Alternative Futures and the Present: Postcolonial Possibilities

Ranabir Samaddar’s most recent book is a densely packed series of experiments in thought, at once a work of political theory and of historiography, of use to historians of futures both past and yet to come. Drawing on Marx and Lenin as much as Fanon and Foucault, it casts a net over concepts and categories familiar or even necessary to postcolonial thought but recasts them otherwise as a way of pursuing the signs they offer or conceal of “alternative futures.” An alternative future is a future that was, and perhaps still is, possible, even tangible, but that has not yet come to be. It lies buried beneath the future that did indeed come to be. To re-find and understand the need for that failed future, to find present desires for it, these are the tasks Samaddar sets himself.Alternative Futures and the Present: Postcolonial Possibilities sets out to create a series of intellectual steps we can take to unearth and explore the myriad ways alternatives to our inhumane present, and to the past that birthed that present, exist if only we can develop the eyes to see them. This is not an easy task though it is one utopian scholars should welcome. Samaddar does not dwell on utopian scholarship or even much on the concept of Utopia at all. He does, however, make significant use of the idea of “necessary utopias” in a manner that might well be one of the most important gifts this book has to offer. Samaddar’s argument arrives at the notion out of its drive to “decipher the present,” a drive that “refuses the categorical wisdom of distinguishing the scientific from the utopian, which counsels us that defeats are so because they were driven by utopias and were not led by scientific understanding of situations. . . . Indeed, we gain our scientific understanding only through such ‘utopian’ exercise. They are therefore the ‘necessary utopias’” (2).What is necessary is not the defeat but the struggle that preceded it, the struggle for an alternative. Necessary utopias may be failed utopias but that does not lessen their necessity. Though the book promises “that the pathways to alternatives lie through the present—through the struggles, thoughts and events of our time” (19)—the understanding we gain as we read is one which draws heavily on Samaddar’s historical knowledge and the political acumen this lends his analyses of the present. Moving through six sections, Alternative Futures brings to the forefront problematics in political thought that Samaddar reads in terms of a sequence of conjunctures. Paying attention to these rigorously historicized conjunctures as scenes where alternatives blossomed, in however short-lived or contradictory a manner, produces a strong reading of temporality and of space as multilayered and meaningful—as much in terms of what did not happen as what did. In this way, extant forms and concepts from postcolonial political theory are reworked to throw up both new facets of meaning and new usages.Section 1 threads through its three chapters the form of the nation as a problematic: its limits, its affordances, and the endurance of its seeming centrality to liberationist thought and emancipatory politics. Whilst the nation as political force and national liberation as political goal are interlinked themes woven throughout the book, they take center stage here, where a chapter detailing Marx’s thoughts on colonialism, social transformation, and the form of the nation sits side by side with chapters on uncertain forms of the nation, and on the modes of temporality made possible by nations. For Marx—whose views on this changed from the 1850s to the 1870s—“the nation” was an indelible part of his work on social transformation, both the transformations wrought by capitalism and by revolution. The nation was also a figure in Marx’s exploration of pre-capitalist forms of community, in his interrogation of colonialism and global trade, and in his reflections on potentially post-capitalist forms of social life. The consequent richness of Marx’s thought on the nation is, for Samaddar, sufficient to explain why anti-colonial and post-colonial scholars continue to turn to Marx to understand the force and the lure of nations: “The concern regarding the supposed ‘Eurocentric’ bias in Marx’s writings is found mostly among European and broadly Western scholars, while revolutionaries in the erstwhile colonised countries have looked to Marx for inspiration to struggle for social transformation. The national and the social transformational have combined more creatively than one could anticipate. This has been a feature of the entire twentieth-century history continuing till this day” (20).Section 2 treats the question of classes, people, and populations in the same way, taking specific instances of political contestation—here Marx and Malthus—and exploring them to yield ways of imagining each otherwise, and ways of concretizing that imagination by finding instances of it at work in the present. In what is arguably the book’s core section, section 3, the problematic of universalism is taken up in an exploration that weaves its way through imperial imaginaries of the universal—via Hegel—to B. R. Ambedkar’s piercing critique of caste hierarchies in Annihilation of Caste (1936) and the “universalism of the oppressed” that breathes through Ambedkar’s argument.Section 4 broaches the concepts of contention and antagonism as themselves alternative models of thinking, models necessary both to thinking through the contradictions generated by the world, and to identifying and negotiating the multiple nodes mediating between these socioeconomic contradictions and their political expression. An exploration of the theorizing of the historical sociologist Charles Tilly on “contention” as a mode of analysis, a theme, and a problematic (154), and then of the concept of genocide as a site of contention, provide Samaddar with two chapters that illustrate his argument that “studying a contradiction and appreciating social process and social transformation is not enough to study politics. Contradictions in economy make their presence felt in politics often not directly but in round about ways. There are mediations in the process” (151).Section 5 turns “beyond the political” to look at imaginaries of other kinds in the literary work of the German writer Bertolt Brecht and the Urdu writer Sadaat Hasan Manto. The shift to literature in section 5 is not an unexpected move; it was anticipated not least in the chapter on “contention” foregrounding the work of Tilly. For Samaddar, Tilly’s understanding of political modes of contention is valuable precisely because in “essay after essay” (151), Tilly came to stress storytelling as core to the social work holding (or failing to hold) groups together. Storytelling—for example, stories of blame or of credit—define “our collective boundaries,” effectively binding us together (155). For Samaddar, Tilly “relentlessly showed how narratives, that is stories, were important in documenting uncertain outcomes, how political processes were like narratives of collective violence, and how different paths to democracy lay through various forms of political contention, confrontation, and retaliation, which in turn were marked by inequalities and challenges to inequalities, trust networks, and participation” (151).In chapter 10, “The Impossibility of Politics: Brecht, Manto and Two Acts of Literature,” Samaddar explores two creative pieces unified by their use of political impossibility in a way that helps us identify conjunctures within which political openings are impossible. Strangely, Samaddar writes, “these are not stable or more correctly speaking static situations but are situations of mobility. Yet the conditions of mobility bring to us only spectres of closure and deaths. Political openings towards transformation at least in a conventional sense are ruled out” (185). The two creative pieces are Brecht’s 1939 play Mother Courage and Her Children and Manto’s short story on Indian partition, “Toba Tek Singh” (1955). Each of these texts turns on political closure, of the type involved in war and in violent partition. Both highlight the lack of political possibility—of any opening for alternatives—in such situations, and both refuse to suggest political solutions. In so doing, they open up literature—“acts of literature” (185)—as a route to alternatives when political practices are closed down. The aesthetic forms of power were already touched on in chapter 2’s discussion of the uncertain spatiality of the nation-form in the work of Rabindranath Tagore, the poet and novelist of colonial Bengal, in particular in his 1916 novel Ghare Baire (The Home and the World). But in chapter 10, Samaddar confronts both the potency and the limits of aesthetic power. Brecht’s play and Manto’s story take the figure of the migrant, the forcibly moved, itinerant or homeless person, to pit the loss of the world against the meaning of the world we might win when we can see that loss:By the book’s concluding section, “Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities,” both the method that unifies the sections, and the political impulse that irradiates the whole—a search for alternatives that pays respect to the past as the source of alternatives we need in the present—have become fully detailed and almost urgent. As a result, this final section is perhaps the strongest in its clarity and in its scope. The “events” of the title are the European revolutions of 1848, the October Revolution, and the less well-known event of the development of the tactic of occupation out of the tactic of gherao in the College Street neighbourhood of Kolkata in West Bengal in the 1960s. Gherao had been used as a “form of sit-in, the tactic of surrounding and cordoning of the bosses by masses of workers and preventing the former from exiting till demands are met” (250).Overall, Alternative Futures is a monumental sign-reading exercise, each chapter an “act of interpretation” (1), and one where interpretation takes the form of critique in a post-colonial Marxist spirit so that tracts, thoughts, and events—the signs of the present—are to be deciphered to render up the trajectory of an alternative world. The concept of alternatives is loose as it must be, as capitalism produces alternatives willy-nilly. For Samaddar, it is necessary to demonstrate howThe necessity of such deciphering is explained by Samaddar’s method, a method which sees and accepts the challenges of thinking across different temporal rhythms and spatial formations so as to identify and—as far is possible—to understand, the configurations in which alternatives take their form and in which they frequently fail. In the important introductory chapter, Samaddar does much to detail the nature and necessity of his interpretive method. He cites Benedict Anderson’s classic essay “Radicalism after Communism” (1993) at one point to illustrate how those living in the ruins of past utopias find the wherewithal to attempt to avoid the production of dystopian futures. Anderson had written of the political need to “to retrieve treasurable parts of the debris at the Angel’s retreating feet. The modern past, including the communism that was such a central part of it, must be profoundly reexamined, interrogated, and where possible recuperated, as we listen, to borrow from Satyajit Ray, for the roll of distant thunder up ahead” (Anderson, qtd. in Samaddar 2).Samaddar borrows from Anderson this treasure-hunt mode of thought, scavenging for his necessary utopias in the daily struggles of activists whose practices figure both the alternatives and their necessity. “Political and social activists” (say in the realms of migration activism or care-work after COVID-19) are those “engaged in the work of social transformation,” and they “not surprisingly therefore stress the present as the ground of the future”:The search for alternatives that such activists engage in is one moulded by the practices and events of a present itself configured by neoliberalism and neocolonialism. These constraints need to be recognized as they are the framing constraints on all politics and political thought. But in studying the work of activist struggles, we can see how they work through those constraints by establishing links “with the forgotten history of the revolutionary search for alternatives” (5). Between those forgotten histories and the neoliberal present there is us, and Samaddar’s book, carrying the “marks of an in-between situation.” As Samaddar puts it in one of his many potent reflections on the imbrication of present and past in the imagination of alternative futures, the “alternative in history is the detour through which the present reality works” (11). The alternative here is the event or the reflection that acts like an engine of cognitive estrangement—more or less abruptly opening up a way to read “reality” for what it is rather than for what it posits itself to be.