We're home. Monster jet-lagged. Happy.
I figured out after the last post that the Hindu majority stuff is the rhetoric of Partition. The last thing the Brits did/first thing the new govt did was create the states of Pakistan (Muslim) and India (Hindu). It's like if the trail of tears just happened: mass displacement, mass killings. Government sanctioned mutual mass murder. It was a parting shot for the British, and while Ghandi was against it, the new governments were all for it: the nation-state needs an ideological other. The upshot is a lot of evil BS.
I'm home for about 4 days then I'm off to Puerto Rico with my family. I'll be gone for a week, then home for a day, and then school starts.
No, not crazy at all.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Not buying it
We're in Delhi.
I keep being told (by media and tour guides) that India's got an 85(ish)% Hindu majority. And yet, everywhere I look I see evidence to the contrary. I get the feeling it's a bit like claiming the US is a Christian country.
On the same note, I had no idea of the incredibly pervasive Islamic influence here. I know that Hyderabad and Delhi were Muslim kingdoms at different points (I think one King built stuff in both places) but still--even in Kolkata/Calcutta and Mumbai--lots of mestizaje. The north more so than the south.
One amusing thing about it: our guide today kept referring to the Muslim invaders like it was a recent thing: first ones were about a thousand years ago. We went to Qutb Minar, the first mosque in India. They tore down Hindu temples to build most of it, and while they destroyed a lot of the faces and bodies, a lot is still visible. So, you see these Hindu pillars inside a mosque, complete with Islamic script. It's a gov't monument now, noone uses it for worship--and apparently they had to cover (with a green metal cage) a bit showing Ganesha; people were praying there. And if you have Hindus praying at the site of a mosque, well. All hell could well break loose.
And I kept wondering about my skepticism about holding that particular grudge, especially given the comparisons I keep making to colonial Mexico, where I think calling the Spanish invaders makes total sense. It comes down to cultural politics: in Mexico the Spanish won hands down. To this day anything European is privileged: materially and culturally. In India, that's really not the case. Muslims are a minority, especially in terms of cultural capital. While the biggest monuments in Indian cities are Muslim and English (the historic Hindu stuff was trashedby the invading armies), cultural and religious hegemony belongs to the Hindus. Indigenous tribal people here are as dispossessed and marginalized here as they are in the Americas; only here, nobody ever talks about them.
I keep being told (by media and tour guides) that India's got an 85(ish)% Hindu majority. And yet, everywhere I look I see evidence to the contrary. I get the feeling it's a bit like claiming the US is a Christian country.
On the same note, I had no idea of the incredibly pervasive Islamic influence here. I know that Hyderabad and Delhi were Muslim kingdoms at different points (I think one King built stuff in both places) but still--even in Kolkata/Calcutta and Mumbai--lots of mestizaje. The north more so than the south.
One amusing thing about it: our guide today kept referring to the Muslim invaders like it was a recent thing: first ones were about a thousand years ago. We went to Qutb Minar, the first mosque in India. They tore down Hindu temples to build most of it, and while they destroyed a lot of the faces and bodies, a lot is still visible. So, you see these Hindu pillars inside a mosque, complete with Islamic script. It's a gov't monument now, noone uses it for worship--and apparently they had to cover (with a green metal cage) a bit showing Ganesha; people were praying there. And if you have Hindus praying at the site of a mosque, well. All hell could well break loose.
And I kept wondering about my skepticism about holding that particular grudge, especially given the comparisons I keep making to colonial Mexico, where I think calling the Spanish invaders makes total sense. It comes down to cultural politics: in Mexico the Spanish won hands down. To this day anything European is privileged: materially and culturally. In India, that's really not the case. Muslims are a minority, especially in terms of cultural capital. While the biggest monuments in Indian cities are Muslim and English (the historic Hindu stuff was trashedby the invading armies), cultural and religious hegemony belongs to the Hindus. Indigenous tribal people here are as dispossessed and marginalized here as they are in the Americas; only here, nobody ever talks about them.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Negotiations
I keep thinking about ideas and social justice--in particular about microcredit and the ways it makes me reassess the ways I've almost always thought about capitalism. My class identification's conflicted, but I've been largely at an intellectual impasse about it. At best I said: yup, I'm a contradiction. Doing: ok--give. But thinking through it--that was the hard part. Thinking through it. This whole visit's made me do that, indeed the entire reason we're here makes me think about globalization and capitalism in a way far more complex than: globalization=bad/local=good. But then, that's true of almost everything, when you get down to it. Binary oppositions foreclose any sort of complex analysis. And to be honest, I've never seriously pushed a critique of the easy critiques of globalization. Yes, many horrendous things have come out of it. That part seems easy. Further than that, though, I hadn't gone far.
I think one of the reasons that Yunnis's book (and by extension, the notion of microcredit and its larger implications) has stayed with me is the absolute practicality of the question it approaches: How do you help the people at the very bottom--the poorest people in any given capitalist society? In the academy, where Marxist/post-marxist thinking is most effective, the focus is on an analysis of capitalism, not the way to a socialist utopia. It's useful for analyzing how capitalism shapes how we think and understand the world, the means of cultural and material production and reproduction. The post in post-marxism comes in here: you can use these analytic tools to negotiate the system you are subjecting to critique. Marxism itself is often invoked to describe a economic/political system, and yet The Communist Manifesto is all about industrial capitalism. While I understand that the radical critique of any system that oppresses people often involves a divestment from that system, its a position that doesn't seem tenable to me. Capitalism, especially in its information based, globalized form, isn't going anywhere anytime soon-- in spite of the hopefulness of calling it "late capitalism." Complicating this are my observations being in a developing, third world country. There are some very very good things about modernization, that capitalism can, and has, brought about here: basic quality of life stuff. And yet, not for the poorest of the poor. The benefits are uneven--cruelly and fantastically so.
Ding's comment below has gotten me thinking again about negotiating class, or any other system of privilege (race, gender, sexuality) from below--how do you negotiate terms you didn't agree to and that don't benefit you from the get-go?
Obviously, I'm on the side of negotiations. The metaphors of war don't get you far. Chicanas are always already traitors--we come from a long line of vendidas, as Moraga would put it. The alternative is to negotiate:to do that, you have to learn the other side's language, the other side's rules. You become part of both sides, something new--classic new mestiza stuff.
I don't think, however, that anyone's used mestizaje, or a Chicana feminist methodology to think about how poor women might negotiate capitalism. As a model of transnational feminist consciousness yes, as a challenge to the canon, of course. But the jump from thinking to doing, that's where we need help. Poetry, art, culture, all of these offer a vision of change: but the doing--that still matters.
The thing is, you need to be in a position to negotiate in the first place.
I think one of the reasons that Yunnis's book (and by extension, the notion of microcredit and its larger implications) has stayed with me is the absolute practicality of the question it approaches: How do you help the people at the very bottom--the poorest people in any given capitalist society? In the academy, where Marxist/post-marxist thinking is most effective, the focus is on an analysis of capitalism, not the way to a socialist utopia. It's useful for analyzing how capitalism shapes how we think and understand the world, the means of cultural and material production and reproduction. The post in post-marxism comes in here: you can use these analytic tools to negotiate the system you are subjecting to critique. Marxism itself is often invoked to describe a economic/political system, and yet The Communist Manifesto is all about industrial capitalism. While I understand that the radical critique of any system that oppresses people often involves a divestment from that system, its a position that doesn't seem tenable to me. Capitalism, especially in its information based, globalized form, isn't going anywhere anytime soon-- in spite of the hopefulness of calling it "late capitalism." Complicating this are my observations being in a developing, third world country. There are some very very good things about modernization, that capitalism can, and has, brought about here: basic quality of life stuff. And yet, not for the poorest of the poor. The benefits are uneven--cruelly and fantastically so.
Ding's comment below has gotten me thinking again about negotiating class, or any other system of privilege (race, gender, sexuality) from below--how do you negotiate terms you didn't agree to and that don't benefit you from the get-go?
Obviously, I'm on the side of negotiations. The metaphors of war don't get you far. Chicanas are always already traitors--we come from a long line of vendidas, as Moraga would put it. The alternative is to negotiate:to do that, you have to learn the other side's language, the other side's rules. You become part of both sides, something new--classic new mestiza stuff.
I don't think, however, that anyone's used mestizaje, or a Chicana feminist methodology to think about how poor women might negotiate capitalism. As a model of transnational feminist consciousness yes, as a challenge to the canon, of course. But the jump from thinking to doing, that's where we need help. Poetry, art, culture, all of these offer a vision of change: but the doing--that still matters.
The thing is, you need to be in a position to negotiate in the first place.
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Felicidades to Dr. Stinky
I'm almost a week late. Still, Happy happy wedding wishes! Many felicitations. May your married life be full of all the best parts of hanging out with your sweetie.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Money! Money!
We're back from Kolkata. Indulged ourselves in a decadent and hideously expensive manner. Seriously. Sion had his first facial, and I spent hours at the spa and in the swimming pool. We drank lots, and bought lots of things in the market. Presents! And now, all I can think about is going home. We leave Hyderabad Saturday, then it's a day in Delhi, a day in Agra, back to Delhi, then home. Home. Home.
It's time. The housemates are all back, including my favorites, the Swede and his wife.
I'm reading Mohammed Yunnis's book, Banker to the Poor, and learning about microcredit. I had heard about it before from a student I used to talk to all the time (though she was never in any of my classes). Now of course, confronted with the materiality of serious poverty all the time, and my own relative wealth, I'm really thinking that I have to think about poverty, wealth, and capitalism from another angle, just to wrap my brain around it. Yunnis argues that capitalism doesn't have to be greedy, that it can be just as easily be driven by social justice; the entire logic of the Grameen bank is that there could be such a thing as a social-consciousness driven free market. It's a fascinating idea. That, and his emphasis on and insistence on working with communities of women.
I know. Those two paragraphs are at war with each other. What else is new?
It's time. The housemates are all back, including my favorites, the Swede and his wife.
I'm reading Mohammed Yunnis's book, Banker to the Poor, and learning about microcredit. I had heard about it before from a student I used to talk to all the time (though she was never in any of my classes). Now of course, confronted with the materiality of serious poverty all the time, and my own relative wealth, I'm really thinking that I have to think about poverty, wealth, and capitalism from another angle, just to wrap my brain around it. Yunnis argues that capitalism doesn't have to be greedy, that it can be just as easily be driven by social justice; the entire logic of the Grameen bank is that there could be such a thing as a social-consciousness driven free market. It's a fascinating idea. That, and his emphasis on and insistence on working with communities of women.
I know. Those two paragraphs are at war with each other. What else is new?
Friday, August 3, 2007
Kolkata for the weekend!
Huzzah! We're off for an exotic weekend in Kolkata. Yeah; fancy hotels and restaurants, real exotic. It's our anniversary so we're being more self-indulgent than usual. Everyone here says Calcutta--I wonder what people there say. I have to pack now! Being picked up in a little over an hour. I'll come back with stories and lots of pictures.
I've been quiet because I don't want to turn this blog into a bitch-fest. I was, in many ways, totally unprepared for just how much I detest being "the wife." I think everyone must. No wonder so many middle class women go quietly nuts. And me without some key files I need to work on major projects, so I'm reduced to small and new pieces of writing--really not my plan for the summer.
I'm happy when adventurizing, but surly midweek, what with all the waiting. But now, we're off!
I've been quiet because I don't want to turn this blog into a bitch-fest. I was, in many ways, totally unprepared for just how much I detest being "the wife." I think everyone must. No wonder so many middle class women go quietly nuts. And me without some key files I need to work on major projects, so I'm reduced to small and new pieces of writing--really not my plan for the summer.
I'm happy when adventurizing, but surly midweek, what with all the waiting. But now, we're off!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)