Dwelling in American: Dissent, Empire, and Globalization

3. Dissent on the Border: Arundhati Roy

a c h a p t e r t h r e e A Dissent on the Border a r u n d h a t i r o y Arundhati Roy, author of the Booker Prize–winning The God of Small Things, has also penned a series of essays—collected in The Cost of Living , Power Politics, War Talk, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, Field Notes on Democracy, and Broken Republic—that have gained international recognition for their pungent critiques of exploitative multinational corporations , international organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the complicity of India’s national and state governments in marginalizing millions of adivasis1 and the rural poor by displacing them, submerging their lands, and alienating them from their cultures by a forced imposition of industrial development. In this chapter , I analyze Roy’s nonfictional writings and, drawing on Abdul JanMohamed ’s theory of the border intellectual, I advance the following arguments : (1) Roy views herself as a public intellectual who has direct access to non-Western experience and knowledge; (2) she affirms civilizational difference to mobilize antiglobalism sentiment in India and abroad, and she disingenuously abstracts culture from economics and politics; and (3) she uses an interpretive grid that enables her to frame international events as integral to a world system dominated by the United States and the West, whose power is exerted with such penetrative force that almost every conceivable large-scale problem in the non-Western world—such as poverty, drought, genocide, and corruption—can be explained with reference to this grid. Roy, I argue, risks becoming an exoticized, authentic voice of the Third World in the First World, and being co-opted as an intellectual who can transparently represent the interests of the subaltern in the global arena. 56 d w el l i ng i n a merican Public Intellectuals on the Border JanMohamed distinguishes between a syncretic border intellectual who, positioned between cultures, chooses to “combine elements of two cultures in order to articulate new syncretic forms and experiences,” and a specular border intellectual who, “caught between several cultures or groups, none of which is deemed sufficiently enabling or productive . . . subjects the cultures to analytic scrutiny rather than combining them.” The difference between the two types is in the “intentionality of their intellectual orientation.” He identifies “four different modes of border crossings” by border intellectuals: “the exile, the immigrant, the colonialist, and the scholar.”2 The exile—unlike the immigrant, who is eager to become part of the host society—sustains the memory of home, which may make the subject “indifferent to the values and characteristics of the host culture.” Without any “structural nostalgia,” the immigrant emphasizes assimilation into the host society. In contrast, unlike the exile and the immigrant, the colonialist and the scholar view culture “not as a field of subjectivity, but rather as an object of and for their gaze.”3 Not having to choose between the life of an exile and an immigrant does not automatically cancel out the ambivalence of cross-cultural encounters that inform Roy’s nonfiction, which could be characterized as protest literature. Although a novel like The God of Small Things is syncretic in the sense that it embodies what might be called Indian English, which combines elements of the Queen’s English with regional dialects and idiolects, and the tensions of cross-cultural histories, traditions, and interactions, her nonfiction takes clear ideological and political stances and embodies a sense of specularity—a “willed homelessness”4 that subjects indigenous, national, and international politics, societies, and cultures to scrutiny and judgment. This kind of specularity is not so much about an unwillingness to be Indian as it is about the intentionality of her dissents and politics. Those dissents generate a condition of homelessness, an uprooting from the stable ground created by the myths of modernity, development, nationhood, and globalization. To Pablo Bose, Roy is—like Medha Patkar, a famous activist associated with the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Movement, hereafter the NBA) in India—a “popular intellectual” or critic.5 The difference between what Michel Foucault calls experts and critics is applicable to Roy and her writings, notes Bose. The experts are the engineers, administrators , and planners whose work gains authority by the imprimatur of governments and institutions, while the critics include students, activists, d i ssent o n the b o rd er 57 workers...