Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  Certainly, the kinds of resistance explored in Insurgent Empire – from the legendary Indian uprising of 1857 to the Egyptian revolution of 1882, which was fomented in part within a milieu of radical Islamic intellectualism; from the Swadeshi movement in India, with its Hindu iconography; to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, which drew on Kikuyu cultural beliefs and practices – at once asserted cultural specificities and made insistent claims upon shared humanity. In this regard, we might recall Susan Buck-Morss’s suggestion that, if ‘the historical facts about freedom can be ripped out of the narratives told by the victors and salvaged for our own time, then the project of universal freedom does not need to be discarded but, rather, redeemed and reconstituted on a different basis’.55 Similarly, the archives yield the sense that, even as colonial narratives of universal freedom were challenged and queried, the project of something like universal freedom was reconstituted and reframed, rather than discarded. Witnessing or interpreting resistance, British critics of empire read against the grain of colonial discourse’s insistence on immutably sharp cultural differences or radical alterity, recognizing possibilities for forging common cause in cultures of resistance, as well as what Satya P. Mohanty describes as ‘the kind of agency that is so crucial to defining practices and, collectively, cultures’.56 In Said’s words, rebellious ‘natives’ were able to ‘impress upon the metropolitan culture the independence and integrity of their own culture, free from colonial encroachment’.57 This does not necessarily imply either the elision of cultural differences and historical particularities, or the de facto imposition of a grand scheme of European Reason; indeed, the very nature of encounters in the face of anticolonial resistance made such elision difficult even where it might have been wished for. Uday Mehta is right to point to the impulse within British liberalism, when confronted with the unfamiliar, ‘to hitch it to a more meaningful teleology’, to annex difference, and render it a subset of more evolved European modes of thinking.58 Yet, as we shall see, liberalism was affected not only by empire but also by anti-empire as idea and praxis. For British dissidents of a liberal-reformist bent, encounters with resistant colonial subjects often entailed learning that not all that was deemed ‘European’ was in fact solely European – that, when it came to ideas of freedom and justice, as Gurminder Bhambra puts it, ‘the concepts and traditions are not European; what is at stake is the claiming of these concepts and traditions as European’.59 Unlearning paternalism, for many British dissidents, involved interrogating and working through the seeming ‘Otherness’ of the colonized, and the ‘sentimental charity’ that a sense of difference called for, as well as working with the possibilities – radical in context – offered by the often difficult practice of equality. Far from neutralizing the other within a safe mode of ‘difference’, resistance brought home the fact of a commonality that could not be contained by the familiar disposition of benevolence. What was required was solidarity.

  Human Affinities, Political Communities

  A revolution which does not aim at changing me by changing the relations between people does not interest me; what’s more, I doubt whether a revolution which does not affect me enough to transform me is really a revolution at all.

  Jean Genet, ‘The Palestinians’

  For some time now, historians and literary critics who have made use of postcolonial approaches have been excited by the ‘utopian’ conceptual possibilities embedded in what they regard as profound otherness. In her important and influential 2006 work Affective Communities, Leela Gandhi reflects on the concept specifically in relation to the emergence of British anticolonialism, arguing that British radicals in the nineteenth century undertook border-crossings, ‘visible in small, defiant flights from the fetters of belonging toward the unknown destinations of radical alterity’.60 Inasmuch as theirs were ‘flights from imperial similitude’, the imperial dissidents of Gandhi’s study were radical, she argues, in their refusal of ‘the exclusionary structures of instrumental binary reason’.61 This refusal, for Gandhi, is contiguous with what she sees as fundamental to postcolonial critique: ‘the impulse against imperial binarism’. Gandhi does, however, dissent from the tendency in postcolonial studies to figure the dissolution of such binaries as inevitable; Homi Bhabha famously theorizes ‘ambivalence’ always already inscribed ‘at the very origins of colonial authority’.62 As I have already argued, such ‘ambivalence’ would seem to be little more than a theoretically fashionable version of Whig imperial history’s own rendering of imperialism as a self-correcting system that arrives at emancipation or decolonization without regard to the resistance of its subjects. In other words, the theory of ambivalence produced through mimicry also suggests that there is always ‘a kind of built-in resistance in the construction of any dominant discourse – and opposition is an almost inevitable effect in its construction of cultural difference’.63 Gandhi rightly calls for attention to be paid to more active dissidents, those ‘from within the imperial culture’ who are ‘unwilling to wait for its eventual hybridization, actively renouncing, refusing, and rejecting categorically its aggressive manicheanism’.64 For all that its use of ‘anti-imperialism’ is expansive to a fault – ‘troped as shorthand for all that was wrong and iniquitous in the world’ – Gandhi’s study offers us a refreshing return in our jaded times to a subculture of utopian aspiration embedded in a longing for ‘ideal community’.65 Certainly, it is the case that the late Victorian moment she examines – and to which Insurgent Empire also turns, if somewhat differently – was redolent with the promise of radical transformation on a global scale.

  Ultimately, however, Gandhi too fails to break with the dominant elisions of postcolonial studies – a field that, despite her claims, is not for the most part predicated on the binaries between colonial power and anticolonial resistance, favouring as it has precisely the grounds of ‘hybridity’ and ‘ambivalence’. Her welcome, if excessively cautious, critique of the conceptual inadequacies of Bhabha’s rendering of colonial ambivalence notwithstanding, and despite a salutary emphasis on the ‘aspirational energy’ of metropolitan anti-imperialism, Gandhi’s rather limited understanding and hostile repudiation of ‘historical dialecticism’ impoverishes her account. While it is gently critical of Bhabha’s elision of agency, Gandhi’s own rendering of metropolitan anti-imperialism in the mirror of postmodernism – diffuse, unorganized, even ludic – is appealing to contemporary literary sensibilities but performs several occlusions of its own. Foremost among these is the figuring of metropolitan dissidents as in some sense intrinsic exiles who responded to local pressures, rather than as evolving subjects who were often in dialectical engagement with insurgents and movements in the colonies that can be caricatured neither as simply nationalist nor as being in thrall to invented traditions. Even assuming that it might be possible or desirable to glean ‘one paradigmatic narrative of metropolitan anti-imperialism’ – a diversely unwieldy phenomenon – it is unlikely that such a narrative could be merely character-driven, simply a story of fascinatingly eccentric outliers whose actions constituted ‘the disaggregated forms of a dissent engaged for its own sake, bearing no practical investment in the telos of the anticolonial nation-state and certainly gaining no apparent material advantage from the economic and political diminution of imperial power’.66

  As we shall see, for many of the figures discussed here, ‘intolerable domestic pressures’ were less the cause of a conversion to anticolonialism for them than a useful point of comparison, a way of drawing connections between domestic forms of oppression and those being exercised abroad. Certainly, they allowed for common cause to be made. Characters such as Ernest Jones, Wilfrid Blunt, Nancy Cunard and Fenner Brockway may have been unique personalities with distinctive life-stories, but the point is not that they were somehow ontologically less ‘immune to the ubiquitous temptations of empire’. What is more significant is that their critical positions developed out of a concatenation of factors in which their contact with or consciousness of insurgent mov
ements and actors was significant. Anticolonial insurgency often inspired these personalities to call for parallel domestic resistance to tyranny. The elision of agency that emerges in theories of ambivalence resurfaces in Gandhi’s attribution of these processes to ‘cultural osmoses occasioned by colonial encounter’ and ‘the irremediable leakiness of imperial boundaries’.67 In the face of the theoretical condescension that afflicts our present view of such movements, it is worth noting that not all anticolonialists – indeed, not even all nationalists – naively embraced ‘purity’ or ‘edenic premodern antiquity’. On the contrary, they were all too aware of the strategic nature of the binaries they deployed against empire; these, moreover, often took the form not only of subject nation against imperial nation but of the powerless against the powerful, the just against the unjust, and right against might. Crucially, those ranged against power, injustice and oppression were not defined in exclusively racial or communal terms but could comprise alliances across the boundary between metropole and periphery. Imperial binaries could not simply be ‘dissolved’; they had to be fought strategically with differently constituted ones not unlike those implied by the ‘new and better forms of community and relationality’ which Gandhi writes about with verve. The ‘unsatisfactory theoretical choice between the oppositional but repetitive forms of cultural nationalism on the one hand and the subversive but quietist discourse of hybridity or contrapuntality on the other’ may, in fact, exist only in the writings of contemporary critics.68

  While profoundly attuned to its psychological dimensions and representational mechanisms, the metropolitan critics of empire and their anticolonial interlocutors discussed in Insurgent Empire rarely saw imperialism as, in the first instance, ‘a peculiar habit of mind’, or ‘a complex analogical system’ that could be disrupted simply through aestheticized versions of disorder, chaos or unruliness. Nor was anticolonialism simply a volitional matter of ‘opting out from the idiom of their own colonizing culture’ for an ‘other-directed ethics’.69 If the periphery did give rise to ‘a new politics of unlikely conjunction and conjuncture’, it was one that took hard work, reciprocal un-learning and learning, and collective organizational efforts. It was a politics, in short, not so much of friendship (though that was not absent) as of difficult solidarities forged through dialogism, in which both parties found themselves being transformed in just the way suggested by Genet above. The story of British metropolitan anticolonialism is not one of the growth of ‘affective communities’ alone, but also of shifting of affective dispositions, from that of the paternalist humanitarian to one of solidarity defined as a ‘transformative political relation’, or ‘the active creation of new ways of relating’ – one in which both sides might shift and evolve their dispositions in response to the encounter.70 This transformation is traced here through thickly historicized textual readings in which the individual voice, distinctive as it is, was necessarily inflected by the collective, in a relationship that at its best is at once interrogative and representational. The effort – particularly in the twentieth century – was to create political communities that were not devoid of affect, or even of conviviality, but cognizant of challenges, disagreements and power differentials; a solidarity characterized neither by homogeneity nor by shared national belonging, and where contiguity of interests had to be argued for and forged rather than taken for granted. Indeed, to recall the famous closing scene from Forster’s A Passage to India, Aziz and Fielding, the Indian and the Englishman, would have to be allies in the project of driving the English out of India before they could be friends. The resistance of the colonized was key to this process, in which the political and the affective were mutually constitutive.

  Culture, Universalism and the Anticolonial

  The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.

  Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination

  The relationship between the political and the affective as manifested in the relationship between anticolonial insurgency and British dissent on questions of the Empire was a dialogical one in the broadest sense, where each term influenced the other, if not evenly or equally. The kinds of British oppositional discourse examined here can be seen as manifest responses to the voices, insights and consciousness of insurgents, incorporating them in a transformative process. Bakhtin’s insight that the word ‘lives, as it were, on the boundary between its own context and another, alien, context’ is helpful here.71 The actions, utterances and, in complicated ways, ‘voice’ of insurgency inhabited the discourses of British criticism of empire, so that they embody what Bakhtin describes as a hybrid of ‘varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of “our-own-ness” ’.72 The ‘process of interaction and struggle with others’ thought’ inflects the genres and utterances of these texts, from speeches and manifestos to memoirs, petitions and editorials. The emergence, at first, of ‘sympathy’, and subsequently of variants of ‘solidarity’, as a metropolitan response to resistance and crises of insurgency, can be broadly located in the intersubjective space of communication. It is a space that can be simultaneously conflictual and reciprocal, in which meaning is made, and in which the fact of cognized difference does not preclude, and may indeed facilitate, the emergence of shared ground. Inasmuch as ‘a relation is never static, but always in the process of being made or unmade’, the dialogism of the anticolonial encounter, as much as that of the colonial one, enabled the reconstitution of both selves and relations in more radical directions.73 If we might regard anti-colonialism as a very specific form of address through self-assertion, it can be seen to generate a sense of ‘answerability’ in imperial dissidents. To the extent that dialogism ‘argues that sharing is not only an ethical or economic mandate, but a condition built into the structure of human perception, and thus a condition inherent in the very fact of being human’, I make the case for both something like a reconfigured critical humanism and an expansive universalism as central to the anticolonialism of the texts examined here.74

  The space of ‘sharing’ that emerges through the dialogism of the encounters discussed here – also one in which universals make their claims felt – does not necessarily entail the elision of difference or the assimilation of it into the cunning of European ‘Reason’. On the contrary, as we shall see from the intellectual journeys of Wilfrid Blunt, Henry Nevinson, Nancy Cunard and Fenner Brockway, among others, the space of anticolonial encounter is also a field of moral inquiry, in which different cultures functioned as ‘laboratories of moral practice and experimentation’ for all concerned.75 Satya P. Mohanty’s argument that cultural differences (and, arguably, historical specificities) are not necessarily at odds with moral universals is useful here. He points out that it is perfectly possible for ‘a nonrelativist understanding (and defense) of diversity and pluralism’ to be developed if interaction between cultures (as ‘fields of moral inquiry’) can be seen as a form of ‘epistemic cooperation’.76 This would mean, as it did for many of the metropolitan figures I discuss, that the practices of ‘other cultures’, particularly in the crucible of resistance, showed themselves to ‘embody and interrogate rich patterns of value, which in turn represent deep bodies of knowledge of humankind and human flourishing’.77

  As I will show, these encounters frequently generated a pedagogical process I call ‘reverse tutelage’, in which metropolitan dissidents came to learn something from their anticolonial interlocutors and the movements they represented. In the crucible of these pedagogical encounters which ‘widen[ed] the fields of historical inquiry’ and enabled ‘a fuller range of human possibilities’, notions of human good or a just global order were unsettled, challenged, expanded and reconstituted.78 The likes of Keir Hardie, travelling to an India in ‘unrest’; Raymond Michelet, writing about various African cultures; and even C. L. R. James and George Padmore, teaching
themselves about Africa in order to be able to better interpret and represent black resistance, would come to a recognition of the narrowness of their own frames of historical and epistemological reference. They would seek to expand and deepen these through studying both resistance itself and the various cultural resources which African and Asian resistance to empire drew upon. There was certainly an operative sense in most cases that there were ‘features of human nature … shared by all humans across cultures’ and some ‘minimal requirements for human welfare’, but these were insights that were acquired through reading the texts of resistance rather than an a priori claim, often conceded rather than imposed.79 Human commonality – and equality – were reclaimed by the colonized, not bestowed by the colonizer, much in the spirit of the black man who stands upright in the frontispiece to abolitionist and feminist Elizabeth Heyrick’s magnificent 1824 polemic, Immediate not Gradual Abolition, who does not ask whether he should not be treated with common humanity, but asserts defiantly: ‘I AM A MAN, YOUR BROTHER’.80 Rejected here was the mendicancy and petitioning that many anticolonialists from the colonies would also take pains to repudiate.