those that he called the “ayesayers.” He thought he was a “naysayer” by virtue of being an exilic intellectual. Here I completely understand why Said celebrated his exilic condition as a marker of his oppositional stand against power. But having exposed the fact that from the selfsame site of exilic intellectuals we have far more native informers serving the imperial condition of their knowledge production than those opposing it, I categorically depart from that marginal position and suggest that we must in fact own up to where and what we are and fight back not from a self-marginalized position but in fact from the very center and heart of imperial position in which we have found ourselves. In an age of the masses of millions of migrant labourers, I find this notion of “migrant hybridity” not only indecent but entirely useless because it makes people dually marginal and categorically irrelevant and thus irresponsible. Notice that the theorization of this “hybridity” comes from a cosy and comfortable academic bourgeoisie that scarce ventures to say anything meaningful about the imperial horrors that terrorize the earth. We must assume responsibility for where we are, by virtue of if nothing else then at least the tax money we pay and from which the imperial operation sustains its military machinery. In that condition and context I find it ludicrous to say well you know I am really in exile and what the US does is none of my business. I come from Iran (or from Timbuktu or Kalamazoo for that matter) and I only care about that country, while I am not even there and my presence has very little or no effect on that country either. This being doubly useless is unacceptable to me. I believe we now find ourselves in a different condition of planetary imperialism than the generations of Fanon or even Said did. So I simply extend the logic of their insights and their courage to a different context, the context that is defined from the heart of American imperial imaginary.

Lastly, are the ideas in your book relevant to the events surrounding the killing of Osama Bin Laden and the reaction to them?

Yes they are - if only because the death of Osama bin Laden is now so entirely inconsequential to the rise of Arab Spring. The central theme of my book has been that these native informers are in fact native dis-informers, that they tell their employees what they want to hear not what they ought to know. As you see the US and its allies are now scrambling to come to terms with the Arab Spring, which at its core is the coming to fruition of the cosmopolitan cultures of which I have written over the last three decades, and which to keep themselves in business the comprador intellectuals have denied or even ridiculed.



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