Geeta Kapur, 'A New Inter Nationalism: The Missing Hyphen'
In: Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts. Edited by Jean Fisher. London: Kala Press in association with the Institute of international Visual Arts, 1994, pp. 39-49.
Vexations
I speak here with a sense that I am coercing myself into an act that is much more relevant to the immigrant, the exile, the diasporic 'community', rather than to those whose struggles are located in their own all too national cultures. It is worth keeping this distinction in mind.
Because the First World in which the immigrant lives has entirely, since the days of imperialism, appropriated the term international to its own perceptions and exploits, that international is to be claimed by the immigrant inch by inch. Here is a strength and a problem: the need to negotiate with powerful cultural élites within the western world and the inevitability of measuring success in terms of the positions gained in the control of culture and the media that attends to it. If the aim is to turn the centre-periphery model inside out then the positions may change but not the model. We should continue to question the radical import of this.
[...]
At the risk of a dissembling manner, I still have to ask myself what I am doing here talking about a new internationalism when I know that within India it is only the smallest minority who will tackle this concept in terms that are not on the one hand xenophobic, and on the other ingratiating to the western world's globalising dictate. Until recently India was jogging along a planned, progressive, modernising process; it had worked into its cultural programme a Soviet-style debate about the 'national in form, international in content' formula but in reverse: national in content, international in form. Either way it dates us thoroughly on the question of internationalism.
The visibility of the ASEAN tigers suggests that the economic miracle of late capitalism brings cultural internationalism into effect, suddenly. By the same token Indians are becoming all too aware, once again, what worth there is of a seat within internationalism when this is not backed by economic viability... Even as the developed nations disgorge the developing ones of their material basis, great amounts of cant about one world and polyvocal identities is offered theoretically. We have to reckon that the postmodern age offers a more deterministic scenario for internationalism than western liberal discourse is ready to acknowledge. Indeed, one might say precisely in favour of anachronistic models of mid century nationalisms that progressive leadership like that of Nehru (Nasser, Soekarno and Tito) did in fact usher in, within the cold war context, a new internationalism via such a concept as non-alignment in the first flush of postcolonial euphorias. And if that does not meet with current historical consideration as hard politics, we do know that socialist internationalism, a voluntarist and emphatically revolutionary, cultural phenomenon, gained for a period the vanguard position in world culture. And that, if nothing else, sustained the dignity and struggle of the Third World nations until at least the ripening of the Cuban revolution.
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A Nationalist Position
The international acquires a new dimension precisely because the national is now deconstructed in terms that go beyond the famous levering consciousness of the exile. These are terms based on the recognition, after Benedict Anderson, [2] of the mythic imaginings of the nation as a political community that is sovereign. Whereby there is both a peculiar persistence and fragility to the concept nation. Related terms come from critiques of the nation state by Subalternist historians who urge us, among other things, to give close regard to the pain and struggle of such societal 'fragments' that survive with-out. [3] They thereby force a revaluation of the nationalist narrative which sees the nations as some kind of a transcendent, continually reconfigurating, whole.
The Indian national refers to several things at once. To the nationalist consciousness and its ambivalences towards western style modernisation of society and state as, for example, with Gandhi whose social reflexivity sets modernity at odds with the nation itself. Even while he 'invites the masses into history' he undermines institutionalised collectivities in a way resembling anarchism. This brings him full circle into modernity through a paradox. In contrast, there is the actual emergence of a national state and the regime of modernity it favours through its institutional structures as of universal franchise, formal education, courts of justice and democracy.
[...]
Considering the predominantly economic rhetoric of Third World nationalism in mid-century, and considering the high stakes on pragmatic survival globalisation now demands from the Third World, any consideration of nationalism will have to contend with more than a culturist idiom. It will include the fallout from western attempts to dismantle national economies through mala fide legislation, embargoes and economic sanctions. And it will include the resistances that will be forthcoming against this new form of US imperialism.
In India where the modern comes in the wake of a passive revolution, eschewing most radical initiatives, the progressive gets defined in an exclusive way as the cultural values of the middle class - "the lonely bilingual intelligentsias" in Benedict Anderson's telling phrase. [5] And this leads to exclusions in the discourse as well as cultural practice of such notions as subversion/transgression and even serious disjuncture. Nevertheless, we have to recognise how mainstream nationalism is challenged from within its full course; how, along the trajectory of the national, a figure like Gandhi is complemented by an Ambedkar to produce a discourse on the subaltern in terms that are militantly 'modern'.
[...]
[2] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London, 1983.
[3] Gyanendra Pandey, 'In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today', Economic and Political Weekly, Annual Number, March 1991; Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1993.
[5] Anderson, op cit, p 217.