"There Is Fascism in the Air Around the World": On Postcolonial Responsibility

• In Event: South Asians in/and America: Engaging Solidarities, Specificities, and Intersections in Educational Research in Troubled Times

Abstract

Objectives
Arundhati Ray’s insight on the global rise of fascism(s) frames my estranged and postcolonial engagement with contemporary and Indian political life. As a first-generation daughter of diasporic parents, who are ‘midnight’s children,’ (Rushdie, 1981), I was encouraged to ‘stay out’ of engagement with Indian political life while ‘pledging allegiance’ to my parents’ cultural commitments to India, particularly West Bengal. In this paper, I combine autoethnography and political philosophy to illuminate the paradoxical position of anti-nationalist yet pro motherland stance that characterizes the critical capacities or what I term, following De Bois, “desi consciousness” of diasporic Indians living elsewhere. Neither belonging but overly-attached, diasporic subjects are both fervent and reluctant citizens when engaging politically in Indian affairs.

Theoretical Framework
It is from this position of dislocation that the writings of Gayatri Spivak (2013) and Arundhati Ray (2019), both Bengali-Indian, thinkers, and scholars, come to capture the postcolonial imaginary of my political formation and teaching with students. In my presentation I discuss what Hannah Arendt terms, “worldly” aspects of their writing. For Arendt (1968) the world is not “the people who inhabit it.” Instead, “the world lies between people, and this in-between—much more than (as is often thought) men or even man” (p. 4). The world(s) that lie in-between people is cause for social and political conflict as it breeds fear and misunderstanding, Arendt finds.

Modes of Inquiry/Data sources
In this worldly space, I apprehend the literary writings of South Asian feminist scholars who engage social hatreds that breed fascisms in our time. Literature as discussed differently by both Gayatri Spivak (2002) and Arundhati Ray (2018a, 2018b) is best positioned to address the surreal yet deadly real violent resurgence of fascism arising in India and the world today. Through the literary speculation we might move beyond nationalisms and ethnocentrisms to create a global and postcolonial framework by which to make connections between past and present histories violence that are propelling the rise of global fascism.

Arguments
As predicted by Arjun Appadurai (2007) in his study of communal violence articulated in his book Fear of small numbers, globalization leading to an erosion of borders and nationalism is turned on the other. This re-partitioning of peoples is evidenced in mass scenes of displacement arousing a tide of violence against migrant and minoritized groups on a global scale. To speak out and act in this violence requires a postcolonial fictional imaginary, one which acknowledges the limits and failures of decolonization projects, towards imagining a border-free world and future ‘fit for human habitation’ (Arendt, 1968).

Significance
Placing these diasporic South Asian Indian writers and political philosophers in conversation, I put forth a vision of postcolonial imaginary in what Lyndsey Stonebridge (2001) describes as the relentless search for a style and enactment of responsive and responsible political speech one that “can capture the complexities of this radically new kind of human condition,” and intervene in new forms of partition, of social violence, mass displacement, and dehumanization.

Author

• Aparna Rita Mishra Tarc, York University