Internal Frontiers. Jon Soske
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and forms of identity. Things “Indian” permeated the sociopolitical landscape of Natal and, to a lesser degree, other parts of the country. They appeared both in everyday life and material culture (from the atchar sold by the local shopkeeper to the grand minarets of Grey Street’s mosques) and in great events that shaped the course of South Africa’s history (such as Gandhi’s campaigns). India was ubiquitous, part of the very fabric of South Africa. The ambiguity of the term “Indian,” which named both a distant country and a variety of familiar people and places, intensified this uncanny effect.
In his important book Enlightenment in the Colony, Aamir Mufti suggests that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century arguments regarding the place of Jews within Europe—the famous “Jewish question”—prefigured the dilemma faced by ethnic minorities within the postcolonial nation-state. 17 According to Mufti, the secular state, based on the categories of national identity and citizenship, produced the Jewish diaspora as doubly anomalous. On the one hand, the Jew functioned as a figure of premodern, religious particularity that disrupted the universalizing ideal of individual and secular citizenship. On the other hand, the diasporic and cosmopolitan character of Jewishness, which European nationalist intellectuals frequently associated with the elusive attributes of transnational capitalism, threatened the Romantic ideal of a solidly rooted and holistic national identity. Reading the place of the Muslim in contemporary India through these earlier debates, Mufti concludes that the contradictory imperatives of secular nationalism, rather than demography, produce the cultural-political status of the minority. If nationalism institutionalizes a territorial identity through the establishment and policing of external boundaries, the category of minority allows the nationalist project to replicate this structure of demarcation within its territorial body: the minority group is included inside the space of the nation in such a way as to protect both the putative universalism of citizenship and the underlying exclusivity of a singular (cultural, linguistic, or racial) national subject. This mode of incorporation renders the minority precarious and vulnerable. In the process of unifying a collective territorial subject, nationalism “makes large numbers of people eminently unsettled. More simply put, whenever a population is minoritized—a process inherent in the nationalization of peoples and cultural practices—it is also rendered potentially movable.”18 Mufti’s concept of minoritization usefully marks the distinction between “minority” as a political status produced by majoritarian nationalism and actual groups of people, who can understand their relationship to and within nation in a multitude of ways.
In developing the concept of internal frontier, this book follows Mufti’s insistence that the relationship between nation and diaspora is not predetermined by demography, but is the product of an ongoing process that generates both the majority and minority as interlacing political identities. In its modern form, the phenomenon of diaspora resides at the intersection of the global distribution of certain ethnic or cultural identities—such as Jew or Indian—and an international system based on the territorialization of identity in the form of the nation-state. (It is notable that comparisons between Indians and Jews were a fixture of both popular discourse and the postwar iconography of Indian political struggles in South Africa.) As many scholars have observed, this territorialization is always, necessarily incomplete.19 Political projects of assimilation or ethnic cleansing might asymptotically approach the classic ideal of European nationalism (“one people, one territory”), but the complexity of existing populations and the transnational movement of migrants render its ultimate realization impossible.20 Because homogeneity remains elusive, diaspora functions as a shifting boundary—an interior limit to the project of majoritarian democracy—that destabilizes territorial nationalism and forces the continuous elaboration of a bounded national subject. This dialectic of interruption and reassertion changes, however subtly, the dominant identity over time. As Paul Gilroy argues, the effects of diaspora on a cultural landscape make it impossible to theorize without developing a new perspective on national culture as a whole.21 At the same time, Internal Frontiers extends—and to a degree departs from—Mufti’s argument by raising the possibility of subverting the majoritarian logic of nationalism. Because Mufti accepts that the trajectory of postcolonial politics necessarily recapitulates the Romantic ideal of peoplehood, his critique assumes a tragic structure. In his account, diaspora only ever becomes territorialized through the legal-juridical category of minority. Is it possible to invert this movement and rethink the nature of national community through its essential permeability? What would it mean to leave the internal frontier open?
PHILOSOPHICAL IDEALISM
Both a neighbor and an outsider, unmistakably South African and cosmopolitan, “the Indian” displaced the problem space of postwar African nationalism from within. If the liberation struggle necessitated a unified people, then what was the place of the also-colonized other in the nationalist project? What type of unity could allow for an irreducible plurality of cultural and political subjects? In his enormously influential Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that imperialism and Third World nationalism, by equating modernity with a highly ideological construction of the “West,” universalized a particular subject of history, the sovereign subject of the nation-state.22 Echoing the Indian psychologist Ashis Nandy (and through him Frantz Fanon), this argument suggests that anticolonial struggles emulated the subjectivities, political forms, and normative conceptions of their ostensible enemy, the European colonizer.23 Along similar lines, Mahmood Mamdani claims that African nationalism limited its goals to the deracialization of civil society and therefore left the distinction between the citizen and native (embodied in the institutions of indirect rule) intact.24 In contrast, Internal Frontiers argues that an important group of African intellectuals explicitly questioned the foundation of nation in settler civil society and, in the aftermaths of Partition and the 1949 Durban Riots, sought to reconceptualize the subject of anticolonial nationalism by privileging the question of difference. Articulated most fully in the writings of a group of Natal intellectuals centered on ANC president Albert Luthuli, this position upheld the central agency of Africans in their own liberation—and the broadly African character of postapartheid national culture—while rejecting a racial or majoritarian basis for a future political community. Drawing on precolonial practices of social inclusion and a Christian critique of materialism, these thinkers argued that a common set of values would provide the foundation for the liberation struggle and a historically dynamic nation-building project. Their conception was self-consciously idealist in a philosophical sense. The most powerful force binding the nation was the idea of the nation itself. Unlike the categories of race or civilization, idealism could incorporate the also-colonized other without postulating the existence of a national majority or threatening assimilation: it provided a basis of unity that did not presuppose homogeneity within the realm of the social.
The idealist critique of philosophical and economic materialism represented a major strand within twentieth-century thought.25 As Michael Adas argues, the profound crisis generated by the First World War challenged a central precept of colonial ideology: that the technoscientific strength of Europe embodied its civilizational superiority over the colonized world.26 In the wake of the horrors of industrialized warfare, an increasing number of European and colonized intellectuals rejected the identification of moral progress with material power. According to Adas, the resulting debate over the future of European civilization, and its putative basis in secular progress, was the first truly global intellectual conversation.27 Eventually, this exchange would encompass thinkers as diverse as the philosopher Henri Bergson, the Nobel Prize–winning poet Rabindranath Tagore, the Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain, the Muslim-Indian thinker Mohammed Iqbal, and the theorists of negritude, Paulette Nardal, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Senghor. Pankaj Mishra explains: “Often drawing upon philosophical and spiritual traditions in Islam, Hinduism and Confucianism they developed a refined suspicion of the ‘brave new world’ of science and reason, insisting on the non-rational, non-utilitarian aspects of human existence.”28 While many proponents of idealism opposed foreign rule, they nevertheless understood the crime of colonialism in philosophical rather than political terms. They believed that the West’s overreliance on technology and its one-sided emphasis on an abstract form of rationality denied the very things that give human life value: the moral and spiritual dimensions of being. This critique displaced European