Postcolonial Encounters in International Relations

The Politics of Transgression in the Maghreb

Alina Sajed

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415781725
• eBook ISBN: 9781135047788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Postcolonial Encounters in International Relations examines the social and cultural aspects of the political violence that underpinned the French colonial project in the Maghreb, and the multi-layered postcolonial realities that ensued.

This book explores the reality of the lives of North African migrants in postcolonial France, with a particular focus on their access to political entitlements such as citizenship and rights. This reality is complicated even further by complex practices of memory undertaken by Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals, who negotiate, in their writings, between the violent memory of the French colonial project in the Maghreb, and the contemporary conundrums of postcolonial migration.

The book pursues thus the politics of (post)colonial memory by tracing its representations in literary, political, and visual narratives belonging to various Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals, who see themselves as living and writing between France and the Maghreb. By adopting a postcolonial perspective, a perspective quite marginal in International Relations, the book investigates a different international relations, which emerges via narratives of migration. A postcolonial standpoint is instrumental in understanding the relations between class, gender, and race, which interrogate and reflect more generally on the shared (post)colonial violence between North Africa and France, and on the politics of mediating violence through complex practices of memory.

1 IR and the world

The politics of encounters

… liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages.

Edward Said (1994b: 332)

My first encounter with International Relations (IR) theory happened in 2002 as I was completing a Master’s degree in European Studies in my native country Romania. I do not recall the name of the book I randomly skimmed through to get a glimpse of what IR theory is about, but I do recall that it only presented two views: realism and liberalism. The realist perspective gave me the chills, while the liberal perspective left me unsatisfied and wondering whether this was all there was to IR. I knew what I imagined IR should be about but I simply could not find it in any of the readings I was doing or in any of the class discussions. I had a BA degree in English and French literature so I felt I was a novice in political science. As an undergraduate student I had been mesmerized by the intricate webs literary narratives spun where politics, art, history, philosophy and culture seemed to be blended so effortlessly into the texture of life as to make their separation futile and violent. It was this rich intricacy and the multiple connections it engendered that sent me reeling and thirsting for more. However, the IR readings and discussions I encountered as a graduate student (first in Romania, then as a bona fide IR student in Canada), were cold and clinical, unimaginative and tedious. I remember going through the IR theories course and thinking that I must be enrolled in the wrong program, as I could not imagine a greater gap between the world I experienced and IR theory. My first glimmer of hope was lit in the last week of the course when we discussed postcolonial theory. I remember reading Edward Said’s Orientalism, Philip Darby’s The Fiction of Imperialism, and Sankaran Krishna’s ‘The Importance of Being Ironic’ and suddenly it all made sense. Perhaps it was not I who was misplaced in the world of IR. Rather it was IR who had displaced itself from the world.

I wrote this book to understand what it might mean to bring the world back into IR. IR’s world is suffocatingly narrow and self-referential: a glance at most IR narratives reveals not people, but states, as privileged subjects of politics and of the international. In fact, people are conspicuously absent from the world of IR, and the world as I imagined it is one of overlapping voices, memories and histories, of encounters, violence, but also promises. The contours of these overlaps and the memory of these encounters do not obey the statist logic of rigid borders but evoke different geographies of meaning and interaction. I thus chose a locale that encapsulates the richness of encounters, the painful weight of violence, and the intricate webs of memory: the Maghreb, ‘the land where the sun sets.’ But the Maghreb I engage here is a living ‘web of translocal relations,’ and not simply the sum of several nation-states.¹ To make sense of (post)colonial Maghreb I examine the violence of the encounter between France (or rather the French colonial project) and the various Maghrebian locales and voices. The goal of this book is threefold: to provide an alternative framework for looking at (international) relations as encounters, one which questions the state-centeredness of the ‘international,’ focusing instead on the translocal webs created and on the various subjectivities produced.² In adopting this specific focus, this book seeks to go beyond not only the limiting framework of the ‘international,’ which has been for so long the stubborn preoccupation of IR, but also beyond recent conceptualizations of the ‘trans-national’ as a necessary alternative and foil to the former (see, for example, Mandaville 2003; and Varadarajan 2010).³ As I contend later, ‘translocal’ does not take the nation-state as its primary reference; rather, it refers to the enmesh- ment of the local into larger structures and webs of interactions that precede the emergence of the nation-state (Dirlik 2007: 166). In employing the idea of translocality, this book does not seek to render the state irrelevant or ignore it as a level of analysis, but rather to indicate the workings of different and varied spatial and political formations that should also be legitimate foci of IR.

Another goal pursued by this project is to re-centre the importance of colonialism and imperialism in the creation and endurance of ‘inter-national’ relations both as a discipline and as a set of practices. As explored at length by Chapters 2 and 8, IR as a discipline is itself a product of colonial relations (see Inayatullah and Blaney 2004). To take colonialism as crucial to an under-standing of the discipline is to seek to make visible the workings of colonial difference in contemporary world politics and the global racial hierarchies it has engendered. In this sense, this book highlights the failure of critical approaches within IR to engage meaningfully the (post)colonial substance of ‘global relations.’⁴ A third objective of this book is thus to interrogate the limits of current critical endeavours in IR and to suggest an approach that hopes to make visible other lifeworlds outside the West. These limits become apparent when examining the emergence of the post-structuralist project from the violence of the French colonial project in Algeria and its intersections with the Algerian War (undertaken at length in Chapter 2). Given the centrality of French intellectual traditions to the emergence of critical IR theory, this work’s focus on French colonial history and the translocal character of the Maghreb aims to bring into spotlight both the colonial roots of post-structuralism and the exploration of non-Western worlds and subjectivities through postcolonial lenses. This trans-Mediterranean encounter produced specific subjectivities shaped by class, gender and racial formations. The book’s interest in the migration flows between the Maghreb and France thus stems from a desire to explore these various subjectivities and, more specifically, to provide more nuanced distinctions among various migration experiences and the differentiated claims to agency, hybridity, belonging and citizenship they have enabled. As the critique of Roxanne Doty’s analysis of immigration policies in France illustrates (explored in Chapter 7), many critical engagements with migration and diaspora in IR remain stubbornly state-centred even as they seek to disrupt or destabilize the hegemonic hold the nation-state has on practices of citizenship and belonging. This paradoxical approach produces analyses whereby processes of migration emerge as largely undifferentiated experiences unaffected by categories of class, gender or ethnicity.

The emphasis of the book then falls largely on Franco-Maghrebian diasporan cultures, and more specifically on how subjects from these cultures experience and situate their hybridity, belonging, and sense of political agency within the colonial world of the Maghreb and within the ‘cosmopolitan’ spaces of France. My more particular interest in the role and figure of the Franco- Maghrebian intellectual speaks to the complicated character of the differentiated subject-positions within this diaspora and to the limits of postcolonial dia- sporic solidarity. Any solidarity between the diasporic intellectual (called the exile here) and her diasporic other - the disenfranchised Maghrebian migrant labourer living on the fringes of French society, identified here as the immigre - is constrained and compromised by multiple stratifications of class, gender and racial formations lingering on from the colonial encounter. This compromised solidarity only serves to reinstate and perpetuate the colonial position of the ‘native’ within the postcolonial imaginary and spatiality of a supposedly hybrid and cosmopolitan French society.

The Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals whose works I examine here aim to reflect on and to mediate in their narratives the persistence of colonial memory in the current condition of the immigre(e). However, their act of translating the ‘suffering of the immigrant’ (to use Abdelmalek Sayad’s phrase) into literary narratives without musing on their privileged position within the diaspora, and hence on the socio-political distance that separates them from their immigres subjects, renders them complicit in the (post)colonial violence that produced the category of the ‘native’. Ultimately, as I argue throughout this book, their strenuous attempts to rescue the authenticity of the Maghrebian ‘native’ through strategies of sanctification, which aim to undo the colonial defilement of the ‘native’, speak more than anything about a desire to take control of the ‘native’s’ subjectivity and to re-fashion their own endangered sense of selfhood as the ‘non-duped’ of modernity (capitalism, imperialism or globalization) (Chow 1993: 53).

The politics of encounters and translocal webs of relations

This project draws a link between the work of colonial memory, its mediation into the postcolonial present, and the politics of authenticity that surface from the examination of various diasporic subjectivities. Within critical approaches in IR (more specifically post-structuralist ones) there is a tendency either to dismiss the notion of authenticity altogether (in the name of a dogmatic anti-foundationalism), or to dilute it into a never-ending fluidity and weightlessness (to use Naficy’s term) that divests it of all political content. I argue that this position has been detrimental to our understanding of the complexities of various subject-positions, and of the politics of subalternity. This is an issue I take up in Chapters 2 and 6, where I discuss the colonial roots of deconstruction in the context of the collapse of the French colonial system in Algeria, and the contrapuntal experiences of the Algerian War of Fanon and Camus. In spite of the centrality of French intellectual traditions to the emergence of critical approaches in IR, there has been virtually no discussion or exploration of the colonial origins of such traditions. As I remark in Chapter 2, it is ironic that a project so attentive to the notion of historicity - as post-structuralism claims to be - should be so oblivious, indeed resistant, to the idea of examining its own historicity.

Here I suggest that the failure of the post-structuralist project to decentre the discipline of IR may lie also in its own amnesiac tendencies. I make the case for rethinking the relationship between post-structuralism and postcolonialism by probing the claims of Robert Young, Azzedine Haddour and Pal Ahluwalia that the history of deconstruction coincides with the collapse of the French colonial system in Algeria. Names associated with post-structuralism such as Jacques Derrida, Helene Cixous, Jean-Frangois Lyotard experienced the violence of the Algerian War and reflected on it in their various writings. Their reflections on their personal experience of colonialism in Algeria are particularly relevant to a better understanding of the historical context in which the project of deconstruction became possible. In these reflections, I argue, the colonial subject tends to be recolonized as the wholly other whose alterity is unfathomable, and whose difference serves to refashion a knowable Western discourse. Their framing of alterity and difference has been very much replicated in many of the contemporary critical analyses in IR informed by poststructuralist perspectives. Indeed I contend that one of the consequences of an approach inattentive to its own colonial historicity has been the idealization of the marginalized, the oppressed or the ‘native’ without attending to the complexity of her position, voice or agency. Within critical attempts in IR at retrieving the native’s voice, this idealization of the ‘native’ as the other, the oppressed, and wronged/marginalized subject, speaks ironically to the notion that ‘defilement and sanctification belong to the same symbolic order’, which is that of colonial/imperialistic discourse (Chow 1993: 54).

Equally disconcerting is the assumption embraced by many critical IR scholars that a critique of the Eurocentrism of the discipline is a sufficient gesture in decolonizing the discipline, without a meaningful engagement with the difference and alterity for whose voice they claim to be creating space (see George 1995). More specifically, this book finds problematic the politics of post-structuralist analyses in IR that empty out the ‘other’ while retaining an epistemological privilege on the ‘self ‘ - a practice sadly reminiscent of realist and liberal approaches in the discipline.⁵ Post-structuralism emphasizes dif-ference both as an important focus of analysis meant to supplement IR’s refusal to engage its inherent hierarchies and marginalizations, and as an analytical tool that investigates the violent dynamics of an international pre-dicated upon exclusion and exploitation. In doing so, its contribution to the field has been most valuable. But the critique of the field has been confined to a self-referential project that ends up re-centring the Eurocentrism of the discipline through a critical re-reading of IR’s ‘canon’. By ‘canon’ I mean not only the so-called major thinkers who have purportedly inspired the realist and liberal traditions (such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Kant), but also the by now canonical themes of IR (sovereignty, state, international, security). I re-emphasize here that I do not wish to dismiss the very good work done by such critical re-readings. Indeed it has been salutary to exposing some of the limits of the mainstream’s claims to disciplinarity, and for this aspect, my work is greatly indebted to such analyses. However, it is also worth noting that when such re-readings are not accompanied by genuine attempts to de-centre not only the discipline but its embedded Western-centric frame, they end up simply reiterating the image of a West in ‘[a] permanent dialogue with itself’ (Fanon 2004: 237). Julian Saurin noted that ‘IR has inherited a colonizer’s model of the world or arrogated to itself a supremacist position’ (Saurin 2006: 27). In this sense, post-structuralist IR has simply attempted to reform the model of the discipline from within without breaking up the mould of colonial supremacy, which still deeply permeates the discipline. To put it differently, the post-structuralist project has not dislodged the engrained assumption that the history of IR is the history of the West. Thus the discipline is still very much constituted as an Anglo-American space that renders all other spaces and voices as both inadequate and dispensable.

As an academic trained in a Western institution and working in a nonWestern location, I’ve been inspired by Appadurai’s conceptualization of the ‘research imagination’ as a tool with immense emancipatory potential (see Appadurai 2000). I am committed to the idea that as academics we need to make the link between the emancipatory potential of imagination in our contemporary world, which has informed people’s desire to migrate, to mobilize and to congregate politically across national borders, and our impoverished research imagination, which does not yet have the adequate vocabulary to capture these emerging webs of relations. In order to make sense of the multiple translocal connections and relations, I thus adhere here to a perspective that aims to highlight the ‘mutual constitution of European and non-European worlds and their joint role’ in political, security, economic and social relations (Barkawi and Laffey 2006: 329), or as Said (1994b) would have it, ’intertwined histories’. In this book, I take the Maghreb as a paradigmatic example of an intertwined history forged through its violent encounter with French colonialism. When I speak of the encounter between France and the Maghreb, I am not referring to the ‘official’ portrayal of histories and characters; nor am I focusing upon the state-centred interactions within this region. Rather, this project is concerned with the interactions, transgressions and negotiations that happen between and among individual and collective voices and memories, which find themselves located within the Franco-Maghrebian web of translocal relationships. My interest in the productivity of this trans- has thus been stirred not only by a desire to investigate cross-border politics and border crossings in a territorial and concrete sense, but also by the theoretical and disciplinary border crossings promised by the connotations of ‘trans’ that emerge from terms such as ‘transgressive’ and ‘translocal’. Thus I am interested in how the flows of colonial memory but also the postcolonial flows of unequal mobility (migrant labourers, intellectual exiles) and activism constitute the space of the Franco-Maghrebian borderland in a way that is irreducible to individual states.

Branwen Gruffydd Jones and Julian Saurin argue that the task of decolonizing IR cannot be confined to ‘restoring excluded narratives from beyond the confines of Europe’ (Gruffydd Jones 2006: 8; see also Saurin 2006). I agree that simply bringing voices from ‘elsewhere’ is not a sufficient gesture, but it is a necessary starting point. Julian Saurin’s analysis of IR as an imperial project raises excellent criticisms about the limits of contemporary postcolonial theory, but his easy dismissal of the necessity for a retrieval of various colonized voices is disconcerting in the context of a discipline in which such a task has barely begun (see Saurin 2006: 37)! Moreover, his suggestion...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. IR and the world: the politics of encounters
• 2. The post always rings twice? The Algerian War, post-structuralism and the postcolonial in IR theory
• 3. Exilé and immigré: the politics of exile and diaspora in the Franco-Maghrebian borderland
• 4. Where have all the natives gone? Spectral presences and authenticity in photographic and literary narratives
• 5. The Franco-Maghrebian borderland as cinematic space: memory, trauma and authenticity
• 6. Fanon, Camus and colonial difference: possibilities and limits for decolonial thought and action
• 7. Postcolonial strangers in a cosmopolitan world: postcolonial hybridity and beyond
• 8. Diasporic identifications, translocal webs and International Relations
• Transgressing International Relations: concluding remarks
• Bibliography
• Index