Imperialism and the Fantasies of Democracy
A Plenary Session of RETHINKING MARXISM 2006, an international conference organized by the journal RETHINKING MARXISM, 26-28 October 2006, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Time and Date: 8:00-10:00 PM; Friday, October 27, 2006
Plenary Speakers:
With Ernesto Laclau, Ella Shohat, and Antonio Callari.
About the Plenary: Imperialism and the Fantasies of Democracy
Many of today's left analyses of imperialism make note of the neoconservative turn to democracy. At the same time, such analyses are often too quick to discard this reference to democracy as empty rhetoric, as a mere cover for the real imperial economic interests (generally centered on oil). Parting ways with such simple critiques of imperialism, this plenary recognizes the constitutive role democratic discourse plays in structuring today's imperial vision and poses the following questions: How does taking the rhetoric of democracy seriously (and conceiving of it as fantasy) aid us to understand what is new and different in contemporary imperialism as well as to grasp the ways in which neoconservative hegemony elicits popular consent? The reason we use the term "fantasies" is to introduce a deliberately ironic and also a disputed term in making the connection between imperialism and democracy. That is, we think that "fantasies" could be read, alternatively, as connoting a source of desire/pleasure, an ideological formation, a possible "illusion," and much else. What kinds of economic, political, legal orders are formed and imposed through imperial fantasies of democracy? What kind of new and unique contradictions are spawned by them that disrupt their smooth functioning? What are the material practices by and through which determinate democratic movements have been able to articulate their projects in the midst of, in spite of, or in conjunction with the forms of imperialism that are currently in play? Does the contemporary turn toward religious and ethnic ideals and movements attest to the failure of these particular democratic fantasies? Or are they conditioned by the inherent limits to the democratic promise?
Alternatively, to the extent that democracy exceeds its articulation to imperialism, it also becomes a potential to mobilize the growing reactions to imperialism in the form of diverse anti-globalization and peace movements. The question then becomes: How can the left critiques of imperialism rethink the promise of democracy that animates the desires of many who wish for economic and political justice, drawing, partly, from rich traditions and current new thinking stemming from Marxism?
About the Plenary Speakers:
Ernesto Laclau holds a Chair in Political Theory at the University of Essex, where he is also Director of the Doctoral Programme in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Toronto, York (Canada), Chicago, California (Irvine), Paris (Nouvelle Sorbonne), SUNY-Buffalo, and the New School for Social Research, as well as various Latin American Universities. He has been made Honorary Professor of the Universities of Buenos Aires and La Plata (Argentina). He has been a Guggenheim Fellow as well as a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the Wilson Center (Washington, D. C.), and the Institute of Humanities (University of California). He has lectured extensively in many universities in North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Australia, and South Africa. He is author of Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (NLB, 1977); New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time (Verso, 1990); Emancipation(s) (Verso, 1996); and most recently, The Populist Reason (Verso, 2005). With Chantal Mouffe, he also wrote the enormously influential Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Verso, 2001, 2nd ed.), which has been described as "a brilliant tour de force of scholarship and argument." He was also the editor and contributor to The Making of Political Identities (Verso, 1994). His writings have been translated into many languages, including German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Slovenian, and Turkish.
Ella Shohat is Professor of cultural studies at New York University. She has lectured and published extensively on the intersection of gender, race, post/colonialism, and transnationalism as well as on Eurocentrism, Orientalism and the representation of the Middle East. Her books include Unthinking Eurocentrism (co-authored with Robert Stam and winner of the Katherine Singer Kovacs Award), Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, as well as the co-edited volumes, Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and the Postcolonial Perspectives and Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media. Shohat and Stam are currently in the final stages of writing The Culture Wars in Translation (NYU press), and their forthcoming Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissisms and Anti-Americanism should be out in November 2006 from Routledge. Shohat is also currently co-editing a volume entitled The Cultural Politics of the Middle East in the Americas. A recipient of a Rockefeller fellowship, she has served on the editorial board of several journals, including Social Text, Critique, and Meridians. Her writing has been translated into diverse languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Polish, Italian, and Turkish. Most recently she taught at The School of Criticism & Theory at Cornell University, and her book Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices has just been published by Duke University Press.
Antonio Callari is a professor at Franklin and Marshall College. Callari is co-editor (with David Ruccio) of Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory — Essays in the Althusserian Tradition (Wesleyan, 1996) and (with Carole Biewener and Stephen Cullenberg) Marxism in the Post Modern Age: Confronting the New World Order (Guilford, 1994). He is the author of numerous essays including 'The Ghost of the Gift: The Unlikelihood of Economics' in The Question of the Gift (Routledge, 2002) and 'Economic Subjects and the Shape of Politics,' in the journal Review of Radical Political Economics (September 1991). Callari was also the translator (along with Joseph Buttigieg) of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, Volume I (Columbia, 1991).
Chair:
David Ruccio is the editor of Rethinking Marxism. His most recent article on globalization and imperialism appeared in the January 2003 issue of RM. The author of over 50 articles and chapters, his books include Postmodern Moments in Modern Economics (coauthored with Jack Amariglio [Princeton, 2003]), Postmodernism, Economics, and Knowledge (coedited with Stephen Cullenberg and Jack Amariglio [Routledge, 2001]), and Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory (coedited with Antonio Callari [Wesleyan, 1996]). Ruccio is currently working on 2 new book projects: "Economics, the University, and the World" and "Planning, Development, and Globalization: Essays in Marxian Class Analysis."
About the platform panels
We have organized a series of panels designed to continue the conversation of the plenary "Imperialism and the Fantasies of Democracy." These panels, conjoined with the plenary session, constitute a 'platform' on the topic. We have at least four panels planned thus far, and are in the midst of organizing further ones. If you are at all interested in joining these panels or organizing any new ones, please mark on your proposal submission that you would like to be a part of the 'Imperialism platform panels.' If we are able, we will try to add your paper to one of the four panels listed below. Otherwise, we will try to add your paper or panel to the overall program of the 'Imperialism' platform.
Platform Panels in the works (for more information, please contact either Maliha Safri at maliha.safri@gmail.com, or Vin Lyon-Callo at slyoncallo@yahoo.com:
A. Cultural imperialism and spaces of resistance
Cultural Imperialism is often defined as the ideological apparatus accompanying and making possible the economic relations of imperialism. Despite the fact that 'superstructure' arguments have been criticized by Marxists and non-Marxists alike, this understanding of cultural imperialism continues to have theoretical purchase. What we would like to do is have this panel continue the discussion of the plenary "Imperialism and the Fantasies of Democracy." Our hope is to challenge the "traditional left position that assumes democratic forces cannot somehow arise in the context of imperial vision or its practices." For this panel we are interested in presenters who investigate cultural movements that can be understood as resisting imperialism despite existing inside or in conjunction with imperialism.
B. Fundamentalism's relation to Imperialism
One of the questions touched upon in our formulation of the plenary "Imperialism and the Fantasies of Democracy" was about the traditional leftist analysis of ethnic and religious movements as a reaction to secular democratic ideals; in this story, the fantasy of democracy loses appeal because of its marriage to economic and cultural imperialism. We want presenters who seek to challenge this received wisdom.
C. Fantasy
Two questions proposed as possible topics of discussion for the plenary "Imperialism and the Fantasies of Democracy" are:
How does the formulation 'fantasies of democracy' grasp (or not) the ways in which neoconservative forms of hegemony elicit popular support?
With or without support, what are the practices or orders that are formed/imposed through the imperial fantasy of democracy?
So in this panel, we want to push further the specific psychoanalytical concept of fantasy as one that is different from the usual left understanding of fantasy as 'deception.'
D. Colonialism and Imperialism
In so many formulations, the distinction between colonialism and imperialism is elided, and both are considered as having the same capitalist-centered origin and dynamic. Some post-colonial critics have argued that the distinction must be kept alive, because of the qualitatively different relations between occupier and occupied under colonialism. These critics have cited forced labor, military occupation, and state expropriation as distinguishing the colonial relation. However, recent understandings of imperialism have expanded to include military force (as in the American war in Iraq), and more generally, to many of the practices previously considered exclusive to colonialism. We want presenters who explore the boundaries, commonalities, and differences between colonialism and imperialism.
We are pleased to announce some confirmed participants in the Imperialism platform panels. These participants include Randy Martin, Ranjana Khanna, and Arjun Jayadev. Here are short bios for these presenters:
Randy Martin from New York University is the author of On Your Marx: Rethinking Socialism and the Left, Socialist Ensembles: Theater and State in Cuba and Nicaragua, and has just completed a book for Duke titled Empire of Indifference: Entanglements of War, Risk and Finance. The project this book is based upon was initiated at the Rethinking Marxism conference in 2003, and examines the terror war through the lens of finance. For the Rethinking Marxism 2006 conference, Randy Martin will be organizing a panel on the political economy of finance and the war.
Ranjana Khanna is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Program in Literature at Duke University. She teaches and researches in the areas of psychoanalytic, postcolonial and feminist theory and literature (and in various combinations of these). Her book Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism is forthcoming from Duke University Press. She is currently completing a book manuscript on transnational feminism provisionally titled "Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830 to the Present." Prof. Khanna will be organizing a panel on Imperialism and Psychoanalysis.
Arjun Jayadev is now Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Professor Jayadev's research focuses on international and macro economics, development, and political economy. He recently published "Capital Account Openness and its Effects on Growth and Distribution: A Review of the Cross Country Evidence" (With Kang-Kook Lee), in Capital Flight and Capital Controls in Developing Countries (2005, edited by Gerald Epstein). For the conference, Arjun Jayadev will be organizing a panel on the political economy of imperialism.
Selected Bibliography of Works on Imperialism published previously in Rethinking Marxism:
Samir Amin. Accumulation on a World Scale: Thirty Years Later. RM 1(2):54-75
Stefano G. Azzara. Marxist Thought, Leninism, and the Historical Balance of the Twentieth Century. RM 8(1):116-121
Reed Brody, Jacinda Swanson, Joseph Buttigieg, Arvind Ganesan, Neve Gordon, Smita Narula, Joe Stork. Human Rights and Global Capitalism: A Roundtable Discussion with Human Rights Watch. RM 13(2):52-71
Arif Dirlik. Globalization as the End and the Beginning of History: The Contradictory Implications of a New Paradigm. RM 12(4):4-22
David Harvey. Globalization in Question. RM 8(4):1-17
David M. Kotz. Globalization and Neoliberalism. RM 14(2):64-79
Joseph E. Medley. Concepts of Capital Accumulation and Economic Development: Samir Amin's Contradictions. RM 2(1):83-103
Elizabeth Oakes. Grenada under Occupation: US Economic Policy, 1983-87. RM 1(3):131-157
Orlando Nuniez Soto. Social Movements in the Struggle for Democracy, Revolution, and Socialism. RM 2(1):7-22
David F. Ruccio. Globalization and Imperialism. RM 15(1):75-94
Kalyan K. Sanyal .Capital, Primitive Accumulation, and the Third World: From Annihilation to Appropriation. RM 6(3):117-130
Reinhold Wagnleitner. American Cultural Diplomacy, Hollywood, and the Cold War in Central Europe. RM 7(1):31-47
John Willoughby. Is Global Capitalism in Crisis? A Critique of Postwar Crisis Theories. RM 2(2):83-102
Richard Wolff. Marxism and democracy. RM 12(1):112-122
Y. Yeadon. Occasional Notes on Mark Lombardi's Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Reagan, Bush, Thatcher and the Arming of Iraq, c. 1979-1990, 3rd Version. RM 15(3):343-349
Slavoj Zizek. What Can Lenin Tell Us about Freedom Today? RM 13(2):1-9
Special double issue on Empire 13(3) edited by Bulent Eken and Abdul-Karim Mustapha The issue included articles by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, Slavoj Zizek, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.