Eurozine – What is postcolonial thinking? – Achille Mbembe An interview with Achille Mbembe

A fantastic interview with the great Achille Mbembe in Eurozine. The interview is (contrary to almost any interview you’d get in a similar magazine in the States) lengthy, in-depth, and unafraid of appearing…’intellectual.’ Similarly, Mbembe is unafraid of making clear what so many American appropriators of continental thought are always unwilling to acknowledge, that whatever the successes or failures of most modern continental philosophy, the most important movements have been “chiefly concerned with the issue of self-creation and self-government.” He then goes on to quote my man Castoriadis, who deserves far, far greater recognition and discussion in the anglophone world than he has yet received….

Indeed, colonization never ceased telling lies about itself and others. As Frantz Fanon explains so clearly in Black Skin, White Masks, the procedures for racializing the colonized were the driving force behind this economy of duplicity and falsehood. In postcolonial thinking, race is the wild region, the beast, of European humanism. To borrow Castoriadis’s terms on racism, I’d say that the beast puts it more or less this way: “I alone possess value. But I can only be of value, as myself, if others, as themselves, are without value”.

Postcolonial thinking aims to take the beast’s skeleton apart, to flush out its favourite places of habitation. More radically, it seeks to know what it is to live under the beast’s regime, what kind of life it offers, and what sort of death people die from. It shows that there is, in European colonial humanism, something that has to be called unconscious self-hatred. Racism in general, and colonial racism in particular, represents the transference of this self-hatred to the Other.

via Eurozine – What is postcolonial thinking? – Achille Mbembe An interview with Achille Mbembe. Check out the rest of the interview, which includes, among many other topics, important discussions on ‘memory’ and on Fanon and Marx’s reception by the ‘non-West.’

In November, We Remember

The Twin Cities IWW (General Membership Branch) has just released its thirteenth issue of its official newsletter, The Organizer. It can be viewed online for free, downloaded, printed, and distributed. This month’s issue focuses primarily on three themes: the economic crisis, electoral politics and the union, and, of relevance to this post, the theme of memory.

The wobblies have a saying, “We never forget.” They mean by this that they never forget their own real history, their goals, their tools, and the massacres and violence they experienced as the most radical working-class, rank-and-file union in the United States. This was admirably summed up in a poem by Ralph Chaplin, a member of the IWW who wrote the anthem Solidarity Forever (which the entire anglophone union movement seems to have adopted as its anthem, despite the distinct lack of actual solidarity among most union leadership).

Red November, black November
Bleak November, black and red.
Hallowed month of labor’s martyrs,
Labor’s heroes, labor’s dead.

Labor’s wrath and hope and sorrow,
Red the promise, black the threat,
Who are we not to remember?
Who are we to dare forget?

Black and red the colors blended,
Black and red the pledge we made,
Red until the fight is ended,
Black until the debt is paid.

So, let’s remember in November. The battle for the past is for the future, as Chandrasonic of Asian Dub Foundation memorably chanted. Or, as Utah Phillips, another wobbly (of blessed memory) used to say, “The long memory is the most radical idea in American history.” The issue of the Organizer is embedded below.

Organizer #13 – November 2008

Get your own at Scribd or explore others: IWW Organizer

Wenchuan Earthquake in Sichuan Province, PRC – National Day of Mourning

China, too, has had an enormous tragedy in the last week. Exactly one week ago, in fact, the Sichuan Earthquake of 2008 (aka the Wenchuan earthquake) registered at 8.0 on the richter scale. Tens of thousands, and very likely hundreds of thousands, will have lost their lives before things return to ‘normal.’

Today, the People’s Republic of China declared a 3-day period of National Mourning.

image ganked from Wikipedia

Short Film on Hmong Refugee Experience: Experience & Memory

A lovely short film by Kao Kalia Yang, writer, and John O’Brien, filmmaker. Kao, a Hmong refugee immigrant to the United States. She reflects specifically on the limits of experience and memory, place, and home. Is her homeland Laos, or the refugee camp where she was born? Or the place where she lives now?

Truly lovely. I hope to hear more from both of them, now that I’m slowly getting settled in the Twin Cities.

The Place Where We Were Born from John OBRIEN on Vimeo.

False Memory Animation

BoingBoing caught this a few days ago, and now its being picked up by the brain blogs. The boingers thought that the animation was cool (it is), but much more interesting to me (and the brain bloggers) is the way in which it quite concretely and effectively communicates the way in which false memories work. We all have them. Samuel R. Delany’s wonderful autobiography starts with his realization that a memory he’s told for years is in fact, wrong.

Around The Web

Martijn de Koning is a Dutch anthropologist who has just received his doctorate for his dissertation on young Dutch muslims and the turn among some of them to Salafi Islam. The book based on the dissertation (which is only in Dutch) is in press, and will be titled, “Searching for a ‘pure’ Islam. Religious Beliefs and Identity Construction among Moroccan-Dutch Youth. There’s an excellent summary of the main points by Lorenz over at anthropologi.info.

Anders Poulsen has just published a book on Childbirth in Isan, which promises to be a historical and detailed study of childbirth practices and their survival or disappearance in Isan. Notice over at New Mandala.

Details Are Sketchy blogged a useful intervention in the ongoing memory wars fought by various adolescent factions of the Khmer political class here. Foreigners are much more interested in these damned symbolic appropriations than most Khmers are – I’m not saying that the Khmer don’t want to memorialize the dead, but rather that the people I’ve spoken to recognize all of these political appropriations for exactly what they are – completely bankrupt opportunism.

Holy Crap! The Phnom Penh Post is putting its archives online! While I’m happy about this, I’m somewhat regretful about all the article clipping, archiving, and transporting of PPP articles I did. Via DAS.

New Class, Fall 2008: How To Do Things With Dead People

How to do things with dead people.

syllabus

Everybody dies. This class focuses on what happens afterwards, and approaches this question from the only perspective that we share in common – the perspective of the living, the survivors. What do people do with the dead? How do human societies deal with the material remains, the memories, and the spirits, souls, or ghosts of the dead? This class will introduce the issues in the social study of death generally, and offer comparative examples and case studies to explore the general themes, rooting these discussions in concrete cases. The class approach is broadly anthropological.

This title of the class plays on the title of J.L. Austin’s famous work in linguistics “How to do things with words.” In that famous piece, he argued that sentences were doing more than merely conveying meaning – there was always, also, a force in the sentence’s production that extends beyond merely conveying the meaning of a sentence to another person. Similarly in this class I will introduce the notion that funerals can be interpreted in terms of abstract symbolic codes, but must also be understood to be more or less ‘felicitious,’ that is, more or less successful.

So, what are funerals doing? What do they communicate, and what do they achieve? In Austin’s terms, what would we call their illocutionary and perlocutionary force?

The class will be broadly comparative, held together by the evolving direction of class discussions (guided by the instructor). Class sessions will be a mixture of lecture, discussion, and the occasional film projection. While most classes will be held together by themes explored through differing case studies, in some cases, we will be focusing on particular case studies in depth. Final projects will be required, planned and shaped in coordination with the instructor.

note: this post updated April 25, 2008.

Trauma, Memory, and Evolving PTSD

Nearly thirty years ago, a crisis in the care for U.S. military personnel returning home from Vietnam, changed the way in which psychological diagnoses were defined. Ever heard of PTSD, of post-traumatic stress disorder? That diagnosis, which made it into the DSM after a protracted and highly political struggle, was created precisely to deal with the collection of symptoms presented by these veterans.

These veterans were experiencing flashbacks, depression, stress, constant anxiety, and too often, psychotic breaks. They were forced indoors much of the time, terrorized by the world and occasionally terrorizing the shrinking worlds around them, their families. Those who were not able to keep it together at even this level ended up in the streets, or dead.

They didn’t, at this early stage, end up in the hospitals, receiving quality care. Partly, this was because of the fact that there existed no diagnosis for these symptoms: they clearly shared a single experiential trigger of sorts – participation in the Vietnam War – but even at that level a great deal of diversity existed. There was the classic victim trauma, but also perpetrator trauma. The latter has received very little attention, perhaps because of the unpopular ethical questions that necessarily accompany its investigation. But the former has become enshrined in our medical, psychiatric, academic, literary, and popular cultures.

In thirty years.

Now, only six years into another great military conflict fought for reasons of imperial ambition, with America’s domestic political scene not only divided, but with one of those halves losing ideological unity and direction, the veterans of the current conflict are finally getting noticed for the problems they are presenting.

Gulf War One created Gulf War Syndrome – a wildly underattended and reported health crisis. Perhaps because we ‘won’ that conflict, it was somehow shameful to report on the costs? But it is increasingly clear that we have ‘lost’ this war, if indeed it was ever winnable.

Compared to these enormous, political, and social questions, the following consideration will necessarily seem trivial. However, this blog does not exist to stake out political positions, but to investigate and draw attention to a very specific range of issues, the most central of which cluster around the academic realm.

The cultural studies/psychological/popular trope of trauma, which plays out nightly on sitcoms, soap operas, radio shows, which makes its way into everyday conversation and spontaneous ‘pop psychological’ analyses of others, comes out of a specific lost war. The veterans and their supporters had to fight extremely hard to get the diagnosis added to the DSM, so that they could be treated.

PTSD is still in the DSM, though Gulf War Syndrome is not. And there are good reasons to want to avoid stuffing the DSM with syndromes, which are by necessity not the same thing as diseases in which we understand the cause of the symptoms. With syndromes, we are still guessing not only at the cause, but by definition, with whether diagnosis refers to a ‘really existing’ pathology, or is instead a collection of related and potentially overlapping problems.

So, while veterans of this current conflict may be able to receive care under the PTSD diagnosis, receiving treatment for Gulf War Syndrome is considerably more difficult. And even those who receive care receive it at places like the Walter Reed Medical Center, at the heart of so many outrageous scandals regarding the healthcare for military personnel

The following article is very worth reading: [link]

CS Pierce on Memory

“Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.”

Philosopher Charles Peirce in Vol VII of his Collected Papers.

[via Mindhacks]

Memory, Dengue, and Trauma – a quick link roundup

In a recent article on Mindhacks, Vaughan decided to use a picture of the collected skulls at Choeung Ek to signify ‘trauma,’ even though the article wasn’t about Cambodia at all. It is annoying to see Cambodia continue to serve as a floating signifier of trauma, almost an iconic commodity.

Meanwhile, Dengue Fever has claimed over 300 lives so far this season, and the entire region is in danger of a real epidemic.

And in the ‘cynical links roundup,’ Zoellick has declared that Cambodian poverty is the result of a poor land titling process. While the current land titling process is unbelievably corrupt and bad, it is obviously not the dominant cause of poverty in Cambodia, and to claim that improving this process will result in a more just country is just, frankly, dumb.