In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

NWSA Journal 18.3 (2006) 211-213

  • Muse
  • Search
  • Journals
  • This Journal
  • Contents
Reviewed by
Stacy Bautista
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile by Arundhati Roy. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004, 120 pp., $40.00 hardcover, $16.00 paper.
An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire by Arundhati Roy. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004, 200 pp., $40.00 hardcover, $12.00 paper.
War Talk by Arundhati Roy. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003, 152 pp., $40.00 hardcover, $12.00 paper.

"I grew up in a village. I saw rural India at work. And yet I had the advantage of having an education. It's like being at the top of the bottom of the heap—without the blinkered single-mindedness of the completely oppressed nor the flabby self-indulgence of the well-to-do" (The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile [CCM] 6). The author of The God of Small Things, and noted Indian activist, describes herself as having had an unconventional childhood in Kerala, one in which "there was a delightful absence of a box" (CCM 106). Amid a complex, fractious, gender-stratified society, she grew up literally in a no-man's land: without a father, and so automatically displaced and disinherited, Roy learned early to look askance at norms, whatever they might be. "I was the worst thing a girl could be: thin, black, and clever," she reports, and then adds: "The least [I] could do was to be unhappy" (CCM 7). But, as she says, she was not, and the result of her singular experience is a unique and powerful perspective on contemporary sociopolitical questions and problems.

Roy's political essays remind one of works like Noam Chomsky's What Uncle Sam Really Wants: works aimed at a general audience, intended to clarify the obscurity of U.S. policy decisions, or rather, the policy decisions consistent with the neoliberal empire1 that is not confined to the borders of the United States. "I speak as a subject of the U.S. empire. . . . I speak as the slave who presumes to criticize her king," Roy writes in her introduction, reprinted in War Talk to the recent Chomsky anthology, For Reasons of State. Throughout War Talk, as well as An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire and the interviews in The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, she provides a scathing indictment of the two largest "democracies" in existence (India and the United States) by taking aim at their foundations: the neoliberal political economy that sustains them.

War Talk (WT) contains essays and lectures from 2002–2003, including "Come September" and "Confronting Empire," the latter given at the World Social Forum in Porte Alegre; An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire (OPGE) has talks and essays delivered in 2003–2004. The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile is a set of interviews with David Barsamian, which covers much of the same material and even repeats verbatim, or nearly so, some key passages from her earlier essays. Nevertheless, the [End Page 211] conversation between them ranges over other topics as well, and it is in the interviews rather than the essay collections that Roy's concern for the plight of women (particularly Indian women and poor women) comes out most clearly. Barsamian's questions also touch on such topics as racism, in India and elsewhere; Roy's fiction and its connection with her nonfiction; her childhood in Kerala and experience of race and gender relations; and Roy's understanding of the role of academic scholarship in the struggle for liberation, as well as the problematic status of the Ivory Tower.

All three works return, in various ways, to the basic problem of empire, namely, the gap that separates those who have the power to advance their own ends and those who endure the politics of the powerful few. Two simple questions are at the cornerstone of Roy's critique: by what right do the powerful have such power? By what right does a government call itself democratic that requires such a...

pdf

Share