In the Wake of Terror

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In the Wake of Terror

Class, Race, Nation, Ethnicity inthe Postmodern World

E. San Juan, Jr.

LEXINGTON BOOKS

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ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

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Let the white race perish. . . . They seize your land; they corrupt yourwomen, they trample on the ashes of your dead! The way, and the onlyway, to check and stop this evil, is for all the [Indians] to unite in claiminga common and equal right in the land, as it was at first and shall be yet; forit was never divided, but belongs to all for the use of each. . . .

—Tecumseh, Shawnee Chief (circa 1811)

Like most poor and oppressed people in the United States, I do not have avoice. Black people, poor people in the U.S., have no real freedom ofspeech, no real freedom of expression and very little freedom of the press.The black press and the progressive media have historically played an es-sential role in the struggle for social justice. We need to continue and toexpand that tradition. We need to create media outlets that help to educateour people and our children, and not annihilate their minds. I am only onewoman. I own no TV stations, or radio stations or newspapers. But I un-derstand the connection between the news media and the instruments of re-pression in Amerika. All I have is my voice, my spirit and the will to tellthe truth.

—Assata Shakur

Although white supremacy was the working rationalization and ideology be-hind theft of Native American lands, and especially the justification forAfrican slavery, the independence bid by what became the United States ofAmerica is more problematic, in that democracy/equality and supremacy/dominance/empire do not make an easy fit. . . . American supremacy andpopulist imperialism are inseparable from the content of the U.S. origin storyand the definition of patriotism in the United States today.

—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

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vii

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction xi

1 Post-9/11 Reflections on “Homeland” Culture Wars 1

2 Re-visiting the Race/Class Dialectic 23

3 Prison Testimonies: Fighting for Dignity, Justice, Freedom 41

4 Ethnicity and Modernity: Gramsci, Postmodernism, Identity 57

5 From Racism to Class Struggle 87

6 Nation/State, Nationalism, and Violence 107

7 Multiculturalism and Globalization 133

Afterword 163

References 179

Index 195

About the Author 00

Contents

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ix

For encouragement and support of this project, I would like to acknowledgeDr. Sam Noumoff, professor emeritus, McGill University; Professor MichaelMartin, Director of the Black Film Center, University of Indiana; and Prof.Peter McLaren of the Graduate School, University of California, Los Ange-les. Thanks also to Prof. Marilyn Yaquinto, Bowling Green State University,who read the initial version of the manuscript and suggested valuable im-provements. For general assistance on various occasions, I would like tothank the following colleagues and friends: David Palumbo-Liu (StanfordUniversity), Kenneth Bauzon (St. Joseph’s College), Arif Dirlik (Universityof Oregon), and Doug Allen (University of Maine); Lester Ruiz (New YorkTheological Seminary); Dick Bennett (University of Arkansas), Jim Zwick(Boondocksnet), Donald Pease (Dartmouth College), and Paul Wong (Dean,San Diego State University). For inviting me to present some of the ideas inthis book to a special seminar at Yale University, I am grateful to Prof.Michael Denning of the American Studies Program.

I am also grateful to my former students for their solidarity: JeffreyCabusao, Anne Lacsamana, John Streamas, Joel Wendland, Rachel Peterson,Freedom Siyam, Steve Thornton, and Bill Takamatsu Thompson. On theother side of the world, I am indebted to the following comrades for theirhelp: Dr. Francisco Nemenzo, former president of the University of thePhilippines; Prof. Lulu Torres, Ateneo de Manila University; Prof. DavidBayot and Prof. Clodualdo del Mundo, Jr., both of De La Salle University;and colleagues at the University of the Philippines, Trinity College, Poly-technic University of the Philipppines, and Bulatlat: Elmer Ordonez, Bien-venido Lumbera, Roland Simbulan, Ave Perez Jacob, Bobby Tuazon, Roge-lio Mangahas, Dennis Guevarra, Gloria F. Rodriguez, Esther Pacheco, KarinaBolasco, Joseph Lim, and Tomas Talledo. For their patience, wit and critical

Acknowledgments

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good sense—all necessary qualities, Bertolt Brecht once said, for the “longmarch,” I am most indebted to Dr. Delia D. Aguilar (University of Connecti-cut), Prof. Karin Aguilar-San Juan (Macalester University), and Eric SanJuan, Esq. Finally, thanks to the editors of the following journals where ma-terials for this book were culled: Michigan Journal of Race and Law, NatureSociety and Thought, St. John’s University Humanities Review, Red Critique,Left Curve, Souls, Diliman Review, Cultural Logic, Social Analysis, DenverUniversity Law Review, and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.

—E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

x Acknowledgments

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xi

Since September 11, 2001 and the advent of unlimited war on unruly and re-calcitrant peoples, nations, and states by the only superpower left from theCold War, the image of the avenger inflicting instant doom on millions ofhelpless people has dominated quotidian life everywhere. It has altered thebalance of political forces, the public sphere and private sensorium, all overthe planet. It has generated the specter of a hegemonic order founded on apredatory capitalist ethos, operating on a rapacious free-market drive super-vised by the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), andthe World Trade Organization (WTO)—all beholden to finance-capital head-quartered in the sovereign nation-states of the United States, Europe, andJapan. With self-righteous hubris, this ruthless avenger roams globally, boast-ing that it has suppressed permanently the specter of the Other, proletarian re-volt, in particular national-liberation struggles of the “third world” and its dis-sident allies everywhere. Globalization, for many, is the unrelenting avengeron the march.

Founded on the logic of capital accumulation, globalization is a late-mod-ern phenomenon of profit-centered industrialization. For the first time, fi-nance capital is able to cross national boundaries and control erstwhile sov-ereign domains, facilitated by rapid leaps in the technology of electroniccommunication and transportation. Despite the sophisticated and insidiousmode of extracting surplus value derived from the labor-power of millions, itis still centrally dependent on its ownership or control of the means of pro-duction, together with the forces of production needed to generate value: themasses of workers, including peasants and intelligentsia or middle strata ofsociety in charge of the state and the ideological bureaucratic machinery ofgovernance.

Introduction

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Without the exploitation of labor-power and the private expropriation ofsurplus wealth, global capital would cease to exist. Class division and classinequality are necessary for profit accumulation, without which globalizationpowered by finance capital would be unthinkable.

With the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the magic of globalization hasbeen used to displace the politics of class and national struggles from the in-ternational arena. What seems to replace it, aside from the anarchic play offragmented social movements that somehow distinguish the “multitude” ofanarchist gurus, is the virtual hegemony of the “free market” sanctioned bythe IMF/WB and the “Washington Consensus.” Transnational corporationsand multilateral agencies promoting neoliberal privatization now effectivelydominate the arena of world politics and the conversation of intellectualsclaiming to be post-nationalist cosmopolitans. They endeavor to legitimizepublic affairs by a pragmatic discourse of entrepreneurial democracy, hedo-nistic individualism, and the relentless capacity to shop and consume. I con-cur with the nonconformist view that the agenda of the globalization processis world hegemony (persuasion enforced by “smart bombs” and tomahawkmissiles) by U.S. capital. In effect, globalization’s rationality inheres in “cap-italist class interests operating through the agency of U.S. foreign, militaryand commercial policy” (Harvey 2000, 69). The emergence of the imperial“homeland” broached in chapter 1 frames the subsequent discussion ofracism, class conflict, nationalism, multiculturalist globalization, postmodernarticulations of ethnicity, all shadowed by the explosion of imperial violenceagainst what the U.S. perceives as rogue or terrorist groups/states challengingits supremacy.

One way of appraising the recent global mechanism of racialization may befound by examining the multiculturalist invention of the “everlasting Asian.” Anexample may be found in Eric Liu’s provocative apology for “model mi-noritism” in his The Accidental Asia where we encounter a curious diagnosis ofthe madness labeled “ Mongolphobia, “an archaic but insidious” belief thatAsians threaten the American Way of Life. Liu ascribes this primal terror, the“fear of a yellow planet,” to yellow journalism—The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu,the Evil Genius—or to the annals of early psychoanalysis. A history of collectivepsychosis is recounted in his book: the riots and lynch mobs against Chineseworkers in the 1870s leading to the infamous 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act; theinternment of Japanese Americans in the concentration camps of the 1940s; andthe demonization of the Japanese in the 1980s, and now the conspiracy theoryof China as the new source of the “yellow peril.” Currently this has been side-tracked by the racial profiling of the Arab “terrorist” whose surrogates may alsobe the Pakistani, Indian, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, or dark-skinned Filipino, In-donesian, and even “exotic” Pacific Islanders.

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Here is the balance sheet so far in the globalized pacification campaignagainst terrorists or extremists. In exchange for the three thousand victims of9/11, approximately 600,000 Iraqis and 220,000 people in Afghanistan haveso far perished. And the end is nowhere in sight. It was not so long ago thatGeneral William Westmoreland, at the height of the war in Vietnam, becamenotorious for his judgment that “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high priceon life as does a Westerner . . . Life is cheap in the Orient” (quoted in Jack-son 2005).

Unfazed by recurrent attacks against Asians, Lieu believes the “last judg-ment” is on the horizon: From “perfect Manichean scapegoats,” or subhumancreatures to superhuman monsters or machines, Asians in the U.S. have mul-tiplied and “breached the mainstream,” with the “advance guard” reaching“the commanding heights of power,” while a resurgent Asia is profoundly al-tering American language, manners and dreams. Liu prophesizes the thirdpossibility that reconciles extreme aversion and extreme idolization: “Asiansare, in fact, human; that they have left our imagination and arrived in ourlives. Soon we may have to admit: We have already met the East, and it is us”(1998, 135). In this sleight-of-hand version of Hegelian dialectics, Liu ironi-cally has willy-nilly collapsed the heterogeneous Other into the banal Same.This passage from the thesis of the wholly Other into the worshipped ModelMinority may serve as an allegorical figure for the vicissitudes of the Asianpresence, as well as that of other hybridized “aliens,” in the historical land-scape of the United States in the era of globalization and the war against ter-rorism.

GEOPOLITICAL CONJUNCTURE

In the whirlwind process of globalization blasting the threshold of the twenty-first century, we face a massive heterogeneous phenomenon: the traffic ofpeoples moving at a faster pace around the planet, traversing all directions.This has resulted in a planetary milieu distinguished by the compression oftime/space. Such jolts in time and sudden shifts in space have produced trau-matic syndromes in individuals and groups, disorientation and psychic ver-tigo for all. What earlier periods decried as decadence or degeneration—Su-san Buck Morss (2000) calls it “catastrophe” of social dreamworlds andcommunist utopias—is now apprehended as a kind of terror. This may betrue, at least before the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City.

Under the aegis of the USA Patriot Act, homeland security has arrived in theform of totalizing/totalitarian electronic surveillance. Warrantless arrests andprolonged detention of civilian suspects in secret camps have now become

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normative in securing law and order, “business as usual.” With its draconiansupplement, the Military Commission Act of 2006, torture and detentionabroad (also known as “extraordinary rendition”) have been allowed, evengranting the President the right to move military troops across states, under thepretext of an unquestionable “public emergency.” Under the aegis of cynicalreason, freedom has been privatized, according to sociologist Orlando Patter-son, to the exclusion of “politics, civic participation, and the celebration of tra-ditional rights” (2005). We seem to be entering the threshold into an armedghetto, a police state. Fear and hyper-real anomie are unleashed in suburbia;exorbitant difference, hyper-otherness, disjunctions of all kinds becomethreats to be avoided, not an exotic diversion to be explored and savored. Thepostcolonial mania for difference seems to be over.

Meanwhile, the transit of nomads from periphery to center, from South toNorth, mocks the pseudo-utopian metaphor of borderlands, including their at-tendant borderless, in-between exiles. For some, this passage has assumed adiscernible pattern approximating the prototypical diaspora of uprooted peo-ples (Jews, Africans, Chinese, Armenians, etc.), constellations of events thatnow subsume the flow of immigration, displacement of refugees, labor ex-port, traffic in prostitutes and “mail order” brides, dislocation of victims ofpolitical upheavals, and so on. While hemorrhaging borders are being reme-died by the construction of an extended wall between the U.S. and Mexico,the vogue for transnationalism—transnational libidinal flows, borderless li-aisons, and so on—seems untempered by sheer bodily pain, by the rape ofmen and women, by the carnage of thousands of civilians, regarded as “col-lateral damage,” in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Colombia, So-malia, and other contested territories.

Are we on the way to celebrating a fully multicultural United States despitethe officially sustained 9/11 trauma and Homeland Security alerts? Allow meto recount a conference on race and ethnicity that I recently attended at a mid-western university noted for its Center for Immigration History Research.This academic event witnessed a vigorous exchange on issues of diaspora,representation, labor conflict, nativism, as well as the genealogy of whiteness,imperial migration during the Cold War, and the effects of gender and sexu-ality on identity community formation. As I noted particularly in Chapters 1,2 and 5, despite the latitude of exchange, my suspicion—shades of Ni-etschean and Freudian hermeneutics!—was confirmed that class (in the struc-tural sense), or the political economy of social relations, was a stigmatized ifnot wholly forbidden topic. Social class may have operated as a subtext, if notthe sliding signifier, in most presentations, but it was never seriously ad-dressed and consistently explored. Whether we are aware of it or not, any in-vestigation of the complex history of racial and ethnic relations in the United

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States will ineluctably involve class as “the political unconscious,” eventhough it is neutralized in the form of “classism,” an aspect of identity sub-sumed within the more vulgar rubric of “life-style” or status. Re-functionedas one element in the “race-class-gender” intersectionality paradigm, class inthe systemic construal of this concept becomes trivialized.

As in most academic exchanges today, we noted the tendency for the in-terdisciplinary conflation of categories among the participants coming fromthe traditional social and political sciences obsessed with verifiable quantifi-cation. But this is an ideal often avowed but never really implemented in con-crete research practice. The way it is carried out nowadays is often by prag-matic or instrumentalist shortcuts. Most studies of ethnicity, race andimmigration are still guided by empiricist and functionalist orientations, if notpositivist methodologies. With some exceptions, this trend only reflects thehistorical situation of mainstream knowledge-production in the global North.It may be that the Weberian dilemma of “hard facts” and value-free pre-sumption may have produced a melancholy if not “dismal science” now al-most, or nearing replacement by, computerized statistics. On the other hand,those judgments extrapolated from the numbers game become counters in thelarger field of Realpolitik. All evidence points to the fact that despite individ-ualist pretensions, we cannot escape the urgencies and imperatives of makingpolitical decisions based on a consensus of universal ideals and rational goals.What is probably needed is a systematic exercise in self-reflection on our var-ious disciplines.

It is possible that my colleagues are now already examining their tools andframeworks of understanding whenever they engage in any new project—something that graduate students, apprenticed to their self-righteous advi-sors, will not dare to do before they get their certification for jobs. But whatrecent developments have brought to our attention cannot be ignored. Let meinvoke the idea of critique by quoting from Irving Horowitz’s book The De-composition of Sociology which I happened to peruse by accident while sur-veying the book fair in the conference: “If the first step toward a recon-struction of social research is to examine the actual conditions ofprofessional life and academic ideologies, then the next step will most surelybe to locate the broad field of study—one that enlists the aid of empiricalstudies to normative issues” (1993, 147). I stress here the necessity of cri-tique tied to explicit normative principles. Short of not wishing to extendHorowitz’s choice of “one critical frame of reference”—the social meaningof life and death, which he uses to examine the problem and historicity ofgenocide, I would like to raise certain questions that underlie the perennialthemes and controversial topics that beset the field of cultural studies gravi-tating around race, ethnicity, immigration/diaspora, nation and social justice,

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all underpinned by the political economy of production and reproduction ofunequal class relations in the social formation.

THE HISTORICAL IMPERATIVE

Whenever “race” and “ethnicity” are juxtaposed, we confront an egalitariangesture that hides more than reveals inequities, disproportions, and abuses.This gesture evokes again the issue that Manning Marable and others haveraised against the still hegemonic sway of the “ethnicity paradigm” in theacademy. My proposal is to historicize concepts and methodologies to extendtheir heuristic efficacy. In the process we need also to historicize the role ofintellectuals and other producers of knowledge in the context of the rapidlychanging sociopolitical climate of the field in which we labor. In this context,I focus on the decisive role of organic intellectuals in Chapter 3 and through-out the book. Before everything else, the fundamental question of whether theUnited States is a racial formation or not, and to what degree and extent areethnic differences subsumed within this racial formation, still remains thepivotal question for all. In short, in what way are cultural practices and insti-tutions—symbolic capital invested in networks of socioeconomic power—embedded if not articulated by variable political and economic processes?Ancillary to this is the whole problem of the historic characterization of theU.S. as a white supremacist state, or a “racial polity” (Mills 1999) within thesystem of nation states in globalized capitalism. Crucial to this is the recon-ceptualization of the national civil religion, the fetish of the homeland as “ex-ceptional” and sacrosanct, American Exceptionalism as situated in pivotalstages of history with their attendant ideological and institutional changes.

At this point, one might propose that the modernity of the U.S. formationhinges on what happened after the Civil War, in particular the failure of theReconstruction and the beginning of segregation, with the conquest of theever expanding Western frontier culminating in the seizure of territories andpeoples outside the continental mainland. “Manifest Destiny” is born. Asidefrom the subjugation of the Native Americans and the pacification of newlyarrived Chinese (and later) Filipino labor, the aftermath of the Mexican-American War is, in retrospect, decisive for the understanding of the plight ofthose Spanish-speaking communities dispossessed and disinherited by Anglowhite supremacy. I am not ignoring the fate of the indigenous Native Ameri-cans whose deterritorialization (in more ways than one) and their formidableresistance to this genocide underlie the founding of the Republic. What is of-ten innocently described as the “golden age” of immigration from Europe—the period from 1880 to 1914—should also be framed by the historic turning

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point of the Spanish-American War of 1898 together with the subsequentbloody Filipino-American War (1899–1903), a watershed event in which theU.S. acquired its first colonial possessions overseas—the Philippines, Guam,Puerto Rico, Hawaii, with control over Cuba and other Pacific islands—andextended its sphere of influence in the Caribbean and Asia. I suggest that therise of imperial ideology, as epitomized by the shibboleth of “Manifest Des-tiny” (now celebrated by proponents of the reactionary “Project for a NewAmerican Century”) consonant with the ascendancy of monopoly/financecapital—the search for markets in China, for raw materials in Africa andLatin America—cannot be ignored whenever immigration is considered. Thelogic of capital accumulation has driven the process of globalization since thevoyage of Magellan and Columbus in the sixteenth century and the onset ofthe slave trade. If this is ignored, what Stephen Steinberg (1981) has famouslylabeled “the ethnic myth” will tend to obscure, if not erase, the reality of un-equal power relations and unequal exchange that have always problematizedthe “national ideology” of laissez-faire liberalism. It is this hegemonic dis-pensation of social hierarchy combined with the operation of the competitive“free market” that becomes central to the constitution of U.S. modernity andits “civilizing mission,” a self-appointed “destiny” aggressively mobilized inAghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines, and other battlefronts of the global waragainst its terrifying victims.

In a cogent overview of the genesis of American Exceptionalism, RoxanneDunbar-Ortiz traces the origin of white supremacy to late fifteenth-centurySpain that implemented class leveling based on putative biologically basedracial differences. She shows how the Calvinist Puritans from England in turnadapted this ideology in their brutal conquest of Ireland and in the ferociousgenocidal wars against the Native Americans, highlighting the fact that “thevery origin of the United States is fundamentally imperialist,” not just a di-vergent or aberrant excess. She contends that “American supremacy and pop-ulist imperialism are inseparable from the content of the U.S. origin story andthe definition of patriotism in the United States today” (2004, 38). I elaborateon the implications of this thesis throughout this volume, a sequel to my ear-lier inquiries in Racial Formations/Critical Transformations and Racism andCultural Studies.

In our era of transnationalized capital, the racial formation exemplified in theU.S. “homeland” is undergoing slow if radical re-structuring under the almostunchallenged program of the “free market” and WTO policies. Deregulationand privatization have universally produced ambiguous if not catastrophic re-sults. Scholars like Saskia Sassen and others have led us to believe thatWB/IMF/WTO policies have fostered progressive industrialization in “thirdworld” countries, even as they continue to dislocate massive populations and

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intensify diasporic tendencies—for example, nearly ten million Filipino over-seas contract workers are scattered around the planet due to the cataclysmic im-poverishment of the Philippines, an unprecedented phenomenon in the post-Cold War millennium. In this planetary milieu, the neoliberal consensus ofindividual right to exploit others and consume the surplus wealth stolen fromthem, needs to be re-examined. Whether we construe it as “the possessive in-vestment in whiteness” or (to use David Roediger’s loaded rubric) “wages ofwhiteness,” it seems that the mystique of individual rights within the paradigmof universal commodification needs to be critically interrogated (see, in partic-ular, chapters 3 and 5).

Corollary questions that need to be addressed in future conferences, withwhich I engage in chapters 4, 6 and 7, may be formulated as follows:

1. If, according to the ideologues of corporate-led globalization, the nation-state—which nation? And which mode of state regulation?—is defunct ifnot obsolescent, what is the function of law in determining immigration?

2. If the nation-state has been re-structured from the “welfare” to the “home-land security” state, has the change in the national consensus (both sym-bolic and real) replaced racial categorization with ethnic difference, as ev-idenced, for instance, in the Hispanic category of the 2000 Census?

3. Globalization proceeds unevenly via an almost remorseless dialectic of thesimultaneous processes of global and local mutations. In a situation wherewar still occurs between nation-states in the international system, willrefugees and displaced populations continue to provide racialized subjectsor ethnicized citizens?

4. Is the neoliberal state still founded on the patriarchal family? Is the polit-ical economy of gendered and sexualized labor furthered or hindered bythe transnational labor market?

5. What is the role of the diasporic intellectual in the decolonizing movementof indigenous peoples and beleaguered migrant enclaves? In the produc-tion of symbolic capital, are we as knowledge-producers and consumersimmune from the racializing drive of systemic accumulation?

TRANSNATIONALIST SYNDROME

Events in the last half of the twentieth century substituted appearance foressence in our cognitive geopolitical mapping of the world. Ideologicalsymptoms of racism obscured its source in the social relations of work andthe ramified division of labor. The conceptual validity of class disappeared orwas distorted. The misconstrual of “class” as a theoretical and analytic cate-

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gory for defining group or individual identity has led, especially during theCold War period, to its confusion with status, life-style, and other ideologicalcontingencies. This has vitiated the innovative attempt of an intellectual trendcalled Critical Race Theory, for example, to link racism and class oppression(as discussed in Chapters 2 and 5).

We need to re-instate the historical-materialist category of class derivedfrom the social division of labor and its reproduction that generates antago-nistic class relations. Class conflict becomes the key to grasping the totalityof social relations of production, as well as the metabolic process of social re-production in which racism finds its effectivity. In other words, “the politicsof racist segregation are the direct product of U.S. capitalism” (Red Critique2002). This will help us clarify the changing modes of racist practices, espe-cially in global market operations where immigrant workers from the globalSouth play a decisive role. In my recent books, Working Through the Contra-dictions and On the Presence of Filipinos in the United States, I use the ex-ample of Filipina domestics as a global social class actualized in its specifichistorical particularity as gendered, neocolonized subjects of capital accumu-lation (Anderson 2000). In case studies like these, critical theory on race andethnicity can be renewed and made socially relevant by adopting the modal-ity of class struggle on a global scale as the means of resolving racial injus-tice through radical transformation of specific societies and conjunctural in-ternational relations.

Long after the “battle of Seattle” and the disaster of September 11, 2001, itis time to regroup and re-assess our “weapons of criticism” and tools of “con-scientization.” The perils of globalization abound within and outside the acad-emy and research laboratories. Can globalized capital truly universalize thecommunities of peoples around the planet and bring freedom and prosperity toeveryone, as its celebrants claim? Globalization as the transnationalized dom-ination of capital exposes its historical limit in the deepening class inequalityin a polarized world—a substantial part of Africa seems to have been writtenoff the accounting books of banks and Wall Street investors. While surplus ex-traction in the international labor market remains basic to the logic of accu-mulation, the ideology of neoliberal transnationalism has evolved into the dis-course of the “war on terrorism” or “extremism,” a sub-set of the “clash ofcivilizations.” This is the current mode in which the worsening contradictionsof finance capital, the crisis of unilateral globalism, are being resolved. Tomaintain its hegemony, the U.S. corporate elite needs to prevent any countryor state from emerging as a nuclear power and challenge U.S. military, andtherefore, market supremacy. A historical-materialist critique should seek tohighlight the political economy of globalism/transnationalism manifest in thefierce competition of the ruling classes of the industrialized powers (Europe,

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U.S., China, Russia) even as they continue the neocolonial oppression of theglobal South. What is especially required is a radical critique of the ideologyof technological determinism and its associated ideology of the “civilizingmission” of preventive war. This Realpolitik of the humanitarian interventionon behalf of freedom and democracy has aroused fierce opposition from work-ers, peasants, women indigenous communities—from all the excluded andmarginalized peoples of the planet.

In the search for connections or coherence, scholars of comparative culturetend to sacrifice their over-loaded sense of contradictions and incommensu-rabilities with which the postmodern habitus has made us feel at home. Morethan “inter-“ or “post-,” “trans” is indeed the contentious prefix, the handy-man’s special fix for all seasons. What does it signify?

The semantics of “transnationalism” is entangled in complex political, cul-tural and economic processes that now circumscribe the condition of every-day life in late modernity. With the presumed collapse of the nation-state, orits loss of centrality as the defining locus of identity, or the effective machinefor neutralizing class antagonisms, an urgent quest for an explanatory narra-tive of the present has led to the discovery that identity or subjectivity can nolonger be anchored to anything coherent or stable as race, nation, nature,class, or any of the old transcendental guarantees of a permanent “human na-ture.” The formation of the self is now framed within social relations of con-sumption, relations that constitute our pleasures, desires, consciousness. ForLyotard (1984), modern life is characterized by electicism, “the degree zero”of quotidian existence. We consume commodities, signs, spectacles, even tothe point of cannibalizing our own imaginaries and mentalities. In this cultureof consumption, subjectivity is constructed or performed according to thetraffic of affects, whether grasped as contingent reflexes, symptoms of the un-conscious, or “rational choice.” The self is no longer a unitary entity stabi-lized by a nation with fixed borders, but a site of the play of manifold forces,forever unfinished and in flux, which the subject takes positions according toa logic of difference or hybridity. Either it shifts from one “national” space toanother, or “transgresses” such boundaries in its deterritorializing passagethrough phases of its indeterminate metamorphosis.

From another angle less ethical and more political, “transnationalism” is anideological construct open to contestation. It evokes the idea that nations areequal or substitutable, that is, free contracting parties to a business transac-tion. One can shift identities or citizenship as easily as flying from one airportto another. This usage is reflected in the notion of trans-migrants, of flexiblecitizens parachuting from Taiwan or Hong Kong to California, from Jamaicaor Haiti to New York and Montreal, with shifting habitats and life-styles.

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Does this generalization apply to everyone, including Filipinos, the largestnomadic if not diasporic nationality in the world today?

FILIPINO COSMOPOLITANISM?

The Philippines today is the largest exporter/supplier of affordable domes-tics—about ten million Filipino OCWs (Overseas Contract Workers), out ofeighty seven million Filipinos at home shuttle back and forth (San Juan2001). Everyday, approximately 2,600 Filipinos leave for abroad—not astourists but as low-paid contract workers. Some were especially recruited tobuild the metal cages of captured war prisoners in Guantanamo, Cuba. As Inoted in my book, After Postcolonialism, something monstrously perversehas been inflicted on Filipinos when they are called “transnationals”: “Whatcould be more muddled than the notion that all nation-states are equal inpower and status, making the newly arrived Filipina ‘transmigrant’ indistin-guishable from the white American middle-class suburbanite?” (San Juan2000, 91). Unfortunately, this is a noticeable reflex vitiating many commen-taries dealing with the situation of migrant workers in the care-giving sector.In a recent article on globalization, Fredric Jameson refers to this patronizingsyndrome: “American blindness can be registered, for example, in our ten-dency to confuse the universal and the cultural, as well as to assume that inany given geopolitical conflict all elements and values are somehow equaland equivalent; in other words, are not affected by the disproportions ofpower” (1998, 59). Part of the reason is the habit of ignoring the social divi-sion of labor as constitutive of material social relations, not just an affect ofstatus or roles, of identity as life-style and consumption pattern, following thewell-beaten track of neoWeberian doctrine and other not-so-polite modes ofreconciling antagonistic forces.

And so we can agree on the face of bare empirical accounting that “trans”doesn’t translate into equality or parity. In the conventional sense, “trans”designates a moment or event of “going beyond,’ so that “transnationalism”is used to convey the easily accomplished disappearance of the nation or na-tion-state despite the United Nations and other international bodies. Shouldwe then conceive of “transnationalism” as an epochal transcendence of the“nation” and nationalism? Some offer qualifications that the national sover-eignty specifically of underdeveloped formations has been usurped by globalinstitutions expressing G-8 interests, primarily the U.S. Or, in another regis-ter, how the European Community has sublated peculiar national interestswithin one normative ethos despite the persistence of distinct sovereignties?

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Chapters 6 and 7 continue this discussion on nation-states, transnational-ism, and globalism. It is instructive to cite here Virginia Dominguez’s cau-tionary warning that transnationalism as a social imaginary should be prop-erly situated in the long history of U.S. racialism and nationalism, in short,the context of the actually existing racial polity we inhabit. Racialist talk orracial classification surrounds the usage of transnationalism. Dominguez re-minds us that “assertions of transnationalism, transnationalist sentiments, andthe development of the language of transnationalism torefer to peripheralised,racially Other-ised peoples living within the context of the USA are all oc-curring in the context of a US society intensely engaged in circumscribing‘the American nation’ and legitimating, indeed reinscribing, the compulsoryracialism of its nationhood . . . [Transnationalism] is a social imaginary inwhich the ‘nation’ is inconceivable without, rather than with, racial differen-tiation” (1998, 152–53). Indeed, how can the bridging agency of “trans” fullytake effect without implicating the “nations” that enable it?

Research into this unprecedented phenomenon of transnationalism is justbeginning, disadvantaged by Eurocentric prejudices and nominalist limita-tions. This foregrounds the problematic of ethnicity and attempts to makesense of it, as I discuss in chapter 4.

One can pose the following queries on the interface of race, ethnicity, andclass in this globalized flow of labor: What unique characteristics distinguishthis circulation of Filipino bodies (an emergent diaspora) compared to those ofthe Jewish, Chinese, African, Palestinian, and others? Are these migrant work-ers intending to settle or return? If so, what forces determine their choices?What defines their sense of belonging, their notion of collective identity? Whatis their relation to their host society? What is their conception of citizenship (thetheme of bourgeois, formal citizenship has pre-empted interest in class or na-tionality in the academy) vis-a-vis their country of origin? In what way can thisinchoate diaspora serve as a speculative instrument of inquiry for investigatingthe nature of the globalization of labor, its sexual and racial categorization, theputative transnationalization of local cultures and traditions? How does it affectthe commodification of identities and cultural practices in the homeland? Notonly ethnography of the positivist variety, but also cultural analysis from a his-torical-materialist perspective should yield heuristic protocols and hypothesisfit for inductive testing, as well as elaborate thought-experiments geared forthose committed to radical social transformation.

One would expect that the new discipline of postcolonial studies would beable to illuminate the complex process of diasporization suffered by Filipinos.No such luck (see chapters 6 and 7). Emerging from the theoretical debateson structuralism in the sixties, postcolonial criticism arose originally as a cri-tique of Eurocentric discourse and imperial disciplinary practice. In the last

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quarter of the twentieth century, it evolved as an apologia for neoconservativefree marketeers and other reactionary social formations. Its method of decon-structive skepticism led to its subsumption in a neoliberal epistemology thatdisplaced concepts of class and nation. By rhetorical and ideological ruses, itreplaced the conceptual schema of class conflict with questions of indetermi-nate identity and subjectivity. This identity concerns specifically diasporicand border-crossing intellectuals removed from popular struggles. In thesame process, postcolonial criticism removed culture from the realm of sys-temic or structural changes in the mode of production and its correspondingpolitics of property/power relations.

A metaphysics of relativism and nihilism supervened. Instead of its in-scription in the political economy and dynamic totality of social relations,culture becomes for academic postcolonialists the easy paradigm for explain-ing vast historical changes in both North and South. Instead of revolution,postcolonialism opts for a niche within the global intellectual markeplace inwhich official policies of multiculturalism, cultural diversity or pluralism, al-low localized, circumscribed identities based on ethnic markers to flourish.All for the benefit of consumerist pleasures, solipsist jouissance, and otherself-serving games that foster the status quo of domination and subordination.Postcolonialists now celebrate hybridity, syncretic games, ambivalent per-formances, shifting or fluid subject-positions, flows of all kinds, after havingrejected axioms of totality, foundational propositions, historical progress, andhypotheses of social change and emancipation (see chapter 7 and Afterword).It thus serves objectively a counter-revolutionary function in contemporaryexchanges as the ideology and practice of global capitalism proceeds to re-solve by apocalyptic wars—the holocausts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon,Palestine, and so on—the crisis of overproduction, unemployment, social os-tracism, widespread impoverishment and homelessness, in addition to the ir-recoverable devastation of the planet’s ecosystem.

CARNIVAL OF TRANSGRESSIONS

We return to the problem of globalization as a stage of emancipation or abackward move to the initial onset of alienation and reification? Can global-ized capital succeed in universalizing the world, eliminating nation-stateboundaries and sovereignties and in the process usher the reign of freedomand prosperity for everyone, as its celebrants claim? Or is it the new opiumto deepen consumerism and zombify humanity?

Globalization as the transnationalized domination of finance capital exposes its historical limit in the deepening class inequality of a polarized

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antagonism-laden world. While surplus extraction in the international la-bor market remains basic to the logic of accumulation, the ideology of ne-oliberal exchange has evolved, after 9/11, into the unilateral “AmericanExceptionalist” discourse of the “war on terrorism” and the more con-tentious “clash of civilizations.” Contradictions in specific loci of socialstruggles inform the imperialist project of resolving the crisis of financecapital by eliminating any obstacle (such as nation-state fiscal controls,trade tariffs, etc.) to its unlimited sway. Prompted by this exigency, the US.ruling class is desperately striving to impose hegemonic control over mul-tiple nations, states, and peoples in an increasingly contested space, im-posing its own “American Way of Life.” As Scott McConnell aptly re-minds us: “Now the US is the sole, charter member of its own Axis of Evil:invading and threatening invasions, breaking arms treaties willy-nilly, kid-napping and murdering foreign citizens without cause, refusing to abide bythe Geneva conventions.” What American Exceptionalism concealed,namely, the “free market” and democracy of the propertied few rests on theexploitation of the majority, has now become a banal safe truism.

Despite the fascistic provisions of the USA Patriot Act and the repressiveclimate, we can still mount resistance in the limited opportunities left. ToniMorrison seized one when he defined the link between racism and fascism:“When our fears have all been serialized, our creativity censured, our ideas‘marketplaced,’ our rights sold, our intelligence sloganized, our strengthdownsized, our privacy auctioned; when the theatricality, the entertainmentvalue, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves living not in anation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to our-selves except for what we see as through a screen darkly” (1995, 760). Whatis imperative is a radical critique of the ideology of utilitarian determinismthat legitimates technocratic neopragmatism. We need also a critique of thedogmas of the “civilizing mission” embedded in “preemptive” interventionsof the “Washington Consensus” in the name of Realpolitik democracy againstthe rights and dignity of workers, peasants, women, indigenous communities,and all the excluded and stigmatized, including the integrity of the earth.

Notwithstanding the changes in theoretical vocabulary and paradigms afterthe 9/11 disaster, the law of motion of global capital follows an intelligiblepattern first diagnosed by Marx and Lenin. It still pursues a dialectical law ofmotion generating its sequence of internal crisis sprung from ineluctable con-tradictions. Despite claims that recent technical innovations have negated po-litical choices and nullified the state, specifically the sovereignty of the na-tion-state, as well as national and class interests, I contend that globalizationhas sharpened the contradictions among sectors, communities, groups, andultimately that between capital and labor. Polarization on various levels ac-companies the totality of social trends in any historical conjuncture.

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One can illustrate the dissonance of the manifold flows by analyzing thecurrent situation of the Philippines. The profound crisis gripping this former“showcase of U.S. democracy” in Asia may serve as a concrete example ex-emplifying how transnational corporate schemes (dictated by the “Washing-ton Consensus”) have continued to maintain the neocolonial underdevelop-ment of the whole society and intensify the exploitation of workers andpeasants, as well as the oppression of indigenous groups and Muslim com-munities. This horrendous plight of millions have been obfuscated, if notmystified, by the neoliberal ideology of individualist freedom underlyingWB/IMF/WTO conditionalities imposed on debtor countries like the Philip-pines, structural constraints that have aggravated endemic gender, ethnic, re-ligious, and other social divisions subtending the major class war between thetiny comprador-bureaucratic elite and the propertyless masses of workers andpeasants.

As in other beleaguered formations of the South, Filipinos from all sectorsare mounting resistance to U.S. hegemony implemented by its local agents.The inequalities and injustices caused by globalization have generated acoalition of the oppressed—women, peasants, indigenous minorities, work-ers, youth, and middle strata, including fractions of the traditional elite—in aburgeoning democratic insurgency with a transitional program of national lib-eration. This growing bloc of national-popular forces (as embodied, for ex-ample, in the National Democratic Front and the New People’s Army—to citeonly one of the long-lived viable counter-hegemonic forces) testifies to aresurgence of the drive for participatory democracy and national indepen-dence from U.S. imperialist control. In affirming the right to self-determina-tion, this socialist-oriented movement is reconstructing the meaning of popu-lar sovereignty grounded on universally recognized human as well as socialrights. It is reconstituting the outline of an Asian civilization that has histori-cally challenged Western colonial impositions. It is critically transforming thedialectics of neoliberal globalization in order to restore and revitalize theegalitarian, social-justice project that Marx and Engels discerned in the secu-lar Enlightenment. This project of national-democratic liberation has beencontinually distorted and sabotaged by the bourgeois drive for profit and itsreactionary effect of preserving historically obsolete relations rooted in bar-baric social relations of production and reproduction.

PASSAGE TO BEGINNINGS

One testimony of this is the recent convening of an International People’s Tri-bunal in Quezon City, Philippines, which found the Arroyo regime guilty ofmassive human rights violations (Bulatlat 2005). Due to increasing, massive

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human-rights violations—approximately 800 victims of extra-judicial mur-ders, and forcible disappearance—perpetrated by the military and police un-der Arroyo’s supervision, and in response to an international outcry, the Ital-ian-based Permanent People’s Tribunal will try Arroyo’s government forcrimes against humanity this March 2007 in the Hague, Netherlands. Organi-zations such as Amnesty International, World Council of Churches, Asian Hu-man Rights Commission, U.S. Congress’ Bureau of Democracy, InternationalAssociation, and other monitoring groups have censured Arroyo for allowingor abetting the commission of such crimes against labor militants, churchpeople, journalists, lawyers, civil libertarians, and other critics of her corruptand illegitimate rule.

These moves have partly been inspired by the World Tribunal on Iraq (June23–27, 2005) where the Jury of Conscience condemned the invasion and oc-cupation of Iraq as a violation of the Charter of the United Nations and otherinternational treaties and conventions. Recognizing the right of the Iraqi peo-ple’s struggle for self-determination, freedom, and independence, the Tri-bunal expressed its hope that their findings “will lay the groundwork for aworld in which international institutions will be shaped and reshaped by thewill of people and not by fear and self-interest, where journalists and intel-lectuals will not remain mute, where the will of the people of the world willbe central, and human security will prevail over state security and corporateprofits” (AmigaPhil 2005). The Indian writer Arundhati Roy distilled the mo-tivating principle of the Tribunal in stating that “the assault on Iraq is an as-sault on all of us: on our dignity, our intelligence, and our future”; and whilethe Tribunal’s judgment is not binding in international law, it “places its faithin the consciences of millions of people across the world who do not wish tostand by and watch while the people of Iraq are being slaughtered, subju-gated, and humiliated.”

Confronting the outrages of Abu-Ghraib and other U.S. prisons holding“unlawful combatants” for torture, and the daily suffering of impoverishedmillions in globalized industries, the participants of the aforementioned Tri-bunals represent a substantial portion of civil societies around the world.They may not have state power or armies, but they represent the ideals ofequality, self-determination, and justice that have inspired the French andAmerican revolutions in the 18th century. They also served as the motor-forcefor the Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese and other revolutions in the lastcentury. And they are continuing to inspire the mobilization of oppressed peo-ples everywhere. Against the rapacity of predatory corporate business and thealienation of life-forms caused by irresponsible market competition, progres-sive forces everywhere, especially in the battlefronts of Palestine, Venezuela,Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Nepal, the Philippines, aside from those in the

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Middle East and Africa, are mounting a formidable united front from thegrassroots to oppose the destructive incursions of globalizing corporatepower. The principles and program of these liberation movements (immanentin the struggle against racialized violence embodied in institutions such asprisons, academic disciplines, regulated discourses) is, in my conviction, theonly feasible altenative to ecological disaster and neoliberal barbarism fo-mented by corporate business and its desperate, interminable war on human-ity and the earth. Indeed, in the wake of the disaster of September 11, 2001,and the current havoc in Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico, the Philippines, and else-where, we have another world to make possible, a new world to imagine andcreate.

Let us take the initiative and begin a dialogue or colloquy on the themesand issues in the current “culture wars” in a time of fear and repression, whenthe troubled interlacing of racism, class conflict, nationalism, and ethnic ten-sions in a globalized “flat world” cry out for rational argument and roundedcritical evaluation.

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1

Public exchanges after September 11, 2001, somehow police themselves withthe obligatory gesture of condemning the fanatical atrocity of those who feelvictimized by Western civilization. Professor Richard Falk of Princeton Uni-versity ruminated over the right of the U.S. nation-state in a “just war” to de-fend its “civic order and democratic liberties” against “the lower depths”(2001, 11). We are now conscripted into a “just” war waged against terroristswherever the Bush administration thinks it is found, even as far as the remotejungles of the island of Basilan in the Philippines where the Abbu Sayyaf ban-dit group of less than a hundred is holed up—a local problem born of socialneglect, military delinquency, and political corruption, which has neverthelessconverted this U.S. neocolony into the next battleground after Afghanistan.

What I want to call attention to for this occasion is the new reality of whatthe The Nation (December 17, 2001) calls the new “National Security State”especially after the passage of the Patriot Act. This omnibus law “imposesguilt by association on immigrants, rendering them deportable for wholly in-nocent nonviolent associational activity on behalf of any organization” la-beled as terrorist by the Secretary of State. More than 1,200 aliens have beendetained on mere suspicion, without any hearing or the usual safeguards to in-sure “due process.” For the sake of protecting the “homeland,” racial profil-ing is acceptable as one legitimate weapon. This has targeted immigrantsfrom the Middle East, citizens in Arab American communities, and southAsians who seem to fit the profile. I don’t have to remind you of the rash ofviolent acts, harassment, and killing of South Asians suspected of being Arabsthat occurred in the few weeks after September 11, perhaps a testimony to theneed for more multiculturalist educational programs?

The undeclared state of war has resurrected not only the nation-state thatpostcolonialists taught us was obsolescent if not defunct; it has revived the

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coercive Leviathan in its current military emergency posture, with all the legalapparatus of McCarthyist surveillance, military tribunals, and new, secretground rules of inclusion/exclusion for defining national subjecthood (Chitty2002; Amin 2001). With the suspension of the constitutional right of habeascorpus and due process, U.S. jurisprudence was seriously gutted (Nader 2006).Authoritarianism was reinforced by the U.S. Military Commission Act of 2006passed before the November 2006 elections. This act not only legitimized theongoing practice of torture of war prisoners, universally acknowledged as a vi-olation of the Geneva Convention, but also allowed the executive to use troopsto suppress citizens’ protests under the pretext of a “public emergency.” A mil-itarist police state deploying fascist demagogic maneuvers has been hatchedfrom the machinations of rightist elements in the Bush regime.

Apart from indulging in chicanery and corrupt manipulation of media, theBush administration continues to engage in the flagrant violation of theUnited Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and theConvention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treat-ment, both ratified by Congress and embodied in criminal law statutes (Lewis2005). Unfortunately, Congress has refrained from exercising its oversightprerogative to put an end to these violations. Up to now, no real inquiry hasbeen conducted into the scandalous Abu Ghraib prison abuses that squan-dered whatever was left of world sympathy for the victims of the World TradeCenter disaster. Court cases against erring officials have been dismissed whenthe “state secrets privilege” is invoked.”Extraordinary renditions”—the CIApractice of transferring suspects for torture in other countries (Egypt, Mor-roco, Syria)—have been temporarily halted by the U.S. Supreme Court judg-ment on the plight of a tortured prisoner held in Guantanamo (Fisher 2006).However, the Bush administration seems incorrigible, as Lisa Hajjar avers af-ter scrutinizing the voluminous documentation of torture cases: “There is noreason to doubt that torture has been systemic and pervasive, or that authori-zation can be traced up the chain of command, or that this has seriously dam-aged not only the immediate victims but also our national institutions andAmerica’s image abroad” (2005, 30). The victims of this unprecedented re-jection of international law are mostly Muslim men, with distinctly non-whitephysiognomies, speaking languages other than English and subjected toforms of inhuman and degrading punishment specially crafted for their reli-gious background.

What is more, the dreaded meta-narratives seem to have awakened in “thenight of the living dead,” as it were, a primal scenario returning to haunt us,the inheritors of the tainted legacy of the Enlightenment. We cannot presumethe legitimacy of the liberal democratic status quo, with citizens of color liv-ing under duress. The postmodernists, including post-socialists espousing

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“radical democracy,” now confront the fact that the United States continuesto be a racial polity, “white supremacy . . . as a political system in itself.” Inthe history of the United States, racial exclusion is, as Charles Mills argues,“normative, central to the system,” with racism as “the ideological correlateof a fundamental organizing principle of the “modern Euro-implanted socialorder” (1999, 25), and the liberal state as the prime defender of Western civ-ilization threatened by dark-skinned terrorists and non-Christian rogue states.I would qualify this thesis of the racial polity by framing it within another ex-planatory category, namely, the historical totality of capitalism as a global andglobalizing system with all its multilayered contradictions, a dominant modeof production in a world-system of uneven social formations.

In my view, any discussion on the nature of racism, identity politics, eth-nic studies, and the multiculturalist problematic should immediately engagewith this theme of the racial polity. The arguments on the fraught issues ofpluralism, “common culture,” individual liberties, civic consensus, republi-canism, and so on hinge on the confrontation between these two positions:one that claims that the U.S. is a democratic polity where a “common culture”will eliminate through incremental reforms the problem of racism as individ-ual prejudice, and one that holds that one major support of the class-dividedpolity is what Du Bois called “the wages of whiteness,” whiteness as prop-erty, differential entitlement—as Derrick Bell, Cheryl Harris, David Roedi-ger, and others have called it. The first celebrates cultural pluralism—figuredas the “melting pot” and the “Americanization” of differences, as MichaelWalzer (1994) envisaged it. The ideal of cultural pluralism implies that thereis a normative standard—call it the “American Way of Life,” the “commonculture,” the Great Books, the canon, civic or republican nationalism—com-pared to which the other ways (not real alternatives) are alien, weird, menac-ing. The second position critiques a racial polity founded on the “possessiveinvestment in whiteness” (Lipsitz 1998). Whichever position one finds onselfaligned with, and I am afraid you cannot negotiate a middle ground, that po-sition will determine one’s stance on the numerous versions of multicultural-ist pedagogy, postcolonial discourse, cosmopolitan identity, and citizenship.

Sometime ago, Ronald Takaki countered Nathan Glazer’s thesis of the“American ethnic pattern” with his theory of “racial patterns.” Racial in-equality persists despite legislation prohibiting discrimination based on color,race, or ethnic origins. Takaki observes: “Due to racially exclusionist forcesand developments in American history, racial inequality and occupationalstratification have come to coexist in a mutually reinforcing and dynamicstructural relationship which continues to operate more powerfully than directforms of racial prejudice and discrimination” (1994, 34). It might be instruc-tive here to rehearse briefly the historical contours of this racial pattern.

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POINT OF DEPARTURE

A review of the geopolitical formation of the United States demonstrates aclear racial, not simply ethnic, pattern of constituting the national identity andthe commonality it invokes. As oppositional historians have shown, the U.S.racial order sprang from a politics of exploitation and containment encom-passing inter alia colonialism, apartheid, racial segregation, xenophobia, ex-ploitation, marginalization, and genocide. It evolved from four key conjunc-tures that mark the genealogy of the social field of power and its logic ofdivision: first, the suppression of the aboriginal inhabitants (Native Ameri-cans) for the exploitation of land and natural resources; second, the institu-tionalization of slavery and the post-Civil War segregation; third, the con-quest of territory from the Mexicans, Spaniards (Puerto Rico, Cuba, thePhilippines, Guam), and Hawaiians, together with the colonization of Mexi-cans, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans; and, fourth, the subordination of Asian labor(Kolko 1984; Goldfield 1997). This racial genealogy of the empire followedthe logic of capital accumulation by expanding the market for industrialgoods and securing sources of raw materials and, in particular, the primecommodity for exchange and maximizing of surplus value: cheap laborpower. This confirms the enduring relevance of Oliver Cromwell Cox’sproposition that “racial exploitation is merely one aspect of the problem ofthe proletarianization of labor, regardless of the color of the laborer. Henceracial antagonism is essentially political-class conflict” (1948, 485).

With the end of the Cold War and the globalization of a “free-market” setupafter the fall of the Soviet Union and its statist command economy, a newphase of the “culture wars” began. This is an ideological-political conflictsymptomatic of the organic crisis of capitalism as a historical stage of social-ity and human development. One manifestation of this debates is SamuelHuntington’s “clash of civilizations,” the replacement of class/national strug-gles with the putative rivalry between the Islamic/Confucian axis and amonolithic Western dispensation. However, as Fred Halliday (2002) acutelypointed out, the 9/11 crisis was precipitated not simply by inter-state conflictor quarrel over moral-cultural values, but chiefly by the internal struggle offundamentalists (in key Islamic societies) against secularism, to gain politicaland social power.

In the context of economic recession and aggravated urban problems after1989 (Los Angeles, Cincinnati), the problem of cultural ethos has become themajor site of racial categorization and conflict. In scholastic circles, we ob-serve the confrontation of two irreconcilable positions: one that claims thepriority of a “common culture,” call it liberal or civic nationalism, as thefoundation for the solidarity of citizens; and another that regards racism or a

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racializing logic as inherent in the sociopolitical constitution of the UnitedStates, a historical episteme undercutting the universalizing rhetoric of itsproclaimed democratic ideals and principles (Perea 1998). Attempts to medi-ate the dispute, whether through the artifice of a “multicultural nationalism”or a post-ethnic cosmopolitanism (Hollinger 1998), have only muddled theprecise distinctions laid out by the various protagonists.

Multiculturalism, inflected in terms of cultural literacy, canon-revision, thedebate between Eurocentrism versus Afrocentrism, and corollary antago-nisms, has become the major site of philosophical contestation. It has becomea field of forces in which the exercise of symbolic violence preempts thefunctioning of communicative rationality and supplements the coercive sur-veillance of citizen-subjects. In clarifying why cultural identity has suddenlybecome salient in the terrain of multiple social antagonisms, however, itwould be useful to invoke here again Gramsci’s ideas about ideological dis-putes functioning as synecdoches for deeper, protracted systemic conflicts(more on this in Chapter 4).

Before analyzing the ideology of pluralism and the problems surroundingidentity, difference, and community, I want to clear the ground and rehearsethe competing views on multiculturalism. This inventory can serve as an ori-entation guide. Manning Marable (1992) explains that multiculturalism in-volves two fundamental ideas: “first, the recognition that American historyand this nation’s accomplishments are not reflected solely in the activities ofonly one race (whites), one language group (English speakers), one ethnicity(Anglo-Saxons), or only one religion (Christianity). African Americans, Lati-nos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and others have also made centralcontributions to our society. And secondly, beneath these differences are someunderlying principles and values which bring us together, such as the idealsof human equality, democratic government, and individual liberty.” There isin Marable’s paradigm a dialectical process between identity and difference,the singular and the typical. In contrast, Fred Siegel (1993), in diagnosing“The Cult of Multiculturalism,” reduces multiculturalism to an “all-consum-ing politics of identity” whose chief instigator is none other than the Frenchhistorian Michel Foucault. Blaming Foucault for spreading the idea thatknowledge is nothing but an instrument of power, Siegel recycles tiredcliches about the “great American hyphen” that allows Americans to be bothparticularists and universalists, syncretists and naturally tolerant, mixing as-similation and traditional allegiance into a homogenized if plural culture. ButSiegel, nonetheless, betrays an obsessive fear of multiculturalism so that heends his tirade with this lesson: “The future may well lie with the Stanfordstudent who, when asked about studying important non-Western trends suchas Islamic fundamentalism and Japanese capitalism, responded, “Who gives

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a damn about those things? I want to study myself.” “Myself” here would bethe microcosmic surface armor of the cyborg, the ambiguous mimicry ofWhitman’s “multitudinous self.” With such disarming naivete, all problemsindeed disappear.

In Stanford University itself, things were more complicated than this lastpronouncement might suggest. As Mary Louise Pratt has recounted, the strug-gle to revise the Western Civilization requirement faced not only conservativeresistance but also the cooptative strategy of liberalizing the canon by simpleaddition. The more, the better—that’s the new slogan of postmodern parsi-mony. Thus, the autobiography of West African Olaudah Equiano can beadded to Genesis, Aquinas, and Rousseau to provide a “common intellectualexperience” for all students. The center of gravity, however, still remains themonumental texts of a Europe narrowly defined to exclude Spain, Eastern Eu-rope, and Scandinavia. The revisionists then proposed a relational or inter-cultural approach that would at the same time recognize the “internal fullnessand integrity of particular moments and formations.” Deploying the mode ofexamining “the complex interactions of colonialism, slavery, migration, andimmigration” between Europe and people of color, the revisionists wanted tosuggest an approach to Others that would not just be tokenizing nor patroniz-ing tolerance: “It is not from Europeans that enslaved peoples have learnedhow to construct cultures that conserve a sense of humanity, meaningful life,and an abiding vision of freedom in the face of the West’s relentless imperialexpansion” (Pratt 1993, 59). Millions of indigenes have invented their ownselves long before Disneyland and the “zippies” of globalization’s “flatworld.”

What’s the lesson of this encounter? It becomes clear that the cardinal flawof culturalism of either the pluralist or monopolist kind lies in its disjunctionof the institutional practices of intellectuals from the operations of the cen-tralized state and the power of corporate business. Culture then becomesfetishized knowledge sealed off from contingencies dictated by state powerand commercial exigencies (Chomsky 1982). In my book Racial Formations/Critical Transformations, I attempted to counter the essentialism and apolo-getics of culturalism by arguing that culture, which embraces both civiliza-tion and mental labor, must be understood within the framework of a socialstructure constituted by multiple contradictions, in particular from the view-point of the hegemonic process of struggles by multiple sectors and forces.Without the totality, the particulars don’t make sense. Given the racist poli-tics of U.S. society, the problem of subject-position or agency needs to be sit-uated and mapped within this overarching process of antagonistic relations.Cultural practices become intelligible only when they are mediated by thecategories of race, nationality, gender, etc., in concrete time-space encounters.

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They are all mediated by class struggles. In this way the question of identitycannot be rhetorically deferred in a putative commonality of shared experi-ence, in a field of forces believed to be synchronized and self-equilibrating.Nor can it be displaced into a “free play of signifiers” where, for the cos-mopolitanist intelligentsia, roles circulate freely and will power alone sufficesto calculate and determine one’s life-chances.

The salient point is this: In a society stratified by uneven property relations,by the skewed allocation of resources and of power, can there be equality ofcultures and genuine toleration of differences? It is now generally agreed thatculture (symbolic and cultural capital), appropriated through the educationalsystem, functions to reproduce class relations in all spheres of civil society(particularly the job market), as well as in the technocratic institutions of thestate. Such truths are bitter and hard to swallow, but one cannot avoid themin pursuing a rational inquiry into the causes of the current “global war on ter-rorism.”

To avoid the reductionist tendency of judging culture as thoroughly reifiedand racially-interpellated groups as equivalent or surrogates of each other, weneed to deploy the concept of hegemony and unfold the contradictory im-pulses (residual, dominant, emergent) at play in the historical dynamics ofoverdetermined social formations. I will elaborate further the limits of the lib-eral thesis of multiculturalism in the succeeding chapters. For now, I wouldsimply remind ourselves of our insistent problematic: in a world torn by class,gender, and racial contradictions, can any society plausibly claim to be dem-ocratic and organically unified, honoring equally the claims of every subject?

ETHNICITY OVER ALL

One reason why multiculturalism has become the ascendant strategy of liberalreformism can be located in the exorbitation of the notion of ethnicity during theCold War. The epistemological paradigm of ethnicity worked to displace raceand class as explanatory categories for dysfunctionality, for social conflict andintegration. In an essay entitled “Ethnic Pluralism: The U.S. Model”, StephanThernstrom, editor of the influential The Harvard Encyclopedia of AmericanEthnic Groups, describes the successful assimilation of European white immi-grants (based on the sole index of ethnically exogamous marriages) and the dis-solution of boundaries marked by national origin. This model of Americaniza-tion cannot yet be applied to Afro-Americans, Thernstrom adds, although “Blackpeople have won full equality before the law—in some respects a favored posi-tion before the law” (1983, 253), hence the “black-white divide remains the ma-jor fault line in American society.” Cognizant of this differential incorporation of

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“racial” groups, another authority contends that “structural pluralism” obtains inthe United States, a pluralism harnessed to the ends of the functionalist meta-nar-rative of social equilibrium (Gordon 1975). To substantiate his model of sub-sumption for non-European immigrants, Thernstrom asserts that “Orientals areno longer a stigmatized racial minority but a rapidly assimilating ethnic group”through marriage—which may be true for Japanese Americans but not for otherAsians. Sexual cohabitation seems a cheap easy way out. Here we discern theconflation of culture and biology, a tendency of proponents of “common culture”that warrants Paul Gilroy’s criticism: “Culture is conceived along ethnically ab-solute lines, not as something intrinsically fluid, changing, unstable, and dy-namic, but as a fixed property of social groups rather than a relational field inwhich they encounter one another and live out social, historical relationships.When culture is brought into contact with race it is transformed into a pseudo-biological property of communal life” (1990, 266-67; see Webster 1992). Cul-tural racism, the latest metamorphosis of the phenomenon, is one ideological-po-litical effect of hegemonic pluralism.

The paradigm of the U.S. as a pluralist multi-ethnic society may be saidto underwrite the identity politics of self-affirmation. The constitution ofidentity involved here refers to the manipulation for political purposes ofan ensemble of “ethnic” attributes and representations detached from theirsocio-historical contexts. Identity politics may be exemplified by Afrocen-trism and its mirror image, the fetishism of a “common culture” champi-oned by Establishment intellectuals. Postmodernist liberals, however, begto differ from those parties. Proud of his eclectic cosmopolitanism, HenryLouis Gates, Jr. (1992), for example, disavows their politics and invokesthe ideal of pluralism underpinned by tolerance and mastery of substantialknowledge gained from a liberal education of the kind trumpeted by Car-dinal Newman (see the objections to this pluralistic compromise in Graff1992). Immersed in a world “fissured by nationality, ethnicity, race, andgender” [“class” is revealingly omitted], Gates exhorts us “to transcendthose divisions . . . through education that seeks to comprehend the diver-sity of human culture.” Urging us to forge a “civic culture that respectsboth differences and commonalities,” Gates puts a high premium on thepostmodern virtue of hybridity, Dewey’s pluralism, individuality, etc.—allthese somehow immune from corruption by the centralized state, massconsumerism, and profit-making. Ironically, while avoiding the traditional“universalistic humanism” of “melting pot” integrationists and “vulgarcultural nationalists” (like Leonard Jeffries), Gates succumbs to the pathosof the eclectic idealist so poignantly described by Frantz Fanon andGeorge Jackson: he wishes that lived contradictions will go away by tak-ing thought, by contemplating a dialogue among equals, by an encyclope-

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dic inventory of differences. Granting that differences are all equal, whatgrounds this equivalence? Agreement to disagree—the obsession withopen-mindedness—becomes a pretext for a sophisticated form of apolo-gizing for the status quo (cf. Marable 1991; Wald 1991).

Both humanists and social scientists are thus culpable in fostering the plu-ralist fallacy, with disastrous consequences. The exorbitant focus on ethnicityand its corollary, the superficies of culture, in discussions of urgent socialproblems has led to the virtual cancellation of the historical specificities ofthe lived interaction among groups that constitute any social formation. It hasmystified culture and its complex articulation with state power and civil so-ciety, the site where the public/private split is reinforced. Where multicultur-alism is deployed to occlude the historical specificity of the incorporation ofracialized groups into a free-market polity, ethnicization results. Everyone isdeemed a citizen regardless of cultural properties—provided, of course, thatone stays in one’s place. In Holland, for example, Philomena Essed observesthat the multiculturalist agenda utilizes tolerance (or tokenization) as an in-stantiation of power by the dominant group to control others: “‘Ethnic’ mi-nority policy in a ‘multicultural’ society, ‘multicultural’ education, ‘transcul-tural’ psychology, ‘ethnic’ social workers, and many more variants andconcepts indicate that the dominant group manages cultural difference. Mul-ticulturalism is the application of the norm of tolerance. . . . Therefore, cul-tural tolerance is inherently a form of cultural control” (1991, 210). This in-sight is worth volumes, a powerful retort to the flattening scourge of ThomasFriedman and his cohort of corporate globalizers.

Theory means nothing without its practical entailments. Assuming thenthat we want to move forward and tackle the problems of racism and ethno-centrism and all their institutional complexities, which partisans for andagainst multiculturalism want to postpone or evade, let us see what the im-plementation of a theory of a multicultural society entails. It may be assumedthat we are all committed to the principle that human beings are entitled toequal treatment regardless of their racial or ethnic category—regardless, in-deed, of gender, class, race, ethnicity, etc.; that members of any ethnic orracial constituency should be protected from derogatory stereotyping andabuse; and that all individuals should have equality of opportunity in attain-ing the rewards offered by society as presently constituted. Now, for some,the enjoyment of equality of opportunity requires relative or complete ab-sorption into the dominant group, the sacrifice of what is culturally unique toone’s group and therefore a denial of the right to be culturally different. Pro-ponents of multiculturalism uphold this fundamental right—but does it guar-antee equality of opportunity or access to resources for disenfranchised sub-alterns? Does it automatically empower the victims of liberal democracy?

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NEXUS BETWEEN HIATUS

Ironies and paradoxes multiply. The sociologist John Rex (1986) points outthat the concept of the plural society (as used by Furnivall and others) in-volves the recognition of cultural difference together with the political andeconomic exploitation of one group by another. Not only can the right to beculturally different be conceded without allowing for equality of opportunity;cultural difference can even be used as a marker of the boundary betweenthose enjoying legal and political rights and those who are not, leading to dejure or de facto differential incorporation. Those classified different, even de-viant, are marginalized again. Consequently, if we don’t address the inequal-ity of power and of control of resources, then cultural pluralism, albeitpremised on individualism and democratic freedom, will only reinforcestereotypes, racist theory, and racialist practice.

One outstanding example of multiculturalism in practice is the apartheidsystem in South Africa where racist theory and racialist practice insist on thesaliency of cultural differences. In this setup, according to Rex, the variousracial groups are “unequal estates differentially incorporated into the state,while the official ideology insists that the groups have their own distinctiveculture,” the apartheid state itself positively insisting on the recognition ofcultural differences (121). This cultural separateness of whites, blacks, col-ored, and other racial groups is supposed to be divinely ordained. So, ironi-cally, multiculturalism turns out to be a program for apartheid—even worsethan the paternalistic slave system in the antebellum U.S. South.

Rex believes that to guarantee equality of opportunity as well as tolerationor even encouragement of cultural differences that would characterize a gen-uine democratic polity, it is necessary to divide life into two spheres: the pub-lic and the private domains. Equality of opportunity belongs to the public do-main, cultural uniqueness to the private. So in this hypothetical arrangement,every individual would enjoy equal rights before the law, in politics and in themarketplace, as well as equality of social rights provided by a welfare state,while exercising the right to conduct “private” matters (religion, familyarrangements, language, culture) according to the custom of a separate ethnicor racial community. From this point of view, the United States represents asociety where all groups enjoy equality before the law de jure side by sidewith de facto inequality in legal and political rights as well as in economicand social matters, even though this inequality may have been somewhat al-leviated by civil rights programs. While the separate cultural institutions ofblack slaves have been abolished so that now African Americans “share theculture of White America,” Rex reminds us that “a culture of Black con-sciousness and Black Pride has promoted Black cultural difference.”

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A theoretical flaw vitiates this inquiry. Because Rex applies a functionalistmethodology that tends to rigidly define public and private domains in termsof their contribution to maintaining the status quo, euphemistically labeled“Pattern Maintenance” and “Tension Management,” he is unable to grasp ina more processual and integral way the contradictions in the positioning ofgroups in a society where scarcity (determined by private ownership of socialgoods, inheritance laws, etc.) spells asymmetry in the access to power andtherefore the enjoyment of rights. In short, Rex assumes that the abstractmoral and legal systems of the modern state suffice to insure that the old folkculture and kinship-based morality of ethnic/racial minorities function toserve the smooth operations of the system by giving psychological stability tochildren and performing primary socialization for all members of the family.Or, at best, these residual folkways and mores are kept neutral relative to thenormal functioning of the main political, economic, and legal institutions ofbusiness society where equality of opportunity formally obtains. Communitywith its “primordial” sentiments has indeed given way to association, me-chanical solidarity centered on kinship to organic solidarity consonant withthe changing social division of labor.

Hegemony is the key concept that unlocks the political ambiguity of mul-ticulturalism within the analytic framework of mapping the relations of socialforces in any given conjuncture. Gramsci (1971) postulated that hegemony(political and intellectual leadership) in most societies is realized through acombination of peaceful incremental reforms (voluntary consent from themajority) and violent struggles (coercive domination). Hegemony incorpo-rates the working of symbolic violence shown in the “transfiguration of rela-tions of domination and subordination into affective relations, the transfor-mation of power into charisma” (Bourdieu 1998, 102).

Culture wars are thus engagements for ideological-moral positions that atsome point will generate qualitative changes in the terms of engagement andthus alter the balance of political-economic power in favor of one social blocagainst another. In modern industrial formations, the struggle is not just to oc-cupy City Hall, as it were, but also (from a dialectical or strategic point ofview) to mobilize the masses in order to transform the relations of power,their productive bases and political modalities, on both material and symboliclevels.

With the demise of the welfare state and the end of the Cold War, theSelf/Other binary persists as the integrating paradigm that underpins tokenprograms of multiculturalism with all their infinite permutations. I recentlyread the colorful polycentric multiculturalism that Robert Stam has proposedwhich “calls for a kind of diasporization of desire, the multiplication, thecross-fertilization, and the mutual relativization of social energies” (1997,

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200). Wonderful! Could a multiculturalist strategy of peacefully managingdifferences have prevented the 1992 Los Angeles riot if it were deployed ear-lier? Is the question of ethnic difference, the politics of identity, reducible tothe celebration of cultural diversity? How does a group claim to be distinc-tive and different? Can the expression of cultural difference be tolerated aslong as it pays deference to the prior claims of a civic nationalism rooted inclass division? Does the notion of citizenship—the abstract owner of prop-erty—premised on the universalizing discourse of individualism resolve in-equalities of class, gender and race? If ethnicity is not primordial but a strate-gic choice, will reforms of the now obsolescent “welfare state” curtailinstitutional racism and racist violence? With the demise of liberal programsof amelioration and safety nets, will “ethnicity” still function as before by le-gitimizing stratification and inequality as a result of disparate cultural normsand folkways? Is multiculturalism a reformist tactic for carrying out thosehighly touted neoliberal goals of stabilization, deregulation, and privatizationthat have caused untold misery for millions?

THE FINAL SOLUTION?

Multiculturalism is celebrated today as the antiphony to the fall of the “EvilEmpire” and the triumph of the free market, the performative self as modelconsumer and exemplary shopper. Ishmael Reed (1998), among the multi-literati, has trumpeted the virtues of “America: The Multinational Society.”The rubric “multinational” is meant to vindicate the thought of Du Bois, theproponents of La Raza Unida, and the theories of internal colonialism. Ironi-cally, however, Reed declares somewhat naively that “the United States isunique in the world: The world is here” in New York City, Los Angeles, andso on. Reed, I suspect, doesn’t mean that the problems of the underdevelopedsubaltern formations have come in to plague American cities. With this figureof subsumption or synecdochic linkage, the imperial center reasserts a privi-leged role in the world—all the margins, the absent Others, are redeemed ina hygienic uniform space where cultural differences dissolve or are sorted outinto their proper niches in the ranking of national values and priorities. Mul-ticultural USA then becomes the ultimate prophylaxis for the loss of globaleconomic superiority and endemic social decay.

We are now supposed to accept as fait accompli the status quo of plural cul-tures or ethnicities coexisting peacefully, without serious contestation, in afree play of monads in “the best of all possible worlds.” No longer a meltingpot but a salad bowl, a smorsgasbord of cultures, our society subsists on themass consumption of variegated and heterogeneous lifestyles. There is of

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course a majoritarian subject-position—tune in to the six o’clock news—towhich we add any number of fragments of particularisms, thus proving thatour principle of sophisticated tolerance can accommodate those formerly ex-cluded or ignored. Even recusant denizens can be invited to the Mall of Amer-ica. Why not? It’s a bazaar for anyone who can buy, though it may turn outthat your particular goods are not as valuable or significant as mine. Assortedpostality sages are accessories to this fashionable cosmopolitanism.

On closer scrutiny, this bureaucratic mechanism of inclusion—what Her-bert Marcuse (1964) once called “repressive desublimation”—is a mode ofappropriation: it fetishizes and commodifies others. The self-arrogating uni-versal swallows the unsuspecting particulars in a grand hegemonic compro-mise. Indeed, retrograde versions of multiculturalism celebrate in order tofossilize differences and thus assimilate “others” into a fictive gathering,which flattens contradictions pivoting around the axis of class. Questions ofidentity (racial, gender, sexual, etc.) need to be framed within the totality ofsocial relations articulated with determinate modes of production. Other ver-sions grant cultural autonomy but hide or ignore structural inequalities underthe umbrella of a refurbished humanist cosmopolitanism—a totality that ho-mogenizes all the atoms contained in its space. And so the noisy border-crossers like Guillermo Gomez Pena or Coco Fusco, our most provocative ag-itprop artists, are constantly reminded that to gain full citizenship,unambiguous rules must be obeyed: proficiency in English is mandatory, as-similation of certain procedures and mores assumed, and so on and so forth.

Cultural pluralism first broached in the twenties by Horace Kallen has beenrefurbished for the imperatives and exigencies of the “New World Order.”What the current Establishment multiculturalism elides, however, is the his-tory of the struggles of people of color—both those within the metropolis andin the far-flung outposts of finance capital. While the political armies of racialsupremacy were defeated in World War II, the practices of the capitalist na-tion-states continue to reproduce the domination and subordination of racial-ized populations in covert and subtle ways. The citizen-subject, citizenship asself-ownership with the right to buy and sell (that is, alienate own’s own la-bor-power), demonstrates the universalizing virtue of the liberal nation-state.Citizenship remains defined by the categories that govern the public sphereof exchange and the marketplace, categories denominating race, geopoliticallocation, gender, nationality, sexuality, and so on (Peller 1995). While glob-alization may render national boundaries porous, the U.S. nation-state con-tinues to institutionalize social differences in national structures of enfran-chisement, property law, and therefore of exploitation. This transpires amidprofound social crisis that has undermined emancipatory projects and the au-tonomy of collective agencies. As Stephen Steinberg has tirelessly argued,

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“the essence of racial oppression [in the U.S.]—our grand apartheid—is aracial division of labor, a system of occupational segregation” (2000, 64). Theracial polity is a thoroughly nationalized machine for reproducing racializedclass hierarchy that sustains and informs the political economy of capital ac-cumulation.

Multiculturalism in its diverse modalities has indeed become the officialpolicy designed to solve racism and ethnic conflicts in the North. Contextu-alized in the history of transnational capitalism, however, multiculturalismtends to occlude if not cancel out the material conditions of racist practicesand institutions. It conceals not only the problematic of domination and sub-ordination but reconstitutes this social relation in a political economy of dif-ference where privatized sensibilities and sensoriums become the chief or-gans of consumerist experience. The performative self fragments the publicsphere into self-replicating monadic entities equipped with customized sur-vival kits. In short, neoliberal multiculturalism idealizes individualist plural-ism as the ideology of the “free market” and its competitive utilitarian ethos.

BEGINNING WHERE WE ARE

A historical-materialist frame of interpretation may enable us to appreciatewhat is involved in the struggle over classification and delimitation of socialspace and the fields of symbolic power. In a polity (such as the United States)configured by a long history of class divisions articulated with gender, race,nationality, and locality, the claim that there is a single moral consensus,“habits of the heart,” or communitas can only be a claim for the ascendancyof a particular ruling group. And it is around the moral-intellectual leadershipof a social bloc, which translates into effective hegemony, that hierarchy andstratification, along with the norms and rules that constitute canons and dis-ciplinary regimes, become legitimized. This is also the locus of struggle overwho defines the nation, authorizes the criteria of citizenship, and sanctions vi-olence.

Liberal pluralism and its variants obfuscate this hegemonic process con-ducted via wars of position and maneuver (to use Gramsci’s terminology). Es-tablishment pluralism exalts diversity, multiple identities, as “a condition ofhuman existence rather than as the effect of an enunciation of difference thatconstitutes hierarchies and asymmetries of power” (Scott 1992, 14). Fromthis pluralist perspective, group differences and discrete ethnic identities arecognized in a static categorizing grid; that is to say, they are not examined re-lationally or dialectically as related systems constructed through variousprocesses of discursive and practical enunciation of differences. Cultural plu-

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ralism then legitimates and reinforces the status quo of differential powerbased on asymmetrical positioning in social space and on unequal propertyrelations.

Viewed from this angle, the “common culture” interpellates individualsand articulates them in a commonality of monadic identities. Instead of acomposite identity overdetermined by manifold lines of interests and affilia-tions, one acquires an identity defined by this shared heritage with its natu-ralized closure and its exclusivist fiat. Implicit here is the constitutive role ofthe market, specifically the buying and selling of labor as commodity, whichguarantees and is predicated on individual rights, the foundation of bourgeoiscivil law and procedural liberty. Thus, if the “common culture” of Hirsch,Schlesinger, and others is affirmed by the status quo in mainstream education,workplace, family, and other institutional matrices of subjectivity, then therewill be no room for encountering, much less recognizing, the dignity and in-tegrity of un-common texts, expressive practices, and deviant expressions ofpeople of color within and outside the North American continent. This is sogiven the fact that, to paraphrase Lipsitz’s (1998) thesis, the racial polity’s ru-inous pathology in the “possessive investment in whiteness” perpetuates theabsence of mutuality, responsibility, and justice. We should then disabuseourselves that there is equality of cultures and genuine toleration of differ-ences in a racial polity sustained by an unjust political economy. No doubt,culture wars (both of position and maneuver) will continue until the presenthegemonic order is transformed and ethnic antagonisms sublated to anotherlevel where a more genuinely egalitarian resolution can be realized.

We need to be cautious about the possible cooptative and compromising ef-fect of the liberal brand of “multiculturalism” commodified by the globalizedmarketplace. Its answer to inequalities of power and privilege is to add andrelativize Others’ modalities of interaction without altering the underlying hi-erarchy of status and class. This pragmatic species of multiculturalism, color-blind and gender-blind, elides the actual differences in systemic power rela-tions immanent in the lived experiences of communities, peoples, andnations. In fact it apologizes for the institutionalized racism, sexism, hetero-sexism, and overall class exploitation that prevail, sanctioned by the instru-mentalities of government and the Realpolitik of international agencies.

Given the time-space coordinates of cultures conceived as “designs for liv-ing” or signifying practices that produce meaning and value for groups, it isuntenable to posit a homogeneous culture as the definitive index of a complexsociety. Instead of fixing on the abstract and large cultural configuration atplay in any society, we should conceive of historically specific cultures thatstand to one another in relations of domination and subordination, in strugglewith one another. One might recall that Raymond Williams once suggested

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that we construe any social formation as comprised of stratified layers ofdominant, residual, and emergent cultures in varying degrees of tension withone another. The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies proposed an analo-gous approach: “We must move at once to the determining relationships ofdomination and subordination in which these configurations stand; to theprocesses of incorporation and resistance which define the cultural dialecticbetween them; and to the institutions which transmit and reproduce ‘the cul-ture’ (i.e. the dominant culture) in its dominant or hegemonic form” (1976,12–13).

From an analogous point of view, Hazel Carby warns us that “because thepolitics of difference work with concepts of diversity rather than structures ofdominance, race is a marginalized concept” (1990, 85) replaced by ethnic di-versity. Instead of revealing the structures of power at work in the racializa-tion of a social order, “a social formation structured in dominance by the pol-itics of race,” academic multiculturalism fosters ethnic separatisms amongthe oppressed in the guise of celebrating the virtues of every ethnic group andculture. Carby elaborates: “By insisting that “culture” denotes antagonisticrelations of domination and subordination, this perspective undermines thepluralistic notion of compatibility inherent in multiculturalism, the idea of ahomogeneous national culture (innocent of class or gender differences) intowhich other equally generalized Caribbean or Asian cultures can be inte-grated. The paradigm of multiculturalism actually excludes the concept ofdominant and subordinate cultures—either indigenous or migrant—and failsto recognize that the existence of racism relates to the possession and exer-cise of politico-economic control and authority and also to forms of resistanceto the power of dominant social groups (quoted in San Juan 1992, 128-29).”

In effect, an integrative liberal version of multiculturalism can celebrate (inorder to fossilize) differences within an imagined national community. Cul-tural autonomy may hide or ignore structural inequalities under the umbrellaof a refurbished “humanitarian” civilization. Multiculturalism thus legit-imizes pluralist stratification, exploitation, and oppression in the process ofcapital accumulation here and worldwide (Appelbaum 1996). Even ToddGitlin, the enemy of identity politics, suggests that race is tied to the unbri-dled market that “fuels fantasies of a ‘moral community’ surrounded by for-tifications” (1995, 235).

One can of course discriminate among varieties of “multiculturalisms”—from conservative to liberal, left liberal, critical or resistance multiculturalism(see Goldberg 1994). It is not the best polemical strategy to reduce the widespectrum of positions to the usual binary or manichean formula. Nor is it ju-dicious, I think, to multiply positions in a permanent state of deferment, flux,or “suspension of disbelief.” Nonetheless, the “politics of difference” and

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identity underwriting such positions as Nancy Fraser and other well-inten-tioned social democrats, reduce class to a “mode of social differentiation”(Fraser 1997, 17), an index of identity, as equally functional for this purposeas race, gender, sexuality, etc. That is a serious and recurrent mistake. In thespirit of Weberian sociologism, they tend to reify “superstructural” differ-ences into almost intractable social and political disjunctions, rendering dia-logue and communication among groups impossible—and this, despite theirdesire to combine both the politics of recognition and of redistribution in agradualist evolutionary scheme of reforming the polity without fundamen-tally altering the market and commodity-exchange, that is, the basic contra-diction between capital and labor.

Due to Cold War exigencies and the demonization of the ideas of Marx,Lenin and other critics of capitalism, the notion of class as a systemic featureof society gradually disappeared in the universe of analytic discourse. It hasbeen replaced by status, occupation, and other seemingly complex ap-proaches such as the intersectionality of race-class-gender. By focusing onethnic identity defined by cultural values and attitudes, orthodox scholarshiphas marginalized if not displaced the historical-materialist category of classanalysis—in Michael Denning’s (2004) view, mode of production—as an ex-planatory principle for understanding the structural determinants of race, gen-der, nationality, and so on. As Gregory Myerson formulates it:

Oppression is multiple and intersecting but its causes are not . . . [T]he primacyof class means not only that class is the primary determinant of oppression andexploitation but the only structural determinant. “Race” and gender are notstructural determinants. There is racist and sexist ideology. And there is racialand gendered division of labor, whose severity and function vary depending onwhere one works in the capitalist global economy. Both ideology and the divi-sion of labor are understood here to be functional for class-rule—facilitatingprofit making and social control. Class rule is itself a form of class struggle(1997, 2).

Confronting this quandary, we need to return to our point of departure: thehistoricity of the racial polity and the strategy of ascertaining which of theprojects of social transformation will lay the groundwork for the change ofracializing patterns of cultural interpretation and evaluation. I believe that isthe project of dissolving the iniquitous social relations of production, the la-bor-capital contradiction, which I submit is key to unraveling the antinomiesand dilemmas of reification.

Paradoxically, some notion of commonality is needed to recognize diver-sity. It is implicit in the Establishment version of multiculturalism as plural-ism with a more nuanced, sophisticated tolerance of differences. The French

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philosopher Colette Guillaumin has elucidated the axiomatic presence of hi-erarchy underneath or behind the egalitarian articulation of difference in dem-ocratic regimes. What exactly is the ideological significance of this paradox?Guillaumin explains: “To speak of ‘difference’ is to articulate a rule, a law, anorm—briefly, an absolute which would be the measure, the origin, the fixedpoint of a relationship, by which the ‘rest’ would be defined. . . . It is quitesimply the statement of the effects of a power relationship. . . . [Differencepresupposes] a source of evaluation, a point of reference, an origin of the def-inition. . . . The definition is seen for what it is: a fact of dependence and afact of domination” (1995, 250–51). It is clear, then, that the marker of dif-ference is diacritical, with opposites coexisting in suspended tension. Is therea way of untangling this web of interdependencies so as to seize an opportu-nity for mass intervention?

NEW TERRAIN OF CONTESTATION

In the globalized environment of profit-making and renewed ethnic conflictsaround the world, we are faced with ethical/moral questions that cannot be di-vorced from the political economy of relations among groups, nation-states,regional alliances, and so on. With migration (refugees, diasporic movements,genocidal expulsion) as the salient fact of this century, the dialectics of Oth-ering has become more vexed and fraught. The politics of cultural difference,or what Stuart Hall (1998) calls the “pluralization of cultural difference,” hasintertwined processes of racialization and ethnicization that need to be finelydiscriminated. Ideas of postcolonial syncretism and hybridity cannot accountfor the forced diaspora of millions of migrant workers (for example, ten mil-lion Filipino Overseas Contract Workers spread around the world) whose re-lational vicissitudes the conventional theories of transnational citizenship orlaissez-faire pragmatism cannot fully make sense of.

It will soon become clear that the multiculturalist problematic operateseffecively as a hegemonic scheme of peacefully managing the crisis of race,ethnicity, gender and labor in the North, a way of neutralizing the perennialconflicts in the system (Palumbo-Liu 1995). By containing diversity in acommon grid, multiculturalism preserves the ethnocentric paradigm ofcommodity relations that generate particularisms in the experience of life-worlds within globalizing capitalism. Cultural difference sells. In “Multi-culturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” SlavojZizek points out that “postmodern racism is the symptom of multicultural-ist late capitalism” (1997, 37). The inherent contradiction of the liberaldemocratic project, for Zizek, lies in its objectification of the Other, reduc-

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ing the others—minorities, strangers, immigrants, undocumented aliens,refugees, and so on—into folkloric spectacles or objects, the “ethnic Thing”supposedly liberated from the predatory alienating market and the reign ofcommodity-fetishism. Against the radical chic of postmodernist nihilism,Zizek cogently formulates one of the most powerful critiques of multicul-turalism as a historical phenomenon:

And, of course, the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multicul-turalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each lo-cal culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people—as ‘natives’ whosemores are to be carefully studied and ‘respected.’ That is to say, the relationshipbetween traditional imperialist colonialism and global capitalist self-coloniza-tion is exactly the same as the relationship between Western cultural imperial-ism and multiculturalism: in the same way that global capitalism involves theparadox of colonization without the colonizing Nation-State metropole, multi-culturalism involves patronizing Eurocentrist distance and/or respect for localcultures without roots in one’s own particular culture. In other words, multicul-turalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a ‘racism witha distance’—it ‘respects’ the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-en-closed ‘authentic’ community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintainsa distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position. Multicultural-ism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive content (the mul-ticulturalist is not a direct racist, he doesn’t oppose to the Other the particularvalues of his own culture), but nonetheless retains this position as the privilegedempty point of universality from which one is able to appreciate (and depreci-ate) properly other particular cultures—the multiculturalist respect for theOther’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority.

. . . .The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multicultural-ism—the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds—which imposes it-self today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence ofcapitalism as universal world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented ho-mogenization of the contemporary world. It is effectively as if, since the hori-zon of social imagination no longer allows us to entertain the idea of an even-tual demise of capitalism—since, as we might put it, everybody silently accepsthat capitalism is here to stay—critical energy has found a substitute outlet infighting for cultural differences which leave the basic homogeneity of the capi-talist world-system intact. . . . (1997, 44, 46).

I suggest that we ponder seriously Zizek’s critique of neopragmatic multicul-turalism before we celebrate its putative virtues and lament the pathos of itsinadequacies. “Corporate national populism” deploying notions of cultural/ethnic absolutism can advance their postmodern agendas for racial apartheidby mobilizing multiculturalist rhetoric and policy strategies (Solomos andBeck 1996).

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Within the framework of neoliberal globalization, a policy of multicultur-alism in the arts, education, and other domains has been institutionalized—even though constrained by the USA Patriot Act and arbitrary denial of civilliberties. Given the demise of the “welfare state” and social programs pur-porting to include the non-Western immigrant, the discourse of cultural plu-ralism and ethnic identity has replaced the discourse of socio-economicrights. We witness today, in North America and Europe, the explosion of mul-tiple ethnicities and identities side by side with the growth of xenophobia(most notably, anti-Muslim hysteria) and new varieties of racial division andethnic exclusion. Multiculturalism in its diverse modalities has become theofficial approach to conceal racism and assuage collective moral panics in theglobal North and South. Contextualized in the history of the development ofmonopoly capital, multiculturalism seeks to erase the material conditions ofracial practices and institutions by the aestheticization of life-styles, tradi-tional customs, urban space, clothing, food and other cultural paraphernaliafor commercial purposes and investment. Expressions of cultural differenceare regulated and managed by means of ersatz civic nationalism, formal citi-zenship, and so on. Establishment multiculturalism thus conceals not only thelogic of domination and subordination of groups, but also reconstitutes thisinequity in a politics of difference in which privatized identities become theparamount agency of consumerist experience and self-fulfillment. As I elab-orate further in Chapter 7, official multiculturalism idealizes neoliberal plu-ralism as the ideology of the free market and its individualist ethos. Culturalautonomy may flourish but only within the framework of possessive individ-ualism, alienation of labor, and reification of social relations. With the ethosof white supremacy persisting, ascribed ethnic differences become fossilizedinto seemingly primordial, inherited properties. Ethnicity becomes fate, not astrategic choice, in the imagined national community where material in-equality, or (in more neutral terminology) the “asymmetry” of power and re-sources, prevails. What is needed to critique this ideological imposturedeemed a panacea for social inequality and racial conflict is to foreground theconcrete historical context of the raging “culture wars,” also known as “theclash of civilizations,” and demonstrate how the exacerbation of local differ-ences and ethnic particularisms is fomented by the ruling elite’s politicaldemagogy to preserve the status quo of fear and jingoistic hatred of the cho-sen enemy. After all, the huge weapons industry and the entire military-in-dustrial-prison complex thrives in a climate of rabid competition and a per-manent war regimen.

Culture as ethnic distinction then reinforces the legitimacy of the racialpolity. Opposed to those who insist on conformity to a monolithic pattern ofconduct, I am for the recognition of the integrity and value of peoples’ cul-

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tures and life forms, and for their collective right to exist and flourish. Buthow can this recognition of multiplicity and autonomous singularities be uni-versalized? I believe it cannot happen as long as the global logic of corporateaccumulation determines the everyday life of people on this planet. To lay thegroundwork for a genuine popular-democratic esteem for cultural differences,class divisions must be abolished first with the socialization of productiveproperty and the equalization of competencies. Iniquitous property relationshidden by commodity-fetishism ground the reification of social life. Powerrelations are anchored on the iniquitous division of social labor, which framesunequal distribution of wealth and devaluation of specific cultures.

I believe that multiculturalism, as long as it is conceived within the exist-ing framework of the racial polity, of a hegemonic order founded on in-equities in social relations of production and reproduction, cannot offer themeans to realize justice and the recognition of peoples’ singular identities andworth. We need to be critical of this easy way out of the present crisis. Themulticulturalist respect for the Other’s individuality may indeed prove to bethe very form of asserting one’s own superiority. This paradox underlies mul-ticulturalism as, in fact, the authentic “cultural logic of multinational” orglobalized capitalism. So I am afraid the terror of racism will be with us inthis new millenium as long as the conditions that produce and reproduce classrelations, in effect the material armature of the racial polity, remain the sinequa non for the reproduction and legitimation of the dominant social struc-tures and institutional practices of our everyday lives.

Because the theoretical efficacy of “race” seems to have trumped that of“class” owing to diverse theoretical and sociological reasons which we can-not go into here, the next chapter and chapter 5 focus on the subtly synco-pated interaction of these two categories and their implications.

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23

The implacably zombifying domination of the Cold War for almost half a cen-tury has made almost everyone allergic to the Marxian notion of class as a so-cial category that can explain inequalities of power and wealth in the “freeworld.” One symptom is the mantra of “class reductionism” or “economism”as a weapon to silence anyone who calls attention to the value of one’s laboror one’s work to survive, if not become human. Another way of nullifying theconcept of class as an epistemological tool for understanding the dynamics ofcapitalist society is to equate it with status, life-style, even an entire “habitus”or pattern of behavior removed from the totality of the social relations of pro-duction in any given historical formation. Often, class is reduced to income, orto voting preference within the strict limits of the bourgeois (that is, capitalist)electoral order. Some sociologists even play at being agnostic or nominalist byclaiming that class displays countless meanings and designations relative tothe ideological persuasion of the theorist/researcher, hence its general use-lessness as an analytic tool. This has become the orthodox view of “class” inmainstream academic discourse.

Meanwhile, with the victory of the Civil Rights struggles in the sixties(now virtually neutralized in the last two decades), progressive forces re-learned the value of the strategy of alliances and coalitions of various groups.These coalitions have demonstrated the power of demanding the recognitionof group rights, the efficacy of the strategic politics of identity. Invariably,ethnic or cultural identity became the primordial point of departure for polit-ical dialogue and action. Activists learned the lesson that Stuart Hall, amongothers, discovered in the eighties: the presumably Gramscian view that “thereis no automatic identity or correspondence between economic, political andideological processes” (1996, 437). This has led to the gradual burgeoning ofa “politics of ethnicity predicated on difference and diversity.” Nonetheless,

Chapter Two

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Hall insisted that for people of color, class is often lived or experienced in themodality of race; in short, racism (racialized relations) often function as oneof the factors that overdetermine the formation of class consciousness. Whilethis trend (still fashionable today in its version of cosmopolitanism, post-na-tional or postcolonial criticism, eclectic transnationalism of all sorts) did notcompletely reject the concept of class, it rendered it superfluous by the for-mula of subsuming it within the “intersectionality” of race, gender, and classas a matrix of identity and political agency.

One of the systematic ideological rationalizations of this approach is DavidTheo Goldberg’s Racist Culture. Goldberg argues that class cannot beequated with race, or race collapsed into class; in short, culture cannot be dis-solved into economics. That move “leaves unexplained those cultural rela-tions race so often expresses, or it wrongly reduces these cultural relations tomore or less veiled instantiations of class formation” (1993, 70). Race thenacquires an almost fetishistic valorization in this framework of elucidating so-cial reality. A less one-sided angle may be illustrated by Amy Gutman’s be-lief that class and race interact so intimately that we need a more nuanced cal-ibration of the specific moments in which the racial determinant operates overand above the class determinant: “What we can say with near certainty is thatif blacks who live in concentrated poverty, go to bad schools, or live in sin-gle-parent homes are also stigmatized by racial prejudice as whites are not,then even the most complex calculus of class is an imperfect substitute foralso taking color explicitly into account” (2000, 96). What is clear in bothGoldberg’s and Gutman’s analysis is that class (taken as a rigid phenomenalfeature of identity) is only one aspect or factor in explaining any dynamic so-cial situation, not the salient or fundamental relation. Unlike the Marxian con-cept of class as a group relation (more precisely, class conflict) as the dis-tinctive characteristic of the social totality in capitalism, class in current usagesignifies an element of identity, a phenomenon whose meaning and value isincomplete without taking into account other factors like race, gender, local-ity, and so on. Neoliberal pluralism and the discourse of methodological in-dividualism reign supreme in these legitimations of a reified world-system,what Henri Lefebvre (1971) calls “the bureaucratic society of controlled con-sumption.”

RETROSPECTIVE TURN

To date, the standard judgment of a Marxist approach to racism and racialconflict is summed up in reflex epithets such as “economistic,” “reduction-ist,” “productivist,” “deterministic,” and cognate terms. Despite the influence

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of Althusser, Gramsci, and assorted neo- or postMarxists, the majority of ac-ademic experts and their acolytes in the global North continue to toil with thisCold War syndrome. It is probably a waste of time to dignify this doctrinairereflex. However, I think it is useful insofar as it might dispel the ideologicalhold of the paradigm supposed to remedy the simplification: the intersectionof race, class and gender. This mantra obviously commits the other error ofreducing class, and for that matter race and gender, to nominal aspects of per-sonal identity without any clear historical or materialist grounding. The solu-tion is worse than the problem.

One recent example of the orthodox Marxist view of the race/class nexusis found in Michael Parenti’s Land of Idols: Political Mythology in America.After a substantial account of the linkage between racism and slavery, Parentiargues that racism is functional to the preservation of capitalism: the domi-nant class interests use it “to discourage working-class unity and divide peo-ple from each other (1994, 133). Parenti adds: “Class power gives attitudinalracism much of its virulence. . . . The class dimension is sometimes over-looked by the victims of racism. . . . Rather than looking at the politico-eco-nomic system that has victimized [them], they blame an undifferentiated‘White racism . . .” But he grants that “along with being an expression of classsociety, racism develops a momentum of its own” (1994, 137–38). One of thereasons for the habit of treating class problems as racial ones, according toParenti, may be traced to the Supreme Court’s treatment of “race” as a “sus-pect category,” thus making race-motivated harms subject to constitutionalredress.

An earlier “take” on the race/class problematique is found in OliverCromwell Cox’s now classic 1948 book, Caste, Class and Race: A Study inSocial Dynamics. Cox rightly emphasizes the social context of race relations.For Cox, class analysis applies to race relations as social contacts “deter-mined by a consciousness of ‘racial difference” (1972, 206). In his study ofrace relations, he is interested in “the phenomenon of the capitalist exploita-tion of peoples and its complementary social attitude,” the latter cognized asracism or “a philosophy of racial antipathy.” Racism, for Cox, is the ideologyor system of rationalization that underlies racial antagonism within the frame-work of exploitation that can take diverse historical forms or situations.

Cox theorizes racism as a “socio-attitudinal facilitation of a particulartype of labor exploitation”: “The fact of crucial significance is that racialexploitation is merely one aspect of the problem of the proletarianization oflabor, regardless of the color of the laborer. Hence racial antagonism is es-sentially political-class conflict” (1972, 208). The capitalist demonstrateshis practical opportunism when he uses racial prejudice to “keep his laborand other resources freely exploitable.” Race prejudice, for Cox, is not just

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rejection of the physical appearance or attitudes of the other person. “It restsbasically upon a calculated and concerted determination of a white rulingclass to keep peoples of color and their resources exploitable”“(1972, 214).And this pattern of race prejudice becomes part of the social heritage so that“both exploiters and exploited for the most part are born heirs to it.” Cox,however, is not just a simple determinist addicted to the base/superstructureformula. He is historically sophisticated in conceptualizing the nuanced“situations of race relations,” describing the U.S. situation as “bipartite,” inwhich “large proportions of both colored and white persons seeking to livein the same area, with whites insisting that the society is a ‘white man’scountry’ (1972, 216). Cox would differ from another scholar of race rela-tions, Leo Kuper, who believes that class structures and racial structuresconstitute different systems of stratification. For Kuper, “racial differenceswhich are societally elaborated have preceded” social interaction (1972,95). But racial difference cannot usefully serve as a secondary hypothesisin explaining, say, national-liberation struggles. In colonial and neocolonialformations, independent class struggles emerged that were mobilizedaround national, ethnic and race ideologies, as shown in Latin American,South Africa, Algeria, and the Caribbean countries. But for Cox, the importof racial differentiations, alignments and antagonisms insofar as they influ-ence class formation cannot be fully grasped unless they are situated withinthe process of class conflicts operating on complex levels in a historicallyevolving capitalist system. A recent example of this mode of “situating” thedialectic of race and class is Alex Callinicos’ argument that the 1992 LosAngeles mass upheaval was a “class rebellion, not race riot,” concluding hisbrief that “only a strategy which takes as its starting point class rather thanrace can provide the basis for the necessary unity of the oppressed” (1993,57). Fine, but Callinicos skips the necessary steps needed to grasp totalityas a multiplicity of mediations, steps that precisely link the knowledge ofclass inequality to the experience of racist violence and exclusion. Laborexploitation is both experienced and cognitively grasped, gradually at first,then with sudden leaps—a process yoking together knowledge and per-ception, suturing the domains of thought and action, often in a unity of opposites.

It might be instructive, for pedagogical purposes, to re-examine the argu-ments of Michael Omi and Howard Winant (O/W) in dismissing a “class-based” Marxist theory” in Racial Formation in the United States (1986). Firstof all, O/W conceive of the class-based paradigm as comprised of three ele-ments: market, stratification, and class-conflict approaches. This stance imme-diately prejudices the conceptualization of the problem. A class system, for

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O/W, is based on “unequal exchange” of material resources in the marketplace,even though market relations based on exchange are distinguished from sys-tems of stratification based on distribution—what’s the difference?—and classconflict based on production. Why this postulated muddle at the outset? We cansee why after we summarize their interpretation.

In the market-relations approach deemed to be egalitarian, racial inequal-ity results from irrational prejudice or discriminative monopolistic practices.They disrupt the equilibrating tendencies of the market. This neoclassical the-ory admits a limited amount of “judicious” state intervention to restore equi-librium, but the principle of individualism in market competition constitutesthe governing foundation. Although the monopoly cartels impose inequalitiesin labor, capital, and consumption, minorities and capital (according to O/W)hold equal power. Market theories are economically deterministic, conceiv-ing of racial inequality as located in the sphere of exchange. Why this ap-proach is called “class-oriented,” is puzzling. The split-labor market theory ofEdna Bonacich—an attempt to improve the segmented labor-market theory—focuses on exploitation as part of the sociohistorical division of labor, withthe sale of labor power conditioned by the total political economy of specifichistorical periods (see Banton 1987).

In the stratification approach, we focus on the social distribution of re-sources. Here O/W simply conflate class and status, in which stratificationof groups arise from unequal distribution of income/wealth. Extra-eco-nomic factors, political authority and other forms of domination, accountfor the status order. This clarifies William Julius Wilson’s analysis of strat-ification in the black community (in his The Declining Significance ofRace, 1978) oriented around “life chances.” In O/W’s view, Wilson’s dis-missal of “race” for “class” (that is, status) is mistaken: “the black middleclass remains tied to the lower class precisely through racial dynamicswhich are structured into the U.S. economy, culture and politics.” Despitea disingenuous play on words, glibly alternating “class” and “status” as wellas “caste,” O/W cannot argue that stratification theory is in any wayfounded on class analysis.

Now, for O/W, class conflict theory derives from the Marxist concept ofexploitation absent in the other two approaches. Then they postulate the fol-lowing questionable interpretations: first, the Marxist view posits “the cen-trality of the ‘social relations of production’ in structuring classes and classrelationships”; and, second, “class conflict theory infers racially oriented po-litical interests from economic ones.” Ultimately, however, O/W connect andmis-identify bourgeois economics (market theory) with a Marxist analysis bytheir preoccupation with the labor market. Class is mistakenly construed as a

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production-relation, hence they wonder how that relation can be “specificallyracial.” Two tendencies in class conflict theory are discernible, according toO/W: the “divide and rule” conception resting on the notion of labor-marketsegmentation as “the key determinant in racially based inequalities in pro-duction relations,” and second, an “exclusionist” perspective based on theidea of a split-labor market. Notwithstanding these distinctions, O/W betrayan obsessive drive to mis-recognize Marxism—as they construe it so far—and wrongheadedly confuse it with bourgeois neoclassical economics: racialinequality results not from production relationships but from “market or ex-change relationships.”

For O/W, the Marxist model as far as they conceive it is flawed. It ignoressubjectivity, politics and ideology. Race cannot be understood “in terms of aneconomically determined formula of class belonging defined as the relation-ship to the means of production.” For them, “race and class are competingmodalities by which social actors may be organized.” Because ideology andpolitics determine the labor market, “racial categories cut across class lines.”Because class formation process is complex and contingent, O/W concludethat sectoral lines of demarcation pervade production relations and, therefore,class analysis cannot adequately elucidate racial dynamics. This latter “mustbe understood as determinants of class relationships and indeed class identi-ties, not as mere consequences of these relationships.” It is clear that in orderto correct a simplistic reduction of the racial category to an epiphenomenalsuperstructure, O/W redefine class formation, not to speak of class conflict,as a function or effect of the primacy of racial dynamics, that is, of ideologyand politics.

To sum up O/W’s strategy of refutation and repudiation of Marxist classanalysis: first, class is located in the sphere of market-exchange, then it issubsumed into status and life-chances, and finally it is located in the realm ofproduction that is, however, decisively shaped by political and ideologicalforces. Race, or racial dynamics, is ultimately elevated as the principal ex-planatory instrument for comprehending social actors. In a shrewd decenter-ing strategy, racial politics displaces the political economy of group/class an-tagonisms and functions as the metanarrative of postmodernity, albeit one ofambivalent or indeterminate progress, during the Reagan-Bush period. Thisapproach easily slides into philosophical idealism, a feat achieved at the costof distorting a dialectical-materialist theory of class-struggle and refurbishingdogmas already consigned to the dustbin of Cold War history. Unanchored tothe material process of wage-labor exploitation, race becomes an enigmaticfetish for race-centered observers, something of a floating signifier suscepti-ble to all kinds of contingencies and varying interpretations. How can thismuddle be rectified?

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A RETURN TO THE SALT MINES

Let us first review what Marx said about class. As everyone knows, Marxdied before completing the chapter on “class” in Volume III of Capital. Marxdid not invent the theory of class and of class struggle as the motive force inthe development of world history. What Marx as a theoretician of socialistrevolution did was to analyze the origin and characteristics of classes in bour-geois society, with emphasis on how the interests of one class coincide withthe development of the productive forces toward new social structures, andhow other classes defend the established system for their own benefit. Marx’ssingular accomplishment is to show how the liberation of the proletariat im-plies the abolition of classes and class society, together with the exploitationof commodified labor. The destruction of class relations implies the social-ization of the means of production (owned or controlled privately in capital-ism), including labor-power itself, with effective political power devolving tothe majority, the producers.

In historicizing the social division of labor, Marx demonstrated that classesare specific and historically determinate. They are neither rigid nor im-mutable. They arise from the complex dynamics of historical development.There are not just two homogeneous classes, the proletariat and the bour-geoisie, as the Communist Manifesto proclaimed, but many dependent on themultiple ramifications of the division of labor and the overdetermined speci-ficity of the modes of production as well as the historical conjuncturesthrough which the modes go through. For example, in The Eighteenth Bru-maire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx described the formation of numerous middleand intermediate strata and various coalitions that formed during the eventsof the 1848 revolution. He also later observed that in England “intermediateand transitional strata obscure the class boundaries” that separate the increas-ingly polarized bourgeoisie and the proletariat. What is crucial, however, isMarx’s view that classes are formed in the process of class antagonisms.Class struggle, not the relation to the means of production, is primary in classformation and the coeval crystallization of class consciousness (from class-in-itself to class-for-itself). This modifies Lenin’s doctrinal formulation ofclass: “Classes are large groups of people, differing from each other by theplace they occupy in an historically determined system of social production,by their role in the social organization of labor and, consequently, by the di-mensions of the share of social wealth of which they can dispose and themode of acquiring it” (quoted in Schmitt 1987, 128).

A fully constituted class is described by Marx in Eighteenth Brumaire, (sec-tion VII): “In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions ofexistence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from

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those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, theyform a class. In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among thesesmall-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no commu-nity, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do notform a class.” In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels write: “The separateindividuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common bat-tle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each otheras competitors. On the other hand, the class in its turn achieves independentexistence over against the individuals” (quoted in Schmitt 1987, 128). Classes,groups locked in battle, are thus not unchangeable monolithic formations; they“are forever changing, developing, differentiating themselves, while at thesame time the common element always comes to the fore and integrates the in-dividual within the class”“(Fischer 1996, 77). Classes undergo a constantprocess of inner movement and transformation dependent on the vicissitudesof the class struggle locally and internationally, given the permanent crisis ofcapital accumulation in the sharpening rivalry among competing powers (U.S.,Russia, China, Europe, Japan) and between finance capital and the exploitedmasses of the global South.

We cannot grasp the dialectics of race and class by using the market as theconceptual space of cognition as well as a point of departure for crafting revo-lutionary political strategy. Nor the idea of exchange and money, for that mat-ter. Marxism begins with a grasp of the social totality in its historical develop-ment. The key concept is the mode of production consisting of productiveforces and of relations of production. Let us confine ourselves to capitalism asthe determinate mode with its various historical stages. In industrial capitalismand its sequel, globalized transnational capitalism, the differentia specifica isthe buying and selling of labor power. The forms of the extraction of surplusvalue may vary, but the essential logic of exploiting labor-power of the prop-ertyless millions remains the same. Lenin states that capitalism is the system inwhich labor-power becomes the prime commodity. This gives rise to the work-ing class as the group separated from the means of production, free (unlikeslaves or serfs) to dispose of their labor power, to sell it to another group—thecapitalist—who utilizes it to expand the unit of capital he owns. This laborprocess involving contracts dealing with the conditions of the sale of laborpower needs to be strictly historicized, While the market for labor-power hasexisted since antiquity, it is only with the rise of industrial capitalism in the 18thcentury that a substantial class of wage-workers emerged. We need to distin-guish between the production of commodities on a class basis and mercantilecapitalism founded on the exchange of the surplus products of prior forms ofproduction (Braverman 1974). What is distinctive in this mode of production isthe fact that the labor process has become alienated, that is, alienation now

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characterizes the subordinated situation of workers under capitalist control.This alienation of the process of production exerts a peculiar force that affectsthe factoring of racial, ethnic, sexual and other qualities in the struggle betweenclasses. Alienation, commodity fetishism, and what Georg Lukacs (1971) calls“reification” determines and adjusts the racial dynamics to the level and stageof class antagonisms in the specific social formation.

Viewed from the materialist framework of intelligibility, social class de-notes groups of social agents defined principally but not exclusively by theirplace in the labor process. This process plays a crucial and necessary role indetermining class, but not a sufficient one. For the political and ideologicalconditions provide decisive criteria in ascertaining how the economic will ex-ert its pressure on the behavior of the class in concrete situations of struggle.Marx suggested this in Poverty of Philosophy (chapter 2, section 5): “ Eco-nomic conditions had in the first place transformed the mass of the peopleinto workers. The domination of capital created the common situation andcommon interests of this class. Thus this mass is already a class in relation tocapital [class in itself], but not yet a class for itself. In the struggle, . . . thismass unites and forms itself into a class for itself. The interests which it de-fends become class interests.”

Nicos Poulantzas’s formulation, however, rejects the distinction betweenthe group determined by structure and the supplementary role of ideology inthe process of class conflict: “A social class is defined by its place in the en-semble of social practices, i.e. by its place in the ensemble of the division oflabor which includes political and ideological relations. This place corre-sponds to the structural determination of classes, i.e. the manner in which determination by the structure (relations of production, politico-ideologicaldomination/subordination) operates on class practices—for classes have exis-tence only in the class struggle” (1973, 27).

It is therefore incorrect to conceive of class as a bounded social entity en-dowed with a specific agency divorced from its place in the productionprocess and the social division of labor. In the Marxist optic, class is a rela-tional (to the means of production) and processual category. It differs fromstratum or status group in the Weberian theory of stratification. Anthony Gid-dens (1980) reminds us that stratification theory applies a gradation schemeto rank individuals descriptively along a measurement scale, whereas classcannot be visualized or conceptualized in this manner. Thus the distinction ofgroups in terms of income, prestige, etc. translates class antagonism into ajockeying of groups for higher/lower positions in the hierarchical ladder,abolishing the material and necessary contradiction between the workingclass and the bourgeoisie. In the interest of clarity, Weber’s functionalismshould be distinguished from Marx’s revolutionary dialectics.

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In 1927, Karl Kautsky argued that the class conflicts described in the Com-munist Manifesto were really conflicts between status groups and ranks. Thiscontradicts Marx’s own thesis stated in the third part of Capital, chapter 47,that needs to be underscored: “It is always the direct relation between theowners of the conditions of production and the direct producers which revealsthe innermost secret, the hidden foundation, of the entire social edifice.” Inaddition to class as defined by specific historical antagonisms within the pro-duction process, we need to examine the moment of reproduction. The laborprocess as an abstraction needs to be fleshed out. Goran Therborn instructsus: “Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous con-nected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities,not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital rela-tion; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer” (1970, 5).In this site of reproduction of the production relations, the division of laborand the distribution of resources, we discern the intervention of “race” as acategorizing property that enables the realization of hegemony and its sub-version.

REMAPPING THE ARENA

No longer valid as a scientific instrument of classification, race today oper-ates as a socio-political construction. Differences of language, beliefs, tradi-tions, and so on can no longer be sanctioned by biological science as perma-nent, natural, and normal. Nonetheless they have become efficaciouscomponents of the racializing process, “inscribed through tropes of race,lending the sanction of God, biology, or the natural order to even presumablyunbiased descriptions of cultural tendenceis and differences” (Gates 1986, 5).It is evident that, as Colette Guillaumin (1995) has demonstrated, the class di-visions of the feudal/tributary stage hardened and eventually became natural-ized, with blood lineage signifying pedigree, status, and rank. Industrial cap-ital, however, destroyed kinship and caste-like affinities as a presumptiveclaim to wealth.

The capitalist mode of production articulated “race” with class in a pecu-liar way. While the stagnation of rural life imposed a racial or castelike rigid-ity to the peasantry, the rapid accumulation of wealth through the ever moreintensifying exploitation of labor by capital could not so easily “racialize” thewage-workers of a particular nation, given the alienability of labor-power—unless certain physical or cultural characteristics can be utilized to divide theworking population or render one group an outcast or pariah removed fromthe domain of “free labor.” In the capitalist development of U.S. society,

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African, Mexican and Asian bodies and their labor power were colonized andracialized, hence the idea of “internal colonialism” retains explanatory valid-ity. “Race” is thus constructed out of raw materials furnished by class rela-tions, the history of class conflicts, and the vicissitudes of colonial/capitalistexpansion and the building of imperial hegemony. It is dialectically accentedand operationalized not just to differentiate the price of wage labor within andoutside the territory of the metropolitan power, but also to reproduce relationsof domination-subordination invested with an aura of naturality and fatality.The refunctioning of physical or cultural traits as ideological and political sig-nifiers of class identity (as well as national belonging) reifies social relations.Such “racial” markers enter the field of the alienated labor process, conceal-ing the artificial nature of meanings and norms, and essentializing historicaltraditions and values.

William Julius Wilson indicated some of these changes in the role of “race”in class-divided U.S. society, though he drew mistaken conclusions. He ap-plied stratification theory on the mapping of black-white contacts in U.S. so-ciety configured in three major stages: first, the plantation economy with itsracial-caste oppression; second, class conflict and racial oppression in the pe-riod of the end of Reconstruction up to the New Deal era; and third, the pro-gressive transition from race inequalities to class inequalities after World WarII, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Given a hierarchical model of statusroles, Wilson intended to find out how “access to the means of production”(by which he means employment) can be obtained by education. His concernis with opportunities for mobility provided by a segmented labor market thatgenerates high-wage sector (salaried white-collar positions in governmentand corporation) and the underclass. “Race” disappears because all barriersfor blacks dissolve with affirmative action, more education, and so on.“Race” is no longer the cause of discrimination and segregation of the labormarket; rather, it is class, meaning education or symbolic capital, lifestyle,consumption power, and so on. Gunnar Myrdal’s “American Creed” has fi-nally expunged racism only to re-inaugurate “classism,” the rebarbative termof postmodern skeptics, without which the classic American moraldilemma—the opposition between “high national and Christian precepts” andsordid practices of apartheid and other institutional forms of racial injusticein everyday life—would be vacuous.

Unfortunately, the current debate between a class-based Affirmative Actionand one based on race, assumes that class as status attached chiefly to incomeor occupation is the normative obstacle to eliminating racism (Gutmann 2000).In short, racism translates into a question of social mobility and the individu-alist “bootstrap” ethos of competition (also known as neosocial Darwinism) inthe “free market,” the privileged locus of alienation and reification. From the

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perspective of liberal multiculturalism, “class” becomes an aspect of identity,like race and gender susceptible of stylistic alteration. One is then reminded byEllen Meiksins Wood: “Is it possible to imagine class differences without ex-ploitation and domination? The ‘difference’ that constitutes class as an ‘iden-tity’ is, by definition, a relationship of inequality and power, in a way that sex-ual or cultural ‘difference’ need not be” (1995, 258).

Clearly, racism cannot be dissolved by occasions of status mobility whenhistorical circumstances in a neoconservative period change. The black bour-geoisie continues to be harassed and stigmatized by liberal, multiculturalistpractices of racism, not because they drive Porsches or conspicuously flauntall the indices of wealth. Class exploitation cannot replace or stand for racismbecause it is the condition of possibility for it. It is what enables the racializ-ing of selected markers, whether physiological or cultural, to maintain,deepen and reinforce alienation, mystifying reality by modes of commodifi-cation, fetishism, and reification characterizing the routine of quotidian life.Race and class are dialectically conjoined in the reproduction of capitalist re-lations of exploitation and domination.

REORIENTATION

We might take a passage from Marx as a source of guidelines for developinga historical-materialist theory of racism that is not empiricist but dialectical inaiming for theorizing conceptual concreteness as a multiplicity of historicallyinformed and configured determinations. This passage comes from a letterdated April 9, 1870 to Meyer and Vogt in which Marx was explaining why theIrish struggle for autonomy was of crucial significance for the British prole-tariat:

. . . . Every industrial and commercial center in England possesses a workingclass divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians.The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowershis standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member ofthe ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capital-ists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination overhimself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irishworker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the ‘poor whites’to the ‘niggers’ in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays himback with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once theaccomplice and stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland.

This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pul-pit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the rulingclasses. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working

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class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class main-tains its power. And that class is fully aware of it (quoted in Callinicos 1993).

Here Marx sketches three parameters for the sustained viability of racism inmodern capitalist society. First, the economic competition among workers isdictated by the distribution of labor power in the labor-market via differentialwage rates. The distinction between skilled and unskilled labor is contextual-ized in differing national origins, languages and traditions of workers that canbe manipulated into racial antagonisms. Second, the appeal of racist ideologyto white workers, with their identification as members of the “ruling nation”affording—in W.E.B. DuBois’s words—”public and psychological wage” orcompensation. Like religion, nationalism provides the illusory resolution tothe real contradictions of life for the working majority of citizens. Third, theruling class reinforces and maintains these racial divisions for the sake of cap-ital accumulation within the framework of their ideological/political hege-mony in the metropolis and worldwide.

Racism and nationalism are thus modalities in which class struggles artic-ulate themselves at strategic points in history. No doubt social conflicts in re-cent times have involved not only classes but also national, ethnic, and reli-gious groups, as well as feminist, ecological, antinuclear social movements(Bottomore 1983). The concept of “internal colonialism” (popular in the sev-enties) that subjugates national minorities, as well as the principle of self-de-termination for oppressed or “submerged” nations espoused by Lenin, exem-plify dialectical attempts to historicize the agency for socialisttransformation. Within the framework of the global division of labor betweenmetropolitan center and colonized periphery, a Marxist program of nationalliberation is meant to take into account the extraction of surplus value fromcolonized peoples through unequal exchange as well as through direct colo-nial exploitation in “Free Trade Zones,” illegal traffic in prostitution, mail-or-der brides, and contractual domestics (the Philippines today supplies the bulkof the latter, about ten million). National oppression has a concrete reality notreducible totally to class exploitation; but it cannot be fully understood with-out the domination of the racialized peoples in the dependent formations bythe colonizing/imperialist power.

Racism arose with the creation and expansion of the capitalist world econ-omy. Solidarities conceived as racial or ethnic groups acquire meaning andvalue in terms of their place within the social organization of production andreproduction of the ideological-political order; ideologies of racism as collec-tive social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural constraints thatpreserve the exploited and oppressed position of these “racial” solidarities.Such patterns of economic and political segmentation mutate in response tothe impact of changing economic and political relationships (Geshwender and

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Levine 1994). Overall, there is no denying the fact that national-liberationmovements and indigenous groups fighting for sovereignty, together with het-erogeneous alliances and coalitions, cannot be fully understood without a crit-ical analysis of the production of surplus value and its expropriation by thepropertied class—that is, capital accumulation. As John Rex noted, “differentethnic groups are placed in relations of cooperation, symbiosis or conflict bythe fact that as groups they have different economic and political functions. . . .Within this changing class order of [colonial societies], the language of racialdifference frequently becomes the means whereby men allocate each other todifferent social and economic positions” (1983, 403–5, 407)—an integral fea-ture of global capitalism’s diverse ways of exploiting labor by manipulatingthe wage scale. Hence race relations and race conflict are necessarily struc-tured by the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as wellas modifications in the structure of the world economy. Corporate profit mak-ing, at bottom, still remains the logic of the global system of finance capital-ism based on historically changing structures and retooled practices of domi-nation and subordination.

The configuration of class hierarchy, to be sure, is much more complex andambiguous in advanced industrial social formations (Giddens 1973; Balibarand Wallerstein 1991). Because of the comprehensive state regulation of con-temporary social life, some have replaced ownership or control of the means ofproduction with control of the state apparatus as a more decisive criterion of so-cial development. In 1899 Eduard Bernstein dismissed class struggle becauseof the growing middle class, socialized welfare reforms, liberalization, and soon. In the sixties C. Wright Mills also rejected fundamental class conflict as partof a “labor metaphysic,” while Herbert Marcuse bewailed the incorporation ofthe working class into advanced capitalist society. However, the production anddistribution of the social surplus cannot be ignored. This is so despite empiri-cist arguments that “class interest” is now viewed not only as defined posi-tivistically in relation to the means of production but as constructed from the in-teractions of everyday life and attendant interpretations. Notwithstanding suchformal and technical shifts of subject-positions, classes and their historicaltransformation as the principal agents of change, in particular, the transition toa socialist “classless” society, remain valid in conceptualizing realisticprospects of change in capitalism as a global economic and political system.

APPROACHING NATIONALITY

At this juncture, I would like to cite a research agenda proposed by FredricJameson (1993) in the context of assessing the current status of “Cultural

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Studies” in the academy. He recommends that a possible dialectical approachto the interface of class and race can begin by positing groups (“imaginary”totalities) and their complex relations as the primary analytic object of study.In theorizing culture as the “object” of investigation, it is necessary to articu-late its position in the totality of its determinations. In other words, we needto chart the “problematic” (as Althusser once counseled) of this inquiry. Sinceculture is the vehicle or medium whereby the relationship between groups istransacted, we are led to reflect on how we should read the allegorical“dream-work” and logic of collective or group fantasies. “Common culture,”one such fantasy or “thought of others,” cannot be understood without a rig-orous analysis of what and how it excludes and includes in specific historicalmilieus.

Like the apologias for the Establishment consensus I noted earlier, the de-sire or nostalgia called “common culture” attended by metaphors of naturalblending and weaving reveals its constructed, artificial status when the “na-tion” is invoked. Recent inquiries into the formation of modern nation-stateshave shown that a nation is not just a political entity but also a symbolic com-munity, a system of cultural representations that enables its citizens to acquirea sense of identity and loyalty. Hence a national culture is a complex of dis-courses and symbolic practices that construct identities for individuals whoparticipate in, and identifies with, the meanings of the nation produced bythose discourses and practices.

Since race and class have become sublimated into the symbolic economyof national culture, we need to examine its synchronic and diachronic dispo-sition. Stuart Hall (1992) outlines five main elements in the narrative of thenational culture: 1) the narrative of events, scenarios, and landscapes that rep-resent the shared experiences giving significance to ordinary lives; 2) the em-phasis on primordial origins, continuity, and destiny; 3) the invention of tra-dition through rituals and public ceremonies; 4) the narrative of nationalculture as foundational myth; and 5) the grounding of national identity on theidea of a pure, original people or folk, such as the Puritans in the New Eng-land colonies, or the pioneers in the Western frontier.

Given the concept of the nation as a contrived or fabricated community thatunifies and cancels/subsumes differences in a libidinal “constellation” of fig-ures or Imaginary, we can now infer that underlying the labor of bonding andunifying is a “structure of cultural power.” Behind the unity of modern na-tions lies a process of violent conquest, a suppression of diverse peoples withtheir own customs, languages, and traditions climaxed by an imposition of theconqueror’s will and way of life. Alexander Saxton has pithily encapsulatedthis process in U.S. history: “Already in the days of Jefferson and the ‘saintedJackson’ (to use Walt Whitman’s phrase) the nation had assumed the form of

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a racially exclusive democracy—democratic in the sense that it sought to pro-vide equal opportunities for the pursuit of happiness by its white citizensthrough the enslavement of Afro-Americans, extermination of Indians, and ter-ritorial expansion largely at the expense of Mexicans and Indians” (1972, 145).

In order to unify the various social classes, nationalities, and ethnic con-stituencies, U.S. nationalism provides alternative points of identification suchas the definition of the American character as tolerant, open to diverse influ-ence, both universalist and particularistic—all virtues of members of onefamily. This is the prime reason why, with very few exceptions, knowledgeproduced by American experts automatically upholds “the White Man’s Bur-den,” the supremacy of Western/Judaeo-Christian civilization, whatever theavowed honest, altruistic, compassionate motives and purposes.

The semiotics of nationalism operates subtly. Via metaphoric andmetonymic exfoliations, the theme of one national culture generates a kind ofcommunity that is not just instrumental or sentimental but also constitutive inthe sense defined by Michael Sandel: “For [the subjects distinguished byrights], community describes not just what they have as fellow citizens butalso what they are, not a relationship they choose (as in voluntary association)but an attachment they discover, not merely an attribute but a constituent oftheir identity” (1982, 150). Given the historical record, it is more accurate tothink of a shared culture not as an organically unified creation but “a discur-sive device which represents difference as unity or identity.” This is preciselywhat we perceive in the arguments of those anxious to project or affirm a“common culture.” In thrall to an absorbing mythical identity, operatingthrough the exercise of different forms of hegemonic power through ethnic“rites of assent,” they are made to speak the same language, one that harmo-nizes with that of the literary canon, mass media publicity, and various ideo-logical apparatuses. This language or rhetoric of belonging is capaciousenough to accomodate those resistant or deviant voices—unless they refusethe terms and rules of incorporation to the prevailing division of labor andpower.

What is happening today is unarguable, especially with the institutional-ization of a “homeland.” An official discourse has almost succeeded in sub-stituting the idiom of culture for the now fallacious lexicon of race (earlier, ofclass) as a symbolic marker of difference, positing the claim that the nation(conflated with the state) is a unified cultural entity that can weather the tur-bulence of political-economic crisis and the decline of its superpower ascen-dancy. Hence amid the current dislocations and rapid time-space compressionin the political economy of transnational business, we see how the idea of acommon culture—Schlesinger’s (1994) theme of “the unified, democraticculture that has always been the American ideal”—only discloses the play of

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power behind it, together with the internal contradictions and crosscutting al-legiances that presuppose it and are reproduced whenever the imperative of“national security” or “national interest” is invoked.

One example of how this play of power, the syncopation of differences intothe unity of a racial polity, can be exhibited for criticism has been offered byToni Morrison. In her perceptive essay “Black Matter(s),” she elaborates onthe topos of intertextuality, more precisely the psychic economy of the whiteimagination, in the foundational texts:

I have begun to wonder whether the major, much celebrated themes of Ameri-can literature—individualism, masculinity, the conflict between social engage-ment and historical isolation, an acute and ambiguous moral problematics, thejuxtaposition of innocence with figures representing death and hell—are not infact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanistic presence. . . . The litera-ture of the United States, like its history, illustrates and represents the transfor-mations of biological, ideological, and metaphysical concepts of racial differ-ences. (256, 268)

This insight into the over determined “thickness” of American canonical litera-ture exposes the process of how certain discursive principles—the perennialthemes Morrison cites—operate to construct an unstable but reconciling artifactequivalent to the national ethos, national sensibility, the exceptional Americancharacter. An act of historicized deciphering is required to grasp the contradic-tions hidden, suppressed, or displaced in the symbolic icons of “the commonculture.” Especially today, when the hegemonic consensus in mediatized/commodified images has nearly colonized all spaces (including sexuality, theunconscious, cyberspace) under the aegis of the Simulacrum, the logic ofSpectacle, the question of the democratic control of mass culture—its pro-duction, distribution, and consumption networks—deserves priority in the ac-tionable program of transformative critique.

Where do we go from here in fulfilling this task? A recent translation of Al-bert Memmi’s magisterial opus, Racism, teaches us that any understanding ofthe complex network of ideas and practices classified by that term will alwayslead us to the bedrock of class relations. Memmi defines racism as “the gener-alized and final assigning of values to real or imaginary differences, to the ac-cuser’s benefit and at his victim’s expense, in order to justify the former’s ownprivileges or aggression” (2000, 169). The underlying frame of intelligibilityfor this process of assigning values cannot be anything else but the existence ofa class-divided societies and nation-states with unequal distribution of powerand resources. Both motivation and consequences can be adequately explainedby the logic of class oppression and its entailments. In our epoch of globaliza-tion, inequality between propertied nation-states (where transnational corporate

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powers are based) and the rest of the world has become universalized andthreatens the welfare of humanity and the planet. What becomes more urgent isthe application of a Marxist perspective on the destructive mechanisms of cor-porate globalization, at present led by the aggressive military of the UnitedStates and its crusade of an endless preventive war on the oppressed and ex-ploited of the global South. Musing on the recent World Conference AgainstRacism held in Durban, South Africa, immediately before September 11, 2001,Eric Mann observed that to launch the most effective intervention to changehistory, it is necessary to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the imperial-ist system: “Right now the U.S. is financing its war against the world by super-exploiting the entire world, subjecting more than three billion people to abjectpoverty . . . In that racism and imperialism are at the heart of the U.S. ideolog-ical framework, antiracism and anti-imperialism are the central ideological con-cepts of contestation, the essence of counterhegemonic political educationwork” (2002, 220–23). Much of this political education has transpired withinprison walls. If the entire United States of America is conceptualized as a vastlaboratory of apartheid for the twenty-first century, where the pain of race/classembodiment is felt everyday, then we should listen now to the testimony ofprisoners symbolizing both our current predicament and future liberation.

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41

The end of the twentieth century witnessed a universal recognition of the hor-ror of genocide and the reciprocal need to compensate the survivors of suchcatastrophes. One such expression is the ongoing reparations movement forthe victims of slavery and colonization in the United States the groundworkof which was laid by the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism, RacialDiscrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. Slave trade, slavery,apartheid, and colonialism were judged as “crimes against humanity.” As Fi-del Castro put it: “What is undeniable is that tens of millions of Africans werecaptured, sold like commodity and sent beyond the Atlantic to work in slav-ery while 70 million indigenous people in that hemisphere perished as a re-sult of the European conquest and colonization” (2001, 24). Historians suchas Walter Rodney (1982), Eric Williams (1944), and others have cogentlydocumented this unprecedented holocaust.

We need to face the outrage of this commodity system that continues to wreakhavoc today. Since any vision of a caring and nurturant future can only be ex-trapolated from the persistence of the past in the present, a critical analysis ofconjunctures is imperative. How can restitution be made for past wrongs so asto undo what has been done to an entire people? What is problematic is the par-adox of the solution: justice conceptualized as a fair exchange of values, thecompensation for labor-power expropriated from the slave, follows of coursefrom a liberal understanding of value as a product of free labor. However, it re-veals in its fold the real inequality of the parties involved: the slave’s labor wascoerced, her/his freedom alienated from her/him. As everyone admits, this in-equality (impervious to market calculation) includes not only the deep psycho-logical trauma of free persons being enslaved but also the disastrous social andpolitical structures that have damaged the lives of the survivors—something“non-reparable or “incompensational “ (Martin and Yaquinto 2004, 22). Can

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deprivation of freedom be repaired or rectified by an attempt at “equal” ex-change? Can disparity of life chances be remedied by equality before the law ofthe market?

In this chapter I want to explore briefly this disjuncture between the formand substance of the reparations dilemma, and its feasible resolution, by us-ing as touchstones certain heuristic observations by Du Bois, George Jackson,and Mumia Abu-jamal concerning the passage of the African American peo-ple from slavery to bourgeois democracy.

FATEFUL INTERVENTION

History discloses the instructive duplicity of the emancipation narrative. Inhis classic testimony The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois evokes themelancholy time of the destruction of the South’s plantation empire and thetransformation of the slave into that “most piteous thing,” the black freedman.Using his uncanny feel for dialectical twists and turns, Du Bois describes theirony of the “mockery of freedom” in the wake of the Reconstruction :

Not a cent of money, not an inch of land, not a mouthful of victuals,—not evenownership of the rags on his back. Free! On Saturday, once or twice a month,the old master, before the war, used to dole out bacon and meal to his Negroes.And after the first flush of freedom wore off, and his true helplessness dawnedon the freedman, he came back and picked up his hoe, and old master still doledout his bacon and meal. The legal form of service was theoretically far differ-ent; in practice, task-work or “cropping” was substituted for daily toil in gangs;and the slave gradually became a metayer, or tenant on shares, in name, but a la-borer with indeterminate wages in fact. (1965, 308–9).

The transition was not linear but disingenuously warped. While the Union’svictory abolished the trappings of chattel slavery, it introduced an illusoryform of liberation, the serf-like class of sharecroppers. The change was asleight-of-hand conversion of status and objective identity in the web of so-cial relations. The Reconstruction promise of “forty acres and a mule”brought the former slave from the auction block to the ballot box; but itclearly did not bring economic independence via land ownership. It was anintermediary stage between the slave’s total lack of ownership of his bodyand its capacities and the worker’s right to sell “freely” his labor-power in thecapitalist market. The ex-slaves were “free,” not legally owned; but they wereunable to participate fully in decision-making processes concerning their col-lective fates.

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There may have been justice of the liberal sort implemented after 1865, buthow about substantive life and efficacious liberty for the black nation? DuBois focuses on this transitional stage as a microcosmic scene in which theobsolescence of slavery registers itself in two ways: the dependence of theformer slave on the “old master” has become detached, the organic ties be-tween lord and “his Negroes” dissolved, while the “freedman” subsists on“indeterminate wages,” now dependent on a force that imposes an illusion ofliberty which proves more ruthless than the paternalistic reign of the dis-penser of “bacon and meal.”

What Du Bois tried to dramatize in that quoted passage from his allegori-cal narrative is the irony of emancipation within the racial polity of the UnitedStates. He sought to trace the dialectical movement of the totality: the nega-tion of one part coexists with the sublation of another into a different level ofsignificance. The destruction of chattel slavery in the South precipitated a dy-namic social mutation that both released the African slave from ownershiponly to imprison him in the deceptive thrall of another condition: wage-slav-ery. This is a learning process registered by the protagonists of this particularhistorical conjuncture. Du Bois sums up the lesson: the appearance of changedisguises but also reveals a reality with an ethical demand: capitalism needsto be exposed as complicit in the persistence of subordination and perma-nence of racialized hierarchy. The change in form has to be recognized, butthe lack of change in substance also admitted.

The reparations movement for America’s “holocaust” enunciated by theBlack Manifesto captures the hidden double movement of meanings unveiledby Du Bois. The major premise stems from “the historical fact that the UnitedStates was constitutionally founded on slavery and that the persistence of racialinequality and injustice in American society is derived from slavery” (Martinand Yaquinto 2004, 3). Walter Mosley updated this inaugural event in a con-temporary idiom: “We are a racial minority in a country where racism is a factof life, a country that was founded on economic and imperialist racism” (2006,11). Given the damage wrought by slavery and its consequences, justice can berendered only if indemnification is made through the juridical intercession ofthe state. Such compensation—a demand for a just share—is based on the con-tribution of the entire African American nation to the economic wealth of thecountry. Such a claim requires a disruption of the mirage of political change(from servitude to parity), and a grasp of the real motion transpiring in con-sciousness and in the praxis of collectivities engaged in social production. Thisencapsulates the succinct answer to the objection that reparation is futile be-cause past crimes cannot be undone, the dead parties—the guilty perpetratorand the victims—cannot be brought back to life, and history must start anew.

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Du Bois has precisely pointed out that the crime is continuing in its effects:segregation, dependency. Despite surface alterations, the unequal position ofthe parties remain unaffected (even though the specific members of the groupoccupying the positions may have changed). What is implied in Du Bois’ ac-count is that the social contract can become operative again if contingentrules and norms are put on trial when the principle of justice is made an-swerable to the substantive universal values of life and freedom, as embodiedin the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of theRights of Man and Citizen. The resonance of those values are reaffirmed andelaborated in the United Nations Charter and its foundational principles.

A crime has been committed, to be sure, but where is the “body,” as it were,the encountered evidence? While the ideals of justice and equality are defi-nitely the two motive-forces that underpin the demand for reparations, I thinkthe movement is far more significant in its educational and practical implica-tions. First of all, it has revived an interest in the understanding of historicalcausality and the critique of accountability. What made possible the conditionof humans being treated as privately owned commodities? What perpetuatesthis denial of their control over their labor and their fruits, and over the qual-ity of their own reproduction? Why can the slaveowner grant manumission inacient Rome, for example, without affecting the system of slavery, unlike thatof the ante-bellum South? A slave’s life is generally equated to involuntary la-bor, with non-economic compulsion enabling its reproduction. Who is ac-countable for it? Who can be held responsible for its long-term effects, its im-pact on psyches and the communal memory? Is just retribution—say, thereturn of stolen property—an end in itself or only a means to the discovery (ifnot invention) of a more all-encompassing ethico-political concept of justice?These are some of the questions provoked by the resurgence of this campaignfor indemnification of the victims of a system that has been abolished and yetsurvives as an unhealable wound of the body politic.

“PECULIAR INSTITUTION”

The existence of slave society in the “New World” (in the U.S. as well as inthe Caribbean and Brazil) was a historical anomaly. In 1857 Marx observed:“The fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capi-talists, but that they are capitalists, is based on their existence as anomalieswithin a world market based on free labour” (1973, 513). As Eugene Gen-ovese (1969) has shown, this anomaly is captured in the slaveholders’ beliefin their unlimited patriarchal authority even as implacable world-market

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forces and ascendant bourgeois hegemony eroded the moribund paternalisticethos, unleashing the racist violence immanent in the system.

The apparent incongruity of the “unfree” (slave) inhabiting the terrain ofthe “free” (laissez-faire market) disappears if we apply two analytic concepts:social formation and mode of production. While the U.S. then may be definedas chiefly an emergent capitalist social formation from the time of its inde-pendence to the Civil War, one can discern in it two discordant modes of pro-duction: the slave mode in the South and the mercantile-industrial one in theNorth. The triumph of the juridical framework of capitalism (based on Lock-ean principles of alienable labor, etc.) and its state machinery led to the legalabolition of slavery in 1865. This is a clear sign that New World slavery wasnot similar to that in Graeco-Roman societies where slavery was not abol-ished by a legal act but by a long period of evolution when it was eventuallysuperseded by another kind of dependent labor (serfdom) which becamedominant, even though chattel slaves continued to exist up the late MiddleAges. What is clear, however, is that the elite in the U.S. South was mainlyparasitic on coerced labor for its wealth and reproduction (Finley 1983, 441).Reconstruction eliminated the practice of coercion, the aristocratic habitus(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), only to replace it with that of the market le-gitimized by Constitutional amendments, and (after 1877) by wholesalefraud, Jim Crow laws, and vigilante violence.

In effect, slavery in the U.S. performed a dual function. It was part of thesocial relations of production and simultaneously of reproduction. The laborof the slave yielded surplus value (value realized over and above the cost ofits reproduction, or profit) that accumulated as capital within the world mar-ket of alienable labor, as Marx remarked. This became the basis of the polit-ical power of the plantation regime and its successor in Jim Crow. At the sametime, this productivity, enabled by non-economic force (violence synchro-nized with tradition, rituals and other pedagogical, disciplinary apparatuses),reinforced the juridical and ideological mutation of the system. What is re-produced is the racist legitimation of the entire social order based on the pri-vate ownership of land and other vital means of production.

Now the ideology that rationalized the political exclusion of the black na-tion was racism in its various ramifications. In late-nineteenth century cul-ture, racism functioned as a theory that certain human types are superiormorally and intellectually and, therefore. they have the right to subordinate,dominate and exploit other types regarded as inferior on the basis of ascribedqualities and imputed characteristics. Such a theory, in the aftermath of theNazi defeat in World War II, has been repudiated by the UNESCO Statementsof 1950, 1964 and 1967 (Montagu 1972). But it is the persistence of this racist

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ideology in various disguises and its institutional machinery that distinguishthe U.S. racial polity from other societies where diverse forms of slavery con-tinue to exist (as in India where a debtor can be treated as property, in Peru orBrazil where plantation workers are held in bondage), although the existenceof domestic servants (illegal Indonesian immigrants) sold to wealthy Los An-geles homes (Cashmore 1984, 284) may be a symptom of the return of thephase of early capitalist primitive accumulation to a postmodern globalizedeconomy.

Patricia Williams comments on the worsening crisis of community: “Whitesfear blacks, blacks fear whites” (1997, 12). We might speculate if this succinctformulation condenses the ramified impact of this modern development in thewhole polity. How do we estimate the resonance and legacy of slavery, segre-gation, and colonization in the social fabric of U.S. modernity? The economistGlenn Loury (2000) has argued that instead of demanding a “money settle-ment” or any kind of indemnity to correct the racist past, we need to invoke “na-tional fellowship and comity,” presumably a higher moral order, that wouldbring reconciliation between the conflicting parties similar to the aim of SouthAfrica’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This certainly repudiates mereformal exchange of commodified values, the norm and rule of a market-cen-tered society. But lacking equality, which is not an independent universal valuebut a necessary condition for “the complete and unfailing actualization of thevalues of life and freedom” (Heller 1987, 122), these latter two being the au-thentic universal values, what is the point of “national fellowship and comity”?Indeed, before such a level of moral enlightenment can be attained, we need togo through the complex mediations of historical development to grasp the im-port of the axiomatic values of life and freedom. This is the route which GeorgeJackson, the author of the highly influential collection of prison letters SoledadBrother (1972), took before he was killed in Quentin Prison on August 21,1971, two days before the opening of his trial.

BLACK SINGULARITY

Jackson symbolizes, in Manning Marable’s (1983) assessment, “the plight ofthe Black domestic periphery” that has suffered severe underdevelopment,the result of integration into the predatory world-market economy after slav-ery and segregation. For stealing $70, Jackson languished for more than tenyears in inhumane jails—a crime against property usually merits one to fiveyears in prison for a black person. Assassinated in prison at the age of 31,Jackson’s life epitomized the demand for freedom and meaningful life, notjust equity alone: “Underdevelopment and the imprisonment of the Black

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masses will not die a natural death until the real criminals within America’spowerful ruling class taste something of the bitter anguish that distorts andcripples the Black majority” (1983, 130).

For Jackson, emancipation of the slave ushered a period of internal colo-nialism, the “free” subject willing or consenting to be ruled. In a letter to hislawyer, Jackson comments on how blacks embrace capitalism as “the mostoutstanding example of man against himself that history can offer.” In theprocess he emphasizes the continuity and disruption in the lives of AfricanAmericans after the Civil War. We return to Du Bois’ perception of duplicitythat needs to be clarified in this way:

After the Civil War, the form of slavery changed from chattel to economic slav-ery, and we were thrown onto the labor market to compete at a disadvantagewith poor whites. Ever since that time, our principal enemy must be isolated andidentified as capitalism. The slaver was and is the factory owner, the business-man of capitalist Amerika, the man responsible for employment, wages, prices,control of the nation’s institutitions and culture. It was the capitalist infrastruc-ture of Europe and the U.S. which was responsible for the rape of Africa andAsia. . . . Imperialism took up where the slave trade left off. It wasn’t until afterthe slave trade ended that Amerika, England, France, and the Netherlands in-vaded and settled in on Afro-Asian soil in earnest. As the European industrialrevolution took hold, new economic attractions replaced the older ones; chattelslavery was replaced by neo-slavery. Capitalism, “free” enterprise, private own-ership of public property armed and launched the ships and fed the troops; itshould be clear that it was the profit motive that kept them there (1972, 176).

Several points need to be underlined here. First, the shift to wage-slavery en-tailed the new mask of the property-owner as the businessman who runs thefactories and also administers the entire cultural/ideological order—the splitbetween economic structure and ideological “superstructure” disappears. Theproducers reproduce their own condition of domination. Second, it was thislogic of accumulation that underpinned imperial conquest and trade in slav-ery—colonial conquest led to the capture of dark-skinned natives, the plun-der of their habitats, and their subsequent transport to distant lands where theywere sold and forced to work. Capitalism as the infrastructure of “neo-slav-ery,” Jackson contends, is the necessity that compelled the ruling classes ofEurope and the United States to invade and possess colonies, this time drivenby a new contradiction: “private ownership of public property,” the usurpa-tion of social wealth for private gain. We have finally reached the stage of im-perialism when formal liberal rights serve to disguise its twin half, the alter-native face of fascist authoritarian domination, as lived by millions of AfricanAmericans in prison or its counterpart, the ghettos and inner cities.

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The historical plot of causation charted by Jackson seems to impose a sur-face logic of linear duration and inevitability to the whole enterprise of slav-ery and its metamorphosis. This is not exactly a valid inference. Grounded onhis commitment to radical political change, the central preoccupation of Jack-son’s thought concerns the subject-position of the former slave—how isher/his bodily movement determined, how is collective agency and its libidi-nal expressions circumscribed by the new configuration of space/time in post-bellum America? This exceeds the functional analysis of racism or race prej-udice as the rationale for exploitation since Jackson poses the question whythose “freed” could not grasp and outgrow the character of their subjugation.Notwithstanding the relative autonomy of the ideological sphere from theeconomic determinant, racism is not simply a reflex attitude completely di-vorced from the material conditions that sustain and enable it. As BarbaraFields succinctly formulates the materialist hypothesis: “If the slaveholdershad produced white supremacy without producing cotton, their class wouldhave perished in short order” (1990, 112). The same holds for the proprietors/owners of transnational corporations and their political representatives in theepoch of Homeland Security and the pre-emptive imperialist war againsthordes of angry, terrifying subalterns.

What justifies this intervention to elucidate the links between chattel andwage slavery? Underlying the overarching historical pattern, the semblanceof continuity, behind the varying shapes of quotidian phenomena, Jacksonsearches for what he regards as the governing principle of his analysis: theideal of self-determination in both individual and collective senses. This syn-thesizes the universal values of freedom and life to which I alluded earlier.(One gleans from this theme of self-determination a long tradition of histori-cal-materialist discourse from Fredrick Douglass and Du Bois to Harry Hay-wood, William Z. Foster, C. L. R. James, Amiri Baraka, Nelson Peery, andothers.) This presupposes the rigor of scientific knowledge converted to theversatile tactics and strategy of practical reason, sociopolitical praxis, dedi-cated to the fulfillment of the whole community’s radical needs, beyond whatisolated individuals merit in return for services rendered:

Chattel slavery is an economic condition which manifests itself in the total lossof absence of self-determination. . . . The new slavery, the modern variety ofchattel slavery updated to disguise itself, places the victim in a factory or in thecase of most blacks in support roles inside and around the factory system (ser-vice trades) working for a wage. However, if work cannot be found in andaround the factory complex, today’s neoslavery does not allow even for a mod-icum of food and shelter. You are free—to starve. . . . If you’re held in one spoton this earth because of your economic status, it is just the same as being heldin one spot because you are the owner’s property. . . .

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Neoslavery is an economic condition, a small knot of men exercising theproperty rights of their established economic order, organizing and controllingthe life style of the slave as if he were in fact property. Succinctly: an economiccondition which manifests itself in the total loss or absence of self-determina-tion. Only after this is understood and accepted can we go on to the dialectic thatwill help us in a remedy. (1972, 190–91).

It had to take this singular, untypical prisoner, most of the time confined toisolation in maximum security cells, to grasp the essence of self-determina-tion as the ability to decide on one’s own where to go, how to position andmaneuver one’s body, how to inhabit space and experience time in the processof performing and triangulating one’s destiny—in short, how to actualize lifeto its fullest. An ironic turn, this intellectual exercise, and also an eloquentparable of the predicament of the black nation.

The overriding importance of self-determination informs Jackson’s searchfor how the “crime against humanity” can be repaired. What Jackson at-tempted to do was to make critical reason realize a double task, somethingthat Du Bois tried earlier. He had to reconstruct history as the confluence ofcontradictory trends, and from this deduce the ideal of radical freedom as anecessary future horizon based on the historicity of human needs. Critical rea-son is no longer confined to moral agency; it becomes a sociopolitical prac-tice motivated not just by interests—for example, the idea of retribution—butprimarily by the collective needs of the human species. Jackson is applyingMarx’s method of historicizing the “species essence” of humanity alienatedin history, a humanity whose needs cannot be satisfied by the existing order;hence, the bearer of social practice—the slaves/workers—needs to destroythe oppressive order in an act of revolutionary transformation.

MODERNIZED PLANTATION

We are still far from the stage of genuine liberation envisaged by Jackson, amoment of establishing the unity of the individual and the species-essence ina realm of self-determination, the autonomy of associated producers. We arestill operating in the realm of necessity where market forces prevail, whereauthority/morality is still dictated by external forces (state, church, etc.), andwhere justice is still the formal application of reified norms and rules of thegroup to everyone regardless of manifold differences that make individualsand groups unique and incommensurable. In this context, the French philoso-pher Daniel Bensaid comments on the limits of formal justice (which under-lies the call for reparations) as one “based on actual inequality and duress . . . ,as limited and illusory as the contractual freedom of wage-laborers compelled

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to sell their labor-power to survive. . . .” He points to exploitation as “theunity of the formal justice of the purchase of labor-power and the actual in-justice of its exploitation as a commodity. This double-dealing accords withthe general duplicity of the reign of the commodity. It prolongs and repro-duces the split between use-value and exchange value, concrete labor and ab-stract labor, production and circulation” (2002, 128).

The reparations movement acquires its moral force precisely from theconviction that justice is needed so long as we remain in the realm of ne-cessity. And one of the stark evidence of this is the character of the repres-sive and unjust racial polity we inhabit, the United States as a sociopoliti-cal order of “white supremacy,” in which “whiteness is property,differential entitlement,” and racial exclusion is normative and central tothe system (Mills 1999, 29).

Robert Staples has summed up the context in which we should evaluate theappropriateness of reparation: “However one defines racism in the 1990s, thiscountry is more racially segregated and its institutions more race driven thanany country outside South Africa.” After citing massive statistical indicators,Staples concludes: “The net effect of the ‘color-blind theory’ is to institution-alize and stabilize the status quo of race relations for the twenty-first century:white privilege and black deprivation” (1993, 230–31). This may serve as anantidote to the “amnesic principle” that has depoliticized social antagonismsand neutralized the “otherness” of black power into the reifying logic of bu-reaucratic rationality and pluralist hegemony (Reed 1999).

Of all the institutitions that have distilled with painful immediacy the cu-mulative resonance of slavery and segretation for African Americans, theprison, or criminal justice, system remains unsurpassable. Angela Davis hascharacterized the U.S. justice system as a “punishment industry.” Crime orcriminalization of the poor, preponderantly blacks and latinos, becomes themasquerade behind which “race” with all its ideological ramifications “mo-bilizes old public fears and creates new ones. . . . [so that] prison is the per-fect site for the simultaneous production and concealment of racism” (1998,271). I will not rehearse in detail here the known facts of the notorious butprofitable prison-industrial system. Suffice it to mention the following: of thetwo million people in prison, African Americans comprise 47 percent whilerepresenting less than 6 percent of the population. Close to a million youngblack men suffer the exploitative regime of the modern prison industrial com-plex, where their virtually unpaid labor is coerced and extracted for corporateprofits (see Buck 1999; Davis 1998). This is not just a matter of ethnic strat-ification or status difference, as George Fredrickson (2000) and others wouldsuggest. This is a situation that resurrects the biophysics of spatio-temporalreduction imposed by slavery and segregation in the old Southern plantations,

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this time utilizing the sophisticated apparatus of bourgeois/liberal justice andits technological paraphernalia.

To convey the historic gravity of the prison system today as a proxy/surrogatefor the old plantation regime, we might cite here the prisoners’ revolt at theAttica State Correction Facility in 1971 (54% of 1200 inmates were blacks)when they failed to get even minimal relief for their grievances. After its vi-olent suppression, the government’s McKay Commission summed up theevent in these words: “With the exception of Indian massacres in the latenineteenth century, the State Police assault which ended the four-day prisonuprising was the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since theCivil War” (Hampton and Fayer 1991, 561).

FUGITIVE SOVEREIGNTY

This sense of “the return of the repressed,” of the duplicity of the passage fromslavery to the narcotic freedom of the consumer-citizen, is captured most acutelyin the writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal, journalist and activist. Charged for themurder of a police officer in 1981, Jamal has been languishing in death-row eversince. He has been widely acclaimed for his award-winning work with the As-sociation of Black Journalists, National Black Network, and other radio stations.He has distinguished himself for his powerful exposure of racial violence inPhiladelphia in the late seventies. Convicted and sentenced to death on July 3,1982, Jamal was saved from execution by the huge rallies held around the worldprotesting the Court’s refusal to acknowledge the 22 separate violations of rightsand procedures that occurred during his first trial. He remains incarcerated in themaximum-security unit in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania.

Jamal’s case has become something of a scandalous celebrity dangerous tothe Establishment. Suffice it for this occasion to quote a passage from his un-forgettable testimony, Live from Death Row, a cunning riposte to the genericslave narrative, in order to demonstrate the way in which the “middle pas-sage” of the trans-Atlantic trade is re-enacted in late-modern United States.For refusing to cut his hair as a sign of loyalty to the teachings of John Africa,a charismatic religious teacher/leader, Jamal has been placed in disciplinarycustody status. He reflects on the milieu of death row at the State CorrectionalInstitute at Huntingdon, Pennsylvania:

Life here oscillates between the banal and the bizarre.Unlike other prisoners, death row inmates are not “doing time.” Freedom

does not shine at the end of the tunnel. Rather, the end of the tunnel brings ex-tinction. Thus, for many here, there is no hope.

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. . . . All death rows share a central goal: “human storage” in an “austere worldin which condemned prisoners are treated as bodies kept alive to be killed.”Pennsylvania’s death row regime is among America’s most restrictive, rivalingthe infamous San Quentin death unit for the intensity and duration of restriction.A few states allow four, six, or even eight hours out of cell, prison employment,or even access to educational programs. Not so in the Keystone State.

Here one has little or no psychological life. Here many escape death’s om-nipresent specter only by way of common diversions—television, radio, orsports. TVs are allowed, but not type-writers: one’s energies may be expendedfreely on entertainment, but a tool essential for one’s liberation through judicialprocess is deemed a security risk. . . . (1995, 6–8)

In 1994, Jamal diagnosed with unerring scalpel the effects of incarceration:

That prisons are hotbeds of violence is undeniable, but overt expressions of vi-olence are rarely daily ones. The most profound horror of prisons lives in theday-to-day banal occurrences that turns days into months, and months intoyears, and years into decades. Prison is a second-by-second assault on the soul,a day-to-day degradation of the self, an oppressive steel and brick umbrella thattransforms seconds into hours and hours into days. While a person is lockedaway in distant netherworlds, time seems to stand still; but it doesn’t, of course.Children left outside grow into adulthood, often having children of their own.Once loving relationships wither into yesterday’s dust. Relatives die, their lossmourned in silent loneliness. Times, temperaments, mores change, and thecaged move to outdated rhythms.

Encased within a psychic cocoon of negativity, the bad get worse and feed onevil’s offal. Those who are harmed become further damaged, and the merelywarped are twisted. Empty unproductive hours morph into years of nothingness.This is the furrowed face of “corrections” in this age, where none are corrected,where none emerge better than when they came in. This is the face of “correc-tion,” which outlaws education among those who have an estimated 60 percentilliteracy rate.

The mind-numbing, soul-killing savage sameness that make each day an echoof the day before, with neither thought nor hope of growth, makes prison theabode of spirit death that it is for over a million men and women now held inU.S. hellholes. (1995, 64–65).

Unlike the traditional neoslave narratives, Jamal’s interrogates the individu-alist outlook and romantic sensibility found in conventional stories of thefugitive or runaway slave. He strives to articulate the intertwined fate of thosecondemned to solitary confinement, crossing the boundaries of race and eth-nicity to concentrate on their common subjugation, converting abject mindsand bodies into the solidarity of speaking subalterns. Jamal indicts a corruptsystem that “eats hundreds of millions of dollars a year to torture, maim, and

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mutilate tens of thousands of men and women; a system that teaches bitter-ness and hones hatred.” What makes Jamal’s prison commentaries a power-ful pedagogical instrument in mobilizing the masses to support the cause ofreparation is its emphasis on causality and the instigation of agency. In hissecond volume, Death Blossoms, Jamal asserts: “When you don’t oppose [anunjust] system, your silence becomes approval, for it does nothing to inter-rupt the system . . . Do you see law and order? There is nothing but disorder,and instead of law there is only the illusion of security. It is an illusion be-cause it is built on a long history of injustices: racism, criminality, and the en-slavement and genocide of millions. Many people say it is insane to resist thesystem, but actually, it is insane not to” (1997, 11).

In their contrapuntal affinity, Jackson and Jamal have sharpened the de-mystificatory and critical program that Du Bois first launched at the end ofthe Reconstruction as he recharted the historical trajectory of the AfricanAmerican community. Their purpose is not just the production of usefulknowledge, or the acquisition of truth, but also the preparation for ethico-po-litical action. The call for repairing a collective wrong pursues the liberalquest for justice or fairness beyond the “stigmatization of racial bias” thatRandall Kennedy (1997) celebrates in the annals of U.S. jurisprudence. Butsurely it goes beyond that in so far as it seeks to empower the majority of cit-izens to destroy the material practices, laws, habits, and institutions that re-produce the terror of racial, class, and gender injustice. In a period of waragainst “terrorists” defined by the neoimperialist state as “others” hostile toWestern beliefs and values, the demand for reparation returns us to a timewhen those “others” (captured slaves, subjugated aborigines) enabled the in-vading armies of civilization to survive and flourish. These “others” today arethe victims held in Abu Ghraib prison, the Delta Camp in Guantanamo, Cuba,and other hi-tech dungeons where suspects are tortured in order to confesstheir “crimes.” The violence of the U.S. military in Afghanistan, Iraq, Colom-bia, the Philippines, Haiti, and esewhere recapitulates in undisguised if self-righteous form the inaugural violence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and thebarbaric genocidal aggression against American Indians, Mexicans, and otherpeople of color around the world.

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER

Meanwhile, the unconfessed “crimes” of the slave trade, colonial domination,segregation, and more subtle forms of subjugation have never been properlyaddressed in a world court or international tribunal. The millions who havesuffered injury, loss, or wrong at the hands of white supremacist capital remain

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crippled by the experience, co-opted and silenced, quarantined and repressed.The instrumentalities bequeathed by the past continue to inflict damage thatrequires redress and the enforcement of justice—the fair distribution of goods,not just amends or apology for a minor grievance. What is possible for citizenswith rights in the liberal order is “restitution,” the act of returning to the right-ful owner (the oppressed group) what has been taken illegally in violation ofmarket rules. What is needed is indemnity, a reimbursement for loss or dam-age caused by a series of unjust acts. We are concerned here with social jus-tice within a racial polity, a regime of unequal groups. But if a group catego-rized as a “race” or “minority” is not treated equally as the rest, then we facethe problem that Du Bois, Jackson and Jamal faced, namely, the problem ofthe racial polity that denies substantive freedom and purposeful life to the ma-jority of citizens, not just to the African American constituency.

Thus far we have confined ourselves to justice as the attribute of actions,not of persons. This is because the cry for reparation concerns a situation ora state of affairs structured by a history of actions, not of psyches or person-alities. We are not engaged in conflating justice with virtue, as Aristotle andclassical ethics would insist. On the other hand, we are not utilitarians whofocus only on consequences because, in the ultimate analysis, equality or theexchange of equal values as it occurs in the realm of necessity—in the arenaof class-divided society—has to give way to the transcending primacy of hu-man needs in a possible realm of freedom when classes have been abolished,work is no longer alienating but pleasurable, and material abundance obtainsfor all. To expedite that transition analyzed by Du Bois, the passage from var-ious forms of unfreedom, we need to advance the struggle for the recognitionof collective rights, here those of African Americans as a symbolic part of thetotality. Any act to compensate, redress, or indemnify the African Americancommunity will only be a first step toward that transformation of the statusquo which Jamal evokes in a 1996 interview in prison when he observed howAfrican Americans moved out of de-facto segregation and slavery in responseto Fredrick Douglass’ teaching that “Power concedes nothing without a de-mand.” Within this frame of intelligibility and solidarity, we can appraise thedemand for reparations as the initial catalyzing move of a long over-due pop-ular-democratic challenge to the inhumanity of corporate Power.

In the 1960s, Malcolm X called on African Americans to invoke the issueof human rights in order to escape the repressive juridical boundaries of theU.S. nation-state. Since the domain of civil rights was chiefly controlled bywhite supremacists, it was futile to appeal solely to the hegemonic institutionsof the racial polity. Full substantive equality cannot be guaranteed by the sim-ple assumption of formal citizenship, Malcolm X implied (Asad 2003, 142).

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Rectifying the effects of slavery, together with the full restoration of in-alienable human rights, requires adjudication by a court or judge other thanthe U.S. state that enforced slavery and, after its abolition, has continued tosanction and prolong its dehumanizing consequences.

It is clear then that neither moral conciliation, electoral representation, ortherapeutic integration can fully resolve a fundamental conflict embedded inthe larger socio-historical context of power and social justice. Any resolutionwould require a new agency, using legal persuasion and force, to carry out theterms of the settlement, the binding decision, of this historic dispute. To besure, the enforcement of this mode of justice requires truth or reasonableness(Golding 1975, 122), objectivity, impartiality, rationality in procedures,weighing of evidence, etc. But the substantive question of equality and in-equality, and how to discriminate between them, is basically a political ques-tion (Golding 1975). Ultimately, the politics of reparations concerns whatkind of good, caring society we want to prevail—the “joinder of issue,” in le-gal parlance. Engaging the global problem of the “good society” embodyingand universalizing the principles of justice and equality, the politics of repa-ration returns us once again to two heuristic insights: W.E.B. Du Bois’ con-ception of the “Negro problem” as “a local phase of a world problem” (Horne2003, 79–80); and Malcolm X’s conviction that “colonialism or imperialism,the international power structure,” is primarily responsible for oppressing“the masses of dark-skinned peoples all over the world” (Collins 1992, 73).Indeed, the issue is joined in ways that connect the local and global, afford-ing multilevel dialogue among diverse peoples, traditions, and cultures thatneoliberal capitalist globalization today continues to prey upon, commodify,and enslave.

Entering the site of dialogue requires us to re-examine again the nature ofethnicity and its symbolic articulations with other forces in order to shed lighton its role in influencing the outcome of hegemonic and counter-hegemonicconfrontations.

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Because the significance of ethnicity has become so controversial in publicexchanges today that it is necessary to re-inscribe it in the field of culturalstudies for rigorous scrutiny. For this purpose, we need the pedagogical me-diation of Antonio Gramsci. Probably one of the most important seminal re-sults arising from the recent revaluation of Gramsci’s thought may be foundin the conceptualization of an interdisciplinary realm of inquiry linking thetraditional humanities and the social sciences, the discipline of cultural stud-ies. However varied, amorphous and shifting the current approaches in thisfield may strike the conformist thinker, they all converge on Gramsci’s basicinsight that the full understanding of social phenomena depends on theoriz-ing their historical specificity in the thickness and density of any given soci-ety and culture. Historical specification requires that any conjuncture orcross-section of life be analyzed as concretely as possible, concreteness beinga function of the multiple determinations that reciprocally interact and sooverdetermine each other, marking what Gramsci calls an ethico-politicalcatharsis, “the decisive passage from the structure to the spheres of the com-plex superstructures” (1971, 180–81). This is the crucial leap in dialecticalmaterialism. In describing this passage from the obligatory parameters ofMarxist theory, the economic “base” or production relations, to the ethico-po-litical and ideological complex where human beings become conscious oftheir contradictions and begin to fight them out, Gramsci stresses the need fora multilayered, dynamic mode of analyzing the balance of relations of socialforces, their tempos and trajectories, at any given period, focusing in particu-lar on circumstances defined in long-range and short-range terms.

Gramsci’s organon of truth is a radical historicism sensitive to the dialecticalinterplay of textures and structures. Gramsci argued for theorizing the social for-mation as a subtly differentiated whole. This designates a historically-defined

Chapter Four

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totality structured by mutually interacting levels of articulation of economic,political and ideological instances leading to different combinations, eachcombination spelling a unique configuration of social forces with its singulartype of social development, political struggle, etc. (This demand for “con-creteness” has been proposed by Marx in his 1857 introduction to the Grun-drisse and elaborated by succeeding thinkers like Althusser and Balibar inReading Capital.) There is no predetermined telos or objective law of neces-sity governing any of the levels or their interdependence. Given this histori-cally determinate notion of social formation, Gramsci reconceived politics asa strategic (historicist and programmatic at the same time) mapping of his-toric possibilities in which the subject, the historical agent (the intellectual,for example, as theoretician of ethnicity), participates as a factor in the move-ment for conjunctural and organic social change. Theory becomes a materialforce in social practice. Politics, thus, is no longer a mechanical, positivist re-flection of changes in the mode of production, the economic base. Rather, itis a mode of articulating the various levels toward the hegemony—the intel-lectual, moral and philosophical ascendancy—of a social bloc with its ownagenda of social reconstitution. In the struggle for hegemony, the site of cul-ture—more precisely, the national-popular dimension of social practicesranging from systematized beliefs (religion) to common sense—becomes thearena of struggle. This arena serves as the space of that “decisive passage”earlier referred to where subjectivity becomes problematized, where thecatharsis of the economic to the political transpires.

Within this historicizing but not relativistic perspective, Gramsci charts thenew relations of social forces in the modern world. Modernity encompassesthe period after 1870 and “the colonial expansion of Europe,” when new com-plex forms of transaction between state and civil society emerged, with theunprecedented elaboration in the structure and processes of “civil hegemony”appearing, to Gramsci, as “resistant to the catastrophic ‘incursions’ of the im-mediate economic element. While civil society remains the space of multipleinscriptions of subjectivity, the text of indeterminacy and difference, the mod-ern state serves as the point of condensation of this variety of relations andpractices into a definite “system of rule” founded on a system of alliances.This now hegemonic social bloc evolving therefrom harbors contradictorystructures that reflect the divergent tendencies in “the civilization and moral-ity of the broadest masses.” This schema of a dialectical interaction betweenstate and civil society foregrounds the primacy of culture and ideology ingeneral as the site where the intellectual and ethical unity of individuals andgroups as the prerequisite for forging hegemony can be realized. Premised onthe basic instability of “common sense”—a palimpsest of texts without an inventory—and the contradictory tendencies of various practices comprising

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civil society, whatever hegemony is achieved can thus only be temporary.Hegemony is always vulnerable to oppositional challenges. This is becauseideology—all cultural practices including art and literature—is a complex,highly differentiated discursive formation, a terrain of diffused and fracturedtendencies locked in conflict, so that the subject of ideological articulation isnever a unified, self-identical, permanently coherent class subject but is a lo-cus of multiple energies and actions circumscribed only by the possibilities ofthe historic conjuncture.

I single out Stuart Hall’s interpretation of Gramsci’s concept of hegemonyas the most applicable for this discussion. Hegemony, for Hall, is not “a mo-ment of simple unity, but a process of unification (never totally achieved),founded on strategic alliances between different sectors, not on their pre-given identity” (1986, 7). And because there is no automatic correspondencebetween economic, political and ideological practices, we can begin to ex-plain “how ethnic and racial difference can be constructed as a set of eco-nomic, political or ideological antagonisms, within a class which is subject toroughly similar forms of exploitation with respect to ownership of and ex-propriation from the ‘means of production’” (1986, 12). In this context,Gramsci conceives culture as a historically fabricated terrain where cate-gories of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and other forces intersect. Thus thesubject or subject-position (the monadic agent of thought and action) thatcontending cultural processes work on to identify or fix cannot but be a con-tradictory and composite subject. The subject is a social construction in-scribed in a complex genealogy of incompatibles consisting of “Stone Age el-ements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all pastphases of history . . . and intuitions of a future philosophy” (1971, 324). Be-cause the identification of subjects and their social positioning occur in allstages of cultural-ideological mobilization, it is imperative for any socialforce aspiring for hegemony to grasp the precise value of the culturally spe-cific elements—ethnic, racial, gender, religion, etc.—that coalesce in the for-mation of classes, elements whose articulation constitute the historically dif-ferentiated and specific forms of labor guaranteeing the accumulation processin the regime of capital.

SPECULATIVE COORDINATES

Ever since the inauguration of sociology in the 19th century as a disciplineaddressing the historic challenges to the precarious situation of bourgeoishegemony from 1848 to 1917 and the 1930s depression, questions of cultureand ideology have been subsumed in the concern for maintaining consensus

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(Comte), organic solidarity (Durkheim), and cohesion through an ideologicalcommunity (Weber). Goran Therborn has cogently demonstrated how classi-cal sociology arose as a response to the inadequacies of liberal political econ-omy in solving what we now call the legitimation crisis of laissez-faire capi-talism (1980, 219–315). A characteristic response was to conceive of themarket as a sphere controlled and regulated by values and norms, the “moralmilieu” of Durkheim or the collective will and representations (Sumner’s“folkways” or mores) of Park and Burgess.

It was Weber’s theory, however, that (through the help of Parsons and Mer-ton) eventually set down the coordinates for theorizing the significance ofethnicity and race in mainstream cultural studies. Weber conceived the mar-ket as a constellation of individuals each rationally calculating availablemeans to acquire goods to satisfy his needs; this prudent self-interested “ra-tional choice” may be seen to derive from a particular historical system ofvalues embodied in cultural institutions and is not simply dictated by com-pulsive market mechanisms. For Weber, the system of common values andnorms underlying self-interest made up the social pattern of determination,the ideological community. Like Durkheim, Weber focused on value-integra-tion and normative regulation to endow the market with rationality and main-tain the harmonious operations of bourgeois society. From this functionalistperspective, racial conflict then becomes a problem of integration and assim-ilation of minorities (out-group) in a social system with a widely shared sys-tem of common values (see Berting 1980). Park’s race-relations cycle and itslatter-day versions, the “melting pot” metaphor; Parson’s evolutionary notionof adaptive upgrading; Kallen’s cultural pluralism; multi-cultural diversity—all these proposals to resolve the dysfunctional effects of a free market econ-omy hinge on the need to affirm “the integrity of a common cultural orienta-tion” defined not by rational argumentation of various interest groups butpresumably by a previous settlement, an earlier negotiated compromise, onthe hierarchical distribution of power.

Completed by the end of the first systemic crisis of global capitalism, andits interrogation by Robert K. Merton—see his “Discrimination and theAmerican Creed” (1977), Gunnar Myrdal’s study An American Dilemma(1944) marked the phasing out of the norm-centered paradigm, a cultural sys-tem in constant equilibrium. Merton’s commentary is useful here. While stillbound by the premises of a methodological individualism rooted in the utili-tarian tradition, Merton calls our attention to the relations individual actorsform in the context of communities (hence the possibility of amelioratingracist discrimination by policy regulations), not the social system where alter(the other) encounters ego (the self or subject). Despite their differences, bothMerton and Talcott Parsons reject any Hegelian notion of totality that would

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approximate Gramsci’s conception of society as a concretely differentiatedwhole, a contradictory synchronic-diachronic articulation of multiple prac-tices. Bound by the problematic of self-interest (where the choosing subjectdefines the meaning of social action) and of normative unity as the unques-tioned “social fact”—the axioms of the twin reductionist poles of economismand humanism, traditional sociology is unable to comprehend the Marxianconcept of practice as collective processes of transformation occurring di-alectically on the interacting economic, political and ideological levels.

The social upheavals of the thirties following the collapse of the laissez-faire market forced the humanities and social science disciplines to rethinkthe almost unlimited determinism ascribed to social norms and to revise the“oversocialized conception” of individuals in the light of conflict theory. Withthe withdrawal of the European powers from the colonies, the saliency ofracial antagonisms and the resurgence of revolutionary nationalism in the“third world” (now the global South) defied the technocratic assumptions ofliberal-humanist apologetics. With the freezing of the Cold War in the frame-work of “peaceful coexistence” after the Korean War and the onset of theCivil Rights struggles of the sixties, a new demand to assert the hegemony ofthe free enterprise system required the invention of new ways to reach a com-promise with the unruly subalterns. A new method of pacification (exclusionor marginalization) had to be invented and deployed. Without renouncingtheir metaphysics of individualism, proponents of ethnomethodology andsymbolic interactionism replaced the “normative paradigm” with an “inter-pretative” one designed to register the plurality of ways by which dominantvalues and norms are internalized and operationalized in everyday practice.

It is at this point where Weber’s notion of explanatory understanding (Ver-stehen) based on grasping the subjective meaning behind actors’ behavior pro-vides the impetus for Fredrik Barth’s influential theory of ethnic identity as amatter of socially constructed boundaries, not an ontological and primordialfact. What is essential in defining ethnicity are the practices and processes en-gaged in by social actors in specific situations: Barth states that “ethnic groupsare categories of ascription and identification by the actors themselves” (1969,10). Three points may be underscored in this analytical model: first, ethnicityappears only when boundaries are maintained between “us” and “them,” a sit-uation self-interpreted by the actors involved; second, ethnic identity dependsupon ascription by those inside and those outside; and third, ethnicity is notfixed but situationally defined, influenced by ecological or market factors,with the criteria of the boundary changing according to the needs of group or-ganizing. Given this interpretive approach, it is not difficult to explain why theentry on “Concepts of Ethnicity” by William Petersen in the Harvard Ency-clopedia of American Ethnic Groups betrays both an eclectic indeterminacy

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and homogenizing hubris, a latitude of self-interpretation permitting the viewthat the “black subculture” can be considered “an immigrant way of life withsignificant transfers from Africa” and that American Indians, with the declineof tribal units, will become a new ethnic group “based ostensibly on culturalremnants that its members half-recall, but more fundamentally on the benefitsobtainable from today’s ethnic politics”(240)—Leonard Peltier and survivorsof the siege of Wounded Knee, take note!

NEW BEARINGS

We can observe more clearly the allochronic distortions and excesses thatBarth’s theory can generate in the writings of Werner Sollors. Sollor’s eruditethesis in Beyond Ethnicity centers on the proposition that “ethnic groups inthe United States have relatively little cultural differentiation, that the culturalcontent of ethnicity . . . is largely interchangeable and rarely historically au-thenticated” (1986, 28). Stressing the psychological strategies of contrastiveand dissociative behavior, “outsiderism” and “self-exoticization” that anyonecan arbitrarily deploy, Sollors concurs with Parson’s notation on the “optionaland voluntary component of ethnic identification” (1986, 35). By a singlestroke, ethnic groups suddenly become ghostly, floating monads under thepressure of universalistic (read: Anglo white) norms. Sollors discounts “race”as merely one aspect of ethnicity, with slavery construed as one extreme formof social boundary “constructed between people who considered themselvesfull human beings” (1986, 37). Denying historical concreteness, Sollors isthus forced to resort to paradoxical, even antinomic, formulations when hedefines liberal bourgeois ideology as “consent at the expense of descent def-initions” for individuals and groups, an achieved rather than ascribed identity,that nevertheless allowed slavery and segregation (descent-based exclusion orinferiorization) as integral elements in the constitution of “American Excep-tionalism” (Kaplan and Pease 1993).

In demarcating the space for theorizing his notion of ethnogenesis, Sollorsprivileges the culture of the dominant white majority, centered on New Eng-land Puritanism, as the typological matrix of ethnic expression (40–65). Ifethnicity functions as a symbolic construct that evokes blood, nature, descentwhile national identity springs from “the order of law, conduct, and consent”(151), then it follows that the racialist rhetoric of Dubois—in “On the Con-servation of Races” which Sollors cites as an example of Royce’s notion of“wholesome provincialism”—occupies a dubious if not inferior rank. Withethnic boundary-making as a ludic maneuver accessible to everyone whoseeks to affirm a particular distinction vis-a-vis the Other, no wonder every

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writer can be denominated “ethnic.” “Ethnic” then becomes the premium as-similationist password. It functions as the vehicle of a modernizing, mono-lithic, all-encompassing world-spirit that happens to be domiciled in theNorth American continent. This conforms aptly with the universalizing proj-ect of modernist art—except that when the book was being written, U.S. im-perial power had just suffered an unprecedented defeat in IndoChina and wasthen retooling itself for new interventions in Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador,Grenada, Panama, as well as in the Middle East (Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan),Iran, the Philippines, Venezuela, and elsewhere.

Sollors concludes that ethnicity has been transcended with the attainmentof consensus, “a shared sense of destiny,” American nationalism as “transna-tionalism”: “The language of consent and descent has been flexibly adaptedto the most diverse kinds of ends and has amazingly helped to create a senseof Americanness among the heterogeneous inhabitants of the country” (1986,259). But it is difficult to accept the equation of a “sense of Americanness,”however this is defined, with the skillful manipulation of formal rhetoricalstrategies such as “boundary-constructing antithesis, biblically derived con-structions of chosen peoplehood, . . . regionalist ethics and generational think-ing” and the entire repertoire that Barth’s theory enables. In fact Sollor’s priv-ileging of American “revivalist standards” and his conflation of late capitalistmodernism with ethnicization tend to infiltrate a substantialist or essentialistapriorism that logically contradicts his analytic formalist method.

Another example of inconsistency may be instructive. When Sollors at-tacks critics of the standard sexist, racist and elitist literary canon in “A Cri-tique of Pure Pluralism” for reproducing the antinomies and inconsistenciesof Horace Kallen’s doctrine of “cultural pluralism,” and for endorsing “sec-tarian and fragmented histories of American literatures (in the plural) insteadof American literary history,” he betrays a will to knowledge/power thatposits only two alternatives: the modernist dogma of American “cultural syn-cretism” espoused in Beyond Ethnicity, or the chaos of ethnic relativism dis-guised as the “cultural pluralism” of a black nationalist. Sollors equates “theethnic perspective” proposed by a MELUS contributor with the emphasis ona writer’s descent in contrast to the polyethnic art movements pervading U.S.consumer society. The group-by-group approach traceable in, for example,the Heath anthology of American Literature edited by Paul Lauter, would beflawed—for Sollors—by its unhistorical accounts “held together by static no-tions of rather abstractly and homogeneously conceived ethnic groups,” lead-ing to ethnic insiders claiming authority for being what they are, instead ofjust “readers of texts” (“A Critique” 256).

In a fairly latitudinarian spirit, Sollors then tries to advocate what he calls“an openly transethnic procedure that aims for conceptual generalizations and

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historicity.” He demonstrates this in attempting to genealogize Kallen’s no-tion of “cultural pluralism.” But Kallen is not, to be sure, an African-Ameri-can, Chicano, American Indian or Asian American. It is clear that Sollor’s ex-emplum illustrating the “dynamic nature of ethnogenesis” cannot afford usany insight into the historic predicament of racialized victims, peoples ofcolor, who are still engaged in the praxis of writing and living their histories.By insisting that American literature can be made “recognizable as a produc-tive force that may Americanize and ethnicize readers, listeners and culturalparticipants” if we follow his method, Sollors privileges a model of transeth-nic hermeneutics—he cites Boelhower’s Through a Glass Darkly: EthnicSemiosis in American Literature (1984) and Mary Dearborn’s Pocahontas’Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture (1985) as examples. Itis questionable whether his approach can grasp the aesthetic and cultural sig-nificance of Frederick Douglass’ Narrative, or H. Scott Momaday’s The Wayto Rainy Mountain, among others, as politically substantive discourses ofpopular resistance. Just as Sollor’s paradigm cannot register the nuances ofcounter-hegemonic subversion when African Americans utilize the formsborrowed from the dominant culture to advance their emancipatory goals, soit cannot do justice to the critique of atomized, market-oriented individualismoffered by Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (seeSollors 1990). One cannot help but suspect that what Sollors really wants isto expunge the term “ethnicity” from the critical lexicon and substitute theWeltliteratur of “Manifest Destiny” under the aegis of triumphalist Eurocen-trism.

In general, the practitioners of ethnicity theory applied to cultural studieslabor under the limitation of an instrumentalizing metaphysics that fragmentsand reifies its objects of study. Within this framework, they can only repro-duce the inadequacies of a problematique of resolving the practical antino-mies of commodity production—the disjunction of purpose and activity, ex-change and use, etc.—by idealizing a unity of bipolar boundaries thatconceals internal ruptures, conflicts, divisions on all levels. By positing eth-nicity as a transactional process open to manipulation, and concentrating onthe self-perceptions and self-interpretations of the actors, the ethnicity theo-rists seek to thwart the dangers of determinism and ethnocentrism that vitiatethe study of inter-group relations. However, as Richard Jenkins has pointedout, ethnicity theory cannot escape its major shortcomings with its ethical andpolicy implications. Aside from tending to reify ethnic groups as corporateentities, it cannot distinguish the ethnic from the racial; consequently, it ig-nores power imbalances since racism occurs in situations of domination andsubordination (1986, 176–77). The everyday reality of racist oppression andexploitation for millions of people are bracketed, or explained away. In his

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philosophically idealist criterion for determining ethnicity, Barth’s theory ig-nores power imbalance in structures and takes for granted the prevailing con-sensus of power that defines unilateral exchange. Paine points out that Barth’snotion of exchange is based more on complementarily (master and slave re-lation) than on reciprocity or mutuality (1974, 8). Barth’s theory is obliviousto the racial oppression that occurs in the “pre-established matrix of statuses”sanctioned by the normative market morality of maximizing self-interest.This limits the range of possible transactions, of alleged reciprocal ex-changes, with persisting differences presumably suspended since the theorydoes not examine the differences in values of the transactors negotiating theboundaries (Moore 1989; Rex 1986).

Not only does ethnicity theory disregard race but it also muddles its differ-ence and similarity with class. While ethnicity is supposed to be deemed a so-cial resource, it can also stigmatize when it explains the failings of ethnic mi-norities in terms of their orientations, values and goals. Banton (1987) for hispart has attempted to correct these shortcomings: he suggests that individualsuse cultural and physical difference to create groups by the process of inclu-sion and racial categories by the process of exclusion. It is the act of racialcategorization that foregrounds power relations, whether one group can im-pose its categories of ascription upon another group and what resources thecategorized collectivity can draw upon to resist that ascription. But when webegin to deal with collective subjects and their positioning in a decentered,asymmetrically structured whole, we are already confronted with distinctionsof “class in itself” (categorization of individuals) and “class for itself” (groupidentification). The phenomenon of power imbalance across ethnic bound-aries cannot be accommodated to the ethnicity paradigm except when itmakes a provision for racial categorization: a categorical identity, based onpurported inherent and unalterable differences signifying inferiority, is im-posed by one group on another in the process of subjugation, colonization,conquest, occupation, and so on. This is the area of racial antagonism thatother mainstream sociologists—for example, Louis Wirth (1945) in his con-ceptualization of the minority group and Pierre van den Berghe (1978) in hisdistinction between paternalistic and competitive race relations—have triedto explore and problematize further by going beyond the paradigm of ethnicboundary construction.

POPULIST NUANCE

One of the more persuasive critiques of the ethnicity paradigm employed inliterary hermeneutics and ethico-political judgment is that drawn up by Alan

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Wald. In his essay “The Culture of ‘Internal Colonialism’: A Marxist Per-spective,” Wald lays out his premise by summarizing the findings of previousempirical researches by Blauner and Barrera among others: “colonized mi-norities differ from the European immigrant ethnic minorities in at least threerespects: historically, the colonized minorities were incorporated into the na-tion by force and violence (for example, as slaves kidnapped from Africa oras the population of a territory that was invaded by outsiders); economically,the colonized minorities became special segments of the work force (for ex-ample, as chattel or immigrant laborers); and culturally, the colonized mi-norities were subject to repression and misrepresentation on a scale surpass-ing the experience of any European ethnic immigrant group in the UnitedStates (for example, the extirpation of African languages and religions, andthe banning of certain Native American Indian religions)” (1981, 21). By con-flating the two concretely disparate experiences of white European immi-grants and the colonized—slavery (Africans), colonization (Chicanos),racially based exclusion (Chinese, Filipinos), genocidal pacification (NativePeoples), forced relocation (Japanese Americans)—the ethnicity school per-petrated a pseudo-universalism that in effect gutted the progressive gains ofthe Civil Rights movement in the conservative Reagan era and its sequel.

Dissociating himself from the chauvinist nationalist movements of the six-ties (with which this “internal colonialism” approach is erroneously allied),Wald invokes Frantz Fanon’s and Amilcar Cabral’s dialectical strategy of na-tional liberation. He offers Leslie Silko’s novel Ceremony as an instructivemodel whose perspicuity and vision lies in its discrimination between ritual,in “which the false lessons of history are simply re-enacted, and ‘ceremony,’a praxis-like activity in which a consciously controlled creative act restoreshumanity to its correct relation to the world” (1981, 26). In a recent essay“Theorizing Cultural Difference: A Critique of the ‘Ethnicity School,’“ Waldrecapitulates the fundamental principle of demarcating “between the experi-ence of people of color and the European ethnic immigrants in the mode andconsequences of their incorporation into the social formation, and their sub-sequent treatment” (1987, 23). Race, not ethnicity, becomes the central ana-lytic category; race construed as a social (not just cultural) construct some-times underpinned by a mythology of color, an ideology of racistsuper-exploitation. In recapitulating the theory of internal colonialism, Waldemphasizes the levels of historically interlaced determinations pertinent tounderstanding the social construction of race: origin, occupation, Americanapartheid, religion, culture, and history of the U.S. social formation.

Actually Wald’s materialist critique of doctrinaire ethnicism is not an en-tirely new approach since early students of race relations and ethnic stratifi-cation from Oliver Cox (a critic of the sociology of race-as-caste) and

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E. Franklin Frazier to Wirth, Schermerhorn, Blalock, Rex and others have ac-corded due weight to racial factors in the context of anti-colonial struggles(especially in South Africa) before and after World War II. The impact of his-torical circumstances on theory can be exemplified by the way Roger Danielsand Harry Kitano, in American Racism: Exploration of the Nature of Preju-dice (published in 1970; the subtitle is perhaps a counterpoint to the empiri-cal study of racial prejudice by Theodor Adorno and his colleagues, The Au-thoritarian Personality, 1950), try to apply their two-category stratificationmodel by making boundary-maintenance or permeability contingent on rela-tively weighted criteria such as color (as racial signifier), numbers, national-ity, religion, political ideology, culture, and marginality. Later commentarieslike Stanley Lieberson’s A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrantssince 1880 (1980) and Stephen Steinberg’s The Ethnic Myth (1981), to citejust two titles, explicitly contend against the lack of historical concreteness inthe “abstracted empiricism” and subjectivist formalism of the ethnicityschool.

In any case Wald qualifies his earlier view. Noting that the “internal colo-nialism” analogy foregrounds the economic and cultural exploitation of peo-ples of color as part of the general development of western colonialism, herecommends its improvement by adopting a comparative approach—insteadof the serial cataloguing to which Sollors objects—and addressing the issuesof class and gender founded on the recognition that “the components of aclass are produced historically and may be comprised of different genders anddiverse races” (1987, 24). Valorizing the text-specific critical practice of suchcritics as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Houston Baker, this materialist perspec-tive pursues the Gramscian research program I mentioned earlier in whichmultiple determinants of a complexly structured formation need to be articu-lated in a historic conjuncture in order to disclose its hegemonic specificity.By “hegemonic specificity,” I mean the sense of totality that allows the sub-ject, the historical agent of change, to intervene in realigning the iniquitouspositioning of social forces. Wald imputes this sense of concrete totality to awider notion of “class” that, as orientation for cultural studies, implies “redi-recting the study of U.S. cultural formation away from myths, themes, sym-bols, and elitist networks—all symptomatic, not causal, elements—and fo-cusing more precisely on conquest and invasion, capital accumulation,urbanization, colonial and imperial expansion, and late capitalism, as theframework that nurtures and limits the context in which active agents createculture” (1987, 30).

Except for the peremptory dismissal of symbolic exchange as merely“symptomatic,” a vestige of the mechanical base-superstructure logic of vul-gar Marxism, I agree with Wald’s position. To recapitulate his thesis: the

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conceptualization of “American Culture,” or for that matter, American iden-tity, nation or society, entails the forcing of a premature methodological unitythat can only serve to reinforce and intensify the present relations of domina-tion and oppression that has marginalized numerous cultures and obliteratedfrom our concerns the ineluctable contradictions of class and race. Wald’s callfor a dialectical re-thinking of racial difference implies a challenge to thehegemony of Eurocentric world-views whose disciplinary imperialism hasthrived on the continuous reproduction of subalternity status for the majorityof the human species. This is not just a triumphalist affirmation of difference,of Otherness as a gesture of radical solidarity, but a beginning stage of a re-search programme that would articulate complex cultural wholes within theparameters of a stratified world-system of global capital undergoing perma-nent crisis—one symptom of this is the current U.S. war on terrorism.

The last phrase might evoke for some the parallel or supplementary inves-tigations of Immanuel Wallerstein and cognate theories of dependency. WhatI have in mind is the old-style historical-comparative analysis of the rise ofthe world market and the conflictive relations between the metropolitan in-dustrial powers and the peripheral colonies made by Harry Braverman,Gabriel Kolko, and others. A useful textbook synopsis can be found in EricR. Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History whose historical charting ofethnic segmentation not only undercuts the not-so-disinterested antithesis be-tween the culturally homogeneous European modern nations and the hetero-geneous societies of the “third world,” but also argues that ethnicity theorywrongly ascribes explanatory power to cultural difference when this differ-ence itself is generated by the organization and mobilization of the laborprocess itself. Racial designations like “Indian” or “Negro” are valorized ashierarchic markers or devices of categorization to rank workers in the world-wide scale of labor markets, segmenting workers, stigmatizing some to lowerlevels (the underclass, the “truly disadvantaged”) and insulating the higherechelons from competition from below. Racial categorization homogenizesby negating cultural and physical differences within subject populations andthus effectively denies their political, ideological and economic identity.

Wolf thus gives us a historical-materialist appraisal of the exclusionaryfunction of racial categories within industrial capitalism, usually excludingpeoples of color from all but the lower echelons of the industrial labor force;whereas, ethnic categories serve to express “the ways that particular popula-tions come to relate themselves to given segments of the labor market.” Wolfconcludes that ethnicity is not a “primordial” or biologically given social re-lations; ethnic groups are conceived as “historical products of labor marketsegmentation under the capitalist mode” (1982, 381). Wallerstein’s observa-tions about the ‘ethnicization’ of community life, the world’s work force, in

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the period he designates as “historical capitalism” also makes the point thatthe conceptualization of race and ethnicity cannot be theorized cogently apartfrom the historical vicissitudes of capital accumulation. Institutional racism,one of capitalism’s ideological pillars, was used to regulate the relations be-tween various segments of the work force by socializing/reproducing groupsinto their assigned roles, fashioning expectations and limiting them: “Racismwas the ideological justification for the hierarchization of the work-force andits highly unequal distributions of reward. What we mean by racism is that setof ideological statements combined with that set of continuing practiceswhich have had the consequence of maintaining a high correlation of ethnic-ity and work-force allocation over time” (1983, 78). While color or physiol-ogy offered itself as the “scientific” tag in the course of the development ofphysical anthropology, racial typology and Darwinian evolutionary thinkingin the nineteenth century, Wallerstein maintains that the volatility of anygiven group’s boundaries (whether drawn up by color or other phenotypicalmarkers) is a function of “the persistence of an overall hierarchy of groups,”the ongoing ethnicization of the global army of labor.

Using the universalizing claims of Barth’s theory of ethnicization as “aform of boundary-construction” where cultural differentiation is erased, Sol-lors’ Beyond Ethnicity ignores the global historical formation of ethnic groupsor peoples traced by Wallerstein, Wolf, and others. Sollors has elaborated aformalist theory of ethnicity—formalist, it seems, because it dismisses thehistorical specificity of various peoples’ differential incorporation into U.S.society—that actually privileges the European immigrant experience as thearchetypal mold for peoples of color, including Native Americans. He con-tends, for example, that “Afro-American peoplehood could be fashioned . . .with the help of the same typological materials that were used to naturalizenational identity” (1986, 59). This contradicts outright the efforts of criticslike Baker and Gates to found a vernacular Black poetics on the conjuncturaland organic thickness of their peoples’ histories. A symptomatic aporia, how-ever, decenters Sollor’s synthesizing blueprint. As I have shown earlier, hisprivileging of American “revivalist standards” and his conflation of capitalistmodernism with ethnicization reinforce an idealist tendency in his argumentthat logically undermines his claim to historical veracity.

POSTMODERNIST RESCUE

In a synoptic account of the transition from modernity to a postmodern epoch,“Postmodernism; or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (now expandedinto a book with the same title), Fredric Jameson explores the mutations of

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expressive forms as homologous reflections of global changes in contempo-rary life. He demarcates three stages of capitalist expansion: market capital-ism (the growth of industrial capital and early nation-states from the 17th to18th century), monopoly capitalism or imperialism (19th century up to 1945),and multinational consumer capitalism (from 1945 on). The last one is “thepurest form of capital yet to have emerged” (1984, 78). What distinguishesthe postmodern condition is the pervasive commodification of everything, inparticular, the modality of representation as such that involves not only cul-ture but all social and economic practices. In short, everything is transformedinto exchange value, quantified for circulation, in the period of globalizing,transnational capitalism.

Within this framework, Jameson describes the crisis of representation inmodernism, the separation of the sign from its referent, as an effect of alien-ation and reification. All social relations are reduced to inert objects, fetishes(money, commodities) hiding everyday people-to-people relations. The self-identical subject, the reason-endowed Cartesian ego, of liberal thought is in-terrogated and problematized. One dimension of this crisis can be witnessedin the colonization of culture itself—art and mass media, information andknowledge, the private sphere or the unconscious—by capital; the reificationof social relations initiated in the early stage of capitalism spreads to con-taminate discourse and language, hence the divorce of sign and referent thatallows the disruption of critique and utopian extrapolation. Jameson pursuesthe spread of reification in postmodernist culture when capital relieves signsof all referential function, occupies all autonomous spaces, and permits onlya “pure and random play of signifiers.” This new style of pastiche andschizoid collage “ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, thebuilding blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new andheightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other books, metatextswhich collate bits of other texts” (1982, 222). Postmodernist spectacle, inti-mations of the sublime, simulacra, then become the locus of the crisis wherethe play of fragmented and ephemeral intensities, ruptures of synchronic anddiachronic sequences, may be read as symptoms of the quest for symboliccapital: new identities in fashion, localism, religious revivals, myths. Ethnic-ity here enters as one furniture from a lost primordial era of representationrescued, overhauled and remodeled to serve the needs of a new posthumanistscience to be founded on the rubble of the old metanarratives and “grand the-ories.” Post-colonial scholasticism is another form of rubble salvaging.

Another instance may be found in Michael Fischer’s essay “Ethnicity andthe Post-Modern Arts of Memory.” To revitalize the practice of ethnographyas a mode of cultural criticism, Fischer appeals to ethnic autobiography andautobiographical fiction whose resolutions “tend toward a pluralistic univer-

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salism, a textured sense of being American.” Of course Fischer subscribes tothe pervasiveness of a postmodernist ideology in ethnic writing. Bakhtin’snotion of heteroglossia becomes the new organon of emergent resistance writ-ing. Fischer celebrates this new mode of textuality shown by Black, Chicano,Native American and Asian American artists when they utilize formal tech-niques such as “bifocality or reciprocity of perspectives, juxtapositioning ofmultiple realities, intertextuality and inter-referentiality, and comparisonthrough families of resemblance “(1986, 230). These tactics of postmodernistwriting are meant to reconcile the twin currents of universalism and particu-larism in modernist thinking and afford “an ethical device attempting to acti-vate in the reader a desire for communitas with others, while preserving ratherthan effacing differences” (1986, 232–33). But all these innovations in gen-erating personality-centered explorations of ethnic identity, which are paral-leled by other non-ethnics in the cultural spectrum, are meant for Fisher todemonstrate and reinforce “the tolerance and pluralism of American society,”not to transform power relations or the hierarchical order of priorities. Thispostmodernist strategy of contriving a fetish of the unified but equivocal self,reborn in the womb of ethnic inter-reference but still operating within thehegemonic system of exchange value, harnesses the capacity of ethnic writ-ers to forge a moral vision through a modernized Pythagorean arts of mem-ory. Ethnic memory is invoked to restore the “public enactments of tradition”and “ritual and historical rootedness” gutted by a commodity/consumerist so-ciety. Ethnicity will return us to a pre-capitalist Gemeinschaft where authen-tic individuality will flourish once again. A glimpse of a retro-primitivistutopia comes to the rescue.

Fischer’s endeavor employs the deconstructionist principle of textuality asthe matrix of ethnic difference. Spatialization overcomes temporality, be-coming, in the palimpsest of the dream-text of Kingston’s The Woman War-rior. Unlike the drive of Freud’s dream-analysis toward fixing referentialityin the cathexis of experience, Fischer’s reading displaces the historical sub-text that is the condition of intelligibility of Kingston’s fragmentary “talk sto-ries.” Time collapses into manipulable units of topography, grids, diagrams,charts where humans are quantified and duly catalogued. The complex proj-ect of Kingston’s narrative apparatus to articulate the continuity of the Chi-nese people’s resistance against white racist violence amid the discontinuitiesof several generations, shifts in state policies, alterations in political climatein China itself, and so on, are reduced to the problem of finding “clear rolemodels for being Chinese-American.” In effect, everything can be instru-mentalized, even trivialized as ad hoc formalities: “Being Chinese-Americanexists only as an exploratory project, a matter of finding a voice and style”(1986, 210).

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What needs to be underscored, according to Fischer, are the polyphony, in-ter-references, interlinguistic or intertextual modalities, the repertoire of al-ternative selves that constitute ethnicity. But this ethnicity, dependent on thefunctionalist paradigm of Barth and others cited earlier, ignores preciselythose mediations of class, race and gender required to produce concretenessin the philosophical sense I have defined earlier. What is at stake is theoverdetermined concept of socially constructed identities of peoples of color.This is the reason why I think Ramon Saldivar criticizes Richard Rodriguez’smedia-acclaimed autobiography Hunger of Memory for its uncritical accept-ance of the dichotomy between private and public spheres in pluralist/liberaldemocracy, and its effect of reducing “the interplay between these two con-stitutive realms to the overpowering order of the private world” (1990, 159),precisely a symptom of the fetishism that converts form itself (divorced fromsocial/use value) into exchangeable, universalizing currency.

In the case of Amerindian writing, Fischer describes how “the techniquesof transference, talk-stories, multiple voices or perspectives, and alternativeselves are given depth or expanding resonances through ironic twists” (1986,224). Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony illustrates how “the problem ofthe Indian is analogous to that of whites” in their becoming victims of a com-mercial, reified society; the Indian protagonist Tayo becomes an archetypalfigure of the alienated citizen, confused and deracinated. Valorizing irony andhumor and satirical techniques, the postmodernist ethnographer would erasethe struggle of Native Americans—the official rubric to designate a multi-plicity of nations—to preserve their own history of resistance against thegenocidal State, conflating their specific predicament with the life-situationof others (including their oppressor). Native Americans thus prove them-selves human too, just like white European immigrants.

In treating Momaday, Silko and other Amerindian writers as no differentthan other postmodernist authors in utilizing comparable discursive strate-gies, Fischer has ironically undermined his own commitment to a more real-istic, textured, nuanced ethnography. Underlying his commentary is the un-questioned assumption that ethnic writers operate like the typicalEuroAmerican author afflicted with existentialist angst. Ethnic autobiogra-phy may display similarities with the Western genre in its dialogic manipula-tion of historia and poesis, verifiable events and imaginative fabrication. Butthis distinction with its genealogy in the divergent lives of St. Augustine andRousseau cannot apply to the embattled collective predicaments of NativeAmericans, Chicanos, Asian Americans or Blacks. The two modes of signi-fying practice are just truly incommensurable. Arnold Krupat insists that thenative American narrator cannot be summarily dissolved by postmodernisttheory into the figure of the Western white male author because in her voca-

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tion she functions as a storyteller with a well-defined, conventional socialrole. The voice in Silko’s Storyteller, for example, is one “who participates ina traditionally sanctioned manner in sustaining the community.” Storyteller isa polyphonic “text, in which the author defines herself—finds her voice, tellsher life, illustrates the capacities of her vocation—in relation to the voices ofother storytellers Native and Non-Native, tale tellers and book writers, andeven to the voices of those who serve as the (by-no-means silent) audiencefor these stories” (Krupat 1989, 163). Silko herself points out that both re-membering and retelling of stories in the Native American milieu are parts ofan integral “communal process” in a larger unfolding narrative. Applyingpost-structuralist criteria, Krupat construes Storyteller as an attempt to liber-ate “cultural-semantic and emotional intentions from the hegemony of a sin-gle and unitary language” and as a “clear instance of novelized, of dialogicdiscourse” that rejects the notion of an independent self competing in the“free market,” a premise central to the dominant liberal world-view definingwhat it is to be “American.”

One lesson bears emphasizing here. Just as it is presumptuous to predicatethe ethnogenesis of peoples in the North American continent on the strengthof a few Puritanical sermons in seventeenth-century New England, it is alsoan act of supererogation to claim that “the arts of memory” practised by non-Europeans can be instrumentalized to reinvigorate the ethnographic pursuitsof academic anthropology and the social sciences. Mnemonic procedures andmethods have traditionally served the colonizing project of Western scienceand commerce. What peoples of color strive to articulate is an archaeology ofpopular resistance. Instead of endlessly memorializing Puritan texts, or insti-gating revisionist readings of Emerson, Hawthorne, James and Faulkner, weneed discourses and texts that would mobilize the practicable honoring of ac-tivists such as the chiefs of the Nez Perce, Harriet Tubman, Juan Cortina, andthe anonymous Chinese miners and Filipino farmworkers in the Southwest.Historical discourses of the U.S.”nation” have been precisely constituted bythe absence, elision, silencing of oppositional agents of change. It is clear thatcertain ethnic representations of the continent’s history, or one highly selec-tive version of it, has achieved centrality, displacing other competing versionsin the process of political and economic struggle. There is no question that“political domination involves historical definition. History—in particular,popular memory—is at stake in the constant struggle for hegemony” (John-son 1982, 213).

Popular memory, a sense of history immanent in the collective resistanceagainst racist, patriarchal and exploitative forces, is one of the necessarymeans for oppressed peoples to acquire a knowledge of the larger context oftheir collective struggles, equipping them to assume transformative roles in

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shaping history. It is the means by which communities can become self-con-scious about the formation of common-sense beliefs that govern the practicesof everyday life. These beliefs are products of determinate processes in his-tory. What is imperative is to articulate their ‘inventory,’ not in the manner ofthe antiquarian folklorist intending to preserve quaint traditions for modernconsumption, but “in order that, their origin and tendency known, they maybe consciously adopted, rejected or modified” (214). Popular memory as em-bodied in ethnic historiography can provide a knowledge of basic social con-tradictions that hegemonic liberalism, mediated through the “common sense”of cultural pluralism or individual freedom, easily conceals. It is this knowl-edge or its possibility that postmodernist theory blocks by its spatializing andaestheticizing politics, reducing differences into formalist novelties or “repe-tition of circularities” in a “unified global space economy of capital flows”(Harvey 1989, 296). The struggle to define a politics of popular memory onthe face of the selective amnesia induced by consumerism necessarily occu-pies center-stage in formulating an agenda for a radical ethnopoetics sensitiveto the racial politics of the twenty-first century.

SEMIOTIC EXPERIMENT

The fundamental importance of a “politics of memory” has been underscoredby William Boelhower’s pioneering work Through a Glass Darkly: EthnicSemiosis in American Literature (1984), so far the most ambitious attempt tooutline a semiotic theory of ethnic sign production with particular referenceto the United States. I think the attempt is commendable in its late modernistvision of challenging universalist and homogenizing politics that condemnsthe Other as a false, inferior image of a superior Self. However, the attemptis flawed by its failure to sustain a genuinely historicizing, emancipatory proj-ect capable of taking into account the multiple determining forces in the for-mation of the unequally positioned peoples of color in the U.S. racial polity.

The first two chapters of Boelhower’s book proposes the centrality of ageneric “American” identity crisis in understanding the culture and history ofthe United States. While the roots of this crisis may be traced to the Cartesianlogic of private property of land and its corollary, the “Great Myth of Na-tionalism” and the illegimate claim of one “nation state” to cultural purity, itcenters on the permanent ethnic difference embodied in the historical fact ofimmigration. In elaborating a “type-scene pragmatics” that performs therepertoire of possible actions provided by a cultural encyclopedia of the im-migrant’s ancestors, Boelhower asserts that immigrant narratives “representthe legimitizing epicenter, the original authority, of ethnic literature as a

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whole” (1987, 98). By privileging the European immigrant experience as theparadigm informing the ethnogenesis of diverse peoples in the continent,Boelhower undercuts his initial aim of refuting the validity of both assimila-tionist and pluralist paradigms. Boelhower’s premise assumes that capitalistmodernization generates and increases ethnic differences through the mobiledistribution of populations; ethnicity, fluid and situational by definition,springs from the confrontation between the native (here personified by HenryJames’s sensibility) and the immigrant whom he confronts in Ellis Island in1904. This hermeneutic interrogation of the space juxtaposing native and im-migrant produces the “ethnic topos,” a conjunctural context where both par-ties are “decentered onlookers, both on the margins. At the center is not an en-tity or a content or a definable subject, but a dynamic relation, a qualifyingenergy, in short an ethnic kinesis” (1987, 23). We are faced here with a ver-sion of Barth’s concept of boundaries where the unequal power relation be-tween native and immigrant is obscured since both share a European geneal-ogy. In time, however, the problem of American identity (habitare, forBoelhower) can be solved in the choreographic map within the nationalspace, more precisely in a local authentic space that can permit the actualiz-ing of the stereoscopic American self: A (non-A).

Boelhower’s semiotics mobilizes the destabilizing logic of ethnic kinesis,its principle of “absent presence,” against the “assimilationist logic of reduc-tion ad unum.” How do ethnic signs embedded in the dominant culture comeabout? It comes about through a strategy of affirming the principle of differ-ence, non-identity; the “constructive dream of a unique American identity” isfounded on the “deconstructive deferment of plural Otherness” (1987, 85).But Boelhower, unlike post-structuralist agnostics, believes that the produc-tion of ethnic discourse requires a cohesive unitary subject able to deploy astrategy of localizing, of perspectival orientation. He defines ethnic semioticsas “the interpretive gaze of the subject whose strategy of seeing is determinedby the very ethno-symbolic space of the possible world he inhabits” (1987,87). This possible world springs from ethnic semiosis, the strategic use ofmemory realized in “the topological and genealogical interrogation of theoriginating culture of his immigrant ancestors” (1987, 89). An ethnic traditionarises from the tension between the processing content of Memory and an on-going Project; this project, I take it, is what Boelhower calls “transgression ofthe national culture of habitare” fixated to a patria, a homogeneous geopolit-ical unit.

The aim of subverting Anglo/Eurocentric hegemony is commendable. Butis the project viable? For Boelhower, the task of ethnic semiotics is to re-deem the bare present, the reductive nunc of present business society,through cultural contrast and comparison. This involves a game of shifting

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temporal dimensions that combines both tenses of Memory and Projectwhereby the American crisis of identity can be historicized. Ethnic kinesiscan transform “the monocultural space of ‘twentieth-century cosmopoli-tanism’ into a polymorphic physiognomy of ethnic traces, associations, im-ages, and symbols” by the “insertion of a dialogical ‘clash’ capable of redi-mensionalizing the spatio-temporal restrictions of the culture of the nationalmap” (1987, 93). In the process of social interaction, the aleatory, nomadicethnic sign emerges from a situation where the protagonist (in such texts likeJohn Cournos The Mask or Rolvaag’s Their Father’s God) employs “a per-spectival strategy of comparison and contrast by means of a genealogical in-terrogation of his/her traditio” (1987, 107). This strategy is at the heart of theethnic narrative program that reinterprets tradition as a cultural encyclope-dia, a semantic/pragmatic apparatus that can be used by the ethnic protago-nist to yield “ethnic savoirs,” mobile and free-floating sign-sequences. Thediagram of the ethnic habitare, for Boelhower, is coordinated by the verticalaxis of Memory and Encyclopedia, the collective resources of the originalcommunity, and the parallel axis of Frame and Project, the individual sub-ject who activates innovative thought by Genealogical Interrogation, movingfrom Memory to Project; and who activates semantic resources in the Ency-clopedia through tactical manipulation of Type-scenes, an “instructionalgestalt” that codifies prefabricated scripts, roles, homologous situations, etc.Here is Boelhower’s semiotic diagram plotting the continuous production ofthe ethnic self (1987, 112). See Figure 1.

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Figure 1 Boelhower’s Semiotic Diagram of Ethnic Habitare

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Since ethnicity here is tied with the immigrant matrix, Boelhower observesthat the cultural encyclopedia tends to lack “the intrinsic and ordering princi-ple” usually ascribed to the ancestral community and its institutions. Thus itcannot organize the complexity of the immigrant experience into a totality.However, this epistemological weakness of the “primordial sentiments” be-comes the semiotic strength of ethnic texts since ethnicity now can “be onlyoptional and symbolic, a micro-strategic and rhizomatic device of doubleawareness which has no desire to retotalize a buried encyclopedia but whichalso has no desire to abandon the practice of ethnic semiosis.” Predicated onthe rupture between the ethnic self and her traditio, ethnic textuality can ei-ther fashion a local cultural map (the quest for roots in regional places, as inToni Morrison’s Song of Solomon) or establish the site for “intercultural per-formance” where the protagonist experiments, reinvents, interrogates, dis-rupts—in short, creates the American self as A (non-A), an algorithm pro-jecting identity as basically differential and contextual.

One senses a peculiar kind of dialectic of subject and object in this semi-otic game. What Boelhower is wrestling with is not just the constraints sur-rounding the immigrant performance, the conservative and limiting resourcesof the Encyclopedia (the authority of the community unfolded in Memory)and the limited pragmatics of Type-Scene, but the seemingly uncurbed energy(ergon) of the subject signified by the Frame, “the spatio-temporal momentof ethnic semiosis.” But this sudden conatus of hybridization appears tooeasy. The role of the Frame in the semiotic diagram is, in my judgment, anom-alous because it preempts the functioning of the whole system as the sourceof ethnic performance. I suspect that it introduces what might be called “free-dom of agency,” a gesture of suspending the structural closure so obviouslyconnoted by both processes of Genealogical Interrogation and the operationalpressure of Type-Scenes. According to Boelhower, the Frame is “thought inaction” versus Type-scene, thought at rest: “Instead of trafficking in types,thereby reconfirming the established field of ethnic identity through repeti-tion, the frame proposes actorial roles never evident until then, thus introduc-ing an ethnic novum unrepeatable in time and space. It is this fundamentallycontractual or dialogical dimension that makes it impossible to explain or pre-dict frame genesis by means of encyclopedic description. Between the se-mantic stasis of the latter and the pragmatic action of the former there is aqualitative leap” (1987, 110–11). How the Frame is able to succeed in escap-ing the relational logic of perspectivism and suddenly come up with a quali-tatively new act, is not explained here.

Following this discussion of the Frame and the semiotic diagram, Boel-hower’s example of “The Ethnic Feast” as a literary topoi only illustrates howthe “utopian space of ethnic identity” is achieved through “a genealogical

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exercise of storytelling, music, and group recollection,” an exercise of histor-ical synthesis and integration where Memory and Encyclopedia limit subjec-tive framing. The ethnic feast, it turns out, serves only as an ad hoc device tocontrast, say, the American Way of Life and the Italian, a digressive point thatbegs the question of exactly how ethnic kinesis relativizes and unbalances thewhole field of signs, practices, rituals, etc. This is the moment when Boel-hower, attributing a flexible pragmatic astuteness to the framing subject, sig-nals his shift to a postmodernist celebration of ethnic discourse as ceaselessacts of interpretation, that is, endless semiosis par excellence.

INTUITING POSSIBLE WORLDS

In returning to the crisis of habitare in the late-modern context, Boelhowernow declares that all ancestors are dead, “in place of the real world there isnow only a global strategy of possible worlds” (1987, 120). At this juncture,the presiding spirits of Deleuze and Guattari are replaced by the invocation ofsome cosmic technotronic simulacra, courtesy of Baudrillard and Virilio. En-cyclopedia, Memory and topography disappear in the formlessness of thecontemporary metropolis celebrated by Le Corbusier, Futurism, and JohnDos Passos. We enter a world of simulacra and infinite mimicry. Boelhowerrightly observes that this urban deterritorialization serves “the mass man’sfunctions of production and consumption,” not the possibilities of socializa-tion and communication. The tempo of America as one huge metropolis “re-quires the self to be a perpetuum mobile in a highly organized culture ofprofit,” of productive circulation (1987, 125). In the city of advertisement andpublicity, everything has become de-realized into fiction, news, image; fur-ther, reality and the subject have dissolved into the simulacrum. Since theoriginal has disappeared, together with the authentic object and the uniqueand unrepeatable subject, what happens to the identity quests of ethnic dis-course?

Forgetting what he has just said about the commodification of all life in latecapitalist society, Boelhower now believes that the national map has changed.It is “now capable of realizing an updated version of the American dream, ahyperreal circulation of simultaneous communication in which the humansubject, no longer hampered by a physical body, can be everywhere and yetnowhere at the present time” (1987, 131). Formerly invested with a differen-tial relation, a temporal spacing, ethnic kinesis is now inconceivable withinthe postmodern episteme where past and future are reduced to the present,where synchronic relation supersedes diachronic referentiality, juxtapositioncausal sequence, and fragmentation perspectivism. Ethnic semiosis can no

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longer deploy the strategy of genealogical interrogation since distinctions ofauthentic and false, existential and symbolic, are no longer valid: “authentic-ity now pertains to the pragmatics of simulation rather than to a process of lit-eral representation” (1987, 132). Ethnic pragmatics cuts off its mimetic an-chorage by privileging the world of signs, the world of absence, wherepossible worlds can be performed by free play: “After all, the task of ethnicframing is not to name a world already known but to produce the same con-ditions of knowability as that which has already been named. Far from beingconfined to the ethnic encyclopedia as a set of fixed cultural contents to becontinually reproposed with each new generation, the ethnic subject nowplays freely with the encyclopedia in order to produce an ethno-critical inter-pretation of the present and of his possibilities in it” (1987, 133). The episte-mological status of the “encyclopedia” is highly suspect because it can proveto be merely an archive of hallucinatory bytes, not a fixed inventory of tradi-tional practices.

Boelhower concurs with the postmodernist thesis that the metaphysics ofself as organic, rational and coherent has been annulled by a notion of the selfas “an effect of the surface,” of linguistic stratagems, of “a serious game ofwords and possible worlds” (1987, 134). The ethnic self is now conceived asa potentially catastrophic subject: “As a pluralized and multiform self, theethnic’s very instability as well as his access to an open series of possibleworlds make him unpredictable and aleatory” (1987, 135). The ethnic subjectis posited to be multiple, polymorphic, protean, allotropic, ultimately uncod-ifiable. Ethnicity is a matter of performance, of role reversibility, a puttinginto play of ethno-semiotic competence. This self-reflective game of inhabit-ing several possible worlds is not a return to origins but a questioning of lim-its. But underneath this exultant apotheosis of fiction and fable where historyis absent, Boelhower still insists that ethnic semiosis is “a radical questioningof contemporary American experience.” The politics of memory cannot be re-pressed: “Indeed, in a culture without a historical memory, where the crisis ofidentity and the crisis of memory are coterminous, remembering is itself acentral category of the ethnic project. By interrogating the traditio of his an-cestors, the ethnic subject opens a new inferencing field in which he can re-present the crisis of cultural foundations in a critical light. . . . the ethnic re-mains semiotically strong because of his relationship with his originatingcultural traditio which, as an absent presence, solicits ethnic interpretation ina metacultural space that is nowhere and everywhere at the same time” (1987,140–42).

At this stage, postmodern ethnic wisdom rediscovers the meaning of “theoriginating cultural tradition.” The “absent presence” of the Encyclopedia, thecommunity of origin, resurfaces here as the binary opposite of the simulacra,

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virtually the “political unconscious” buried by textuality, language-games,images, exorbitant signifiers that characterize the empty now of postmodernAmerica. Nevertheless, we can no longer think of American identity in termsof maps, of a charted space where the Puritan city on the hill and the wilder-ness surrounding it are clearly demarcated. We can no longer totalize the or-bit of our knowledge and experience. Despite this gesture of refusing to gen-eralize, Boelhower sums up with a resolute tone: “Ethnic semiosis, then, is away of thinking differently by thinking the difference, and in the postmodernAmerican framework this may be all the difference there is: a particular formof discourse, of evaluating the agency of the subject, of holding one’s groundagainst the map of national circulation” (1987, 143). To be sure, the postula-tion of the power of a “map of national circulation,” unless this is just anotherequivalent discourse competing for supremacy, reveals that the ethnic subjectknows something else that the theoretician of ethnicity unwittingly elides ordeliberately ignores. We are a long way from the “culture of the map” asso-ciated with European merchant capitalism, far from the “sense of the caul-dron” that disturbed Henry James. In the unfolding of his discourse, Boel-hower seems to have forgotten the condition of possibility of theorizingethnicity itself so that the concept of deconstructive differance collapses fig-ure and ground, subject and object, signifier and signified, into itself. Mean-while, the ethnic self survives this vertiginous adventure in the abyss of post-modernism to carry on its protracted if often interrupted resistance against thepower of the American Dream.

DECIDING UNDECIDABLES

In the course of surveying ethnic discourse mutating into ecriture or textual-ity incarnate, one might already have discerned an inconsistency if not anaporia undermining the plausibility of the argument. The problem lies inBoelhower’s desire to reconcile opposites, to preserve the modernist dream ofthe monadic subject in the all-absorbing intensity of the postmodernist sub-lime. Even while endorsing the view that reality has disappeared into the sim-ulacra, Boelhower appears unable to give up the thematics of the individualsubject in quest of some coherent identity, albeit one that is in perpetual mi-gration, inescapably nomadic and schizophrenic.

Another paradox threatens an impasse. Boelhower’s Project, a parasite onmemory as it ransacks the collective encyclopedia, is not really motivated toa future redrawing of the map of different positionalities for the simple rea-son that representation no longer makes sense. But if there is no antecedentorder, not even a vestige of tradition, embedded in Memory and the Encyclo-

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pedia, how can the Frame of ethnic pragmatics ever create the New? Never-theless, Boelhower still believes in hermeneutics and interpretation even thoughthe diacritical nexus of surface and depth, of outside/manifest and inside/latent, as well as the liaison of signifier and signified in the signifying chain,have all broken down. A pragmatics of simulation now valorizes the here andnow, the immediacy of the flux. Boelhower comments on Maya Angelou’s IKnow Why the Caged Bird Sings: “Encyclopedic foundations do fade awayinto myth and the ethnic genealogical strategy is a mise en abime” (1987,102–103). The act of remembering turns out only to be a ludic gesture, a car-nivalesque ruse, as empty as the intention of historicizing actions and situa-tions ascribed to the Frame. (In my Racial Formations/Critical Transforma-tions, I offer a supplementary if not alternative paradigm of ethnogenesis inmy reading of Arturo Islas’ novel, The Rain God, in the hope of resolving in-adequacies I noted in Boelhower’s ingenious schema.).

Another aberration comes up. Even though Boelhower affirms the neces-sity of ethnic mimesis when he says that “ethnic sign production is ultimatelyan encyclopedia/frame circuit” (1987, 117), he posits at the same time a cat-astrophic subject transcending all codes, representation, referents, figuration.If ethnic equals postmodernist, what was ethnic semiosis in the stage of mod-ernism? I suspect that in the process of constructing his model in which thestrategic locus of the Frame will guarantee creative novelty and depth of re-flexivity, with utopian plenitude surrounding the genesis of the ethnic Self,Boelhower succumbed to the seduction of the “hysterical sublime” (Jameson1984, 77), the pleasure of aestheticizing. In brief, the spatializing logic ofpostmodernism that Boelhower upholds cannot but destroy the essentiallytemporal dynamics, the historicizing purpose and will, of ethnic habitare.This fusion of place and subject/agent is what ethnic framing was originallydesigned to make intelligible. Ethnic framing cannot just be a valorization ofexperience as the heterogeneous given. As Adorno has explained in NegativeDialectics (1973, 186), experience acquires intelligibility only when its denseand rich mediations, its specifically historical immanence, are thoroughlyconcretized in a totalizable temporal pattern. Comprehension of a totality de-pends on a dialectical process of analysis and synthesis, calibrating di-achronic and synthronic vectors in any historical conjuncture.

Postmodern speculation is exciting but also hazardous. Consider the case ofBaudrillard who, imprisoned by his theory of universal simulation, was forcedto concoct fantasies when he used the “Tasaday tribe” in the Philippines as anexample of “the precession of simulacra.” Not knowing that the late dictatorFerdinand Marcos manipulated this hoax by bribing anthropologists and me-dia experts in order to promote tourism, grab mineral-rich lands, and sow division among rebellious ethnic minorities in the Philippines, Baudrillard

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indulged in naïve self-congratulation: “The Indian [a misnomer for several in-digenous tribes inhabiting Mindanao, Philippines] thereby driven back intothe ghetto, into the glass coffin of virgin forest, becomes the simulation modelfor all conceivable Indians before ethnology. The latter thus allows itself theluxury of being incarnate beyond itself, in the ‘brute’ reality of these Indiansit has entirely reinvented—savages who are indebted to ethnology for still be-ing Savages: what a turn of events, what a triumph for this science whichseemed dedicated to their destruction!” (257–58). Factoids jostle here withentirely capricious schemas fabricated by anthropologists gone mad, asthough the sorcerer’s apprentice himself incarnated the mythical Frankensteinand transmogrified the DNA of knowledge-power.

Alchemy has replaced critique. The “Tasadays,” colonized by Baudrillard’stext as “Indians,” became posthumous, “referential simulacra” while ethnol-ogy (actually, the bureaucratic machinations of a U.S.-subsidized neocolonialregime) became “pure simulation.” Here is the history that Baudrillard re-jects. Culled from different tribes engaged in farming, trade and crafts inmodern society, the “Tasadays” were not savages who lived in virgin forests.The “Tasadays” were contrived and staged by a rich oligarch Manda Elizalde,a Marcos-appointed minister, for commercial and political purposes. Terror-ized without reprieve, with many of them mysteriously murdered after inves-tigations by the Aquino government were launched in 1986, the “Tasadays”today no longer exist except as a pseudo-referential aberration, perhaps animploding moment, in Baudrillard’s self-serving script. They remain a foot-note to the fatuous lucubrations of Western sagacity.

At the risk of short-circuiting further analysis, I attempt a provisional bal-ance sheet of Boelhower’s theoretical contribution to the field of ethnic stud-ies. Its strengths have already been noted. One of the limitations of Boel-hower’s semiotics inheres in its axiomatic premises: competitiveindividualism, allocentric Eurocentrism. Boelhower was not attentive enoughto recognize that in the case of peoples of color who have experienced vio-lent conquest (Chicanos), slavery (Africans), systematic genocide (Indians)and dehumanizing exploitation (Asians), the problem of habitare is a collec-tive one: the loss of homes for Indians and Chicanos, the cultural deprivationand various forms of racist oppression for Africans, Asians and others. Theparadigm of European immigrant success that underpins the orthodox theoryof ethnicity (and also, to some extent, Boelhower’s model) cannot compre-hend the collective project of Indians aspiring for self-determination in theirhomelands, of internally colonized Blacks demanding self-determination, andso on. Ethnic framing for peoples of color goes beyond mere “genealogical”retrospection, beyond a pragmatic inventory of “ethnic” life-styles. Ethnicframing for the colonized subalterns coincides with the recovery of a materi-

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alist consciousness that can value the experience of resistance to colonialdomination, the experience of defeat and survival, of continuing struggle toassert the integrity of the community against the destructive force of the cap-italist system. What is lacking in Boelhower’s schema is precisely the con-creteness (in Gramsci’s sense) of the Project, the multiply determined histor-ical agenda of peoples subordinated to the hegemonic rule of theEuro-American power elite. For Boelhower, this Project is like a primalscript, an ontological archive open to the excluded and outcasts forever try-ing to assume the masks of the Other as the necessary complement of theMaster.

Whatever its merits, this principle of amalgamating the Many into a mul-tiplicitous One seems like the postcolonial alibi of alterity and syncretism.Despite its gestures toward history, it approximates the model of a formal-ist exercise in duplicity. At best it strikes the skeptical observer as a parodyof Bakhtin’s heteroglotic scenario, predicated on the assumption that post-modern society no longer values the traditional norm of individuals sharingcommon ground and pride in the rituals and sentiments of a historicallyevolved community. The ethos of a possessive/acquisitive individualism in-forms Boelhower’s semiotic engine, making it incapable of grasping the an-tithesis of a transactional anthropology, namely, the mutable relation ofdomination and subordination, of hegemony and resistance, that establishesproductive interdependencies between peoples of color and their Euro-American overseers.

INDEXING CONTINGENCY

Whatever their claims to giving priority to historical specificity and to the com-plex combination of forces in any given event, postmodern theories of ethnic-ity, on the whole, elide the boundaries marked by the conflict of individuals,classes, peoples. Contradictions of power are neutralized in a transactional ex-change of signs, of symbolic capital. It is precisely by transcoding this com-munication circuit of supposedly equal subjects into a scenario of multifacetedcontradictions that produce subjects/agents in process, a scenario where the re-lations of domination and subordination shape the contours of will, action andimagination, that ethnic semiosis contributes positively to our understanding ofthe formation of the ethnic subject in history. By virtue of its specific geneal-ogy, the ethnic subject-position is always constituted in a site of polymorphous,fluid, nomadic guerilla resistance; its authority can be glimpsed in strategies ofreversal and displacement as it renegotiates boundaries and disturbs hierarchiesof power. Born in the terrain of U.S. racial politics, this subaltern persona

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assumes an identity that is necessarily plural, disjunctive or decentered, not be-cause of some essential biology or fixed essence but because of the interpella-tions addressed to it by contestatory ideological appeals and the conjuncturaldemands of mass action. In short, this collective ethnic subject constructs andlegitimates itself in opposing the utilitarian property-centered ethics and racial-izing logic of postmodern capitalism.

It would be salutary to hark back to Gramsci’s original philosophical con-cept of concreteness as a theoretical guide in appraising any future semioticsof ethnic becoming. In a passage on theorizing multiple relations of force inPrison Notebooks, Gramsci stresses the imperative of analytically discrimi-nating stages, phases, or moments of any sequence, in particular the multi-faceted interface between the organic and the conjunctural and the complexmediations implicit between them, in the process of constituting historicallyformed subjectivities and agencies. What the “concrete analysis of relationsof force” imbricated in discourse and in experience finally teaches us, Gram-sci points out, is the understanding

. . . that such analyses cannot and must not be ends in themselves (unless the in-tention is merely to write a chapter of past history), but acquire significance onlyif they serve to justify a particular practical activity, or initiative of will. Theyreveal the points of least resistance, at which the force of will can be most fruit-fully applied; they suggest immediate tactical operations; they indicate how acampaign of political agitation may best be launched, what language will bestbe understood by the masses, etc. The decisive element in every situation is thepermanently organized and long-prepared force which can be put into the fieldwhen it is judged that a situation is favourable (and it can be favourable only inso far as such a force exists, and is full of fighting spirit). Therefore the essen-tial task is that of systematically and patiently ensuring that this force is formed,developed, and rendered ever more homogeneous, compact, and self-aware.This is clear from military history, and from the care with which in every periodarmies have been prepared in advance to be able to make war at any moment.The great Powers have been great precisely because they were at all times pre-pared to intervene effectively in favourable international conjunctures—whichwere precisely favourable because there was the concrete possibility of effec-tively intervening in them (1971, 185).

Taking Gramsci’s precept into account, we can comprehend certain impera-tives. A semiotics of racial discourse acquires its mediating power only when,first, it helps define and consolidate the emergence of self-critical historicalagents (exploited peoples of color) seeking empowerment. At this stage, thepolitics of ethnic difference that has so far underwritten the prevailing systemof institutional apartheid yields to a politics of racial formations. And, second,such a semiotics in the making is valorized when it succeeds in establishing

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the ground for effective popular intervention, the conjuncture of politicalpraxis, by pinpointing the “weak link” of an overdetermined, uneven socialtotality. This can be accomplished by invoking a master narrative of realiz-able social emancipation, a narrative that requires for its unfolding the con-crete analysis of organic and conjunctural relations as well as the astute com-bination of what is necessary and what is contingent, the strategic and thetactical. The goal of ethnic semiotics after all, as I conceive it, is the destruc-tion of racial formations where the laboring multitudes are constructed asracialized, historically defined subjects in antagonistic positions. This so-cially oriented semiotics will be committed to the elimination of the hege-monic discourse of race in which peoples of color are produced and repro-duced daily for exploitation and oppression under the banner of individualfreedom and consumerist liberal democracy. At this turning point of whatGramsci calls “catharsis,” the qualitative leap from the economic to theethico-political where categories of race, class and gender are inextricablybound together, we have already traversed the sphere of aesthetics andreached the threshold of substantive political engagement. We are ready oncemore to grapple with the ordeal of racism through waging class struggle onvarious fronts.

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Owing to the unrelenting ideological and political constraints of the ColdWar, academic discourse on racism and ethnic/racial relations has erased theMarxian concept of class as an antagonistic relation, displacing it with ne-oWeberian notions of status, life-style, and other cultural contingencies. De-spite the civil rights struggles of the sixties, methodological individualismand normative functionalism continue to prevail in the humanities and socialsciences. The decline of militant trade unionism and the attenuation of “thirdworld” liberation struggles contributed to the erasure of class conflicts. Withthe introduction of structuralist and poststructuralist paradigms in the lastthree decades, the concept of class struggle has been effectively displaced bythe concept of power and differential relations.

From the viewpoint of the humanities and cultural studies (fields in whichI am somehow implicated), the advent of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in theeighties was salutary if not anticlimactic. For the strategic foregrounding ofracism and the race problematique (following feminism’s assault on the ColdWar stereotypes of economic determinism and class reductionism synony-mous with Marxism tout court in the previous decades) served to remedy theinadequacies of the intersectionality paradigm of gender, class, and race. Un-fortunately, with the neoconservative resurgence in the Reagan/Bush admin-istrations, and the collapse of “actually existing socialism” in the SovietUnion and arguably in China, the deconstruction of bourgeois legal discourseand its attendant institutions will no longer suffice. Not only because of thereconfigured international situation and the emergence of neoliberal apolo-getics and authoritarian decrees, but because of the accelerated class warmanifest in the ongoing de-industrialization, huge income gaps, unemploy-ment, the destruction of welfare-state guarantees, and the disabling of tradi-tional challenges to corporate rule.

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EPOCHAL CHALLENGE

The advent of critical race theory marked a re-discovery of the primacy of thesocial relations of production and the division of labor in late modern industrialsociety. A historicizing perspective was applied by Derrick Bell and elaboratedby, among others, Charles Mills in his theory of the United States as a “racialpolity.” However, a tendency to juxtapose “class” as a taxonomic category with“race” and “gender” in an intersectional framework has disabled the Marxianconcept of class relation as a structural determinant. This has led to the reduc-tion of the relational dynamic of class to an economistic factor of identity eventhough critical race theory attacks capitalist relations of production and its le-gal ideology as the ground for racist practices and institutions.

The intersectionality approach (where race, class and gender function asequally salient variables) so fashionable today substitutes a static nominalismfor concrete class analysis. It displaces a Marxian with a Weberian organonof knowledge. As Gregory Meyerson (1997) points out, the “explanatory pri-macy of class analysis” is a theoretical requisite for understanding the struc-tural determinants of race, gender and class oppression. Class as an antago-nistic relation is, from a historical-materialist viewpoint, the only structuraldeterminant of ideologies and practices sanctioning racial and gender oppres-sion in capitalist society.

Nonetheless, it was exhilarating to read classic texts in both CRT antholo-gies of Richard Delgado and Kimberle Crenshaw et al, such as Cheryl Har-ris’ “Whiteness as Property,” Delgado’s “Legal Storytelling,” and DerrickBell’s “Property Rights in Whiteness.” Not being a legal scholar, I cannotgauge how effective the impact of CRT has been in changing legislation,court procedures, prison and police behavior, nor how CRT has altered aca-demic practice in law schools. Bell has been exemplary in linking class ex-ploitation and racial discrimination. Racism indeed cannot be understood out-side or separate from the social division of labor in the capitalist mode ofproduction and its concomitant reproduction of unequal relations. This is acentral insight that has motivated many CRT practitioners. But, as Alan Free-man has noted, the “dilemma of liberal reform” springs from CRT’s inability,or refusal, to reject—not just question, expose, or demystify—the premises orpresuppositions of the system. Freedman adds that the various strategies Belland others have deployed simply preserve “the myths of liberal reform.” Heconcludes: “Yet it is one thing to call for, and show the need for, the histori-cization of civil rights law, and quite another to write the history. The task ofunmasking, of exposing presuppositions, of delegitimizing, is easier than thatof offering a concrete historical account to replace what is exposed as inade-

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quate” (1995, 462). Could it be that for all its power as a rigorous critical an-alytic of U.S. jurisprudence, mainstream legal theory and practice, CRT hasfatally confined itself to this reformist task?

With its derivation from legal realism (Jerome Frank) and Critical LegalStudies (Roberto Unger), it seems that CRT’s adherence to the notions of for-mal justice—considered by some as another style of class domination basedon the rule of law—leads them to accept the fact of substantive inequality. Toeliminate the effects of systemic domination and subordination, racial justiceand gender parity may not be sufficient. As Daniel Bensaid remarks: “Theo-ries of justice and the critique of political economy are irreconcilable. Con-ceived as the protection of the private sphere, liberal politics seals the holy al-liance between the nightwatchman state and the market of opinions in whichindividual interests are supposed to be harmonized. Marx’s Capital estab-lishes the impossibility of allocating the collective productivity of sociallabour individually. Whereas the theory of justice rests on the atomism ofcontractual procedures, and on the formalist fiction of mutual agreement(whereby individuals become partners in a cooperative adventure for theirmutual advantage), social relations of exploitation are irreducible to intersub-jective relations” (2002, 158). This is why Mas’ud Zavarzadeh (2003) insistson the “pedagogy of totality” to underscore the explanatory power of the con-cept of class, of class critique, for elucidating the objective structure of ex-ploitative relations.

On the other hand, one commentator ascribes to CRT the allegedly Marx-ist doctrine of “radical contingency” and then faults it for its belief that theexperience of the racially oppressed affords valid knowledge of society. Thismay be due to CRT’s eclectic and latitudinarian temper. CRT’s loss of politi-cal neutrality and perspectival objectivity, if true, can prevent it from engag-ing the dominant discourse as well as compromise its revolutionary aspira-tions (Belliotti (1995). Given the historical stages of its emergence, CRT’snonconformist constructionism may be the source of its strength and also itsweakness in promoting radical institutional changes.

One may hypothesize that a re-assessment of CRT’s condition of possibil-ity may disclose ways of renewing its emancipatory potential. Reviewing thehistorical context of its formation can be a heuristic point of departure. Why,at this conjuncture of the seventies and eighties, did the evil of racism replacethe evil of class exploitation for CRT and other progressive intellectuals com-mitted to radical democracy if not a more permanent revolutionary movementtoward socialism? Why did the problem of racism overshadow what is now atamed “classism”? Why did movements for recognition eclipse the working-class struggle against exploitation at the point of production?

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REORIENTATION

Like most liberal academics in the seventies, I reacted to the right- and left-wing opportunisms of the leftist formations that mechanically reduced allstruggles to support for “bread-and-butter” unionism. My reading of RobertBlauner’s Racial Oppression in America (1972) and contending theories of in-ternal colonialism was a breath of fresh air (see San Juan 1992, 2003). Amiddebates on the “national question,” we welcomed the issues raised by StuartHall and others concerning the formulaic base/superstructure metaphor, therelative authonomy of the ideological field, the labor metaphysics, and thechallenging theses on the racialized polity, the rationale of white supremacy,elaborated in such works as Oliver Cox’s Caste, Class and Race, ManningMarable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, and assorted textsby Harry Haywood, C.L.R. James, Amiri Baraka, and others. Hall’s observa-tion on the complex constitution of class served as a guide to further inquiry:“Race is the modality in which class is lived. It is also the medium in whichclass relations are experienced” (quoted in Solomos 1986, 103). This modal-ity, though framed by class antagonism, in practice exercised a cause-free au-tonomy (following Althusser) that immunized it from any totalizing dialecti-cal virus.

One suspects that with this stress on modality of experience, Paul Gilroy(in Against Race) was inspired to condemn the evils of ultranationalism, eth-nic absolutism, and “raciology’s brutal reasonings” with a plea for revitaliz-ing “ethical sensibility” (2000, 6). One wonders if this is part of an ingeniouspolitical strategy or another deconstructive flourish. Amid the incommensu-rability of local solidarities and diasporic estrangement, amid the aestheti-cization and spectacularization of commodities that Gilroy indicts, can we doa re-turn to Kant? Can we regenerate ethical awareness by invoking “visionsof planetary humanity” and “cosmopolitan traditions” without understandingtheir historical determinants and trajectories? Surely, the experience of thelast few decades, from the urban uprisings in the sixties and seventies to thehorrible genocidal strife in Africa and the Middle East, has fully registered inour minds enough to dissuade us from succumbing to the naïve pathos ofTzvetan Todorov’s plea for the humanist ideal: “[T]he humanist ideal can bedefended against the racist ideal not because it is more true (an ideal cannotbe more or less true) but because it is ethically superior, based as it is on theuniversality of the human race” (2006, 215). Universality of the human race?Are we still in the fabulous times of Voltaire, Rousseau, and the storming ofthe Bastille?

In the humanities and mainstream social sciences, the Weberian emphasison ethnicity (status, roles) and ethnic marginalization has displaced the prob-

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lem of class inequality (Crompton 1995). Experts like Robert Park, RobertMerton, Erik Erikson, Fredrick Barth, Nathan Glazer, and others (partly re-viewed in the previous chapters) have focused on identity crisis from the op-tic of methodological individualism, rational choice theory, and other plural-ist nostrums. In the Establishment source book Ethnicity: Theory andExperience (1975), Glazer and Patrick Moynihan pontificated on the “per-sistence and salience of ethnic-based forms of social identification and con-flict” over those based on class (Sollors 1996, xiii). Culture, not economics,is the key to understanding problems of injustice, poverty, alienation. Withthe prevalence of poststructuralist and deconstructive modes of thinking(Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze) in the neoconservative eighties and nineties, thenew orthodoxies represented by Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s RacialFormation in the United States (1986) and the work of the BirminghamSchool of Cultural Studies, in particular Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, pre-empted any quick return to a retheorized mode of class analysis and a recon-stituted political economy of racism and sexism.

Let me cite here the revisionary work of David Theo Goldberg as an ex-ample. In his Racist Culture and subsequent texts. Goldberg has obsessivelypursued a Foucauldian, neopragmatist genealogy of racist discourse and prac-tices, rejecting structuralist conceptualizations as well as the standard ap-proach that reduced racism to an epiphenomenon of economics or politics inwhich “racism is mostly conceived as ideological, a set of rationalizations forsustaining exploitative economic practices and exclusionary political rela-tions” (1993, 93). Goldberg thus dismisses Robert Miles’ (1989) theory ofracialization—the construction of differentiated social collectivities by theway human biological characteristics are signified—as narrow and restric-tive. For Goldberg, exclusion by virtue of imputed somatic characteristics ac-quires a privileged position in the analysis of social relations, overshadowingthe fact of class exploitation. In doing so, Goldberg and other ludic neoprag-matists lapse into a species of nominalism that equates class with stratifica-tion, “not recognized as constituting a “real totality,” but “as an aggregate ofindividuals, who are differentiated from one another in terms of various kindsof social and psychological criteria” (Giddens 1973, 76).

Nominalists (like Goldberg) refuses to recognize class as a relationalprocess in historical reality. Limited to a concern with atomistic facts thanwith a world of intelligible necessity, sociologists of ethnicity likewise con-fine themselves to heterogeneous experiential data removed from any largersociohistorical process within which they acquire intelligibility. Instead ofhistorical-materialist principles, techniques of psychologistic and functionalinstrumentalism are deployed to connect discrete phenomena and validate thenormality and consistency of the status quo. This applies to the functionalism

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of neoWeberians, hermeneutic and interpretive humanists, and various neo-Marxists who reject the historical materialist principles of critique, totality,and the dialectical approach to elucidating the dynamics of multifarious con-tradictions in society.

One staunch opponent of the ethnicity paradigm, Stephen Steinberg,summed up the trends I have been sketching here in his influential book,Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Pol-icy (1995). What is ironic is that Steinberg’s sense of being betrayed by hisneoliberal colleagues stems from his odd expectation that their view of jus-tice as “fair equality of opportunity” (Gutman 2000, 93) can substitute forclass struggle and its drive for systemic transformation. Alternatively, Stein-berg is sure to provoke renewed outcries of economism and reductionism.

MOVEMENT INTERLOCUTIONS

The condition of possibility earlier referred to that allowed ethnicity andnominalism to preempt inquiry and debate involves the whole period of de-velopment of finance-capital in the U.S. from the end of the Civil Rightsstruggles to the birth of the Homeland Security State. This includes the oilcrisis of 1974, the unregurgitable defeat in Vietnam, and the unprecedentedpolitical realignments in the U.S. ruling class with the resignation ofNixon, and so on. What is more significant in terms of geopolitics is thefact that the whole post-WWII period involves the largest internal migra-tion in U.S. history that reconstituted the class and racial formations of theNew Deal era.

The resurgence of new forms of class struggle in the sixties and seventies,with the mobilization of African Americans and women together with theunionizing of public employees and service/white collar professionals, com-pels us to refocus our analysis on the reconfiguration of specific historicalblocs, to class generation and its trajectories, that would explain the nature ofcapitalist hegemony. Michael Zweig (2000) notes that the decline of classpolitics coincides with the rise of identity politics in a period of the deterio-ration of living standards for the working class majority. What cannot be ig-nored in the recent historical conjuncture in terms of its long-range culturalresonance is the new massive immigration from Asia and Latin America af-ter the 1965 Immigration Act that, up to now, continues to “thicken” the eth-nic and racial contradictions of the post-Fordist working class.

The 1992 Los Angeles urban rebellion was a symptom of an epochal trendthat would culminate in the re-election of George W. Bush, the USA PatriotAct, and the establishment of the Homeland Security State. In short, the cri-

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sis of capitalism has moved to a critical stage in which protofascist measures,brutal military aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, and unilateral preemptivestrikes are becoming the norm. How can we, putative organic intellectuals ofthe masses, intervene?

Cultural Studies debate may have catalyzed the groundwork for the emer-gence of CRT. From a more heterodox perspective, Michael Denning ob-serves, “the ‘turn to race’ was not a rhetorical shift, a refusal of the languageof populism, Americanism, and industrial unionism.” Rather, it “was the markof a profound remaking of the working classes, in the United States and glob-ally” (Denning 2004, 153). This turn, however, did not neglect class antago-nisms, by which is meant precisely the struggle over how the social surplus—the unpaid values expropriated from those who don’t own or control themeans of production—is generated by various modes of exploitation, andthen appropriated and distributed chiefly through the agency of the capitaliststate and its ideological apparatuses.

Our key heuristic axiom is this: the extraction of surplus labor always in-volves conflict and struggle. What is crucial is this process of class conflictin which identities are articulated with group formation, where race, genderand ethnicity enter into the totality of contradictions that define a specificconjuncture, in particular the contradiction between the social relations dom-inated by private property and the productive forces. Reformulated, thisproposition translates into a principle of causality: the organization of workand livelihood influences the way in which race and gender are mediatedwithin the hegemony of a social bloc. Class-consciousness as a “state of so-cial cohesion” (Braverman 1974, 29) involves layers that have varying dura-tion and intensities expressed in popular and mass culture. A historical mate-rialist understanding of race relations and racism embedded in the process ofclass formation and class struggles, in the labor process and cultural expres-sion, distinguishes the research projects of Cultural Studies scholars likeMichael Denning, Peter McLaren, Paul Buhle, Gregory Meyerson, TeresaEbert, Bertell Ollman, Alan Wald, and others.

Given this emphasis on class struggle and class formation, on the totalityof social relations that define the position of interacting collectivities in soci-ety, materialist critique locates the ground of institutional racism and racially-based inequality in the capitalist division of labor—primarily between theseller of labor-power as prime commodity and the employer who maximizessurplus value (unpaid labor) from the workers. What will maximize accumu-lation of profit and also maintain the condition for such stable and efficientmaximization, is the question whose answer would explain the ideology andpractice of racial segregation, subordination, exclusion, and variegated tacticsof violence.

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This does not reduce race to class, rather it assigns import or intelligiblemeaning to the way in which racialization (the valorization of somatic or“natural” properties) operates. While social subjects indeed serve as sites ofvariegated differences—that is, individuals undergo multiple inscriptions andoccupy shifting positionalities on the level of everyday experience—the pat-tern of their actions or “forms of life” are not permanently indeterminate, norundecidable, when analyzed from the perspective of the totality of productionrelations. It is the capitalist labor process and its conditions that overdeter-mine the location of groups whose ethnic, racial, gender and other character-istics acquire value within that context. I think this is the sense in which Bar-bara Jeanne Fields argues for a materialist reading of slavery in U.S. history:“A majority of historians think of slavery as primarily a system of race rela-tions—as though the chief business of slavery were the production of whitesupremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco”(1990, 99). This one-sided, indeed mechanistic, explanation needs to be cor-rected with the observation that the production of cotton, etc. reproduces initself the whole complex of social and political relations of that field—in fact,production of commodities for exchange, and profit, would not be possible ifthe reproduction of class relations did not accompany it. Which came first, theactual exploitation or its rationalization, is a trick question posed by disin-genuous cynics whose vulgar materialism can easily consort with the halluci-natory narcotics of superstition and the mesmerizing fetishism of goods andspectacles (Guillaumin 1995). Culture, ideology, politics and economics areall inextricably intertwined; but their “law of motion” can be clarified throughthe mediation of a historical-materialist optic attuned to the nuances of class-conscious mass mobilization.

DECODING WHITENESS

Which brings us to the field of whiteness and Whiteness Studies, largely in-spired by CRT. The intervention of Whiteness Studies may be considered asa refinement of CRT in its treatment of whiteness as an analytical problem inthe determination of class hierarchy (Delgado and Stefancic 1997). It takesoff from W.E.B. Du Bois’ insight (in Black Reconstruction) that white work-ers enjoyed “public and psychological wage” regardless of position in the so-cial hierarchy. Whiteness Studies has been interpreted as a response to the po-litical realignment in the eighties, illustrated by the appearance of Reagandemocrats and the “cult of ethnicity,” when liberal intellectuals disavowedblack activists like Stokely Carmichael and the Civil Rights agenda. How canone account for the celebration of ethnic whiteness at a time of severe crisis

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in the form of de-industrialization, unprecedented lay-offs, widening incomegap, disproportionate imprisonment of African Americans and Latinos, andother symptoms of social decay?

In scholarly interventions by David Roediger (Wages of Whiteness),Alexander Saxton (The Rise and Fall of the White Republic), Theodore Allen,The Invention of the White Race), Michael Goldfield (The Color of Politics),and George Lipsitz (The Possessive Investment in Whiteness), among others,we learn that the core normative belief-system that props up the hierarchicalsystem hinges on white privilege, white supremacy, the foundation of theracial polity (Mills 1997). This construction of white racial superiority pre-vents class unity and conceals class exploitation. This thesis has already beenargued earlier by Marxists like Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy (Monopoly Cap-ital 1966) in explaining the deprivation of blacks after the end of the CivilWar. But the proposition of whiteness as a psychological compensation forwhites anxious to raise themselves in the “status hierarchy” (Baran andSweezy 1972, 310) is only one element in a wider critique of capitalist ideol-ogy and institutional practices. Race, whiteness, is not an autonomous factoroperating apart from the totality of social relations, in particular the politicalstruggles and ideological struggles of the time. Even Noel Ignatiev, the editorof Race Traitor and exponent of the treason of whiteness, concedes that“while not all forms of injustice can be collapsed into whiteness, undermin-ing white race solidarity opens the door to fundamental social change in otherareas” (1994, 86).

One observer points out that, in contrast, the historical-materialist analysisof “whiteness” carried out by Alexander Saxton inscribed the ideologicalwithin the process of class politics, mass culture, and historical background(Hartman 2004). Arising as a rationalization of the slave trade and the theft ofland from nonwhites, white supremacy evolved as a theory/practice designedto legitimize the rule of dominant groups in fluctuating class coalitions, mod-ified and readjusted according to the complex process of reconfiguring hege-mony (moral and intellectual leadership of a historic bloc, in Gramsci’s con-strual). Thus, it is the totality of capitalist production relations—not anessentializing ingredient such as economic position alone—that explain whythe ideological synthesis of white supremacy functioned as a key element inthe bourgeoisie’s strategic construction of hegemony through the calculatedcalibration of the relations among the state, the institutions of civil society,and the practices of everyday life. When the economic and political domains(base and superstructure) are separated and fragmented into discursive localeffects, the result is an incoherent amalgam of factors that cannot provide anexplanatory critique that would connect various seemingly incommensurablesocial practices and institutions to one another and to the global situation

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(Meyerson 2003). If we want to transform the oppressive system based on theskewed social division of labor and the unequal distribution of social wealth,we need a testable knowledge of social totality that would afford opportuni-ties for wide-scale, organized mass intervention.

BACK TO THE MAELSTROM

Finally, I can only suggest here a need to shift some of our energies and re-sources to the task of understanding the oppression of women migrant work-ers, particularly women of color or “third world” women, as a focus for fu-ture research programs. This current period of reaction after 9/11, the drasticcurtailment of civil rights authorized by the USA Patriot Act and supervisedby an authoritarian, militarist administration; the outrageous “killing fields”in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and many regions of Africa; the U.S.-aidedcounterinsurgency campaigns in Colombia, the Philippines, and elsewhere;unprecedented ecological catastrophes everywhere—all these demand an ur-gent need for those committed to radical change to engage in drawing up amore comprehensive critique of the global totality. This is not to downplaythe horrors of genocidal ethnic strife, environmental disasters, AIDs andSARS epidemics whose implications can only be grasped as networks of so-cial events with intelligible causality. But an engagement with the interna-tional division of labor as an integral component of globalization and its pro-found, enduring impact on everyday life may help us move beyond narrowempiricism and connect the fragmented categories of race, gender and statusinto an intelligible complex that can offer openings for radical popular mobi-lizations.

The global migration of labor is certainly an integral part of the interna-tionalization of production and the worldwide division of labor. It is nowcommon knowledge that capitalism’s expansive nature led to the uneven, un-equal development between colonizing nation-states of Western Europe,North America, and Japan, and the rest of the world (the global South). Mi-gration is a response to the spatial and developmental inequality produced bycapitalist accumulation by colonial/imperialist aggression, Cold War inter-ventions, and “dirty wars” for regime change. Not only commodities and cap-ital circulate more rapidly and frequently in the late-modern world, but alsobodies and their capacity to produce, consume, and reproduce the whole cos-mology of their repressed existence.

The situation of the Philippines may be taken as a case study in this un-folding narrative of globalization. Colonized by Spain for three hundred yearsand by the United States for almost a century, the Philippines remains a poor

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underdeveloped dependent formation. Ruled by a local oligarchy of com-pradors, bureaucrat-capitalists, and semi-feudal landlords molded by morethan fifty years of U.S. tutelage, the Philippines failed to develop into a“Newly-Industrialized Economy” after World War II owing to a variety ofcauses the chief of which is the uninterrupted U.S. economic, political andcultural stranglehold since its annexation in 1899, and even after formal in-dependence in 1946 and the removal of its huge military bases in 1992.

In 2002, 67% of eighty-three million Filipinos are poor. In 2006, the situ-ation worsened, with the poor increasing to more than 70% of the population(IBON 2006). Unemployment runs to 11–12% annually and underemploy-ment to 17% (Ocampo 2002). Due to severe unemployment and the disrup-tion of traditional work processes by the imposed Structural Adjustment Pro-grams of the IMF/World Bank during the long period of the Marcosdictatorship, successive administrations in the Philippines have instituted asystematic export of its citizens, in particular women, to overseas jobs,thereby collecting enormous fees and taxes. Over two thousand people leavethe Philippines every day; approximately ten million Filipinos in over 186countries remit earnings of over $13 billion (about 10% of the Gross Domes-tic Product), the largest source of foreign currency enough to pay the enor-mous foreign debt. These “servants of globalization”—as one textbook callsthis largest cohort of migrant contract workers in the world—are praised byFilipino politicians as “modern heroes,” “overseas Philippine investors,” “in-ternationally shared resources,” and other ironic euphemisms.

There are now between 80 million to 95 million migrant workers world-wide; about 20 million are Asians. In the last decade, Filipinos in the U.S. in-creased to over three million, the largest Asian community. After 9/11, sev-eral hundred Filipinos have been summarily deported, treated as dangerouscriminals, for assorted reasons short of being “terrorists.” The racist discrim-ination against thousands of Filipino WW2 veterans, nurses and caregivers,and especially former airport screeners may be explained not by the USA Pa-triot Act but by a long history of national oppression and class exploitationthat exacerbates invidious categorization by gender and sexuality.

Complementing the push-factor of economic deprivation and political in-stability in this Southeast Asian neocolony is the transformation of the U.S.economy in the last half of the twentieth century. The rise of global cities likeNew York or Los Angeles restructured labor demand so that immigrationpolicies and laws had to be shaped in order to hire immigrants for low-wageservice jobs in certain highly specialized service sectors with the high-incomelifestyles of its professional workforce; and for declining industries in need ofcheap labor for survival (Sassen 1998, 261). One can see that changes withinthe dominant economies reflect those in the dependent formations, disrupting

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the neutral-sounding terms “sending” and “receiving” countries. Preciselythis interaction of apparent equality of buyer and seller in the “free market”underlies the unequal status relation of nation-states. This is indeed a literalcase of lack of transparency: appearances mystify or conceal the real state ofaffairs.

Orthodox immigration experts and neoWeberians like Sassen posit themarket as the major factor in forming class. But this stress on exchange ig-nores the process of class formation within the web of social relationshipsthat are historically concrete, determinate, and specific (Wood 1995), andleads to treating people as mere bearers of reified structures. Law in capital-ism—as the Russian critic Eugeny Pashukanis has shown—expresses thefetishized relations among commodity exchangers; the allegedly “free mar-ket” is what Marx called the “very Eden” of human rights. What this marketdomain hides—it’s no secret now, folks—is the exploitation founded on theconsumption of the use-value of the workers bought by capital; the subordi-nation of the collective producers in the labor process; the extraction of sur-plus value, and so on. And this juridical symmetry of apparently free ex-changes between seemingly look-alike property owners is what critical theoryneeds to unmask (Arthur 1978).

On the other hand, interpretive ethnographies of the personal experience ofdomestics have only trivialized the agency they are supposed to discover.Women workers do indeed enact their intentions and desires—traveling foradventure, release from abusive husbands, etc.—but the powers “instanti-ated” in their behavior attest to their overdetermination by larger economicand political structures. In Alex Callinicos’ words, “what agents can collec-tively or individually do depends to a significant degree on their position inthe relations of production” (1989, 136).

Theories of the de-centered subject or ludic performativity touted by post-modernists often prove arbitrary if not vacuous because they lack a nuancedmapping of the variable structural determinants of action. To guard againstthe feared reductionist specters of the past, we obviously need a self-criticalmethod whereby one undertakes a cognitive inventory of internal relationswithin any historical conjuncture; only within this framework can we appre-ciate the value of individual and collective resistance to racism, sexism andother forms of oppression.

MIGRANT CRUCIBLE

Let me call your attention to the plight of Filipina domestics. UnlikeCanada, which has officially instituted a Live-in Caregiver Program, the

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U.S. does not regulate the conditions of domestics. Hundreds of cases ofabuse of Filipino nannies in the U.S. are recorded daily. Women enter thecountry with a visa tied to an employer; since there is no working permit,the employer dictates inordinately long hours and intolerable working con-ditions. Abuses concerning minimum wage, non-payment of overtime pay,and time-off are common. Most domestics here are from the “third world,”separated from each other by their isolation, lack of regulations on the re-cruiting industry, and the social discrimination of their language, immigra-tion status, nationality and race.

Grace Chang cites the case of women domestics in New York uniting tourge the City Council to pass a bill requiring agencies to issue contracts withhumane work conditions, including minimum wage, two weeks’ paid vaca-tion, sick days, etc. Carol de Leon, a Filipina who has first-hand experienceof the plight of domestics, stated that the group not only wants to improve theworking conditions but also to “change the notion that immigrant workers arelazy and uneducated. Because it relates to history, because this country in-herited this industry [import of domestics] through American slavery andideas that this is women’s work. We are calling for respect and recognition forwomen in this industry” (Chang 2004, 256).

In addition to the sociohistorical contexts of employment, what is crucialis to grasp the unique condition of the labor process that is already overde-termined by factors of globalization and the politico-economic environment.We need to attend to the exceptional and distinctively late-modern commod-ification of domestic labor. With penetrating insight, Bridget Anderson em-phasizes how, in the form of migrant domestic women, “the transnational,globalized economy is brought into the home, not just in the goods consumedthere, but in the organizing of reproductive labor” (2004, 263). In addition tothe global division of labor sketched earlier, we need to analyze the currentsituation through the theoretical optic of reproductive labor. The concept ofreproductive labor involves the complex dialectic of culture, politics, econ-omy, as well as the intricate entanglement of the private and public in every-day life. Anderson highlights the theoretical usefulness of this concept:

Domestic work—mental, physical, and emotional labor—is reproductive work,and reproductive work is not confined to the maintenance of physical bodies:people are social, cultural, and ideological beings, not just units of labor, and re-productive labor is not organized exclusively for the labor market, althoughmarket forces affect it. Under capitalism, human beings’ social relations find ex-pression and are mediated by patterns of consumption. Reproductive labor, then,not only produces workers; it also produces consumers of the products of capi-talism, consumers from the cradle (cot or basket? Bed or crib?) to the grave(marble or granite? Embossed or engraved?) (2004, 264)

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Domestic work thus reproduces lifestyle, status, beliefs—in effect, the hier-archical system of social relations where identities are defined, the sphere ofdesire and pleasure marked out, and life-chances charted in reciprocal inter-action with the framework of production relations. What needs careful un-derscoring here is how Anderson’s dialectical approach connects the systemicwith the sociocultural and ideological when she posits domestic service as theselling of the self in the global market, the marketing of personhood, the fash-ioning of modern slavery:

The domestic worker is not equated socially with her employer in the act of ex-change because the fiction of labour power cannot be maintained; it is “person-hood” that is being commodified. Moreover, the worker’s caring function, herperformance of tasks constructed as degrading, demonstrates the employer’spower to command her self. Having allegedly sold her personhood, the domes-tic worker is both person and non-person. She is, like the prostitute, a personwho is not a person, someone for whom all obligations can be discharged in cash(2000, 121).

Positivist social science has generated a plethora of empirical microstudies ofindividual life-histories of women workers. It has even massively docu-mented the statistics of the feminization and “housewifization” of labor. Butit has not been able to take into account the pressure of global and local so-cioeconomic forces at work in the national and international migration ofwomen and the ideologies that legitimize them and that they propagate. Weneed to register the varying impact of inter alia structural adjustment policieson “sending” neocolonies like the Philippines, the histories of colonialism,imperialism, and patriarchy; national debt; the growth of agribusiness; therole of finance capital and outsourcing, as well as immigration and trade lawsboth national and international. And concomitant with this, the diverse col-lective modes of resistance and opposition to the effects of such forces. Theanalysis and evaluation of this totality of forces and their mutual interactionis what a historical materialist approach seeks to carry out.

TRANSLATION DYNAMICS

Following the lead of Anderson, Chang, and other militant intellectuals, Iwould re-affirm the need to situate racism in late-capitalist society within theprocess of class rule and labor exploitation to grasp the dynamics of racial ex-clusion and subordination. Beyond the mode of production, the antagonisticrelations between the capitalist class and the working class are articulatedwith the state and its complex bureaucratic and juridical mechanisms, multi-

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plying cultural and political differentiations that affect the attitudes, senti-ments and actual behavior of groups. A critique of ideologies of racism andsexism operating in the arena of class antagonism becomes crucial in the ef-fort to dismantle their efficacy. Moreover, as Bensaid observes in Marx ForOur Times (2002), “the relationship between social structure and politicalstruggle is mediated by the relations of dependence and domination betweennations at the international level.” Linear functionalism yields to the materi-alist analysis of concrete mediations in the social totality, with all their con-sequences in practice.

Viewed historically, the phenomenon of migrant labor, in particular Filip-ina domestics in North America and elsewhere, demonstrates how racial andgender characteristics become functional and discursively valorized whenthey are inserted into the dialectic of abstract and concrete labor, of use-valueand exchange value, in the production of commodities—in this case, the do-mestics’ labor-power as an international commodity. Contrary to the socio-logical trivia of a global “chain care” legitimizing the underpaid services ofwomen of color from the South, the racializing and gendering discourse ofglobal capitalism can only be adequately grasped as the mode through whichextraction of surplus value, wage differentiation, and control of bodies andtheir representation are all negotiated.

A study of racist practices and institutions, divorced from the underlyingdeterminant structure of capital accumulation and class rule that allow suchpractices and institutions to exercise their naturalizing force, can only perpet-uate an abstract metaphysics of race and a discourse of power that would re-inforce the continuing reification of social relations in everyday life. We can-not multiply static determinations in an atomistic manner and at the sametime acquire a practicable totality of knowledge that we need for designingstrategies of radical social transformation. A first step in this project of re-newing critical race theory is simple: begin with the concept of class as an an-tagonistic relation between labor and capital, and then proceed to analyzehow the determinant of “race” is played out historically in the class-conflictedstructure of capitalism and its political/ideological processes of class rule.

It is of course important to always maintain vigilance concerning the mys-tifying use of “race,” or the practice of racialization, in any location, whetherin the privacy of the family, home, school, factory, or state institutions (court,prison, police station, legislature). Grace Chang (2000) has meticulously doc-umented how people of color, exploited immigrants and refugees, have them-selves used racist images and rhetoric in their role as “gatekeepers” to theracialized class system. Recently, Adolph Reed (2005) acutely exposed theunderlying class-based anatomy of the social catastrophe precipitated by hur-ricane Katrina, a tragedy ultimately rooted in decades of material inequality

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and neglect in a market-centered racial polity. Reviewing the achievement ofMarxist legal scholars (e.g., Tigar and Levy 1977; Edelman 1979; DellaVolpe 1966) more than two decades ago, Mark Tushnet (1984) expressed thehope that the theoretical initiatives of Bell, Delgado, Crenshaw and otherCRT pioneers can be integrated with the doctrinal/empirical approaches. Suchintegration may be facilitated by the models I have alluded to here if only byway of provocation.

However, I offer a caveat. Without framing all these issues within the totalpicture of the crisis of capital and its globalized restructuring from the lateseventies up to the present, and without understanding the continued domi-nation of labor by capital globally, we cannot effectively counteract theracism that underwrites the relation of domination and subordination amongnationalities, ethnic communities, and gender groups. A critique of an emer-gent authoritarian state and questionable policies sanctioned by the USA Pa-triot Act is urgently required. In doing so, naming the system and under-standing its operations would be useful in discovering precisely that elementof self-activity and collective agency that has supposedly been erased in to-talizing metanarratives such as the “New World Order” and the “New Amer-ican Century” that will end ideology and history, and in revolutionary proj-ects of establishing racial justice and equality. As the familiar quote goes, wedo make history, even in this epoch of the “Global War on Terrorism” and“extremism”—but not under circumstances of our choosing. So the questionis, as always, what alternatives do we have to carry out which goals at whattime and place, who are our friends and who our enemies, and what minimumand maximum objectives are doable in the short term, and feasible in themonths and years ahead. Another world is certainly possible if we have thewill, solidarity, and hope to realize it

The goal of a class-less communist society and strategies to attain it nec-essarily envisage the demise of racist ideology and practice in its currentforms. But progressive forces around the world are not agreed about this. Forexample, the World Conference against Racism World Forum of Non-Gov-ernmental Organizations held before September 11, 2001 in Durban, SouthAfrica, publicized the global problem of racism but was unable to formulatea consensus on how to solve it. Its final declaration highlighted the historicorigin of racism in the slave trade, colonialism, genocide, and the possibilityof reparations for its victims, but did not offer a concrete program of action(Mann 2002).

Given its composition, and the pervasive climate of reaction, the Forumcould not of course endorse a radical approach that would focus on the elim-ination of the exploitation of labor (labor power as commodity) as a neces-sary first step. Given its limits, it could not espouse a need for a thorough-

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going change of the material basis of social production and reproduction—thelatter involving the hegemonic rule of the propertied bloc in each societyprofiting from the unequal division of labor and the unequal distribution ofsocial wealth—on which the institutional practices of racism (apartheid, dis-crimination, genocide) thrive. “Race is the modality in which class is lived,”as Stuart Hall remarked concerning post-1945 Britain (Solomos 1986, 103).Without the political power in the hands of the democratic-popular massesunder the leadership of the working class, the ideological machinery (laws,customs, religion, state bureaucracy) that legitimizes class domination, withits attendant racist practices, cannot be changed. What is required is a revo-lutionary process that mobilizes a broad constituency based on substantiveequality and social justice as an essential part of the agenda to dissolve classstructures; any change in the ideas, beliefs, and norms would producechanges in the economic, political and social institutions that would in turnpromote wide-ranging changes in social relations among groups, sectors, andso on.

UTOPIAN EXTRAPOLATIONS

Within a historical-materialist framework, the starting point and end point foranalyzing the relations between structures in any sociohistorical totality can-not be anything else but the production and reproduction of material exis-tence. The existence of any totality follows transformation rules whereby it isconstantly being restructured into a new formation (Harvey 1973). Theserules reflect the dialectical unfolding of manifold contradictions constitutingthe internal relations of the totality. Within this conflicted, determinate total-ity, race cannot be reduced to class, nor can class be subsumed by race, sincethose concepts express different forms of social relations. What is the exactrelation between the two? This depends on the historical character of the so-cial production in question and the ideological-political class struggles defin-ing it.

In his valuable treatise, The Invention of the White Race, Theodore Allenhas demonstrated the precise genealogy and configuration of racism in theU.S. It first manifested itself when the European colonial settlers based onprivate property in land and resources subdued another social order based oncollective, tribal tenure of land and resources, denying the latter any socialidentity—”social death” for Native Americans. We then shift our attention tothe emergence of the white race and its system of racial oppression with thedefeat of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1677 and the establishment of a system of life-time hereditary bond servitude (for African Americans): “The insistence on

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the social distinction between the poorest member of the oppressor group andany member, however propertied, of the oppressed group, is the hallmark ofracial oppression” (Allen 1997, 243). In effect, white supremacy defining thenature of civil society was constructed at a particular historical conjuncturedemanded by class war. The result is a flexible and adjustable system that canadjust its racial dynamics in order to divide the subordinates, resist any cri-tique of its ideological legitimacy, and prevent any counter-hegemonic blocof forces from overthrowing class rule.

Class struggle intervenes through its impact in the ideological-politicalsphere of civil society. Racial categories operate through the mediation ofcivil society which (with the class-manipulated State) regulate personal rela-tions through the reifying determinations of value, market exchange, and cap-ital. Harry Chang comments on the social mediation of racial categories:“Blacks and whites constitute social blocks in a developed setting of ‘masssociety’ in which social types (instead of persons) figure as basic units of eco-nomic and political management . . . The crucial intervention of objectifica-tion, i.e., relational poles conceived as the intrinsic quality of objects in rela-tion, must not be neglected here. Racial formation in a country is an aspect ofclass formation, but the reason races are not classes lies in this objectificationprocess (or fetishization)” (1985, 43). Commodity fetishism enables the ide-ology of racism (inferiority tied to biology, genetics, cultural attributes) toregister its effects in common-sense thinking and routine behavior in class-di-vided society (Lukacs 1971). Because market relations hide unequal powerrelations, sustained ideological critique and transformative collective actionsare imperative. This signifies the heuristic maxim of “permanent revolution”(Lefevbre 1968, 171) in Marxist thought: any long-term political struggle toabolish capitalism as a system of extracting surplus value through a system ofthe unequal division of labor (and rewards) needs to alter the institutions andpractices of civil society that replicate and strengthen the fetishizing mecha-nism of commodity production and exchange (the capitalist mode of produc-tion). If racism springs from the reification of physical attributes (skin color,eye shape) to validate the differential privileges in a bourgeois regime, thenthe abolition of labor-power as a commodity will be a necessary if not suffi-cient step in doing away with the conditions that require racial privileging ofcertain groups in class-divided formations. Racism is not an end in itself but,despite its seeming autonomy, an instrumentality of class rule.

What needs re-emphasis are the following propositions. Reification of na-ture and all social relations is the distinctive logic of the political economy ofbourgeois domination. Racial differentiation and class antagonism convergein the revolutionary process when, as C.L.R. James states in a gloss onLenin’s thought, the colonized subalterns (e.g., the Irish in 19th century

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Britain) and racially oppressed peoples/nations (African Americans, indige-nous communities) begin to act as the “bacilli” or ferment that ushers onto theinternational scene “the real power against imperialism—the socialist prole-tariat” (1994, 182). Socialist revolution is thus the requisite precondition forending racism.

Before reaching the barricades, we need to traverse again the perilousgeopolitics of the nation, surveying the character of the state vis-à-vis the na-tional formation, and the attendant phenomena of nationalism and politicalviolence in the field of global class conflict.

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Upheavals of class conflict, ethnic “cleansing” and racism all converge in themalevolent charge imputed to nationalism and the nation-state. Rarely do wefind sweetness and light here. After the excesses of fascism in World War IIand the inter-ethnic conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, and the former Yu-goslavia, it became axiomatic for postmodernist thinkers to condemn the na-tion and its corollary terms, “nationalism” and “nation-state,” as the classicevils of modern industrial society. The nation-state, its reality if not its con-cept, has become a kind of malignant paradox if not a sinister conundrum. Itis often linked to violence and the terror of “ethnic cleansing.” Despite thisthe United Nations and the interstate system of nation-states still function asseemingly viable institutions of everyday life. After September 11, 2001, theU.S. nation-state is evolving into a besieged “homeland,” hence the zealousenforcement of “national security” measures. How do we explain these seem-ingly paradoxical trends?

Let us review the inventory of charges made against the nation-state and itscognate concepts. Typically described in normative terms as a vital necessityof modern life, the nation-state emerged after the breakup of the medievalChristian empire. It has employed violence to accomplish questionableends—colonial annexation of territories, conquest of markets, systematic ex-termination of natives. Its disciplinary apparatuses for war and pacificationare indicted for committing unprecedented barbarism. Examples of disastersare the extermination of indigenous peoples in colonized territories by “civi-lizing” nations, the Nazi genocide of Jews and inferiorized populations, andmost recently “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia, Ruwanda, SriLanka, and so on. Pursuing a line of thought elaborated by Elie Kedourie,Partha Chatterjee, and others, Alfred Cobban (1994) asserted a widely sharedview that the theory of nationalism has proved to be one of the most potent

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agencies of destruction in the modern world. In certain cases, nationalismmobilized by states competing against other states has become synonymouswith totalitarianism and fascism. Charles Tilly (1975), Michael Howard(1991), and other historians concur in the opinion that war and the militarymachine are principal determinants in the shaping of nation states. In The Na-tion-State and Violence, Anthony Giddens defines nationalism as “the culturalsensibility of sovereignty” (note the fusion of culture and politics) that un-leashes administrative power within a clearly demarcated territory, “thebounded nation-state” (1985, 219). Although it is allegedly becoming obso-lete under the pressure of globalization (for qualifications, see Sassen [1998]), the nation-state is considered by “legal modernists” (Berman 1995) as theprime source of violence against citizens and entire peoples.

Postmodernist critiques of the nation (often sutured with the colonialist/imperialist state) locate the evil in its ideological nature. This primarily con-cerns the nation as the source of identity for modern individuals via citizenshipor national belonging, converting natal filiation (kinship) into political affilia-tion. Identity implies definition by negation, inclusion based on exclusion un-derwritten by a positivist logic of representation (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991).But these critiques seem to forget that the nation is chiefly a creation of themodern capitalist state, that is, a historical artifice or invention. As Giovanni Ar-righi observes, the Settlement of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty-Year Warmarked the “reorganization of political space in the interest of capital accumu-lation” and signaled “the birth, not just of the modern inter-state system but alsoof capitalism as a world-system” (1993, 162). Under this imperialist world sys-tem, Nikolai Bukharin reminds us, “the state power sucks in almost all branchesof production; it not only maintains the general conditions of the exploitativeprocess; the state more and more becomes a direct exploiter, organizing and di-recting production as a collective capitalist” (Callinicos 1982, 205).

It is a truism that nation and its corollary problematique, nationalism, pre-supposes the imperative of hierarchization and asymmetry of power in a po-litical economy of general exchange. The prime commodity exchanged isnow labor-power. Founded on socially constructed myths or traditions, thenation is posited by its proponents as a normal state of affairs used to legit-imize the control and domination of one group over others. Such ideology hasto be demystified and exposed as contingent on the changing grid of social re-lations; that is, on how domination by force is legitimized via the state. PierreBourdieu’s reformulation of Max Weber’s formula of the state as the agencymonopolizing the legitimate use of physical and symbolic violence over adefinite territory/population may be useful here:

The state is the culmination of a process of concentration of different species ofcapital; capital of physical force or instruments of coercion (army, police), eco-

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nomic capital, cultural or (better) informational capital, and symbolic capital. Itis this concentration as such which constitutes the state as the holder of a sort ofmetacapital granting power over other species of capital and over their holders. . . It follows that the construction of the state proceeds apace with the con-struction of a field of power, defined as the space of play within which the hold-ers of capital (of different species) struggle in particular for power over thestate, that is, over the statist capital granting power over the different species ofcapital and over their reproduction (particularly through the school system)”(1998, 41–42).

This meta-capital, more precisely statist capital (Bourdieu 1992, 114) enablesthe dominant class to articulate the field of national identity, the habitus of na-tional belonging, to reinforce the prevailing ownership/allocation of eco-nomic and symbolic capital. A critique of essentialist nationalism, or its ex-pression in “bodily beliefs,” passions and dispositions that make up thehabitus of racism, cannot succeed unless it enables “the transformation of theconditions of the production and transformation of dispositions (Bourdieu2000, 180), conditions that are social constructs or artifacts resulting fromhistorical struggles.

This heuristic notion of the state as distinguished from the nation in the fieldof social power eludes postcolonial thinking. Postcolonial theory claims to ex-pose the artificial and arbitrary nature of the nation: “This myth of nationhood,masked by ideology, perpetuates nationalism, in which specific identifiers areemployed to create exclusive and homogeneous conceptions of national tradi-tions” (Ashcroft et al 1998, 150). Such signifiers of homogeneity not only failto represent the diversity of the actual “nation” or body politic, but also servesto impose the interests of a particular section of the community as the generalinterest. One example is the imposition of “Englishness” on the heterogeneousconstituencies of the United Kingdom after World War II, as Stuart Hall (1997)recently pointed out. But this is not all. In the effort to make this universaliz-ing intent prevail, the instrumentalities of state power—the military and po-lice, religious and educational institutions, judiciary and legal apparatuses—are deployed. Hence, from this orthodox postcolonial stance, the nation-stateand its ideology of nationalism are alleged to have become the chief source ofviolence and conflict since the French Revolution.

ANATOMY OF VIOLENCE

Mainstream social science regards violence as a species of force that vio-lates, breaks, or destroys a normative state of affairs. It is coercion toutcourt. Violence is often used to designate force devoid of legitimacy or

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legally sanctioned authority. Should violence as an expression of physicalforce always be justified by political reason in order to be meaningful andtherefore acceptable? If such a force is used by a state, an inherited politi-cal organ legitimized by “the people” or “the nation,” should we not distin-guish between state-defined purposes and in what specific way nationalistideologies or nation-making mechanisms are involved in those state ac-tions? State violence and assertion of national identity need not be auto-matically conflated so as to implicate nationalism—whose nationalism?—in all class/state actions in every historical period. It would ignore thehistorically specific “field of power” (in Bourdieu’s sense) in which sym-bolic capital is deployed in the interests of those who monopolize statistcapital. Devoid of such specification, postcolonialists tend to indulge in anabsolutist censure of nation-state power bereft of intentionality—in otherwords, power is reduced to violence construed as merely physical forceakin to tidal waves, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and so on.

Violence, properly construed, signifies a political force that demands di-alectical triangulation in order to grasp how nation and state are implicated init. We might use, at this juncture, Hannah Arendt’s (1970) distinction between“power” as the socially sanctioned ability to act in concert, “force” as the “en-ergy released by physical or social movements,” “authority” as a property thatelicits obedience without coercion, and “violence” as the instrumental use ofimplements to multiply natural strength. Arendt notes how violence is oftenconflated with the power of government, but this is a mistake. The power ofthe state really depends on whether its commands are obeyed by its army orpolice forces who wield the instruments of violence; thus, “where commandsare no longer obeyed, the means of violence are of no use. . . . Everything de-pends on the power behind the violence. The sudden dramatic breakdown ofpower that ushers in revolutions reveals in a flash how civil obedience—tolaws, to rulers, to institutions—is but the outward manifestation of supportand consent” from the citizenry (1970: 49). In what sense is the nation or thesymbolic capital of nationalism utilized as an instrument of violence or ameans for legitimizing state power?

A materialist historicization of the phenomenon of nationalism is needed todetermine the complicity of individual states in specific outbreaks of vio-lence. Postcolonial criticism supposedly abhors totalization or generalization.But postcolonialists like Homi Bhabha (1990) resort to a questionable use ofthe versatile performativity of language to ascribe a semiotic indeterminacyto all nationalitarian projects, reducing the multifarious narratives of nations/peoples to a formulaic paradigm of hybridity and syncretism. Bhabha’s abso-lutization of contingency and local knowledge derived from Foucault, espe-cially the dogma of singularity attached to the “event” as “the reversal of a re-

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lationship of forces” (Foucault 1984; see Ebert 1996), rules out the sedi-mented potency of traditions, the counter-memory of popular-democratic re-volts, and the structuring impact of habitus in regions and localities deemedcrucial in undermining colonial authority. While postcolonialists (Bhabha1999) seek to expose the doubled or supplementary nature of the national signin order to open a critical space to alter the communal values of the dominantculture and to allow “the people” to negotiate other possibilities in their plac-ing between object and subject status, they eliminate outright the nation-formas a possible vehicle for popular struggles. The subalterns are forbidden tospeak their own collective ethos of insurgency in their ethnic idioms. Whilethe state has “governmentalized” power relations, analysis of the nation-statecannot exhaust the political economy of power-knowledge (Dreyfus and Ra-binow 1982; Lemert and Gillan 1982). History is reduced to the ambiguitiesof aleatory occurrences immanent in the arbitrary play of textualities. Thismove rules out systematic critique and political intervention. The social fieldof contending determinate forces represented by political parties and diverseorganizations cannot be conceived at all in the face of unintelligible singular-ities defying the mediating categories of class, nation, race, gender, and so on.

In this light, what makes the postcolonialist argument flawed becomesclear in its non-referential semiotics (more on this later) and a kind of non-se-quitur reasoning justified by a general deconstructive, post-structuralist ra-tionality. It is perhaps easy to expose the contingent nature of the nation onceits historical condition of possibility is pointed out. But it is more difficult toargue that once its socially contrived scaffolding is revealed, then the nation-state and its capacity to mobilize and apply the means of violence can be re-stricted if not curtailed. Exposing the artificiality of the nation is not the sameas delegitimizing the violence of the state or the political authority of theclasses and groups manifest in juridical institutions and state bureaucracy.

We can pose this question at this point: Can one seriously claim that oncethe British state is shown to rest on the myth of the Magna Carta or the UnitedStates government on the covenant of the Founding Fathers to uphold the in-terests of every citizen—except, of course, African slaves and other non-white peoples, then one has undermined the power of the British or Americannation-state? Not that this is an otiose, wrong-headed task. Debunking hasbeen the classic move of those protesting against an unjust status quo pur-porting to be the natural and normal condition for everyone. But it should notbe mistaken as a substitute for the actual organized resistance of the op-pressed and exploited multitudes.

It is not superfluous here to counsel ourselves again: the weapon of criti-cism, as Marx once said, needs to be reinforced by the principled criticism ofweapons. If we want to guard against committing the essentialist dogmatism

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of the imperial nationalists, we need a historicizing strategy of ascertaininghow force—the energy of social collectivities—turns into violence for thecreation or destruction of social orders and singular life-forms. The sover-eignty struggle of aboriginal groups has become a crucible for testing soli-darity or betrayal. Understood as embodying “the pathos of an elementalforce,” the insurrectionary movements of indigenes have been deemed thesource of a dynamic primordial energy that feeds “the legal Modernist com-posite of primitivism and experimentalism,” a fusion of “radical discontinu-ity and reciprocal facilitation” (Berman 1995, 238). But the American Indians(as well as the native Hawai’ians) are asserting a communal right to landsthey have been dispossessed of; their struggles for self-determination, coevalwith the rise of the imperial nation-state, belong to a kind of “modernity” notcomprehended by postcolonial-studies doctrine.

The question of the violence of the nation-state thus hinges on the linkagebetween the two categories, “nation” and “state.” A prior distinction needs tobe made between “nation” and “society” since these two are often muddledin postcolonial discourse. While the former “may be ordered, the [latter] or-ders itself” (Brown 1986). Most historical accounts remind us that the mod-ern nation-state has a beginning—and consequently, it is often forgotten—and an ending. But the analytic and structural distinction between thereferents of nation (local groups, community, domicile or belonging) andstate (Bourdieu’s meta-capital, governance, machinery of sanctioning laws,disciplinary codes, military) is often elided because the force of nationalismis often conflated with the violence of the state apparatuses, an error com-pounded by ignoring the social classes involved in each sphere. This is thelesson of Marx and Lenin’s necessary discrimination between oppressor andoppressed nations—a nation that oppresses another cannot really claim to befree. Often the symptom of this fundamental error is indexed by the formulaof counterpointing the state to civil society, obfuscating the symbiosis andsynergy between them. This error may be traced partly to the Hobbesian con-flation of state and society in order to regulate the anarchy of the market andof brutish individualism violating civil contracts (Ollman 1993).

MAPPING NATION FORMS

Before dealing with how society was nationalized, it may be useful to recallthe metaphysics of the origin of the nation elaborated in Ernest Renan’s 1882lecture, “What is a nation?” This may be considered one of the originary lo-cus of nationalism (in Europe, at least) conceived as a primitivist revoltagainst the centralized authority of modernizing industrial states. Renan’s

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idea of the nation as a kind of total destiny finds resonance in Max Weber’spraise of the state’s capacity to impart meaning to death, the state as a “pur-posefully constructed, functionally specific machine” (Poggi 1978, 101) thatappeals to and mobilizes nationalist sentiments. While Renan emphasized acommunity founded on acts of sacrifice and their memorialization, this focusdoes not abolish the fact that the rise of the merchant bourgeoisie marked thestart of the entrenchment of national boundaries first drawn in the age ofmonarchical absolutism. The establishment of the market coincided with theintroduction of taxation, customs, tariffs, etc., punctuated by the assertion oflinguistic distinctions among the inhabitants of Europe. Karl Polanyi’s thesisof The Great Transformation (1957) urges us to attend to the complexities inthe evolution of the nation-state in the world system of commodity exchange.We also need to take into account Ernest Gellner’s (1983) argument that cul-tural and linguistic homogeneity has served from the outset as a functionalimperative for states administering a market-centered economy and its class-determining division of social labor.

A more empirically nuanced explanation for how society was nationalizedis provided by Etienne Balibar. Starting from the premise that the world-econ-omy is a system of constraints, not a self-regulating invariant system (as re-ceived, “Washington-Consensus” globalization theory would have it), subjectto the unpredictable dance of its internal contradictions, Balibar describeshow the privileged status of the nation form “derives from the fact that, lo-cally, that form made it possible (at least for an entire historical period) forstruggles between heterogeneous classes to be controlled and for not only a‘capitalist class’ but the bourgeoisies proper to emerge from these—statebourgeoisies both capable of political, economic and cultural hegemony andproduced by that hegemony” (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, 90). Thus, to re-solve the internal contradictions, the bourgeoisie restructured the state in thenational form. This nationalized state intervened “in the very reproduction ofthe economy and particularly in the formation of individuals,” whereby indi-viduals of all classes were subordinated “to their status as citizens of the na-tion-state, to the fact of their being ‘nationals’ (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991,92). The key term in this narrative of nationalization is “hegemony,” in thisinstance capitalist hegemony (domination by consent) based on the formalnationalization of citizenship.

This function of hegemony, now realized through the sublimation of classcontradictions in the nation form, is ignored by postcolonial theory. Post-colonialists subscribe to a post-structuralist hermeneutic of nationalism as aprimordial destabilizing force devoid of rationality. And so while the shapingof the nation-state in the centuries of profound social upheavals did not fol-low a transparent linear trajectory—we have only to remember the untypical

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origins of the German and Italian nation-states, not to speak of the often intractable nationalist mobilizations in Greece, Turkey, and the colonized regions—that is not enough reason to ascribe an intrinsic negativity or bel-ligerency to the nation form as such. States may rise and fall, as the absolutemonarchs and dynasties did, but sentiments and practices constituting the na-tion follow another rhythm or temporality not easily dissolved into the vicis-situdes of the modern expansive state. Nor does this mean that nations,whether in the North or the South, exert a stabilizing and conservative influ-ence on social movements working for radical changes in the distribution ofpower and resources.

What seems obvious at this point is that the effects of state violence, or theconsequences of the instrumental application of force (following Arendt),cannot be judged as damaging or healthy as such without defining clearly theactors/agents involved, the purposes or ends of state activity, and the socialfield of forces in their dialectical interaction at specific historical conjunc-tures and epochs. Otherwise, jingoist, white-supremacist nationalism may belumped with struggles for genuine national autonomy or sovereignty on theground that both invoke the “nation” archetype.

Meanwhile, in pursuing a historically situated analysis of violence, weneed to avoid collapsing the difference between the concept of the “nation-state” and the variegated import of nationalist agendas around the world.Whence originates the will to exclude, to dominate? Philosophically, this hasbeen traced to the dialectical emergence of the communal universal selfthreatened by the violence of the Other in Hegel’s philosophy. Politically, na-tionalism has served a practical function. According to Anthony Giddens,“what makes the ‘nation’ integral to the nation-state . . . is not the existenceof sentiments of nationalism but the unification of an administrative appara-tus over precisely defined territorial boundaries in a complex of other nation-states” (1987, 172). That explains why the rise of nation-states coincided withwars and the establishment of the military bureaucratic machine. From thisperspective, the state refers to the political institution with centralized au-thority and monopoly of coercive agencies coinciding with the rise of globalcapitalism, while nationalism denotes the diverse configuration of peoplesbased on the commonality of symbols, beliefs, traditions, and so on.

Mindful of fundamentalist teleologies and moralisms, we need to guardagainst confusing historical periods and categories with disparate valences.Imagining the nation unified on the basis of secular citizenship and self-rep-resentation, as Benedict Anderson (1991) once demonstrated, was only pos-sible when print capitalism arose in conjunction with the expansive state. Butthat in turn was possible when the trading bourgeoisie developed the meansof communication under pressure of market competition and internal exigen-

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cies. Moreover, the dissemination of the Bible in different vernaculars did nottranslate into a monopoly of violence by the national churches. In LatinAmerica, however, the “nation as imagined community” exhibited multiplesymptoms of abortive birth, stagnation, and premature decay, precipitated bymutations in the social field in which the violence of the feudal/tributary land-lord and slaveholding classes collided with the predatory incursions of mer-cantile and industrial capitalism (Franco 1997). We can find examples ofthese deformations in Asia and Africa. It is obvious that the sense of nationalbelonging, whether based on clan or tribal customs, language, religion, etc.,certainly has a historical origin and localizing motivation different from theemergence of the capitalist state as an agency organizing the populace toserve the needs of the commercial class and the goal of accumulation. The un-even development of the colonized nation-states led by compradors and feu-dal landlords, dependent formations investigated by Samir Amin (1980), Pe-ter Gran (1996), and others, should be demarcated from the Europeanmetropolitan experience discussed by Balibar, Giddens, and other scholars.

REFUSALS AND DENIALS

Given the rejection of a materialist analysis of the contradictions in any so-cial formation, postcolonial critics find themselves utterly at a loss in makingcoherent sense of nationalism as a historically variegated phenomenon. Thereason lies in its adherence to the closure of conventionalist self-referential-ity wrongly ascribed to Saussure (Merquior 1986). Whereas, in CharlesSanders Peirce’s semiotics, signs are not only limited to iconic and symbolickinds, but also perform indexical functions (reference to an experimentallyverifiable world outside discourse), postcolonial theory is locked in the“prison-house of language” and the vertigo of logocentric interpretation(Sheriff 1989). The community of interpretants disappears (Rochberg-Halton1986). Representations of the historicity of the nation give way to a Niet-zschean will to invent reality as polysemic discourse, a product of enuncia-tory and performative acts. No wonder the nation becomes culpable of na-tionalist aggression and other crimes.

Postcolonial critics resort to a duplicitous if not equivocating stance in re-gard to nation-centered cultures vis-à-vis diasporic cosmopolitanism (seeAppadurai 1994; Mohanty 1994). They perceive nationalism as “an ex-tremely contentious site” in which notions of self-determination and identitycollide with notions of domination and exclusion. Such oppositions, how-ever, prove unmanageable indeed if a mechanical perspective is employed.That view in fact leads to an irresolvable muddle in which nation-states as

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the field of antagonism for the extraction of surplus value (profit) and “free”exchange of commodities also become violent agencies preventing “free”action in a global marketplace that crosses national boundaries. Averse tohistorical grounding and indexing, postcolonial studies regard nationalistideology as the cause of individual and state competition for goods and re-sources in the “free market,” with this market conceived as a creation of ide-ology. I cite one postcolonial authority who, in a mode of double-speak, at-tributes violence to the nation-state on one hand and liberal disposition to thenation on the other:

The complex and powerful operation of the idea of a nation can be seen also inthe great twentieth-century phenomenon of global capitalism, where the “freemarket” between nations, epitomized in the emergence of multinational compa-nies, maintains a complex, problematic relationship with the idea of nations asnatural and immutable formations based on shared collective values. Modernnations such as the United States, with their multi-ethnic composition, requirethe acceptance of an overarching national ideology (in pluribus unum). Butglobal capitalism also requires that the individual be free to act in an economicrealm that crosses and nullifies these boundaries and identities (Ashcroft et al,1998, 151).

First of all, it is misleading to label the slogan “one in many” as the U.S.hegemonic ideology. Officially the consensual ideology of the U.S. is neolib-eral “democracy” founded on a normative utilitarian individualism with aneoSocial Darwinist orientation. Recently, U.S. “Manifest Destiny” has beenrefurbished with a modernizing mission: witness Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq,Colombia, and so on. The doctrine of formal pluralism underwrites an ac-quisitive or possessive ethos that fits perfectly with mass consumerism andthe gospel of the unregulated market. Global finance capital and businessfinds sanction in this brand of U.S. cosmopolitanism signaled by McDonald,Microsoft/IBM, Broadway musicals, Hollywood films, and the Internet.

It is within this framework that we can comprehend how the ruling bour-geoisie of each sovereign state utilizes nationalist sentiment and the violenceof the state apparatuses to impose their will. Consequently, the belief that thenation-state simultaneously prohibits economic freedom and promotes multi-national companies actually occludes the source of political and juridical violence—for example, the war against Serbia by the NATO (an expedientcoalition of nation-states led by the United States), U.S. aggression inAfghanistan and Iraq, or the stigmatization of rogue and “terrorist” states(Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Syria—”the axis of evil”) by the draconian stan-dards of the Homeland Security State. One can then assert that the most likelysource of political violence—and I am speaking of that kind where collective

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energy and intentionality are involved—is the competitive drive for accumu-lation in the world market system where the propertied class of each nation-state is the key actor mobilizing its symbolic capital made up primarily of eth-nic loyalties and national imaginaries.

We have now moved from the formalistic definition of the nation as a his-toric construct to the nation as an actor/persona in the larger plot of capitalistdevelopment and imperial expansion. What role this protagonist has playedand will play is now the topic of controversy. It is not enough to simply as-cribe to the trading class the shaping of a new political form, the nation-state,to replace clans, city states, leagues, municipal kingdoms, and oligarchic re-publics. Why such “imagined communities” should serve as a more effica-cious political instrument for the hegemonic bloc of property-owners, is thequestion that I have already anticipated at the beginning of this chapter.

Another approach to our topic is to apply dialectical analysis to the histor-ical record of national sovereignty alluded to earlier. Historians have de-scribed the crafting of state power for the new bourgeois nations in Enlight-enment philosophy. During the emergence of mercantile capitalism, JeanBodin and Hugo Grotius theorized the sovereignty of the nation as the pivotof centralized authority and coercive power (Bowle 1947). The French Rev-olution posited the “people,” the universal rights of man, as the foundation oflegitimacy for the state. In the passage from the nineteenth to the twentiethcentury, the people as nation embodied in the historical act of constituting thepolity as national-popular domain of public life gradually acquires libidinalcathexis enough to inspire movements of anticolonial liberation across na-tional boundaries. Its influence on the U.S. Constitution as well as on per-sonalities like Sun Yat-Sen, Jose Rizal, and other “third world” radical dem-ocrats has given the principle of popular sovereignty a cross-cultural if notuniversal status (on Filipino nationalism, see San Juan 2000). Within the sys-tem of nation-states, for Marxists, “recognition of national rights is an essen-tial condition for international solidarity” (Lowy 1998, 59) in the worldwidefight for socialism and a class-less political order.

Nations thus differ in terms of who controls state-power and for what ends.Capitalist states claim legitimacy in terms of the putative rule of the majority.The universal principle of people’s rights is generally considered to be the ba-sis of state power for the modern nation, “the empowerment, through this bu-reaucracy, of the interests of the state conceived as an abstraction rather thanas a personal fiefdom” (Ashcroft et al 1998, 153). A serious mistake occurswhen the nation and its legitimating principle of popular sovereignty are con-fused with the state bureaucracy construed either as an organ transcending theinterest of any single class, or as the “executive committee” of the bour-geoisie. A mechanical, not dialectical, method underlies this failure to connect

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the ideology, politics, and economics of the bourgeois revolution with the su-premacy of the propertied class. This quasi-Hegelian interpretation posits thepopular will of the post-Renaissance nation-states as the prime motor of worldexpansion, of 19th-century colonialism. Instead of regarding the West’s”civi-lizing mission” as a program informed by the gospel of progress via profit-making, postcolonialists confound the ideology of national glory with “theunifying signifiers of language and race.”

Ideological justification in actuality precedes and accompanies colonialconquest and domination. Nationalism, the need to superimpose the unifyingmyth of the imperial nation-state, is not only generated by the bourgeoisagenda of controlling and regulating the space of its market, but also by thenecessity of seizing markets and resources outside their territories and peo-ples. Nationalism is then interpreted by postcolonial theorists as equivalent tocolonialism; the nation is an instrument of imperialist aggrandizement, so thatif newly liberated ex-colonies employ nationalist discourse and principles,they will only be replicating the European model whose myths, sentimentsand traditions justified the violent suppression of “internal heterogeneitiesand differences.” The decolonizing nation is thus pronounced an oxymoron,a rhetorical if not actual impossibility. One example often adduced is Irishcultural nationalism; its culturalist absolutism, in Seamus Deane’s judgment,“has found in postcolonialism the future that it deserves” (1998, 368).

Lacking any historical anchorage, the argument of postcolonial theorygenerates inconsistencies due to an exorbitant culturalism and the concen-tration on diffuse power networks inspired by Foucault (Smart 1985). Justas Foucault repudiated Marxism for being an inversion of bourgeois politi-cal economy, postcolonialists today condemn nationalist thought for adopt-ing the same essentialist, transcendental, objectifying epistemology of Ori-entalism (Lazarus 1999). Foucault’s theory of power rejects foundationalisthistoriography but succumbs to the fallacy of equating all questions of lawand sovereignty with monarchical absolutism. Gillian Rose has detailed thenumerous sophistries in Foucault’s ontology of power in which juridico-discursive concepts are refunctionalized after their negation by his rules ofimmanence, continual variations, double conditioning, and technical poly-valence of discourse. Foucault regards violence as endemic: “By drawingon a theory of civil society without a theory of the state Foucault does notopen up the perspective of myriad powers in place of the conventional sov-ereign and singular power, he introduces or posits a spurious universal: war-fare” (Rose 1984, 200). Foucault’s omnipresent power as a constitutive sub-ject in the Kantian or Husserlian sense (Callinicos 1989), or as Nietzscheanpower-knowledge causing mischievous mayhem everywhere, finds its res-onance in the postcolonial repertoire of mimicry, ambivalence, hybridity, as

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well as in the deconstructive methodology of the Subaltern Studies group(Callinicos 1995). This relativistic perspectivalism which ironically pre-scribes totalizing schemes can not discriminate between the reactive jingoist/chauvinist nationalism of the oppressor and the revolutionary nationalismof the oppressed.

Rejection of the political economy of structured power relations leads tountenable interpretations of the historical process. Because they disregard theevolution of the nation-state discussed by Balibar, Anderson, Smith (1971),among others, postcolonial critics uphold the sphere of culture as the decisiveforce in configuring social formations. Not that culture is irrelevant in ex-plaining political antagonisms. Rather, it is erroneous when such antagonismsare translated into nothing but the tensions of amorphous cultural differences.The dogma of cultural difference (for Charles Taylor, the need and demandfor recognition in a modern politics of identity) becomes then the key to ex-plaining subalternity, racism and class exploitation in subordinated forma-tions. Ambivalence, liminality and ludic interstitiality become privileged sig-nifiers over against homogenizing symbols and indices whose “authority ofcultural synthesis” is the target of attack. Biopolitics, disciplinary regimes ofpower/knowledge, and discursive performances serve as the primary foci ofanalysis over against the practices of “localized materialism” and a demo-nized economistic reductionism.

MODERNIZED MINOTAUR

Violence in the international system of unequal nation-states is thus locatedin ideas and cultural forces that unify or generalize a range of experiences;such forces suppress differences or negate multiple “others” not subsumedwithin totalities such as nation, class, ethnic group, and so on. While somepostcolonial critics allow for different versions of the historic form of the na-tion, the reductive dualism of their thinking manifests a distinct bias for aphilosophically idealist framework of analysis: the choice is either a nationbased on an exclusionary myth of national unity centered on abstractions suchas race, religion or ethnic singularity; or a nation upholding plurality and mul-ticulturalism (for example, Canada or the United States). This vogue of mul-ticulturalism and its celebration of “minor differences” has already beenproved inutile in confronting inequalities of class, gender, race, nationality,and so on. Moreover, it cannot explain the appeal of nationalism as a meansof reconciling the antagonistic needs for order and for autonomy (Smith1979) in the face of bureaucratic statism and the anarchic market of atomizedconsumers supposed to be exercising “rational choice.”

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The limits of fetishisizing culture can be illustrated briefly. The most fla-grant evidence of the limited parameters of the postcolonial diagnosis may befound in its reading of racist ideology as “the construction and naturalizationof an unequal form of intercultural relations” (Ashcroft et al 1998, 46). Ifracism occurs only or chiefly on the level of “intercultural relations,” fromthis constricted optic, the other parts of a given social formation (political,economic) become superfluous and marginal. Politics is then reduced to anepiphenomenal manifestation of discourse and instrumentalized language-games.

A virtuoso application of culturalist contextualism may be exemplified hereby the legal scholar Rosemary Coombe who defends the right of the CanadianFirst Nations to claim “ownership” rights to certain cultural property. Coombecorrectly rejects the standard procedure of universalizing the Lockean conceptof property and its acquisitive rationale that underlies the Western idea of au-thorship and authenticity. She writes: “By representing cultures in the imageof the undivided possessive individual, we obscure people’s historical agencyand transformations, their internal differences, the productivity of interculturalcontact, and the ability of peoples to culturally express their position in a widerworld” (1995, 264). Although Coombe calls attention to structures of powerand the systemic legacies of exclusion, the call remains abstract and conse-quently trivializing. Above all, it obscures the reality and effect of material in-equities. It is blind to the effects of institutional racism. The postmodernist leit-motif of domination and exclusion mystifies the operations of corporatecapitalism and its methodical suppression of the indigenous struggles for self-determination. Coombe ignores precisely those “internal differences” and theircontradictory motion that give concrete specificity to the experiences of em-battled groups such as the First Nations. With “sly civility,” the postmodernistinflection of the subjugated community mimics the strategy of bourgeois na-tionalism to erase class, gender, and other differences ostensibly in the nameof legalistic nuances and sophisticated casuistry.

Notwithstanding her partisanship for the subaltern, Coombe indicts “cul-tural nationalism,” the struggle for sovereignty, as an expression of posses-sive individualism and its transcendental metaphysics. This is a suprising butsomehow consistent twist in her argument. Her method of empiricist contex-tualism contradicts any emancipatory move by the First Nations toward af-firming self-determination. It hides the global asymmetry of power, the dy-namics of exploitative production relations, and the hierarchy of states in thegeopolitical struggle for world hegemony. We have not transcended welfare-state pluralism and the injustice of cultural appropriation because the strategyof contextualism reproduces the condition for refusing to attack the causes ofclass exploitation and racial violence. Despite gestures of repudiating domi-

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nation and exclusion, postmodernists echo the moralizing rhetoric of UnitedNations humanitarianism that cannot, for the present, move beyond re-formism since it continues to operate within the framework of the globalizedmarket supervised by the IMF/WB/WTO and guaranteed by U.S. military su-premacy. Such a framework is never subjected to critical interrogation byHomi Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, or any of their acolytes.

FANON’S SPECTER

In the fashionable discourse of postcolonialists, dependent nations and the na-tionalism of neocolonized peoples are charged for being complicit with theconduct of Western colonialism and its Enlightenment metanarrative. Theybecome anathema to deconstructionists hostile to any emancipatory project inthe “third world” inspired by socialist goals. This is the reason why postcolo-nial critics have a difficult time dealing with Frantz Fanon and his engage-ment with decolonizing mass violence as a strategic response of people ofcolor to the inhumane violence of occupying settlers and pillagers. Fanon’sinvocation of a nation-making principle is the direct antithesis to any cultur-alist syndrome, in fact an antidote to it, because he emphasizes the organic in-tegration of cultural action with a popular-democratic program of subvertingcolonialism: “A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a peo-ple in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action throughwhich that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence” (1961, 155).Discourse and power are articulated by Fanon in the dialectics of practice in-scribed in the specific historical conditions of their effectivity. Fanon’s cri-tique of national liberation proves itself a true “concrete universal” in that itincorporates via a dialectical sublation the richness of the particulars embod-ied in the Algerian revolution and generalized in the revolt of the impover-ished majority, “the wretched of the earth.”

Given this historicizing method, Fanon refuses any demarcation of culturefrom politics and economics. Liberation is always tied to the question ofproperty relations, the social division of labor, and the process of social re-production—all these transvalued by the imperative of the radical transfor-mation of colonial relations and its Manichean subterfuge. Opposed toFanon’s denunciation of “abstract populism,” Bhabha and others fetishize anabstract “people” located in diasporic flux and borderline spaces. Such recu-peration of colonial hegemony via a negotiated “third space” reveals the ac-comodating character of postcolonial theories of translation and cultural ex-change. Transcultural syncretism designed to abolish the nation substitutesfor anti-imperialist revolution a modus vivendi of opportunist compromises.

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An analogous charge can be leveled at Edward Said’s reading of Fanon’s“liberationist” critique. Said locates violence in nationalist movements (un-less it is “critical”) since they deny the heterogeneity of pre-colonial societiesby romanticizing the past. For Said, a liberationist populism is preferable tonativism and the fanatical cult of “minor differences.” Said presents us a hy-pothetical dilemma: “Fanon’s] notion was that unless national consciousnessat its moment of success was somehow changed into social consciousness, thefuture would not hold liberation but an extension of imperialism” (1993,323). Despite the priority of national consciousness for Fanon, Said isadamant: he posits a scholastic dichotomy between the project of nationalself-determination and a vague notion of social liberation. For Said, national-ism is always a tool of the hegemonic oppressor and holds no socially eman-cipatory potential. Said’s answer evacuates Fanon’s popular-democratic na-tionalism of all social content, postulating an entirely abstract divide betweena nationalist program and a socially radical one. For Said, the violence of an-ticolonial movements becomes symptomatic of a profound colonial malaisefrom which the natives have not yet recovered.

National liberation and social justice via class struggle are interdependent.As Leopoldo Marmora observes, “While classes, in order to become pre-dominant, have to constitute themselves as national classes, the nation arisesfrom class struggle” (1984, 113). This is why, for Marx and Engels, the pro-letariat in bondage to capital does not have a country—unless it has consti-tuted itself as the nation through the ordeals of class war: “Though not in sub-stance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat is at first a nationalstruggle,” a fight for hegemonic leadership (1968, 22). The popular-demo-cratic aspiration for self-determination contains both national and social di-mensions. This also enables us to grasp the objective significance invested inGramsci’s ideal of the national-popular: proletarian hegemony as the nationalcollective will of the people built from alliances, compromises, affiliations,and pedagogical sharing of national conditions and traditions—the people,not the bourgeoisie, become the nation (Forgacs 1993).

Counter-imperialist violence derives its legitimation from a national-popu-lar authority in the process of emergence. In “On Violence,” Fanon invokesthe ideal of decolonizing freedom as the legitimizing rationale of revolutionby the dehumanized, oppressed natives. Decolonizing violence is force de-ployed to accomplish the political agenda of overthrowing imperialist au-thority and bourgeois property relations. Violence here becomes intelligibleas an expression of subaltern agency and its creative potential. Its meaning iscrystallized in the will of the collective agent, in the movement of seizing thehistorical moment to realize the human potential suppressed by exploitativecapitalist relations (Lukacs 2000). If rights are violated and the violence of

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the violator (for example, the state) held responsible, can the concept of rightsbe associated with peoples and their national identities? Or is the authority ofthe state to exercise violence derived from the nation/people?

Here we need to ascertain the distinction between the state as an instrumentof class interest and the nation/people as the matrix of emergent sovereignty.The authority of the bourgeois state as regulative juridical organ and admin-istrative apparatus with a monopoly of coercive force derives from its histor-ical origin in enforcing individual rights of freedom against the absolutistmonarchy. National identity is thus used by the state to legitimize its actionswithin a delimited territory in the process of taking charge of the mobilizationand coordination of policy (Held 1992). Formally structured as a Rechststaat,the bourgeois nation-state functions to insure the self-reproduction of capitalthrough market forces and the continuous commodification of labor power(Jessop 1982). Fanon understands that anti-colonial insurgency challengesthe global conditions guaranteeing valorization and realization of capital,conditions in which both the internationalization and nationalization of thecircuits of capital are enforced by the bloc of capitalist nation-states (with theU.S. as current hegemon) and its ascendancy over the planet.

Fanon is addressing the task of a genuine social revolution that will radi-cally alter the existing property relations, especially land ownership(Wertheim 1974). Historical experience shows that this revolution will be metwith the full force of the imperialist state. We are thus faced with the notionof structural violence attached to the bourgeois state as opposed to the inten-tionalist mode of violence as an expression of subject/agency such as the col-lectivity of the people. Violence is thus inscribed in the dialectic of identityand Otherness, with the bourgeois state’s coherence and legitimacy depend-ing on the subordination (if not consent) of workers and their communities. Itcannot be divorced from questions of power, authority, and legitimacy.

RETROSPECTIVE INVENTORY

We can resolve the initial paradox of the nation, a Janus-faced phenomenon(Nairn 1977), by considering the following historical background. The ideaof state-initiated violence (as opposed to communal ethnic-motivated vio-lence) performs a heuristic role in the task of historicizing any existing stateauthority and questioning the peaceful normalcy of the status quo. The pre-vailing social order is then exposed as artificial and contingent; what isdeemed normal or natural reveals itself as an instrument of partial interests.But the relative permanence of certain institutional bodies and their effectsneed to be acknowledged in calculating political strategies. The long duration

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of collective and individual memories exerts its influence through the media-tion of what Pierre Bourdieu (1993) calls “habitus” and its activation in var-ious fields of social transactions.

The space of the nation is always a field of conflict among social blocs forhegemony. We begin to understand that the state’s hierarchical structure ismade possible because of the institutionalized violence that privileges thehegemony (moral and intellectual leadership crafted via negotiating compro-mises) of a bloc of classes over competing blocs and their alternative pro-grams. Hegemony is always underwritten by coercion (open or covert, subtleor crude) in varying proportions and contingencies. The demarcated territoryclaimed by a state in rivalry with other states becomes for Weber one majorpretext for the state monopoly of legitimate violence in order to defend pri-vate property and promote the overseas interests of the domestic businessclass (Krader 1968). Historically the nation form, as mentioned earlier, be-comes a vehicle for unifying classes and groups under bourgeois hegemony.

From another angle, Georges Sorel argued for the demystificatory use ofviolence in his Reflections on Violence (1908; 1972). Sorel believed that theonly way to expose the illusion of a peaceful and just bourgeois order is topropagate the myth of the general strike. Through organized violence, theproletariat is bound to succeed in releasing vast social energies hitherto re-pressed and directing them to the project of radical social transformation.This is still confined within the boundaries of the national geopolitical frame.Planned or calculated violence purges the body politic of hatred, prejudice,deceptions, and so on. Proletarian violence destroys bourgeois mystificationand its philistine inertia. Sorel’s syndicalist politics of violence tries to con-vert force as a means to a political and social objetive: the strategy and tac-tics of the general strike. This politics of directed mass violence appeals to autopian vision that displaces the means-ends rationality of bourgeois societyin the fusion of force with pleasure realizable in a just, egalitarian order.

The classical Marxist view of violence rejects the utopian idealization aswell as the mechanical calculation of means-ends that vitiates the logic ofBlanquist and Sorelian conceptions of social change. Marx disavowedutopian socialism in favor of the overthrow of the bourgeoisie through a com-bination of violent and peaceful means depending on the ever-changing align-ment of forces. Instrumentalism is subordinated to a narrative of emancipa-tion from class bondage. The objective of emancipating labor associated withthe nation/people requires the exposure of commodity-fetishism and the ide-ology of equal exchange of values in the market. Reification and alienation insocial relations account for the bourgeois state’s ascendancy. Where the statebureaucracy supporting the bourgeoisie and the standing army do not domi-nate the state apparatus completely (a rare case) or has been weakened, as in

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the case of the monarchy and the Russian bourgeoisie at the time of the 1917Revolution, the working class might attain their goal of liberation by peace-ful means; but in most cases, “the lever of the revolution will have to beforce” harnessed by the masses in solidarity, unified by a program of abol-ishing the entire class system and its foundation.

Based on their historical inquiries, Marx and Engels understood the role ofviolence as the midwife in the birth of a new social order within the oldframework of the nation-state. In his later years Engels speculated that withthe changes in the ideological situation of the classes in any national territory,“a real victory of an insurrection over the military in street fighting is one ofthe rarest exceptions.” In an unusual historic conjuncture, however, the Bol-shevik revolution mobilized mass strikes and thus disproved Engels. Never-theless, Marx’s “analytical universality,” to use John Dunn’s (1979: 78)phrase, remains valid in deploying the concept of totality to comprehend thenexus of state, class and nation. We can rehearse here the issues that need tobe examined from the viewpoint of totality: Was Lenin’s “dictatorship of theproletariat” an imposition of state violence, or the coercive rule of the peopleagainst the class enemy? If it is an instrumental means of the new proletarianstate, did it implicate the nation? Is violence here both structured into the statesystem of apparatuses and inscribed in the collective agency of the workingmasses claiming to represent the nation? Is the political authority invoked bythe proletarian state embodied in the class interest of all those exploited bycapital (in both periphery and center) ascendant over all?

Marxists critical of the Leninist interpretation denounce the use of stateviolence as an anarchist deviation, an arbitrary application of force. They af-firm instead the law-governed historical process that will inevitably trans-form capitalism into socialism, mainly through the spontaneous develop-ment of the productive forces, whatever the subjective intentions of thepolitical protagonists involved. Such fatalism, however, rules out the inter-vention of a class-for-itself freed from ideological blinders and uniting allthe oppressed with its moral-intellectual leadership, the cardinal axiom ofsocialist revolution. I think the most persuasive Marxist exposition on therole of violence in socialist revolution is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Human-ism and Terror (1947). Merleau-Ponty displaces the problematic of means-ends by locating revolutionary action in the praxis of the proletariat alreadyat work in history: “The proletariat is both an objective factor of politicaleconomy and a system of subjective awareness, or rather a style of coexis-tence at once fact and value, in which the logic of history joins the forces oflabor and the authentic experience of human life” (1969: 126–127). Revolu-tionary violence arising from social contradictions acquires legitimacy bythe commitment of humans in a common situation, fighting injustice and

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daily exploitation in local workplaces and neighborhoods, for a humanist fu-ture already being realized in the totality of historical acts.

Neoliberal thinkers for their part reject violence as an end in itself while ac-cepting the brutalizing force of the market as normal and natural. Nor do theyheed the cry of victims already doomed by the structure of their situation.This is epitomized by legal scholars who contend that primordial nationalistclaims should be regulated by autonomous international law, “the domain ofthe metajuridique” (Berman 1995). By identifying nationalism as a primitiveelemental force outside the jurisdiction of positive law, the legal expert claimsto be receptive to its experimental creativity so that new administrative tech-niques can be devised to regulate the destabilization of Europe—and, for thatmatter, its colonial empires—by “separatist nationalisms.” The aim is topacify the subalternized classes by juridical and culturalist prophylactic.

As I have noted above in dealing with Fanon’s work, the nature of violencein the process of decolonization cannot be grasped by such dualistic meta-physics epitomized in the binarism of passion-versus-law. What is needed isthe application of a historical-materialist critique to the complex problem ofnational self-determination (as already envisaged by Merleau-Ponty and oth-ers). Revolutionaries like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, despite their differ-ences, stress the combination of knowledge and practice in analyzing the balance of political forces. They contend that class struggle is a form ofknowledge/action, the civil strife of political groups, that can synthesize warsof position (legal, peaceful reforms) and wars of maneuver (organized frontalassault by armed masses, to use Gramsci’s terminology) in the transformationof social relations in any particular locality or national space.

Violence itself can become a creative force insofar as it reveals the classbias of the bourgeois/colonial state and serves to accelerate the emergence ofclass-consciousness and organized popular solidarity. Luxemburg held that“the proletarian revolution is not the desperate attempt of a minority to shapethe world by violence according to its own ideals; it is the action of the greatmillions of people called upon to fulfill a historic mission and to transformhistorical necessity into historical reality” (Frolich 1972, 268–269). Insofar asthe force of nation/national identity distracts and prohibits the developmentof class-consciousness, then it becomes useless for socialist transformation.In colonized societies, however, nationalism coincides with the convergingclass-oriented consciousness of workers, peasants, and the masses of subju-gated natives that, through affiliation and elective affinities, constitutes the re-flexive force par excellence in harnessing violence for national self-determi-nation, for terminating shameful self-reproducing tutelage.

Contrary to doctrinaire postcolonialism, violence cannot be identified withthe nation or nation-state per se under all circumstances. We need to distin-

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guish between two positions so as to illuminate the problem of violence in ournew millennium. First, we study the postmodern one of indiscriminate attackon all totalities (“incredulity toward metanarratives” thematized by the syn-thesizing logic of class, nation, and other collectivities) premised on an infer-ential Kantian means-ends rationality. Second, we consider the historical-materialist one where means/ends are dialectically calibrated in concretelydeterminate modalities. The impasse between these two positions reflects therelation of unceasing antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the nationali-ties they exploit in the world system of commodity-exchange and accumula-tion. It also conveys the moment of globalization where, as in Antonio Negriand Michael Hardt’s Empire (2001), a naïve anarcho-populism underminesthe sovereignty struggles of oppressed peoples and the solidarity of margin-alized groups in favor of celebrating a supranational ideal modeled on themiddle-class life-styles of the urban metropolis in the global North. Nationsare dead, long live the U.S. super-nation!

DEAD-END ALLEY OR FREE PASSAGE?

We seem to have reached an aporia of thought, a theoretical antinomy. If na-tional sovereignties no longer matter, why do international bodies like theWorld Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank/IMF, and others, continue toexercise inordinate power? On another level, the impasse may be viewed asthe reprise of a familiar topic of argumentation. It signifies the disjunction be-tween agency and structure, the nominalizing pragmatism of liberal thoughtand the transformative optic of historical materialists. The former looks at thenation as always implicated in the state while the latter considers the nationas historically separate and contingent on the vicissitudes of class warfare. Ei-ther way, violence is implicated in the behavior of the nation-state. One wayof trying to elucidate this contradiction is by rehearsing the major points ofWalter Benjamin’s argument in “Critique of Violence” (1978).

Taking Sorel’s apocalyptic vitalism as one point of departure, Benjaminconsiders the use of violence as a means for establishing governance. Law isopposed to divine violence grasped as fate and the providential reign of jus-tice. Bound up with violence, law is cognized as power, an agency for estab-lishing order within a national boundary. The abolition of state power is theaim of revolutionary violence that operates beyond the reach of law-makingforce, an aspiration for justice that would spell the end of class society. Pro-letarian revolution resolves the means-ends instrumentalism of bourgeois pol-itics. (This instrumentalist means-end analytic is foregrounded in the ex-change between Leon Trotsky and the leading American pragmatist John

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Dewey over the former’s critique of the 1936–38 Moscow Trials, TheirMorals and Ours [1969] ). Violence becomes problematic when fate/justice,once deemed providential, eludes our grasp with the Babel of differencesblocking communication. We are also saddled with aggrandizing particu-larisms found below the level of the nation-form and its international, not tosay cosmopolitan, possibilities.

Violence for Benjamin is only physical force divorced from its juridical po-tency or its legitimation as political power, a distinction analogous to Arendt’scited earlier. Benjamin’s thesis may be more unequivocal than the academi-cally trendy Foucauldian view of subsuming state violence in the plurality ofpower relations in the social body. Benjamin carries out a more scrupulousappraisal of the sectarian limitations as well as the constructive possibilitiesof violence in the context of class antagonism. While the issue of nationalistviolence is not explicitly addressed in his essay, Benjamin seeks to explorethe function of violence as a creator and preserver of law, a factor involved inthe constitution of normative processes. According to Benjamin: “Lawmak-ing is powermaking, and, to that extent, an immediate manifestation of vio-lence. Justice is the principle of all divine end making, power the principle ofall mythical lawmaking” (1978: 295). Lawmaking mythical violence can becontested only by divine power operating at present in “educative power,which in its perfected form stands outside the law.” It is difficult to state ex-actly what this “educative power” signifies. One may hazard the guess that itdesignates the influence of ideological relays like the school, the family andother agencies in civil society not regulated by bureaucratic mechanisms andtechnologies. In another sense, Benjamin alludes to “the proper sphere of un-derstanding, language,” that makes possible the peaceful resolution of con-flicts. Since language is intimately linked with the organic community, thepractice of a lingua franca contradicts the disruptive effects of violence by fa-cilitating dialogue and negotiations. This strikes me as idealistic if notutopian, given the manipulation of modes of communication and even thegrammar and syntax of expression in late capitalist society (see Bourdieu1991; McChesney, Wood and Foster 1998).

Benjamin goes on to investigate violence embodied in the state (as con-tradistinguished from the national community) through a process of demysti-fication. Critique begins by disclosing the idea of its development, its trajec-tory of ruptures and mutations, that in turn exposes the fact that all socialcontract depends on a lie, on fiction. “Justice, the criterion of ends,” super-sedes legality, “the criterion of means.” Justice is the reign of communicationthat, because it excludes lying, excludes violence. In effect, violence is themediation that enables state power to prevail. It cannot be eliminated by

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counter-violence (in postcolonial rhetoric, by the mediation of the hybrid, theliminal or diasporic border-crosser) that simply inverts it. Only the educativepower of language, communication associated with the national collectivity,can do away with the need to lie. But since the social contract displaces jus-tice as the end of life with legality connected with the state, and law is re-quired as an instrument to enforce the contract, violence continues to be a re-current phenomenon in a class-conflicted society.

Benjamin is silent about the nation and the efficacy of popular sovereignty.His realism seeks to clarify the historic collusion between law, violence andthe state. He wants to resolve the philosophical dualism of means and ends thathas bedeviled liberal rationalism and its inheritors, pragmatism and postmod-ern nominalisms. His realism strives to subordinate the instrumentality of vio-lence to law, but eventually he dismisses law as incapable of realizing justice.But we may ask: how can justice—the quest for identity without exclusion/inclusion, without exclusive and stigmatizing otherness—be achieved in his-tory if it becomes some kind of intervention by a transcendent power in thesecular domain of class-driven politics? How can justice be attained as anideal effect of communicative action? Perhaps through language as mediatedin the nation-form, in the web of discourse configuring the nation as a com-munity of speakers (San Juan 2000), the nation as the performance of groupsunified under the aegis of struggle against oppression and exploitation? Lan-guage use, speech acts in linguistic games, are of course not autonomous butopen to articulation by and with other agencies and dispositions in determi-nate sociohistorical fields.

Benjamin’s thesis on the reconciling charisma of language seems utopianin the pejorative sense. Peoples speaking the same language (e.g., NorthernIreland, Colombia, North and South Korea) continue to be locked in in-ternecine conflict. Linguistic fetishisms pervade the deregulated marketplace.If violence is inescapable in the predominant milieu of reification and com-modity-fetishism, how can we use it to promote dialogue and enhance the re-sources of the oppressed for liberation? In a provocative essay on “National-ism and Modernity,” Charles Taylor underscores the modernity ofnationalism in opposition to those who condemn it as atavistic tribalism or aregression to primordial barbarism. In the context of modernization, Taylorresituates violence in the framework of the struggle for recognition—nation-alism “as a call to difference, . . . lived in the register of threatened dignity,and constructing a new, categorical identity as the bearer of that dignity”(1999, 240). This is diametrically opposed to the indiscriminate censure of allnationalism and nation-states by postcolonialists as the origin of unmitigatedevil.

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ALTERNATIVE ROUTE

What needs to be stressed here is the philosophical underpinning of thestruggle for recognition and recovery of dignity. It invokes clearly theHegelian paradigm of the relation between lord and bondsman in The Phe-nomenology of Mind. In this struggle, the possibility of violence mediatesthe individual’s discovery of his finite and limited existence, his vulnerabil-ity, and his need for community. Piotr Hoffman’s gloss underlines theHegelian motif of freedom as risk: “Violence . . . is the necessary conditionof my emergence as a universal, communal being . . . for I can find commonground with the other only insofar as both of us can endure the mortal dan-ger of the struggle and can thus think independently of a blind attachment toour particular selves” (1989, 145). Since the nation evokes sacrifice (Renan),the warrior’s death on the battlefield (Weber), honor (Sorel), self-transcen-dence, destiny, the state seeks to mobilize such nation-centered feelings andemotions to legitimize itself as a wider, more inclusive, and less artificial re-ality to attain its own accumulative goals. This metaphysical speculationneeds the necessary interrogation of critique (Benhabib 1986). It needs to bequalified by specifying the state as a bourgeois “meta-capital” that super-vises “the violent domination of men by men through the private possessionof social capital” (Caudwell 1971, 110).

Beyond the simplistic formulas of postcolonial thought, the nationaliststruggle for recognition impelling anticolonial revolts displays a contentious,even recalcitrant, complexity. We also need to estimate the weight of othervariables such as the uneven development of the world system of nation-states as a whole, the interaction of various fields of power (Bourdieu’s meta-capital vis-à-vis symbolic capital in each formation), and the vicissitudes ofthe post-Cold War accumulation crisis. In any case, whatever the moral puz-zles entailed by the manifold genealogies of the nation-state, it is clear that adogmatic pacifism is no answer to an effective comprehension of the realworld and grass roots intervention in it. Given the continued existence of na-tion-states amidst the almost unchallenged power of transnational corpora-tions and the bloc of rich industrialized nation-states led by the current world-hegemon (the United States), can we choose between a “just” and an “unjust”war when nuclear weapons that can destroy the whole planet are involved?Violence on such a scale obviously requires the transcendence of the systemof nation-states, of states administered by historically decadent and moribundclasses, in the interest of planetary justice and survival (Meszaros 2001).

Overall, the question of violence cannot be answered within the framework ofthe Realpolitik of the past but only within the framework of sovereign nation-states living in mutual reciprocity. Causality, however, has to be ascertained

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and responsibility assigned even if the nation is considered only “an interpre-tive construct” (Arnason 1990, 230). My view is that the action of the prop-ertied classes using the various state organs for the legalized expropriation ofunpaid labor (surplus value) of millions of people around the planet is thecrux of the problem. Precisely because of corporate globalizing, James Petrasand Henry Veltmeyer cogently explain, “it is impossible to conceive of theexpansion and deepening involvement of multinational banks and corpora-tions without the prior political, military and economic intervention of the na-tion-state” (2001: 54). If nations have been manipulated by states dominatedby possessive/acquisitive blocs that have undertaken and continue to under-take imperial conquests ostensibly for humanitarian goals, then the future ofhumanity and the entire ecosystem can be insured only by eliminating thoseinstitutions and practices that are the source of material and symbolic vio-lence inflicted on their citizens by these states.

To be sure, the post-9/11 international status quo policed by “homeland”patriots cannot be changed by scholastic postcolonial studies, however eru-dite and well intentioned its practitioners may be. I propose that we adapt andretool the internationalist horizon of a revolutionary Marxism that has so farbeen confused with its multiple national-bureaucratic counterfeits. MichaelLowy’s advocacy may help cure the intellectual pessimism that paralyzes theoptimism of the will of those fighting the relentless commodification of theplanet:

Marxism has the advantage of a universalistic and critical position, in contrastto the passions and intoxications of nationalist mythology. On the condition,however, that this universalism does not remain abstract, grounded on the sim-ple negation of national particularity, but becomes a true “concrete universal”(Hegel), able to incorporate, under the form of a dialectical Aufhebung, all therichness of the particular. . . . For Marxism, the most important universal valueis the liberation of human beings from all forms of oppression, domination,alienation and degradation. This is a utopian universality, in opposition to theideological ones, which apologetically present the Western status quo as beingthe accomplished universal human culture, the end of history, the realization ofthe absolute spirit. Only a critical universality of this kind, looking towards anemancipated future, is able to overcome shortsighted nationalisms, narrow cul-turalisms, and ethnocentrisms (2000: 10–11).

It is appropriate to add here Rosa Luxemburg’s insistence that “no nation isfree whose national existence is based upon the enslavement of another peo-ple. . . . So long as capitalist states exist, i.e., so long as imperialistic worldpolicies determine and regulate the inner and the outer life of a nation, therean be no ‘national self-determination’ either in war or in peace” (1976: 290).

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Within such a framework, the nation-form, and its surrogates, can then be re-constituted and/or superseded in order to insure that the new social arrange-ments will not generate opportunities for profit-motivated state violence to re-cur. That revolutionary transformation will surely render obsolete allpostcolonial speculations on the withering of the nation, much less the nation-state, in a world where transnational finance governs the majority of poor, un-derdeveloped countries almost absolutely but, we hope, not permanently.

It may be untimely but not superfluous to ask, at this late date, if there isstill hope for renewing a critical multiculturalist teaching/learning programon the face of ravaging globalization. The next chapter will address the topicof globalization, immigration, and the multiculturalist project with all itstemptations and hazards.

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133

The recent passage of a comprehensive immigration act (HR 4437) bringsagain to the foreground the centrality of class in understanding racial/ethnicissues: the act decrees the building of a 700-miles wall on the southwest bor-der to prevent Mexicans from entering U.S. territory illegally. Everyoneagrees that this will not accomplish the job, but the wall is still useful as sym-bolic of the essence of the U.S. racial polity as founded on the axiom of in-clusion/exclusion. Aliens (mostly non-European) and citizens must be care-fully distinguished from each other. Without establishing distinctions basedon racial, nationality and class attributes, the identity of the “American”seems to have become precarious, exposed, and endangered, especially afterthe 9/11 attack on the “homeland” by “Islamic fundamentalists” and other“unlawful combatants” beyond the reach of the Geneva Convention on hu-mane treatment of prisoners.

Census statistics indicate that by the year 2080 the majority of the U.S.population will be composed of “minorities” (primarily Hispanics, AfricanAmericans, Asians). Since 1991, minorities have already become the major-ity in fifty-one of the largest cities with over 100,000 people. Such terms as“minority” and “majority” are, of course, inexact and misleading; nonethe-less, these developments, including the presence of nearly 10.3 million “il-legal” or “undocumented” aliens, have frightened many, evoking in this fin-de-siecle milieu visions of a horrendous apocalypse brought by the enemywithin and without. In contrast, the novelist Ishmael Reed paints an upbeatpicture of this “twilight zone” of WASP Puritan America in his essay“What’s American About America?” He opens with a citation from the NewYork Times (June 23, 1983): “At the annual Lower East Side Jewish Festi-val yesterday, a Chinese woman ate a pizza slice in front of Ty Thuan Duc’s

Chapter Seven

Multiculturalism and Globalization

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Vietnamese Grocery store. Beside her a Spanish-speaking family patronizeda cart with two signs. ‘Italian Ices’ and ‘Kosher by Rabbi Alper.’ And afterthe pastrami ran out, everybody ate knishes.” Given the multiplicity of cul-tural styles in this late-modern formation, Reed questions the attitude thatequates the whole society with Western civilization, an attitude that “causedthe incarceration of Japanese-American citizens during World War II, thepersecution of Chicanos and Chinese Americans, the near-extermination ofthe Indians, and the murder and lynchings of thousands of Afro-Americans.”Closing his essay, Reed counters the fear and suspicion of many that alieninfluences are destroying the distinctive American ethos with the assurancethat the United States and Canada are places where the cultures of the worldcrisscross, that the North American continent is unique because “The worldis here.” Clearly Reed’s strategy of displacing the boundaries of outside andinside, or eliminating them outright, may not appease those whose identitiesare already psychically invested in a distinctive, singular culture called“American”—a “common culture” enshrined in a hallowed set of discourses,symbolic rituals, literary canon, and other traditional practices that constitutethe “American” or “USA nation.”

Commentators on the cultural scene like Reed have been accused of im-posing a “politically correct” doctrine and charged with attempting to destroyEuro-American civilization. A whole issue of Newsweek (December 24,1990) entitled “Watch What You Say: Thought Police” was devoted to thiscontroversy. The debate probably started with William Bennett’s 1984 piece“To Reclaim a Legacy” and its alarming message: the irresponsibility of uni-versity administrators and their “failure of nerve and faith” have precipitateda catastrophic decline of standards. The decline of learning is ascribed to aloss of “our cultural heritage”—to wit, masterpieces from Homer, the Bible,Shakespeare to Emerson, Faulkner, and Robert Frost—so that a consensus orcommon culture is sacrificed. Multiculturalism threatens the destruction ofWestern civilization as a whole. In a famous rejoinder, Robert Scholesdoubted whether U.S. society expresses any “single, durable vision” and con-tended that Bennett’s pious cliches about sacred texts make impossible a crit-ical engagement with them. Scholes’ position represents a humanist concernshared by many liberal reformers:

The trouble with establishing a canon—the great, insuperable problem—is that itremoves the chosen texts from history and from human actualities, placing themforever behind a veil of pieties. This soulful rhetoric is guaranteed to drain the lifeout of the texts studied, because it permits only worship and forbids all criticism.. . . What I advocate . . . [is] the critical study of texts in their full historical con-text. . . . The purpose of humanistic study is to learn what it has meant to be hu-

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man in other times and places, what it means now, and to speculate about what itought to mean and what it might mean in the human culture (1986, 116).

In another famous exchange, Stephen Greenblatt answers the charge ofNewsweek commentator George Will that “watery” Marxists are promoting“the political agenda of victimology” and “fighting against the conservationof the common culture that is the nation’s social cement.” Greenblatt arguesfor a historical investigation of the founding texts and ideas—like Shake-speare’s The Tempest—which are not cement but “mobile, complex, elusive,disturbing,” intertwined like any great cultural tradition “with cruelty, injus-tice, and pain.” Greenblatt takes seriously Walter Benjamin’s aphorism that“there has never been a document of culture which was not at one and thesame time a document of barbarism.” If the self-appointed guardians of a“common culture” want to risk collective amnesia and promote the artisticheritage as “a simple, reassuring, soporific life,” they can continue to ignore“the painful, messy struggles over rights and values, the political and sexualand ethical dilemmas that great art has taken upon itself to articulate and tograpple with” (1993, 290).

While differing in their views about the function of the canon, both Scholesand Greenblatt believe that scholarly historical study of texts—where truthand art coincide—fulfills a humanistic ideal that presumably transcends par-tisanship. Scholes suspects canons to be instruments of a central authoritybent on suppressing individual liberty, while Greenblatt conceives of litera-ture as one that can forge community “founded on imaginative freedom, theplay of language, and scholarly honesty, not on flag waving, boosterism, andconformity.” While admirable in their critical stances, both scholars somehowevade the real issue underlying the origin of this debate, namely, the pro-foundly complex historical antagonisms articulated around the categories ofrace, gender, and class that define U.S. society from its very beginning. Suchevasion occurs when a detour around the issue of a “national culture” is made.The key term that condenses the nuances and ambiguities in the debate is“common culture” whose seeming binary opposite, “multiculture,” inaugu-rates a new perilous field of contestation.

A year before the fires of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, a debate on multi-culturalism appeared in The American Scholar between Molefi Asante, a pro-ponent of the “Afrocentric Idea” and Diane Ravitch, a well-known educator.To Asante’s proposition that “there is no common American culture as isclaimed by the defenders of the status quo,” Ravitch (1993) replies that theU.S. has “a common culture that is multicultural,” formed by the interactionof its subsidiary cultures.” Either Ravitch is just playing with words, or a per-formative contradiction vitiates her statement; if a common culture already

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prevails, why arouse suspicion by pleading for it? However, in her brief for“cultural pluralism,” it turns out that the “multitextured tapestry” of Ameri-can culture is dominated by Europe that occupies a “unique place” in U.S.history; the salient proof is that “our governmental institutions were createdby men of British descent who had been educated in the ideas of the Euro-pean Enlightenment” (292). While acknowledging the differences that haveall blended into the cultural mosaic, Ravitch posits that “we are all Ameri-cans” subscribing to a Western democratic ideology, “ideas of individualism,choice, personal responsibility, the pursuit of happiness, and belief inprogress.” In effect, U.S. “common culture” has become universal, as provedby the Chinese students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 quoting Patrick Henryand Thomas Jefferson. But I believe no amount of triumphalist self-glorifica-tion nor astute repackaging of the canon, or rhetorical skill in shifting and de-constructing subject-positions, would necessarily guarantee that ordinary stu-dents would be fully cognizant of the history of the U.S. as a racial polity(reviewed in the preceding chapters) and the racial practices/institutions thathave been hitherto decisive in shaping the structure and texture of prevailingsocial/power relations.

CONJUNCTURAL CRISIS

Despite claims to the contrary, the national imperative to include courses oncultural diversity (non-western material) into the General Education CoreCurriculum in many universities springs from a conjunctural crisis. Multicul-turalism may be conceived as the latest reincarnation of the assimilationistdrive to pacify unruly subaltern groups. It can be interpreted as a strategic re-sponse to the deterioration of the social fabric of the country in the decade af-ter the early seventies when progressive policies and institutional reformsgained by the civil rights struggles of the sixties were severely eroded orwiped out from the eighties to the present. One stark index of the crisis is the1987 statistic of the gap between the poor and the rich, the largest in 40 years:the poorest fifth of all families received only 4.6 percent of the national fam-ily income while the top fifth’s share was 43.7 percent (Parenti 1994;Mantsios 1992). More Americans are ill housed, poorly educated, and with-out health care than ever before. The condition for the racial minorities ofcourse is twice, even three times worse than for the general population(Franklin 1991). The situation has deteriorated since then. In “America 101,”Bill Moyers (2006) summarized all the signs of breakdown plaguing the U.S.,from income to schools, health care, housing, and so on. In his book Namingthe System (2003); based on dense statistics, Michael D. Yates observed that

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the poverty and income inequality in the U.S. “is greater than in any other ad-vanced capitalist nation” (2003, 54). But the most important fact underlyingthe debate is the changing demographics of the country: by the first twodecades of the next century, the labor force and most urban centers in thecountry, together with the student population in high schools and universities,will be predominantly comprised of people of color: the majority of Califor-nia’s population, for example, will be made up of Hispanics, African Ameri-cans, and Asians in the next decade. And so this revivalist quest for a com-mon culture defining the American nation, a peculiarly American ethosbinding all citizens, can be properly appraised as a symptomatic reaction towidespread social decay gripping the homeland of global capital.

Another indicator of decay is the marked resurgence of racism culminatingin the Los Angeles urban rebellion; and before that Bensonhurst, VirginiaBeach, Howard Beach, the Miami riots, and Charles Stuart’s lie that, accord-ing to Derrick Bell, “is in an American tradition that virtually defines the evilthat is racism” (1990, 23). Decades after the 1968 Kerner Commission Reporton Civil Disorders, we are confronted this time with an unprecedented polar-ization of society—not just between black and white, but across a wide rangeof “races,” genders, classes, identity-groups, etc. On top of this are the every-day facts of homelessness for thousands, impoverished single mothers, in-creasing teenage pregnancies and infant mortality rate, school dropouts;drugs, violence, and criminality (an issue now targetted by opportunist politi-cians); and an exploding prison population comprised mostly of racial mi-norities. Is everything falling apart?

Alarmed by the erosion of a consensual equilibrium and its consciencearoused, Chrysler Corporation sponsored a forum on “500 Years After Colum-bus Rediscover America/How to Make Our Nation Better” advertised in Moneymagazine and other mass periodicals. The distinguished novelist Joyce CarolOates was recruited for this promotional campaign; she dutifully contributedher share of “commonsense” by bewailing the loss of community and ritual thatgives us our human identity. Oates’ anxiety betrays a chronic predicament ofthe liberal mind: how can one resolve the tension between “the security of thecommunity and the hunger for freedom in the individual”? Unfortunately, theorganic and consensual community is more a myth than an archaic fantasy.Oates is aware that we inhabit “a secular, consumer-oriented society, rapidlyfragmenting into sub-societies of ethnic, cultural, professional and religious di-versity” (1991, 10) whose incommensurable interests can only be suspended orneutralized by media-ordained rituals like the assassination of presidents, theGulf War, the 9/11 disaster, the “killing fields” of Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on.

A little reflection will spell out the etiology of the malaise. What informsOates’ nostalgia for traditional life stabilized by the sense of the sacred and

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group-togetherness, her desire to recuperate a milieu before technological ra-tionality and bureaucratic administration colonized the life-worlds ofl’homme moyen sensuel, is a sentimental notion of community where contra-dictions between groups and individuals are immersed in a collective faith orshared world-outlook. At the same time she intuits our sordid complicities ina Hobbesian, rapacious world of actors/roles pursuing diverse interests withthe use of instrumental reason to control nature and other humans. The pathosof her naive pluralism lies in its attempt to construct a discourse of commu-nity premised on primordial attachments, a discourse that claims at the sametime to recognize and respect diverse others upon whose exclusion or mar-ginalization that community is founded. Alarmed by all the changes thatwrecked the self-contained pieties of her hometown, Oates cannot reconcilethe truth of Watts and Harlem burning in the sixties, or Los Angeles in thenineties, with her vision of a harmonious antebellum America that supposedlyaccommodated almost everyone. One also recalls in this context ArthurSchlesinger’s nostalgic wish to return to the “melting pot” trope (as against adivisive Tower of Babel) invented at a time when, in fact, this trope harmo-nized with another figure of reconciliation used during the carnage of theMexican-American War (1846–48): “Manifest Destiny.” Terrified by thethreat of a “linguistic and cultural apartheid” he attributes to the followers ofthe “cult of ethnicity,” Schlesinger longs for the good old days when a sup-posed homogeneous national identity prevailed. When was this? In the timeof Hector St. John de Crevecoeur two centuries ago. Schlesinger’s prayer isless an echo of the Statue of Liberty’s welcome than a recasting of “ManifestDestiny”: “Let the new Americans forswear the cult of ghettoization andagree with Crevecoeur, as with most immigrants in the two centuries since,that in America “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of man”(1994, 295)—words published before the Rodney King trial exploded in theheart of Los Angeles, the “multicultural capital of America.”

LIGHT BUT NOT SWEETNESS

A little historical analysis might be instructive in elucidating the dilemma ofthe partisans of “the common” monopoly culture. The sociologist FerdinandTonnies (followed by Max Weber and Emile Durkheim) was the first toschematize the disparity between the folkish community, Gemeinschaft, anda rationally administered system called society, Gesellschaft. What needs tobe grasped is that those changes in human relationships, patterns of behavior,norms, and beliefs—what we now indiscriminately call “lifestyles”—did notjust happen because of the wishes of individuals or the conspiracy of a few

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bad people. Those changes coincided and reflected transformations in theway people produced their means of existence and thereby reproduced them-selves and their social networks.

A useful conceptualization of this historical trajectory involves a dialecti-cal transaction of consciousness and environment, not simply a unilateral de-terminism. It concerns the way people associated with one another in devel-oping circumstances, altering them, and in the process elaborating new“habits of the heart” and “structures of feeling” appropriate to the circum-stances—when the horse and plow were replaced by the factory, when thefactory was replaced by Ford’s assembly line, and all the technological andsocio-cultural mutations that accompanied the periodic reconfiguring of vary-ing modes of production. Eventually the market replaced the church as themajor institution of everyday social exchange. The recurrent nostalgia for thepast, for the face-to-face, more direct and immediate lives of the village folkin contrast to the formal, abstract, and instrumental relationships of a techno-cratic state governed by the cash-nexus and commodity-fetishism, is a famil-iar response with a genealogy dating back to the late 18th century when dis-possessed peasants in England attacked the trains encroaching on their farms,all the way back to the enclosure movement in the thirteenth and fourteenthcenturies in Europe. In the recent past, however, this praise of communalbond and organic solidarity easily evolved into the cult of volkish nationalismbased on biological kinship, patrimony, blood and soil, the virtues of the pa-triarchal hearth, inherited purity of the superior race with a “civilizing mis-sion” over the “lesser breeds,” and preservation of the homeland against in-ternal and external enemies: Jewish parasites, Marxist contaminators,stigmatized aliens, etc. Like all representations, the notion of a “common cul-ture” since the time of the Puritan pilgrims up to the imperialism of “Mani-fest Destiny” has usually been articulated to legitimate the exclusion, domi-nation, and oppression of multitudinous others (Native Americans, Africanslaves, etc.) and, in effect, sanction an apartheid regime of “unity in diver-sity.”

Not only Chrysler Corporation but media pundits, politicians, and bureau-crats all collaborate in trying to resist alternative/oppositional versions of thenarrative of progress of “one nation indivisible.” Civic virtue attached to cit-izenship requires upholding and sustaining a myth of commonality so discor-dant with the reality of conflicts on every level of business society. Seen inthis context, class, gender, and racial antagonisms expose the arbitrarily im-posed grid of national belonging. Indeed, our participation in the broadcast-ing of this allegedly homogeneous “common culture” will be confined to thatof spectators of media-packaged spectacles and other simulacra. The latestnews is that we are living in a postmodern age of artifice where reality, not

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just the town commons or the village fair, has evaporated—”Everything solidmelts into air,” so proclaims The Communist Manifesto. Or else, it has beenreplaced by fragments of memory haunting us with uncanny repetitions, withour dreams and hopes now reduced to a paltry recycling of old movies, TVsoap operas, cliches, and stereotypes from drugstore novels and quotidianroutine. Oates’ vision itself comes to us in the pages of mass-produced com-modities like Money, pastiches of the corporate machines so incompatiblewith her evocation of idyllic hometown uniformities. Such irony is not sur-prising in our age of sudden reversals, discontinuities, loss of affect, etc., thatsomehow parody the banal sociological diagnosis of the malaise of urbananxiety and alienation.

At this point, I hope no one accuses me of being against cultural plurality—can one be for or against what already exists? Although a totalizing compre-hension of economic, political, and ideological structures constituting theU.S. social formation is requisite for judging the real worth of such reformsas that advocated by E. D. Hirsch in Cultural Literacy. What is primarily atissue here is cultural pluralism, a normative concept, and the corollary theoryof rights and justice within the parameter of liberal ethics and jurisprudence.Why is this pluralism, translated into the pedagogical register of multicultur-alism and elevated into a synthesizing formula, inadequate to resolve theproblem of racism and ethnically motivated conflicts? Because it explainsaway political-economic antagonisms as effects of “natural” cultural legacies.Michael Banton points out that cultures “tend to be systems of meaning andcustom” that have no clear boundaries and thus “there is no finite number ofstable constituent units” that can enter such a field as “multicultural” educa-tion (1984, 69). Moreover, the tendency to essentialize culture as inner, spir-itual refinement (in contradistinction to the crude practices of civilization)subtly reactivates elitist, class-bound hierarchies privileging mental overmanual labor, rendering inutile any demand to transform the actual circum-stances of social life (Marcuse 1968; The Frankfurt Institute 1972). Thuswhat is needed is not mass struggle against institutional racism but individualself-improvement through a variegated, easily consumable reading fare.

POSTMODERN SNAKE OIL

Whatever the inadequacies of the functionalist approach employed by mostscholars dealing with race relations and ethnicity, it is clear that conflicts inthe political, legal, and economic fields cannot be glossed over by postmod-ern language games in a hyper real space such as that attempted by Reed andhis avant-garde colleagues. The privileging of identities and cultural differ-

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ence divorced from their structural contexts, often referred to as macrostruc-tures of inequality and injustice, that subtend them may lead to the oppositeof what is intended: a Department of Minority Affairs or special offices areset up to deal with individuals considered different (by ascription or self-iden-tification) from the dominant group. This can exacerbate the ongoing differ-ential incorporation of groups in plural society, surveillance, and disciplinaryregimes to enforce a specific hegemony. Conflicts between the private andpublic domains—in matters relating to sex, marriage, the family, and reli-gion—cannot be resolved by simply theorizing what is claimed as adhoc, de-centered, provisional boundaries (as proposed in Fredrik Barth’s influentialwritings, as noted in Chapter 4), for such boundaries are subject to the forcesof reification and hierarchical determinations which condition the social prac-tices of everyday life.

All of us share varying degrees of adherence to the ideology or civic moral-ity of individualism and its corollary ethos of utilitarianism transmitted by theschools, media, and other state apparatuses. This social code of action, gov-erned by secular means-end rationality, is grounded in the logic of the ex-changeability of values as formal abstractions mediated through a universalmeasure of exchange: money. Mainstream historians have traced the devel-opment of the industrialized nation-state composed of “mutually substitutableatomized individuals” homogenized by a monopoly culture, by a dominantlogic of representation coalescing difference and identity. While cultural dif-ferences have been flattened by bureaucratic administration and technical in-strumentalism, we witness simultaneously the antithetical process of in-creased ethnicization and the valorization of assorted particularisms. Bothphenomena are effects of the individualist utilitarianism that still prevails incontemporary “postindustrial” societies.

We are faced with this recurrent problem: How can cultural differences berecognized without this recognition becoming an instrument of covert racisttheory and racialist practice? The well-meaning advocates of multicultural di-versity can become unwitting sponsors/patrons of racism if they endorse thefollowing attitude: “They’re different, so therefore they cannot be expected tohave the same standards. It would not respect their specific nature, so theyshould be judged according to their own cultural values and norms.” This isactually what British chauvinists and nationalists said in pushing for the repa-triation of colored peoples from Britain (Fitzpatrick 1990). That sentimentshows affinity with the rationale of the bantustans in formerly apartheidSouth Africa. Articulated within a framework of hegemonic pluralism, a cul-turalist idealism becomes an apology for de facto differential incorporation ofracial collectivities into a polity where the hegemonic ideology valorizes dif-ferences to guarantee sameness.

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On the other hand, those who espouse assimilation or integration and whooppose, say, arranged marriages because this contradicts a universal feministdoctrine, begin to distort the historical complexity of “minority” cultures byreducing and immobilizing them to one element and condemning that wholecommunity as backward or even “uncivilized.” Ethnicity manifests itself herein the sense of permanent heritable practices of a population of ancestors anddescendants. In this case, it is necessary to make distinctions between theclear separation of public and private domains for the dominant group, andthe historical fact that family and community for people of color (AfricanAmericans, Latinos, Native Americans, Arab Americans, and others) servethe goals of popular resistance: physical survival and affirmation of collectivefreedom and dignity. A pragmatic argument for the functionality of indepen-dent ethnic communities can be suggested here: in providing identity optionsor ideas as to who the individual is, ethnic institutions can also serve as theavailable social machinery that guarantees the production of the labor forceand the smooth maintenance of law and order all around. Hence multicultur-alism pays.

At this juncture, I want to rehearse what is ultimately at stake in the con-troversy surrounding multiculturalism. A binary opposition is one way of for-mulating it: democracy of equal groups, or the freedom of individual subjects.So far we have examined the issue of whether or not cultural pluralism, a fun-damental ideal for a postmodern micropolitics of identity, requires its ground-ing in a “common core,” a civic morality that outlaws inequality based onracist theory and racialist practice. One might speculate also on whether mul-ticulturalism, invested with an original emancipatory charge, truly enacts arupture of the pluralist myth by historicizing its emergence and linking it withthe political economy of knowledge-power in capitalism. Whatever the mer-its of each case, we might be guided by Charles Taylor’s insight that a poli-tics of difference—postcolonial “sly civility,” or “common culture” altru-ism—simply acquiesces to the status quo unless it has an impliedethico-political criterion of value:

To come together on a mutual recognition of difference—that is, of the equalvalue of different identities—requires that we share more than a belief in thisprinciple; we have to share also some standards of value on which the identitiesconcerned check out as equal. There must be some substantive agreement onvalue, or else the formal principle of equality will be empty and a sham. We canpay lip service to equal recognition, but we won’t really share an understandingof equality unless we share something more. Recognizing difference, like self-choosing, requires a horizon of significance, in this case a shared one (1992,51–52)

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FROM COMMUNITARIANISM TO COMMUNISM

The communitarian solution, as illustrated by Taylor, has offered one way outof the dilemma of liberal-democratic “equality” founded on hierarchicalproperty relations. But it fails to resolve the classic bourgeois dualism ofmind (value) and body (experienced life-situation), refracted in the tensionbetween use-value and exchange-value in the logic of market pluralism, a du-alism underlying alienation in all nation-states today. This is what Marx ad-dressed in On The Jewish Question, an invaluable source-text for elucidatingthe problem of racism and ethnic heterogeneity in globalized capitalism.

In that intervention, Marx showed the aporia of dualistic and mechanicalthinking about individual and society, minority and majority interests, the eth-nic group and the nation-state. The antithesis between “political society” as aspiritual or heavenly commonwealth and “civil society” as a fragmented do-main of private interests and egoistic drives warring against each other is thelocus of the problem. In a free state, Marx argues, citizens live a double life:the real life of isolated, private persons in civil society, and the imaginary lifeof the citizen in a political sphere (state; civitas). Civil society is character-ized by the pursuit of money and self-interest, the real world of everyday af-fairs, where humans function as instruments, “a plaything of alien powers”;while in the state, individuals are integrated and unified as citizens. Can thesetwo halves be comprehended as aspects of a totality?

Bourgeois civil society and the state are dialectical opposites in unity. Thisbifurcation explains why political emancipation in terms of citizenship doesnot coincide with real, human emancipation—which is not a religious but asecular question. As Marx emphasizes: “A state can be a free state withoutman himself being a free man” (1975, 218). This is because freedom involvesthe species-life of humans (the subject as citizen) as opposed to the material,egoistic life of the bourgeois individual. In the state, however, when religion,language and other particularistic cultural properties have been confined tothe sphere of private law, the individual remains “an imaginary member of afictitious sovereignty, filled with unreal universality”—the free rational sub-ject first elaborated in Spinoza’s Ethics.

The bourgeois revolution in France (translated into jurisprudence and po-litical principles by the American version), according to Marx, demonstratesa dialectic of opposites. The idealism of the state coincides with the material-ism of civil society, with egoistic man in the latter as the foundation or pre-supposition of the former. In history, the bourgeois state emerged from thedissolution of feudal society into independent individuals, the world of atoms,in the theories of Locke, Mill, Rawls, Rorty, and assorted nominalists inspired

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by Kant, Foucault, Lyotard, and others. I would like to quote this extendedpassage from Marx’s 1843 essay for its bearing on the topic of rights andpower:

The rights of man [with the triumph of the bourgeoisie] appear as natural rights,for self-conscious activity is concentrated upon the political act. Egoistic man isthe passive and merely given result of the society which has been dissolved, anobject of immediate certainty, and for that reason a natural object. The politicalrevolution dissolves civil society into its component parts without revolutioniz-ing these parts and subjecting them to criticism. It regards civil society, theworld of needs, of labour, of private interests and of civil law, as the foundationof its existence, as a presupposition which needs no further grounding, andtherefore as its natural basis. Finally, man as he is a member of civil society istaken to be the real man, man as distinct from citizen, since he is man in his sen-suous, individual and immediate existence, whereas political man is simply ab-stract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, moral person. Actual man is ac-knowledged only in the form of the egoistic individual and true man only in theform of the abstract citizen. . . . Political emancipation is the reduction of manon the one hand to the member of civil society, the egoistic, independent indi-vidual, and on the other to the citizen, the moral person. . . . Only when real, in-dividual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual manhas become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his in-dividual relationships, only when man has recognized and organized his forcespropres as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him inthe form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed(1975, 233–34).

What divides state and civil society is the alienation of laboring bodies. Oncefreed from private ownership, this cooperative labor (the collective body ofproducers) functions as the social subject of thinking and action—in effect,Spinoza’s wise man who orders the affections of the body according to the or-der of the intellect. The current debate over citizenship as the site of tran-scendence—the point where the formal or abstract dimension of citizenshipis supposedly fleshed by the social and cultural dimensions (Glenn 2000,Rosaldo 1999)—may have missed the crucial interface or reciprocity of theprivate and public aspects.

To recapitulate Marx’s thesis: in the world of alienated labor and com-modity exchange where competing private interests dominate, the general in-terest embodied in the civitas or commonwealth can only be realized in a for-mal way, via abstraction. Thus the basis and substance of the politicalorganism we call state, sovereignty or commonwealth remains civil societywith its class divisions and internecine warfare. In fact, the unified state sanc-tions and legitimizes the unequal economic relations and other differences

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that constitute civil society. In order to overcome those actual differences, likereligion, the hypostatized idealized state—the modern representative democ-racy with its liberal, tolerant ethos—has to acknowledge the limitations of theprofane world, that is, it has to reinstate and confirm the crass materialism ofbourgeois society. Estrangement and unsociability inform the very nature ofthe polity, the state; hence, uncritical idealism or spiritualism coexists withuncritical positivism and crude, vulgar materialism.

Citizenship in a liberal democratic order is necessarily premised on differ-ence. The citizen is an abstraction, a formal product of a “thoroughgoing tran-substantiation” of all the particular qualities, elements, and processes that aresynthesized in the constitution of the modern liberal state. But this constitu-tion is nothing else but the exaltation of private property, in short, the sancti-fication and legitimation of the basis of the disintegration of the state. Every-thing is turned upside down: the ideal of equality is praised in order to defendthe cause of inequality, private property, as fundamental and absolute. Ulti-mately, the irresolvable contradictions in the racial polity of global capital-ism, the source of its permanent crisis, cannot be resolved except through asocialist/communist revolutionary transformation.

BORDER-CROSSING BLUES

Given the apologetic thrust of current research in ethnic relations, I urge thatwe focus our attention on contradictions, not on consensus, the ensemble ofeconomic and political contradictions that underlie the racializing process insociety. Because the ethnicity paradigm highlights mainly the value of groupidentity as functional to system integration and stabilization of consensus, ac-ademic inquiries into racism and racial conflicts tend to stress the cultural(sometimes conceived in the most anecdotal and pragmatic sense) dimensionsof intergroup relations (orientations, values, goals of actors) and thus placethe burden of their plight on the victims themselves. Phenomenology and as-sorted empiricisms may seek to foreground subjectivity but at the expense ofgiving functionalist positivism a blank check to underwrite everything else,including policy decisions of bureaucrats and state functionaries.

While such studies might claim to combat ethnocentrism and racialist bias,their view that ethnicity (the group’s self-representation) depends on ascrip-tion from both sides of the group boundary in question results in making allparties equally complicit in identity formation and its consequences. More-over, they occlude the matter of group categorization arising from the play ofclass antagonisms, which are usually sublimated into racial/ethnic hostilities.This is the reason why we almost never hear of police terror or state coercion,

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in spite of the claim to sensitive appraisal of agency and consciousness, amidthe plethora of statistics about jobs, occurrences of discrimination, illegal im-migrants, and so on.

Another example illustrates the danger of a purely culturalist/ethnicist ap-proach. When the doxa of Asian Americans as a “model minority” is imposedby the media and neoconservative bureaucrats to establish the groundworkfor gutting affirmative action, curtailing social services, and justifying “dein-dustrialization,” aside from upholding an invidious model to instigate ethnicrivalries, then we are confronted with a process of group categorization aspart of a divide-and-rule hegemonic strategy. The implication is that AfricanAmericans and Latinos should forsake government assistance and conform tothis putative ideal of individual success; we hear the familiar message that“the problem lies in the nature of these people,” it has nothing to do with so-cioeconomic policies and programs that guarantee the normal operation of thefree market and reinforce the consensus. (This consensus is aptly encapsu-lated in President Reagan’s praise of democracy as a system where anyonecan become rich.) And so the phenomenon of inter-ethnic behavior as trans-actional and situationally defined needs to be inscribed in the historical dy-namics of a socioeconomic formation where racial politics is central to itsnormal routine and continuing reproduction (Miles 1989). In this contextual-ization far removed from the “free play” of simulations and their self-refer-ential dialogue, we begin to understand how status, privilege, and asymmet-rical distribution of power mediated through “race” as a synecdoche of classare subject to permanent political contestation. Here the state, the changingmodalities of late-capitalist production and exchange, and mass political mo-bilization at various historical conjunctures are the major topics to be ad-dressed in research. Thus I would concur with critics of this mode of ethnicabsolutism by proposing that we engage instead with the inescapable central-ity of power relationships grounded in the history of conflicts over property(control of the means of production) and political representation when we an-alyze the interaction of identity groups in specific circumstances.

As stated at the outset, the controversy over immigration legislation revealsthe key themes and issues in U.S. racialization strategies in a much sharperway than the debate on multiculturalism. U.S. House Resolution 4437 lumpsthe issue of immigration control with the program to catch potential terroristsby making “unlawful presence” a federal crime and felony—”unlawful pres-ence” referring to undocumented immigrant labor. What is reprehensible isthat the bill penalizes any person or organization who assists an individualwithout documentation “to reside in or remain” in the U.S. knowingly. Andso church personnel, ethnic organizations, and charitable outfits who provideshelter or other basic needs assistance can be charged and sentenced to five

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years in prison, with property used in the act seized and forfeited. Moreover,the application of “expedited removal” measures would allow officials of theDepartment of Homeland Security (which has absorbed the Department ofImmigration and Naturalization) to remove a potential asylum seeker, or refu-gree, without providing an opportunity to appear before an immigration judgeor qualified adjudicator. Further, asylum seekers and refugees who are con-victed of a minor offense (such as petty theft) would be barred from perma-nent legal residence and eventual citizenship.

One of the most oppressed ethnic communities in the U.S., Filipinos willsuffer the greatest from the criminalization of immigrants and immigrant ac-tivisits once the act is fully implemented. Under the extremely repressive po-litical climate, three million Filipinos living in the U.S.—not just the millionmore Filipinos who are undocumented—will be affected in the followingways, as described by the U.S. Chapter of Bagong Alyansyang Makabayan, asupport group:

Because of the classification of an undocumented status as a federal crime, asopposed to an immigration violation, undocumented Filipinos stand to facecriminal charges, jail time and severe financial penalties. This will include notonly low-income migrant workers, but also other sectors such as students, pro-fessionals, and health-care workers. Moreover, all who “assist” undocumentedimmigrants in any form also stand to face criminal charges, jail time and severefinancial penalties. This includes families, friends, acquaintances, employers,churches, centers, schools, and facilities (2006).

A study of the legislation published by the Institute for Policy Studies and theInterhemispheric Resource Center called attention to the futility of stricterborder controls to stem illegal immigration flows, producing instead “risinghuman rights abuses and victimization of border crossers (2006). It also notedthat immigrants, documented and undocumented, became targets of populistbacklashes (California’s Proposition 187); while refugees fleeing repressivegovernments find themselves rejected by Washington.

IMMIGRANT SUBLIME

The vicissitudes of Asian immigration to the U.S. have been thoroughlycharted by historians (Takaki, Chan, Daniels), sociologists, and other schol-ars. The early Asian communities made up of Chinese, Japanese and Filipinoworkers have all suffered diverse forms of racial violence and ethnic dis-crimination from farm owners, business employers, immigration and state of-ficials, and ordinary citizens. From all evidence, they were not recruited as

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“abstract citizens” by the U.S.—1.4 million Filipinos defending their revolu-tionary government were killed by the invading U.S. troops in the Filipino-American War of 1899–1904. Filipino contract workers recruited by theHawaiian Sugar Plantation were colonized subjects or wards, not citizens.European and U.S. pressures on China and Japan contributed to the push-pullfactors that led to the Chinese and Japanese entry into Hawaii and the U.S.West coast. In all such cases, immigration legislation applied to these groupsdid not function as “the site of resurgence of contradiction between capitaland the state” (Lowe 1996, 20). The state interacting with civil society facil-itated the exploitation of these groups, with the reward of “citizenship” as acynical alibi to dissemble the predatory exploitation of a multiethnic/multira-cial proletariat.

It might be useful to recapitulate the lesson of Marx’s On the Jewish Ques-tion, which I discussed earlier in order to dispel the lure of “citizenship” asthe solution to the antinomies of a multiculturalist racial polity. One needs torecall how the dialectic between civil society and the state functions in align-ing the abstract universal citizen as defined by the bourgeois state with theconcretely differentiated individual in civil society. Both abstract citizen andconcrete class-defined subject inhabit the same space of the political econ-omy. The two aspects (political, economic) of human life are not autonomousfrom one another; they share the same enabling material contradictions: oneside of the contradiction seeks to resolve the opposition of wage-labor andcapital through the abstract universal of the citizen (the political subsump-tion), while the other tries to resolve the same contradiction through an ap-peal to the concrete or particular (Hegel’s “caprice”; postmodern “contin-gent”; the economic subsumption). In this connection, Marx reminded BrunoBauer that Jewish emancipation was not guaranteed by political emancipationwithin the terms of the liberal state; the Jewish predicament was only shiftedinto the domain of civil society to be resolved through different means andagencies in the private realm. Likewise, this logic applies to the analysis ofgender, race, age, and so on. Failure to grasp the intricacies of class strugglein the immigrant narrative of Asians will prevent one from appreciating thespecific differences that distinguish the singularity of ethnic groups becausethe process of racializing and gendering proceeds through a material logicthat shifts according to the historical conditions of class conflict, in particularto what is most profitable for capital at a given stage of its development.

Avoiding to wrestle with the labor-capital contradiction leads to an easynominalist reading of the Asian immigrant as a figure of excess, an unrepre-sentable outside, that harmonizes easily with a formalistically pluralist, ecu-menical U.S. culture. A variant idea of American Exceptionalism, thus, per-mits the exercise of Asian American “cultural negativity” that, according to

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Lisa Lowe, appears “in the concrete particular unassimilable to modern insti-tutions, particulars that refuse both integration into dominant forms and thelogic of exchange” (Lowe 1996, 31). This view of the Asian immigrant assomeone inhabiting a space transgressing outside/inside distinctions, outsidethe borders of nations, “occupying other spaces, imagining different narrativeand critical historiographies, and enacting practices that give rise to newforms of subjectivity”—this is exactly what I have criticized in previouschapters as an idealist conceit born of the self-deluded postmodernist hubris.

What’s the result of that conceit? The excessive and liminal effects of “im-migrant acts,” instead of disrupting the American nation-state as an excep-tional one founded on “racialized relations of production,” serve to underlinehow a certain blindness to material relations of oppression and exploitationunderwrites “Model Minority” criticism. This leads to a ludic theory of iden-tity construction and a subjectivist re-writing of history when Lowe, for ex-ample, valorizes gossip as a deterritorializing narrative strand in JessicaHagedorn’s Dogeaters. Like her postmodernist colleagues, Lowe abandonsthe nation-state, and nationalist revolution, for the pleasurable immigrant actsof consumption and desiring that substitute for genuine popular resistance. Inthe end, immigrant acts are acts of frenzied consumption of commodities,whether images, gossip, tropes, etc., that serve as the libidinal space for anoverflow of significations in excess of determinate social meanings. The mul-ticulturalist syndrome and its insidious charm has found its mirror-counter-part in this aesthetics of negativity that can only admire the uncanny virtue ofthe Homeland Security state in being able to perform an ambidextrous act:supplying corporate interests with cheap immigrant labor while at the sametime stigmatizing the “illegal” Mexicans as threats to American culture, jobs,and security. Like official multiculturalism, this romanticization of the Asianimmigrant erases the material conditions of vicious racializing practices andinstitutions. It conceals not only the logic of domination and subordination in-trinsic to U.S. hegemony, but also reconstitutes this invidious social relationin a seductive politics of difference where privatized identities become thechief agency of consumerist experience. In short, immigrant acts of differ-ence idealize neoliberal pluralism as the ideology of the “free market” and itsindividualist ethos of consumerism.

E PLURIBUS, UNUM?

Difference always harbors “the same” in multiple ways. In the antinomies ofthe “New World Order” and its post-9/11 repercussions, we are witnessing the combined and uneven development of both the nation-state’s technocratic

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homogenizing drive as well as an accelerated repluralization of the industrialstates. It is customary to cite (for the United States) the influx of enormousnumbers of Mexican migrants, legal and illegal, as well as other groups (fromIndoChinese to Central American refugees, and now East Europeans). I thinkthe view that an industrial nation-state requires from its citizens cultural ho-mogeneity—everyone should conform to what people in TV advertisementsdo, or toe the line in those rituals beloved by Oates, Ravitch, Will, etc.—onlyhelps to legitimize the hegemony of an elite minority. Culture is complicitwith power and production. This is what the anthropologist Sally Falk Mooreimplies in her provocative essay, “The Production of Cultural Pluralism as aProcess,” where she demonstrates the embeddedness of cultural practices inthe complex totality of a social order: “Pluralism is the juxtaposition-in-the-world of group cultural differences. The most important large-scale issues re-garding pluralism are less about cultural content than about when and whysomething is made of cultural difference in circumstances of juxtaposition.What matters in the analysis of pluralism is not just cultural difference, butthe larger system of political and economic differences into which any par-ticular cultural difference is fitted and given consequences (1989, 37). Like-wise, M.G. Smith emphasizes the point I have stated earlier “the decisive con-ditions of pluralism are political and relate directly to the conditions ofcollective incorporation in the public domain” (1986, 195). The issue then iswhether or not culturally distinct collectivities (ethnic groups) within theboundaries of a nation-state have equal access to resources and to politicalrepresentation; whether or not ethnicity and race are bracketed/cancelled sothat individuals alone are “equally” incorporated into a state, a power-struc-ture which in most cases represents the hegemonic dispensation or “commonculture” of the ruling bloc.

It is never too late or redundant to stress once again the distinction betweentwo ways or paradigms of conceptualizing culture: culture as a coherent andinterconnected system possessing an essence that needs to be preserved be-cause it sustains the life of the group or community, and culture as an acci-dental historical product, an aggregate of separable parts. If culture is seen asa historically constructed assemblage of separable parts, then rearrangementsand recompositions become occasions or stages of an inevitable and continu-ous process that does not destroy the integrity of the whole assemblage. “In-tegrity” and closure are of course debatable terms whose significations haveto be investigated. Here we are addressing questions of change and continu-ity, whether common values are generated through social transactions (a gen-erative model of social change through negotiation and compromise) or dif-ferent cultures persist despite transactions across ethnic boundaries (cultureas difference and complementarity). Is there a permanent cultural habitus or

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pattern constituting the American “national” identity? Is there a need for con-sensus of beliefs or shared value commitments on which to inaugurate the be-ginning of a genuine popular democracy? Do differences of values, symbolsor practices in any setting constitute “cultural differences” that matter?

We know that the dominant culture in any society, its differential appropri-ation and distribution of rewards and penalties, can be used as cultural capi-tal, an instrument of domination. A factory worker and a corporate executivecan both listen to Mozart and Madonna and enjoy them, but what does thatfact signify? Equality? The political meaning of cultural difference can rarelybe found in the content of those differences but in how the bearers of culturalknowledge, their identities locked in conflict or alliance with others, are po-sitioned in the structure of power. If cultural difference is a marker of classdifference, then the program of multiculturalism may exert a critical transfor-mative impact if it questions the ascendancy of one high or elite culture—asupremacy won at the expense of those who either are denied access to it forpolitical and economic reasons, or who are silenced by it as its own conditionof possibility. “Common culture” then becomes the figure or trope for sup-pression and domination. This is so because “social identity is defined and as-serted through difference” (Bourdieu 1977). But in doing this, multicultural-ism is no longer purely a “cultural” or merely ideological project of reformbut one, which interrogates and challenges the foundational principles of thesocial order itself. By then the call to grant equal social representation togroups with diverse cultures would be a call to equal participation in the ex-ercise of substantive political power.

My brief then is for a critical analysis and transvaluation of the discourseof multiculturalism and its mirror image, the “common culture.” We need togo beyond celebrating fluid identities, hybridity, borderline or liminal bodies,uncanny deconstructive ventriloquisms setting “postcolonial” gurus as a newbreed, etc. We know that the ideal of ethnic pluralism, of multicultural de-mocracy, can be used demagogically to legitimize existing class divisions andapologize for the systemic inequalities that enable a simulacrum of “civic hu-manism” to become plausible. We need to go beyond the platitudes of iden-tity politics, however much these may provide a space for recuperating re-sources and renewing indigenous folk memory for nourishing the resistance.We need to wrestle with the task of historicizing the cultural symbols thatconstruct identities and ontologies of self-representation by disclosing theconstellation of power and property relationships informing them. If we areindeed forced to struggle on the discursive terrain of a monopolistic liberal-ism, we need to invent a heretical, oppositional, even utopian multicultural-ism. This proposal will be generated not from arguments about citizenship,humanism, individual freedom, but from the vicissitudes and creativity of

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popular struggles for a broad socialist agenda, for equalizing wealth and re-covering the sources of meaning and self-worth from the commodifyingreach of a tendentious, patriotic “common culture” that has now almost colo-nized the whole planet.

PROLOGUE TO GLOBALIZATION

Whether academic buzzword or essentially contested concept, “globalization”has become a pretext to revive “end-of-ideology”/”end-of-history” programs tolegitimate coercive measures sanctioned by the USA Patriot Act. After 9/11,one should already have been disabused that there is anything more to global-ization than a more unrelenting “transnationalization” (a problematic wordopen to abuse) of the whole planet through the expansion of financecapital/TNCs (transnational corporations), particularly their control of theeconomies of poor countries in the so-called “South.” Given the endless “waron terrorism” and stigmatized “extremists” by the Bush administration, onewould think that the globalizing instrumentalities of the World Trade Organiza-tion (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Bank (WB) wouldnow appear as more lawful and trustworthy than “smart bombs,” U.S. SpecialForces, renditions, and torture in Abu Ghraibs spread around the world.

It would be superfluous to rehearse here the well-known historical devel-opments behind this complex phenomenon. I would note, among others, thecollapse of the Soviet Union, the erosion of Keynesian welfare state policies;the emergence of a new unequal international division of labor; liberalizationof capital, telecommunication, and trade (including Trade-related IntellectualProperty Rights [TRIPS]) flows, normative privatization, deregulation—inshort, the accelerated spread of capitalism in pursuit of profit maximizationand capital accumulation through new and old modalities. I agree with theview of Sylvia Ostrey, former chief economist of the Organization for Eco-nomic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that “the primary agent ofglobalization is the transnational enterprise. The primary driving force is therevolution in information and communications technology” aiding the ex-pansion of TNCs to developing countries (Instituto del Tercer Mundo 1999,64). With enforced “free trade” in a global “free market,” the U.S. corporateelite would not be challenged anymore by new Koreas or Taiwans—theWashington Consensus would prevail as the new pax Americana, the goal ofthe Project for a New American Century.

What I would like to comment on here is the way in which certain radical,even left-wing, theories have utilized the “field” of globalization to advance,either ironically or straightforwardly, defeatist wish-fulfilling agendas. One

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of the more influential is Fredric Jameson. In an essay following The Culturesof Globalization (co-edited with Masao Miyoshi) entitled “Globalization andPolitical Strategy,” Jameson deploys a modified Althusserian optic to dis-perse the totality of globalization into five autonomous levels: the technolog-ical, the political, the cultural, the economic, and the social. With his usualerudition, Jameson seeks to demonstrate the ultimate cohesion of the extantdescriptions of globalization in order to articulate a politics of resistance. Onwhat axis of political efficacy will Jameson articulate these manifold levels?

Although Jameson claims to be a Marxist, his is a singularly revisionistone, to say the least. Clearly he does not believe that capital accumulation northe competition to extract maximum surplus value, is the key motive in ex-plaining the process of globalization—in general, globalization denotes thedeepened and extensive linkages, interconnections or interdependencies be-tween states and societies, the beginning of a cosmopolitan world society(McGrew 1992). Wasn’t this already foreseen by Marx and Engels in 1848,when they forecast “intercourse in every direction, universal interdependenceof nations” as a result of the ceaseless development of the productive forcesin capitalism (Marx and Engels 1949, 8)? In any case, Jameson considers theU.S. “propagation of the free market” only as one policy among others (suchas the propagation of human rights and American-style electoral democracy,etc., which he borrows from Samuel Huntington’s notion of a three-prongedU.S. strategy). Jameson does not discuss such matters as global labor arbi-trage (in which high-wage jobs in the developed world are eliminated in fa-vor of low-wage jobs in the South), nor the “dark” side of globalization,which includes, for mainstream thought, “terrorism, nuclear proliferation, in-fectious disease, protectionism, and global climate change” (Haas 2005).Jameson then reduces the political question—what he calls the anxiety overimperialism—to “nationalism,” which for him is not political nor economic,but really cultural.

Jameson then resorts to a psychological analysis of anxieties over global-ization construed as a process of homogenization and centralization. The eth-nic or nationalist response to the standardization of world culture, in fact theAmericanization of every culture, is a symptom which masks an underlyingfear: “that specifically ethno-national ways of life will themselves be de-stroyed” (51). But even before you have registered your caveat, Jameson con-fronts us with ambiguities hobbling the resistance to U.S. cultural imperial-ism, what he calls “antinomy of political correctness” comprised ofincommensurable “strategies of representation” meant to paralyze the grum-bling Mexican or Chinese workers exploited by Nike, Walmart, etc.

Immediately, Jameson follows this with the expected shift to the econom-ics of globalization only to realize that that dimension “in fact, constantly

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seems to be dissolving into all the rest: controlling the new technologies, re-inforcing geopolitical interests and, with postmodernity, finally collapsing thecultural into the economic—and the economic into the cultural. Commodityproduction is now a cultural phenomenon, in which you buy the product fullyas much for its image as for its immediate use” (53). Use-value and exchange-value are dissolved into a somatic-psychic mass phenomenon divorced fromdeterminate sociohistorical contexts. This is a questionable maneuver thatJameson universalizes across varied locations and situations, a feature ofepochal postmodernism that Jameson fully elaborates in his now canonicalPostmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Jameson’s privi-leging of exchange/reception/consumption occludes relations of class powersustaining capitalist production relations, imprisoning us in what Marx calledthe “pre-established harmony of things . . . under the auspices of an omnis-cient providence”: “The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, withinwhose boundaries the sale and purchase of labor-power goes on, is in fact avery Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom,Equality, Property and Bentham” (1977, 280).

Of course Jameson takes into account the economics of the culture indus-try, the marketing of U.S. films, etc. But again, he reveals himself averse toapplying a historical materialist framework, for he claims that “the more dis-tinctively postmodern forms of imperialism” operating through WTO,NAFTA, etc. are the ones that show “that confluence between the various anddistinct levels of the economic, the cultural and the political, that character-izes postmodernity and lends a fundamental structure to globalization”(54–55). In this heady mix of categories, we cannot talk about exploitation orsocial justice. Analogous to what Negri and Hardt tried to prove in theirmuch-touted Empire, Jameson casts doubt whether the global financial mar-ket is really working in the interest of the United States; that is, finance cap-ital “will mutate into autonomous mechanisms which produce disasters noone wants, and spin beyond the control of even the most powerful govern-ment,” a prospect already anticipated in the scenario of systemic crisis drawnin The Communist Manifesto, or in Lenin’s Imperialism, the Last Stage ofCapitalism. Consequently Jameson claims that we cannot stop globalization’sdestruction of local cultures, nor can we conceive of any feasible alternativeto the doom awaiting all of us.

DE-GLOBALIZING PANTOMIME

After a short interlude reviewing the conservative John Gray’s diagnosis ofglobalization, Jameson offers an anticlimactic proposal for resisting global-

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ization. His vision is even bleaker: national liberation struggles all fail be-cause of the inescapable “force-field of capitalist globalization, subject to thedominion of the money markets and overseas investment.” No one can resistU.S. imperialism (the only one able to, Japan and the European Union, aredeeply implicated in it). Despite all these warnings and jeremiads, Jamesonstates that “the nation-state today remains the only concrete terrain andframework for political struggle” (65). All nation-states, or some, Jamesondoes not say. Again, the nationalist struggle is caught in an aporia: that of at-tempting to universalize a particularity. And so the struggle of “anti-imperi-alist nationalism” (such as Iran) against globalization founders because of thelack of “a genuinely universalistic opposition”—though Jameson is quick tosay that he does not endorse “universalism” as such because the contradictionbetween the universal and particular is embedded “within the existing histor-ical situation of nation-states inside a global system” (66).

A potentially catalyzing insight, but Jameson does not elaborate, though atthe end he gestures toward the need for belief-systems, for social cohesion orsolidarity (contraposed to the atomized individualism of consumerized poli-ties). We reach finally those apocalyptic moments (he invokes the demon-strations against the WTO) which “designate whatever programmes and rep-resentations express, in however distorted or unconscious a fashion, thedemands of a collective life to come, and identify social collectivity as thecrucial centre of any truly progressive and innovative political response toglobalization” (68). This celebration of the utopian mode of transcending cap-italist crisis (the recovery of some archaic Gemeinschaft) recalls the famousdiatribe of Marx and Engels against petty-bourgeois utopian socialism, whosechief trademark was that of fantasizing the thorough radical transformation ofpredatory capitalism, private property, and alienated, can be achieved withoutthe necessity of class struggle and the revolutionary role of the working classunited with all oppressed sectors in accomplishing this systemic transition.

And so, in spite of Jameson’s sophisticated articulation of intersecting levelsof globalization, we are offered a metaphysical dualism between the collectiveand the individual, one of those bourgeois antinomies that George Lukacssharply delineated in his 1923 book History and Class Consciousness. Were itnot for his credentials as (to Perry Anderson) the practitioner of “a sober mate-rialist analysis of the historical ground of major cultural transformations”(1998, xii), one could lump Jameson with either “localist” or autonomist” anti-capitalist blocs described by Alex Callinicos in An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto.Jameson’s understanding of globalization shares the eclecticism of AnthonyGiddens and Roland Robertson, with their invocation of multiple logics of cau-sation, departing from the approaches of Immanuel Wallerstein and David Har-vey in their singular focus on the logic of the capitalist world-economy and its

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uneven development. One thing is certain: the working class as a social agencyor political formation scarcely figures in Jameson’s vision of resistance to cor-porate globalization.

A clue to the stark limitation of Jameson’s analysis of globalization—his isnot idiosyncratic but typical of well-intentioned liberal academics in societieswhere popular working class mobilization is absent or rightist reaction (as inthe U.S. today) is ascendant—may be found in his obsessive concern with the“immense enlargement of world communication.” Deviating from purelytechnological determinism, Jameson criticizes the transnationalizing market,which swallows up national cinemas and vernacular musics in the culture-ideology of consumerism (1998, xv). This is the well known problematic ofsubsumption of the referent in the simulacra, in the interminable chain of slid-ing signifiers and vertiginous tropes. Prioritizing consumption, the psychic,agency, the body, performance, aesthetics, etc., supposedly marks the “sub-jective turn” from the doctrinaire Marxist economism of the Cold War era toa new protean, flexible, eclectic, neopragmatic radicalism espoused byJacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, RichardRorty, and their numerous disciples. By absolutizing the categories of thoughtin its immediate relation with experience, intuitions, etc., this post-structural-ist trend has forsaken or forfeited their relative truths in the inner contradic-tory movement of the “concept,” that is, capitalism as a historical system(Lefebvre 1968).

POSTCOLONIAL ALIBIS

Postcolonial theory of the Establishment kind—aside from Bhabha, ArjunAppadurai’s theory of flows and multiple-scapes may be cited here—has suc-cumbed to nominalist metaphysics in its various manifestations as textualism,deconstructive nihilism, Foucauldean genealogy, diasporic citizenship, and soon. Australian postcolonialist scholars such as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffithsand Helen Tiffin describe globalization as “a process of the world becominga single place.” This occurs through time-space distanciation, disembedding,the conflation of local and global (Giddens 1990), or through time-spacecompression (Harvey 1989). Individual lives and local communities, territo-rial nations, are affected by the impact of colonialism, imperialism, and glob-ally disseminated knowledge and culture, so that the nation-state system (andcorollary concepts of internationalism, etc.) are dissolved by the global econ-omy, its invasive communication system, and the world military order. Theydiscriminate between the affirmers and rejectionists, and seem to favor whatthey call “critical globalism,” which ironically takes a neutral view by not

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blocking out globalizing processes nor supporting them. How it is critical, wedon’t know. They argue that globalization “demonstrates the transmutation ofimperialism into the supra-national operations of economics, communica-tions and culture” (1998). However, globalization is not just the dominationof finance capital at the center (via IMF/WTO/WB) on the periphery, but isessentially “transcultural,” with the prefix “trans” somehow producing anequalizing or reciprocalizing effect (see San Juan 2004, Ch. 1).

Like orthodox postcolonialism, our Australian experts view globalizationas a reciprocal process of exchange between colonizer and colonized. Al-though they acknowledge the destructive effects of imperialism, they insistthat “globalism is not simply a result of top-down dominance but a transcul-tural process, a dialectic of dominant cultural forms and their appropriation”(1998, 113). And even though they believe that the agency of nation-stateshave been practically eroded or nullified, they contend that local communi-ties and marginal interest groups can appropriate “strategies of representation,organization and social change through access to global systems” to empowerthemselves and influence those systems (114). Like the TNCs, the nation-state seems anathema to them. Ashcroft et al have already ruled out socialclass or class agency beforehand, so where will the subaltern turn to? Theirbelief in creative adaptation, abrogation plus assimilation, summons back thenostrums of the localists and anarchists we have met before. Are we goingback to archaic forms of groupings prior to the nation-state as safe havensfrom neocolonialism? Ashcroft and colleagues cite Stuart Hall’s view of ho-mogenization by global mass culture operating through the values, tastes anddecisions of local, nationality-defined elites (for the opposite thesis on the po-larization of temporal/spatial distances, see Bauman 1998). Overall, theypoint to the paramount issue underlying globalization studies and current de-bates in postcolonial discourse: the nature and survival of cultural identity.

This identity of the subaltern, however, is a question-begging evasion ofthe crisis of the system manifest in symptomatic breakdowns, collectiveprotests, individual criminal acts, etc. For one thing, it accepts as fait accom-pli the corporate control and marketized management of identity/subject for-mation. The subaltern can speak, but only using the fluctuating currency ofthe shopping malls and ideological media apparatuses. Leaping beyond thecontradictory movement of capital, postcolonialists follow Bhabha’s reifiednotions of ambivalence and interstitial compromises to reduce the dialectic ofuse-value and exchange value at the heart of alienated labor (embodied incommodities, money, symbolic capital in the circuit of exchange) to the ques-tion of individual identity. This only reproduces the contradictions of liberalideals and brutalizing reality. Beginning with multiple levels of categorizingglobal society, Jameson ended up also with this problem of identity. This is

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but a logical result of the “incredulity toward meta-narratives”—except towardtheir own version, a hypotastized methodology of doubt and nihilistic cynicism.This may be viewed as a mode of pre-emptive reconciliation of opposites (notthe transitional unity of opposites that functions as a moment of the dialectic),resolving the conflict between, say, dependent countries in Latin America andthe U.S., or between “vulture capital” and exploited workers in the global ex-port-processing zones in favor of the status quo. It seems that dialectical inquiryas “the search for internal relations” and its movement (Ollman 2003) has givenway to opportunist pragmatism. So much for postnational “sly civility,” dias-poric hybridity, and cosmopolitanesque negotiations.

ISLANDS ON FIRE

Pursuing a dialectical perspective on globalization, I would like to connectthis problematic of identity theorized by Jameson, Ashcroft and others, to thespecific plight of the Moros (Muslims) in the Philippines and their struggleagainst the neocolonial Philippine state and U.S. hegemony. After all, themass media since 9/11 has used the terrorist “Abu Sayyaf” as a bogeyman torally Americans to unite in this “civilizing mission” of sharing the benefits ofthe Washington Consensus with the benighted inhabitants of Mindanao andSulu (Broad and Cavanagh 2002). But that would be to move to an exempli-fying mode, which, though appropriate for investigating the ambiguities of“identity politics,” would require a space reserved for another occasion (seeSan Juan 2000). Suffice it to make these provisional concluding observations.

In order to probe and analyze the multilayered contradictions of any phe-nomenon, we need to apply the principle of historical totalizing: connectingspheres of culture, ideology, and politics to the overarching structure of pro-duction and reproduction. This is axiomatic for any historical-materialist cri-tique. Consequently, the question of cultural identity cannot be mechanicallydivorced from the historically determinate mode of production and attendantsocial relations of any given socioeconomic formation. What is the point ofeulogizing hybrid, cyborg-esque, nomadic global citizens—even fluid, am-bivalent “subject positions” if you like—when the majority of these post-modernized creatures are dying of hunger, curable epidemics, diseases andpsychosomatic illnesses brought about precisely by the predatory encroach-ment of globalizing transnational corporations, mostly based in the U.S. andWestern Europe? But it is not just academic postmodernists suffering fromthe virus of pragmatist metaphysics who apologize for profit-making global-ization. Even a latterly repentant World Bank expert, Joseph Stiglitz, couldsubmit in his well-known Globalization and Its Discontents, the following

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ideological plea: “Foreign aid, another aspect of the globalized world, for allits faults still has brought benefits to millions, often in ways that have almostgone unnoticed: guerillas in the Philippines were provided jobs by a WorldBank financed-project as they laid down their arms” (Stiglitz 2006, 420). Anyone slightly familiar with the Cold War policies of Washington vis-à-vis aneocolony like the Philippines knows that World Bank funds were then usedby the U.S. Pentagon to suppress the Communist Party-led peasant rebellionin the 1950s against the iniquitous semi-feudal system and corrupt compradorregime (Doty 1996; Constantino 1978). It is globalization utilized to maintaindirect coercive U.S. domination of the Philippines at a crucial conjuncturewhen the Korean War was mutating into the Vietnam War, all designed tocontain “World Communism” (China, Soviet Union). Up to now, despite na-tionalist gains in the last decade, the Philippine government plays host everyyear to thousands of U.S. “Special Forces” purportedly training Filipinotroops in the war against “terrorism”—that is, against anti-imperialist forceslike the Communist Party-led New People’s Army and progressive elementsof the Moro Islamic National Liberation Front and the Moro National Liber-ation Front (International Peace Mission 2002).

VOLATILE PRAYER

One needs to repeat again that the present world system, as Hugo Radice ar-gues, remains “both global and national,” a contingent and contradictoryprocess (1999, 4). Globalization dialectically negates and affirms national en-tities—pseudo-nations as well as those peoples struggling for various formsof national sovereignty. While a universal “free market” promoted by TNCtriumphalism is deemed to be homogenizing and centralizing in effect, abol-ishing independent states/nationalities, and creating a global public spherethrough juxtaposition, syncretic amalgamation, and so on, one perceives acounter-current of fragmentation, increasing asymmetry, unbridgeable in-equalities, and particularistic challenges to neoliberal integration—includingfundamentalist political Islam, eco-terrorism, drugs, migration, and othermovements of “barbarians at the gates” (Schaeffer 1997). Is it a question ofmere human rights in representation and life-style, or actual dignity and jus-tice in the everyday lives of whole populations with singular life forms? Ar-ticulating these historical contradictions without theorizing the concept of cri-sis in capital accumulation will only lead to the short-circuitingtransculturalism of Ashcroft and other ideologies waging battle for su-premacy/hegemony over “popular common sense” imposing meaning/or-der/significance on the whole globalization process (Rupert 2000).

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Indeed, academic inquirers of globalization are protagonists in this unfold-ing drama of universalization under duress. One may pose the followingquestions as a heuristic pedagogical maneuver: Can globalized capital trulyuniversalize the world and bring freedom and prosperity to everyone, as itscelebrants claim? Globalization as the transnationalized domination of capi-tal exposes its historical limit in the deepening class inequality in a polarized,segregated and policed world. While surplus-value extraction in the interna-tional labor market remains basic to the logic of accumulation, the ideologyof neoliberal transnationalism has evolved into the discourse of war on ter-rorism (“extremism”) rationalized as the “the clash of civilizations.” Contra-dictions and its temporary resolutions constitute the imperialist project ofeliding the crisis of unilateral globalism. A historical-materialist critiqueshould seek to highlight the political economy of this recolonizing strategyoperating in the fierce competition of the ruling classes of the U.S., Japan,and Europe to impose hegemonic control in an increasingly boundary-de-stroying space and continue the neocolonial oppression of the rest of theworld. What is needed is a radical critique of the ideology of technologicaldeterminism and its associated apologetics of the “civilizing mission,” theevangelism of pre-emptive” intervention in the name of Realpolitik “democ-racy” against resistance by workers, peasants, women, indigenous communi-ties (in Latin America, Africa, the Philippines and elsewhere [see Houghtonand Bell 2006; San Juan 2003), and all the excluded and marginalized peo-ples of the planet.

Beyond descriptions and articulations, the controversy culminates on howchange is to be carried out. Reacting to Eric Hobsbawm’s historical accountof globalization which ignores social movements, Michael Denning calls fora transnational cultural studies that will “narrate an account of globalizationthat speaks not just of an abstract market with buyers and sellers, or even ofan abstract commodification with producers and consumers, but of actors”(2004, 28). On the other hand, Teresa Ebert asserts that globalization dealswith production and labor, with the “struggle over the structured inequality inthe world economy” (2000, 6); thus, the vehicles of change are the producers,creators of value. Where do we situate, for example, the BangsaMoro (in thePhilippines) struggle for dignity and justice in these conceptualizations? (Orthe struggles of the Nepalis led by the Communist Party of Nepal, the Boli-varian revolutionary communities in Venezuela, the guerillas in Colombia,not to mention the Zapatistas in Mexico and the New People’s Army in thePhilippines?)I agree with Denning that actors should be discovered and rec-ognized, but are these actors the prefigurative communities that Jameson hadin mind, abstract forms without content or relational substance? I agree withEbert on the overarching narrative of globalization as the struggle over struc-

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tured inequality manifest in the unequal division of international labor, regis-tering acutely the movement of contradictions in our historical period.

In my view, this narrative of socialist internationalism represents a “criti-cal universality” of liberation of humans from all forms of oppression, a uni-versality that unfolds in various specific theaters and stages around the world,with their concrete historical specificities (Lowy 1998). One such theater isthe Moro revolutionary struggle in the Philippines, a predicament embodyingglobal/local antagonisms in which (to modify Jameson) “the truth of experi-ence no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place” but implicateseveryone from the center to the periphery, in various gradations of responsi-bility (1988, 349). The official representation of the Abu Sayyaf as a terroristphenomenon that tarnishes the legitimate struggle of Muslims in the Philip-pines for self-determination, for example, functions as a symptom of the cri-sis of corporate globalization evidenced in the current U.S. wars against peo-ple of color, a crisis of the capitalist process of accumulation (exploitation oflaboring masses), revealing its irreversible contradictions and, in the process,intimating where and how the possibility of its overcoming can be realized.As Arundhati Roy eloquently voiced it early in this new millennium: what weneed to sharpen is a new politics, “not the politics of governance [as “thirdway” liberals and reformist NGOs call for], but the politics of resistance, . . .of opposition. The politics of forcing accountability . . . In the present cir-cumstances, I’d say that the only thing worth globalizing is dissent . . . join-ing hands across the world and preventing certain destruction” (2006, 467).

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A few months before his death, Edward Said, arguably the founding “patri-arch” of postcolonial studies, reassessed his critique of “Orientalism” by af-firming the value of “humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle” soas to enable the speaking of “issues of injustice and suffering” within the am-ply situated contexts of history and socioeconomic reality. He invoked senti-ments of generosity and hospitality so that the interpreter’s mind can activelymake a place for “a foreign other,” the “active practice of worldly secular ra-tional discourse”. He strongly denounced the current U.S. government policyof celebrating “American or western exceptionalism” and demonstrating con-tempt for other cultures, all in the service of “terror, pre-emptive war, and uni-lateral regime change” (2003, 5). In an earlier interview, Said asserted that hismain interest was in neocolonialism, not postcolonialism (which, to him, wasa “misnomer”), in “the structures of dependency and impoverishment” in theglobal South due to the operations of the International Monetary Fund and theWorld Bank (1998/99, 82). Overall, a modernist humanism, not postcolonialhybridity, deconstruction, or genealogy of speechless subalterns, was for Saidthe paradigmatic framework of inquiry for a comparative analysis of culturesand societies in an epoch of decolonization.

After over two decades of intellectual specialization and investment, post-colonial inquiry has now enjoyed sufficient legitimacy and prestige in the Euro-American academy to make it serviceable for reinforcing the Establishment con-sensus. Decolonization is over. The natives now run the government. Long livethe free market around the planet! Works by Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, andothers are institutionally consecrated “touchstones,” to use the Arnoldian rubric,that, though somewhat vitiated as products of a “comprador intelligentsia,” nev-ertheless serve to authorize a validation of colonialism and its legacies as a use-ful if ambivalent resource. Informed by theoretical protocols and procedures

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hostile to nationalist movements, not to speak of antiimperialist revolutionarystruggles and other “metanarratives” inspired by Fanon, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, CheGuevara, Cabral and others, postcolonial studies today function not as supple-ments to the critical theories of Derrida, Foucault or Deleuze, but to the officialapologetics of the “new world order” called “globalization” ushered with the de-mise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, that is to say, the end ofhistory and the eternal triumph of capitalism and its attendant ideology, neolib-eral globalism. Lest I forget, globalization also refers to the authority of theGlobal North’s enforcing agencies, the WB/IMF/WTO, adhering to the “Wash-ington Consensus” of privatization, deregulation and “free trade.” As Arif Dirliksummed it up, postcolonial discourse has become an academic orthodoxy in its“self-identification with hybridity, in-betweeness, marginality, borderlands”—afatal move from the “language of revolution infused with the vocabulary of po-litical economy to a culturalist language of identity politics” (2000, 5).

What happened to revolution and the decolonizing figure prefigured byCaliban and personified by Rizal, Sandino,Nelson Mandela, and others? Inhis master-work Culture and Imperialism, Said paid homage to the revolu-tionary militants, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, and others, asthe locus classicus of emancipatory “third world” discourse who engaged therecovery of lost integrity in the context of regaining the habitat of popularmemory—places instead of spaces—and popular sovereignty. But today, na-tionalism and national liberation struggles are anathema to postcolonialists.And with the neoconservative counter-revolution after the defeat of U.S. ag-gression in IndoChina, a “cultural turn” effectively replaced the revolutionaryprocess in history with an endless process of “abrogation and appropriation”of colonial texts and practices in quest of an identity that is ultimately and for-ever decentered, shifting, borderless, fluid, aleatory, contingent, and so on.What encapsulates all these qualities is the term “transnational.” As I dis-cussed earlier, the prefix “trans” functions as the magic word bridging the im-mense gap between the unmitigated misery of peoples in the underdevelopedSouth and the affluent suburban megamalls of the global North. One mightask: Would transnationals and transculturals resolve questions of sufferingand injustice that confront us daily in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Nepal, Su-dan, Colombia, the Philippines, and of course in the “internal colonies” ofNorth America and Europe?

AFFECTS OF NARCISSUS

In the canonical handbook Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies by the sameAustralian authors (Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin) of The

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Empire Writers Back, we do not find any entry for “Liberation” but one for“Liminality. And, more telling, there is no entry for “Revolution” either.Aside from the valorization of the liminal as the in-between hybrid notion,“rhizome” is privileged by our postcolonial experts as the concept (atributedto Deleuze and Guattari, but defined in Foucauldian terminology) that bestdescribes colonial power: “it operates dynamically, laterally and intermit-tently.” Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin assert that “There is no ‘master plan ofimperialism, and its advance is not necessarily secured through violence andoppression”; and therefore we should focus on the way “cultural hegemony”operates through “an invisible network of filiative connections, psychologicalinternalizations, and unconsciously complicit associations” (1998, 207).Surely these generalizations will strike anyone as quite dubious, departingradically from Gramsci’s use of “hegemony” as a historically variable, deter-minate combination of force and consent (see chapter 4 and passim). Revo-lution and postcolonial studies strike most observers as antithetical, anathe-mas to each other.

One sign of the terminal exhaustion of this anti-totalizing stance is the re-duction of the issue of globalization to “the nature and survival of social andcultural identity,” thus evacuating the arena of political and socioeconomicstruggle which Said and his models (Fanon, C.L.R. James) considered salientand inescapable. We have seen this vitiate Jameson’s discourse on globaliza-tion in the preceding chapter. Disturbed by this trend, students and teachers atMcMaster University in Ontario, Canada, recently organized a conference on“the politics of postcoloniality.” Anticipating an “Empire Resurrected,” theyposed the following questions in a futuristic or subjunctive mode (reproducedfrom a widely circulated flyer): “What are the chances of establishing directcolonialism again in the 21st century? Why did the old empires give up theirold colonies in favor of indirect colonialism? What are the conditions thatwould make them revert back to direct colonialism? What are the circum-stances (economical/political/cultural/social) that would facilitate the resur-rection of direct colonialism/empire? How can colonial schemes be countered?What should be the new mode of resistance? What is the role of civil disobedi-ence in this case? Is terrorism/radical resistance the new mode for counteringthe new empire? What are the viable modes or resistance? How can postcolo-nial theory respond/react to such a possibility? What would be its role?” Theseare fresh winds blowing from the dusty ivory-towers and foggy archives of theEmpire’s higher institutions of learning. Possibly they betoken grassroots un-rest in the “belly of the beast” that might stir us up from dogmatic slumber in-duced by the seductive pleasures of postcolonial contingency and disjuncture.

We are at a pivotal juncture in critical self-reflective inventory. Instead ofelaborating fully the historical circumstances that might explain this shift, a

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transition I have sketched in my Beyond Postcolonial Theory and WorkingThrough the Contradictions, what I would like to attempt here is to explorebriefly the most suggestive ways in which we can restore the critical edge inpostcolonial critique by engaging the problem of terrorism and its polar an-tithesis, the “New American Century” and the project of globalization de-signed to re-establish an imperial hegemony not dreamed of by either CecilRhodes or the architects of pax Americana erected on the ruins of Hiroshima,Berlin and Stalingrad. What I have in mind is the interrogation of the dis-course of imperial neoliberalism as the wily, duplicitous mimicry of post-colonial agency. What is urgently needed is a new analytic approach totwenty-first century imperial hegemony and a corollary strategy of demysti-fication that would advance the anti-globalization actions to take into accountcrucial developments since the disaster of September 11, 2001 and its after-math, the ongoing devastation of Afghanistan and Iraq. This is both a peda-gogical and mobilizing task aimed at sectors of the pettybourgeois intelli-gentsia and middle strata open to an evolving neo-postcolonial critique, if nota revolutionary agenda.

IMPERIAL NEOLIBERALISM

Imperial neoliberalism, the rationale of actual political and economic global-ization, reveals itself most lucidly in the “Project for New American Cen-tury,” the manifesto of advisers closest to President George W. Bush. The de-signers of this new aggressive U.S. foreign policy premised on anunprecedented military buildup were participants in the invasions of Panamaand Grenada, counter-insurgency wars in Central and South America (partic-ularly Colombia, Peru), the Cold War showdown with the Soviet Union inAfghanistan, and the arming of Iraq to counter radical Islamists in Iran andelsewhere. Basically, the project centers on a doctrine of unilateral pre-emp-tive war against any nation or power seeking to rival the U.S. rather than con-tainment and multilateral internationalism of terrorist groups. The goal is to-tal war, endless preemptive and preventive war. It is premised on acceleratedmilitarization of society, erosion of civil liberties, and Manichean “moralclarity” as to who is good and who is evil.

What the last phrase means may be grasped by quoting portions of themanifesto: “American foreign and defense policy is adrift . . . As the 20th cen-tury draws to a close, the United States stands as the world’s pre-eminentpower. . . . Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century fa-vorable to American principles and interests?” This domination of the planetis based on “unquestioned U.S. military preeminence” beefed up with new

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generation of nuclear weapons and sufficient combat forces deployed to awider network of forward operating bases to fight and win multiple wars, in-cluding forces for “constabulary duties” with American rather than UN lead-ership. Are we facing here an aberrant act committed in a moment of absent-mindedness? Not really. The provenance of this revival of pax Americanamay be traced to George Kenan’s statement (US Government documentPPSW23, 24 Feb. 1948) in the early days of the Cold War: “We have about60% of the world’s wealth but only 6./3% of its population. In this situationwe cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in thecoming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us tomaintain this position of disparity. We need not deceive ourselves that we canafford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction. We should ceaseto talk about such vague and unreal objectives as human rights, the raising ofliving standards and democratization. The day is not far off when we are go-ing to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hamperedby idealistic slogans, the better” (US Government 1950). Kenan may be thepresiding genius behind the neoconservative “conspiracy” to revitalize impe-rial ambitions as the Empire crumbles.

In a blueprint entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forcesand Resources for a New Century” released last September 2000, the Cheney/Rumsfeld group in the current administration outlined its grand plan for worldhegemony: “The United States is the world’s only superpower, combining pre-eminent military power, global technological leadership, and the world’slargest economy. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extendthis advantageous position as far into the future as possible. Yet no moment ininternational politics can be frozen in time; even a global pax Americana willnot preserve itself. . . . The presence of American forces in critical regionsaround the world is the visible expression of the extent of America’s status asa superpower . . . “ The report urges the control of the Persian Gulf region bythe U.S., proceeding through the conquest of Iraq, followed by Syria and even-tually Iran. For this plan to be “saleable” to the public, a catastrophic and cat-alyzing event “like a new Pearl Harbor” was needed; this was promptly sup-plied by September 11, 2001. While the ostensible excuse for the invasion ofIraq included Hussein’s tyranny, putative weapons of mass destruction, andterrorism, it was in effect the desire of the US ruling elite for a permanent roleand base in this strategically important region of the world, rich in resourcesbut also geographically situated in a way that would provided springboards forintervention into Europe, Russia, China and the Indian subcontinent.

In President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, the doctrine of “pre-emptive war” as the lynchpin in the endless war against terrorism, against roguestates that form the axis of evil (Iraq, Iran and North Korea), was announced.

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The right to act preemptively, using nuclear strikes and other “operational ca-pabilities,” as well as the use of torture, “extraordinary renditions” and otherunconventional means, were no longer being employed to punish the perpetra-tors of the crime of September 11 by the savage onslaught on Afghanistanwhere Al-Qaeda and Osama bin laden had strongholds. Rather, they were mea-sures necessary” to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.” The fantasmaticdanger of terrorism scattered around the world now justifies this militarizationof foreign policy and the willingness to intervene and engage even in “lots ofsmall, dirty fights in remote and dangerous places” in the process of “drainingthe swamp” of civil society (to quote Defense Secretary Rumsfeld; Mahajan2002, 97; Shank 2003). In addition to the “shock and awe” war against Iraq,endless and borderless war against anyone perceived or declared as “terrorist,”that is, anti-American, seems overreaching and out of proportion to the catas-trophe of September 11 (Ullman and Wade 1996). The aim of fighting and win-ning multiple, simultaneous major theater wars seems a postmodernist avant-garde invention. But the reality of events appears to confirm the intent:Afghanistan was subjugated at the expense of some 20,000 lives, Iraq at morethan triple the number (now over 600,000 casualties, circa 2006) and still count-ing.

What strikes most people as sinister is the plan of a secret army or “super-intelligence support activity” labeled as the “Proactive Pre-emptive Opera-tions Group,” or P2OG. It will combine the CIA and military covert action,information warfare, and deception to provoke terrorist attacks that wouldthen require U.S. “counterattack” against countries harboring the terrorists.But this is humdrum routine for the “civilizing mission” since the conquista-dors landed in the “New World” and the European traders-missionaries beganthe merchandising of the bodies of African slaves. Now, it is genocide of en-tire communities and ecological devastation without sense—except profit/capital accumulation.

In retrospect, one can discern an uncanny similarity with the events beforethe war against Iraq in 1991 that inaugurated the era of “total war.” The de-pressed economic situation and the scandals of corporate criminality cannotbe remedied by further dismantling of the welfare state, so the public must bediverted. Noam Chomsky’s analysis of that situation sounds prescient andhistorically grounded in a well-defined pattern of political sequences thatcondense half-a-century of postcolonial interventions:

Two classic devices are to inspire fear of terrible enemies and worship of ourgrand leaders, who rescue us just in the nick of time. The enemies may be do-mestic (criminal Blacks, uppity women, subversives undermining the tradition,etc.), but foreign demons have natural advantages. . . . As the standard pretext

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[Communists] vanished, the domestic population has been frightened—withsome success—by images of Qaddafi’s hordes of international terrorists, San-dinistas marching on Texas, Grenada interdicting sea lanes and threatening thehomeland itself, Hispanic narco-traffickers directed by the arch-maniac Nor-iega, after he underwent the usual conversion from favored friend to Attila theHun after committing the one unforgivable crime, the crime of disobedience . . . .The scenario requires Awe as well as Fear . . . (1992, 408)

THE TERRORIZING SUBLIME

Awe as well as fear—this “structure of feeling,” which postcolonial criticshave so far ignored, frames the situation of the war against terrorism carriedto the imperial margins, this time in the Philippines. I would now like to callthe attention of the reader to the Philippines, a former colony of the UnitedStates (now arguably a genuine U.S. neocolony) and the continuing l’affaireAbu Sayyaf and its use as a pretext for the invasion by over a thousand U.S.troops of this second front of the war against terrorism, after Afghanistan (SanJuan 2006b). Like the Maoists of the Peru and Nepal, the Communist NewPeople’s Army, the Palestinian Hamas, and others, the Abu Sayyaf is distin-guished as one of the minuscule terrorist groups in the Philippines that theU.S. State Department considers a serious menace to the national security ofthe world’s only military super-power. This seemingly ludicrous aggrandize-ment can only be made intelligible when seen in the framework of drastictime-space compression, coupled with the disembedding of the local into theglobal, of globalization theories mentioned earlier.

Since 9/11 and the USA Patriot Act, it has been useful for the U.S. neo-conservative regime to establish several battle-fronts against “terrorist” recal-citrants in the “global village.” Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union,the military power of the U.S. nation-state has been crossing territorialboundaries with impunity, seeking to impose regime change wherever possi-ble. After Afghanistan and before the invasion of Iraq, the Philippines becamethe second-battlefront of the war due to the presence of the Abu Sayyaf. Asidefrom trying to regain its geopolitical springboard for intervention in theSoutheast Asian/Pacific Rim theater of commercial operations, the U.S.clearly wants to paint Al Qaeda as a world-wide threat so as to justify pre-emptive aggression against dehumanized “enemy combatants” with their evilideology. One enemy combatant discovered in the resource-rich region ofMindanao, Philippines, adjacent to Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Viet-nam, the Abu Sayyaf, a Moro guerilla outfit with questionable links to AlQaeda, turned out to be a propaganda bonanza especially when they kid-napped American missionaries Gracia and Burnham in 2002 (Perlez 2002).

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One of the most victimized indigenes of the Philippines in its long historyas an archipelagic colony is the Muslim or Moro inhabitants (now about tenmillion of 84 million Filipinos). Never subjugated by four hundred years ofSpanish colonial rule, the Moros resisted U.S. military pacification with leg-endary tenacity, for many decades, after 1.4 million Filipinos were slaugh-tered in the scarcely known Filipino-American War of 1899-1902. U.S. geno-cidal subjugation of what U.S. colonial bureaucrats called “depraved,intractable and piratical” (Ocampo 1998, 236) people may be illustrated intwo incidents of fierce Moro resisance: the battle of Mt. Dajo, Jolo, in March1906 where U.S. troops massacred over 600 women, men and children; andthe battle of Mt. Bagsak, Jolo, in June 1913 where 3,000 Moro women, menand children were killed. A dual policy of coercion and cooptation of the lo-cal elite led to the establishment of U.S. hegemony in the first three decadesof the last century; but this same period witnessed the intensifying marginal-ization, dispossession, and impoverishment of the Moros until the sixties andseventies when newly organized separatist movements exploded in armed re-bellion against the neocolonial state in 1972 (San Juan 2000).

The Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) led by Nur Misuari, a secu-lar intellectual from the Tausug community, distinguished itself as the firstarmed unit that spearheaded the fight for self-determination against the U.S.-Marcos dictatorship (1972–86). Its goal was a separate autonomousBangsaMoro Republic that would govern the ancestral territories once popu-lated by Muslims, now largely owned by Christian settlers or leased by TNCs.After marshalling 30,000 troops at one time, the MNLF fought the govern-ment troops to a stalement in the mid-seventies. By this time, after thousandsof casualties on both sides, the Moro struggle had drawn the attention of theMuslim world (Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Malaysia) enoughfor them to provide arms, logistics, and other support to the exiled MNLFleadership.

PEACE WAGER

In 1976, peace talks were held in Tripoli, Libya. Mediated by the Organiza-tion of Islamic Conference (OIC), the Marcos regime and the MNLF leadersnegotiated the Tripoli Agreement for a ceasefire and granting of autonomy tothirteen provinces where Muslims were a majority. This was never imple-mented during Marcos’ authoritarian rule. Another agreement was signedwith the Aquino government in which the MNLF relinquished its goal of in-dependence and accepted limited autonomy—finalized in 1996. Meanwhile,the Moro Islamic Liberation Front splintered from the MNLF in 1984 and re-

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sumed the armed struggle for independence. In the late nineties, it enteredinto negotiations with the government, demanding a greater role for Shari’alaw in Muslim communities, genuine land redistribution, rehabilitation ofwar-ravaged areas, urgent relief for refugees, and so on (for the MILF’scounter-hegemonic influence, see McKenna 1998).

With the MNLF paralyzed by bureaucratic structures, and the MILF de-mand for complete separation on hold, the Abu Sayyaf (also known as AlHarakat Al Islamiyya) emerged in the 1980s to pursue the installment of anIslamic state—its quoted slogan—while engaging in a range of violent acts,including bombings, extortions, assassinations, and kidnappings. The kidnap-ping of the Burnham couple and their bungled rescue in June 2002 have madethe Abu Sayyaf the most publicized “terrorist” gang surpassing Osama binLaden’s Al Qaeda in the whole world. This is the pivotal moment when cap-italist globalization encounters its antithesis: a nomadic, dispersed, porousand flexible entity navigating a field of contingencies, both present and ab-sent, its founder a product of the global/local conflation—a “personalizing”of Islamic jihad according to journalists Marites Vitug and Glenda Gloria(2000).

According to US State Department and other public records, the AbuSayyaf may be linked to Al Qaeda through an intricate if questionable glob-alization route (Council on Foreign Relations 2005). The founder AbdurajakJanjalani was an Islamic scholar, former member of the MNLF, and a veteranmuhajadeen of the Afghanistan war against the Soviet. He supposedly re-ceived funding from Muhamad Jamal Khalifa, Osama’s brother-in-law, in theeighties. Recently, U.S. and Australian intelligence agencies claim that theyhave detected “intermittent ties to the Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyah terroristgroup” (Wikipedia 2005). Killed by the police in December 1998, Abdurajakwas succeeded by his brother Khadafi Janjalani. The group acquired notori-ety beginning with the raid on the town of Ipil, Zamboanga, in April 1995;and attained some kind of celebrity status when they received $25 millionfrom Lybia’s Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi in exchange for European hostages cap-tured in Malaysia in 2000. Estimated to number between 200–1,000 guerillasand about 5,000 members, the Abu Sayyaf has become popular through theredistribution of ransom payments to its partisans and sympathizers, a kind ofactive charity work which (according to an International Peace Mission report[2002]) has benefited military officials, businessmen, local politicians, andassorted bureaucrats in government. In fact, the CIA has been linked to theformation and activities of the Abu Sayyaf (see Bulatlat 2001; De Quiros2002).

One may argue that the Abu Sayyaf is a global sequence of events in a field of inter-state politics, an internal situation given intelligibility by

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external ideological and political interventions (chiefly U.S., but also Ara-bic), by the infusion of ransom money and armaments. It can be character-ized as trans-national but not a testimony to parity of national sovereign-ties. It is motivated not just by Islamic fundamentalism but by the wholegeopolitical environment: drugs, eccentric leaders with “bizarre bandit ca-maraderie,” adhoc strategies and “fluid support network” (Clark 2002).Like the MNLF, it has fragmented in at least three splinter groups, some ofwhom are holed up in the impenetrable jungles of Basilan, Jolo and else-where. In September 2001, the U.S. State Department classified the AbuSayyaf as an official terrorist organization whose financial assets were de-clared to be frozen. In January 2002, 650 US Special Forces arrived in thePhilippines to fight the Abu Sayyaf together with the Philipine military af-ter U.S. officials’s visit in Mindanao in October 2001 (Niksch 2002, 7).Meanwhile, the U.S. Agency for International Development actively par-ticipates in implementing the 1996 Peace Agreement “for MNLF combat-ant reintegration in MNLF-controlled areas and community-based recon-ciliation efforts in 2000 after the resumption of hostilities between theMILF and the Philipine military” (Gershman 2001)—one among manysigns of profoundly complicitous U.S. involvement.

We can see how regional bodies, national states, the U.S. military, Westernintelligence agencies, peace organizations, Islamic governments, media, etc.have all triangulated the identity of the Abu Sayyaf, fashioning an enigmaticprotagonist, a monster, or a shifting and protean signifier. Its habitat or terri-torial scope, however, remains subordinate to Philippine sovereignty, how-ever much violated. To articulate these heterogeneous elements into a dis-course-producing knowledge, the postmodern discipline of ethnographywould enter this picture with a putatively more comprehensible identity forthe nebulous Abu Sayyaf.

In the midst of U.S. intervention, an International Peace Commission wentto Basilan in 2002 (as noted earlier) and produced what I think is the mostcomprehensive report on conditions in the embattled region. Its conclusion isunambiguous: the Abu Sayyaf is a symptom of the disastrous failure of theoccupying state (the government military enforces law and order in Mindanaoand Sulu) to guarantee not only peace and security but honest and efficientgovernment—both provincial governance and military-police agencies—in amilieu where the proverbial forces of civil society (business, church, media)have been complicit in the barbaric war against the Moro people. Enmeshedin routine corruption entangling local officials, military officers, and centralgovernment, the region where the Abu Sayyaf thrives has witnessed the reignof absolute terror over civilians exercised by the state as well as warlords androaming gangs. Nowhere in the entire country is the violation of human rights

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and the brutalization of civilian suspects so flagrant and ubiquitous as in Basi-lan. In this context, the deployment of U.S. troops in Mindanao, and contin-ued U.S. meddling, has only worsened the situation, demonized the AbuSayyaf as an Al Qaeda accomplice, and exacerbated the traditional hostilityamong various sectors in civil society.

KNOWLEDGE AS POWER

Given this propaganda war against the Moro struggle in general, what is therole and impact of knowledge-production in this field of ethnopolitical con-flict? In the prestigious American Anthropologist (1998), the anthropologistCharles O. Frake offers us a seemingly novel approach to the bloody land-scape. In his article entitled “Abu Sayyaf: Displays of Violence and the Pro-liferation of Contested Identities among Philippine Muslims,” Frake demon-strates expertise in referencing the history of the Muslims from the Spanishtimes to the present. What is remarkable is the attitude of not examining se-riously, except in a tokenizing and gestural mode, the political and economiccontext of land dispossession, political exclusion, and economic marginaliza-tion of the Moro majority. Is this a blindspot afflicting scholars of globalizedknowledge?

Typical of the fashionable postmodernist optic, Frake focuses on the AbuSayyaf as an attempt to solve “the logical gap in the identity matrix of Philip-pine Muslim insurgency.” Since the Moro movement has been weakened byethnic antagonisms among Tausugs, Maguindanaos, Maranaos, Yakans andso on, the Abu Sayyaf, according to Frake, is “militantly Islamicist.” In short,religion operates as a foundational nexus, a sublimation of ethnic particu-larisms in dire anomic circumstances. Of course, Islam itself (including theShari’a) has been interpreted variously, according to historical circumstancesand pressures; the alleged fusion of religion and state in Islam urged by pri-mordialists or essentialists is, in fact, a historical construction (Halliday2002). Further, because the Abu Sayyaf leadership draws from the displacedand unaffiliated youth, as well as the traditional outlaw areas, the group rep-resents “a new layer in the strata of kinds of identity laid down in the longhistory of conflict in the Muslim Philippines” (1998, 48). In short, the AbuSayyaf is a symptom of the problem of “identity proliferation,” since thefault-lines of identity construction are often revealed in explosions of politi-cal violence.

To be sure, Frake is an example of a knowledge-producer skilled in disin-genuous hermeneutics. Frake’s use of “thick description” leads him to focuson how participants interpret everyday happenings instead of clarifying the

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intricate nexus of causality and accountability. Frake muddles along finally topose the question: “How can such nice people [meaning the anonymousmembers of the Abu Sayyaf], at times, do such horrible things?” Alas, whatscandalous behavior! But Frake’s premise—that the central motivation of in-dividuals in society is to be recognized as somebody, to establish an iden-tity—is a proposition that cannot be applied to all times and places, certainlynot to the context of the Abu Sayyaf phenomenon. It is completely divorcedfrom the historical specificities of the Moro people, from the basic determi-nants of their cultural complex or location in contemporary modernity (suchas that provided, for example, in Vitug and Gloria 2000). The result is mysti-fication compounded with banal tautologies of suspicious provenance, abankrupt ideological position.

Despite empirical citations and native informants, Frake’s attempt to de-ploy postmodern ethnography in trying to elucidate the Abu Sayyaf phenom-enon results only in a simplistic reduction. He discovers that in situations ofstruggle, people fail to unite because they continually interpret what’s goingon around them, thus multiplying “contested identities.” Such “thick descrip-tion” is meant to produce spectacles of unintelligibility, obscuring instead ofilluminating the plight of the Moro people, offering “no specifiable evidencefor [the anthropologist’s] attributions of intention, his assertion of subjectiv-ity, his declarations of experience” (Crapanzano 1992, 67). Postmodernist an-thropology of this kind proves useless if not misleading in elucidating theAbu Sayyaf as part of the current globalization process.

The same caveats apply to two indefatigable American anthropologists in-tending to explain Filipinos to themselves: Thomas McKenna’s MuslimRulers and Rebels (1998) and Nicole Constable’s Maid to Order in HongKong: Stories of Filipina Workers (1997).

In this context, I would like to mention here two other sources of historicaland political inquiries, aside from the writings of Cesar Adib Majul: one is thework of the Indian scholar Aijaz Ahmad (1982), and the essay of political sci-entist Robert Stauffer (1981). In both these thinkers, the differentiated total-ity of Filipino society and its historical imbrication in the world-system ofglobal capitalism are the two necessary requisites for grasping the concretelinkages and contradictions in the Moro struggle for autonomy and dignity.For these intellectuals are not only practitioners of a mode of scientific analy-sis of history but also protagonists in the search for solutions to the most ur-gent social and political problems of our time.

One symptom of a habitual scholastic tendency to mystify the historicaltrajectory of the Moro struggle—a form of symbolic violence unleashed byEurocentric epistemology—is the failure of these ethnographic accounts toinclude the paradigm that valorizes the ummah or the solidarity constituted by

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Islam. This is a desideratum for an adequate assessment of the heroic projectof the Bangsa Moro for emancipation from colonial chauvinism and bondage(Bauzon 1991). Michael Mastura informs us that “Muslim minority con-sciousness made the Filipino Muslims receptive to the argument that it wastheir obligation to protect and strengthen the ummah” (1983, 158). If so, theAbu Sayyaf (or the perception of this group by its sympathizers and partisans)represents a heightened Islamization of Moro collective identity, not a searchfor heterogeneous personal identities. We can also take into account W. K.Che Man’s insight that the Muslim protagonists (Moros and Malays) in theconflict will continue to resist “government policies of assimilation and bu-reaucratic exploitation or maltreatment,” convinced that national self-deter-mination is “a fundamental right of every people, believing, with WoodrowWilson, that ‘every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under whichthey shall live’ “ (1990, 179; see also Rodil 1993). Forcing a template of in-dividualist psychology on the Moro project of self-determination automati-cally yields negative inferences and judgments that render further inquiry re-dundant.

Recalling Said’s critique of Orientalist scholarship cited earlier, I cannotimagine any intellectual who, endeavoring to grasp the roots of a long-en-during, complex “Moro problem,” will preemptively assert or claim a de-tached or disinterested stance. A few postmodernist scholars openly announcetheir point-of-view, their subject-positions—if only to wash their hands, ofcourse, of any complicity with US colonialism or imperialism. Professions ofneutrality have been replaced with gestures of liberal guilt manifest in phil-anthropic compassion. Unfortunately, these gestures only prolong the orien-talizing supremacy of Western knowledge-production and its hegemonic in-fluence. Of course it is now commonplace to note that all disciplinaryresearch performed in state institutions, all pedagogical agencies (in KarlMannheim’s phrase, the “everyday constituent assembly of the mind”), aresites of ideological class struggle and none can be hermetically insulated fromthe pressures of material local and global interests. There is no vacuum orneutral space in the planetary conflict of classes and groups for hegemony.

This is not to indict all of Western anthropology, let alone the hermeneuticmethodology of the social sciences, in failing to help us resolve what has be-come, to my mind, the most barbaric genocidal war in late modern times.However, we can find a more constructive historical approach to the Morostruggle in the writings of other scholars (Majul, Ahmad, Stauffer; in general,see Eadie 2005) where the differentiated totality of Filipino society and its dy-namic imbrication in the world-system of global capitalism serve as the twonecessary requisites for grasping the dialectical linkages and contradictions inthe Moro struggle for freedom and dignity. For these intellectuals are not only

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practitioners of a mode of scientific analysis of history, but also protagonistsin the search for solutions to the most urgent social and political problems ofcapitalist globalization.

PERSEVERANCE IN COMMITMENT

Under the shadow of the terrorist hegemon, we need to pursue the mass linein resisting the violence of corporate globalization, as witnessed in Mindanao,Philippines. In my recent work (San Juan 2002; 2004), I called attention to re-cent developments in Cultural Studies as a disciplinary practice in NorthAmerica and Europe that have subverted the early promise of the field as aradical transformative force.

In every attempt to do any inquiry into cultural practices and discourses,one is always carrying out a political and ethical project, whether one is con-scious of it or not. There are many reasons for this, the main one being the in-escapable political-economic constitution of any discursive field of inquiry,as Pierre Bourdieu has convincingly demonstrated. And in the famous theo-retical couplet that Foucault has popularized, knowledge/power, the produc-tion of knowledge is always already implicated in the ongoing strugglesacross class, nation, gender, locality, ethnicity, and so on, which envelopesand surrounds the intellectual, the would-be knower, learner, investigator,scholar, and so on.

Quite provocatively on target here is an argument elaborated by the lateCanadian scholar Bill Readings in The University in Ruins. Speculating onthe impossibility of subjective self-identity, of being free from obligation toothers, Readings comments on an attitude prevalent in the United States—anattitude that, I think, became more articulate when, after September 11, 2001,most Americans, newly self-anointed as victims, refused to see any responsi-bility for what happened to them and disclaimed any share in causing suchhorrendous disaster, what is indeed a terrible tragedy because it is uncompre-hended and disconnected from the flaws of the “egotistical sublime,” hencethe hunger for revenge. Readings of course includes his fellow Canadians inthe following remark that we can immediately apply to our own relations withthe Moros, Igorots, and other ostracized neighbors:

It is the desire for subjective autonomy that has led North Americans, for ex-ample, to want to forget their obligations to the acts of genocide on which theirsociety is founded, to ignore debts to Native American and other peoples thatcontemporary individuals did not personally contract, but for which I wouldnonetheless argue they are responsible (and not only insofar as they benefit in-directly from the historical legacy of those acts). In short, the social bond is not

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the property of an autonomous subject, since it exceeds subjective conscious-ness and even individual histories of action. The nature of my obligations to thehistory of the place in which I live, and my exact positioning in relation to thathistory, are not things I can decide upon or things that can be calculated ex-haustively. No tax of “x percent” on the incomes of white Americans could ever,for example, make full reparation for the history of racism in the United States(how much is a lynching “worth’?). Nor would it put an end to the guilt ofracism by “whiteness” (1996, 186).

In the wake of the reactionary terror unleashed after 9/11, Noam Chomskyand other public intellectuals have called the United States itself “a leadingterrorist state” (Chomsky 2001, 16; for militarism, see Chasin 2004). Just togive an example of how this has registered in the lives of Filipinos in theUnited States: Last June, 62 Filipinos (among them, doctors and engineers)were apprehended by the US Immigration and Naturalization Services foroverstaying their visa or for lack of appropriate documentation. They were ar-rested as “absconders,” handcuffed and manacled in chains while aboard aplane on the way to the former Clark Air Base in Pampanga. About 140 Fil-ipinos are now being treated as hardened criminals, according to Migrante In-ternational, thanks to the Patriot Act. Over a thousand persons, most of thempeople of color, are now detained in the United States as suspects, already be-ing punished. I am not referring to the prisoners caputured in Afghanistan andconfined to cells in Guantanamo, Cuba; I am referring to American citizenswho have been jailed on suspicion that they have links with Osama bin Ladenor other terrorist groups listed by the US State Department (which now in-cludes the CPP/NPA). Just last November, there was a report of eight Filipinoaircraft mechanics who were detained since last June without bail due to “sus-pected terrorist links”; they are now being deported because of alleged inac-curaces in their immigration papers. Amid the thousands of Filipino contractworkers in the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and elsewhere, howmany more will suffer globalized state terrorism spearheaded by the US gov-ernment, a fate that may befall any one of us who as citizens (here or in anypart of this beleaguered planet) may be branded as unpatriotic or traitors tothe “homeland” (which one?) because we dare to criticize, dare to think andresist?

This is the moment when I would like to close with some reflections, andquestions, on why problems of culture and knowledge are of decisive politi-cal importance for the postcolonial critic. Although we always conceive ofourselves as citizen-subjects with rights, it is also the case that we are allcaught up in a network of obligations whose entirety is not within our con-scious grasp. What is our relation to Others—the excluded, marginalized, andprostituted who affirm our existence and identity—in our society? In a sense

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we (Filipinos, Americans) are responsible for the plight of the Moros—yes,including the existence of the Abu Sayyaf—insofar as we claim to live in acommunity of singular persons who alternatively occupy the positions ofspeakers and listeners, I’s and you’s, and who have obligations to one another,and reciprocal accountabilities. We should also keep in mind the new histor-ical milieu characterized by what Alain Badiou calls “the disjunctive synthe-sis of two nihilisms,” capitalist nihilism and the anonymous fascist nihilismmanifested in the 9/11 attack (Badiou 2003, 160). This ethical challenge sumsup, to my mind, the riposte that postcolonial agency must pose to neoliberalimperialism (instanced by Frake’s discourse, among others) if it is to sustainits tradition of critique, that uncompromising questioning of absolutisms andsacralizing mystifications that Edward Said initiated at the beginning of hisexemplary intellectual adventure.

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1

An internationally renowned cultural and literary critic, E. San Juan, Jr. di-rects the Philippines Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut, USA.

He was recently a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio StudyCenter, Italy; Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the Katholieke Uni-versiteit Leuven, Belgium; and visiting professor of literature at National Ts-ing Hua University, Taiwan. He received his graduate degrees from HarvardUniversity. He has taught at various universities in the U.S. (University ofCalifornia; Brooklyn College of the City University of New York; Universityof Connecticut) and abroad (Tamkang University, Taiwan; University ofTrento, Italy; University of the Philippines).

His recent books include: Beyond Postcolonial Theory (Palgrave/Macmil-lan), After Postcolonialism (Rowman & Littlefield), Racism and CulturalStudies (Duke U Press), Working Through the Contradictions (Bucknell UPress) and the forthcoming Balikbayang Sinta (Ateneo U Press); FilipinasEverywhere (IBON); and In the Wake of Terror: Class, Race and Nation in theField of Global Capital.

He is editorial advisor for Atlantic Studies, Nature Society and Thought,Cultural Logic, Amerasia, Left Curve, KritikaKultura, and other journals.

He has received the Myers Human Rights Center Award, the Asian Amer-ican Studies Distinguished Book Award, the MELUS Award, and a citationfor Distinguished Achievement in Literature from the Cultural Center of thePhilippines.

About the Author

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