[This is Essay #13 in our Spotlight Series. Click here for archives.]
Thinking-Feeling Dual-Citizenship
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Since I am trying to think about how one negotiates several spaces emotionally, cognitively, and physically, it is worthwhile to say where I am. Born in Hyderabad, I lived there as well as Sirsila and Karimnagar during my brief eight years in India. Holidays and breaks between school years often saw me in my family’s village house in Sankapelli, the only place on earth that distinctly feels like home. Less frequently, but still quite often, I would also travel to visit my aunt and uncle already settled in America, which is my current country of residence. I am not an American citizen and very trepid about becoming one, neither do I belong to India in any simple way. The space between these locations often feels like an abyss, while I stand on the rickety plank that is the hyphen between Indian–American.
I share this sense of dislocation with one of my intellectual heroes, Edward Said, who wrote the flawed classic Orientalism. At the close of his introduction, Said remarks that the book is partly an attempt to take inventory of his own Palestinian heritage and diasporic life. Said goes on to say that his migration allows him to occupy a double position, one that is invested in and critical of those two cultural influences. You can see why this spoke to me immediately. However, I have come to realize that I cannot yet identify with Said’s double position. I am, rather, in a position of double exclusion, belonging to neither space but linked to both in weird ways.
To those who would argue that one’s sense of belonging is always already imbued with a sense of exclusion, I agree completely. My interest here is to trace out the particularities of my belonging/exclusion and see how it may affect our thinking about belonging, criticism and citizenship. While belonging and citizenship seem rather obviously linked, the latter being a particular manifestation of the former, I want to argue that criticism too is marked by belonging and an odd nationalism. By criticism, I am talking about the kind that most interests me, critiques of the nation.
Received wisdom in the American academy––I speak from within it but not for it––comes in the form of Benedict Anderson’s argument in Imagined Communities. Published over thirty years ago, the text’s central arguments still provide valuable insights into nationalism as a phenomenon. Anderson argues that nations are imagined political communities because no individual will ever know, meet or even hear of all their fellow citizens, “but in the minds of each lives an image of their communion.” This raises the question of how it is that one identifies with all these people she will never meet, so much so that she is willing to die for them. For Anderson, this imagining is born out of the intercourse between “print language” and “print capitalism;” the former is written language that is above spoken vernaculars, while the latter is that language’s dissemination in various print media such as newspapers, novels etc. (Note: when Anderson says print language is “above” spoken vernacular, he is not putting them is a hierarchy of value. Rather, print language is that which is communicable across all vernacularizations).
I want to bracket the time sense that Anderson argues print capitalism produces to focus on its linguistic particularities. When I write something in English (a print language), says Anderson, I am imagining an audience that is limited to those who are able to read printed English. No matter how large that population may be, it does not include the whole world. If my imagined audience is only English readers, I have narrowed my imagined community by billions of people; coupled with other mechanisms Anderson offers, I am on my way to communing with the citizens of one nation only.
Those interested in thinking beyond nationalism, toward something like a cosmopolitan sensibility, have argued that none of Anderson’s mechanisms need necessarily limit us to one nation. That I am using English to write on an Indian blog is an obvious place to begin a rebuttal. Indeed, as one of my undergraduates put it, imagination is not limited. True…somewhat. If I merely want to hold hands, hug and sing about being “one world,” then I can continue to imagine my communion with the globe all day long. Doing so would be banal, and to my eyes a violent abdication of responsibility, a purposeful ignorance of daily suffering. What then does the practice of engagement with the world look like? There is, obviously, no singular answer to such a question, but for me and for many of those bloggers reading this, it involves writing, critical writing.
Critical writing may seem to be a detachment mechanism, a way of distancing oneself to see the global forest from the nationalist trees. This feeling of detachment, one that I am in no way immune to, is based on the belief that one has seen through the obfuscating brush, cut through the jungle of rhetoric hiding some truth that the writer’s critical piece will illuminate. As my belabored metaphor suggests, however, cutting through the jungle means immersing oneself in it, getting tangled while trying to create a path through it. This is less an insight than a reminder, a lesson that even professionals in my field––English studies––forget. I recently attended a professional conference where a panel of “All Star” scholars was asked to respond to the question, “Why Teach Literature Anyway?” One scholar argued that teaching the art of “close reading” helps students, or practitioners generally, stay afloat amidst the world’s discursive tidal waves. I disagreed, arguing that “close reading” is a purposeful immersion, a controlled drowning, into the object of analysis. In other words, a critical perspective sees its objects more closely, not from afar.
To critique policies, systems of prejudice and oppression, one needs to immerse in the particularities of their practices and manifestations. Although my focus is narrowing in on Human Rights discourse, a global project if there ever was one, I have to put abstract philosophical conceptions in dialogue with their physical incarnations. Given the current world political system, these physical incarnations are located in nation-states, and I must immerse myself in them for any of my critiques to be worthwhile.
Critiquing the nation, then, is always also an ode to it. That is, such critiques testify to the time and energy spent in investigating, thinking and writing within that discursive community. There are two important thoughts that follow from this. First, the need for immersion is an implicit rejection of the idea that knowing a country’s language gives you a ‘native’ perspective of it. I know Telugu but have very little sense of Andhra politics. Learning a language may be the first step, but it need not be; I can, for instance, follow Kuffir’s blog and allow that to be my first steps into Andhra’s political pool. Second, and much more important, the need for immersion may also explain why it is that the (American) Left has been unable to articulate an acceptable position against Fundamentalism generally and militant Islamists particularly. If years of training, thinking and immersion have been necessary to formulate nuanced critiques of Western imperialist practices, then even more would be necessary to immerse into a culture that one has not grown up in. The call for historically and politically locating these violent groups, rather than dismissing them as more crazy brown people, has been a frequent response from the Left. This is not meant as an apology for violence, but can also be an articulation of our own ignorance. Arguing, for instance, that “attacks” on Western nations may be belated retaliations for centuries of imperialism, moreover, folds militant Islamists into the only real epistemic structure we have available. If this is true, then both the Left and far Right are performing the same gesture; in an attempt to understand such violent acts, both are reaching for pre-established sense-making frames and forcing the actors into them. For the Left, they are victims of imperialism. For the Right, they are a force of evil to be saved by the gift of democracy. Either way, they fit into an already available episteme.
Qualifiers and Hopes:
Although the notion of “immersion” posited here needs further thought, it does seem to set a rather high bar for a critic. How then does one make political interventions, even at the level of writing, if every important topic requires “immersion”? A broader way to posit this question is, “So how does one cultivate a cosmopolitan sensibility then?” I do not know. My initial thought, however, is to note that I have isolated discursive communities, i.e nation-states, as if they are not linked in intricate ways. This isolation is incorrect, but so is believing that a person can understand any discursive community by reading it through one they are already familiar with.
Reading Indian politics through my understanding of American politics, to offer a personal example, would lead to a reductive understanding. This is an epistemic gap partly produced by my own lack of cultural immersion in India joined with a hesitant but unavoidable immersion in America. Like Said, this brief project has been an attempt to take an inventory of my own double outsideness. And although I am no technological utopist, the presence of this post on this blog signals a method of crossing the abyss between Indian and American.
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Shashi Thandra is moving slowly toward a PhD in English, hoping to specialize in Human Rights discourse, and posts on his blog in spurts.
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Much food for thought here; I was going to raise the ‘immersion’ vs. engagement issue but you’ve brought it up in the last section! However: you say, “This isolation is incorrect, but so is believing that a person can understand any discursive community by reading it through one they are already familiar with.”
My question is, how is one to avoid looking through anything at all except through the lens of what is lived (and therefore familiar)?
Related question: How much is a secondhand immersion worth? Reading, for instance, or discourse, or interpretations by others of something you might not be able to experience firsthand?
Space Bar,
Your questions point to the central problems facing everyone who is trying to cultivate a global perspective. I’m not sure there is an answer but maybe I can offer some thoughts.
The first thing to say is that even those experiences and lives we live first hand are not entirely our own. That is, the language and implicit theory of the world we operate with on a day-to-day basis is not born cleanly out of the soul, but neither is it simply received knowledge from a “culture.” I would argue that our everyday consciousness is something like a ongoing war between our mental faculties (including memories) and the onslaught of information coming in (including ‘cultural values’). Extending this thought, although too simplistically, our own nations are not entirely our own.
Although I foreground my own vexed relationship with both India and America, I don’t think anyone has a simple relationship with their nationality. Certainly, and my gloss on Anderson points to this, we cannot know everyone and everything that happens within a set of territorial boundaries. We can all attest to the long and arduous process of education that has brought us to our current level of understanding; however, we all also know that we don’t know a lot, especially about an incredibly complicated nation-state like India.
Second order information, then, isn’t quite so second order; it may even be constitutive of how we understand our lives. However, I would rather think of reading (or research generally) as one tool amongst many, which like all tools has certain abilities and inabilities. Another tool may be traveling, but as Said’s study of Orientalism taught us long ago, travelers never experience a place on their own; they always see through the eyes of those who came and wrote before.
That said, I am currently working on a project that is trying to think through our bodily reactions in foreign places. Despite all the critical sensitivities (second order) immersion can cultivate, I may still experience tension, nervousness, nausea etc when I actually have to be there. This is a physical knowledge and it can provide insights otherwise unavailable. I am dealing with this issue in the context of the Rwandan genocide and the texts I am using highlight the need for this kind of physical knowledge. Unfortunately, that brings us back to the question we began with: If physical, bodily knowledge is necessary to “really know,” then how do we who have no ability to be there intervene politically, especially in something as atrocious as a genocide?
This is an interesting post. I would like to know more about your thoughts on the constraints that define immersion? How would you argue that immersion, isn’t a ding an sich, ( a thing in itself) but in reality a process which cant be standardised and hence cant be concurred on. This is essence means, a huge question mark about the meaning of cosmopolitan sensibility, or the word global, which if we think is changing as we speak. Say, a £1200 car which didn’t in the sense , have an existence yesterday ?
Thus if immersion is arguably, an extent of dynamic order reflecting the image of a more dynamic order, to what significance would it amount to, constrained by time and space, quintessential attributes which led to the need for immersion in the first place? For instance, the two layers of your identity of Indian-American is shaped by time and space, which have at a given point only one value in infinity. This limits you in your cognition to seek to immerse only in those two layers, Indian and American.
This sounds so much like Hegel. I have no definitive position or answers at this moment. This is just thinking aloud. I am curious about your response
Regards
sunil
Sunil,
Thank you for an interesting response. You are absolutely right to note that immersion is a dynamic process, not a prescribed event, that is attempting to negotiate an even more dynamic process that can loosely be called ‘globalization’. For the sake of my post, however, I was thinking of immersion as a *practice* that is intimately linked to the practice of critique. Although practice and process have correlations, they are not identical. Practices, at least as I post it them here and in the post, are attempts to negotiate, understand and make interventions in the larger processes. In so doing, practices have to be as dynamic as the things they are trying to make sense of.
Equally dynamic are our modes of self-identification. Again, it is only for this post and as a thought experiment that I have limited myself to thinking my Indian-American-ness. These are far from the only two layers of my (or anyone’s) identity and, perhaps even more importantly, they are not fixed quantities or qualities. I may be able to posit a moment, e.g. one where I experience prejudice because a ‘white’ person identifies me as Indian, and think through its various logics. Doing so, however, will eventually call attention to the impossibility of isolating that moment in itself, lest I slip into some transhistorical critique wherein the prejudicial agent stands in for all ‘white’ people existing through all time. Similarly, ‘Indian’ and ‘American’ are never stable but rather, as you point out, ongoing processes; they could also be performative practices.
Moreover, Indian and American are not dialectically related. (My understanding of Hegel is impressionistic at best, so bare with me). These two nodes, which are not the only two available, are not constitutively dependent on each other by a negative relation. That is, dialectic thought would require that X be defined as being not Y. Being Indian, however, cannot be defined as not being American. Although Indian-American are in tension with each other, I’m not sure it can properly be called a dialectical tension. Moreover, I reject the possibility of sublating these identities, especially not into an easy hybridity.
I wonder whether it is a bit late for “immersion”, after all, “the child is father to the man”. I spent my first 13 years in coastal Andhra villages (starting from 1941), studied in Telugu medium and am still not comfortable with English. On a recent trip to India, I found that I was less comfortable with English speaking urban Indians than with Americans but I felt OK in villages.
swarup garu,
i thought you felt comfortable in multi-lingual states?
Kuffir,
Theoretically, I like diversity. May be it is old age; I seem to be going back to my roots. When I sit in the garden, I remember old Telugu songs. As that girl said in Awaara, my heart skips a beat when I hear simple Telugu in unexpected places. But with too much reading, the distinction between what one feels and what one thinks that he/she feels probably blurs. I did enjoy meeting you; wish we could have met a few more times.
Regards,
Swarup
Shashi,
I understand your thoughts on of the dynamics and how it process is to be distinguished from the practice. My thinking was on what are the basic attributes you would set yourself to define the distinction ? That’s why I drifted into Hegel.
My contention was that your practice , not the process is limited by the attributes you cant measure to define . In the above instance time and space: so in your immersion you are limited. In your case, you can only seek to immerse in Indian or American identities or the synthesis of the two. This means, extending your own example- An American can call you Indian(may be wrongly) he wouldn’t venture to call you Chinese, an identity which you cannot immerse yourself. Ergo the practice, which reflects the dynamic process is confounded by constraints eluding a common understanding or even communication which opens up the debate on the term cosmopolitan sensibility?
Thanks anyway.
This self-indulgent “who am I” question that keeps getting asked over and over by students in English, communication, cultural studies departments, and answered in polysllabic convolution is an indication of nothing more than the indoctrination of navel gazing by mediocrities posing themselves as scholars. Grow up Shashi and read some good Indian texts and you will find a lot more about the self and its disjunctures than the prattling of Said and his cohorts.
Dear Ramesh,
You will note that the framing question is not “who am I?” but rather “how does (national) allegiance work and what does it allow?” This framing question is put through biographical details only as a rhetorical device, one that I hoped would bring readers of this blog into the piece. For the more metaphysical question “Who am I?”, I turn to a combination of Yoga and Zen Buddhism to create my own answers. But maybe those texts are not Indian enough.
I am certainly open to critique, especially in the service of overcoming my own mediocrity. In this spirit, I would ask you to point out how raising questions about nationalism and human rights––the projects I am interested in and partly think through above––qualify as navel gazing?
Best,
Shashi
The blog has interpreted quotation marks and dashes oddly. I hope the reply is still readable.