Academia.eduGoldenTriadGilroy.docx

Anderson, Imagined Communities, 5
Ibid. 5
Said, Orientalism, 2
Lewis, The Influence of Edward Said, 775
Ibid., 777
Gikandi, Afterword: Outside the Black Atlantic, 241
Ibid. 241
Kaisary, The Black Atlantic: Notes on the Thought of Paul Gilroy, 2
Amante, Nations and Nationalism, 612
Nic Craith, "Migrant" Writing and the Re-Imagined Community, 84, 85, 90
Owen, The Two Critiques of Orientalism, 2
Ibid. 2
Wogan, Imagined Communities reconsidered, 403
Ibid., 404-405
Globalization and Social Change, 2016
Raghaven, British Orientalism in India, 2016
Black Atlantic: Global Development of Art on Popular Trends, 2004
Prison University Project, San Quentin, CA 2016
Baez, Joan http://www.joanbaez.com/Lyrics/pristrilogy.html Billy Rose, 1972













ANDERSON, GILROY AND SAID:
THE GOLDEN TRIAD OF POST COLONIAL THOUGHT







Seminal works that forever change the ways in which a society views itself do not come along very often. Even less common is the consensus that the scholarly authors who wrote them were right and hit upon profound truths that are the building blocks of civilized thinking and behaviors. For all their complexity and proposed divinity, human beings are distressingly cruel to each other. They are intolerant and fearful of the things they do not understand and horrifyingly quick to "other" another human being for the simplest of reasons. However, the fact that human beings have language and the ability to reason, puts them in a category apart from all other species on the planet. In this way, they are able to socially construct and imagine abstract ideas including nations, the concept of race, and exclusion.
This essay will assess the significance and impact of three of the most extraordinary thinkers of the 20th Century: Benedict Anderson, Edward said, and Paul Gilroy, on immigrations and migration theories as well as on globalization. Although they are very different men, from different ethnicities, each with their own original thoughts and ideas, they also possess a thread (or threads) of commonality that binds them together: weaving a tapestry for their fellow humans with rich and thought-provoking proposals. Whether one agrees with them or not, it is hard to deny the depths of passion from which each of them articulates. Much like seeds that have been watered and nurtured over time, the ideas of this Golden Triad of scholars has evolved, taken root, been challenged, been criticized, then expounded upon, and finally been accepted or rejected by thinkers around the world.
Benedict Anderson, in what was arguably his most famous work, Imagined Communities, posited that "print capitalism" was the key to nationalism and the social construction of nations. Anderson identifies three paradoxes as follows: (1) The objective modernity of nations to the historians' eyes vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists. (2) The formal universality of nationality as a sociocultural concept [and] (3) The "political" power of such nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence."
Further, his definition of the nation as "…an imagined political community, " was pivotal in the understanding of the social construction of a nation thanks to his explanation that no matter how small a nation happens to be, it was unlikely that all of its citizens would ever know each other. Therefore, the unity and solidarity of the nation was a construct in the minds of those who embraced it.
Edward W. Said, in his celebrated work, Orientalism, makes the claim:

…that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of them,
in my opinion, interdependent. The most readily accepted
designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed
the label still serves in a number of academic institutions.
Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient-
and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, soc-
iologist, historian, or philologist-either in its specific or its
general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is
Orientalism.

While this is a key concept of his work, it is also the lightning rod for much of the criticism that has been directed at Orientalism. In a journal article by Herbert S. Lewis, the author concedes that Said "…has had a powerful impact on Anthropology-despite the discipline's absence from its pages-because of a powerful mood that had taken hold of America by the 1970's." However, he also writes about the 'crisis of representation' including Said along with Charles Briggs, Bernard McGrane, Johannes Fabian and others who raise "…fears that keep ethnologists and ethnographers on their toes even about what to call the people they write of, let alone what they write about them."
Indeed, Paul Gilroy has come in for similar criticisms. The Black Atlantic has certainly become one of the definitive works on blackness, countercultures, Diasporas and post-colonial studies of this century. His theories and concepts of the Atlantic slave trade, double consciousness, modernity and black post nationalism have influenced not only academia but also art and music as well. The Black Atlantic combines multiple periods of history and black culture to create a panorama of the constructions of (inter) national identities and makes his reader rethink borders.
In the ways that Benedict Anderson and Edward Said questioned the constructs of borders and nationalism, Gilroy too, raises similar questions about the human allegiance to imagined communities that have often oppressed and enslaved them. Digging deep to discover the origins and nuances of nationalism, these three authors offer differing pathways to the hermeneutics that have been presented, embraced and rejected by others.
A journal article by Simon Gkiandi posits that Gilroy's book has "…been central to a new black studies because of the debates it has triggered and the questions it has raised, many of them connected to what have been assumed to be the books' sins of omission." In this regard, Gikandi refers to criticisms that Gilroy failed to address the horrific suffering on slave ships in favor of "redemptive hermeneutics" that focused on cultural goods instead.
This is a sentiment that is echoed by Philip Kaisary as well lamenting that, "…Gilroy does not proceed down the postmodernist path of equating Western modernity per se with totalitarianism and genocide, and therefore jettisoning it altogether." Other authors question the idea that Gilroy seemed to privilege the black of North America, over the rest of the world. Indeed, this is one of the common themes running through critiques of Gilroy's work.
Nevertheless, The Black Atlantic, like Orientalism and Imagined Communities remains one of the most influential works in post-colonial studies in the world. According to one review on The Persistence of Nationalism: From Imagined Communities to Urban Encounters, a 2013 book by Angharad Closs Stephens, the influence of Anderson is undeniable. In fact, the reviewer states that "…the author argues, imagining the community is not related to the past or present but to the future."
Another journal article from 2015 is evidence of the influence of all three seminal works and their impact on "othering", exclusion/inclusion, and the "new semantic vistas" created by them. This author posits that the "construction of difference is hardly a neutral process." Indeed, Anderson, Said and Gilroy would be the first to agree. After all, the construction of difference goes to the very core of the arguments of this "Golden Triad" whose clear perception of the social constructions on a global level blazed the trail for others to follow. Discourses of exclusion following the publications of these authors more often than not, reflect the tendency to recognize social constructs for what they are and dismantle them much more effectively.
Another author cites the significant and far reaching changes in the world during the 1960's and beyond and the desire of much of society to "…liberate ourselves from the world views on race and empire…" Analyzing the roles of social sciences, in particular anthropology, "…in what Talal Asad called the "Colonial Encounter…" this article takes the position that "Orientalism… continues to be regarded as dangerous… in particular by those who have never read it." That all three of the subject works take on the raging bull of colonialism is a key aspect of the message they seek to convey. For it is colonialism that lies at the heart of the debate over whether the "savage other" was conquered and rescued by their saviors or stripped of all they held sacred (including life itself) by their oppressors.
In fact, these authors (and those that followed in their wake) had a great deal of baggage to unpack, about 500 years or more worth, and it was global baggage. Even in the days before globalization as we know it today, the world had common threads that connected them: greed for resources, use and abuse of religion, the taking of lands, the subjugation of "inferior" peoples, and a sense of entitlement that convinced them that the world was theirs alone.
In a 2009 journal article by Peter Wogan, the tremendous influence of Benedict Anderson on language and national identity as well as the fact it was well received by a diverse academia, are reasons cited for the positive influence and long-lasting impact of this particular work. This article also analyzes print capitalism and evaluates the role of language and media in the social construction of communities and nationalism.
However, the same article posits that oral history and communication are also critical to the human experience and cannot be so easily discounted. Wogan's arguments concerning "print vs. orality" emphasize the power of oral language (especially poetry and song) as visceral connectors to nation and to each other.
For evidence of the profound influence of Paul Gilroy one need not look very far. Any number of universities alone have committees and organizations dedicated to the study of The Black Atlantic and the arguments it raises. At City University of New York (CUNY) for instance, the Committee on Globalization and Social Change is predicated heavily on the work of Paul Gilroy offering a Symposium on Freedom and Entanglement Across the Black Atlantic with an array of distinguished scholars from world famous universities. Perhaps the most powerful statement of Gilroy's influence however, is the trend toward globalization itself so prominent on today's horizon.
In an essay by Anirudh Raghaven the opinion is expressed that Said's Orientalism "…marked a radical shift in the understanding of this term." Raghaven expresses the idea that Said combined Foucalt's 'power-concept' ideology with Gramsci's hegemony concept to effectively construct a new framework in which to study Orientalism. Foucalt's idea that power and knowledge go hand in hand, was reinvented by Said as "colonial power" and "colonial knowledge" (according to Raghaven). The end result was that the English, far from sympathy for the Orient, instead used this to serve their own colonial power structures. Said's contention of course was that Orientalism was used to "…establish hegemony over the Orient…" by the Europeans themselves. Edward Said provided a new lens with which to view British hegemony and European dominance. Perhaps the strongest criticism of his work is the most obvious: that one is in no position to understand or critique another group unless one is a member of that group. This is a sweeping generality that, while it perhaps has some merit, presumes that Said is in a unique position to make that call.
In this century it is hard to think of two more pivotal ideas than Black Culture/History and the Black Diaspora. The influence of both on a global level has been nothing short of phenomenal. From music and dance, to fine art and literature, the black influence is obvious. Teenagers in Japan and China know how to rap. Hip-hop concerts around the world played two sellout crowds. Arguably, there is no corner of the world that does not know and love Beyonce. Paul Gilroy may not have started it all, but he was certainly an architect, as he continues to be, of the black experience as it relates to globalization and pan-Africanism.
According to a 2004 article describing a programme [sic] of art and music, the wealth of performances, media coverage, films, workshops, concerts, and more challenging the Eurocentrist concepts of the past few centuries, "…confirm the "dissident identities" of black culture as Paul Gilroy, curator of the programme [sic], points out. The present project is named after Gilroy's influential book The Black Atlantic, in which he describes the highly complex structure of interrelationships in the African Diaspora that extends across Africa, America and Europe, and the alternatives it poses to Western modernity."
Finally, according to the essay prompt for this paper, an opinion is required regarding my own research and the impact of the subject works as it relates to what I am doing. For me, these are three works that I will study in more depth and use in my thesis as well as in the curriculum I am writing for inmates of the California State Prison system. All too often, inmates are not given the opportunity to study ideas and concepts beyond basic reading, writing, and math. In my opinion, this is a huge mistake. While it's true that many inmates do not have high school diplomas, it is also true that many of them have very high IQs and the potential to succeed in higher education.
To my mind, an awareness of the abstract as well as critical thinking skills are essential to inmate rehabilitation. In particular, the ideas and concepts set forth by these three seminal works create a framework that allows a person to break out of mental prisons that have been imposed upon them by American education, society, and the media. On the most basic level, how do you salute the flag that represents a country that has always considered you a second-class citizen and treated you accordingly? And perhaps, on the deepest level, how then do you also obey its laws and its law enforcement system?
If you live in a day-to-day situation that reinforces the knowledge that mass incarceration is a reality and that people of color are populating the prisons, how then do you see a light at the end of the tunnel? If your boundaries have never extended further than Folsom or Delano, how do you know and understand globalization as well as oppression on a global level? Getting your history and your news from television is severely limiting, to say the very least. I belong to an organization called the Prison University Project based out of San Quentin. This is the inspiration for my thesis and my future work. Below are listed some of the accomplishments of this amazing program thanks to the introduction of higher education to inmates:
In the past ten years, PUP has served roughly 1,000 unique students at San Quentin State Prison.
There are about 330 students currently active in the program, about two-thirds of whom are enrolled in college-level courses.
The recidivism rate for new offenses among PUP graduates who leave prison is just 4 percent, compared to 19 percent for all prisoners released in California in the same timeframe.
In the 11 years in which the program has been collecting data, no PUP graduate has been returned to prison for committing a violent crime.
Can Edward Said, Benedict Anderson and Paul Gilroy make a contribution to these amazing statistics? I think so. In fact, I think the influence of their work already has. Globalization is here to stay as the confines of our planet grow smaller with each passing year. The time has come for all of us to know and understand what is going on beyond our borders. Indeed, media has helped facilitate that, but the works of these three scholars are what has reminded us that borders and nations are only social constructs. They are not real, they are not absolute, and they are confining only in our own minds. The joint power of language and knowledge is what shapes our reality.
Certainly, prison walls are constructed of concrete and steel. They are very real, particularly to the men and women whose lives are controlled by the state and whose freedom has been taken away or severely restricted. However, the social constructs of race, gender, class, and poverty need not prohibit intellectual growth of any individual even if they live in a penitentiary. The most effective way to "raze the prisons to the ground" as Joan Baez so poetically sang it, is to stop populating them. Educate to Liberate that is my goal.








Bibliography
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Prison University Project, San Quentin, California, 2016
https://prisonuniversityproject.org/

Raghaven, Anirudh. "British Orientalism in India: Nature and Impact on Indian Society (A HistoriographicalSurvey)"https://www.academia.edu/2565126/British_Orientalism_in_India_Nature_and_Impact_on_Indian_Society_A_Historiographical_Survey_2016

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books Random House, 1978.

Wogan, Peter. "Imagined Communities reconsidered: Is Print-capitalism What We Think It Is?" Anthropological Theory 1, no. 4 (January 7, 2009): 403-18. Sage Publications.




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