States of Exception: Everyday Life and Postcolonial Identity (review)

Perhaps one of the few disciplinary "tribes" that currently has more angst about its academic work than anthropologists wrestling with the textual and postmodernist turn in ethnography consists of literary theorists wrestling with the specter of the "empirical" in literary studies. This is a productive angst, in many cases, because the quasi-ethnographic turn among literary theorists brings a new inflection to debates about the meanings of cultural studies and the politics of disciplinarity in the U.S. academy. Keya Ganguly's States of Exception: Everyday Life and Postcolonial Identity is a provocative book that will help push this debate further in its critical interrogations linking "the subject of ethnography" with a postcolonialist and Marxist approach to "quotidian" experience. In doing so, Ganguly is responding to what she sees as postcolonial studies' failed project of theorizing "ideas of lived experience and social reality"(15), and "the explosion of propositions about border crossings, liminal zones, the aporia of postcoloniality, performative or strategic essentialisms, and so on" in cultural studies at the expense of historical and materialist analysis (4). Sharing this fatigue of culturalist criticism myself, I am deeply sympathetic to her project and with her interest in using ethnography to explore the "mutual-constitution . . . of subject and object, theory and practice" (178).

The book also makes an important intervention in linking analyses of postcoloniality to those of immigrant experiences, an area where more work needs to be done in South Asian American studies. Ganguly chooses, for this purpose, to study a network of twenty Indian immigrant families in Southern New Jersey, focusing intensively on a dozen families or, rather, twelve immigrant couples, the majority of whom are Bengali immigrants. She herself is a daughter of one of the couples and this potentially makes for an interesting analysis of ethnographic reflexivity or autobiography's relation to theory. However, apart from learning that her parents were "latecomers" to this community, we never learn how and when they came, what their relationships were to this social network, and what her own memories are of this community. Ganguly clearly tries to stay away from using navel-gazing to stand in for critically reflexive analysis, but the problem is that her own relationship to the community or to the locale surfaces in sometimes problematic or puzzling ways.

For example, in the first chapter, she describes the setting for her research as typifying the "ecological damage, topographical blandness, and parochialism of U.S. suburbia" (18). There is no reason to doubt that Southern New Jersey is, in fact, topographically bland and parochial or that it represents the "banal and even deadening daily life" of the suburbs (85). Yet the reader cannot help wondering, given that she spent some time living in this area and was considered an "insider" (18), that perhaps a critical reflection on her own attachments to, or need to distance herself from, this place might be in order. More importantly, perhaps, how would this description resonate with the subjects of her study, those who actually live in this area and about whom she is writing? Would they share this view or would they find it dismissive of other kinds of meanings produced in relation to place or home, beyond the fact of the landscape of highways and shopping malls, so easily skewered in images of the Garden State? The author is astute enough to note that "methodological reflexivity or ethical piety" is not enough to produce a critical ethnography and at the outset she notes that her use of "my ethnographic community" (10) is intended as an "ironic notation" to draw attention to the reflexive relationship between observer and observed. Yet this irony seems not to be sufficient to address the question of her own assumptions about her "informants" and their lives and beliefs that appear early on in the book and are never completely resolved.

There are some interesting insights that emerge from her relationship to the ethnographic community, such as a moment in the first chapter, where she comments on disciplinary and...