Cartographies of resistance: A response

There is something truly wonderful about the new life that a book finds in the minds of thoughtful readers and interlocutors who bring to it perspectives from their own disciplinary training and concerns. Let me begin then by thanking the five scholars here who have engaged with Insurgent Empire in such generous, thoughtful, and generative ways. Between them, they have raised questions that are both illuminating and challenging, pointing to directions of research that the book touched on but did not explore in their fullness.

Although I had written about the specificities of contexts of struggle as well as connections between different geographical (and geopolitical) locations in Insurgent Empire, I found Sarah de Leeuw’s attention to the question of place suggestive in new ways. De Leeuw speaks of her own presence as a writer on ‘untreatied’ and therefore ‘stolen’ land (in North America). It is a stark reminder that despite the endemic and tenacious nature of anticolonial struggles, each inflected by the specificities of space and place, decolonisation, at least in the fullest sense of the term, was not the inevitable outcome. As Eve Tuck and KW Yang point out famously, discussions of ‘decolonisation’ on expropriated land that do not acknowledge this fact, the ineluctable history of the occupied ground beneath their feet, are hamstrung from the start. Tuck and Yang, however, end up underscoring ‘an ethic of incommensurability’ where Insurgent Empire made the case (in relation to other contexts) for the making of common cause. This raises the question: when it comes to ‘vehemently colonial’ states – de Leeuw uses the example of Canada, referring, I would imagine, to the continued settler presence and the violence of the settler-state’s ongoing crimes against Indigenous people – is ‘common ground’, literally, possible? While noting that friction and difficulty must be negotiated, de Leeuw finds a politics of hope in Insurgent Empire and its accounts of efforts to find commonalities across historical and political difficulties without eliding the latter. On solidarity (or ‘allyship’), de Leeuw draws on the lessons imparted by a Cree scholar and friend who reminds them that ‘changes in relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in colonial Canada, changes that must result in allyship and solidarity, will only come when both heads and hearts of non-Indigenous peoples are transformed’. How, though, can ‘geographies of political affinity’, de Leeuw’s resonant term, be shaped in the face of the realities of actually existing colonialism? This is not a question for settler colonies alone.

Nuno Domingos and Ricardo Roque offer bracingly critical observations which are helpful to discussions of resistance. Questions must be asked: who resists? What do they resist in the name of? Who gets to speak for that resistance and who gets heard? Insurgent Empire does not pretend to offer a history of anticolonialism as such and it certainly does not claim to write a subaltern history, still less of the variety propounded by James Scott, that Domingos and Roque privilege as the kind of ethnographically-inflected history writing necessary for accounts of anticolonialism. There are, of course, examples of everyday resistance to be found in the contexts of colonialism described by the book from Morant Bay in 1865 to Mau Mau in the 1940s. Insurgent Empire’s specific interest, however, was in those moments of resistance and rebellion that had manifest repercussions in the metropole – frequently moments of crisis around overt resistance and ferocious repression. At other times, anticolonialism registered in the metropole (the focus of the book) through the presence of ‘interpreters of insurgency’ (the term ‘mediators’ misses something quite fundamental). These are dissenting writers and campaigners who brought certain qualities of voice to the process of making visible and audible the claims and actions of those who were challenging colonialism in myriad ways.

At no point does Insurgent Empire suggest that an interest in interpreters or ‘mediators’ should ‘replace the actual study of resistance practices in their own terms’, although quite what those terms are may not be always simple to establish even as many ‘mediators’ were very much part of the movements they sought to bring to wider attention. I am quite in agreement that anticolonial resistance cannot be ‘be reduced to a thirst for “freedom” or a to a dualistic “opposition” to European colonialism’. Many of the movements and figures that are part of the book’s purview indicate precisely that ‘freedom’ was subject to contextual interpretation and that many movements, from those of Urabi’s soldiers and peasants in Egypt to striking workers in the West Indies and from the Swadeshi boycott of goods in India to land rights demands in Kenya, targeted multiple perceived oppressors, including landlords and planters. I don’t myself see why a focus in one book on ‘the critics of empire at home’ is in danger of ‘replac[ing] the study of the local repertoires of resistance in their own right’ although I might be as careful about the ‘actual’ versus ‘mediated’ binary as I agree we must be about the colonial and the anticolonial. Similarly, while ‘hidden transcripts’ have yielded many insights, the academic ‘reading’ agency and meaningful subversion into gestures of ambivalence or frustration may well run the risk not only of romanticising situations of deep oppression but of refusing to acknowledge those less opaque moments when those at the sharp end raise their voices and put their actions into organising – Morant Bay, 1865, comes to mind again, and the Caribbean in the 1930s as also many unnamed demonstrators at Trafalgar Square protesting the invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s. It is worth considering the possibility that the subaltern can not only speak but act; she does not only bow while farting silently, but is quite capable of consciously wielding other weapons ranging from to the withdrawal of labour to outright mutiny.

David Nally makes a crucial point in this regard: the spaces and modalities for the articulation of criticism and for registering resistance were varied: ‘The appropriation of governmental space for the purpose of anticolonial critique reminds us that…criticism of empire was not only more pervasive than is generally admitted, it was also spread across a range of a sites which at times ‘provided a fertile milieu for the elaboration of insurgent principles’. This is a crucial point in the face of entrenched ideas about what might be considered to constitute properly subaltern resistance or correct modes of protest. Additionally, the role of ‘mediators’ across racial and class axes is not to be dismissed for they often undertook the task of what Edward Said calls ‘being a witness to persecution and suffering’. Nally gives the fascinating example of English MP George Poulett Scrope who not only took seriously testimony to a Parliamentary Select Committee, about the depredations of the devastating famine in Ireland, but would facilitate the amplification of subaltern voices that might otherwise go unheard in the British public sphere. What Nally says of Scrope is true of many of the characters in Insurgent Empire. The likes of Wilfrid Blunt and Fenner Brockway were certainly no subalterns – indeed, not even Ernest Jones, the Chartist leader, was – but the work of these ‘interpreters of insurgency’ in bearing witness to and facilitating hearing ‘helped to propagate and prolong subversive discussion’. Brockway, like Scrope, and like fellow MPs Shapurji Saklatvala and James Maxton, among others, also ‘appropriated state space, and the privileges it afforded, to restate principles that were deemed treasonous when uttered from below’. There is a curious purism in theories of subalternity that will insist simultaneously that the subaltern cannot speak and that they should also not be spoken for. As Arundhati Roy has famously noted, there is ‘really no such thing as the “voiceless.” There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard’. Academics need to be very careful that their theorising of subalternity does not inadvertently facilitate either deliberate silencing or the failure to hear. As Nally notes, ‘acts of exposure’ undertaken by more privileged agents ‘very often dramatised insurgent ideas that were often developed outside and beyond the recognised channels of politics’. Nally’s focus on Ireland is a welcome complement to the Asian and African movements and personalities considered in Insurgent Empire, not least since Ireland was often invoked by many anticolonial movements as exemplar and inspiration.

The question of inspiration follows us into the present, to Sarah Hughes’ evocative phrase, ‘the mobility of accounts of resistance’. Hughes refers to the ways in which resistance travelled across places and spaces, from colony to metropole but her insight applies also across colonial contexts. Lines of influence, philosophical, political, and material, running across anticolonial movements and insurgencies are strands of research that invite further exploration. Hughes describes what is perhaps the most pressing task for us today in relation to history, the ‘political imperative to thinking through how the conditions of what is made possible now, is shaped by the in/actions of the past’. Towards the end, Insurgent Empire asks: ‘What if, rather than discourses of “unappreciated magnanimity,” Britons had access to more textured and dialogical but honest stories of ideological and personal encounters in the crucible of empire?’ Decolonisation involves an engagement with history which asks what other ways of being and doing had been interrupted or erased by the violence of the colonial encounter. Hughes speaks of the need for reflections upon ‘those moments where other things might have been, might now be’. She is writing in the context of recent protests in Britain and beyond that coalesced around monuments commemorating slavery and empire. Protesters are frequently charged, and not just by conservative commentators, with wanting to ‘erase history’ as though the only way in which history survives is in the form of monuments. The answer to Hughes’ question: ‘How do we work to sustain any hopeful trajectory?’ is not a simple one but her point about the importance of genealogies of dissent and the erasures of key moments of resistance and solidarity in the public memory is relevant here. Surely, one task must be to resurrect more publicly, audibly and visibly, the histories of the times when people forged common cause.