Review of

Graham Huggan and Ian Law, ed. Racism, Postcolonialism, Europe

(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), pp. 256.

Reviewer: Gaia Giuliani, giuliani.gaia@gmail.com

The collection of essays in this volume resulted from the “Racism/Postcolonialism/Europe” conference held at the University of Leeds, in 2006. Transdisciplinary in its methods, postcolonial studies are applied to historical, sociological, and political surveys. Continental European debates on race and racism reveal the importance of postcolonial studies, critical studies on race, and black feminist studies; particularly, within East European Countries (Romania), continental cases (Spain, France, Germany), and the UK. The collection contains discussions on (1) the German debate regarding Turkey’s inclusion in the EU, (2) post-2005 English paranoia towards multiculturalism, (3) Islamophobia and the public humiliation of minorities in the Netherlands and (4) post-republicanism in France, all of which are treated with a broad outlook placing emphases on racial ideologies central to the construction of both European nation-states and Europe. Finally, this collection deals with anti-Semitism, anti-Gypsism, and racism against migrants.

The aim of this collection is intellectual and political, in the tradition of Subaltern Studies and G.C. Spivak. The authors’ intention is to contribute to a postcolonial Europe that counteracts the “need to repudiate [Europe’s] imperial past clinging resolutely to the belief that there can be no alternative to the essentially European liberal democratic state” (p.1). They address the controversial notion of multiculturalism defined as both an egalitarian approach to diversities and conversely, a “specific political model of managing cultural heterogeneity in times of postcolonial ‘hyper-globalization’” (p.122). To envision the project of a postcolonial Europe, the authors work on past and present imperial/colonial histories in Europe through an in-depth analysis of popular and state racisms that are both nationally situated and pertinent to the European space as a political and legal structure.

In all the contributions, the notions of “colonialism,” “internal colonialism,” and “neo-colonialism” are deployed to signify internal forms of racism, involving a number of “minorities” that reside in European and national territories. I would not personally use the term “colonialism” to identify a process that refers not to the material or symbolic conquest of a close/remote territory/population, but to an historical conjuncture where globalization, migration policies and the construction of “European society” induce a re-edition of the (white) nationalist paranoia. Nevertheless, I acknowledge the effort made to outline the continuity between current European racism and its colonial past through a revitalization of these terms. The use of the adjective “colonial” (instead of “colonialism”) as a bridging-term between past and present forms of inferiorization is absolutely pertinent. Defining pro-Roma sentiments in Romania as internally colonial allows us to grasp how the activities of pro-Roma NGOs, EU anti-discriminatory laws, philanthropists, donors based in the United States, and local governments can foster the quality of life for the Roma people while denying any subjectivity to single and collective Roma formations. By defining “white paranoia,” German anti-Turkish feelings, and the “terror of multiculturalism” (p. 119) as colonial, the authors connect the current distribution and organization of racial stereotypes in popular culture, educational systems, and the political arena to the long-lived racist ideologies of imperial times.

Even if it has a clear political significance, the notion of colonialism in the case of Griselda Pollock’s discussion of the Holocaust (pp. 17-38) is problematic. As in the case of the chapter by Nidhi Trehan and Angéla Kóczé, on the Roma, the link established through the use of the term “colonialism” in anti-Roma/Jewish racism to colonial practices of discrimination, inferiorization, infantilization, and diminution of the humanness of colonized people is politically valuable. It enables us to trace trajectories of colonial/racial ideo- and techno-scapes across Europe, connecting the bio-political structure of control, segregation, exploitation, and elimination that innerves nation-building and colonialism as outcomes of civilization. But again, the problem is the possible misunderstanding of the particular experience of segregation and/or elimination of the less-human, typical of anti-Jewish and anti-Gypsy racisms within the nation-state building process. In using the term “colonialism,” these experiences are reduced to those of exploitation colonialism and its racial hierarchies. This is manifested in the distinction between Polish people and Jews. Polish people—colonized, inferiorized, and exploited—survived, while Jews—obstacles to the formation of a nation based on “one history, one blood, one country” ideology—did not.

The “colonial” legacy of current Islamophobia in United Kingdom, post-2005, is at the core of Ashwani Sharma’s essay. In his critique of multiculturalism as hidden white-supremacy Sharma offers an important insight on vernacular multiculturalisms “in dialectical opposition to the discourse of white anxiety and paranoia” (p. 128). It is against a new postcolonial racism–one that tries to contain cultural otherness in a condition that is increasingly impossible–that these vernacular multiculturalisms resist and reconfigure the nation, notwithstanding the impossibility of overcoming increasingly powerful postcolonial fantasies of whiteness and the United Kingdom’s “imperial nostalgia” (p. 176). The battle, now, is on the meaning associated with the term “multiculturalism,” while “multiculturalism,” as Spencer states in the last essay of the collection, “is hollowed out until it is reduced to little more than a signifier for multi-coloured conformity to the priorities of the British state” (p.181).

The decadent but still persisting fantasies of whiteness are termed “Europism” by Philomena Essed: “While Eurocentrism emerged from the victory of conquest and the ‘civilizing mission,’ Europism is based in the defeat of Europe, first by the United States, now gradually being followed by the Far East” (p.139). However, Europism is still fostered and underpinned by the same colonial stereotypes that sustained European colonialism. As Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius states in her discussion of the Mohammad cartoons war,  the conflict corresponds to competing representations and self-representations of the colonial other in the War on Terror.

Finally, Michel Wieviorka analyzes the reasons (social, institutional, cultural, political, and intellectual) that lie at the very base of the banlieues crisis of 2005 and offers a new balance between private and public spheres in France. This given proportion results from the long-running, post-republican claim of religious communities and racial minorities to “both constitute themselves as a minority in the public sphere and continue to adhere to the Republic” (170).

This essay collection is a detailed, complex, transdisciplinary, and multilayered discussion of historical and current racisms in Europe, and an important contribution to the contemporary debate on race and colonialism in Europe and elsewhere.

Gaia Giuliani is a scholar in Colonial and postcolonial studies at the Dept. Politica Istituzioni Storia of the University of Bologna in Italy.

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Review

Martin McKinsey, Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination: Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010), 224 pp.

Reviewer: Annie Vocature Bullock avbullock@gmail.com

Martin McKinsey’s Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination is an energetic comparative reading of three very different poets, each occupying a peculiar position with respect to the cultural and political center of the British Empire. McKinsey organizes his reading around the trope of Hellenism, which refers broadly to the “historically mediated idea of ancient Greece and its cultures,” as cultivated among intellectuals in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, and narrowly to “the espousal of the Hellenic ideal and the assertion of Greek exceptionalism” among Victorian authors (p. 9). McKinsey applies a postcolonial analytic to Yeats, Cavafy, and Walcott, each of whom appropriated Hellenism differently according to specific local concerns.

In the introduction, McKinsey outlines a dialectic between the center and margins that underwrites all of his analysis. As a cultural discourse, Hellenism was produced at the center and disseminated to the margins, but those who appropriated it at the margins were not sullying it or producing a degenerate counterfeit. On the contrary, McKinsey argues in his introduction that the “periphery’s borrowings from the core culture can be understood as active rather than passive, creative rather than “degenerative” or “obsequiously submissive” (p. 25). He reads local appropriation of Hellenism as generative but also transgressive. As he notes later in the introduction, the Hellenism of Victorian England was already an Anglicized Hellenism—the Greeks as a cipher for whiteness—but the multifarious representations of Hellenism found in postcolonial literature destabilize this monolithic vision. In this way, they were “writing back to the center” but they were also “writing back to their particular neighborhood of the encircling globe” (p. 34).

McKinsey does not undertake a full survey of Victorian Hellenism but rather focuses his efforts in chapter two, “Ulysses Victorianus,” on the story of Ulysses as a single thread in the fabric of Hellenism. He offers a reading of Ulysses as a colonialist archetype, at least in the character’s post-Homeric literary afterlife. Ulysses is a voyager, discovering new lands and rendering them in his own language. As read by McKinsey, Ulysses is a figure who speaks with a forked tongue, to borrow language from Homi Bhabha. In his many encounters with the strange, exotic, and foreign, he “invokes the two faces of colonial control: paternalist benefactor (bringer of “the rule of law”), and disciplinary enforcer” (p. 46).

The story of Ulysses—that is, the story previously encoded in Homer’s Odyssey—was a significant point of contact between poets at the margins and those at the center. If Ulysses can be read as an archetype of the colonial master, fraught with the ambivalence of imperialism, there is ample room for subversion in appropriations of the story. McKinsey follows a shift in Yeats’s work from Irish epic in a latently Homeric mode to a self-conscious assertion that Ireland is no second Troy. This is addressed in chapters three and four and attributed to Yeats’s movement from England to Ireland, from imagining a mythic Irish landscape to confronting a grim social reality.

McKinsey’s reading of Cavafy spans chapters five, six, and seven and he describes the poet as an “odd, clattering assortment of identities” (p. 79). Cavafy was a Greek-Egyptian with Turkish roots who spent time in England and was also homosexual, adding a further layer of marginality to his overall profile. In these chapters, McKinsey is primarily concerned with the relationship between Cavafy’s biography and his poetic output. McKinsey reads Cavafy’s poem, “A Second Odyssey,” through Bloom’s concept of kenosis, which is “ a subversive form of mimicry that ends in humbling failure: a self-humbling that enfolds the precursor in its fall in such a way that the precursor falls all the more momentously” (p. 89). McKinsey further explores the intersection between Cavafy’s biography and his literary output in chapters six and seven. He first situates Cavafy’s poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in the context of the poet’s experiences as an outsider in Paris and London. Then, in chapter seven, McKinsey explores Cavafy’s decision to express himself in his native Greek rather than in English, which McKinsey characterizes as “a way to escape the ‘linguistic gaze of the colonizer’” (p. 119).

In the second half of chapter five, McKinsey inserts a major excursus on Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, which McKinsey argues holds an important place in the history of postcolonial literary analysis. McKinsey appeals to Said’s own critique of Bloom as instructive. For Said, Bloom fails because he did not make a connection between the poet’s historical and cultural position and his poetic output. At the same time, although most commentators highlight Foucault’s influence on Said, Said’s debt to Bloom is equally significant, by his own admission. Bloom highlighted the dialectic between production and reproduction, which implicitly places poetic and literary production in the context of a specific matrix of power relationships.

Even if Bloom did not do enough to identify these dynamics with any historical specificity, his theory draws us to the space between texts. And, as McKinsey points out, “intertextual approaches have been a mainstay of postcolonial criticism from the outset” (p. 93). Bloom’s implicit intertextuality is met by Said’s Foucauldian emphasis on power. To this, McKinsey adds Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, which opened later conversations about resistance but also the psychological impact of oppression.

This leads to McKinsey’s contribution, the idea of a specifically postcolonial kenosis. Borrowing the idea of a literary kenosis as a self-emptying or humbling from Bloom, he translates the concept into postcolonial terms. Put simply, postcolonial kenosis is “an act of mimesis and homage that is the same time an act of disavowal” (p. 97). In greater detail, McKinsey writes that kenosis is a poetic process that starts out as mimicry of a European precursor, and ends as symbolic decolonization, where the putative imitation first empties the model of its godhood—thereby rendering its cultural victory hollow—and then in the name of greater authenticity (here with respect to both Homer and Dante) divests the prime ‘idea [or] raw material’ of undesirable colonialist impositions” (p. 98).

This section is easily the most interesting in the book and if I have a criticism of McKinsey’s work, it is that this brief but canny sub-chapter is inserted more or less in the middle of the book where it could have been useful nearer the beginning. McKinsey uses Bloom’s thought in his discussion of Yeats, for instance, although he does not invoke kenosis until he reaches Cavafy. Even so, his choice to rely on Bloom is not fully explained until the reader reaches this section of chapter five. This is an intentionally slight criticism because the organization is still admirably clear overall. The flow of argument is never difficult to follow and the discussion moves quite elegantly through McKinsey’s points. It is ultimately not surprising to learn that McKinsey is both poet and critic. His argumentation is less academic than it is literary in its own right. The reader is therefore drawn into the essay-like structure of the book, experiencing the excursus on postcolonial kenosis as a welcome flash of insight. The criticism stands only because this style of presentation is all but impossible to skim effectively, which is less than ideal for an audience of overtaxed academic readers.

Chapters eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve all address Derek Walcott, a Saint Lucian poet. Each of these chapters is relatively short, creating a fragmented mosaic of ideas. His poem, Omeros, is a self-consciously Homeric epic and the subject of chapter eight. Chapter nine addresses the Adamic act of naming, another New World trope that identifies creation with colonization, as if the pre-European history of a place were “no history at all: the voice before creation” (137). In Chapter ten, McKinsey turns to the notion of Black Greeks, figured in Walcott’s Another Life. Chapter eleven returns briefly to Omeros and to the question of names. In chapter twelve, McKinsey returns to the Black Greek, an idea that made an appearance in Another Life. In all, McKinsey’s treatment of Walcott is decidedly the most impressionistic and for that reason, perhaps the least effective. At the same time, the discussion addresses issues of race and gender that are not raised elsewhere, making it a valuable contribution to the overall volume.

In his conclusion, McKinsey reiterates his point about the inherent hybridity of Hellenism itself. The poets in this study return Hellenism to its hybridized roots by undermining its monolithic representation. McKinsey also draws out the irreducible locality of culture. This is a worthwhile reminder in the present globalized context. But for postcolonial theology, McKinsey’s most important contribution is his attention to poetry itself. According to McKinsey, poetry is especially suited to postcolonial conversation:

with its deep formal and lexical memory, and its attention to the reticulated landscape of the local, [poetry] is well situated to register the tectonic shifts that are integral to our era. (which I hope is not to cast poetry as the canary in the coal mine). Yet even as a recalcitrant spirit of place, poetry takes part, inescapably, in the global dynamic (176).

Given that religious texts are so often poetic and so often engage a mythological register, this is a keen reminder that, where poetry is perhaps particularly suited to register the shifts, so is religion. Meanwhile, poetry itself functions as a template for theological inquiry. Addressing theology on poetic terms may just be the most effective way to write back to the center while simultaneously addressing a local neighborhood. Whether or not McKinsey’s analysis of his data are of interest to theologians, his work is a potent reminder to postcolonial theologians never to overlook the poetic as either a source or a mode of theological writing.

Annie Bullock is a graduate of Emory University and is currently a Humanities Instructor at Regents School of Austin.

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Review

Libby Porter, Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 192 pp.

Reviewer: Michelle LeBaron lebaron@law.ubc.ca

Stories are told, and retold, by victors. In Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning, Libby Porter challenges readers to consider how stories are understood, told and enacted in communities in ways that perpetuate colonial systems of privilege. Informed and legitimized by planning theory and practice, hegemonic relations between European settlers and indigenous peoples continue.

Dr. Porter looks at Canada, the United States, and Aoteoroa—New Zealand and Australia—all former British colonies where indigenous people were dispossessed. She does so with an acknowledged standpoint, aiming for congruence between her personal and political project of unlearning colonial culture and her methodology. Drawing on an ethnographic approach, she analyzes “practices of everyday life” (p.5) and “webs of significance” (p. 6) as they are situated and take on power in planning contexts. Her expressed objective to work from passionate interest and methodological rigor is largely met through her sensitivity to perspectives and unacknowledged, long-buried assumptions in the everyday practices of planning theory and practice.

Porter argues that the only way to defensibly meet the challenge she sets herself is through deconstructing the cultural ethos of planning itself. To do otherwise, she contends, would be merely to move playing pieces around on the same table. As an example, she points out that the current focus on bringing traditional and scientific knowledge into dialogue in the service of land management will always reproduce the subordination of traditional knowledge unless power relations themselves are up for renegotiation. Nor are readers let off the hook by recent trends toward collaborative planning and meaningful engagement of diverse parties in decision-making. Porter frames these trends as dangerous unless those with power—typically people of European descent aligned with institutions—are willing to unsettle their ways. It is not only ways of doing business that need to change, she argues, but also ways of conceiving and enacting relations to land and social production.

Provocatively, Porter defines culture as “structures of feeling” (p.12). The implications of defining culture in this way remain undeveloped, leaving readers reaching for elaboration. What are the implications of this definition and how do structures of feeling incorporate multiple dimensions of culture—time, ethos, patterns of thought, identity, and meaning-making processes—to name only a few? Porter’s thin definition of culture as centered in feeling is mirrored in her final plea for planning to proceed from a radical ethic of caring and love. These two references to positive affect seem rather stark in the context of the book, which overall adopts a voice of critical, analytic deconstruction. Porter’s passion about her post-colonial project is expressed in abstract and theoretical arguments that do not always meet her stated aim to unsettle existing approaches precisely because they fail to adequately address symbolic, relational and affective dimensions.

One of the chief contributions of this book is its continual return to the question, not of differences between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples, but of the differences that differences make. Her accounts of the development of land tenure systems and mapping as political acts buttress this theme, demonstrating how European settlers privileged commodification, fragmentation and production-based utility in their approaches to occupying, managing and improving land. Her striking repetition of the insistence of European settlers in Australia that they had ‘discovered’ an empty land (terra nullius) underlines her thesis: that settler cultures have rendered indigenous people invisible in many ways over a long time. Her disturbing conclusion is unavoidable: the continuity of approaches that perpetuate unequal relations is maintained, in part, by planners and the social power they wield.

One central problem, as Porter acknowledges, is diversity within the subject groups. Indigenous people are diverse; their cultures are in constant flux and continual exchange with others around them. Settler populations, too, are in the midst of rapid change, as social and economic structures and relational cleavages are contested globally and locally. The economic crisis, in particular, has the potential to shift long-held assumptions about systems and relationships in settler-dominated societies, just as environmental crises spawn questions about how indigenous wisdom might have prevented some of the damage. Perhaps the very disruptions caused by rapid change and systemic strains can foster new opportunities for dialogue and recast processes for making and enacting policy among people with multiple metaphors about space, place and relations.  Porter is right that this promise would be realized if those with political and institutional power were willing to acknowledge the hegemony of their worldviews as constituting ‘normal and acceptable’ ways of managing land. As she recognizes, even if those in power were willing to examine the assumptions that animate their worldviews, the project of meaningfully engaging multiple worldviews in public decision-making is—at best—a work in progress.

Porter is alive to the danger of reifying images of indigenous people and their relations to space and place as distinct from settlers’. Yet her work strays into essentializing indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Her examination of processes related to the Wadi Wadi people and the Nyah Forest in Australia is a case in point. Porter’s account positions the Wadi Wadi people as more legitimate than some other indigenous counterparts, with their respective political positions correspondingly more and less legitimate. While it appears that the Wadi Wadi people were not included in meaningful shared decision-making in relation to the Nyah forest, Porter’s framing of the process casts them more as victims than agents, more as maligned heroes than complex and multi-positioned actors. Her work in this section would be strengthened by the inclusion of more voices from indigenous and non-indigenous people representing a spectrum of views about the contested activities in and around the Nyah Forest. Additionally, in her case study of the Clayoquot Sound/Meares Island conflicts in British Columbia, Porter falls victim to essentializing, attributing ecologically holistic values to indigenous people that have not been realized in practice.

Porter further develops her thesis by arguing that the habitual divide between environmental and cultural values, aligned with non-indigenous and indigenous interests respectively, perpetuates unequal power. She problematizes the definition of ‘sites’ as discrete locations, citing indigenous perspectives that sites may be diffuse areas still to be identified in the future, given incomplete inventories arising from the ill effects of colonialization and the subsequent need for comprehensive surveys. Similarly, Porter argues against ubiquitous approaches that freeze traditional interests at particular points in history while failing to recognize the ongoing dynamism and diversity of interests. Finally, she criticizes collaborative approaches to planning for not going deep enough to question buried assumptions that reproduce the hegemony of European ontologies and epistemologies. These examinations of the bases of planning and public policy decision-making raise some important and thoughtful questions. How the answers might be operationalized is not explored, but is vitally important to her argument.

Porter’s book precedes the new volume by Canadian historian Paulette Regan titled Unsettling the Settler Within. Regan uses her own experience as a descendent of European settlers and a federal government employee working on residential school reparations to deepen her account of the unsettling process. Read together, the two books complement each other well in their arguments and core concerns. Regan’s book does something that Porter’s does not; it not only identifies standpoint, it uses narrative to bring the standpoint alive. It is hard to imagine how the theoretical ideas Porter meticulously documents will manifest a field-changing revolution in practice. At the very least, her book – if taken on board by the planning profession – may generate more work for conflict resolution practitioners.

Unfortunately, Porter provides very little practical material for those who would like to unsettle planning practices. A short and diffuse section at the end of the book includes suggestions of how this might be accomplished without wrestling any of the demons that arise whenever policy and decision-making structures and frameworks are contested.

I anticipate that Porter’s book will be read by many of her fellow professionals who see themselves as well-intended and even as advocates for those whose identities and voices have been ignored. Setting aside the skepticism or defensiveness with which they may read her work, I wonder what it would mean if they were to take it seriously. Porter acknowledges that one unavoidable implication is that planners need to include more indigenous people—and their ideas about relations, place and space – in their ranks. Surely it is true that the planning discourse itself needs to be more permeable and adaptable to growing legal and social awareness of indigenous rights, and Porter’s discussion of the emergent Gariwerd/Grampian collaboration in Australia raises glimmers of hope. Anchoring the argument for (post)colonial approaches to planning in this example of relative success strengthens her work.

Even if these ideas are accepted as both sound and self-evident, the question remains how the settler majority of planners in the subject countries should conduct themselves. Should education and continuing study for professionals be directed to unsettling settler attitudes and practices? How would this be done, and by whom? Surely educational reform—even if successful—would be insufficient. Porter envisions a wholesale unsettling of the field of planning through reviewing and rethinking its cultural assumptions. In her advocacy, she fails to fully explore how planning is itself a practice embedded in legal, regulatory and policy structures that would need to change alongside planning education and practice to create the radical de-centering she advocates. As well, she fails to seriously engage the substantial literature on collaborative decision-making in ways that would reveal its potential contributions to the unsettling project.

Stories are told—and retold—by victors. Porter suggests a radical re-ordering of the victor identity. In doing so, she poses many questions that will spawn new questions as they are engaged. Her contribution to the field of planning and related areas of public decision-making is substantial. It would be even stronger if she made a clear case for a truly collaborative practice; at the end of the day, the book leaves the impression that indigenous people should re-emerge as victors, replacing colonizers’ hegemonic domination. Here lies the central challenge of the book: the need for co-existence between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples exists in all the countries about which she writes. Planners and publics urgently need to find ways to work meaningfully together in modalities that respect multiple systems of meaning, diverse identities and different worldviews. They need to bring nuance and complexity into their work in ways that do not reproduce unfair and exclusionary histories. In the end, Porter leaves this challenge unanswered.

Michelle LeBaron is Professor of Law and Director of the Program on Dispute Resolution at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

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