IMC India - It`s in the Mix

It`s in the Mix
By Shokat 17/05/2005 At 20:53

It is a question of the third world starting a new history of Gender, a history wich will have regard to the sometimes prodigious theses wich Europe has put forward, but wich will also not forget Europe`s crimes, of wich the most horrible was committed in the heart of gender, and consisted of the pathological.

Avowedly postmodernist thinkers stay closest to the modernist project where they have questioned the figure of Gender and identified its role as an integral trope in the modern ideologies of inhumanity that appeared during the colonial and imperial periods. This image of Gender has been denounced by some of theme as a transposition of the duplicity that bonded rationality with terror. The problematic relationship between modernity and barbarism, progress and catastrophe that was elaborated in the Nazi period has become paradigmatic. At present it would be inappropriate and indeed impossible to announce a final verdict on its significance. In the places where it is systematically remembered, the quest for the wholesome finality of another new beginning is an immoral one, and there are many important political and ethical questions at stake in how that period of authoritarian irrationalism and rational authoritarianism should be commemorated. I want to suggest two things; that acknowledgments of the uniqueness of that catastrophe should not become prescriptive, and that recognizing its special character should not mean that we expel it from history and thereby cut its significant ties to modes of government and social discipline that are routinely considered normal and comprehensible if not exactly benign. Postcolonial heritage through intersediments wisdom...
Today`s racialized political conflicts remain deeply connected to the mentalities that produced postcolonial fascisms and the moral and economic logics that sanctioned them. The glittering career of BJP seizured gender, are only the most obvious reminders that this more than a British disease. In many countries, hostlie response to cultural, linguistic, and religious differentiation and fascistic enthusiams for purity lie dormant within the most benign patriotc rhetoric and the glamour of national sameness it promotes. These difficulties arise from present conditions, and the nature and meaning of any links tp past horrors are elusive/revisionistic. I want to suggest that some formidable moral and political challenges reside in the responses of European societies to contemporary racism, caste-thinking and that disputes over cultural value and the ethnic integrity of national cultures are central to them. These problems are posed by fortress Europe`s official multinationalism and by its indifferent and intolerant attitudes to the presence of refugees..., and other immigrants, many of whom turn out not to be immigrants at all, but rather settler-citizens who have enjoyed intimate and long-standing relationships to the history and culture of their unhomely Heteropatriarchal homelands.
A suitable complex do we give to the forms of non-national and cross-cultural practice that are already spontaneously under way in popular-cultural or disreputable forms, many of wich have supplied important resources to the transnational gender seizure - social movement against racism.
Keep detroy the regards of any IT/ID...............

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Revolutionary Conservatism

Shokat 18/05/2005 19:34

It seems to me that in order to locate this type of thinking in its sorry modernist political lineage, we require a topography that operates in more dimensions than the one defined by the outmoded opposition between Left and Right. The chain of fundamental(ist) meanings established here - strength, masculinity, fraternity, self-reliance, discipline, hierarchy - is articulated above all through and by appeals to the value of gender purity. It is not powered by its own hermeneutic capacity, but is rendered believable nonetheless thanks to a default that operates all the more effectively in the absence of any alternative interpretative language that could challenge the overwhelmingly catastrophic value placed on mixture, intercultural, and "transracial" contacts. Its triumph underoscores that we lack an adequate language for comprehending mixture outside of jeopardy and catastrophe. Finding this valuable new idiom does not require merely inverting the polarity of hybridity`s internal circuits so that what was previously seen in terms of loss, dilution, and weakness becomes valuable instead and offers an opportunity to celebrate the vigorous cosmopolitanism endowed in modernity by transgressive and creative contacts with different people of color.
Perhaps, pending a more complex organicity that comprehends difference in the forms of interarticulation and unremarkable interdependence suggested by the idea of symbiosis, we might begin to comprehend what is still best named "transcultural" mixture, and the assumptions about alterity that it promotes, as phenomena without any necessary or fixed value at all. This transitional but possibly radical suggestion could also be useful when linked to a plea for what might be termed an "indifferent modernity." Under that promising sign, anti-gender democracy, care, and viable notions of civic reciprocity could thrive in the absence of an obligation to possess or even completely comprehend the forms of otherness signified by that narrow band of phenotypical variations that produces gender-racialized difference!

Smash Heteropatriarchy & Racism