Seagull Books congratulates Sumanta Banerjee on being honoured with the Pandit Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar Gold Plaque by the Asiatic Society. A distinguished cultural historian and journalist, Sumanta Banerjee’s research on popular culture, particularly of the colonial period, has been highly influential in contemporary scholarship. Seagull is proud to have published three of his seminal works:
The Parlour and the Streets analyses the development of the various forms of folk culture of the the urban poor in the new metropolis of nineteenth-century Calcutta.
Dangerous Outcast traces how, from the peripheries of precolonial Bengali rural society, prostitutes came to dominate the centrestage in Calcutta, the capital of British India.
Taking its title from Karl Marx’s description of religion, Logic in a Popular Form explores the hidden logic behind popular religions in nineteenth-century Bengal. https://www.seagullbooks.org/logic-in-a-popular-form/
A friend is in India and I am vicariously planning tours that would take more time than anyone has…
I recently – well 3 years ago – read the journals of Henrietta Clive, the daughter-in-law of Lord Clive, and she, in 1800, just after Tipu’s defeat, sets out from Madras with 60 elephants and hundreds of retainers, intrepidly “on her own”!! This means she was on her own, of course, sans man – it was only that she was leaving her insufferable colonel husband at home doing colonial admin: she takes her two daughters and their governess with her. Seems her trip was a series of stops at military encampments all across South India – there is a map, a trail so to speak – Madras-Vellore-Mysore-Coimbatoor-Trichy-Tanjore-Tranquebar-Pondicherry-Madras – and she basically is visiting various battle sites and occupation/guard stations to collect up loads and loads of tribute and booty after Tipu’s defeat. This includes getting his gold encrusted slippers which are now on display in Powys Castle, rural Wales, along with more Indian loot than is in the whole of the Victoria&Albert Museum in London (and that’s a lot of looting). The narrative is called “Birds of Passage” – the kids and the governess make it plural – and my copy was an edition printed in Serampore – it was absolutely fascinating, romantic, ghastly, and revealing of much detail that is not available in the usual Chris Bayly type histories. Car-crash plunder nevertheless. Would make a great trip, historical investigation – reparations implied.
“The ethnic diversity of India has never been a problem – for tgroughout her history sge has been able to absorb different races and impose on them one common culture and tradition” (Bose 1935 [1948]: 10-11)
(first India edn 1948, for Netaji Publishing Society, Thacker, Spink and Co)
there are many gems to be found in the life and death of Siraj. The Gardens by his tomb are most peaceful, and here I read and honoured the sharp wit of the power behind the throne.
The 1821 Galland version of the Thousand and One Nights. “slightly abridged” with eight full colour drawings by Joan Kiddel-Monroe. 1965 reprint, Dent & Sons.
Got this book when I was 8 years old, poured over the stories and illustrations (yes, exoticist before the rush). Am not sure what an 8 year old was meant to make of the instruction to enjoy the stories over a cup of strong Arabic coffee, but my dad did get me ready for my early morning paper round with some of his percolated finest tar-like brew.
Unfortunately, and unforgivably, in this edition Scheherazade is basically written out of the whole thing, which made it all the more a challenge to work out what these two paragraphs really meant:
“The stories are connected one with the other by the fact that they were said to have been related night after night by a wife under sentence of death. She cleverly managed to stop at daybreak at such an exciting point in the story that her husband, the Sultan, was compelled by curiosity to let her live another day so as to hear the end of her tale. This went on for the thousand nights, when eventually the wife was pardoned and her life saved by her own wit and imagination. The text of this selection from the ‘Arabian Nights’ is that of Galland, 1821, slightly abridged and altered.”
“a methodological issue … to forestall one of the most notorious and inveterate stereotypes of Hegel discussion, namely the thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula. It is certain that there are plenty of triads in Hegel, beginning with the Trinity (or ending with it?). It is also certain that he himself is complicitous in the propagation of this formula, and at least partly responsible for its vulgarization. It is certainly a useful teaching device as well as a convenient expository framework: and is thereby called upon to play its role in that transformation of Hegel s thought into a systematic philosophy—into Hegelianism, if you will—on which we will have occasion to insist over and over again in the present essay. For even if the tripartite rhythm happens to do justice to this or that local Hegelian insight, it still reifies that insight in advance and translates its language into purely systemic terms. (Indeed, for contemporary philosophy it is precisely this sequence which is identifiable as being teleological, so that today—or perhaps from Freud on—we tend to reverse this order and to affirm that it is the antithesis which produces the thesis in the first place, in order to generate the ideological illusion of the synthesis as such” (Jameson 2010: 18)
” the standard tripartite language, whose final term, “synthesis,” presupposes a resolution in this movement which is not at all consistent with Hegel’s thinking; positing a kind of success or progress in externalization and internalization which scarcely does justice to Hegel’s deeper appreciation of failure and contradiction and turns the historical movement of the dialectic into a banal and uplifting saga of inevitable progress” (Jameson 2010: 20)
Are we living in the greatest ever era of incineration?
Add your favourite book burning quotes here. Bradbury’s F◦451, Maugham’s Razors Edge, Umberto Eco’s name of the Rose, here and here and here…
But mainly I am keen to find stats on how many books are burnt after non-delivery by providers like amazon etc.
The history of book burning is inflammatory of course. Still surprises me when I ask who has burned a book (and how each page seems to be read as the book is consumed). The controversial historical memory of celebrity book burnings is storied enough – Libraries, Spanish Inquisition, Opernplatz, Bibles, The Koran, Rushdie, etc – But today, seems to me more books than ever are put to the torch. An anecdote from John J about living in the building where Progress Press had its offices back in the winter of 1990: in a fuel shortage, the building heating was stoked by feeding the Collected Works of V.I.Lenin into the furnace (sacrilege). Yet, this is minor compared to what I suspect is going on today with the flame put to the written word by the brutality of delivery services and their doublespeak – “energy recovery” (see article excerpt below).
This from a Katie Tarasov @KATIETARASOV article in January this year from the pretty mainstream source that is CNBC:
“Amazon told CNBC, “No items are sent to landfill. We are working towards a goal of zero product disposal and our priority is to resell, donate to charitable organizations or recycle any unsold products. As a last resort, we will send items to energy recovery, but we’re working hard to drive the number of times this happens down to zero.””
““Energy recovery” often means it’s burned. In the words of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it’s “the conversion of nonrecyclable waste materials into usable heat, electricity, or fuel through a variety of processes, including combustion, gasification, pyrolization, anaerobic digestion and landfill gas recovery.””
““The thing that really shocked me honestly, was the items that the computer system tells you to destroy,” said Shay Machen, a seasonal worker at an Amazon returns center in Mississippi. “I had a book come back, it was a children’s book, and the customer said that it was smashed upon arrival and bent, and it was not. And no matter what I put into the system, it said destroy the item. And that was kind of heart wrenching.””
“Disposal of returns is a widespread practice in e-commerce. Luxury retail brands like Burberry have been criticized in the past for burning millions in unsold merchandise to protect their brands, a practice Burberry told CNBC it stopped in 2018. A Danish TV station reported H&M burned 60 tons of new and unsold clothes since 2013, a claim that H&M told CNBC was a misunderstanding. An H&M spokesperson said, “The products media referred to had been affected by mold or did not comply with our chemical restrictions.” Similar claims have hit Coach, Urban Outfitters, Michael Kors, Victoria’s Secret, and J.C. Penney.”
““It’s the easiest thing to do and sometimes certain brands do it because, you know, they want to protect their brand and they don’t want lesser valued items out there on the market,” Moore said.””
‘The bookbinding trade in the city of London employs very many young girls from 14 to 15 years old, and that under indentures which prescribe certain definite hours of labour. Nevertheless, they work in the last week of each month until 10,11,12, or 1 o’clock at night, along with the older labourers, in a very mixed company. “The masters tempt then by extra pay and supper,” which they eat in neighbouring public houses. The great debauchery thus produced among these ‘young immortals’ (“Children’s Employment Comm. V.Rept P.44. n.191) is compensated by the fact that among the rest many Bibles and religious books are bound by them’ (Marx 1867/1890/1990: 477n)
A detail from Yasmine Seale’s annotation of pages of Edward Lane’s 1838 translation of 1001 Nights – Sleepless 2022, Mirage 2022, Of the Sea 2022 – seen in the British Museum March 2023.
—
Book Fetish (unfinished volumes from the crypt)
“If it were half as big, would you read it then?” I ripped my copy in two and it was still scary.
“This is not a bible” – yet major religions have one book at the source, what trouble it is for those who don’t read it.
The presentation copy of Marx’s Capital photographed here – Penguin edition – was used in over 20 years of teaching, in seven cities. I’ve ruined two more since.
Translation issues – appearance as form – erscheinungsform – contains multitudes, but the anger is leached out in bland connotations lost.
Viral commodities – metabolic and contagious.
Tattooing as interpretation, aggravation, language arabesques that might bug most people.
The book as artefact or souvenir. Always souvenir.
Other books are for burning, the pages incandescent in the night by the sea. I did not burn this, but a cheap novel – remembering though J-J telling me of his apartment in Moscow housing the Progress Press printshop and fuelling the furnace with unsold volumes to heat the building in the cold. Of course, undelivered amazon books are also incinerated by the delivery office. Especially Ray Bradbury novels.
JH.
Khalil Rabah – Dictionary Work – 1997 – the visible entry is Palestine (he was born in Jerusalem in 1961). Seen in the BM March 2023.
From a time before the city had a five word name (K.F.K.A.C), photogenic proof of the rupee version of Rumour in the window, re-released after 27 years…
On Time. My teacher and friend Don Miller passed away last month. We had published his book “Time and Time Again” in 2022. His memorial is on the 19th of October. Makes me think of time once more.
For now, just a note then – a ramble inspired by Don…. Seems hard to fit it in since ‘all my time is given’ over to teaching to make it a good lecture and try to generate discussion, the rest of my time… pace Derrida and the king – well, how can all my time be in one place and then there be some extra time? – that time, too, the media companies want to colonise to make my kids do school at home online, wants me to do my shopping via TIKI or Lazada online, to stay in touch with the Govt and the Embassy and my family – and whats app, FB, Google classroom, google scholar, Web of science, Yalo, ziki, insta, Messenger, Dasha, Sascha, Prancer, Heuy, Duey, and Louie, rights, law and Bentham etc. Much more on this deserves study. The idea that we are ‘on’ 24/7, that our work and our entertainment merge into the one platform, that the working day has expanded and there is no ‘union’ or organisation of workers to question this invasion of time by the time corporations, that make their profits from us looking at ads while we cower at home under virus lockdown – not that I am opposed to the very successful response in Vietnam, but I look at the rules in India and England and think there is a little bit of glee on the part of the authorities for locking up people in their individual cells rather than having them swarm to protest outside hospitals or hotels.
There are plenty of time management course to go on, but who has any free time to do that?
There are studies of time use and social media, but it seems each time I look at that research, google then asks me to take a survey.
I got software to track my time – how many hours on this, how many on that – but I do not always have time to write down what I am doing. I mean, besides also logging health, shopping online etc etc.
And running out of time to post this onto the course which officially ends in two minutes, but about which I will work over the next few hours as well. Time might be a great topic for an assignment for them courses.
As promised, here are two pages of the pdf review (a three page review – the third page does not show) of Miller, Time and Time Again:
Time and Time Again, written by Don Miller Reviewerd in: KronoScope Author: Filip Vostal Online Publication Date: 11 Jul 2022 Title: Time and Time Again, written by Don MillerArticle Type: Book ReviewDOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/15685241-20221510 Language: English Pages: 64–66In: KronoScopeIn: Volume 22: Issue 1
Tzanelli disturbs the normative premises on which much tourism and hospitality research are predicated to make space for imaginations whereby the represented can manage their representations, and destination design is co-developed with more just digital technologies.
— Dorina-Maria Buda, Nottingham Trend Business School, UK
Tzanelli goes beyond the co-ordinates of contemporary cultural theory to contextualise a new “atmospheric” ethos in tourism markets. All of this grounded in a Marxist appreciation of the relation of space to labour and, perhaps the most innovative focus of the book, on the notion of worldmaking borrowed from Hollinshead and deployed here to organise the appearances (another mode of spirit, etymologically justified in Marx’s terminology) of tourism in case studies. As cases, however, these studies are saturated in an astute appreciation of theoretical confluence, from Derridean spectres and hospitality to Hardt and Negri’s Empire, to Boltanski and Chiapello, Žižek, Sewell, that guy Hutnyk and the classics – Hegel, Nietzsche, Arendt.
The book narrates a necessary movement from crisis to justice, designing places for care and reviving a new hospitality in an always open-ended inquiry. It will allow you to travel to your own conclusions, taking or leaving the many stops on the way as possible dwelling-places or refreshment. Theoretical tourism has rarely been done with such vigour. A fabulous, fun, and flagrantly phantasmagoric read.
— John Hutnyk, Ton Duc Thang University, Vietnam.
About the Author
Rodanthi Tzanelli is Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director of the Mobilities Research Area in the Bauman Institute, University of Leeds, UK.
I was asked yesterday how I might explain the attraction of current right wing ideas and autocracy…:
>> How do you explain the attraction of current right wing and autocracy?
Crikey – the billionaire dollar question. I think the collapse of any viable organised left and the near blanket media assault on people’s lives that dangles impossible fantasies of luxury in front of them as if it were all simply a matter of working hard. Neither Elon Musk or Taylor Swift really work, and the so-called left has failed to write widely or even conceive of the need to talk about the workers who actually worked to make those glamorous lifestyles look so shiny – who made the propaganda pictures that make them look glam? Who sweats in the photo labs and the digital processing pens. We need to write in a way that shows the devil-fetish at work. Ahh for that Taussig devil character commodity book to be read more often. If we had time to study.
How did “study” get such a bad reputation so that nowadays it cannot even be mentioned as a positive except as a kind of chore, and it cannot have content (are you studying Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Adorno, Spivak?). For most of the time (I am thinking of popular films) study just gets presented as a period of sacrifice/time away from the fun, something to do for the parents, for the career, for the certificate/exam/ego affirmation of passing. Never for sheer curiosity or the drive to find out if you can think something new – I lament the loss of what the kids had before they went to school and ‘learnt’ that study is boring, hard, slow and to be done before fun. That is the path, I think, the leads us towards the right, but I am not the one who can articulate it as clearly as it needs be, so as to show that the elevation of empty ego affirmation leads inexorably to the deification of the empty leadership – the autocrat – business guru – maverick above us all – the wizard of Oz – and there’s no Toto to pull back the curtain and bark.
However much dreams might come true over the rainbow, today we really are not in Kansas anymore Dorothy, and the White Witch is never coming to shine our ruby shoes.
‘On 21 January 1936, a prospectus presenting the Cahiers de Contre-Attaque was published; this leaflet announced the forthcoming issue of a Cahier devoted to Nietzsche with the following text:‘
“It appears that the only people who are allowed to invoke Nietzsche are those who subject him to despicable betrayals. It seems that one of the most revolutionary human voices has spoken in vain.
Must this violent anti-Christian, this scorner of the idiocies of patriotism, remain — for having made all demands and all acts of pride his own — for ever the victim of Philistines and fools who follow the herd, the victim of universal banality?
We do not believe in the Philistines’ future. The proud, all-shattering voice of Nietzsche remains for us the herald of the coming moral Revolution, the voice of he who was in touch with the Earth… The world that will be born tomorrow will be the world heralded by Nietzsche, the world that will call time on all moral servitude.”
Apologies for writing what is not even a think piece, it is a bit raw: but I first got to know Don Miller at a series of astonishing seminars on metaphor he ran in the evenings in the 4th floor passageway between the blocks of the University of Melbourne Medley building and he soon became a mentor and guide. I was not even a student of that uni then. I joined his classes though. Later he supported the first journal I started – Criticism, Heresy and Interpretation (C.H.A.I.), and introduced me to Spivak, Nandy, Kakar, Visvanathan and Rushdie. His big book The Reason of Metaphor: A Study in Politics (Donald F Miller, Sage 1992) was the published version of a hot seminar held weekly on Thursdays in a small room within the politics department. All the members of that seminar went on to be writers, but I mostly remember laughter, and encouragement. Like others in that seminar, I got a start in teaching as a tutor and then lecturer on his courses (that I had already taken as an undergraduate): Indian Politics and Society, Politics and Art. His India was one of debate and interpretation, debate over interpretation – his earlier book Pervasive politics : a study of the Indian district was formative as a style of research. His questions for Politics and Art demanded ‘think pieces’ not essays (kudos to the student who answered all eight questions in one thunk). He introduced Godard, Surrealism, Freud, Foucault, Derrida, Said, Ou-li-po, . But it was rambling discursive lunches in the university house, in Jimmy Watsons bistro, or in his his book filled Carlton terrace house, that remain most vivid (despite there always being a couple of bottles of red). I also recall the time when Don forced a fellow academic to make a formal apology for some slight and prepared me for when that apology came – just say ‘thank you, I think its appropriate’ and walk away. Don visited me in India when I was there too long, and visited in a dream two nights ago, metaphors for how important he was are not yet available to me. I am happy to have published what I think was his second last book, blurbed on this blog: Time and Time Again, and I went through his autobiography in manuscript, The First 90 Years: Memoirs of a Melbourne Boy (I’ve not seen the book, so there is that to come). As the footy finals begin, his A Will to Win stays with me. I simply cannot fully imagine what his family are feeling but my thoughts are with them – metaphorically and metaphorically [actually].
Here is his text for the TCS special on Global Knowledge – only because I cannot see a digital copy of The Reason of Metaphor (yet). See Claire Reddleman’s commentary on that book on Into Ruins.
Seen in the wild in India//purchased with rupees by a close friend from a close friend who runs a bookstall – I notice the cover has with a bloomsbury banner and ever so slightly different layout to “the same” cover that graced the volume 27 years ago.
“The International Union of Left Publishers expresses solidarity with the Toko Buku Rakyat bookstore that suffered a raid by officers looking for The Communist Manifesto.
The International Union of Left Publishers issued a statement of condemnation after a left book store in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia was raided by the Malaysian Ministry of Home Affairs who seized several books related to Marxism, and one written by the owner of the establishment. The International Union of Left Publishers is a network of 40 publishing houses from Indonesia to Chile.
On Friday, August 18th, 2023, a raid happened at Toko Buku Rakyat (People Bookstore) in Wisma Central, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Four enforcement officers from Malaysian Ministry of Home Affairs wearing vests stating “Penguatkuasa KDN”, came unannounced to look for the book “The Communist Manifesto” and then seized a book about Marx and education, and also a book of poetry written by Benz Ali, owner of the bookstore.
The International Union of Left Publishers condemns this raid as authoritarian and anti-democratic, not only because it perpetuates a long-standing campaign against any Marxist discourse/thinking, but also because it violates the basic right of Malaysian people to read and speak freely.
This act betrays the hope of Malaysian people that the new government under Anwar Ibrahim will be more democratic, fair, intellectually and culturally open than all the previous eras. How can a public intellectual like Ibrahim—who is known to like to quote Shakespeare, Raniri, and other names—let a seizure of books happen under his reign?
We demand that the Malaysian government guarantee the basic right of Malaysian people to read freely, and the safety of booksellers and publishers across Malaysia.”
After 27 years… The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation. Publication Day! This is the 30 year anniversary edition (well, 27 years) finally out in a plausible rupee price – R.574. There are no changes from the 1996 version (would be impossible to update) though of course budget/charity tourism has changed/remains. Pretty amazing to see it out, though this version/price is only for South Asia.
If you have not had a chance to get with this big (coffee table) book – even if sometimes the aesthetic overrides the political – there is no better way to get your history and context. Among MANY MANY gems, the work of Reece Auguiste is luminous:
‘A general paralysis seems to govern the Left’s political imagination in the 80s, and that is particularly pronounced in the area of cultural production. Having said that, we must also acknowledge that the crisis of the British film industry predates the advent of Thatcherism. It appears that Thatcherite politics is merely hammering home the last few nails into the coffin. Those vital considerations aside, we still do not have a film policy on a national level that is capable of creating a vibrant and viable film and media industry; of promoting a film culture which has at its centre new and challenging visual productions, together with the necessary finances to ensure its continuation. A reformulated and viable film policy with central and local government providing capital investment would ensure full employment for film and video artists whose immense talent for the art of cinema often dies a horrendous death. Any national film policy, however, cannot afford to erase from its agenda the issues of race and representation; thus black independents have, with relentless persistence, to deliberate and ensure the inscription of race on any film policy agenda in Britain. In this cataclysmic field of multiple contradictions, of political and cultural uncertainties, which is partly determined by economic monetarism, where precisely are black independents located and how can we best arrest the tide?’ (Auguiste and Black Audio Film Collective. 1989/2007: 163)
Auguiste, Reece and Black Audio Film Collective. 1989/2007. Black Independents and Third Cinema: The British Context.’ In, Eshun, Kodwo and Anjelika Sagar (Eds), The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982-1998. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 162-167
(word to the wise guy – its on zed lib – but a digital version won’t have the same feel as the pleasures of handling this lush and fat landscape tome)
2722 years ago my first book was typeset and laid out in the days before electronics – well, an electric typesetting machine was plugged into a wall, but no digital file was produced. Nevertheless, I had crossed out the digital rights clause in my contract with Zed so I own this [2023 update, though since Bloomsbury acquired zed books they seem to be selling an ebook version, which is a bit weird because I don’t have a digital copy and as the electronic rights clause was removed in the contract I signed, I own those rights – anyone want to get in touch?]. At last some kind anonymous soul has bootlegged it and set digital copy free on the nets, though its a large scanned file and the bibliography was left off (I’ve made a rough scan of the biblio but that too is a large file). Nevertheless, notwithstanding, and such like phrasings, the book is still one of which I am proud, if nothing else for trialling a way of citing tourist backpacker-informants, for its stuff on photography and maps and for the reviews it got (and indeed keeps getting discussed, for example on films – see diekmann2012) and especially for its critique of charity and what charity is for. In the context of do-gooder well-meaning hypocrisy, the effort of charity workers serves wider interests as well as their own, and only marginally any individuals they help – who would be better helped in better funded state-run facilities if the funds extracted through business-as-usual colonialism were, you know, made as reparations for the several hundred years of colonial plunder. Ah well, the critique stands up, the charity industry sadly thrives, second only perhaps to weapons in terms of so-called development, writing books does not yet always change the world as much as you’d like (and no, I did not ever think a book would single-handedly stop Mother Theresa, but…).
Graeber, David. 2023. Pirate Enlightenment, Or the real Libertalia. London: Allen Lane.
In this entertaining book, the world of early eighteenth century Madagascar piracy, and the women they liaised with, turns out to have been the font of “a great historical achievement” in that “public assemblies”, with “a decentralized and participatory system of self-governance” (91), were brought into the pirate settlements and the subsequent Betsimisaraka “confederation”. This utopian scenario involves a fabled egalitarian, talkative (endless meetings – “The Great Kabary” 104), enlightened society beyond the reach of the Royal Navy and the East India Company – a “confederation” (87), that others call a kingdom, or, as Graeber calls it at one point, “nation” (100). This is where, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, as many as a thousand pirates settled, intermarrying with sexually “adventurous” local women keen on trade (52), holding shared views of “hostility to the slave trade” (96) and with aspirations for sending their offspring for education in England (98), and much else besides.
This is a rattling good yarn, hedged often enough with noting that the sources are thin, that the main text, A General History of the Pyrates by Captain Charles Johnson – we are told three times – may or may not have been written by Daniel Defoe (xxiv, 12, 23) and in many ways is “intentionally provocative” (88). Graeber’s text is provocative, that is, and the provocations are many: that the relationships, and indeed the lives pirates were able to live on the islands, were effectively managed by local women, and with the arrival of the pirates, these women had been “liberated from earlier sexual restrictions” (54) – they were largely “sequestered” by Muslim or Jewish immigrants (52). As well, the salons in which such ideas were discussed in Europe were run by women we have also now forgotten (xii, 148, perhaps the books on Lady Blessington that clutter some shelves might counteract this). Provocations are to be welcomed of course – though how welcome the pirates were in Madagascar, at one point facing an uprising which saw most murdered in 1697, is not clear. There might be other reasons to wonder at the motivations.
Madagascar is massively interesting though, and there is much in this book on magic charms, myth, even some psychoanalysis, so it is a rewarding read. Yet, as Graeber mentions Defoe, as noted, several times, it’s a bit of a worry that he ignores the part of Robinson Crusoe that takes place on Madagascar – a rape and a massacre by Crusoe’s crewmates (see a forthcoming article in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing). Graeber stresses the ways the import of pirate democracy was brought into the settlements (this story is fodder for TV series like Black Sails,Crossbones, unmentioned here), and on this, his ethnographic work of some decades past, and wide reading of relevant texts, is harnessed to offer a great speculative discussion that must complicate any simplistic idea of piratical politics. Unfortunately, much of the existing scholarship on the history of Madagascar seems to suffer – we are told – from the dreaded “strain” of Marxist analysis (the “high water mark” 88) and an obsession with elites and the encroachment of the “system of trade” (88). These are problems that “corresponded to a period when Madagascar, like so many postcolonial societies, was itself experimenting with state socialism” (88). While it is hard to credit that only the work that departs from this focus is “superb” (88-89) it is nevertheless a very good point to stress that “political elite … primarily in the business of accumulating wealth and power” do tend to erase variety with the “intellectual currents” of “popular movements”. That however was the point of the initial critique of postcoloniality, used by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1993), for example, to refer to refer to the betrayal of the anti-colonial struggles by new elites claiming the mantle of decolonization in a “hoax” that reintroduced neo-colonial ways. Alas, this use of the term postcoloniality has also been erased by those who take it as a temporal historical noun rather than presenting a diagnosis of disappointment in what might have been.
Which is generally how this book ends up – a sense of disappointment that doubles as an imaginative rewriting of the script for a reboot of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, now set in the Indian Ocean, with Occupy Wall Street stylings. Indeed, although this is provocation, the echoes of Occupy explicitly ring the closing bell of the book, as we discover “99 percent of all this has been lost to us” (141). Graeber means the conversations of the general assemblies of the Madagascar revolution “have, of course, been entirely lost to us” (146), but an imaginative ethnographic reconstruction of “pirate utopias discussed in the salons of Paris under Louis XV” (149) should be a welcome idea – indeed, “its hard to imagine they weren’t [discussed], since at that time, they were being discussed virtually every-place else” (149).
Pirate-affiliated “Besimisarka women dominating markets, and forming commercial alliances with wealthy men to act as their commercial agents” so that these men – pirates remember, unsavoury scurvy lot – with “substantial amounts of tradable commodities” (68) could unload their plunder, should indeed provoke us to think of the origins of the global trade system. It might be worth sampling some more of the “scholarship” on Defoe/Johnson. Graeber ignores any engagement with this, but Defoe had at one point endorsed the idea that England should trade directly with the pirates and that the notorious Captain Avery should be offered a deal. Was Defoe involved in conversations ahead of his times or not? – he had apparently “suggested the possibility of offering” Avery “a pardon in exchange for a portion of his wealth in the Review of 18 October 1707” (Novak 2003: 581). Novak also notes that in a South Sea Company pamphlet (before it spectacularly failed in 1722), Defoe had written in favour of trade with the pirates settled in Madagascar (2003, 569). This should not surprise us at all, Defoe was an advocate, as Alan Downie notes, of colonial expansion “through trade, not through force of arms” (Downie 1983, 74). Yet he disapproves of pirates and illicit trade too (Downie 1983, 82n). He “is not the prophet of progress he is so often painted” and was “primarily concerned with the preservation of England’s present advantages” (Downie 1983, 78). Downie warns against distorting Defoe’s message (Downie 1983, 83). Underneath the piratical posturing in Johnson/Defoe, there is ultimately a commitment to business-as-usual that we might today register as neo-colonial today – we should ask about how anyone gets involved in this – women, pirates, their children, the intellectuals in the salons…
Defoe is against war and for trade. A trade underpinned by violence that wins for England 300 years of EIC and imperial dominance starting, more or less, with Drake and Raleigh writing their accounts as benign memoirs (Hakluyt [1589] 1962). Siraj Ahmed makes the case in his book The Stillbirth of Capital, that “commerce between English pirates and the East India Company […] occurred at the very origins of the British Empire” and via a deft allusion, finds that “Defoe had a much more critical understanding of ‘capitalism’ than we have attributed to him” (Ahmed 2012, 56).
It may be a “strain”, but the erasure of the antecedents of capitalism are found lying at the heart of capital to this day, as set out already by Marx as “the old dodge of every conqueror who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has robbed them of” ([1867] 1990, 507). Plunder laundered through trade domesticates theft, making it difficult to conceive of the lost conversation here as being more than capital’s delusion about the propriety of its actions. Th pirates were not wrong to resist the British Navy, the opportunism of trade as a way out of a tight spot makes sense, the context is complicated, magic plays its part – yet, what it leaves us with today is continued duplicity and double-dealing. Seems to me that the “confederation” is alive and well, and we do well to be provoked to rethink who was involved.
Ahmed, Siraj. 2012. The Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment Writing and Colonial India. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Downie, J. Alan. 1983. “Defoe, Imperialism, and the Travel Books Reconsidered.” The Yearbook of English Studies, Colonial and Imperial Themes 13:66-83.
Fanon, Frantz. (1961) 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press
Hakluyt, Richard. (1589)1962. Voyages (8 Volumes) Edited by John Masefield. London: Dent.
Marx, Karl. (1867) 1990. Capital: Critique of Political Economy. MEGA II(9). Hamburg: Dietz.
Novak, Maximillian E. 2003. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. “Situations of Value (Interview with Pheng Cheah).” Australian Feminist Studies, 17:141-162.
Most interesting post of the day, and by far, has been this attached article on Bhagat Singh and anarchism, shifting to socialism. A few points fist though. I find this the most urgent imperative support for the importance of using a good library. This can never be overstated. Get into the stacks, and learn learn learn (as Godard says Lenin said, though this popular Russian slogan appears as study study study*)
[*”By any means we have to set ourselves a task to refresh our government staff: first, to study, second, to study, and third, to study, — and then check it so that our science would not remain a dead character or a fashionable phrase (which, truth be told, happens often with us), so that the science really would penetrate flesh and bone, become a part of everyday life at the fullest and for real”.
Better Less, but Better; Pravda, №49 March 4, 1923; also: Compendium of Works (in Russian), vol. 45, page 391.
«Нам надо во что бы то ни стало поставить себе задачей для обновления нашего госаппарата: во-первых — учиться, во-вторых — учиться и в-третьих — учиться и затем проверять то, чтобы наука у нас не оставалась мертвой буквой или модной фразой (а это, нечего греха таить, у нас особенно часто бывает), чтобы наука действительно входила в плоть и кровь, превращалась в составной элемент быта вполне и настоящим образом».
Лучше меньше, да лучше, газета «Правда, №49, 4 марта 1923 года. Также: ПСС, т. 45, стр. 391]
The Manifesto translation we have now seems pretty good, though I like the very first one in English in 1850, I am sure you can guess, because the first sentence, ”ein gespenst geht um in Europa“, which we have now as ”a spectre is haunting Europe” was first translated, and published by the chartist and slavery abolitionist, Helen MacFarlane. Her rendering of that first line has it as the immortal, and child terrifying: ”A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe”! Gotta love it.
Macfarlane though married a vicar and died young.
but it is probably well worth exploring her life and writing
Crikey, would you have paid 35 grand (GBP actual price ‘realised’ in 2017) for just parts one and two of the original Robinson – this was missing the third part. Bargain at half the price (probably get a decent boat across in Hull for that): https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6089432
In the updated 1844 edition of the Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin offers his view on political systems (as indeed many do about the acephalous societies of South America – Clastres, even Lévi-Strauss) but here, well, not even ‘of its time’ is an excuse for this foolery – cheap shots at indigenous Australians and Maori notwithstanding, the structured racist-species-ism is built in:
‘The perfect equality among the individuals composing the Fuegian tribes, must for a long time retard their civilization. As we see those animals, whose instinct compels them to live in society and obey a chief, are most capable of improvement, so is with the races of mankind. Whether we look at it as a cause or a consequence, the more civilized always have the most artificial governments. For instance, the inhabitants of Otaheite, who, when first discovered, were governed by hereditary kings, had arrived at afar higher grade than another branch of the same people, the New Zealanders, – who, although benefited by being compelled to turn their attention to agriculture, were republicans in the most absolute sense. In Tierra del Fuego, until some chief shall arise with power sufficient to secure any acquired advantage, such as the domesticated animals, it seems scarcely possible that the political state of the country can be improved. At present, even a piece of cloth given to one is torn into shreds and distributed; and no one individual becomes richer than another. On the other hand, it is difficult to understand how a chief can arise dU there is property of some sort by which he might manifest his superiority and increase his power. I believe, in this extreme part of South America, man exists in a lower state of improvement than in any other part of the world. … The Australian, in the simplicity of the arts of life, comes nearest the Fuegian: he can, however, boast of his boomerang, his spear and throwing-stick, his method of climbing trees, of tracking animals, and of hunting’ (Darwin 1844: 241)
Have this in my hand, having helped translate a part of it, cannot recommend it more highly. The full Đường Cách Mệnh trans will follow next year, also with Leftword. Only the first third of that essay is here, but lots of other important pieces. See Leftword for copies.
Trinketization 