Basu
Thakur proceeds by reconciling what are considered irreconcilable disciplines:
postcolonialism and psychoanalysis. He finds that the two fields share common
ground more than what each avows. The book is divided into two sections: the
first contains three chapters and the second two plus a conclusion. The
chapters in the first explain why postcolonial writers cannot counter the
ontological challenge posed by the big Other. The second section teases how
neoliberal modes of expression perpetuate the colonial/oriental project,
thereby testifying to how the colonised/decolonised remains crippled with the
same ontological fixation.
Chapter
One: “The Subaltern Act of Freedom” distinguishes between acting out, ‘the
passage to the act’ and act in Lacan’s theory of the Act in the sense that the
first two never challenge the Other because they maintain the fantasy, whereas
‘to act’ is to decimate both the big Other and the imagination. Basu Thakur
illustrates this point with one subaltern character, Draupadi, in Mahasweta
Devi’s story with the same title, wherein the subaltern abolishes politics by
putting the signifier’s symbolic order under duress. The revolutionary
dimension in Draupadi’s act is specifically that one that does not solicit
recognition; its spontaneous and eruptive unfolding breaks the monopoly over
the symbolic framework because the master signifier through the show is deeply
shaken. Indirectly Basu Thakur is telling readers that postcolonial texts fall
below this bar set by Mahasweta.
Chapter
Two: “Postcolonial. Animal. Limit” revises postcolonial to criticism by
claiming that the real animal is the one whose capacities escape humans’
imaginary: it shocks and destabilises the seemingly ever-strong symbolic order.
(p. 36) only to learn that all extended orders remain rooted in lack. Only
fantasy exhibits the Other’s apparent invisibility. Through a reading of
Mahasweta Devi’s story, the postcolonial animal interpreted through a
pterodactyl underlies less and less the occasional failures of language by
zooming on the expressive shortcomings of language. Encountering the flying
demon uncovers the impossibility of representing the condition of subalternity.
In as much as it is real, not a symbol, the radical alterity in the pterodactyl
remains an insult to subjectivity; it disrupts facile renderings and certainly
cancels the capacity of representation to render any experience translucent.
The animal’s death drive can be effectively countered through “explosive love”
(p. 44), never through desire, allowing readers to confront universally
traumatic nothingness.
Chapter
Three: “Hysterization of Postcolonial Studies; or, Beyond Cross-Cultural
Communication” builds on the Lacanian principle wherein people “…desire to
remain in desire without satisfaction…” (p. 68). The author finds that the
colonial archiving of knowledge is fundamentally rooted in nuisance or that
excessive enjoyment from the dream of controlling the colonised. But this
orientalist project wherein knowledge is sought less for its own sake and more
for domination remains paradoxically an expression of lack and non-being
besetting the master signifier. The evidence from reading Leila Aboulela’s “The
Museum” and Tony Gatlif’s film, Gradjo Dilo (The Crazy Stranger, 1997), shows
that the archive amassed to qualify for cross-cultural communication miserably
fails. Hence, how postcolonial theory, when restricted to answering back, is
destined to remain a self-defeating endeavour. Only the willing blind refuses
to note that the archive cannot be exhaustive. By extension, a counter archive similarly
expresses hysteria that craves acknowledgement from the Other’s symbolic order.
Chapter
Four: “Fictions of Katherine Boo’s Creative Non-Fiction, or, The Unbearable
Alterity of the Other” reads an American journalist’s Behind the Beautiful
Forever: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (2012). Basu Thakur finds
that neoliberal accounts have remained consistent with colonial narratives
regarding how oriental spaces remain marred in poverty. Instead of chastising
capitalism for the proletarization of India’s undercity, the report underlines
postcolonial mismanagement and the elites’ corruption. White supremacists
remain incapable of noting that the impoverished multitudes in Calcutta and
other cities are essential to the prosperity of residents of upscale neighbourhoods
in Mumbai or New Delhi in the sense that the two antagonistic sights go
together. Narrative accounts wherein poverty is humanised, such as in Boo’s,
risk “gutturalising the politics of globalisation by strategically redrawing
the phantasmatic screen of third world abjection over the real conditions of
global inequality suffered in the third world.” (p. 108). The argument wherein
only in India (or other decolonised spaces) where corruption explains sights of
depravation fortifies the idea that the West cannot tolerate despicable
depravities because only the West/Other knows how to address gross economic
inequalities systematically.
Chapter
Five: “Political Correctness Is Phallic: Idaho Politics, Black Panther, and
Gran Torino”, considers how representational politics, as shown in these films,
facilitates disengagement from reality and remains complicit with
neoliberalism. As displayed in these films, the conflict between communities is
geared less toward provoking audiences to register the injustice of political
choices but is precisely directed toward culturising injustice. The films serve
as an ideological apparatus obfuscating the precariat’s chances of reversing
their misfortunes by feeding them the illusion that solid opportunities are
waiting for them just around the corner if they only stay patient. Meanwhile,
the neoliberal order remains untouched. Instead of highlighting institutionalised
segregation or the ensuing discrimination that followed the formal abolishment
of slavery, Black Panther reverses the typical image by showing the imaginary
African republic of “Wakanda as a site of pure plenitude.” (p. 148) But the
technologically advanced Africa and Africans are nowhere nearly helpful or
emancipatory as ‘Africa-as-the-heart-of-darkness’ since it is still through
fantasy that the West mediates Africa. Readers reach this understanding that
whoever seeks an acknowledgement from the master signifier is
counterrevolutionary.
The
Conclusion: “Particular Universal” underlines how postcolonial writers’
penchant for competing representations of misery and victimhood subscribes to
the logic of illogic wherein gratification is expected and generated from the
Other’s acknowledgement. Besides illustrating how this logic is sick, the
conclusion claims how this logic enforces the other’s phallic image and justifies
postcolonial oppression. Differently put, no matter how exhaustive the native
informants’ knowledge of the subaltern will be, that knowledge stays rooted in
lack and has to be mediated through fantasy. The subaltern cannot be reduced to
any set of archives or manuals. The particularity of the urban precariat stands
for the new universal. Following Žižek, Basu Thakur credits Malcolm X for
accurately seizing on the radical understanding wherein “…the only possibility
of moving forward lies through embracing the negation, claiming it as part of
one’s identity, hence the ‘X’ in his name.” (p. 192)
When
reading Basu Thakur’s volume, the reader cannot avoid the question, why would
one seek to fix a theory by invigorating it with another one? But lest one
precipitates, what seems like a fixation on the palliative is found out to be
indeed revolutionary. Similarly, there are several instances of convoluted
writing like in: “This is not freedom in the sense of Liberty as a metaphysical
attribute. But, rather, freedom here is action illuminating the lack of
freedom.” (p. 28), where they attempt to follow through the prose becomes a
challenge. But soon, Basu Thakur’s discussion of his selected fiction comes to
the reader’s rescue, convincing us to remain glued to the book. Indeed, Basu
Thakur’s reading of Mahasweta’s Draupadi reads to me (at least) like the Tunisian
Bouazizi, the man who inflamed himself in December 2010: an act that deposed
several dictators. I could not overlook this quote: “By erasing their bodies to
correspond with their already erased speech, that is, unravelling the body as
an object of speech, the subaltern shocks the big Other. Their wanton disregard
for the body delivers a traumatic truth. Namely, there’s a difference between
having and being a body.” (p. 7). Insights such as these underline the author’s
insistence on historical totality and the class dimension in the precariat’s
misfortune with which he reinvents communism from the debris of postcolonialism
and neoliberalism. How can readers afford to bypass Basu Thakur’s insights as
to the latter recall Marx and Engels’ underscoring of the class struggle? Only
that Postcolonial Lack deploys a different approach to solve the same theorem.
Fouad
Mami
Université
d’Adrar (Algeria)
ORCID
iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524
fouad.mami@univ-adrar.edu.dz
