Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone

Readers interested in a detailed biography of the three monumental anti-colonialist and liberationist figures Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, and W. E. B. Du Bois will be greatly disappointed with this book. Though it contextualizes its theorization of, what Lahiri terms, print internationalism with relevant historical facts, Imperfect Solidarities eschews a simple biography in favor of a critical exploration of the ways in which each figure anticipates the political and textual shifts that today preoccupy the discipline of literary studies broadly, and postcolonial studies more specifically. And this is to its benefit. This is also what makes this a wonderful addition to a utopian studies reading list. The book’s emphasis of a print internationalism, merging the future-oriented approach of internationalism with the use of print media “to create alternate geographies” (4), establishes a community amongst three figures who are rarely read together. But unlike other postcolonial texts, Imperfect Solidarities crosses borders not simply as a means of cherry-picking examples but because the material to which it responds demands such crossing.In Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone, Madhumita Lahiri reads textual ruptures within the writing of Tagore, Gandhi, and Du Bois for the social constraints they make apparent, while eschewing the common practice of reading these texts as evidence of a political unconscious. Instead, each author’s work, in Lahiri’s hands, serves as “agents of historical transformation” (13). Or to put this in different terms, Lahiri reads each text “as an uneven yet interconnected realm” that makes visible Tagore’s, Gandhi’s, and Du Bois’s respective contributions to the formation of variously connected communities (14), letting the texts and authors speak for themselves without the mediating voice of psychoanalysis. These communities variably stretch beyond the confines of racial and national borders, thus complementing Lahiri’s utopian vision. Moreover, as Lahiri works to show, these communities demonstrate themselves to be formed through the collaborative efforts of men and women, despite what often amounts to the erasure of women. Extending Benedict Anderson’s theorization of how print capitalism made possible the formation of imagined communities, and ultimately nationalism, Lahiri directs attention toward interpretative communities that not only link the figures of Tagore, Gandhi, and Du Bois to one another and their respective audiences, but that also challenge contemporary concepts of the Global Anglophone, people of color, and the Global South.Organized into three chapters, which are couched between a contextualizing introduction and conclusion, Imperfect Solidarities paints a beautiful portrait of Tagore, Gandhi, and Du Bois as intentional internationalists grappling with the limitations of race, nationalism, and citizenship sustaining the colonial and imperial systems in which each man found himself entangled. In the first chapter, Lahiri explores Tagore’s neologism “gitanjali” as an expression of his investment in engendering solidarity between the peoples of India and China, a solidarity that stood in contrast to the British Empire’s aims for India. In the process, Lahiri articulates Tagore’s dual deployment of the mediums of print and the English language as means for reconfiguring political and social lines, as well as conjoining cultures separated by linguistic and political differences. Through the gaps between the linguistic and political cultures of Tagore’s India and an evolving China, Lahiri explores how Tagore’s project both aligns with and challenges contemporary understandings of a global Anglophone literary tradition, calling readers to reconsider a term that seems to have taken up residency in discourses trying to make sense of the disparate body of writing produced in the English language.Similarly, the third chapter, with its focus on Du Bois’s appropriation and redeployment of the term “brownie” in the construction of his children-focused publication Brownie’s Book, Lahiri attends to how Du Bois’s desire to enlarge the scope of concern of his Black American readers led to his embrace of a form of what we today have come to understand as the Global South. In this way, Du Bois becomes positioned as a prototypical figure for a discursive shift that gained momentum when the former language of colonialism was recognized as insufficient. The insightful analysis of Du Bois’s international agenda not only makes clear how his print internationalism sought to expose Black American children to the bonds they shared with people around the world. In this way, Du Bois comes to figure a community of socially marginalized people positioned against the forces of racism, colonialism, and imperialism that seek to reinforce barriers and divisions. Together with the first chapter on Tagore, the projects outlined in these two chapters resist the cloistering of political concerns behind walls of racial and national difference. Rather than letting racial and national differences fragment the solidarities they seek to establish, Lahiri articulates how, through the strategic production and circulation of texts, Tagore and Du Bois utilize racial and national differences to emphasize similarities between peoples spread across geographic locations. In this way, Lahiri exposes how both projects stand in stark contrast to the colonial and imperial regimes that rely on policies of division to maintain their rule.The book’s second chapter, however, poses a notable break with the chapters on Tagore and Du Bois. In this chapter, Gandhi’s print internationalism moves between his concern for the treatment of Indians under British colonial rule in South Africa and India. Elucidating how Gandhi’s satyagraha grounds itself in demands for replicability and (Indian) cultural specificity in the face of colonial demands for assimilation or separatism, the defense of Gandhi against accusations of racism poses perhaps the most questionable break in an otherwise convincing argument. Where with Tagore and Du Bois, Lahiri approaches race as a construct across which each writer attempts to transgress through strategic deployments of their respective print internationalisms, with Gandhi, the focus turns to his (and his texts’) alleged racism. When read in Gandhi’s texts, race—or, more specifically, blackness—becomes interpreted as a metaphor he uses to reify the true object of his eye: Indians under, and resisting, British colonial rule. Arguing that Gandhi’s South African–focused writings allow him to develop an anti-colonialist program grounded in the recognition of the importance of specificity and replicability for the success of his project of resistance, Lahiri offers a defense against accusations that Gandhi’s writings demonstrate him to be racist. Acknowledging that at times he analogizes and differentiates the treatment of Indians by deploying racist tropes that re-present Black South Africans as either children or figures of Nature, Lahiri polishes Gandhi’s image, rather than engage his writings for how they demonstrate the insidious nature of racism and antiblackness. Or to state this differently, while the focus on Gandhi’s South Africa–focused writings allows Lahiri to honor the terms of the print internationalism theorized throughout Imperfect Solidarities, it disrupts the parallelism the work otherwise establishes between its three focal figures—a move perhaps suggested, or at least anticipated, by the work’s title. Regardless, the attempt to protect Gandhi’s legacy disrupts the monograph’s drive to expose the underside of the relationship between language and the communities that language engenders and sustains.At a moment of heightened sensitivity to the forms and practices of antiblackness, and given that two of Lahiri’s subjects touch on issues of blackness, the defensive position suggested by Lahiri’s discussion of Gandhi’s use of Black South Africans as an analogy for Indian oppression under British rule, and not as evidence of his being racist, exposes the limits to even the most inclusive and politically effective print internationalisms. Furthermore, it begs the question of what really sustains such communities. Couched between its chapters on Tagore and Du Bois, the defense disrupts the solidarities it works to establish. As it endeavors to redeem the image of Gandhi (however much the image of Gandhi is in need of redemption), this defense risks disrupting Lahiri’s utopian drive. Where Tagore and Du Bois are presented as men positioned against institutions of racism and discrimination, Gandhi is suggested as being above, or at least untouched by, these systems. Why not explore the contradictions and tensions between Gandhi’s use of the figure of the child and Du Bois’s own ideas of the child as they are figured in his Brownies’ Book? It is important that I emphasize that by stating this moment as a disruption, I in no way intend to suggest either a failure or a negation of aims on the part of Lahiri. An examination of the place and presence of racism remains important. Instead, I query the queer case of this defense considering its placement within the text and its absence in the discussion of the other figures. Rather than spend so much time writing only against accusations of Gandhi’s alleged racism, why not explore how potentially problematic ideas about race inform and haunt the print internationalisms of each? Or to put this another way, what use might there be in recognizing that one can pose an effective challenge to the prevailing social and political order and, yet still, maintain views aligned with racism? How might the boundaries of each man’s understandings of and experiences with race shape not only their approach to their respective forms of print internationalism but the contemporary understandings of the global Anglophone, people of color, and the Global South? These questions become even more urgent if we take Lahiri’s contention that “Gandhi’s print internationalism can assist us in thinking carefully about our choices in forging internationalism’s interpretive community” (105).Regardless, notwithstanding these questions, Imperfect Solidarities is a pleasure to read. Its lucid writing makes following its complex argument a more than manageable task, while providing insightful analyses of often under analyzed texts by three important voices who made refusing expectations for assimilation their life’s work. Ultimately, asking us to rethink our understanding of the construction of the texts of three monumental figures and the role of writing in forging connections between people otherwise thought distinct or disconnected, Imperfect Solidarities should prove instructive and enlightening for student-scholars working in the fields of utopian studies, as well as those in Africana or Black Studies, South Asian Studies, or postcolonial studies.