Listen to Kolar Aparna, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, present at the Europe and the Crisis of Reason workshop, titled "Reading 'post-WWII Europe' Against the Grain: Black Feminist Poethical Responses to Slavery and the Crisis of Reason."
Full Transcription:
Speaker 1 [00:00:01]: I think my presentation connects a lot to the questions you raised, certainly ghosts, dreams also. And yeah, I think for me the politics of centring Central Europe, maybe I will shift the vantage point, because who was mourning which death is also related to from where we are, from which location we are viewing these narratives. So, I will also travel in time to different locations, but certainly, writings written during the 20th century. And I shifted the title a little bit, moving to those moments of anti-colonial imaginaries, resisting this epistemic assimilation to Europe and their echoes in the present. Just a brief structure, I will be introducing the lens of intellectual responses for social transformation, resisting oppression from this location of the colonised coloniser, and I will introduce these intellectual responses, and then moving forward to sensing from shadows, stains. So, we can multiply these metaphors of haunting in terms of ghosts, demons, but also shadows, stains, and I think much more. But how do we sense and move forward? In terms of the intellectual responses, and again, this is just, I've only started going on this journey, texts that I've read in the past but revisiting now in this moment, but texts that I had not read myself because of my own [?? 00:02:04] epistemic blindness, you can say. So, these would be certain texts written under occupation, under double occupation of the colonised coloniser, writings that were censored in mid-20th century, that were on trial, that were anonymous, under camouflage, but also, writings that would see fascism and colonialism deeply entangled and not separate. And of course, very much intellectual elites from the colonies educated within the French, British, and Dutch Empire in the mid-20th century. So, these are some of the periodicals or associations or groups that were spaces of dreaming, but also resisting and searching. So, Tropiques, that's part of the Surrealist movement, but also the Négritude movement that reclaimed that. And then, Ambedkar is a shadow figure as much as he was very much part of writing the constitution of independent India, but very much offering a lens for the racial ghosts of Europe. So, I use these writings as offering us a lens for today's crisis, but who were responding to the crisis of mid-20th century, multiple. And then, Perhimpoenan Indonesia, these were psychiatrists, lawyers within the Dutch Empire studying in the metropole, and then the Indian Progressive Writers Association, these were all groups of intellectual elites who were permitted to be educated in the disciplines, which for a long time was not allowed for people from the colonies. So, they are writing very much aware that they have this privilege, they have been granted this privilege to selectively enter European epistemology, but very much reappropriating and selectively using it to rethink the crisis or the paradox of freedom, because this was a moment when, let's say officially, slavery legally did not exist, but it was also a paradox, the paradoxes of freedom, and a crisis for dreaming too, in terms of, and this is a writer who moved during the India-Pakistan partition, but very much gives us a vocabulary to deal with the madness and the ghosts and the deaths of freedom, in this case, and the violence that comes with freedom.
Speaker 1 [00:05:12]: And he says, [foreign language 00:05:14], when we were slaves, we were dreaming of freedom, now that we are free, what do we dream about? So, I use this as a kind of crisis also of dreaming, and therefore, what were people writing, where were they writing from, of this crisis of seeing the violence of the colonised coloniser. I look to, and I'm still struggling with this method, but I look to the Black feminist poethical reading. Poethical in the sense, on one hand, there are the ethics of knowledge production, how are we producing these narratives of crisis, but also what new imaginaries are we unfolding, but poethics in the sense, the project of decolonisation cannot be predetermined, or the liberation, cannot be predetermined, so there is this mix of poethical project to say we cannot determine, and there your speculative fiction is very much part of these methods where we cannot fix, and we see the limits of reason, scientific reason in this case, and the violence of the modes of colonial anthropology and different disciplines that were enacted, both in the colonies that came to Europe eventually in the World War II, which Césaire and others would argue. So, it's a kind of method that from without the world as we know it, which is very much a call to all disciplines and beyond disciplines where the category of the other does not become a referent of commodity or object. This is a whole other field, I'm just selectively using it as a method to really question how these writers, how were they making time, what notions of space, what political consciousness came to be claimed that can give us tools for dreaming today. So, this is one, he was very much trained in law within the British Empire, and he came from an untouchable family. And therefore, the theories and concepts he develops from that location, as someone navigating violence much before, ongoing violence much before European empires, but that perpetuated, so Nicholas, when you said the perpetuation of violence, that connects to all the writers who say these temporal breaks of empire finished, freedom started, or slavery finished, freedom, these were always ongoing violence that stays with us today. So, these were writers who were very much [?? 00:08:05], and there, even when he talks about how slavery is understood, as a lawyer, he says most people condemn slavery simply because they hold that for one man to have the law of power of life and death over another is wrong, because that's what the legal definition of slavery says, but they forget that cruel oppression, tyranny, can be within the train of misery, disappointment, and desperation, even when there is no slavery. And here, he's talking about very much the impossibility, and there I would use him as a lens and his writings as a lens to think about this crisis of what does it mean, democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity. When we look to Ambedkar's writings from this lens of untouchability, first we have to name the violence, name what do we mean by slavery, that goes beyond these legal definitions.
Speaker 1 [00:09:03]: So, he, coming himself from an untouchable family who made it to the top of, well, so-called top within the law discipline within the British Empire, he puts a finger on this ongoing crisis. What does it mean to have ended slavery while not giving the tools of opportunity, access to education? And he differentiates it from even slavery within the Roman Empire or slavery within the transatlantic slavery, in the sense of attaching it, which I think we need to read it in relation to the race religion constellations of European empires, in terms of whose bodies would be seen as polluting, and this comes back to the demons, in terms of how we constitute the European subject, whose bodies are seen as polluting either the nation state or the haunting house, who is allowed inside the hotel or not, whose bodies are seen as, you used it metaphorically, but it literally happens, in terms of trash and pollution. And these are ongoing demons that we need to talk about. And in fact, the death of some is really seen as a purified. And he differentiates it from the transatlantic slavery in the sense, at least the master was responsible, just purely for profit, for the slaves' health and maintenance, whereas with untouchability, it's much more, and this goes to Mbembe's Necropolitics and others, where we're not even any more responsible for the health and well-being of the slaves that we are exploiting. So, it comes back to these master-slave relations that didn't make it to other canonical European philosophy. And he says, "If this is a war against the new Nazi order, it's not a war for the old order either." It's not about going back in time and restoring some pre-colonial order or traditions or the timelessness that was also within colonial anthropology projected onto the colonies. But it is a new order in which liberty, equality, and fraternity will not be merely slogans but become facts of life. So, he was very much claiming the language of the colonised coloniser to rethink a new world order that would not anymore just be dependent on being allowed into the hotel, or being allowed into the epistemic crisis of Europe in those times. And in that sense, there is also, I think, because he's a legal scholar, he goes into Roman Empire, and there is, again, maybe joining the writers from Central Europe, selectively going back to different imperial regimes to say that, actually, there was a possibility where so-called slaves were accessing these professions of librarians, but we have to be cautious that his audience was very much the audience that spoke the language of Roman Empire and other things, so he was very much appropriating and not using the Roman Empire as we have to go back and as the best model. He was writing in a certain time within the British Empire to the British legal scholars, let's say, and politicians, of course, so in that sense, there is this selective assimilation to speak the language and appropriate it to talk about the perpetuation of violence and how this can happen even after freedom, after independence, and these demons will stay. And then, of course, he also, and that's the wilful amnesia that connects to other writers who were writing at this time, he says, "Racial hierarchy very much perpetuated in how the British Empire and European imperialism fed into ongoing racial hierarchies", rather than, even though they positioned themselves as we are humanitarian, and we condemn Sati, and these other practices that were seen as oppressive to women, they were very much perpetuating these caste hierarchies, and that was very much within the World War II and World War I with soldiers who were fighting for Europe. These caste hierarchies were very much within the hierarchies of the army, and who were much more disposed than certain other castes. And of course, in general, the soldiers who fought from the colonies were not and still today are not seen as central to the memory politics and in museums and others as central to shaping freedom, who fought for freedom for Europe and who helped Europe.
Speaker 1 [00:14:06]: So, he very much also brings back to this, connects back to what later Foucault would build on, but without being in dialogue with these scholars, on knowledge and power, on how we need to unmask interests of privilege, and there, I think, he is very much aware that economic and social interests within racial and caste hierarchies could also be shaping, even when there is the international proletariat movements claiming that we, he says, what if the proletariat does, we assume that the proletariat does not desire advantages for himself, which in this case, they were mostly upper castes, including Gandhi and others, who were claiming, who were speaking very much the language of the international solidarity, but were very much blinded to these caste hierarchies, and then eventually, would have their own interests, furthering their own interests to place the helper centre, centralising the helper in this case, that we will fight for the untouchables, rather than being shaped by the violence. And I wouldn't use giving voice, but these were all these violence that he saw even within communist and Marxist movements, where the proletariat is very much furthering his own vested interests. And there, he says, "Why does reason fail to bring about social justice in this case, especially to untouchables in India? Is [?? 00:15:53] so long as it does not come into conflict with one's own vested interests? So, how much are you invested in this as long as you have political power in this project of freedom and independence, anti-colonial movements?" So, he says, "Before any justice or abuse of oppression can be resisted", because he saw very much also the British going to rescue the women, and you see that pattern again in European humanitarian regimes, going to rescue oppressed people, he says, "The lies upon which it is founded must be unmasked and should be clearly recognised, and this can happen only within the educational sphere." So, for me, it also connects to all these debates on let's decolonise everything, let's save everything, but we actually need to sit with the demons and the ghosts to really even find the vocabulary of what is being told as narratives of the past, and whose interests are within certain narratives, and whose interests are not. And unmasking these interests of the privileged is much more a political project for him, because he saw it happening within the Gandhian project of nonviolence, which Europe was very much willing to selectively centre. Then, we move to Martinique, in French Martinique, which was also a location, French Martinique that was under Vichy domination during the Nazi occupation, so it was a double colonisation, let's say. And there, Suzanne Césaire, very much trained within metropolitan Europe, along with Aimé Césaire, but she's a particular figure in founding this journal Tropiques. And again, her writings are very relevant today in this search for dreaming, and not to confuse liberation as assimilation. And she brings attention to this condition of pseudomorphosis, where she says just after slavery was abolished, and there, again, it's the politics of memory, she says we have forgotten too soon the slaveships that are fundamental to shaping the condition of Martinique and the sufferings. And then, she brings certain dates and this gradual prohibition from practice of medicine. And again, this connects to all the intellectual elites who were writing at that time, who were selectively given these spaces. But she says, we have to understand this history, also the prohibition of practicing of law, prohibition of wearing clothes even, identical to those of [whites? 00:18:46], and then after slavery was abolished, you're required to take permits to work anywhere other than in the fields. So, even that question of like, you know, yes, we got freedom, now just go free and work anywhere, it was very much especially regulated, until today it is with the [?? 00:19:06] and others, you are selectively allowed to work, but is it really beyond slavery?
Speaker 1 [00:19:15]: So, from this point, she says, and she brings attention to, we are confusing liberation to assimilation, and she talks about the violence, precisely of prohibiting and then allowing, creates a certain pseudomorphosis, a certain psychological condition where she says this rush, we have just forgotten ourselves, and here she speaks very much from Martinique, because they escaped France and were writing from there, and the journal was also prohibited, so they had to camouflage their writing during this time, but she says, "Nevertheless, within that space", because they were very much censoring, so they had to camouflage it as a West Indian folklore magazine, even though they were radically, you know, they were only allowed to say, "We are developing some indigenous concepts", but actually, what they were doing is a fundamental critique and the hypocrisies of freedom. And she says, "What's happening to us is, there's this confusion because we've too soon forgotten, and this freedom is completely masking us to say that actually liberation means assimilating." So, quickly, we have to wear the clothes that were prohibited for us to wear. Quickly, we have to get the jobs that were prohibited. And then, we are rushing to this desire for competition and other things, which is not fundamental to our being, and therefore, there is this condition of pseudomorphosis that she talks about. So, she says, and then that's the epistemological project that she invites us, freedom from the bonds of space and time to see clearly, which comes back to the temporal, you know, it was a crisis also of temporality, this disjointed time that you were talking about. So, very much critiquing this enlightenment, marching towards progress, linear marching towards progress, unmasking policies of enslavement. And she says, "The Martiniquan has failed because unaware of his real nature, he tries to lead a life that's not his own." And yeah, I already mentioned this. And there, she brings a beautiful metaphor that I enjoy also with my daughter talking about. She says, "It's the condition of a plant-human." And there, I think it's also inspiring for some ecological feminist movements today, but she says, "What is the Martiniquan? This desire, this rush, this race to become and assimilate is not our condition." And this is not to, and it's not to fix a geographic identity or go back in time to some prehistoric Martiniquan way of living, but it is very much a creative, speculative way of how do we understand our ways of being, unmasking the pseudomorphosis, and she says that always alive, very much trampled underfoot, but still alive, dead but reviving, the plant-free, silent and proud, and I think we have to again situate it in those times to say that she was trying to resist this epistemic assimilation to a Europe that they were fighting for freedom against and fighting for Europe against the Nazis. So, there was, precisely because of that double relation, they were able to also put a finger to totally detach, or not detach but dream a certain way of being that could not reproduce this violence, that could not participate in the violence, because yes, slavery has ended, but we continue to have even more violence, because massive poverty and hunger continued even much more after slavery until today in those regions.
Speaker 1 [00:23:05]: And there again, it's again to think with you how they thought about time is, when time is abolished, when the past, present and future are merged, when we live this unique state, comes the plenitude, which very much, even till today, like more recent writings on Black feminist poethics, where everything is related to everything, and plenitude is another special metaphor. Then, we can talk about freedom, when we have abolished this time, but [?? 00:23:35]. And I think this was a moment also for dreaming and playing and to go through the poethical project, and they were very much claiming poetry as filling the silences of scientific knowledge. Just checking the time, 15 minutes, okay. I might finish earlier then, yeah. So, she invites us to go to a cannibalistic aesthetic, because precisely, if Africans are seen as cannibalistic, we will reclaim that aesthetic. Because anyway, the world has gone mad. So, let's not talk about civilised and barbarians. We will speak about a cannibalistic aesthetic. It's an urgent time, and they were speaking in times which was extremely violent, similar to today, where ongoing genocides, killings, silences, wars, and she says, "Urgent time to dare to know oneself, to dare to confess to oneself what one is, to dare to ask oneself what one wants to be." And I can relate there to Nicholas's the haunted house. It's an urgent time for all of us to ask what ghosts and demons exist in our house. And that was a call she was making very much in those times. Science that is not just an enlightened order, clever mastery of facts, but the search for intimate knowledge of a secret reality revealed in the life force itself. This one, of course, because they had to camouflage their writings, she had to, that is my reading, we have to situate it, because then she refers to Leo Frobenius, this German anthropologist, and there was this reclaiming the so-called canons, because they had to, in order to publish, they had to show that they are actually saluting French and canon, canonical scholars. And as much as she was saluting, I think there was this reclaiming to say, actually, Frobenius, he has very much travelled all over Africa and written about all this, I think, sentiment of life. And there, she also says Frobenius deviated a little bit from other German philosophers in that time to say this was, we're not giving facts, but we're searching for this intimate knowledge that goes beyond boundaries of certain civilisations, but of human life force in general, these intimate knowledges. And there, she positions their writings as part of this, revealing these life forces where we don't separate the exterior and the interior. And there, more recently, Denise Ferreira da Silva and others, they also talk about, and she's much more a philosopher, not me, but within those debates, they say that there was always this separation of the interior and exterior in secularising, but she connects back selectively to that we cannot separate this interior-exterior, and it's not a backward return, but very much a consciousness where we must deploy these energies that have been locked up within us. And these energies are in relation to the violence of colonialism, and too bad for those who consider us as mere dreamers. And she says, "Martinique in poetry will be cannibalistic, or it will not be at all." And so, she claims this cannibalistic aesthetic, which they were very much using. And there, I would say, yeah, it was the stain, France's stain. She calls Martinique as France's Antillean stain, which is yet to enter, I would say, education in Europe till today, as I've been teaching in the Netherlands, and here, there's a long project to go. But she says, and here, the Antillean, the great grandson of a white coloniser and a slave Negress, millions of black hands across the clouds of world war will nevertheless rise up. So, she talks very much of the degrading forms of the modern wage system that stays with us till today. But nevertheless, without separating precisely because those houses of those demons and ghosts do have the great grandson of a white colonizer and the slave Negress, how do we move from this, because these demons and ghosts are indeed at the same, well, with multiple temporalities, plural temporalities.
Speaker 1 [00:28:15]: Now, we travel a little bit to the Dutch Empire and intellectual elites, coming to Leiden and other places, to study psychology. So, we have a mix of lawyers, psychiatrists, literary scholars, which didn't have centres of excellence like us, but I'm bringing them together today. And they very much were trained in psychiatry, and for me, that's fascinating, because if you're dealing with the demons and pasts, also what about these traumas, and what tools do we have, because it has to be interdisciplinary, but at the same time, these were very much trained, and of course, some of them would participate as leaders of independent Indonesia, but when they published in this magazine or a journal, it would be very much anonymous, because it was also banned. And again, Dutch was already occupied under the Nazis, but they were occupying Indonesia, so they were also writing under this double, resisting the colonised coloniser. And they published this Psychological Conflict, which was very much a psychological critique of colonialism, a profound belief, because colonial psychology and psychiatry was reproducing, and you could say they were the Frantz Fanons of Indonesia that are not yet so much in the canons and also in post-colonial studies. And they named these conditions that we can very much relate to today as well, within populism in psychiatric fascism, and how internalising, this belief had been internalised by the subjugated Indonesian population through a process of colonial hypnosis. So, I do believe these psychological metaphors are very much needed today all over the world, and not only in European Union, with the rise of populism, and again, seeing Nazism and colonialism and fascism and colonialism together allows us to put our fingers, as you see it also, I've just come back being in Bangalore and in India, and then you see these, and they were very much, even Sukarno, who later became the first prime minister of Indonesia, very much looks up to Hitler. And then, Benedict Anderson talks about this inverted telescope that he thinks that you're going away from Europe, and there you find Europe there, because Sukarno is very much saluting Hitler and building this future inspired and continuing that project. And then, yeah, in that sense, they're operating very much within the Dutch psychology, imperial discipline, while appropriating that education and terms to name the psychology of colonialism, which very much Suzanne Césaire and also Ambedkar were writing from different locations. And this colonial hypnosis creates a certain condition that you can say is ongoing, and I saw it also within the Dutch university, tying up to Indonesian universities, and Indonesians coming as visitors, and you see this reproduction of these conditions, the hypnosis. And they were basically provincializing Dutch colonial psychiatry. Okay, five more minutes. And inverting the anthropological gaze. If you can study us, and again, blurring this East and West, if you can study us, why are you not studying also the Brabant and the Rotterdammer who is so different from others? But that is not happening within the anthropology lens, which was used to justify colonialism. And they were saying this is a very subjective census that is being collected of the colonised populations in the name of building psychological theory, and publishing their own journals, and they said, we will actually reclaim medical, and you could say they were doing medical anthropology already back then without naming it, to say reclaim our own medical fate in our own hands. We don't need to go to the colonial psychologist to talk about our traumas. We will talk about the traumas you are giving us.
Speaker 1 [00:32:42]: So, well, yeah, there are all the questions of space and time, a plenitude but outside the fold of how we imagine space, theorising from untouchable spaces, very much contesting binaries, so shifting lived realities and not only slogans. Questions of time, time of slavery has not ended, not time of capitalism nor socialism, enslavement of mind, no return to old time or new time of freedom, wilful amnesia, time of linear progress abolished, contesting timelessness, and what consciousness annihilation of race and caste knowledge and power, unmasking lies of privileged, this is just a kind of summary of what I mentioned. And just an invitation to all of us of sensing from these shadows, stains and outside the fold of post-war EU, and this is my own struggles in education as an educator, what historical narratives in education system in EU on colonialism and fascism, access to education and higher arts, all these race, religion, caste, class, gender constellations, who is sitting here now with us, how many of us, I myself included, are not always representing, and we see how the violence of the university and access to education continues onto epistemic pluralities, institutional legacies, also the post-colonial studies, or continue to be blinded by certain canons and certain locations that also need constant challenging and critique, rather than just everyone jumping into the decolonial bandwagon. We need to also understand universities, and knowledges that entered universities were part of this violence. And of course, to deal with populism, these words are very useful, madness of partition, hypnosis, pseudomorphosis. But I will leave it at that. Thank you so much for listening.