The Importance of Being Cultural: Nationalist Thought and Jagan’s Colonial World

[O]nly a vulgar reductionist can insist that [nationalism's] new political possibilities simply "emerge" out of a social structure or out of the supposedly objective workings of a world-historical process, that they do not need to be thought out, formulated, propagated and defended in the battlefield of politics.

—Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?

[T]he native intellectual . . . sooner or later will realize that you do not show proof of your nation from its culture but that you substantiate its existence in the fight which the people wage against the forces of occupation.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

In 1986 Partha Chatterjee's influential work on anticolonial nationalist discourse presented a programmatic framework that viewed nationalism as having three distinct but related ideological moments in the historical emergence of the postcolonial state.¹ The first was characterized by a cultural consciousness enabled by Enlightenment thought but articulated as "Eastern" culture; the second, nationalism's power in mobilizing the population, based on a notion of the nonpassive "Oriental"; and the final, the hegemonic resolution of the non-Western nation with the liberal state and the postcolonial state's entry into Western modernity. Chatterjee claimed general relevance for his theoretical framework and this is what generates this analysis. The theme of this essay is a dual one: it is, one, an account of Jagan's nationalist discourse during the initial period of Guyana's trek from colonial territory to postcolonial state through, two, a critical adaptation of Chatterjee's framework. One of the most important aspects of the critique of Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World involves the ontology of culture, an element that is central to Chatterjee's argument. What I hope to produce is a way of reading the difference between the general framework of Nationalist Thought, which takes India as its case study, and the particular manifestation of Guyanese nationalist thought.² That is, by way of metaphor, the difference between a title like Towards Freedom and Forbidden Freedom.³

One of the tasks of postcolonial theory is to locate agency on the part of the colonial subjects, to find a way for those figures to make visible their subjectivity. This objective is evident in the opening quotation above: alongside the recognition of the power of world historical forces exists a critique of Marxist as well as liberal sociologies that emphasizes the capacity of teleological determinisms to hide the potential of the colonized to assert agency and offer alternatives to those forces and those sociologies. This essay follows the same path and is inspired, in particular, by Chatterjee's implicit suggestion that the overdeterminations of metahistory cannot operate as an alibi for ignoring microhistories. As Nationalist Thought was written almost two decades ago, situating the argument presented here within the debates of contemporary postcolonial criticism invokes, as David Scott has pointed out, a different set of problematics.⁴ There is now a kind of dualism that may be discerned in the collective of recent scholarship in this area. Scott advocates a move away from questions about epistemology, nationalism, and humanism—that is, the politics of theory—and toward those concerned with macropolitical issues—that is, the theory of politics. Nationalist Thought is undoubtedly part of the former project, and in its attentiveness to the framework of Nationalist Thought the analysis of Jagan's discourse falls into that arena as well. However, as is well known, Jagan's nationalism named itself orthodox Marxism. It is therefore relevant to the other argument currently emerging within postcolonial studies that engages in the retrieval of Marxism for the explicit purpose of bringing back the material into analyses of post/colonialism.⁵ Although the scope of this essay cannot accommodate the development of the idea that Jagan's nationalism straddles both arenas in postcolonial studies, the principles are apparent here—through the critique of...