Preface to the Japanese Edition of Alter-Politics: For an Alter-Colonisation of Everything

 

I am happy to see this Japanese translation of Alter-Politics. Especially that it has been initiated by my friend and colleague Yoshikazu Shiobara, who also translated Against Paranoid Nationalism and before that, along with the late Minoru Hokari, translated White Nation. If anyone in Japan is familiar with my work, and the way I write and think, it would be him. This is important because of the relation between translation and trust. Alter-Politics has also been translated to French, and even though the translators Maria Thedim and Emmanuel Thibault did an excellent job, I didn’t have to trust them as much. I am fluent in French and can check for myself if the translation did justice to the original text. Likewise when my friend Yassin el Haj Saleh translated part of the book in Arabic. Though I often fantasize about learning and being fluent in Japanese, unfortunately it is far from being the case. I have to rely entirely on the translators as I have no idea how effectively they have translated concepts, sentences and paragraphs. This is why the question of trust is important here. 

This is especially so since I know from the previous translations that Alter-Politics is not an easy book to work with. As far as its geographic interests are concerned, it casts a very wide net.  It deals with Australia, with global political trends, with Middle East politics and particularly with Palestinian politics. As far as its subject matter, it deals with colonialism and anti-colonialism, with nationalism and belonging, with racism and anti-racism, with the nature of crisis, with ecological questions and with utopian politics. Its theoretical approaches bring together anthropological theory, Bourdieusian theory, affective theory and post-colonial theory. And it creates new theorizing out of all of these.

The book’s most general argument is that critical analysis has predominantly invested itself, intellectually and emotionally, in a sociology of power. This sociology investigates the structures of domination behind the inequalities and injustices of the world. As such, the critical writing it has generated is predominantly concerned with helping oppose and combat those existing structures: what I have referred to as anti-politics. It has been less concerned with the analysis of radically different emerging realities that can be mobilised in the struggle to build an alternative social world. What I have called alter-politics. The book helps define the analytical horizon of a writing that contributes to such an alter-politics. 

I developed the outline of the above argument in 2009 when delivering the inaugural Australian Anthropological Society Distinguished Lecture series. At the time, I could already see the shrinking of the alter-political imaginary around the world. For all its attacks on White multiculturalism, the text of my earliest book, White Nation, took for granted that there was within multicultural policy a desire for a better society. My critique saw itself as pushing to intensify that minimal alter-political dimension at the expense of the White liberal ‘tolerance-enrichment’ tendency.  By 2009 I could see that multiculturalism had in fact lost whatever alter-political dimensions it had. It had become a purely defensive tool. Gone was any hint of a desire to build a better multicultural society. What was left was the shrunken particularist imaginings that figured in sound-bites such as: ‘how to let people maintain their culture.’ Likewise, gone was the desire for a non-racist society. What was left was a cornered and defensive: how do we protect people from racism? 

What was true of multiculturalism was also true of many of the liberal policies advocated by the state. They were all slowly but surely gutted of any vision of a better society and reduced to band-aids for social injuries. Even environmental policy, that should have invited us, given the magnitude of the ecological crisis, to radically revolutionise our relation to the planet, was slowly transformed into a disenchanted and disenchanting: ‘so, what’s the minimum that can be done here?’.

I write this preface shadowed by COVID-19, which has accelerated all these tendencies. Despite the voices that call for a need to re-invent society once we are out of the pandemic, the main impulse has been a survivalist one. In the way described in chapter 2 of this book, what dominates is a survivalist ethos: we are on the brink of the abyss and it is not the best time for new ideas. Let’s survive first. More than ever, it can be said that being bereft of new dreams and fantasies for a better future self and a better future society is one of the main characteristics of our time. I am not talking about whether such dream exists in the literary and artistic world. It does. It also exists in a far more pronounced way among young people. But never has the dreaming in that field been as cut off from institutionalised politics as it is today. The idea of ‘a better future self and a better future society’ was premised on the belief that one can always work to transform oneself and one’s society so as to improve them. This belief is largely gone. The world is no longer driven by fantasies and visions of better futures. This is true of right-wing as much as of left-wing fantasies.

Take something like the US imperialist fantasy of ‘spreading democracy around the world’. This has always been a fantasy with destructive consequences for colonised people. Some might like to think that with the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan the fantasy is still alive. They would be wrong. The words are definitely still being used, but the belief in them has diminished considerably. In the 1950s such a fantasy had a genuine propelling power. It was certainly used to justify imperialism. But many of those doing the invading believed and even idealised their ideological justifications. Today, those in the United States who truly believe that it is ‘spreading democracy’ are a very small minority. The words are the same but their affective power is not. ‘Spreading democracy’ today sounds hollow. It offers nothing more than a very thin, and often cynical, justification for a conquest that is uninspiring even for those who are participating in it, let alone those who have been subject to its destructive consequences. 

Fantasies, visions, hopes and dreams of a better world are alive when they inject life into those who believe in them. They propel those believers into the future. To be propelled by a dream or a vision is to relate to it in such a way that it infuses hope into you and pushes you forward by working from within you. This is the very meaning of a propelling power. Much of today’s world politics is deprived of such propelling fantasies.

It can even be said that the most potent fantasies that are close to or inhabit institutionalised politics today are entirely regressive. The fantasies of Islamic fundamentalists, of right-wing nationalists, and Trumpists, are all largely nostalgic, wanting to take people ‘back’ or ‘again’ to a past that never even existed: a past-to-come.[i] One can speak of such fantasies as dead fantasies that are well past their use-by date. They are rotting. And yet they are maintained alive by those who continue to believe in them. They are transformed into zombie fantasies.[ii] To paraphrase Frank Zappa ‘they are not entirely dead, they smell funny’.

The late Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘Cruel Optimism’ continues to define the predominant fantasies of our time. She argues that ‘cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.’ [iii] But perhaps that today’s fantasies are even more than cruel. They are more zombie than we think. Not only are they the living dead, they are classical flesh eaters. Those who believe in them keep them alive while they are gnawing at the bones of these very believers. It is not by chance that Trump’s rallies often resemble scenes from the famous Japanese zombie movie One Cut of the Dead (カメラを止めるな!, Kamera o Tomeru na!).

In times such as these it is particularly important for academics not to just dwell on how to oppose oppressive realities. More than ever there is an imperative task to stay connected to the forces motivated by the enacting alternative futures. I often think of this as a project of re-colonisation. Nietzsche once quipped that being opposed to ‘exploitation’ is like being opposed to life. What matters is what kind of exploitation prevails not whether or not it exists. The same can be said of colonisation. At its most general, to colonise means to populate, occupy and inhabit a certain space. Understanding colonisation at this broad level is important because it makes us face the fact that there is no alternative to it. If we are to exist on earth we have to populate it, occupy it and inhabit it. It is when facing the question of who does the colonizing and the populating, and how does one occupy and inhabit the environment that the possibility of a radical re-colonisation, an alter-colonisation comes to the fore. How do we stop one ethno-nationalist colonising force to be replaced by another ethno-nationalist colonising force? How do we stop a destructive inhabitance of the planet to be replaced by another destructive inhabitance? It is to this kind of alter-colonial politics that this book aspires to provide a minimal intellectual contribution. 

 

---

[i] Ghassan Hage, Afterword: The end of nostalgia: waiting for the past-to-come, in Ethnographies of Waiting Doubt, Hope and Uncertainty. Editors: Manpreet Janeja, Andreas Bandak, Bloomsbury Publishing, UK, 2018.

[ii] See Ghassan Hage, Introduction to Ghassan Hage (ed), Decay, New York: Duke University Press, 2021.

[iii] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, New York: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 7.