Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism: Making Place for Nationalism

This essay takes as its point of departure, the debate between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism in international normative theory. It expresses several dissatisfactions with this debate, criticizing its inattention to politics and history, its Eurocentrism, and the simplistic imageries of threat on which attitudes towards boundaries in the debate are premised. In attempting to remedy these problems, it recasts the figure of the subaltern that haunts this debate — hitherto imagined as a passive recipient of Western largesse — as an active agent struggling for emancipation, and contrasts the potentials of cosmopolitanism and communitarianism to function as vocabularies in which such struggles might be articulated. The chapter then turns to the writings of two proto-postcolonial thinkers — James Joyce and Rabindranath Tagore — who reject the conventional opposition between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism. Through a selective reading of their thought, it argues that rather than resolving the cosmopolitan/communitarian impasse, the tension between these normative worldviews running through their oeuvres, offers a protest sensibility that is better suited to the exigencies of subaltern struggle in the contemporary conjuncture

The Empire Writes Back (to Michael Ignatieff)

This article critiques the re-legitimisation of empire evident in recent writing by Michael Ignatieff. It begins by locating his work within the larger debate on empire emerging today. Focusing first on Ignatieff's more general comments on empire, it suggests that his defensive case for empire is misleading: it ignores the extent to which the circumstances allegedly necessitating `new' empire are themselves a consequence of older empire, and indeed older US empire. Focusing next on Ignatieff's largely consequentialist case for the 2003 attack on Iraq, it argues that the `success' of the imperial project — to the extent that this requires the cooperation of Iraqis — will depend crucially on the motives of the imperialists. Without engaging directly with Ignatieff's work, the final section addresses some of the questions that the foregoing critique may have raised. In particular, it examines critically the claim that empires are legitimised by the public goods they provide

Review: 'Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics' by Naisargi N. Dave.

The queer movement in India has been adept at documenting itself. A succession of anthologies compiled by leading voices from within the movement has made available to a wider reading public the lives and longings of many of its diverse participants (Sukthankar 1999; Bhattacharyya and Bose 2005; Narrain and Bhan 2006; Narrain and Gupta 2011). Naisargi Dave’s book on queer activism in India offers something new and valuable. A book-length account of the queer political landscape with a focus on lesbian activism, this study is distinctive both for its longer temporal view and for the productively ambivalent positionality of its author. Based in Toronto where she teaches anthropology, Dave presents herself in her writing as both insider and outsider, as both participant in the groups and movements she writes about and critical observer of their everyday activity; sometimes she is neither, inhabiting the liminal position of the diasporic Indian. “Insiders” will read with amusement of her self-avowedly clumsy discovery that “lesbian sexual encounters were there to be had, often in the most unexpected of places” (50), but will also be enlightened by this nuanced cultural history of their own subjectivities. “Outsiders” will find in this book a model of an intimate ethnography by someone who does not pretend to belong

Global Homocapitalism

In this article I ask why leading institutions of global capitalism have begun to take activist stances against homophobia, and why they have done so now. Central to these initiatives is a common-sense understanding of homophobia as a cultural disposition that might be disincentivized through the deployment of economic carrots (the promise of growth) and sticks (the withdrawal of capital). Revisiting debates over recognition and redistribution politics, I argue that viewing homophobia as ‘merely cultural’ enables international financial institutions (IFIs) to obscure the material conditions that incubate homophobic moral panics, and their own culpability in co-producing those conditions. Positioning themselves as external to the problem they seek to alleviate, IFIs are able to cast themselves as progressive forces in a greater moral struggle at precisely the historical moment in which austerity and capitalist crisis threaten to bring them into ever greater disrepute. Through a critical survey of recent IFI initiatives on homophobia, I attempt to delineate the emerging contours of what I call ‘global homocapitalism’