Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship

Politics, History, and Culture

by Leela Gandhi

“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” So E. M. Forster famously observed in his Two Cheers for Democracy. Forster’s epigrammatic manifesto, where the idea of the “friend” stands as a metaphor for dissident cross-cultural collaboration, holds the key, Leela Gandhi argues in Affective Communities, to the hitherto neglected history of western anti-imperialism. Focusing on individuals and groups who renounced the privileges of imperialism to elect affinity with victims of their own expansionist cultures, she uncovers the utopian-socialist critiques of empire that emerged in Europe, specifically in Britain, at the end of the nineteenth century. Gandhi reveals for the first time how those associated with marginalized lifestyles, subcultures, and traditions—including homosexuality, vegetarianism, animal rights, spiritualism, and aestheticism—united against imperialism and forged strong bonds with colonized subjects and cultures.Gandhi weaves together the stories of a number of South Asian and European friendships that flourished between 1878 and 1914, tracing the complex historical networks connecting figures like the English socialist and homosexual reformer Edward Carpenter and the young Indian barrister M. K. Gandhi, or the Jewish French mystic Mirra Alfassa and the Cambridge-educated Indian yogi and extremist Sri Aurobindo. In a global milieu where the battle lines of empire are reemerging in newer and more pernicious configurations, Affective Communities challenges homogeneous portrayals of “the West” and its role in relation to anticolonial struggles. Drawing on Derrida’s theory of friendship, Gandhi puts forth a powerful new model of the political: one that finds in friendship a crucial resource for anti-imperialism and transnational collaboration.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Theory, Philosophy, Post Colonial

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Leela Gandhi is Professor of English at Brown University and a noted academic in the field of postcolonial theory. She is the co-editor of the academic journal Postcolonial Studies, the author of the summary text Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction and she serves on the editorial board of the electronic journal, Postcolonial Text. She is the daughter of the late Indian philosopher Ramchandra Gandhi and the great-granddaughter of the Indian Independence movement leader Mahatma Gandhi.
She has offered analysis that some of Mahatma Gandhi's philosophies (on nonviolence, vegetarianism, for example) and policies were influenced by transnational as well as indigenous sources.
Her undergraduate degree is from Hindu College, University of Delhi and her doctorate was obtained from Oxford University.


She is also the great granddaughter of C. Rajagopalachari. Her paternal grandfather Devdas Gandhi was the youngest son of Mahatma Gandhi and her paternal grandmother Laxmi was the daughter of C. Rajagopalachari

Reviews

[Rhyd Wildermuth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both Lenin and Orwell wrote tirades against "the immature left"--the strange web of "juice-drinkers and sandalwearers" (orwell's words) who refused to embrace True Leftism (that is, white-boy, scientific socialism) and instead had messy sex lives and linked their vegetarianism or their gayness to occultists and anarchists and anti-colonialism. Wildes "The Soul of Man under Socialism" was rejected by the Adults for its childish linkage of aesthetics to liberation. For those who wanted scientific Socialism, people like Wilde were dangerously naive. But for the rest of us, it's the only way to live.

Leela Ghandi'a accounts of british vegetarian, aesthetic, occult, anarchist and gay movements is precisely the redemption (and a big fuck you) to Lenin's "Left-wing Communism: an infantile disorder" of fin-de-siecle political movements. But more than that, it's a guide, written by Ghandi's great-granddaughter, for anyone who is both anti-colonialist and also a little off-kilter.

Her radical thesis: it isn't gayness or vegetarianism or even anarcho-socialism that is the truly radical link which connects "leftists" the the plights of the oppressed--there's nothing radical about having gay sex. Rather, it's the politics of friendship, the messy (she calls it "Radical Relationality") relationships which undermine the bourgeois/capitalist governance. Vegetarianism wasn't radical (the nazi's built a cult out of it), but the hospitality of certain british vegetarians who took in a young mahatmas ghandi into their homes, a radical extension of friendship which bridged the colonialist vs. colonised gulf, undermining that power relationship. The circles of Oscar Wilde were large and dangerous to power, undermining governability, and however the Scientific/Adult Left disparaged him, almost every gay-boy who's ever read him finds more there than in Orwell or Lenin's tirades.

Leela Ghandi makes deliciously outrageous statements (quite in the manner of Zizek, with whom she quarrels a bit), and liberates quite a bit of territory usually dismissed as infantile or immature (the point of her last chapter, "An Immature Politics").

Better still, Radical Relationality creates a new constellation in which to place a host of things seen by the western left as immature, or, better yet, completely undermines the white-privelage vs. every-other-non-white-subaltern class. That it takes Ghandi's great-granddaughter to extricate us from the mess of criticising ourselves (oh, but never ourselves, just each other: how many times does crimethinc or a queer pagan vegan syndicalist tori-amos listening f-to-m have to be labeled by other white leftists as "suburban, middle-classed, white and privelaged" before we all just shoot each other?) and instead re-orients, for those willing to stop doing the work of governanance for the governed, resistance and radicalism within a beautiful tapestry far richer than the internalised "white man's burden" of the "Scientific Left."

Also useful is the slight work she does adding to Dipesh Chakrabarty's work on paganism and the agency of the gods. Scientific Socialism (and Western Capitalism both) make the same claims of materialism, and both hope someday to uproot from the minds of the people the "immature" notions of gods and deities, etc.. But what precisely to do with India? (or with those pesky First Nations?) Either project would need to shed quite a bit of blood to uproot that "divine suspicion." What if neither Dawkins nor Lenin's "mature" rejections of pagan "superstitions" work for you? You're not alone (materialism is still mostly limited to the West), and have already quite a lot more in common with millions of oppressed indigenous peoples than you think. I, for one, don't mind being on their side.

[simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

holy crap this book is genius. i don't know where to start. first of all, the phrase "herein lies the rub" was used well and tongue-in-cheek in the most appropriate ways. m. ghandi, oscar wilde, derrida, victorian vegetarians, turn-of-the century utopian socialism, homosexual identity formation, a stinging critique of post-colonial orthodoxy, a discussion of hegelian aesthetics in kant, i mean, wow. and how it all lies together, and how it all actually means something relevant to the way we on "both sides" of the colonial divide conceptualize just what that divide means.

needless to say, i am pumped to take classes with this author come winter and spring semester!