Racism is in decline… everywhere (from the preface of Against Paranoid Nationalism (Pluto Press 2003)

I was looking at the first chapters of Against Paranoid Nationalism that deal with the question of hope to write a short piece on the subject. Like re-reading White Nation its is amazing/depressing/etc. how not much has changed:

2001 was a good year in Australia as far as opposition to ‘racism’ is concerned, and 2002 is looking better. While not claiming to have investigated the matter empirically, my impression is that in 2001 a record number of Australians declared themselves to be opposed to the use of the terms ‘racist’ and ‘racism’. Everywhere I turned, people were courageously stating things like ‘I am not racist’, ‘That’s not racism’, ‘I did not mention race, I am talking about culture’ or ‘People will say I am racist but I am not.’ And, of course, to the delight of the connoisseurs, the famous ‘I am not racist, but…’ was everywhere. Anti-racist culture is flourishing. We’re clearly over the timid years of Hansonism.

It is true that in 2001 a considerable number of Indigenous people and Arab and Muslim Australians felt demeaned, inferiorised and excluded from the rest of society (‘Asians’ were breathing with relief in 2001 – at least they’d have time to replenish before the next round). But does being demeaned, inferiorised, treated insensitively and excluded mean you are being subjected to racism? It’s no longer easy to answer this question, for it is no longer up to the victims to decide if a person is racist. Racists declare themselves to be so. And the fact that no one in Australia has done so just shows the depth of anti-racism in this country. So strongly do the anti-racists feel that if you refer to one of them as racist without their agreeing, they are likely to sue you. I have tried to get some people I think are racists to sign a contract agreeing that they are racists before I use the term to refer to them, but I have not succeeded so far: it is clear that they are deadset anti-racists.

Strangely, many of the people who have been accused by some misguided third world-looking minority or another of being racist have been key figures in the promotion of Australia’s ‘anti-racism’ culture. They might have occasionally demeaned, inferiorised, treated insensitively or excluded people they have pictured as belonging to a tribe other than theirs, but obviously I cannot apply the slur ‘racist’ to them when they have such an established record of hating the very sight of the word.

This is especially so since in 2001 it was internationally established, at the United Nations conference on racism, that most colonised and previously colonised third world-looking people don’t know much about racism. They’ve shown themselves to be notoriously oversensitive and unreliable when it comes to this subject, and are very likely to misunderstand what is actually happening to them. To make things worse, those living in colonial and post-colonial slums and ghettos – the Palestinians, for instance – expressed their hatred of their colonisers. What’s more, the Palestinians do so in a totally vulgar and unsophisticated way. Clearly unaware of where such vulgarity might lead, other third world-looking people expressed sympathy with the Palestinians instead of being rightly outraged at the massive suffering inflicted on the Palestinians’ sensitive and civilised colonisers.

Luckily, countries such as the US, Canada, the European states and Australia used the magnificent historical record of their emergence as nations to enlighten everyone and explain that this hatred of the coloniser was the only real racism there is. It is now well known – and it was widely reported in the press – that by stopping this hatred of the coloniser being officially accepted and expressed by other delegates at the conference, they actually ‘saved the conference’.

Having done so much for anti-racism at that conference and everywhere else around the world, some people in Australia are rightly ‘offended’ when they are accused of racism. For instance, the Prime Minister has publicly declared himself ‘offended’ on many occasions; he even went as far as being ‘outraged’ once when faced with the term ‘racism’. More offended by it than by the sight of the dehumanising concentration camps he has used to cage third world-looking asylum seekers. In fact, in Australia today those offended by the term ‘racist’ almost outnumber those offended by racists.

Another measure of the depth of this ‘anti-racism’ is the degree of heroism shown by the people who are struggling in its front line. These courageous people might appear to be in power, they might appear to have pages of newspapers and endless radio and television time at their disposal, but every now and then the repressive conditions under which they are operating reveal themselves in the way they speak. They all say something along the lines of: ‘I know they will get me, but I am going to say it …’ Even the Prime Minister says it. ‘They’, in case you’ve been kept in the dark, is the formidably powerful ultra-left revolutionary council of political correctness. This council, all appearances notwithstanding, and as every ordinary mainstream, paranoid-and-allowed-to-be-relaxed-and-comfortable-with-his/her-paranoia Australian will tell you, is clearly still ruling the country. So one can appreciate the effort it takes the John Howards and Alan Joneses of the country to heroically squeeze their points of view across to the public despite the incredibly repressive measures being used against them by the revolutionary council. And let us not forget that these ‘heroes’ all volunteered to do so. Which goes to show you that you cannot repress Australian values.

One version of Marx’s theory of ideology, based on the concept of the camera obscura, is that capitalism creates an ‘appearance’ – a level of experience – that is an ‘upside down’ version of reality. This idea has long been academically discredited. But it clearly needs to make a comeback to make sense of the lopsided reality which increasingly engulfs us.

As this book goes to press I find myself right in the midst of such a reality.

In the aftermath of the April 2002 Israeli reoccupation and vandalisation of the West Bank, I initiated, with my colleague John Docker, a petition calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. A petition, one would think, is a basic and peaceful means of democratic expression. But not so for the editor of The Australian (well-known for standing up for the oppressed across the world), who captured its incredible violence by editorialising that the petition ‘verges on book burning’. On the other side of this camera obscura reality stood the Israelis’ medieval-like rampage in occupied Palestine, where books and documents were actually burning. Obviously, that kind of burning was too subtle for the editor of The Australian to smell.

But there is more. This was a petition that was initiated and signed by Arab-background and Jewish-background academics, precisely to avoid any sense of ‘communal chauvinism’. It was a petition that had been laboured over for many days to ensure that it was not open to claims of being anti-Semitic, and that was then signed by some of the most important Australian academics to have researched and written on racism in Australia. Here, the venerable editor of The Australian, and a minister of the government that brought us the Tampa crisis and the concentration camps and destroyed the process of reconciliation with Australia’s Indigenous people while tabooing the use of the term ‘racism’ to refer to any of this, finally broke the taboo, in the face of the horrendous assault on, and exceptional inferiorisation of, other fellow human beings that the petition represented, and called it … yes … you guessed it … racist! I guess even anti-racism can reach its limits of tolerance. Along with other academics, I had long dismissed Marx’s camera obscura theory. I didn’t know that a time would come where I’d be living what it described with all its nightmarish qualities. Sorry, Marx, I take it all back.

The conservative conception of 'first contact' as a permanently insurmountable encounter

'Anthropology as a permanent state of first contact' is the title of a short piece I presented a few years back at the American Anthropological Association (it is available on the site of the journal Cultural Anthropology). In that piece I wanted to highlight the importance of an anthropology that foregrounds the ethnographer's capacity to always aim to find and confront new differences that widen our horizons of the possible. So much research is explicitly or implicitly invested in the analysis of the production and reproduction of sameness. Indeed in a way sameness and continuity is what defines social research as social, and it goes without saying that such research is highly important: it is the research that allows us to find and analyse social structures, social habits, laws, etc. Notwithstanding this importance, critical anthropology, as I see it, can instill in researchers a desire and a disposition to always go out of this emphasis on sameness in order to stage an encounter with what lays outside of it. It is a Star Trek like desire for an encounter with a difference no one has encountered before, and once this encounter has happened to continue yearning for yet another one, and then again another, endlessly. Implicitly, I was acknowledging what I took for granted: every first contact that might start as a trying encounter with difference sooner or later becomes a non-event as we open ourselves to this difference and incorporate it into our everyday life. But in speaking of this as a permanent state of first contact, I did not take into account what is a conservative version of this encounter. This is when we don't open up for the difference we encounter and stay permanently in a relation of antagonism towards it. This permanent state of first contact becomes the very oppose it of the Star Trek ethos: a refusal to explore difference and to go anywhere one has not been before. This is what defines cultural openness and cultural rigidity among non-researchers as well.

For instance, I have heard stories of or came across, both in my everyday life in Australia and as an ethnographer working among the Lebanese diaspora world wide, a number of families encountering the coming out of a gay son or daughter. In the great majority of cases, quite conservative, religious, non-cosmopolitan families began by being shocked to learn that their son or daughter is gay. Yet after a certain period of 'first encounter', members manage to routinise that difference such as it became a non-issue. Some remain hostile to the idea of a gay person but manage to live with the fact of gayness quite well without making a fuss about it at all. For some others, albeit a minority, it transformed them into activists against homophobia. However, there was also a conservative minority which simply could not adapt to the difference and reacted with extreme marginalisation or attempts at 'reconversion'. For such families difference was not something that could be overcome and the shock of the first encounter was maintained over time. They encounter difference like an insurmountable mountain. It is this kind of encounter that conservative thought mobilises. Yet, it is important to argue and show that it is far from the norm.

My mother was quite shocked to learn that I wanted to just live and have children with my partner without any religious or civil marriage (just celebrated thirty years of it by the way). She was adamant that she could not possibly relate to grand-children born 'illegitimately'. She made a big fuss, etc. but when faced with the fact of it slowly accommodated herself with the reality. She overcome the shock of her first contact with the idea of a family based on a de facto relation and slowly and surely it became a non issue for her. I am sure she will not be an advocate of de facto relations but it is a fact that she does not look at my partner and I or the children and think: 'Oh my god here comes the ungodly couple and their kids'. Nor does she continue to see it as something strange. Many of her grandchildren are living in such relationships now and she has not acted at all as if she was encountering something objectionable. After the shock of first contact there is routinisation. That is really the norm.

Yet, it is this routinisation that is almost always foreclosed by conservative thought. It mobilises the moment of 'first contact' but, and this is an important but, instead of noting that whatever is shocking to begin with becomes routinised with time, like the family who could not overcome their gay son they make out as if any encounter with difference is an insurmountable situation. The conservative version of 'permanent state of first contact' is not a permanent state of openness to the world and a willful or forced discovery of new forms of life, but a permanent state of protectively blocking, and protecting oneself from, the very first shocking encounter.

Take for instance a famous pronouncement by Australia's ex-prime minister John Howard which was later repeated in a different context by another more recent conservative prime minister, Tony Abbott.  Howard declared that he found the veil 'confronting'. Tony Abbott declared that he found the burqa 'confronting'. They were both speaking to their conservative constituency and telling them: it is ok to be shocked and find the experience a trying one. They thought that in doing so they were opposing those politically correct people who would try to make people feel guilty for experiencing the veil or the burqa confronting.
 
Here we face a classic case of a conservative fetishising of the shock of first contact and portraying its permanence as the norm. For the question that needed to be asked to Howard or Abbott was not 'why do you find the veil or the burqa confronting?' Rather, the question should be 'ok, so you find the first or second or third time you confront the veil hard to deal with, fine, but for how long is this supposed to go on for? Isn't there a point where one becomes familiar with what is shocking them? 

In fact there is one clear reason behind Islamophobic thought's ability to make it out as if every encounter with a veiled woman is a shocking encounter. It is its own inability to think of the encounter as a space of reciprocal interaction and co-existence and co-discovery. Rather is sees this space a priori as a space of conflict where one needs to protect oneself, indeed it even sees it as a space of war. It is thus 'a bit rich' or perhaps just simply banal to highlight the 'confronting' nature of the encounter, since it is the conservative who has introduce the ethos of conflict into the situation in the first place. It is a case of what Bourdieu calls introducing into the object one's relation to the object.

Most recently, we had another case of the fetishisation of the 'confronting nature of the first contact' when the father of the Orlando murderer, made it out that his son found the encounter with a gay kissing couple confronting. The father gave this as an explanation for his son's behaviour. As it turned out the murderer must have been quite used to the sight of kissing gay couples since he was a regular at the gay club where he committed the massacre. Regardless of whether the father was saying the truth or not, we have again an example of how conservative thought legitimises itself by reducing the potentially enriching permanent state of first contact into a permanently insurmountable encounter. The possibility that the first encounter with a gay kissing couple leading to or opening the way for an acceptance of gay kissing couple is foreclosed.

I am thinking all this as I am facing ethnographically in Lebanon conservative Lebanese Christians' imaginaries of the Muslim threat. Here is a politico-communal formation whose members refer to themselves as 'the Christians' (empirically, they are not all Christians nor even all the Maronites). This politico-communal formation has formally and informally lived with Muslims for more than two hundred years. And yet, for all kind of class, colonial, racist and many other entangled reasons, they have never been allowed, nor have they allowed themselves to encounter the Muslims in a mode of mutual openness. It is two hundred years of encountering a specific form of otherness and two hundred years of seeing it as something strange, obscure, unknowable and threatening. This is not true of all Lebanese Christians. And there is not doubt that one can find similar tendencies among Muslims. But of all these possibilities, it is tragic to think that the whole world seems to be following in the footsteps of those conservative Christians, as if their experience of the permanent state of first contact as a state of permanent insurmountability is the only experience available to us.

Why I have voted in support of BDS

From the 15^th of April and until the end of May members of the American Anthropological Association will be voting on whether to endorse the proposal to boycott Israeli academic institutions as part of offering to support the Palestnians’ call for a Boycotts, Sanctions and Divestments (BDS) movement against the state of Israel. I have voted in support of the resolution. As the vote has been an occasion whereby AAA has initiated and encouraged a more public discussion of the pros and cons of the BDS movement, I wish to share my understanding of the nature of the opposition between those who are for and against BDS and why I personally, as a AAA member, support it.

To be sure, almost all of the anthropologists who are against the Boycott begin by stating their opposition to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories or the treatment of Palestinians inside the state of Israel. So the debate is not, nor one expects it to be, a simple debate between ‘critics and supporters of the state of Israel’. Yet, the difference between the two camps is quite pronounced and it begins to emerge in the very way those opposed to BDS declare their objection and opposition to the Occupation. In their very starting point there is a regressive attempt at shifting the grounds of the debate away from where the supporters of BDS have located it.

The starting point of those who support BDS is not that all those who do not agree with them are supporters of the occupation. It is that for a long time now there has been a groundswell of people critical of the occupation (inside Israel sometimes even more than outside of Israel). But this has not had any influence whatsoever on the occupation. Indeed the road to the settlements is paved with people deploring or being opposed to one aspect or another of the occupation, people calling for dialogue, deploring Israeli war crimes and even genocide, and calling for Israeli accountability or for investigations, etc… The BDS supporters’ argument is: so, given how useless all this sometimes quite radical ‘position taking’ has been, can we start something that has a slightly, even if minimally, coercive effect on the state of Israel rather than just something that is merely voicing a ‘critique’. Israel creates facts on the ground in its colonization and what is needed is an opposition that is not a mere opinion but one that also strives to create a fact on the ground. It is by looking at what is available in terms of peaceful and democratic strategies that can have such a factual effect that the idea of a boycott came into being. So to oppose BDS by calling for the very things that BDS is trying to supersede because proven ineffective, such as more critique or calls for dialogue, is disingenious to say the least. It is considered an implicit call for the continuation of the status quo. The same goes for mistaking the boycott for a ‘statement of extreme condemnation’ instead of seeing it for what it is: a strategically appropriate, and above all practical, technique of protest against a social force that might be vulnerable to such a technique. In this regard the people who exclaim ‘why don’t you boycott China, etc…’ fail to see how nonsensical such a position is. It is like saying that if you are opposed to both the British Prime Minister and the President of Syria and are calling for the democratic removal of the British Prime Minister, you are a hypocrite if you don’t also call for the democratic removal of the President of Syria. ‘Calling for democratic removal’ like ‘calling for a boycott’ works in one place and not in another.

There is no doubt that we the supporters of BDS have a more acute sense of the quantitative and qualitative degree of injustice and suffering that is being meted on Palestinians in Israel and the territories. For the opponents of BDS in the words of Marc Edelman writing for PoLAR, the outrage of BDS activists is excessive, ‘outsized’ as he put it, in that Palestinian suffering is comparatively not so great compared to that of others. According to him 'in the spectrum of violator (ie, violators of human rights) states worldwide, Israel only attains middling status'. BDS people do not have such a relaxed view of what is happening in Israel/Palestine either quantitatively or qualitatively. They expect that most anthropologists would agree with them that thinking comparatively about, and ranking, states according to how much they 'violate human rights' is a homogenizing mode of thinking that mystifies the difference between forms of violation and erases the specific ugliness of colonial settler situations. Most anthropologists, especially those who are located in settler colonial settings themselves, are well aware that colonial injury goes way beyond the common understanding of 'human right violations and abuse': it includes appropriation and extraction of land and resources, ethnocidal politics that cannot be accounted for by counting the number of people killed, politicide (see Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling about this) that eviscerates a whole culture. And then there is the racialised violence that is also a very specific form of violence which impact is an equally specific and incomparably damaging shattering of the psyche. Not being able to experience affectively the urgency of the need to address what is happening in Palestine is nothing short of a professional failing.

There are also some who think that boycotting universities is not appropriate because one needs to maintain the autonomy of academic life from political processes. Wherever one is located in the world today, this is a rather fantasmic belief in this day and age where states and neo-liberal capitalist logic have eaten their way through university autonomy almost to the point of saturation. But it particularly lacks validity in a colonial context where the very nature of a university as an open democratic space is itself dependent on the very colonial violence that disallows and violently suppresses the possible existence of such an open space among those it colonises. Paradoxically, in a colonial-settler society, even the space from which one can be ‘pro-indigenous’ is dependent on the colonial violence that allows such a space to exist. As it happens, in Israel’s universities, the very idea of being pro-indigenous is quasi impossible, expressed only by a negligible minority. What there is instead is an academic indifference and obliviousness to the deadly, remorseless and excessive colonial violence directed at the Palestnians and their universities, the very violence that makes such indifference possible in the Israeli universities: so much for autonomy.

There is always a critique that one can and should address to any form of political action, which by definition has and will be found to have many weaknesses. But there are critiques aimed at enhancing a political practice and others aimed at paralyzing it. It is very easy to use some idealized, beautiful and full-proof conception of action to shelter from the imperfections of any actual struggle since the latter is guaranteed to be found always already wanting. It is possible to tell oneself: 'I am not going to do anything since no action meets my unbelievably pure criteria of what needs to be done’. I don’t think it is coincidental that such an attitude ends up working to support the status quo.  For those of us who do feel the urgency of dealing with Palestinian question this is not enough and we hope that most of my colleagues share our sense of urgency.

Terrorism Brussels etc: think before you hunt

Look at the swamps created by the differential of exterminability and mournability between Muslims and non-Muslims.

NEWYORKbaghdadLONDON
TELAVIVgazaMADRID
BOSTONkabulOSLO
PARISaleppoBRUSSELS

It is in those and similar dips in the affective tectonic plates in which we are all embedded where some of the emotional propellors of Islamic terrorism grows.

Those affects do not *necessarily* lead to terrorism but Islamic terrorism does not grow without them. Some people like to use the cliché ‘not all Muslims are terrorists’ to comfort themselves as if on one hand there’s the crazy terrorists and on the other there’s the Muslims who don’t feel anything.

This is not the case. Many, indeed most, Muslims feel the effect of this differential in exterminability. Who would come to realize that they, as a racialized collectivity, are considered more expendable than others and not feel it?

Most Muslims are depressed by this, or outraged, or humiliated, or angry, or stunned or made resentful, or all of the above. And sure, it does not lead all of them to become terrorists. But please don’t make it out as if all is fine for those ‘peace-loving majority’.

Muslims might block those feelings or they might process them. They might process them in a secular way, they might process them poetically or politically, in a masculine or in a feminine way, they might process them silently, publicly and collectively, or by screaming alone in the night. But they all process them. And than there’s the proverbial ‘tiny minority’ that processes them in a militarist combative way. If the latter is all you see, you're not seeing much.

If you cannot see those affective swamps and what is allowed to fester in them, if you cannot see how it is drowning all of us in a destructive culture of exterminability, a culture of selective indifference to the killing and death of some, you are not seeing much at all.

Yet it is a collective responsibility, particularly for those of us living in the West, to see and discuss and understand those swamps and their effects. If for nothing other than the fact that it is not the Muslims who have created them, it is the West. It is years of colonial impunity in Africa, the Middle East and Asia where Muslims began to be considered exterminable and disposable and where the modern indifference to their extermination grew. And do we need to mention Palestine and the Israeli monstrosity where exterminability is continually and increasingly flirting with extermination?

In the early colonial era each colonised Muslim community had to deal with its own exterminability alone. As the world grew to be more global and interconnected, today every Muslim death is for most Muslims a global event. There was and there continue to be a politics around whether those deaths should be experienced as ‘Muslim deaths’, or as the death of colonized people, or as the death of victims of capitalism. But there is no doubt today that those deaths are primarily experienced as Muslim deaths. And likewise, there is no doubt that those who identify even mildly as Muslims don't share the western indifference to those deaths.

Caring or experiencing indifference is not simply a matter of will. Speaking for myself, I am more likely to be in a cafe in Paris or an airport departure lounge in Brussel and be the victim of an Islamic terrorist, than I am likely to be somewhere in Iraq or Syria and get killed by a drone. That is the truth for most of us in the West. But not all of us. And we need to recognise that more and more people living among us do not feel affectively or practically as disconnected from the drone exploding in Afghanistan or Libya or Iraq. There are more and more people who live and work and intermingle with us who do think that it could be them. They don’t all think it with the same intensity or with the same sophistication or capacity for detachment. But they think it.

We live in a world of colonially produced but intermingling plurality of cultures and intensities of mournability. Until the nefarious effect of this colonialism comes to an end we could at least try and recognize and minimize the effect of this differential as opposed to letting the culture of exterminability to thrive on its back. Being aware and mindful of this differential and of its effects is one step to take along this road.

So, let’s go hunting Islamic terrorists. I don’t want to die next time I am in Paris, London, Beirut, New York or Boston. And I am there a lot. I have an interest in the hunt and its success. And it is because I have an interest that I’d rather the hunters think a bit more than they appear to be at present.

Houellebecq's Soumission

Ghassan Hage

I read Houellebecq's Soumission over the Christmas break.  A novel pertaining to imagine a peaceful and democratic Islamic take over of France which ends up generating a creepy sexist dictatorial social and moral order, and a whole new class of French 'collaborators' that happily join in lured by all kind of equally creepy sexual and financial benefits.

It is interesting that just before the holidays I had also finished writing a piece for American Ethnologist (I think it will be available on AE's site as open access 'early viewing' on the first week of the new year) in which I look at the sense of 'Etat de Siege' that exists in the west today as a result of the refugee crisis.  I analyse the refugee crisis as a colonial crisis, particularly as a crisis in the colonial borders that were traced in the beginning of the twentieth century and that, like the fences of an old and mismanaged farm, have rusted away and are no longer capable of keeping those contained within them under control. I argue that this sense of a 'state of siege' is also accentuated by the ecological crisis. Both the ecological and the colonial crises are experienced as governmental crises. That is, both involve processes of exploitation that have generated 'ungovernable' by-products whose effect has ended up producing a sense of loss of control over what initially was a relatively under control natural/colonial space. Over-exploitation generates a beyond control over-flow of waste and refugees that end up besieging the exploiter and changing the very nature of the physical and social atmosphere under which exploitation is occurring.

In the process I examine those who see in the state of siege a 'reverse colonisation'. It is as part of this process that I look at a very old colonial genre which is precisely the 'reverse colonialism' genre. As I note:

A feeling of being besieged by the very people whom one is actually colonizing is, paradoxically, part and parcel of the history of colonialism. Images of Asians, indigenous people, Arabs, and black people dominating, exploiting, and enslaving White Europeans abound in colonial cultural production. This is so even at the height of the “classical” European colonial venture when colonialists were, relatively speaking, most secure about their entitlements and their transnational supremacy. Stephen Arata (1996) has called these stories of besiegement “narratives of reverse colonization.” As he put it, discussing English literature,

Moments like this recur with remarkable frequency in late-Victorian popular fiction, embedded in what can be called narratives of reverse colonization. In such narratives what has been represented as the “civilized” world is on the point of being overrun by “primitive” forces. 

It is hard not to place Houellebecq's novel in this tradition. I would have of course liked to add: since we are of course talking about Houellebecq, he is too sophisticated a writer and a thinker to just place him there. But the fact is that many writers who have written in this tradition had added their own specificity that shows them to be not just belonging to it.

As Arata points out many a good novel belong to the genre, from Stoker's Count Dracula to H. G. Well's The War of the Worlds (1898). Nonetheless, and as he rightly points out: "Stoker's Count Dracula and Haggard's Ayesha frighten not least because their characteristic actions - appropriation and exploitation - uncannily reproduce those of the colonising Englishman"(108). 

Of course there is non-literary 'reverse colonialism' genre that I have actually examined in White Nation as part of the analysis of white decline. I had not read Arata then and I referred to it as an 'imaginary power reversal' emanating from a real loss of reality which 'explains some of the more hallucinatory fan­tasies one finds in the discourse of decline. '

In Ron Casey's auto­biography, for example, the 'analysis' of the effect of Asian migration reaches truly phantasmagoric proportions. As he put it:

In 2020, the entire east coast of Australia, from Cairns in the north to Melbourne in the south, could be overrun by those of Chinese and Japanese extraction. The north, from Broome across the Northern Territory to the Gulf of Carpentaria, could be populated almost entirely by Indonesians and Malays, and the west coast from Broome in the north to Perth in the South could be home to millions of Indians. Those of European extraction, the ordinary white Australians, could live in small enclaves in South Australia or be driven back to Europe or to parts of the United States. There could be sporadic fighting from gueril­la groups of `dinkums', but this insurrection won't have a snowflake's chance in hell of reversing the Asianisation of Australia. Ghettos of Australian labourers — or 'white coolies' — could live in outer metropolitan areas to service the Asian factories.'

An updated version of this hallucinatory imaginary, his­torical antecedents of which can be found as far back as the 1840s Anglo-Asian encounters, that we find in Pauline Hanson, The Truth. Here we meet the president of what is imagined to have become the 'Republic of Australasia' in the year 2050: Poona Li Hung, 'a lesbian ... of multiracial descent, of Indian and Chinese background' who is also `part machine — the first cyborg president. Her neuro-cir­cuits were produced by a joint Korean-Indian-Chinese research team.'

Soumission has of course a lot more to offer, but in so far as it is a novel of reverse colonisation, not that much more. The Islam that ends up taking power is really a creepy product of a genuinely colonial imagination not aware at all of the coloniality that it is reversing. As to the racialised sexism that characterise most forms of Islamophobia and end up producing subservient Islamic women en masse, all willing to stop working  as soon as Islamic rule shows its face, all willing to become mothers, feeders and whores without a whimper... hard to know where to begin and where to end with that one.

Some might like to argue that what is different from other reverse colonialism novels is that Houellebecq locates that weakness that allows the take over within French society and shows many tendencies in French culture to be actually far more accomodating of his imagined ruling Islam then French people would like to believe. So, the boundaries between, this French cultural tradition and the imagined Islamic forces that end up becoming the ruling force in France is nowhere near as absolute as some would like it to be.

But as Arata points out this is actually very common in British novels of reverse colonialism:

These forces can originate outside the civilised world (as in She) or they can inhere in the civilised itself (as in Kurtz's emblematic heart of darkness). In each case a fearful reversal occurs: the colonizer finds himself in the position of the colonized, the exploiter is exploited, the victimizer victimized. The reversals are in turn linked to perceived problems—racial, moral, spiritual—within Great Britain itself. (1996, 108)

Where Houellebecq distinguish himself is not really in what he has to offer ideologically. But since he has been editorialising in all kind of places and sees himself as capable of giving advice to all kind of political leaders about the political and cultural rot in which we find ourselves in, it would be a mistake to think that the novel is not primarily intended to be read as an ideological novel.

Nonetheless, there are technical moments of beautiful and even transporting French writing in the book. Description of French regions that are very evocative and descriptions of states of being that are classically Houellebecqian and that cannot but resonate with most male readers. Has Houellebecq anything to offer a female reader? I don't think he has anything at all. but I'd be interested to know if I am wrong about this.

Houellebecq captures two social phenomena that I felt play a critical function: the corporatisation of the university taken in the novel to its delicious logical end with the Saudi financed Islamic university of the Sorbonne. Closely linked to this, he also captures some of the crassness of Gulf but particularly of Saudi-financed events in the West. But this becomes racist, as all critiques of Saudi Arabia do, when not properly contextualised. And Saudi Arabia's power, which undoubtedly is real, can also become imagined as far more important than it actually is and 'the source of all evil' without a full understanding of the political economy of the kingdom and of capitalism  and colonialism. Indeed it becomes a bit like the fascist fetishisation with 'Jewish bankers' as the source of all evil. How can these be transmitted subtly in a novel without ending up giving lectures is a matter for novelists. What is clear is that Houellebecq does not seem to have that subtle understanding in the first place in order to transmit it.

The mourning after (in Australia)

I met this morning at the Glebe Fair a Lebanese-Australian I’ve known for years. He used to work as a maintenance staff at Sydney University when I worked there. He never struck me as a particularly ebullient personality but he looked more somber than usual. I asked him why. He let me know that he lost his cousin in the terrorist bombing that struck the poor neighborhood of Burj el Barahjneh in Beirut killing fourty people and causing massive destruction. It was the biggest bombing since the end of the civil war in 1990. As if this is not enough, he tells me, his sister is married to a Frenchman and they live in the 11eme arrondissement of Paris, one of the main areas that the Parisian terrorists attacked the day after the Beirut bombing. So not having fully recovered from the Lebanese bombing they spent an anxious half a day before they knew that his sister and her family were safe. 

He paused for a second and then he said: I know these things interest you so can I ask you a question? I said: sure go ahead. He said: ‘did you see how they projected the French flag on the Opera House?’ I hadn’t seen it. I said: ‘no but that’s great…’ Indeed, for a fleeting moment I thought to myself ‘what a great idea!’ But then I stopped mid-sentence because it immediately dawned on me what he was aiming at, and I said: ‘but not the Lebanese flag right?’ 

‘Exactly,’ he said, ‘it is very upsetting. They keep giving us lectures about how we should integrate but they act as if we don’t exist. They think that only the French are worthy of mourning. I thought the new prime minister looks like a decent guy and he had it in him to say a few words and make us feel that they cared about what happened to us but he hasn’t.’

'Why couldn't they project both flags?' he asked moving away from Malcolm and back to the Opera House. 

I left him feeling I should write at least a few ethnographic notes about this encounter. So I quickly walked back home to my computer, and as I hadn’t seen the French flag projected on the Opera House, I looked it up on the Internet. I still liked what it represented. But I did feel that the absence of any sign of solidarity with the Lebanese made the act of solidarity with the French more akin to an act of colonial solidarity. It polluted what should have been a grand gesture. Not more than a few minutes later I was astonished and heartened to see a Facebook status by my friend and colleague Martha Macintyre. Even though she wrote from Melbourne, it was as if she had been part of the conversation I just had. She wrote:
While I feel devastated and overwhelmed by this terrible event [the Paris event], it worries me that so much vicarious grief and outrage can be mustered around the deaths of people, white Europeans, who we can see as being 'like us', while a similar event in Beirut is not subject to a similar outpouring. No cedar tree silhouettes on the Sydney Opera House. What is more telling is that there are relatively few people of French origin living Australia and a lot of Lebanese.

Martha knew as much as I did, of course, that neither the victims of the Beirut bombing, nor of the French bombing were homogeneously white or not white. What they actually empirically are is not the point. It's what the act of solidarity with France imagines them to be that counts here.
 
Still, my guess was that since the Sydney Opera House is full of enlightened, cosmopolitan and open-minded kind of people, if I was to approach the person who thought of the French flag idea and say to him/her ‘well, how about the Lebanese flag?’, even though they will rightly suspect that the idea will not have the aesthetic value and universal appeal that the French flag has, they will probably still say: ‘of course, what a good idea, why didn’t I think of it myself’. And this would be exactly where the problem lies: why didn’t they think of it themselves? 

It not easy to tell White Australians what they should and shouldn’t do - as always I call White those who partake in a colonially inherited white fantasy of Australia -. Especially following an Islamic act of terrorism. It comes naturally to them to think that it is up to them to engage in moralistic pontification about what Muslims should and should not do to prove their Australian belonging.

At the best of times, it is a difficult spectacle to watch. The inheritors of the Western culture of colonial plunder, land theft, over exploitation of resources, racialised genocides, rape, and over-exploitation of non-Western people are very good at being totally oblivious of the thinness of the moral ground on which they stand. They assume with incredible ease that the moral high ground is theirs to occupy and keep. It is true that this high ground is not so hard to occupy when imagining yourself as facing third-rate petty criminal shits who think they are great because they can mindlessly repeat that their god is great while psychotically murdering people. But the fact is, this is not who White Australians are facing, they are facing a community with whom they have been sharing Australia for more than one hundred years. And so, especially in moments like this, White Australians fail miserably. They fail both morally and socially. They have a lot to learn about the art of building a national society, and despite many people, over the years, trying to teach them, they haven’t learnt much. Jews, Greeks, Vietnamese, Lebanese, Italian, Chinese and many more, each on their own and some times together have tried to make White Australians come to terms with what it means to live in a culturally plural society, and again and again they fall into mindless, unrealistic escapist monoculturalism: anything that will stop them from facing the fact that they are sharing Australia with a whole variety of different people; anything that will stop them from facing the fact that as a dominant culture they are responsible for helping people to integrate and become part of a shared Australia. Again and again, they show that they are much better at disintegrating people than they are at integrating them.

I mean here we have a situation where the Lebanese have been migrating to Australia since late 1880s. It’s not that they are some new unheard of part of the Australian equation. And yet somehow, White Australians find it hard to accept or think that the Lebanese are still connected to Lebanon; they find it hard to understand that this does not make them more or less Australian; they find it hard to keep in mind that if something bad happens in Lebanon this affects in all kind of ways their fellow Australians who hail from Lebanon. They hypocritically believe all this while the most extreme among them are very matter-of-factly still licking British royal arses without this appearing to affect their degree of Australian-ness. White Australians are very big on lecturing everyone around about how they should be part of a single Australian nation with clear cultural values. That’s great, but if part of the ‘cultural values’ they are advocating is to be sharing the same national space with someone for more than a hundred years and not having it in you to express some sympathy when they are mourning, there is no doubt about what they can do with that part of ‘Australian cultural values’. They are seriously lacking in the art of making themselves part of other people’s lives so that others can feel that they are part of theirs. 

So, my dear White Australian, if you are unable to do something as basic as the above, you will get the divided society that you deserve. Just don’t keep blaming it on others as if you’ve had nothing to do with it.