In the spirit of building a community of students working in the field of postcolonial and transnational studies, the Postcolonial Studies Group invites students and faculty to join us in thinking about our theme for this year, “Freedom.” We invite suggestions and seek your active participation in planning activities/events to explore the questions and thoughts raised below. Possible events include reading groups, film series, speaker colloquia, writing workshop, but are not limited to these. We hope that our efforts in thinking together will culminate in a symposium in the fall of next year.
FREEDOM
“They tell us we are in a free country… Yes, we are free. Free to starve, free to live in shacks, free to be idle and unemployed, free to die for want of medical attention. Free to work for low wages, free not to have anything to save… It is possible that democracy and freedom have different meanings for different people.”
-West African Youth League of Sierra Leone, quoted in Penny Von Eschen’s Race Against Empire
“We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is… the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom…”
– Slavoj Zizek, remarks given at Occupy Wall Street, NY 10/9/2011
Postcolonial studies operates within a context of struggles for freedom and liberation, yet freedom is often defined as what it is not—anti-colonialism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-capitalist, etc.— than what it is or might be. In particular, postcolonial studies has argued that declarations of freedom’s arrival in the form of third world national independence have been consistently premature. However, this argument might be extended to apply more generally. Consider the following statistical examples and their articulations of (non-)freedom. Fifty years after the Freedom Rides in the southern U.S., one in nine black males between 18 and 34 is imprisoned. Nearing 20 years after the declared end of apartheid, the average South African woman is more likely in her lifetime to be raped than to finish secondary school.
Perhaps we should closely examine what “freedom” is for which so many struggle. Do struggles to be free from constraint (for example, to abolish slavery, to abolish colonial/dictatorial rule) and those that seek a positive freedom of action (right to vote; right to same-sex marriage; right to a living wage) articulate different understandings of freedom? How does the subject–whether individual; majority or minority collective–articulated by a particular struggle or movement shape or delimit aspirations of freedom? How is our understanding of freedom shaped by the entity against which one protests (for example, Wall Street) or to which one petitions (for example, the state)? Moreover, what does a struggle for freedom look like? If, alongside highly visible, organized and historic movements, actions in the everyday and in marginal spaces (for example, peasant workers dragging their feet; the housewife teaching herself to read) are to be considered, how would freedom be conceptualized? Put differently, in what ways do particular contexts shape conceptions of freedom? Rather than treated as isolated from one another, how might local struggles for freedom, however small or seemingly insignificant, be connected to the bigger (“global”) picture? If the shortcomings of particular struggles ought not be understood as failures, but as indications of the ongoing work that remains to be done in various dimensions, is freedom something that is perpetually re-defined by historical circumstances? Or, does its mobilizing force lie in its elusive quality, as an intuited transcendental?
Questions? Email fiona.lee [at] gmail.com; ianfoster [at]gmail.com; tracysriley [at] gmail.com