Let me begin with a story about the humanities. My university had a celebration of its Learned Fellows â that is, members of learned societies such as the Academy of the Humanities, of which I was a member. The sciences were duly recognised as members came forward to receive their awards. But somehow, they had forgotten the humanities, claiming that the Academy hadnât had its annual meeting. So I was left sitting there, starkly aware in that moment of the plight of the humanities in these neoliberal times. This was followed up in 2020 by the conservative government quadrupling the student fees for humanities courses, to persuade them to take âjob-readyâ course such as nursing and engineering.
We live in an increasingly technological age in which the humanities appear to be under attack from governments and policy makers at the same time the humanities have become even more important. Indeed, Martha Nussbaum talks about âa crisis of massive proportions and grave global significanceâ as education becomes increasingly geared to âproducing a greedy obtuseness and a technically trained docility that threaten the very life of democracy itself.â (2010: 1) In her book The Value of the Humanities, Helen Small points to the dangerous prevalence of âeconomists with no sense of the history of their disciplineâ and âempirical cognitive psychology operating without any scepticism about what brain imaging can tell us.â In such cases, she says, âyou will find representatives of the humanities, including myself, standing up and saying: âWe would have a better public conversation if it incorporated forms of thinking that are called humanistic.â (2016: 7)
But we also live at a time of unprecedented global mobility, a time in which the borders between nations and cultures are crossed incessantly and the bordering practices of states are continually contested by precarious subjects. This is a transnational, cross-cultural and potentially transcultural world. And not only are the humanities best prepared to engage this world but also, one particular branch of the humanities â postcolonial literatures â is ideally positioned, I believe, to articulate this engagement. By taking the language of the coloniser and making it work towards the process of self-representation and delivering it to a global audience, such literatures reveal the transformative power of writing.
But first, before we think of transcultural humanities in South Asia, what are the humanities? The humanities are the study of how people process and document the human experience. Since humans have been able, we have used philosophy, literature, religion, art, music, history and language to understand and record our world. These modes of expression have become some of the subjects that traditionally fall under the humanities umbrella, but as practices, they permeate the whole of modern life. Knowledge of these records of human experience gives us the opportunity to feel a sense of connection to those who have come before us, as well as to our contemporaries. The HASS disciplines (humanities and social sciences) examine intrinsic values of living as contrasted to extrinsic or instrumental values that we find in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
There are many reasons for the power of the humanities, but here are nine suggestions:
- The humanities help us understand others through their languages, histories and cultures.
- They foster social justice and equality.
- They reveal how people have tried to make moral, spiritual and intellectual sense of the world.
- The humanities teach empathy.
- They teach us to deal critically and logically with subjective, complex, imperfect information.
- And they teach us to weigh evidence sceptically and consider more than one side of every question.
- Humanities students build skills in writing and critical reading.
- The humanities encourage us to think creatively. They teach us to reason about being human and to ask questions about our world.
- The humanities develop informed and critical citizens. Without the humanities, democracy could not flourish.
While these features are true of the humanities in general, one particular branch of the humanities, the study of postcolonial literatures, displays all these features.
In the volume The Power of the Humanities published by the Australian Academy of the Humanities (Marks 2017) there are 21 examples of the humanities being pivotal in an incredibly wide variety of enterprises. Examples include enlisting Shakespeare to fight cancer, making fishing more sustainable through cultural change, learning lessons from antiquity about coping with grief and gender studies transforming the culture of sporting and military groups. We can see that these are examples of the humanities trying to display their relevance in a technological world. But we donât need to play on the technological playing field as addenda to STEM activities. Over half a million people work in the creative industries sector in Australia, more than mining and agriculture combined. The humanities are valuable to such a wide range of enterprises because they enable us to think critically, to contextualise a problem by thinking widely as well as deeply. A research group studying the 20 most innovative companies in Australia found that none of them used STEM skills alone. This is because the humanities deploy several of the benefits mentioned earlier, combining critical and creative thinking in ways that look beyond the problem at hand. Innovation has become a very big global issue as Silicon Valley start-ups adopt a policy of disruption, computers become more and more powerful and technological inventions more lucrative. The social problems generated by influential and fabulously wealthy enterprises such as Google, Facebook, Uber and Airbnb have arisen because they have not employed the humanities enough in enacting their vision of changing the world.
Dr. David Silbersweig, a Harvard medical school professor (and thus belonging to the STEM subjects), offers a somewhat eccentric, but perceptive, view of the value of the humanities
If you can get through a one-sentence paragraph of Kant, holding all of its ideas and clauses in juxtaposition in your mind, you can think through most anything. If you can extract, and abstract, underlying assumptions or superordinate principles, or reason through to the implications of arguments, you can identify and address issues in a myriad of fields.
(cited in Kwak 2016)
Unlike computer programming, it isnât easy to specify exactly what you learn in the humanities: reading and writing, perhaps, knowledge of history, politics or literature. The hermeneutic features of the humanities mean that one of the most significant things they teach is how to deal with ambiguity. In fields like social studies and history, you rarely find explanations of the world that are unequivocally correct. You donât even have the pretense, under which many economists labor, that there is an unequivocally correct explanation out there, and you are just trying to find it. As a result, one thing we become adept at is using words to fill gaps â manufacturing connections and relationships between different phenomena. Another value that emerges from the negotiation of ambiguity is the underlying power of rhetoric in the humanities, the ability to convince people. The absence of an irrevocable meaning means that the humanities combine critique with rhetoric to provide creative answers to problems. These things are not going to be much help in designing an application or an algorithm, but they are critical in thinking through the human and social impact of those inventions.
Ultimately, the central value of the humanities lies in their recognition of the importance of culture, which is the plethora of beliefs, attitudes, habits and forms of knowledge by which a people has a world. Plato was the first person in Western society to reveal that to know human beings as whole persons, we must know their culture. To me as a postcolonial theorist, this is the key to the humanities â they are the collection of ways in which we foster cultural empathy. They are the array of strategies by which we enable ourselves to see beyond the boundaries of our own culture. Indeed, the humanities go further, enabling us to empathise with people who see the world entirely differently. We may never see the world as a person from another culture sees it, but the humanities teach us to understand that experience, to understand difference.
At their core, the humanities are transcultural because they allow us to see beyond the metaphorical borders that restrict thought, and they prompt us to cross those borders. Salman Rushdie, who sees the nation as a seething, teeming tangle of realities rather than one reality embodied in the national myth, is enthusiastically committed to border crossing. âIn our deepest natures,â he says, âwe are frontier crossing beingsâ (2002: 76). We see the importance of this for literature in Notes on Writing and the Nation, in which he says, âGood writing assumes a frontierless nation. Writers who serve frontiers have become border guardsâ (1997: 36). The literary accounts of journeys across national boundaries belong with these stories of the journey of becoming. Literature has an inevitable interest in border crossing, and postcolonial literatures in particular have an interest in both the transcultural consequences of border crossing and the profound significance of the human.
However, postcolonial theory advanced with battles on two fronts: on one hand, it had to deal with the sense of humanism as an elitist and Eurocentric hangover of the Enlightenment, and on the other, ironically, it encountered the dominance of post-structuralism, which rejected such humanism with the doctrine of the post-human. The Eurocentric character of humanism led to the arrogant assumption that the heirs of the European Enlightenment were the caretakers of human rights. In the novel In the Light of What We Know (2014), Zia Haider Rahmanâs character Zafar rages against the attitudes of the Western forces in Afghanistan:
They have built this monument to the European enlightenment, the Westâs enlightenment, and they call it human rights, and on that rock they have founded their new humanity, and in its name they act with clear conscience.
(245)
Global conflicts pivot on the idea of what it is to be human.
But for postcolonial theory, the terminal battle was with the proposal that the very concept of the human was passĂ©. Indeed, one of the great casualties of the theoretical sea change that began in literary studies around the middle of the twentieth century was the concept of humanism, an ideal one might imagine lying at the heart of the humanities. The great revolution of Renaissance painting and of the Enlightenment itself had been the reorientation of the world around the phenomenon of the human subject. The âhumanitiesâ comprised all those activities that contrived to celebrate the centrality of the human. For many reasons, this centrality did not survive the late-twentieth-century post-structuralist attack on the concept of the human, a situation neatly summarised by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things that man âis an invention of recent dateâ (1989: 387). In this way, just as the relevance of the humanities began to come under attack from a monopoly of economic and technological discourse in human affairs, âhumanismâ itself came under attack from within the humanities, not only as an outmoded view of human subjectivity, but also, more broadly, as the representative of an outmoded and elitist view of cultural production, a hagiographic rather than a critical view of cultural history. Much of this criticism was justified. Humanism had become characterised by aesthetic snobbery and other-worldliness, which, in Masao Myoshiâs opinion, meant that the humanities had become harmless as well as powerless to affect anyone or anything (Said 2004: 14).
The paradox of postcolonial humanism with its contest against both Eurocentric universalism and post-humanism is embodied in Edward Said. For Said, the demise of humanism was exacerbated by the triumphalist declarations of âpost-humanistâ literary theory and criticism that dispensed with Cartesian notions of self and identity. The humanities, according to him, had lost their direction, their confidence that âHumanism is the achievement of form by human will or agencyâ (2004: 15). Saidâs notion of the human was never the kind that homogenised cultural identities and difference (indeed, the paradoxical contradictions of his ...
