Chapter 3

GENDER, GENRE, AND GLOBALIZATION

Proletarian revolutions, however, … constantly engage in self-criticism, and in repeated interruptions of their own course.

—Karl Marx

Yet the word “proletarian”—one who serves the state with nothing but his [sic] offspring (OED)—continues to carry an effaced mark of sexuality.

—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

And where is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again.

—Tillie Olsen

This chapter asks what happens when we shift our emphasis from working-class literature understood as categorized by systemic accounts of labor history, to working-class literature defined by ethico-political questions. Proletarian writers such as Tillie Olsen—from 1930s North America—as well as writers with strong socialist sympathies—such as Mahasweta Devi from postcolonial West Bengal—figure a critique of historicism in their writing, reminding us that measures of chronology, important dates, periods, and “events” do not let us into quiet moments that are “too late” or “too early”—into secret places where chance meetings and haphazard alignments take place. They do not lead us into quiet moments that cannot be read like a message. Such texts illuminate the possibilities of “ethical singularity” rather than the logic of ethical universality and master narratives.¹

The emphasis on the concept of literature and an ethics of historical materialism are inescapably intertwined. Literature is categorically antihistoricist. Its concept refuses particularism in favor of the “singular and unverifiable.” Its history is aleatory, not progressive—international, not insular. Precisely because literature is historical, not historicist in this way, as Raymond Williams puts it, “many of the active values of ‘literature’ have then to be seen, not as tied to the concept, which came to limit as well as to summarize them, but as elements of a continuing and changing practice which already substantially, and now at the level of theoretical redefinition, is moving beyond its old forms” (Marxism, 54). Too often, a consideration of the literariness of working-class literature is either overlooked, hastily assimilated into familiar Frankfurt school debates on aesthetics and politics, or indeed dismissed outright as elitist. I am suggesting, however, that a rhetorical analysis of figural logic and the literariness of such texts must be made to supplement the logic of periodized case studies.

History is not synonymous with the past, nor is it reducible to historiography. And, once again, “Marxism is not a historicism.”² The latter, particularly concise formulation belongs to Louis Althusser, who calls for a critical epistemological reading of the object of history in Marx. In Reading Capital he argues his case by initially analyzing the politics of the turn to historicism and humanism by Antonio Gramsci and others as a “vital reaction” against the mechanism and economism of the Second International. Acknowledging these debates between major theoreticians of a particular period and the justified—if ultimately mistaken—basis for their critique, however, he then goes on to painstakingly elaborate the significant ways in which Marx leads us to a different mode of conceptualizing history and progress when he rethinks the concept of Hegelian totality, opening up breaks and disjunctures in the concept of developmentalist logic. Whereas “the Hegelian totality presupposes an original, primary essence that lies behind the complex appearance that it has produced by externalization in history,” the Marxist “totality” is a decentered structure. And thus, as Althusser puts it, “the reduction of and identification of the peculiar history of science to the history of organic ideology and politico-economic history ultimately reduces science to history as its ‘essence’” (133). Althusser wished to make Marx contemporary even as he sought to prevent Marx (and Marxism) from merely becoming slogans for validating left-party politics of the day. And yet the discussion of ethics remains a lacuna in his corpus. The interminable contest between subject and structure, “agency”—any form of agency—versus the immanent logic of capital, is driven to a stalemate, even in his later writings.³ The feminist critique of historicism (proposed in this chapter) owes to thinkers like Althusser and Balibar but also builds on the simple facts that Marx’s texts on class remain unfinished and that it is a mistake to posit reified theories of capital and class relations or stagist modes of production narratives based on any specific historical instance. Such a critique proposes a comparative (but not cultural relativist) approach to the changing object of working-class writing and suggests the ethico-political agency of a dispersed collective subject of feminism.

The isolated study of the discrete historical event—whether we consider the metropolitan financial centers of Europe and the United States (the 1929 stock market crash) or rural Naxalbari (the 1967 Naxalite rebellion)—irreducibly limits the scope of working-class literature to a particular, resplendent period in organized labor—a moment of crisis or planned rural insurgency. But what happens after the revolution, after national independence, after the communists are in power? This chapter trains the focus on women writers from different moments in the literature of labor, whose writings—novels, short fiction, poetry, and periodicals—explicitly engage questions of historicism. Through a literary-critical analysis of women’s texts from noncontiguous spaces within the international division of labor, I attempt to rethink the category of proletarian literature with attention to specific questions of gender, genre, and the politics of history. My texts range from a “classic” work of proletarian fiction from the 1930s United States to socialist fiction in contemporary communist West Bengal, to serialized pieces of poetry, prose, and reportage in radical periodicals of a collective of worker-writers in contemporary, neocolonial Sri Lanka. Specific writers considered are Tillie Olsen (1912 or 1913–2007), Mahasweta Devi (b. 1926), and the Dabindu Collective (est. 1984).

GENDER, GENRE, AND GLOBALIZATION

Proletarian writing as a movement has been identified with the period of the 1930s, the decade of international socialism. And yet it was hardly a formal institution.—as Michael Denning puts it, “proletarian literature was a formation in Raymond Williams’s sense”⁴—but rather a strategic alliance of workers, writers, readers, and political activists who came together in formal and informal settings: Marxist study groups, May Day rallies, national and international writers’ conferences, etc. This concept of proletarian writing as a changing “formation” as opposed to a static institution—anti-essentialist and nonidentitarian in its very origins and “structure”—poses a problem for the academic subdivision of labor in universities. (Admittedly, the adjectives modifying Williams’s words, “formation” and “structure” are my own, but I perceive an opening for thinking anti-essentialism here.)

How do we begin to conceive of this interminably provisional and shifting terrain as an object of study? Williams writes that “since such formations relate, inevitably, to real social structures, and yet have highly variable and often oblique relations with formally discernible social institutions, any social and cultural analysis of them requires procedures radically different from those developed for institutions” (Marxism, 119). The study of the changing formation of proletarian writing, not limited to the period of the 1930s or indeed to nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, exceeds the grasp of specialized programs of study conventionally demarked (solely) by genre, period, and nation. Anticipating the way in which the “disciplining” of such a formation might happen, Williams warns against a pedagogy where

many of those in real contact with such formations and their work retreat to an indifferent emphasis on the complexity of cultural activity. Others altogether deny (even theoretically) the relation of such formations and such work to the social process and especially the material social process. Others again, when the historical reality of the formations is grasped, render this back to ideal constructions—national traditions, literary and artistic traditions, histories of ideas, psychological types, spiritual archetypes—…

(119)

We might say that in terms of the cultural politics of working-class studies, E. P. Thompson’s figure of “the freeborn Englishman” remains an “ideal construction,” not only emblematic of the British working class, but also significant generally for the field of working-class historiography.⁵ From within traditions of Indian Marxism, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s important intervention, Rethinking Working-Class History, presents the other side of the story of the Industrial Revolution and the organized working classes in England—that of the colonial working class (in this case, in Bengal).⁶ However, in the current economic conjuncture of globalization what we understand as the “new international division of labor” is predicated on the cheap labor of (mainly) women workers in neocolonial countries with national economic policies of export-oriented industrialization. And yet, proletarian writing, according to the old system of signs and notations, remains synonymous with icons and codes of masculinity and the metropole.

Arguably, in the contemporary historical moment, the “new proletariat”⁷ is best represented by the figure of the woman worker in the periphery. Separate from organized labor in industrialized countries of the North, the occluded agent of production in this “postindustrial” age is the super-exploited worker in postcolonial, “developing” countries with extraverted, rather than autocentric, economies.⁸ In the terms of government-issued business brochures targeted at foreign direct investment, she is sold as “cheap,” “docile,” and as “famous for her manual dexterity.” In terms of U.S. feminism, she cannot be easily written into labor history because she represents, disturbingly, the containment of the wage-bargaining power of struggling women workers closer to home.⁹ (Tillie Olsen’s “I Want You Women Up North to Know” is an interesting exception. But more on this in an upcoming section.) In terms of nationalist historians and trade unionists, she is not identified with the revolutionary conjuncture. In fact, proletarian literature seems unable to produce a script for her. She seems illfitted to the narrative conventions, especially when we consider that the dominant archetypes and idealized constructs—the available language (despite the interventions of feminist genre critics) is limited. Spivak, in her Critique of Postcolonial Reason, frames the problem in this way: “we see [in] the establishment of the International Workingmen’s Association … a foreclosure of the woman who will be the agent of Marxism today in the inevitable docketing of European as ‘international’ and organized internationality as men’s.”¹⁰

This chapter is an attempt to open up questions of genre as well as debates on aesthetics and politics in the service of this figure excluded from the literary-critical calculus. It builds on the intuition of U.S. feminist critics who have astutely drawn our attention to the fact that “’30s feminism”—its conventions, notations, ideologies and ethics—has been overlooked in the history of ideas forging ahead toward the logical conclusion of postmodernist, antifoundationalist variations, even by some trends within single-issue postcolonial feminisms. What gets lost in the ideological break between the old left and the new is (1) the Marxist-feminist critique of the autonomous subject; (2) how to think a comparative, not competitive, model for internationalized feminism; (3) how to think feminism and class struggles outside reified narratives of organized resistance.

Too often, in literature and criticism alike, the working class is seen and represented as masculine, metropolitan, and revolutionary. Women’s texts of nonrevolutionary socialism, however, present us with new figures and concepts for thinking unorganized resistance, everyday experience, and the shape of the ethical within globalization. Bracketing these anomalous, unfinished, dialogic, anticipatory texts, theoreticians of proletarian literature confront the problem that its celebrated narratives are tied to the logic of revolutions and the mindset that is supposed to accompany them. Since the literary internationalism of the “radical” 1930s, the development of proletarian literature beyond short-term political agitation, codings of crisis, and revolutionary romanticism remains an issue for the political and literary history of working-class writing. According to a corpus of representative texts and standard, minimal Marxist definitions, the “proletariat” of proletarian literature is by definition revolutionary, and by implication, male; this is the specific subset of the working class entrusted with the historic mission of abolishing the class system. Nonrepresentative texts by proletarian women writers from different historical periods propose a more counterintuitive model, one not connected to the conditions and constraints of the revolutionary conjuncture but to other measurements and templates for thinking socialist ethics.

The genre of proletarian literature remains to be analyzed in connection with the changing terms of gender and sexuality. In her important contribution to feminist historiography of women’s working-class texts, Labor and Desire, Paula Rabinowitz exposes the ideological biases of prevailing 1930s generic taxonomies where codes of proletarian realism, naturalism, and the idea of the (rational) subject come to be automatically associated with masculinity and, by extension, proletarian writing, whereas techniques of modernism and/or realist (domestic) fiction and any and all depictions of interiority are associated with women’s writing. More than a simple recounting of the forgotten numbers of women proletarian writers, Rabinowitz’s broader epistemological critique acknowledges the pitfalls of an essentialist logic (subscribed to by certain feminist critics themselves) that reifies a dichotomous rendering of difference refracted through the oppositions between realism and modernism; factory and home; male and female. Ultimately, however, Rabinowitz, along with other contemporary feminist historians of the genre, falls prey to the terms of her own critique. While unmasking the politics securing the privilege of the 1930s male literary-critical establishment and their rules of genre, she replaces this standard of judgment with the criteria of liberal feminism. That is, the project of feminist historiography becomes the recovery of the lost subject, sometimes part of “the search for our literary foremothers.”

Infused with this mission, which becomes inextricably personal, the feminist critic is quick to recognize in the writings of women worker-writers and organic intellectuals of the period versions of the bildungsroman, arguably the norm of high feminist criticism allied to the later mainstream Euro-American idea of consciousness raising. Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties, understood to be a hallmark text of U.S. literary radicalism, for example, has been construed (misconstrued, I will argue) as an example of a novel of self-formation.¹¹ Along these lines, what has been overlooked in a certain tradition of materialist-feminist historiographic practice is the rejection of the idea of the individual subject at the very core of texts by proletarian writers.

In the opening section of my chapter, I will read, in relationship to the works of North American proletarian writer Tillie Olsen, a selection of poems, political commentary, and short fiction produced by the worker-writers of the Dabindu Collective, from the Katunayake free-trade-zone region in Sri Lanka. The period under consideration is 1984 to 2001, which covers the passage of Dabindu’s transformation from a workers’ collective organized loosely around the free-trade-zone periodical and other forms of alternative organizing into an internationally funded NGO. Neither Olsen nor the writers of the Dabindu Collective chose the form of a bildungsroman as they undertook to represent the nonsubject of history. Each writer in her own way under cuts the “the development” of an essentialist feminine consciousness. Rather, what is at stake for these proletarian writers (from different sides of the international divide) is the critique of the subject, as well as a critique of historicist thinking. In the place of the style of the individualist utterance, elliptical marks, interruptions, and interferences take the measure of moments, not monuments. A concept of a nonindividual subjectivity brings these writers together under the rules of a different sociology of form. Anti-essentialism and the decentered subject are considered to be the provenance of deconstruction or high postmodernism, but the calculus changes when we consider feminist working-class texts as our object. Ultimately, both Dabindu and Olsen undo the concept of working-class writing as a canonical genre or even as a unitary authorial construct and instead keep it alive as an “oppositional transformative.”¹²

RETHINKING WORKING-CLASS LITERATURE

Consider this curious passage in Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties¹³—a moment of speech interference that communicates the writer’s resistance to the transformation of the working-class novel into a fetishized, canonical object. At a critical juncture an angry voice interrupts the story: “And could you not make a cameo of this and pin it onto your aesthetic hearts? So sharp it is, so clear, so classic” (20). In terms of Olsen’s plot, the speech interrupts at a point where a terrible mining accident has occurred in a small mining town in Wyoming. The ominous death whistle has blown, and the members of the mining families are standing about, gathered in tense suspense to discover who has been lost to the explosion and who will be lifted up from the rubble. At this point the focalization of the scene shifts away from Mazie, the girl-child subject of the story, to a disembodied voice that cuts in to save the episode from the literary critic’s desire to crystallize the moment into a “classic.” During this moment of text interference, the separation between what is constituted “the social”—the historical event, always in the past—and “the personal”—in Raymond Williams’s words, “this, here, now, alive, active, ‘subjective’ always in the present”—is momentarily collapsed.¹⁴

The narrator’s discourse breaks abruptly, with the third-person past tense—the value-neutral, objective prose of history—becoming instead an immediate, direct, angry address to the reader-critic:

Surely it is classical enough for you—the Greek marble of the women, the simple, flowing lines of sorrow, carved so rigid and eternal. Surely it is original enough—these grotesques, this thing with the foot missing, this gargoyle with half the face gone and the arm…. You will have the cameo? Call it Rascoe, Wyoming, any of the thousand mine towns in America, the night of a mine blowup … [and then, answering her rhetorical question regarding the aesthetics and politics of representing working-class struggles, the speaker concludes] A cameo of this, then. Blood clot of the dying sunset and the hush. No sobs, no word spoken. Sorrow is tongueless.

(20–21)

In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Volosinov defines “speech interference” as the “merging of two differently oriented speech acts; [in which we sense] the integrity and resistance of the reported message behind the author’s transmission.”¹⁵ In this autoreferential passage, punctuated by deictic indices, as elsewhere in Olsen’s Yonnondio, an impossible ethical paradox is made visible: might something be irretrievably lost when Olsen’s book, “this” writing, acquires the status of a canonical, “classical” object? The rhetorics of this passage, the prose-poetry of its language, allows the writer to say something unsayable in the voice-consciousness of her characters, struggling for representation and visibility. Indeed, such a declaration would be unthinkable for an impoverished labor activist and writer struggling for recognition and validation during the hard times of Depression-era America. Yet the language performs this impossible task.

Is it possible to represent without monumentalizing a necessarily provisional structure? How do you capture “all that is present and moving”? (Williams, Marxism, 128). Olsen outlines the terms of a representational strategy for working-class writing other than reportorial realism, on the one hand, or romantic idealism, on the other. She turns to a philosophy of literature, rather than a system of official history, to figure the terms of an ethos of working-class writing that is not defined in relationship to a moment of crisis or a single, emblematic instance, but is connected, instead, to other durations. “This” literature is not a monument to casualties of labor history, but rather it is categorically unfinished, anti-essential: not a Greek statue, but “this thing with the foot missing.” A conceptual shift from historical prose to literary language is most transparently underscored in the anonymous protest letter that signs off the segment: “Dear Company [the unsigned letter reads]. Your men are imprisoned in a tomb of hunger, of death wages. Your men are strangling for breath—the walls of your company town have clamped out the air of freedom” (Yonnondio, 20). A movement is charted from the philosophy of History to that of Literature as the “buried” workers become allegories of history and the “facts” of the past are transformed into a “larger” figural logic.

Postcolonial Sri Lanka, transnational corporations, and the writings of the export-oriented garment industry worker-writers might seem extraneous to the moment that Olsen writes about in the 1930s United States, but the poetry, short fiction, and serialized novels of the monthly free-trade-zone newspaper—always unfinished, always awaiting the next supplement—seem to figure the dilemma addressed in Yonnondio (and also later in Olsen’s short stories, “I Stand Here Ironing” and “Tell Me a Riddle”¹⁶). Of what is history made as it happens? How do we write about the necessarily disappearing objects of working-class literature without sentimentalizing them—without freezing them into emblematic objects? This chapter introduces the periodicals of the Sri Lankan free-trade-zone workers as a supplement—that is, as both supplying a gap and adding an excess—to the rhetorics of the working-class novel of the Europe and the United States. But as I begin this section on contemporary Sri Lankan working-class writing, I want to keep in mind the difficult lesson of Olsen’s Yonnondio. Even as the patheticized figure of the “nimble fingered” garment industry worker threatens to become a “classic”—acquires a certain iconic status within contemporary discourses on globalization and the feminization of labor—I want to be mindful of the lost parts in the telling of the story. In a Sri Lanka riven by an interethnic war, working-class history is daily being erased and reconstructed by political institutions such as the Sinhala Commission.¹⁷ To this end, I do not construe the (Sinhala) Dabindu periodicals as the representative example of modern industrial fiction, but rather as one example, among the many ignored texts of labor at the limits of metropolitan discourse studies, within the changing terms of the international division of labor.

In Yonnondio, the text itself is a split subject. In her epigraph Olsen marks that her unfinished book, published in 1974, is pieced together from rough drafts begun in 1932, “in arduous partnership,” as she puts it, “with that long ago writer.” With regard to Dabindu I ask: How is the subject put together in these stories and poems from post-Independence Sri Lanka? How is woman as subject for history imagined? In Olsen’s staging of the diachronic autobiographical subject we are given the writer straining to reconnect with a past self, the working-class subject from the forgotten 1930s. By contrast, in Dabindu we are presented with a heterogeneous collective subject, a group of women free-trade-zone workers writing in and against the history of the present—within globalization and counterglobalist struggles. And yet, while the text of the free-trade-zone periodical is produced by a “collective,” it does not offer us a model for a “synchronic” subject in the readily available sense; that is to say, it does not represent some seamless cultural unity of contemporary women’s working-class struggles. Rather, the subject of Dabindu figures a “unity-in-dispersal”—heterogeneity and contradictions gathered under a collective signature.¹⁸ Writings are contributed by named and sometimes unnamed garment factory workers and mediated by the interventions of volunteer editors. The very concept of (private) authorship becomes unstable in the context of its publication history and material production, evoking perhaps the situation that Terry Eagleton describes when he proposes that “community and cooperative publishing enterprises are associated projects, concerned not simply with a literature wedded to alternative social values, but with one which challenges and changes the existing social relations between writers, publishers, readers and other literary workers” (216; my emphasis).¹⁹ He goes on to describe a concept of (British) working-class writing that portends the interrogation of unitary authorship and, indeed, “ruling definitions of literature.”

Eagleton (as always) is preoccupied with the example of the worker-writers’ movement in Britain, but the point resonates with the example of the free-trade-zone worker-writers collective also. If we consider the form of the free-trade-zone newspapers, we see that the text itself is a creative mishmash of genres—bits and pieces of political analysis and cultural critique interspersed with romantic melodrama, nationalist poetry, letters, didactic leftist literature, reportage on local strikes, and international labor news. In considering content, it is important to note that while the periodical is composed of writing contributed by garment factory workers, pieces are sometimes edited and selected by feminist activists and cultural workers. While these two constituencies (of feminism and the working class) are not always mutually exclusive, as Kumudini Samuel points out, the periodical’s editors belong to different formations within organized feminism in Sri Lanka, reflecting Dabindu’s shifting political tenor over the span of different editions.²⁰ Kumudhini Rosa, one of the conveners of the collective and the founding editor of the periodical, explains Dabindu’s historical conjuncture in these terms: “In Sri Lanka, the new wave of the women’s movement arose in the late 1970s, at the same time as the FTZ (Free Trade Zone)” (75).²¹ Along these lines—and also in its current incarnation as an internationally (and locally) funded NGO—it goes without saying that the Dabindu Collective categorically cannot lay claim to some ideologically uncontaminated space outside relations of capital and class within globalization.²²

Thus a seamless or idealistic concept of “the collective” gives way to a more complex, contemporary historical transaction between class politics and feminism. Just as we mark that Olsen’s 1930s Yonnondio comes to us in some way mediated by the author’s own hand—guided by the projects and interests of 1970s U.S. feminism, we note that Dabindu, too, is mediated by changing waves of feminism within globalization. But then again, arguably, neither Olsen nor Dabindu (the collective signature) claims to offer us direct, unmediated access to some authentic working-class “voice from the factories.” Instead, they both illuminate a vital, if overlooked, exchange between Marxism and feminism in different historical conjunctures. Dabindu, perhaps, presents us with a particular type of collective subject—resolutely nonindividual in its figuration. Following signs of anti-bildung and speech interferences, I will attempt to trace the itinerary of such a collective subject in my close readings of these short stories, poems, and serialized novels. But first, in the absence of a formalized institution resembling the working-class novel, and given that Dabindu and global feminism are not immediately part of the history of other Sri Lankan traditions of working-class writing—for example, Tamil protest literature and oral narratives composed by laborers of the tea plantation regions—it becomes necessary to begin by saying something about the protocols of the text—as well as something of the history of the present.

“ALL THAT IS PRESENT AND MOVING”: SRI LANKAN FREE-TRADE-ZONE PERIODICALS

Most of the signs in contemporary historical war-torn Sri Lanka mean “crisis.” As I sort through research materials from previous summers, archival papers, handwritten notes from interviews, I come across a photograph that recalls me to a place where the writing on the walls reads: “Mavbima Koti Kate! Sinhalayini Avadivav!”²³ The urgency of this message is belied, however, by the subtext of a watchmaker sitting directly under the poster. Oblivious to the blarings of racist, nationalist propaganda overhead, he appears to be putting into order the remains of old, broken timepieces—curls of wristbands and cracked faces. Shaded by the awning of his stall, against the backdrop of that raucous lettering, it looks as if he is selling crisis.

This conspicuously odd figure, exorbitant to the time frame and setting of nationalist histories, represents something about the calculated untimeliness of this project. My research into forms of working-class literature does not conform to the expedient demands of the day. Lawyers, policy makers, and human rights activists turn their attention to constitutional reform and relief work. Instead, my objective is to collect examples of literature by garment industry workers: letters sent home by foreign domestic laborers, and literature of and by the tea plantation workers. Instead of the founding documents of the nation-state, I turn my attention to the working-class writings of the garment industry factory workers whose stories, essays, and poems are defined by narrative durations other than “crisis.”

The free-trade-zone paper Dabindu (Sweat)²⁴ traces its origins to a date of little-known historic significance in September 1984, when a group of women workers, newly employed in the free-trade-zone regions, joined together with cultural workers and grassroots labor activists to devise an alternative means of communicating in a climate where trade unions were effectively prohibited and speech was censored. Sri Lanka’s first free-trade-zone region was created in 1978 under the advisement of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as part of the conditions for global aid. These plans were implemented by the rightist UNP (United National Party) government, whose national economic policies charted a shift from welfarism to development. Dismantling the infrastructure of labor laws put into place as the result of the hard-won gains of the 1930s anticolonial working-class movement, the new free-trade regime of the United National Party promised investment protection, tax holidays, and the availability of cheap labor to foreign capital.

Seven years after the first factories were built and operational, the Dabindu Collective first met to discuss the strange, separate space that they inhabited. Here, by fiat of the GCEC (Greater Colombo Economic Commission), their workplaces were declared exempt from the Trade Unions Ordinance and the Maternity Benefits Ordinance, as well as the Factories Ordinance, among other laws of the country.

In the beginning there were no resources for a printing press. The founding members of the group pieced together a first edition from photocopies of anonymous letters, protest poems, testimonials, and worker biographies. They distributed these copies free of charge among the cramped quarters of the boardinghouses where many of the garment factory workers lived. After the first installment, it was discovered that the paper would find its way down the assembly line to factory notice boards. In other instances, it would be smuggled into the premises slipped in between the sheets of the dailies that they used as wrapping paper for their meager lunches. From the time of the first meeting in September 1984, regular publication was discontinued just once, for a three-month period in 1989, coinciding with the second JVP uprising following the disappearances and murders of some of the worker-activists connected with the collective.²⁵ During that time Dabindu was proscribed as an antigovernment publication. Since the old days of forbidden pages smuggled into the factory, the periodical has received some measure of visibility with the Dabindu Collective’s transformation into a local NGO.

The newspaper was originally conceptualized as a medium for interrogating false rumors, for publishing workers’ correspondences, factory reports, and news of struggles with management, and for bringing together national and international labor news. It was also, however, conceived as means of publishing the preliminary “beginning/amateur” literary efforts of worker-writers. The preface to the 1988 International Women’s Day commemorative booklet titled Stri nirmana (Women’s writing)²⁶ addresses a general feminist readership: “Therefore, because [the writings] found here are only amateur creative efforts [“Adhunika” nirmana—also in some traditions of literary history, the word for “modern”], we hope in the event of shortcomings and failures for your unbiased response.”²⁷ In their creative writings, the garment workers formed a political picture of an organization of society counter to the new mythologies constructed by the state, which simply extolled the virtues of their obedience and manual dexterity.

For example, in poems such as “Apatada nidahasak natha” (For us, there is no freedom)²⁸ they write themselves as set apart from the declarations of independence sounded by political parties in postcolonial Sri Lanka. The unsigned poem, appearing on the cover of the February 1998 edition, published to coincide with postcolonial celebrations of fifty years of freedom, is a critique of the nationalist rhetoric of independence as well as an exposition of the terms of economic imperialism. The first two stanzas read:

 

Although fifty years ago today

This land received its freedom

O for the sisters of the zone

There is still no freedom from enslavement

 

Today, as then, under foreign rule

They are

Like prisoners

O, when do they become free?

 

The writing is a mix of colloquial and literary Sinhala. Each stanza registers a different meter. On some occasions we find words shortened with a literary license according to some metrical scheme that is impossible to isolate, indicating signs of collaboration—text interferences.

Recent studies of the Dabindu papers have focused mainly on segments of their prose writings as sociological evidence of working-class consciousness among the women of the Sri Lankan garment industry. There are, for example, such wonderful texts as grotesque cartoons personifying the World Bank, comparative studies of the exploited garment industry workers in Bangladesh, and opinionated discussion pieces on the international implications of U.S. child labor legislation.²⁹ However, in an otherwise close reading of the vocabulary of “class” in the free-trade-zone factories of Katunayake, anthropologists Sandya Hewamanne and James Brow briefly dismiss the fiction pages, generalizing, “In their fiction writings, however, the heroines unfailingly overcome the pressures of outside forces to uphold moral values. … It could be that some of the writings are addressed to a general readership in an attempt to convey the message that there are ‘moral heroines’ within the FTZ.”³⁰

But in addition to their tales of moral heroines, the Dabindu periodicals encompass a vast heterogeneity of narrative forms, ranging from worker biographies and realist reportage to short stories about recanting JVP insurgents, romantic melodramas with the interethnic civil war as their backdrop, didactic stories critical of Sinhala ethnonationalism, poems dedicated to soldiers on the frontlines, poems addressing the Tamil tea plantation workers, free-verse (Nisandas) poetry addressing that abstract entity named the MNC (Multinational Corporation/Bahujathika Samagama), socialist fiction celebrating great Russian and Latin American Marxist leaders, love stories and other elliptical utterances, and perhaps most poignantly, stories and poems mourning lost opportunities for higher education in the university system.³¹

These bits and pieces may not be particularly useful in the context of projects of data retrieval for United Nations statistical reports on gender and free trade. Still, while much has been written about the internationalization of production and the feminization of labor by anthropologists and economists focusing on these poems and stories—the less useful parts, summarily dismissed by social investigators—I return to my central question: How is woman as subject for history constituted in these different writings? What if any recurring conventions and notations make up the figuration of her identity? In “For us, there is no freedom,” we discern the traces of a nonindividual subject in the irregular lines and erratic rhythms of the unsigned poem. On the other hand, “Vagrant wishes/Padada pathum” (Vagabond wishes [Perera]), appearing in the June 1994 edition, imagines the abstract entity of the multinational corporation as a speaking subject whose sovereign speech act brings into being the terrible order of things. The poem reads in colloquial Sinhala:

 

Garment³² for girls

Army for boys

Heavenly comforts for us …

Say the Multinationals

Together with those-who-lay-waste-to-the-country …³³

 

“Wishes” illustrates a brief anatomy of the national sexual division of labor in terms of the militarization of the state. Its form is quite simply a short list of actors in a staging of post-Independence Sri Lankan history. The list includes working-class women of the export-oriented garment industry, men of the Sri Lankan armed forces fighting a savage war to maintain a unitary state, multinational corporations (bahu jathika samagam) and a set of unnamed agents: “those who ruin/lay waste to the country.”

The English translation fails to capture the stark brevity of that final line as well as the planned slippage between the words for those who “rule” (deshapalana/palaka), and those who “ruin” (deshapaluvan). In the context of contemporary historiography, the poem is crucially significant in that it shifts the focus of dominant narratives of the Tamil-Sinhala interethnic conflict, placing the blame not on Tamil separatist nationalism, but on the governing elite who collude with global capital to perpetuate the war industry. Perera’s poem uncovers a hidden complicity between “free trade,” the slogan of the MNC, and “freedom,” the patriotic rhetoric of the postcolonial Sinhala-Buddhist government. (Less “literary” techniques mediate the language of the antiwar statement of the Committee for Democracy and Justice in Sri Lanka published in the 1995 September/October edition.³⁴)

“Vagrant wishes,” written in the short, staccato language of the pamphleteering tradition, represents the macropolitics of nationalism-as-an-alibi-for-global-capitalism in terms of a compact, accessible, gendered logic. Deepika Thrima Vitana’s 1994 “Chintanaya nidahas nam” (Thinking freedom),³⁵ on the other hand, dramatizes the micropolitics of internalized gendering in a modernist short story that stages the interior monologue of a former “Marxist” insurgent. The time frame is the present, after the 1989 abortive JVP insurgency in the southern part of Sri Lanka. The protagonist, Sahra, is the only one in a group of operatives who manages to escape her captor, and only after an army officer brands her face with his cigarette, leaving her permanently disfigured. The description of this scarring, however, is withheld in the order of narrative sequencing. Starting with the opening scene, in which we see Sahra walking out on her lover, the story moves backward and forward as bits and pieces of the heroine’s life story are given as a series of retroversions through reported speech, but without quotation marks. The title, here translated as “Thinking freedom,”³⁶ also underscores a movement in the text where the former JVP recruit gives up the phraseology of mechanical Marxism—the harabara vachana, tharaka vada (heavy duty words, and logical arguments) of “the organization” to discover her “self” through a process of uncollected thoughts and disconnected sentences—a collection of textual interferences, rather than the speech of the autonomous, intending subject.

Sahra remembers episodes of university life, of leaving the university to work full time for “the organization,” a failed love affair, the scarring of her face. Rooted to the spot by the river where the primary action of the story takes place, she also inhabits the present. She overhears village women discussing the marks on her face: “One of those ‘Che Guevara’ types, when these words beat against Sahra’s ears she feels incredible pain. That she had committed herself on behalf of their children no one seemed to acknowledge.” In the final turn of the story, Sahra contemplates her reflection in the water and resolves to no longer ask for validation from disaffected party ideologues or grieving family members. “If she died in that jungle—that would have been something. Now how do you keep an unmarriageable woman in the house”: Their comment is a statement, rather than a question. In the closing scene, the protagonist counters with her own philosophy of Marxism, feminism, and history as she reconstructs her image in the water: “She began to feel the strong need for independence of thought. There is no possibility of returning to University to continue studies. Well, whatever happens, tomorrow, by first light [I] must go to the fair and find some greens, potatoes, yams. Life is beautiful but there must also be independence of thought. She saw on her face a strange beauty from under the water.”

Ultimately, Vitana’s short story connects the narrative of the gendered revolutionary working-class subject to a different duration than either “crisis” or “development” (the proletarian female bildungsroman). Rather, “Chintanaya” (along with S. Udyalata Menike’s “Mai Dinaya” [May Day]) is an autocritical text of nonrevolutionary socialism. The protagonist’s final thoughts register as a hymn to ordinariness—a rededication to inglorious, mundane affairs. Ultimately “Chintanaya” strains to connect the rhythms of the daily task to the historic event of the revolutionary conjuncture. Vitana’s protagonist, like the indomitable figure of the mother in Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing,” measures “history” and socialist ethics not in terms of the logic of revolutions, but in the unceasing back-and-forth movements of daily life that construct and erase the present.³⁷

Over and against the wide-ranging and anomalous texts discussed here, I find it particularly telling that the best-known Dabindu poem, originally published in the 1987 July-August edition of the periodical and since reproduced in local- and foreign-development NGO and human rights publications, is K. G. Jayasundera Menike’s realist testimonial, which describes with play-by-play precision the factory scene at Star Garments.³⁸ Here we find stanzas organized by segments of clock time, as Menike’s poem faithfully replicates the mind-numbing mechanical rhythm of the working day at a garment factory. I would suggest that caught within this exacting tempo, bound to the factory floor, we cannot begin to imagine different times and other measures for thinking collectivities beyond trade unionist socialism and class politics as usual.

Still, despite the unresolved critical debate on Marxist aesthetics, the relationship between working-class writing and literary realism continues to be taken as dogma. Tony Davies writes, “That relationship, in one strong tradition, is simply taken for granted. According to this view, working-class writing is realistic in the most unpremeditated and unselfconscious fashion: autobiographical, documentary, or commemorative, rooted in the experience of family, community, locality, it ‘tells it as it is,’ (or, more often was) in plain words, valued for their sincerity and simple truth.”³⁹ Still, beyond realism and the genre of testimonial writing, then, how are the truth claims of working-class literature constructed—and according to what terms? These working-class women have been dubbed by some as “the good girls of Sri Lankan modernity.”⁴⁰ But they actively write against such crisis-management myths of the state. We might ask how, in fact, they themselves define the interruption that is the “modern” (adhunika)—that is the new. Theirs, as we see, are collaborative writings, not self-writing in any smooth, seamless way. They are not necessarily rooted in family or locality. Strategic a-chrony, not clock time or nation-building projects, constitute their measure. In the Dabindu periodicals, I believe that perhaps the most politically imaginative (but at the same time tenuously situated) writings are a group of Sinhala poems, stories, and letters addressing and identifying with the stateless Tamil women workers of the up-country tea plantations/estates.

Some pieces haphazardly blur the lines between collective identity and class interest. For example, in one segment of a long-running, anonymous epistolary novel, one protagonist (a free-trade-zone factory worker) compares her marginalization to the disenfranchisement of Indian-origin “recent” Tamils:

Just like those plantation workers … They, too, were brought over from India … got their work done by them … After that they were discarded like dirt … Did anyone think about what happens to these people? … No … How many years has this been going on? Still these people don’t have citizenship … That’s how we are.

(Hasuna [Letter] 7)

The historical analogy is forced. Despite numerous palliative reform measures, ever since 1948 (the year of Ceylon’s independence from Britain), countless numbers of Indian-origin Tamils by birth and descent have been denied national citizenship. Here the narrator reaches for a comparison, invoking a national scandal to give meaning to her own sense of social betrayal.

Other texts approach the plantation workers’ struggles more cautiously, acknowledging limitations and marking communication failings. “From zone to plantation” (“Kalapayen vathukarayata”), for example, resists the ethically compromised stance of recognition through assimilation.⁴¹ The exergue preceding the heading identifies this writing as the second part of a serialized letter, but there is no specific addressee. “Put together,” not “written by,” as the credits disclose, it disclaims unitary authorship and, as such, metonymically mirrors the bricolage aesthetic of the Dabindu page. Part reportage, part analysis, part journal entry, embedded speeches (translated, we are told, into Tamil by Sinhala-speaking Tamil activists) take on the challenge of opening a collective dialogue in the face of race war (jathi vadaya). As one labor activist puts it, calling for solidarity in alienation, “I too am a garment factory worker. I don’t own what I produce. Plantation workers are the same. Production has no caste, race, or religion. And yet we remain divided in that way” (9). From the margins, though, a personal observation (submitted by “the compiler”) provides a quiet counterpoint to slogans. Upon entering the line rooms she notes:

They welcomed us with love. But how do we inquire about their day-to-day lives? We don’t understand Tamil. But this doesn’t pose a problem for us because Arumugam speaks Sinhalese. The other brothers and sisters that accompanied us could also speak both Sinhala and Tamil. I felt a sense of shame because the only language I know is Sinhalese.

(8)

Counter to the communalizing ploys of the Sinhala commission, texts such as these, as well as others like “The tea plantation worker-woman” (“Vathu kamkaru striya”) and “Tear drops from the hills” (“Kandurelle kandulu binduva”) (both written in the voice-consciousness of the plantation worker) imagine cartographies of labor that attempt to displace competing nationalist imaginaries.

“I WANT YOU WOMEN UP NORTH TO KNOW”

The rhetorical protocols of Tillie Olsen’s texts—interruptions interspersed with “heteroglossic crossfire”—certainly resemble the writing (or, properly speaking, the “graph”) of the Dabindu page. And it is tempting to claim the necessarily collaborative aspect of the unfinished text, writing under the sign of text interferences—whether it be the “serialized poetics” of the free-trade-zone periodical awaiting the next installment, or writing cut short because of the inexorable regulation of the working day and the demands of others (Yonnondio)—as categorically feminist. However, to focus only on formal similarities as transparent signs of ideological content is to replay, albeit in a different way, the historicism of those who ordain postmodernism the cultural logic of capital.⁴² By simple reversal, the form of feminist interruption becomes “the prose” of counterglobalization.

Not withstanding the fact that the literature of labor and especially the literature of women’s labor have been overlooked in literary historiographies charting the passage from realism to postmodernism, we risk collapsing a formalism into an ontology if we claim some seamless unity between the aesthetics and politics of Dabindu and Tillie Olsen. There is no organic connection between these texts. Indeed, separated by time and geography, these two very different examples of working-class literature are positioned such that they seem to illustrate perfectly what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri might describe as the failure of proletarian internationalism today—the incommunicability and untranslatability of different working-class struggles via a common system of meaning making. As they put it: “There is no common language of struggles that could ‘translate’ the particular language of each into a cosmopolitan language. Struggles in other parts of the world and even our own struggles seem to be written in an incomprehensible foreign language” (Empire, 57). Furthermore, even as they bracket feminism and the global South as constitutive objects in their study of globalization, Hardt and Negri advance the case that when proletarian internationalism was alive and active it was so because “international solidarity had to be recognized not as an act of charity or altruism for the good of others, a noble sacrifice for another national working class, but rather as proper to and inseparable from each national proletariat’s own desire and struggle for liberation” (49–50).⁴³

But this rationale does not account for today’s emergent “new trade union initiatives,” bringing together different “national” labor unions across the North-South divide (India and the United States, for example) to produce a unified platform against the divisive ploys of outsourcing.⁴⁴ Neither, in fact, does it account for the ethico-political strategy of Olsen’s 1934 “I Want You Women Up North to Know,” written in the interest of the garment factory worker of the “global South,” in this case, Chicana women in the U.S. garment industry. Olsen writes not in the service of the U.S. working class, but on behalf of a heterogeneous, collective subject of feminism. What do we make of texts such as these, which negotiate the countercurrents of “intranational class differences?” Via a reading of Olsen’s poem, this section of my chapter considers global feminism as a language—properly speaking, a translation or mediation, never pure, not always clear, sometimes ideologically compromised—that facilitates communication (amid misfirings) across the North-South divide.

If, as Hardt and Negri contend, internationalism needs to be recognized not as altruism, but as self-interest, Olsen’s “I Want You Women Up North to Know” occupies an uneasy position in the canon of literary internationalism. Based on Felipe Ibarro’s letter to New Masses (1934), Olsen’s poem, at a very rudimentary level, reads as antisweatshop boycott politics. Ibarro documents labor violations based on evidence gathered from interviews with Chicana workers in San Antonio. In an interesting variation upon the genre of workers’ correspondence poetry, Olsen the working-class poet rewrites the activist journalist’s impassioned rhetoric, translating it into lines of poetry. But the first stanza follows Ibarro’s opening salvo almost word for word:

 

I want you women up north to know

how those dainty children’s dresses you buy

     at macy’s, wanamakers, gimbels, marshall fields,

are dyed in blood, are stitched in wasting flesh,

down in San Antonio, “where sunshine spends the winter.”

 

The central metaphor, predictably perhaps, translates women’s bodies into commodities. But the narrative logic of the poem also relies on another metaphoric scheme—alternative regionalisms—depicting an economic and ideological divide between “the North” and “the South.” Several decades before the documents of the Brandt Commission mapped the world in the simplest, starkest terms, divided between rich nations (the North) and poor (the South), Olsen adopts their rhetorical strategy, investing the historical North-South divide in the United States with new meaning—one that is all too familiar to us, now, in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.

Written during a period of hard-won gains for the U.S. labor movement, at the height of proletarian internationalism, Olsen’s poem anticipates the age of comparative advantage, multifiber agreements, and NAFTA. As Charlotte Nekola and others have noticed, “‘I Want You Women up North to Know,’ about Mexican needle workers, is unusual [in the context of standard surveys of 1930s literature] in that it not only details the conditions of work itself, but also outlines the relationship of third world workers to a capitalist economy” (132). Here Olsen takes it upon herself to write in the class interest—although, significantly, not in the voice-consciousness—of Mexican American workers. She calls our attention to ever-shifting contours of cartographies of labor reminiscent, perhaps, of Antonio Gramsci’s concept metaphor of “the South,” or of Raymond Williams’ construct of “the country and the city.” According to Olsen’s narrative of global capital, the country, here, is down south, where workers are exploited; the city, in this context (up north), identifies the metropolitan centers of consumption. New York, Chicago, and Boston are explicitly named in Ibarro’s letter. (Note that Olsen herself is living in San Francisco at this time.) Olsen assigns “the North” a subject position and connects it with the figure of the American Woman-as-Consumer. The last two lines are an exact replica of Ibarro’s oath: “I tell you this can’t last forever / I swear it won’t.”

There are other significant moments, however, where Olsen’s writing departs from exacting fidelity to the original, taking on an ideological and ethical discursive life of its own. In Ibarro’s letter as in Olsen’s poem, the North-South divide is inscribed as Northern (women consumers) versus Southern (women workers); the poem, however, beyond naming these women according to their documented names (as Catalina Rodriguez, Maria Vasquez, Catalina Torres, and Ambrosa Espinoza), does not hypostasize national difference. Ibarro makes a point to call attention to the fact that these superexploited women are “American-born Mexican” (emphasis mine). But in what might seem a questionable omission from within the ideological and disciplinary maneuvers of (liberal) multiculturalism and identity politics, Olsen does not comment on cultural, ethnic, or indeed national difference in her narrative.⁴⁵ Some might make the case that, twice removed from the lived context of their stories and struggles, Olsen is merely ventriloquizing these women. But I would argue that her position might better be understood in terms of a system of socialist ethics put in the service of the worker as opposed to an ethics of the immigrant worker—or the legal (American-born) immigrant worker. Elsewhere, as we know, she writes critically of the current overemphasis on race, ethnicity, and identity politics. Overall, in this, her first publication, oversimplification of terms becomes her ethico-political strategy. The women “Up North” constitute a faceless monolith, but the Southern women are named, given subjectivity—sometimes collectively (“maria catalina ambrosa”), sometimes individually. All the Northern women are consumers; the Southern women are workers; but the working-class poet is brave? Ultimately, we do well, as we read Olsen’s 1930s poem, to keep in mind the richness and complexity of Chicana protest poetry as a necessary supplement to discourses on borders and borderlands—collective selves and others.⁴⁶

Olsen’s own critique of individualism and identity politics cuts across period and genre divisions. While her novel and poem are appraised and studied separately, a comparative study illuminates linkages as well as divergences between history and an ideology of form. Thus it is interesting to compare the reception and discursive life of Yonnondio with that of “I Want You Women Up North to Know,” her first publication. Olsen (then Lerner) was twenty-one (or twenty-two) when her poem first appeared in Partisan Review. Its theme of divisions and differences not withstanding, “I Want You Women Up North to Know” finds a home in feminist working-class studies. Yonnondio is generally celebrated as the hallmark text of U.S. literary radicalism. It is widely anthologized in authoritative retrospective collections of the period. What does it mean to celebrate the cultural legacy of the U.S. left in this moment? While hardly expansive, Olsen’s corpus of texts provides constant counterpoints to an agenda of triumphalist recovery projects and celebrations of self-interest. And as such, it is immediately relevant to the critical task facing feminism in globalization today. In her poem, as in Yonnondio, once again, there is a hesitation around the commodification of resistance—a question as to how “this” (her own) writing might be received and formalized. Once again there is a warning note addressed to “the bourgeois poet.” If in Yonnondio the message to the corporation cannot/will not be sent, here it will be, but must needs be rerouted via the Northern woman as consumer. Marking its shortcomings, “I Want You Women Up North to Know” is unique in that it anticipates with uncanny prescience feminist negotiations within globalization.

“REPEATED INTERRUPTIONS”: HISTORY AND ETHICS IN MAHASWETA DEVI

Chotti Munda’s life is one story after another.

—Mahasweta Devi

 

“Proletarian revolutions,” Marx writes, “constantly engage in self-criticism, and in repeated interruptions of their own course” (Surveys, 150). Here the adjective “proletarian” is charged with a specific disembodied, abstract meaning. It becomes synonymous with the process of autocritique. Marx invokes this meaning again in his postface to the second edition of Capital, volume 1, where he links dialectical thought to “revolutionary” critique: “in so far as such a critique represents a class, it can only represent the class whose historical task is the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes—the proletariat” (98). Then again, later in the same text, we encounter the stuff of this “critique”: “It does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary” (103). In such moments of exergues and revision, the meaning of “revolution” is transformed, even as “proletarian” comes to signify not merely the real working-class (or even that specific subset of the working class entrusted with the historic mission of abolishing class society) but also the agency—“in so far as such a critique represents a class”—of historical materialism. Such revolutions are autocritical and antidevelopmentalist, and thus are long-lived. They are conceptualized as “repeated interruptions,” constantly sidelining the path of capital.

Serialized form (as in the Dabindu periodicals) generates repeated interruptions, and the rhetorical protocols of Tillie Olsen’s texts, as we have seen, resemble those of Dabindu’s writings. Building on Marx’s elaboration of “the proletarian,” this final section of the chapter considers “interruption” as a structural, not aberrational, aspect of a specifically feminist proletarian aesthetic and ethic. It is not open-ended messianicity, but the open-endedness of proletarian (in this sense) “revolutions” that is captured by Indian writer and tribal rights activist Mahasweta Devi’s works. Her writing and activism emerges within and against over thirty years of left front rule in the communist state of West Bengal in India. In the preceding section, I read Olsen’s field-defining literature from the 1930s alongside the Dabindu writings representing the new proletariat within globalization. There the incongruous pairing of the single-author novel with the collectively authored and edited free-trade-zone periodical was intended to call attention to the figure of a collective subject and the critique of individualism shared by different changing traditions of women’s and feminist texts of labor. This concluding section considers how Devi’s aesthetics and ethics of interruption extend the reach of such a Marxist-feminist critique of historicism.

A consideration of moments of revision and supplementation (like Marx’s postface to the second edition of Capital) animates retrospective battles over the political and theoretical provenance of the “real” Karl Marx. Was he a humanist—a structuralist? Is his intellectual legacy properly validated and countersigned in the work of Antonio Gramsci or that of Louis Althusser? (I return to this question below.) It doesn’t even occur to us, however, to consider how a Devi (or a Spivak, we might add) might extend the afterlife of Western Marxism. Born in 1926 in East Bengal (contemporary Bangladesh), Devi came of age intellectually and politically during anticolonial struggles against the British, but was also witness to the CPI (Communist Party India)-initiated peasant movements in Tebhaga, Kakdwip, and (later, in 1967) Naxalbari. Marx, caught within the historicism of his own milieu—industrial-imperial Britain—was unable to think outside certain ideological blind spots of his time. And yet, as attentive poststructuralist readers of Capital have shown, Marx’s method—his self-reflexive attention to the gaps and hesitations in his own thought—at the very least suggests an itinerary for mapping an autocritical Marx(ism) beyond the conditions and constraints that produced the historical individual. Both formally and conceptually, however, Devi’s writings are categorically unfinished texts connected to the longue durée. Validated by a longer “proletarian moment” than the “Red Decade” of Europe and the United States, her writing nevertheless is radically antitriumphalist.

The journalistic prose of her memorial tribute to CPI leader Asoke Bose sets a context for her investment in a type of nonrevolutionary socialism and her own “ethics of interruption.” Writing the text of a memorial tribute in collaboration with her brother, she observes,

For us Asoke Bose is not a mere leader of a short-lived movement that failed years ago. It has been proved time and again in the history of peasant struggles in this country that failure can be more glorious than victory. Who remembers the names of the victors of these struggles? Or of those who defeated Birsa Munda and Sidhu Kanhu? It’s the defeated who continue to live in our minds. The name of Kakdwip has become a part of this history and has provided inspiration to movements of later periods and will continue to do so. Regimes change, but the struggle continues.⁴⁷

In her literary texts she dramatizes this critical agency of failure and uncompleted mourning. Her stories play with differential time—alignments and misalignments, repetition as transformative recurrence.

As we know, Marx’s final texts on class remain unfinished. Whose script of history, then, should determine the context of general theories of capitalism—of an ethics of socialism? Can we speak of a global ethics of time—of historical materialism? Which history? Whose time? Even as we think in terms of Marxism and (comparative) literature, what should be the frame of reference for making comparative moral judgments about modes of production and the logic of culture? “Time, complex time, how can a computer possibly process this time and give birth to a data-sheet” (156)? The question is raised in Mahasweta Devi’s “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha,” which depicts the appearance of a pterodactyl in contemporary postcolonial India.

Devi’s realist novella addresses debates in Marxism, shifting the burden of questions from grounds of history to questions of ethics. Again, “Marxism is not a historicism”: Placed in context, Althusser’s famous but polemical statement refers to a quarrel with Antonio Gramsci—properly speaking, it refers to a quarrel with lesser practitioners’ interpretations of Gramsci—who tended to reduce theory to historically specific programs of action and agendas of reform. As mentioned before, Althusser sought to prevent Marx (and Marxism) from merely becoming slogans for validating left-party politics of the day. As such, although Althusser accepts Gramsci’s “leftist” humanist reaction as a strategic response to the economisms and mechanism of Second International doxa, he cannot allow Marxism to be understood merely as a programmatic call to arms. But “historicism” in Althusser’s lexicon also refers to a specific ideology of history that conforms to a narrative logic of successive stages, continuity, and determinism. Marxism cannot be handcuffed to history—either specific failures in state socialism, or momentary successes like the making of the English working class. It is a general theory of changing capital and class relations over time. And yet, if Marxism is not a historicism, from what does it derive its content? What should be its morphology? Althusser, for the most part, leaves us hanging with his partial insight. It is the burden of this book to show that unwittingly, perhaps, somewhere between his critique against reformism and revolution, a consideration of Althusser’s—mistaken, some would argue—anti-Gramsci polemics leads the Marxist reader to a middle ground: the need for a theory (and practice) of socialist ethics. As Perry Anderson puts it, “The notorious absence of anything approaching such an ethics within the accumulated corpus of historical materialism—its regular displacement by either politics or aesthetics—lends to this project a peculiar point and force.”⁴⁸

Mahasweta Devi, writing in the aftermath of revolution (1968; Naxalbari), and yet, hearkening to the threat of organized leftist brutality (2007; Nandigram), would seem to echo Althusser’s cautionary statement. Her “Pterodactyl” and “The Fairy Tale of Mohanpur” are both “myth and analysis” of a particular Indian left tradition too hastily assimilated into legends of revolution, on the one hand, and into knowledge bureaucratized by left-party politics and managerial NGO culture, on the other. But while—as I’ve mentioned before—Althusser opens up the provenance of Marxism for us through his reading of Marx beyond the historical particularism of Marx’s own milieu, nowhere in Althusser’s own corpus do we find an ethical alternative to “historicism.” There is in fact a gesture of equivocation that concedes some ground to possibilities opened up by the “Third World”—but only provisionally:

Even today, this “humanism” and “historicism” find genuinely revolutionary echoes in the political struggles waged by the people of the Third World to conquer and defend their political independence and set out on the socialist road. But these ideological and political advantages themselves, as Lenin admirably discerned, are offset by certain effects of the logic that they set in motion, which eventually and inevitably produce idealist and empiricist temptations in economic and political conceptions and practice—if they do not, given a favorable conjuncture, induce, by a paradoxical but still necessary inversion, conceptions which are tainted with reformism and opportunism, or quite simply revisionist.

(Reading Capital, 141)

Devi’s literary texts on West Bengal, supplemented by Spivak’s elaborations of Marxism and feminism, articulate a connection between a politics of comparativism, the critique of historicism, and the turn to ethics. If historicism is the parsing of history as seamless, continuous, and tending toward “the global,” the critique of historicism makes visible the narrative and logical mechanism by which we produce such an apprehension of history. The counterintuitive lesson of “Pterodactyl” might be that we must look beyond the epiphenomenal headlines of the period, as well as short stories of revolution, to the longer-term logics and uncertain outcomes of history. Here history is understood as “the ordinary,” the nonevent—it is daily repetition understood as transformative recurrence.

A brief plot summary sets the context for my reading: A pterodactyl—or properly speaking, a creature closely resembling the exact specs of the science textbooks—has been sighted in the famine-ravaged area of Pirtha, India, “where … eighty thousand tribals among the one million, one hundred and seven thousand, three hundred and eighty-one people of the district live” (98). If the well-meaning reporter and dedicated left-front government representative were to document the media event, no doubt attention would be focused on a habitually neglected area and aid money would come pouring in. But in consultation with tribal “representatives,” the decision is made not to capitalize on this phenomenon. Eventually, the creature dies, having communicated a cryptic message to Bhikia, a mute tribal boy. “Pirtha,” it is claimed, “is the place where reporters go mad.” Empirical investigations into current events are confounded. Puran, the journalist, cannot understand the message, but intuits the lesson to be learned: “We have lost somewhere, to Bhikia’s people, to Pirtha. By comparison with the ancient civilizations modern progress is much more barbaric at heart…. We have slowly destroyed a continent in the name of civilization To build it you must love beyond reason for a long time” (195). Devi’s pterodactyl does not lend itself to the marketing ploys of the postcolonial culture industry. “This time is out of joint.” It is not safely “post” colonial. Shankar, the “native informant,” explains to the reporter and his friend, “We are late by many, many moons. Now no one can show us any help” (117). Neither the postcolonial state nor the new imperial philanthropy of NGOs can provide redress or remuneration to the tribal aboriginals, even if they wished to: “The government does not even know that there are human beings in Pirtha” (117). The Pirtha tribals remain delayed and deferred. They remain to be “scheduled” and “denotified” into independence along with other “scheduled castes,” awaiting the minimal measures of affirmative action devised by the postcolonial state.

Devi’s writing directs attention beyond the conjunctural limits of “the revolution” to the daily, unglamorous, unrewarding, unfinished business of the everyday. Her novella and activist journalism (some of which is compiled in Dust on the Road) conceptualize an epistemological break from monumental time marked by explosive (global/ newsworthy) events to time registered as transformative repetition—in fact, untimeliness. In terms of structure, her writing breaks with the representation of linear time and progressive narrative-sequences. Even at the level of the sentence, there is no subject or (obvious) syntax, just parataxis held together loosely by alliteration. “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha,” the heading, becomes emblematic of a signature rhetorical strategy deployed throughout the text. Time is represented as décalage (dislocation). Breaks and interruptions cannot be easily sorted out by devices of periodization or literary history. A moment of speech interference, reminiscent of the moment discussed in Yonnondio, enjoins the reader to reflect on the ethico-political agenda of “this” writing. This is not “science fiction” (nor is it “national allegory”). The narrative of the pterodactyl sighting—on the eve of the enforced liberalization of the Indian economy—in 1987 neoliberal India is something else.

At the heart of “Pterodactyl” is this angry, chastising outburst commenting on the cultural politics of class struggle, literature, and the way we parse literary history.

But oh the first and last living messenger from the prehistoric world! This too is the implacable and cruel truth that time will advance, that the wheels of time will destroy much as they advance. You cannot turn the eighteenth to the seventeenth, however hard you try. Only the creators of science fiction can do that. The boys and girls who are of the “cute” and “oh baby” and “oh boy” brand and who are constant escapists in the mind get an adulterated joy when they read those stories. But in India, or in the world, what is “tidy,” just fine, smooth? Such things exist for the few. For the many, time means a struggle red in tooth and claw and the struggle does not mean the same thing all the time. Time, complex time, how can a computer possibly process this time and give birth to a data sheet?

(156)

Deictic indices are both implicit and explicit in this passage. Here and now, “this” is the literature of struggle, a cruel truth—not utopian “science fiction.” This does not belong under the heading of “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” (In fact, Devi’s fiction opens up different ways of reading and engaging Jameson’s classic texts in Marxist theory.) According to the narrator at least, conventions and notations of architectural historicism or theories of time-space compression cannot account for the unceasing dialectical revisionism of “the everyday.” Time travel is the provenance of “escapist” science fiction. And there is an unmistakable American accent (“cute,” “oh boy,” “oh baby”) to the brand of fantasy disavowed. But contrary to a genre of postcolonial revisionist history, neither is “Pterodactyl” a romantic, romanticizing journey back in time to some prebourgeois, precolonial idyllic past. In Devi’s novella (as in contemporary Indian history) the caste-Hindu postcolonial subject is colonizer and usurper of aboriginal lands. As such the ethical objectives and aims of Devi’s texts transgress the provincialism of some South Asian (area studies-based) subaltern studies approaches that (despite their best impulses) tidily equate historicism with Eurocentrism. “But in India, or in the world, what is ‘tidy,’ just fine, smooth?” Devi’s is a rough, uneven, global comparativism, where the breaks and articulations are designed to show. Her pterodactyl is a figure for an ethics of historical materialism. Over and against reformism and revolution, beyond just the decentering of the subject of the moment, Devi’s writing proposes an autocritical aesthetics and ethics.

There is, for example, this precarious moment in Devi’s novella—one which resembles, on the surface at least, a kind of unapologetic cultural relativism. We don’t know what to make of Shankar’s decision to refuse aid from those committed to painstaking infrastructure building. We also don’t quite know how to read the decision to withhold the transcript of the truthful report and to submit, instead, an edited “false” one, omitting details of the pterodactyl. A rationale is spelled out (but not spoken) in Puran’s thoughts:

Bhikia, I don’t want anyone to know of our dreadful discovery, because if we let them know there will be an invasion of the media of the inquisitive world. You will be shown on television, and the soul’s warning message, the terrifying news of the tribal being of Pirtha, will all lose their perspective, by many analyses the rodent and the rhododendron will be proven the same. And who can tell, all the countries of the world will conduct investigations out of Pirtha everywhere, into the last forest, last cave.

(162)

“By many analyses the rodent and the rhododendron will be proven the same.” The silent admonition makes perfect sense on one level: global capital-logic opens up spaces and economies, making them continuous and available for exploitation under one (world) trade regime, forcing recognition of the other through assimilation. But on another level, Puran’s warning runs counter to the text’s own protocols and politics—coming riskily close to reifying historical differences as static monuments. To refuse the telos of globalization (as Hegelian “transculturation” or world history) is one thing. But feminism and comparative literature also contrive connections across distances and differences. At first glance, Puran’s ethical stance does not square with either the politics of form or the broader ideological and political vision elaborated by Devi. (Elsewhere in this novella, we see that against prevailing leftist moralism, she depicts journalists and local activists bypassing NGO strategists and working instead with ethical state officials.) Overall, through parataxis/alliteration Devi suggests imaginative, counterintuitive, heterodox connections and collectivities. Here, the insistence on logical, coordinated sequencing seems opposed to such creative alignments and misalignments. Upon closer scrutiny, however, we see that Puran’s warning speaks to Mahasweta’s commentary on the Marxian question of value—more specifically, the question of how value is produced and expressed in exchange relations. As such, Puran’s demurral takes us into the heart of the productive problem of historicism in Marx—his elaboration of the emergence of the differential “value-form.”

Puran’s insistence on the incommensurability of “the rodent and the rhododendron” recalls us to basic foundational tenets of Capital, volume 1. To posit a relation of value you need at least two different commodities. In Marx’s lexicon, “value” constitutes “that simple and contentless thing” that mediates between differences. There is, however, an implicit political corollary to Marx’s discussions on the commodity form and the value relation that arises as a consequence. Marx (the Hegelian Marx, some would qualify—Marx had other moments) believed that the logic of the commodity form encrypted a universal emancipatory narrative in the unfolding of its internal logic: he believed that “[t]he secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labor, … could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired a permanence of a fixed popular opinion” (152). (Thus England becomes his example for elucidating capital relations.) Capital logic needs as its predication a society that has collectively internalized ideals of liberalism and equal standing as its foundation. The value-form—a basis for comparing and thus making equal two entirely different commodities—can arise only though a process of abstraction. But to “abstract”—to defetishize the concrete—in this way is also to necessarily dehumanize and dehistoricize by arbitrarily creating equivalence. To do so is to elide historical differences and cultural particularities in order to produce a common measure for comparison. Arguably, the process of abstraction in itself is intrinsically neither “good” nor “bad.” This dialectical tension between the universal and the particular is as much the ethical leverage of socialism as it is the driving force of capital maximization. Spivak, reading Marx through Derrida, will call this relationship “pharmakonic”—poison taken as medicine.

Through this cryptic statement made in Puran’s voice-consciousness, Devi’s novella engages just this thorny question of value—especially pertinent to how we produce the value-coding of the object of history. The rodent and the rhododendron are unequal. Adamantly maintaining their incommensurability must accomplish some specific ideological (or ethical) work. What if we were to begin by dismissing the premise of equality and liberalism to begin with? What if we were to begin, instead, with the insertion into responsibility, rather than liberalism and individual rights? The pterodactyl as a figure for tribal culture represents responsibility as freedom and individuality as separation. “There is no escape, we were torn apart so long ago, in fragments in atoms, we are scattered everywhere” (161), someone mourns. It is not clear who. To be autonomous individuals marks the painful dispersal of the disparate parts of a collective subject. Devi asks us to conceive of this starting point as a brilliant lost opportunity—not for capitalism, but for socialist ethics. In Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940, Dipesh Chakrabarty, too, begins to unpack this proposition when he observes that “the bourgeois idea of ‘equality,’ incorporating as it does concepts of ‘individual rights,’ ‘contract,’ and ‘possessive individualism,’ has extremely serious and grave limitations that are necessarily inimical to the construction of any socialist, communitarian ethic and order” (xii). He questions what might be learned from other resistant collectivities devalued by capitalism. But ultimately he, too, remains caught up in a historicist trap of his own, as he demarcates the space of resistant collectivities and communitarian ethics as “precapitalist.” Devi’s pterodactyl, on the other hand, is not precapitalist. It figures as a sign of other times outside in capitalism. Logically outside the temporality of factory discipline and the measurements of (a labor theory of) value, it represents the unthinkable abstraction of “difference without hierarchy”—and also the ideal of feminism and comparative literature.

The meditation on the rodent and the rhododendron cuts deeper and closer than the earlier self-reflexive passage commenting on the cultural politics of genre and a literature of struggle. Puran’s statement, in fact, gets to the heart of the matter: how we make comparative judgments about historical value. E. P. Thompson—though conflating history with the past and mixing morals with values—touches upon the difficulty of grasping the a priori value-coding of history when he observes that “progress is a concept either meaningless or worse, when imputed as an attribute to the past, which can only acquire a meaning from a particular position in the present, a position of value in search of its own genealogy.”⁴⁹ “[B]y many analyses the rodent and the rhododendron will be proven the same” is a statement that flouts empirical measurements and places pressure on how we produce that slipperiest, most abstract, and nonteleological of Marxist concepts—value. As such, it must be understood as a mirror text of the fabula. The illegibility and untranslatability of the pterodactyl might be misread by some as a signature postcolonial device—a valorization of an “ethics of alterity.” But, in effect, the pterodactyl cannot be valorized. It is outside the scheme of value. It represents a starting point for histories of socialism—difference without hierarchy.

Thus “Pterodactyl” rests stubbornly on a blatantly illiberal premise: the resistance to neoliberal globalization and development. Devi’s reconstitution of the object of labor history through the perspective of tribal adivasis confronts and disputes the famous affirmation of Empire, where Hardt and Negri claim that “Empire is better in the same way that Marx insists that capitalism is better than the forms of society and modes of production that came before it” (43). The pterodactyl cannot speak but “[w]hat does it want to tell? We are extinct by the inevitable natural geological evolution. You too are endangered. [The addressee, here, is the human/journalist.] You too will become extinct in nuclear explosions, or in war, or in the aggressive advance of the strong as it obliterates the weak, which finally turns you naked, barbaric, primitive, think if you are going forward or back” (157).

“Pterodactyl” read through the critical interpretive lens of Marxist-feminist critic (and Devi’s translator) Spivak opens up other possibilities. As she puts it, “Today Marx’s ghost needs stronger offerings than Human Rights with economics worked in, or the open-ended messianicity of the future anterior, or even ‘responsibility’ (choice or being called) in the Western tradition. The need is to turn toward ethical practices—care of others as care of the self—that were ‘defective for capitalism.’”⁵⁰ The formulation charts an interesting development in the chronology of Spivak’s own writings. If in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” she opposed the ethical decentering of the sovereign subject via a meaning of class suggested by Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire” to certain standard signature moves of poststructuralism, there she stopped short of following through with this theoretical opening in terms of an ethical alternative. Here, building on Foucault’s third volume on the history of sexuality, she turns to the question of socialist ethics—specifically a collective subject articulating Derridian responsibility-based ethics with Foucault’s posthumanist humanism.

Spivak’s own symptomatic reading of Marx builds upon the counterintuitive implications of Althusser’s exegesis, not taken up by most Marxist (or subaltern studies) scholars. Marx could not envision other modes of collectivity (beyond the party form and trade unionist socialism) outside bourgeois liberal traditions of equality and rights. Devi refracted through Spivak (feminism as translation) suggests that we must harness those “residual” sometimes hierarchical, gender-compromised (“defective”) modes—failed modes for capitalist progress—in the service of an ethics of historical materialism and a vision for other collectivities. Here, as elsewhere, Devi and Spivak venture into dangerous terrain when they imply that we may have to (in some instances, at least) instrumentalize feudality in the service of fighting feudalism and capitalism. Resource-rich, rights-based societies may have something to learn from (sometimes gender-compromised) responsibility-based cultures. The content of an ethics of historical materialism is not ideologically pure. Upon first take, the silent message of the pterodactyl intuited by (not communicated to) Puran seems rather anticlimactic, almost banal and melodramatic, in fact: “To build it you must love beyond reason for a long time” (195). “Only love, a tremendous, excruciating explosive love can still dedicate us to this work when the century’s sun is in the Western sky, otherwise aggressive civilization will have to pay a price” (196). Elsewhere, in conversation with her translator and collaborator, the author, Devi, repeats this mandate: “Our double task is to resist ‘development’ actively and to learn to love” (Imaginary Maps, xxii).

“Love beyond reason” does not quite compute in Althusser’s calculus of structural causality. But Devi’s concept of “love,” as it is developed in her novella and other writings, provides Spivak with the basis for elaborating a concept of socialist ethics. Akin to, but some paces removed from, an extension of Levinasian ethics, Spivak parses such love as the encounter of “ethical singularity”: this is the “secret encounter” of imperfect communication that transpires in the interstices of history-making events, in something like normality, between equals—not subject and object of benevolence. In other words, such an ethical exchange can occur only in the tempo of the everyday between interlocutors—not historian and native informant, nor journalist and source. It cannot take place in crisis mode in the register of moral exhibitionism; the message of the pterodactyl cannot be read like a manifesto or be made “actionable” like a state agenda. Such an encounter cannot be confused with the event that galvanizes shortterm coalitional politics and forges provisional links between activists and subalterns in the moment of crisis.

Such nonteleological dialogic relationships of ethical singularity constitute daily repair work undoing internalized gendering. “The slow effort of ethical responding” is measured by other speeds than those of the revolutionary conjuncture or mode of production narratives. It lasts beyond media events, well after the ink dries on official reports and newspaper pages become obsolete. Such labored practice, “which is neither ‘mass contact’ nor engagement with the common sense of the people,” must supplement collective action, Spivak proposes: “Most political movements fail in the long run because of the absence of this engagement” (xxv). And yet, the goal of this effortful striving can never be (completely) realized. There is no moral “payoff.” Something is always lost/held back, despite the best intentions of both respondents involved. (It is in this sense that the encounter is “secret”—because of the lost bits, parts inaccessible to the subjects themselves). Thus the condition of this relationship is loss. Its outcome is uncertainty. But this acknowledgment cannot forestall the commitment to action. Elsewhere in her Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak builds on Derridian responsibility-based ethics to propose that “the promise of justice must attend not only to the seduction of power, but also to the anguish that knowledge must suppress difference as well as différance, that a fully just world is impossible, forever deferred and different from our projections, the undecidable in the face of which we must risk the decision that we can hear the other” (199). Here we see that in Spivak’s formulation, “ethical” perhaps replaces “historical” in the system of ideas operating “historical materialism.”

Perry Anderson hypothesizes that the reason the founders of historical materialism were so wary of “ethical discussions of socialism … is their tendency to become substitutes for explanatory accounts of history.” However, to be “ethical” in the context of ethical singularity is not necessarily commensurate with doing good or being good according to a prescribed set of morals or established precepts. Rather, it might be understood as acting in the hope of justice in the absence of guarantees, ideological sanction (histories of left-party politics), or institutional validation. Singularity, in this sense, is repetition with a difference. It is not identical with individualism or exceptionalism, as in commonly available received notions. Where the individual is indivisible, singularity is divisible and relational. Thus “the everyday” is singular because it epitomizes repetition with difference—transformative recurrence. Ethical singularity is focused on the task, not the event.⁵¹ But most importantly, ethical singularity, predicated on the impossibility of “winning,” is not proposed in lieu of collective struggle. Rather, as Spivak puts it, ethical singularity is what needs to happen in the everyday, in the aftermath of the revolution: “For a collective struggle supplemented by the impossibility of full ethical engagement—not in the rationalist sense of ‘doing the right thing,’ but in the more familiar sense of ‘love’ in the one on one way for each human being—the future is always around the corner, there is no victory, but only victories that are also warnings” (xxv). In Devi’s “Pterodactyl,” “Love” (responsibility-based ethics, ethico-political negotiations of the everyday), it is hoped, will sustain the revolutionary event beyond its duration. It must disrupt the telos of “aggressive civilization” and competing stages in the developmentalist logic of modes of production narratives.

The pterodactyl itself becomes a figure for the critique of teleological history. We don’t know if it is from the past, the present, or the future. (Based on available scientific evidence, it is unclear as to precisely which era this “current” Pirtha variant of the winged creature hails from: “[Pterodactylus, pteranodon, pterodactyl!]” Puran wonders.) Nonessentialist in its morphology, mapping a planetary internationalism before national maps ever existed, it is an impossible retrospective glance at the present. Its message depicts an antihumanist ethics derived from nature—“man’s body without organs”—where history is geology and temporality cannot be value-coded as history.

How transparent the dark, how liquid, melting bit by bit. Everything can be seen in such darkness. No, I don’t want even to touch you, you are outside my wisdom, reason, and feelings who can place his hand at the axial moment of the end of the third phase of the Mesozoic and the beginnings of the Cenozoic geological ages?

(156)

The rhetorical question goes unanswered. Puran, the journalist, cannot grasp its concept.

It is crucially significant that Devi’s pterodactyl cannot be empirically verified. Devi’s pterodactyl, like the revolution, will not be televised. It is illegible—the antithesis of historiography as such. But, therefore, it figures an abstract ethics of historical materialism. History is not reducible to historiography. “Marxism is not a historicism,” Devi would agree. In making their case, Althusser and Balibar reject schools of thought that canonize Marx as an empiricist historian of the British working class, but stop short of extending the implications of their critical exegesis further. A certain formation of postcolonial Marxist studies takes off from this formulation, opening up Marx toward other histories of labor and social movements—but they care little for “ethics,” emphasizing, instead, questions of politics. On the other hand, criticism by certain schools of postcolonial scholarship simply equates Marxism with Eurocentrism. Spivak’s and Devi’s intervention is some paces removed from these trajectories within Marxism and cultural studies. Their collaboration/translation supplements the theoretical vacuum left in the wake of the epistemic break between the (early) “humanist” Marx and the later “political” one, with their proposed turn to socialist ethics.

While the line between aesthetics and politics in never firm, nor straight, Mahasweta’s text mediated by Spivak’s translation/ethics proposes a supplement to Marxism, beyond Marx. Devi’s pterodactyl, as we see, is a break in structure, but it does not inaugurate a politics of the subject in any uncomplicated way: (along with Puran Sahay and Pirtha,) the pterodactyl is the part-subject of ethics. The logic of its figuration proposes an autocritical ethics of historical materialism that can never be fully recovered, only partially reconstructed:

One person eats well by keeping five hundred starving, one person graduates college while six hundred remain illiterate, and one person buys an apartment keeping how many people homeless, such complicated ratios. No ratio has ever been calculated from the position of people like Bhikia. The position from which computer, information ministry, and media of the inquisitive world see the situation depends on the will of the current social and state systems. And it is by the will of this system that the educated person is unwilling to think. This system considers original thought an “exterminable threat.” This system forcibly occupies the thinking cells of the brain and makes a body brush his teeth with Forhan’s toothpaste. Sometimes makes him or her say that India is proudly on the way to becoming the biggest power in the Third World. Again sometimes it makes one crazy with the idea that the first duty is to change the name of the state. The system wants, and people “dance like wooden dolls.” But the first obligation is to calculate the ratio from the position of people like Bhikia. Without that effort Independence has grown to be forty years old.

(161–162)

“The system wants, and people ‘dance like wooden dolls.’” Subjectivity is assigned to the system, here. The inexorable arithmetics of poverty call for an ethics of historical materialism. And, indeed, here as elsewhere, echoes of Walter Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history seem to abound. But the comparison cannot be made too glibly. The angel of history is not the same as the pterodactyl.

“Pterodactyl” ends with the journalist leaving Pirtha. The story breaks off abruptly, as Devi stages it; Puran stops a truck, “steps up,” and passes out of the frame. What remains to be done is left for the tribal adivasis, who have categorically refused NGO assistance and state aid. Shankar speaks for the collective subject, articulating the present (the event of the pterodactyl) with the present continuous—the quotidian tasks of the everyday: “We will do what we used to do. We’ve got water, we’ll work the field. One thing is true, we must plant the Khajra that keeps us alive. If Baola keeps us alive, we must plant Baola. Otherwise everything will be desert, and we will have to leave” (184). Questions of feminist agency and historiography seem outside the narrative proper, unless we consider that Puran (who must abandon the task of simply documenting) might be understood as an alter ego for Devi herself.

In Dust on the Road, a compilation of Mahasweta’s journalistic writings, we uncover the author’s own thesis on the philosophy of history during a moment where she confronts a shocking statue of a tribal hero, Birsa Munda, depicted in chains. “Why did the artist have to be so faithful to the photograph?” she asks, decrying the aesthetics and politics of a representational strategy bound by a blind fidelity to documentary realism and the official historical record.⁵² Throughout the corpus of her writings, Mahasweta Devi elaborates the object of postcolonial historiography in terms of ethical questions rather than historicist preoccupations. Thus her objective is not simply the “recovery” of lost objects of (subaltern) history through the privileging of narratives of tribal (or peasant) resistance movements. Central to her capturing an ethics of history is a philosophy of “fiction,” not journalistic accuracy or documentary realism.

In “The Fairy Tale of Mohanpur” (1999), the critique of official historiography and of the Naxalite revolution is figured in the character-person of Andi, and the critical agency of “repeated interruptions” is explicitly gendered—also a structural and structuring aspect of the story. If in “Pterodactyl” interruptions occur as periodic breaks and rifts at the level of the syntactical unit of the sentence, here the very concept of “repeated interruptions” becomes formalized in the figure of irony—“permanent parabasis or a source relating otherwise.”⁵³ In this case, an old blind woman’s “fairy tale” history and women’s everyday ethical negotiations disrupt and derail the trajectory of masculinist left-party politics and trade unionist socialism in the communist state of West Bengal. “Andi” (the blind one) marks the place of the parabasis, which reveals “a sudden discontinuity between two rhetorical codes”: tragedy and wish fulfillment; revolution and the everyday; politics and ethics. Formally, Devi gives us the narrative of a hopeless tragedy undermined, somehow, by the voice-consciousness and blurred vision of an unbearably hopeful, completely clueless optimist. (Every dismal happening is reversed in Andi’s mind, “jes like a fairy tale one by one!” [104].) Conceptually, Andi’s experience of time and of women’s collectivity undermines the plot trajectory of the primary fabula: the struggle of the communist trade unionist (Gobindo) to unionize sharecroppers in the rural electorate. Gobindo’s history is that of the storied Naxalite movement of the late 1960s. The “fairy tale” is set in an experience of time completely antithetical to revolutionary consciousness. It exists solely in the head of an irrepressible aging woman’s overactive imagination.

A word of background first. As mentioned before, Devi’s story must be read as a rethinking of a specific historicist tradition of literary radicalism in postcolonial West Bengal—a genre of historical fiction commemorating the Naxalite movement. The name, Naxalite, retrospectively constitutes the designation for a supporter of the militant, “revolutionary” Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI-ML). But the word (and corresponding ideology, Naxalism) derives from Naxalbari, a village in northern West Bengal that in May 1967 was the scene of a peasant uprising against landlords and police. The event of the Naxalbari rebellion marks a watershed moment in the official annals of not only Indian left-party politics but also Marxist (and Maoist) theory and practice. The peasant-based Naxalite movement quickly catches on as the stuff of an international cultural imaginary—though hardly approaching what the talisman of May 1968 accomplishes for Western Marxism and, thereafter, “political ethics.” Marxist writers and critics have, however, already questioned its ideological significance for Indian Marxism and revolutionary thought in general—especially in the wake of Nandigram and Singur. In his Present History of West Bengal, Partha Chatterjee comments ironically on a genre of literary radicalism: “If the decade of the seventies did not quite turn out to be the decade of revolution, it does seem to have ended up as the decade of books on revolution.”⁵⁴

Devi—at least since 1974, when she published Mother of 1084, and then Agnigarbha (a novel and a collection of short stories dealing explicitly with the historical background of the Naxalite struggle) in 1978—seems to have moved away from the endeavor of documenting accounts of rural uprisings toward a very different project. In her more recent fiction, counter to her ongoing historical research into agrarian movements, she illuminates the successes and losses that occur in the uneventful day-to-day lives of the rural poor. Spivak mentions one critic who, isolating the final scene in “Douloti the Bountiful,” regards this other trend as illustrative of the “jaded pessimism of the postcolonial middle class.”⁵⁵ But as we know from placing Devi within context, she is adamantly against romanticizing lost causes or fetishizing subalternity. In “The Fairy Tale of Mohanpur,” Devi attends to the narrative of the gendered subaltern, set apart from organized agrarian movements—in the aftermath of Naxalbari.

The eccentric center, not subject, of this story “about” the struggles of sharecroppers in contemporary rural West Bengal is an old woman whose wild imagination and terrible hunger know no bounds. No one listens to Andi’s stories about Mohanpur before the time of famine. Her failing eyesight and frequent memory lapses make her an unreliable witness. But as the narrative opens we are drawn into the knowledge of a secret history: “Old Andi alone knows the fairy tale of Mohanpur. In which fairy tale there are paddy stacks in every house.” Andi “remembers” history the way it never was.

Narratalogically, Devi constructs Andi as the donor, not the subject, of the story, “who must wear the functional appearance of the protagonist in order to perform [a] quite different actantial function.”⁵⁶ Andi’s inaccurate, nonrealist vision provides the basis for the narrative, although she is not the subject of left-party politics. It is while taking “this screw-loose body” to hospital for eye surgery that the protagonist, Gobindo, a dedicated CP village worker, happens upon a trail of wrongdoing sanctioned by the system. “I won’t give a damn for the Pat-ty. Your time for seeing straight has also come,” Gobindo tells the government-appointed doctors (102). Thus Andi’s blindness sets the terms for a recurring metaphor that holds together the different pieces of the story: history is a way of seeing, a mode of focalization. Beyond propagandist histories and party slogans, the rural activist also learns another way of seeing, by becoming attentive to feminist practices of ethical responsibility outside the sad failings of the socialist message.

Without romanticizing Andi’s way of seeing/remembering the lost object of the past, Devi elaborates the metaphor of history as an optics by making Gobindo’s story parallel to the story of Andi’s eye operation. Ultimately, the dedicated leftist, too, requires a vision adjustment: regarding the daily struggles of the sharecroppers, he is asked by a patient old villager, “It has been, it is always, it is now, it will be, still you say it can’t be. Why don’t you understand what you see?” (87). Ultimately, Gobindo learns the limits of trade unionist politics and ignorant goodwill when he is made aware of the harsh retaliatory schemes of the party-sanctioned head of the panchayat. “He no longer asks Andi’s sons to leap into the sharecroppers movement” (88), but he learns instead from the dynamism of other collectivities born of the daily intimacies and binding kinship of women’s labor. The social worker learns ethical responsibility from observing the relationship between Andi and the (unnamed) eldest daughter-in-law.

While “old Andi alone knows the fairy tale of Mohanpur,” her daughter-in-law is the only member of the village community who shares with her an affection for the past. She recalls with fondness her induction into the household as a girl-bride when “[Andi] would mind [her] with candy and sweet balls” (98). The relationship between the old woman and the younger is defined by other durations, set apart also from the “bad times” that everyone else recalls, including the narrator. And while a sharply coded, gendered division of labor organizes rural life in Mohanpur, here gendered hierarchies between women are lovingly reversed. Their bond is defined by the changing dynamics of responsibility-based ethics, rather than the timing of crisis management or oedipal narratives. When Andi’s situation worsens, the well-intentioned social worker only sees an added burden: “All this falls on you now,” he says to the daughter-in-law (98). But she quietly chooses responsibility, in contrast to Andi’s son, who, as the narrator tells us, “reveals his filial affection by way of … grand declaration[s]”—speeches chastising Andi for her voracious appetite. “I can’t lose my mother for fish,” he maintains before going to the field (76). The two women are also connected by the daily rhythms of household work, overlooked as invisible labor in the broader context of the sharecroppers struggle. In fact, as Devi depicts it, the daughter-in-law expresses her affection by giving her old, blind mother-in-law a variety of tasks. The following radically unsentimental scene is illustrative of this “fierce love”:

You Mustn’t cry at all …

Mustn’t Cry?

No. Didn’t I tell you to wind me the string by measuring with your hands?

I can’t do it, my love.

You can. Who says you are of no use? Then who is mixing cow-dung and coaldust balls? (96)

In terms of a sequence of events, it is upon witnessing this exchange that Gobindo is moved to action.

The history of the Naxalbari revolt is in the interstices of “Fairy Tale.” We know, for example, that the short-tempered Gobindo is a product of “Naksali days.” The rhetorical conduct of the text also works against a simple reading of Andi’s unequivocal instrumentality. As Mahasweta stages it, focalization shifts from the character of Andi to that of Gobindo, and then back to Andi in the final scene. The story ends with, according to the rhetorical conduct of the narrative, a paralepsis (information that should be left aside), an internal focalization containing Andi’s unconscious thoughts. Whatever the outcome of the operation, and the indices are ominous, as everything fades to black, Devi leaves us with an impossible in-sight into the subaltern unconscious.⁵⁷ Ironically, it so happens that Andi’s fictions have come to pass: “‘everything jes like a fairy tale one by one!’” In a gesture of ironic reversal, commented upon in the split voice of a speech interference, narrative agency is given back to the donor and the unreliable narrator is proven right. Might this be read as a comment on the limits of historicism? As Spivak has reminded us elsewhere, “the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic” (Other Worlds, 207).

 

Some feminist readings of capital logic remain caught up in a historicist bind. Cynthia Enloe, in her contribution to Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor, appears cautious about either glibly eliding or reifying differences, when for example, she writes, “Women textile workers live in history.” Arguably, however, she does reproduce the elements of a certain developmental narrative when she hypothesizes that

women being recruited from the countryside to work for the new textile factories in the Third World in many ways are experiencing some of the same hopes, frustrations and risks that their Western sisters did 150 years ago—removal from their families, regimentation of factory organization, wage payments, female companionship, incentives for literacy, textile dust, job layoffs, crowded boarding houses, tension from piecework payment, loneliness.⁵⁸

(We might say that Julia Kristeva’s “Women’s Time” is perhaps an extreme example of this specific [Euro]centric sequencing of gender and the philosophy of history.) In contrast to the narrative logic of global sisterhood on the one hand, or Eurocentrism on the other, in this chapter I have tried to be attentive to comparative critiques of historicism within feminist texts from different, discontinuous moments in the international division of labor, which persists in spite of the conjunctural changes inaugurated by globalization. Ranging from the rethinking of nationalist historiography in Sri Lankan working-class periodicals, to a critique of the romanticizing of categories of working-class and subaltern in texts by Tillie Olsen and Mahasweta Devi, these examples of women’s “proletarian” fiction prompt us to refigure the narrativization of history—not according to teleological narratives but in connection with counterintuitive measures—according to different “presents” and discursive unities. The logic of the “secret encounter,” not the “revolutionary conjuncture,” organizes these writings. Beyond evolutionary schemas and brief histories of crisis, these texts from India, Sri Lanka, and the United States are ultimately defined by other durations—unfinished, unverifiable outcomes and ethico-political agendas beyond statist realms of rational planning. In the Dabindu periodicals, for example, once again, perhaps the most politically imaginative writings are the group of Sinhala poems addressing and identifying with the stateless Tamil women workers of the Up-country tea plantations. Written fruitlessly, perhaps, across the Tamil-Sinhala linguistic divide, a perfect example of destinerrance—a message irreducibly errant from the intended receiver—reaching … reaching … these poems at least gesture to the possibility of a working-class internationalism and other modes of collectivity.⁵⁹ Along these lines, perhaps Spivak’s concept of the impossible “secret encounter” will also bring us back to Marx in Capital, volume 3, where he writes of the timing of the future anterior “realm of freedom,” which “only begins beyond [the realm of necessity/sphere of production] though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis.”⁶⁰