The following is a SAJAforum interview of writer/professor/activist Vijay Prashad, conducted by fellow academic Rohit Chopra, currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Emory University who also runs the blog Antihistory/In Another Life (more on Rohit at the bottom).
Vijay and Rohit discuss some of the ideas in Vijay's latest book, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World. These include: Nehru and Gandhi's impact (or not) on the Third World, the Internet as an organizing tool, colonial and post colonial violence (Belgian Congo, Gujarat '02), and that war in Iraq. [Contact info for The New Press, Vijay's publisher, here.]
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SAJAforum: The title of the book is a direct invocation of W.E.B. Du Bois' idea of the "darker races of mankind"; as he put it "the millions of black men in Africa, America, and the Islands of the Sea, not to speak of the brown and yellow myriads everywhere" (p. 23). It is an intriguing phrase, immediately evoking solidarities beyond the narrow loyalties of chauvinistic nationalisms or the jingoism of my-country-right-or-wrong. What possible histories does this idea allow one to imagine and write?
I am a Du Bois junkie. I love reading his work, not only because he is a lyrical writer, but also because he was remarkably perceptive about developments in world history. In 1915, he wrote a great essay called "The African Roots of the War," which argued that World War I had its origins in the great power conflict over the colonization of Africa; it was an inter-imperialist war, as Lenin would write two years later, and not a war between nations.
Du Bois was able to ground what appears as a domestic conflict in the terms of world history. That was one of the important contributions of his historical methodology, signaled by the phrase "the darker nations." In other words, events in Europe and in Northern America, from the colonial era onward, cannot be seen outside of the colonial and imperial framework.
But more: tensions between peoples in the colonized world should not be read in cultural terms alone, but also seen for the way in which their political conflicts are often intensified by colonial structures. One contemporary writer who develops this line is Mahmood Mamdani, both in his book on Rwanda and in his essay on Darfur (for the London Review of Books). Resource crunches, a failure of political imagination, fights over the construction of the new political community -- these are some of the dynamics that are often reduced by chauvinistic nationalism.
Is the idea of the Third World obsolete in the face of global capitalism and neoliberalism?
My book is about the "project" which was the Third World. For me, the Third World was not a place, but it was this project. The Third World project challenged Europe and northern America on its terms: it said, you do not have the answers to the world's problems, but we do. The answer, the project, had three components: peace (disarmament using the moral force of the anti-colonial movements); bread (a New International Economic Order that included the creation of new rules for trade and development, including the creation of commodity cartels); dignity (that each part of the world had some cultural resources up to the task of the creation of better societies, that they did not have to rely upon European or North American discoveries and inventions alone to flourish - they could borrow and learn, but not be culturally suffocated).
The triumph of financialization (what we sometimes call globalization) certainly renders the actual details of the project anachronistic. It, the project, does had not yet absorbed the immense power of finance capital and, therefore, seized upon some barriers to it placing itself at the center of world history.
But other projects need to be conceptualized that can bear the task, by providing a challenge to finance capital. My book sorts through the Third World project, its rise and its assassination. It settles accounts with that, in order to see what we might anticipate in the present as our new project.
You engage sympathetically yet critically with Nehru's contributions to the history of the Third World. However, even with his own great impact on the third world there are just 3 references to Gandhi in your book. Why is that?
Gandhi is a central character in the anti-colonial struggle against British rule. He came to India at a crucial time (1916): the Indian National Congress had exhausted its petition strategy and had split into the 'moderate' and 'extremist' groups; the anarchist-terror groups of young people brought a new kind of patriotism to the table, but with little more strategically than the propaganda of the deed; the peasant and working class movements reasserted themselves in light of the drive by imperial capital to slough off the war debt to India; and on. Gandhi put these elements together through his Satyagraha campaigns.
By the 1940s, however, as the Third World project developed,
Gandhian ideas became irrelevant. Gandhi's own sociological vision had
little role in the Third World project: his revived, but altered, caste
system; his kind of Sarvodaya economics (including small-scale cottage
production) and on, were not taken seriously. For India, they entered
the Constitution as the "Directive Principles of State Policy," or
hopeless
ideals. This is, of course, a pity, because there was much to be learnt
from Gandhi. His lack of presence in my book simply mirrors his lack of
presence in the Third World project.
Your book describes the incredible violence of colonialism, (for example, between 1885 and 1908, Belgium was responsible for the deaths of 10 million people in the Congo), as well as brutal reprisals of European powers against anticolonial movements. Are we, either in an academic or a popular sense, able to address this violence?
I didn't want to write a book only about the violence, because I think this simply repeats the view that we are victims of a history that is otherwise European. We also made our history, and the Third World project was one place in which the darker nations made this history.
That said, violence is hard to write about, as historians and anthropologists have noted. As one describes it and reasons with it, one domesticates the violence itself. Its raw horror cannot be easily replicated. But why would one want to replicate it? It is more important, it seems to me, to find the causes of violence and seek to transform these.
You bring out the ambivalence of Third World movements on the issue of violence in compelling fashion. Opposition to colonial violence and brutality and repressive regimes was central to anticolonial nationalism. Until, that is, the oppressed gained power. On page 208, you speak of the farcical victory of the Congress in Assam in 1983, in an election marred by violence between Assamese, Bengalis, and Bobos, and one in which merely 2 percent of the population voted. You describe the massacre of 5,000 refugees in Nellie, Assam, at the time, and the inaction of the Indira Gandhi government in response.
"New Delhi," you conclude, "allows us to write the obituary of the Third World." Was such violence inevitable in the Third World, once the imperialists had left the house?
Inevitable is a strong word. I don't think state violence is inevitable. But first, there is a major difference in scale between colonial violence and post-colonial violence, and there is a difference in the agents. By the last point, I mean this: that whereas the colonial state enacted violence as a rational way to derive the most power and production, the post-colonial state's violence is not always conducted by the state but by powerful political forces who seek to hold onto their privileges that have been undermined by the post-colonial state.
I have in mind the rise of the Hindutva movement, which emerges as the social democratic agenda of the post-colonial state withers; elites who felt constrained by the horizontal comradeship of the new nation, now nurture a vertical hierarchy of religious fellowship, to redirect anger against minorities rather than on a class basis. The massacre of the refugees, the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat -- these are all instances when the patriotism of the bottom line becomes stronger among elites than the patriotism for the people's good. Another kind of social democratic agenda, a genuine socialist democratic agenda, might not enact violence of the scale of the Congo, or of Gujarat. All violence is not the same violence.
Your book describes a range of collusions between U.S. state power, monopoly capitalism, and frameworks of neoliberal governance, such as IMF-led globalization. Some critics of the US invasion of Iraq would see it in this light. Others see the invasion as a new, virulent form of imperialism, tailor-made to meet the demands of transnational global capitalism. Some would argue, however, that the motives for the war, even if misguided, cannot be reduced to the American ambition of global and economic dominance. Where you do stand on this matter?
A few years ago I wrote a book called Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses. In it I show that the U.S. state structurally adjusted itself from the late 1960s onward, and it cannibalized its social democratic (New Deal) agenda for that of the upwardly mobile segment. It created, what The New York Times' Louis Uchitelle calls the disposable Americans. This new structurally adjusted state developed a new foreign policy, what I call the foreign policy of jobless growth.
The U.S. has pioneered jobless growth, with the rent economy creating a uber-class who earn fabulous rents from their patents on what is manufactured in countries like China. Their barely taxed super-profits provide growth to the U.S. economy, although the jobs created within the country are neither in the manufacturing sector nor do they pay well. Increasingly income inequality is a function of the rent economy, and so is the close to $1 trillion deficit of the US economy. India is walking toward that road. A small class of people who earn large amounts of money live in a sea of impoverished and frustrated people. In this context, the "security" of the population is less significant than the maintenance of the "power" of the minority. All concepts of foreign policy, in this context, stem from this fundamental fact. What we see is the planetary version of the gated community.
I am going to elaborate upon this in the second volume of this project called The Poorer Nations: A People's History of the Global South (whose ambit will run from 1983 to the present).
It seems the media can both foster and hamper global solidarities among marginalized groups. One thinks of the positive role of the Internet and global media in enabling transnational social and human rights movements. On the other hand – sigh – one also thinks of Fox News. Given all the variables and contingencies, can one speculate at all about the net impact of media in one direction or another?
The Internet is not a neutral site. It is a mirror of extant power relations. More powerful media units are able to shape public opinion, even though "anyone" can set up a website (and anyone is in quotes because most of the world is still priced out of the Internet).
Nevertheless, the Internet has been very useful in building knowledge and networks between movements in different locations. The water wars in Bolivia were related through the Internet to those in Ghana, to those in India. The Internet was that media. But it does not itself build power. Power has to be built locally. Think globally, communicate globally, but build power locally. That is the limitation and the potential of this new media.
--Rohit Chopra
Rohit is Visiting Assistant Professor at Emory University and will be joining Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts this fall as Assistant Professor of Media Studies. His research interests include the impact of the internet on South Asian identities and socialities, the historiography of media and technology in colonial and postcolonial India, and nationalism and identity politics in contemporary South Asia. He runs the blog Antihistory/In Another Life (http:antihistory.blogspot.com)
