Subjects in Difference: Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, and Postcolonial Theory

This essay aims to rethink historical difference in light of Walter Benjamin’s formulation of mimesis and Frantz Fanon’s phenomenology of difference. Divided into three parts, the essay engages Dipesh Chakrabarty’s account of historical difference, considers how an understanding of mimesis might safeguard against some of the philosophical pitfalls within Chakrabarty’s formulation, and revisits Fanon for an explication of a theory of mimesis and difference that may be the grounds for a renewed understanding of historical difference. The essay makes a case for the relevance of Frankfurt School dialectics for postcolonial problematics

On Finitude: Life and Death Under Neoliberalism

Essay in contemporary Indian photography, for Fotofest 201

Desert Blooms

This essay considers the place of abstraction in documentary photography, a genre whose primary aesthetic-political commitment is usually assumed to be on the side of figuration, denotation, and facticity. Taking up photographer Fazal Sheikh's photographic series Desert Bloom, which records natural and human-made disturbances in the Naqab/Negev desert, the essay considers artistic abstraction in relation to other forms of economic, juridical, and political abstraction critical to settler colonialism in particular and capitalism more generally. How might abstraction be the very condition of politics? What might this imply for our understandings of documentary aesthetics

Humanity Adrift: Race, Materiality, and Allegory in Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men

This article aims for an account of materiality that helps apprehend race as a material reality while attending to its semiotic, aesthetic, and cultural signification. Through a close reading of Alfonso Cuarón's film, Children of Men (UK, 2006), the author argues that allegory is a figure for recasting the problematic of racial alterity as a materialist concern. Relying on Walter Benjamin's formulations on allegory as a privileged mode of representation under conditions of modernity, the author argues that alterity straddles the boundary between the corporeal and the ideational. Cuarón's film deploys certain cinematic strategies to represent difference: from disjunctures between sound and image and a cinematic obsession with lingering on “incidental” details that lends them allegorical significance to an extended chase sequence. The place of race and biopolitics in this film cannot be understood without examining how allegory produces meaning, and what saves allegory from a nihilistic surplus of meaning in the film is the figure of alterity, which in this film has become an allegorical emblem. The cinematic logic of this film, which stages racial and biopolitical issues as ones about visibility, suggests that alterity itself is what grounds the circulation of all the other signs. Allegory's claims are transhistorical, and when alterity is caught in its system of signs, it marks the transience of our own historical embeddedness, a double recognition that categories of difference regulating human organization and politics are as temporary and as transient as all historical artifacts. Alterity-as-biopolitics is also, however, a kind of traumatic sign that persists across history, and its meaning is often concealed. The article concludes with speculation about cinema's unique means of producing the truth about race

The Politics of Exposure: Truth After Post-Facts

This essay analyzes contemporary politics of truth across overlapping contexts: the predicament of whistleblowers, the proliferation of digital disinformation, the extractive imperatives of data economies, and the impossibility of exposing the truth when exposé becomes itself a game. The essay reads the recent cultural and political interest in exposure as a signpost for linking a diverse range of cultural and geopolitical phenomena: the rise of neoliberal financialization as well as surveillance capitalism, the biopolitical management of increasingly precarious workers, the displacement of populations. "Exposure" names a rationality, a biopolitical condition, a political strategy, a cultural-epistemic priority, and a collective mood

Paranoid Publics

This article takes up the insurrection in Washington DC, and the paranoid politics of QAnon. It analyzes the gamification of paranoia across QAnon and related paranoid publics, tracking such gamification as a political-economic demand generated by neoliberalism. Taking seriously Sigmund Freud's insight that delusional formations are attempts at recovery, this article reads QAnon as a part of a symptomatology of the social world

This Time with Feeling: Impunity and the Play of Fantasy in The Act of Killing

Through a psychoanalytic reading of Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing, this essay considers the role of fantasy in genocidal Cold War violence. Considering both Oppenheimer’s film and also Frantz Fanon’s clinical case studies as investigations into impunity, the essay analyzes fantasy’s place in global violence and in the psychology of impunity. How does The Act of Killing signal a crisis in the global distribution of affect and accountability? How do bodily symptoms crystallize the negativity that underwrites social relations? The essay deploys psychoanalysis as a form of social critique

Sacrificing Citizenship: On Muslims and Assimilation in a Neoliberal Frame

This article analyzes the discourse concerning the assimilation of Muslim minorities in the United States and suggests that calls for assimilation are solicitations for a form of self-renunciation and sacrifice. Yet such solicitations occur against the economic and political background of neoliberalism, in which all citizens are asked to make sacrifices for the sake of economic health. How does one read, then, the discourse of Muslim assimilation in light of the psychological, political, and economic realities of neoliberalism? The article explores the transformation of the so-called Jewish question into the contemporary concern with the “Muslim problem.” Drawing on Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s reflections on the affinities between capitalism and fascism (especially their reading of Odysseus), as well as Sigmund Freud’s reflections on narcissism and group psychology, the article analyzes the figure of the sacrificial victim in the context of neoliberalism’s authoritarian tendencies and argues that sacrificial figuration allows us to think past the polarizations (West/rest; Trump supporters/Muslims) of our contemporary historical moment

An analysis of different approaches to women empowerment: a case study of Pakistan

Women empowerment has attracted the attention of researchers as an active area of research since 1980s. It can be viewed as an ultimate end as well as a mean to achieve other development goals. The present study is an attempt to investigate how consciousness /sensitization of women about their rights, economic empowerment of women and women’s overall development can be helpful in achieving the goal of women’s empowerment. The study uses data for the period of 1996 to 2009 for Pakistan. Empirical results reveal that consciousness of women about their rights, economic empowerment of women and women’s overall development have positive and significant effect on women’s empowerment as measured by Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) index. Granger Causality Test confirms the existence of bi-directional causality between women’s overall development and women’s empowerment. A unidirectional causality exists between sensitization of women and women’s empowerment

Poverty, inflation and economic growth: empirical evidence from Pakistan

This study aims to investigate the role of economic growth and inflation in explaining the prevalence of poverty in Pakistan. ARDL bound testing approach to co-integration confirms the existence of long run relationship among the variables of poverty, economic growth, inflation, investment and trade openness over the period of 1972-2008. Empirical results show that economic growth and investment have negative and inflation has positive impact on poverty. The effect of trade openness on poverty is insignificant in this study. The short run analysis reveals that economic growth has negative and inflation has positive impact on poverty whereas the role of investment and trade openness in poverty reduction in short run is not significant.Poverty, Inflation, Economic Grovvth, Pakistan, Macroeconomic Policy, Welfare, Trade Openness