Imagining Community: The Question of Nationalism PDF

6 Imagining Community: The Question of Nationalism A s we have seen, the encounter with feminism urges postcolonialism to produce a more critical and self-reflexive account of cultural nationalism. In this chap- ter, we will consider some grounds for a pos...

6 Imagining Community: The Question of Nationalism A s we have seen, the encounter with feminism urges postcolonialism to produce a more critical and self-reflexive account of cultural nationalism. In this chap- ter, we will consider some grounds for a postcolonial defence of the anti-colonial nation. It is generally acknowledged—even by the most ‘cosmopolitan’ postcolonial critics—that national- ism has been an important feature of decolonisation struggles in the third world. Thus, for all his reservations about cultural particularism, Said concedes that: Along with armed resistance in places as diverse as nineteenth- century Algeria, Ireland and Indonesia, there also went con- siderable efforts in cultural resistance almost everywhere, the assertions of nationalist identities, and, in the political realm, the creation of associations and parties whose common goal was self-determination and national independence (Said 1993, p. xii). Accordingly, postcolonial critics recognise that any ade- quate account of the colonial encounter requires a theoretical and historical engagement with the issue of Asian and Afri- can nationalisms. And in this regard, a number of questions 102  IMAGINING COMMUNITY present themselves: are these insurgent nationalisms purely or simply reactions against the fact of colonial dominance? Is the idea of the ‘nation’ germane to the cultural topography of the third world, or is anti-colonial nationalism a foreign and ‘derivative’ discourse? And, finally, is it possible to rec- oncile the often-aggressive particularism of Asian and African nation-States with the late twentieth century dream of interna- tionalism and globalisation? Good and Bad Nationalisms In seeking to negotiate the complex implications arising from ‘the nationalism question’, postcolonial studies is forced to make an intervention into a vexed discourse. So while Benedict Anderson famously argues that ‘nation-ness is the most uni- versally legitimate value in the political life of our times’ (Anderson 1991, p. 3), at the same time, and paradoxically, competing or ‘separatist’ appeals for nationhood are gener- ally regarded as symptoms of political illegitimacy. It would appear, then, that while some nations are ‘good’ and progres- sive, others are ‘bad’ and reactionary. In his illuminating essay, ‘Nationalisms against the State’, David Lloyd attributes the persistence of this chronic distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, or ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’, nationalisms to a deeper con- tradiction that has always occupied the troubled heart of the discourses surrounding nationalism (Lloyd 1993a). The selec- tive and current bias of Western anti-nationalism, he main- tains, emerges out of a historically deep-seated metropolitan antipathy toward anti-colonial movements in the third world. Thus—in response to the threat of decolonisation move- ments—liberalism has been unable to adjudicate between, on the one hand, the world historical claims of Western nation- alism, and, on the other, the specifically anti-Western and oppositional development of cultural nationalism in the ‘third world’. Western anti-nationalism, Lloyd suggests, has a history in imperialist thought which postcolonialism cannot afford to ignore. What, then, are the conditions under which nationalism 103  POSTCOLONIAL THEORY has obtained the theoretical endorsement, and hostility, of Western scholars and critics? For many theorists, the unquestionable legitimacy of nationalism accrues from its labour on behalf of modernity. Writers like Ernst Gellner and Benedict Anderson, in partic- ular, defend nationalism as the only form of political organ- isation which is appropriate to the social and intellectual condition of the modern world. Gellner attributes the emer- gence of nationalism to the epochal ‘shift’ from pre-industrial to industrial economies, and argues that, as forms of social organisation become more complex and intricate they come to require a more homogenous and cooperative workforce and polity. Thus, industrial society produces the economic condi- tions for national consciousness—which it consolidates politi- cally through the supervisory agency of the nation-State. In Gellner’s words:... mobility, communication, size due to refinement of spe- cialisation—imposed by the industrial order by its thirst for affluence and growth, obliges its social units to be large and yet culturally homogenous. The maintenance of this kind of ines- capable high (because literate) culture requires protection from a state... (Gellner 1983, p. 141). In a similar vein, Anderson argues that the birth of nation- alism in Western Europe is coeval with the dwindling—if not the death—of religious modes of thought. The rationalist secularism of the Enlightenment brings with it the devasta- tion of old systems of belief and sociality embedded in the chimeral mysteries of divine kingship, religious community, sacred languages and cosmological consciousness. National- ism, Anderson tells us, fills up the existential void left in the wake of paradise: ‘What was then required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning... few things were (are) better suited to this end than an idea of the nation’ (Anderson 1991, p. 11). The nation, then, is the product of a radically secular and modern imagination, invoked through the cultural forms of the novel and newspaper 104  IMAGINING COMMUNITY in the godless expanse of what Anderson calls ‘homogenous empty time’. Gellner’s and Anderson’s accounts of the teleological neces- sity—indeed, inevitability—of the modern nation-State reveal a Hegelian bias. As is well known, Hegel posits the story of ‘mankind’ as the story of our progression from the darkness of nature into the light of ‘History’. The prose of ‘History’, in turn, delivers the narrative of modernity. ‘History’ is the vehi- cle of rational self-consciousness through which the incom- plete human spirit progressively acquires an improved sense of its own totality. In other words, ‘History’ generates the ratio- nal process through which the alienated essence of the individ- ual citizen acquires a cohesive and reparative identity in the common life of the nation. Thus, for Hegel, the overlapping narratives of ‘Reason’, ‘Modernity’ and ‘History’ reveal their proper ‘end’—the final truth of their significance—in the con- solidated form of the nation-State (see Hegel 1975). Hegel’s monumental and influential defence of civil soci- ety furnishes the ideology of nation-ness and, concomitantly, points to the process through which the nation-State has been rendered as the most canonical form of political organisation and identity in the contemporary world. In these post-Hegelian times, ‘productive’ international conversations and transac- tions can only be conducted between nations and their real or potential representatives. So, also, individual subjectivity is most readily and conveniently spoken through the idiom of citizenship. And yet—to return to an earlier point in this discussion—despite general assumptions about the universal desirability of nation-ness, how is it that liberal thinkers remain hostile to the growing cacophony of national desires in some parts of Asia, Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe? Why is it so widely acknowledged that these ‘new’ nationalisms are retrogressive, narcissistic, transgressive, uncontainable? In answer to some of these questions, Lloyd directs atten- tion to a fundamental ambivalence which marks even the most enthusiastic (Western) celebrations of ‘progressive’ nationalism. In the same works which highlight its irreducible moder- nity, nationalism is also, and paradoxically, postulated as the 105  POSTCOLONIAL THEORY catalyst for ‘pre-modern’ or ‘atavistic’ sentiments (Lloyd 1993a). While it is acknowledged that the historical momen- tum toward the nation-State fulfils the Hegelian expectation of a successively expansive and rational civil society, writers such as Gellner and Anderson concede that the poetics of ‘national belonging’ are often underscored by ‘irrational’, ‘superstitious’ and ‘folkloric’ beliefs or practices. How else can we explain the alacrity with which citizens are willing both to kill and to die for their nations? Tom Nairn’s work offers an instructive response to the self- doubt which troubles most liberal engagements with nation- alist discourse. It is Nairn’s contention that the genetic code of all nationalisms is simultaneously inscribed by the con- tradictory signals of what he calls ‘health’ and ‘morbidity’: ‘forms of “irrationality” (prejudice, sentimentality, collective egoism, aggression etc.) stain the lot of them’ (Nairn 1977, pp. 347–8). If the rhetoric of national development secures a forward-looking vision, the corresponding—and equally pow- erful—rhetoric of national attachment invokes the latent ener- gies of custom and tradition. Thus, nationalism, figured like the two-faced Roman god Janus, or like Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’, is riven by the paradox that it encourages societies to: propel themselves forward to a certain sort of goal (indus- trialisation, prosperity, equality with other peoples etc.) by a certain sort of regression—by looking inwards, drawing more deeply upon their indigenous resources, resurrecting past folk- heroes and myths about themselves and so on (Nairn 1977, p. 348). Notably, however, rather than simply condemning the atavis- tic underpinnings of nationalism, Nairn reads the nostalgic yearnings of nationhood as compensatory—as an attempt to mitigate the onerous burden of ‘progress’: ‘Thus does nation- alism stand over the passage to modernity, for human soci- ety. As human kind is forced through its strait doorway, it must look desperately back into the past, to gather strength 106  IMAGINING COMMUNITY wherever it can be found for the ordeal of development’ (1977, p. 348–9). Nairn’s analysis offers a vital understanding of nationalism’s structural vulnerability—of its intrinsically unstable, self-decon- structing discourse. While embodying the idea of universal progress and modernity characteristic of the European Enlight- enment, nationalism—it would appear—also incorporates the conditions for an internal critique of its own foundational modernity. It is thus both ‘good’ and ‘bad’, both normalising and rebellious:... the substance of nationalism as such is always morally, politically, humanly ambiguous. This is why moralising per- spectives on the phenomenon always fail, whether they praise or berate it. They will simply seize on one face or another of the creature, and will not admit there is a common head conjoining them (1977, p. 348). Of course, as Nairn recognises, the ideology of modernity is unlikely to concede the dangerous hybridity of its favourite child. And it is at this point in his argument that we can begin to formulate a postcolonial understanding of the impulse underpin- ning Western anti-nationalism. In the light of Nairn’s analysis, could we, for instance, diagnose metropolitan anti-nationalism as an attempt to purge European nationalism of its own ata- vism, and in so doing, to project ‘regressive’ nationalisms else- where? Indeed, much Western anti-nationalism is informed by the assumption that the progressive history of the nation swerves dangerously off course in its anti-colonial manifestation, and that relatedly cultural nationalism tragically distorts the founda- tional modernity of nation-ness. Eric Hobsbawm’s reflections on contemporary nationalisms argue just such a case:... the characteristic nationalist movements of the late twen- tieth century are essentially negative, or rather divisive... [They are mostly] rejections of modern modes of political organisation, both national and supranational. Time and again they seem to be reactions of weakness and fear, attempts to 107  POSTCOLONIAL THEORY erect barricades to keep at bay the forces of the modern world (Hobsbawm 1990; cited in Lloyd 1993a, p. 2). Hobsbawm’s critique of inaccurate or deluded late twenti- eth century nationalisms is chronologically inclusive of anti- colonial struggles in Asia and Africa. And in this regard, his insistence on the erroneously anti-modern nature of these insurgent nationalisms carries within it the echo of an earlier Hegelian perception of the ‘lack’ characterising the ancient cultures of the ‘East’. Hegel’s philosophy of history notori- ously conveys the notion that civilisation (and modernity) travels West. In this scheme of things, the non-West is con- signed to the nebulous prehistory of civilisation and, thereby, of the completed and proper nation-State. Thus, nationalism outside the West can only ever be premature and partial—a threat to the enlightened principles of the liberal state and, thereby, symptomatic of a failed or ‘incomplete’ modernity (see Hegel 1910; Butler 1977, pp. 40–64). Nothing in the preceding discussion is meant to condone the horrific violence justified in the name of nationalism. East or West, we are now aware of the xenophobia, racism and loathing which attends the rhetoric of particularism. Nation- alism has become the popular pretext for contemporary dis- quisitions of intolerance, separating Croatians and Serbians, Greeks and Macedonians, Estonians and Russians, Slovaks and Czechs, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Israelis and Palestin- ians, Hindus and Muslims. And while we have been focussing primarily on the Western/liberal squeamishness about non- Western nationalisms, some of the most compelling recent cri- tiques of nationalist ideology have emerged out of distinctly postcolonial quarters. In particular—as we have seen—Said’s Culture and Imperialism stands out for its relentless disavowal of the ‘third world’s’ post-imperial regression into combative and dissonant forms of nativism. It is Said’s contention that in their desperate assertions of civilisational alterity, postcolonial nations submit all too eas- ily to a defiant and puerile rejection of imperial cultures. The result is a form of reactionary politics, whose will-to-difference 108  IMAGINING COMMUNITY is articulated through the procedures of what Nietzche has called ressentiment and Adorno, after him, theorised as ‘nega- tive dialectics’. In other words, enterprises such as Senghor’s négritude, the Rastafarian movement, Hindu nationalism and Yeats’ occultism are each, according to Said, limited by an essentially ‘negative’ and defensive apprehension of their own society and, relatedly, of ‘civilised’ European modernity (Said 1993, p. 275). For Said, this project is ultimately self-defeating as it merely reiterates the binary oppositions and hierarchies of colonial discourse. Thus, Yeats’ mysticism, his nostalgic revival of Celtic myths, his recalcitrant fantasies of old Ireland are already underscored by the jaundiced colonial cognition of Irish backwardness and racial difference. To accept nativ- ism, in other words:... is to accept the consequences of imperialism, the racial, reli- gious, and political divisions imposed by imperialism itself. To leave the historical world for the metaphysics of essences like négritude, Irishness, Islam or Catholicism is to abandon history for essentialisations that have the power to turn human beings against each other (Said 1993, p. 276). Said’s irate critique of overheated nativism is predicated upon his own overarching cosmopolitanism. He holds the view that nationalism—especially in its anti-colonial manifes- tation—is both a necessary and now entirely obsolete evil. If nationalism fuels the oppositional energies of decolonisation struggles, the accomplishment of postcolonial independence should sound the death knoll for fanatical nation-making. History requires the graceful withering away of all nation- States. However, while this vision may be, in itself, pre- eminently desirable, Said’s argument is inclined to capitulate to the liberal perception of anti-colonial ‘nativism’ as the only remaining obstacle to the democratic utopia of free and fair internationalism. A more just analysis demands that we first reconsider the discursive conditions which colour the some- what paranoid antipathy toward the bogey of ‘nativism’. In this context, we need to pay renewed attention to Seamus Deane’s claim that insofar as colonial and imperial nations 109  POSTCOLONIAL THEORY characteristically universalise themselves, ‘they regard any insurgency against them as necessarily provincial’ (Deane 1990, p. 9). While anti-colonial insurgency may very often, as Said points out, seek its deliverance in a defiant provincialism, it is equally true that the charge of ‘nativism’ is all too readily invoked to pronounce the illegitimacy of insurgency. Nativ- ism or atavism constitute, as we have seen, the indispensable and convenient Other to the arrogant discourse of modernity. This deceptively neat opposition between positive or modern and negative or non-modern nationalisms renders all local, plu- ral and recalcitrant varieties of nationalism as inevitably inad- equate and subordinate. Lloyd’s comments on Irish national movements are, once again, startlingly apposite: In the writings of nationalism we can observe, as it were, the anxieties of canon formation, since negation largely takes place through the judgement that a given cultural form is either too marginal to be representative or, in terms that recapitulate those of imperialism itself, a primitive manifestation in need of development or cultivation (Lloyd 1993b, p. 5). Furthermore, it is important to recognise that forms of nationalism which refuse the singular content of moder- nity are not necessarily all designed to turn human beings against each other. Mercifully there is still a world of differ- ence between Yeats’ occultism and the Taliban militia’s fanati- cal edict against female literacy in wartorn Afghanistan. And modernity itself, far from being simply a benefit, can also be read, as Nairn reasons, as an ‘ordeal’, which demands the pal- liative energies of so-called ‘atavistic’ enterprises. Midnight’s Children: The Politics of Nationhood From another perspective, the postcolonial attachment to nationalism is informed by the historical apprehension that the condition of Asian and African ‘postcoloniality’ has been mediated and accomplished through the discourses and structures of nation-ness. Thus, the project of becoming 110  IMAGINING COMMUNITY postcolonial—of arriving into a decisive moment after colo- nialism—has usually been commemorated and legitimated through the foundation of independent nation-States. So, also, nationalism has supplied the revolutionary vocabulary for various decolonisation struggles, and it has long been acknowledged as the political vector through which dispa- rate anti-colonial movements acquire a cohesive revolution- ary shape and form. Or, to put this differently, through its focus on a common enemy, nationalism elicits and integrates the randomly distributed energies of miscellaneous popular movements. Thus, for example, Indian nationalism, as Ranajit Guha writes, achieves its entitlement through the systematic mobilisation, regulation, disciplining and harnessing of ‘subal- tern’ energy (Guha 1992). In another context, Fanon similarly foregrounds nation- alism’s capacity to distil a shared experience of dominance. Nationalism, Fanon argues, responds to the violence of colonialism by augmenting a vertical solidarity between the peasantry, workers, capitalists, feudal landowners and the bourgeoisie elite. Moreover, this consolidated counteroffensive serves another end—it revolutionises the most retrograde and moribund aspects of the colonised society: ‘This people that has lost its birthright, that is used to living in the narrow circle of feuds and rivalries, will now proceed in an atmosphere of solemnity to cleanse and purify the face of the nation as it appears in the various localities’ (Fanon 1990, p. 105). Although Fanon’s writings maintain a deep ambivalence toward the political desirability of an entrenched and central- ised postcolonial nation-State, he remains unequivocally com- mitted to the therapeutic necessity of anti-colonial national agitation. While nationalism comes under suspicion as the only legitimate end of decolonisation, it is nevertheless postulated as the principal remedial means whereby the colonised culture overcomes the psychological damage of colonial racism. Thus, in The Wretched of the Earth Fanon privileges nationalism for its capacity to heal the historical wounds inflicted by the ‘Manichean’ structure of colonial culture which confines the colonised to a liminal, barely human existence. In this context, 111  POSTCOLONIAL THEORY nationalism responds to the urgent task of rehumanisation, of regaining an Edenic wholeness. It becomes a process of reterritorialisation and repossession which replaces the ‘two- fold citizenship’ of colonial culture with a radically unified counter-culture. By challenging the fallacious racial priority of the coloniser, the native, Fanon tells us, discovers the coura- geous idiom of equality: ‘For if, in fact, my life is worth as much as the settler’s, his glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into stone. I am no longer on tenterhooks in his presence; in fact, I don’t give a damn for him’ (Fanon 1990, p. 35). In his extensive writings on swaraj—or self-rule—in India, Gandhi defends the nation- alist project in similar terms for its incitement to abhaya, or fearlessness. So also, Ngugi, Cabral and Mboya, among oth- ers, have variously extolled the recuperative benefits of anti- colonial nationalisms within Africa. Writers like Benita Parry add a further dimension to the defence of anti-colonial nationalism by arguing that the mem- ory of anti-colonial nationalisms in Asia and Africa might help to politicise the abstract discursivity of some postcolonial theory. Parry maintains that the ideologically correct censur- ing of ‘nativist’ resistance is tantamount to a rewriting of the anti-colonial archive. Given its poststructuralist inheritance, recent postcolonial critique tends to favour those varieties of counter-hegemonic anti-colonialisms which subvert rather than reverse the chronic oppositions of colonial discourse. This theoretical bias—fully developed in some of Homi Bhabha’s work—seeks evidence for the dispersed and dislocated subjec- tivity of the colonised which, we are told, defies containment within colonialism’s ideological apparatus. Within this reason- ing, the native insurgent is shown to confound the logic of colonial domination through a refusal to occupy his/her desig- nated subject position within colonialism’s discursive cartog- raphy. In fact, for a writer like Bhabha, the slippery colonised subject is intrinsically unassimilable within the ideological boundaries of Fanon’s Manichean colonial city. Without dis- counting the transgressive availability of such polysemic anti- colonial subjectivities, in deference to a sense of realpolitik 112  IMAGINING COMMUNITY we still need to listen carefully to, for example, Fanon’s cat- egorical delineation of a situated, monolithic and combative national identity. And, as Parry argues, in order to do justice to the politics elaborated by anti-colonial revolutionaries like Fanon, ‘it is surely necessary to refrain from a sanctimonious reproof of modes of writing resistance which do not conform to contemporary theoretical rules about discursive radicalism’ (Parry 1994, p. 179). It may well be true that nativism fails ultimately to divest itself of the hierarchical divisions which inform the colonial relationship. Nevertheless, anti-colonial counter-narratives, as Parry insists: did challenge, subvert and undermine the ruling ideologies, and nowhere more so than in overthrowing the hierarchy of colo- niser/colonised, the speech and stance of the colonised refusing a position of subjugation and dispensing with the terms of the coloniser’s definitions (1994, p. 176). Even if nationalism is theoretically ‘outmoded’, it still consti- tutes the—albeit forgotten—revolutionary archive of contem- porary postcoloniality. A Derivative Discourse? The energies of the anti-colonial nationalisms under review are, as we have seen, fuelled by an indomitable will-to-difference. In its intensely recuperative mode, national consciousness refuses the universalising geography of empire, and names its insurgent cultural alterity through the nation—as ‘Indian’, ‘Kenyan’, ‘Algerian’ etcetera. And yet herein lies the paradox at the heart of anti-colonial nationalism. It is generally agreed that nation-ness and nationalism are European inventions which came into existence toward the end of the eighteenth century. Anderson, among others, persuasively argues that this newly contrived European nation-ness immediately acquired a ‘modular’ character which rendered it capable of dissemina- tion and transplantation in a variety of disparate terrains. In his words, ‘The “nation” proved an invention on which it was 113  POSTCOLONIAL THEORY impossible to secure a patent. It became available for pirat- ing by widely different, and sometimes unexpected, hands’ (Anderson 1991, p. 67). By consigning all subsequent nationalisms to a typology of ‘piracy’, Anderson refuses to recognise the possibility of alter- native, variant and different nationalisms. In this reading all ‘post-European’ nationalisms are altogether divested of cre- ativity. They are, at best, surreptitious and vaguely unlawful enterprises posing or masquerading as the real thing. Of course, Anderson’s pessimistic insistence on the homo- geneity of all nationalisms can be seen as severely limited and open to contestation. Nevertheless, as Partha Chatterjee’s sensi- tive reading of anti-colonial nationalisms reveals, the terms of Anderson’s analysis do vitiate the imagining of nation-ness in colonies like India (Chatterjee 1993a). And so it is that the proj- ect of Indian nation-making is plagued by anxieties of imitative- ness, by the apprehension that Indian nationalism is just a poor copy or derivation of European post-Enlightenment discourse. There is a general consensus among liberal historians that the formative lessons of nationalism were literally acquired in the colonial classroom through the teaching and transmis- sion of European national histories. Anderson contends that the vast network of colonial educational apparatuses vari- ously enabled Vietnamese children to absorb the revolution- ary thought of Enlightenment philosophes, Indian children to coopt the principles of the Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution, and Congolese children to discover the energies which underscored Belgium’s independence struggle against Holland (Anderson 1991, p. 118). In a similar vein the histo- rian Percival Spear claims the achievements of Indian nation- alism for Europe. In an account which reads very much like Anderson’s description of the secular ‘dawn’ of European nationalism, Spear maintains that Westernisation/moder- nity forges its way through the mist of pre-modern religios- ity, replacing old gods with the new sentiments of nationalism (Spear 1990, p. 166). In this way, then, the literature of the rulers hoists itself on its own petard by communicating to its subject audience the values of civil liberties and constitutional 114  IMAGINING COMMUNITY self-government. No one, Spear tells us, ‘could be in contact with Englishmen at that time for long or read Shakespeare (prescribed reading in the colleges) without catching the infec- tion of nationalism’ (1990, p. 166). Spear’s historiography corroborates the view that anti-colonial nationalism remains trapped within the structures of thought from which it seeks to differentiate itself—that, in short, it takes Europe to invent the language of decolonisation. So, also, Anderson claims that: The nineteenth-century colonial state... dialectically engen- dered the grammar of the nationalisms that eventually arose to combat it. Indeed one might go so far as to say that the state imagined its local adversaries, as in an ominous prophetic dream, well before they came into existence (Anderson 1991, p. xiv). Plagued by such anxieties of derivativeness, anti-colonial nationalists were doubly troubled by the knowledge that colo- nialism was itself a type of nationalism. In other words, the problem was not just that the lessons of anti-colonial nation- alisms were taught paradoxically by the (colonial) oppressor, but rather that the rapacious territorial energies of nineteenth- century colonialism were themselves fuelled by the ideology of nineteenth-century nationalism. Imperialism, as earlier writers in the Marxist tradition were well aware, is simply the aggres- sive face of European nationalism. After postcolonialism, the idea of imperialism has almost exclusively come to imply the processes and consequences which accompanied the historical domination of the ‘third world’ by the ‘first’, with the ‘third world’ designated as the proper object of imperialist histories. Thus, most recent studies of ‘imperialism’ tend to foreground its impact upon the economy, culture and politics of formerly imperialised nations. Yet, writers such as Lenin, Bukharin and Hilferding understood imperialism not as the relationship between coloniser and colony, but rather as a relationship of antagonism and rivalry between the ruling elite in competi- tive European nation-States (see Brewer 1980; Jameson 1990). The consequent scramble for markets and territories resulted in what Anderson calls the birth of ‘official nationalism’—an 115  POSTCOLONIAL THEORY enterprise which combined dynasticism and nation-ness to expand or stretch ‘the short, tight skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire’ (Anderson 1991, p. 86). On a similar note, David Cannadine’s detailed study, ‘The British Monarchy, c. 1820–1977’ (Cannadine 1983), suggests that the rituals of monarchism were reinvented between 1877 and 1914 in order to produce self-consciously the British nation as empire. Similar trends in Germany, Austria and Russia deployed the rhetoric of dynastic aggrandisement to instanti- ate the symbiosis of nationalism and imperialism (Cannadine 1983, p. 121). In this regard, the crisis of imitativeness within anti-colonial nationalism assumes existential proportions. For its problem is not simply, as Chatterjee puts it, to produce ‘a different discourse, yet one that is dominated by another’ (Chatterjee 1993a, p. 42), rather it has to consider that, ‘it is, mutatis mutandis, a copy of that by which it felt itself to be oppressed’ (Deane 1990, p. 8). In this regard, we need also to recognise that if national- ism permeates the expansionist politics of empire, it is equally constitutive of imperialist ideology, of the logic which com- pounds the crude rhetoric of la mission civilisatrice. This point is compellingly elucidated in Tzvetan Todorov’s monumental analysis of Enlightenment thought (Todorov 1993). Todorov discerns the incipience of colonial thinking in the debate between nationalism and cosmopolitanism which obsessed thinkers as diverse as Montesquieu, Cloots and Maurras. Montesquieu famously retained an exemplary and clear com- mitment to the ethics of an esprit général, whereby the claims of the ‘citizen’ were to remain secondary to those of the ‘man’, and those of the world were automatically to supersede those of the nation. Other lesser thinkers resolved the conflict between home and the world through an insidiously Kantian sleight of hand: the interests of a particular country were defensible insofar as these interests were universalisable, namely, if they could be postulated as standing for the benefit of the entire universe. Hence, Cloots defends the promotion of French interests by arguing that there is no article in the Declaration of Rights 116  IMAGINING COMMUNITY which does not apply to all men of all climes (see Todorov 1993, p. 189). In Maurras we find a similar sophistry: ‘It is a doctrinal truth, in a philosophy very remote from daily life, that the fatherland is in our day the most complete and the most coherent manifestation of humanity...’ (cited in Todorov, 1993, p. 190). Ironically, this reasoning is unapolo- getically exhumed in Julia Kristeva’s strange book, Nations Without Nationalism (1993). While Kristeva begins soundly enough with a lament about particularism, her argument gradually builds up to the conclusion that the French nation transcends the pitfalls of patriotism on account of its unique universality. In words strikingly reminiscent of Maurras she asks: ‘where else one might find a theory and a policy more concerned with respect for the other, more watchful of citi- zens’ rights... more concerned with individual strangeness?’ (pp. 46–7). Reasoned liberal thinkers have long argued that in its positive aspect nationalism—much like the family—ought to provide an education in good international manners, teach- ing citizens to gain their cosmopolitan bearings in the wider world. Kristeva and the thinkers examined by Todorov pro- ceed somewhat differently, by postulating the European nation as an elastic universal project capable of accommo- dating the rest of the world—of raising it to the level of the mother/fatherland (see Todorov 1993, p. 254). Colonialism, thus, becomes the logical outcome or practical application of the universal ethnocentrism which characterises much late eighteenth and nineteenth century European nationalism. In a peculiar sense, it exemplifies the cosmopolitan impulse which so agitates the guilty conscience of ‘enlightened’ nationalisms. As Todorov writes: From this viewpoint, the history of humanity is confused with that of colonization—that is, with migrations and exchanges; the contemporary struggle for new markets, for supplies of raw materials is only the end result—rendered harmless owing to its origins in nature—of that first step that led the human being to cross her own threshold. The most perfected race will 117  POSTCOLONIAL THEORY unfailingly win, for perfection is recognised by its own ability to win battles (1993, p. 257). Anti-colonial nationalism responds to this painful symbio- sis between imperialist and nationalist thought in a variety of ways. It attempts, for instance, to be selective in its borrow- ings from colonialist nationalism, and it consoles itself with the understanding that while the colonial nation-State can only confer subjecthood on the colonised, the projected post- colonial nation-State holds out the promise of full and par- ticipatory citizenship. And yet, insofar as nationhood is the only matrix for political change, does the anti-colonial will-to- difference simply become another surrender to the crippling economy of the Same—‘a copy of that by which it felt itself to be oppressed’? In Bernard Cohn’s judgment, Indian national- ism spoke almost exclusively through the idiom of its rulers (Cohn 1983). Terence Ranger similarly maintains that African nationalisms simply dressed their radicalism in European hand- me-downs. And Edward Said reads Conrad’s Nostromo to insist that postcolonial nation-States, more often than not, become rabid versions of their enemies: ‘Conrad allows the reader to see that imperialism is a system. Life in one subordi- nate realm of experience is imprinted by the fictions and follies of the dominant realm’ (Said 1993, p. xxi). To what extent can we—as postcolonial critics—concede the mimetic nature of anti-colonial nationalisms, or submit to the paradox that the very imagining of anti-colonial freedom is couched in language of colonial conquest? For Chatterjee, the fault lines of Indian nationalism emerged at the very moment of its conception, in its desire to counter the colonial claim that the non-Western world was fundamentally incapable of self-rule in the challenging conditions of the modern world (Chatterjee 1993a, p. 30). Insofar as Indian nationalism pre- pared to embark on a project of indigenous self-modernisation, it announced its suicidal compromise with the colonial order: ‘It thus produced a discourse in which, even as it challenged the colonial claim to political domination, it also accepted the very intellectual premises of “modernity” on which colonial 118  IMAGINING COMMUNITY domination was based’ (Chatterjee 1993a, p. 30). As a con- sequence, nationalist discourse surrendered its ‘meaning’ to a European etymology. Accordingly, nationalist production ‘merely consists of particular utterances whose meanings are fixed by the lexical and grammatical system provided by... the theoretical framework of post-Enlightenment rational thought’ (1993a, p. 39). Without denying the acuity of this analysis, we might proceed by foregrounding a crucial distinction between—to borrow Jayprakash Narayan’s phraseology—the ‘outward’ attributes of nationalism and the ‘mental world of those who comprise it’ (Narayan 1971, p. xv). To properly pursue this separation between the people-who-comprise-the-nation and the State-which-represents-the-nation, it is useful to think of nationalism, through a literary analogy, as a genre. It is commonly understood that the nation-State is the proper end of nationalism, that is, the point at which the narrative of nation-making achieves its generic closure and therefore its distinctive generic identity. In these terms, we might say that the foundation of the postcolonial nation-State embod- ies the paradigmatic moment of generic conformity between anti-colonial nationalism and its antagonistic European pre- decessor. As Lloyd tells us, the project of State formation is ‘the locus of “Western” universalism even in decolonising states’, for it heralds the violent absorption of the heteroge- neous nationalist imagination within the singular trajectory of world historical development (Lloyd 1993b, p. 9). Moreover, the generic continuity between anti-colonial movements and colonial regimes is sharply elucidated in the simple transfer- ence of State machinery—which marks the inaugural moment of postcoloniality. In this transfer, nationalist revolutionaries simply come to inhabit the bureaucratic machinery created for the implementation of colonial rule. And as Jayprakash Narayan has written of Congress rule in post-independence India: ‘One of the more malignant features of that machine is its continued adherence to the British imperialist theory that it is the duty of the people to obey first and then to protest’ (Narayan 1971, p. xviii). 119  POSTCOLONIAL THEORY As we have seen, liberal accounts of nationalism insist that the process of nationalisation is entirely congruent with the ends of the nation-State. Thus, the awakening of national con- sciousness is said to instantiate a teleology of inexorable ratio- nality and development which finds its completed form in the regulative economy of the State. Nationalism, Gellner main- tains, ‘emerges only in the milieux in which the existence of the state is very much taken for granted’ (Gellner 1983, p. 5). And yet it is obvious that the enterprise of anti-colonial nationalism invokes energies which—in Lloyd’s formulation—are intrin- sically against the apparatus of the State (see Lloyd 1993a). For anti-colonial nationalism first acquires its meaning and its impetus through the etymology of struggle, and, as writers such as Dharampal and Guha argue, this struggle is often spoken in a distinctly popular, indigenous and pre-colonial idiom (see Dharampal 1971; Guha 1983b). Thus, rather than being sim- ply ‘derivative’, the insurgent moment of anti-colonial nation- alism not only contradicts the pre-eminence of the State, but it also furnishes its dissent through the autonomous political imagination of the people-who-comprise-the-nation. So also there is a sense in which the recalcitrant elements, characters, and actions invoked and energised by anti-colonial national- ism are ultimately in excess of the generic closure proposed by the postcolonial nation-State (see Lloyd 1993a). And these indomitable features remain in circulation as vestigial traces of different imaginings struggling to find expression within the monotonous sameness which infects the postcolonial State. Tragically, as Dharampal points out, so long as the postco- lonial State retains a certifiably colonial belief in an infallible State structure: ‘It not only keeps intact the distrustful, hostile and alien stances of the state-system vis a vis the people but also makes the latter feel that it is violence alone which enables them to be heard’ (Dharampal 1971, p. lx). Some versions of anti-colonial thought have attempted to break this nexus between dissenting nationalism and the State. For example, Fanon remains circumspect about the desirability and creativity of the postcolonial state. His writings are almost prophetic in their predictions about the imaginative lethargy 120  IMAGINING COMMUNITY of bourgeoisie-led national governments, ‘who imprison national consciousness in sterile formalism’ (Fanon 1990, p. 165). In Fanon’s understanding, such governments inevi- tably privilege the imitative scramble for ‘international pres- tige’ over and above the dignity of all citizens. Fanon’s vision of a government ‘for the outcasts and by the outcasts’ (1990, p. 165) was reflected to a large extent in Gandhi’s utopian dream of a decentralised polity. Notoriously, Gandhi desired that the Indian National Congress disband upon independence to give way to autonomous, self-sufficient and self-regulating village/local communities. Once again, nowhere did Gandhi conceive of the nation-State as the logical fruition of the anti- colonial movement. From a different perspective his friend and critic, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, retained a life-long opposition to the conformity-producing rhetoric of nation- alism. For Tagore, nationalism was a system of illusions, designed progressively to homogenise and normalise small, individual sentiments of insurgency. Recently, the Nigerian Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, has added his voice to this com- mitted band of dissenters. Once again, his focus is upon the ‘leadership dementia’ which has lead to the disintegration of the Nigerian nation (Soyinka 1996, p. 153). For Soyinka, the postcolonial nation needs to be re-imagined along the lines of its original conception, as a revolutionary and dissident space from which—indeed, through which—it was possible to refuse the totalitarianism and violence of colonial governments. This, then, is its inheritance, its responsibility to the world: ‘our function is primarily to project those voices that, despite mas- sive repression, continue to place their governments on notice’ (Soyinka 1996, p. 134). 121