الفكر القومي والعالم الاستعماري - خطاب اشتقاقي

by Partha Chatterjee

في هذا العمل ينتقد المؤلف، وهو فيلسوف سياسي بارز النظريتين الغربيتين في قومية العالم الثالث، أي الليبرالية والماركسية، إنه يظهر كيف أن المنظرين الغربيين، بتشديدهم على سلطة العقل وأولية العلوم البحتة وعلبة المنهج التجريبي، قد افترضوا أن فرضياتهم المسبقة هي صحيحة عالمياً وفرضوا، من خلال تأثير التعليم الغربي، مفاهيم القومية على الشعوب اللاغربية لإيذاء رؤاها الخاصة للعالم، إن لم يكن لهدمها.
يسبر البروفسور تشترجي التناقض المركزي الذي وقعت فيه القومية في آسية وإفريقية: ففيما كانت تشرع في تأكيد تحررها من الهيمنة الأوروبية، بقيت مع ذلك أسيرة الخطاب العقلاني لما بعد عصر التنوير الأوروبي.

Genres: History, Politics, Academic, Post Colonial, India, Nonfiction, Grad School

333 pages, Unknown Binding

First published July 1, 1986

About the author

Partha Chatterjee is a political theorist and historian. He studied at Presidency College in Calcutta, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. He divides his time between Columbia University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where he was the Director from 1997 to 2007. He is the author of more than twenty books, monographs and edited volumes and is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective. He as awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize for 2009 for outstanding achievements in the field of Asian studies. He is also a poet, playwright, and actor. In the Mira Nair film The Namesake (2007), he played the role of “A Reformed Hindoo.”

Reviews

[Chris Chapman]

Critique of Imagined Communities

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite pieces of historical criticism. Partha Chaterjee dissects colonial Indian history into three critical moments: departure (Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay), manoeuver (Mahatma Gandhi), and arrival (Jawaharlal Nehru). He successfully complicates any simple reading of Gandhi as inspirational leader of the Indian National Movement, engaging the notions of statecraft, symbolic politics, and formative history. A must read for anyone interested in South Asian Studies.

[Vik · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating scholarship on 'nationalism'. It was for his own good that Chatterjee agreed to not use the original working title for the book, the crooked line. Galileo was, indeed, right that if there are obstacles, the shortest line between two points may be the crooked line. This book is by no means an attempt to provide a short explanation of nationalism in the post-colonial conditions.

His pedantic discussion on difference between problematic and thematic returns the favor to the reader in the end for investing her time in the book by offering a Marxist advice to emancipate Reason from the clutches of Capital and, consequently, alerting the popular struggles to hold those in power (the State) to account for advancing the cause of the Capital by undermining the Reason.

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

An outstanding book, but at times very confusing and difficult to know which voice Chatterjee is using at different times. He adopts the narrative persona of whoever he is referencing on that page which makes for large chunks of the book where one doesn’t know if Chatterjee is being sincere or is satirist the person he’s talking about.

The outstanding conclusion makes clear Chatterjee’s personal beliefs but this did make the book difficult. I would have liked to have a more consistent display of what Chatterjee was working towards and his own argument.

The essential thesis of the book, which occasionally seemed to get slightly sidetracked from, is that Indian nationalism (or any nationalism of a colonsied people) is a derivative discourse of colonialism. In other words, nationalist discourse does not break with the ‘logic’ of the enlightenment and colonial teleologies of development, but instead simply says that Indians are capable of doing those things too. Thus, the postcolonial state doesn’t actually cause a revolution or radical critique of the colonial structures of western though but simply places the colonised population into the Eurocentric teleology. I.e. instead of “development is a Eurocentric notion that requires reformulation”, the discourse is usually just “Indians are also capable of development and that’s exactly what we’re going to do”.

Chatterjee argued this thesis via 3 main chapters each on a different nationalist thinker, and analyses the various ways that colonialism and the enlightenment dictated their thought. Each author was throughly influenced by westernisation and the enlightenment (aside from Gandhi) and Chatterjee (if I interpreted his rare personal commentary correctly) believes that this is part of the reason why postcolonial states the world over have usually failed. Due to simply following the normative European models of nation-states and development rather than formulating new ways of seeing the world and organising a nation.

I greatly appreciated and agreed with Chatterjee’s view that Indian nationalist thinkers often continued an orientalist representation of ‘the east’ and struggled to liberate their worldviews from enlightenment baggage that has influenced their view of Asia, India, Hinduism (and Islam) and themselves.

I’m only giving 2 due to the books confusing style and being a rather challenging read, which although not necessarily a bad thing, reduces my likelihood to claim it as one of my favourite books that I return to many times.

[Leonardo]

El concepto mismo de una soberanía nacional liberadora es ambiguo, sino completamente contradictorio. Mientras este nacionalismo busca liberar a la multitud de la dominación foránea, erige estructuras de dominación domésticas igualmente severas. La posición de los Estados-nación de reciente soberanía no puede ser entendida cuando es vista en los términos del imaginario optimista de las Naciones Unidas de un concierto armonioso de sujetos nacionales iguales y autónomos. Los Estados-nación postcoloniales funcionan como un elemento esencial y subordinado en la organización global del mercado capitalista. Como sostiene Partha Chatterjee, la liberación nacional y la soberanía nacional no son impotentes ante esta jerarquía capitalista global, sino que contribuyen a su organización y funcionamiento:

"En ningún lugar del mundo el nacionalismo como tal ha desafiado la legitimidad del matrimonio entre la Razón y el capital. El pensamiento nacionalista... no posee los medios ideológicos para afrontar este desafío. Resuelve el conflicto entre el capital metropolitano y el pueblo–nación absorbiendo la vida política de la nación dentro del cuerpo del Estado. Conservador de la revolución pasiva, el estado nacional procede ahora a encontrar para “la nación” un lugar en el orden global del capital, mientras se esfuerza en mantener en suspenso perpetuo las contradicciones entre el capital y el pueblo. Toda la política se ve ahora subsumida bajo los abrumadores requerimientos del Estado–representando–a–la–nación."

Imperio Pág.104

[Joma Geneciran · Rating 2 out of 5]

As another reviewer said below, (or maybe above?); Chatterjee is overrated.

He's the brown Foucault.

Granted, I'm writing from the vantage point of 30+ years. Chatterjee argues that nationalism emerges out of a rejection of Orientalist categorizing of the colonial people as backwards. But that they are still trapped in the logic emerging from the Occident. I'm likely not the first to mention this, but given Chatterjee's case study of India, he implicitly writes an essentialist account of the colonized.

Being active in the Philippine Democratic Revolution, we, a colonized people are demanding national democracy, national industrialization, etc. Why? Because the wealth of the nation is being extracted to the imperial core. Nowhere in Chatterjee's work does he wrestle with how the international state-system structures the choices of the colonized and what nationalism (or patriotism) or internationalism for that matter means to them.

Lastly, and this isn't as important, but these essays could have used an introduction connecting all of them together. You have to put in work to unpack what Chatterjee is arguing.

[Ian Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Partha Chatterjee is vastly overrated.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 1 out of 5]

First off, Partha, concepts don't actually do things, humans do. Second, we don't set paradigms using extremes since you'll find that whatever your original example and no how matter how much jargon and reductio ad absurdum wordiness you can throw at your reader examples are still singular. This book serves as a warning to the scholar that it is more important to reach a conclusion after research, fact-finding, and actual knowledge production, rather than "[giving] to nationalist thoughts its ideological unity by relating it to a form of the post-colonial state which ACCORDS MOST CLOSELY TO THE THEORETICAL CHARACTERIZATION I HAVE MADE ABOVE ABOUT THE PASSIVE REVOLUTION." (my emphasis). It makes it worse, too, when you make it so startling obvious, but hey, this was the Eighties. Whatever there is of worth here, and I'm certain there must be something, is otherwise drowned in abstraction. Woe!

[hh · Rating 2 out of 5]

in terms of my thesis, useful in a general theory way.

dense and somewhat difficult, much of the book assumes the reader has a basic grounding in postcolonial and nationalist theory as well as a thorough grounding in studies of gandhi and the formation of the indian nation-state.

most people will find what they need in the first few chapters, although the book is engaging.

[Karlo Mikhail · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marxist-Gramscian investigation of Indian nationalism as an instrument of the domestic ruling classes' "passive revolution" from its initial advocates during the apogee of the British colonial era, Gandhi's revivalist ideas, up to Nehru's subsuming of all these into an official nationalism legitimizing the Indian state.

[Steven]

Didn't read the whole thing, but framework for stages of revolution might be useful in examining Ghanaian history.