Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality Introduction, One of chapters 2,3,4 or 5; 12, 13 and 14
Leela Gandhi, Affective Comunities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-siecle Radicalism and the Politics of Friendship Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4.
1. Would Darwin have still asserted the continuity between civilization, reproductive sex and sexual difference if methods of artificial procreation were available during the fin de siecle?
ReplyDelete2. Anti-communitarian communitarianism???
3. Lake and Reynolds write, “The overwhelming nature of Jewish persecution and the extent of mass murder (during the Second World War) had raised the issue of race ‘in a way that nothing else in history had ever done before’”. Wars ability to be a catalyst for massive social change has been recognized and well documented by countless academics. Lake and Reynolds, ‘Drawing the Global Colour Line’, follows a similar vein in tracing the changing national and international perspectives on race by focusing their discussion around notable historical conflicts – the Civil War, The First World War and the Second World War. Were these massive conflicts necessary for such radical changes in national and international perspectives on race or would these changes have naturally/organically occurred and just happened to do so against the back drop of three of the most significant conflicts in the past 150 years?
1. Gandhi says that "...once imperialism was troped as shorthand for all that was wrong and iniquitous in the world, it's abandonment - and the project, thereby, of anti-imperialism - came to carry, we will see, the promise of ideal community, a utopian order of things." Is the lumping together of different causes i.e. sexual freedom, animal rights, racial equality etc under the single banner of anti-imperialism ultimately productive? Does banding them all together give more power to the movement, or does it disguise/obscure the individual mandates and needs of each one?
ReplyDelete2. Lake and Reynolds quote Goldwin Smith as saying "The Negro question will, I fear, be a great difficulty. You cannot have a pariah caste without fatally derogating from the specific principles of your Republic. On the other hand from the difference of colour and physical repugnance, amalgamation seems unlikely." If we apply this statement to the contemporary era, can genuine 'democracy' (or as genuine as it comes these days) be said to occur in places that are still experiencing an undercurrent of racism, state-endorsed or not? How does the election of Barack Obama as president of a still very racially unequal country factor into this?
1. What purpose does Gandhi's use of Michaelangelo's Pieta serve in her arguments about homosexuality and friendship?
ReplyDelete2. What links can be drawn between the vegetarian, anti-vivisection idea of "love," or kinship, with animals and the Epicurean kinship with strangers and guests? In other words, can loving a beast and loving a colonized person be compared?
1. Lake and Reynolds make perfectly clear that most of the imperialists barely considered the people they colonized capable or intelligent, much less human. Even though the "civilized savages" could speak the King's English and recite the Lord's prayer, was they reason they were more expendable than equal purely a racist one, or was there more at play?
ReplyDelete2. The late 19th century, Lake and Reynolds pointed out, was also the "golden era" of "scientific" and bureaucratic racism. Did the racism of this era make more "sense" to its proponents, as they felt that they could fall back upon the "empirical" power of science and the state? Why or why not?
3. Gandhi briefly speaks about the English priest, Charles Freer Andrews, who behaved in unusual ways for a man of the era. Andrews defended his actions due to a close reading and interpretation of the New Testament. Given that he held heterodox views regarding Imperialism and its intersection with the nonwhite races, could we then read that his kinfolk and statesmen (as Lake and Reynolds have suggested) practiced the religion of Imperial "whiteness", rather than the Christianity they espoused?
1. Gandhi notes: "For if the very idea of community is, notwithstanding its necessity, from a postmodern perspective inevitably unworkable, inoperative, negative, then we can only speak, under erasure, of an impossible community". How does this position of 'impossible community' disrupt or complement more common understandings of an 'imagined community' (Anderson). Are these two ideas of community at odds, or are there correlations between the two?
ReplyDelete2. Gandhi asserts in her discussion of Carpenter that all politics are sexual politics, and therefore he ultimately was referring to sexual politics when he was referring to anti imperialism. Are the two always inseperable as Gandhi implies? That is, can one assert sexual issues/positions without a political aspect? Does this extend to personal acts?
1. Gandhi paraphrases Ashis Nandy in the first chapter of Affective Communities when she says that minor narratives of cross-cultural collaboration between oppressors and oppressed rarely took centre stage in colonial encounters. That the "numerically small" number of people who "opted out of their colonizing society for the cause of India" were "scarcely observed on either side of the imperial divide." With this in mind, my question is: why focus on these people at all? What can be learned from the study of so seemingly marginal and unimportant a minority? More broadly (and more crassly) with regards to the book....so what?
ReplyDelete2. In what ways is it possible to apply Gandhi's work to what Lake and Reynolds were doing in their book? Would it be productive to consider the individual that occupies a space outside of anti-imperialism in , for example, the case of Japan's bid to have a racial equity clause included in the League of Nations?
Gandhi talks about meat in relation to anticolonial thought. Sometimes, two events can be thought to have a causal relationship when there is in fact more to the picture. For example, in hot months more ice cream is consumed and more people drown in pools. This does not mean eating ice cream causes drowning, but rather that hot weather causes both. In that same sense, when Gandhi talks about Vegetarian-kindness what might be another factor in the relationship? Does lack of consuming meat make people kinder or is there larger circumstances that make simultaneously encourage vegetarianism and kindness?
ReplyDeleteGandhi also mentions that sex has very little to do with homosexuality. The acts performed in private are not what threaten the empire, but rather the culture or 'gayness' surrounding the sexuality. When looking at chapter 5 in Lake and Reynolds, I wonder if the same can be said about race. To what extent does the color of skin, or place of origin have anything to do with race? At the point where MK Gandhi is in Africa preaching imperialist ideals, is he still Indian? When Obama is elected president, is he still black?
1. On page 56 of Affective Communities, Gandhi quotes Wittig: "it would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with women, for woman has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought... Lesbians are not women.: Can the same logic be applied to the binary of colonizer-colonized? In other words, can individuals who choose to live outside of the traditional racial boundaries conceived in empire, or who willingly subvert them, still be considered white, or Indian, or Aboriginal?
ReplyDelete2. What do we make of the fact that Indians were signalled out in South Africa as the threat to white rule/power in that colony? What does the fact that black rule was not considered at the time reveal about racial hierarchies, and about notions of what made one racial group more "civilized" than another?
3. Lake and Reynolds observe: "Hughes rapidly became a champion of the white man and, in the manner of most contemporary policy-makers, declared that his hostility to Asian migration was not motivated by racial superiority but by Asiatic difference" (295). To what extent could using certain language allow (white) politicians, reformers, etc. to extricate themselves from the racism of their policies? As historians, how does our reading of exclusionary policies shift based on the language with which they were justified, if at all?
Lake and Reynolds show us how white countries are constructed not coincidentally, but together, how whiteness is constructed, affirmed and reaffirmed through racist policies and exclusionary practices by white governments. However, “W.E.B. Dubois believed ...that the white man's world was less secure than it appeared to be. Nationalist movements challenged imperial and metropolitan powers all over the world...While he appreciated there was little coordination between such disparate groups, perhaps they might eventually develop common conscience.” Has this happened? What glimmers of global solidarity have we seen in the twentieth century? Drawing on Leela Gandhi, are some/many of these present within Western/white countries?
ReplyDeleteThe final chapter talks about cooperation among governments and the UNDHR, rescinding of policies of official racism, and the end of apartheid in South Africa, even suggesting that, with the Declaration, “race had been toppled from its eminence”. Do we find this conclusion satisfying? How might this book have continued well past 1994? In what ways are white countries still kept white, and still in power?
“clearly not every nineteenth-century homosexual was alert to this symmetry, but for those who were, the critique of colonialism was at least available as an affective or political response to the constraints of their own condition.” (middle of chapter on sex)... Is Gandhi serious? How literal are these links meant to appear to a reader? Just as the linking between homosexual and “savage, primitive, foreigner, traitor” is “discursive”, isn't the capacity for resistance among homosexuals and colonized peoples in the nineteenth century mostly theoretical and less lived? Without Edward Carpenter, where might this argument be found?
How does the global 'wave' of whiteness effect more local cultures? How can we apply the theories of 'whiteness' or of 'non-whiteness' to living in Kingston?
ReplyDeleteIf, as Gandhi states "all politics are ... sexual politics" (39), then how does this concur with our readings from last week and the effect of imperialism on marriage? Is Gandhi's statement true anywhere?
Does Gandhi resolve the ever present problem of the Derridean impasse, in which friendship "rare announces itself" without a competing categorical relationship between so called friends?
ReplyDeleteAre historians more interested in understanding the formation of dichotomies and categories to investigate to the fascinating, yet anarchic space of the politics of friendship?
How do we incorporate Gandhi's insights into our own work?
1. As Lake and Reynold’s argue, “The imagined community of white men was transnational in its reach, but nationalist in its outcomes, bolstering regimes of border protection and national sovereignty” (4). It thus seems quite fitting that the final chapter of their book should focus quite a lot on the opposing trajectory ‘towards universal human rights’ of the national political movements of South Africa as opposed to that of most of the countries within the UN. It is interesting to consider how Lake and Reynolds were able to reconcile these transnational, global shifts in understanding of race, and more specifically ‘whitness’, while also highlighting the way that these shifts proved to be extremely divergent within different national contexts. How much does the reality of increased migration have to do with these changing dynamics?
ReplyDelete2. Gandhi’s experience in South Africa and his subsequent role as a leader of the anti-colonial movement in India points out, as Lake and Reynolds say, “the importance of the diasporic experience of Chinese and Indian colonists, patriots in exile such as Gandhi and Sun Yat Sen, in shaping nationalist agendas.” (9) How does this complicate our debate about the role of ‘guns’ vs. ‘imperialism of intimate spaces’? What does it suggest that Gandhi's desire for "national self-respect" developed while he was outside of his own nation?