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Religion • Society • Polity • Arts
WORLD ORDER
Postnationalism: Challenging and Redefining
Our Views of National Identity and Citizenship
In this issue. . .
Postnational Roots
Editorial
Transcending the Limits of
Political and Intellectural
Boundaries
A Review of Charles V. Carnegie’s
Postnationalism Prefigured:
Caribbean Borderlands
Deborah A. Thomas
Citizenship and Belonging
Local and Postnational Forms
Steven K. Thomson
An Interview with
Susan Atefat-Peckham
Letting Life Sit Cross-Legged
In the Palms of Your Hands
Kim Meilicke Douglas
Poems
by Arash Abizadeh,
Susan Atefat-Peckham,
Diane Huff, and Paul Mantle
2003
Volume 34, No. 4
Religion . Society . Polity . Ar’rs
2003 VOLUME 34, NUMBER 4
WORLD ORDER AWIS TO
STIMULATE, INSPIRE, AND SERVE
ITS READERS IN THEIR SEARCH
TO UNDERSTAND THE RELATlONSHlPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND
CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS
AND PHILOSOPHY
EDITORIAL BOARD
Betty J. Fisher
Arosh Abizodeh Monireh Kozemzodeh Dione Loffi
Kevin A. Morrison Robert H. Sfockmon Jim Stokes
CONSULTANT IN POETRY Herbert Woodward Mor’rin
INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS
World Order is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 536 Sheridan Road, Wilmette, IL 60091—1811. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher or of the Editorial
Board. Peer review: Submissions to the journal will be subject to
external blind peer review if they fall outside the expertise of the editorial board or upon request by the author.
Submissions and other editorial correspondence should be addressed to the Editor, 1%er Order, 7311 Quail Springs Place NE, Albuquerque, NM 87113—1780 or e—mailed to <wotldorder@usbnc.org>. Detailed information for contributors may be requested in writing or by e—mail.
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Articles may range in length from some 3,750 to 6,250 words.
Reviews vary iri length. Review Note: run from some 125 to 150 words; Mini—Review: run from some 1,000 to 2,500 words, and ReviewEtsayx, from some 3,750 to 6,250 words.
Poems should be single spaced with clearly marked stanza breaks.
Wzrld Order is indexed in the Index Of/1mtrimn Periodical Verse and the ATLA Religion Database.
INFORMATION FOR SUBSCRIBERS
Subscription Rates: U.S.A. and surface to all other countries, 1 year, US $25; 2 years, US $48. Airmail to all other countries, 1 year, US $30, 2 years, US $58. Single copies US $7 plus shipping and handling. Make checks or money orders payable to Bahá’í Distribution Service. Send address changes to and order subscriptions from the Babe“ Distribution Service, 4703 Fulton Industrial Boulevard, Atlanta, GA 30336-2017. Telephone: 1—800—999—9019, United States and Canada; 404—472—9019, all other countries. Or, please e—mail: <subscription@usbnc.otg>.
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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2004 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’í’s of the United States; all rights reserved. World Order is protected through trademark registration in the U.S. Patent Office. Printed in the U.S.A. ISSN 00438804.
ART CREDITS
Cover design by Richard Doering, cover photograph, courtesy Benoit Beauregard <www.istockphoto,com/benoitb> and Diane Diederich; pp. 8, 22, Steve Garrigues; p. 29, courtesy Steven K. Thomson; p. 38, Steven Garrigues.
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23
39
48
Postnational Roofs Editorial
Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor
Meditations: The Faithful Poet a poem by Diane Hufl
X-Yugoslavia a poem by Amsb Abizadeb
Transcending the Limits of Political
and Intellectual Boundaries: A Review of Charles V. Carnegie’s Postnafionalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands
by Deborah A. Tbamas
Passing On a poem by Paul Mantle
Citizenship and Belonging:
. Local and Postnational Forms
by Steven K. Tlmmmn
An Interview with Susan Afefat-Peckhom: Leh‘ing Life Sit Cross-Legged
in me Palms of Your Hands
by Kim Mei/icbr Douglas
Lower Manhattan (1 [Hum by Susan ArdZII—Prt‘b/rzzrtz
Edi’roriol Postnational Roots
For more Then Two centuries humanity has been living in who’r has been called The Age of Nationalism. The single label, however, masks The Tremendous vorie’ry of The phenomenon. The revolutionary-democro’ric form of nationalism championed by The French revolutionaries
is a far cry from Italian fascism. The Creole nationalisms directed against Imperial Spanish rule in the Americas find a readily heard echo in the national liberation movements that swept Africa in the second half of the twentieth century; but their affinity with the expansionist belligerence of pan-German nationalism is harder to discern. Even today the horrors of Serbian nationalism could not provide a Starker contrast to the peaceful and democratic nationalism of the Québécois. And if, before 1919, nationalism connoted the incorporation and assimilation of “little peoples” into larger, world—historical nations, after World War I nationalism came increasingly to mean the precise opposite: nationalism became a rubric under which little peoples fought to save themselves from being swallowed up by their larger neighbors.
But there is a common thread that runs through nationalism in all its forms: Nationalism is premised on an identity that lays claim to the modern state. The classic nationalist view was, of course, that each nation should have its own state. That nationalists today are willing to settle for something less is a reflection of the math: There are potentially thousands of nations in the world, and not all could be Viable states. But to assert that an identity is a national identity is invariably to claim that the political boundaries of the state should somehow reflect that identity’s boundaries.
The connection between national identity and the modern state is crucial. For a defining feature of the modern state is its claim of jurisdiction over some bounded territory. The modern state is rooted in a particular territory; insofar as nationalism Claims the state for the nation, national identity, too, must be rooted in a particular territory. And the modern state, unlike feudal or imperial regimes, demands unambiguously defined territorial boundaries; again, insofar as nationalism claims the state for the nation, national identity, too, must have unambiguously defined boundaries. This nationalist ideology of territorially bounded identities is perhaps best conveyed by one of its favorite metaphors, the metaphor of having “roots.” When we literally think of roots, we think of a plot of land upon which a living being builds its whole life; to uproot oneself is, in a metaphorical sense, to die. For the nationalist, to be rooted is to hold fast to a particular territory; and to be “rootless” is to be spiritually adrift, confused about who one is, perhaps even lacking an identity to speak of.
But we should not be fooled by nationalist metaphors. Human beings are not
2 World Order, 2003, Vol. 34, NO, 4
[Page 3]
trees or weeds: We are fundamentally spiritual beings. Our roots do not just plunge
downward into the earth; they also reach upward for the heavens and outward to
all of humankind. No particular plot of earth has a monopoly over our fellow human
beings: We are found everywhere. The philosopher Anthony Appiah recalls that his
father “thought that there was no point in roots if you couldn’t take them with you.”
With a sky above us, we are free, in Bahá’u’lláh’s words, to “consort with all men
in a spirit of friendliness and fellowship,” wherever we are. We are humans, and
we are capable of taking our roots with us wherever our life’s journey takes us.
The crux of the postnationalist insight is this: Identities do not need to be either territorially rooted or clearly bounded. Even the cultures that we human beings create are not sedentary entities tied to particular territories. They are fluid and constantly on the move. Cultures, roots, solidarity—their fuzzy lines are constantly cutting across the borders of states and nations, carried over by the hundreds of thousands of human beings whose bodies and minds cross those borders daily, in spite of the best coercive efforts of contemporary nation-states.
World Order, 2003, Vol. 34, No. 4 3
Interchange
Letters from and to the Editor
Every era has its fomilior linguistic usages. In recent years it has become common ’ro ofioch The word “post” odjectivolly to a noun, as in postcoloniol, postmodern,
poststructural, postadolescent, postimpressionist, and so on. Its use is a way of putting a border around something from the immediate past and looking at it with a certain degree of separation. The usage often implies some conditionality, suggesting that we have moved to something else but that the thing from which we have moved is not so completely “past” that it no longer affects us. That something is not perfectly, unproblematically “past.”
Adjectivally enhanced nouns tend to be better at describing what we are looking back at than at indicating precisely what it is we have become or are about to be. Even though they often seek to give a dispassionate description of a phenomenon, the “post” and its new noun friend, as verbal constructs, often inevitably express a certain amount of disdain for or criticism of that phenomenon, with their sense of having progressed beyond it.
But using the post+noun construct to define change can also be immensely valuable in marking moments of significant change affecting the human condi 4 World Order, 2003, Vol. 34, No. 4
tion and can be a source of excitement and optimism in helping one to acknowledge and contribute useful responses to that change. One of those slippery but meaningful terms—postnationalismis the theme of this issue.
The concept of postnationalism certainly provides a vantage point from which one no longer defines personal and societal identities exclusively by race or national boundary; from which people begin to acknowledge that personal and societal identities have always been characterized by a great degree of mobility and interaction, and today are even more so, given the semipermeable nature of modern societies; and from which one can begin to make sense of a range of geopolitical, economic, and societal changes that may otherwise seem erratic and nameless.
The editorial and two of the articles in this issue were prompted by Postnatiomzlz'sm Przfigurm’: Caribbean Borderland; by Charles V. Carnegie, an associate professor of anthropology and chair of the African American studies program at Bates College in Maine (and former head of the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica). In his book Carnegie examines the nature and meaning of ethnicity, race, nationality, and even kinship as they relate to the human need for belonging. He looks at traditional anthropological models not so much in
[Page 5]
terms of what they study but of what
they neglect, drawing on his own experience of the Caribbean to point out
communities that have formed over time
in seeming contradiction to prevailing
notions of nation and state—communities, in fact, where such distinctions
become meaningless. Carnegie draws on
a rich historical tapestry of events to
emphasize and buttress his arguments
and offers as an alternative model a global,
nonhomogenized community that recognizes the attraction human beings feel
for the symbolic and the sacred.
The editorial, “Postnational Roots,” challenges us to examine the false premises on which nationalism, in its many forms, is based and to explore identities that are not, and never have been, territorially rooted or clearly bounded.
Deborah A. Thomas, an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, reviews Carnegie’s Poxmationalism Prefigurm’, focusing on two themes—“exposing the inequities and iniquities of ideological projects that continue to bind group identity to territory and race” and the “complicity of academic scholars in ideological projects that naturalize territorial and racial boundaries.”
Thomas recommends the book to scholars and lay readers alike as “an excellent and thoughtful contribution to contemporary analyses of globali INTERCHANGE
zation.” But she also raises provocative questions about how Carnegie “juxtaposes faith—based and secular models of community” and his “presentation of the Bahá’í Faith as a cultural model rather than a set of principles for ‘living well together,’ as Jamaicans would put it, that might also catalyze broader social transformation.”
Steven K. Thomson, who is completing his doctoral thesis on a multi-ethnic community in coastal Africa at Boston University, finds Carnegie’s book a “bold” work that “inspires us to examine nationhood as characterized by national inclusion and exclusion defined in racial terms.”
Thomson offers “an expansion of Carnegie’s analysis of postnationalism by examining the structure of various types of citizenship, allowing a specific set of implications and conclusions about the term to develop” from cases he examines. The cases Thomson chooses include citizenship in Kartong, The Gambia; the structure of citizenship at multiple levels in the Bahá’í Faith; and postnational community building in Jim Crow Washington, DC.
Finally, Kim Meilicke Douglas’s interview with Susan Atefat-Peckham, a poet who won the 2000 National Poetry Series Award for her book T/mt Kind of Sleep, brings the issue on postnationalism close to home. Atefat—Peckham, the
World Order, 2003, Vol. 34, No. 4 5
INTERCHANGE
daughter of Iranian Muslims, has led a truly international life. Born in New York City but raised in New Jersey, France, and Switzerland and having lived in a number of states in America and a variety of countries aborad, she uses her poetry to explore “what place means to a person, and how the spaces we leave behind in a place affect who we are.” She says that she sets “a place aside” in her poems “where the reader can stand and become an active participant in a place that neither of us can claim in the same ways but which both of us can become a part of through poems.” In short, she uses poetry to “remind us that we are global neighbors,” poetry thus being a change—agent in our postnational world. The editors have found editing this issue on postnationalism mind—stretching and look forward to dialogue with our readers on a topic that informs so much of what is going on locally and internationally but that seldom finds its way into the news sources by which we are bombarded. You can reach us by email at <worldorder@usbnc.org> or by regular mail at 7311 Quail Springs Place NE, Albuquerque, NM 87113-1780.
Spiritual space and place, a look at our built and physical environments, was the focus of “70er Order’s Volume 34, Number 3. The lead article was Geoffry \W. Marks’ “Reflections on the Completion of the [Bahá’í] World Administrative Center on Mount Carmel,” which explored, among other things, the spiritual and social ramifications for peace and unity of the terraced gardens lead 6 World Order, 2003, Vol. 34, No. 4
ing to the Shrine of the Báb in Haifa, Israel. We have learned that in 2003 the Bahá’í garden terraces were honored (along with five other recipients) by the Society of American Travel Writers (SATW) with its Phoenix Award.
The Award, established in 1968, recognizes those involved in “conservation, preservation, and beautification campaigns that further the growth and appeal of travel regions.” According to a press release, the Bahá’í gardens, surrounding Bahá’í buildings in Haifa, Israel’s major port city, are “exquisitely manicured” and “extend for a kilometer down the side of Mt. Carmel.” They “incorporate natural outcroppings, plants, marble, and the surrounding scenery, using an advanced watering system to conserve water.”
On its website <http://satw.org/ phxwinners.asp>, the Society of American Travel Writers notes that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, “Mount Carmel, sacred to Jews, Christians, Muslims and Bahá’ís, was nothing more than another desolate hill, rock and scrub brush.” Now it is a “magnificent floral jewel.” The SATW goes on to say that, “In a sense, the mountain has come full circle—in the days of the ancient Hebrews, this was a fruitful land. However, during the Ottoman occupation of the Holy Land, it was deforested. In a region where water is precious, the gardens use a combination of ancient and modern gardening practices, from mulching and composting to computerized irrigation systems. The noise of the city is masked by the gentle sound of water, which flows down the sides of the staircases and through a series of fountains. Water for the 70 fountains is recycled.”
[Page 7]
Meditations: The Faithful Poet
‘%eyeamed to writepoetry . . . , but he lacked 170th meter and rhyme. . . .”
—}‘ll7du’l-Ba}m'
Lost among the songbirds, Poor lonely crow . . . But if walk he must, Where others flew, One dusty step, One dust—ctoaked songAt least his faithful track Held true, ‘Akká beholding, Abhzi beyond.
——D|ANE HUFF
Copyright © 2004 by Diane Huff
DIANE HUFF is an editor of English and Spanish for CTB/ McGraw—Hill. Her interests include community literacy projects, sustainable development, desktop publishing, and web design.
X-Yugoslavia May 1994
X marks the spot
and the house
and the city and the mountain
and the heart and the body
of the refugee
where mention of God hath been made, and His praise glorified.
—ARASH ABIZADEH
Copyright © 2004 by Arash Abizadeh
ARASH ABIZADEH is an assistant professor at McGill University in Montreal, where he teaches contemporary political theory and the history of political philosophy. He has been writing poetry since he
was five.
World Order, 2003, Vol. 34, No. 4
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[Page 9]
DEBORAH A. THOMAS
Transcending the Limits of Political and Intellectual Boundaries: A Review of
Charles V. Carnegie’s Postnationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands
In today’s world, scholars and activists alike are struggling to define, historicize, and critique the transformations wrought by contemporary processes of neoliberoI capitalist gIoboIizotion. The massive decentralization of capital accumulation worldwide over the past two decades
has resulted in the growth of new centers of economic expansion, while many older centers have declined. Simultaneously, rapid advances in information and transportation technology, as well as in the circulation of new technologies of knowledge, have changed the ways in which space and place are conceptualized and experienced. Moreover, the postcolonial and post-Cold War decline of particular models of empire, and the subsequent remobilization of ethnic and national groups, have fundamentally reorganized global political space. While massive movements of people, and with them their ideas and customs, have been documented throughout the historical record, recent global teconfigurations mark an intensification of the speed and character of these processes. Among the results of these transformations has been a significant reconfiguration of modernist categories of belonging, definitions of community, and conventions of political practice to better suit the realities of our postmodern, postcolonial present.
Copyright © 2004 by Deborah A. Thomas.
DEBORAH A. THOMAS ” ‘
a former professionaI dander with the New York—bdsed Urban Bush Women, holds 0 Ph. D. In anthropology from New York Univetsity. She Is an assistant professor In the Department of Cultural AnMropotogy at Duke Untverstty and a Research Feltow with the Research Institute for the Study of Man. Her research focuses on the changing relatlonshlps among the political and cultural dimenstons of ncttonaIIsm, gtobolizoficn, ‘ and popular culture. She Is Interested' In the ways In thch 0 chonglng gtobot political. ,, economy structures and restructures how peopte of African descent think about ‘_ experlence. represent and mobttize Ground racial, class. national gendet and gran» , erctionoI Idenflttes. Her book Out of Many, One (Black) People: Nationalism Globe _ , ‘ izaflon, and the Politics of Culture In Contemporary Jamaica M" be published by Duke, UnIversIty Press In 2004. “
World Order, 2003, Vol. 34, No. 4 9
DEBORAH A. THOMAS
Like many contemporary scholars, Charles V. Carnegie is wrestling with issues of global transformations and reconfigurations. His new book, Postnationalz'sm Prcfigured: Caribbean Borderlandr, published by Rutgers University Press in 2002, is a brilliantly conceived ethnographic exploration of the role of nation-states and nationalisms within the contemporary era of intensified transnationalism. Carnegie is especially interested in getting to the bottom of what he sees as the central paradox
of the contemporary period:
POSTNATIONALISM PREFIGURED While “sovereignty is anchored
IS A BRILLIANTLY CONCEIVED to bounded territorial units, ETHNOGRAPHIC EXPLORATION OF THE ROLE OF the populations over which that NATION-STATES AND NATIONALISMS sovereignty might be exercised
WITHIN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA and the resources those PopuOF INTENSIFIED TRANSNATIONALISM. lations contml are inCFCaSingl)’
transterritorial.”1 He has written both a cautionary tale about the exclusions and contradictions inherent in attempts to define community membership through racial or national belonging and a manifesto of sorts, offering new models through which we might imagine global community.
Carnegie writes from the context of the Anglophone Caribbean, where he has lived and conducted research for many years, with a particular focus on Jamaica, St. Lucia, and Barbados. The Caribbean is, in many ways, an ideal site from which to undertake a critical analysis of the processes of race-making and nation-building, for the region has been at the center of Western European innovations in trade, imperialism, agricultural exploitation, social engineering, and capitalist expansion. The Caribbean is an area where almost everyone who currently populates the region came from somewhere else, where plantation agriculture and slavery provided the wealth for Europe’s industrial revolution and informed the development of island populations, and where the United States initiated its hemispheric hegemony at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the Caribbean, therefore, globalization is not new. Instead, the region has been central to developing an ongoing (and intensifying) global circulation of goods, money, people, ideologies, and popular cultural forms and practices. Indeed, as Carnegie explains, the “modern disciplinary practices that produced categories of private property and race, careful differentiation and hierarchical arrangement of labor by task and skill, and the all—encompassing demarcation of time and space” were all projects that were first attempted and perfected in the Caribbean region.2 By this he means to point out that plantation—based sugar production in the Caribbean—in its delineation of African slaves as property, in its factory-like distribution of tasks and time, and in its positioning within a triangular network of trade among Europe, Africa, and the Americas—created an early form of modern agro-industrial labor relations and global commodity circu 1. Charles V. Carnegie, Postnationa/ism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands (New Brunswick, NJ, USA: Rutgers UP, 2002) 6. 2. Carnegie, Posmatianalism Przy‘igured 66.
10 World Order, 2003, Vol. 34, No. 4
[Page 11]
A REVIEW OF POSTNATIONALISM PREFIGURED
lation. Carnegie suggests that the transnational processes at the core of Caribbean life for centuries presage or “prefigure” the kind of postnational identities that contemporary processes of globilization force us to recognize and that contemporary thinkers have mistakenly imagined to be recent phenomena.
Owing to its colonial past, the Caribbean has also been (and continues to be) a site of ongoing creolization. Populations arriving from Europe and Africa, and later from India, China, and the Middle East, did not transplant their social and cultural systems wholesale to the New World. Instead, they created new and dynamic cultural practices that would serve them in their new locations. They did so, however, within a context of extreme inequality. As a result, CARNEGIE SUGGESTS THAT THE TRANSNATIONAL
nationalist projects in the re- PROCESSES AT THE CORE OF CARIBBEAN LIFE FOR gion have faced various chal- CENTURIES PRESAGE OR “PREFIGURE” lenges in their attempts to unite THE KIND OF POSTNATIONAL IDENTITIES THAT extraordinarily heterogeneous CONTEMPORARY pROCESSES OF
POPUIafionS Struggling With the GLOBILIZATION FORCE us TO RECOGNIZE
legacies of European expansionism and to deal with the continued features of the colonial hierarchies established along the axes of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and culture. While the formation of states in the independent Anglophone Caribbean has often been seen as the inevitable and positive result of post-World War II anticolonial agitation, for Carnegie the state has also been “a source of terror if one considers the ideological roots of the conceptual order that undergirds it.” While acknowledging the importance of structural (political and economic) analysis, however, Carnegie’s primary focus is on the symbolic dimensions of human life—“the consciousness of belonging”—which he understands as “malleable over time.”3 That is, he is concerned about delineating how people understand membership in communities, what they root their understanding in, and how that understanding changes over time based on their own experiences and on broader social, economic, and political transformations.
AND THAT CONTEMPORARY THINKERS HAVE MISTAKENLY IMAGINED TO BE RECENT PHENOMENA.
Border Crossings and Nomadology
Carnegie develops two interrelated arguments throughout Posmatiomzlixm Prefigurea’. One, to which I have already alluded, has to do with exposing the inequities and iniquities of ideological projects that continue to bind group identity to territory and race. This argument Carnegie develops through his ethnographic and historical attention to the various kinds of border crossings that have characterized Caribbean peoples’ experiences and imaginations. In particular, he examines various kinds of “frontier” communities—contemporary St. Lucian speculators (a self—designated term that means small—scale, cross—border marketing, typically by women); eighteenth— and nineteenth-century coastal multi-ethnie communities of sailors, runaway
3. Carnegie, Posmationalz'sm Prefigured 28, 9.
World Order, 2003, Vol. 34, No.2! 11
DEBORAH A. THOMAS
slaves, and small—scale traders and sellers; Marcus Garvey’s early twentieth—century Universal Negro Improvement Association, the largest pan-African organization in the world to date; and Bahá’í communities globally—in order to examine the ways in which they refuse to accept state or racial boundaries as markers of community membership, economic participation, and political practice.
The second argument Carnegie weaves has to do with what he Views as the complicity of academic scholars in ideological projects that naturalize territorial and racial boundaries. Carnegie criticizes historical and economic accounts of nationalism because they lead scholars to remain wedded to analyzing the territorially bounded nation—state and its “sedentary” population and, therefore, to miss “more itin CARNEGIE CRITICIZES HISTORICAL AND ECONOMIC ACCOUNTS OF
NATIONALISM BECAUSE THEY LEAD SCHOLARS cram Opponents of the domiTO REMAlN WEDDED TO ANALYZING nant order.” As a corrective, he
THE TERRITORIALLY BOUNDED NATION-STATE proposes a study of “nomad AND ITS “SEDENTARY” POPULATION AND, ology.” He also argues that THEREFORE, TO MISS “MORE ITINERANT secularist prejudices have limOPPONENTS OF THE DOMINANT ORDER." ited scholars, understandings
of the religious character of national belonging, “the extent to which social community ultimately requires and may need, even in this secular age, to be guaranteed by and anchored in a sacred tradition.”4 It is time to consider the prospect, Carnegie asserts, that a practice inspired by religious ideas not rooted in any one particular state might fundamentally transform the global social order.
In reviewing the theoretical literature on nationalism, Carnegie demonstrates the ways in which scholarship has reproduced and made concrete the notion that nations are “natural” forms of community organization. By paying more attention to being fixed than to being in motion, he asserts, scholars have either not noticed or declared as aberrant the various kinds of organization enacted by “subaltems.” As a result, they have given limited attention to the various “strategies used to contest nationalism’s stranglehold on our consciousness.”5 For Carnegie, looking at the routine transgressions of national and/or racial boundaries provides a way to understand how people maneuver within contradictory fields that are conditioned at once by local material and symbolic realities and by global geopolitical dynamics.
As an example, he investigates the ways in which St. Lucian speculators embody a sort of “strategic flexibility,” the ability to take advantage of whatever options come along as well as the actual building of multiple options and “potential ‘capital’ to hedge against future insecurity.”6 St. Lucian women who cyclically buy goods at markets in Barbados, Martinique, St. Martin, and French Guiana to sell (at sometimes significant mark-ups) in markets back home are not only continuing an ageold marketing practice that emerged during the slavery period but are also respond 4. Carnegie, Pasmatiamzlism Prefigurea’ 69, 139, 42. 5. Carnegie, Posmationalixm Prefigurm’ x, 49. 6. Carnegie, Postnatianalism Prefigured 106.
12 World Order, 2003, Vol. 34, No. 4
A REVIEW OF POSTNATIONALISM PREFIGURED
ing to changing monetary and trade policies during the past four decades that “have created incentives for extending trading and social networks across island and nationstate frontiers.”7 In this way, they are both taking part in and resisting economic imperatives at national and international levels. As Carnegie points out, “At a time when politicians and bureaucrats were trying to consolidate the national economies of their newly sovereign states, ordinary people were diligently occupied in extending their personal economic networks overseas and trying to ensure that they remained outside the purview of the state.”8 Speculators thus provide a complex example of how Caribbean people have both responded to and shaped global trends. On the one hand, speculators serve the interests of capital (by extending formal markets informally, by discounting the value of their labor, by providing alternative employment, and by channeling goods to customers in uncertain times). On the other hand, however, they hold alternative cultural ideas, evincing “a certain indifference toward” ideological claims of sovereignty and exclusive citizenship, as well as a rejection of a rationalized view of trade, instead binding cross—island marketing with friendship and family ties?
Carnegie also uses examples of border phenomena to critique essentialist dimensions of traditionally conceived nationalist units. Especially important is his discussion about the implications of defining national belonging through racial criteria.
Carnegie draws from his own experiences of marginalization on the basis of being a duna’us (a black albino in
Jamaican parlance) in a society CARNEGIE LINKS pOPULAR
Where “blaCknCSS has become NATIONALIST DISCOURSES TO one of the fundamental attributes of Jamaican nationality.”10 He argues that, because Jamaican popular nationalist ideology naturalizes the link
EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY SOCIAL, SCIENTIFIC, AND HISTORICAL RESEARCH, RESEARCH THAT OFFERED CLASSIFICATORV SCHEMES OF RACIAL LANDSCAPES IN SPECIFIC TERRITORIES
between racial and territorial SUCH AS JAMA'CA'
belonging, albinos’ lack of vis ible blackness raises questions about the ability of the black albino to belong to the nation, to profess loyalty to the nation, and to pass on the nation’s most indentifiable characteristic—its race—fulness. Carnegie links popular nationalist discourses to early nineteenth—century social, scientific, and historical research, research that offered classificatory schemes of racial landscapes in specific territories such as Jamaica. By positioning black albinos (and other persons of indeterminate race) , these classificatory schemes placed them outside the body politic and, to some extent, the body human. Because these schemes still inform people’s commonsense understandings of race, and because theSe racial schema have been manipulated to forge political consciousness throughout the Americas, Carnegie argues, black nationalisms have tended to
7. Carnegie, Posmationalism Prefigured 87.
8. Carnegie, Posmationalism Przfigurea' 92. 9. Carnegie, Posmatz'omzlism Prqfigured 111. 10. Carnegie, Poxmationalz'xm Prefigured 17.
World Order, 2003, Vol. 34, No. 4 I3
DEBORAH A. THOMAS
reproduce the exclusionary social practices that underlay the original classificatory formulations.
Global Phenomena and Local Networks: Rethinking Transnationalism MIGRATION: INADEQUATE RUBRIC FOR STUDYING TRANSNATIONALISM Essential to Carnegie’s analysis of various examples of “border phenomena” are three interrelated points. First, he argues that migration is an inadequate rubric for the study of transterritorial phenomena. Migration has, indeed, been a hallmark of the anthropology of the Caribbean, reflecting the development of the region through the voluntary and involuntary movements of people from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia that began in the fifteenth century, as well as the vast human mobility that characterizes the contemporary period. Early scholarship on migration tended to focus on questions
MIGRATION HAS BEEN A HALLMARK about identity, assimilation
OF THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE CARIBBEAN, and acculturation, changing REFLECTING THE DEVELOPMENT rural economies, and the de OF THE REGION THROUGH THE VOLUNTARY velopment of ethnic interest
AND INVOLUNTARY MOVEMENTS ' groups. More recently, scholOF PEOPLE FROM EUROPE, AFRICA, ars have refined their ap THE MIDDLE EAST, AND ASIA THAT BEGAN ProaCh ‘0 migration by re IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY defining transnationalism to
encompass events, processes, and social and institutional formations taking place in two or more nation—states.11 Thus migrants create and sustain transterritorial institutions to facilitate their own movement back and forth, giving rise to the concept of the “deterritorialized” nation—state that roots the nation within mobile peoples rather than within fixed territory.
In spite of the transnational model that emphasizes both rootedness and mobility, Carnegie argues that there has been a continued tendency to understand migratory experiences in terms of nations and races. His own research among St. Lucian speculators highlights the difficulty of distinguishing between the local and the extralocal. He suggests that the local and the translocal so heavily influence each other and are so intertwined by “social relationships and symbolic meaning” that, in the eyes of St. Lucians, the distinction is meaningless.12 He contends that conceptualizing a nation-state that is not defined by territorial boundaries does little to diminish the traditional view of the nation—of a collective identity—that is “often naturalized in terms of race.”13 This point is also at the crux of Nina Glick 11. See Linda Basch, Nina Glick—Schiller, and Christina Szanton—Blanc, Nation: Unbound: Fanmatz'ona/ Projects, Postcolonia/ Prtdimmmtx, and Deterritorialz'zed Nation—Stam (Langhorne, PA, USA: Gordon and Breach, 1994), and Nina Glick—Schiller, Linda Basch, and Christina Szanton—Blanc, Ewards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalixm Retonsidered (New York: NYAS, 1992).
12. Carnegie, Postnationalixm Prqfigured 84.
13. Carnegie, Posmatiandlixm Prefigurm’ 105
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A REVIEW OF POSTNATIONALISM PREFIGURED
Schiller’s and Georges Fouron’s analysis of what they call long—distance nationalism among Haitians in Haiti and throughout the diaspora.14 Nevertheless, their work on St. Lucian speculators also demonstrates the ways in which ordinary people actively shape global phenomena, rather than simply responding to them, and points out how important local networks and histories are in understanding the specificities of contemporary global experience.
RECONSIDERING HISTORY IN TERMS OF MOVEMENT
Lest we think that St. Lucian border crossings, transnational livelihoods, and transterritorial processes of identity formation are recently occurring phenomena, Carnegie also argues for the importance of reconsidering historical data. He analyzes marronage (bands of runaway slaves who formed communities in various Caribbean locations) and marketing across frontiers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, outlining aspects of a shared collective consciousness that developed not only within territorially settled maroon communities but also within fluid communities comprised of sailors, army conscripts and deserters, tavern operators, free people of color, runaway slaves, peddlers, and marketers in various Caribbean coastal cities. He argues that, by understanding marronage in terms of movement rather than fixity, one discovers the limitations of the generally accepted social categories that operate through race and place.
RECONSIDERING BINARY CATEGORIES
Carnegie’s third point about examples of “border phenomena” has to do with the importance of rethinking binary categories such as hegemony versus resistance and secular versus sacred in terms that are other than oppositional. For example, Carnegie argues that speculators and others who work within Caribbean informal economic sectors broaden capitalism’s reach while rejecting its supervision, discipline, and rationalizations found, for example, in customs fees and taxes. Their self—interest in their chosen, or only available, line of employment leads them, in effect, to develop practices that destabilize, even seem indifferent to, nationalist claims to sovereignty and exclusive citizenship. We are left, therefore, with an increasingly dialectical conceptualization of the relationship between global processes and human agency.
Similarly, Carnegie’s exegesis of Marcus Garvey’s ideas and organizational strategies designed to consolidate a pan—African social and political community reconsiders the relationship between Garvey’s attempt to balance local and transterritorial concerns and the religious allusions that filled his oratory. Both strengthened his appeal for a new sensibility of belonging among Africans throughout the diaspora. Hence, for Carnegie, these two points are linked: “Garvey’s use of religious ideas decentered, stretched, and reconfigured dominant perceptions of the nation—state. They also provided a warrant for his transnationalism.”15 Within the Garvey move 14. See Nina Glick—Schiller and Georges Fouron, George: “701?: Up Laughing: Long Distance Nationalism and the Seart/afbr Home (Durham, NC, USA: Duke UP, 2001). 15. Carnegie, Posmationa/ism Pnfigured 163—64.
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DEBORAH A. THOMAS
ment, religious rhetoric “became central to clarifying an alternative, morally grounded politics, to building an organization, and to advancing a set of economic and political programs.”"’ The intertwining of racial pride, moral authority, and transnational organization provided an early twentieth-century challenge to the idea that collective political action had to be secular and territorially based, an idea that became hegemonic during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the formation of Western European states.
Redefining Community Ultimately, Carnegie is arguing for an anti—essentialist means of defining community. His “larger aim is to kindle a renewed passion for sustaining a condition of global belonging that nurtures the positive features of localized, patriotic attachments but does away with the fundamental contradictions inherent in the present-day nationstate order.” This is what leads him to consider another paradigm that could “guide the development of political community on a global scale”—the Bahá’í Faith.17
Carnegie’s contention that a new paradigm exists for guiding the development of a global political community stands in stark contrast to the ways in which scholars have typically understood and described contemporary processes of globalization. Contemporary scholars focus on global capitalism and “diHerence and fragmentation”—a gloomy picture that is the result, Carnegie argues, of the continued dominance of either/or modes of thinking. To these views, he contrasts Bahá’u’lláh’s vision of societal transformation and the achievement of world unity. It is a vision of global community as a “condition of deeply felt belonging” that transcends the ideological limitations of race and nation and, therefore, offers a way out of the paradox in which traditionally conceived sovereign states restrict as much as they liberate.18
To support his assertion, Carnegie outlines several of the principles of Baha’u’llah, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith. He argues that global citizenship is made a living
concern for Bahá’ís both through
CARNEGIE ARGUES THAT GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP practices—such as being buried IS MADE A LIVING CONCERN wherever they die, thereby dislo FOR BAHA’I‘S BOTH THROUGH PRACTICES— eating “the assumption that SUCH AS BEING BURIED WHEREVER THEY DIE, people are rooted to place”—and THEREBY DISLOCATING “THE ASSUMPTION THAT through conceptual reformulaPEOPLE ARE ROOTED TO PLACE"— tions.l9 With respect to the con ceptual reformulations, Carnegie points to Baha’u’llzih’s understanding of difference not as divisive but as complementary. To encourage this understanding more broadly, Bahá’u’lláh transforms representations of belonging. Instead of rooting world community in the
AND THROUGH CONCEPTUAL REFORMULATIONS.
16. Carnegie, Posmatianalism Prqfigured 159. 17. Carnegie, Posmationalixm Prefigurm’ 8, 175. 18. Carnegie, Posmatianalixm Prefigurm' 181. 19. Carnegie, Poxmationalism Prefigurea’ 183.
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A REVIEW OF POSTNATIONALISM PREFIGURED
metaphor of shared blood, Bahá’u’lláh uses natural referents to describe a unity that could be embodied through infinite varietymthe leaves of one branch, the fruits of one tree, the flowers of one garden, the waves of one sea, and so on. In this way, He admonishes Bahá’ís to value both unity and diversity.
The Bahá’í conception of be ing rooted in a global community THE BAHA'T CONCEPTION
is also related to the principle of OF BEING ROOTED IN A GLOBAL COMMUNITY simultaneous belonging (to a 10- IS ALSO RELATED TO THE PRINCIPLE cality, to a nation—Statc, to a glo— OF SIMULTANEOUS BELONGING
bal community)- Carnegie argues (TO A LOCALITY, TO A NATION-STATE, that this principle is commonplace TO A GLOBAL COMMUNITY).
for Bahá’ís because Bahá’í’u’llah be lieves that “valuing distinct cultural and historical characteristics and a sane patriotism can be compatible with a commitment to global citizenship” and that this commitment could, indeed, strengthen local attachments. Carnegie asserts that this ideal is realized in practice through the Bahá’í electoral process and the principle of consultation.20 The feeling of global belonging in Bahá’ís is also facilitated, he argues, through the calendar and ritual cycle, as well as through a series of international conferences, which have been a part of the Bahá’í Faith since its earliest days.
Reconciling the Secular and the Sacred,
the Material and the Symbolic
What seems evident in Carnegie’s overview of the Bahá’í Faith is an ongoing commitment to equality between women and men and to antiracist and antixenophobic principled action, which are essential components of realizing economic justice and “universal education and employment.” For Carnegie, this signals a “reconciliation of the secular and the sacred that might well be regarded, in the present world context, as one of the distinctive contributions of the Bahá’í vision to a world in search of new conceptual paradigms in the wake of the failure of the old.”21 This is, of course, a compelling vision. Yet, for me, it is this conclusion that raises the most questions. My questions are not related to Carnegie’s claims regarding the potential for religious communities (and particularly the Bahá’í Faith) to serve as models for global community and to dislodge the fixation on race and place as determinants of belonging but rather to the implications of the ways he juxtaposes faith-based and secular political models of community.
Carnegie argues that Baha’u’llah’s perspective “contrasts markedly with the contemporary scholarly perception of world community as the precipitate of powerful global market forces” and with “the bleak prognosis that the only likely prospect for anything resembling a global culture would come in the form of an eclectic embrace of consumer capitalism.”22 While this may be a dominant tendency within
20. Carnegie, Postnationalz'sm Prqfigured 189. 21. Carnegie, Posmationalism Pnfigurea' 190, 198. 22. Carnegie, Posmationalism Preflgured 191, 192.
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DEBORAH A. THOMAS
scholarship on globalization, it is certainly not the only Vision. Within recent Caribbean research, there has been refreshing documentation of individual and collective agency at various levels.
For example, scholars have focused on the ways women workers remake themselves as they maneuver between global economic and political processes, on the one hand, and local categories of race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality, on the other.23 Others are investigating emergent patterns of social mobility and autonomy among lower-class Jamaicans,24 counter—hegemonic strategies pursued by St. Lucian small—scale agricultural producers about economy and work,25 and processes of identity formation and negotiation through the consumption of mass cultural products among West Indian youth in Brooklyn.26 While the various negotiations described in such works may not lead to wholesale shifts in power relations either locally or globally, they emphasize the need to recognize contemporary struggles as lenses through which we might reframe all too often dominant understandings of globalization, political action, and community belonging. These perspectives, together with those of scholars who envision global community through contemporary protest movements, suggest that dialectical interpretations of contemporary global processes are more generally afoot.
The broader questions that arise for me, however, have to do with Carnegie’s presentation of the Bahá’í Faith as a cultural model rather than a set of principles
for “living well together,” as Ja BECAUSE CARNEGIE FOCUSES MAINLY ON maicans would put it, that might SYMBOLS, HE DOWNPLAYS THE IMPORTANCE OF also catalyze broader social transWHAT, FOR ME, IS A CRITICAL LINK. formation. This brings us back
THIS IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE t0 the 00mm“ Carnegie sets UP CONCEPTUAL ORDER AND PERSISTENT between the kind Of global unity
through difference that he sees within Bahá’í teachings and practice and the kind of homogenizing unity he feels is embodied through nationalist or racially based mobilizations. While he rightly indicts creole nationalist ideologies within the Caribbean (as well as nationalist ideologies more generally) for excluding as much as they include,
STRUCTURAL HIERARCHIES AT LOCAL, NATIONAL, AND GLOBAL LEVELS.
23. See Carla Freeman, High 726/7 and High Heels in the Global Economy: “70mm, Wor/e, and PinkCollar Identities in the Caribbean (Durham, NC, USA: Duke UP, 2000); Irma McClaurin, Women of Belize: Gender and Change in Central America (New Brunswick, NJ, USA: Rutgers UP, 1996); Helen Safa, The Myth Of the Male Breadwinner: Wbmen and Indmtrialization in the Caribbean (Boulder, CO, USA: Westview P, 1995); and Kevin Yelvington, Producing Power on the Factory Floor: Ethnicity, C1455 and Gender in a Caribbean Workplace (Philadelphia, PA, USA: Temple UP, 1995).
24. See Deborah A. Thomas, Out of Many, One [Black] People: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in jamaim (Durham, NC, USA: Duke UP, forthcoming 2004).
25. See Karla Slocum, “Discourses and Counter Discourses on Globalization and the St. Lucian Banana Industry,” in Bananas, Conflict, and Capitalism in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Steve Strifl'ler and Mark Moberg (Durham, NC, USA: Duke UP, 2003) 306—57.
26. See Oneka LaBennett, “Consuming Identities: Consumption, Gender, and Ethnicity among West Indian Adolescents in Brooklyn,” diss., Harvard U, 2002.
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A REVIEW OF POSTNATIONALISM PREFIGURED
because Carnegie focuses mainly on symbols, he downplays the importance of what, for me, is a critical link. This is the relationship between the conceptual order and persistent structural hierarchies at local, national, and global levels.
I am thinking especially of arguments Carnegie makes in his first chapter about the use of race as a symbol of political consciousness and a means for mobilizing people politically. In his discussion of the development of a pan—African black ethnicity in Jamaica among slaves during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries; of the rallying cry “cleave to the black” during the 1865 uprisings in the parish of St. Thomas that led to the imposition of Crown Colony rule; and of the varying levels of race- and place—based symbolism manipulated throughout the Caribbean during the post—World War II nationalist movements, he argues that invoking blackness to motivate political action “only reinforces the ideological falsehoods of the racial categories themselves.”27 But are the racial categories he describes merely ideological? Is not one of the legacies of imperialist expansion and the trans-Atlantic slave trade a conflation of material and ideological hierarchies?
Moreover, can we really say that racial mobilization had the same meanings and resonances in the three centuries Carnegie describes? Aren’t people being roused to political action within specific historical circumstances because racial identities are also tied to structural conditions of marginality—that is, to class identities (which also change over time)? Isn’t “race thinking” in Caribbean cognitive systems rooted in experiences of racial discrimination (at the local level) and racialized hierarchies (at the international level).>28 In other words, can a conceptual reformulation really transform the structural conditions that continue to imbue mainstream political concepts with racial and national identities? The advantage of Carnegie’s focus on symbolic analysis is clearly revealed in his explorations of, to cite only one example, the emotional resonance of representations of the UNIA’s Black Star shipping line. Carnegie expertly clarifies the ways in which Afro-Jamaican people generated visions of progress and modernization through a symbolic inversion of the historical memory associated with (slave) ships and through the rhetorical tradition of using Biblical allusions to act as a catalyst for community action. However, this kind of analysis cannot alone account for the persistent power of race and nation.
Finally, I am interested in the uniqueness Carnegie claims for Bahá’ís’ liberal egalitarian principles and practices and their vision of a religious community that transcends national or racial boundaries while still being malleable enough to suit cultural particularities in various locales. He writes that
the generative quality of Baha’u’llah’s writings; the nonformalized, open—ended,
discursive quality of Bahá’í meetings and consultation, with their emphasis on
truth seeking; the Bahá’í system of governance that uses electoral and other procedures that exceed in many of their provisions systems in current use in western democracies; and acceptance of the arbitrariness of language contrast sharply with anthropological models that view religion generally as an extreme
27. Carnegie, Posmationalism Prefigured 29. 28. Carnegie, Posmationalz'xm Prcfigured 30.
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DEBORAH A. THOMAS
form of traditional authority and the language of religion as formalized and
restricted codes.29 While Carnegie’s assertion may, in fact, be the case, it seems to me that it is also the ideal aim of other religions that are gaining global speed as fast as (if not faster than) the Bahá’í Faith and that are also adaptable to local cultures. One example that comes to mind is Pentecostalism,30 but the case could be made that the ideals listed above also underlie
HISTORICALLY GROUNDED Judeo-Christian traditions
ETHNOGRAPHIC ACCOUNTS LIKE CARNEGIE'S more generally, as well as HELP us TO ENVISION THE ACTUAL WORKING OUT 151m}. 1 am sure 1 am doing
OF THE FLUIDITY BETWEEN BINARY PAIRINGS little more here than reveal SUCH As HEGEMONY AND RESISTANCE, ing my own ignorance about MODERNITY AND TRADmoN, the Bahá’í Faith, but this
GLOBAL AND LOCAL, issue also begs a broader
AND STATE AND N ATION. question that has to do with
how panterritorial religious visions of all sorts can be co—opted by minority interpretations to serve the very exclusionary projects they propose, in theory, to transcend.
Ultimately, however, Charles V. Carnegie’s Postnationalz'sm Prtfigured: Caribbean Borderland: is an excellent and thoughtful contribution to contemporary analyses of globalization. Historically grounded ethnographic accounts like Carnegie’s help us to envision the actual working out of the fluidity between binary pairings such as hegemony and resistance, modernity and tradition, global and local, and state and nation. The book is an accessible and incisive read that I would heartily recommend both to scholars and to lay—intellectuals interested in grappling with the most profound national and postnational issues confronting us today.
29. Carnegie, Postnationalixm Prqfigured 197. 30. See Diane Austin—Broos, Jamaica Genesis: Religion and the Politic: OfMoml Order: (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997).
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Passing On
As a dew in the morning, making the Day come bright;
like leaves
falling
going
down
to
make
more soil; as a candle burning,
dripping
quiet tears;
like water boiling steaming up the air;
like snowfall melting
helping the Spring come green; as a river rolling to join the Great Ocean, as a river rolling, that’s the way
we go.
——-PAUL MANTLE
Copyright © 2004 by Paul Mantle
PAUL MANTLE, who worked for three years in Information Services at the Bahá‘x’ National Center in Wilmette, Illinois, is now living in a rural area of the Sierra Nevada foothills ofNorthern California.
World Order, 2003, Vol. 34, No. 4 2]
STEVEN K. THOMSON
Citizenship and Belonging: Local and Postnational Forms
Charles Cornegie’s Posfnofiono/ism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands, published by Rutgers University Press in 2002, is 0 bold and inspiring work. Bold in style (Carnegie eschews The convention of onThropoIogicol wri’ring Then“ seeks bounded, Iocol arenas for research To Chart 0
“nomadology” to find emerging superterritorial identities), his project inspires us to examine nationhood as characterized by national inclusion and exclusion defined in racial terms. Catnegie’s effort to describe what postnationalism has looked like and to anticipate (or prefigure) what it can look like “examines both past and present in search not only of fatalities and futilities but of potential.”1 His book is a welcome turn from the increasingly despairing tone of most of the politically engaged anthropological writing I read.
In Carnegie’s efforts to find new directions “to stimulate research and discussion on forms of global community and consciousness,” I find few faults.2 Indeed, his book has encouraged me to look at my own work from a new perspective by taking his formulation of “postnationalism” in a slightly dierrent direction. While both of us are concerned with “the consciousness of belonging,”3 I approach identity by studying an area far from the Caribbean (a single, close—knit, rural community of a few thousand in West Africa characterized by its face—to-face interactions, local but far from neatly bounded or self—contained) and with a different purpose: the
Copyright © 2004 by Steven Thomson. Portions of this article are based on research conducted in 1999 and 2000 under a Fulbright—Hays grant. The author would like to acknowledge the generous feedback and support of Lisa Heaton and of the World Order reviewers and editors during the process of writing this essay.
1. Charles V. Carnegie, Postnationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Bam’erland: (New Brunswick, NJ, USA: Rutgers UP, 2002) 139, x.
2. Carnegie, Posmationalism Prefigured 8.
3. Carnegie, Posmationa/ism Prefigurea’ 9.
STEVEN K. THOMSON ', 3
Is completing hls doctoral thesis,“ ‘ChIIdren of the VIIlc'Ige’. Dynam of a MUIII Ethnic Community In Coastal Gambia " In Boston Universtry' s Depart {Anthropology His other interests Include the anthropology of gender and dies of masculinity; children and culture; and the comporlson of qn’rhropologi CGI and IIIeIcw representafions of African cultures.
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STEVEN K. THOMSON
practical working out of daily interaction in a multiethnic community. While Carnegie explores the construction of “the consciousness of belonging” generated by various nonlocalized, highly mobile groups in his “nomadology,” I examine the identities reflected in the local politics of a diverse community of rural cosmopolitans—a mix of lifelong farmers; retired, layed off, or underemployed wage earners; and well-educated, weIl—traveled urban professionals who return home perhaps as often as several times a month, many of whom from all these categories have traveled widely for education, for work, for pilgrimage to Mecca, or simply to see the world. Besides being complementary approaches to common questions about how to anticipate the future form of postnational identities (which I believe they are), the difference between Carnegie’s approach and mine does have something more substantial at stake. My single major criticism of Carnegie’s approach to postnationalism is that, while he does an admirable job of anticipating postnational senses of belonging, he does little to point to how such postnationally affiliated persons might govern relations among themselves. He
IF NATIONALISM IS FRAYING focuses, instead, on “global communi AT THE EDGES, ties” where boundaries remain fluid and
WHAT CAN WE SAY ABOUT THE the need for internal order is minimal. POLITICAL ORDER BEING PREFIGURED Thls IS a critical question to confront IN THAT PROCESS? precisely because nationalism is the foun dational assumption of the contemporary world political order. If, as Carnegie and I agree, nationalism 1s fraying at the edges—neither as bounded, as enduring, nor as vital to political order as we once thought—what can we say about the political order being prefigured in that process? I offer an expansion of Carnegie’s analysis of postnationalism by examining the structures of various types of citizenship, allowing a specific set of implications and conclusions about the term to develop from the cases I examine. I start with the initial definition of citizenship as the set of rules and practices that legitimate a given individual’s participation in political action. Three cases—the structure of sateedingo citizenship in Kartong, The Gambia; an expansion of Carnegie’s consideration of how the Bahá’í Faith structures citizenship at multiple levels; and a brief review of an episode in the history of race in the U.S. Bahá’í community—provide contexts for exploring and expanding my initial proposition.
Safeedingo Citizenship in Kartong, The Gambia
Anthropology, going back at least as far as Sir Henry Sumner Maine’s Ancient Law, published in 1861, has generally relied, explicitly or implicitly, on the distinction between societas and civims—the structures, categories, and principles of society versus those of the state. In this distinction lie the roots of the relegation of citizenship from anthropology to the realm of political philosophy.4 However, some of Carnegie’s topics in Postnationalixm Prcfigured, marronage and small—scale inter 4. For example, consider this statement by William Shack: “Alien and citizen define legal status, not social status. Legal status is regulated by the machinery of government at the level of the nation—state,
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CITIZENSHIP AND BELONGING
island trading in particular, begin to show that, far from being unilaterally defined by the state, the categories and meanings of citizenship are as subject to daily manipulation and redefinition as any other aspect of state regulation.S Is not marronage a denial of the categories of citizenship that defined slave—owners as the only legitimate political actors? Are not the activities of the “speculators” (their term) Carnegie studied reliant on the strategic development of a network that includes those with local political access in each of the critical nodes of trade? Indeed, at the most general level, are not the legal definitions of citizenship one of the critical sites for contesting the rules and boundaries of national belonging? Many of the works mentioned by anthropologist Deborah Thomas in her review of Carnegie’s book discuss the strategic efforts of individuals in the Caribbean in a postnational age to maintain multiple citizenships and the conundrums of having to choose one over another.6
My own recent work has encouraged me to expand my thinking about citizenship in two directions. First is a shift away from considering citizenship only in terms of the nation—state and expanding the concept to encompass legitimate political participation at the local level. Local politics reveals the mutual implication of concerns that are strictly local, negotiations over concerns about national policy and resource priorities, and the practical effects of supernational patterns and structures from the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization decisions, to trends in aid and development, to actions of individual migrants. Fairly rapidly this shift brings to light connections among local, national, and supernational structures. As Carnegie and many others have noted, close attention to global forces quickly shows how they take radically different forms in particular locations. I am simply moving through this general observation in the opposite direction in finding transnational, and postnational, forces at work in a localized setting.7
not at the level of local politics which have been incorporated into larger political systems” (William Shack, “Introduction,” in Strangers in African Sotietz'ex, ed. William Shack and Elliott Skinner [Berkeley, CA, USA: U of California P, 1979] 4).
5. Marronage is the general term used in anthropology and history for societies established in the Caribbean by escaped slaves. While such communities are often viewed as being isolated, rural reservoirs of specifically African cultural traits in a semipure form, Carnegie and others, especially Parris, emphasize that maroons often traveled widely and interacted with plantation society in complex ways. See Scott V. Parris, “Alliance and Competition: Four Case Studies of Maroon—European Relations,” Niewe W/est-[ndixc/ye Cid; 55.3/4 (1981): 174—224.
6. See Deborah A. Thomas, “Transcending the Limits of Political and Intellectual Boundaries: A Review of Charles V. Carnegie’s Posmationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands," \World Order 34.4 (2003): 9—20.
7. See Carnegie, Poxmationalism Prqfigurm' 79. The distinction between postnational and transnational is, in my opinion, both highly significant and minimal. Clearly, analysis of a situation as transnational implies that the category “national” remains but has become problematic and that an additional level of analysis has been added. Carnegie’s position is that the category of “national” needs to be left behind entirely because of its racializing tendency. This distinction is a worthy topic of debate, but not one I will pursue further here. In this essay I use postnational and transnational interchangeably since the substantive trends and phenomena analyzed under either rubric are basically the same. Much of the writing about transnational processes could be easily refrained to draw the conclusion that they are postnational.
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STEVEN K. THOMSON
The second shift in my thinking casts citizenship as a type of identity based on political participation. Like all identities, citizenship needs to be analyzed as being based equally on claims for as well as on externally granted political rights. We must look to the dialectic between self—assertion and social recognition inherent in all identities. As we will see later, citizenship is a social act to be performed, not simply
a category of existence, arbitrarily
CITIZENSHIP NEEDS TO BE ANALYZED granted. Such a perspective gives some
AS BEING BASED EQUALLY ON CLAIMS FOR structure for understanding assertions AS WELL AS ON EXTERNALLY GRANTED of “world citizenship” as a claim of pOLmCAL RIGHTS. both affective belonging and an asser tion of some (albeit limited) political rights that transcend the national sphere. First, let us consider one rural community of considerable ethnic diversity and the transformation of local citizenship that has occurred there.
Kartong, The Gambia, is a community of some two thousand people composed of at least seven different ethnic groups. It is, however, considered to be “owned” by four Mandinka families that claim first tenure to the surrounding farmlands. The alkaloship~the office of village headman—is shared by two of these families. A third family provides candidates for the office of imam. Strangers, lunnmgo in Mandinka, are generally incorporated through ties to a host (jaatz'o) from one of the four principal families. For the purposes of this brief description, I will not discuss the five or six other ethnic groups with the smallest numbers who occupy positions as cattle herders, bread bakers, fishermen, shopkeepers, and school teachers and will focus primarily on the members of two Jola subgroups—Fongy—Jolas and Karon—Jolas. Both, like the Mandinkas, farm rice although with a traditional technology that allows them to exploit parts of the flood plain lower than those of their hosts. They differ from each other linguistically and by religious affiliation—FongyJolas are Muslim; the Karons are associated with the Catholic mission, though a few have converted to Islam. In general, the local form of luntango—jaatio clientship is relatively benign, and the composition of the community is rather stable.
Local political rights are defined by the Mandinka concept of being a sateedingoliterally “a child of the village.” This status is ascribed to an individual who is (1) physically born in the village and (2) born to parents born in the Village. All of the ethnic groups of The Gambia are patrilineal, and it is not uncommon for a man to marry a woman from another town. Thus it is more precise to say that one’s father must be born locally. This is the formal rule, as it was explained to me, but one should note that, like many traditional “rules,” it provides a general framework but is not necessarily applied to the letter. Still, it generates an effective guideline that legitimacy in local politics is obtained in the third generations Note, however, that these rules do not require current residence. Indeed, many of the “children of the
8. The three generations can be explained as follows: A moves to the town and obtains land from a host (jaatio). A’s son B is born in the town but remains a stranger (luntzmgo). B’s son C, provided he is born in the same town, obtains mttm'z'ngo status.
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village” most active in local politics are living and working in the urban areas forty kilometers away.
Sateea’ingo status governs eligibility for service in some village—wide organizations, the right to vote for members of such organizations or for a new alka/o (there may be several candidates from the founding families), and, more generally, the right to a legitimate voice in consultation about community affairs. However, Mandinka society can generally be considered a classical gerontocratic patriarchy—traditionally politics has been the realm of old men who are the heads of large families.9 In this facet of life, one can see a strong contrast to Jola society (particularly in the regions where Mandinka-style Islam has been less influential) that is based more on principles of gender complementarity in politics, religion, and the division of agricultural labor.10
While I was conducting field research in Kartong in 2000, the structure of local politics at the level of the alkalo and male elders was renegotiated. The Gambian National Assembly11 was in the process of drafting a Local Government Reform Law that would include formalizing Village Development Committees (VDCs) as the most basic level of governance. VDCs were introduced to The Gambia in the late 19805 and early 19905 through the collaboration of several international aid and development nongovetmental organizations (NGOs) and the Ministry of Community Development. This structure was introduced to coordinate development activities on the local level in order to reduce duplication of projects and prioritize community needs. However, their lack of legal status had created myriad legal problems. The legislation proposed by the Ministry of Local Development sought to provide a uniform legal basis for Village Development Committees.
The sitting VDC in Kartong made the strategic decision to draft a constitution for their community before the final passage of the new law so that they would be prepared to take advantage of the changes in the delivery of development services the law would bring about. While the process of writing a new constitution did not specifically redefine community membership, it did usurp many of the functions previously executed by the political system headed by the alkalo without abolishing the office. Further, the process of writing a constitution demonstrated, albeit implicitly, that the community thinks of itself as fundamentally multi-ethnic and integrated, not as a Mandinka polity with merely tolerated strangers. In the situation in which religious affiliation was a key marker of ethnicity (among others), both the imam and the Catholic priest were made ex officio members of the VDC. This is important as a symbolic measure and an indication of respect of office, as it is highly doubtful that the holders of either of these offices would exercise their right to participate directly in the VDC’s deliberations. Further, the process of selecting the membership of the VDC to serve under the new constitution showed a deliberate practice of balancing the composition to reflect the diversity of the community.
9. It is interesting to note that the few Mandinka women in Kartong who have education beyond high school are gaining stature in local politics.
10. See Olga Linares, Power, Prayer and Production: The fold of Casamance of Senegal (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992).
11. The unicameral national legislative body of The Gambia.
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STEVEN K. THOMSON
Having provided a brief outline of the political organization of Kartong, let me draw out the implications for a more general consideration of citizenship. First, in this town, citizenship—legitimate rights of political participation—is defined in part, but not entirely, by the state. Inspired by national legislation, the rules were negotiated locally. While satem'z'ngo citizenship does not control who is eligible to vote in national elections, it does define legitimacy in policy making related to the much more immediate work of the state in providing basic local services. Further, while defined by a term and conventions that are “traditionally” Mandinka (without making any claim to stability into an indefinite past), the concept has been expanded to include non—Mandinkas; generally Jolas of both subgroups are passing the threshold of third generation residence. That this has most probably occurred under the influence of international NGOs and state agents that were implicitly promoting principles of participatory democracy leads me to conclude (1) that the material incentives were sufficient to induce flexible reinterpretation of “tradition”; (2) that the “traditional” definition of citizenship had not been raised to the level of orthodoxy as the process of its redefinition was not considered particularly noteworthy;12 and (3) that under a different set of incentives—incentives that are in this case transnational—another process of redefinition is entirely possible. While the origins of the concept and implementation of VDCs points to transnational processes, it is important to look at their purpose as well as their form.
“”Development in The Gambia 15 the basic metaphor of governance both at the local level (Village Development Committees, not “’workers ,” “land management,” “policing,” or “welfare” committees) and
“DEVELOPMENT" IN THE GAMBIA at the national level (see figure 1): the
IS THE BASIC METAPHOR OF GOVERNANCE fundamental baSiS for any Claim Of 16‘ BOTH AT THE LOCAL LEVEL gitimacy and effectiveness is an all—inAND THE N ATION AL LEVEL elusive concept of development.13 Fur ther, in its execution and its ideology, “development” is simultaneously local, national, and transnational. It is the nexus of local landscapes, local labor, and local aspirations; national resources, state bureaucrats, and the interests of national politicians; and transnational (interstate, nongovernmental, and individual) flows of capital, technology, ideology, and personnel. Defining local citizenship in terms of development begins to (re)shape the individual’s relationship to all of these realms.
The model of development-citizenship takes one final equally postnational form. The Association of Kartong Youth (AKY) has existed for several years in two cities in the United States.M These sateedingo gather regularly in part for the pleasure of sharing company but also to collect regular dues for various projects in Kartong.
12. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory omectire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977).
13. For my insights into development as the driving metaphor of politics, I am indebted to Crawford Young, The Afiican State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, CT, USA: Yale UP, 1954) 211—12, 242.
14. Their identity as “youth” should not be confused with North American conceptions of the single under—twenty—five set. Here it marks that they are not keba, literally big men, or elders.
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Fig. 1: DEVELOPMENT AND POLITICS “Education, Health, Justice, Agriculture, Energy, Transports, Communications, National Development, Etc”: 3 presidential campaign platform capped by an all-inclusive promise of development.
As actors, they are transnational local citizens, but their contributions also generate a sense of transnational belonging in Kartong as the community, both collectively and in its constituent households, becomes increasingly dependent on such remittances.IS This is hardly a celebratory consciousness: Young men in The Gambia increasingly feel that the only way to lift their families from grinding poverty is to immigrate either by means of deception of the controls on international air travel (for example, visas secured under false pretenses) or overland to the Strait of Gibraltar and thence by sea into Europe at enormous physical risk.
15. It is important to distinguish between immigrants (persons who live abroad and basically cut ties with their old community) and transnational local citizens (persons who individually and collectively maintain ties of both information and material assistance and who, in many cases, plan to return to Kartong in later years). Tmnsnationals may or may not be naturalized U.S. citizens, but their status in the US. does not disrupt their claim to Kartong .mttedingo citizenship. Transnationalism is often a matter not of either/ot but both/and/pattially. Also, being a transnational local citizen involves enacting and performing; it is not something that can be known in advance or that derives from the category. See Michael Kearney, “From the Invisible Hand to Visible Feet: Anthropological Studies of Migration and Development,” Annual Review of Anthropology 15 (1986): 331—36; Paul Stoller, Money Has No Smell: The Afi‘imnization of New York City (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002; Lillian Trager, “Home-Town Linkages and Local Development in South-Western Nigeria: Whose Agenda? What Impact?Afi1'ta 68.3 (1998): 360—82; and Lillian Trager, Yoruba Hametawm: Community, Identity, and Development in Nigeria (Boulder, CO, USA: Lynne Rienner, 2001).
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STEVEN K. THOMSON
The case study of Kartong, The Gambia, shows us three competing principles of citizenship. First is descent: Political legitimacy is, in part, based on genealogical depth. To be a trustworthy member of local society, three generations of residence is required. The second competing principle is place of birth: The category is not restricted to descent from the founding families or even of the ethno—linguistic group of the founding families. While descent is an element of closure, it is mitigated by a principle—endurance in a place over time—that provides openness.
Note that place of birth is distinct as a principle of legitimacy from place of residence. In local politics, residence is often a key qualification. If you move out of the city of Chicago, for example, you may no longer run for mayor. If you move in just to run for office, you are called a “carpetbagger,” which is an epithet used to de—legitimize your candidacy. Under the rules of Bahá’í “citizenship,” you may not serve on the Local Spiritual Assembly (the Bahá’ís’ local governing body) of the city any longer if you move out of the city. Rights by residence, strictly speaking, you lose when you move away. Rights by place of birth are more portable but often require some sort of affirmation or further action as an adult to secure them. By contrast, in Kartong many of those most active in local politics do not sleep in Kartong on a daily basis. Their work and lives elsewhere in The Gambia keep them away for weeks, if not months, at a time, but this does not affect their legitimate role in Kartong’s local politics.
Third, and more subtle, is the principle of interest, commitment, or “performance.”16 An individual may choose not to return to Kartong on a regular basis precisely to avoid the responsibilities of Citizenship: contribution to projects in cash or labor, sometimes seemingly endless consultation, and so on. This same principle allows a mteedingo in America who may have naturalized and given up his right to vote in Gambian elections to retain local citizenship by attending meetings in the United States, contributing funds, and remaining informed of changes in Kartong. Thus there is a performative aspect to sateedz'ngo citizenship. Descent, place of birth, and performance combine to form a category of local citizen.
The Structure of Citizenship in the Bahá’í Faith
With my set of terms for analyzing citizenship, what kinds of answers to questions about the structure of citizenship can be found in contemporary practices in the Bahá’í community? My thoughts are an extension and reworking of some of Carnegie’s notes on how they function as elements of prefigurement.” Such practices, are, more narrowly, rules of membership in a religious community and are not today generally
16. The idea of “performance” in anthropology is a way of highlighting that it is not just the categories that matter but what people do with them. Consider the difference between a “script” for a play and the performance, which is much more elaborated, interactive, and contingent. Actors may or may not deliver their lines as they were written, the audience may intervene, an understudy may be substituted, the night’s show may be canceled, and so on. There is a sense that lived, evolving reality is contingent: Everyone is improvising a bit, and the categories are never really applied to the letter.
17. Carnegie, Posmationalism Prefigured 194—95.
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applicable to any state.18 However, I will show first that they provide alternative answers to the same questions of defining citizenship and second that they are backed up by practices that create postnational identity.
The rules of Bahá’í citizenship are quite simple: a letter of transfer from one’s previous community, a good local address, and one day of residence. There are no restrictions on membership related to descent (as there are, for example, in Orthodox Judaism or Zoroastrianism) or local processes of recertification or ritualized incorporation into the local community as are often involved in transfers of membership in Christian denominations. Because the scheduling and rules of elections are consistent worldwide, it is possible for a Bahá’í to move on April 20 and vote in local elections on April 21, the uniform date of local Bahá’í elections; indeed, there is no a priori reason one may not be elected to the local governing body in the election. Through these elections, the rank and file express their interest in the leadership of their communities in a globally uniform process. Though one’s location may change, the individual’s relationship to the structures of governance—local, national, and international—is consistent.
For participants, local Bahá’í elections have an additional layer of significance as enactments of global citizenship. Those voting believe, on the basis of statements in the Bahá’í writings, that the practice will be the model for a future system of world federalism. Thus the elections, for them, are part of a developing model that foreshadows a future political system, not merely an ecclesiastical one.
The Bahá’í system of highly portable local citizenship is most dramatically enacted by the increasing number of Bahá’ís, who, in their late teens or early twenties, spend a year or more in service to Bahá’í projects or institutions in other regions of their country or internationally. In many cases a Bahá’í youth’s first experience of community participation autonomous of his or her parents is in a context that, while culturally unfamiliar, is nearly structurally identical to the place where he or she was raised. This combined experience of strangeness and familiarity can be quite potent in generating a postnational orientation. Further, through a combination of factors—they are often underage for election (to cast a ballot or be elected one must be twenty—one); they possess levels of literacy and numeracy needed for managing the technical requirements; as full-time volunteers they have fewer fixed responsibilities, a commitment to serve where needed, and greater flexibility to travel—it is not uncommon for such youths to be called upon to serve as election tellers or to organize an election in a remote area where communities have less experience with Bahá’í electoral practices, thus thrusting them from the position of relatively passive
THE RULES OF BAHAIT CITIZENSHIP ARE QUITE SIMPLE: A LETTER OF TRANSFER FROM ONEIS PREVIOUS COMMUNITY, A GOOD LOCAL ADDRESS, AND ONE DAY OF RESIDENCE.
18. However, a form of local government very similar to Bahá’í structures has been adopted in Uganda under the regime of the current President, Yoweri Museveni.
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STEVEN K. THOMSON
observers at “home” to a position of leadership and responsibility “away.” Thus they often learn the basic practices of citizenship in a context of localized postnationalism.
Finally, many Bahá’í communities are learning that the more closely this model of citizenship is linked to the provision of community services, the stronger the participation is both in terms of numbers and individual interest and commitment.19 Like the citizens of Kartong, Bahá’ís consider “development” to be one of the key outcomes of citizenship; unlike the sateedz'ngo in the United States, Bahá’ís practice a form of citizenship that insists both on local participation wherever one finds oneself but does so in such a way that they are constantly and consistently linked with the global.
In sum, rather than being simply the individual-level marker of nationality, citizenship should, at least potentially, be considered as (a) scaled—that is simultaneously and interactively local, national, and transnational; (b) structured and rule—guided at each level, albeit by different mechanisms; (c) interacting across local, national, and transnational levels in mutually ttansformative ways; ((1) expressive of claims of legitimacy in political participation at each level; (e) having emotional content and acting as a basis of identity; and (f) defined in terms of metaphors of either coresidence (as in the Bahá’í model) or codescent (as in race and many forms of ethnicity).
Principle and Practice:
The Bahá’í Faith in Jim Crow Washington, D.C.
Turning from an outline of the structure of postnational citizenship in the Bahá’í
Faith, let me consider another question: how new models of citizenship become
ordinary practice or, to put it another way, the potential of religious conviction to transform social conventions. In
THE RELATIONSH'P BETWEEN Thomas’s review of Carnegie’s
FORMAL RELIGIOUS TEXT, PRECEPT, Postnatz'onalism prgfigured, she
AND TEACHING AND THE DAY-TO'DAV draws attention to some of the MORALITY OF COMMUNITIES, limitations of Carnegie’s treatment
IS ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL CONUNDRUMS of the Bahá’í community in the
OF ANY ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION. context Of his larger themeS- She
proposes a distinction between “the Bahá’í Faith as a cultural model” versus “a set of principles for ‘living well together’” and asks if “a conceptual reformulation [can] really transform the structural conditions that continue to imbue mainstream political concepts with racial and national identities.” This problem, the relationship between formal religious text, precept, and teaching and the day-to-day morality of communities, is one of the fundamental conundrums of any anthropology of religion. The interpretive challenge is not to dichotomize these conceptual poles but to show how they interact dynamically. Still, I, too, found Carnegie’s treatment of the Bahá’í Faith a bit too
19. See Bahá’í International Community, Office of Public Information, The Prosperity afHumankina’ (Wilmette, IL, USA: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, n.d.). See also “UNIFEM/Bahá’í' project strikes a responsive chord,” One Countvy 5.3 (Oct.—Dec. 1993): 1, 4—9.
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concerned with providing an overview of the general teachings, origins, and global history of this religious movement and insufficiently focused on the ethnographic description of how these principles (Thomas’s “cultural” models) become daily practice and secure elements of a way of “‘living well together.”20
Indeed, Carnegie succeeds best in showing how religious conviction transforms social convention in his most concrete example: the significance to his own family members of his renunciation (in accordance with Bahá’í teachings) of the repatriation of his mortal remains, what one might style as refusal of interment as a last act of patriotism.21 Rejection of this powerful—and very common—form of socially marking where one truly belongs by sacralizing bits of the earth with the bodies of one’s kin signals to his family that he has chosen a radically different orientation to the value of one land versus another.
In the final chapter of his book, Carnegie also provides a thorough documentation of the introduction of the Bahá’í Faith to Jamaica through a network of individuals already actively engaged in migration and Garveyite transnational affiliation, though, for his general argument, he could perhaps do more to clarify the significance of this history.22 He also treats the restructuring of time and space through calendrical innovations, orientation to a Qiblih, travel for pilgrimage, international conferences and visiting other Bahá’í communities, the translatability of the sacred texts, and some as—yet—undeveloped blueprints for social services organized around Bahá’í temples.23 I find persuasive his selection of trends and teachings that have the potential to disrupt fundamentally race—and—nation affiliations and to point the way toward more global identification, but I find unsatisfying his exposition of their capacity to effect such change. In the end, one is left noting that this chapter is entitled “World Community Imagined” and not “World Community Enacted.”
It need not be the case to stop with “imagining.” A more fundamental formulation of Thomas’s critique—a skepticism about religion’s capacity to challenge structural conditions in a fundamental way—can be met with concrete examples drawn from the history of the Bahá’í community. In her authoritative biography of Louis G. Gregory, Gayle Morrison uses the life of an early African-American believer and advocate to examine the evolution of race relations in the U.S. Bahá’í community over the course of the first half of the twentieth century.24 When Gregory became a Bahá’í in June 1909 in Washington, D.C., he soon confronted the community about the apparent duplicity of proclaiming a vision of the oneness of humanity while many of their meetings were racially segregated. The Working Committee (the predecessor of the Local Spiritual Assembly, the current form of local community administration and leadership) reported that it had never before consulted upon the topic, and no immediate action was taken, despite the arrival in February 1909 of
20. Thomas, “Transcending the Limits of Political and Intellectual Boundaries,” World Order 34.4 (2003): 9.
21. Carnegie, Poxmationa/ism Prefigured 183.
22. Carnegie, Pormatianalism Prqflgured 186—89.
23. Carnegie, Poxmatianalism Prtfigurea' 194—97.
24. See Gayle Morrison, 7?) Move the Worla’: Louis G. Gregory and the Advancement afRatial Unity in America, foreword by Glenford E. Mitchell (Wilmette, IL, USA: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1982).
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STEVEN K. THOMSON
a letter from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá encouraging the Bahá’ís to hold interracial meetings.25 However, by March 1910 the decision was taken to integrate the races in every fourth public meeting.26
The situation continued until ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s visit to the United States in 1912 when, on many occasions, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá specifically insisted on holding racially integrated public gatherings. His example established a precedent that was followed after His departure.” However, in 1914 the practice of holding desegregated meetings broke down, and for the following two years the community was divided into several camps over the issue.28 The situation was particularly acute because the regular flow of communications with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in the Holy Land was cut by World War 1. Until this time the American Bahá’ís, having very few translations of the texts of Baha’u’llah, were nearly entirely dependent upon letters from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and messages from Him carried by returning pilgrim-Visitors for guidance and elucidation of the Bahá’í teachings. In the end, the Washington, D.C., community reached a working understanding that
meetings for teaching which were publicly advertised through the press should
welcome and teach any who responded, regardless of race. On the other hand
those holding private meetings for contacting and teaching their friends might
use their own discretion about bringing the races together where such a step
seemed premature.29
While one may argue that interracial fellowship in the context of the community gatherings of a religion espousing the oneness of humanity is unremarkable (as well it should be) and does not rise to the level of “structural conditions that continue to imbue mainstream political concepts with racial and national identities,” let us not forget that these events took place in an era when Jim Crow laws were common and widely enforced and when public interracial gatherings were rare and potent events?0 Note that this policy applied to all “publicly advertised” meetings and that the exception as stated applied to private meetings, allowing individuals to try to meet those they wanted to introduce to the Bahá’í Faith under the conditions they felt would be most favorable. The public face of the new religion would be integrated.
Further, the public meetings were challenges to the iconic “11 o’clock Sunday morning, the most segregated hour in America.”51 Consider how frequently various
25. The son of the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, Baha’u’llah, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was the recognized leader of the community throughout the world from 1892 through 1921. See Morrison, To Move the World 56, 31.
26. See Morrison, To Move the World 73.
27. See Morrison, Yb Move the Wbrld 52—62.
28. See Morrison, 7?) Move the 1%er 73—81.
29. Louis G. Gregory, “Some Recollections of the Early Days of the Bahá’í Faith in Washington, D.C.,” TS, p. 5, Louis G. Gregory Papers, National Bahá’í Archives, Wilmette, 111., quoted in Morrison, To Move the “Vorla’ 80.
30. Thomas, “Transcending the Limits of Political and Intellectual Boundaries,” World Order 34.4 (2003): 19.
31. Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride ThwardFreedom: 7716 Montgomery Story (New York: Harper, 1958) 207.
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nationalisms have co—opted religion as one of its standards: Afrikaner adherence to the Dutch Reformed Church, contemporary Russian revival and protection of Orthodoxy, and the various instances of AIab—Islamic nationalism, among many others cases. Desegregating the meetings of the Bahá’í Faith not only challenged US. law, it thereby challenged the
unspoken root—racial practices and DESEGREGAT'NG THE MEET'NGS attitudes deeply ingrained in American OF THE BAHA'l FAITH NOT ONLY nationalism. CHALLENGED U.S. LAW,
What is most remarkable about the IT THEREBY CHALLENGED decision is that it was reached without THE UNSPOKEN ROOTthe direct intervention of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá RACIAL PRACTICES AND ATTITUDES
but was based on the reasoned application of the principles of the new religion by the local Bahá’ís and was motivated by the growing concern about the effects of the division of opinion on the health of their fellowship.32 Thus the episode in Washington, D.C., provides a concrete example of how abstract principles gradually transform the everyday practices and norms of community life.
Even a brief review such as this demonstrates the possibility and the value of the close examination of Bahá’í communities in instances where adherence to a transnational community brings members into direct confrontation with key elements of national identity. My own experience with Caribbean Bahá’í communities suggest that just such a combination of religion and nationalism take a particular form there in the combination of the centrality of Christian affiliation (though not necessarily practice) to codes of respectability and the social dynamics of insularity where neighborly surveillance is particularly acute.33 Put more directly, while individuals may or may not attend church regularly, they retain the good will of the community by remaining Christian, at least nominally. Conversion to a non—Christian religion can carry high social costs because one’s afliliation with the Bahá’í Faith is quite unlikely to be unnoticed. The challenge to Carnegie, then, is to show how Bahá’í-inflected postnationalism has challenged and transformed ordinary social dynamics.
Let me further expand this point by offering some of my own observations of several Bahá’í communities in several West African countries. I have on many occasions found myself in the company of Bahá’ís from a nearly complete cross section of the country’s ethnic groups, three or more neighboring countries, as well as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Iráq, and Iran. It is common practice to generate such inventories as a form of self—adulation for generating local communities with a distinctively global flavor. Indeed, such gatherings
DEEPLY INGRAINED IN AMERICAN NATIONALISM.
32. See Morrison, To Move the Wzrld 81.
33. Compare P. J. Wilson, “Reputation and Respectability: A Suggestion for Caribbean Ethnography,” Man ns 4 (1969): 70—84, and R. D. Abrahams, “Reputation vs. Respectability: A Review of Peter J. Wilson’s Concept,” Review /Rew'mz Intemmericand 9 (1979): 448—53.
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STEVEN K. THOMSON
are distinct; it is not an exaggeration to suggest that no other cause, organization, group, or movement in these countries can honestly claim a membership of such diversity.
But the point I would like to make is not merely that Bahá’í communities are diverse but rather that they struggle with this diversity. Just as the Bahá’ís of Washington, D.C., circa 1914 voiced widely divergent opinions and found themselves temporarily estranged from each other, I have witnessed West African communities that struggled to hold themselves together, tried a variety of policies and practices, sought guidance and direction from the outside, but, most fundamentally, were engaged in a process of postnational community building because of a deep and abiding belief that the principles for which their Faith stood were transcendent over various forms of prejudice and parochialism.
The mere fact of demographic diversity is an insufficient measure of a robust community. Rather, what is called for is close attention to the practices that structure access to knowledge of both the broad principles and the administrative minutiae detailed in various Bahá’í writings, information concerning current events and trends both locally and internationally, a working basis in the management of financial resources, and renegotiation of the ordinary styles of speech and communication that individuals from such diverse backgrounds bring with them. These substantive negotiations are the very essence of the practical challenge of cross-cultural, postnational community building, not merely assembling groups of nominal diversity. The close examination of such processes of bringing about the restructuring of daily practice
is the vital piece missing
FOR THOSE WHO WISH TO DOCUMENT from Carnegie’s Chapter 011 THE GROWTH AND IN-UENCE OF THE BAHA’I’ FAITH, the Bahá’í comr‘f‘unit)‘
ONE OF THE GREATEST CHALLENGES . What cameg‘e does do
IS TO EXAMINE CAREFULLY THE PROCESSES ‘5 lea‘l ”5 toward an under'
standing that concepts of
WHEREBY INDIVIDUALS AND COMMUNlTIES .
race and nation, although ARE MOTIVATED BY PRINCIPLES TO TAKE ACTIONS
specific in their particular THAT DO FUNDAMENTALLY CHALLENGE origins, content, and hisTHE STRUCTURES THAT
tories, share fundamental IMBUE MAINSTREAM POLITICAL CONCEPTS similarities in their exclu WITH RACIAL AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES.” sionafy workings and are often tightly interlinked. For those who wish to document the growth and influence of the Bahá’í Faith and the ways in which it provides social and conceptual structures that challenge the primacy of race-nation, one of the greatest challenges is to examine carefully the processes whereby individuals and communities are motivated by principles to take actions that do fundamentally challenge the structures that “imbue mainstream political concepts with racial and national identities.”3"i
34. Thomas, “Transcending the Limits of Political and Intellectual Boundaries,” World Order 34.4 (2003): 19.
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CITIZENSHIP AND BELONGING
Conclusion: Citizenship in the World and at “Home”
Charles V. Carnegie’s Posmationa/ism Prqfigured makes a strong case for the argument that nationalism is not inevitable. Global communities can generate senses of belonging that challenge the racial underpinnings of national identities. My contribution has been to add some initial terms for examining the politics of such a postnational order. Like Carnegie, I turn to very local situations for inspiration. Sateedingo identity in The Gambia shows us that citizenship as the expression of the claim of legitimate political voice is a performed, not a conferred, quality of the person. It also demonstrates that national and transnational forces help articulate, but not determine, local forms of citizenship by interacting in structured but mutually transforming ways. And it suggests that there may be multiple, even simultaneous, principles implicated in the designation of who can claim local citizenship: descent, place of birth, and participation, in The Gambia; residence, in the Bahá’í Faith; and perhaps others elsewhere. Through the examination of the efforts of Louis G. Gregory and my own experiences in various Bahá’í communities, I sought to highlight both the struggle to use religious teachings to transform the practice of citizenship and the error of merely using demographic diversity to measure effective participation. In the discussion of the structure of Bahá’í “citizenship,” I considered mechanisms through which local and world citizenship are practiced together.
Are there other ways, then, that we can see “world citizenship” in action, or are such statements merely emotives, empty claims of affiliation? Where do we look for individuals claiming the legitimate right to act politically on a global stage? Demonstrators at World Trade Organization meetings are clearly attempting to do so. Amnesty International members who write letters also assert their interest in the acts of distant governments. United Nations Associations gather private individuals to support international organizations. A plethora of “citizen—ambassador” programs, people-to—people exchanges, sister-city relationships, Rotary Clubs, and servicelearning programs provide opportunities for individuals to act as world Citizens, to observe, negotiate, and contribute to communities. These are some of the arenas of postnational politics that need to be analyzed with the framework I have proposed: In what terms are claims of legitimate voice voiced, performed, and/or validated? How do such claims change or express one’s sense of belonging? How do expressions of global citizenship change one’s position as a local citizen?
But, while occasionally acting globally, we return “home”—or establish a new one far from where we originated—and then we must make arrangements with our neighbors to dispose of the trash, provide for a minimum of public order, secure sources of Clean water, deliver “development,” however that is locally defined. These kinds of ordinary, local, and, yes, national, politics will endure and must also be addressed in any consideration of the emergent postnational.
For postnationality to move from being prefigured to enacted, we will have to confront the day-to-day business of face—to—face communities. To do that, we will need a postnational theory of citizenship.
World Order, 2003, Vol. 34, No. 4 37
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[Page 39]
KIM MEILICKE DOUGLAS
An Interview with Susan Atefat-Peckhom: Letting Life Sit Cross-Legged in the Palms of Your Hands
I had the pleasure of working with Susan Atefat-Peckham at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, about a year before she received the 2000 National Poetry Series Award for her book 777;“ Kind of Sleep, which was published in 2001 by Coffee House Press in Minneapolis.
Atefat—Peckham, a daughter of Muslim Iranians, was born in New York City and raised in New Jersey, France, and Switzerland. Aiming to pursue a career in medicine, she obtained a BS. degree in pre-med biology and chemistry from Baylor University in Waco, Texas. But, being pulled toward literature, she also obtained an MA. degree in English literature from the same university. Then she moved to Nebraska, where she received her Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and taught creative writing, literature, and composition. Her first full-time teaching position was as an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Hope College. In August 2002 she became an assistant professor of English in the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English and Journalism at Georgia College SC State University in Milledgeville, Georgia.
Atefat—Peckham’s many honors include, most recently, a Fulbright Fellowship to Jordan in 2003 and a National Poetry Series Award in 2000. Her nonfiction manuscript, “Blue-Eyed Bird,” was finalist for the Associated Writing Programs Intro Award and a runner-up finalist for the Beryl Markham Award in creative nonfiction given by the Story Line Press. Other awards include an Academy of American Poets Award, the John H. Vreeland Award, and several teaching awards.
Although born in the United States and having lived abroad, Atefat-Peckham has Visited her relatives in Iran as often as possible. Many of the poems in That Kind of Sleep portray these visits and the culture of Iran. Hilda Raz, editor of Prairie Schooner, writes about the volume of poetry that, “Like Rumi, Atefat—Peckham finds
Copyright © 2004 by Kim Meilicke Douglas.
KIM MEIUCKE DOUGLAS 0 write! and an assistant professor, teaches at Hope College in Hotland Michigan She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Center for Women, in , ,, ‘ Holland and writes a column ‘Women Changing the World” for the her husband, David, she cofounded the Alliance for Cultut interests include porenflng, family life, the outdoors (hiking walking) yoga and fitness
World Order, 2003, Vol. 34, No. 4 39
KIM MEILICKE DOUGLAS
holiness in immanence, the presence of beloved family. Her rich and sophisticated poems lead readers from Iran to Switzerland to the United States, Tehran to Staten Island and beyond, to renew our faith in empathy and the healing properties of human love. These poems help reconcile political divisions and human separations.” Literary critics agree that Atefat—Peckham’s book serves as an artful and humane
tricultural perspective on Iran.
T bougb That Kind of Sleep focuses primarily on Iran, you have lived in various places. How has moving so ofien and living in difl'erent cultures influencedyou.’
Some people say, when you move from place to place, you’re never from any one place. That’s partially true. Moving from place to place also means that you are from all of those places you’ve lived, all of those places that have touched you and have become a part of you in some way. My poems explore what place means to a person, and how the spaces we leave behind in a place affect who we are. While at times we leave behind spaces, at other times we carry them with us everywhere, always remaining a part of every place at once. I think Iran influenced me in this way—in the fact that it was the largest absence in my life and for the longest time. Between 1978 and 1993, I was unable to visit. Inside the ache of the poems in That Kind of Sleep, I’m trying to bring back the world I had lost. I’m trying to recreate the people I missed or those who had died or grown older. Inside the poems I could create a space for me to exist with these people, in their spaces, because, physically, I was no longer there.
I notice in your poem: a powerful love for family. Simultaneously, though, you question—not critically but in an exploratory
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—K1M MEILICKE DOUGLAS
manner—some of the cultural behaviors you observed. This creates an interesting tension. How do you manage to maintain such a love for fizmily while at the same time questioning some of the traditions you observe?
That’s a very perceptive question. I think you question traditions and people because you love them. If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t challenge them. The answer to this question lies in my personal perspective as an international citizen. Because of the absence I mentioned
. earlier, I didn’t enjoy the luxury of being
near my extended family. Many people who live near their relatives have opportunities to participate in everyday company or, less frequently, big family reunions. For fifteen years my parents and I were absent—were not able to see my Iranian family. In Iran, family is of paramount importance—the most sacred unit of society, even—and in spite of living apart from one another, we were all trying not to grow apart. Children are the most important part of a family; we say, in the words of a Farsi idiom, that we “wear them on our heads,” like a crown. As a child of the family, at that time, being so far from my extended family was particularly difficult.
During Visits, especially after the revolution, when I was no longer a child but an adult, I approached life as an Iranian
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influenced by an American and European upbringing. I observed through eyes
that were now tricultural. Racially, I’m
Iranian, and perhaps I am Iranian somewhat socially as well—there is, of course,
always the blood that courses through
the veins, that primal cultural pull to
my own ethnicity that I can never understand nor change—but a good part
of my social and worldviews are European and American. When visiting my
family with this tricultural awareness, I
felt strongly about respecting their traditions, in part from a respect for the
Iranian culture, and in part from love.
I think every child of immigrants has
dealt with this dilemma of “new world”
versus “old country.n For instance, I
couldn’t say to my Iranian relatives, “You
really shouldn’t wear the chador.” I would
never say that to my aunt, who is a
devout Muslim and to whom the chador
means so much more than what Westerners perceive as an oppressive symbol
over women. What I did say, though, is
that I wished I had the choice to wear
a chador or not; I expressed that I didn’t
feel such obedience ought to be legislated.1 We had many discussions, of
course, some of them heated. But in the
back of my mind, I remembered how
much I resented colonialism. And I
thought, in my situation, there’s a fine
line between words being revolutionary
and words being colonialist. I’ve never
been the kind of person who believes in
walking into another culture and telling
them I know what is best for them to
do. Yet I also think that when you are
a part of a place, when you care enough
for a place to look at it with deep feeling
and the need to leave it as what you
1. When Atefat—Peckham visited Iran, she wore a chador.
INTERVIEW WITH SUSAN ATEFAT—PECKHAM
would think would be a better place, you do criticize it. You might even dare to attempt change.
When your parents leftlmn, did they try to instill traditionsfiom your background as you movedfiom place to place? How did they manage the impact that America and Europe must have had on you?
It was complicated [laughs] . I was blessed with parents who are very open—minded people who lived with dreams and visions, as I think all immigrants do, that opened them to cultures beyond the land that they were from. In the sixties those dreams and visions led them from Tehran to New York City. When people choose to live nomadic lives, they try to adopt a more open and accepting stance because they must for survival. There is no other way to survive the isolation that would follow if they could not to a degree integrate into new societies. However, immigrants also tend to want to hold onto values from their homelands, and they struggle to exercise them in a place that is not always friendly to what it perceives as different.
My parents did try to keep me involved in the traditions of our family. They raised me to be the kind of moral person they had been taught to be. At times some of their values conflicted with some of the European or American values that I was exposed to in the street or at school. So we would argue about it. We would argue about when it was appropriate to date or when it was appropriate to wear a mini-skirt or when it was appropriate to do whatever, but in the end the point for me was not necessarily the specific answers to those questions but how to bridge the distances between us, a value which has proven to me indispensable as an adult.
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KIM MEILICKE DOUGLAS
Whether the issues are cultural or generational, I think every child deals with these issues in some similar way—in any family. In our family it was just a little more colorful. And perhaps a little bit louder—we are passionate people!
In many poems you tend to he more of an observer of,‘ rather than a participant in, the Iranian culture. \Vhat was that like for you? Were you conscious of the tension of “This is my aunt”and “These are my grandparents, ” and yet as you participate as niece andgranddaughter, you also seem to stand outside of the family as an observer? Or was this more about observing as many artists
do?
The answer to this lies in part in the revolution itself. The Iran I came back to was not the same one I had left behind, and I had to learn, as many Iranians did, how to adjust to the changes and to the new and different rules for everyday living. Those Iranians who returned after twenty years understood and realized that deep changes had taken place since the seventies when attitudes were more liberaI—definitely more liberal—than they are now. Besides needing to refamiliarize myself with family members who were now fifteen years older, some of my observant nature had to do with standing back and examining what had changed. For instance, the buses are segregated now, and they hadn’t been earlier. There were separate lines for men and women at the airport, and there hadn’t been before. Things like that. Add to that that I tend to be solitary and observant anyway. I was painfully shy as a childalways the silent observer. I never desired attention or noise. And I learned a lot just listening and watching. I felt and still feel to a degree that the most active way I can participate in something is by creating as silent a space as
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possible around it and allowing it to exist alone.
I agree with your concept of art. I think there is a balance between being the active participant and also being quiet and watching and listening. I think the best art is created from the great silences of our lives. Fromisimply listening and letting life sit cross—legged in the palms of your hands. Then handing it to the reader, from your palms to the reader’s. I did try to set a place aside in the poems where the reader can stand and become an active participant in a place that neither of us can claim in the same ways but of which both of us can become a part of through the poems.
The images you present definitely help the reader observe and, I imagine, if they feel inclined, to make their own judgments, since you refrain from doing so. But not everyone believes art should he devoid of opinion or statement. In fact, I remembera story you shared earlier about an editor considering the poem in which you refer to Rosa Parks—‘I‘lvenue Vali Asr.” You said that the editor would take the poem if you took a stronger stand and had an opinion against the women who tolerated their heingfireed to sit in the hack of the bus. You did not want to revise your poem. . . . I think this story is rather beautiful, and it shows again your position of not wanting to he a eriticaljudge of women who were on that has. Do you want to comment?
In that poem I was going to get on the front of the bus, not realizing that the front was reserved solely for men. I’m not sure whether the decision to place men in the front and women in the back was a conscious decision or not, but what was difficult was that the space for women was smaller, and, of course, who goes to buy food at the market? Mostly women. It made more sense to me to have had the women in the from larger
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section. In the bus, though, I wasn’t
really thinking of that as much as I was
thinking about being hot and irritable
in my chador—it was summer and a
good 95 degrees [Fahrenheit] outside. I
started talking about how we were not
sheep to be herded into the back, and
other women shushed me quiet. The
poem ends with an ambivalent image of
a folded sky spreading over the city.2 I
wanted to show how the experience made
me feel. I did not wish to attack, polemically, a way of living.
When I sent the poem to magazines, two or three editors said, “We’ll take it if you revise the ending—we’re interested in what side you come down on because the end is ambiguous.” To all of them I said the same thing. “I’m not coming down on a side. That’s not the job of this poet.” You know, in this particular case the narrator simply states the situation and allows readers to participate in the action and make their own decisions. We all ought to live as citizens inside a society before we make judgments about a people or their government.
I have learned—it took me years to learn this—that there is a distinct difference between the government of a country and its people. Various parts of this world do not have truly free elections. It’s easy to want to be critical of the entire country when actually what strikes you as wrong is a representation of very few in positions of power who
2. “We need another Rosa Parks,” the direct statement opening “Avenue Vali Asr,” and the images that follow reveal the poet’s sentiments about the oppressiveness of the situation. The poem coneludes: I know that words can’t help them here. Hot breath hovers in old Wind.
A folded sky spreads in Tehran.
INTERVIEW WITH SUSAN ATEFAT—PECKHAM
control others. For me to have said these women were wrong for their silence or that they should have said something would have been foolish. I can’t, from my perspective, strut in there and say “Oh. Well. You should have done this” or “You should have done that.” I should allow them the space and the dignity to decide for themselves what is right and what they should be doing.
Another kind of tangential point, which is still relevant in a strong way to this idea, is the idea many have as they stereotype Middle Eastern countries“Oh look at these poor women who are abused and victimized. We need to go in there and save them.” I should point out that in Iran—and I know from my experiences when I was there—that most women there are very strong, very powerful, and do not appreciate anyone’s pity. Many would bristle at it as arrogant. They consider themselves strong, having found power in ways that may not be traditional to American women. They often recognize their own strength. I know that there are abusive situations in every culture, and many women are survivors of severe abuse—just as we have our own abuses of women in American culture.
Plenty ofit.
Plenty. And when you compare the two places, Iran and the United States, I don’t think that Iran’s women look highly on the pity I sometimes see being offered to them by American women. Whenever you pity someone, you are placing yourself above them; you are saying, “Just look at that poor little person.” Of course, we ought to be vigilant for social and human injustice, and there certainly is a lot to go around in the world. But I
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KIM MEILICKE DOUGLAS
think that people should get credit for what they believe in; if it’s different from what we believe in, we shouldn’t immediately assume that they’re being victimized. This may be a choice. That some women there do choose and desire to wear the chador because they want to is a fact. Devout Muslim women wear the chador because they think of it as a sign of respect to God and as a sign of what God told them would protect them from men—and there are women, my Grandmother was one of them, who would never hear of doing otherwise.
One of the sections of your book deals more directly with women. In fact, when I first started reading this section, I assumed that I might he moving intopoems that deal with the oppression of women. I was surprised, and very delighted, that the poems in that section reflected a wide range of women’s experiences. Wile samepoems were clearly upsetting like “Stoning Soheila,” there were poems about some of your relatives in domestic situations, without violent imagery. \Vhat were your hopes and what are your hopes as more people read That Kind of Sleep, for how women, especially Iranian women, will be seen? ‘Vhat reactions have you already hadfiam publishers and read ers?
I like the way my publisher put it. He said that I present the people of the Middle East and the people of Iran in particular as “the girl next door.” I’d like to think that the poems in That Kind of Sleep can bring us closer together, that they can remind us that we are global neighbors. The poems underline and underscore that in spite of our differences—which should be celebrated and not erased—we can learn to see these people as our neighbors, literally and figuratively. One big mistake we make is that we try hard to erase differencesto dismiss them by saying that we are all
44 World Order, 2003, Vol. 34, NO. 4
just the same. We are not all the same, and that’s okay! We have to remind ourselves that being different is okay. We need to try to understand the differences and how we can work with them. I hope the poems make cultures seem closer. There’s plenty of room for human nature—misunderstanding that may lead to prejudice and stereotyping. After all, human motivation is similar—there’s love, jealousy, kindness, hatred—no matter where you are. My focus on women underlines that nothing is ever all good or all bad. On the one hand, women are celebrated—the basics of Islam celebrate the equality of the sexes. For the first time the belief that women are not property and that they are valued in the eyes of God and should be treated by men with fairness and respect became widespread. At the time the idea was revolutionary. On the other hand, I recognize societal rules that create situations in which the sexes don’t seem to be treated equally.
If we examine religious history and view the world religions as a progression, Islam actually was a stepfbrwardfbr women.
Yes, it was. Many Americans don’t realize that Islam provided liberation to women at a time when women were nothing more than property, were not permitted to own land, and were not permitted any say in family life. I think what has happened is that we have stopped distinguishing between the religious subcultures and the rhetoric of government leaders. Government leaders are often the spokespersons of a culture, and we seem to associate the spokespersons of a culture with the entire race and culture, when we should be remembering that the individuals have their own ways of living as well. And
[Page 45]
that people regularly appropriate religions and other institutions to further
their political stance. And that not all
leaders are freely elected.
But along that line, let me interjeet: I imagine that some Americans, readers of That Kind of Sleep included, might view you as a spokesperson of the Iranian culture. How do you feel about this? Should one person have this kind ofpower, to representa whole culture?
No, I don’t believe that any one person can truly speak about the complexities of many cultural voices. I have mixed feelings about being perceived as a spokesperson. When I was about eight years old during the hostage crisis in the Seventies, I remember not wanting to be Iranian. I tried to hide who I was. If someone thought that I was Italian or Greek or Spanish or anything else, I was happy for it. I didn’t claim my cultural identity until I was much older. I didn’t wish to be a cultural ambassador back then. I didn’t know how to be one, and I still don’t know how to be one. I’m no expert. I’m not a political analyst. I am just a person.
I feel that when I speak about Iran, I am speaking from common sense and personal experiences rather than from political ties. I’ve taken on the role as spokesperson willingly since September 11. I felt that it was necessary and that it was healing, and it worked at that point. But I think it is important to realize that many people of Iranian descent simply wish to be left alone and not be asked about anything, not to be in the public eye in any way, partly because one person can’t speak for the culture and partly because it’s personal and a sort of private realm. You know,
I always tell people I hate being asked
|NTERV|EW WITH SUSAN ATEFAT—PECKHAM
where I am from. I don’t think that people are aware of how intrusive that question is. I don’t think they think about the fact that, when a person is being asked by a stranger, “Oh, where are you from? What is your ethnicity?”—from a stranger those questions also sound like, “What species are you? What kind of animal are you anyway?” It’s disturbing. The other part of it: serving as a spokesperson, when press coverage of your culture is questionably unpleasant, means that being the cultural ambassador also entails being the goodwill ambassador—a trying, taxing, and exhausting task. I have chosen to serve as a spokesperson at such times because I feel called upon to do so. But I will underscore that there are many, many more who wish to be left alone. Assuming everyone Middle Eastern is willing to be up there and talking about their cultures, especially now, would be wrong.
I zmagine that in the classes you teach—li/ee many of us teaching—you assign students books written by writersfi‘om various ethnic backgrounds. I sometimes worry that students will perceive individual writers as spokespeoplefor, rather than one voice of a culture, and I attempt to directly deal with this tendenty. How do you deal with this? IVhat are some tips you mightgiue educators to prevent students fiom viewing one writer as the cultural standard?
I think it is very hard, especially in isolated areas of the country and smaller schools where there isn’t much diversity, and often what they encounter is one spokesperson, if anyone at all. Most of these students have not had diverse experiences. The book they are reading is all they are getting and likely all they will ever get from Native American culture, the African American culture, or whichever culture it is. They may be
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KIM MEILICKE DOUGLAS
making many judgments on the basis of that one book. That puts a lot of pressure on the professor as well as the writer.
My suggestion would be to read the book and then bring in individual works by a variety of writers from the same culture who have different perspectives. For example, you might read a book by Sherman Alexie, but you also bring in a poem by Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and other Native American writers who have different opinions from the one in the book you are reading—this, with an appropriate education about the pressures of being spokespersons, etc.
I think, too, with ethnic writers that it is important to educate “white” as an ethnicity as well. I think writers would rather be seen as, simply, writers, rather than representatives of their culture. They would like to be seen as writers, simply and plainly.
Do you think we are making progress? I remember; even in graduate school, that writers of color were regarded by many professors as less important writers. Do you think we are makingprogress?
I think it depends, depends on where you go and who’s teaching the class and how much they believe in what they are doing——I’ve seen both men and women make some terrible mistakes in the Classroom. It’s hard to say. Sometimes I think, “Yes, we’re making progress.” I look in the anthologies, and I see all these great varieties of people and all these different viewpoints. And then a colleague makes a terribly inappropriate comment, or, for example, I just pulled an anthology of my shelf that I had received from a large trade paperback publisher and noticed that almost all of the writers were white. Surprised, I checked the
46 World Order, 2003. Vol. 34, No. 4
copyright date, sure that the book had been published before the sixties, but it was actually published in the nineties. There has been progress but clearly not enough. Women have become much more prominent than they were, and so have writers of color. I think there is an effort, but I also think we are still finding our footing as to do this truly effectively.
That Kind ofSleep containsplenty of imag ery connected to Islam. Since I ’m a Baha z and have many Iranian fi‘iends, I was fitmiliar with such images asprayer mats and heads, mosques, the chador, and even some Arabic terms. What is your connection to Islam? How has Islam impacted you in positive and/or negative ways?
Islam has had a very positive impact on me. For one thing, my parents taught me to love and respect Islam, and my whole family are devout Muslims. My parents as immigrants dealt with many transitions. When they came to the United States, they attended both church and mosque, mixing the two together. I feel that I was raised to believe in God rather than a world religion. It didn’t really matter to my parents what religion I was, as long as I believed in God. My adulthood has led me down many paths, and I have found my own now. I’m grateful and indebted to my strong roots in Islam. I can be a witness and say, “No, it’s not the way you think it is. This is how I was raised, and these are the ideas I have, and I come in part from this tradition. I love peace, I love justice, and I love charity.” I try my best to underline the positive aspects of Islam to others who may have misconceptions and misunderstandings, especially today, of what the religion teaches. And I love Islam’s gateways into mysticism.
[Page 47]
You quotefiom Rumi to begin each section
of the book. 1% did you decide to do this?
I had written about half of That Kind of Sleep when I discovered Coleman Barks’ translations of Rumi’s work. And I felt an affinity with it—it’s that feeling of reading something you’ve thought of before, and it never occurred to you that someone else thought that thought. Rumi gives me a feeling that I belong, which is a rare feeling for me to come by. We share similar mystical and spiritual beliefs about the universe, the nature of existence, the holiness of a moment, all that. I feel that I find in Rumi a kindred voice—one that is a teacher and a guide. I like, in poetry, to pay homage to the poets who have come before us. And my using the quotes to begin each section of the book does just that. I like to think of my poems bowing down to Rumi’s.
Regarding other influences: . . . I think my strongest influences are in Persian rug weaving, the oral storytelling traditions of my family, mosaic handwork, classical Persian music, as well as my training as a classical pianist. Each of these has taught me something about discipline, how all art is a giving act, and how all things converge.
You are working on a second book of poems that is, in some ways, a continuation ofyour first book. Would you comment on your new work and also on your memoir?
The second book of poems is going really well! It will be a book—length sequenced poem that will continue where the final poem in the first book, That Kind of Sleep, leaves off. To me that poem is incomplete. I had not intended to publish it in its current form, but I got so
INTERVIEW WITH SUSAN ATEFAT—PECKHAM
lucky, and the book came out too quickly. I ran out of time. That Kind of Sleep in its current form is sixteen sections. The second book, “Say This,” picks up where the first left of, beginning with section seventeen. I have thirty—eight of these poems written so far and feel that the manuscript is between a third to a half complete. It takes me years to write a book! In it, I’m working with the death of my grandfather from esophageal cancer. It’s about speaking and the cancer of silence at points when speaking can save—not just preserve, but redeem. At the same time, it explores what it means to be alive, that dying is simply walking through another door, to another mystery.
My memoir, “Black Eyed Bird,” needs extensive revision—I’m not sure where I’ll be taking that one. The collection is still a collection of essays. In it, I continue to explore place and the many ways in which we are all connected to one another. It’s about family, and heritage, and being tricultural, and being a woman, and growing into one’s voice.
What I’m eyeball deep in at the moment is finishing my anthology of contemporary Middle Eastern American writing. I hope that it will bring to American audiences a deeper and more varied understanding of our voices. Its title is “Talking Through the Door” . . . ; I see many ethnic writers talking through a door. My hope is that readers will always see writing as a door to open, to walk through, and to experience, in some way, another world. I like to say to others, may words carry you to far off places and always bring you home to the back door of your house once again.
World Order, 2003, Vol. 34, No. 4 47
Lower Manhattan
If you are lost look for the World Trade Center andyou will find your way home. —szerby
From the United Nations International School, on FDR Drive and 25th Street, Mother and I walked the wind north fifteen blocks to meet Father who waited for us at the United Nations, the East River lapping its edges, lifting our hair to the brass of rush hour traffic. And the twin towers gleamed with western sunlight if I looked over my small shoulder. If you are lost, look for this shining, shadows looming over the bay as the Staten Island Ferry pushed its way from Lower Manhattan through Hudson water, home to New Jersey, the skyline receding till the towers slipped between the closing pinch of my thumb and forefinger, my eye just behind. This city, in the palms of my hands, beneath spaces of clamped fingers, where I carried it to France, Iran, Switzerland, Texas, Nebraska, Michigan, Georgia, where I still hold it the years I’ve left it behind. How will I find my way home? My palms burn. If you are lost, look for my eyes, hot in your hands, Carry me there, bright, burning, and alive.
—SUSAN ATEFAT—PECKHAM
Copyright © 2003 by Susan Atefat—Peckham. Reprinted by permission from North American Review 288.5 (Sept.-Oct. 2003): 26‘
SUSAN ATEFAT—I’ECKHAM won the 2000 National Poetry Series Award for That Kind afS/eep. She is an assistant professor of English in the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English and Journalism at Georgia College & State University, Midgeville, Georgia.
48 World Order, 2003, Vol. 34, No. 4
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CALL FOR PAPERS
A Special [Mac on T ravel
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: June 3004
In our modern world, growing numbers of people assume that it is their right (and increasingly their practice) to travel as they wish, sometimes over vast distances, and for any number of personal reasons. Travel has unarguably brought the world closer together. Travel contributes to greater understandings of cultures, histories, and peoples and has helped to shape an emerging sense of world citizenship. The term travel, like the term tourism, suggests freedom of movement and the desirable mixture of cultures and peoples.
But it wasn’t always so. In earlier ages most people had no personal right to move from place to place. For most, travel meant short, sanctioned, carefully circumscribed journeys. The privileged few might, of course, travel greater distances, and do so for more diverse purposes than could the great masses of people. However, travel in those earlier times often had overtly symbolic social, religious, or governmental content. Travel almost always was, in part, an expression and exercise of power and social control, part of the exercise of governance. Today. mobility is one of the defining characteristics of our age. Submissions (articles, re views, photo—essays, creative writing, poems, and the like) to this issue might wish to take up some of the following questions:
0 Sacred travel in a semlar modern world: How do the Bahá’í writings or those of other religious traditions speak of travel and mobility? How is pioneering or religious missionary work related to sacred writings on travel?
0 Tourism and Ecology and Culture: Can one speak today of unspoiled beauty and authentic cultures if one only encounters it/them through travel and tourism? How has travel blurred cultural distinctions? What are the ecological implications of travel? How has travel contributed to either economic equality or increased poverty? What can travel writing teach us about new cultures and peoples? Do National Parks preserve nature or accommodate tourists?
0 Meta, virtual, and imaginative travel: How do new technologies make it possible to travel without physically going anywhere? How has literature and, more recently, film already made such “travels" possible?
0 Travel and sufli’n'ng: How is travel linked to the exercise of power in the case of exiles, refugees, or those who have been banished? How might Bahá’u’lláh's banishment and exile be related to conceptions of travel and place in the Bahá’í writings? How does immigration change ideas of nationality and identity? How has travel contributed to the recent explosion in exilic and diasporic novels and film? How does war change the way the terms travel and home are understood?
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Submissions to the journal will be subject to external blind peer review if they fall outside the expertise of
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Manuscripts (in Word or WordPerfect) should be sent to World Order, Dr. Betty J. Fisher, Managing Editor. 731] Quail Springs Place, NE, Albuquerque. NM 87113-1780, USA
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